avi

Hi Steve,

Repetition is one of the main features of most educational systems. I know it will bore everyone else, on the forum, to tears, but please, for the sake of one not yet enlightened, can you identify "Jesus' teachings", wherever they may exist?

I am laboring under the probably misinformed, and mistaken impression, that there are NO teachings identified as those of Jesus.
NONE
ZERO,
Zilch.

I cannot find a document, for which it is claimed, JC put quill to papyrus to outline his "teachings".
Ditto for euphemisms, aphorisms, or lectures.

What I encounter about JC, his life, his work, his claims, his accomplishments, is merely hearsay from "Paul", or the four gospels, all of them documents written by unknown authors, at an unknown date, of unknown purity, (or even worse, known imperfections, interpolations, deletions, omissions and redactions).....

Mingled among these ancient papyri, I have thus far located exactly zero communications from JC himself, so please teach me, where can I find JC's instructional guidelines to potential proselytizers. I have no idea at present, about JC, his life, or his "teachings". To me, there is no genuine information available.

I do not agree with you, that Jay's thread is preposterous. Strikes me as very reasonable, well written, and non-confrontational.

avi

Juststeve

Avi:

The teachings of Jesus referred to in the book of Acts are those set forth in the Gospel Of Luke. That's where you can find them, in the Gospel of Luke.

Steve

PhilosopherJay

Hi Juststeve,

Thanks for this insight into the author's thinking. Your supposition that the author has already written about the teachings of Jesus in his version of the Gospel and therefore doesn't want to be redundant and repeat any of them is quite interesting.

If we see the introduction as part of an actual letter to the "most excellent Theophilus" then this makes sense.

However, these works are not in the form of actual ancient letters. According to "Ancient Letters & The New Testament" (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Hans-Josef Klauck (Baylor University Press, 2006, an English translation of the 1998 Die antike Briefliteratur und das Neue Testament: Ein Lehr- und Arbeitsbuch.) all genuine ancient letters from this time period contain a:

1) prescript (consisting of three parts 1) superscriptio or superscription, sender’s name in the nominative, 2) adscriptio or adscription, addressee’s name in the dative, and 3) salutatio or salutation, greeting in the infinitive

2) proem such si vales, bene est, ego valeo (If you are well, it is well. I also am well).

3) main body of the letter, which is usually several pages, but may much longer (although, I am not sure if any are as long as Acts).

4) letter closing, usually consisting of a closing greeting or wish which may be of three forms:

(1) Direct greeting of the sender to the addressee, using a firstperson indicative: “I greet you”

(2) Request from the sender to the addressee to greet a third person, using a second-person imperative: “Greet X for me”

(3) Forwarded greetings from a third person (or group) to the addressee, using a third-person indicative: “X also greets you”

Since the Gospel of Luke and Acts do not follow this standard form, (which all the epistles in the New Testament do) we may take it that the opening of both are meant to indicate a literary device rather than an actual letter. In the same way, the title "based on a true story" at the beginning of a movie is a cinematic device. It does not indicate that the movie is a documentary recording actual historical events. Rather, it indicates only that some events in the movies are recreations of some historical events.

If, indeed, the writer is not writing for the unknown Theophilus, but is writing for a general audience, it seems unlikely that fear of redundancy is the actual motive for the writer not repeating any of Jesus' teachings in the work.

In the case of true disciples, we seem to always find the work of the masters/teachers. For example, in Plato we find the sayings of Socrates, in Aristotle, we find the ideas and sayings of Plato, if only to refute them. In Lenin, we find the writings of Marx quoted extensively, and in Mao, we find the sayings of Lenin quoted extensively. It is the rare writing of the Muslim scholar when writing a history of Islam that doesn't quote from the Koran (Muhammad) and the rare Buddhist when writing the history of his movement who does not quote the Buddha. So I do not think it is unnatural to expect some teachings of Jesus to be included in a work on the history of the Christian movement after Jesus died.

What is surprising is that the apostles are not portrayed as students of Jesus who go around quoting him and debating over the meaning of his many parables. Instead they are portrayed as Jesus Clones. They have the Holy Ghost in them like Jesus, they travel around performing miracles like Jesus, they attack the Jewish laws like Jesus, and are persecuted like Jesus. They do this with virtually no reference to Jesus outside of chapter one and no reference to his teachings. The Paul and the Peter sections could stand on there own and be stories even if the gospel stories had never been written.

