I’m skeptical that Papias’ information is accurate (assuming we even have a fair account of what he wrote), but I’m skeptical that any 2nd century Christians really knew much about the 1st century history of their religion, given the way collective memories tend to degrade over time. (Granted, Papias lived through part of the 1st century, but not the useful part for our purposes–he was only a child when the gospels were written, and doubtless only became aware of them later in time).
Much was lost, and much was invented. Finding that core that is real is the historian’s task–as well as understanding the origins of what isn’t drawn from real life, but was nonetheless highly influential on many lives yet to come.
I have been guilty innumerable times in my life of relating as fact things I genuinely believed were facts, but which were not facts, however authoritatively I said or wrote them. I did so with no malign or dishonest intent. I believed in the factual nature of my statements, that were not, in the event, at all factual. Many far better educated persons than myself or Papias have done the same in recent times, in spite of all the superior informational resources that exist now, and obviously higher education today is at a level not even the richest people of ancient times could hope to obtain. (Though one might argue they were more focused then.)
Matthew’s primacy was a tradition. But not one that anyone could have factually substantiated. So we can’t depend on what anyone says. We have to look at the texts themselves. And the texts themselves strongly argue for Mark coming first, Matthew and Luke following in his wake with new material, and John taking a variant path.
Robert said
But the Griesbach hypothesis has already been thoroughly rejected by the overwhelming consensus of critical scholars. Continually asserting your naive belief that this will somehow change in the future is nothing but magical thinking on your part. Have you still not bothered to read the scholarly works generously and patiently recommended to you?
I’ve read the Fundamental Solution chapter of Streeter’s The Four Gospels, where he gives his reasons for Markan Priority.
I’ll write a post on why I don’t find them convincing.
godspell said
Second century Christians disagreed with each other so much of the time, it’s hard to see any consensus, other than “Jesus is cool.”
The consensus is very much that the four gospels were written by Matthew Mark Luke and John and that this is the traditional ordering – as Origen says. If Mark was written in Rome say, John in Ephesus, Luke in Greece and Matthew in Antioch we may well have had Roman christians saying Mark was first, Ephesians saying John, Greeks saying Luke and Antichene’s saying Matthew. The tradition of Matthew being first is unchallenged and therefore noteworthy.
Matthew was accepted as the first gospel for a variety of reasons (that had little to do with actual chronology), but they wouldn’t have had any proof of which was written first (no copyright notice sin ancient books), nor would they have known for sure who wrote it, because of the way books came out then. Books got written in the tradition of someone, then later audiences (lacking the sophistication of the original audience) took the attribution literally.
But there’s no particular reason for Matthew to be accepted as first. And certainly no reason for this tradition to be unchallenged throughout the christian world.
Matthew is clearly written after the great uprising in Palestine. Mark probably before. Matthew is much more concerned with separating Christians from Jews. You want to believe Mark is more embellished, but that’s clearly not true, and you have to bend over backwards to make that argument. The longer gospel with more stories nobody else has is clearly not the first. Nor does it make sense that the first synoptic gospel would have a nativity story.
The only reason to think Matthew is written after the Jewish revolt is that it mentions the destruction of the temple. But Mark’s gospel does too.
Matthew’s alone has Jesus say he was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel, and tells his disciples not to go among the gentiles or towns of the Samaritans. It’s virtually inconceivable that these lines are written by a christian after 70.
You keep saying Mark edited out this or that–why? If he strongly disagrees with the virgin birth, why would he copy Matthew at all? If he believes Jesus is Messiah, as clearly he does, why would he not want people to know Jesus was born in Bethlehem?
Mark is adapting the early Jewish gospel of Matthew for a later more gentile friendly version. Jesus fulfilling OT prophesies is less important to gentiles than to Jewish Christians. Mark is concerned with Jesus being the son of God, not the son of David.
