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[The Prophet]

> Critical analysis has shown that the Gospels are written from the same linguistic and cultural perspective as their contemporaries.

That's not my point. My point is that you can't argue about the Gospels based on what was the case in oral tradition, because the Gospels aren't oral tradition. They're literature. Considering literature is in fact easier to preserve intact than oral tradition (that's precisely why we write things down), I'm not even sure why you'd appeal to oral tradition as though it were a source of reliability anyway.

> By what measure are you concluding that the Gospels are unreliable?

First, because the Gospels don't even use the recognizably imperfect standards of ancient historians anyway. Yes, people like Tacitus are generally reliable, but none of the Gospels use any of the methods employed by Tacitus. None of the Gospels tells us the name of their author; that we know Tacitus wrote the Annals because he put his name to the document is more than we have for any Gospel. At no point do the Gospels name their sources, use those sources comparatively, discuss the relative merits of those sources, or explain why they are reliable. They do not discuss methods, or the possibility that their information is incorrect, or the existence of any alternative accounts. They express no amazement at anything they report, no matter how fantastical it is. They never acknowledge when they have changed what their sources say, or explain why they did so. They do not read like eyewitness accounts or collections of such, nor do they identify themselves that way.

Second, because many scholars have demonstrated that the Gospels are primarily and pervasively mythical. Required reading on this topic:
John Dominic Crossan, The Power of Parable
Randel Helms, Gospel Fictions
Dennis MacDonald, The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark
Thomas Thompson, The Messiah Myth
Thomas Brodie, The Birthing of the New Testament

In the words of Marcus Borg, in Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, we have to admit "(1) that much of the language of the Gospels is metaphorical; (2) that what matters is the more-than-literal meaning and (3) that the more-than-literal meaning does not depend upon the historical factuality of the language."

We know that many of the narratives are rewrites of pre-Christian Jewish stories. Matthew borrows stories about Moses to turn into stories about Jesus, and borrows from Daniel to rewrite Mark's empty tomb narrative. Mark created the crucifixion narrative largely from Psalm 22.

Mark 15.24:
And they crucified him, and divided his clothes among them, casting lots to decide what each should take.
Psalm 22.18:
they divide my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots.
Mark 15.29-31:
Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, 30 save yourself, and come down from the cross!” 31 In the same way the chief priests, along with the scribes, were also mocking him among themselves and saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself.
Psalm 22.7-8:
All who see me mock at me; they make mouths at me, they shake their heads; 8 “Commit your cause to the Lord; let him deliver— let him rescue the one in whom he delights!”
And of course, Mark 15.34 and Psalm 22.1:
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

We can find examples of Jewish rabbinical legends rewritten into the Gospels. Inventing stories about famous people was the norm, and students educated in Greek schools (which the authors of the Gospels obviously would have been, writing in Greek) were explicitly taught how to do so, crafting symbolic narratives out of general proverbs and making major or minor changes to traditional stories to make whatever points they saw fit. They were also taught to emulate old stories, changing their messages along the way, with new characters and new outcomes; Homer wrote about a boxing match between Epeius and Euryalus, which Virgil turned into a boxing match between Dares and Entellus which changed the outcome and promoted Roman values of wisdom and experience as superior to Greek glorification of youth and vigor.

> Several of the Gospel writers specifically say that objectivity and accuracy are their agenda, so you need to support your claim.

No, they don't. But regardless, even if they did, the failure to actually write as though they were doing so makes such declarations moot.

> Their intent is faithfully record history, since the history itself persuades readers of Jesus' deity.

That is clearly not the case. The only Gospel to even look remotely like history is Luke. And he's a terrible historian, for the reasons I noted above. Now, I'll grant you that writing as though the stories actually happened was a very useful device for being convincing. That's why it was adopted, and why students were taught how to do it as standard practice in Greek literature of the time.

But I would note that this practice was clearly not undertaken from the beginning of the Church. Paul seems to have had no trouble preaching his gospel without any such stories, or indeed any reference to anything Jesus did on Earth at all. He actually had to defend himself to the Galatians against accusations that he had learned his gospel from a human, historical source rather than directly via revelation. So the earliest documents we have show us a church that was aggressively disinterested in history.

