Sheshbazzar

What is really funny about Adam proposing this textual chop-suey of his is that he claims to be a believer.

Tell us Adam, why your god could not have simply inspired and directed one writer on what to write in each Gospel, (as was believed to have been the case by christians for over a thousand years) or like with Moses of the OT, had one self-identified writer for the entire New Testament?

Your attempts at divvying up the texts into so many fragments and layers only makes it sound like you think that your god was a dullard who was so stupid he couldn't get his shit together enough to get the text down right the first time.
Just what do you propose is the sense of each of these texts needing to be fabricated in chunks and piled up layers over a period of years by multiple contributors and editors?

Your flakey textual analysis methodology, along your apparent disrespect for the intelligence or the capabilities of your god is doing nothing to foster any confidence in either you or your god.
Arguments like yours here are damn near bad enough to even convert old Job himself into becoming an atheist!
Reading what you have been writing here, is possibly the best argument for NOT becoming a christian, if this is any example of what being a true christian is.





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Adam

I had decided in 1964 that Andrew wrote gJohn, never having read about the Muratorian Canon. When later I realized that gJohn was composite, I noted that the Muratorian Canon would support me with a tradition that contrasted with the usual solitary ascription to John. Only my theory (apart from standing pat with unitary authorship by John) supports my internal criticism with external criticism. It's apparently the correct remembrance, even though preserved in a document later than the first ascriptions to John.
At the time I started presenting this thread, I could not link to my second thread, Significance of John. Finally in my Post#368 I provided the following link to my (still incomplete) serialization of my 1988 article that provides the scholarly backing for my sources within gJohn:

Unfortunately I am not allowed to go back and edit my posts with links.
So for my post #18 that spin critiques above in Post #420, I derive the Signs Source in Post #30 in that thread, and give further considerations in Post #45.

Vorkosigan

Adam, I recommended this book not to refute your "thesis", but so you could learn how to construct a thesis. Your current claims are irrefutable.

That is why everyone is laughing.

Vorkosigan

Chili

Does anyone here think maybe that if we look with our eyes and see with our mind the transformation of human into man will not be seen with the eye but with only the mind? and so the cross that Jesus died on was not a pole but the human condition that he carried like a splinter in his eye to be removed by the very authority that had put it there when he first became a rational being which so makes this a non-rational event that was bigger than him.

I am reminded here now of my favorite line in the Spire where dean Jocelin's tower "was to rise another eighty feet into another chamber, with more lights, more hosannaing heads, more platforms and ladders, so that the mind winced to think of it; winced at any rate up here, where solidity balanced in midair among the birds, held its breath over a series of diminshing series of squares with a round hole at the bottom which nevertheless was the top."

. . . and then, finally, as downward he peered and to ruins applied himself he walingly [saw his own splinter] and then fell down thence by way of Annunciation and that is where the Gospels begin. So it is rather foolish to look for curbside eyewitnesses as the Spire was built on the crossroads of his own chest . . . whereupon it also crashed and so is why the English scholar may still be looking for it, or call it fiction perhaps, to solve the riddle in t.

Adam

Say what you will about this thread Gospel Eyewitnesses, but you did not enter the fray until your Post #53. You perhaps never looked at the bottom portion of my OP in which I presented evidence that the author of the Passion Narrative was "the disciple known to the High Priest" in John 18:15-16 and my reasoning that he was also the "another disciple" of John 20:2.

You did get involved from the outset in my second thread, Significance of John, but that thread has been inactive while I explored the "Pharisee..." thread and have been responding on this thread. Thus you may have forgotten that I there presented evidence for my arguments supporting my thesis in that thread. Perhaps we should re-engage there about a thesis that is refutable. The irony is that in this current thread I was deliberately making myself vulnerable by "letting it all hang out", you might say, to encourage debate about whether there really might be seven written eyewitness records about Jesus. "Your current claims are irrefutable" can be taken in a different way than you intended. The last thing you wanted was seven eyewitnesses raised from the dead, and now you're acknowledging you can't put any of them back in the grave? I could list all the vulnerabilites I'm exposed to, such as whether Teeple has been convincingly refuted (or even if his anarthrous Editor idea is unsupportable).

