Surely I’m not the only one to find Diogenes the Cynic insufferably pretentious. He certainly has a very high opinion of his own knowledge. Many of his posts have precious phrases like “Modern scholars agree …” but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single Diogenes post with any citation or URL. I suppose he thinks his own opinion is all that’s needed to justify the phrase “Modern scholars agree” and that his own hurried writing on SDMB is its own self-sufficient citation. :smack:
I’m not qualified to evaluate Diogenes’ competence, if any, at archaeological or Biblical scholarship, but some recent posts demonstrate he’s incapable of following plain English. Consider the following dialog in a recent thread about Jesus’ historicity.
Most other participants seemed to agree that the Nativity stories were probably contrived and should not be the focus of a historicity debate. But even if someone disagrees with this point of view, it shouldn’t be hard to understand that it is the position one is addressing. Yet flaws in the infancy stories seem to be all Diogenes wants to talk about! (Perhaps he’d use the cherry-tree myth to disprove George Washington’s existence. 
– I’m being silly now, of course, yet that is the conclusion we’d derive from Diogenes’ continued comments.)
OK. If he’d read the thread for comprehension, he’d know others in the thread already know this much, but he wants to reiterate it. Fine. I’ll elide some responses to Diogenes that reiterate why the Nativity contradictions are of little interest.
Check the original thread to confirm that the following non sequitur response by Diogenes is intended to directly answer ITR’s post just shown.
So we have a self-avowed world-class scholar (whose opinions are their own sufficient citation) but he doesn’t understand that “infancy narratives” include narratives about the infancy? Confused, septimus and ITR call this to Diogenes’ attention:
But Diogenes is capable only of another non sequitur:
septimus and others did give explanations for the contradiction. (To summarize yet one more time for Diogenes’ benefit, the infancy narratives are fictional.) But that’s not the point. The point is that repeating over and over and over and over the same flaws in the infancy narratives is not responsive, when answering people who have specifically excluded them from further consideration.
And again!! Even if Diogenes is the world’s fastest typist and rewrote this tedious and repetitious babble in five seconds, he could have invested that five seconds more wisely by reading the posts he’s responding to. No one cares about the flaws in the fictional infancy narratives, as septimus said in his very first post!
Instead, we have yet again:
One gets the impression, that when Diogenes deigns to speak, no matter how wrong or irrelevant his utterance, we mere mortals all need to bend over and kiss his ass. But before I bend over, I’d like to see the slightest evidence that he’s intelligent enough to even comprehend the posts he responds to.
