Adam

I've gone ahead and purchased the James R. Edwards The Hebrew Gospel because of its Appendix II with all 703 Semitisms in Luke. $27.50 is a lot less than the hundred or four hundred they want for Pannenroth or for Jay Harrington, even though they are more in the main stream of scholarship.
Edwards has a major flaw, however. He first proves that the Special Luke has four times the Semitisms. Then he turns around and wants to argue that there is no Q, but instead gMatthew copies gLuke's copy of Gospel of the Hebrews. But the Q section of gLuke does not have the Semitisms that this theory would require! Yes, Virginia, there is a Q.

Sheshbazzar

No doubt Edwards has a major flaw;

Presbyterian Ministers as 'Preachers of the Gobspell' are paid to make up any shit that will scratch your itching ears."

The term for the flaw is 'religious bias'.

Adam

I'm all the more satisfied with my recent findings on L and Proto-Luke, Shesh, because comparison of Passenroth with Edwards yields a possible minimal amount of text before I see Simon entering the picture as author of L, possible editor of Proto-Luke. Passenroth starts L with Luke 3:10-14, but Edwards shows little Semitisms here. That leaves 4:25-27 as the only pericope preceding the Widow of Nain, and it's about Elijah and the Widow of Zarephath--each a story about a son restored from death to life. That might change a close relative of Jesus from an antagonist to a disciple. My theory holds Simon himself appearing in Luke 7:36-47.

However, I'm chagrined how many mistakes I made in transcribing Passenroth's list back in Post #568. Here's my list from that post with strike-overs and corrections:
And I'll give a better list below. However, I'll annotate it with pericopes in Passenroth's L list that have few Semitisms. With those omitted, we get a very minimal L indeed.
Passenroth’s L contains:
Luke (3:10-14(few Semitisms)), 4:25-27, 7:11-15, 36-47, 10:30-37, 39-42, 11:5-8, 12:16-20, 35-38, 13:1-17, 31-32, (14:2-4, 8-10(few Semitisms)), 12-14, 28-32, (15:4-6, 8-9(few Semitisms)), 15:11-32, 16:1-8, 19-31,( 17:7-10(few Semitisms)), 17:12-18, 18:2-8, 10-14, 19:2-10,

However, I would prefer expanding L by adding in major parts of gLuke that are heavy in Semitisms. This would add great parts of the last five chapters that Passenroth does not list, going right through Luke 24, where I find the author Simon witnessing the risen Christ. The Passion Narrative is not, of course, from L, but it is high in Semitisms in its particular translation from the Aramaic. The Passion Narrative was not part of the original Aramaic L (or Q or Proto-Luke), but was a separate document that "everyone" knew about (Thus in gJohn the Signs Source stopped before there, in gMark the Q-Twelve-Source stopped before there, just as L stopped in gLuke.) After this translation, the Passion Narrative was part of Greek Proto-Luke.)

Sheshbazzar

Anything you post today may be changed again tomorrow. These continual 'adjustments' undermine any confidence in the validity of your various claims.

Again, you are only presenting your religiously biased and loaded opinions about what you think are possibilities.
(Which in itself is not objectionable. The objections arise when you present such materials in an asserted form as each being a solid fact, and do not qualify such guessing or claimed 'insight' with such admissions as "it is my opinion" or "I believe it is possible".)

You could be much more persuasive if you would learn how to present your (possibly valid) material without that thick and choking crust of dogmatism.



.

Adam

Dogmatism? Yet your opening remarks chide me for adjusting my position. So you don't mean by "dogmatism" a "rigid cast of mind".
If it's my presuppositions, have you forgotten that I've stated many times that I make no presuppositions.
So I take it that your complaint is that I have a Christian belief at all. OK, that's what you mean by dogmatism.
But not so dogmatic even in that sense that I would not entertain the idea (my own, though it was) that my seven written gospel eyewitness theory could be presented from your presuppositions as The Gospel according to the
Atheists." I would not have seven writers, but still three or four free from supernaturalisms: John Mark's Passion Narrative, Nicodemus's Johannine Discourses, Matthew's Q (without the Twelve-Source I like to combine it with), and the L source (shorn of the Resurrection chapter, Luke 24). Yes, for the sake of making my source-criticism "possible" even on your preconceptions, I would let my theory be used to bolster the predeliction for a Jesus without Christianity.

