Was Jesus of Nazareth a religious loon?

[Pat Mustard]

Massacre of the Innocents
Perhaps it might help if people reviewed the entire thread before posting further. Succubus#2 had stated that the massacre of the innocents was based around Jerusalem (so couldn't have involved few children). It was actually set in Bethlehem, so his argument was invalid. That's the thing.


It's the academic consensus. I'm sure there's many learned articles out there which would discuss in further detail.

I tend to start with where the academic arguments lead to. So they're looking at things like relationship to AD 70, what are the hot topics being given centre stage, solutions to the synoptic problem etc. There's also the complication of Q. The latter half of C1 tends to be the ballpark, depending on which one we're talking about.

More importantly, the Infancy Gospel is more like the script for a horror movie than a kerygmatic or theological writing. It basically illustrates a fascination with the bizarre and a desire for religious entertainment that intentionally contains little history.

The canonical Gospels are written as bios (think biography). They have a series of ideas running through them- how the OT story continues, the arrival of the Kingdom of God, what Jesus did etc.

These do not appear on a blank canvas, but in a thoroughly Jewish context. There are connections, details and structures running through them, some not obvious to the modern eye, which tell us that the author is not trying to entertain, but to tell us about reality.

That's fine; the academic consensus is 35 (for Mark) to 65 (for John) years after the death of Jesus.  But, you've conceded the point of modern scholars, namely, that there were legends, fables and embellishments about the life of Jesus that were in wide circulation at least in the 2nd century.  Most scholars would also extend those legends, fables and embellishments as being present in the mid 1st century, also.

The main question that I would have for you is why we should take any of the canonical Gospels as being reliable historical sources?  Do you, for instance, believe in Matthew's Zombie invasion, where the tombs opened up and the dead walked the streets of Jerusalem after Jesus' death?

And we've also got to remember that academic consensus is for earliest date (and is biased to some extent by the fact that most "biblical scholarship" is christians using confirmation bias). While I'm satisfied that wrting dates of c75 CE to 100-125 CE for John are good estimates, the physical evidence is that we've nothing of them before the late 2nd century CE, and nothing that is more than small fragments before the lae 3rd century CE.

So we can't even say for definite how close to the originals the current versions are. Their standing for accuracy is severely compromised, as evidenced by the stuff we can check like archaeology and geography which both show the gospels sadly lacking.