most of us have read around this subject and know this stuff, so coming on here trying to teach us to suck eggs is not appreciated;
your penultimate post above mine is a repost from earlier and was tl:dr the first time;
are you sure about quoting from your book? You do realise that when you signed up for the Ship you signed away any copyright on anything you publish here to the Ship?
May I point out, Firenze, that I am not engaging in nasty comments. But some people seem to think that it is nasty to espouse a different view from theirs.
Did I say you were?
Btw, should you wish to take issue with anything in Host tags, Styx is the place.
Technically it's not signing away copyright so much as it's sharing copyright. You give the Ship the right to requote/republish whatever you say on the Ship. It doesn't stop you from continuing to use/publish your own stuff elsewhere.
My goodness, Lamb Chopped. What kind of person are you? Can you not accept that I am sincerely trying to give you the best answer that I can? If the following is not enough for you, however...
New Testament professor Dr. Brad Chase (my alter ego) is being interviewed by NBC anchor Ben Broadus:
______________
“…Dr. Chase, would you be willing to let me ask you a very personal question? A question which many people would surely consider important, even decisive?”
“Yes, Ben, go right ahead.”
“Sir, do you yourself believe that Jesus actually rose from death?”
“…Ben, I’m convinced that when Jesus went to his death, he went believing that he, as the Son of God and as the Isaian servant, would die in accordance with God’s will, but also believing that he would be raised up, exalted to the heights.”
“But was he? Was he raised up?”
“According to all the New Testament accounts we have, soon after Jesus’ death his followers began experiencing appearances – appearances of Jesus. Those appearances they found so real, so convincing as to transform them from a frightened little band of despairing individuals into a faith community fearlessly united against all dangers, so fearlessly united that they were able to withstand the numerous persecutions and martyrdoms that came to them. And that, I am convinced, rests on historical bedrock.
“Now, as for what actually happened, or my own beliefs, I would like to think that those appearances of Jesus were not mere hallucinations or wish-fulfillment fantasies, but were grounded in some form of reality… Better yet, I would like to think that they were grounded in a loving God who, as Jesus said, is ‘God of the living’ to whom all live…
“But now Ben, let me just add this: A few years ago my dear mother died, a strong believer in Jesus who did not fear death because, she said, she knew where she was going. I would like to think she’s now with the Jesus she so loved and trusted, and with other loved ones who have passed on before, perhaps sitting with them together at the feast that Jesus and the prophets promised, a table spread for all the families of the earth where tears and death and sin and shame will be no more. And I would hope someday, somehow, to be with them.”
“…Dr. Chase, we thank you for those comments. And we look forward to your final session with your class tomorrow.”
Isn't the Q hypothesis still pretty controversial even among non-Christian scholars? Calling the edifice you've built on it "fact" seems to be rather stretching the definition to breaking point. Heck, even Marcan priority, while widely accepted, is not without its learned and scholarly detractors.
True, Arethosemyfeet, but widely accepted by the better scholars, imho.
I just put strong emphases on what we get from Paul, from Q (which is nothing more than parallel passages in Matthew and Luke that had to have been written before either of them), and Mark, and see how all that adds up. And then bring in all the other gospel materials and see how it all adds up.
I think it adds up pretty well, especially the earlier stuff.
And that doesn't seem to me to be all that surprising.
But why dismiss material that is unique either to Matthew or to Luke? And on what basis can we identify Q as a specific literary work. The idea of a single Q (rather than a rag bag of source material) is one of the less defensible elements of NT source theory.
Your answer sounds like you’re not sure—you would like to believe it is real, but can’t be certain. Fair enough. Thank you for finally giving an answer.
To be absolutely clear, Dr Brad Chase is one of the characters in your novel. He may be your alter ego in the sense that he is based on you, rather than him being a real person.
So, do his views in that fictional interview accurately reflect your views in real life?
Let me just throw in here one "cold shower" comment:
When I was a young teenager and first began studying the gospels, I was prepared to believe in the Virgin Birth as a miracle. What I was not prepared to believe, however, is that Mary (according to Luke) and Joseph (according to Matthew) could both be told by angels exactly who and what Jesus was destined to be, and yet when he began his ministry his own family thought he had lost his mind (Mark 3:20) and his mother and brothers* went over to Capernaum to try to seize him and bring him home, but he refused (3:31-34).
I take that last to rest on non legendary historical bedrock.
_________
*Joseph is never mentioned as being alive during Jesus' ministry.
