rcrocket wrote:I can't believe that any of Trevor's sources are "first hand," the least of which is Paul. "First hand" is either the witness telling you personally, or telling you in an autograph.
Allow me to clarify for you. By first hand, I meant that they actually witnessed events that they wrote about. Certainly not everything they wrote about, but some of what they wrote about, and in this they differ from Paul on Jesus, who relied entirely on reports from others. Got it?
“I was hooked from the start,” Snoop Dogg said. “We talked about the purpose of life, played Mousetrap, and ate brownies. The kids thought it was off the hook, for real.”
Doctor Steuss wrote:I'm not by any means well-studied on the topic of ancient historiography in general, so I hope you don't mind holding my hand here a bit. Was the practice of using previous first-hand written accounts a common practice, or was it more common to utilize oral traditions? I know that within Judaism, memorization was very (very) important during the time period that Christianity (purportedly) arose. Given Christianity’s Jewish roots, at least in the beginning, would it not be feasible that the "first-hand" accounts would most likely have been oral rather than written traditions/legends/accounts/mythoi? What was the common practice of historiography within 1st Century CE Judaism (there is Josephus, but in my opinion he is arguably Hellenistic enough as to preclude him being used as a “classic” Jewish example).
I am not a specialist on Jewish historiography, Steuss, but here is a bit that I posted on the Evidence for Jesus thread in the CK:
Christine Schams in her 1998 book Jewish Scribes in Second-Temple Judaism (p. 40):
"A very similar problem concerning the dating of traditions arises from the Mishna and Tosefta. Compiled in the beginning of the second and third/fourth centuries CE respectively, much of the material is ascribed to rabbis or scholars who lived during the Second-Temple period (me: why? probably to establish authority for the material). It is likely that at least some laws and traditions stem from the period prior to the destruction of the Temple. There is, unfortunately, no reliable method to distinguish earlier from later ones."
What this author says offers good reason to interrogate closely any claims that the oral traditions attributed to the Second Temple period--like those about Jesus--actually do date to that time. They could, after all, be the result of contact with later generations of Christians.
Oral tradition was important, but it is difficult to assess the value of what we have, and what we have comes along later than Paul and the gospels. I have no idea how one would call something that has passed through so many ears, minds, and mouths "first hand."
“I was hooked from the start,” Snoop Dogg said. “We talked about the purpose of life, played Mousetrap, and ate brownies. The kids thought it was off the hook, for real.”
Trevor wrote:[...] Oral tradition was important, but it is difficult to assess the value of what we have, and what we have comes along later than Paul and the gospels. I have no idea how one would call something that has passed through so many ears, minds, and mouths "first hand."
Thank you Trevor. After reading your clarification (last post on previous page of thread) I realized that my questions were off the mark and I had misunderstood you (sorry about that).
"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead." ~Charles Bukowski
Jersey Girl wrote:Is this considered to be a scholarly publication?
Scratch, you wanna field that one? :-)
"Finally, for your rather strange idea that miracles are somehow linked to the amount of gay sexual gratification that is taking place would require that primitive Christianity was launched by gay sex, would it not?"
I started a new topic in the Celestial about the Ted Lyon piece. It's quite good actually.
"Whatever appears to be against the Book of Mormon is going to be overturned at some time in the future. So we can be pretty open minded."-charity 3/7/07
Jersey Girl wrote:Is this considered to be a scholarly publication?
Scratch, you wanna field that one? :-)
Cut that out! Let me revise....
Do LDS consider this to be a scholarly publication?
My impression is that yes, they do. Consider the lengthy defenses of the journal we have seen from LoaP and rcrocket: clearly, these two want to defend FARMS Review's peer review process as a means of maintaining its credibility. Of course, as I have said all along, this publication is not "scholarly" in any normative sense, and even DCP has admitted that.
LifeOnaPlate wrote:The review of the Dawkins book = lame.
Elsewhere5 Dawkins puts a similar spin on the old monkey-at-the-typewriter argument by insisting that a monkey could type out a line from Shakespeare in fairly short order: each time the monkey accidentally hits a correct character it gets locked in, while all the incorrect characters are immediately erased. Thus the monkey, completely unaware of what it is accomplishing, never has to start over from scratch—the process itself is self-improving. It retains correct characters, discards those that are incorrect, and, after sufficient iterations, produces a fully coherent sentence.
But for a monkey to do this, its typewriter would have to be programmed, and who or what is the programmer? Dawkins assigns that role to natural selection. So on the one hand natural selection is blind and mindless, and on the other it is teleological. This is a contradiction that goes back to Darwin's personification of natural selection
Lol.
The facile monkey analogy has been long decimated by other competent critics, including Michael Denten, David Foster, Fred Hoyle, and a number of others (indeed, it was the inconceivable mathematical improbabilities associated with such claims, and the existence of the cosmic constants etc. that provoked Eddington, Whitehead, and Jeans to conserve evolutionary theory but abandon it as a self contained explanation of ultimate origins. The universe is a great thought, as Jeans said, not a great machine.
The face of sin today often wears the mask of tolerance.