Solitary Man

So did you stop with form criticism, or did you read the whole article? Sounds to me you found what you wanted and stopped thinking (if you even were ever thinking to begin with). Sad case of confirmation bias. What's new with you, though? This pattern of yours to find what you want in the details while abandoning everything is a pathetic and sorry excuse for the lame scholarship you claim to be doing.

Zeichman

You think NONE of it derives from oral tradition? Surely the extent to which there is tradition in the gospels has been exaggerated by many, but to say there is NONE is equally unlikely.

Toto

I don't claim to be doing scholarship on an online message board.

I read or skimmed through the entire article. Would you like to point out anything that indicates that form criticism has any value to a historian? Do you want to try to salvage the old critieria of embarrassment that has been discredited here so often?

Toto

Why exactly?

Solitary Man

Don't both, Z. It's apparently obvious to Toto that all the New Testament was created ex nihilo, that nothing is derived from anything else not written down.

Solitary Man

If by discredited you mean someone Jack made a post and you liked it, no, I don't know why I even bother with your apologetics.

Toto

This is what the literary critics say - that Mark is a literary composition with no evidence of an earlier "oral" tradition. There are clear literary sources for most of the NT.

If you have some actual evidence for oral sources, please present it.

Toto

No, I mean that the issue was examined in great detail. Many examples of "embarrassing" criteria were shown not to be embarrassing, and to have alternate explanations. It was pointed out that this "criteria of embarrassment" is unique to NT studies, and is not in use in any other field, which seems suspicious if it might in fact be useful.

There are some online lecture notes by Darrell Doughty that deconstructed the NT criteria thoroughly. There was nothing left.

I'm sorry you missed those discussions.

Zeichman

How would you explain the overlaps between Mark and Paul's versions of the words of institution?

And no, an appeal to Turton is not sufficient.

And wasn't form criticism largely created by the Grimm brothers? Classification of different types of traditions is useful outside the field of NT studies.

Solitary Man

So that it was examined, it must have automatically been debunked? Because you can grasp at straws to find "alternatives", they must be correct? Because you've failed to do a thorough research of the various fields which use the criterion, it must be anomalous? In other words, the incompetence and ignorance of IIDB determines truth in Biblical studies? What baloney.