(March 28, 2019 at 10:45 am)Gae Bolga Wrote: The Q hypothesis strongly argues against there ever having been any eyewitnesses to copy from. I think that you have in mind an idea that there were two guys sitting around with a stack of books and that's how this stuff was made.
If you see two posts with "life is like a box of chocolates" in them..that won't actually certify that either person ever saw forrest gump (or that there was a forrest gump, or that the forrest gump of the movie had much to do with a real forrest gump if there were, lol). The same would have been true then.
This is how stories work.
(his name was Sammy Davis, btw)
-just more to chew on, using the same example above. If you do watch forrest gump, you'll see a scene with lyndon johnson in it. How they did that, was to put tom hanks head on top of sammy davis' body. It remains a fact, however, that forrest gump isn't really based on the historical sammy davis or the historical tom hanks. Importantly, hanks has said that one of the defining aspects of the charcter, the way he talked, was actually based on a little boy named micheal humphreys, who played the younger gump and had trouble sounding like hanks, so hanks took it upon himself to sound like him.
This is one of the many ways in which the character you see in the new testament could have been constructed. No q, no eyewitnesses, no person from which the stories were built in a historic sense, but many stories and many people grafted onto a larger and independently existent narrative. It wouldn't have been the first or last time this happened.
Or, I suppose, people can twist themselves into knots trying to make all of this stuff cogent with respect to a fatally misconceived assumption derived from the articles of someone else's faith.
No doubt exists as to the fact that the authors of all of the Gospels (both canonical and extra-canonical) were 2nd or 3rd generation Greek speaking Christians who were not eyewitnesses to Jesus's life, which is why they gathered various traditions, oral and written, to compose their works, all of which paint different pictures of the historical Jesus.
