Yellum Notnef

Lets give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he's an extremely slow reader. Or perhaps he's busy in production of his two hour television program in which your book will be throughly dismantled on all major American and Canadian networks that he has purchased time on.

aa5874

Actually the internal evidence, the evidence supplied by the Church writers and apologetic sources, place gMatthew well before 70 CE and was the 1st Gospel to be written. And there is no external evidence, evidence not supplied by the Church or apologetic sources, that can show when the Gospels were actually written.

The date of writing, the authoship and chronology from the internal evidence, the evidence supplied by the Church writers and apologetic sources, is completely erroneous or have been rejected.

The 70-100 dates for the Synoptics have been deduced after rejecting the internal evidence, the evidence supplied by the Church and apologetic sources, and by using certain clues like the so-called prediction of the Fall of the Temple by the Jesus character.

And further, there is internal evidence that indicate or tend to indicate that there were no Gospels known as according to Matthew, Mark or Luke up to the middle of the 2nd century.

Now, once the Synoptics were anonymous writings and cannot be directly linked to any known historical writer then it cannot be that they must have been written between 70-100 CE, they could all have been written late and merely based on some earlier source like the "Memoirs of the Apostles".

The Memoirs of the Apostles were claimed by Justin Martyr to have been read in the places of worship on Sundays. Justin Martyr never mentioned one single Gospel called according to Mathhew, Mark or Luke.

The Gospel according to John was not mentioned by Justin Martyr up to the middle of the 2nd century. Justin Martyr appeared to have only known about a Revelation written by an apostle called John.

The Gospel called John cannot be confirmed to have been written by an old guy in Asia Minor.



Ignatius is not an external source for gMatthew. Ignatius is an internal source, and is questionable.

And there is no paleographical dating that is within a year.

Papyrus Fragment P52 is dated approximately by some sources to be around 125-150 CE.

It is not true at all that the tendency was the deification of a man. No Church writer wrote about such a tradition any where at all.

Your claim is bogus.

It is the complete opposite. The Jesus in gJohn was a God, the Creator of all things made in heaven and earth, before he was made flesh. See John 1.

And further, the author of gMark clearly show that his Jesus was supernatural or of a Divine nature when he wrote that Jesus was recognised by devils as the son of God, and that Jesus had the power to kill trees by a mere curse, walked on water, was transfigured and was raised from the dead.

But, I have just pointed out that you have provided bogus and mis-leading information and indeed is a cherry-picker.

1. Paleographic dating of P52 is not AROUND 125 CE BUT around 125-150 CE.

2. gMark's Jesus was an entity with supernatural powers recognised as the son of a God.

3. There was no tradition among Jesus believers or Jews to deify any human being based on Church writers.

4. There is no external non-apologetic source that can cofirm the dating of the Synoptics.

5.There is no external non-apologetic source that can confirm that an old guy from Asia minor wrote gJohn.

Your post is filled with more bogus information. I have only highlighted some.

gurugeorge

I say it's very difficult to draw conclusions, but until you get your external evidence for the Jesus fellow, the conclusion that such a hypothetical person is the correct explanation for the existence of the Jesus myth and the Jesus religion must remain tentative - and presented a tad more humbly than it has hitherto been presented, given its tentative nature without the external evidence.

The mythicist conclusion(s) is(are) also hypothetical at this stage, for sure, but because there was no need for the mythicist to prove the existence of any special entity (a human being called Joshua the Messiah), the mythicist can gaily proceed to make up plausible stories that best fit the evidence (that evidence being the extant myth of Jesus Christ and the existence of a Christian religion). The historicist will do that too, of course, but he cannot afford to do JUST that, he has the extra burden of showing that his HYPOTHETICAL EXPLANATORY ENTITY (the human being) actually existed.

(Of course the mythicist needs real human beings to have been involved in the creation of the texts, but their specific identity does not matter so much - they don't need to be located in time and space for the mythicist theory to work, or at least, their existence isn't bound up with the logic of the mythicist argument in the same way as the existence of a man at the root of the Jesus myth is bound up with the logic of the historicist argument.)

Once again, and for the zillionth time, I find myself unable to quite capture the subtlety of the error that's being made by historicism - it's such a slippery thing.

You have a story about entity X, all the stuff in the story is putatively historical-about-entity-X. Historically, there was supposed to have been this superhero-like figure walking the earth 2,000 years ago. That's the CONTENT OF THE STORY.

But none of that "historicalness" NECESSARILY carries over, as it were, to any hypothesised entity Y (a non-miraculous, non-divine, non-superhero-like-mere-human-being) who is supposed to be at the root of the myth, UNLESS THERE WAS A Y.

If there WAS a Y, then sure, we can suppose that there are echoes of a real biography in the story about X. But if there wasn't a Y, there is zilch, zero, nada, historical fact about Y in there at all, because there was no Y.

We have to have good independent reason to believe there was a Y before we can "carry over" the historicalness from the story about X to a history about Y, before we can assign "historical weight" about Y to the story about X.

Hope that's clearer.

rob117

Wow. OK, historiography 101: "Internal evidence" means "evidence that can be deduced from the text itself." Anything else-- including church writers-- is external evidence.

And this, my friend, is what we refer to as internal evidence.

Argument from silence (weak), and an incorrect one at that. Mark, at least, is known from c.110, as it is mentioned by Papias.

Uh-huh, and it is only through your mythicist blinders that you would think that Justin Martyr is referring to anything but the gospels.

Actually, the gospel of John is first mentioned c.140 in a Gnostic canon, although it seems to have been attributed by at least some Gnostics at this time to a late first century Gnostic thinker named Cerinthus. See here, final paragraph. The attribution to the apostle, as you said, dates to the late 2nd century.




If you keep failing historiography 101, you're never going to pass the third grade...


Mark calls Jesus the "Son of God." He does not call him "God." In Mark, "Son of God" is a figurative title: Jesus becomes the Son of God at his baptism. Matthew and Luke add the virgin birth story in order to make this connection literal.

Ironically, it is you here who are falling into the trap that the Church has set for you. That the Son of God must necessarily also be God is an interpretation of the post-Markan church, developed to deal with criticism by the Jews that they were actually worshiping two gods.

And your citation of John is irrelevant because it is the latest gospel. All it does it prove my point-- it is the latest gospel that is most specific about Jesus' divinity.

The tendency is to cite c.120-130 as the greatest probability. The Wikipedia article on P52 refers to the hand as "strongly Hadrianic"-- i.e., most similar to texts dating to the reign of Hadrian (117-138). Given the nature of paleography, anything between c.100 and 200 is possible, but it is possible to narrow down probabilities within this range. Think of it like a bell curve.

EarlDoherty

Hmmm…in the hundreds of books I have read over the years by ‘historians’ of the New Testament, I did not once encounter the name of Spinoza or his critical theories. I guess I’m not the only one who overlooked this essential guide to the proper principles for interpreting texts. Would you like to summarize them for us? (Just to show, of course, that you are actually familiar with them yourself and understand them and how they apply to the New Testament.)

A rejection of holistic theory? Are you kidding? One of the compliments I get the most is that my case for the non-existence of Jesus actually addresses all of the evidence and creates a picture of the origins and growth of Christianity which possesses coherence and completeness, with no need for an historical Jesus. You obviously haven’t read any of my books. (Typical.) And you’re darn right I attack and counter standard interpretation. Is that part of your brand of historiography: appeals to authority, and the condemnation of anyone who doesn’t follow suit?

Earl Doherty

spin

How do you distinguish what is and what is not authorial "interjection"? Is there anything in those gospels that you know that is not authorial "interjection"? How would you know?


spin

aa5874

I have made it very clear that I consider internal evidence to be from internal sources which includes the NT Canon and Church writings.

The NT Canon was in control and in possession of the Church and they may have altered the very texts and supplied or fabricated the names of the authors of the Canon.

The evidence from the Church writers was that the author of gMatthew wrote his Gospel first before the Fall of the Temple.

You cannot deny that.

And further, the author of gMatthew did not claim that gMatthew, as found canonised, was written between 70 CE-100 CE.

Therefore, based on your own interpretation of internal evidence, there is no internal evidence supplied by the author to date the text between 70-100 CE.

The prediction of the Fall of the Temple by Jesus as found in the Canon was NOT given as internal evidence that the Synoptics was written between 70-100 CE but that was given to imply that Jesus made a prediction before 70 CE.

But, my friend, Papias did NOT appear to be aware of the internal evidence that you have talked about.

You must realise that the Church writers claimed gMatthew was written first. Using your own interpretation of external source, my friend, Papias was one of the external sources that may have supplied bogus information about gMark.

If the internal evidence according to you places gMark and gMatthew between 70-100 CE, how is it that Papias places gMark before the death of Peter and that the Church writers placed gMark as early as around 40-50 CE or around the time of Philo.

Your internal and external evidence may be bogus. The Gospel according to Mark according to Papias and the Canonised gMark may not be the same or were written at different times.


What kind of blinders do you have? You don't have blinders? Well, you imagine things that are not there. Please show me where Justin Martyr mentioned any writer called Mark or Matthew and Luke in all his writings.

Now, you are arguing from silence. You are hearing things. You can NOT argue history from silence.


