Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Little Dot · 08-19-2011, 08:40 PM

Some people believe that John was never intended as a seperate work, but, was attached to 1John, because it lacks the salutory opening that is common with the the other works of the New Testament as does 1John. John is not concerned with a lot of the things that Matt., Mark and Luke are, because he is giving his audience an overview of the material they are about to learn.

The purpose of the Book of John and 1John was to show people that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God and believing this one would have life in his name and to portray Jesus as the "Logos", "Messiah" emphasizing His diety over His humanity and in so doing to lay to rest the gnostic views of Cerinthus and the Ebionites that Jesus was only a man that the Spirit visited and then left.

aa5874 · 08-20-2011, 12:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by avi

.....Can I impose upon you, the task of identifying the precise verse which claims that Paul knew of written text describing the death and resurrection of JC, three days later?

avi

I have already shown 1 Cor.15 many times.

People here ASSUME that "Paul" refers to Hebrew Scripture when he did NOT make such a claim.

1Co 15:3 -

Quote:

For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures

And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures....

Are you implying that "Paul" could NOT have been referring to the Jesus story as found in the Gospel?

I hope not.

You should know that even apologetic sources claim "Paul" was AWARE of gLuke.

See "Church History" 3.4.8 and 6.25.4-6.

Eusebius has PRESENTED a written statement that "Paul" was AWARE of a WRITTEN source called gLuke which contains the death, burial, and resurrection of a character called Jesus.

"Church History" 6.25.

Quote:

....4. Among the four Gospels, which are the only indisputable ones in the Church of God under heaven, I have learned by tradition that the first was written by Matthew....... The second is by Mark...... And the third by Luke, the Gospel commended by Paul........

J-D · 08-20-2011, 02:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Toto

Quote:

Originally Posted by Juststeve

Isn't the anomaly of Paul's treatment of Jesus explained by what Paul himself says? Paul had a personal experience, his understanding of Jesus came from that experience, and he did not get his Gospel from any man. Under those circumstances I would expect Paul's view to be somewhat idiosyncratic until it was adopted by others. Is there anything strange about that?

Steve

It is quite strange, if Jesus was a figure of recent history. Can you imagine some current politician claiming that he had communed with the spirit of John F. Kennedy, and that the current Kennedy family members were all wrong about his views - not only wrong, but irrelevant? Why would anyone take him seriously? Why wouldn't he have to spend all of his time explaining that away?

Bahá'u'lláh's declaration that he was the one prophesied by the Báb (a figure of recent history) and had received a divine message to that effect--which brought him into conflict with other recognised leaders--is a partial parallel. It's certainly a closer parallel than your hypothetical one. Neither Kennedy's admirers nor his family imagine that he brought a message from God or any other supernatural source. They accept (or don't) Kennedy's political positions because they believe those positions meet a test of rational examination, by their standards. By contrast, there's no (or at any rate much less) rational limit to what can be accepted by people who believe in a divinely inspired standard.

andrewcriddle · 08-20-2011, 02:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by yalla

Check this out:
[from here: http://virtualreligion.net/iho/prayer.html]

"Our rabbis taught:
Once it happened that the son of Rabban Gamaliel (I) fell sick.
They sent two disciples of the sages to cHanina ben Dosa to pray for mercy on him. When he saw the, he went up to the upper room and prayed for mercy on him. When he came down, he told them:
-- "Go, the fever has left him!"
They said:
--"Are you a prophet?"
He told them:
--"I'm not a prophet or a prophet's son" (Amos 7:14)
but my tradition is thus:
-- 'If my prayer flows from my mouth, I know it's accepted; if not, I know its rejected.'
They sat down and wrote, noting the exact hour.
And when they came to Rabban Gamaliel he told them:
--"(My) Worship! It happened neither sooner nor later, but just then.
That was precisely the hour that the fever left him and he asked us for water to drink."

This 'trick' of being able to heal from afar and have it verified by the hour of such occurring is common to the stories of both JC in g"John" and Hanina ben Dosa who is dated latish first century.

(The link should be http://virtualreligion.net/iho/prayer.html )

One problem is that the story of Hanina ben Dosa healing at a distance seems to first occur in the Jerusalem Talmud (final form c 400 CE). The story is probably older but we have no real grounds to date it before 200 CE.