Missed. They knew that He was something. They knew that He was the Messiah. And forgot and disbelieved through the contempt of familiarity. especially His half siblings. And then when He came out, it wasn't as the Messiah of their expectations. Just like the Jews at large.
Mary knew for over 30 years. Joseph too. Mary exploited her knowledge at Cana.
And if He was, is, He, as I have written above for your ignoring and disparaging again as fundamentalism, the second hand legends are true, truer than the emotionally truest stories are true.
Often the Greek text of the Matthew=Luke parallel passages are word for word exactly the same, or nearly so.
Would that not suggest they were derived from a common Greek text?
I list six or seven of the better scholars (imho) on the INFO page of my website (also in one of the posts above. My criteria for that opinion is/are years of study.
I'm sure future "installments" will be more controversial, as it becomes necessary to admit that some of the later stuff cannot be historical.
LAMB CHOPPED SAYS:
To be absolutely clear, Dr Brad Chase is one of the characters in your novel. He may be your alter ego in the sense that he is based on you, rather than him being a real person.
So, do his views in that fictional interview accurately reflect your views in real life?
_____________
Yes! Lamb Chopped, Yes! Put down that faggot and do not burn me at the stake!
What a lot of rigamarole! (sp?). I am genuinely surprised that there are still some who will try to find historical truth in the birth stories of Matthew and Luke (though theological truth might be another matter). Those stories are quite simply and obviously LEGENDARY, both with regard to Jesus' birth and with regard to the birth of John the Baptizer.
That has been so well demonstrated by Bart Ehrman, John P. Meier (a Catholic!) and numerous others going back a long time that I will simply direct your attention to them.
But do pay attention to my next Brass Tacks installments which, simply by by sticking to the earliest New Testament source strata (Paul, Q, and Mark) will make this clear without even having to take on those birth stories -- and without a lot of rigamarole.
It's not obvious that the census story was intended as legend.
I agree that arguments based on external evidence, e.g. our knowledge of Roman census processes, require an answer. But any argument based on genre or what we think authors would do is at best educated guesswork. We don't have a large corpus of comparative literature from which we can deduce literary conventions, and we don't know enough about the lives and other works of Matthew and Luke to judge what's on their mind at any given time.
As for fundamentalism, my interpretation, which I freely admit is speculation, depends on Luke picking up a mangled version of what really happened - hardly an option open to a fundamentalist.
Often the Greek text of the Matthew=Luke parallel passages are word for word exactly the same, or nearly so.
Would that not suggest they were derived from a common Greek text?
On the basis of Occam's Razor, I prefer the Farrer hypothesis. Mark was first, Luke borrowed from Mark, Matthew copied from both Mark and Luke. This explains the duplication, and also doesn't require us to posit an entirely new gospel which was as authoritative as Mark but which was never mentioned by any of the earliest Church Fathers ever.
Okay, Lamb Chopped, in my next post I am going to quote from my novel.
@James Boswell II, as was pointed out to you when you registered, Ship of Fools is not a place where you can come and invite us to discuss your novel. It is a place where we discuss, among equals.
You are welcome to discuss the same ideas you develop in anything you write elsewhere, but you are not welcome to foist your book, website, blog, YouTube channel or anything else on us, whether in instalments or otherwise, and simply to refer us to your writings elsewhere instead of interacting here.
Commandment 9 says Don't advertise or spam and in my judgement you are treading dangerously close to that line.
The last person who tried that did not last very long. We've been indulgent with you, but don't push your luck.
A FEW BRASS TACKS
Let’s begin by trying to establish a few Jesus “facts” that most historical researchers can agree on, for they are found in the earliest available strata of New Testament writings, Paul’s letters and/or Q and/or Mark. (I will simply state all this without giving evidence for it, because that has been abundantly done by others – and I fear that much of this will despite that already seem somewhat “dry”.)
Yeshu (Jesus) was probably born in Nazareth of Galilee (not Bethlehem of Judea), the Jewish son of a construction worker tekton (Gk, often translated carpenter) named Yosef and a mother named Miryam. He had four brothers, Yakob (James), Yudah (Jude or Judas), Yoshe (Joses) and Shimon (Simon). He also had at least two sisters whose names and number are never mentioned.
If anyone had asked the people of Nazareth if there was anything special about the family of Yosef, they might have said, No. Or, they might have remembered that Yosef did claim to be descended from King David, a claim he may have based either on archival evidence or simply on a family tradition.
