Stephen said
Well the consequences of the First Revolt put paid to any strong centralized Jewish sectarian Jesus movement.  Although we know of such sectarians in later times the movement seems to have been largely marginalized.

Yes, the fracturing of influence among larger diaspora Jewish communities post-First-Revolt is part of the mix of the pluralism that is a plausible reason for the early proto-orthodox accepting the canonical redactions of the four canonical gospels ... it opens the door for different degrees of accommodation and conflict in different language-mix environments. And then the Bar Kohkba revolt further weakens the "Party of Circumcision" and strengthens the hand of the various Gentile leaning strands.

  One can imagine an alternative history sans Revolt where there remained an active Aramaic Jesus movement centered in Jerusalem.  Would this have affected the evangelization of Gentiles?   Maybe the Pauline churches would have been marginalized had the "Party of Circumcision" won the day!  Maybe the gospel of Matthew would have survived as a foundational document known only to specialists and a few outside the academy.  No Luke/Acts or collected Pauline corpus at all!
  

Or, in between the two extremes, one could imagine history rhyming when it does not repeat, and project something similar to the Shia / Sunni split.

Quote I:
A third position on the spectrum is somebody who feels that Paul “properly understood” is divinely inspired, but “the enemy” traps people into an “improper understanding” of his writings, so additional divinely inspired elaboration is required for people to better understand what Paul “meant” to say.

Stephen said Sure but if agreeing and disagreeing with Paul are both signs of influence then where are we?  How could we ever falsify the claim that Luke/Acts knew Paul's letters?    Heads I win, tails you lose. 

In the real world, either would indeed be an influence ... it's blithely ignoring the Paul of the letters which would be Luke/Acts not knowing Paul's letters.

But in either the positive or negative influence, the burden of proof would be on the claim of influence, so the counter-argument would be arguing against the strength of the evidence that has been advanced.

A fourth position is someone who is trying to get some factions of Paul following faith communities on side, so the most appealing (from this editor’s view) traditions about Paul from those factions that are the most compatible with the editor’s faith community are composed into a Church history that proves that the faith communities that view themselves as Pauline should make common cause with the faith communities that view themselves as Petrine, because despite “corrupted” texts suggesting the opposite, in reality Paul and Peter resolved any differences that they had and were part of a single larger overall faith community.

Stephen said The problem there is there doesn't seem to be any accommodation.  In both Acts and the two Petrine forgeries, Peter is made to mirror the views of Paul as recorded in Acts and the Pauline forgeries in the two letters of Peter.  Paul gets distorted and Peter gets cancelled.  

There is an empirical problem in observing any accommodation in the composition of canonical Luke/Acts ... you can't get movement from a single observation.

If the Vincent & &c. group are on the right track, there are at least two observations available, and possibly three ... the movement from the Paul in the reconstructed Apostolos to the Paul in Acts & the canonical epistles, and possibly the movement from Paul in the reconstructed Apostolos to Paul in the canonical epistles to Paul in Acts.

If the Peter in Acts is made to agree with a Paul that is progressively shifted away from the Paul in the epistles, then equally well Paul is made to agree with the Peter in the Apostolic myth making in Acts. Compared to the Paul in the Apostolos reconstruction, the Paul in the canonical epistles has the confrontation relocated to Jerusalem, and resolved with the added element of fund raising for the Saints in Jerusalem, and then in Acts the resolution includes additional elements required.

The various speculative and/or scientific inferences of Vinzent and krewe about the edition history of the letters of Paul are open to the possibility that one set or group of editors were responsible for a redaction of Paul’s original letters and the three “deutero” Pauline epistles, and another editor compiled canonical Luke and composed canonical Acts.
Yes I think we need to avoid the idea that all these Christen communities were intimately familiar with each other.  It was only in the second century that these disparate strands began to push up against each other.  
  

I guess the argument advanced for broader communities would involve roving itinerant evangelists knitting faith communities together. But then there is the language barriers. If Antioch is a primarily Greek speaking city with an Aramaic speaking hinterland, that could be the northern extent of the Aramaic zone, except for a community of Aramaic speakers in the metropole. Then Antioch toward the north and west is the Greek speaking region. And of course there is the Greek & Coptic communities in Alexandria. And the metropole is Latin speaking, with substantial Greek fluency, and likely a native Aramaic speaking community among other minority language communities in the Imperial Capital. So there are a minimum of four "zones", and frequency of interactions between different faith communities within each zone very much open to question.

Sure but if agreeing and disagreeing with Paul are both signs of influence then where are we?  How could we ever falsify the claim that Luke/Acts knew Paul's letters?    Heads I win, tails you lose. 

