Adam

My Post #555 contained an error, and I include here the bottom third of that post with changes in bold for both the error in verse numeration (was "22:3-23, 48-49, 23:35-37" in both places) and the section reconciling with my Post #230.

Sheshbazzar

The only way you can posit such blatant crap is by totally ignoring everything that the Atheists on this Forum and in this thread have said on the subject.
As these mythical non-events and non-situations never actually happend, there is no such thing as a 'gospel according to the atheists'.
And nothing we have said here can validly be 'restyled' into any form of, or support of a 'gospel'.
You are free to write your own fucked up horse-shit ideas here, but that does not extend to a license to falsly attribute beliefs or positions to others which they do not hold.





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Doug Shaver

What an interesting concept.

Other than "He was not the son of God," I cannot think of a single statement about Jesus that all atheists would agree with. Perhaps you mean "The Gospel According to Lots of Atheists"?

Adam

I suppose it's proven to be "The Gospel according to no Atheists". I had uncovered incidentally along the way that some of my eyewitnesses would not necessarily be a priori rejected, because there was no supernatural event in the proposed source. Thus my proposals should be considered on their merits, not arbitrarily dismissed and condemned. We're trying to get at the truth, here (aren't we?), so it should be possible to consider whether the Passion Narrative is so simple in the source within gJohn that it should be considered an eyewitness's account of a week in his young life. It's not that big a deal to accept that Jesus was crucified and that it turns out that there is strong evidence of it. That there was an eyewitness here does not imply, however, that it has to be John Mark.

My other strong case is for Nicodemus as the eyewitness recording the Johannine Discourses--his viewpoint changed during the process. Now some people who particularly like Jesus (but not as the Christ) object to anything about the Jesus in gJohn, but at least I showed that the sayings recorded here do not present Jesus fairly. Nevertheless I understand why some people firmly reject this portrayal of Jesus and would not want to accept my argument that Nicodemus was an eyewitness.

However, these same people who object to Nicodemus would have reason to accept Matthew as author of Q, because they like the Q document that they use for the Jesus Seminar Jesus. This type of Jesus is the least like the churchy Jesus that they do not like, so this serves to be argument in itself for Q being from an eyewitness. It's necessary to maintain Matthew (or someone) was an eyewitness to override the (stronger) case for John Mark and Nicodemus. The desirability is all the stronger because the further development of my case (as in the bold in #561) provided textual evidence that the apocalypticism in Q is really from a later Q2 source.

My hypothesis extends to claiming to include a Mark-size gospel, Proto-Luke (in my #555 as modified by #561). It's this Proto-Luke that is the reason some scholars regard Luke-Acts as Ebionite. Most scholars exclude from Proto-Luke most supernaturalism, not just the Infancy Narrative and the Resurrection. In the rest of the gospel the miracles and such are regarded as having been copied in from Mark.

So wouldn't that work for you? Give due consideration to what you regard as possible (two or three or four eyewitnesses), but draw the line at other sources that I can't show to be as such likely eyewitnesses?

Sheshbazzar

Contrary to your verbose claims, there is no evidence that any character that is named in any of the NT texts ever contributed to or wrote any part of those texts.
It is as simple as that. You have no 'strong case' for any of your many claims. (as has already been pointed out to you __ repeatedly)
NO it won't work, and the reason has nothing to do with the ridiculous 'miracles' that these tall-tales are built upon.
But rather the fact, that whatever "might' be 'possible" is inadmissible as being EVIDENCE of anything.

The existence of 'Possibilities', and the existence of 'EVIDENCE' are two entirely different things.

Your elaborate reasonings fail because they attempt to substitute your imagined 'possibilities', 'maybe's','could have been's', and 'probablies' for the supplying of any actual EVIDENCE.

We here cannot regard, or accept a claim of the existence of "two or three or four eyewitnesses" because the texts nowhere present or ever identify any such 'eyewitness', Or any part of these texts as having been written by or dictated by anyone who had actually seen, or had ever been a companion of this man.
-IF- the 'Gospels' had been written in the FIRST PERSON singular, or plural -then- we would have claims of being eyewitnesses to the events reported. Unfortunately for your case, they were not. They DO NOT purport to be eyewitness accounts.
And even if they had been written in the 'FIRST PERSON', there would still be serious credibility problems with their 'flying pigs' type of claims.
Just because someone says that a thing happened, it is not EVIDENCE that the stated thing actually DID happen.
Otherwise we would be constrained to accept the testimony of such persons as Joseph Smith and his collection of sworn witnesses as likewise being irrefutable, true, and accurate accounts.

The NT texts report on -beliefs-, not accurate history.
(and through latter interpolations, even manage misrepresent when and where many of these christian beliefs first originated)

You are only wasting your time in presenting such fundamentally flawed arguments here.
As no one who respects reason and logic is ever going to accept what you are peddling.





