Sheshbazzar

...And only if we had some independent reason to believe in the existence of the supernatural 'angel's' that allegedly were at the tomb to announce "He is risen".

Because without their presence and announcement, Take away the miraculous after death appearances, the disciples would have had no way of knowing, and no reason for believing that 'Jesus' had 'risen', except by the testimony of the supernatural 'angel's'.
... and how would anyone be able to identify an 'angel' ? Does wearing 'a long white garment' make one an 'angel'?

The tomb visit 'testimony' stories are are 'all over the map' in their details, with 'an angel' descending from heaven and rolling away the stone' here, one 'young man' sitting in the tomb' there, 'two angel's' in the tomb' in another place, and in yet another, no 'angels' to be found or mentioned at all.

You would get more consistent testimony from the inhabitants of a crack house raid.

spin

How come we are still reheating this nonsense, yet again? This thread was earmarked for oblivion ages back, yet we've gone through a few more rounds of tango eliminations.

We've seen the stupidity of taking a passage that you know is suspect and removing the bits you don't like to end up with a sanitized version. That's how we end up with scholars justifying their use of the TF. (Anyone remember my flyshit on buttered bread test? Taking out the crap you can see doesn't mean there is no more crap. It's simple epistemology. You cannot falsify the result, so the methodology is useless.)

Adam will not stop believing he can extract history out of pure text that has no substantive links to reality. He's been churning this material around his head with whoever will listen to him for over 30 years, going on his claim that his article on John was written in 1980-81. There have been no methodological improvements since then. Can you all realize this and stop feeding him?

Adam

Ironic that it was spin who gathered together almost all the substance on this thread for his posts #161 and 162. It has been followed by almost none of all that substance that Toto proposed for a new thread. Joe at least proposed a test case with John 20:11-16, but even that was not directly applicable because I don't list Mary Magdalene as one of my seven eyewitness authors (to try to clarify that they did not personally see all they write about, even though they may have been in that general location that day or soon afterward). Even Bauckham when talking about eyewitnesses means only that eyewitnesses were somehow in the background, not that they were what I now will call eyewitness authors.

Thus I'm still waiting for people here to realize that I'm not talking about strike-over deletions of text wherever a priori objections rule them out, but as shown by my source-criticism in this thread that there exist sources accepted by Consensus that don't require any such deletions. Unfortunately the main source identified in my paper here is the Signs Source, which is not one of the three sources that are free of eyewitnessed supernatural events. Once again, there are Q (Q1, and not including the Twelve-Source passages in Mark that my bolder thesis suggests as the narrative portion of Q1), the Passion Narrative (in the S Source in John), and the Discourses.

The main methodological improvement since 1980 has been the discredit heaped upon Form Criticism because of its failure to produce results. Thus that I was always skeptical of Form Criticism has given me an "unfair" advantage. I could be the only(?) person utilizing all the great scholarship of the 1970's without having to bracket all my results as "impossible". By the time Form Criticism was discredited, everyone had forgotten about those great scholars of the 1970's (Temple, Freed, Nicol, and Teeple). Was Teeple the first to put a stake in the heart of Form Criticism with his 1970 JBL article, "The Oral Tradition that never Was"?

Just call me "the Borg", I guess, I assimilate so readily. Yes, my interchanges with Joe have established that no one person originated or recounted the empty tomb stories. Several women told different accounts. We can isolate much of John 20 to Mary Magdalene, because the person she told remembered only her as present there. Yet there were three or more there according to the Synoptics, and Luke is different enough from the other two that this is best explained by two other women telling variations to two different "apostles". For any of this none would qualify as personally seen by any of my seven different eyewitness authors. And based on my difficulties in communicating with Jeffrey, perhaps I should always say "eyewitness authors" instead of eyewitnesses, because I'm not saying they personally viewed or heard everything they write, just that they were eyewitnesses to Jesus who wrote about him and the people and events around him. But they were more closely involved than just a reporter would be.

So yes, what one woman remembered as two men would be remembered by another as two angels, by another as just one man.

spin

Sheshbazzar

Adam

Not really.
Back in the 1960's I took it for granted that Mark was the earliest gospel and that I could not get back beyond that. I assumed that I would find that the earliest material was the most free of the supernatural, that I would find that there is no supernatural validation of the gospels, that Jesus was just a very special man.
Yet I found that supernaturalism was intrinsic to gMark, and I thus could not just dismiss it as giving no witness to a revelation from God. I became a Christian (but without getting baptized for eight years, because I could never find enough evidence for any particular denomination) because of looking for evidence and finding it.

So even now I would prefer to find that my three earliest strata of the gospels fully attested to the supernatural. Only by batting my head against a wall here on FRDB long enough did I realize that three discrete early sources could be identified that lack supernaturalism. I did not want to find them. I nevertheless revealed this discovery here on FRDB because it would help my thesis that seven authors wrote down their eyewitness testimony (along with much else that made the story readable). That didn't start until the 500's in Gospel Eyewitnesses. I guess you could say I put my ego needs for my thesis ahead of preaching for the divinity of Jesus Christ.
So no, I did not start "preaching" here about the non-supernaturalist sources because I am making the texts say what I want them to say. Quite the contrary. (But you're not the only one here who completely misunderstands me and my thesis and my methodology.)

Sheshbazzar

My reply;

spin

Toto

Every time I think of closing the thread, Adam comes up with something even weirder, so I put it off to see just how strange it can get.

I'll give Adam one more post, but then it's bye bye.

spin

I ache for the touch of your lips, dear,
But much more for the touch of your whips, dear.
You can raise welts
Like nobody else,
As we dance to the masochism tango.
-- T. Lehrer