Yuri Kuchinsky

Dear friends,

Here's the article that I promised, where I present a more realistic version of how the early Christian gospels developed.

All the best,

Yuri.
________________________________


Evolutionary View of the Gospels

It seems to me that the way our mainstream biblical scholars still see the early history of Christian gospels can be best compared with Creationism. After all, each of our mainstream Synoptic theories today -- whether it is 2ST, 2GT, or Farrer -- is premised essentially on the assumption that all of the Synoptic gospels somehow emerged into the world in a single act of creation -- each put together by a single writer, it seems, an exegetical genius of some sort, locked up in a private study somewhere, and isolated from all the others. And after each of the gospels had been written down "during the first century", it had been frozen textually, more or less, somewhat miraculously perhaps?

But what I'm offering here, on the other hand, is essentially an evolutionary view of gospels' history. And, on this view, no single date can ever be affixed to any of our 4 canonical gospels. Their development was a continuous process, that started perhaps even before 70 CE, and continued well past 200 CE. And, all throughout, while this process unfolded, there had been a lot of cross-pollination among the gospels -- the sort of a cross-pollination that's usually pretty obvious even to a casual reader. After all, especially after the 4 gospels had been assembled together into a single edition ca 170 CE, the whole collection was owned by the Church, so all 4 gospels had a potential common editor who was quite interested in making their accounts appear more harmonious.

And, in general, I find that if one discusses these matters with non-professionals, for a change, they will usually express no surprise at all upon hearing that the Church continued to develop and "improve" these works for quite a long period of time as it saw fit. After all, it's a common enough assumption that the Church was the owner of these texts right from the beginning, so why wouldn't their owner continue to make some "improvements" to them, if it saw the need to do so?

So here we see a bit of a paradox. While it's widely assumed that the ordinary uneducated folks today are still quite sympathetic to biological Creationism, and while the professional biologists, the specialists, are overwhelmingly against it, it seems like this situation is almost reversed in the field of biblical studies as we see it currently. Because, in the biblical field, it seems like it's the specialists who are overwhelmingly Creationist, while the common people have no problem at all assuming an evolutionary view of gospels' history. This is a completely natural idea, after all, and everybody understands intuitively that these are primarily faith documents, and have always been such; from the beginning, their primary purpose was a very specific one, to spread the Faith. So the gospels would have always been subordinate to the Faith, and they would have changed and evolved together with it.


A REALISTIC PICTURE

So what follows, I submit, is an entirely realistic and rational account of the early history of Christian gospels, based on solid historical and textual evidence. It's too bad that, for our mainstream academic scholars, much of this might come as a complete shock. What else can one expect from them, considering that this whole field of study is still hopelessly mired in outright fantasies, in a multitude of faith-based presuppositions, and in the political biases of all sorts...

And so, as I see it, the development of the gospels may have started even before 70 CE, with the development of the earliest liturgical source-texts such as an early Passover Haggadah upon the Passion of Jesus, and some impressive accounts of his miracles and teachings. So it's the liturgical role of the gospels that I'm now talking about; from the earliest times, these texts were meant to be read during Church services.

But even this suggestion, itself, that the gospels have always been primarily the liturgical documents, is already likely to raise some hackles among today's NT specialists, (and here, I see some hidden Protestant bias at work, about, which later). All too often, scholars would like to see the history of the gospels quite apart from the history of the Church -- which would already be a significant departure from the scientific historical perspective. So here we already get into the fantasy world of "the isolated evangelists", writing quite apart from the natural dimensions of time and space, and quite oblivious of the larger world around them, as if suspended in a vacuum somewhere.

But let's get back to the real history now. So, at some point in time, most likely well after 70 CE, there happened to emerge a first complete gospel narrative -- the first Christian proto-gospel, that soon began to serve as a model for some further creative efforts in this direction by other groups of believers.

Myself, I believe that that original, and still rather mysterious proto-gospel was produced by the Jewish-Christians outside of Israel. It was probably very short, and textually looked the closest to our Gospel of Luke. I would date this important break-through at shortly before 100 CE. And, before that time, the Christians just used the Jewish Scriptures, adding to them, for some special occasions, a few liturgical texts of their own.

(Now, it's not really important for my overall evolutionary argument that that first Christian proto-gospel was very Lukan in its character. It may have also been Markan in its character -- nobody really knows for sure, and this wouldn't affect my overall argument all that much. The essential things are that there _was_ an original Synoptic proto-gospel, that it dated shortly before 100 CE, and that it served as a source and a model for the existing canonical gospels.)

