It matters very much if they were/are fiction.
Millions of people have died because of Religion including Christianity.
Homosexuals were condemned by society and they were put in prison for being so until fairly recently. They are still considered as intrinsically evil and disordered by the largest Christian Church in the world. ie the Catholic Church.
Women were and still are second class citizens based on male domination throughout the bible. Its only the male lineage that was considered important. Its again in recent history they got the vote and sat on Juries.
Divorce was frowned on and not allowed by the Church because Jesus said so unless it was adultery so abusive and drunken husbands could beat their wives every day and were told, to stay in the home and put up with it.
It was Paul remember who said Wives should obey their husbands and be subserviant to them and keep silent in the church. This still applies to many Christian Churches still.
The Church made a man called Jesus, God himself and so anything ascribed to him in the Gospels was unchallengable. His words were mandatory. Unbaptized babies were denied burial in a church yard and placed in a man made place called Limbo which tormented their grieving parents for the rest of their lives as they thought they would not see them again in heaven!
People were burned at the stake and not allowed to even have a different opinion on doctrinal differences. Look at what Calvin’s contributiion was.
The Catholic Church had the keys to the Kingdom be because Jesus said he would give them to Peter, their acclaimed first Pope. and used that power and control over kings and queens and sold indulgencies to build the Vatican and palaces.
The Pope has virtual control over the moral decisions of one billion Catholics including birth control and stem cell research and abortion.
The list is endless!
It was a sad bad day when so many people left their intelligence behind to believe in this stuff and I was one of them. So yes, it matters very much whether the Gospels and any holy text is considered as true and the word of God. There is no problem anyone believing what and in who they want to, providing that is personal to them and has no compulsion or punishment to think differently.
How much of the Gospels are fiction?
Probably most of it, as is all religious text and even though its claimed that a moral society depended on such words and works. I don’t believe that at all as other cultures such as China and Japan and others had their own moral codes as well and all have moved progressively by people thinking for themselves and laws enacted that protect us against the doctrines of religious extremism and bigotry that had they had their way, we would still have them, indeed as many Theocratic countries still do.
Atonement by human sacrifice I believe is an affront to God. The fundamental rule throughout history and society is that each person is responsible for their OWN actions and can never scape goat them on anyone else. Is it really credible that Hitler and many many others could be excused their crimes against humanity by a death bed conversion?
It would be considered an act of God’s grace IF all the religious books and texts in the whole world be placed on a huge bonfire a and destroyed so that men and women could use their God given brains and 21st century intelligence to decide what is good for the humanity today, not 2000 years ago or 6000 years ago but TODAY and living together, alongside respect for the planet and the animal kingdom. If as I believe there is a spark of the Almighty in every living thing that has ever lived and died, then lets go for it!
Judith said
To me it does not matter if most of the gospels are fiction. The Spirit of Jesus lives on in our world. His teachings that we can think of the Creator as Abba and everyone else as brothers and sisters would make earth heaven if truly followed by us so-called Christians.
If the gospels are mostly (to my mind completely) made up, how can we know what the teachings of Jesus were!!!
Did Jesus really teach we are all brothers and sisters … Personally i will not be calling YAHWEH father … Of the Mesopotamian Gods he is petty angry envious vicious deity …
It is not in my nature to be rude … so I will simply say your comment worries me somewhat.
john76 said
This is an interesting encyclopedia article that argues most of the gospels are fiction: ** you do not have permission to see this link **
How much of the gospels do you think are fiction?
What is your favorite fictional gospel story?
This is all a bit thin. On the one hand we have it that the disciples et al were illiterate and therefore could not have written the gospels, but they were SOMEHOW literate enough to develop Midrash or “expansion” What’s instructive here is the very thin
evidence. Thus while both Matthew and Mark have been described as being unfamiliar with Jewish custom and local knowledge, they are exemplers of customary Jewish methods: Mark is said not to understand the basic Geography( unless Bauckum is right) Matthew has Jesus ride two different animals into Jerusalem because he didn’t understand a basic form of Jewish poetry.
The whole being called out of Egypt thing sounds more like a reference to Moses. The problem here is that extrapolation, expansion, etc doesn’t necessarily equate to fiction: People very often explain the present in terms of the past.
