What counts as a historical Jesus?

[SpuriusMaximus]

Yeah, I think we can dismiss the objection about when were the first complete copies found. Though I think he does have some point there that when we're talking about some idea being from decade X, as opposed to a later interpolation, it kinda helps to look at about how early we can actually date it. By quote in some epistle if needed, but still... Even taking, say, John as dating from the 90's, it doesn't necessarily mean that every paragraph or exact twist of the story in it is actually from the 90's, and in fact we know at least one whole story which is definitely later.

 

[grahbudd]

Hmm? Did Justin Martyr actually quote from any of our four gospels? Can you elaborate on that a bit please?

Not if you believe a site like this...

http://firstnewtestament.com/gospels_early_silence_martyr.htm

But the question is: should you? (hint: THE FORMATTING).

The case against, once again, revolves around obsessing about a set of pseudo data, i.e. things that loom large in the minds of certain people. In this instance, it is things like: Justin Martyr never calls the gospels by name, even though he knows his bible backwards and often names the OT book he is quoting from. Instead (it is alleged) he knows of a single work called "the memoirs of the apostles". Given that this "work" obviously has some sort of resemblance to our extant gospels, some even go so far as to claim that the four gospels were made out of this work, i.e. some time between the time of JM (fl. mid 2nd C.) and Irenaeus, who wrote some twenty years later or so.

Now perhaps all this sounds insurmountable. But there are some other factoids to take into account here, of varying degrees of importance. Note also that this site is typical in not actually analyzing any of the data (ie the gospel-like material in JM).

This can be seen at the admirable Textexcavation site:

http://www.textexcavation.com/justinmartyr.html


The first thing to note is that, as the text stands, JM actually refers to the "gospels"; he also says the "memoirs of the apostles" were written by the "apostles and their followers". So all this implies that he knew of more than one text (indeed, one might think, at least four: plural apostles (this would be Mark Matthew and John) and plural followers (Mark (proxy for Peter) and Luke (proxy for Paul)). However, one does not need to go down this somewhat speculative route, merely note that in the text of JM there is reference to “gospels”.

Scond, if you list all the gospelly-type stuff in JM, it more or less neatly condenses into what is in the synoptics, plus a tiny handful of other traditions and glosses, the most famous of which is that Jesus was born in a cave (seen also in the Protoevangelium of James). Justin is clearly using source(s), and it is noteworthy that the source(s) he is using corresponds closely to what is in our present day gospels, with very little else.

Although Justin uses strikingly Johannine language on occasion, whether he actually alludes to the Johannine literature is endlessly agonized over. Answer: unclear.

Third, when Justin refers to gospelly type stuff, he strings together material that when we compare it to the modern gospels, often seems to combine material from both Luke and Matthew. Mark is harder to call because so little of Mark is not also in Luke and Matthew (even so, JM refers to some such).

Fourth, this characteristic points towards the directionality of the gospels as we know them and JM. Quite simply, the procedure for producing the gospels we have today out of a single proto-gospel would be quite problematic (to say the least).

In particular, his account of the nativity is a stringing together of the material in Matthew and Luke. This material is unique to the respective gospels. Furthermore, the nativity material of Luke, despite being clearly Lucan in style, is nevertheless likely to be part of a “second edition” of Luke – the third chapter opens up with a grand formal opening that may have been the original opening.

We thus have a case of JM quoting from material that was unique to Luke and yet was added to the rest of Luke (presumably by the same author on stylistic grounds) as a prologue.

There are many other arguments of this type revolving around Koester’s requirement for identifying quotations based on them containing author-specific modifications of his/her own sources. Good works on this in the JM case are

Bellinzoni, A. J. The Sayings of Jesus in the Writings of Justin Martyr. Leiden. 1967.

And

Gregory, A. 2003. Reception Of Luke & Acts In The Period Before Irenaeus: Looking Of Luke In The Second Century (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen Zum Neuen Testament 2)

Of these, Gregory’s is the more critical – indeed, he has been criticised for a tendency towards hyper-skepticism. But even so, he accepts that JM must have known Luke.

I would recommend getting hold of one or both of these if you are interested in the topic!

JM also seems to quote from Mark, as follows:

And when it says that he changed the name of one of the apostles to Peter, and it is written in his memoirs that this also happened, with the nicknaming of others as well, two brothers, who were the sons of Zebedee, with the name of Boanerges, that is sons of thunder, this was a sign that it was that very same man through whom also the nickname of Jacob was given to be called Israel, and Hoshea was called Joshua by name, through whose name also the people who remained from those who had come out of Egypt went into the land promised to the patriarchs.


(Dialogue 106:3).

This one is particularly interesting. The passage about the Boanerges is only in Mark. And here, JM seems to assign the text to the memoirs of “Peter”. Now, this is not quite certain, because JM only writes, “and it is written in his memoir” – who does this refer to – Jesus, or Peter? But we know that JM consistently talks about the “memoirs of the apostles”, not of “Jesus”. Since at least the time of Papias, it has been held in the church that Mark was in fact the writer up or amenuensis of Peter. In other words, on the face of it, JM here is not only quoting a tradition found only in our modern Mark, he is also explicitly referring it to that work too.

As with all these topics, I would not expect to persuade of this topic here – it involves a lot of detailed comparison of greek, the style of Luke (and Matthew), etc etc. All I can suggest is that you read and think about the topic at some length, and then I hope you will come to see that by far the most reasonable view is that Luke, Matthew and Mark were already extant in the time of JM.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

I am sorry that I've been away for a few weeks, and a thousand posts have appeared, many of which would be good or entertaining to respond to.

I wrote a posting on the dating of the gospels a few weeks ago that could be easily dug up. Suffice it to say that if Mark was employed, as most people think, by Luke and Matthew independently, and Irenaeus in around 180 knows all three, then of course Mark must predate this. And, as I wrote before, it is clear that Justin Martyr knew these works and a harmonized version as well. So all three predate JM as well. Etc.

That said, although I'll still reserve discussing Justin Martyr until I see what your case for him actually is, I will comment about how big a constraint those things are. Actually not so much. While, ok, Mark can't be as late as 180, here's for example an alternate chronology just off the top of my head that doesn't violate those constraints, just for illustration sake:

- first of all, Q. We know from Papias for example that people were in his time making up sayings of Jesus (even he purports to have filtered what he collected, because apparently some people aren't preaching the right stuff) and people collecting those. In fact he himself is an example of Jesus parables that don't match ours, nor match Thomas. So there was an entire genre of Jesus pericopes being made up at the time. Much like in the 20'th century there would be a whole genre of making up parables about Nasrudin Hodja.

So let's say that genre appears as soon as Paul disappears from the scene, maybe somewhere in the 60's. Or possibly even sooner.

One collection of such pericopes, with a distinct Galilean flavour, becomes Q.

At any rate 60's and onwards

- 135 CE, Hadrian destroys the last hope of rebuilding the temple, outlaws circumcision, outlaws even the Jewish calendar, etc, and Christians get included in all the bans, although they never supported the revolt or considered Bar Kokhba to be the messiah nor were keeping those Jewish traditions in the first place. It's one thing that from then on would drive Christians to distance themselves more from Judaism, and form a separate identity. It's arguably an even bigger failure of the expectations of Judaism than the first revolt brought about.

- 135-140 CE, though possibly even earlier, as Hadrian announced his intention to replace the temple with a Roman temple and triggered the revolt years before 135, gMark writes his work loaded to the brim with a theme of irony and failure of the Christ. In fact, there are at least SOME reasons to suspect that gMark might have not even intended to write an actual gospel, but a parody, same as later "The Prince" wasn't supposed to be actual advice for ruthless princes.

