Roger Pearse

No hassle: I thought it best to say that I was struggling a bit.

I don't really understand the point at issue, I think. Why should we not have copies from the 2nd century but not the 1st? There were, after all, probably rather few copies in the first few years after composition. We do have some remains of ancient literary texts; why should we worry that they don't come from the same century as composition. (I.e. I don't think that I understand your problem with this).

I'm not sure I understand here either, but let's unpack it.

Menander was a poet of the period of Alexander the great, ca. 320 BC. His works were lost, but papyrus copies of some of them have been discovered in modern times. The so-called "Cairo codex" is perhaps fifth century AD. The Bodmer papyrus XXV-IV-XXVI is apparently from the second half of the third century AD. A palimpsest containing 4th century parchment leaves from a copy of Menander also exists.

So we have works composed ca. 320 BC, extant in fragmentary copies from the 4th century AD onwards; that is, 7 centuries after composition. That seems natural to me, and indeed rather earlier copies than one might expect (but that's because they are papyri).

Unfortunately I can't follow the logic above as to why this shows that texts extant in papyri of the 2nd century AD must therefore have been composed in the 2nd century AD. Surely it demonstrates the opposite? -- that, from the papyrus remains of these texts, if we knew nothing better, we could infer that they were composed anything up to 7 centuries earlier? (confused)

The Bodmer collection of papyri contains quite a number of different papyri. I read your comment above as referring to the Menander; if it refers to something else, you will have to say what. I only query this because you then refer to the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are not to do with Menander.

I'm sorry: I was unclear here and wrote too briefly. What I should have said is "The author of the paper which published the papyrus in 1936 dates it to 125 AD, plus or minus 25 years."

Just a technical note: binding took place after writing of a codex, as a rule. Ancient bindings were more like loose-leaf binders, and could be -- and were -- unpicked so extra pages could be added, or leaves removed. Having the folios loose meant that several copyists could be let loose on a single book. Modern bindings are far tighter than any medieval binding that I have ever seen. The latter are made in such a way that they can be undone again.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Kapyong

Good ol' P52.

Variously dated to :
* 2nd C. (100-199)
* early 2nd C. (100-150)
* 145 - 195
or even later.

But everybody seems to have their own preferred dating - depending on whether they are an HJer or not :-)


K.

andrewcriddle

Hi Roger

Maybe you mean this post Oldest Gospels

Andrew Criddle

Roger Pearse

It was - thank you! And I had misremembered the argument, I see, but not the conclusion moving things somewhat to the right.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

spin

Adam , you stopped dialoguing when you decided to take the cheap way out of the Latinism problem. You cannot be hypocritical here and play the "it isn't me but you" game. I do agree that you have wasted enough FRDB bandwidth.

Wild assertions? What wild assertions? This just appears to be a wild assertion to me with a tinge of shifting the burden.

When you feel like examining the Latinism issue at length then you might gain a little credibility, but as things stand you've failed to impress merely insisting on the rightness of your layers, layers that get crossed by some of the chiasms in Mark, suggesting in itself you've got something wrong.

Adam

It didn't work for Joe Atwill, but I'll say as he did (without repeating the questions, you look them up in my Post #295), answer my questions. Your whole post #294 is loaded with wild assertins. Let's see some support for any of it, like your expertise in Aramaic.
And again, I need to know what I'm supposed to refute, so state whether there was just one version of gMark. Add in what the date was for whatever version(s). No sense me shooting at a moving target. Let's establish where the goal posts are before you move them (as I expect is your standard technique).
If you fail to give an honest reply, I'll likely believe that Roger is telling me that I should put you on ignore. Your detail listing of Latinisms gives you credibility, but regarding your knowledge of facts, not your fairness nor logical faculties. The chiasms in Mark give Vorkosigan considerable credibility, but you and he need to engage further to explain how and why my replies don't satisfactorily defend my thesis of six layers in Mark. (Which itself was peripheral to my original thesis that seven men wrote eyewitness records about Jesus. The add-on thesis is that an eighth man wrote about Jesus making an improper point about Jesus's apocalypticism. Casey and Crossley go so far as to say Mark 13 was a product of the very early church, but not of Jesus.) You say that I have not proven my point, but you go farther to say that you can prove the opposite. So say precisely your contradictory thesis and support it. Do not just refuse to answer as in your #295. Ball is in your court.

bleubird

Again,as a long time lurker,some time reader of Bible study.
How can we know anything about what the bible says let alone what what it means if they can never agree on the redact?

spin

Your apparent fascination with Joe Atwill seems misplaced. Do you support such a strange idea? I'd doubt that. It just seems like some retro rhetoric on your part.

Your questions included a facetious bout of silliness over criticism of Casey. If you want to defend Casey's position and argue it I'll happily respond, but as is you don't know what his arguments are and cannot yet evaluate them. I'll criticize you when you can present the material.

However, your assertions in #295 were never substantiated. You said, "In light of the chiasms in the later Greek edition, and the Latinisms yet later," There are signs of chiasms in your second and third strata, so you can scrap they claim about later Greek edition there and you have failed dismally to do anything other than make bald claims about the Latinisms, ie your comments have been worthless. You should either defend what you said or retract them as waste of effort.

