Do you want to tell us what the sources of the biblical narratives were?
I watched representative samples of that video and found Miller to be unfailingly polite, cordial and scholarly in his tone. So that means he must be correct, and I don’t have to pay any attention to the content of his claims.
I will say, it is much easier to do “scholarship” your way, Eddie, regardless of whether it produces any worthwhile results.
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That case will never evaporate. You probably say the same thing about the theory of evolution. Right? My parents were non-religious Jews as is my entire family. Many of my friends are as well. I can tell you one thing that is off putting for Jewish people is that the names in the gospels are Greek especially the name Ιησους. The name you mentioned is not Simon it’s Ειμωνα. Τhe baptizer is Ιωαννης. The entire New Testament is supposedly about a Jewish holy man but who seems to know almost nothing about Jewish traditions of the time (a Jewish woman had no right of divorce cf: Mark 10:11-12), who quotes from the Septuagint instead of the Hebrew texts and drinks wine as blood which is an anathema for religious Jews and is a tradition that comes from a pagan ritual prevalent in Gentile agriculture cults - these facts are some of the reasons Jews reject Jesus. The notion that Jesus never even existed is also a lot more common among the Jewish people than you probably realize. No one in my family believed or believes such a person ever existed.
It isn’t a mainstream idea among the people with sufficient education in history, philology, and religion to offer a relevant opinion. It may be a mainstream idea among the sort of lay people who find Erich von Daniken or Velikovsky convincing, who think that Elvis is still alive, etc. If those are the people you want to impress with your Biblical scholarship, that’s fine, but I aim for a slightly more discriminating audience.
We “know” no such thing. You’re offering crank scholarship again. The latest date accepted for the Five Books by most Hebrew scholars is just after the Babylonian captivity, centuries earlier than your date, and that’s just for the compilation, with parts of the work having been composed centuries earlier – too early for the authors to have been familiar with the Agamemnon story.
You’re not listening – again. It is not just Christian scholars, but the vast majority of Jewish, agnostic, and atheist scholars, who think a historical Jesus existed.
Not always, and if you mean “caves” in the proper sense, i.e., natural formations, almost never. There wouldn’t have been enough natural caves in all of Palestine to house the hundreds of thousands who died there during Hellenistic times. So you must be talking about “caves” excavated out of rock. But even that does not exhaust the options for the Greek term: “Contexts of the biblical references in which the various terms appear do not make clear whether the tomb involved was a natural cave, an excavated underground chamber, a trench-type grave, or a tower-type structure.” (For this, and six double-column pages on “Tomb”, I refer you to The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Volume 4, pp. 663-670.) So your attempt to identify “tomb” with “cave” must be rejected.
In any case, given your own hypothesis, i.e., that Mark self-consciously borrowed this episode from Homer, he would have used the word that Homer used for the cave of the Cyclops, i.e., speos (Odyssey, Bk. 9, line 180 et seq.); or rather, since that term is not found in Biblical Greek, he would have used the etymologically related term spelaion, found throughout the Greek Bible. So why didn’t he say that the madman lived among the spelaia?
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What your family believed, or more generally what “Jewish people” believe, is irrelevant. Only what “Jewish scholars” believe is relevant. Only the scholars are competent to render a judgment on the existence or non-existence of a figure who purportedly lived 2,000 years ago.
No, the nominative form of the name is “Simon” (long o); “Simona” would be the accusative. Or are you talking about the Aramaic form of the name during Jesus’s day? If so, please cite some Aramaic sources where the name can be found. If you’re talking about the modern Hebrew form of the name, as used by today’s Jews, that’s irrelevant to historical questions.
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You mean people who believe in magic and miracles? That’s a discriminating audience? LOL!
What are the oldest OT texts we have? Dating anything before that is nothing more than wishful thinking.
Based on what facts exactly?
There are no Aramaic sources. That Jesus spoke Aramaic is more made-up rubbish coming from Christians.
Now I showed my cards. You folded. You’re done.
By that reasoning, Caesar wrote De Bello Gallico some time in the 9th Century CE. Are you sure you want to go with that?
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Nobody is trying to prove De Bello Gallico is a sacred text, inspired and magical and we all need to believe that or burn in hell for all eternity. The Christian orthodoxy uses a pseudoscientific approach to the biblical texts. They start with a conclusion and then make assumptions from that. “Well, it talks about the Babylonian captivity so that’s the time when it must have been written!”