- 140's-150's CE: a lot of people take gMark's story as gospel. Not the least because it's the first coherent Jesus story in a world of disjointed rumours and pericopes about Jesus. Several derivative works appear in quick succession, mashing up gMark's story with the more familiar pericopes they all knew, including Marcion's gospel very early in the 140's, followed by the mash-up that Justin Martyr calls "the memoirs of the apostles" and gMatthew.

- 160's CE: Theophilus of Antioch, the newly minted bishop of one of the biggest churches, commissions gLuke to research things and write a truer gospel in response to Marcion's. Explaining among other things the dedication to Tehophilus. Well, gLuke does a less than stellar work, and most of the theme is just uncritically copying in sequence. (It's one reason why we take Luke to be a pretty good indication of the order in Q.)

- 170's CE: gJohn happens. Which would explain the apparent lack of JM's even hearing about John. Giving the huge margin of the paleographical dating of P52, yes, John can be that late and then some.

Now I'm not going to propose this as THE one true chronology, among other things, because it's not really that important. But it does illustrate how huge the actually supportable intervals are, because, really, the constraints only happen very late. And I might have missed some aspects, you know, take it as just an idle mental exercise for illustration purposes.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Not if you believe a site like this...

http://firstnewtestament.com/gospels_early_silence_martyr.htm

But the question is: should you? (hint: THE FORMATTING).

I'm pretty sure the formatting is the lamest ad-hominem circumstantial ever. But, yeah, it doesn't hinge on trusting that site or any particular other, as much as the fact that all claimed quotes (A) don't really match our gospels as well as you'd expect from the guy who gives exact quotes when it's about the OT, and (B) the same guy who properly cites sources about the OT, in fact, he says the exact book/author for 2/3 of his OT citations, forgets to do that when it comes to having several NT books. Both are much more simply explained by Justin's really having just one source that was actually called "the memoirs of the apostles", and he properly cites that one.

The case against, once again, revolves around obsessing about a set of pseudo data, i.e. things that loom large in the minds of certain people. In this instance, it is things like: Justin Martyr never calls the gospels by name, even though he knows his bible backwards and often names the OT book he is quoting from. Instead (it is alleged) he knows of a single work called "the memoirs of the apostles". Given that this "work" obviously has some sort of resemblance to our extant gospels, some even go so far as to claim that the four gospels were made out of this work, i.e. some time between the time of JM (fl. mid 2nd C.) and Irenaeus, who wrote some twenty years later or so.

Actually the case hinges on those doing the positive claim actually supporting theirs. The whole "I'm right because I can cherrypick opponents X, Y and Z as bogus" act that is done on this kind of issues is ultimately a non-sequitur. If JM can be reasonably supported to have quoted from the scriptures, then that's that, and who cares about what X, Y and Z think? And if not, then that's the nail in the coffin, not what X, Y and Z think.

Now perhaps all this sounds insurmountable. But there are some other factoids to take into account here, of varying degrees of importance. Note also that this site is typical in not actually analyzing any of the data (ie the gospel-like material in JM).

This can be seen at the admirable Textexcavation site:

http://www.textexcavation.com/justinmartyr.html

But again, I didn't ask you to do a politician act and go "look, I can find some guys who I can make sound more wrong than me!" Not the least because, as I was saying, it's a complete non-sequitur anyway. I asked you to elaborate on exactly when and where JM quoted our four gospels. Surely you can spend your time better actually sating my thirst for knowledge than just telling me why I shouldn't trust two guys out of several hundreds

Not the least because among the remaining doubters of JM, there are much better sources than the worst formatted two sites one can find. Calling into question the bottom of the barrel doesn't really mean much. Unless you actually plan to disprove every single one of them and... still fail to support your point at the end of it all, but it seems to me like a pointless act of herculean proportions. Surely it would be more productive to just forget about that, show a few quotes and settle things your way

The first thing to note is that, as the text stands, JM actually refers to the "gospels"; he also says the "memoirs of the apostles" were written by the "apostles and their followers". So all this implies that he knew of more than one text (indeed, one might think, at least four: plural apostles (this would be Mark Matthew and John) and plural followers (Mark (proxy for Peter) and Luke (proxy for Paul)). However, one does not need to go down this somewhat speculative route, merely note that in the text of JM there is reference to “gospels”.

Scond, if you list all the gospelly-type stuff in JM, it more or less neatly condenses into what is in the synoptics, plus a tiny handful of other traditions and glosses, the most famous of which is that Jesus was born in a cave (seen also in the Protoevangelium of James). Justin is clearly using source(s), and it is noteworthy that the source(s) he is using corresponds closely to what is in our present day gospels, with very little else.

Although Justin uses strikingly Johannine language on occasion, whether he actually alludes to the Johannine literature is endlessly agonized over. Answer: unclear.

Third, when Justin refers to gospelly type stuff, he strings together material that when we compare it to the modern gospels, often seems to combine material from both Luke and Matthew. Mark is harder to call because so little of Mark is not also in Luke and Matthew (even so, JM refers to some such).

Fourth, this characteristic points towards the directionality of the gospels as we know them and JM. Quite simply, the procedure for producing the gospels we have today out of a single proto-gospel would be quite problematic (to say the least).

In particular, his account of the nativity is a stringing together of the material in Matthew and Luke. This material is unique to the respective gospels. Furthermore, the nativity material of Luke, despite being clearly Lucan in style, is nevertheless likely to be part of a “second edition” of Luke – the third chapter opens up with a grand formal opening that may have been the original opening.

We thus have a case of JM quoting from material that was unique to Luke and yet was added to the rest of Luke (presumably by the same author on stylistic grounds) as a prologue.

There are many other arguments of this type revolving around Koester’s requirement for identifying quotations based on them containing author-specific modifications of his/her own sources. Good works on this in the JM case are

Bellinzoni, A. J. The Sayings of Jesus in the Writings of Justin Martyr. Leiden. 1967.

And

Gregory, A. 2003. Reception Of Luke & Acts In The Period Before Irenaeus: Looking Of Luke In The Second Century (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen Zum Neuen Testament 2)

Of these, Gregory’s is the more critical – indeed, he has been criticised for a tendency towards hyper-skepticism. But even so, he accepts that JM must have known Luke.

I would recommend getting hold of one or both of these if you are interested in the topic!

JM also seems to quote from Mark, as follows:

And when it says that he changed the name of one of the apostles to Peter, and it is written in his memoirs that this also happened, with the nicknaming of others as well, two brothers, who were the sons of Zebedee, with the name of Boanerges, that is sons of thunder, this was a sign that it was that very same man through whom also the nickname of Jacob was given to be called Israel, and Hoshea was called Joshua by name, through whose name also the people who remained from those who had come out of Egypt went into the land promised to the patriarchs.


(Dialogue 106:3).

This one is particularly interesting. The passage about the Boanerges is only in Mark. And here, JM seems to assign the text to the memoirs of “Peter”. Now, this is not quite certain, because JM only writes, “and it is written in his memoir” – who does this refer to – Jesus, or Peter? But we know that JM consistently talks about the “memoirs of the apostles”, not of “Jesus”. Since at least the time of Papias, it has been held in the church that Mark was in fact the writer up or amenuensis of Peter. In other words, on the face of it, JM here is not only quoting a tradition found only in our modern Mark, he is also explicitly referring it to that work too.

As with all these topics, I would not expect to persuade of this topic here – it involves a lot of detailed comparison of greek, the style of Luke (and Matthew), etc etc. All I can suggest is that you read and think about the topic at some length, and then I hope you will come to see that by far the most reasonable view is that Luke, Matthew and Mark were already extant in the time of JM.

I'm even prepared to concede that the gospels probably existed by the time of JM. In fact, I generally went by Mark being actually written in the 70's so far. There are enough problems with making them good and authoritative sources even then, without also picking an extra battle over the dating, that isn't all that important anyway.

