Stephen said
cstu said
Stephen said
I mentioned this in one of the other threads but I wonder if the composer of gMatthew knew who wrote the gospel of Mark? Or did he use it completely divorced from its original context? (Like us!)
There’s zero evidence that he did. The author of Matthew does not even acknowledge he was using another gospel as his basis. His goal was different than that of gospel he had and he wanted to portray Jesus as the fulfillment of Jewish scripture. It would not surprise me if he wanted his gospel to completely replace “Mark” as the sole gospel of Christianity.
But why would Matthew have depended so heavily upon a text if he had no idea of its trustworthiness?
You assume the priority of the writers of the gospels was on reporting factual historical information. BDE says often that their goal was to promote their theological agendas.
You assume the priority of the writers of the gospels was on reporting factual historical information.
Nope. I make no such assumption. I note the use to which Matthew puts the text of Mark. I note that slightly more than 90% percent of the content of Mark’s Gospel appears in Matthew’s gospel, whole swaths copied verbatim. I note that the changes Matthew makes to Mark’s text appear to be spots where Matthew finds problems with Mark’s text. I conclude that Matthew privileges Mark’s text but feels free to modify it as necessary, supplementing it with sources of his own. The question then becomes, what is the basis of his acceptance of Mark’s text? It makes sense that he either knows the source of Mark’s gospel or his confidence is based on Mark’s acceptance among early Christian communities. After all, Luke copies much less of Mark and John dispenses with Mark altogether (I remain agnostic as to whether John knew Mark). It’s not like Matthew had to use so much of Mark.
I am sure that this is not an original observation, but I think it is interesting that if any of these gospel writers had access to the other accounts, which seems inherently obvious given the degree of repetition even in phrasing, that they did not simply adopt that account and use it as it was. I think this unwillingness to simply adopt what already existed shows two points. First, that the early church had no overarching plan of creating a single cohesive collection imbued with a prepackaged theology. Second, that the accounts were, in a way, consciously competing with each other, even while they seem to have wanted to share some core of the story. It does make me wonder if some earlier accounts, which have not directly survived, or some form established by oral tradition, had already set in with various geographical areas, and they wanted to assert their own elements into the accounts that were created in those traditions. It might be part of the complication that there is more than a single point of interaction in which the accounts were created, and perhaps in which some elements of the traditions crossed each other by contacts other than writing.
JAS – That’s the whole problem in a nutshell. People have debated this continuously since the early church, when many gospels were deemed heretical for one reason or another, for the most part based on the word of a select group who’d accumulated power as church fathers. It makes it one of the most fascinating puzzles in history, and it also makes it nearly impossible to shed any final scientific, historical truth on it. But it’s surely true that each gospel writer had his own specific agenda. Talking about that would take a few books, but they weren’t written by one faction. Various factions with various axes to grind wrote separate gospels for separate audiences. The three synoptic gospels and their interconnections are well documented, but, just for instance, to throw more confusion into the mix, there was a fellow named Simon Magus who shows up in Acts, and who Peter decries as a devil, but very little exists of who he actually was or said and what part he played in the early days of Christianity. However, a number of sources point to him as having direct contact at least with John the Baptist, possibly as a disciple, and also with the Jesus movement, possibly as an early baptized Christian after the crucifixion. He was also known as a miracle worker, or rather, a magician, as he’s called, Magus, who apparently did some extraordinary things that impressed people. What bearing did this one significant person, who we still know barely anything about, have on the writing on the gospels? The references in Mark to Jesus being called a magician and the gospels denying that could show a spill-over from Simon to Jesus, possibly – the gospels careful to portray Jesus as not a magician. Could that be in the light of a Simon-Jesus religious followers’ rivalry? Could be. But we don’t know for certain. There’s something there. How much? The parable of the mustard seed always struck scholars as a weird analogy, since better examples of seeds growing into large trees could have been used, but the mustard seed has bearing on the teaching of Simon and the tiniest spark of divinity people were said to be born with, in Simonian ideas, and which had to be nurtured. Again, in all this, the best scholars suppose and guess and rarely agree. The NT is rife with this stuff. Unpuzzling it is nigh on impossible, unless some huge cache of early documents are one day found. Who wrote what and why, when it comes to the gospels, is unanswerable. What we do have are a thousand intriguing questions.
