This brief exchange with Prof Ehrman followed from his recent post on 8/10, Is Critical Biblical Scholarship Valid? What the New Testament Itself Indicates!
Note: Prof Ehrman’s misspellings are his own, HA!
Stephen August 10, 2023 at 2:41 pm – Reply
Would you agree that by modern standards Matthew and Luke were plagiarizing Mark?
Did the ancients have any concept of plagiarism?
Thanks!
BDEhrman August 11, 2023 at 2:01 pm – Reply
They definitely had a concept of plagiarism and discuss it on occasoin, even though most New Testament scholars apparently don’t know it — the book “The Five Gospels” claims that no such idea existed. Yikes. Too bad NT scholars don’t read more ancient literature! Some authors (Martial, e.g.) complain vociferously about plagiarism. BUT, Matthew and Luke wouldn’t be cases of it. Plagiarism in antiquity involved taking someone elses words and claiming that they were your own (just like today). But Matthew and Luke are *anonymous*. They aren’t claiming any words are their own, because they don’t say who they are. That is, they are not falsely claiming ot have authored the words, writing them in their own names instead of attributing them to the correct name, because they are not naming themselves (and the source they were copying didn’t name himself)
Rking August 11, 2023 at 7:49 pm – Reply
Bart, I love answers like this one, explaining the historical context, which is so often radically different in antiquity than modern minds conceive. So thought provoking!
But one thing you left unanswered, and I’m interested in your teaching/academic view, would Matthew and Luke be considered plagiarism by *modern* standards?
BDEhrman August 13, 2023 at 10:25 am – Reply
If an authjor took an anonymous uncopyrighted writing and reused a number of its sentences in her own writing without giving any indication who she herself was? I don’t really know? There are some legal experts on the blog: maybe one of them can help us out here.
Stephen August 12, 2023 at 4:24 pm – Reply
OK I do see the distinction you’re making. This does raise another question. Do we have other examples from ancient history of anonymous authors using other anonymous authors in the same way Matthew and Luke use Mark?
BDEhrman August 13, 2023 at 10:55 am – Reply
ot exaclty like Matthew and Luke, I suppose. We have later Gospels that are anonymous that use all the Gospels like that a bit, though not to the extent of Matthew and Luke. I wsa on a dissertation committee a couple of years ago for a Duke student who argued that this kind of copying practi e never really happened much in narratives in the Roman world, but in certain kinds of techincal writing. You do get something similar in the OT, though, in 1 and 2 Chrnoiles in relation to 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings.
There’s a lot to chew on here but a couple aspects stand out to me.
First, most obvious, yet little commented upon, is that whatever their motivations, however they made use of the material, neither Matthew nor Luke treated Mark’s text as if they regarded it as inerrant, inspired scripture. Little commented upon by historical critical scholars for the simple reason that a miniscule number of them hold to the doctrine of inerrancy. (H/C studies tend to rapidly cure you of that notion.) But this becomes a very important issue with fundamentalist/evangelical believers who form the majority of such in the public sphere. Now a common response when this issue is pointed out is that even if one accepts the fact that Matthew and Luke depend on Mark, they were themselves inspired by God and so stand in a different relationship with Mark’s text than we do. The problem here is that inerrancy is inerrancy. Mark is either inerrant or he’s not. If he’s not then why assume Matthew or Luke are? If Mark’s text was inspired by God then why would any changes be necessary at all? This is why most evangelical fundamentalists reject H/C altogether. They see it (quite correctly!) as a slippery slope leading to a bottomless pit.
Second, much less obvious, yet much more interesting and important, is the question of exactly what Matthew and Luke were up to in using Mark the way they did? Why didn’t they just write their own gospels? Why change some aspects of the narrative and not others? What criteria were they using to decide? Of course this gets to authorial motivation which is largely occluded to us. We can however, explore the possibilities.
Prof Ehrman’s response jibes with my own impression after years of reading and reading about ancient texts, that taking wide swaths of another’s text and building one’s own larger text around it is very very rare in ancient writing. (We’re not really talking about quotation here.) In fact you could claim that this is where Matthew and Luke’s “uniqueness” is revealed. (It’s also a hint that maybe Luke knew Matthew. What are the chances that this very rare practice would be occur between two independent writers on the same subject?)
This is just thinking out loud. I’m not writing a paper here.
There was a single dependent literary strand of tradition. Not multiple independent literary strands. Each layer of tradition was consciously preserving prior literary strands. (Even Mark.)
And/Or, Mark had achieved such a status in the community that even if you found it inadequate, perhaps especially if you found it inadequate, you could not ignore it.
Luke and Matthew aren’t cheating but reproducing large swaths of Mark out of necessity. These texts were mostly being read orally to illiterate congregations. They were so familiar with the Markan text that you had to include as much of it as possible.
Or, the Synoptics are operating on a purely literary level and the idea that they spring from the needs of specific communities is in error.
Robyn Faith Walsh’s recent book deals with some of these issues. It has now come out in an affordable paperback edition so I guess it’s time to read it.
First, there have always been two types of copyright. Large rights defining the author. BDE was, is and will be the author of his books. And small copyrights – these are transferable. BDE can sell the right to future royalties from future editions of its books in one transaction.
As in ancient times, today a recognized author chooses the right publisher/scriptorium and squeezes out as much advance as possible for a new book, and fixes some royalties on each copy published above the advance level.
The reason for the development of a particular story is the success of its first version. Those who saw the first gospel saw more clearly than Ludemann that 95% is certainly fiction, pesher, haggadah and some popular sensational themes. And that 5% can be true or a made-up story, which is completely irrelevant.
