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no one knows for sure. It is an intractable problem unless we make some new discovery.
I don't have access to a more recent review-type article, but as far as I know this is more or less still where we are. Impasse.Quote:
On the basis of this observation in a commentary that represents main line scholarship we can say that the present state of the Synoptic Problem is one where it is now openly acknowledged that the standard arguments for the priority of Mark popularized by Streeter seventy-four years ago have at long last come to be recognized in a "flagship" publication as "weak and inconclusive".
Yet, in another publication appearing in the same year (1995), it was possible for highly regarded specialists in Gospel studies to state that the research of the team of scholars who were responsible for the conclusions in the publication concerned, rested in part on the two pillars of Marcan priority and the existence of 'Q'. Then, to explain to their readers the scientific basis upon which these two pillars rested the editors of this volume cited in support of the Two Source Hypothesis the very same arguments (albeit in different words) discounted by Tuckett.
The present state of the Synoptic Problem is characterized by a remarkable lack of consensus among practicing specialists in Gospel Studies as to the scientific grounds for their work. The fact is that the ongoing discussion of the Synoptic Problem has reached a "critical mass" where a "consensus" among experts on the Synoptic Problem (that the Streeterian arguments for Marcan priority are no longer to be relied upon) serves to raise questions about work based upon that hypothesis. We have already noted the way in which this has led some of the most creative Lucan scholars in the United States to prescind from use of the Two Source Paradigm.
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We see then that the present state of the Synoptic problem, as represented by these five books, is one in which there appears to be no longer any theoretical basis for the existence of "Q", and it appears that the old Streeterian reasons for belief in Marcan priority are no longer regarded as valid. None the less, most scholars continue to use the Two Source Hypothesis as the "best working hypothesis". The reasons given for this vary. But the most recurring one is that all major alternatives appear to be fraught with even greater difficulties than those associated with the Two-Source Hypothesis.
Among these difficulties the only one which appears to be so serious as to block a shift away from the Two Source Hypothesis in the direction of its major rival, the Two-Gospel Hypothesis, is the difficulty in imagining how one can explain the omissions Mark has made from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke on the assumption that the author of Mark has derived his Gospel largely from those two earlier Gospels.
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If and when advocates of the Neo-Griesbach (Two Gospel) Hypothesis are able to provide readers with a literary, historical and theological explanation of Mark's compositional activity, giving a coherent and reasonable picture of the whole of this Gospel, the last major task in solving the Synoptic Problem will have been completed. Of course there will be the further need to provide a literary, historical and theological explanation of Matthew's compositional activity, giving a coherent and reasonable picture of the whole of this Gospel as well before the Synoptic Problem can be put to final rest. That task will help explain why Matthew was the foundational Gospel of the Church.
Meanwhile, it should be observed that it has been forty-seven years since Cambridge University Press, on the recommendation of Professor C.H. Dodd, published B.C. Butler's book, The Originality of St. Matthew. It was this book which first established the point that Streeter's argument from order was not valid. Since some form of the argument from order has been basic to confidence in Matthew's and Luke's dependence on Mark both in Germany and in the English-speaking world, and almost a half-century of research on the Synoptic Problem has produced no new arguments to support the Two Source Theory, the observation that "the Emperor has no clothes," already being made, is likely to spread.
Unless defenders of the Two Source Theory can produce new arguments to defend that theory, and renew critical confidence in it, source criticism in Gospel studies appears destined to remain at an impasse. The only other way this impasse can be broken, it seems to me, is by some development in Gospel studies that will satisfy the critical need for a comprehensive solution to this problem.
Zobel said:
and yet none of this actually addresses the matter at hand: who wrote them if not their namesakes? It's absurd to think that Irenaeus was the first person to say, oh, here are four gospels and I probably better distinguish them.
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this list is what you would expect if you were going to name something to draw authority. But there's an important distinction between those works and the gospels, which is the point I was making.