Take a much more recent example: Secretary of State, John Kerry, ran for president in 2004.Many of his fans referred to him as John F Kerry an obvious allusion to John F Kennedy, but the allusion din’t mean someone made up Kerry’s initials. it’s more likely they chose to take advantage of the similarity to make some sort of point about who Kerry was. Indeed, we could argue that many facts of their lives were similar. Kennedy was a senator, so was Kerry. Kennedy was in the navy; so was Kerry. In deed both were in charge of small boats .Kennedy received a purple heart so did Kerry. Do we conclude that claims Kerry’s received a purple heart were derived from the fact that Kennedy did? Apparently, the syncretic FLAVOR of Kerry’s life was derived from
earlier stories about Kennedy’s PT109 story. Thus Kerry swift boat heroism, medals and resume were simply fictitious expansions on Kennedy’s story.
I think it would help if john76 ( or anyone else) could put forward a concise definition of “haggadic midrash”. Then we might compare it to the literary genre of “gospels” as they appeared in the late first and early second century.
I think it is clear from the gospel style that these gospels are not primary haggadic midrash in themselves, but a valid hypothesis could be that they are composed from such sources.
Primarily mythicists list alleged parallels one after the other, claiming that the gospel part of the “parallel” is made up from the scriptural passage (or whatever is considered the source). It is no doubt that this is true in many instances, f.inst. the story about the 30 pieces of silver given to Judas. But on the whole, this view, that some kind of correlation demands one-way causation throughout, is methodologically flawed, since there are other valid explanations, in those instances where the claim of a “parallel” has some merit.
The second objection, methodologically, is that it is too easy to find a “parallel”. This is shown very effectively in the work of certain modern christian sectarians: Every time a spectacular catastrophe strikes the modern world, they are able to come up with a scriptural passage that is said to prophecy it.
I think we tend to dismiss the cultures of the ancient world where it was normal to worship statutes and mythical beings like Zeus and Thor and the Romans had theirs as well. Could any person today think it was normal to pray to a stone statue? Well possibly when people do that in front of a crucifix with Jesus nailed on etc. But maybe that is slightly different as believers think Jesus was a real person. ie they wouldn’t worship the donkey that Jesus rode on for instance.
I’m just putting into perspective that the idea of worshipping Jesus as God or as a God, was not that surprising, given the times they lived in. But should we be expected to believe that in the modern era, because they did or it was written down by Greeks who had no problem with doing just that?
gavriel said
I think it would help if john76 ( or anyone else) could put forward a concise definition of “haggadic midrash”. Then we might compare it to the literary genre of “gospels” as they appeared in the late first and early second century.I think it is clear from the gospel style that these gospels are not primary haggadic midrash in themselves, but a valid hypothesis could be that they are composed from such sources.
Primarily mythicists list alleged parallels one after the other, claiming that the gospel part of the “parallel” is made up from the scriptural passage (or whatever is considered the source). It is no doubt that this is true in many instances, f.inst. the story about the 30 pieces of silver given to Judas. But on the whole, this view, that some kind of correlation demands one-way causation throughout, is methodologically flawed, since there are other valid explanations, in those instances where the claim of a “parallel” has some merit.
The second objection, methodologically, is that it is too easy to find a “parallel”. This is shown very effectively in the work of certain modern christian sectarians: Every time a spectacular catastrophe strikes the modern world, they are able to come up with a scriptural passage that is said to prophecy it.
The line is thin between extrapolating new meanings from ancient scriptures (borrowing the authority of the old) and actually composing new scripture (or quasi-scripture) by extrapolating from the old. By this process of midrashic expansion grew the Jewish haggadah, new narrative commenting on old (scriptural) narrative by rewriting it. Haggadah is a species of hypertext, and thus it cannot be fully understood without reference to the underlying text on which it forms a kind of commentary. The earliest Christians being Jews, it is no surprise that they practiced haggadic expansion of scripture, resulting in new narratives partaking of the authority of the old. The New Testament gospels and the Acts of the Apostles can be shown to be Christian haggadah upon Jewish scripture, and these narratives can be neither fully understood nor fully appreciated without tracing them to their underlying sources.
My favorite 3 fictional gospel stories are (1) The Passion in Mark, (2) The Empty Tomb, and (3) The Resurrection, because these are the three central stories of Christianity. In 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 Paul tells us about the death of Jesus and its relation to Old Testament Scriptures. Paul writes: “Jesus died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and He was buried, and He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.” What I present below are the scriptures Paul was talking about according to which Jesus died and was raised:
(1) The Passion of the Christ in Mark:
Likely the clearest Prophecy about Jesus is the entire 53rd chapter of Isaiah. Isaiah 53:3-7 is especially unmistakable: “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.”
