Adam

My thesis all along has been that we have no complete gospel that is the product of an eyewitness (gMatthew and gJohn are not), but that contained within them are seven written eyewitness records. I realize that this does not make this simple. I did say that the only candidate for a written statement by an eyewitness to Jesus's baptism would be Andrew in the Signs Gospel, and I did say in Post #36 that that would be limited to John 1:31 and John 1:35 and thereafter. You specifically ask about the voice from heaven, but that's from the Synoptics (Mark 1:11; Lk 3:22). Coming from Peter or Matthew, these would be by an eyewitness of Jesus, but presumably not an eyewitness of this particular event. Between eyewitness to the event, eyewitnesses to Jesus but not to the event, and later redactors, there's plenty of room for confusion.No matter which scholars, the Signs Gospel has lots of support, I just picked the best at getting an objective text based on stylistic analysis. If there was such a text, someone wrote it. You can't have it both ways. You can't attack gJohn as not a complete, unified text, and then say you prefer to discuss its provenance as just one simple text.
In my next in my series from my article, I'll shore up my case for Andrew as an author.

Sheshbazzar

Duh. No shit Dick Tracy, what gave you that clue, a voice from heaven?

If that's the best you have to offer, I'll certainly be sticking with my parsimonious and rational explanation as is outlined above.

Just because -'someone'- 'wrote' a text, that does not entail that the content of said text describes any reality.
There isn't any such thing as an 'objective' Bible text. It doesn't exist, no more than a sky-daddy or zombie Jebus.
You got what you got, and that's all you got, and it contains exactly what it contains; its filled with fabricated horse-shit from front to back.
Hopefully, for your sake, you can do a hell of a lot better than what you have been doing so far.
And you know that I'm going to be catching you out on any 'maybe's' 'perhaps's' or 'could have been's', or any claims of sequences of events based on magical acts performed by an invisable sky-daddy.
So you might want to think about editing out any of your reasonings based on that type of horse-shit before you post more of your old and moldy material here.

John the Baptist got his head on a platter. I intend to be handing you your ass on a platter.





Sheshbazzar the Hebrew

.

Adam

I rarely post my 2005 Mega Society articles in FRDB (and only thus far in my original thread on Gospel Eyewitnesses, Post #23), because I can so easily link to them. Or you can type in "Mega Society" and go to the "Special.Issue: Biblical Scholarship".
In this thread I have transcribed my 1988 "Significance of John" in Cincinnatus Society Bulletin that was of course not on the internet. It was scholarly, so is more cautious about giving names and dates. It was not aimed at specifying eyewitness material, "just" specifying the sources and editions of gJohn. I won't be changing the reasoning except as denoted by brackets, which mean "2011 note". Everything in bold is new.
That article was accepted for publication in the Biblical Theology Bulletin by the (still) editor David Bossman, but was displaced by an article on John that the prior editor wanted to publish. So it is peer-reviewed, and I'm not going to change it. I have not seen any advance in source-criticism of John in 30 years, so I don't have to accommodate new knowledge.

Sheshbazzar

I edited my above post #43, removing the reference to the 'Mega Society' I had intended my statement to be more inclusive anyway,
so it now includes any published or unpublished moldy old horse-shit from 1988, or from any other year or source.
That better?


Sheshbazzar the Hebrew

Adam

And I'll go ahead with #5 in the series (following Posts #1, #2, #13, and #30 so far). This won't even get me through the Signs Gospel that I attribute to Andrew. The "P" (for "Pharisee") is not a new eyewitness, just an editorial strand that is not a source, though I now attribute to John Mark, who was an eyewitness to the Passion Narrative elsewhere in John. (But I say nothing about that in the original paper.)
[2011 note: To go against von Wahlde’s advice and going beyond John 18:5 and my article as published in 1988, additional P-Strand verses might include 20:3-5, 8, 11b-14a, 22-23, and 26-27. But as I hold that John Mark wrote both the P-Strand and the Synoptic Source, these verses might have already been included earlier. Both Matthew and Mark diverge from the underlying “Petrine” source, so only Luke is available for a good comparison and may have omitted some of these verses.]
The names Andrew and Philip can be tied to the Signs Source better than the P-Strand [can be]. The names occur repeatedly in John 1:40-48. Nicol definitely identifies this as Source. These names occur again at John 6:5-8. Nicol may consider these verses as Source, also. However, Nicol’s’ hesitation at specifying all of John 6:1-15 as Source is due to later insertions of Johannine material which I admit include the names themselves. My understanding of the Signs Source is that it specified Andrew and Philip, but rarely gave their names. The text as originally written said things like “two of his disciples,” one of the two,” and “this one,” as still found in our text at John 1:35, 37, 40, and 41.

The places where names were inserted later can be recognized by the absence of the Greek article before the names. In contrast, the styles of both the Signs and P-Strand sections include using the article before most names.
The terminology requires redefinition at this point Nicol called “Source” and other authors called “Signs Source” what we now are beginning to see was actually the additions by the first editor style, which I call Signs-style, is so well-preserved because it was not complied by an editor who added his Johannine style to everything. These editions are best called simply the “Signs.” In contrast, the Second Edition of John 1 call the P-Edition. It added the P-Strand and the larger part of the Synoptics passages within John.

