Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Here I thought my most recent "The Exactly Parallel Verses" was the best of my four-in-a-row (thus I rushed it to here before bed), but I suppose your response can be taken to indicate that you could find nothing to attack in the prior three. ("Argumentum" is singular, right?)

It can be taken to indicate that I'm getting bored of asking for evidence and getting none.

Only a sense of duty compels me to comment in any case. I'm not picking on you or your ideas in particular.

Keep in mind that you'd have no rhetorical springboard for further rambling without my comments. You should be thanking me.

Thank you!
Yes, I have learned not to expect to gain more from interaction with other members than I learn from reconsidering what I have myself put out into cyberspace.

As I said a week ago, I didn't expect to be posting during this "Golden" week in Colorado. I hand-wrote ten pages, but because of poor internet connection I only posted here a page and 1/2 of it here (The Parable of the Tenants, Nov. 30). The rest of my posts here have been short responses or brief inspirations. I'll also edit some of my posts with verse numbers when I have access to my notes and a better Bible.

Of course, I may skip ahead to more challenging tasks like considering redaction in the Grundschrift itself as it was passed along from one gospel writer to another. (As for the Gospel of Thomas, it probably traces back to an earlier Q1 component of the Proto-Gospel.)

Adam wrote:Yes, I have learned not to expect to gain more from interaction with other members than I learn from reconsidering what I have myself put out into cyberspace.

Yes, of course. Blame your audience. They don't appreciate your genius.

Vorkosigan at FRDB already topped you there. He said I was Galileo. Or maybe that I wasn't.

You guys will think I cheated and already had checked Gospel of Thomas, but no. I picked up Robert Funk's The Five Gospels and found that all the explanatory verses are missing from GT 65, and even "The stone that the builders rejected" is not acknowledged as a scripture reference (not a surprise from such a Gnostic source), but pops up right away in Saying #66, yet lacking any apparent relation to #65. The GT "abridgment" (yet adding an otherwise unknown quote in 65:4: "His master said, 'Perhaps he didn't know them.' ") is not very close to any of the Synoptics, maybe closest to Luke, particularly 20:10 to GT 65:2. There is almost no possibility of a common Greek origin.

As for the key verses I analyzed November 30th (in my newly retitled "Parable of the Tenants"), I had noticed decades ago that GT apparently takes yet another alternative in dealing with Aramaic verses that no one could understand: he omitted them. (Matthew had changed the quote as not from Jesus, Luke had taken the "Hearing this they said" so that it applied not to the preceding "What will the owner do?", but to the following "God forbid!" Mark waffled on this confusion by not attributing a quote to anyone but Jesus.) Four irreconcilable presentations. The GT 65 version, though the least tenable, is quite likely to have appealed to someone who wanted to avoid the parable too obviously condemning the Jewish authorities. Leave the parable without explanation to avoid ruffling feathers! So likely enough an early version leading to GT did omit the "What will the owner do: He will make an end of them." Perhaps from Oral Tradition the Synoptics restored the original, but in Matthew 21:40-41 it is more elaborate and more likely original than the text Mark and Luke share: "Now what will the owner of the vineyard do...? He will come and make an end...of the tenants and give the vineyard to others." Thus the latter has to be shared Greek. By my new explanation that Luke transcribed the Proto-Gospel first and made marginal glosses to it, Mark picked up his notes but Matthew could access an Aramaic original that he translated in its place.

Needless to say, I am now quite proud of my latest elaboration of my Occam's Razor version (that ironically now adds in the complication of detailed redaction within the Grundschrit Luke used). I'm thinking that any parallels with Gospel of Thomas must be the Q1 strata, even if occasional long consecutive stretches of words would indicate Q2. Incidentally, I now suggest that the frequent exact multiple-verse Q passages be labeled Q3. The Grundschrift had Q1 in Aramaic, Q2 in Greek (with lots of verbal exactness, but not for very long stretches), and Q3 is Greek verses added at the time Luke was written. These Q3 include the usual John the Baptist additions Luke 3:7-9, 16b-17 (raising the suspicion that the intervening verses are of the same nature and just omitted by Matthew--that would give us 3:7-17 as all Q3 in origin) 7:19, 22-28, (By Luke I mean the main writer of what we now call Luke--by my Seven Written Gospel Eyewitnesses thesis this would be Simon of Cleophas, later Bishop of Jerusalem. Maybe Luke wrote it, however, if he was a Jew as many scholars now suggest.)

Adam wrote:Vorkosigan at FRDB already topped you there. He said I was Galileo. Or maybe that I wasn't.

Maybe he mentioned the Galileo gambit. Maybe Vork said something like this:

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

My Horizontal Hypothesis is rather extreme in appearance, but may actually be a compromise among all the various proposals. That it may reconcile all hypotheses at the same time would argue for its truth.
Sure, I champion a Proto-Gospel (Grundschrift) to explain how we got our extant gospels. However, it's like the Two-Document Hypothesis (or any other source theory) in allowing for the formation beforehand of that Proto-Gospel. At that stage we would still have something comparable to Q (such as a Sayings/and-or/Narrative Q1) and something like Mark (Twelve-Source or at least Passion Narrative, or maybe the newly proferred Gospel of Peter, Secret Mark, or Cross Gospel).

