Ben C Smith

You and I have been speaking past each other a lot.

Yes, I see this difference. I did not realize that this was the difference you wished to highlight. I was responding to this:

I did not (and still do not) read anything here about a permanent disappearance or a permanently empty tomb. Now that I understand you a little better in this regard (and how is it that communications are always so hard here?), I can respond, I think, a little more to the point.

No, the Toledoth account does not itself witness to a permanently lost body.

But let us turn back for a moment to the gardener motif that Price traces.

Earlier I said that you and Price (and I, for that matter) agree that the gardener motif is based on John. I think I have picked up since then that you disagree with him that any Jews were actually using it; if that is not accurate, then please correct me.

At any rate, Price does argue that the Jews were, by the time of Tertullian, using the gardener defense. I have already pointed out that he is also certain that the Jews were using the stolen body defense, and have argued that this conclusion is not secure, since it could have come straight from Matthew. But that argument of mine does not apply to the gardener defense. Sure, the gardener himself is (probably) based on John, but the twist on that story element, that the gardener removed the body in order to save some heads of lettuce, is something new. It is, as Price says, an inference from the Johannine story, but it looks like a good Jewish inference, not a Christian one. Furthermore, Tertullian did not make up any of the other charges on the list; he got them from sources he trusted, the canonical gospels. But this charge is not in the canonical gospels (even if its inspiration is). Where did he get this one? I submit that, since he has not made up the other charges, he is not making up this one out of thin air. He has heard it before.

Now, in all fairness, I cannot say for certain that the gardener story indicates a permanently empty tomb. The garbled version of it in the Toledoth certainly does not, right?

But I return to the apparent tension between your view, on the one hand, that the stolen body story is a weak defense and your view, on the other hand, that it should have popped up everywhere if it existed at all. What if the stolen body story was, in fact, the first (on record) to appear, and it was soon replaced with the better gardener version (better both because it did not presume a permanently empty tomb and because it avoided the conundrum, pointed out by apologists like Origen, that the disciples were later martyred for a lie of their own making)? That progression puts several of your better insights to work and avoids the contradictions you have put forward.

First of all, this is your best argument yet. Now, I said that on another thread concerning the Q issue and my relative words were immediately interpreted as an absolute, which was not exactly my intention there. So let me say here, in absolute terms, that this is indeed a good argument. (Why can not all of your arguments be of such quality? )

However, I do not imagine that Matthew has transcribed the Jewish charge exactly, word for word, from some Jewish informant. Of course he has fit it into his story. The while we were sleeping bit, in first person plural, by definition cannot belong to the story the Jews were passing around, at least not in that form; they are the content of what Matthew imagines the guards themselves to have said in order to have started the rumor. More to the point, these words are necessary for Matthew here, since without them the theft of the body would be inexplicable; are the guards saying that they just sat there and observed while the disciples committed their crime? IOW, I do not think Matthew necessarily intends the part about sleeping as part of the Jewish charge; I think he had to have it in order not to leave a gaping plot hole.

Our apologists, Justin and Tertullian, also support this reading. I have already pointed out that both of them attribute only the stolen body charge to the Jews, neither of them using any part of the guard story. They apparently understood the substance of the actual Jewish charge in the same way I do.

That said, however, I repeat that you have made a good observation here, and one that I will do some more thinking about.

Actually, I do not necessarily think that Matthew devised the entire thing on his own. It could well have come to him in much the same way as I mentioned in conjunction with Wells.

...or a story grew until it reached Matthew....

Actually, my willingness to reject it stems primarily from its general implausibility and secondarily from its obvious congeniality as Christian apology, though I will admit that its failure to make the pages of Mark, Luke, or John helps.

Perhaps I flatter myself that I am applying the same standard across the board, but I certainly try. The story of the guards is (A) inherently implausible, (B) congenial to the empty tomb story, and (C) not mentioned in either earlier (like Mark) or roughly contemporary (like Luke and John) accounts of the same events. (Notice that I use the argument from silence, but it takes a back seat to stronger fare.) The Jewish charge, however, is (A) not inherently implausible, (B) liable to raise awkward questions among those who had not heard any such thing yet, not to mention that it is unnecessary to anything within the story, and (C) possibly witnessed to by Justin or Tertullian, or both.

