Matthew and Luke both took some info from Mark but also took some info from the Q source and their own sources. Since all three have this same wording, it is likely the error came through Mark.
The blog author briefly references this Aramaic theory in his post and says that it has been similarly debunked, linking to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf0Fm8aVApk
The supposed Aramaic word for rope doesn't appear in any sources until the 10th century CE and is derived at that time from the same Cyril origin.
It wouldn't be at all unusual for all three languages to have a very similar rare word for rope if the word at least originally meant a (rarely made) type of rope made of camel's hair.
A couple decades ago, I was told that this saying was an intentional play on words between an Aramaic word for a rope made of camel's hair rhyming with the Aramaic word for camel, to make the saying more memorable.
It's a bit sad to hear it was probably made up rather than clever word play.
Others here have posted the Aramaic word in question.
Notice though that the anonymous author of "John" appears to have tried to scrub it in the early/mid second century. It was apparently already a troublesome image by that time.
The fainting hypothesis seems much more likely than an intentional fraud.
Given the original leaders initially successfully scattered to the wind, then later returned to Jerusalem, and continued to travel the empire despite being slowly hunted down, tortured and executed by the Roman government over the next few decades, it seems they genuinely believed they were serving some grand purpose beyond themselves. They were clearly mobile, and word clearly got around they were being hunted. It would have been a much easier life for any of them to settle and hide in any one of scattered corners of the empire they visited rather than attempting to start churches there.
Especially after word got 'round that the first few had been tortured and executed, I'd expect any intentional fraudsters to just melt away into the backwater corners of the empire.
If they were going to make things up, you'd think they'd have made at least one of the disciples brave and smart. (To a man, they all come across as more than a bit dense and cowardly.) At a minimum, you'd think they would have made the first pope (Cephas/Peter) much less foolishly impulsive, and removed the several incidents where he tried to correct Jesus.
If you were making it up from whole cloth, you'd also have at least one of the disciples faithfully hang out at the tomb waiting for the resurrection, rather than having a group of women (considered hysterical unreliable witnesses) be the ones to discover the resurrection. Failing that, you'd expect at least one of the disciples to say "ah, of course" to the women, rather than (to a man) accuse them of hallucination.
Instead, with the official story, the one good leader is gone from the earth just as the story is getting going, and the remaining leaders are all poor choices.
A more plausible explanation is that one of the many charismatic anti-establishment nomadic preachers of the day assembled a ragtag bunch of illiterate fishermen, outcast Roman collaborators, etc. He starts to get some fame, it goes to his head and he gets a bit too anti-establishment, especially anti-priest. The priests convince the occupying Romans that they better execute him for sedition before he raises a rebel army. After his arrest and execution, his ragtag bunch flee Jerusalem and scatter. It turns out that against one-in-a-million odds, this one guy faints and survives crucifixion, wakes up a few days later, and wanders off to find his followers. The women left behind to do the grunge work discover the empty tomb, word gets 'round the small community, and the disciples trickle back into Jerusalem. The illiterate former cowards set out spreading the message. The leader eventually succumbs to his wounds a few weeks or months later, but his followers rationalize this just as his way of going back to heaven after making his point by coming back from crucifixion. They hide away the body to protect it from the Romans as they patiently await his second resurrection. (Or maybe the leader counted his blessings having survived execution and himself melted away into the backwaters of the empire without telling anyone.) As it was taking longer than they expected for Jesus to come back a second time, they later started a collection of sayings in the original Aramaic (the Q document hypothesis). At some point, a scribe marginally literate in Koine Greek tooks down Mark's version of events. Later on, other scribes working from these sources, passed oral history, and perhaps direct access to the disciples, wrote down a few more histories in Koine Greek. At some point, a physician (perhaps a freed slave, formerly belonging to a relative of Paul's) traveling with Paul tried to collect a proper history of events, citing names and locations of eyewitnesses.
Paul makes note of the portions of his letters that he's writing out with his own hand rather than dictating to a Greek-literate scribe. So, it seems his audience expected even most of his writings to be through a scribe rather than directly written by him, despite him being literate in Greek. Presumably early Christians would have similarly been un-surprised that scribes were involved in writing Greek accounts for illiterate Aramaic-speaking fishermen.
