Solo

How's that for my view that you have a disconcerting habit of preempting opposing opinions ?

Also, I hope you consulted, and are authorized by everyone here (including GDon), to speak for them and announce that my critique is a waste of time.
(as opposed, say, to great fun and stimulation without resort to illicit substances).

But then again, life itself may be a meaningless waste of time designed as a short break in the eternal bliss of Nothing, except to those unto whom it has been given as witness to the imponderable greatness of Creation.

This was an ex hypothesis scenario, you <self-censored> !. I said 'for example', which of course you missed as you routinely miss most things put to you by people who are critical of your ideas and your ways to promote them.

One of the problems that I see with your theorizing is that you have a very narrow view which does not anticipate ideas that may come and clobber your theoretical assumptions. When they come - as they will always - you go at them ad-hom, which is the only way you know how to counter.

In the paragraph on the priority of Mark, I was simply saying you do not give enough thought to possibilities than the one that you clearly prefer. You think that you can dispose of other theoretical framework by creating an emotional reaction to your agitprop in your fans. Let me assure you that this does not work with the brainier people.




You are just blindly lashing back and reversing the charge I raised against you in the essay (not getting into the history of Q and deliniating the argument) against me. But there is a difference ! I have not written a book with a chapter on Q (yet); you have. I was not writing a chapter on Q, but an assessment of your handling the subject, as you - some would say foolishly - goaded me into doing !

You are out to lunch, Earl Doherty! You don't even grasp what a disciplined argument looks like and what makes one side win. You continue to misrepresent what Occam's principle says (even though I paraphrased it for you) and continue to denounce it as 'ludicrous'. It is not the argument 'with the least elements' that wins but one with 'the least necessary elements'. Obviously, you do not seem to be able to appreciate even not so subtle differences of this kind. But then again, some people are more easily persuaded than others that any persistent buzz between their ears must be thought.

Is it I who is posturing ? True, you were 'hardly pressing' the absurd analogy of those challenging an exegetical dogma with a prosecutor[sic] who would deny legitimate defence to someone accused of murder... MURDER. But your pressing it is not the issue here; your bad judgment is in using it !

Which I read as a sample of what I described above as : 'BzzzzzzzzzBzzzzzzzzzzzBzzzzzzzzz......:huh:.


So what you are saying - even though I tried to show how foolish it is - is that there is theoretically no difference between having Mark and not having Mark. If there was no gospel of Mark, we would have to invent it, right ?

There was a way in the country I was raised to handle people who are excessively hypothetical.....we say to them : 'if, if,... if shit was sweet, we would pooh into coffee cups !'

So, let me ask you another question Mr. Doherty : if the Q hypothesis should not be rejected on grounds that such document is not to be found anywhere, if it indeed is 'ludicrous' as you say, what gives you such confidence in proclaiming Jesus was not a historical figure, if for the latter we actually have documents, regardless the perhaps excessive hopes pinned on that individual ?

Do you understand the question ?

I take the wonderland captive back. It is insulting to Alice : you want the idea of the sentence not before but without the evidence.

Except for one small detail: among reasonable people, it has been decided long ago that one cannot be the judge of one's own merits.

So what is this, if not "a pious conviction" ? Statement of fact ?

Hallelujah ! :angel:

Even if I were to accept that, and I do not, it still would not dispose of the objection that Luke need not have not have been as impressed with Matthew, or in the same way as the later orthodox church, and some atheist worshippers of dogma evidently were and are to this day. Again, I find it ironic that you do not see Luke appraising the sermon on the Mount, which the Q theorists accuse Matthew of partially making up, as someone who would know Matthew made it up almost entirely, on the bright idea of Jesus refuting the nasty assault of Mark on the judaic and Nazarene traditions (Mk 7-8), after dutifully proclaiming Dad's love for everybody.

'Feebly 'explain'' ? And evidently you believe you are making a valid argument against a well-esteemed scholar. You evidently missed the part of my essay where I say this:

and this:


To smear, dear Earl, assumes an intent to villify (by spreading untrue rumours and such). So when you say of Goodacre, that he was desperate or that 'he could not feebly 'explain'', or I say that Doherty gives the appearance of naivete, and tortured poses and beliefs, these would not be smears. Such statements are neutrally described as characterizations.

Really ? Shame, shame, shame,....isn't it ?

Clearly, Earl, we are not impressed with each other. :huh:

You reacted to my posting A. Schweitzer's appraisal of the mythicists of his time, and his opinion that they are unable to take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves to them. All I wanted to do was sketch my view of the silliness of your commitment to Q, in view of Schweitzer's comment.

