Argument from Historical Proximity

[Adam]

Adam:
Concerning the thread on source strata in John, other posters, especially robertb, have said everything I would have to say. I have nothing useful to add to their comments.

I only have time tonight to address this point. No one on my thread has dealt seriously with my article nor the arguments I made on the thread itself. If robertb made points you consider so good, please point out those posts or reiterate what he said. I considered him as having withdrawn defeated from my thread.

[The Pixie]

Adam

Had Luke been very young, he would have known enough about the subsequent "trials" of Paul and Peter, and we would expect an account of their martyrdoms.
My common sense analysis is that Luke brought the story in Acts to the date of writing, particularly since the ending is such an anti-climax,
"For two whole years Paul stayed there in his own rented house and ....preached...." We get the date AD64 from secular records of such people as Felix, Festus, Agrippa and Bernice.

I find it just a little odd that you do not spell out your reasoning for this in the Neosis article.

You offer one possible reason why Luke omitted the trials of Paul and Peter, and seem to hang your entire thesis upon that be so. Can you really be sure that that is the reason? Maybe Luke finished at that point because he died of old age before getting to the trials of Paul and Peter. The fact is that we do not know, and your own hypothesis is just speculation.

[Doug Shaver]

No one on my thread has dealt seriously with my article nor the arguments I made on the thread itself.

The fact that no one has changed your mind does not imply that no one has dealt seriously with your arguments.

If robertb made points you consider so good, please point out those posts or reiterate what he said.

To what end would I do that? Anyone who reads the thread can decide for themselves whether you or he had the better argument. As for your own opinion of it, I don't have time to try to convince you after others could not.

[Adam]

The fact that no one has changed your mind does not imply that no one has dealt seriously with your arguments.

No, I simply said no one has dealt seriously with my arguments, not that no one swayed me. If someone would read my article carefully and expose flaws, I am open to acknowledging that it is not as persuasive as I thought. I admit that my article is a hard read as I write very condensed, but whom do you contend has read my stuff seriously?

To what end would I do that? Anyone who reads the thread can decide for themselves whether you or he had the better argument. As for your own opinion of it, I don't have time to try to convince you after others could not.

I see you as a victim of what I would call, "The Logical Fallacy". It's the idea that if a proposition is not a logical deduction or someway 100% certain, it's not worth further discussion. The upshot of that is that the opposite contention is as likely not 100% certain either, so it's not worth discussing either. But in the real world almost everything is a matter of probabilities. If something is 99% certain, it's a good bet to be true. And in really important issues, if something is assessed as over 10% likely to be true, maybe one had better study it more and find if it is 50% likely, maybe even than 90% likely. And one such issue is this, "The gospels are in the main true."
For atheists it might seem that it's more than 90% likely that Christianity is false, based on such reasoning as, "Christians are stupid, therefore what they believe is untrue." Or, "Christians believe all non-Christians go to Hell, therefore Christianity is untrue." And such reasoning impresses me profoundly, thus I have spent much of my life proving (to myself, anyway) that Christianity is true in spite of such arguments that I would accept if evidence did not exist that Christianity is true and not all non-Christians go to Hell. (As to the other proposition, I guess many Christians are stupid about scientific things, but I would say atheists are stupid about spiritual things.)
So if you wonder why robertb can't sway me and I can't sway him, it doesn't mean that no arguments either of us present are any good. All I'm asking is if any of his arguments are better than others at diminishing the probabilites that my Biblical criticism shows Christianity is true. I admit that at this point in my life experience nothing robertb can present that will make me cease to be a Christian, but what he has to say might show me that my argument is weak. Obviously I can't claim that my case is so strong that it will make any atheist, any Fundamentalist, see things my way, but further discussion can perhaps reveal whether any atheist or Fundamentalist should see things my way (but refuses to for no particularly good reason). There will always be differences of opinion, but some opinions are better than others. Only a total skeptic would say otherwise.
I still plan to answer your Post #89.

[Adam]

Adam
I find it just a little odd that you do not spell out your reasoning for this in the Noesis article.

In Myers-Briggs terms I'm way over-balanced on the NT scale and tend to assume others will see the logic as clearly as I do. I'm very intuitive rather than by-the-numbers. But where someone points out that I have skipped steps, I can usually supply what's missing. We all have our faults.
I'm glad that you agree that once it's thus supplemented, it makes sense (but not proof, I admit).

You offer one possible reason why Luke omitted the trials of Paul and Peter, and seem to hang your entire thesis upon that be so. Can you really be sure that that is the reason? Maybe Luke finished at that point because he died of old age before getting to the trials of Paul and Peter. The fact is that we do not know, and your own hypothesis is just speculation.

Havn't you overstated yourself somewhat? Based on analysis of the first 8% of the first of my four articles, you say I "seem to hang your entire thesis upon that". I had nothing to say in the other 98%? One has to start somewhere. I'm sorry you don't like where I started, but it's just your opinion that I didn't choose a good place to start. Starting with the end of Acts seems a far cry from starting with the gospels themselves, but nothing within the Synoptics themselves helps in dating them. (In contrast John does give internal support to dating when part was written.) Not in my four articles, but in my thread "Source Strata in the Gospel of John" I analyze John without any reference to Luke or Acts.