So, let’s look at the Book of Daniel. We don’t know who wrote Daniel or for that matter many of the other books in the Bible. Pseudepigrapha is the literary category of Daniel. We know the book was written during the time of Antiochus, around 167 BC and completed before 164 BC. However, Daniel is crafted as if it had been written centuries earlier. We have to understand that Daniel was written for a Jewish audience who correctly interpreted it as an apocalypse concerning the destruction of Jerusalem. But to Christians Daniel had accurately predicted the rise of Antiochus centuries earlier so his prophecy about the Son of Man was sure to be fulfilled soon. This misunderstanding led to and to this day still leads to false expectations.
By the way you remind me of James Tour when he says that we are completely clueless about the origin of life. You seem to be saying that we are completely clueless about the sources of the biblical narratives. Perhaps you are but scholars of ancient literature are not. You’re looking for the kind of wooden, word for word parallels that we find in the gospels between Luke and Matthew and their source material that is in Mark. If you don’t know what you’re reading the parallels between Homer and Mark will naturally appear weaker. There are six criteria used to detect intertextual referencing: accessibility or availability, interpretability or intelligibility, analogy, density, order and distinctiveness. Students in ancient Greek schools learned to write through mimesis or in Latin schools imitatio. Jewish poets also imitated Homer, “On the Jews” by Theodotus, “The Book of Tobit”, “On Jerusalem” by Philo Epicus.
These require patience, knowledge of the Homer and other Greek texts and some generosity in order to discover and appreciate them. The parallels pertain to plot elements and motifs, not copying. They conceal and reveal, occult and disclose. What Mark does is called trans-valuation which was quite common in antiquity. The source material for these emulations is known to the readers and so they recognize the trans-valuation’s attempt “to speak better.” Telemachus fed 4500 but Jesus fed 5000. Hector and Jesus both die at the end of the story but Jesus is raised from the dead. The authors of Homer and Mark lived and wrote in different cultural (mythical versus historical settings), religious (many Gods versus one God), literary (poetry versus prose) and political worlds.
Hardly relevant to the point, is it? The point is that the oldest known manuscripts are only a lower limit to the age of the original text.
No, I only say that you are completely clueless.
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I asked you where you think the biblical narratives came from. You ignored me. Not surprised.
Different ones come from different places. That’s not a serious question. I suggest that the earlier books come from tribal legends, some of the later OT books may contain some actual histories, and the gospels come from legends or original imagination about the life of Jesus, likely with some occasional bits of real history. You present no evidence that any of the sources are the Odyssey or anything Greek. This is in no way my field, but even I can tell you’re out to lunch.
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Well you’re wrong. There are simply too many examples of parallels for them to be coincidental. You don’t undertsand them even though I explained how they work. You don’t want to understand. I understand that.
The Murders of Agamemnon and John the Baptist
Odyssey — Mark 6:17-29
The causes of the murders of Agamemnon and John the Baptist were royal menage a trois between unfaithful women, their lawful husbands, and close relatives of their husbands. Agamemnon and John represent threats to illicit unions.
Odyssey: Homer narrated the story as a flashback
Mark: Mark narrated the story as a flashback
Odyssey: Clytemnestra forsook her husband for her husband’s cousin
Mark: Herodias forsook her husband for her husband’s brother
Odyssey: Clytemnestra sought to kill Agamemnon, who posed a threat to her affair.
Mark: Herodias sought to kill John, who posed a threat to her affair.
Odyssey: Aegisthus hosted a banquet and invited the king and his soldiers
Mark: Antipas hosted a banquet and invited dignitaries
Odyssey: Agamemnon was slain amid serving dishes
Mark: John was beheaded, and his head was brought in on a platter
Odyssey: The feast was befouled by murder
Mark: The feast was befouled by murder
Odyssey: The murder of Agamemnon anticipates the perils Odysseus will face
Mark: The murder of John anticipates the perils Jesus will face
Curious detail about Jesus and the demons. Instead of just annihilating the demons or exorcising them and sending them into some immaterial realm or whatever, Jesus elects instead to force them into some pigs and then mind-control the pigs to run into the sea. Truly odd.