Davidic descent, however, was probably not considered all that important because David had produced numerous progeny and there may have been hundreds if not thousands of Jewish males in the time of Yosef who could claim descent one way or another from King David (such descent being passed on paternally.) Still, descent from David did suggest one significant possibility: In David’s lifetime, a prophet named Nathan had allegedly told him that a son of his body would always sit ruling from his throne. In other words, David was promised by Yahweh an eternal earthly kingdom(!), a promise which, however, came to an end with the defeat of Judah and their ruling class’s exile to Babylonia. After that, there were no more royal sons of David on the throne, and that held true through numerous subjugations to other nations, the Babylonians, Persians, Medes, Greeks (Ptolemies, then the Seleucids), and in Jesus’ day, the Romans.
However, because it was believed that a divine promise could not simply be set aside, the expectation had emerged among the Jewish people that a future “son of David” would yet appear, one who would be anointed, not with the mere oil of a royal coronation, but with the Spirit of God itself, in order that he might free them from all their enemies and rule with righteousness over a reconstituted Israel. And that specially anointed (“messiah-ed”) one, it was believed, would ultimately rule the world. Moreover, according to Nathan, Yahweh had promised that “I will be a father to him and he will be a son to me.”
Against that background, the boy Yeshu grew up in Nazareth.
To be continued. (I'm hoping this will soon get more interesting.)
A nearly minimal, nearly historical Jesus. So? What's your point? If He was not He, then he was still the most positively pivotal human being, as Schweitzer recognized. Which would be easy to dismiss as an invention of an initially Jewish humanist messianic Greco-Roman priestly class of the late C1st onward. But the cult was well established half a century before. The Church erupted on His death. I find no sociological explanation for that. The historical Church, not the Bible it created, validates the historical Jesus at least.
LAMB CHOPPED SAYS:
To be absolutely clear, Dr Brad Chase is one of the characters in your novel. He may be your alter ego in the sense that he is based on you, rather than him being a real person.
So, do his views in that fictional interview accurately reflect your views in real life?
_____________
Yes! Lamb Chopped, Yes! Put down that faggot and do not burn me at the stake!
Your quote is from me, not from @Lamb Chopped. Please will you take a little time to learn how to use the quote function, then this kind of misattribution will be less likely to happen.
Hi, James Boswell II. A few years after you were writing your play, I submitted a script about the life of Jesus to Lew Grade. Somebody called Anthony Burgess got the job, and I subsequently came to the conclusion I was perhaps trying to box above my weight. So I do admire, yes really, someone who can write creatively about Jesus Christ, especially if it attracts people who have been otherwise repelled. I have also enjoyed reading this thread, partly because I am interested in history and in faith, and how the two relate.
But I think you may be trying to square a circle here. In the third paragraph of your website you say: 'I feel that in this novel I may have been able to give voice to three or four compelling insights about Jesus that are rather unique …' I stop there, because something is either unique, or not unique. What's the uniqueness here? Bringing 3 or 4 unique ideas together for the first time perhaps? If so, how does each of them stand up to the scrutiny of theologians or historians?
As someone who studied 20th Century History, and spent 25 years teaching Tudor History I am thoroughly bemused by the lack of evidence for this period. The evidence for the 1st century has grown remarkably, but it's still tiny, and the historical evidence concerning Jesus Christ can probably be written down in 3 or 4 short sentences. In the opening chapter of volume 1 of the Cambridge History of Christianity, which can be read online, Frances Young describes the peculiar difficulty of making sense of the evidence, including the tension between historical study and faith.
Personally, having learned Mark's Gospel, and even performed a bit of it, I find it has the 'Ring of Truth' which J.B.Phillips referred to. (And spookily enough I was just reading R.T.France's Greek commentary on Mark, specifically 3:20, when the subject came up on this thread.) I like to believe that Mark was Peter's ghostwriter, and am intrigued by the fact that a recent study of the names of the people portrayed in the Gospel clearly reflects the names current at the time they refer to. That said, there's not enough evidence here or elsewhere in the New Testament for historians to describe an 'historical Jesus', so theologians need to be wary too.
I apologize to both Lamb Chopped and to BroJames for that misattribution. Especially to you, Lamb Chopped, for thinking you were pursuing or pushing me a bit too tightly. But I hope I did answer your question with that excerpt.
@wabale
Interesting. R. T. France is a conservative scholar I have in the past admired for his take on why Jesus became convinced that he must die. I think he and I. H. Marshall and the excellent scholar Martin Hengel were all correct to attribute to Mark a greater historicity than some do.
By the way, the only people who are identified by name as speaking to Jesus in Mark are the three fishermen disciples Peter, James, and John -- with one exception, and that is Judas in Gethsemane who says "Rabbi!" to Jesus as he kisses him.
