CX

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to agree with actually . I think the idea of a semitic proto-Matthew is certainly plausible, but lacks concrete support for an strong conclusion one way or the other. On a side note I find Spin's off-handed dismissals and ad hominems unconvincing and tiresome and I do think he belies a significant amount of atheological axe grinding as well as personal hubris, but that really isn't any more to the point than his accusations of your incompetence regarding source texts (which accusation, incidentally, I find laughable). It is clear from previous comments that Spin places little or no historical value on any Xian text. So be it. One need not be a Xian to find that position ridiculous.

spin

cx:
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I'm not sure what I'm supposed to agree with actually . I think the idea of a semitic proto-Matthew is certainly plausible, but lacks concrete support for an strong conclusion one way or the other.
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Yeah, like Matt puts LXX into the mouth of Jesus, follows Mark in order and data but improves the Greek (are we to believe that Mark simply botches Matt's Greek?), uses material that Luke uses, mainly in the same order but in different parts of the source Marcan structure.

cx:
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On a side note I find Spin's off-handed dismissals and ad hominems unconvincing and tiresome
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This is just ad hominem in itself. I can see that you don't play holier than thou. I think you have no grounds for saying that I have been using ad hominems. Off-hand dismissals are another of those unsupported claims. In most of what I have dealt with, cx, I have supplied evidence to back up what I say. If you don't like it, you should either question the evidence or show some counter-evidence, not play the one hurt by ad hominem and off-hand claims.

cx:
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and I do think he belies a significant amount of atheological axe grinding as well as personal hubris,
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This is just one ad hominem after another, cx. It's starting to seem clear that you have nothing to say. Please either deal with things or not have yourself heard this way. It is unbecoming.

cx:
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but that really isn't any more to the point than his accusations of your incompetence regarding source texts (which accusation, incidentally, I find laughable).
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You're the fellah who tried to pretend he knew so much about the Greek and tried to tell me that I didn't. That was crass, matey. You end up pulling your horns in saying that you didn't know quite as much as you implied you did. Now, can we calm down and talk, or are you going to continue with another load of this sort of stuff next post?

cx:
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It is clear from previous comments that Spin places little or no historical value on any Xian text.
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Doing history is no longer a case of reading a few books and rehashing them. If you don't like my approach to the literature, go and try to find a historian (not an apologist) who will touch the stuff with a ten foot pole. The NT material is undated, with unknown authors, written to an unknown audience, from an unknown location, for an unknown purpose. Can't you see what the problem is?

cx:
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So be it. One need not be a Xian to find that position ridiculous.
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One needn't be a non-believer to see that you are misrepresenting the situation to the extreme. You show no willingness to see the grave problems in using such literature as history. Read some of the more recent classical historical work. See what is being brought in as evidence. See how literary sources are being used and how they are being criticised.

Historical studies have become more serious over the last fifty years -- and I'm not talking aout coffee table histories. Find out what's going on before you talk about it.

[ April 02, 2002: Message edited by: spin ]</p>

CX

I'm not sure you understand what is being argued for here. I presume Haran is not suggesting that if a proto-Matthean document existed it is underlying canonical GMt. If he is then he and I are in disagreement for the reasons you sate above among others. I am merely saying that an aramaic sayings source written by a disciple of Jesus is plausible, but ultimately unproveable and of little value for any kind of study.


I did no such thing. I make no pretenses about what I know and what I don't know. I further have seen no evidence that you know anything about Koine Greek that could not be gleaned from a website somewhere. And lastly I did not "pull in my horns" I dropped out of the discussion because you have made it abundantly clear in nearly all your participation here that you are incapable of recognizing and admitting error, you are filled with you own sense of false superiority and discussing anything with you is pointless for anything besides some mental aerobics. How's that for Ad Hom. Please don't bother to reply as in future I plan to put your posts ion the same file with Amos, Amen-Moses, offa and others who like to see their own brilliant writing in print.

Haran

Ever memorize a song? I'm a singer and I have. I can reproduce the words with extreme accuracy due to the rhythm and intonation. The ancients used similar techniques and did not rely on "whispers", palm pilots, or voice recorders...

Their material was surely more reliable than you make it out to be.

Again, spin, with your criteria, such monumental works as Bruce Metzger's Canon of the New Testament would not be possible, for he relies upon the testimony of early church fathers and canon lists to reconstruct the development of the New Testament Canon.

My transliteration was incorrect, sorry. Anyway, Matthew is mixed, part Hebrew and part Aramaic. Mark is all Aramaic. Honestly, I have no idea how the Hebrew Eli got into Matthew because the rest of the phrase is Aramaic with very good MS support. As far as confusing the name with Elijah, I suppose it would depend on whether the name was Elahiyah in Aramaic instead of simply adopting the Hebrew Eliyah. Either way, Eli / Elahi ('My God' whether Hebrew or Aramaic) is or at least could be the shortened form of Eliyah/Elahiyah(?) ('My God is Yahweh'). I don't see any of this being a huge problem. Why would they have said that they confused the cry for the name of Elijah if people wouldn't have recognized it that way?

