Thank you it sounds fascinating. When I was a Christian I just took all this at face value. I never looked at the things he supposedly said in any kind of historical context and certainly not with a critical lense. And then for twenty years as an atheist I ignored the Bible.
Truth be told, I only picked up this book because of my religious trauma. I didn’t worry much about the afterlife when I was an atheist but now that I am a practicing Buddhist for some reason the hell anxiety is back. I had some deeply disturbing religious experiences as a child, when I belonged to a Pentecostal church, that reinforced this idea of spiritual warfare. I told my husband I think I believe in hell more than God.
So I picked up this book hoping I could add some reason to combat the fear. What I didn’t expect was for it to open up this entire fascinating world of historical and philosophical study.
In high school, our teacher told us thee was a sect (can’t remember the name) that said Jesus did not realize he was divine until his resurrection. That ring a bell with anyone?
I’m dubious since I don’t know how we tell the difference between; The eyewitness account of John
and The account of Q and other Gospel writers as told by John
I don’t see that we can. [ETA: other than that something that shows up only in John seems less likely to have been taken from Q and/or other gospel writers. Whether that’s because only John knew it, only John remembered it, only John mis-remembered it in that fashion, or John made it up I have no idea.
And, of course, something that actually happened might have been reported by John and/or by Q and the other writers; we don’t know whether something reported by all of them is so reported because it happened and they all knew it, or because one of them reported it inaccurately and the others all got it from that one.]
I wasn’t addressing that; I was only addressing the question of why a person who was actually an eyewitness might nevertheless have consulted additional sources.
In the Synoptics, the ministry of Jesus takes a single year, but in John it takes three, as evidenced by references to three Passovers. Events are not all in the same order: the date of the crucifixion is different, as is the time of Jesus’ anointing in Bethany and the cleansing of the Temple, which occurs in the beginning of Jesus’ ministry rather than near its end.
is fatal to the idea that the author of John was an eyewitness.
I’ll not even get into all the other glaring contradictions that exist between all of the Gospels.
I don’t think so. Memories are imprecise. And the style of writing at the time was more about story-telling than about literal accuracy. And the audience at the time was completely aware of that.
It’s anachronistic of us, modern, documented-boring-literal-truth cultural beings that we are, to expect the gospels to be literal in their telling of such a symbolically important story.
Counterpoint though, for several hundred years certain sects of Christianity HAVE, as an article of faith, insisted that every word is the literal truth as well. So, yet another anachronistic version of interpretation that we ourselves are reacting too from a modern POV.
And that’s leaving our another difference between Judaism and Christian practice, in that in the post-Temple, Rabbinical era, no one scholar speaks with unassailable authority. Not so for many Christian sects who have pronounced (with varying degrees of success) what the True Gospel (heh) is.
And- no one else was writing unbiased history. The steles of ancient egypt sometimes honor great victories- that were really losses.
Look at Herodotus- an early historian and writer- his stuff is full of myths, fables, and legends which he wrote as if fact.
Same for Muslim sects, etc- there are always extremists or scholars that go overboard.
No one Christian leader speaks with unassailable authority, except to his followers. Are you saying the Lubavitchers dont accept the words of that Rabbi as unassailable ?
And some of what he wrote that people thought he made up turned out to be literally true. He described a grotesque funerary practice of … maybe the Mongols or the Scythians… that everyone thought was a legend until modern archeologists dug up a site just like what he described. (A lot of horses and servants were ritually slaughtered to accompany the deceased lord, and their bodies were mounted on wooden spikes or something. I forget the details, but he gave a lot of them, and they were bizarre and gruesome, and they were real.)
Well, the Rebbe is dead, so he’s not saying much these days. But when he was alive, they thought he might be the Messiah because they liked what he said so much. If he’s said things they didn’t like, there would have been dissent. It’s a big deal to leave your rabbi for another opinion, but it’s done.
And the Pope is only infallible for certain defined pronouncements. And he’s pretty careful of what he says in those pronouncements.
This only happened after Gutenberg, mostly (entirely?) among certain Protestant sects. There’s a modern technical term for this: it’s called fan wank. My hypothesis is that the ancients were not idiots. The gospels present conflicting stories of Jesus’ life and death, just as the first chapter of Genesis presents conflicting stories of the origins of the Earth. There are no records of debate on these topics, because none of the writings were meant to understood in such a fashion. That’s a new development, post-Gutenberg.
No argument about that, thus the multiple qualifiers and caveats. The point was mostly a response to @puzzlegal’s attempt to remind us that contextually, an audience from when the gospels were likely written would have not assumed it all to be literally true, and that us expecting that in part, is a modern anachronism. And thus my comment, that some sects DO consider it literally true and/or divinely inspired, which is an anachronism of it’s own. And that some of us respond to the texts in that light.
Basically, Christianity in it’s multiplicity of sects has been branching off into different interpretations for near two thousand years, with each era adding it’s own assumptions, interpretations and twists, and adding to multiple libraries of scholarly thought on the subject, which is turn reviewed in each new generation based on it’s own assumptions.
Or, to borrow a board trope, it’s anachronisms all the way down.
Be careful that you only look at Mark, the original gospel story. The other three just rewrote Mark and twisted it for their own perspective and purposes.
Also, anything Paul wrote: remember he lists his sources as “revelation” (that is like daydreaming) and the OT scriptures. Paul even states that it did Not come from other people.
Not quite. They all seemed to have used the Q source. Mark was first, and John was way last, but John is markedly (no pun intended) different than the other three.
I’ve watched a lot of lectures…currently leaning towards the “No Q” side. I.e. the order was Mark, Matthew, Luke, each taking from the prior, then John which is considerably different. I tend to agree with Bart Earhman and David Fitzgerald.
