Jeffrey Gibson

His Lutheran friends would be surprised to know this.

Who said he did? And he never simply dismissed those whom he thought were wrong. He, unlike you, provide3d reasons why he thought they were wrong.


Ah, the aggrieved "scholar's" petulance. Mis-characterize what others say and feel like you've scored some rhetorical points amd made your case.

Except that he doesn't (even if you haven't begged the question about the clarity of the evidence). See pp. 64-68 of this book and his "Thomas and the Synoptics" NovT 30 (1988) 132-57 and his Q and Thomas: Evidence of of a Primitive "Wisdom Gospel"?" ETL 67b (1991) 346-60.

My confidence that you have any idea what you are talking about and are as familiar with the relevant literature (and the work of the scholars you speak of) as you want us to think you are grows less and less with each of your postings

You ought to know.

Jeffrey

Adam

[Response to #168, not #171]
Golly, Jeffrey,
I am of course truly saddened by your assessment. It's almost as if spin wrote it.

BTB in 1980 had an issue reserved for the gospels. When the ex-editor's article was chosen instead of mine, that was the end of that for several years--not to mention that the next article on John would probably not be source-criticism anyway, as that is not BTB's niche. They were more broadly into theology.

I am aware that my article leaves much to be desired, but I kept referring to it here to give evidence for the existence of sources in the gospels that cannot be ignored in blithely contending that their were no eyewitness records. This is still the standard position of scholarship. Hermann C. Waetjin stated in page 3 of his The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple in 2005, that a
"pre-Johannine narrative "Signs Source" combined with a Passion story and subsequently with a Discourse Source and redacted into the present form of the Gospel, has dominated scholarly efforts to resolve its enigmas, aporiai and riddles."
My contribution here has been to isolate a P-Strand that identifies where these sources were first stitched together, to detach Discourse material from Teeple's E recognizing it as Discourse Source, and to acknowledge that Teeple's R identifies yet a third layer of editing/redacting proving that the Passion Narrative was not dependent upon the Synoptics. I was correct in 1980 even though my limited space did not allow proving all these points.

I believe that I was right in 1980 to remove Teeple's ideological bias is splitting G from E the way he did. He had retained this much of Bultmann's ideology-driven source-criticism in spite of Teeple's expertise with style. I continue to oppose ideological separations of source strata as in Udo Schelle's Antidocetic Christology in the Gospel of John, 1992 (translated from the 1987 German). Teeple was correct except to the extent he let his own predilections assign Discourse material he disliked to an Editor E who botched sayings, as opposed to a G source he found enlightening. In spite of being an atheist Teeple was primarily a humanist who wanted to acknowledge Jesus as good. (My way of dodging unpalatable sayings of Jesus in E Discourses is to blame Nicodemus for zealously collecting material for the indictment against Jesus.)

You're seriously saying after comments like yours and spin's that I should submit to a scholarly journal a 33-year-old article by someone who never took any courses in religion beyond Philosophy of Religion during my brief stint post-graduate as a philosophy major before I found out it was not at all a glamorous substitute for intellectual history? That was in the heyday of British Analytic Philosophy--very dull. (At least it got me studying German.)

Jeffrey Gibson

Peer review is blind -- and a submitter's qualifications or lack of them are not and cannot be taken into account when a reader is assessing whether a paper deserves to be published. It's only the quality of the paper itself and the soundness of its argument that is considered by reviewers. They are not told who the submitter is. So unless you are now saying that you are unqualified to produce a good paper, and that your paper hasn't stood the test of time, your ad misericordiam poor poor pitiful me note is inexplicable. After all, you didn't let your lack of credentials stand in your way when you sent it off to BTB.

And you miss my point. You article is rubbish and I don't think it has a chance of being published anywhere.. But you keep insisting that it's good and scholarly, and that since source criticism of John allegedly hasn't changed in 30 year, that it's still "up to date". So what I'm saying is that given this, you should either put your money where your mouth is and send it off for publication or shut up about how incisive and cutting edge and compelling, not to mention true, it is and how the rest of us are too blinkered to see what a sterling contribution you've made to Johannine studies.

And one wonders why you haven't sent it off to current Johannine scholars like Paul Anderson and Tom Thatcher and Felix Just or Warren Carter for their reviews of it.

And again, in the text I cut out, all you did was assert what you thought you had accomplished. We have no reason to believe, and only your word for it, that you actually did what you think you did.


Jeffrey

Jeffrey Gibson

The issue is not who wrote it, but whether it is accurate.

Probably? You don't know for sure?

Funny how they published an article of mine on Matt. 6:11-13//Lk. 11:1-2, not to mention many many other articles on the Gospels since 1980.

In any case, here's the journal's archive:

http://btb.sagepub.com/content/by/year

Perhaps you'd like to demonstrate with actual evidence rather than just assert that after 1980 BTB was "... more broadly into theology" than source criticism of Gospel study.

Would you care to demonstrate your self serving claim that those who contend that there are no eyewitness records behind the gospels do so "blithely" (whatever that means)?

Can you do so?


Jeffrey

Jeffrey Gibson

BTW, I've just had a look at the table of contents for all 4 1980 issues of BTB. I do not see any issue devoted exclusively to the Gospels or any article's there by O'Grady by him on GJohn (he has one on the Passion in Mark). Moreover, O Grady was still the BTB editor in 1980.

