Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Gday Bernard Muller and all

Kapyong wrote:Papias 100-130 knows rumours of two Gospel-like writings - by Mark (from Peter), and Matthew.

to Kapyong,How do you know Papias knew only about rumours?

Well, no-one really KNOWS do we ?
I just think it's the best conclusion to be drawn from the evidence. I'd be just as happy to say that he knew of the two books, or that he was aware of the two, sure. But his description is so poor, that his connection seems distant. It's quite odd that he doesn't use the word 'Gospel'.

Papias said he was not much interested about books: "For I did not imagine that things out of books would help me as much as the utterances of a living and abiding voice."

Indeed he did.

But that does not mean he was not aware of gMark,

Well, he may be aware of a book that might be an early version of G.Mark (and possibly G.Matthew.)

But he doesn't have his hands on them, he doesn't know the title 'Gospel', he gives no quotes, his descriptions are variant, and the chain of evidence is weak. Proves nothing.

more so because that gospel had been known before by "Luke", "Matthew" & "John", who were working on more than just rumours about it.

Pardon ?
What 'more so' is it exactly that applies to Papias ?

Obviously the other three Gospel authors knew G.Mark. But that's it. They spread no further for 50-80 years - on the evidence. Because an argument from silence can be strong IF :

• the author should know the information, and
• has a motive to mention it.

Especially when both conditions are true for ~30 books.

The evidence for my original claim is quite good : The Gospels Were Not Published Until c.150.


Kapyong

Kapyong wrote: I just think it's the best conclusion to be drawn from the evidence. I'd be just as happy to say that he knew of the two books, or that he was aware of the two, sure. But his description is so poor, that his connection seems distant. It's quite odd that he doesn't use the word 'Gospel'.

I'm sorry for jumping in, and this will be my last post here, but it is OBVIOUS that Papias knew of a lot more than a rumor here, due to the detail provided about the contents, their accuracy, and how people interpreted those contents. That's a LOT of information to just sprout up from a rumor:

And the presbyter said this. Mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately whatsoever he remembered. It was not, however, in exact order that he related the sayings or deeds of Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied Him. But afterwards, as I said, he accompanied Peter, who accommodated his instructions to the necessities [of his hearers], but with no intention of giving a regular narrative of the Lord's sayings. Wherefore Mark made no mistake in thus writing some things as he remembered them. For of one thing he took especial care, not to omit anything he had heard, and not to put anything fictitious into the statements. [This is what is related by Papias regarding Mark; but with regard to Matthew he has made the following statements]: Matthew put together the oracles [of the Lord] in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best he could. [The same person uses proofs from the First Epistle of John, and from the Epistle of Peter in like manner. And he also gives another story of a woman who was accused of many sins before the Lord, which is to be fount in the Gospel according to the Hebrews.

Rumor? Come on. How can you even think that based on this passage? Both of these were clearly about Jesus' sayings, which by itself is a 'gospel' (Mark's also includes 'deeds'). They may not be the final version, but they are gospels nonetheless (as is the Gospel of Thomas), and their authors are named and were known by others.

Kapyong wrote:On the truth of the matter - why do you keep ignoring the matter of positive evidence for a spiritual/heavenly Jesus Christ ?

This is silly. I would love to move on to that topic (well, I would, if I had more time). I'm not debating or discounting mythicism. I actually am quite fond of the matter of the positive evidence for S/H JC. It's been something that I've been exploring on this forum and on my blog for a few years now.

Kapyong wrote:I can genuinely confirm that I certainly DO understand that the argument from silence has serious problems.

Fantastic.

Kapyong wrote:We are fully informed that the argument from silence has serious problems. That it requires supporting conditions to be a good argument :

• The author must have knowledge of the information, and
• the author must have motive to mention the information.

Which clearly DO apply to Paul.
But NOT Rutherford.

I'm not sure that a premise about "motive" is sufficient. I'm not sure that you've really understood how problematic these arguments can be.

Kapyong wrote:Actually you rudely dismissed us all personally as morons and idiots

For clarification: Not you and not "mythicists." But, sure, many of the people you quoted are random whoevers.

Kapyong wrote:There was some discussion about the example of Mother Teresa - both in the original thread, and more recently

It's not really all that logical, but I thought I would go nice on the attempt to bring in more data, which is a good idea in general.

