Regarding my preface yesterday to my recycled FRDB MacDonald review, I claimed Bernard Weiss as a precursor. Meanwhile I have discovered Benjamin Bacon likewise (apart from his vehement Marcan priority) favorable to an expanded Q. For Bacon ridiculed the idea "that [Q+] was...'not a gospel'....not referring to Jesus' death and Resurrection....Per contra...with both B. & P. Weiss, Burkitt and Vernon Bartlet" (115 in Studies in Matthew, 1930) they and Bacon recognized a Passion Narrative in it along with other Triple Tradition and unique Mt and Lk material. "In B. Weiss' QL will be found the most systematic argument...such narrative ...as has filtered downs through Mark and L and thus escapes recognition" (107).
And I like this: "L2...too intensely Jewish to permit its being ascribed to the gentile Luke." That is, most of the material unique to Luke is from a Jew, just as I say (Simon, Bishop of Jerusalem, I say).
http://www.scribd.com/doc/98706688/Stud ... -1860-1932
Edited to add:
Ironically, such Two-Document Hypothesis scholars as Bernhard Weiss and Benjamin Bacon expand their Q to a size we would expect from such Urevangelium proponents as Eichhorn and Marsh. Completing the paradox, the latter two so limited their proto-gospel theories and/or methodologies to just the Triple Tradition, leading inevitably to Two-Document proponents Weisse and Holtzman.
Compounding the irony, none of the critics regarding either of these schools have noticed or commented upon such a paradox.
Ur-Marcan Priority? Or Inner Circle?
Re: Ur-Marcan Priority? Or Inner Circle?
My "Horizontal Synoptic Solution" thread is itself almost too difficult for comment, but petered out on the apparently uninteresting idea of John 21 as a source that was the original ending after Mark 16:1-8. Both of them are diversions from my main thesis of seven written eyewitness records of Jesus that has fortunately been copied over here (in this thread, "Ur-Marcan Priority? Or Inner Circle") Oct. 10, 2013 from Christian Forums by Peter Kirby under his own name, prominently labeled as NOT MY IDEAS. Here's the link to his post (or just back-tack to Page 1) that contained my Gospel Eyewitnesses. On other forums such as Theology Web and FreethoughtandRationalismDiscussionBoard I have received feedback and (mostly) hostility, but I'm still waiting for thoughtful opposition. Does the lack of any mean I'm right? Of course not--no notable academics (except Jeff Gibson) are going to risk their reputations by tackling an unknown, but isn't it time to bell the cat? How long will I continue getting away with my radical thesis without meaningful refutation?
[quote="Peter Kirby"]
THESE ARE OBVIOUSLY NOT MY IDEAS.
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=14
[quote="Peter Kirby"]
THESE ARE OBVIOUSLY NOT MY IDEAS.
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=14
Re: Ur-Marcan Priority? Or Inner Circle?
(Quoting back Peter Kirby quoting me from Christian Forums)
Bored with internet interchanges on my ideas, I resorted to reconnoitering my nearby academic library where I found Richard Bauckham's 2006 book still so hot it got a 2012 review. Christoph Stenschke wrote in Religion & Theology 19(2012) reviewing on page 154 "Bauckham does not specifically state 155 his interpretation of the gospels. However, his well-argued..." 154 "largely persuasive alternative to the current critical consensus... is more plausible than than many of the hypotheses which he questions."
Which feeds right into what Peter kindly copied over here on this thread Oct. 10, 2013, where I do dare to go the extra mile and name the sources and the eyewitness writers.:
Bored with internet interchanges on my ideas, I resorted to reconnoitering my nearby academic library where I found Richard Bauckham's 2006 book still so hot it got a 2012 review. Christoph Stenschke wrote in Religion & Theology 19(2012) reviewing on page 154 "Bauckham does not specifically state 155 his interpretation of the gospels. However, his well-argued..." 154 "largely persuasive alternative to the current critical consensus... is more plausible than than many of the hypotheses which he questions."
Which feeds right into what Peter kindly copied over here on this thread Oct. 10, 2013, where I do dare to go the extra mile and name the sources and the eyewitness writers.:
Peter Kirby wrote:[THESE ARE OBVIOUSLY NOT MY IDEAS.
The standard Christian apologia for the gospels states that they were written by eyewitnesses or (in the cases of Mark and Luke) were written to give someone else’s eyewitness testimony. This works well for Mark, which is usually understood as Peter’s personal testimony, but the others are typically regarded as composite works. For the Gospel of John, the more it is presented as a unitary work by Christians, the less critics regard it as an eyewitness record. When examined more carefully, however, most of the gospel material can be established as from eyewitnesses.
