You have made zero corrections. If you have some objections state them over again.
You never could answer my questions. It’s easy to forget much of a language you don’t converse in. Maybe that’s what happened.
No, it’s not irrelevant. Religious people are not and many times cannot be convinced by evidence. Evolution denial, climate change denial is a perfect example of that. The religious believe what fear of death makes them want or have to believe. I’m pretty sure the thought of biblical authors writing fiction doesn’t mix too well with your religious superstitions
I agree. Now apply this same standard to the academic impropriety of both you and your hero Meyer on the subject of OoL research. Those improprieties are more than an order of magnitude worse, because it was not merely an omission of relevant information (the enzymatic center of the ribosome is a ribozyme), but outright lying about it–a lie that you uncritically regurgitated without looking at any of the correct information that was provided to you.
Please note that Meyer’s lie was in a book and that Meyer still has not corrected it 14 years later. Scholarly?
Also, note that Meyer is not posting on an online forum under the misspelled name of a cartoon character. He was posing as someone who had done due diligence and you touted him as such a person. He also lied about the RNA World hypothesis itself and its predictions. Scholarly?
And you wrote:
Was that an academically proper thing for you to have written?
False. I have made many. You made errors about Philo of Alexandria, and have not acknowledged them. You did not respond to my second batch of corrections regarding caves and tombs. You were wrong about the name “Simon”. You were wrong about the dating of the Hebrew Bible. You were wrong to say that it’s only Christians who accept a historical Jesus when almost all Jewish and agnostic/atheist scholar also do so.
You’re being vague. Are you now saying that I did learn Greek and did teach Greek, but have forgotten what I learned and taught? If so, you’ve modified your original claim severely. And in that case, you should admit that your original claim, as stated, was false. Or are you still denying that I ever learned or taught Greek? And if so, how do you explain the visual evidence that I did both?
Come clean here, and speak plainly and directly.
You’re describing yourself, since you’re absolutely impervious to evidence, whether provided by people here or by the vast majority of the world’s trained Biblical scholars.
You know nothing of what I believe. And “fiction” would not be the correct term for the sort of writing you are postulating. That would be using “fiction” in a popular sense, rather than as a term of literary classification. In any case, I would welcome any interpretation of the Bible that connected it with something as noble as the Homeric writings. The problem is that your interpretation is poorly executed, because you are so eager to find parallels that you have no standards at all for what parallels you let in the door. And your use of pretentious academic terms like “transvaluation” to cover up the fact that your parallels don’t work cannot blind your readers to how weak your parallels are.
I’d be happy to converse in good faith with you about this, after you’ve conversed in good faith with me about the questions I asked you much earlier, and which you keep ducking, i.e., about your reasons for believing in God, for believing that God created the world, and for being a Christian (with a non-vague explication of what “Christian” means for you).
Mercer’s intervention here is off-topic – what John Harshman would call an example of “whataboutism” – and therefore I’m under no obligation to answer it here. But even though I’m under no obligation, I’m offering to answer him anyway – if Mercer answers the questions for which I want his answer. It’s simply a trade, a business arrangement. Mercer is free to decline the offer, of course, and I expect he will; past experience suggests that he is not going to expose his understanding of Christianity or God or creation to public scrutiny, here or anywhere else.
“Embraced” is hardly the right word. I resisted answering him with visual proof for well over a year, and only gave in for the purpose of ending the litany of false charges. It also served a dual purpose, since Faizal and some others here have frequently expressed denial or doubt regarding my claim to graduate-level training. As the probability that someone without graduate-level training would have such a set of books is close to zero, I think this should put such denials and suspicions to bed, once and for all.
To be clear, I do not usually doubt you have such training. I simply point out the many times you write things one would not expect from someone with such training. Not quite the same thing, right?
Actually, this is one such example right here: Your belief that posting pictures of someone’s bookshelf is a good way to prove you have such training.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with trusting me; a Christian scientist with nothing to hide would be freely offering his statement of faith on a science-faith website even if I didn’t exist. A whole bunch of Christian scientists here and on BioLogos have done so. Only one that I can think of is conspicuous for not having done so.
