FRDB Archives

Freethought & Rationalism Archive

The archives are read only.


Go Back   FRDB Archives > Archives > Religion (Closed) > Biblical Criticism & History
Welcome, Peter Kirby.
You last visited: Yesterday at 03:12 PM

 
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread
Old 11-19-2011, 06:15 PM   #331
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2008
Location: Latin America
Posts: 4,066
Default

In addition to latinisms, another problem is that a relatively early writing attributed the gMark to a record of sermons Peter preached at Rome. Note Clement of Alexandria’s commentary on 1 Peter 5.

Quote:
“Mark, the follower of Peter, while Peter was publicly preaching the gospel at Rome in the presence of some of Caesar’s knights and uttering many testimonies about Christ, on their asking him to let them have a record of the things that had been said, wrote the Gospel of Mark from the things said by Peter”
This suggest to me that the above writer believed that the gMark had a single, rather than a plurality of authors.
arnoldo is offline  
Old 11-19-2011, 07:02 PM   #332
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: Dixon CA
Posts: 1,150
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Vorkosigan View Post
Quote:
Originally Posted by fatpie42 View Post
I've not heard much about the issue with Latinisms. Weren't the gospels written in Ancient Greek? Why would Latin make a difference?
Mark's greek is peppered with formations taken from Latin, or heavily flavored by it. These occur throughout the gospel.
Agreed. Throughout the canonical Gospel of Mark, but not usually in the comparable verses of gLuke and gMatthew. And if they were present from the earlier stages of composition, this could mean that the gospels were not early, not composed in Palestine, and probably not by eyewitnesses. However, the Latin terms present from the first (found in all three Synoptics) are words in common use in the Roman Empire. Maurice Casey has recently published books showing that the earliest gospel strata (Q and Mark) show Aramaic origins, as we would expect for real historical accounts. After getting farther along in the process of editing Mark in Greek, perhaps accomplished in Rome as tradition says, many Latinisms wound up in the text of gMark that we have. These are not numerous before Layer 5, and most cannot be proved to be there before Layer 6.
Quote:
Adam's position is that there are multiple sources that go back to eyewitnesses. He cuts up the gospel into little sections, and then assigns them to sources. He has no methodology for doing this, and as spin has noted, the Latinisms and other idiosyncratic behaviors of the author of Mark, as well as the gospel's numerous literary structures, cut across the "sources". Adam treats these as a "final redactor" of six different layers and ignores the literary aspects of the gospel altogether.
Yes, "final redactor" of the sixth layer. Most of the Latinisms just introduce an explanatory note or translation inserted in Layer 5 or 6.
Quote:
This means that Adam and his source, Howard Teeple, have made a rather elementary error -- like reading A Song of Ice and Fire and then concluding that books 4 and 5 can't be by George R R Martin because they don't mention Ned Stark (who was killed in book 1) and then assigning each of the little chapters, with their different points of view, to different sources in the world of Westeros.
Vorkosigan
Once again I thank you for following my argument in this thread from the start. You have even read material from my link to my four articles in Noesis.
http://megasociety.org/noesis/181.htm#Common
However, those four articles are about the Synoptics only, and don't mention Howard M. Teeple. The matter at hand now about gMark has little to do with Teeple, as he wrote only on gJohn. (My current thread here, Gospel Eyewitnesses, does bring in the first three from gJohn, that is true. The basic thesis on seven eyewitnesses can be seen in these posts in this currect thread: #1, !8,#38, #52, #74, #132, #144, and #170. #52 is particulary relevant to our matter at hand. The first list there gives Layers 1 and 2 and the second list gives Layers 3 and 4. See also the OP to specify Layer 1, but it's in gJohn and cites Teeple.) My Post #230 started the current controversy when I separated Layer 3 from Layer 4 (comparable to separating Q1 from Q2 as many scholars have done).
Adam is offline  
Old 11-19-2011, 07:48 PM   #333
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: Dixon CA
Posts: 1,150
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by spin View Post
Quote:
Originally Posted by Adam View Post
Again, no response from you. If you don't like my answers, critique them, but in terms of my hypothesis, not in terms of your (unstated) preconceptions. You can't undo my thesis just by repetition of points which I have already adequately answered. You have undermined yourself by wild charges (as against Maurice Casey) and refusing to give us any backing other than your say-so.
Looks like I should take Roger Pearse very seriously.
Yes, Adam is apparently going to duck the problems of the Latinisms and the chiasms eternally, pretending that ad hoc rubbish has answered the issues adequately and rushing to the defense of a book he hasn't read nor knows the linguistics for, merely championing favorable authorities and attempting to shift the burden. As he doesn't think his thesis is worth defending, there is nothing more that needs to be said about Adam's layers and his crock of crap about eye witnesses. A thesis he can't defend is no thesis at all.To reiterate for the latecomer, Adam has decided he can carve the gospel of Mark up into layers that reflect the work of different authors and redactors. I pointed out that Mark contains 1) Latin words, 2) words constructed for a Latin or Roman audience, 3) Latin idioms translated literally into Greek, and 4) Latin word order. Adsm's response was to pretend that the Latinisms were the work of different redactors including a late editor. This is pure Sergeant Schultz.
See my #332 response to Vorkosigan (and fatpie42)
Quote:
The other problem I looked at involved the existence of a literary structure known as a chiasm found throughout Mark, some of which being inside Adam's layers, but some crossing his layers, suggesting that the layers as he has delineated them are inadequate to explain these chiasms. His approach was to say that these chiasms were constructed later, thus breaking the chiasms and not explaining the resultant structural mess.