A fourth position is someone who is trying to get some factions of Paul following faith communities on side, so the most appealing (from this editor’s view) traditions about Paul from those factions that are the most compatible with the editor’s faith community are composed into a Church history that proves that the faith communities that view themselves as Pauline should make common cause with the faith communities that view themselves as Petrine, because despite “corrupted” texts suggesting the opposite, in reality Paul and Peter resolved any differences that they had and were part of a single larger overall faith community.

The problem there is there doesn't seem to be any accommodation.  In both Acts and the two Petrine forgeries, Peter is made to mirror the views of Paul as recorded in Acts and the Pauline forgeries in the two letters of Peter.  Paul gets distorted and Peter gets cancelled.  

The various speculative and/or scientific inferences of Vinzent and krewe about the edition history of the letters of Paul are open to the possibility that one set or group of editors were responsible for a redaction of Paul’s original letters and the three “deutero” Pauline epistles, and another editor compiled canonical Luke and composed canonical Acts.

Yes I think we need to avoid the idea that all these Christen communities were intimately familiar with each other.  It was only in the second century that these disparate strands began to push up against each other.  

Stephen said
...
2.  Did "Luke" (or whoever) know Paul's letters? 
Some scholars, including Robyn Faith Walsh, claim that the gospel writers, including Luke/Acts, knew Paul's letters.  The problem is that when we can check the claims in Acts against Paul's own testimony, they invariably disagree.   Markus Vinzent's view that "Luke" is using Paul's letters to create a foundational account, i.e., Acts, of the spread of early Christianity to the gentiles  seems internally contradictory.  If Paul is your hero and you know his own writings why change everything?  You either value Paul or you don't.   You either know his writings or you don't.   ...

Note that these dichotomies may not actually be dichotomies.

A third position on the spectrum is somebody who feels that Paul "properly understood" is divinely inspired, but "the enemy" traps people into an "improper understanding" of his writings, so additional divinely inspired elaboration is required for people to better understand what Paul "meant" to say.

A fourth position is someone who is trying to get some factions of Paul following faith communities on side, so the most appealing (from this editor's view) traditions about Paul from those factions that are the most compatible with the editor's faith community are composed into a Church history that proves that the faith communities that view themselves as Pauline should make common cause with the faith communities that view themselves as Petrine, because despite "corrupted" texts suggesting the opposite, in reality Paul and Peter resolved any differences that they had and were part of a single larger overall faith community.

A speculative hypothesis regarding traces of knowledge of Paul's letters in the fourth position would be the traditions being drawn on to compose an Apostolic history were from faith communities aware of Paul's letters, so that "signal" (in Bilby's lingo) comes into Acts from the traditions that it draws upon. That could happen even if it is explicitly trying to avoid the "tainted", "corrupted" Pauline epistles in circulation. However, I'm not sure whether that could be made into a scientific hypothesis, since it's not obvious to me at the moment how one would test the hypothesis given available evidence.

The various speculative and/or scientific inferences of Vinzent and krewe about the edition history of the letters of Paul are open to the possibility that one set or group of editors were responsible for a redaction of Paul's original letters and the three "deutero" Pauline epistles, and another editor compiled canonical Luke and composed canonical Acts.

If, as I seem to recall, there is at least one early canonical list or codex that placed Acts directly before most of catholic epistles that were later canonized, that suggests the hypothesis (as far as I can tell, purely speculative) that the placement of Acts in front of the Pauline epistles to provide a useful proto-orthodox lens for reading the Pauline epistles was a later move, where Acts was originally intended to provide a "purified" alternative to the "corrupted" epistles in circulation. In that hypothesis, the original function of Acts did not stand up to the determination of a cohort of Pauline faith communities insisting on using some version of Pauline epistles as part of their holy literature, and a new function was found for it.

** you do not have permission to see this link **

** you do not have permission to see this link **

Note that this latter link requires registration but it's free. 

I take it as an act of faith that any picayune amount of renumeration denied to these scholars by free access to their work is more than offset by interest and appreciation of its content.   The first link is to the U of Toronto so presumably Cornthwaite approves.  However, for Mohr Siebeck to charge $160 for specialized scholarship I take as a personal insult.  I would never boot one of Ehrman's books because they are reasonably priced and I am happy to support his work.  But the rapacious academic press brings down its own doom upon itself.   Such is my own ethical calculation.  

** you do not have permission to see this link **

My comments are based on the assumption you've already watched the video.  So, in more or less the order in which the issues were raised-

1.  Did "Luke" (or whoever) know Josephus?

Several respected scholars think so.  However, while certain figures and details are strikingly similar there are also chronological disparities in the narratives.  I regard this influence as an open question.  My primary request, given these two writer's divergent audiences, is to hear a convincing account of how the author of Acts would have known of Josephus in the first place.  For the record, I have no real objection to placing Luke/Acts in the early second century. 

