Is the Q source the origin of the Gospels?
thecollector.com
thecollector.com
In addition, the synoptic puzzle can be laid in a self-consistent and "path-of-least-resistance way" by looking at e.g. author motives: Matthew writing for the Jewish community in Jerusalem; Mark describing Peter's preaching in Rome; Luke writing as a Greek doctor for a gentile audience (and John writing much later, clarifying and responding to the first heresies that had popped up).
So the Q hypothesis, aside from being a theoretical construction based on internal evidence, is not necessary either.
See e.g. "Case Against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem" by Goodacre.
Sounds like redux of https://xkcd.com/1053/
I thought I made it clear that this was a strawman. Literally no one is proposing that. If you think OP is good actually, feel free to argue that on its own grounds.
>> Well yeah, but you can just post the wiki article if that's better. HN is usually cool with that.
>> If you want to post about a random topic, and Wikipedia is better than the random blog where you encountered the topic, you should prefer to post the Wikipedia article. This is a specific case of "prefer to post higher-quality pages", which I hope is not controversial.
I'm sorry, there's nothing about it being a strawman and that you're not actually proposing it.
In fact, its quite easy to read the opposite, you say "This is a specific case of prefer to post higher-quality pages" and "Wikipedia is better than the random blog where you encountered the topic"
You got out over your skis and went too far. Maybe you spoke sloppily and were just speaking completely theoratically about an abstract example and forgot to mention that. Its fine, but I'd prefer you didn't pretend you made clear this was all an abstract intellectual exercise and you liked the article.
As far as the rest, I understand why you're upset. Forgive me, the first comment in the thread giving a Wikipedia link they wanted posted instead threw me off. I understand now you were speaking generally that it was fine to submit Wikipedia articles. I'm sorry I bothered you so much, I must have went way too far for you.
Maybe I should just accept that "I, for one" doesn't mean you're implying someone else in the thread doesn't know what if means. You're just saying you know what if means, which is certainly uncontroverstial! I'd never accuse you of not knowing it :)
> A weakness of the Q source hypothesis is the absence of any textual evidence despite extensive scholarly efforts to find it. The entire hypothesis is based on statistical and literary analysis and inference. It adds complexity to the synoptic problem by introducing an additional layer of tradition, transmission, and composition, which may not be warranted given the available evidence (or rather lack thereof).
Wouldn't Occam's Razor suggest that the Farrer hypothesis is most likely true?
Edit: Or, maybe I should just continue reading to the end first:
> On the other hand, it would also make for a more complex explanation than other scholars have proposed, violating the principle of Occam’s Razor. Alternatively, Mark could have been the source for Matthew, and Matthew for Luke, which is a much simpler explanation than the Q hypothesis.
That has to be accounted for, which is where Occam's Razor falls short. It's probably the strongest argument in favor of a Q source.
So, for me the simplest explanation is that Mark had to write his gospel on his own, because he was first, but Matthew and Luke could both use previous works as a source, so they do not have to start from scratch, but still they both did have enough of their own stories to add.
So, in the end "the Q source" isn't any written source it is just what they both remembered from their conversations with Peter and Paul (or, in Matthew's case, even with the Jesus himself).
But late dating creates a host of disparate problems that must be explained. One problem coming to mind: Acts of the Apostles clearly ends with Paul still being alive.
If you simply don't share the assumption that prophecy is fundamentally impossible, then early dating for Mt, Mc and Lc becomes easy to accept on the basis of evidence.
Mark alludes to the war that began in 64CE, that eventually led to the destruction of the temple in 70CE, but does not mention that destruction. Thus, for the majority of scholars, Mark must have been written before that moment.
Further, Burkett and Duling date Matthew to within a decade of Mark being written, because of similar events that should have influenced the writing if it was later, but did not. On the other hand, some suggest an even earlier date to 40-50CE (Wright, Wenham).
You won't be able to force the synoptics to a "much later date", as they were dated and discussed (poorly) by Papias of Hierapolis in 95-110CE. Therefore the works happened before this. As he was also "a hearer of John", you also can't date the Gospel of John after Papias was already dead.
The majority view is that the synoptics were written within living memory of the original witnesses, as I've already stated.
> So, in the end "the Q source" isn't any written source it is just what they both remembered from their conversations with Peter and Paul (or, in Matthew's case, even with the Jesus himself).
What a amazing memories they had, decades later, without sharing a written source by just talking to the same people they literally produced the same text word for word, with common phrasing, literally style and everything. Yeah totally, that is incredibly likely.
Or you can actually read 'The case against Q' that shows there evidence of literally dependence.
At some point its pretty easy to identify who is serious about studying this topic and how just wants to take 'tradition' as an article of faith.
Which is to say, I think it less likely that Q was written. Mark is generally said (by people who follow Christ, at least) to be summarized from Peter's messages. It seems likely that Matthew and Luke took from Mark as well as a shared source of apostolic teaching, especially since Luke claims to have researched these things, and at least several of the original disciples are traditionally said to have been preaching in the Greek-speaking areas of the Mediterranean.
The different books of the Gospels are different because they were pulling from different sources. Mark is assumed to be the oldest, since Luke, Matthew, and John all clearly had access to it. Luke and Matthew seem to be contemporaneous, several decades later than Mark, and thus had access to, on top of Mark, the evolving, partly oral, canon of information that formed within the first century and a half or so of Christianity. That's labeled "Q".
I like this joke and think it exemplifies this a lot. A Franciscan, a Dominican, and a Jesuit are doing archaeological research in the Holy Land and discover an unopened tomb from the early first century. After excavating it, they go inside and find a cross with a skeleton nailed to it and a sign above that reads "Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews".
Immediately the Franciscan says, "The Resurrection never happened! My whole life has been for nothing!" and runs out distraught. The Dominican says, "The Gospels are full of lies! My whole life has been for nothing!" and runs out distraught. The Jesuit looks at the skeleton and says, "Well what do you know, I guess He really did exist!"
I also really enjoyed his book about suffering. If you've struggled with your faith over the amount of suffering in the world, and/or yearn for answers to those hard questions, I highly recommend "God's Problem: The Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question - Why We Suffer." It actually goes far beyond just the Bible (though that is covered very, very well) and includes much philosophy and other things. It's a deeply personal book where he opens up about his own struggle and really allows himself to be vulnerable. For me, I was struggling deeply with these questions and had nobody to talk to. Everyone close to me in life had strong faith and was perfectly satisfied with dismissing the problem as "God knows. He is perfect. That's enough for me." The book was like having a brilliant and deeply thoughtful friend to have a conversation with, and it was an important point in my life. I'll be forever grateful to Bart for writing it.
Disclaimer: Bart is a friend of mine, but I read most of his books before meeting him.
The question is a central one in Western philosophy and religion. Less so in some other traditions. But it predates Christianity.
https://www.amazon.com/stores/Bart-D.-Ehrman/author/B001I9RR...
