vocesanticae wrote: ↑Fri May 26, 2023 7:59 am
Secret Alias wrote: ↑Tue May 23, 2023 7:15 am
We are compelled to believe in the existence of Mark, Matthew and Luke because we have manuscripts. Their existence is therefore demonstrable. We do not have manuscripts of Q.
When mythicists use similar logic against the existence of Jesus they are met with ridicule.
Mark, Matthew, Luke and John were (together) the officially sanctioned "gospel" (singular) of the Church. Four as one is an absurd proposition. It is absurd to suggest that anyone NATURALLY understood four texts to be one gospel. But more than that we have testimony from antiquity that the Marcionites thought these texts were forgeries (De Recta in Deum Fide). They are forgeries. The Marcionites were right. So what are we left with? A choice between an undemonstrable source text and demonstrable forgeries. Bad choices. But it is an even worse choice to mistake canonical Mark for a source text for all gospels. It is only a source text for the forgeries of Matthew and Luke.
I don't get why we just can't admit we will never unravel the origins of the gospel. What the ur-gospel looked like. At least with any degree of exactness. It's part of life to accept limitations. The hubris of humanities scholarship. We would choose a certain nothing than an uncertain something. (roughly the equivalent of
lieber will noch der Mensch das Nichts wollen, als nicht wollen.)
Disambiguating voices, even underlying voices, is more and more possible these days with Natural Language Processing.
BeDuhn, Gramaglia, Daniel Smith, and I all concur that Marcion's Evangelion has two clear underlying sources. If the Marcionite Evangelion is earlier than canonical Luke (which it clearly is), and the two-source hypothesis for the Evangelion is valid (which it is), then that is likely the way we can reconstruct the earlier underlying gospel strata/texts in this movement. The Qn source is highly coherent in terms of its overarching Aesopian framing, its combination of Aesopian logia/fabulae and pharmakos narrative, its persistent focus on the poor, its repeated emphasis on women leaders, and its linguistic patterns. These patterns, across many features, prove distinct from the two main sections that cluster/overlap with early Mark, which is focused on controversies over miracles and ritual piety, male characters, etc. As just one linguistic example, lemmas with "en" (episolon nu) in them have a statistically significant variation between these two portions of the Evangelion, with extremely high frequency rates in Qn, and extremely low frequency rates in early Mark.
Rigorous data science can clarify far beyond the muddled mess that currently obtains.
If scientists today can map black holes that formed billions of years ago billions of light years away (!), then we sure as heck should be able to reconstruct significant voices echoing to us from and through the texts of 2000 years ago.
The admission that a person or group of people haven't been able to achieve scientific-historical clarity in the pass should never be confused with the proposition that a new scientific achievement cannot occur, now or in the future.
I may be misunderstanding you, but you seem to conflate your own theory of “Qn” and what it “means,” with the methods of computational linguistics and open source knowledge that (very admirably) you promote.
There is a logical chasm between this claim, which anyone must admit —
Disambiguating voices, even underlying voices, is more and more possible these days with Natural Language Processing.
And this cluster of claims, which contains some very loaded exegesis —
If the Marcionite Evangelion is earlier than canonical Luke (which it clearly is), and the two-source hypothesis for the Evangelion is valid (which it is), then that is likely the way we can reconstruct the earlier underlying gospel strata/texts in this movement. The Qn source is highly coherent in terms of its overarching Aesopian framing, its combination of Aesopian logia/fabulae and pharmakos narrative, its persistent focus on the poor, its repeated emphasis on women leaders, and its linguistic patterns. These patterns, across many features, prove distinct from the two main sections that cluster/overlap with early Mark, which is focused on controversies over miracles and ritual piety, male characters, etc.
I really don’t object to the substance of this portait, as a theory. It may be as correct as any portrait can be of earliest Christianity (or whatever we should call it). My problem is that you seem to think that this account just falls out of the “science” as the only possible account. In the recent youtube, your disparage standard accounts as “pet” theories, but seem to think that yours is not a pet theory. But the “Aesopian” and “pharmakos” characterizations, as well as the strong claims about class and gender, are very much interpretations or meanings that seek to define. They are in a different category from those “linguistic patterns” that are susceptible of quantitative analysis. I am trying to make a basic appeal to the distinction between the
hermeneutics of a cultural artifact like the Bible, and any scientific comprehension of its outward, empirical, quantifiable attributes.
As for the Marcionite text in particular, you declare that “the two-source hypothesis for the Evangelion is valid.” I can see the outline of such a theory in BeDuhn 2013, except that Jason is quite careful to distinguish between what he knows, and what he thinks a reasonable theory (of a Q within *Ev) would look like. But you seem confident that the two-source idea has already been demonstrated and widely accepted.
What am I not understanding?
