rationalskepticism.org

COVERED IN THIS POST:

Those “sources” of the Gospels

How obvious?
Downplaying what scholarship knows
Enter Q with a cardboard cutout Jesus
Oral tradition hypothesis fails the prediction test
How one story became four
Luke’s and Matthew’s special sources

“You can’t be serious!”
Hiding and hoping?
Insupportable claims for Mark and John

John’s sources were unique . . . the problem
Evolution of Jesus
Who invented Jesus?

The Oral Tradition hypothesis fails the prediction test

I have touched on this situation earlier. If, as part of a large and notably uncoordinated (the record itself shows this) sectarian movement of the time, Luke’s or Matthew’s community owed its origins to oral traditions about Jesus’ life and death, each would inevitably have formulated its own version of that life and death, its own focuses on features of the Jesus story and how to preserve and tell it. There is also no reason to think that each community would not have created its own written account of that story, with all those unique focuses and literary renditions. (Why should Mark’s community alone have come up with such an idea, impulse or need?) Yet neither Luke nor Matthew presents any such different, let alone unique, foundational version. Each simply took Mark as his starting point, his blueprint, as though he had never known a story, oral or written, about a life of Jesus before he encountered a copy of Mark. And to have two separate evangelists (and John partially) present such a picture, such a virtually infeasible situation in their literary creations, confirms this insight.

How one story became four

What we have here is the opposite of what Ehrman is trying to claim. Mythicists are indeed right. The four Gospels, inasmuch as they purport to tell the story of a man on earth who preached, prophesied, worked miracles and underwent a death and resurrection, are simply one story with differing incidental details and organization. Once that story materialized in the sect’s mind, it would inevitably have been expanded. How? By pulling into its orbit all manner of teachings, prophetic pronouncements, anecdotes about miracles performed by the sect’s prophets, controversies with the establishment, etc., and attaching them to the newly formulated Jesus figure. Some of this took place in Q’s evolution, some of it in the creation of the Gospels.

New Testament scholarship has long recognized this process, this wholesale adoption of Jesus and the attribution to him of disparate elements from truly independent (non-Jesus) sources. What they have not recognized is that this Jesus is an entirely fabricated figure, partly imagined by the sect through common sectarian tendencies, partly utilized by Mark to fashion an allegorical story about the sect as a whole and its new spiritual truths. Those truths also encompassed the entirely separate cultic Christ sect as preached by Paul, with Mark bringing Christ’s heavenly sacrifice to earth and allegorizing it in a tale of crucifixion by Pontius Pilate with the connivance of the Jewish authorities. Syncretism in spades!

<the full post can be read at the link below>

http://vridar.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/ ... e-gospels/