jgibson000

Excuse me? This claim under discussion is something you brought up. If anyone hasn't stuck to the topic it's you.

JG

Nazaroo

Guilty as charged.

Please delete or split off the last 8 messages. Specifically, messages 25-32.

They are a waste of time to those interested in the topic.

Nazaroo

Back to Textual Criticism.

Turning to Petersen's article, he provides a summary of the evidence as he sees it in the first section:

Each of these points listed by Petersen has a force to it, and that force is based upon the evidence and its evaluation in relation to the question of authenticity/authorship.

For instance, we can take point one.

This would have a force, if we could be sure that its assertion were actually true. But the history of transmission and editing of a book is a separate issue entirely from how it originally left the hands of its author.

Unless we ascribe to a doctrine of "Divine Preservation", we must be prepared to assume and indeed expect that the book be modified by subsequent editing, error, and happenstance in the process of hand-transmission through multiple copying, reading, and preservation by mere human beings.


But once this is conceded, all evidences (manuscripts) of later states of the text or 'snapshots' of the process of transmission must be recognized as wholly secondary to the issue of the original state of the book and hence the authorship of any proposed or potential section of it.

At best these evidences can be used to 'deduce' previous states of the text, or parallel states of the text in a wide stream (or multiple streams) of transmission.

Diogenes the Cynic

"Spam?" You're referring to your own assertions posted in your own OP as "spam?"

Moderator hat is ON:

Your request to split the thread is denied. You made an assertion, you were asked to defend it, you were unable to do it, you retracted the assertion. It happens all the time in civil debates. We do not split the thread every time somebody retracts an assertion. The fact that the assertion was made in your OP means that the discussion cannot be said too have been off-topic, since the OP ostensibly defines the topic.

Since that particular issue has now been resolved, the thread can proceed with the other issues you've tried to raise. If you didn't want to discuss your contention about atheists, you shouldn't have made a de facto declaration of intent to do so by putting in your original post, but there is absolutely no reason to split that discussion off and there is no current need for moderator action in this thread. One thing that WILL result in such action will be any further attempt to DISCUSS moderation in this thread. If you are dissatisfied with my decision, please use the "request moderator action" function by clicking the red triangle in the lower lefthand corner of this post or start a thread in the forum entitled "Questions Problems and Complaints (or do both). Either action will result in an evaluation by the other mods and I will be removed from their decisions. This is all that's going to be said about the moderation of this thread within this thread.

Nazaroo

No. I was referring to the extension across 8 messages of a minor point as spam.

The logic in this SPAM section of the thread is faulty.

All opinions are, and usually must be expressed as assertions. Its up to the reader to recognize opinion and separate that from historical or scientific fact.

You have to be intelligent enough to separate them in order to challenge factual assertions that that can and should be supported by external evidence.

All articles will inevitably contain some opinion. And posters are free to challenge those opinions. But to go on and on over a minor point of opinion is a waste of other readers' time and discourteous.

jgibson000

Better yet, and so you don't get to portray yourself as a martyr unjustly labeled as a sinner for having "opinions", let's title it:

"How many other of Nazaroo's global and apodictic claims should be taken not as he presents them (i.e., as objective and well grounded truths), but as personal "opinions" that are as unsubstantiated as they are unsubstantiatable, that are wholly without merit, and that in the end do not warrant any attention whatsoever."


Then why did you post it in the first place? And are you now saying you were wrong to say what you said?

Really? Then why did you make it a grounding point for your claim that previous scholarship on the PA was rubbish and a new "objective" discussion of the PA was necessary?

JG

Nazaroo

I am abandoning this thread as unfruitful and time-wasting.
I have started a new thread on John 8:1-11, where I will only be discussing that.

Enjoy the thread you have hijacked.

jgibson000

So .. you wasted our time?

More importantly, didn't you previously say that one of the things that makes the TC-Alternate list so great was that the moderators there have decided that nothing posted there should ever get deleted?

Why would you reverse yourself now on this point?

JG

Nazaroo

No. As an adult (an unsubstantiated hypothesis), you wasted your own time.


Because of you.

Nazaroo

A good overview of the stream of transmission will give us a better picture of how and why the tiny sample-size of P66/P75/Aleph/B (4 MSS) is inadequate to represent the state of the text for the first four centuries:



From the chart we can see that these manuscripts occupy key positions along the 'fracture-line' between the budding Lectionary tradition and the mainstream manuscript tradition.

Although early, these manuscripts are not really representative of the wide base of transmission streams that later became the Byzantine, Latin Vulgate, and standardized Christian NT text.

So the 'sample' of two 2nd century Egyptian MSS and the two related 4th century uncials, has two basic problems associated with it:

(1) It is not a diverse enough sample of MSS to represent the actual variants and early text-types that must have existed.

(2) It is not a big enough sample of MSS to give us a clear picture of *any* text-type(s) across 3 centuries, or even 3 decades.