Aug 29 2015 62 mins 36
By moving the Transfiguration to come after the 1st Passion Prediction (8:31 ), the redactor altered Mark's Gospel from clearly adoptionist to merely having adoptionist overtones, and screwed up the literary quality of the story. Were certain gospels, etc., excluded from the canon because they contained inconvenient statements that later church authorities were keen to gloss over? Any thoughts about the "family of Jesus" stuff, which I know of primarily from reading Mack and Eisenman? Could you please explain what the "rape of Dinah" story meant at that time? It occurs to me the "four facts" that Habermas, Licona, and Craig say prove the resurrection can be explained by something I've never seen the HLC crew challenged with: hoax. Have you, or other scholars, explored the possibility that the founding executive of Christianity was an insincere opportunist, along the lines of Lucian's Alexander, or Joseph Smith, or L. Ron Hubbard? Might the statement concerning John that "the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he is" (Mt. 11:11 ) be Marcionite in origin? How would we recognize an original autograph manuscript of a NT book if we did find it? Is it fair to say that you are a full mythicist, while Bart Ehrman is a majority 75% or 90% mythicist? Why would someone trying to write a history intentionally do artsy things that expose it as literature? Are we to understand that the gospels were not intended to be history?
