Steefen said
… So, the Synoptic Gospels are ongoing revision and re-branding …
  

This is Bilby’s thesis: if the proto-Luke used an early edition of Mark and another source, there are parts of Mark that have strong stylometric resemblance to their reconstructed Luke, which he uses to reconstruct a “Mark 1st edition” (his marker is “Mk1”), and so for him, Marcion’s proto-Luke, his Evangelion, draws from “Mark1” and a “new Q”, “Qn” (apologies that Bilby’s tags and my expansions of them trigger the biblical reference function of the forum comment system):

Qn: 65-70 CE

Mark1 (Mk1) 75-80CE: Qn + Mark1 Redactor

Luke1 (Lk1/Ev): 80s CE: Qn + Mk1 + Luke1 Redactor

Matthew1 (Mt1): 90s CE: Qn + Mk1 + Lk1 + Matthew1 Redactor

John1 (Jn1): 100s CE: Qn + Mk1 + Lk1 + Mt1 + John1 Redactor

John2 (Jn2): 110s CE: Qn + Mk1 + Lk1 + Mt1 + Jn1 + John2 Redactor

Luke2+Acts (Lk2): 117-138 CE: Qn + Mk1 + Lk1 + Mt1 + Jn1 + Jn2 + Luke2 Redactor

Mark2 (Mk2): 140s CE: Qn + Mk1 + Lk1 + Mt1 + Jn1 + Jn2 + Lk2 + Mark2 Redactor

——————

Matthew2 (Mt2): Qn + Mk1 + Lk1 + Mt1 + Jn1 + Jn2 + Lk2 + Mk2 + Matthew3 Redactor

John3 (Jn3) 140s CE: Qn + Mk1 + Lk1 + Mt1 + Jn1 + Jn2 + Lk2 + Mk2 + John3 Redactor

Mark3 (Mk3) 140s CE: Qn + Mk1 + Lk1 + Mt1 + Jn1 + Jn2 + Lk2 + Mk2 + Mark3 Redactor

So in Bilby’s thesis, the gospel was adaptive, a process of both preserving and expanding sacred traditions. The same could be said of Rabbinic literature, but unlike Rabbinic literature, the gospel tradition was one that did not value retaining the memory of the debate and the earlier sources that the later versions were based upon.

Regarding Stephen’s challenge, and contra the youtubes, there’s heaps of ** you do not have permission to see this link ** for this document chain, but note that if you don’t put much weight on stylometrics, it’s not evidence that you are going to give a lot of weight to. 

Steefen said
So, if the play was put on for Flavia Donitella,
which means the first gospel’s date get pushed back,
there is no way, I’m accepting the historical Jesus lived in the late 20s C.E. 
If Marcion’s gospel was the first gospel,
there is no way, I’m accepting the historical Jesus lived in the late 20s C.E.

“Marcionite priority” is a bit more nuanced than that … it’s priority for Marcion’s Evangelion over canonical Mark, Matthew and Luke, not Marcion’s Evangelion as the first Gospel. At least Bilby’s thesis is that the mostly Q “Gospel of the Poor: would be the first gospel in Greek with passages preserved in later texts, from sometime in the 60s, and proto-Mark the second, from sometime in the 70’s.

Stephen said
This is Bilby’s thesis: if the proto-Luke used an early edition of Mark and another source… 
My own fancy is that Proto-Luke closely followed Mark structurally, as well as being Adoptionist in outlook.   The later revision of Luke was occasioned by the appearance of Matthew and was a direct response to his gospel.   My assumption is that Proto-Luke contained no “Q” material, all of which was derived from Matthew. 
My surmise satisfies all camps.  Proto-Luke knew only Mark.  Luke II knew Mark and Matthew. 
Hold your applause. 
  

IIUC, Bilby’s response regarding “new Q” would be after using stylometric comparison to reconstruct a coherent gospel of Luke from the attested contents of Marcion’s “proto-Luke”, the presence of proto-Luke passages in Mark and stretches of proto-Luke that are not in Mark is still there.

So away you go … the canonical Mark passages that are copied by proto-Luke have statistically significant differences in style from the average of Markan passages, indicating that proto-Luke is copying from an earlier edition, so use the copied passages in proto-Luke to reconstruct the best available stylometrically consistent reconstruction of that earlier edition.

