For the No-Jesus Camp

However, my reading leads me to numerous NT scholars who believe that many of the letters were doctored, added to, etc. -- to fit later conditions and concerns of the emerging church -- far after their original writing. In other words, the Pauline letters are not pure, unadulterated text -- they are fabrications, in the sense that they have been altered, edited, added to, etc. for a variety of doctrinal, political and conditional reasons.

If you want to talk about later insertions, then lets start a new post. The texts indicate that sure, some areas may very well be later insertions. This is NOT the case for the letters of Paul. The Pauline letters are in fact letters. They contain names of particular people doing particular things. You might make a case for portions of 2 Corinthians, but that is about it. Textual criticism indicated that the Pauline letters mostly pure-- any "doctored" portions you might be able to make a case for are typically liturgical, not historical, or really even theological. It's a mute argument.

Flick
 
SF, I am not arguing that Christianity is fabricated -- there may have been a Jesus, and I am inclined to accept that there was such a person. What I am arguing is that the willingness to die for a belief is not an indication of the inherent truth of a religion or whether it merits belief. You suggested that the willingness of Christians to die for their belief not only underscored the profundity of their faith, but was somehow also an indication of the truth of that faith. You challenged, it seems to me, that this was unique and that believers of other faiths were not willing to make the same sacrifice for their beliefs.

Then we have a misunderstanding somewhere in the ranks. This post was aimed at anyone who wants to assert that Jesus did not exist and the whole Christianity thing was fabricated. I do not believe that dying for a belief increases its validity. I think for a liar to stare down death, knowing he is lying is not reasonable. You might get 1, or 2, but not a dozen, and not an educated Jewish leader like Paul. They were not fabricating. They were relating their experience. Maybe their interpretations of the experience are false, but the experience was not. A man named Jesus did exist.

Flick
 
stamenflicker wrote:
Which canon? How about the "current" one, which is what I enclosed in my post? Current, you know, "The one we use today."
See Differences in Canon.
stamenflicker wrote:
And no I'm not sure which was the last book but textual criticism says it was most likely John or Revelation.
How could textual criticism (as opposed to, e.g., form criticism) say anything of the kind? Textual criticism is an analysis of manuscripts. To the best of my knowledge, the earliest know scrap of gJohn is dated by paleography to the 3rd century CE. For James and Jude there appears to be little in the way of textual evidence earlier that the 4th century P72 and Sinaiticus. The dating of 'original' NT sources is based primarily on content. Language and textual characteristics play little or no role in the process.
stamenflicker wrote:
I picked John due to the massive textual variants from the Synoptic gospels and the obvious Hellenistic influences in chapter one.
Please provide a reference for "massive textual variants". Also, please suggest why John is likely to postdate the II Peter pseudepigraph. By the way, do you know what a "textual variant" is? Speaking of which, does your version of John contain the great line about "cast[ing] the first stone", or are you using the earlier witnesses which do not? Does your version include the Johannine Comma or does it not?
stamenflicker wrote:
I'm referring to the Koine textual tradition as it arose from Attic-Ionic Greek. I have no idea what you are referring to.
That you know nothing about Alexandrian, Byzantine, or Western textual tradition is pathetically clear. It is also a remarkable admission from someone claiming to speak with authority. It seems that you simply don't know what you don't know, and that you are more than willing to make it painfully obvious. See, for example, The Encyclopedia of New Testament Textual Criticism
 
stamenflicker said:
I think for a liar to stare down death, knowing he is lying is not reasonable. You might get 1, or 2, but not a dozen, and not an educated Jewish leader like Paul. They were not fabricating. They were relating their experience. Maybe their interpretations of the experience are false, but the experience was not. A man named Jesus did exist.
I think this is where most of us come in...Jesus may (or may not) have existed, but there is nothing to prove that he was divine.

For the record, I don't think anybody was "lying." I don't believe that a bunch of people sat around a table one day drinking wine and said,"Let's start a new religion. We'll say there was this guy, let's call him Jesus, and he was the son of God. Um, and he died on a cross and then his body got up and walked away. Yeah, that's it."

