Toto

You keep using the repugnant term, "Gospel according to the Atheists." The use of this term indicates that you have not absorbed the most basic criticism of your work: you assume that if a gospel snippet does not involve a supernatural claim, that it must be accepted as true.

How do we get beyond this?

Can you prove that the gospels are not fictional works from beginning to end?

Jeffrey Gibson

As much as a sympathize with your complaint against Adam and his ways, are you not now asking him to prove a negative?

And Adam, I ask again - do you read Greek, and if so, at what level of competency?

I note with interest that you seem to be avoiding answering this question.

Jeffrey

Toto

Of course - but how is this different from requiring skeptics to disprove his claims?

JoeWallack

JW:
Yes, more relevant to you than good criteria such as Credibility and Location. The irony is that this is exactly what your "John" does with "The Jews" (employ the fallacies of ad hominems and straw men).

JW:
Like I said, the text is explicit that "we" are the authors and "The Beloved Disciple" was the eyewitness. You reject the explicit but accept (per you) the implied. So you accept that what the author said here was false. Maybe he passed false information, maybe he was lying or maybe he was using a godly amount of poetic license. Is this how you make decisions outside of religion? Say you ask someone for directions on how you can get to Carnegie Hall. They tell you to go through the Church on your right and than keep going straight, you can't miss it. So, do you accept their explicit statement or reject it and look instead for implications in their directions?

Why do you only act like this in the context of religion? The only reason I can think of is because it has something to do with your religion.

JW:
According to authority "Luke" used "Mark" as a primary source. The only way to try and counter this is to appeal to select authority. But authority... A Cathechism-22.

JW:
Bingo!

JW:
Toto, I know we Atheists generally don't believe in The Death Penalty but Adam is not providing any sensible Methodology here. I'm starting to fear that Jesus might actually return before this Thread dies (thereby making it eligible to be with us in Hell for all Eternity). I disrespectfully request that either Adam be required to list his Methodology here in outline form or we place the Thread in Solitary confinement with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and tell him it's a Jewish Thread.


Joseph

ErrancyWiki

Jeffrey Gibson

According to Adam, his claims are all positive assertions, and therefore can be proven wrong, or at least, unlikely, if the evidence that is (allegedly) adduced to support them, does not do it's job.

I take him to be asking people here to show that his arguments are weak and that the conclusions he comes to at the end of them do not follow.

The problem, of course is that he does not engage in what is ordinarily understood to be "argument". He assumes what needs to be proven, and moves on as if he has established his case.

Jeffrey
Jeffrey

stephan huller

This is true to a degree in any attempt to use language as a vehicle for expressing ideas. Adam's difficulty is that he is doing it more or less on his own rather than as part of a pack. To some degree we all have to join a party in order to be understood. My advice to Adam is latch on to a school of thought and then allow the inner workings of that political organization help further your career. It is amazing to see how many doors will open when you have a label attached to your name. Any label. It doesn't matter.

Remember It is not good that Adam should be alone

All of life is prostitution. One way or another we have to tart ourselves up and allow an old man to take us shopping for shoes. Unless of course, we want to remain alone in Paradise.

Adam

spin correctly inferred that I did not study Greek formally, perhaps because I said that Spanish and Russian were my languages studied by time of graduation. It happens that his inference is weak because I did take courses in German while a graduate student. So Greek is among my self-taught reading-knowledge languages French, Italian, and Dutch. I do indeed read source-criticism in all these languages--except Greek (and Russian). However, I am unaware of any such studies in Greek (or Russian), so this does not seem to matter.

Or spin may base his claim upon his false statement that I believe Greek has an indefinite article. Playing to my general audience here that does not know Greek, I explained "anarthrous" as the lack of articles in a language, giving "a", "an", and "the" as examples. Now if I had said it meant the absence of the article "the", then readers who know that in English "a" and "an" are also articles might infer that "anarthrous" still allows the latter two articles to appear in Greek text.

