Sheshbazzar

I have noticed that I made a flub in my above post, and it now well past the time in which I could edit it. So I'll repost it here with the needed corrections, and any expansions in blue.

I apologize for the stuck together nature of this, but am sure that most of you can get the drift. and the ones that can't would have problems no matter how smoothly it read

Sheshbazzar

Your huge blocks of prose are very dense and not particularly easy to read.
But that aside lets consider a few of your past statements with regards to your Nicodemus theory.
Lets review a few of your posts Adam. In your thread 'Gospel Eyewitnesses' you say the following;
Post # 6Post # 38 That constitutes an argument that Nicodemus was a first hand eyewitness to the living Jebus, and wrote down things that he had heard directly from Jebus's lips, and was one of the writers behind the Gospel texts. This is clear from your entire line of argument.
Post # 86 Nicodemus was an eyewitness against Jebus, according to you.
Post # 98 Post # 155 Lots of luck in selling that theory to well established NT scholarship.
Post #186And then there was this From another huge block of your prose which seems to unfortunately have gone missing in the thread split; (Hope you can bring it back, I'm in need of more humorous material )

To which you know how I reacted and replied.

Anyway, there certainly is already more than enough evidence present here to call into question your above claim "I don't present Nicodemus as the eyewitness."

(I do recognize that you may be positing someone else entirely as being the first hand eyewitness for baptism narratives,-
apparently someone with a faulty memory, given the large discrepancies between those accounts given in the synoptics and in John.)



Sheshbazzar


.

Adam

gday, mate! shesh!
By george he's got it! almost....
So you've got it that Nicodemus is an eyewitness--but he's not the eyewitness. I said he wrote nothing that appears before John chapter 3. We're talking about John 1.
I continue promptly to say (still in the bolded section) that I develop below Andrew as an eyewitness. And you should recall from my other thread that I also presented John Mark and John the Apostle as eyewitnesses in the writing of John.

I don't think anything is missing from the thread split (transfer from Gospel Eyewitnesses to here). So far my primary text runs here at #1, #2, #13 (the transferred post you may think is missing) and #30.

Sheshbazzar

So?
Why not just cut to the chase and simply state -whom- it was among all of these 'witnesses',
(or whatever -other- as yet to be revealed figure it is, that you might be hiding somewhere in these dense and unwieldy blocks of prose)
__that you think was "THE" eyewitness?

Just spit out the name.

And then we can begin to consider your evidence, without having to try to sift through and deal with all the horse-shit, personal beliefs, and theological baggage that you have loaded your reasonings and text with.

If we are having difficulty understanding what you are writing, that is your responsibility.
If you actually desire to educate and to persuade us on this forum concerning this 'eyewitness' of yours,
you need to be composing and presenting your material in a format that more appropriate to the discussion nature of -this- board.

We here, on this board, are NOT your choir of Theo buddies.

You should by now be well aware that huge blocks of dense text, loaded with personal beliefs, 'maybe's' and 'could have beens' leaps of imagination,
are NOT appreciated here.

The name of your -one- "THE' witness", that should not be too much to ask for you to be upfront and forthright about;

Simply state it.



Sheshbazzar the Hebrew.

andrewcriddle

I'm not sure how clear the distinction was in the NT period.
This article on the Bat_Kol (Bath Qol) may be of interest.

Andrew Criddle

Adam

So, Shesh,
You don't get it. I don't get it either.
I have made it clear that it was not just one eyewitness who (in my opinion) wrote John. If you're asking whom I think the Beloved Disciple was (in John 13), I think it was John the Apostle. If you're asking if he wrote John, I say he was a later-stage Editor. If you're asking who was the witness to the Baptism of Jesus, I said it was not Nicodemus.
After that, it gets complicated. In my Gospel Eyewitnesses thread, I never talked about the Redactor, because he was not an eyewitness. Teeple assigns the first three verses John 1:28-30 (about John the Baptist seeing Jesus) to the Redactor. He assigns 1:31 to his S Source, which would be the Signs Gospel I assign to Andrew. (My analysis assigns all of these so far to the P-Strand, a complication unnecessary to discuss yet.) Teeple assigns 1:32-34, the E Editor, by Teeple not well regarded. I regard E as John the Apostle, except that I don't personally affirm these verses are E. Teeple and I agree that John 1:35-42 are basically S, the Signs Gospel, thus by Andrew in my analysis. So the only eyewitness here can be Andrew, but he did not write John 1:28-30 and maybe not 31-34. Note that John 1:34 is pointed out by Shesh as suspicious, so I can't affirm that an eyewitness wrote, "And I have seen and have testified that this one is the Son of God."

