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To send us a longer email, please send it to FamilyVoterBloc@aol.com The Impact of The Fictional New Testament The Oral Tradition Theory of New Testament Origins I first heard The New Testament, and in fact the whole Bible, declared a collection of myths by a man who had not ever read much of anything, and did not even know that such a thing as New Testament scholarship exists. I have since heard others, like him in their lack of scholarly attainments, say the same thing. Some very scholarly writers, on the other hand, offer reasons, starting with a lack of contemporary mention, for challenging New Testament historicity, but do not take the obvious step of declaring it a Greek Novel, a work of fiction. In point of fact, however, aside from Luke 3:1, The New Testament contains not one solo word of historical truth. Let me make my stance clear. I firmly and unequivocally accept Christian morality and Christian values, as The New Testament actually teaches them, and within the limits of capability live the Christian Way of Life which they define. I have discovered that Christian morality and Christian theology came into The New Testament from very different sources. Upgraded Pagan theology became Christian theology. Upgraded Pagan philosophy became Christian morality and values, and the Christian Way of Life. I have resolved Christianity into its theological and philosophical components. I have completely rejected the theology, and completely accepted the philosophy, and again within the limits of capability, have internalized that philosophy. The fictional New Testament impacted and still impacts me by making a philosopher out of me. At the risk of judging everybody by myself, I extrapolate this impact onto a large population of people who accept and internalize the fictional New Testament, and who become philosophers, each in his or her own style. On society at large, this impact will enormously upgrade the intellectual component of today’s culture. Thoughtful people welcome this upgrading of our incredibly thoughtless contemporary culture. While the internal evidence provided by The New Testament’s text clearly shows that more than one author contributed to it, that same internal evidence as clearly shows that a final editor gave it the thematic and linguistic coherence which characterizes it. Only a philosopher could impose coherence onto the Christian value system and Way of Life, and only a superlatively good linguist could impose upon it a language, which today we call New Testament Greek, that united widely different writing styles into one coherent book. Our final editor had both of these capabilities, otherwise the language would not seamlessly proclaim The New Testament’s thematic content. Its many historical inconsistencies actually contribute importantly to that seamless proclamation. As I once did, many people think of a philosopher as a person detached from the real world, living in a sheltered environment such as an Academic institution. The Christian who dumps theology for philosophy, however, becomes a pragmatic realist. He or she has dumped religious belief, and therefore all other belief which shall take precedence over pragmatic commitment to life in the real world. Professional philosophers consider abstraction from reality, in other words detachment from reality, an essential virtue. Pragmatic realists vigorously reject that detachment, and so do not consider themselves part of the professional philosophical community. The Christian value system and Way of Life, as actually taught in The New Testament, and detached from theology, adapts its internalizers to life as a pragmatic realist, to successful life in the real world. The Family Voter Bloc offers that value system and that Way of Life independently of theology. Christian Value System and Way of Life Both theological and philosophical Christians deplore the slide into Dionysian morality which has characterized our nation since the end of World War II. This slide particularly characterizes our entertainment culture, and the values and Way of Life there portrayed increasingly inspire emulation in people’s personal behavior. Unmarried people now head a majority of the nation’s households, in spite of the well documented advantages of marriage to those who enter successfully into it. Some cohabiting couples avoid marriage because they feel that the ceremony would commit them to values which they do not want to implement in their behavior toward each other and toward the world outside their marriage. The oaths of conventional marriage ceremonies scare them off, even when they intend to live conformably to those oaths. In this detail we confront a crucial difference between theological and philosophical Christianity. As certain elements of the Christian fringe have recognized, the whole idea of swearing oaths violates a direct commandment of Jesus. In Matthew 5:34 he says, do not oath at all. In a marriage ceremony without oathing the couple would simply answer yes to the question, do you want to marry each other?. We can expect that this innovation would attract many cohabiting couples into marriage. Phoebans (members of Phoebe, FVB) do not swear oaths except under compelling circumstances. The Christian Way of Life, as actually taught in The New Testament, offered independently of theology, will attract many people because of its commitment to pragmatic realism. Widespread acceptance of pragmatic realism and its Christian Way of Life