Adam

Jeffrey,
If in your #309 you had given any specifics I would know whether or not you had read enough of my stuff to make the harsh judgments you do. You didn't even complete your promised analysis of my one-page selection you demanded. You only know enough of my Part I (Post 161) to name "Nicodemus", but you don't seem to know that I pointed out that two of the three mentions of his name in John are pretty strong indications of his involvement in the Discourses.

It doesn't depend on my skills. It's the proverbial "standing on the shoulders of giants' like Teeple, Nicol, and Freed. And Teeple could only do it because of recent publication of papyri.

Indeed, if you know all that much about better delineations of sources, why are you hiding your light under a bushel? That you top scholars fear to take chances leaves it to amateurs like me to announce "great discoveries"--that the professionals presumably can expose as false under analysis, but they (you in this case) elect to forego.

Sheshbazzar

21st century 'witnesses' still do.
Got a pastors wife here that talks incessantly about all of her supernatural experiences, quite literally hundreds of them.
Got people in my old congregation that 'witnessed' that they had met and had carried on conversations with dead people.
One old fellow even claimed that Jesus his-self had sat down on a stump and ate lunch with him while on a walk in the woods.

Where does it end? How much of this Christian claimed 'eyewitness testimony' to the supernatural are we supposed to swallow?
What makes the first of these 'eyewitness stories' any more valid than the one that I can hear in church this week?
(actually don't need to wait to go to a church, a mile down the road and I could be listening to one of these cock and bull 'witnessing' tales within an hour.)

Hey Adam, What did become of 'Jesus' body?

Toto

NO THEY DON'T.

If something is theoretically possible, that is no evidence that it actually existed.

Even if you were correctly delineating sources, that would not prove that the sources were eyewitnesses.
You continue to miss the point, and you attempts to insult those who don't agree with you as being "negative" or "people-bashing" are unwelcome.

There is no evidence for eyewitnesses. You have not produced any, and neither has anyone else. There may in fact be eyewitness testimony incorporated into the gospels, but there has been no proof.

If you think that you are entitled to identify the author of a source when all you have are the anonymous gospels, you don't understand the objection.

How does anything written by your opponents in this thread require rejecting any of these scholars' work?

N.T. Wright is a religionist. He believes that Jesus literally rose from the dead, in violation of the laws of physics.

I searched for eyewitness in the Amazon preview for Charlesworth's Historical Jesus, and I don't see where Charlesworth says anything that supports your ideas or an especially early dating of the gospels.

So? Nothing there allows you to identify a source with an eyewitness.

I think we are coming to the end of this discussion.

Adam

First, there’s your epistemological certainty that only professionals at your level have any possibility of finding out the truth about these matters. Scholars wildly disagree, so this cannot be sound epistemological grounds.

Second, could I have found the truth? What if I had divine assistance, as I seemed to assume in reaching my results in 1980? Then there's the creative muse in Plato's Ion. Have you considered that I might be a shill for someone at your level or even greater? Someone who doesn’t want to soil his own reputation battling on the internet? Or I might be a reincarnation of some even greater scholar, thus having an even better aristocratic epistemological basis than you claim--refer to Plato's Meno.
If you had given any specifics, I could consider whether my “thesis” could be modified to overcome your objections. That leaves me with the alternative I present below of stating possible modifications of my views to see if that’s what you’re implicitly recommending.

On this thread Significance of John my least reworkable point concerns the Signs Source. I gave scholarly citations getting to pretty much the standard seven signs scholars find in it. I showed the presence of the name Andrew associated with it, and I named him as the author. The spectacular miracles herein weaken my claim that Andrew wrote this as an eyewitness. He could have been there, however, just getting carried away with tall tales. Someone could have written later a sort of Andrew’s story about Jesus, with this Signs Source soon enough incorporated with the Passion Narrative that its Feeding of the 5000 got into all the Synoptics.

Or is your greater wisdom, Jeffrey, that the Signs Source is not identifiable by Freed and Nicol’s stylistic criteria but arose spontaneously together with a larger Signs Gospel as famously touted by Robert Fortna or various similar theories as by Urban von Wahlde? There are lots of possibilities, but I have to admit I’m sticking for now with Synoptic-type style identifying a Signs Source in which the name of Andrew (and Philip) occurs, whether that’s from an eyewitness, a tale-teller, or a representative of a type of disciple.

