Toto

For religionists and some others, any skepticism of the gospels is considered impolite. Is that your stance?

Jeffrey Gibson

Philostratus' Life of Apollonius? Porphyry's Life of Pythagoras? Dioneges Laertes, Life of Empedocles; Philo's Life of Moses? Speusippus' Plato's Wake?

In any case, which Gospel is composed predominantly of miraculous events?

Jeffrey

Jeffrey Gibson

My "stance" is that from anyone's point of view rlogan's expression of his skepticism was anything but polite. Is it your "stance" that it was otherwise?

Jeffrey

Jeffrey Gibson

Before we do, should we not first determine that what "we" take to be sure indicators of the Gospels having to be fiction really are such things, let alone really are from the point of view of what ancient writers thought indicators of fiction were?

Jeffrey

Toto

Are you prepared to argue that Moses was a historical character, based on Philo?

Can you cite modern historians who base their professional opinion on those works in particular to prove the existence of these putative historical characters?

Please.

All of the Gospels contain a large number of miraculous events - how many are required for "primarily?" In addition, they include highly improbable events (the Temple ruckus, the trial) and events of a theological nature. If you remove them, you have something like Jefferson's Bible, a set of moral statements. Do you know any historians who conclude that Jesus was a historical character based on the reported statements in the gospels?

Toto

My comment was a generalization, not confined to rlogan' statement in particular. rlogan's post was jocular and informal, but I saw nothing particularly impolite about it, unless you think that any criticism of the gospels is impolite.

It seems to have rubbed you the wrong way.

Toto

I think you are once again trying to shift the burden of proof.

Does it matter if the gospels would fit into a literary category of "fiction" or "bio" or something else? It might matter to a literary critic, but it would not make them at all believable, whatever the answer.

Jeffrey Gibson

Good for you! But I thought Iwas simply stating what we might need to be sure of before we claim that we speak with any degree of authority about what kind of literature an ancient author was intent to produce or had produced.[/quote]

Speaking of shifting things, why are you now presenting the questions I've been raising as ones that deal with how (or whether) something's being in a particular genre makes that something more believable (especially to us) than it would be if presented in another?

The issue is whether or not the markers that rlogan pointed to as showing that the Gospels had to be fiction (differences between them on the "date" of Jesus' birthday, competing and contradictory genalogies, bad geography, descriptions of the "fantastic", etc.) are not only peculiar to the Gospels, but are pecuilar to ancient works of fiction (and whether or not his claims about thesethings are in any way more imformed than his claims about what went on at Nicea).

Do you know?

Jeffrey

Jeffrey Gibson

What does this have to do with the question of whether there are ancient historical works about people the ancients believed were historical that are "composed predominantly of" accounts of the miraculous deeds of the work's central figure?

You tell me. You are the one who made the claim about what's in the Gospels and what they are composed of.

And I notice that you have shifted your claim now from the Gospels being "composed predominantly of miraculous events" to them being composed "primarily" of accounts of miraculous events, which is actually something that I don't think even you would wish to maintain.

Now would you please tell me which of the Gospels are are either predomonantly or primarliy composed of accounts of miraculous events? I don't see that any are so composed.

And let's get down to brass tacks, shall we? How much space in each of them is actually taken up by accounts of miraculous events. 10% 50% 90% Something else?

And is it the same across the board? 90% in Mathew and in Luke and in Mark and in John?


Jeffrey

Toto

rlogan did not comment on the genre of the gospels. He just said that My guess is that this is not based on literary analysis, but on a generic "bullshit detector." You can try to distinguish or explain all of the details that he mentions, but there is still an overall air of unreliability about the gospels.