bleubird

Sorry,I posted in wrong thread.

yalla

I have a copy of the RSV published in 1954 by the National Council Of the Churches of Christ in the USA after '32 scholars' with ' an Advisory Board of 50 repesentatives of the co-operating denominations' worked for several years.

All this, and more, is contained in the Preface.
Then follows the text and then ..."Simple Helps and Visual Aids to the understanding of the Bible" by Rev. David J. Fant, Litt.D.
Which includes a neat little section where each book of the Bible, OT and NT, is listed with the headings Title/Author/Setting.

Matthew is from 'the writer, an apostle, a Hebrew, before conversion called Levi, the tax collector, written in Judea, c 60AD.

Mark is 'credited' to Mark, associate of Paul, "Peter may have furnished much of the material .."

Luke is "from Luke "the beloved physician". close friend and travelling compnion of Paul. probably written in Caesarea c 63 AD".

John is 'ascribed' to the writer, "apostle of Christ also wrote 3 epistles and Revelation, written at Ephesus c 98 AD."

Acts is authored by Luke as in the Gospel of Luke written c 63 AD.

There you have it folks. The standard version.

Adam

One wonders why the National Council of Churches, a relatively liberal body, would put out in 1954 conventional ascriptions known to be untrue. Surely it was to sell Bibles in the course of replacing the KJV still favored by conservatives.
While there is similarity there to my conclusions, I work independently from internal study of the gospels themselves.
By 'sources" in my challenge in Post s#149 (and as I clarified in post #157) I don't mean from whom the information was obtained, but written documents separated out by source-criticism. The internet went down last night while I was trying again to reply to mountainman with this clarification. The idea that any one man gave us all the information that is in any one complete gospel, has been thoroughly refuted.

Horatio Parker

That's wasn't so hard.

My advice: keep pulling at that thread...

Adam

Apparently it's not just my renegade opinion. This is from Post #5 in the new thread here, "Roger Bagnall's...."

"The narrowness of much of it has permitted its practitioners to reach conclusions that I believe are profoundly at odds with fundamental social realities of the ancient world and with basic probability; and the lack of a self-critical posture has been particularly damaging in that it has tended to allow problematic assumptions, interests, agendas, and desires to escape being made explicit.”
Unless he's just talking about his paleological specialty.
I don't believe in reasoning by analogy, so my "emperor's new clothes" above is just rhetorical flourish. Using an analogy nevertheless, considering the gospels to be the body, I would regard most contemporary scholarship to be mutual inspections of the most recent layers of clothing upon the body. Form criticism was the rage at my coming of age, and in my contrarian nature I looked for more lasting analysis. Form criticism and the oral gospel has always seemed to me to disproven by the evidence for written sources that underlie all four gospels. Accordingly I reject also redaction criticism and any other acceptance of unified texts. Though "undergarments", the first layer of tradition, may be helpful for insights about the four gospels, the main study has to be the four gospels themselves in the light of recent centuries of investigation into the texts themselves. Yet even today many reject the clear conclusions about the Synoptics and the evidence that John used sources.
To recap what I have spread over seven posts about seven eyewitnesses, I don't believe any of our canonical gospels were written by eyewitnesse. Sources written by eyewitnesses include the Passion Narrative by John Mark, the Signs Gospel by Andrew, the Discourses by Nicodemus, and most of the rest of gJohn by John the Apostle as the next-to-last Editor. Half of Mark comes from Peter, Q comes mostly from the Apostle Matthew, and Proto-Luke was written by Simon of Cleopas. There is strong textual evidence that these were separate written texts.

aa5874

Virtually all your claims for your eyewitnesses are UNCORROBORATED and total speculation.

You could have just STATED what you IMAGINE from the start.

1. Your John Mark has NO history at all. He is TOTALLY unknown, uncorroborated and UNKNOWN as a WRITER.

2. Your Nicodemus has NO corroborative history at all and NONE as a writer. We have NO known text written by Nicodemus.

3. We have NOTHING credible on Andrew. We have no way of corroborating what you have IMAGINED about Andrew.

4. It is highly unlikely that Half of gMark came from Peter. Over 90% of Mark is likely to be IMPLAUSIBLE and Peter is an UNCORROBORATED source.

5. You are WRONG about "Q". It means material common to gMatthew and gLuke.

"Q" is completely hypothetical does NOT refer mostly to any SINGLE Source.

6. Simon Cleopas is another uncorroborated character and has NO history as a Writer.

You seem NOT to understand that people here QUESTION the Gospels and will NOT any longer accept IMAGINATION as evidence.

You IMAGINE your witnesses. That is all.

Adam

If it's too personal to contact me about sending to you my 1988 article, you can preserve your anonymity by going to the thread "Source Strata in the Gospel of John" I entered as a thread on Theology Web. I didn't get much useful help over there, but I got advice that I could receive fair (albeit hostile) and valuable critiques over here.
I recommend you read my OP over there summarizing my 1988 article and my post #5 giving a sketch for a movie about the Gospel of John (something that's never been filmed, as far as I know). Or try Post #208 three months later on March 31, 2011 giving a slightly modified summary.
http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/sh...of-John/page15

aa5874

The Gospel of John is NOT history at all and could NOT have been witnessed. It is claimed Jesus was GOD and the Creator of heaven and earth.

You cannot use QUESTIONABLE and UNRELIABLE sources to ASSEMBLE the past. You NEED corroborative sources OUTSIDE the sources that are QUESTIONABLE and UNRELIABLE.

