Thursday, March 25, 2010

Summarizing My Methods

 I did promise a summary :)  So here it is:




We use two overarching philosophical principles:

I) skeptical/critical reasoning
II) empirical evidence

leading us towards two explanatory goals:

    A) depth
    B) scope

We also use our related theoretical principles of:

Ia) parsimony
Ib) no new texts


We then propose the gospel authors were motivated by two primary goals:

I) Story
II) Theology

and were influenced by two primary methodological mechanisms:

I) Paired Major Sources, and
II) Multiple Minor Sources.


They typically handled their paired major sources by:

1a) conflating two textual elements
1b) pairing two textual elements
1c) eliminating a textual element (note: sometimes a textual element was eliminated when it was compared to a similar source, but no corresponding element was found there)

They typically developed story and theology by:

2a) splitting a textual element
2b) duplicating a textual element
2c) re-using a textual element (note: sometimes a textual element was re-used while retaining the original version, but sometimes it involved relocating and re-writing the original itself).


While there's no need to completely restrict myself to these methods, I return to them repeatedly when in doubt, to guide my investigations.  I've found them incredibly useful.

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