2010-12-06

Roll over Maurice Casey: Latin, not Aramaic, explains Mark’s bad Greek

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by Neil Godfrey

A multi-volume Latin dictionary (Egidio Forcel...
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While preparing a new post on a new topic that had nothing any more to do with Casey I stumbled across this list of Latinisms in Mark’s Gospel. The one that hit me hardest was one that Casey uses to justify his argument that Mark was clumsily translating an Aramaic expression into Greek. Well, if this list has any credibility, then Casey’s learned argument, at least with reference to this particular instance, collapses.

The list is found on this New Testament Introduction course webpage: http://www.abu.nb.ca/courses/ntintro/mark.htm (ABU is now Crandall University.) Continue reading “Roll over Maurice Casey: Latin, not Aramaic, explains Mark’s bad Greek”


Precautions to take when dating and getting to know Paul

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

A nineteenth century picture of Paul of Tarsus
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The following post is an adaption of what I recently wrote to someone who had emailed me for an opinion on a study he had written on the origins of Christianity. His thesis rested entirely on acceptance of the conventional scholarly view of the authenticity of certain letters of Paul. I was reluctant to burst his balloon and only wrote the following after being pushed for a detailed explanation of my reservations.

Being on time

If we rely on external controls for verification, on the understanding that self-witness of a narrative or document alone is insufficient to establish authenticity, then we have no certainty that the Pauline letters were composed earlier than the second century.

We do not see evidence that anyone knew of them until the second century. They are first testified as belonging to Marcionite and other “unorthodox” Christianities.

We can take internal indicators, such as his flight from Damascus under king Aretas. That’s fine, but it also raises methodological questions that are discussed below. Continue reading “Precautions to take when dating and getting to know Paul”