These first two editions of John can be differentiated from one another by style and content, but for practical purposes can be treated as one process. For these two editions conclusive proof cannot be given that one preceded the other, or what is the exact relationship. What seems to have occurred is a teamwork of author and scribe. The sources employed were written by the scribe, and he added final editorial touches of his own. However, the new stories added (the Signs) were done by the author (or his personal scribe) in his own style. To explain it all in detail is best reserved for a separate study.

The source pieces seem to have been brought together in a double process of editing. For our purposes now and probably for as much as we can know anyway, this can all be treated as one operation. All the Discourses and all the Synoptic passages in John were brought in as sources during this editing. The miracle stories called Signs were not from a source, but were additions basic to this editing itself. They are free from Johannine style, so we can know that an editor added them—they did not acquire the mild Johannine characteristics notable in whatever the co-editor touched. The co-editor brought in his Discourses, the Passion Narrative, and various inserts about the Pharisees.

The result of the process (the combined First Edition and Second Edition of John) was most of our Gospel of John. We might call this the Signs-Discourse Gospel, conceptually similar to the Narrative-Discourse Source developed by Temple (the main part of the “Core” of his book, the Core of the Fourth Gospel). It could be called the Primary Edition. To use the shortest and to express its similarity to Temple’s concepts, I will call it the “Core Gospel.”

The Core Gospel began with the full Prologue except for John 1:17. The Prologue was simply theology by Nicodemus after he had written the Discourses from dictation. The somewhat different word use in the Prologue is because they are Nicodemus’ words, not Jesus’. The rest of Chapter 1 was also largely in the Core Gospel. The word “Pharisee” first occurs at John 1:24, and the section through 1:31 seems to be P-Strand. The Call of the Disciples which follows is from the Signs, except that the repetitions of names were added later. Indeed, the name Andrew probably did not appear in the text, which is an argument for Andrew as author of the Core Gospel.

Vorkosigan

Please explain how you know that John Mark wrote both the P-Strand and the Synoptic Source.

Adam

By "Synoptic Source" I mean here the Passion Narrative. The latter I attribute to "the disciple known to the High Priest". What I call the "P-Strand" claims to know Pharisees and high clergy and Caiaphas's statement that it is better "that one man die in behalf of the people and not that the whole nation perish". (John 11:46-50)
Howard Teeple could not find any stylistic difference between this P-Strand and the Passion Narrative portions that he labelled as "S". It is possible that they are even the same layer of text, thus most likely with the same author.
For John Mark as the author see the last one-third of my OP in Gospel Eyewitnesses. It will not be later in this thread, as I came up with this idea just in 2011.
http://www.freeratio.org/showthread.php?t=306983
For more about the P-Strand see the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs in Post #144 there:
http://www.freeratio.org/showthread.php?t=306983&page=6

Sheshbazzar

A little better. Not so many wild-ass 'could have beens' and speculations. And amazingly no claims based on sky-daddy pulling off any of his magic tricks.
about as likely as having been Humpty Dumpty's words.

Vorkosigan

There is no argument in that thread. There is simply a statement. An argument consists of evidence in some kind of logical framework. For example, if I want to argue that the author of Mark paralleled the OT in a particular passage, I'd show that (1) ancients constructed their fictional narratives by paralleling religious tales; (2) the gospels are constructed by similar paralleling; (3) the parallels are X Y and Z between the two stories; and (4) the writer of Mark cites his source using the language of the Septaugint in that passage, to link his creation and the source.

There is (1) no evidence that John Mark is anything but fictional and (2) no evidence whatsoever to connect him with any particular passage in the New Testament.

Stop asserting. We already know you think John Mark is the source for X Y and Z. What I want is an argument that shows it.

Adam

I suppose you're already aware you said there is nothing about John Mark in the NT. I guess you meant the gospels, because he's named many times in Acts.
I needed to refer you to at least one more place in Gospel Eyewitnesses. There's #52 about the 4th eyewitness to Jesus, Peter.
http://www.freeratio.org/showthread.php?t=306983&page=3
And my #52 provides a link to the third of my four Mega Society articles, which should fill in any details still missing. The first two paragraphs about "Ur-Marcus" is all that's relevant.
http://megasociety.org/noesis/181.htm#Underlying
There is also the first of those articles, whose first six paragraphs tie Luke as eyewitness to Acts to John Mark and Peter as eyewitnesses to Jesus. For an argument, this one is the best.
http://megasociety.org/noesis/181.htm#Underlying
This is probably a good time to acknowledge that I am not a member of the Mega Society. I am a member of several one-in-a-thousand societies, such as the Cincinnatus Society that ultimately published my Significance of John article that had earlier been approved by Biblical Theology Bulletin. I was invited by the Mega Society editor to write for their Noesis because I was so qualified in the field of their planned issue on the Bible.