This suggests to me that we are wrong for looking at the gospels as the architype for the apostle stories, but the gospels themselves may be copies of an Apostle architype. In other words, Peter and Paul may not be clones of Jesus, but the Jesus character is a clone of Peter and Paul and John "Persecuted Apostle" stories.

Think of it as gangster movies and "the Godfather" (Coppola, 1972). There were many great gangster movies before "the Godfather," "Public Enemy," "Scarface" and "White Heat" for example. However "The Godfather" synthesized different elements from different earlier gangster movies into something spectacularly different. After the success of "the Godfather," there were a multitude of gangster movies over the next 35 years that based themselves on "the Godfather". To those without a knowledge of cinema history, one could very well imagine that "the Godfather" was the first gangster movie. When one sees a film like Johnny Depp's "Public Enemies" (Mann, 2008) which goes back to earlier gangster films for its style and ignors the influence of "the Godfather," it seems incredibly original and fresh.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

Toto

Biblical scholars do not talk about conspiratorial cabals, but they do commonly conjecture that Luke and Acts may be based on earlier materials assembled by a later editor, who added the preambles.

If this is the case, it makes sense to look at Acts as a separate document.

Toto

Not the sort of Biblical scholar I had in mind.

One forger is not a conspiratorial cabal.

This is more in line with what mainstream NT scholarship would find to be in the realm of possibilites.

Neither of these gentlemen are mainstream scholars.

I don't think you read that carefully enough.

Nomina Sacra were just a shorthand used by scribes. Give it a rest.

This is the sort of mainstream scholar I had in mind:

Cadbury, Henry J. The Making of Luke-Acts (or via: amazon.co.uk), p 8-9. New York: Macmillan, 1958.

avi

Thinking further, about the controversy regarding nomina sacra, this thought passed through, on its way to oblivion:

Is it possible that there is a link between Jay's OP, and Pete's righteous objection to the casual dismissal of the controversy regarding the role and significance of nomina sacra?

What if the reason for writing nothing about JC is related to a taboo against writing about persons who have attained lofty positions?

Is there any evidence from two millennia ago, of deliberate omission of written details, regarding persons of great significance, to avoid premature death....

Apart from avoiding injury/death, there have been numerous studies to show the effect of death on subsequent reference to individuals. The field of inquiry is thanatology. Point is, perhaps the absence of reference to JC's notable accomplishments in Acts, and the use of nomina sacra, represent two facets of the same behaviour: writing in a style commensurate with respect/fear for the "recently" deceased "messiah".

avi

Doug Shaver

OK. It matters little to my take on Luke and Acts whether their preambles are authentic in the sense of having been included in the original versions. And I agree that the thread title, so worded, is erroneous.

Very well. I'll have a followup question, but first I want to make very sure I'm understanding you correctly.

What I understand: Assuming that Peter must have said something explicit about Jesus' teaching on at least some occasions, and assuming Luke must have known that, we should reasonably expect him to have omitted any reference to Peter's saying such things because he did not want to repeat anything that he could have expected Theophilus to already know. Have I got that right?

Juststeve

Doug:

I would argue the following but no further:

1. I would not expect Luke to reiterate what he said in the gospel of Luke with respect to Jesus' teachings.

2. I would not expect Luke to quote Peter for the purpose of reiterating the teachings of Jesus nor would I expect him remove references to the teachings of Jesus from what he was quoting from Peter for other purposes.

3. I don't know how much Peter spoke about the teachings of Jesus nor how much of what Peter said was quoted in Acts. Either not much or Peter was quite reticent. Therefore I don't think we can conclude much about the absence of Jesus' teachings in Acts.

To me the more interesting question is why are the teachings of Jesus so absent from conservative Christianity today?

Steve

Toto

This does not answer the question.

That's like asking by what authority each of those scribes spelled Greek words the same way.

I don't think that Eusebius knew or cared.

Some scholars? How did they avoid the commonplace conclusion that Paul himself was barely literate and used a scribe to record his epistles?

Toto

That's an interesting question, probably outside the scope of this forum. It involves the history of the religious right in this country, including the Council for National Policy, the somewhat strange history and influence of Richard Mellon Scaife, Christian Reconstructionism, the entrepreneurial Christianity of Jerry Fallwell.