Sure I am working with that presumption. I brought it (or at least an example of it) up earlier when I noted that we both had broader presuppositions that informed how we approached this question; The specific example I offered was of my being convinced that the gospel of Matthew was not written by an eyewitness.
So I’m aware that I’m approaching this from the perspective of doubting whether there are many (even any) apostolic writings from the start (aside from some of Paul’s letters), I’m aware that that influences how I think about this question, and I’m very much willing to discuss the various reasons for my favoring that position.
On the other hand, do you have any positive, non-circular, reason for approaching this question from the presumption that the writings of the NT (or at least the four canonical gospels, or even any gospels, canonical or not) were written by apostles (or their intimates)? Why do you think the apostles left the canonical gospels? Do you have any aside from taking protoorthodox apologists writing a century later at their word when they claim their scriptures are apostolic, and their adversarys’ are forgeries?
And what I was doing in the paragraph was simply sketching a plausible alternative to the traditional account which you favor. The point was simply to show that there exists at least one plausible alternative to the conclusion you want to establish, so that point was not circular; I literally introduced the offending passage with “putting it all together you might get something like this”, and as you elsewhere noted, I called it “hypothetical”.
Porphyry, re: your post 421 (I’m responding to this one before 416 and 417 because of its importance):
“Sure I am working with that presumption. I brought it (or at least an example of it) up earlier when I noted that we both had broader presuppositions that informed how we approached this question;”
Ok, good. You’ve at least begun to understand me. You just need to think it all the way through – that is, think through the implications of your presupposition. It’s clear you have not yet done that. For one thing, this presupposition allows you to set the bar of plausibility for your thesis very low. I’ll say more about this below.
“The specific example I offered was of my being convinced that the gospel of Matthew was not written by an eyewitness.”
I’m still in shock that you would allow the Goodacre take on that Matthew/Mark comparison to convince you that Matthew didn’t write GMatthew. When I see a man push over a wall with one hand, I know there was something wrong with the wall. In other words, there had to be a lot more motivating you to dump Matthew than that comparison.
“On the other hand, do you have any positive, non-circular, reason for approaching this question from the presumption that the writings of the NT (or at least the four canonical gospels, or even any gospels, canonical or not) were written by apostles (or their intimates)?
The existence of texts like the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Judas. There could only be counterfeit dollars if there were genuine dollars.
“Why do you think the apostles left the canonical gospels?”
I do not think it was their first inclination. They said they were assigned to go, preach, and teach – not hole up in an upper room writing books. And as I’ve said, nothing in the NT speaks of a goal or plan to produce a NT. Therefore, I think they saw it as an oral mission and additionally so because they believed the second coming (day of the Lord, coming of the kingdom of God – as prophesied by Jesus) would occur in their lifetime. But as the movement continued to grow while apostolic ranks were reduced by persecution (which had also been prophesied to them), the idea of getting their testimony on record began to make sense and increasingly urgent – just as Paul used letters to stand in for his absence when he needed to be in two places at once. Even then, I don’t think they were writing for the ages so much as to sustain their own generation. Once all the apostles had died, and the second coming did not take place according to common expectation, the apostles’ writings naturally became even more important.
“Do you have any aside from taking protoorthodox apologists writing a century later at their word when they claim their scriptures are apostolic, and their adversarys’ are forgeries?”
Without reading the NT texts, I would have no way of discriminating between the claims of the proto-orthodox about authorship of those texts from the claims of their adversaries. But once I’ve read the NT texts and judged whether they speak truth or falsehood, then I can make informed decisions about counter-claims.
“And what I was doing in the paragraph was simply sketching a plausible alternative to the traditional account which you favor. The point was simply to show that there exists at least one plausible alternative to the conclusion you want to establish, so that point was not circular; I literally introduced the offending passage with “putting it all together you might get something like this”, and as you elsewhere noted, I called it “hypothetical”.
As I said above, the problem with what you’re saying about plausibility is how low you have set the bar for yourself. Consider the annoyance you expressed with my questions – and I didn’t even ask all that I wanted to ask. To you, the number of questions seemed excessive, but that’s because you accept your thesis so easily. And you can accept it so easily because your presupposition is that the traditional view, for all practical purposes, is impossible (“…the gospel of Matthew was not written by an eyewitness”). I’ve observed this same phenomenon in people who deny that Jesus could have been raised from the dead. When asked about the multiple apostolic and other eyewitness testimony about it (e.g. 1 Cor 15:1-11), including how these witnesses were willing to go to death for the claim, a hardened believer will say something to the effect that ANY hypothetical would be more likely than someone actual rising from the dead. Thus you really can’t see how flimsy your thesis is because your presupposition is a hardened conviction.
