johno

Without intending to derail anything, could anybody inform me if the Stephanie Louise Fisher is the rather pleasant-looking graduate student at the University of Nottingham?

http://nottingham.academia.edu/stephanielouisefisher

If this is the person, she seems rather cocksure of herself for a lowly graduate-student.

spin

Casey just happens to be at U.Nott.

hjalti

Author Casey claims to be a professor at the University of Nottingham!

Steven Carr

No, he is retired. Students don't have to pay 9000 a year to listen to Casey talk.

Grog

Objectivity is something to strive for. Every person brings a set of biases with them, sometimes not unrecognized. Even cultural baggage that isn't recognized. That's why we can, sometimes, look back on how past generations viewed something and think, "how could they not see that?"

Also, my suggestion that objectivity is something to strive for does not suggest that everyone equally lacks objectivity. We aren't all cookie cutter shapes.

The historian attempts to apply tools of the trade to diminish the impact of their own personal bias. Some are more successful than others.

I am actually surprised that this is even a question here on this board. I recommend That Noble Dream (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Peter Novick.

Quantitative studies ostensibly mitigate the negative influence of bias. Thus, Carrier advocates for Bayes' Theorem. It astounds me (as one coming from a political science direction) that the whole qualitative vs. quantitative debate so late in the day raises such histrionic responses from the Hoffmann cabal, in particular, Fisher (who, yes, is the, I believe doc student at UNott, but, no, I don't find her appealing). This question has been dealt with in most other professions. The arguments remain the same: "can't account for complexity" vs. "bias" and "sample size." I do tend to land on the quant side myself, so am anxious for Carrier's next book. Applying quantitative methods to the social sciences does, as has been noted, require careful application. "Garbage in, garbage out" is exactly true. So don't put garbage in. In the end, it all really just front loads the argument.

aa5874

There is no need for this talk about Objectivity as if people cannot assess written statements, and written evidence and come to a reasonable conclusion.

Ordinary People do this everyday all around the world.

For example, if an "X" is written on a piece of paper and I asked what was written then you can only say what you see NOT what you imagine.

That is the problem with some people here. They ignore what they see and argue about what they imagine.



Well, those so-called historians are NOT using the written and dated evidence in the HJ/MJ argument.

When a so-called historian points out that the NT is NOT a credible source with false attributed authors and unknown time of authorship but then turns around and use those very sources for history then such historian is hopelessly incompetent.

Ordinary people understand that sources must be credible but in the HJ/MJ argument historians don't seem to know or care about credibility of sources.

Grog

Sure. I agree with you here, aa. Pick up almost any popular biography on Paul ("Paul of Tarsus" "Paul the Tentmaker") and in the discussion of sources they will say that Acts is late and undependable. Yet they go on to base their "biographies" on Acts. The methodology being that if it doesn't contradict the epistles, it's fair game.

It's practices like this that call the discipline into question. To see that the "link between the historical Jesus and any of the gosels had decisively been severed" (KloppenborgThe Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 89, No. 4 (Oct., 1996), pp. 307-344) and then see the gospels used time and time again in the same simplistic fashion by scholars again causes one to question the conclusions of the consensus coming out of modern NT studies.

Maurice Casey's work could very well point to underlying Aramaic sources. Horseley argues for underlying oral Aramaic tradition behind gMark. (Oral Tradition, 25/1 (2010): 93-114) That's hardly surprising. Either way, it looks to me that it originates with a narrative structure that does not depend on real events and certainly not a recollection of events that occurred in history. Here is a piece of Horseley's paper: "In addition to the “infrastructure” of the narrative steps, there are numerous links between
and across the narrative steps, including repetitions of themes that drive home the message."

None of this goes to the question of the HJ, per se. But it does go toward evaluating the sources that Hoffmann calls the "best refutation of the myth theory." The Gospels are theological narratives with a purpose and a message that is not to document the life of an historical human being. That they are the "best refutation" available should say something about the state of the Historical Jesus project.

spin

But then the so-called transliteration that is βοανεργες argues against the gospel writer's knowledge of the language. Casey just doesn't handle the indicator meaningfully, for he has no way of explaining the diphthong in the first syllable.

Adam

I think Casey argues for the final version of gMark being very early, not the work of somebody decades later in Rome (my position). Your point, spin, argues against him. But a later transliteration by a Latin speaker does not prove that the underlying author of gMark did not know Aramaic well.

Consider also that the transliteration may have been done by a scribe or translator working under the author as early as Casey would have it, and Casey could still be fully right.

spin

You can invent excuses for why βοανεργες was not the work of the writer of the gospel, but it is like all your efforts, ad hoc and untestable. Casey's case is flimsy at best and his inability to make sense of βοανεργες in his scheme simply undercuts him. He doesn't pay any attention to the Latinisms in Mark because he is falling all over himself to sell his Aramaic story. Your trick is to farm out the explanations for a Latin Greek audience is to shove them off to a scribe or some other later hand. Convenient, but uninspiring.

There has to be some Aramaic connection, given that the religion is based on a perversion of the Jewish religion and a strong knowledge of that religion is evinced in the gospel, but there is no evidence that the writer of the gospel knows Aramaic. βοανεργες points against it. His only Aramaic transliterations are so trivial that they appear to be abracadabra words, ie giving a sense of genuineness of obscurity to an ignorant audience, trivialities "little girl, get up" and "be opened" or cultic words like "corban". The translation of talitha kumi is actually given in the Greek as "little girl, I say to you, get up", but what that "I say to you" is doing there has nothing to do with the Aramaic and suggests that the writer wasn't working from Aramaic at all, but like βοανεργες he got it from a chain of transmission that garbled it. His lack of geographical understanding speaks against his being from Judea/Galilee and thus not being directly familiar with its languages.

In short, no-one is doubting an Aramaic connection with Mark, but Casey is unable explain the evidence meaningfully. In fact the evidence suggests that the writing wasn't by any native speaker of Aramaic. This is only strengthened by the Latinisms through the text ("but they were by a late hand" is your shot in the dark), not the loanwords so much as the loan translations and grammatical structures. And these Casey is totally silent about. In fact one of Casey's Aramaic explanations is seen by others as a Latin loan translation (οδον ποιειν in 2:23, iter facere). If you got this far, you can now happily ignore the above as has been your wont.