Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

TedM wrote:

Mental flatliner wrote:

TedM wrote:Mental, you either misspoke or you don't know what you are talking about. If it is the latter, then it appears to me that you don't think anything can be discerned about history at all, which is why you know little about the gospel claims -- ie 'why bother--ie no truth can be determined from writings about the past' appears to be your position. Correct?

I'm an auditor by trade. Evaluating quality of evidence is a professional skill.

Name my error or move on. (You might be out of your league here.)

Diogenes is already doing that, saving me time thank goodness. Are you going to answer my question?

Are you talking about the dude with the green name?

To date he has offered not a single original source for any request I've made. So forget about relying on him, you made the claim. Support it or move on.

I'm an auditor by trade. Evaluating quality of evidence is a professional skill.

Mental flatliner, how do you evaluate the different Jesus' genealogies in the first and third gospel (attributed to Matthew and Luke).
Did you ever notice any conflicts between gospels?
Cordially, Bernard

Bernard Muller wrote:

I'm an auditor by trade. Evaluating quality of evidence is a professional skill.

Mental flatliner, how do you evaluate the different Jesus' genealogies in the first and third gospel (attributed to Matthew and Luke).
Did you ever notice any conflicts between gospels?
Cordially, Bernard

Certainly not in the black-and-white way of gentiles who haven't the first clue of Jewish culture.

During the Roman period, most Jews had two genealogies: one legal, one biological.

Eusebius went to the trouble to explain in detail how the two differ and why. You should read it.

(As for conflicts between the gospels, there aren't any. I just completed a word-by-word study of the four gospels and found them in total agreement. Of course I welcome challenge. Enlighten me.)

Welcome, Flatliner.

You are a breath of fresh air.

There is a lot of magical thinking and frank delusion on this board- and in the "Jesus" field in general.

Your work is cut out for you!

Mental flatliner wrote:During the Roman period, most Jews had two genealogies: one legal, one biological.

Where do you get this stuff? No they didn't. The Jews cared about patrilineal lines and that was it.

Eusebius went to the trouble to explain in detail how the two differ and why. You should read it.

Eusebius did not say Jews had two genealogies. He devised an elaborate, frankly ridiculous apologetic by which he posited (absent any evidence at all), that Jacob and Heli (the two contradictory names given to the father of Joseph by Matthew and Luke) were brothers and that one of them must have been a Levirate father of Joseph (the practice wherein if a brother dies without a male heir, his brother is supposed to impregnate the widow in order to produce an heir who will be legally the dead brother's heir, but biologically the living brother's progeny). Eusebius throws out this hypothesis from desperation, but it doesn't work, even if accepted because the genealogies still diverge all the way back.

Moreover there is no attested Jewish practice of keeping two genealogies and Eusebius doesn't actually say that. His argument was ad hoc only for Jesus, not claimed as a general practice.

As for conflicts between the gospels, there aren't any.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Was Jesus born during the reign of Herod or during the census of Qurinius. The census happened ten years after Herod's death. Tell me how Jesus could have been born before 4 BCE and also born in 6-7 CE.

Interesting, as I am also an "auditor by trade." What specialty (e.g., accounting, insurance)? In my case it is insurance premium auditing.

In this trade in general the auditor reviews primary evidence (a business' payroll, cost and sales records), and the auditor uses these to compute the amount of payroll/cost/sales to use as measurements of risk exposure and how it should be divided between risk categories. This is in turn used to calculate earned premium. These calculated premiums based on actual exposures are then used to adjust advance premiums based on estimates. The advance estimates of payroll and how to report it are much like our preconceptions of what things will look like. The audit itself is performed every year to rectify pre-expectations against the reality of what really did happen as measured from primary sources.

In my case, I work for a Workers Comp state monopoly, and the employers report payroll to us after the fact. Our audits are meant to be samples to confirm whether more or less randomly selected employers have reported the correct amount of payroll and if they segregated it between risk classes correctly. Believe me, the primary sources betray the fact that many times the employer makes mistakes. They do not adjust owner wages to reflect reporting rules (minimum and maximum reportable wages), or cannot figure out how to segregate it properly between risk categories (these rules can be arcane). Most folks do the best they can, but when faced with a dilemma, they guessed at solutions, whether right or wrong. So in a way, I am now doing forensic audits.

Just curious ...

DCH

Mental flatliner wrote:I'm an auditor by trade. Evaluating quality of evidence is a professional skill.

During the Roman period, most Jews had two genealogies: one legal, one biological.

Mental flatliner, do you have evidence for that?

Eusebius went to the trouble to explain in detail how the two differ and why. You should read it.

Actually, Eusebius quoted Julius Africanus (160-180), a Christian. The explanation of Africanus is rather stupid.
Africanus said each wife of presumed ancestors of Jesus in the Luke's genealogy were childless but got impregnated with a son by the ruling Davidian king of the day. And that generation after generation.
Are you accepting that as true?

Cordially, Bernard

Bernard Muller wrote:Actually, Eusebius quoted Julius Africanus (160-180), a Christian. The explanation of Africanus is rather stupid.
Africanus said each wife of presumed ancestors of Jesus in the Luke's genealogy were childless but got impregnated with a son by the ruling Davidian king of the day. And that generation after generation.
Are you accepting that as true?

Cordially, Bernard

The fact that Eusebius quoted an older source, the fact that Eusebius quotes can be verified elsewhere as word-for-word accurate quotes from the sources named, and the fact that Africanus lived in Emmaus, 6 miles west of Jerusalem, makes Eusebius' quote that much more valuable.

Africanus likely had access to original genealogy records.

I'm sorry you object to the gospels being non-contradictory, but that's not my problem. You may want to investigate your tolerance of other cultures. Apparently, if they are any different from your own, they're subject to your judgmentalism and categorized as stupid without further investigation, even if it means you have to misquote the source to make it stick. (Africanus said the men were childless, not the women.)

Africanus does not claim to be citing documented records, he only cites Levirate tradition and infers the rest from that.

What is your evidence that any written genealogies going back to David ever even existed for Joseph (or for anybody else) in the Second Temple period at all? Julius Africanus lived in the 2nd and 3rd Centuries (c. 160-240 CE). Judea and Galilee had already been destroyed twice by the Romans before JA was even born. Where do you imagine these records were stored, how did JA know where to go to find them, how were they kept safe and intact for 200 years in the wake of two devastating wars followed by an ethnic cleansing of Jews and why does Africanus himself make no mention of seeing these documents?

Diogenes the Cynic wrote:Africanus does not claim to be citing documented records, he only cites Levirate tradition and infers the rest from that.

This is getting stupid.

If you're claiming that Julius Africanus just made it up out of thin air, provide a source.
If you're claiming that Julius was quoting some other source, provide the source.

For the rest of us, the text provided by Eusebius is sufficiently similar to what we would expect from genealogical documents, and it's an abdication of common sense to dispute that.

Denial is not a tool of any kind of analysis. Don't respond to my posts if you don't intend to contribute to them, and if your goal is to deny every piece of legitimate evidence that supports the Bible, for your own good, you may want to leave this forum and find one more suited to your interests.