I am not sure what makes Carrier a non-serious historian. He is trained in ancient history and applies conventional historical methodology to his studies (perhaps the only non-conventional addition is that he tries to add Bayesian statistics to it). He studies and cites the available primary sources. He researches and cites the available scholarly literature. He lays out his arguments both in his book (published under peer review, which he will be the first to inform his audience :-) and now in its second edition) and in various talks. He has participated in a number of debates, in which supposedly serious historians had a chance to demonstrate, with evidence, the error of his ways; yet, to my knowledge, none ever did. Bart Ehrman refuses to engage with him directly; so they resort to sniping at each other in their blogs or youtube appearances.
> But he's hardly the only radical eschatological/messianic jew to emerge from the period, and believing he was fabricated involves making even larger assumptions that there also isn't contemporaneous evidence for.
As Carrier would point out, Jesus wouldn't be the first figure thought to be historical, who, upon further scrutiny, would turn out to be fictional. Moses is one example of such a figure who was believed to have existed; yet, it seems that the consensus among modern historians is that he was an invention. Another example much closer to us is Ned Ludd, the supposed originator of the Luddite movement, whom many treated as historical (see e.g. Encyclopædia Britannica from 1911), yet who now, historians agree, was fictional.
Also, Carrier doesn't claim to have disproven the historicity of Jesus. What he is saying is that he thinks there is a pretty strong case to be made against it, and that he would give about a 60% chance to him being a myth.
Too late for me to edit my sibling comment; but it just occurred to me that you are using the same methodology as Carrier to come to conclusions about historical facts. You call it Occam's razor. Carrier calls it Bayesian probability. But the idea is the same: what is the most likely (most probable) interpretation of the presented evidence. It is funny that, appealing to the same methodology, you arrive at different conclusions.
He's called a crank because the consensus historian opinion is that he'a a crank.
No, it's not. One is a argument about the semantics of the rhetorics and the other is quantitative dealing with lists of claims about the world.
> The reason that a complex explanation is less probable than a simple one is because a complex explanation contains multiple parts (which is what makes it complex), and the probabilities of each of these parts multiply to produce the probability of the whole, which of course quickly makes this overall probability very small.
There is no straightforward connection between probability and the complexity of a set of claims. Sometimes probable events are very complex to explain; sometimes highly unlikely events are simple.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_induc...
Anyway, the question of historicity is not really important, but sometimes atheists who take on atheism as a new religion rather than dropping a religion will get zealous about arguing about Jesus's historicity. No current working academic historians in ancient history I'm aware of take the position seriously since the Jesus Myth argument is a conspiracy theory that has to explain away a lot of evidence rather than an account that uses the available evidence.
This idea of an interpolated marginal note is Carrier's own contribution, first published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Early Christian Studies in 2012. While elegant, is not the only explanation. In his blog [1], Carrier references several recent publications (peer-reviewed, as he likes to emphasize), including one published in Journal of Early Christian History in 2017 by a South African historian Nicholas Peter Legh Allen, who argues that the James passage is a forgery, of which his prime suspect is Origen [2]. So, you can see that Carrier isn't the only one among modern academic historians of antiquity who casts doubt on Josephus passages.
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[0] Josephus and the Testimonia Flaviana in On the Historicity of Jesus, 2014, p. 332-342
[1] https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/12071
[2] Abstract at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/2222582X.2017.1.... Full text can be found in: Christian Forgery in Jewish Antiquities: Josephus Interrupted, 2020, of which a pirated pdf exists online
The only really significant question is the account of James. He dismisses it because he has to, so claiming it's a forgery is another attempt to dismiss evidence. He's not a real philologist, it's great that he managed to get a peer reviewed journal to accept his work, but it's still a crank conspiracy theory attempting to wave away evidence. If denying evidence to prop up a conspiracy theory is your thing, then Carrier is great, but in truth all his work is weak and a waste of any serious person's time and you'd be better off dropping the conspiracies and fringe scholars and learning about the evidence objectively. The truth is more interesting than Carrier's conspiracies once you learn it.
One passage. One. In a text, where the other passage is accepted to be forgery, and which comes to us as a copy by Christian scribes. And if it is specifically Carrier that you dismiss, take a look at Nicholas Allen's recent book that I referenced in my previous comment. Allen uses arguments that are independent from Carrier's and comes to a conclusion that is even more radical than his — while Carrier accepts the James passage on the whole and only suggests that the "who was called Christ" line started as a marginal note by a Christian peruser of the text, Allen argues that the whole James passage is a forgery. And he seems to be a modern mainstream scholar trained in philology and ancient and classical history.
Per TFA The synoptic gospels are thought to have been completed no later than 95 CE, with historical dates for the crucifixion (for those that consider the crucifixion factual) 30-33CE, placing them as no more than 65 years after the crucifixion.
Lee Strobel has a good take on the authenticity of the Gospel account in his book The Case For Christ [0] and as always the book is better than the movie
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/73186.The_Case_for_Chris...
There's a lot of debate over the synoptic problem in the academy, but almost nobody doubts that the solution involves a literary source instead of an oral one.
So they have to claim that, because otherwise their claim of 'oral' tradition falls apart even harder.
However, funny enough nobody seems to quote this oral tradition as evidence anywhere. Most of the church fathers arguing with each other in the 100-150 period never bring up this oral tradition or quote from the 'Q' source or the gospels. We have plenty of text from 100-170 period but somehow the actual supposed words from Jesus himself doesn't seem to interest people very much.
Curious too when the various disciples lived, wrote. I didn't know that scholars assumed that Matthew and Luke already had Mark's gospel to draw from.
All the gospels have differences. None of them are historical work as different events are taking different orderings (or are missing from the other gospels).
But in terms of differences, John is the most overtly different.
Watch out for using that standard. You have to throw out Pompeii and Josephus. Both replay events and move them around in time to make a point.
But I'm also somewhat studied in history. The gospels are the best historical records available for Jesus but they have their flaws (and that's why all four gospels are used, to help us figure out the truth between the writings).
It's actually somewhat uncomfortable to discuss the differences of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John with regards to important events like the first Easter.
Did Peter come to the tomb first? Or did the women? When exactly did the angel appear to declare that Jesus is risen? In the tomb? Outside the tomb? Etc. etc. Who rolled back the stone?
The core, historical truth, is muddy. The four gospels have slightly different stories even if the important events are mostly there (Peter checking the tomb. The women checking the tomb. The appearance of the angel and the declaration that Jesus is risen)
Even Mark itself isn't a single work either. The earliest versions of Mark don't have the events of Easter detailed like the later versions of Mark. (IE longer Mark 16 vs Shorter Mark 16 issue). And Mark is the earliest written gospel, the one we should defacto trust the most.
That Jesus arose from the tomb is in no doubt for any of these gospels. But when we dig into the specific order of events, we realize it's a story and reconstruction of the history with different nuances.
And alas, that is the nature of the Gospel Truth. Anyone who studies the Bible must contend with this and accept it.
Catholics believes the Bible to be a collection of stories, and that God wants us to know these stories. Certain elements of the Bible are taken as truth, but so are long running traditions (such as the Assumption of Mary, an event that is NOT in the Bible).