Hi Robert
You see it in
Mark 15:3
“And the chief priests accused him of many things” (the following is an interpretation, not the text of Mark)
As that he was a magician, and a blasphemer, and gave out that he was the Son of God; and that he made himself a king, and even forbad the people to give tribute to Caesar, and moved discord, sedition, and rebellion throughout the land;
Also in Mark 3:22, when he cast the demons out of a man “And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, “He is possessed by Beelzebul! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons.” Someone who does acts under the power of the devil was considered a magician.
Mark 8:22 says, “And he cometh to Bethsaida; and they bring a blind man unto him, and besought him to touch him. ** you do not have permission to see this link **And he sent him away to his house, saying, Neither go into the town, nor tell it to any in the town.”
Spitting into a man’s eyes has aspects of magic ritual… in John 9:6 he mixes spit with dirt to make mud that he uses in the man’s eye, also a magic like ritual. Why would an all-powerful Jesus need to do that? And in Mark, it takes him two tries to finish the job. These actions are more in the realm and ritual of a magician, who is working the crowd. “Oh, I think I can see shadows (trees walking) then the second action gives him complete eyesight and the crowd is amazed. This smacks of stagecraft, in my view. Which brings up the (blasphemist) next thought or conclusion, did Jesus work with people planted in the crowd, like many magicians do? Was he accepting of a little chicanery in order to get people to hear his message?
In any case, he was accused of being a magician.
brenmcg said
Robert said
If this is the only reasonable opinion, then surely it must be the view of all critical scholars. Is it? No. Is it even the predominant opinion? No, again. Is it an extreme minority opinion? Ding, ding, ding! Yes! So there must be other reasonable opinions, right?
Let’s hear one. What is a reasonable historical account for how all four names of the gospels came to be universally accepted by christendom if these names were only added to gospels after they had spread throughout the empire.
Sorry for the necro-post (and I haven’t read all 5 pp of this thread), but I have to ask rhetorically:
How did the Torah become known as the five Books of Moses? How did the Athanasian Creed become known as the Athanasian Creed?
Theories of attribution can arise in a bunch of ways, and once they arise there is no reason they can’t spread to everywhere that the work is already known, they don’t need to spread in lockstep with the text to become universal–so the fact that by some later stage the attribution is universal doesn’t imply the attribution was present from the beginning.
Further, once an attribution is sufficiently common, even people who dispute it will often still use it just because it facilitates communication to use the name that everyone knows–this is especially true when there is need to distinguish several similar works: It isn’t technically the Nicean creed–since it was expanded by Constantinople and subsequently still got the filioque–but everyone calls it the Nicean Creed, so unless I want to be misunderstood, that is what I will call it. Ditto the Apostles’ creed (everyone calls it that, even though no one thinks the apostles wrote it). Ditto, the Athanasian Creed (though some people will call it quicumque, but historically Athanasian predominated as the name and is still most recognized. Thus too attributing the Torah to Moses and Hebrews to Paul.
The point is that a later, false attribution coming to be the universal way to name something is not at all uncommon, even when the false attribution is disputed. And we have tons of examples of this sort of thing happening.
The point is that a later, false attribution coming to be the universal way to name something is not at all uncommon, even when the false attribution is disputed. And we have tons of examples of this sort of thing happening.
I suppose it wouldn’t be impossible to find out how the Torah came to ascribed to Moses (even when it refers to him in the third person and describes his death). I suspect it was for the same reason that the gospels came to be associated with the apostles. Authority. But I take your larger point. Behind all these attributions lies a reception history. One aspect of this process that fascinates me is how often attempts to reform a tradition couch themselves as attempts to get back to the “true” meaning of the original way that was lost somehow.
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