2.  Did "Luke" (or whoever) know Paul's letters? 

Some scholars, including Robyn Faith Walsh, claim that the gospel writers, including Luke/Acts, knew Paul's letters.  The problem is that when we can check the claims in Acts against Paul's own testimony, they invariably disagree.   Markus Vinzent's view that "Luke" is using Paul's letters to create a foundational account, i.e., Acts, of the spread of early Christianity to the gentiles  seems internally contradictory.  If Paul is your hero and you know his own writings why change everything?  You either value Paul or you don't.   You either know his writings or you don't.   

3.  What was the point of Acts?

First, I am interested in Cornthwaite's discussion of social and economic factors in the spread of early Christianity.  I very much want to read his thesis.  If I can find a copy online not behind a paywall I'll share it. I also want to read Julien M Ogereau's book but I'll be damned if I'll pay the $160!  The search begins.

So what was the point of Acts?

In the absence of a psychic we can't really talk about purposes or intentions.  But we can notice how a text functions.  Let's look at the situation in the second century.   You have disparate writings.  You have a community that began in Palestine and consisted of Jews and now you have communities in various spots that consists mainly of gentiles.  

My view is that Acts functions as a way to build a connection between the dominant gentile communities and the original Jewish communities.  A connection that had been destroyed as a result of the First Revolt.  (Stories like the "Flight to Pella" fulfill the same function.)  Just as the gospels are creative literary depictions of the life and ministry of Jesus, Acts is a creative literary depiction of the hero Paul.   Acts is gentile Christianity's origin story.   

What did happen in the second century is that the different surviving literary strands engaged in conversation with each other.   But of course that doesn't mean that the surviving literary strands had their origins in the second century.  I think Luke/Acts and Josephus definitely came out of a similar intellectual milieu but dependence?  Maybe.

Note: Cornthwaite includes links to all the books he references in the notes with the video.  

Robert said

BruceRMcF said
Yes, prior to the period when there is an established church governance system with bishops of locales and deacons of specific groups in a developing new institution of an proselytizing religion, the ongoing social needs include integrating new converts into the community and in bring them from being converts to proselytizing themselves. The plausible range of rates of growth before the systems of church governance were established demonstrates that there were effective routines established to meet these needs.
Given most or all early congregations being largely illiterate, public sharing of information in forms like memorized speeches is more efficient than private transmission, so in my view it should be the default assumption unless contrary evidence is available, and in my mind, the scant evidence available regarding the Joshua movement communities before the transition to primarily non-Judean church membership lines up more with public sharing of information than the alternative.
Obviously I am not more a scholar in the Church Fathers than I am a scholar of the New Testament, so mayhap I will encounter more evidence that will swing my view. 

I don't see it. The gospel of Thomas does not strike me as a document intended to serve liturgical needs. Seems to me much more something used for private contemplation.

Is there a link between a liturgical setting and the medium being oral or written?

The medium is going to be oral if the leader of the teachings part of the community meeting is illiterate.

But since we're speaking of a text, I'm cautious about presuming too much about an oral pre-history of the text.

And following an argument that the text results from a rolling corpus, we are talking about a reconstruction of the pre-history of the text, the "Kernel". It is equally conjecture whether the Kernel is conjectured to be a written source or an oral source.

...
I'm going to temporarily add here part of our discussion from another thread because I think it fits better here. In the long run, we may need totally separate threads that better structure separate discussions of the reconstructions of Marcion by BeDuhn, Bilby, and others, as well as the theory of April DeConick on the gospel of Thomas:

A flag that these may cross-over, since Bilby uses GThom in one of his criterion for the reconstruction of the hypothetical Qn.

I can't help tending to read Qn as a mathematician would, as the end of the sequence, and kind of wish he had dubbed it Q_1, the beginning of the sequence, even as I know it explicitly means "Neue Quelle" (not to be confused with the town in Germany).

BruceRMcF said
The statistical evidence for material of different styles being contained in the earliest texts that we have is quite empirically strong. The stylometric work appears to me to be statistically sound, though it is not exactly the kind of non-parametric statistics that I have done, but rather adjacent to it. So the idea that the authors of gospels in the 60 CE - 140 CE period tended to retain much of earlier work while adding new material to it is rather the claim that best fits the available empirical evidence than a conjecture.

Can you point me to this evidence. I followed your earlier link and saw several documents to download, which I haven't had time to sift through. Please fell free to point me to what you consider the strongest stylometric evidence. My own experience is strongest in the area of evaluating the consistency of Markan style so that evidence would be especially interesting to me.

