I don’t think Robyn Faith Walsh would say that Roman provenance makes sense.
She does seem to discard ideas like gospels being a compilation of community beliefs, i.e. a Mark community had verbal stories about Jesus of Nazareth that Mark wrote down, and the same for the other communities.
Instead, she seem to think that the gospel writers would have known each other and their writings thoroughly, as an elite class of writers. And Josephus would have known of them and they of him as well. The Roman world was small for the wealthy, who could go across the Mediterranean in a matter of days and had good roads besides. These elites knew each other.
She discards ideas like communities having verbal stories about Jesus?
So, if you don’t have Jewish communities of the client kingdom of Judah-Galilee talking about Jesus,
what is left?
The empire and empire supporters creating Jesus. You’re back at Roman Provenance.
The Gospel WERE written in Greek.
The elite class of writers could have been Jewish. Were they pro-Roman or not, especially since we know who the victors writing were.?
In the second passage after the Testimonium Flavianum, we see Josephus know of a Pauline figure.
I guess I agree that Josephus would have known the elite class of writers that produced the Pauline Letters and the Gospels.
I am a total mythicist myself, but I think Roman provenance gets one thing terribly wrong. However, most NT critical scholarship forgets this as well as they attribute modern ideas of freedom and colonialism onto the Judean situation.
There was nothing new about a Judean author writing literature showing leaders subservient to or even praising foreign leaders, even one who absolutely wrecks Jerusalem and the temple. They simply show that Jerusalem and its leaders failed and YHWH sent the leader to punish them. Jeremiah is the perfect example. He twice calls Nebuchadnezzar the Servant of YHWH. He advises the king, Zedekiah, to surrender. He is protected by Nebuchadnezzar’s military general and is close to the family of the eventual governor appointed by Nebuchadnezzar, Gedaliah.
So there is no need to propose that NT writers were paid by Romans or were secretly Romans in disguise, creating a fake Jesus of Nazareth.
Isaiah called Cyrus, the foreign emperor who ruled over Judea, the anointed one.
Josephus is often depicted as capitulating and writing to please a Roman audience. while this is sensible, the above context should be added in. The great prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah basically did the same thing.
Also, getting rid of oral tradition does not take completely do away with a historical fiction. It simply says that a writer can create a story around a character without having heard it in his community first.
She did away with Q for a while, but is reconsidering since sensibly even a fictional hero might have a number of sayings attributed to him.
Her faith in a historical Jesus seems to hang on Paul, mostly on Galatians and encounters with James, Peter, Cephas and John.
The sons of God.
The Greeks:Romans supposedly had a religious tradition where a female would be impregnated by a male not her husband. Part of the pagan temple ways of life. The baby was then government property to become a soldier or priesthood. This way you don’t need a military draft or volunteers.
The Roman Imperial Cult authorship is perhaps the darkest and most disturbing interpretation.
I actually thought of it on my own several years ago. Nobody told me. I don’t like people putting new ideas in my head. Just wait, eventually I think of it on my own.
This is from the supposed Talmud stories that Jesus was the bastard son of a Roman military member. All those Talmud stories were banned, outlawed and burned a long time ago in Europe long before Nazi Germany existed.
I know that various emperors, especially Julius Caesar and Vespasian, were attributed with miracles.
However, I need to double check my sources on those. Do you have any sources on Jesus copying Julius Caesar specifically?
I would think that a gospel writer using a trope for Jesus that came from Julius would be to compare Jesus as in a very high category of human, almost divine. I don’t see how it would help to propagate the cult of Julius Caesar. Did the Flavians even support the worship of Julius Caesar?
As far as purpose, it seems to me that Mark’s Jesus echoes Isaiah and Jeremiah in having a preacher who is ignored “ears to hear, but do not hear” that type of stuff.
Focus My View
Do you have any sources on Jesus copying Julius Caesar specifically?
Steefen
Look at the name of the thread.
Francesco Carotta wrote a book called Jesus Was Caesar.
He also did the documentary video, The Gospel of Caesar:
Third, I watched the video, then I studied the book.
Then I added the information to my book in a way that I thought was better organized. My book is Historical Accuracy.
That isn’t the only topic in my book. Plus I’m writing a second edition.
I haven’t read and studied the book, but there is an obvious similar theme of Jesus:King of the Jews:God and Julius:Caesar:God. That’s probably not a coincidence since most of the ancient world also lived in that belief system. I also don’t believe any post-Solomon’s Temple interpretations of Judaism that King David was not worshipped as God. David:King:God. So the concept that the ruler was God goes way back 3000 years or more. It’s obvious why a King of the Jews would be thought of as God within the Roman Imperial Cult since the Caesar is God.
Julius Caesar was betrayed. Jesus was betrayed.
JFK was assassinated live on television. Oswald proclaimed his innocence live on television. Oswald was assassinated live on television. Television is a good record of history. The official government investigations say that Oswald was the lone assassin.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert