Adam

Truth Methodology?
[When FRDB members refuse to rise to my challenges, that makes me start some new thread. This time I’ll start something long overdue from me, an investigation of epistemology, “How do we know anything?” So much seems to cancel out, so new foundations for knowledge need to be explored, if only to reach the same non-conclusion. At the least we can establish the need for this very forum, Biblical Criticism and History. This only of course serves to justify my Gospel Eyewitnesses thread, the Significance of John thread providing underlying evidence, and the Falling Dominoes thread following up on them. ]
Methodology must start with epistemology—how do we know anything? That can be difficult, so alternate path may be needed. The standard ways have not worked. Empiricism is the most obvious path, studying sense perception as the key to knowledge. Surely we can trust the immediate impressions on our senses? Not so fast, we get contradictory information. The great English Empiricist school of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume led to a skepticism about knowledge that even Immanuel Kant could not fix. Hume trusted common experience and concluded that miracles were impossible. Yet every day we supposedly see miracles occur on Pentecostal TR channels. Which impression on our senses is correct?

The other great school of philosophy is the Rationalist, based on reason as our key to knowledge. Descartes formulated its one sure principle, “I think, therefore I am.” Yet nothing seems surer than that this maxim proves very little. It used to be said it proved God existed, but Rationalists of our day tend to be Atheists. This itself seems to be “picking oneself up by one’s bootstraps”, taking reason for a given that proves that nothing higher than itself exists. From reason proving God we have moved to Reason proving that there is no supernatural.

God seems to be the conundrum upon which philosophy shatters. Perhaps we should seize the bull by the horns and postulate one or the other, “God exists” or “God does not exist” and see what follows. The latter would seem to no solid conclusion, as it is so difficult to prove a negative. “God exists” offers the possibility of enlisting the hypothesized deity into proving Himself. Granted, even that won’t work if God is not a Person Who can respond to us. On the other hand, chasing this hypothesis might lead to an indirect disproof God. If we treat God as existing and a contradiction results, we have disproved God.

Let’s thus focus on a “short-cut“ whether there is a Personality behind reality to which religion might speak? Using that as a hypothesis, how would we find our way towards knowing it? Once given that there is a Personality underlying reality, we would expect this Personality to be aware of us, and seeing our plight, He would communicate with us in some way. The most likely means would be through the largest or most prominent religion. This would be Christianity. Within Christianity we would look first to Roman Catholicism. (If there is no Personality, no God let’s say, then our epistemological task would become much more difficult. Let’s try this short-cut first.)

Roman Catholicism claims of its essence that adherents must believe much more than is obvious to philosophy, the senses, and historical support from the Bible or the like. This makes it vulnerable. And indeed, studying these supererogatory claims does prove that Roman Catholicism in its standard form is unsupportable. When I left it in 1992 I had three disproofs; now I am up to 15. Let’s take it for now that my experience is sufficient to set Roman Catholicism aside or at least not at all obviously Personality’s way of communicating with us. Perhaps something its like may give us the truth, such as Lutheranism or Orthodoxy? If so its proof would have to rest upon appeal to Christianity’s holy book, the Bible. What is most important in the Bible is the gospels. (Paul might be more important for doctrine, perhaps, but unless the gospels are true then Paul is irrelevant.)

The Bible is claimed to be inerrant. In addition such conservative Christians tend to believe that the gospels were written specifically by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. (Disproving either would tend to invalidate the other as well, if the disproof showed both a mistake and a wrong attribution of authorship. Plus it would show that the type of authority used for the one might be equally improperly underlying the other.) That gMatthew uses so many sources would be unexpected if the Apostle Matthew was really the writer. Even grant that Matthew wrote Q, why would Q not mention Matthew and gMatthew wind up copying in Matthew’s call from Mark 2:14? Or if Matthew wrote gMark, what happens to the Tradition that Mark wrote gMark? And if Matthew wrote gMark, why would he make so many geographical mistakes? This gets us to the inerrancy question as well. (Racing a little ahead here, there would be more conservative assertion that Matthew wrote gMatthew and that gMark gives correct geography. Not to mention that there is Q material in gMark, and I myself have established that it includes narrative such as the call of Matthew.)

