Robert said
Of course, as I’ve already explained it best explains Matthew’s and Luke’s attempts to erase the difficulty of Mark’s ending.
Again, as I already said above, regardless of whether or not they understood Mark’s intent here, it clearly didn’t suit their purposes.
You can’t have your cake and eat it.
If there’s a difficulty with the ending it counts as evidence against it being the intended ending.
If its a powerful ending it can’t be used as evidence for Markan priority.
Again, Mark’s ending does not prevent this from happening. You do not think the disciples would have returned to Galilee after the resurrection? Mark’s Jesus has already told them that he would go before them back to Galilee.
If the disciples were going to galilee anyway there was no need for the man in the tomb to tell them to let the disciples know where to find him.
Stephen said
Why would Matthew and Luke leave out the resurrection of Lazarus?They liked Mark’s Jairus story better which shares the motif of sleep/death.
So, they didn’t leave out an historical account. Even then, they knew a significant part if not all of the Jesus biography was historical fiction.
…a significant part if not all of the Jesus biography was historical fiction.
While I think very little of the gospel narrative is historical that’s a different question than to ask if the authors intended their gospels to be read historically. We have no idea who the authors of the gospels were or the context in which they composed much less do we have access to their intentions. Consequently we are forced to take these ancient texts at more or less face value. Adding to the difficulty is that many of these conceptual categories we routinely use (for example, “fiction”!) are modern. (Fiction used in the sense you mean it Steefen does not appear until the 14th century.) When Herodotus describes the troglodytes living in “inner” Africa who dine on crocodiles and can run faster than humans was he writing fiction?
Steefen said
The New Testament Gospels and Sources in the Order of When They Were Written:
1. The Book of Enoch / 1 Enoch (Chapters 1-36) The Book of Watchers
2. The Book of Enoch / 1 Enoch (Chapters 37-71) The Book of Parables
3. Authentic Letters of Paul (see if they match what was in Marcion’s canon)
4. Mark
5. Q
6. Matthew
7. John
8. Marcion’s Gospel according to Paul
9. Luke (a response to Marcion)
The New Testament Gospels and Sources in the Order of When They Were Written:
1. The Book of Enoch / 1 Enoch (Chapters 1-36) The Book of Watchers
2. The Book of Enoch / 1 Enoch (Chapters 37-71) The Book of Parables
3. Authentic Letters of Paul (see if they match what was in Marcion’s canon)
4. Mark
5. Q
6. Matthew
7. Luke
8. John
9. Marcion’s Gospel according to Paul with Marcion editing Luke’s gospel
10. Acts of the Apostles (a response to Marcion and brazenly re-writing the autobiographical information in the authentic Pauline Letters)
Bart D.E.
Critical scholars are widely agreed that the earliest Gospel was Mark, written around 70 CE; that Matthew and Luke were some years later, say, 80-85 CE; and that John was the last Gospel, around 90-95 CE. But how do scholars establish those dates?
It is actually a highly complicated matter, but I can give some sense of why these particular dates are so widely preferred. To begin with, none of the Gospels appears to have been known to the apostle Paul, writing in the 50s. Paul was an extraordinarily well-traveled and well-connected apostle, as we will see, and if anyone would have known about the existence of written accounts of Jesus’ life, it would have been him. Probably they did not exist yet. On the other hand, early non-canonical authors such as Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp of Smyrna (see chapter 28) do seem to know some of the Gospels. And so some or all of the Gospels were written before these authors produced their letters, around 110-15 CE. This means that the Gospels probably date to somewhere between 60-115. Can we be more precise?
It is frequently noted that the earliest Gospels seem to presuppose the destruction of the city of Jerusalem and of the Jewish temple, as happened in 70 CE. And so, for example, in Mark’s Gospel Jesus indicates that the nation of Israel will be destroyed (12:9) and that the temple will not be left standing (13:1-2). Matthew is even more explicit: here Jesus tells a parable in which God is portrayed as burning the city and killing its inhabitants (22:8). Luke has similar passages (e.g., 21:24). All these passages seem to presuppose that by the time the books were written, the destruction had happened.
Someone may respond by saying that in these passages Jesus is predicting the destruction of the Jerusalem, not looking back on it. Fair enough! But when is a Christian author likely to record a prediction of Jesus in order to show that he predicted something accurately? Obviously, in order to show that Jesus knew what he was talking about, an author would want to write about these predictions only after they had been fulfilled. Otherwise the reader would be left hanging, not knowing if Jesus was a true prophet or not. So even if we assume that Jesus did predict such things, the fact that they are written so confidently by later authors suggests that they did so after the events – that is, after the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 70 CE.
Mark, as we will see, was the first Gospel. So possibly he was written soon after 70 CE. Matthew and Luke both used Mark for the writing of their Gospels; that means that Mark must have been in circulation for a while, so say ten years or so later. And John appears to be the last Gospel of all, so sometime at the end of the first century makes sense. These then are some of the grounds for the widely accepted dates of the Gospels.
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Steefen said
Which gospel has the most Oral Tradition?
