Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

gmx wrote: associated with the four evangelists

Which are not even historical characters in this apologetic context, as being the original Aramaic followers of the man in question.

Instead we see Hellenistic authors creating these evangelist in fictional mythology, based oral traditions THOUGHT to be the real Aramaic followers.

gmx wrote:

Ulan wrote:

gmx wrote:The traditional attribution of the gospels to Mt, Mk, Lk, Jn is obviously very early and very strong.

No, it is not. As you mention all 4, you can only refer to Irenaeus, shortly before the year 200. Regarding earlier mentions of some of these, basically all depend on specific interpretations of some less than convincing snippets by an author whose work the church decided to lose. All other mentions are just quotes of quotes. Which means the testimony is rather weak and depends on a single, lost source.

Well 180 CE isn't "shortly before the year 200"... it's clearly 2nd century, which is indeed "very early" from a Christian historical perspective.

You should listen to yourself. How can 150 years after the alleged time that the stories happened be considered "early"? It's just "early" because there isn't anything else. Luke is mentioned for the first time in 180. Which means that the attribution is late and far removed from anything that happened.

Except if you think that Irenaeus wrote gLuke by himself. Then the attestation is "early".

gmx wrote:Your assumption that the ancient church had the capability to preserve any document it wanted to is absurd.

This argument has been trotted out for a long time, but it's born out of desperation and does not sound plausible. Also, my "assumption" was that the ancient church had a wonderful capability of losing any document that didn't fit. And Papias' fabled five volume work isn't "any document", it's basically the one and only document the attestation of the gospels is based on. All other attestations are quotes of this, and you can see from what the quoters write that they don't really know what to make of this short, quoted statement about the "oracles" that Matthew collected or about that scrambled report of Mark who had everything in the wrong order. None of the descriptions fit the gospels we have.

gmx wrote:The extant gospels date from the 4th century, and they are the most important books in Christianity, and the existence of those copies today is considered somewhat miraculous. If there were copies of Irenaeus or Papias from the 12th century, you'd probably say they were heavily interpolated or falsified, or historically unreliable for whatever other reason. At some point, bias infects absolutely everything.

The reason for dumping the writings of Papias is rather easy to discern, given that Eusebius attested that Papias "appears to have been of very limited understanding", which means that the text was probably full of details that didn't fit the official church position. Which is a bit of a dilemma, if the only earlier text that mentions gospel authors, the only source you have, is "of very limited understanding".

Ulan wrote:

gmx wrote:Well 180 CE isn't "shortly before the year 200"... it's clearly 2nd century, which is indeed "very early" from a Christian historical perspective.

You should listen to yourself. How can 150 years after the alleged time that the stories happened be considered "early"? It's just "early" because there isn't anything else. Luke is mentioned for the first time in 180. Which means that the attribution is late and far removed from anything that happened.

You're getting a bit hysterical. There can't be traditions about documents that haven't been written yet. Most critics place authorship of the synoptics in the 70s-90s, and John somewhat later. So our best guess is that Irenaeus wrote 70-100 years after the Gospel writers -- nothing like 150 years. Also, he's writing from France, so whatever traditions he's documenting have wended their way some 2500 miles from the epicenter of Christianity to his location. Now while it is clearly inconvenient for us modern folk that the earliest Christians didn't compile and preserve a daily run-sheet of their exploits, it doesn't follow that we should have expected them to. You're ducking from shadows.

gmx wrote:You're getting a bit hysterical. There can't be traditions about documents that haven't been written yet. Most critics place authorship of the synoptics in the 70s-90s, and John somewhat later. So our best guess is that Irenaeus wrote 70-100 years after the Gospel writers -- nothing like 150 years.

Or, in other words, there can be zero overlap in people with such a long timespan. Irenaeus clearly doesn't know what to make of Papias' words. There's nobody to ask anymore, either.
And the remark about "no tradition about documents that haven't been written yet" means you put Luke after 180? Well, that's certainly a new one.

gmx wrote:Also, he's writing from France, so whatever traditions he's documenting have wended their way some 2500 miles from the epicenter of Christianity to his location.

Now you are clearly getting disingenuous. The only thing that has "wended their way some 2500 miles from the epicenter of Christianity" is Irenaeus himself. He's from Smyrna, and the flock he tended to in Gaul were Greeks from the same area he came from. Those people had just moved there with their former bishop. You are looking at a start here, not a tradition.

gmx wrote:Now while it is clearly inconvenient for us modern folk that the earliest Christians didn't compile and preserve a daily run-sheet of their exploits, it doesn't follow that we should have expected them to. You're ducking from shadows.

