Earliest Jesus stratum?

[Stone]

I offer it here merely for discussion: ... Pappias apparently describes GMatthew as "loggia". According to some scholars but not all, "loggia" could well mean "sayings". IF -- IF -- it does mean that, then that's very odd. GMatthew, as we know it, does not just consist of sayings; it's a narrative gospel, not a sayings one. The only sayings one we have is GThomas. Or is it?

Is it possible that the earliest sayings-gospel in fact came from the writer of GMatthew (whoever that was), that this early sayings gospel preceded the GMatthew that has survived, and that that would account for the GMatthew markers that Gentile claims to perceive in both the GMatthew and GLuke versions of the Q sayings? It may be that the ur-GMatthew gospel I am hypothesizing was just a disordered and random but reasonably accurate assemblage of all the oral sayings that had been floating around. It may be that it was THE go-to source for these early sayings. It may be that IT was this hypothetical Q gospel already suggested by 20th-century scholars. It may even have been in Aramaic(?). Then, when it came time for the writer of GMatthew to write the narrative gospel we know today, he possibly adopted a very high-handed approach to the sayings he had himself assembled, ignored the Aramaic flavoring in many of the originals, and produced a very tweaked version of both these sayings and the Jesus bio in his finished narrative gospel. When the writer of GLuke comes along, he then goes back to the original Aramaic assemblage and bypasses much of what the writer of GMatthew had done in his narrative gospel.

That provisional scenario for what happened at least makes some attempt to account for all the possibly contradictory patterns we see here.

Now you perhaps see why I cannot view any discussion of this entire issue as at all worthwhile unless a considerable variety of sharply contrasted viewpoints are reflected in such a discussion. Hopefully, you also see why I have no interest whatsoever in hearing from either subscribers to the standard pre-Goodacre model, who argue strenuously in favor of the challenge to Gentile's findings, or mythicists who argue strenuously in favor of Gentile's findings. Both groups are merely grinding their own axe and not approaching this in the needed impartial way, at all.

Candidly,

Stone

It's also possible that end-products such as GMatthew are the end-result of several versions within one community or via more than one community.

This is why I wish someone would address Gentile's analysis in depth and stop screwing around. His stylometrics tests plainly reveal the habits of one. specific. author. Not a community.

Duh.

It needs a specialist in Koine Greek to tell us if his analysis is on the level or not. I do not read Koine Greek. If there's any point to having this thread at all, it would be to involve specialists in Koine Greek. Otherwise, this thread is a waste of everyone's time.

And speaking of wasting people's time, is there a reason why you choose to separate your questions into umpteen different posts. Is that some new tactic that the mythicist community has handed down?

Stone

[Peter Kirby]

And speaking of wasting people's time, is there a reason why you choose to separate your questions into umpteen different posts. Is that some new tactic that the mythicist community has handed down?

One thing's clear: It isn't brain surgery to see that any mythicist is going to automatically side with Gentile here against those challenging him! This is because mythicists will naturally be delighted to think that all the Q sayings originate solely with GMatthew, since it accords with their lock-step claim that all Gospels are fictional spin-offs from GMark.

Not all mythicists. It is feasible one or more of the final gospels reflect the thinking or writings of a few different communities.

And you're really so insulated you don't know that that is ROUTINELY the take on these different gospels by modern academia already! You know, I've read some of your postings. I know you're a mythicist, and a prevailing habit of mythicists is that they always think they've invented the wheel when they come up with something obvious like Gospels Reflect the Writings of Different Communities. Well, golly zooks.

Stone

MrMacSon didn't claim to invent anything in that post.

More apparent than perceived 'prevailing habit of' some large group of people who share one common trait are the prevailing habits of observed individuals.

For example, even in the short time he's been posting on the forum, Stone has an observed tendency of a 'prevailing habit' of being harsh to the point of being unreasonably uncharitable when encountering anything that sets off his alarms for things and people that he "knows" are "mythicist." He also has a 'prevailing habit' of hurling gratuitous abuse at the same things and people. He also has a 'prevailing habit' of introducing the bugbear of "mythicists" and "mythicism" even in discussions where there is no real and necessary connection between that and the subject at hand.

Just some observations. Anyone at this forum, including Stone himself, can see that they are true.

I'm not sure everyone is really going to be able to have much time on the ball in discussion with Stone--discussion centered on the actual subjects of discussion--so long as habits such as these keep dominating his speech. It's fairly distracting for someone to take broad swipes at you just because they don't like the category that they consider you to be in.

Stone, please be aware that I am putting this all in terms that are the least "hostile" as I can, while still relating the truth of this matter. Your own words--containing, as they do, in several posts, 'more heat than light'--have invited this to be discussed, instead of what could have been something more illuminating. If you truly do want to discuss history and similar topics, you'll be better-served with different rhetoric.

