Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

So in this entire account of Paul's time in Jerusalem, at no point does anyone say anything meaningful about Jesus. The Sanhedrin doesn't say, "You're a believer in that heretic we executed!" Or, "Yes, we remember Jesus, he was a false prophet, and you are too!" The Romans don't...

So, and while I agree with it, if you state that the gospels tell us little more than a Palestinian Jesus who was put to death, leaving everything else open, then perhaps it was the goal to do just that. Mark for one uses a grand and elaborate framework with chiastic structure and he certainly was ...

... A Jesus that was conceptualized like Paul's was taken up to be made a symbolic tale -- the Jesus who lived out a life of a "new Israel". My point in my previous post is that it's very likely that Paul's Jesus reflects to some degree the gospel Jesus, even if just by more use of the na...

... I don't accept the Doherty/Carrier view that Jesus was an entirely celestial figure. I see Paul's Jesus as descending to earth for crucifixion. That is, if one likes, a Jesus who "appeared in history" -- though that seems a rather modern way to put it. Paul's Jesus didn't do much else...

What the gospels did establish was that -- when all were read literally -- a Jesus figure of some form or nature did wander around Palestine and got crucified . The Jesus of the gospels entered history but left it open for his literal minded readers to understand him, his composition, his provenanc...

I start from the Doherty/Carrier position that the earliest Jesus that Christians believed in, the Jesus of the Pauline epistles, was not a historical man recently dying in Palestine. If that’s right, don’t we have to look for tension in the transition from a celestial/mystical Jesus to the full ac...

I see where the problem arises from my first reply. Interpreting the gospels literally was not the way to laying a uniform or agreed-upon Jesus of Nazareth figure. It was only the beginning of the problem. Literal readings of symbolic texts (not meant to present a real biography) opened the floodgat...

I just don’t see this schism as arising from a patristic-style debate about the natures of an already-agreed-upon Jesus of Nazareth figure. I agree. That was what I was trying to get at with my understanding of the origin of the gospels as a kind of symbolism. Those early gospels left the field wid...

omg -- a sure sign of senility -- saying the same thing 6 times --- apologies for the duplications.

Hypothesis: 1 John makes sense on the mythicist theory about Jesus Christ despite its own affirmation of a historical Jesus. It reflects the controversy and upheaval that, on the mythicist hypothesis, must have attended the transformation of the Jesus figure as the Gospel stories were developed and...