Freethought & Rationalism Archive

PhilosopherJay · 04-18-2006, 09:23 AM

Hi Newton's Cat,

One of the conclusions in "the Evolution of Christs and Christianities" is that the original gospel was a political/satyrical play written by a woman named Mary. The book gives a likely date of 46 CE for the play. However, the evidence for this is by no means conclusive. I do consider it a possibility that it could have been written in the Second century.

Why do you think that Simon of Cyrene refers to Simon Bar Kochbar?

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

Quote:

Originally Posted by Newton's Cat

Mark 15,13-29

And they cried out again: Crucify him!
But Pilate said: What evil has he done?
And they cried out more: Crucify him!
So Pilate, resolving to do something sufficient to satisfy the crowd, released Barabbas to them and sent Jesus to be crucified.
Then the soldiers led Jesus "into" (context: "out of sight") his palace, and the whole cohort were gathered and they put a purple robe on him and hailed him as King of the Jews.
And they impress into service as a messenger (aggareuousin) a certain passer-by, Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus (this seems to be a reference to Simon bar Kochbar and his sons, c. 130 ad, the leaders of the revolt against the Romans), and they brought him to Golgotha (which is called 'The place of a skull' - a graveyard? Some reference to a place associated with Simon bar Kochbar?) and they gave him wine spiced with myrrh (embalming fluid - a soporific). Now it was the third hour (after sunset) and they crucified him, placing a sign on him which read: The King of the Jews.

Next morning:

And those passing by blasphemed him, wagging their heads and saying ...

(What they saw was a broken and bloodied body on the cross with a sign that read 'King of the Jews')

All I've done is remove the interpolations.

Despite the efforts of whoever altered the text the context of several of the original Greek words doesn't fit with what we have today - but makes perfect sense when the interpolations are removed.

The original text was written, I think, around 130 ad - the storyline was set a 100 years earlier. The earliest convincingly provable evidence for the existence of Christians is in the late 130s ad. It seems that the alteration of the original story was done within a few years of it being written.

I think that the original story was written to be performed as a political/satirical play - it was written for an intellectual audience and would have been understandable only to people with knowledge of current events.

This is entirely the product of my own observations - but others have, throughout history, "seen" what I "see" in the text (including Isaac Newton!) - that the text has been deliberately "corrupted" by very cunning hands.

TedM · 04-18-2006, 10:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by PhilosopherJay

Why do you think that Simon of Cyrene refers to Simon Bar Kochbar?

We've already discussed this stuff with Newton's Cat here: http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...er#post3169529

While the link of the name Simon to Rufus is interesting, I don't see anything to link him to another Alexander. Plus the name Simon was VERY common. Newton's Cat enjoys finding anagrams (ie hidden messages) in the texts. That's IMO even more far-fetched than some of the proposed chiasms of Michael and others.

I'm willing to consider links that have strong evidence, but I don't see that here.

ted

TedM · 04-18-2006, 10:48 AM

I was just searching around to find a list of names found on Jewish Ossuary's, and to my surprise ran across this article, which I highly doubt, but DIRECTLY relates to what is being discussed here:

Quote:

http://www.cornerstonesc.org/20030803.pdf
THE CROSS BEARER
Twentieth in a series of Communion meditations, Mark's Story of Passion, by Dr. Rick Perrin from Mark 15:16-22
“They pressed into service a passer-by coming from the country, Simon of Cyrene (the father of Alexander and Rufus), to bear His cross.” Mark 15:21
.......In 1941 the renowned Israeli archeologist Eleazer Sukenik discovered a first century Jewish tomb in the Kidron Valley east of Jerusalem, that had not been opened since the Romans destroyed the city in 70 AD. Sukenik and his assistants shoveled away centuries of dirt and removed the partly broken closing stone that covered the tomb entrance --a stone like the one that sealed Jesus' tomb. Inside the single chamber he found 11 ossuaries or bone
boxes. The bones were reinterred according to Jewish law, and the ossuaries were removed for close examination. Nine of the ossuaries had names scratched on them, and of these, two were of great significance. One of them read, “Sara, daughter of Simon of Ptolemais.” Ptolemais was one of a ring of five cities, of which the largest was Cyrene, the capital of the Roman province of Cyrenaica in North Africa, in present day Libya,
about 200 miles west of the border with Egypt. The second ossuary was inscribed, “Alexander son of Simon.” Simon was one of the most common Jewish names in the first century, but the name Alexander is very rare. Put this together with the family's home in the area of Cyrene, and we have almost positive identification of whose family tomb this was. It was an astounding find! But the ossuaries were packed into a government warehouse where they disappeared for decades. Recently, somebody found
them again.

