The Origins of Christianity

[neilgodfrey]

I am defaulting to whatever we have evidence for.

Do we have evidence that Mark was the first gospel text? I mean both the first of the canonical four and the first overall. The evidence for the former is strictly internal, right? So can you hypothetically imagine, at least, internal evidence pointing to Mark having used gospel sources (and therefore not being the first gospel text)? Note that I am not suggesting an ability to reconstruct those sources: just a recognition that a given passage appears to be based on a source, which brings me back to a previous question: would your methodology, however you may describe it, prompt you to recognize that a given passage is being drawn from a source? (Would it, if Mark were lost to us, prompt you to recognize that Matthew is drawn from a source?) How big a part of your methodological approach is keeping an eye out for possible source issues when it comes to Mark?

If there are good arguments for Mark being later than any of the other canonical gospels I am quite willing to work with those. Very little is set in stone.

But each time I have tried to place Mark later than other gospels (including, at one time, the Gospel of Peter) I find myself returning to the mainstream view. If there are new arguments or fresh ways of looking at older ones, then great. Let's have a look.

I think most of Mark can be identified as being derived from sources, actually. I thought I have explained this, but maybe there is some misunderstanding. But that is clear because we can recognize the sources used.

I can't see any point in postulating a source for a passage if we have no evidence for the existence of that source. What passage(s) are you thinking of here?

As for your hypothetical re Matthew, my position is the same. If we have no evidence for X then we can't validly build a scenario that is based on X. As I have said a few times now, I'm reminded of my maths teacher telling us that if we get a right answer but show no understanding of the correct method to get that answer (in other words our correct answer was a lucky guess or dishonestly arrived at) then we get a big fat zero.

But to take the hypothetical a bit further, if we lost Mark then we would identify in Matthew several of the sources we can see in our Mark but attribute them to Matthew's direct reliance upon them. We'd just be cutting out the middle man and not knowing anything about a form of Christianity with which Matthew appears to us to be in dialogue.

[neilgodfrey]

How about if what Papias refers to, or Justin Martyr's Memoir of the Apostles, or both, were the first texts?

We would be in the same situation we are in now: knowing that there are many unanswered questions about what was going on in the early years.

[Ben C. Smith]

If there are good arguments for Mark being later than any of the other canonical gospels I am quite willing to work with those. Very little is set in stone.

But each time I have tried to place Mark later than other gospels (including, at one time, the Gospel of Peter) I find myself returning to the mainstream view. If there are new arguments or fresh ways of looking at older ones, then great. Let's have a look.

(Again, I believe you and I agree on some form of Marcan priority vis-à-vis the other canonicals; I also agree with you about the gospel of Peter. My mention of existing gospels in my last post was an analogy.)

I can't see any point in postulating a source for a passage if we have no evidence for the existence of that source. What passage(s) are you thinking of here?

A good example is the observation and argument of many scholars that Mark seems to have known a story in which the Last Supper was held on the night before the Passover meal would have been eaten, but turned it into a story in which the Last Supper is the Passover meal. This observation and argument is often part of a broader argument for a pre-Marcan passion narrative, but to my mind, even if the rest of the Marcan passion evinced no such internal tension as the Last Supper does, the internal tension would potentially point to an earlier source.

My concern with this (and with any concrete) example, though, is that the literary critic will enter the argument with a default position already consciously or unconsciously locked into place, and will seek to justify his or her existing position against the new challenge, whereas the methodology I have been arguing for involves not having that default position in the first place (at least not until every single verse has been examined from every single perspective ever published, and then some). I have the same concern, incidentally, about those enamored with oral tradition and lost sources: I fear they will enter the argument already trying to fend off the idea that the evangelist may have made the story up from his own imagination. As I said earlier, I believe that the investigative methods on both sides of the issue are too strong on their own: it is all too easy to dream up reasons why the evangelist must have received something from tradition, or why the evangelist must have been making things up, against the opposite view. These texts are practically unprovenanced, are extremely difficult to date, and seem to deliberately avoid telling us anything of value about their authors or editors. They therefore require a gentle hand and a balancing of arguments.