Have my eyes deceived me (a possibility) or have you been prevaricating?

Jeffrey

Toto

Memory fades.

There is the May 1982 issue which has an article by John F. O'Grady "Recent Developments in Johannine Studies" - that could be the issue Adam is thinking of. (The editor had changed at this point.)

Jeffrey Gibson

Except that it is not devoted solely to the Gospels.

Jeffrey

Adam

Almost without exception members here on FRDB deny we have any eyewitness records of Jesus. The poster "Tassman" on Theology Web so categorically denied this that I started accumulating seven written gospel eyewitness records to refute that contention. I asked him, and later everyone here on FRDB, to provide evidence that there were no eyewitnesses. None has been forthcoming, not even pointers toward scholars who have done so. Form Criticism does assume that there were no eyewitnesses, but Form Criticism has failed, which undermines its assumption.
Meanwhile Richard Bauckham and others have re-established the case for eyewitnesses.

Building on my base from 1980 I went much farther than Bauckham did and met no credible opposition there in the thread on which I posted, Argument from Historical Probability. So I moved over here to FRDB to present my thesis in my thread Gospel Eyewitnesses. The basic retort was that these could not be eyewitnesses because they tell of miracles. Seeing that my thesis was being denied on a priori grounds, when the post-count reached into the 500's, I started pointing out that several of the earliest eyewitnesses told about Jesus without much (if any) supernaturalism.

Here's #526.
And with detail on the Passion Narrative at Post #534
And Post #546
See Post #548 for detail, except that at the start where I say my "Post #533 it should read #534.
I list my "Gospel According to the Atheists" exhaustively at Post #555, see my correction that should read Luke 22:1-38 in place of Luke 22:3-23, 48-49, 23:35-37 at Post #561
At this point I at least expected to get a hearing here at FRDB, but even HJ partisans here did not want to accept this aid against the more active Mythicist posters here. This is surely some most "blithe" rejection of my case for eyewitness testimony, even to the extent of caviling at my name for this modified thesis, "Gospel According to the Atheists". I had presented texts that could not be rejected a priori, namely the Passion Narrative (from Teeple's S Source in John), Q1, and the Discourses. (These are the same three sources I derived in Significance of John except substituting Q1 for the supernaturalist Signs Source.)

stephan huller

The clearest evidence for this tradition is in De Recta in Deum Fide:

AD. Will you agree if I show from the Gospels that they are not fabrications?
MEG. I will agree if you prove it. First state the names of the Gospel writers.
AD. The disciples of Christ wrote them: John and Matthew; Mark and Luke25.
MEG. Christ did not have Mark and Luke as disciples, so you and your party are convicted of producing spurious writings. Why is it that the disciples whose names are recorded in the Gospel did not write, while men who were not disciples did? Who is Luke? Who is Mark? You are therefore convicted of bringing forward names not recorded in the Scriptures.
EUTR. If Christ had disciples, would He not have committed the work to them rather than to men who were not disciples? Something seems wrong here. The disciples themselves ought rather to have been entrusted with the task.
AD. These men are also disciples of Christ.
MEG. Let the Gospel26 be read, and you will find that their names are not recorded.
EUTR. Let it be read. Ad. The names of the twelve apostles have been read, but not of the seventy-two.1
EUTR. How many apostles had Christ ?
AD. First he sent out twelve and, after that, seventy-two to preach the gospel. Therefore, Mark and Luke, who are among the seventy-two, preached the gospel together with Paul the apostle.
MEG: It is impossible that these [two] ever saw Paul.

and then later:

EUTR. How is it, Marcus, that your party do not accept those who were sent out by Christ to preach and proclaim the Gospel, yet you do accept one for whom you offer no proof? Why is it that you disparage Matthew and John, whose names are recorded in Scripture, and whom Christ sent out to preach and proclaim the Gospel, but accept Paul, for whom you have no proof? Surely this is ridiculous? Tell us this at least: Did they proclaim and preach the Gospel or not?
MK. They proclaim the Gospel. b
EUTR. Was their proclamation and preaching of the Gospel recorded or unrecorded?
MK. It was unrecorded.
EUTR. It is quite absurd to assert on the one hand that those who were sent out to preach and proclaim the Gospel did so unrecorded, and on the other to claim that Paul, who had not been sent out, taught and was recorded! [p. 91]

http://books.google.com/books?id=KI6...who%22&f=false

Jeffrey Gibson

You are confusing two things -- whether there were eyewitness whose testimony stands behind gospel sources and whether any gospel source that can be uncovered was composed by an eye witness.


Here again you confuse two things: that someone has made a case for position X and that someone has irrefutably proven that X is true.


Moreover, what Bauckham argues is .
You have misrepresented him if you think he says that sections of the Gospels were composed by eyewitnesses.

Quote:

( Building on my base from 1980 I went much farther than Bauckham did amet no credible opposition there in the thread on which I posted,

Even leaving aside the question begging use of "credible", so what? That doesn't mean you are right.


But here's a thought. Post your work to Bauckham and see if he thinks there's any merit to it. He can be reached here.

http://richardbauckham.co.uk/index.php?page=contact



Jeffrey