That John wrote gJohn is inconsistent with his name never appearing in the whole gospel (except at 21:20, probably as an interpolation). If he be identified with the Beloved Disciple, this person is never cited before the Last Supper. Yet John is supposed to be a disciple from a very early time. Someone else must have written the first twelve chapters of gJohn. John would have been aware of a very different Jesus based on what he and his fellow fishermen saw of Jesus in Galilee, and he would not have written of a Jesus basically in Judea doing and saying such different things than in the Synoptics. This falsifies or vitiates (makes useless in practice) the Jesus in gJohn as against the Synoptics. Even assuming eyewitnesses wrote both accounts, there must have been something very faulty in one of the accounts. Where goes infallibility then—we can salvage an underlying Truth to the gospels only by dismissing the infallibility of the texts as written?
Having put aside Tradition and Biblical infallibility, we can proceed to source-criticism of the gospels as the next step in seeking whether Personality has given us an epistemological grounding. Academic scholarship seems largely agreed that we can seek sources underlying the canonical texts. Some scholars question the “conventional” sources (such as Q), but don’t deny the legitimacy of the quest. What do we learn about the written records that could tell us whether Personality stands behind them? Can we learn which records are earliest and from the most trustworthy writers? (What looked hopefully like a shortcut looks by this point as a long, hard slog, but at least we have something to work with. If it works out, fine, if not another religion may need to be examined by the Personality hypothesis.)

For sources we start with the most recognized; the Passion Narrative, Q, and gMark. The Passion Narrative is widely regarded as the earliest and is usually regarded as indicating that the arrest, trial, and crucifixion of Jesus really happened. The version found in the Johannine source is so simple and “factual” that there would seem to be no reason to deny it. Unfortunately, it tells us almost nothing about what Jesus taught. Q gives us a lot about what Jesus taught, but comes to us in a much-processed version that does not in itself prove that Jesus said these things. If there was an eyewitness, his identity is missing from the classic Q text. He seems to have been an apocalyptic prophet of the type of John the Baptist, but this may be only in the later Q2 sayings. Thus Q would not serve to explain why the Passion Narrative follows it. What did Jesus say or do wrongly? (Consider Q1, “The Original Book of Q” in Burton Mack’s The Lost Gospel of Q, pg. 73-80.)

Thus far we have seen no supernaturalism, but if we turn to the next supposedly most fundamental text we get healings, exorcisms, and other miracles in profusion. The text otherwise supports the above, however, because we find reasons why Jesus became a target and we find sayings that are somewhat similar to Q1. The supernaturalism may not be a conflict at all. Other than the raising of Lazarus, the gospels do not seem to portray Jesus as performing miracles in his last months on Earth, and this is even true of gMark. Conversely, Q1 may have included miracles that are still found today throughout Mark, but not recognized as from Q1 because gMark did copy lots of narrative from Q1 even while omitting most sayings. gMark is not a unified entity. It includes an underlying common source with gJohn (mostly the Passion Narrative), some additional “Petrine” material (these both marked by close verbal parallels when copied over from gMark to gLuke), this Q1 narrative I’m speaking of here (called the Twelve-Source), Q2 sayings, and the interpolations found in gMatthew but not gLuke (such as most of Mark 6 to 8).
With Q1 thus compared with comparable early portions of gMark, there is not so very much difference. Likewise it is clear that the Q2 in gMatthew and gLuke is much like the apocalyptic material in gMark and that Jesus may not have been a doomsday prophet after all. In early sayings Jesus does seem to have predicted gloom and doom much like the Fall of Jerusalem forty years later, but that which Jesus really said seems to have been recast improperly in the Q2 strand of the Synoptics. The following Q2 material is recast in its special way in gMark, with over-charged apocalypticism in Mark 13: Twelve-Source from Qumraner : Mark 1:9-15; 6:14-16, 13:18-27.

We have now reached a point from which we can assess our epistemological groundings. Scholars today frequently label Jesus as a false prophet, but the proof of this is lacking when the truth about Q2 and the Twelve-Source is factored in. Jesus may have had a consistent message after all. There may be a Synoptic vision of Jesus that supports my epistemological short-cut. It’s very rough-cut, all right, but deserves further study. (Along the way the proposed “short-cut” has turned into a lengthy path that might even have to be repeated for any proposed true religion.)
Revisioning methodology, the focus now becomes upon more careful delineation of the sources within the gospels. Stylistic considerations, some indicated above, can give objective criteria for proposed sources. Once scholarship has determined likely sources, historiographical research can look for the provenance of these sources. Times and places are important to determine when individuals may have had occasion to write texts. Suggested individuals may (or may not) have had the proper perspectives to give the information stated.

