Adam

TO: Kapyong
Your posts s#484 and #485 seem to be saying the same thing in several different ways, so I won't quote them.
Atheists necessarily say there are no eyeswitnesses to the gospels, because with their preconceptions any reports of the supernatural would be false, thus showing that they are either lying or were not eyewitnesses. If the supernatural is possible, however, then texts that seem to be from eyewitnesses might actually be from eyewitnesses. I have found seven, comprising a majority of the text of the gospels, so that is evidence for the supernatural in itself. You automatically reject such evidence, but the preconception is yours, not mine.

Apart from that, most people in the world do believe there is evidence for the supernatural. Those who have seen such evidence would seem to have a better case for believing their conclusions. You can't prove a negative. You can't use a negative you can't prove as your basis for rejecting all knowledge that you can't account for. Yet most of what is posted here against me does take for granted that that negative has been proven. Critiques thus vary between saying that I can't say what I say to saying that I have said something yet cannot prove it.

Toto

Please feel free to either start a new thread or request a split. (This goes for anyone - this thread is becoming unwieldy.)

spin

Let's go back to your original silly comment that you seem to have forgotten:

Does the bold part answer your question?

I must have confused you when I said "require" rather than "your word "force", but that seems to have not had any effect either.

Sorry, the else is your insinuation. Opinions are what everything on internet is until you can show differently. Scholarly books are safer that way.

So, you've cited someone's opinion but you need to cough up the goods about real Aramaisms in Mark rather than depend on someone's opinion for lack of knowledge. It ultimately means, when you claim that the most reasonable explanation is that they were written by Mother-tongue Latin Aramaic speakers of Greek, that you are wasting your breath, because it has no value.

There is a value in the redundancy of communication, ie when more is said than is needed. It helps get the idea through. But I point out that it is not an extra point in the argument. It is just a reminder that the writers were aware of Jewish culture whether they were Semitic or not.

Some awareness must be expected given the Jewish connection, but you are certainly wrong to make much of the geography given the fuck ups regarding 1) Tyre and Sidon (7:31), 2) the location of Gerasa near the Sea of Galilee and 3) the order of villages between Jericho and Jerusalem. Whoever wrote the material was not aware of the real geography.

The Greek that gets translated end up in Latin: leptas explained in relation to a quadrans (12:42) and a hall in relation to a praetorium (15:16). What have leptas to do with Judea when the smallest coins were prutahs? (Coin collectors are now confused because of this!) Why explain a hall with a Latin term? Obviously the text was written in Rome and the evidence is strong.

judge

This is hillarious
We have a story with Roman soldiers and bureaucrats in Judea and they refer to the praetorium ( a Latin word) and somehow this is strong evidence the work was written in Rome.
Give up Spin.

judge

"I tried, for my own personal use, to see what Mark would yield when translated back into the Hebrew of Qumran. I had imagined that this translation would be difficult because of considerable differences between semitic thought and Greek thought, but I was absolutely dumbfounded to discover that this translation was, on the contrary, extremely easy. Around the middle of April, 1963, after only one day of work , I was convinced that the Greek text of Mark could not have been redacted directly into Greek and that it was in reality only the Greek translation of an original Hebrew."


(Jean Carmignac, "Birth of the Synoptics", p. 1; the author was a scholar who worked for a decade on the Dead Sea Scrolls)

Carmignac was , of course, a philologist..

Vorkosigan

Because that is naturally how I speak Chinese -- with word order in Chinese that is awkward in Chinese but natural in English! That is normal second-language sentence patterning. Everyone whose second language is less than perfectly fluent does that. So there is no probative value in noting that some of GMark's sentence structure looks better in another language because it is not evidence of where the translation is taking place -- in the writer's head, or from text to text. The only way you can demonstrate that GMark is a translation from an aramaic or Hebrew original is to find the original text in the other language.

Did you ever read Heart of Darkness? It's probably not difficult to find English sentences that look more natural in Polish than in English. Did Conrad write it in Polish first?

Vorkosigan

stephan huller

I have the same experience in German (although German was originally my Muttersprache but after a long absence it is now my second language). I find it impossible to naturally place conjugated verbs in the past tense at the end of sentences). It just feels unnatural now as do most of the rules of my former mother tongue. Even the professors I know who can write papers in a foreign language only do so with great unnaturalness.

judge

Waht you need to do is find something rather than speculate.
We know exactly what a translation from a semitic tongue to greek looks like.
We have the LXX.

Semitic grammar is characterised by the repetition of a preposition before every noun of a series which it governs. Such a construction is and is intolerable in literary Greek and likewise in English.

Joshua 11:21

ויב�? יהושע בעת ההי�? ויכרת �?ת־העתקי�?
מן ־ההר מן ־חברון מן ־דבר מן ־עתב ומכל הר יהודה מן כל הר ישר�?ל
ע�?־עריה�? החרימ�? יהושע

και ηλθεν ιησους εν τω και�?ω εκεινω και εξωλεθ�?ευσεν τους ενακιμ εκ της ο�?εινης εκ χεβ�?ων καιεκ δαβι�? και εξ αναβωθ και εκ παντος γενους ισ�?αηλ και εκ παντος ο�?ους ιουδα συν ταις πολεσιν αυτων και εξωλεθ�?ευσεν αυτους ιησους


Then Joshua came at that time and cut off the Anakim from the hill country, from Hebron, from Debir, from Anab and from all the hill country of Judah and from all the hill country of Israel. Joshua utterly destroyed them with their cities.

Of couse this will not sit well with you Vork becuase you have wasted so much of your life with your work on greek texts.
It is going to be difficult for you to accept, quite naturally. Who wants to admit they have been wasting so much time?

And so rather than produce any evidence, you speculate that maybe possibly something in heart of darkness will help you.
What you need is evidence

Vorkosigan

Adam, you're asserting again. Please show that John Mark was an eyewitness of the Passion using evidence that puts him directly on the spot. He is mentioned only in Acts, which does not place him at the death of Jesus. So what would be your evidence that he saw Jesus die and ever said anything to the writer of Mark?

Also, I've witnessed the supernatural many times. I like exploring Taiwan where I live, and have frequently been present in temples where the shaman is possessed by a god and speaks to locals. I have watched two men, possessed by gods, cutting each other with giant knives. I have spoken with mediums in a magic trance.

Clearly, the temple gods of Taiwan must exist, for I see their effects every day.

This is why you need to make a deeper study of methodology. It is not up to us to prove anything because (1) you're the one making affirmative claims ("John Mark is the source of Mark's passion story") and (2) methodological naturalism is the foundation of scientific and scholarly inquiry. Instead, it is up to you to show affirmatively how your claims are true.

If we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.

Even funnier is that the existence of the supernatural is completely unrelated to whether a particular text comes from a particular person. Even if Jesus rose from the dead and is now punishing people for all eternity for using their genitals in an unapproved fashion, it doesn't mean that the writer of Mark got the Passion story from John Mark.

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

I make a nice second income editing Chinglish scientific papers into good English. Some of the stuff I get is utter garbage. But all of it was originally written in English. The translation takes place in the writer's head, not on paper.

The claims about an Aramaic/Semitic layer are untenable because there is no way to find where the original translation is taking place, in the writer's head or text-to-text.

I generally think that all Bible scholars should be sent to live in a polytheistic culture where they had to speak in a second language.

Vorkosigan