Matthew 1:1 “This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David”
Mark 1:1 “The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah the Son of God”
Mark thinks the story of the trip to Bethlehem is an invention and unnecessary and so removes it. Lets get straight to the ministry of Jesus.
To me, looking at the way the story develops, it’s very clearly Mark, Matthew, Luke, John. John going off on his own tangent, and not copying much if anything from the synoptics. And not putting in that story about the woman taken in adultery, because it’s just not his style. He wouldn’t even like that story.
The story is essential to the narrative of John’s gospel. The pharisees originally want to stone the woman. Jesus saves her and from then on the Jews take up stones to kill Jesus. Jesus has taken her punishment upon himself.
As to your consensus comment, bren–let’s be real. There are still people saying Shakespeare isn’t Shakespeare. There are still people saying global warming isn’t real. There are still people saying the earth is flat. There are still people saying Jesus didn’t exist at all.
You don’t want to be one of those people, do ya?
There are different kinds of expert consensuses involved here. There is not only a scientific consensus that the earth is round, there is also scientific consensus than the probability of it being flat is precisely 0.
With global warming the consensus is probably less than 1% but not zero.
With Markan priority there is scholarly consensus that its the most likely but there’s no consensus on the probability of Matthean priority being near zero.
godspell said
One more thing–Mark’s gospel is problematic in a lot of ways. It doesn’t have the nativity story, nor is there any reason at all to think Jesus was born of a virgin, or born in Judea. It doesn’t attempt to explain away Jesus’ baptism by John, that the others either change or ignore to make John subordinate to Jesus, when the opposite was clearly true. The original version ended without the risen Jesus appearing to any of his followers. Not hard to see why 2nd century Christians, while still revering it, would want to believe Matthew came first. (They never said anything about Mark just editing Matthew though, since they believed Mark was an eyewitness as well–if you’re going to believe them, you’d best be consistent about that).If Mark disagreed that much with Matthew and Luke–why did he copy them? There were other sources available to him. You believe Matthew could have written it all from scratch (which is most unlikely, but you still believe it). We know there were other sources, because there are a lot of stories not in Matthew. And if he’s just copying their superior Greek–why is his so bad? I think he’s the better writer in terms of storytelling, mind you–but you and I both suffer from a problem in that we can’t read the originals. It’s widely agreed that Mark’s grasp of Greek is the weakest, but that makes no sense if he’s just editing.
Your argument isn’t even a three-legged stool, so it keeps falling over.
I dont think we should just believe what early christians say about the first century but we should begin with assuming theyre correct and see what we have reason to doubt. There’s no reason to doubt Matthew being the author of the first gospel but there’s every reason to believe the author of the second has copied him.
Lets take the author of 1 Timothy, which if not Paul is probably a late first century christian. He tells other christians in 1 Tim 1:4 “not to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies”. Now if gave this author the gospels of Matthew and Luke and asked him to write his own the first thing he’d do is remove the myth of Bethlehem and contradictory genealogies.
Both Luke and Mark have the same baptism story and neither attempt to explain away the baptism like Matthew and John. However John baptising Jesus would pose the same problems for Mark/Luke as for Matthew/John so that the absence of explanation while note worthy doesnt help with chronological ordering. The absence is strange whether it comes before or after Matthew’s gospel.
Editing doesnt just mean removing, its rephrasing as well. If he’s rephrasing Matthew/Luke he’ll be rephrasing with his own style.
Robert said
Papias, upon whom almost all later authors are dependent, actually says nothing whatsoever about Matthew writing first, if he is even referring to anything resembling what we know of today as Matthew’s Greek gospel.
From what we know of Eusebius’ fourth-hand account of Papias’ third-hand account of the second-hand account of the elder, one might easily presume that Papias (or the elder) discussed Mark’s gospel first because he considered Mark’s gospel to have been written first and then explains why Matthew ordered his oracles to supply precisely what had been lacking in Peter’s preaching upon which Mark’s gospel was based, an ordered composition of the Lord’s oracles.