This plateau does not mean that the gospels have been accepted as historical at this point. They are plausible in the order presented, but further study could undermine them. This would leave us still without grounds for a divine Jesus or even a clearly knowable Historical Jesus (HJ).
Proceeding farther requires a long road or a longer road yet. To get into the evidence for sources leads to my scholarly article posted here in FRDB as #1, #2, #13, #30, #45, #57, #59, #63, #77, #80, and #84 and related links in #50 to my Noesis articles
in Significance of John
Much easier is to skip to the write-up of the source-criticism in
Gospel Eyewitnesses serialized at
#1, #18,#38, #52, #74, #132, and #144, and #170 or the shorter Gospel According to the Atheists version at Gospel Eyewitnesses posts #526 and #534.

Adam

[The OP examined whether we can know anything other than by revelation, then established that we can’t easily know anything by revelation either. As a further prolegomena to my several threads around Gospel Eyewitnesses, I here extend my epistemology investigating whether there are markers for how we can know whether the gospel sources can give us knowledge. Is there something in them corresponding to Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am”?]

Bible criticism is thought of as a scholarly historical enterprise, but is properly philosophical as well. We need a starting point to our search for knowledge. How do we know? That is the study of epistemology. Implicitly this proceeds from authoritarianism by citing authorities or by proclaiming the Bible to be inerrant. Many start with external criticism based on what early church fathers said about the gospels.

I propose a new starting point. To reach Descartes’s dictum, “I think, therefore I am”, we must find some place in the gospels where an individual starts from his own knowledge. This point occurs in John 12 where Jesus comes for dinner to Bethany in the home of Mary and Martha and (and apparently also of John Mark). The Passion Narrative is widely recognized as the written source underlying the gospels, but the writer has to have known Jesus from earlier to be among his followers in what occurs in John 18 and 19. The individualistic standpoint of this writer may go back no farther than these few days earlier when Jesus came in John 12:2. This was also Lazarus’s house, which may be why some scholars have suggested Lazarus as being the Beloved Disciple and/or the author of the Gospel of John (or a source in it). But Lazarus was already well known to Jesus (11:3), so his own eyewitness story would have to start much earlier, and it does not seem to. Tentatively let’s work with “the disciple known to the high priest (18:15-16) as this “I am” source who is telling us all he knew about Jesus for the next week, starting with John 11:54, 12:2-8, 12-14a, 13:18 or 21, and 13:38. The Passion Narrative in John 18 and 19 is told very simply, quite unlike what precedes it. We can easily accept this as proving that the historical Jesus was arrested tried, and crucified. [above in “Biblical texts earlier than thought” #17 Feb. 12, 2012][And in”Bart Ehrman—Did Jesus Exist”,March 18, #276]

Even within this tale of this week the name of Nicodemus comes up as assisting in the burial of Jesus (19:39). Thus the writer of the Passion Narrative has every reason to know of Nicodemus (who may also have been at Jesus’s trial) and that Nicodemus had been assigned to gather evidence against Jesus (7: 50-52). What Nicodemus wrote has apparently been largely included in John as the Johannine Discourses. What he wrote starts as neutral and/or uncomprehending (john 3 and 6), turns hostile after being given his charge (John 8-10), and turns favorable at the end (John 12, 14-17). These contrasts prove that he wrote these down during Jesus’s life. Here again we have the immediate knowledge of the “I am”.

Other than these discourses, the content of the first twelve chapters of John is often called the Book of Signs or the Signs Gospel. This Signs Source begins at John 1:19 with “this is the testimony of John the Baptist”. He was soon dead, of course, so this information has to come from one of his two disciples mentioned (1:40). These two disciples, Andrew and Philip are named time and again throughout the first twelve chapters. As one of them is mentioned in the Muratorian Canon as one of the authors of the Gospel of John, we can pick Andrew as our “I am” source for the Signe Source. He was one of the twelve apostles, of course, so the author of the Passion Narrative would have known him. What was needed was information only before the Passion Narrative. At this point a first draft of John was put together combining most of our current John with the Signs source, the discourses, and the Passion Narrative. Almost all of this was witnessed first hand, The “I am” in epistemology of this type does not mean the certainty of Rationalism, however, nor the straight sense impressions of empiricism. An eyewitness does not present indubitable knowledge, and may not even be trying to represent fairly what he has witnessed. The Passion Narrative is simple enough that we expect it to be actual. The Signs source presents such great miracles that we know this is not routine even for Jesus, nor do we know the purpose of particular miracles. With the Discourses we have to distrust much of what we find because the purpose in writing was not to be fair, but to condemn.

