thief of fire

Aren't you advocating a conspiracy theory when yoiu write in another thread.

There must have been a conspiracy to destroy every original copy of Mark. One person who allegedly according to you changed the text for some unexplained reason, must have needed help to find and destroy every original copy.

Vorkosigan

Yes, that's the only possible way it could have happened. Why didn't I think of that? There I was, imagining that an editor had altered it and then other scribes brought their manuscripts into conformity over time with the copy that was different, or that there were only a couple of small manuscript lines and one simply died out, or that the editing took place after it was written but before it was distributed. I guess I simply lacked the stern logic necessary to leap from "an editor altered the text" to "every competing copy was deliberately destroyed!" Lucky you posted to save me!

Vorkosigan

thief of fire

We have no evidence because they destroyed it? A conspiracy theory


This is not what you proposed though.


Like the Womens Weekly maybe. Are you serious?


You lack an explanation and sceptics should reject your conspiracy theories and unsupported theories, unless you supply evidence.

Vorkosigan

LOL.

jdl

The only reason you can get away with posting this nonsense is because you haven't defined your terms. I dare you to define "conspiracy" and show us how perfectly that definition matches a suggestion that Mark had an earlier form that wasn't preserved. Then I dare you to define "unsupported" and compare that definition to this instance, where the theory in question is derived from published scholarship, and where the general idea of identifying redactional layers is well established elsewhere.

Joseph

thief of fire

Conspiracy is to "breathe together" . I define it as people working together to achieve a common aim. In this instance to destroy the original of Mark and replace it with a changed version (laughingly which loses some organisaing components.)



Unsupported means "no evidence supplied".

Now answer two questions for me. Are you a sceptic? Do you base your beliefs on evidence?

Another question..are you a personal aquaintance of Vorkosigan. Yes or no?

stephan huller

Steve Carr

Yes there are difficulties with the book from what I have read and I have been consistently disappointed by Ehrman's ability to misrepresent source material dating back to Lost Christianities. That's probably the reason I didn't buy the book at Barnes and Noble. I couldn't stand the idea of giving a 'vote' for someone who claimed that Morton Smith promoted a homosexual view of Jesus. It was Ehrman who gave life to this erroneous view which has since become almost second nature for ignorant folk (= the 'gay gospel' or perhaps better 'Smith's homosexual interpretation of his discovery').

If I could get the book for free I would read it. My only point was that the question of whether the story of Jesus was a myth should remain as uninteresting and dispassionate a discussion as possible. Part of Ehrman's objective - part of the objective of any author who has a deal with Harper Collins or any major publisher - is to sell as many books as possible. If his books don't sell the publisher loses interest in the author and he rejoins the rest of us in the mire.

Ehrman has a habit of developing caricatures of his subjects rather than dealing with actual people, books and ideas. In that way he is one of the great mythicists or developers of μυθοποιία of our time. It is like the John Lennon song, 'How Do You Sleep?'

Nevertheless with all this said, I think that we shouldn't confuse Ehrman's shortcomings as a human being with the question of whether there was a historical Jesus. I have only recently come to the conclusion there wasn't such a historical figure and what turned me around was one simple thing. I have uncovered a number of early Coptic traditions about Mark that only survive in Arabic and so have never been translated into English. I couldn't get over how consistently the idea is repeated over and over again that Simon Peter was Mark's source for information about Jesus.

While this may not be a revelation for many at this forum, I think I always held out hope that there would be some witness somewhere who would say, Mark was an eyewitness to Jesus. When that hope was extinguished I just took a second look at the evidence and asked myself, 'why can't anyone even lie and say that Mark met Jesus?' The answer must be that there was no Jesus to physically meet in the flesh.

The same thing happened with Paul. I always left open the possibility that the Marcionites might have believed that Paul was an eyewitness. But then after looking at the Dialogues of Adamantius I saw the Marcionite saying basically, 'none of the four evangelists ever met Jesus' and wondering 'why doesn't he say Paul met Jesus' (especially when his opponent asks him if Paul was present at the crucifixion).

The silence just became too much for me. It was easier to explain the evidence as Mark relying on a visionary experience of Peter rather than a lost witness to his eyewitness of Jesus.

Toto

Doesn't this definition of conspiracy fit the orthodox Christian Church? It operated out in the open, and it preserved orthodox-friendly documents while dumping heretical documents in the trash. We have only fragments of, for instance, the gospel of Peter. We know that lots of other gospels were lost, including earlier versions of some we have now.

jdl

What makes you think manuscripts need to be destroyed to not survive for two millennia? If Mark was altered, and widely disseminated only after that alteration, must we invoke the image of manuscripts being tossed into bonfires? We don't have the original because not enough people cared to copy it. Simple.
Brodie supplies bundles of it.
Only when it suits me.
Ha! Now there's a conspiracy for you!

Taiwan is fairly close, but not that close.

Joseph

maryhelena

Well done, Stephan - one can only applaud someone prepared to change course in their investigations into early christian origins. If the course one has followed does not produce results - then one has to rethink and and look at other options. A mind prepared to ditch the old paradigm and open up new roads forward - that's what scholarship should be about.....:thumbs::clapping::thumbs:

No resting on your laurels though - you might have 'joined' the ahistoricist/mythicist camp - but that ahistoricist/mythicist camp is bogged down with illusions, visions and historicizing myths (:banghead - and needs a lift. History, Stephan - the ahistoricist/mythicists position cannot move forward without a helping hand from history. Some ahistoricists/mythicists might not want to go there - do I hear howls of protest already? Without being able to present a historical argument for the ahistoricist/mythicist position - that position will drift around in a fog of it's own making..................