There is ZERO corroboartion for virtually all the characters in gJohn like Nicodemus, the disciples, and even Jesus.

You have PRESUMED the history of your witnesses.

Your PRESUMPTIONS are NOT evidence of anything.

PRESUMPTIONS do NOT resolve any matter.

Adam

Robin Lane Fox’s Unauthorized Version turns out to be rather conservative, in spite of his reputation from Pagans and Christians. Writing in 1992, he advances the historicity of John above the Synoptics, and tends to support the Apostle John as author and Beloved Disciple. That means the fourth gospel has eyewitness testimony, whereas the Synoptics are second or third hand. Mark stems from an even earlier written source. Nevertheless, he acknowledges the historicity of Acts of the Apostles and that the Western text is a second edition by Luke the eyewitness author of the latter half of it.
Before reading it at the University of California at Davis library, I looked through 2011 book reviews that I could find (mostly of 2009 books) in the handy Catholic Biblical Quarterly. (I found out later that the best known periodicals are there online.) There is so very much activity about Jesus, but little about the source criticism I was looking for. I found as expected that mythicism and Fundamentalism are equally scorned. In The Historical Jesus: Five Views, 2009, the reviewer Anthony Le Donne criticized the editor James Beilby for including Robert M. Price’s implausible mythicism. Also in less favor now are the views of Dominic Crossan and Burton L. Mack, Bruce Chilton accused Craig Keener in the Historical Jesus of the Gospels of using them as straw men for his conservative position. Paul Bennett in Finding the Historical Christ names four mission groups around Paul, James, Peter, and John. He says evangelicals now accept oral tradition. (Same as it was when I was Roman Catholic—conservatives are always 50 years behind the times.)
Deep into source criticism, too deeply in fact, is Delbert Burkett in Rethinking the Gospel Sources. Against Goodacre he finds Q to be necessary. He says Matthew and Luke combined Q with other sources, as where Q over-lapped Proto-Mark.
What source-criticism I found is about the Synoptics, not about John that is more controversial. I still have not found any advances being made in this field.

Adam

This is the eighth part of the main body of thesis in this thread (following #1, !8,#38, #52, #74, #132, and #144), but not naming any writers of texts. This considers some implications.
The additional eyewitnesses include several of the witnesses to the Resurrection of Jesus. However, among the seven are several as well. I detail the verses attributable to each of them in my article, “Resurrection Sources”:
http://megasociety.org/noesis/181.htm#Resurrection
This article is restricted to probable sources, not authors, so let me enlarge upon that to say, as I have shown earlier here already, that Matthew was the author of the Twelve-Source, John Mark was the author of Petrine Ur-Marcus, and Simon the Son of Clopas was the author of Luke 24 after the 12th verse. Not in the article, but as shown one page above, I list the verses in John 20 and John 21 due to the Apostle John, also an eyewitness. Putting these together almost all of Matthew 28, Mark 16:1-8, Luke 24, and John 20 &21 were written by eyewitnesses to the Resurrection.
Even beyond the identifiable eyewitnesses, is there gospel material we can substantiate? Yes. To start with Mark, a two-chapter interlude that is not found in Luke seems to be a round trip back to its start: Mark 6:45-8:27. But at this point in Mark the Twelve Apostles had already been chosen and were presumably well trained to go out in pairs by themselves. We know from Luke 10:1, 17 that seventy two others were later sent, and it was presumably with a pair of these that Jesus went to Tyre and Sidon. If the source of this information was an eyewitness, he would be the eighth. The person supplying this information may also have provided the Matthean chapters that are similar in nature. The author of Q, presumably Matthew, had his own take on Jesus. Likewise the author of Proto-Luke.
Backtracking about the pairs Jesus sent out--in much of Jesus’s ministry he had no more than twelve, so just six pairs. We would not expect to stay on his knees in a synagogue while his disciples were out and about, so we would expect Jesus to be out with one pair or another. The first pair He taught was Andrew and Philip (John 1), the pair with Him in Jerusalem. Yet even they seemed unaware of His most radical teachings that are found in John 7 to 10. The Synoptic gospels tell us that Jesus was reticent about proclaiming His messiahship, so it figures that He kept away from his apostles when revealing this. Out in the countryside Jesus did not include “I” statements about Himself, and evaded demands that He clarify His role. In Jerusalem there were so many learned persons that Jesus gave frank answers to questions from them.
We should not expect the gospels to be uniform in their presentation of Jesus. A core of eyewitnesses were apostles, but Matthew in his Q was quite different in his interest in ethical sayings as against the narratives around miracles preferred by Peter and Andrew. The Apostle John focused on sacraments and theology. John Mark told just what he knew personally. Simon, apparently one of the seventy-two, told only about the later part of Jesus’s ministry.. Only Nicodemus with the Discourses was radically different from everyone else.

The case needs to be made that each eyewitness record adds to the probability that the gospels have at least one eyewitness. Let’s assume a minimal probability component that a particular eyewitness is 10% certain to be such. That leaves a 90% probability that he does not serve to prove to be an eyewitness. But each additional eyewitness proposed drops that negative result by a factor of .9, leaving 81% after considering two. After considering four, the negative probability drops to 65%, then down to 52% after six are multiplied together. The negative drops to just over 40% after the seven. True, all these probabilities are not independent, but the probability of each is probably a lot larger than 10%. All in all the probability that there was not at least one eyewitness probably drops to 10-20%.