But the rest seems to be at best weak conjecture.

E.g., why not the Gospel Of Peter? Given that we do know there is one where the author literally claimed to be Peter, and it seems to be a derivative of Mark after all, as well as a whole genre of gospels, apocalypses, epistles, memoirs, etc, attributed to Peter... why do we need to assume that whenever JM hints at Peter he means Mark? Why not simply Peter? Heck, why infer even Peter when JM doesn't quite say so? It looks more like confabulation to me than anything else. Also, especially since it's not very clear what he'd call Mark or Peter at the time, it just doesn't follow to derive from a random assigned name that he'd mean the same text we today call Mark.

Yes, the general themes and things he speaks of, parallel our gospels, but the thing is, they're not really exact quotes. And generally we pretty much need a bi-modal Justin who switches between exact quotes and properly citing sources when he talks about OT stuff, and for NT just saying something vaguely similar to the NT gospel he supposedly quotes, and forgetting to even cite which.

What seems to me that can be said is that Justin is using SOME mash-up work containing much the same traditions we have. And really, it's not very surprising. What we now call orthodoxy probably didn't appear over night, so a lot of the ideas about Jesus would already be in circulation in JM's time. And especially if we're told that there were oral traditions that the gospel authors wrote, it's not all that improbable that someone else from the same church, and thus the same general set of beliefs and dogma through which to filter them, would have collected some of the same oral traditions.

In fact to identify something that is in Matthew as only explainable to some other author if someone else took it from Matthew, is pretty much to deny such oral traditions. It just means that whatever was in M and not Mark or Q, IS made up by Matthew and nobody else knew about it unless they were working from Matthew. Which actually I'm even tempted to grant, as it makes a bigger case against HJ than I ever could.

But at any rate, yes, the stories in Mark, Q, L and M were obviously existing in JM's time, and he's working from them. No doubt about that. What is asked is pretty much just how do you know he actually used those gospels, as opposed to some other derivative work?

 

[grahbudd]

Yes, the general themes and things he speaks of, parallel our gospels, but the thing is, they're not really exact quotes. And generally we pretty much need a bi-modal Justin who switches between exact quotes and properly citing sources when he talks about OT stuff, and for NT just saying something vaguely similar to the NT gospel he supposedly quotes, and forgetting to even cite which.

What seems to me that can be said is that Justin is using SOME mash-up work containing much the same traditions we have. And really, it's not very surprising. What we now call orthodoxy probably didn't appear over night, so a lot of the ideas about Jesus would already be in circulation in JM's time. And especially if we're told that there were oral traditions that the gospel authors wrote, it's not all that improbable that someone else from the same church, and thus the same general set of beliefs and dogma through which to filter them, would have collected some of the same oral traditions.

In fact to identify something that is in Matthew as only explainable to some other author if someone else took it from Matthew, is pretty much to deny such oral traditions. It just means that whatever was in M and not Mark or Q, IS made up by Matthew and nobody else knew about it unless they were working from Matthew. Which actually I'm even tempted to grant, as it makes a bigger case against HJ than I ever could.

But at any rate, yes, the stories in Mark, Q, L and M were obviously existing in JM's time, and he's working from them. No doubt about that. What is asked is pretty much just how do you know he actually used those gospels, as opposed to some other derivative work?

Once again, this revolves around the synoptic question.

For example, suppose JM really only had a single mashed-up source. Nevertheless, within this mashed up source, we see that there are phrases that will appear in later Luke. Furthermore, such phrases, by comparing them with parallels in Mark and Matthew, can be seen to be Luke-specific modifications of his source (i.e. Mark).

Here is an example.


JM 1st Apol. 19.6:

[...we have learned; for we know that our Master Jesus Christ said, that] what is impossible with men is possible with God

τὰ ἀδύνατα παρὰ ἀνθρώποις δυνατὰ παρὰ θεῷ

This is a quotation that appears in the triple tradition, i.e. material in all of Mark, Matthew and Luke. And the almost universally accepted reason that the triple tradition exists is that Luke and Matthew both used Mark as a source.

Here are the three examples in the gospels:

Luke 18:27:

[He replied,] "What is impossible for men is possible with God.

τὰ ἀδύνατα παρὰ ἀνθρώποις δυνατὰ παρὰ τῷ θεῷ ἐστιν

Matthew 19:26

[Jesus looked at them and said], "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible."

παρὰ ἀνθρώποις τοῦτο ἀδύνατον ἐστιν, παρὰ δὲ θεῷ πάντα δυνατά

Mark 10:27

[Jesus looked at them and said], "With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God.

παρὰ ἀνθρώποις ἀδύνατον, ἀλλ’ οὐ παρὰ θεῷ· πάντα γὰρ δυνατὰ παρὰ τῷ θεῷ

JM's version is almost exactly the same as that of Luke. But in general, our explanation for Luke's text is that he edited Mark's text. And there are several such examples in JM. And this seems to imply that JM knew Luke.

Now one solution to this is to claim that JM was drawing on a source that Luke also drew on, and that this source was an edition of Mark. Or, more formally, every time that JM departs from Mark in a Lucan direction in his quotations, he is in fact relying on a source that Luke also used to modify his copy of Mark in the same way. And this escapes the conclusion that JM knew Luke. It does not, however, escape from the conclusion that Mark existed before JM, unless we add a further hypothesis that only fragmentary pericopes existed that later got edited by someone very close to Luke's heart, and also got independently gathered up into Mark by someone.

It is of course always *possible* to claim such things, but note now two things. First off, we have now contradicted our original premiss that Luke's deviations from Mark in the triple tradition is generally a result of Luke editing. And second, a "source" that happens to modify Mark in a way that looks like Luke, when reproduced in a work that also parallels lots of other Luke (including single and double tradition) looks very much like - Luke! And to postulate the existence of such a source, when there is no way of driving a wedge between it and Luke itself, is just empty. It has no interesting explanatory power.

One might be able to point to such a source if it included what one might call "special proto-Luke". In other words, if Luke really had a copy of a source that he *in general* used to modify Mark, and JM had it as well, then one might expect JM to sometimes quote material from this source that Luke doesn't. But the trouble with this is that there is virtually nothing in JM that is not in the canonical gospels, and certainly too little to persuade that he really did have an extra source (despite an awful lot of attempts to show this).

Similar arguments can be made for Matthew, but the take-home is this. JM, although variable in his quotation, seems to quote material that we otherwise regard as Lucan redaction of Mark. He also quotes material that is only in Luke (e.g. the nativity material), and material that is shared with Matthew. And the same goes for Matthew. Now we come to looks and walks and etc like a duck time: such material seems indistinguishable from in fact Luke and Matthew. It is only by some odd contortions that one can do this, and the only reason to do it would be to save the otherwise unevidenced assumption that JM is not quoting from our gospels.

JM says he is quoting from "Gospels", the memoirs of "the apostles and their followers". He does so, extensively, and in virtually every case this parallels material known in the synoptic gospels, including material that we otherwise regard as a particular evangelist's redaction of his own source (i.e. Mark).

conclusion: JM knew these gospels.

Again, I don't want to be dogmatic, but try thinking about the relationship of the modern gospels in terms of the synoptic problem and JM without coming to this conclusion!

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Oh, I know about the synoptics. And yes, I'll cheerfully grant that Mark probably did exist before JM. In fact, whatever JM's mashup looked like, it's almost definitely a derivative of Mark. So we don't need to focus much on Mark's existence, I would say.

I can somewhat see Maximara's point about Irenaeus being the only hard upper limit for some document, but I actually think probabilities or supporting it get incredibly thin for a MARK that's that late. So I'm already agreeing with you about Mark. So that's not what I asked. The question was just if it's supportable that JM quotes exactly from our Gospels, or something else, even if they're related.

