vid

Can we be sure Aristides here means a written gospel, not gospel as teaching? I am not sure about words translated as "preach" and "read" here, whether in original they support gospel-as-teaching or written-gospel interpretation better.

Also, would you say given description is closer to Mark, or Luke, or not decidable?

aa5874

Well, based on Justin Martyr's "Dialogue with Trypho" there was a written source called "Gospels" or "Memoirs of the Apostles" in the middle of the 2nd century.

This is Trypho in Justin Martyr's "Dialogue with Trypho" 10 See http://earlychristianwritings.com

It would appear that the "Gospels" were not attributed to any specific author/authors up to the writting of Justin Martyr or Aristides whichever is later.

Kapyong

Gday,

Well, "read" seems to refer to a written work, and we do know of other authors who refer to written but un-named Gospels.

Of interest is the comment "preached a short time among them" - I checked this with the syriac forum, and they thought it did indeed have the meaning : "which has only been preached for a short time"
http://www.freeratio.org/thearchives...ad.php?t=60833

Which means the Gospel was still fairly new during Aristides time (138-161.)

K.

vid

Thanks... Since I found this site, it all got just too complicated...

So we have a Syriac version which appears to be dated 138-161 (contrary to tradition and Greek/Armenian versions), and appears to say written gospel is something new. Then, we have a quite different Greek version which appears to be dated 117-138 and doesn't say written gospel is a new thing.

With regard to "gospel" passage, I see much better motivation for someone late writing prose century to edit out reference to gospels as something new, than for someone late to add such reference into text.

Does Armenian version have the "short time" passage?

spin

The Syriac is dated by its opening:
The first mention of "Hadrian" could give the reader the wrong idea, but the second clarifies the dating, not to the emperor Hadrian, but to Titus Aelius Hadrianus Antoninus Augustus Pius. So, not 117-138 period, but 138-161. The Greek we have doesn't provide a date as far as I can see.

And here's a slightly different translation of the Syriac:

spin

EarlDoherty

The "Gospel" passages in the Apology of Aristides, as found in the two versions surviving (Syriac and Greek) are substantially different, do not appear in the same position in the text, and are not integrated with the rest of the apology and its treatment of Christianity. In both cases, those Gospel elements are isolated within their respective paragraphs and do not gel with the rest of the document.

My conclusion is that they are interpolated, and that the original document to Antoninus Pius, probably written around 140-5, did not contain anything about an historical Jesus. In fact, the remainder of the text, in regard to its description of Christians and their faith, bears strong resemblance to those other 2nd century apologists which lack an historical Jesus and regard the Son as a heavenly entity.

An Appendix in my new book Jesus: Neither God Nor Man (or via: amazon.co.uk) is devoted to a detailed analysis of the Apology of Aristides, demonstrating that we need to be highly suspicious of the traditional acceptance of this work as having knowledge of the Gospel figure.

Earl Doherty

Roger Pearse

The state of the text is somewhat confusing, I agree. Let me offer some suggestions.

Firstly, the Syriac is the direct transmission of the text as translated into Syriac. This has to be used as the primary text available to us.

The Greek text is extracted from the 6th century novel of Barlaam and Ioasaph by a modern editor. We know that extracts from Aristides were used by the author of Barlaam, because we can see this from comparison with the Syriac. But since Barlaam is not a copy of Aristides, but merely a text making use of long extracts from it, we must consider it an indirect transmission. We must also be aware that the author has likely added or expanded material which Aristides left brief, for the purposes of his own text. I note a long creed at one point, which might be an instance of this.

That said, because the indirect transmission is in the original language, while the Syriac is probably somewhat expanded or paraphrased, in some cases we may be able to see expansion in the Syriac from the comparison with the Greek.

So quite a bit of judgement and an education in both languages and the process whereby Greek literature went into Syriac is required in reading the text.

I think that it would be fairly imprudent to start calling this or that bit of the text an interpolation without being rather careful. The texts on both sides seems to have been interpolated. But the problem is the temptation to ascribe easily any portions of the text which are inconvenient to us or our theories to interpolation. Because claiming interpolation is so easy, we must resist the tendency to do it. We are not, after all, obliged to form opinions on the subject.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

vid

What does the Armenian version say about gospel? Does anyone have a translation? Which version (greek/syriac/neither) does it support in this quote?

avi

Thanks, Roger.

I don't feel any obligation to form an opinion, but I do feel a keen interest to understand whether or not the evidence points to an "interpolation", i.e. forgery....

Does the evidence suggest forgery for the extant Syriac text, or, contrarily, is the evidence unconvincing either for or against "interpolation"?

I find this explanation confusing.

How can we employ a novel, a work of fiction, to evaluate a document viewed by Christians as representing the word of God? It would appear to me, that the Greek version is entirely bogus.

Roger, I know you mean well, and probably everyone else on the forum can understand you, but I am hopelessly lost here.

Could you perhaps provide a more recent illustration from our own era, i.e. within the past few hundred years, where one takes a source from the Semitic language family, representing itself, a translation of an original document written in an IndoEuropean language, and then transposes this translation back to some other IndoEuropean language, with added, acknowledged fictional elaboration, hoping to rediscover, in this process of retranslation, the original meaning, or the original form, or the original vocabulary, or the original grammar of the long since lost original document?

avi

Roger Pearse

I'm glad it was helpful. I wanted to try to head people off from going in directions where they would just confuse themselves, if possible.

Evidence of interpolation in anything is usually really difficult to find. It tends to come down to judgement, which you may call "speculation" if you like. This was why I was suggesting that we might want to avoid rushing to judgement. To assess it, we'd need to have a feel for how Syriac documents generally reflect Greek originals. I think they can be quite loose, up to the 5th century.

I am sorry! But I also find this response very confusing, so we're probably at cross-purposes. Are we perhaps mixing up two different issues here? and introducing theology also? Let's step through this more slowly.

What we are trying to do first, surely, is establish what Aristides wrote? We are NOT concerned whether we agree with him at this stage, or whether he was correct in his opinions; only with finding out what he said.

Normally we would have no real problem with this; we just look at the text that has reached us. But in this case we have only a translation of his work. He wrote originally in Greek; but the Greek text has not reached us.

But ... now we have the translation into Syriac, we see that the author of a novel happened to quote the original Greek, word-for-word. Discovery! Yippee! Except... how accurately did he quote it? How much of it did he quote? Which bits did he "tweak" to fit his story better? We don't know the answers to these things.

It doesn't matter what kind of book the person quoting Aristides was writing. It's just fortunate that -- for some unknown reason -- he chose to quote Aristides.

Does that make sense? Shout if it doesn't.

Erb. Not off hand!

Let me try again to elucidate the sequence.

1. A Greek (=A) writes an interesting text, ca. 120.
2. An oriental (=B) reads a copy of A's book, ca. 400, and translates it into Syriac. The two languages are quite different, so the result is a bit of a paraphrase at points.
3. Another Greek (C) reads the Greek text, ca. 600.
4. C writes a novel. He decides to quote long chunks of A's book, because he's on drugs at the time and trying to save brain-cells.
5. In 1204 AD the last copy of A's book perishes.
6. In 1900 someone discovers a copy of B's book in the library at Mt. Sinai.
7. Soon afterwards, someone is reading the copy of B's book and realises that C had quoted chunks of the now lost text of A.

So ... how do we get the text of A?

Well, we can't. Our next best chance is B, because it is a copy of A, although in translation.

The quotes of A in C are interesting, but C is not a copy of A; it's a work in which the author happened to quote a lot of A, without saying so.