Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Vorkosigan · 03-15-2003, 04:26 AM

Thanks Vinnie. I'll be sure to bring this all up, since I shamelessly stole what you put here.

To clarify, all I meant in that quote is that we don't start with any assumptions about authorship. We look at the record, see that early on the gospel is mentioned with any attribution, and then later it appears with a name. That's all. W just study the record as it appears, incomplete and arbitrary -- in the sense that survival is often the result of happy accident.

Anyway, Holding is reading this thread, so this will help him prepare.

Vorkosigan

Vinnie · 03-15-2003, 09:29 AM

I forgot, add one more to my arguments for anonymous authorship or rather, contra traditional authorship:

3) Author detectable by internal means. Ask him if he thinks John wrote John and Matthew wrote Matthew? And if Mark is an accurate non-chronological narration of Peter's preaching?

You mentioned that yourself in there which Holding wanted put off for a while. Then comes GJohn vs the Synoptics:
http://www.acfaith.com/gjohn.html

"This lack of material in GJohn is all the more stranger if a person was to accept more conservative views on Gospel authorship. If both Matthew and John represent eyewitness accounts and Mark is basically Peter�s transcribed account, we have a very serious difficulty here! Left with such contradictory �eyewitness accounts� we might as well all become HJ agnostics! It is very strange that John would leave out virtually all references to what Matthew and Peter considered to be the central and driving factor of Jesus� ministry! "

As I cited Sanders & Davies yet another time towards the end:

Quote:

In all of those passages we see that the subject of Jesus� discourses is mainly himself. In the synoptics, however, he speaks mainly of the kingdom of God. There are other noted differences between them and E.P. Sanders and Margaret Davies (Studying Synoptics p. 5) summarize them well: �In the synoptics there are short, pithy statements, aphorisms and parables which focus not on Jesus� person but on the kingdom of God. The synoptics� Jesus must ask his disciples who they think he is (Mark 8:27 and parr.), and it is clear that he has not identified himself explicitly. He refuses to give a sign to those who ask (Mark 8:11-13). When he is on trial, according to Matthew and Luke, he will not even give a straightforward answer about who he is when asked by the high priest. The Jesus of the Gospel of John, however, talks in long monologues, and the subject is usually himself: his relationship to God on the one hand and to the disciples on the other. He offers �signs� in abundance (see, for example, John 2.11), and he says explicitly that �I and the Father are one� (John 10.30).

Vinnie

Family Man · 03-15-2003, 09:46 AM

Dammit, Vork is making mincemeat out of Holding and you don't provide a link to it! What's wrong with you people?

Vinnie · 03-15-2003, 10:16 AM

Here is some more material:

In 180 A.D. Irenaeus mentions 4 Gospels and names. What is disputed is whether or not he possessed good information

Quote:

ibid pp below:

If we move back just thirty years we meet a much more uncertain use of the gospels. Justin Martyr, who wrote in approximately 150, quoted sayings attributed to Jesus from what he called �the memoirs of the Apostles�. He did not, however, quote the sayings precisely as we have them, and diverse readings among our Gospels not infrequently appear together in Justin. In the following quotation from Justin, we underline the words which agree with Matthew, capitalize the words which agree with Luke and print in bold the words which agree with neither. The differences and similarities may not always be seen if one compares English translations of the passages.. We shall show disagreements and agreements which are seen clearly only in the original Greek:

Do NOT FEAR THOSE [who] kill you and AFTER THESE THINGS are not able TO DO ANYTHING, but FEAR THE ONE who AFTER KILLING [you] is able TO CAST both soul and body INTO GEHENNA
(Justin, Apology I.19.7; Matt. 10.28; Luke 12.4-5)

To help the reader follow this way of marking agreements and disagreements, we list them separately:

Justin --------------------- Agrees With
fear those ------------------ Matt and Luke
kill you ---------------------- neither
after these things ------------ Luke
are not able ------------------ Matthew
to do anything --------------- Luke
but --------------------------- Matthew
fear ------------------------- Matthew and Luke
the one after killing --------- Luke
is able ---------------------------- Matthew
to cast -------------------------- Luke
both soul and body ------------- Matthew
into ------------------------------ Luke
Gehenna ------------------------- Matthew and Luke

"If Justin had our Gospels before him, he was very careful to alternate words in copying from Matthew and Luke, taking 'after these things' from Luke, 'are are not able' from Matthew, and so on. There are two more likely explanations. One is that he quoted fro memory and naturally conflated two similar passages. The other is that he had not our gospels but a collection of sayings which itself depended on them: that he used a prepared harmony."

