Sheshbazzar

Same old same old, and just as full of the unsupported and unsupportable assertions as what you have been posting here.

It is noteworthy that you tend to assert whatever you happen to 'think' might be the origin or author any text (without supplying any independently verifiable proofs)
.....that is until you decide to change your mind about that section and 'think' differently. (still without any independently verifiable proof)

You seem to suffer under an arrogant delusion that whatever you happen to 'think' is more important or valid than what anyone else thinks or knows.
You employ a lot of guess-work, 'could-have-been', 'possibilities', and 'perhaps's', inventing imaginative possible scenarios that are wholly lacking in any shred of explicit textual backing or evidence.

Really, it is impossible to engage in any meaningful discussion when so much what is being offered (asserted) by you here has so little textual evidence, and cannot be corroborated by the actual content of any existent texts.
Certainly no one can reasonably 'critique' what are nothing more than your unprovinanced assertions, it leaves only the faultiness of your methodology to critique.

You like to declare yourself a 'winner' in a debate where your opponents are provided precious little that is based on any solid facts, to which they could possibly respond.

Sorry Adam, but to put it as politely as possible, you simply do not display either sufficient knowledge of the details of the texts, nor the depth of knowledge or skills that are needed to even begin to accomplish what you are presently pretending to have mastery of, and be a valid teacher of.

You have provided us nothing of any substance, nothing that anyone could ever 'hang their hat on' in any of this tremendous volume of hot air you have expended.
You didn't there, and you haven't here.
You can keep on adding to this material endlessly, but that will never address the fundamental flaws that are inherent in your methodology and reasoning.

Actually, I do feel sorry for you, first that you have so misapplied yourself for so long, and secondly that your pride has so blinded you to your glaring deficiencies.

Adam

Lots of unsupported assertions there, Shesh,
and unprovenanced without textual backing.
Is your point that I am too much like you to be taken seriously?

I did detail the verses attributable to each of the seven eyewitnesses and the rationale for each of the seven categories. I havn't seen anyone argue against me yet that any particular verses cannot be from an eyewitness or could not belong to the category according either to my rationale or a critique thereof. We've had spin analyze my layers in my peripheral theory on gMark, but rejecting the concept of layers entirely, to which I responded adequately. Lots of scholars acknowledge such sources within gMark as the Passion Narrative, Ur-Marcus, and the Twelve-source, and redaction is widely accepted as well. Apparently we have Fundamentalists of the Left here.

Meanwhile I'm working on something which may wrap up my thesis neatly (without necessarily proving it beyond the possibility of mere coincidence). Naturally, I always have a reason for suggesting an eyewitness, usually his name appearing in the text. I have now noticed for each of these seven candidates that the name (or other indicator) appears at least twice, and they occur at both the beginning and the ending. Shesh looks for a God who orders things neatly, so maybe this will serve. I'm still working on the fine points, and would not want to post anything here dishonorable to shesh's God, so have a little patience.

Adam

For all the above, I need to explain that this paper on the Gospel Eyewitnesses started out as a careful statement of the process by which the four gospels got written, starting with a foundation stone (the Passion Narrative) and adding blocks to the structure (including some perhaps written earlier). Then I recast it as each block being from an eyewitness. The process is wearying in itself, much less including within every explanation why an alternate process would not work. Each detail above works around complications that prevent any simpler process. We know from Nicol (see below) and others the the Signs Source is the most Synoptic in style, yet the specific signs do not appear in any of the Synoptic gospels (except the Feeding of the Five Thousand). It seems contradictory on its face. Whoever did the actual writing of the Signs Source must have also been involved in the Synoptics, but actually brought with him into the Synoptics only the Passion Narrative that someone else had translated into Greek--but with enough similarity that Teeple puts them both into his own "S" layer.
Now that my Significance of John serialization is in progress, I can link to
http://www.freeratio.org/showthread.php?t=307897&page=2
Post #30, about paragraphs 7 and 8. There I show evidence from Nicol (The Semeia in the Fourth Gospel, Leiden: Brill,1972) and Fortna, Freed, Temple,and von Wahlde that the Signs source is stylistically at one extreme and other sections of gJohn can be associated with it (or not) depending upon the scholar's theory.
Refer again to my link above, but also into my Post #45 there.
Pardon me for saying so much about the P-Strand, but it is my own development rather apart from von Wahlde about the significance of the word "Pharisee" in uncovering a stratum in gJohn. See the link, Posts #30 and #45 both. I have still been trying to make improvements upon it--see my thread here, conclusions in Post #3:
http://www.freeratio.org/showthread.php?t=308580

It's nice that someone has finally after almost 270 posts resumed investigating my main thesis in my serialization here. See #436 for the most recent list, particularly for #436 itself replacing #52. (Hopefully the enlargement will reduce the number of sentences merely condemned as assertions, but we'll see.) However, it's been a week, and no one but spin seems up to spotting discrepancies. Unfortunately spin lists everything, so I am delayed in responding to whatever might really need attention.