Sheshbazzar

Interesting.
So you choose to offer no suggestions as to whom specifically 'might have been' the eyewitness or eyewitnesses to the baptism of Jebus in either the synoptics or in John?
What good are 'eyewitnesses' that cannot be demonstrated to to have been eyewitnesses to the events that they are alleged to have been the eyewitnesses to?

And if they were eyewitnesses why would their accounts, -if 'the Gospel truth' be true-, be so fundamentally and radically different regarding what transpired on that occasion?
This isn't a minor matter, Was there a voice from heaven or not? Exactly what did it really say? Who knows? the accounts disagree.
Or was it just Jebus's lunatic second cousin spouting off and preaching his personal religious visions?

If what happened as narrated in Matthew, Mark, and Luke is the true Gospel account, what is narrated in John must be false or in error.
And if what is narrated in John is the true Gospel account, what is narrated in Matthew, Mark, and Luke must be false or in error.
This does not make the testimony of any of your alleged, supposed, or possible 'witness' either credible or trustworthy.

This of course is not my problem, as I believe that the entire NT scenario is a literary fabrication, and as such never had any witnesses present for these non-events that never happened outside of 'visions' and the writers fertile imaginations.

All these so called witnesses ever 'witnessed to' was the existence of their 'spiritual' religious experiences; dreams, 'visions' and the resulting beliefs, that were eventually all crudely cobbled together into narrative forms.

The NT writers were never actually eyewitnesses to anything that they wrote about these (non)-events.
The NT narratives were simply the end product of an ecstatic religious community, midrashing their messianic dreams and fasting induced 'visions'.

The dramatic differences between the texts being the result of the different communities dreams visions and resultant textual traditions, that combined with a load of latter theologically motivated additions. No one ever met this Jesus, no more than they had ever met the prototypical OT Joshua upon which the entire tale was constructed.

Again, huge bocks of dense text is not convincing, and even when carefully perused is not very impressive.
I do not worship Teeple, nor any of the other 'names' you have mentioned, and do not regard their opinions to be any more valid than my own. Citing them or their opinions serves neither to impresses nor to edify me.

tanya

Thank you Andrew for that link to the Wikipedia article, very interesting.

Here's a quote from that article:
First, it would seem then, that these whispers are part and parcel of Judaism, as is the "Holy Spirit", with which the prophets spoke. My question is whether this is the same "holy spirit" described by orthodox trinitarianism? The related question is whether or not Jews have believed in "holy spirits" before the arrival of Christianity, or only since Christianity?

Secondly, some banal and utterly insignificant, off topic, comments about that Wikipedia article's quote vis a vis the Synagogue at Dura Europos, a town on the famous river in Syria, if I am not mistaken.

I don't know of any Christian artwork inside a Jewish synagogue, whether in Syria, or anywhere else. Wasn't that city destroyed by the Persians? "Hand of God", I am confused, Andrew, I thought that Judaism prohibited representation of God by drawings, paintings, sculpture, and so on. Am I wrong about that? Apologies for the several off topic questions.......

jakejonesiv

That's fine. If you want to retreat to the impregnable citadel of faith, you are welcome to it. It is a tacit admission that you have been defeated on the field of rational discourse. I don't care what you believe. If you are asking us to consider your arguments from a historical perspective, then leave your beliefs out.

Toto

Dura Europos was buried and preserved like a fly in amber in the third century. It was an outpost of the Roman Empire, and contains an elaborate synagogue with Hellenistic style paintings, which show that 3rd century Jews did not strictly follow any prohibition against artistic representations. There is no Christian artwork in the Synagogue, but I think the wikipedia statement is intended to mean that Christians copied the idea of representing the bat kol in their own artwork at a later date.