spin

Oh, rubbish. You presuppose Aramaic against the evidence to the contrary. You presuppose eye witnesses from text. You presuppose that you can separate layers without any hope of falsifiability. (I'm sure a master's allows you to appreciate the need for falsifiability.)

That last statement doesn't make sense. It's just a contrarian soundbite.

Truth is subjective. We try to deal in facts.

We all have our little crosses.

That should be a comfort to you. You are not alone.

There are no exceptions. Everything is up for grabs.

Sheshbazzar

Adam still has not provided concrete evidence of the existence of even a single eyewitness to a living and human Jeebus.

The assumption of the existence of any eyewitnesses to a living and human Jeebus is a thesis that awaits to be proven, not simply repeatedly asserted.

No figure Adam has named can be demonstrated to have been an eyewitness to the existence of a human Jeebus the christ.

A great many words, but he has thus far failed to demonstrate, or provide any irrefutable textual proof of the correctness of his major thesis.



.

Horatio Parker

I wonder why you would think that this is only an issue for atheists.

There are Christians who believe Jesus was mythical and atheists who believe he was historical.

Jesus as myth or history is separate from questions about the existence of God.

What's the point of trying to marry them?

Adam

Food for thought, Horatio, thank you.
Coming out of the '50's as an epiphenomenalist (though properly speaking, materialism later than 1918 is anachronistic), I can easily imagine a religion of a spiritual realm that is a refined essence apart from the world, probably with a finite God. But in acknowledging a realm above the everyday, I had expected that others would like me welcome evidence that that supernatural can even impact the natural realm. I would have thought that anyone who would not consider even epiphenomenalism would be so dead-set against spirituality that even mystical experience would be disregarded as useless or hypocritical. I'm a common sense kind of guy. I tend to regard Bultmann, Spong and such as just a pretense at Christianity, just milking the money out of it.

Doug Shaver

That might depend on what he means by evidence. In another forum, I tried to get him to define the word. I did not succeed. Apparently, it means whatever he needs it to mean in order to prove his point.

Adam

Lead me on! Back in Post #149 I stated that I found nothing much is going on in recent decades in source-criticism of the gospels, and I asked if anyone knew otherwise. See below for the reply I got from Doug Shaver in #153.

Maybe I set my standards too low in what I have debated in the last 190 postsd. Now that replies have dropped off to my Post #230 in which I added in my six layer analysis of gMark, I have brought forth another main post #335 in my series in which I argue that the burden of proof is on the anti-Christians regarding my thesis that there were seven eyewitnesses who wrote records about Jesus. I got a great amount of flak about the six layers (my Post #230), but the original thesis has been ignored. So I went back to find any evidence of substantive criticism regarding my Post #170 of general conclusions or after #144 in which I named my seventh eyewitness. One point came up from three members here, Solo in #243, Vorkosigan in #238, 236, and #173, and Joe Wallack in #174, that Peter could not have been an eyewitness and written such bad things about himself. Other than that, I had to go back to #153 on October 15 to find Doug Shaver directly facing the whole issue—but coming up empty. That was in response to my plea in #149 for any kind of refutation, even by web link. Steven Carr in #151 did ridicule my P-Strand (itself peripheral, not adding to the number of eyewitnesses). I’m currently rethinking this with my (now obsolete) thread on the “Pharisee Strand”, and that has delayed me from finishing up my third thread, Significance of John”. That means that almost all our last two hundred posts (over half the whole thread) have not dealt with the substance of the thread. Is there no argument against me than consensus? This from mythicists?

I had been led to expect more substance from you guys. I am quite impressed with the erudition of many of you, but I am not finding analytical criticism. From what Doug says below, it's up to you, because even the consensus scholars are not doing much of a job these days regarding the thesis of this thread.

