Loading...And behold, a leper approached him and said, “Teacher Jesus, while I was traveling with some lepers and eating with them at the inn, I myself contracted leprosy. If, then, you are willing, I will be made clean.” Then the Lord said to him, “I am willing: be clean.” Immediately the leprosy left him. Jesus said to him, “Go, show yourself to the priests and make an offering for your cleansing as Moses commanded; and sin no more….”
This may sound like the Bible, but it’s not. This is one of the stories found in a document known to scholars as Papyrus Egerton 2. This papyrus consists of four small pieces of papyrus manuscript, written on front and back (so it comes from a codex, not a scroll). It contains four different stories: (1) an exhortation by Jesus for his Jewish opponents to “search the Scriptures” (in terms similar to John 5:39-47 and 10:31-39); (2) a foiled attempt to stone and then arrest Jesus (cf. John 10:31f) and then his healing of the leper cited above (similar to Mark 1:40-44); (3) the question of whether it is right to pay tribute to the ruling authorities (as for example in Mark 12:13-17); and (4) a highly fragmentary account that cannot be satisfactorily reconstructed – i.e., the scrap of manuscript has too many holes in it – that appears to be about some kind of amazing miracle Jesus did by sowing seed on the Jordan River (this story is unlike anything in the NT).
Clearly this is not a copy of any of the books of the NT: its similarities are with different Gospels and in the fourth story with none of them; and when there are similarities in contents there are differences in words. When this “Unknown Gospel,” as it was called at the time, was first published in 1935 it made a huge stir. Its two editors, H. Bell and T. C. Skeat – renowned experts in ancient papyrus manuscripts – indicated that the manuscript dated to around the year 150 CE. At the time, that made it THE earliest Christian manuscript of any kind that we had, much earlier than any manuscripts of the NT. But it was of a book not found in the NT! Could there have been apocryphal Gospels that pre-dated the NT Gospels???
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Bart,
You wrote “What if ‘the four’ were not thought of as ‘the four’ until, say, a hundred years earlier?” Did you mean a hundred years later? I tend to think there were more gospels in the earlier church simply because we’ve found so many of them, and because the author of Luke 1:1-4 mentioned them. I suspect we will eventually find many more of them than we have even today, although we could be running out of time with factors such as climate change and rising sea levels in some locations. How about that for a sobering thought? If nothing else, what I learned from your entry today is that we can’t assume much at all about the gospels. We have to be open to new discoveries, and they are very likely to upset the applecart.
Woops. Later!
I guess I’ve tended to imagine it was like your students suggest; in fact, when I’ve read your stuff I guess I’ve considered that background an unspoken milieu that was inherent in your thinking. But apparently, you’ve never explicitly suggested anything of the kind. Go figure.
yes, in fact it has been my thinking for a long time. But my students are going a step further in seeing how messy the early Christian soup was.
I’m looking forward to your book of gospel fragments by Hermeneia. Is there a working title and projected timeline for it yet? I don’t think they have done one on the Gospel of Thomas yet. Have you considered that for your next scholarly project? Are is one already in the work by someone else?
I think your students are on to something. I keep thinking the heart of early Christianity was not in Jerusalem but rather in the Sea of Galilee area where Jesus would have done his most of his teaching. Jesus’ family would have been there interpreting his life perhaps as the True Prophet, his disciples interpreting his life as the Messiah as well as Galileans who heard Jesus teach interpreting his life as a good teacher. Jewish Hellenists were in the area interpreting the teachings as freedom from the Law and maybe even gentiles of the Decapolis were seeing a Jewish sage.
Instead of a progression in Christology toward divinity, could the origins of Christianity have been multiple interpretations by multiple groups and when the texts of the NT were eventually agreed on this caused a merging of the various interpretations (the origin of how believers read the texts today)?
I”m sure the title will be completely straightforward. No timeline: simply as soon as I can write it, which may be years. I won’t do Gospel of Thomas. That would require a true expert in Coptic, and that’s not me….
How much credence do you give Rodney Stark’s estimate of 1000 Christians in 40 CE and 7530 in 100 CE?
Number of Christians, given 40% growth per decade
40 1,000
50 1,400
60 1,960
70 2,744
80 3,842
90 5,378
100 7,530
150 40,496
200 217,795
250 1,171,356
These would have been spread out from Egypt to Israel to Syria, Asia, Greece and Italy.
What interests me is how few 1st century Christians there would have been at any given time that could write, write in Greek, and write well in Greek. Maybe there were fewer manuscripts than people realize. We know there were more than 4 gospels but perhaps the actual number of 1st century gospels is in the range of 15-25.
I’d be surprised if there were 1000 by the year 40, but I’m not sure if there really is any way to know. But yes, even if the number is right, VERY few Xn people in the world would have been able to read….. I also don’t know how to estimate how many first-century Gospels there were.
Sounds like a reasonable theory.
I always have thought that “Q” was bunkum, that the gospels were transcriptions of oral traditions geographically based. That is to say, different gospels came out of different communities, but a lot of the oral traditions would have come out of the exodus from Jerusalem and would have much in common.
That said, I have William Hone’s Lost Books of the Bible (obviously a poor imitation of your work, but it was on sale). They strike me as “immature”, dated, sort of like religious “junk food”.
On a personal note, I get to go to university for free when I’m 65, five years from now. I’m studying as hard as I can to hit the ground running. I’ve just learned my Greek alphabet, and hope to tackle Hebrew in a coupla years. Which is a roundabout way of complimenting you on your energy and productivity
I’ve always felt that there must have been (or perhaps “probably were” is a better way to say it) several other traditions than just the 4 Gospels that we have and I assumed that scholarly opinion was of the same mindset. Something similar that I’ve wondered is how do we know that the early church fathers who railed against what they deemed heresy were not actually in the minority themselves, ie. that there were other more widespread and more accepted traditions than what people like Irenaeus would have us believe? Their works are what we have left at the moment. Maybe they were successful in destroying every scrap of dissension, written and oral and what Christians have today is an extreme distortion of what Jesus really taught.