The progress towards the Synoptic Gospels takes two different paths. We can start again with the “I am” of the Apostle Matthew called in Mark 2:14 and extending through the Twelve-Source in all the Synoptics. Less clear is that testimony includes the main Q material. Q is usually thought to appear in only Matthew and Luke, but where it appears in Mark it is not recognized as Q. We know Q is in Mark because it is the same passages are sometimes found in the Gospel of Thomas. There is a similarity in that Twelve-Source passages in Mark and Q passages in Mark lack verbal exactness in comparable passages in Luke. The original Aramaic or Hebrew was translated independently for each of these gospels. (There is a Q2, however, that was not independently translated between Matthew and Luke.) In the Q-Twelve-Source the miracles are less spectacular and the teachings less contentious, so we can feel confident that the “I am” knowledge is quite good here.

The nature of the translation towards Luke can be more exactly known, as it must have been translated before the L portions were added during the writing of Proto-Luke. The Q portions have few Semitisms, but the new eyewitness L passages are full of Hebraisms. This shows us that the L portions were not introduced by Luke, but by someone native to the region. Who this “I am” is can best be surmised by the appearance of the name “Simon” in Luke 7:36-50 and in Luke 24:13-35.

Study of the Synoptics usually begins with Mark and the frequent linking of Peter as source and John Mark as author. If John Mark wrote the Passion Narrative, however, he did not necessarily consult with Peter before writing that part, and we find an “I am” moment regarding Peter only about fifteen years later. In Acts 12:12 we find Peter reaching John Mark’s house, and this would most likely be the time when the primary collaboration for their gospel occurred. Peter’s name occurs throughout the Gospel of Mark, in the portions distinct from Q-Twelve-Source above. See the separation between the two here.
http://megasociety.org/noesis/181.htm#Underlying Apparently, unlike all the above gospels, they wrote not just about Jesus, finishing with the Passion Narrative, but they continued right on up to the current time, which was apparently 44 CE. We read about many further events in Peter’s life and preaching, thus even more obviously eyewitness testimony.

The seventh eyewitness gospel writer had a unique “signature” to identify his “I am”. We are introduced in John 13 to the Beloved Disciple. He also edited in much material in the preceding twelve chapters, most of it not direct eyewitness testimony but things he would have been in a good position to know about.

None of the above claims certainty about any of underlying gospel writings, but that we do have some epistemological grounds for knowledge. (We can at least know that Jesus existed.) Perhaps only the simpler portions (sources without supernatural events) can be accepted as providing some knowledge about the founder of Earth’s pre-eminent religion. This could in turn lead us to infer that some Personality behind the scenes has guided things towards this adulation of this one person. Beyond that we might speculate with Bultmann and others that a mythology properly needed to be built around this and that Christians for 2000 years would believe in this mythology. Some would certainly believe that we have grounds for accepting the gospels including (some, at least) supernaturalism and a fundamentally correct presentation of the Life of Jesus. Accordingly, we must continue to study the gospels and Jesus to suggest whether we gain knowledge therein that can be confirmed by the only means possible, some superhuman (divine, mystical, or extraterrestrial) approbation.

Vorkosigan

Adam,

http://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/...al-methodology

I suggest also books on literary methodology. And a PHD.

and people like

R G Collingwood, Foucault, god I could write a million.....

Note that I am not engaging in or proposing a debate. I am merely pointing you, again, in the direction that you need to go. It is likely that along the way to a more robust understanding you will lose your faith in the cardboard Jesus you're constructing, but it is a small price to pay.

Vorkosigan

Adam

Isn't it strange, Vork,
That you, with such such superior methodological theory, cannot use it beyond critiquing my OP in Gospel Eyewitnesses?

And that no one else has effectively used such knowledge against me here?

And that no one here can point me to any person, book, or blog where such knowledge has refuted me in advance?

And that no one with such better methods has advanced source-criticism of gJohn beyond where I took it 30 years ago? That everyone here is so in awe of Shesh's methodology that you've all let it suffice as critique of my Significance of John?

Iskander

I offer my apologies for this post. I am only trying to begin at the beginning.
Please ignore my post if you feel that it only deserves a polite nothing

To know something by revelation requires disclosure by an entity of what is inaccessible to human reason.

To know something without revelation is very easy at an elementary level and it is accessible to animals.


