Sheshbazzar

I have a nephew who miraculously hears audible voices from invisible beings, sometimes making him become dangerously violent. they go away when he stays on his meds.
I was. Although I have heard this particular story countless times....
Not according to the tales and 'witnessing' of many of the Christians whom I have known. Their zombie god seems to be a regular blabbermouth, talking to them night and day... that is when he is not magically levitating them out of rivers or taking over the steering wheel of their cars and driving them into trees, to 'save' them.
Have they? One might then wonder just how sensible they really are. Or perhaps recommend that they schedule an appointment with really good Neurosurgeon.
Credible? there are a lot of urban legends that get repeated monotonously by the gullible.
How many of these 'miraculous events' have -you- been an eyewitness to?
Have you ever noticed how much your god hates amputees?
He seems to be able to 'miraculously heal' the backaches and boils, tumors and impotence, weekly, in every single damn church in the world, but when an amputee comes through their door, he must be hiding out in the john, as they always come back out still missing their parts.
Your god, althought he can do most everything else must really have a problem with healing amputees.
Care to explain to me why he doesn't give my Christian cousin back his two missing arms? or my uncles back their missing legs?
I don't think it is I that has their head stuck somewhere.

If you care to open a thread on the subject of these alleged miracles, I'll be more than willing to discuss it further with you there.

Doug Shaver

And we should believe that just because you say so? Or because those people say so?

Those accounts are credible only to people antecedently convinced that miracles occur.

arnoldo

A tradition also has it that Luke was never an eye witness to Jesus as per a fragment of the Muratorian fragment.

aChristian

I don't recall that Papias identified himself in his writings. I don't see that Tertullian identified himself in The Apology. Do you believe the tradition that they wrote them, even though they don't identify themselves in the books themselves? Why would you believe Papias or Tertullian wrote it based on tradition? Just curious.

aChristian

If you are really interested in knowing the truth on this, I can direct you to a website with reliable accounts of the miraculous. Just send me a personal message.

Sheshbazzar

Aww. Go ahead and post it here, I'm sure that we are all interested in finding a -'reliable'- site for such.
Perhaps we can discuss the miracles reported on this site with you in another thread?

Doug Shaver

Why? Why not tell the whole forum?

Solo

'Tis written seems to have been the final word in illiterate and semi-literate environments.

Paul knew this effect (1 Cr 4:6) of il-/semi-literate minds being overwhelmed with the suggestion of boundless wisdom contained in scrawls made of incomprehensible maze of signs. This is how his own letters acquired the status of 'scriptural' authority among his followers.

Perhaps Adam does not realize that this technique will not be effective on boards like the FRDB. :huh:


Best,
Jiri

Sheshbazzar

Certainly seems that it is taking a Christian a long time to come up with 'a website with reliable accounts of the miraculous.'

Perhaps it would require a miracle to locate any such? :Cheeky:

Adam

Eighth (Not-so-Eye-)Witness? The "Qumraner"?
(Following up on prior #1, #!8,#38, #52, #74, #132, and #144, and #170)
Seven eyewitnesses would add to the authenticity of Jesus, but not if they presented a Jesus that was disprovable. Of the seven thus far, only Nicodemus has such self-glorifying statements that it would only be acceptable if Jesus were the divine Being so proclaimed, or if we could put what Nicodemus recorded in some explanatory context. That has been covered. Another extreme side of Jesus was the apocalypticism. Did Jesus predict the immediate end of the world? Let us explore whether there is an eighth witness and the nature of what he recorded.