I forgot to add that my subscription auto-renewed this week and this was one of the few times that I didn’t mind something auto-renewing on my credit card! I look forward to your blog every day!
Yes, that’s a popular view (one that I share) that came to first clear expression in the work of Walter Bauer (Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity)
Thanks for the recommendation. I added the paperback version to my Wish List on Amazon. The hardback is $150 on there!!
I’ve actually wondered this myself several times and I have to admit to being somewhat pleased with myself that I might be thinking something similar to elite scholars. My thought was that maybe what we call gospels are like species in evolution, species of tradition forming due to geographical isolation (or perhaps political isolation in these cases).
At first there was maybe one set of gospel traditions, but variations were introduced each time they were passed on or copied and those variations added up. For those in close geographical or cultural proximity, those variations that were popular got passed around. But with geographic or political barriers, local variations would have made their traditions different from those in other communities on the other side of those barriers. Maybe the John traditions were a bit more isolated from the rest, which is why that gospel is so different. The isolation of the Mark, Matthew, and Luke traditions would have been less severe, allowing more admixture. Four distinct tradition streams would have “speciated” by the time that were noticed and attributed as gospels according to specific people, only then becoming somewhat locked in.
This makes me wonder if each gospel can be identified with a distinct region.
Yes, scholars have wondered about the regional question: but we simply don’t have the evidence.
Oldest NT manuscripts in order are P52 and Papyrus Egerton 2. What is the next oldest? Thanks.
Well it’s not easy to say. These dates are complicated and there are disputes. The earliest reasonably full manuscripts are from around 200 (e.g. P75).
Better be careful or you will find yourself “outside the box”! A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. 🙂
I think the two-source theory (Mk & Q) represents a pretty good representation of what we can know (hypothetically) about the of the four traditional gospels. But, in addition to that there must be so much more that we cannot know at this point because it was simply lost to history. There are some who try to construct more detailed and complicated hypotheses (eg, Boismard), but they are hopelessly ultra hypothetical and subjective. Applying Occam’s razor does not mean that the original reality was necessarily all that simple, but that additional unnecessary hypotheses are superfluous, hyper fluid, overflowing, over our heads and drowning what can be known with simpler hypotheses that are more likely to be true, if not a complete picture.
I think the author of this fragment must have ‘known’ at least this part of the gospel of Mark, but that ‘knowledge’ could well have been indirect. Someone heard that part of the gospel and the story was passed along in a partly itinerant church structure.
I think that’s also how ‘Luke’ may have heard sparse but fantastic elements of Matthew’s infancy narrative.
What do you think?
I don’t think Luke heard anything about Matthew’s story, but other than that, I pretty much agree with your assessment.
Hmmm, multiple independent attestation of older virgin birth tradition(s).
If you look at it this way, it might be harder to refute the minority of scholars who suggest that the earliest writings/traditions, which haven’t survived, may have portrayed Jesus as the Gospel of John does, rather than as an apocalyptic prophet…
Of course, there’s no particular reason to think they did! And it’s very plausible that John represents an *evolution* in early Christians’ thinking about Jesus.
Hey, of course there were many christian scripts floating around… aren’t you the master of “lost Christianities”? 😉 However, I think that in the II century CE the four canonical gospels may have already been a bit more authoritative than others – considering Tatian’s Diatessaron and what we know from Irenaeus (both second-half of II century CE), we can reasonably assume that already in the first half of the century the four Gospels emerged as important texts – then used by some people to develop their own Gospels (e.g. Tatian and Marcion with Luke).
Moreover, by chance, all extant “apocryphal” texts have been written (at least in their final form) after the canonical Gospels and many of them show also literary dependencies from them (from synoptics in particular): this strengthen the idea of a “supremacy” of our beloved Gospels.
I don’t think they were “more” authoritative. They may have been authoritative to “more” Christians, but that’s another issue! And I don’t think that we know for sure that the apocryphal texts are later than the canonical: that’s just the question with some of them!
Sorry, just another thing: couldn’t Egerton 2 reflect a genuine oral tradition that didn’t find its way to the canonical Gospels? I can’t find in the (short) text any evident Christology development, or anything that strictly points to a purely fictional account..
Yup, could be!
Yes, indeed. It’s a lot murkier than most people think.
If there weren’t something special about Mark early on, it’d be an implausibly unlikely coincidence that Matthew and Luke were both so heavily based on Mark. So even if there were many many gospels early on, asking whether the author of Egerton 2 knew Mark is a sensible non-anochronistic question.
Very interesting point!
Hi!
Yes, I read old posts!
It must have seemed somewhat natural for these Christians, specially for the gentiles that converted, the different accounts (written or oral) of the life of Jesus. Maybe some (most?) of them had no problem with that. After all, it was a characteristic of Greco-Roman mythology (or any myth for that matter) to have different versions of stories about the Gods.
But Paul certainly had a problem with this view.
:o)
I just noticed that the Egerton text leaves out the Messianic secret, Mark 1:44: ““See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest…”. Luke and Matthew both follow along with the Messianic secret (Matthew 8:4 // Luke 5:14), but not the Egerton text.
Do you think this could be an indication that it really is an independent text? The author knew the story, but not Mark’s addition of the messianic secret, so maybe the author is drawing on a different tradition of the same story. What are your thoughts?
I do think it’s an independent text, yes. The Messianic secret does seem to be a distinctively Markan idea…