jjramsey

jakejonesiv was talking about the Gospel contents being allegories of LXX content, not about the places explicitly depicted as fulfillment of prophecy. Again, this doesn't answer the question: If jakejonesiv is right, why are the supposed allegorical associations so loose?

Toto

No Robots - Yes

jjramsey - it's like asking why West Side Story doesn't track Romeo and Juliet more closely. The gospel writers made the story fit as closely as they cared to.

Diogenes the Cynic

Allegory isn't really the right word. Parallels and allusions is better. They're as close as the authors could make them. Since a lot of what they were using had no Messianic significance its original context they had to be loose about it. They were trying to fit square pegs into round holes a lot of the time.

jjramsey

With this I would agree, but it doesn't fit with jakejonesiv's statement, "Most of the events in the alleged life of Jesus were created by allegorical interpretations of the Septuagint."

jakejonesiv

I can go along with that. Maybe "midrash" loosely defined is a better term.
Regardless, most of the events in the alleged life of Jesus have a literary precedent in the Septuagint. Sometimes it is labeled a prophecy, sometimes it is not.

For example, the temptation narrative in Mark was based on 1 Kings chapter 19. both Elijah and Jesus go to the wilderness.

Elisha was in the wilderness forty days and forty nights. In Mark, Jesus is in the wilderness forty days. In Matthew, the precise forty days and forty nights are noted (Matt 4:2).

In 1 Kings, Elijah prays to die. In Mark, Jesus is tempted by Satan.

Both Elijah and Jesus are said to be ministered to by angels.

After the wilderness, Elijah calls Elisha as a disciple (1 Kings 1:19). Likewise, Jesus afterwards calls disciples (Mark 1:16ff).

The conclusion then, is that the temptation narrative was created from a retelling of the tale of Elijah in the wilderness, and that it contains no history. The enhancements by Matthew and Luke just illustrate how these allegorical(or whatever word is right) stories grow.

Jake Jones IV

Diogenes the Cynic

I think "allegory" is the wrong word, but it is pretty clear that many of the Gospel narratives were fabricated by recontextualizing passages from the OT.

Ben C Smith

You may be correct. I do not know, however, how the parallels alone would prove that the narrative contained no history. It is also possible that Jesus intentionally reenacted the Elijah material like many of the imposters in Josephus intentionally reenacted other OT narratives.

Legend feels right, but I am still probing.

Ben.

jakejonesiv

Absolutely, I mean created. Do you think they really cast lots for Jesus' clothes, or the gospel writer cribbed it from Psalm 22:18? Which was it jj?

Jake

No Robots

It was common midrashic practice to narrate prominent lives as parallels to previous figures. We see this with Hillel:

In the Midrash compilation Sifre (Deut. 357) the periods of Hillel's life are made parallel to those in the life of Moses. Both were 120 years old; at the age of forty Hillel went to Judea (today's Israel); forty years he spent in study; and the last third of his life he passed as the spiritual head of Israel. Of this artificially constructed biographical sketch this much may be true, that Hillel went to Jerusalem in the prime of his manhood and attained a great age. His activity of forty years is perhaps historical; and since it began about one hundred years before the destruction of Jerusalem, it likely covered the period 30 B.C.E. to 10 C.E.

None of this is evidence that Hillel never existed, nor are similar techniques in the Gospels evidence that Jesus never existed.

jjramsey

In that case, it was definitely a crib from the Psalms. However, the overall fit of Psalm 22 to the Passion is poor. One would not see a crucifixion in it unless one was looking for one to start with. It's as if someone looking for the crucifixion in the scriptures glommed onto verse 16 in the Psalm, "my hands and feet have shriveled [often translated 'pierced']," as a prophecy, and then invented details about the Passion to make the Psalm a somewhat better fit.

Quite simply, in some cases, it looks like the prophecy was stretched to fit events, and in other cases, it looks like events were embellished or fabricated to fit the prophecies. The direction is not all one way.