Originally Posted by Julian

I would like to encourage everybody to read the link above and find out exactly how Bede feels about people here and also get a taste of his writing style.

Julian

Originally Posted by jgibson000

Is how he feels about people relevant to the question of whether his arguments on any topic are correct?

Originally Posted by Julian

That's certainly very possible, he has that right and he may even be justified,

Originally Posted by Gibson

Of course he has the right not to respond to anything anybody writes. But that he is justified in doing so on grounds of having been dishonoured by anything I've said or done, is highly questionable, In the first place, I don't think that most of the time he actually grasps what I say. In the second place, and more importantly, when he has posted specifically on the topic of why he allegedly has cause not to repond to me and noted what that cause is, he has, in his outlines of what this is, consistently misrepresented and mischaracted what I've actually said or done with respect to him.

Originally Posted by JoeWallack

JW:
"But that he is justified in doing so on grounds of having been dishonoured by anything I've said or done, is highly questionable,"? Your last post says, "No, no, no but your previous posts here say "Yes, yes, yes."

Originally Posted by Wallack

Okay, so you refuse to address the only Issue I have here which is even if Mr. Doherty is grieviously wrong about 4.4 it's not evidence by itself or even representationally that MJ should not be taken seriously.

Originally Posted by Gibson

Actually I believe I have addressed this issue, and more than once.

I mean I have pointed to the fact that, as Earl himself has noted, a major plank in his case for an MJ is the alleged fact that Paul believed in an MJ rather than an HJ, haven't I.

I have also noted that the main piece of evidence he cites in support of this "fact" as a fact is that at Gal. 4:4, in the expression GENOMENON EK GUNAIKOS, Paul speaks (so Earl says) of Jesus as having been born in a heavenly realm and not on earth, yes?

And I've also gone on to note that it follows that if one shows, through an analysis of the vaidity of Earl's claim of what GENOMENON EK GUNAIKOS can and cannot mean, that Paul did not say what Earl says he does at Gal. 4:4, and especially if Earl has in anyway cooked the evidence he has appealed to in order to "show" that it does mean what he claims it means, then not only does a major plank supporting his case for an MJ fall down, but that it would be more than reasonable to conclude the validity of the case is higly suspect, haven't I?.

If so, then I certainly have addressed the issue. And if what I've done isn't addressing the issue, I don't know what is.

Originally Posted by Doherty

"As you know, I have always been very reticent about claiming interpolations in the pauline texts, and limit myself to only one and possibly another two. The first is widely suggested by mainstream scholarship: 1 Thess 2:15-16 (“the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus…”). The others are 1 Timothy 6:13’s reference to Pilate (which could be authentic anyway given that the Pastorals are generally dated to the 2nd century), and Galatians 1:19 “the brother of the Lord” which makes sense as a 2nd century marginal gloss to specify James (now regarded as Jesus’ sibling) and avoid confusion with the Gospel apostle James.

Recently I read Bart Ehrman’s The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture and am now wondering if I’ve been needlessly conservative on the question of interpolations. He made observations about orthodox Christian tampering with all sorts of passages, scribal emendations done for the purpose of making it clear that Jesus was such-and-such in opposition to heretical doctrines like adoptionism, separationism, and docetism. These observations were based on variant manuscript readings, of course, coming from the 3rd and later centuries, because we have no manuscripts to speak of from earlier than around the year 200, although he was able to make certain deductions about emendations that could have been made as early as the first half of the 2nd century.

The passage in the book that really jumped out at me was headed “Christ: Born Human” (p.238) from his chapter “Anti-Docetic Corruptions of Scripture”. It focused on Galatians 4:4 and Romans 1:3-4, the two passages most often cited against mythicists like myself. Here is some of what Ehrman has to say:

Quote:
"For the orthodox, Jesus’ real humanity was guaranteed by the fact that he was actually born, the miraculous circumstances surrounding that birth notwithstanding. This made the matter of Jesus’ nativity a major bone of contention between orthodox Christians and their docetic opponents….