The translation of Qn into English and the parallel Greek and English translation of his reconstruction of GMarc is in the 5th pdf (with those translations still works in progress), but I believe the First Mark reconstruction is only in the parallel apparatus in the 2nd pdf. For you Greek readers, the parallels are more subtly a work in progress in the sense it sometimes seems to be updated.

However, the evidence here is the cluster analysis in the first pdf, which requires wading through or skipping the polemic/diatribe in early parts of the the 1st pdf to the hypotheses guiding the Qn reconstruction to 1.11 presenting the cluster analysis, and this is not the evidence I was referring to.

So the tests of relative proportions of a wide range of terms in various reconstructions versus canonical Luke is in another source which I saw but don't seem to have bookmarked. If the video you noted  is the same one I recently saw, it makes reference to the proportions, but doesn't give the specifics. I'll remember to post that when I find it again, because Bilby admits that he is not trained in these statistical analyses, and one of the things I aim to look at is whether he is using the correct statistic and using it correctly.

But on the other hand, it is a fact that the passages in canonical Luke that are attested present and attested absent have statistically significant stylometric differences, and those differences show up in all of the reconstructions, from the fragmentary minimalist ones where the differences are which Patristic sources are given priority over others, to the reconstructions that aim to reconstruct a coherent text.  That implies both that the Marcionite priority over canonical Luke has much more empirical support than the Heresiologist's claims that Marcion's Evangelion is a heavily edited version of canonical Luke, and that there is a Marcionite layer preserved in canonical Luke ... since a bottom up rewrite using information but not text from an earlier source will have a much more consistent style than what is seen between the attested present and attested absent passages from canonical Luke.

This is very much an apples and oranges contrast and not really a comparison of alternative interpretations of evidence.

Yes, I'm still learning the names used in the literature for the different main alternative interpretations, and surely only know of a limited set among the hypotheses that have been advanced.

I'm sure Ken Hamm has done a much better job of marshalling scientific evidence in favor of his interpretation of a 6,000-year-old creation in six days than I can for my own literary poetic interpretation of the text of Genesis, but that will not persuade me to abandon either my own interpretation of the text nor the various fields of mainstream science that interpret the scientific evidence very differently than Ken Hamm.

Yes, one cannot skip the step of marshalling evidence in opposition to a hypothesis and trying to knock the hypothesis down, which if it is not skipped would lead to a different conclusion regarding the 6,000 year old creation in six days hypothesis.

Quoth I:
On John, I have the impression that Bilby is referring to another line of work rather than his own analysis there, so I'm not even going to be looking at that for a good long while yet.

This is a question that is even more fraught with various approaches and methodological assumptions in the scholarly literature. Yet another caution against accepting a single all-encompassing interpretation by one particular scholar or group of collaborators.
  

I mean, Archimedes needs a place to put his lever, and without multiple wealthy ship owners from multiple regional Christian communities who might be (for example) promoting the gospels they learned when they came into the faith, we don't have, eg, the Church Father's accusing the Johannine equivalent of Marcion of editing John with a knife and the attestations of the contents of "First John" to get started.

So in all of Bilby's enthusiasm (often quite aggressive enthusiasm) for "signals analysis", it may well be that the signal processing has too little signal and too much noise to make any headway into the Johannine stretches of Bilby's hypothetical redactor ladder.

Robert said 
... Yet it would be of interest for us to be aware of whatever prior bias you bring to the table. Is it confirmed or contradicted by the evidence you are now confronting?

I'll note that Bilby has five levels of hypothesis requiring five levels of trust in the accuracy of the reconstructed GMarc text. I may not get there for all five of his levels of trust, so I may have to sort out how much can be inferred without all 5 of his hypotheses.

The 5 layers of hypotheses are directly five layers in his reconstruction of his Qn, a "Neue Quelle", but the stronger his reconstruction of Qn is, the stronger his two-source hypothesis for GMarc is, and that is a substantial part of his placing the lever to disentangle a "First Mark" from later Mark redactions.

I can't read the Greek "signals" from the parallel passages charts, only the English translation, and that translation isn't complete, but so far, it seems like confirming long held suspicions, so I'm going to have to be careful in not letting enthusiasm color my view of the level of trust to place in his GMarc. I'll have to keep my data scientist hat firmly in place through the process.

Robert said

Whether or not the sayings are unique to the gospel of Thomas are not one of the criteria for selecting a passage as being probably in a later layer. That cannot be inferred from either the Q or the Tatian overlaps, since in each case, a substantial part of the Kernel is not in the overlap.

Then why have you been focusing on the sayings in common with the synoptic gospels?

Perhaps we should focus on the substantial part of the kernel that is not in the overlap. That might be the most illuminating way to situate the most unique characteristics of the community/authors behind the earliest layer. 

