teilhard

The Gospels are Stories about EVENTS and PERSONS ...

Apollodorus gives us stories about events and persons.  So does Charles Dickins.  So does Dan Brown.

teilhard

Not quite.

Apollodorus, Herakles, Charles, Dan and so on are directly relevant to this forum and this thread since they illuminate the fictive processes of the gospel writers.

There's no doubt that Paul's theology is much more Greek than Hebrew too.

teilhard

The Literary Conventions of The First Century C. E. Mediterranean Regional Culture(s) is a DIFFERENT Question also ...

Fiction is fiction, whether written by writers of the 1st century CE Mediterranean Regional Cultures or by Dan Brown.

And the gospels and the rest of the NT are chock-a-block with fiction.

(I don't mind if you'd prefer to refer to it by sub-genres of fiction, such as 'myth', or 'parable' or 'instructive story' or 'folktale' &c, as long as you make it clear what you're doing.)

teilhard

And "Geschichte" is "Geschichte" ...

Geschichte has two central meanings - 'history' and 'tale' - so that one says Geschichtswissenschaft when wishing to indicate 'history' unambiguously.

It's sloppy thinking to confuse the two meanings, as you like to do but no scholar does.

YES ... !!!  Getting  The NATURE of The Text Right -- CORRECTLY understanding The NATURE of  The Story -- IS both BASIC and CENTRAL ...

The NATURE of The Story in the NT is fiction.

The only historical things we know about Jesus with any confidence are negatives - if he existed then he didn't perform miracles, fulfill OT messianic prophecy or undergo a real bodily resurrection after a real death.

As with fiction, some real things may be invoked - James Bond may be said to be in London with the Prime Minister, and Jesus may be said to be in Jerusalem with Pontius Pilatus.  Such details don't make either James Bond or Jesus historical.

If the fictions are hung on the peg of an historical person, it's a person about whom we have no historical information.  Perhaps if he lived at all, he lived in the first three decades or so of the 1st century CE, or perhaps he lived in the 1st century BCE.  Perhaps he copied the Cynic philosophers in advocating a life of poverty or perhaps his message was simply Paul's, that congregations must pay their priests. Perhaps he was a follower of John the Baptist, or perhaps the author of  Mark brings John the Baptist into the tale to beef up Jesus' credentials  by association.

But it's no less possible (and in my view, on balance more possible) that he was always a skygod as Paul says, whose only encounters with the earth were the fictions of an unnamed Jewish mother and a wholly unexplained crucifixion - until later the author of Mark invented a more elaborate earthly fiction about him, by cobbling together purported OT messianic prophecies, using Josephus's account of the trial of Jesus son of Ananus, and adding miracle tales to his taste.

teilhard

(1)  "Geschichte" is "History" told with its Meaning(s) ... (as Distinct, but not Separate, from "Historie," which is spare "History" told as bare "Facts" ) ...

Geschichte, as I said, means either 'history' or 'story'.  Historie is a musty old German word (from Latin, 13th cent) meaning 'history' or 'organized knowledge'.

Regardless, the essential thing is to distinguish 'history' from 'stories', historical fact from fiction purporting to be or mistaken for fact.

You of course feel vulnerable talking about the difference, which is why you always want to keep things vague and unspecific.

(2)  You make an ASSERTION ... So what ... ??? You state your OPINION as "Fact" ...

FACT: If there was an historical Jesus, no one has identified him in history yet.

FACT: We first hear stories of Jesus from Paul.  Paul (a) tells us expressly that everything he knows about Jesus comes not what others have told him, but exclusively out of his own head and (b) on that basis, in any event says nothing more of an earthly Jesus than that he was born of an unknown Jewish mother, had some relation to Jerusalem, was crucified but with no who, what, when, where or why, and was buried.

FACT: Mark (hence the other gospels) is very largely fiction and quite possibly wholly fiction. For  the miracle tales, including the fulfillment of prophecy stuff, this is self-evident.  We know the trial of Jesus is "borrowed' from Josephus.  And so on.  As with Mark, so with the others.  No relevant part of the NT can be shown to be an historical account of Jesus.

But you're quibbling and obstructing - you know all this already.