Doug Shaver

I have told you exactly what I mean when I say that something is evidence. You are the one who says, in effect, "It's evidence if I say it is evidence." You are the one who, when I presented several definitions of "evidence" from the OED and told you to pick the one you were using, replied, "All of them." That, my friend, is a quintessential case of not knowing what evidence is.

Doug Shaver

Oh, yes, we can. We can explain why we think the academic consensus is mistaken about Jesus' historicity. Thus we justify accepting the consensus in the one case but not the other. You, however, have not explained why you think the academic consensus is mistaken about gospel authorship. Thus, you are being inconsistent if you accept it in the one case while rejecting it in the other.

Adam

Thank you both for replying to portions of my Post #377. However, you both ignored the more substantive portions of #377 that reiterated my expose that no one has yet responded to my #370 after six days now. My Post #97 here goes back to Feb. 27th.
http://www.freeratio.org/showthread.php?t=311862&page=4

MJ partisans are in serious denial. It's one thing to continue to believe in some fringe view you have identified with. It's quite another to refuse to admit that someone has presented new evidence to disprove that fringe belief. Refuting my arguments would require effort, sure, but since none of you have even cited anyone (academic or otherwise) as an authority that has dealt with my case, you have no basis for your denial. MJ is simply an act of faith.

Vorkosigan

No, your position is seriously, mortally, idiotic. It's actually beyond idiotic, and the fact that you still post here about it after being told by many different posters here what the problems are, is an indication of severe problems with comprehension.

Please stop wasting bandwidth with this looniness. Or else, as courtesy to the site managers, post to one thread so we can all conveniently ignore this idiotic position you hold.

Vorkosigan

Sheshbazzar

Refuting your arguments is impossible, because they are all based upon conclusions that only exist within your imaginations.
The effort would be as futile as trying to refute notions that Goofy is not a dog and Donald is not a Duck.

You certainly need someone to deal with your 'case'. Unfortunately this is the wrong place in which to be seeking the authoritative clinical advice of a Psychiatrist who can advise you on how to deal with rejection anxiety.





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Adam

Well, maybe my problem is that I am not able to recognize some responses as seriously requiring a reply. Follow this link to Page 25 in my thread, Gospel Eyewitnesses:
http://www.freeratio.org/showthread....306983&page=25

Look up there posts 610 and 620 that give judgments on my positions here without giving any hint of his argument or how I was supposed to reply. Here is the whole content of Post #620:


This would appear to claim that I claim that an atheist specifically supports my position, and that I claim that I am right because of this. It would seem to call for me to present an argument instead of appealing to Teeple's authority. Yet anyone who looks at my preceding Post #619 will easily see that I present at least three arguments. The argument involving Teeple is not that Teeple agrees with me that John Mark was the eyewitness of the Passion Narrative, but just that I was acknowledging as correct his stylistic criteria for determining the Source S underlying the Gospel of John. That Teeple was an atheist I felt needed to be mentioned here to gain credibility for his derivation of his source criticism, i. e., that he was not conjuring it up for Christian apologetics. Here at FRDB it is quite a no-no to be seen citing Christian apologists, in case you havn't noticed. I was trying to avoid trouble, not get myself into it.

Perhaps "denial" is not the word I should be using. There is something more visceral? Maybe it's an emotional block; hysteria, rage, or hate? I'm looking for intellectual interaction here (it's why FRDB was recommended to me, and I do see lots of fine minds interacting at high levels of erudition), but the position I take on the historicity of the gospel sources cannot be discussed rationally here?

I should add that I am not claiming that no one here has any rational basis for what he believes. Among your friends you can even discuss your views intellectually (with the obvious exceptions that may be the occasion for yesterday's March 24, 2012 revision of the TOU #11), but many of you have perceived me as an enemy that must be "slain" rather than argued with. I'm still looking for someone able to deal with my position intellectually. That said, I am not seeking to ban anyone just because he can only see "red" when he sees my name on a post. I will continue presenting my freely thought-out views in a rational manner even though this may rarely be reciprocated.

Meanwhile I have largely accomplished my purpose here of further honing my presentation of my seven or eight eyewitnesses of Jesus, and would have expected to work up the final form thereby. However, along the way I unexpectedly reacted to the stone wall here of anti-supernaturalism by discerning that the earliest gospel sources could be excavated in a manner free of supernaturalism. (And this in turn leaves me in a quandary about whether to make me case a two-step process of disproving MJ and only next attempting to present the remaining eyewitnesses.) I presented this in Gospel Eyewitnesses in posts#526, 534, and 555 and further in the posts in this current thread that I cite at Post #370. Apparently the emotional barrier against me prevented any rational response to this, and if so I should not be so confident that I have disproven MJ. I have only proved something about the limitations of MJ partisans here on FRDB.