The problem is that there aren't any shadows to duck from. There's nothing. Early Christian history is an attempt at reconstruction by people in the late second century with limited sources, and there seems not much they can build on (the famous "oral tradition"). Even in the time of Justin Martyr, the gospels (well, he only mentions one written gospel) still must have had a different text. And that was just 15-20 years earlier.

But anyway, it's no use of discussing this further, given your line of argumentation.

So your view is that all four Gospels were written in the 15-20 years between Justin Martyr and Irenaeus (160-180 CE)? Or really, in the ten years between Justin Martyr and the Muratorian canon? Brilliant. I'll just go and cross reference that with all the NT scholarship of the last two centuries, which has arrived at that exact same apparently self-evident conclusion!

.
Ehrman, Bart D. (2016-03-01). Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition -

"..all our references to the Gospels prior to the end of the second century ... are never named or associated with an eyewitness to the life of Jesus." --p.95

• "In the various Apostolic Fathers there are numerous quotations of the Gospels of the New Testament, especially Matthew and Luke. What is striking about these quotations is that in none of them does any of these authors ascribe a name to the books they are quoting. Isn’t that a bit odd? If they wanted to assign “authority” to the quotation, why wouldn’t they indicate who wrote it?" --p.93

"Justin quotes Matthew, Mark, and Luke on numerous occasions, and possibly the Gospel of John twice, but he never calls them by name. Instead he calls them “memoirs of the apostles.” It is not clear what that is supposed to mean — whether they are books written by apostles, or books that contain the memoirs the apostles had passed along to others, or something else. Part of the confusion is that when Justin quotes the Synoptic Gospels, he blends passages from one book with another, so that it is very hard to parse out which Gospel he has in mind. So jumbled are his quotations that many scholars think he is not actually quoting our Gospels at all, but a kind of 'harmony' of the Gospels -- it would suggest that ... the Gospels -as a collection of four and only four books- had not reached any kind of authoritative status." --pp.102-3

"It is not until nearer the end of the second century that anyone of record quotes our four Gospels and calls them Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. That first happens in the writings of Irenaeus, whose five-volume work Against the Heresies, written in about 185 CE .." --p.103

"It is striking that at about the same time another source also indicates that there are four authoritative Gospels ...the famous Muratorian Fragment".* --p.104

* Though wikipedia says

The Muratorian fragment ... consisting of 85 lines, is a 7th-century Latin manuscript bound in a 7th or 8th century codex from the library of Columban's monastery at Bobbio; it contains features suggesting it is a translation from a Greek original written about 170 or as late as the 4th century ... The fragment consists of all that remains of a section of a list of all the works that were accepted as canonical by the churches known to its anonymous original compiler.


The text of the list itself is traditionally dated to about 170 because its author refers to Pius I, bishop of Rome (142—157), as recent:

• "But Hermas wrote 'The Shepherd' very recently, in our times, in the city of Rome, while bishop Pius, his brother, was occupying the chair of the church of the city of Rome. And therefore it ought indeed to be read; but it cannot be read publicly to the people in church either among the Prophets, whose number is complete, or among the Apostles, for it is after their time."

...The unidentified author accepts four Gospels, the last two of which are Luke and John, but the names of the first two at the beginning of the list are missing. Also accepted by the author are the "Acts of all Apostles" and 13 of the Pauline Epistles (the Epistle to the Hebrews is not mentioned in the fragment)...
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& see - Sundberg, Albert C, Jr (1973) Canon Muratori: A Fourth-Century List The Harvard Theological Review Vol. 66, no. 1, pp. 1-41

and - http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/extras/Muratorian.html

and - http://www.earlychurch.org.uk/pdf/fragment_hill.pdf

and http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/muratorian.html

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gmx wrote:So your view is that all four Gospels were written in the 15-20 years between Justin Martyr and Irenaeus (160-180 CE)? Or really, in the ten years between Justin Martyr and the Muratorian canon? Brilliant. I'll just go and cross reference that with all the NT scholarship of the last two centuries, which has arrived at that exact same apparently self-evident conclusion!

No, that is not what I said. We just don't know any gospel quotations that are attributed to certain authors before late 2nd century, as MrMacSon also showed in his quotes. That does not mean that several different texts that looked similar existed before that. While various authors from before are usually given as indication that, for example, gMatthew existed at their times, at close inspection they quote mixed forms.

