Don is making stuff up again (see recent comments) and passing it off as fact. I’m not going to respond to all of his nonsense – I have a life to live – but here are some basic refutations:
Don: ‘Did Jesus rise from the dead? The whole reason for the church, which exists to this day and which can trace its history back to the early 1st century, rests on that. It is the consequence that confirms the real history of the event.’
No. He didn’t. If he had done, all the things he and Paul promised would happen as a result would have happened, and two thousand years ago at that. https://rejectingjesus.com/2022/08/09/if-the-resurrection-had-really-happened/
This is irrefutable evidence he did not rise from the dead. It also puts the lie to those other supposedly fulfilled prophesies you reference. But we’ve been down this road before, Don. I suggest you go back and read the refutations of your claims that others provided then. https://rejectingjesus.com/2022/07/24/more-on-prophecy/
Don: ‘It is possible that Mark and Luke met in Rome; they were there at approx. the same time.’
And it is more likely they did not. In any case ‘possible’ is not ‘probable’, and absolutely not ‘certain’. This is all invented conjecture on your part.
Don: ‘Luke may have been the proofreader for Mark’s manuscript, who knows.’
Certainly not you. This is more fantasy. There is no evidence of it happening. In my thirty years of reading round this kind of thing this is the first time I’ve encountered the suggestion. That’s because you made it up. Next you’ll be telling us they were drinking buddies who invented the printing press together.
Don: ‘Most significant, at best Mark/Peter only supplied a small portion of Luke.’
According to Bible.org about 88% of Mark is in Luke. That’s hardly ‘a small portion.’
Don: ‘You will find few pericopes that are word for word the same.’
According to the same a source, much of the plagiarised material is verbatim.
https://bible.org/article/synoptic-problem
Don: ‘In any case all the Gospels call Jesus the Son of God.’
These are faith statements, not historical facts. They’re evidence that that is how the writers of the gospels – who were not eyewitnesses – and early converts saw him. Significantly, the synoptic gospels don’t make Jesus claim the title for himself. In any case, and as you know, the world back then was awash with sons of God. It didn’t mean every claimant was the real progeny of a deity. However much you want him to be, your man is no exception.
None of what you write, Don, is evidence of God, which is supposedly what you’re providing. That some in the first century claimed someone they never met was divine in some way is not evidence that God exists. Believe in him all you like but don’t think that that belief and the spiritual experiences it gives rise to in your own head are evidence. They are not.
rejectingjesus, 
It isn’t just Don. EVERY Christian makes claims about what the bible really means/says. In fact, there are multitudes of deciphering experts, which makes it very convenient for believers to pick and choose which version makes sense to them.
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Neil: (Don: ‘Most significant, at best Mark/Peter only supplied a small portion of Luke.’)
According to Bible.org about 88% of Mark is in Luke. That’s hardly ‘a small portion.’
This is an intentional game you play. (Ehrman also on the subject of variations in the text) I said that most of Luke is not derived from Mark. You said that 88% of Mark is found in Luke. Thos are two different observations.
But there is more to it that that. What do you mean by Mark being found in Luke?
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Okay. To put it another way, 45% of Luke is lifted from Mark. 45% is not a ‘small portion’. 23% is probably taken from Matthew and the remaining 35% is either from an (unreliable) oral tradition or is stuff Luke just made up (like his nativity story). https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/tags/synoptic-problem/info
What do I mean by Mark being found in Matthew? I mean 88% of Mark’s gospel had been plagiarised by Luke and plonked into his own gospel.
Your comment is edited; I cut the rest of your very long essay addressing points raised on the website I linked to. Stick to the point.
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You are using a very rough measure of plagiarizing – or even dependence. With respect to Dr. Wallace, I find my own analysis points more toward the author Wallace referenced but did not consider, Bo Reicke. He argued for an earlier source for both Mark and Luke in the oral gospel.
If you care, I did a brief analysis comparing Mark and Luke https://biblicalmusing.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-synoptic-problem.html
The most interesting similarity between all the synoptics is the words of Jesus. They differ in style from the characteristic syntax of all three synoptic writers. This translator is careful to include Hebrew idioms and syntax that would have been expected of an Aramaic speaker. But they are also smoother Greek than Peter, the source of most of Mark’s Gospel, and they differ in style from anything Luke himself wrote. They are clearly translations done by a capable Hebrew and Greek speaker. The one person known in history and evidenced in the New Testament having that ability is Matthew.
Matthew, or the author of Matthew, was very capable in both languages. In any event, whoever did the translations did them prior to the writing of any of the Gospel writers. That might fit the Matthew that Papias reported wrote the first gospel.
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The ‘rough’ definition of plagiarism I’m using is the same as Oxford University’s:
“Presenting work or ideas from another source as your own, with or without consent of the original author, by incorporating it into your work without full acknowledgement.” https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/guidance/skills/plagiarism
We might say as far as those biblical plagiarists Matthew and Luke are concerned, without any acknowledgement.
I fully acknowledge you know better than Oxford University, every dictionary in existence and me. This enables you to redefine the term (your ‘own analysis’) to let your plagiarist pals off the hook. It’s a poor standard to apply nonetheless.
And nope, not interested in your ‘brief analysis’ (I’ll bet) of Matthew and Luke. We all know what your conclusion will be without reading anything you’ve written: ‘God dunnit’.
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Well, my VERY brief analysis is that ALL the Gospel writers owe the material they used in the Gospels to the prior oral gospel and perhaps to the collection of saying found in brief written sources such as Q. I think even the order of the narrative for the synoptics is found in the earlier source of the oral gospel – which Mark incorporated without embarrassment when he transcribed Peter’s oral gospel spoken to the church in Rome when he and Peter where there. It was after all not the creation of any one person but the collected memories of the Apostles.
