Steven Avery

Your welcome.

We seem to have different purposes in this dialog, and I look forward to your answering my questions above about the dating of John, so I might get a better understanding of where you are coming from.

Anyway, as to Didscalia being ...
"clearly..oral story, so not in the Gospels"

I have to smile and laugh.
How often does the Didscalia have definite quotes?

"thou obeyest not our Saviour and our God .., asked her and said to her" etc and such quotes are from oral strories not in the Gospels?

I gladly acknowledge that I haven't checked, but you automatically have become a five-minute expert in the Didscalia style and text !!

So, Steven, .. I really have to laugh at your chutzpah.
Nice brazen handwaving, cover your backside, fall-back position.

If Chuck has some quote you want me to comment on, I will be happy to do so, but simply give me the quote, cut-and-paste is fine.

And I gave a whole bunch of sources, simply to show the scholarship on the Pericope as requested. I actually omitted a number of pro-Pericope articles since they didn't add enough to the quote sourcing. And some of those sources I gave have the opposite view of the text as I do, yet they happened to properly supply the references that Metzger, Ehrman and crew omit. Good scholarship is appreciated, wherever it falls.

Now, it seems the Didscalia is much more important to your theories than to mine, since apparently it could destroy some pet theory of yours about John.

... Yet to me the Didscalia it is simply one of a couple of a dozen or two evidences of an early Pericope, with many of those evidences placing it the Pericope in John. And far less signficant than, for example, Jerome's comment.

And I'm sure when we have literature and quotes from A.D.150 you make a similar comment. Probably, you will not be satisfied until we have a bunch of detailed early church writers giving full homilies in AD.80. Even then you would say that is was almost 50 years after the crucifixion of Jesus :-)

(Snip hackneyed morman stuff, suggest you start another thread if you really want to go that far afield)

Shalom,
Praxeas
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic/

Steven Carr

If I can summarise Praxeus, he doesn't have any early manuscripts which contain the pericope. He has no early Church father which even hint that the story is in a Gospel.

The best he has is the very late writing of Jerome claiming that it is in 'many' manuscripts ie not the majority of manuscripts.

Little wonder he has to resort to insults.

Let him bring forward his evidence that it was in the original Gospel of John.

All he can do is claim that the early manuscripts don't count, because they are so unreliable.

Peter Kirby

Thank you, Praxeas, for revealing things about my psyche unbeknownst even to me. A doctor of psychoanalysis via electronic text? Truly a feat!

As a matter of fact, I do suffer from anxieties, but fortunately the text of the New Testament is not one source of them. Since I've never been an inerrantist and it's never been a live option for me, and I've mostly avoided spending much time on what I consider to be "errancy issues," I don't know where you get off.

Some facts:

1. Whether you use KJV, RSV, NAB, NIV, or Darby doesn't matter to me in the respect that, as far as I'm conerned, none of them is without error.
2. I am not a believer in the "Alexandrian text," generally speaking. At the moment, I might be best described as a text-family agnostic.
3. I do not defend deception, and my "phoney-baloney" detection kit is in good working condition.

Pertaining to the last of those three, I plan to look, briefly, at your beef with the point you selected out of the quote from Metzger. More importantly, later, I plan to talk a bit more about the Pericope itself. But first, I would like you to say something about the paragraph that you wrote above. Was it really justified to say those things of me?

best wishes,
Peter Kirby

Amaleq13

To repeat a previously offered admonition in a different thread, speculation about the motives of posters is inappropriate and irrelevant in a RATIONAL discussion. It only serves to make it appear that one's argument cannot stand on its own merits. Stick to the facts.


-Amaleq13, BC&H moderator

Steven Avery

Again, you are simpy wrong here, and I already showed you that from common sense and a dictionary.

We get a lot of misinformation from Iraq that is "technically true" is a carefully parsed sense.. yet it is misinformation. When Bush went over there and said something like "active hostilities are over" there was a sense in which it could be defended as "technically true", but even my elderly dad saw right through it as media hype, misinformation to the public, (and perhaps self-delusion).

And disinformation is another type of misinformation that can be "technically true", which is apparently all you care about. Maybe you should go work for the government or the drug companies.. I'm really surprised that supposedly informed youth like yourself could be so naive on this.

Here is Peter Kirby, outright giving misinformation about the Pericope

"In fact, all evidence indicates that it is an invented story that the author of John never knew."

Apparently you put yourself out on a limb with your false comments, that you could never prove, and apparently you never really researched ..

What nonsense. Does Jerome's comment that "many Greek and Latin manuscripts" have the Comma not count in "all evidence" ? <edit> Are you ready to stand up and correct your blunder ?

And when you simply parroted Metzger's "technically true" yet deceptive representations publicly, such as..

". No Greek Church Father prior to Euthymius Zigabenus (twelfth century) comments on the passage"

you seem to have locked yourself into a hardened position

<edit>
Covered before. You are agreeing that, as far as we can tell, Ehrman didn't even have a buried reference in his public presentation. The point of this whole thread, and you don't care a whit. Any integrity ?

You are apparently agreeing that public reference after public reference doesn't get the basic information right, using Metzger as a source. Any integrity "

And that Metzger does a dishonest type of parsing, much like our government. You apparently could care less. Any integrity "

Now, why don't you quote the full Metzger quotes on Jerome and Augustine, and if he gives a reasonably fair and honest and balanced representation of the evidences, I will be more than happy to give a nice apology to that aspect of my statement, especially to anyone who thought I was referencing his book, instead of the wealth of deceptive public information about his book that is readable on the web.

Meanwhile, as I showed, most everything published and quoted on the web about the Pericope from Metzger's material, made available by textcrits, confuseniks, fawning syncophants, and whomevers, is basically garbage and junque, because it is designed to deceive.

