mountainman

Ehrman's counter-objection to the claim that Constantine made Christianity the state religion of the empire is not shared by all scholars. For example, see T.D. Barnes in Constantine's Prohibition of Pagan Sacrifice. It is quite obvious that there is not a consensus between all scholars on the specific issue, rather that there is a spectrum of opinion.

Positive and Negative Evidence for all Claims

A spectrum of opinion for any and all claims is generated by the examination of the same evidence that is to be associated with the claim. This evidence of of two kinds - positive: evidence presented FOR the claim, and negative: evidence presented AGAINST the claim.

The first point is that we cannot hope to prove any proposition unless we look for negative evidence that might contradict it, and the second point is that many of us ignore the first point, because of the tendancy of our minds (not, of course, of "human nature") to look only for positive evidence that confirms a proposition we want to prove. This tendancy explains the remarkable tenacity of superstitions ... and of prejudices ....

Negative Evidence - Richard Levin
Studies in Philology; Vol. 92, No. 4 (Autumn, 1995) (pp. 383-410)

p.383

Spanky

How many people were "illegitimately" born of a married woman in those days? Just one? It must have been Jesus right? :facepalm:

stephan huller

am i correct to understand that ehrman himself postef something at the Jesus mysteries?

GakuseiDon

Actually, Carrier took Ehrman to mean that the Romans didn't keep such records AT ALL, that "our not having them means Romans never kept them". In light of Ehrman's comment that "we simply don't have" instead of "they simply didn't have", do you think that is a supportable reading?

Toto

GDon - why are you obsessing over this point? Ehrman did not express himself either accurately or precisely. You could email him or pay $3.95 for the first month to ask him yourself what he thought he was saying.

EarlDoherty

I'm a couple of pages back in this thread, but better late than never...

After the Exile, Hebrew gradually became displaced by Aramaic as a ‘lingua franca’ of the region. Hebrew subsequently became a literary language, and was used also for ritual, liturgy, etc. The ‘vulgar’ tongue was Aramaic. After around 200 BCE, Jews in that region spoke Aramaic and Greek (after all, they had been under Greek overlordship for over a century). It’s a little like the medieval and early modern Church tending to write and, on an ecclesiastical level, converse in Latin (to some extent they still do), even though it was essentially now a literary language and they lived within cultures which spoke a variety of ‘vulgar’ languages, like Italian, French, English, etc.

But if Mark is writing a scene where his Jesus character is crying out from the cross amid his suffering, is he going to have him voice that cry in a formal, literary language, or will it be the vulgar tongue which his readers would relate to and which would make sense in the mouth of his character, namely Aramaic? You can be sure the Psalms, or at least the better known ones, would have been familiar and used in Aramaic.

I don’t see any necessity to cast Mark as “translating” a line from a LXX Psalm into Aramaic. As a resident of the Near East, probably in the Galilean-Syrian region, he knew it equally well in both languages, or at least the best known parts of it. I can even believe that “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” could have been a stand-alone expression, used in a variety of contexts and known in both language versions. (If the Pope stubs his toe, is he liable to swear in Latin, or in Italian—or in his case, German?)

Too much is made of the paltry few words in Aramaic Mark has inserted in his Gospel. In the absence of any other concrete evidence that any of his Gospel elements, sayings, anecdotes, traditions, were circulating in some kind of Aramaic versions going back to Jesus, it is nothing but wishful thinking to postulate (as Ehrman has done, though he states it categorically) that we have ‘evidence’ of a whole Aramaic phase of activity and tradition preceding the Gospels.

Take, for example, the scene of the raising of Jairus’ daughter. Mk. 5:41 says: “Then, taking hold of her hand, he said to her, ‘Talitha cum,’ which means, ‘Get up my child.’”

Could this be a memory, or tradition, about Jesus, who might have spoken such words in Aramaic in such a situation? Theoretically, perhaps. But it could equally well be the usage by Mark of a common type of phrase used in faith healing in the Greco-Aramaic culture of the day, including in Q-type expression which Mark would have been a party to, something that might have been more familiar in Aramaic than in anything else. Bilingual people in our own day tend to intermix phrases from one language into the other, especially if they have a well-used meaning in the other language. If I as a writer (or even speaker) in English use the phrase “raison d’etre”, I don’t need to have the reader postulate that I am reflecting a prior source in French, it’s just part of the parlance which English speakers in a bilingual culture often use. (This one's actually handier in the French.) And Mark provides a Greek translation for those of his readers who are not bilingual, maybe gentiles within the movement.

So we need to abandon any thought of basing arguments on why or whether Mark ‘translated back’ into Aramaic, or on why he didn’t use Hebrew. The latter is inapplicable and the former enjoys much more natural understandings.

Consider 1 Cor. 16:22, in which Paul (let’s assume this ending is authentic to the letter) says: “Marana tha”—Come, O Lord!” This hardly is expected to be from Jesus’ mouth. It’s part of the parlance of the prophetic movement of the time (though Paul’s cult was distinct from the Galilean preaching). There is no need to imagine that Paul is tapping into some ‘source’ or tradition in Aramaic. He is simply inserting a well-known phrase within a bilingual culture, common in both languages in his apocalyptic-oriented circles.

