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Post by fortigurn on Aug 7, 2013 14:49:20 GMT
It could, of course, be a total coincidence that we have the phrase/s "carpenter"/"son of a carpenter" being used as a Talmudic euphemism for "scholar" and here we find exactly the same phrases being used in a pericope where people are wondering about Jesus' scholarship but never used or even mentioned about him anywhere else. But that's the point; we do not have exactly the same phrase being used; Vermes showed this even when he still believed Mark was mangling an Aramaic source. Nor do we have the same context in which the phrase was used. In the other examples you provide in your next post, you show clear evidence for Mark struggling with a word in the text, and writing something strange, difficult, or nonsensical as a result. I've already pointed out this isn't the case in the passage we're discussing; Mark's text makes perfect sense as it stands, and there's no evidence of him struggling with an original source he did not understand.
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Post by ignorantianescia on Aug 7, 2013 16:49:38 GMT
The case about orgistheis is very intriguing, but then there is the fact that the variant has few, late textual witnesses. So I am not sure what to think of it.
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Post by timoneill on Aug 7, 2013 20:01:25 GMT
It could, of course, be a total coincidence that we have the phrase/s "carpenter"/"son of a carpenter" being used as a Talmudic euphemism for "scholar" and here we find exactly the same phrases being used in a pericope where people are wondering about Jesus' scholarship but never used or even mentioned about him anywhere else. But that's the point; we do not have exactly the same phrase being used; Vermes showed this even when he still believed Mark was mangling an Aramaic source. Nor do we have the same context in which the phrase was used. We have "carpenter" in Mark and "son of the carpenter" in Matt. And we have them in a context where scholarship is the issue. The context in which we find the "carpenter" euphemism used is one where it is noted that something would require the erudition of a "carpenter" - ie someone of great scholarship. You seem to be working very hard to try to dismiss even the possibility that this is more than a co-incidence, which strikes me as tendentious. You can disagree with me on the likelihood of the possibility by all means, but a possibility it remains. Which is all I am saying. I said the possible Marcan misunderstanding of naggārā is similar to the other examples, not the same. You're going a bit Godfrey on me here.
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Post by fortigurn on Aug 8, 2013 0:52:54 GMT
We have "carpenter" in Mark and "son of the carpenter" in Matt. We have 'Is this not the carpenter?'. We do not have the Talmudic phrases 'This is something that no carpenter, son of carpenters, can explain', or 'There is no carpenter, nor a carpenter’s son, to explain it'. The context is people saying 'Is this guy not an X?', with the meaning 'This guy is an X, so why is he acting like a Y?'. The word in question is used to identify the fact that he is acting in a manner incongruent with an X, but your interpretation is that he is acting in a manner congruent with an X. The context is completely different. No, I'm just repeating the reasons given in the scholarly consensus, for why this is not considered sufficiently probable to be taken seriously as an alternative to what we have in the text. Even Casey dismisses it in a single sentence. It's a possibility on the same level as the possibility that Jesus was a wealthy stone mason, which the word could 'possibly' refer to. I didn't say you were claiming it was the same. I am making my own point; that the key reason why the other examples are considered likely possibilities, does not exist in this case. There is nothing to explain. You have a solution looking for a problem. This is exactly what Godfrey and Widowfield do.
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Post by sankari on Aug 8, 2013 12:30:02 GMT
The phrase simply says what it says - that something is in the text. That tells us nothing about whether the person using the phrase has read it themselves or has heard it recited/read and learned it by rote. It's an explicit reference to what is in the text, with no reference whatsoever to oral tradition. This indicates familiarity with the text. Herod went to the most literate members of Jewish society: priests, scribes, and experts in the Law. They spoke as people who studied the text every day. They didn't just hear it recited; they read it and interpreted it. An illiterate person isn't going to use the phrase 'it is written' when what they really mean is 'I have heard', or 'it is said.'
