itsdatruth

I want to cite some more proof for authorship for Matthew to you, as I brushed it over earlier using what the Bible said alone. I have found that both Eusebius and Papias agreed that Matthew and Mark wrote (surprise!) Matthew and Mark. And I never, EVER have found dissenters…at least not until the “modern� era-that is, after the 1600’s. Try going to http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/ for more info-in their extensive list, many ancient writings, both valued and trashed, can be accessed.

Vorkosigan

For future reference, please cite the posts of others by pressing the REPLY button. It is often difficult to see what you are referring to.

Itsdatruth, the author of www.earlychristianwritings, Peter Kirby, is member of this forum and wrote the sticky at the top of this forum. Everyone here is familiar with ECW.

I think you should pick up one of the good introductory texts, by Raymond Brown, Bart Ehrman, or Udo Schnelle, and carefully read the section on authorship. There you will find that it is universal among modern scholars that the names attached to the Gospels were added later. Only conservative religious scholars disagree. The reasons for this scholarly judgment are sound.

Mark obviously did not get his information from Peter, and the Papias cite is generally thought to refer to another document, a collection of sayings (most likely). Mark's gospel is built out of the OT, relying heavily on the Elish-Elijah cycle in Kings as its model, and then building the Passion out of various OT proof texts.

Actually, they undoubtedly did not, for serious scholarship is unanimous that Luke and Matt copied Mark, but the ancients were unaware of this. By contrast, numerous ancient authors mention the problems with fraud and forgery in the early Church, and they were often quite shrewd in their assessments. But generally, today, scholars possess a much better critical apparatus, including access to a greater number of texts, much better methodologies, and much greater interscholarly communication.

There is some debate as to just whom, how many, and which traditions of the Apostles (there are numerous ones) are correct.

The fact that the early Christians believed something does not make it true. All 24 of the Heaven's Gate cult committed suicide in hope of getting to a flying saucer. Do you think that was a true belief? Many today in India and abroad believe the Indian guru Sai Baba can raise the dead and has other miraculous powers. Sai fortunately does not ask people to die for him, but I have no doubt that there are many who would. Yet all objective accounts agree Sai Baba is a parlor magician, though inventive and talented.

I do not wish to get into a debate over martyrdom in early Christianity, but there is little solid evidence that anyone was martyred for Christianity until long after the first century and everyone was dead.

The Concordia reference is very nice, but one book cannot tell you much. If you want to understand these documents, you need to read a wide variety of scholarly works, develop some comparative perspectives, and become familiar with the contents of the texts themselves (not what your pastor or mother or some book tells you).

Vorkosigan

Vinnie

"""""Mark obviously did not get his information from Peter, and the Papias cite is generally thought to refer to another document, a collection of sayings (most likely). """"""""""

Which Papias cite? One probably does refer (in my estimation) to a version of our extant GMark though there is no certainty. The "Matthew "attribution is even more less certain.

But you are correct, Mark did not write Mark and everyone knows it. For those who want to know why scholarship is so settled on this issue, begin here:

http://www.after-hourz.net/ri/mark.html

Don't forget at least two later authors used Mark verbatim and extensively at times and this fact (granted the nature of Marcan material) means they were not eyewitnesses either.

Vinnie

itsdatruth

I believe that Papias cited the combination of oral traditions that he had known of over the years. i. e. People who knew the apostle's disciples. There is good reason to believe that 11/12 of the apostles were martred, as was Stephan, the very first. There is absolutly no suggestion in any historical writing or the time or later that these killings did not occur. The evidence is unanimous.

Now, this is directed more toward dado.
Please note that today I am leaving to investigate the possibilities of attending some of the fine universities in the Midwest. I will be able to respond to your concerns on Saturday at latest.

However, I have a few concerns of my own right now.

1. The use of literary techniques Luke’s “they� becoming “we.� Along with the “we,� I am also referring to “the disciple that Jesus loved� and the general avoidance of using ones’ one name while writing a canonical gospel. I just finished World Lit. class, known to be one of the hardest at my school. We covered many texts, including those of the time period, and this technique was nowhere mentioned, nor found an any writing of that time period or culture. Please cite whatever ancient text you have that uses these literary techniques in fiction. Another problem is that the concept of a novel did not exist at the time. Acts is clearly not a play, a poem, or an epic. That leaves a history. I might note that 98% of the place names in the Book of Acts have been found. It was clearly never meant to be fictional.

2. I notice you accuse the 500 witnesses of being added in later. However, every history of the Christian Church that I found suggested that the Pauline Epistles were the first books to become widely copied. Churches, even house churches, quickly recognized the value of these works and read them along with the Septuagint for church services. Today, there are approximately 5,000 ancient copies, complete or not, of the NT. None that I have ever heard of, including the most valued codices, from either the Byzantine majority or the Alexandrian textual traditions, ever left this out. If somebody added it later, the copies made before it was added would not have the 500 and there would be a textual discrepancy. I have never found such discrepancy. I have a suberb reason to believe that it doesn’t exist and Paul dictated the 500 to his copier (Paul had bad eyesight, and dictated nearly everything he wrote.)

Magdlyn

I guess you meant click the "quote" button, not the "reply" button?



Some newbies probably aren't. It bears repeating.

Peter Kirby
Peter Kirby
Peter Kirby

Magdlyn

I agree with that except for #2. Comparing one text to another contradictory one, then tying onself in knots to make them fit together is not solving anything. It is merely apologizing via congnitive dissonance.

As "authority?"

dado

yep, that's a real problem. once you let in one set of extra-scriptural documents as "evidence" there is no justifiable way to stop all the other extra-scriptural documents from being let in as well.

Vorkosigan

Alas, it is not. Several scholars have presented powerful arguments that the martyrdom of Stephen is entirely fictional. See, for example, Eisenman's massively-researched James the Brother of Jesus, in which he takes Stephen's death to be an overwrite of James' death. No solid evidence exists for the martyrdom of the other apostles. Even their existence is murky.

No, many Roman/Hellenic period fictions are known, essentially novels. Indeed, the Gospel story bears a close resemblence to some of them, for apparently dead people whose tombs were empty was a common theme in ancient fiction. See, for example, the ancient novel by Chariton called Chaereas and Callirhoe, where the heroine is apparently killed by her husband, who goes and sits by her tomb and astonishingly, finds it empty. The heroine later confesses that she had "died and come to life again." The account itself contains numerous close parallels to the Gospels, especially John 20:1-10. Later in the novel the husband is crucified, but gets a reprieve as he is mounting the cross. Similarly, Iamblichus' Babylonian Story contains an empty tomb. In Xenophon's Ephesian Tale, another early novel, the heroine is poisoned and descends into deathlike torpor. She awakens in the tomb and is carried off by pirates (another empty tomb motif). Meanwhile her beloved goes through a series of misadventures and winds up on -- you guessed it -- a cross, from which he is miraculously saved by a giant wind that blows the cross down. In Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon, the heroine is twice apparently disemboweled and has to fake her own death by lying in a coffin, from which she rises. Similar motifs are found in many ancient novels.

Vorkosigan

itsdatruth

Thank you for your explanations... but that still doesn't prove that the Gospels and Acts are fiction. Do your "fictions" quote numerous other works known to be truthful? Jesus and others quoted prophets' writings that were and are known to be real.

Magdlyn

Jesus quoted Dionysus and Paul quoted Plato, you mean?

You can't mean to convince us that Jesus "quoting" Hebrew Scripture as though he took it literally is going to convince us that the Greek Scriptures are to bet taken literally? Jesus made mistakes when quoting scripture anyway.

Paul took the Hebrew Scriptures to be allegory.