Does anyone know anything about this alleged find?

ted

blastula · 04-18-2006, 10:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Newton's Cat

The Gospel of Mark, as we have it today, is the product of a cunning and calculated alteration of an original text.

Has it been determined that there is an outside source to back up the claims listed?

Phlox Pyros · 04-18-2006, 11:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vorkosigan

Phlox, recent redating places p52 after 150 and probably later. It is very compatible with Mark at 130 (which is where I happen to locate Mark).

I believe that is the opinion of one liberal scholar (can't remember his name at the moment...by the way, what is his experience in palaeography?). I would say that the majority still render it as 125 A.D. give or take 25 years. In fact, a conservative scholar by the name of Phillip Comfort argues from palaeography that it is earlier. I think 125 A.D. is a comfortable date for moderate scholars, not too early and not too late.

Again, since John's theology took time to develop and was already in place in 125 A.D., it is on the verge of radical to state that Mark, the least theologically developed, dates to 130 A.D..

Roger Pearse · 04-18-2006, 12:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Phlox Pyros

I believe that is the opinion of one liberal scholar ...

There is a mention in Metzger on the NT to this effect, I think. Attempts to date NT things late are nothing new, of course.

There was also a paper which wanted to do the same by debunking paleography, iirc -- which I didn't think was much of an argument!

But I do have some vague memory of a genuine study that would have moved it later...

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Julian · 04-18-2006, 12:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Phlox Pyros

I believe that is the opinion of one liberal scholar (can't remember his name at the moment...by the way, what is his experience in palaeography?). I would say that the majority still render it as 125 A.D. give or take 25 years. In fact, a conservative scholar by the name of Phillip Comfort argues from palaeography that it is earlier. I think 125 A.D. is a comfortable date for moderate scholars, not too early and not too late.

Again, since John's theology took time to develop and was already in place in 125 A.D., it is on the verge of radical to state that Mark, the least theologically developed, dates to 130 A.D..

Check this out and make sure to follow the various links, they are all pretty short: http://www.ntgateway.com/weblog/2005...te-of-p52.html

Julian

PhilosopherJay · 04-18-2006, 01:20 PM

Hi Phlox,

The P52 fragment is the size of a credit card and contains less than 14 complete words on it. We cannot conclude that it contains the gospel of John. It is possible that p52 represents an earlier gospel text that the present gospel of John copied from.

The earlier dating by the "conservative" Christian scholar Thiede, who is apparently a novice in paleography, has been discredited for many years now.

Here is information from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rylands...ry_Papyrus_P52

Although Rylands P52 is generally accepted as the earliest extant New Testament canonical record (see 7Q5 for an alternate candidate), the dating of the papyrus is by no means the subject of consensus among critical scholars. The style of the script is strongly Hadrian, which would suggest a date somewhere between 125 and 160 CE. But the difficulty of fixing the date of a fragment based solely on paleographic evidence allows for a range of dates that extends from before 100 CE to well into the second half of the 2nd century.

The original translation of the work was not done until 1934 by C.H. Roberts, who published the essay “An Unpublished Fragment of the Fourth Gospel in the John Rylands Library” in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library XX, 1936, pp 45-55. Roberts found comparator hands in papyri then dated between 50 CE and 150 CE, with the closest match of Hadrianic date. Since the contents could scarcely have been written before circa 100 CE, he proposed a date of the first half of the second century. Over the 70 years since Roberts' essay, the estimated ages of his particular comparator hands have been revised (in common most other undated antique papyri) towards dates a couple of decades older; while other comparator hands have subsequently been discovered with possible dates ranging into the second half of the second century.

Skepticism about the date (not about the fragment's authenticity) is based on two issues. First, no other scrap of Greek has ever been so narrowly dated based on the handwriting alone, without the support of textual evidence. Secondly, in common with every other surviving early Gospel manuscript, this fragment is not from a scroll but from a codex; a bound book not a roll. If it dates to the first half of the second century, this fragment would be an uncharacteristically early example of a codex (around 90 CE, Martial describes the codex form as then new to Rome). Nevertheless, while some experts in paleography have disputed the dating, it is agreed that this piece of papyrus is the earliest text for any portion of the New Testament. Its closest rival in date is the Egerton Gospel, a late-second-century fragment of a codex that records a gospel not identical to any of the canonical four, but which has closer parallels to John than with the synoptic gospels; and whose hand employs letter forms consistently rather later than those of P52. Thus the Egerton Gospel may represent a less-developed example of the Johannine gospel tradition (though in a manuscript of slightly later date).

