Adam

There I go again thinking something is too obvious to need my input to clarify it. Christianity exists, and whatever it was that got it started could reasonably have included real events. Mythicism is not the standard view of critical historians, I think even you agree. Many of these historians think an empty tomb story was early. You're saying that this story arose even though women did not visit the tomb? That's possible of course, even though all four gospels agree at least on that much, that women visited the tomb. Then again, if there was no Crucifixion either, there would have been no tomb at issue in the first place! That takes care of that problem.

Toto

No. No. No.

There is no reliable evidence that there was an event, or that anyone close to it wrote anything. The contrasting accounts are evidence of story telling variations.

But this is the most coherent thing you have written about how you reached your conclusions, so go on...

Perhaps not.

Yes, it looks like fiction. Once again, you bring supernatualism into the question as if the lack of supernatural elements makes a story reliable history.
Anyone could have written that. Anyone in the first few centuries of the Christian era.

So IF you accept that the gospels have to be historical, your reconstruction identifies a possible author. But your assumptions are not those of anyone else on this thread, or any respectable scholar that I know of in the modern era, even Christian believers.

Adam

Editing to add:
Great Post #302, Toto. We understand where we agree and disagree, and that I stand pretty much on my own.

Yes, starting substantive replies would be great!
Keep in mind that the first two paragraphs was later introductory material, not a thesis statement. The Abstract gets it right.

Toto

Yes, Christianity exists, but that doesn't require a specific real event to have started it.

We're not talking about mythicism here.

An early story does not translate into a real event.

There is no evidence of this story before Mark's gospel, assuming that is the earliest. The other gospels took the story from Mark and embellished it. But Paul makes no mention of an empty tomb, or any tomb, and no mention of Mary or any women as early witnesses.

Even if there was a crucifixion, a respectable portion of critical historians think that there was no burial and no tomb.

If you have read any of the more recent scholarship, you might have noticed that even believing Christian scholars working at seminaries do not insist on the historicity of much in the gospels (at least when they are writing for a secular audience.)

So now that you have laid out the assumptions behind your work, it is crumbling like a stale cookie. This is why no one will "refute" it - your assumptions are just unsupportable.

Toto

But you have realized that no one else here shares your assumptions, so what's the point?

Adam

Um, that I come over here and work with your assumptions tailored into my "GattA" and no one responds even to that?
So just like these believing Christian professors at seminaries, I present basically accepted sources (Q, Passion Narrative, Discourses) that are entirely free of supernaturalism, but they are still a priori rejected here because I don't accept the assumption that there were not and could not have been any eyewitnesses? Can't take the chance that assumption won't stand scrutiny?

Maybe it's going too far here to argue for other sources tainted with supernaturalism like the Signs Source, L, and Ur-Marcus, but you guys would still be free to argue that these must be late and that they integrate with the non-supernatural sources in ways that show they are all late. Or that they are later and are lies or myths.

So the problem seems to me to be the prevailing paradigm here of Mythicism. If any of the three non-supernatural sources wound up still standing, some sort of HJ would prevail. It might be hard for you to show that these non-supernatural sources also are lies or misidentified as relating to Jesus. So it's safer to treat the gospels as finished products and wave off dealing with sources, even those I identify in agreement with most critical scholars. Is the failure here to attack the substance of my Significance of John that (apart from my naming of authors and their dates) this would require rejecting too much of current scholarship?

Toto

What do you mean no one responded?

Your assumptions about our assumptions are incorrect, as I keep telling you.


No, your claims are rejected because the mere fact that the ancient stories are free of supernaturalism does not constitute evidence that they were written by eyewitnesses.


This is not the problem. Most of the people arguing with you are not mythicists.

But it's so easy for you to shift the burden of proof.

Are you pretending to not understand the issue? You can claim to identify "sources" but you can't tie those sources to eyewitnesses.

What current scholarship would we be rejecting? Please give names and citations, not just your casual impression of what current scholarship claims.

spin

Lock the thread already, Toto. You're sucked in to thinking there is a dim chance that it's going to dawn on him that he's been making things up. It's not. He's been going on and on and on with this nonsense for well over a year. He still assumes basic veracity of the contents of the text and that he can then guess how things must have happened. The only person convinced with rhis amateur hour stuff is Adam, though I have thought a few times that he could be trolling, for who could be so persistently impenetrable? Instead of taking your turn at futility, lock it, Toto. You'll thank me.

