Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Sheshbazzar · 11-26-2011, 12:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Adam

Roger Pearse must have meant someone else! This is good stuff, spin, I'll have to answer it, though some will require research. I expect you to continue to refuse to answer my questions and to disregard my answers, but you sure can rise to a challenge! Observing a hundred inadequate posts from my opponents, and that they had given up, spin took the occasion of my peripheral thesis in my Post #230 to launch a series of barbs at me starting with #252 to distract all of us from the main business at hand, determining whether or not there is adequate historical basis for believing in Jesus Christ.

Oh. so that is the 'main business at hand'

And you wouldn't think of trying to distract us from the premises of your flakey OP and TITLE subject of this thread you instituted now would you?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Adam

My #230 was trying to defend against the embarrassment of apocalypticism, so keep our eyes on that and not on seven written records of Jesus by eyewitnesses.

Says "THE GREAT AND TERRIBLE OZ! 'er ADAM! ...and pay no attention to that little man behind the curtain."

Quote:

Originally Posted by Adam

Unfortunately for you guys, this makes even spin's post here an embarrassment to your side, as it brings forth the events of Jesus's life and the men who testified to it afterwards.

After THE GREAT AND TERRIBLE ADAM! is found to be nothing but a hum-bug, his terrible sounding threats lose all of their power to impress.
Your only making a hilarious ass out of yourself by attempting to carry on this charade

Quote:

Originally Posted by Adam

Thanks for the lead about Wilfred L. Knox (one of the four Knox brothers, his brother Ronald did a Catholic translation of the Bible), but he died in 1950, otherwise I would rush to buy the 2010 paperback edition of his Sources of tth Synoptic Gospels. Vol. 1.
I'll close for now while I read what I can get in the Barnes & Noble preview. The book itself is in the library I go to. Already I have learned that Eduard Meyer's 1921 Ursprung... came out at the worst time when Form Criticism prevented proper consideration of written sources. Knox gives some dates as early as 40 A.D.

More of the appeals to the out-of-date and speculative writings of christian 'Authority Figures'.

I can tell you now, we are not shaking in our boots. -unless it be from laughter at your pathetic antics.

You should have learned by now that such silly and bogus 'Arguments from Authority' won't carry much weight here.
We can point out the guesswork, empty speculations, and unsupported assumptions in your Authority Figure hero's reasonings just as well as those in yours.
A thousand more posts along that line, and you still will have proved nothing, except perhaps that you are simply too vain and too stupid to know when to stop.

tanya · 11-26-2011, 02:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Adam

Unfortunately for you guys, this makes even spin's post here an embarrassment to your side, as it brings forth the events of Jesus's life and the men who testified to it afterwards.

Hi Adam,

I read spin's post, and found it, contrarily, exhilarating, not embarrassing. It is (in my opinion), a remarkable skill, to exhaustively dissect the logic of anyone's post, clarifying the assumptions, documenting the evidence, and challenging the precepts.

Maybe I err, here, but I think "our side" is that considerably large group of folks on this forum, interested in discovering, to the best of our ability, the origin of Christianity.

Some of us (myself included) think the Jesus story is a myth. Some of us, on the other hand, accept the validity of all, or part, of the new testament. What we all, I believe, share, is a common interest in attempting to analyze and explain, how the Christian tradition arose, developed, and prospered.

Some of your writing, in my opinion, Adam, appears to get side tracked, with discussions about forum members, instead of issues associated with the concept of "eyewitness" support for the message conveyed in the Gospels.

Chili · 11-26-2011, 06:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tanya

Quote:

Originally Posted by Adam

Unfortunately for you guys, this makes even spin's post here an embarrassment to your side, as it brings forth the events of Jesus's life and the men who testified to it afterwards.

Hi Adam,

I read spin's post, and found it, contrarily, exhilarating, not embarrassing. It is (in my opinion), a remarkable skill, to exhaustively dissect the logic of anyone's post, clarifying the assumptions, documenting the evidence, and challenging the precepts.

Maybe I err, here, but I think "our side" is that considerably large group of folks on this forum, interested in discovering, to the best of our ability, the origin of Christianity.

