Thus saith the Evan Part 2

Evan has graced me with a reply. Let's take a look:

The triablogger who got this assignment was some dude named Genembridges, (I'll call him Gene).

Sorry, Steve doesn't hand out assignments. I chose you because yours was begging to be rebutted.

He quotes my points and agrees with them mostly.

Wrong. Evan suffers from a chronic case of reading incomprehension.

I agreed with 2, let one slide, and disagreed with the rest.

As to my research, I believe I've given evidence for most of my assertions. I looked and looked for Gene's but couldn't find once where he showed the 1st century Palestinian Christians believed in:

1. The virgin birth.
2. The trinity.
3. The bodily resurrection of Christ.

Then he makes a huge digression that asserts that somehow the Acts of the Apostles is accurate history.

I quoted Acts itself. If you think that this text is inaccurate, then you need to argue it, not assert it.

In my opinion and in the opinion of large numbers of believing Christians, Acts is a second century document.

"Large numbers" is an argument by popularity. Well, in that case larger numbers of believing Christians have believed it is from the First Century, Evan. That's the majority opinion. There are those who date it prior to or near 62 AD, those who date it btw. 70 and 80/90ish, and those who date it in the 2nd century. Tyson, your own source indicates that the majority think it is to be dated in the First Century. Pay attention to what he actually writes.

To say what Paul/Saul did or did not do on the basis of Acts is as likely to be accurate as saying what Jesus did or did not do on the basis of Luke alone.

Acts records something about "the Nazarenes." It is up to Evan to argue it is to be dismissed, not merely assert it.

To say that Evan is likely to have taken a graduate level course in Luke or Intro to New Testament at the graduate level is likely to be as accurate as saying Evan is a Christian.

Notice that Evan treats Iranaeus, etc. as giving accurate information, but not Luke. Why is that? Why are these sources more accurate compared to Luke? More on that below.

In other words, this is an assertion, not an argument. Once again, if Evan thinks that the text I quoted is inaccurate, he needs to argue it, not assert it.

I refer Gene to a book by Joseph B. Tyson, "Marcion and Luke-Acts" where the date of Luke-Acts is given as 120-125 CE.

I am aware of Tyson's position. I am also aware that he's resuscitating Knox.

1. This merely begs the question.

2. It's an argument from authority. Okay, two can play at that. I refer Evan to New Testament Introduction by Donald Guthrie. Guthrie argues for a First Century date. Alternatively, he can email my old NT professor at SEBTS, Dr. Maurice Robinson and get a personal response. Let's let Evan deal face to face with him.

3. Tyson sees Luke as a response to the Marcionite challenge.

a. Guthrie deals with Knox, whom Tyson is basically reproducing, on pages 120-121 of his text.

b. Here's what the Society of Biblical Literature's review says:

Despite this work’s welcome invitation to revisit a debate that has significant implications for our understanding of second-century Christianity, several weaknesses should be noted. First, the attempt to reach back to the nineteenth century in order to invoke a purported German consensus concerning the relationship between Marcion’s Gospel and Luke is ill-fated because no such consensus actually existed (see my forthcoming JBL
article, “Marcion’s Gospel and Luke: The History of Research in Current Debate”). Of
course, this fact does not speak to the validity of Tyson’s arguments, yet it does indicate that this view may not claim all the “formidable scholars” to which Tyson appeals for support. Second, since Luke 1–2 and 24 contain more than half of the Lukan Sondergut absent from Marcion’s Gospel, on one level Tyson’s statistical analysis simply reveals that, if one assumes that a large amount of distinctively Lukan material was absent in Marcion’s source, then it will be seen that Marcion omitted significantly less of this material. Furthermore, the difficulty of precisely defining Marcion’s “editorial concept” is well-known, yet if the content of Luke 1–2 and 24 was added to the Gospel particularly to combat Marcionism, surely it is obvious that the chapters would also contain a tremendous amount of material offensive to Marcion. Therefore, if Marcion’s use of and omissions in Luke 3–23 are not difficult to understand and Luke 1–2 and 24, consisting almost exclusively of Lukan Sondergut, were offensive to Marcion and, as “bookends,” would be quite simple to omit, it is not entirely clear that the statistics Tyson invokes are
really able to advance the argument. Finally, and most problematically, although Tyson has avoided dating Luke-Acts to around 150 (as Knox did), he has only been able to do so by redating Marcion’s movement to early in the second century. It should be noted, however, that Hoffmann’s previous attempt to do so was subjected to devastating criticism (see especially the reviews by C. P. Bammel, JTS [1988]: 227–32; Gerhard May, TRu 51 [1986]: 405–13). Therefore, even if Tyson is right about the dating of Luke-Acts, significant doubt may still exist as to whether texts written around 120–125 could possibly already be confronted with a Marcionite threat justifying such significant literary creations.