I hardly mention in my paper the Passion Narrative, and its presence in all four gospels weakens my recent case for John Mark as the original author. My openness to Stephan Huller’s objection to John the Apostle as author or Beloved Disciple leaves more possible that John Mark himself was the Beloved Disciple and author of later expansions of gJohn. Yes, this could override stylistic considerations dismissable as merely due to different scribes. Nevertheless, these expansions are missing in the Synoptics (except in the possibly added verse, Luke 24:12), so a case can still be made that the Passion Narrative is earlier than and quite distinct from the general Johannine narrative additions to the Signs Source and Passion Narrative. I’m not planning on changing that.

I launched my paper with the Discourses as a distinct source. Even though Nicodemus can be twice keyed in here (John 3:1, 7:50) with where the Discourses start, he could have been historicized as a type to “baptize” pre-Christian Gnostic thought that we now know was known in Judea. (A century ago this was believed to prove gJohn was Greek.) If so I should not so readily have merged together Teeple’s G (Gnostic) and E (Editor) strata. The name “Nicodemus” could be variously considered best tied to G, to E, or to the combination. If “G”, then that would restore ever-so-much of E Discourse material to the more limited editorial stratum I list (in Part 2) of my paper as the Beloved Disciple Edition.

So, Jeffrey, I was not aware of who is the greatest living authority on Teeple’s stylistic criteria, and if you are that person, then please fill me in on where I went astray in departing from the master or whether I did not go far enough. My understanding of the situation is that Teeple is no longer disrespected (except in apologetic circles), but he remains bypassed.

Call me dumb as usual, but I still think my paper finished in 1981 presented elements still recognized today as Signs Source, Passion Narrative (well recognized sources), and Discourse (not so universally acknowledged as early), and later Johannine editing.

Toto

At this point, it is not clear if this is a joke, or if you really are delusional. But it's another step towards closing this thread.

Jeffrey Gibson

I think at this point it might be wise to ask Adam if he has ever been diagnosed as bi-polar. I'm absolutely serious when I say that he is now exhibiting signs that he suffers from that malady.

And no, I have never considered that he is a shill for any scholar. Why would I? And if God assisted him, then God certainly wasn't at his best when he did.

Jeffrey

Adam

Toto, from his post #292:
"These topics are closed, along with peer review and any personal characteristics or flaws of the combatants here."

Who am I to go against Toto? He's right that we should be discussing the substance of my paper conveniently found in #161 & 162 (thanks to spin). I'm doing my part to get anyone besides Joe to discuss substance (my #300), and Toto readily obliged. That's progress. Unfortunately my larger offering of substance in my #314 has not yet been addressed. Maybe I need to enlarge that beyond John to the Synoptics to engage the HJ crowd that ignores John. Q, Ur-Marcus, and L leave me lots of room to reconsider if I continue entertaining the idea that there is something very wrong with my work, in spite of no one coming up with specifics on either methodology or results. I came here expecting I might need some help, but helpfulness does not seem present here.

Toto

Here are the issues that you have continually failed to address:

Scholars like Teeple identify sources, but you have gone radically beyond that by identifying actual authors of those sources, and by trying to claim eyewitness status for either the author or an informant.

You have no method for doing this except that you assume that there is eyewitness testimony there, and that identifying something that theoretically might be eyewitness testimony is sufficient.

You continually act as if any text without supernatural elements must be treated as historical, and ask others to prove that the text is not historical.

You don't leave much room for anyone to say anything except you are just wrong. But you can't hear that.

Are you the pastor of this church?

Adam

No, I deny all that.
Except I do go far beyond Teeple in identifying authors. When he published in 1974 it was safe to just assume all of John and even its sources was too late to relate to anyone in the narrative. That's not a good assumption anymore, and I was one of the first to try to identify people involved in the gathering of information towards it. Perhaps by force of habit (and professional reserve) they still refrain. But even Jeffrey Gibson in #309 admits that there is a prima facie case for it. What's wrong with weighing the pros and cons? Let's get into the substance of #161 and #162, as you propose.

Jeffrey Gibson

This is a perfect example of how you fail to argue. You make a global claim ("this is not a good assumption anymore") but do not tell us why this assumption is no longer good, let alone provide evidence that shows that this is so.


Jeffrey