gregor2

Or, the thread will continue . . . simply to see the train wrecks of (il)logic that are generated.

Amlodhi

Actually, the implication was that one should at least read through these two short epistles; as opposed to waiting to be handed selected verses out of their context.

I am glad you put your post in question form. I would have been dismayed to think that you are in the habit of making unwarranted presumptions.

Amlodhi

Joshua Adams

Ridiculous. You don't guess some journalist's name out of the blue and get it right. The article says how he examined a number of samples and narrowed it down to one. Luck? Give me a break.

Wow, that must have been some guess! But there's more:
Those were some damn lucky darts he threw to decide who wrote all those, eh?

If you mean Hebrews, well, all I'm saying is that the letter itself does not anywhere claim to be written by Paul. There is no more reason to suppose Paul wrote it than there is to suppose that Joshua wrote Judges. Bible believers who reject scholarship or are unaware of its opinions do not, as far as I know, claim that Paul wrote Hebrews. It's just an anonymous letter. So I ask you, why do you think he did write it?

When have I ever... ever said anything about 100% proof, in any discussion? We can't be 100% sure whether Paul wrote a given document, as there's always a faint possibility that he went out of his way to seem like someone else, but tell me which is more rational to believe: that Paul wrote Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians, and the pastorals and deliberately altered all the subtleties of his writing style, contradicted his own theology, etc; or that somebody else wrote them and either that author or a later compiler tried to use Paul's identity as a sort of "appeal to authority", but the letters didn't quite imitate him perfectly?

I was only using one small example of your "style"... you also deliberately refrained from using the ???, as is obvious, and you'll probably be self-concious about it in the future. If I, or anyone, were to base an analysis off of solely this criterion, it would obviously be incomplete. I'm sure there are other ways to assess literary style, like punctuation use, the frequency of structures like parallelism, apositives, or relative clauses; which synonym one uses most frequently in common structures (e.g. "However" vs. "On the other hand" vs. "Then again" vs... we all have a favorite); how many simple sentences you use as opposed to compound or complex ones; average length of sentences and use of fragments; capitalization of certain words "such as He or Him when refering to God); how often "you" is used incorrectly in place of "one" as a generic person; and innumerable other quirks that all add up to make your unique writing style. One thing I noticed in a cursory reading of Paul (that is, I wasn't analyzing it in order to compare linguistics), was his common use of rhetorical questions followed by a negative answer ("Will their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? By no means!" Romans 3:3-4). Another is his ubiquitous use of the "Just as x, so y..." setup. The latter is not present in 2 Thessalonians, 1-2 Timothy, or Titus. That's one example, mind you--so don't feel the need to pounce on it as insufficient. The point is that Paul, just like everybody else, had certain distinct habits and peculiarities that are copious in some epistles and not in others.

As Till said, there are bound to be a few misfires with this technique, but it is a generally reliable practice--we should not ignore its findings. I'd be willing to bet an expert could pick out your writing from a random sample by comparing it against your posts (I'm not an expert, so I may or may not be able to; doubt it). If I knew any such people personally I'd put their skills to the test.

By the way, if higher criticism is so unreliable then why don't you contest its conclusion that Paul actually wrote Romans, 1-2 Corinthians, etc; and that Luke wrote Acts? That Jeremiah wrote (most of) Jeremiah? That Ezekiel wrote Ezekiel? Oh yeah, that's right: the techiques are only good for anything when they agree with you. Kinda like how fundamentalist apologists cite archaeological evidence that various Israelite kings existed, yet claim the fossil record doesn't indicate an old earth.

This bit may have been off topic, but we can make it a "contradiction" if we need. If Paul wrote all thirteen of his epistles (Not counting Hebrews here, since as stated it isn't even allegedly Pauline), then why are they so different? For example, 1-2 Timothy and Titus describe specific guidelines and qualifications for specific groups of people (bishops, deacons, wives, children, slaves), yet others do not contain anything like this. Why is it that in the pastorals, he repeatedly admonishes the recipients to watch out for heretics and preachers of "false gospels" who disagree with Paul, yet in 1 Corinthians 1 he says that all that really matters is that you follow Christ, with himself not being important? Isn't this a contradiction in Paul's beliefs? What gives?

Finally, does it really matter to you who wrote the letters? I mean, does their lesson become invalid unless Paul wrote them? Earlier I believe it was you who seemed to have no problem with Luke committing an error, so you apparently do not view the Bible as totally 100% inerrant. Aren't the salutations in a few of the epistles just little minor human errors like that? Maybe some manuscript somewhere was torn at the top and they just filled in Paul's name, assuming he wrote it.