“This also the presbyter said:
Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not in order (οὐ … τάξει) whatsoever he remembered of the things said or done by Christ (τὰ ὑπὸ τοῦ κυρίου ἢ λεχθέντα ἢ πραχθέντα). For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but afterward, as I said, he followed Peter, who adapted his teaching to the needs of his hearers, but with no intention of creating a connected account of the dominical oracles (σύνταξιν τῶν κυριακῶν ποιούμενος λογίων), so that Mark committed no error while he thus wrote some things as he remembered them. For he was careful of one thing, not to omit any of the things which he had heard, and not to state any of them falsely.”
These things are related by Papias concerning Mark. But concerning Matthew he writes as follows:
“So then (οὖν) Matthew wrote the oracles in the Hebrew language (Ἑβραΐδι διαλέκτῳ τὰ λόγια συνετάξατο), and every one interpreted them as he was able.”
The order of the account, the connective particle (οὖν, therefore), the nearly identical language, and Papias’ own focus on the dominical oracles (see the title of his work: Λογίων κυριακῶν ἐξηγήσεως) all point toward Papias’ account explaining that Matthew subsequently supplied an ordered account of the oracles of the Lord because that is specifically what was missing from Mark’s account.
Although we do not know that Papias or the elder were referring to our canonical Greek Matthew, one cannot help but think of how the current gospel of Matthew does indeed present five major discourses of Jesus’ teaching material.
I think we only have scraps of material from the first few centuries and I would consider it unlikely that one of the scraps we have happens to be what the entire Matthew tradition was based on.
I think the problem with reading Eusebius’s Papias account as “Therefore Matthew wrote … ” is that Mark being careful not to omit anything nor state anything falsely does not result in a necessity for Matthew to write the logia in the Hebrew language. There’s no connection – no causal motivation.
Better instead to see these as two separate accounts brought together by Eusebius in which Matthew writes the logia in Hebrew/Aramaic and everyone (Mark included) tries to interpret them as best they can.
godspell said
I’m skeptical that Papias’ information is accurate (assuming we even have a fair account of what he wrote), but I’m skeptical that any 2nd century Christians really knew much about the 1st century history of their religion, given the way collective memories tend to degrade over time. (Granted, Papias lived through part of the 1st century, but not the useful part for our purposes–he was only a child when the gospels were written, and doubtless only became aware of them later in time).Much was lost, and much was invented. Finding that core that is real is the historian’s task–as well as understanding the origins of what isn’t drawn from real life, but was nonetheless highly influential on many lives yet to come.
I have been guilty innumerable times in my life of relating as fact things I genuinely believed were facts, but which were not facts, however authoritatively I said or wrote them. I did so with no malign or dishonest intent. I believed in the factual nature of my statements, that were not, in the event, at all factual. Many far better educated persons than myself or Papias have done the same in recent times, in spite of all the superior informational resources that exist now, and obviously higher education today is at a level not even the richest people of ancient times could hope to obtain. (Though one might argue they were more focused then.)
Matthew’s primacy was a tradition. But not one that anyone could have factually substantiated. So we can’t depend on what anyone says. We have to look at the texts themselves. And the texts themselves strongly argue for Mark coming first, Matthew and Luke following in his wake with new material, and John taking a variant path.
I think you should more faith in the ability of oral history to preserve truth.
There’s the story of the archaeological dig, at Öland island in Sweden, on a mound with a stone wall around it, from which locals had stayed away and had had stories of it being a dark and dangerous place. The archaeologists found it had been a town deserted for 1,500 years after a massacre of all the townspeople and where the bodies had been left in the street.
Ludwig Papmehl-Dufay, an archaeologist from the team at the local museum, which began excavations after warnings that the site was being targeted by treasure hunters, said that while no written or oral history of the massacre survived, there were persistent stories that it was regarded locally as a dangerous place. “I do find it most likely that the event was remembered and that it triggered strong taboos connected to the site, possibly brought on through oral history for centuries.”