In any case, a mildly competent fraudster would have set himself or a collaborator up as the wise and brave hero, and would have vanished when it became clear that at best the leaders were going to spend decades on the run with only the clothes on their backs.
Being mistaken about what they witnessed seems much more likely than an intentional fraud.
Nevertheless, it remains the case that Christianity began with a diverse multitude of often mutually contradicting schools of thought and far more than four Gospels, all written decades if not centuries after the death of Jesus, about whom we know nothing beyond a scholarly consensus that a person existed upon whom the religion is based, supernatural claims notwithstanding. We certainly have not a single word or teaching that can be directly attributed to Jesus, or the apostles. Whether one considers that "intentional fraud" or simply religion and folklore in its natural state is up for interpretation.
Wholesale fabrication was the normal mode of production for religious literature at the time. Why would exactly four gospels, out of the many dozens, be different, that way? And why exactly those four and not some other? Their contradictions demonstrate their authors were not interested in accurately recording anything.
We need look no farther than 2 Peter to find dire warnings to pay no attention to the other Christians saying Jesus had not walked the Earth; so we know that was a common enough belief to worry its late forger. Of course anything they wrote was burnt in short order, along with them.
Given they wrote in Koine, and exhibit some ignorance of the geography of the area, and almost definitely never met anyone that met Jesus, it's reasonable to assume no spoken Aramaic accounts were part of their source material.
There is some evidence in Matthew that it could have originally been written in Aramaic.
It seems fairly reasonable then to assume it was a literary device made by the author of Mark - his writing is actually pretty good as far as allegory goes - that was subsequently lifted near verbatim by the later two authors.
There are some parts of Matthew and Luke that neither come from Mark nor Q so they each also have one or more other sources unique to themselves.
Given that we know nothing about the provenance or contents of 'Q' - it's lost to time, and its hypothetical existence is effectively intuited by some researches - I do not understand how we can identify the set of things 'not in Q' (or indeed 'in Q').
I'd also note that there's zero evidence to suggest the unknown authors of Matthew and Luke had other sources - there's more evidence to suggest they were simply making stuff up.
If you could cite some rational sources that describe what you're alluding to, I'd be delighted to read them.
As I noted in a sibling comment, the consensus is Marcan Priority, but a) it's not a huge majority, and b) it's ultimately a tallest dwarf competition anyway.
Q is literally 'source' - with unknown author and unknown content - so we don't know what's in it nor what's not in it.
Therefore I challenged the claim by parent that 'anything not in Q ...' because that's an objectively ludicrous statement.
My 'theory', inasmuch as I have one, is that the authors of Luke and Matthew had different target audiences, different incentives, but predominantly the same (probably two sets of) materials.
They made different mistakes than the author of Mark, and indeed each other, though were presumably much more earnest.
The author of Mark was probably just writing allegorical fiction.
The author of Matthew for instance was the only one to talk about saints / zombies rising from the graveyards and walking into town, being seen by many people, etc - which is an odd thing for everyone else to have missed or not think to be worth mentioning.
There's a beautiful graphic showing % breakdowns of the Mark / Luke / Matthew content about half-way down this page: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gospels
EDIT: that whole page is worth a read to get a better idea on the bleed between the different texts, a historical context for when they were probably written, and a reminder of the earliest copies we can reliably put dates to.
I would prefer to earnestly cite Price, Carrier, Fitzgerald etc, but those citations are less convenient, especially for casual readers (clicking a link rather than obtaining books).
Disliking the style of rationalwiki seems insufficient reason to discount the clear assertions made, explained, and with original sources cited on that page.
Can you identify matters of factual error in that graphic I pointed at, or other material on that link?
I note this is the only comment you've made on the entire thread. I don't believe it moves us forward.
There is not a hint of evidence for unattested "sources" beyond their fevered imaginations. Making shit up was just how the stuff was produced, at the time, as illustrated by the (literally!) dozens of other "gospels" and forged epistles from the same period.
The King James Only movement alone:
asserts the belief that the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible is superior to all other translations of the Bible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Only_movement
This barely scratches the surface of the many opinions held about the collections of smaller books that are bound as versions of "The Bible"; which books, which translations, which interpretations, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon
and lots of disagreement about translation and interpretation.
As one who is fond of classical English literature, I am compelled to agree.
I'd suggest a large portion of self-identified Christian believers really haven't thought much about it at all, beyond (as you say) some orthodox assumptions about divine nature etc.
