Dumplin' Dumbass wins again for banging his head against the brick wall of scholarship:
When I was young and full of zeal for Jesus, I met a woman who told me her approach to Bible study. “I only use the King James Version,” she told me. “I read through the passage, figure out how you would say it in modern English, and then I’m done.” Though I was too meek to say so at the time, my little Christian heart was horrified. The New Testament was written in the common language of the people of the time. By paraphrasing an archaic translation into her “normal” usage, she was stopping right at the point where a New Testament Christian would have started. How could she call that “studying” the Bible?
Like you don't know, Dumplin'? That's YOUR Bible study method to a T -- when I beat you senseless with ancient patronage, you fell over like a poleaxed cow.
JP starts with a clarification regarding his argument, which he seems to think I’ve misunderstood.
Which indeed he did, and pedalling your tricycle backwards won't get ya out of it Dumplin'!
My sum last time was: The full argument is, they weren’t denying that JESUS’ RESURECTION did happen, they were merely QUESTIONING WHETHER it was even possible for THEIR RESURRECTION to happen. Dumplin' snorks back:
This to correct my somewhat snarky summary, “so they weren’t denying that it did happen, they were merely denying that it was even possible for it to happen.” Notice that JP makes a little edit in there. According to his rendition, the Corinthians “merely QUESTIONING” the resurrection, versus Paul’s description, “some of you SAY that there is no resurrection of the dead.” Not, “some of you are merely QUESTIONING whether there is a resurrection of the dead,” but “some of you SAY that there is no resurrection of the dead.”
"Little edit"!
Yeah, right! Talk about trying to force a camel through the eye of a needle. Dumplin' wants to create a distinction between "questioning" and "saying" here but apparently he's too fundie-dumb to grasp the idea of "questioning" ideas by making statements about them.
Duh ah....doh....not that this makes a lick of difference in my argument to begin with, but it seems poor Dumplin' Dumbass has to take what victories he can when you're as ignorant as he is, even if it means looking for a misplaced apostophe somewhere.
This little alteration is, I believe, the key to understanding what JP sees as the issue here, and why he is so befuddled by my apparent failure to address it on his terms.
No, Dumbass. Whether the Corinthian doubters were framing their doubts in terms of questions or statements doesn't change my argument one bit and doesn't change the fact that you didn't grasp my point, which rests on an inconsistency in the Corinthian argument when it comes to Jesus' resurrection in the past vs THEIR resurrection in the future. No wonder Dumbass' blog gets only as many visitors a month as my single article on Osiris.
We need to think like apologists here, and perceive the problem in terms of making Christianity sound like it has all the answers. Christians are highly motivated to believe what apologists tell them, so they don’t have to be good answers, or even correct ones, as long as the believer can feel like the problem has been addressed and has an answer.
If we take this approach, we’ll soon see that the most obvious problem in 1 Cor. 15 is the plain admission that there were people in Corinth who did not believe in resurrection.
Um, yeah, that's something I did NOT mention at all when I said there were people in Corinth who doubted that they'd be resurrected and also referred to pagan ideas that were hostile to the concept of resurrection. Duh ah....
That’s rather a problem for a religion that’s supposed to be based on a resurrection, so the apologist’s number one priority is to find some alternative interpretation of the Corinthian belief that allows you to claim that they weren’t denying the resurrection of Jesus. JP believes that he has found such an alternative, based on a certain amount of scholarship into pagan beliefs and the denial of resurrection among unbelievers. (He ignores the existence of Jews who denied the resurrection, even though the Corinthian church started in a synagogue, but then again, why spoil a perfectly good apologetic with distracting facts?)
Duh, Dumplin'? It's pretty clear that the Corinthians are NOT denying the resurrection of Jesus, precisely because Paul is able to bring it to them as something they believe in! Duh ah! If they DID doubt that Jesus rose from the dead, he'd have started from a different place in his argument, you moron!
"Certain amount of scholarship" -- yeah, this shows why that's foreign language to Dumplin'. I know about Jews who denied resurrection, you dip. Did you have some evidence that modern scholarship was unaware of that the
Sadduccees existed anywhere except in Palestine (and in Corinth)? Oops.