In recent years the early date favoured by many New Testament scholars has been challenged by A. Schmidt, who favours a date in the later second century. Both earlier and later dating tendancies have been criticised by Brent Nongbri in his essay "The Use and Abuse of P52: Papyrological Pitfalls in the Dating of the Fourth Gospel" (Harvard Theological Review 98 [2005], page 48). In his conclusion Nongbri states:

"What emerges from this survey is nothing surprising to papyrologists: paleography is not the most effective method for dating texts, particularly those written in a literary hand. Roberts himself noted this point in his edition of P52. The real problem is the way scholars of the New Testament have used and abused papyrological evidence. I have not radically revised Roberts's work. I have not provided any third-century documentary papyri that are absolute "dead ringers" for the handwriting of P52, and even had I done so, that would not force us to date P52 at some exact point in the third century. Paleographic evidence does not work that way. What I have done is to show that any serious consideration of the window of possible dates for P52 must include dates in the later second and early third centuries. Thus, P52 cannot be used as evidence to silence other debates about the existence (or non-existence) of the Gospel of John in the first half of the second century. Only a papyrus containing an explicit date or one found in a clear archaeological stratigraphic context could do the work scholars want P52 to do. As it stands now, the papyrological evidence should take a second place to other forms of evidence in addressing debates about the dating of the Fourth Gospel."

Udo Schnelle writes on the palaeographic dating: "Cf. A. Schmidt, 'Zwei Ammerkungen zu P. Ryl. III 457,' APF 35 (1989) 11-12, who dates P52 in the period around 170 AD (+/- 25) on the basis of a comparison with P Chester Beatty X, and thus excludes an early dating around ca. 125 for P52! The result for the dating of p52 is that the 125 AD period, usually given with extraordinary certitude, must now be stated with some doubt. One must at least allow a margin of 25 years, that one could think of a dating around 150." (The History and Theology of the New Testament Writings, p. 477 n. 119)

While I personally consider it quite possible that the gospel of John comes from around 60 CE, I don't believe that P52 can be used to dismiss any theory that would put it at any time up to 200.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

Quote:

Originally Posted by Phlox Pyros

I believe that is the opinion of one liberal scholar (can't remember his name at the moment...by the way, what is his experience in palaeography?). I would say that the majority still render it as 125 A.D. give or take 25 years. In fact, a conservative scholar by the name of Phillip Comfort argues from palaeography that it is earlier. I think 125 A.D. is a comfortable date for moderate scholars, not too early and not too late.

Again, since John's theology took time to develop and was already in place in 125 A.D., it is on the verge of radical to state that Mark, the least theologically developed, dates to 130 A.D..

Gamera · 04-18-2006, 01:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Phlox Pyros

Many, here, are familiar with the actual "corruptions" in the Biblical text. Can you point out the "corruptions" you are referring to in a modern critical edition, and give evidence for why you think they should be wholly removed? Thanks.

By the way, p52 - a papyrus with the gospel of the book of John dates back to approximately 125 A.D. Since it is supposedly the most theologically developed of the gospels, it would be very very hard to imagine Mark dating as late as 130 A.D.

Of further interest is the role of Paul in all this. Although the actual mss of the letters are much later, it's pretty settled that Paul is writing around 55 ad, and so is a contemporary of at least some of the witnesses. Wilson and other "anti-Paulines", like Crossant, make a point that if this is so Paul's writings antedate the gospel writers, and presumably influenced the gospels. Wilson et al, see this influence as pernicious (they claim he "invented" Christianity by turning an itenerant preacher called Jesus into the messiah). But if Paul's writings are authentic and are the earliest Christian writings, they have the authority of priority.

I mention this only because if so, then the "reconstructed" Mark gospel posited by this thread would be doubtful, an attempt to reconstruct an pre-Pauline narrative of Jesus, which never existed, since Paul's narrative has priority.

Phlox Pyros · 04-18-2006, 03:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Julian

Check this out and make sure to follow the various links, they are all pretty short: http://www.ntgateway.com/weblog/2005...te-of-p52.html

Thanks. Nogbi. That was the name I was trying to remember. Anyone know anything about him? Where was he educated and how might that have affected his views?

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