Andrew Criddle

dog-on · 08-20-2011, 02:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Juststeve

Dog-On:

The book of Acts confirms the existence of a Jerusalem church unless you are prepared to label it as a complete hoax.

Paul does not use the Jerusalem church to buttress his claim to authority. Quite the opposite. He claims his authority derived from his encounter with Jesus, not from any stamp of approval he got from Jerusalem. He is in fact willing to say that on some important subjects Jerusalem and he did not agree.

As to Paul's writings and how well known they were, they look like letters he sent to the churches he had earlier founded. They would have been hand written, hand copied and perhaps passed around. They were therefore not well known in the way modern publishing make books well known, but for their time, I don't think we can know how well known they were.

Steve

I think that Acts is an historical fiction, written to buttress the claim of Apostolic Authority for the Orthodoxy versus their contemporary competitors.

yalla · 08-20-2011, 03:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by andrewcriddle

Quote:

Originally Posted by yalla

Check this out:
[from here: http://virtualreligion.net/iho/prayer.html]

"Our rabbis taught:
Once it happened that the son of Rabban Gamaliel (I) fell sick.
They sent two disciples of the sages to cHanina ben Dosa to pray for mercy on him. When he saw the, he went up to the upper room and prayed for mercy on him. When he came down, he told them:
-- "Go, the fever has left him!"
They said:
--"Are you a prophet?"
He told them:
--"I'm not a prophet or a prophet's son" (Amos 7:14)
but my tradition is thus:
-- 'If my prayer flows from my mouth, I know it's accepted; if not, I know its rejected.'
They sat down and wrote, noting the exact hour.
And when they came to Rabban Gamaliel he told them:
--"(My) Worship! It happened neither sooner nor later, but just then.
That was precisely the hour that the fever left him and he asked us for water to drink."

This 'trick' of being able to heal from afar and have it verified by the hour of such occurring is common to the stories of both JC in g"John" and Hanina ben Dosa who is dated latish first century.

(The link should be http://virtualreligion.net/iho/prayer.html )

One problem is that the story of Hanina ben Dosa healing at a distance seems to first occur in the Jerusalem Talmud (final form c 400 CE). The story is probably older but we have no real grounds to date it before 200 CE.

Andrew Criddle

Out of curiousity, when is the first evidence for this story occurring in g"John"?
What is the oldest dated mss that includes this passage?
Who and when is the first person, who is reliably dated, who specifically quotes this passage and also specifically attributes it to g"John"?

Serious questions, I'm not being sarky or similar.

After all we know [probable to highly probable] that the story of the woman taken in adultery was added to g"John" well after the purported dating of the original gospel and that it wandered around in the text and was even included in g"Luke" for a while I believe.

So we cannot necessarily presume the original had this story of healing at a certain time from afar in the original and as such its dating is, I suspect, no more secure than the Jewish story.

Edit.
Whoops, forgot one of the reasons why I brought the ben Dosa story up in the first place. In was to show that the theme I raised in 2 previous posts of g'John" adding detail to previous gospels was not applicable in this instance because the author had gone off on a tangent from the "Markan" basic story [official/centurion slave/servant being healed] to add elements not present rather than just add detail for verisimilitude as I suggest s/he had done in my two previously cited selections.

andrewcriddle · 08-20-2011, 04:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by yalla

Quote:

Originally Posted by andrewcriddle

...............................................
One problem is that the story of Hanina ben Dosa healing at a distance seems to first occur in the Jerusalem Talmud (final form c 400 CE). The story is probably older but we have no real grounds to date it before 200 CE.

Andrew Criddle

Out of curiousity, when is the first evidence for this story occurring in g"John"?
What is the oldest dated mss that includes this passage?
Who and when is the first person, who is reliably dated, who specifically quotes this passage and also specifically attributes it to g"John"?

Serious questions, I'm not being sarky or similar.

After all we know [probable to highly probable] that the story of the woman taken in adultery was added to g"John" well after the purported dating of the original gospel and that it wandered around in the text and was even included in g"Luke" for a while I believe.

So we cannot necessarily presume the original had this story of healing at a certain time from afar in the original and as such its dating is, I suspect, no more secure than the Jewish story.

