judge

Look this is an after the fact suggestion.

Just look at Hallandales earlier thread.
As far as I can see hallandale has no reason to try to twist this section. He just wrote what was obvious. he saw 41 generations. No one has ever suggested there were 40 generations there previously.

This suggestion only comes now in a rationalisation. In case you haven't noticed spin likes to argue as many points as possible. Nothing wrong with this at all. It is helpful to test ideas. We need to test them. But we need to weed out the less credible arguments.

If it weren't a rationalisation others would have seen it before.

from the american atheists

Spins approach is quite novel.
It is a nice try in his usual vein. It will perhaps get applause and approval on a skeptics website, (and in the matrix), but not elsewhere.

Amaleq13

Nope. If you had asked me last month or last year I would have given the same answer. The first guy isn't a generation. His children are the first generation. If Abraham is to be counted as a generation, his father should start the list.

Regardless of how we interpret the word, what seems more relevant is determining how did folks in the first century counted generations.

judge

Well it is quite easy to show you are wrong here.

Back in June you made the following comment WRT the traditional renderiong of these generations.


here

You claimed there were 13 then. But according to what you now say there should be 12.

spin

That says nothing, judge. When one does their own research and doesn't simply rehash other people's, they often come up with "novel" approaches. This doesn't reflect whether it is right or not.

You naturally understand what I'm saying because of the way each of the three segments start. As the first segment starts off telling us that Abraham was the father of Isaac, so the second segment starts off with the fact that David was the father of Solomon, but you don't include David in that segment. The third starts with Jeconiah and you don't count him either. The reason is that the first name doesn't belong to the list of generations: fortunately they've been included in earlier lists. For some reason you, like everyone else, arbitrarily count Abraham in, when he belongs to whatever list came before what he generated.

• Abraham to David:
  Abraham was the father of Isaac == here you start with *Abraham
• David to the deportation to Babylon
  David was the father of Solomon == here you start with Solomon
• From the deportation to Babylon to the messiah
  Jeconiah was the father of Salathiel == here you start with Salathiel

With this incongruence on your part, once again you provide not a clue of being able to deal with the problem. Typical. :rolling:

And of course all this stuff is froth hiding your avoidance of dealing with it.

I am still waiting for a response to the philological case I provided for why you are obviously wrong about your use of gbr) to make Joseph Mary's father.


spin

judge

I accounted for this before you raised it. In anticipation. Go back and re-read earlier posts.

If anyone one else has any questions I will be happy to answer them.
If it is just me and Spin I think I will retire.

spin

These are the points you claim to have responded to:

1. the word for "father" in Syriac is )b) and it is used throughout the Peshitta nt, so there is no reason to assume that if the writer wanted to mean "father" in Mt 1:16 he wouldn't have used )b) there.
   No response.
2. gbr) simply doesn't mean "father" (and yes I know of your misuse of Mt 7:9, which is the reason why I supplied the example of the doctor's son, so that you wouldn't persist in arguing along the lines that "doctor" must mean "father" in that case). I gave an example which you completely ignored earlier: Jesus says that he's come to set a man gbr) against his father )bwhy, Mt 10:35.
   Your efforts have helped to show that gbr) simply means man. You even made the false claim:The greek translator rendered gbr) husband. In fact the Greek text has aner, ie "man". gbr) is the correct translation.
3. the Greek aner and the Syriac gbr) mean the same thing, "man", and it functions well enough as is in Mt 1:16. We would normally assume that Joseph was Mary's man with all its implications. (One Hebrew word for man, Y$, "ish", is also used where we would specifically put "husband".)
   No response.
4. though women are mentioned in the list of generations of Mt, they are never part of the actual list of generations, but are additions outside the generation list, so that your attempt to insert Mary into the list doesn't reflect the list modus operandi.
   No response.
5. a verb connects each generation, X begat Y in every case down to Joseph, and while Jacob begat Joseph, there is no indication that Joseph begat Mary, which would be necessary for the wild scheme you are proposing.
   No response.

One half-arsed attempt from judge, dealing with only one of these problems. Why, one asks, does judge meddle with what he doesn't have any training for? He knows nothing about the linguistics. He doesn't know Aramaic or Hebrew. He doesn't know Greek. He has the commitment that the nt was written in Aramaic. Why? That's one of his fundamental beliefs. There is no why. As I said he lacks the tools to know why.

