Loading...Just over a week ago I did an eight-lecture on-line course on the Gospel of Matthew, not connected with the blog but with BECO (Bart Ehrman Courses Online); you can find out more about that here: The Genius of Matthew. Someone who came to the course asked me an intriguing question: if it’s true that Matthew used Mark for a number of his stories, actually copying his account word for word in many places, wouldn’t he be guilty of plagiarism?
Ah – right! That’s certainly something we would be thinking about today! Did people in the ancient world think about plagiarism? There weren’t copyright laws or, in fact, any laws about the theft of intellectual property. So was plagiarism even a THING?
As it turns out, this is a topic that, I venture to say (with good reason), the vast majority of New Testament scholars don’t know about. My (good) reason for saying so is that you can hear many such-a-scholar say oh-so-wrong things about it, either based on what they assume or what they have heard. My view is that if we want to know the views of ancient people, we should read what ancient authors say. Seems obvious, huh?
In any event, I had to deal with this question in my book Forgery and Counterforgery (Oxford University Press, 2013) and thought it might be useful to extract a portion of my discussion here to throw some light on the issue.
Before getting to the issue of whether Matthew could be considered a plagiarist (by ancient people/standards), we need to think about what they (ancients in the Greek and Roman worlds) thought about plagiarism in general. Here’s what I say in my book.
Get access to Dr. Ehrman's library of 4,000+ articles plus five new articles per week about the New Testament and early Christianity. It costs as little as $2.99/mth and every cent goes to charity!
Unlock 4,000+ Articles Like This!
Would the gospel writers be guilty of plagiarism for their use of “Q”?
In the next post I explain why not.
“What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before.” Mark Twain
I wonder if the cases cited here as condemned in the ancient world are quite analogous. It is no surprise that people have always looked askance at someone who aims to steal the credit (and perhaps profit) due another author for themselves. But in the case of “Matthew” and “Luke” we have two anonymous authors effectively doing bricolages of two other anonymous authors (“Mark” and Q), who they presumably viewed (perhaps wrongly) more as simple recorders and transcribers of accounts that had been handed down as part of a common tradition, rather than authors engaged in original literary composition. At least intuitively it seems unlikely it would have been viewed in the same light as simply slapping one’s own name atop a play by Sophocles.
Dr. Ehrman,
At the end of book 1 of Cicero’s De inventione,
Cicero mentions sixteen ways that sufferings
can be used in rhetorical discourses.
But as for 2 Cor. 11:22ff “Fool’s Boast”
do you think these things were events that
Paul actually suffered?
Yup, I really do.