Gamera

[QUOTE=spin]
You misconstrue. I make no such assumption. I'm suggesting that any writings that recorded the Augustan census/Judean census parallel were destroyed. Luke apparently got the story from various oral traditions, if at all, since his rendition seems garbled.

Well, we have document that assert that Jesus birth was somehow related to a known historical event. That is evidence on its face. You wish to obliterate that historical evidence by the absence of other historical evidence linking a Judean census with the Augustan census. I think were both on equally shakey ground, but that's just the nature of the beast for this period of time in this part of the world.

Well, because he said he talked to witnesses for one. Second, his narrative purports to be an account by witnesses. Third, his narrative refers to actual historical events. Sound like he talked to witnesses to me. And where were those witnesses. In Judea. So just like the rain in Spain falls mainly in the plalin, it sounds like Luke went to Judea to interview witnesses of the Jesus event, something a purported historian would be likely to do.

I'm not confusing anything. I'm simply pointing out that Luke states what he claims is an historical fact. Your rebuttal is based on the poor state of the records of the time, but you act as if we have certain knowledge of what happened at this time. We don't Admit it and move on.

Perhaps for the reason I've mentioned about ten times: he got the narrative from an oral or family tradition that linked a Judean census with the Augustan census, and it got garbled over time.

May be, may be not. The point is, if Luke got the details garbled whether this is true or not doesn't matter. If a Judean census occured at about the time of the Augustan census, for whatever cockamamie reason now lost in time, and if knowledge of that census were kept alive by oral tradition, and if that tradition garbled the details (or Luke did), so that it or he conflated the two censuses, problem solved. Your anxiety about the details of Luke's rendition is salved.

He knew that it happened, and we know -- que mirabile -- that it happened right around Jesus' birth. If he confused it with a concurrent Judea census, problem solved and your anxieties about Luke's details vanish.

I'm contributing an utter rebuttal to your position, which has perplexed you for about 10 posts now.

spin

Do you normally build cases on conjecture? You have a text which is obviously confused, mentioning an Augustan census (apografh no less!) in the same breath as the Quirinius census, which was an apografh, of 6 CE. You then proceed to take that confused statement as a working hypothesis.

As already indicated, the source is highly questionable in its confusion.

Rubbish. We turn to what we know of history to see if the untested statement is consistant. In this case it isn't and on numerous grounds.

You have no grounds to comment. You display a lack of knowledge of the historical context, such as your misinformed opinions about Rome during the reign of Augustus..

You misconstrue the text. You will notice that the beginning of the text talks of "us", not "me". There is no statement from the gospel that conforms to your assertion.

Again, no. It purports to be derived from eye-witnesses. What that derivision is doesn't get stated.

So does Ben Hur. Please deal with the topic you are trying to deal with.

I understand your wishful thinking. But the text itself being mainly derived from Mark should convince you otherwise.

So when Gore Vidal wrote about ancient Persia, his sources were from there, right? I'm still waiting for even one solid fact in your diatribe.

I think you should stick to musicals.

Because a writer locates an event in an apparent hisotircal context, you cannot conclude that he is presenting it as a historical fact. Look at the works of Judith and Tobit. Naive literalism is not very much use in this discussion.

My comments are based on historical knowledge of the behaviour of Augustus. You are hopeful that you can plead lack of data for want of anything useful to say. This is so often the case: the apologist when nothing else works tries to say, we don't know enough and then stonewalls. You're in good company along with the cadres of apologists who feel they have to come here and do their witnessing.

I can't help the fact that you know next to nothing about Augustus and h is behaviour in the early principate. Why don't you get into Augustan administration rather than talking through your hat?

If you accept that the tradition got garbled over time, then you dismiss the veracity of your text, which you claim was based on that tradition. What else was based on garbled traditions? Was anything in the text actually derived from reality?

You have merely made my case for me. He got it ballsed up according to you, though you have no means of decideing what in the text you can salvage as you have no frame of reference for doing so.

How would you know what the writer knew? You've already admitted that he has garbled traditions.

Shite, that's deep there, Gamera. The census was the contextualisation provided by the writer. Que mirabile???

You're still running on empty, admitting that the tradition he was using may well have been garbled, yet your grimly holding onto the literal statements as fact. That's pretty hopeless.


I'm glad I'm not paying for your legal services.

You are still farting about, neither knowing anything about the historical context (nor wanting to), nor doing your source any service by admitting that he may well have got garbled tradition. What would you think of someone so confused as to adhere to the veracity of a text while undermining that veracity?

I'll leave you with the final say.

Next!


spin

JoeWallack

JW:
Well than, I have Good News and Bad News. The Good News is that at this point I can say:

"Now we are getting somewhere!"

The Bad News is I say it in an Inspector Clouseau voice. Seriously though, this is farther than we ever got with Richbee/VexVerizon/?.

Let me make a point here that Spin has alluded to except I'll make it even clearer. Uncertainty regarding a Conclusion can be due to an Understanding of the related Evidence which is than the Cause of the Uncertainity Or a Lack of Understanding of the related Evidence, in which case the Cause is the Lack of Understanding of the Evidence and not the Evidence itself.