But as per my link above to wikipedia (Marcan Priority) the larger consensus amongst religious historians / researchers is that Mark was written first, Luke & Matthew were written subsequently, and based heavily on a combination of Mark + some unknown source ('Q').
What is interesting is that is appears to be a book of quotations, rather than a narrative - so Matthew and Luke agree more than expected when directly quoting Jesus. At the time the theory was proposed we hadn't discovered any gospels like this, but now at least one such book of Jesus quotations has been found.
"Q", like "oral traditions", Docetism, and Gnosticism, turns out to be a fever dream of "biblical scholars" working before sound textual analysis had been invented.
I recalled something about the intrigue over some parchments from this collection, and found this recent story [0] about the alleged illegal sale, recovery, translation efforts, and (this year) publication of some fragments.
One of the researchers is quoted in that article with a 'This is not Q' statement.
[0] https://www.thedailybeast.com/scholars-publish-new-papyrus-w...
I haven't seen anywhere which suggests that Thomas is Q, but to me if a book of biblical quotations is hypothesised when none has previously been found, and forty-five years later a book of biblical quotations is discovered (which, despite uncertainty about its timing, certainly dates to at least a millennium before the hypothesis) that lends some weight to the hypothesis.
Of course, given my general ignorance in this area, perhaps books of quotations from this time are common, and hypothesising the existence of one is like hypothesising the existing of a website for a popular TV show in 2023 (i.e. a meaningless proposition).
Given 'Q source' (tautology, forgive me) was a conceptual construct to try to explain a part of the synoptic problem, there's no reason to believe it was necessarily a single document in the modern sense, or that earlier versions (that we don't have) may be subsets of things we actually subsequently got our hands on.
(The phrase you're looking for is "divinely inspired", but Christianity also teaches that all of world history is also divinely inspired. It's a very broad category.)
It is a small lie from among an enormously larger corpus.
The only evidence I've seen points in the opposite direction; e.g.:
- The frequency and granularity of place names mentioned match other documents where we're pretty sure the people actually travelled there; vs other documents where we're sure they never travelled there
- The frequency of names and requirements for disambiguation (e.g., Jesus has two disciples named James, but only one named Bartholomew)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5Ylt1pBMm8
Regarding Aramaic: I'm just learning Biblical Greek, and one common pattern is rather than saying "X replied, '...'", to say 'X replied, saying '...'" (or "Replying, X said '...'". A Jewish friend who is a classicist told me that this pattern was a "semitism" -- i.e., not something you'd hear in native Koine Greek, but something imported from Aramaic / Hebrew. This would indicate at least that the original source material was written by native Aramaic speakers. (This latter bit is lower significance, because it was an offhand comment she made when discussing something else.)
I was probably thinking of the author of Mark who had his Jesus doing the roundabout trip via Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, or the same author having Jesus stepping out of his boat and into a region that is actually 45km from the shore [1].
With regards Hebrew phrasing - I believe the author of Matthew was almost definitely Jewish, not sure on the authors of Mark (who I think was writing for a non-Jewish audience) or Luke. So they were writing in common Greek, but almost definitely were either Jewish, or spoke Hebrew, and/or were well versed in Jewish lore.
Given the earliest copies we have date from a couple of hundred years after the alleged events, and would have been transcribed numerous times by then, we can't confidently read too much into the phrasing nuances, can we?
[0] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gospels
[1] pages 72 & 106 -https://ia800707.us.archive.org/17/items/NailedTenChristianM...
> And on the other hand, if Mark received his Gos- pel from Peter, why is it that the other Gospels have more anecdotes about Peter, including for example, Je- sus telling him, “You are Peter the rock, and upon this rock I will build my church”? Would Peter himself for- get such an incident? It gets worse. Mark shows no un- derstanding of the social situation in the Holy Land, making numerous errors that no one living in early first century Judea would have made. Interestingly enough, when you compare Matthew’s and Mark’s Gospels, one finds that the author of Matthew is constantly correcting Mark’s blunders about all aspects of Jewish society, re- ligion, the calendar, holidays, customs, attitudes – even repeated misquotes of scripture.
I'm afraid this is just not informative at all, and doesn't give me a good impression of the rest of the book.
