Don't hold your breath.
The Homeric references are less compelling than he might think. Literacy was so circumscribed in antiquity that virtually every highly literate person would have heard of, if not read, Homer. So I suspect that variants of the Homeric tales appeared in a lot of ancient literature and with a little stretching could be made to resemble almost any hero. Some of the seafaring omissions by "Matty" and "Luke" who copied much of "Mark's" gibberish into their own gibberish are consistent with the idea that "Mark" didn't know jack shit about the geography of Galilee.
Far more compelling are the copyings from the OT and in the insertion of OT words into the mouths of jesus and others. This is the basis of Earl Doherty's "Jesus Puzzle" which is certainly worth reading.
Then there are the equally well-documented edits and scribal fuck ups which Bart Ehrman has detailed in his books.
Of particular interest was the list of heroic figures who were "taken up to heaven" indicating that this was also a common literary motif in the Hellenistic world. Livy's discussion of the "ascension" of Romulus was particularly amusing but the point remains that if someone wanted to be taken seriously in antiquity then they had to fly up to fucking heaven at the end of the tale..... even mohammed took a trip there! And of course, Greek literature is full of tales of heroes going down to Hades for one reason or another to fuck with the dead.
He does provide cross references which enables some fact-checking and so far he has been correct in everything I examined but it does drag the process out somewhat. There are far more than 16 episodes to this series. I had to take a break during the "saul/paul" bullshit because that crap is hard to swallow at the best of times.
I'll see how he finishes up tomorrow.
The Homeric references are less compelling than he might think. Literacy was so circumscribed in antiquity that virtually every highly literate person would have heard of, if not read, Homer. So I suspect that variants of the Homeric tales appeared in a lot of ancient literature and with a little stretching could be made to resemble almost any hero. Some of the seafaring omissions by "Matty" and "Luke" who copied much of "Mark's" gibberish into their own gibberish are consistent with the idea that "Mark" didn't know jack shit about the geography of Galilee.
Far more compelling are the copyings from the OT and in the insertion of OT words into the mouths of jesus and others. This is the basis of Earl Doherty's "Jesus Puzzle" which is certainly worth reading.
Then there are the equally well-documented edits and scribal fuck ups which Bart Ehrman has detailed in his books.
Of particular interest was the list of heroic figures who were "taken up to heaven" indicating that this was also a common literary motif in the Hellenistic world. Livy's discussion of the "ascension" of Romulus was particularly amusing but the point remains that if someone wanted to be taken seriously in antiquity then they had to fly up to fucking heaven at the end of the tale..... even mohammed took a trip there! And of course, Greek literature is full of tales of heroes going down to Hades for one reason or another to fuck with the dead.
He does provide cross references which enables some fact-checking and so far he has been correct in everything I examined but it does drag the process out somewhat. There are far more than 16 episodes to this series. I had to take a break during the "saul/paul" bullshit because that crap is hard to swallow at the best of times.
I'll see how he finishes up tomorrow.
