Excavating The Empty Tomb

[Minimalist]

We don't know the intent of whoever the author of "mark" was. This fellow is suggesting a fictitious tale on the order of the Homeric epics but the obvious difference is that Odysseus does not get his sorry ass nailed to a cross. Bad form for a hero.

Doherty looks upon it as Midrashic.

Midrash is a method of interpreting biblical stories that goes beyond simple distillation of religious, legal, or moral teachings. It fills in gaps left in the biblical narrative regarding events and personalities that are only hinted at

"Mark" may have been trying to tell a story and it is not his fault that later readers took him seriously.

Ehrman, of course, sees this stuff as hopelessly compromised by scribal miscues and deliberate edits for later doctrinal purposes.

We'll see how it turns out.

[Undeceived]

I took this as a central theme to the argument. If Christ's deeds and words were of any unique importance, then why did the very literate authors invoke limited and popular literary themes to express the message?

The question that should be asked is: Why wouldn't God infuse his most important messages of love, sacrifice, betrayal, reconciliation and redemption in the human mind? Are they not the clues that Romans 1:20 predicts?

[KichigaiNeko]

Because there is no god?

[Drich]

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.

'some fact checking?' You do know why people do that dont you? By pairing something verifiable with empty conjecture or other wise baseless speculation the 'facts' lend creditablity to those unverfiable statements that would be quickly dismissed on their own.

Again people see what they want to see. You see the facts he presents openly and blindly follow where ever else he wants to lead you. Because You want to believe what this guy has to say, he only has to put out a 1/2 truths. It is because you have so conditioned yourself to look for fact, when you see a few, your faith in what he says has you bridge the gaps that are in his message with what he has provided. Allowing to over look things like the failed odysseus Jesus compareson.

[little_monkey]

Again people see what they want to see. You see the facts he presents openly and blindly follow where ever else he wants to lead you. Because You want to believe what this guy has to say, he only has to put out a 1/2 truths. It is because you have so conditioned yourself to look for fact, when you see a few, your faith in what he says has you bridge the gaps that are in his message with what he has provided. Allowing to over look things like the failed odysseus Jesus compareson.

Funny that you are accusing Minimalist of those same things that you have been doing all of your life!

[pocaracas]

Again people see what they want to see. You see the facts he presents openly and blindly follow where ever else he wants to lead you. Because You want to believe what this guy has to say, he only has to put out a 1/2 truths. It is because you have so conditioned yourself to look for fact, when you see a few, your faith in what he says has you bridge the gaps that are in his message with what he has provided. Allowing to over look things like the failed odysseus Jesus compareson.

Now, take all this intellectual honesty you must have and apply it to the bible's tale.

[KichigaiNeko]

Thing is that there is no recorded history for this jebus identity, nothing that says the genesis is accurate and nothing more than wishful thinking as the only pillar supporting judaism, christianism, and islamism.

Ergo the abrahmic religions are nothing more than a fraud.

[Minimalist]

'some fact checking?' You do know why people do that dont you? By pairing something verifiable with empty conjecture or other wise baseless speculation the 'facts' lend creditablity to those unverfiable statements that would be quickly dismissed on their own.

Try to remember, dickhead, that YOU have no facts to check. All you have is a silly old book of poorly written fairy tales. I get your vested interest in maintaining this bullshit as "true;" your whole lifestyle goes down the shitter without it but your desires amount to little more than wishful thinking.

[Angrboda]

Well, there are some legitimate and not so legitimate responses to the Oddyseus stuff (that's as far as I've gotten). The first is the question whether our notion of fiction being opposed to history being valid, both in general and in this time frame. It was a perfectly well recognized practice in the past for historians to simply "recreate" a famous speech in the author's best recollection of what was said. There was not the same tension between invention and truth that we recognize in today's genres. Historical narrative as a genre didn't even really exist at this time. Just as we have historical fiction which may not be totally fiction, nor totally historical, the notion of literal truth of a historic narrative may be an anachronism here. (I recall how it used to be a standard part of higher education to have people practice writing or speaking in the idiom of someone famous; mimesis had a long life as both a creative and pedagogical technique.) The other key point to consider is whether many of the inclusions or parallels were intentional, or simply the unintentional fusings of culture and craft in a writer's mind.

I enjoy this stuff a great deal, because it's a fascinating subject. However, the subject of these videos seems aimed squarely at literalists and inerrantists, as I don't think this would be as troubling to anyone else. The problem with aiming arguments at such people is that they aren't interested in evidence; they've already made up their mind about what "the truth" is, so a search for the truth becomes simply doing whatever is necessary to make the facts conform to their preconceived belief. You can't win such an argument. That being the case, such a person might offer two responses. The first, as above, denying that fiction and truth are antithetical. The more common response though is likely to deny the consensus of higher criticism and argue that Mark is not primary (whether because of being reliant on Matthew, or being a codification of an oral tradition). If you deny the primacy of Mark, then you've not cut the gordian knot, only weakened one of the strands.

[Pandas United]

So is there going to be some sort of summary on this apparent silver bullet argument against the empty tomb apologetic? Saying "watch these 16 videos" doesn't seem like good discourse to me.

And no, the Oddyseus/Jesus relation argument is absolutely horrible.