[MrMacSon]

Enter Dave Gentile. For him, they all originate with GMatthew. He derives that conclusion from the claim that he has run stylometric tests on both the GMatthew and the GLuke sets of the sayings. He claims to have detected distinctive stylometric habits in the distinctive Koine Greek of GMatthew well outside of the Q passages in GMatthew, habits of which there are also traces in GMatthew's Q versions as well. So? Habits of a writer might also seep into passages he lifts wholesale from other sources. That can happen. What's the big deal?

The big deal is what he then finds in GLuke. In GLuke, the apparently simplified and more scattered presentations of Q material found there still carry, nevertheless, traces of the same stylometric habits found in GMatthew. Even more to the point, those stylometric GMatthew markers duly found in Q passages in GLuke are not found in GLuke's surrounding material at all. This absence of such markers in the bulk of GLuke suggests to Gentile that those stylometric markers are exclusive to GMatthew and that thus the Q material, whether in GMatthew or in GLuke, must stem ultimately from GMatthew and not anything earlier.

The question is, Are his findings trustworthy or is he cooking the books? His whole apparatus can be found here --

http://www.davegentile.com/synoptics/main.html

... it appears to reflect pretty thorough work ...

... I wish someone would address Gentile's analysis in depth and stop screwing around. His stylometrics tests plainly reveal the habits of one. specific. author. Not a community.

Where do you think the Matthew, Luke, and other communities might have been based?

It needs a specialist in Koine Greek to tell us if his analysis is on the level or not.

Yep. So much of that literature does.

And speaking of wasting people's time, is there a reason why you choose to separate your questions into umpteen different posts. Is that some new tactic that the mythicist community has handed down?

lol. You posted a lot of engaging material. It was worth teasing it into different posts: I find stuff gets overlooked or addressed more glibly in bog or long posts.

[Aleph One]

Only these two groups would arrive at these two respective conclusions against their erstwhile interest. That is why they are worth hearing from. Others, including mythicists, would obviously not be. That's why only the two groups A) and B) are worth our time here -- in my view.

Like others said your post is interesting. But it's obvious you don't have very much respect for the integrity of religious scholars and investigators. IMHO I'd recommend focusing more on the substance, or lack there of, of actual arguments and evidence, instead of the individual presenting them. A sound argument stands regardless of whoever's saying it, or whatever other views they may hold. Just some friendly advice. Unfortunately I'm no koine greek expert and can't offer anything useful to answering your question, though, but good luck!

[neilgodfrey]

Now you perhaps see why I cannot view any discussion of this entire issue as at all worthwhile unless a considerable variety of sharply contrasted viewpoints are reflected in such a discussion. Hopefully, you also see why I have no interest whatsoever in hearing from either subscribers to the standard pre-Goodacre model who argue strenuously in favor of the challenge to Gentile's findings or mythicists who argue strenuously in favor of Gentile's findings. Both groups are merely grinding their own axe and not approaching this in the needed impartial way, at all.

Candidly,

Stone

Oh my god. You'd have no place in academia where bias is acknowledged and where academic integrity is maintained by that very acknowledgement. Some scholars and even humble lay people do, you know, follow the evidence and come to conclusions against their own personal preferences and pet-theories. I myself have been obliged to back-track on core political and religious arguments I had clung to for years when confronted with contrary evidence and demonstration of flawed arguments.

But the person I generally avoid all serious discussion with is the black and white thinker who categorizes persons in either-or camps and psychoanalyzes not only their mindsets but even their scholarly integrity on the basis of simplistic thinking. And also the one who insists that only persons who hold certain paradigms that they will never shift from are worthy of engagement..... Seriously?

(The leading popularizers of mythicism since late last century are actually staunch defenders of the Q hypothesis, by the way.)

[Peter Kirby]

Some scholars and even humble lay people do, you know, follow the evidence and come to conclusions against their own personal preferences and pet-theories.

(The leading popularizers of mythicism since late last century are actually staunch defenders of the Q hypothesis, by the way.)

This is exactly what came to my mind as well. The two most famous 'mythicists' in the late 20th century were, perhaps, G. A. Wells and Earl Doherty.

(1) G. A. Wells continued to maintain his position on the Pauline epistles, but he came to believe in the likely historicity of some historical Jesus on the basis of a belief in Q. This fully contradicts the point being assumed: not only does Wells receive the idea of Q, but he uses it to reverse his position on the existence of a historical Jesus.

(2) Earl Doherty does only half of that: he receives the idea of Q, but he accommodates it to his position on the non-existence of a historical Jesus.

Not exactly a large sample size, but it does illustrate the problem with assuming that anyone's opinions are set in stone on any one matter (let alone that every other opinion is going to be pre-determined just because someone has one very particular opinion). There are indeed people who attempt to apportion their belief to the evidence as they understand it and who are willing to re-evaluate their understanding of the evidence on the basis of additional information or insight.