Incidentally, I did manage to find some analysis of Teeple, but back in 1991, by J. Eugene Botha. He is favorable to Teeple.

http://books.google.com/books?id=g3L...age&q&f=false:

Adam

Really now, Doug! If I reply to this by throwing these words back in your face as your own words, not mine, we'll just create the usual aa vs. J-D chiasm we have seen in multiple threads here. Or maybe we could go off on the tangent of discussing Logical Positivism, but let's avoid that as well. Here's a link to that debacle:

http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/sh...ical-Proximity

See Post #293 there and several in the 260's. See especially my Post #261 in which I tie in to earlier posts on the issue of "evidence". Maybe on other threads there as well.

spin

As Adam is still here crapping on about his ridiculous layers, I'll go back to an example of a chiasm that shows just how full of crap Adam's little construction is.

According to his carve up of Mk 6:1-6, verses 1 & 3 belong to his sadly named Qumraner. Verses 2, 4-5 belong to his "Twelve-Source from Levi" and verse 6 is your best guess because it's not in Adam's carve up. However, all these verses together make a chiasm, as indicated below:

[T2]

A 1 Jesus went out from there and came into His hometown; and His disciples followed Him.

B 2 When the Sabbath came, He began to teach in the synagogue;

C and the many listeners were astonished, saying, “Where did this man get these things, and what is this wisdom given to Him, and such miracles as these performed by His hands?

D 3 “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? Are not His sisters here with us?”

E And they took offense at Him.

E' 4 Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown

D' and among his own relatives and in his own household.”

C' 5 And He could do no miracle there except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them.

B' 6 And He wondered at their unbelief.

A' And He was going around the villages teaching.

[/T2]
You can see how each pair relate to each other.
A & A' are the start and finish, the arrival and departure.
B & B' are the preaching in the synagogue and the lack of belief of the people therein.
C & C' are people wondering about him performing miracles and his inability to do so.
D & D' deal with his family and
E & E' deal with the other people of the village.

However, if the reddened verses, A, D and E, are the work of a later layer, then the structure totally fails. The implication is devastating to his layer system, for the whole was written as a unit, not a bit earlier and a bit later. No cogent response was ever made. He ignored the data. The layer notion as he presented it is unable to explain the text as we find it. How many chiasms need be shown to cross layers?

He fobbed off the earlier chiasm, just as he functionally ducked the Latinism issue. His approach to dealing with problems is to abnegate all responsibility to defend his flight of fancy and bleat rubbish about Aramaic in response to the Latinisms. I have asked him to deal with these problems many times and he has simply given no meaningful response.

Well some of the Latinisms belong to the layers they are found in, others were added later. Consider 15:15, Adam's first layer, when Jesus was whipped. The verb here was not a Greek verb for "whipped", but a Latin one. In hiding the light under a bushel, 4:21 ("Twelve-Source from Levi"), the bushel was not a Greek measure, nor a Hebrew measure, but a Latin "modius". Latin words come in most layers, so Adam says well, they were probably in common usage. He has Jesus using not local terms but Latin terms.

A nice Latin idiom is used in 2:23 ("Ur-Marcus Greek"), "to make way". Another such Latin idiom "to take counsel" is in 3:6, but his breakdown of layers doesn't have that verse. Yet another "to be at the point of death" is in 5:23 (again Ur-Marcus Greek). In 15:1 (his first layer) is an idiom meaning "to hold a consultation".

Throughout Mark there is a Latin syntactic structure with a verb indicating a speech act followed by a conjunction ινα (for the Latin ut), in various layers, but note in 6:36, in his first layer (see Lk 9:12). Latin crosses his layers with gay abandon. Response to the Latinisms? Not a problem.

This layer stuff is just a shambles and I no longer expect an intelligent response from Adam.

