I Was Challenged to See More Dan McClellan ...

Two Answers to Dan McClellan · I Was Challenged to See More Dan McClellan ...

He's as bad here as in the other videos.

There are no eyewitness accounts of Jesus in the New Testament
Dan McClellan | 7 Febr. 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsCJsfXE_5Q

0:15 Traditional authorship only secondarily assigned ...

How come 99 % or so of Classical texts, the scholars agree with Traditionally assigned authorships?

If books in the BC / AD turn of millennium were not published by contract with printers who still exist today and whose contracts we can consult for verification, how do you figure authorships should be decided? Well, traditional authorship assignment would be one big clue.

What exact data do you pretend trump this one when it comes to the four Gospels?

0:25 Sorry, but state of the field is a concept that basically presupposes that your own academia department (as in the ones it acknowledges) has done a good job so far.

To some academics, "state of the field" / "status questionis" is a default which cannot be bypassed, except by very good argument.

In a case like this, my very good argument is, your state of the field has been produced by bad arguments.

The real default is, traditional authorship assignment.

Curious

@curious968

Not if you use a critical method of history.

If you 'just want to believe" it's a nice default. If you want to do scholarship, you recognize it as secondary and tertiary sources. Not dishonest, necessarily, but not inherently reliable because it is farther removed from the original.

What happened was that when the Bible was treated the same way as Homer or any other ancient source, a lot of things came unraveled.

The defense, to the extent there is one, is to simply believe "tradition". Despite being an unreliable "default" anyplace else we looked.

Secondary and tertiary sources can be truthful, but they have to be cross-checked and sifted because it was so easy, especially in ancient times with no real understanding of how to record history, for such sources to get it wrong.

Hans Georg Lundahl

@hglundahl

@curious968 I can't see exactly where you found proof tradition was:
1) very unreliable
2) so unreliable it couldn't be a default.

Your "critical" view of history certainly works for doing history of the 19th C. AD, but hardly 19th C. BC, nor even for most of the centuries inbetween.

In the absence of primary sources, go to secondary ones.

But if the secondary sources identify sth as a primary source, you'd be stupid not to take it as that unless you have a very good and clear case for the opposite.

Which Dan McClellan simply does not have.

@curious968 "when the Bible was treated the same way as Homer or any other ancient source, a lot of things came unraveled."

There are very different ways of treating Homer, as well as the Bible.

When it comes to Caesar, which is an ancient sources, roughly contemporary to the Gospels (i e about a century older), the four Gospels hold very well in comparison.

@curious968 "because it was so easy, especially in ancient times with no real understanding of how to record history, for such sources to get it wrong."

You are simply both disingenious and colonially supercilious. Prejudiced.

0:34 "does not turn up a single first person claim of being an eyewitness"

Conspicuously, the very clear claim of dealing with an eyewitness in John's Crucifixion account is a third person one. We know he speaks the truth etc.

If that's supposed to be an argument, how come Caesar's Gallic war and Caesar's Civil war, both considered as by Caesar, except for book VIII of Gallic War, are considered genuine, even if Julius didn't litter them with affidavits of being indeed the Caesar he was speaking of.

The "status of the field" in your version of Biblical scholarship (there is also a very much more conservative and non-Prussian version!) basically ignores the basics in other but clearly comparable fields. You are a narrow specialist, you think your questions are very profound, and a glance across the hedge to the next field would have given you a very simple answer.

You are hailed like "the voice of good research" by people who very clearly want to believe there is no reason to believe the Bible. But you find it superfluous to make your case to a Latinist who knows sth about Classic texts from an adjacent century.

1:05 "We" is obviously the Church where St. John the Gospeller currently was. Probably Ephesus.

Minimally, the "we" passages extend over John 19:35 and John 21:24. Maximally the latter extends John 21:21—25. Or 21:23—24.

In other words, we are very far away from a collective writing with only a spare nod on two occasions to the witness they relied on.

1:21 Why would it have to have been "added later"?

An obvious possibility is, for the Crucifixion and the Resurrection + accounts, he borrowed the pen to people who could illico insert the "we" passages. Simply because these were very important.

1:49 You fail to argue for important editorial changes (except the question begging argument on the "we" passages).

That early patristic authors quoted anonymously is compatible with ignorance of authorship, but also with huge familiarity with the four Gospels and their authors, so the ones written to would be counted on to know.

2:06 The Gospel of Matthew is very clearly sayings with context. In an edition where God's own words are marked as red, 56 % or so of Matthew would be in red. I checked.

You don't expect it, there is so much action you expect the sayings to be a quarter, but they are in fact more than half.

2:12 "Wasn't originally written in Hebrew"

A k a the only available translators that they would have to Greek were sticking so word for word that it would have shown if it had been Hebrew, like my Latin translations to Swedish, English or French.

2:28 Mark may have agreed with the broad narrative order, but Papias may have concentrated on a detail, or he could even have presumed, falsely, that there was only one cleansing in the temple, and where that one was, he knew from John.

Curious

Wait, you think the Jewish authorities allowed their affairs to be repeatedly (from their perspective) vandalized by some itinerant preacher?

Who is making the stronger assumption here?

Hans Georg Lundahl

@curious968 Both times it was a one day disruption, and both times, it was motivated by an appeal to OT Scripture about the function of the temple.

The first time, they wanted to test Him, but obviously were disingenious about it.

The second time, they clearly didn't allow it, but revenged themselves by the Crucifixion a few days later.

2:44 Your bias is clear, in the "simply does not line up"

3:00 You are being very imprecise about what Papias said that "nobody" takes seriously.

Could you mean "no Protestant"?

3:26 What if it follows from the logic of St. Irenaeus, as best as he could, simply transmitted a correct tradition?

Fr. Jean Colson has argued, he mixed up the Beloved with the Son of Zebedee, since he left Asia Minor at 16.

We have no indication he mixed anything else up.

4:07 Your guesswork about the traditional authorship assignments being late guesswork, is, as I just said, guesswork.