gurugeorge

Neither of you see that you might be begging the question here? On what grounds do you FIRST believe that there is any "impersonal narration" going on here at all, such that the writer could conceivably be taking a break from it?

Chaucer

This has to do with technical terms out of the study of English literature. "Impersonal" is merely opposed here to "Personal" -- i.e., "first person". No attempt at characterizing the spirit of the writer is intended. Terms like "narrative voice", "voice", "first person", "third person" -- etc. -- are perfectly familiar to those trained in Literature 101.

Agatha Christie's "Murder of Roger Ackroyd" is in the "first person" because the narrator is a character in the story who habitually refers to himself as "I".

Other works, such as history books, are written by what's termed an "Omniscient Narrator", not because any characterization is meant of the spirit of the author behind the work, but because the "voice" who tells you the facts is never identified as an "I" and never plays a part in the events described. It is an "impersonal narrator" because the events never involve the "voice" who's telling you the events. The "voice" is telling you the events in the way that a TV viewer might tell a friend the events in a TV news story seen the previous evening.

The author of Mark presents the events with never a reference to the author's own involvement in any of the events -- except for a single moment when the "story voice" is dropped momentarily to address the reader directly with "Let the reader understand". Suddenly the author "has a local habitation and a name", rather than an "impersonal" stance of recollecting a skein of events already gone by. With that "local habitation and a name", the writer is momentarily a player in his own story. A more ironic example of this mode of suddenly dropping the "impersonal" mask and momentarily addressing the reader directly as an individual is used brilliantly and repeatedly in Fielding's "Tom Jones".

Chaucer

aa5874

So you consider evidence external of the NT and the Church as internal evidence?

What access to early manuscripts do "you have"? Please tell me everything that you know about the "Memoirs of the Apostles". What was the first verse detected in the early manuscript of the Memoirs of the Apostles and what exactly wasdetected to be interpolated?

Please show or demonstrate that you are really adept at detecting interpolations using the "Memoirs of the Apostles" as a test case.


Your claim that I demand that you either accept or reject all of what the Church writers say is very obviously false. I made no such demand at all anywhere in my post.

You have set up your own false dichotomy.

Now, as you should know some texts appear to have been anonymous and after passing through the hands of the Church or some Christian source the texts itself may have been manipulated.

Even texts that appear to have been authentic after passing through the hands of the Church or some Christian source may have been manipulated. The writings of Josephus is a good example.

Some historians may be pulling things from behind their backs if they do not understanf that it is very likely that the texts under scrutinity may have been manipulated by the very sources that appear to be an external source.



No. Your are the one who claimed there is internal evidence that can date gMatthew and gMark to between 70-100 CE, and I am the one who reminded your claim was bogus.

The prediction of the Fall of the Temple by gMark and gMatthew was to acheived the opposite. The prediction was to show that this so-called Jesus made a prediction approximately 40 years earlier, i.e, about 40 years before the Fall of the Temple.



But, you must show that the authors of gMatthew and gMark did not use some souce like the "Memoirs of the Apoostles".

Do you understand what fiction novels are? Any anonymous author writing fiction, in any century after the Temple fell, can place a fictitious God/Man character in the 15th year of Tiberius predicting accurately that the Jewish Temple would fall.



Again, my friend, the internal and external evidence, based on your own view of the meanig of evidence, that is, the text itself ( internal) and the (external) Church writers place gMark before the death of Peter and during the time of Philo or somewhere between 40-50 CE or earlier.

If you think that Papias' Mark is your Mark ,then you may be pulling things from behind your back.

Papias' Mark is before 70 CE.

Just tell me about Papias and Mark.

When you accused mythicist of wearing blinders you seemed to think it was relevant.

But, Justin did not mention Papias, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or any writings called Epistles to any Churches by anyone or to anyone named Timothy, Titus or Philemon or written by James, John, Peter or Jude.

It is confirmed and obvious that the dating, authorship and chronology of the internal evidence, the text itself, from the extenal source, the Church writers is bogus or quite cintradictory.

You have utterly failed to show that the internal and external evidence places gMatthew and gMark between 70-100 CE.

Zaphod

God Bless You, gurugeorge!:notworthy:

aa5874

We simply have two competing theories [hypotheses].

One theory [ the MJ hypothesis] is fundamentally based on the direct evidence or written information supplied by the authors of the NT and Church writers and the other theory [ the HJ hypothesis] is based on speculation after discrediting the direct evidence or written information supplied by the authors of the NT and the Church writers and substituting one's imaginative skills.

The authors of the NT and Church writer have in writing that Jesus was the offspring of the Holy Ghost, they also have in writing that Jews and Jesus believers only worship Gods, not men as Gods.

These written admissions of antiquity by the authors of the NT and Church writings have fundamentally provided the security of the MJ hypothesis.

The MJ hypothesis is extremely strong and well supported.

On the other hand, the HJ hypothesis has virtually no support from the NT where Jesus is the offspring of the Holy Ghost, and Church writings where Jews and Jesus believers ONLY worshiped Gods and refused to have themselves worshiped as Gods and asked others not to worship men as Gods.

Jesus of the NT and Church writings could not have been just a man for the Jesus character to have achieved Salvation for mankind. Jesus must be raised from the dead.

