stephan huller

And here's one more reason why New Testament scholars should be beaten over the head with a club.

How did the Johannine tradition RESIST the tendency to absorb synoptic narratives. These people are so fucking stupid. It's not like John was guarded like Fort Knox. If it was a real literary literary tradition 'existing' in a world with other ideas, bouncing off those ideas or at least coming into contact with those ideas.

These fucking dimwits can't seem to conceive of the text (or better yet lack the ability to conceive of these pieces of paper) coming across an oral tradition or another written gospel tradition and hearing WELL KNOWN oral sayings of Jesus.

What do they imagine that the 'guardians' of the Gospel of John did when they heard all the so-called Q material? Do they think that Polycarp or whomeever said 'Oh we can't add this to John because it's not 'true' to his POV?' Really? People actually believe this?

What these people don't take into account is why the Diatessaron was so popular in the land of Jesus (Syria). They can't because they are essentially devoid of creative visualization abilities. All they can do is say 'my gospel is four therefore all the saints must have shared my prejudices.' They can only reinforce their prejudices.

But when you think about it the Diatessaron is such a natural thing. It's what would happen if there was a gospel tradition which 'bumped into' another tradition. You know like those Reeses peanut butter commercials we grew up with. You've got chocolate in my peanut butter, you've got peanut butter in my chocolate.

At some point the gospel associated with John MUST HAVE encountered the synoptic tradition. Now we can argue that for whatever stupid reason 'the guardians' of this tradition might have felt that the Q tradition was unreliable or not worthy of mixing with their sacred text. But the stories of John meeting and witnessing Jesus? Can anyone honestly say that these would not have been included in a gospel of John?

Of course the reality is that the Johannine tradition as we now have it is utterly artificial. There certainly was a Gospel of John with synoptic elements WHICH WERE LATER EXCISED. But that then opens us up to the real question - why were they excised which I think I have already answered.

stephan huller

The question again is what is natural. Is it natural that the Gospel of John is almost completely devoid of synoptic ministry narratives? Is it natural that the Gospel of Mark is so f---g short! I mean could this gospel really have been used by anyone. It doesn't tell you who Jesus is, what the context of his ministry was.

These texts only make sense to us because Irenaeus has framed the context for us - i.e. the gospel is 'of four' and each of these texts represents 'a quarter' of the gospel.

People always reference the idea that Polycarp doesn't explicitly reference the Gospel of John (as we know it). But isn't that strange in itself. Why is the gospel citation in to the Philippians a reworked reference to the same passage in 1 Clement? Who did the reworking?

Isn't it also strange that Irenaeus's reference only reference to the Ignatius corpus is to one of the longer recensions (look and compare; it has already been noted in the literature).

Again, people at this forum who claim that the Patristic literature is faked or that the signs of corruption mean we can just ignore the evidence clearly don't have any intimacy with the material.

It's sort of like living in a city. You know the story of the American tourist who goes to Italy and stays at a Holiday Inn, hangs out by the pool and eats at McDonalds. Even the Ignatian corpus reflects the general tendency of the age towards ever expanding texts.

When people scratch their heads and say 'how can Clement just casually reference the idea of a longer version of Mark'? I say, what could be more natural? It's like hearing that a guy was hanging around at a strip club all day and ended up trying to proposition one of the women.

It might be illegal but its not unnatural.

The Ignatian corpus has THREE different lengths to many of the letters. Just think of that for a moment. There is a tendency to keep 'adding stuff' to original material. No one thinks about why this is, that it might have been 'natural.'

The hypomnemata attributed to Hegesippus by Eusebius has clearly two endings (one which reflects the author having written it in 147 CE and another where the original narrative is brought down to the time of Eleutherius). We see the same thing in the Pauline corpus (the letter to the Romans for example). The Martyrdom of Polycarp has like three endings and a lot of confusion with the martyrdom of Pionius (especially in Eusebius's version).

The writings of Josephus were expanded. 1 Clement is filled with expansions as Lightfoot demonstrated with a much shorter citation of the material in the writings of Clement of Alexandria (albeit an anonymous reference). The ending of Mark. The list goes on and on and on as the Taio Cruz song says.

Now the pious want to maintain that there is no problem here just move along. The idiots at forums like this want to 'disqualify' the material because there are 'corruptions' at every turn. But how do reasonable people like us EXPLAIN the material?

The answer has to be that something about the age was ENTIRELY ACCEPTING to the idea of such expansions. This has to be acknowledged. It has to be accepted that the Diatessaron would not be rejected or diminished in significance merely because it represented a blending of various reports - i.e. mirrored the development of historical hypomnemata (whiere a patchwork of sources were used by one author).

And far more significantly THE IDEA THAT MARKED DIFFERENCES EXIST BETWEEN JOHN AND THE SYNOPTICS and MARK AND THE OTHER SYNOPTICS (i.e. that it was so short) HAVE TO BE VIEWED AS UTTERLY UNNATURAL AND INDEED ARTIFICIALLY INDUCED GIVEN THE TENDENCY OF THE AGE.

Indeed if Irenaeus uses the longer version of 1 Clement and the longest version of Ignatius to the Romans and the corrected ending of Mark how could we believe even for a minute that there was ever such a thing as a 'guardian' protecting the existence of the gospels of Mark and John IN THE INFANT FORM (i.e. that resisted subsequent attempts at expansion).

This is more of a myth than the 'historical Jesus' ever was