** you do not have permission to see this link **
brenmcg said
godspell said
Second century Christians disagreed with each other so much of the time, it’s hard to see any consensus, other than “Jesus is cool.”
The consensus is very much that the four gospels were written by Matthew Mark Luke and John and that this is the traditional ordering – as Origen says. If Mark was written in Rome say, John in Ephesus, Luke in Greece and Matthew in Antioch we may well have had Roman christians saying Mark was first, Ephesians saying John, Greeks saying Luke and Antichene’s saying Matthew. The tradition of Matthew being first is unchallenged and therefore noteworthy.
Matthew was accepted as the first gospel for a variety of reasons (that had little to do with actual chronology), but they wouldn’t have had any proof of which was written first (no copyright notice sin ancient books), nor would they have known for sure who wrote it, because of the way books came out then. Books got written in the tradition of someone, then later audiences (lacking the sophistication of the original audience) took the attribution literally.
But there’s no particular reason for Matthew to be accepted as first. And certainly no reason for this tradition to be unchallenged throughout the christian world.
Matthew is clearly written after the great uprising in Palestine. Mark probably before. Matthew is much more concerned with separating Christians from Jews. You want to believe Mark is more embellished, but that’s clearly not true, and you have to bend over backwards to make that argument. The longer gospel with more stories nobody else has is clearly not the first. Nor does it make sense that the first synoptic gospel would have a nativity story.
The only reason to think Matthew is written after the Jewish revolt is that it mentions the destruction of the temple. But Mark’s gospel does too.
Matthew’s alone has Jesus say he was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel, and tells his disciples not to go among the gentiles or towns of the Samaritans. It’s virtually inconceivable that these lines are written by a christian after 70.
You keep saying Mark edited out this or that–why? If he strongly disagrees with the virgin birth, why would he copy Matthew at all? If he believes Jesus is Messiah, as clearly he does, why would he not want people to know Jesus was born in Bethlehem?
Mark is adapting the early Jewish gospel of Matthew for a later more gentile friendly version. Jesus fulfilling OT prophesies is less important to gentiles than to Jewish Christians. Mark is concerned with Jesus being the son of God, not the son of David.
Matthew 1:1 “This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David”
Mark 1:1 “The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah the Son of God”
Mark thinks the story of the trip to Bethlehem is an invention and unnecessary and so removes it. Lets get straight to the ministry of Jesus.
To me, looking at the way the story develops, it’s very clearly Mark, Matthew, Luke, John. John going off on his own tangent, and not copying much if anything from the synoptics. And not putting in that story about the woman taken in adultery, because it’s just not his style. He wouldn’t even like that story.
The story is essential to the narrative of John’s gospel. The pharisees originally want to stone the woman. Jesus saves her and from then on the Jews take up stones to kill Jesus. Jesus has taken her punishment upon himself.
As to your consensus comment, bren–let’s be real. There are still people saying Shakespeare isn’t Shakespeare. There are still people saying global warming isn’t real. There are still people saying the earth is flat. There are still people saying Jesus didn’t exist at all.
You don’t want to be one of those people, do ya?
There are different kinds of expert consensuses involved here. There is not only a scientific consensus that the earth is round, there is also scientific consensus than the probability of it being flat is precisely 0.
With global warming the consensus is probably less than 1% but not zero.
With Markan priority there is scholarly consensus that its the most likely but there’s no consensus on the probability of Matthean priority being near zero.
The consensus means nothing when it isn’t based on verifiable facts, which none of these people had. They could not talk to the authors, they could not read copyright notices that didn’t exist. The gospels were not released in bookstores. They distributed slowly, over time, with few people reading them at first (with few people who could read). And as has been pointed out, the earliest known sources don’t say Matthew came first. Nor is there any reason to assume that they believed the gospels to have been written by the disciples they’re named after for any reason other than that they self-evidently wished to believe it. There’s a well-established consensus among Mormons that Joseph Smith found golden disks with The Book of Mormon on them, even though none of them ever saw the disks. Do you believe that’s a fact? The time factor is quite similar. And they had printing presses and libraries and mass literacy by then.
