spin

Of the bits I've read, and your habit is to shit the thing all over the thread so it is an incoherent mess, you have done nothing more than what I have repeatedly described, ie made assertions that you do not support. The stuff lacks argumentation and evidence.

This is, once again, utter shit. You will not get that into your sorry reasoning. I don't give a fuck how many times you list stupid numbers or repeat the garbage you published in Noesis that I have already commented on.

As you are incorrigible, I'd recommend to the moderators that they take action against your carryings on. You are stuck in a rut with your agenda driven assumptions of eye witnesses and that you can indivduate writers of anonymous texts. You are attempting to force others to accept your complete disregard for scholarly practice through nothing more than repetitive assertions. I feel your posting is without any hope and I depair at your ability to understand what has been said to you concerning your overburdening problem of lack of scholarly methodology, as evidenced in your perpetual disinterest in argumentation and evidence.

Your rejection of them is not a reasoned response. Try again. Here's the first one:

1. Adam neither posts evidence nor argumentation, but busloads of assertions;

Show the forum your evidence and arguments. Specifically pick a representative example of your work and provide a commentary showing the evidence and argumentation. Please try. No numbers, no bald assertions, no opinions of authorities. Just the evidence and the argumentation for your claims of eye witnesses.

2. He claims that people should take notice of a paper published in some unknown non-scholarly periodical, though claimed to be peer-reviewed;

So why should people accept your faux peer-reviewed article as peer-reviewed?

3. No-one bothers to continue reading his gospel-hacking material because it has no methodology to it;

Do you disagree that no-one bothers to continue reading your methodology-challenged material?

4. He comments on Aramaic when he shows no knowledge of the language.

Is this not correct??

The skill of mindreading is not one of your fortes. They include persistence and disregard for scholarship.

(Maurice Casey is now a doddering idiot kept on his feet by a silly New Zealand suckup with pretensions. He is at least a serious scholar of Aramaic.)

This shows your inability to read the specific forum guideline. Here it is yet again:

Issues that have been analyzed by the forum in great detail should, unless new evidence can be introduced to revitalize them, be considered dealt with and will thereafter be considered agenda-driven.

Note that there is nothing about "anyone else is hawking [your] ideas", so you are being irrelevant and not dealing with your problem.

Jeffrey Gibson

Why should there be? You haven't presented it coherently (i.e., all at once instead of in serialized sections) or made it accessible by providing links to the places it can be found here.

I strongly suggest that you leave off posting anything in this thread, including your responses to Spin, until you post the entirety of the article in one place.

I'm sure I'm not alone in having no inclination whatsoever to see whether or not your article (which you are indeed now only making increasingly petulant and annoying claims about) is a scholarly one until you do this. And your continuing failure to present the article as a whole, rather than to tell us where we can find it (though only after doing work we shouldn't be asked to do) lends credence to Spin's accusation that you don't know how to present a scholarly argument and that all you are doing is asserting that your article is scholarly.

It's time to put up or shut up.

Jeffrey

Stringbean

Jeffrey is right. I have tried to form some sort of coherent response to it but it's like a drunk driver it's all over the place.

Adam

I anticipated learned discourse when Doug Shaver recommended this forum to me. I was even more expecting stimulating challenge when Joe Wallack bragged that FRDB is the Big Leagues. Instead I have had to have the good grace to expunge without comment spin's first paragraph from his lengthy Post #124. Now #141 yet a second time demands that I refute his four extracts from that paragraph. Is he really such a masochist?
Significance of John OP

OK, class, as it seems too difficult for some of you to find My Post #1 on page one of this thread you're reading, please follow the above link thereto. Than scroll down to my continuation of my article where the argumentation and evidence starts with my Post #2.
Now this "I. Analysis of the Discourses" does have the complication of a three-fold series of threes because I was determined to show convincing
logic to my position. The three series are parallel in nature, with the second and third series providing the evidence for the first. The first series gives three reasons why a contemporaneous eyewitness account nevertheless never got included in the other three gospels (the Synoptics).
In the second series (1) I explain that the writer was not likely an apostle, and I footnote Oscar Cullman stating that various non-apostles have been suggested for the Beloved Disciple. I argue that non-apostles must have been present as servants or scribes. (2)I state that the Discourses were originally written in Aramaic, and I cite Matthew Black as the leading authority on the matter. (I could also have mentioned that Bruce Metzger detailed the fact that the Discourses feature the most textually suspect verses in John, thus arguing against an original text simply in Greek.) (3) I argue that the Discourses were controversial, not suitable for evangelizing one's fellow Jews.