Regarding the point we're immediately discussing here, John Mark as author of the Passion Narrative, I could not document it in my 1988 article because I came up with the idea only in 2011. You may have relied on Joe Wallack's Post #45 here that dismissed my OP evidence about John Mark, but I think you will agree that he sets such a high stardard for proof that little could be said at all in this BC&H subforum. spin has just in #403 laid out my OP line-by-line to which I responded in my #405--see the bottom paragraph regarding "the other disciple" in John 20:2. I see my link states Post #187 in error, it should be #184, and the link actually goes to Post #1. Trying to get the link right now:
http://www.freeratio.org/showthread.php?t=306983&page=8
Yes, read my Post #184 for more about John Mark as author of the Passion Narrative.

Edited to add: I see now from your #49 in my Significance of John thread that you considered my OP here as presenting no argument. I'm expected to prove a fictional Mark is not fictional and wrote specific verses? No, I can't prove he is "the disciple known to the High Priest", but he is the best candidate.

Vorkosigan

Adam, the claim that John Mark is somehow the author or source for the Passion narrative is ridiculous on its face, and certainly you've made no case for it at all.

Vorkosigan

Adam

You don't mention it, Vork, so I'll assume that you have not just read my two screens-full of text posted eleven hours previously in my second thread, Significance of John. As you can see there, I am under the impression that there are two major portions (the bottom of my OP here in this thread and the first six paragraphs of my first article in Noesis)
http://megasociety.org/noesis/181.htm#Common
that you have not read (or considered adequately) yet. (The former omission due to your late start on this thread and the latter due to my mistake in linking to the wrong article.)

Vorkosigan

Adam, I read the whole thread and the article at the link....

Scholars don't do "commonsense analysis." They do critical analysis. The use of "we" may have been conventional in ancient texts and says nothing about the author's relationship to the topic. This was discussed here at Infidels years ago, in fact, and if you type this text you'll find an old post on ChristianCadre by one of the pro-Jesus discussants. Here is the original paper by Vernon Robbins:

http://www.religion.emory.edu/facult...SeaVoyages.pdf

The date of 64 for Acts is unsupportable. It was written long after the time of the events it purports to describe. You do not seem aware of any opposing views -- the scholarly consensus is that it was written around 85, and many of us here see it as a second century text. Here's Price on Pervo:

http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.c...ating_acts.htm

You can accept or reject, but it is best to understand and reflect.

Essentially, you take everything on its face and ask nothing about the text itself. Who wrote it, and why? How is it positioned, theologically (for example, it is obviously in conversation with Galatians). What is its genre? What other texts is it related to? How does it represent itself to the reader, and why does it choose that mode of discourse? Who is it attacking and defending? Is its author trustworthy? Critical thinking requires such questions.

Vorkosigan

Adam

No, it’s not taking it at face value, Vork. My method has always been to dismiss the preconception that the gospels arose fully formed from an omniscient author (God, by traditionalists). I look for the subjective stance underlying the words in the text. That’s how I wound up with seven written eyewitness records in the gospels. (But I don’t define or “create” sources to it, there has to be textual support that a given portion traces to a different person.) Applied to Acts, one wonders why some late author would have nothing to say about anyone but Paul for the last ten years or so, when the earlier portions of Acts focus on more prominent figures, the apostles. This makes sense if, as Acts 28:30-31 says, that’s the last to be told about Paul and the author apparently knows nothing about goings-on in the Church otherwise. This perfectly fits human subjectivity and finiteness. The author told us only what he knew at first hand or from copying documents, (perfectly fitting my thesis, even Luke does not have to be one of my eyewitnesses). Thus I don’t see good reason to think that someone decades later set out to use some early documents and then continue for another ten years beyond that time about only one person and the places he went. Why would he decades later make it look like the concluding period of ten years was his diary, basically, but nothing else in any earlier period was?

Redaction is another matter. If copying from Josephus can be shown, such incidences could have been inserted into the text as footnotes and later incorporated. This might have extended as far as putting speeches into the mouths of Gamaliel or Paul. The basics to me have to be that the basic text of Acts was early, leaving in place the starting point of my thesis that Acts 12:12 shows when Peter and John Mark got together. This would even be true if the whole of Luke-Acts could be shown to have been conceived and written much later, if the underlying sources are early.