Besides, the remark you are alluding to was made after (and because of) years of your stonewalling about your religious belief, and therefore cannot have been the cause of the stonewalling. Have you enough understanding of the usual meaning of “cause” to make that elementary deduction?
I didn’t pick the size. That’s how they came out. As many here like to point out, I’m technologically challenged.
Yet you didn’t object when Boris offered photos of a bookshelf to support his claim. Double standard.
I don’t need to, because I couldn’t care less whether or not you believe me. I’m certain it’s true. If you don’t believe me, talk to some colleagues in religion and theology. Show them the pictures. They’ll back me. Oh, wait, you don’t know any colleagues in religion or theology, do you?
No, what’s pathetic is a Christian molecular biologist who won’t say in public why he believes in God or what he means by Christianity. Christians don’t hide their faith under a bushel; they proclaim it. And proclaiming means much, much more than simply saying, “I’m a Christian.” It means giving an account of why you’re a Christian, why it’s such a great thing to be, why you think it’s true.
At least on some occasions, you have expressed doubt about the training. And others here, such as Burke, expressed it frequently. So shots of over a thousand dollars’ worth [largely 1980s prices – much more now] of technical works of philology, most of which no one but a serious academic would buy, and which from my conversation here evidently represent only a fraction of the books I have on hand, ought to lay such doubts to rest. People don’t lay out that kind of money for summer cottage reading; they only spend it because their work requires it.
Of course, you can formally doubt that the books are mine; you can imagine I went over to a friend’s house and took pictures of his shelves instead. But I don’t think you really believe that, and even if you did, that would prove only that I was not the owner of the books, which would be hardly to the point, since I couldn’t argue at the philological level I present here unless I had actually studied from books like that. The ownership is irrelevant, though certainly the hypothesis that I am the owner is, by Ockham’s razor, the one to be preferred.
The only two people posting here who have extensive background in Biblical scholarship, Allen Wittmer Miller and Ken Turner, have never doubted my academic competence in the field, so it’s really of no concern to me if psychiatrists and biochemists here have such doubts. I don’t feel obligated to “prove” anything in a rigorous way. If you don’t find the pictures adequate confirmation on a common-sense level, well, I’ll leave you in your state of Cartesian doubt.
Trades require trust, no? And you already did implicitly admit that you were discussing the subject in bad faith for years by demanding something before discussing it in good faith.
Have you considered thinking more and writing less?
You did pick the number. You’re hilarious.
I don’t really care about his claims. I’m under no obligation to object.
Because you just made it up.
I’m pretty sure that any academic in any field would agree that they are pathetic.
YOU can’t proclaim YOUR faith while hiding behind a pseudonym. That’s absurd, which makes petulant demands of others even more so.
Eddie, what’s pathetic is that you obviously did feel obligated and you claim that photos of bookshelves constituted proof.
Pure whataboutism. Either you, as a Christian scientist, feel a desire to explain why you are a Christian to others on sites where Christian scientists and young, potential Christian scientists gather, or you don’t. Whether I or anyone else does the same should not affect your own desire to witness.
Besides, I’m not a scientist, and the whole point of BioLogos and Peaceful Science is to bring scientists into dialogue with religious doctrine or with faith communities. Nobody reading these forums would care what a non-scientist like me thinks about faith and science, but they do care what Francis Collins, Darrel Falk, Joshua Swamidass, Daniel Ang, etc. think. You’re pronouncing yourself a Christian scientist but refusing to speak in any meaningful way about the Christian part, in precisely the forums (or fora, if you will) where that speaking would be most meaningful to readers, especially young readers, potential scientists experiencing religious tension between science and faith, who want to see examples of scientists with a robust Christian faith with clear doctrinal contents. As far as I can see, you’ve done nothing to help such people in that struggle in your 14 years on BioLogos and PS. If I were a well-published Christian scientist posting frequently on such sites, I’d be ashamed of that record. And it’s a record that seems to admit of only two possible explanations, neither of which is particularly admirable.
