Evidence of a common editor across NT works?

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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Irish1975
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Re: Evidence of a common editor across NT works?

Post by Irish1975 »

RGP

I was responding to your question in the title and the OP, not these other questions.

There are really three broad theories:

1. One person did it all: redaction, compilation, final re-write, etc. (very unlikely)
2. Some coordinated effort of a school worked toward the same basic editorial goals.
3. Total lack of coordination: each text was authored independently and circulated independently for a while before compilation.

Obviously we cannot fingerprint this or that contribution. 2 is the most promising paradigm, because it explains the evidence for many hands and also the evidence for a consistent editorial agenda (and w/r/t to the Nomina Sacra, a very specific code for this edition). But there are so many possible scenarios that could fit under 2. The general insight from Trobisch is that, while we are completely in the dark as to individual authorship or contribution, we can at least discern a common editorial plan, and that’s what provides a solid predicate for our conclusions. (Not, e.g., ideas about Mary Magdalene.) Most of your questions probably can’t be answered in a principled way.

Also, we shouldn’t forget how much evidence there is that many changes continued beyond the late 2nd century. No first edition of a literary publication, however classic, escapes re-editing, additions, alterations.
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Re: Evidence of a common editor across NT works?

Post by perseusomega9 »

Irish1975 wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 11:39 am
Also, we shouldn’t forget how much evidence there is that many changes continued beyond the late 2nd century. No first edition of a literary publication, however classic, escapes re-editing, additions, alterations.
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rgprice
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Re: Evidence of a common editor across NT works?

Post by rgprice »

Irish1975 wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 11:39 am RGP

I was responding to your question in the title and the OP, not these other questions.

There are really three broad theories:

1. One person did it all: redaction, compilation, final re-write, etc. (very unlikely)
2. Some coordinated effort of a school worked toward the same basic editorial goals.
3. Total lack of coordination: each text was authored independently and circulated independently for a while before compilation.

Obviously we cannot fingerprint this or that contribution. 2 is the most promising paradigm, because it explains the evidence for many hands and also the evidence for a consistent editorial agenda (and w/r/t to the Nomina Sacra, a very specific code for this edition). But there are so many possible scenarios that could fit under 2. The general insight from Trobisch is that, while we are completely in the dark as to individual authorship or contribution, we can at least discern a common editorial plan, and that’s what provides a solid predicate for our conclusions. (Not, e.g., ideas about Mary Magdalene.) Most of your questions probably can’t be answered in a principled way.

Also, we shouldn’t forget how much evidence there is that many changes continued beyond the late 2nd century. No first edition of a literary publication, however classic, escapes re-editing, additions, alterations.
I would think there is a mix of #3 and either 1 or 2. Most of the works existed independently, prior to their inclusion in the NT, but the only versions we have are the ones from the NT. Whatever they looked like prior to inclusion we don't know, and their circulation prior to inclusion may have been so poor that few other versions were ever noticed.
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Irish1975
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Re: Evidence of a common editor across NT works?

Post by Irish1975 »

perseusomega9 wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 11:45 am
Irish1975 wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 11:39 am
Also, we shouldn’t forget how much evidence there is that many changes continued beyond the late 2nd century. No first edition of a literary publication, however classic, escapes re-editing, additions, alterations.
<strike>STAR WARS</strike> New Testament Special Edition
Imagine if they called it “A New Hope” when it debuted in 1977 😐
perseusomega9
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Re: Evidence of a common editor across NT works?

Post by perseusomega9 »

Irish1975 wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 3:23 pm
perseusomega9 wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 11:45 am
Irish1975 wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 11:39 am
Also, we shouldn’t forget how much evidence there is that many changes continued beyond the late 2nd century. No first edition of a literary publication, however classic, escapes re-editing, additions, alterations.
<strike>STAR WARS</strike> New Testament Special Edition
Imagine if they called it “A New Hope” when it debuted in 1977 😐
https://starwarsintrocreator.kassellabs ... -VQnz628vY
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neilgodfrey
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Re: Evidence of a common editor across NT works?