Why did Mark not include it? The simplest answer is that he didn't think it was important. Mark is the shortest book -- there are lots of things that mark could have included and didn't. His implication is that somehow Mark didn't know where Peter / Cephas / Rock's nickname came from, which I find much more hard to believe than that he just decided not to include it. This is hardly the kind of evidence you can follow with "it gets worse".
But it gets worse. There's absolutely no detail here -- what social situation is Mark allegedly showing no understanding of? What kinds of "errors" is he making? I can't go and verify what he's saying, or consider the claim critically myself. Is Mark's change an "error", showing a basic lack of knowledge about the societal situation? Or is it a deliberate "contextualization", to make the stories accessible to a Greek audience without having to explain loads of irrelevant cultural background? No way to check and judge for myself; I'm expected to just take it on his authority.
And re the geographical "blunder" -- I someone in Cambridge, UK today said, "I'm going by way of Manchester to London", nobody would say they were committing a "geographical blunder". They'd understand that person to mean that they are going to first visit Manchester briefly, and then go to London.
This sort of thing is exactly in line with other things I've read claiming that Jesus didn't exist; I've never seen anything to make me think it's worth spending more of my time digging into.
Coincidentally, this fairly describes the reaction of a sceptic reading the book of Mark.
Anyway, you quoted entirely the wrong section, given your earlier question.
> "“from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis,” a trip 50 miles out of his way, on foot!"
Someone going from Cambridge to London via Manchester .. would take the train, or a bus, or drive.
As noted, this was a walking journey. It could be hand-waved away, but aren't you curious why someone would mention an 80km detour but not give the reader any tidbits about why, or what went on in Sidon that was worth a) the massive detour & effort, and b) mentioning?
I agree, however, that this is not, by itself, a compellingly damning piece of evidence. I hope you don't think it was meant as such.
> But it gets worse. There's absolutely no detail here.
Again, you're echoing the sentiment of people reading these works and wondering why there's no source citations, why the authors don't identify themselves, why there's no record of dates, why there's no critical analysis offered.
That book I pointed you at contains a lengthy bibliography, and in fairness was intended to provide an overview of the field.
There are certainly much more detailed works - including that author's follow-up trilogy Mything In Action, which I can highly recommend.
Obviously Price, Carrier, et al, provide a wealth of very detailed analysis, if you are indeed genuinely interested.
> I've never seen anything to make me think it's worth spending more of my time digging into.
Are you perhaps strongly invested in a particular position on this subject?
I'm strongly enough invested in the truth to ask you for references, read them, and engage critically with them. I can honestly say that if I was wrong, I would want to know. I've even thought carefully about what kind of evidence could be presented to me to convince me that I was wrong. Can you say the same?
> Again, you're echoing the sentiment of people reading these works and wondering why there's no source citations, why the authors don't identify themselves, why there's no record of dates, why there's no critical analysis offered.
The difference is, Mark isn't a 21st century skeptic claiming to represent scholarship. He's a first-century author trying to write down what's happened for common people to read. The proper thing to compare him to is other books of his time to which we give credence.
> As noted, this was a walking journey. It could be hand-waved away, but aren't you curious why someone would mention an 80km detour but not give the reader any tidbits about why, or what went on in Sidon that was worth a) the massive detour & effort, and b) mentioning?
The key thing here is that Tyre and Sidon are "foreign" places in the same region. You make a big deal about how far away they are, but almost everywhere in the New Testament they're lumped together. For example, in the Matthew version of this story (15:21-29), Matthew says, he "withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon". It then tells the story, followed by "Jesus left there and went along the Sea of Galilee". Mark, on the other hand, says "Jesus... went to the vicinity of Tyre"; then tells the story, and then says "Jesus left Tyre and went through Sidon, down to the Sea of Galilee".
Nobody would at all wonder why, if I was in Paris, I decided I wanted to visit Lyon first before returning to London; or why if I was in Manchester I'd visit the Lake District before returning to Cambridge. Mark mentions Sidon for the same reason Matthew mentions Sidon: they think it's important to let us know that Jesus wasn't stuck south of Galilee, and/or that opposition at some point literally drove him out of the country. He doesn't tell any stories about Sidon for the same reason Matthew doesn't: nothing that happened there was worth the space on the scroll. That he went there, not what he did there, was the point. If anything, the fact that Mark feels it necessary to add a chronology (Tyre first then Sidon) when he could well have glossed over it like Matthew did, is a small amount of evidence that he's trying to be more accurate.