Accepted. I wanted to know where you stand, because that directly affects your arguments and their level of importance. You saw that I paraphrased your stance up above. Was that an accurate paraphrase? I'm having some doubts now that someone has pointed out that this is apparently a character in your novel and not a real interview with you...
Laying my cards on the table, I am NOT interested in burning you at the stake, yelling at you or any similar foolishness. Why should I be? I simply want to know where you're coming from because it impacts the way I respond to you. A person who categorically decides that Jesus is in fact still dead (and therefore the whole superstructure built on him is basically hollow) will get one response from me--and in fact that response would most likely be "Why am I even bothering to discuss this, since in your view the guy's been dead and gone for 2 thousand years?" If you had said that, I would most likely have withdrawn from the thread and gone off to play sudoku.
But given that you admit the possibility of his being alive, that leads me to ask--how do you investigate such matters realizing that the one you investigate is, essentially looking over your shoulder?
Not that you shouldn't investigate. Of course you should. But it's very different thing to investigate a living and interested person than it is to investigate one who's safely gone.
@wabale
Interesting. R. T. France is a conservative scholar I have in the past admired for his take on why Jesus became convinced that he must die. I think he and I. H. Marshall and the excellent scholar Martin Hengel were all correct to attribute to Mark a greater historicity than some do.
By the way, the only people who are identified by name as speaking to Jesus in Mark are the three fishermen disciples Peter, James, and John -- with one exception, and that is Judas in Gethsemane who says "Rabbi!" to Jesus as he kisses him.
And Jairus the synagogue leader, and Andrew and blind Bartimaeus.
But lack of evidence is a bit too strong a claim. John P. Meier is now on his sixth volume on the historical Jesus (A Marginal Jew).
It is the editor of the Cambridge History of Christianity who made this claim, and she was discussing the absence of reliable i.e. historical evidence. Theologians can (and do) discuss mountains of non-historical evidence, and so they should, but it doesn't add up to a hill of history beans.
I made a huge mistake. Thanks for calling it to my attention. I meant to say that the only disciples (and more specifically those of the twelve) who speak by name identity in Mark are Peter, James, and John (fishermen) and Judas. (I don't believe Andrew does, actually, not by individual identity). I meant to back up your contention that Peter could well have been an important source for the narrative.
I made a huge mistake. Thanks for calling it to my attention. I meant to say that the only disciples (and more specifically those of the twelve) who speak by name identity in Mark are Peter, James, and John (fishermen) and Judas. (I don't believe Andrew does, actually, not by individual identity). I meant to back up your contention that Peter could well have been an important source for the narrative.
I'm not sure I understand you. What about Mark 13:3?
Mark 13:3 Good point! Though Andrew did not individually speak to Jesus, he was among the four, and that is similar to when James and John collectively spoke to him in Mark 10:35,f.
MORE BRASS TACKS – but this time with some real speculation
Against the background previously stated, the boy Yeshu grew up in Nazareth.
At that time, the everyday language spoken by his people had become Aramaic, a language closely related to Hebrew which had taken over much of the eastern world. Aramaic was Jesus' native tongue, learned at his mother’s knee, while the Hebrew Scriptures were treasured and read aloud in the synagogues, with line by line oral translations being made into Aramaic. Both languages were written using the same alphabet.
Jesus would probably have first learned to read and write Aramaic, and this holds out a tantalizing possibility:
Among the sacred scrolls in the Nazareth synagogue was one that was exceedingly popular* among his people, the Scroll of Daniel which, surprisingly, contained a large portion of text written not in Hebrew but in Aramaic. It is likely that the boy Yeshu would have been quite intrigued by that section, first because he could read it easily, but more especially because the beginning and the end of that section (which we call chapters two and seven) contained exciting visions of what must soon happen to the world.
The first vision (chapter 2) depicted a statue representing four arrogant empires that would rule his people, but they would all be divinely destroyed “by no human hand,” after which God would set up a kingdom on the earth that would supplant them all by striking them and smashing them to the merest dust, the merest chaff, which the wind would blow away, after which the kingdom established by God would would fill the entire earth, and would never pass away.
How exciting!
But perhaps the boy was even more excited by the final vision (in chapter 7) for it depicted four horrible beasts that would arise to devastate the earth, after which they all would be destroyed by the Ancient One sitting on his fiery throne. And then, "one like a son of man" would come with clouds of heaven and be given power and glory and dominion so that all nations and peoples of all languages would be made to serve him.
