The Gospels Are Not Histories | Dr. Richard C Miller 

Cameron is among the worst of self deception.

loved the ending :)

How do your subscribers send you private messages? I haven’t been able to locate a message toggle.

Happy new year! Digging your future plans 😁

@@ring-tone278 all that sounds grand until you get to the actual “message”. Then you have to ask yourself if the message is literal or allegorical!!!

😂😂😂. Pun not intended

@@prettyambitious79😂

@@ring-tone278 Are you quoting epistles as a reply to a comment abour a historical perspective on the gospels? Why? What did that add to this conversation?

@martinnyberg71 Probably because the Melvin in the video (and the toolbag interviewing him) is being deceptive by misrepresenting historical records and shamelessly lying about the accuracy of the Bible. He baselessly asserts that the vast majority of things written during biblical times included complete bibliographies (lol, no, they didn't), but claims the Bible/gospels do not (also incorrect, many of the Bible authors/contributors are known); so therefore, his refusal of evidence somehow means the gospels couldn't possibly be historically accurate. He doesn't acknowledge or even allude to people like the apostle Paul, one of the most historically cited authors of all time. I'm not a 'religious' man, but the whole video is unabashedly dishonest & done in bad faith (no pun intended). Its also ironic he won't acknowledge the veracity of the Bible because he alleges a lack of source/citation, but provides zero sources/citations to support his fallacious claims. He's just trying to legitimize his atheistic religion by attempting (and failing) to delegitimize the Bible.

Thank you so much 😉

Well, it's true that there are plenty of texts from that time period that mix history and myth. This is basic. Apologists simply have twisted that fact to obscure the reality that they are cherry-picking what they want to believe is factual from the Bible. But that's not how the historical method works. And, yes, history-writing did start to develop in classical antiquity. The challenge for the rest of us is learning to recognize when someone is summarizing what actual historical and literary scholarship has shown. You should be aware, for example, that there are still serious historical debates about the historicity of Jesus. Most historians lean towards "there was a guy named Jesus in Nazareth who seems to be the same one mentioned in the gospels" (nevermind all the supernatural claims). But there's still a minority who argue that Jesus is entirely mythological or a mythologized composite of various actual people.

Arrian's Anabasis is another good example of a classical ancient history

you have different writers #~writing on the same theme they would have to agree on the the same story and know each others work and to achieve that would have to be a miracle in itself

The actual events that were coded and allegorized into "Myths" that the "gullible " people of "antiquity" believed were already more ancient to their timeline than those people are to ours. Written history began because so many natural catastrophes had occurred over the ages that oral tradition could not keep up.

Completely wrong, Jesus is verified to be a real person by numerous historical non chrostian sources and we'll ad many other people spoken of in the new testament

@@ring-tone278 Define "God."

@@KentuckyBrad Nobody says Jesus was not a real person. Neither does anybody claim every word of the Gospels is a historical fact.

​@@KentuckyBradif he was or wasn't real, nobody wrote about him or what he might of said while he was alive. We have no idea of who he was as a person.

Yet, almost no Ape can handle it. And how much of it? The full truth of today, is vailed by tomorrow.

As Derek and the numerous scholars continuously point out (Christian scholars as well), these stories and texts were developed with the clear adoption of the melting pot of cultural influences in the milieu of the Mediterranean in the 1st & 2nd century.

“Pulling on the heart strings” doesn’t necessarily mean that the substance of the story is made up. World War II is turned into dramatic tearjerkers, in reality it was just war amongst men.

It is easier to see this, IF one reads the parable about sowing of the Word correctly [IMO]. The part of having the "DEPTH OF EARTH" refers to the common/pagan and 'base' levels of thinking. Once it was established, the literalist view became a "ONE SIZE FITS ALL", and then it was HERESY to suggest any other interpretations.

How would you know? You don't have a heart.

The bible is a myth

Yeah search and you shall find

Let us say it simple a lack of education in common antiquity. It is obvious for everyone that Homer's Odyssey is what Marc relies on.

you have different writers #~writing on the same theme they would have to agree on the the same story and know each others work and to achieve that would have to be a miracle in itself

😁

you have different writers #~writing on the same theme they would have to agree on the the same story and know each others work and to achieve that would have to be a miracle in itself

@@Sportliveonline Your comment is not really an answer to mine. Perhaps you meant for it to be a stand-alone comment?

There is no audiobook. But you could get the e-book version and then run it through a text to speech program of your choice.

His book is very dense scholarly language and unapologetically so. Most will struggle to read and understand it unless you take the time to look up words and think through it.

