Bede

Robert,

I think we've taken this as far as we can. Enjoy your reading.

Best wishes

James

darstec

I'm afraid you are going to get nowhere on this with Bede. Those who have access to such documents (and have taken one course in papyrology during their university sojourn) are considered experts in the field.

I just had a conversation on this topic over at alt.atheism (where your name was impugned -- not by me too). I'm sure Bede would concur along with Roger Pierce (one of the participants) and my main antagonist that if radio carbon dating was done for fragment in the third and fourth centuries BCE and for fragments of the sixth through eighth centuries CE and overlapped those dates of the paleographer's estimates with a 65% confidence level that was accurate enough. That was evidence enough.

To point out that there were no confirming evidence for the paleographer's assertions, it took a long drawn out discussion for the apologists to agree but then retort with So What?

If an "expert" in a field proclaims something even if our commentators do not understand the nature of the "evidence" it matters not one iota. Think about it. Their position is perfect. Those that have access to the documents (and in document identification photographs are not nearly good enough) are almost to a person, a member of some religious institution or a religious department of some university. It is almost certain where the evidence is going to lay for them. If, on rare occassion, someone is secular and has the same opportunity to examine the same documents and disagrees with them, a charge of sour grapes will be launched against them.

How many people actually get to examine any one original fragment or manuscript? Is it thousands? Is it hundreds? No, it is more like three or four.

In the aforementioned discussion I have learned a few things:

If paleographer's guesses overlap by within 100 years at the 65% confidence level, that means they were highly accurate and their guesses as to the non dated material of the first or second century CE material should be accepted as gospel.

That it is OK to ignore links to photographs and facsimilies found on the Internet because they come from biased secular sources. Instead giving a reference to some expert's assertion in a book or medium the average reader is not going to be able to obtain and not be able to validate for accuracy of the quote or photography.

That I am an idiot, liar, and nincompoop especially when my oponent desires to misread or misunderstand my comments, or if I give references to a secular (meaning atheist) website.

You will problably meet with the same outcome here except for two things: name calling is held to a minimum by moderators and there are more here that understand the issues and might agree with you.

mountainman

Thanks for the response Darstec.

This issue of paleographic dating being accepted as some form of
authority by the mainstream is totally unacceptable to the 21st CE.
This state of affairs is made critical due to the fact that it is known
that paleographic assessment will normally fail to detect a forgery,
and that the art of forgery is not beyond the possibility of fourth
century technology.

Earlier this year, I received an encouraging response from usenet
in the following discussion:
http://groups.google.com.au/group/so...365ac6b6?hl=en

Here is the relevant text ....


And in regard to the inpugning of names as a response to my dialogue
rather than the option of reasoned discussion, I can only continue to
point out that this behaviour is consistent with the first christians.

Calumny was the literary weapon of Eusebius to deal with those groups
and tribes of people who, being distinct from the new and strange religion
of christianity in the fourth century, were fair game for mud-slinging.

Nothing much has changed with this 4th CE phenomenom in the intervening
centuries.

Best wishes, and thanks again for your objectivity.


Pete Brown
NAMASTE

Gamera

I'm not certain at all, Ben, but that's not my claim in any event. My point, in rebutting Amaleq's rather hyperbolic claim, is that at least some objective analysis was carried out by early Christian scholars in evaluating the suitability of texts for inclusion into the canon. Amaleq claimed that he wasn't aware of any objective analysis on their part, and I think the evidence shows that's patently false.

I'm quite comfortable with the fact (and believe I suggested as much) that the objective analysis may have been more on the exclusionary end, while the inclusion relied on tradition (which is arguably objective) and such nonscholarly nonrational practices as prayer. Ultimately there is no rational way to determine that a text is "inspired", by definition. But since authenticity of authorship was arguably a sine qua non of inspiration, the resort to tradition to determine authorship, for people much closer in time and hence with access to various sources of information lost to us, I think the inclusionary end also has its objective elements.

But even if it didn't. It's helpful and I think well-established that that early Christian scholars winnowed out the bad texts through some objective process.

gregor

watch out, folks. Don't get hit by those moving goalposts.

And your reference to tradition as equivalent to objective analysis is not particularly persuasive.

I think your initial disclaimer of knowledge is sufficient.

Amaleq13

It is bad form to try to take credit from those who, unlike yourself, provided a substantive response to my question. You have rebutted nothing.

While it is not true to take the extreme position that the early church fathers never applied reason to objective evidence in reaching their conclusions about authenticity, it is also not true that this was common or even necessarily their primary approach.

The evidence shows I was aware? You are confused. The evidence shows that my lack of awareness is entirely reasonable since examples are, contrary to an earlier assertion, "plentiful".