Doug Shaver

No matter which gospel it was in, we don't know who wrote it or where the author got his information. Therefore we do not know whether Jesus actually said it. That is not a quibble. That is a fact.

Richbee

Your lack of evidence to the contrary is noted.

Go and learn.

Richbee

<insults edited out>

Vorkosigan

...yeah, you know, scholarly methodological stances. Any time you want to start being a scholar, prax, I predict that you can do great work. But at the moment you are simply an apologist building walls, not bridges. Because your conclusions were decided before you ever came to the text, you will never be able to do creative and insightful scholarly work. What a terrible waste, prax!

Vorkosigan

Richbee

Would his Mother know the differnce?

Yes, this was spoken of the time beyond Jesus.

Hint: You have to know the Real True(TM) Jesus to spot the false prophets.

Another hint, don't follow a dead prophet like Mohammed, or Baha'u'llah of Baha'i fame, or Joseph Smith. They are dead.

Now, just think of all the times you lost each and every debate on TheologyWeb.com Johnny boyo? Is it worth wasting all your time spinning nonsense?

Gamera

These type of stylistic speculations are the weakest arguments possible. They truly assume the conclusion and then seek to validate it with stylistic analysis.

The problem is I could use the same techniques to "prove" that Lincoln didn't write the Second Inaugural, because it's so different from the Gettysburg Address. Similarly, I could probably show on stylistic grounds that some of the posts by darstec are interpolations, because they differ from other posts.

This is truly a desperate tendentious argument.

The idea that some redacteur would tamper with Paul's works, and not only that that the religous authorities, without any cops or phone taps, could hunt down and destroy every deviant ms showing the original without an interpolation, is utterly without merit

Gamera

Getting back to the topic thread, which somehow got off track, the existence of hymnic material in the letters of Paul that are beyond question, like Romans, truly suggests that Paul accurate characterized the church's early view of Jesus as a divine savior.

Add to that the fact that Paul is without a doubt the earliest of the Christian authors we have, his letters predating the gospels by at least a decade and possibly 40 years, the creeds and hymns he seems to be quoting are powerful evidence that his views were in fact the earliest views of Jesus, and not some later fabrication by religious authorities seeking to turn an itinerant preacher into a messiah.

Gamera

Well, that problem is solved very simply if Peter's scribe (the Silas he refers to) drafted Peter 1 and Peter himself, not the most educated man in the world and probably having only a rough knowledge of Greek, drafted Peter 1 himself. Most of the attacks on the authenticity of the Peter letters involved a presumption that a 1st century Jew without much education would not be able to speak Greek, or at least attain the level of literary Greek in Peter 1.

That claim however has been completely debunked by recent scholarship.

First, it's clear that many if not most of the Jewish inhabitants of Roman Judea were trilingual, speaking Hebrew for sacred texts, speaking Aramaic around the house, and speaking Greek in the marketplace. The fact that Peter 2 is in such "simple" Greek strongly accords with what we would expect under the trilingual hypothesis.

Second, I don't even need to go into the use of amanuenses in 1st century Judea as the practice was commonplace, widely attested, and clearly used by Paul himself. This easily explains the better Greek of Peter 1.

Doug Shaver

What is the evidence for that? Please be specific.

darstec

No you can't '"prove" that Lincoln didn't write the Second Inaugural, because it's so different from the Gettysburg Address.' You do not seem to have the grasp of English grammar and vocabulary necessary to the task judging from the imprecision of your own posts. If I am wrong, please give us some demonstrations. A paragraph or two will suffice.

Your reply was rather brief. Did you have something other than simple handwaving to offer? Perhaps a critic of where Price and others are incorrect in their assessment? But then you don't do Greek, so we know that lies outside your purview. And there do not seem to be any critical counters to what they write, so you cannot offer those. You are left with mere handwaving.

Furthermore, I and quite a few others who post here do not assume the conclusion. We in fact were steeped in traditional orthodoxy and apologist rhetoric. Read my profile. The difference between your and our points of view is that we actually changed our minds when the evidence became overwhelming.

Access to manuscripts, and the ability to read them, was a factor in my case.

Please be my guest. I would like a demonstration just to show you understand the concept. A couple of paragraphs would suffice. You have at least 11 years of posting material to use if you know where to find it.

Yes, I agree your answer most certainly is.

You truly do not know the state of manuscript development. What makes you think everything we have of Pauline literature is invarient from document to document? Even more importantly what do we have of Paul's literature? The answer is nothing but copies of copies of copies.

And you are assuming that there were large numbers of manuscripts that had to be changed/destroyed. Just how big a printing press do you think Paul used? And do you think the papyrus/parchment on which the copies were transferred were made of some type of teflon-titanium weave?

Could you please explain how a letter, take 1 Corinthians for instance, got from Paul to Rome, Athens, Damascus. As an experiment, again using 1 Corinthians, hand write the entire epistle. In four weeks use that copy and write it again. Use that new copy and two months later hand write another. For a third copy, you may use any of the other three handwritten copies and you may do so any time between one week and four months later. And just for fun repeat the last step for a fourth copy.

First question -- how long did it take (probably zero as you would never agree to our little experiment)?

Were you able to read every letter and word of your handwritten copy? Sometimes I can barely read what I wrote last week.

Were all four copies faithful and exact copies of the original down to the letter?

Repeat the experiment again, this time use friends to make the copies, copying from each other. Compare the results and answer the three questions. Did they differ?

I am for the moment assuming you and your friends are literate and have been acquainted with penmanship however briefly. And now for the coup d' grace, instead of being able to read the original, have somebody read the original to you. In turn have somebody read your handwritten 1 Corinthians to the next person, which in turn is written to the next, on down the line to the fouth letter.

Do you think there will be any changes/differences? It would of course be much better if we could use material with which you disagree in part especially on some emotionally charged topic. It would work even better if there were as many opinions as their were copiers.