[Tassman]

Sure it follows. If Jews wouldn’t normally write an account about God incarnate then a Jew must have had compelling reasons to write it. The sheer fact this Gospel exists gives us good reason to not quickly dismiss it.

It can be taken as a given that the author is a Christian and this alone is a sufficiently “compelling” reason to write a Christian apologetic. But this does not necessarily mean that John’s Gospel is an eyewitness account. Majority scholarship does not consider ANY of the gospels to be eyewitness accounts.

As well, there are many reasons for thinking it is theology, not history - eyewitness or otherwise.

To give just one example, John refers to Jesus as “the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” This is declared by John the Baptist at the beginning of the narrative and again several verses later.

But, to make his point about Jesus being the Passover Lamb whose sacrifice brings salvation from sin, it was necessary for the author to change the day and time when Jesus died. Because in John’s Gospel, the Passover Lamb i.e. Jesus, must die on the day (the Day of Preparation) and the time (sometime after noon), when the Passover lambs were being slaughtered in the Temple.

Thus John changes a historical datum in order to make this point. This is a literary device, NOT eyewitness reporting of history. And this manipulation of events to enhance his theology is true throughout John’s Gospel.

And actually there aren’t concrete reasons for the late dating of John. Late dating is entirely arbitrary. However, even if we grant late dating for John an old man writing it wouldn’t preclude it from being an eyewitness account. Your objection to relying on an old man’s memory would be an argument against the historical reliability of John anyway, not an argument against whether it was an eyewitness account. Further, it is not unprecedented even in modern times to compose an account decades after the events, late in life. Denis Avery, at age 92, has finally broken his silence and written his biography telling of his experiences of events 60 years earlier in Auschwitz.

The age of the author is a side issue, although it is unlikely that a very old man with a fading memory wrote it as a memoir of his time 60 years previous with Jesus. It’s possible but unlikely.

It is the nature of the narrative which is the issue. It is a presentation of well-developed, sophisticated and advanced Christology of the pre-existent god incarnate, not a recital of historical events.

And you don’t have ANYTHING in the way of conclusive evidence to show that it was an interpolation. You don’t get to dismiss 1:14 because you wish it wasn’t there. What a joke...

Given that we don’t have the original autograph we can’t know for sure that this, which is the one and only reference, was in the original text in the same form as it appears today. Just wanting it to be there, as an eyewitness account to bolster your faith is NOT the same as it being there.

Are you arguing that fish was NOT a dietary component of those associated with Jesus? You can’t possibly be serious...

As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. – Matthew 4:18

Feeding the 5,000 – Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people. - Matthew 14:19

Later, feeding the 4,000 – Then he took the seven loaves and the fish, and when he had given thanks, he broke them and gave them to the disciples, and they in turn to the people. – Matthew 15:36

Jesus instructs Peter to go catch fish – “But so that we may not cause offense, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. - Matthew 17:27

Jesus asks for something to eat from his disciples and “they gave him a piece of broiled fish.” (Luke 24:40-43)

The disciples were still fishing even after Jesus had died – Simon Peter, Thomas (also known as Didymus), Nathanael from Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two other disciples were together. “I’m going out to fish,” Simon Peter told them, and they said, “We’ll go with you.” – John 21:2-3

But never mind, those were probably interpolated too…

I’m arguing that we cannot know the dietary habits of specific individuals 2,000 years ago. It is merely an assumption that the author of ‘John’ was long lived because he ate a lot of fish.

As well, I’ve never argued that the author wasn’t around at the time of Jesus, just that it was unlikely and it’s irrelevant anyway because the author’s primary concerns are not in recounting eyewitness reminiscences but expounding on the meaning of Jesus life. This is obvious from the long dialogues throughout John’s Gospel, with Jesus engaging in long protracted speeches with each of them establishing a theological point.

Or the author of John was composing an eyewitness account as best he could.


It is possible the author of John may have used other written sources as a type of “outline” or “memory jogger” per se. We can’t rule that possibility out entirely. Even in that case though it would not preclude it from being an eyewitness account.

Possibly but not likely and this is not the opinion of the majority of textural critics for several reasons. The majority opinion is that the gospel arose within a particular Christian community with its own evolved theology and Jesus tradition.

Only Christian scholars consider ‘John’ to be an eyewitness account of Jesus’ ministry and it is reasonable to assume that they are following their own religious agenda.

You are just repeating yourself now. The late dating argument precluding John being an eyewitness account has been refuted

No it hasn’t been refuted. The argument does not revolve around whether an eyewitness could have lived long enough to record the events but in the nature of the text itself.

You have not dealt with the high Christology presented in John’s gospel, which is the purpose of this gospel, not the writing of a memoir by a fish-eating geriatric apostle.

Your personal feelings on the matter are noted. But conveniently you forgot the first part, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory…”

The Word became flesh (Jesus) and lived with them.

What is “noted”, is that it is personally important to you as a Christian to have the authority of eyewitness reportage so as to lend credibility to your religious beliefs.

Sadly for you the imagery of the “Word becoming flesh etc” is poetic, not history. Its aim is to make the point of Jesus as pre-existent and eternal.

The Johannine Comma is widely accepted (even by me) as an interpolation because we have conclusive manuscript evidence to prove it. What do you have for John 1:14? Please tell me you have something more concrete than wishful thinking...

And the fact of the Johannine comma is concrete evidence that such interpellations have occurred through the history of NT texts.

