Sparrow

You didn't address my question. This website listed the inscription as:

Line One: TIBERIEUM,,
Line Two: (PON) TIUS
Line Three: (PRAEF) ECTUS IUDA (EAE)

I can see that there are letters after the TIUS in line two, but the first one looks more like a B to me. The next letter appears to be an I, but interestingly it goes above the line like the T whereas the I letters which appear in line 1 do not. Having no axe to grind here, let me say then that I'll take your word for the letters visible which then means the inscription reads:

Line One: TIBERIEVM,,
Line Two: (?) TIUSPILATV
Line Three: (?) ECTUS IUDA (?)

So back to my question; How do you replace those question marks with certain text, not guesses?

aChristian

Sorry I took so long to answer. My computer has been down.

'Imagine' - that's a key word.
I have read the gospels many times, and Mr. Weeden is just reading things into the text that just are not there. There is no history to support his story. In order to believe it, you have to believe some conspiracy theory of how the people at the time made up the gospel stories and convinced everyone that they were true. There is no record of this happening. The accounts from the people who lived back then support the traditional history.

The fact that you can impose a structure on two different historical accounts (not very successfully I might add) does not cease to make them historical accounts. In order to make your story believable, you need to produce a record of someone who lived at the time and knew those involved who said that he knew Mark, was there when he wrote it, and saw him keep referring back to the story of the calling of Elisha for ideas as he wrote it.
Form criticism is ridiculous. It tries to read deep meanings that just aren’t there into straightforward historical records. It reminds me of a Peanuts cartoon I read a long time ago. In it Linus shows a picture that he has drawn to Charlie Brown. It is a picture of a man. Charlie Brown says, “The reason that you have drawn the man’s hands behind his back is that you yourself have feelings of insecurity.� Linus replies, “The reason that I have drawn the man’s hands behind his back is that I myself do not know how to draw hands.� It also reminds me of a story I heard about Ernest Hemmingway laughing throughout an award ceremony as literary scholars described the deep meanings in his book ‘The Old Man and the Sea’. The scholars were doing the same thing that Charlie Brown was doing and Hemmingway found it quite amusing.

aChristian

The Jesus film project (from Campus Crusade for Christ) and Gospel for Asia would supply information if you are interested. There are many others.

aChristian

I imagine that not only does Archer know much more about the subject than you, he has probably forgotten more than you will ever know about it.

aChristian

John wrote much later and the other gospels were well known. Maybe didn’t need to repeat that part. This however misses the point. I may be able to give reasonable explanation for why something was or wasn’t included, but that is not what is important. What is important is that the people who lived then and knew the facts, accepted them all as historical accounts. Just because two people write separate biographies of George Washington and they are not identical does not mean that they are not both accurate.

What?!? Can’t three people write Washington’s biography? If they are quoting, can’t all three quote correctly?


Your logic is faulty.



Same point as I mentioned above. Just because they don't say the things you would expect them to say doesn't remove the historical witness. The people who lived then and knew the facts accepted them as accurate.

Roger Pearse

Inscriptions are not my thing, but I believe they tend to be very formulaic, which means one can tell a lot from other, similar inscriptions. After all the words have to fit into a stone, so you can work out how many letters are missing, and look at a dictionary of Latin and see how many possible words fit. Just my opinion, tho.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

mata leao

roland, the Roman army's brutal assault on jewish culture and the diaspora certainly had a lot to do with the loss of written evidence

Sparrow

would all the possible names be in the dictionary as well as words? I'm not discounting the formula thing, but I'm just saying, from my layman's perspective, that the letters we have, while they fit the proposed inscription, would also fit other inscriptions. we have no guarantee that they say Pilate.

Roland

But you are missing my point completely. It isn't just two people writing a biography. It's FOUR. How would three of them COINCIDENTALLY and INDEPENDENTLY record most of the same things, while a fourth recorded mostly different things? It doesn't matter whether John's account came later. The four writers all started with the same biographical info. How did the first three to write their accounts all manage not to record what John ended up recording? Not one found the "I am" speeches found in John worth putting down on paper? The Gospel of John is the one most Christians truly love; didn't Matthew, Mark or Luke see the value in any of those self-revalatory statements of Jesus, the ones upon which much of the modern born again movement is built?

Roland

[What?!? Can’t three people write Washington’s biography? If they are quoting, can’t all three quote correctly?]

Yes, but three wouldn't independently quote the same statements while the fourth quoted different statements. All of Jesus' sayings would end up randomly matched up within the four works, not UNrandomly matched up in three but randomly in the fourth.