Both Wells and you, have attempted to devour your own tail. (He's given up though). Actually, Wells was even more obscure than you in this respect because he knows the German theological tradition much better than you and understood the impact that Strauss had on the subsequent theological developments of the 19th century, and his importance for the mythical theory. To embrace Q for the mythical effort is hard to understand in him more because he knew the sequence of exegetical developments, coming as they were partly as direct backlash to Strauss. Suffice it to say here, Q grew out of the futile quests for the Holy Grail of Papias Hebrew/Aramaic logia of the Lord supposedly collected by Matthew. It was when it became clear that nothing would materialize (To the vast majority of scholars Matthew did not betray any dependence on Aramaic sources) then the goal-posts were moved and "another collection" was being asserted, and 'logia' became 'logoi' after Oxh. 654 fragment of Thomas was discovered, but as that document did not look promising either (and turned out to be a blind alley with the Nag Hammadi discovery), the putative "Quelle" became elaborated more and more, and asserted as a signle collection of sayings. A century after it started to be proclaimed, we have nothing that would assure a reasonable, neutral researcher of an objectively established, palpable literary fact. There is nothing per se that is formidable about the Q theory that I can see and you have showed nothing in your book that would make me re-consider.

...which makes a single early ur-text all the less probable.


Nothing speaks of your confusion louder, Earl, than your concluding statement. You simply do not understand that 'alternate explanations' is exactly what is needed to defeat Q as the monstrosity it has become over the last century and a half. You just simply do not understand that you are lending your support to a theory 'which is not falsifiable'. You even parade your lack of skill, not understanding that you are discrediting yourself.

So I thank you for your reply. I have written the essay to take away from you the silly out that I do not respond to you substantively. I have no further interest in debating the merits of your theory, and will respond only to factual issues if you find any to raise against my assessment.

I wish you the best,

Jiri

andrewcriddle

Hi Jiri

The sort of thing I mean is that in the account of the woman healed of an issue of blood Matthew (9:20) and Luke (8:44) have the lady touching the fringe of Jesus' garment while Mark (5:27) has her touching the garment. IE Luke and Matthew agree here against Mark.

However, codex Bezae and some old Latin omit fringe in Luke giving a text in which Luke and Mark agree against Matthew.

Andrew Criddle

stephan huller

Completely off topic Jiri, I was at your blog and saw this list about Paulinisms in Mark. Very well done.

aa5874

The Markan gospel was NOT derived from the Pauline writings.

Ro 10:9 -
Mark 16.6-8 In gMark, the disciples did NOT publicly confess Jesus Christ.

The very Jesus Christ of Mark did NOT allow his disciples to Confess that he was the Christ.

And further the disciples did NOT believe he was raised from the dead.

In the NT, The Markan Jesus is BEFORE the Pauline writings about Jesus.

Solo

Thanks, Stephan.

Jiri

Solo

Correct. Paul was the first one who confessed Jesus as the Messiah and it happened after Jesus' death. That was the intent of Mark's gospel's ending as I see it. That was the reason for the women to run away without telling anything to the disciples. This was Mark's way of telling the people in his time who proclaimed Peter as the leader of the disciples, that Peter was a coward and a hypocrite who never accepted the cross of Christ (cf. Gal 2:11-16). Paul's church - the mythical Galilee - was where the "body of Christ" (1 Cr 12:27, 1 Cr 10:16, Rom 7:4) was alive and well.

Correct, except that is a plot told in different ways in the later gospels, not in Mark (ending at 16:8).

Nope. Mark wrote after Paul, so he could play all sorts of mind games with that. For example he could have the Sanhedrin strike Jesus and mock him to 'prophesy', because he knew the outcome of the story was fixed. At 14:49, his Jesus says "let the scriptures be fulfilled", but this is again Mark's humbug on the outsiders. The scriptures referenced here are not the Old Testament but Paul's letters, specifically Rom 4:25, 8:3-4 & 8:32. The gospel is full of puns, off-the-wall parodies and recursive paradoxes.

Jiri

stephan huller

Don't you feel when you are addressing aa that it's like your tourist in a strange country trying to give directions to the airport? When you get into the car and move forward you're not sure you explained things correctly until you get there.

aa5874

Have you NOT read Romans 16.7

Ro 16:7 - Have you NOT read Galatians 1.

"Paul" was a PERSECUTOR of the Faith that he now preached.

Ga 1:23 - We are NOT going anywhere on BCH if people REFUSE to accept the written evidence and invent their own stories about "Paul".

It is WHAT the Pauline writings CONTAIN that is to be analysed NOT what you want them to say.


"Paul" was LAST and least in the Canon of the Church.

Inventing stories about "Paul" that have ZERO SUPPORT is futile.

There is NOT one single verse in gMark that is found in the Pauline writings. Not even TEN consecutive words in gMark is found in the Pauline writings.

The Pauline writers made many references to Hebrew Scripture or Septuagint but still the author of gMark hardly used any of the references of Hebrew Scripture or the Septuagint that are found in the Pauline writings.

The very fundamental signs that one writer may have used another is WORD FOR WORD copying and the order of passages.

