Ben, I have to defend Poly here. He is one of the most thoughtful and consistently courteous Christians on this board. Even though I (obviously) have a different interpretation of Christian history and exegesis than he does, I have never seen him personally attack another Doper, no matter how much he disgreed with them. I understand your frustration with obstinate dogmatism and willful religious ignorance, especially as it pertains to creationism, but I really don’t think that Poly falls into that category.
A fair assessment of the present state of knowledge about the origins of the Gospels – but it needs to be noted that the dates for the Gospels and the very existence of Q are conclusions based on a methodology that is probably valid but subject to question. A scrap of parchment dateable to AD 50 plus or minus 15 years that mentions Jesus’s prophecy of the destruction of the Temple would completely put paid to the idea that that was “written back into” the Gospel after the destruction. Nothing in any canonical gospel shows a clear timing of after 70 AD if predictive prophecy is allowed as a valid possibility. (I’m not necessarily arguing for its validity, simply against the assumption that it is automatically invalid. A Jesus possessed of certain limited knowledge of the future is not something that sits comfortably with me, but is not out of the question.
Likewise Q is presumed to have existed because of the strong similarities of the sayings of Jesus in Matthew and Luke combined with their generally different placement and sometimes use and implications in the narrative sequences of those two Gospels. Beyond that unquestioned identity, there is not one shred of evidence that it ever existed, except for the reference in Papias that would attribute a collection of that sort to Matthew – in Papias’s view, such a collection was Matthew’s Gospel. [My own theory on this allows for the composition of Mark and of the collected logia of Christ by Matthew, some editor (Matthew himself in his old age?) emplanting the infancy narrative and the five collections of teachings on a “frame story” closely adapted from Mark, and Luke working with the logia manuscript and Mark together with his other researches to place the material together in a different (and I think more historically accurate) order.]
Thomas appears to have been rejected because it was used principally by heretics of a Gnostic “mystery cult” whom the “orthodox” Christians were united in condemning as in grievous error.
Mark supposedly worked from Peter’s memory before his martyrdom, according to early tradition.
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On the contrary, I think it’s entirely relevant to the debate that your position (or, to be precise, what I mistakenly interpreted to be your position) is similar to one which you hold in contempt.
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No, I didn’t ignore it- I missed it. You have my sincerest apologies.
Bear in mind that in GD, the usual procedure is to explain one’s own beliefs. But when I asked Christians to explain what they thought of Paine’s essay, you, a Christian, gave a detailed explanation of what other Christians think of Paine’s essay- and said nothing whatsoever about your own beliefs.
Can you see why I might have gotten a bit confused?
For that matter, would you care to give your own opinion on these matters?
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Cite?
So, do you believe that believers in typological exegesis are believing in the Divine Weasel? Do you believe them to be as intellectually lazy and lacking in fath as you believe the creationists to be?
And if you’re going to claim that this is a general problem on my part, I think I’m justified in asking you to either provide some cites, or retract your claim.
I understand and respect your desire to defend Polycarp. But, let me say that this puts me in a difficult position. Polycarp is so popular that if anyone criticises him- even constructively- they can find themselves attacked by people who explicitly say, “How can you attack Polycarp? He’s so much a better person than you could ever be!” For some people, there is no reason to consider what Polycarp did, because that’s overshadowed by who Polycarp is.
I agree that Polycarp is an admirably patient person. OTOH, I don’t think he’s perfect, and he’s done a number of things that I very much disagree with. But, I can’t discuss them here, because they’re not relevant to the thread.
If this involved anyone else, it would just be a case of hey, not everybody gets along. Friction happens in GD, and it generally isn’t a big issue. No one has commented on my brush with NaSultainne, for example.
But everyone is supposed to get along with Poly- and if I don’t, it’s going to be perceived as my fault. If there’s friction between Poly and me, I think there’s an expectation that I justify it. But I can’t justify it in this thread. Ergo, I have to take it to the Pit. And if I do that, I might as well paint a bullseye on my head and put a “PILE ON ME” sign on my back.
These are all accurate descriptions of some of the more conservative (faith based) theories that are part of the current scholarship. One very early version of the temple destruction prophesy has Jesus saying something like “I will destroy this temple and no one will be able to rebuild it.” It is possible that Jesus may have made a metaphorical reference to “destroying” the temple which was later literalized after the Roman attack. (This is admittedly only a hypothesis but it is a plausible, non-supernatural explanation).