Matthew has sources Mark didn’t have (like Q), but Mark is one of his sources, the most important one. He wants to include things Mark doesn’t–otherwise what’s the point? Jesus probably did say that thing about the gentiles (his mission was primarily to the Jews). Matthew feels like he has to include it. His hatred of the unconverted Jews clearly shows that he’s writing further along than Mark, at a time when a gospel that anti-Jewish could have an audience.
Your statement about the Woman Taken in Adultery is baffling. I know you can’t read Greek, but you can read English, pretty sure. I’ve never seen any translation of that story that ended with the Jews preparing to stone Jesus (you seem to be confusing it with a different story).
He reasons with them, on their own terms–there is a tradition in Jewish thought then that says you can’t condemn others for your own faults. There’s a passage in Hosea where God says he won’t condemn Jewish women for prostituting themselves, because the men are just as bad, with less excuse. It may well be Jesus wrote a few words of that passage in the dirt, enough for the more educated men there to recognize it–and become ashamed, as Jesus makes his case with a verbal economy you basically never see elsewhere in John (where Jesus speaks in verse most of the time). In John’s gospel, the Jewish religious leaders are incapable of shame, remorse, or mercy. They show all of them in this case. They are men. Imperfect, angry, judgmental–and capable of learning. They are not the temple leaders, because the temple leaders wouldn’t be trying to have a woman stoned at the Passover, when the main concern is to keep order. John doesn’t care. To him, they’re all the same. You’re either with Jesus or against him.
But in Mark, Jesus says anyone who isn’t against him is for him.
I’m not against you, Bren. But your arguments are pretty bad, and exhausting in their tedious wealth of unsubstantiated details, most of which turn out to be spurious when examined closely. I’m going to be paring you way down if you keep responding, and keep bringing you back to the points you don’t want to confront.
Like the fact that Matthew’s Greek is much better than Mark’s. How could Mark be copying Matthew, and just editing out what he doesn’t like? The Greek should match Matthew’s, in that case. Matthew is editing Mark (among others) and cleaning up the Greek.
I remember once, as a grad student, I was reduced to typing high school students’ papers for cash–and this one kid had written a truly awful paper about his vacation in Israel. His English was a hell of a lot worse than Mark’s Greek, I’m pretty sure (and English was his first and only language).
The father who brought it to me asked me to please fix the language wherever possible, and I did. I really needed the money.
If you compared the original ‘manuscript’ with what I typed and printed out, you’d know very well whose version came first.
brenmcg said
I think you should more faith in the ability of oral history to preserve truth.
There’s the story of the archaeological dig, at Öland island in Sweden, on a mound with a stone wall around it, from which locals had stayed away and had had stories of it being a dark and dangerous place. The archaeologists found it had been a town deserted for 1,500 years after a massacre of all the townspeople and where the bodies had been left in the street.
Ludwig Papmehl-Dufay, an archaeologist from the team at the local museum, which began excavations after warnings that the site was being targeted by treasure hunters, said that while no written or oral history of the massacre survived, there were persistent stories that it was regarded locally as a dangerous place. “I do find it most likely that the event was remembered and that it triggered strong taboos connected to the site, possibly brought on through oral history for centuries.”
** you do not have permission to see this link **
That’s rather a different thing to be remembering than who wrote what first, which 99.999999% of Christians wouldn’t have known to begin with. Yes, collective memory can keep certain things alive–memorable things. Things that stick in the memory.
Back then, nobody CARED who wrote what first. It became an issue later. After the few who knew (or cared) had died, and their memories with them.