The authors of the subsequent gospels knew exactly what they were dealing with. The infallible Word of God is a much later invention of PR.
Anyone who has dealt with ghostwriting without copyright can clearly see that most of the reconstruction of the synoptic problem is rickety and very modest. Just a few blocks on two or three levels and a couple of one-way arrows. And a lot of exceptions for each model. It’s a bit strange because if you take a list of arguments for and against Marek’s priority, you can see that there should be more of these levels, as well as more blocks and arrows.
Once someone invented the historical Jesus, who turned out to be a success, he sat astride this figure and did not let go. It began to provide the market with products complementary enough to be attractive to both new customers and existing buyers. The authors looked over each other’s shoulders in the same scriptorium or exchanged material. Their order in successive iterations could have been different, because literary inspiration is an unpredictable matter.
Everything happened at the same time, which indicates the urgency of the moment. Marcion again?
And as for Marek – he only used colloquial dialect to convey great thoughts, theatrical dramatic scenes (screenplay) in advanced literary constructions. He fooled most researchers like Paul.
The RFW book is still too expensive in my humble opinion.
taking wide swaths of another’s text and building one’s own larger text around it is very very rare in ancient writing
I can’t comment on the dissertation Bart mentions, as I haven’t read it, but it seems to me that we have other cases of someone taking a work and trying to improve it, sometimes with significant modifications or additions.
One example that pops to mind is Gilgamesh, of which there are several versions, or many early Christian martyr stories, where we sometimes find an early core story that later got greatly embellished.
I suspect the phenomenon was rather more common than we can show but that it has been hidden, in many cases, by how few manuscripts survived; even when many manuscripts survived it might well be that those that survived were written after one of several editions rose to the top as the definitive version. Part of what is interesting about the synoptics is that none of the three displaced the other two in the transmission, rather all three were quickly adopted as canonical and preserved in parallel.
Porphyry and Robert, I think we’re talking about two different things. Variations yes, adaptations, of course, rewrites, sure. But wholesale verbatum copying of narrative texts? Remember, Matthew includes >90% of Mark. Luke, >50%. Verbatum. I can think of no other ancient examples. Even the technical examples referred to are probably going to be along the lines of recipes or formulae. Those would have to look the same no matter how many times they were copied. I think an example of what you are talking about is of course, gJohn. My suspicion is that Matthew and Luke are doing something else. What that something else might be is fascinating to think about.
Jarek, your, well…”market based” approach let us call it, is so hopelessly anachronistic that it’s funny. You have to wait until the 18th century for what you’re describing. In the ancient world the modern ideas of copyright and intellectual property rights simply didn’t exist. But the idea of theft certainly did and someone who lifted a text and published it under their own name would have been condemned just as fervently as they would today. Back then there simply wasn’t a procedure in place to take universally recognized legal action.
You did remind me of a point I didn’t raise in response to Ehrman’s comments. Was the anonymity of these texts intentional? (This would be part of that something else I was talking about.) Of course we’ll never know for sure. But it does make a difference if their provenance was lost or suppressed. (I’m not implying a conspiracy by the way.)
Sorry for chasing a particular rabbit here but I am yet to be convinced that the gospel writers are using Homer or other Greek writers as models. I think you can source the gospels much better in the Hebrew texts. The stories of Elijah and Elisha for example. The Prophets, and the Wisdom literature. No aspersions cast here but can I sniff a certain prejudice among some scholars, privileging Greek traditions?
Steven, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Of course there were copyrights, originals and facsimiles. People differentiated these things. Artists wrote works, performed at private events, gave declamation and singing lessons, and sold copies of their works. The main product was personal performances, then the sale of copies of works or acting lessons for the host’s daughter.
If someone wrote something and succeeded, they could do one of two things. He could order copies from the scriptorium so that he could trade for himself. He could sell his royalties, and this scriptorium took care of the retail sales and serving his customers. He could make both deals with the scriptorium at the same time. Of course, the author and his partner faced various problems specific to the era, but people lived from their art.
They couldn’t block private copying, but if they caught someone trading illegal copies for profit, I guarantee they could prosecute them just like they did with wine counterfeiters did. Same mechanism.
The anonymity of the gospels stems from the brazenly bold idea that they were written in a time close to Jesus, eyewitnesses with clairvoyant abilities, conveying even what they could not hear themselves. In the case of works written by a ghost writer and not assigned to anyone, you can do what you want – there is no question of plagiarism or theft. You just found another copy of the same or almost the same thing. Just like Marcion found a copy of the Galatians. This arbitrary copying and development of the product eventually led to three different versions later credited with apostolic authorship.
The Gospels were myths presented as an account of historical events, and no one subscribes to such. Paul ignored these stories. Only the one who combined “his letters” with the “gospel” by means of rather modest editorial procedures and stitched them together into one spine of the book, created a canon and showed how to combine contradictory works.
The narrative about Paul, Cephas and James is about half a page of text from all the letters together.
The development of the original early Christian literature is associated with the first conflict over the leadership of the Christian movement. Literature was developed as a competitive tool for warring parties in their missionary activity.
stephen wrote: “You have to wait until the 18th century for what you’re describing. In the ancient world the modern ideas of copyright and intellectual property rights simply didn’t exist.”
Jarek wrote: “you don’t know what you’re talking about. Of course there were copyrights”
Stephen is right; Copyright is very modern; authors expecting to be paid for writing is also modern.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
1 Guest(s)