(December 14, 2015 at 12:13 am)Huggy74 Wrote:(December 13, 2015 at 11:51 pm)Crossless1 Wrote: Huggy, I don't doubt for a moment that in any other instance of a work of literature showing such a high degree of symbolic parallelism, you wouldn't hesitate to ascribe it to authorial artifice. Please justify your treating the Gospels differently.
"I really, really believe it" isn't a good enough reason.
What are you saying exactly? That Jesus and Judas never existed, but were a fabrication in order to parallel Genesis? The Bible has around 40 writers over the period of around 1500 years, yet it dovetails perfectly.
What other "work of literature" can you say the same about?
I'm not a Jesus myther, so I wouldn't be inclined to say that Jesus and Judas are whole cloth fabrications. What I am saying is that I find it likely that Jesus' followers tried to make sense of his death in the only way they knew: they scoured their holy writings to find an explanatory framework with which they could come to grips with the crucifixion and frame it as a victory rather than the gruesome defeat it must have seemed as it was happening. By reading their and Jesus' experiences back into the holy books, they found what they thought was prophetic evidence that it was all part of God's plan all along.
Am I supposed to be surprised that around 40 writers, working within a tradition that claimed to have the stamp of divine inspiration, would offer a narrative arc that dovetails, as you put it? What else would you expect? That each writer would feel free to wander off the reservation? However, working within such a tradition hardly eliminates artifice. I should think it encourages it, since events must be made to fit a framework that is already accepted as true and holy.