(November 10, 2022 at 9:31 am)LinuxGal Wrote:(November 10, 2022 at 7:14 am)Jehanne Wrote: One of the earliest and one of the few historical passages in all of the Gospels is Mark 3:21-22:
Ergo, Jesus' own family thought that he had "lost it"; the Jews thought that he was possessed. Jesus, like Jim Jones & David Koresh, was probably psychotic.
Also Mark 3 (verse 11): And unclean spirits, when they saw him, fell down before him, and cried, saying, Thou art the Son of God.
So we're left with the task of judging what's historical in Mark and what was not. For what it's worth, the scroll was written about forty years after the events depicted. It'd be like someone in Generation Z writing a gospel today about Reagan being shot for our sins in 1981.
This goes back to the dawn of higher criticism and the work of scholars such as Rudolf Bultmann. For instance, Dr. Bultmann pointed out the fact that you or I can observe in our day exorcisms; we don't observe people walking on liquid water. Likewise, we can observe family members going after one of their own who has gone off the "religious deepend"; we don't hear spirits talking to them. And, so, higher criticism is about separating what probably did happen from that which almost assuredly did not.
