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Do You Need A Free Membership?

Thanks to the incredible generosity of members of the blog, I am happy to announce that there are a limited number of free one-year memberships available.   These have been donated for a single purpose: to allow those who cannot afford the annual membership fee to participate on the blog for a year.   I will assign these memberships strictly on the honor system: if you truly cannot afford the membership fee, but very much want to have full access to the blog, then please contact me. Do NOT reply here, on the blog, as a comment.   Send me a separate email, privately, at [email protected].   In your email, let me know your situation (why you would like to take advantage of this offer) and provide me with the following information: 1)      Your first and last name. 2)      Your preferred personal email. 3)      Your preferred user name (no spaces). 4)      Your preferred password (should be 8 or more characters, no spaces).   The donors will remain anonymous, but here let me publicly extend my heartfelt thanks for such [...]

2014-12-06T21:07:07-05:00December 6th, 2014|Public Forum|

Gift Memberships on the Blog 2014

‘Tis the season!   It’s hard to believe, but the holidays are upon us again.  And I want to open up a holiday giving option that can help out people who really want to be on the blog but cannot afford the membership fees. As many of you know, last year, thanks to a number of generous donors, we pulled this off in a big way.  It happened in two stages.   Two anonymous donors had provided some funds to pay for memberships for a few people who wanted to be on the blog but because of personal circumstances, could not afford the membership fees.   I put out the offer on my Facebook page, asking if anyone was in that boat, and within twenty minutes I had thirty requests –all from people who were eager to join but simply did not have the means to do so otherwise.  I had to shut down the offer nearly as soon as I made it.   This made me suspect that there were a lot more people out there like [...]

2014-12-06T21:03:49-05:00December 6th, 2014|Public Forum|

Why Was the Gospel of Mark Attributed to Mark?

I come now – at *last*, you might say – to the final post in this thread dealing with how the Gospels of the New Testament came to be named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.   I have covered a lot of territory in this thread, arguing that the Gospels were not known by these names until near the end of the second century; that they probably acquired their names because of an edition of the Gospels produced in Rome sometime after the time of Justin Martyr (mid second century), an edition that influenced both Irenaeus and the author of the Muratorian canon, and eventually all of Christendom. This edition named the first and last of the Gospels after two of Jesus’ disciples and the third Gospel after a companion of the apostle Paul.   I have explained the reasons in the preceding posts.  And now comes the most difficult and puzzling question: why was the second Gospel attributed to Mark? I regularly am asked this question, and usually the questioner expresses it with some surprise: why [...]

2020-04-03T14:17:16-04:00December 5th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Why Was the Gospel of Luke Attributed to Luke?

So far I have tried to explain why, in the proto-orthodox church of the second century, the Gospels of Matthew and John came to be attributed to two of the disciples of Jesus.  My thesis is that an edition of the four Gospels appeared in Rome sometime in the second half of the century and that it differentiated the four Gospels by indicating which was “according to” whom.  I now can address the question of how the other two Gospels were given their names, and why they were not assigned to disciples of Jesus but to companions of the apostles, Luke the companion of Paul and Mark the companion of Peter. Luke is the easier of the two to explain, and in some ways is the easiest of all four Gospels.   That’s because the author provides hints of who he is – or at least hints of whom he wants his readers to *think* he is. The hints do not come in the Gospel of Luke itself.  As I have already pointed out, the author [...]

2020-04-03T14:17:26-04:00December 4th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Why Was the Gospel of John Attributed to John?

Some of the same objections to Matthew having written the First Gospel apply to John the son of Zebedee having written the Fourth.   Unlike Matthew, John did not copy any of our other Gospel sources, and so that’s not the problem that it is for Matthew (who surely, if he was an eyewitness, would not have taken his stories about Jesus from what he found in someone else’s written text).   But there is an even higher probability, bordering on certainty, that John the son of Zebedee could not write.  He was a fisherman from rural Galilee.  Fishermen were not educated.  They were very low class peasants.  John would never have gone to school.   Where he lived, there *were* no schools.  He never would have learned to read.  Let alone learned to write.  Let alone learned to write in Greek.  Let alone learned to write sophisticated, philosophically informed prose narratives in Greek.   I think there is virtually no chance that the historical John of Zebedee wrote the Gospel. So why did our anonymous editor living a [...]

2020-04-03T14:17:35-04:00December 2nd, 2014|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Why Was The Gospel of Matthew Attributed to Matthew?

I have now gotten to a point where I can discuss why the four Gospels were specifically given the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.   Recall the most important points of my preceding posts on the blog so far:  the Gospels were all written anonymously and they circulated anonymously, for years and decades; we have no certain evidence that they – these particular Gospels -- were called by their familiar names until around 180 CE, in sources connected with Rome (Irenaeus and the Muratorian Fragment); my hypothesis is that an edition of these four Gospels was published in Rome sometime between Justin in 150-60 CE (he quotes the Gospels but does not name them) and Irenaeus in 180-85 CE.  That edition gave these Gospels their now-familiar names. If all that is correct, then there is no reason to think that people widely associated them with their familiar names before that.   The reason this became a widespread tradition is that it was started by a single editor – possibly based, of course, on things being [...]

2020-04-03T14:17:44-04:00December 1st, 2014|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|
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