Gospel -- thoughts

[jack]

I won't try and summarise the background, for it would be too simplified and provoke much correction. If you're as ignorant of early Christian History as I am, you can do worse than starting at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels and reading articles linked from there (though you can presumably do better too).

Just about every combination of relationship between Mark, Matthew, and Luke has been proposed by scholars at some point. (Someone even had an enumeration.) For what it's worth, when I was reading, I bore in mind Matthew and Luke being based on Mark and something else (either both on X, or Luke on Matthew, or some combination).

Small observations:

* Mark presents a generally simple and consistent story, although it lacks a lot of the more detailed accounts of the other gospels. It's very consistent with the idea of Jesus as a wandering preacher like John the Baptist.

* All the gospels have an account of Jesus calming a storm, and the disciples saying "even" the wind and the waves obey him. It's interesting to compare this story to the "Which is easier? To say your sins are forgiven, or to say get up and walk? Your sins are forgiven. But now, get up and walk." quote.

* Indeed, now I'm acutely aware of the suggestion that many passages are pre-emptive strikes against heresies people were promulgating around the time the gospel was written. I just can't reliably tell which.

* When Jesus turns up in Nazareth, he's described as having a fairly normal family, and commenting that no-one ever believes in a prophet where he grew up. The later gospels have a passage where his mother and brothers try to visit him, and he says "no, those who believe are my true family". There's not yet suggestions that his early years were characterised by miracles.

* The resurrection is mainly "several women called Mary turned up, and the body was gone, and someone told them Jesus had risen." Most of the miracles accord to Jesus' death. (There's more details in the other gospels.)

* Although if you're taking a very literal reading, I notice that it says "Joseph bought some linen cloth, took the body down, and wrapped it in the cloth. Then he laid it in a tomb that had been cut out of the rock and rolled a stone against the door of the tomb." I don't know what normal burial customs would have been then, if Joseph actually did it himself or had twenty-one servants do it for him, or what a normal size of stone would be, but it got there somehow.

* Matthew reads like someone ticking boxes. "Step one. Burn bras. Step two ???. Step three. Come from Bethlehem. Step four. Come from Egypt. Step five. Come from Nazareth... Step n-1. Be messiah. Step n. Profit spiritually." :)

* John (and Acts of the Apostles and "letters to") has all the theology in.

Comments

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

Richard Carrier has an entertaining article on the many difficulties involved in establishing reliable dates for the New Testament:

We could still argue for a terminus ante quem for [the letters of Ignatius] if they are all forgeries (since it wouldn't matter if they were, as a forged quotation of Matthew is still a quotation of Matthew) by observing that Polycarp, at some unspecified time in his life, wrote his own letter as a preface to the entire collection of Ignatian letters, and Polycarp was martyred sometime between 155 and 168. Or so we think.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Yes. Carrier seems to be popular amongst people who have a hostile attitude towards Christianity, but he is not considered very highly among biblical historians (I'm not saying this is the case with you - you might just be unaware that Carrier is not a very good person to quote).

Carrier's atheism seems to have propelled him to the fairly indefensible position (among academics, whether they have Christian beliefs or not) that "it [is] very probable Jesus never actually existed as a historical person, which has changed my perspective considerably".

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

Atheism vs Christianity shouldn't be an issue here. The most dogmatic atheist and the most fundamentalist Christian agree that the gospels were written down at some time in the first couple of centuries, so they ought to be able to agree on the range of dates that are supported by the historical evidence. Carrier's point is that New Testament scholarship is not yet at a stage where this can happen, because scholarship is mixed up with apologetics.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Yes, and Carrier is wrong there. Many historians in this area aren't Christians and so have no interest in apologetics at all. Even among 'the most fundamentalist Christian' (let's make this something a bit more realistic - something like a reformed evangelical) you'll find the scholars referring to the issues in dating that make a stronger and a weaker case, and presenting the objective evidence for both positions.

My point above was that if you take a broader look than Carrier it's easy to see that Carrier is so heavily influenced by his atheism that he is not being very objective in his analysis of the historicity of the Bible (which would be the overwhelming scholarly view).

Edit: I should add that I think Carrier is worth reading, if only because he is quite entertaining, but he is a particularly poor source on this subject unless you're trying to get a really out there on the edge view (like you'd get from someone like Wells).

[nameandnature]

To be fair to Carrier, we should probably read what he says. He says that N.T. studies is in a poor state, but as far as I can tell, doesn't directly link this to apologetic commitments. In fact, he says more or less the opposite in this comment, namely that there are other historical fields with strong dogmatic commitments which aren't in as bad a shape, and that "a lot of scholars in biblical studies are agnostics and thus hardly dogmatically biased".

Carrier's opinions on historicity needn't affect when he dates the NT documents, I suppose: if something was made up, it could still have been written down early (though I'll be interested to see what his book on the historicity of Jesus does say, and how it's reviewed by other historians). I've not seen Carrier rejecting an early date for 1 Thess, for example (which isn't to say he doesn't).

Mark Goodacre's paper was interesting, but I don't think he's actually contradicting Carrier's whinge about Ignatius: Carrier says that Matthew post-dates 70, which is all that Goodacre seems to say (since Goodacre thinks Mark post-dates 70 and Matthew post-dates Mark). What Carrier is complaining about is that people haven't done enough work to establish an upper bound on the date, which Goodacre doesn't comment on, unless I missed something.