When did I ever say or suggest anything like that?
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You don’t remember saying you taught Koine Greek in one seminary and Ancient Greek in another? You constantly make claims like this. You talk about work you’ve done, education you’ve had, positions you have held, people you know and when asked to elaborate you obfuscate and deflect or employ the Ham Hightail. Suppose a student posed this question: In the NT the temporal dative is used in answer to the question “How long?” How is this different from the classical usage?
More likely I said that I taught Koine Greek in a seminary and Classical Greek at a university, since that’s what I did. As for your bizarre question, I made no claim that people without PhDs were teaching Biblical languages – in my seminary or in any other.
The rest of your post is irrelevant distraction from your own failure to defend your Gospel exegesis, so I ignore it. Let us all know when you have the meaning of that Gospel passage figured out and are willing to state it directly on this site. Which, I predict, will be never.
Paging @Mercer, who seems to have missed the above question:
I believe that the words “in the subject” in Boris’s claim may be more restrictive than you noticed. Not sure what counts as “in the subject” for teaching Greek. PhD. in Greek? Greek literature? What is yours in?
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The problem with a PhD in Greek is that if that is all you can teach, you would have to wait for somebody to die to get a job. Our local campus of UBC has 12,000 students and does not offer a single course in Greek of any sort.
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Again, it’s not my gospel exegesis. It’s a question posed an answered in an intermediate Greek textbook geared for seminary students. The scholar who wrote that particular chapter is Andreas Kostenberger. The last question comes from a book almost every advanced Greek student and teacher has called “A Greek Grammer of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature” better known as BDF or Blass Debrunner and Funk. Never heard of it have you? I asked you these questions because I don’t believe your claims to be a Bible scholar, or that you’ve ever actually even read the Bible, that you can read, translate or have ever taught Koine or Classical Greek. One would think someone who makes these kinds of claims about himself like you constantly do, while putting me down because I don’t have a post graduate degree, would gladly be willing to prove them. I say you can’t.
John Harshman asked “PhD. in Greek? Greek literature? What is yours in?” That is a legitimate question seeing as how you constantly claim you’re a scholar, I’m not and so no one should listen to me. Tell us what your PhD is, where you got it and what your real name is. My good friend Harriet who has been in the HR biz for over two decades will check it out. If you are unwilling to do that then I think we can bring this charade to a close and safely assume that Ed Robinson as presented on Peaceful Science is a fictional character that never existed.
I don’t expect anyone to believe it if they simply choose not to but it is not at all unusual for the lower and even middle-level Biblical language seminary courses to be taught by non-PhDs. When I was an MA/NT student in the late 1970’s, nearly all of the Intro to Koine Greek sections were taught by third year students or doctoral candidates and there were DMin and even DMiss professors (that is, no PhD in a Biblical language or any other field) teaching in the Greek Exegesis sequence. (The same was probably true in the Hebrew courses as well but I just don’t remember because I was MA/NT.)
I personally observed this same situation at virtually all of the top-ranked seminary campuses where I worked or guest lectured. All of those institutions were in the USA and Canada. I can’t speak for institutions outside of North America.
I retired from seminary faculty academia a generation ago. (And I was a secular university professor before I became a seminary professor.) Perhaps someone will claim that non-PhDs no longer teach Biblical languages in seminaries today. All I know is that former colleagues and associates tell me that this practice has become even more common as financial constraints have culled faculty sizes. (Moreover, most PhDs in Biblical languages prefer to teach upper-level courses anyway, in my experience. Some of the very best teachers of Biblical language courses were the non-PhDs.)
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I think that is common across many fields. One of the best ways for more advanced students to learn is to teach. Also, cheap labor. 
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Thanks for your input, Allen.
At the seminary where I taught, the tradition had been that the professor of New Testament taught both Greek exegesis and Greek language courses, as well as the New Testament Intro and New Testament theology, both taught in English. In those days the profs taught six courses per year (one-semester courses), so the NT professor would teach two semesters of Intro Greek and one semester of New Testament Intro (in English) to first-year students, and the other courses (Greek exegesis and NT theology) to second- and third-year students. However, there was a transitional period when their New Testament prof retired and they had a famous but only part-time NT scholar teaching the non-Greek courses, and hired me to teach the Greek. Eventually they got a new full-time NT scholar who took over the Greek courses as well, at which point I left.
I think it’s true that many institutions are eager to save money and often do this by using part-time faculty, and that Greek and Hebrew teachers are often brought in to teach single courses. However, it’s important to point out that given the surplus of ultra-qualified scholars, it is easy for seminaries to find part-time Hebrew and Greek teachers who have PhDs, and so they no longer have to settle for grad students or upper-year students. They can get a PhD and even one with publications for dirt-cheap, so desperate are young scholars to grab any teaching experience, even one-shot single courses, to beef up their C.V.s. So while it is certainly possible that a Greek or Hebrew teacher at a seminary does not have a PhD, it’s not uncommon nowadays to find PhDs doing the first-year teaching, with no long-term contract and hence replaceable on a whim, for slave wages.
