Solitary Man

If I say that Julius Caesar crossed the Atlantic and thus declared war on the Roman Catholic Church, is that history? It's certainly bad history. But it's not true.

Dogfish

Fiction has to have entertainment value? And, if it does, writing it and calling it history would have entertained you, in the broad sense of the word you are using it.

Dogfish

Calling it history, even bad history, is mislabeling it. If call red "green", it's not green in any way just because I called it so.

Solitary Man

False analogy. Besides, they're both colors.

Wait, are you talking about history as a genre or history as what actually happened or history as what is recorded and what happened? It appears you're trying to label all three as only the third (or second one) which is an equivocation fallacy.

Solitary Man

No, I'm using it in a very specific sense of genre. You're not. You're going by all 4 or 5 "dictionary definitions" wrapped into one. Whether or not I get entertainment out of it doesn't negate the fact that something isn't written for entertainment.

Solitary Man

I've said this before, we're discussing genres here. First Man in Rome isn't "history", even though it has historical elements in it (Gaius Marius and Sulla capturing Jugurtha, for instance), and the Gospel of Mark isn't "fiction" just because it has fictional elements in it. If that were the case, the Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Livy, etc... wrote fiction and not history. Likewise, history itself as a genre would cease to exist because an overwhelming amount of history is filling in the gaps.

patcleaver

We can never know anything absolutely. All human knowledge consists only of what is probably true and what is probably false.

There is lots and lots of evidence in the following site that proves that Mark was almost certainly fiction.

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/ar...ospel_mark.htm

Additionally Bible Scholars such as Robert M. Price in The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man prove that Jesus was almost certainly just a myth.

It is quite correct that Josephus contains some fictional devices. However parts of Josephus are believed to be fictional.

Fiction is full of fictional devices such as plot, irony, character development, mystery, misunderstanding, foreshadow, magic, but histories contain few of these devices because in real life such things are unusual. Mark if full of these fictional devices. Mark is almost certainly fiction.

patcleaver

Mark is based on a few books of the OT, the Odyssey, and a few other works. All this material was probably very familiar to his audience. The original audience of Mark probably knew Mark, and knew exactly how Mark had written his story. Within a few generations the knowledge that Mark was fiction was simply lost.

The authors of Matthew Luke and John almost certainly believed that Mark was fiction because they freely changed the words of Jesus simply for aesthetic reasons. Nobody would do that with a history, even for a minor character, but for a fictional work all that matters is the aesthetics.

The authors of Luke clearly knew that Mark was fiction based on the OT, because the authors of Luke add details from the OT stories that the authors of Mark had used. For example, the Gethsemane Scene, of Jesus praying in the garden, is based on the scene where Elijah is hiding in a cave on the run from Jezebel. An angel appears to Elijah in the cave. One of the authors of Luke realized that Mark left out the angel, and figured out how he could fit the angel into the Gethsemane Scene so he added it to the story in Luke. This shows that the authors of Luke knew that Mark was a fiction, and they knew how Mark was constructed from the OT stories.

aa5874

But remember, Mark is unknown, the information about "Mark" in Church History by Eusebius, appears to be fiction, so I don't really know if Mark had an audience, he could have died long before his writings were discovered which he may have intentionally left without a name.

Or perhaps some Christian sect used gMark alone, late 1st century or early 2nd century, believing it was true, and the authors of gMatthew and gLuke merely copied and modified gMark to kick-start their own sects.

In any event, it would appear to me that the author of gMark knew that he wrote bogus history with respect to the events surrounding the figure called Jesus the Christ.

schilling.klaus

The canonical Gospels are just mid to late second century Judaising/euhemerising rewrites of earlier metaphysical gospels.
This has been shown by Massey, van den Bergh van Eysinga, and others
(independantly).
So even if they are meant by the churchfathers who wrote them to be read historically, the history related in them has no historiographical value,
only a dogmatic one.
The Catholic doctrine requires Jesus to be a flesh-and-bone being,
and thus the gospels had to be written with this purpose in mind.

Klaus Schilling