Malachi151

I've decided against it. I'm writing a larger article on the Jesus Myth in general instead.

spin

Why bother?

When you want to talk about the text, your comments will become more useful. Until then, how do you account for the fact that beyond the father's name, mother's name, baby's name and birth place name, what else do you find in common between the two accounts? What makes you think that the writers were choosing from a much larger repertoire of nativity data? Oh, I get it: you're rationalizing yet again!

Perhaps you could get a remake to redress the problem by leaving out the prosecution's case.

Could you apply this irrelevance criterion to you actual argument? I mean Matthew leaves out the bit about living in Nazareth and going off to Bethlehem only to substitute it with the idea that Joseph lived in Bethlehem, took Mary as wife and had the kid there and eventually move to Nazareth because he didn't want to live under Archelaus, who had just been deposed under Luke version in which the birth followed the census to incorporate Judea into the Roman empire after the removal of Archelaus. This makes Jesus about eleven by the time he is born.

Try looking at what the Lucan writer(s) borrows from Mark. Do you find him leaving out say over 50% of his source material there? No? well maybe the nativity is a special case.

How much of the Marcan source material does the Matthean writer(s) omit?? Maybe this time there was just so much material, they could afford to leave it out, or maybe, seeing that Mark shows no knowledge of the nativity material, it didn't exist at the time. We all can speculate.

I'm not an atheist, but I'll still look at the original Greek word, because the text is the primary source, not any amount of speculation and justification you might like to work up.

Why don't you start a thread on some of this stuff?

But then, you might not be getting what the "biblical criticism" part of the name of this thread actually is.


spin

The Evil One

It's not so much that, as the fact that the following clause rules out them having ever lived there before:


Get that? Matt. is saying that the reason Jesus is "called a Nazarene" is because his family moved TO Nazareth after going to Egypt. If Joseph was a native of Nazareth to start with, then that prophecy would already have been fulfilled.

spin

That seems to be what the writer thought, but of course Nazarhnos, or at least Nazwraios which is the form Matt uses, is not derived from Nazareth. That is however another story.


spin

Malachi151

But the odd thing is that the passage that he is referencing has nothing to do with a place:

This is typical of the sloppy references used by the NT writers, especially "Matthew", but if he is drawing "Nazareth " from here, then it has nothing to do with a place called Nazareth.