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Post by sandwiches on Aug 8, 2013 13:20:55 GMT
An illiterate person isn't going to use the phrase 'it is written' when what they really mean is 'I have heard', or 'it is said.'
Indeed, would have taken a lot of chutzpah for Jesus to to keep debating with literate people and asking "Have you not read...?" etc if he had not read it himself?
The article by Craig Evans Jewish Scripture and The Literacy of Jesus (linked to earlier) shows how often Jesus used and how widely he quoted from the scriptures. "Jesus quotes or alludes to all of the books of the Law, most of the Prophets, and some of the Writings". A degree of literacy is the simplest explanation.
As Evans citing Dunn observes: Jesus’ rhetorical and pointed “have you not read?” seems to be distinctive of his style and surely would have little argumentative force if he himself could not read.
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Post by sandwiches on Aug 8, 2013 18:13:28 GMT
A Guardian review of the book by Reza Aslan: www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/07/zealot-life-jesus-aslan-reviewZealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan – review Was Jesus reinvented by St Paul? Stuart Kelly likens the argument to a West End musical
In the opening post I said that "I would find it hard to believe that a book on Jesus and the Gospels' view of Jesus by a Muslim would not inevitably be slanted i.e. working toward a certain propagandistic aim." This is not say that a Muslim could not write an "objective" view (at least any less "objective" than a Christian or Jew or atheist) of Jesus, but we all bring our own prejudices to the table? (possibly even atheists?).
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Post by timoneill on Aug 8, 2013 20:04:45 GMT
We have "carpenter" in Mark and "son of the carpenter" in Matt. We have 'Is this not the carpenter?'. We do not have the Talmudic phrases 'This is something that no carpenter, son of carpenters, can explain', or 'There is no carpenter, nor a carpenter’s son, to explain it'. Unless you can now make an evidence-based case that these formulas are the only way the euphemism was used, you're dangling a lot of assumption from a very slender thread of evidence. We only have a few uses of the euphemism in question - we simply don't know exactly how it could be used. And unless you are seriously arguing that there is absolutely no way at all that what we see here is a misunderstanding of the euphemistic use of naggārā, then all we are disagreeing on is the likelihood. As I keep saying. Yes, it is. And that has been precisely my point all along. Read back over my previous posts. My problem is with people like Witherington who take one possibility, dismiss the others using apologist language like "the old canard" and then build a position based on a series of suppositions on the foundation of the possibility they selected from many, despite the fact it is no more or less likely than many others. You can take exactly the same scraps of ambiguous evidence that Witherington uses to create his literate, middle class stone mason Jesus and use them to create an illiterate, peasant bucket-fixer Jesus. Or a Jesus who isn't a carpenter/artisan at all. This is where we need to say "we don't know" and to indicate what the possibilities may have been. That's what a historian does, which is why people like Witherington are doing something other than history. What he's doing is actually much closer to what the Mythers do, except from the other end of the ideological spectrum.
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Post by timoneill on Aug 8, 2013 20:15:56 GMT
The phrase simply says what it says - that something is in the text. That tells us nothing about whether the person using the phrase has read it themselves or has heard it recited/read and learned it by rote. It's an explicit reference to what is in the text, with no reference whatsoever to oral tradition. This indicates familiarity with the text. Herod went to the most literate members of Jewish society: priests, scribes, and experts in the Law. They spoke as people who studied the text every day. They didn't just hear it recited; they read it and interpreted it. An illiterate person isn't going to use the phrase 'it is written' when what they really mean is 'I have heard', or 'it is said.' Some very bold assertions there. A common oral formula in medieval English poetry is "as clerkes rede" or "as clerkes finde writen" or "in bokes be founde". Lyrics and oral poetry refer to written authority - that doesn't mean the singer or oral poet has read them. And in the madrassas where scholars quote from rote learned passages of the Qu'ran a quote is introduced with the Arabic formula mektoub - "it is written". That's the formula whether the reciter has ever actually read it or not. They are not saying "I have read it". They are saying "I am certain it is a truth anchored in a written holy text". In an age before printing and wide-spread literacy, this pattern of a text anchored in a written form but propagated via rote learning and oral recitation was common. It's only modern prejudices that find the idea of someone who was learned in this way to be somehow inferior to someone who was "literate" in our sense. Knowing and using the scripture was what made you learned, not being able to read it for yourself. Jesus could have been considered very learned without have been able to read a word.