@@jericosha2842 Yeah, that’s not a problem. My reading disability is PTSD, not intellectual. 😬

I’ve often speculated if the author of Matthew was a student of say Philo, writing out of Alexandria, giving us the clue in the story…”Out of Egypt I called my son.”. Another thing to point out is that the Matthew narrative refers to the the traveling of magi to pay homage to a King, while there being a star in the heavens. In Cassius Dio’s work he writes of an Armenian King Tiridates traveling to Rome to pay homage to Nero, the same year Halley’s Comet was in the heavens. The Cassius account also states that the Armenian King went back taking a different route than when he came. The year was 66AD, the same year the Romans began their war with Israel.

Read the writings of Josephus.

​@@dw3403why?

@@GameTimeWhy He was a historian that wrote about the destruction of jerusalem.

@@dw3403 "historian" he wrote a lot about a lot of things he had no ability to know about. Some things were more accurate than others and some were more akin to propaganda.

Hi @rayoshima .. you seem to possibly be misunderstanding what I have said in the interview. My position is that these texts present legends predominantly untethered to ontological events in time and space. The video argument has an easy target, namely showing that no sacralized early Christian narratives were composed as histories. As for the penchant for myth, folk-belief, and tall tales, these texts employed common tropes from embellishing mythography. Healings, exorcisms, divine births, returns from death, apotheoses, ascensions, etc were well-trodden tropological patterns in Greek and Latin literary culture(s). As for these texts including creative refractions of earliest Christian storytelling and anecdotes, I agree. After all, what is a legend but a set of tall tales contextualized in real places, with some real people, and in real history? Have you read the Life of Apollonius? One of a hundred striking analogues.

@@RichardMiller-ym5jc Well, as I said one of my relatives had two more children after imprisoned 9 mos, shot in the back dead, and buried. You have a history people want to present, they reorder the facts to suit their desires. What is reality? Seriously ask yourself the question. If you ask three physicist what is reality, the most likely answer is they will tell you what its not, this problem has haunted physics since 1913 and its called the observer problem. The problem doesnt get better when we take the machines out of it. Lets go talk to the IDF, they will tell you something is true, Gazans did X, Y, Z. 2 days later you find out 75% of what they said is bullshit. You talk to the other side, same thing bullshit. Reality is something we interpret and project, its like gods, except for using internal data the signals are coming through our senses. But the interpretation of phantom feelings and observations are the same process. The question is you take a legend, pass it through the apologetic literarure through a couple of cycles, what you get in the end is a well polished turd, and it shines. If some one tells you they are writing mythos, myth, you assume they are imagining, but you dont know, they might be interpreting their own or someone elses ecstatic experience. There are no sharp distinctions between "truth" and imagination, both truth and imagination come from the same mind. So lets deal with the problem of the gospels in general and the luke specifically. Taking an example from the bible, you sometimes read a text "and this was reported in the blah, blah, blah" but we dont have blah, blah, blah any more. More so in Mark, despite heresay to the contrary Mark gives no source of his information, Marks primary source was not Peter. And it skims the Q source. And so the Markan narrative is a sudden appearance of a type of gospel genre, its a very rhetorical text. Matthew seems to appreciate Marks style in that he relies heavily on Mark and, though more carefully representing Q, likes to modify (e.g, sermon on the mount). I withhold judgement as to who added the birth narrative, but Matthew is very dependent on Marks made-up passion narrative. Its essential to his theology. This is the foundation of the gospel of luke. Luke is a constructor, its more a matter of stylistic representation than theology, as a cohesive theology is missing. Who are the real christians Paul or Jacobians, its not clear. Should one try to obey the law or not, its not clear. Should you gove everything you have to the cult, or not. Luke gospel is