The earnest desire for ‘John’ to be an eyewitness is all that you have. Furthermore, the prologue to John is not history; it is theology in the form of poetic imagery.

And I showed why your reasoning was faulty in that case. You didn’t even attempt a serious rebuttal.

Your reasoning is based on the presupposition that the Johannine text is reliable and always been as we see it today.

The inconvenient fact for you is that we don’t have the original autograph, nor can we establish its provenance any earlier than the middle second century and any number of emendations and insertions or scribal errors could have changed its original meaning. We know for certain that such corruptions occurred in the scriptural texts. No I can’t prove that it occurred in key Johannine texts but you cannot prove that it didn’t.

More to the point, ‘John’ is far more likely the end-product of an evolved oral tradition, which had become commonly accepted by the Christian community of which the author was a member – NOT the eyewitness memoirs of the author.

[Dr Cranberry]

I would call, "The Logical Fallacy". It's the idea that if a proposition is not a logical deduction or someway 100% certain, it's not worth further discussion.

Worth discussion, but not belief.

I had something relatively nasty happen to me on the internet, which was perpetrated by an "in-law", who was intent on anonymously wrecking my relationship, so he could sleep with my partner. In the aftermath of that, I was left with "clues" in emails, and clues in possibly faked emails, with possibly faked people in them, who were real on his say-so. I now have some respect for police investigative logic, because they must always be facing situations like this (albeit with more power), where they come up against a possibility which is apparently 50/50 on someone's say-so. When you hit a 50/50 wall, it is demoralizing. You almost can't look beyond it, unless you are trained to think of a logical consequence of the consequence, and then follow up on that. Police investigators are obviously trained to follow up both paths, remorselessly, otherwise they'd get nowhere.

In this investigative process, above, I was at least in possession of accurate records on my own system. Even if some aspects of the emails were lies (or total fabrications), I could trust the integrity of myself, and my computer. However, anybody I told the story to could not be sure that I was telling the truth. Police also have to deal with a stringent evidence chain, whereby any data they discover can be evaluated as accurate, rather than fabricated.

In this kind of situation, where someone affable and community-minded has done something reprehensible, people evaluate data in terms of their emotional bias. That is to say, if they have a grudge against you, they will side with the perpetrator, no matter how weak their argument is. If proven wrong on an issue, they will instantly excuse the offence, and resume attack on another vector. Even when you are in possession of accurate data, harassing emails, you cannot prove it is accurate, nor are you given an opportunity to present your case. You get beaten into a form of submission with various threats and tactics, depending on the power, cunning and luck of your opponent. This will always be the case when there is no [brutal] arbiter in a debate.

The rub is that "truth" depends upon an arbiter. If you are lucky, the arbiter is in possession of untampered evidence.

Summarising what I have said, in terms of the Bible. There is no external record of how the gospels were constructed, or even who did it. If we had access to Paul's emails, Pilate's emails, Jesus' emails, intact with IP addresses and headers, and we knew that the evidence chain had not been tampered with, we could probably make something of it, even if half of them were lying. Assange and other email leakers have provided illuminating information. People provide real information when they get caught with their pants down, or if you happen to be recording all your phone conversations, but they never seem to do it at any other time. When you hit a 50/50 investigative wall, you need solid contemporary records to work out what the truth was, so you can move on to the next lie. You can't guess your way through it, helped by the say-so of the perpetrators.

In the case I mentioned above, the "in-law" can explain-away anything he likes using lies™, fabricated emails and people. Lies™ are a new technology which enable a bastard to explain anything, no matter how improbable. As long as there is no brutal arbiter present, surprise phone recordings, or photo, lies™ are terribly effective. That's why they remain in use, even today.

[Adam]

Adam:
Concerning your Noesis articles, I don't have nearly enough time to do a thorough critique of all four of those articles in any detail. What follows are just a few initial reactions. I could go on at great length in the same vein.
When I read anything that starts out with an appeal to common sense, I know that whatever follows is going the be something other than serious scholarship. It might include lots of references to the work of serious scholars, but they will just be window dressing.

Sounds like an appeal to common sense, so we don’t have to take seriously what follows?

There is of course a role for common sense in any scholarly investigation, but not as a substitute for carefully examining all relevant evidence and building the most parsimonious theory that accounts for all the evidence. Common sense with not save or justify any theory that ignores any relevant evidence or that depends in ad hoc assumptions that effectively presuppose the conclusion being defended.

And where do you refute my evidence or expose my presuppositions?

Great. Let's put aside those presuppositions. But let's put aside a few others as well.
Here are some things I do not presuppose:….
• The gospels' original authors intended to write factual history.

I agree in not accepting the other presuppositions. I don’t accept or deny this one. You seem to be presupposing that they intended to lie.

Why is that the proper starting point? Because you say so? You offer no other reason.

Because not only does Acts continue the gospels, it continues the specific gospel of Luke. Therefore scholars agree that the date for Acts is after the date Luke was written. The date Luke was written sets the date before which any of the various sources (Luke 1:1-4) were written, such as Q and Ur-Marcus.

No, it cannot be dated that way to that date. You have got to go outside the New Testament to get that date. And, Paul's epistles contribute nothing to the exercise. If it were not for Acts, we would have no reason at all to suspect he was ever anywhere near Rome.

