Another Video with Paulogia, Up to &t=634s

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Another Video with Paulogia, Up to &t=634s · Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : The Answer I Tried to Add

Final Nail to Apostle Martyrs? (Sean McDowell vs Paulogia)
4th June 2020 | Paulogia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CHV6dXZRUc

As usually, commenting after noting time signatures to where in the video the comments fit.

5:15 Actually, Acts 6 through 7. The Deacon and Proto-Martyr Stephen. Acts 8, but not 9 deals with another of the seven first Deacons, who is actually already briefly mention in chapter 6.

Now, that kind of momentary "my brain just fucked up and this is all I remember" is by one who has read the things pretty accurately.

I'll not question your credentials bc you confused two James'.

5:44 I think there may have been some debate on whether James the Son of Alphaeus was in fact the cousin, hence "brother" of Jesus.

7:07 "the person who makes the claim on any side, bears the burden of proof to see if we should trust this testimony"

Disagree. It is dismissing a testimony that takes a burden of proof, not accepting it.

Now, we should be aware testimonies have different dignities, like whether one has seen it oneself or speaks from a "vulgate" (I think the word is so used) but even a vulgate from back then beats a dismissing of that vulgate done now without good proof counter to it.

Otherwise, one could never establish any history, since the credibility of a testimony would be established by other testimonies which equally we cannot cross examine orally, but have to take as a text from back then with a credibility yet to be established.

I know this approach will get results that seem counterintuitive to some, like accepting lots of stories from the corpus globally referred to as "pagan myth". This the Church Fathers also did, like the one who dismissed Perseus and Andromeda being taken up to the stars as a lie of the devil, but left the rest of their story untouched, I think it was St. Justin Martyr, or St. Augustine opening De Civitate by giving what appears to be complete credence to Aeneas picking up the statue of Athena to save it from burning Troy. His point thereon being, Athena didn't really help her devotees in Troy that much. Or someone (not sure whether St. Justin or Lactantius or some) who said "Hercules was a strong man, but not a god" (last words also readable as "but not God" since Latin lacks definite article).

8:43 Yes, a very good point. I take the Bible as a historical source for Resurrection happening. I also take the Mahabharata as historical source for Krishna dying. However, for Krishna being received as supreme god by spirits up in heaven, Mahabharata is not a historical source, since Mahabharata put this "fact" into the dream of a poet, perhaps Vyasa.

Nevertheless, let's not forget the Mahabharata can't have been written down until sth like 5th C BC, and unlikely even then. And its action, according to Kali Yuga, is set in a time span including 3102 BC. So, I don't quite as much accept Mahabharata as historical as I do it with the Gospels. Nevertheless, the parts where I dismiss it as unhistorical are not its theophanies - the devil could do that, for that matter God could have done some and the memory of it could have been distorted among non-Hebrews. Where I dismiss it as unhistorical is where it conflicts with what I take as a better source, for theological reasons, namely early chapters of Genesis.

Kauru and Pandu had an ancestor "Bharat" who was both a city founder and received into heaven ...? Ah, wait, one Henoch was city namer when his father Cain founded a city, and another Henoch was received into heaven.

Pandavas were wood hermits, living a hunter-gatherer life? Wait, Jabal was father of such as rear livestock and live in tents ... as we know from Abel, he didn't invent pastoralism, but it seems he or his sons, presumably identifiable as Pandavas, invented the combination of pastoralism with nomadism.

If I were a Hindoo, I would arguably instead try to fit Genesis 4 and 5 into Mahabharata frame. But from what is supposed to have happened in Mahabharata, one can argue this fits very nicely with Genesis 6:5. And God seeing that the wickedness of men was great on the earth, and that all the thought of their heart was bent upon evil at all times - sound pretty close to a war in which "finally the deeds of the good men could no longer be distinguished from those of the bad men" (as I recall a recounting of Mahabharata / Peter Brook).

Now, obviously, Acts and Gospels are way closer to their events than either Mahabharata or even Moses to 3102 BC. It would take even stronger reasons to dismiss even partially their historicity.

9:19 Historians want to match up claims in one source with external sources.

Want to is ambiguous. If you mean would like, I agree. If you mean need to, no, that is not consistently applied. We have no external source for Julius Caesar "building" (i e ordering his men to build) a bridge of wood over Lake Geneva (Bellum Gallicum, book I). Yet no one doubts it.

9:37 "a discreet claim in the Bible, that doesn't correspond to any external source"

The problem is, most claims in most books that most agree to take as historical aren't, when we go this far back. Partly, because the culture was less written than ours is, partly because much more of the writings from then are lost.

10:17 [Sean] "I am not sure at all we can tell where history ends and where legend begins"

The test is not Thomas Gospel being later, though that is part of its problem. The test is, the Gospels are part of the auto-documentation of a community we later came to call the Catholic Church, which credibly traces its origins back to Jesus (in much more detail than one could trace re-tellings of the Mahabharata story). The Thomas Gospel simply doesn't fit that community, cannot be attached to any community with better claims, was rejected very explicitly by that community.

The problem isn't "legend" but forgery by a momentary rival sect to Catholicism.

10:21 Yes, I have seen this diagram.

It doesn't correspond to any historical testimony about when the books in question were written, it corresponds to a reconstruction, made with the actual purpose of assigning as much of the historical visible facts as would imply the supernatural to sources as late as possible and as contaminated as possible with "later legendary accretions".

Historical testimony says Matthew wrote the first Gospel and at first in "Hebrew" (which may have meant Aramaic).

It also says, St. John wrote the Gospel as last survivor of Apostles, c. AD 100, while St. Peter had written his letters before he died under Nero. Those who accept the Infancy Gospel of St. James as genuine assign it to being a common source both to Matthew and to Luke, each of which cite different parts of it, therefore very early.

(at 11:30, sth)
I tried to answer a very pertinent question, and my answer was taken down for some reason ... ?

I am not sure I'd attribute to you same kind of intellectual integrity you do to Sean McDowell.

[next day: I actually did manage to copy from the post and then post the comment, and am now commenting on, from 15:11 on, which will make a new post.]