I am not an expert in Koine Greek, but my focus on the gospels allows me to spot when text is different, as most notably with a highly-articulate writer in his own style as with the preface of both Luke and Acts (a good indication they were both written by the same person). Were I an expert like Jeffrey Gibson I might venture (as he indeed does) to parse my own translations of Greek text, as he is currently doing with his book on what "temptation" means in the Disciples' Prayer. He can legitimately make his own case without reliance on anyone else. But perhaps that gives me more openness
to sift through competing scholars to determine sources within the gospels. After all it's not what the words mean that matters for this purpose, but simply what the word order is and what the words are--which way a particular scribe or author preferentially uses to translate from the Aramaic or what style he uses when he creates his own Greek text. As a young man I preferred to disregard verses whose meaning I did not like, but I long ago switched to literary criticism as a more impartial way of determining the most authentic text. Statistics and word-use are more objective, and these crystallized with the advent of computers in the 1960's. I guess that's not "sexy" enough anymore, so we see a return by some to older unitary authorship, or a Johannine Community, or ideological Docetism vs. anti-Docetism theories. You don't have to read Greek to suspect those theories of bias and special pleading (pretty clearly Church for the first two vs. anti-Church for the third).

Adam

That's my point. IF the gospels seem to be simple, early, and by eyewitnesses, then the best Atheist alternative seems to me for them to show that conspirators got together. Each had his own piece of the mosaic to fit in and others had the job of stitching them together. Indeed there are various theories out there like this, such as by Carotta, Atwill, Wheless (or whoever touts the Piso Family as the forgers), and Huller. No one here touches them with a ten-foot pole. (And it would be kind of unfortunate if it came to that, instead of the current Consensus in which moderately-early-moderately-late dates allow both sides to pitch their wares. It won't be pretty if we emerge with radically conflicting "historically established" vs. "forgery mill".)

My "GattA" repositioning in the 500's in Gospel Eyewitnesses (still unaddressed)
(see my post #178 in this thread)
does not take for granted that any non-supernatural sources is necessarily true. I even acknowledge that an eyewitness source may be inaccurate or misleading (and intentionally so with the earlier Discourses within John). And I just above stated that it may indeed be lies. That's why I expected conspiracy theories to be trotted out as defense against my thesis that their are seven written eyewitness records about Jesus in the four gospels.

Adam

I have explained many times before that my thesis arose in 2011 in reaction against New Atheists dogmatically asserting that there are no gospel eyewitnesses. It didn't do any good to show that they were right that "Matthew" did not write gMatthew (because he would not have copied his own conversion story from gMark), but Mark 2:14 could have been his own entry in Q or the Twelve-Source. (The argument from Tradition for Matthew as author of Matthew applies as well to him as author of Q.) It didn't do any good to acknowledge that if John was the Beloved Disciple, then indeed he as a Galilean fisherman would not have written mostly about high theological controversies in Jerusalem, but this would not mean that he could not have added in John 13 as his own eyewitness testimony.

So I got busy and systematized it so that no one could say with a straight face anymore, "We know there were no eyewitness records to Jesus". It ain't necessarily (not) so. I found seven written records. Unless you guys prove them to be fiction, you can't say that any more. There is evidence. Deal with it or stop asserting you know there were no eyewitness records.

Toto

The gospels do not seem to be either simple or early or by eyewitnesses, so dragging conspiracy theorists into this is uncalled for.
Each of who? Do you know how fiction is written, or how urban legends develop?

How did Wheless get into this list? Or Huller?
Except that Huller is here, and Wheless has a number of admirers.

Carotta and Atwill do claim a conspiracy. But this is hardly the only way to claim that the gospels are not historical.

You post there does not say anything about non-supernatural sources not being necessarily true. It is a typical confusing raft of pointers to other threads and empty claims to have established something that has not been refuted.

You state there

The poster "Tassman" on Theology Web so categorically denied this that I started accumulating seven written gospel eyewitness records to refute that contention. I asked him, and later everyone here on FRDB, to provide evidence that there were no eyewitnesses. None has been forthcoming, not even pointers toward scholars who have done so.

which is asking everyone else to prove a negative, is it not?