Steven Avery

Hi TH, Counting scholars is a funny game (who gets counted, why, how much weight? etc) and everyone here would likely agree that it is not very important.

Occasionally you get an overwhelming historic consensus ..eg. Jesus of Nazareth was an important historical man who lived in Israel c.30 AD .. yet that does not in of itself disprove any of the fringe mythicist theories, even if they are fanciful and contradictory to each other and very strange. They still deserve a hearing, of sorts.

On textual issues you don't get an overwhelming consensus on any of these items. The writers with a more humanist, skeptic and atheist bent will generally all line up on the side of 'forgery', late dating, denial of the internal authorship claims., etc. for the NT documents. And they have in fact been joined by a contingent of scholastic liberal 'Christians' who agree with them on some of these issues, with Bruce Metzger especially giving the denial views a visibility in what is termed Christian scholarship. (not sure about on the Pastorals, but definitely on 2Peter).

On this Pastorals issue I shared a good number of scholarship articles, (note that nobody commented directly on the material from any of the articles) from various sources, that strongly and quite powefully defend the authorship of the epistles. I myself was quite surprised how weak were the anti-Pastoral authorship argument when I first researched this about two years back.

In opposition, we had one link against it, and I demonstrated how strange the arguments are, most especially the supposedly "overwhelming" arguments, arguments that for the most part are somewhere between insipid and asinine, to put it bluntly.

Now if a dozen Ehrman types give their nod to the super-weak "overwhelming" arguments, without ever really getting to the gist of the issues, what consequence is that? And on this forum you can expect rummagging for any "scholar" who takes an anti-NT position, and little examination of the real issues, and especially not from a "respectful-to-the-NT" position.

What is really amazing is the ease with which they close their eyes to the general circularity of their positions. This Pastorals case is a perfect example. As I showed, it essentially assumes that Acts is ahistorical as well, in order to attack the Pastorals. Clearly this is a skeptic anti-NT rejection-of-the-NT presup, taken from one realm and then superimposed on another. That is what I call a "general circularity", the circularity of skepticl presups transferred from realm to realm. Of course if you start from the presup that all the books of the NT are fabricated, and/or extremely unreliable and/or junque, from that position you can easily argue against any one specific NT item. The motif and modus operandi on this forum.

As I have pointed out, to the chagrin of Amaleq especially, this is the scholastic morass here, the inability to see the conceptual circularities applied again and again.

Hope that helps, I tried to answer your question in the context of the bigger picture :-)

JohnnySkeptic went into a long discussion the other day about who I was hoping to "convince". If I simply help bring a type of level playing field and scholastic honesty to the forum, that alone would bring a smile in regard to my time here. In addition I myself learn a lot about these issues, and that has always been a great personal faith-strengthener.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
Queens, NY
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

Amaleq13

It is highly ironic when an individual accuses others of circularity because they refuse to assume the historical reliability of part of the very collection of texts under consideration for historical reliability. That is, essentially, the very definition of "circular reasoning". :huh:

I encourage you to research the subject yourself and an excellent place to start is Peter Kirby's Early Christian Writings. He generally acknowledges the core arguments of both sides for each text but you can start to get an idea of the true nature of the scholarly position.

Steven Avery

There are major differences. First, I always make it clear that I consider the NT text as an accurate source, and my logic in that regard is consistent from A to Z. Consistent, not circular.

In contrast, the skeptics constantly make grumpy attacks on some specific aspect of the NT, and ONLY after it is discovered that they have a lot of underlying anti-NT accuracy presups, that they are using those presups in response, only after it is all exposed, as on this thread, do they rewrite their statements, as you tried to do above.

"Oh, I really meant that we have to assume that Paul's epistles are forgeries, or 2 Peter was written by somebody else fraudulently 50-100 years later than Peter, before discussing this other issue - if you start from my base then I can show you that Paul did not know a,b,c....."

- that type of stuff is the general and subtle and hidden circularity of the skeptics on this forum. On a scholastic level, it often simply makes this forum of no import whatsoever, as few statements mean what they say.

Time and again we run into the same subtlety, where auxiliary attacks on some specific element of the NT (or the Tanach) are not really logically consistent UNLESS you assume a bunch of skeptical baggage. To make it much worse, the skeptics themselves have seven layers of baggage, so that you can never tell what is assumed and presumed. You need a special baggage scorecard to tell what it is being presumed.

That is precisely what happenned in this thread, and it happens again and again on this forum.

Nope, there is nothing circular about taking a consistent position of respect for the NT, and declaring such forthrightly. You should try again if you want to get any mileage out of such an accusation.

Yes, I use Peter's web sites frequently, and occasionally dialog with him on specific textual and inerrancy issues. Your encouragement is appreciated but unneeded.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
Queens, NY
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

Steven Avery

Before anybody complains, Amaleq's specific quote was one where he added the presumption of the inauthenticity of Pauline authorship to another poster's question ... my "quote" above is what this type of shenanigans boils down to.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
Queens, NY
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

yummyfur

Actually while not technically in the Tanach, there is a comparable qoute in the deuterocanon, in the book of Sirach 34:22

"He that taketh away his neighbour's living slayeth him; and he that defraudeth the labourer of his hire is a bloodshedder."

This book has tons about the rewards of labor as well as this qoute.

Also in the Torah is

Leviticus 19:13
"You shall not oppress your neighbor, nor rob him. The wages of a hired man are not to remain with you all night until morning."