Then the proto-Mark is compared to the proto-Luke, and the parts of proto-Luke that do not come from proto-Mark are mostly conventionally reconstructed “Q” (because most “L” material is not present in proto-Luke), and somehow (I will have to read more deeply at the linked open-source online publication) a coherent Qn is reconstructed, with proto-Luke being an extended section of proto-Mark, then an extended section of Qn, then an extended section of proto-Mark, and so on.

So Bilby’s thesis is Qn priority, then proto-Mark, then proto-Luke, then proto-Mathew, then the “Dionysian” inspired proto-John, and then comes the reaction against the Dionysian inspired proto-John, “Jn2”, and so it goes until arriving at the autographs recognizable as the direct sources of the canonical editions in the mid-2nd century.

IIUC, Vinzent seems to be of the strong view that the first “mostly canonical” Luke, Bilby’s “Lk2+Acts”, is a reaction to Marcion, but, yes, in my view, it could well alternatively or in addition be a reaction to one of the preceding editions of Matthew.

Steefen said
Stephen:
BruceR
This is Bilby’s thesis: if the proto-Luke used an early edition of Mark and another source… 
Stephen:
My own fancy is that Proto-Luke closely followed Mark structurally, as well as being Adoptionist in outlook.   The later revision of Luke was occasioned by the appearance of Matthew and was a direct response to his gospel.   My assumption is that Proto-Luke contained no “Q” material, all of which was derived from Matthew. 
My surmise satisfies all camps.  Proto-Luke knew only Mark.  Luke II knew Mark and Matthew. 
Steefen:
So Marcion’s Proto-Luke is not the first gospel.
Mark is still the first gospel, then comes Marcion with an edition of Mark which is called Proto-Luke.
Well, you cannot have a Luke gospel written before 100 CE!
  

In Bilby’s thesis, Q is the first gospel, then a pre-canonical Mark, then a pre-canonical Luke, but as noted, I have to read further in his work to see how strong the evidence is for the reconstructed Mark containing parts of the reconstructed Q.

The reconstructed Luke is very much a combination of some Markan material with something else, and there is also the elaborations of Mark without that material to bring it to the canonical Mark, so IMV it would be clearest to refer to the first layer on top of proto-Mark that omits most of that extra material as “a second edition of Mark.

But in any event, you certainly can have a pre-canonical Luke that is before 100 CE.

Bear in mind that the existence of evidence in a passage from canonical Luke that it knew Josephus is not part of the criteria for selecting it for the pre-canonical Luke. The criteria are direct attestation from heresiologists that a passage was in Marcion’s Evangelion, and then after removing the passages that have direct attestation to being missing from the Evangelion, stylometric tests for which of the unattested passages in canonical Luke are similar to the passages attested to be in the Evangelion.

But in the event, the reconstructed text of passages claimed by Church Fathers to be in the Evangelion, and passages that are statistically similar to those passages do not contain any witness to the author of the Evangalion knowing Josephus. Nor, IIRC, are the passages present that Goodacre uses to argue that Luke knew Matthew.

So there is not strong evidence placing the pre-canonical Luke after 100 CE.

As far as how definitive or tenuous is Bilby’s dating to the 80s of the Evangelion, the “proto-Luke” in the Marcion priority thesis, that I will have to keep reading from Bilby’s work (linked in the comments above) to find out, but the definitive evidence that canonical Luke is post 100 CE is not there for the reconstructed Evangelion.

In a sense, under Bilby’s thesis, the evidence for first century composition of the gospels exist in the canonical texts because of the tendency to preserve much of the earlier text and then add stuff to it, so they are evidence carried forward from the earlier texts. And the evidence for second century composition of the gospels exist in the canonical texts due to the redactions done in the second century.

It’s like, everybody except the people who date the synoptics to the 40s or 50s are at least partly right — Bart Ehrman is right about the existence of Q, Goodacre is right about Luke having access to Matthew, the Dionysus in John theory is right, the Dionysus not in John (in the sense of being over-written in important ways) theory is right, and etc.

Mind, all of this requires accepting all of the available evidence at hand. If the stylometric work is dismissed out of hand, as Goodacre seems to do, then Bilby’s ladder pretty much collapses into something like:

** you do not have permission to see this link **): 117-138 CE: Stuff in Common with Mark, Stuff in Common with Matthew, Hints of a knowledge of John, and stuff that Luke alone had.