The starting point for a new look might be Richard Bauckham in his 2006 Jesus and the Eyewitnesses and his 2007 The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple. He rejects the Form Criticism of early 20th Century and endeavors to show that all the gospels are based on eyewitness testimony. He’s not saying that any gospel is itself the work of an eyewitness, but that eyewitnesses stand behind each gospel. The most obvious example is Peter as the basis for Mark. The Gospel of John is more complicated. By dropping John as the author and eyewitness behind that gospel, he goes on to show that there are several eyewitnesses consulted by the man who did write John. The same would be more obviously true of the Gospel of Luke. He says he consulted eyewitnesses or eyewitness testimony. As for John, Bauckham explains the gradual emergence of the Beloved Disciple as the author’s way of introducing himself, a non-apostle, who only from John 13 presents himself as the eyewitness who needs no other validation. The Beloved Disciple is the author of John, but we don’t necessarily know who he is.
Bauckham seemed to stop in no-man’s-land. For Evangelicals, and even more for conservative Roman Catholics, establishing any eyewitness(es) behind John is not good enough if it is not John the Apostle. That he did not name the eyewitness(es) for sure is not satisfying to Christians not even so conservative. Trying to establish eyewitnesses and even suggesting their names is anathema to scholars of a more liberal bent. If my opinion matters, it’s not enough to go against the grain of scholarship and suggest eyewitnesses, but without closing the deal and presenting evidence for specific eyewitnesses and which parts each wrote. But to do that Bauckham would have had to cross his Evangelical base by acknowledging sources within the gospels, and he was not prepared to do that.
Re: Ur-Marcan Priority? Or Inner Circle?
I’m finding new evidence that my “lone-wolf” Higher Criticism is nevertheless meaningful and productive. I had heard of Bruce Chilton, and found two of his books side-by-side with trenchant analysis of 20th Century Synoptic Problem writings. He suggests that Sanday and Streeter in the early 20th Century were close to solving the problem, but even before Form Criticism blotted them out they had made some missteps. However, Chilton’s own resolution fails for some of the same reasons.
For starters, Sanday presupposed his study group would be accepting Holtzmann’s 1863 Marcan-Priority. Streeter cited Lachmann favorably, not noticing that he was creating the Lachmann Fallacy in the process. Thus there is no necessary Marcan Priority. That left an opening for the opposite fallacy from Farmer reviving the Griesbach Hypothesis, misconstruing Occam’s Razor (which is valid only on philosophic realization, not on historical facts). (Profiles of a Rabbi. Synoptic Opportunities….1989, p. 27-32.)
Chilton nevertheless accepts Oral Tradition, not insisting that anyone try to solve all the minute textual problems within the Synoptics. This too casually accepts Marcan Priority and avoids deriving an underlying text. Yet Streeter himself had earlier-on recognized that Q was in writing (in Sanday, 1911, Oxford Studies) and that Mark was written to supplement Q. (Bruce Chilton, Judaic Approaches to the Gospels, 1994 p. 5, citing Streeter in Sanday p. 165-66, 176-77, 219). Even in his 1924 The Four Gospels Streeter still held that significant Q material was in Mark. He surprisingly wrote that “The overlapping of Mark and Q is more certain then the existence of Q.” (p. 186) Chilton seems unaware that almost concurrently Streeter was advising that the dilemma of Q should be avoided by simply defining it as the overlap of Matthew and Luke.
In any case most of the rest of the 20th Century was lost in the Form Criticism that was so stultifying that critiques of it were prevented from publication for decades (p. 43) before Thorlief Boman in 1967 in Die Jeus-Uberlieferung…”attacked this model, showing quite convincingly from the orally developed literature of many cultures that we must think rather of longer continuous epics at the point of origin which were woven together over the course of time.” (Synoptic, 106) On the same note Chilton observed, “institutions of higher learning can—and often do—reduce their faculty to… repeating knowledge rather than framing it.”
However, Chilton himself does not avoid all the traps. Along with most current scholars he knows that “Logion” does not translate as just sayings (Schliermacher’s mistake), but includes narrative as well. Chilton takes advantage of this to push his conservative position that Papias was speaking in the 2nd Century already about the completed Gospel of Matthew (Synoptic, p. 15). He cites statistics that show much less use of Q by Mark than by Matthew and Luke, in spite of acknowledging that Q did after all include narrative. He fails to consider that Q may include much of the Triple Tradition, and thus Mark did after all use lots of Q. Chilton concludes in error that this “makes it problematic to assume Q was an actual document.” Actually we just need to broaden our concepts of what this document was. But Chilton was writing two decades before Dennis MacDonald with his Q+, and apparently no scholar can be expected to think outside the box unless he is young with a name to make for himself.
