protos said:
I honestly don't understand what you don't agree with. You claim anecdotal evidence yet you give me some random quote about 80% of statistics being made up. I didn't look up statistics my friend, I actually read the people who said these things
Unless you've surveyed all the literature, or a statistically valid sample of it, you can't put a statistically valid figure on it.
The comment about 80% of statistics being made up is a well known quote and is a swipe at Brown and Robinson, who as far as I know didn't do any such meta-analysis to arrive at their figure.
Ok, so now it's Brown
and Robinson who didn't do meta-analysis. I know Robinson for a fact surveyed 30-50 scholars and I've personally read 5-6 of them. Unless you are willing to say he's lying, you don't have any basis for that. Robinson's book Redating the New Testament is well known for an abundance of citations. He's read so many scholars on New Testament studies that when I started writing down all the names he lists in the Index and I got 3 pages of my large notebook filled out and I was still at around the letter D. So please, check your references before you make your false accusations in order to support your dead cause that tries to say it's ok to say the New Testament books weren't written by who they say they were.
I really wish most scholars would support Ephesians' authenticity. Hopefully these days they are.
protos said:
Second of all, one can accept a book as canonical if it was written yesterday too, as the Mormons do. It doesn't mean it makes sense.
If perfectly reasonable if one accepts that writing under an earlier master's name was accepted practice. A whole mass of pretty conservative scholars accept that half of Isaiah was written much later than the original prophet - but accept the whole book as canonical.
I doubt a whole mass of pretty conservative scholars accept it. Please name them. Now I know there's probably a whole mass of
liberals who accept it. A whole mass of liberals could accept that the Earth rotates around Mars, but that doesn't mean anything if it makes no sense. I remember how the atheist Joseph McCabe put it when he saw similar claims about Daniel being 2nd century BC and at the same time authentic: he said something of the sort - any person, even the Arab of the 7th century knows the difference between poetry/symbolism and literal history. It's the same here: no one accepted writing under an earlier master's name and this is evident from the fact that 1 Clement cites these writings as Paul's. Furthermore, those who did write not
in Paul's name, but
about Paul as if it were history, such as the Acts of Paul and Thecla, were severely criticized and held very guilty of forgery. And I will tell you that the theories of Deutero- and Trito-Isaiah have no ground.
protos said:
If a writing is deutero-Pauline and the book says "Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ," then I can tell you that you are not using common sense to say that it makes sense to call it "authentic" in the nominal sense of the word and not a whole lot of people would agree with you.
There's plenty of people that don't have a problem with the idea that, let's say 2Tim may have been written by one of Paul's protégés after his death but is still canonical.
Plenty of people also don't have a problem with aliens existing on the planet Mars. It doesn't make it logical or likely. And no, there aren't plenty of
conservatives people who don't have a problem with it. Most if not all conservatives accept them as Pauline.
protos said:
A deutero-Pauline letter more or less implies a date after the Apostle's death or else it certainly would have been corrected by the Apostle (see for example 2 Thess).
Yes, but "after his death" can be one year after his death.
How would you know when the forged writing was written? No one does, that's why ranges of 20-30 years are given. Usually it takes about 10-15 years when a collection of Paul's letters as well as his fame can induce such a forgery.
protos said:
A deutero-Pauline letter does imply a late date. What you meant to say was that it didn't prove it was one. But certainly a deutero-Pauline letter is best to be regarded as 15-30 years after the Apostle's death and I don't think you can cite any consensus against that. Anyone who accepts the Pastorals as deutero-Pauline and very close to the Apostle's death is simply assuming something without any evidence.
Unless you've read their reasoning how can you possibly evaluate it?
What reasoning would that be? There's no way to pin down an inauthentic piece of literature to a specific year (unless it dates itself), and most scholars know this.
protos said:
Here's a quote regarding that - Anything is possible, but that doesn't make it likely. You've confused what is possible with what is likely. I admit that it is possible that a deutero-Pauline letter is written 1 day after Paul's death just as much as it's possible that the Emperor Nero wrote the whole Pauline corpus! But that doesn't make it very likely, does it?
It largely depends on what assumptions one is making about dating. One can make just as good an argument for close dating as distant dating.
One can't make an argument for close or distant dating unless there was a major event inbetween. After 70 AD no such event really exists (except perhaps the not-so-heavy persecution of Domitian which is still not "big" enough). There really is no way to say, if let's say 2 Thessalonians is inauthentic, that it was written 66 and not 76 AD. There simply isn't and any attempt to give a specific year is simply, as the German scholars call it, building castles in the air. This is why the Gospels are dated within 10 years and more: i.e. Mark 65-80, Luke 80-90, Matthew 75-85, John c.90-100. You can't say that John is more likely to be written in 91 than 99 AD, that's simply not possible to make an argument based on data.
Personally, I think you should stop agreeing with the liberal and anti-Christian consensus and you should eliminate the false notion that Deutero-Pauline books does not mean they're not forgery. It's simply common sense. The sooner you get rid of that notion, the better it will be for the actual field of biblical scholarship. On this note I can quote Kummel's 12th edition's Preface where he cites a 19th century scholar who says something to the degree of:
"I can't help but feel that the results and conclusions of this book will displease both those seeking more facts (the book says a lot of things are unknown) and will offend the pious who view the Scriptures as holy."
Now if you think that a scholar who openly agrees with that statement considers the New Testament full of Deutero-Pauline books as authentic, you are fooling yourself. And what about 1-2 Peter? I can assure you, no one calls them deutero-Petrine: in other words everyone who does not consider them from Peter, thinks of them as late after the fact inauthentic pieces of literature, written by someone who put Peter's name on them to give them authority.
The sooner you accept that fact and stop kidding yourself, the better it would be.