So let's name this original Christian proto-gospel as "L". As soon as the news about its production got around, it seems that there was a response from the Jewish-Christian believers who were based in Jerusalem (and there's evidence that quite a few of them remained there even after 70 CE). Let's name the gospel that they produced in response as "M". So this would have been the source text of both Mark and Matthew, and it was most likely written originally in a Semitic tongue -- either Aramaic or Hebrew, or maybe even both. This would have happened around 100 CE.

So here's a simple chart that illustrates these developments.

----------L--------------
--------/----\-----------
-------M-----\----------
------/--\-----\----------
-----/----\-----\---------
----Mk---Mt---Luke-----

As for John's Gospel, it's clearly very close to Lk in a number of important respects, so it was probably originally also based on "L". But then, after some considerable evolutionary development of its own, the final edition of John did come to diverge from "L" more substantially.


THE SECOND JEWISH WAR, AND THE GREAT HIJACKING

So now let's go back to the importance of Church history for the history of the gospels. A very big shock indeed awaited nascent Christian Church, which was still predominantly Jewish-Christian in its character, at around 130 CE. These momentous events of the Second Jewish War could not fail but influence the continuing evolution of the gospels -- because they came just at the time when that evolution was still in full swing. While our mainstream introductions to NT are almost entirely silent about how these events may have influenced the text of the gospels, an honest historian cannot avoid this issue.

This second Jewish rebellion against Rome resulted in a complete ruin of Israel, and the outlawing of Judaism empire-wide. So this set the scene for the complete Gentile take-over of the Roman and the Jerusalem-based Churches. Much re-editing and expansion of the gospels followed upon the heels of these events. The first Roman edition of the 3 Synoptic gospels appeared soon after, and it probably existed both as separate gospels and as a gospel harmony. Justin Martyr cited his Christian Scripture in the form of a harmony, and these citations in Justin are extremely valuable for us. Justin's Harmony was clearly based on a Gentilized edition of 3 Synoptic gospels. The original Jewish-Christianity was now being systematically supplanted by the victorious proto-Catholic forces; it was gradually and systematically pushed out to the periphery of things. As a result, only a very few isolated Jewish-Christian documents from those early centuries still survive -- each in its own exceptional and sometimes rather odd way, it seems -- but their testimony is very precious for us.

The next major canonical development -- the adding of John to the canon -- came soon after the publication of that first Roman Synoptic edition. And naturally enough, this was an occasion for some more re-editing of the gospels all around. So this is the form of the canon that we see attested already in the works of Irenaeus, shortly before the end of the second century. But this was, as yet, certainly not the end of this long evolutionary process of gospels' composition. After all, the citations from Irenaeus clearly represent a Western text of the gospels, which is very different from the current canonical versions -- either Alexandrian or Byzantine.


MARCION

The first solid historical attestation of any Christian gospel is associated with Marcion, a very important early heretic, active in Rome ca 140 CE. But, of course, he wasn't necessarily considered a heretic at first, and for a time he even hoped to be elected as the Christian bishop of Rome. Marcion used some sort of a short version of Luke, minus the name "Luke".

So this tells us a couple of important things. First, it indicates that the proto-Luke was the gospel that was most popular at that time either in Asia Minor (where Marcion hailed from originally), or in Rome, or perhaps, quite likely, in both places at once. Otherwise, why would have Marcion chosen proto-Luke as his main gospel? He would have had no trouble adopting any of the other ones for his purposes if he so wished -- and there isn't much doubt that at least Mark and Matthew would have already been available to him... And we also have the short (although much disputed) attestation from Papias, indicating that, also ca 140 CE, Papias was well aware of Mark and Matthew.

But also, it's the timing, itself, of the Marcionite controversy that's very important. These were apparently the first open disputes about what should constitute the Christian canon; this makes it quite obvious that, previously, Christians had no agreed-upon Scripture. And let's also keep in mind that this Marcionite controversy came against the background of Jewish-Christianity being basically outlawed by the Roman state.

There can be very little doubt that these momentous events, taking place in the larger Roman society, could not fail but leave a deep imprint on what we now consider the canonical gospels. Marcion was widely seen as quite anti-Judaic; he even advocated that Christians should abandon the Jewish Scriptures. But, in the fantasy world of our mainstream NT scholarship, none of these events are relevant in the least to the text of the gospels -- the text that was, by most accounts, still very fluid at the time...


THE CHART OF MAJOR DEVELOPMENTS

Below is a chronological chart of the most important developments in the area of canon formation, as I see them. Each of the three main text types is treated separately. The Western text clearly came first.

