Were the Gospels Established by 'Other-Worldly' Means? Do Scholars Need to Defend Their Belief in 'Other-Worldliness'?

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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Peter Kirby
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Secret Alias wrote: Wed May 05, 2021 8:10 amOf course when reference to 'other gospels' are inevitably mentioned THEY become suspects and incredible scrutiny follows. Why? Why are they preserving 'honors' for texts that we know are prostitutes (Mark, Matthew and Luke) but suspicion for new ones.
This is a good point. For a while, I thought people like Koester were the norm, or at least becoming the norm, with their attempt to include texts like the Gospel of Thomas and Secret Mark in the study of trajectories in early Christianity. It seemed to be a modest, logical, and inoffensive idea, to me. I wildly underestimated how hidebound the field could be, even in the twenty first century, and how much kudos there was to be gained from prioritizing canonical texts. Prodigious attempts have been made to set the Gospel of Thomas firmly in the middle of the second century, dependent on the canonical four, and to put Secret Mark in the twentieth. While the development of "Marcionite studies" is initially encouraging, the idea that there was actually just a "Luke Minus" text seems far from obvious.
Secret Alias wrote: Wed May 05, 2021 8:10 amI mean, Mark, Matthew and Luke are forgeries but 'in a good way.
Secret Alias wrote: Wed May 05, 2021 8:10 amFor them, in whatever sense Matthew and Luke were forgeries of Mark it shouldn't be treated as a crime. Why? It reminds me of when celebrities commit felonies and their fans are inevitably open to leniency.
I think where a lot of people end up is that they increase their focus on Mark (or maybe on Q too), the "originals."

This is part of why a Secret Gospel of Mark is a dangerous idea. It suggests that even the "original" canonical gospel might not be original.

Personally I've also tended to view the Gospel of Mark as an "original" text. Only recently have I started to consider its redaction history.

To advance the discussion, it's probably good to come with specific ideas, even if they're mostly wrong. A simple "non liquet" is frustrating.
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Re: Were the Gospels Established by 'Other-Worldly' Means? Do Scholars Need to Defend Their Belief in 'Other-Worldlines

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First things first. I'll start with the end. The post was basically created after a pattern of Ben ignoring my participation in any of his threads. That's fine. My wife ignores me. But the reality is this a pattern which cuts through scholarship. The 'experts' inevitably ask questions only to confirm the answer they want. So at the forum Ben or Ken says 'X' Ken or Ben answer (or someone else with similar 'reasonable' views) they allow idiots to chime in to prove that only 'idiots' would object to their prejudices and so on.

At first I was annoyed by this pattern but in the end it stimulated a thought - these Americans have a worldview that it is possible for the truth to prevail in the world. So, as you cite, I said Mark, Matthew and Luke can be 'good forgeries.' Given the choice of Matthew and Luke's additions to Mark 'the best answer' is that Matthew and Luke 'knew things' that Mark didn't and so acted as 'reasonable editors' and expanded Mark's original narrative.

My question was - why is it more reasonable to assume that the synoptic forgeries were 'gooder' than other texts? More critically I followed up with the psychological inquiry what about people like Ben and Ken makes them think that 'what survives' is better, gooder than what perished. Like for instance there is something noble about the guy who sits at a bar downing scotch as in a Sinatra song lamenting the one that got away than the Ben and Ken-type husband who just married 'a girl' (metaphorically speaking not commenting on their actual marriages) because it's 'what everyone else does.'

My point was again, I get that if you want to 'make it in scholarship' you have to produce something. You have to write something, say something and that means accepting as true certain things about let's say 'the gospels,' 'the letters of Paul' etc. I get the need for productivity. I get the need to make a living. But why can't you become a professor as a criminal, as an outsider. Yeah I had to publish what they wanted me to publish just to get 'inside the system' and now that I made it, be ruthless in my prosecution of the system. Why do the Ben and Ken types inevitably have this annoying American quality where they buy into the system, that they believe the system is good, truthful even beautiful?

So for instance they 'went all the way in the study of early Christianity.' I was watching this motivational video this morning (rather than annoying my family with music like this
) and the guy cited this study where there were two groups of people - those who affirmed that life was great and those who woke up and said life is pointless and bad and the first group lived 7 years longer than the other. This was supposed to prove that if you developed a 'positive attitude' you'd live longer. But what if the positive group were just positive because they were healthier and thus had more zeal for the better life they already had?

My point is that if you similarly had two groups of people - the Ben and Kens of the world who somehow bought into the 'appropriateness' of the surviving early Christian literature and another group of people who thought it was bullshit and that it only survived because the powers of the world encouraged its development and favored these new fake gospels over the original stuff which in some form was more 'unworldly' the study of early Christianity is always going to filled with the Ben and Kens. How many insane intellectual guerillas are going to infiltrate the study of the Bible to propagate nihilism.

Moreover because they spent a lot of time 'buying into the system' - i.e. flattering people in power, 'experts' who they respected and loved (often times surely because it had advantage for their 'life goals') - they are never going to stray that far from productivity to see the possibility that life is corrupt and pointless. They aren't going to end up in a Motel 6 in some nowhere town fraternizing with crack addicts and whores and seeing the nature of existence beyond personal achievement and teleological purpose. There will always been this sense that 'everything has a purpose.' The preservation of the Bible is one such 'grand purpose' - a kind of Olympic torch that was passed on through the monasteries to us in order to resist the corrupt nature of the world which is understood to have never occurred to the Bible.

