Short excerpt from On The Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier:
And before some jesus freak starts whining that David Gowler is just some atheist who hates fucking jesus, do know that he is the
Quote:As we shall see through the rest of this chapter, the Gospels also cannot
be classified as eyewitness testimony or even the collection of it.20 They
do not read as such, and they do not identify themselves as such. Even
John, who alone cites what we shall see is a fabricated unnamed witness,
claims to have been using something that witness wrote, in other words a
prior Gospel, perhaps the Gospel our John is redacting; but more likely,
as with Luke, this is again just a ruse (see §7). Instead, the Gospels look
like the edifying but fictional biographies composed for many other heroes
and sages (see Element 44). As David Gowler observes, they appear to be
an assembled network of vignettes (pericopes in the language of biblical
studies) that were already identified i n ancient schools as chreiai, a standard
rhetorical device that was extensively taught to all students of literary
Greek (and as the authors of the Gospels wrote in literary Greek, we know
they attended those schools).
Students were actually taught to invent narratives about famous and
legendary persons, and to build a symbolic or moral message out of general
rules or proverbs. 21 As Gowler explains, 'the composition of the stories
in the Synoptic Gospels is very similar to such exercises as the expansion
and elaboration of chreiai found in other ancient literature and delineated
in ancient rhetorical handbooks', in which authors 'were free to vary the
wording, details, and dynamics of chreiai according to their ideological and
rhetorical interests', and in fact they 'were taught and encouraged' to make
both minor and major changes even to traditional stories in order to make
whatever point they desired.
-- Pg. 397
And before some jesus freak starts whining that David Gowler is just some atheist who hates fucking jesus, do know that he is the
Quote:Dr. Gowler is Dr. Lovick Pierce and Bishop George F. Pierce Chair of Religion; Founding Director, The Pierce Institute for Leadership and Community Engagement, Oxford College of Emory University; and Senior Faculty Fellow, the Center for Ethics, Emory University.