[jimwalton]

You are obviously taking an extremely liberal and even borderline minimalist perspective of the Gospels, which is your right, and is obviously the majority opinion of liberal and minimalist scholars. More to the point is taking the Gospels in this historical and cultural context, appreciating the thesis and purpose of the writers, and extracting the intended meaning of the literature.

The stories of Jesus circulated as oral tradition for several decades. As time progressed, there was sensed a greater need to record the events for posterity, a common strategy behind most ancient writing. (Generally, such records were only committed to writing for archival purposes.) The Gospel writers, as I have already shown (and contrary to your claim), make their theses fairly clear: to give evidence (in a culture still replete with eyewitnesses) that Jesus is the predicted Messiah who was to come. 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. Your denigration of them as "inaccurate" and "legends" merely reveals your bias and subjectivity in approaching the material. 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. 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. In any case, I often relate stories that are true in my conversation with others and I don't necessarily reveal my sources. This technique is, again, an issue of modern writing, where we are driven to footnote every sentence, and not as much a part of the ancient world. In that sense you are guilty of presentism, expecting the ancient world to have worked the way our modern world does.

You're absolutely correct that Mark composes his crucifixion narrative from Ps. 22, that Matthew often paints Jesus as the Moses that Moses never was, and that Daniel figures into the passion and resurrection narratives. These are religious literary techniques to support their thesis: Jesus is the fulfillment of prophecy, the David that David never was, the Moses that Moses never was, the new Israel that Israel never was, the priest that the priesthood never was, the Adam that Adam never was, and the true Messiah of the world as the fulfillment of prophecy. This is no lame rewriting of legends but the point of the Evangelists and the purpose of the Gospel writings.

While you assert that "many scholars have demonstrated that the Gospels are primarily and pervasively mythical," you are indubitably aware that you are quoting liberal and minimalist scholars with little respect for the Gospels, who write with bias against them. In opposition to these, there are batteries of more conservative scholars who pointedly disagree with those assessments and substantiate their positions as well.

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. You can't prove they didn't happen any more than I can prove they did, except for the resurrection.

You chide Luke for being a "terrible historian," but that shows a lack of research on your part. A study of Luke's accuracy rating proves him to be at least 99% accurate (two or three or his references, out of more than 100, are still being debated). He has been firmly established as quite a reliable historian, and the burden of proof lies in your court if you claim otherwise.

> Paul seems to have had no trouble preaching his gospel without any such stories

The truth of the Gospel is not dependent on Jesus' teachings or actions, but on his identity and his resurrection. Even if Jesus didn't speak a single word or do any other miracles, his incarnation and resurrection tell it all. 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. Everything else is in the background. Paul majored on the majors. It doesn't show an aggressive disinterest in history, but a ranking of priorities in delivering the most important message of history.

[The Prophet]

> There are many valid reasons to consider that all of the Gospels, and perhaps even the entire New Testament, was written before the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70.

Oh, come on. No, there are not. The Pauline Epistles, yes. Hebrews, definitely. But the Gospels are clearly writing in a context in which the Temple cult is no longer active.

> Often the shorter lifespans are due to infant mortality than to young adult demise.

Not when it comes to war.

> Acts, which, by the way, has never been shown to be historically unreliable, mentions nothing of the destruction of the temple, or of the Roman siege.

Acts has been repeatedly shown to be historical fiction. See Richard Pervo, The Mystery of Acts and Acts: A Commentary. And why would it mention events that happened after the period of time it was purporting to be about?

> There is a solid chain of custody from the Apostles through Ignatius, Papias, Palycarp. Irenaeus, etc. There is a chain from Peter to Mark to the first five African bishops, all the way to Eusebius of Caesarea.

This is simply false. Unless you have some actual documents of what happened between 64 and 95, that's a 30-year black box in the history of Christianity. Other than what is in the NT, we have nothing from the first sixty years of Christianity, and yet we know there had to have been a lot more written than what we have. People wrote to Paul, since his letters are often responses to letters he received. And it would beggar belief to say that only Paul wrote any doctrinal letters. Clearly, the early church had both the means and the desire to preserve doctrinal letters; after all, we have Paul. So the fact that we have only Paul is odd. And the fact that we have so little of Paul is odd, since he certainly wrote more than we have. We have no church records, no family records, no census or tax receipts, no deeds for property, no trial documents. Very little if any of this would even pertain directly to Jesus, just to the church and its members. But we have none of it.