In any case we note: (1) that Justin did not name the authors of the gospels; (2) that he was not concerned to keep them distinct, quoting precisely from one or the other. He seems not to have attached importance to �the Gospel according to Matthew� and �the Gospel according to Luke� as written documents, but rather simply to the sayings of Jesus which he received from Christian tradition. Christian tradition by then included our gospels (as we shall see), but Justin seems not to have cared for each document as a canonical text. It is noteworthy that when quoting the sayings of Jesus Justin spoke of the �Memoirs�, not of �the Scripture�, which was his name for the Old Testament.

Justin, who was active in Rome, was not far distant from Irenaeus in either time or space. Irenaeus represents Roman Christianity as well, rather than that of Alexandria or Antioch. It seems that, in Rome, the gospels grew in importance between Justin and irenaeus. This is usually explained as being partly due to the influence of Marcion, who was a contemporary of Justin. Marcion was a dualist who rejected the Old Testament and denied the goodness of the created order. He was eventually condemned as a heretic. Marcion accepted only one gospel, that of Luke, and then only a truncated form of it. In response to Marcion, mainline Christians seem to have begun to emphasize that four gospels should be accepted and should be given equal status to that of the Old Testament. This development is reflected in Irenaeus.

Sanders & Davies, pp. 7-8)

If we move back a few years earlier than Justin we come to Papias writing about 130-140(?) ad.

Quote:

And the presbyter said this. Mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately whatsoever he remembered. It was not, however, in exact order that he related the sayings or deeds of Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied Him. But afterwards, as I said, he accompanied Peter, who accommodated his instructions to the necessities [of his hearers], but with no intention of giving a regular narrative of the Lord's sayings. Wherefore Mark made no mistake in thus writing some things as he remembered them. For of one thing he took especial care, not to omit anything he had heard, and not to put anything fictitious into the statements. [This is what is related by Papias regarding Mark; but with regard to Matthew he has made the following statements]: Matthew put together the oracles [of the Lord] in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best he could.

Holding might try to press this issue, I'm not sure. Some scholars entirely dismiss the Papias reference. I'll come back to this later though.

Quote:

ibid p. 9-10

Before trying to answer the first question (did he have in mind our Mark and our Matthew?), it will be useful to put Papias' statement in the context of earlier quotations of the sayings of Jesus are like those of Justin: anonymous and often conflated (combining two of the gospels)). The most quoted gospel was Matthew, though it was quoted without being named. Ignatius of Antioch, writing to the church of at Smyrnas about 110, used the phrase 'fulfill all righteousness' in discussing Jesus' baptism (Smyrnaeans ch. 1). This phrase comes from Matthew's account (matt. 3:15), but the source is not named. Similarly the Didache (also c. 110) quoted the Lord's prayer according to Matthew's version rather than Luke's, but the prayer is attributed to 'the lord in the Gospel', and the author does not say, 'as it is written in the gospel according to Matthew' (Didache 8:1-3).

But as I�ve quoted Crossan (HJ p 222- 223 on baptism) appeal to Koester bofore o nthis board:

Quote:

Our Lord . . . is truly of the family of David according to the flesh, Son of God according to the will and power of God, truly born of a virgin, baptized by John that all righteousness might be fulfilled by him . . . (Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 1:1)
For our God, Jesus the Christ, was carried in the womb by Mary according to God's plan-of the seed of David and of the holy Spirit-who was born and baptized that by his suffering he might purify the water. (Ignatius, To the Ephesians 18:2)

Those texts give two divergent explanations for Jesus' acceptance of John's baptism. The one in the first text has to be dependent on Matthew since it uses "righteousness," a redactional emphasis concerning John in both Matthew 3:14-15 and 21:32. But since, as Helmut Koester has argued, there are no other equally clear indications that Ignatius had read Matthew, it is best to consider this an indirect dependency on which the creed used by Ignatius was already influenced by Matthew's apologetic gloss (1957:59).