When I get to 416 and 417, I hope later this morning, I will suggest some ways you can improve your thesis for those who aren’t as convinced as you are that Matthew could not possibly have written the gospel that has borne his name and no other for as long as anyone can remember.
Porphyry, this is my response to your post 417 (I’m answering it before 416 because it’s shorter and I can get it out of the way.)
“I don’t understand what you find illogical. Nor do I understand how I’m moving the goal posts. I may be overlooking some blunder I made, but I don’t see it.”
I just tried to respond to your sentence as best I understood it. Perhaps I should have simply said I don’t understand it all. I don’t know that it’s even necessary for me to understand it at this point. The only issue for me regarding Irenaeus is what I thought you and I had agreed to, which was that your thesis was addressing the period of time from when the four gospels in question were first written to 180-185 when Irenaeus called them Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – specifically, how they went from acceptance as anonymous, to being considered apostolic, to being individually named as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John such that Irenaeus could refer to them that way with the expectation of being understood. As long as that’s still your view, I don’t think you’ve moved a goal post.
Porphyry, this is my response to your 416:
“Do we have any particular reason to think this must have happened uniformly across the Roman empire all at the same time?”
No. Here’s what I see: Your thesis proposes a sequence of three scenarios:
-Scenario 1: the acceptance and circulation of the four gospels as anonymous
-Scenario 2: the continued acceptance and circulation of these gospels as collectively apostolic, but individually unnamed
-Scenario 3: the continued acceptance and circulation of these gospels as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
You’ve already said that scenario 1 lasted 50 years or so. I suggest you also assign a time period to each of the other two scenarios.
I think you also need to recognize that precisely because the change from one stage to the next would not be uniform across the empire, that there needs to be an time assigned to
– the time between the writing of these four gospels and the initiation of scenario 1.
– the transition from scenario 1 to scenario 2
– the transition from scenario 2 to scenario 3
You may choose to address the issues above in a different way. I’m not trying to direct you. I’m just trying to show the kinds of questions that would be in a person’s mind who’s sincerely trying to assess the viability and plausibility of your thesis.
For transition times, I think it would be useful to consider as a benchmark the length of time it took to clean up the loose ends of the NT canon. As for the starting point you could use c 313 because that’s when Eusebius named the 27 (though in two categories of “acknowledged” and “disputed [but] known and approved by many) or 367 because that’s when Athansius named today’s NT TOC book for book as canonical or you some other date you think more appropriate. As for the completion date, I don’t know what to suggest because I’m unaware of commonly-used dates like the two I just suggested for the starting end. Robert’s assessment suggests he might completion didn’t occur until the Council of Trent, or maybe even that it’s still not settled. I myself have most often described this mopping up process – that is, the spread of the 27 NT TOC to the full empire – as lasting “a hundred years or so” or “more than a hundred years.”
(Candidly, this is one of the areas where your thesis struggles for plausibility in my mind. Granted the churches would have been fewer in 1st-2nd century times compared to 4th-5th century, but, conversely, inter-church communications would have been more limited. I struggle to see how you get all three scenarios along with the respective transitions accomplished in time for Irenaeus to write what he wrote Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John without thinking he was announcing news. But I’ll withhold judgment until you’ve had a chance to lay out your view for me.)
“Legends take time to grow and spread. And legends often develop by degrees. You seem to think that every time I suggest a mistake was made and spread that this was a concerted and unanimous choice by everyone–as though people have to decide as a group that they will adopt a new belief. (Perhaps this is why you think the lack of an ecumenical council is so telling.) That isn’t what I’m saying. I’m not saying one day all Christians woke up and spontaneously said, “I’m sick of having anonymous gospels; I’ll adopt a new and utterly unfounded belief about who wrote them,” and as it turns out they all happened to adopt the same arbitrary belief at the same time. I’m suggesting that one person makes one assumption or one leap of logic, that assumption gets reported as fact and others accept it. Then another person makes another mistake, and that mistake likewise gets reported as fact and spreads.”