Some of us (myself included) think the Jesus story is a myth. Some of us, on the other hand, accept the validity of all, or part, of the new testament. What we all, I believe, share, is a common interest in attempting to analyze and explain, how the Christian tradition arose, developed, and prospered.

Some of your writing, in my opinion, Adam, appears to get side tracked, with discussions about forum members, instead of issues associated with the concept of "eyewitness" support for the message conveyed in the Gospels.

Adam is pointing out that there is a material cause in metamorphosis and 'the sacred seven' were eyewitness to the event in gJohn and he postulates that the same John who comes 'walking in' in the Gospel of Mark 'triumphantly walks out' in the Gospel of John. It is this same John who 'escaped' the inquisition in material Mark 14:51 just before 'reasoning Pilate' enters the scene simply because he did not have the determination (efficient cause) in place to succeed.

I suppose the purpose here is to show authentic continuity as grafted branch on Judaism' with all the foliage removed so that a clean break is made on only the trunk. So then, not only does Mark remove the Jewish error of Matthew but he also sets the stage for material John who does not just white-wash the wall with an advertisement placard for a new evangelist on the block, but has cause 'in being' via the gospel of Luke who presents the exposition of his origin in causation and so with the intuit determination in place of this 'non-rational event' to succeed when his time has come in the end.

From this angle it is easy to see why both Peter and Thomas, for example, were not eye-witnesses as they pertain to religion that is now procuring against him and so, yes, they were there but only as negative stand. I kind of like his 7 in number that really serves as cause for Pilate to give 'the body' back to good old Joseph so that the other 5 may remain in memory of old because he once was the cave hewer with a cave-ity in his head as it happened to him and so is for him that the spoils must remain in the eye of the mythmaker but who could not very well call him Joseph Christ as an actual Jew in history then. So does anybody deny Joseph as being a Jew?

Then let me add that it may sound prestegious to call it fiction in 'a-theist circles' but let's not forget that 'fictionism', just tries to smash the iconic image into fantasy, which cannot be conceived to exist without its counterpart being real (declared dogmatic fer Christ-sake) and so the iconoclast is still alive and well on this DB here today.

Pityable really is the fact that if you do not understand the mystery of faith it is an act of violence to you own self to try and destroy it's image that still remains as the knawing antagonist within and so is with imago indeed.

Adam · 11-26-2011, 10:47 AM

On further study of the "material" linked and boxed by spin, I see that he has taken my conclusions and detail in my third Noesis article, "Underlying Sources of the Gospels" and ignored my first article, "Common Sense Gospel Study". As so much of the underlying evidence and argument is there:

http://megasociety.org/noesis/181.htm#Common
I don't need to answer spin's Post #357 point-by-point. See especially the first six short paragrapsh coming before I deal with Luke. The big picture is that my analysis is my own unique blend, but it agrees with consensus scholarship minus all Form Criticism. Once again it would seem that spin never read before my basic thesis, but now has chosen to misrepresent it by quoting none of my posts, ignoring my link to my primary supporting article, and picking on my article that applies my conclusions towards naming textual strata. He does not even try to refute any of my "assertions", other than an occasional dictum that Acts is not history. Does spin have any footnotes to document that I have made mistakes here?

Quote:

Originally Posted by spin

As this thread has gone on so long without any evidence being proffered to support its thesis, it might be useful to look over all the material that Adam has supplied. Then you'll see that he hasn't got a clue how to justify his claims. Everything is assertion-driven. Just look at this stuff:

[T2]The sources underlying the gospels can be established by general comparison and by detailed analysis. The general picture is that even John has textual overlaps with the other three gospels, the Synoptics. This shows that there was originally a gospel with only a few chapters covering the life of Jesus . Comparison with the Acts of the Apostles shows that there is no reason to assume that this text stops with the end of Jesus’s life in 29 A.D. If we look for the logical end-point, it comes near the end of chapter 12. Just before the death of Herod Agrippa I in 44 A.D., the Apostle Peter arrives at the home of John Mark. The underlying text had focused on Peter to this point. Since we hear of Peter only once again, we can assume that this source ends here. It is best called “Petrine Ur-Marcus”. It was written in Aramaic at that time.[/T2]

Assertion #4: Comparison with the Acts of the Apostles shows that there is no reason to assume that this text stops with the end of Jesus’s life in 29 A.D. There seems to be no reason to stop the story of Jesus's life with his death. There seems to be some reason to treat Acts as though it were historical. No comparison is actually done, no evidence is actually discussed. This is just another of those notions plucked from the abyss.