If you are worried I may be making this up, this was the conviction of the early church expressed by Papias and preserved by the church in Alexandria, which Mark founded, and recorded by Clement of Alexandria, an early bishop of the church, and preserved by the Coptic church today.
My analysis of the text merely confirms that by isolating the part of Mark that is Peter’s – not too difficult because Peter’s language is considerably different from Mark’s. In short, Peter contributed the majority of the first fourteen chapters,
The words of Jesus are an exception. They were translated sometime earlier by someone who had a good command of both Aramaic and Greek – definitely not Peter – and was a personal hearer of Jesus. My guess is Matthew. Papias said that he wrote the first gospel which was the logia (sayings) of Jesus in Hebrew.
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It’s all conjecture, Don. You’ve no evidence for your thesis. I address some of your claims in today’s post and will look at others in the next.
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Don:
“The one person known in history and evidenced in the New Testament having that ability is Matthew.”
What a statement…”the one person known in history”.
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Name another who had the ability, the opportunity, and the motive. No one other than Matthew shows up in history. That is not to say that it was definitely Matthew, though Papias does say that Matthew wrote the logia of the Lord in Hebrew before Mark wrote his Gospel. Mark too had the ability in languages, But he was not there to hear Jesus. Barnabas probably had the ability, but he too was not there to hear Jesus. Either might have translated an existing Hebrew logia into Greek, but Matthew still remains the best bet. But, your guess is….?
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Don:
“your guess is….?”
My guess is some anonymous people, over time, wrote some crazy, superstitious writings about their understanding of some god thingy, trying to explain the craziness of their lives, and now in the 21st century, you’re trying to adapt those writings to our modern world.
And this is the reason you’re bringing in Steven Hawking of all people, to say, “see, this craziness might have an explanation…the multiverse!”
Now, you’re denying the very words of jesus to say that he never promised to answer prayer.
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Don’s recent appeal to Stephen Hawking is a prime example of Don’s loose grasp of reality.
I took the time to watch the video of Hawking that Don linked as his “evidence.”
Don insisted Hawking’s imaginary time is a dimension of space.
Hawking was clear that it would be an dimension of time.
Don insisted Hawking’s imaginary time is a dimension of space outside our Universe.
Hawking was clear that his imaginary time is a dimension of our Universe, it began at the Big Bang just like our existed 4 dimensions of spacetime.
Don used a science fiction notion of “dimension” saying God could move in and out of it at will or “our dimension” and “God’s dimension” could intersect.
Hawking was clear that it would be an dimension of our Universe. As such we’d all be in it all the time just as we are in the 4 known dimensions of spacetime.
There were more I can’t remember at the moment and I’m not going to wade through Don’s driveling posts to find them.
But Don completely misses the entire content of the video he recommended.
I don’t know if this is because Don is a pathological liar, simply out of his depth when discussing the fundamentals of the Universe, or just delusional. Maybe it’s some combination of the three. But it’s clear from this and every other interaction I’ve had with him, he’s just not competent to discuss any topic that’s ever come up.
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Here’s a quote from Don from one of the links Neil provided:
“Why is it not possible for people to see immaterial things? We see with the mind as much or more than with then eyes. If the mind can conceive of immaterial things we can see them. Often skeptics declare that what Paul saw was a hallucination. If so, he saw something that was not material. We all dream. When we do we see things that are not material. If there are immaterial beings such as spirits, why would it not be possible to see them?”
As we know, seeing something in the mind isn’t “seeing” in reality…we are “imagining” something in our minds, such as a unicorn, or elves.
I think Don admits he is delusional.
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I don’t think he watches the videos he links…they’re obviously NOT the proofs he insists they are…when I showed him one of the papers by Hawking that completely refutes his point, he just ignored it.
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Once Don was holding up a Ugaritic text as proof (yes Proof!) of his God in ancient Syria. It was purported to be a prayer to a single god. I say purported because the consensus among qualified scholars in the field was that the proposed translation was false.
But Don had locked on to a Christian scholar working outside his field and the translation he offered. That translation was a generic prayer to an unnamed god. But Don insisted that it was a prayer to Elohim and thus Yahweh and showed there was a monotheistic Yahweh sect in Syria.
He gave me some reading to do, a chapter from some book I don’t remember. I read it carefully. Twice. But that chapter specifically said that this prayer shouldn’t be taken to represent monotheism. But Don knew better than even this rogue scholar. Don saw his god in this prayer therefore the prayer ABSOLUTELY WAS to his god.
Don’s “reasoning” has only one goal – prove his god. As such it is completely dishonest.
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“May have been.” “Possible.” Who knows?”
Sounds like an Ancient Aliens episode. Exactly like an AA episode, start with a few historical facts, then slip in the maybe’s, the perhaps’es, the might have beens, the could have beens, and the is it possible’s?
I hear that crap from the other room and my head wants to explode.
But dumbasses don’t seem to notice. Judging by how many seasons of that bullshit show there are now, there’s a lot of dumbasses.
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SD, people love to use their imagination! (I don’t think I need to elaborate.) Of course the problem arises when they start thinking the things they imagine are REAL!
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Exactly. nothing wrong with imagination, a lot of good thing come from there.
But to spin imaginative thought into some bizzare reality, and attempt to convince others it is (or might be,) real, ought to be punishable by a good cussing, while simultaneously being flogged with a smelly hat. Then both incidents posted on youtube for the rest of us to laugh at.
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