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Author | Topic: Reconstructing the Historical Jesus | |||||||||||||||||||
PaulK Member Posts: 17919 Joined: Member Rating: 6.6 |
...are not independent. John MIGHT be independent of the other three, but the Synoptics include a good deal of copying. Contrary to your claims the words are too often the same for it to be otherwise.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17919 Joined: Member Rating: 6.6 |
quote: It's one argument that some people use. Just as others argue that Mark must have been written before 70 AD because he doesn't come out and state that the destruction had actually happened. Neither argument is taken as decisive and the mainstream dating for Mark covers a range around 70 AD. Before and after.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17919 Joined: Member Rating: 6.6 |
quote: Who is this higher authority and why would he/she or it object to an honest and objective attempt to get to the truth ?
quote: Sine your assertions are all false, they obviously have no place in an honest and objective assessment of the evidence.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17919 Joined: Member Rating: 6.6 |
quote: If you bother to look back in this thread YOU made assertions without evidence. In countering them, I need no more. Secondly as you know full well we HAVE discussed your claims in other threads and I have offered substantive criticisms. Which you have often failed or even refused to address. Thirdly as you also know, you have a record of repeatedly making unsubstantiated assertions and running away without producing any substantial arguments. Unlike you I am not going to run away. Start a thread for any of your assertions you made in
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PaulK Member Posts: 17919 Joined: Member Rating: 6.6 |
The thread for reporting problem posts is a thread for requesting administrator action.
My responses are not such a request.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17919 Joined: Member Rating: 6.6 |
quote: Do you have any evidence that this is the case ? Or is it like the case where critics of the book of Daniel "assume that prophecy is impossible" ?
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PaulK Member Posts: 17919 Joined: Member Rating: 6.6 |
quote: In other words, you made it up - but you think it's OK to do that because they came to conclusions you don't like.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17919 Joined: Member Rating: 6.6 |
So, you can't find any evidence that either of them beleive that miracles are impossible yet you contend that you didn't make it up ?
Come off it. Either produce real evidence or admit that it is your invention.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17919 Joined: Member Rating: 6.6 |
quote: I know that. That is what I am asking you to provide evidence for. So far I haven't seen any.
quote: You've been here long enough to know that you are not meant to rely on bare links. Nevertheless I looked them over and saw no indication that Crossan or Borg assumed that miracles could not happen.
quote: Except that we don't have that.
quote: Crossan and Borg are theists. Therefore you contradict yourself.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17919 Joined: Member Rating: 6.6 |
Well I'm glad that you have accepted that I was right about Crossan and Borg. In future try not to indulge yourself in "poisoning the well".
quote: Perhaps you can cite my Paul's own account then. Although even if you do, it refers to events after the Resurrection and the Ascension and thus does not qualify as an eyewitness account of the Resurrection itself (which, of course, was not witnessed).
quote: And says very little about the Resurrection as a historical event. Surprisingly little, in fact given its theological importance. There is no mention of the empty tomb, nor are there any details to the list of "appearances".
quote: Yet if they were not witnesses their accounts were not "recorded by those who witnessed it".
quote: That really depends on when Mark was written - and more importantly on its early circulation. It does not matter who might have been available to refute it, if they never saw it. It is generally accepted that Mark was written after Peter's death, not in Judea and even the earliest mainstream dates do not put it long before the Jewish war, which would have had a major effect on the availability of witnesses.
quote: However your point was that they absolutely denied the possibility of miracles. Then you say that they believe in a miracle. That IS a clear-cut contradiction. As I have observed before logic is not your strong point,
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PaulK Member Posts: 17919 Joined: Member Rating: 6.6 |
So the only actual bias you can suggest is that they didn't believe that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet.
That's not really relevant to the question of the Resurrection, is it ?
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PaulK Member Posts: 17919 Joined: Member Rating: 6.6 |
quote: Two problems here. Firstly, Paul's according to the Bible, Paul's alleged turnaround has nothing to do with the resurrection as such. Secondly all the alleged turnarounds come from the Bible, mostly from the Gospels and Acts. We can't know how accurate they are on that point. All we can really say is that the early Christians made some sort of turnaround, focussing their messianic expectations on a resurrected Jesus after the living Jesus failed and died. Do we really have sufficient information to assert that that was impossible without a literal resurrection ? Maybe the odds were such that we could expect one group to survive - and Christianity was the lucky sect. The Jehovah's Witnesses have been recently forced to reinterpret their prophecies again. The early Christians also saw their apocalyptic expectations fail. Failure and disappointment are not certain killers of any religious movement.