The only thing is, as Spong points out, Isaiah wasn’t making a prophesy aboout Jesus. Mark was doing a haggadic midrash on Isaiah. So, Mark depicts Jesus as one who is despised and rejected, a man of sorrow acquainted with grief. He then describes Jesus as wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities. The Servant in Isaiah, like Jesus in Mark, is silent before his accusers. In Isaiah it says of the servant with his stripes we are healed, which Mark turned into the story of the scourging of Jesus. This is, in part, is where atonement theology comes from, but it would be silly to say II Isaiah was talking about atonement. The servant is numbered among the transgressors in Isaiah, so Jesus is crucified between two thieves. The Isaiah servant would make his grave with the rich, So Jesus is buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, a person of means.
Then, as Dr. Robert Price says
The substructure for the crucifixion in chapter 15 is, as all recognize, Psalm 22, from which derive all the major details, including the implicit piercing of hands and feet (Mark 24//Psalm 22:16b), the dividing of his garments and casting lots for them (Mark 15:24//Psalm 22:18), the “wagging heads” of the mockers (Mark 15:20//Psalm 22:7), and of course the cry of dereliction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34//Psalm 22:1). Matthew adds another quote, “He trusts in God. Let God deliver him now if he desires him” (Matthew 7:43//Psalm 22:8), as well as a strong allusion (“for he said, ‘I am the son of God’” 27:43b) to Wisdom of Solomon 2:12-20, which underlies the whole story anyway (Miller, p. 362), “Let us lie in wait for the righteous man because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law and accuses us of sins against our training. He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord. He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange. We are considered by him as something base, and he avoids our ways as unclean; he calls the last end of the righteous happy, and boasts that God is his father. Let us see if his words are true, and
let us test what will happen at the end of his life: for if the righteous man is God’s son he will help him and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries. Let us test him with insult and torture that we may find out how gentle he is and make trial of his forbearance. Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for, according to what he says, he will be protected.”
As for other details, Crossan (p. 198) points out that the darkness at noon comes from Amos 8:9, while the vinegar and gall come from Psalm 69:21. It is remarkable that Mark does anything but call attention to the scriptural basis for the crucifixion account. There is nothing said of scripture being fulfilled here. It is all simply presented as the events of Jesus’ execution. It is we who must ferret out the real sources of the story. This is quite different, e.g., in John, where explicit scripture citations are given, e.g., for Jesus’ legs not being broken to hasten his death (John 19:36), either Exodus 12:10, Numbers 9:12, or Psalm 34:19-20 (Crossan, p. 168).
Whence did Mark derive the tearing asunder of the Temple veil, from top to bottom (Mark 15:38)? Perhaps from the death of Hector in the Iliad (MacDonald, pp. 144-145). Hector dies forsaken by Zeus. The women of Troy watched from afar off (as the Galilean women do in Mark 15:40), and the whole of Troy mourned as if their city had already been destroyed “from top to bottom,” just as the ripping of the veil seems to be a portent of Jerusalem’s eventual doom.
And so we can at least propose there may not be any historical content with a fairly comprehensive haggadic midrash reading of The Passion of the Christ in Mark.
(2) The Empty Tomb
The Empty Tomb (Mark 16:1-8)
Crossan (p. 274) and Miller and Miller (pp. 219, 377) note that the empty tomb narrative requires no source beyond Joshua (=Jesus, remember!) chapter 10. The five kings have fled from Joshua, taking refuge in the cave at Makkedah. When they are discovered, Joshua orders his men to “Roll great stones against the mouth of the cave and set men by it to guard them” (10:18). Once the mopping-up operation of the kings’ troops is finished, Joshua directs: “Open the mouth of the cave, and bring those five kings out to me from the cave” (10:22). “And afterward Joshua smote them and put them to death, and he hung them on five trees. And they hung upon the trees until evening; but at the time of the going down of the sun, Joshua commanded, and they took them down from the trees, and threw them into the cave where they had hidden themselves, and they set great stones against the mouth of the cave, which remain to this very day” (10:26-27). Observe that here it is “Jesus” who plays the role of Pilate, and that Mark needed only to reverse the order of the main narrative moments of this story. Joshua 10: first, stone rolled away and kings emerge alive; second, kings die; third, kings are crucified until sundown. Mark: Jesus as King of the Jews is crucified, where his body will hang till sundown; second, he dies; third, he emerges alive (Mark implies) from the tomb once the stone is rolled away.
