Toto

Meta: I give you this evidence that some early writers treated the Gospel of Mark as legend or fiction.

Both the authors of gMatt and gLuke-Acts felt free to take the material in Mark and revise it according to their theological needs. Would they have done that if they had thought it was accurate history of their Lord and Savior? I think not.

General note from mod:

Please lower the emotional tone and avoid insults.

GakuseiDon

Marcion and Tatian revised the Gospels according to their theological needs. But as you point out, their revisions were to fix the "inaccurate" parts. Is there any evidence that the gMatt and gLuke authors changed parts that they thought were accurate, or that anyone regarded the Gospels as non-historical (as opposed to inaccurate)?

spin

A few simple things:

1. he put Jesus on two animals because he thought that's what Zechariah intended.
2. he fixed Jesus's last words.
3. he turned a few single individuals into two, not one but two blind men.
4. he eliminated Mark's nazarhnos (and a later redactor started using nazaraios).
5. he combined sources, conflating them (it must have been that way, right?).

Oh, and it is only well after the fact that church fathers claimed that Marcion revised his gospel. It could be that someone later revised it to make today's Luke.


spin

Amaleq13

That is far from certain. Irenaeus believed he knew the Apostle John but Eusebius disagreed and believed it was Presbyter John that was known to Papias.

"Eusebius already doubted the reality of a connection between Papias and the apostle John on the grounds that Papias himself in the preface to his book distinguished the apostle John from John the presbyter and seems to have had significant contact only with John the presbyter and a certain Aristion (Hist. Eccl. 3.39.3-7)." http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/papias.html

According to both men, "presbyters" were either disciples of the Apostles or disciples of the disciples of the Apostles.

Rick Sumner

Those scholars are attempting to give me grounds to doubt. I still haven't assumed anything.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Metacrock

Ok Toto, that's a good question. It's one I can understand asking. But Yes, I think they would. Because we get the idea from our theological baggage about how to handle holy writ, that doesn't mean they had the same idea.

you know I was thinking of this today. Just because it is redacted we might be tempted to think that they were treating it as fiction. But really you don't treat a fictional story that way. They clearly tried to preserve the aspects that they included and to tell it such a way that it presreved the elments they thought were important. But if you believed it was just fictional, you would feel free to change lots of elements such as times, places, characters and so on.

the whole idea that they took it as ficitional is very problematic. There's a lot we could discuss there. For example what was the motive for writting it if it was just fiction? Just to have a nice story? Then how did it become a religion?


eliear you say:


But I disagree completely. I think there are reasons, many reasons to understand it as historical. For one thing, so much of Acts was born out by Sir William Ramsy as archeaological fact. I don't think people in the ancient world put the kind of effort into realism that we do today. you can't compare it to Hemingway.

And as I said, no one ever approached as fiction. From the earliest writtings we have it was understood as historical. In fact the extra canonical stuff is also approached as historical, or it approaches the Gospel story itself as historical.

But you know Toto, what would make a document seem historical? If it is written in narrative form, you can't just assume that narrative is always fiction.

General note from mod:

Please lower the emotional tone and avoid insults.[/QUOTE]


good idea. I'll try

Metacrock

You know, actually, if I am recalling rightly, I think he mentions both the Apostle John and the Elder John. But Elder John and Arition, whom he also mentions, both are said to have seen Jesus preach and to have been desciples. So there Papias is assuming Jesus was historical and cliams to have spoken with eye witnesses.


I believe he says that Elder John and Aristion were desciples of the Lord.

NOGO

The problem that you raise is in fact not a problem at all.
You just have all the elements in the wrong order.
Christianity started with Jews looking to the scriptures to discover how God would save them and send them a saviour.

From scriptures the idea was started that the saviour was the WORD of God.
The one who created the world and spoke to Moses in the burning bush etc etc etc.

Gradually from scriptures they discovered what the saviour would say and do when he would come. Another element: this is the last generation ... but the last generation came and went and no sign of the saviour. Until someone had a bright idea. The saviour did come. All the elements of the story were all there already. The religion had already been created.
Mark was written.
Where are those who could tell us "no, no ... Mark is not historical", you ask?
Answer:
First, there was the destruction of the Jewish state. The religion was taken over by outsiders who misunderstood the whole thing.
Second, people had no concept of what is historical, as you claim. To them truth spans across, history, legend and myth.

Amaleq13

I agree that Papias assumed Jesus was historical but that isn't what I'm calling into question. I'm calling into question your assertion that Papias knew Apostles. Irenaeus certainly agrees with you but Eusebius does not. The actual identity of his sources has not been conclusively established though the lack of reliability of his information certainly has been.

Whether he actually knew any Apostles is questionable. Even the Catholic Encyclopedia feels compelled to acknowledge that "it is admitted that he could not have known many apostles".

That, too, is questioned in the same article linked above. Both Irenaeus and Eusebius understood Papias' "presbyters" to be disciples of the Disciples" or perhaps even one more generation removed.

Given your criticism of Doherty's "argument from silence" it is odd to see you repeat this one so frequently and assert it as so fundamental to your position. Arguments from silence are only as strong as the reasonability of the expectation of 'X' being said with 'X' representing what the source is silent about.

You have offered nothing to show that it is reasonable to expect such a claim from folks in the early centuries of the Common Era. Are there any examples of early Common Era skeptics questioning the historicity of any figure? Without that, your argument from silence is too weak to be credible.

What we do find, on the other hand, are early pagan critics of Christianity calling the stories about Jesus "fables" no different from the ones told by the Greeks.

I would also be interested in why the following statement attributed to Trypho in Justin's Dialogue doesn't qualify:

"But Christ--if He has indeed been born, and exists anywhere--is unknown, and does not even know Himself, and has no power until Elias come to anoint Him, and make Him manifest to all. And you, having accepted a groundless report, invent a Christ for yourselves, and for his sake are inconsiderately perishing."

In the end, I have to agree with spin that these early opinions are ultimately irrelevant to establishing or denying the historicity of Jesus. Even if we actually found a 1st century pagan whose written assertion that Jesus never existed somehow survived to the present day, it would not constitute any sort of reliable evidence in favor of Jesus Myth theories.

Metacrock

Ok, so how can you prove that theory? I mean, there are no examples of Jews inventing fictional narratives to fulfill the word of God in other respects. I also don't see how you get around the fact that Christianity was already going, with Jesus and the empty and the whole stroy as early as AD 50.

Paul was crusading before the destructin of the temple there were Christians preaching the resurrection in Antioch before AD 70 and Koester dates the pre Markan redation to AD 50. Now that's a certainty and is based upon textual criticism not merely guess work. It's proven.