Robert said
Steefen said
Hugo
the “Johannine community”—the hypothetical setting in which the Gospel and Epistles of John were written …
Source: Robert’s link to a Bart Ehrman blog post
This one: ** you do not have permission to see this link **
Read the whole sentence: Simply put, the article argues that the “Johannine community”—the hypothetical setting in which the Gospel and Epistles of John were written—never existed.
He defined what the Johannine Community was because some people thought it existed and he thought it didn’t exist.
Robert said
Steefen, your last three posts have nothing to do with the topic of this thread. Did you intend to post them somewhere else?
The Johannine Community promoted High Christology.
I said, there can be no High Christology if the apocalyptic prophet was a false prophet.
I am questioning the validity of a Johannine Community, myself, not only is Hugo doing that.
I also questioned how we got to the High Christology of the Johanine Community.
We got there by Jesus being one with the Father and with Jesus being the Son of Man based on the book of Daniel.
That bridge is not persuasive.
The Book of Enoch speaks of an actual Son of Man, not one like a Son of Man.
= = =
Was John familiar with the synoptic gospels?
Answer: One gets to High Christology via Paul. Paul fails to recognize much of the biographical information about Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels.
So, John did not exhibit an excellent familiarity with the Synoptic Gospels. He even has Jesus insisting on body and blood before the Last Supper whereas the Synoptics do not show that.
One cannot get to the issues of Johannine High Christology without a strong connection to the method by which Jesus moves from human being to Son of Man–and that is through the Book of Enoch, in my opinion.
Your topic, “John’s Familiarity with the Synoptic Gospels” is confusing.
If there were an historical Jesus, “John’s Familiarity with the Historical Jesus” would equal “John’s Familiarity with the Synoptic Gospels.”
One difference would be that John is reflective where as the Synoptics are not.
Second, John is reflective BECAUSE, as I mentioned, the apocalyptic prophet got the second part of the apocalyptic prophecy wrong unless he was referring to the Gaius tradition in the Roman Empire. So, John moved away from the Kingdom of God/Heaven/Righteousness to Eternal Life.
Maybe that is why John has the resurrection of Lazarus and the Synoptics do not–to show the power of the Resurrector can give you more life on Earth, even after you have died.
That is how I came to address your post, John’s Familiarity with the Synoptic Gospels.
They were not important because his point of view was not biographical but reflective.
In his reflection, he wanted to focus on Jesus as the source for eternal life whereas the Synoptics were focusing on Jesus as the ruler of the post-Apocalypse glorious Kingdom of God/Righteousness/Heaven.
The alleged Jesus of the late 20s/early 30s was way behind John by AD 70s and AD 80s, so the gospels that presented that reality were not urgent in John’s familiarity, evidenced by the Gospel of John, we suppose you want us to go by, by the topic of the thread you posted. What else could we go by, anyway?
Robert
Paul does not fail to recognize much of the biographical information about Jesus in the synoptic gospels. He does not even know of the synoptic gospels because they were not yet written until 10 to 60 years after his death.
Steefen
Moot point you are making:
According to the majority of critical scholars, there is no difference between the synoptic gospels and the historical Jesus and the Oral Tradition which Paul would have known biographical information about the alleged historical Jesus.
Yes, Bart wrote Jesus, Interrupted and Misquoting Jesus, but broadly, the synoptic gospels are a significant source scholars use for the case to be made that the Jesus of the gospels and the historical Jesus are mostly the same.
Robert
If you want to address the similarities between the gospel of John and the synoptic gospels, by all means, please do.
Steefen
As I said, I followed my thought process on this topic and came to an excellent answer even though you wouldn’t have taken the route I took.
Should the similarities between John and the synoptics be attributed to John’s familiarity with the synoptic gospels.
Steefen
Give us a source of the similarities, then. We have Q for what is similar between Matthew and Luke, but not Mark.
What source is there for what is similar between the synoptics and John?
You posed a topic.
I kindly responded.
Scholarship has separated the Synoptics from the Gospel of John. That is Christianity 101, not me.
For your sake, I hope more members step up to your topic, but they probably won’t as long as you are critical of answers arrived at via a way you would not have taken.
In the Adult Classes I have taken before Christian church services, Gospel of John is different from Q and the Synoptics in significant ways, but you want to fault that: “It seems as if you merely want to focus on the differences between John and the synoptics.”
