The Gospels may still tell us something profound about Jesus. But “profound” and “signed eyewitness affidavit” are not the same thing. If your faith collapses when Matthew stops being Matthew, perhaps your faith was resting less on Jesus than on four names added to the covers later. God can survive textual criticism. Biblical inerrancy might need a moment.
Exactly. As I said in the piece that will be published later today, intellectual honesty requires looking at history as it exists, not as one wishes it were.
The prologue of Luke is similar to the prologue of Acts, which is why the two are linked. It is likely that an early version of Luke, which started with the nativity story of Jesus, was edited by Marcion when he pitched his idea of the Bible to the church in Rome. So the received text was modified after that, adding the nativity of John the Baptist and the prologue. Since Acts isn't mentioned until around 200 CE, and shows signs of extensive edits, the prologue of Luke was likely the last edit of Luke, around 200 CE.
You’re absolutely spot on that the matching prologues and shared dedication to Theophilus strongly link Luke and Acts as a two-part work.
Just as a small historical tweak regarding Marcion: most textual evidence suggests Marcion excised the birth stories (and the Old Testament connections) from an existing version of Luke to fit his theological views, rather than editing a version that already had Jesus' nativity. While the "Marcionite priority" hypothesis has seen some modern discussion, the prevailing scholarly consensus is still that Luke's infancy stories and prologues were part of the early core text prior to Marcion's work in Rome (~140 CE).
The reason I believe the Jesus nativity predates the John nativity is because the Jesus nativity begins "In those days...", which is the standard beginning of a story. Starting Luke in chapter 2 gives a coherent story.
FOLLOW UP TO PREVIOUS COMMENT. In that same article Part One on Scribes, I also drill down on the documented practice of the Roman Empire in their occupied territories (ie., Judea) of: damnatio memoriae (censor the memory).
Iquote extensively from this SOURCE: "Censorship and Book-Burning in Imperial Rome and Egypt" by Susan Rahyab, Master of Arts in History, Hunter College The City University of New York May 15, 2020].
These highly trained secular scribes had their own party in the Sanhedrin, distinct from the Pharisees and Sadducees. And they infiltrated every level of cultural life looking for treason. Their Roman name was "aegiles". If you read this full article by Rayhab, it's not difficult to see why our Lord Christ Jesus addressed them conjunctively in Matt. 23 as "... scribes AND Pharisees..." 🙏🔥
All is well, I read pretty much every article. I just don't comment unless I have something useful to say. Doesn't mean I don't enjoy the content. Probably won't be able to get around to any writing myself until this fall.
Seems we will never know the true authorship of the 4 Gospels, the absolute foundation of Christian worship and reverence. Written in sophisticated, polished Greek and not in the native language of the culture from where it originated, questions inevitably arise over who wrote what, and the mystery will continue to be analyzed and dissected for generations to come.
But it seems to hardly matter to the faithful. So much that compels the historian to investigate and unravel the controversies to set the record straight, can absolutely bore and perhaps even anger the believer. They want the Gospel message, and probably don’t give much thought to who wrote it all down. Their loss, if blind faith is all they require. But is it blind faith, or maybe it is simply a deep devotion to their beloved religion, despite the lack of knowing how it all got put to print.
So while Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John have a catchy flow to their titles, maybe it’s not all that important to the story that lies within their pages.
Most Christians in the West haven't read the Bible cover to cover. The Old Testament alone runs over 50 hours as an audiobook. A typical novel takes 8-9 hours, so that's six novels back to back before you even reach Matthew.
A small nitpick: if Matthew used 600 out of 661 Marcan verses, it does not follow that 90% of his account comes from Mark, since Matthew is significantly longer than Mark. The general point stands, though (if we assume Marcan priority, as most scholars do)
Thanks for the catch. You're right that the percentages run in opposite directions, and I'd conflated them.
Corrected version:
Matthew the tax collector, one of the Twelve, present for the ministry, sat down and copied nine-tenths of Mark into his own book, and that borrowed material accounts for more than half of everything he wrote. The man he was copying from wasn't an eyewitness either, a secretary of Peter's working up other people's stories a generation after the events. Then he reached the passage about his own calling, took that over from Mark along with the rest, and changed the name in it to his own. The tradition asks you to believe an eyewitness preferred hearsay to memory.
Yes. Excellent article. 🙏🔥 This may be of interest. I published Part One of 4 in a series today on these secularscribes' practices. Much more is to follow in parts 2, 3 and 4. Coming soon. Midway in, this first part drills down on the CopticGospel of Thomas found in 1947 at Nag Hammadi, and challenges the vveery modern "umbrella" pejorative labels applied by so-called 21st century scholars to "Thomas's" 114 sayings as being: "gnostic", "pseudepigrapha" and/or "apocrypha".
