mountainman

Another way one might look at this opinion is that C14 is off topic unless you go along with the assumption that there are in fact earlier manuscript originals. The C14 says we are dealing with 4th century manuscripts and I do not go along with the assumption that there were any earlier manuscripts.

No one uses C14 to date the composition of NT related texts because the C14 says 4th century and everyone expects there to be original manuscripts which were authored in a prior century.

What if the NT literature phenomenom and indeed the historical jesus is a 4th century literary phenomenom?

When did Jesus ever anachronistically carry a Codex in his left hand?

"A book cover like (those of) my books was in his [Lithargoel's] left hand. --- SOURCE

Everyone in this forum and all commentators read Lithargoel in the Nag Hammadi "The Acts of Peter and the 12 Apostles" as "behold I am Jesus Henry"! So the question is when was this story authored if Jesus is carryng a codex in his left hand? The answer it is suggested also points to the 4th century, when the Christian message was publicised by the codex. You'll also note that the speaker is Peter, and that he already had a book. Dont you find it interesting that this story presents Jesus and Peter walking around with books in their hands? When were the scrolls of the new testament supposed to have been written according to the (Eusebian) story-line? When was Jesus was walking around talking about "The City of Nine Gates", an important citation to the Bagavad Gita? Was is fact Jesus carrying around a copy of the Gita (like Mahatma Gandi)?




The C14 "Bell Curve".

We have 2 extant C14 citations for NT related manuscripts and both suggest 4th century. Assuming further C14 citations are conducted on other "early NT literature manuscripts" and the C14 dating keeps saying 4th century. Test after test.

How many 4th century citations does a statistical analyst need to accumulate in order to conclude that the "Bell Curve" of "New Testament related literature C14 dating" does not in fact cover the first two centuries at all?

Christianity Today is not sure about the Historical Jesus becauee people generally look up to modern science and technology and archaeological assessments and multi-spectral analysis of previously illegible manuscripts. C14 has only entered the technology a short time ago and its first voice with regard to BC&H has been treated as a signal to start avalanches of conjectures about original authorship of the source texts centuries earlier than the C14 date.

Everyone is following Eusebius, and expecting his "Church History" to be factual.
Hence the 4th century C14 datings are not treated as the "originals".

Appeal to Common Sense

How many books produced in antiquity were "originals" and how many were "straight copies of earlier works".
How many of each category were produced by Eusebius, Origen, Porphyry, Philo, Josephus, Julius Caesar, eyc, etc.
Choose your author or authors --- everyone without exception produced "originals".
Where is your evidence to think that most literary productions in that epoch were not "original works"?
Do you have any citation to support this opinion.

gurugeorge

Dammit, you know mountainman, that's the first time I've read something of yours here and though "hmmm, maybe .... "

Keep at it - it's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it!

Toto

What about the mere possibility that these manuscripts are copies of earlier manuscripts? How can do you rule that out? That mere possibility means that the C14 date cannot be taken as the date of composition.

You keep posing this as a possibility but you have made no progress on finding any reason for it.

Codex Why is your example anachronistic if it was written any time after the first century?

Some of the earliest apparent scraps of Christian literature have not been carbon dated because the current technology is destructive. I think I read somewhere that new techniques have been developed, so there may be some new data.

Some current pieces have been dated by palaeography to the second or third centuries, but you reject this technique -- because you don't like the results, even with a large margin of error.

There are too many errors in this paragraph to deal with. CT is quite sure that Jesus existed, and is only unsure about what sort of a religious type he was. The authors in CT do not rely on modern science for answers, but on the Holy Spirit. C14 is not that new.

This is not the basis of dating Christian and gnostic literature to the second or third centuries. If you can't even deal with the actual arguments, you are never going to get anywhere. You have to deal with palaeography, with the historical context. You still have no coherent explanation for why Eusebius would write heretical documents and also orthodox refutation.

There is no common sense evident here.

Many books are ephemeral - the author writes it, publishes it, finds an audience, and then the next season another author writes a new book.

But with sacred or classical literature, people make copies and preserve them. There are still copies being made of Christian literature after several millenia. Why do you insist that this process must have started in the 4th century and not in the 2nd? :huh:

Pete, you are remarkably persistent and you are always polite, but you seem to be trying to substitute persistence for actual persuasion.

As I have noted, it is radical enough to date most Christian literature to the second century, and you can do that without rejecting massive amounts of secular scholarship. Trying to date Christianity to the 4th century makes no sense.

mountainman

What about the dating the Gnostic authors to the 4th century with the C14? See C14 dating the "Gnostic Gospels and Acts" to the 4th century

OAO

History is an art, but there are some things I think we can say are historically certain (i.e. very improbably false):

*There was a Jew named Jesus.
*Jesus performed exorcisms and healings.
*Jesus proclaimed the coming of the Kingdom.
*Jesus was crucified under Pilate.

The reasons for the crucifixion are debated. Some people want to link it to the Temple and say that Jesus was an orthodox Jew on everything else - but if Jesus was willing to go against the Temple, why not expect him to break more rules?

For my part, I think the criterion of double dissimilarity has some serious defects and that you have to appeal to things like parsimony, explanatory scope, non ad hocness, and so forth.

bacht

* there were lots of Jews named Jesus/Joshua
* there were others who did such things, including OT characters
* maybe, or maybe John the Baptist did, but what kind of kingdom?
* the Romans crucified many Jews in the 1st C


Sorry but this is Apologetics 101. All of your claims and many others have been disected in this forum by some very smart people.

spamandham

(I assume you mean a Jew named Jesus upon whom the Biblical Jesus was based rather than just a random Jew by that name).

None of these are substantiated sufficiently to be considered facts. Everything we know about this Jesus comes from writers who never knew him, writing long after the purported facts, and spinning impossible yarns for propaganda purposes. There is nothing we can say with any certainty regarding the man Jesus, including whether or not he even existed.

neilgodfrey

McKnight gives the game away when he explains at some length how biblical scholars are mostly following the historiography of G.R. Elton who wrote a key book titled "The Practice of History". But if you read Elton's book you see that what he means by historical evidence and tests for genuineness is at a whole different conceptual level from the way biblical scholars have (mis)applied his principles. For example for Elton, you analyze old texts such as accounting records and administrivia in the light of their broader contexts to assess economic conditions of this or that place and group. You use provenanced data to uncover more facts.

McKnight sidesteps such explanatory illustrations in Elton and begins with our culturally inherited assumption that the Gospels are some sort of history about a real person (by and large bypassng Elton's testing for genuineness and nature of sources). He then admits that biblical scholars use criteria (criteriology) and exegesis -- exclusively -- to attempt to find facts in the text that is untested and assumed to contain a basically historical narrative.

When Elton and others (Carr, von Ranke, even the postmodernist Jenkins) speak of "existential facts" being the raw data with which they work, as far as I am aware they never think of facts that are the creation of imaginative and debatable exegesis, or of criteria applied to an untested narrative. And they are not attempting to waste time seeing if their meagre sources for ancient events will enable them to discover if Julius Caesar really did say "Et tu, Brute" or went to the Senate on a particular day in March.

I get the impression lots of biblical historians are like children playing make-believe grown-up games. They imitate the expressions and put on the oversized clothes, but they have no idea what it's really all about.

Neil

Toto

More from Vridar (Neil Godfrey)

Scott McKnight’s lament and the fallacy of the HJ historical method

Historical Facts and the very UNfactual Jesus: contrasting nonbiblical history with ‘historical Jesus’ sham methodology