But to go back to Sanders and Davies:

Quote:

The most typical way of quoting the gospel material, however, is seen in this example from Clement of Rome (c. 90):

Above all, remember the words of the Lord Jesus which he uttered while teaching forbearance and patience, �Be merciful, that you may receive mercy. Forgive, that forgiveness may be given you; as you do, so it shall be done to you; as you give, so shall it be given to you; as you judge, so shall you be judged; as you show kindness, so will kindness be shown to you; the measure you give will be the measure you get� (1 Clement 13.1-2).

This combines material now found in matt. 5.7; 6.14[//Mark 11.25]; 6.15; 7.1,2,12; Luke 6.31,36-38, and it is assigned simply to the Lord Jesus.

Since in the late first century and for more than a half of the second century the gospel material was used without naming the author, several scholars have doubted that these early Christian writers had the gospels as we know them, proposing that they had instead �free traditions�, oral tradition, sayings collections, or even the sources of our gospels. It is our own view that the Didache (though probably not 1 Clement) used the Gospel of Matthew directly, though we shall not argue the case here. What is noteworthy is that the material was not assigned to an author, but was used as if it were anonymous�or, put another way, as if it went directly back to Jesus without the intervention of an author or editor with a distinct point of view. The compiler of the Didache thought only of �the gospel�, not �the gospel according to x� in contradistinction to �the gospel according to y and z�. later Christians would study and compare the gospels and remark on their distinctive traits and material. Early writers, however, did not do this.

In the period of 90-150, though our gospels probably had been written, the authors� names were either not known or were regarded as irrelevant. In this period Papias stand alone. Before him (Didache, Ignatius and Clement, among others), and immediately after him (Justin Martyr), the gospels were quoted without naming the authors. There is no sign of a continuing tradition assigning the gospels to Matthew, Mark and Luke. It is at least slightly dubious that Papias got it right when other Christians seem not even to have been interested in the question.

I�ll post some stuff on Papias later. And after all this we can look at the contents of the Gospels themselves and see if they look like they come from eyewitnesses or older traditions or whether some of them does.

Vinnie

Vinnie · 03-15-2003, 10:20 AM

Family man:

http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/sho...5&pagenumber=1

Vinnie

Family Man · 03-15-2003, 01:44 PM

Thanks

Vinnie · 03-15-2003, 09:12 PM

Quote:

Anyway, Holding is reading this thread, so this will help him prepare.

How do you know he is reading this? Not that I doubt that.

Holding has already written on a lot of this stuff:

http://www.tektonics.org/tekton_02_02_02.html

In there he has 4 subpages with talk on each Gospels and why he accepts traditional authorship and earlier dating.

If you are going to continue the conversation with him you might want to familiarize yourself with some of that material.

Vinnie

Vorkosigan · 03-16-2003, 01:32 AM

I've read all that, thanks. But I have to bow out for a couple of days, duty calls. <sigh> All the work I put off last week has now come due.

Michael

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03-15-2003, 04:26 AM	#21
Vorkosigan Contributor Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Barrayar Posts: 11,866	Thanks Vinnie. I'll be sure to bring this all up, since I shamelessly stole what you put here. To clarify, all I meant in that quote is that we don't start with any assumptions about authorship. We look at the record, see that early on the gospel is mentioned with any attribution, and then later it appears with a name. That's all. W just study the record as it appears, incomplete and arbitrary -- in the sense that survival is often the result of happy accident. Anyway, Holding is reading this thread, so this will help him prepare. Vorkosigan

03-15-2003, 09:46 AM	#23
Family Man Veteran Member Join Date: Jun 2000 Location: Superior, CO USA Posts: 1,553	Dammit, Vork is making mincemeat out of Holding and you don't provide a link to it! What's wrong with you people?

03-15-2003, 10:20 AM	#25
Vinnie Veteran Member Join Date: Apr 2001 Location: Waterbury, Ct, Usa Posts: 6,523	Family man: http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/sho...5&pagenumber=1 Vinnie

03-15-2003, 01:44 PM	#26
Family Man Veteran Member Join Date: Jun 2000 Location: Superior, CO USA Posts: 1,553	Thanks

03-16-2003, 01:32 AM	#28
Vorkosigan Contributor Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Barrayar Posts: 11,866	I've read all that, thanks. But I have to bow out for a couple of days, duty calls. <sigh> All the work I put off last week has now come due. Michael

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