Johnny Skeptic

The following is from one of Roger Pearse's websites:

http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/nicaea.html

Comments please.

Roger Pearse

If you say so; but in that case, the argument is over, and no evidence was produced.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Yellum Notnef

To hell with the authorities! Except for the ones who believe in an HJ or anything else important to Roger's belief system.

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Johnny Skeptic

What credible first century, primary, non-biblical sources say that Jesus performed miracles? I know, you don't have any, which is quite odd since if Jesus did perform many miracles in Jerusalem, throughout all Galilee, and throughout all Syria, and was sometimes followed by vast multitudes of people, he would have easily been the biggest celebrity in the entire Middle East, and his achievements would have been unprecedented in human history.

spamandham

For the sake of argument, let's suppose that the names of the authors really were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Let's further assume they really were apostles, keeping in mind that apostleship in no way implies direct knowledge - witness the apostle Paul.

So then, so what? Four pages devoted to arguing something unprovable one way or the other and which has no real significance anyway...

aa5874

The Pauline writer cannot be his own witness, some other external credible corroborative source must be used or else the Pauline writings are inerrant.

There was an attempt to use author of Acts as a credible corroborative source for the Pauline writer but Acts is not credible.

The claim by Paul that he was an apostle in the 1st century may be false and cannot be confirmed externally.

The apostles of Jesus in the Canon were fictitious characters and a Pauline writer claimed he met some of the Canon fiction characters.

Doug Shaver

OK, I was being a bit metaphorical. The evidence consists of a large number of manuscripts and manuscript fragments that are owned by various museums and libraries and are not readily accessible to the general public, in particular not to us lay people. When I say we have seen them, I mean we know of their existence and contents, and we have some fairly reliable information about when and where they -- the manuscripts themselves, not necessarily the originals of which they are believed to be copies -- were produced.

Aside from those manuscripts and the apparent facts of their provenance, there exists no evidence from which we can infer anything about either the authorship or the content of the original documents. I suggest, though, that any such inference has to be part of a theory intended to explain the existence of all the extant manuscripts, together with any other facts pertinent to an account of Christianity's origins. Many such theories have been proposed, and I'm not going to push for any particular one here. But I will note that practically all of them that are taken seriously by anyone qualified to have an opinion regard the original anonymity of the gospels to be dictated by parsimony.

Roger Pearse

I think that you have perhaps omitted the actual argument itself that you are making here. You see, I don't quite see how any this relates to the points at issue.

Around 50,000 Greek manuscripts exist in libraries. I presume you are here discussing the manuscripts of the New Testament. Your refer to some, unspecified. You then seem to suggest we should infer something from these unspecified manuscripts, and some unspecified thing about them.

Just guessing, is the claim that some of the mss have no name attached -- if so, which? -- and that therefore ... what? That if a text has no name in some copy, that means it never had one? Or that it was anonymous?

It should not be for me, surely, to drag out whatever argument is being made. But if so, I'd want to see a lot more detail; and some logical connection between "this copy has no title" to "this work was anonymous".

If so, I'm sorry to say that loss of the name of author from a medieval text is not at all uncommmon.

But probably I misunderstood the point being made.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

avi

How many of those represent authentic, non-interpolated, exact replicas of original manuscripts created by an author whose existence has been described by any other person?

Seems like a reasonable start to me.

Consider, for example, papyrus 45. We are missing so many pages. We have some doubt about the scribe(s) involved--e.g. there is some evidence to support the notion that different scribes wrote different components of the canon. Codex W is not simply the closest to Papyrus 45, it is, in places, an exact replica of papyrus 45, here I mean an exact replica of the SAME ERRORS.


I don't think you are wrong. On the contrary, you are surely correct, in terms of your point of view. You maintain that no one has provided evidence of anonymity for the synoptic gospels, whereas various "patristic" documents, supposedly dating from the second century, have offered evidence of authorship of these three works, namely MML. So, you write with some annoyance, that the gospels, far from being anonymous, are authored by MML as has been reported by scores of second and third century authors.

For me, there are two problems here, Roger. One, I don't know of a single document from the first century, and those from the second and third centuries seem to me, upon close scrutiny to have been altered, adjusted, modified, redacted, or CHANGED in some form, from the original. Second, writing MML doesn't identify the author. It is just a word. A hundred "patristic" sources can name Mark, it doesn't change the fact that I have no idea who Mark is, or was, whether real or fictitious. Until reliable evidence appears to the contrary, "Mark" for me, is a fictional author. Ditto for Matthew, Luke, John, and especially Paul.

Roger, can you point me towards ONE, just one, (or more,) but one will suffice, one lowly document, from the second century, that you believe to be unadulterated, authentic, real, genuine, and unredacted? Ok, I will even accept third century origin, if a second century document does not exist.

regards,
avi

Doug Shaver

Not only them. I'm referring to all the extant copies, or documents alleged to be copies, of writings produced by Christians during the first few centuries of the religion's existence.

Not exactly. I mean to suggest that if we are going to infer anything at all about Christianity's origins, then aside from those manuscripts and whatever generic background knowledge may be pertinent to the issue, there is no other evidence from which we can make any inferences.

No, that is not my claim.

From my side, there is nothing to drag out. I'm making a simple argument from authority. If you have a counterargument to make, go for it. What is your evidence for asserting that the gospels were not originally anonymous?