I'm frankly surprised no Scripture scholar has ever come up with this [the "two-calendars" hypothesis] before.
It's not new. The Essenes proposed doing away with the lunar months (tracking the irrational number of days in a lunar cycle and independently irrational number of lunar months in a solar year was the great problem of ancient mathematics), making the months be four weeks, four weeks, and five weeks every quarter-year, so that every calendar-date had a fixed week-day (an added complexity to the Jewish calendar is to avoid particular clashes between holidays and Sabbaths: Yom Kippur on Tishri 10 can be a Saturday, as there is no conflict between the strictures on Yom Kippur and those on the Sabbath, but must not be Friday or Sunday, since that would mean
two days in a row when no ordinary work could get done).
The problems are that the solar year is not 52 weeks exact (that's 364 days, not 365 let alone 365 1/4) and that this system means a "leap day" could not be added, only a "leap week" (lengthening a four-week month to a five-week month once in a while would be OK, but slipping in a single day would destroy the fixed week-days of the holy days) and the intervals for that correction are hard to work out in a reasonable system (an extra week every 7th year is not enough; one every 6 years is not quite enough). Herod Agrippa did, we are told, give consideration to adopting this calendar officially, but only if the mathematics could be worked out: leaving the day-and-a-quarter-per-year discrepancy uncorrected would destroy the alignment of months with seasons too rapidly to ignore (Passover would have drifted back from spring equinox to winter solstice within one human lifespan; it is not like the Gregorian correction to the Julian calendar, which was a discrepancy that took millennia to do that much damage).
It is not clear whether the Essene communities actually put their calendar into practice in the first place; if so, it cannot have run very long, or the problem with its rapid drift would have to have been addressed, and we are told that no solution to the problem was presented to Agrippa. Some authors (Humphreys is not the first) have claimed that this was the "ancient Jewish calendar" while the current Jewish calendar was a copy of the Babylonian: it is clear that the Jewish calendar did change sometime around the exile to conform more to the Mesopotamian model (New Years in the fall instead of the ancient spring; month-names copied; 19-year cycle for extra months adopted) but I think it clear that the ancient calendar was also lunisolar (the commandment "remember the new moon" appears in the Torah as often as "remember the Sabbath"), and it cannot possibly have been the 52-week calendar since that could have survived even one human lifespan without alteration.
Moreover, the common assumption that Jesus and John the Baptist were Essene-like in their religious sympathies is not really tenable, as we get a fuller picture of what the Qumran texts tell us about the Essenes. There is one late passage excommunicating members of some sect, "Have nothing more to do with any follower of so-and-so", which could be antagonistic either to Christians or to Baptists, depending on who "so-and-so" is (of course, "so-and-so" could be somebody else entirely). But more strongly, there are passages which clarify what is going on in some Gospel passages, indicating that Jesus was, on some occasions, specifically
rebuking Essene positions on interpreting the Law strictly. "Even if your lamb should fall into a well on the Sabbath, do not act to rescue him until the evening", says the Damascus Document: it is now clear that Jesus was not making up the example, but specifically contradicting the Essenes. We are also told not even to handle any coins which have human images on them: Herod Antipas issued coinage in his Galilee/Transjordan subkingdom without his picture, showing instead a scene of river reeds (John the Baptist seems to mocking this when he says "What did you come to see? A reed shaking in the wind?"); the "Render unto Caesar" passage, again, now reads as a specific refutation of the Essene position.
My own resolution of the "Last Supper" problem I have posted before on this board, but to repeat: Mark often reads as if Greek is his second language; the Greek is not bad ("Revelation" is the only NT book with truly terrible Greek) but many sentences appear to be written by someone "thinking in Aramaic" and mentally translating very woodenly (Lamsa takes the position that the Aramaic Mark is actually the original, and the Greek text a translation; few support this, and I don't either, but translating Mark back into Aramaic from Greek was easy since it was often structured like Aramaic sentences to begin with). The key sentence is rendered into English (KJV) as "And after two days was the Passover." In Aramaic this would be the ordinary way to say "It was two days before Passover." In Greek, however, as in English, it would be more usual to understand this as meaning "And, two days later, it was Passover"; an editor of Mark who interpolated some verses ("And when they had killed the Passover lamb..." does not belong here; it seems to be an attempt to cover for the mysterious absence of lamb from the Last Supper's menu) took it that way, and Matthew and Luke have followed that misunderstanding, but Mark originally meant that the Last Supper was two days before the Passover meal, consistently with what John has to say. The Last Supper was on what we would call Thursday night, but Jews would call the eve of Friday, that is Friday the 13th of Nisan (the superstition that "Friday the 13th" arises because all medievals understood the chronology this way); the trial took place that night and into the morning, the crucifixion on Friday afternoon, and Jesus was in the tomb for Saturday the 14th (the "preparation day" when the Passover lamb is killed), getting up again on the morning of Sunday the 15th (the "feast day" of Passover proper).
I believe the miracles are either
a. hypebole for the purpose of the story, to accentuate and assist the retelling
b. created to make our godman equivilant or better than other godmen previously
c. natural occurances, that can and will be scientifically proven as to how they can be accomplished.
faith healing, spiritual healing, hands on healing....I've participated, I believe... I believe it natural... like acupuncture....which was/still a mystery....I believe it natural not supernatural...
Which fall in which category...I can't say.