Getting ready for a faculty meeting, so I'll respond to the other points anon, but on this point, yes, if the reconstruction seems to be plausible and is not contradicted by the evidence, that seems like something to look at.

The point about examining the overlaps with the Kernel and overlaps with the balance of GThom is the prior question of whether the reconstruction is contradicted by available evidence.

Case in point (33:17--34:18): 

Uh, and then it adds a bunch of stuff to Q that scholars traditionally wouldn't consider part of it. And you know, I'm not the only scholar these days who has made this case for a much expanded notion of Q, including a passion and resurrection gospel. All right. Uh if you if I'm on the right track with this, all right, what it would suggest is that there's a class bias in Q studies where um you know, a lot of the passages that are really harsh toward the rich and vindicating the poor that they've actually just been completely left out of Q. Even passages like here in Luke 16 that fit thematically right in the vein of Q. Why why do scholars just leave those out? The faithfulness and mammon passage, the judge and widow, why can't that be Q? Right? All of these are indictments of the rich. So to me, that suggests that scholarship for the last 200 years has had a massive class bias and just left a bunch of stuff out that was really just offensive to them because of their own sensibilities, not because, you know, it was an accurate reflection of the earliest um traditions here. And then I also see a massive gender bias happening in Q scholarship, right? ...

No, regardless of whatever class sensibilities may have been shared by these scholars, they are simply following simple source-critical delimitations of the double-tradition. It's not a question of thematic definitions of Q or bias in refusing to acknowledge class-based definitions of themes in how one determines if a passage is in Q or not in Q. It simply starts as an attempt to evaluate what is and is not part of the double tradition. 

Has all previous scholarly discussion completely explained everything that can and should be questioned and explained? Of course not! Is it possible that some M or L material may have been part of Q? Of course! But before one can contribute to the ongoing scholarly discussion of these issues, one must first study and correctly assess the state of the question being discussed.

BruceRMcF said
Yes, prior to the period when there is an established church governance system with bishops of locales and deacons of specific groups in a developing new institution of an proselytizing religion, the ongoing social needs include integrating new converts into the community and in bring them from being converts to proselytizing themselves. The plausible range of rates of growth before the systems of church governance were established demonstrates that there were effective routines established to meet these needs.
Given most or all early congregations being largely illiterate, public sharing of information in forms like memorized speeches is more efficient than private transmission, so in my view it should be the default assumption unless contrary evidence is available, and in my mind, the scant evidence available regarding the Joshua movement communities before the transition to primarily non-Judean church membership lines up more with public sharing of information than the alternative.
Obviously I am not more a scholar in the Church Fathers than I am a scholar of the New Testament, so mayhap I will encounter more evidence that will swing my view. 

I don't see it. The gospel of Thomas does not strike me as a document intended to serve liturgical needs. Seems to me much more something used for private contemplation.

Is there a link between a liturgical setting and the medium being oral or written?

The medium is going to be oral if the leader of the teachings part of the community meeting is illiterate.

But since we're speaking of a text, I'm cautious about presuming too much about an oral pre-history of the text.

Whether or not the sayings are unique to the gospel of Thomas are not one of the criteria for selecting a passage as being probably in a later layer. That cannot be inferred from either the Q or the Tatian overlaps, since in each case, a substantial part of the Kernel is not in the overlap.

Then why have you been focusing on the sayings in common with the synoptic gospels?

Perhaps we should focus on the substantial part of the kernel that is not in the overlap. That might be the most illuminating way to situate the most unique characteristics of the community/authors behind the earliest layer. 

I cannot transcribe a 32pp. research paper into the comment thread a paragraph at a time, but it is not my impression that a status as an early independent source is simply assumed.

Not simply assumed, but note I said "in part." So I'm still curious about the focus on the overlap.

I don't follow why it would provoke curiosity. If someone has argued that the characteristics of a text best fit a rolling corpus, and has proposed criteria for identifying at some passages likely added later in a rolling corpus, and used that to reconstruct an earlier Kernel of the rolling corpus, then a responsible scholar would look for evidence capable of contradicting the effectiveness of the criteria. Given the existing scholarship in various collections of sayings of Joshua, one of the possible ways to contradict the criteria would be if some collections contain passages from many of the hypothetical layers, and others contain passages exclusively from what were presumed to be later layers. That would be evidence that the reconstruction has the arrow of time inverted.
So rather than wondering why she turns to consider those overlaps after completing the analysis amd discussion the characteristic of the reconstructed Kernel, if the paper had not examined overlaps of other collections of logia, and whether those overlaps are compatible with the arrow of time implied by the analysis, I would have wondered why not, if she had skipped it.

That's not what what I was curious about. I think I simply do not yet know enough about how she reconstructs the kernel and what it consists of. I'm happy to learn that she does consider unique aspects of the later document as potential parts of the kernel. I had not understood that to be the case up until now.  