There may be such an eighth eyewitness, but hard to establish as such and hard to disentangle from what he read into what Jesus spoke. For over a century it has beena scholarly fashion to dismiss Jesus as a doomsday prophet who turned out to be wrong about the imminent end of the world. Carefully analyzed, however, something like this can only be documented to the final days of Jesus’s ministry and to a source that Is not involved with Jesus earlier. Presumably he was not close to Jesus and may have read into Jesus’s words his own apocalyptic theology he learned at Qumran or from John the Baptist. Jesus had advised his closest disciples that catastrophic ruin was 40 years ahead in the Fall of Jerusalem and the Second Coming at the end of the age, but this disciple compounded the two together. Thus the Little Apocalypse in Mark 13 gives a wrong impression of what Jesus said, and many scholars have mistakenly retrojected this impression as characterizing all of Jesus’s message. How does this fit into the analysis presented to this point?

Back with the fifth eyewitness, Matthew as author of Q, I expanded Q to include the Twelve-Source within Mark. After listing those passages, I referred to the usual Double Tradition as also from him. Actually, I include as Matthew’s Q only the passages in which Matthew and Luke are similar, but not verbally exact.

There was more than one Q text. Copying from Luke to Matthew (or vice versa) does not sensibly explain the number of nearly-exact parallels that would have been pulled out from widely scattered places, mostly individually (except for the great grouping at Mt. 23:23:33 to 24:51). These draw from a Greek text that would not likely have been Greek scattered among the original text mostly in Aramaic. A separate later Q2 in Greek makes better sense to explain about a dozen sequences. These include Lk. 3:7-9, 16-17; 6:36-42, 7:1-23; 9:57-10:24; 11:1-4, 9-32; 12:2-7; 12:22-31,39-46; 13:34-35; 17:1-2. These passages are disproportionately about John the Baptist and apocalypticism. These could come from someone who remained a follower of John the Baptist even after Jesus’s ministry began. Accordingly he was an eyewitness to Jesus only towards the very end, and apparently read his Qumran perspective into his reports.

As for the larger volume of non-exact parallels in word-use, these Q1 sayings and parables must trace to an Aramaic original separately translated. There is a disproportionate emphasis on parables and sage sayings. This would fit with someone from an unconventional religious background, like Matthew who is said to be the author of the Logia.
Similarly, there is Q material in Mark that is from Q2.

The Gospel of Thomas seems oddly fitted for a sequential guide to the Synoptics. The order of sayings in Thomas roughly corresponds to what comes first in sequence in either Mark or Matthew. Thomas early has a number of separated sayings related to the Parable of the Sower, which is grouped in Chapter 4 of Mark, preceded by few other teachings. Thomas early similarly has Matthew Chapter 5-7 sayings from the latter half of the Sermon on the Mount.

(Also remarkable is that it early on has a few verses from the very start of that Sermon, 5:3-5, and then has next to nothing at all from the next chapter and a half. Other than these few verses, one would have thought that Thomas did not have available to him the very heart of Q, the ethical teachings of Jesus. Instead it seems that he dropped use of such a text after just those few verses. There was such a separated text of ethical teachings? Apparently yes, as nothing of Thomas&Mark parallels is found in Matthew before 9:14. Almost nothing of Thomas is found before Matthew 6:19. It would seem that there was a separate text for what we see today in Matthew 5:3 to 6:18. We could assume it was never available to Mark, but was available to Thomas and was found distasteful. Thus Thomas does include a little bit of genuinely Jesus compassion for the poor, but Mark has none. We could call this document Q-narrow. It is found as Q was usually defined, only in Matthew and Luke, but the complication of overlap with Thomas is largely eliminated. Ironically by the above, the Beatitudes and other compassionate ethical teachings of Jesus are now what I can't account for. Who created the small document that contains them?)