Also, I'd say that at least of the problems pretty much disappear if you go four-document hypothesis instead of three-document. Then we have some separate sources for stuff unique to Luke or Matthew, such as the nativity, and possibly a proto-Luke along the way.

IF the actual gospel of Luke wasn't composed yet -- and note again that I'm not a particularly strong proponent of that, but just for the sake of exploring the whole possibility space -- there's nothing to say that all the traditions in Luke started with Luke. They may have existed as an actual document L, or a corpus of church traditions of a particular church, or an oral tradition, or whatever, long before Luke even started on his work.

As for a source that is kinda like Luke, but not quite Luke, that's actually a quite simple proposition. We know that Marcion and his opponents accused each other of adding stuff to Marcion's gospel to get Luke, or conversely of lopping off stuff from Luke to get Marcion's gospel. A possible solution to placing Luke after Marcion is basically to go with the possibility that Luke did copy wholesale from Marcion, save for a couple of key additions of his own.

That said, let's look at that quote, supposedly from Luke. It's very close, but not identical. Using your own citations for a quick eyeball comparison, an article and the verb are missing in Justin's version. Ok, I suppose that's close enough for it to be a scribe error in whatever version Justin is using, but...

... it's also an incredibly common idea, phrased in several ways by thousands of different people. In fact, Justin says it without citations himself in the previous chapter 18 as what the Christians believe, and in On Resurrection he cites Homer as saying yet another different phrasing of the same thing. The idea that with a god, or with the gods, nothing is impossible or conversely everything is possible, was a staple of all religious thought across all recorded human history.

I.e., far from having to come from Luke or Mark, it's something that could come from just about any church tradition. It's just about the kind of thing that you'd expect any new religion or religious apologist to squeeze in SOMEWHERE.

Finally, while somewhat less probable, it's not clear at all that Justin had to get it from Luke as opposed to the other way around, or both getting it from some liturgical formula or such. Luke copies things verbatim in other places, and indeed it's one reason why we take the Q passages in Luke to be the best reconstruction of Q we can get. Why would he change Jesus's saying? Well, there are lots of reasons, but it being already a formalized saying or affirmation in his church is one thing that made other people alter scripture or scripture translations in the last 2000 years. See, the KJV for example.

A further problem is that basically far from being the norm, such identifiable quotes are something like a couple total, and even then they're too simple phrases to really have a good identification. Where Justin mentions more than a brief quip, it starts to differ significantly, and points more at some other mash-up -- possibly a harmonization of Luke and Matthew, or possibly some other kind of mash-up -- than we have. E.g., his nativity record while echoing the general ideas in both Luke and Matthew -- which alone says it wasn't directly from either -- also has some differences from both. In fact, it looks more like someone trying to make a definitive version of the virgin birth prophecy being fulfilled, or someone quoting that, than someone actually working from either Matthew or Luke directly.

Still, either way, I guess you did what was asked of you.

 

[maximara]

Oh, I know about the synoptics. And yes, I'll cheerfully grant that Mark probably did exist before JM. In fact, whatever JM's mashup looked like, it's almost definitely a derivative of Mark. So we don't need to focus much on Mark's existence, I would say.

I can somewhat see Maximara's point about Irenaeus being the only hard upper limit for some document, but I actually think probabilities or supporting it get incredibly thin for a MARK that's that late. So I'm already agreeing with you about Mark. So that's not what I asked. The question was just if it's supportable that JM quotes exactly from our Gospels, or something else, even if they're related.

Back in the Usenet group sci.archaeology in 1999 there was a long talk about many of the sources both Pagan and Christian sources. Here is what was said about the Christian sources:


1) Gnostic Marcion (c140)

This is our first provenancal useful evidence for the existance of the Gospels. Unfortunately Gnostic belief held that there were two Gods --a supreme but unknowable God and the defective, inferior, evil Creator-God (Demiurge) who made the world (http://www.religioustolerance.org/gnostic.htm). As a result Marcion only took those portions of Paul's writings and a version of what others called the Gospel of Luke (despite saying it was actually written by Paul) Given all this it is hard to know exactly what Marcion's 'Luke' really was - ours or some unknown variant.

2) Bishops Papias (c145)

Sadly the provenance for Papias's writings are really bad and what we we do have is very fragmentary (http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/ANF-01/anf01-43.htm#P3497_597426) Even if we like Wheless did in 1930 assume the references to his works are accurate there is not much here. He talks about Matthew being in Hebrew and that St.Jerome regarded the 'Gospel according to the Hebrews.' as the original Hebrew Mark but this creates more problems from the standpoint of provenance ('Our' Matthew showing up in Greek but NOT Hebrew) than it solves.

3) Bishop Theophilus (c180)

In Book 2 Chapter 22 of Theophilus directly quotes John 1:1-3 (http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf02.toc.html#P1469_430289) Unfortunately this tells us about as much provenancewise as the c125 fragment does: that -a- Gospel of John (or its origin document) existed in the 2nd century

4) Bishop Irenaeus (c185)

Here we have a person whose works have a good provenance who mentions the names used for our Gospels in Book 3 of his works
(http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/ANF-01/anf01-60.htm#P7297_1937859) As with Papias his Matthew is in Hebrew rather than the Greek Matthew seen just 15 years later (c200). Compounding matter is that some of Irenaeus's quote cannot be found in any Gospel and some of his statements if taken to their logical conclusions create more problems than they solve.

-----

Why does JM's version have to be derivative of the Mark we know? As Robert M Price's The Pre-Nicene New Testament: Fifty-four Formative Texts there were Gospels galore all claiming origins as far back and as good as the ones that became canon.

For all we know JM's "Mark" could have been the original and the version we have is the derivative. It could also be a totally unrelated document that JM called "Mark". Sure JM might have know of "a Mark" but the kicker is was it in any way related to our Mark other then in the name?

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Actually, I'm not going by the name. I just made the same argument, plus I don't consider an inference like 'he kinda could be talking about Peter's memoirs when he talks about some unnamed apostle, and they believed Mark was the secretary of Peter, hence he's talking about Mark' to hold any water in the first place.

My gist is that a lot of the content he quotes has parallels in what we now call Mark. Whether JM would call it Mark or not. Actually, we know it's the "not" variant, as he never calls it Mark.

Whether that meant our final version Mark or some Ur-Markus (proto-Mark) hypothesized by some, is a matter of debate. But I'm kinda lumping them both under gMark for the purpose of this discussion, since IMHO since we don't really know who Mark was or how he treated his sources, it's IMHO splitting hair whether Mark made up X or he took X from someone else who made it up. I'm talking about the general content of Mark, wherever it may have come from. It could have been the fiction of Mark himself, or copied from an Ur-Markus, or writing down an oral tradition, or whatever, but, you know, it's still the content of Mark I'm talking about in relation to JM. I'll save the fine distinctions for a talk where they're more relevant.

That said, I'm still thinking the textual evidence points at one author making up most of Mark, as opposed to it being really a collection of independent oral stories and traditions.

The thing is, while the individual sentences in Mark read like awfully beige prose, they form an overall structure that is brilliant. Those are not separate stories, from independent sources, but form a coherent narrative, have foreshadows from one to another, and in at least one place, several stories in a row form not just a disparate collection of stories, but a layer cake of metaphors nested in metaphors, literally half a dozen levels deep. Metaphor layers that extend across different stories.

Independent urban legends... err... "oral traditions" don't work that way. You don't get guy A who made up story X, foreshadow story Y made up by guy B. Even if they're highly literate authors, there's the simple fact that author A wouldn't know what author B was going to say, short of being psychic. Illiterate peasants and fishermen from ancient Palestine, even less so. And the guys involved in a retelling chain, in effect a huge game of telephone, would have no reason to preserve intact a red herring piece that is just a foreshadow to a different story they probably don't even know of. Much less fit in a layered metaphor together.