I think that perhaps there was this guy who went around thinking himself the Messiah (that everybody had been waiting for), and said a lot of cool and interesting stuff, and some people followed him, believing him to be the Messiah (if you're going to ask why they would do so, please think of Jonestown, Heaven's Gate, Waco, et al). He may or may not have actually believed he was God's son (paranoid schizophrenia?). He may or may not have died on the cross and so on.

Anyway, my feeling is that the people who were his followers could easily have been mistaken about his body or the story got convoluted at some point or whatever, but it's not hard to imagine that stories and letters written after the fact, even 20 years after, could be all wrong, given the fallibility of human memory. If anybody did die for their beliefs, I think they really did believe it, not that they were lying about it. But people die for lots of beliefs that they are mistaken about (again, think Heaven's Gate). None of these things lend any amount of credibility to the man's divine nature.
 
stamenflicker said:
Whether or not there was an historical Jesus, there can be little doubt that Christianity was fabricated and refabricated in the crucible of Roman politics and bloody doctrinal struggles.

Do you just have a habit of making ridiculous statements without evidence? The texts of the NT clearly demonstrates that your assertion is false.
And just how, precisely, do they manage to 'clearly demonstrate' such a thing? Is it 'clearly demonstrated' by the controversy surrounding the Johannine Comma and the Markan appendix? Do you insist that the text was never purged, embellished, and/or harmonized to meet the doctrinal needs of the church fathers?

"The text of the NT clearly demonstrates ..." This will be fun to watch. Go ahead, Flick, clearly demonstrate it for us. :D :D
 
Fade:

Potato, you did make a strawman, and from the third sentence you seem to not understand that that is exactly.

You saying it is so does not make it so. Explain *how* it is a strawman. Impy himself brought up showing a car to Roman citizens, and my response was to say that doing so would be irrelevant to what was being discussed. That's not a strawman.

Also, the average lifespan of somebody living in those times was around 40 to 50 years.

Here you go again. You said the same thing in the Christ-mythers vs. POM thread, I called you on it, and you would not/could not support its relevance. Right there in that thread I pointed out that several of the historical figures we were discussing lived to their 70s or 80s. As Loki pointed out (thanks Loki) and I mentioned in the other thread, if you're talking about the *average* then that means there would be people who lived beyond that -- quite possibly a lot of people, especially if Loki's point is true about high numbers of deaths before age five. So have some integrity and stop using that statistic as an argument.
 
stamenflicker said:
Then we have a misunderstanding somewhere in the ranks. This post was aimed at anyone who wants to assert that Jesus did not exist and the whole Christianity thing was fabricated. I do not believe that dying for a belief increases its validity. I think for a liar to stare down death, knowing he is lying is not reasonable. You might get 1, or 2, but not a dozen, and not an educated Jewish leader like Paul. They were not fabricating. They were relating their experience. Maybe their interpretations of the experience are false, but the experience was not. A man named Jesus did exist.
Paul was not an eyewitness to anything. As such, his "experience" was no more or less substantive than that of the people at Jonestown or Waco. Nor, by the way, was his experience any more probative than those of the many early Christian 'heretics' who "stared down death" at the hands of their erstwhile brothers.
 
Flick,

A few quick thoughts.

First, your points :

First, we have the problem of Paul.
...
What's the odds of two fabricators within 50 years of each other willing to die for the same fabricated theme?
Can't see a problem, really. At least two possible explanations for Paul :

(a) he's a believer that embraces the original lie (not knowing it's a lie), and believes he has the knowledge and the duty to continue and extend the teachings. In this sense, he's no different to Martin Luther.
(b) he's a fabricator who embraces the original lie (not knowing it's a lie) and seeks to create his own history for his own purposes.

Go with (a), and Paul is no longer a problem!

Second regarding Paul, we see him fighting with one of the first fabricators in Antioch (Peter) about whether or not the orgininal fabricator (Jesus) meant for his fabrications to extend to non-Jews.
You assume Peter was a fabricator, not a believer. Even if true, then (a) above resolves the problem - Paul was acting genuinely when confronting Peter.

Third, we have to assume the fabricator (Jesus) never wrote anything down or that the true fabricators lived in 100AD and thought to themselves they needed to create a religion.
Well, you're getting confused here - are we discussing "Jesus was a fabrication", or "Jesus was a fabricator"?

