(June 24, 2015 at 8:06 am)Nestor Wrote: My guess is that Minimalist was probably raised by Christian fundamentalists, or was himself one at some point, which would likely explain why he evidently only lost the Christian part. Old habits die hard. Or they just don't die at all.
But an obvious solution, keeping in line with the dating of the Gospels ascribed by most historians, Christians, and mythicists, is that the superstitious idea of spitting on the eyes in divining a cure for blindness was not invented by either the Gospel writers or Suetonius, but was popular in the cultures they wrote. Of course, to a black-and-white mind, any similarity between two surviving texts out of a mass now lost necessitates that one was copying the other, but that's not really how the world, or the writings that reflect it, typically works.
I suspect we don't agree on much, but I can't argue with any of this.
Spit was regarded as a healing agent in the ancient world (not without merit- it has antiseptic qualities). As I said earlier, this passage makes Jesus look like a bog standard market healer, and as such muddies rather than clears the picture of “Unique Redeemer” that the gospels are pushing. IMHO that's why Matthew and Luke won't touch it, and all this is a very powerful argument for authenticity.
