You conflate several issues here. Pointing out that supernatural beings don't exist is something most people only do in debates whether a religion is true (which has nothing to with biblical scholarship) or when it comes to investigating historicity issues (which is just a tiny subset of biblical scholarship). On the other hand, the existence or non-existence of supernatural beings has no bearing on judging whether a passage of a text is original or not. That is, indeed, no valid argument, but I don't see any of the good scholars do any such thing. Calvin was dealing in matters of faith, which have no bearing here. Scholars generally know that they are dealing with a religious text and treat it accordingly. In other words, this a strawman argument.rakovsky wrote:Hi Ulan.
This is my general theory about what is really happening with the skepticism. Calvin would never say "I am a skeptic about the supernatural, so the Bible can't teach supernatural things like the real presence in bread". But that was basically what he did. He made that same kind of argument on numerous issues, as some Calvinists started to in his wake. One famous 18th c. Calvinist said that in the Bible when it talks about people being demon possessed, it really just means lunatics and crazy people.
The thing is, I think that actually when the Bible talked about demons, it really did mean supernatural beings that could go into people.People in those days really believed in that stuff.
For example, when Mark describes the dealings with the man with an unclean spirit in the first chapter, he uses the image of driving out a possessing spirit from that man. However, the choice of words given by the spectators “What is this? A new teaching" makes the situation clear: the teacher sets the mind of the man straight by convincing the man of his version of whatever was spoken of. This is not the invention of modern scholars, it's what the text spells out in clear words. Whether Mark believed in possessing spirits or not doesn't even factor into this judgment, even if I see it as highly likely that Mark actually believed in spirits. Nevertheless, the text makes clear what we are looking at, even if you, the listener, don't believe in spirits.
I'm not aware of any scholar arguing this way. That's something you read on messageboards, which doesn't really matter.rakovsky wrote: Likewise, nowadays, people are even more skeptical about virgin birth stories, and I believe it's a major unspoken factor why some people think it's not something the original Christians believed in. Modern skeptics aren't going to announce: "I think Virgin births are fake, therefore Peter, Paul, and James, etc. never believed that stuff". But it's actually the same kind of bias just like what Calvin had.
You completely disregard my actual argument. I think you are dead wrong here. You start from your pet theory of which gospels were first and then accuse those people who consider gMark to be the first gospel (or a version thereof) for having reasons for their judgment which they don't need and don't employ. gMark doesn't need any birth story, because his Christ is created during baptism (as Irenaeus put it, gMark is the gospel of the docetists). The reason why the star of Bethlehem and the visit of the magi is disputed lies in the simple fact that we have two different childhood stories that don't match in most of their details. This gets especially egregious when part of the story gets lifted verbatim from the OT. And Matthew generally has the bad habit of quote-mining the OT completely out of context (gMark is much better in this regard, because there the context usually fits).rakovsky wrote: Here's the thing. If the gospels started with Jesus sitting as a kid in Nazareth's synagogue and learning Torah and Tanakh from the rabbis, the modern skeptics wouldn't have much problem with it. You start throwing in stuff like a star going to Bethlehem and magi visiting a cave, and it becomes "Whoa whoa whoa, the Christians definitely never taught any stuff like that".
And the cave? That's from Justin Martyr and the Protoevangelium of James.
Where's the crucified and risen Christ in the Didache? The Didache doesn't show any knowledge of this. I think you misunderstand (Burton?) Mack's intent. He is just describing the contents of the text.rakovsky wrote: Take for example Bruce Mack's comment on the Didache:He totally does not get it and is imposing his own worldview about non-supernatural non-apocalyptic philosophy back onto people 1900 years ago who had a totally different mindset, speaking in tongues and listening to charismatic "prophets".We thus have to imagine a highly self-conscious network of congregations that thought of themselves as Christians, had developed a full complement of rituals, had much in common with other Christian groups of centrist persuasions, but continued to cultivate their roots in a Jesus movement where enlightenment ethics made much more sense than the worship of Jesus as the crucified Christ and risen son of God.