Wow, you’re more Fundamentalist than the Fundamentalists! Sola scriptura!

So, anybody who thinks Luke and Acts were written a lot later than that is not being sensible, eh? Maybe so, but you'll need a lot better argument than anything I've seen yet.

It’s not a matter of sensible, just that they have to argue against the simplest explanation of the text.

That is what he wrote, yes. To infer from that, that he actually did use sources begs the question of his actual intentions in writing those books. I have read several works of fiction in which the author included a similar claim in his narrative.

Here again, you’re presupposing gospel writers lie.

Your stick-with-the-text methodology is practically guaranteed to reach whatever conclusion you want it to reach. That is why postmodernists like it so much.

No guarantee other than what the texts indicate. If the texts show A, how does that support conclusion B?

You seem to think there is a correlation between frequency of a name and the probability of its indicating a source. You nowhere indicate how you derived that correlation.

Other than in a work of fiction or a biography, that’s just a common sense approach. Uh, oh, that’s forbidden—let’s call it historiography instead. (I have an M. A.in History, by the way.)

There is no logic to it. It is rank speculation presupposing the truth of church tradition. .

How so? I did not say Tradition = Logic. I said that in this case Tradition supports logic. The most “logical” expectation is that what happened happened according to cause-and-effect, hence “logical”, and that what happened was remembered as Tradition rather than Tradition contradicting what actually happened. Someone here is presupposing that Tradition = Lies. .

Speculations and presuppositions do not constitute evidence for anything. Only facts, uncontested facts, can be counted as evidence. The fundamental fact we are starting with is the existence of numerous manuscripts, none produced before 200 CE with the arguable exception of a fragment of John. The only unambiguous earlier attestation to their existence is Irenaeus, though we can reasonably assume they had been circulating for at least some years prior. Justin might have referred to them, but this is not certain. From all this, we cannot definitely establish their provenance any earlier than the middle second century. And that is just their existence, never minding their authors' identities and sources and their reasons for writing the documents.

Behold, the Argument from Historical Remoteness!

m talking here about the gospels and Acts in their extant form. I accept the likelihood that what we have now are heavily edited or redacted versions of whatever the original authors wrote. It remains the case that no undisputed fact is inconsistent with the originals having been written after 100. .

Except Acts carrying the story no farther than 64AD, Ur-Marcus/Acts 1-12 carrying the story no farther than 44 AD, etc.*

I accept the scholarly consensus that Mark was the first gospel written, and that Matthew and Luke are derivative with additions from Q. A few scholars now think Mark used some material from Q as well. My personal jury is still out on that, but in any case, it is probable that Q existed before Mark. That does nothing, though, to support your chronology, because it makes no difference how long Q might have been around prior to the writing of anything in the canon.

And it makes no difference because….?

There is no way to recover the origins of Q. Some think they have identified some layers in it -- original Q, first additions, later additions, and so on. I think some of those theories are more precise than the evidence warrants, but it is not unreasonable to suppose that it had undergone some evolution between its origin and its use by the gospel authors. What cannot be justified without question-begging is the assumption that it originated as eyewitness reports by some disciples or other followers of a charismatic preacher known as Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified by Pontius Pilate.

Not an assumption, just that it’s possible. Let’s hear no more of, “We know that no eye-witnesses wrote about Jesus.”

It is not my argument, let me note, that the gospels could not have been written during the first century. They could have been, and none of the evidence to which I've referred proves the contrary. My point is just that the evidence does not indicate that they must have been written that early. For anyone who argues "They must have been written before X," the burden is to produce a fact that is inconsistent with the documents' nonexistence prior to X.
The extant manuscripts suffice to prove X = 200 CE. The writings of Irenaeus push it back a bit to X = 180. Most people figure Justin makes it probable that X = 150 at most. I have seen no facts presented by you or anyone else that establish any smaller value.

See “*” above. Or kiss the thread title good-bye!

[The Pixie]

Adam

In Myers-Briggs terms I'm way over-balanced on the NT scale and tend to assume others will see the logic as clearly as I do. I'm very intuitive rather than by-the-numbers. But where someone points out that I have skipped steps, I can usually supply what's missing. We all have our faults.

Great, so we have established that skipped some steps. The logical thing to do now would be for you to furnish us with those steps.

So why have you not done so?

I point out that your argument is lacking, and in response you say that that is because of your personality type. Are you aware that that does nothing to solve the lack in your argument?

I'm glad that you agree that once it's thus supplemented, it makes sense (but not proof, I admit).

Should you ever bother to supplement it, and put in those logical steps, then that may well be the case.

Can you see that until that happens your argument is dead in the water?

Havn't you overstated yourself somewhat? Based on analysis of the first 8% of the first of my four articles, you say I "seem to hang your entire thesis upon that".

The impression I get is that your dating system hinges on when Luke and Acts was written, but I admit I did not read the whole article properly. Have I got that wrong? You do not state that that is the case, so for now I will continue to think that.

To be honest, I did not see a lot of point in reading the rest too deeply, if the article starts from a flawed argument. I appreciate you think it is not flawed, but as we have agreed, you have missed steps in your arguments. Until those steps are given, and can be evaluated, your argument will remain flawed.

I had nothing to say in the other 98%? One has to start somewhere. I'm sorry you don't like where I started, but it's just your opinion that I didn't choose a good place to start. Starting with the end of Acts seems a far cry from starting with the gospels themselves, but nothing within the Synoptics themselves helps in dating them.