As I've indicated, I don't really have the time right now to polish every phrase for you. Take my apology -- I'm sorry, but I just don't have the time to do this.

spin wrote:Still operating at the wrong level. This isn't about Paul of Rutherford or whoever. It's about the fact that an argument from silence is a logical fallacy. As a methodology it doesn't work. That was the point of Peter's effort. I'm sure you've heard the fact that lack of evidence is not the same as evidence of lack. See the Rutherford stuff as an effort to show you that fact. You have no evidence for your c.150 claim. You just have a lack of evidence. You've made a long list of lack of evidence and yet you have got no further with your 150 CE claim. You can't. You've got nothing to use to support your claim. (And nothing comes of nothing.)

I've avoided this whole thread up to now as it is pointless and I think Peter should have for the same reason. If you insist on pushing the logical fallacy, no argument will dissuade you. And adding ad hominem to argument from silence doesn't raise your credibility.

---

So Peter, puh-lease give this a miss. I'm back to avoiding the thread. I just wanted to see what bad deeds you were up to!

Thanks for the vote of confidence. I don't really have much choice in the matter. Got so much to do and only so much time.

Kapyong wrote:I AM right about the historical evidence :

• not one Christian writer on record before Justin Martyr had his hands on any Gospels

Kapyong, I think your way of phrasing things is having an effect on how people respond to your argument. For example, to the above assertion the reasonably knowledgeable person on this forum very naturally replies: "But whoever wrote Matthew was a Christian writer on record before Justin Martyr, and he had the gospel of Mark in his hands...." You have tried to vary your wording for the evangelists (whoever they may be), and perhaps you also mean something special by "on record", but the meaning that you personally are pouring into these terms is not always obvious to me, at any rate, and I imagine they are not always obvious to others reading your words. It becomes difficult to tell, therefore, when someone is disagreeing with your logic and when someone is disagreeing only because of semantic issues.

Your distinction between a text having been written and a text having been published, likewise, is not always very clear. This is why some of your respondents on this thread start writing about the original copy of a text: if you say that a gospel has been written but not published, they naturally start to imagine the autograph of that text still sitting on the author's desk, uncopied and undistributed even to the slightest degree. Yet you acknowledge that the autograph, say, of Mark got copied just enough for Matthew and Luke to get hold of a copy. This is confusing. There are intermediate phases of publication in the world of authoring and producing texts, both in antiquity and in modern times, but your terminology is not very clearly mapping out onto either the ancient or the modern way of expressing them.

Would it be possible, then, for you to rephrase the statement above ("not one Christian writer on record before Justin Martyr had his hands on any Gospels") to take account of these confusions in advance? Is there some way you could phrase it, for example, to distinguish between, on the one hand, the author of the Didache as a Christian writer of the kind you propose and, on the other hand, the author of Matthew, for example?

And I don't think Kapyong has thought through his apparent 'acceptance' of Jesus as a god in terms of its impact on openly disseminating the gospel.

If Jesus was a god (let's suppose for a moment he was a Jewish god) would the gospel (= the story of the Jewish god coming to earth) have been a doctrine which was openly disseminated in public? So for instance when we see our first glimpses of references to the narrative in Justin Martyr who lived in the middle of the second century, let's suppose that Justin knew the person who wrote the gospel - a man who was a contemporary of his - what would have been the public reaction to the claim that the Jewish god (or any god for that matter) walked the earth and met historical figures like Herod or Pilate?

On the one hand you might argue that a fitting 'space' must have existed in order to create a 'god meets humans' narrative - i.e. that no one living in the age of the people mentioned in the gospel could have claimed that god actually came to earth. But I would turn that around. I think that people can claim all sorts of crazy things AND DO everyday. The important thing is that people want to avoid shame so the idea of secrecy moves into the foreground (i.e. this god meets human narrative could have been written in ANY AGE but it was a narrative which circulated PRIVATELY as Clement of Alexandria repeatedly suggests).

Kapyong wrote: I AM right about the historical evidence:
not one Christian writer on record before Justin Martyr had his hands on any Gospels

Then, which writer, prior to "Irenaeus" (whose existence is known because of which secular document?) claims to have read "Paul's" epistles? How did "Paul" send a message to Corinth, Kapyong? Who was there to receive it?

