mlt5198

Well, still not the best place for this comment, but that said…

1a) The Septuagint, Enoch, Homer, possibly early Josephus, and other Jewish apocrypha, the Epistles of Paul, and possibly the missionary teachings of Paul and other Christians. And his own literary imagination.

1b) Mark invented the sayings of Jesus, mostly or wholly (and when mostly, he is adapting sayings received by revelation passed down by the apostles). There was not likely any Q. Luke is redacting Matthew, in a freer style at several points. See Goodacre, The Case against Q</em>.

2) The latter. See Goodacre, Thomas and the Gospels.

3) Entirely a forgery. Josephus never mentioned Christ in any capacity. See my chapter on Josephus in Hitler Homer Bible Christ (that’s a reprint of my peer reviewed academic article).

Many thanks again for your time and thoughts on the previous collection of questions that I posted. I read a good deal of the material that you linked to your response and they were instructive and informative as always.

I have a couple more questions:

1) What do you feel the author(s) of the Gospel of Mark used as his sources for the complex redaction/synthesis that he achieved in his gospel? Do you feel that the parables and logia attributed to Jesus might have originated from a non-Q written source that is no longer extent or do you feel Mark put them into Jesus’ mouth as a part of his redaction editing?

2) As a corollary to that, what are your thoughts on the relationships between the canonical Gospels and the Gospel of Thomas. Do you feel that they shared a common source for the logia material or do you think the author of Thomas read the canonical gospels and simply de-deified what was read about Jesus?

3) Do you feel that the reference to Jesus in the Testimonium Flavianum in the Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus is entirely a forgery by a later Christian interpolator(s) or do you feel that it might have contained an authentic reference that originally was potentially highly suspicious of Jesus’ existence or his messiahship? Do you take Origen’s reference to Josephus as “although not believing in Jesus as the Christ” to mean that the Testimonium wasn’t present in the copy Origen possessed or that it had a authentic reference to a Jesus, but was deprecatory?

Many thanks again for your time and research!!!

mlt5198

Would you accept a smaller party of…one…for a free course? Kidding.