And despite your excuse here, this refusal has nothing to do with me. The outburst on my part to which you refer as creating “mistrust” happened only in 2022, but for 13 years before that you steadily kept your religious views out of sight, beyond the most skeletal and brief statements that you called yourself Christian. I had nothing to do with that choice; you have to own the choice and not blame it on a pseudonymous internet commenter. It’s called personal Christian responsibility.
Yes he’s Philo from Alexandria but he lived Jerusalem long enough to negotiate with the Romans for financial support for the Temple, arrange for daily sacrifices and he wrote about it. He wrote about a lot of things. The important point is that he was in Jerusalem at the time Jesus was supposedly seen by large crowds and by Jewish religious leaders, or shortly thereafter, he’s a historian and he never mentioned Jesus Christ or any of the supposed events in the New Testament. What is so hypocritical about Christian apologists is that had Philo mentioned Jesus we would never hear the end of it. You would never ever claim that you think Philo didn’t travel to Palestine. “Philo mentioned Jesus! He is risen!” Christian apologists on the other hand claim the writings of historians who were never anywhere near Jerusalem and were born many decades after Jesus supposedly died.
I know it’s difficult to accept that Jesus is a myth because his legend is taught as real and Christian mythology remains a major theme in American films, book and pop culture. It’s deeply entrenched in our American psyche, but not so much in Europe and Scandinavia where polls show as many as 40-50% of people questioned say they don’t believe such a person as Jesus Christ ever existed. Finally, we are rapidly heading in that direction. Now THAT is the Good News!
Σιμωνα is a Greek name. None of the disciples are called by Hebrew name and the most important name Ιηους also Greek.
Your desperate nit-picking about tombs which were in caves is an extremely dishonest ploy by you. Let me quote one of the latest Christian hoaxes: “The Original Walls of the Cave Where Jesus Was Buried…” Christians also say, “Three days later, he awed his followers when he walked out of the tomb alive.” So, which is it? Tomb or cave? LOL!
What evidence is there that the dating of the Pentateuch by Berossus and Manetho is wrong? You never even heard of them until I mentioned them. It has been shown that the main source for the first chapters of Genesis comes from Babyloniaca written in 278 BCE. The main source for the Book of Exodus is Aegyptiaca written 285-280 BCE. So that explains why we have no manuscripts or mentions of any of the Pentateuch before those dates.
Neither you nor the majority of the world’s trained Biblical scholars have any evidence whatsoever that can even come close to refuting the dating of the Pentateuch we get from Berossus and Manetho. This early dating claim for the New Testament is also bogus. Jesus was invented in August 70 CE because that’s when Roman troops set the Temple on fire. That’s when it became necessary to craft a new salvation myth because the Temple was no more. This made Yom Kippur impossible. That was the annual remission of sin ritual for the Jewish people. Making up Jesus means the Jewish people don’t need to get remission or salvation anymore because this “god man” sacrificed himself for them his blood is good for a permanent atonement!" We don’t have anything mentioning Jesus before that and in fact nothing before Marcu ion of Sinope “discovered” (read: forged) some of the first New Testament texts.
Let me spell it out for you: The gospels are didacatic fictions in the form of passion plays. In other words they are theatre.