I did not say that I do not like where you started; you seem to be tilting at windmills. If Luke seems the best place to start for you, then by all means start there. However, when you start from an unsupported assertion, then it looks like you are buildinmg your argument on very weak foundations.

See, Adam, this is the crux of it. You make a claim that Luke and Acts was written before Paul died, but the logic behind that claim is missing. We both agree that it is missing, so I am struggling to think of any reason why you have choosen not to state what that logic is.

I am going to be away for a week; have a good think about and see if you can actually post what the logic is for those of us who are by-the-numbers, rather than intuitive.

[Juice]

It can be taken as a given that the author is a Christian and this alone is a sufficiently “compelling” reason to write a Christian apologetic. But this does not necessarily mean that John’s Gospel is an eyewitness account. Majority scholarship does not consider ANY of the gospels to be eyewitness accounts.

Well, if those scholars who reject eyewitness testimony do so with arguments similar to what you have presented in this thread I can see why those arguments don’t hold water.

Thus John changes a historical datum in order to make this point. This is a literary device, NOT eyewitness reporting of history. And this manipulation of events to enhance his theology is true throughout John’s Gospel.

All this really amounts to is an alleged discrepancy between John’s gospel and the synoptic gospels. It wrongly assumes it cannot be reasonably reconciled without presuming the author of John intentionally “changes a historical datum in order to make this point.”

Further, in an effort to argue along the line John was concerned only with making a theological point and not concerned with accurately reporting history and not an eyewitness you tacitly acknowledge the author understood the importance of reporting “historical datum” and “events” in trying to make a point. One can hardly argue from there that John was not concerned with the reporting of history.

The age of the author is a side issue, although it is unlikely that a very old man with a fading memory wrote it as a memoir of his time 60 years previous with Jesus. It’s possible but unlikely.

Why is it unlikely? Because you say it is?

It is the nature of the narrative which is the issue. It is a presentation of well-developed, sophisticated and advanced Christology of the pre-existent god incarnate, not a recital of historical events.

Falsified by the text itself. The author of John does record historical events, even the mundane ones, throughout the text. Indeed the author of John appears very concerned with the handling of history.

Why couldn’t John record history and emphasize Christology at the same time anyway? Your argument seems to be a false dichotomy of either one or the other.

Paul presents some very advanced theology and explicit Christology in his letters, even the undisputed ones...

”In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Philippians 2:5-11)

But never mind, that was probably interpolated too…

The fact is “high Christology” was existent by the time Paul was writing his letters some 40-50 years before John (assuming a date of c.100 AD for John). The entire NT is laced with theology. It does not follow from there that therefore the NT texts, and specifically John in this case, are not also concerned with recording history.

Given that we don’t have the original autograph we can’t know for sure that this, which is the one and only reference, was in the original text in the same form as it appears today. Just wanting it to be there, as an eyewitness account to bolster your faith is NOT the same as it being there.

That is by far the silliest thing you've said so far! Dude, I’m not “wanting [1:14] to be there” IT IS THERE! No amount of wishful thinking and whining on your part will make it disappear.

I’m arguing that we cannot know the dietary habits of specific individuals 2,000 years ago. It is merely an assumption that the author of ‘John’ was long lived because he ate a lot of fish.

Surely you are capable of recognizing the difference between an assumption and an inference from the available evidence. I’ve given more than ample evidence to show those associated with Jesus ate fish and ate it regularly. I’ve also given evidence that those who have a high intake of fish tend to live longer despite hardship in their life. I’ve also given evidence that people in the ancient would from around the time of Christ did live to around age 100. You don’t seem capable of offering a cogent rebuttal to this. “We cannot know” is not an argument.

Possibly but not likely and this is not the opinion of the majority of textural critics for several reasons. The majority opinion is that the gospel arose within a particular Christian community with its own evolved theology and Jesus tradition.

That opinion is noted. Let’s stick to the facts and arguments though shall we?

Only Christian scholars consider ‘John’ to be an eyewitness account of Jesus’ ministry and it is reasonable to assume that they are following their own religious agenda.

To dismiss their arguments because they are Christian is to commit the Genetic Fallacy.

No it hasn’t been refuted. The argument does not revolve around whether an eyewitness could have lived long enough to record the events but in the nature of the text itself.

You have not dealt with the high Christology presented in John’s gospel, which is the purpose of this gospel, not the writing of a memoir by a fish-eating geriatric apostle.

What's to deal with? I fail to see how a more explicit Christology precludes John from being an eyewitness account.

What is “noted”, is that it is personally important to you as a Christian to have the authority of eyewitness reportage so as to lend credibility to your religious beliefs.

Actually, I can make my beliefs work just fine without the existence of any eyewitness testimony. Ironically it’s the sceptic that spends an inordinate amount of time railing against it. Like you, sceptics try to wish away the evidence. Why do you fear John being an eyewitness account anyway?

Sadly for you the imagery of the “Word becoming flesh etc” is poetic, not history. Its aim is to make the point of Jesus as pre-existent and eternal.

Sadly for me? The irony of course is you just can’t seem to get away from the fact that John 1:14 is claiming to have been a witness to Jesus, whether stated poetically (as you call it) or not.

