LegionOnomaMoi

Sort of like you've done? You claim that the gospels can't be interpreted as anything other than myth, because they contain mythic elements. However, you don't apply this standard to Plutarch, Josephus, etc. When I asked about the historicity of "divine Augustus" or Alexander the Great, the son of Zeus, you gave me sources which contained EVIDENCE of myth. And I've yet to see you supply one without such evidence. So apparently we can accept Plutarch as evidence for a historical person, even if there is EVIDENCE of myth, and the same for Josephus, where we likewise find EVIDENCE of myth, but for the NT we have to use a different standard. Why? Because of a court of law. Or something. It's hard to get a coherent picture of your methodology, "logics", and application of inference, deduction/induction, or just reasoning in general. But it is entertaining.

maryhelena

Nope - no feeling any guilt here
I've been playing this game far too long for negative assaults upon my thinking ability to cause me to pause......the opposite in fact......more 'wind' to my sails.....

Amusement though - that such tactics were used.....

judge - you know that I'm not in the JC historicists camp - I've simply been trying to take the *brother* reference on face value. An approach to the text that I'm quite happy to concede to the JC historicists. From there though - well - it's each to their own...........................The ahistoricist verse historicist debate is not going to be settled by linguistics!

aa5874

I did NOT make such a claim.

I specifically stated that HJers have NO source for THEIR Jesus.

In the NT, Pilate was a Governor, Gabriel was an angel, Satan was the Devil, Tiberius was Emperor and Caiaphas was High Priest and I hear no complaints about interpretation.

However as soon as I show that Jesus in the NT was the Child of a Ghost, and God the Creator then we have severe interpretation problems.

That is a double standard.

Again, it is NOT the claims of myth that made Augustus a figure of history. Augustus the Emperor of Rome is documented in many historical sources and there are artifacts.

There is NOTHING credible for Jesus the Son of a Ghost.

Please state the human father of Jesus and stop wasting time.

I can name the human father of Augustus.

It is you who have a double standard.

You Presume the history of your Jesus.

LegionOnomaMoi

Really?
Where in the NT does it say that Satan was the devil? Or are you relying on your interpretations of translations?


It's not an interpolation problem. The problem is simply your lack of familiarity with ancient historiy. Because you don't have any idea what ancient historical accounts contained, you apply a double standard without realizing it.

1) We have statues, coins, inscriptions, etc., of Zeus and other mythical figures.
2) Those "historical sources" you mention contain "EVIDENCE" of myth.

You, how about a consitent criteria? What sources do you have for Augustus which don't contain "EVIDENCE" of myth? Or for Alexander?


But for an emperor who can magically disappear and reappear, there is evidence? Where is the historical source that doesn't contain EVIDENCE of myth?


I can name the father of Jesus: Joseph. What is your source for the father of Augustus that doesn't contain EVIDENCE of myth? Plutarch? And a magical divince Augustus who performs miracles and is psychic? That's historical?

And you 'presume" the history of your Augustus and Alexander. You use sources which contain EVIDENCE of myth.

spin

This just provides some of the motivation for the phenomenon.

It's endemic of the problem of reading Paul through the gospels and not for what the writer himself says. That's the fundamental issue, mystification rather than elucidation.

Still projecting the Jesus sect where there is no evidence for it. Continuing to use "Peter" rather than "Cephas", when the former only appears in the interpolation in Gal 2:7-8, while everywhere else we find Cephas. That's just more mystification.

Judaism before the Jewish War was rather heterodox and could accommodate a great range of theologies, as long as one was a torah observer. Paul's abandonment of torah observance would have separated him from the Jerusalem people. He was probably still ostensibly torah observant when he went to see Cephas.

So the development of the notion of heresy does not show a concomitant notion of orthodoxy.

The effort being undertaken is to find traces of history in the literature. The claim of so-called independent sources here is that one can individuate such sources that somehow go back to witnesses of events. This is unachievable with literary sources that develop within a single tradition, for there is no way to extract any significant real world fact behind any datum, once information is merged in that tradition.



Simply alluding to different voices within a tradition in no way points back to real world data about what one is trying to historicize.

LOM has lost his way...

The leaded window opened
to move the dancing candle flame
And the first Moths of summer
suicidal came, suicidal came.

or

. . . . an ignis fatuus of the mind,
Which, leaving light of nature, sense, behind,
Pathless and dangerous wand'ring ways it takes
Through error's fenny bogs and thorny brakes;
Whilst the misguided follower climbs with pain
Mountains of whimseys, heaped in his own brain;

Independence of attestation is about getting to historically viable information. Despite his protestations LOM is empty-handed when it comes to having anything to do history with. He just reheats selected centuries old dogma that prevents any hope of getting to a better understanding of what happened. The agnostic, selecting among hegemonic values, nevertheless displays subservience to the hegemony.

Paul calls no-one disciples. The writer knew no storybook character Peter. (If he knew a Peter at all, it was a very different one from the one indicated in the gospels or Acts.) He shows no sign of knowing any prior Jesus sect, which doesn't mean to say he didn't feel early dependence on existent religious groups. Paul specifically states that his knowledge of Jesus came from a revelation from god, not from other people.

If one is going to read Paul in order to understand what he says, one has to discard all the encrustations of 1700 years of apologetics, to circumvent the desire to read the gospels into Paul, to remember that his language is not christian (there hadn't been time to develop a christian language) but idiosyncratic diaspora Jewish, and to realize that he has been in the normatizing hands of christian scribes from the earliest of times (as Gal 2:7b-8 ably shows). If one wants to claim Paul as an independent voice, one has to give him the chance to speak for himself.

judge

<removed>

MrMacSon

You equate Paul with Josephus, or classical or hellenistic authors?