Also Deuteronomy 24:14-15
"You shall not oppress a hired servant who is poor and needy, whether he is one of your countrymen or one of your aliens who is in your land in your towns.You shall give him his wages on his day before the sun sets, for he is poor and sets his heart on it; so that he will not cry against you to the LORD and it become sin in you."

Steven Avery

Thanks Yummyfur. The problem with all such alterantive explanations is multi-fold.

One - for the apocrypha verse, the NT uses graphe/scripture 51 times, again and again quoting Tanach, never apocrypha

Two - for all the 'somewhat vaguely similars' the Luke verse and 1 Timothy 5:18 are more than close

Even Peter Kirby on Xianity went this far..
"I agree that the precise six word phrase is drawn by the author of 1 Tim. from Christian tradition/writing ... No, six identical words is not a coincidence; if they are relatively independent, there is a common source, written or oral."

However once one agrees that the two phrases are linked, and we know Paul is calling the verse scripture, theories that he would call an oral tradition scripture become at best extremely dubious.

I have even had one person try to reverse the issue, that Luke included the phrase in the Gospels because Paul had written about it as scripture.

Folks can come up with just about anything when they don't want the simple Occam-ish explanation.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

rlogan

Every time I hear such hypocritical bloviating, it emphasizes all the more to me the inability of the author to think rationally.

Your house of sand rests upon the sky-daddy sending himself to save us from himself by killing himself, afterwhich he comes back to life, but only in this remote place and time, since as sky-daddy we should obviously expect nothing different.

Now, I realize that centuries of state terrorism dictating what "God" is, in combination with the desperate faith in everlasting life, can give one excellent legacy and cultural cover for maintaining such a preposterous scenario.

But let's just look in the mirror when pointing such fingers about an "edifice of sand".

rlogan

The "bedrock" upon which the AD 70 claim rests is the pseudo-prophesy regarding destruction of the temple. But it is a "therefore after AD 70" deduction and not one that gives us AD 70 as a "around then" date.

I realize that your question is independent of this comment.


There is also another possibility, and that is "Paul" writes in an independently developing "Christology", one that does not recognize historicity. We would not expect any direct challenge to historicity to survive the police state canon. But we would expect a neutered version to survive if it consolidated power across different Christ cults.

Amaleq13

Making your starting assumption of accuracy clear doesn't make it any less circular when you are arguing for the historical reliability of a given portion of the NT text.

Circular reasoning is consistent. So much so, in fact, that no contrary evidence or logic flaw can defile the sacred conclusion.

This is pretty obviously untrue. I rewrote it to avoid the problem of including arguments about authorship. It is difficult to believe that your apparent inability to grasp my actions is genuine. There is no presupposition involved in acknowledging the fact that the only possible affirmative answer exists in a letter that is not one of those universally accepted as genuine.

Discussions about the credibility of the arguments for and against Pauline authorship follow from this starting fact.

Sorry, I thought it was obvious that my suggestion was directed at the person asking questions about the facts behind this discussion.

Chris Weimer

The overwhelming historic consensus doesn't exist outside Western (read Christian) scholarship. And even in those who do regard it, it's never the Jesus of the gospels as he is depicted except for the few "fringe" fundies.

And you point of this petty ad hominem is?

Let me address some of those now:

Your first article is a bunch of weak defenses against strong arguments. He barely even tries to touch them and works a lot with pure conjecture (i.e. makes up stuff to suit his need).

The second article uses well-debunked defense of early church position, then ignores all the stylistic differences of the Pauline epistles to the Pastorals by trying to attribute a couple of minor similiarities (blessing at the beginning? well what else would you expect from someone trying to imitate Paul? come on!), then tries to argue from authority, then tries to say that the theology of the letters do not differ (without refuting any sort of evidence at all), etc... I could go on, but it's not worth my time.

The third article can be refuted on several terms, but it would require more than little space here, and definitely belong in its own thread. If I may point out this argument: "Tertullian says Marcion rejected them, which is no wonder, since the content of 1 Timothy 4:1-5 is completely antithetical to Marcionism." This is simply ludicrous - if the church fathers know anything of Marcion, they surely reported emphatically that Marcion expunged the supposed "interpolations" even to the point of leaving out the first chapters of Luke (if they existed then, this is still debateable). Why would not he treat the pastorals that way. In fact, Marcion could find a lot of material useful in the Pastorals.

Your fourth article is the same as the second - yeah, you've really read these, have you?

Also making me doubt this is that the next article contains only a brief paragraph about the authenticity at the beginning, and then goes into theological detail. I only skimmed this one over, so if there's more information that I haven't covered please let me know.

The sixth article is actually a blog by Rick Brannon - could you point to a specific post?

The seventh article cited is actually the blog archive for the eighth article, and uses some circular reasoning (his reason against pseudonomity is that Paul is still alive since when he was able to write the Pastorals, so they must be written by Paul, and since they were written by Paul, he must have been alive to write them, no evidence necessary) and a lot of rehashed arguments that I already debunke and even some ridiculously odd strawmen. If I may quote: "On the one hand, liberals classify the Prison Epistles (especially Ephesians & Colossians as deutero-Pauline because they are too much alike; on the other hand, they classify the Pastorals as deutero-Pauline because they are too like Romans or Galatians. The entire spectacle is clownish without being funny." :roll:

Acts is historical? Uh-huh, and so is the Odyssey. Next. Besides, your second article had to defend the Pastorals against Acts, so once again we see here some deliberate lies, nothing new from you though.

My irony meter just broke.

What a strawman.

The rest of your insulting post makes me further no response to you.