And the fact of the Johannine comma is concrete evidence that such interpellations have occurred through the history of NT texts.

Then all you need to do is furnish us with the manuscript evidence to support an interpolation at 1:14. C’mon now, pony up that bad boy, we are all waiting…

The earnest desire for ‘John’ to be an eyewitness is all that you have.

I have more than that. I have a direct internal claim to be a witness at 1:14. Which is far more than some secular texts from antiquity believed almost without question to be eyewitness accounts. What do you have other than your desire for John not to be an eyewitness account?

Furthermore, the prologue to John is not history; it is theology in the form of poetic imagery.

So what? Even if it were “poetic imagery,” as you call it, poetry can still reflect the author’s observation of actual history. Do you deny this?

Your reasoning is based on the presupposition that the Johannine text is reliable and always been as we see it today.

My arguments showed to be faulty your reasoning that the author of John would have lied for a purpose.

The inconvenient fact for you is that we don’t have the original autograph, nor can we establish its provenance any earlier than the middle second century and any number of emendations and insertions or scribal errors could have changed its original meaning. We know for certain that such corruptions occurred in the scriptural texts. No I can’t prove that it occurred in key Johannine texts but you cannot prove that it didn’t.

Then it would be unreasonable to argue that a particular verse or passage was an interpolation without manuscript evidence to support it. To do so is rooted in wishful thinking, nothing more.

More to the point, ‘John’ is far more likely the end-product of an evolved oral tradition, which had become commonly accepted by the Christian community of which the author was a member – NOT the eyewitness memoirs of the author.

John 1:14 falsifies that notion.

[Composer]

Well, if those scholars who reject eyewitness testimony do so with arguments similar to what you have presented in this thread I can see why those arguments don’t hold water.

There is NO eye-witness testimony!

Paul presents some very advanced theology and explicit Christology in his letters, even the undisputed ones...

”In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Philippians 2:5-11)

The late Dr. W R Matthews, Dean of St Paul's Cathedral, wrote:

"It must be admitted by everyone who has the rudiments of an historical sense that the doctrine of the Trinity, as a doctrine, formed no part of the original message. St Paul knew it not, and would have been unable to understand the meaning of the terms used in the theological formula on which the Church ultimately agreed". (27)

27. "God in Christian Thought and Experience", p.180

&

Was Jesus God to Paul and other early Christians? No. (p. 160 - How the Bible became the Bible by Donald L. O'Dell - ISBN 0-7414-2993-4 Published by INFINITY Publishing.com)

&

There is no indication in the Old Testament that the Messiah would be a person before his conception. The very opposite was taught: The Messiah would expressly not be God, but a unique, final "prophet like Moses," coming into being from a family in Israel (see Deut. 18:15-19; Acts 3:22; 7:37) - " It was impossible for the Apostles to identify Christ with Jehovah. Psalm 110:1 and Malachi 3:1 prevented this " (Charles C. Bigg, D.D. Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Oxford, in International Critical Commentary on I Peter).

&

"The Old Testament tells us nothing explicitly or by necessary implication of a triune God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is no evidence that any sacred writer even suspected the existence of a trinity within the God head. Even to see in the Old Testament, suggestions or fore-shadowings or veiled signs of the trinity of persons, is to go beyond the words and intent of the sacred writers. The New Testament writers give us no formal or formulated doctrine of the trinity, no explicit teaching that in one God there are three co-equal divine persons. Nowhere do we find any trinitarian doctrine of three distinct subjects of divine life and activity in the same God head. [The Triune God , by Edmund Fortman, Jesuit].

&

(The Early Christian Doctrine of God, R.M. Grant, D.D., Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, Divinity School, University of Chicago).
“The Word,” said John, “became flesh.” We could put it in another way — “the Mind of God became a person"

William Barclay, Gospel of John, Saint Andrews Press, 1957, Vol. 1, 14. God’s wisdom became flesh in the man Jesus.

[Juice]

There is NO eye-witness testimony!

Classic Argument by Assertion

Let X = There is NO eye-witness testimony!
Let C = ”The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” - John 1:14

Composer: X is true.
Juice: [argument/evidence C]; therefore X is not true.
Composer: X IS TRUE!

The late Dr. W R Matthews, Dean of St Paul's Cathedral, wrote:

"It must be admitted by everyone who has the rudiments of an historical sense that the doctrine of the Trinity, as a doctrine, formed no part of the original message. St Paul knew it not, and would have been unable to understand the meaning of the terms used in the theological formula on which the Church ultimately agreed". (27)

The Trinity? Really? Do you even bother to read the stuff you type?

Was Jesus God to Paul and other early Christians? No. (p. 160 - How the Bible became the Bible by Donald L. O'Dell - ISBN 0-7414-2993-4 Published by INFINITY Publishing.com)

I didn’t claim Paul thought Jesus was God. Do you even bother to read the stuff you type?

There is no indication in the Old Testament that the Messiah would be a person before his conception. The very opposite was taught: The Messiah would expressly not be God, but a unique, final "prophet like Moses," coming into being from a family in Israel (see Deut. 18:15-19; Acts 3:22; 7:37) - " It was impossible for the Apostles to identify Christ with Jehovah. Psalm 110:1 and Malachi 3:1 prevented this " (Charles C. Bigg, D.D. Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Oxford, in International Critical Commentary on I Peter)

Wonderful. This precludes John 1:14 from claiming to be a witness to Jesus because….