quote: You've not shown that the Jesus Seminar had any such bias. You've not given any reason to believe it. The fact that you feel the need to resort to such tactics clearly illustrates the fact that you have no real case. Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17919 Joined: Member Rating: 6.6 |
quote: You'd consider the author's agenda, biases, sources and agreement with other data. Unfortunately we have very little that would let us do that very well with the Gospels.
quote: Which just shows how much your assumption that the Gospels are the "inspired word of God" biases your evaluation of the data.
quote: Eh ? All the Gospels pretty much agree that they remained in Jerusalem. Matthew has them going to Galille under Jesus' (post-resurrection) instructions, relayed by Mary Magdalene. Luke leaves out this instruction and doesn't have them going further than Emmaus until they see Jesus - and they don't go to Galilee at all. John has Jesus appearing to them in Jerusalem and only later are they fishing in Galilee. The only way to get your version would be to ignore Matthew, Luke and chapter 20 of John. Is that how you treat the "inspired word of God" ?
quote: You're kidding, right ? It's in Matthew, Luke and Revelation - all written after the destruction. 2 Peter (maybe as late as 160 AD) indicates that the idea was becoming embarrassing, but obviously it was still believed enough that it was necessary to argue that "soon" didn't really mean "soon".
quote: And I didn't say that they had a prediction to the day or even year. But they were expecting it in the near future - within the lifetime of at least some of the Disciples. And as 2 Peter reminds us - it didn't happen.
quote: You're moving the goalposts. You specifically said that thety were biased against miracles. Liberal Christians simply lack a strong bias in favour of Christian miracles. Not the same thing at all.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17919 Joined: Member Rating: 6.6 |
quote: No, we often have a better idea of who the author is.
quote: SInce I explicitly listed the author's biases as something that should be included when assessing the reliability of the text I wonder what your point is.
quote: However, it's far from clear to what degree they were sources or how directly. And that is something we would want to know. We've got some important disagreements between the Gospels (e.g. Luke's account of the post-Resurrection appearances versus Matthew's) which don't seem to be consistent with both coming directly from people who were there. Let alone with both being the product of some "Divine Inspiration" that guarantees reliability.
quote: Bias makes your conclusions unreliable. I resist mine. You seem to embrace yours.(And I can certainly agree that your bias is likely to have got stronger - it would probably need to). And it is certainly not valid to baselessly accuse others of bias just to discredit their conclusions as you have done repeatedly in this thread.. quote: That was less than 72 hours. None of the Gospels say that the Disciples did anything much in that time, and even Mark implies that they were still in Jerusalem at the end of that time. Given that John 21 (which INCLUDES a post-Resurrection appearance) is the only thing that suggests anything similar it looks as if my initial assessment is more accurate.
quote: I didn't quote you out of context. Here's the whole paragraph as proof.
Most of the apocalyptic expectations seem to have resolved around the destruction of the temple. I think that Paul believed that "New Creation" would happen in the relatively near future but Jesus made the point that no one would know the hour or the minute. Nobody as far as I know was suggesting any particular day or year.
The additional text does not contradict my reading. It reaffirms and emphasises it. It does not admit that the belief that the end would come within a generation persisted for any length of time after the destruction of the Temple. By associating such beliefs with Paul (who is believed to have died some time before the destruction) - and Paul alone - it only emphasises your assertion to the contrary. Thus your accusation that I quoted you out of context is an obvious falsehood. (In fact the word "generation" appears in exactly one of your previous posts - in a quote of Grizz).
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PaulK Member Posts: 17919 Joined: Member Rating: 6.6 |
Of course you're doing exactly what Wright does - specuilate about what people would do. However, if you listened to the discussion between Wright and Crossan (and you obviously didn't) you would know that even Wright was forced to weaken his arguuments by appealing to there being something "special" about Jesus which caused the authors to act atypically.
It is easy to concoct motivations. For instance given Paul's tensions with the Jerusalem church maybe it was desirable to make the disciples look bad - to make Paul (andd Jesus) look better in comparison. But why put such speculations above what the texts actually tell us ? Isn't it more important that Paul tells us almost nothing about the post-Resurrection appearances, Matthew places them in Galilee and Luke places them in and around Jerusalem. John tries to have it both ways, which contradicts Luke and Matthew. Doesn't this suggest a shortage of reliable information ? Before we jump to conclusiosn about why Mark has women as witnesses shouldn't we note that he tells us that they told nobody what they had seen ? Isn't that more puzzling - and therefore interesting. Is it at least not possible that Mark is explaining why the story was not taught by the disciples ? Paul doesn't mention it, or even the existence of a tomb. Isn't it as likely that the stories we have are tales that grew up to fill a near-vacuum of information. And if you are relying on stories that grew up to obscure the unimpressive real events, how can you come to a reliable conclusion ?
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