Ted Hoffman

Bede,
Provide links or we will be right to assume you are talking out of your ass.

Ted Hoffman

IC,
Let us know what Doherty's response is. In the meantime, I will take a shot.
The writer of Habakkuk 2:3 predicts an imminent coming of the messiah. He promises that though the coming has been delayed, they should wait for it. Now, dead people can't wait can they?

If the coming is considered overdue by Habakkuk,and he tells them to wait just a little more - doesn't that sound imminent to you?

How does it do this? By using Pilate? Well, the Pilate in the Gospels is not the Pilate we find in Josephus and Philo. What that means is AMatt/AMark was writing historical fiction: using historical characters to write a fictitious story.

Plus, Josephus does not mention Jesus of Nazareth among his more than nineteen Jesuses who were Jesus' contemporaries and among whom were messiahs - was this Jesus a secret messiah known only by Mark? You will be hard put to convince us that only the Gospel writers knew of the merciful side of Pilate and had a monopoly over the knowledge of the existence of a Jesus of Nazareth.

This is BS. Its like telling us that it doesn't matter whether Robin Hood existed - what matters is where we are told he lived. Placing a fictional character in a known time frame and mingling him with historical characters does not make him real.
If Jesus was historical, and was crucified by Romans, Josephus would have cited that. He did not. Its up to you whether to believe AMark had monopoly over that bit of historical information or whether Josephus simply decided its not important.

The author of Matthew also tell us lots of other BS - why should we believe this one (the time frame)? Does 'your' author explain why?

Tell the author they simply can't pick and choose what they like and ignore what they don't like.

This is like saying that if the author of Matthew knew that hungry crowds cannot eat five loaves and two fish and leave basketfuls of leftovers, he would not have included the story, but since he did, it must have been happened. Or walking on water, or healing the sick.

I hope you see the circularity of the argument you made above and the question begging aspect. The information given is not multiply attested and contradicts reliable information from other sources.

Vinnie

I argued this like two years ago on this list. I think Vork said something along the lines that Matthew could have just attributed false prophecies to Jesus in the 2d century.

<--Not buying it.

I think Matthew obviously comes before the redaction of John's Gospel which further apologizes over this issue. Also, while this statement could still be made.

Matthew ca 90 c.e.

Vinnie

Vinnie

Some of the reasons I've seen used for dating GMatt:

For Matthew:

1. Nearness to Luke in the 2DH (Lk ca 90 c.e.)
2. Mention of the Temple Destruction (post 70 c.e. text)
3. Written after GMark (Mk ca 70 c.e.)
4. I am not convinced Papias referred to this work (Papias is no help)
5. The harmonies used by Justin Martyr (Limit us to early ca 125 as latest possible date)
6. I am not convinced that GPeter ("plausibly" dated by Brown to 125) drew on Matthew. I think it is more likly to be independent and less confidently, I think Crossan "may" be correct in that it contains some very early elements. N(No help here)
7. I do not believe GThomas knew the text of Matthew (or Luke or Mark for that matter so no help here).
8. If written in the Antioch area, it was probably written before Ignatius (110) for whom gnosticism was a threat.
9. Ignatius knowing Matthew?

As Crossan wrote, "Those texts give two divergent explanations for Jesus' acceptance of John's baptism. The one in the first text has to be dependent on Matthew since it uses "righteousness," a redactional emphasis concerning John in both Matthew 3:14-15 and 21:32. But since, as Helmut Koester has argued, there are no other equally clear indications that Ignatius had read Matthew, it is best to consider this an indirect dependency on which the creed used by Ignatius was already influenced by Matthew's apologetic gloss (1957:59)."

But how do we know Ignatius and Matthew did not share a source or creed? If Jesus was baptized by JBap this was probably well known and all Christians on record apologized this information in some way. In that light I'm not sure why "fulfill all righteousness" should be explicitly deemed Matthean? GMatthew has no monopoly on Jbap apologizing, IMO. But still many scholars view 3:15 as Matthean redaction. Can anyone on the list elaborate as to why?

But what do we make of Ephesians 19? It seems that this chapter knows the text or story of Matthew. Maybe not Matthew itself but the virginal conception of Jesus with details found in Matthew (e.g. the star). Unless these aspects can both be broken into a pre-Matthean source and or shown to be textually dubious then we would have to concede Matthew was written before Ignatius wrote. (possibly before 110 c.e.)

10. Brown writes that Did 1:4 shows knowledge of Matt 5:39-41 and Did 8:2 of Matt 6:9-15. I can't comment on this. Scholarship is all across the board on this text (some date it early, some date it late). Some think the first reference in 1.4 is part of an interpolation and some think both 1.4 and 8.2 are the work of a final redactor.

11. Matthew predates 2 Clement and also Ptolemy in his Letter to Flora.

12. We have 1 Clement 13:2 and 46:8 but I am not convinced these references are directly or indirectly dependent upon Matthew.

13. The Triadic formula in Matthew 28:19 is called the most advanced NT step in a "triniatarian direction". This supposes a later rather than earlier date. This is course is vague. High Christology occurs early as well and the close of the NT period is not until 130 c.e. and this would be regarded as much too late for GMatthew.