Indeed: Catholics treat the Bible as just one of many traditions and even as other traditions beyond the Bible in terms of truth.
IE: Biblical Literalism (trying to take the Bible as LITERALLY True or historical) is a mistake. And ignoring other traditions (ex: assumption of Mary) is also a big mistake.
Still, the myth of Biblical Literalism exists today. Because well... Catholicism is not the only interpretation and some other Christians have a different belief system.
The Bible is written by men, specifically prophets and apostles. As such, there is errancy that creeps into the work. There is also errancy introduced in copying and translation.
Well, not all of it (depending on your definitions of course).
The gospels, for example, have no known authorship. Several of the epistles are believed to be pseudepigrapha.
A problem to contend with in bible authorship is the name on the book/epistle isn't always going to be the actual person that penned that book/epistle.
A great example of this is Isaiah, which is believed to have at least 2 to 3 authors (with most scholars, afaik, believing it's probably 3).
This wasn't really a nefarious action, because the people that wrote the bible didn't believe they were writing infallible works of religious text. Much like the telling of tall tales, it was simply acceptable to write (or relay through spoken tradition) fables of favorite historical characters. So what if Moses didn't exist, it's pretty cool to use him as a figure to unify the Canaanite tribes. (Fun fact, biblical scholars/historians believe that the ancestors of the Jews were Canaanite and that the story of moses was mostly there to unify them).
The bible is a mishmash of historic documents mostly solidified in ~400CE.
> When exactly did the angel appear to declare that Jesus is risen? In the tomb? Outside the tomb? Etc. etc.
Right. An angel appeared. You going to need a whole lot better evidence to convince me of that, than a few ancient text that may or may not agree with each other.
Jim Warner Wallace's
COLD-CASE CHRISTIANITY
It really should be read by everyone!!!
Yep, but more specifically Jesus as the Logos, which is a core concept in Platonism and Stoicism.
John very clearly meant his gospel to be read by gentiles from a Greek background.
The nativity was important for Jewish converts, partly because of descending from kind David (you'll notice the lengthy listings of ancestors in the synoptic gospels).
Plus, when they talk about the same topic, the synoptic gospels have entire sentences that are basically the same, word by word.
For a comparison table see https://www.ammannato.it/vangelo-di-vangeli/appendice/cronol....
(Just someone who had a very good religion teacher in middle school).
John, on the other hand, is organized around theological and moral themes, rather than the totality of Jesus' ministry and teachings. That's why it's not considered a synoptic gospel.
Maybe you're only thinking about religious people who would have encountered this one in such a context?
I don't frequent any so I am clueless, but if true I would suspect there could be more than correlation to the aptitude to use words without meaning and religiosity.
That mostly seems to be true whenever you talk to people who don't specifically have some interest in linguistics.
>Maybe you're only thinking about religious people who would have encountered this one in such a context?
Yeah, presumably the original questioner (and myself because it's not something I've ever given much thought towards) didn't realize synoptic had a definition outside of religion, because knowing the definition would have answered their question.
This is often untrue, though—words will evolve along parallel tracks and often diverge quite significantly in how they're used across different contexts. In those cases the homonyms make for fun etymological deep dives but don't help much for deriving the specialized meaning from the more general one.
Sure that happens, but mostly when they are borrowed from language to language. Mostly in the english language, if you have a situation where you have synopsis and synoptic, it's more often than or not that they are different forms of the same word or closely related. I think it doesn't immediately register for people because those 'sis' words from Greek origin aren't used a ton in general speech. Genesis and genetic is a similar situation that many people probably don't realize they are related unless they are familiar with abiogenesis or such from science.
Correct, but what I'm saying is that frequently etymologies are nothing more than fun exercises that would actually mislead you as to the modern definition because the word has changed so much. In those cases it's amusing to identify the shared root but you should be careful about blindly translating from one to the other. The original sense is often somewhere in the middle of the two modern meanings.
Taking your example of Genesis: if I know that Genesis means "the first book in the Bible" that doesn't help me derive the definition of "genetic" all by itself. Likewise if I know the "genetic" means "relating to the structures that encode traits in living organisms", I won't be able to arrive at "the first book in the Bible". At best I might come up with some folk etymology explaining that Genesis has to do with life, which is close but not fully accurate.
The correct understanding of the shared root of "creation" is only possible if you understand both concepts and triangulate to what they have in common. It cannot be derived from only one of the two definitions.
In this case I doubt many people have heard the word "synoptic" in any other context. That makes it a rather meaningless word.
This and that's sorta what I found interesting, most people don't realize a word they've only heard in the context of religion actually has a definition outside of, and predating, that context and that definition more or less explains the religious usage.
The fact that synopsis is a Greek word makes it even harder to discern because a lot of names and terms of early Christianity are Greek, just as much as Latin names and terms come along later. I don't think it's a religious thing at all. I think it's going to be common to anything that has a lot of terminology that is rooted in a foreign language and culture.
> 1763, in reference to tables, charts, etc., "pertaining to or forming a synopsis," from Modern Latin synopticus, from Late Latin synopsis (see synopsis). It was being used specifically of weather charts by 1808. Greek synoptikos meant "taking a general or comprehensive view."
> The English sense "affording a general view of a whole" emerged by mid-19c. The word was used from 1841 specifically of the first three Gospels, on notion of "giving an account of events from the same point of view." Related Synoptical (1660s). The writers of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are synoptists.
The subtle change vs OP's is that EtymOnline does include some sense that the word 'synoptic' should be understood to describe the way in which the works relate to one another. But they do say that the connection to 'synopsis' is, in fact, part of the original intent of the usage.
The usage of "synoptic" in reference to charts is also attested in other contexts from this time. For the English language, the Online Etymology Dictionary mentions 1763 as the date of the earliest usage of the term "synoptic" (from Greek syn- "together" + opsis "sight, appearance") in "reference to tables, charts, etc.", also used in other contexts such as wheather charts.[4]
Today, a synopsis of the gospels typically also includes the gospel of John, see for example Kurt Aland's 'classical' "Synopsis of The Four Gospels"[5]. However, the term "synoptic gospels" stuck to the original set of just Matthew, Mark and Luke.
The term ‘synoptic’ in relation to the Gospels is thus derived from a technical term in connection with charts and tables, not from the more general meaning ‘summary’.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Jakob_Griesbach
[2] Here is a scan of this book: https://archive.org/details/synopsisevangeli00dewesynopsisev... -- The table starts at p. 12.
[3] Matthew as based on Mark + Q + extras, Luke as based on Mark + Q + extras. However there is one longer passage in John 7:53–8:1 ("Jesus and the woman taken in adultery"), that is not included in the oldest manuscripts of John, but nevertheless became canonical, that is sometimes refered to as a "synoptic" interpolation into John, although it is not from any of the synoptic gospels, but similar in style to them.
[4] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=synopsis
[5] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/291923.Synopsis_of_the_F...
Luke was not a disciple, but the rest of his works read like a scholar doing careful interviews of eye witnesses to find the truth.
