yalla

What is 'the word', from when is it dated, if it is able to be dated?
Does an eyewitness of 'the word' mean an eyewitness of....JC, or something else?
Can the gospel of "Mark" be labelled 'an eyewitness of the word' and if so when is it's 'beginning'?
Frankly, even if accepted at face value, the whole introduction is so vague and ambiguous, IMO, as to render it virtually impossible to arrive at a date of 'the beginning/the word/whatever'.
I'm fairly sure I have had people at my front door wanting to give me 'the word' so its a rather hard thing to put a date on.

Ben C Smith

You may be right. But it should be possible to figure out whether several generations are implied between the eyewitnesses (whatever it is they witnessed) and the author. Toto said that the statement implied that several generations had passed. My question is, within the passage, where are those several generations?

Ben.

Toto

I read it as an indeterminate number of generations, too many or too obscure to give an actual number.

If it were only one generation, I would expect a more specific reference.

A personal identification is necessary but not sufficient to take a document seriously as eyewitness testimony.

At least the forgers of gPeter and gJames made an effort. The author of Luke-Acts is not even pretending to write an eyewitness account.

yalla

I think the word 'generation' is a little misleading in this context.
If the author of g "Luke" means to imply that all the group of original witnesses to the 'word' [whatever that is] are all gone and we generously take that to mean most of a long lifetime has passed since alleged witnesses heard JC speak the word, then we are possibly looking at 60- 80 odd years since the era of JC, roughly 30 CE. Thats a lifetime of 80-100 years [as we are told is the lifespan of blokes such as the Elder John, Beloved Disciple] and puts us around the turn of the century give or take a bit.
And then we have a second group, following Ben's second scenario, called 'us', which can continue for as long as you like, after all, all those that follow the original groups are 'us'.
So the length of time envisaged can be to the present today if you really want to.
In other words "Luke's" words could have been spoken by the pair of bright eyed and bushy tailed youngsters who knocked on my door a few months ago, waved a Bible and a magazine at me and promised to 'reveal the good word' to me. Which is pretty close to what they actually did say.
Lots of people have 'spread the word', or gospel or kerygma, over the centuries.

"I read it as an indeterminate number of generations, too many or too obscure to give an actual number"
That pretty well sums it up for me.
cheers
yalla

DramaQ

Or the author of Acts and the writer of the epistles (writing in Paul's name) both used common legendary material about Paul.

Not saying this is my position, but it is a possibility. (I was just reading Detering's essay.)

D.Q. (still around)

Ben C Smith

Why? The original readers would certainly not need to be told approximately where they stood with relation to the witnessed events. It is only we who would perhaps like a more exact reference.

This is what I think. I think that the statement in the Lucan prologue implies nothing like what you said it implied. Handed down to us by eyewitnesses might mean handed down to us over several generations by eyewitnesses, but it might also mean handed down to us directly by eyewitnesses. I think you found what you wanted to find in the text, well beyond what the text itself actually implies.

I still do not know what you are doing with the we passages. No theory that ignores them is going to be worth very much. That is the value of what Robbins tried to do; he tried to explain them.

Ben.

yalla

Ah, motes and logs.
Almost immediately after saying that 'ye may know the truth' the author of g"Luke" launches into a fanciful story involving an angel of the lord telling an old man named Zech. that his aged wife will [miraculously] bear a male child and when Zeck wonders how this is possible he is miraculously struck dumb for his scepticism, just after the angel has completed a long monologue for which we have only one alleged witness, Zech himself, who was 'an old man' around a 100 years minimum before the author of the scene is writing.
Eyewitness account?
cheers
yalla