Here's a case where spin attemtps to refute me. He sarcastically observes, "There seems to be no reason to stop the story of Jesus's life with his death." That's true enough, but it is not enough reason to stop Peter's memoirs, particularly when Harnack and others showed that a source underlying the Synoptics continued into many parts of the first half of Acts. And I did prove my point about this in the first article that spin ignored. It's that other article that is directly relevant to my thesis about seven written records from eyewitnesses, this "Sources" article I linked to provide the boundaries of the records. So should I count spin's post as finally (after 200 uncontested posts) as relevant to my thesis? Probably not.

spin goes on again about no evidence for Aramaic sources of the gospels (for which I was relying on Matthew Black and Zimmerman), yet he himself clued me in about Wilbert L. Knox and Maurice Casey. spin has already made up his mind, so further documentation by me is not going to change that. It's still up to spin and the rest of you to refute me or else you cannot legitimately use a number of your favorite anti-Christian arguments.

Adam · 11-26-2011, 11:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tanya

What we all, I believe, share, is a common interest in attempting to analyze and explain, how the Christian tradition arose, developed, and prospered.

I hope you understand I'm fully with you there.

Quote:

Some of your writing, in my opinion, Adam, appears to get side tracked, with discussions about forum members, instead of issues associated with the concept of "eyewitness" support for the message conveyed in the Gospels.

Yes, we continue to be side-tracked for over 200 posts now. I mistook spin's Post #357 as a legitimate return to substance, but he apparently deliberately chose to pick at the wrong article of mine, and he deals with only the first two short paragraphs of even that.

Chili · 11-26-2011, 11:31 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tanya

[Some of us (myself included) think the Jesus story is a myth. Some of us, on the other hand, accept the validity of all, or part, of the new testament. What we all, I believe, share, is a common interest in attempting to analyze and explain, how the Christian tradition arose, developed, and prospered.

Maybe so but you might want to consider that it was Catholic and not Christian that arose and developed to become the greatest civilization that the great planet earth has even known, and if that was not so poor Eusebius would be a friend among us here. Then let me add that the great Reformation we had ended its highpoint in history to leave us with mega amounts of entropy left to dispose but which now is running thin and thinner each year as if the dark ages are coming back in evidence that also the Celestial light has a cause for being greater than the darness we see.

Jo · 11-26-2011, 01:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by spin

As this thread has gone on so long without any evidence being proffered to support its thesis, it might be useful to look over all the material that Adam has supplied. Then you'll see that he hasn't got a clue how to justify his claims. Everything is assertion-driven. Just look at this stuff:

[T2]The sources underlying the gospels can be established by general comparison and by detailed analysis. The general picture is that even John has textual overlaps with the other three gospels, the Synoptics. This shows that there was originally a gospel with only a few chapters covering the life of Jesus . Comparison with the Acts of the Apostles shows that there is no reason to assume that this text stops with the end of Jesus’s life in 29 A.D. If we look for the logical end-point, it comes near the end of chapter 12. Just before the death of Herod Agrippa I in 44 A.D., the Apostle Peter arrives at the home of John Mark. The underlying text had focused on Peter to this point. Since we hear of Peter only once again, we can assume that this source ends here. It is best called “Petrine Ur-Marcus”. It was written in Aramaic at that time.[/T2]

Assertion #1: The sources underlying the gospels can be established by general comparison and by detailed analysis. Evidence for this? None.

Assertion #2: The general picture is that even John has textual overlaps with the other three gospels, the Synoptics. Evidence for this? None, but we can sort of accept this because we bring to the discussion the knowledge that there is some shared narrative elements between John and the synoptics.