This is a very poor example to make your point. All memories are not equally memorable. Massacres are generally agreed to be among the most memorable of memories. People even come up with phrases to make sure nobody forgets–“Remember the Alamo.” Nobody said “Remember when the first story about the Alamo was written down” and I doubt you could find anyone on the streets of San Antonio who does.
And btw–why are you so dismissive of the story of the Woman Taken in Adultery being a real event in Jesus’ life, when you believe John put it in, you believe John was an eyewitness, and you believe in collective memory? That was a lot more memorable than when a book most people didn’t even read first started appearing–and of course, appearing just to the handful of people it was written for.
They didn’t remember because they didn’t know to begin with–by the time many of them finally saw Mark’s gospel, Matthew and Luke were probably in circulation as well. Nobody is writing dates on these manuscripts. The original manuscripts wouldn’t have an author’s name on them either. Bart’s made that very clear.
You have a right to your own opinion. You don’t have a right to your own facts.
This has been diverting and all, but it’s starting to feel like an ouroboros. Just keep going around and around, chewing on the same points, ad infinitum.
Also, weren’t we supposed to be discussing Barabbas? And his psychic wife, that only ‘Matthew’ knew about?
I don’t cast aspersions on all oral history. I believe there are legitimate memories preserved in the gospels. I also believe there are many stories and traditions (like which gospel came first) which came about later, for reasons that had nothing to do with preserving oral history.
I furthermore consider it unlikely that most of what’s in the gospels was the result of people going around doing oral history surveys (armed with tape recorders, no doubt). Some, perhaps. But much would have been drawn from earlier written sources that we no longer have. Some of them probably in Hebrew or Aramaic, which most Christians couldn’t read by the time the synoptics were produced. Which explains why they weren’t preserved, since fewer and fewer Christians were literate in those languages, or even understood them.
Robert said
Nobody would ever say the οὖν is meant to explain Matthew’s native language, a nonsensical strawman. That Matthew writes in his native language requires no explanation. Rather, the οὖν sentence easily explains how the deficit in Mark’s gospel is directly addressed by Matthew, described with the very same language and in agreement with the central focus of Papias’ work, as seen in the very same wording used in his title to the whole work. To try and claim that that these sentences are not related is to ignore the language used in the text. Even worse, to imagine that the text is describing Mark translating Matthew is to contradict the actual text, which clearly says that Mark was Peter’s interpreter, not translating Matthew’s text. You literally add words that are not there, twist the order of the text that is there, and ignore the plain meaning of the text before you. Your magical thinking is hopelessly immune to evidence and, much worse, you neglect to admit that your original claim (that the early Christian authors were unanimous in claiming that Matthew was the first to write a gospel) is false. Even if you are not able to understand the meaning of the elder and Papias’ statements as cited by Eusebius, you should at least be intellectually honest enough to admit when your own claim is shown to be wrong. Otherwise, there is no point in discussing anything with you. I will give you one last chance. Do you now admit that the Papias fragments do NOT say that Matthew was the first person to write down an account of Jesus’s life and works?
“Unanimous” was an overstatement – I meant there are no dissenting voices. That is, no-one claims explicitly that Mark was first. I don’t think Papias is claiming Matthew was first here either.
I think the translation “with no intention of creating a connected account” is incorrect if its interpreted as Mark wrote an un-ordered account and therefore Matthew wrote an ordered one.
Also I think the break in direct citation by Eusebius “These things are related by Papias concerning Mark. But concerning Matthew he writes as follows… ” indicates they are two separate passages being brought together. No need for Eusebius to break off if the οὖν is follows on from the Mark account
The order of the accounts Mark then Matthew is, I think, down to the detail of the respective accounts. More is said of Mark therefore this goes first, less detail and therefore less importance is given to the Matthew account. Followed by brief mentions of letters of John and a woman accused of many sins.
