Svartalf wrote:John 20:24

Svartalf wrote:MMmh , that's not how my Jerusalem Bible has it, it's the very end of the gospel where John says he knows all of this is true because he was there.


EDIT, OOOPS sorry , I meant 21:24

proudfootz wrote:People seem to respond to authoritarianism. Regardless of content they will more likely lend credence to something coming from a god, a prophet, or other approved source.

proudfootz wrote:

Svartalf wrote:MMmh , that's not how my Jerusalem Bible has it, it's the very end of the gospel where John says he knows all of this is true because he was there.


EDIT, OOOPS sorry , I meant 21:24

"This is the disciple who testifies to these things and who wrote them down. We know that his testimony is true."

It does seem to say the Beloved Disciple testified and wrote things down.

But who is the 'we'?

Is this the royal We?

Svartalf wrote:

proudfootz wrote:

Svartalf wrote:MMmh , that's not how my Jerusalem Bible has it, it's the very end of the gospel where John says he knows all of this is true because he was there.


EDIT, OOOPS sorry , I meant 21:24

"This is the disciple who testifies to these things and who wrote them down. We know that his testimony is true."

It does seem to say the Beloved Disciple testified and wrote things down.

But who is the 'we'?

Is this the royal We?

It stated a) that the author of the gospel claims to be the disciple himself testifying to what he witnessed personally
b) the 'we" obviously stands for the christian community to whom the testimony was given, nice moving of the goalposts by the way

Svartalf wrote:... Only mark is fairly decent, it's also the shortest and least detailed of the 4 gospels.

Svartalf wrote:
I just assume that each book is more or less what the original author wrote down, none of the gospels are worth much, Matthew is full of fulfilled prophecies that are mentioned only in Matthew, Luke ghost-wrote for the madman Saul of tarsus, and John obviously lies through is teeth and likely wrote after partaking of weird mushrooms or ergotized bread...

Hermit wrote:So much of the Bible has been interpolated, deleted, downright forged and changed in other ways, it's ridiculous to lose sight of the fact that pretty much none of it can be reasonably regarded as the Gospel Truth.

archibald wrote:

Hermit wrote:So much of the Bible has been interpolated, deleted, downright forged and changed in other ways, it's ridiculous to lose sight of the fact that pretty much none of it can be reasonably regarded as the Gospel Truth.

Obviously true, yes.

Imo, he probably existed, on balance of reasonable possibilities.

archibald wrote:

Hermit wrote:So much of the Bible has been interpolated, deleted, downright forged and changed in other ways, it's ridiculous to lose sight of the fact that pretty much none of it can be reasonably regarded as the Gospel Truth.

Obviously true, yes.

Imo, he probably existed, on balance of reasonable possibilities. But all other explanations are ultimately far less parsimonious, when you dig down into them, imo, and generally agreed to be so.

“Christianity” is presented as a second-century confection. The heretic Marcion is credited with writing the first gospel, inspiring the reaction that we call the canonical Gospels. Any knowledge of Peter and Paul’s death is dismissed as pure myth. Paul is a figure mainly constructed as a totem of identity in the later second century. The Book of Acts is not just a romantic history but a wholesale historiographical fabrication. Until sometime in the second century, the Christians had “as yet no actual community.” The persecutions, the martyrdoms, were mostly the work of Christian imagination—a literary experiment that got way out of hand. In the second century of the Roman Empire, rival entrepreneurs such as Marcion and Irenaeus “invented” the Christianity we know. https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/08/pagan-piety

[Marcion] found a theoretical, easily memorizable justification for his anti-Jewish position by reversing a prevailing dualistic narrative: evil was not to be identified with any kind of demon, but with the creator god as depicted in the Pentateuch. The god of Jesus Christ, as described in the available texts by Paul, was the positive antagonist of that ancient figure.