It's 30CE, along comes L. Jesus Hubbard - a rather charismatic teacher/carpenter. He's full of himself, but very convincing. Hires "the mount" for his new one man show, and it's a roaring success. A few followers start writing down things before they forget. Before long scientology...er, I mean christianity, is in full swing.

"Jesus was a fabrication"? - Probably not.

"Jesus was a fabricator"? - Certainly!


----------------------------

Second, 'fabricators' versus 'believers'. To even begin to make the case you are working towards, you need to determine who are the fabricators, and who are the believers. Who wrote the gospels - believers, or fabricators? You whole point here is that "fabricators don't die for their lies". But believers sure do. So this argument rests entirely on determining who the fabricators were. Again, just think L. Jesus Hubbard.

But again, I have to wonder why this is important. Surely, for you and Potato, Jesus has to be both (a) not a fabrication and (b) not a fabricator. Even if you establish (a), what purpose does that serve? If you assume that Jesus or the gospel writers were at least partial fabricators, how do you propose to determine which bits are which?
 
Your sources don't count. Ceasar didn't exist.

My sources are independantly verifiable. Any source alone is just about worthless, it's their totality that makes it evidence.

Do you not understand the most basic concept of cultural anthropology? Do I really need to type up the opening chapter of an anthropology book?

The bible is a book with many different authors, and yes stories.

So you claim. Where is your evidence? I am willing to accept that they are written by different authors. But, why are they so disparate in the story they tell when they are supposedly talking about the same thing? When you look back on the historians of the past, they don't write about the same event in vastly different ways. You are destroying your own case.

But half the NT are letters. Actual letters written around 50AD.

Evidence?

I'd say that counts as a touch of history. How many of Ceasar's letters do we have in tact?

He was recorded by every single european and african culture of the time, and his image was printed on thousands of coins, and his statues, commissioned in his time and recorded as being him survive to this day.

Scratch taking you through cultural anthropology, we need to put you through a course in logic.


Unlike you, I am willing to insult people directly. You hide, and insult from the sidelines.

That's great, thanks for sharing. And now, back to the thread.

Oh, can't take a little derailing? Want to cry about it a little more? Want a tissue? Do you need me to wipe the drool from your chin?

You've totally missed my point
You said no other religions were oppressed. I gave you several instances off the top of my head.

Does your meager intellect not even allow you to recognize the words you wrote?

Read the above response to headscratcher.

I am responding to YOU though :)

It beats me as to why I have to type something out about 8 times before someone finally reads it close enough to understand.

Ho ho, you give us lessons in reading comprehension? Ironic. Really.

Either we are a slow lot here, or lazy. My money is on the latter. I see Loki actually gave my point a prod, which is more than I say for you, HS, or RD. Perhaps you would like to try again, I mean try again again.
Your point was an appeal to ignorance. Several people apparently exposed it. Now, you are getting defensive so as to take attention away from the fact that you know absolutely nothing about which you speak. Your attempt to hide behind a wall of veiled insults doesn't work. You see, I can ignore your verbal diarrhea and cut right to the point. You have been beaten, kiddy.

Sorry you feel that way. However after about your third insult in a single post-- both lips right here ( ! )

And I thought you had a thing against insults. Let us add hypocrisy to the long, damning list of character faults that you seem to be collecting.

I am sorry that you aren't able to grasp things on a higher level, but don't feel bad when poke fun at you. You're like JK, except you apparently believe the horse ◊◊◊◊ that you spout.

Go on, you can get it all out. We don't oppress freedom of speech here. Hell, you might even get some equally ignorant historical revisionist to agree with you! Then, the pangs in your stomach that you are no doubt feeling due to the level of ignorance this board has exposed you to have will subside, and you can feel vindicated. Because, no matter how wrong you are in every single conceivable way, somebody out there is just as wrong as you are, and you can revel in your stupidity.

K thx bye.
 
"My God, My God, why have your forsaken me?"

Excuse me for leaping into the third page of this discussion.

I latched onto that forsaken business when I read this topic for the first time today. Using the edit search function, I have read some interesting ideas about that passage in the Bible. All of them incorrect.