Surely the boy Yeshu would have become intensely excited by these visions, for they promised that all oppressive beastly empires, including that of the Romans, soon must end, after which they would be supplanted by an eternal kingdom which would be divinely established on all the earth and in which the "one like a son of man" would rule, being served by all.
--But why should we suppose that these two visions greatly influenced Jesus, even as a child? I think it's because later when he began his teaching ministry, the two phrases "the Kingdom of God" and "the Son of Man" were among those he most frequently and significantly used.
Ah, but at this point a mystery emerges. Although the passage in Daniel 7;14 states that the glorious "one like a son of man" will be "served by all peoples," Jesus in his later teaching turned that statement on its head by saying that "the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Mark 10:45).
What could have caused Jesus to say that? What could have caused him later to describe the Son of Man so differently from the "one like a son of man" envisioned in Daniel 7, the one who would serve rather than be served by the nations, and even die for them?
___________________
*This is made clear by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, writing around 93CE (Antiquites of the Jews, Book X, chap. XL, 7.)
MORE BRASS TACKS – but this time with some real speculation
Against the background previously stated, the boy Yeshu grew up in Nazareth.
At that time, the everyday language spoken by his people had become Aramaic, a language closely related to Hebrew which had taken over much of the eastern world. Aramaic was Jesus' native tongue, learned at his mother’s knee, while the Hebrew Scriptures were treasured and read aloud in the synagogues, with line by line oral translations being made into Aramaic. Both languages were written using the same alphabet.
Jesus would probably have first learned to read and write Aramaic, and this holds out a tantalizing possibility:
Among the sacred scrolls in the Nazareth synagogue was one that was exceedingly popular* among his people, the Scroll of Daniel which, surprisingly, contained a large portion of text written not in Hebrew but in Aramaic. It is likely that the boy Yeshu would have been quite intrigued by that section, first because he could read it easily, but more especially because the beginning and the end of that section (which we call chapters two and seven) contained exciting visions of what must soon happen to the world.
The first vision (chapter 2) depicted a statue representing four arrogant empires that would rule his people, but they would all be divinely destroyed “by no human hand,” after which God would set up a kingdom on the earth that would supplant them all by striking them and smashing them to the merest dust, the merest chaff, which the wind would blow away, after which the kingdom established by God would would fill the entire earth, and would never pass away.
How exciting!
But perhaps the boy was even more excited by the final vision (in chapter 7) for it depicted four horrible beasts that would arise to devastate the earth, after which they all would be destroyed by the Ancient One sitting on his fiery throne. And then, "one like a son of man" would come with clouds of heaven and be given power and glory and dominion so that all nations and peoples of all languages would be made to serve him.
Surely the boy Yeshu would have become intensely excited by these visions, for they promised that all oppressive beastly empires, including that of the Romans, soon must end, after which they would be supplanted by an eternal kingdom which would be divinely established on all the earth and in which the "one like a son of man" would rule, being served by all.
--But why should we suppose that these two visions greatly influenced Jesus, even as a child? I think it's because later when he began his teaching ministry, the two phrases "the Kingdom of God" and "the Son of Man" were among those he most frequently and significantly used.
Ah, but at this point a mystery emerges. Although the passage in Daniel 7;14 states that the glorious "one like a son of man" will be "served by all peoples," Jesus in his later teaching turned that statement on its head by saying that "the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Mark 10:45).
What could have caused Jesus to say that? What could have caused him later to describe the Son of Man so differently from the "one like a son of man" envisioned in Daniel 7, the one who would serve rather than be served by the nations, and even die for them?
___________________
*This is made clear by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, writing around 93CE (Antiquites of the Jews, Book X, chap. XL, 7.)
Yes, Martin, Isaiah. (Though there are numerous liberal or progressive scholars who will not agree with you and me on that.) Good for you. And in the next brass tacks we will explore how Jesus may have gotten to that realization, and some of the implications of it.
@James Boswell II you do realise joining on 22 June 2019, starting posting on 26 June and racking up 111 posts, 110 on this thread in 4 days is not usual behaviour for this forum? Most of us, even the most verbose*, do not post 25 times a day on average. It does feel as if you've come to lecture us on your book, not join in a discussion forum.
Yeah, I know this will be post 4,376, but there are a couple of people who've posted more than me, still. And my post count includes lots of game playing.
Rudolph Bultmann influenced a lot of people to think that we can know almost nothing about Jesus, though he was himself convinced that Jesus was into apocalyptic thinking. There has been a tremendous amount of scholarly reaction since then, indicating that we can know quite a lot But that includes the Jesus Seminar aberration who, however, found the kind of Jesus they wanted to find (non apocalyptic, among other things).
