Tenorikuma

One other thing: His system clock shows the same date and time as the "sent" email. In other words, he took the screenshot within one minute of drafting that email.

It seems highly unlikely that Watts immediately goes to his Sent box and takes screenshots of all his outgoing emails within one minute of sending them. What's more, he couldn't have just sent the email, because his wifi is disconnected. He appears to be on the go somewhere, since his battery is being drained and his external monitor is not plugged in.

Furthermore, the next screenshot Watts posts in his explanation of what happened (http://unsettledchristianity.com/2013/06/run-dmca/) shows the "correct" date of June 28, the day all the screenshots (including the "sent" email) were most likely taken.

This is damning. It appears that, shortly before 12:56 of June 28, Watts set his system clock back to June 26, wrote a fake email to Godfrey, moved the email manually to his "sent" mailbox without sending it, and took a system screenshot capturing (1) the modified system time of 12:56, June 26 in his system bar, (2) a freshly written email to Godfrey, dated precisely to the current (and incorrect) system time of 12:56, June 26, (3) additional emails in his email application dated to June 27, and (4) the fact that his System Preferences app, which you use to change the system time and date, was currently running (see the Dock or system menubar).

A short while later, at about 2:30 of June 28, he remembered to change the date back to June 28, and took another screenshot, this time of the DMCA notice (http://unsettledchristianity.com/wp-...ca-request.png). Note that by this time, his laptop is back at his desk somewhere, with an external monitor and an active wifi connection, and his battery has charged 4% from the last screenshot. Then he wrote his blog article and posted both screenshots, not realizing he had just posted incriminating evidence.

Again, if there is a plausible explanation for these screenshots that does not involve fraud, please let me know so I can revise my comments.

Toto

That's what didn't work for me - the moved email did not have a sent date. But there's probably a way around that.

Tenorikuma

It's also possible that he turned off his wifi and actually hit "send" on the email, which would put the email in his "Outgoing" mailbox with a proper date stamp. He could then have moved it from there to the "Sent" mailbox.

In fact, that is probably what happened, since his wifi is not merely getting no signal, but appears to have been turned off. (The icons are different.)

Toto

Joel's blog

oops - better not quote it. He claims there is a glitch with Outlook on the mac.

At the end, he links to this thread and laughs about conspiracies - but no explanation.

James The Least

OK, this is getting really boring now. The only thing that matters is that Vridar is back.

Toto

Boring?!? This is net drama, intrigue, possibly a spherically challenged Christian who knows how to fake the date of an outgoing email, but slipped up on a few basic points. . .

Okay, it's boring. Please start a new thread on something interesting.

James The Least

We're discussing screenshots of system clocks.

:banghead:

outhouse

I'm glad I'm not the only one that recognized this.


I was like holy cow, its a conspiracy !!!!!!!!

Grog

Um. Well, I wasn't arguing 1) that Teeple "overturned" anything, or 2) that oral tradition was not alive and well.

I was challenging the view that the Gospels are based on an oral tradition that originated with real events surrounding a real person. There are some problems with that view, you know?

Grog

Notice what you said:

"recite the OT by oral tradition"

that is where your underlying assumption begins to fail. The OT was committed to memory and recited. There was an authority that controlled what was passed on and that authority was a written a document that was committed to memory and passed on.

The Jesus story does not have any such authority. "Scripture" to the early Christians was the OT, since the NT was not written.

Let's take any single event. Say, the sermon on the mount (or plain, wherever). How many people witnessed that? How many different versions of Jesus' sermon were told and retold? How did the ones that came down to us survive the interlude of some handful or more decades? Those that did survive (assuming there was an event followed by oral tradition) would have done so because of the purpose they served, not the authenticity of the words.

So even if we assume that these stories are based on events that actually occurred at some point in time, we are long way from knowing what actually happened based on this oral tradition.

Even so, how do we sort out if any of the Gospel stories are based on oral tradition or simply creations of an author? The literary structure of the Gospels suggests the latter, in my opinion. We can find the sources upon which much of the story is based. How, then, is it an "oral tradition" that lies behind the Gospel story?

Did Oral tradition exist in the culture? Yes.

Are the Gospels based on oral tradition? I am not so sure.

And, yes, Toto, I did get the title wrong, sorry. Never Existed, not Never Was. And it is on JSTOR. Here's the full citation:

Teeple, Howard Merle. "Oral Tradition That Never Existed." Journal of Biblical Literature, 89.1 (1970): 56-68.