This logical interpretation of 1 Cor. 16:22 is fully applicable to any of the other Aramaic phrases in the NT, as well as any detectable Aramaicisms. There is even less need to postulate some Aramaic predecessor in such cases, with a translator preserving previous Aramaic versions, much less that they go back to the year after Jesus’ death, a la Ehrman. The very paucity of Aramaic words in the Gospels is argument against that. Any entire Aramaic phase of preaching and faith, let alone one that went back to Jesus himself, would be far more pervasive than this. Can you imagine, in a bilingual society such as Palestine was, a ‘record’ of Jesus’ life which would not have been full of preserved words by him in Aramaic? And especially in the so-called ‘genuine’ teachings of Jesus supposedly collected in Q1?

And a Q1 written in Rome? What a nonsensical idea. Q1 reflects a Galilean-Syrian prophetic movement, hardly one operating in Rome in the mid-first century. (The only connection it could have to Rome or anywhere else in the empire might be in some of its philosophical content which clearly borrows from or owes a debt to the preaching of the Cynics, which was a Mediterranean-wide phenomenon.) And it is only a little less nonsensical to place the writing of the Gospel of Mark in Rome (unless someone from Galilee-Syria just happened to be on vacation there and filled some of the time with a bit of writing).

Earl Doherty

EarlDoherty

Yes, and it is prima-facie plausible that—if I had gone to the moon—those rocks in my garden could have been moon-rocks.

Earl Doherty

stephan huller

As Hebrew was the divine language and Aramaic the secular tongue of Palestine it is curious that the gospel - if it was the 'new Torah' or supposed to be equal in authority to the Law given to Moses - would not have been written in Hebrew. I am not sure that Gospel of the Hebrews doesn't somehow recall the text being written originally in Hebrew. The sign on Jesus becomes very interesting if it was originally conceived as being written in Hebrew. But all of this is idle speculation. One would expect Hebrew to be the language of the gospel not Aramaic.

stephan huller

There is a parallel tradition in the Samaritan tradition with respect to Mark. It is said that he 'created wisdom' where wisdom is a common epithet of the Law. The word in the Tulida spelt bet-dalet-vav-alef-he is an active participle with a definite suffix. The pronunciation of the indefinite is bādo (accented on the first syllable) and the pronunciation of the definite form here is bādū’a (accented on the second syllable). The word spelt dalet-h.et-mem-tav-he means “of wisdom” or “of the wisdom”. The dalet is a prefix. It is pronounced dikmāta (accented on the second syllable).

The connotation of spuriousness in the verb bet-dalet-alef (or he or yod) is not in Western Aramaic. It is only in Eastern Aramaic, i.e. Syriac and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. (It is not attested in Mandaean). In Jewish Palestinian Aramaic it can only mean original invention. This includes made up situations or words for the sake of explaining an argument. I will have another look at Jastrow’s examples. (Note that his example from Yerushalmi Megillah does not mean what he reads into it. It does not say the Latin translation was spurious, but rather that it was a new translation without reference to previous translations). In Samaritan Aramaic there is never any bad connotation. It still has its primary meaning of metalworking and other craftwork, but always with the connotation of originality. It is the verb used for the divinely inspired work of Bezalel in crafting the Tabernacle under Moses’s direction on the model of the Heavenly Tabernacle. That ought to set you thinking.

Here is an example from Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, not known to Jastrow. Nu 16:28. Read the verse in context. Moses says he did not make the Torah up himself. A marginal variant in Targum Neofiti uses this verb, not with any connotation of spuriousness, but instead with the connotation that such originality was beyond the ability of Moses. In Jewish Palestinian Aramaic it also means to make intelligible. There is alternation in Western Aramaic between the roots bet-dalet-yod and vav-dalet-yod. Look this root up. (Note by Ben-Hayyim in his edition of the Tîbat Marqe).

Although all mss. of the Tulida have the verb bet-dalet-he (or yod), it should be borne in mind that dalet and resh are very similar in shape not only in Jewish script but also in the original Hebrew script (Samaritan), and bet-resh-he (or yod) means to create. An original wording with this verb is not impossible.

In Florentin’s critical edition of the Tulida with notes the Hebrew word [bore] bet-vav-RESH-alef meaning “creator” is given by Florentin as the nearest Hebrew equivalent to the exact meaning of the Aramaic term

EarlDoherty

I don’t know what literary circles you move in, but I totally disagree. I found the writing in this book to be appallingly amateurish, with unpolished prose, garbled exposition, and hardly a clever turn of phrase anywhere. It’s condescendingly colloquial to the reader, treating him like an uninformed dummy. That is not how one achieves “clarity”, let alone respect as a writer. I have said that this book suffers from an appalling lack of professional editing, and it may be that Ehrman is barely a competent writer by himself, let alone a polished one, but that earlier books enjoyed the benefit of good editing by someone in the field. This one obviously did not.

Ehrman ought to collect all copies of this book that have been sold and burn the lot of them. Then he should retire and spend the next ten years researching and writing a proper book on historicism and against mythicism. This Did Jesus Exist? will go down in the annals of NT mainstream apologetics as the winner in the equivalent of the Oscar Razzies.

Earl Doherty