The alleged author that allegedly wrote ...
Yes, perhaps the alleged Paul may be equated with Euripides --- "identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances." (wikipedia) ops:

tanya

Thanks for a very interesting post. I have selected only this fragment above, not because it is the most important, nor because of any perceived controversy, but simply to gain a better understanding of your meaning here.

As I understand the word diaspora, it refers to Jews (and not Chinese, for example, who are similarly dispersed, often involuntarily, as slaves, nor west Africans) who are living somewhere other than their ancestral "homeland", (though, DNA results suggest an earlier migration from Mesopotamia to Palestine.)

These Jews, living in Greek occupied "Middle East", (formerly Babylonian occupied, formerly Persian occupied, etc, etc), administered by Greek speaking Roman officials, under the authority of the Roman military, are thought to be at least bilingual, often trilingual: Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic.

My question concerns your use of the word "diaspora" in the sentence quoted above. I think another common understanding of this term, refers to the dispersion (original meaning of the Greek word from which diaspora is derived) of the Jews from Jerusalem following the Bar Kokhba rebellion, i.e. third Roman Jewish conflict, circa 135 CE.

In that narrow view of the word, diaspora could then suggest, as I believe is the case, that "Paul's" writings originate after 135CE. To me, that date is reasonable, in view of the political upheaval that would have led to chaos, and turmoil, not the calm required to have messengers delivering letters to congregations throughout the empire:

"Hello, excuse me, you are blocking this road, and I need to travel to Galatia, to deliver this letter praising a new God, not a Roman Emperor"

"Well, you will have to travel some other way, because the roads between here and Damascus are shut down, to prevent rebellious Jewish men from attacking our Roman army. The only traffic allowed to travel, has a pass issued by the military governor. Run along, now, before you wind up on one of those stakes, like these terrorists you see in front of you"

LegionOnomaMoi

1) Bother "Peter" and "Cephas" are nicknames. I could say petros or kephas or rock but I stick with conventions.
2) Evidence doesn't disappear because you close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears, and try to drown out arguments using the 3rd person.


Which is why, in Galatians 2:16, he states hoti ou dikaioutai anthropos ex ergon nomou ean me dia pisteos Iesou Christou. Wait...

All that talk about Jesus Christ superseding the Law, and that the Law no longer matters now that Jesus Christ came and made it unnecessary, but I'm sure by nomos he means Roman customs. Or perhaps it is an interpolation reflecting the laws from the Theodesian codex. Or whatever other make-believe evidence you wish to conjure up.

After all, Matthew specifically states that Jesus doesn't make the Law irrelevant. In fact, not only is Jesus fulfilling it, but it still applies in its entirety. So Paul can't be saying that the Law/Torah is no longer relevant, because that would reflect a very different ideology than Matthew, which is later than Paul, and they were all the same group (which is why we can claim literary dependence even when what we find is substantial differences not only in lexical/syntactial expression of the same events, but accounts that differ). Keep pounding that square peg into the round whole. Eventually it will fit, even if you destroy what was there to begin with in the process.


Let's see, the earliest references to a kind of "heresy" are in Paul, and concern the Jerusalem community in general and Peter and James the pillars in particular, so...what's orthodox? The gradual shift from a Jewish sect with differing conceptions/ideologies into christians with differing conceptions/ideologies eventually resulted in a dominant group. That wasn't until much later.


That would be a pontential issue, if it weren't for the fact that you start with the assumption of an original single constructed tradition, rather than a historical person who provided the catalyst, and support this by dismissing all differences as "developments." When historiography doesn't work, a magic wand does. Tap the texts 3 times, and they all transform into a coherent tradition.


At this point, all I'm saying is we have nothing to indicate Luke knew of Paul's letters. You ignore the typical methods historians employ to determine dependence by saying "it's all one tradition" and somehow that's enough to impose your artificial construct.

You should probably start doing that then. Otherwise, you'll keep talking about "orthodoxy" and a coherent tradition.

spin

Gosh what novel information! I guess it doesn't matter that the Hebrew name behind Caiaphas could also produce Cephas, nor that כפא was an ordinary name in an Aramaic text from Egypt, nor that the names Peter and Cephas have been seen as different people, as in the case of the Epistle of the Apostles, which gives both names in its list of apostles.

More dogma.

Which we note is given in contrast to Cephas.

LOM seems to be talking to himself, having gone off in automatic into the ether.

This is irony coming from the guy who bent over backwards trying to make his formula fit the real world. And more tangent to back it up.

Somewhere in there LOM seems to think he is dealing with the topic of independent attestation. Hmmm.

When we use the term heresy, we do not mean what Paul mean by αιρεσις, ie faction or sect. We mean what Irenaeus meant, deviation from orthodoxy. Doh!

Utter rubbish. I start with the notion that once information enters a tradition be it from a veracious source or not, it is reduced to the same material as all information in the tradition, veracious or not. It is all accepted tradition.

LOM uses "historiography" as an abracadabra word.

This is more irony, I'm attempting to extract Paul from the straightjacket of retrofit christianity to understand what he actually says if possible and I'm accused of ignoring "the typical methods historians employ to determine dependence...". Ya hafta work out what someone is actually saying before you overwrite his ideas.

This sort of irony derived from vacuous back-at-ya-ism is only to be expected.