In light of this orthodox stand, it is not surprising to find the birth of Christ brought into greater prominence in texts used by the early polemicists. I can cite two instances. In both cases one could argue that the similarity of the words in question led to an accidental corruption. But it should not be overlooked that both passages proved instrumental in the orthodox insistence on Jesus’ real birth, making the changes look suspiciously useful for the conflict. In Galatians 4:4, Paul says that God “sent forth his Son, come from a woman, come under the law” (genomenon ek gunaikos, genomenon hupo nomon). The verse was used by the orthodox to oppose the Gnostic claim that Christ came through Mary “as water through a pipe,” taking nothing of its conduit into itself; for here the apostle states that Christ was “made from a woman” (so Irenaeus…and Tertullian…) It should strike us as odd that Tertullian never quotes the verse against Marcion, despite his lengthy demonstration that Christ was actually “born.” This can scarcely be attributed to oversight, and so is more likely due to the circumstance that the generally received Latin text of the verse does not speak of Christ’s birth per se, but of his “having been made” (factum ex muliere).

Given its relevance to just such controversies, it is no surprise to see that the verse was changed on occasion, and in precisely the direction one might expect: in several Old Latin manuscripts the text reads: misit deus filium suum, natum ex muliere (“God sent his Son, born of a woman”), a reading that would have proved useful to Tertullian had he known it. Nor is it surprising to find the same change appear in several Greek witnesses as well, where it is much easier to make, involving the substitution of gennwmenon for genomenon…”

I’ll remark here that Ehrman’s reasoning is a little off. If Irenaeus and Tertullian could use genomenon (come, or “made from”) in Greek, why could Tertullian not use the Latin equivalent, especially since even this version would have been useful? Wouldn’t another explanation recommend itself: that Tertullian’s version contained neither phrase, indicating that his Old Latin text was derived from an earlier version of Galatians which did not have “come/born of woman”? If scribes could alter words in the periods from when we do have manuscripts (3rd century on), and even insert them (Ehrman’s book provides evidence of all sorts of orthodox insertions, not just emendations), there is nothing to prevent them from having been doing it in the preceding century, when we happen to have no direct textual evidence for it. “Born of woman” would be a natural insertion in Galatians (let’s say around the middle of the 2nd century to counter docetics like Marcion and others) to make the point that Jesus was in fact a human man from a human mother. The question is always raised why Paul would need to make this obvious point to his readers. This is doubly true if he wrote long before docetics came along whose views would need counteracting. The first insertion would have been of genomenon ek gunaikos, but later this was regarded as not graphic enough since it used the verb ginomai, and so later emendations changed it to the more direct gennwmenon, from the verb gennaw.

Ehrman goes on:

Quote:
A similar corruption occurs in Romans 1:3-4… Here Paul speaks of Christ as God’s Son “who came from the seed of David according to the flesh” (tou genomenou ek spermatos David kata sarka). The heresiologists of the second and third centuries also found this text useful for showing that Christ was a real man who was born into the world….Given the orthodox assumption that “having come from the seed of David” must refer to Jesus’ own birth—an event not actually described by Paul—one is not taken aback to find the text of Romans 1:3 changed as early as the second century, as attested by the citations of Origen, and periodically throughout the history of its transmission. As was the case with Galatians 4:4, the change was a matter of the substitution of a word in the versions and of a few simple letters in Greek (from genomenon to yennwmenon), so that now the text speaks not of Christ “coming from the seed of David” but of his “being born of the seed of David.”

It is possible that we need to give more credence to the idea that key phrases appealed to by historicists may not have appeared in the original texts or were changed to make them more historical-sounding. If later scribes had their fingers all over them in the textual evidence we do have, in order to make Jesus more human, there is no reason to think that the same wasn’t happening in earlier periods when Jesus was undergoing a change from mythical to historical.

As far as I can see, thanks to Ehrman (his book in 1993—and I’m sorry I didn’t read it earlier—surprised everyone with the scope and amount of corruption for polemical purposes by Christian scribes that he uncovered), the historicist case just got even weaker. It would appear that very little trust can be placed in the integrity of our texts, and historicist arguments that are based on these phrases, and on exact wording of any given passage, rest on quicksand.

Originally Posted by JoeWallack

JW:
Oh for Christ's sake Jeff, are your really this, this, this (trying to control self like Fonzi in the classic Happy Days episode where he just couldn't bring himself to say "I was wrong".) this... You were doing better when I didn't understand what the hell you were trying to say.