[Stone]

Some scholars and even humble lay people do, you know, follow the evidence and come to conclusions against their own personal preferences and pet-theories.

(The leading popularizers of mythicism since late last century are actually staunch defenders of the Q hypothesis, by the way.)

This is exactly what came to my mind as well. The two most famous 'mythicists' in the late 20th century were, perhaps, G. A. Wells and Earl Doherty.

(1) G. A. Wells continued to maintain his position on the Pauline epistles, but he came to believe in the likely historicity of some historical Jesus on the basis of a belief in Q. This fully contradicts the point being assumed: not only does Wells receive the idea of Q, but he uses it to reverse his position on the existence of a historical Jesus.

(2) Earl Doherty does only half of that: he receives the idea of Q, but he accommodates it to his position on the non-existence of a historical Jesus.

Not exactly a large sample size, but it does illustrate the problem with assuming that anyone's opinions are set in stone on any one matter (let alone that every other opinion is going to be pre-determined just because someone has one very particular opinion). There are indeed people who attempt to apportion their belief to the evidence as they understand it and who are willing to re-evaluate their understanding of the evidence on the basis of additional information or insight.

You have a case of 1. Wells dropped his mythicism after studying the Q material. Doherty is the only one who retained his mythicism and still received the idea of Q.

And BTW (and I know this is not your fault), where is the wide variety of perspectives hoped for in this discussion? Aside from Bernard, everyone here appears to be a mythicist and as ignorant of Koine Greek as I am.

Stone

[Stone]

* The extent to which GLuke's Q material inherits from a separate source or from some redaction of GMatthew.

I also have a detailed answer to that, with some remarks dealing with Aramaic:
http://historical-jesus.info/q.html

Cordially, Bernard

Thank you. This is a painstaking analysis. I'm disappointed that no one else has addressed it. But perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, given the restricted range of apparent interests reflected in this thread so far.

Your section 7 -- "Did "Q" get extracted from Matthew's gospel?" -- is especially useful and has direct bearing on Gentile's analysis. I'd say the most pertinent point you make -- with respect to Gentile -- is your reminder, in the concluding paragraph of #7, that certain phrases in Q do indeed bleed over into non-Q material in GLuke, and those few are not found in the rest of GMatthew. "[M]ammon" and "Love your enemies" are repeated elsewhere only in GLuke and not in GMatthew. This is not to say that other Q terms are not duly repeated elsewhere in GMatthew only. There are indeed such terms/phrases. But the point you make is that such patterns are not unique to GMatthew at all. The presence of such repeated terms/phrases elsewhere is also in GLuke. This blunts some of Gentile's arguments, which strongly imply that only GMatthew has such bleed-through. Wrong! So well done. My compliments.

I'm still hoping that someone may have some more arguments that effectively torpedo my current hunch that the lost Q was really an ur-Matthew that was lost and only contained sayings. Your argument that GLuke has just as much Q bleed-through as GMatthew goes a long way to putting paid to that argument. But it's still conceivable that even if you're right (in your earlier sections) and Q was indeed first set down between GMark and GMatthew rather than first, that first Q may still have been an ur-Matthew.

One possibly awkward component of my hunch is the notion that when GMatthew heavily edited the sayings that he had first set down years earlier, by incorporating them into the extant narrative-GMatthew, he somehow abandoned all the Aramaic markers in the original because his editing had become so heavy-handed the second time around that all of that disappeared. But now that GLuke too has some bleed-through (and thank you!), it becomes less necessary to suppose that only the writer of GMatthew has any kind of unique proprietary or transcriptional relationship to the earliest form of the written-down sayings. They once again become (as they were before Goodacre) a totally separate source, most likely ndependent of either GMatthew or GLuke.

This helps place the remarks by Gentile's challengers in that Yahoo thread I linked to in the OP in a stronger light. The possibly more alert Aramaic antennae claimed there in GLuke complements your own points made roughly midway through your presentation regarding the seemingly more high-handed editing in GMatthew. So we now have two different analyses, both of which argue for more faithful curation of Q in GLuke, based on two different but complementary trains of reasoning.

Cheers,

Stone

[andrewcriddle]

It is a long time since I looked at Dave Gentile's work. However IMS I thought it could be explained if Luke and Matthew independently used Mark and Q but our present text of Luke has been secondarily assimilated to Matthew.

Andrew Criddle

[andrewbos]

The assimilation of Matthew into Luke could have happened by the redactor of the 'gospel of the Lord' that Marcion used.
In the three-source hypothesis the idea is that the author of Luke knew Matthew, but if Luke was redacted I would be interested to know at which redaction level(s) Matthew was assimilated.
The gospel of Marcion did contain portions of the double tradition that are narrative rather than sapiential which may already have come from Matthew rather than from Q (these aren't more 'primitive' in Luke than they are in Matthew either).

https://sites.google.com/site/inglisonm ... -luke/lk-7