Conservative. Idaho. Software engineer. Historian. Trying to prevent Idiocracy from becoming a documentary.
Email complaints/requests about copyright infringement to clayton @ claytoncramer.com. Reminder: the last copyright troll that bothered me went bankrupt.
"And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose." -- Rom. 8:28
At least the paperback edition. This is a very touching piece of fiction about Herod's slaughter of the innocents. The Kindle edition will be ready in the next few days.
I incline to the view that Jesus existed, and that the accounts that have him baptised by John the Baptist, preach in Galilee, and go to Jerusalem where he was crucified, are entirely plausible.
Everything said about his childhood, however, seems to me probably to be rubbish. Mark, or his sources, talked to eyewitnesses to Jesus's adult life, I presume. Who on earth would have paid any special attention to his birth and childhood?
Because some of those eyewitneeses to his adult life knew him as a child? Mary would have been around, and might have known something of Jesus' early years.
It depends when Mark wrote. Suppose he wrote about 50 years after Jesus's death and therefore roughly 80 years after his birth. Someone who was, say, 15 when Jesus was born was in his midnineties when Mark wrote. And therefore probably dead.
My own interpretation is that the scarcity of things said about Jesus's early life in the synoptic gospels increases the likelihood of their being about someone who really existed, and of their being based on eyewitness evidence.
I incline to the view that Jesus existed, and that the accounts that have him baptised by John the Baptist, preach in Galilee, and go to Jerusalem where he was crucified, are entirely plausible.
ReplyDeleteEverything said about his childhood, however, seems to me probably to be rubbish. Mark, or his sources, talked to eyewitnesses to Jesus's adult life, I presume. Who on earth would have paid any special attention to his birth and childhood?
Because some of those eyewitneeses to his adult life knew him as a child? Mary would have been around, and might have known something of Jesus' early years.
ReplyDeleteIt depends when Mark wrote. Suppose he wrote about 50 years after Jesus's death and therefore roughly 80 years after his birth. Someone who was, say, 15 when Jesus was born was in his midnineties when Mark wrote. And therefore probably dead.
ReplyDeleteMy own interpretation is that the scarcity of things said about Jesus's early life in the synoptic gospels increases the likelihood of their being about someone who really existed, and of their being based on eyewitness evidence.