aa5874

To claim credibilty has no relevancy in determing intent and meaning must be naive.

If Galations 1.18 was interpolated unknown to the reader, how can the reader use passages about Titus which was written by another author to determine the meaning and intent when the reader has been duped.

You may have been duped by assuming "Paul" wrote Galations 1.18 and you may have been duped if you think he did not.

It is absurd to think you know, without any evidence, that Galations 1.18 is credible.

spamandham

This is where textual analysis comes in, to determine the likelihood of interpolations.

You live in a bizzare "it must be 100% credible or it is 100% fiction" world, never allowing for ambiguity.

aa5874

You are the one who tried to analyze Galations 1.18 on the premise that the information about Titus was credible. You are the one who used 2 Corinthians 2.13 and 8.23 on the basis that the passages were credible.

2 Cor 2.13 2 Cor 8.23 You MUST accept that 2 Cor 8.23 is credible if you want to claim that Titus is not the blood brother of "Paul".

Credibilty MUST matter.

You are relying on the credibilty of the passages in Galations 1.18, 2 Cor 2.13 and 8.23 and yet you blatantly deny it. You cannot properly analyze the passages unless you first accept their credibilty.

And it is completely false, extremely erroneous, that I have a view that "it must be 100% credible or it's 100% fiction".

It is my view, I repeat, please read carefully that nothing in the NT can be considered credible without the aid of external credible non-apologetic sources.

You have been posting here too long to be making erroneous statements about my views.

spamandham

There's no assumption of credibility in anything I wrote. Someone had to have written those portions of the text - it matters not who.

Everytime I think I know your positions, you surprise me with either something reasonable, or something ridiculously black and white.

teamonger

Nor have you refuted his view of Paul. Look, I grant you that Paul is the "rub" in the historicity equation; I'm just giving you a theory which could explain him. We know he was eager to show himself the equal of those "superlative apostles", so that alone could give him a motive for not writing to his converts, "Peter told me that Jesus was crucified", or "John reports that Jesus spoke these words at the last supper".

Yes, I must indeed bow to Wiki authority! :notworthy:

Peter Kirby used to have an excellent page on the TF, surveying the gamut of opinions. Hope it comes back someday.

And you seem overly dismissive of a simple textual reference.

A historicist has to explain why Paul is an odd duck; I have done my best.

Seems to me that a mythicist has explaining to do as well, especially concerning Mark. It won't do just to say "Mark fabricated a Jesus based on Paul", because there is far more to Mark. What motivated the details?

Why did Mark make Jesus a Galilean from an obscure town? How did Mark pick the names for Jesus' family? Why make his family and his local countrymen doubt him? Why have Jesus seem to deny that the Christ must be the son of David, when Paul plainly considered him thus? Why have Jesus teach not to worry about tomorrow? Why have him curse a fig tree for no good reason? What evidence is there that Mark reinvented the "pillars" as disciples, and invented other disciples including one to betray him? Did Mark write down fabricated stories he had heard, or did he come up with it all on his own? If Mark is so based on Paul, why doesn't Jesus plainly explain the crucifixion as a saving sacrifice? Why doesn't he speak about the gentile circumcision issue?

Appears that Mark is your odd duck: a fabricator of comparitively recent history, cleverly fitting an odd duck Jesus into the activities of known historical people, with many unclear motives as to the details. But for the historicist, Mark isn't odd at all. Much of his detail came from real history, based on second hand stories about a real crucified preacher, with a few decades of embellishment and glorification thrown in.

Whenever we see cult movements start up today, isn't there usually a charismatic person there at the beginning, who gets the ball rolling? So why not in the case of the early Christian cult?
t

teamonger

I've already discussed Sanders' criteria, which is shared by many other historians. You reject it. I'm not going to walk that talk a second time.

But Paul is not the only source, is he? And even his Jesus is better explained by a recent historical kernel.

I must admit not being familiar with "Ebion tradition". Recommended reading?

Paul was not the original Jesus apostle. Seems pretty clear he heard about a Jesus from predecessors whom he persecuted. Why would he persecute people if he knew nothing at all about their beliefs?

We both agree that oaks grow from seeds. Your seed is a human Paul, mine is a human Jesus.
t

teamonger

Yep, I'd heard there were Paul-mythers too. So from what small seed does your oak grow?
t

spin

I'm talking to you. Sanders is not going to be here to expound or defend his views. It's up to you to say what evidence you have, not what opinions of Sanders you like.

Our problem is that we have texts and that Paul's is the earliest we have. Historical methodology gives priority to Paul's. That's where we start for evidence. That's what I was asking you to deal with, so that we can maintain good procedure.

In other words, you won't even look at the material. Do you want me to give you book references that you won't look up? I pointed you to indications to answer your question, as you didn't know the fact that the TF was considered an interpolation for a few centuries.

You might look through the archives here. I've written a lot on it.

I use evidence. And I provided some for the Origen issue.