Most of the associations between Mark and Peter come from Papias (whom we possess only in fragments). He makes no suggestion of a filial relationship between the author of the second gospel and Peter.
I guess at this point, I'm legitimately asking who holds this view such that one can say "It is thought that . . ."
That may have been what you were trying to say and I just misunderstood. I think I may have just misunderstood what you meant by the 170 AD date.
Why does it matter? It is the difference between eyewitness testimony and hearsay. Either type of testimony could be true or false, but generally speaking we put more weight on eyewitness testimony and far less on hearsay.
The primary argument against the traditional assignation of authorship of the Gospels is that they're not referred to by name in the Church Fathers before Irenaus (~180 AD). But by the literary standards of the ancient world, that just doesn't seem that weird to me? The early Fathers were referring to works by authors in living memory, and the prevailing bibliographical standards were somewhat lax for even further removed sources. We wouldn't claim that anyone who referred to Aristotle as "the philosopher" or Isaiah as "the prophet", as often happened, didn't know their names. Moreover, Justin Martyr (~150 CE) is often cited as evidence against named Gospels, but in the same source he refers to the Gospels collectively as "the memoirs of the Apostles", which doesn't help the case for anonymous authorship.
The biggest problem for the anonymous theory, however, is simply that there are no manuscript witnesses to support it: all the early manuscripts have titles. So the anonymous theory has to posit:
- The last Gospel, John, was reduced to writing about ~95 AD.
- The Gospels circulated throughout the Mediterranean in anonymous form.
- At some point before 180 AD, the Church decided to get its story straight and assigned names to the Gospels.
- At that point, everyone from France to India started referring to the Gospels with their present names, without any controversies or mixups.
- All of the earlier anonymous manuscripts were lost to history.
I'm not saying that definitely could not have happened, just that it doesn't seem especially more plausible than the traditional account.
I've read a suspiciously large amount of historical criticism for someone who doesn't do this for a living, thinking I would finally get to the bottom of what the New Testament was "really" about. I came away with the impression that the optimal amount of attention to pay to NT hist crit is either a lot, or zero. Every generation of hist crit somehow comes away with the conclusion that the NT is really about the issues of concern to that generation. In fact this has been going on ever since the field was founded by 19th century German Romantics, who discovered that the NT was the product of national ur-spirits expressed through folklore [!]
Our cultural familiarity with the NT sometimes keeps us from seeing how strange a collection of documents it really is. It is perhaps the best attested collection of sources in the ancient world, yet contains a mixture of Greco-Roman biography and history, supernatural events, and mystical theology. I am not trying to persuade you of any particular view about NT scholarship so much as challenge the idea that there's anything cut and dry about it.
There were dozens of other books often attributed to other apostles, and even by the time of Paul, he was warning about false gospels in circulation. The point is that we know that authorship was attributed to various books to give them weight and credibility.
It took around 200 more years before the current canonical list of books was settled on -- and then distributed around the world of Christianity without mixups (of course, Eastern Orthodox had their own ideas but the point stands). Considering how much less established and illiterate Christianity was in 180 vs 380 it seems even less surprising that the names of authorship could be chosen and settled.
My impression is that "gospel" (evangelion, G2098) is used exclusively to refer to something like "the good news of the Kingdom of God" rather than this or that manuscript or written account. The word is used extensively by Jesus in that sense: "the Kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe in the Gospel" (Mk 1:15) means "believe the good news that I am telling you", not the (rather meta-literary) "believe the literal document that you are now reading, in which I am a character".
This sense carries over straightforwardly to the Epistles. So "false gospels" seems better interpreted in context as "false teachings about Jesus" rather than "counterfeit manuscripts" in particular. In fact, AFAWCT there were no written Gospels when Paul was writing, so he couldn't have been referring to manuscripts.
We do know that there were non-canonical gospel manuscripts floating around at some point, which is not that surprising if we consider a gospel manuscript to be "something somebody wrote down about Jesus". But the non-canonical gospels are for the most part very late, and I'm not aware of any serious early debate about the list of canonical gospels, with one exception: Marcion rejected all of the canonical gospels, along with all of the OT, and substituted his own Gospel of Marcion (based on Luke and composed ~150 AD). There are debates about some of the minor Epistles, but there's no (surviving) argument about this or that community proposing to replace John with Thomas or anything like that.
There is a common misconception that if an Ecumenical Council pronounces a doctrine at a certain date, then the Church must have started believing it on that date. But more often the definitive ruling comes only when a long-held but unarticulated belief is challenged and the Church is forced to respond to the controversy. (Think of how the rules of sports evolve when a player exploits a loophole that obviously isn't in the spirit of the game.) So the fact that the canon was formally defined at a certain date doesn't seem to require that there was no practical fact of the matter as to which accounts were accepted before then: the early sources we have seem pretty unanimous on Gospel canonicity.
But I could be garbling all of this and don't want to overstate my case.
It’s also possible that Eg they’re written down from an earlier oral tradition which originated with them
That's the big thing.
My understanding is that in spite of the names, the disciples didn't write them.
However, this doesn't preclude the idea of their evangelism being recorded by someone else.
Paul—while not an Apostle himself—is generally held to be the true author of at least some of his letters and is likely the closest we'll find to identifying the earliest authors of the new testament with real, historical figures.
We can't know that that's the case, but I can see the argument.
First, you can't just assume that 'the disciples' wrote those text. There is no evidence for that and lots of evidence against that. Basically no series scholars believe this anymore.
These text came into being later without titles. They circulated without titles. Its later church fathers who just assigned names to them based on tradition.
John is just to different. Especially in terms of 'Christology', meaning Jesus and his relationship to god. In Mark for example, Jesus basically doesn't say that he is the son of god. Mark Jesus is basically just a middle eastern wizard. In John Jesus is basically fully god doing some performance art in a human body.
But many people still believe that John had access to some of the likely earlier gospels (and not necessary just those in the bible). While they are quite different, there is no way they can be fully different. Some apologist want you to believe that John is an independent oral tradition but that is not accepted by most secular scholars.
As someone who was raised in the christian faith, learned the sunday school version of the bible and only later seriously studied the texts (first in theological seminary and later from a purely historical perspective after becoming an atheist) - it's remarkable how different the consensus of serious historians is from what most people learned in sunday school.
As you've said, we don't even know who wrote the synoptic gospels, where or when (closer than estimated decades). Due to the lack of original documents, reliable contemporaneous accounts and other supporting evidence, we know shockingly little with any certainty. It's extremely unlikely the authors of the gospels were eyewitnesses to any of the events they describe. I was most surprised when I learned from later study just how much the canonical bible I'd learned as a child was retconned hundreds of years later through an opaque process of curation and editing by fractious groups of church leaders at events like the Council of Nicea.
> In Mark for example, Jesus basically doesn't say that he is the son of god.