If one trusted the ladder of Bilby's hypothesis, and his "triangulation of signals" as the most plausible available reconstructions of the earliest steps in the ladder ...

Should we simply trust that?

If I thought we should, I would not have said "if one trusted".

Good to know, I thought you were simply asking us to climb up further on yet another extension of a ladder, the first and second sets of rungs of which I do not yet trust.

I'm going to temporarily add here part of our discussion from another thread because I think it fits better here. In the long run, we may need totally separate threads that better structure separate discussions of the reconstructions of Marcion by BeDuhn, Bilby, and others, as well as the theory of April DeConick on the gospel of Thomas:

BruceRMcF said
The statistical evidence for material of different styles being contained in the earliest texts that we have is quite empirically strong. The stylometric work appears to me to be statistically sound, though it is not exactly the kind of non-parametric statistics that I have done, but rather adjacent to it. So the idea that the authors of gospels in the 60 CE - 140 CE period tended to retain much of earlier work while adding new material to it is rather the claim that best fits the available empirical evidence than a conjecture.

Can you point me to this evidence. I followed your earlier link and saw several documents to download, which I haven't had time to sift through. Please fell free to point me to what you consider the strongest stylometric evidence. My own experience is strongest in the area of evaluating the consistency of Markan style so that evidence would be especially interesting to me.

But on the other hand, it is a fact that the passages in canonical Luke that are attested present and attested absent have statistically significant stylometric differences, and those differences show up in all of the reconstructions, from the fragmentary minimalist ones where the differences are which Patristic sources are given priority over others, to the reconstructions that aim to reconstruct a coherent text.  That implies both that the Marcionite priority over canonical Luke has much more empirical support than the Heresiologist's claims that Marcion's Evangelion is a heavily edited version of canonical Luke, and that there is a Marcionite layer preserved in canonical Luke ... since a bottom up rewrite using information but not text from an earlier source will have a much more consistent style than what is seen between the attested present and attested absent passages from canonical Luke.

This is very much an apples and oranges contrast and not really a comparison of alternative interpretations of evidence. I'm sure Ken Hamm has done a much better job of marshalling scientific evidence in favor of his interpretation of a 6,000-year-old creation in six days than I can for my own literary poetic interpretation of the text of Genesis, but that will not persuade me to abandon either my own interpretation of the text nor the various fields of mainstream science that interpret the scientific evidence very differently than Ken Hamm.

As far as what I have been calling "proto-Mark" (to avoid triggering the Bible book/chapter thing that happens with "Mk1") ... I suspected an earlier layer of Mark with a more polished redactor adding material later before I ever heard of this stylometric work trying to reconstruct an Evangelion and Apostolos. So I have to dig into that work very carefully to avoid lapsing into nodding along with confirmations of my priors.

Yet it would be of interest for us to be aware of whatever prior bias you bring to the table. Is it confirmed or contradicted by the evidence you are now confronting? As for me, I have not abandoned the traditional critical exegetical position that Mark may have inherited (or first written or collaborated on) a passion narrative before crafting the current text as a whole. Whether he inherited additional material in oral or written form is also a matter of considerable critical scholarly supposition and hypothesis, which cannot be dismissed but neither has it ever been confirmed over a century of communal debate. For example, some of my own most beloved professors have held diametrically opposed opinions on the question of Mark’s knowledge of Q. I can see both sides of this particular question without fundamentally accepting one and rejecting the other. Some things simply remain open for debate among those who interpret all of the evidence differently.

On John, I have the impression that Bilby is referring to another line of work rather than his own analysis there, so I'm not even going to be looking at that for a good long while yet.

This is a question that is even more fraught with various approaches and methodological assumptions in the scholarly literature. Yet another caution against accepting a single all-encompassing interpretation by one particular scholar or group of collaborators.

Robert said

BruceRMcF said
No, DeConnick's analysis is agnostic on whether they are or not.

So is it your idea that the setting was liturgical?

Yes, prior to the period when there is an established church governance system with bishops of locales and deacons of specific groups in a developing new institution of an proselytizing religion, the ongoing social needs include integrating new converts into the community and in bring them from being converts to proselytizing themselves. The plausible range of rates of growth before the systems of church governance were established demonstrates that there were effective routines established to meet these needs.

Given most or all early congregations being largely illiterate, public sharing of information in forms like memorized speeches is more efficient than private transmission, so in my view it should be the default assumption unless contrary evidence is available, and in my mind, the scant evidence available regarding the Joshua movement communities before the transition to primarily non-Judean church membership lines up more with public sharing of information than the alternative.

Obviously I am not more a scholar in the Church Fathers than I am a scholar of the New Testament, so mayhap I will encounter more evidence that will swing my view. 

