Mental flatliner wrote:He was talking about "the things that have been accomplished among us", present tense.
He also said that he carefully investigated everything from the beginning.
MF has a point?
Yes, Mental Flatliner does have a point. Like the rest of you, I was ready to dismiss this M F as a troll who is just playing with our patience and our minds in his fifteen minutes of fame on his way to expulsion and relegation of all his posts to Nowhere in Particular. His very name screams fraudulent intent or irony or sarcasm. His chosen initials shout profane condemnation of our whole forum and website. And Indeed it does seem that most of his posts are already in “Various Personal Attacks” in that “Particular” sub-sub-forum, where they indeed belong. But even in the wreckage there I awoke to find that he made a claim (“Oh, really?”, I hear you all saying, “All he ever does in make claims that he can’t substantiate!”) that seems like what I have been saying all along. First, I had to trace back his claim that he proved something in the first page of PK’s challenge to our MF in opening PK’s thread, “Luke’s Sources”. No surprise that the first page truly did lack any proof by MF of anything, nor did he even STATE anything of note. But have a little patience with the MF and grant a small brain-fart here that he meant the SECOND page of PK’s thread. Look instead at Page 2 on May 15 where our MF makes four points with which I agree.
Before you all tune me out and cast me into the outer darkness where our MF surely will shortly be consigned, let me perk up your antennae by casting my own (“pearls before swine”, as this MF may well retort”) aspersions upon our MF’s provenance. I recognize this same kind of style from the glory days of Theology Web before the computer crash of 2013 that wiped out all its records and kept it offline for months. (It’s back up again, starting with two of the three original owners, who themselves @ May 14, 2014, turned over the rei(g)ns to four heavy hitters over there. Two of them are quite decent chaps, but one of them goes by “Sparko” (surely open to the charge of letting the lunatics run the asylum). My first impression of this interloping MF was that he was Sparko come to visit to cheapen this forum to his level of Theology Web debate. (Note that I am not accusing Theology Web as a whole of being at MF level, though there is plenty of that from LilllePixieOfTerror and some others among the Dirty Dozen that I named there about four years ago, subjecting myself to much abuse thereby.) Reading through”Various Personal Attacks” did not readily disabuse me of this notion, but by the time I read up to May 15 (Pg 27 there) I realized that there was a more profound thinker active here. I’m thinking the infamous JPHolding now, the purveyor of his apologetics forum called Tektonics. The style of personal abuse he’s unloading here strikes me more of Patrick Turkel (my best approximation now from memory of his real name he some time ago acknowledged) than of any other Theology Web prima donnae. I’m called you out, are you the MF?
Back to my apologia for JPHolding. In page 2 of Luke’s Sources he states:
1--Nowhere in Luke does he tell us that he is not an eyewitness.
2--Evidence does not exist leading to the conclusion that Mark is the oldest gospel.
3--Evidence does not exist that Mark was not an eye-witness.
4--Assuming Mark wrote on his own behalf contradicts other historical sources.
My apologia:
1. For those of you who insist that the Prologue to Luke implies that the writer was NOT an eyewitness, so what? I personally do not believe that these first four verses were written by the author of the rest of the Gospel of Luke. (The Greek style therein is SO high-falutin’, unlike the translated-from-Aramaic style so prevalent in the rest of “L” or Special Luke—see James R. Edwards Appendix II to his 2009 The Hebrew Gospel & the Development of the Synoptic Traditrion.) The author of the rest of Luke (or however much one chooses to define as a Proto-Luke written under the authority of the eyewitness author, who I personally say was Simon, the second bishop of Jerusalem, the son of Cleopas with whom he walked on the way to and from Emmaus, Lk 24:13-34,) seems like an eyewitness starting about 7:36-50 where Simon the Pharisee emerges.
2. My thread here at EarlyChristianWritings.com “Horizontal Synoptic Solutions” makes my case for a Grundschrift or Urevangelium underlying all three Synoptic gospels. Luke was an earlier off-take from this underlying document(basically Gospel of the Hebrews that Irenaeus tells about), and I can’t tell whether Matthew or Mark was next (or last).
3. I contend that John Mark was the “other disciple known to the High Priest” of John 18:15-16 and that he wrote the basic Passion Narrative known to all FOUR gospels that I call the Passion Diary that I extract from Howard M. Teeple’s source critical study in his 1974The Literary Origin of the Gospel of John.
4. Whatever.
Moving on to May 15 we find that MF spelling out a hierarchy for historiographical research. He does not state a source, so I suppose it’s all arguable, but as one who himself has an M. A. in History (Specialization European, for which I had to learn both French and German and already knew Spanish and Russian), I find nothing objectionable in this classification. If someone wishes to pick it apart, be my guest, but I suspect that the “primary” (“secondary?”) reason would be that this particular classification may have been chosen for the particular benefit of establishing credibility for the Christian faith. Such a contention might be true and provable, but certainly would require a doctoral-level study for substantiation. Has this been done? I have no idea, as my first (of two) master’s degrees dates back to 1969. I would appreciate anyone’s elucidation on this.