Anybody here into N. T. Wright? Another aberration imho. Almost a preterist. Perhaps not almost.
@James Boswell II you do realise joining on 22 June 2019, starting posting on 26 June and racking up 111 posts, 110 on this thread in 4 days is not usual behaviour for this forum? Most of us, even the most verbose*, do not post 25 times a day on average. It does feel as if you've come to lecture us on your book, not join in a discussion forum.
Yeah, I know this will be post 4,376, but there are a couple of people who've posted more than me, still. And my post count includes lots of game playing.
This.
But, of course, we all have the option to scroll past the lecturesadverts posts we don't want to read...
Martin, I'm beginning to feel a bit more friendly toward you. That may be a mistake, for I recall you once called me "enemy mine." Anyway, before I do the next brass tacks I am going to ask you some questions which I think you (and that pious, pontificating Bishops Finger and others of that ilk) will have some real difficulty answering. I am not going to do that for sheer spite (well, not entirely) but in a sincere attempt to clear some space here for better understanding. But now I'm off to church Stay tuned.
Yes, Martin, Isaiah. (Though there are numerous liberal or progressive scholars who will not agree with you and me on that.) Good for you. And in the next brass tacks we will explore how Jesus may have gotten to that realization, and some of the implications of it.
Who's we? Jesus knew His TaNaKh better than those liberal and progressive scribes and pharisees ever could.
Comments
Did I say you were?
Btw, should you wish to take issue with anything in Host tags, Styx is the place.
My goodness, Lamb Chopped. What kind of person are you? Can you not accept that I am sincerely trying to give you the best answer that I can? If the following is not enough for you, however...
New Testament professor Dr. Brad Chase (my alter ego) is being interviewed by NBC anchor Ben Broadus:
______________
“…Dr. Chase, would you be willing to let me ask you a very personal question? A question which many people would surely consider important, even decisive?”
“Yes, Ben, go right ahead.”
“Sir, do you yourself believe that Jesus actually rose from death?”
“…Ben, I’m convinced that when Jesus went to his death, he went believing that he, as the Son of God and as the Isaian servant, would die in accordance with God’s will, but also believing that he would be raised up, exalted to the heights.”
“But was he? Was he raised up?”
“According to all the New Testament accounts we have, soon after Jesus’ death his followers began experiencing appearances – appearances of Jesus. Those appearances they found so real, so convincing as to transform them from a frightened little band of despairing individuals into a faith community fearlessly united against all dangers, so fearlessly united that they were able to withstand the numerous persecutions and martyrdoms that came to them. And that, I am convinced, rests on historical bedrock.
“Now, as for what actually happened, or my own beliefs, I would like to think that those appearances of Jesus were not mere hallucinations or wish-fulfillment fantasies, but were grounded in some form of reality… Better yet, I would like to think that they were grounded in a loving God who, as Jesus said, is ‘God of the living’ to whom all live…
“But now Ben, let me just add this: A few years ago my dear mother died, a strong believer in Jesus who did not fear death because, she said, she knew where she was going. I would like to think she’s now with the Jesus she so loved and trusted, and with other loved ones who have passed on before, perhaps sitting with them together at the feast that Jesus and the prophets promised, a table spread for all the families of the earth where tears and death and sin and shame will be no more. And I would hope someday, somehow, to be with them.”
“…Dr. Chase, we thank you for those comments. And we look forward to your final session with your class tomorrow.”
I just put strong emphases on what we get from Paul, from Q (which is nothing more than parallel passages in Matthew and Luke that had to have been written before either of them), and Mark, and see how all that adds up. And then bring in all the other gospel materials and see how it all adds up.
I think it adds up pretty well, especially the earlier stuff.
And that doesn't seem to me to be all that surprising.
To be absolutely clear, Dr Brad Chase is one of the characters in your novel. He may be your alter ego in the sense that he is based on you, rather than him being a real person.
So, do his views in that fictional interview accurately reflect your views in real life?
Missed. They knew that He was something. They knew that He was the Messiah. And forgot and disbelieved through the contempt of familiarity. especially His half siblings. And then when He came out, it wasn't as the Messiah of their expectations. Just like the Jews at large.
Mary knew for over 30 years. Joseph too. Mary exploited her knowledge at Cana.
And if He was, is, He, as I have written above for your ignoring and disparaging again as fundamentalism, the second hand legends are true, truer than the emotionally truest stories are true.
Would that not suggest they were derived from a common Greek text?