Jeffrey Gibson

You persistently miss the point. It's not that its unlikely that there were sources for the gospels. There were. It's not that a source with supernatural elements in it could not be an early, let alone an eyewitness, source given the belief in the supernatural in the first century and the indisputable evidence from pagan sources that first century people did "see" and report what we would call supernatural events (to say otherwise, as JW and S have been claiming, is cultural idolatry and question begging). It's not even that a gospel's source(s) could not have come from an eyewitness. There's at least a prima facie case for it.

The point is

1. whether you have, not to mention that you have demonstrated (not asserted) that you have, the skills necessary to identify what is and is not a source (you don't, you haven't);

2. whether the sources you identify as sources are actually sources (they aren't), let alone early ones (they aren't) and have been demonstrated through sound linguistic and literary analysis as such (they haven't been -- and they can't have been by you since, as you've admitted, you lack the skills necessary to do so), and

3. whether your claims about who stands behind your alleged early sources have anything going for them (they don't -- your identifications are arbitrary if not ridiculous and down right question begging), let alone are as certain as you claim they are (unless we had some actual writing from, say, Nicodemus to compare your alleged Nicodemus source with for linguistic and stylistic and literary similarities with your alleged source, how could we possibly know?).

Stop blaming others for your failure to make your case or to see its merits. It isn't out of any bias that no one sees what you say is there. It's because there's nothing there to see. And you certainly have not shown that there's anything actually there worth looking at.


And I'm still waiting for you to produce the letter from Bossman that says he intended to publish your work in BTB, whether in a 1980 volume or one in 1981.

Jeffrey

Adam

Here on
Post #178 I linked to my posts on Gospel Eyewitnesses in which I trimmed down to three sources that could not be a priori rejected here. Those posts ranged from #525 to #561, but the thread only lingered on less than 70 posts without addressing this presentation of gospel sources that can't automatically be rejected by atheists.Granted, there is no proof that they were. But they provide evidence for HJ. Is this why no one was even willing to deal with whether I was correctly delineating sources?OK. Maybe I should modify my statement to include that there's a second paradigm of hard Agnosticism that denies that we have any knowledge one way or the other. (Perhaps linked to an attitude of just negativism and people-bashing.) I still haven't heard any offers to desist from claiming there is no evidence for eyewitnesses. You guys say that without citing any evidence or scholars to support you. It's an open issue. Why do you insist otherwise?
Maybe I don't understand, then. I have failed to state that identification of sources is preliminary to trying to find who wrote them? Maybe in fearing to just repeat myself I omit a key step? In any case, once the source is established and then I go beyond this to state an author, that makes me vulnerable about the source if my suggested author is refutable. Stephan Huller's objection about John the Apostle could shift me over to John Mark as author of that stage, regardless of the clear stylistic differences. That Editor stratum Teeple identified might be just a different scribe? It's possible. I'm not taking that position yet, but my position has never been examined here and thus has to be subject to revision.Just my messy notes then?
R. A. Martin Syntax Criticism in 1987 said Q is more Semitic than the Marcan material, L is particularly Semitic.
H. T. Fleddermann in 1995 said Mark used Q.
The above are in Scott McKnight Synoptic Gospels in 2000.
Thomas Brodie Proto-Luke: the Oldest Gospel Account in 2006. Luke is independent of Mark.
Delbert Burkett in Rethinking the Gospel Sources gives exceedingly complex sources.
On early dating of the gospels:
N. T. Wright Simply Jesus in 2011.
Charlesworth The Historical Jesus in 2008

My earlier citation was to Herman Waetjin, The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple, 2005 (pg. 3) that recent scholarship has revolved around what I said about John in my paper I finished in 1981,
that a pre-johannine narrative "Signs Source" combined with a Passion story and subsequently with a "Discourse Source" and redacted into the present form of the Gospel, has dominated scholarly efforts to resolve its enigmas, aporiai and riddles.