I agree that senior faculty tend to avoid teaching introductory language courses, and so it’s not surprising to find part-timers doing those. And it is quite often the case that part-timers are more enthusiastic about teaching intro language courses and do a very good job.
Boris’s bizarre, oblique question seems to have been asked in order to imply that I was lying when I said I had taught Greek. All I can say is that I’m indifferent as to whether or not he believes me, but I did in fact teach Intro and intermediate Greek over several years and even filled in for the Hebrew teacher once. During that time my PhD was already in hand and I had in addition published books and articles. But I don’t want my arguments about Biblical matters to be judged by my qualifications, but only by their contents. If Boris can find any error in any claim I’ve made about Greek grammar or Greek exegesis, he is welcome to point it out. If I’ve made an error, I won’t use my formal qualifications as a defense; I’ll retract the error.
I’d ask Boris to do the same – retract his errors when he makes them. He has recently said, quite falsely, that Biblical scholarship is based on the premise that the Bible is divinely revealed. It has been pointed out to him, and not only by me, that this is not uniformly true, because a large number of Biblical scholars do not assume the Bible is divinely revealed and many have said that it is not divinely revealed, but a merely human text. I have not yet seen his retraction.
I’m not concerned where it came from, whether directly from you or borrowed from someone else. You are vouching for it, and therefore you have to take up the argument on your own steam. You made a claim about the importance of verb tenses for the meaning of a Gospel passage. You have not explicitly stated how those verb tenses affect the meaning of the passage. I want to see a paragraph or two discussing the passage in the light of the relevant verbs. Once you provide this, I will agree or disagree, based on my knowledge of Greek and of the Gospels. But I don’t intend to act as an undergrad Greek student while you play quizmaster regarding my knowledge of textbook rules. Explain the passage, or cease talking about it.
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Prove you taught Greek or cease talking about.
You poor thing. How can you tout yourself as a scholar in “Religious Studies and Natural Theology” if you are unable to distinguish between faith and science?
I think this goes back to your desperate avoidance of evidence while flopping between appealing to authority (for example, Tour) and (falsely) claiming to be able to identify authoritative people (you clearly have no clue whether Tour is telling the truth about abiogenesis research).
Hint: I don’t believe in evolution.
Some suggested ideas:
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Logically, would abiogenesis research be in any way limited to trying to completely assemble something that meets everyone’s criteria for being alive? Think about whether Alzheimer’s research is limited to producing AD in people.
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Would the first steps toward life necessarily be through putting a bunch of molecules together, or through harvesting and exploiting energy?
Note that these can be discussed (not that you ever will) in detail without mentioning any people, just ideas and evidence.
Don’t forget:
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Evasion of question noted.
I repeat:
You say you “endorse” the standard Christian doctrine of creation.
Why do you endorse it?
Try answering with an answer, instead of another question.
It’s of no interest to me whatsoever whether or not you believe I taught Greek. And I certainly don’t need to prove that I taught Greek in order to refute various points you have made. The dozens of errors in your posts that I have pointed out could have been pointed out by someone who had never taught Greek.
The problem here is that you make statements – statements about the Gospels, statements about seminaries, statements about Bible scholars – that are either false or completely lacking in evidence. And when I point such statements out to you, instead of retracting or modifying them, you change the topic to whether I ever taught Greek.
You can keep asking, until you are blue in the face, for proof that I taught Greek, but the proof will never be forthcoming. I would suggest that you drop the biographical interrogation and return to discussing the Greek text of the Gospels.
Once again, time for this meme:
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No, you haven’t. You disagreeing with me without giving solid reasoning and evidence proves nothing. If I made errors name 'em and claim 'em™
I’m not in the mood to discuss the Greek text of the Bible with someone who can’t read Greek nor do I feel like discussing the gospels with someone who has never read them. Pick a gospel and after you’ve read through it, I’ll answer your questions. The scientists on this site know more about the Bible than you do. If they want to discuss those things that’s fine.
I won’t be posting again on this 12-hour-delayed discussion unless Mercer replies meaningfully to my last question to him. I will leave Boris’s fumings unanswered.
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Nobody excpects the Spanish Inquisition.
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Pinky promise?
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I keep popping in to see if there is any admitted wavering on the part of the "peaceful’ scientists, who in considerable measure, at least from my vantage point, could be seen in total lockstep with the platitudes expressed in the Lancet, who “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife”.
None that I can see.
Although this “The Argument Clinic” thread has become so long it is hard to search specifically.
The FBI made national news nearly 4 months ago as the director endorsed the lab leak theory.
My search of ‘FBI’ here, indicates the last mention being in March '21.
In the last week (has it been missed by y’all) there are stories with subtitles such as “Confirmation of Wuhan scientists as “patients zero” makes the lab leak theory look likely—and the misinformation police look like fools”
I’m soliciting help from y’all in knowing how to continue to promote the lab leak as conspiracy and zoonotic origin as very close to a sure thing.
Cite the evidence the FBI director put forward as a basis to endorse the lab leak hypothesis or forever hold your peace.