Christian apologists go into the text with various degrees of Biblical accuracy or even inerrancy already locked into place, and they spend their time warding off challenges. I have noticed that many others, in a move more subtle than apologetics but no less liable to skew results, will do much the same thing with their preconceived views of gospel origins.

As for your hypothetical re Matthew, my position is the same. If we have no evidence for X then we can't validly build a scenario that is based on X. As I have said a few times now, I'm reminded of my maths teacher telling us that if we get a right answer but show no understanding of the correct method to get that answer (in other words our correct answer was a lucky guess or dishonestly arrived at) then we get a big fat zero.

I believe that Matthew, quite apart from the existence of Mark, shows internal signs of editing sources: instances of editorial fatigue and internal inconsistencies and the like. I suspect that we would have practically zero chance of reconstructing our gospel of Mark to any real degree, but I do think that, by keeping our eyes open to all the possibilities, we could probably go so far as to assert that Matthew, in those various spots where we find fatigue and inconsistency, is probably redacting a source. (Arguing that such a source exists is a different thing than trying to reconstruct that source.)

But to take the hypothetical a bit further, if we lost Mark then we would identify in Matthew several of the sources we can see in our Mark but attribute them to Matthew's direct reliance upon them. We'd just be cutting out the middle man and not knowing anything about a form of Christianity with which Matthew appears to us to be in dialogue.

And in doing so we would be ignoring those instances of fatigue or inconsistency, either leaving them completely unexplained or attributing them to Matthew's own authorial schizophrenia; and we would be wrong about Matthew's origins.

[neilgodfrey]

What you cite here is what I consider evidence for the use of sources so I don't see any problem with what I have been saying. When you speak of being "locked in" to defending a position when faced with evidence pointing to something else, then I think we have been misunderstanding one another. My approach is evidence based, I hope. But of course we also need to be open to the way our assumptions steer our interpretations. Editorial fatigue and seams are not "facts", of course, but interpretations. Probabilities and general background knowledge come into play, etc. If an author tells us outright that he is using a source, then we have a prima facie case that he is, but of course we don't on that basis alone know that his statement is factual. Similarly with less overt clues in the document -- each needs to be tested against alternatives, etc.

Can you refresh my memory or alert me to the argument you have in mind that re Mark knowing of an alternative date for the crucifixion?

[Clive]

is every bit as gratuitous as the assumption that Mark is using sources.

Is that an assumption?


Do not other sources an author may use include other written works, and stories and embellishments of those works?

How do we treat the references used by authors themselves?

as it is written in Isaiah the prophet

Maybe some of these "oral traditions" are story telling traditions, for example about Moses, Joshua, Passover .....

[Clive]

angels of the lord .....

[Clive]

So Mark is attempting to solve a problem. He brings together loads of themes, deliberately chooses examples to illustrate the themes, and weaves a tale to explain what on earth happened. Others then expand on this.

It should be possible to track everything back to its origins.

[Clive]

I would argue the dating of Jesus is deliberate to match it to the time in the wilderness, ie 40 years before the fall of Jerusalem.

This new sect saw the fall as the entry into the new Israel, it is a completely post 70 phenomenon. Paul was writing about a christ, and got grafted later together with this movement.

[neilgodfrey]

Howard Clark Kee listed for Mark 11-16 alone 57 quotations of Jewish scriptures and 160 allusions to Jewish scriptures in addition to many possible additional influences of those scriptures. A lot of these are set out at:

http://vridar.org/2008/08/30/gospel-of- ... narrative/

http://vridar.org/2008/08/27/the-little ... iterature/

http://vridar.org/2008/08/30/jewish-scr ... arratives/

[Clive]

My background is steeped in the thinking of apologists, pentecostal ones:-)

They continually seek out references in the "Old Testament" to Jesus, because it backs up the gospel story. If you search sermons and books you will probably find every possible reference it is possible to create to Jesus referenced back to the Hebrew Bible somewhere.

This is what Dake does all the time.

As a matter of interest, who here has seen and used a copy of Dake's Annotated Bible, which is the core Bible of proper pentecostal preachers

Snag is of course, that instead of the old prophesying the new, the new very cleverly may use the old!

I think this is possibly the key reason why I think Jesus of Nazareth did not exist. He is a character in a very well written theological story about god with us.