In the third series of three I turn to the offensive for an early date for the Discourses. (1) They don't mention any apostles "until" John 14 (Thank you, spin, to give me this opportunity to correct my obvious mistyping where Post #2 reads "in" in error.) In contrast to the Synoptics set in Galilee, the Discourses are almost entirely set in Jerusalem by someone unfamiliar to the apostles and whom they would not likely meet much later to even know that he had written all this. That they were not written by an apostle means there must have been some other reason to include them in a gospel, namely that they were authentic early records of what Jesus said.
(2) I cite Lightfoot and Sydney Temple that John is the most Hebraic of the gospels. I argue that the Discourses were written from dictation recording what had been said in Aramaic.

(3) I argue that Jesus is recorded as saying things before John 14 that a disciple of Jesus would have ignored, suppressed, or softened. "The thrust of the case is that the dialogues must have been written at the scene (or shortly afterwards) by a non-Christian or pre-Christian, more likely the latter." The name I provided was "Nicodemus, a Greek name". I failed to cite Sydney Temple at this point, probably because Temple in 1974 contended that Nicodemus wrote much more than just the Discourses, what he called "the Core Gospel". (Unlike Earl Doherty and some other mythicists, I don't like to cite someone as if they support my position more than they do.) However, that Nicodemus is the person who wrote the Discourses is not necessary to my thesis that the Discourses are one of the seven written eyewitness records in the gospels.

Nevertheless, I then conclude my Post #2 with a paragraph carefully detailing my evidence for Nicodemus as that particular eyewitness. Nobody here likes to follow links, so here it is again:
By believing me at my word? Oh, wrong answer. I suppose the best reason would be that spin is indefatigable and has had ample opportunity to contact David Bossman (or even the still-living Editor Emeritus) and has not reported back anything disreputable about me. So believe spin if you don't believe me.
The reading count on my threads continues to rise quite proportionately to the reads on other threads. I admit this surprises me, as I would have expected firm atheists (or at least mythicists) to put me on ignore. I give credit to FRDB members being more open-minded than I would have expected. (insert popcorn symbol here?)How about all the Greek specialists who take the position that John (and all gospel sources) were written originally in Greek? So we can discount them, surely? Thus wherever there is doubt we should elect for an Aramaic original?

No, I am not an Aramaic scholar. The Dead Sea Scrolls were so important as of 1964 that I wanted to start graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin so that I could go to the one institution I knew of where I could both major in Intellectual History (under George Mosse) and study Aramaic. I already knew in 1964 that I had a special gift regarding the sources of the gospels. However, family finances would not allow for that, so I wound up with only a regular History M. A. and German, Greek, Dutch, Italian, and French as further languages beyond the Spanish and Russian I already had. I admit I don't have much of a gift for languages, so I never attempted self-study of Aramaic.
So I was wrong to discern that you don't like to lie? Or that fear is not your problem, but, say, jealousy? I admit I don't know what makes you tick. I was trying to be charitable, just acknowledging that you take care in what you say to avoid being proven wrong. Am I wrong to suspect you do aim to provoke me (and others) into rash replies that may get us banned, however? You are openly campaigning to limit my participation here.OK. So I have more of an agenda than aa, duvduv, Earl Doherty, maryhelena, Mountainman, outhouse, Shesh, Solo, or almost anyone who posts here? Who is safe?

Jeffrey Gibson

This is an insult. Why should anyone here be made to work to find what you have written? If you want us to read what you've written it, then it's your job to provide us with what you've written. Stop telling us to go hunt for it.

What's more, I've gone to this link, and the thread is too discursive to be readable.

I'll say it again. Put up or shut up. Either post the article in its entirety somewhere or stop complaining that no one has taken the time or made the effort to read it.

And good gawd -- there were others in the room where Jesus and Nicodemus met??? How on god's green earth do you know that?