Did you have anything to say about my comments on 2 Thessalonians? I've checked a few Bible commentaries and, as expected, they do not agree that God in v11 is actually "Satan disguised as God". Rather, God is actively allowing Satan to deceive people, so that they will be damned (in what can only be described as "revenge").

inquisitive01

People can share very similar writing characteristics, so this "technique" is not as reliable as some may think it is. Take 3 examples - writing essays, writing songs, writing e-mails . . . none of which do I do THAT similar (you won't see LoL's or smileys, among other things, in the songs or essays; you won't see a topic sentence, sentences to support the topic sentence, and a summary in songs or e-mail.
Similarly, "accounts" and "letters" may be written differently by the same person.



Wouldn't disagreement with Paul's teachings regarding Christ be very similar to disagreeing with Christ himself? If a man and the man's mother agree about certain things, and this man's girlfriend disagrees with the man's mother's views, wouldn't the man's girlfriend also be likely to disagree with the man's views?



No, it does not become invalid IF Paul didn't write them. However, one must wonder why the phrase "The Epistle of Paul to . . . " are present at the beginning of these books.



IF it is God sending the delusion as you described (certainly possible), it could also be described as "they asked for it by continuing to live unrighteously (they keep killing, stealing, and so forth, even though they know better), so they got it." Your assignment of revenge to it seems similar to saying that the person who distributes lethal injections in a capital punishment case is the one wanting the revenge against the murderer. It is not revenge that is carried out by the executioner for himself/herself, but is the result of what was done by the murderer - the murderer killed someone and was sentenced to death (the cause of the end result).

Another way to put it, IF it is God sending the delusion, for what cause would He send it? Because the people continue to be misled towards unrigheousness (their own choice, not God's choice, since God, not Satan, has chosen them for salvation, as stated in Thessalonians 2:13) - whether they accept His choice of salvation for them is ENTIRELY up to them.

inquisitive01

Is someone making you read this thread? If not, then there's no need for you to be bothered by any train wrecks that may or may not occur within it.

Amaleq13

How does making this observation render the technique unreliable?

How does making this observation contradict the successful outcomes of actual tests of the technique?

This observation, by itself, does not constitute a rational basis to deny already established reliability. The technique focuses on multiple writing characteristics that are, taken together, uniquely identifying.

In order to challenge the established reliability of the technique, you would need to produce a writing sample that comes from a different author but is misidentified by the technique as coming from the same author.

Otherwise, you have no rational basis for your assertion that the reliability is less than the actual test results suggest.

It makes absolutely no sense to refer to people deluded by God as having a free choice. When God sends a delusion, God is robbing them of the accurate information necessary to a truly free choice. You can try to argue that they were free before being deluded by God but there can be no free choice after they have been deluded by God.

Joshua Adams

You are right that there are only so many ways that people can make up a sentence, but the analysis is not as superficial as you imagine. I mean sure, if you just pull a few sentences out, anybody could have written them. What you look for is trends and commonalities and habits. This can often be done by a computer, too. Yes you write differently in a chat room than a book report, but this isn't going to drastically affect your vocabulary, basic grammar and punctuation, average sentence length/complexity, etc unless you are just typing in blurbs, in which case we don't have much of a writing sample to work with. But tone is another thing that is taken into account, not so much in telling whether two documents were written by the same guy, but in analyzing the authenticity of one document. As noted on Paul Tobin's site, Ephesians has a very different tone than would be expected of a letter from Paul to the Ephesians, who, based on several other letters appears to have been quite familiar with that lot. Ephesians, however, reads nothing like a letter to close aquaintances; it is more like a tract that has the "letter parts" tacked on afterwards.

Obviously things like poetry would be different in certain ways, so our options for comparison are more limited but not completely exhausted. But I don't think you're quite getting it when you talk about essays. You speak as though you think higher critics say something like this: "Well, there's no salutation on Hebrews, and Paul always wrote a salutation, so it couldn't have been by Paul". While something akin to that may be one more straw on the camel's back, it certainly doesn't make or break the argument. What you seem to be neglecting is the fact that in the epistles we don't have a song here, and an essay there, and a poem; they are all personal letters. Paul would not have adopted a substantially different form when writing them (although I wouldn't say the "form" is at all key in determining authorship). What we are looking at is, again, various subtleties and nuances that we all absentmindedly employ when writing almost anything. No one is 100% consistent with himself in writig, but we do have a pretty distinct style with simply our choice of words, punctuation, and structure. You will not be able to sift through a million papers and get every last one of them correct; of course not, as some variation is possible within an author's work and similarity between others is possible. But what you have to understand is that the scholars are aware of this and take it into account. And they have been successful at it, too! It is very careful and thorough analysis, and if it weren't reliable we simply wouldn't have things like Foster's detective work. You sift through hundreds of articles and find that two of them were written by the same person, there's something to your methodology. It's not bullet proof, but it's fairly reliable. This is why certain epistles are disputed (Colossians); they contain enough of the Pauline trademarks that it could have just been on off day for him; but they aren't quite the same as the rest... so we'll never know. Others seem quite blatantly impossible to have been written by Paul due to the differences as well as the content. In the pastorals, for instance, things he says would imply a hierarchical church that did not exist in Paul's time (namely, the official positions of bishops and deacons, complete with rules of ordination). The same sort of considerations indicate late authorship for other letters like 2 Peter and Jude.