Thus, JP’s solution to the problem of 1 Cor. 15 is to suppose that the Corinthians were adopting pagan beliefs about resurrection even though this is clearly a contradiction of the doctrine of the resurrection on which the Church is founded. He then makes the trivial and superficial observation that “Paul appeals to Jesus as their example, as leader of their ingroup. He is citing Jesus as precedent and also exposing the Corinthians on their inconsistency. They can’t reject resurrection for themselves on grounds that would also apply to Jesus (eg, the pagan idea that it was impossible at all).”
Dumplin' just shows how stupid he is when he says that my observation was "trivial and superficial." Dumbass,
it's the key to Paul's whole argument! You're just too stupid to understand the relevance of appeal to the example of an ingroup leader within the context of a collectivist society. To the people of such a society, this was a HUGE burden to overcome.
This, plus the observation that “people are inconsistent,” is JP’s conclusion. After much hard work and diligent study, he as arrived at an alternative interpretation of what the Corinthians must have believed, and therefore regards the matter settled. (Like I said, it doesn’t have to be a good answer, it just needs to be an answer, so that the apologist can claim that the problem does have an answer).
Fact is, Dumplin', it's an answer that coheres with the reality of hard, Biblical scholarship....stuff so far over your head you can't even hear the roar of the engine.
Where JP stops, however, is where I start, because his “answer” raises some very interesting questions. For example, JP uses “people are inconsistent” like it was some kind of magic wand: you just wave it around, and poof, all your problems disappear. He doesn’t dwell on why and how people acquire inconsistent beliefs, and he can’t understand why I focus so much attention on this aspect of the problem. But this is a key problem that his “answer” fails to even acknowledge, let alone resolve.
Duh ah...I did say "how," moron....they were influenced by pagan ideas about resurrection. "Why" is easy even for you: The ideas were there in that social milieu and they had been influenced by them for their entire lives...duh ah....the reason you focus on this aspect is because you have Dunning's disorder.
It’s true that people do end up with inconsistent beliefs, but they don’t do so knowingly and voluntarily. Who would want to make themselves obviously wrong? And the contradiction between “Jesus rose from the dead” and “nobody rises from the dead” is so obvious and easily pointed out that it’s worth asking how the Corinthians could have missed it.
That 9/11 wasn't a conspiracy is obvious and easily pointed out too.
In such cases, Dumbass, people do like you do -- either ignore the problem, or let their stupidity cover for them, or contrive some convenient excuse for their errors. I'd say the Corinthians did the latter, say by saying that Jesus was an exception because he was a divine being.
What’s more, Paul points out that only some of the Corinthians were saying that there was no resurrection. That means that by the time Paul wrote back to them, a number of Corinthians had fallen into contradictory beliefs about resurrection vs. no resurrection, and nobody before Paul’s epistle had the wit to point out to the resurrection deniers that there was any conflict with the Gospel there!
Actually, Dumbass, I expect some of them did, but you clearly (again) fail to grasp the relevance of someone like Paul, in an authoritative position, delievering his own verifying judgment on such matters, especially in a collectivist society.
This might work for JP, who is naturally attracted to the idea that everybody else in the whole world is stupid, but for the rest of us it’s a rather remarkable curiosity.
"Rest of us" meaning victims of Dunning's?
After this Dumbass repeats himself some more, proposes some other answers from nowhere that no one here follows, and then props for the idiotic "spiritual rez" thesis that I've defeated 500 times now.
So there really is an interesting issue in I Cor. 15, even though JP hasn’t dug into the matter deeply enough to understand why I’m not spending all my time where he does, at the superficial observations.
So speaks the gnat to the elephant. As my link shows (which Dumbass ignored), "spiritual resurrection" just doesn't cut the mustard when reading
1 Cor. 15 or anything else in the NT. But don't expect him to pick up some real scholarship and find out. He's got too many coloring books to work on.
arise if someone was arguing that spiritual resurrections are not real (like “what kind of body do they rise in?” etc.) and that he conspicuously does not make any mention of pagan philosophers being wrong or deceived like JP might have expected him to…and so on.
Wrong, Dumbass. Questions like "what kind of body" were the typical challenges of pagans to the Jewish belief in resurrection....and philosophers don't need to be in the mix; that there was no resurrection was a general idea, one found in such lowly places as everyday Joe tombstones and the popular literature of the day like Homer.
Yep, just coincidences, every one. Really amaaaaaaaazing coincidences. That’s all.
Nope. No coincidences....just one big Dumplin' Dumbass whose scholarship stops at his Monopoly board.
***Rest in peace, Curtmudgeon!***