Shalom,
Praxeas
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic/

Steven Avery

Praxeas
> And that seems to be why folks like Peter and Joe are so anxious to try to > defend the most phoney-baloney textcrit conceptions and contraptions and > deceptions -- in their gut, they really want the NT to be errant and weak, > and the textcrit alexandrian text is a big help to that cause.

Granted I don't know you well enough to speculate on your motives like this, I have seen a lot of Joe's attempts to justify alexandrian nonsense, for the reasons above, (not that they are "psychological", however, they simply fit his well-known public errancy shtick) but it isn't fair to put you in any such realm without good solid backdrop.

However, as you can see in the previous post, I really don't know why you put yourself in the position of misstating evidences on the Pericope, and also still not having shown any public interest in the deception being perpetuated, such as the one that began this thread by Ehrman, and the ones on the numerous websites I gave quoting Metzger, Ehrman, Wallace, etc. Maybe that will change now.

Btw, I've never claimed or thought that you had ever been an inerrantist.

Good, I will be interested to hear what you share, including referencing your previous quotes on the matter.

Nope. Apologies. Your integrity track record has been good in our dialogs. Here, I felt you were taking some very strange positions, simply fabricating an issue about my usage of "misinformation", and looking for gnats and avoiding seeing camels.

Ready to start afresh on this end.

Shalom,
Praxeas
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic/

Steven Avery

Hi Folks,

First, while Steven claims by Carr fiat..about the Didiscalia
"Clearly it is an oral story, so not in the Gospels."

Tischendorf admitted that this citation was taken from the Gospel of John. "Although," he wrote, "the Apostolic Constitutions do not actually name John as the author of this story of the adulteress, in vain would anyone claim that they could have derived this story from any other source." - Edward Hill

The Apostolic Constitution is the next generation Didiscalia, with the same reference, at the same time that other references placed the pericope in John.

Nope. The common definition of "early church" writers includes a number of the references, even including Augustine and Jerome, and a number of others.

http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/
The Early Church Fathers
Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, Ambrosiaster, Apostolic Constitutions, etc and yes, to most anyone other than Steven Carr, the Didascalia all hint, or much more than hint, that the Pericope is Gospel.

I'll leave it up to a Latin expert to parse the precise meaning, but it deep-sixes all ideas of a late interpolation.

Jerome used Greek manuscripts as the "fountainhead". Thus, the Pericope is established in many Greek and Old Latin manuscripts around 250-350, (including before Vaticanus), and a wealth of references are given for the Pericope from AD 250-500, it remained in Old Latin manuscripts and was included in the Vulgate, accepted by Jerome as scripture.

Thus the real question to consider is why it was reduced in quantity in the Greek line. And this is a question that is addressed by Augustine, and also by Professor Robinson.

After disappointing your hope that the Didascalia didn't really reference the pericope.. you played a game with the claim...

"clearly it was an oral story"
.. and I called you on the unsupported claim.

To you it is an insult, yet I feel the insult is your chutzpah in the statement, as a self-proclaimed five-minute Didascalia expert. Tacky.

And you haven't even had the courtesy to respond to my question to you about your view of the dating of John, simply (snipping), again a rather tacky way to handle the dialog.

It seems that you were more concerned that the Didascalia would quote John than anything else, due to some apparently very strange theory that you refuse to divulge, despite your earlier references.

Actually I am just (quite successfully, thank you) showing that there is lots of good evidences for the Pericope being in John, in response to the claims of Ehrman, Metzger, Kirby and others that there is basically no such case.

Since I gather you look at the NT as fabricated, the claim is really not made for you anyway. As I have explained on this forum a number of times, folks who have the forgery, fraud, fabrication view of the NT text are in a whole nother world than I in dialog. So I have no interest, expectation, or desire to try to "convince" those folks of the dating of any books, when they start from the fabrication presumption anyway. If the NT was a fabrication, I could care less whether it was written in AD 50 or 250.

On the manuscripts, if you especially mean Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Bezae, in paticular, I agree 100%, they are grossly corrupt unreliable, and this comes up again and again in textual discussions, since B and Aleph started as virtual prooftexts for Westcott and Hort, whose text has morphed into the modern textcrit text.

In any sort of sensible textual analysis, those manuscripts would have close to zero weight. And even less amongst folks who are hospitable to the idea of Inspiration and Preservation of the Scriptures.

However on the Pericope as a whole, there is lots more to claim than that, as anyone who has studied the issue can see. Manuscripts evidences,in multiple languages, the Byzantine Majority Text, external evidence like church writers and lectionaries, internal evidences, and the basic concepts of preservation.

Shalom,
Praxeas
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic/

andrewcriddle

The Didascalia was (probably) written in Greek in Syria around 225-250 CE.

It only surives in Latin and Syriac translation.

Whether the Didascalia is quoting the Pericope of the Woman taken in adultery from John or some other source is disputed.

See Ehrman 'Jesus and the Adulteress' NTS 34 1988 24-44.

(Ehrman mentions a divergent version of the story recently discovered in the writings of Didymus the Blind (4th century) he suggests that although some versions of the story may be very early the form in John is substantially later.)

Andrew Criddle

andrewcriddle

I'm pretty sure that what Ehrman means is this.

Although the pericope is found in some Greek and Latin manuscripts from early times and is part of the Vulgate from the beginning, it only became part of the standard Byzantine/Majority text after the rise of Islam ie in the (early) middle ages.

The King James people were using the Majority text in its late form and therefore included the pericope.

(This is questionable as textual history though IMHO probably correct. But right or wrong I think it is what Ehrman means.)

Andrew Criddle

Vorkosigan

Prax, what do you mean by "fabrication?"