I think judge can retire. The only problem is you know he'll be back with the same stuff agin and agin. He will repeat the same errors without improving on them. Like a good fundamentalist, he will neither listen to, nor analyse, what you say. This is the sort of dead end many of you have escaped from.


spin

spin

I have proposed in this thread that this conclusion is wrong. There are not 41 generations but 40.

Note in the above the Hallandale has included Abraham in the list. However, he is only given as a generator, not a generation in this list. He is not part of the generation list. Here are the generations:

2 Abraham begat Isaac, 1
Isaac begat Jacob, 2
Jacob begat Judah and his brothers, 3
3 Judah begat Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar, 4
Perez begat Hezron, 5
Hezron begat Ram, 6
4 Ram begat Amminadab, 7
Amminadab begat Nahshon, 8
Nahshon begat Salmon, 9
5 Salmon begat Boaz, whose mother was Rahab, 10
Boaz begat Obed, whose mother was Ruth, 11
Obed begat Jesse, 12
6 and Jesse begat King David. 13

Then we get the 14 Generations from David until the Babylonian captivity

David begat Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah's wife, 1
7 Solomon begat Rehoboam, 2
Rehoboam begat Abijah, 3
Abijah begat Asa, 4
8 Asa begat Jehoshaphat, 5
Jehoshaphat begat Jehoram, 6
Jehoram begat Uzziah, 7
9 Uzziah begat Jotham, 8
Jotham begat Ahaz, 9
Ahaz begat Hezekiah, 10
10 Hezekiah begat Manasseh, 11
Manasseh begat Amon, 12
Amon begat Josiah, 13
11 and Josiah begat Jeconiah[a] and his brothers at the time of the exile to Babylon. 14

And finally 13 Generations from the Babylonian Captivity to Jesus

Jeconiah begat Shealtiel, 1
Shealtiel begat Zerubbabel, 2
13 Zerubbabel begat Abiud, 3
Abiud begat Eliakim, 4
Eliakim begat Azor, 5
14 Azor begat Zadok, 6
Zadok begat Akim, 7
Akim begat Eliud, 8
15 Eliud begat Eleazar, 9
Eleazar begat Matthan, 10
Matthan begat Jacob, 11
16 and Jacob begat Joseph, 12 the man of Mary,
of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ. 13

In total we have 13 + 14 + 13 generations, ie forty generations.

Why Hallandale would think this counting error is a serious problem, I don't know. This is only a book, which has been transmitted by hand. It's very difficult not to make mistakes when transmitting texts by hand.


spin

Chris Weimer

I didn't even see this at first! Technically, a generation (both in generatio Latin and γενεας in Greek) technically mean "a begetting". But a question - could Matthew have merely been wrong in his usage like judge here?

spin

I think we are falling over this necessity for literal accuracy. Maybe the writer miscounted. Maybe he was just wrong as you say, but he shows with the other two segments that if he were wrong, he was also inconsistent with the way that they start, though it just so happens that the beginning of the second and third segments are the last begettings of the previous segments.

This is only a problem for fundamentalists and those anti-religionists who require the bible to be 100% accurate.


spin

spin

Just a further reflection, but now on the second segment of the genealogy:

David begat Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah's wife, 1
7 Solomon begat Rehoboam, 2
Rehoboam begat Abijah, 3
Abijah begat Asa, 4
8 Asa begat Jehoshaphat, 5
Jehoshaphat begat Jehoram, 6
Jehoram begat Uzziah, 7
9 Uzziah begat Jotham, 8
Jotham begat Ahaz, 9
Ahaz begat Hezekiah, 10
10 Hezekiah begat Manasseh, 11
Manasseh begat Amon, 12
Amon begat Josiah, 13
11 and Josiah begat Jeconiah[a] and his brothers at the time of the exile to Babylon. 14

According to the HB tradition, between Jehoram (=Joram) and Uzziah (=Azariah) there were three other kings, Ahaziah, Joash and Amariah. (1 Chr 3:11-12) What has happened here is that before the genealogical list reached Mt, a scribe had confused Ahaziah and Azariah (Uzziah) when copying and omitted the names of three kings. This seems the simple likelihood. Whatever the case, the second segment lacks three names that it should have, making it potentially seventeen names. But let's not get too concerned with accuracy.



spin