Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Vinnie · 04-16-2003, 09:55 PM

Quote:

How do you show that the gospels are reliable?

You can start with the pages from Sander's that I referenced above which deal with general arguments on creativity: 36-38, 41-44, 132, 138-145, 166, 173, 194, 195-196, 221, 308, 323. Throw in pg 45-46 of v1 of Marginal by Meier.

Vinnie

Vinnie · 04-16-2003, 09:57 PM

Quote:

Since you claim to be an historian, perhaps you could tell us what methodological techniques confirm the historicity of Jesus.

All the texts you deem interpolations.

Vinnie

Vorkosigan · 04-16-2003, 10:01 PM

But Q is clearly hypothetical, and the people who made it up said so. The point of Q was not to fool anyone. To say that the Gospels are based upon all mythical sources just because there is no Q source is absurd.

You seem to be missing the point here. Made up or accumulated by organic processes, the effect is the same. Q relates its collection of sayings to a fictional figure. The sayings are "real" in the sense that they predate the documents they are incorporated into.

No, you are wrong. There's tons of data. There is good textual data which proves that some kind of prior sources existed and can be pushed back to AD 50.

None. No argument on this account has ever gain wide acceptance. Such arguments are put forward, like the oral transmission claim, to enable scholars to avoid being compelled to conclude that Mark was the source of it all.

As for the claim that these sources were invented for some reason, you have no evidence for that. There are doctuments form the period saying so, and nothing more than conjecture.

I never said any "sources" were invented. I believe Q existed as a real document used by Luke, though it may have attributed its sayings to some other figure. Mark invented his stories about Jesus, that's what I said, and did not use sources, except perhaps for certain sayings, and of course the OT to build up his stories.

The limitations on Christian creativity can be documented easily enough through the similarity of texts.

Sanders wants to claim that Christian creativity was not extensive. Obvious bullshit. Half of Paul's canonical letters are forged, there are other known forged letters of correspondence between Paul and Seneca, Jesus and Agbar, as well as 30 gospels, including fanciful infancy gospels, as well as acts of Paul and Thecla, Acts itself, the heavily redacted and edited and interpolated gospel of John, as well as interpolations and redactions throughout many Christian documents, and of course, demonstratable creation of stories, such as the Passion, built out of other sources, the OT, Josephus. Sanders claim is pure bullshit. Christians were early and ardent forgers.

The sytax shows us they are copied from prior soruces. you just don't make the very same sentence structure as somone else working independently. the argument about copying OT just shows a lack of understand about the way things were done in the ancient world. They liked the OT a lot, it was their primary text, they loved to make litterary allusions to it.

Metacrock, you know as well as I do that the Passion story is not a set of allusions, but at every level it is built out of the OT. As Crossan stated, there is nothing left but the brute fact of Crucifixion.

That argument has been so defeated by scholars today. Almost no one believes that the passage is 100% interpolation. Almost all scholars accept some core witness to Jesus as a historical figure. Your argument is analogous to an astronmer trying to plug the steady state theory.

Metacrock, in all other texts, when a passage has clear seams on each side, contains non-authorial language, interrupts the flow of the text, has no record for a couple of centuries until it suddenly appears, etc ,etc the whole passage is condemned as an interpolation. Only in this passage are those sensible principles condemned. It is one of a number of scholarly inventions that make Jesus Historicism plausible and compromise with believing scholars.

Vorkosigan

Vinnie · 04-16-2003, 10:10 PM

Quote:

Sanders wants to claim that Christian creativity was not extensive. Obvious bullshit.

Sanders does not make the claim for all Christians and excludes the Gospel of John. The claim for creativity is applied to the synoptic Gospels (and Paul). Read those texts I cited above and come back and refute all of Sander's bullshit. The idea of "Pauline forgery" is a red herring here. So is the sayings material in GJohn as Sanders excludes GJohn from his reconstruction.

Vinnie

Vinnie · 04-16-2003, 10:25 PM

Quote:

Metacrock, you know as well as I do that the Passion story is not a set of allusions, but at every level it is built out of the OT. As Crossan stated, there is nothing left but the brute fact of Crucifixion.