Assertion #3: This shows that there was originally a gospel with only a few chapters covering the life of Jesus . Evidence for this? None. It is in the form of a conclusion. It somehow claims to follow from the previous assertions that there was some early written source shared by the later texts. There couldn't for example have been an oral tradition that developed and gained elements that were either similar or different from those taken over by other strands of the same tradition.

Assertion #4: Comparison with the Acts of the Apostles shows that there is no reason to assume that this text stops with the end of Jesus’s life in 29 A.D. There seems to be no reason to stop the story of Jesus's life with his death. There seems to be some reason to treat Acts as though it were historical. No comparison is actually done, no evidence is actually discussed. This is just another of those notions plucked from the abyss.

Assertion #5: If we look for the logical end-point, it comes near the end of chapter 12. This assertion does have a modicum of evidence supplied for it, but we'll have to wait.

Fact #1: Just before the death of Herod Agrippa I in 44 A.D., the Apostle Peter arrives at the home of John Mark. This is a "fact" according to Acts 12:12. A hidden assertion here seems to be that this John called Mark is the initiator of the Marcan tradition, purely on the grounds that Peter is supposed to have gone to his mother's house. The insinuation of the date 44, when Agrippa I died, is interesting because this is basically the last Acts tells us about Peter, oh, except for the disputing with Peter in 15:7, so 44 as a terminus ad quem is dead even on the narrative of Acts.

Fact #2: The underlying text had focused on Peter to this point. There is no argument here: Acts does tend to focus on Peter thus far.

Assertion #6: Since we hear of Peter only once again, we can assume that this source ends here. Well, saying "assume" shows a dose of self-awareness, though the assertion is actually totally unsupported, ie that there was a source that went through the Jesus story up to the time that Acts stops focussing on Peter.

Assertion #7: It is best called “Petrine Ur-Marcus”. How it came to be "best" is only a reflection of Adam's imagination, as is the rest of the theory thus far.

Assertion #8: It was written in Aramaic at that time. This assertion was made before Adam became acquainted with Maurice Casey, so now he has another name to through in the ring in lieu of evidence to back up the assertions. What we would like to see is actual evidence for Aramaic being the source of anything in Mark let alone his "Petrine Ur-Marcus".

These assertions are then followed by a list of biblical references that somehow were decided that make up this imaginary "Petrine Ur-Marcus" and the assertions start up again:

[T2]No other Synoptic sources were employed in the Gospel of John, so we can deduce that 44 A.D. slightly preceded the major development of the writing of John. Its textual mark is identity of word-use between Mark and Luke, but not with John. This shows that it must have been translated into Greek by the time it was used in Mark and Luke.[/T2]
Assertion #9: No other Synoptic sources were employed in the Gospel of John, so we can deduce that 44 A.D. slightly preceded the major development of the writing of John. Well, this is actually a pair of assertions,

Assertion 9a: No other Synoptic sources were employed in the Gospel of John,. Evidence that "synoptic material was employed at all? None. Adam is stuck in the notion that all sources were written.
Assertion 9b: so we can deduce that 44 A.D. slightly preceded the major development of the writing of John. This is in the form of deduction, based on the erroneous notion that 44 CE had any significance.

Assertion 10: Its textual mark is identity of word-use between Mark and Luke, but not with John. There is some sense to be discerned by these words and it is about some linguistic issue shared by Mark & Luke but not with John, but there is no evidence whatsoever to support the assertion.

Assertion 11: This shows that it must have been translated into Greek by the time it was used in Mark and Luke. It shows nothing of the sort. It does show that one can use assertions to breed more assertions without the need of any evidence at all. Once you assert that something was written in Aramaic, then I guess you can just as easily assert that it was translated into Greek. We need to see tangible evidence that there was any Aramaic beside the few mumbo-jumbo words preserved in Mark, until then any notion of translation is unsupported assertion.

One could go on with his assertions on Q or "Twelve-Source", but you can do it. It will only be more of the same. The twelve source stuff comes from E. Meyer followed by Wilfred L. Knox, way back when biblical scholars thought they could apply the knife to texts and get nice neat layers without needing to consider much the effects of the hypothetical redactors on those hypothetical layers.

