Ben C Smith

In a court of law all copies of manuscripts are hearsay. We have extremely few original autographs from antiquity.

History is the art of dealing with hearsay. Hearsay constitutes most of what we have left from antiquity.

Ben.

Rick Sumner

Again, your comments are about the quality of the evidence. That you need to address Paul as a source at all belies your statement: If he wasn't evidence, he wouldn't need to be discussed. He might not be good evidence, but that's another issue.

You're robbing Paul entirely of his context. As he makes clear in the proceeding passage, what's at issue with Paul are the questions of circumcision and table fellowship. What the "gospel" refers to is brought home still further by turning back to 1.9 after reading Paul's information on Barnabas. "Even if we. . ." bringing home the point that the "we" here indicates Barnabas, who, as Paul later discusses, appears to have lapsed.

But what is the different gospel Barnabas accepted in Jerusalem? There's no indication that it has anything to do with a Christ, spiritual or otherwise. The different gospel concerns what is required of the Galatian community. Paul is stressing that even if that comes from "an angel from heaven," much less a "super apostle," it is to be rejected.

That has nothing to do with any "gospel" as you're anachronistically using the term, and tells us nothing about what is "evidence" regarding Jesus in Paul's letters, because it has nothing to do with it.

Richard Bauckham had a nice article way back in JSNT 1.2 (1979) exploring, in particular, the Barnabas angle from this passage. But the Barnabas angle notwithstanding, your reading a meaning of "gospel" into Paul that isn't there.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Rick Sumner

I wasn't aware we were trying a crime.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

mountainman

Fraudulent misrepresentation of ancient history
using forgery and supreme imperial initiative.
Christianity as a fourth century top-down
emperor cult, which got the inside running
and eliminated the counter-evidence as best
as it could.

See Nestorius' "Bazaar of Heraclites".

Best wishes,



Pete Brown

Solitary Man

Which posters? I must have missed this.

What non-biased methodology do you use to determine if someone is an apologist or not?

So why are you throwing it all out? Do you discount everything Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, and other historians say when they mention the divine? Do you ignore the Holocaust survivor when he says that God helped him get through Auschwitz? Do you ignore the coins which state that Augustus is the son of God?

Tossing out an entire text because it mentions the divine is a very stupid methodology to me.

spin

I guess you'd listen to the nutter who comes into the police station without checking the data before using it. It's not about the quality of evidence at all, but establishing if there is any to start with. You assume your conclusion.

His context, at least regarding Galatians, is differing opinions on messianism. Too bad he didn't find support among the Palestinian messianists.

Just what you'd expect in the conflict between Paul's apparently newfound radicalism and more strongly Jewish traditions held by the Palestinian Jews.

When you retroject later significance of "gospel" into Paul's writing you may come up with some difficulties. The gospel is the message that Paul disseminated. It included a revelation of Jesus Christ, though none, or few, of the traditional Jewish practices. Barnabas's problem was over praxis, as is clearly stated in 2:11ff.

Anachronism? Ironic use, I'd say.

Pot looking for kettle.


spin

Solitary Man

That nutter is evidence of something. If a bunch of nutters independently said the same thing, it'd even be good evidence. You're abusing the notion of what evidence is.

Snipped the rest, as there isn't any substance worth correcting from you.

aa5874

But can you cite a legal proceeding, whether civil or criminal, where manuscripts of antiquity were used to determine the historicity of a figure of antiquity?

It is immaterial at this point to consider whether manuscripts are hearsay or not, since there appears to be neither heasray nor history of Jesus of Nazareth from any extant credible non-apologetic writings in the first century.

Philo of Alexandria wrote no anecdotes or hearsay about Jesus of Nazareth.

patcleaver

Josephus is irrelevant and Tacitus is irrelevant because first they have to prove that Mark is not fiction. If Mark is fiction then Jesus of Nazareth never existed. Matthew, Luke and John are based on Mark and Paul says he never met any Jesus.

There is lots of evidence that Mark is fiction and no evidence that it is not fiction so obviously Jesus of Nazareth never existed.

wordy

But the fiction Jesus is what works for the Christians that lives now so regardless if they had a fiction or something more substantiated back then the fiction is what we have now.

And that fiction works. That is the interesting thing for me. Could it not be a fiction from start. If it works now for us why would it not work for them too back then?

what they did was to take texts from what we name OT and they weaved fiction but named it revelation from God.