Whether or not Crossan is correct we must remember that many scholars think the crucifixion of Jesus was embarrassing to early Christians What is left underneath all the apologetics and theological damage control regarding Jesus being baptized by John the baptist? Baptism.

Vinnie

Cretinist · 04-16-2003, 10:28 PM

Vorkosigan, how sure are you that Mark invented his stories about Jesus? Could you elaborate a bit on this idea? It seems to me that there would be no way of knowing what Mark may or may not have invented, or what he got from another written source or an oral tradition.

Granted, it is indeed almost entirely fiction (I particularly liked Randel Helm's book Gospel Fictions, which details all the links between the NT and the OT, and other literature), but saying that the author of Mark himself invented it seems to be stepping outside the evidence. Perhaps you could enlighten me.

Cretinist · 04-16-2003, 10:40 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Vinnie
Whether or not Crossan is correct we must remember that many scholars think the crucifixion of Jesus was embarrassing to early Christians What is left underneath all the apologetics and theological damage control regarding Jesus being baptized by John the baptist? Baptism.

Vinnie

I don't particularly see how the crucifixion is embarrassing to the Gospel writers. I do however see signs of embarrassment about Jesus' baptism in the Gospels, except Mark. Mark doesn't appear to be embarrassed at all about it to me.

If Mark wasn't embarrassed by it, then it doesn't appear to lend any support to the historicity of Jesus.

Vinnie · 04-16-2003, 10:46 PM

Quote:

Mark invented his stories about Jesus, that's what I said, and did not use sources, except perhaps for certain sayings, and of course the OT to build up his stories.

If Mark was inventing why the lack of any sort of chronology and the movable pericopes? Helm's list of narrative elements:

Once he was approached by a leper (1:40)
When after some days (2:1)
Once more (2:13)
When Jesus was at a table (2:15)
Once, when (2:18)
One Sabbath (2:23)
On another occasion (3:1)
On another occasion (4:1)
When he was alone (4:10)
That [same unspecified] day (4:35)
He left that place (6:1)
On one of his teaching journeys (6:6)
On another occasion (7:14)
There was another occasion about this time (8:1)
Jesus and his disciples set out (8:27)
On leaving those parts (10:1)

There appears to be a source behind the controversy traditions .
See this citation from Sanders which also mentions the pericope form:

Quote:

For the sake of emphasis and clarity, I wish to comment once more on the nature of the material that the gospels incorporated and also on how the authors utilized it. When Mark wrote his Gospel he had before him a lot of individual pericpes, and he put them together in a narrative without, however destorying the basic pericope form. We saw above his brief links: 'immediately', again', and similar vague indications (pp. 73f.). The quick stringing together of the pericopes allowed Mark to open his gospel in a dramaticaly forceful way, by racing through brief accounts of healings and conflicts, up to the conclusion that some people plotted Jesus' death. Matthew and Luke did not always keep Mark's order sequence, and they moved some of the stories to other places in their gospels. Thus, for example, Matthew did not put the story of the healing of the paralytic where it would go if he had been following Mark's order, in his ch. 4, but rather with other miracle stories in ch. 9. The pericope could be moved to suit the interests of each author. This reminds us once again that the gospels are not biographies in the modern sense of the word.

Mark may not have been the first to put pericopes together to make a story. Many scholars think that the series of conflict scenes in 2.1-3.6 came to him ready-made. It is noteworthy that the conclusion (the Pharisees and the herodfians plotted Jesus' death) comes too early for the structure of the gospel as a whole. The Pharisees and Herodians are reintroduced nine chapters later (Mark 12:13), where they are said to be trying to entrap Jesus. Historically it is not likely that the fairly minor conflicts in Mark 2.1-53.5 actually led to a plot to put Jesus to death (3:6), and editorially it is not likely that Mark himself created the plot where it now stands in 3:6, only to reintroduce a weaker version of opposition from these two parties in 12.13. The most likely explanation of 3.6 is that the conflict stories of 2.1-3.5 had already been put together and that they immediately preceded a story of Jesus' arrest, trial and execution. That is, a previous collection--a proto gospel-- may have consisted of conflict stories, a plot against Jesus, and the successful exocution of the plot.