But, my friend, you must admit that your external sources, the Church writers, did not get their internal evidence right. The dating, authorship and chronology of the Canonised NT provided by your external sources is bogus or erroneous.

What did your external sources really know about the dating, authorship and chronology of Gnostics like Cerinthus? What internal evidence can be used to date or confirm the authorship of a writing that have passed through the hands of your external Church writers?

What test is that? What grade are you at?

You know that Ignatius must have missed the internal evidence about the Pauline Epistles.

Ignatius quoted passages found in the Pastorals but there is no external historical source that can show the Pastoral were written before Ignatius supposedly died.

And Ignatius did not admit that more than one person wrote Epistles under the name Paul or that gMark and gMatthew were not written before the Fall of the Temple, or that no disciples really wrote any of the Gospels.

Ignatius may fail his own historicity test based on internal and external evidence.

Ignatius was condemned to die for propagating belief in Jesus and committed the very crime while in custody under armed guards in public view. Probably the only condemned prisonner to have become an active missionary well-stocked with pen, ink and paper, and a major distributor of banned christian literature while behind bars.

No Robots

I'll quote from the profile of Spinoza by Christopher Norris in this week's edition of The Philosopher's Magazine:

What he achieved in this ground-breaking work [Theological-Political Treatise] was the invention of analytic methods and techniques that would not be taken up and developed to anything like their full potential until the advent of the mainly German “higher criticism” two centuries later.

In his recent introduction to the Theological-Political Treatise, Jonathan Israel summarizes Spinoza's approach:

While his revolutionary metaphysics, epistemology and moral philosophy subtly infuse every part and aspect of his argumentation, the tools which Spinoza more conspicuously brings to his task are exegetical, philological and historical. In fact, it is the latter features rather than the underlying philosophy to which scholars chiefly call attention when discussing this particular text. Spinoza’s hermeneutical methodology constitutes a historically rather decisive step forward in the evolution not just of Bible criticism as such but of hermeneutics more generally, for he contends that reconstructing the historical context and especially the belief system of a given era is always the essential first and most important step to a correct understanding of any text. In this respect his approach was starkly different from that of traditional exegetes of Scripture and from Renaissance text criticism as a whole (as well as from that of our contemporary postmodernist criticism).

Now, that's Gibsonism.

I just don't see any evidence of any kind of coherent interpretative framework.

rob117

And you do not get to arbitrarily redefine what constitutes internal and external evidence. Sorry.

Not only may they have, they did. However, we can usually detect these interpolations because a) we have access to early manuscripts that do not contain them, and b) redaction criticism is fairly adept at detecting interpolations via things like abrupt changes in literary style and theological statements that do not fit with the body of the work.

You're setting up a false dichotomy here by demanding I either accept or reject all of what the church fathers say. In order to do real history you need to look at all the sources and use them critically. That means making judgment calls on which statements are accurate and which are not. These judgment are not simply pulled out of the historian's ass; they are formed by cross-checking the statements of the church fathers with the evidence supplied by the texts themselves.

Internal evidence need not be explicitly stated by the author; otherwise we'd be unable to date any ancient documents. Your logic is astoundingly bad.


A prediction that was supposed to come to pass within one generation of AD 30. Someone writing in AD 130 wouldn't write this.


This is possible, but what evidence do we have to believe this? Given that all the internal evidence places Mark around 70, the most parsimonious explanation is that Papias is referring to our Mark.

Irrelevant. Papias predates Justin and mentions Mark. Matthew and Luke circulated anonymously until late second century anyway.


Epistles are not literature to those who write them. They are letters. Mail. It is we who turn them into literature by collecting, canonizing, and studying them. And he wasn't exactly behind bars either; he was en route to Rome, being taken there by a company of soldiers. Prisoners being allowed to communicate via letters is not unheard of. Even condemned criminals need to set their affairs in order.

As I understand, Ignatius' letters were not meant as missionary work. They were to already-established churches dealing with topics such as theology and church organization.

Persecution of Christians at this time was sporadic, local, and unsystematic. The crime was not being Christian per se, nor do we have any evidence that Christian literature was systematically banned until the third century. The crime was simply refusing to participate in the imperial cult.


Common sense. Even people who believe in prophecy don't envision the prophet breaking the fourth wall.

Chaucer

By "authorial interjection", I'm guessing that rob117 means moments where the author of Mark deliberately presents himself to the reader/listener in his own voice rather than as an impersonal narrator. Acting as an impersonal narrator entails the mere description of events without overtly drawing any attention to oneself as in any kind of relationship with the reader. But when an author overtly draws attention to that relationship with "Let the reader understand" or whatever, the narrator is no longer impersonal but an active character on the page. Another way of expressing this is to characterize the writer as becoming the "first person narrator" rather than third person.

Chaucer