Roger Pearse

The text called the gospel of Barnabas was composed in either Italian or Spanish by a medieval renegade who converted to Islam and invented a "gospel" to show that Islam is true. It contains references to festivals of the church not invented until the Middle Ages.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

andrewcriddle

I can't see any reference in the Gospel of Barnabas to Judas being crucified upside down

Andrew Criddle

andrewcriddle

In their present form the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (including the Testament of Gad) are a Christian work. They are a dubious source for pre-Christian tradition.

Andrew Criddle

DCHindley

It is not generally agreed that the sources used by the Christian editor of the T12P (as preserved by Christians) was one or more Jewish "testaments"?

If you agree with that, do you then doubt the ability of critics to recover at least some of the Jewish sources via source or redaction criticism?

It is almost as if you are suggesting that there is no point to it if the source remains a reconstruction. The recent "anti-Q" movement in synoptic studies echos this sentiment, preferring to use one or more of the surviving synoptic gospels as secure sources, even while accepting the influence of totally hypothetical "oral tradition" in general (e.g., sondergut, "separate material", that material which is separated out, i.e. is unique to Matthew or Luke).

When Jacob Neusner, an ordained Rabbi of Conservative Judaism, makes an assertion that assumptions about pre-destruction Jewish tradition identified in Mishna etc are dubious, it still strikes me as if he is "erecting a wall around Torah," and simultaneously protecting Mishna, Talmud and midrash from the insult of being mined in support of research about the Christian faith.

Are moderate to moderate-conservative NT critics doing the same thing in favoring the preserved Christian literature? Do reconstructed sources somehow insult preserved Christian literature?

We do tend to favor the devil we know rather than the angel we don't.

DCH

Littlejohn

Hello Andrew!..

I'm debtor to you for the attention you paid to my post.

You're right; in the Gospel of Barnabas is not reported that Judas was crucified upside down.

By the Barnabas' Gospel:

The 'detail' about the crucifixion upside down, I added myself.

I have already discussed above, the 'Judas Iscariot' argument. If you give a look to the messagges that I already inserted here in the forum Infidels.org, then I am sure you will understand why I added it (crucified upside down)


Greetings


Littlejohn

__________

PS: I will bring this message in the thread "Was Jesus a historical caracter? ..." If you want to continue the discussion, you can do it there. Greetings.

.

andrewcriddle

I don't think it is generally agreed that a Jewish collection of twelve testaments underlies the present T12P.

Many scholars eg Charles have held this position others such as de Jonge have rejected it. IMVHO de Jonge is probably correct.

We have evidence from Qumran and Geniza fragments for an ancient "Testament of Levi" and a "Testament of Naphtali" but they have substantial differences from out T12P. Again IMVHO the Hebrew "Testament of Naphtali" is irrelevant to our T12P but the Aramaic "Testament of Levi" is ultimately a source of our T12P. In any case apart from the Testaments of Levi and Naphtali I am dubious about our ability to isolate Jewish sources in this work.
Neusner presents a carefully argued case that little of the material in the Mishnah etc can be securely dated before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. I don't think that this argument is a rationalization of his theology and some of the strongest attacks on Neusner have come from other Jewish scholars.

IMO Neusner is correct that most of the material in the Mishnah let alone later sources is substantially later than 70 CE. His work (whether or not you accept his conclusions) provides a basis for isolating the minority of material that has any real plausibility of being older than 70 CE.

Andrew Criddle

Littlejohn

Hi!

I responded to your message in the "Was Jesus a historical caracter?... " thread.


Greetings


Littlejohn

.

DCHindley

My apologies if I am frustrating you here. That is not my intention.

Yet doesn't the position that it is essentially a Christian work still have to acknowledge that it has a complicated compositional history that certainly drew from some Jewish sources? Per James Davila:
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/divinity.../testoftwelve/

Not everyone is pleased with Neusner. I am not alone here. There is a summary of critics on the Wiki page about him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_N...usner.27s_work

Hey, I really like his translation of the Mishna and have a couple of his books, but have been troubled by his variability on some issues, such as the path of oral tradition that ended up codified in the Mishna and later literature.

He has published literally hundreds of books (the Wiki bibliography for him is 56 pages long), all scrupulously researched, many times covering the same subjects in a way that is quite different than his earlier book(s), and it seems to me that this is not what you would expect from positions deduced from evidence alone. I understand tweaking, but this is something beyond tweak ...

DCH

spin

Neusner writes for a number of audiences: 1. introductory works; 2. general analyses for a semi-popular audience; 3. teaching works at uni level; 4. scholarly works; 5. reference works (translations, collections). There are probably more. He could write on the same issues at least four times. Then changing his ideas with the times he could do it all again.


spin

DCHindley

My direct experience was when I was looking into the subject of the transmission of oral tradition, back when everyone was making a big deal about Kenneth Bailey's theory that informal but controlled oral gospel tradition had been passed on in a manner similar to the way Rena Hogg described the Arab style haflat samar (campfire tradition/story recitations by village elders) her father John had experienced in a Christian village in rural Egypt prior to WW1.
http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/ar...on_bailey.html

I do not have the exact references at hand, but I had purchased and copied some books and articles on the subject, including the most recent reprint of Birger Gerhardsson's Memory and manuscript; oral tradition and written transmission in rabbinical Judaism and early Christianity (or via: amazon.co.uk), which has a preface by Jacob Neusner.

Neusner, who had originally vigorously opposed the idea Gerharddson had proposed, in the introductory notes is now ready to endorse Gerhardsson's idea of accurate transmission of oral tradition through a class of Christian sages. I took this to be an indication that he had convinced himself that by doing so he was erecting a wall around rabbinical interpretation that was high enough to protect it from any possible Christian contamination by interactions with Christian sages.

In Neusner's The Memorized Torah: The Mnemonic System of the Mishna (or via: amazon.co.uk) (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985), which clearly describes what he took to be the mnemonic techniques used to transmit the oral sources for the Mishna prior to it being written down, Neusner's position is apparently quite different that presented in Oral Tradition in Judaism (New York: Garland, 1987). Unfortunately I never laid hands on the latter and no one on Crosstalk2 could enlighten me in 2002. However, what Neusner says of orally transmitted tradition in the introduction to Gerhardsson's book (it only refers to his 1987 Oral Tradition in Judaism) is far different than what I found in the 1985 The Memorized Torah.

Another peculiarity of Neusner's introduction, and perhaps incidental to this question, is the way he really rips into his late mentor Morton Smith, revealing a LOT of latent anger towards the man of whom he once was the star protege.

I am reminded of Albert Schweitzer's comment about Bruno Bauer, who was himself a very able and meticulous critic, at least of the Gospels, but here referring to criticism of Pauline literature:

No attention was paid to Bauer, and in part he himself was responsible for the neglect. The bitterness and the [123] carelessness of his writing, the contradictions in which he becomes involved, the fantastic imagination which he allows to run riot, made it impossible for the few who read him to regard him seriously.

Nevertheless, in detached observations, and in some of the incidental ideas, he displays a critical acumen which has something great about it. Paul and His Interpreters, pp 122-123

We do tend to see our own reflections, don't we?

DCH