See A and B above.

Neither desire nor rescue has anything to do with it. It would be a doddle to say that Matthew (or somebody) made the whole charge up wholesale if I could figure out why (in a way that would handily answer A and B above) he would do so. But, when I asked you why, you shrugged your shoulders and asked who knows why an evangelist writes as he does. If that is what I have to look forward to in rejecting the more obvious option, I politely decline to travel that path.

I asked you for your reading of the final comment in light of allegory, and you have not graced me with anything that goes beyond the guard story itself. I already know how to explain the guard story; tell me how I am to explain the comment.

Ben.

andrewcriddle

It is quite possibly not a slur on Jesus at all. In the account by John the Jewish opponents of Jesus are reacting indignantly to the claim that they are not genuine descendants of Abraham.

They may merely mean that they are not like the Ammonites and Moabites descending (according to Genesis) from an incestuous one night stand.

I think it unlikely that Celsus would have interpreted the passage this way.

(You may mean that John's Gospel and Celsus are drawing independently on the same tradition which, whether right or wrong, would be another issue.)

Andrew Criddle

Solo

Interesting, Andrew. Thanks.

Yes, you are quite right, that is what I think. The tradition of ben Panthera fathering Jesus looks like a retort to the claim of Mary's virgin motherhood, and thus it appears reactive to Christian lore. The charge of sorcery, however, may be inadvertently upheld by the canon, if it holds that John interprets enthusiastically but naively as miracle what was a story of Jesus' public deception forced by circumstance.

Bottom line - both traditions about Jesus seem attested earlier than Talmud and likely would have been propagated in the non-Christian circles informing Celsus.

Jiri

EarlDoherty

I wouldn’t pontificate one way or the other. It’s possible that Jews by the early 3rd century were starting to pick up on Gospel elements and fashioning rejoinders to them. (Although if Zindler is right, and I find him compelling, Jews were not responding, at least in written form, to the Gospel Jesus in the 3rd century, but only in the later actual Talmuds--the alleged 3rd century material not being references to Jesus at all.) But we can’t tell from Tertullian or anyone else on the matter of Jewish spins in the 3rd century because (with your one apparent exception) everything they say looks to be derived directly from the Gospels. The Jews were notorious at getting the Gospel elements wrong (to judge by the Talmud) or at least distorted, so one might expect that people like Tertullian should have had to deal with such distortions, and yet they do not.

However, I think you are making too much of the “lettuce” business. It’s really a very minor detail, and who knows where Tertullian might have taken it from. We can tell from the Christian record itself that all sorts of different versions and embellishments on basic Gospel themes were rife from the later 2nd century on, a flood of apocryphal enlargements and sheer invention, not all of which have survived. An apocryphal Gospel that borrowed from John may have added it. Some preacher whom Tertullian may have heard may have stuck in the lettuce when giving a sermon on John, who the heck knows? I think the idea that Tertullian picked it up from Jews is only one option among many equally feasible ones. And the fact that the Toledoth does not use it in its presentation of the gardener is one strike against it being an element current in any Jewish spin. And why would Jews be particularly prone to introduce lettuce as a reason for moving the body? To me, it’s simply an extra element of color, more likely the product of innocent Christian embellishment.

I’m not quite sure what “contradictions” you are referring to. The stolen body story being weak (I assume you are referring to the Jewish one alleged by Matthew), and the idea that it should have widely spread? First of all, why is there a tension here? Are you saying weak ideas never spread to be embraced by many? I don’t think I need comment any further on that. And how exactly did I say such a (Jewish) story would be “weak”? It would actually be quite a good and natural one, which any Jew would be willing to seize upon and spread. Which is why we should find it all over the place. It villainizes the apostles, making them deceitful; whereas the gardener story (I don’t know why you call it “better”) is actually quite bland and unimaginative. It may have helped, as a plot element, in enabling the recovery of the body, but a good imagination could have come up with any feasible storyline for recovering it from thieving disciples. Thus I have to disagree that any initial “stolen body” story would have been likely to require a permanent disappearance of the body. I just think that Jews would never have come up with any spin which would involve the acknowledgement that the body was permanently gone. In the face of such a dramatic fact, any excuse could be seen as “weak.” And the whole point to my argument over the last several exchanges is to discredit Matthew’s story as factual, on the basis (one of several) that Jews would never create such a spin that would involve such a troublesome admission. And since the Toledoth (or its roots) is potentially our earliest witness (in Jewish writings) to any Jewish spin involving an allegedly disappearing body, and it does not contain such an admission but rather the recovery of the body, this is support for my contention.

