[WS:] I think you are too generous, Rudy. This stuff is basically literature, a bunch of parables, metaphors, stories, myths and what not - no different than any other work of fiction. Saying that there is something factual in such stories misses the point. There is something factual in anything we say - we live in this material world and our consciousness is a reflection of it. The point, however, is that fiction is a hodgepodge of facts and fiction crafted at will to meet a particular narrative need, whereas science describes facts in their proper social, geographical context, and proper chronological sequence and verifies their accuracy to the extent possible.
To look for history in the bible is more than a fools errand - it is a drunkard's search, a search in place where that something simply is not there. As any other work of fiction, the bible may be a good source of anecdotes, metaphors and parables whose meaning is pretty much defined by the user. That is, you can take anything you want from there and place it in your narrative as needed without worrying whether it is a "true" meaning of the source document, as no such such meaning exists. I understand that it may boil the blood of the biblical literalists, whom you can find in strange places including leftist internet forums - but let's face it, theirs is an idée fixe.
Wojtek
On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 8:40 AM, Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> wrote:
> An outsider to all this, I was convinced on the completely insufficient
> basis of one book by John Shelby Spong - written specifically for people
> like me - that looking for history in the gospels is, basically, a fools
> errand. Which is not to say that there isn't a history, only that starting
> in the gospels to find it... not so much.
> A
>
> On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 10:58 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>wrote:
>
>> "Paulist Christians, by a trick of orthography"? Paul wrote ca. 55-65CE,
>> and the stories you refer to come not from Paul or his circle but from the
>> gospels, written down at a minimum a decade - and more likely a generation -
>> later.
>>
>> The Wikipedia article is not bad on the subject: <
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barabbas>.
>>
>> The one undoubted and important point (noted in MacCulloch's recent and
>> encyclopedic "Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years") is that Jesus
>> of Nazareth is described in the gospels as referring perhaps uniquely in the
>> time to YHWH as "abba" = "daddy."
>>
>> The story of the substitution is repeated in the Synoptic gospels and in
>> the fourth gospel as well as in various extra-canonical literature. The
>> reference to "the Jews" as demanding responsibility is found uniquely in
>> Matthew, the Christian gospel most concerned with disputing the heritage of
>> the religion of ancient Israel with the Pharisee party, already engaged in
>> reconstituting Judaism in the wake of the destruction of the public
>> religion. The point of Matthews' gospel is to show that "Christians are
>> better Jews than rabbis (Pharisees)."
>>
>> I see now how you could argue that in a different way that's what Paul was
>> on about, too. But there's little warrant to say "that 'Jesus' and 'Bar
>> Abbas' were one and the same person." What historical sources we have,
>> Christian and non-Christian, make it clear that the Roman occupation
>> government executed Jesus; they apparently reserved the right of capital
>> punishment in Judea, as in other colonies.
>>
>>
>>
>> On 9/22/10 9:17 PM, Shane Mage wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> On Sep 22, 2010, at 7:58 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>>>
>>> There's no evidence for that, and - given the subsequent relations
>>>> between the Christian movement [founded by a Roman police agent] and the
>>>> Roman authorities - it's highly unlikely.
>>>> On 9/22/10 3:52 PM, Shane Mage wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> ...The historical fact is that "Jesus" and "Bar Abbas" were one and the
>>>>> same person. Jesus, a notable rebel, had no legitimate father to give him a
>>>>> patronymic and so called himself son of the father...
>>>>>
>>>>
>>> So "Jesus Son of the Father" and "Jesus Bar Abbas" don't refer to the
>>> same person? Perhaps I can convince you, and anyone reading this, by this
>>> simple exercise: (remembering always that Bar{son} and Abbas{father} are
>>> pronounced as two separate words, like you would pronounce Bar Kochba, Ben
>>> Gurion, or Bin Laden) read in a loud voice these two scriptural statements:
>>>
>>> The Jews exclaimed "free Bar Abbas"
>>> The Jews exclaimed "free Barabbas"
>>>
>>> So now you hear in your own voice how the Paulist Christians, by a trick
>>> of orthography, turned the Jewish demand that Jesus be freed into something
>>> that persuaded their dupes down the millennia that the Jews demanded His
>>> crucifixion!
>>>
>>> And so created the blood libel of deicide, the emotional basis for the
>>> Holocaust and all the pogroms down the millennia that adumbrated it.
>>>
>>> Shane Mage
>>> "Thunderbolt steers all things." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ___________________________________
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>>>
>> ___________________________________
>> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>>
>
>
>
> --
> *********************************************************
> Alan P. Rudy
> Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work
> Central Michigan University
> 124 Anspach Hall
> Mt Pleasant, MI 48858
> 517-881-6319
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