The vigil of the mourning women likely reflects the women’s mourning cult of the dying and rising god, long familiar in Israel (Ezekiel 8:14, “Behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz;” Zechariah 12:11, “On that day the mourning in Jerusalem will be as great as the mourning for Hadad-Rimmon in the plain of Megiddo;” Canticles 3:1-4, “I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him but found him not; I called him but he gave no answer,” etc.).
(3) The Resurrection
Jesus’ resurrection seems to be a further haggadic midrash of Psalm 16. Peter stressed the significance of the resurrection and cited the prophecy predicting it in Psalm 16: “God raised him up, losing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it … Brothers, I may say to you with confidence about the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants on his throne, he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. This Jesus God raised up, and of that we are all witnesses (Acts 2:24, 29-32).” In this case, Psalm 16 was not making a prophesy about Jesus, but rather Psalm 16 was used in a haggadic midrash to invent the story of Christ’s resurrection.
Also, Price also has some interesting comments on the resurrection. He writes that: The Resurrection of Jesus (Matthew 27:62-28:20)
Matthew had before him Mark’s empty tomb story and no other source except the Book of Daniel, from which he has embellished the Markan original at several points. (Matthew had already repaired to Daniel in his Pilate story, where the procurator declared, “I am innocent of the blood of this man,” Matthew 27:24b, which he derived from Susanna 46/Daniel 13:46 LXX: “I am innocent of the blood of this woman.”) (Crossan, p. 97-98). First, Matthew has introduced guards at the tomb and has had the tomb sealed, a reflection of Nebuchadnezzer’s sealing the stone rolled to the door of the lion’s den with Daniel inside (6:17). Mark had a young man (perhaps an angel, but perhaps not) already in the open tomb when the women arrived. Matthew simply calls the character an angel and clothes him in a description reminiscent of the angel of Daniel chapter 10 (face like lightning, Daniel 10:6) and the Ancient of Days in Daniel chapter 7 (snowy white clothing, Daniel 7:9b). He rolls the stone aside. The guards faint and become as dead men, particular dead men, as a matter of fact, namely the guards who tossed Shadrach, Meschach, and Abed-nego into the fiery furnace in (Daniel 3:22).
To provide an appearance of the risen Jesus to the women at the tomb (something conspicuously absent from Mark), Matthew simply divides Mark’s young man into the angel and now Jesus himself, who has nothing more to say than a lame reiteration of the angel’s words. He appears again on a mountain in Galilee (Matthew 28:16) which he now says Jesus had earlier designated, though this is the first the reader learns of it. There he dispenses yet more Danielic pastiche: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” This is based on a conflation of two Greek versions of Daniel 7:14. In the LXX, “to him [the one like a son of man was] … given the rule… the authority of him [the Ancient of Days].” In Theodotion, he receives “authority to hold all in the heaven and upon the earth.” The charge to make all nations his disciples comes from Daniel 7:14, too: “that all people, nations, and languages should serve him” (Helms, p. 141).
john76 said
gavriel said
I think it would help if john76 ( or anyone else) could put forward a concise definition of “haggadic midrash”. Then we might compare it to the literary genre of “gospels” as they appeared in the late first and early second century.I think it is clear from the gospel style that these gospels are not primary haggadic midrash in themselves, but a valid hypothesis could be that they are composed from such sources.
Primarily mythicists list alleged parallels one after the other, claiming that the gospel part of the “parallel” is made up from the scriptural passage (or whatever is considered the source). It is no doubt that this is true in many instances, f.inst. the story about the 30 pieces of silver given to Judas. But on the whole, this view, that some kind of correlation demands one-way causation throughout, is methodologically flawed, since there are other valid explanations, in those instances where the claim of a “parallel” has some merit.
The second objection, methodologically, is that it is too easy to find a “parallel”. This is shown very effectively in the work of certain modern christian sectarians: Every time a spectacular catastrophe strikes the modern world, they are able to come up with a scriptural passage that is said to prophecy it.
The line is thin between extrapolating new meanings from ancient scriptures (borrowing the authority of the old) and actually composing new scripture (or quasi-scripture) by extrapolating from the old. By this process of midrashic expansion grew the Jewish haggadah, new narrative commenting on old (scriptural) narrative by rewriting it. Haggadah is a species of hypertext, and thus it cannot be fully understood without reference to the underlying text on which it forms a kind of commentary. The earliest Christians being Jews, it is no surprise that they practiced haggadic expansion of scripture, resulting in new narratives partaking of the authority of the old. The New Testament gospels and the Acts of the Apostles can be shown to be Christian haggadah upon Jewish scripture, and these narratives can be neither fully understood nor fully appreciated without tracing them to their underlying sources.
