I will again try to give this a serious answer, though I may well come to regret it.mlinssen wrote: ↑Fri Jul 29, 2022 1:32 amThanks Ken!Ken Olson wrote: ↑Thu Jul 28, 2022 11:00 pmI'm going to give this a serious answer. If you want other people to accept your arguments, you need to state them clearly to give others a chance to examine them them. Clarity involves things like defining your terms and stating your conclusion and giving the premises and the reasoning that led to your conclusion (i.e., true premises and a truth-preserving series of deductions leading to a true conclusion).mlinssen wrote: ↑Thu Jul 28, 2022 2:37 pm I spent 5 minutes on Google and quickly drew my verdict: Eusebius is our source to Ignatius, so all this must be completely fake - and indeed it's the alleged "first use of the word catholic".
At least I now know where it comes from - LOL
[Snip]
When will Christians demand honesty, sincerity and truth from their scholars and academics?
What will it take for the likes of you, Gathercole and Goodacre to stand up and shout?
"Thank you for sharing your research Martijn"
Sorry Ken, I have nothing but praise and respect for you, and you deserve nothing but from my point of view. But what does it take to turn all this around - what does it take to simply do the right thing?
In this specific case, what is 'all this', the Ignatian correspondence, or just Smyrnaeans, or what? And what logical thought process did you go through to determine it came from Eusebius? And what does it have to do with the NHL? You seem to think this is all obvious. It is not.
I gather that in a lot of your posts, you are examining when a word, symbol, or concept is first found attested in surviving manuscripts. You seem to make a jump from [earliest use attested in surviving manuscripts] to [absolute earliest use] without making it explicit how you get there. There is a tendency in a lot of your writings to state a position and then mock those who don't agree with you as incompetent or dishonest. Making your logic explicit and understandable might be more helpful.
To put it another way: How do you know the things you claim to know?
Proper questions, some good points
I'm a bit surprised by your view that I take a position and then expect people to agree - I was under the impression that I present objectively verifiable data, look at that from both sides of a coin, and then make an informed decision
As example of that would be viewtopic.php?p=125462#p125462 which is a typical TL;DR post.
A much more concise one would be viewtopic.php?p=119209#p119209.
A really concise one is viewtopic.php?p=119091#p119091
Are those in line with what you see as my "default" behaviour described above?
No, I didn't have those particular posts in mind when I wrote that you state a position and then mock those who disagree with you. The three you linked were all posted in February 2021 or later, after the point I decided to stop replying to your posts on the synoptic problem because you dismissed my points in three posts (and more later) and simply made strong counter-assertions. I didn't see the point in engaging you further.
But I can give you an example of what I'm talking about from the second of the posts you link, the one on Luke 11.27-28:
I think those verses were composed by Luke as a substitution for Mark 3.31-35/Matt 12.31-35, which he had already used in one of his Markan blocks at Luke 8.19-21. Mark Goodacre devotes an entire chapter to Thomas 79 and Luke 11.27-28 in Thomas and the gospels (pp. 97-109).
At one point, I decided to give you a chance and read some of the papers you posted on Academia.edu and I took a look at the 72 Logia of Thomas and Their Canonical Cousins and I was particularly interested, when I got to your discussion of Thomas 79, in how you were going to answer Goodacre's case on Luke 11.27-28 // Thomas 79. What I found was no mention of Goodacre but this:
The idea that Thomas put together two sayings related by catchwords (which the majority of scholars hold) is to be dismissed as unworthy of consideration. But instead of serious consideration I found stuff like this:
Impossible
viewtopic.php?p=125009#p125009
You think Goodacre actually knows that you are right that Thomas is the original and just won't admit it.
And this:
Break down that $ 37.47 into a page price and you'll sit at 15.8 $-cent per page. And the book you'll get will be mediocre at best, half of which is just mere filling, among others talking about verbatim agreements between Thomas and the Synoptics (duh, really?!). The other half will pretend to demonstrate direction of dependence but in essence it will do nothing more than point out verbatim agreement, and a bit of rhetoric is deployed to fool the gullible into believing the claims made by Goodacre in the Intro. But it will be a total waste, not only of your money, but most importantly of your time.
And if anyone else but Goodacre had published it, it would have been binned on the spot and perhaps no one would have even deemed it worthy of a review
[Snip]
Let me throw in my own unprecedented masterpiece (I'm in a generous mood today!), the Complete Thomas Commentary, Prologue through logion 51, which will be available to you in 3-6 months ... for free.
A guesstimated 500 pages, so you'll save 500 * 15.8 $-cent = $ 79.34! LOL
Then I read your case for Thomas 'From Adam to John the Baptist" being a reference to the book of Chronicles which begins with Adam and ends with ... who, Zedekiah? But he had a brother named John and allowed the prophet Jeremiah to be lowered into in mud/filth (Jeremiah 38.6), hence John the Dipper. If one first assumes that the saying must be talking about the beginning and end of the book of Chronicles, you might end up with some such rationalization like that. I can't imagine any other reason to think that's where John the Baptist came from.
Oh, and you are not assuming the authenticity of the works of Josephus until further notice.
I kind of stopped reading your Academia.edu stuff at that point, and stopped commenting on your Thomas posts. You make confident assertions and mock those who think otherwise. You are constantly praising your own work and disparaging that of others. But a large part of your arguments are arguments from ignorance (I'm right because I have not been proved wrong) and personal incredulity ('Good luck with that!", which is maybe the argument from snark).
I recently looked at your paper on the Mustard Seed and found this:
.
There are three or four pages of this kind of polemic (You name names!). No one wants to read that kind of stuff. And no one is persuaded that his or her argument is wrong by having it dismissed or mocked.
My guess is that the scholars you've sent your work to just stop reading when they see the polemic, the mockery and dismissal of alternate views and extreme departures from what is usually held (Josephus, John the Baptist) not backed by adequate argument (or backed by wild speculations, to put it another way). They are not willing to put in the effort to wade through all that to see if you've possibly made some good points somewhere in there. (I certainly don't want the job). I think it gets binned on the spot, to use your idiom.
If you want to be taken seriously, what I would suggest is that you limit the scale of your claims. Take one case (or maybe up to three) from Thomas and seek publication in a peer-reviewed journal. You would have to cut out all the polemic and make an effort to state opposing positions as strongly as possible before explaining, with convincing reasons, why they are wrong. You may need an editor to help you with that.
I will make an exception for your literal Thomas translation. I think that is useful, so thank you for your research there.
Best wishes,
Ken
ETA: I have changed the title of the thread from 'Why has Martijn not been thanked for his research by Goodacre, Gathercole, and me?' as Martijn has now posted to say that 'Thank you for sharing your research, Martijn" is, in fact, the sole response that he has received from Simon Gathercole and Mark Goodacre. I believe the new title is appropriate to the existing content of the thread.