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Those all self-claim authorship to these famous people internally.
We already discussed that whether or not John mark was the writer, or if this was the founder of the church of alexandria or both, the appeal is still there. And there are many reasons such a tradition could form. We could have a mark who was the founder of the church at Alexandria be the source of the document, or even his church be the source of the document and that name come to be associated with John mark or peter through time and word of mouth. It hardly matters as possibilities abound. The point is as I said from the beggining that the problems arise not from the name mark but from someone who was an eyewitness or had direct access to eyewitness accounts.Quote:
. Here we have neither. There's no internal reason to attribute Mark to Mark, and Mark was not famous (we don't even know who Mark is, which Mark is Mark the Evangelist) so why would anyone pick that?
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I didn't say they were mutually exclusive. I read Irenaeus, and looked at how he argues. If authorship is tied up with authority, you're going to make sure that claim is explored.
This is actually your best case scenario. There is significant doubt as to if he had access to them in anything resembling their final form. You might like this one he throws some shade at Ehrman.Quote:
mean you're implying that Justin Martyr didn't have names on the gospels, and that was 30 years before Irenaeus wrote.
I addressed this earlier. It can be both true that someone considers something authoritative and has reason to bolster it's authority...Quote:
But Irenaeus makes no effort or pains to defend his naming, they're thrown out casually. The gospels carry weight prima facie, not because of the authors - exactly like Justin uses them.
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no one knows for sure. It is an intractable problem unless we make some new discovery.
Matt. Was looked to strongly by the early church fathers, but Mark is almost certainly the oldest gospel.Aggrad08 said:
What ancient authors contest the traditional order? I'm not talking about listing them, I'm talking about asserting which came first.
The actual external evidence from the church fathers strongly supports matthean priority
Zobel said:
Depends on how you read them. Several talk about a non-Greek Matthew which we don't have. So it's unclear. I also don't think it is really that important.
I don't understand what you're saying here, sorry.Quote:
But regardless of if there was a Hebrew version as you said the Greek version wasn't a direct Hebrew translation, and as is well established the Greek version and mark copy one another in one order or another.
If you look at what is said, the earliest sources say Matthew wrote first, but they also add clearly "in the Hebrew language". Like you say, we don't know what that first writing is. It might have been a briefer version, it might have been thought for thought what we have. It may be "Q". Matthew, or an amanuensis, or a follower could have translated a briefer original it and added to it - for example, the sidebar comments explaining Aramaic words would have only made sense to happen at that time (if you suppose an Aramaic first version).Quote:
It seems quite a stretch to argue that Matt wrote a Hebrew gospel, then mark wrote his then Matt wrote a totally different Greek gospel that copied mark and Q. What then was his original gospel? A nativity tale?
Because you're asking the wrong question. Literally no one in the ancient world would blink if you said Moses wrote the Torah, and no one would have blinked if you said Moses did not write the version of the Torah we have today. It's obvious, and they weren't dumb.Quote:
Either way the early church doesn't hedge its bets on the primacy of Matthew. And we have literally no early church evidence that mark was first, so what's the problem? Why then is modern scholarship a valid tool here but not for authorship?
Zobel said:
Some of the fathers explicitly attribute the Greek to Matthew, but as we noted that doesn't mean by his own hand any more than e.g., Paul wrote Romans vice Tertius or how they freely call all the writings of Baruch Jeremiah.
If a briefer version sure, maybe something totally unrelated. That it's thought for though what we have now is pretty unlikely given mark.Quote:
If you look at what is said, the earliest sources say Matthew wrote first, but they also add clearly "in the Hebrew language". Like you say, we don't know what that first writing is. It might have been a briefer version, it might have been thought for thought what we have.
