Adam

OK, no one is dismissing me as a troll, but already most of you are saying that I am outside current non-conservative scholarship and that I have no evidence because the gospels themselves cannot be used as evidence. Instead you prefer to rely upon third and fourth hand accounts (or lack thereof) from people unfamiliar with the events.
I understand your attacks on my first five paragraphs in my post #1 and in my posts #5 and #6, but everyone has ignored my presentation of the first eyewitness in the latter portion of #1. That John Mark wrote the Passion Narrative is my idea and needs to be critiqued on its own terms. The same applies to the subsequent six eyewitnesses as I present them in the future. It is not my duty to defend Bauckham or any other conservative scholar, I just used him as a springboard to launch my own more radical theory. Bauckham and Robinson both fear to deal with underlying sources, but that's the only way to get beyond tracing eyewitnesses in order to demonstrate who they were and what they wrote.

aa5874

I do NOT prevent you from using the Gospels as evidence at all.

I stated that ONCE you introduce the Gospels as credible evidence then Jesus was described as a Child of Ghost, the Word that was God and the Creator of heaven and earth, that was PHYSICALLY ON the Pinnacle of the Jewish Temple with SATAN (tempting Jesus to commit SUICIDE ), walked on the SEA, who TRANSFIGURED, RESURRECTED, ATE FISH after the resurrection and ASCENDED in a cloud.

The Gospels appear to be EVIDENCE of BELIEF of antiquity not evidence of historical events with respect to Jesus.

Atheos

Correction: He is the first of several purposed witnesses, for which you have nothing but conjecture.

Look, I'm not trying to be purposefully adversarial here, but to claim that someone is an "identifiable eyewitness" using this methodology is preposterous. This alleged author never signs the book, never identifies himself as any of the characters in the narrative, never gives any indication that he actually witnessed any of the events himself, never gives any indication that he actually knew anyone who witnessed any of the events himself.

The earliest identifiable tradition that suggests "Mark" might have been the author of the gospel traditionally ascribed to him is from around 130 C.E., where Papias claims John the Presbyter told him Mark wrote the book. Irenaeus makes a similar claim 50 years later. Clement of Alexandria also makes such a claim circa 200 C.E. Although it is possible these three claimants represent different lines of confirmation it is considerably more likely that Irenaeus and Clement were simply parroting Papias. Especially Irenaeus.

This evidence is specious at best. Getting from that to "Mark wrote about these events, some of which he witnessed himself" isn't very impressive scholarship IMO. It requires leaping to the conclusion that one hearsay source (JtP via Papyrus) is reliable, making unwarranted assumptions about this "Mark" character, and ignoring the agenda of the very people who would benefit most from getting people to believe in an eyewitness tradition (the "church").

Internally, the consensus of scholarship is that the book is Greek to the core. It belies no evidence of being translated from Aramaic and no evidence of Aramaic idioms being translated or transliterated into Greek. Although this is an argument from silence it's one of those defining silences contrasted with the speculation that Peter (whose native tongue would have been Aramaic) was the source of much of the content. The numerous geographic errors, erroneous information about Jewish laws and customs and general historical errors in the book are much more consistent with fiction than memoir.

By all means continue presenting your case, but understand that it's not going to meet with great acceptance around here if it is based mostly on wishful thinking. There's a reason they call us skeptics.

Toto

Did you mean to write that most of us prefer to view the gospels as at best third or fourth hand accounts from people unfamiliar with the events?

As a side note, you appear to be copying your posts from a formatted MS Word document, and your paragraph breaks are being lost, which makes your posts harder to read. It is a good idea to copy from Word or some other text editor, but it would help the readability of your posts if you turn off formatting so you are aware how your text will appear.

It is your idea, but I can't find any support for it in your post. Why was John Mark the unidentified disciple who was known to the High Priest in John 18? Is the unidentified disciple the same person as the beloved disciple?

Adam

That's a start. Thank you for allowing me to use the gospels as evidence. But I don't require you to take the all-or-nothing approach you go on to detail. For purposes of this thread I am asking you only to consider whether words that got down on paper most likely came from one particular human being or another. If no such subjective stances can be identified, then we might be reduced to seeing the gospels only as evidence of later belief. Please allow me to apply Higher Criticism before you lump it all together as myth.