responding to an observation, the movement started here (probably from the Q source and now there are lots of christians in Rome). Luke deal with the conflict by harmonizing them, in Acts 10 we see a vision of profanities, but not so profane as they appear. Its middle of the road. So we could argue, and I think this is the case, Luke has multiple contradictory sources and he is trying to make sense of it. And we have to understand this is the second century, great skeptics are not in great abundance. So lets take and example of this. Isaac Newton observed a second order derivative of position with respect to time. He came up with a theory we called gravity, it explained behavior of things on earth and heaven. Newton pointed out, hey geeze, its weird that there is object causing the gravitational attraction. Despite his misgiving we attribute Newton with the discovery of gravity. The gravitation force does not exist, nor does centifugal force. A person working with an incomplete set of facts got the answer wrong, but the answer works over most reference frames. It may be a surprise to you that newton was not only a judge, in the clergy, but was also a mystic and practiced alchemy. People are complicated. And so this is what happens in any discovery process, which is what you and Derek are doing. You are in the process of discovering past meanings. What was group X thinking about in year Y. Its not reality but a representation thereof. 95% of whats in Luke is either false or made up, but the changes carry the meaning of what various sprites along the path from sources to final product were thinking important to themselves. The process is more visible with the epistles, why is a pastoral writing changing what Paul said, if this is a position within the church, then he must have had reason for changing it. David Litwa is correct in what he is doing, he is unbinding the chains that held christianity in step, and so we see how mystical christianity was. So imagine yourself in the Jesus movement, you are kind of conservative. So you enter the movement say in the 90s there are alot of Jewish christians. Off in the corner of your eye you see the beginings of protognosticism, and you are probably aware of some heresay mystical cults that think heaven is already on Earth. More and more these gentile deviations from the more conservative genre are troubling you. We need to see this, both the action and the reaction. And when you look at the actors and it hits you, this was a get-go problem. It wasnt just Paul having strange visions there were others. Yacov was probably replacing Peter to clamp down on the "blasphemy", self-destructive exotericism, but when he died, pandoras box was opened. And so, we have here a categorization problem. What is myth versus mysticism, what is folk-tales versus folk-"wisdom", what are tall-tales and what are exotericism, what are ressurection and post bereavement hallucinations. If you're a mystic its not hard to see when someone is trying to float an inspiration, and you can show them how their interpretation is influence by their tightly held magick. And so there are two categories of historical deviations, the literary embellishments for the rhetorical expose (e.g. Mark). In contrast others are working from their mysticism as a worldview that helps them explain/filter other infirmation (e.g. the Pauline epistles). But with the rest of the text we are often standing on a thin line between experience and imagination and its often not clear which is which. Did Matthew imagine zombies or did he invision them, did he imagine angels on a tomb or invision them. It seems the author of matthew believed most of Marks passion narrative, and if so then this must have been a very powerful magick to him. And so we see clearly the second century problem. When mysticism becomes popular in a movement, when it stops being esoteric, when exotericism becomes increasingly expressive, when it becomes a competitive part of the genre and when literary imaginations take a hold of it what you get is christianity. This is the mud puddle the author of luke is writing from. You say Acts is fiction, but compared to Luke, Acts is a mess, with little pieces of out of place trivia thrown into the text, we have bizarre esoteric episodes, phantoms, . . . . Luke gives no reference to his sources and they are not apparent, he contradicts the epistles, is Paul and Saul the same person? How many sources on Pauls Conversion? Can you imagine the author of Luke pulling on his hair while writing Acts?

