aa5874

Again, your statement is erroneous and shows that you are relying on imagination and have very little knowledge of what you promote.

Once Jesus was dead and was NOT KNOWN by the Jews as a Messiah there is NO WAY in the world he could be PROMOTED as a Jewish Messiah AFTER death.

The JEWS look for their EXPECTED MESSIAH among the LIVING not at the GRAVEYARD of dead men.

There is NO such thing as a POSTHUMOUS Jewish Messiah just like there is NO such thing as a POSTHUMOUS Emperor of Rome.

If a person was NOT the Emperor of Rome BEFORE death then surely they cannot be PROMOTED as Roman Emperor after death.

It should be completely OBVIOUS that if Jesus died and was UNKNOWN as the Messiah that the Jews either found their EXPECTED MESSIAH or was still looking among the living or those of the future.


Matt 16:20 - The JEWS did NOT expect or PROMOTE their Messiah should come from a Graveyard.

Adam

I thank you, Sheshbazzar, for reviewing my post #132 so thoroughly. You are obviously correct to note that I have little proof that this Simon wrote Proto-Luke. If it were a sure thing someone else would have worked this out long ago. And as you say, we cannot determine much about this Simon from the NT texts. The Acts of the Apostles ends at 62 A.D. (the most likely time of its writing) and cannot tell us who became leader of the Jerusalem church. We do know from Josephus that James the brother of Jesus was killed that year, and church tradition tells us that Simon his brother replaced him. Somebody did. And if Streeter is correct about Proto-Luke, someone wrote it. Who better than someone of whom we know almost nothing from the NT except what occurs at the beginning and end of events in which he was involved?
Outside the New Testament, but from the very text of Proto-Evangelium of James, the brothers of Jesus are presented as His step-brothers from Joseph’s prior marriage. If this were the case, Simon could have been an eyewitness to the Infancy Narrative in Luke 1 and 2.
Basically I’m saying that somebody wrote it, I say it looks like Simon did, Sheshbazzar says he did not. Simon is a very plausible candidate. The Simon of Luke 24 is the son of the Cleopas in Luke 24 by the (other) traditional view is that the “brothers” of Jesus are actually his cousins and the sons of Cleopas. This alternative traditional view would allow Simon to be young enough to be around to become bishop of Jerusalem in 62 A.D. Yet he would be old enough and with family connections. to be in a position to learn all the material in Luke that he could not have witnessed.
Again, I cannot prove that Simon or any of the other six were eyewitnesses. My insistence on presenting my eyewitness thesis has been provoked by the militant Atheism so prevalent now. I am out to set aside their doctrinaire claim that there were no eyewitnesses to Jesus. To keep claiming that they need to disprove my thesis. They cannot do that, because I have a plausible set of eyewitnesses, all of whom are known in the New Testament and all of them known in sources outside the New Testament. More specifically, my extension of Q into gMark allows the Apostle Matthew to implicitly identify himself as author there rather than seeming to copy in someone else’s description of him into gMatthew. Marcan priority should not be used to argue that the man Matthew was not an eyewitness. (It can still be used to argue that gMatthew is not the work of an eyewitness.)
By definition, Proto-Luke would have been written before Luke, which sets it before 62 A.D. by my reasoning. It would likely be the only fairly complete gospel known in Jerusalem when he was chosen Bishop there that year. Probably all the gospels were completed in the ‘60’s, but even any finished by 62 A.D. would not get to Jerusalem quickly enough.

Sheshbazzar

A bit shorter reply for you this evening.

I have better things to do than slice through your daily hunks of baloney.
Keep on cranking it out till you drop dead. Makes no difference to me.

The world will roll, on and all of your reasonings and writings will decompose along with you.
And the universe won't give a damn.

Adam

Before resuming with my seventh eyewitness, allow me to splice in what should have been the first paragraph in my Post #132 with my sixth eyewitness, Simon:
Even accepting Q-Twelve-Source as eyewitness, could there be yet another eyewitness who wrote Proto-Luke, since it would already have existed before Luke added in Petrine Ur-Marcus to it? No one seems to suspect that. Here’s something I wrote in an earlier article:
Proto-Luke [and continuing with this and the rest of Post #132:]

And now my seventh eyewitness, unnamed but most likely John the Apostle, not a new proposal but much more limited in scope (but first a further note about Proto-Luke: )
One further note about Luke. Even where he knew more from what he had heard, he as much as possible restricted himself to eyewitness testimony. If as I say Luke got the Walk to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35) from Simon and it continued through to the end at Luke 24:53, Luke did not add other events between the Resurrection and the Ascension. By “handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses” (Luke 1:2) he means what they had written. Rather than expanding upon that, Luke 24:44-53 looks like a compressed version of what was in his source. His source was equally scrupulous, not listing any appearances of the resurrected Jesus that he had not personally witnessed (Luke 24:13-43, 50-53). The numerous eyewitness details in the Gospel of Luke were already there before Luke translated and edited Proto-Luke.