Adam

No, no, the third and fourth hand refers to the non-Christian classical writers. I should have written "fifth or sixth hand", I guess, to be closer to the reality.
On my screen my Post #1 has paragraphing of my MS Word docx document
Sorry about that. For economy of presentation and avoidance of duplication, that evidence comes in conjunction with Peter, the fourth eyewitness, based on Acts 12:12-23.
No, he is not the Beloved Disciple (who is unnamed either for humility or for safety as he was apparently still alive until the last few verses of John 21 were added).

Adam

Understand please that I am not presenting the Gospel of Mark itself in total as an eyewitness account. In Post #1 I am specifically limiting myself to the Passion Narrative as found primarily in John chapters 18 to 20, and primarily as detailed by Howard M. Teeple, an atheist. There is enough identity of content with the Synoptics that the similarities must be rooted in facts or a common source, but no one has been able to display direct literary dependence in either direction. This leaves us with the middle position that any source most likely was in a different language than Greek.
The scholars the most knowledgeable about Aramaic tend to favor Aramaic sources of the gospels.

Adam

Yes, we're getting into problems from presenting too much too soon (about Bauchham, etc.) and not presenting enough. To continue from my Post #1 now with the second eyewitness, Andrew:

I used to think that earlier parts of John were equally carried to the Synoptics from what I believed Peter had told. Now that I think of John Mark as the writer of the Passion Narrative, I have had to find some other explanation for the earlier Synoptic-type passages. The clearest of these is the Feeding of the Five Thousand. It’s regarded by many source-critics as from the Signs Source.
Yet little else is thought to come from Signs into the Synoptics, and I used to think that nothing at all did. What seems to have happened was that John Mark’s Passion Narrative later had Signs added in front of it. That’s why the Signs Source ends at John 12, because the story beyond that point had already been written. At this time the entirety of John Mark’s text plus some Signs were used as the base to which Peter added his recollections to form Petrine Ur-Marcus. (Perhaps the Signs were incomplete at this time.) In the process whatever was in Aramaic was translated into Greek. But this was used henceforth only in the Synoptic gospels, not in John. Meanwhile (or perhaps beforehand) the Passion Narrative text in Aramaic (or a copy of it) was used for translation into Greek. Next in front of the Passion Narrative in Greek the complete Signs Source was translated into Greek by the person who (later or) had earlier translated Petrine Ur-Marcus. The latter at this point was a Signs gospel, consisting of the Signs plus the Passion Narrative, neither of which had any input from Peter. Both these portions had similar style (but not exact) either because the Signs translator made some stylistic changes in the Passion Narrative or because the two translators had similar Greek style.
The Signs Source according to W. Nicol is John 1:35-51;xx. 2:1-11;xx. 4:1-9,x. 16-19,v. 27-30,x. 40,ii. 43-54;x. 5:1-9;x. 6:16-25;xv. 9:1-2,iv. 6-7;vii. 11:1-6,vii. 11-17,vii. 33-44;xv. 12:1-8,xii. 12-15.v. I would agree with Howard M. Teeple in The Literary Origin of the Gospel of John in ascribing some individual verses within the above to the later Editor and in adding to the Signs Source John 6:1-15,xx. Teeple recognizes as his source “S” basically what I attribute above to the Signs Source in John 1 to 12 and the Passion Narrative in John 18 and 19. What I show above in the Passion Narrative in John 20 Teeple never labeled as “S”, but he did denote it as a special source “p-1” or even “p-2”. However, he shows as “S” a number of sections not accounted for above, most of which I will show later to be P-Strand.
Not necessarily disclosing the author, but largely related to this section of John is the name “Andrew” at John 1:40, 41, 44; 6:8; 12:22(2). The name “Philip” occurs even more frequently in about the same places and in John 14:8, 9, but I long ago settled on Andrew as a more probable author, particularly when I found out that the Muratorian Canon (usually dated to 170 AD) states that Andrew started out the process of writing John. As a further note I would add that the first occurrence of each name at John 12:22 is shown by Teeple as from the source, so should not be used to claim that the name “Andrew” is not associated exclusively with the Signs Source, even though it falls outside the sections more conclusively identified as Signs Source. Andrew is the second identifiable eyewitness.

Dutch_labrat

Well, if that is the standard this thread is going to be on then I will assert that the gospels were written by Glenn Beck's grand children. They sent it back using a time machine but because they used creationist mathematics got it about two centuries wrong.

Toto

What browser are you using?

Are you going to claim that Acts has any historical value? Or that you can infer anything from this?

Acts 12:12 When this had dawned on him, he went to the house of Mary the mother of John, also called Mark, where many people had gathered and were praying.


And then everyone forgot who he was?

I'm doubtful that you can get anything out of this, but I'll wait and see.