For your examples, you pick a sect [i.e. the Essenes] which had an obvious interest in purity and preservation of their holy language, Hebrew, though there are still many Aramaic translations (targumim) among the DSS. The same could be said for the so-called "Bar Kokhba cave texts" you refer to and the Bar Kokhba revolt. Of course, he had an interest in reviving their dying language. Did you know that, at Murabba'at, 17 Hebrew texts were found compared to 16! Aramaic and 75!! Greek? Did you know that the other "Bar Kokhba cave" [i.e. Nahal Hever] revealed quite a different thing - 17 Hebrew texts as compared to 40!! Aramaic, 51!!! Greek, and 15! Nabatean? There is even a dispatch from Kokhba in which he complains that "the letter is written in Greek as we have found no one to write it in Hebrew"! You might be correct Spin, but there's some serious data here that needs to be dealt with.

Haran

[ April 02, 2002: Message edited by: Haran ]</p>

Haran

You are mostly correct CX, though I'm not sure I, myself, would call the "sayings" a "proto-Matthew" because it does sound like a gospel.

I do think that this theory is of worth and helps to understand the semitic flavor of the New Testament Greek and Aramaic flavor of the Gospel of Matthew.

Doh!! I don't think I'd go that far CX. Spin has some interesting ideas. His theory in Galations is worth exploring, I suppose, but remains an unprovable hypothesis none-the-less, similar to mine. He is entitled to his opinion, however wrong.

I had to laugh a moment at the emotion that has seeped into this thread on all sides. I usually do a little better job of keeping my emotions in check, even when I'm annoyed... I'll try a little harder.

Haran

spin

cx:
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I did no such thing.
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Petulance, eh?

cx:
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I make no pretenses about what I know and what I don't know. I further have seen no evidence that you know anything about Koine Greek that could not be gleaned from a website somewhere.
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If you had read what I said, you would know that I make no claim in having any special understanding in Koine Greek.

Then again, in fact no-one who has only studied NT Greek has much understanding, because there are not enough exemplars for there to be a coherent corpus of the language to make many generalizations on Koine Greek. There is just so much language not found in the NT. One has to go elsewhere to get a solid basis for the language.

cx:
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And lastly I did not "pull in my horns" I dropped out of the discussion because you have made it abundantly clear in nearly all your participation here that you are incapable of recognizing and admitting error, you are filled with you own sense of false superiority and discussing anything with you is pointless for anything besides some mental aerobics.
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No cx. I need convincing about axioms. They have no meaning in themselves and your type of "who are you to challenge them" is no argument at all.

cx:
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How's that for Ad Hom.
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I'm sure you can do better.

cx:
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Please don't bother to reply as in future I plan to put your posts ion the same file with Amos, Amen-Moses, offa and others who like to see their own brilliant writing in print.
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This is a slightly better attempt at ad hominem, branding a person along with those one has no value for.

As you have given nothing that I've seen which adds to any of the discussions -- you have only performed apologetics in the posts I have seen --, do you expect to get the sorts of responses you would find useful?

spin

Haran:
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Ever memorize a song? I'm a singer and I have. I can reproduce the words with extreme accuracy due to the rhythm and intonation. The ancients used similar techniques and did not rely on "whispers", palm pilots, or voice recorders...

Their material was surely more reliable than you make it out to be.
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I have no problem with general memory. It's not too accurate but it works relatively well. (There are songs that I know which will have a line that I simply can never remember, while remembering the rest of the song though, including one with 12 verses...) It's not only a problem of simple memory however. Each person in that line I mentioned last time adds something from their own point of view as the material is internalised and then externalised. The message changes.

You know of Paul saying that people were going around telling a false gospel. In the Didache you find itinerant preachers going around living of religious communities telling them who knows what in order to keep the food coming. From memory, Didache makes laws about how long such people should be supported.

There is an early phase in the development of christianity in which there was no necessary quality control.

spin:
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Trusted sources mean nothing when doing history. The only works you trust are those that have been proven repeatedly and then you don't trust them very far.
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Haran:
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Again, spin, with your criteria, such monumental works as Bruce Metzger's Canon of the New Testament would not be possible, for he relies upon the testimony of early church fathers and canon lists to reconstruct the development of the New Testament Canon.
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Early church fathers are witnesses to what they know. I used early church fathers in delimiting knowledge of early christianity or the different flavours of it. (I claim, based on Justin, that he was the first to show evidence of a good knowledge of written gospel materials, that he was the first to have a background knowledge of the term "son of man".) They are witnesses to their own times.

spin:
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You'll note that Matthew has it in the Hebrew! Explain how it got into Mark as eloi eloi..., if Mark got it from Matt or how anyone hearing it would get it confused with Eliyah.
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Haran:
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My transliteration was incorrect, sorry. Anyway, Matthew is mixed, part Hebrew and part Aramaic. Mark is all Aramaic. Honestly, I have no idea how the Hebrew Eli got into Matthew because the rest of the phrase is Aramaic with very good MS support.
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The Westcott and Hort I think has only the Aramaic. I merely noted that the majority have various forms with Hebrew. You'll note that in different versions you'll find "lima","lema" and "lama", the last being more certainly from Hebrew. It is only the "sabachthani", with its intruded chi and perhaps no initial vowel that is not Hebrew.