C. Building on this I might add that now Evan has generated a new set of problems for himself by advocating Tyson's theory. Tyson's theory involves some redating. Well, Evan, when you start redating:

Steve has already dealt with this here:

I'll quote. Just sub "Luke" for "Pauline corpus"

I’d like to point out a rather obvious obstacle in the way of this redating scheme. Marcion died around 160.

So the implication is that we redate the Pauline corpus from the mid-1C to the mid-2C, give or take.

And the scheme isn’t limited to the Pauline epistles. By dating Acts to the same period, one inevitably implicates the synoptic gospels.

And that, in turn, raise the question of where to put the Fourth Gospel and 1 John. Surely one wouldn’t date the Johannine corpus to the 1C while dating the synoptic gospels to the 2C.

Now, one of the logistical problems which this redating scheme overlooks is that you can’t move most of the NT forward by a century or so while leaving all of the other dates in early church history in place. For many other individuals, movements, writings, and events are historically and/or literarily dependent on the prior existence and influence of the NT.

Therefore, if you push the NT forward by a hundred years, that is going to have a domino effect on any number of other dates. It affects the dating of everyone and everything that quotes or cites or alludes to the NT. Manuscripts. Church fathers. Heretics. NT apocrypha. Local synods. And so on and so forth.

Relative chronology is a web of synchronies involving younger and older contemporaries, as well as diachronic relations involving predecessors and successors. It also involves a sequential chain of prior, simultaneous, and posterior events.

So the chronology of the NT is not a self-contained question. It spills over into the chronology of the early church. And that, in turn, spills over into the chronology of the Roman Empire. You can’t make a radical, but discrete change in the dating of most all of the NT while leaving all the other dates intact.

To upwardly revise the date of the NT by a hundred years or so would necessitate a corresponding and complete readjustment in all of the other dates in early church history and Roman history which are impacted by that revision.

And at the risk of stating the obvious, these dates were not arrived at on dogmatic grounds. Modern scholars of Roman history are not dating events to accommodate a theological agenda.

So, Evan can make claims about the late dating of Luke all he wants, but now he has a bigger problem on his hands.

So much for dating Luke in the 2nd century.

He then quotes from Epiphanius to state that at one point all Christians were called Nazarenes. This seems perfect for my theory.

Except, of course, that's not what Evan said. Evan is now changing his argument. This is an admission that his first one failed. What Epiphanius actually does is draw a distinction between the Nazarenes of old and the Ebionites of his own day.

If there was no real Jesus, then the way to retroject the Greek gospels onto Palestine would be to take the Pauline Jesus Christ and turn him into the quasi-historical Jesus of history.

An assertion, not an argument. Notice that now, Evan is trying to back up a bad theory with another bad theory. In addition, the Nazarenes accepted Paul but they used Matthew's Gospel. So now Evan needs to explain how Matthew is representative of "the Pauline Jesus Christ" and a "Greek Gospel." Matthew and "Greek Gospel" don't exactly go hand-in-hand. It would be easier, one would think, to link Luke with Paul and therefore "the Pauline Jesus Christ." ...but the Nazarenes are connected to Matthew, not Luke. Evan is theorizing himself into a web from which it will be ever more difficult to extricate himself. Jesus didn't exist, but there were (see below) Christians who called themselves Nazarenes before, so the Fathers and Apologists (because, as we all know in the Subapostolic period, they were all colluding together and trying to rise to power like the Mafia today), colluded together to do this:

But then you're left with a problem. What about all those Christians who called themselves Nazarenes before. What do you do about them?

Perfect solution. Name your quasi-historical Jesus "Jesus of NAZARETH". Thus you explain the odd name that used to describe all Christians but now is only applied to Jewish Christians.

Or Jesus really existed, as the majority of scholars affirm. Those who later followed him were called that name, because Jesus was called a Nazarene. Which of these actually fits the available evidence?

Evan's theorizing grows ever more absurd. Where's the documentation for this theory?