I might suggest that this argument strikes you as such because it is a relatively plain and simple one (not only to understand but to formulate in the first place). Other arguments can be much more complex and even difficult to get across, often needing several attempts to do so. This is not to cast any aspersions on your critical abilities (or mine). It’s simply a fact. I think one of the problems I have had with people like Chris Zeichman and GakuseiDon is that the points we are arguing are complex ones (such as that ‘crucified man’ passage in Minucius Felix, or “progressions” in Q). Of course, it doesn’t help that understanding (quite apart from accepting) what I’m trying to say is somewhat dependent on being willing to relax established paradigms and preferred interpretations. And that, too, is simply a fact.

No, as I recall, I used the “who knows?” idea only in application to the question of why Matthew felt it necessary, or what was his motivation, to append that final comment, not in application to the whole guards sequence and the “charge” it involved. (The charge was already there, even without the final comment.) I offered a very feasible (to me) reason why he did so: because it seemed to be an obvious objection that could have been raised within his story of the resurrection. Perhaps he was a more sensitive and perceptive author than Mark was, or any of the other evangelists. He could have said to himself, now if I was an outsider and I heard something about a dead body disappearing after it had been entombed, wouldn’t I be likely to be skeptical and wonder whether the man’s followers could have stolen the body? It might be a good idea to put in something that would counter such a thing, and it would be a nice touch. We have to keep in mind that Hellenistic romances were all the rage at the time Matthew was writing, and many of them involved concluding episodes centered on tombs where the hero was installed (often not really dead), and a lot of shenanigans took place in those tomb settings. Adding the charge and guard sequence may have been motivated by little more than Matthew wanting to put in his own shenanigans at the tomb in his final scenes.

As for “travelling that path”, didn’t you follow it when you said “I don’t know” to my question as to why, if Luke copied Matthew in the absence of Q, he didn’t carry over the charge and guards element? I’m sure I heard those shoulders shrug.

Well, I feel that it need not go beyond the guard story itself. Now, you and I, and others here, being perspicacious about literary art and theory, tend to identify this final comment as an ‘editorial’ one, the author “stepping outside” the confines of the guards narrative itself. But is Matthew really to be expected to see it that way? Especially to see it as an objectionable thing to do? He has just come up with a particularly inventive sequence that livens up the narrative and deals with a literary-based objection. Why not just accept that he got a little carried away and simply said, and this story was widely circulated. It really does enhance the impact of the story. Instead of “stepping outside” the narrative, he put himself into it. Since he has been busy making up fictional stuff all along, including altering his major source (Mark) in any way he felt necessary to his agenda with no concern for historical accuracy, it doesn’t seem out of place that he could feel comfortable with inserting something which is also the author telling something that is untrue.

Anyway, you expect knockdown, high-quality arguments from me on absolutely everything??

Earl Doherty

Amaleq13

Not objectionable so much as unusual. He doesn't do it anywhere else, does he?

This would be a credible explanation if it was something the author did elsewhere. As it stands, it appears to me to be an odd divergence that requires a better explanation than this.

spamandham

I'm guessing you've addressed what you think this story teaches, as an allegory, somewhere on your site? It seems to me that a cohesive interpretation of the allegory would go a long way toward supporting your overall position, at least to those willing to consider it.

Mr. Logic

Question: Can someone who is a Believer in Christ but not Christianity post here or is this an Amen Pew for Atheists? I came on this forum a couple of weeks ago, and keep getting censored for trying to post another view point, even though those stopping me, admit that I have interesting things to say!
Thanks

Amaleq13

If the Believer is interested in engaging in a rational discussion of the evidence relevant to Biblical Criticism & History, absolutely. We have several. If the Believer, however, prefers to preach or otherwise ignore the rules, no. That sort of posting behavior is inappropriate and subject to moderator action.