Even in the one leg of the possible reason for the overlap(s) between Tatian and Thomas, it is agnostic on whether the hypothetical Hebrew sayings gospel was brought to the Thomas community orally or in written form.

Is there a link between a liturgical setting and the medium being oral or written?

The medium is going to be oral if the leader of the teachings part of the community meeting is illiterate.

Whether or not the sayings are unique to the gospel of Thomas are not one of the criteria for selecting a passage as being probably in a later layer. That cannot be inferred from either the Q or the Tatian overlaps, since in each case, a substantial part of the Kernel is not in the overlap.

Then why have you been focusing on the sayings in common with the synoptic gospels?

I cannot transcribe a 32pp. research paper into the comment thread a paragraph at a time, but it is not my impression that a status as an early independent source is simply assumed.

Not simply assumed, but note I said "in part." So I'm still curious about the focus on the overlap.

I don't follow why it would provoke curiosity. If someone has argued that the characteristics of a text best fit a rolling corpus, and has proposed criteria for identifying at some passages likely added later in a rolling corpus, and used that to reconstruct an earlier Kernel of the rolling corpus, then a responsible scholar would look for evidence capable of contradicting the effectiveness of the criteria. Given the existing scholarship in various collections of sayings of Joshua, one of the possible ways to contradict the criteria would be if some collections contain passages from many of the hypothetical layers, and others contain passages exclusively from what were presumed to be later layers. That would be evidence that the reconstruction has the arrow of time inverted.

So rather than wondering why she turns to consider those overlaps after completing the analysis amd discussion the characteristic of the reconstructed Kernel, if the paper had not examined overlaps of other collections of logia, and whether those overlaps are compatible with the arrow of time implied by the analysis, I would have wondered why not, if she had skipped it.

If one trusted the ladder of Bilby's hypothesis, and his "triangulation of signals" as the most plausible available reconstructions of the earliest steps in the ladder ...

Should we simply trust that?

If I thought we should, I would not have said "if one trusted".

, then the reconstructed Qn would give a distinction between conventionally reconstructed Q passages from an early source, and conventionally reconstructed Q passages that are redactions from Matthew to canonical Luke.

What is Qn?

Bilby's "New Q", his reconstructed antecedent source to Evangelion and his hypothetical early Matthew that provides some of the common non-Markan material between canonical Luke and Matthew that has been labelled "Q", for "Source" in German, and singular under the premise of "Q" being a single coherent text.

But still, if Thomas is not treated as a work that an author sat down and composed, but rather than as a rolling corpus that has been compiled, that would seem to rather be an additional criteria for placing a passage into a later llayer.

Why? Because it is less apocalyptic? Because it is unique? Or another reason?

Because the composition of the indicated gospels seem likely to have taken place later than the date that the earliest layer was the current corpus. If one assumes a single corpus, or an original main corpus with some later scribal redactions, then that evidence is evidence regarding a later date for the whole corpus, while if one has previously concluded that it is a rolling corpus, that evidence is evidence regarding a later date for the passage containing the evidence. 

Not the tone of modesty, because it's not my work, so I don't have to be modest about it, but given that a map is never a 1:1 correspondence to the terrain being mapped, being precise whether a statement is referring to the map or the terrain.

I wasn't referring to your modesty. So is it merely a theoretical distinction then?
  

It's a guardrail -- it's easy to start conflating an early text that one has some evidence exists with the best reconstruction that can be made of that text, so just as in statistical analysis we are careful to distinguish between the sample that has been taken and the population from which it was taken, I feel a need to avoid conflating the text that seems likely to have existed and the reconstruction. The reconstruction "feels like" it is more concrete, because it can be read, but I feel it is important for me to keep in mind that it is more hypothetical.

Until a couple of years ago -- and well after I started following Bart online -- I had only the most vague idea about all of this Marcion stuff from the Church fathers. But I've suspected Mark of being a redaction on top of an earlier layer for decades before I heard the term "redaction", so I feel like I have to step carefully when going into the next step down Bilby's stylometric rabbit hole.

BruceRMcF said

No, DeConnick's analysis is agnostic on whether they are or not.

So is it your idea that the setting was liturgical?

Even in the one leg of the possible reason for the overlap(s) between Tatian and Thomas, it is agnostic on whether the hypothetical Hebrew sayings gospel was brought to the Thomas community orally or in written form.

Is there a link between a liturgical setting and the medium being oral or written?

Whether or not the sayings are unique to the gospel of Thomas are not one of the criteria for selecting a passage as being probably in a later layer. That cannot be inferred from either the Q or the Tatian overlaps, since in each case, a substantial part of the Kernel is not in the overlap.