Well, that’s a quote from Price. It would be nice to have an independent definition from some authoritative source.
gavriel said
john76 said
gavriel said
I think it would help if john76 ( or anyone else) could put forward a concise definition of “haggadic midrash”. Then we might compare it to the literary genre of “gospels” as they appeared in the late first and early second century.I think it is clear from the gospel style that these gospels are not primary haggadic midrash in themselves, but a valid hypothesis could be that they are composed from such sources.
Primarily mythicists list alleged parallels one after the other, claiming that the gospel part of the “parallel” is made up from the scriptural passage (or whatever is considered the source). It is no doubt that this is true in many instances, f.inst. the story about the 30 pieces of silver given to Judas. But on the whole, this view, that some kind of correlation demands one-way causation throughout, is methodologically flawed, since there are other valid explanations, in those instances where the claim of a “parallel” has some merit.
The second objection, methodologically, is that it is too easy to find a “parallel”. This is shown very effectively in the work of certain modern christian sectarians: Every time a spectacular catastrophe strikes the modern world, they are able to come up with a scriptural passage that is said to prophecy it.
The line is thin between extrapolating new meanings from ancient scriptures (borrowing the authority of the old) and actually composing new scripture (or quasi-scripture) by extrapolating from the old. By this process of midrashic expansion grew the Jewish haggadah, new narrative commenting on old (scriptural) narrative by rewriting it. Haggadah is a species of hypertext, and thus it cannot be fully understood without reference to the underlying text on which it forms a kind of commentary. The earliest Christians being Jews, it is no surprise that they practiced haggadic expansion of scripture, resulting in new narratives partaking of the authority of the old. The New Testament gospels and the Acts of the Apostles can be shown to be Christian haggadah upon Jewish scripture, and these narratives can be neither fully understood nor fully appreciated without tracing them to their underlying sources.
Well, that’s a quote from Price. It would be nice to have an independent definition from some authoritative source.
Price wrote the quote in the Encyclopedia Of Midrash, so I guess that would make him an authority.
As I said before, inventing something that benefitted humanity would have been a more worthwhile project than spending years and years rewriting fiction. It just appalls me that so many innocent gullible people have died and are dying for a myth, when they didn’t need to. And the Christian God keeps his arms folded while it all happened without the remotest intervention. But Paradise awaits all sides.
gavriel said
john76 said
gavriel said
I think it would help if john76 ( or anyone else) could put forward a concise definition of “haggadic midrash”. Then we might compare it to the literary genre of “gospels” as they appeared in the late first and early second century.I think it is clear from the gospel style that these gospels are not primary haggadic midrash in themselves, but a valid hypothesis could be that they are composed from such sources.
Primarily mythicists list alleged parallels one after the other, claiming that the gospel part of the “parallel” is made up from the scriptural passage (or whatever is considered the source). It is no doubt that this is true in many instances, f.inst. the story about the 30 pieces of silver given to Judas. But on the whole, this view, that some kind of correlation demands one-way causation throughout, is methodologically flawed, since there are other valid explanations, in those instances where the claim of a “parallel” has some merit.
The second objection, methodologically, is that it is too easy to find a “parallel”. This is shown very effectively in the work of certain modern christian sectarians: Every time a spectacular catastrophe strikes the modern world, they are able to come up with a scriptural passage that is said to prophecy it.
The line is thin between extrapolating new meanings from ancient scriptures (borrowing the authority of the old) and actually composing new scripture (or quasi-scripture) by extrapolating from the old. By this process of midrashic expansion grew the Jewish haggadah, new narrative commenting on old (scriptural) narrative by rewriting it. Haggadah is a species of hypertext, and thus it cannot be fully understood without reference to the underlying text on which it forms a kind of commentary. The earliest Christians being Jews, it is no surprise that they practiced haggadic expansion of scripture, resulting in new narratives partaking of the authority of the old. The New Testament gospels and the Acts of the Apostles can be shown to be Christian haggadah upon Jewish scripture, and these narratives can be neither fully understood nor fully appreciated without tracing them to their underlying sources.
Well, that’s a quote from Price. It would be nice to have an independent definition from some authoritative source.