What knowledge can the sources give us?.

Adam

Thank you for your probing question.
Yes, we (and animals as well, let's say) can "know" things in our own right. Our sense impressions and our reason may convince us that some things are true. However, what we sense may not (and in most cases will not) be obvious to other people. What we reason out may be our own subjective understanding of the world. Where other people have reasoned out the same system, as with syllogistic logic and with mathematics, the truths are really based on shared definitions or intuition. 3 +4 = 7, yes, but requires a shared intuition of impervious linear space. For 2-dimension, 3 on a side plus 4 on a side = 5 on a side, so 3 + 4 = 5. We would instead conventionally say, 3 squared plus 4 squared equals 5 squared: 9 + 16 = 25. Similarly if volume is not impervious, then 3 + 4 = 4. And in computer programming, n + 1 = n (the old "n" increased by the next in the series becomes the new "n" for the next iteration).

Nothing accepted by one person as truth is necessarily accepted as truth by someone else. This is especially true of things we cannot see, all the big questions of philosophy and religion. It would seem only revelation can answer about God or any afterlife.

Can revelation be any help if the topic is something beyond human functioning? It does appear that there are some people who automatically reject anything beyond their own understanding. Many philosophers and scientists may fall in this category. But anyone who thinks that there might be something beyond what he himself thinks he can figure out, would be potentially open to revelation. Too many people of this type, however, are also willing to just accept the revelation without filtering it through what humans can routinely process. This can make revelation look like a bad thing, necessarily deceptive. Thus in this thread so far I have argued for careful scrutiny of anything that might have a claim to authoritative revelation. The conclusion of such study might be that there is no revelation that gives us any truth. Any truths beyond human access would have to remain tentative, but at least we would have opened new vistas that would have been closed to us.

If such careful scrutiny failed to provide much assurance that revelation had been received, we would doubt the worth of such study of what a Personality had revealed to us and whether such a Personality even existed. But we can never get that far unless we explore the possibility.

In my Post #1 I tried to show that revelation as conventionally accepted by Christians does not get beyond arguments from authority. My aim is to show that certain sources underlying Christianity do provide first-hand information that can be evaluated to see if these are what a Personality has communicated to us, or failing that, has allowed to stand as revealing that Personality. Only the sources can get us near enough to evaluate this supposed revelation.

Iskander

Thank you.

Yes, it is easy for humans to disagree with each other whatever the source of their knowledge, but there is a big difference between the knowledge we claim to have been acquired by the effort of our reason and the knowledge that some person claims to have acquired by the statements made to him by something living in a world outside the experience of men and women.


The arguments put forward in support of the knowledge acquired by our efforts are intended to persuade people of the need to improve on these discoveries by further critical examination, whereas the arguments put forward in support of the knowledge acquired by the generosity of revelation are intended to gain the approval for those statements as a set of supreme importance.


How could any revelation avoid holding back liberty and progress?

Horatio Parker

But the experience of truth is the same for all.

aa5874

Your post is really worthless once you bring "revelation" into the argument.

The very computer and internet service that you use to communicate with people ALL OVER the world CONTRADICT you. Computers and the Internet could NOT have become valuable tools for mankind that function as designed if we were to RELY on revelation.

When you click on "SEND" for your E-mail it is NOT revelation that performs the task, nor faith.

We don't need revelations from YOUR GOD. Now, there was a time when A ROCK was just as powerful as your God--that is not a revelation--that is History found in many sources of antiquity.

Deut 4.28 It is time you deal with the TRUTH--Your God cannot see, and hear mankind.

If YOUR God could see and hear mankind you would NOT be using a computer and the Internet talking about Revelation.

Your God would have revealed the TRUTH to us long before computers and the Internet.

Please, deal with FACTS and tell us when YOUR God was made.

Your God made ADAM??? ADAM was a fictitious character in Genesis.

Let us deal with the TRUE methodology. Let us use the AVAILABLE evidence to re-construct the past.

Sheshbazzar

This statement if you believe it to be correct, effectively renders all of your previous wordy posts and arguments as being vacuous.

Your 'truth' by your own admission is not our truth.
Kind of silly and futile for you to continue to present here, what you should know by now, that we consider to be your warped logic, and which we have repeatedly demonstrated that we will not accept.
This thread like your previous ones is just more of that same old :hobbyhorse: :deadhorse: :horsecrap:

Nothing new here, or has changed since your previous attempts.
ta ta.