"The Old Testament tells us nothing explicitly or by necessary implication of a triune God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is no evidence that any sacred writer even suspected the existence of a trinity within the God head. Even to see in the Old Testament, suggestions or fore-shadowings or veiled signs of the trinity of persons, is to go beyond the words and intent of the sacred writers. The New Testament writers give us no formal or formulated doctrine of the trinity, no explicit teaching that in one God there are three co-equal divine persons. Nowhere do we find any trinitarian doctrine of three distinct subjects of divine life and activity in the same God head. [The Triune God , by Edmund Fortman, Jesuit].

More Trinity stuff, huh? Do you even bother to read the stuff you type?

(The Early Christian Doctrine of God, R.M. Grant, D.D., Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, Divinity School, University of Chicago).
“The Word,” said John, “became flesh.” We could put it in another way — “the Mind of God became a person"

And who was that person? That’s right, Jesus. Hence John 1:14 claims to be a witness to Jesus. Do you even bother to read the stuff you type?

William Barclay, Gospel of John, Saint Andrews Press, 1957, Vol. 1, 14. God’s wisdom became flesh in the man Jesus.

Check. Do you even bother to read the stuff you type?


Are you done spamming yet?

[Doug Shaver]

I see you as a victim of what I would call, "The Logical Fallacy". It's the idea that if a proposition is not a logical deduction or someway 100% certain, it's not worth further discussion.

You should call it something else. Every fallacy is a logical fallacy.

That is not an idea I hold. All I ask of any proposition is a good reason to believe it, and a good reason does not have to establish the proposition beyond all possible doubt, just beyond reasonable doubt. I think it very reasonable to doubt that the gospels contain any eyewitness testimony, and I believe you have failed to present any evidence that should reduce that doubt.

But in the real world almost everything is a matter of probabilities.

I agree, and I have never claimed that Christianity is certainly false. All I claim is that the probability of its being true is extremely low.

And in really important issues, if something is assessed as over 10% likely to be true, maybe one had better study it more and find if it is 50% likely, maybe even than 90% likely.

Well, if the consequences of being wrong are provably severe, then one should establish as high a probability as the evidence will allow. And the more severe the consequences, the higher the probability one should reach for. But sometimes the evidence for a clear judgment just is not available, and if a decision nevertheless must be made, one can only do one's best with whatever there is.

But none of that matters if the consequences of error are not provable. Some people do say that I'll burn in hell forever if I'm wrong about Jesus, but I have only their word for that, so I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.

For atheists it might seem that it's more than 90% likely that Christianity is false, based on such reasoning as, "Christians are stupid, therefore what they believe is untrue."

That might work for some atheists, but I for one am quite aware of how absurd that sort of reasoning is. Atheists who say that sort of thing are being just as stupid as they accuse Christians of being.

Or, "Christians believe all non-Christians go to Hell, therefore Christianity is untrue."

The fallacy of that argument ought to be pretty obvious. Besides, I happen to know that a majority of Christians don't believe anything of the sort.

So if you wonder why robertb can't sway me and I can't sway him, it doesn't mean that no arguments either of us present are any good.

I don't wonder about that at all. There is nothing to wonder about. It almost never happens that anybody in these forums changes their mind about anything, even though good arguments frequently do get posted. There is no reliable correlation between the cogency of an argument and the number of people who find it persuasive.

All I'm asking is if any of his arguments are better than others at diminishing the probabilites that my Biblical criticism shows Christianity is true. I admit that at this point in my life experience nothing robertb can present that will make me cease to be a Christian, but what he has to say might show me that my argument is weak.

If your mind is so made up that nothing can change it, then I don't have time to provide the kind of tutoring you're asking for.

[Adam]

Adam

Great, so we have established that skipped some steps. The logical thing to do now would be for you to furnish us with those steps.
....I am going to be away for a week; have a good think about and see if you can actually post what the logic is for those of us who are by-the-numbers, rather than intuitive.

You quite perplex me, Pixie.
You accuse me of skipping a step or two in my argument, then you present one step unaccompanied by anything before or after, thus miscommunicating quite terribly.
In your Post #85 you requested my logic regarding Luke as my starting point for my common sense approach to gospel study. I responded in #90, giving a pedantic presentation stating the obvious that the date of writing is more likely to be when the story concludes irresolutely than to have been written at a later time when the author would more likely have given us the upshot--to which you responded in #92:
"I find it just a little odd that you do not spell out your reasoning for this in the Noesis article."
I could only interpret this to mean that you were graciously thanking me for having provided the rationale lacking in my Noesis article. Then here you turn around in #99 here and berate me as if I have provided no additional development beyond my inadequate opening to my "Common Sense Gospel Study" article! Quite unlike Doug Shaver's Post #103 sophistication about probalities, logic, and doubt, you seem entrapped in what I exposed in my #94 as "The Logical Fallacy", that everything is subject to absolute proof or disproof. As if all I would have to do is tidy up the logical steps in my opening paragraphs in my article, and suddenly you would become a Christian? Or more likely that any such presentation I would make would be ridiculed as proving the inaninity of even one who poses as an intellectual Christian! I'd say, "Give me a break!" except that's exactly what your type of posting refuses to grant to an opponent.
My characterization of you as "by-the-numbers" was my polite way of characterizing the ST personality type that completely lacks intuitive insight and intellect and instead is mired in petty details of the senses.