Funny you should bring that up. Paul actually contradicts Christ himself on quite a bit. So if you want to agree with Christ you should not listen to Paul. To give you an example, Jesus clearly thinks highly of the Law: "Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or tittle shall nowise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven." (Mt. 5:18-19). Jesus claims earlier in the chapter that he came not to destroy the Law and Prophets, but to fulfill them (this is enigmatic, presumably he is just talking about the Prophets when he says "fulfill"). Yet, as we shall see momentarily, Paul says just the opposite.
Now apparently nobody listened to this instruction, since in Acts 10 Peter eats foods banned by the Law. Luke has God give him permission for this, meaning at the very least, Luke also thought the Law was out of style. Paul too seems to think it is rubbish, that we should "avoid Jewish fables and geneaologies" (i.e. the Old Testament. 1 Tim. 1 and a few other verses) and just concentrate on Christ. "But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us; Having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace..."
Pauline theology is also more centered towards the Protestant view of justification by faith, while Jesus seems to value works more than Paul. Keep in mind that scholars date the genuine Epistles as being written earlier than the Gospels, and of course Paul never met Jesus, so he had no real information about him except possibly what he was told by Peter and crew. Second hand info is bound to be hazy in your memory, with a less clear mental picture--he may not have really understood Jesus properly and simply developed his own theology based on this misunderstanding.

But anyway, I'm not necessarily saying Paul was out of line in condemning heresies. The point was that he didn't do so in Corinthians. He said that there should be no "followers of Paul" or "followers of Peter" in the church--because it's all about JC. Elsewhere he considers it blasphemy to disagree with him. That is simply 180 degrees, my friend. Incidentally, the question in 1 Timothy 3 (and mentioned in other verses) was whether the resurrection had already happened. Paul said that it hadn't yet happened.

Pseudepigrapha were common in that time. A pseudepigraphal work is one that is written and claimed to be by a famous person, presumably in order to give it more credibility. Many of the apocryphal books are like this (e.g. Enoch, or the Gospels of Peter and Thomas). Here are some such texts. As you can see, even a few are attributed to Paul, so it is not unheard of to falsely attribute things to Paul (unless of course you actually consider the apocrypha to be authentic... in which case you are really unusual). Why they do this can not be known for sure, but it clearly does happen. Like I said, it is most likely in order to give your book's ideas more credibility. I know you won't agree, but basically the whole NT is thought to be pseudepigraphal except for the Pauline epistles, and several OT books as well. I am not prepared to get into the nitty gritty of all of the books and why they are not considered authentic, but you can probably find someone able and willing around here somewhere...

I agree that this is pretty much the gist of what it's saying. And it's what we've been proposing all along, more or less. God is instrumental in the deception, not "Satan pretending to be God". He may have his valid(?) reasons, I don't know or care, the point is that God is quite party to the lying. And thus, we must consider the implications of this on the claims that he is the God of truth. That cannot be entirely, erm, true if he is an established liar/deceiver.

Amaleq, I'm sure there are indeed failures out there, but this is no more to the point than saying that people who can cheat drug tests throw the very act of drug testing into doubt. The method is sound, the practice is done by humans.

Magdlyn

Jagan, thanks so much for expounding upon what I only outlined! Ie: pseudepigraphy, criteria for establishing the authentic letters of Paul (or writings of anyone). :wave:

Magdlyn

A fellow anmed Zebedee is written to be the father of John the Apostle.

But very few scholars think John of Zebedee wrote the Gospel acc to John, 1,2, or 3 John, or the Revelation of John.

Sven

There's again this ridiculous attempt from you to cast doubt on what authorities say. Fact is:
(1) Authorities are experts, who have studied their subject quite extensively and are thus expected to make far fewer mistakes than laymen
(2) Of course authorities still make mistakes - but then it's up to you to show that your explanation is more reasonable than theirs. So far you only asserted that you are right and they are wrong.

Your argument is still invalid - as was pointed out the last time you tried to use it. I wonder what is more pathetic...

Hint: Something which is a conclusion based on mountains of evidence is usually not called "assumption".