Adam

Happy Thanksgiving to all,
and I pardon you all for again failing to respond to my Post #335 in which I lamented the lack of response to my Seven-Written-Eyewitness-Record hypothesis. So I won't tease you teday about five weeks of non-response.
And thanks to spin for engaging my actual (though peripheral) hypothesis. I hope that if spin ever reads my basic (pre-#230) posts, he will answer questions and deal with my answers instead of repeating assertions.
No, spin, it was quite coherent before the words in red were added. It just was not a chiasm. You would do better to argue that the Layer 5 Editor made us this info to create the parallelism that is there now. This would help refute both inerrancy and mythicism with one blow. You can't prove any crossing of layer 1, 2, 3, and 4 boundaries.

By use of B. H. Streeter's Proto-Luke theory, I can show the relationship between gMark and gLuke, and I have done so. It's right there in my first post #230 about the six layers of gMark. Start reading below the bold:
http://www.freeratio.org/showthread....306983&page=10
Yes, please do. No, wait a minute, that's a diversionary strategy against my almost-uncontested Seven Eyewitnesses hypothesis. Please read my posts before spin got involved. In any case, be sure to skip spin's repetitiveness.This appears to spin's first-ever comment on my Seven-Eyewitnesses hypothesis. Thank you for your opinion.
By use of B. H. Streeter's Proto-Luke theory, I can show the relationship between gMark and gLuke, and I have done so. It's right there in my first post #230 about the six layers of gMark. Start reading below the bold:
http://www.freeratio.org/showthread....306983&page=10
Didn't I say that to you? If I didn't, I should have.
That's the third time you have said that in this post. Here again for the second time:
By use of B. H. Streeter's Proto-Luke theory, I can show the relationship between gMark and gLuke, and I have done so. It's right there in my first post #230 about the six layers of gMark. Start reading below the bold:
http://www.freeratio.org/showthread....306983&page=10
Fourth time. But I'll stand with my second identical reply.
Mark and gJohn are related as shown in the bottom of the OP,
http://www.freeratio.org/showthread.php?t=306983
and at the top of Post #18 and #52.
I still see no evidence spin has read any post of mine preceding #230.

spin

I'd hope that Adam stop making false presumptions and start defending his theory rather than continuing to obfuscate. There are more weak links in this chain than there are links.

Streeter is welcome to his theories. He's not here to argue them, long since pushing up ye olde dayseyes. You have to argue your theory. You have failed to do so from the start of this thread to the current post.

Perhaps you should have actually read what I've posted, rather than ignoring criticism. Try post #241,

[T2]Your thesis is based on an assertion regarding eye witnesses, one that you have no way of verifying and, worse, no way of falsifying.[/T2]

You've only ever been massaging text, not dealing with the real world. This stuff about witnesses is only an albatross around your neck. Normally one doesn't talk about things they cannot verify or even falsify.

Streeter is welcome to his theories. He's not here to argue them. You have to argue yours. You have failed from the start of this thread to the current post.

You'd just be playing the schoolyard copycat.

Streeter is welcome to his theories. He's not here to argue them. You have to argue yours. You have failed from the start of this thread to the current post.

I guess you'll continue to defend your thesis with the same nonsense.

Yes, you lips moved. Did you actually read your own posts? I mean beside the fact that you accept the notion of a signs source and that you jovially assert "Now that I think of John Mark as the writer of the Passion Narrative", which you further assert was the source of later Johannine text. See the pattern? Assert based on assertion. This is fact free theory development.

He he probably pulled that notion out of the same place he pulled his theory about seven written records about Jesus in the gospels.

Adam has failed to respond meaningfully to the widespread Latin influence in Mark.

He has failed to deal with the chiasms that cross his layers, while other chiasms happily sit within his layers.

He talks about stuff he has no hope of knowing anything about, eg the fictitious eye witnesses that someone in their first year at university would understand is totally useless noise.

He pretends to respond to things and when he seems to lack an understanding of how to justify any of his claims other than by reference to some authority, be it Teeple or Streeter or Black or Crossley or now Casey. It's all just assertion held together by reference to names of authorities in lieu of actual evidence and argument. I'd happily argue against content if he had any, as you are all well aware. This is the frustrating thing: there's no meat.

The end of this schemozzle is Adam's surreptitious avoidance of responsibility. He feels no obligation to defend his flimsy theory, having obfuscated long enough to have to make untangling his retreat not worth the effort.