Do you know what this is called?:
A. Jesus, Israel & the Gentiles, Fulfillment, God With Us (1:1 – 25)
B. Jesus Acknowledged as King by a Few (2:1 – 3:17)
C. Jesus Overcomes Three Temptations in the Wilderness (4:1 – 11)
D. Jesus Gathers and Prepares the Disciples for Ministry (4:12 – 25)
E. First Major Discourse: Blessings, the New City on a Hill (5:1 – 7:28)
F. Jesus Calls to Israel as the Prophet Like Moses (8:1 – 9:34)
G. Second Major Discourse: Jesus Trains the Disciples to Call More Disciples (9:35 – 11:1)
H. Division in Israel, Jesus Announces Concern for Gentiles (11:2 – 12:45)
I. Third Major Discourse: Kingdom Growth as a Household (Mt.12:46 – 13:58)
H.’ Division in Israel, Jesus Enacts Mission to Gentiles (14:1 – 17:27)
G.’ Fourth Major Discourse: Jesus Trains the Disciples to Shepherd Other Disciples (18:1 – 19:2)
F.’ Jesus Calls to Israel as the Prophet Like Moses and Heir of David (19:3 – 22:46)
E.’ Fifth Major Discourse: Woes, Fall of Jerusalem, the Old City on a Hill (23:1 – 25:46)
D.’ Jesus Prepares His Disciples for His Death (26:1 – 35)
C.’ Jesus Overcomes Temptation Three Times in the Garden, Peter Fails Temptation Three Times (26:36 – 75)
B.’ Jesus Presented to the World as King and Rejected (27:1 – 66)
A’. Jesus, Israel & the Gentiles, Fulfillment, God With Us (28:1 – 20)
You never heard of transvaluation, mimesis or ζηλος until I told you what they are. You don’t know the six criteria used to detect intertextual referencing: accessibility or availability, interpretability or intelligibility, analogy, density, order and distinctiveness. These parallels pass all the criteria and they were not dreamed up by me. Scholars of ancient literature have known about them for more than 200 years and probably a lot longer than that, seeing as how writers used them 2000 years ago. Writers in antiquity went to schools to learn these literary techniques, techniques that have been around forever but you’re just finding out about them now. That doesn’t mean doesn’t mean you’re not a scholar and it actually supports your claim because Christian Bible scholars never learn about these things either. That’s because they have supervisors to enforce rigorous Christian reasoning - telling you what you can read and what you can’t.
Source, please. All sources I have found say that it was his wealthy brother who donated money for the Temple, and that Philo did visit Jerusalem once, but there is no link in the sources between his visit to Jerusalem and his brother’s support of the Temple.
Please verify from sources what date he was in Jerusalem.
And even if he was in Jerusalem for a brief visit, it wouldn’t follow that he heard anything about Jesus while he was there.
He’s a “historian” only by a stretch. He wrote very little that we would call history, and what little he wrote does not survive except in fragments. And from the best records we have, he did not write a history of contemporary Palestine.
What the average American think, and what the average European thinks, are absolutely irrelevant to determining historical facts. The majority of the Classicists and Biblical scholars in the world think Jesus was a real historical person. Not necessarily that he did all the things reported in the Gospels, but that he was a real person. If you think he wasn’t a real person, you have to take on the greatest scholars in the world. You have to show they are wrong by publishing your arguments in scholarly venues. You have not done that.
You still don’t get my grammatical point. The dictionary form of a name is the nominative form, not the accusative. The nominative form is Simon, not Simona. This is first-year Greek grammar, and you don’t appear to know it.
You don’t seem to realize that the Greek names of the disciples are in some cases renderings of Hebrew or Aramaic names into Greek letters, and in other cases translations of the meaning of Hebrew or Aramaic names into Greek. “Simon”, for example, is from “Shimon”, a perfectly good Old Testament name.
“and the most important name Ιηους also Greek.”
Iesous is Greek in form, but it’s a Greek rendering of Yeshua, from the Hebrew root for “save”. (Joshua is from the same root.)
Again, your philology is quite weak.
False. I knew the name of Berossus before I was a teenager. I read ancient history all the time.
Interesting. You have said we can’t date the Hebrew Bible with certainty any earlier than our earliest manuscripts. Yet you rely on Berossus and Manetho – well, what are our earliest manuscripts of their writing? Certainly not 278 BC. So how can be sure that their original words survive intact in the much later manuscripts we have? Your skepticism about sources is selective. You pick the sources you like without reference to the actual age of the manuscripts, and only bring in age of manuscripts when you want to discount a source you don’t like.
