Malachi151

It seems to me that the following is a likely scenario, certainly not definite, but likely:

1) The authentic letters of Paul
2) The Book of Hebrews
3) The Gospel of Mark - An allegorical story written by someone of Pauline background
4) The Gospel of Matthew - Based on GMark with additional story elements totally fabricated by the author
5) The Gospel of Luke - Based on an altered or condensed version of Matthew, plus Josephus and Pauline letters
6) The Gospel of John - Based on Matthew or an altered or condensed version of it, or an oral hearing of it
7) The Gospel of Thomas - Sayings Gospel produced by a Jamsian sect of Jewish-Christians
8) The Gospel of Peter - A harmonization between John and some synoptic

I think that a key to part of this would be showing that the author of Luke did not base his story on Mark. This eliminates Q as well.

Ben C Smith

!!!

Your sketch is impossible. Luke and Mark overlap and agree against Matthew too often not to be related somehow.

Ben.

Malachi151

Yeah, this may be true. I was looking at this, The Four Gospels Parallel, and there are at least 3 cases where Luke contains stuff from Mark that is not in Matthew. This doesn't even take into account the stuff that is in both, but where Luke is closer to Mark than Matthew.

The only thing that would reasonable make what I said in the OP possible then would be if there were a longer version of Matthew that was later reduced to what we currently have.

Is there evidence for this? I don't know, probably not.

There seems to have been several variants on Matthew though, or people who made different writings based on it, so that's what got me thinking about this.

The problem is that when you say one source was dependent on another, there could be in-between sources that were used which we don't know about.

Zeichman

How does this indicate Lukan independence? This sounds frighteningly familiar to Yuri's infamously-flawed logic. The problems with this sort of genealogy you propose are numerous, and probably has few advocates. Speaking of which, where has he been?

Any good primer about the synoptic problem will assist you on this. Familiarity with the original languages alone makes the fact that there is a literary relationship between each the synoptic gospels abundantly clear. Because we don't "know" doesn't mean it's not worth investigating.

I'm baffled by your statements about proto-Matthew, though.

Ben C Smith

I think Malachi151 was correcting himself, not reasserting the original thesis.

Malachi, there are quite a few more than just 3 places where Luke and Mark contain stuff that Matthew lacks. From one of my synoptic problem pages:

Between Mark and Luke there is the matter of Matthew 4.18-25 = Mark 1.16-39 = Luke 4.16-44, which Matthew abbreviates drastically, yet Mark and Luke retain their common order, sharing 6 of 8 passages in the same order in that section (called the day in Capernaum), while Matthew shares 2, omits 2, and moves 4 to different sections of the gospel.

One of the pericopes in this section that Matthew omits is the exorcism of the Capernaum demoniac. This pericope alone proves some tight connection between Mark and Luke. (As you say, there could hypothetically be intervening documents; but the relationship here is, I think, going to be literary, and any intervening, nonextant documents would have to be argued for separately.)

Ben.

Malachi151

It doesn't. I was agreeing with Ben's disagreement with my OP.

Malachi151

Yeah, I agree. It seems impossible to get away from the Q idea

I think the synoptic problem is one of those puzzles that every under graduate should be forced to work on, no matter what their field

Ben C Smith

Q is supposed to mediate between Matthew and Luke. The pericope I pointed out mediates between Mark and Luke.

Finally. We agree on something.

I sometimes wonder if God works on the synoptic problem in his spare time. No blasphemy intended.

Ben.

Newton's Cat

In the Gospel of Mark the voice that spoke to Jesus after his baptism by John was supposed to be understood as the voice of his deceased father.

Accepting this as a possibility leads one into the realisation that there was an original story depicting Jesus as King of the Jews - but NOT as Jesus Christ, Son of God. A second author altered the original story and added large chunks of new material, thereby creating the character Jesus Christ, Son of God.

So who was this guy who founded the cult we now call Christianity?

... and who was Paul?

All references to Jesus Christ and Christianity in Romans was interpolated into a pre-existing text ... by someone with a very different style of thinking from that of Paul.

Paul was never a Christian.

Paul may have written the original version of the Gospel of Mark.

Paul and the mysterious founder of the Cult of Christ were real people.

I prefer Paul ... he seems a nice guy.

His intelligence is such that it seems reasonable to suggest that he may have been a well-known personality of the time ... a philosopher of some sort - a Jew with a great deal of knowledge of, and sympathy with, Greek thought.

The guy who founded Christianity, on the other hand, was, to my way of thinking, a bit like our present-day "fundie" personalities.

Someone with a very well-developed criminal mind.

Possibly he was a well-known personality as well?

People have spent centuries mulling over the biblical texts ... going nowhere.

Maybe I'm going nowhere as well?

Chris Weimer

Malachi,

Do have a look at Peter Kirby's website for standard dating of the texts.