Bart,
Which gospel contains the most Oral Tradition?
The answer cannot be the Gospel of John because the great resurrection of Lazarus should have been part of the Oral Tradition for Mark, Matthew, and Luke, but that event was not part of people’s memory for Mark, Matthew, and Luke to include it in their gospels.
Maybe it was Marcion’s gospel because Marcion liked Paul so much and Paul was closer to Oral Tradition than Mark was. The problem here is that although the Authentic Letters of Paul would have more Oral Tradition than the gospels because he was closer in time to 27-33 CE, Marcion’s career as a gospel writer came after the careers of the author/s of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John.
Can you correctly say, the gospel with the less miracles is closer to being the gospel with the most Oral Tradition?
Mark does not have virgin birth, so honest Oral Tradition as opposed to hero Oral Tradition
Mark has no appearances of Jesus following the visit of the women to the empty tomb! (James Tabor),
so Mark wins again?
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Robert said
Of course, as I’ve already explained it best explains Matthew’s and Luke’s attempts to erase the difficulty of Mark’s ending.
“They went out and fled from the tomb for terror and amazement had seized them…”
Dont know how this reads in greek but the english rendering shows that the women fled to seek safety in flight.
Matthew says
“They left quickly with fear and great joy and did report”
Did matthew realise that mark is turning “good news” into something which requires to be fled away from for these women?
i am not saying mark is saying that the message is to be fled away from, but the women did and christian followers of mark should not flee like the women.
Mark 4:17.talk about falling away.
Steefen
QUESTION: Given the historical challenges to the prophetic perspective, were there two responses: Apocalypticism where God relinquished control to evil forces and Gnosticism where the force had been evil all the time? Did Gnosticism originate before, at the same time, or after the Apocalyptic Alternative?
Bart D.E.
Centuries after.
Steefen
Because Gospel of Judas dates to 280 C.E.
and Gospel of Thomas dates to … wait a second, Gnostic Gospel of Thomas dates 60 to 140 C.E.
The Gospel of Thomas, preserved in a Coptic gnostic library found about 1945 in Egypt, contains several such sayings, besides some independent versions of canonical sayings. At certain points the Gospel tradition finds independent confirmation in the letters of the Apostle Paul.
= = =
You say centuries after but Gnostic Gospel of Thomas is dated right there with Mark through Acts. Please explain.
Wikipedia – Gnosticism
Gnosticism (from Ancient Greek: γνωστικός, romanized: gnōstikós, Koine Greek: [ɣnostiˈkos], ‘having knowledge’) is a collection of religious ideas and systems which coalesced in the late 1st century AD among Jewish and early Christian sects.
Among the Mandaeans, Jesus was considered a mšiha kdaba or “false messiah” who perverted the teachings entrusted to him by John the Baptist.
Wikipedia – Mandaeans
There are several indications of the ultimate origin of the Mandaeans. Early religious concepts and terminologies recur in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Yardena (Jordan) has been the name of every baptismal water in Mandaeism. The Mandaic language is a dialect of southeastern Aramaic with Palestinian, Samaritan Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, as well as Akkadian and Parthian influences and is closely related to Syriac and especially Jewish Babylonian Aramaic.
Adding the book of Daniel [since this is all about an apocalyptic prophet, Jesus] , Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Judas
The New Testament Gospels and Sources in the Order of When They Were Written:
1. Book of Daniel
2. The Book of Enoch / 1 Enoch (Chapters 1-36) The Book of Watchers
3. The Book of Enoch / 1 Enoch (Chapters 37-71) The Book of Parables
4. Authentic Letters of Paul (see if they match what was in Marcion’s canon)
5. Gospel of Thomas (60 to 140 C.E.)
6. Mark
7. Q
8. Matthew
9. Luke
10. John
11. Marcion’s Gospel according to Paul with Marcion editing Luke’s gospel
12. Gospel of Thomas
Wikipedia – Gospel of Thomas Date of Composition, Late [Dating] Camp, Dependence on the New Testament
Several scholars have argued that the sayings in Thomas reflect conflations and harmonisations dependent on the canonical gospels. For example, saying 10 and 16 appear to contain a redacted harmonisation of Luke 12:49, 12:51–52 and Matthew 10:34–35. In this case it has been suggested that the dependence is best explained by the author of Thomas making use of an earlier harmonised oral tradition based on Matthew and Luke.[52][53] Biblical scholar Craig A. Evans also subscribes to this view and notes that “Over half of the New Testament writings are quoted, paralleled, or alluded to in Thomas… I’m not aware of a Christian writing prior to AD 150 that references this much of the New Testament.”[54]
Another argument made for the late dating of Thomas is based upon the fact that Saying 5 in the original Greek (Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 654) seems to follow the vocabulary used in the gospel according to Luke (Luke 8:17), and not the vocabulary used in the gospel according to Mark (Mark 4:22). According to this argument – which presupposes firstly the rectitude of the two-source hypothesis (widely held among current New Testament scholars[citation needed]), in which the author of Luke is seen as having used the pre-existing gospel according to Mark plus a lost Q source to compose his gospel – if the author of Thomas did, as Saying 5 suggests – refer to a pre-existing gospel according to Luke, rather than Mark’s vocabulary, then the gospel of Thomas must have been composed after both Mark and Luke (the latter of which is dated to between 60 AD and 90 AD).