No matter. Today I found in my James R. Edwards book I purchased that the Gospel of the Hebrews quoted Matthew (the apostle) in the first person. Sure, it's an apocryphal gospel, but it may be earlier than the canonical gospels. Epiphanius in Panarion 30.13.2-3 quotes Jesus saying to Matthew, "As I passed beside the Lake of Tiberius, I chose John and James the sons of Zebedee and Simon and Andrew and Thaddeus and Simon the Zealot and Judas the Iscariot and you, Matthew, I called while you were sitting at the tax table, and you followed me. You therefore I desire to be twelve apostles for a witness to Israel." That's Edward's translation on page 66 of The Hebrew Gospel and the Development of the Synoptic Tradition (2009, Eerdmans).

Edwards uses that to support Matthew as the author of the L material within Luke. First he states six items that tie in to the Gospel of Luke (pg. 67). However, far from tying Matthew himself in to the L material he claims Gospel of the Hebrews to be, the tax collector is in all three Synoptics and known as Matthew only in gMatthew. This ties this man as author of Q, the very document Edwards wishes to deny existed. So this Gospel of the Hebrews here gives Matthew as the eyewitness of Q, and I have already shown (Post #568) that this book reveals Simon as the author of Proto-Luke. (Edwards pg. 60, from Origen's Comm. Matt 15:14.)

Huon

Adam, small nitpicks :
You had better call the lake of "Tiberius" the lake of "Tiberias".
Tiberius was a roman emperor.
Secondly, you had better use the writing "Nikodemos" instead of Nicodemus, too latinized.

Sheshbazzar

No. look up the word in several Dictionaries, I meant it in sense that the context of my post clearly indicates;

Statements and OPINIONS that are asserted as if being PROVEN facts when they are not. Because you believe such and such to be the 'correct' explanation, does not necessarily make your chosen explanation either correct or acceptable.
Statements that you should be qualifying as being your personal OPINION, you consistently presenting in your religiously biased compositions as being facts. That is asserting and being dogmatic



You might state it in every single post. But you compositions continue to make a lie of the statement.

You write with the PRESUPPOSITIONS that the NT is a record of actual events.
The PRESUPPOSITION that the miracles which these texts report actually happened, - for example, your reason for your Nicodemus characters allegedly changing perspective.
And countless other PRESUPPOSITIONS about history, and about the TEXTS and their ORIGINS.

Pfft. You are welcome to believe any type of stupid horse-shit you want. I have many family members and life-long friends that believe all kinds of stupid horse-shit. But the ones that remain my friends are the ones that admit that it is their OPINIONS and their BELIEFS that they are offering.

As I stated in the final sentence of my above post, my objections are not so much to what you have been posting, "(possibly valid)" but to the unqualified ('it is my opinion', or 'I sincerely believe') manner that it is being presented in.

Crap dude. You just don't get it. I am trying to HELP you learn how to present your 'possibly valid' material in a more palatable form that might possibly persuade someone here.

yada yada yada, same old.

Adam

You might not be so "dogmatic" about my mentality if I had finished with the implications of my Post #595. I presented there evidence for Matthew as a first-person author of Q, but I failed to extend this to the implication that I am correct about Q also being bound in the the Twelve Source. Matthew at his counting booth is in all three Synoptics, not just gMatthew and gLuke, so this is more "proof" that Matthew wrote both. That brings in lots of Narrative (particularly identifiable in gMark) telling us about Jesus.

