I hear you, and to an extent, you're right. It's the value of that that makes this forum so precious, and one of the reasons why I now regret my impatience and jumping to conclusions with jiii. It remains inexcusable and self-destructive on my part along with everything else.
At the same time, what I haven't seen here -- yet -- is, say, a careful mining of strictly the J sections only in the Pentateuch, the presumed earliest sermons only in the Digha-Nikaya (some scholarship has already been started on this question in the offline world), a careful attempt to chronologize the various sections in the Rig-Veda and the earliest presumed accounts of Krishna, the Vaticanus/Sinaiticus mss. of the Gospel of Mark together with the Luke text of the "Q" sayings (generally viewed by modern non-denominational scholars as probably a more faithful repository of these sayings than Matthew), Chapters 4 through 8 of the Analects of Confucius, and a modern scholarly attempt to chronologize the different chapters of the Qur'an.
That would only be the first half of such a project. Once these texts were isolated and the earliest of these in each tradition extracted (naturally, unanimous agreement on that might not be possible, so a consensus by a number of varied scholars with usefully varied backgrounds would be required instead to come up with primary texts), then and only then could the second half of this project proceed: the mining of the chief parallels and/or contrasts on the most clearly related topics to be found in these earliest texts only.
I've encountered resistance to this in the offline world to such an extent (some of it perhaps justified, but much of it not, IMO) that, instead of having developed a thick skin, I've become shell-shocked instead, with a trigger-happy allergy to many a doubt from others, no matter how mild. This then spilled over into my inexcusable conduct with jiii. I should not assume that any and all demurs, suggested adjustements, and caveats from others are meant destructively. But sometimes I do, unjustifiably -- and don't I know it! And I'm certainly not proud of that today.
The kind of skepticism on such a project that I've encountered -- aside from reminders of its being frankly thoroughly Quixotic, and I realize that -- have come from the ultra-Orthodox and the ultra-atheist primarily. From the ultra-Orthodox has come the refrain that all our texts are sacred and how dare you turn sacred texts into a cafeteria menu where some are prioritized over others, while from the ultra-atheist has come the equally predictable refrain that all religion represents the most evil phenomenon known to humanity and how dare you waste resources and talents studying mumbo-jumbo texts in such detail.
This has made me gun-shy and exasperated. I don't have the capacity or the credentials to do such a double-barreled and two-stage task myself, and in any case the task requires a plethora of different viewpoints represented by a multitude of scholars to have any viability at all. Thus, the "project" remains a suggestion only.
Given all this, perhaps the thing that most directly set me off was jiii's remark: "You can't pour a bunch of rotten apples into a bushel and expect them to turn ripe and red in juxtaposition to each other.
My first thought was "Whatever one might think of the final results, why pre-judge the initial ingredients?!" After all, jiii was calling the initial ingredients "rotten apples". Why? Sure, one might even call the final results hooey. Fine (and actually, jiii didn't quite do that). No problem with that (only with my temper.........). But the characterizing of the initial ingredients as "rotten apples"? The initial ingredients in this case would be simply the source documents like the J sections of the Pentateuch, the earliest sermons in the Digha-Nikaya, the "Q" sayings in Luke, and so on. Are those "rotten apples"?
Now, sure, if one is frankly an atheist, then all such source texts might strike one as "rotten apples" and one should feel absolutely free to say so. But jiii didn't make it clear what he was referring to in his reference to "rotten apples" partly because he didn't make it clear if he is in fact an atheist or not. And I'm afraid it was that lack of clarity that made me lose it here on this forum. I'm still not clear if he is an atheist and he candidly views these source texts as having profoundly misled humanity, or if he is pretty much a traditional believer and was inadvertently distorting the first half of the process I thought I had already outlined.
Bottom line: I was sincerely interested in how much viability such a Quixotic project might have in the opinions of others here, but I shot myself in the foot when I imagined that someone was trying to simply distort (among other things) what I was proposing. Not only did I probably do jiii an injustice, I helped abort a constructive dialogue I myself had been particularly eager to start in the first place.
So it goes.............
Operacast