If you are keen to find out about the functionality of the layers, look for Adam's responses. As I can't get a satisfactory answer from him, I'd recommend not to bother.
I'm still intrigued by the chiasm theory. If Mark was the Shakespeare-level genius you and Vork say he was, couldn't he have adapted his gMark through the various editions?. (Luke saw a different edition than Matthew did, and the canonical Mark is also slightly different.) My research on chiasms is not turning up verse-by-verse chiasms covering the whole gMark. There is a mild critiicism specifically aimed at Michael Turton. http://www.textexcavation.com/turtonchiasms.html
Meanwhile, at UCDavis I consulted Paul Owen's review of Casey's (2009) The Solution to the "Son of Man" Problem. Owen decried Casey's omission of consideration of Matthew Black, Joachin Jeremias, Joseph Fitzmyer, and Larry Hurtado. Maybe there are questions about Casey's credentials in Aramaic, but I was left by spin to think that spin was only spouting his personal opinion. And maybe he was--how now will I eve know since he does not answer my questions?
Adam is offline  
Old 11-20-2011, 12:31 AM   #334
Contributor
 
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: Los Angeles area
Posts: 40,549
Default

The Paul Owens review of Casey appears to be online here (direct link to pdf here.)
Toto is offline  
Old 11-23-2011, 12:21 AM   #335
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: Dixon CA
Posts: 1,150
Default