The problem with the assertion of Matthew or an amanuesis is that modern scholarship casts serious doubts upon this. Given you can't even tell what exactly constituted the original text, the claims of modern scholarship that cast serious doubts on the primacy or first person account of the gospel of matthew hardly seem somthing we can dismiss because of a few comments from early fathers. And it would hardly be the first things they got wrong.Quote:
It may be "Q". Matthew, or an amanuensis, or a follower could have translated a briefer original it and added to it - for example, the sidebar comments explaining Aramaic words would have only made sense to happen at that time (if you suppose an Aramaic first version).
Yet now you are in a land of naked speculation and somehow are willing to freely dismiss all the findings of modern scholarship based on a hebrew gospel of which nothing survives, and nothing was quoted with the earliest dates significantly removed? I really don't get what your foundation here is supposed to be for dismissing internal evidence when external evidence is so wanting.Quote:
It wouldn't be so crazy, we actually have multiple versions of Acts, one is probably an emendation of the other
I've said from the very beginning the gospels to not appear to be written by an eyewitness account or those with direct access to eyewitness. We are not talking about mere translations or copies of copies with minor redactions et. al.Quote:
Because you're asking the wrong question. Literally no one in the ancient world would blink if you said Moses wrote the Torah, and no one would have blinked if you said Moses did not write the version of the Torah we have today. It's obvious, and they weren't dumb.
Here is the issue, even where there isn't silence it doesn't do damage to speculate. Because even what is asserted has extremely little backing. We have nothing from the early church about the hebrew version, we have nothing that contests it was different in content than the greek. If the early church is only claiming that matthew originally wrote first in hebrew why must we pretend to be confident he's the author or primary source of the greek?Quote:
The fathers say Matthew wrote first. Sure, I see no reason to doubt this. But the question of what came first between the Greek version of Matthew we have and Mark is silent in the fathers. And where there is silence in history it doesn't do any damage to speculate.
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Again, they weren't dumb and many were scholars in their own right.
this is the interesting question - to rephrase it, the question would be multifold:Quote:
If the early church is only claiming that matthew originally wrote first in hebrew why must we pretend to be confident he's the author or primary source of the greek?
Zobel said:
I think you're simultaneously over-stating your position and making mine broader than it is.
This discussion began with an utterly stupid claim that the NT being written in Greek precludes apostolic authorship. I think most are satisfied that this can just be ignored.
It quickly spiraled off into the usual bad arguments about how we can't know anything because of an unfathomable ~100 year gap between writing and attestation of authorship, which is an arbitrary standard that literally no work of antiquity can meet. The last time this discussion happened I noted that, for example, Herodotus while alluded to and referenced in other works is not explicitly identified as the author of his Histories until Roman Imperial era Greek writers such as Plutarch. And if we take this as an analogy, we must include the allusions and references of the NT itself back to the gospels as seriously as Sophocles or Euripides allusions to Herodotus. In the end, the facts on the ground remain that we have no other actual historical evidence, not one, of the gospels being attributed to anyone else.
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- The gospels namesake are the source for their attributed gospel.
They never once indicate that the greek matthew is distinct from the hebrew matthew. But then again for the most part they can't know as very few of them even can read hebrew/aramaic. Either way, it seems bizzare to take people who's knowledge is so limited of what happened and when as so authoritative as to dismiss all internal evidence.Quote:
- We don't know the order of the four Greek gospels we have. There are a couple of varying theories in the fathers, usually pertaining to the swapping of Luke and Mark in second place, but the fathers are clear on Matthew writing first, but not clear or silent that the Greek gospel they use was published before Mark's.
And given we know the answers to none of these things, seems we should also question the basic authorship claim as well.Quote:
- to what extent is the gospel of Matthew we have written by Matthew
- to what extent is does it draw on the unknown / lost Aramaic gospel written by Matthew
- when was it published and by whom
Except not all those arguments are equally "reasonable" and some have dramatically overshadowed others to foster pretty widespread agreement in a field of study where such things are rare. We can address your farmer quote separately.Quote:
there's a huge range of "reasonable" arguments associated with this, which is why the Synoptic problem remains unsolved.
