gurugeorge

Make no mistake Peter. If 2,000 years of Western civilisation (including even our very dating system itself!) is based partly on some kind of monumental misunderstanding, error, fraud or hoax, then that's probably one of the most important things a scholar of ancient history and religions could be working on. (Not that anybody has to do it. Scholarship is like art, in that it can be pursued for its own sake; all I'm saying is that if this happens to be your area of interest, then you're either lucky or unlucky, depending on how you look at it, that the area you are interested in has such tremendous importance.) For instance, the fact that many Christians find something deeply "spiritual" in the "message" of Christ is not to be denied - and indeed one of the things a MJ reading would reveal is that there is some perennial validity in this "message", indeed just as much validity as many Christians find (as a "spiritual" message - i.e. as helping the individual come to some deeply satisfactory standing in relation to the world he or she finds themselves in), and that the "historical" aspect really isn't all that important after all (i.e. in that lack of a HJ doesn't actually affect the spiritual message one whit, and in fact the supposed presence of a HJ actually hindered it).

Just to be unbiassed, a similar process of analysis ought to be undergone wrt Islam, and all the other major religions. I say this as someone who, like Sam Harris (an arch-atheist) has great love of and respect for "spiritual experience" per se, but finds its connection to propositional truths about the cosmos to be, and to have been throughout history, problematic. It's an important thing, for humanity, to be able to disentangle the wheat (of spiritual and mystical experience) from the chaff (of intellectual meanderings and politically or financially motivated "religious" shennanigans).

Not that I would expect any of these kinds of studies to bring up anything conclusive (unless some surprising new texts or archaeology were discovered, which is always possible, but can't be relied upon). But the airing of possibilities in these areas of thought is a good thing no matter how you look at it.

Roger Pearse

Well even I think Adversus Marcellum probably deeply tedious -- I really cannot summon up the slightest interest in disputes about the homoousion. But it should exist in English, if only because it is presently inaccessible. It'll have to wait until after the Chronicle, tho.

You, on the other hand, aren't allowed to be bored. Not after those two posts :-)

What do you think about the idea of translating, not the Greek text of some of these, but the Latin translation in the Patrologia Graeca? There are an awful lot more people who know Latin than Greek. Alternatively work from both but morphologise them so that people can see the transliteration, part, tense, etc and meaning on either side. I have such a thing for the Latin; but does anyone know of such a script for the Greek?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

lpetrich

:rolling:

What did he mean by "our Father in Heaven"? An entity who makes rain, feeds birds and clothes flowers, among other things. And an atheist would say that such an entity is a figment of the imagination.

The Epicureans, for instance, were MUCH closer to atheism than Jesus Christ had ever been.

Jet Black

I thought it was written by Mel Gibson :/

Julian

There is no automatic POS (Parts-of-speech) tagger for Koine Greek as of last time I checked, which was several months ago. I have been corresponding with a couple of people who are working on one but it seems to be slow going, everybody keeps getting pulled onto other projects, including yours truly. If there is strong interest, I could conceivably create one with decent accuracy within a reasonable amount of time. I have most of the pieces (chunker, dictionary, syntactical parser, probabilistic disambiguation code, and other stuff) sitting around since I will eventually have to write one for some other projects I have going on.

Julian

Roger Pearse

I am very definitely interested, and I would be willing to help. If such a thing could be done as an open source item, however simply and with whatever limitations, I think that it would quickly snowball, as people would then add whatever bits they felt were missing. At the moment no-one has anything to hack around with.

What dictionary? What language?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

No Robots

Reply is here.

judge

That Jesus used that which was in use and commonly known (ie the HB) to communicate does not mean he agreed with Judaistic interpretations.
In fact his view of the HB seemed to baffle the religious folk of his day and even today many of his sayings are inscrutible (to christians anyway)
What can one do, but use common metaphor and myth to explain that which is beyond words anyway?