Perhaps Vork and spin and fatpie42 have accepted my answers as having explained my theory satisfactorily (in my own terms, at least). More likely, they don’t like my answers, but want to avoid stirring up more attention around my views. That would certainly be understandable on a website for atheism. But I want to try to establish that a sort of burden of proof is on this other side, because my thread here is not just a provocation, but has arisen in response to atheists coming in to Christian websites and making arguments that I can show are not conclusive and are not legitimate to make once my case is understood. Here’s what I am now thinking:
On the Attack? Foolish Assertions? Bold vulnerability?
Gospel Eyewitnesses has obviously been a frontal assault on FRDB or any non-Christian site in general, so I left myself wide open to attack on all my assertions. Replies have been hostile, but few have tried to directly refute the eyewitnesses claimed. Particularly here at FRDB it would be hypocritical for many of the zealous members to just stand on scholarly consensus as a sufficient counter-argument, when so many (particularly mythicists) reject the consensus utterly. Lately the attacks on me have been only against the peripheral thesis about the six layers in Mark, which was not so much an assertion by me as a defense against the downplaying of Jesus as a doomsday prophet who falsely proclaimed the imminent end of the world. It seems that extreme skepticism about the gospels is hand-in-hand with traditionalism that the gospels are unitary. Atheists (same as with fundamentalists) find it easier to dismiss (vs. support) each gospel as a whole rather than have to deal with the complex underlying sources.
Or Defense? Patching the Holes?
But maybe the Eighth (not-so-eye) Witness is not the only eyewitness in which I am primarily defending against assertions made by the other side. I presented John Mark as the first record in the building of the gospels. This defends against recent attacks on the historicity of the Passion Narrative in gJohn as by Maurice Casey and James G. Crossley. Shouldn’t the burden of proof be on them to undercut what has been written? After all, there are no miracles in this part of gJohn. They want to dismiss this along with their general dismissal of gJohn.
I forwarded Andrew as the second eyewitness. This makes it harder to dismiss the miracles of the Signs Source as automatically set aside. This puts the burden of proof on the atheists that the records must be late, not from an eyewitness, because miracles cannot happen. Or atheists can just rest on their dogma, but that then becomes all it is.
The largest reason for disregarding gJohn has been the pernicious theology in which Jesus so glorifies himself. By identifying Nicodemus the third eyewitne4ss as collecting whatever he could to incriminate Jesus, we don’t have to accept every discourse in gJohn as a fair representation of the historical Jesus. Exclusivism and anti-Semitism can be set aside or reinterpreted. On this point, where some (like Casey) want to indict gJohn for hostility to “Jews”, but the word is more literally “Judean” in these discourse sections. Elsewhere in gJohn the corresponding word is “crowd”, and in one distinct strand, “Jerusalemites”.
For Peter as the fourth eyewitness the objection has often been made that much of gMark does not seem to be from him. But with most of gMark assigned to other layers, this does not remain as a problem.
Regarding the Apostle Matthew as the fifth eyewitness, I derived this after noting atheists objecting that he could not have written gMatthew because he copies his own call from gMark into gMatthew. However, many scholars have noted the characteristics common to both gMark and gMatthew and thus posited some common authorship or tradition. Perhaps Matthew authored the Twelve-Source (my Layers 3 and 4 in gMark, just Layer 3, or more likely as I have presented that Layers 3 and 4 both derive from Q (Q1 and Q2 respectively). By my theory, Matthew would have been the source of half of gMatthew, giving good reason that it was named for him.
Similarly atheists have argued that gJohn could not have been written (in its entirety, anyway) by the Apostle John. Here again, I agree (as with gMatthew not having been simply written by Matthew—none of the gospels were simply written by apostles or eyewitnesses). However, once gJohn has been stratified to Passion Narrative by John Mark, Signs Source by Andrew, and the Discourses by Nicodemus, the missing section is John 13, and that would reasonably have been written by John (as well as very numerous editorial insertions all through this gospel, making it best named after him.
Atheists are fond of saying that we have no eyewitness records of the Resurrection. With some critical acumen I have sorted out two anonymous accounts.
http://megasociety.org/noesis/181.htm#Resurrection
Not stated there, but by my analysis in this thread, the two accounts are most likely by Matthew and John Mark (most likely not Peter, though my article then said “Petrine”). However, I identify my seventh eyewitness as the Simon who along with Cleopas saw Jesus during the Walk to Emmaus.
My point in all the above eight defenses is to put the burden of proof on atheists if they want to assert their arguments in the cases shown. If so, you cannot simply rest from trying to refute my Gospel Eyewitnesses thesis as presented in my Posts #1, #!8,#38, #52, #74, #132, #144, #170 and #230.
Adam is offline  
Old 11-23-2011, 02:58 AM   #336
Contributor
 
Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: Barrayar
Posts: 11,866
Default

After reading this, I think you need to spend a couple of years studying both historical methodology and methodology in HJ studies.

Good luck!
Vorkosigan is offline  
Old 11-23-2011, 06:41 AM   #337
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: Mondcivitan Republic
Posts: 2,550
Default

Adam,

Please, add a space after each paragraph, or no one is going to read what you write.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Adam View Post
Perhaps Vork and spin and fatpie42 have accepted my answers as having explained my theory satisfactorily (in my own terms, at least). More likely, they don’t like my answers, but want to avoid stirring up more attention around my views. That would certainly be understandable on a website for atheism. But I want to try to establish that a sort of burden of proof is on this other side, because my thread here is not just a provocation, but has arisen in response to atheists coming in to Christian websites and making arguments that I can show are not conclusive and are not legitimate to make once my case is understood. Here’s what I am now thinking:

On the Attack? Foolish Assertions? Bold vulnerability?