In this paragraph, you mischaracterize my view. I’m in 100% agreement with everything else you write in it. And this is why I have such a hard time seeing your thesis as plausible. That is, I not only struggle with the concept of each of the three scenarios, I don’t see how legends can form and change as fast as you are describing.
“I really think you would do well to consider the known cases where misinformation has formed and spread. I mean, how many Catholics today think that there was a Saint John Lateran? Where did that belief come from? It is an idiotic mistake, and yet completely understandable. How many Catholics believe in the virgin martyr St. Philomena, although we know exactly the shoddy basis for thinking she ever existed? Again, the issues you are raising as problems I need to answer are of a sort that makes me question whether you are able to seriously entertain what I am suggesting, or whether you are so locked into your narrative you can’t even envision another. People can and do (on their own, without coercion) come to accept things that are not well founded. Uniformity of belief is not–pace Tertullian–a guarantee that the belief is true.”
I’m aware of how urban myths form and circulate, but I’m also aware of how rebuttals to them form and circulate. It’s not enough to say, “People have gotten things wrong before; so you ought to find it easy to believe they got things wrong here” as if people have not gotten things right before, too.
“As I’ve repeatedly tried to alert you, the sorts of mistakes I attribute to the early Christians in arriving at the authorship of the gospels are not abnormal. On the contrary they are entirely normal. These are just the kinds of mistakes that people have made and spread throughout history.”
Again, I think you have to give us a reason people got them wrong here using examples that are closer analogies to confirming receipt of a letter/text than the Kitty Genovese case.
“I do not think ancient people, on the whole, were more gullible than modern people. I do strongly suspect that the earliest generations of Christians (let’s say roughly the first century of Christians) tended to be on the gullible or fanatical end of the spectrum–just as I think faith healers and snake handlers today are on the gullible end of the spectrum. And during that same time, there were plenty of very smart people who knew the claims of Christianity and rejected it as ludicrous madness. Galen, for example, multiple times uses Christians as exemplars and paradigms of unreasonable people who can’t be argued with. So I agree ancient and modern people both run the gamut from naive and credulous to skeptical rationalists. It’s just that I tend to think it is the first Christians–the ones from whom all this develops and spreads–who were credulous, and those who mocked them as crazy were the rationalists.”
Well, here the beans have been spilled. When you start out saying, “I do not think ancient people, on the whole, were more gullible than modern people” you sound like me, but when you go on to say, more or less, that the ancient gullible people became believers and the ancient skeptical people didn’t, you give away your bias. No wonder you think your thesis is plausible – the early Christians were gullible. What else would they do but the illogical things your scenarios have them doing. (You’ve said repeatedly they’re behaviors were normal; you never said they were logical, and indeed they were not.)
You may recall that I, too, was raised RCC and left it. Therefore, I can recognize and agree with a lot of the thoughts and feelings you express, but, by my lights, you just traded one tribe for another. The faith you were losing sounds like a faith in the RCC, not a faith in Jesus Christ. And the secular world you joined has a magisterium of its own (modern critical scholarship.) What a lot of people call conversion these days sound like college students transferring from the small quirky fraternity to the big cool one. Thus I agree with your assessment that much that passes for religion is socially-driven. I have been affected by this, but not governed by it. I believe in Jesus…because I cannot in good conscience not believe in Him.
No wonder you think my questions about your thesis are excessive. But, Porphyry, you know how gullible we believers are! We’re always asking questions, wanting to carefully weigh things out and make sure we understand all the relevant aspects of an issue, so that we don’t rush headlong into error based on a misunderstanding. Just chalk my excesses up to the impulsivity and naivete of a rube.
You’ve pressed me on a timeline for my hypothetical several times, so I’ll start with some global comments on that.
I do not know when the transitions happened. 50 years was only a rough suggestion meant to assist in envisioning what happened. We have Justin–describing at least 3 of the canonical gospels as memoirs of the apostles–and Irenaeus, a few decades later unambiguously giving them the traditional ascriptions.
But we don’t know how representative they were of the whole church when they wrote: you seem to think that Irenaeus’s use of the traditional titles establishes that those ascriptions were widely adopted through the whole world, so that he could presume to be understood when he used them. It isn’t clear to me (I haven’t gone through all of AH to see if he uses them in a way that would require the reader to know his ascriptions in order to understand his text). Even if the reader did know his ascriptions, that doesn’t mean that they accepted them–it may in other words have been a widely known, but not widely accepted theory. Or it could be that at his time it was only current in his part of the world, and either he didn’t realize they were not universal, or didn’t care that they were not universal (maybe he didn’t envision how widely his work would be read), or because he unambiguously identified which gospels he was referring to other than by the ascription (note, for example, that in the famous passage, he gives how each of them begins–which is the traditional way of identifying works) it didn’t even matter whether his readers knew of the ascriptions: the text would still be completely intelligible.
