Amedeo

I find the thread you opened rather intriguing... May I repeat what I understand to be your objective?

You aim to find out whether John 8:1-11 is authentic or not. And you made it clear that this does not mean whether that passage is divinely inspired or not, for obviously by inspiration you do not mean authorship; so that there might be passages in a Gospel are not inspired (and you have no way of telling which is and which isn't). So, the issue of authenticity has nothing to do with the divine guarantee of its truth.

The passage in question is a biographical anecdote of Jesus. We do not know whether it ever occurred, and since we have to prescind from the issue of divine inspiration, we may not assume that if the episode of Jesus' life is in a Gospel, it must have really happened. The episode in question may have been invented rather than it being a factual report.

Textual analysis can give us only probable knowledge. Is the Jesus in that passage "in character"? Is the nature of his response or behavior here the same as it is in other situations? I would say, Definitely yes, as many other episodes may be adduced to this effect. On the contrary, the anecdote which tells of Jesus sending the evil spirits into pigs is an unlikely story, because there were no pig-herders in Palestine at the time of Jesus. The tale is very probably invented -- which goes to show that the presence of a passage in a Gospel is no guarantee that it is true.

So, we wonder whether the adulteress passage or any other passage was put in a Gospel by the evangelist or by somebody else afterwards. The fact that the passage may not be found in any other Scriptures tells us nothing about the constitution of an evangelist's evangelium. John himself say that many other episodes were left untold by him -- which means that we may not presume that any Gospel or other biography of Jesus has to be presumed complete.

Any Gospel is the compilation of episode of Jesus's life [whether they were reports or invented tales] and of accounts which have a bearing on him, such as a genealogy of Jesus. We have no knowledge of what any original Gospel contained or did not contain, and the fact that an anecdote is found in more than Gospel is no guarantee that originally it belonged in those Gospels.

When you put the issue in these words, "IS THIS PASSAGE A PART OF JOHN'S GOSPEL?", namely the Gospel that John compiled, you are asking an unanswerable question, since nobody knows the constitution of the Gospel that John or someone by that name compiled.

However, another textual analysis may give us probable knowledge as to whether a given passage belonged to an original gospel. If we can discover that an evangelist is expounding a biographical thesis, of all the anecdotes [true or fictitious] that he knew or collected, he employed only those relevant to his thesis. So, if one or two passages are contradictory to the thesis, then most likely somebody else added them to the Gospel. (I am assuming that the evangelist himself recognizes inconsistencies.)

I know that each evangelist emphasizes something pertaining to the life of Jesus, but I doubt that they tried to establish theses. Thus Mathhew is interested in the kingly nature of Jesus, which HE inherits through his father Joseph, but almost in the same breath, Matthew tells the story that Mary's child was conceived from the Holy Spirit in her -- which implies that Jesus was not a descendant of King David... and kingship in barbaric cultures is alwys inherited through males. (In Neolithic times, as in Genesis-2, and as according to the nature of men and women in Jesus' culture, it is only the MALES that generate other humans, while the females incubate. So, royal blood goes from male to male. Mary is irrelevant, even if she is of Davidic lineage -- which is never stated in the Gospels.) Asthe Gospel-compilers, so the theologians never grasp the contraditions inthe Gospel-accounts. It never dawnes upon them that, according to evangelical accounts, Jesus the King was born before Herod's death in 4 B.C., and Jesus the Messiah (conceived by the Holy Spirit and foretold to be born in Bethlehem), was born around 6 A.D. at the times of the census... which miraculously required all the Palestinians to be registered in their native cities.

Since the Gospels do not expound logical theses, we have no way of telling, or of SUSPECTING, that the adulteress's anecdote was extraneous to John's original Gospel. Nor does it matter at all, whether it was or wasn't part of the original text.

JoeWallack

JW:
So what is your evidence that what you are using here from PJ is original to PJ? External evidence? If so, where is the ratio analysis like what you applied to the PA? Do you apply the same Standards to evidence you think favors your conclusion that you apply to evidence you think goes against your conclusion?



Joseph

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

Doug Shaver

I failed to notice that. I apologize.

Steven Avery

Could Wieland have been working with ketchup bottles as part of the
scientific array and gotten mixed up with 57 varieties ?

Steven Avery

Diogenes .. how do you evaluate whether Professor Maurice Robinson
or Bart Ehrman is included in the set of "all the best scholarship" ?

Steven Avery

Hi Amedeo, that is technically true, since there was no 'Palestine' at the time of Jesus.

Looking especially at the northern regions of the Decapolis near the Sea of Galilee could you supply your evidence or sources that there were no pig-herders ?

Thanks.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

Nazaroo

We have exerpted Petersen's difficult to locate article on John 8:1-11, and reviewed it in a detailed way, and have put our review on the site:


Petersen on John 8:1-11 and Egerton <-- Click Here.

jgibson000

"We"???

JG

Steven Avery

Thank you Nazaroo. For those who don't have solid comprehension of the web scholarship picture, often when an article reaches the web there are many hands involved. Somebody researches, there may be a procurement, another may do the formatting, there is a website involved, perhaps scanning and OCR, a person could be checking and proofreading for ideas and accuracy. Feedback can lead to changes. And more.

To use the term "we" in such a case is simply respectful for those who work in assistance and tandem. Personally I believe it is the proper and correct usage.

Even if the particular page were a one-man operation the term is properly used for all involved in the general research and presentation enterprise.

Although I am not involved in this Pericope enterprise in any direct way whatsoever I thank Jeffrey for another forum example of Grumpola Quibble.

Now if Nazaroo still owes a little apology for the name mixup I would encourage him to so offer. However I also encourage him to bypass side-comments of little substance that serve mainly to divert from the scholarship issues being discussed.

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

Jack the Bodiless

A minor digression:
Well, the apparent sarcasm didn't help matters there. But, just in case this flares up again, I will point out that atheists such as myself do not use the late addition of the Pericope Adulterae as "part of some plan to dethrone the authority of the Bible". That would be quite unnecessary, as the Bible has already been dethroned. Rather, we DO use it (as indeed I have used it, fairly recently) to counter clueless inerrantists who try to argue that the text of the Bible has been "miraculously preserved".

For this purpose, it actually doesn't matter if the Pericope was added later, or removed later (and then put back in). The substance of the argument would not change: only a minor detail. Either case would be sufficient to illustrate the point that the NT text hasn't been protected from tampering.

This is a contest between two "skeptical" arguments, not between skepticism and inerrancy.