EarlDoherty

Then, Doug, you are wasting both our times if you insist on using some paragraph of mine that in itself made no mention of the "recent crucified man" business, when you know (or should) that that is what this whole discussion has been about, and you also know (or should) that I would agree with everything in it in the absence of any "recent crucified man" in the equation. (Just as I have in fact agreed with everything you said in that regard.) For you to do that is irresponsible.

You are impossible to work with. And this really is the last word I will have with you on the subject.

Earl Doherty

Jeffrey Gibson

Would you care to show us through an analysis of the instances that Danker and LSJ adduce that any of the authors whom they list as using the verb προτίθημι with the sense of "to display publicly" are saying that what they set forth is being manifested as a "revelation" or that they understood προτίθημι and φανερόω were synonyms?

Curious then why they didn't use προτίθημι in these instances, isn't it, if the fit is as great as you claim it is.

And I thought we were referring to what to God's action of setting forth something to show his righteousness, not Jesus' (self) manifestations.

Naturally?

Liddel, Scott, Jones were all committed to the HJ??. And they and Danker let this commitment get in the way of honest scholarship? Hmm. Do you have any proof for this? Can you show us where such alleged distortion of the linguistic evidence that they adduce actually gets in the way of what they write?

Who was it who said that a mark of someone who actually doesn't know what he's talking about is that person impugning the integrity of his opponents?

In any case, perhaps you could find us a clear example of the word being used in "secular" literature in terms of revelation. If "to reveal" in the sense of "to disclose", "to make known what was previously unknown -- esp. a heavenly secret" was indeed one of the senses that προτίθημι bore. After all, if it did do so, it should be easy to find instances in which it is so used.

Yes, and that's why I framed my question as I did to wit:

So I ask again: What is it within those "several verses" (i.e., 3:32ff --or in the whole of chapter 3 -- that justifies your claim that Paul is stating that God manifested his righteousness -- and especially the righteousness Paul says God showed ἐν τῷ νῦν καιρῷ when he set forth Jesus as ἱλαστήριον -- through Paul?


Why should anyone do this since you have not yet shown that we have any legitimate grounds for taking away from that passage the meaning that you say can (??) be taken away from it. I think the job is yours to show that the meaning of that you take away from that passage is not eisegesis.

Jeffrey

Ben C Smith

What amazing statement. Are we to believe that these classics scholars, when compiling definitions from the whole of ancient Greek literature, were motivated by this one, single instance of the verb as applied to Jesus in Romans 3.25 to ruthlessly eliminate reveal from their entire compilation of definitions for this verb??

Earl, what is your explanation for such an outrageous statement?

Ben.

Amaleq13

I suspect you are the only person reading this exchange on Paul's miracles who thinks so.

The argument clearly applies to all the possibilities I mentioned. Your exclusion of one is arbitrary and without merit. Carrier's article, alone, is sufficient to show this. There is simply no good reason to balk at the notion of people credulous enough to be convinced by the standard miracles of the day as also being willing to accept that what Paul preached involved a recently crucified man any more than a crucified man from the distant past or a heavenly messiah that never touched ground.

Miracles and Scripture are all Paul claims to have needed to obtain converts.

Carrier shows that this is an entirely credible claim.

Your refusal has no basis other than arbitrary personal incredulity.

How predictable. If all you are going to offer is an argument from personal incredulity, then I agree you will find me "impossible to work with" because it is clearly counter to reality.

EarlDoherty

Whose outrageous statement? Jeffrey’s or mine?

You guys are the "amazing" thing. You get so worked up. You are ready to twist everything I say or put the worst cast on it you can come up with, and then react as though I’d murdered your grandmothers. You treat this whole thing like a blood sport. All I can say is that ‘Thank God’ it doesn’t mean as much to me as it apparently does to you.

OK, let’s see what we’ve got here.

First of all, did I say anything about Liddel and Scott? Should I have been assumed to be referring to Liddel and Scott when I used the word “lexicons” when talking about the meaning of a word in the New Testament, especially making a remark that they are all committed to an HJ? There’s example number one of you guys going off the deep end. And probably knowing full well that I’d never have L&S in mind.

Second, could anything I have said honestly be taken as me saying that they “ruthlessly eliminate ‘reveal’ from their definitions for this verb”? That’s example number two of you sailing off into an apoplectic stratosphere over what I did say, again probably knowing full well that I didn’t intend that either.