The upshot is that Chilton himself fails to press forward against the Oral Gospel errors nor the assumed Marcan priority. He should have pressed for documentary underpinnings for the Synoptics. But that wasn’t fashionable then, and it certainly would not have been fashionable to hark back almost two centuries for a Grundsc hrift or an Urevangelium. He rightly rejected slovenly Oral Gospel advocates and left Marcan Priority ungrounded, but he did not come up with anything better. Thus I say again, the fine points of the Synoptic Problem require something like my Horizontal Synoptic Solution.
For starters, Sanday presupposed his study group would be accepting Holtzmann’s 1863 Marcan-Priority. Streeter cited Lachmann favorably, not noticing that he was creating the Lachmann Fallacy in the process. Thus there is no necessary Marcan Priority. That left an opening for the opposite fallacy from Farmer reviving the Griesbach Hypothesis, misconstruing Occam’s Razor (which is valid only on philosophic realization, not on historical facts). (Profiles of a Rabbi. Synoptic Opportunities….1989, p. 27-32.)
Chilton nevertheless accepts Oral Tradition, not insisting that anyone try to solve all the minute textual problems within the Synoptics. This too casually accepts Marcan Priority and avoids deriving an underlying text. Yet Streeter himself had earlier-on recognized that Q was in writing (in Sanday, 1911, Oxford Studies) and that Mark was written to supplement Q. (Bruce Chilton, Judaic Approaches to the Gospels, 1994 p. 5, citing Streeter in Sanday p. 165-66, 176-77, 219). Even in his 1924 The Four Gospels Streeter still held that significant Q material was in Mark. He surprisingly wrote that “The overlapping of Mark and Q is more certain then the existence of Q.” (p. 186) Chilton seems unaware that almost concurrently Streeter was advising that the dilemma of Q should be avoided by simply defining it as the overlap of Matthew and Luke.
In any case most of the rest of the 20th Century was lost in the Form Criticism that was so stultifying that critiques of it were prevented from publication for decades (p. 43) before Thorlief Boman in 1967 in Die Jeus-Uberlieferung…”attacked this model, showing quite convincingly from the orally developed literature of many cultures that we must think rather of longer continuous epics at the point of origin which were woven together over the course of time.” (Synoptic, 106) On the same note Chilton observed, “institutions of higher learning can—and often do—reduce their faculty to… repeating knowledge rather than framing it.”
However, Chilton himself does not avoid all the traps. Along with most current scholars he knows that “Logion” does not translate as just sayings (Schliermacher’s mistake), but includes narrative as well. Chilton takes advantage of this to push his conservative position that Papias was speaking in the 2nd Century already about the completed Gospel of Matthew (Synoptic, p. 15). He cites statistics that show much less use of Q by Mark than by Matthew and Luke, in spite of acknowledging that Q did after all include narrative. He fails to consider that Q may include much of the Triple Tradition, and thus Mark did after all use lots of Q. Chilton concludes in error that this “makes it problematic to assume Q was an actual document.” Actually we just need to broaden our concepts of what this document was. But Chilton was writing two decades before Dennis MacDonald with his Q+, and apparently no scholar can be expected to think outside the box unless he is young with a name to make for himself.
The upshot is that Chilton himself fails to press forward against the Oral Gospel errors nor the assumed Marcan priority. He should have pressed for documentary underpinnings for the Synoptics. But that wasn’t fashionable then, and it certainly would not have been fashionable to hark back almost two centuries for a Grundsc hrift or an Urevangelium. He rightly rejected slovenly Oral Gospel advocates and left Marcan Priority ungrounded, but he did not come up with anything better. Thus I say again, the fine points of the Synoptic Problem require something like my Horizontal Synoptic Solution.
Re: Ur-Marcan Priority? Or Inner Circle?
Now that I have turned against the two-source theory (Mark and Q) for a more nuanced Proto-gospel hypothesis, I have edited in changes regarding the Synoptic eyewitnesses in posts #4, 5, and 6 at Christian Forums. My basic Thesis does not change, thus it's no big deal that I can't edit here Peter Kirby's summation at Oct. 10, 2013.
http://www.christianforums.com/t7594923/
http://www.christianforums.com/t7594923/