They need the Palestine Quiz
You could substitute "Kosovo" for "Palestine" in that bit of sophistry. Ditto for "Bosnia-Herzegovina". Or "East Timor". Or "Slovenia".
What does that tell you?
Much? Or Not much?
There have been 5 items by TimONeill (Search limited from 22-May 23)
Posted by TimONeill on 11 June 2011 - 03:30 PM in Archaeology, Biblical History & Textual Criticism
They need the Palestine Quiz
Posted by TimONeill on 10 June 2011 - 02:58 PM in Archaeology, Biblical History & Textual Criticism
Posted by TimONeill on 09 June 2011 - 06:45 PM in Archaeology, Biblical History & Textual Criticism
"Vast swathes of the gospels can be shown to be utterly false, but this does nothing to show that there wasn't a historical Jewish preacher as the ultimate point of origin for the later stories."
An absolute gem indeed
See Jeppo, the thing with us is that we can take it when O'Neill says things like this. We don't pretend that most of the gospel record isn't unsupportable by evidence, so when he says things like this we don't bat an eyelid; when we factor in his own atheist bias, it's hardly surprising that he's going to come up with statements like this.
Yet how many other historians so much as mention Athronges, the Samaritan, Theudas or the Egyptian? None. Apart from Josephus, no writer so much as gives them a sentence's worth of attention.
I guess O'Neill doesn't consider Luke a historian, eh?
Josephus, who was completely agenda-driven, is the credible historian while Luke, who was also completely agenda-driven, was not.
I don't expect O'Neill to agree with me and at the same time I don't have to agree with him.
Posted by TimONeill on 09 June 2011 - 07:21 PM in Archaeology, Biblical History & Textual Criticism
That said, most scholars, Christian, non-Christian or Calathumpian, accept that vast swathes of the gospels can't be taken at face value via some literalist reading. So saying this is not some evidence of any "atheist bias", it's simply accepting a consensus of reasonable scholarship.
Saying that vast swathes of the gospels can't be taken at face value via some literalist reading (with which I agree), is very different to saying vast swathes of the gospels are shown to be utterly false. The latter is spin, not 'a consensus of reasonable scholarship'.
Blunders like the one above indicate how seriously the author of gLuke can be taken as a "historian". He takes the new genre of "gospel" and dresses parts of it up in some of the trappings of historical writing of the time. Ditto for Acts.
Could you recommend some recent scholarship on Luke and historiography, as well as 'the new genre of "gospel"'?
Posted by TimONeill on 10 June 2011 - 01:14 AM in Archaeology, Biblical History & Textual Criticism
Interesting that Casey reads Paul like this.
For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised directly to heaven on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he later came back down from heaven and appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. (1 Corinthians 15.3-5).
Not what I would have called a parsimonious reading. Then there's this.As Jesus is Paul’s exemplar for every person’s resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, we can conclude that Paul’s distinction between the decaying earthly body and new spiritual body would apply to Jesus too. Therefore, in Paul’s conception of resurrection, Jesus’ physical body would have rotted in his grave; Jesus was resurrected in a new, spiritual body.
That's a new spin, bit Mytherist though. From the review so far it looks like Casey is heading down the Mytherist path. Let's see how far he goes.