Jesus as an historical figure
But the gospels were all written anonymously, the traditional attributions are dodgy, and none of the authors claims to be an eyewitness. Eyewitness accounts are better than secondhand, and multiple eyewitnesses are essential, but the gospels give no solid indication of being other than secondhand reports of eyewitnesses. Anybody can make up what an 'eyewitness' told them, and anybody can claim to be an eyewitness to a secondhand reporter, who could have no way of establishing if that were the case.
I wasn't disputing that the gospels agree on the main events: if you think your book is likely to be read by people who will have heard about Jesus and you aren't interested in presenting a contrary narrative, you're likely to get the main parts right. It seems clear that shortly after Jesus' execution a story went around that he'd turned up. That's the story, and a gospel writer a few decades later is going to build from that.
And I didn't have in mind nitpicky details so much as inconsistencies of theological import, which pretty clearly derive from different authorial motivations, e.g. especially, the different Jesus presented in John versus the Synoptic gospels. I think with John you have to conclude that stuff is just being made up willy nilly. Matthew doesn't describe Jesus as God, or have Jesus describing himself as God. Why not?
You left out the biggest one, the hoax that Jesus was born of a virgin, which I can't imagine having been made up for reasons other than to explain his illegitimacy. I.e. certain embarrassing details, like Joseph being useless, could just have been papering over even more embarrassing ones, like that he was a cuckold.
Reading between the lines of Peter's denial and Judas's betrayal, and using common sense, it's clear things got messy, which undermines the claim that Jesus was overawing everybody. So those are embarrassing considerations, and using the commonsense theory that Jesus was not actually God walking among us, they're aspects of the story that are easy to believe - but equally easy to spin! If you're prepared to believe that Jesus was God walking among us, you're prepared to believe anything about why certain people forgot or failed to see that.
I don't really see how Peter being made an example of counts as potentially embarrassing, though. The point was to persuade the reader not to be like Peter.
It's clear enough that the earliest gospel authors weren't interested in editing out certain potentially embarrassing facts, but they weren't Church Fathers, weren't in cahoots, and probably had inchoate ideas at best of an organized religion. I would think the Church Fathers' reasons for leaving them in would have more to do with going to war with the army you had. These texts and others were already in circulation and they couldn't just whip up something new and neat and call it gospel.
Well, in that people's memories can be pretty unreliable, it's just something that has to be taken into account.
The inconsistent details aren't the story though. They are the result of oral history. We get that even today in biographies, where one source might disagree with another on the details, but agree on the main points.
I wasn't disputing that the gospels agree on the main events: if you think your book is likely to be read by people who will have heard about Jesus and you aren't interested in presenting a contrary narrative, you're likely to get the main parts right. It seems clear that shortly after Jesus' execution a story went around that he'd turned up. That's the story, and a gospel writer a few decades later is going to build from that.
And I didn't have in mind nitpicky details so much as inconsistencies of theological import, which pretty clearly derive from different authorial motivations, e.g. especially, the different Jesus presented in John versus the Synoptic gospels. I think with John you have to conclude that stuff is just being made up willy nilly. Matthew doesn't describe Jesus as God, or have Jesus describing himself as God. Why not?
One technique of interrogating the validity of writings for which supporting evidence is inconclusive is the principle of embarrassment -- the aspects which you would edit out if you were trying make up a story for the purposes of propaganda.
The gospels are full of these. Peter's betrayal of Jesus (the leader of the sect was a disloyal coward!), for example.
Or the nature of Jesus' crucifixion, a method of executing that was seen as particularly humiliating -- a good stoning would have been more dignified for the Son of God; a crucifixion represented a stumbling block in terms of propaganda.
Or the discovery of the empty tomb by women, whose testimony was seen as worthless. If you wanted your claims to have credibility, you'd place a bunch of men at the scene.
And so it is with the inconsistencies in the gospel narratives. The fact that these were not excised or edited indicates that the Church Fathers (none of them gullible idiots) let them stand because the gospels agree on the important stuff.
The gospels are full of these. Peter's betrayal of Jesus (the leader of the sect was a disloyal coward!), for example.
Or the nature of Jesus' crucifixion, a method of executing that was seen as particularly humiliating -- a good stoning would have been more dignified for the Son of God; a crucifixion represented a stumbling block in terms of propaganda.
Or the discovery of the empty tomb by women, whose testimony was seen as worthless. If you wanted your claims to have credibility, you'd place a bunch of men at the scene.
And so it is with the inconsistencies in the gospel narratives. The fact that these were not excised or edited indicates that the Church Fathers (none of them gullible idiots) let them stand because the gospels agree on the important stuff.
Reading between the lines of Peter's denial and Judas's betrayal, and using common sense, it's clear things got messy, which undermines the claim that Jesus was overawing everybody. So those are embarrassing considerations, and using the commonsense theory that Jesus was not actually God walking among us, they're aspects of the story that are easy to believe - but equally easy to spin! If you're prepared to believe that Jesus was God walking among us, you're prepared to believe anything about why certain people forgot or failed to see that.
I don't really see how Peter being made an example of counts as potentially embarrassing, though. The point was to persuade the reader not to be like Peter.
It's clear enough that the earliest gospel authors weren't interested in editing out certain potentially embarrassing facts, but they weren't Church Fathers, weren't in cahoots, and probably had inchoate ideas at best of an organized religion. I would think the Church Fathers' reasons for leaving them in would have more to do with going to war with the army you had. These texts and others were already in circulation and they couldn't just whip up something new and neat and call it gospel.
Incidentally, if we are going to discount the gospels altogether because they were written 35-70 after Jesus' death, then we'll have to doubt the anything a World War 2 veteran says today about his service, and not take seriously any of our memories from 1980.
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