> That's because Acts was probably written before AD 60.

Since it pretty clearly used Josephus' Antiquities as a source, it had to have been written after 93.

> Possibly Luke was working off a common source also available to Mark and Matthew.

Which we don't have. It's far more likely that, when Luke directly quotes Mark or Matthew, it's because he had those texts.

> The Synoptics may be, though it is debatable. John, probably not.

John's literary structure has been messed with, because John has been multiply redacted. While it's a more free redaction of the previous Gospels than Matthew or Luke, there's abundant evidence that the author knew all three.

We may run into trouble evaluating what the structure is, or what the original said; after all, the version we have has two endings that are entirely ignorant of each other. In John 5, Jesus goes to Judea, but in John 6 he's by the Sea of Galilee, so the order is jumbled. In John 2, he's in Jerusalem, and then he enters Judea in John 3, but if he was in Jerusalem, he was already in Judea, so it's likely a return to Galilee has been deleted. He concludes his speech in John 14 with 'Arise, let us go from here', and then stays where he is and gives another speech for three chapters until they leave in John 18, so someone inserted the speech. John 11.2 tells us about a Mary who 'was that Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment, and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick', but that doesn't happen until John 12.

But we can still piece together some significant artifice, particularly around the journey from Cana to Cana, a very elegant framing of stories entirely unique to John...except that many of them are rewrites of the miracles of Moses (from Exodus 4) and Elijah (from 1 Kings 17), so he clearly doesn't care about history.

> This is patently untrue. 1 Cor. 15.3-7 is a clear example.

That's not the Gospel story. There is no Galilean ministry in that at all, and all of Jesus' appearances that Paul relates here are after his resurrection.

> Paul's thrust is not the words and life of Jesus, but his death and resurrection, which is the point of contact for Gentiles.

It's not that Paul de-emphasizes Jesus' life, or mentions it only rarely. It's that he never mentions it. Paul mentions 'Jesus' or 'Christ' at least 280 times across his authentic letters; add in the references to 'the Lord' or 'the Son of God', and it's over 300. His crucifixion is mentioned at least 15 times, his resurrection at least 30. Precisely zero of these mentions of Jesus tell us anything about a Jesus on Earth. No stories, no parables, no physical traits, no personality traits, no quotes that aren't from scripture or a vision, no miracles, no baptism, no trial. He doesn't mention Galilee, Nazareth, Pilate, Mary, or Joseph. Nor does he mention anything that isn't in the Gospels. Since Paul is responding to letters he's received, apparently no Christian ever asked him about any of this. None of it ever became relevant in any dispute he had. None of his opponents ever brought it up, which would have required a response. No one ever doubted a claim he made about Jesus, no one ever asked him for confirmation or witnesses or more details. We have twenty thousand of Paul's words, all obsessively talking about Jesus, and yet he finds no occasion to mention anything about Jesus! If Paul's purpose was theological, why wouldn't the theological points made by Jesus, or embodied by the events of his life, ever be relevant?

Particularly since you also said, "Their intent is faithfully record history, since the history itself persuades readers of Jesus' deity. Christianity, unlike the other major religions, is historically based.", I find your position here to be inconsistent.

[jimwalton]

Were the Gospels written before AD 70? Very possibly, though not provably so. (On the other hand, they can't PROVABLY anything as far as date of writing.) But there is evidence to their pre-70 writing.

1. Acts is later than Luke, and mentions nothing of James' or Peter's death, Nero's persecutions, the Jewish war against Rome, or the fall of Jerusalem. Since you use such silence as a point, I will also assert "he *never* mentions it." The attitude to Roman power throughout the book makes it difficult to believe that the Neronian persecution of AD 64 had begun. At the end of the book Paul expects a favorable hearing in Rome.

2. Many of the expressions in Acts are early and theologically primitive.

3. Acts deals with issues that were especially important prior to Jerusalem's fall, such as Gentile admission to the church, the relation of Jews and Gentiles in church, and the food requirements of Acts 15.