Sheshbazzar

:boohoo: A lot of noisy squawking sounds.

Why not knock off with the constant whining and offer up something with some substance, that does not consist of simply another assertion about something that you imagine to be?

If you were offering up statements that could be examined and proven one way or another, then others would have something to discuss rationally with you.

For example when you make your claims about Nicodemus as an eyewitness writer, you should be able to point to actual texts that clearly state that he wrote this or that, not that you -think- he wrote this or that.
When all we have to go on is your personal opinions of whom it was that you -think- wrote what, with NO confirmation at all of it from the actual texts, there is no basis on which for us to either support or to refute these 'possible' scenarios you present.

Even if one or more of us were to be persuaded to go along with your theories, there would be no validity to the choice, because the textual evidence to support and to prove the validity of those choices to others would still be lacking.

You cannot reasonably just take blocks of texts and hang 'possible' authors names upon them willy-nilly based on your best guesses and expect everyone, or even anyone, to care to be identified with holding such textual material deficient positions.

Apart from the fact that even you have been making revisions as to whom it was that you think wrote what multiple times here.
Thus you effectively destroy any confidence anyone might even begin to develop in your choices. -who knows but you might decide to revise and shuffle them around yet again tomorrow, while providing no reasonings or evidence for the cause of your newest flip-flop.

And the way you do it, with long sequences of verse numbers, split up willy-nilly between this proposed eyewitness author and that.
Are you seriously expecting others to memorize whomever it is that you propose for each verse? (which you might well decide to switch again tomorrow? and who could argue for the former as neither it nor it replacement have any evidence?)

Can you explain why anyone else here ought to accept Nicodemus as being a NT writer, with NO 'could have beens', no 'might have beens', or 'possiblies', and based upon nothing more than actual clear and unambiguous content of these texts?




.

Adam

I can give a quick summation on Nicodemus with the two following extracts from my Post #38 in my Gospel Eyewitnesses thread:
http://www.freeratio.org/showthread.php?t=306983&page=2
If we look for clues within the text itself, we find (apart from the Prologue) that high theology begins in John 3, the night visit to Nicodemus. Did Nicodemus record this? Consider that we next hear of Nicodemus in John 7:50-52, in which Nicodemus argues that the Law does not condemn a man without first hearing from him. If he took it upon himself to do what he said, the words recorded in the next three chapters from Jesus seem well suited to be a record of what Jesus said that might be worthy of condemnation. Later chapters reveal more and more favor towards what Jesus had to say, concluding with John 17. In John 19:39 Nicodemus brought spices for Jesus’s burial. He had obviously become a Christian. The marked change in attitude toward Jesus shows that Nicodemus wrote all this (or at least notes) while Jesus was still alive.
......
The raw text from Nicodemus, my modification of Teeple’s G, runs as follows:
3 (in the main); 4:20-24; most of 5:17-47; 6:26-51, 58-65; most of 7:5-52; 8:12-57; most of 9 & 10, but not 9:1-2, 6-7, 13-17, 24-28; 11:1, 9-10, 16; 12:23-59; 13:16-17, 21-22; Ch. 14-17.

As you see, this was presented before, but the bull-eye affixed to the target nevertheless elicited little response. It was much later before I realized that almost everyone commenting was a Mythicist, so no one was open to presentation of evidence anyway. Emotional and intellectual barriers were too high to overcome.

Thank you, Shesh, for listing a test case for study. Something productive can come of such a procedure.

Sheshbazzar

We don't know. The texts nowhere say that he did. There is no evidence.
You are guessing.
They might 'seem' to be, but that is no evidence that they were. The texts nowhere say that he was the writer. There is no evidence.
The entire tale might even be fictional.
You are guessing.
Perhaps, but that is no evidence that Nicodemus wrote anything. The texts nowhere claim he did. Is there even a tradition that he did?
If there is you have faliled to reference it. The entire tale might even be fictional.
Again, you are guessing.
Here you have another assertion or guess about something which you have not been able to provide any persuasive evidence for.

'Could have's' don't cut it. It also could have been an invisable pink Martian that flew around writing down everything that everyone said.
The texts DON'T say.

Adam

I avoided dogmatic utterances in my Post #38. Here's the way to write it to suit you and state the facts:
Nicodemus was told to investigate Jesus in John 7:52, "Go into the matter, and see for yourself: prophets do not arise in Galilee." We know that somebody did write down these discourses, and they start where Nicodemus became involved in John 3.

There is a Gospel of Nicodemus. Thus there apparently was a tradition that he wrote a gospel that his name was affixed to later pseudonymously.

It is a fact that the discourses change in tone. The best explanation is that the writer's beliefs about Jesus changed while he was writing all this during Jesus's lifetime.

The above is evidence. It won't persuade you, but it is persuasive.