Adam

I started this thread to get people to address what I have written in Gospel Eyewitnesses and other threads. Still nobody does. :banghead: Ask me a question that shows you have read anything of my theses, and I will respond.

Meanwhile, is there someone here on FRDB that you guys claim has read, understood, and answered my arguments? You have not cited even any academics who refute my views. (So yes, I agree with you guys that mainstream scholarship has not addressed the basics. You can't criticize me for being outside the Consensus.)

Adam

I guess this more recent one is more relevant than the others I found obtuse or demeaning.
You're all here in denial that there could be source documents about Jesus that you have no objective reason to refuse to treat as evidence. No one has responded to my Post #124 here. Certainly steve's #128 and Toto's #133 don't suffice.
For what I believe see my blog here on FRDB. (Second request.)
I accept a document as more likely reliable if it is early, from an underlying source. I determine a source where it underlies several extant texts or has distinct stylistic characteristics or if it shows the distinct perspective of one person.

Sheshbazzar

With your many revisions it is difficult to determine where you wish your imagined 'Gospel' to begin, or what it contains.

But taking the content of your OP in -this- thread it seems that currently you wish to present -something -'preceding' John 11:54 as the first verse of your 'Gospel'?

Is John 11:54 now your intended first verse of your 'Gospel according to the Atheists'? Is this a verse you wish to discuss?

I am willing to begin to 'address what you have written' beginning at any verse -you- wish to designate as the beginning of -your- Gospel.

We went through this search for the beginning verse of your 'Gospel' in your previous thread, and now evidently by your OP, you wish to shift, or to include an unspecified different verse, as your beginning, and now add other unspecified additional verses throughout your Gospel?


I have no preference at all for where ever or what ever verse you might choose for a beginning, from all of the available texts, -OR even one that you might wish to freely compose yourself.

If you wish to incorporate additional verses into your proposed 'Gospel text', only you can determine exactly -where- and in -what order- you wish them to appear.

So is the received 'text preceding the Passion Narrative in John 11:54' now the first verse of your version of a Gospel? or is something else?

WHAT 'text preceding the Passion Narrative in John 11:54'??? Beginning WHERE??? How on earth are we supposed to know? :huh:
You cannot 'refute' anything until, and unless, you can first make your presentation intelligible.


Can anyone else here make any sense or order out of Adam's presentation?




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Atheos

And here we go. Just how does one define "evidence?" My standards of what is evidence is a bit more rigorous than yours is, but it's not so black and white as you make this out to be. There's an ocean of difference between proof and evidence, and there's another ocean lying between evidence and conjecture. You present conjecture and try to pass it off as evidence. Of the three things you mentioned that you use:

• stylistic differences,
• comparisions between extant texts,
• the perspective from which the author writes.

Only one of them (comparisons between extant texts) is actually what I'd call "evidence." The others are opinion and conjecture. Application of methodology is not evidence. It might be helpful in many cases but it is not evidence.

Again, not to attempt to defend my silly scenario, but you still haven't provided even a speck of rebuttal. Claiming it has no objective textual support is bullshit. You begin with the assumption that the (no longer extant) Passion Narrative was a favorable account. I begin with the assumption that it was a hostile one. Why is your assumption the only one with any merit? Since (in my scenario) the apologetic redactors had the motive and means to eliminate the original passion narrative, all credits to it and all traces of its claim that everything in it was entirely fictional my scenario once again fits perfectly with the available evidence. My scenario provides an explanation for the existence and the demise of the Passion Narrative. Yours attempts to account for the demise but doesn't account for why it would have been destroyed while the synoptic gospels derived in part from it survived. So far my scenario makes more sense than yours.

Find the place where I said we can know that something you said is false and I'll gladly concede my contradiction.
Here's how it works in the world I live in. Texts are evidence. Historical records are evidence. Replicable phenomena (such as observing a ball thrown in the air falling back to the ground) is evidence.

Theories are not evidence. They can gain strong acceptance if their application produces predicable outcomes (e.g., the electron theory -> vacuum tubes), but the acceptance level is directly proportional to the strength of actual evidence or repeatability of outcomes based on predictions implied by said theory.

When I say "Texts are evidence" I in no way imply that the content of the text is evidence of anything other than information (or fiction) someone had cause to write at some point in history. A text containing descriptions of a woman so ugly that simply looking at her face would cause men to turn into stone is not evidence that such a woman actually existed. Similarly, a text containing descriptions of a man who could walk on water as if it were dry land is not evidence that such a man actually existed.