4. Acts doesn't deal with concerns after Jerusalem's fall, such as the doctrine of the church, the sacraments, and the development of ecclesiological hierarchy.

There are excellent reasons to believe Acts was written before 70, which puts the Synoptic Gospels before 70. We know Paul's epistles were all before 70. I stand on my statement.

> Not when it comes to war.

The war came in AD 66-70. There were eyewitnesses around during the writing of the Gospels and Epistles.

> Unless you have some actual documents of what happened between 64 and 95, that's a 30-year black box in the history of Christianity.

Remember that persecution was severe, from Nero to Domitian. I wouldn't expect a lot of casual writing when soldiers are going house to house and Christians are being slaughtered. Also remember that many of these works, including many works by Roman historians, are no longer extant. Barnabas of Alexandria is said to have written an epistle (the oldest copy of which we have is the 4th c.). Some scholars (Lightfoot and Hefele) place its writing at 70-79. The Shepherd of Hermas mentions a Clement whose responsibility it was to transport Christian writings to various churches. Some scholars also date the Didache to the late 1st c., some even to as early as 70. In other words, you can't claim with certainly that it was a dark era.

> John's literary structure has been messed with, because John has been multiply redacted.

This is a theory and nothing more.

> so the order [of the Gospel of John] is jumbled

The order of all the Gospels is jumbled. None of them claim to write a chronography, and they didn't. They arranged the material to suit their thesis.

> except that many of them are rewrites of the miracles of Moses (from Exodus 4) and Elijah (from 1 Kings 17), so he clearly doesn't care about history.

You miss the point completely. John was showing that Jesus is the new Moses (and greater than Moses) and the true prophet (and greater than Elijah). Rather than perceiving John as a copycat of legendary material who cares not for history, John was plying the waters of prophecy and OT history to give evidence that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God.

> That's not the Gospel story.

You have missed the point and history of 1 Cor. 15.3-8. It's a pericope that by virtual unanimous acclamation dates to with 3 years of the resurrection, firmly embedded in history and evidence. Of course Jesus' appearances are after the resurrection—that's Paul's point: Jesus has risen from the grave and lives today. Remember, the Gospel is not that Jesus was a good teacher who did some cool stuff; he is God in the flesh who died to forgive sins and rose from the dead. Paul doesn't give any of his writing space to Jesus' Galilean ministry, because the point is the cross and the resurrection.

> If Paul's purpose was theological, why wouldn't the theological points made by Jesus, or embodied by the events of his life, ever be relevant?

Because Paul was a missionary to the Gentiles, and what mattered was their salvation from sin based on the death and resurrection of Christ, not the details of Jesus' life. Even Peter and Stephen don't mention the details of Jesus' life when they preach (Acts 2 & Acts 6). what matters is His death and resurrection, their repentance and salvation.

[Taco Bandito]

> The Gospels were written within the lifetimes of many eyewitnesses to Jesus

At the outside, assuming the most favorable dates in the wide possible ranges suggested by historians.

But that gets you nothing, unless you can ALSO show they were published within the literary circle of the eyewitnesses. AND that the eyewitnesses were literate. AND that the eyewitnesses had the motiviation, wherewithal, and influence to correct the teachings. AND that the corrections would have been preserved as faithfully as the originals. AND that all copies of the originals would be dutifully amended and not promulgated further.

Assuming that the Jesus monologues we have recorded are fundamentally flawed, every single one of those necessary conditions drastically lowers the possibility that your hypothetical eye-witness review board would have fixed it. Frankly, depending on eye-witness correction seems a little foolhardy unless you have a ton of historical supporting evidence showing these factors were all in place.

[jimwalton]

Were the Gospels written before AD 70? Very possibly, though not provably so. (On the other hand, they can't PROVABLY anything as far as date of writing.) But there is evidence to their pre-70 writing.

1. Acts is later than Luke, and mentions nothing of James' or Peter's death, Nero's persecutions, the Jewish war against Rome, or the fall of Jerusalem. The attitude to Roman power throughout the book makes it difficult to believe that the Neronian persecution of AD 64 had begun. At the end of the book Paul expects a favorable hearing in Rome.

