aa5874

But, what you think is religion not history. You display FAITH rather than FACTS.

The author of gMatthew is NOT known, and did not claim to have copied gMark. It is simple baseless to think you can know by guessing when an anonymous writer wrote.

You should know that the author of gMathhew does not even appear to have needed gMark when he stated time AFTER time that all these things that he wrote about Jesus was ALREADY written or spoken by the prophets.

The author of gMatthew did NOT use gMark for his conception and birth narrative, the killing of the innocent, and the so-called prediction that Jesus would live in Nazareth. The author used so-called prophecies.

According to the author of gMatthew virtually EVERY EVENT in his JESUS story was fulfilled prophecies and was written in the Scriptures.

The author of gMatthew did NOT need gMark since he demonstrated that he used so-called prophecies found in the Scriptures.

What is "pretty sure"? You are "pretty sure"? Explain "pretty sure"!

Are you "pretty sure" about that? What does the rabbi say now?

spamandham

For what it's worth, I seem to recall a lecture by Carrier where he asserts that much of the gospel story is constructed from the OT. If we accept that, then wouldn't it follow that details of gJesus' life aught to match messianic prophecies?

GakuseiDon

Show_no_mercy, back on page 2 of this thread:

Taking into consideration Matt's habit of taking phrases [from the OT] out of context to make "prophecies" about Jesus' messiah-hood, this fits his modus operandi of reading the "he will be called a Nazirite" out of context and inserting it into his gospel to make it a prediction about Jesus.

Doherty, p. 394 of his new book:

Much of the ministry details [of Mark's Gospel], including Jesus' miracles, were fashioned from Old Testament precedents, and virtually the entire passion narrative was constructed out of passages from scripture.

Doherty, p. 396:

Matthew carried the midrashic approach to new heights, pointing to Jesus doing this or that in order to fulfill such-and-such a scriptural passage.

Plus in general any other mythicist that brings up the topic of "midrash".

Toto

So it dod not match the messianic prophecy. It used a phrase taken out of context.

Those precedents are not necessarily prophecy.

Midrash is not based on prophecy.

GakuseiDon

:huh: To repeat my point:

The old argument was that the details described in the Gospels didn't match what was found in the OT, and that was obvious. As Zindler put it: "Our evangelist either did not know that the Hebrew word nazir was unrelated to the Aramaic-Greek place-name Nazara or Nazareth, or he was dishonestly trying to fool his readers." So the evangelist who says that the Judges passage can be connected to 'Nazareth' is either ignorant or dishonest.

The new argument is that the details described in the Gospels DO match what is in the OT. The mythicist who proposes that 'Nazareth' is derived from the Judges passage is working honestly from the evidence. But it is simply apologetics, mythicist style.

All it goes back to is that the early Christians mined the OT to show that Jesus was prefigured there. It is a point that I think no-one doubts.

Ferryman to the Dead

The Mythicists argument does not stand on weather or not Sky Daddy's city was derived from the OT. What the authors of the NT wrote they had to draw from somewhere weather from the OT or each other they wrote what they imagined not what they saw or knew as fact.
http://www.stellarhousepublishing.com/mythicist.html

Charles Weisman, wrote in Jesus Christ in the Old Testament,

"The concept of a messiah (or savior or deliverer) is a central theme in the Old Testament.... It is also apparent that this messianic concept appears in the history of many ancient cultures. There are varied accounts and stories of a messiah in the histories of Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Persia, and other ancient civilizations."

Weisman also goes on to say that:

"The focal question here is, what is the origin of this messianic concept? ...the fact that Egyptian texts on this subject go back to 3000 B.C., long before the writings of Moses and the prophets, has led many skeptics, gnostics, and atheists to claim that the Scriptures are but a copy of ancient pagan religious beliefs...."

GakuseiDon

My point -- my ONLY point -- is that critics used to point out how weak such correlations were. It was evidence that Jesus didn't really fit with what was being said in those passages. But now mythicists state that it is quite reasonable to assume that the OT passages inspired the early Christians.

Stellarhousepublishing? Oh, you are one of THOSE. In that case, the mythicist also recognizes that the origin of the Horus myth -- and therefore Christianity -- is the Super Advanced Pygmy Theory: http://freethoughtnation.com/forums/...ic.php?p=18880

"The Pygmies believed in a Father-God who was murdered, and a Virgin Mother, who gave birth to a Saviour-God Son, who in turn avenged the death of his father. These later on became the Osiris, Isis and Horus of Egypt. The Pygmy Christ was born of a virgin, died for the salvation of his people, arose from the dead, and finally ascended to heaven. Certainly this looks Christianity before Christ."

Has it really? So, many skeptics, gnostics and atheists (that's a lovely distinct bunch!) claim that the Scriptures are but a copy of ancient pagan religious beliefs? Well, to paraphrase an earlier saying: "When people stop thinking there was a historical Jesus, they stop thinking and will believe anything".

Ferryman to the Dead

Thanks for pointing that out had not saw that until now. Though I am not quite sure what you mean by one of those?:huh:

Well if he was historical he surely was a legend in the minds that created him....

Doug Shaver

Carrier and Doherty both say that, and I think Price does, too. I'm not disagreeing with any of them.

Nope. Here's how it works, using for an example the bit about Judas getting 30 pieces of silver for betraying Jesus.

On the historicist assumption, the author of Matthew's gospel thinks Judas really betrayed Jesus and really got 30 pieces of silver for doing so. He scrounges through the scriptures for something that can be construed as a prophecy of that event. He finds it in Zechariah (but misattributes it to Jeremiah, presumably because he didn't always have the scriptures right at hand and was working from memory at that moment).

On the mythicist assumption, Matthew started out by scrounging the scriptures for ideas of what to include in his fictional account of a misunderstood messiah. He thinks he remembers reading something in Jeremiah (though it was actually Zechariah) about somebody being thought worth 30 pieces of silver and the money going for something having something to do with a potter's field, and he thinks to himself, "OK, that could be interpreted as a prophecy, and if Judas does such-and-such, that will fulfill the prophecy."

In neither case can it be credibly argued that Judas's actions actually constituted a fulfillment of any prophecy. It makes no difference at all whether we suppose that Matthew was under the impression that he was writing a true history or knew perfectly good and well and none of it really happened. In either case, he believed he was writing about a fulfilled prophecy, and in either case he was dead wrong.

show_no_mercy

Here's the problem. You seem to be wavering between two definitions of "match". One way we can say "match" is that Jesus' life was based on actual messainic passages in the Tanakh. The other way to say "match" is that Jesus' life was based on quote-mined passages from the Tanakh.

They are not the same thing, but you seem to be trying to make them the same thing for your argument.

It's no different than when Creationists quote-mine a biologist to show that the flaws of evolution that Creationists point out "match" the same problems that biologists find with the ToE.

No one says that the town name Nazareth (which is an actual town) was "derived" from Judges. This is a strawman.

Jesus' life was quote-mined from the Tanakh. The key phrase is quote-mined. They are not actual messainic prophecies. Much of the passion sequence is derived from the Psalms. But the Psalms are not prophetic. What is the HJ explanation for this?