TedM

IMO the reason the synoptics contain identical wording in many places is simple:

Whoever copied from the other took the material to be TRUE HISTORY. This is consistent with my belief that those who believed in Jesus as the Christ, the Savior of their souls, would NOT have written a gospel for entertainment, as though they were embellishing a fun story about someone known to not have been real, like a Superman. Nor would they have written it as an 'educational tool'--an instructional allegory that people could relate to more easily than a 'savior in another sphere'. I think they took the representation of their Messiah very seriously, and were endeavoring to write what they truly believed was historical truth.

But, could those copiers have been 'duped' by the original writer(s)?

Is it possible then that the originator(s) of the original material that was later being copied, did not believe they were passing along true history? Sure, they could have mined the OT for details, but can we really believe that whoever placed it in the historical setting of the times of JTB and Pilate KNEW FOR A FACT that it was not real history while successfully duping all of those writers of the 'many' other gospels?

Comments?

yalla

On the contrary, the observable fact that the later authors who largely copied "Mark" changed so many of his words and thus the significance of his messages to suit their own personal agendas shows clearly that they did not regard "Mark's" words as set in stone, gospel, sacred eye-witness calibre fact but plastic material able to be squeezed and moulded to whatever shapes took their theological fancies.
They knew it was not true history and thus felt quite comfortable offering their own idiosyncratic revised editions.

stephan huller

They are expansive forgeries (paralleled by the Apostolikon and Ignatius corpora) attached to and developed from Mark which is itself a corruption of an original Alexandrian text which is now lost. Succinct enough for you?

TedM

But why would they have copied so much word for word? Why didn't they just re-write all of it as they wanted to if they were simply playing around?

stephan huller

for the same reason that the Catholic forged Pauline letters have to introduce countless 'fellow workers' unknown to the Marcionites and Clement of Alexandria. There was a pre-existent tradition based on the sole witness of 'the apostle' which could only supplanted by a chorus of invented witnesses.

TedM

SO you are saying there was a 'pre-existent' tradition of the original wording that was copied by 2 of the synoptic writers? This agrees with my original conclusion that the copiers believed the material they copied was historically reliable and true. Otherwise it would not have been important to retain the original wording: if it was believed to have been fictional it was subject to complete rewrite as they wished (like the boy-Jesus 'gospel'). Yet, we have all these gospels that more or less co-existed and not a clue that anyone thought any of it was not historical fact. In fact, two of the gospels say outright they are writing historical fact.

stephan huller

No I am not assuming that Matthew and Luke were written by people named Matthew and Luke. The Marcionites (Dialogue of Adamantius) explicitly deny that disciples of this name actually wrote the texts ascribed to them. I don't know who wrote these texts, whether they were deliberate forgeries or accidental forgeries (though I suspect the former). All I know is that they were expansion of Mark for self-evident theological purposes.

It is always best to stop short of overreaching. This is all that we can say for certain. Everything beyond this is speculation.

Toto

IMO the reason the synoptics contain identical wording in many places is simple:

People are lazy. If they can copy something without putting the effort into rewriting it, they will be inclined to do so -- unless, of course, there is a need for rewrite.

aa5874

You appear to be in a dream world.

Ask yourself if the CHRISTIANS called Marcion and Marcionites knew that their Phantom, WITHOUT BIRTH and FLESH, did come down from heaven into Capernaum in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius.

You need to get back to reality.

The Jesus stories were most likely WRITTEN in the 2nd century based on the abundance of evidence and Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline writings were UNKNOWN up 180 CE.

The Gospels as found Canonized are not history of actual events but the history of what people of antiquity BELIEVED or was told to BELIEVE.

The NT Canonized Gospels may be in fact a reasonably TRUE history of the FRAUD, FORGERY and FICTION of the past.

TedM

I'd like to see the comments for the part bolded.

It is not clear to me the significance, if any, you ascribe to exact copying word for word. Those that copied didn't change a lot of the wording for some reason.

Gotta go. Cannot spend time here. Just throwing out the info for discussion. Will check back some time to see what others have to say..