Casper

I'm not aware of any others, but I guess I am guilty of simply assuming there were. That is a good point Neil.

Solo

I, on the other hand, don't see this mental operation establishes or "argues for" anything except a belief of the bishop that Marcion edited a gospel which, he Irenaeus, knew in a form he considered authoritative. IOW, Irenaeus could have very well compared Marcion's text to that of the later, "expanded", Luke and on finding differences, decided they were due to Marcion's deliberately "mutilating" a text, which in fact used him as a principal source.

Please, assure yourself also, that if Marcion really was the author, or major editor, of a proto-Lukan gospel, from which the orthodox version was compiled, then indeed he could have been the only one who appeared to Irenaeus to have altered the text which was copied in the orthodox church.

Jiri

Ben C Smith

I wrote before:

Perhaps you could give an example of the sort of question we cannot ask; in my view, we can ask virtually any question, but the answer to many of them may not be forthcoming, and we have to formulate other questions whose answers are more forthcoming. IOW, just because questions 1-99 yielded no significant results does not mean that question 100, or 1000, or 10000, will yield no results.

I, OTOH, am looking precisely at the formulation of new hypotheses that cover the extant evidence better than the old hypotheses. Often, it takes many tries before the scholar can formulate a hypothesis that really works (Howell and Prevenier).

Ben.

Petergdi

Hi Ben,

One piece of data that seems important to me is that bishops and elders are synonyms
in Acts 20. The people who are introduced as elders in verse 17 are called bishops
by Paul in verse 28. This suggests that the presbuter / episkopos distinction did not
yet exist when Acts was written. The proto-orthodox appear to have had a clear
distinction between bishops and elders by the time they reacted against Marcion.

Peter.

Ben C Smith

Good point. In fact, the entire NT seems to equate bishops with elders wherever the point comes up, as do several of the apostolic fathers.

Ben.

aa5874

But, didn't the author of Acts want the readers to think that Acts was written in the 1st century before the death of Paul and Peter as stated in Church History by Eusebius?

It would seem that the author of gLuke used material from gMark written at about or beyond 70CE. GLuke was written sometime after gMark, and Acts was written sometime after gLuke.

And, it cannot be determined with any degree of certainty that any event with respect to the disciples and Paul actually occured as stated in Acts.

Petergdi

It isn't at all clear that the author of Acts was interested in providing cues, true or false,
about when the book was written. The common surmise that it was written before the
death of Paul is based on the fact that the history ends abruptly with Paul in prison.
There are other plausible reasons for the book to end where it does.

It is very unlikely for the use of bishop and elder as synonyms to be a crafty
misdirection.

For one thing, it appears to have quite quickly become a little known fact after
the establishment of the episcopacy as a separate office. Irenaeus thought that
the separate office dated from apostolic times and thus misread this portion of Acts.

For another, it doesn't look like a planted piece of historical realism. If it were
a misdirection, the writer would draw attention to it, so that it would be hard
for a reader to miss what the writer was doing. Many commentators did miss it.

Also, if the purpose of Acts were to make the mid-2nd century proto-orthodoxy
look apostolic, then something that shows that the church in apostolic times
was organised differently would work against the supposed intentions of the
writer.

Peter.

aa5874

Eusebius in Church History claimed that it was probable that someome named Luke wrote Acts of the Apostles while "Paul" was in prison.

And, if Luke was a companion of Paul and also knew Peter, it would be extrmely unusual for the author of Acts not to include their martyrdom if Acts of the Apostles was written after their deaths as MARTYRS.

The exclusion of Peter's and Paul's death from Acts of the Apostles is a CLEAR indication that the author wanted the readers to think that he/she wrote before they died, that is, before 68 CE.

And further John Chrysostom made a startling statement in his "Homilies on Acts of the Apostles", late in the 4th century

Homilies on Acts of the Apostles 1 How is it that many persons did not know even know that Acts of the Apotles was even written or heard about an author called Luke?

Perhaps this is an indication that either it was written very late, or not circulated when it was written, Luke was not known to be a writer, or no such person actually existed.

neilgodfrey

I think we are going around in circles now. Where we differ appears to be over the exact nature of that extant evidence. I have discussed what, say, a book like Acts is (and the same applies to the gospels) as "evidence" in posts #50, #109 and #112. And I've discussed evidence from another perspective in another thread, where I included the following significant 1904 quote from E. Schwartz. It is in direct relation to the evidence of Papias, but the point applies to all ancient documents for which we have nothing but their own "self-attestation".

We have primary and secondary evidence interlocking in ways that enable us to "do history" with Julius Caesar. We have no comparable evidence at all about Jesus.

The texts we have that talk about Jesus are evidence of the authors and social and intellectual matrices of whoever produced them. They are not evidence of the historicity of the narratives within them.

Is there any other area in (nonbiblical) historical studies where historians rely on the narratives within documents whose provenance is unknown and that lack any external controls? As far as I am aware, studies in biblical history is the only field where this is acceptable. If I am misinformed then I'd welcome being more fully informed.

The sorts of hypotheses we can frame, then, will largely be about the provenances of our texts. That means examining them for clues about their authorship, agendas, relations with other texts, etc. Through that sort of work we can see what evidence we have for Christian origins and where it points for further exploration.

I know of know historical methodological grounds for assuming historicity within the narratives in texts that are themselves without external controls or known provenance.

Neil

Ben C Smith

Yes, we must be going in circles. I thought we were talking about Acts, and here suddenly we are talking about Jesus.

Relying on narratives within documents whose provenance is unknown? Yes, of course historians often have to do that.

Going without external controls? I hope not.

Louis Gottschalk, Understanding History, page 144, on the process of determining the credibility of the particulars of a document:

The historian, however, is frequently obliged to use documents written by persons about whom nothing or relatively little is known. Even the hundreds of biographical dictionaries and encyclopedias already in existence may be of no help because the author's name is unknown or, if known, not to be found in the reference works. The historian must therefore depend upon the document itself to teach him what it can about the author. A single brief document may teach him much if he asks the right questions.

Ben.