You don't get to state what I'm supposed to think. I pointed to the fact that Latinisms can be found in various of your layers, which undercuts the veracity of the layers, at least as you have presented them. You have merely claimed that the widespread Latin influence is later, without any justification. The two chiasms I pointed out were across layers, which brings into question the divisions you have made. You are supposed to either defend your layers meaningfully against the evidence of the Latinisms and the chiasms or rethink your layers.

Or shooting at the wrong target. You're just looking for somewhere to shift the burden, but you are the one who has proposed these layers I've been examining. That's where we are focused. That's what the Latinisms are brought to bear on, as is the case with the chiasms. Your divisions break the chiasms and leave the stories without information that highlight the chiasms.

The goal posts are clear. You have set up a bunch of layers that you claim represent the development of the gospel and I have provided what I consider falsification of your hypothesis.

Watch it with your aspersions regarding honesty that will probably cause you to break the rules of the forum.

That's your choice. I have a number of people on ignore, people who don't interact with what is said to them.

I think you are just flirting with ad hominem.

The evidence is relatively plain. Sections of Mark feature structures that cross your layer lines I cited two chiasms that do so. You are supposed to explain exactly how these chiasms don't actually break your layers. To do so, you need to look at the evidence and explain how your layers work with the data from the chiasms. You can't just wave the data away with a generalization as you have. It just shows that you have failed to grasp the task you have to perform.

That the layers were written by eye witnesses is totally unfalsifiable, so that information is without value. Assuming your layer system, you obviously cannot verify that they were eye witnesses, but when there is no way to show that your claim could be false then your claim is without merit. (If this is not clear to you, you need to check out falsifiability (see, eg, Falsifiability.)

They can say whatever they like, but I can respond that they feature a long evolution which includes the christianization of Jewish apocalyptic elements with a brand of christianity that has come into contact with Mediterranean realms (standing before kings and governors) and features the christian misuse of Dan 7:14's "one like a son of man", which includes the misunderstanding of Daniel's one like a son of man (who is coming on the clouds into heaven), transforming the scene into "the son of man" who is coming to earth on the clouds, reversing the movement and not comprehending the phrase "one like a son of man". The text took some time to be so abused in the process of its christianization. This suggests a later development than earlier.

I have apparently provided two separate methods of falsifying your hypothesis.

I don't need a contrary thesis. You have presented a thesis that doesn't seem to work. That's the problem.

Roger Pearse

I'll have a go at responding, although the way you phrase this suggests that this is not a question.

It sounds as if you are asking how we can know what the text of the New Testament actually says, given that we don't have photocopies of the autographs (and for letters, there may never have been a single autograph, if they were dictated to a number of scribes so several copies could be sent, as Cicero did). The oldest copies that we have all disagree in small details, as hand-copying texts is inherently a process that breeds typos.

I would respond that this is not a question about the bible. It is a question about every book written prior to the invention of the photocopier; "do we actually have the text"?

Whatever objection is being made here applies equally -- or even more strongly -- to every book written in antiquity, and indeed right up to modern times. But if so, we have two choices; to treat these as inevitable typos, of no significance; or else to say, blandly "we don't have any books written before 1950".

The latter choice seems insane to me, and I don't believe ANYONE actually works on that basis; they merely seek to raise an issue affecting all books, and use it selectively to dispose of particular books. So we are left with the former option. This was, indeed, how the ancients approached the issue themselves.

One related issue: often, lurking in the background here, from someone with a fundamentalist education who has abandoned it, is a *theological* question: how can we possible have the scripture, every iota etc, unless we have a photocopy of the autograph. That is not a historical question, however. I would only comment that it didn't bother the ancients, since to make the demand that scripture must be a photocopy of the autograph would mean that no scripture could possibly exist. In short this argument is (a) not relevant to a historical question and (b) rather strange, even in theological terms. I mention it only because I know that some people get confused at this point.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

aa5874

Your claim is UTTERLY erroneous.

There is simply ZERO corroboration from antiquity for Jesus, the disciples and Paul in any well known non-apologetic source dealing with the period from c 6 BCE- c 70 CE.

We have NOTHING, ZERO, NIL and NAUGHT to show that Jesus, the disciples, Paul, the Jesus stories and the Pauline writings had any influence at all on any writers like Philo, Josephus, Tacitus, and Suetonius who wrote about events BEFORE the Fall of the Temple.

We see that the Jesus story had INFLUENCE on 2nd century non-apologetic writers like Lucian of Samosata in the the "Death of Peregrine" and Celsus in "True Discourse" as claimed in Origen's "Against Celsus".

We also see that that Acts of the Apostles and the PAULINE writings had ZERO, NIL, NONE, NAUGHT influence on gMatthew, gMark, the 2nd century writings of Justin Martyr and also "Against Heresies" 2.22 where it is claimed John the disciple and other disciples did preach that Jesus was crucified at about 50 years old.

The abundance of evidence do suggest that the Jesus stories including the Pauline writings are ALL AFTER the Fall of the Jewish Temple.