Mr. Doherty's discussion of 4.4 is entirely Defensive. He recognizes that the plain meaning supports HJ so he offers possibilities to create Doubt of its support for the HJ position. Here, I'll show you his original Post here:

Originally Posted by jgibson000

Of course he has the right not to respond to anything anybody writes. But that he is justified in doing so on grounds of having been dishonoured by anything I've said or done, is highly questionable, In the first place, I don't think that most of the time he actually grasps what I say. In the second place, and more importantly, when he has posted specifically on the topic of why he allegedly has cause not to repond to me and noted what that cause is, he has, in his outlines of what this is, consistently misrepresented and mischaracted what I've actually said or done with respect to him.

Take, for instance, his claim in BCH message 3065525 that in a 2001 message to the JesusMysteries List I "pronounced" against his "reading of the grammatical structure of Romans 1:1-4 in a rather pontificating way" [emphasis mine].

And yet when we look at what he wrote about that message in his reply on JM he says "I want to thank Jeffrey for injecting a note of calm and neutrally rational argument into the discussion on Romans"!

Or consider how he wrote, quite contrary to, and in gross exaggeration of, what I actually did say regarding what the import was of anyone's calling a participle a verb, that I had in this specifically called him an "idiot" when it came to matters Greek.

So I would argue that, no, in actuality, the style and tone of my writing, even granting for the sake of argument that it can be sharp, is not the cause of Earl's not responding to me.

Jeffrey Gibson

Originally Posted by Julian

Well, I purposely used the word 'may' for the simple reason that I don't know everything that went before. For this reason I also refrain from speculating on the topic. I am not about pronounce judgement on either party as I feel my knowledge of the history of the matter is incomplete and will undoubtedly remain so.

Originally Posted by Wallack

You characterize Mr. Doherty as making an Offensive (do with this what you will) argument as if he makes a straight forward claim that the wording indicates Jesus was born in a Heavenly realm which is therefore Significant evidence that Paul believed in MJ. Talk about misrepresentation of an opponent! His related web site argument is correspondingly all Defensive as well.

Originally Posted by Gibson

Umm, Joe, if you actually look at the beginning of this thread you'll see that what the starting point of it was -- and what has been the point of contention from the beginning, at least as far as I'm concerned, is not this relatively new claim of Earl's based on Ehrman (and only made for the first time here and only after the present debate, a continuation of "Doherty, Gibson and Barrett, oh my", was underway). Rather it was/is an older one, (mis) based on Burton's comments on Gal. 4:4, that appears on Earl's Jesus Puzzle web page where he states that Gal. 4:4 is central to his case, and argues, appealing to Burton, that the "plain meaning" of Gal. 4:4 does not, as is usually thought, support the HJ.

Originally Posted by Doherty

Burton first. I said in TJP, p.123-4, that Burton “points out that the way the verb and participle tenses are used in the Greek, the birth and subjection to the Law are presented as simple facts, with no necessary temporal relation to the main verb “sent.�? (By the way, in quoting that passage, Jeffrey Gibson left out my word “necessary�?. Why he did so, I will not speculate on, but it is not wise in a quoted phrase to leave out any words of an ‘opponent’ which lend nuance to the statement and which softens the meaning of what one is trying to rebut; it looks possibly deceptive.)

Originally Posted by Doherty

I love this guy. Why? Because here Burton is further allowing (though of course he is not intending it) for a mythicist interpretation. He is saying that the “born of woman, subject to law�? is not intended “so much to express the accompaniments of the sending…�? In other words, these characteristics of the Son don’t necessarily accompany the action of him being “sent forth�?. But wouldn’t this be odd if Paul were in fact referring to a human birth, since is the Son not “born of woman�? at the time of his sending (birth) into the world? Whereas, if the “sending forth�? is not referring to a historical birth, but a spiritual sending—identical to the “God sent forth [exactly the same verb] the spirit of the Son�? two verses later—then the “born of woman, subject to the law�? could be mythical features, independent characteristics not tied to the “sending�?. Burton as much as says so (again, not intentionally) when he goes on: “…as directly to characterize the Son, describing the relation to humanity and the law…�? Again in other words, these are characteristics of the Son, and can be seen in Paul’s mind as certain spiritual/mythical features that define his relationship to humanity, not tied to any human birth which Paul was unaware of.