Nor do we know how old their position was before they articulated it. Maybe Justin was the last hold out refusing to adopt the new ascriptions. Or maybe Irenaeus was on the bleeding edge of adopting them. I don’t know, and I’m not aware that we have the data that would let us say.
What we can do is to trace a general movement happening in the second century around Rome. We have Justin, who ran a school in Rome, who still doesn’t name the gospels, though he knows them. We have Irenaeus, who spent time in Rome and wrote from a place still within the influence of the Roman Church, a few decades later, who unambiguously names them. Then we have the Muratorian fragment–placed in Rome, a bit later still–, that knows four gospels, and names the last two in their traditional sequence (the first names, presumably Matt and Mark, are lost because of its being a fragment). All of these sources are connected to the Roman church in the second half of the third century.
The point is that, not only do I not have the information to say precisely when the transitions happened, I expect that even if I did have perfect knowledge of the process, I still could give no sharp delimiters between periods, but I would expect gradual change as ideas were adopted by one area then another.
Second, as I said earlier, I think connecting the gospels to the apostles is a perfectly logical step (for one who already accepts them as authoritative) that might have happened quite early, and might have happened independently in various areas, or even if it happened later, it spread rapidly once it was first suggested–because it is such an obvious step. Again, I don’t have the data to pin down when that happened, aside from saying that at least one theologian in Rome writing in the middle of the third century knew them as apostolic memoirs. How universally held was that belief when he wrote? I don’t know. How long had that idea been around by Justin’s day? I don’t know that either.
The fact that I don’t have the data that would let me pin down the specific dates of when these stages occurred in which places doesn’t embarrass the general theory, let alone render it implausible. On the contrary, the theory is entirely consistent with the records we have.
Sorry to introduce a new line of thought before responding to outstanding lines, but I think we are under pressure to get in whatever we can before the exchange is ended, and this seems significant to me:
What do you make of Papias?
I won’t try to set a trap; I’ll just show a few of my card in brief.
It is pretty clear that the gospels that Papias says were written by Matthew and Mark are not the documents were know under their names.
Among other very interesting things that means: either Papias was right and the later tradition we know is wrong, or the later tradition is right but the objectively early Papias, who also explicitly traces his connection to even more primitive sources and who in turn exerted a clear influence on later Christians, was wrong, or both are wrong.
It seems to me that however you dice it, this is a problem for the view that there is a trustworthy and certain tradition concerning the authorship of the gospels reaching back to the evangelists themselves. I guess one could take a fourth option, and say that both are right: both Matt and Mark wrote multiple gospels, but that seems pretty ad hoc and also raises the question why the those that Papias referred to were lost.
The existence of texts like the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Judas. There could only be counterfeit dollars if there were genuine dollars.
Classic question begging. This statement assumes a conclusion that remains to be demonstrated. There were communities who regarded both the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Judas as “genuine dollars”. That they were minorities and eventually marginalized is neither here nor there. Their writings are just as interesting to historical/critical scholars as are the canonical texts. mike, that you dismiss them is simply revealing of an unacknowledged prior faith position.
There is also the issue that gospels are not like currency. One cannot take it as granted that the first written gospel was apostolic. I admit that Mark likely defined the genre of “Gospel”–a biography of Jesus–(thus it was the “genuine” gospel that other copied) but that doesn’t mean it was written by an apostle or anyone close to an apostle.
I’d also be interested to know how Mike has established that the Gospel of Thomas is a copy-cat, rather than an entirely independent work. Note that the gospel of Thomas has an entirely different form than the four canonical gospels and doesn’t’ even call itself a gospel. To be clear, I’m not saying it is independent, but it isn’t obviously a copy of Mark either.
Porphyry, re: post 430 and your further explanation of how you think your timeline of how the stages and transitions of your thesis can be fit into the years in question, I think you’ve said all you can say. I appreciate your efforts; no one can say you didn’t try to accommodate my requests. It’s just not a compelling chronology because it’s expecting too much to happen in too short a time. If the formation of the New Testament teaches us anything, it’s that the process was very slow by modern standards – roughly 300 years from texts to final collection, at the least.
