Make that originated 70 to 140 and I'll agree with your dates but they
were far from the form we know today by a large margin. (JT)
> A faith-neutral philological/historical study of these quite interesting
> texts teases out a number of layers in their construction. Any given
> passage is quite likely to incorporate formative elements from various
> layers. It's not like doing archaeology, where you shovel away the stuff
> on top to get to the stuff that's lower down and hence older. You just
> can't pare away Talmud from Torah that way in the gospels -- it's all
> mixed up. You can make some shrewd guesses about how earlier material
> was re-shaped by somebody's theological or polemical agenda, and even
> about what the earlier material might have looked like -- but you can't
> really ever get back to it in any definitive way.
>
> BTW, very few people who know the languages and the texts and the
> scholarship, faith-based or non-, think that it's all just made up out
> of whole cloth. Everybody, apart from fundies, agrees that there are
> mythological and urban-legend elements there, but also that the point of
> departure for this elaboration of texts is a series of events that
> really happened. Backwoods Hasid from Galilee goes wandering around,
> attracting crowds, stirring people up, gets iced by the Romans, maybe
> with the enthusiastic cooperation of the Temple authorities, or maybe
> not -- this is a much-ground ax -- that's the arc, and there's a pretty
> good consensus that something like that is what started it all.
>
Getting people to admit that Jesus Christ (or Rabbi Yehoshua or whatever name you choose) was more like King Midas than Horus may seem like a good thing to some but it is counterproductive. If we expand the level of acceptability of historical evidence to include the scant low quality interpolated evidence for a historic Jesus Christ as reliable we are, as I pointed out earlier, going to have to have to accept the evidence for griffins as even more compelling and claim they too actually physically existed. I am not prepared to do that and I'm surprised that otherwise rational people are but only apparently where this messiah is concerned. Somehow, 2000 years after his resurrection he manages to create a blindspot in otherwise rational peoples minds. Truly a miracle if you ask me. If you want to believe in JC go ahead but do so based on faith. Don't diminish the quality of evidence we have for actually existing figures like Herod, Julius Caesar, and others by pretending it is either equal to or not much better than the evidence for the physicality of your godman. It's at a minimum an order of magnitude better for Julius Caesar than Jesus Christ.
John Thornton