Gospel Eyewitnesses has obviously been a frontal assault on FRDB or any non-Christian site in general, so I left myself wide open to attack on all my assertions. Replies have been hostile, but few have tried to directly refute the eyewitnesses claimed. Particularly here at FRDB it would be hypocritical for many of the zealous members to just stand on scholarly consensus as a sufficient counter-argument, when so many (particularly mythicists) reject the consensus utterly. Lately the attacks on me have been only against the peripheral thesis about the six layers in Mark, which was not so much an assertion by me as a defense against the downplaying of Jesus as a doomsday prophet who falsely proclaimed the imminent end of the world. It seems that extreme skepticism about the gospels is hand-in-hand with traditionalism that the gospels are unitary. Atheists (same as with fundamentalists) find it easier to dismiss (vs. support) each gospel as a whole rather than have to deal with the complex underlying sources.

Or Defense? Patching the Holes?

But maybe the Eighth (not-so-eye) Witness is not the only eyewitness in which I am primarily defending against assertions made by the other side. I presented John Mark as the first record in the building of the gospels. This defends against recent attacks on the historicity of the Passion Narrative in gJohn as by Maurice Casey and James G. Crossley. Shouldn’t the burden of proof be on them to undercut what has been written? After all, there are no miracles in this part of gJohn. They want to dismiss this along with their general dismissal of gJohn.

I forwarded Andrew as the second eyewitness. This makes it harder to dismiss the miracles of the Signs Source as automatically set aside. This puts the burden of proof on the atheists that the records must be late, not from an eyewitness, because miracles cannot happen. Or atheists can just rest on their dogma, but that then becomes all it is.

The largest reason for disregarding gJohn has been the pernicious theology in which Jesus so glorifies himself. By identifying Nicodemus the third eyewitne4ss as collecting whatever he could to incriminate Jesus, we don’t have to accept every discourse in gJohn as a fair representation of the historical Jesus. Exclusivism and anti-Semitism can be set aside or reinterpreted. On this point, where some (like Casey) want to indict gJohn for hostility to “Jews”, but the word is more literally “Judean” in these discourse sections. Elsewhere in gJohn the corresponding word is “crowd”, and in one distinct strand, “Jerusalemites”.

For Peter as the fourth eyewitness the objection has often been made that much of gMark does not seem to be from him. But with most of gMark assigned to other layers, this does not remain as a problem.

Regarding the Apostle Matthew as the fifth eyewitness, I derived this after noting atheists objecting that he could not have written gMatthew because he copies his own call from gMark into gMatthew. However, many scholars have noted the characteristics common to both gMark and gMatthew and thus posited some common authorship or tradition. Perhaps Matthew authored the Twelve-Source (my Layers 3 and 4 in gMark, just Layer 3, or more likely as I have presented that Layers 3 and 4 both derive from Q (Q1 and Q2 respectively). By my theory, Matthew would have been the source of half of gMatthew, giving good reason that it was named for him.

Similarly atheists have argued that gJohn could not have been written (in its entirety, anyway) by the Apostle John. Here again, I agree (as with gMatthew not having been simply written by Matthew—none of the gospels were simply written by apostles or eyewitnesses). However, once gJohn has been stratified to Passion Narrative by John Mark, Signs Source by Andrew, and the Discourses by Nicodemus, the missing section is John 13, and that would reasonably have been written by John (as well as very numerous editorial insertions all through this gospel, making it best named after him.

Atheists are fond of saying that we have no eyewitness records of the Resurrection. With some critical acumen I have sorted out two anonymous accounts.

http://megasociety.org/noesis/181.htm#Resurrection

Not stated there, but by my analysis in this thread, the two accounts are most likely by Matthew and John Mark (most likely not Peter, though my article then said “Petrine”). However, I identify my seventh eyewitness as the Simon who along with Cleopas saw Jesus during the Walk to Emmaus.