Rethinking my Q-Twelve-Source is necessary. Levi’s call is in Mark 2:14-17 (following 2:1-12 Cure of a Paralytic, apparently witnessed by Levi (Matthew)). This continues right on to the justification of not fasting while in the presence of the Bridegroom, etc., through 2:22. Twelve-Source resumes Mark 3:7-4:41, including the call of the Twelve. It skips to 6:1-13. This includes the austere charge to the apostles, but missing from anywhere in the Twelve-Source is broader ethical teaching we associate with Jesus. We do find enough parables to establish this “mark”; of both Mark (in its entirety, the Petrine portions as well) and Thomas. This is sort of like the Cynic Jesus that the Jesus Seminar loves. Let me hasten to add that the Twelve-Source includes some spectacular miracles, however. There seems to have been a document that combined Twelve-Source with other parables of Jesus, particularly the more paradoxical sort that are paralleled in Thomas, and in the Matthew&Luke overlaps outside of Matthew 5:3-6:18 with interest in Pharisees and John the Baptist. Eschatology as well, as this seems to have been studiously suppressed in Thomas in which we see some sayings obviously transformed.

And here's my detailed work-up of my 6-level theory of Mark. I'm still unsure whether level 3 can be objectively separated from level 4. I haven't attempted to separate Mark 15 and 16 here.
Ur-Marcus in John: Mark 6:30-52; 11:15-17; 14:3-9, 27-30; Passion Narrative 14:43-
Ur-Marcus Greek: Mark 1:1-3, 21-39; 2:18-3:4; 5:1-43; 8:27-9:7; 9:30-32, 38-42; 10:13-10:34; 11:27-33, 12:18-23, 38-40; 12:18-23, 35-44; 13:1-17, 28-31; 14:1-2, 32-42
Twelve-Source from Levi: Mark 1:40-2:17; 3:7-19; 3:22-4:41; 6:2, 4-5; 9:14-29, 33-37; 10:35-11:11; 12: 1-17, 24-34; 14:10-25
Twelve-Source from Qumraner: Mark 1:9-15; 6:14-16, 13:18-27
Additions by Qumraner: Mark 1:5, 16-20; 6:1,3; 6:17-29, 6:53-8:21; 9:9-13, 33-37, 9:43-10:12, 35-40; 11:12-14, 20-25; 14:55-60;
Final Edition: Mark 3:20-21; 8:22-26
Was Levi the source for the added two chapters (Mark 6:53-8:21) I assigned instead to the Qumraner? Not likely, as the focus has become upon miracles and straight-forward sayings, without parables and witticisms. It’s not very much like Thomas, which had been part of my justification for confirming that the Twelve-Source was a separate stratum in Mark.

Here's a recap of the above six strata. Peter and Mark first collaborated in 44 A.D. and wrote in Aramaic at least what is found as Synoptic overlap in John 6 and 18 to 20.
A somewhat larger Ur-Marcus can be shown in Mark by the exactitudes between verses in Mark and Luke. It's heavy on miracle stories and the name "Peter".
Passages not so exact are from the Twelve-Source written by the Apostle Matthew.See Mark 1:40 to 2:17 ("Levi" there is "Matthew" in Matthew) and passages where "Twelve" occurs after the call of the Apostles at 3:13. Also Parable of the Sower Mark 4:1-20 and the rest of the chapter.

But if they have the same interests as the later Q2 writer in Greek, in John the Baptist and eschatology, they stem from a disciple of John the Baptist, and they present Jesus as a Qumran believer would. See the "Little Apocalypse" in Mark 13.
Then there's the Mark 6 to 8 portions that were absent in the version Luke saw. These were used in Matthew and show the characteristic interests in John the Baptist, Pharisees, and the end of the world. Perhaps this Qumraner disciple of John the Baptist also wrote Matthew as we know it (and was the writer of the prior strata as described just above).
There is also a tiny final stratum where the final canonical Mark diverges from Matthew. The largest is Mark 8:22-26. This accounts for why Matthew and Luke show some tiny agreements against Mark.That's six strata.

As I have taught in my articles that Q and Twelve-Source are related, it becomes possible to think that the Twelve-Source may have layers as well. The Twelve-Source Qumraner material in Mark has the more startling end-of-the-world scenarios, whereas the Petrine material is more limited to the impending Fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. Separating these out would support the Preterist position. It would also make it easier to show that Jesus did not in error predict the immediate end of the world.