Not to mention that peasants from a rural backwater would not come up with stories that are clever parallels to Homer and whatnot. It's doubtful they'd even know by heart their own religious parables to make clever and subtle parallels to, much less come up with parallels to Homer.

So, anyway, Mark is not a folklore anthology, but a coherent story written by one highly-skilled and highly-educated author. If there was any folklore involved in it, he at least heavily reprocessed and rearranged it.

But it's doubtful that there even was such folklore, not the least because it makes a mess of the geography, customs, etc, of the place. E.g., in Mark's version John The Baptist objects to Herod Antipas's marrying his brother's widow, although we see in Ruth for example that that was actually the custom, rather than some religious offense. (We see in other sources that some people were starting to object at the time to marrying a niece, so there might have been SOMEONE who objected on that ground to the marriage with Herodias, but that's something entirely different.) And many many other such problems. In fact most of the motivation for Matthew to write his own, was to correct the many blatant errors in Mark.

So, you know, it's a bit hard to believe that those stories actually originated with people from Palestine in the first place. I.e., they're probably no folklore, but come from Mark. Plus, we see that Matthew and Luke also know no better, but are just taking Mark's BS and correcting it to something more believable. It doesn't sound like there was all that folklore containing those stories floating around, or they could revert to that version, instead of copying word for word from Mark.

So my impression is basically that Mark made all that up. With the note that of course, Mark would be constrained by the OT and Paul and contemporary beliefs, so he didn't literally make it ALL up, but he did take the OT and Paul and all and worked from there to make his own story.

(Again, whether that was our Mark or some Ur-Markus that our Mark copied from, is still open.)

You can probably see where I'm getting with this. Either there is actually an oral tradition with those exact stories, or there isn't. If those stories actually originated with Mark, then a different author quoting the same stories must have gotten them from Mark one way or another. We can't have an independent oral tradition that both exists and doesn't.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

That said, about Marcion being a "gnostic"... the word was, and still is, WAY overused. And more complex.

While some sects did have complex systems of parallel universes, and layered heavens, and aeons ruling them, and all sorts of secret knowledge for initiates that will set you free, and, you know, merit to be called "gnostic", it eventually became a generic word for whatever mundane theology didn't agree with whatever an author favoured. Some actually not that different from orthodoxy. In fact, for some it still seems to work that way, and is just some arbitrary label to apply to anything they want to date later.

In a sense some were accused of being into "knowledge" ("gnosis"), just by contrast with the dumbass anti-intellectuals of the church that would eventually become dominant. If you applied any philosophical or rational thinking to it, you were one of those icky gnostics

Also some gnostics had that dualism, some didn't, and for some actually it was all they had to be called gnostics.

I think Marcion of Sinope is a prime illustration of it all.

The guy was actually pretty much as orthodox as it gets most of the time, and apparently even almost made it to Pope, if he hadn't been out-maneuvered by more skilled politicians. It's also likely that he had been consecrated as a bishop. Pretty much all the accusation of gnosticism came over his thinking that the OT God must be an evil inferior demiurge, rather than any complex systems of secret knowledge for initiates. In fact, quite the contrary, his collecting a public bible instead of it being a one-on-one initiation, is the exact opposite of what gnosticism was supposed to be about. If anything, IMHO that guy deserves to be remembered as an anti-gnostic.

It's also pretty clear that the accusations of gnosticism referred only to his dualistic beliefs and teachings, not the contents of his bible. If his gospel had been a mess of complex parallel worlds, and aeons, and principles and all, I think his opponents would have found more to say against it than just that it lacks some stuff from Luke.

And as a tangent, Marcion is also an illustration of how one can't take things at face value in ancient Christian writings, because they did make up episodes on Earth to illustrate some abstract symbolic metaphor about someone. E.g., the story about how Marcion was at first an all holy ascetic, and then seduced and defiled a virgin, and was kicked out by his father for it, seems to be really a metaphoric fiction of his relation with the Catholic Church (as the virgin) and his excommunication by the Pope (as his Father.)

So, yeah, they were writing such episodes. Beats me why some people think that only about Jesus they can take some story and proclaim that it definitely wouldn't be exactly the same kind of symbolic prose.

 

[grahbudd]

...

That said, let's look at that quote, supposedly from Luke. It's very close, but not identical. Using your own citations for a quick eyeball comparison, an article and the verb are missing in Justin's version. Ok, I suppose that's close enough for it to be a scribe error in whatever version Justin is using, but...

... it's also an incredibly common idea, phrased in several ways by thousands of different people. In fact, Justin says it without citations himself in the previous chapter 18 as what the Christians believe, and in On Resurrection he cites Homer as saying yet another different phrasing of the same thing. The idea that with a god, or with the gods, nothing is impossible or conversely everything is possible, was a staple of all religious thought across all recorded human history.

I.e., far from having to come from Luke or Mark, it's something that could come from just about any church tradition. It's just about the kind of thing that you'd expect any new religion or religious apologist to squeeze in SOMEWHERE.

Finally, while somewhat less probable, it's not clear at all that Justin had to get it from Luke as opposed to the other way around, or both getting it from some liturgical formula or such. Luke copies things verbatim in other places, and indeed it's one reason why we take the Q passages in Luke to be the best reconstruction of Q we can get. Why would he change Jesus's saying? Well, there are lots of reasons, but it being already a formalized saying or affirmation in his church is one thing that made other people alter scripture or scripture translations in the last 2000 years. See, the KJV for example.

A further problem is that basically far from being the norm, such identifiable quotes are something like a couple total, and even then they're too simple phrases to really have a good identification. Where Justin mentions more than a brief quip, it starts to differ significantly, and points more at some other mash-up -- possibly a harmonization of Luke and Matthew, or possibly some other kind of mash-up -- than we have. E.g., his nativity record while echoing the general ideas in both Luke and Matthew -- which alone says it wasn't directly from either -- also has some differences from both. In fact, it looks more like someone trying to make a definitive version of the virgin birth prophecy being fulfilled, or someone quoting that, than someone actually working from either Matthew or Luke directly.

Still, either way, I guess you did what was asked of you.

*mildly* well I just chose à simple example, and there are others. But my first point was really that whole books have been written on this (I cited two) and I urge you to look through them if you're interested. Internet fora are not really the place for the long and cumulative arguments required, as I'm sure you can see.

It's true that Justin's quote is not exact, but so what? Why when he quotes from something should he quote exactly? Luke and matthew do not with their sources afterall (eg compare Luke and Matthew vs mark in the triple tradition).

The point about the Boanerges quote is that that story is actually found in our Mark, and nowhere else. And it's also true that mark (rightly or wrongly) was thought to be the interpreter of Peter. So therefore there's surely a reasonable case to be made for JM actually referring to mark here.

One point I will agree with you on, and that is about textual tradition. It's clear that in the west (and other places) the transmission was indeed quite loose, and we can see that in general Justin's quotations do fit into this textual tradition rather than the Alexandrian. There was (and is!) no single 'Mark' - variants exist in every ms source we have. But nevertheless, there is a difference between this sort of transmission variation, which seems to have been relatively wide in the west, and the sort of variation that exists from much deeper variants. One can see this from the so-called doublets - sayings that exist in different forms in both the triple and double tradition (of which there are around 30 or so). I once looked at these in Greek, and one sees that although in the triple tradition, Matthew mark and Luke are relatively close, in the double tradition Matthew and Luke are relatively different. This suggests that the sources Luke and Matthew got their double tradition material from was actually quite divergent. One possible explanation was that unlike their Greek mark source, they were independently making translations from Aramaic in their double tradition material (or that their sources were different Greek translations of an aramaic original).

