Ben Shapiro's Hypocrisy Was Astonishing Tonight At Rudder

8,369 Views | 148 Replies | Last: 1 yr ago by Aggrad08
Sapper Redux
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Zobel said:

It really seems like you're struggling with the concept of argument from silence.

Also can you please tell me the portion of the Didache which you think would make a claim about titles or authorship?

Here:
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0714.htm

Which chapter?


Seems like you have trouble admitting there is nothing before 180 to support your claims, even in documents quoting from gospels.
Zobel
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AG
I think the problem is there are real academic discussions and then there are message board or blog post discussions and they get conflated. Arguments get condensed down into over simplified junk.

The other issue is the problem of history masquerading as demonstrable science. We can't prove this, we can only speculate. So in the end, you have facts from evidence and then your have explanatory framework - but those aren't the same. People run too far with explanations as settled facts when they simply aren't.

To the point of your post on John - one result of Protestant extreme reliance on the text that you end up with woodenly literal necessity of person x wrote y. The problem is, as I have said, ancient history rarely worked this way. It can be that the gospel according to Mark is from Mark even if what we have today wasn't penned by Mark. And it can also be from Peter. It can be that the Apocalypse of John is truly of John, even if it was written by Prochorus, just as Romans is truly of Paul though written by Tertius. So when we talk about what it means to say so and so wrote x or so and so is the author of x you have to be very specific. People with motivated reasoning often steamroll past these points because they make their theories much more complicated and less compelling because of lack of evidence.
nortex97
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AG
Yeah that is all fair, imho.

Really, it is not 'settled science' a la general relativity, but more along the line for a message board (here) discussing something akin to theoretical physics which is a topic that...takes a lot of study/depth/agreement to really even agree as to a postulate/theory.

In sum, I don't really know who the authors of John are/were, and I should refrain from making a post here that implies I do have such certainty/knowledge. It's still fun to read about though, and I have my favorite pet theories/ideas today, even if some/many think they are ill informed/stupid yada yada yada...
Zobel
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AG
Sure - and to be clear I would go as far as to say, if we take the theory you posted previously about the Gospel according to St John and other Johannine writings as being the products of a Johannine "school" as true, I would say that the attribution of those works to St John is historically correct. It is also consistent with other areas - for example, in art it is incredibly common in history for attribution to be given to individuals for works which are not theirs. Take for example, Van Dyck explicitly only painting the hands and face of portraits, or in modern times Warhol using many employees to execute his work, sometimes with little or no direct involvement of his in actual production. Or perhaps more on point, much of Aristotle's work may not strictly be his, or may be his only in the way described in your post about John.
Jabin
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Zobel, you and I might disagree with each other on many things inside of Christianity, but you are a true polymath which I respect and admire greatly.
Zobel
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AG
Thanks, I have never been called that before. Maybe I'll put it on my business cards.
Jabin
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Zobel said:

Thanks, I have never been called that before. Maybe I'll put it on my business cards.
Maybe a lot of your fellow engineers will assume that it means that you're really good at math!
jkag89
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Jabin said:

Zobel said:

Thanks, I have never been called that before. Maybe I'll put it on my business cards.
Maybe a lot of your fellow engineers will assume that it means that you're really good at math!
C'mon, it is just your polite way of calling Zobel a know it all.
Aggrad08
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AG
Zobel said:

Quote:

And given we know the answers to none of these things, seems we should also question the basic authorship claim as well.

This is where you lose me. When we have universal consensus in antiquity, which is not a given by any means, it seems that you need to find reasons to dismiss that consensus rather than default to the position of questioning it.
But I don't. There is no default position no assumption that the fathers were wrong, and that's my point, we have internal evidence of varying degrees of strength certainty and persuasion. We have external evidence of varying degrees of strength certainty and persuasion. You have been trying to dismiss modern scholarship as inconsequential. It just isn't. The evidence is quite significant in many respects. It wasn't flippantly that the external claims were largely dismissed as incorrect by academics. It was through a comparative weight of evidence and plausibility of various scenarios being true, including the scenario in which the gospels are not authored by eyewitness or people with close access.

And remember this is all under the gracious assumption of a relatively early date. Once we start talking about authorship occurring later things get even more problematic.

I see no reasonable argument by which internal evidence can be dismissed by external evidence. And even external evidence isn't all in favor of patristic tradition when we get to reviewing who was quoting what and when.


Quote:

The fact that we don't know the answer to these questions doesn't go any further than that. What I means is that there is no claim. On top of that, we don't know, so we can't say for sure.
Seems like a great reason to look at the evidence in total. I don't think anyone is saying we can claim much of anything for sure. We can only say where the preponderance of the available evidence is pointing.


Quote:

We do know without a doubt that the authorship was affirmatively claimed over and over again in unambiguous terms. Equating the two topics is an error.
I don't think they even need to be equal, if only similar. The nearest sources are still well removed more than enough to plausibly be wrong, not just about order. In fact it becomes an unreasonable position to try and come up with a coherent theory by which the early fathers were completely correct in their assertions. We need not go out of our way to dismiss anyone, we simply look at all the evidence available.
 
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