(For a long time, there's been a discussion among Textual Critics about how to refer to the Western text, which, along with the Byzantine and Alexandrian texts of the gospels, constitutes the 3 most important recognised text-types. The name "Western text" is quite problematic, because this name emerged long before the discovery of the ancient Aramaic gospels, which happened to provide excellent parallels with the Old Latin gospels in the West. The designation "Syro-Latin text" was then suggested as an alternative, but this wouldn't account for the Greek Codex Bezae -- a very special, and very old manuscript -- which is often parallel both to the Old Latin and to the Old Syriac Aramaic gospels. The alternative that I, myself, suggest is to refer to "Western text" as "Peripheral text". The advantage of this name is in that it recognises that these "Western" manuscripts mostly survived around the geographical periphery of Christianity -- in places like North Africa, the British Isles, and Syria. The Catholic mainstream, on the other hand -- the places like Rome, Constantinople, and Alexandria -- clearly came to settle upon the later, much evolved and "improved" texts of the Scripture.)


WESTERN (PERIPHERAL) TEXT

50-90 the earliest source texts are being
produced
90-110 first separate gospels are assembled
together from them
140-150 the 1st Roman edition of the separate
gospels
140-150 the earliest gospel synopsis/harmony (not
including Jn as yet)
160-170 Jn is included in the Roman canon, both as a separate gospel, and as part of a harmony.
170-300 subsequent modifications
350-450 our existing Old Latin & Syriac
gospel MSS

ALEXANDRIAN GREEK TEXT

180-250 early edition is being produced
250-350 minor modifications
350-450 our existing Greek Alexandrian text

BYZANTINE (KJV) TEXT

350-450 early edition is being produced, reflecting Western & Alexandrian texts
450-600 minor modifications


THE PROTESTANT BIAS

And now, let's come back to what seems like a very pervasive early Protestant bias that's still affecting our NT studies, although it is nowadays often masked in a variety of ways, and even the Catholic scholars are often in its grip.

It's well known that, from the earliest times, the Protestants have been very influential in critical biblical studies; indeed, they may be considered as the founders of modern biblical criticism. And sure enough, they've brought in a lot of their own particular bias into their deliberations.

This bias, whether conscious or unconscious, has been in preferring to see the gospel writers primarily as individuals -- mostly unconnected with the hierarchy of the Church. It's this desire to ignore the institutional politics, and the liturgical role that these texts obviously played from the earliest times, that can be attributed to the Protestant world-view of these pioneers of modern biblical criticism.

The whole very Protestant concept of the Sola Scriptura is the result of trying to see the Scriptures as entirely separate from the "errors and corruptions" of the Roman Catholic Church, with all its multitude of complex customs, rituals, and observances (such as the veneration of the saints), that have very little, if any, foundation in Scripture.

In fact, the Sola Scriptura movement can be described as an extreme form of this Protestant bias, a sort of a determined assault on history -- an anti-historical project on the part of Protestant fundamentalists, that's still very much with us.

And so, originally, this Protestant bias expressed itself as follows, "Let's separate the gospels from the Church as much as possible, and especially from Church politics." The gospellers are seen as "single authors", working in isolation from each other, and pretty much from everything else -- only guided by the Holy Spirit, and a few assorted sources, perhaps, that happened to come to them in some sort of a round-about way... This is extremely fanciful, of course. In the real world, the Church always owned the Scripture -- until the 19th century, that is, when a small cabal of Anglo-German scholars managed to wrestle them away from its previous owner rather fraudulently, on the whole, by introducing their own Egyptian version of the gospels, that has since taken the world by storm.

Of course, it needs to be said that, more recently, this old set of Protestant biases seems to have mutated into some more "secular sounding" forms. Such as, for example,

1. "The Literary Bias": Let pretend that the gospels are just the works of pure literature. Minimise, or even completely avoid the early liturgical significance of these texts, and their central role in Christian proselytising.

Literary criticism, to be sure, has always been the preserve of more weird and strange theories than anyone can count. They seem to pass quickly with each changing generation of literary critics, to be remembered as curiosities only, if at all -- the field is notorious for its subjectivity and the propensity for overwrought and highly abstruse theorising. Structuralism, post-structuralism, reader-response criticism, "intertextuality", the fads change with every passing moment, it seems. So this is one way to take the gospels almost completely away from real history, and apart from reality.