Doug Shaver

Is that the best you can do? Your speculations must be true if no one can prove they can't be true?

Adam

To: Vorkosigan:
You're the Marcan expert. What do you think about what James M. Arlandson writes here, based on Bauckham (Pg. 164):
http://bible.org/seriespage/eyewitne...%80%99s-gospel

Vorkosigan

Adam, assuming this is correct (very interesting, thanks, helps me a lot), it doesn't tell us anything about a source.

Vorkosigan

Steven Carr

Really?

So Bauckham has discovered a secret code - a method of signalling eyewitness sources that was never mentioned by any ancient author or reader and was undetected until Bauckham discovered it?

Has Bauckham also tried looking at every 7th letter in the text or reading the initial letters of each word backwards?

Bauckham's junk pseudo-scholarship is not convincing even if somebody could turn it into an actual line of reasoning, rather than the product of his overwhelming need to have an eyewitness source by throwing out anything at all that he can sell to his public.

Adam

Well, the idea, in case anybody is missing it, is that the written source(s) Mark used were in the form from the eyewitness(es) (the apostles Peter and Matthew, in my opinion) "we (went)....Jesus (or pronoun) said (or other verb)" transformed in gMark by a person who was not himself there to "they(went).....Jesus...."
If Vork is implying that this device runs over my layers and would thus invalidate my case, several eyewitness sources could have been in the original form "we....he" etc.
and transformed when brought into gMark. I have already acknowledged that gMark has too much stylistic unity to pick out sources just by inspecting gMark itself.

There are examples and argumentation at the link, items 2 through 23:
http://bible.org/seriespage/eyewitne...%80%99s-gospel

Vorkosigan

It's fascinating how many times you can explain something simple to someone, they still can't get it.

Vorkosigan

Adam

I've now worked out what I proposed in my Post #442. (Sorry, Vork, I'm not giving up yet. Or was your #449 your confession about yourself? I couldn't reply directly for fear of another aa vs. J-S chiasm.)

Hypothesis: For each section of the gospels proposed as from an eyewitness, near the beginning or end the name or an identifying feature will appear. (This seems closely related to the principle of inclusio enunciated by Richard Bauckham in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006).) (See the link in #445 above.) To give it a name of its own for my purposes here, call it the Alpha and Omega principle.
Result: Seven true positives, and two false positives (Mary and Philip)

There would be no magic in the number seven as those who left written eyewitness records about Jesus, would there? Even assuming that seven is the perfect number of completeness, there would be no evidence for it, would there? Maybe there is.

Relating to the seven eyewitness sections proposed, for each of the eyewitnesses, I can usually find his name in the texts he wrote (or he can be identified as some distinctive individual). On closer inspection this turns out to occur at least twice, of which two “book-end” the text in question (inclusio).

The best recognized source is the Passion Narrative. After long attributing this to Peter, I now see John Mark as the author. His name Mark is attached to the start of that gospel, and he is often considered to be the young man who fled away naked in Mark 14:51-52. The beginning and ending identifications are weaker here, so the evidence needs doubling? Fine, this is paralleled in the Gospel of John in which he may be “the disciple known to the High Priest” (John 18:15-16). As he may also be the author of the P-Strand I derived, he may have accompanied the Pharisees who went to see John the Baptist (John 1:24). If so, the basic list he inserted into John runs from first to last: John 1: 20-21, 24-28, 35-37, 42-44; 7:40-49; 9:13-17; 11:46-50, 55, 57; 12:18-22; 20:11b-14, 16-17.

The Signs Gospel is usually seen as a source, and I name Andrew as it author, named at John 1:40. His name occurs often thereafter in narrative sections of the first twelve chapters up to the end at John 12:21 (2 times). Scholars also think that the original ending of Signs has been shifted to John 20:30-31 to conclude a later edition of that gospel. This covers from the baptism of Jesus to the Resurrection, truly an Alpha and Omega.

For each of the eyewitnesses, I can usually find his name in the texts he wrote (or he can be identified as some distinctive individual). On closer inspection this turns out to occur at least twice, of which two “book-end” the text in question. For Nicodemus, for whom I have given the argument that he wrote the Johannine Discourses while Jesus was still alive, his name appears in John 3:1 at the very start of these. At the end, Nicodemus brings spices to anoint Jesus’s body, John 19:39. The text he actually wrote was sayings only, so his name only appears in text that brackets his writings.