I list six or seven of the better scholars (imho) on the INFO page of my website (also in one of the posts above. My criteria for that opinion is/are years of study.
I'm sure future "installments" will be more controversial, as it becomes necessary to admit that some of the later stuff cannot be historical.
To be absolutely clear, Dr Brad Chase is one of the characters in your novel. He may be your alter ego in the sense that he is based on you, rather than him being a real person.
So, do his views in that fictional interview accurately reflect your views in real life?
_____________
Yes! Lamb Chopped, Yes! Put down that faggot and do not burn me at the stake!
It's not obvious that the census story was intended as legend.
I agree that arguments based on external evidence, e.g. our knowledge of Roman census processes, require an answer. But any argument based on genre or what we think authors would do is at best educated guesswork. We don't have a large corpus of comparative literature from which we can deduce literary conventions, and we don't know enough about the lives and other works of Matthew and Luke to judge what's on their mind at any given time.
As for fundamentalism, my interpretation, which I freely admit is speculation, depends on Luke picking up a mangled version of what really happened - hardly an option open to a fundamentalist.
On the basis of Occam's Razor, I prefer the Farrer hypothesis. Mark was first, Luke borrowed from Mark, Matthew copied from both Mark and Luke. This explains the duplication, and also doesn't require us to posit an entirely new gospel which was as authoritative as Mark but which was never mentioned by any of the earliest Church Fathers ever.
@James Boswell II, as was pointed out to you when you registered, Ship of Fools is not a place where you can come and invite us to discuss your novel. It is a place where we discuss, among equals.
You are welcome to discuss the same ideas you develop in anything you write elsewhere, but you are not welcome to foist your book, website, blog, YouTube channel or anything else on us, whether in instalments or otherwise, and simply to refer us to your writings elsewhere instead of interacting here.
Commandment 9 says Don't advertise or spam and in my judgement you are treading dangerously close to that line.
The last person who tried that did not last very long. We've been indulgent with you, but don't push your luck.
/admin mode
A nearly minimal, nearly historical Jesus. So? What's your point? If He was not He, then he was still the most positively pivotal human being, as Schweitzer recognized. Which would be easy to dismiss as an invention of an initially Jewish humanist messianic Greco-Roman priestly class of the late C1st onward. But the cult was well established half a century before. The Church erupted on His death. I find no sociological explanation for that. The historical Church, not the Bible it created, validates the historical Jesus at least.
That's rational. Not fundamentalist.
Your quote is from me, not from @Lamb Chopped. Please will you take a little time to learn how to use the quote function, then this kind of misattribution will be less likely to happen.
But I think you may be trying to square a circle here. In the third paragraph of your website you say: 'I feel that in this novel I may have been able to give voice to three or four compelling insights about Jesus that are rather unique …' I stop there, because something is either unique, or not unique. What's the uniqueness here? Bringing 3 or 4 unique ideas together for the first time perhaps? If so, how does each of them stand up to the scrutiny of theologians or historians?
As someone who studied 20th Century History, and spent 25 years teaching Tudor History I am thoroughly bemused by the lack of evidence for this period. The evidence for the 1st century has grown remarkably, but it's still tiny, and the historical evidence concerning Jesus Christ can probably be written down in 3 or 4 short sentences. In the opening chapter of volume 1 of the Cambridge History of Christianity, which can be read online, Frances Young describes the peculiar difficulty of making sense of the evidence, including the tension between historical study and faith.
Personally, having learned Mark's Gospel, and even performed a bit of it, I find it has the 'Ring of Truth' which J.B.Phillips referred to. (And spookily enough I was just reading R.T.France's Greek commentary on Mark, specifically 3:20, when the subject came up on this thread.) I like to believe that Mark was Peter's ghostwriter, and am intrigued by the fact that a recent study of the names of the people portrayed in the Gospel clearly reflects the names current at the time they refer to. That said, there's not enough evidence here or elsewhere in the New Testament for historians to describe an 'historical Jesus', so theologians need to be wary too.
Interesting. R. T. France is a conservative scholar I have in the past admired for his take on why Jesus became convinced that he must die. I think he and I. H. Marshall and the excellent scholar Martin Hengel were all correct to attribute to Mark a greater historicity than some do.
By the way, the only people who are identified by name as speaking to Jesus in Mark are the three fishermen disciples Peter, James, and John -- with one exception, and that is Judas in Gethsemane who says "Rabbi!" to Jesus as he kisses him.
