gnosis92

Dear Peter,

Did John make use of a sayings or discourses source, or take gospel of Thomas like sayings and expand on them to discourses?

Could John's chronology and account be harmonized with the synoptics?

Did the synoptics of know pre-John Sign's gospel.

regards
the gnostic

Riverwind

Maranatha...

You should know by know, if you don't, that it is not so much the dating of Mark that I am concerned with as examples of the bias often shown (and overlooked) by secular scholars and scholarship.

Peter Kirby

Well then. Give another example. My contention is that this one is bogus.

Riverwind

And that contention would be due to that elusive thing called bias.

Peter Kirby

Possible, but you overlook:

- error of thought
- other bias than alleged "atheistic bias" (say, the 7 biases enumerated in the other thread)

How do you discount the plausible options that my conclusion is based on error of thought or another type of bias?

(To say nothing of the plausible option, to my mind, that it is based on proper rational thought.)

And why don't you come up with another example, one that we might agree on?

Febble

Yes please.

Febble

About this bias thing. I think it is a red herring. We cannot avoid bias. What we need is a methodology to deal with it. In science we use the null hypothesis. A model hypothesis is, in a sense, a formal way of stating a "bias" - what the researcher proposes is true. If the model doesn't stand up to the test, the null is retained - if it does, the model is supported. So as long as we know what the model is, we can assess it on its merits. And a good researcher, having found support for his/her model, will then devise a counter-hypothesis that might account for the same data i.e. adopt the opposite bias. Or leave it to others to produce a counter-hypothesis.

It seems what we need is clarity in the expression of hypotheses, not "freedom from bias", which doesn't make a lot of sense as I see it.

And I like Peter's Thomist methodology of knitting his own counter-hypotheses.

Riverwind

I know that. You know that. Peter used to know that.

The only reason I've been pressing the issue as I have is because Peter's recent threads come down hard on Christian biases while he seems to be attempting to free himself of such accusations of bias by obfuscating his beliefs. I know that Peter tries to do his best to rid himself of biases, but the fact remains that he has a priori biases due to his beliefs just as Christians do. I don't think that he or anyone else has the right to call Christians out on their a priori biases.