2. "The Isolated Communities Bias". This is really a strange one. For some reason, it's very commonly assumed in our mainstream NT introductions that each of the gospels was produced within an isolated Christian community all of its own, that was completely out of touch with everyone else! (So this provides a rationale for holding that Luke's author was unaware of Matthew's author, and vice versa, and thus we need the "Q Source" to explain where the gospels come from!)

But in essence, though, this is just a more modern form of that old Protestant Bias -- to take the gospels away from the Church. According to this brand of pseudo-history, there wasn't any Church there, in the first place, to unify these "isolated communities"... And also, one variety of this trend postulates some sort of a mythical "Q community" -- never heard of otherwise from any legitimate historical sources. The only raison d'etre of these "Q peoples", it seems, is to memorise and transmit the mythical Q. A modern academic myth, if there's ever been one...

3. "The Secularising Bias" (also often associated with the "Q studies"): Let's pretend that Jesus was some sort of a secular philosopher, maybe even a Cynic of some sort! But, in such a case, one may wonder, How are we to explain all those hundreds of parallels that the gospels show with the Jewish Scriptures? After all, the gospels are just loaded with them! Hey, never mind, let's just say that, at some point, the Jews hijacked Christianity (?), and turned it into some sort of an imitation of the Jewish religion... Sounds bizarre, but that's how our NT professionals, such as Burton Mack, work...


CONCLUSION

Try as you might, you will have very little success in finding any recent mainstream Introduction to the NT that offers anything like an evolutionary view of the gospels, as presented in this article. According to our mainstream scholars, any historical evolution that there was (as reflected perhaps by "Matthew's use of Mark"?) was all over in the first century of Christianity. And everything that happened since -- such as the subsequent formation, itself, of the Catholic Church, as well as the formation of its canon -- must have happened on some other planet, right?

According to the crypto-apologists who write these Introductions, it may seem like these texts were only preserved by some isolated and rather mysterious enthusiasts, who only wanted to copy them the best they could, and cared about nothing else in the world? But I'm saying that, in the first three centuries or so, the gospels still continued to evolve -- a process that tended to go hand-in-hand with the continuing, and quite well attested, evolution of early Christian theology. So whose point of view is more realistic?

And it's especially the second century that is important. There's much evidence to indicate that, at the end of the first century CE, the youthful Christian movement was still predominantly Jewish-Christian. And yet, 100 years later, it was already predominantly Gentile-oriented. A lot of this theological evolution is still discernible even in our canonical Greek text. But it's in those very few and very ancient peripheral texts, that are still almost completely ignored by our biased NT professionals, that this evolution happens to be reflected a lot more fully.

All the best,

Yuri.

Evangelion

Loved the chart!

wordsmyth

Yuri,

I generally enjoy reading your posts and this one was good for the most part. However, your contempt for mainstream biblical scholars needs to be more... restrained. Limit it to a small opening or closing paragraph in which you can air out your personal criticisms and let everything else stand as basic evidence for your position. Otherwise, it appears more like a bitter rant than an intellectual study.

Just my 2 cents.

Cretinist

Your ideas intrigue me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Vorkosigan

Good post, Yuri. I especially like your POV about protestantism and historical analysis of the evolution of the gospels. Another excellent insight is your comments on the second jewish war. However, I have to agree with the other poster. You should eliminate the assaults on NT scholars. You read like Van Daniken's old complaint that "archaeologists just invent dates for their sites."

One thing I was wondering: what do you think was in the proto-gospel that gave rise to Mark? What were its contents? What did Mark add or subtract? Also, the evidence seems indisputable that Canonical Luke depends on Canonical Mark. Cn you give us a few reasons why we should instead regard them as both dependent on an Ur-gospel?

Vorkosigan

Asha'man

Nicely done, Yuri.

I have believed in an evolutionary model for some time, but my belief was based on content, not history. I'm glad that you provided me with a larger understanding.

My content-based belief is based on the idea that many pieces of the story were added to confront objections that were being raised by the audience. For example, the Jews have an old tradition that Mary was an adulteress. I think the addition of the virgin birth story was partly to counter such a claim. Same thing goes with the genealogies, they were added to the text in order to counter objections, probably raised by Jewish scholars in the audience, about the required lineage of a Messiah.

It's a perfect example of evolution: the story is adapted to it's surroundings, and only the adapted story survives for the next generation of tellings.

mike_decock

Ditto!

Thanks for that article, Yuri.

-Mike...

Llyricist

Excellent and highly likely hypothesis, Yuri. I have to admit to the same sort of frustration when trying to interject the idea that the writers were not isolated from their surrounding movement or church in certain other threads .