In your table you have a column heading "Sources Used." That really should be "Possible Sources Used" or "Hypothetical Sources Used" as none of those list can be verified, e.g. Johannine tradition. When people refer to a tradition in means what they want it to say and not what was actually said.
This is an overly simplistic article. It relies on countless assertions without providing evidence for them.
For example; “Mark mentions the Temple being destroyed so it must have been written after 70 AD”-even if the Christians are wrong and Jesus didn’t know the future, that kind of prediction could certainly have been made without divine knowledge given how much the Jews chafed under Roman rule.
Asserting that Matthew must have been written after Mark and ignoring the theories that claim otherwise.
Forgetting that Luke mentions himself in the narrative in Acts.
But why am I wasting my time arguing against something that was clearly written by an AI chatbot?
Mark is best read from the understanding that is was a rapidly written accounting derived from witnesses.
The author or authors realized some very notable had happened and no one was writing it down. As this piece notes literacy at this level was rare for a backwater Roman province of little consequence. What we have is amazing in its simplicity.
It reads as if it's a series of interviews. The person is telling the tale to the author verbatim. Thus no long explanations or any reasons given. Just the accounting.
Even the ending bears this mark....sorry..... It just stops with what happened. Not explanation.
So tell me about what happen that morning?
Well you know Like I work at the cemetary. I was getting to work early that day because of all the excitement and to make sure no animals had gotten into the new tombs since they hadn't been prepared or sealed.
It was sun up, I heard noises, then voices. There was light in The tomb. Women. We're in the tomb already? I headed that way and they came running out screaming yelling all sorts of nonsense. I assumed they were fanatics. Vandals who had set the body on fire. But by the time I got to the opening the tomb was empty. No fire. No torches or lanterns. Empty. Like no 'body' had been there. Very strange. But you see strange things in a cemetary all the time you know.
The Gospels may still tell us something profound about Jesus. But “profound” and “signed eyewitness affidavit” are not the same thing. If your faith collapses when Matthew stops being Matthew, perhaps your faith was resting less on Jesus than on four names added to the covers later. God can survive textual criticism. Biblical inerrancy might need a moment.
Exactly. As I said in the piece that will be published later today, intellectual honesty requires looking at history as it exists, not as one wishes it were.
The prologue of Luke is similar to the prologue of Acts, which is why the two are linked. It is likely that an early version of Luke, which started with the nativity story of Jesus, was edited by Marcion when he pitched his idea of the Bible to the church in Rome. So the received text was modified after that, adding the nativity of John the Baptist and the prologue. Since Acts isn't mentioned until around 200 CE, and shows signs of extensive edits, the prologue of Luke was likely the last edit of Luke, around 200 CE.
You’re absolutely spot on that the matching prologues and shared dedication to Theophilus strongly link Luke and Acts as a two-part work.
Just as a small historical tweak regarding Marcion: most textual evidence suggests Marcion excised the birth stories (and the Old Testament connections) from an existing version of Luke to fit his theological views, rather than editing a version that already had Jesus' nativity. While the "Marcionite priority" hypothesis has seen some modern discussion, the prevailing scholarly consensus is still that Luke's infancy stories and prologues were part of the early core text prior to Marcion's work in Rome (~140 CE).
The reason I believe the Jesus nativity predates the John nativity is because the Jesus nativity begins "In those days...", which is the standard beginning of a story. Starting Luke in chapter 2 gives a coherent story.
FOLLOW UP TO PREVIOUS COMMENT. In that same article Part One on Scribes, I also drill down on the documented practice of the Roman Empire in their occupied territories (ie., Judea) of: damnatio memoriae (censor the memory).
Iquote extensively from this SOURCE: "Censorship and Book-Burning in Imperial Rome and Egypt" by Susan Rahyab, Master of Arts in History, Hunter College The City University of New York May 15, 2020].
These highly trained secular scribes had their own party in the Sanhedrin, distinct from the Pharisees and Sadducees. And they infiltrated every level of cultural life looking for treason. Their Roman name was "aegiles". If you read this full article by Rayhab, it's not difficult to see why our Lord Christ Jesus addressed them conjunctively in Matt. 23 as "... scribes AND Pharisees..." 🙏🔥
Rayhab's article:
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1629&context=hc_sas_etds
Thank you for the addition.
Perhaps Papias was referring to the lost Hebrew Gospel of Matthew or the Gospel of the Hebrews.
I am extremely interested in what was used to compose Mark. But it seems we don't have much of any indication in the historical record.
I’m planning to write about the prevailing hypotheses on the sources used for the gospels, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.