Apologists have a goal of creating Doubt as to any Conclusion regarding Errancy. In order to create Doubt they will sometimes Transfer Uncertainty they have towards the Evidence to Uncertainity towards a Conclusion by anyone, including those who don't share their Uncertainty towards the Evidence. Now at this point I Am not saying you're an Apologist and I'm not saying you are not (sound familiar?).

JW:
Ookay, time for the next clarification. You have testified that where you wrote, "I think proti ordinarily means before", you meant, "I think proti ordinarily means first". Where you wrote "this is not a clear passage and scholars with better facility with NT Greek have suggested readings that use proti to refer to that most notable of all censuses, the Augustan census" are you trying to say that Bible scholars you respect think prwth means "before" here?



Joseph

Gamera

[QUOTE=JoeWallack][COLOR="Blue"]Which begs the question and doesn't resolve it, a common problem with Detractor logic.

Actually I have no such goal, since I said before and I'll say it again, the circumstances surrounding Jesus' birth are irrelevant to Christianity in my opion. The gospel message is not the gospel narrative. But to try to dispell ambiguity in a text by claiming it is generated by a particular reader shows a great deal of naivety about semiotics. An ambiguity exists if a texts meaning is unclear to a reader. It's fair to say many readers, including me, find Luke 2 a garbled narrative. You don't. That doesn't mean ambiguity doesn't exist only that you have resolved in favor of a particular reading (not surprisingly)

I don't really respect scholars. I respect readings. My perusal of the literature on Luke 2 suggests to me that arguably proti could mean not first, though grammatically it would be an odd usage. Being a Anglo-Saxonist, I face odd grammatical passages in Old English all the time, so that doesn't really offend me. Language isn't normalized except by bad scholars. But my real point of contact with this possibility is that a possible, though rare, grammatical use of proti, links Jesus's birth with a known historical event and we're pretty sure Jesus was born around the time of that event. Don't you find that odd? That a possible ambiguity in Luke just by pure chance places Jesus's birth at the time we now believe it actually happened. I suggest that that the best resolution to this is to consider this passage a garbled reference to some tradition or other that imputed a Judean census around the time of the Augustan census. The tradition doesn't even have to be true, as far as that goes, it's just the explanation Luke glommed onto to explain how Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Again, if Luke was just in a fictive mood, he could have come up with a much clearer, much more plausible explanation (they were visiting relatives). Further, this comports with the texts' claim that the author interviewed witnesses, who would presumably have knowledge of such a tradition. Finally, no detractor stepped forward at the time and said, rubbish, the Augustan census didn't apply to Galilee. Christianity had a lot of detractors, for a long time, but no text includes this criticism.

On the whole, an obscure passage, and not the clear historical bungle you make it out to be.

Gamera

[QUOTE=spin]One hardly knows what to do with this. Using this standard, there is no historical text. All historiography has garbled parts. You seem to have trouble dealing with the ambiguity of the past.

Yes, the Augustan/Judean census is the basis of the passage.

Gamera

I don't know what your case is, since your posts tend to wander, but if your interpretation of Luke 2 is that Luke made up a Judean census, then no, I haven't made your case. The opposite is true: the text bears the stamp of a garbled tradition of a Judean census, which got mixed up with the Augustan census, for whatever reason. The point is, this explains the passage better than your typical detractor posturing about your total knowledge of history. It is supported by the text's own statements of the authors methodology. It conforms to what we know about oral tradition (in about 100 years they get garbled)

Diogenes the Cynic

The only thing garbled is your own arguments about this. Let me try to simplify (again). There couldn't have been a census in Judea before 6 CE. Luke is not "garbled" in his assignment of that census to Quirinius. He didn't make it up, he just used it as a device to get Jesus to Bethlehem. His association (if that's what he's doing) of this census with Augustus' survey of Roman citizens in 8 BCE may show a garbled understanding of what that census was about, who it applied to or when it occurred, or he may have been reaching for a way to make Joseph look like an obedient Roman subject, but none of that changes the fact that the FIRST Roman census of Judea took place in 6 CE. There were none prior to that nor could there have been.

Furthermore, no census of Judea would have affected the residents of Galilee anyway. Galilee was a separate Tetrarchy under the authority of Antipas, and outside the jurisdiction of the Judean census and of Quirinius.

Gamera

[QUOTE=spin]

You take all this much too personally, almost as if, like most detractors, you have an agenda.

Toto

We ask that posters not speculate about other posters' motives or mental states. Confine your response to the arguments.

Thank you

Toto, mod

Gamera

Something's garbled because the Quirinus census was later than the Augustan census, but Luke insists there's a relationship. He's either making stuff up (your resolution) or he knows something you don't know, but isn't expressing it explicitly because it's a tradition whose details got mixed up over time.

Since he purports to be making an orderly account, based on eyewitnesses, I suggest the latter is the better explanation.

Why do you find it so hard to accept that historical events get garbled? It's common, if not inevitable.