Jeffrey Gibson

But this is not shown. It is asserted. Where is your evidence that the anarthrous names (if such there be -- you haven't provided anything that makes clear that these names are anarthrous) are insertions. Is it bad Greek? Is it really out of keeping with John's style?

Is he right? How do you know? Why should anyone accept his claims? Are there any other explanations for what he sees?

So what?

But why should anyone put their work together? What is the justification for doing so?

This is not an argument. It is a report.

And where is your criteria that you use to determine what does and does not "look like the work of an editor"? Again, without stating this and showing that "the remainder" you speak of (that you have arrived at arbitrarily) indeed does resemble editorial work, this is just assertion. There's no demonstration of its truth. There is no way given by which we can judge the truth or falsity of your claims. Why should I or anyone believe what you claim?


The rest is cut from the same cloth.

Jeffrey

Sheshbazzar

OK Adam, I'll give it a start.

They equally or more likely, 'might have' not been invented until much latter.

You can not provide any evidence that the 'discourses' are anything more than literary productions produced by anonymous authors at a late date.
Justin the ardent Christian, writing circa 130-150 appears to be totally unaware of any so called 'Gospel according to John' or any of these alleged 'discourses'.
And they equally, or even more likely, might not have existed in either Aramaic or Greek.

No such early Aramaic text, not even a fragment of such has ever been recovered.
No such claim of Aramaic composition cames down to us from the Patristic sources, or church writings.
All they knew of was the Greek text, and that only in the 2nd century.
You are guessing and hoping, without a shred of physical evidence to support your guess.
That is a silly claim if these text are at all what you wish to purport them to be.

They equally, or even more likely, 'might have been as yet unwritten, and non-existent in the first century.
Purely literary inventions, Far from being the 'eyewitness reports' that you are theorizing them to be.


To you with your FAITH driven agenda. All three of your reasons seem extremely unlikely to me.

The first thing that you have written that makes any sense.
The only reason you think that is because you are proceeding from a FAITH driven view that 'The Last Supper' STORY is an account of an actual historical event, rather than a product of literary invention. Which your FAITH will not allow.

There is no valid reason, other than your FAITH driven attempt at apologetics, to think that any apostle ever wrote a single word of these texts.
Or that any of it at all was written as a verbatim account 'while 'Jesus' was alive'.

It is far more likely that these texts, all of them, are not historical accounts, but literary productions and religious mythology through and through.

Anyone else care to add more? Or take on Adam's claims made in his next paragraph or two?



.

Adam

Thanks for engaging on this issue, Jeffrey. No one else on FRDB has attempted to be helpful or even to argue about specifics of my thesis (just some hobby-horse ideas of their own).
My bolded text is 2013 explanatory introduction or correction of mistypings. Readers who don't know that anarthous means "without the article" will be enlightened in Part 2 (not included in this excerpt). But even within my selection here, this is covered a little farther on:
That would have been a nice place for me to define that first sentence as the definition of "anarthous". My bad!Apparently no one should accept von Wahlde's claims, as his later books ran with the "Pharisee" word to quite different lengths. Maybe if he had seen my article (in BTB, featuring liberal Catholics like himself) he would have retained a sounder view or turned to my purported improvement on his. I think I made good use of his earlier views in that article. In any case the Gospel of John does feature "Jews" and "Pharisees" in contrasting settings. That's what's at issue, not whether I was foolish in believing von Wahlde whose own views later changed.For most scholars, maybe there is none. If Proposition A implies not-B and not-C and Proposition B implies not-A and not-C and Proposition C implies not-A and not-B, maybe most of us should leave well enough alone. However, one of my gifts is a talent for Synthesis (and fortunately still combined with talent for Analysis and Creativity) by which I can massage conflicting views and derive an ABC in which the best of each of A, B, and C can be retained. That I was not a "professional" committed already to A, B, or C (say for example, Evangelicalism, Liberalism, and literary criticism) made it easier for me to reconcile conflicting scholars (who in point of fact never seemed to learn from each other in subsequent decades).
But in the very next paragraph I listed the verses comprising the P-Strand. (I also acknowledge there that the verses in John 1 don't seem so obviously to be from an editor, but yes, I did fail to add that this would indicate that many verses there beyond the key verses 24 to 26 should have been deleted from the P-Strand.) I could have tried suggesting that the P-Strand Editor had been present there in John 1. And yes, I could have tried including a footnote giving the text of those verses, but as it turned out I did not get even the essential text published by BTB.

