Leolaia wrote: “EverAStudent .....First of all, rest assured that I have no intention of ‘converting’ you away from your faith;”
Ummmmm, not really worried about that, but thanks, good to know…
Leolaia wrote: “I have already said in a prior post that you are perfectly entitled to believe what you believe,”
Agreed, it is wrong for one human to require from another human: faith in God, faith in humanism, or a lack of faith altogether (atheism).
Leolaia wrote: “and I'm not really expecting to convince you, or anyone else, of my position.”
Yet, those expectations do not really keep us from trying, else no one would bother posting anything of substance on this forum.
I simply appreciate understanding what your “faith” position is. Doubtless I will have misstated or misperceived your beliefs here, but this is what I have come to feel it must be based on your comments so far: you were once an adherent to WTS doctrine (not sure how strongly), you left that faith and doctrine; presently you believe there is no supernatural God, Scripture is not revelation from the supernatural God/Creator but is the result of writings by persons who either perceived themselves to have had revelations or they wrote intentional fiction and called it “inspired.”
As I said, my perceptions are likely wrong (I am neither a mind-reader or a prophet), so please correct if you wish.
A question if you don’t mind: Do you pity those who have a faith in the supernatural and desire to educate/warn them, or disdain them and desire them to go away, or are completely ambivalent and desire to talk with them principally for the entertainment value? Other?
Leolaia wrote: “Did the rabbis who invented stories about the patriarchs through biblical interpretation believe that they were themselves crafty ‘liars’, or did they instead think that they were discovering hidden truths in the Torah through a particular methodology of interpretation?”
To my way of thinking (welcome to the madness) what the rabbis “invented” fall into multiple classifications. Some invented parables (unfortunately, sometimes using the names of actual patriarchs to preclude having to invent an entire new background setting for the story) that were obviously fiction for the point of delivering a spiritual lesson--therefore no claim of historical accuracy is made so it is not a lie. Some referred to oral accounts of alleged historical events not recorded in Scripture--so long as they are couched in such terms as “oral tradition” then I would not consider it to be a lie. Some recounted the actual stories of what they considered to be oral histories assuming them to be true--so long as the disclaimer is stated or implied (that this is oral history and not a scriptural retelling) then it seems there is no attempt to deceive. If a rabbi invents a story of fiction (from his own mind) and claims it to be an historical event then no matter his intent or motive it is a lie and deception.
The problem with oral tradition is that they may or may not be true stories, or, they may have errors in them. So long as they are tagged by implication or overt statement as oral tradition, it is obvious to any reader/listener that the story may be fiction.
To bring this to the time of the evangelists, if they invented the story of Mary and Joseph going into Egypt just to make Jesus’ life match an Old Testament passage, then that is a dirty/filthy lie. Why call it a lie and not a parable? Parables use fictional stories to illustrate truths. Claiming that Joseph and Mary went to Egypt, if they did not, to show how Jesus fulfilled a Messianic prophecy is deception, not an illustration. It is inventing “facts” to make Jesus a more plausible Messiah because God was incapable of causing sufficiently convincing real events to happen on His own.
Yes, inventing fictional stories and then calling them historical events to “bolster faith” is a terrible lie. If Psychotic Parrot can demonstrate such a fiction accompanied by concrete evidence, that would be one of the “proofs” he seeks to unseat the veracity of the Scriptures.
Leolaia wrote: “I already said in my last post that the evangelists regarded the OT as a reliable witness of Jesus Christ; the author of John was explicit on this. I see no reason to think that they would have hesitated in appealing to this source for information about the life of Jesus — a source that was regarded as more reliable than human witnesses.”
I agree. But it is a huge stretch between linking events in Jesus’ life to OT passages and inventing events into the life of Jesus so as to have something to link to.
Leolaia wrote: “Why do you think drawing on the OT was intended to entertain’?”
The intended message in what I wrote has been misunderstood.
Leolaia wrote: “In light of all this, it is hardly inescapable that literary invention necessarily involves deceit. “
The specific string of logic you used assumed that “literary invention” resulted from “hearing or remembering things that never happened” which got incorporated into the evangelist’s gospel account as if it did happen. Presumably the evangelist was more concerned with telling a coherent narrative via a meaningful sequence of events than with whether the events were historically valid. Ordinarily I would agree that such careless “errors” are not necessarily deceit.
However, since Paul claimed in his letters that the major events of Jesus’ life were true (e.g. born of a virgin, lived without sin, died as a sacrifice, rose from the dead) and that any inaccuracy in these points would destroy the entire Christian faith, then such an “error” by one of the evangelists becomes willful deception. It would be willful deception by not only the evangelists who originated the error, but also by Paul who repeated the faith-crushing “error.” Each of the eyewitnesses would have known the true story making it inexcusable to have repeated the same essential episodes anyway. That is willful deception, is it not?
Worse, Paul claimed that no human taught him the gospel story and that Jesus took him into heaven to teach him all these things while he was sequestered in Damascus for three years. Therefore, if any of the four evangelists got something wrong, Paul would have known it. Instead, Paul made the same gospel claims as the four evangelists. Therefore, they are all liars to the last man, or, they are all correct in their accounts, at least in the primary events listed above.
Leoleaia wrote: “This is neatly accounted by the fact that the author of Matthew drew on traditions pertaining to Moses and Luke drew on traditions pertaining to Samuel. But if we adopt EverAStudent's position, this patterning has no obvious explanation since the historical Jesus would have fulfilled both sets of "prophecies" and one would need to explain why one author carefully omitted all mention of anything that is paralleled the OT intertexts and traditions used by the author of the other gospel. “
Seems you have answered your own objection. Nonetheless…
You said, “the author of Matthew drew on traditions pertaining to Moses,” meaning your foundational assumption is that the author of Matthew invented the episodes of Jesus’ life that would fulfill the Scriptures that depict the life of Moses. It should be equally apparent that the author of Matthew need not have invented fictionalized accounts but could have emphasized the actual episodes in Jesus’ life that mirrored those of Moses’. Your treatment of Luke demonstrates the same foundational assumption and bias that the life episodes were invented to match favored existing sacred texts.
You then said, “one would need to explain why one author carefully omitted all mention of anything that is paralleled [by] the OT” external co-texts/intertexts that were favored by the other three writers. While this is a common complaint toward the evangelists, it lacks substance.
The complaint assumes that each evangelist should have written a word-for-word carbon copy of the other evangelists’ works. Then we would have four utterly consistent, but identical gospels. Of course, the reason that each evangelist wrote their own account, often borrowing words/phrases/sentences/paragraphs from the others, was precisely for the purpose of emphasizing different episodes, details, and theology that was more dear to them and more meaningful for their own targeted audiences.
It is entirely without merit to insist that all eyewitnesses of an event limit themselves to a single collaborative account or to a single intended audience or to one purpose for the account. That is not human nature or the way reality works. The multiple accounts give us vastly different insights into both the life of Christ, but also into the thoughts of the evangelists. Far from such multiple accounts being an implication of fiction they mirror real people operating in the real world with personal integrity.
Blessings.