Thomas has usually been called a Gnostic text, but it is not entirely clear that it was originally intended as such, although t seems to have been used by gnostics. It’s early date and sparse nature makes me think that it may have a genuine apostolic connection.
You are right that Q is purely theoretical, but the evidence is fairly strong that Mark and Matthew had a common source for sayings.
The attribution of Matthew’s gospel to the apostle is traditional (the gospel, itself, does not name the author. Papias, as you mentioned, spoke of a collection of sayings collected by the Apostle in Hebrew. The Gospel is written in good Koine, though, and much of the source material (Q, Mark) only existed in Greek. I would submit the possibility that a collection of sayings may have been compiled by the apostle. At some point those sayings were translated into Greek and became Q. Mark and Matthew then used Q, and Matthew was so called because of its apostolic source material with regards to the sayings. But this is all just a wag on my part.
Herod’s massacre of the innocents may NOT have been the big event Bible epic movies portray which would have made it into the history books. Demographers have figured that the number of newborn-to-two year old males in the Bethlehem area at the time would have been around 20-30- a number that could have easily been taken out by assassins, “accidents” & other means than sending a fully uniformed police into the streets to grab babies & toddlers. Also- all Matthew actually states is that Herod gave this order & it recalled Jeremiah’s prophecy about “Rachels in Ramah (mothers in Bethlehem) mourning for their children”- which would allow maybe for a few deaths but not necessarily a total extermination. It could well be that Herod issued such an order, that his officers were used to such crazy orders given & soon forgotten, & that mothers in Bethlehem were told to lay low till Herod gets another obsession.
Did any early anti-Christian writer deny that any such order or killing occurred? Because that would have been a good point to have scored at the time.
Also- RE Matthew’s dating & the destruction of the Temple- Polycarp put it quite well- but I would add- Daniel 9 clearly states that Messiah would come, be cut off & the city would be destroyed & the Temple made desolate. Jesus based his Messiahship on the Daniel model- taking the title “Son of Man” from Daniel 7. If he regarded himself as the Son of Man/Messiah Prince to be cut off, he would also have thought the Temple & City were on limited time.
Turns out he was right G
Btw, NO ONE says Daniel 9 was written post-70 AD- while I believe it was actually written by Daniel in Babylon & Persia around 530 BC, the latest anyone dates it is
around 160 BC.
Turns out he was right G
Surely both the Herod and Egypt stories were invented to create a parallel to the Moses story?
I don’t have much time right now, I have to go to work, but let me just say that Daniel was written during the Greek occupation of Palestine in 164 CE and refers to past events, not future ones. The phrase “son of man,” (Ben Adam) was a Hebrew and Aramaic idiom for mankind as a whole. The “son of man” or (son of Adam) is not a titular reference to the Messiah but a generic reference to all people akin to the English convention of calling all people “man.” The Greek writers of the NT didn’t really understand the idiom and used it as a specific title for jesus.
I can give more details later, gotta go now.
I am skeptical of this claim that the word shifted meaning. The word (and its male equivalent) is used in the Talmud, centuries after JC, and never means virgin. It means young man or woman. What it your basis for saying this?
OTOH, they would have to have been ignorant of the Biblical passage, which was not referring to a virgin. Are you claiming that the translators themselves were prophesizing about JC? Most likely, they did not understand Greek all that well (or perhaps the Greek word had different meanings at that time and place). In any event, there are errors in many translations - you can’t make too big a deal out of it.
Oops, I should have said 164 BCE, not CE…big difference there.
Diogenes- are you saying that Jesus was not referring to himself in his “son of man” statements? I agree the basic meaning in Daniel 7:13 is the company of the righteous (“the holy ones of the Most High” vv17-18,25-28), symbolized by the other Jewish visionary in Babylon- Ezekiel who is called “son of man” 90 times & whose vision of God’s Throne-Chariot is replicated in Dan 7:9.
Though the phrase does appear in some parts of the Enoch books to denote a Messianic figure- those may be a Christian edit. I have no problem with the idea that Jesus may well have been the first to employ “son of man” as a messianic term for himself as the embodiment of the righteous people of Israel.