You've only had two moderator actions taken against you and neither was actually for the reason you state but the appropriate place to complain about such action is Questions, Problems & Complaints.

Ben C Smith

It is more than the lettuce detail. It is the turning of innocent words from Mary into an actual objection to the empty tomb story.

Yes, except that he tells us it came from Jews. And all of the other things he tells us came from Jews have authoritative backing from sources he would have trusted.

How can the Toledoth help us determine this one way or another, being so late? (Surely you have not neglected my attempt to clear up the previous confusion; I was not trying to introduce the Toledoth as an independent witness to traditions from centuries I to III.)

It is not that they, above all others, would be prone to introduce such a detail; it is that they, above all others, would be prone to turn innocent words on the lips of Mary into an actual alternate scenario that does not involve resurrection.

It is possibly the product of Christian embellishment. But are you really saying it is probable that some Christian turned the gardener into a foil against the resurrection?

There is not a tension between the story being weak and the story spreading widely. There is a tension between the story being weak and you expecting it to have spread widely. It is easy to hold that a weak story in fact gained much currency; it seems inconsistent to hold that all weak stories must necessarily gain much currency.

No, I am saying that we should not expect weak ideas to be embraced by many. Some are, to be sure. But you were using the expectation that this Jewish charge would remain in vogue for centuries as an argument against it ever having surfaced:

Here you argue, point blank, that, if the Jews ever did circulate a story that the disciples stole the body, then we should expect it to become the dominant story.

You said that Jews were unlikely to use the charge that Matthew puts on their lips, since it implied an empty tomb (which you later clarified as a permanently empty tomb):

That is what I meant by you considering it weak (for a Jewish opponent of Christianity).

So this is the tension I am finding in your argument: On the one hand, the Jewish charge according to Matthew has the Jews admitting that the tomb was (permanently) empty, and the Jews would not be liable to admit this. On the other hand, the Jewish charge according to Matthew, if it was ever made at all, should have been the dominant, if not exclusive, theme in the Jewish literature.

So the disciples stealing the body would be a good and natural one for a Jew to spread. Contrast this:

So the disciples stealing the body would be something a Jew would not be liable to hold to, since it admits that the tomb was empty.

Unless you can finesse this somehow, I think you are contradicting yourself.

I gave two reasons for calling it better, and one of those reasons was that it, unlike the Jewish charge in Matthew, would not necessarily imply a permanently empty tomb (the gardener could have come forward, for example, as he does in the Toledoth).

Then what happens to your argument that no Jew would have been liable to have spread the charge as we find it in Matthew? If all a Jew had to do, on your own terms, was add that the body was discovered later, then why would he or she not be liable to charge the disciples with theft?

I get the feeling (and it is just that, since I am having trouble piecing together some of your ideas) that you are saying that the Jews would only come up with a story that avoided admitting that the tomb remained empty, and that once they came up with it then this story would dominate the landscape. But you also feel that a story about the disciples stealing the body does not have to end with an empty tomb. So what is your objection to the Jewish charge in Matthew? How do you know whether or not the Jews behind the Matthean comment added something about the whereabouts of the body after the disciples absconded with it? Surely you would not expect Matthew to show the recovery of the body!

The story as we find it in Matthew virtually demands that the Jews (inside the story) beef up the charge with more information. You and I have basically agreed that the guard sequence could, on its own merits, be answering a potential question in the Marcan plot; could the disciples have stolen the body? But look at what the guards in Matthew are supposed to be admitting! That they were asleep when the theft occurred. Well, if they were asleep, how are they so sure it was the disciples who stole the body? Why not some conscientious Jews, or even a gardener? (This is similar to the question of how anybody ever passed on the contents of the Gethsemane prayers, since the story has everybody else besides Jesus falling asleep.) Has Matthew filled in one possible plot hole only to open up another?

What if the Jews known to Matthew actually did finish up the story of corpse theft with some clue or account as to the whereabouts of the body? In that case, the hole in the Matthean story has a quite plausible cause; Matthew has not told us all of the Jewish charge.

