Ever the relativist. (I apparently skipped this post when I got distracted by other respondents.)
If I'm a "relativist," then it's only in a very specific way reflective of Einsteinian types of considerations about frames of reference, but in this case, applied to Historiography and Hermeneutics and Epistemology.
I don't care what "Christians" or "atheists" say. If I happen to care at all, it will be for what the experts on the topic say. If their reasoning is tainted by an ideological position then chuck 'em into the Sun.
That's good to hear.
I thought we were discussing the authorship or dating of the Bible texts, not Christianity.
We are. But remember, from my vantage point, the assessment of both the past (even the Christian past) and historical writing (such as is represented by the New Testament literature to some moderate degree) are interdisciplinary and not isolated from either the texts themselves or from the development of the essential ideas at the core of the Christian faith. It all ties together one way or another, even if not in a comprehensively coherent web.
Perhaps I did not understand your aside.
Oh, that's alright. Sometimes I'm sure I don't make myself clear and probably need to reiterate my intended meaning from time to time.
This will be as good a place as any...
You put yourself forward as scholarly and academically oriented on these and other things. You know I am a scholar in a (very) different field. When we deal with things outside of what we are studying and there is a model that best fits the existing data and provides additional explanations, we use it. Dark matter (and dark energy) as a low-interacting kind of matter fits a lot of data and provides explanations. We don't know what it is, and there are alternatives (MOND), but when doing calculations of the evolution of the Universe or galactic structure, DM is used as it is the best model of the data and leaving it out would be a bad idea. The fact that their might be a better model in the future doesn't mean it should be left out now.
Yes, I'm at least minimally aware of that issue, unfortunately what works within assessment of the hard sciences doesn't nicely translate or transfer on to the praxis by which historians evaluate the past and then 'do history.' At worst, the writing of history is a craft; at best it is a soft science, not a hard science. So, one would expect a bit more latitude with exactly how historians form their descriptive models and expect them to 'fit' nicely at all points. At most, they'll use various statistics and Bayesian modeling to support their historical constructs and explanations, whereas the hard sciences will use................other, more advanced maths. So, keep that in mind.
The "consensus" information about biblical texts falls in the same category. The c. 175 BCE date for the core of Daniel, c. 70 CE for Mark, and 50s CE for the letters of Paul are models that best fit the data as determined through years of scholarship. I'm not going to feel any "shame" using those values and I will continue to ask *why* an alternative is insisted upon. Vague claims of "but it isn't certain" doesn't fly. If you have a specific alternative and a reason, state it. Just as I'm not going to accept vague "but it isn't certain" about dark matter. If you have an alternative (like MOND) state it and why, then be prepared to discuss the consequences.
I'm not going to attempt to tackle all of these various books of the bible all at once with a long essay. Each one is its own historical set of questions and problems. All I'll say about Daniel at the moment is that its contents may be subject to more questions than what either modern linguistics or historians can address.
But where the date of the Gospel of Mark is concerned, I'm going to accentuate pretty strongly the fact that you're citing it
CIRCA 70 CE, and that necessitates that we allow that it could go a few years in either direction, not simply in the direction of "maybe later than 70 CE."
The double trouble for you here, though, is that whether the Gospel of Mark was written in 72 CE or 68 CE won't necessarily discount the possible historical nature of the Olivet Discourse "if" mark indeed drew upon his own sources that reflect oral reports or collections of Jesus' sayings from decades before in the 1st century. So, you'll have to think about that, and I'll leave you with a few ellipses................for that.
Isn't the source called "Mark"?
Only partly. Someone should knock us in the head if we insist that the relation between the Synoptic Gospels is only one of sharing Mark's narrative as a main source. There are many considerations for differences that can't simply be shoved to the side just because they share a boatload of apparent tropes and statements; they also express differences in order, phrasing, placement and non-common statements that have to be accounted for in type and possible source(s). We can't just say, Matthew and Luke were "only" copying from Mark, with no intent to re-engineer the goals of the text.
Y'know, as a Christian, I've always asked myself: Why in the heck did we ever 'need' more than, say, one special Christian, inspired document, maybe 10-20 pages in length that could be then circulated with God's perfect direction? No instead, we have a hodgepodge of letters and books that everyone has been haggling over since at least the time of Marcion.
Well, we don't and we have to wrestle with the historical, occasion based nature of most of the New Testament documents, as well as the problems inherent in their dating, authenticity, copying and further transmission.
Like the "YTubers" I've seen don't have their own walls of reference texts and degrees.
Nope, they sometimes don't. But some of them like MythVision rely on having a large scad of primarily PhD scholars of the most skeptical kind. So, what he lacks in his own credentials, he tries to punch it to Christians through the sheer quantity and quality of those scholars whom he has on this show. And there's a few others like him as well. So, they do provide a formidable front that folks like myself have to remain aware of and work against (and maybe even learn from, from time to time).
There are other skeptical type tubers, though, like C.J. Cornthwaite, who do have some credentials behind their youtube presence.