Wikipedia wrote:The Battle of Corinth was a battle fought between the Roman Republic and the Greek city-state of Corinth and its allies in the Achaean League in 146 BC, which resulted in the complete and total destruction of Corinth.

What kind of archaeological evidence do you have, Kapyong, for existence of a Christian presence in Corinth, prior to 4th century CE?

http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/pdf/uploads/hesperia/147197.pdf

Extending north from the northwest corner of the South Stoa, a row of stumps of Doric monolithic columns of the archaic period marks the line of an aqueduct built in Roman times. (footnote 5)

5. Corinth, XVI, pp. 2, 24 (5th century after Christ);
Yes, 500 years after the common era, Kapyong. Not five years. Not fifty years.
And, that data simply attests to the repopulation of the city post annhilation, it says nothing about the composition or ethnic profiles, nor linguistic preferences of the inhabitants.

to Kapyong,

Well, no-one really KNOWS do we ?
I just think it's the best conclusion to be drawn from the evidence. I'd be just as happy to say that he knew of the two books, or that he was aware of the two, sure. But his description is so poor, that his connection seems distant. It's quite odd that he doesn't use the word 'Gospel'.

But you KNOW Papias knew only about rumours of gospels, not the gospels themselves. And now you say "no-one really KNOWS". Would that means no-one except you?
And from where do you think Papias knew about Judas the traitor?
Papias' intent was not to describe the writing of a Mark in details, just to explain why it was out of order. Compare to what? if not another gospel.
As for the word "gospel", it means "good news", which is hardly adequate, rather strange, to name this kind of book about pseudo-history. No wonder "gospel" was not used immediately to name these books. The use of "gospel" for these books was progressive. Even much later, Justin Martyr preferred to call these books, most of the time, "memoirs of the apostles".

Well, he may be aware of a book that might be an early version of G.Mark

What is your evidence Papias knew only an earlier version of gMark, but not the real gMark itself?

But he doesn't have his hands on them, he doesn't know the title 'Gospel', he gives no quotes, his descriptions are variant, and the chain of evidence is weak. Proves nothing.

I do not think "gospel" in Mk 1:1 "The beginning of the gospel [good news] of Jesus Christ" would be understood as establishing the type of book in the time of Papias. Paul used the same word, but it was not to appeal to these pseudo-histories.
I do not see why Papias had to provide quotes. And his description as "the sayings or deeds of Christ" is more adequate as describing gMark than just "gospel".

Obviously the other three Gospel authors knew G.Mark. But that's it. They spread no further for 50-80 years - on the evidence. Because an argument from silence can be strong IF :
the author should know the information, and
has a motive to mention it.

How do you know? You think if someone read gMark, he/she had to write a new gospel. So if someone did not write a new gospel, that means that this person was not aware of gMark!

The evidence for my original claim is quite good : The Gospels Were Not Published Until c.150.

WRONG

Cordially, Bernard

to Kapyong,

I AM right about the historical evidence :
not one Christian writer on record before Justin Martyr had his hands on any Gospels

It seems to me you are wording that so if an early Christian author did not name himself, that does not count, even if he/she used material which shows in the gospels. But that thinking would take out "Luke", Matthew" and "John" regarding gMark.
Anyway, you have no evidence to declare such a thing. Actually the evidence is against you, even if pertinent writings from this period were lost.
But before Justin, "Luke", "Matthew", "John", "Q", "Clement", "Barnabas", Didache, Revelation, Cerinthus, Papias, Aristides, Quadratus, Basilides, Valentinus, Marcion, "Ignatius", Polycarp, the secret book of James, Epistula Apostolorum are proven to use or comment_on material which existed in the gospels. These gospels (or one or some) were written before them. So, the odds are high they knew about earlier gospel(s). Even if I am wrong about some of these authors, there is still a fair number left testifying they knew about some gospels.
There are too many leaks on a dam to say that the water leaking does not come from what is behind the dam.
The leaks: gospel material, Dam: your ultra strict position, Reservoir: the gospels.

Cordially, Bernard

Gday spin,

Thanks for dropping in, I hope you stay around

Peter Kirby wrote:It is a test of the argument from silence. It is not an argument from a comparison to Paul.