As for Peter, the source for Ur-Marcus, his name turns up from the first when his brother Andrew finds him (John 1:40). Acts 15:7-12 records his speech. He is the most-named apostle, helping to identify material attributable to him in both the Synoptics and Acts. Limiting the purview to the gospels, however, Peter still turns up at the end at the Sea of Tiberius, John 21:23.

During Jesus’s life-time the Apostle Matthew may have written Q and later the associated Twelve-Source that underlies gMark as well. If so his name turns up almost at the start of his eyewitness portion of gMark, his call by Jesus at Mark 2:14. His name only occurs again in the naming of the Twelve, but this gospel concludes abruptly at 16:8 in a section most likely from the Twelve Source that can be shown to continue into much of the ending of gMatthew, or at least Matthew 28:16 with the word “eleven” denoting Matthew among them. The Twelve-Source may underlie part of the Acts of the Apostles, and the name “Matthew” is included there along with the other ten remaining apostles (Acts 1:13).

Last to write, but still active on my interpretation (and thereby) becoming Bishop of Jerusalem in 62 CE, is the eyewitness I discovered, Simon. He is one of the two disciples seeing the resurrected Jesus on the road to Emmaus (Luke 2413-35) according to Origen and my reading of Luke 24:34. The name Simon also comes at the start of the Lucan material as Simon the Pharisee (Luke 7:36-50). If he is not to be identified with this Simon, he still may be (as a family member) the source for the Infancy Narrative starting up Luke 1 and 2. I see him as the author of Proto-Luke.

Writing later than most of the others, but still an eyewitness, was the Apostle John as the main Editor of the Gospel of John. His name is in the title. For “John” in the text itself, John the Baptist comes up early, but always as simply “John”. This could indicate an author not needing to give further identification about a John who was not himself. In any case, the editorial insertions I recognize (following Howard M. Teeple) begin in John 1 and continue through John 21. If we assume he was also the Beloved Disciple, then he is written about in the very ending; John 21:20-23.

But could this process be carried on and on? Might there be other names we could associate with an occurrence at the beginning and end of relevant sections? There are not actually very many other names to consider. James is one. The last instance is Mark 10:35, with still six more chapters of Mark to go. The first occurrence does fit, in Mark 1:19. I’m setting it aside as not close enough a parallel

Finally, I encounter two that don’t fit. There is inclusio, but they are not eyewitnesses. The name “Mary” does appear at first and last. She’s in the start of both gMatthew and gLuke. She is present at the Cross (John 19:25) and in Acts1:14. She is named at Luke 1:27, and concluding this section we read at Luke 2:52, “His mother stored up all these things in her heart.” Shouldn’t we have an eyewitness text from her also? I guess Luke 1 and 2 would fit? Eight eyewitnesses? And yes, it fits. Practically everything could have been known to Mary except Luke 1:1-4. Personally, I had never given much thought to Mary as having written an eyewitness record; just that Luke had gotten good information from her. This story goes back three decades before the rest of the gospel narratives, leaving more time for legendary accruals, however. The scholarly literature on these two chapters is heavily weighted to the Roman Catholic side, as elegantly reviewed by Raymond Brown in Birth of the Messiah (1999). He has lots of doubts about historicity of Luke 1 and 2. As for any eyewitness claims, he dismisses this on page 575, “that the Lucan infancy narration came from Mary has been deemed untenable from the start (1B)”
The Birth of the Messiah (or via: amazon.co.uk)
(The above link to Amazon gives the largest preview I have ever seen. Of course the book is 750 pages. Highly recommended.)

Another name that gives a false positive is Philip. His name appears basically wherever the name Andrew appears. Did both of them write eyewitness accounts spanning the same sections of narrative? The best that can be made of this is a reinforcement of the Muratorian Canon that a team of apostles wrote gJohn, and that Andrew is a better choice as the writer because the name “Philip” appears over a chapter beyond the relevant section (in the Farewell discourse, John 14:8, 9).

Close, we might say, with seven true positives, two false positives (Mary and Philip. For ordinary purposes that might serve, but here I’m seeking confirmation from God that He ordained these seven eyewitnesses and no others. Since I’m using names in the first place as my primary identifiers of eyewitnesses, it’s not saying much that the same name appears more than once, and that the primary occurrence is at the start of the section.

So my hypothesis is not confirmed in exactly the way I wanted it. My seven eyewitnesses are confirmed, but something equally meaningful may apply to the other two. The name “Philip” in paralleling “Andrew” may indicate he also had a part in writing gJohn, maybe in tying the Signs Source together with the rest of gJohn by his name getting into the Farewell Discourse at John 14:8, 9. As for Mary (aside from the old standard that women don’t count), there could be good reason(s) to emphasize her under the Alpha and Omega principle.