 

[IanS]

I am fairly sure you've been party to this discussion before, but actually the "implication" is not that "relatively complete and readable copies" date from the 4th century onwards. A fragment in this context is any incomplete chunk, and some of the early papyri are very substantial. e.g. p66, etc.

veryrarelystable on RatSkep did a count of the amount of material preserved from before the great codices of the fourth century in ms, and it turned out to be that of the 270 chapters in the NT, 197 of them are in papyri that have been dated up to about 300AD, or about 76%. And on top of that, there are of course patristic quotations as well.

OK, well firstly - I did not say that I know the date of the earliest readable copy of any Gospels. Because I have not, and I daresay neither have you or anyone else here, ever had the opportunity to examine any of these early “fragments” for ourselves, much less ever had any opportunity to date them by genuinely accurate scientific methods such as C14.

Instead, what I said was - according to that Wiki link which I quoted earlier, Wikipedia is clearly implying that fragments which are thought to be earlier than the 4th century are not sufficient in number and/or not in sufficiently readable condition to give the bulk of the detail which we now ascribe to the four canonical gospels.

Here, for your convenience is that relevant Wiki entry again, with the relevant words highlighted in red -


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel
Dating
Estimates for the dates when the canonical gospel accounts were written vary significantly; and the evidence for any of the dates is scanty. Because the earliest surviving complete copies of the gospels date to the 4th century and because only fragments and quotations exist before that, scholars use higher criticism to propose likely ranges of dates for the original gospel autographs. Scholars variously assess the majority (though not the consensus [21]) view as follows:


Mark: c. 68–73,[22] c. 65–70[23]
Matthew: c. 70–100.[22] c. 80–85.[23]
Luke: c. 80–100, with most arguing for somewhere around 85,[22] c. 80–85[23]
John: c. 90–100,[23] c. 90–110,[24] The majority view is that it was written in stages, so there was no one date of composition.


Traditional Christian scholarship has generally preferred to assign earlier dates. Some historians interpret the end of the book of Acts as indicative, or at least suggestive, of its date; as Acts mentions neither the death of Paul, generally accepted as the author of many of the Epistles, who was later put to death by the Romans c. 65[citation needed], nor any other event post AD 62, notably the Neronian persecution of AD 64/5 that had such impact on the early church.[25] Acts is attributed to the author of the Gospel of Luke, which is believed to have been written before Acts, and therefore would shift the chronology of authorship back, putting Mark as early as the mid 50s. Here are the dates given in the modern NIV Study Bible:
Matthew: c. 50 to 70s
Mark: c. 50s to early 60s, or late 60s
Luke: c. 59 to 63, or 70s to 80s
John: c. 85 to near 100, or 50s to 70
Such early dates are not limited to conservative scholars. In Redating the New Testament John A. T. Robinson, a prominent liberal theologian and bishop, makes a case for composition dates before the fall of Jerusalem.



As far as “Papyri-66” is concerned, that, according to Wikipedia again (see link and quote below) is part of the so-called Bodmer Papyri, of which P66 is thought to be much earlier than the rest (see below) and which provides a copy for most of the gospel of John, thought to date from some time around 200AD.

Apart from P66, the other Bodmer papyri, apparently include numerous parts of other gospels and/or biblical works, such as Mathew, but those “fragments” are said to date from the 4th century and later (the copy of Mathew is dated there to 7th century, for example). See the link and quote below.

However even if that “estimated” (how? … any C14 dating?) date is correct for P66 being around 200AD, that still puts it about 200 years after the lifetime of Jesus, and about 100-150 years after the dates usually given for when the earliest gospels were said to have been written, eg here is the Wiki link and quote for the dates of those Bodmer papyri -


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodmer_Papyri

Bodmer Papyri
Bible related manuscripts

Greek

Papyrus Bodmer II (66)
Bodmer V — Nativity of Mary, Apocalypse of James; 4th century
Papyrus Bodmer VII-IX (72) — Epistle of Jude, 1-2 Peter, Psalms 33-34
Bodmer X — Epistle of Corinthians to Paul and Third Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians; 4th century
Bodmer XI — Ode of Solomon 1; 4th century
Papyrus Bodmer XIV-XV (75)
Papyrus Bodmer XVII (74)
Bodmer XXIV — Psalms 17:46-117:44; 3rd/4th century
Bodmer XLVI — Daniel 1:1-20
Papyrus Bodmer L — Matthew 25-26; 7th century


Coptic

Bodmer III — John 1:1-21:25; Genesis 1:1-4:2; 4th century; Bohairic
Bodmer VI — Proverbs 1:1-21:4; 4th/5th century; Paleo-Theban ("Dialect P")
Bodmer XVI — Exodus 1:1-15:21; 4th century
Bodmer XVIII — Deuteronomium 1:1-10:7; 4th century
Bodmer XIX — Matthew 14:28-28:20; Romans 1:1-2:3; 4th/5th century; Sahidic
Bodmer XXI — Joshua 6:16-25; 7:6-11:23; 22:1-2; 22:19-23:7; 23:15-24:2; 4th century
Bodmer XXII (Mississippi Codex II) — Jeremiah 40:3-52:34; Lamentations; Epistle of Jeremiah; Book of Baruch; 4th/5th century
Bodmer XXIII — Isajah 47:1-66:24; 4th century
Bodmer XL — Song of Songs
Bodmer XLI — Acta Pauli; 4th century; sub-Achmimic
Bodmer XLII — 2 Corinthians; dialect unknown
Bodmer XLIV — Book of Daniel; Bohairic



The point, which should of course be very clear to you, is that if the above Wikipedia dates and quotes are correct, then it is completely misleading for anyone to suggest that we know what was written in any Gospels said to have been written within about 40 to 70 years of Jesus’ lifetime, or indeed written within at least about 150 years in the case of the estimated date of P66 and the gospel of John, or more widely and more importantly (as the first Wiki quote above says) from any copies known to have been written within about 200 years or more of the 1st century AD.

IOW - as I said before, what is said in the above Wikipedia quotes very clearly implies that most of what is commonly given today as the detailed stories from the four canonical gospels, does not come to us from any fragments dated anywhere near the 1st century AD, but instead mostly (if not entirely) from the earliest readable and relatively complete copies which are typically dated to be from the 4th century onwards.

Or to put that another way - we cannot know what any 1st century gospels actually said about the detail of Jesus, because (apparently) we don’t have any readable and relatively complete copies until some centuries later.

 

[davefoc]

deleted post.

 

[maximara]

Apart from P66, the other Bodmer papyri, apparently include numerous parts of other gospels and/or biblical works, such as Mathew, but those “fragments” are said to date from the 4th century and later (the copy of Mathew is dated there to 7th century, for example). See the link and quote below.

However even if that “estimated” (how? … any C14 dating?) date is correct for P66 being around 200AD, that still puts it about 200 years after the lifetime of Jesus, and about 100-150 years after the dates usually given for when the earliest gospels were said to have been written, eg here is the Wiki link and quote for the dates of those Bodmer papyri -


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodmer_Papyri

Wikipedia is good for a quick thumbnail glance but I would hardly depend on it to provide reliable information.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Conspiracy_theory&diff=495158917&oldid=495158530 is a case in point as references from Oxford University Press; Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology (Edinburgh University Press; Ashgate Publishing Page; Peter Lang and Wiley-Blackwell were reverted (and later ignored) via gaming the system so a collection of editors could push their own definition of what "Conspiracy theory" means that has no reliable source to back it up!
The dating of the fragments is via a method known as Papyrology which as Brent Nongbri in his 2005 Harvard Theological Review paper "The Use and Abuse of P52: Papyrological Pitfalls in the Dating of the Fourth Gospel." is a total garbage method of dating.

