Doug Shaver

Not really. The underlying thought is that Christian fundamentalists might not be as infallible as they think themselves to be.

Steven Avery

Sure. And there was motive for careful consideration and rejection of any such attempts. The Glenn Miller article goes into this some. Roger has pointed out the Tertullian quote and some others, I recall.

Quote:

Originally Posted by lpetrich Why don't you explain to us what you think is wrong with the hypothesis of non-Pauline authorship?

There are generally three different theories. The one I am most familiar with is the case made against the Pastorals. Dunno if we have good threads on that here. Some of the arguments are social/circular, and depend on the skeptics similarly late dating of Acts. Probably the most consequent hard argument is the dating/chronology question. In terms of early referencing and manuscripts the Pastorals do quite well.

Anyway, anybody is welcome to have whatever hypothesis they please. All I said is that the evidences given are on the weak side. The skeptic will embrace the weak evidences and also work with the circularity of one book being late and forged because he assumes other books are forgeries or late in his argumentation.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

CreamFilledGiraffe

I have heard this from some Christians and it confounds me. If the Bible isn't authentic then what is it that Christians have faith in?

Amaleq13

A personal relationship with Jesus.

Roger Pearse

I'm not sure that this is what your friend meant. We certainly know a lot less about events in the ancient Near East than people who lived there at the time, as a rule.

Alas, we never lack for a motive to accuse others of wrongdoing, in my experience. It's not enough to show that someone has a motive, because it's always possible to show motive. This is, indeed, the ad hominem: "he says that because he is a... (whatever)".

True.

Um. This is all a bit woolly for me, and I'm not sure that this is not misleading in some way. It is certainly the case that people wrote under names not their own -- one thinks of Dionysius the Areopagite. It is also the case that texts acquire famous names in the manuscripts -- a process which rarely has anything to do with the authors. (Indeed a text is attributed to Tertullian in the 1483 printed edition of his works which cannot possibly be by him since it quotes Gregory, etc. Clearly it was present in the ancestor manuscript, and the printer finding no name just hastily attributed it to Tertullian).

People would compose apocrypha in the name of long dead patriarchs. But... I was wondering which of them specifically says that they did so for such a reason. This sort of evidence cannot exist, I imagine, which means that the above must be an inference.

What do others feel about this?

Not if he wanted to remain a Christian. The presbyter who composed the Acts of Paul (which are orthodox) was hunted down and defrocked, despite pleading that he wrote only out of love of the apostle (i.e. as a novelisation). Forging such texts would be fraud, precisely because they held special status.

Lack of any really convincing evidence for it. The arguments that I have seen all rely on 'internal evidence' not much different (in my humble opinion) from speculation. I would always want to see objective evidence to show that any text has been wrongly attributed in the mss. Arbitrary changes seem to me to lead straight to subjectivism.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

jakejonesiv

The pastoral epistles as a whole form a interpolation.
Paul's supposed status beforehand (as a prisoner in chains Acts 28:20), must be restored after the pastorals to exactly as it was before.

No other book in the New Testament mentions Paul's alleged journeys to Ephesus (1 Tim 1:3, 2 Tim 1:18), Macedonia (1 Tim 1:3), Crete (Titus 1:5), Nicopolis (Titus 3:12), Troas (2 Tim. 4:13), and Miletus (2 Tim. 4:20).

This is enough to raise the suspicions of all but the most uncritical readers.

Jake Jones IV

EarlOfLade

And how do you know that jesus existed if the rest of the bible is not trustworthy?

Amaleq13

I would assume that the aforementioned personal relationship is sufficient to establish Jesus' existence for the individual.

Clivedurdle

There was a comment on another thread about Greek and Hebrew Bibles(?).

Has anyone seriously thought, hang on, instead of biblical criticism, what we should be studying is Greek literature and how these writings fit into that context?

lpetrich

(Genesis 30 heredity...)
True, but that does not make them infallible.

The writer of Genesis 30 was much closer in time than we are to the genetic engineering that he wrote about; does that mean that it had happened as he had described it?

And consider that both Suetonius and Tactius report that then-General Vespasian had cured some people using salivary therapy. Suetonius and Tacitus were much closer in time to Vespasian than we are, so they must be correct about it, right?

(Inverse-plagiarism motive...)
That's beside the point.

I don't imagine that I would have much motive for passing off some of my writings as some of Isaac Asimov's unpublished essays, because the Internet does in seconds what would take human scribes hours or days. But in past ages, if I wanted to get some Isaac Asimov fans interested in copying my writings, I might be tempted to claim that they were IA's.

So you do concede that inverse plagiarism had happened, though you are evading the question of why they had falsely claimed such ancient notables as the real authors of their writings.

(So there would be a motive for some early Xian to write letters and claim that they are really from Paul.)
Except that Xian pious-fraud creators have often gotten away with their fraudulence. Consider the Donation of Constantine, many medieval relics, and deathbed-recantation legends. The Shroud of Turin continued to be accepted as a legitimate relic despite the forger being exposed back when it first appeared.

Where did you get that from?

And this is someone who got caught; many such forgers never have. The writers of noncanonical Gospels, for instance, never got exposed as frauds, and neither did the writers of those pseudo-Solomon, pseudo-Enoch, pseudo-Moses, psuedo-Aristotle, pseudo-Galen, and pseudo-Geber works. Nor, I may add, the authors of the Jewish-evangelist pseudo-Sibylline Books.

(Why don't you explain to us what you think is wrong with the hypothesis of non-Pauline authorship?)
So internal evidence can never be a convincing argument?

I find that rather odd, because in some cases, one can recgonize anachronisms and other such telltale features with a high degree of certainty. For example, if some document features "google" as a verb in a context that suggests searching for information, one knows that that document, or at least some subset of it, is less than 10 years old and is likely less than 5 years old.

In a famous case of such detective work, Lorenzo Valla showed that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery by showing that it contained anachronisms. Was his inference valid or not?