For the moment it is important to see that, in reading the first chapters of mark, we are not reading a first-hand diary of 'life with Jesus in Galilee', but an edited collection of individual events that may originally have had another context."

Historical Figure of Jesus p 130-131

There appears to be a source behind some of Mark's miracles (used by John as well).
There appears to be a complex tradition history behind the feeding of the multitude.
Mark 12:1 uses "parables" but only one parable follows.

etc etc. There are numerous spots where it seems that Mark used earlier sources. Paul mentions crucifixion and the Twelve. Paul mentions Jesus' teaching on divorce and the final meal he had with his disciples. How is it that the author of GMark made all this material up when Paul, who was writing before him in the first Christian generation, has these details? Oh wait, are all those references in the Pauline corpus interpolations as well?

If you accept Johannine independence of Mark a host of other material arises as well which shows the existence of pre-Marcan sources.

Quote:

Such arguments are put forward, like the oral transmission claim, to enable scholars to avoid being compelled to conclude that Mark was the source of it all.

As we can see, this is BS and virtually all scholars agree.

Vinnie

Metacrock · 04-16-2003, 11:10 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Peter Kirby
[B]I don't think that people are saying, "everything in a religious and polemical text must be false," as that would mean for example that Herod was also a myth because he happens to be in the story.

[b]

[color=blue]Well I think many of them do assume as a matter of course that anything in the Gospels must be so.[/font]

Rather, I think that people are saying that the stories are unreliable because of their mythological qualities and polemical intent.

That's where the genre argument comes in. They aren't mythologoical. Legeodary perhaps, but they lack any of the criteria that Kerane (sp) or Elliade would give to mytholgoical content. They don't even have their own mythos.

How do you show that the gospels are reliable?

I don't have to, I'm a liberal. But as far as the historicity of Jesus is concerned, I linked to my Historical Jesus pages. TWo arguments I like the most are the Koster stuff on textual evidence from the Diatesseron taking the Passion narrative back to AD50 (Crosson's cross Gospel). And my original argument about no other versions of the basic Jesus story. All versions in houndreds of documents assume the same basic story line. If it was myth, or just made up (myth in the Doherty sense) it someone would have invented another version somewhere.

this is all just about construing the historicity of Jesus from the Gosples. As far as arguing for their litteral turth in every pericope, I don't.

For many people, taking Jesus as having been a real person is a matter of apologetics; it has become part of their beliefs that he is mythical or plausibly mythical. For them, the matter of the historicity of Jesus has extreme significance. Is it wrong for them to require better evidence than hearsay to assuage their doubts?

Perhaps its wrong for them to steak their atheism on the idea that Jesus didn't exist. But then perhaps its wrong of them to steak their problems with God upon God not existing.

Oh shouldn't say that!

BTW that assumes that something is wrong with the evidence. If you remove the immerative to find it one way or the other (the christian has to believe he existed, the Doherty type has to believe he didn't) then there's no real reason to find that the evidence is inadequate.

We've done posts, my friends and I (Nomad and others) on using Doherty's criteria to prove things such as Jospehus didn't exist. The evidence for Jospheus is pretty bad if you make the assumptions these guys make. Also that ancient Rome didn't exist, which is of course absurd, but I've pushed it pretty far using just Doherty's type of arugment. I just don't think that's the way to do history.

BTW I met Ish and Nomad in person. Nomad came down from Canada to Dallas and we got together at a coffee shop. They are great guys. It was a good time.

Is The Bible the Word of God?

Ted Hoffman · 04-16-2003, 11:15 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Peter Kirby
No, I truly and objectively dislike the bother of responding to your nonsense. I know that what I have written in this thread holds up, and I am not obligated to write anything because you have the time to bang on a keyboard. If someone else will take up the torch of discussion, I might find it bearable to respond to them.

Peter Kirby

What an easy way to cut off a challenging discussion. Simply dismiss what the other person is saying as nonsense. The questions became too tough? You expected me to say yes to everything you typed?

You are fooling yourself if you think anyone can buy that kind of childish crap.