"What I have done is to show that any serious consideration of the window of possible dates for P52 must include dates in the later second and early third centuries. Thus, P52 cannot be used as evidence to silence other debates about the existence (or non-existence) of the Gospel of John in the first half of the second century. Only a papyrus containing an explicit date or one found in a clear archaeological stratigraphic context could do the work scholars want P52 to do."

This explicit date or one found in a clear archaeological stratigraphic context ie Provenance is what I have been hammering on and the apologists ignore like crazy. By the standards of Provenance there is simply nothing that show the Gospels as we know them existed before c180 CE and even then there are serious questions as to what was in those versions being cited.

 

[IanS]

Wikipedia is good for a quick thumbnail glance but I would hardly depend on it to provide reliable information.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Conspiracy_theory&diff=495158917&oldid=495158530 is a case in point as references from Oxford University Press; Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology (Edinburgh University Press; Ashgate Publishing Page; Peter Lang and Wiley-Blackwell were reverted (and later ignored) via gaming the system so a collection of editors could push their own definition of what "Conspiracy theory" means that has no reliable source to back it up!
The dating of the fragments is via a method known as Papyrology which as Brent Nongbri in his 2005 Harvard Theological Review paper "The Use and Abuse of P52: Papyrological Pitfalls in the Dating of the Fourth Gospel." is a total garbage method of dating.

"What I have done is to show that any serious consideration of the window of possible dates for P52 must include dates in the later second and early third centuries. Thus, P52 cannot be used as evidence to silence other debates about the existence (or non-existence) of the Gospel of John in the first half of the second century. Only a papyrus containing an explicit date or one found in a clear archaeological stratigraphic context could do the work scholars want P52 to do."

This explicit date or one found in a clear archaeological stratigraphic context ie Provenance is what I have been hammering on and the apologists ignore like crazy. By the standards of Provenance there is simply nothing that show the Gospels as we know them existed before c180 CE and even then there are serious questions as to what was in those versions being cited.

Sure. Wkipedia is not Phys Rev. That's understood. But in my experience it's usually pretty accurate on most factual subjects, and in any case most articles are fully referenced, so if the reader wants to check the original sources then they can.

But if you are referring particularly to the dating of P66, which is generally given as circa 200AD, then of course I am well aware that date was probably arrived at mainly by so called "palaeographic methods", ie broadly meaning a visual examination of the writing.

However, that does not seem to me to be a very scientific method. See for example this wiki page & quote re. the dating of P52 -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rylands_Library_Papyrus_P52

Nongbri collected and published a wide range of dated comparator manuscripts; demonstrating that, although there are plentiful examples of hands similar to that of 52 in the early second century, two later dated papyri also had similar hands (P. Mich. inv. 5336, dated to 152 CE; and P.Amh. 2.78, an example first suggested by E. G. Turner, that dates to 184 CE). Nongbri suggests that this implied that older styles of handwriting might persist much longer than some scholars had assumed, and that a prudent margin of error must allow a still wider range of possible dates for the papyrus:.

What emerges from this survey is nothing surprising to papyrologists: paleography is not the most effective method for dating texts, particularly those written in a literary hand. Roberts himself noted this point in his edition of 52. The real problem is the way scholars of the New Testament have used and abused papyrological evidence. I have not radically revised Roberts's work. I have not provided any third-century documentary papyri that are absolute "dead ringers" for the handwriting of P52, and even had I done so, that would not force us to date P52 at some exact point in the third century. Paleographic evidence does not work that way. What I have done is to show that any serious consideration of the window of possible dates for P52 must include dates in the later second and early third centuries. Thus, P52 cannot be used as evidence to silence other debates about the existence (or non-existence) of the Gospel of John in the first half of the second century. Only a papyrus containing an explicit date or one found in a clear archaeological stratigraphic context could do the work scholars want P52 to do. As it stands now, the papyrological evidence should take a second place to other forms of evidence in addressing debates about the dating of the Fourth Gospel.

Nevertheless, most scholars continue to favour the earlier dating, though the possibility of a later date cannot be entirely discounted. The John Rylands Library continues to maintain Roberts's assessment of the date of P52, that it "may with some confidence be dated in the first half of the second century A.D.",[10] and the date is given as c. 125 in standard reference works.


Of course I'm well aware that theologically interested historians, and historically interested theologians, who typically believe that such documents and fragments are from a very early date, will say that such palaeographic methods are extremely accurate. But, of course, they would say that, wouldn't they!

Whilst physical measurements such as C14 do have quite wide error ranges, eg +/- 50 years, they are at least objective scientific methods. And as some of those wiki links have said, it does seem rather common for theologically or historically interested parties to date such documents optimistically early, presumably wishing to push the dates back as close as possible to the time of Christ.

The reason for that, is of course, that the further removed you are in time from the claimed events (such as the details of what the gospels say Jesus said and did), the less reliable such accounts become. In fact, the further you become removed in time from the believed events, the more your unreliability rises exponentially.

That is of course well known from numerous legal cases and trials, where nowadays a judge will refuse to admit/allow such evidence at all when it is far removed in time from the claimed events.

In the present case of dating the gospels, it is one thing if our detailed information is coming from gospels accurately dated to circa. 70AD to 100AD, but an entirely different and far less reliable matter if in fact our gospel detail comes from copies of copies made centuries later by devoted Christian copyists.

Even if we ignore the fatal problem that such copies are actually hearsay accounts from unnamed authors apparently relying on unknown unnamed sources, evidence like that, coming so long after the claimed events, would never be admitted in any western legal court, purely on the basis that the time lapse renders it so unreliable as to be worse than useless (actually “worse” than useless, because far from failing to inform you correctly, it’s more likely to seriously misinform you).

 

[maximara]

Of course I'm well aware that theologically interested historians, and historically interested theologians, who typically believe that such documents and fragments are from a very early date, will say that such palaeographic methods are extremely accurate. But, of course, they would say that, wouldn't they!

Whilst physical measurements such as C14 do have quite wide error ranges, eg +/- 50 years, they are at least objective scientific methods. And as some of those wiki links have said, it does seem rather common for theologically or historically interested parties to date such documents optimistically early, presumably wishing to push the dates back as close as possible to the time of Christ.

The reason for that, is of course, that the further removed you are in time from the claimed events (such as the details of what the gospels say Jesus said and did), the less reliable such accounts become. In fact, the further you become removed in time from the believed events, the more your unreliability rises exponentially.

That is of course well known from numerous legal cases and trials, where nowadays a judge will refuse to admit/allow such evidence at all when it is far removed in time from the claimed events.

In the present case of dating the gospels, it is one thing if our detailed information is coming from gospels accurately dated to circa. 70AD to 100AD, but an entirely different and far less reliable matter if in fact our gospel detail comes from copies of copies made centuries later by devoted Christian copyists.

Even if we ignore the fatal problem that such copies are actually hearsay accounts from unnamed authors apparently relying on unknown unnamed sources, evidence like that, coming so long after the claimed events, would never be admitted in any western legal court, purely on the basis that the time lapse renders it so unreliable as to be worse than useless (actually “worse” than useless, because far from failing to inform you correctly, it’s more likely to seriously misinform you).

As I tried to show with the example of John Frum even the early traditional dates for Gospels doesn't help!

If we assume Manehivi was the "historical" John Frum then we have to admit in a period as short as 16 years (1941 to 1957) he was transformed from a illiterate native (ie brown to black skinned) to a literate white US serviceman who appeared to the Elders a decade earlier.

The only other logical assumption is the mythical John Frum came first and Manehivi, inspired by this myth tried to plug himself into it but rather then being seen as an inspired follower his efforts were woven back into the preexisting myth.

Using the John Frum-Manehivi example as our baseline there is NOTHING to say the Gospel Jesus and the teacher Paul talks about are one and the same.