One of the problems in simplistic analyses such as those often provided by biblical scholars is that they assume such things as single writers of gospels. Gross assumption, causing probable impediments from understanding the writing processes. It should be obvious that these texts were the property of communities, house the community's Jesus traditions.

Traditions were developed expanded upon when someone brought a new snippet their way. The itinerant preacher is the equivalent of the bee to the community's honeypot. The Didache warns communities about abuse from such preachers, living off their kindness in return for his nuggests. Lucian of Samosata ridicules one such preacher.

Mark? You need to remove such impediments.

The town is a late addition to the gospel. It's derived from an epithet applied to Jesus, "nazarhnos", probably derived from the Hebrew NZYR, ie "Nazirite", someone who has made a vow and refrains from various things, someone such as John the Baptist, a modern model of Samson and Samuel, both of whose birth stories were also models for that of Jesus. If you check the archives I show how Nazara (see the Greek of Mt 4:13, Lk 4:16) is derived from nazarhnos, then eventually Nazareth becomes the functional form.

Umm, how did the writers of Paul's letters with Seneca get their ideas? How did someone choose the birthplace of Ebion? Another not so good question.

Perhaps because as Origen points out Jesus' message was destined for the benefit not of the Jews but the gentiles.

Separate the military messiah from Jesus.

Do you want to give slaves and peasants too much hope?

A simple show of ability?? Read it in context.

The person who wrote down those traditions probably got them from the whirlpool of traditions flying around. You make blunders with your simple evangelist theory. You don't know how much time passed between Paul and the first writing of the gospel.

Talking of fabrication will almost lead you to make bad assumptions. The community was a collector of traditions. The first writer put them on paper.

Signs are that Mark was written in Rome, for a Greek speaking Roman audience with a substrate of Latin. Circumcision wasn't particularly relevant.

You seem to like multiplying the levels of assumption. This tends to mystify rather than clarify your subject matter.

Modern common sense is no necessary analytical tool to get you into ancient literature. You need to deal with facts and evidence rather than generate more and more untestable problems for yourself, which you solve with this common sense.

Through all your questions were you hoping not to deal with the problems I've posed?

Where is your tangible historical evidence for this pseudo-messiah?

Why do you look before Paul when Paul makes it clear that he didn't get his stuff from anyone before him?

When the sorts of questions you ask could easily be applied to Ebion, why do you ignore his implications?

Paul.


spin

aa5874

No. Look at your post. You must have thought that 2 Cor 2.13 and 2 Cor 8.23 was credible or else you would not have used the passages in your analysis.

You assumed 2 Cor 2.13 and 2 Cor 8.23 were credible.

I cannot properly analyse your statement unless it is credible.

teamonger

So why do you think he draws a distinction here?

When Paul refers to "brother(s) of the Lord", he appears to be making a special distinction of some kind. If you want it to mean "peer of the Lord", that's fine... but if Jesus has a human James as peer, that would seem to argue for Jesus once being human as well.

So, Jesus arrived right on schedule in the distant past, and then nothing came of it until Paul and the apostles? Seems like a stretch to me. Why the unexplained delay?

I don't say Paul's theology "is dependent" on a recent Jesus, only that a recent Jesus makes more sense.

Paul wrote "the appointed time has grown very short; from now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none" (1 Cor 7:29). (I love to ask Christians if they follow Paul's advice).

Paul wrote of what will happen at the "last trumpet" in 1 Cor 15:52. He also mentions the "trumpet of God" in 1 Thess 4, associated with "the coming of the Lord" who will "descend from heaven". That sounds a lot like Mark 13 to me.

Other epistles such as 1 Peter, 1 John show a clear expectation of imminent end times. But they were incorrect, the end times did not occur. They were wrong, and apparently so was Jesus. This is a primary topic I raise with believers: if Jesus was wrong, maybe today's prophets of doom are too.

Not sure I understand your question. In the second encounter described in Gal 2, Paul plainly does argue with the "pillars". He claims he won the argument, but clearly it wasn't that simple, since the Galatians are now apparently following "another gospel" that says gentiles must be circumsized.

If Paul claimed he got a revelation from Jesus, how would he be obviously lying in Galatians? Who could prove him wrong? When Paul gets new ideas which differ from other apostles, he calls it revelation. But sometimes he agrees with his fellow apostles, as he does in 1 Cor in general.

Perhaps it was both: he used "revelation" as argument with the pillars, then informed the Galatians about that later. But we can't know exactly what form his argument took. I suspect the promise of bringing back money from converts was involved as well ("remember the poor").

Not really. If Paul was spinning crucifixion as a good thing, I would expect ambiguity. He's a theologian, after all.

I'm not qualified to judge interpolations, especially when scholars disagree about them.

Come on now. When the "rulers of this age" ... "crucified the Lord of glory" (1 Cor 2:8), Paul thinks the authorities humbled some celestial being?

Then you have quite an imagination. That Mark's Jesus is predicting the imminent end of days is plain as day. "Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power."

I haven't finished reading him, but so far I'm not persuaded by his arm-waving about genre.
t