We were talking about the meaning of one word in Romans 3:25. That was the context. The NASB used the definition of “to display publicly” for protithemi. Now I apologize if I gave both of you the wrong impression, but my intention was to say that one could understand “display publicly” in the sense of ‘to reveal’. I should have done what I just did, put those words in single quotes instead of double quotes. I never meant to claim that an official definition or translation of protithemi was “to reveal.” But if, as I would claim, the use of the verb in that verse could be understood in that fashion, then ‘reveal’ would be a legitimate way of putting it, in that particular case of protithemi. I don’t care if no one has ever done so before. And in the context of my larger case as to what Paul believes, and how he is presenting his Christ, the sense of reveal would be a legitimate way to put it. You and Jeffrey are, of course, free to disagree, but I’d hate to see either of you have a heart attack over it.

So when I said “no lexicon is going to supply an outright translation of ‘to reveal’,” I meant that no mainstream biblical scholar—who tend to be compilers of such lexicons—would ever understand Romans 3:25 in that way, and therefore would have no reason to supply, in their official list, any sense of “reveal” for protithemi, since definitions of any word are going to be compiled according to their perceived usages in the literature. And if the two of you hadn’t allowed yourselves, or chosen, to get so incensed and offended about it, you might—just might—have realized what I was getting at.

After all, you both know the sort of thing I, as a mythicist, do. It’s a part of the total package of interpreting the texts. You particularly, Ben, are constantly challenging me on the basis of, well this word or this phrase, or whatever, has a standard meaning of such-and-such, and it’s ridiculous or invalid to step outside that standard meaning. Mythicism, on the other hand, requires that we open our minds to understanding certain words and phrases, in certain contexts in the epistles, as being used by their writers in a different way, and not just constrict those words and phrases a priori as having to live inside the orthodox box, the same box as you do. You have encountered specific examples of that with me before. A good example is kata tas graphas in 1 Cor. 15:3 and 4. I take “according to the scriptures” in that case to have a meaning of (not a literal translation) ‘as the scriptures tell us, or as we find in the scriptures.’ (IOW, his gospel is taken from scripture.) Traditional translations invariably understand it as having the meaning ‘in fulfillment of the scriptures.’ No traditional scholar would ever take it my way, because, to use my phrase again, “they are all committed to an HJ, so that’s to be expected.”

This is in direct parallel to my understanding of protithemi in Romans 3:21. No commentator or lexicon is going to supply ‘reveal’ as a rendering of the meaning of the verb in that verse because they will never allow themselves to understand it that way. My understanding of it is determined not just by that passage itself, but by the cumulative picture I have put together through the study of the epistles as a whole, and bringing in their usage of other words, like the verb phaneroo, and what all of it signifies and the picture it creates. In the same way, me saying in my own words the import of 3:21 of Romans, as ‘God revealing his own righteousness,’ is dependent not only on my reading of the passage as a whole but of all the other things that Paul has said about God in relation to Jesus, and about him being the source of Paul’s own gospel.

Other examples would be the singular (Bauer would call it “extraordinary”) use of oikumene in Hebrews 1:6, where to restrict it to a meaning of “the inhabited earth” simply doesn’t fit the exclusively heavenly context in view, and other features of the epistle. Another, as we well know, is my understanding of kata sarka in certain contexts, and we’re all very familiar with the arguments used on both sides of that issue.

And maybe if you guys and others like you did not have such an immovable personal investment in the traditional understanding of these texts, if you weren’t so ready and eager to pound contrary interpretations into the ground, if you weren’t so pathologically inimical to the very thought of Jesus mythicism, if you had even a shred of the spirit of inquiry which is the hallmark of an open mind and a scientific approach, we might actually have a productive and mutually instructive exchange on the whole business.

But since none of that is possible for the two of you, along with certain others here, that is never going to happen.

Earl Doherty

Ben C Smith

!!

Danker and the LSJ were the only lexicons Jeffrey cited for you.

I give up. Your prose is incomprehensible to me.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

Earl is (rather, was) debating GDon and me here; neither of us is a fundamentalist. That was the point; he sometimes seems to be trying to score points against moderate or liberal viewpoints by attacking conservative viewpoints.

Do you mean the common sense that says Jesus the descendant of David means that Jesus was not even human?

Ben.

Amaleq13

Did you assume that all-inclusive terms like "no lexicon" or "they are all committed to an HJ" included LSJ just because it is a lexicon?

You're still thinking too much. Words don't mean what they mean, dude. You've got to escape your dogmatic attachment to what "the man" tells you words mean in those elitist "dictionaries" with their "definitions" that you worship.

If you think less, it all makes sense.


"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?" -- Alice

Ben C Smith

Then may it never make sense to me.

Ben.

Jeffrey Gibson

Now what was that from you about how "the poor man’s response" is to impugn the integrity and competence of one's opponents??

Jeffrey