Adam

spin
You're just proving again you have nothing. If what you say is true, why can no one here refer to anyone here or elsewhere who refutes either me or my sources? (No one has ever said anything bad about Howard Teeple except scholars who later valued him highly (Robert Kysar and Dwight Moody Smith).)

Even scholars who don't believe we have eyewitness records acknowledge it's possible, even Dale Allison the top HJ writer. The overall discussion has been thrown off track by Bauckham's overly optimistic view of how veridical eyewitnesses are. I just present the case for the eyewitnesses, who they are and when they wrote, but how accurate they are I don't necessarily assess (except for the Passion Narrative as first written by John Mark and how untrustworthy the Johannine Discourses written by Nicodemus for a court case against Jesus)

mountainman

Start at the beginning, keep it simple, use examples.

Use a diagramatic presentation if necessary.

Here is an example. You may or may not find it useful.

spin

Actually, I demonstrated a few times over that you had nothing when you introduced your conjectures.

This just demonstrates that you consistently fail to understand my position. The onus is always on the propounder to demonstrate the substantive case. If you propose that there's a HJ then you need to demonstrate the fact. If you propose that you there were specific sources discernible within the gospels, you need to demonstrate that. If you propose that there are eye witlesses, then you have to do more than trade in opinions.

You have zip, have always had zip and have demonstrated that you won't have more than zip. I don't have to have anything more than nothing. I'm not propounding anything in this discussion. You are and you do. Acknowledgements of possibilities are nothing. But they seem to be the key card in your house of cards.

Adam

Mythicism in the sense of asserting that there was no historical Jesus is falsifiable. The onus is on mythicists to prove there is no evidence for HJ. I have shown there is evidence for HJ in the form of written eyewitness records. Neither you nor anyone else can refute that.

Not entirely irrelevant, but I entered into this fray in reaction against New Atheists coming into Theology Web and asserting that there were no eyewitness records of Jesus. I refuted that and worked up the number of eyewitness records to seven. They made the initial assertion with the burden of proof on them, and I refuted them. Their only defense has been the same as yours, to deny that evidence is evidence.

You still won't state which of my theses you have refuted nor in which posts you did. You avoided any substantive reply to my Post #47.

spin

This is misguided rubbish. Forget mythicism for the moment. It is a red herring. We have inherited a tradition that Jesus was real therefore an actor in the past. For him to be historical, we need evidence. That has nothing to do with mythicism. That is scholarly responsibility.

You don't have the means to refute it. You can only respond that they are going beyond the evidence, just as you are by asserting the contrary.

Stop joking. There is no substance in your post #47 to give a substantive reply to. You don't seem to have any idea what evidence is. This has always been the complaint against your stuff. You weave a web of conjecture peppered with lists of numbers and appeals to authority and wonder why you have curried no interest in your efforts. Sad. Very sad.

Adam

We have seen your method here and on my Gospel Eyewitnesses to simply deny my assertions after repeating them one-by-one. We can understand your reticence to enter into such detail again, but no one else has stepped up above Shesh's level, so my theses remain unaddressed here. Even your painstaking attack on my subsidiary thesis has failed, as my defence against your denial of six layers in gMark led me into recognizing a seventh layer.

Your attempt to move the goal posts on mythicism cannot stand, because no one here is addressing my minimalist thesis that there are four independent eyewitnesses that are not larded with supernaturalism that atheists could dismiss as apologetic sources. Any eyewitness to Jesus proves existence, no matter how inaccurate the testimony might be. Like the New Atheists what I hear here is that evidence is not evidence. I presented clear evidence that the source Passion Narrative is so simple it would not have been composed later and that the Johannine Discourse source shows changes in perspective that show it was composed while Jesus was still preaching. (And Dale Allison has refuted the Jesus Seminar position that Jesus did not say things about his own elevated status, though I admit that few critical scholars, not even Allison, are willing to acknowledge historicity for more than the Synoptics.) q1 and L seem like simple records of what Jesus said without later theological innovations of early Christianity.

I don't recall appealing to authority until after you complained that I did not appeal to authorities. Or are you referring to footnoting as if no one else had this bad habit?

Again we see that you have nothing except to say that I have nothing. That's nothing. Or less than nothing, as you are willing to sacrifice anything MJ adherents might say on behalf of your agnostic position regarding MJ vs. HJ. Calling mythicism a red herring admits that I have accomplished something here. Now you're in No Man's Land, needing to prove your case against both MJ and HJ. My positions defeats MJ, but you can't allow it to support HJ.

Grog

--snip mind numbing mental masturbation--

Whatever.

So...I present an example of scholars summarizing the evidence to support a consensus theory and you criticize it as merely scholars summarizing the evidence to support a consensus theory.

That prompts you to write these word wall posts?

Wow...

From this discussion, it's apparent that your main goal is foist your on intellectual superiority, apparently inherited from your grandfather, on the rest of us.

Give it a rest.

Adam

Parenthetically, and not to be confused with my above response to spin, I had been assuming that multiple scholars had already recognized my analysis of the Johannine Discourses (Teeple's G and E) as notes accumulated towards the Trial of Jesus. Instead I find that they are describing this part of gJohn as testimony favoring Jesus as if this were going to be presented at a trial. They view the Discourses as witnessing for Jesus, whereas I recognize the bulk of the earlier Discourses as accumulated evidence against Jesus. Is this another case of an original idea I had that has still not entered scholarly discussion?

Too bad LOM is on self-ban. He might know this--when a paper is peer-reviewed and accepted for publication, but is not published, does it become available for reference by scholars associated with that journal? Perhaps it is destroyed so that there will not be questions in the future of plagiarism? In any case my above idea did not get anywhere, not that I would have expected it to be popular at Biblical Theology Bulletin in 1980 when eyewitnesses or named authors were not popular subjects.

spin

That was just the latter phase of my analysis of your stuff. It was an effort to show that you had not a skerrick of evidence, merely a pile of assertions and assertions based on other assertions.

You still have no idea what evidence is needed to support your claims.

Until you can get yourself out of that state, you'll understand that I've done everything available to help you understand your predicament, so there's nothing more that need be said. You need to dig yourself out of your commitments.

Adam

I can only assume that you are assuming Form Criticism still prevails as the consensus, even though it was refuted several decades ago. Perhaps a thread should be started on the topic, "Who Killed Form Criticism and When?" I may not participate, as I was naive enough to assume that it was still considered viable. I proceeded with my theses regardless, due to being contrarian and aggressive in scholarly matters.

On second thought, people still into the Form Criticism paradigm would be disproportionately active on FRDB. Maybe no one here knows that it's dead.