spin

You seem not to understand the reason why Julian wrote the brief passage.

He says of the Jews:

Was it because the gods granted the sovereign power to Rome, permitting the Jews to be free for a short time only, and then forever to be enslaved and aliens?

The importance here is of the Jews being subjugated and he provides a potted history of that subjugation up to the current Roman subjugation. He then adds:

Even Jesus, who was proclaimed among you, was one of Caesar's subjects. And if you do not believe me I will prove it a little later, or rather let me simply assert it now. However, you admit that with his father and mother he registered his name in the governorship of Cyrenius.

This Jesus also was a subject of the Roman empire and to rub it in he says to the Galileans, "you admit that with his father and mother he registered his name in the governorship of Cyrenius."

There is no doubt that Julian wrote this passage. It's tailored invective.


spin

spin

Gkk, I thought that silly thread was closed. Don't try to start up the same banal stuff again, please. You can't even get it into your head that your desires are nothing to do with logic. You may believe that the gods of the bible are non-existent and you may even be right, but you have no way of ever knowing this believe has any substance.

What on earth makes you think that Julian has dreams of gods living? This is just your own perverse machination. Just because people have difficulty identifying rational thought coming from you, it doesn't mean that they must be christian.


spin

mountainman

I provided 6 issues to be agreed upon, or at least tentatively
defined, before continuing this discussion. You have snipped
four of these issues, and have quoted above the remnant, but
have ignored the option of comment.

Am I to assume by this response that you consider that the
original six items outlined have nothing to do with the analysis?

If so, please state this clearly and we need proceed no further.

I am happy to answer this, and your other questions once this
mandatory (IMO) groundwork of issues is appropriately answered,
so that we can obtain a better historical persoective on the text
itself, that you are attempting to pronounce beyond doubt.

spamandham

in response to "You can prove a negative, without mathematics"

Well, this sounds like a positive statement. Can you prove it?

aa5874

I don't believe you.


I don't trust your machination.


spin[/QUOTE]

spin

You provided nothing that is relevant. You must start with an understanding of Julian's text from the text. Your "6 issues" do not do that.

Right.

If you cannot explain what the fabrication and fiction is, and if you cannot do better than deluding yourself with the parlor trick of legal fiction, then you can proceed no further, because you have no case and no desire to look at what Julian is actually doing.

When dealing with a literary source you have to be able to understand the source. You don't perform eisegesis, which is exactly what you are doing. You are imposing on the texts you read what they are supposed to mean, then you ignore most of the text. Julian argues again and again against the people you want to be fiction. You start from the source, not your proposals about it.

Look at the criticism he writes here:

The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a leader from his loins," were most certainly not said of the son of Mary, but of the royal house of David, which, you observe, came to an end with King Zedekiah. And certainly the Scripture can be interpreted in two ways when it says "until there comes what is reserved for him "; but you have wrongly interpreted it "until he comes for whom it is reserved." But it is very clear that not one of these sayings relates to Jesus; for he is not even from Judah. How could he be when according to you he was not born of Joseph but of the Holy Spirit?

Jesus can't have been the messiah: he wasn't even of the line of David. Julian wasn't a skeptic. He was a believer in the traditional religion of the gods. His means of dealing with the Galileans is to show where they are inconsistent with their theology. That displays the fiction. There is no claim in his text that the founders of the Galileans, ie Jesus, Paul and the others, were not real.


spin

spin

That's right: your position is not a matter of logic, but belief. Logic knows its limitations.

Fine. So you can also understand that others don't trust yours.

(--End of tangent--)


spin

spin

This much deals with the text and therefore is vaguely relevant.

Religions don't get imposed by decree. Religions develop a "user base" and what Constantine does is take advantage of that base. It didn't mean that other religions stopped. Julian got his "pagan" beliefs from somewhere.

Uh-huh.

Who the f*ck is bullburner? Why can't you bring yourself to communicate seriously, instead of using dumb epithets?

Which you could have spared us.

Are you happy now? If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands.

Face the fact that Julian accepts all the figures of early christianity. He is no consolation for your conspiracy theory.


spin

Steven Avery

Hi Folks,

Quote:

Originally Posted by Praxeus http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...65#post4385065 - E. P. Sanders gives us an implied Jewish genealogical/lineage assertion that is totally unsupported, that there was not a lineage system in place among the Jews in Israel. From an unreferenced implied assertion Sanders goes into flights of numerical fancy.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jgibson000 please (1) quote me the passage from Sanders in which he engages in the "flight of numerical fancy" you say he does and then (2) show me both (a) that it is based on the claim you say it's based on and (b) why and how this "flight of fancy" is as you say it is?