I'm taking to heart what you have brought forward here about the latest scholarship, and do understand the significance of Pervo. However, Pervo himself communicated with D. Miller to drop from his review that Acts was a historical romance, but instead as a popular history.
http://gervatoshav.blogspot.com/2009...rd-pervos.html

Pervo on page 365 of Dating Acts states that the standard view on sources of Luke is that Luke must be dated later than Mark because it used Mark, and he says he accepts this) and Mark he dates to 80-85. Yet we have no evidence that Luke saw more than about 13 chapters of Mark. This is weak argument.

Adam

Shesh!
It’s great that you’ve been throwing so much shit at me, so no one will now accuse you of being my shill! You couldn’t have set it up better for me!

Fundamentalists like to think God sat his agents down and dictated one or another book of the Bible to them. But God wanted humans involved using their free wills. When Jesus was incarnated, as far as we know He wrote nothing. But God’s plan for the gospels was that the people most closely involved with Jesus would write down their experiences. God planned it that eyewitnesses would tell what Jesus had done, next about what they had good information that he had done. When apostles and such had written all they chose to, God brought in people not so closely involved to write what they knew (or thought they knew) about Jesus. Last of all what God wanted written was assigned to people who only knew Jesus at second or third hand. Had God done it the way you insist He had to, we would have one text by one person, with no way of corroborating that he had seen any at all of what he wrote about. Even if it had been written in the first person by a named individual, this could be taken as an affectation as with the pseudonymous gospels. Isn’t it fitting that the gospels about Jesus are the most complex texts of all? God had to intervene time and again, yet never forcing any one person to write any particular thing that He wanted written.

Starting with gJohn, the Passion Narrative was first written the person most closely involved in the arrest, trial, and crucifixion of Jesus, who was the disciple known to the High Priest (John 18:15-16, ;20:2). We see this today largely in John 18, 19, and some of 20. Then the earlier ministry of Jesus was written down in the Signs Source by an apostle. This is found in the narratives of the first 12 chapters of John. Most likely this was Andrew, whose name also appears in the Muratorian. The Discourses in John are very different from the rest of the gospels, so they are best explained as written by someone very different, like Nicodemus, and for a different purpose (preceding the Farewell Discourse, collecting evidence to condemn Jesus). To edit gJohn knowledgeably about all the foregoing, an apostle would be necessary, and the indicated person is John the son of Zebedee. All these four were eyewitnesses. Something like a chapter in total was added by the Redactor, not an eyewitness.
For the Synoptics, the Passion Narrative by John Mark (above) was expanded when he got together with Peter. The Apostle Matthew wrote Q (Q1 really), but why wouldn’t he have written down any experiences with Jesus? The Q portions of gMark (identifiable as Q because paralleled in gThomas) have the same looser verbal relationship as the Twelve-Source in gMark, so they fit together as from the same eyewitness. This major portion of gMark (also including some Q2 text) was available for incorporation in Proto-Luke. This author added massive amounts of new material (our Luke 9 to 18, basically), probably as an eyewitness. He apparently was one of the two disciples who saw the Resurrected Jesus during the Walk to Emmaus in Luke 24. If so, his name was probably Simon (Luke 24:34).
Later Luke added his own materials, but not being himself an eyewitness. This may have included Luke 1 and 2.

The Q2 sayings seem to be from someone who knew Jesus during His life, but in a lesser degree of closeness. His involvement in providing material that went into the early version of gMark (about 13 chapters) probably also led into providing the remaining three chapters of gMark, but probably not himself as an eyewitness. He may have continued working gMark towards gMatthew. In any case the remaining material in gMatthew was not from an eyewitness. We can assume God wanted non-eyewitness material included in the canonical texts of about one chapter of gJohn, three chapters of gMark and gLuke, and eight chapters of gMatthew. It was His plan, we might assume, that these materials would eventually be discovered by scholars as less indicative of what Jesus did and said while on Earth. (On the other hand, if God had to resort to non-eyewitnesses for some things, maybe they were the most important, but I don’t think so.)
Thanks, Shesh, for the perfect set-up!