It does rather mean there might well be no substance to what you're thinking.
Not really. It simply means the lack of evidence excludes any reason for accepting what you're thinking as anything more than speculation.
Gospel Sources Partly Written and Contemporary with witnesses?
- Thread starter Longfellow
- Start date
That is not my experience..
I find that people who continually ask for evidence are normally people who
dislike what G-d has revealed to mankind.
They claim that if good evidence is provided, they would become believers..
..easy to say that .. particularly when they disqualify any evidence that is provided.
Longfellow
Well-Known Member
Notes written by disciples are part of a larger story that I’m imagining about how the gospels were written.
• Jesus didn’t give a sermon only once or twice. He taught the same lessons many times in public talks and private lessons, in different words, different orders, and different settings.
• His disciples wrote notes, just as disciples of other teachers did.
• After his death, belief in his exaltation motivated followers to recopy those notes whenever needed, until the gospels were written.
• Late in the first century or early in the second, as overseers faced competition and challenges to their authority, some chose skilled storytellers (or called for submissions) to write stories that supported their claims: one for Antioch, one for Rome, one for the wider diaspora, plus Acts to show Paul’s deference to Peter and James.
• Possibly someone close to John—or John himself—produced a gospel for Greek audiences, which may have inspired the others.
• These stories arranged and seasoned parts of the disciples’ notes differently for different interests. Some parables may even have been misunderstood as physical events.
Examples of what this explains:
• Similar sayings worded differently, similar events with different details.
• Papias’s references to notes and collections.
• Overlaps between gospels that are not well explained any other way.
• Jesus didn’t give a sermon only once or twice. He taught the same lessons many times in public talks and private lessons, in different words, different orders, and different settings.
• His disciples wrote notes, just as disciples of other teachers did.
• After his death, belief in his exaltation motivated followers to recopy those notes whenever needed, until the gospels were written.
• Late in the first century or early in the second, as overseers faced competition and challenges to their authority, some chose skilled storytellers (or called for submissions) to write stories that supported their claims: one for Antioch, one for Rome, one for the wider diaspora, plus Acts to show Paul’s deference to Peter and James.
• Possibly someone close to John—or John himself—produced a gospel for Greek audiences, which may have inspired the others.
• These stories arranged and seasoned parts of the disciples’ notes differently for different interests. Some parables may even have been misunderstood as physical events.
Examples of what this explains:
• Similar sayings worded differently, similar events with different details.
• Papias’s references to notes and collections.
• Overlaps between gospels that are not well explained any other way.
Oh, I agree ... we see examples of it here.That is not my experience..
I find that people who continually ask for evidence are normally people who
dislike what G-d has revealed to mankind.
But I'm not asking for evidence of the Divine, I'm asking for evidence of human activity.
OK.
But there are other, simpler solutions, that are more demonstrable and don't rely on imaginary scenarios.
Longfellow
Well-Known Member
I’d love to see an example.
Longfellow
Well-Known Member
Never mind about an example. I see that you’re just repeating slogans, and not thinking for yourself.
Are you aware of the various source hypotheses? I currently favour the Farrer Hypothesis, although flavoured by more recent streams of scholarship.
And I keep repeating, no-one is denying people were literate in Jesus' day. I've said I reckon the literacy among the Twelve was higher than the national average. I reckon there were 'written materials' probably from the days of the first Apostles (I mean, Paul is evidence of that, and traditionally the John of the Apostles is the author of the Gospel that bears his name), but the stories of Christ would have been narrated by them, and spread by word-of-mouth – written down later, but those materials are lost to us.
What we cannot say, with certainty, was that material in the Gospels was directly copied from something written down at the time.
Longfellow
Well-Known Member
This is for anyone who might be interested in the possibility that some of the sources for the gospels and for Acts might have been accurate reproductions of notes written by disciples of Jesus during the time when He and His apostles were teaching. I’m preparing a list of authors who have written about the pieces of that puzzle without putting them together, summaries of what they’ve said about it, and arguments against it, so you can judge for yourself.