would greatly improve the nation’s morality. We can count this improvement among the benefits of a widespread recognition of the fictional New Testament. The End of War President Bush got major prowar voter support from prowar Evangelicals. They base their thinking on the prophecies of the Bible, especially the prophecies in Revelation. A fictional New Testament makes possible a vigorous refutation of their convictions. The antiwar establishment can hammer endlessly and effectively on the mythological base of those convictions, and cripple this major political base of war support. We can end war as as policy, for the United States, of violently imposing democracy onto other nations, by becoming a majority voter base for antiwar sentiment. This imposition of democracy directly parallels and supports the Evangelistic imperative of imposing Christianity onto those nations. To cripple that imperative politically, which the fictional New Testament does, also cripples the political policy of the violent imposition of democracy. Antiwar activists have what The New Testament calls a kairon, an opportunity, to end war. Our successful imposition of an antiwar policy on our government will set an example for the rest of the world. Antiwar activists in all nations can follow that example, give or take variations which their particular circumstances mandate. We can not suppose that current antiwar sentiment will continue to prevail without militant advocacy. Lieberman in Connecticut, and a full page ad in The Wall Street Journal for November 21, 2006, demanding intervention in Darfur, suffice to show that prowar sentiment has not suffered much of a setback in this year’s election, and can easily mount a triumphant comeback. The fictional New Testament, however, will hit them where they live, and hard enough that they can not recover. What You Can Do You can participate in the pursuit of these three major goals by spreading the word about the fictional New Testament. It will help the cause immensely if you can successfully urge friends and other members of organizations to which you belong to get their own copies of FVB’s 46 page Newsletter for January 28, 2006, The Origin of The New Testament. When we reach a threshold of sales, The Origin will take off, and will then attract the attention of national media. Since it offers a new reconstruction of New Testament history, the news media, always looking for something both new and significant, will give it the boost it needs to achieve truly mass circulation. The consequences described in the foregoing paragraphs will then follow, as surely as day follows night. To make your contribution to the propagation of a new Christian morality, and to the end of war, and to move to the cutting edge of serious New Testament scholarship, urge others to send a check or money order for $10 for a rush copy of The Origin of The New Testament to FVB, P. O. Box 2753, North Canton, OH 44720. When The Origin reaches its critical threshold of sales, it will begin to inspire a whole industry of secondary literature. As an example of what we can expect, the treatise which follows explores the oral tradition of New Testament history. It demolishes a staple of Establishment historical reconstruction. Other refutations of Establishment doctrines will soon follow. The Oral Tradition Theory of New Testament Origins New Testament history today begins with the supposition of an oral tradition in which people who heard Jesus speak remembered some part of what he said, and some of them wrote their remembrances down, or told them to others who could write and who then wrote then down. The documents thus produced, according to the oral tradition, became source materials for the Synoptic Gospels. They became the text thru a process of aggregation of the fragmentary documents of those who first wrote the sayings and teachings on papyrus, the paper of the time. They would have written these fragmentary documents in Aramaic. Aggregators would then have collected these fragments into Aramaic manuscripts. The first Gospel of Mark emerged from this sequence of events, according to the oral tradition. At some point in the subsequent sequence someone with a rare command of both Aramaic and Greek would have translated this Aramaic version of Mark into Greek. Subsequent editors, the traditional scholars say, modified this original to produce the text which we presently have in Mark. During this time, the Oralists tell us, other collectors aggregated a collection of sayings of Jesus into a document called Q, the first letter of the German word Quelle, which means source. These collectors seem to have worked independently of the collectors and compilers of Mark, because the two collections have nothing in common. The author called Matthew, and the author called Luke, selectively blended Mark with Q, and with their own creative inputs, to produce their respective Gospels. Very many scholars accept and teach this oral tradition in their reconstructions of New Testament origins. Any challenge to the oral tradition can arise only outside the traditional scholarly community. In the traditional view, it solves the problem of a collection of documents, the Synoptic Gospels, which seem to have no traceable physical origin, but which most emphatically exist. Outside the traditional scholarly community, however, the analytical, realist historian can reject the oral tradition out of hand, denying it every vestige of historical truth. We take that stance here. We reject the oral