by The Prophet » Mon May 23, 2016 5:48 pm
> The stories of Jesus circulated as oral tradition for several decades.
We do not know this. The first we see of any stories about Jesus' life is Mark. Could the author have been drawing on stories circulating orally about Jesus? Yes. Do we have good reason to believe that's the case? Not necessarily. Is it even particularly relevant? No. We can go through every scene in Mark and identify which ones are rewrites of Jewish scripture, which ones are drawn from the Illiad, which ones parallel Josephus' Jewish War, and so on, until we've eliminated everything except those few scenes for which we have no identifiable precedent. We can then assert that, despite his quite apparent literary genius, the author of Mark couldn't possibly have made them up himself, and must have been using orally transmitted stories. This does not in any way confirm that such stories contain authentic, historically reliable information.
> The prophecies of Mark, for instance (that you quoted), are not boring rehashing of old material, but dynamic proof that Jesus was the fulfillment of the ancient prophecies of the one who was to come.
I never said they were boring rehashes. They're in fact quite clever examples of the Jewish practice of midrash. But you can't simply assume that Mark records that the prophecy was fulfilled because it actually was. If, as you admit, Mark's goal was to present Jesus as the Messiah, he would have no choice but to claim that Jesus fulfilled messianic prophecy, whether it was true or not.
> While the Gospel writers don't mention their sources, at least one possibility for that is that three of the four authors could easily have been eyewitnesses to many events.
We don't know who the authors of the Gospels were. Traditional attribution doesn't make sense, because it would argue that the eyewitness accounts are Matthew, Luke, and John, while Mark was recording what he heard from Peter. However, since the former three all use Mark as a source, and it would be ridiculous for the eyewitnesses to base their accounts on the work of someone who wasn't, this idea falls apart. Only one Gospel claims to have an eyewitness source; John claims to have gotten information from the Beloved Disciple. The Beloved Disciple is often thought to be nameless, which makes him a suspect source in the first place. But he's not nameless. Only one person in John is repeatedly referred to as 'the one whom Jesus loved': Lazarus (Jn 11.3, 5, 36). And he's depicted as reclining with Jesus at a meal after his resurrection (12.1-2, 9-11), so we're clearly supposed to realize he's the one reclining with Jesus after the Last Supper (13.23-25).
But there's a problem, because we know Lazarus is fictional. The story of Lazarus' resurrection is John's refutation of the parable of Lazarus that appears in, and only in, Luke. In Luke's parable, a rich man dies and goes to hell, and sees a beggar he once knew named Lazarus 'reclining on the bosom of Abraham'. He begs Abraham to resurrect Lazarus and send him to warn others to avoid the rich man's sad fate, but Abraham tells him that he will not do so, and that even if he did, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.' But John's theology is very much opposed to the messiah being hidden, so he flips everything around. A fictional Lazarus becomes a real Lazarus, who is resurrected, and whose resurrection does convince a lot of people. And this Lazarus even 'reclines on the bosom of Jesus', casting Jesus as the new and better Abraham.
John pulls Lazarus out of Luke's fiction, makes him real, and uses him throughout the Gospel to refute the parable that openly claimed that even a resurrection wouldn't convince people. Luke clearly said it wouldn't work, so John has it work tremendously well.
> Another factor to consider is that what they were writing was a theography, not a biography, so source notation took a back seat to their purpose in using the genre of Gospel.
That's certainly a relevant point. But hardly one that argues for the historical accuracy of the works.
> In that sense you are guilty of presentism, expecting the ancient world to have worked the way our modern world does.
Not at all. I wouldn't expect any ancient author to meet our standards. I would expect an ancient historian to meet the standards of historians of the time, and when they don't do this, I don't trust them as much. And the Gospels don't follow any of the methods of critical historians of the 1st century, not even Luke; he writes in a mode like that of a historian, and fills out his account with historical detail (pulled, most likely, from Josephus' Antiquities), but making his account look like a history and actually doing history are two different things.
> This is no lame rewriting of legends but the point of the Evangelists and the purpose of the Gospel writings.
I entirely agree. But that purpose is quite good motivation for fabricating those stories and sayings. This is not an unknown practice; the Mishnah was supposed to be the orally transmitted collected teachings of Moses, and it is almost certainly no such thing.