According to Papyri-list the passage is found in papyrus P66 paleographically dated c 200 CE and papyrus P75 paleographically dated 200-250 CE.

Andrew Criddle

Doug Shaver · 08-20-2011, 04:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Little Dot

Matthew Henry says:

I do believe some Christians would be rendered absolutely speechless if they had no authorities to quote.

yalla · 08-20-2011, 05:31 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by andrewcriddle

Quote:

Originally Posted by yalla

Out of curiousity, when is the first evidence for this story occurring in g"John"?
What is the oldest dated mss that includes this passage?
Who and when is the first person, who is reliably dated, who specifically quotes this passage and also specifically attributes it to g"John"?

Serious questions, I'm not being sarky or similar.

After all we know [probable to highly probable] that the story of the woman taken in adultery was added to g"John" well after the purported dating of the original gospel and that it wandered around in the text and was even included in g"Luke" for a while I believe.

So we cannot necessarily presume the original had this story of healing at a certain time from afar in the original and as such its dating is, I suspect, no more secure than the Jewish story.

According to Papyri-list the passage is found in papyrus P66 paleographically dated c 200 CE and papyrus P75 paleographically dated 200-250 CE.

Andrew Criddle

Yep, I went looking after I asked the questions and found the same.

According to what I found Papyrus 66 c 200 does not contain Ch.4 of "John" [?], there is a fair bit missing, so that's no help.

And I'm not sure if P66 or p75 contain the woman taken in adultery pericope so really we are unable to conclude too much about the provenance of some stories in "John".

Irenaeus cites some Elders as saying that "John":
"as the elders who saw John, the disciple of the Lord, related that they had heard from him how the Lord used to teach in regard to these times, and say: The days will come, in which vines shall grow, each having ten thousand branches, and in each branch ten thousand twigs, and in each true twig ten thousand shoots, and in each one of the shoots ten thousand clusters, and on every one of the clusters ten thousand grapes, and every grape when pressed will give five and twenty metretes of wine. ..." [ Ad.Her. Bk 5 Ch 33] yet that material seems pretty likely to have come from Jewish material, Baruch if I remember correctly.

So given the lateness of our material and the vagaries of what is or claimed to be in "John" I don't think we can rule out that the author of "John" .. er ... 'borrowed' Jewish material for his gospel.
Which doesn't rule out the opposite of course.

Incidentally P75 contains both "Luke" and "John", so the relationship between those two seems to continue to intertwine.

andrewcriddle · 08-20-2011, 06:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by yalla

Quote:

Originally Posted by andrewcriddle

According to Papyri-list the passage is found in papyrus P66 paleographically dated c 200 CE and papyrus P75 paleographically dated 200-250 CE.

Andrew Criddle

Yep, I went looking after I asked the questions and found the same.

According to what I found Papyrus 66 c 200 does not contain Ch.4 of "John" [?], there is a fair bit missing, so that's no help.

And I'm not sure if P66 or p75 contain the woman taken in adultery pericope so really we are unable to conclude too much about the provenance of some stories in "John".

P66 and P75 do not have the woman taken in adultery pericope (at least not at the beginning of chapter 8).

I'm pretty sure P66 does have John chapter 4.

This is a textual commentary on John , it uses P66 (and P75) as a witness throughout chapter 4.

Andrew Criddle

Thread Tools	Search this Thread
Show Printable Version	Search this Thread: Advanced Search

08-19-2011, 08:40 PM	#41
Little Dot Junior Member Join Date: Aug 2011 Location: South East Texas Posts: 73	Some people believe that John was never intended as a seperate work, but, was attached to 1John, because it lacks the salutory opening that is common with the the other works of the New Testament as does 1John. John is not concerned with a lot of the things that Matt., Mark and Luke are, because he is giving his audience an overview of the material they are about to learn. The purpose of the Book of John and 1John was to show people that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God and believing this one would have life in his name and to portray Jesus as the "Logos", "Messiah" emphasizing His diety over His humanity and in so doing to lay to rest the gnostic views of Cerinthus and the Ebionites that Jesus was only a man that the Spirit visited and then left.

Freethought & Rationalism Archive

The archives are read only.