Here is an interesting thing. But let me start out by saying I don't claim to be as well read in the bible as some of the more vociferous atheists do. Particulary, I am not as well read as the ones who like to ask questions about verses in the bible which appear contradictory or inhumane or whatever to justify their condemnation of it.

At the same time, some atheists like to talk about the "creative editing" the bible has undergone over the millenia.

Talk about a contradiction! How could all those religious scholars have missed so many seeming contradictions? Why didn't they edit them out? Were they freaking stupid or something?

Or is that a paradox? I don't know.

Maybe "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" is not a contradiction or questionable uttering of a man on a cross. Maybe it has a blindingly simple explanation......

"To make him more lovable?" ROTFLMAO!

I know you can do better than that.
 
Hey, if you can be wrong about the "forsaken" passage, is it possible you could be wrong about everything else, too?

Here are the applicable passages:

Mathew, Chapter 27, verses 33-49:

33 And when they had come to a place called Golgotha, that is to say, Place of a Skull, 34 they gave Him sour wine mingled with gall to drink. But when He had tasted it, He would not drink. 35 Then they crucified Him, and divided His garments, casting lots, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet: "They divided My garments among them, And for My clothing they cast lots." 36 Sitting down, they kept watch over Him there. 37 And they put up over His head the accusation written against Him: THIS IS JESUS THE KING OF THE JEWS. 38 Then two robbers were crucified with Him, one on the right and another on the left. 39 And those who passed by blasphemed Him, wagging their heads 40 and saying, "You who destroy the temple and build it in three days, save Yourself! If You are the Son of God, come down from the cross." 41 Likewise the chief priests also, mocking with the scribes and elders, said, 42 "He saved others; Himself He cannot save. If He is the King of Israel, let Him now come down from the cross, and we will believe Him. 43 He trusted in God; let Him deliver Him now if He will have Him; for He said, 'I am the Son of God.' " 44 Even the robbers who were crucified with Him reviled Him with the same thing. 45 Now from the sixth hour until the ninth hour there was darkness over all the land. 46 And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" that is, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" 47 Some of those who stood there, when they heard that, said, "This Man is calling for Elijah!" 48 Immediately one of them ran and took a sponge, filled it with sour wine and put it on a reed, and offered it to Him to drink. 49 The rest said, "Let Him alone; let us see if Elijah will come to save Him."

and Mark, Chapter 15, verses 33 - 37:

33 Now when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. 34 And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?" which is translated, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" 35 Some of those who stood by, when they heard that, said, "Look, He is calling for Elijah!" 36 Then someone ran and filled a sponge full of sour wine, put it on a reed, and offered it to Him to drink, saying, "Let Him alone; let us see if Elijah will come to take Him down." 37 And Jesus cried out with a loud voice, and breathed His last.
 
Wolfgirl

I think this is where most of us come in...Jesus may (or may not) have existed, but there is nothing to prove that he was divine.

O my, there is logic in the ranks. I agree with everything you posted. Maybe it didn't happen the way it is conveyed in the NT because people just didn't interpret the events correctly. That's an entirely different thing than saying the NT is not a historical document.

Whether or not Jesus is who he said he was is subject to doubt, the idea that he existed at all is pretty much a mute point. Somebody named Jesus arrived on the spiritual-political landscape and shook things up. The documents pretty much support that.

Flick
 
My sources are independantly verifiable. Any source alone is just about worthless, it's their totality that makes it evidence.

I disagree. Your sources are meaningless.

Do you not understand the most basic concept of cultural anthropology? Do I really need to type up the opening chapter of an anthropology book?

Your anthropology book is a biased source and has undergone numerous edits in the past 200 years. I reject it too.

When you look back on the historians of the past, they don't write about the same event in vastly different ways.

Exactly. That is evidence that the writers were conveying their experiences or at worst writing the experiences of people they knew. If it had been written like a history book then it would look more like a fabrication-- like the contrived voice of the possible Josephus insertion.

Evidence?

Go back to the top of the thread for a few questions a fabricator-approach should consider. Futhermore, consider the references to Jerusalem which was destroyed in 70 AD. Also see that at least one of the members of the Council of Nicea indicated the dated voice of the gospels as I posted above. Also note the use of Aramaic in Mark. While your at it pick up a book and do your homework.