—You are right that Q is purely theoretical, but the evidence is fairly strong that Mark and Matthew had a common source for sayings.—
Waitaminute. I though Q was theorized as being a source for Luke and Matthew, not Mark. I was under the impression that Mark does not include the wisdom sayings of Q and that Mark is dated earlier than Matth/L precisely because some people think it and Q were used as sources by those two. I also was under the impression that the date of Mark hadn’t been nailed down: that it still could have been written after the destruction of the Temple (and thus be what some believe it to be: a usage of Jesus to give a theological explanation for the destruction of the Temple)
On Q:
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/q-exist.html
The Case Against Q
—In any event, there are errors in many translations - you can’t make too big a deal out of it.—
You can when the mistranslation itself appears to be the source of a claimed phrophecy.
“Looking at this passage from the OT, it strikes me as referring to Jesus. Now, God is omniscient and omniptent, so of course He knew that it would strike me in that way. If He had not wanted me it to strike me that way, He would have written it differently. So the fact it struck me that way means that God wanted it to strike me that way, and of course God would not have wanted it to strike me as supporting the idea that Jesus was the Messiah unless Jesus actually was the Messiah. So therefore, any passage that I think supports the idea that Jesus was the Messiah does in fact prove that Jesus was the Messiah, regardless of the literal meaning. Any misinterpretation that I have is a misinterpretation specically engineered by God, and therefore does not invalidate my conclusion.”
Polycarp, is that an accurate restatement of your explanation of exegesis (and yes, I am “remembering that [you’re] distancing myself from any adherence to the view [you’re] trying to describe”)?
The Ryan, I couldn’t have said it better myself. I think you’ve nailed it.
Just about, TheRyan (and Ben) – and Ben, my apologies for not getting back to this thread to answer the questions you asked. (“Exegesis” is the technical term for developing out the theology contained in a given Scripture quote, whether validly or not – “eisegesis” is the technical term for the fraudulent practice of reading your views into Scripture, by the way. The particular practice we’re speaking of in Ben’s example is “typology” – the practice of seeing in a given Scripture quote a pre-existing “type” of a later event that illuminates it, as in the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross being foreshadowed by the sacrifice of a ram in place of Isaac, Abraham’s only and beloved son – complete with Abraham’s “God will provide himself a sacrifice, my son” in the KJV.
As for my personal views, I think it’s clear that a whole lot of what Matthew and various commentators since have identified from the OT as “types” is a bad case of “special pleading.” The “voice in Ramah, Rachel weeping for her children” thing is a cite of (ultimate reference) Rachel weeping for the loss of Joseph way back in Genesis 37 (remember that at the point when Joseph is sold into slavery and reported back to his family as having been killed by a wild beast, Rachel had only two sons, with the other Benjamin being as yet a small child in a country where childhood mortality was high), and (specific reference) the Babylonian Captivity of the Judahites and Benjamites:
There are admittedly a few direct prophecies of the Messiah in the O.T. that do seem to be fulfilled in the person of Jesus, IMO. (Zev can provide a contrary opinion if he chooses to do so.)
Now, to be totally honest, I tend to see some occasions when this sort of thing seems evident. While it is probable that Second Isaiah is talking about the ideal Jew and his role as example to the nations in the Servant Songs, the echo of what they have to say speaks strongly to me of what the role of Jesus was. But I do realize that that is due largely to long-time inculcation of the connection and to my own grasp of the similarities, not to any necessary intent on the part of Second Isaiah to depict the suffering of the Messiah some centuries in the future.
As for the angry exchange with Ben, I willingly grant forgiveness, Ben, and ask it of you for my own hostility in response to your comment. With regard to the claim of “several times” (made in anger), I was referring to the contretemps in “Order Here First” that you and I and others discussed privately, and I’m sure that you’re as dissatisfied with the outcome of that situation as is everyone else – all I can say is that I did my best to work within the framework of that board and its policies for the proper addressing of the concerns of all. And I didn’t go into details above (and won’t in this post beyond the reference to it) out of respect for the privacy of you and others. I hope you’ll forgive my even bringing it up, but as you seemed offended by my “several times” comment, I thought it appropriate to specify what I was talking about for clarity’s sake.
As for your response on having disagreements with me, I would welcome opportunity to resolve them either in e-mail or with a thread in which we dispassionately discuss what they are, as you see fit.
And I apologize for the hijacking of your thread into this analysis of our differences – but I have a lot of respect for your knowledge and ability to explain complex topics clearly, as well as for you as an individual, and I would very much like to ensure that we are not at odds in the future.