Here is the Sanders quote.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...ternetinfidels
The Historical Figure of Jesus - E. P. Sanders

Besides, how would any given man know where to go ? No one could trace his genealogy for forty-two generations, but if he could, he would find that he had millions of ancestors. (p. 86)

Now if there was a top-down lineage system nobody would have to trace out millions of ancestors to know where to go and the Sanders question -

"how would any given man .. ?"

would be answered very simply. eg. "My father and mother were of the tribe of (Bethlehem, David, Judah, (other)". Or just the father is the system was patrilineal.

So the Sanders numerical speculation simply makes no sense outside of an implied assumption that there was not a lineage system. The numerical fancy is apparently designed only to try to paint the NT nativity account as unhistorical. (How could Joseph carry a list of millions of names.) Or to falsely improperly paint the account of tribal affiliation as absurd.

This weekend I asked Alan Segal about the Sanders claim and he had a bit of a puzzled look, agreed that it did not make a lot of sense and mentioned that we also similarly have Paul identified as from the tribe of Bethlehem (giving weight to the understanding that there was in fact a lineage system in place).

Romans 11:1
I say then,
Hath God cast away his people?
God forbid.
For I also am an Israelite,
of the seed of Abraham,
of the tribe of Benjamin.

Philippians 3:5
Circumcised the eighth day,
of the stock of Israel,
of the tribe of Benjamin,
an Hebrew of the Hebrews;
as touching the law, a Pharisee;

If there is another understanding of the Sanders speculation about needing an ancestry list of millions, other than an implied denial of the existence of a lineage system, anybody is welcome to share their idea.

What is amazing on the IIDB list is that such a messy and transparently weak attack on the NT nativity accounts of Luke and Matthew (involving an implied but unstated major historical claim) is missed by all the IIDB experts while the posters go into ultra-parsing the far less consequent 'c.4 BCE' words of E. P. Sanders.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

Steven Avery

Hi Folks,

All of this Amaleq nonsense below is fully answered in 109. 112, and 114, including the Bible reference :

"whom ye brought from thence".

Apparently Amaleq has nothing better to do with his time than to quibble Gill's probability (probable, likely, very possible) as part of his flawed role in the Skeptic Protection Society.

Remember we got here when spin tried to buttress the false Sanders claim of nativity error by straightjacketing :

Matthew 2:23
And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth:
that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets,
He shall be called a Nazarene.

In fact spin was wrong in two ways.

1) the language is flexible, in the Bible and in everyday English
2) Jesus never dwelled (other than in utero) in Nazareth earlier.

Wisely spin has pretty much dropped the grammatical issue and has moved on, while Amaleq continues to act in the mode of diversion.

The consequent part of this is that the Sanders attack is left without any grammatical support, which was the most forceful but fatally flawed attempt to justify the Sanders claim of Luke or Matthew chronological/geographical error between Bethlehem and Nazareth.

An attempt that has doubly failed.

The goal of such SPS diversions as Amaleq's here is to cloud the real issues in pseudo-issues and non-issues. Such as whether John Gill would be more precise if he had said possible instead of probable.

Either way the spin grammatical argument was refuted anyway, since it was dependent on the impossibility of "came to dwell" being a return to a region, something we all should know is not the case in English. And spin tried to give Bible verses to support that view (spin's verses really didn't show anything much but that is another story. Even what spin hoped they might have showed was contradicted by the 2 Kings 17:27-28 "Then one of the priests whom they had carried away from Samaria came and dwelt in Bethel").

Yet even if spin had been correct in this strained and convoluted argument it was irrelevant to the Sanders position since Jesus had not dwelled in Nazareth.

So the Amaleq junque below doesn't even reach the level of quibble.

As for Gill, probability versus possibility, it is all personal interpretative sense. Personally I believe "probable" was a good solid statement but I could never demonstrate it to an Amaleq-type who is simply intent on creating unsubstantive diversions. John Gill gave his expert opinion, as one who was very familiar with the historic Hebraic literature.

So Amaleq, please try to follow the actual substantive issues in the thread and use logic in trying to understand who is making what underlying grammatical assertion.

======

Oh, are you, Amaleq, actually claiming that "came to dwell" must mean that a person never was in the place before ?

And are you, Amaleq, claiming that Jesus did dwell in Nazareth before Matthew 2:23 in the Luke account ?

If either one of these is no -

Then I do hope that you realize that the whole issue of the grammatical attempt to support Sanders is finito.

Thanks.

Shalom,
Steven