@@Darisiabgal7573 I am not sure I have followed your logic. I perhaps am less pessimistic than you regarding objectivity and ontological reality.. science is not the same as human cultural, political, and religious history. I think we can achieve reasonable historical accuracy on many of the primary contours and texts of classical antiquity. I do not regard the Gospels as heavily esoteric. They are obscure to us primarily due to the cultural distance. The gospels were central to the evangelizing spread of the cult. The very effort rapidly to “spread” works against any notion of closed esoterics. I do think some branches of the religion, however, were more Gnostic or esoteric in disposition. The rest of your communication-I apologize-I may have failed to follow.

@@RichardMiller-ym5jc Science is a process that emerges from society, in earnest it began with recipes for beer making in temple culture 3100 BCE. Chemistry evolved out of alchemy. Why I am pessimistic is that I worked in science for 40 years, what we call reality is constructed of little truths, data. What you learn is that uncertainty at the quantum level percolates up into all levels and the little truths in and of themselves are worthless. And so you need two other things, statistics and perspective. And that is science, science is a process, little things go wrong, you improve things a little bit, rinse and repeat. I think the best histories are reconstructed from diverse perspectives, we need attestation. While I do not stoop so low as to say we only know 6 things about Jesus, we are in one magnitude of deviation of that and the crippling reason, IMHO is the gospel of Mark. That text sets the expectation stage for what a gospel should be. "I do not regard the gospels as heavily esoteric" First off, if esotericism is complete, you should see no esotericism in the gospel. Esoteric mysticism is about keeping the hidden hidden. Pauls mystical expressions are profane in that sense. When does the bible express exotericism? When it wants to make a claim this message came from god, otherwise there is no basis. Paul ministry is based on his vision of a christ from ressurection, his vision of christ has no historical reference, he is the first that we know of that makes the claim, therefore he needs a basis. But in 2 cor 12 we see a bit of what he is supposed to keep hidden, he has studied something under someone. In Acts 10 we have Peter in Joppa, this story is unlikely true but it also is removing the viel of mysticism a bit. In this case its being used to show Peter got the message from god. And it explans why in the epistles Paul and Peter are in conflict, for whateve reason peter believes something, but he is afraid to act on his belief around James watcher's. "The gospels are central to evangelizing the spread of the cult" while that maybe true, the canonical text are used to contain the cult and eventually clouster the mysticism. And there in lies the problem, if you argue, well the apocryphal text are lesser text so they arent representaive of christianity, then of course the mystical evidence is distal. But its the contractions between the gospels and orthodoxy that lay the problem open. In the text it does not say, build a giant stone edifice, go into it pray and sing in it. It says the opposite, beware the scribes and the teachers of the law (piety) and when you pray go into private . . . .In otherwords the text is advocating a more individual mystical experience . The church experience is about a means to control an outcome, its a a type of magick. When you remove the church and its icons the magick is more chaotic. The two actors, Paul, goes into the Aravah for three years, Peter was rumored to bathe often and go upon the the roofs of houses to pray. These are the two principles of christianity. I defer to Elaind Pagels on the valuation of mysticism in John and the secret sayings. So we could value the esoteric question 2 ways. The first was is there are few direct references because they are striving to be esoteric, the second choice is that they are reaching for markers of esotericism to prove their case for god-inspired but the sources were not esoteric. If you hold to the churches interpretation of John then you probably uphold the second. But enter the Nag Hammadi material and that opinion is flipped upside down. Why does the church prefer non-mystical teachings, because the church feels visions of heaven and god through a mystical practice are delusional. They are correct, but they really want leverage to deal with people like Marguerite Poirete. These types of people are a threat to their power structure and authority. Thus, in the text they have techniques that are mystical only at a very close inspection. The church has arranged a very physical ecclesia, from James to Rome, its phoney, but its basically a claim to authority that overrides any challengers. So heres how I see this. At the beginning esotericism was very behind the scenes, hidden but very driven to expanding inner cult members, but then Jesus is killed and this cukt setup is prone to almost immediate radiation. Right off the bat when a cult leader dies there are arguments over succession. Its not clear but peter did struggle to maintain authority. In the Q source it seems maybe disciples were sent out on missions, only to come back to a dead leader. So jesus gave them the independence stamp, all of them could become the next jesus. We never hear that there are many disciples hanging around Yacov, instead there are constant stories about antioche, Joppa and other places. The cult is decentralized and mystical. At this points it helps to be a mystic to understand the process that will unfold. The outcome of practice is very dependent on the magick that goes into it. Any magick applied to mysticism, be it a cat in the room, whether one is under the stars, listening to waves crash along a shore, affects the experience. This will be very important in the second generation of followers because many of them are gentile and they are surrounded by icons of magick of foriegn gods. It is this second generation that begin the process of story telling.

Is Zeus a historical entity, No Did Jesus actually lived, YES. O No, Zeus at present doesn't have followers to defend his historicity, But Jesus has,doesn't mean that Jesus was a historical person. Bart Erhman is a Christian - madrassa product.

Okay.

you have different writers #~writing on the same theme they would have to agree on the the same story and know each others work and to achieve that would have to be a miracle in itself

you have different writers #~writing on the same theme they would have to agree on the the same story and know each others work and to achieve that would have to be a miracle in itself

Okay.

Okay.

I think so. One day Jesus is on a sea, next day he's on a mountain, then in a desert, then in the wilderness, then in a city. Such transport would be challenging today with a vehicle. Imagine trying to pull that off wearing sandels & riding donkeys. My point is all this unexplained mobility points to a work of fiction, not history. So many things point to Mark (1st gospel writer everyone else copied) having copied the original Jesus story straight out of Homer's Oddesy. For more on this, RU-vid the video series "Escavating the Empty Tomb."

@@danmurray1143 exactly, same story adapted for the times and events of the region.

Hi Ivanos, I would contend that “historicity” is a relatively modern obsession and misreading of these texts. They rather were read in the first 5 centuries as sacred cultic iconographic legends, not as ontological footage of live first-century events in time and space. Scribal whimsicality in editing these texts, the near endless array of other such legendary texts produced in the early Christian myth factory, the immediate obsession with symbologized and allegorized readings, the cultic cues in framing every page of these texts within the standing traditions of folk belief, legend, and superstition in antiquity, and the cultic social contexts where these texts exclusively circulated all determined how these texts originally performed in antiquity. The whole point of legend was (and still is) to ground tall tales in real contexts, places, historical persons, etc.