The speculation based HJ hypothesis is extremely weak and unsupported with no security using extant writings of antiquity.

rob117

:banghead::banghead::banghead:

Internal evidence: evidence in the text we are studying. Not from other texts, only from the text we are studying. When we are studying gMark, any other text, including the other gospels and the writing of the church fathers, are considered external evidence.




Not me personally. It's well known that Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus do not contain the adultery pericope that appears in the Gospel of John in more recent manuscripts.

I am not adept at detecting interpolations, however, I don't have a PhD in New Testament criticism, and I trust that those who do have one know how to do their jobs.


First, you criticized my argument because it made use of church sources. Then, you turned around and criticized me because I disagreed with those same sources on certain points.

That's setting up a false dichotomy.

Yes, and the interpolations in Josephus are largely obvious. We can argue about whether or not a certain line of the TF is authentic, or whether Josephus originally had anything in there about Jesus, but it's obvious that the present text has been tampered with.

How do we know this?

Because it contains theological statements (such as that Jesus was the messiah) that are at odds with what Josephus says elsewhere-- he elsewhere implies Vespasian to be the messiah, not to mention he is a Jewish priest and a Pharisee who makes no statement anywhere else about being a Christian. This is one of the criteria used for determining an interpolation.

They understand this. However, it is only assumed if they feel they have good reason to assume it.

What evidence do you have that these writings have indeed been tampered with beyond what is already conceded by mainstream biblical criticism?


The texts do not simply have Jesus predicting the fall of the Temple. They have him predicting the apocalypse, which was to immediately follow the destruction of the temple:

See?


Text critics have detected earlier sources, like the hypothetical Q document. No such underlying source for any of the gospels have ever been postulated, because there is simply no good reason, internal or external to the text, to postulate it.

If this embarrassing statement was in a 2nd-century writer's sources, he would have simply omitted it. The fact that the church did not delete these statements says something about how little the texts have been tampered with.

Fiction novels are clearly meant as fiction. GMark as written as a message to believers ("let the reader understand"). This means it was not intended as fiction, even though its author likely got some facts wrong.

Internal evidence (within Mark itself) never gives us any indication of being written before 70.

Papias was writing 40 or so years later. His testimony indicates only that gMark existed in his time. Since this agrees with the internal evidence, and does not contradict his description of the text, it is safe to assume that the text he is speaking of and gMark are one and the same

You, my friend, have utterly failed to show that you know anything about historiography, logic, or the English language. You have taken my statements out of context, set up false dichotomies, and misinterpreted the plain meaning of my statements.

Not only that, you have supplied no positive evidence your own, and the negative evidence you have supplied is in fact false negative evidence. And this is the entire mythicist case-- one big argument from a falsely manufactured silence.

Until you can demonstrate that you know how to respond to an opponent's statements without resorting to misquotes, misinterpretations, and "yeah, but" statements, I will no longer respond to your arguments.

You get nothing.

You lose.

Good day sir.

Chaucer

God Bless You, rob117!:notworthy:

EarlDoherty

Quoting “summaries” by others does nothing to indicate whether you understand them or how you would apply them to the New Testament. In those summary passages there was only one sentence that gave us any indication of the actual content of Spinoza’s approach:

This is revolutionary? It may have been so in Spinoza’s day, but it is a commonplace today by critical scholars, and even in mainstream scholarship generally, and has been for most of the 20th century. Again, if you were at all familiar with my own mythicist case you would realize that this is a key foundation of my own approach.

You don’t see? Does this mean you have actually read one of my books? Have you even read my website? Can you confirm this, and are you then saying that in your study of my writings you find “no coherent interpretative framework.” Or are you just talking through your hat as so many historicist dissenters here seem to be doing?

Earl Doherty

aa5874

Internal evidence [within Mark itself] does not indicate that it was written as late as or between 70-100 CE.
The words of Jesus were supposed to be from the time of Pilate or around the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius.

But, my friend, you seem to be taking things from somewhere, possibly behind your back.

The internal evidence from Papias places gMark during the lifetime of Peter who was claimed to have died before the death of Nero.

We have sources of antiquity which purports to have quoted "Papias".

This is from the "Fragments of Papias" See http://www.newadvent.org

So, based on the fragments, Peter was aware that gMark was already written before he died.

You have utterly failed to show that the internal and external evidence place gMatthew and gMark between 70-100 CE.

The internal and external evidence place gMark and gMatthew before the death of Nero and as early as the time of Philo of Alexandria.

No Robots

You claim to use the same methodology as Spinoza, and yet you come to contrary conclusions. This is something worth pondering, no?

Spinoza declined to analyze the NT, writing:

The time has now come for examining in the same manner the books in the New Testament; but as I learn that the task has been already performed by men highly skilled in science and languages, and as I do not myself possess a knowledge of Greek sufficiently exact for the task; lastly, as we have lost the originals of those books which were written in Hebrew, I prefer to decline the undertaking.--TTP, Chap. 10

The only book to explicitly apply Spinoza's approach to the NT is Constantin Brunner's Our Christ. Brunner appended to this book a critique of mythicism which I have posted in its entirety. Readers can assess for themselves whether it is Doherty or Brunner who has reason on his side.