13. Acts of the Apostles (a response to Marcion and brazenly re-writing the autobiographical information in the authentic Pauline Letters)
14. Gospel of Judas (280 C.E.)
1. Who were the first and earliest Apocalyptic prophets of OT?
2. Could Book of Isaiah be hinting to Cyrus the Great? Maybe Book 1 hinting towards Cyrus and Book 2 and 3 towards Cyrus?
3. Could Book of Isaiah be considered most important OT book for Christianity?
Bart D.E.
1. The only main one is Daniel (chs. 7-12)
2. Isaiah calls Cyrus the Messiah.
3. I’m not sure how that would be decided, but it certainly was highly important.
Steefen
Just double checking if the Isaiah prophecies for Jesus are misplaced and actually belong to Cyrus.
Steefen said
Dr Ehrman,
1. Who were the first and earliest Apocalyptic prophets of OT?
2. Could Book of Isaiah be hinting to Cyrus the Great? Maybe Book 1 hinting towards Cyrus and Book 2 and 3 towards Cyrus?3. Could Book of Isaiah be considered most important OT book for Christianity?
Bart D.E.
1. The only main one is Daniel (chs. 7-12)
2. Isaiah calls Cyrus the Messiah.
3. I’m not sure how that would be decided, but it certainly was highly important.
Steefen
Just double checking if the Isaiah prophecies for Jesus are misplaced and actually belong to Cyrus.
Bart D.E.
I don’t think there’s anything to suggest so that I know of.
Steefen
Isaiah calls Cyrus the Messiah but Christians see Isaiah making a prophecy about another Messiah, Jesus?
= = =
According to Isaiah 45:1, Cyrus is YHWH’s anointed, his Messiah: Thus says YHWH to his anointed, to Cyrus whom I took by his right hand. … The act of anointing simply indicates a commission: Cyrus is to perform the office of king.
Cyrus the Messiah? The Historical Background to Isaiah 45:1
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Bart,
What did Albert Schweitzer get wrong to come to the conclusion Matthew was the first gospel?
Steve Campbell, author of Historical Accuracy
Dale Allison relayed to Paul Williams of Blogging Theology that Schweitzer had some Greek synopsis that he used to try to persuade a Methodist pastor that Matthew was the first gospel, not Mark.
I recently read “How Jesus Became Christian” by Professor Barrie Wilson, which, by the way is full of citations to Bart’s work.
He states that the life and ministry of Jesus gave rise to two movements: a Jesus Movement led by James in Jerusalem and a Christ Movement led by Paul in the Diaspora. This is not surprising, what comes as a mild shock form this book is that Wilson believes that the Gospel of Luke and its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles were written possibly as late as 120 CE. This would be 20-30 years after the Gospel of John and 90 years after the crucifixion .Does any other scholar support this view?
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
1 Guest(s)
Where Did the Apocalyptic Views of Jesus (and others) Come From?
Bart D.E. 1/25/2022
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Steefen
I read the above. I remember the gist of it from one of your Great Courses.
God was not at fault, his enemies were. … God had relinquished control of this world to evil forces. That almost sounds like the Gnostics.
QUESTION #1: Given the historical challenges to the prophetic perspective, were there two responses: Apocalypticism where God relinquished control to evil forces and Gnosticism where the force had been evil all the time? Did Gnosticism originate before, at the same time, or after the Apocalyptic Alternative?
QUESTION #2: With Jesus being an apocalyptic prophet, should he be less tied to the Prophetic Perspective than to the Historical Challenges to the Prophetic Perspective:
Apocalypticism where God relinquished control to evil forces
and
Gnosticism where the force had been evil all the time?
All of Jesus’ ministry is not tied to Gnosticism
All of Jesus’ ministry is not tied to Apocalypticism
because in the first part of Jesus’ ministry, God had not relinquished power to evil: Go tell John [basically, the Kingdom of God is at hand, the Son of Man is here, etc.]. It wasn’t until Jesus himself saw his Heavenly Father relinquishing power to the evil of “the wicked tenants killing the messengers and the son.”
Bart D.E.
1. Centuries after. 2. So Jesus had no GNostic influence on him. He was definitely influenced by both the Hebrew prophets and apocalytic thinking.
Steefen
Because Gospel of Judas dates to 280 C.E.
and Gospel of Thomas dates to … wait a second, Gnostic Gospel of Thomas dates 60 to 140 C.E.
The Gospel of Thomas, preserved in a Coptic gnostic library found about 1945 in Egypt, contains several such sayings, besides some independent versions of canonical sayings. At certain points the Gospel tradition finds independent confirmation in the letters of the Apostle Paul.
= = =
You say centuries after but Gnostic Gospel of Thomas is dated right there with Mark through Acts. Please explain.