Which is why the many inconsistencies in today's canonical new testament are even more remarkable. This is the most consistent version they could assemble from a far larger group of even more divergent, inconsistent texts. Ultimately, the bible we know today is descended from a pastiche of copies of copies, written over decades by unknown authors in different places and languages and then survived several 'negotiated settlements' between opposing factions arguing over arcane theological points under an overarching power dynamic trying to unite some semblance of a unified "church" (and even what we know of these councils is only the sanitized version written by the 'winners').
Applying an adult's experience of how large groups work and how ad hoc organizations adapt orthodoxies over time and distance (ie 'telephone game'), the only way to not see the synoptic gospels as randomized fan fiction largely unrelated to any actual historical events is to believe that god miraculously intervened dozens of times over hundreds of years to force an historically "correct" bible to be the surviving version we know today.
Well one side is "children, once a week" and the other is "full time commitment in history career".
Sunday school is just day care with stories. I once believed that "wet wood burns better than dry wood" because that's what a Sunday school teacher opened with for the story of the altar burning comparison (OT).
I'm still "a Christian" in some sense of the word, in that I think humans operate wholly on stories, and that there needs to be a unifying power structure that is ruthless yet humane, and I think some form of Christianity fits the bill.
but I believe no one (in most churches) actually knows what they're talking about. "Useful ignorance" useful for the power structure. They don't want historians at Sunday school they want recital.
Even fairly conservative evangelical churches like the one I grew up in were pretty much totally in alignment with modern scholarship when it comes to topics like the authorship of various New Testament books. If you are into debating the "Q source" or other fun stuff then there is no better place cause most elders would know what you are talking about, whereas this is all a niche topic at best outside of that environment (but thankfully not on HackerNews).
Study of ancient languages and strict study of the base texts is kind of a foundational aspect of most serious Protestantism.
Basically what I'm getting at is that everything you've written is reasonable, and I don't think it would be remotely out of the ordinary to hear in an adult Sunday school or other sort of adults oriented class (for adults interested in these sorts of things...we usually don't do classes on Sunday lol, that's too long at church for one day).
I'm as irritated as you are by the way a lot of the childrens content comes off.
Either they were copying off each other, or were copying from some other source. That's the sense in which they were "synoptic".
John is a separate document. It does tell different stories, but more importantly, it has completely different text even when the stories do overlap.
It is widely thought that the writer of John had access to some of the other gospels. But he wrote his text from scratch.
I would put my money on the similarities being tied to oral tradition. Probably listening to each other.
Was oral tradition around and popular for the lay polity that time? Absolutely. Was it heeded in and above scribal tradition? No, not at all.
Terry A. Davis unluckily died in 2018.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels#The_synopti...
It’s a somewhat plausible notion so far as it goes, but the complete lack of primary or even secondary evidence for the existence of a Q document is a major problem for the conjecture.
So, you've got an early church with a poor textual record and lots of people either making up quotes or misattributing them to Jesus, and probably kept making up new ones for decades after he died, and probably toward contradictory ends, and people get tired of it and decide to keep a list of accepted quotes from Jesus, so that people would stop making up new ones from that point on (and it doesn't appear to have worked -- the later gospels have additional quotes and stories -- in particular "He who is without sin cast the first stone" seems to have been a later addition.)
Then after that, you have this list of canonical quotes going around, and of course people want the context, because you don't necessarily know how to interpret a quote without the context in which it was said, and so you get the gospels of Mark and Luke.
> in particular "He who is without sin cast the first stone" seems to have been a later addition.)
That is the consensus, but there are people who think otherwise - the alternative theory, which is at least plausible, is that it was offensive at the time to suggest a woman could get away with adultery.
> We have recent, extremely well documented historical figures like MLK, Einstein, and Gandhi, who have quotes commonly misattributed to them all the time, that are easily disproven with a a few minutes of searching.
One advantage they had over us is that writing and circulating information was an effort - they did not have social media! I would imagine believers would be motivated to be accurate.
Also, people misattributing quotes to people is not a recent phenomenon. Many commonly misattributed quotes have a long history going back 100s of years or more.
It's only the massive amount of information we have about recent historical figures that allows us to definitively say that the misattributed quotes are wrong. If you go back more than a few hundred years, it gets very difficult.
How often would there be eyewitnesses to adultery anyway?
That highly questionable. Even the very conservative secular scholars don't believe Mark was written before 70 and John before 90. And many secular scholars believe considerably later dates.
> One advantage they had over us is that writing and circulating information was an effort - they did not have social media! I would imagine believers would be motivated to be accurate.
I'm sorry but that is completely at odds with everything we know from that time. There is rampant falsification, editing and addition in ancient writings.
That's why we have lots of letter from Paul, some talking about things that literally didn't even exist when Paul wrote. Thus even conservative scholars don't believe all the letters are written by Paul.
We have tons of faked content from back then. The bible (both old and new) is full of it.
People back then even the very best ancient historians simply admitted that they made up the speeches of great generals. And there is zero evidence that the gospel were written by series historians or anybody that even attempted that.
The idea that we can trust the gospel because writing was effort and nobody would ever put effort into lying is just naive.
> [lots of letters from Paul] talk about things that literally didn't even exist when Paul wrote
Seems unlikely to me, and I've never heard any reference to them. But do you have any examples?
Regarding faked content, making up the speeches of generals, etc: for one thing the Christians viewed these sayings as coming from God, so they had a definite interest in getting them right. One need not quote someone exactly to write something that is accurately reflects what he said. My dad talks about secretaries who CEOs, etc. would just say "answer this letter for me", and they knew exactly how he would respond and could write the letter for him. The apostles were alive for several decades and could correct things. Eusebius cites someone who had learned the faith from someone who was one or two people removed from the apostles, and he went and found the apostle John, and was overjoyed to find that what he had been taught was the same as what John said.
If 'Mark' was this early, and such an important document, it seems strange then that externally nobody refers to the text or talks about it or brings it up in arguments.
That seems quite strange, if this was a document that people in the 100-150 frame believed was ACTUALLY from this 'Mark' then this would be by far the most important Christian document. It would be use in debates, it would be referenced. But somehow all the Christian we can date to that period show no evidence of knowing 'Mark' or caring about it. Nobody uses it for theological argument, nobody even references it, or quotes it.
So basically you are relying on incredibly flimsy internal argument to give it the earliest possible dating you can get away with and just assume that must be it while ignoring more reliable ways of dating and establishing a proper historical record.
> Eusebius notes
And I'm sure he had excellent record from a time that was 2+ major wars ago. By the time of Eusebius all of early church history is just legendary history. We have absolutely 0 evidence this is true from anything even remotely contemporary.
> or one thing the Christians viewed these sayings as coming from God, so they had a definite interest in getting them right
Yeah if you believe that we have no basis for argument.
The methodology you want to use here is not valid in literally for any other history. Its just a bunch of Apologetics.
He is basically the arch myth-maker who defined orthodox view on early Christianity. Much of the subject of series study of the topic is overturning myths made popular by Eusebius. Of course the conservatives would say he is an 'excellent source' because he is 'the' source.
To claim he is considered an 'excellent source' by all secular christian historians isn't really accurate, particularly about early christian history.