Then why have you been focusing on the sayings in common with thebsynoptic gospels?

I cannot transcribe a 32pp. research paper into the comment thread a paragraph at a time, but it is not my impression that a status as an early independent source is simply assumed.

Not simply assumed, but note I said "in part." So I'm still curious about the focus on the overlap.

If one trusted the ladder of Bilby's hypothesis, and his "triangulation of signals" as the most plausible available reconstructions of the earliest steps in the ladder ...

Should we simply trust that?

, ... then the reconstructed Qn would give a distinction between conventionally reconstructed Q passages from an early source, and conventionally reconstructed Q passages that are redactions from Matthew to canonical Luke.

What is Qn?

But still, if Thomas is not treated as a work that an author sat down and composed, but rather than as a rolling corpus that has been compiled, that would seem to rather be an additional criteria for placing a passage into a later llayer.

Why? Because it is less apocalyptic? Because it is unique? Or another reason?

Not the tone of modesty, because it's not my work, so I don't have to be modest about it, but given that a map is never a 1:1 correspondence to the terrain being mapped, being precise whether a statement is referring to the map or the terrain.

I wasn't referring to your modesty. So is it merely a theoretical distinction then?

Robert said

BruceRMcF said

Robert said
Then I don't understand these two statements:

... if Dr. DeConnick is correct, someone would still have to memorize and say the sayings as part of the Teachings part of a liturgy, ...
... if DeConnick is correct about it being a rolling corpus of liturgical teachings ...

Yes, only the first one is stated correctly, if obscurely. In my view, if Dr. DeConnich is correct, someone would have to do that.

Is it that DeConnick thinks the earliest stage was liturgical? And, if so, why?

No, DeConnick's analysis is agnostic on whether they are or not. Even in the one leg of the possible reason for the overlap(s) between Tatian and Thomas, it is agnostic on whether the hypothetical Hebrew sayings gospel was brought to the Thomas community orally or in written form.

DeConnick's analysis doesn't hinge on whether the corpus is written or oral, but part of her evidence suggests that the actual (as opposed to reconstructed) Kernel might have been written down and available to some parties. In both Quispel's and Baarda's studies of Tatian's Diatesseron, parallel sayings between Thomas and Tatian are all but one in the reconstructed Kernel, with 36 such parallel passages in Quispel's study and 45 in Baarda's (she has an argument regarding the one later saying, 113, which appears in the so-called 'Western Text', and may have come into Tatian by a separate route).

Nicholas Perrin sees the gospel of Thomas as being dependent upon Tatian's Diatessaron.
Why wouldn't the sayings unique to the gospel of Thomas not be considered as potentially part of the earliest layer? Is this based in part on an assumption that earliest layer was an independent witness to an earlier stage of Christianity? 

Whether or not the sayings are unique to the gospel of Thomas are not one of the criteria for selecting a passage as being probably in a later layer. That cannot be inferred from either the Q or the Tatian overlaps, since in each case, a substantial part of the Kernel is not in the overlap.

By contrast, other Syrian texts are aware of sayings in the later layers, 10 in Liber Gradum, 8 in Marcarius. As she notes, this may mean Tatian has some version of an early Thomas. Alternatively, it might mean that both Tatian and Thomas are informed by Quispel's hypothetical "Jewish Christian" gospel source.
Further, about half of the Kernel sayings are paralleled in the minimal reconstruction of Q, and all of the parallels with Q are in the reconstructed Kernel, and in DeConnick's view, the parallels are without literary dependence in either direction.

It's much difficult to identify Matthean or Lukan redaction on a hypothetical source that can only be reconstructed. But in the absence of such clearly identifiable Matthean or Lukan redaction making its way into the gospel of Thomas, one should not simply assume an early independent source.

I cannot transcribe a 32pp. research paper into the comment thread a paragraph at a time, but it is not my impression that a status as an early independent source is simply assumed.

If one trusted the ladder of Bilby's hypothesis, and his "triangulation of signals" as the most plausible available reconstructions of the earliest steps in the ladder, then the reconstructed Qn would give a distinction between conventionally reconstructed Q passages from an early source, and conventionally reconstructed Q passages that are redactions from Matthew to canonical Luke.

But still, if Thomas is not treated as a work that an author sat down and composed, but rather than as a rolling corpus that has been compiled, that would seem to rather be an additional criteria for placing a passage into a later layer.

How does one supposedly distinguish between the actual kernel, as opposed to a reconstructed kernel? Or is that merely a theoretical distinction, essentially preserving a tone of modesty with respect to one's ability to reconstruct the kernel.

Not the tone of modesty, because it's not my work, so I don't have to be modest about it, but given that a map is never a 1:1 correspondence to the terrain being mapped, being precise whether a statement is referring to the map or the terrain.