(July 12, 2018 at 6:37 pm)Khemikal Wrote: So, a few final comments before summary. The immutable details of this story have nothing to do with the character of jesus or the mundane details of that moment....in short, nothing to do with a dry recounting of events. The only immutable portion is the theologically pregnant miracle itself. The authors felt free to write it how they wanted, and even to add bits if the need arose. It isn;t told from a 1st person perspective, and only one narrative includes any relevant personal detail (johns..of all four, hows them apples synoptics!). The miracle in question is not your normal miracle..its a downright impossible miracle only made miraculous by a privileged narrator. Only two of the eponymous authors could have such privileged info, because the other two weren;t present. John and Mathew. However, we know that matthew was based on mark..who wouldn;t have been present...and that john was a bit of a loon...constantly "remembering" things in his own way and forgetting what everyone else "remembered".
Of the four....either "John" himself is the originator of this story...and it somehow made it;s way into mark despite marks earlier date..to be later copied into mathew and then luke (even though John appears top have copied from luke)..or all four are recounting a story they;d heard told. Or perhaps "Peter" told "Mark"...but this immediately makes us wonder why, of the four, the account peter gave to mark is the most divergent from johns?
-and that brings us to the question. Is this a legend or a myth. I'll use two senses of legend here, strong and weak. A strong legend would be an embellishment of some thing x that actually happened between some people..though not necesarrily the authors. A weak legend..one which may -or may not- have been based on something that happened..and was then embellished....that the authors took to be true.
Again for reference, a myth would be a case in which the character and events in this story were manufactured explicitly to elaborate and explain doctrine.
To establish that it was a legend in the strong sense we would need corroboration of some kind and a reason to believe that the authors were either present or knew someone present. For the former..we have nothing..and we know the latter to be false.
In the weak sense, some corroboration would help but not be required (as it would not need to have been based specifically on any one thing or person)..and we would need confidence that the authors had at least intended to write an accounting of presumed events rather than a just so story. Tghe former is still false....and while it;s plausible that the parable of the loaves and fishes is a weak legend....that does lead one to wonder how the authors managed to accidentally include so many mythic elements. If they had done so intentionally, they would be mythologizing a legend, and the end product of the character in the narrative, despite some hypothetical historic jesus, would be a mythic christ.
So, now a question. When we can discount the entirety of acts as legend (and only given that moniker instead of myth because people either do or did believe that stuff happened..not because it did)...and that at least one of the two stories in all four is...on review, certainly a myth either by nature or by accident.....how does that bode for the other stopry in all four..or any other story not in all four a person would like to present or consider? Not, mind, how does it bode against the batshit "it;s twoo it;s twoo it;s twoo" assertion....but in the question of whether or not the character in the NT is legendary or mythical.
If we can definitively prove that the gospels were nothing more than extrapolations of a Greek myth based on Jewish scriptures, then it has huge ramifications indeed. The issue is we don't have enough information to definitively prove this.
But I don't think that's what you're saying either. You are saying that, based on your analysis of the texts, you have come to a conclusion that it is most likely a myth, correct?
Someone else can look at the same text and come to a different conclusion regarding the likelyhood of a historical Jesus (and I mean outside of religious biases and all that. Just looking at the text itself.)