@@RichardMiller-ym5jc If you're now aware, the New Covenant is not a random collection of pagan legends, but a continuation of specific tradition, namely of Temple-Judaism, or the Old Covenant, which was developed over generations as record of history, while our modern attitude towards history comes specifically from Christianity.

The book says the book is true? Then it must be true. @@ring-tone278

@doncamp1150, you seem not even to have watched the video. I did not argue they were histories. There was no genre “euangelia” in antiquity. My argument and position, had you read my work and listened carefully, is that these texts defied the generic lines and performed as etiological legend narratives aimed at founding / establishing and servicing cultic identity. The cultic legends written by Damis and those legend narratives prevalent regarding Pythagoras would have provided close analogues.

@@RichardMiller-ym5jc And that is where I differ. You seem to be stuck trying to squeeze the Gospels into a common genre. My argument is that they are a genre of their own, though it is a kind of writing that was not unknown in ancient times, that of announcement or proclamation. (_euagelion_ is a word used outside of and prior to the use in the biblical Gospels.) But more to the point, genre is not something that is forced upon a piece of writing; it is derived from the piece. It is not prescriptive but descriptive. The Gospels were identified by the authors to be announcements. (See Mark 1:1) and by Jesus (Matt. 26:13. et al.) Here's a test. Insert _legend_ in the places where _euangelion_ is used. Does it make sense? Insert _proclamation_ or _announcement_ in those places. I think it makes far more sense. That the Gospels are narratives I think confuses you. But the thing is, they are not fundamentally narratives, they are announcing the one who is the subject of the narratives and declaring him to be the Christ. That could be done wholly apart from a narrative, and it was. Whether the narratives were legend or historical is actually a different issue. I think they are historical when they are telling of evets that happen in the real world and about people who are clearly identifiable as real people in the real world. They are anchored in reality as no legend I am aware of is. Jesus is portrayed as very human. But they are also more than mundane history. They are hero stories (another genre) in which the main character is described, well, heroically. But that is not uncommon in literature early or modern, even in literature like biography where a real person and real events are described. We do like heroes, and there are some who are truly heroic. I think, Richard, what you are really concerned about is the part that God plays in the narrative. God or gods seem to you to be unreal, And anything that includes God or the supernatural must therefore be unreal. But that is a personal bias. It is your particular worldview. Making that the criterion that distinguishes historical from myth or legend is a personal choice. It is not the criterion of everyone.

@@doncamp1150 there you’d be mistaken. This is why literary criticism matters and what happens when folks who claim expertise over the New Testament fail so miserably to make sense of it. Add to that faith bravado and you end up with this cocktail of irrational confidence. Genre is about cognitive conventionality. Perceiving the generic signals in a text, piece of music, film, etc, sets the cognitive frame for the consumer. I “squeezed” nothing in my analysis. Some have tried to shoehorn the canonical gospels into biography or historiography or novel. Whereas I pick up on hybridity, a mix of a few ancient genres and modalities. Don, without spending decades immersed in the literary world of classical antiquity, instead running about having online feuds contending for your confessions, you stand no chance of understanding the topic. Your object of study is the modern culture war of your sacred texts. Whereas the actual topic that matters is the literary and mythographical cultures of antiquity. As for supernatural in history, well, they had strong policies against that. Nobody in antiquity argued for the inclusion of fantastical stories being passed off as literal realities in historiography. So, that distinction matters.. it first shows that the ancients recognized the difference and had a different mental space for such tales than ontological / mundane reality. These were cultic texts and cultic tales, legends meant for cultic indulgence, not literalist civic representation.

@@RichardMiller-ym5jc Richard, you may have deeper knowledge of classical literature that I don't have. But I doubt you have knowledge of Hebrew literature that I don't have or a knowledge of the Greek New Testament that I don't have. My object in "having online feuds" is probably the same as yours. I am trying to correct misconceptions and misrepresentations of the biblical literature. What are you doing? I have fifty years of formal and informal study of both secular literature biblical literature I think qualifies me to have an educated opinion. On that point, I do not think that the Hebrews thought the inclusion of God in the stories was anything but literal reality. The literary style of the Old Testament stories is so different from any myth I am acquainted with that I wonder you can't see the difference. The literary style of the Gospels is likewise so different from any myth of the ancient world that I wonder you can't see the difference. In the case of the Gospels, if there is any reliance on prior literature, it is upon Hebrew literature. All the recurring themes you noted in the past are actually found much earlier in Hebrew literature. So, the issue is myth. How do you distinguish myth from a historiography? I distinguish myth from historiography or biography when the story is not anchored in real events.

