jgibson000

OK.

It's "highlight" and "mispellings" and so far as I can tell, I've never commented one way or the other on how anyone has mispelled "your opponents".

More importantly, so far as I can see, what I usually do, when I have the inclination to be corrective, is to comment upon someone's infelicities of grammar, especially when those infelicities make the meaning what they are trying to say ambiguous.

Good for you! But leaving aside the question of how this makes you qualified to speak about what professors other than your wife, let alone all professors, typically do or don't do, how ever did you manage to get her to marry you?


Do you now, even assuming that I'm "avoiding" anything? I wonder if you've read my reply to Richard Carrier about why I don't mention my appointments. But since you seem to think it's important to do so, may I ask what your academic appointments you have had?

Could it be, do you think, it's because I'm not teaching there at the moment?

So far as I can see, I've never asked for someone's academic affiliations, only whether they have the training that is necessary to be able to make the claims they do with the confidence with which they make them.

More importatly, I've only asked about qualifications when someone was claiming an expetise on a topic that, as evidence in their posts indicated, they didn't really seem to posess. And as the moderators have noted both here and at

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=169725

this is both a perfectly legitimate and even neccessary thing to do under those circumstances -- that is, when someone makes a claim about a subject in such a way as to bring into question that they really have the expertise on the matter at hand that they are laying claim to.

It's "bifucating" (or are you casting an aspersion about my sexual orientation and proclivities?). And leaving aside the questions of whether you actually know what "bifucation" means and whether I've ever engaged in it, I don't think that, however the phrase is spelled, looking it up would do me any good. As far as I know, there isn't any entry on the phrase in any dictionary or reference work.

Jeffrey Gibson

Toto

Mod note: please keep personal items out of this discussion. Thank you.

krosero

As I pointed out, Earl seems in his first post to be operating with AND, not OR. I have not seen any clarification, but yes, I do agree that I misread your own clarification of the mythicist (Earl's?) position: you did present alternatives, not a combination of two things.

So I'll modify my quotation of your statement:

Now, this position I have also criticized, as Ben has done. I see he's laid out the objections again in a new reply to your last post, so I won't repeat my rendition of the argument here.

Kevin Rosero

S.C.Carlson

Suppose Marcion wrote the epistles of Paul. Why would the proto-orthodox co-opt them unless they believed that Paul, not Marcion, wrote those epistles. But why would they believe Marcion about Paul's epistles when he showed up with epistles the proto-orthodox never heard of before?

I'm trying to puzzle out the reasoning (which I am not understanding) behind why, if Marcion wrote Paul's epistles, the proto-orthodox would have anything to do with them. They did not co-opt the Gospel of Judas or any of the Nag Hammadi gospels.

Stephen

S.C.Carlson

Constantine is irrelevant. The supposed orthodox interpolations into Paul's epistles predate him.

Stephen

Ben C Smith

This is very much like the question that I asked earlier. I do not see why anyone would hijack Paul for the true faith and nobody else. Is there an analogy for this? Did the proto-orthodox hijack anybody else that we know of?

Ben.

jgibson000

Glibson??

Well let's say I say yes. How would this make it legitimate, as you apperently think it does (in a good example of tu quoque), for Earl to do the same things?

If these tactics are, as you intimate, argument nullifying, then they nullify the arguments and the claims based upon them of anyone who uses them.

Jeffrey Gibson

krosero

Ben, this is why Earl's proposal has struck me as an important one to debate over. Yes, of course, he's just tentatively looking at a new idea; there's nothing wrong with that. What strikes me is the contrast with the former argument. For years, Earl has presented the Pauline phrases as ambiguously denoting a flesh-and-blood human being on the earth. But now he's considering -- not reluctantly, but with anticipation and apparent eagerness -- an option in which the phrases are said to emphasize an earthly savior and contradict a purely supernatural savior.

And even that would be okay in and of itself. People can change their positions dramatically. It's just that the question raises itself, why? (Just like Jeffrey asked Ted: why did you come around to this position?) For years, historicists have been arguing that Paul's phrases denote an earthly/divine creature (i.e., a divine incarnation) and not a purely supernatural one (such as Earl's heavenly savior, or the docetist "phantom"). So this change of heart is startling, and it makes me wonder just what Earl's commitment to his former arguments was based on -- not because I think he has a bad character (I am genuinely skeptical that he does have bad character, and genuinely uninterested in raising the issue), but simply because I have to ask such a question.

But perhaps even more importantly is what happens to the mythicist case, as you've already been describing. If the phrases in Paul's texts now emphasize an earthly savior over and against an unearthly one, then what would happen if a strong case for interpolation could not be made for every one of those phrases? Then it would mean that Paul had genuinely spoken of an earthly savior.

What I wonder is why Earl did not even nod toward these difficulties, not even in anticipation. Did he notice them?

Kevin Rosero

krosero

I think this is an excellent way of putting it. If Marcion is your opponent, and all his original ideas and original contributions are anathema to you, then you don't try to take one of his original texts from him. I imagine you wouldn't want to be involved at all with things that are associated strongly with him and his church.

But you and he can fight over a third-party text that you both regard as part of your heritage. That's perfectly plausible.

Kevin Rosero

Didymus

You must be joking. Where else in all Christian literature is Yahweh said to have siblings?

Far as I can tell, all the MJ arguments on BOTL are tautological, i.e., "We know that Jesus was not a man living on earth, so Paul could not possibly have been speaking of James having a brotherly relationship with a human being." The possibility of a literal meaning is rejected because it doesn't fit the theory, not because there's anything inherently suspect about it.

Didymus