The other prominent theories work primarily with extant gospels and the presumed order of use of one (or two) by the other(s). My most recent iteration of my Occam's Razor version acknowledges copying from one gospel to another in the form of the first and/or second in the chain to copy in its new stuff right into the Grundschrift from which it gets picked up indirectly. This should obliterate the objections to the copying hypotheses (whether Augustinian, Griesbach, or Farrer/Goulder/Goodacre) by not needing the later-in-sequence gospels to omit so much material from the earlier gospel(s), since the earlier gospel itself was never seen, just some of the additions that were transcribed to the Proto-Gospel. I also reconcile between the proponents of Aramaic originals or Greek originals. I only exclude Oral Tradition as irreconcilable.

Unfortunately, I'm now thinking that the framework I have sketched above may work too well. Applying such sophisticated techniques probably would work to explain any order of transmission of the three Synoptics, not just my currently preferred Luke to Proto-Matthew then branching to Mark and Matthew independently.

I seem to find any day unproductive when I don't come up with yet another creative idea on the Synoptic Problem. I can see why people would become irritated by me.

An additional wrinkle to my evolving-Grundschrift proposal: in addition to the Q3 transcriptions to the Proto-Gospel by the author of Luke, there likely were similar additions to the Grundschrift by whichever author of Mark or Matthew worked first with the Grundschrift after the Proto-Matthew ("completed") phase. If Mark 13 (= Matthew 24) had been the M additions themselves that Mark and Matthew both had in front of them to work with, such nearly total verbal identity would not be found between these two gospels here. It is more likely that one added the Little Apocalypse to his gospel, altered the Grundschrift to include it exactly (reaching what would now be my new definition of "completed Grundschrift"), and then the other gospel writer transcribed it almost word-for-word.

Obviously my recently-selected name Horizontal Hypothesis Occam's Razor Version won't serve for the new complications. As in the above paragraph, how about "Evolving-Grundschrift Hypothesis"? If it has to be English, how about "Evolving Proto-Gospel Hypothesis"?
Edited to add:
I would now prefer to omit the "Unfortunate (ly)" paragraph above, as further study on it does not leave me believing that it is as easy to keep modifying the Grundschrift in a different order than my preferred Luke to Mark to Matthew. But I'll leave it as an idea someone else might want to pursue.

I appreciate your forbearance in holding off your replies in anticipation of my idea-of-the-day, but the well seems to have run dry today (except for witticisms that follow). So go ahead and comment on my post of yesterday.
Not that I won't further amend my views--is it that I fear that I will am likely be shot down if I don't keep presenting a moving target?
And if I wind up having nothing further to add, does that mean I've already attained all the answers? Surely someone out there must have some way of showing me where I'm wrong? (Or are you holding off because I seem capable of changing my views quite on my own?)

I found in Bartosz Adamczewski’s $116 2010 Q or not Q a study of recent proponents of a proto-gospel. Tresmontant is too Roman Catholic traditional to work for me, T. L. Brodie is too radical, and I don’t see much purpose in H. M. Humphrey’s focus on Mark 1-13 vs. Mark 14-16. David Flusser agrees with Lindsay’s Jerusalem School’s priority of Luke, which is fine with me once the Grundschrift is established. For the only close agreement with me that leaves Stephen Hultgren’s 2002 Narrative Elements in the Double-Tradition. See pages 133-139 .
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2IlM ... en&f=false
(or in this case it's amazon without a preview, see)
http://www.amazon.com/not-So-Called-Tra ... 3631604920
Hultgren’s $159 book (not extensively enough previewed to avoid depending on the RBL review) is thoroughly analyzed by Matthew Baldwin in the 06/2005 Review of Biblical Literature. Anachronistically Baldwin devotes a page of his review stating Hultgren’s attack on Form Criticism, when even by 2005 Form Criticism was widely regarded as doubful or even refuted. Score that point for Hultgren, he was ahead of the curve when selecting his dissertation leading up to its acceptance in 2001.
The review is basically unfavorable, however, as next comes up the main point that gospel scholarship has made altogether too much of a distinction between sayings and narrative. [This assumption unfortunately continues today.]
Hultgren is thus not a believer in Q as commonly defined, so he talks about “q” uncapitalized (in spite of its origin in German, that capitalizes all nouns). He seeks to explain the gospel texts in terms of traditionality and “narrative arc” and not historicity, but nevertheless too much of the latter slips through for Baldwin’s taste, with so much focus on narrative about John the Baptist.
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=2940

Hultgren himself relies heavily on the analysis by Antonio Gaboury as to the sources within the Proto-Gospel. See pages 138 to 159 in his book.
http://www.amazon.com/Narrative-Traditi ... 3110175258
(Gaboury teaches that Mark 1:1-13 and 6:14-16:8 present the fundamental order in the Synoptics, with variation occurring in-between. I don't particularly see that.)

So it looks like I'm citing a scholar I've never read as the best evidence for what I'm touting now. I can't even find a review about Gaboury, much less a page that I could read (I read French pretty well). And that after tracking him down from a scholar I had never heard of (Hultgren, at least my same denomination ELCA) that I learned about from the maverick scholar Adamczewski that I first heard about when I read a review about him two months ago.