In “The Jewish Annotated New Testament: ** you do not have permission to see this link **,” it is argued that Matthew presents Jesus as “The New Moses.” Co-editor Amy-Jill Levine says this is an example of Midrash. I know this because I E-Mailed her a few years ago and asked.
I was just saying in my posts that the three core episodes of Christianity, (1) The Passion in Mark (2) The Empty Tomb and (3) The Resurrection pericopes were historical fiction developed by rewriting Old Testament stories to make it seem like Jesus was fulfilling Old Testament Scriptures. They were doing this to sell the new Jesus religion. The goal of the Christians was to take over the world with the gospels. For instance, we read in Matthew that:
Matthew 28:16-20 New International Version (NIV)
The Great Commission
16 Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. 17 When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. 18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
AND IN LUKE:
a. Sending out Emissaries (Deuteronomy 1; Luke 10:1-3, 17-30)
Just as Moses had chosen twelve spies to reconnoiter the land which stretched “before your face,” sending them through the cities of the land of Canaan, so does Jesus send a second group, after the twelve, a group of seventy, whose number symbolizes the nations of the earth who are to be CONQUERED, so to speak, with the gospel in the Acts of the Apostles. He sends them out “before his face” to every city he plans to visit (in Canaan, too, obviously).
To match the image of the spies returning with samples of the fruit of the land (Deuteronomy 1:25), Luke has placed here the Q saying (Luke 10:2//Matthew 9:37-38), “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few; therefore beg the Lord of the harvest to send out more workers into his harvest.”
And Jesus’ emissaries return with a glowing report, just as Moses’ did.
*****************************************************************
The first Christians thought that if people would listen to Jesus’ message, it would create a better world. I believe they were willing to die for this cause, and would do anything to bring it about.
I don’t believe Jesus’ first followers thought he was a miracle worker, because there is no such thing as miracles. The first Christians just put forth the story that Jesus was a miracle worker in order to “wow” new potential followers.
Just like Apollonius of Tyana had miracle stories told about him that he never really did, so too with Jesus.
john76 said
Price wrote the quote in the Encyclopedia Of Midrash, so I guess that would make him an authority.
This quote is taken from his home page, just like most of your other postings. Almost all of your stuff is Price-quotations, which is probably violating Copyrights unless you have his explicit permission. It is sufficient to give hyperlinks, like the one you gave in your post of April 3. Which book or web page are you referring to with “Encyclopedia Of Midrash” ?
gavriel said
john76 said
Price wrote the quote in the Encyclopedia Of Midrash, so I guess that would make him an authority.
This quote is taken from his home page, just like most of your other postings. Almost all of your stuff is Price-quotations, which is probably violating Copyrights unless you have his explicit permission. It is sufficient to give hyperlinks, like the one you gave in your post of April 3. Which book or web page are you referring to with “Encyclopedia Of Midrash” ?
The article on Price’s homepage was originally printed in “The Encyclopedia of Midrash (ed. Jacob Neusner and Alan Avery Peck 2004):” qid=1428247094&sr=8-2&keywords=the+encyclopedia+of+midrash
john76 said
The article on Price’s homepage was originally printed in “The Encyclopedia of Midrash (ed. Jacob Neusner and Alan Avery Peck 2004):” qid=1428247094&sr=8-2&keywords=the+encyclopedia+of+midrash
The quote you gave is not a definition of “haggadic midrash”. Could you please try to define the term so that we can compare it to the Gospel genre?
gavriel said
john76 said
The article on Price’s homepage was originally printed in “The Encyclopedia of Midrash (ed. Jacob Neusner and Alan Avery Peck 2004):” qid=1428247094&sr=8-2&keywords=the+encyclopedia+of+midrash
The quote you gave is not a definition of “haggadic midrash”. Could you please try to define the term so that we can compare it to the Gospel genre?
I think “haggadic midrash” just means gospel writers were rewriting old testament stories using Jesus as the central character. For instance, Matthew’s Jesus infancy narrative recapitulates the story of Moses. Matthew’s Jesus is the New Moses.
By the use of Haggadic Midrash, the New Testament writers constructed the stories of (1) The Passion in Mark, (2) The Empty Tomb, and (3) The Resurrection, by rewriting Old Testament scriptures using Jesus as the central character. They did this to make it seem like Jesus was fulfilling Old Testament scriptures. They believed this would help them sell the new religion. The Gospel of John points this out when the author of The Gospel of John has Jesus say: “You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me (John 5:39).”
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert