spamandham

Outside the Old Testament (I believe the stories of Abraham are exact parallels) and the gospels, I am not aware of such a thing. But that isn't relevant, because the argument that the original audience knew it was not literally history is based on internal evidence, rather than an argument from similarity with other works.

Take for example, the whithering of the fig tree. The fig tree doesn't produce fruit, and so Jesus destroys it. This is a bewildering story to anyone who doesn't understand the symbolism. But if you *do* understand the symbolism, then it becomes clear that the story is not even intended to be taken as historical. The fig tree was a well known symbol for the coming messiah. Jesus sees that the fig tree isn't bearing fruit and so destroys it. The allegory is clear and obvious: Messianic hopes are not productive, and so Jesus, who represents the Jewish people, should cast aside that dream.

Toto

There is no evidence of these stories. They are a hypothetical construct to connect the gospels to the first part of the first century. The gospels themselves show literary dependence, with no indications of any oral tradition.

The author of Luke is not a reliable source.

GakuseiDon

Sure, I agree totally. We need to look at all the evidence. But my suggestion that we look at the Gospels in isolation was in relation to the apparent intentions of the Gospel writers. If the Gospels appear to be a form of ancient biography, and the evidence suggests that ancient biographies were almost exclusively written about people who were thought to have existed, then this needs to be factored into the final equation. From the historicist perspective, the Gospels were written this way because they were about an actual person. From the ahistoricist perspective, the Gospels were written this way despite them not being about an actual person.

I'm not sure what you mean. My point is that the Gospels were accepted as being about an historical person fairly quickly. Lucian states that it was obvious when tall tales were being told, so, whatever the Gospels were, they must have had some kind of inherent credibility about them, for them to have been accepted as history. I don't doubt that educated pagans (like Lucian and Celsus) would question some of the contents, but if any of them recognised the Gospels as being in the genre of fiction, we never hear of it. Certainly Celsus read the Gospels and believed that they were about an actual person.

If someone reads a Popeye cartoon today, they recognise the genre and might be surprised that Popeye was inspired by an actual person. Whatever the Gospels were, they were not obvious fictions to the people of that time.

Again, it comes down to the genre of the Gospels and the intentions of the authors. It seems to me that, regardless of what the authors personally believed, the Gospels were written in such a way that they were accepted as history. (This is in regard to someone's earlier point about the Gospels being recognised as allegorical fiction.)

At some point the Gospels were written. In your view, were they written by people who believed that the events in them related to an actual historical person, an actual Jewish person crucified under Pontius Pilate? Or did the Gospel authors craft "bioi" of someone they thought didn't exist, in a genre that appears to have been used to exalt people who were thought to have existed?

Juststeve

According to Toto the author of Luke is not a reliable source even with respect to how he himself went about gathering information for his Gospel. <edit>

Steve

Toto

If you want to assume that the author of Luke "gathered information", as opposed to weaving together a story, you have you mind made up already.

Seriously, is there any other branch of scholarship where ancient documents are assumed to be basically true?

show_no_mercy

The earliest versions of what is now called "Luke" don't seem to have that disclaimer at the beginning.

It might just be only coincidence that a person named "Theophilus" lived in the late 2nd century who called himself a Christian but didn't know the Jesus story.

spamandham

I think you've misunderstood Lucian. His point was that people were taking such tales seriously, and so he goes absurdly out of his way to state up front that he's writing lies, and then goes on to write a story that is intentionally more fantastic than average. It's a parody of the gullibility of his day and the rampant practice of presenting fables as if they were real.

GakuseiDon

We don't know whether Lucian read the Gospels or not, but IYO do you think he would have recognised them as fictions, or would he have thought them as exaltations of an actual person? That is, did the Gospels have an inherent credibility about them, such that even educated pagans would have thought them to be about an actual person?

Toto

Haven't we taken this joke too far? "Inherent credibility" in a tale of a wandering miracle worker?

Steven Carr

'Luke' seems to have read these other accounts that existed - Mark, and either Matthew or Q - , and used them.

As well as the LXX, of course.