Adam

That's just what I have been doing, but getting no response to my recent posts #345, 344, and 314. Exchange is a 2-way street.

Toto

Not this again. Are we caught in Groundhog Day?

Several posters have tried to explain to you that the Gospels cannot be used as proof of what happened in the Gospels.

You can convince yourself that you have identified eyewitness sources in the gospels, but you clearly haven't convinced anyone else. You are trying to use a part of the gospels to prove that the gospels are true, and this is not how proof works.

What gurugeorge asked of you, what everyone else requires, is some source external to the gospels. Otherwise you are just engaged in circular logic.

This is the response to all of you posts, and you have not answered or engaged with it. What will it take to get a response from you?

Toto

For example, here is one of the assertions from you Gospel Eyewitnesses thread at #526, December 16, 2011, extracted from a wall of verbiage:

What response do you expect? The Passion Narrative can even more easily be labeled as fictional or allegorical.

And it is misleading to say that your post got no responses. You can see the whole thread, and various posters raised the same objections over and over, that you could not seem to deal with because they didn't fit in your theme of non-supernatural stories must be accepted as historical.

Adam

Non-supernatural stories have to be considered in order to weigh the pros and cons, even by someone with an a priori rejection of supernatural stories. Three non-supernatural literarily identifiable documents need to be explained as to whether written by eyewitnesses to Jesus, by fiction writers, or by conspirators as lies. You can't escape from source-criticism just by saying they're "fictional or allegorical". I have presented the pro for eyewitness, it's someone's turn to present the con for whatever explains a different origin. (Nor does doing so necessarily eliminate whether they shed light on a historical Jesus.) The con has not been explored in Gospel Eyewitnesses after #525 except by Shesh with his flying donkeys.

Toto

What is there to explain?

You have never explained why these stories should be considered to be eyewitness accounts, other than "non-supernatural." That's not enough.

Source criticism cannot add any authenticity to a non-historical text.

Against the idea of eyewitness accounts, you have the whole field of Biblical criticism, which has traced every part of the gospel stories to some theme of the Hebrew Scriptures; you have the impossibilities and improbabilities throughout the gospels. There's too much to list here, when you haven't even presented a real case.

Adam

Try another approach then. Ever heard of historical novels? Their appeal is that they take something that happened or someone who lived and then make it more interesting. This does not prove that that person never existed and nothing like the events ever happened. You still need to account for whatever is real that caused someone (in the case of the gospels, many people) to tell about it and caused other people to gather together what they had written. Who or what was so phenomenal that many people wrote about this?

You're saying "the whole field of Biblical criticism", but my case is just about Jesus and the gospels. You're surely not saying all scholars are now Jesus Mythers?

Sheshbazzar

There is no 'Non-supernatural' story in the NT. You are trying to create one by means of selective editing.

You could as well take a couple of Newspapers and cut out selected sentences and rearrange them to create whatever story you wanted, hell, you could even cut out dozens of the phrase 'eyewitnesses report' and make 'eyewitness reports' out of your clip and rearrange compositions.
Far as I can see that is what you are doing with the NT texts, just 'cutting out' whatever don't fit your personal predilections, and rearranging the rest to suit yourself.

Your arguments are not persuasive because you are savaging the texts to make them say what you want them to say, rather than dealing with what they do say.

Toto

Historical novels can be useful, but you can't infer that the characters in them actually existed.

You will never be able to discover this from reading the gospels. You need another source of information. You can't rule out the distinct possibility that the character of Jesus was modeled on several different actual persons, none of whom resembled him, and none of whom were very phenomenal. Fiction can do that.

Obviously not, but you have yet to produce a scholar who thinks that the gospels contain direct eyewitness testimony. Bauckham seems to think that there were stories from eyewitnesses underlying the narrative, but he is not rash enough to claim that actual eyewitnesses wrote parts of the gospels.

Sheshbazzar

"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn". There was a South, there was a Civil War, there was an Atlanta, there were shady riverboat gamblers.
... ergo there must have been a real historical Rhett Butler, otherwise how could anyone have recorded his words?

Now let's see who could the 'eyewitnesses' be? Prissy is mentioned to have been present at Tara, and she could have told.....'

gurugeorge

I've been following your ideas loosely while you've been here. What I see is someone begging the question and then going into long, detailed analyses that would hold water only if we had some independent reason to believe there was a "Jesus" fellow.

It's only when there's that independent pointer that the hypothesis of a human being buried in the supernatural story comes alive, becomes viable. THEN AND ONLY THEN, can the type of analysis you are doing have any meaning other than an intellectual exercise.

There are often lots of quotidian elements in any supernatural story, mentions of real places and people, etc. But there is no logic to simply extracting those elements and having them be evidence of a hypothesis about a real and historical figure at the root of the story. There is no logical link WHATSOEVER. You need something external to the story to triangulate with, to make that hypothesis come alive, and to make subsequent internal investigations of the texts along those lines have purchase on historical reality.

AAAAARRRRGGGHHHH!!!!!!