The person who wrote “we” in that verse wasn’t the disciple referred to. No other interpretation makes sense.
Interweaving the copied material with other material and not differentiating the two makes it hearsay.
There are. Lack of any personal details. Language. Copying. Emphasis or unfamiliarity of certain topics. Matthew in particular doesn’t match what would be expected to have been written by the actual Matthew.
Why would I bother trying to claim that? The gospels contradict each other enough that some of them have to be inaccurate. Stating that fact isn’t ‘trashing’ them, it’s just accepting reality.
That is one of those sweeping grand statements which sounds like it captures some profundity, but examined closely actually does not mean much. How exactly, for instance, is astronomy tainted?
What did sin do to the Andromeda galaxy? What would be different about the milky way central black hole were it not tainted?
What are we to make of Psalm19 which tells us that The heavens declare the glory of God?
Why couldn’t it be? If the writer was part of a group and had them proof-read and comment, “we” makes perfect sense, though it would also make sense if someone else in that group inserted that phrase. And from the rest, it is likely that those included in “we” were also eye-witnesses given that they were affirming that what had been written was accurate.
Nope – if it was eye-witness material that both writers had been present at, all it is is borrowed words. You can’t project modern skeptical standards to the first century.
Read Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Bauckam – there are plenty of personal details, they’re just not written the way a modern writer would do it.
Sheer guessing – there’s no way to know “what would be expected to have been written”.
I played all these critical games in grad school, and to a large extent that’s all they are – mind games.
That is a very narrow and very likely misleading viewpoint.
As long as the monopoly of interpretation was in the hands of the RCC, alternative interpretations were quelled. If an alternative interpretation was in danger of spreading, either the movement was violently crushed or the interpretation was doomed as a heresy, or both. Most people did not even have an opportunity to read a Bible, so no wonder there were few persons that could challenge the prevailing dogma.
In the east, the orthodox church held the monopoly in matters of religion, so there were no more room for interpretations that would challenge the symbiosis of the church and the rulers.
The spread of humanism may have happened simultaneously with the increased opportunities to read scriptures and present alternative interpretations. That does not mean that humanism caused those alternative interpretations.
By the way, during the first centuries there were differing opinions and interpretations about the baptism of infants and the relationship between baptism and forgiveness. Probably also other disagreements but I do not know the history well enough to know about these.
You may be interested in a good review of Bauckam’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. I get how an eyewitness testimony isn’t irrefutable, but I find it less believable for soneone to say there are no eyewitness accounts in the NT.
I wouldn’t go that far. Mark might be (mostly) an eyewitness account. Acts might be too.
I’ll look at your link.
Added: Bauckham’s thesis seems to be that Mark was Peter’s scribe/translator, that John was John the elder not John the disciple, and that Matthew was a translator of an earlier writer. That Mark and John were written by people who were not necessarily eyewitnesses themselves, but who were close to the events and had spoken to eyewitnesses.
At best there are eyewitness accounts for the resurrection of Jesus in the NT, which for me still wasn’t convincing enough… the work of God’s Spirit was the proverbial straw for me
It was universal at the end of the second century. Tertullian objected to it because he thought it impossible to sin before puberty, but other than that it was accepted. Objections also arose in the fourth century, but that was based on the belief that sins committed after baptism couldn’t be forgiven; this led to adults not being baptized until they were dying. No objection appears after these two bits of silliness were ended until the sixteenth century, and those were due to humanistic transformation of baptism into something humans do that is centered in the individual being baptized – they in essence returned to the position of Tertullian, dragging in the notion of “age of accountability” from Judaism.
None of these arguments had any basis in the scriptures.
So they don’t fit other genres of literature – that’s irrelevant.
I dismiss it as sheer guessing because I learned to do it. Most of it isn’t even analysis, it’s skepticism mounting attacks. Historical analysis produced the thesis that the book of Joshua was a tourist guide to ancient ruins, which just shows that it can be used to assert all sorts of ridiculous ideas.
We have limited information about the varying opinions (interpretations) during the first centuries because we have only few remaining texts about the subject. Tertullian wrote about it but not very many others. We also have very few, if any, texts about the baptism of the smallest children during the first two centuries. There are obscure mentioning of baptisms of a household but these do not reveal the age of those baptized or if the smallest children in those households were baptized immediately.
The question of forgiveness, especially can major sins done after the baptism be forgiven, was a major disagreement during the first centuries. That is why there is more information about that disagreement. All sins were assumed to be forgiven in baptism but it is not obvious why?
One viewpoint is that baptism was a symbolic grave and resurrection from death - the old life was buried and when the person rose from the water he/she stepped to a new life in Christ. Sins of the old life were buried with the old life and were therefore left behind. This assumes that the person had a previous period of ‘old’ life that had died and needed to be buried to the symbolic grave.
In countries with multi-god religions, like hinduism, baptism is the separating border in the walk from paganism to Christianity. It is acceptable to believe in Jesus and serve him as one of many gods but baptism is the borderline where the old is left behind and buried. That is why the hardest persecutions in these countries start from the baptism.
An interpretation from the opposite end has been an assimilation of baptism with the need to be ‘born from above’ (Joh. 3:3-7). In this interpretation, baptism saves the person in the sense that the person is ‘born from above’ in baptism, independent of what happens before the baptism. There is also the interpretation that the person baptized gets the Holy Spirit, in or just after the baptism. According to this interpretation, salvation is dependent on what happens in the baptism.
Here, some Lutherans use the expression ‘return to the grace of baptism’ when they speak about persons that become believers.
The interpretation of what happens in baptism is also related to the question of what happens to those who believe but are never baptized? Some think they are not saved, others think that they are saved through their faith - believers should be baptized but if this is not possible for some reason and they die before baptism, they are saved through faith.
