- Some points in the NT are demonstrably true - for example Jerusalem existed
I get that too, but that's so fully irrelevant that it boggles the mind. I mean, equally New York exists, but that isn't evidence that anything else in Spiderman is real. Transylvania is real, but that doesn't make anything of substance in Dracula real. Moskow and the Napoleonic Wars in War And Peace are demonstrably true, but that doesn't make Count Piotr Bezukhov historical.
Setting historical fiction in the context of some real historical places and events isn't even new. Homer used it too. And before him the story of Wenamun used real places as a setting, but it is historical fiction. So, yeah.
- Some points are demonstrably false (for example catering for 5,000 with 5 loaves and two fish in phelix's opinion)
Which, however is a good reason to doubt anything else in there. They say insanity is doing the same thing ten times and expecting a different result. If someone blatantly lied to your face about nine thing, just believing him about the tenth without any independent confirmation, is insane.
- Many points are neither one nor the other and cannot be independently verified
Which is reason enough to take them by default as likely false, in a document which lied about so many things we can verify.
- phelix claims that analysis of the gospels, for example, show that they come from independent sources and so that it is unlikely that they came from a single fictitious source
1. BUT, and that's a big but, we don't know what those sources are, and by what criterion they were connected to the Jesus of the NT.
By comparison for example, as I've said before, while we no longer have the primary sources for Alexander, the secondary sources cite the primary sources. We don't have to guess where something came from. We can know what parts came from Aristoboulus, and we can know who he was, or that he was an eyewitness.
By comparison, WTH is actually Q? Who wrote it? When? Were they making it up?
Collections of fictive smart sayings of some fictive character are as old as the world and still going. E.g., the whole Nasreddin Hodja set of parables. While he was a real teacher and cleric, most of the parables told about him are made up by people who didn't even know who he was: he was just the traditional guy to use when you need to put smart words in someone's mouth. In fact, people are
still making up new Nasreddin Hodja stories in Azerbaijan. There were whole magazines dedicated to periodically publishing new Nasreddin Hodja stories.
Can you treat those as an independent source of Nasreddin Hodja? No. They're made up fiction.
In the case of Jesus we know that they made up stories and sayings about him. There were literally dozens of gospels written about him, one more fantastic than the other. One even has him subdue dragons as an infant. (The Infancy Gospel Of Thomas.) They even had whole sayings gospels. (E.g., the Gospel Of Thomas, not to be confused with the infancy one.) It didn't even stop there. They continued adding smart Jesus stuff, waay into the middle ages. (E.g., the story of the woman taken in adultery.)
So how
did Q originate? Is it just a collection of urban legends? Or what? There is no author cited or anything.
Was it even originally written about Jesus, or just repurposed stories that were originally about other wise men? (Yes, they had a Nasreddin Hodja kinda thing already going for centuries. Smart sayings of some wise or holy man were doing the rounds all around the Mediterranean.)
Even if we assume it was about someone named Jesus -- which, again, is not a given for a document nobody even saw or mentioned as existing back then -- which Jesus? Just count the Jesuseseses in Josephus. It was as common a name as Joshua is in the USA.
2. But there is something even more perverse in there. Even granting multiple sources, we don't actually have independent confirmation. Just about any given event or saying actually comes from only one source. Either it's in Mark (and copied from there by Matthew and/or Luke), or it's in Q, or only in Matthew, or only in Luke. Even additional sources like the Gospel Of The Hebrews or the Gospel Of Thomas, actually don't add much, as basically they too either have different material or you can tell it's copied from the same source as the canonical ones. E.g., a bunch of material in the Gospel Of Thomas comes from Q too, so really at most it confirms the existence and content of Q (and possibly
IS Q), not the reality of the events in Q.
We have different sources all right, but they don't actually corroborate each other almost at all. They tell different things, wherever they didn't copy from each other. In fact, they even contradict each other all over the place.
I.e., it's BS.
- Therefore, because of the agreement between the gospels there must be some truth in there
No, there is no such thing as there "must" be anything more than can be supported. While the previous points were debatable, this one is plain old stupid nonsense.
There might or they might not be more true details in there, but there is no such thing as "must".
Just because several Santa stories agree about the North Pole residence or his coming on Christmas eve, and the North Pole and Christmas exist, doesn't mean there "must" be any other truths in Santa stories. Same here. There is no "must". That's unsupportable nonsense.
- but we cannot tell which bits are true
Which by itself would make the whole exercise irrelevant. But was already irrelevant anyway, because the previous step is just wishful thinking. Without that one, not only we don't know which or how many other details are true, we don't even know if there are
any at all.
