The evident primacy of the Gospel of John as the first of them all

[mlinssen]

Regardless of the contextual similarities between John and Thomas, I find it incredibly amazing that John still is considered "late" in stead of early.

1. Look at Tertullian's Adversus Marcionem, do the bean counting of "names dropped" and this is the result:

Matthew: 9/76 = 12%
Mark: 6/76 = 8%
Luke: 42/76 = 55%
John: 19/76 = 25%

That evidently excludes John the Baptist, who gets 58 mentions. This is Tertullian raging against Marcion, and he mentions John more often than Mark and Matthew combined?

2. Then look at the bulk of early MSS found, and John overwhelms. And while Irenaeus kicks off with the canonical order when he is the very first Patristic ever to name gospels (and gets the number and names right straight away!), he later once slips into John, Luke, Matthew, Mark in Adv. haer. III 11,8.
I have taken the first 137 MSS from wikipedia, and - rather ruthlessly - assigned each MS a span of one single century. Some had 400-600, others 225-275, and so on - and I have rounded them all down to one single century, for instance changing 400-600 to 400-500, 225-275 to 200-300, and so on.
Why? To get a decent overview, no matter how incredibly crude the method is. Here is the result for the first 137 MSS totaling 183 gospels / letters that range from 100-200 to 700-800:

Acts 40
John 31
Matthew 27
Romans 14
Heb 13
Luke 12
Revelation 9
1 Cor 8
James 5
Eph 3
Mark 3
1 Peter 2
1 Thessalonians; 2 Thessalonians 2
2 Cor 2
Gal 2
Philemon 2
Philippians 2
1 John 1
1 Peter; 2 Peter 1
1 Thessalonians 1
1 Timothy 1
Jude 1
Titus 1

40 Acts, 31 John, 27 Matthew - that is the top 3 and number 4 are the teens of Romans (14), Hebrews (13) and Luke (12), after which we get into the single digits for counts.
Everybody knows that such a picture is impossibly skewed, and when we drop that last century alone, 700-800, we get 1 less Romans yet 24 (!) less Acts, and the new top 3 is:

John 31
Matthew 27
Acts 16

Just look at that, John beats them all; John, that anomalous outlier of the gospels, a poetic and spiritual text that even I wouldn't include in the canon even thouhg (or perhaps because) I really love the core of John.
John only got included in the NT because he couldn't be excluded, it is as simple as that. Go on then, please, make a business case for including John in the NT - I simply can't

And when we observe until 300 CE we have 19 John and 12 Matthew, and the century after that adds 3 John and 7 Matthew

Yet 1 picture says more than millions of words could:

EarliestChristianManuscripts.png (13.19 KiB) Viewed 1190 times

Thomas, John, Marcion: that is the Chrestian tradition.
And it gets countered by Mark, after which Matthew redacts Marcion into Luke while writing his own on the side
And it whill take until 500 CE before Christianity starts gaining the upper hand, and it will require the Inquisition to get rid of any and all Chrestianity for good, so every record of it is wiped from the history books

[lclapshaw]

You mention a "core" John; by any chance do you have a link to this? I would really like to see it.

Lane

[mlinssen]

You mention a "core" John; by any chance do you have a link to this? I would really like to see it.

Lane

Well I have David James Audlin's, but that is not what I meant.
What I meant was the fact that he breathes the atmosphere of Thomas rather than that of the canonicals: his text is deep, poetic, spiritual, free from the simple and mundane Mattheanisms, the platitudes, the moral messages that get rammed down the reader's throat ad nauseam.
Read him in Greek and he is just astonishingly deep: let's take Berean literal as usual

ἦν (Was) δὲ (now) ὁ (the) χιτὼν (tunic) ἄραφος (seamless), ἐκ (from) τῶν (the) ἄνωθεν (top) ὑφαντὸς (woven) δι’ (throughout) ὅλου (all).

ἄραφος doesn't exist as a word, it may come from the verb ῥάπτω: un-patched, and naturally that refers to logion 47 where a new garment receives an old patch - which Marcion turned around in order to make explicit that good new religion most definitely want fit for Judaics

τῶν is plural genitive, of-the(PL)

ἄνωθεν ἄνω

I.adv. of place from above, from on high, Hdt., Trag., etc.; ὕδατος ἄνωθεν γενομένου, i. e. rain, Thuc.: from the upper country, from inland, id=Thuc.
2.= ἄνω, above, on high, Trag.; οἱ ἄν. the living, opp. to οἱ κάτω, Aesch.:—c. gen., Hdt.
II.of Time, from the beginning, Plat., Dem.:— by descent, Theocr.; τὰ ἄν. first principles, Plat.
2.over again, anew, NTest

And again we see the excruciating banality of the NT blending everything into a bland

ὅλος doesn't mean 'all', it means 'whole'

ὑφαίνω

I. [select] to weave, ἱστὸν ὑφαίνειν to weave a web, Hom.; ἱμάτιον Plat., etc.:—absol. to weave, ply the loom, Hdt.:—Mid., ἱμάτιον ὑφαίνεσθαι to weave oneself a cloak, Plat.
II. [select] to contrive, plan, invent, Lat. texere, δόλον ὑφαίνειν Il.; μῆτιν ὑφ. Od.
III. [select] generally, to create, construct, Pind

Gently woven, contrived, created, and the connotation of a round web or wheel is beautiful