Porphyry, this is my response to your post 431:
“What do you make of Papias?”
I think he opens up a new box of problems for your thesis.
“It is pretty clear that the gospels that Papias says were written by Matthew and Mark are not the documents were know under their names.”
That’s not clear to me. And while I have learned that you feel confident about lots happening in a short periods of time, I just don’t see how you and I are going to be able to work this issue out in the time we have left.
By my lights, Papias referring to Matthew and Mark around the turn of the 1st-to-2nd century moves the starting date of the alleged silent period in a way that reduces further the time in which you have to fit your imagined events – only worsening your chronological dilemma.
But leaving aside the chronological issues, since you’re bringing up a voice near the “silent” period, we’d also have to bring in Justin Martyr, Tatian, and the Diatessaron into the discussion – voices that break the silence about the identity of the gospels’ authors in the middle of the period one way or another.
But, once again, I find we are wandering from the essence of the traditional view, which is that public reading in the church congregations from the beginning is the steak and citations of the texts from church writers are the side dishes.
Porphyry, this is my response to your post 433:
“There is also the issue that gospels are not like currency. One cannot take it as granted that the first written gospel was apostolic.”
I’m not so sure that the gospels are not like currency. There had to be some motive for forgeries.
In any case, I take it as unlikely that the all 10 of the extant ostensible gospels by apostles of Jesus we have from the earliest Christian centuries are every single one a forgery – whether the genuine ones be Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John or Thomas or Judas or one of the others.
“I’d also be interested to know how Mike has established that the Gospel of Thomas is a copy-cat, rather than an entirely independent work. To be clear, I’m not saying it is independent, but it isn’t obviously a copy of Mark either.”
I wasn’t implying anything about composition or content of the books when I invoked the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Judas. I was just identifying a couple of ostensible gospels by apostles of Jesus.
Well, here the beans have been spilled. When you start out saying, “I do not think ancient people, on the whole, were more gullible than modern people” you sound like me, but when you go on to say, more or less, that the ancient gullible people became believers and the ancient skeptical people didn’t, you give away your bias. No wonder you think your thesis is plausible – the early Christians were gullible. What else would they do but the illogical things your scenarios have them doing.
Yes it is a bias, but it is a bias I hold tentatively and it is based on my assessment of the known facts. What do you make of people who, for example, treat First Enoch as Scripture? What do you make of people who claim regularly to communicate with the dead? And what is your impression of people who engage in glossolalia? What do you make of people who believe they can cure people’s physical diseases by laying hands on them or praying over them? People who believe those things, and things like them, are not in short supply, and I’ve got plenty of experience with such folk. And based on my experience, I tend, pretty strongly, to think they are deluded.
I’m open to being proven wrong, but the fact that they are sufficiently numerous to forms groups and churches full of other people who believe the same things doesn’t convince me.
I don’t see why my assessment of the dramatis personae of early Christianity is less defensible than yours. As Christianity was beginning to spread, some people joined the movement and many other people rejected them and even mocked them. In that sort of basic conflict, somebody was basically right and somebody was very wrong.
If you are a Christian, it seems to me you have to dismiss the people who rejected and mocked the early Christians as either superhumanly stupid or superhumanly evil. And even within Christianity, you will, I think, be forced to dismiss whole groups of people as nutty–e.g., the various gnostics.
We agree that humanity runs a gamut from credulous and gullible to rational and skeptical (and I’d say the gamut goes past rational to over-skeptical, where it ends up joining with the gullible; these are the people who unintelligently reject everything, but just as unthinkingly end up swallowing their own form of dogma unawares: there the extremes meet–in fact I suspect you’d place me somewhere near that part of the continuum). The issue then is how we map that onto the initial reception of Christianity. Whatever we end up concluding, we are going to have to make an unflattering assessment of some large group of first century people.
I’d also point out that my position is not mere question begging: It is not that I’ve decided the early Christians were gullible, and therefore I decide everything they say is wrong. It is rather that in assessing what the earliest Christians claimed and believed, I am aware that I would be naive to accept their claims at face value, simply because I do not know that they aren’t the sort of people who today would be out snake-handling or drinking Kool-Aid so they could meet up with the mothership. And this isn’t an arbitrary or ad hoc incredulity; I have similar skepticism towards similar claims from other traditions.
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