Adam

Still no evidence that spin has read any of my posts preceding my peripheral thesis Post #230. Nevertheless, I zealously answered his many critiques of the latter, knowing that many would evade judging my main thesis is spin prevailed on the peripheral thesis. Now that there's no danger of that, I see no need to answer a post that says nothing new.
Meantime, I have studied the Greek and am now prepared to answer the details in his Post #348. Unless he starts showing some signs of mutual dialogue, I may not bother doing so. If he wants to meaningfully engage, his retreat here does not have to be in abject defeat.
Apparently I should pay more attention to Roger Pearse than to spin.
http://www.freeratio.org/showthread....306983&page=13
Post #306
The count has now reached 200 posts since my main thesis has been engaged other than the ridicule of Peter. So it's just so obvious that the gospels are full of eyewitness testimony that it's hard to argue against?
About the relevant specifics about Proto-Luke, I may have only linked to my arguments it from my Post #74 to this:
http://megasociety.org/noesis/181.htm#Underlying
Read my small section on "Luke"
But spin has not read the articles, much less the links

Sheshbazzar

Hundreds of posts and Adam still has not provided any solid evidence of the existence of even a single eyewitness to a living and human Jeebus,
Which might be recalled, was the substance of his OP, and is still reflected in his chosen title for this thread.

The assumption of the existence of any identifiable eyewitnesses to a living and human Jeebus is a thesis of Adam's that still awaits to be proven, not simply repeatedly asserted.

No figure Adam has named can be demonstrated to have been an an actual eyewitness to the existence of a human Jeebus the christ.
The Gospel tales are contrived, the characters whom Adam names are all fictional, entirely lacking in corroboration from any source outside of the script of the highly imaginative B-grade Walking Dead Zombie Fairy-Tale that they are but brief bit players in.

A great many words, but Adam has thus far failed to demonstrate, or provide any irrefutable textual proof of the correctness of his major thesis.
Not will he ever be able to do so.

All of the other shit he is throwing up here is just so much smoke and noise.
Even Toto could see that there is nothing but hum-bug behind that curtain.

Think you have convinced anyone here Adam?
The more that you write, the more certainly you convince me, and most others, that you are simply an empty cistern, a well without water, a cloud without rain, an unlearned wanna-be.

I say to you in the Hebrew language; 'Le'kah Adam! Lamed'oo! v'Shoo'voo min'ha ov'veh'leth ha'zeh;
Let the Heavens and the earth hear, and bare this record. What I have written, I have also spoken.

Adam

Thank you, Sheshbazzar,
For displaying evidence that spin did read something of mine precedig Post #230. (Which post of his was that?)
I would not want to think he had no basis whatever for saying what he did in those three lines. In any case that wasn't enough to respond to nor to stick in my memory. Nice try, but I'm still counting at the last 200 posts with my main thesis uncontested.

Sheshbazzar

And unevidenced and unsupportable.
Add a thousand more posts full of similarly empty and unsupportable assertions and you will still have nothing.

spin

As this thread has gone on so long without any evidence being proffered to support its thesis, it might be useful to look over all the material that Adam has supplied. Then you'll see that he hasn't got a clue how to justify his claims. Everything is assertion-driven. Just look at this stuff:

[T2]The sources underlying the gospels can be established by general comparison and by detailed analysis. The general picture is that even John has textual overlaps with the other three gospels, the Synoptics. This shows that there was originally a gospel with only a few chapters covering the life of Jesus . Comparison with the Acts of the Apostles shows that there is no reason to assume that this text stops with the end of Jesus’s life in 29 A.D. If we look for the logical end-point, it comes near the end of chapter 12. Just before the death of Herod Agrippa I in 44 A.D., the Apostle Peter arrives at the home of John Mark. The underlying text had focused on Peter to this point. Since we hear of Peter only once again, we can assume that this source ends here. It is best called “Petrine Ur-Marcus”. It was written in Aramaic at that time.[/T2]

Assertion #1: The sources underlying the gospels can be established by general comparison and by detailed analysis. Evidence for this? None.

Assertion #2: The general picture is that even John has textual overlaps with the other three gospels, the Synoptics. Evidence for this? None, but we can sort of accept this because we bring to the discussion the knowledge that there is some shared narrative elements between John and the synoptics.

Assertion #3: This shows that there was originally a gospel with only a few chapters covering the life of Jesus . Evidence for this? None. It is in the form of a conclusion. It somehow claims to follow from the previous assertions that there was some early written source shared by the later texts. There couldn't for example have been an oral tradition that developed and gained elements that were either similar or different from those taken over by other strands of the same tradition.

Assertion #4: Comparison with the Acts of the Apostles shows that there is no reason to assume that this text stops with the end of Jesus’s life in 29 A.D. There seems to be no reason to stop the story of Jesus's life with his death. There seems to be some reason to treat Acts as though it were historical. No comparison is actually done, no evidence is actually discussed. This is just another of those notions plucked from the abyss.

Assertion #5: If we look for the logical end-point, it comes near the end of chapter 12. This assertion does have a modicum of evidence supplied for it, but we'll have to wait.