Sorry to detract from the current argument, but I was (for the first time) reading through this thread, then saw this post. As formal debates (though I know this is informal) but in the arena of debates - this is as beautiful as one can get it.

:notworthy:

Adam · 11-26-2011, 06:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Adam

On further study of the "material" linked and boxed by spin, I see that he has taken my conclusions and detail in my third Noesis article, "Underlying Sources of the Gospels" and ignored my first article, "Common Sense Gospel Study". As so much of the underlying evidence and argument is there:

My apologies to all of you, and especially to spin, because in looking back at my main posts I see three times that I linked to my third article spin critiqued (the first two paragraphs), but never to my first article in which I present basic evidence and argumentation for how the Synoptic gospels were written. Here's the link again.
http://megasociety.org/noesis/181.htm#Common
I should have referenced it especially in my Posts #52, #74, and #132. Instead I just footnoted the article in which I list the verses in each of my sources.

As for my sources within gJohn, I can now reference my thread here, Significance of John
http://www.freeratio.org/showthread.php?t=307897
as support for my posts here #18 and #38. Unfortunately, I have not finished my serializing over there, so this link only starts to cover the background for Post #144 (in #59 there). For my #18 here see #30 there, for my #38 here see #2 and #13 there.

spin · 11-26-2011, 07:10 PM

There is a little more glue to this longer effort, mainly description. (I've included some of the glue marked in grey.)

Assertion #1: The four Gospels and Acts can be shown by simple common sense to be very early in date. No evidence.

Assertion #2: The proper starting point is the Gospel of Luke and its continuation, The Acts of the Apostles. Common dogma, but there is nothing beyond the most superficial connections, ie their introductions, between the two.

Assertion #3: [At the conclusion of these, Paul is still alive and in Rome,] which can be dated by reference to Paul’s epistles in the New Testament to be about 64 A.D. No evidence.

Assertion #4: The most sensible date for the Gospel of Luke and its complementary Acts is thus 64 A.D. Sensible to Adam.

Assertion #5: [The author (presumably Luke) could have written this much later in his life, but] it would by common sense analysis still be early. Common sense is not evidence. It is retrojection of modern ideas into an alien past.

Assertion #6: [The Lucan author employed sources,] as he himself tells us in Luke 1:1-4. This asserts that there is one author, but no evidence is evinced for the assertion.

Assertions #7-#10: At least one source bears some connection to the apostle Peter, whose name appears frequently in the Gospels and in the first fifteen chapters of Acts. The mention in Acts 15:7-11 occurs in the context of Acts chapters 13 to 28 that focus on Paul, so the source connected with Peter seems to end at Acts 12:19. The death of King Herod Agrippa I (12:23) sets the date at 44 A.D. This likely sets the date of the writing of the source and also establishes the likely author, as this is when Peter “went to the house of Mary the mother of John, also called Mark.” Church tradition also supports this logic, that Peter’s scribe was Mark, and critical scholarship calls this source “Ur-Marcus.” It would have been as well titled “Ur-Lucas” to acknowledge that it underlies not just the Gospel of Mark, not just the Gospel of Luke, but also the Acts also written by the writer of Luke. Already dealt with in my previous commentary.

Assertion #11: The earliest version of this Ur-Marcus was evidently written in Aramaic and included at least the Passion Narrative and the Feeding of the 5,000, as these are recounted in all four of the canonical Gospels. No evidence is given with this claim regarding Aramaic.

Assertion #12: The composition of the Fourth Gospel, John, seems best regarded as having been rotated in composition among a team of the apostles, making an early date sensible for it as well. What it seems to Adam in not evidence, but opinion.

Assertion #13: [Peter (after Jesus, of course) is the focus of the Ur-Marcus Aramaic draft, but his name is primary in many other passages of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) as well.] Verbal identities in the Greek among these passages between the Gospels of Mark and Luke establish that this second (?) draft should be called Greek Ur-Marcus. After the observation about interest in Peter in more material than what had previously been gathered, an assertion arbitrarily ropes more material in because the extra bits talk about Peter.