My point in all the above eight defenses is to put the burden of proof on atheists if they want to assert their arguments in the cases shown. If so, you cannot simply rest from trying to refute my Gospel Eyewitnesses thesis as presented in my Posts #1, #!8,#38, #52, #74, #132, #144, #170 and #230.
DCHindley is offline  
Old 11-23-2011, 10:24 AM   #338
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: Dixon CA
Posts: 1,150
Default

Thank you, DCH.
Yes, Toto told me about the problem with my Word paragraphs being lost when posted here. So for my major posts #52, 74, 132, 144, and 230 I remembered to add a space between paragraphs. Unfortunately, #1, 18, 38, 170, and 335 do not paragraph for most of you out there. Apparently the paragraphing does show when you click "Quote" and read the editable text, because the paragraphing shown in #337 is exactly right. So any of you out there can read my paragraphing if you pretend like you're going to reply to me, and then hit "escape"? Not that that's a good solution. Too bad the 45-minute rule prevents me from going back and editing my improper posts correctly.

I forget to click "Enter" after each paragraph because my FRDB screen shows up paragraphed properly (except when the ending line of a paragraph fills the whole last line). I even have a bad habit of eliminating the blank lines in the posts I am quoting, and I guess this makes their paragraphs run together. Toto suggested that I turn off formatting in my Word editor, and I guess that I should do that. How do I do that?
Adam is offline  
Old 11-23-2011, 10:34 AM   #339
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: Dixon CA
Posts: 1,150
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Vorkosigan View Post
After reading this, I think you need to spend a couple of years studying both historical methodology and methodology in HJ studies.

Good luck!
You're telling a contrarian not to be a contrarian! If I weren't a contrarian, I would have been urged to get a Ph. D. Instead I only have two master's degrees (including one in History).

I don't accept presuppositions. I start out fresh (like Descartes in Meditations and Discourse on Method) and work out everything for myself.
And I'm as skeptical of skepticism as I am of anything else. Yet I have always believed that there might be Truth out there. I am shocked by how I have had to shoulder so much of the burden to find it myself. No one out there seems to have all the answers. Given that that is true, I can sympathize with you in doubting everyone except your fellow skeptics.
Adam is offline  
Old 11-23-2011, 11:09 AM   #340
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: Mondcivitan Republic
Posts: 2,550
Default

Good question. Most of us just use the FRDB built-in HTML editor, which makes no attempt to format while you're typing, just enter the mark-up code. You can click on "Preview" to see what it looks like in the web page before formally submitting the response.

If the FRDB built-in editor has an option to show formatting as you type, it seems it is selected as the default setting. I've seen it set that way in other V-Bulletin powered lists, but do not know if it is a feature that users have access to.

The problem is that HTML formatted data adds a line space after a paragraph chacter, making you think it has added two paragraph marks, when it really hasn't. This is one of those stupid programming "features" of HTML formatted text that was designed to allow the average doofus AOL user communicate "creatively" (meaning lots of different fonts, sizes, colors and effects, all done by someone who could not format their resume on a real word processor such as Word if they tried).

I think the way that FRDB seems to have the editor set up as default works fine for me, as I have to hit enter twice to add a line, as gawd intended.

If it isn't a setting problem in the FRDB board software, it might be that you are editing your responses on a 3rd party word processor set to HTML mode. Are you responding somehow via e-mail? If so, the e-mail editor usually has the ability to format in ASCII.

DCH

Quote:
Originally Posted by Adam View Post
Thank you, DCH.
Yes, Toto told me about the problem with my Word paragraphs being lost when posted here. ... I forget to click "Enter" after each paragraph because my FRDB screen shows up paragraphed properly (except when the ending line of a paragraph fills the whole last line). I even have a bad habit of eliminating the blank lines in the posts I am quoting, and I guess this makes their paragraphs run together. Toto suggested that I turn off formatting in my Word editor, and I guess that I should do that. How do I do that?
DCHindley is offline  
 

Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -8. The time now is 07:47 AM.

Top

This custom BB emulates vBulletin® Version 3.8.2
Copyright ©2000 - 2015, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.