I see a parallel with the Gospel of Thomas. It was expected to turn out to be late apocryphal Gnostic writings, but the Synoptic-like portions are more like early approaches to Q. The Gospel of the Hebrews was honored by the Church fathers, so turning up apparently eyewitness verses has real credibility as linking in to the earliest Synoptic traditions.

Another similarity between gospels of Thomas and Hebrews is that much extraneous and inauthentic got attached to them as time went on.

Adam

I should have documented better my above post #598. By presenting evidence tying the Apostle Matthew to the Twelve-Source, I was supporting my Post #74 in which I argued for identifying Q and Twelve-Source. http://www.freeratio.org/showthread.php?t=306983&page=3
See further argumentation in my article:
http://megasociety.org/noesis/181.htm#Common
I also showed in my Post #230 the verses I attribute in Mark to the Twelve Source as the third layer, Twelve-Source from Levi.

Here’s another (presumably) eyewitness quotation in which Edwards harnesses four patristic scholars who did apparently quote Gospel of the Hebrews. Ignatius’s Letter to the Smyrnaeans 3.1-2 reads:
“For I know and believe that he was in the flesh even after the resurrection. And when he [Jesus] came to those with Peter, he said to them, ‘Take, touch me and see that I am not a disembodied ghost.’ And immediately they touched him and believed.” (Edwards, The Hebrew Gospel & the Development of the Synoptic Tradition, pg. 45)

This and other contiguous material could be understood to be paraphrases of the Gospel of Luke, but Edwards argues that they must trace back to a source of gLuke. “To summarize, four reputable witnesses in the early church—Ignatius, Origen, Eusebius, and Jerome—cite a text that bears an unmistakable correlation to Luke 24:39. None of the four, however, ascribes it to Luke. The most complete witness to the citation comes from Jerome, who ascribes it to the Hebrew Gospel, and by implication to the apostle Matthew… The source of all these statements appears to be the personal memoirs of the narrator, who can be deduced to the apostle Matthew.” (pg. 55)

Now if even Edwards does not claim it is proven that Matthew is the putative author here (as I acknowledge him to be of Q), then the evidence cited here would apply better to the author of Proto-Luke, who I believe to be Simon. See my posts #74 and #132 about that.

Adam

Objections have been raised that indicate I should justify doing this thread. Not that I need this for myself, as the original thesis has been supplemented by additional results such as The Gospel According to the Atheists that is a pretty strong put-down of the Mythical Jesus theory. At that point there was no longer any justification for the common (lack of) response here to refuse to engage with my theory.

My methodology was constantly under attack. Yet it turns out that in this at least I am swimming with the tide. The third quest (or fourth) is turning up more of a substantial Historical Jesus. For almost fifty years I have been working with names as significant, and that’s the latest trend. To quote from James R. Edwards again:
Edwards also shows that names tend to drop out when text is edited into later gospel rescensions. In earlier editions more names appear. See my posts # 568 and 595. This reveals that the L strand in Luke was the last eyewitness material added to the Q that had already been written before and translated besides. The Marcan material in Luke had been copied from an intermediate edition of Mark, so there too names and details about characters had been lost. Nothing in gMatthew is newly added eyewitness testimony, so names are sparse. Nor does gMark indicate recent addition of eyewitness material, though it does preserve earlier eyewitness material rather well.

So I reiterate that my thesis is quite worthy of consideration. Let’s put it now in terms of two levels. In the first I refute MJ with my Gospel According to the Atheists, featuring the eyewitnesses John Mark, Matthew, Simon, and (less obviously) Nicodemus (Nikodemos?). None of that can be dismissed a priori. For those willing to venture farther, add in Luke 24 from Simon evidenced by the highest number of Semitisms in any chapter in Luke, plus the Twelve-Source from Matthew, plus the rest of gMark from Peter, the Signs Source in gJohn from Andrew, and the editorial touches from the Apostle John in gJohn. All these latter will be more or less unacceptable according to one’s presuppositions, but can be considered for eyewitness status as I have argued in this thread.