Continuing with K. L. Noll's dissection of jesus freak "testimony" claims.....
I hope the xristards are frightened off by all the big words.
Quote:The genuine contribution of Thompson’s monograph is its explication
of motifs in the New Testament that appear to be part of the universal
ancient literary conversation. The Gospel narratives of the New Testament
are fictions constructed from prior literature and betraying only minor
influence, at best, from memories of (or, perhaps, gossip and folklore inspired
by) real-world events. The researcher must accept, as a necessary methodological
foundation, that any tale about Jesus is likely to have a long and
rich pre-Christian provenance. The miracle stories have derived from the
prevailing literary (and probably folk) culture, as demonstrated by Wendy
Cotter; moreover, Jens Schröter observes that ‘the distinction between
“genuine” words of Jesus and other traditions played no part at all’ in the
construction of the Gospels’ teaching segments.44 For example, Schröter is
able to identify many formulations that appear firstly in the letters of Paul,
and were only secondarily attributed to Jesus himself.45 Observations of this
kind must play a central role in any historical hypothesis that hopes to be
plausible. In sum, the variant images of a Jesus are identical to the variant
images of a Moses or a Jeremiah, suggesting that attempts to dissect Gospel
narratives in quest of a historical Jesus are methodologically unsound.
Is This Not The Carpenter's Son pg. 245
I hope the xristards are frightened off by all the big words.
