I would like to begin by clarifying that I was not in any sense criticizing you for highlighting scholarship for an audience unfamiliar with it. As you rightly point out, professors do this semester after semester, and if I thought doing so was pointless, I might have to abandon blogging as well as teaching! \ud83d\ude42 \u00a0I did, however, feel that you were at once sharing a wealth of scholarly information, and simultaneously suggesting that scholars somehow were foolish enough not to see the conclusion to which these points obviously lead. The truth is that the scholars whom you mention \u2013 e.g. Brodie, MacDonald, Maclean\u00a0\u2013 do not see their points about the Gospels being largely fictional as leading to the conclusion that there was no historical Jesus upon whom they were even loosely based \u2013 at least, not in anything I\u2019ve read by them, and in what I have<\/em> read by them, they assert or otherwise indicate the contrary. And for good reason. One of the most popular genres in this period, akin to the \u201cnovel\u201d, was a form of historical fiction. It has often been suggested that the various Acts of apostles are in this genre, and they illustrate nicely that they are regularly based on a historical figure while being largely fictional.<\/p>\n If we take our earliest Acts, the Acts of the Apostles attributed to Luke, he clearly gets at least some things about Paul correct in his second volume, since they can be corroborated in Paul\u2019s own letters. Is there really a good reason to think that the situation was entirely<\/em> different when it comes to the first volume attributed to Luke?<\/p>\n You say that Seneca mentions Judaism. He seems to have done so on one occasion, if the quotation Augustine offers<\/a> of a work that I do not believe is\u00a0otherwise extant is anything to go by.\u00a0But a more germane question for the present discussion would be: Does he mention Pharisees and Saducees? We are discussing the earliest period of Christian origins, during which Jesus and his first followers were a sect within Judaism. To expect them to be mentioned as though they were a separate world religion is anachronistic \u2013 an anachronism Augustine seems to be guilty of himself in the passage I linked to.<\/p>\n On the subject of Origen\u2019s mention of Josephus, I think I have interpreted the evidence correctly. He criticizes Josephus for not blaming the calamaties that befell the Jews on their treatment of Jesus, not for never mentioning him. And Origen\u2019s confident statement that Josephus was not a Christian seems to imply that Josephus\u2019 stance on Jesus was clear, rather than that he simply failed to mention him.<\/p>\n If you wish to explain why you consider 1 Corinthians 1:22-23<\/a> a disavowal on Paul\u2019s part that Jesus had performed miracles, please do so. It seems to me that you must be reading something into that passage that I simply do not see there.<\/p>\n
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