Adam

In #348 you acknowledge that you're going back again to your example of Mark 6:1-6 as a chiasm. Is it possible (and it is) that I never stated that so neat a chiastic structure was only set up in the last or a near-final edition? If so, I was just being polite and not riding too hard on a too-obvious point. Apparently it's not too obvious to spin. The missing verses are not in gLuke, so we have no evidence that the chiasm was set up originally as shown in black and in the red.
I have of course answered spin regularly. spin never got involved (and still hasn't) gotten involved with my thesis of the seven eyewitnesses. In my #230 I presented my six layers of gMark, to which spin responded with his #252 which I answered in (253), 254 (255),256 (257), 258 (262), 264 (267), 268 (270), 271 (275), 276 (278), 279 (280), 294 (295), 296 (316), 318 (321), 324 (325), and 327 (333). Only after his #296 did I put off answering because of his repetitions, refusals to acknowledge that I had given answers, and refusals to answer my questions. I appreciate spin's attention to the details of my layers, but because he does not give the corresponding gLuke verses, I cannot tell quickly whether they affect even my (peripheral) thesis on gMark, nor whether I have already answered the particular point. I have to compare the Greek on both the gMark and gLuke sides.

Is spin baiting me to say flat-out that much of what he says here is untrue? But that would not violate forum rules, because I would not be accusing him of being a liar. Maybe he just forgets.

Regarding Mark 6:36, that the corresponding Luke 9:12 (with the eyewitness touch, "It was late afternoon") has the word "Twelve" may raise question about what layer it comes from, but no Latinisms can be proved to precede Layer 4, as Luke never saw any in-progress gMark before it included the first four layers. You need to quit talking about "crossing all the layers", because we can have no evidence of that (unless a Layer 1 Latinism can be found in gJohn, and there is, "Praetorium").

spin

Yes, yes, assuming what one cannot demonstrate, ie that he can know the exact relationship between Mark and Luke. It just goes to show how insubstantial this little exercise of Adam's is.

There are chiasms within the larger chunks of Adam's divvying up of Mark and chiasms that cross layer boundaries. He asks that one overlook those that cross layers as late manifestations. This is understandable for someone who would prefer to ignore those that cross layers. The fact is though that what exists before the addition of the red material is incoherent and adding just those verses was all that was necessary to turn the mess into a coherent text that just so happens to embody a chiasm. Credibility is not a strong point in favor of the Adam layer theory.

I advise interested parties to go back and look at Adam's "answers". They are as lacking in substance as his response here.

The so-called theory of the seven eye witnesses has no basis whatsoever. One may identify layers of construction of a text, but to make pure assertions as to the status of those claimed to be responsible is vacuous at best. Jumping from text to the real world needs justification. Who can say anything about those who wrote the text purely on the grounds of hypothetical layers? For all we know the Marcan community was visited by itinerant preachers who, picking up tales here and there, told their stories as dramatically as possible in their own voices and the listeners remembered the ones they liked and incorporated them into their written traditions from time to time, either depending on the language of the preacher or whoever wrote them down. If as appears likely the gospel was written in Rome--the simplest explamation for the complexity of the Latin influence--, then the notion of eye witnesses takes a trip to oblivion.

We are analyzing Mark. Maybe he forgets that fact. What Luke does with Mark will vary. One cannot simply assert that Luke is a guide to the construction of Mark. The writers involved in Luke had their own agenda.

One expects a poster who is ostensibly responding to you to receive the courtesy of a reasonable thought out reply. You have been dodging and weaving for many posts. If you don't want to reply meaningfully don't waste space.

This is assuming the conclusion, a rather complex conclusion, and then complaining about lack of proof regarding evidence for Latin influence throughout Mark. There are no layers until one can successfully argue them, which Adam has refused to do.

As to the claim that "no Latinisms can be proved to precede Layer 4", if one looks back at my last post they'll see that I pointed to two Latin idioms in Adam's layer 2 translated into Greek. I can provide more, but they'd probably be ignored as these two have.

Again making inappropriate assertions about Lucan writers. There is no way of making definitive statements about Mark solely based on the finished version of Luke, which is the case here.

The complex layering of assertions is what strikes me about this layer theory. There are assumptions about Luke and assumptions about John without any way of testing those assumptions. It's just further and further into the dark. Adam doesn't know how Mark and John are related. He is basically making things up and perhaps using others' conjectures to pad it out. The only way I'll get him to take the Latinisms seriously it seems is if I produce the draft which contains the Latin notes. Otherwise he'll continue to ignore or trivialize the issue, as he has done with the chiasms. It seems to me both falsify this particular layer theory.