Eusebius cites Clement with much the same account of Mark writing his gospel but Clement places Matthew before Mark.
godspell said
The consensus means nothing when it isn’t based on verifiable facts, which none of these people had. They could not talk to the authors, they could not read copyright notices that didn’t exist. The gospels were not released in bookstores. They distributed slowly, over time, with few people reading them at first (with few people who could read). And as has been pointed out, the earliest known sources don’t say Matthew came first. Nor is there any reason to assume that they believed the gospels to have been written by the disciples they’re named after for any reason other than that they self-evidently wished to believe it. There’s a well-established consensus among Mormons that Joseph Smith found golden disks with The Book of Mormon on them, even though none of them ever saw the disks. Do you believe that’s a fact? The time factor is quite similar. And they had printing presses and libraries and mass literacy by then.
I dont believe Joseph Smith found golden plates with the book of mormon on them but I do believe the tradition/claim that he did goes back to his life/time. I dont believe the book of mormon was passed around anonymously for 100 years before everyone came to a collective agreement that joseph smith must have written it.
Matthew has sources Mark didn’t have (like Q), but Mark is one of his sources, the most important one. He wants to include things Mark doesn’t–otherwise what’s the point? Jesus probably did say that thing about the gentiles (his mission was primarily to the Jews). Matthew feels like he has to include it. His hatred of the unconverted Jews clearly shows that he’s writing further along than Mark, at a time when a gospel that anti-Jewish could have an audience.
I dont see how a writer who supposedly hated unconverted Jews could, alone of the gospel writers, have Jesus tell the 12 apostles only to go to the lost sheep of Israel and not go among the gentiles. If history is to be used as any guide for the relative dating of the gospels we should expect the possibly of this line being added to go down and the possibly of it being removed to go up.
Your statement about the Woman Taken in Adultery is baffling. I know you can’t read Greek, but you can read English, pretty sure. I’ve never seen any translation of that story that ended with the Jews preparing to stone Jesus (you seem to be confusing it with a different story).
Chapter 8 begins (probably) with the Jews ready to stone the woman and ends with them picking up stones to throw at Jesus. It should all be seen as part of a single account.
He reasons with them, on their own terms–there is a tradition in Jewish thought then that says you can’t condemn others for your own faults. There’s a passage in Hosea where God says he won’t condemn Jewish women for prostituting themselves, because the men are just as bad, with less excuse. It may well be Jesus wrote a few words of that passage in the dirt, enough for the more educated men there to recognize it–and become ashamed, as Jesus makes his case with a verbal economy you basically never see elsewhere in John (where Jesus speaks in verse most of the time). In John’s gospel, the Jewish religious leaders are incapable of shame, remorse, or mercy. They show all of them in this case. They are men. Imperfect, angry, judgmental–and capable of learning. They are not the temple leaders, because the temple leaders wouldn’t be trying to have a woman stoned at the Passover, when the main concern is to keep order. John doesn’t care. To him, they’re all the same. You’re either with Jesus or against him.
Nicodemus is pharisee but cant be said to be either for or against Jesus. His beliefs are obscure.
The pricope adulterae doesnt show the pharisees having shame or remorse or mercy, it just shows them being beaten in a contest of understanding the law.
But in Mark, Jesus says anyone who isn’t against him is for him.
I’m not against you, Bren. But your arguments are pretty bad, and exhausting in their tedious wealth of unsubstantiated details, most of which turn out to be spurious when examined closely. I’m going to be paring you way down if you keep responding, and keep bringing you back to the points you don’t want to confront.
Like the fact that Matthew’s Greek is much better than Mark’s. How could Mark be copying Matthew, and just editing out what he doesn’t like? The Greek should match Matthew’s, in that case. Matthew is editing Mark (among others) and cleaning up the Greek.
The greek in Mark cannot always be said to be of a poorer standard. Just on occasion. Exactly what you’d expect if a poorer writer was editing a better one. If Mark is editing/rephrasing Matthew, he has no choice but to use his own level of Greek. These arguments are unhelpful in deciding who wrote first.