Before anyone brings up the brother nonsense in Paul's writings I would like to point to Hong Xiuquan leader of the Taiping Rebellion (1850 to 1864) who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ. How do we know that Paul didn't meet some nutcase who only thought he was the biological brother of Jesus but like Hong Xiuquan in reality wasn't? Answer is we don't.

If as many Christ Mythers suspect Jesus is like John Frum then the historical search is a blind dead end--there is NOTHING to connect the Gospel accounts to an actual flesh and blood teacher in the denoted time period.

Even though there are centuries separating them from the stories told about them there is more evidence for the historical people that we know as Robin Hood and King Arthur then there is for the Gospel Jesus.

 

[Stone]

Even though there are centuries separating them from the stories told about them there is more evidence for the historical people that we know as Robin Hood and King Arthur then there is for the Gospel Jesus.

HJ-ers here are NOT discussing the Gospel Jesus. We are discussing the human teacher Jesus, as found in the extra-Biblicals. To talk about the Gospel Jesus is shameless obfuscation and goal-post-shifting of the most tawdry kind. Typical of many a myther on the web and of most creationists and holocaust denialists as well: Set up a moving target in order not to be pinned down.

Where were you trained?

Stone

 

[Greediguts]

More over near the end of Book II, Chapter XIII of his Commentary on Matthew Origen says that he disagrees with Josephus' placement of blame for the destruction of Jerusalem on the death of James saying that it should be attributed to Jesus. Because of this and numerous other conflicts with Origen there is serious doubt to the authenticity of the 'who was called Christ' phrase. (Painter, John (2005). Just James: The Brother of Jesus in History and Tradition. Univ of South Carolina Press ISBN 0-567-04191-3.)

In fact Painter above states:

"What he (Origen) has to say at this point is, however, not to be found in extant text of Josephus. No precise reference is given by Origen, and the quotation cannot be found in Josephus, nor does its form suggest that it is a precise quotation."

If anything Painter is going back to the idea theorized back in 1909--the 'who was called Christ' phrase could be just as likely be a well meant but incorrect gloss based on Origen's comment later inserted into the text of Josephus by a later copiest. To paraphrase a famous movie statement 'This is not the James you are looking for'.

maximara, as you really didn't answer me regarding the Painter quote, I got a hold of a copy of Just James: The Brother of Jesus in History and Tradition from Amazon. The quote you reference is on page 203 (you offered no page number). Painter at first, refers to this Origen quote:
"...said that these things happened to them in accordance with the wrath of God in consequence of the things which they dared to do against James the brother of Jesus who is called the Christ."

Painter states that this retains the "idiom of Josephus in the genuine reference to James". Then he gives the following quote from Origen:
"And the wonderful thing is this, that, though he did not accept Jesus as the Christ, he yet gave testimony that the righteousness of James was so great; and he says that the people thought that they had suffered these things because of James."

Painter is referring to Origen stating "the righteousness of James was so great" as Josephus does not mention this. Painter states "this is precisely what is missing from the evidence of the genuine reference to James in Ant. 20.197-203".

So, no, Painter was not saying the Josephus sentence contained an incorrect gloss, Painter was referring to Origen's use of the phrase "the righteousness of James was so great..."because that is not found in Josephus nor does it appear to be a direct quote. (The quote I found and gave is actually correct in form, location, and context.)

If you are going to quote sources, it would be nice for all involved that you be familiar with the source and its context because I honestly have a hard time believing you read this book. Of course one could assume you just cut & paste from some other site without bothering to check that site's sources/references, yes?

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

HJ-ers here are NOT discussing the Gospel Jesus. We are discussing the human teacher Jesus, as found in the extra-Biblicals. To talk about the Gospel Jesus is shameless obfuscation and goal-post-shifting of the most tawdry kind. Typical of many a myther on the web and of most creationists and holocaust denialists as well: Set up a moving target in order not to be pinned down.

Where were you trained?

Stone

Except the question is exactly how much you know about that Jesus. E.g., what do you base on that he even was a teacher? Extra-biblical? Oh you mean the Christian 4'th century interpolation that was the Testimonium Flavianum? Riiight, Eusebius sooo totally wasn't getting that from the gospels

And of course the thread is precisely about what counts as a HJ. I don't see how you get to just proclaim what everyone else should take as the answer to that question.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

@Greedyguts:
Now I don't know what Painter's argument is, but let's do the full quote thing from Origen:

And to so great a reputation among the people for righteousness did this James rise, that Flavius Josephus, who wrote the “Antiquities of the Jews” in twenty books, when wishing to exhibit the cause why the people suffered so great misfortunes that even the temple was razed to the ground, said, that these things happened to them in accordance with the wrath of God in consequence of the things which they had dared to do against James the brother of Jesus who is called Christ.​

What he says isn't just that Josephus said that the righteousness of "James the brother of Jesus who was called Christ" was so great, but that Flavius Josephus blames even the razing of the temple in the First Jewish Revolt on what the Jews did to James.

Needless to say, the only paragraph in Josephus about "James the brother of Jesus who was called Christ" that we have doesn't say that, and is in the awfully wrong place to say that. It happens when Albinus was made governor, i.e., in 62 CE. That's 8 YEARS before the destruction of the temple. And sure enough, in the chapter that we got an interpolation about James in, he doesn't talk about any temple destruction, but the polar opposite, finishing building the addition to the temple that he mentioned at the end of the previous chapter.

In fact not only it would be in the wrong place, but the wrong work of Josephus altogether, IIRC. The destruction of the temple is in the Wars Of The Jews, not in Antiquities Of The Jews. In fact the Antiquities Of The Jews ends with book XX, where the last chapter is about governor Florus who made the revolt necessary. And he even says himself that he'll end the antiquities there, that it's 20 books, and he'll write about the war elsewhere. (But apparently he never got to it.) In fact, you read it for yourself: http://www.ccel.org/j/josephus/works/ant-20.htm

So, yeah, the destruction of the temple wouldn't even be in the same work as where we got the James reference.

That's a bit bigger a discrepancy than just whether James's righteousness was so great, you know. Whatever such paragraph Origen found, where Josephus blames the destruction of the temple on the execution of "James the brother of Jesus who was called Christ", most definitely isn't the same as OUR reference to the supposedly same James.

Plus, again, what Origen seems to say is that Flavius Josephus blames the misfortune of the Jews on their daring to execute the brother of Jesus Christ. But that not only doesn't fit the chapter we have on James (the only one punished for it there is Ananus son of Ananus), but doesn't fit anything Josephus does anywhere else, nor the character and purpose of Josephus's work. Josephus writes his stuff to dispell the notion that the Jews are some superstitious backwards cultists of a crazy God, and wants to show that most of them were as normal people and subjects as anyone in the Roman Empire. Whenever someone did something wrong or was to blame for something or was blamed for picking on a prophet, he just says who. The whole point is to say that, no, it was THAT guy, not Jews as an amorphous category to vilify and demonize. The notion that a Jew would just accept blame on behalf of the Jews for wronging Christ or the Christians is a loonie Christian notion, not something Josephus actually does or would do.

So we can be pretty sure that if Origen found such a paragraph, not only it wasn't ours, but it was a Christian interpolation too. I.e., we know that Christians were trying to fit "James the brother of Jesus who was called Christ" into Josephus, even if they had to resort to forgery. (I guess such is the nature of loony fanboys willing to lie, cheat and deceive for Jesus.)

 

[grahbudd]

Except the question is exactly how much you know about that Jesus. E.g., what do you base on that he even was a teacher? Extra-biblical? Oh you mean the Christian 4'th century interpolation that was the Testimonium Flavianum? Riiight, Eusebius sooo totally wasn't getting that from the gospels

And of course the thread is precisely about what counts as a HJ. I don't see how you get to just proclaim what everyone else should take as the answer to that question.

What evidence do you have that Eusebius is the author of the TF?