In addition, "Nazoraean" could not be derived from the word for "Nazareth." Attempting to derive Nazoraean from Nazareth isn't linguistically defensible. Indeed, Evan's "theory" doesn't stack up to modern scholarship on the origin of this term, including those who hold to the view that Jesus was a Gnostic teacher:

http://books.google.com/books?id=GoWhptP_up0C&pg=PA134&lpg=PA134&dq=Nazarenes+Nazareth&source=web&ots=A1U26ZrPXn&sig=u4XAaR_ssAnKgrONjnVhngSjmtc&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=6&ct=result#PPA135,M1

Indeed, even Wikipedia (and you know how much we think of Wiki's here notes this by quoting Baur's lexicon:

Nazoraean, Nazarene, quite predominantly a designation of Jesus, in Mt, J, Ac and Lk 18:37, while Mk has Ναζαρηνός ("coming from Nazareth"). Of the two places where the later form occurs in Lk, the one, Lk 4:34, apparently comes from Mk (1:24), the other, 24:19, perhaps from a special source. Where the author of Lk-Ac writes without influence from another source he uses Ναζωραῖος. Mt says expressly 2:23 that Jesus was so called because he grew up in Nazareth. In addition, the other NT writers who call Jesus Ναζωραῖος know Nazareth as his home. But linguistically the transition from Ναζαρέτ (Nazareth) to Ναζωραῖος is difficult ... and it is to be borne in mind that Ναζωραῖος meant something different before it was connected with Nazareth ... According to Ac 24:5 the Christians were so called;"

In addition to that, the term was a term of contempt given to them by the Jews of that day (Schaff), not a term that they took for themselves.

Thanks, Evan, for proving, yet again, you don't do your research. It's this sort of namby pamby theorizing that makes DC such an easy target for us here at Tblog. If you want to say this term is derived from Nazareth and a name that they took themselves, you need to actually argue for it linguistically and historically, and only then can you begin to argue for your "theory."

Further, Evan simply dismisses Luke by dating it late (without argument). In so doing, he affords himself the privlege of dodging my questions:

Evan, are you going to seriously argue that Paul would have been put on trial for not believing the doctrines that he articulates in his letters? The Ebionites of the Subapostolic period (the period from which you are getting your information on them) were a version of the Judaizers. Paul wrote against them, not in favor of them. So, if you're going to equate Nazarenes and Ebionites in the period prior to 70 AD, you've got a problem. This must be quite the conundrum for you. Was Paul put on trial for not believing that Jesus was divine, for not believing in the virgin birth, etc? Why would the Jewish leaders have a problem with Paul and say he was a leader of a sect that rejected the very things that they themselves rejected and that adhered to the same sorts of Jewish practices they accepted? Do you actually think about what you write or are your fingers autonomous with respect to your higher cortical functions?

Or, will you argue that the text is simply in error? Where is the supporting argument?

Or, will you argue that the designation "Nazarenes" at that time had come to denote what we call "orthodoxy" today and the Ebionites (as you portray them) were first? If so, then where's the documentation?

Asserted with no evidence whatsoever. I dismiss it with the same evidence....We simply have no evidence for his assertions and Gene isn't giving us any. I suppose it's possible that things are the way he describes.

Evan is a chronic liar. I quoted more than one source, including one of his own. If Evan believes the Ebionites of the 2nd century believed the same thing as those of the first, when at least one of his own sources expressly says otherwise, he needs to argue that to be the case. I engaged Evan on his own grounds. He quoted Epiphanius, Panarion 30. I quoted the same work 29. This what his very own source says. I also quoted Schaff and Berkhof and Justin. Evan never bothers to interact with them. Has Evan ever taken a Church History course? No.

As to my research, I believe I've given evidence for most of my assertions.

No, you asserted your theory and then read your sources in that light. You didn't exegete your sources, drew fallacious inferences from your sources as well. Key word: assertions.

I looked and looked for Gene's but couldn't find once where he showed the 1st century Palestinian Christians believed in:

1. The virgin birth.
2. The trinity.
3. The bodily resurrection of Christ.

I guess it's too difficult for Evan to follow an argument given his dinosaur brain. I was merely going for his root assumption that Nazarenes in the First Century = Ebionites later on. However, I further made some statements that I had hoped Evan, who loves to tell us what an astounding thinker he is, would be able to put together.

If by "the Trinity" you mean something as fully orbed as the Nicene Creed, that can't be produced. That would be anachronistic. If by the Trinity you mean the divinity of Christ, that can be produced.

