leonarde

Posted by Skeptical: Which of the "other religious leaders/teachers of
his time"
1)claimed that they would rise from the dead?

2)had disciples who claimed that they (the leaders)did indeed rise from the dead?

3)appeared post mortem to a prominent persecutor of the nascent cult/religion (a la Saint Paul)?

It just seems to me that you are gilding the lilly: sure it would be nice to have 5 Gospels (of
a canonical nature) instead of 4. But why stop there? Six would be better still. Seven would be better still etc.

In the second paragraph of your OP you yourself
seem to make assumptions, in the most general way,
about the CONTENTS of such a (wholly theoretical)
NT work:
-------------------------------------------------
Especially given the controvery over the veracity of the NT writings as we have them and the amount of time between his death and the present, it seems completely illogical that he would not have left writings from his own hand to clear up any questions about what he may or may not have said.
-------------------------------------------------
But perhaps such a work wouldn't "clear up" those
grey areas but rather make the grey areas larger.

Cheers

[ September 11, 2002: Message edited by: leonarde ]</p>

Kosh

Now leanarde, I know you've been here long enough to have seen all these claims blown away. Need we waste bandwidth on them again?

leonarde

I don't agree:

1)I haven't read enough apologetics to have absorbed the basics in even the most tentative way.

2)at II that has not been my focus.

3)at no point did I try to "unskepticize" Skeptical. I merely tried to show that his "Jesus
Gospel" itself is a vague concept and (perhaps) the product of wishful thinking.

4)I think I stayed on topic and showed
a)why there's evidence in the NT that Jesus was
literate.
b)even a (theoretical) Jesus-written Gospel wouldn't NECESSARILY be better.

Cheers!

Kosh

[quote]Originally posted by leonarde:
<strong>
Which of the "other religious leaders/teachers of
his time"
1)claimed that they would rise from the dead?
</strong>
[/quote

You don't have evidence of Jesus claiming this. You have 4 Gospels, written a minimum of 40 years after the event, which claim that Jesus claimed this. You have no of knowing that they weren't retrofitted to the events.

Once again, you have only Gospel accounts. The Gospels are anonymous, and were not written by the disciples to whom they have been traditionally attributed. This is agreed on by even Christian NT scholars. Where are the writings of these disciples?

Paul saw a "vision" of Jesus. Just exactly what happened is contradictory in the NT. He did not see the ressurrected Jesus. Nor are there any Roman records of this exceptional ressurection. You'd think somebody would have made mention of it after the Romans crucified him.

Now, back to the topic at hand.

leonarde

The refrain here is that we have "only" the Gospel
accounts. But the idea of the OP is: what if we
had a Fifth Gospel account? I humbly submit we would be in the same (in your view leaky) boat as
we are at present: having only the 4 canonical
Gospels. If not, WHY NOT??

And saying "Well, it was written by Jesus" doesn't
really do it; HOW WOULD WE KNOW it was written by
Jesus?

Cheers!

Skeptical

I'm not interested in other leaders, I'm interested in why Jesus would not have left his own writings and your evading the question. Based on the claims of Jesus in the NT, I would expect a certain minimum level of evidence which it doesn't appear that we have. Saying Jesus compares well to other religious figures is, IMO, like being valedictorian of summer school. The point is that IF Jesus was as important as the NT stories claim, it seem very difficult to reconcile that he would not have left his own writings.

Your avoiding the question. The question has nothing whatsoever to do with the number of Gospels, it has to do with the _author_ of documents.

The point is that there are various forms such a work by Jesus could take. You are assuming it _must_ look a certain way to have had value, all I am saying is that there are various assumptions one can make about what such a document could have taken that would have made it very valuable. I am not saying such documents _must_ have taken a certain form, I am saying they _could_ have taken a certain form. Some of your arguments rest on the idea that the documents would have been written in a certain way, and my argument back is that they could have been written in a different way. Assuming the content and then saying "well that content would not have been useful" is not a valid argument since there are various forms such documents could have taken that would have made them very valuable. That was my point.

CX

If Darth Vader had the voice of James Earl Jones why did he look like my dad? The problem with your question is that the antecendent is not established as true. Consequently the question is meaningless.

Skeptical

That is _not_ the question. The point is that we only have documents written by other people and nothing even claimed to have been written by Jesus.

Strictly speaking we couldn't have absolute proof. However, if we had a document that:

1) Was claimed by Paul to have been in the possession of the disciples in Jeruselem and to have been written by Jesus
2) Was circulated among the early churches in the 1st century

This would be evidence that could not be simply dismissed and we would have at least as good a reason to believe it was written by Jesus as we would to believe that the letters of Paul are written by Paul.

It seems to me you are skirting the issue. Whether or not we would have sufficient evidence to conclude a document claiming to be written by Jesus was in fact written by Jesus is irrelevant since we don't have any documents that are even _claimed_ to have been written by Jesus. Why we don't have such documents is my question.

CX

But now aren't you making the very same assumption that I discussed in my response to Skeptical? If you define god the way Xians do you can't possibly draw any conclusions about his motivations or methods. An omnipotent, omniscient, infinite being is not, in principle, comprehensible to you or me or any other person. The real problem is actually with that definition of god. But that's a topic for EoG.

CX

Defined that way the "historical Jesus" undoubtedly existed. Joshua was and is and extremely common name amongst the Jews and there were Rabbi's in the 1st century. This, of course, tells us nothing about the founder of Xianity.

Not all Rabbies were Pharisees. That was only one "sect" if you will of 1st century Judaism. If what we have in the NT and extracanonical texts is in any way reflective of the HJ, he most certainly wasn't a Pharisee.


Just some minor quibbles.