Naturally, I believe what I say and others will disagree. I can add "maybe", "probably" or such everywhere to avoid seeming arrogant, but I receive constant carping here if I do that, that what I have said is just "coulda, woulda, shoulda". Yet I could go to great lengths to demonstrate my case, and we all know that great scholars will disagree. There are contending camps out there. The best I can do is prove that someone else's assertion is wrong (like the refrain everywhere, "we know there are no eyewitnesses
to Jesus"). My contending thesis is out there, not just that there is eyewitness testimony in the gospels, but eyewitnesses left written records still in the gospels today. The "I" and "we" pronouns are gone now (except in Acts), but in the case of gJohn I can even point out specific places where names (without the article) were later inserted in earlier text from the Signs Source.

Thank you for your trouble, and I look forward to your continued analysis of my selected text from where you left off about 40% of the way through.

spin

That seems to be what you are doing, ie never getting your hands dirty with any evidence. This suggests that you are really in over your head and you don't know what you are doing. You seem to be appealing to me to show you what your job should be.

Reasoning is argumentation supported by evidence, which cannot be found in your efforts. Instead you assert what you think or what others think and I couldn't give a fuck what either thinks. I want to know why you think it and how you get there. You slavishly accept opinions of people such as Teeple with almost no interaction, which is understandable when you aren't trained to handle the material. This means you pick and choose from your authorities without interacting or seriously evaluating their work (through your lack of skills: you can't talk about the language because you don't know about it, yet it is a pre-requisite). On top of their opinions you spread a heavy layer of conjecture without support of evidence. You aren't reasoning, you are simply bullshitting.

You need to try showing exactly why you delineate a particular layer. You never do that. Then you need to show that the characters in a text were indeed real. Then you should show what evidence is credible enough to allow you to say beyond conjecture that a particular person was responsible for producing a particular piece of text or layer thereof.

How can one supply more than the damning fact that you don't even know what you are supposed to be doing and are incapable of responding by pointing out that you do have evidence for your assertions. You don't. And you can't.

There is nothing more to be said. You are not adhering to the guidelines of this forum and all you are doing is sourly complaining that no-one is listening to you, when you clearly are the one who is hard of hearing.

Jeffrey Gibson

Before I do, please tell me this: How fluent are you in Greek? It's clear you have no Aramaic. But Spin has intimated that you don't read Greek. Is this true?

Jeffrey

JoeWallack

JW:
Oh Jesus Adam, now you have Professor Gibson on your back, known as "The Kraken" round these parts. There are only two known effective means to get rid of him:

1) Click your crosses together 3 times and start chanting, "There's no place like TheologyWeb, There's no place like TheologyWeb, ..."

2) (The more difficult of the 2) Answer his questions.

I have Good News and bad news for you regarding your Methodology. The good news is, contra some of the correspondents here, you do have a Methodology. The bad news is, it is proof-texting. You are adding up anything you think supports your conclusions, no matter how small, and failing to subtract anything your opponents think does not support your conclusions. In spin's professional opinion, that's naughty.

Take a look at Source criticism for a starting point as to what qualities good evidence should have. Two stand out:

1) Credibility - Is the witness credible?

2) Location - Was the witness well placed?

You need criteria which measure the quality of your evidence. Than you need to measure the distance between what good evidence would be for your conclusion and the evidence you have.

Regarding "John" as evidence for eyewitness to Jesus, you have a biased institution that changed what the biased editors wrote, who changed what the biased author wrote, who copied from the biased "Mark", who were all unknown, wrote outside of the setting in a different language long after the time they were writing about primarily about the Impossible. You have major problems here with Credibility and Location. Having a work that finishes by identifying the author as "we" and the source for we as "The Beloved Disciple" doesn't help much. Proof-texting supposed subtle similarities in Literary Criticism doesn't make much of a dent in these problems.

Let's suppose that I have a Methodology that only measures the extent of Impossible claims. If the impossible claims are greater than a certain amount, than I conclude that the entire work is not from an eyewitness. "John" has a significant amount of the impossible. It also has a high dose of improbable some of which I could classify as "impossible" from a Naturalistic standpoint (extremely unlikely). Due to the level of the impossible in "John" I conclude that it does not contain eyewitness evidence. My methodology is lacking, as there could still be some eyewitness in "John" for the possible claims and a real eyewitness could even make an impossible claim. But my methodology is still exponentially better than yours because it is [understatement]far more likely[/understatement] that impossible claims were not made by an eyewitness than subtle language consistencies identify a specific historical witness.

