The Naivete of Scholarship on the Gospels

[Peter Kirby]

If you have a public book, why not give your real name here?

Mark G. Bilby is my real name, vocesanticae is a handle I use on Wikipedia, Patreon, blogs, and other sites.

It's good to see you here!

[Peter Kirby]

I see evidence from Syriac texts and other sources that the Marcionite gospel was unlike Luke.

I know you've touched on this before, but this could be an interesting post.

[lclapshaw]

You know, we absolutely know that there was a thriving publishing industry in the Mediterranean during the time that the NT material was being written. This is a fact that is supported by numerous primary sources. Also, fiction was very popular, we absolutely know this for sure. The problem with our current view of the NT material imo is that it is being touted as being only in the purview of religion instead of simply being a form of popular literature for that time. The Gospel stories et all were obviously popular enough for the publishing industry to jump on to. The market became flooded with knockoffs, what we have now is simply the best of that run, the best of. This can be seen in the form of all the Acts and Martyr stories that never made it into the Cannon but were obviously very popular none the less.

When viewed this way, the overall picture looks a lot clearer. The NT stories and letters made a profit so publishing houses cranked them out. Simple. Until the market for them cooled that is.

Completely in agreement. To explore some of the connections drawn between canonical and non-canonical gospels and acts with the earliest Greek novels, as well as the Aesopian romance, check out:

Brant, Jo-Ann A., Hedrick, Charles, and Chris W. Shea. Ancient Fiction: The Matrix of Early Christian and Jewish Narrative. Society of Biblical Literature Symposium Series 32. Atlanta: SBL, 2005.

Hock, Ronald F., Chance, J. Bradley, and Judith Perkins, ed. Ancient Fiction and Early Christian Narrative. SBL Symposium Series. Atlanta: Scholars, 1998.

Litwa, M. David How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths. Synkrisis. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019. esp chp 11 on Pharmakos

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature. Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. (especially the chapter on Aesop)

Right on Mark, thanks for the list.

Lane

[davidmartin]

Come at it from another angle

Take Hebrews (and the pastorals in general). They show zero knowledge of the gospel Jesus. The Jesus of Hebrews is utterly unlike him
Yet we find in Luke Jesus crying up to the Father asking the cup be taken from him... just like the Hebrews Jesus

It's as-if this were added to Luke (or *Ev) to placate the Hebrews camp and throw a bit of 'their Jesus' in

The question is - does orthodoxy derive from a camp which had no gospel of it's own and knew no gospel Jesus?
I think yes.

That would mean every single piece of the gospels that wasn't redacted came from a non-orthodox camp.
Yep