I am just saying that if you spend enough time in the Motel 6 you start seeing that everything gets corrupted. If you spend time on the career path you're biased toward purpose. But everyone ends up in corruption. So in my opinion it is more reasonable to suppose that everything succumbs to corruption including the Bible.
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Re: Were the Gospels Established by 'Other-Worldly' Means? Do Scholars Need to Defend Their Belief in 'Other-Worldlines

Post by Secret Alias »

And again

1. the argument against the corruption of the Bible is 'books have survived from antiquity uncorrupted.'
2. since the Bible is a collection of books it is reasonable to suppose that like other books the books of the Bible are uncorrupted.

But I take issue with this argument. With respect to the Torah there was a lots of corruption and plenty of claims of corruption. The Jews clearly 'corrected' any reference to the overt sacredness of Gerizim. So that's point one. The next point follows that if there could be this sort of overt corruption of the Torah and scholarship goes along with the corruptors it would be possible for the same thing to happen with the gospel. Thirdly the Marcionites tell us that the original New Testament was corrupted, we hear their cries but side with the winners of history again. Fourthly we see with the Ignatian correspondences the exact kind of expansion from the Syriac form to the long Greek form and against to the longer Greek form. This doesn't in itself mean that the Ignatian correspondences prove the Marcionite point but it certainly could be used to support Marcionism. Fifthly and finally, the Bible is not a book like other books. It was a lawbook for a community of Gentiles who went over to a foreign god and moreover a god who was perceived to be hostile to Rome. How couldn't these books have been altered by editors sympathetic to the will of their Imperial rulers like Irenaeus? In short, it is reasonable to conclude in a world of corruption that the Bible was corrupted.
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Re: Were the Gospels Established by 'Other-Worldly' Means? Do Scholars Need to Defend Their Belief in 'Other-Worldlines

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Working on my attempt to translate p46 into English at the motel 6.

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Gotta go, the crack whore upstairs is knocking on my door.
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Re: Were the Gospels Established by 'Other-Worldly' Means? Do Scholars Need to Defend Their Belief in 'Other-Worldlines

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Working on my attempt to translate p46 into English at the motel 6.

Did they leave the light on for you?
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Re: Were the Gospels Established by 'Other-Worldly' Means? Do Scholars Need to Defend Their Belief in 'Other-Worldlines

Post by Secret Alias »

Actually, seeing John2 in the discussion brought another point to mind. They pretend on the one hand to stick to the synoptic gospels, the question of Q all the boring subjects which develop from the 'good forgery' model. But Ben and others are strangely open to this notion of 'Jewish Christianity' which basically develops from some marginalia in Hegesippus and Irenaeus. So there is a Gospel of the Hebrews. In some undefined way it is parallels with Matthew. The business about Jesus having a brother or brothers or a Jewish family. All good with that. But it's all really, really sketchy.

If you start with Judaism and the Jewish reports about Jesus, you see immediately that the Jews hated Jesus for being antinomian. That's it. The business about him being born from a whore or being a bastard might have developed from some version of the gnostic myth. But it is incredible the way you have consistent reporting about Jesus being antinomian or anti-Jewish (i.e. the Samaritan report in John and Tertullian) however whenever there is a parallel scrap of something 'Jew-positive' like Jesus has a Jewish family, 'Jewish Christianity' we go 'all in' with this collection of marginalia.

Why is that? The answer is clearly that it's much more speculative to develop an understanding of an antinomian Jewish heresy. We have examples of such things - Sabbatai Zevi, Jacob Frank. But in the end, scholars don't want to posit that understanding for early Christianity. They prefer the prejudices of their ancestors. But as I have noted antinomian Jewish sectarianism better explains the early emergence of Marcion. But remember even the Marcionite scholars are typically German and are influenced by Luther more than Sabbatai. In the end, it's about subjectivism. If you make it all the way through the system you end up 'all the way through the system' because you share some of the prejudices of previous generations embodied in a teacher or guide. There are no neo-Sabbatian scholars in early Christian scholarship. So bye bye Marcion.
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Re: Were the Gospels Established by 'Other-Worldly' Means? Do Scholars Need to Defend Their Belief in 'Other-Worldlines

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John2 wrote: Fri May 07, 2021 12:29 pm
Working on my attempt to translate p46 into English at the motel 6.

Did they leave the light on for you?
A red one, yeah.
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Re: Were the Gospels Established by 'Other-Worldly' Means? Do Scholars Need to Defend Their Belief in 'Other-Worldlines

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Jax wrote: Fri May 07, 2021 11:26 am Working on my attempt to translate p46 into English at the motel 6.

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Gotta go, the crack whore upstairs is knocking on my door.
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Re: Were the Gospels Established by 'Other-Worldly' Means? Do Scholars Need to Defend Their Belief in 'Other-Worldlines

Post by Ken Olson »

Jax wrote: Fri May 07, 2021 1:42 pm
John2 wrote: Fri May 07, 2021 12:29 pm Did they leave the light on for you?
A red one, yeah.
Tell her she doesn't have to do that.

Those days are over.
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Jax
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Re: Were the Gospels Established by 'Other-Worldly' Means? Do Scholars Need to Defend Their Belief in 'Other-Worldlines

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perseusomega9 wrote: Fri May 07, 2021 2:09 pm
Jax wrote: Fri May 07, 2021 11:26 am Working on my attempt to translate p46 into English at the motel 6.

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Gotta go, the crack whore upstairs is knocking on my door.
Do you always carry a selection f hot sauces around with you?
Oh totally! :D
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Love the stuff! :cheers:
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