stephan huller

i had just finished corresponding with one of the greatest living scholars. a classicist from Oxford. it was very pleasant but ultimately very depressing.

spin

So instead of dealing with the evidence in John, you run to other gospels whose veracity in some manner you assume. Circular reasoning is of no use to you. You have to start your job somewhere. How do you know from John who wrote the verses Joe cited? If you first assume the veracity of other texts (implied in this conjecture: "I would hold that John Mark heard the above version he wrote for the Passion Narrative underlying gJohn"), then you need to demonstrate that before continuing here.

How would you know that the tomb visit actually happened? How do you know that the story found in John with only one visitor does not have priority over the multiple visitors? If John received the earliest tomb tradition in the gospels, who wrote Joe's verses? If not, how do you know that the single visitor was not the earliest tradition?

stephan huller

for me the Marcionite testimony that none of the gospels was written by an eyewitness is sufficient as a working hypothesis

Adam

But Stephan,
The Marcionites only accepted (most of) Luke. Everybody knew he was not an eyewitness of Jesus.

Yes, the blame is on me for turning some of John 20 into eyewitness material, but I merely applied more modern (earlier) datings for John to Teeple's extraction of sources as John 20:1,3-5, 8,11-14 (JW's selection), 16-17, 19ad, 20b, 22-23, 26-27, 30. I recently verified this independently by my own examination of the style for my thread
Dan Barker's Easter Challenge
Can you name some Mythicists who are recognized scholars in source-criticism? As for the conspiracy theorists, can they account for the sources or (supposedly) just the extant texts?

stephan huller

I am not so sure about that. Irenaeus developed that argument because IMO he was intimately associated with the production of Luke (= anti-Marcionite cheat sheet). His teacher Polycarp was intimately associated with John. But the Marcionite gospel was probably a Diatessaron (how does Ephrem think that his gospel lines up with the Marcionite text save only for a few exceptions? Casey's Marcionite Diatessaron http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.230...21102276635677, also the number of times Tertullian's source (and other sources) think Marcion cut things which only appear in Matthew) etc

The Marcionites did not think Matthew, Mark, Luke or John were written by eyewitnesses. One can read De Recta in Deum Fide as if Adamantius knows the Marcionites thought Paul was an eyewitness. This doesn't mean its true or that the Marcionites actually believed that. It just means that we can't assume anything to be true just because we have inherited these ideas.

stephan huller

My problem with John is that I can't reconcile the idea of the author of John being an eyewitness when John was present at the Transfiguration and the Gospel of John neglects to mention that narrative.

Adam

I would suggest that you start with the paragraph in #232 I copied in from Truth Methodology. Then turn to the OP in
Gospel Eyewitnesses or your own #403 I link here in which you listed my points and labeled everything an assertion. Perhaps you forgot that I have covered all this and you have seen it. Also see my #244 listing of Teeple's Sources.

Circular? Hardly. I lamented the lack of an eyewitness recording these verses and left uncertain the true account that was filtered through two or more men who did record what they heard. Far from assuming the truth of everything, I left much in doubt!Did you read what I wrote? It's pretty well covered. I implied that John Mark heard from Mary Magdalene what he wrote in the Passion Narrative (but failed to specifically say this that was implied from it being about only Mary Magdalene). I could have added that it got over-written in the Synoptics by men presenting the different story they heard from other women or giving their own eyewitness testimony (Luke 24:13-35) or what was lost after Mark 16:8. Which woman am I supposed to say gave the "earliest tradition"? They said what they said that same day, probably. However, I do hold that John Mark wrote down almost immediately what he had heard, so that makes his version presumably the earliest and best. Indeed, I regard Matthew 28 as rather garbled and third-hand. (Not to mention the problems with Matthew 27!)

Do I know the tomb visit really happened? That's the kind of thing critical historians readily acknowledge as meaningful to explain how Christianity arose, regardless of whether a miraculous Resurrection occurred. That's regarded as history, isn't it? That the women saw "real" physical angels or even Jesus himself (John 20:14-17) I cannot affirm just from comparison of these somewhat contrasting ancient texts. If I say I believe it as a Christian do I get automatically banned from FRDB? You and Joseph are making dire threats.

Adam

No problem at all. John the Apostle (not John Mark who wrote the Passion Narrative) was involved in the editing of all of gJohn, but so much of it happened in Jerusalem that he could not contribute any personal touches. Virtually nothing occurs in Galilee after John 6, certainly not a journey north to Caesarea Phillippi. He does add in most of John 13, the foot-washing etc.

Toto

No it's not. The existence of a religion does not prove that its origin stories are true. There are many ways that Christianity could have started other than an empty tomb on Easter morning.

No, you don't, but I suspect you will lose the argument.

Adam

I'll keep that in mind.
And have you remembered what you read, spin?
If you're talking about the Synoptics, for you meaning Vork's Mark I guess, quite extraneously to my thesis I detailed in #230 in Gospel Eyewitnesses six layers in gMark that I never claimed had any stylistic markers between layers (except to allow for spin's Latinisms within at least the last layer). The layers can be derived only by comparison with the other three gospels, not by style within Mark.

If you're talking about John, then I have assiduously detailed stylistic differences between the Signs Source (Synoptic-like statistics), an anarthrous Editor (Beloved Disciple) layer, a P-Strand layer (Pharisees), a necessarily distinct Passion Narrative (overlap with Synoptics), and the remainder not being narrative like the rest but the Discourses.

I suppose that I have not elaborated upon historical characters because they are displayed in the texts themselves, but that a specific person was the eyewitness is often not necessary. I now select John Mark as author of the Passion Narrative instead of Peter, Andrew of the Signs and not the other candidate Philip, could make a case for any of the Seventy-Two for author of L, could find John or James as author of Ur-Marcus instead of Peter, and I'm still debating with myself whether Matthew was the sole author of Q1 or was it augmented by Peter or Andrew or _?