The most influential aspect of Marcionism, however, was neither the institutions it created nor any accompanying rituals, but its historiographical groundwork. In outlining a simple biographical schema, replete with current anecdotes and quotations —here I am following the increasingly mooted, even if still radical position of a second-century date for the canonical gospels and the Acts of the Apostles— Marcion’s portrayal of the life of an apocalyptic visionary and peripatetic preacher, from his first emergence to his rather unusual execution, could be seen as the model of a life turning away from Judaism. He thus orchestrated a rupture that he relocated a century into the past, carefully keeping his narrative free of [then] contemporary references.
------------
Marcion’s opponents reacted immediately with a weighty intellectual exchange of the sort that a metropolis like Rome made possible; and, as was usual in historiography, they reacted with competing versions ... The author of the text that most plagiarized Marcion was identified a little later, by Marcion himself, as Luke, in an edition that featured the gospel along with some of Paul’s letters. It concentrated on correcting Marcion’s fundamental break with Judaism. With their narratives of Jesus’s childhood, both Luke and Matthew demonstrate how familiar the biographical character of the template was, and also how scant the source background was as soon as one wanted to move beyond that template.

Marcion, for his part, criticized their compositions (and that of Mark) as lying close to his own text.

Writings competing with Marcion’s edition of the 140s AD, which was prefaced by his “Antitheses,” could now only continue to accumulate. AD 160 saw a counter-edition that established the core of the future New Testament. The late addition of Luke’s 'Acts of the Apostles' rescued the philosophical core represented by Paul and took a direction that, while no longer avoiding the gray zones of Jewishness, also provided this orientation with a patron. Within the same movement, however, spokesmen such as Luke (in 'Acts of the Apostles') and Justin (in his Apology) —and perhaps earlier the writer of the 'Epistle of Barnabas'— persisted with the genealogy of exclusion, insisting that the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 was a consequence of the crucifixion of the “anointed one.”

Still others in this same period, such as the author of the Gospel of Peter, did not shrink from obvious anti-Judaism and fawning to the Roman authorities ...

This now historiographically constructed collective, this genealogy of Christ’s apostles, had no basis in any historical reality of exclusive bonding ...

... the new gospels gave rise to no text-based communities. The only exception was Marcion’s group, founded by a typical, religious, small-scale entrepreneur: a well-travelled merchant, an organizer, an arriviste (at least by virtue of his move to Rome), and more successful with his money than with his writings. Beyond this group and the intellectual conversation circles (in which Marcion, at least since Justin’s attack on him, was fully involved at a literary level), “God’s people’s assembly” (ekklēsia) had no lasting institutional basis: no one precisely knew where Peter and Paul had died, to say nothing of where their graves might be ...

..Christianity had thus been invented historiographically [in the 2nd century] by means of the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles complemented by collections of letters. There was as yet no actual community.

Rüpke, Jörg. Pantheon: A New History of Roman Religion (pp. 355-358). Princeton University Press.

Hermit wrote:

archibald wrote:

Hermit wrote:So much of the Bible has been interpolated, deleted, downright forged and changed in other ways, it's ridiculous to lose sight of the fact that pretty much none of it can be reasonably regarded as the Gospel Truth.

Obviously true, yes.

Imo, he probably existed, on balance of reasonable possibilities.

Yes, Jesus probably existed... in the same way that William Tell, Robin Hood, King Arthur and even James Bond, who was an amalgam of several people Ian Fleming personally knew, did. The fabrications that grew around all of them made their actual existence irrelevant, though. For all intents and purposes they metamorphosed into becoming mythical figures serving ideological purposes.

archibald wrote:Imo, he probably existed, on balance of reasonable possibilities. But all other explanations are ultimately far less parsimonious, when you dig down into them, imo, and generally agreed to be so.

RealityRules wrote:Directly as laid out by one of today's foremost scholars of Roman religions of that era, Jörg Rüpke, in his February 2018 book Pantheon: A New History of Roman Religion? In which, as one reviewer wrote, -

“Christianity” is presented as a second-century confection. The heretic Marcion is credited with writing the first gospel, inspiring the reaction that we call the canonical Gospels. Any knowledge of Peter and Paul’s death is dismissed as pure myth. Paul is a figure mainly constructed as a totem of identity in the later second century. The Book of Acts is not just a romantic history but a wholesale historiographical fabrication. Until sometime in the second century, the Christians had “as yet no actual community.” The persecutions, the martyrdoms, were mostly the work of Christian imagination—a literary experiment that got way out of hand. In the second century of the Roman Empire, rival entrepreneurs such as Marcion and Irenaeus “invented” the Christianity we know. https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/08/pagan-piety

archibald wrote:Sorry. Why are you posting that carefully-selected snippet?

RealityRules wrote:It's all very well saying "he probably existed, on balance of reasonable possibilities", but ethically one ought to give a probability or a range of probabilities and an explanation why and how one one came to that decision.