Thank you so much for that superthanks!

@stauker1960 Hercules resurrected and became a god on the side of his god father Zeus. Ther religion of Hercules was very popular. So your assumption is wrong.

you have different writers #~writing on the same theme they would have to agree on the the same story and know each others work and to achieve that would have to be a miracle in itself

@@Sportliveonline What?

There is a lot to unpack but the bible is about the unveiling of our true creator. When the messiah came he came to his own. They knew him not. When he is speaking to the people he spoke in parables they understood because they were farmers but when he spoke to the leaders of the church and government he spoke to them about the laws they would make up and not do themselves,

I don't see why I should care about a God who refuses to speak except in riddles and lies. Who exactly is the God of the universe trying to conceal his true intentions from?

@@Uryvichk He wasnt speaking in riddles. He was speaking to those of that day and age who were farmers. They understood the planting of seeds. Many of the things he said were against things they had been taught by ignorant priests. He came to set them free from their religion and set them on a path of faith. After all the temple was going to be destroyed and was in 70 ad.

​@@Uryvichk, the God of the universe reveal Himself to those who seek Him with a pure heart, the rest will flock to the one who deceive them or themselves.

No one knows would be my conclusion.

I think many educated Christians were not literalists. But they took symbolic ideas very seriously so they often sound as if they are. Genesis was widely understood as not literal for example Origen called those who believed it was literal childish, and Saint Augustine wrote a treatise explaining that Genesis referred to non-temporal events. And the Catholic Church never had a problem with the theory of evolution, even with a pope statement to the fact. There is a great deal of evidence that literalist interpretations of the Bible increased dramatically during the enlightenment and into modern times by religious reactionary fanatics. In the Middle Ages priests aside from a few unshakable doctrines generally instructed allegorical interpretations. Therefore Biblical literalism and Biblical inerrancy are reactionary movements. Even Voltaire pointed out the increase of religious fanaticism in the enlightenment.

Titus was the Chrestus, Titus wrote All biblical scripture, Titus crucified Jesus Lucifer along with 2 million Zionists, they wouldn't stop sacrificing to their God Yahweh, Titus called all rebellious leaders Jesus, satire Mary was what the Romans called all rebellious women, Magdala was a town near Galilee, Titus's satire, Titus calling Jesus Lucifer's mum an old slapper.Jesus just means saviour in Greek.

your government is a religious cult uh oh

Nope. Read my comment here.

@@je-freenorman7787 Oh no it isn't, the Government in my country is not a Religious cult as long as we can keep the Christians from turning it into a Religious cult. Like Afghanistan.

@@ring-tone278 That is so true for Islam.

Ok it's always implied that Genesis 3 speaks of the FALL!!! even though never said it read more like a parent kicking out a child that has come of age. Or a Mother weaning puppies. It amazing how thought can be injected. But that's part of our metaphorical thinking that the serpent started with when you can't see the whites of the eye look for intent.

​@@toddstevens9667 U R correct

of course Genesis itself was also written by men. the entire bible is written by human beings. just because someone writes " god said..." doesn't give their claim validity.

never ceases to challenge my confirmation bias.....

@@ghostriders_1 I don't know what that means. I'm waiting for your empirical evidence that the universe can exist without God and how life can exists without God's breath. Waiting and waiting and waiting

@pdworld3421 I think you know exactly what it means & the change of subject indicates your unwillingness to address the issue of you projecting your ignorance onto professional scholars.

@@ghostriders_1 No. I did not understand what you were saying. I'm still waiting for a response. It's so sad that you are guilty of everything you charge theists with. Your view that the universe can exist without God cannot be defended. You have zero evidence for it. You can change the subject all you want but at least be honest and admit, you cannot defend your position. The question isn't whether or not God exists. The question is how do you explain the universe without him. And the answer is- you can't.

@@pdworld3421 Why can’t the universe exist without God? Why can’t life exist without “God’s breath”.

It's jammed packed with incredibly bad advice for individuals and society.

@@mavrosyvannahhow so?

Who would have thought that he would blindly believe anything and everything for a paycheck.

