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Originally Posted by Vinnie
When you say "I dont' see the need for an epitome post Matthew and Luke" you are making the assumptions about evangelists and would be authors post Matthew and Luke---a very dangerous and uncertain proposition. In your case your assumption is probably inaccurate since Mark has many differences from Matthew.
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Actually, many of the following points seem to me to be very valid reasons why Mark could not be post Matthew and Luke. To wit:
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----Matthew esteems the twelve. Mark programatically denigrates them througout and attacks apostolic Christianity.
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Which would be much more plausible before they attained added fame through two better gospels. My point is not a really strong here, however.
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-----Mark omits Matthew's infancy narrative. Presumably he knew the convoluted and problematic joruney to egypt was a spurious creation of Matthew and he also knew thjat Luke saw the problems in Matthew's account and tried to circumvent them with a census but he also made his own errors (the census!). Mark just axed it all.
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Now it seems that the argument is that Mark would have dropped a lot of stuff if he was conflating Matthew and Luke but he would not drop stuff if he had Q. Either he would be willing to drop stuff he didn't care for or he wouldn't, be it Q or Luke/Matthew.
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----Mark saw both authors had given Judas a codign ending. He may also have been aware of a third tradition (killed by a wagon or some such in Papias) and just avoided that issue alltogether.
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Not sure what 'codign' means or if it is a typo what you meant.
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-----Where Matthew and Luke have a law observant Jesus Mark follows them but he alone has Jesus boldy nullify the torah's food laws.
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That could simply be a reflection of divergent christian communities. Even Paul had those issues.
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-----The woman at the end of Mark do not tell anyone about Jesus' resurrection because Mark is writing an apolgetic of why apostolic Christianity might have started out somewhat differently than with the story of an empty tomb and/or risen Jesus.
----- Mark has the messianic secret whereas Matthew an Luke do not.
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Doesn't make sense seeing how the christian community would be flooded with gospels if post Matthew and Luke. Any messianic secret would be too late at this stage. Any different explanation of the tomb events and the following days would be well known and Mark would just look silly since anybody reading him knew what happened next.
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----- Mark saw how loose the passion was in Mattthew and decided to tighten it.
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That's a literary argument, hard to make in favor of Mark, especially considering his scatterbrained gospel.
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and so on...
Some of these are stronger than others but there are enough differences in the theology of Mark to warrant an abridgement of Matthew but certain things like an omission of the SotM and other passages are inexplicable.
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No more inexplicable than omissions from Luke and Matthew. Any omission is fairly inexplicable when looking at christian literary tradition. One of the basic rules is that text tends to get more complicated as time goes by. Scribes hardly ever take anything away, however, they gladly add stuff. This really applies more to the transmission of a single text but could still apply here. For example, the number one reason for accepting the Western non-interpolations is that they are simpler in a text that normally expands sections. Mark, as a shorter conflation, makes very little sense both in terms of christian habits and also when viewed within an environment that contained much greater knowledge of gospel events, as in post Luke and Matthew.
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Most Q propoenents are open to the fluidity of a sayings text and many think MT and Lk might have used different versions. Both versions had the sermon sayings. Even if they used the same versions different copies of Q, just 10-20 years after Mark would have written were used by different evangelists and both had the sermon material. One is very hard pressed to remove such material from a Q used by Mark.
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It is a sticky point, I agree. I just don't know if I see Mark as an evangelist. I tend to see him more as a guy with an axe to grind within a church that needed a boost. He never strikes me as someone who was all that fanatical about getting everything right. He was interested in more earthly issues.
Much of that is speculation, I realize, and mostly a gut feeling on my part but it may not be entirely wrong. His story is far more interesting than the other two mostly because of the goofy disciples. I won't write more on that particular topic in fear of derailing this thread.
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Finally, even if we do something like this it only works once or so. If I find more material in Q that would have been very much with the theological grain of Mark---so much so that he cannot be reconstructed as having dropped it, then the argument is over.
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Yes, there comes a time when Mark omissions from Q would be unsustainable.
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I think this is incorrect on all levels. Mark's community is most always interpreted as having underwent persecution and suffering. The sermon on the mount is very much with the grain of Mark and
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All early christian literature shows signs of 'persecution.' I suspect that they were just ridiculed and put down by their much smater contemporaries and that they went back and wrote polemical material like a kid with skinned knee. Lets face it, their retorts are puerile and would be ineffective against a truly intellectual opponent, e.g. Celsus. Much like today their arguments are only convincing to believers and people who aren't too bright. The gospels were mostly there to make the followers feel better.
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Not all, but more than he did. Why did Mark retain the Q passages he did, but leave out "blessed are the poor in spirit"? You have to provide a solid redaction critical explanation for this. It simply cannot be done. We are left claiming Mark knew a version of Q without this, that or that or this and so on down the line. Q gets smaller and smaller until it becames a malleable text that will fit any theory. In other words, it becomes absolutely useless.
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Well, not useless but it can become fuzzy to the point where it doesn't help much in recontruction of early christianity, which is why it is interesting. I must say that I think that Mack is taking things just a bit too far. Especially since it becomes very difficult to marry Q with Paul, the strongest argument against Q in my mind, at least as Mack pursues the theory.
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I agree. Sanders reconstructs what he feels is a Mattheanism in Lukew but one example is not strong since scribal harmonization towards Matthew is an documented phenomenon.
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Indeed. Which is why I feel that the minor and, to some extent, the major agreements (between Luke and Matthew) carry much less weight than is assumed. It's not like we have the originals here.
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But if we have a number of different families of manuscripts the argument towards scribal harmonization loses its appeal. It would have to have occured very early to corrupt all manuscripts and if it happened too early it would have been before Matthew became popular enough to induce such harmonization which finds its way into Luke (and all versions). So scribal harmoniaztion is not very strong here. In the case of GThomas scribal harmonization arguments are to be given more consideration.
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Apart from P52 (which is John so doesn't count here) we have no early gospel material. If Matthew and Luke are from around 100, which I suspect given the Luke Josephus connection, They would have had oodles of time to make changes. Almost a century. Notice again the Western non-interpolations. Clearly, the second century was a time of innumerable 'heresies' and many gospel changes were done in those days. We don't have anything that's even close to the originals, in terms of time, and time period we are missing is precisely where most changes would have been made.
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There is no need for an either-or. Mark can be colloqual and have "bad Greek" if we can accurately distinguish the concepts as such. Mark need not keep the phrasing of Matthew and Luke. He was a writer with less skill and put things in his own tongue, even if it "dumbed down " the content of Matthew and Luke. Ever see a student write an essay based off other sources that have better writing skills and content structuring than they thmselve possess?
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That is an excellent point. It does kinda read that way at times. Looked at that way, Mark does look like he is copying. But he could be copying from Q or yet another gospel.
Julian
11-11-2005, 03:54 PM