Further, it is fallacious to conclude a lack of evidence, if there is one, selects for them not believing in these things. Indeed, the lack of evidence cuts both ways, yet you assert your theory. Do you even think about this sort of thing, Evan?

The evidence shows that the Nazarenes were considered orthodox and worthy of fellowship in the Subapostolic age, whereas the Ebionites were not. The evidence also shows that, over time, the Ebionites came to dominate the landscape whereas the Nazarenes of old faded away, and that it's these Ebionities that the later Fathers discussed. Evan is building a "theory" on a set of fallacious assumptions.

And notice, In his right hand: Evan is employing the Fathers, many of whom are writing in the late 2nd and into the next century for his theory. Let's stipulate that these Ebionites they describe are, indeed, the First Century version. Okay.

Yet in his left hand, he denies the historicity of the Gospels by theories of legends and accretions and late dates and legends growing up, etc. This would, then mean that all those histories from which he quotes get worse, more legendary, etc. the further from the First Century they get. Yet he treats these as accurate descriptions/histories. At the same time, he denies Luke is accurate history, even though the upper limit given in his own source is 120 AD, and the majority of NT scholars date it much earlier. Evan suffers from epistemological schizophrenia. He desperately wants to avoid Luke, because if Luke is true, at least in Acts 24, he has a huge problem (namely interacting with and explaining Paul's writings against the Judaizers while being called a Nazarene himself), but on the other he needs something to bolster his paper theory, so he takes the Fathers accurately and without argument.

Moving on...

Ephipanius describes the Ebionites of his age, and draws a distinction between them and the Nazarenes. Ephiphanius was an orthodox Christian. So, when he says that the Nazarenes were just "complete Jews," the reasonable conclusion is that they believed in the Virgin Birth, the divinity of Christ, the bodily resurrection of Christ. Ephipanius was one of those Fathers who mentioned a groups heretical beliefs. If they had denied these, it is reasonable to believe he would say so.

Justin writes earlier. Justin distinguished two sorts of Jewish Christians, those who observed the Mosaic Law but did not require its' observance of all others, and those who maintained that this observance was necessary for salvation. This fits with Luke, it also fits with Paul's letters.

Justin, in Dialogue and First Apology, defends the Virgin Birth. So, Evan, tell us if the Nazarenes denied the Virgin Birth, the Trinity, the bodily resurrection of Christ, then, pray tell, Evan, why did Justin fellowship with them at all?

But just for tickles and grins, let's take a look further:

Orr in his book on the Virgin Birth says that the Nazarenes believed in the Virgin Birth of Christ. So does Schaff. So does Origen. Indeed Origen specifically draws a distinction between those who affirmed the VB and those who didn't. In fact, the Fathers who speak of them do not indict them for not believing in the bodily resurrection or denying the Trinity-even those writing after the time of the Nicene Symbol. Jerome (Epistle 79, to Augustine) says that though the Nazarenes believed in Christ the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary, who suffered under Pontius Pilate, and rose again, desiring to be both Jews and Christians, they are neither the one nor the other.

If we take Justin, Origin, Ephiphanius, etc. together, then we see that, yes, the Nazarenes did, in fact, affirm the VB, the divinity of Christ, and the bodily resurrection, or else they would have been indicted for their rejection of it, for the Ebionites are so indicted.

It would do Evan well to simply try and put this information together, but because he's either too stupid or too blind (or both) he doesn't bother.

Gene's a nice guy and mostly he has an easygoing manner, but it wouldn't be a Triablogue post without a little ad hominem, this is probably something the bigwigs at Triablogue demand of all posts, so I think he is just checking off a box here.

No, Evan, we don't "check off boxes" here. I don't post on assignment. I genuinely believe you are incompetent, second or third rate, and have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. I also think Loftus should drop you from DC for his own good, and I think you are way, way out of your league. Indeed, I think you don't think much at all. I assure you, Evan, my opinion of you is quite low, and this is my fully independent opinion, shaped by nothing more than the utter and complete ineptitude of what you write. You'll find I'm as thoroughly disagreeable and irascible as Steve. I play for keeps. I'm just a Southerner. I therefore write in the Southern dialect. We can tell you off and seduce you in the same sentence and you'll never know the difference.

Gene reminds me of a lot of my Christian friends and I'm hoping he keeps doing his research, since he'll figure this all out at some point.

Evan reminds me of a lot of my atheist friends, unthinking, irrational, and willing to assert and theorize to fit his pet theories. I'm hoping he keeps doing his reseach, but it will only be by the grace of God that he figures it out.