Hi Felipe, I think, presuming your comment was born of “curiosity,” as you say, and was not your way of complaining about the video, that you have deeply misunderstood what you’ve watched. I personally have been most all kinds and brands of Christian (Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Presbyterian, Baptist, etc). That is irrelevant. The content of the discussion was selected based on the kinds of questions there are that popularly circulate. Many claim that the Gospels were qualified historiographies by ancient standard. Where they resided in the historical stages of the rise of the religion was relevant only secondarily as most. I am a secular historian and textual critic of classical antiquity. I do not think in show anyone discussed beliefs or atheism; that would not be relevant. We are driving toward our answers as empiricists seeking to understand these texts. The show is not about us. As for description of more primitive Christian history and origins, see other videos we have made. I think you’ve wildly misunderstood what you were watching here. Derek interviews academic research specialists and experts on topics related to sacred history and mythology.

​@@RichardMiller-ym5jc Hi Richard, thanks for reaching out. When I mentioned the fixation on the historicity of the Gospels and associated with Protestantism is not because you brought up beliefs in this video, as you rightly say, but because you are addressing those that "claim that the Gospels were qualified historiographies by ancient standard". By choosing those as your conversation partners you are already putting yourself into that SBL world of protestant perspective overconcerned with the texts. So it ends up with the same conversation over and over again... are the texts history or not? And then you try to answer this - at least in this video - based on the texts alone, as if there was a universal standard of historiography at that time just because Herodotus thought in one way, and as if the early communities were readers of Herodotus (were they readers of the NT in the first place?). And as if you could separate fiction from reality based only on formality. Aristotle already realised you can't - look how he differentiates history from poiesis. And even today: if I write down a narrative with only ordinary elements in it, how could you tell if it actually happened or not comparing my text to fictional and non-fictional ones? So my point was that it would be more interesting from the viewpoint of understanding history (not in confront with protestant believers over the historicity of texts based on the texts) to understand the movement beyond the texts. You were on that path when you asked if the audience at that time considered the texts history, but for this you would need to move beyond the texts for the reasons I've already mentioned. You said in the discussion: people were giving their life not only in the "orthodox" party but also heretics. Why not develop this: For the same reasons? In which context? This is much more interesting and less apologetic. This is to recognise the importance of your goal of moving away from apologetical scholarship, but also to stress the importance of doing it when choosing the questions too, and not to stick only to the texts, but move beyond them. It would be more frutlitful for all of us. Many thanks!

@@felipecinelli3278, I must disagree.. I published a substantial book review a couple of years ago (google it under “The Gospels as Historiae…”) of a book written by a Catholic professor at a famous Catholic college. The book had back-of-book endorsements by other Catholic professors. The book argued that the Gospels were originally written to be read as histories and that they indeed were read as histories. This is a common faith conclusion that is held by Eastern Orthodox, Catholics, and Protestants alike. I am not saying this is the universal perspective in these traditions, but it is far and away the dominant view at present. It has become fashionable to argue that, while these texts may have been passed off as credible histories for early converts, we now properly see them as myth-making. My work challenges that view by arguing that the ancients would have received them as cultic legends more or less from the start.. I appreciate your feedback, nevertheless. I am beginning a popular book project covering topics such as you mention.. the thesis is under wraps, but it should create quite a stir and a more accurate window into Christian origins.

Historical fiction employs the insertion of historical figures in alternate histories. The mere insertion of historical figures and places doesn’t necessarily make the account a historical fact.

@@JayWest14 reread what I said

you have different writers #~writing on the same theme they would have to agree on the the same story and know each others work and to achieve that would have to be a miracle in itself

Someone had to say it.

Hi jj.. we were holding early Christian narrative to ancient standards, not modern. Herodotus, btw, has been extensively vindicated by modern historians. A few ancients criticized Herodotus, but mostly on grounds of their own false conceptions and biases. I think the primary point we were getting at in the interview was not a judgment on accuracy, but on intent, genre, and mode. Early Christian narratives simply did not present the standing literary cues that they be read as histories. Indeed, the receiving generation began immediately to allegorize and to symbologize the texts and to crank out more of the same from their textual legend factory.

you have different writers #~writing on the same theme they would have to agree on the the same story and know each others work and to achieve that would have to be a miracle in itself

@@Sportliveonline Matthew and Luke certainly knew Mark’s work. They plagiarised a lot of material from his account.

I started my research as a Christian. My extensive research led me out of that. For the Gospels to have presented compelling claims of real supernatural events in time and space, by ancient standards, they would have needed to write within the historiographic genre, heavily authenticate their accounts with various testimonies and work overtime to distance / distinguish such accounts from the thousands of similar legendary accounts popularly circulating around in ancient written culture and society.