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Post by jamierobertson on Aug 9, 2013 12:23:19 GMT
1. Could it not be (Shock! Horror!) that the event actually happened, and Luke had more information than Mark, or chose to edit his information less? Have you got any evidence or argument that indicates this is the case? Or just wishful thinking?...This seems to be [Luke's] narrative addition. So... an event is recorded in a biography, but you assume that it didn't happen. I'd agree with unkleE - given that gLuke recorded it, this is prima facie evidence of it actually happening, and the onus is on you to show why Luke would have made it up.
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Post by sandwiches on Aug 9, 2013 18:21:05 GMT
Have you got any evidence or argument that indicates this is the case? Or just wishful thinking?...This seems to be [Luke's] narrative addition. So... an event is recorded in a biography, but you assume that it didn't happen. I'd agree with unkleE - given that gLuke recorded it, this is prima facie evidence of it actually happening, and the onus is on you to show why Luke would have made it up. I'd agree with unkleE - given that gLuke recorded it, this is prima facie evidence of it actually happening, and the onus is on you to show why Luke would have made it upQuite so.
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Post by timoneill on Aug 9, 2013 18:57:14 GMT
Have you got any evidence or argument that indicates this is the case? Or just wishful thinking?...This seems to be [Luke's] narrative addition. So... an event is recorded in a biography, but you assume that it didn't happen. I'd agree with unkleE - given that gLuke recorded it, this is prima facie evidence of it actually happening, and the onus is on you to show why Luke would have made it up. There are several problems with that. Firstly, there's the category error involved in referring to gLuke as "a biography". The gospels were partly works of polemic and partly works of theology, not works of documentary history. This is why I'm always trying to correct my fellow atheists when they note something that is most likely an embellishment on the story - the highly improbable guards on the tomb in Matthew 27:62-66 or the "Jerusalem zombie apocalypse" in Matthew 27:52-53 for example - and say this means the gospel writer was "lying". I try to note that it may be that the writer of gMatt genuinely thought there was a guard unmentioned in any other accounts or that there were risen dead people wandering Jerusalem. Or more likely he was saying these things to make a polemical and theological point and didn't expect his audience to read them as literal history. Secondly, I'm not simply "assuming it didn't happen". Unless I have a reason to do so, that would be unsound. I'm noting that we have two other accounts of the same episode in gMark and gLuke which don't contain the scroll-reading scene. Further, it's generally accepted that gLuke follows gMark. Given that we have no scroll reading scene in gMatt, this doesn't derive from any Q material either. So we have a valid reason to question the historicity of this unique element. ignorantianescia has already noted that Aslan refers to J.P. Meier on this point. Meier points out that what Jesus is depicted as reading here comes directly from the Septuagint, so is more likely to be the author of gLuke consulting his Greek OT than a historical memory of what the historical Jesus read in Hebrew. And what he is depicted as reading is not any contiguous passage from Isaiah, just a pastiche of separate texts with a common theme - he starts with some verses that are in Isaiah 61, jumps back to some that are in Isaiah 58 and then jumps forward to 61 again, though with some omissions. This is therefore most likely not a historical memory of a reading Jesus made in Nazareth. It's the writer of gLuke taking the much simpler story in gMark where it's said that Jesus taught in the synagogue, causing people to be "amazed" and then to "scoff". The gLuke writer elaborates on this, using the opportunity to introduce some theology via some bits and pieces of Isaiah (from his copy of the Septuagint). This is a narrative device and so most likely not historical. The gospels are constructed narratives made up of many elements, some possibly historical and others probably authorial devices. We can't just read them as "biographies" unless we abandon all critical analysis of them and just read them like bone-headed fundamentalists.