He was recorded by every single european and african culture of the time, and his image was printed on thousands of coins, and his statues, commissioned in his time and recorded as being him survive to this day.

Even if you could prove that, why would it matter? History is always written by the winners. And Rome was a big winner.

You said no other religions were oppressed.

Cut and paste it, or shut up.

Unlike you, I am willing to insult people directly. You hide, and insult from the sidelines.

How's this? You're an ass.

Oh, can't take a little derailing? Want to cry about it a little more? Want a tissue? Do you need me to wipe the drool from your chin?

Derailing is counter productive. For the record Jerry Falwell is one of my least favorite human beings.

Your point was an appeal to ignorance. Several people apparently exposed it. Now, you are getting defensive so as to take attention away from the fact that you know absolutely nothing about which you speak. Your attempt to hide behind a wall of veiled insults doesn't work. You see, I can ignore your verbal diarrhea and cut right to the point. You have been beaten, kiddy.

You didn't even come close to debating what I posted. Again, I suggest a re-read.

And I thought you had a thing against insults.

As with most of your thinking thus far, it's unsubsantial. I'm not above insults and never claimed to be. So perhaps you'd like to replace hypocricy with another word? Or maybe look up the definition.

Go on, you can get it all out. We don't oppress freedom of speech here. Hell, you might even get some equally ignorant historical revisionist to agree with you!

It's painfully obvious who the revisionists are.

Flick
 
Flick,

Somebody named Jesus arrived on the spiritual-political landscape and shook things up. The documents pretty much support that.
Last time I hammer this point (well, in this thread) - but you left in no-mans' land with this approach.

Document "Y" tells us "X" existed.
Document "Y" tells us highly questionable, and unverifiable, details about "X".
We conclude that at least some of these details are incorrect.
On balance we conclude that "X" probably existed, but that "Y" cannot be trusted in it's details of "X".

What now? Even if the conclusion for "existed" is "reasonable", it leaves you with a Jesus that you know *nothing* about with any sort of confidence, because you have admitted that the gospels are suspect.

I guess you just want to get to point 'A' - "Jesus existed, in some shape or form". That seems like a low-point to aim for, and I can concede it for the same reason I can concede that Stilpo probably existed - it doesn't really matter if I'm wrong. "Jesus the carpenter" is a low-risk assumption simply because it doesn't really matter!

I think I'd better bow out - I'm not the one to be taking up this argument, 'cos I don't see the relevence (beyond curiosity value) of a mundane Jesus.
 
he's a believer that embraces the original lie (not knowing it's a lie), and believes he has the knowledge and the duty to continue and extend the teachings. In this sense, he's no different to Martin Luther.

Then the original lie was set prior to 50AD?

he's a fabricator who embraces the original lie (not knowing it's a lie) and seeks to create his own history for his own purposes.

In which case he is another fabricator willing to be beaten and jailed for his own purposes.

You assume Peter was a fabricator, not a believer. Even if true, then (a) above resolves the problem - Paul was acting genuinely when confronting Peter.

If Peter was a believer and not a fabricator, then we are left with some pretty significant happenings by Jesus, or at worst, some very convincing smoke and mirrors.

Well, you're getting confused here - are we discussing "Jesus was a fabrication", or "Jesus was a fabricator"?

You are right, the thread was orginally about Jesus as a fabrication, which is illogical. Jesus could have been the fabricator, we can't know. If he was, then he hardly had good reasons to be such, so then we are left with a question of his sanity.
 
I guess you just want to get to point 'A' - "Jesus existed, in some shape or form". That seems like a low-point to aim for, and I can concede it for the same reason I can concede that Stilpo probably existed - it doesn't really matter if I'm wrong. "Jesus the carpenter" is a low-risk assumption simply because it doesn't really matter!

I only chose to aim there because it is highly illogical to assert otherwise as some have done. I agree it doesn't matter to anyone at a spiritual level, but it does matter philosophically because to assert otherwise is lazy thinking. I about through with this too, because it is clear that some refuse to acknowledge a very basic premise.