That is PRECISELY why it is argued that gMatthew is a copy of gMark.

gMark show no sign that the author used or was aware of the Pauline writings.

Solo

I look at it as public service. I give him directions to the airport but I resign myself to his arriving at the city's landfill. It is not something I can do helluvalot about.

Best,
Jiri

EarlDoherty

I will not reply at length to Jiri’s response (it was largely a rant anyway) because I don’t want to unsettle him even more. So I will limit myself to three comments.

Jiri can’t seem to understand that in referring to Occam’s Razor, I was addressing myself to the way it is presented by those who think to use it to reject Q, not what Occam’s Razor technically constitutes per se as a logical argument. If those people adopted Jiri's (correct) definition of it, they would be able to make little use of it in the Q debate, since the “necessary” aspect would force them to leave the door open to regarding a source document as a necessary element in the analysis of the common passages in Matthew and Luke. It is they (and they are legion in amateur Q debates on discussion boards like this) who are misusing Occam, not I. My murder trial analogy was meant to show up the ludicrous nature of their misuse of Occam (declaring that simple multiplying of entities in the explanation regardless of necessity discredits the explanation), not of Occam itself. If Jiri would stay calm instead of being ready to foam at the mouth at everything I say, he might be able to understand me properly.

The need to reject Q at all costs often seems to lead its detractors into strangely illogical argument. What is this “single early ur-text” supposed to imply? We are talking about a hypothetical collection of sayings (whose content suggests stratification and an evolution of thinking which included the later-introduced idea of a founder at its root) which Matthew and Luke encountered and which led them to incorporate into their redaction of Mark. It was an obvious move, since the background of that collection obviously conformed with the background of their own communities’ activities, all apparently located in the same broad area of the Syrian/Galilean Levant. In what way does this not gel with my statement that the early record witnesses to a multitude of different sectarian expressions across the eastern half of the Roman Empire? That collection of sayings came from one particular sectarian expression on the early scene. I fail to see any problem here.

I want to stress again that there is nothing inherently illogical or out-of-place about the idea of such a document existing on that scene, whether it has survived or not—and many of course did not. Detractors often seem to want to portray Q as some kind of monstrous abnormal Frankenstein that could only have been created by modern scholarship for its own nefarious ends. Nothing could be further from the truth. Collections of sayings, sometimes reflecting a sectarian viewpoint, were commonplace. The Jewish intertestamental literature witnesses to many different, sometimes related, prophetic and salvation sects, with many surviving documents. The community and preaching/prophetic activity represented in Q is perfectly compatible with a place in that diverse trend of kingdom expectation and exhortations to repentance and hope for a change of downtrodden society’s fortunes with the arrival of God’s agent of judgment (in Q, the Son of Man). Regardless of the relative weights of the two hypotheses, Q detractors simply have to stop treating the very idea of Q as an abomination, an insult to their idea of intelligence. It only skews the debate. Their animosity to it, strangely enough, is in much the same league as the animosity of mainstream scholarship to the idea of no historical Jesus. Q is a legitimate and logical hypothesis, based on real literary evidence. And, in my view, it confers better sense on the picture of an important aspect of what became our composite Christianity. It fills in a reasonable background to an essential dimension of the Synoptic Gospels and the communities which produced them. Without Q, Mark Matthew and Luke seem to be hanging from a skyhook.

Finally, on the evaluation of Goodacre:

A skill in presenting arguments in readable and understandable fashion, along with being calm and orderly which Goodacre is, does not preclude those arguments being weak or flawed, or even lame and yes, desperate. I pointed out a lot of those weaknesses in my book, including the appeal to Luke finding things in Matthew “uncongenial” to him as an explanation for why he didn’t take them, a primary example being his consistent failure to take over Matthew’s redactions of Mark (a failure virtually impossible to accept as credible in a Luke-used-Matthew scenario) and especially the “upon this rock” saying to Peter. Kloppenborg aptly showed how Goodacre’s silence on this Matthean addition is indeed both lame and desperate, and unsupported by Luke’s overall text.

Much is made of Goodacre’s concept of “editorial fatigue.” In principle it sounds legitimate, but when examined in practice it proves to be extremely weak. I’ll illustrate by quoting a page from Jesus: Neither God Nor Man (p. 321-322). I notice that Jiri made no effort to comment on this passage.

As a postscript, let me add this paragraph from the book, whose argument Jiri has missed or ignored entirely. It concludes a discussion of various aspects of the stratigraphical nature of Q and features of evolution which we can discern in the various contradictions and reworkings within many Q pericopes. Such things, by the way, are not "speculation" but scholarly demonstrable and reasonably deduced exegesis of the Q text. Someone like Goodacre hasn't even come close to dealing with this situation effectively. From page 374 of Jesus: Neither God Nor Man:

Earl Doherty