2. Many of the expressions in Acts are early and theologically primitive.

3. Acts deals with issues that were especially important prior to Jerusalem's fall, such as Gentile admission to the church, the relation of Jews and Gentiles in church, and the food requirements of Acts 15.

4. Acts doesn't deal with concerns after Jerusalem's fall, such as the doctrine of the church, the sacraments, and the development of ecclesiological hierarchy.

There are excellent reasons to believe Acts was written before 70, which puts the Synoptic Gospels before 70 as well.

Were they published within the literary circle of the eyewitnesses, and were the eyewitnesses literate? Most likely yes and yes. We know that Paul's letters, written in the 50s, were circulated among the churches. Such a fact provides evidence that the Christian religious documents circulated. Secondly, their circulation implies at least a modicum of literacy, or what would be the point? Thirdly, in the book of Acts (15.23ff.), after the Jerusalem Council, a letter was drafted, copied, and circulated to the Gentile churches. All of this gives evidences of both circulation and literacy.

Were the eyewitnesses motivated to correct the teachings? In Acts 17.11 Luke has written that the Bereans heard Paul's message, and checked it against the written Scriptures to determine its truth and validity. That gives evidence of assessment, discernment, and literacy—the motivation to correct the teachings. In Galatians Paul met privately with the Jewish leaders to discern whether Paul was preaching the truth or not. In other words, there was motivation, wherewithal, and influence to correct the teachings.

Are the copies we have reliably facsimiles of the originals? Yes they are. Manuscript studies and critical analysis guarantee us that the reading of NT that we have is extraordinarily close to the "autograph" manuscripts.

> Assuming that the Jesus monologues we have recorded are fundamentally flawed

Whoa, whoa, whoa, where did THIS assumption come from? Why would I assume this at all, because there's no evidence for it.

[Chef Random]

> The Gospels were written within the lifetimes of many eyewitnesses to Jesus and "earwitnesses" to the things he said.

Do you remember that outstanding sermon you heard 5 years or maybe just 6 months ago? How about today's sermon? Can you quote them in any degree of detail without looking up the text? I can't even remember the details of the few good sermons I managed to preach, the ones I got a lot of pats on the back for. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously flawed and becomes more so as time passes. It just isn't a good prop.

. It was an era of oral tradition when people specifically put to memory historical events that were important to the community. They were tuned, unlike us moderns, to remember important things that were said.

This is a truism without support that often gets repeated without being sourced. I heard in in Bible College and said it often, but where does it come from? I think it is just an assumption.

> The Gospels writers carefully researched and recorded the events and words of Jesus (Lk. 2.1-4).

I'm sure you meant Luke 1:1-4. He says he was accurate in everything, but was he? There certainly aren't any footnotes or references to sources. We know in large measure he just copied and redacted Mark and Q. What is special about that and what is special about Luke that we should take his word for it?

> Several decades is not an amount of time causing concern between the events themselves and these records of them. It's like us bringing to mind events from the mid 80s: Madonna, Mt. St. Helens, the assassination of John Lennon, Michael Jackson's "Thriller", and Ronald Reagan. This is easy.

Other than lyrics how accurately can you quote any of these people? How accurately can you describe the events of John Lennon's assassination? Just off the top of your head...

> They were working off of earlier and still available sources, like us looking at newspapers from the 80, as well as interviewing people who were there. This is easily done.

The only earlier sources were Mark and Q. Since we don't have Q we don't know how accurately it was used. What sources did Mark use? Tradition says Peter, but there is no textual evidence for that I'm aware of.

You might want to check out Bart Ehrman's new book Jesus Before the Gospels where in he discusses these very issues.

From the book's description: "Many believe that the Gospel stories of Jesus are based on eyewitness testimony and are therefore historically reliable. Now, for the first time, a scholar of the New Testament, New York Times bestselling author Bart D. Ehrman (Misquoting Jesus; and Jesus, Interrupted), surveys research from the fields of psychology, anthropology, and sociology to explore how oral traditions and group memories really work and questions how reliable the Gospels can be. Focusing on the decades-long gap between when Jesus lived and when these documents about him began to appear, Ehrman looks to these varied disciplines to see what they can tell us about how the New Testament developed. In the book, Ehrman examines:

*How cultural anthropologists studied the oral traditions of Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Ghana to reveal how stories always change as they are passed along.