He has also been called forger, a dishonest historians, a polemicist, a propagandist and many things. And there are good arguments and example for many of these claims.
To just outright claim he is this perfect historian isn't accurate. Specifically when it comes to christian history, as he clearly has a very, very strong bias. So Eusebius in 30 claiming 'Christians' did X, 100s years earlier isn't credibly unless he actually can substantiate this.
There is very significant criticism of Eusebius work. Both from a Christian and a non-christian perspective.
Do you mean 70 AD to 90 AD or after Jesus death?
He was crucified around 30 Ad or later, so we we are looking at 40 to 60 years after that then it would be within living memory. Presumably source material would be even earlier.
> That's why we have lots of letter from Paul, some talking about things that literally didn't even exist when Paul wrote. Thus even conservative scholars don't believe all the letters are written by Paul.
Agreed, and there is good reason to think that, but some are generally accepted as written by Paul, right? The point of studying it is to try and work out which are which.
Again that is the conservative perspective. One that I don't actually think looks likely.
We also no that you can have cults develop a whole host of false believes in far less time. And just because it is in theoretical living history, doesn't mean that itself proves that the documents themselves are actually deeply informed by that history.
Also, for most historical documents, where we hear about a guy going around doing magic, we don't tend to think 'ah this must be detailed oral history'. And the documents themselves show a huge amount of mystification.
Also, conservatives have to defend these dates, because if they don't, all the huge amount of church history built on top of those assumption collapses like a house of cards. There is so much mythology built on these foundations.
> Presumably source material would be even earlier.
Nobody question if 'source material' existed. But you can't just assume it existed and then assume what's in it. That's not how history works. Yes it would be awesome to have documents from that time period, from within the movement itself, but we don't. The fact is we have virtually no confirmed evidence from the first century.
And you can't just take 'Church tradition' as a substitute. Because that is a mythological history built by the church built over generations.
We have a lot more in the second century and the waste majority of that, isn't interested in the gospels or even the Pauline epistles. That is troubling for the assumption that by 70AD there was a document that everybody considered the most important document very close from the source. You would think if we had such good evidence of Jesus own direct words, people would talk about that much more. But they don't.
> Agreed, and there is good reason to think that, but some are generally accepted as written by Paul, right? The point of studying it is to try and work out which are which.
Yes. But just because we have some writing with some original content from Paul, doesn't mean the other names attached to other documents are also correct.
We do not know. We have no records that are contemporary to him (if it was one person or it it was someone at all).
I think it's remarkable how well something from 2000 years ago has held up despite the obvious deficiencies according to modern documentation and preservation standards. You can find far worse examples of ancient texts, they just usually don't generate as much research interest so people mostly don't argue about them publicly.
Or they were motivated to present their view of things as seen by the various pseudepigrapha, large number of Gospels by the late 2nd century, disagreements in the community evident in Paul's genuine letters, and theological differences between canonical Gospels, such as what Matthew and Luke left out or changed from Mark. In the 2nd Century, we have Church fathers railing against other Christian communities for heretical writings and teachings. There were Jewish Christians (Ebioinites) who likely saw Paul as a false prophet, There were the various so-called Gnostic communities who thought the were legitimate Christians, and the proto-orthodox. There was also Marcion with his Gospel and followers.
Half the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas are similar to sayings in the Synoptics, but with a twist. Five of the 12 letters attributed to Paul were likely written later by other authors claiming to be Paul with their own theological views. Luke says things about Paul in Acts that contradict what Paul himself says in his genuine letters.
Indeed, and I'd add the fact that the vast majority of people could neither read nor write so most information was subject to memory creep within each person and telephone game each time it was passed on. Also, very few people spoke more than one language and most people of that time never traveled more than 20 miles from where they were born, yet the earliest surviving documents on which the gospels were based were in other languages and originated in distant lands.
> very few people spoke more than one language
I have heard that ancient peoples might have been quite multi-lingual because there was less homogeneity and more linguistic diversity so that e.g. the villages in the next valley over would be speaking something quite different so you couldn't avoid be quite adept.
> never traveled more than 20 miles from where they were born
Along similar lines, I have heard that with smaller communities, there is more natural drive/incentive to move around to find unreleated partners. I am entertained by the idea that familial conflict is an evolved mechanism to promote the... uh... spread of seed.
People in antiquity really motored around way beyond our expectations. These folk would travel for years for education, trade, war, curiosity and pilgrimage.
> yet the earliest surviving documents on which the gospels were based were in other languages and originated in distant lands
And thus, this becomes more of an example case of historical humanity's multi-lingual peripatetic nature rather than an exception.
Sure, there will have been plenty of homebodies but be wary of underestimation. They currently think stone-age folk transported the Stonehenge altar 434 miles from Scotland and hell, I still find it mind-boggling that all sorts of animals from tiny birds to eels travel 1000s of miles each year just for the weather yet I barely leave the house :)
Now clearly Jesus was controversial in many ways and maybe not super Orthodox, maybe it has some more Gnostic explanation...but I just find that highly implausible compared to the much more historically plausible story told in the non Gnostic gospels.
It's fair to question whether the Gnostic gospels are being faithful to a historical movement or whether they are a form of hellenistic fanfiction for lack of a better way to describe a lot of that content. I think they are interesting...but looking at Judaism of the time and the religion in that area and then landing on "Gnostic Jesus" really seems like a stretch. If anything, I would suspect that somebody like Paul probably played up Jesus' acceptance of some Greco-Roman cultural stuff during his ministry to try and lessen the culture shock. If gnosticism was accepted and taken seriously I really doubt Paul's writing would be what they are.
Strategically, putting myself in the shoes of somebody trying to spread the religion of some Jewish guy who maybe got a little liberal with things but was definitely an actual practicing Jew from the Middle East and living in a Jewish culture, the writings we've actually got that are attributed to Paul (as well as the regular gospels) make a lot of sense in the context of the ordinary gospels and new testament canon, and the Gnostic stuff doesn't really make all that much sense.
Sure, much could have been suppressed or destroyed. But it would have had to have been a pretty thorough destruction for a hypothetical Gnostic canon to have been coherent enough to be remotely competitive with what wound up winning out.
In other words, while the Gnostic texts are indeed very interesting and can be fun reads, and there is some debate to be had over canon (but I think a more productive debate would probably be over something like Enoch), the early church and councils and whatnot probably made the right final decision w.r.t most of the Gnostic texts. That's just my opinion of course.
It's always more fun to believe there is a big conspiracy out there trying to supress the true story. But I think a simpler and more realistic explanation is just that the Gnostic texts kinda suck, read a bit like fan fiction by somebody that is culturally disconnected with what they are commenting on, and don't really fit together very coherently and introduce a lot of unnecessary or irrelevant questions. I don't think it's a big mystery why the early church wound up dumping them.
However, much of the historiography dealing with authorship—including the research done by many distinct churches—absolutely treats them as the product of time and multiple contributors. I think there's a tendency to view the simplest narratives as representative because those are the narratives that tend to propagate the widest and fastest, but it's just not representative of what serious scholars think.
