Posted: Jul 23, 2013 9:57 pm
spin wrote:
There's a vague excuse with the eating the body in that Jesus is attributed with inaugurating it, but there isn't even that excuse with baptism.
You are confusing the myth attached to the ritual with the origin of the ritual. We know quite well the symbolic/spiritual reasons for both rites. Paul explained baptism in the most explicit terms.
spin wrote:
Isaiah 40 has nothing to do with water and Scrogg & Groff's article is quite a butterfly effort that floats over all sorts of things including the young man who ran away naked and the young man in the tomb without justifying much of what is said in the article.
Isaiah 43 -- part and parcel of the passages Mark is engaged with intertextually -- has the ideal Israel come through water and fire. I'm overwhelmed by your searing intellectual demolition of the Scrogg and Groff argument. I can't argue with that sort of grappling with the evidence. . . . .vridar.org/2011/10/02/that-mysterious-young-man-in-the-gospel-of-mark/
spin wrote:
What indicates that Jesus material precedes Paul?
I thought you knew your Paul better than this. Paul makes no reference to any earlier material at all?
spin wrote:
He is certainly "stroppy" about people, such as those from Jerusalem, who want to include torah observance in believers' activities. Jesus has supposedly abolished torah observance and Jerusalem, ostensibly the rump of Jesus's disciples, is still advocating circumcision and ritual purity regarding food. That doesn't smell to you that Paul got it right when the Jerusalemites didn't? The fellow who didn't receive the teaching when Jesus was on earth knew better than the disciples.
Where's the actual evidence in Gal that there were any pre-Pauline Jesus believers?
You are resorting to rhetorical questions to paper over weaknesses in your argument here.
spin wrote:
Where is the, umm, baptism? The word comes from the verb "to dip". There needs to be a clear forerunner to the idea of baptism.
I'm not interested in silly, umm, retorts, quips and arbitrary conditionals that substitute for serious addressing of the evidence at hand.
spin wrote:Here's another interesting thing. It is John the Baptist who gets the Elijah material pinned to him. Jesus gets the Elisha stuff. How come John gets to wear the Elijah suit? Mal 4:5 tells us Elijah comes before the great and dreadful day of the lord, ie the eschaton. This is consistent with the gospel presentation of John, predicting the eschaton. There is no room in this for a recon mission by Jesus.
I thought you were more widely read on all that has been studied in relation to this. You seem to be unaware of the way ancient authors drew upon and adapted their literary sources. This is a topic all of its own starting from the basics.
. . . .
I'm bored with this conversation. You are trying to make a case that rationalizes absence of explicit evidence for your case and then just blithely say I don't have any evidence because I don't manage to present the entire argument at the precise moment you say you want it. The sources and evidence I refer to are there all there for everyone to read -- but so many people read into them what is simply not there.
You keep reading the gospels as if they are records of historical events. You will have to justify that assumption before we continue any discussion.
Your arguments, rhetorical questions, question begging -- it's all grounded in so much assumption that I cannot take for granted as easily as you do.
If you want to discuss one specific point then single it out and discuss that. I have no interest in trying to continue addressing a dozen different points in a long-winded post when each exchange only brings up such stark and fundamental differences that there is no common ground for a serious discussion. Those assumptions and methodologies need to be cleared first.