spin

At the moment, I wouldn't trust Philostratus as far as I could throw him. Perhaps you know some way we can test his material. See, Lucian was a no-crap sort of writer.


spin

spin

Narrative, it's all about narrative. Much of the material I mention deals specifically with the unsourceable nature of Marcan gospel content. The narrative itself doesn't suggest biography. You might be able to point out baloney in Philostratus, but you're not looking at what makes up the "biography". Presumably someone can claim that the rhubarb in Philostratus was witnessed by some witless soul, but much of the stuff I mentioned simply cannot get away with that. Who was there to record the angel speaking to Joseph or Mary? Who interviewed the magi? Get my drift?


spin

Ben C Smith

Then we seem to understand each other. Good.

Agreed. Lucian wrote more accurate stuff than Philostratus. Testing Philostratus, who has long been suspected of having added fictional elements to Apollonius, entails comparing the testimonia with what we have in the biography.

Correct. It suggest ancient biography.

Indeed. And Philostratus is even more skeptical than the evangelists are.

What does make up the biography, IYO?

Joseph and Mary themselves, of course. Other ancient biographies contain birth and childhood details that could only have been passed on by the parents, if anyone. (Please understand that I consider the birth narratives to be mostly or even entirely questionable as history or biography; but then, that goes for other ancient biographical details about famous people, as well.)

Ben.

No Robots

Oh yeah, and on the question of Christ's eating habits, let us not forget:

The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say: Behold a man that is a glutton and a wine drinker, a friend of publicans and sinners.--Mt 11:19

Hard to imagine a guy being accused of symbolic over-indulgence.

spin

Not as I see it. I can imagine Suetonius getting some lame report about the interpretation of a flight of birds, or a claimed haruspicy that presaged some whatever. But how do you get the garden of Gethsemane?

The means of obtaining the data is the pointer. The epistemological issue is against your desires.

It's an obvious kludge, but the birth narratives were later additions to the gospel tradition. You mean Peter didn't tell Mark? And I note you didn't ever bother with the magi et al.

This is possible in a literate society. Judea was not.

The birth narratives are endemic. I didn't mean to single them out. I talked of other issues before them. Did you skip them for some reason?


spin

spin

Problem is that one usually made grossly ridiculous statements about opponents about eating habits, about sexual promiscuity, about suspicious financial dealings, about acts with cigars. Some ancient bishop I remember was framed by a hired prostitute. The wicked wiles...

This sort of stuff usually gets shelved as non-starter material, because you cannot test the claims. Either there was a Jesus who was a glutton or perhaps some Jew was stretching the truth for effect or someone was just putting nasty accusations in the mouths of the nasty Jews or....


spin

aa5874

Without any historical evidence for Jesus of the NT, the stories of Jesus can only be called "versions".

Whether, the birth stories were written later or not cannot determine the historical nature of the Jesus stories.

And the theory that gMark was written first is not based on historical evidence , that is the theory about the date of gMark is not cast in stone.

Ben C Smith

Well, you have been mistaken before.

Can you imagine Asclepias of Mendes getting a report about Apia and the serpent?

I suspect it was probably invented, whether by Mark or by a tradent.

So what makes up an ancient biography (that was the question you are answering here), IYO, is data that has a clear means of being obtained? (And obtained from what?)

I am not sure what this is referring to.

I am having trouble understanding you. Of course I do not think Peter told Mark about the birth of Jesus. Why would you even bring it up? And why would your roll your eyes at it? And what exactly is an obvious kludge?

I most certainly bothered with the magi. I said: Joseph and Mary.

Who said anything about it even being possible? I even told you as clearly as I could that I thought the birth narratives were highly questionable in their entirety. It would not surprise me if it turned out I could not get even one solid historical datum about Jesus from them. (Not that I have tried very hard to date.)

Yes, because (if you are referring to your original megaparagraph) you seemed to deal with several different kinds of issues, none of whose relevance to genre is immediately apparent to me. Let us take the first item as an example:

If I answer yes, I wonder: What does this have to do with whether Matthew and Luke are biographies of some kind? If I answer no, I wonder: What does this have to do with whether Matthew and Luke are ancient biographies of some kind? That is what I meant when I said that your first paragraph did not appear to me to relate to your second. I am most certainly not going to run through your list of miscellaneous objections until I understand what you perceive to be the relevance. If they are indeed objections, what exactly are they objections to?

Ben.

Seitsuman

I think there's a point always taken for granted when it should not be. It runs that if there really was a real 'Jesus' then he is the origin of Christianity and stripping the accretions away will reveal him.

There can be a 'real Jesus' but that doesn't mean it all came from him. I think that far from myths developing around him, he was something of a legendary figure that it proved convenient to co-opt into making the myths more relevant for the time.

The best comparison I can think of is Arthur and the Grail Cycle. It's even possible that Arthur was a sort of attempt to make Christianity palatable to a warrior culture. The Grail Cycle predates Arthur and more than it being incorporated into his story, he has been incorporated to Christianise the Grail (or Cauldron of Bran and umpteen other Celtic myths). Knock Camelot out because one of the French romancers admits to inventing that based on Camelodun, the nearest pre-Roman Britain came to some sort of a capital and with it everything pertaining to Sir Lancelot and Galahad, both later additions. You can get rid of Merlin-Merddyn-Murdo as well because he first appears with legends about Vortigern (or the Vortigern (which might even have sounded a bit like some pronunciations of Arthur at the time - Worthiern).

By the time you've done all that you're left with a period of peace in the later 5th and early 6th century which may owe its existence to the final success of a Celtic warlord after switching back and forth between Roman and Celtic organisation earlier. And that's about all you can say.

Jesus is much the same. There are elements in the Crucifixion story that ring true of a failed insurrection by Nasorites who believed their man the Messianic heir to the throne of Israel - except we don't know whether they meant the united Israel of Solomon or the northern Israel excluding Judah that followed it. The charge of 'Blasphemy' is correct in its original secular sense that declaring himself a king pre-empted the Emperor's right to declare kings. Luke's dating is probably correct for this man and would be 6CE - the year Judea deposed Herod Archelaus for direct Roman ruls, necessitating an extraordinary local Roman census. In which case he was executed in 36 - the year Pilate was recalled to Rome to answer maladministration charges.

He appears to have been fairly corrupt so no surprise if he took bribes from both sides and gave Jesus a chance of survival. Again, it was not done to hand the bodies of executed terrorists over, so Joseph of Arimethea must have have 'pull' (and deep pockets!)

With the failure of the Jewish Revolt maybe a milion, mostly from the heterodox North like Galilee were enslaved all over the Empire. They probably brought their tales of their alternative Messiah and some of his adherents felt the need to sort out what they thought true (though they were already elevating him to some sort of incarnation of the Spirit of Jewishness just like the Emperor incarnated the Spirit of Romanness). Other mystics saw these tales as a good familiar basis to hang their own teachings on. What developed has mostly taken symbolic teachings using his story as a framework, to be literal history.

fatpie42

Unless it is to strongly distance him from ascetic groups like, say, the 'Nazarenes'?