Assertion #14: This stage of the collaboration between the men Peter and Mark would thus be most likely not long after 44 A.D. Basically the repetition of an earlier assertion, which assumes a collaboration between Peter and John called Mark, perhaps on the unplumbed authority of Papias.

Assertion #15: The Gospel of Luke is widely regarded by critical scholars as containing a source we call “Q.” This assertion is based on an appeal to an unspecified plurality of authorities.

[Simply by comparing Luke with the Gospel of Matthew, anyone can see for himself that they share a large body of text in common that is not found in Mark. However, it is over-simplifying to hold that all this common material traces back to a common source, Q, and that no other sayings are from Q. The true-blue Q sayings are not verbally exact between Matthew and Luke.]

Assertion #16: Any verses that are verbally exact were copied into Matthew from Luke and are not likely from Q.

Assertion #16a: Any verses that are verbally exact were copied into Matthew from Luke... No evidence is proffered as to the direction of copying if indeed there was any between these two gospels.
Assertion #16b: ...and are not likely from Q. Nothing is provided to support this claim.

Assertion #17: [These are found largely in Matthew chapters 23 and 24, particularly 23:23 to 23:39 and 24:26 to 24:51.] This shows that Matthew was written later than Luke, but still was most likely complete by 70 A.D., as it does not mention the Fall of Jerusalem in that year.

Assertion #17a: This shows that Matthew was written later than Luke... This is an assertion based on the previous assertion.

Assertion #17b: ...but still was most likely complete by 70 A.D.,... No evidence, but wait.

Assertion #17c: ...as it does not mention the Fall of Jerusalem in that year. This has the earmarks of attempting to be evidence, but it simply assumes that if a text doesn't mention the fall of Jerusalem it must have been written before the fall. Yup, assertion supporting assertion.

And so it goes. We eventually come to a reference or two amongst the assertions. The first is to cherrypick someone to counteract the views of someone else, pretending that he is able to reflect the scholarly consensus. But that is later on, though I think the context is worth a wry smile:

Late dates for the Gospels have not disappeared from scholarship, as seen in Burton Mack. However, the more fashionable tendency has been toward early dating. No one has stepped forward to prove wrong the early dating reached by the liberal Anglican Bishop John A. T. Robinson. In Redating the New Testament (1976, pp 352-354) he gave approximate dates for all four Gospels as between 40 and 65 A.D.

Stunning survey of scholarly opinion.

As I said in my previous romp, "you'll see that he hasn't got a clue how to justify his claims. Everything is assertion-driven." I don't think anything has changed--other than the density of assertions.

gurugeorge · 11-26-2011, 07:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jo

Sorry to detract from the current argument, but I was (for the first time) reading through this thread, then saw this post. As formal debates (though I know this is informal) but in the arena of debates - this is as beautiful as one can get it.

:notworthy:

Haha, it's not for no reason that Joe Wallack always offers as one of his options in his polls "whatever spin says"

We loves our spin, he keeps us all on our toes.