Much discussion about the temporal distance between the described events and the writers, but what about the distance between the writers and the text we know?
Any hope earlier copies will surface?
It might seem a little string to think of an entire book that's just quotes from someone, absent context. However, this tradition still exists today:
https://www.amazon.com/Dalai-Lama-Book-Quotes-Collection/dp/...
Imagine you are actually physically there following Jesus on all his adventures. It's unlikely you have the supplies or resources or time to accurately transcribe a narrative as you yourself are involved.
You probably treat it more like you would treat being the "note taker" in a modern Zoom project management call.
"So and so said this". "He said that and said he would talk about it again next week for an update"
...
Seems like a sayings gospel to me. Makes sense a sayings gospel would be the most contemporaneous source and then other gaps could be filled in in other ways in order to build a coherent narrative once you've got the time to sit down and really put something big and official together.
"The Kingdom of the Father is like a woman who takes a vessel of flour and sets out on a long road. The handle of the vessel broke: the flour spilled out on the road behind her without her knowing it and stopping it. When she arrived at the house she put the vessel down and found it was empty."
I never quite understood why it would not be the case that the book of Mark might be the original source, with Q being a Mark derivative, and Matthew and Luke being a Q derivative
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels#/media/File:R...
From my understanding (I did have a BA in this at one time but it's been over 10 years, so, memory's a bit rusty), the "triple tradition" part is the section where scholars believe Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source. The "Double tradition" is the part where Matthew and Luke agree but deviate from Mark, and hence are the imagined "Q" source material. Then there are the sources/traditions known only to Luke or Matthew.
You will notice, however, the orange and red lines indicating instances where Mark and Luke or Mark and Matthew attest, but not with all three. I think those could potentially make your theory unlikely. Because if Q were derivative of Mark, then in theory there shouldn't be anything in Q that wasn't already in Mark. But for there to be some lines that are in Matthew/Mark or Luke/Mark but not in the double tradition would suggest that they had a Q-annotated version of a passage, but opted to drop it in favor of the Mark version. Why would they do that?
This rooted hypothesis would still have Mark be the source of all gospels.
tl;dr The Farrer hypothesis seems much simpler and more likely.
The idea that these text are just written in 1 go and depend on each other doesn't really make sense. There are different styles of writting and so on in these text.
Its much more likely that there are multiple layers and that there are interdependent on each other between each of these.
As the typical standard attack on Q, I suggest people look at 'The case against Q' by Mark Goodacre. And he makes the case that if you simply have Markan Priority you don't need Q. This made more sense to me then Q. However he still accept a traditional view of gospel creation and to some extent dating.
A more 'radical' approach is being put forward currently by people who study Marcion and in general, the 'Apostolic Fathers'.
One of the big problems with biblical scholarship is that 'Gospel' period and 'Apostolic Fathers' period were treated as two different things. So by how the field was split, it was clear that Gospels came before the time of the Apostolic Fathers (this was the standard view in Christian tradition). The problem however is that in terms of external evidence, there is no evidence for the gospel that goes back that far back.
The first we have a clear external indication of these text existing with these names, is in the 170s. Lots of people we have text for, seem to either not know the texts, or not think its important. Both are quite strange if you assume they were in their final form before 100. You would assume that after that people constantly use them as references, but they don't.
So once you overthrow out that 'traditional' view, and you just assume the gospels are just like many other writing in the second century and treat them no different, all of a sudden lots of things make a whole lot more sense. This reevaluates not just Marcion but also other early church figures like Ignatius.
Markus Vinzent and his PhD student Jack Bull have nice youtube channel that you can check out: https://www.youtube.com/@Patristica
They work with Mark Bilby sometiems on using methods better then simple word counts and other traditional methods to try to understand the different layers in the text. He uses computational methods. See his work:
> The First Gospel, the Gospel of the Poor: A New Reconstruction of Q and Resolution of the Synoptic Problem based on Marcion's Early Luke
(Hard to read, but you can find videos of him explaining a lot it). His 'Q' is quite different from the traditional one.
For those interested, the 'History Valley' youtube channel interviews a whole lot of different scholars with different points of view in the field on these topics. So if you want to get an overview on the different positions on Q, you can find all the different position on that channel.
That seems an intentionally bad definition of what the theory actually is and markan priority makes little sense without another source since matthew and luke both contained shared content that doesn't come from mark. Q source theory basically incorporates markan priority, but markan priority doesn't stand on its own.
That is actually a much simpler explanation and in the real world if you were a professor with students handing in their paper, you would assume a A>B>C relationship, rather then assume there was some unknown Q that you have no evidence for. To assume there is some Q that B and C shared, you would need a lot of evidence.
But my large point that you quoted is that these didn't come about as a perfectly finished product to then be used by somebody else, rather there was continual rewriting before the text reached a final form.
I'm not a biblical scholar at all, but IIRC, the timelines of when those works were created doesn't support this idea, which is why the general consensus among actual biblical scholars is that there is some other work or works that the older two borrowed from. If the simpler explanation that you prefer actually made sense, they'd have never come up with the other theory.
>But my large point that you quoted is that these didn't come about as a perfectly finished product to then be used by somebody else, rather there was continual rewriting before the text reached a final form.
That seems mostly unrelated to the concept of whether or not the earlier books borrowed from a previous shared source or sources. Being handwavy about dates seems to be a common issue with people trying to work backwards to prove a point vs those that look at the available data to come up with a conclusion.
We don't know when they were created. The traditional dating are just badly supported assumptions. We absolutely do not have clear evidence that one is after the other. Its actually the other way around, its textual analysis that lead people to conclude that one must have been before the other. So if you change the analysis you also potentially change assumed dates.
> which is why the general consensus among actual biblical scholars is that there is some other work or works that the older two borrowed from
The field is actually very much split on this issue. Conservatives are still holding on to Q but even the people who believe in Q, have no uniform definition and what Q is has a wild amount of variation. So at best one can say that most people agree that some earlier source was involved.
In the last 30 years, there has been a ton of movement against the traditional Q arguments. And I think its fair to say that there isn't a clear consensuses among scholars at secular schools. And many people simply say that they are not really sure.
> If the simpler explanation that you prefer actually made sense, they'd have never come up with the other theory.
You have a totally oversized believe in the infallibly of science. This field was utterly dominated by conservative scholars or outright priests for 1900 years, it took 100s of years to move away from simply Matthew priority as claimed in Church tradition.
Having these sources being independent was a core assumption of much of christian scholarship, and questioning that fundamental assumption was not easily done (and doing so could impact your job). In the 1880s the strong believe in independent tradition basically required people to come up with a solution to preserve that, or it would overthrow a huge amount of traditional history.
If you start without 2000 years of church history and assumptions, and you just straightforwardly think about it, Q isn't the thing you would reach for.
> That seems mostly unrelated to the concept of whether or not the earlier books borrowed from a previous shared source or sources.