14. The controversies with the Pharisees in Matt and the condemnation of the free use of "Rabbi" fit well within the early Rabinic period after 70 c.e. (considered an important one)

15. Matthew 27:8 and 28:15 discusses instances in the Matthean passion narrative as 'remembered to this day'. This also uses an OT phrase to explain location names from long ago (Gen 26:33). (thus Matthew is writing some decades after the fact--sorry conservative redatings...)

15. The stress on the abiding presence of Jesus rather than on the second coming also argues for a later composition.

The focus in Matthew does switch some. Which shows that time is chronologically moving after Mark. The contents still seem to predate the final redaction of GJohn (early 2d century).

If Matthew does have Jesus predicting the imminent end then we must put him also in a time period where this prediction is not obviously false.

Some are stronger than others of course. Some are not persuasive but some carry some force. All in all 90 c.e. for MT.

Vinnie

Amaleq13

I've been rereading Matthew and I think the flaw in the above argument is that Jesus really never preaches an "imminent" end. In fact, the author of Matthew describes a fairly extended process that spans enough time for things like false Christs and wars and rumors of wars, etc. The author seems to me to represent a community that believed it was in the midst of this lengthy time of tribulation that would eventually end with the final judgment.

What I think is mistakenly interpreted to be a prophecy of an imminent end comes at the end of Matthew 16:

"Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom."

But the author immediately follows this prophecy with the fulfillment of the transfiguration witnessed by Peter, James, and John. This is not The End but the beginning of a process the author depicts as including the destruction of Jerusalem several decades later and extending to his own community who knows how many decades later still.

rlogan

Hi Ichabod.


Taken in isolation and with a presumption of internally consistent logic this appears to be a decent argument.

Here are the problems I have. First, Christians and others have been preaching the imminent end of the world for millenia and nothing seems to dissuade them. It is a characteristic we just have to accept in them. The argument that it would not be logical to have Jesus asserting an imminent end of the world fails in view of the same assertion for the next 2,000 years by countless others. Illogical, yes. But a patently Christian characteristic.

Second, we have to take all of the other material in conjunction with this in rendering a judgement. We can't even establish that the Jesus of the gospels existed. The opening question of the thread appropriately asks for positive evidence and thus far it is completely lacking.

For example, the most often quoted "anchor" for dating is the purported reference to temple destruction. Note though that this is an inference and not positive attestation. Jesus purportedly states that not one stone will be left standing upon another.

We do not have a positive reference to temple destruction as a historical event. Rather, we have an inference that the writer already knew of the temple destruction and placed the words in Jesus' mouth.

Not only is this a weak argument for placing the writing near 70 CE (as opposed to merely "after" 70 CE), but it is an explicit recognition that Christian writers are liars.

Notice how those who offer the temple destruction as "evidence" conceal the full argument they are using by merely referring to the temple destruction. It is incumbent upon those using the argument to be explicit that they are deducing a lie.

We take this along with the mountain of other lies about Jesus. That speaks more to the point that the Jesus of the gospels is fiction. Therefore there are no disciples of said Jesus. Thus no disciples wrote first hand of him, nor did they relate to others who wrote second hand.

Amaleq13

It also occurs to me that the author of Matthew is not writing a history book but it is more likely a theological text for his community. Possibly even read during Sunday services as today. That suggests to me that when he has Jesus speak about "this generation", the author is speaking to his own generation through Jesus.

Llyricist

And if you listen to some of the apologist postings here regarding that, he is actually speaking to OUR generation.

ichabod crane

Yes, indeed. Some Christians might even claim that Jesus (or elsewhere in the Bible) says that he is going to return at some point very soon. But I know of no Christians prior to people like Albert Schweitzer who claimed that Jesus thought that the end of the world was about to happen in his hearer's lifetime. Why? Because if Jesus claimed that, then he was obviously wrong, and not many traditional Christians are prepared to say that Jesus was wrong.

That's the fundamental problem, not the imminent end of the world. If Matthew was written more than a lifetime after Jesus, then the writer of Matthew portrays Jesus as saying something patently false. Would the writer of a gospel knowingly attribute a false statement to Jesus? I don't think so. Even if the entire work was fiction, no writer of such a work is going to put something they and everybody else knows is false into Jesus' mouth. So the only conclusion we can draw is that the writer did not know that these statements were false; which entails that he must have lived within a lifetime of Jesus, or if Jesus did not exist, then within a lifetime of when he claimed Jesus existed.

I agree with your other stuff about balancing evidence. But this seems to me a very major piece of contrary evidence. I would want to see some kind of plausible explanation for it from the Jesus Myth point of view.

But the context rules that out. And it doesn't deal with the other instances of Jesus stating an imminent end of the world.

Roland

What you are saying makes some sense, but then how do you explain all those church fathers in the 4th Century leaving these verses in when they were deciding on their official canon of scripture? They surely must have known Jesus was wrong, yet it didn't stop them from keeping them in the gospel.