tradition because no evidence whatsoever supports it. While the realist draws plausible conclusions from conflicting or ambiguous evidence, he or she rejects any conclusion which altogether lacks the support of evidence. The oral tradition evaporates into meaningless mythology when examined against this criterion. The Oralist can respond to this challenge by asking for examples of the kind of evidence the realist expects the oral tradition to have produced of its existence over its long and complex reconstituted history. Any such evidence would, these two thousand years later, consist of written words, either of the actual work of the writers tho first recorded the sayings and teachings of Jesus, or of the compilers who collected these original writings and compiled them into manuscripts, and these into still larger manuscripts, and then the Greek manuscripts produced by the first translators. A burning desire to produce written records of the sayings, teachings, and life of Jesus and those close to him motivated all these people. In order that they know about the Great Work, and who else participated in it, especially who had accepted responsibility for the first collections and compilations, they would exchange letters with each other. Some of these letters would summarize the progress made up to the time of their writing. Some of these letters, if only one or two, would have come down to us as primitive Gospels. The best of these primitive Gospels would have attracted followings of loyalists who would copy and distribute them, and above all else vigorously defend each one’s unique authenticity. Today we would have records of this conflict. The account called Q would have triggered an explosion of literary activity. Its content would put it in a class with the writings of the professional philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Epiktetos. It would have soon gained a following at least as numerous and dedicated as the followers affiliated with the most popular Gospel. Even today a market exists for a competent reconstruction of Q with a commentary which includes references to other philosophers whose writings have survived. A New Testament could have emerged in a literary environment characterized by competing Gospels, these competing further with Q. Translators would shift the major action from Aramaic to Greek. This scenario concedes that Paul existed. A Greek New Testament could then include his letters, which would have become the Scripture of a Christian sect devoted to the worship of an eternally preexistent Christ who dwelt briefly on Earth, long enough to suffer crucifixion for the sins of the world and, resurrected, provided deliverance to believers. This Greek New Testament could accommodate books written in excellent Greek, like James and Hebrews. A New Testament would in fact have emerged from this welter of competitive Gospels, philosophical treatises, and collections. More than one authority figure, perhaps even the Emperor himself, would want his name on the dedication page of a canonical New Testament text. By this time, the primitive Gospels, while surviving in manuscript form, would have given way in the marketplace to sophisticated versions which included fictional embellishment. They would differ as much from each other as John differs from the Synoptics. Our compiler would select four or five of these Gospels, a version of Q, letters such as James, Jude, and Hebrews, and a collection of Paul’s letters, for the new Canon. Fierce controversy would characterize any attempt to compile this Canonical text. Fundamentalist theologians would attempt to exclude Q because of its philosophical stance, but their efforts would fail. While the sect of Paulists could not deny the compiler the option of including Paul’s letters in the new Canon, they would resist the whole idea of a Canon because the sect which promoted it would eventually absorb its competition, including the Paulists. It would make conversion easy for all competitors by including doctrines aimed at making conversion easy. The controversies would generate a papyrus shortage across the whole Greco-Roman Empire. Scholars today could devote lifetime careers to sifting thru a surviving mountain of written records. Any proposed reconstruction of New Testament origins which depends on the unconstrained association of cooperating players can not avoid a measure of the complications described here. Our own New Testament, however, lacks the faintest vestige of any such origin. The Oralists correctly discerned that its writers worked in total secrecy, completely isolated from the social world outside their group. To satisfy the Oralists, however, this secrecy would have lasted more than 100 years. We nevertheless accept the idea of the oral tradition that a group working in social isolation produced The New Testament. All groups like this conspire to do what they do. The conspiracy concept applies in full force here. A conspiracy wrote The New Testament, and succeeded in keeping its existence secret, until now. Analysis of the massively many parallels between Dio Chrysostom’s Discourses and The New Testament, connecting the obvious dots, reveals that he headed the conspiracy. FVB’s 89 page newsletter for February 7, 2008, 006, tells the story. To get your own rush copy of this newsletter, send check or money order for $10 to The Family Voter Bloc P. O Box 2753 North Canton, OH 44720. Return to top Return to Home Page |
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