Kapyong wrote:That's exactly what it was, according to the very first sentence your own original OP - a test based on COMPARING Rutherford's writings with Paul's as a way of testing this particular argument from silence. But then you declared it was NOT a comparison, for some bizarre reason, even though the whole thread talked about how good the comparison was, or wasn't.

spin wrote:Still operating at the wrong level. This isn't about Paul of Rutherford or whoever.

Wrong.
Peter Kirby specifically introduced this comparison as a test of the Argument from Silence, calling it a comparison in his first sentence, and then continuing discussing the comparison for nine pages with various people all using words like 'compare', and 'comparison' and 'comparand'. Not the slightest hint that it wasn't a comparison.

The thread concluded that Rutherford was a bad comparand.

But when I reported that in my thread summary, instead of admitting Rutherford was a bad comparand - Peter Kirby claimed it was not a comparison at all, but that his argument was still valid anyway !

Now he, and now you, are abusing me as if I am too stupid to realise what the argument was about.

This is the behaviour that Earl Doherty and Dr Carrier noted - when arguing against a mythicist, it's OK to use stupid arguments, because all mythicists are stupid anyway.

Peter Kirby was wrong, but I think he finds it very hard to admit error, especially to a mythicist. How about you spin ?

spin wrote:It's about the fact that an argument from silence is a logical fallacy. As a methodology it doesn't work.

Wrong.
The Argument from Silence CAN be a fallacy, and it CAN be a good argument, IF :

• the author should know the information,
• the author has a motive to mention it.

Which obviously DOES apply to writers like Paul.

You must know that spin, why are you are making false blanket claim that it is always a fallacy ?

spin wrote:That was the point of Peter's effort.

Yes it was the point, and the test used was to COMPARE Paul's writings with Rutherford's. But now both of you are playing silly words games to avoid admitting the mistake. Poor form gentlemen

spin wrote:I'm sure you've heard the fact that lack of evidence is not the same as evidence of lack. See the Rutherford stuff as an effort to show you that fact. You have no evidence for your c.150 claim. You just have a lack of evidence.

Wrong.
My argument depends on the evidence - on some positive evidence (e.g. Papias -> Justin -> Irenaeus), and on some silences, as you like to point out. But it's not ALL silences. I hope you stay around to recognise and acknowledge your error(s) spin.

spin wrote:I've avoided this whole thread up to now as it is pointless and I think Peter should have for the same reason. If you insist on pushing the logical fallacy, no argument will dissuade you.

I am not pushing a fallacy, I am listening to arguments, I am sometimes persuaded to changes my views.

I would like to hear your views, spin. I would like to hear you address my evidence - positive and negative.

spin wrote:And adding ad hominem to argument from silence doesn't raise your credibility.

How dare you sir !
I did NOT attack anyone personally at all.
I made sure to criticise comments, and behaviour on this thread, NOT a person.
While Peter Kirby calls us all personally morons and idiots and stupid etc.
Please retract and apologise for your false slur at once.

Let's be frank -
some of you are abusing me like an idiot just because I am a mythicist, without really reading my posts. Well, I've been doing this for many years, I've had very many adversarial arguments with believers etc. in religious forums, where I'm the non-believer, the outcast, the 'other'.

I thought this place was better than that, which was why I came back here after some time studying and researching, including changing my mind on some issues, looking for some stimulating discussion about some new ideas.

But no
I'm just a 'mythicist' here, and the dominant clique, including the leader, are anti-mythicists. So I can be abused and insulted and ridiculed openly.

Fortunately, GakuseiDon and I had a polite and friendly exchange of ideas, even though we have very different views on the issues. He argued the issues, without abusing me or insulting me, and I came away agreeing to consider his argument with wider reading. Just the sort of challenging and informative exchange this place is known for. Isn't it ?

I look forward to politely discussing the evidence for my argument, here is the current summary :

• Papias 100-130 knows rumours of two Gospel-like writings - by Mark (from Peter), and Matthew.
• Aristides 120-130 knows of a single un-named Gospel, mentioning a virgin, which can be read somewhere.
• Justin Martyr c.150 - has several books 'called Gospels', the memoirs of the Apostles, and the memoir(s) of Peter.
• Justin Martyr dies c.163 - his pupil Tatian inherits the books
• Tatian c.172 - produces the 'FromFour' Gospel harmony, still no names.
• Irenaeus c.185 - first to name all four Gospels.

Kapyong