Post by neilgodfrey »

ABuddhist wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 9:38 am
neilgodfrey wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 6:26 am (It's also possible that the odd-looking "double-ending" of John's Gospel was a literary artifice.)
Why would someone want to make the ending seem crudely expanded? Not that I am condemning such a theory, but I am surprised that such a theory has been proposed, and I would love to read reasoning for it.
Ancient authors of this era often had fun with their conclusions. A study worth reading is
  • Roberts, Deborah H., Francis Dunn, and Don Fowler, eds. Classical Closure. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1997.
What better way to drive home a point about so much to write about that not enough books could be written than to have a few added bits after a conclusion stating just such a thing? It works, doesn't it? Oh yes, one more thing.... no hang on, one more bit... (See? I told you it would be impossible to write it all. It's a kind of substitute for length given what is actually a quite short story.)

And the last chapter is really a couple of units, not just one. So much to write about - the book cannot contain it all -- not even this book that you are reading!

Yes, there are differences in some stylistic features, but I think the message and motifs in the end are very much consistent with all that has gone before.

Further, if we see in the Gospel of John a steady dialogue, a counterpoint, with the Gospel of Mark -- as some of us do -- then John's double ending is another play to make up for Mark's "lack" of ending. (No, I don't think John has snitched some original ending of Mark.)

But the play with the ending of the gospel would be consistent with the sorts of play authors of the day did engage in with their conclusions.
Last edited by neilgodfrey on Mon Oct 11, 2021 6:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: Evidence of a common editor across NT works?

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An important (I think) reminder from the work I referenced above:
Ancient novels use many paratextual devices, usually to give a sense of (historiographic) authenticity to the fiction (the embedded preface of Chariton and Longus Sophistes, the programmatic declaration addressed to the reader by Apuleius,13 the introductory epistles of Antonius Diogenes anticipating many modern devices used by Potocky, Poe, Manzoni, Eco, and others, and finally the peculiar parodical preface of Lucian's True Histories).

-- Massimo Fusillo: "How Novels End: Some Patterns of Closure in Ancient Narrative", p, 212
The voice that an author introduces in a work can itself be a fiction -- that is, not genuinely the author's voice. The footnote 13 to Apuleius in the quote points out that the "I" in the narration is neither the author nor the main character in the novel itself. The reference to Lucian is pointing out something of the reverse of what we find in the Gospel of John: "“What happened to me in the other world I’ll tell you in the following books.” - no lie, he says, -- then turn the page or roll up the scroll - nothing. No more books appear. It's all part of the game.

The endings of Mark, Acts, John, are all part of the technique found in Herodotus, Virgil, Homer....
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neilgodfrey
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Re: Evidence of a common editor across NT works?

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Irish1975 wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 9:55 am
neilgodfrey wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 6:26 am Should we expect to find common stylistic fingerprints in that case?
I don't see why we would. Diversity of authorship is a conceit of the collection. There are intertextual echoes and references that may or may not have been intentional.
One can vary one's style, making deliberate changes for effect, but is it possible to remove all trace of a core identity across works of some length? I'm not so sure. (Thinking of Tuccinardi's statistical research into author attribution studies -- e.g. his work on Pliny's letter re Christians -- and Pennebaker's linguistic word counts.) Shorter passages of course are less useful to detect different sources.
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Re: Lucas credits The Master

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perseusomega9 wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 4:55 pm
Irish1975 wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 3:23 pm
perseusomega9 wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 11:45 am <strike>STAR WARS</strike> New Testament Special Edition
Imagine if they called it “A New Hope” when it debuted in 1977 😐
https://starwarsintrocreator.kassellabs ... -VQnz628vY

