• Aaron Adair & GodlessEngineer Debate Dennis Macdonald and Jacob Burman

    New testament scholar Dennis Macdonald and Jacob Berman debate Aaron Adair and Godless Engineer on the Mythicism (Link). Sayanore historicity. While I figured they would emphasize those uncommon ”problem passages” in Paul and Hebrews and so on (it comes up occasionally, but not much) they instead opt to support the tenuous with the even more tenuous, by using debatable interpretations of passages in the gospel of Thomas (!) and questionable inferences from a hypothetical document. Q, for instance was challenged by many scholars but on top of that, granting that it existed, Q has been used by Earl Doherty to argue his own position. Correct me if I am wrong, but the Q document is basically just sayings, sayings that might have originated in dreams, vision or as simply the kinds of things Jesus would command (and other possibilities) and seems not to allow us to distinguish the speaker as a human who once lived on Earth. Most astonishingly, MacDonald comes perilously close to conceding mythicism when he says Paul’s Jesus is a mythical Jesus.

    Have done a bit of digging, it seems Macdonald doesn’t quite offer much of a defense against Mark Goodacre and others who argue Q didn’t exist. He briefly details the Farrer hypothesis, and rebuts it with a handful of examples in which Luke seems to have more primitive material than Matthew. However, might this also be explained if Luke worked with a more primitive Matthew than the final canonized form? Q may not be a radically unlikely hypothesis but for me it is far from being clearly warranted. In any case, Macdonald’s reconstruction of Q includes John the Baptist, whom Macdonald characterizes as historical. However, the Q story he presents as historical is certainly fiction (“Mimetic Commentary on the Logoi of Jesus”) and most of the content in his hypothetical document is fiction.

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    Article by: Nicholas Covington

    I am an armchair philosopher with interests in Ethics, Epistemology (that's philosophy of knowledge), Philosophy of Religion, Politics and what I call "Optimal Lifestyle Habits."