Still on May 15, but turning to this MF’s Page 4 first entry, he surprises us by questioning the authoritative nature of the Early Church Fathers (henceforth ECF):
You forgot to tell me why I need to consider them authoritative sources. If you're going to try to debunk a primary source, you need another source of equal authority (another primary).
That’s heresy here at Early Christian Writings, but not to me. Maybe it’s because my (3-sigma deviation) NT (Meyers-Briggs) mentality chafes at memorization and insists on reasoning from fundamentals, but I’m with stupid here, I don’t place the ECF writers a century or so later above the gospels writers, some of whom I have shown wrote right in 30 A. D., the year of the Passion of Christ.
A little farther down on the same (Luke’s Sources) fourth page, Mental Flatliner jumps off the orthodox cliff and says all the stupid things again we would have expected from him. However, in his third outing on the same page, he does make some good points against the criticism Stephan Huller was so justified in making. All the arguments said MF gives, however, work better to jusfify my case that the three Synoptics are largely based upon an underlying Grundschrift much like Lessing recognized right from the start of Biblical Criticism during the Enlightenment. But let me address Huller’s largely justified critique:
Mental Case is a good argument against independent research.[ I assume 'home schooling' means no university education.
Not in my “case”. (And your MC acronym puts MF in the driver’s seat instead of the hotseat where he belongs.) I have two Master’s degrees and I passed the CPA exam first sitting, am a Fellow in ISPE and former Ombudsman in TNS. (The latter two are clubs that only accept members presenting evidence of IQ at the 99.9%ile level.) As for JPHolding, my understanding is that he is a college-trained Librarian.
It is pointless to debate someone that doesn't have basic cognitive skills.
The MF might well stand for “Much Finesse”. He is no dummy. It not that he can’t reason, just that he intentionally misuses reason wherever it suits him.
forgery is a copy of primary document. Matthew and Luke can be argued to be clever forgeries of Mark.
MF handily disposes of Hullers contention here. It does not take careful study of Dennis R. MacDonald’s Q+ to recognize that current scholarship on Q with respect to Mark is deplorable. Kloppenborg is wrong.
All of this is immaterial to the discussion as to whether Luke is an eyewitness. The fact that the debates between the orthodox and the Marcionites over Luke vs the Marcionite gospel begin with the assumption that neither gospel was written by an eyewitness
I'm With MF right that this is a bad assumption!
and further more progresses to a debate as to whether Matthew or John are 'eyewitness' testimonies (Mark is traditionally excluded too) is critical. The ancients had access to sources we no longer possess. The question isn't whether you can absolutely disprove something based on second hand sources but a question of what is more likely. It is extremely unlikely that the earliest sources would have avoided bringing forward evidence that Luke was an eyewitness during the debate with the Marcionites. Why not say that Luke was an eyewitnes
[--]
Why? Why because they knew that Luke was not the primary writer of the Gospel that carries his name, he mostly wrote only the last half of Acts of the Apostles. They knew Luke was a hodge-podge. The Passion Narrative was mostly from John Mark, the “Q” portions of the sayings came from the Apostle Matthew, the rest of the sayings, parables were introduced by the main writer Simon, and rest of the narrative came from both of the latter two—not to mention where the Infancy Narratives came from.
Because it was generally acknowledged that the Marcionite genre if you will - i.e the gospels identified as related to or explicitly with the Marcionite gospel viz. Mark, Luke and the Marcionite 'gospel of the Lord' were not written by eyewitnesses.
Wait—It’s just GLuke assigned to a bystander. GMark got its name as the one writing DOWN what Peter had said. That’s not mentioning that GMark included earlier material from (my thesis) John Mark’s own Passion Diary and the Q+ poritons of GMark from the Apostle Matthew.
One can include John in this list if we accept Eisler's reconstruction of the source behind certain prologues of the gospel (i.e. that John was written by Marcion the secretary of John) but we needn't go there.
Yes, let’s not.
It is a matter of what is more likely and if Mental guy continues to argue that it is more likely that the early Church Fathers 'forgot' to mention that Luke was an eyewitness or were 'in error' about his status as someone who never saw Jesus or as native Greek speakers they had a worse idea of the original sense of Luke 1:1 - 4 than him (i.e. a homeschooled American who doesn't speak Greek) this is a pointless debate. We are dealing with an ignoramus who is unable to control his brain.
All superfluous and inflammatory as explained immediately above.
So I’m with Stupid, except when he’s so confoundedly stupid as he (usually) CHOOSES to SEEM.
EDITED TO ADD:'
I wrote all the above based only upon my perusal of "various Personal Attacks" (to page 27) and this present thread "luke's Sources" to page 5. I only just now posted this and found that indeed Mr. Patrick Turkel has been banned here. This was of course inevitable. If it is emotionally possible for JPHolding to write politely unlike his wont in Tektonics and on Theology Web, then he should be welcomed back here. But can the Leopard change his spots? I don't think so.
Dale Adams
