neilgodfrey wrote: ↑Sat Sep 30, 2017 12:12 am
Ben Witherington has posted
Justin Martyr’s Knowledge of Matthew and Luke ...
The reference is to a month old post by Larry Hurtado:
Justin Martyr and the Gospels ...
Both scholars are proud to declare that they blog in the public interest, bringing scholarly knowledge to the lay community, and both present only one view, their own.
Can anyone tell us who among "some scholars" are making "much recent chatter" declaring the side of the argument that Ben and Larry seem reluctant to leak to the masses?
BW specifically mentions the gospel of Luke and Marcion, so I believe of the scholars he is thinking of would be someone like Jason BeDuhn. BeDuhn, IIRC, proposed that there was a proto-Luke floating around Marcion's circles, and that this proto-Luke may have served as a source for the editor of canonical Luke *as well as* Marcion or whoever edited the versions of Marcion's "gospel" cited by church fathers in their fiery refutations of the heretic (I will leave the letters of Paul out of this particular discussion).
BW's concern is to counter this concept and demonstrate that there is evidence that canonical Luke existed in Justin's time, and Justin was a (near?) contemporary of Marcion, meaning that canonical Luke was available to Marcion. Thusly, the church fathers would be absolutely correct to believe that Marcion "corrupted" the canonical gospel of Luke. Also, it is meet & right to assume that the canonical gospel of Luke would have preceded their times (early-middle 2nd century?) by several decades in order for it to have garnered a reputation such that Marcion would choose it as his primary source. Conveniently <phwew!>, that would put its final composition somewhere in the late 1st century, which is where most middle and conservative US Evangelicals like BW have no difficulty dating it.
LH is also of the same religious sphere as Ben, although perhaps more towards the middle, yet definitely Evangelical in orientation (he is, as most know, active on the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog, which is actually informative much of the time when I stroll by). LW's blog article was dealing with the issue of whether Justin actually had direct knowledge of canonical Luke, or whether the "memoirs of the apostles known as gospels" that he was familiar with was not in fact a gospel "harmony" of some kind. That opinion goes back to the late 19th century, I think! I think the issue at hand is/was that many of the passages Justin cites, that would appear to reflect canonical Luke, are conflated with readings found in canonical Matthew (and maybe Mark).
The suggestions that had been offered as to the sources for this "harmony" have ranged from (speaking off the top of my head) the harmony was based on the three Synoptics (and possibly also John, as was the Diatesseron) or was something based on apostolic "memoirs" ("proto gospels" or other things that have not survived to our day). Also conveniently <whew!> LH is convinced that he and those of his ilk are correct to see these citations as actually conflations of the canonical gospels of Luke & Matthew, thus irrefutably proving they existed exactly as we know them in their canonical form. EXACTLY!
I think that (Mr.) Hope Hogg discusses the possible sources for Tatian's
Diatesseron in his translation and commentary on the Arabic
Diatesseron (not necessarily the same as Tatian's), which can be found in the supplemental volume (10 in print, 9th in electronic) of the Ante Nicene Fathers series (1896), although IIRC he thinks that Tatian edited his
Diatesseron using 4 gospel-sources, but may himself have based some of this on a pre-existing gospel harmony, maybe based on the synoptic gospels, which could be the same as that used by Justin.
Mr., Stephan Hüller has expounded - at length! - on later thought about proto-gospels and gospel harmonies. Unfortunately the volume of his thought is so great that finding the goodies in there (scholar's names, etc.) is a lot like finding needles in a haystack. Ben Smith, however, may have some easier to digest suggestions. I have posted on this board what the term "memoirs" might have referred to in Greco-Roman times.
For both BW & LH, the bias is heavily toward the view held in US Evangelical circles that all the synoptic gospels (and probably also John) came into their canonical form sometime in the 1st century.
I am receptive to BeDuhn's POV that there was a proto-Luke that served as basis for both Marcion's "Gospel" (or at least his
Antitheses commentary on the Judaic ideas that had crept in and corrupted the "apostolic" Christian message) and canonical Luke. However, my own POV is that Marcion probably did have access to the canonical gospel of Luke and the canonical letters of Paul, but only wrote a commentay (his
Antitheses) lamenting that the pure "apostolic" gospel and letters, which he believed were encapsulated in Paul and Luke, had been corrupted by Judaic ideas and which should be restored. I am not convinced he actually published his own editions of Luke and the letters of Paul to churches (and maybe Philemon) as alleged by Tertullian and Irenaeus, etc., although Marcion's disciples may have produced some.
DCH