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Doug Shaver

I don't need to deny the supernatural in order to disagree with your speculations about eyewitnesses sources. I disagree because they are nothing but speculations.

A desire for truth is one thing. An ability to see truth is something else entirely. Not a one of us is justified in supposing that we can use our sincerity as some kind of truth-detector.

What you have failed to do is demonstrate how the simplicity of any narrative logically entails anything about the source of that narrative. All you have done so far is assert "It is simple, therefore the source was a witness." That is simply a non sequitur as it stands.

You say there is strong evidence. Your saying so does not make it so.

What works for me is the hypothesis that the gospels originated as works of fiction. There were no eyewitnesses because they don't report anything that actually happened, and so there was nothing for anybody to be a witness to.

Adam

Going the other extreme to all fiction just makes it tougher for you. How do you explain the early sources that either are just simple events or just simple sayings? Why start out with those as fiction? Take them instead as factual (even if not necessarily eyewitness), to which fiction was added later (and denying, of course, that my later eyewitnesses were true accounts).

Adam

Eyewitnesses is not just a conservative concept. Among the three recent books I review here, the third reveals that Tubingen scholars could accept that the Gospel of the Hebrews was from an eyewitness--and this James K. Edwards thinks this Hebrews was the L source used by Luke! But Shesh won't be listening, I suppose.
Source-criticism of Luke seems more productive lately than of the Gospel of John, but the two tie together. A major work presents the Gospel of the Hebrews as the L source underlying Luke. That the Passion Narrative is not part of L or even of Proto-Luke seems more settled, and it was controversy about this that undermined Proto-Luke theory all along. Yet this was recognized early on and should never have been argued as part of Proto-Luke. The confusion is understandable, however, though still largely unrecognized by the scholarly community, that the Passion Narrative comes from the same source used for John and extensively rewritten for Mark. (Footnote: especially Feine in 1891, pg. 15, who also came to hold that the document was Ebionite. See the thousand pages by Jay M. Harrington, The Lucan Passion Narrative, 2000—so exhaustive that it is basically an annotated bibliography on Lucan sources.) This later version in Mark was available when the final Luke was written, but the earlier text was basically used. Many scholars thus could argue in error that canonical Mark was adapted to produce canonical Luke here, because the source of the Markan PN was not much different from the reworked version in Mark. It was J. Weiss who found that L and Q were joined before the Evangelist began his work (p. 16) and that Peter’s denial came from a source shared between Luke and John (p. 170). What no one seems to recognize is that the pre-Lucan Proto-Luke never included a Passion Narrative because the church already had a written Passion Narrative to which to turn after concluding Proto-Luke. So there was a PN to Proto-Luke—sort of. Alfred Petty worked it out quite well in 1930 that in the Passion Narrative Luke mostly used the Aramaic early version of Mark’s PN (the only part of Mark he initially had), but added in verses when the more complete Mark was available to him. Perry thought L was written by Cleopas (p. 162), whereas I think it was written by his son Simon.

Another early advance was that Luke’s compositional activity changed when he reached the Passion Narrative (V. H. Stanton in 1909, in Harrington 175). This follows because Luke for the first time had a new source to turn to, not Proto-Luke but the earlier PN. This earlier PN had already been written up (with additions) into the Mark that Luke had been using all along, but in the considerable overlap Luke gave preference to PN wherever the same ground was covered.

When English scholars later came up with similar ideas, some did not even acknowledge that Germans had been there before them. V. H. Stanton and J. V. Bartlet did more careful work in 1911 than Feine had done. (Kim Paffenroth, The Story of Jesus According to L, 1996). A decade later the famous B. H. Streeter got credit for the Proto-Luke theory. But he had not learned from the Germans not to press the theory into the Passion Narrative, nor did he recognize that the basic text for the PN was the Ur-Marcus that was shared by Luke and John. Even Paffenroth did not recognize that PN in Luke could not come from just Mark.

Paffenroth himself does not argue for Proto-Luke, but he does undertake a study of L that leads him to accept it as early and as valuable as Q and Mark, against the Cynic theory of Jesus.
Paffenroth (at pg. 18) turned up some strange ideas that support a very early date for the source. In 1934-35 E. P. Vickie in “The Third Gospel: A Hidden Source” ExpTim46 characterized “L as an anti-Christian source written by Pharisees: he is followed (p. 326-30) …by W. J. Fournier, “The Third Gospel…p. 428”. This parallels what I say about Nicodemus in writing the Johannine Discourses. This would tend to support L or Proto-Luke as a “Gospel According to the Atheists”, even though this view goes way too far. At most I think we can see here someone who may have still considered himself a Pharisee, though now a believer in Jesus.