I remember once, as a grad student, I was reduced to typing high school students’ papers for cash–and this one kid had written a truly awful paper about his vacation in Israel. His English was a hell of a lot worse than Mark’s Greek, I’m pretty sure (and English was his first and only language).
The father who brought it to me asked me to please fix the language wherever possible, and I did. I really needed the money.
If you compared the original ‘manuscript’ with what I typed and printed out, you’d know very well whose version came first.
And if this high-school kid was given a paper written by you and asked to make whatever edits/rephrasing he liked, what would the resulting paper look like? Mostly well-written but some occasional badly phrased edits?
If I took a copy of Hamlet and made what i thought were “improvements” what should someone’s conclusion be when handed both copies? That the better writer had clearly copied off the worse one and merely fixed up his poor writing when necessary?
godspell said
That’s rather a different thing to be remembering than who wrote what first, which 99.999999% of Christians wouldn’t have known to begin with. Yes, collective memory can keep certain things alive–memorable things. Things that stick in the memory.Back then, nobody CARED who wrote what first. It became an issue later. After the few who knew (or cared) had died, and their memories with them.
This is a very poor example to make your point. All memories are not equally memorable. Massacres are generally agreed to be among the most memorable of memories. People even come up with phrases to make sure nobody forgets–“Remember the Alamo.” Nobody said “Remember when the first story about the Alamo was written down” and I doubt you could find anyone on the streets of San Antonio who does.
The point is that it was 1,500 years later. The gospel author traditions are first written down 100 years later. Anyone who received a copy of a gospel would like to know who wrote. The knowledge of authorship has every chance of being passed down.
And btw–why are you so dismissive of the story of the Woman Taken in Adultery being a real event in Jesus’ life, when you believe John put it in, you believe John was an eyewitness, and you believe in collective memory? That was a lot more memorable than when a book most people didn’t even read first started appearing–and of course, appearing just to the handful of people it was written for.
I dont dismiss it, its possibly true. But the story is so good and moral message so strong that the story being invented should be considered a high possibility.
One possibility is the story of the adulterous woman being brought to Jesus as a test its true but that it had some different outcome. And a writer only later thinking of the line “he who has not sinned … ” and how good it would have been to say at the time.
They didn’t remember because they didn’t know to begin with–by the time many of them finally saw Mark’s gospel, Matthew and Luke were probably in circulation as well. Nobody is writing dates on these manuscripts. The original manuscripts wouldn’t have an author’s name on them either. Bart’s made that very clear.
You have a right to your own opinion. You don’t have a right to your own facts.
Its impossible to know whether the original manuscripts had the authors name on them. Bart uses “anonymous” only in the technical sense, the authors name is not mentioned within the text itself.
Robert said
The stone wall around the mysterious mound spoke volumes, I suspect much more dramatically and memorably than any text or oral tradition ever could. But this story fails to make your point precisely because “no … oral history of the massacre survived“!
There’s plenty of mounds with stone walls around them – not all are the site of an ancient massacre.
There’s also the account of the finding of the ship Erebus in the Arctic. Confirming Inuit oral history which had been dismissed for decades. Timelines here comparable with gospel oral traditions.
“The discovery of a ship that had been missing since 1846 on September 2, 2014 had at least partially solved one of Canada’s favorite mysteries; what’s more, its location confirmed the veracity of Inuit accounts that never squared with the accepted version of what happened.” ** you do not have permission to see this link **
godspell said
This has been diverting and all, but it’s starting to feel like an ouroboros. Just keep going around and around, chewing on the same points, ad infinitum.Also, weren’t we supposed to be discussing Barabbas? And his psychic wife, that only ‘Matthew’ knew about?
I think the original points were that the phrase contained in both Matthew and Mark “For he knew it was out of envy that they had handed Jesus over to him” only makes sense in Matthew.
And that Mark’s too early introduction of Barabbas is confirmed by Luke and John’s correct placement and explained by the correct placement of the introduction in Matthew.
BDEhrman
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