Fact #1: Just before the death of Herod Agrippa I in 44 A.D., the Apostle Peter arrives at the home of John Mark. This is a "fact" according to Acts 12:12. A hidden assertion here seems to be that this John called Mark is the initiator of the Marcan tradition, purely on the grounds that Peter is supposed to have gone to his mother's house. The insinuation of the date 44, when Agrippa I died, is interesting because this is basically the last Acts tells us about Peter, oh, except for the disputing with Peter in 15:7, so 44 as a terminus ad quem is dead even on the narrative of Acts.

Fact #2: The underlying text had focused on Peter to this point. There is no argument here: Acts does tend to focus on Peter thus far.

Assertion #6: Since we hear of Peter only once again, we can assume that this source ends here. Well, saying "assume" shows a dose of self-awareness, though the assertion is actually totally unsupported, ie that there was a source that went through the Jesus story up to the time that Acts stops focussing on Peter.

Assertion #7: It is best called “Petrine Ur-Marcus”. How it came to be "best" is only a reflection of Adam's imagination, as is the rest of the theory thus far.

Assertion #8: It was written in Aramaic at that time. This assertion was made before Adam became acquainted with Maurice Casey, so now he has another name to through in the ring in lieu of evidence to back up the assertions. What we would like to see is actual evidence for Aramaic being the source of anything in Mark let alone his "Petrine Ur-Marcus".

These assertions are then followed by a list of biblical references that somehow were decided that make up this imaginary "Petrine Ur-Marcus" and the assertions start up again:

[T2]No other Synoptic sources were employed in the Gospel of John, so we can deduce that 44 A.D. slightly preceded the major development of the writing of John. Its textual mark is identity of word-use between Mark and Luke, but not with John. This shows that it must have been translated into Greek by the time it was used in Mark and Luke.[/T2]
Assertion #9: No other Synoptic sources were employed in the Gospel of John, so we can deduce that 44 A.D. slightly preceded the major development of the writing of John. Well, this is actually a pair of assertions,

Assertion 9a: No other Synoptic sources were employed in the Gospel of John,. Evidence that "synoptic material was employed at all? None. Adam is stuck in the notion that all sources were written.
Assertion 9b: so we can deduce that 44 A.D. slightly preceded the major development of the writing of John. This is in the form of deduction, based on the erroneous notion that 44 CE had any significance.

Assertion 10: Its textual mark is identity of word-use between Mark and Luke, but not with John. There is some sense to be discerned by these words and it is about some linguistic issue shared by Mark & Luke but not with John, but there is no evidence whatsoever to support the assertion.

Assertion 11: This shows that it must have been translated into Greek by the time it was used in Mark and Luke. It shows nothing of the sort. It does show that one can use assertions to breed more assertions without the need of any evidence at all. Once you assert that something was written in Aramaic, then I guess you can just as easily assert that it was translated into Greek. We need to see tangible evidence that there was any Aramaic beside the few mumbo-jumbo words preserved in Mark, until then any notion of translation is unsupported assertion.

One could go on with his assertions on Q or "Twelve-Source", but you can do it. It will only be more of the same. The twelve source stuff comes from E. Meyer followed by Wilfred L. Knox, way back when biblical scholars thought they could apply the knife to texts and get nice neat layers without needing to consider much the effects of the hypothetical redactors on those hypothetical layers.

Adam

Roger Pearse must have meant someone else! This is good stuff, spin, I'll have to answer it, though some will require research. I expect you to continue to refuse to answer my questions and to disregard my answers, but you sure can rise to a challenge! Observing a hundred inadequate posts from my opponents, and that they had given up, spin took the occasion of my peripheral thesis in my Post #230 to launch a series of barbs at me starting with #252 to distract all of us from the main business at hand, determining whether or not there is adequate historical basis for believing in Jesus Christ. My #230 was trying to defend against the embarrassment of apocalypticism, so keep our eyes on that and not on seven written records of Jesus by eyewitnesses.

Unfortunately for you guys, this makes even spin's post here an embarrassment to your side, as it brings forth the events of Jesus's life and the men who testified to it afterwards.
Thanks for the lead about Wilfred L. Knox (one of the four Knox brothers, his brother Ronald did a Catholic translation of the Bible), but he died in 1950, otherwise I would rush to buy the 2010 paperback edition of his Sources of tth Synoptic Gospels. Vol. 1.
I'll close for now while I read what I can get in the Barnes & Noble preview. The book itself is in the library I go to. Already I have learned that Eduard Meyer's 1921 Ursprung... came out at the worst time when Form Criticism prevented proper consideration of written sources. Knox gives some dates as early as 40 A.D.

Doug Shaver

Apparently, a response to Adam is not a response at all unless he agrees with it. Thus we see how it is that all his arguments remain "uncontested."

Doug Shaver

Nothing like that has been determined. You're arguing in a circle. Virtually every premise presupposes your conclusion.