*How psychologists have discovered the routine phenomena of “false memories” and how strongly people contend that these false memories really happened.

*How modern legal scholars and psychologists have shown how unreliable eyewitness testimonies really are, with people regularly distorting what they experienced.

*How sociologists have shown that a group’s collective memory is strongly shaped by the issues and concerns of the remembering community just as much by the events themselves

[jimwalton]

Is Oral tradition reliable? You ask me to remember sermons, but please take into account that our culture places little value on memory, and our memory-capabilities are not trained. Most of us can't remember what we had for breakfast. It was very different in the ancient world. You said, "Eyewitness testimony is notoriously flawed and becomes more so as time passes. It just isn't a good prop." I offer you the words of Socrates in rebuttal:

"Words put in writing are incapable of being clear and are only useful to remind someone of what they have heard."

"Written words cannot be defended by argument and cannot teach truth effectively."

"If an author thinks that what he has written has certainty and clarity, it is to his disgrace."

"Written words do not provide opportunity for questioning and teaching."

"Written words are of little value unless an author is able to back them up by explanation."

There was some consensus in the ancient world that writing was merely an act of intellectual laziness. Rabbinic confidence in memorization was so high that some rabbis even banned the writing of oral traditions (Babylonian Talmud, Temurah 14b).

> There certainly aren't any footnotes or references to sources.

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. 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. In any case, I often relate stories that are true in my conversation with others and I don't necessarily reveal my sources. This technique is, again, an issue of modern writing, where we are driven to footnote every sentence, and not as much a part of the ancient world. In that sense you are guilty of presentism, expecting the ancient world to have worked the way our modern world does.

> Bart Ehrman's new book

Ehrman has been shown by multiple writers and scholars to be lacking in his analysis of the text. The veracity of the NT text is evidenced by the sheer number of eyewitnesses (for instance, 500 at one time in 1 Cor. 15; thousands of Jerusalemites saved within months of Jesus' resurrection in that city; the early attestation of the 1 Cor. 15.3-7 creed, etc.), particularly in a world trained for memory.

And as far eyewitness testimony, we still use it regularly and reliably in modern courts of law. Slight disagreements are often viewed as giving more depth to the accounts, leading to a better understanding of the event than of creating discrediting contradictory claims.

[The Prophet]

> 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.

[jimwalton]

> The stories of Jesus circulated as oral tradition..."We do not know this."

We most certainly and assuredly do. The creed of 1 Cor. 15.3-7 was an extremely early creed that had been passed on verbally for decades before Paul committed it to writing. There are similar creeds in Acts, 1 Tim. 3.16, Phil. 2.5-11, 1 Cor. 8.6, and elsewhere. Oral communication of the stories of Jesus, his words, and doctrine were alive and well before Paul wrote it down 25 years later.

> 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.

You make it sound as if he was painted into a corner if he wanted to fabricate the tale at hand. Instead, Mark was gathering his evidences and resources to portray Jesus as Mark and thousands of others were truly convinced he was: the Messiah, the incarnation of God himself.

> Mark 14.3-9

Anointing with oil was a sign of respect and honor, in this case an act of pure devotion. The woman didn't know she was anointing Jesus for his burial; this is the interpretation Jesus put on it as a way of prophesying his death. What Jesus said to her, to affirm her, that she would understand, is "She has done a beautiful thing to me." At that point you can visualize her looking at him and smiling. But then he said, to the surprise of everyone, "She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial." The woman didn't have that in mind, but Jesus was letting them all know that his death was imminent. The story shows us the deep love of Jesus' followers as well as Jesus' prescience about his impending death.

> 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.

This is odd for you to say since previously you said "he's a terrible historian." I can say either "make up your mind," or "you are contradicting yourself."

> 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.

Again you misunderstand, misinterpreting focus for disinterest. Matthew's focus was presenting Jesus as a teacher (the new David and Moses), Mark's as the suffering Messiah, Luke's as the fulfillment of prophecy, John's as God himself, and Paul's, following all those, as the one whose death and resurrection bought salvation for the whole world. Paul's story is the theological sequel, not a biographical redux.