The two excellent books above came out about the same time, so neither refers to the other, nor do they seem to do so later. They seem to take no notice of one another. Yet they were the lead participants in the 1999 Conference on Proto-Luke in Cologne, Germany.

Christopher Price in 2003 in review (Christiancadre)noted that Paffenroth’s L included no Infancy Narrative, Passion Narrative, nor Resurrection, but noted L was “rich in numerical details…names, place names, or other seemingly superfluous colorful’ details. Passenroth’s L contains:
Lik3:10-14, 4:25-27, 7:11-15, 36-47, 13:10-17, 39-42, 11;5-8, 12:16-20, 35-389, 13:1-17, 31-32, 11:5-89, 12-14, 28-32, 15:4-6, 8-9, 11-32, 16:1-8, 19-31, 17:7-10, 12-18, 18:2-8, 10-14, 19:2-10.

The most exciting new researcher is James R. Edwards with The Hebrew Gospel and the Development of the Synoptics, 2009. He does not combine L with Q, but takes L directly into Luke. The odd thing about his thesis is that it abandons Q and leaves unexplained 177 verses in the Double Tradition. Now if he had incorporated these verses as Q along with L to form Proto-Luke, he would have a better explanation. From the newer and better he seems to retreat into the old. Or maybe to the good—looking for the old, he finds the Gospel of the Hebrews to be this L source underlying Luke. He attributes it to Matthew, whose name got mistakenly attached to the Gospel of Matthew instead. His word study finds the word “Logia” not just to mean sayings, so it can’t describe Q as usually conceived.

Edwards traces his theory back to Pierson Parker’s 1940 article, “A proto-Lukan Basis for the Gospel of the Hebrews. Parker held that the non-Markan in Luke came from this (p. 80).

Edwards uses external criticism to name Matthew as the author of the Gospel of the Hebrews. His exhaustive quotes include one that leads in a different direction. Origen in commentary on Matthew 15:14 notes from Gospel of the Hebrews, “Jesus turned to Simon, son of John” and said “it is easier for a camel to go through a needle” etc. This hints that this Simon is the author, which is indeed what my own theory says. Origen did know that this Simon was one of the two with Jesus on the Road to Emmaus.
Edwards finds Semitisms to be concentrated in the L sections, which raises the question of whether the L author had nothing to do with Proto-Luke that included Q as well. However, all that’s needed is to assume that Q had already been translated into Greek (as was necessarily the case for Q2 anyway).

Edwards concluded with 23 theses (for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet), summarized here: 20 Church fathers wrote about the Gospel of the Hebrews, from all over the Mediterranean, with many specific verses in both Greek and Latin. Matthew wrote it. The original was Hebrew, it was the most highly regarded non-canonical gospel, it’s also called Ebionites, Nazarenes, it’s closer to Luke, it’s a source used in Luke where Semitisms still show from the original language particularly in the unique sections, anti-Jew bias (especially among Germans) has kept it from critical attention, there is no tradition of a sayings source (Q), there are 177 verses of Double-tradition still to account for, Matthew was the last gospel written and was confused with the Gospel of the Hebrews because both were aimed at Jewish Christians.

Atheists have recently revived a lot of teachings of the old Tubingen School, but some of them believed that the Gospel of the Hebrews was written by an eyewitness, Matthew:
Scholars of the Tübingen School such as Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (d.1827),[88][89] Christian Friedrich Weber (1806),[90] thought that the Gospel of the Hebrews may indeed be an authentic eyewitness account written by the Apostle Matthew himself.[91] If this is the case, the Gospel of the Hebrews clearly has important data to contribute toward the solution of the synoptic problem.[92] A study of the external evidence regarding this gospel shows that among the Nazarenes and Ebionites existed a gospel commonly called the Gospel of the Hebrews. It was written in Aramaic with Hebrew letters. Its authorship was attributed to St. Matthew. [93]
http://www.enotes.com/topic/Gospel_o...#cite_note-140

That being the case, we here at FRDB should not be reflexively rejecting my eyewitness theories. This fourth of my seven can be regarded as an eyewitness without necessarily giving up on Atheism—at least if Edwards is right about Gospel of the Hebrews being a source for Luke.

Sheshbazzar

Who is.... this James K. Edwards ? and why should we accept what .... this James K. Edwards thinks ?

Doug Shaver

I think I'm up to the challenge.

What is it about the simplicity of a narrative that needs to be explained if the narrative occurs in a work of fiction?

I have no reason to take any portion of any narrative as factual if there is no evidence outside and independent of the narrative for its having occurred. If, in all the documents that now exist, Caesar's assassination were mentioned nowhere except in the works of William Shakespeare, I would not believe that Caesar was assassinated.