[Doug Shaver]

Sounds like an appeal to common sense, so we don’t have to take seriously what follows?

You need to read more carefully. I made no objection to anything based on what it "sounds like." Nor did I say anything about what I would take seriously. I just made an observation about what kind of expectations I get when the author of an article explicitly states in the first sentence that common sense is sufficient to justify his conclusion.

Here are some things I do not presuppose:….
• The gospels' original authors intended to write factual history.

I agree in not accepting the other presuppositions. I don’t accept or deny this one. You seem to be presupposing that they intended to lie.

I'm not presupposing anything about their intentions. I think any analysis of their writings, combined with an examination of all the other evidence pertinent to the Christianity's origins, should be open to three possibilities. (1) They intended to write factual history. (2) They intended to perpetrate a fraud. (3) They intended to write fiction. If the evidence supported the first possibility, then I would inquire further into the question of how successful they were likely to have been. As it happens, I have concluded that the evidence best supports the third possibility. I have never given serious consideration to the second because I have never seen any evidence that supports it even a little bit.

You have got to go outside the New Testament to get that date. And, Paul's epistles contribute nothing to the exercise. If it were not for Acts, we would have no reason at all to suspect he was ever anywhere near Rome.

Wow, you’re more Fundamentalist than the Fundamentalists! Sola scriptura!

No. Sola reliable evidence. Aside from his writings, our only sources of information about where Paul went and when he went there are the Acts of the Apostles and church tradition (aside from a few noncanonical documents that practically nobody takes seriously). In my judgment, neither Acts nor church tradition is reliable.

So, anybody who thinks Luke and Acts were written a lot later than that is not being sensible, eh? Maybe so, but you'll need a lot better argument than anything I've seen yet.

It’s not a matter of sensible, just that they have to argue against the simplest explanation of the text.

In the first place, it's not the simplest explanation just because you say it is. In the second place, it is historiographically foolish to try to date them in isolation from all of the rest of the evidence about Christianity's origins. When they are studied in that context, arguments for a second-century provenance cannot be dismissed as mere nonsense. I don't claim that those arguments are conclusive, but plenty of scholars who have at least as much sense as you do find them persuasive.

I have read several works of fiction in which the author included a similar claim in his narrative.

Here again, you’re presupposing gospel writers lie.

I am presupposing nothing of the sort. You may think all writers of fiction are liars. I do not. Liars intend to deceive their audience. That is not what fiction is about. I do not believe that the gospel authors intended to deceive anyone.

Some fiction is written with intent to entertain, some with intent to enlighten, and some with intent to do both. I have no idea whether the gospels authors thought their work would entertain anyone, but they surely intended to enlighten their readers.

No guarantee other than what the texts indicate.

What the texts indicate is a matter of interpretation in context, and the context has to include the historical context, insofar as that can be determined from relevant evidence. The text itself is evidence, but it is never the only relevant evidence.

And just by the way, the interpretation of one person, no matter how smart, is a guarantee of absolutely nothing.

If the texts show A, how does that support conclusion B?

It doesn't. But other evidence can contradict what the texts show, and that other evidence can be strong enough to overrule what the texts show -- absent, of course, any presuppositions that the text is inerrant.

The most “logical” expectation is that what happened happened according to cause-and-effect, hence “logical”

You have not demonstrated any cause-and-effect relationship between your evidence and your conclusions. You have only asserted that there is such a relationship.

Someone here is presupposing that Tradition = Lies

Not at all. I'm just not presupposing that Christian tradition should be treated any differently than any other kind of tradition. I don't argue that if tradition says X happened, then X didn't happen. I argue only that if tradition says X, then that is not reason enough to believe X happened absent independent evidence for X. I do not have to affirm "X is false" in order not to affirm "X is true."

It remains the case that no undisputed fact is inconsistent with the originals having been written after 100.

Except Acts carrying the story no farther than 64AD, Ur-Marcus/Acts 1-12 carrying the story no farther than 44 AD, etc.*

Those facts are not inconsistent with those documents having been written during the second century.

That does nothing, though, to support your chronology, because it makes no difference how long Q might have been around prior to the writing of anything in the canon.

And it makes no difference because….?

You're the one with something to prove if you say it makes a difference. So let's see it. Pick whatever year you want to for Q to have been written. Then prove that any other document that used it as a source had to be written no more than X years later, and show us how you computed X.

Oh, and let's not see any special pleading. Your method should work for any other two documents where the author of one used the other as a source. If you think an exception should be made for Q and the gospels, please explain exactly why.

What cannot be justified without question-begging is the assumption that it originated as eyewitness reports by some disciples or other followers of a charismatic preacher known as Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified by Pontius Pilate.

Not an assumption, just that it’s possible.

You are not arguing for possibility. You are arguing for probability.

Let’s hear no more of, “We know that no eye-witnesses wrote about Jesus.”

You have not heard it even once from me. Obviously, I do believe that no eyewitnesses wrote about him. I believe it with considerable confidence. But I have never claimed "We know that."

See “*” above. Or kiss the thread title good-bye!

We can move to a new thread if anyone thinks we've derailed this one, but I'm not debating the thread title. I'm debating your claim about when the gospels were written and what kinds of sources the authors might have relied on.