It is true that Joseph Campbell first became interested in Dr. Carl Jung in the 1920s (Jung's Archetypes, Collective Unconscious, alchemical theory and so much more derived almost entirely from G.R.S. Mead.) But it was Campbell's meeting and studies with Jung's close friend and influencer (1932-43), Dr. Heinrich Zimmer, which truly transformed his perspective. As The Encyclopedia Britannica explains:
While working on his first book, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944; coauthored with Henry Morton Robinson), Campbell attended the lectures of Heinrich Zimmer (1890–1943), a German Indologist at Columbia who had been forced into exile by the Nazis. Zimmer soon died, and Campbell devoted the next 12 years to turning Zimmer’s lecture notes into four tomes: Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization (1946), The King and the Corpse (1948), Philosophies of India (1951), and The Art of Indian Asia (1955). While formally only the editor of these works, Campbell was in fact almost a coauthor. It was from Zimmer, even more than from Jung—with whom Campbell is commonly linked—that Campbell took his comparative and symbolic approach to mythology.

Even before undertaking the editing of Zimmer, Campbell was writing The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), which remains his best-known work. In an approach that contrasted with that of subsequent books, Campbell tied the meaning of myth to its plot and claimed to have deciphered the common plot of all hero myths. He understood the hero myth’s central plot in Jungian terms, defining it as the male or female hero’s journey to a strange, new, divine world. The encounter with the divine occurs in adulthood rather than childhood, involves interaction with gods rather than with parents, and is loving rather than hostile. Understood psychologically, the journey symbolizes the rediscovery of the unconscious, from which an adult has lost contact in the process of growing up. Although revealing Jung’s influence, Campbell broke with Jung in espousing a fusion of consciousness and unconsciousness, humanity and divinity—an interpretation that reflected the influence of Zimmer.

C. Jung and H. Zimmer at Ascona Switzerland, c.1935:
Image

This is well-documented by scholars and Campbell's own testimony. As George Lucas credited Campbell, so Campbell credited his true mentor (1939-43), Heinrich Zimmer.

Prof. Zimmer was Ludwig Edelstein's roommate in Heidelberg for four years. (Yes: roommate, 1924-8.) Such is my very own Creation Myth (Why I'm Here), after the Edelsteins' reconstructed, syncretistic 1st C. AD Program outlined in 1938.
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Jax
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Re: Evidence of a common editor across NT works?

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Irish1975 wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 9:55 am
rgprice wrote: Sat Oct 09, 2021 6:31 am if we follow Trobisch's proposition that the NT was created in the middle of the 2nd century by a single editor or small number of editor
His argument for there having been a specific editor/publisher is based on certain consistent (or in some cases, universal) patterns that appear in the oldest manuscripts—
  • use of the Nomina Sacra and the codex format
  • peculiar titles and peculiar arrangement of the collection
  • anti-Marcion purpose of Acts, the Judaized Gospels, the Catholicized Pauline corpus
  • cross-refences between books
    • mention of “Mark” and “Luke” in Gospel titles and in Colossians, Philemon
    • “letters” by the pillars named in Galatians 2:7-9 (where Cephas = Peter)
  • concluding remarks for each of the four major collections
    • John 21:20 (“four Gospels are enough”)
    • Paul’s farewell in 2 Timothy
    • Peter’s farewell in 2 Peter
    • warning against additions/deletions in Rev 22:19

This is a sketch of what I remember. It is important to read the book in order to appreciate the argument in full. I don't know any rival theories of a general editor, nor have I seen any thorough critiques of this thesis from the conservative side--and it would be great if anyone could refer me to any such discussions.

But it should not be overlooked how poorly traditional theories of the collection explain something so basic as the title "To the Hebrews." It is obvious that this text was not addressed to anyone that might have gone by the name "Hebrews." No deep or prior knowledge of Judaism or the OT is presupposed, much less that the audience should actually be persons of Palestinian origin or conversant in Hebrew. Nor is this text a letter, even though it ends as though it were a letter. So if it makes no sense that the author would have given it this title, and it also makes no sense that multiple early witnesses would have happened upon it independently, it seems the only sensible explanation is to hypothesize some early editorial authority or publisher.
neilgodfrey wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 6:26 am Should we expect to find common stylistic fingerprints in that case?
I don't see why we would. Diversity of authorship is a conceit of the collection. There are intertextual echoes and references that may or may not have been intentional.
Could you link me to the book please?

Thanks

Lane
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