An interesting thesis. Which of the world’s greatest Bible scholars agrees with you about this? If it is true, surely at least some of them would have stumbled on this great secret. Or are you the only genius capable of discovering it? Note that I am not saying it isn’t true. I’m saying that if it is true, thousands of scholars well versed in ancient Greek, ancient drama, and ancient literature should have discovered it long before you. Where are the articles and books by these scholars?
Rubbish. The three professors who taught me how to read the Bible were not Christian: two were Jews and one was an agnostic. None of them forced Christian readings of the Bible on me. None of them told me what I could or couldn’t read. And there were dozens of Christian undergrad and grad student in our department studying under these Jewish and agnostic professors, and some of them became less Christian or even non-Christian as a result. You’re inventing wildly, without any control. Again, if you had actually spent time studying religion in a serious religion department in a major university, instead of at the rinky-dink little Christian college you said you went to, you would have a very different picture of Biblical scholarship. You were out in the sticks, not at the center, and you don’t know what happens at the center.
I may not be as proficient in the classics as you or Eddie, but even I know that the Greek equivalent of ‘S’ is ‘Σ’, not ‘Ε’.[1]
It took very little research to confirm that Eddie was correct - Σιμωνα is the accusative form of Simon in Greek, with a suffix added, and that the Greek form of the name Simon is actually Σιμων (e.g. Mk 1:36)
It doesn’t take any knowledge of Greek to know that Simon being written as Σιμων/Σιμωνα/Σιμωνος in Mark’s gospel doesn’t mean that Simon is not a Jewish name. It only means that the author of Mark transcribed the name into the alphabet he was using.
So you saying “… is not Simon it’s Ειμωνα”, is of no consequence. Simon, Σιμων and שִׁמְעוֹן are effectively the same name written in different alphabets, and choosing one over the other is purely a matter of which language/alphabet one is using, and has no bearing whatsoever on whether Simon is or is not a Jewish name. That question was settled by noting the existence of multiple other Jews of the period named Simon, many of whom predated both the writing of the gospels and even the dates of the events described therein, including Simon Thassi, Simon of Peraea and Simon ben Koseba.
Your claim is like claiming that Muammar Gaddafi isn’t an Arabic name because I’ve written it as “Muammar Gaddafi” and not as “معمر القذافي”. It’s just dumb.
Excellent. Your assertion without evidence that Simon/Σιμων/שִׁמְעוֹן and all the other disciples’ names are not Jewish is dismissed, and not even without evidence.
Which leads to this:
Also dismissed.
And like the previous one, not just dismissed without evidence, but with evidence. Philo wrote an account of the reign of Flaccus over Egypt (33-38AD), suggesting he was living in Egypt at the time of Jesus’s crucifixion. It was Philo’s brother Alexander who provided financial support for the temple, not Philo. There is nothing in Philo’s writings to indicate he was in Jerusalem for more than a brief pilgrimage, at an unknown time.
Every time I check one of your dubious-looking claims it proves to be not only without foundation, but contradicted by the evidence that is available. So I’ll be applying Hitchens’s[2] razor to you.
I did check to see if there was some convention of writing ‘Σ’ as ‘E’ in some circumstances, but couldn’t find one. ↩︎
Not Hitchen’s. Either your typing is terrible, you’re a closet grocer, or you don’t even know his name. ↩︎
By a strange co-incidence, that same pattern can be seen in Eddie’s replies to other people. Eddie has even been known to leave everything except a single word unanswered.
Iff you also admit that you have no answer to three-quarters of the points made against you.
I can’t say for certain that there have never been instances where you wrote something that made me question whether you have any such training at all. But, for the most part, when I say “I can’t believe someone with the level of education you claim would write that”, it is in the same sense in which I would say “I can’t believe a former President of the United States would keep boxes of highly confidential documents stacked haphazardly in a bathroom.” This does not mean I doubt that Donald Trump was ever President, nor that I doubt he actually did this. Hopefully I don’t have to explain that particular nuance of the English language.