11-26-2011, 07:10 PM	#369
spin Contributor Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: nowhere Posts: 15,747	There is a little more glue to this longer effort, mainly description. (I've included some of the glue marked in grey.) Assertion #1: The four Gospels and Acts can be shown by simple common sense to be very early in date. No evidence. Assertion #2: The proper starting point is the Gospel of Luke and its continuation, The Acts of the Apostles. Common dogma, but there is nothing beyond the most superficial connections, ie their introductions, between the two. Assertion #3: [At the conclusion of these, Paul is still alive and in Rome,] which can be dated by reference to Paul’s epistles in the New Testament to be about 64 A.D. No evidence. Assertion #4: The most sensible date for the Gospel of Luke and its complementary Acts is thus 64 A.D. Sensible to Adam. Assertion #5: [The author (presumably Luke) could have written this much later in his life, but] it would by common sense analysis still be early. Common sense is not evidence. It is retrojection of modern ideas into an alien past. Assertion #6: [The Lucan author employed sources,] as he himself tells us in Luke 1:1-4. This asserts that there is one author, but no evidence is evinced for the assertion. Assertions #7-#10: At least one source bears some connection to the apostle Peter, whose name appears frequently in the Gospels and in the first fifteen chapters of Acts. The mention in Acts 15:7-11 occurs in the context of Acts chapters 13 to 28 that focus on Paul, so the source connected with Peter seems to end at Acts 12:19. The death of King Herod Agrippa I (12:23) sets the date at 44 A.D. This likely sets the date of the writing of the source and also establishes the likely author, as this is when Peter “went to the house of Mary the mother of John, also called Mark.” Church tradition also supports this logic, that Peter’s scribe was Mark, and critical scholarship calls this source “Ur-Marcus.” It would have been as well titled “Ur-Lucas” to acknowledge that it underlies not just the Gospel of Mark, not just the Gospel of Luke, but also the Acts also written by the writer of Luke. Already dealt with in my previous commentary. Assertion #11: The earliest version of this Ur-Marcus was evidently written in Aramaic and included at least the Passion Narrative and the Feeding of the 5,000, as these are recounted in all four of the canonical Gospels. No evidence is given with this claim regarding Aramaic. Assertion #12: The composition of the Fourth Gospel, John, seems best regarded as having been rotated in composition among a team of the apostles, making an early date sensible for it as well. What it seems to Adam in not evidence, but opinion. Assertion #13: [Peter (after Jesus, of course) is the focus of the Ur-Marcus Aramaic draft, but his name is primary in many other passages of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) as well.] Verbal identities in the Greek among these passages between the Gospels of Mark and Luke establish that this second (?) draft should be called Greek Ur-Marcus. After the observation about interest in Peter in more material than what had previously been gathered, an assertion arbitrarily ropes more material in because the extra bits talk about Peter. Assertion #14: This stage of the collaboration between the men Peter and Mark would thus be most likely not long after 44 A.D. Basically the repetition of an earlier assertion, which assumes a collaboration between Peter and John called Mark, perhaps on the unplumbed authority of Papias. Assertion #15: The Gospel of Luke is widely regarded by critical scholars as containing a source we call “Q.” This assertion is based on an appeal to an unspecified plurality of authorities. [Simply by comparing Luke with the Gospel of Matthew, anyone can see for himself that they share a large body of text in common that is not found in Mark. However, it is over-simplifying to hold that all this common material traces back to a common source, Q, and that no other sayings are from Q. The true-blue Q sayings are not verbally exact between Matthew and Luke.] Assertion #16: Any verses that are verbally exact were copied into Matthew from Luke and are not likely from Q. Assertion #16a: Any verses that are verbally exact were copied into Matthew from Luke... No evidence is proffered as to the direction of copying if indeed there was any between these two gospels. Assertion #16b: ...and are not likely from Q. Nothing is provided to support this claim. Assertion #17: [These are found largely in Matthew chapters 23 and 24, particularly 23:23 to 23:39 and 24:26 to 24:51.] This shows that Matthew was written later than Luke, but still was most likely complete by 70 A.D., as it does not mention the Fall of Jerusalem in that year. Assertion #17a: This shows that Matthew was written later than Luke... This is an assertion based on the previous assertion. Assertion #17b: ...but still was most likely complete by 70 A.D.,... No evidence, but wait. Assertion #17c: ...as it does not mention the Fall of Jerusalem in that year. This has the earmarks of attempting to be evidence, but it simply assumes that if a text doesn't mention the fall of Jerusalem it must have been written before the fall. Yup, assertion supporting assertion. And so it goes. We eventually come to a reference or two amongst the assertions. The first is to cherrypick someone to counteract the views of someone else, pretending that he is able to reflect the scholarly consensus. But that is later on, though I think the context is worth a wry smile: Late dates for the Gospels have not disappeared from scholarship, as seen in Burton Mack. However, the more fashionable tendency has been toward early dating. No one has stepped forward to prove wrong the early dating reached by the liberal Anglican Bishop John A. T. Robinson. In Redating the New Testament (1976, pp 352-354) he gave approximate dates for all four Gospels as between 40 and 65 A.D. Stunning survey of scholarly opinion. As I said in my previous romp, "you'll see that he hasn't got a clue how to justify his claims. Everything is assertion-driven." I don't think anything has changed--other than the density of assertions.

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