> You claim the Gospel writers "[fail] to actually write as though they were [writing with objectivity and accuracy]," but the only hook you have to hang that hat on is in the miracle stories, for which you have no evidence for your claim that these are legends and myths.
Not at all. Even the events of the story which have no miracle content are products of literary construction. There are even instances where we don't know the symbolism intended by a story, but can still tell it was clearly not meant to be taken literally. For instance, Mark 14.3-9. A woman spontaneously, for no historically intelligible reason, anoints Jesus with extraordinarily expensive oil from a priceless jar. No random nameless stranger would anoint someone for death days before that death, especially when Mark tells us that no one was expecting him to die. And they certainly wouldn't be carrying around an $18,000 jar of oil, much less break it over someone's head, just to make an allegorical point. Mark doesn't explain why it had to be 'pure nard oil', why it had to be an alabaster jar, why this woman isn't given a name but is supposed to be eternally remembered, or why she got it in her head to waste so much money on a pointless gesture. She was not mentioned before this, and is never mentioned again. She's a literary device, and this never happened.
> A study of Luke's accuracy rating proves him to be at least 99% accurate
This is basically irrelevant. Luke could be 100% accurate on all publicly available facts, and it would mean nothing other than that he made use of the work of a reliable historian to add detail to his story. It's clear that Luke had a wide base of knowledge from which to draw, and had sufficient skill at research to get local history correct. But the question is whether he's reliable regarding information that wasn't generally available, whether he was able to critically evaluate multiple sources, sift through conflicting claims, skillfully interrogate witnesses, etc. And he shows none of the signs that ancient historians give us of being good at any of this.
> You berate Paul for not bothering with the stories and teachings of Jesus, but you miss the point that Paul saw so very clearly: The focal point is the blood of his crucifixion and the reality of the resurrection in light of his identity as God.
I get that point. The problem is, this means trouble for any claim that early Christians were interested in accurately preserving stories about Jesus' life. Because Paul, and everyone he ever wrote to, was so entirely disinterested in that life that it never came up. It never even slipped into conversation as an aside. You'd have to work very hard to write 20,000 words about Jesus without ever telling a story about things he did or mentioning something he said, unless of course you knew no such stories or sayings.
> The stories of Jesus circulated as oral tradition for several decades.
We do not know this. The first we see of any stories about Jesus' life is Mark. Could the author have been drawing on stories circulating orally about Jesus? Yes. Do we have good reason to believe that's the case? Not necessarily. Is it even particularly relevant? No. We can go through every scene in Mark and identify which ones are rewrites of Jewish scripture, which ones are drawn from the Illiad, which ones parallel Josephus' Jewish War, and so on, until we've eliminated everything except those few scenes for which we have no identifiable precedent. We can then assert that, despite his quite apparent literary genius, the author of Mark couldn't possibly have made them up himself, and must have been using orally transmitted stories. This does not in any way confirm that such stories contain authentic, historically reliable information.
> The prophecies of Mark, for instance (that you quoted), are not boring rehashing of old material, but dynamic proof that Jesus was the fulfillment of the ancient prophecies of the one who was to come.
I never said they were boring rehashes. They're in fact quite clever examples of the Jewish practice of midrash. But you can't simply assume that Mark records that the prophecy was fulfilled because it actually was. If, as you admit, Mark's goal was to present Jesus as the Messiah, he would have no choice but to claim that Jesus fulfilled messianic prophecy, whether it was true or not.
> While the Gospel writers don't mention their sources, at least one possibility for that is that three of the four authors could easily have been eyewitnesses to many events.
We don't know who the authors of the Gospels were. Traditional attribution doesn't make sense, because it would argue that the eyewitness accounts are Matthew, Luke, and John, while Mark was recording what he heard from Peter. However, since the former three all use Mark as a source, and it would be ridiculous for the eyewitnesses to base their accounts on the work of someone who wasn't, this idea falls apart. Only one Gospel claims to have an eyewitness source; John claims to have gotten information from the Beloved Disciple. The Beloved Disciple is often thought to be nameless, which makes him a suspect source in the first place. But he's not nameless. Only one person in John is repeatedly referred to as 'the one whom Jesus loved': Lazarus (Jn 11.3, 5, 36). And he's depicted as reclining with Jesus at a meal after his resurrection (12.1-2, 9-11), so we're clearly supposed to realize he's the one reclining with Jesus after the Last Supper (13.23-25).