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But that appears to me to be no different from the kind of eisegesis which you tried to distance yourself from.
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Of course. 
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Well, I find that problematic. In all such cases in which you were involved, I was extremely patient with the people who were being dishonest. Far from being quick to accuse them of dishonesty, I started out by giving them the benefit of the doubt and pointing out what I thought didn’t add up about their posts, and giving them every opportunity to provide a reasonable explanation. It was only after they refused to take such opportunities, stonewalled my polite requests, repeated the behavior over and over again (over a period of months, as I remember it,) and in some cases engaged in harassing behavior, including falsely accusing me, that I outright accused them of deliberate dishonesty. Tinker Grey even commended me on my patient handling of such cases.
I find your accusations to be disappointing. I don’t want to talk about the PP at length, because I don’t want to start a board war, but you aren’t the first PPer to jump to make these kinds of groundless accusations against me.
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Given your recent difficulties, perhaps such uncomfortable matters would be best left for later.
Thank you, Poly, I appreciate that.
It depends on what you attribute to Jesus. For instance, when jesus said, “the son of man has no place to lay his head,” he was probably referring to humanity as a whole. There is no question that the gospel writers reinterpreted the phrase “Ben Adam” to refer to their concept of the Messiah, especially as it pertained to he Daniel quotation. So, to answer your question, I would say that the gospel writers understood the phrase to be titular, and, accordingly, their literary characterizations of Jesus used the phrase Messianically. Whether the real historical Jesus understood it as such is a different question, but it doesn’t seem that the phrase had a Messianic connotation in any of the Hebrew Bible. (The reference to the figure in the clouds in Daniel is understood in Jewish interpretation to refer to mankind’s dominion over the Earth).
Of course the whole issue of what Jesus really did or did not say is a huge can of worms unto itself. Let me just say that if you believe that Jesus said what the gospels have him say, then Jesus thought that Ben Adam was synonomous with Messiah (i.e himself) It is my personal belief that the (Greek) gospel writers were trying to make sense of a Hebrew/Aramaic phrase as it was used by a man they believed to be the Messiah, and thus retrojected a titular connotation into the words of Jesus
You are correct sir, my mistake. I should have said Matthew and Luke had a common source, and that they may have also both used Mark. SWorry about that, slip of the keyboard you know.
Again you are correct. 60 CE is the most charitable dating. Many scholars believe it was more probably composed during the Roman-Judean war of 66-70 CE, probably in Syria. It is certainly more than possible that it was composed after the destruction of the temple.
I figured it might be worthwhile to look up the other instances of the word “almah” in the Bible and see what the Septuagint did with them. I found this English version of the Septuagint. Most of the instances that I found are not posted yet. But the two that have been - Genesis 24:43 & Proverbs 30:19 are rendered as “damsel” and “youth” respectively.
I also saw this:
Interestingly, the KJV does render the Genesis 24:43 word as “virgin”. Also Song of Solomon 1:3 & 6:8. OTOH, the same word in Exodus 2:8 & Proverbs 30:19 is rendered “maid”, and Psalms 68:25 is given as “damsels”. Meanwhile the masculine form of the same word (I Samuel 20:22) is given as “young man”. No rhyme or reason, as far as I can tell.
I think the Roman-Judean war of 66-70 CE, the destruction of the temple and other details in the 13th chapter are why historians say it couldn’t have been written any sooner than this period. Any credible historian that has a strict adherence to the philosophy of naturalism, doesn’t believe in prophecies. If they do they shouldn’t be called historians, but theologians. Maybe some think the prophecies were so vague it could be interpreted to mean many things and Mark was just shooting in the dark. When I read it, it seems a bit vague, but I think the historians and scholars have more tools to base their decision on this date and later, than what I can get from it with a casual reading.
JZ
Concerning the virgin birth: The criticism was so bad in St. Jerome’s day from Jews who had been pointing out the mistranslation, that he had to write an entire book on it. Despite knowing it was a mistranslation, he sees no sense in correcting the error though when he falsely mistranslated the Latin texts with “virgin” too. I don’t have a “New English” version before me, but I’ve read where they have taken out “virgin” and use “young woman” in the Isaiah 7:14 texts now. I’m looking at a “New Revised Standard” and it too uses “young woman” but still adds a footnote explaining it as “GK the virgin”.
JZ