This is quite similar to what has happened in Matthew 12.46-50 = Mark 3.31-35. Earlier in the narrative, at Mark 3.20, Jesus enters into a house (εις οικον). There is no actual Matthean parallel to Mark 3.20-21, in which the family of Jesus think him mad and set out to rein him in (apparently to save the family honor). (It seems to many that Matthew does not want to besmirch the family of Jesus, and so has omitted the episode in which they think him insane.) Matthew has instead inserted at this point in the narrative (in 12.22-23) the healing of a demoniac who was both blind and mute; in doing so he happens to have omitted any mention of Jesus entering a house, and the most recent scene change was a departure from the synagogue, with many following Jesus, in 12.15. This Matthean omission makes one scratch the head later on in the narrative when Matthew 12.46, like Mark 3.31, has the mother and brothers of Jesus standing outside (εξω). That Matthew does not mean outside the circle of disciples or some such thing is confirmed in 13.1, in which we find Jesus coming... out of the house (εξελθων... της οικιας).

In omitting something from Mark, Matthew has left us a little inconsistency to ponder. Perhaps in deleting something from the Jewish charge Matthew has again left us a little inconsistency, namely that the guards are sent out to report things they could not have known, since they were sleeping, and expecting to be believed.

I agree, but there is more to it. I like arguments that get me back into the text. A lot of your arguments actually seem to discourage a close reading of the text; instead, I find myself encouraged to contemplate your set of expectations for what we should or should not find, a set of expectations that I may or may not share. This argument of yours was based on the text, not on any expectations of what the text should or should not have said.

I certainly agree that paradigms can be hard to set aside, even for a moment, but again, I find more to this kind of situation than that. I found a lot of what you wrote about Q very hard to understand, not because of historicism, but because I was mentally comparing every textual and critical decision of yours with Kloppenborg. After all, to speak of Q1, Q2, and Q3 is to invoke Kloppenborg, like it or not. But this is the kicker: I do not even agree with Kloppenborg. So I was approaching your work on Q from an angle I do not even subscribe to. But it was natural, since that was the world you seemed to be invoking.

Well, yes, of course. But that is what I meant. I meant the final comment about the whole charge still being bandied about. Sorry if I was unclear.

So far this is fine. It may or may not have happened that way, but it is fine. But so far we are only talking about those parts that remain inside the storyline. Again, I think we basically agree on those (the guard story and such).

Too much going on here. The romances are not easy to date. But I do not want to get into all that right now.

Oh, not at all. Here is the exchange:

I hardly wish this to be my last word on the synoptic problem, or (more specifically) the problem of whether or not Luke knew Matthew. On the one hand, quite a few of the so-called minor agreements have come to seem quite major to me, implying that Luke knew Matthew; on the other, I cannot always explain what Luke does with Matthew. I have waffled between variations on the two-source hypothesis, variations on the three-source hypothesis, the Farrer hypothesis, and hypotheses involving some sort of Ur-Matthew (not a sayings text like Q; a full-on narrative text of some kind, which may or may not have contained some of the stuff that Luke omits, including the story of the guards).

The problem here is the glut of data. I have not even finished my synoptic project yet, and the data are already overwhelming. There is way to much information to resolve over one issue like the guards.

In our discussion on this thread, however, we have no such problem. You do not have scads of data driving you to a temporary indecision on what motivated Matthew to say that the Jewish charge was still around in his day; you have your expectations on what the Jews would or would not have done.

Doug pointed out that it is not a matter of what was objectionable; of course Matthew did not feel it was objectionable. He went ahead and did it, after all!

Rather, it is a matter of what is customary for him. This is his one editorial comment of this kind in the entire text. Why here?

He just got carried away? See, this is the kind of explanation I work very hard to avoid in my arguments for or against various hypotheses. I can well imagine myself saying that an author got carried away, but that judgment would have to be backed up by harder data of some kind.

I feel this is a fairly gross exaggeration.

Every time. Just like me.

Ben.

mountainman

The "True Word of Celsus" was tendered by Eusebius in the
fourth century, along with the claim that it was written in
the prenicene epoch. The works of Origen, which make
reference to the work of Celsus, were also first reported
and tendered by Eusebius in the fourth century.

People are entitled to two separate postulates.

1) Eusebius tendered historical citations.
2) Eusebius tendered fictional citations.

Mainstream opinion has faith in the first.