By the way, I don’t hear from you as often as I used to, and I hope everything is going well.
All is well, I read pretty much every article. I just don't comment unless I have something useful to say. Doesn't mean I don't enjoy the content. Probably won't be able to get around to any writing myself until this fall.
Seems we will never know the true authorship of the 4 Gospels, the absolute foundation of Christian worship and reverence. Written in sophisticated, polished Greek and not in the native language of the culture from where it originated, questions inevitably arise over who wrote what, and the mystery will continue to be analyzed and dissected for generations to come.
But it seems to hardly matter to the faithful. So much that compels the historian to investigate and unravel the controversies to set the record straight, can absolutely bore and perhaps even anger the believer. They want the Gospel message, and probably don’t give much thought to who wrote it all down. Their loss, if blind faith is all they require. But is it blind faith, or maybe it is simply a deep devotion to their beloved religion, despite the lack of knowing how it all got put to print.
So while Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John have a catchy flow to their titles, maybe it’s not all that important to the story that lies within their pages.
Most Christians in the West haven't read the Bible cover to cover. The Old Testament alone runs over 50 hours as an audiobook. A typical novel takes 8-9 hours, so that's six novels back to back before you even reach Matthew.
Killer reads with time like that! No wonder I refrain.
A small nitpick: if Matthew used 600 out of 661 Marcan verses, it does not follow that 90% of his account comes from Mark, since Matthew is significantly longer than Mark. The general point stands, though (if we assume Marcan priority, as most scholars do)
Thanks for the catch. You're right that the percentages run in opposite directions, and I'd conflated them.
Corrected version:
Matthew the tax collector, one of the Twelve, present for the ministry, sat down and copied nine-tenths of Mark into his own book, and that borrowed material accounts for more than half of everything he wrote. The man he was copying from wasn't an eyewitness either, a secretary of Peter's working up other people's stories a generation after the events. Then he reached the passage about his own calling, took that over from Mark along with the rest, and changed the name in it to his own. The tradition asks you to believe an eyewitness preferred hearsay to memory.
Yes. Excellent article. 🙏🔥 This may be of interest. I published Part One of 4 in a series today on these secularscribes' practices. Much more is to follow in parts 2, 3 and 4. Coming soon. Midway in, this first part drills down on the CopticGospel of Thomas found in 1947 at Nag Hammadi, and challenges the vveery modern "umbrella" pejorative labels applied by so-called 21st century scholars to "Thomas's" 114 sayings as being: "gnostic", "pseudepigrapha" and/or "apocrypha".
https://substack.com/@jt913/note/c-307581928?r=19ia12
Thanks, Jeff.
In your table you have a column heading "Sources Used." That really should be "Possible Sources Used" or "Hypothetical Sources Used" as none of those list can be verified, e.g. Johannine tradition. When people refer to a tradition in means what they want it to say and not what was actually said.
You’re absolutely right. Thanks a lot for pointing that out. Much appreciated.
I’ve corrected that column’s name to 'Primary Sources According to the Prevailing Hypothesis'. Is this something we can both live with?
As usual, you went above and beyond. Still a big fan! Keep up the good work!
This is an overly simplistic article. It relies on countless assertions without providing evidence for them.
For example; “Mark mentions the Temple being destroyed so it must have been written after 70 AD”-even if the Christians are wrong and Jesus didn’t know the future, that kind of prediction could certainly have been made without divine knowledge given how much the Jews chafed under Roman rule.
Asserting that Matthew must have been written after Mark and ignoring the theories that claim otherwise.
Forgetting that Luke mentions himself in the narrative in Acts.
But why am I wasting my time arguing against something that was clearly written by an AI chatbot?
Mark is best read from the understanding that is was a rapidly written accounting derived from witnesses.
The author or authors realized some very notable had happened and no one was writing it down. As this piece notes literacy at this level was rare for a backwater Roman province of little consequence. What we have is amazing in its simplicity.
It reads as if it's a series of interviews. The person is telling the tale to the author verbatim. Thus no long explanations or any reasons given. Just the accounting.
Even the ending bears this mark....sorry..... It just stops with what happened. Not explanation.
So tell me about what happen that morning?
Well you know Like I work at the cemetary. I was getting to work early that day because of all the excitement and to make sure no animals had gotten into the new tombs since they hadn't been prepared or sealed.
It was sun up, I heard noises, then voices. There was light in The tomb. Women. We're in the tomb already? I headed that way and they came running out screaming yelling all sorts of nonsense. I assumed they were fanatics. Vandals who had set the body on fire. But by the time I got to the opening the tomb was empty. No fire. No torches or lanterns. Empty. Like no 'body' had been there. Very strange. But you see strange things in a cemetary all the time you know.