Jeffrey

spin

You were asked to pick from your material some sign of evidence and argumentation. You, unheeding of my complaint, merely pointed me back to the mess, beginning with your first post, which contains no argumentation or evidence, for it is all merely "exposition", not even an attempt at providing meat. So let's get past the exposition and cite your entire second post in this thread, with commentary...

Obviously no argumentation or evidence here in this speculation.

More speculation.

Tossing around a few opinions to get to an assertion.

Assertions and then speculation.

Building on assertion and speculation you continue...
Pure speculation.

Pure speculation with subjective assessment of probability.

A mixture of literary fact and conjecture based on assumptions about the factuality of the content of the text.

This non sequitur claims to draw on the previous statements to make a point by using a "thus" without explaining the connection between the writing of the discourses by non-apostles with what you wrote immediately before. It also contains another subjective claim of probability and no foundation for the assertion of "an early enough date to be later respected".

A claim based on authority.

Subjective evaluation of the "most compelling reason" with no evidence or argumentation to support it. How dictation is suddenly dragooned into the fray is not indicated. There is no attempt to show any scholarly background to its suggestion here. There are no analyses given to show how we may be dealing with dictation.

The statement doesn't contain much sense, but it seems to be another assertion without anything to back it up.

An assertion which asks us to wait a paragraph for something to substantiate it.

An assertion.

An assertion.

An assertion.

An assertion.

Here we are at the next paragraph for substantiation of that earlier assertion!
An assertion which is somehow based on a loose connection with a few literary facts derived from Jn. It is in fact a non sequitur. There is no reason to think from the following information about Nicodemus that "Nicodemus as author of the Johannine discourses makes good sense."

None of this allows you to get beyond speculating that "Nicodemus as author of the Johannine discourses makes good sense" to you.

This post of yours is totally free of evidence and argumentation. It is similar in lack of content to every other such piece of analytical work you have presented here on BC&H that I have read.

If you were in a first year university class a kind tutor would reject your paper totally and ask you to resubmit a paper written from scratch supplying at every step of the way evidence and argumentation, avoiding subjective probabilities and evaluations, and sticking as closely as possible to what the evidence that you can find allows you to say. But, the tutor would stress, you need to find some evidence first.

Adam

the OP (always anything in bold [or in brackets] is new explanations I added)


#2


#3 (skip the quoted box)


#4 (ditto, and proceed right to "II. Separation of Narrative Strands"


#5


#6


#7


#8


#9


#10

To be safe, Start with Ctrl-N to open a new screen, then when you "X" out of each post in sequence you will still have this "guide-post" up when you Alt-Tab.

spin

Just what the doctor ordered!

:hysterical: :hysterical: :hysterical: :hysterical: :hysterical: :realitycheck:

Sheshbazzar

If you got something to say Adam, just say it, no one wants to go back and read through all that crap again for the umpteenth time.

Gee, and we haven't even got around to Adam's wonky claim the Nicodemus was actually a low-life paid snitch employed by the Sanhedrin.

Adam

Wow, Johnny on the spot, spin! Thank you. That makes it more clear which post in the thread you're going to. (I had thought that way was bad form, however, Toto likes the naked link hidden, so I went to the extra trouble.)

Unfortunately you caught me in mid-process. I noticed that the fifth in my series only was pegged to the page 3, not Post #57. I changed that to the specific post like all the others. Nor had I yet inserted the line spacing. Hopefully someone can correct the problem with #5 to Post #57. If not, I recommend utilizing my #147 and not spin's #148.

Now that you can all find my serialization, we can discuss the adequacy of documentation and argumentation. And apart from that, we can discuss whether the ideas are true or not, regardless of any perceived deficiency in the evidence I provided.

More pressing might be inquiry into precisely what I said. I had not been expecting this flurry of posting on my old thread and I had said I was starting to prepare a cross-reference from my Gospel Eyewitness thread to eyewitnesses from gJohn (Nicodemus, Andrew, John the Apostle, and John Mark) over to this thread, along with some elucidation of why my P-Strand analysis (my particular contribution to scholarship from my 1980 paper) helps display that the Passion Narrative in gJohn is a source that the P-Strand editorial layer stitched together with the other two sources (the Signs Source quite clearly, but the Discourses as well). My rethinking regarding the P-Strand (see the bold in #67, the seventh in the series) may need some explanation, though careful analysis of Greek style may get us very far.