Clivedurdle

The Pentecostal tradition I was brought up in was very proud to link everything back to the OT - My Dakes is full of cross references - it was used as evidence of Jesus fulfilling the OT! Myriad preachers always did this!

But if you reverse engineer it, oh dear.

hallq

I really don't think the fantastic elements of Jesus' life throws the rest into doubt. All kinds of fantastic beliefs - alien abduction, ghost sightings, psychic powers - have gotten wrapped up with real historical people. I think that's the best way to view these stories about Jesus.

yalla

Vork:
"Not true, because many of the events of Jesus' life are taken from the Old Testament and are probably fictional. Hence the suspicion.''

One of the things that I see as a problem is that when scholars take out the really obvious doubtful stuff, miracles and tanakh prophecy fulfilled type things, anachronisms and the like, there then seems to be a presumption that the rest is authentic.
The rule is it's all true except this bit and that and them but the rest is fair dinkum.
Suspicion is suspended.
The Ignatiana seems to suffer from that, "Yeh we know most of them, including the letter to Mary are fake and there's a lot of really iffy stuff left in the rest but what is left over is OK''.
Doesn't inspire confidence.

Boro Nut

I can't see it. By all accounts he ate quite modestly, and there's no mention of a crane during the crucifiction.

Boro Nut

RUmike

There are a bunch of parables in Thomas that have parallels in Matt and/or Luke. Often they are simpler and without interpretation by the author, so they are considered by many to be closer to the original tradition.

premjan

Why would OT writers make up stories about Jesus and put it into the OT? Was it a kind of mythmaking or allegory or something?

rlogan

hi premjan.

The authors of the gospels were quote mining. Much of it is completely out of context, such as the "suffering servant" material in Isaiah. Those particular Hebrew Bible passages are esoteric meanderings that appear to be about Israel, and not a savior.

If you want to "validate" your son of god, you better tie him into as many ancient writings as you can. So you quote mine and cobble together your saviour out of various passages that may or may not have anything to do with a messiah.

Different Hebrew Bible passages talk about someone important being born in Bethlehem, and another that he comes from out of egypt, and another that he shall be from Galilee, and then of course that he shall be a naza-something.


So you get all of them! You have him "from" naza-something, but born in Bethlehem, and then he travels to Egypt while little babies are being slaughtered by Herod, so he can come "out of Egypt" and be from Galilee.

Doug Shaver

They didn't. The gospel writers found some OT passages that they could construe as messianic prophecies and then wrote their stories to match those passages.

Rick Sumner

You seem to be defining Gnosticism as a theology characterized by themes found in the bulk of the Nag Hammadi texts, I have several caveats with this approach.

First of all, those at Nag Hammadi clearly did not define their religion in the sense that you do--if they did, then many of the texts there would not have made it. Besides which, so little survives of "Gnosticism," that it would be difficult to make any effort at assessing how widespread the views at Nag Hammadi were, or how representative of "Gnosticism" they might be considered.

Secondly, applying the identifying criteria you provide, one could make a very strong case that the GJohn is Gnostic, though it isn't, and might argue that the Apocryphon of James is not Gnostic, though most would agree that it is. One must be wary of criteria that so readily provide false positives.

Ultimately, Gnosticism seems to be like indecency--one knows it when one sees it. More aptly, as suggested by Karen L. King in What is Gnosticism it might be suggested that it never existed, except as a term roughly equivalent to "the other guys," hence the difficulty we seem to have in extracting some sort of homogenous religion from a wealth of different texts. In the case of Thomas, it almost seems to be an ad hoc to support a given dating. Those who claim it Gnostic almost uniformly date it late, while those who don't date it early.

Thirdly, I find most efforts to define a "first layer" in Thomas to be a hopeless venture. The haphazard way that themes are begun and ended, even left and returned to, indicates multiple redactors, over a very long period of time, which causes significant damage to most efforts to stratify it. We have no way of knowing who redacted what and when, and thus--while it may have an early core--there is no way to establish what was early and what was redacted. For one example, Q parallels are a criteria frequently used to establish the earliest strata, yet--even allowing an early core--how do you know if a parallel is early and independent, rather than a third century addition by someone copying from the Gospel of Matthew?

I see this (or statements like it) bandied about a lot, but have never understood them. Where in Thomas would you expect to find a mention of miracles, the crucifixion, or the resurrection? Bear in mind how the gospel is introduced, in particular--it gives no pretext that it is going to give you any information about anything of the sort.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

911

After you find God, you tend to know what is real and what is false and what is immaterial whether true or false.

Seeking God is so simple it is "stupid." Humble yourself and seek God.

After you have found God; read all the "scriptures" or not, it does not matter. Why do you want to depend on someone else's belief?

This is poignant:

"Shortly after Elaine Pagels’ two-and-half-year-old son was diagnosed with a rare lung disease, the religion professor found herself drawn to a Christian church again for the first time in many years... In her exploration, she uncovers the richness and diversity of Christian philosophy that has only become available since the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts... The one deficiency in Pagels’ examination of Thomas, if there is one, is that she never fully returns in the end to her own struggles with religion that so poignantly open the book."

You see, her examination of the gThomas opened her mind again and if I may guess; she chucked most of what she could not accept in mainstream Christianity and found God.