But there's a problem, because we know Lazarus is fictional. The story of Lazarus' resurrection is John's refutation of the parable of Lazarus that appears in, and only in, Luke. In Luke's parable, a rich man dies and goes to hell, and sees a beggar he once knew named Lazarus 'reclining on the bosom of Abraham'. He begs Abraham to resurrect Lazarus and send him to warn others to avoid the rich man's sad fate, but Abraham tells him that he will not do so, and that even if he did, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.' But John's theology is very much opposed to the messiah being hidden, so he flips everything around. A fictional Lazarus becomes a real Lazarus, who is resurrected, and whose resurrection does convince a lot of people. And this Lazarus even 'reclines on the bosom of Jesus', casting Jesus as the new and better Abraham.
John pulls Lazarus out of Luke's fiction, makes him real, and uses him throughout the Gospel to refute the parable that openly claimed that even a resurrection wouldn't convince people. Luke clearly said it wouldn't work, so John has it work tremendously well.
> Another factor to consider is that what they were writing was a theography, not a biography, so source notation took a back seat to their purpose in using the genre of Gospel.
That's certainly a relevant point. But hardly one that argues for the historical accuracy of the works.
> In that sense you are guilty of presentism, expecting the ancient world to have worked the way our modern world does.
Not at all. I wouldn't expect any ancient author to meet our standards. I would expect an ancient historian to meet the standards of historians of the time, and when they don't do this, I don't trust them as much. And the Gospels don't follow any of the methods of critical historians of the 1st century, not even Luke; he writes in a mode like that of a historian, and fills out his account with historical detail (pulled, most likely, from Josephus' Antiquities), but making his account look like a history and actually doing history are two different things.
> This is no lame rewriting of legends but the point of the Evangelists and the purpose of the Gospel writings.
I entirely agree. But that purpose is quite good motivation for fabricating those stories and sayings. This is not an unknown practice; the Mishnah was supposed to be the orally transmitted collected teachings of Moses, and it is almost certainly no such thing.
> You claim the Gospel writers "[fail] to actually write as though they were [writing with objectivity and accuracy]," but the only hook you have to hang that hat on is in the miracle stories, for which you have no evidence for your claim that these are legends and myths.
Not at all. Even the events of the story which have no miracle content are products of literary construction. There are even instances where we don't know the symbolism intended by a story, but can still tell it was clearly not meant to be taken literally. For instance, Mark 14.3-9. A woman spontaneously, for no historically intelligible reason, anoints Jesus with extraordinarily expensive oil from a priceless jar. No random nameless stranger would anoint someone for death days before that death, especially when Mark tells us that no one was expecting him to die. And they certainly wouldn't be carrying around an $18,000 jar of oil, much less break it over someone's head, just to make an allegorical point. Mark doesn't explain why it had to be 'pure nard oil', why it had to be an alabaster jar, why this woman isn't given a name but is supposed to be eternally remembered, or why she got it in her head to waste so much money on a pointless gesture. She was not mentioned before this, and is never mentioned again. She's a literary device, and this never happened.
> A study of Luke's accuracy rating proves him to be at least 99% accurate
This is basically irrelevant. Luke could be 100% accurate on all publicly available facts, and it would mean nothing other than that he made use of the work of a reliable historian to add detail to his story. It's clear that Luke had a wide base of knowledge from which to draw, and had sufficient skill at research to get local history correct. But the question is whether he's reliable regarding information that wasn't generally available, whether he was able to critically evaluate multiple sources, sift through conflicting claims, skillfully interrogate witnesses, etc. And he shows none of the signs that ancient historians give us of being good at any of this.
> You berate Paul for not bothering with the stories and teachings of Jesus, but you miss the point that Paul saw so very clearly: The focal point is the blood of his crucifixion and the reality of the resurrection in light of his identity as God.
I get that point. The problem is, this means trouble for any claim that early Christians were interested in accurately preserving stories about Jesus' life. Because Paul, and everyone he ever wrote to, was so entirely disinterested in that life that it never came up. It never even slipped into conversation as an aside. You'd have to work very hard to write 20,000 words about Jesus without ever telling a story about things he did or mentioning something he said, unless of course you knew no such stories or sayings.