spin

Are you pucking with me because of my peach impediment? :angry:


pin

Steven Avery

Hi Folks,

The normal 'line' is :

"no major doctrines are changed/affected/put-in-doubt/involved/compromised/jeopardized/effected"

which is very convenient with a shifting definition of "major doctrines" and a loose definition of "changed" and a presumption of looking at doctrines from a base of an ill-defined orthodoxy.

(The possibility that the lack of the Gospel of Mark resurrection account of Jesus is the very logical base of a theory of no knowledge of the resurrection by Mark will simply be out of this picture, which is meant to already presume fundamental Christian doctrines.)

Clearly one major doctrine is immediately deep-sixed : and that is that Christianity is a revelation, a set of beliefs, that is based upon a pure and accurate and perfect book given by God.

Dozens of other doctrines are in fact affected, quite significantly. The historic debates on 1 Timothy 3:16, the heavenly witnesses, John 1:18, Acts 8:37 and the resurrection account in Mark and the Pericope Adultera would have to be excised from history to support the Evans view. Also you have to ignore the overhaul and changing of the views of infallibility and inerrancy in the 1800s to the pseudo-evangelical Warfield-Chicago gibberish (a partial inerrancy, and that only in the Bible Unfound and Unknowable) mechanism in order to allow for the newly set corruptions in the modern TC text (e.g. the swine marathon from Gerasa).

The Reformation Battle of the Bible, back when many writers actually understood the relationships between the Bible and doctrines, really was around much smaller differences (TR vs Vulgate) than have arisen from the corrupt modern version (counter-reformation) text. As an interesting sidenote, the reformers actually emphasized infallibility, not inerrancy. Inerrancy (usually in a different phrasing) was simply one component of infallibility.

Here is a discussion of the debate between Daniel Wallace and Bart Ehrman on these issues, where Wallace uses the Craig Evans line in a more sophisticated way.

Original Text: The Essential Doctrines, Ehrman's Admission, and Unknown Variants. The Essential Doctrines, Ehrman's Admission, and Unknown Variants
http://ricchuiti.blogspot.com/2008/0...doctrines.html

This is on a blog sympathetic to Daniel Wallace and you can see that this is really the #1 dodge of the confused 'evangelical textual criticism' position held by Daniel Wallace and the blogger.

In terms of the textual criticism paradigms that they agree upon, Bart Ehrman is far more consistent and sensible than the 'evangelical' apologists for the modern versions like Daniel Wallace, James White and Craig Evans. The majority of the many responses to the Ehrman writings on the Bible text have been bumbling essays. Precisely because the writers actually agree with Ehrman's view that their Bible versions are quite corrupt. And both sides work with theories even more fluid, the text can change daily, new variants can arise tomorrow. The writers of the response books were going to try to defend their corrupt versions and theories of an ethereal inerrancy no matter how illogical is their position and how contrary to historic Christianity.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

andrewcriddle

I've got a copy of 'The Evidence for Jesus' which I've finally managed to track down.

What Dunn is doing is presenting several parallel passages from the synoptics and showing how they involve the writers using previous sources while making moderate changes. (Later in the chapter Dunn gets into specific issues, such as the strong evidence for Markan priority and its implications, but here he is trying to present the point in ways that are valid whatever ones synoptic theory.)

Dunn is arguing that if, in the cases where we can directly determine what is going on, the synoptic writers are being moderately faithful to the pre-existing tradition, then it is likely that this is true in the cases where such direct determination is impossible.

We can restate the argument within a synoptic theory of Markan priority and Q. Given that Matthew and Luke composed their gospels by following Mark and Q with only moderate changes; it is likely that Mark himself followed earlier sources with only moderate changes. It would also appear plausible for whatever pre-Markan sources Mark used that they followed more-or-less faithfully yet earlier sources. Hence it is likely that a good deal of the synoptic gospel material goes back more-or-less to the time of Jesus himself.

How far this is a good argument is less clear. It depends, to some extent, on how plausible one finds the theory that Mark was radically creative in composing his Gospel, to an extent quite different from that found in Matthew and Luke. I don't myself find this likely but a number of people on this forum would disagree.

Andrew Criddle

dog-on

Not at all.

If Mark knew of the character via Paul, had access to both the LXX and the works of Josephus and was a half decent writer, I see no reason not to believe he could have simply made up the story.

I would be interested in hearing why you believe such a thing is unlikely.

Steven Carr

In other words, if Luke and Matthew copied Mark, then Mark must have copied somebody else.

This is totally illogical.

So if Oliver Stone was faithful to the 2 gunman hypothesis of who shot JFK, then the very first person to suggest a second gunman was likely also being faithful to his sources?

andrewcriddle

Two points.

1/ IMO one can understand Mark much more plausibly if he is attempting to tell a story of Jesus as the Messiah who must suffer using older materials with rather different priorities: eg Jesus as prophet like Elijah/Elisha, Jesus as wonder worker etc.

2/ The prima facie evidence that Mark is drastically rewriting the earlier account seems if anything weaker than the evidence that Matthew and Luke are doing so. eg. Matthew is clearly rewriting his account on the basis of his understanding of the OT. However both Matthew and Luke are (mostly) presenting older material. What is your evidence that Mark is approaching his task as gospel writer in a fundamentally different way to Matthew and Luke ?


Andrew Criddle

andrewcriddle

It is prima-facie more likely that the methods of Matthew and Luke are relevant to the methods of Mark than that they are irrelevant. This prima-facie probability might be wrong but those who oppose it have IMO to explain why it is wrong.

Andrew Criddle

bacht

Mark (or Paul?) gave us the "messianic secret": Jesus was the Messiah/Christ but the Jews didn't see it. Thus God chose the gentiles to inherit the kingdom of heaven because the Jews missed the revelation of truth in their own scriptures. And the Jews had been punished by God at the hands of the Romans. To a 2nd C gentile all this would seem reasonable: Jesus became "our" Jew, the one who opened the door to universal salvation after the Israelites blew it.

No Robots

And this misreading is the origin of millennia of anti-Jewish venom from Christianity. It ignores the fact that all the earliest Christians were and remained Jews, that the entire New Testament is Jewish literature. Work on the historical Jesus has made it impossible now to doubt that Christ, too, was and remained a Jew. Thus, we have the Jewish reclamation of Jesus in the twentieth century, while Gentiles desperately try to hang on to their Greco-Roman god/man.

dog-on

1. He did use older materials. Josephus and the LXX.

2. Matthew "cribbed" Mark's story and expanded upon it. Luke had both in front of him.

Please tell me how you concluded that Mat and Luke are, in fact, using "older material".