Reminds me of the story of the God-Emperor of mankind (in the Warhammer 40.000 novel Master of Mankind) who comes to the Eldar webway during the late stages of the siege of Terra, to assist his forces in their battles against the chaos-spawned demonic forces of the warp inside the webway. In this story, the God-Emperor faces off with a legendary demon of immense power known as Drach’nyen. Somehow despite the God-Emperor’s unfathomable psychic might, he is unable to annihilate (erase it from existence) Drach’nyen or just banish it back into the warp (as he was able to do with myriads of lesser demons). Instead he faces off with the demon in melee combat and though being wounded in the process himself, is able to bind the demon into a physical object, creating a demon-possessed sword. He then throws this sword into the torso of one of his loyal subordinates, though without killing him, and then orders his subject to run away and disappear with this sword still stuck in his body.
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Obviously the story of the Gadarene swine was inspired by Warhammer. QED.
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Well I dunno, John. I find Boris quite refreshing on Biblical historicity.
What, like a palate-cleanser?
Perhaps more like an anointing.
Anointing and Recognition
Odyssey 19.108-507 — Mark 14:1-11
When Odysseus returns to Ithaca and spends time at the house of Eumaios, the swineherd, he is disguised as a beggar. He goes to his palace and his wife Penelope doesn’t recognize him. She tells Odysseus’s old nurse Eurycleia to bathe and anoint him with oil. Eurycleia recognizes the scar on his thigh and realizes she is washing her master. Eurycleia is the only one who knows the beggar’s identity. The recognition of Odysseus by his scar is the model for the recognition of the risen Jesus by his wounds in Luke and the doubting Thomas story in John.
When Jesus is in the home of Simon the leper a woman enters and opens a jar of pure nard and anoints Jesus’ head with it. The apostles complain that this is a waste of money but Jesus rebukes them and tells them that she is anointing him before his burial. Like the demon in Luke 4:34, the unnamed woman knows more about Jesus and his destiny than the disciples do. The woman is not named but Jesus tells the apostles that wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her. What is the name that means “Far-flung Fame”? Eurycleia, the name of the woman who anoints Odysseus.
Odyssey: After giving these prophecies, Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, sat by himself.
Mark: After giving these prophecies, Jesus sat at a table in the humble home of a leper.
Odyssey: Eurycleia came in with a bowl of water and washed his feet; later she anointed him richly with oil.
Mark: A woman came in with an expensive alabaster jar of ointment and poured the oil on Jesus’ head.
Odyssey: She dropped the brass vessel to the ground, spilling all the water. She alone recognized her king.
Mark: She alone recognized Jesus would die.
Odyssey: Odysseus and Eurycleia discussed the treachery of some of the servants who sided with the suitors.
Mark: The Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray them.
These sorts of arguments remind me of the ways that Denton argues for design.
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That’s because you don’t understand how these stories were transvalued. See you just learned a new word. The parallels pertain to plot elements and motifs, not copying. Also, you haven’t seen the mountain of evidence. When almost every narrative has an older parallel that’s called overwhelming evidence. BTW the detractors here sound just like James Tour.
The Calming of the Storm
Odyssey 10.1-69— Mark 4:35-41
Odyssey: Odysseus’s crew boarded and sat down.
Mark: Jesus boarded and sat down to teach.
Odyssey: On a floating island Odysseus told stories to Aeolus.
Mark: On a floating boat Jesus told stories to the crowds.
Odyssey: After a month he took his leave, boarded and sailed with twelve ships.
Mark: When it was late, he took his leave, and sailed. Other boats were with him.
Odyssey: Odysseus slept.
Mark: Jesus slept at the stern.
Odyssey: The greedy crew opened the sack of winds and created a storm. “All the winds rushed out.”
Mark: A storm arose. “And there was a great gale of wind.”
Odyssey: The crew groaned.
Mark: The disciples were helpless and afraid.
Odyssey: Odysseus awoke and gave up hope.
Mark: Jesus awoke and stilled the storm.
Odyssey: Odysseus complained of his crew’s folly.
Mark: Jesus rebuked his disciples for lack of faith.
Odyssey: Aeolus was master of the winds
Mark: Jesus was master of the winds and the sea.