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Post by timoneill on Aug 9, 2013 19:32:58 GMT
Most of these reviews are pretty weak sauce. That one was particularly pathetic. The supposed "contradiction" re the Romans in the second paragraph is nothing of the sort if anyone actually bothers to read what Aslan wrote in context. When someone kicks off with a petty distortion worthy of our friends on Vridar, alarm bells should begin to ring. And it gets worse. Try this bit: "Aslan's argument is undermined by various facts, which even he admits. The earliest references to Jesus are from Paul, wherein he is not just one of many Messianic aspirants, but more even than that. " And? This is like saying "We have early references to David Koresh by Branch Davidians. But they don't depict him as just another late twentieth century fringe sect leader, but as much more than that." Of course Paul saw Jesus as the Messiah rather than as just another Messianic aspirant. How does that, on its own, undermine the idea that Jesus was yet another Messianic aspirant? Then we get this: "But these are niggles compared with the major flaw in this work. Aslan simultaneously disparages and relies on the gospels. If a verse fits, he snatches it: if it contradicts his thesis he takes it as proof of the unreliability of the source."Given that I'm now one third of the way through Aslan's book, I know this is a caricature of what Aslan actually does. The reviewer seems pretty much unaware of how source criticism works and seems to think Aslan is simply picking whatever he likes from the gospels, as opposed to simply taking them at face value. Actually, Aslan makes his case for what he accepts and rejects. An informed reader can agree or disagree with the case he makes or the choices he settles on, but this reviewer doesn't even seem to understand what Aslan is doing. So far I've yet to read a review of this book that doesn't indulge in this kind of naive incomprehension or make claims about "mistakes" which are petty at best or simply wrong at worst. Or both.
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Post by ignorantianescia on Aug 10, 2013 10:15:09 GMT
Given that I'm now one third of the way through Aslan's book, I know this is a caricature of what Aslan actually does. The reviewer seems pretty much unaware of how source criticism works and seems to think Aslan is simply picking whatever he likes from the gospels, as opposed to simply taking them at face value. Actually, Aslan makes his case for what he accepts and rejects. An informed reader can agree or disagree with the case he makes or the choices he settles on, but this reviewer doesn't even seem to understand what Aslan is doing. Then you must have an expanded edition of the book, because in the one I read Aslan only occasionally discussed in detail why he accepted one text while rejecting another, while most of the time he exactly did pick and choose (for some random examples: 89, 115 - 117, 152). He does jumble phrases together from gMark to Q to gJohn, but his criteria are not all that clear.
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Post by sandwiches on Aug 10, 2013 21:25:35 GMT
An intriguing and scholarly review by Craig A. Evans, whose article Jewish Scripture and The Literacy of Jesus I linked to earlier: nearemmaus.com/2013/08/07/review-of-reza-aslans-zealot-guest-post-by-craig-a-evans/There are numerous problems with Zealot, not least the fact that it heavily relies on an outdated and discredited thesis. But it also introduces a number of its own novel oddities and implausibilities..... Zealot is riddled with errors, probable errors, and exaggerations. Aslan tells us a builder (Greek: tekton) in Nazareth had “little to do†(p. 34). Excavations at Nazareth and nearby Sepphoris suggest otherwise. Being a builder (or “carpenterâ€) mean that “Jesus would have belonged to the lowest class of peasants in first-century Palestine†(p. 34). Where does this come from?... Aslan assumes throughout that Jesus and his disciples were illiterate (e.g., p. 171: “they could neither read nor writeâ€; 178: “illiterate peasants from the backwoods of Galileeâ€). There is no engagement with scholarship that suggests otherwise... At points Aslan’s book is informative; it is often entertaining. But it is also rife with questionable assertions. Let the reader beware.One does hope that readers will beware.
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