A more evidentiary approach here would be to look at other uses of the word "dia" (the word translated "by way of" in that verse) in ancient Greek. If other ancient sources exclusively use "ek X dia Y eis Z" (from X through Y to Z -- those are the prepositions used in that verse) to mean that Y is between / on the way from X to Z, then that lends credence to the "Mark is bad at geography" theory. If we have other examples of that pattern being for large-ish detours, then it undermines the "Mark is bad at geography" theory.
> That book I pointed you at contains a lengthy bibliography, and in fairness was intended to provide an overview of the field.
What you'd normally do in this case is to include the most convincing or most representative pieces of evidence. If among the top bits of evidence against Mark are, "He didn't include the story of how Peter got his name", and "He said Jesus went from Tyre to Galilee through Sidon", it gives me a lot more confidence in Mark.
I mean, sure, I'll take a quick look at Price et al; but my experience so far leads me to expect more like this -- people eager to find something to quibble with, uncritically making large lists of things that don't really mean anything.
You refer to 'Mark' a lot - are you aware we don't know the author's name?
Comparing that work to actual historians of the time does that work no favours at all. Generally (at least the ones we have the most trust in) were identifying themselves, identifying their sources, writing about contemporary events, and so on.
It's unsurprising the mistake in Mark is repeated, slightly modified, in Matthew, given the way the latter lifted much of the former.
You're writing a lot of words to try to rationalise this one fairly trivial mistake. A simpler explanation exists - whoever wrote Mark wasn't familiar with the area, did not have access to maps (unsurprising), was not referring to any earlier source material, etc.
If you're relying on etymologies around via to provide legitimacy to this story, I'd suggest your complaints that I'm not providing substantive evidence in neatly tied up packages are disingenuous.
I don't believe you're sincere in your research, but on the off-chance I'll reiterate my recommendation for Fitzgerald's three-book work, Mything in Action.
If you find the material insufficiently detailed then his bibliography is a good place to pursue your search for points of view orthogonal to your beliefs.
Jesus ("Yeshua") was the single most common name among Jews of the time, with numerous examples noted in Josephus. Yet, they have no account of their puppet encountering a single example in a year's wandering the region.
Certainly, neither Paul writing in the 50s, nor the Roman church elders who wrote 1 Clements in the 60s had heard of a Jesus ever saying anything noteworthy, despite that backup from that quarter would have enormously eased their own arguments. The anonymous author of "Mark" writing in the 70s evidently confabulated a Jesus to mouth Paul's opinions (as found in his letters) to silence quarrelsome opposition. Amazingly, "Mark" seems to have had little more than Paul to draw on, even then. Every scrap else written down seems to have been torched by his time.
It is particularly interesting that (the anonymous forger of the book of) "John" chose to scrub the "camel" line from his personal canon.
There is not so much as a hint of actual evidence that there was ever any such thing as a Q source, nor M, L, or J; nor any "oral traditions". All are figments of the bubbling "biblical scholar" imagination. The dozens of other gospels left out of the canon, and the even more numerous forged Pauline letters, a few adopted as canon, illustrate how wholesale fabrication was the normal mode of literary production in the early Church. What the anonymous authors of "Matthew" wrote not found in "Mark", of "Luke" that wasn't in either, and of "John" that wasn't in any, is very evidently their personal opinions on what their private Jesuses should have said. ("John" even invented from whole cloth an entire disciple, Lazarus, as his own Jesus's favorite that the other gospels have as at most a wholly hypothetical figure.)
If you are curious about the scholarship, you could start at "Why Invent the Jesus" on YT. Literally none of it has even been replied to, never mind refuted, in any peer-reviewed medium.
There’s a guy at the end of my street who lives in a culvert and screams obscenities. I never saw him refuted in JAMA, though, so I guess by your logic he must be right?
No opinion on whether you’re right about Jesus or the Bible; just saying you might want to think about your yardstick.
Why would anyone watch a YouTube video and then proceed to the literature? Why not just read the literature? This sounds an awful lot like "dOiNg YoUr OwN rEsEaRcH" instead of "reading" (which, of course, is why your reply is flagged and dead).
(Kidding, but it also wouldn’t be that shocking)