Scholarship tends to assign the dates of when the gospels were written on internal evidence, as there is no external one. What is used is basically a date that is closest to when the events that are reported happened, pushed later by the allusion to events that happened later (like the fall of the temple). Most scholarship then uses Clement as proof that gospels should have existed before he wrote, though most of his quotes are characterized as paraphrases. Of course, this can equally mean that he was quoting correctly, but his text looked different, which seems to be very likely. Justin must have used what we call a harmony. His Christmas story resembles the Protoevangelium of James.

Which, taken together, means that some sort of gospel certainly existed prior to mid-2nd century. However, the lack of author attribution, the use of different texts by earlier church fathers and the state of Papias' reference make it rather unlikely that Matthean priority has any leg to stand on, and the internal text evidence stands clearly against it.

Ulan wrote: Scholarship tends to assign the dates of when the gospels were written on internal evidence, as there is no external one. What is used is basically a date that is closest to when the events that are reported happened, pushed later by the allusion to events that happened later (like the fall of the temple). Most scholarship then uses Clement as proof that gospels should have existed before he wrote, though most of his quotes are characterized as paraphrases. Of course, this can equally mean that he was quoting correctly, but his text looked different, which seems to be very likely. Justin must have used what we call a harmony. His Christmas story resembles the Protoevangelium of James.

Which, taken together, means that some sort of gospel certainly existed prior to mid-2nd century. However, the lack of author attribution, the use of different texts by earlier church fathers and the state of Papias' reference make it rather unlikely that Matthean priority has any leg to stand on, and the internal text evidence stands clearly against it.

I think we're finally saying the same thing.

Papias may have written as early as 100 CE, and he's aware (at the very least) of two written documents about Jesus which emanate from Mark and Matthew (that's the tradition he's recording).

Around 150 CE (give or take), Justin is aware of a lot of gospel content but only seems to know that content as coming from the "memoirs of the apostles".

Around 170, the muratorian fragment is aware of most of the NT, including four gospels, mentioning Luke and John by name, but references to the first two gospels is lost...

Around 180, Irenaeus knows all four gospels by their traditional names.

Again, it paints a fairly consistent view of the traditional association of the gospels with the four evangelists. While the evidence is scant, and the testimony of Justin is certainly puzzling, there is nothing which clearly contradicts the view that the association of the four evangelists with the four gospels is an early tradition. The scant nature and vagueness of it might be enough for you to decide that its all back-stitched, smoke and mirrors, but to me that's just framing. Nothing clearly shows the traditional picture as being faulty, in my view.

re -

Ulan wrote: No, that is not what I said. We just don't know any gospel quotations that are attributed to certain authors before the end of the 2nd century, as MrMacSon also showed in his quotes.

They're quotes from Ehrman's latest book, so not really 'my' quotes.

Here -

Ulan wrote:That does not mean that several different texts that looked similar existed before that. While various authors from before are usually given as indication that, for example, gMatthew existed at their times, at close inspection they quote mixed forms.

- did you want to say -

• "That does not mean that several different texts that looked similar did not exist before that."??
  
  ie. Several texts that looked similar may have existed before then ??

Regards,
Mr Mac

MrMacSon wrote:Here -

Ulan wrote:That does not mean that several different texts that looked similar existed before that. While various authors from before are usually given as indication that, for example, gMatthew existed at their times, at close inspection they quote mixed forms.

- did you want to say -

• "That does not mean that several different texts that looked similar did not exist before that."??
  
  ie. Several texts that looked similar may have existed before then ??

Yes, sorry, the "not" was missing. I'm sure that some texts existed, but I'm equally sure that they looked only partially similar, had no author attached and were still in constant flux because they were not "scripture" yet. I see other details that corroborate this position in the parallel thread, like for Justin, where I mentioned the Protoevangelium of James as being part of his "memoirs", and the other thread mentions a snippet from the Gospel of Peter. What is usually mentioned as gMatthew's Christmas story in Clement is also something else and not gMatthew.

In this sense, any question with regard to Markan or Matthean priority has the problem that it neglects the histories of the texts themselves, which we unfortunately don't have any text witnesses for, but we can still see this within the current texts. Even "Markan Priority" has to deal with the point that gMark seems to include parts from different source texts. gMatthew is even more of a grab bag of sources. Of course, the answer to the simple question whether "our" gMark or "our" gMatthew was first looks clear, with gMark being first.

As to the general text history, the human mind likes easy solutions. I'm not sure there is one here. gMatthew as it is looks rather late.