Laying my cards on the table, I am NOT interested in burning you at the stake, yelling at you or any similar foolishness. Why should I be? I simply want to know where you're coming from because it impacts the way I respond to you. A person who categorically decides that Jesus is in fact still dead (and therefore the whole superstructure built on him is basically hollow) will get one response from me--and in fact that response would most likely be "Why am I even bothering to discuss this, since in your view the guy's been dead and gone for 2 thousand years?" If you had said that, I would most likely have withdrawn from the thread and gone off to play sudoku.
But given that you admit the possibility of his being alive, that leads me to ask--how do you investigate such matters realizing that the one you investigate is, essentially looking over your shoulder?
Not that you shouldn't investigate. Of course you should. But it's very different thing to investigate a living and interested person than it is to investigate one who's safely gone.
And Jairus the synagogue leader, and Andrew and blind Bartimaeus.
Apart from the glaringly obvious script we see in hindsight through the lens of Jesus, is there anything else?
Yes, it was accurate. That's why I responded the way I did when I thought you were asking for even more. I even misspelled fagot.
I'm not sure I understand you. What about Mark 13:3?
What, you've got something outside the TaNaKh that He also had?
What investigating?
What investigating?
See Lamb Chopped's post.
MORE BRASS TACKS – but this time with some real speculation
Against the background previously stated, the boy Yeshu grew up in Nazareth.
At that time, the everyday language spoken by his people had become Aramaic, a language closely related to Hebrew which had taken over much of the eastern world. Aramaic was Jesus' native tongue, learned at his mother’s knee, while the Hebrew Scriptures were treasured and read aloud in the synagogues, with line by line oral translations being made into Aramaic. Both languages were written using the same alphabet.
Jesus would probably have first learned to read and write Aramaic, and this holds out a tantalizing possibility:
Among the sacred scrolls in the Nazareth synagogue was one that was exceedingly popular* among his people, the Scroll of Daniel which, surprisingly, contained a large portion of text written not in Hebrew but in Aramaic. It is likely that the boy Yeshu would have been quite intrigued by that section, first because he could read it easily, but more especially because the beginning and the end of that section (which we call chapters two and seven) contained exciting visions of what must soon happen to the world.
The first vision (chapter 2) depicted a statue representing four arrogant empires that would rule his people, but they would all be divinely destroyed “by no human hand,” after which God would set up a kingdom on the earth that would supplant them all by striking them and smashing them to the merest dust, the merest chaff, which the wind would blow away, after which the kingdom established by God would would fill the entire earth, and would never pass away.
How exciting!
But perhaps the boy was even more excited by the final vision (in chapter 7) for it depicted four horrible beasts that would arise to devastate the earth, after which they all would be destroyed by the Ancient One sitting on his fiery throne. And then, "one like a son of man" would come with clouds of heaven and be given power and glory and dominion so that all nations and peoples of all languages would be made to serve him.
Surely the boy Yeshu would have become intensely excited by these visions, for they promised that all oppressive beastly empires, including that of the Romans, soon must end, after which they would be supplanted by an eternal kingdom which would be divinely established on all the earth and in which the "one like a son of man" would rule, being served by all.
--But why should we suppose that these two visions greatly influenced Jesus, even as a child? I think it's because later when he began his teaching ministry, the two phrases "the Kingdom of God" and "the Son of Man" were among those he most frequently and significantly used.
Ah, but at this point a mystery emerges. Although the passage in Daniel 7;14 states that the glorious "one like a son of man" will be "served by all peoples," Jesus in his later teaching turned that statement on its head by saying that "the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Mark 10:45).
What could have caused Jesus to say that? What could have caused him later to describe the Son of Man so differently from the "one like a son of man" envisioned in Daniel 7, the one who would serve rather than be served by the nations, and even die for them?
___________________
*This is made clear by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, writing around 93CE (Antiquites of the Jews, Book X, chap. XL, 7.)
What about it?
Isaiah. And it's both and all. And?
Yeah, I know this will be post 4,376, but there are a couple of people who've posted more than me, still. And my post count includes lots of game playing.
Rudolph Bultmann influenced a lot of people to think that we can know almost nothing about Jesus, though he was himself convinced that Jesus was into apocalyptic thinking. There has been a tremendous amount of scholarly reaction since then, indicating that we can know quite a lot But that includes the Jesus Seminar aberration who, however, found the kind of Jesus they wanted to find (non apocalyptic, among other things).
Anybody here into N. T. Wright? Another aberration imho. Almost a preterist. Perhaps not almost.
This.
But, of course, we all have the option to scroll past the lectures adverts posts we don't want to read...
Who's we? Jesus knew His TaNaKh better than those liberal and progressive scribes and pharisees ever could.