Yuri Kuchinsky

Dear friends,

I'm very happy that my evolutionary thesis is finding supporters. Thanks a lot to everyone who expressed their support.

Also people asked about Loisy-L, my biblical mailing list. You can subscribe by sending blank email to,

loisy-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

The webpage is at,

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/loisy/

Thanks for the encouragement, Vork! Much of what I said is based on Loisy, of course, as well as on some of the analysis by Alan H. Jones, in his overview of Loisy's scholarship, and the way it was received by his colleagues at the time. (Jones, Alan H, INDEPENDENCE AND EXEGESIS: the study of early Christianity in the work of Alfred Loisy, 1857-1940; Charles Guignebert, 1857-1939; and Maurice Goguel, 1880-1955, Tubingen: Mohr, 1983.)

Jones makes the point that Loisy often went against the grain with his colleagues, who were mostly Protestants. Since Loisy was an excommunicated Catholic, he couldn't fit comfortably either with the Catholics or with the Protestants -- and was critical of both.

Quote:

However, I have to agree with the other poster. You should eliminate the assaults on NT scholars. You read like Van Daniken's old complaint that "archaeologists just invent dates for their sites."

Well, I already did try to tone down some of my criticism of the powers-that-be, but I guess it didn't work too well...

I can only say in my justification that I really do believe that everything I said so far was true, and that these abuses that I criticised are very real.

Quote:

One thing I was wondering: what do you think was in the proto-gospel that gave rise to Mark? What were its contents?

These are very, very big questions...

Quote:

What did Mark add or subtract?

Well, to start with, how about the so-called "Great Omission in Luke"? This is the most obvious case of both Mk and Mt adding up a lot of stuff that probably wasn't there in the original proto-gospel.

Here's a very long article where some of these problems are outlined.

The great omission in Luke's gospel
http://www.concentric.net/~Mullerb/appf.shtml

(Mullerb's own solution to the problem, i.e. that the author of Luke used a copy of Mk with some pages missing seems rather contrived.)

Quote:

Also, the evidence seems indisputable that Canonical Luke depends on Canonical Mark. Can you give us a few reasons why we should instead regard them as both dependent on an Ur-gospel?

How about both Luke and John having only one Feeding of the Multitudes, rather than two as in Mk and Mt?

Also, it's a commonplace in literature that Luke's Passion Narrative happens to preserve some very early elements not found either in Mk or Mt.

Also, I accept the view (which is mainstream among Q scholars) that the Sayings tradition, as preserved in Luke, is more pure, compared to Mt.

And so on. There's a lot of such material, although I haven't really brought it together as yet into one study.

All the best,

Yuri.

PS. I'll answer some other comments about my article later. Got to run now...

Yuri Kuchinsky

Glad you liked my article, Asha'man.

Quote:

My content-based belief is based on the idea that many pieces of the story were added to confront objections that were being raised by the audience.

These sorts of "improvements" are actually quite common. Have you read Ehrman's ORTHODOX CORRUPTION OF SCRIPTURE? In this book, he's mostly focusing on some rather late corruptions that the orthodox editors introduced while trying to counter various later "heresies". (Although, in my view, he only scratches the surface there.)

Quote:

For example, the Jews have an old tradition that Mary was an adulteress. I think the addition of the virgin birth story was partly to counter such a claim.

Yes, I'm aware of this theory, although I don't really agree with it, sorry.

Because we don't really know for sure what was the exact cause and effect there. (After all, the Jewish critics may well have reacted to the Virgin Birth idea with this criticism, rather than the other way around.)

Myself, I see Jesus primarily as a dissident Rabbi, a critic of the establishment. All these suggestions that he was somehow "disreputable" would have been very convenient for the critics of Christianity in later times. OTOH, it's very difficult to know for sure if there really had been any solid basis for them.

Quote:

Same thing goes with the genealogies, they were added to the text in order to counter objections, probably raised by Jewish scholars in the audience, about the required lineage of a Messiah.

Well, I don't know about this... If the genealogies really went through Mary, as some Christian apologists maintain, then how would that counter the suggestion of illegitimacy?

Quote:

It's a perfect example of evolution: the story is adapted to it's surroundings, and only the adapted story survives for the next generation of tellings.

So here we agree. Yes, the concept, itself, of the evolutionary development of the gospels is valid, and it needs more exploration. But this doesn't of course mean that all such evolutionary theories are equally valid. There's still a lot of room for debate about the particulars.

Cheers,

Yuri.