From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Wed Oct 16 2002 - 21:25:19 BST
Horse and all you Jesus freaks:
>
Horse said:
> How do we know what the _authentic_ teachings of Jesus really are. As far
> as I know he
> wasn't too big on the writing stuff down side and (as with Socrates) what
> we know of him
> and his teachings is entirely second-hand. Also...
>
[David Buchanan]
There is a little thing called the "international Q project" that
has worked in recent years to use various scholarly techniques to determine
which saying of Jesus can reasonably be attributed to the historical person.
There were a whole bunch of experts working on this and the project's
chairman, James Robinson, has published their findings in book called "The Q
Gospel". Their techniques and conclusions are both fascinating.
Horse said:
> Still leaves the problem of what he said as opposed to what he's supposed
> to have said.
> And even then there's still a lot of controversy about the actual
> translations of the
> various recovered documents. Assuming he existed at all that is! :^)
>
[David Buchanan]
Alot of the most provocative and interesting stuff was eliminated
pretty early on, but some of it has been recovered. The Nag Hammadi texts,
for example, presents gnosticism, a kind of psychological and mystical form
of Christianity, which has some very interesting connections to
neo-Platonism and such. Since we can't very well go back in time with a
video camera, this kind of stuff will have to do. Finally, I'd say that it
doesn't matter much whether or not such a guy ever literally existed. The
ideas generated by this "fantasy" are worthy nonetheless.
Thanks,
DMB
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 10:37:58 GMT