So, instead of perceiving your comment as negative, I asked you for a list of similarities. Second, I said, there should be no major difference between the synoptics and the eyewitness accounts in John of the historical Jesus, accounts which should not differ much. But you said, that is not true that there should be no major difference between the synoptics and what happened with the historical Jesus.
I remember Ehrman saying in his book Did Jesus Exist, the gospels constitute multiple attestation.
We await you mentioning some scholarly works about the similarities between John and the synoptics; however, Critical scholarship recognize that John is not in the same category as the Synoptics.
** you do not have permission to see this link **
Robert said
In my opinion, following the opinion of a growing number of critical scholars, perhaps even the beginnings of a new consensus, John probably was familiar with the synoptic gospels. That’s the topic of this thread.
Fine, then edify us with a list of their articles and books.
Robert
Harold Attridge has a very well written summary of the issue in his chapter of the Oxford Handbook of Johannine Studies. ** you do not have permission to see this link ** is available for free in the Google Books preview. But those who try and develop scholarly approaches to reconstructing an historical Jesus still routinely assume that John represents an independent witness to a pre-synoptic tradition, eg, John P. Meier & our own beloved Bart Ehrman.
Steefen
** you do not have permission to see this link **
Do you want to use the Attridge table of similarities for what the gospels got right about the historical Jesus?
I think we need an Anti-Q, the opposite of what is in the Matthew and Luke but not Mark: what IS in Matthew, Mark, Luke, AND John.
Are there any Hebrew myths you want to remove?
Are there any miracles you want to remove?
What do you need to remove so Multiple Attestation means something? You cannot have it both ways: I am going to support scholars who use the four gospels as multiple attestation but I will admit here are differences in content and chronology (and more).
We want the cleanest presentation of multiple attestation.
For example, if there is X amount of years between the birth of Jesus in Matthew and Luke, then, you do NOT have multiple attestation of Jesus existing for X amount of years.
If three gospels say Jesus didn’t start body and blood remembrance until the Last Supper and the fourth gospel says Jesus was talking this up before the Last Supper, that is not the cleanest presentation of multiple attestation.
If Attridge table of similarities has rows that are not four for four, delete them.
These are the rules for this search for the historical Jesus, if you care to present.
So, let’s say we have the four for four, tell us what keeps that from being Oral Tradition, the Oral Tradition that was put into written form that can be used for excellent multiple attestation?
People are looking for the best case of why scholars say Jesus existed.
Now, I’m going to say the writing of the Oral Tradition had corruptions. For example, by the time they were written, the Jewish Revolt failed. SGF Brandon in study on the effects of the Put Down Jewish Revolt on Christianity, says at least one gospel would v i l l a i n i z e the Temple Establishment against a pro-Roman Jesus protagonist since the Temple was destroyed. Second, stances in the gospels are taken because with a destroyed Temple, some anti-Temple claims would go undisputed.
I would say the same thing about Pontius Pilate. Claims are made about the late 20s/early 30s without dispute of the same force of the published gospels.
Multiple attestation only works if there are independent sources.
An important point. Instead of multiple independent literary lines of transmission we may be faced with a single literary line and multiple (and lost) oral lines. How much of the Jesus tradition did not survive simply because nobody ever thought to write it down?
Steefen you seem determined to miss Robert’s point. Yes there was a strong consensus for a long time (with some dissent) that gJohn was independent from the synoptics. But there are scholars now questioning this older consensus view. The purpose of this thread is to consider those arguments.
I am very interested in the implications of the dependence view. John had no independent tradition of the day Jesus was crucified; he was willing to change an important feature in the narrative, like the day Jesus dies, to make a theological point. Let that sink in. If he felt that freedom there surely he did in other places in the gospel as well. (Matthew and Luke felt free to change Mark. Did Mark not feel free to adapt his own sources to his purpose? It would have been a one-way conversation of course but clearly none of the gospel writers considered the others inerrant infallible scripture!)
We still need to know the Jesus of the critical scholar–what he did or did not do in the one or three-year professional ministry?
Shall we just reduce the historical Jesus statement to the content of the Testimonium Flavianum? Do all of the four gospels agree on that? Is the content of the TF the most we can say is the indisputable historical content of the Oral Tradition?
Do we need to remove, he did wonders? What wonders would you keep or not keep?
The book What is History? by Carr says to ask, what is the historical fact / what are the historical facts?
I would say, what are the historical facts of the Biblical Jesus not simply ask Did Jesus Exist as one, biological man, with mythological references removed, with references/watermarks of deified empire rulers removed, with lack of 100% consensus between the four gospels removed?
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert