DrDeth posted a lot of info. It’s all wrong then, eh? :dubious:
Interesting background on Crossan, and the Jesus Seminar, he being a founding father:
I’m in no position to point out who is more credible (I have not read the book you referenced), but I am suggesting that Crossan does appear to be at least somewhat controversial. Dio, don’t take this the wrong way, but I also found it a bit revealing why you’d find him a reliable source. A light bulb went off, in other words, that illuminated some of your posts in this and other threads. Perhaps I read too much into his association with the Jesus Seminar.
You can actually say we (with those dandy cites and sources) have unsupported assertions, when you have not provided a single cite? It is to laff. :rolleyes:
No serious scholar thinks that the Gospel of John was dicated by John. You really should branch out beyond Christian apologist websites and read some genuine scholarship.
That’s not what Crossan says in the book, IIRC. Crossan doesn’t deny that tekton means carpenter. He argues (from Lenski’s theory of social structures in agrarian societies) that carpenters, as part of the Artisan Class (Lenski’s term), are lower in socioeconomic status than farmers/peasants. Or, as Crossan himself puts in in part of a Frontline documentary.
But that doesn’t mean that tekton doesn’t mean carpenter or means unskilled laborer.
Got you there:
Your very own words:
**Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic **
“*This is not the only reason. In fact, it’s the least of the reasons. I have Raymond Brown’s Introduction to the New Testament right here in front of me, Brown was a Catholic Priest and considere by contemporary standards to be a conservative scholar.”
* http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=595930&page=2
My reply: Ok, let us use Brown.
And assume he is “Brown has been described as “the premier Johannine scholar in the English-speaking world”.[15] Terrence T. Prendergast stated that “for nearly 40 years Father Brown caught the entire church up into the excitement and new possibilities of scriptural scholarship.”
But then "Brown identifies three layers of text in John: 1) an initial version Brown considers based on personal experience of Jesus; 2) a structured literary creation by the evangelist which draws upon additional sources; and 3) the edited version that readers know today (Brown 1979)."
Let me bold that first part for you "an initial version Brown considers based on personal experience of Jesus"
Thus, according *to your own expert- *the Gospel of John was based upon the Apostle Johns own personal experience of Jesus.
More or less the same conclusion is reached in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, which draws upon the collected expertise of some *250 noted historians and biblical scholars. *
So, that’s 251 “serious scholars” to your *no sources at all. *
Tekton doesn’t mean “carpenter,” and I didn’t say it meant "unskilled laboror,: I said it means “builder,” (which it does), and that it referred to a range of unskilled jobs, but yes, Crossan says that artisans were a class below even that of peasants. I’ve said that myself several times on this board.
There are ZERO serious scholars who think that the Gospel of John was dictaed by the apostle. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Even Raymond Brown didn’t think that.
What Brown thought was that it may have had a core based on anecdotal statements from the apostle, but that’s nt the same as sayiong the canonical Gospel was dictated by John. Even if such a layer stemmed initially from an apostle (which it probably didn’t), the bulk of the book is layered fiction by other authors.
Except tekton usuallly refers to skilled labor, not unskilled. Can you find any Greek source where it refers to unskilled jobs?
And I wouldn’t say “below even that of peasants”. In Lenski’s theory, peasants make up the top of the Plebian social class. Here’s a copy of Lenski’s social class diagram, if you’re curious:
About the veracity of ancient writings? Pointing out that people used to throw in all sorts of wacky shit to what they wrote isn’t even a comment on the Bible. According t ancient writers, Archimedes had a giant death ray made out of mirrors, the children’s crusade was an actual event, and King Arthur was a mighty ancient king. In the case of the Children’s Crusade, the story seems almost entirely to have been a gross distortion of the crudest real events, for the sake of a moral fable.
If I knew a PhD in a pre-Renaissance field, I’d have little doubt that he couldn’t point out a sufficient list of hagiographic texts to make your head explode. Cecil, at least, agrees that “The authors of the gospels weren’t writing objective history; they were trying to convert a particular audience, and their words reflect that.”
Why do you particularly doubt the existence of hagiographic, propagandic, and libelous writings, in ancient times? Just going through the Straight Dope columns, you’ll come across a dozen instances being cited.
Sereiously, I’ll dig out my Liddell and Scott and find some attestations, but probably not tonight. That’s work.
Your link won’t display on my computer, for some reason, but being at the top of the plebian classes doesn’t mean much. The entirety of the plebian strata were bad off. The artisans were part of the second lowest social class, above that of only the utterly destitute and the outcasts, the veritable paraiahs that Jesus took his mission to, and proclaimed as those who would inherit the Kingdom.
Yes, but in Lenski, it’s not that strict a hierarchy…which is to say, it’s possible in Lenski’s model for a successful artisan to be higher in social class than a poor peasant. What makes the artisan class as a whole lower than the peasant class is that they don’t own land, and hence, can’t pass down their wealth or arrange advantageous marriages. And all that’s only if you agree with Lenski’s model in the first place. Other sociologists don’t, you know, and I think it’s important to note that when Lenski is looking at the status of artisans, he’s largely focusing on 19th century Chinese and 13th century Fleming artisans.