Yes it does. Because one version of Luke might have copied from one version of Matthew. Mark in its final might be later then both. But all of them might contain stuff from an earlier gospel. As long as you are comparing fixed text and ask 'what was first', you are already fundamentally of track.
You need to go threw these text bit by bit and figure out difference in the different layers. Once you do that talking only about the finish forms isn't really helpful at all.
I recently started reading works that argue against the historicity of Jesus Christ: "Salvation - From Ancient Judaism to Christianity Without a Historical Jesus," "The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? Challenging the Existence of an Historical Jesus," and next up is, "On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt."
I have become largely convinced that the epistles of Paul and pseudo-Paul are writing not about a man who recently lived, but about a being revealed to him / them in revelations from god (small "g;" remember, I'm an atheist). I won't litigate their arguments here as I'd have to write blocks of text, but I have been persuaded that the book of Mark was likely an allegory and it was only with time that such came to be taken literally.
The need to reset the expectations of the believers because the arrival of the kingdom of god kept getting pushed back from "this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened" (Mark), to now coming soon following the destruction of the temple (Matthew, Luke), to (paraphrasing) "it's coming eventually, so trust in the Church," (John) created a need to keep reinterpreting Mark (hence, why Jewish Christianity died out and mostly only Gentiles remained).
Anyway, it's a fun topic if you're a non-believer and won't get offended by the ideas presented. I'm enjoying it a lot and thought I'd share. Q is frequently cited in most of the above works and that was my jumping off point. There's also thought to be a "sayings" source that was made up of quotes by Jesus used in the gospels. The thing is, following the Nicene Creed, the variants of Christianity (of which there were at least three documented by ancient historians) were systematically wiped out. Were it not for the works found around the Dead Sea, we'd have little to go on other than descriptions from Christian apologists; what little we have demonstrates the rich tapestry of alternative beliefs fighting for supremacy (even Paul fought the Jerusalem apostles: Peter, James, John on topics such as The Law and kosher foods).
It's just after 6am where I live and I just woke up. Please forgive typos and errors, as I don't have the leisure of properly proofing this comment before getting on with my day / job.
> "Aslan's grandiose claims and his limited credentials in history is glaring on almost every page."
> "His book is filled with mistakes and inaccuracies... about Roman history, about the New Testament, about the history of early Christianity." [...] Ehrman comments that the book is well-written [as a work from a professor of creative writing], but "I don't think it's trustworthy as a historical account."
But based on what I understand of the documentary evidence, it seems fairly well-accepted by reputable scholars that a Jewish rabbi named Yeshua or Jesus was born in Galilee, was baptized by John the Baptist, preached in the Holy Land, and then was crucified under Pontius Pilate. I'd take arguments to the contrary more or less in the same vein as "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," or any other kind of woo-woo Dan Brown-esque kookery.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Antiquities_of_the_Jews/B...
I'd have to crack "On the Historicity of Jesus," to cite the lines that the author believes were added there, but they included the bit about him being called Christ and some other section. The argument was sound, in my opinion. And it wasn't mentioned in the writings of whatever apologetic a century later when it would have been to their advantage (Origen? Again, I'd have to crack the book.) And not mentioned by Philo, despite his writing about the cruelty of Pilate.
This is all quite weak coming from me and I'm sure there are good arguments against how I've presented this. But the authors do a commendable job of presenting their arguments and evidence.
Final thought: anything that disputed this stance either had to be reinterpreted (Paul and contemporary epistles) to mean something other than what they said or the works were destroyed as heretical. The Qumran caves gave us evidence of this with a handful of works that only remained in existence there (so far as we know). Apologists reference many other heretical works that no longer exist and we'd not know they'd been written had they not been decried.
Once again, posting without proofreading as I have an after-work obligation and I'm only home for a short time in between.
Occams razor says Jesus was probably a real person that developed a following and caused a big commotion. That seems to be the general consensus from secular historians as well (no Dan Brown stuff here).
But the theory about Paul that they brought up is at least an interesting alternative despite me not being convinced right now that it's as likely. So I appreciate them putting the time and effort in to share.
I'm a fan of HackerNews being open minded to less popular scientific or historical or religious theories so long as they aren't in totally obvious crank territory (and I don't think what they said is in that territory, it makes at least some amount of intuitive sense).
The early wacky variants of Christianity are pretty fun to research (obviously I'm biased, and I think a lot of them would have made for an insanely incoherent religion and so I'm not really at all surprised they lost out), but they are definitely fun.
The "this generation shall not pass" thing is hotly debated even in Christian circles as to what it really means, but I agree with you that it's fishy and that you present a plausible alternative explanation.
I'll definitely take a look at some of those books about Paul.
Having said that, I just read the article, and it's not as bad as some of the others.
Maybe the comment is dead because it was too harsh? But in any case, the writing here is very poor.
The actual information offered is barely worth much more than my following summary:
Mark was written first. Then Matthew then Luke. Q is a hypothetical source that addresses the commonality between these gospels but has never been found. As Q was a theory, there are variations where only Matthew and Luke reference Q, or maybe Mark also referenced Q. Or maybe Q never existed and the oral tradition is sufficient to explain all the commonalities (especially between Matthew and Luke).
Which happens to be all my Religion class ever covered. Q theory has never been proven or disproven. The early Church had an oral tradition (Jesus never wrote anything down personally, which is why we rely upon Mark, Matthew and Luke). John has an obviously different writing style.
The truth of the matter has been lost to time.
I think it was doing okay when it was comparing early passages. But somewhere it becomes really spammy and circular.
Maybe the start was written by human and the they filled out the later sections with AI??
- Jesus & Confucius: Treat others as you would like to be treated yourself.
- Jesus & Buddha: Love your enemies and forgiving those who wrong you.
- Jesus & Laozi: Those who humble themselves will be elevated.
- Jesus & Confucius: Emphasized cultivating inner virtue and sincerity above formal rituals.
- Jesus & Buddha: Non-Attachment to Material Wealth
- Jesus& Buddha : Compassion
- Jesus & Confucius: Remove the log from your eye before the speck from another.
- Jesus & Laozi: "I am the path to truth"
Also, the Analects use a very different version of the Golden Rule, much more a prohibition than a moral standard: what you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others. But roughly around the same time Egypt and Greece also had this thought recorded and it's somewhat hard to believe this was due Confucianism spreading like wildfire. Thales used this in ~624-546 where Analects is later than that.
The truth has been hidden from us! Yet again! This time Putin inserts himself in our past! Great powers will come to him! </s>
Today, by the way, idiots willing and christians duped into evil*), he'll have his greatest day.
*) Coerced by the clicks based business model of the non-political by law, modern, tax-exempt NGO dragons (aka churches). The christian truth has been very publicly keelhauled. The USA has lost its christian backbone. The 911 implosion is still in progress, and shows no sign of stopping. Neither candidate addresses the issue, and both will likely aggravate it. Sadly, because during my lifetime, I have come to appreciate the USA, as a work in progress, like all of us. Perhaps it's time for the world to say: USA we love you.
Edit 17: what, no downvotes yet??