回复 509# feng94
At the start of this forum I expressed a hope that, if nothing else, it would show the wide gulf that exists between the traditional stories of Christianity that are still routinely recycled in churches, schools and by nearly all religious documentary makers, and the theological findings of the last 100 years or so.
The two streams of thought seem to exist as parallel but very different universes with little or no apparent awareness by the traditionalists that modern theology has completely undermined most of their fundamental beliefs.
A good example might be the continuing and almost universal popular idea that the gospels are four independent witnesses penned by disciples of Jesus. I think Professor Loader and Rev. Tony B. in this forum would readily concede this has been unsustainable for over a century. Understandably, established Christianity shows little enthusiasm for telling people that what has always been taught as literal truth must now be discarded.
I was also especially concerned to shift focus away from the gospels and to spotlight the very earliest Christian records from Paul and others. This is extremely important because these earliest Christians obviously entertained a dramatically different picture of Jesus from that which we have long uncritically accepted from the gospels.
I was at pains to point out that, completely contrary to our reasonable expectations, these earliest witnesses to Christianity consistently and independently fail to corroborate, and often actually contradict, what we assume from the gospels. Because of our preoccupation with the gospels, this extraordinary paradox has either gone unrecognized, been minimized and trivialized, or else simply been ignored. But until we confront and reconcile this dramatic disparity our understanding of Christian origins must be incomplete.
Some posts asked if we were addressing the right question; so Nothing suggested our focus should be “Jesus: History and Myth”. Rev. T.B. reduced the question to three possibilities: (1) Jesus did exist as the gospels tell us; or (2) he didn’t exist; or (3) he did exist but is now essentially almost unrecognizable and may be unrecoverable. He told us he’d had to abandon the first, he obviously vigorously disputed the second, and seemed to be valiantly trying to make the best of the third, which I think might fairly describe Professor Loader’s position as well.
In fact, (3) is a very broad church indeed as even my mentor, Professor G.A. Wells, now says he is “not a mythicist” because (as I understand him) he finds elements of ‘Q’ sufficiently consistent and early to point to “an actual itinerant Galilean preacher of the 20s or 30s”. However, he warns, “it is surely hazardous to try and decide which details are really authentic.”
This figure, he says, is never referred to as Christ so is not the Messiah, is not accompanied by a select band of disciples, has no encounter with Pilate, is not then crucified or resurrected and his death, in any case, has no redemptive significance. However, he curses specific Galilean places and is associated with John the Baptist which gives us a place and time because, as we’ve seen, Josephus dates John the Baptist.
That Josephus didn’t also notice John’s associate raises the intriguing possibility that this preacher of ‘Q’, this possible proto-Jesus, had a much lower profile even than John the Baptist!
If we accept these first stirrings of a shadowy proto- Jesus, we might at last be catching a fleeting glimpse of one of the original strands of Christianity. Even so, we are still confronted with the task of plaiting in all the other diverse threads of evidence from Paul and co., who were obviously quite unaware of this particular figure but attached enormous significance to a crucified and resurrected being who had once lived somewhere in humility and obscurity. And we also have to account for the dramatically different traditions of power and miracles and teachings and adventures that we find in Mark.
So, in the end, perhaps Nothing is right. Maybe Jesus is both history and myth, though I’d prefer to quantify that and hazard a guess at 5% history and 95% myth.
Even if we haggle a little over those proportions, I think we can still confidently assert that, to all intents and practical purposes, the Jesus as we know him through the gospels simply did not exist. |
楼主: 纸纱窗
狗仔卡
发表于 2012-2-14 19:23:21
显身卡
楼主