** you do not have permission to see this link **): 140s CE: Stuff in Common with Mark, Stuff in Common with Luke, Hints of a knowledge of John, and stuff that Matthew alone had

** you do not have permission to see this link **) 140s CE: Stuff in Common with the Synoptics, of debatable source, and stuff that John alone had.

** you do not have permission to see this link **) 140s CE: The stuff in common with Luke and Matthew, the stuff in common with Luke, the stuff in common with Matthew, and a few additional miracles and parables.

Robert said
I have not read much of Bilby’s theory uet but am highly skeptical of any hypothesis that pretends to trace so many layers of earlier forms of texts supposedly existing prior to the texts we have. He seems to speak of his as a highly scietific method supported by evidence, but so much of it seems like conjecture upon conjecture. Reminds me of the life-long evolving theories of Marie-Émile Boismard of the Ècole biblique in Jerusalem. I have no doubt that the reality on the ground was complex but also doubt that we are able to conclusively reconstruct all of that complexity in great detail. At best we may only be able to set up a few competing bare-bones theories that no doubt simplify the reality but do not multiply additionally ever more detailed hypotheses upon hypotheses.
  

Yes … as we saw with the MBS/CDO housing bubble collapse in 2007-2009, when you pile second and third order models on top of first and then second order model results, if there is a key flaw in the model, it can all come collapsing like a house of cards.

Since the various Patristic witnesses to passages from Evangelion are not always consistent with each other (involving our usual sources of 2nd & 3rd century fog — how carefully they did their work on their source material, what discrepancies there may have been between the source material that each had, and what errors have crept into the chain of manuscripts of their works), the assessment of the original attestations have to decide how much weight to give to each source. Given that weight — they document their work, so I’m guessing they are being consistent, but whether they should give more weight to one source and less to another is not something I would be equipped to judge — the attested passages might not have a lot of additional subjectivity, but the weighting is an unavoidable subjective judgement call.

The statistical evidence for material of different styles being contained in the earliest texts that we have is quite empirically strong. The stylometric work appears to me to be statistically sound, though it is not exactly the kind of non-parametric statistics that I have done, but rather adjacent to it. So the idea that the authors of gospels in the 60 CE – 140 CE period tended to retain much of earlier work while adding new material to it is rather the claim that best fits the available empirical evidence than a conjecture.

But at the same time, the attested passages are always going to be a fuzzy set, given the inconsistencies between and various quotation tendencies the various Patristic sources, and what certainly would have been some drift between the autographs of the Church Fathers and the surviving manuscripts. So a dirty reference base for the stylometric analysis is never going to give a pristine reconstruction.

And then that reconstruction is used to reconstruct the Mark upon which it was based, and then, if I understand correctly (next week is Spring Break, so I may have a chance to get into this part of the process more intently), those reconstructions are used to reconstruct Qn.

Obviously, that Qn is going to be a facsimile transmitted over a noisy line, and even if it is sharpened up with image processing software, some of what was originally there is likely to be missing, and some of what is seen is likely to be an artefact of processing.

But on the other hand, it is a fact that the passages in canonical Luke that are attested present and attested absent have statistically significant stylometric differences, and those differences show up in all of the reconstructions, from the fragmentary minimalist ones where the differences are which Patristic sources are given priority over others, to the reconstructions that aim to reconstruct a coherent text.  That implies both that the Marcionite priority over canonical Luke has much more empirical support than the Heresiologist’s claims that Marcion’s Evangelion is a heavily edited version of canonical Luke, and that there is a Marcionite layer preserved in canonical Luke … since a bottom up rewrite using information but not text from an earlier source will have a much more consistent style than what is seen between the attested present and attested absent passages from canonical Luke.

As far as what I have been calling “proto-Mark” (to avoid triggering the Bible book/chapter thing that happens with “Mk1”) … I suspected an earlier layer of Mark with a more polished redactor adding material later before I ever heard of this stylometric work trying to reconstruct an Evangelion and Apostolos. So I have to dig into that work very carefully to avoid lapsing into nodding along with confirmations of my priors.

On John, I have the impression that Bilby is referring to another line of work rather than his own analysis there, so I’m not even going to be looking at that for a good long while yet.