jdboy

"Literary evidence shows that the gospel of Matthew is not the account of a historical Jesus but was created as a parody of the Torah. This is compatible with the latest evidence in books like Joseph Atwill’s Caesar’s Messiah,
which shows the gospels were created by the Romans as literary satires, after the end of the Roman-Jewish war."

http://www.scribd.com/doc/16438035/G...arody-of-Torah

I guess Hudson helped with Caesar's Messiah?

jdboy

"The first real literary analyst of the Christian New Testament was Porphyry Malchus who lived about 300CE. He wrote a 15 volume critical commentary on the Gospels suggesting that they were literary creations. For instance he rightly suggested that Gospel of Mark was modeled upon Homer. One of his pieces of evidence was that instead of calling the Gennesaret the Lake of Gaillee Mark calls it the Sea of Galilee and has inserted extra voyages on the water and makes the storm more sea like. Of course the church was very threatened by Porphry’s work and it was all burned —we only have a few fragments left. But enough to see what he was doing. He was showing that the gospels are literary creations, not works of history."

http://www.rodephemet.org/hudson.html

Toto

Parody implies mockery. I think most scholars would agree that the gospels took some of their language and form from the Hebrew Scriptures, but would ascribe it to respectful mimesis or modeling.

I don't think that Hudson or Atwill have any direct evidence of mockery.

jdboy

I agree they've carried the idea that the whole message is a mockery too far but i also see that some of it would be seen as mocking the zealots. The prime examples; calling a man lord and paying taxes.

Duvduv

I think it is fair to say that we can all imagine many other ways the Romans could mock Judaism and the Torah than creating some kind of divine savior whose typology does not exist in the Torah.

For one, they could make a mockery of all the details of commandment observance starting with the details of circumcision, the sabbath and kosher laws.

"Now sayeth the angel to JC: "Remember the law of kosher animals. Thou shalt not eat of an animal with a blue eye and a red eye whose left ear faces west while his right nostril is gray and his tongue has one and a half blue spots."
You can get the idea........

jdboy

"One way to see how the writer of Gospel of Matthew has taken Jewish concepts and arranged them to suit Roman needs is the passage on the sheep and the goats (Mt. 25:35-6) which is a midrash on Isaiah 58:7. Traditional Jewish midrash on the same passage describe releasing the slaves and freeing the prisoners from prison. The writer of Matthew’s Gospel however simply recommends that people should be visited in prison, not that they should be released"

http://www.scribd.com/doc/16425596/W...erary-Satires-

Satire in the eye of the Roman elite.