Burridge did the same thing (proof-text). He only looked for similarities between the Gospels and GRB and not for the Gospels and GT. I've indicated that "Mark" parallels better with Oedipus than Burridge's GRB examples and Burridge failed to analyze the Gospels by themselves which would have shown the original, "Mark", which the others are based on, paralleled the best with GT and subsequent Gospels moved the genre towards GRB.

Adam, obviously we have an impossible difference here with using the impossible in Methodology. FRDB is based on Science so the impossible is considered either impossible or the least likely explanation. That means here, the impossible claims of John are evidence that the author was not an eyewitness and did not have a source of eyewitness. The abundance of impossible claims also impeach the author and its sources' credibility so the possible claims are also doubted as based on eyewitness. As a Believer you try to be "neutral" here as to the impossible claims, but there is no such thing as neutral here. This Forum counts impossible as not only going against eyewitness but the best possible evidence against eyewitness the same as you would do for any discipline outside of religion. Since our assumptions are so different here I suggest you leave the scholarship to us and go back to the theology boards where the impossible is possible. As The Humongous said in the classic The Road Warrior "Just walk away and there can be an end to the pain and suffering."


Joseph

ErrancyWiki

Stringbean

Yes, but is it not true that Bible Historians are not held to the same standards as say some one who delve in other parts of History?

Jeffrey Gibson

Not held by whom? And which "Bible Historians" did you have in mind? The ones like Burridge and Koester and Aune and Caird and Bruce and others who took classics degrees first before they went into "bible studies", or someone else?

Jeffrey

Adam

Thank you for your post, Joe,
And I immediately followed your link to Wikipedia. The item most relevant was discounting sources that employ the fallacies of ad hominems and straw men. That's what you do with me. You assume my source criticism is based on my faith when the reverse is true. You apparently think I assume without evidence that gJohn originally had "I" and "we" pronouns throughout. I explain in my paper that scholars disagree with each other, and I acknowledge that no consensus supports my solution for the disagreements. I even have to add in some exegesis of my own, but without falsely claiming that anyone supports my original contribution.Regarding the immediate case here of my selection for Jeffrey at #210, my suggestion for Andrew fits the location for the Signs Source always in Galilee except for the final week of Jesus's life. At that time all four gospels agree with the Signs Source that Jesus was in Jerusalem or nearby. The problem here in FRDB is credibility, since the Signs Source is built around (apparently seven) astounding miracles. Thus I have not included the Signs Source within my Gospel according to the Atheists--see my
Post 178 here in this thread pointing to unaddressed Gospel Eyewitnesses posts.
Where do you get this last sentence? From my last sentence in my Post #210? If so you have read very little of my stuff at all. I categorically reject the idea that the Beloved Disciple wrote GJohn. The only evidence that he wrote even a later part of it is that the main editing identified by Teeple includes additions about the Beloved Disciple. I never say that anything this Editor wrote ever started as "I" or "we". Nor do I say anywhere in my paper that these pronouns originally occurred anywhere. I do say in my Post #210 selection for Jeffrey
I then suggested in my #213 regarding John 6:1-15
The first word would better have been "any", to eliminate any implication that
I knew John 6:5, 6:7 or 6:8 originally read "us" or "I". It might have, but the evidence I had just provided gives us no more than that the Signs Source originally read something like "the disciples" or "one of the disciples".
Again, see my Gospel according to the Atheists link above, which no one has ever engaged. HJ trounces MJ.]
But I don't accept that the extant Mark (short, without 16:9-20) was used to construct Luke or John. This is a matter for scholarship, not your preference for the view of Vork and spin that there are no underlying sources in Mark that explain the similarity to the Passion Narrative in John and to much of Luke. Q1 is limited in Mark and Q2, and L are absent, but all these (and the Passion Narrative) went into making Proto-Luke before an 80%complete version of Mark was copied into Luke.Again, still waiting for engagement in Gospel Eyewitnesses per above.

Jeffrey Gibson

Again, still waiting for you to tell me what your competence in Koine is.

Jeffrey