I think too many atheists here think I'm trying to argue that Jesus was who he said he was, I'm not. This wasn't the place for that. Maybe he was maybe he wasn't, we may never know. But the fact that a man named Jesus existed, incited followers, and had a message of reconciliation with god seems hardly debatable.

Perhaps it is time to stop wasting my time.

Flick
 
Fade:

When you look back on the historians of the past, they don't write about the same event in vastly different ways.

Really? Here are several links from the Ancient History Bulletin that deal with several different historical issues; each one of the articles is at least partially involved with looking at and sorting out discrepancies and differing accounts by multiple authors and source documents speaking of the same event(s):

http://www.trentu.ca/ahb/ahb4/ahb-4-4b.html
http://www.trentu.ca/ahb/ahb5/ahb-5-4d.html
http://www.trentu.ca/ahb/ahb3/ahb-3-1c.html
http://www.trentu.ca/ahb/ahb2/ahb-2-2d.html

Now, can you offer any support for your claim that "historians of the past ... don't write about the same event in vastly different ways"?
 
That you know nothing about Alexandrian, Byzantine, or Western textual tradition is pathetically clear. It is also a remarkable admission from someone claiming to speak with authority.

What can I say? We didn't study it in detail. A few facts about von Soden's approach:

It is rejected by numerous scholars as it is chalked with error.
He used only 414 of the over 5,000 existing fragments to form his criticism. By his method, we could likely assert that 1 John 5:7 was an latter insertion, even though the verse has the following history:

200 AD Tertullian quoted the verse in his Apology, Against Praxeas
250 AD Cyprian of Carthage, wrote, "And again, of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost it is written: "And the three are One" in his On The Lapsed, On the Novatians, (see note for Old Latin)
350 AD Priscillian referred to it [Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Academia Litterarum Vindobonensis, vol. xviii, p. 6.]
350 AD Idacius Clarus referred to it [Patrilogiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina by Migne, vol. 62, col. 359.]
350 AD Athanasius referred to it in his De Incarnatione
398 AD Aurelius Augustine used it to defend Trinitarianism in De Trinitate against the heresy of Sabellianism
415 AD Council of Carthage appealed to 1 John 5:7 when debating the Arian belief (Arians didn't believe in the deity of Jesus Christ)
450-530 AD Several orthodox African writers quoted the verse when defending the doctrine of the Trinity against the gainsaying of the Vandals. These writers are:
A) Vigilius Tapensis in "Three Witnesses in Heaven"
B) Victor Vitensis in his Historia persecutionis [Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Academia Litterarum Vindobonensis, vol. vii, p. 60.]
C) Fulgentius in "The Three Heavenly Witnesses" [Patrilogiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina by Migne, vol. 65, col. 500.]
500 AD Cassiodorus cited it [Patrilogiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina by Migne, vol. 70, col. 1373.]
550 AD Old Latin ms r has it
550 AD The "Speculum" has it [The Speculum is a treatise that contains some good Old Latin scriptures.]
750 AD Wianburgensis referred to it
800 AD Jerome's Vulgate has it [It was not in Jerome's original Vulgate, but was brought in about 800 AD from good Old Latin manuscripts.]
1000s AD miniscule 635 has it
1150 AD minuscule ms 88 in the margin
1300s AD miniscule 629 has it
157-1400 AD Waldensian (that is, Vaudois) Bibles have the verse
1500 AD ms 61 has the verse
Even Nestle's 26th edition Greek New Testament, based upon the corrupt Alexandrian text, admits that these and other important manuscripts have the verse: 221 v.l.; 2318 Vulgate [Claromontanus]; 629; 61; 88; 429 v.l.; 636 v.l.; 918; l; r.

The 414 pieces von Soden worked on were not even all collaborated with each other.

James White asserts, "We were forced to rely on von Soden's work...his presentation of the data leaves much to be desired....The present edition does not cite the testimony of the ancient versions or church fathers."

Flick
 
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
That really is one of the best peices of evidence for a real Jesus - it's the sort of thing a real person would say.

On the other hand, no doubt lots of early Christians felt the same way, when God didn't come through with the touchdown or the A+ test score. So it's also the sort of thing you'd want to inoculate against by having the leader say it first.
 

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