The man could have existed but (like George Washington, who never hurled a coin across the Potomac River) never actually walked on water...

Or the man could have been another Gomer Pyle, just a character in some fictional tale who ended up with his own successful spin-off. Sergeant Vincent Carter might be an identifiable eyewitness, but first one must have actual evidence that the character existed at all.

Right now there is nothing but conjecture based on application of varying methodologies. (And I'm not talking about just you at this point Adam). Just because I remain unconvinced either way does not mean I am certain the questions can never be answered. I also remain interested in the answer should it ever become available.

Adam

Regarding your final two sentences, Atheos,
Given your concession that the questions may be answerable, and that you are interested, what specifically makes my answer wrong? Why can't it be the answer?

You specifically say you havn't said my answer is false. Why wouldn't it be worth further study?

steve_bnk

On what basis do you accept a document as true such as eyewitness to the ressurection? Relative age is not authentification of the claims.

Adam

You still refuse, steve,
to put aside your preconceptions. Time and again I have posted about The Gospel According to the Atheists, in which the Resurrection is not included. I have listed four documents that you cannot automatically reject a priori. Start with the OP of this thread. You're getting ahead of yourself. Right now I am focussing on disproving MJ.

Adam

I gave you too much credit. You have not even gotten to the first verse, much less past it. Yes, I could have phrased the above quote better with a semi-colon after "the Passion Narrative in John" and before "11:54". I inferred that this "Jesus no longer walked about openly" was the epistemelogical starting point explaining why the author of the Passion Narrative next sees Jesus at his own house, John 12:2. These preliminaries to the Passion Narrative lead us to his witnessing of it. See my presentation of it Bilblical texts earlier than thought [Dating the Book of Acts]
and in Bart Ehrman : Did Jesus Exist?
to which there was likewise no meaningful response.
These posts supplemented my OP in Gospel Eyewitnesses
to give the Passion Narrative, the first of four documents in my Gospel According to the Atheists.

That's the Passion Narrative, of course, to which all other source texts were preliminaries that halted once they reached this earlier narrative. Proto-Luke combined Q and L as shown here in Gospel Eyewitnesses Post #561
The fourth document is the Johannine discourses I attribute to Nicodemus
in Post #38 in Gospel Eyewitnesses

Sheshbazzar

So does all of this unnecessary word salad mean that you now want Luke 3:1 as the first verse of your Gospel?

You wanted;
WHAT 'text preceding the Passion Narrative in John 11:54....'??? Beginning WHERE? you still have not answered this very simple and direct question.
You also want either John 13:18 or 21? Which one is it? and where is it that you want it to be included?

And where in the hell were you with all of these added verses in all of your hundreds of previous posts?

WHY didn't you include them if you thought they were pertinent to the presentation of your imagined 'Gospel'?

Do you recall that my biggest and most constant complaint has been how much of these actual text you were senselessly discarding?
And how the result was "full of holes big enough to drive a Mack truck through"?


Do you have any idea of how many times you have asked that verses be added to, subtracted from, or substitute this for that' in your various threads?

I can, and have read all of these texts, but there is no way with all of your adding, deleting, and substituting this for that, time and time again, that anyone here can correlate or keep track of these constant and often wholly unexplained changes.
Are you trying to deliberately obfuscate what your proposed text consist of?

Just list all of the f-ing verses -in order- from the beginning and be over and done with it.
Then some serious discussion of what you are presenting can begin. I'm not going waste time and effort attempting to reason about any verse that tomorrow, without giving any reason, you may decide you would rather omit or substitute something else for.
Pissing and moaning that no one will address what you have written, will not substitute for -YOU- finally getting your shit in order, and deciding -exactly- what your text consists of without introducing any further additions and substitutions, and learning how to compose simple sentences and paragraphs in plain English so that your posts will make sense.





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Adam

Progress! Now you're up to verse 12 in the earliest source, the Passion Narrative. Teeple would choose 13:18 over 13:21.
Not so well on the larger Proto-Luke preceding it. Whether you start at Luke 3:1, 2, or 3, that's just historical preface (as is John 11:54). The essence starts at 3:3. Read on!

It's nice that you've come around to asking for lists of verses! So you're really interested and not just harassing me?

It's sad that I make various changes along the way--from my own re-thinking, not from critique from members here.