This is much my view as well. For example, Heron of Alexandria's expose' of how magic tricks are done includes seven ways of "turning water into wine" and numerous variants of the "horn of plenty" trick (bringing a lot of stuff out of a seemingly small and empty container, like the modern "endless scarves" or "rabbit out of a hat"); these seem to have been the standard repertoire of magicians at the time. The point of emphasizing, in John, that there were numerous multi-gallon stone jugs of water turned to wine, and in the synoptics, that "four" or "five" thousand people were fed with a small amount of food, appears to be showing that Jesus was much better than the standard magician.
The "healing" stories, however, I take to be largely genuine. Just the fact that the name "Jesus" was quickly taken up by charlatan spell-casters is enough to indicate that he had quite the reputation as a healer. Now, we must bear in mind that even the kinds of healings we would regard as totally "natural" seemed "miraculous" to most people at the time (for example, in the OT we get quite circumstantial stories about Elisha using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to revive a dying boy, and dealing with a poisonous herb in a soup-pot by applying the appropriate antidote; both described as miracles, rather than as good medical knowledge). The ability of Jesus to calm down raging lunatics could be attributed to a "good bedside manner" rather than to power over "demons" without taking anything away from the story. The blind man cured by an application of "clay and spittle" may be a slightly incomplete story: this could be filariasis ("river blindness") in which small parasites in the eye induce a thick encrustation; some unguents can relieve this, and Jesus may have had more ingredients to his poultice here than just clay and spit.
But other cases may fall into that inexplicable category of "faith healings" of which we hear from other religions (the 6th Karmapa cured many plague sufferers by his touch, then died of the disease himself, his followers believing that he had voluntarily taken the sufferings of others) or people without religion (cancers sometimes just go into remission, for no medically known reason; sometimes these patients are religious, sometimes unbelievers, but the common factor is a strong will to live combined with a firm belief that they are going to recover). We do not know enough about the mind-body relationship to say anything meaningful here; those who deny that such things happen are just turning a blind eye, in my opinion; we can call them "supernatural" in the sense that they are beyond our current
understanding of nature, although I do not much like the word "supernatural" in the first place (if it happens, then it is part of nature, even if it is a mysterious part of nature). The #1 "healing" miracle in the Jesus story is the Easter story, which I see as simply meaning that despite undergoing all those tortures, which certainly ought to have been sufficient to kill somebody, he had the strength to get up again: I do regard this as quite extraordinary, and do not blame the disciples for thinking that this was the most marvellous thing that had ever happened in history, but I do not put this event in some metaphysically different category from other events
Bob what source do you use to clarify this?
I've read that the whole interlude about the word was added at the beginning of John, and that the woman at the well, doodling in the sand another add.
Now Thomas discounts the Jesus Seminar lock stock and barrel...that what did Jesus say and what did Jesus do...the methodology of all those scholars and their marbles being ludicrous....
your thoughts and resources?
I don't have any particular resources different from anyone else has, although I draw my own conclusions from them. Yes, it is true that the "Go and sin no more" story, although it is among a lot of people's favorites, is not genuinely early, appearing first ~500, once in a manuscript of Luke (!) and then in John where currently found.
The "Logos" essay at the start of John does not appear textually to belong (the line "This is the testimony of John" looks like the beginning of the book; similarly, the last chapter, about Jesus appearing in Galilee, looks like a tack-on, since the preceding sentences are a "wrap-up") and we have some indication of when it got added. Tatian composed ~150 the
Diatessaron ("through four sources") harmonization of the gospels, using versions of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John which were not entirely the same as our present texts; unfortunately later copies of it were often "fixed" to make them match the standard text, and when the
Pe****ta ("separated") translation of the four gospels (as four different books) became standard in the Syrian church, the Diatessaron was deliberately collected and burned (Bishop Theodoret boasts of how many hundreds of copies he managed to find and destroy). We have only excerpts, and four reasonably good copies, not one of them in the Aramaic language in which it was mostly circulated: the Greek manuscript is very incomplete; the Armenian manuscript is "overcomplete" (it is filled with commentaries, and there are no breaks between the text and the commentary, so we can't tell where there were extra verses in the Diatessaron and where there were comments added); the Arabic is reasonably good; and then there is a copy in Dutch (!) whose original was apparently Aramaic but translated by someone not totally competent in the language (we don't know the provenance, must assume that a Crusader brought some manuscript back from the East).
So it's a problem to know what was, and wasn't, in Tatian's original, but when we find that the "Logos" was in some versions, it is more reasonable to assume it was lacking in the original, and added by some to "fix" it, rather than the reverse; we also get a citation of "In the Beginning was the Word" in Tatian's
Oration to the Greeks in which it is introduced by the phrase "As it is said..." rather than "As it is written..." as we find before all other scriptural references. My opinion (shared by other scholars; this is not original with me but I don't have the patience to look up cites right now) is that the phrasing here indicates that the "Logos" hymn was
liturgical at that time, a standard recitation in the churches of Asia Minor-- but not yet incorporated into the Gospel. The form of the piece fits well with the "call and response" style of much liturgy (PREACHER: "In the Beginning was the Word..." CONGREGATION: "And the Word was with GOD..." etc.), and in Pliny's letter to Trajan, Christian worship services are described as starting with "a hymn, addressed to this Jesus as to a god" and I agree with those who think the "Logos" hymn is what Pliny is referring to. Mind you, that custom of reciting those words in Asia Minor churches
might very well have been started by the apostle John: I know nothing to contradict that; the fact (if it is a fact) that this piece of text was not attached to "the gospel" until after 150 does not mean that it was not ancient, or that it was not genuine.