*First it was extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
*Then you came up with "born of woman".
*Then brother of Jesus
*Then you questioned Isiah 7:14 being a messianic prophecy
*Then you arbitrarily stated that Paul excluded some important material because they were fictitious
*Then you wanted me to prove that Dionysos mother was not human
*Family of David
*Race of Abraham
*Hung on a cross
*Buried
*Then you asserted that Paul accepted Jesus as a human being
*Then 1 Cor 15:21-22
*Then the assertion that early skeptics never doubted the historicity of christ
*Then you resorted to caricaturing my arguments, constructing strawman arguments, shifting the arguments, making unrealistic and senseless demands and muddying the waters by conflating concepts.

I addressed each argument you made. You asked for sources, I gave them.

And now you arbitrarily state that all I have typed is nonsense. Thats your last resort.
What a bunch of crap! You really have some nerve!

Ignore my posts in future. We shouldn't waste each others time. You dont like my style and I dont like your sudden dramatic cop-outs.

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04-16-2003, 10:01 PM	#113
Vorkosigan Contributor Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Barrayar Posts: 11,866	But Q is clearly hypothetical, and the people who made it up said so. The point of Q was not to fool anyone. To say that the Gospels are based upon all mythical sources just because there is no Q source is absurd. You seem to be missing the point here. Made up or accumulated by organic processes, the effect is the same. Q relates its collection of sayings to a fictional figure. The sayings are "real" in the sense that they predate the documents they are incorporated into. No, you are wrong. There's tons of data. There is good textual data which proves that some kind of prior sources existed and can be pushed back to AD 50. None. No argument on this account has ever gain wide acceptance. Such arguments are put forward, like the oral transmission claim, to enable scholars to avoid being compelled to conclude that Mark was the source of it all. As for the claim that these sources were invented for some reason, you have no evidence for that. There are doctuments form the period saying so, and nothing more than conjecture. I never said any "sources" were invented. I believe Q existed as a real document used by Luke, though it may have attributed its sayings to some other figure. Mark invented his stories about Jesus, that's what I said, and did not use sources, except perhaps for certain sayings, and of course the OT to build up his stories. The limitations on Christian creativity can be documented easily enough through the similarity of texts. Sanders wants to claim that Christian creativity was not extensive. Obvious bullshit. Half of Paul's canonical letters are forged, there are other known forged letters of correspondence between Paul and Seneca, Jesus and Agbar, as well as 30 gospels, including fanciful infancy gospels, as well as acts of Paul and Thecla, Acts itself, the heavily redacted and edited and interpolated gospel of John, as well as interpolations and redactions throughout many Christian documents, and of course, demonstratable creation of stories, such as the Passion, built out of other sources, the OT, Josephus. Sanders claim is pure bullshit. Christians were early and ardent forgers. The sytax shows us they are copied from prior soruces. you just don't make the very same sentence structure as somone else working independently. the argument about copying OT just shows a lack of understand about the way things were done in the ancient world. They liked the OT a lot, it was their primary text, they loved to make litterary allusions to it. Metacrock, you know as well as I do that the Passion story is not a set of allusions, but at every level it is built out of the OT. As Crossan stated, there is nothing left but the brute fact of Crucifixion. That argument has been so defeated by scholars today. Almost no one believes that the passage is 100% interpolation. Almost all scholars accept some core witness to Jesus as a historical figure. Your argument is analogous to an astronmer trying to plug the steady state theory. Metacrock, in all other texts, when a passage has clear seams on each side, contains non-authorial language, interrupts the flow of the text, has no record for a couple of centuries until it suddenly appears, etc ,etc the whole passage is condemned as an interpolation. Only in this passage are those sensible principles condemned. It is one of a number of scholarly inventions that make Jesus Historicism plausible and compromise with believing scholars. Vorkosigan

04-16-2003, 10:28 PM	#116
Cretinist Banned Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: Hell Posts: 399	Vorkosigan, how sure are you that Mark invented his stories about Jesus? Could you elaborate a bit on this idea? It seems to me that there would be no way of knowing what Mark may or may not have invented, or what he got from another written source or an oral tradition. Granted, it is indeed almost entirely fiction (I particularly liked Randel Helm's book Gospel Fictions, which details all the links between the NT and the OT, and other literature), but saying that the author of Mark himself invented it seems to be stepping outside the evidence. Perhaps you could enlighten me.

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