Since a real God would have complete knowledge of nature, and be somewhat creative to make good things, the Gospels would have to contain; Jesus's knowledge of the human body. For a God to turn a 3 day old dead body to a new alive one, that God would know a lot about eyes, ears, blood, heart, lungs, skin, bones, etc.. Then tell humans about that. Give us information on keeping the body healthy. Tell us how to prevent diseases naturally, not just heal a few people supernaturally, which can be made from humans minds and imaginations in story. Jesus would have been walking around Judea and saw so many people without books to read and people who didn't know how to read. Jesus would have told humans about inventions like the printing press. Also about eyeglasses so more people could read. Jesus would have known a little bit about Physics, Chemistry, Geology, Geography, Mathematics, etc. or at least the way to investigate it. Did Jesus have no knowledge of what we call Science? Really? Jesus would have a lot of knowledge of economics and on how to make things and businesses. Create more wealth with good economics rather than just giving to the poor. A real God would know about Nature. A Story God created from humans minds and imagination would be able to do the Supernatural in stories, but have no real knowledge of Nature. (Which is why Thomas Jefferson included the phrase 'Laws of Nature and of Nature's God. Jesus is never a Nature's God. Jesus is a Supernatural Super hero. So any discussion of Philosophical arguments for a Nature's God do not apply to Jesus and Christianity. Jesus does not deserve the promotion from Supernatural God to Nature's God that many Philosophers do, who try to promote Christianity in debate. )

@midnightwatchman1 - So what makes you belief that greek-roman literature that was produced by anonymous authors. We have 94 gospels and 90 are considered false. So we see first of all a huge war between followers of the cult that no one had a clue and everyone made up whatever they wanted,

@@TorianTammas I do not believe that. the authors of the gospels are written in the super text. the names given in the title of the text. Matthew, Luke , Mark, and John

And in a 3rd of January, 1954 letter to philosopher Eric Gutkind, Einstein said The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.

It's been proven wrong again and again and again.

Where… and when?

Hi Dave.. the first 500 years of Christian history is obscure, largely due to the mythographic/legendary character of early Christian prose and faith / confession-driven description (over open rational description).

@@RichardMiller-ym5jc Thank you very much for the response. 500 years was an unexpected answer, I imagined an answer that fell some place between the rise of early church fathers known by name and Constantine. But 500 years is a reasonable answer to my ambiguous question. Thanks again, Dave

@@davefoc it’s all relative. Admittedly the first century is more obscure than the fifth. Some of this improving visibility, however, comes with having more external sources at later times.. as well as more writings.

Perhaps better a reference to the rhetoric attitudes conveyed thematically through Acts.. The killing of Stephen 7.51-53 struck this theme rather clearly.. Jesus is painted as another scandalously slain prophet, yet somehow part of God’s plan.

🤫

You nailed it. These mythicist guys make up all these conspiracy theories and laugh about them and pat on each other’s back as if they have debunked anything, and don’t realize that nothing of what they say explains the historical data.

I say there are a lot of people looking for a way to deal with childhood trauma.

Nice shifting the burden of proof- we don't have to prove the gospels as not true- believers have to provide evidence for their claims. They read like fan fiction.

@@brianharris7243 I wouldn't say it is shifting, I would say I just responded to the guys in the video. Which of the things i said is wrong? But let me start a discussion with you? Paul became a Christian after a miraculous encounter. Paul found Christians and learned from them maybe years before he wrote the first epistle. All the epistles and canonical Gospels are so close to the events. What do you say about that?

Been there over and over, but the skeptics turn a blind eye. You can lead a horse to water. . . . . .@@brianharris7243

Well that's a new one lol

I don't think this is right.

@@StudentDad-mc3pu I wrote a book about it. Of course it’s right.

I like to think of them being written more as allegorical historical fiction. Dr. Miller touched on the message as being of sacrifice no longer being needed because of the death of Jesus. If Jesus is an allegorical representation of Israel, it would give credence to the idea that he is the Son of Man, according to the Daniel interpretation.

@@JayWest14 nah dude. It’s all Greek poop jokes. Lol most people don’t study Greek poop jokes but once you smell what they were doing you can’t un-smell it. You’re using your eyes, I already explained you need to use your nose.

@@MandyMoorehol seems like a lot of trouble to go through to tell a bunch of poop jokes. In both Matthew and Luke’s infancy narrative there’s an allegorical reference to the Jewish Revolt and war, with Matthew’s birth narrative referencing the Tiridates trip to Rome in 66AD, and Luke’s narrative at the onset of the initial revolt beginning with Judas the Galilean in 6AD, after the Quirinius Census.