Wallener

What about biographies? There must be a million books on people like Einstein, JFK, etc. If you limit it to books that have actually done research, there should be plenty of overlap in content since there should be plenty of overlap in sources. And newer biographies draw on older biographies, etc etc etc.

Vorkosigan

Dave Gentile's Synoptic stat site has an interesting piece of news here that reminds me of Peter Kirby's statistical analysis...

http://www.davegentile.com/synoptics/sci_news.html

John A. Broussard

An excellent site. I highly recommend it and will go back to it for more than just skimming.

It won't have much effect on theists, however. If a presumably pauline letter is clearly shown to be non-pauline, the answer will simply be that god is the true author, and he can most certainly vary his style in such a way that mere humans will never be able to identify it as coming from any given source.

You can't win when you're dealing with the followers of an all-powerful god.

GentDave

Hello.

I think you got it almost correct. The idea is to see if we can use the set 112 and the set of the whole synoptics taken separately, to make a better prediction that just the set of the whole synoptics by themselves. It asks if the additional information (the 112 set) is clearly useful.

For analogy suppose you have a multivariate regression, and you want to know if a variable added to the regression is significant. That is all I am doing.

For standard regression the underlying distribution is normal.
For logistic regression a more complex procedure is needed, since the underlying data is binary.

http://luna.cas.usf.edu/~mbrannic/fi.../Logistic.html

The underlying distribution my study is poisson, since word counts are positive integers. The study uses the same procedure used in logistic regression, but for a poisson distribution.

Its taken right out of an econometrics textbook, with very little adaptation.

But again the concept is just a regression, where we are testing a possible additional variable for significance. Example - We are predicting 002, we already have the synoptics as a whole as one predictor value. If we try to add 112 is it significant?

==========

Based on firm statistical results, the study does not eliminate the 2SH or the FH, or anything related. One could argue it suggests certain things beyond what it establishes firmly, of course.

I do think it statistically eliminates any hypothesis where the order must be something other than Mark, Matthew, Luke.

Dave

GentDave

I agree. If you try to interpret my results in terms of the 2SH, they suggest Q contained a fair amount of M. How else would we explain the 200-202 correlation on the 2SH? The 3SH allows the additional possibility that some of what we call Q is stuff Luke took from Matthew, which would help explain the 200-202 relation.

Yuri Kuchinsky

The truth, of course, is completely the opposite... In fact, there are huge amounts of evidence for a Semitic-language Matthew.

Nobody knows for sure what source material(s) Mt used... But I think it was primarily an early version of Lk.

Not necessarily.

But Papias is only one source. There are lots of others.

Hebrew Gospel of Matthew,
http://www.trends.net/~yuku/bbl/2dh.htm

All the best,

Yuri.

Yuri Kuchinsky

Dear Dave,

Firm statistical evidence had eliminated 2SH long ago.

I'm talking about the 1000 anti-Markan agreements of Lk and Mt, of course.

Thus, 2SH is a "theory of 1000 coincidences". The chances that it is valid are maybe 1 in a million, at best.

So, in my opinion, you have wasted plenty of your valuable time still pretending that 2SH is a valid theory...

Let's suppose there's a cat that's been run over by a car; the poor thing is dead as a doornail... But then some dude comes along and says, "Hey, but maybe it's not dead yet? Let me run some complex statistical studies here for a while, and maybe they will show that not all is lost yet."

And so, the fellow spends a few weeks doing his complex statistical studies, counting the cat's hairs, or something, and comparing their number and distribution with those of the other cats that are still alive, etc... And in the end he comes back and says, "Well, sorry, folks, but the results of my study are still somewhat inconclusive. So my study does not really eliminate the possibility that the cat is still alive..."

Gee, thanks for that, friend...

Yeah, the cat might be still hibernating... :banghead:

All the best,

Yuri.

GentDave

Most defenders of the 2SH would say that it is only the basic outline and there were more complications. However, they would also say there is not enough evidence to say exactly what the complications were.

Personally I say one way or another significant amounts of Matthew probably found their way into Luke.

As for the cat - Maybe it rose from the tomb after 3 days, for all I know.

Yuri Kuchinsky

Oh, I see, Dave... You have surveyed "most defenders of the 2SH", and you now know what they are saying... But it's still not quite clear what they are saying?

Well, I know what the main complication is. The main complication is that the whole Synoptic game -- as it's currently played -- is just so much smoke and mirrors. This is all just a shell game, where all the main contenders, such as 2SH, 2DH, and Farrer are all ridiculous straw-men.

None of these theories is anywhere close to what the real history of the gospels was.

So that's the main complication here, my dear friend!

So what? Sure, some elements of Mt could well find their way into Lk (at some later stage).

But likewise (at an earlier stage) some elements of Lk could have easily found their way into Mt.

All of that could be easily proven... But first you need some honesty, and some respect for the scientific method, which is what the current generation of Synoptic scholars is direly lacking.

It doesn't even need to rise after 3 days! Because the daft scholars will play with it anyway, as if it were still alive... They wouldn't even know the difference!

Yuri

GentDave

That comment is based mostly on a comment by Sanders and Davies in Studying the Synoptic Gospels. I'm not sure how many people or what litterature they surveyed to reach that conclution.

They are all too simple to be completely correct, I agree. But some could be correct as a broad outline for most of the material.

The problem is that more complex solutions, while more plausable explinations of the data, can not be proven based on firm evidence, because too many other complex hypothesis would also explain all the data with as much plausability.