Scholars who find a larger source in John than just the (usually) seven signs usually include the editor who is identified by his frequent use of the term “Pharisee”. A good name for these editorial additions in “P-Strand”, most often identified as John 1:19-31; 3:1a; 4:1a; 7:25-27, 31-32, 43-49; 8:13a; 9:1, 13-16, 24-28, 40a, 11:46-50, 55-57; 12:12, 17-22, 42-43. To this I would go beyond Urban von Wahlde’s advice (to not go beyond John 18:15) and suggest also John 20:1, 3-5, 8, 11b-14a, 22-23, 26-27, based on Teeple’s difficulty in assigning these verses simply to the usual source he recognized (S). These latter, however, I have already treated as John Mark’s Passion Narrative, so I’m not sure where they should go. This difficulty could be due simply to the same author having written both the Passion Narrative and the P-Strand. But the author of the P-Strand cannot easily be identified. His antipathy to the Pharisees could be explained, however, if he was a Sadducee, as John Mark may have been. If John Mark wrote it, he was not likely an eyewitness for all of it.

The P-Strand seems to be a fairly small element with John, but useful in sectioning off what was earlier in the process from the main editing work that followed it. By this time the eyewitness testimonies were in from John Mark in the Passion Narrative (and possibly the P-Strand as well), Andrew in the Signs Source, and Nicodemus in the Discourses. As told by the Muratorian Canon (c. 170 AD) the various earlier testimonies (Andrew identified by Name) were gathered together and put out in the name of John the Apostle. His primary additions as eyewitness are found primarily in John 13, 20, and 21. His other additions can be identified in detail because his style was anarthrous, never to use the article before a person’s name. These smaller segments could be as an eyewitness as well, as any apostle could have been there at those occasions:

John 1:17, 22-23, 40-41, 43a, 44b, 46, 48, 50; (2:23b-25 4:10, 13-14, 44; 6:2-3, 8b, 15, 24ab, 42, 60, 65, 68a; 10:40- 41; 11:1, 8b-10, 16, 22, 33c -34, 51-53; 12:1b, 4b. 14b-16, 21a, 13:1b-9, 12-17, 21-22, 24, 30-36 ,38; 17:3; 18:1a, 2, 4-8, 10ac, 13a, 14, 25a, 26b, 30; 19:26-27; 20:2, 6a, 10-11a, 14b-15, 18, 24-25; 21:2a, 3-6, 7b, 11, 15b-17a, 17c, 25.
Which of the smaller segments show eyewitness traces? The traditional view is that John the Apostle was present from the first, but I believe that in John 1 we see Andrew (for sure) and Philip as the two disciples of John the Baptist. These small sections look like eyewitness testimony, but Teeple’s evidence that the information comes from the Editor may instead mean that the Editor inserted the anarthrous names. In any case, if John was the Editor, he could have obtained sufficient information from Andrew or Philip to give us the details we find there.

Turning in the above list to John 2:23B-25, this commentary would not likely be from an eyewitness. In John 4 the Woman at the Well narrative shows vibrant details from the Editor in the earlier two sections, not just the insertion of names. We can easily believe that the Apostle John could have been present there. As for John 6, the Synoptics tell us that the apostles were present at the Feeding of the Five Thousand, so we can see John providing the numerous details in most of the eight sections. I show the Editor as next involved in John 11, and presumably all the apostles were there at the raising of Lazarus, as this occurred just shortly before Jesus entered Jerusalem for the last time. There is detail here, and there is also the clearest evidence that the Editor wrote after the P-Edition, because E’s 11:51-53 follows immediately upon the P-Strand John 11:46-50.

Intense eyewitness traces are found in John 13 in all the above cited verses. Teeple found none of his usual S (Source) verses in this chapter at all, making the “Editor” seem like a raw source himself here. In contrast, all the eleven insertions in John 17-19 look like additions. Nevertheless, the thirteen Resurrection, Editor sections in John 20 and 21 look like mostly eyewitness testimony. Teeple attributes only one verse to S.
The upshot is that even the eyewitness seeming less identifiable as an eyewitness nevertheless comes through as such. I have presented seven writers of eyewitness testimony for the gospels, to which numerous women (mostly) could be added as likely eyewitnesses that the major seven may have used, or who could have been the basis for the other material in the four gospels.

Sheshbazzar

I got a kick out of this part;
You serious? You really believe you have a eyewitness that actually saw your Living Dead Zombie Jebus? And saw him fly off into the sky? :hysterical:

err.....I have some problems with the -credibility- of your witness....to say the least.
.

Toto

How did this thread get hijacked by the same arguments about the historical Jesus as six other active threads?

Atheos

In fairness it was inevitable. The very implication that there were "eyewitnesses" is predicated on the presumption there was actually something to witness. It's difficult for a mythicist to give that ground up just for sake of analyzing the merits of the argument at hand.

Toto

MCalavera seems to have lead the way, not a mythicist. Split is here

Adam

I’m the thread originator, so I guess I can call for suspension of the usual rule against argument by weblink. If anyone can point me to a site that serves my purposes below, go for it.’
I appreciate the wizardry of Toto to keep this thread to my purpose of having my original ideas critiqued. I had been told to expect a hostile reception here, but was willing to face some harsh evaluation of my ideas. As with other blogs where I posted my gospel theories, I don’t find people willing to face an unusual challenge. In lieu of that, may I request that our numerous well-informed scholars advise me whether anyone else has dared to present a broad-based case for either naming authors of gospel sources or claiming them as eyewitnesses. Google search (and even visits to my academic library) have not turned up much going on in recent decades, nor even what I regard as improvements in source-criticism. Better yet, can anyone point me to scholars who have pretty much proven that there are no eyewitness gospel accounts nor can (m)any authors be identified. And has anyone disproven Teeple's source theories?
I’ll be gone until Sunday, so you needn’t post an answer quickly if it needs research or thinking out.

Steven Carr

Why not just keep making things up out of thin air?

It's worked for you up to now.