ἦν (Was) δὲ (however) ὁ (the) χιτὼν (tunic) ἄραφος (unpatched), ἐκ (from) τῶν (those-of-the) ἄνωθεν (above) ὑφαντὸς (woven) δι’ (through) ὅλου (whole)

An unpatched χιτὼν, the garment worn next the skin, through and through whole, woven by those above: pristine, perfect, untainted, is this skin, this shell, and naturally that reflects on IS, who is (one with) the father

That is John, and he is beautiful, and he really didn't deserve to get smeared by being included in the NT, redacted into the last position

[mlinssen]

John
Father 123 (59%)
God 86 (41%)

21,202 words
0,986%

Mark
Father 6 (11%)
God 50 (89%)

16,702 words
0,335%

Luke
Father 23 (16%)
God 124 (84%)

28,059 words
0,524%

Matthew
Father 45 (47%)
God 50 (53%

25,745 words
0,369%

All case-sensitive, so "proper Father" counts

[MrMacSon]

A friend sent me this from a fb post somewhere

Screenshot 2023-01-13 192627.png (1.48 MiB) Viewed 932 times

[mlinssen]

A friend sent me this from a fb post somewhere


Screenshot 2023-01-13 192627.png

That's interesting. The issue that I have with Pauline priority - period - is that I find it very hard to imagine that a letter from HQ is sent to various branch offices without any story every having been written about anything.
You cannot have a movement of anything, larger than a few hundred people, where there is nothing written down - that simply is impossible, nothing works that way

Where the hell does the story come from that the letters were written prior to any gospel? It is insane

[lsayre]

Luke 1:1 is proof that Luke came after many previous efforts, and was intended as a correction of the order of things written prior (if correcting nothing else). What Gospel was called out for having been out of order?

[mlinssen]

Luke 1:1 is proof that Luke came after many previous efforts, and was intended as a correction of the order of things written prior (if correcting nothing else). What Gospel was called out for having been out of order?

Luke 1:1 - and every single bit of text ever written anywhere by anyone - is proof of nothing but the author's intent to convey a message.
And that message is that Luke will provide the better testimony because he allegedly was informed by

αὐτόπτης ὄψομαι, fut. of ὁράω

seeing oneself, an eyewitness, Hdt

and

ὑπηρέτης 1 ἐρέτης

I.properly an under-rower, under-seaman, v. ὑπηρεσία.
II.generally an underling, servant, attendant, assistant, Lat. apparitor, Hdt., attic:—c. gen. objecti, ὑπ. ἔργου a helper in a work, Xen.
2.at Athens,
a.the servant who attended each man-at-arms (ὁπλίτης) to carry his baggage and shield, Thuc.
b.ὁ τῶν ἕνδεκα ὑπ. the assistant of the Eleven, employed in executions, Plat

Naturally, Luke doesn't go into specifics about anything

[MrMacSon]

A friend sent me this from a fb post somewhere

Screenshot 2023-01-13 192627.png (1.48 MiB) Viewed 881 times

That's interesting. The issue that I have with Pauline priority - period - is that I find it very hard to imagine that a letter from HQ is sent to various branch offices without any story every having been written about anything.
You cannot have a movement of anything, larger than a few hundred people, where there is nothing written down - that simply is impossible, nothing works that way

Where the hell does the story come from that the letters were written prior to any gospel? It is insane

I thought it was interesting in what it said about the order of the gospels ie. John, Luke, Matthew, then Mark

But none of it is logical eg. saying G.John was written after the Pauline epistles because G.John presents a sophisticated understanding of Jesus, his teachings and message, because those things were not present in the Pauline epistles.

Yet, saying that the Pauline epistles dealing with the establishment of early Christian communities could be seen as providing a foundation upon which the later writings expanded upon, essentially means that the later writings can only be based on either the letters, which is implausible; or whatever happened in the communities.

And, as you point out, we have no evidence of a gospel in the Pauline communities. Nor do we have an info about what happened in them (or if they ever existed)

So, with tongue-in-cheek, we can conclude that either

• wrt Christian history, AI will be apologetic; or
• Jesus is based on Paul

And notice that it says Luke-Acts expands on John and the Pauline epistles. And that the implication of the paragraph about Matthew is that it's essentially all a literary creation.

The last sentence says this, too.

[Paul the Uncertain]

That's interesting. The issue that I have with Pauline priority - period - is that I find it very hard to imagine that a letter from HQ is sent to various branch offices without any story every having been written about anything.
You cannot have a movement of anything, larger than a few hundred people, where there is nothing written down - that simply is impossible, nothing works that way It is insane

Why ought we to think that the Christian movement had more than a few hundred "members" by say 50 CE? (After which, on the consensus timeline, there is something written down - Paul's letters.)

Plus, of course, the Jewish scriptures were long since written down, and were still being consulted while Paul was preaching according to his letters.

Although I'm unsure of its relevance, Paul's letter to the Romans isn't from HQ to a branch office. Nor according to Galatians would Paul's office be HQ for the Judean assemblies, and his claim to any enduring leadership in Antioch is unclear - maybe a condominium with the Jerusalem pillars, maybe nothing at all. What, if anything, was going on in Damascus is similarly unclear. And while Acts is dubious history, it surely is pro-Paul, and he plays no role at all in the conversion of Simon and his followers (an already somewhat organized group?) in Samaria.