Haran:
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As far as confusing the name with Elijah, I suppose it would depend on whether the name was Elahiyah in Aramaic instead of simply adopting the Hebrew Eliyah.
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Have you seen one instance of Eliyah in such a form as "Elahiyah"? BDB give no names found based on Elah (see p.43 or thereabouts, #433), the closest you get is that, Elah, as a name of a father of a king.

Haran:
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Either way, Eli / Elahi ('My God' whether Hebrew or Aramaic) is or at least could be the shortened form of Eliyah/Elahiyah(?) ('My God is Yahweh'). I don't see any of this being a huge problem. Why would they have said that they confused the cry for the name of Elijah if people wouldn't have recognized it that way?
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If someone is actually citing a verse which is recognisably from the psalm and a gospel writer could receive this information, it should mean that what was said was understandable, yet we have to believe the gospel writer that it was not understandable to the crowd who were there (unlike the gospel writer), but that they had to make a connection with what they heard to Eliyah.

I see this citation not as something that Jesus amy have said, but as an imposition on the text by those who have ploughed up "prophecies" from the old testament to construct background to the Jesus narrative.

spin:
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Read the Dead Sea Scrolls. Most of the new texts from Qumran were written in Hebrew. Read the Murabba'at texts, also many written in Hebrew. The Hebrew of these texts show that the language was being spoken due to the efforts to represent the spoken language. To understand this, see Elisha Qimron, "The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls".
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Haran:
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For your examples, you pick a sect [i.e. the Essenes] which had an obvious interest in purity and preservation of their holy language, Hebrew, though there are still many Aramaic translations (targumim) among the DSS.
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There is no reason to believe that the Scrolls had anything to do with the Essenes. This is only errors from the early axiomatic approach to the scrolls.

There are two or three targums amongst the scrolls, from memory, Leviticus and Job.

What we have in the scrolls is an enormous body of literature, not produced by a tiny sect. Scribes had to be paid money to make copies of texts and there was a lot of money involved in the copying of the scrolls. These scrolls are strikingly pro-temple (with one historically conditioned exception when the priests had left the temple polluted during the Hellenistic Crisis), so we should see them as mainstream documents. It was a grave error to sideline them as the early scholars had, but this was a consequence of too restrictive control of them: people could not see the vast range in the texts.

Haran:
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The same could be said for the so-called "Bar Kokhba cave texts" you refer to and the Bar Kokhba revolt. Of course, he had an interest in reviving their dying language. Did you know that, at Murabba'at, 17 Hebrew texts were found compared to 16! Aramaic and 75!! Greek?
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Yes, I did. You'll see that I did not claim that Hebrew was the only language spoken, but that it was clearly a spoken language. Please read the Qimron book and look at the orthographical indications for a spoken language.

Haran:
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Did you know that the other "Bar Kokhba cave" [i.e. Nahal Hever] revealed quite a different thing - 17 Hebrew texts as compared to 40!! Aramaic, 51!!! Greek, and 15! Nabatean?
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Nahal Hever was a fair bit further south than Murabba'at. Much of the numbers you cite comes from one cache known as the Archive of Babatha, a personal collection containing no Hebrew but 6 Nabatean, 3 Aramaic, and 26 Greek works.

Remember at the same time that the biblical texts featured no Aramaic targums, but only Massoretic type Hebrew texts.

Haran:
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There is even a dispatch from Kokhba in which he complains that "the letter is written in Greek as we have found no one to write it in Hebrew"! You might be correct Spin, but there's some serious data here that needs to be dealt with.
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I am well aware that there are three languages in operation in the bar-Kochbah documents -- we'll put aside the Nabataean as reflective only of documents from the south (as the component in the Babatha archive shows). My contention was that there was a strong component of Hebrew being used. Simeon hoimself complaining of not having a scribe to write Hebrew may simply be indicating that there was none available where he was, relying on scribes to do the bulk of the writing. There are other letters by him in Hebrew.

My basic claim in this side alley from the thread topic was that Hebrew was a living language used by a considerable body of speakers in Judea. Perhaps I could argue that the closer you get to Jerusalem the more Hebrew you find!?

CX

According to NA27 there is significant first order manuscript evidence for both ELI ELI (i.e B) and ELWI ELWI (i.e. Aleph). From that I would submit we cannot conclude what the original text said. The mixed Hebrew/Aramaic maybe the result of bad editing by someone who wasn't conversant in semitic languages.

Amos

Hey cowboy, that a good tower of Babel technique. Don't bother defeating the arguments to shreds but just shred the papers they are presented on.