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And given we know the answers to none of these things, seems we should also question the basic authorship claim as well.
Great post. Deference to ancient writers as to the Gospel's authorship on the basis of their temporal proximity to the events/original authors while ignoring internal contradictions/evidence, and frankly common sense, is just silliness, imho. The claims to actual apostolic authorship were of course needed to buttress their authority/validity, which…was widely accepted, unlike the many pseudo-gospels which were not (and almost all of course claimed a similar direct authorship).Quote:They never once indicate that the greek matthew is distinct from the hebrew matthew. But then again for the most part they can't know as very few of them even can read hebrew/aramaic. Either way, it seems bizzare to take people who's knowledge is so limited of what happened and when as so authoritative as to dismiss all internal evidence.Quote:
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- We don't know the order of the four Greek gospels we have. There are a couple of varying theories in the fathers, usually pertaining to the swapping of Luke and Mark in second place, but the fathers are clear on Matthew writing first, but not clear or silent that the Greek gospel they use was published before Mark's.And given we know the answers to none of these things, seems we should also question the basic authorship claim as well.Quote:
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- to what extent is the gospel of Matthew we have written by Matthew
- to what extent is does it draw on the unknown / lost Aramaic gospel written by Matthew
- when was it published and by whom
Zobel said:Quote:
And given we know the answers to none of these things, seems we should also question the basic authorship claim as well.
This is where you lose me. When we have universal consensus in antiquity, which is not a given by any means, it seems that you need to find reasons to dismiss that consensus rather than default to the position of questioning it. The fact that we don't know the answer to these questions doesn't go any further than that. What I means is that there is no claim. On top of that, we don't know, so we can't say for sure.
We do know without a doubt that the authorship was affirmatively claimed over and over again in unambiguous terms. Equating the two topics is an error.
Literally no one is arguing for this.Quote:
Deference to ancient writers as to the Gospel's authorship on the basis of their temporal proximity to the events/original authors while ignoring internal contradictions/evidence, and frankly common sense, is just silliness, imho.
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The claims to actual apostolic authorship were of course needed to buttress their authority/validity, which…was widely accepted, unlike the many pseudo-gospels which were not (and almost all of course claimed a similar direct authorship).
It bears noting that this is pure speculation. We have zero evidence of this.Quote:
It bears noting for posterity that the book of John was written anonymously. The title "according to John" was appended after its compilation.
Zobel said:
Until you can produce actual evidence of the gospels circulating under different names or circulating anonymously beyond the argument of silence, yes, there is complete and total consensus on their authorship in antiquity.
I respect your faith/positions, but I also think Raymond Brown, FF Bruce, and Garry Wills were/are exceptionally well read scholars in this matter, and generally speaking are more likely than not 'correct' in their analyses/framework.Quote:
Once it was thought that the authors of John's Gospel and of the Epistles of John and the Revelation of John were one person, the apostle John, son of Zebedee, one of the Twelve, the Beloved Disciple referred to in the Gospel, the one who reclined on the breast of Jesus at the Last Supper and stood at the cross with Mary, the mother of Jesus. This is the figure who entered the iconography of Christian art, the John of many devotional pictures.
There was always a problem with that view. To begin with, Revelation is written in ungrammatical Greek far removed from the style of the Gospel. Even more to the point, the Gospel itself does not seem to be written by one person, whether the son of Zebedee or not.
It ends and begins again at certain points, it has repetitions that look like insertions by another hand. Two or three or even more are thought to have been involved in its production. One of the older reasons for doubting that the Gospel was written by the Palestinian John is that its mystical (some say "Gnostic") theology was considered Hellenistic, perhaps Neo-Platonist, with its emphasis on the Word as Wisdom.
That would help place the Gospel late enough to have emigrated out from its purely Jewish roots. And a late dating, along with its dissimilarity from the Synoptic Gospels, seemed to indicate that it was less historically reliable about the facts of Jesus' life and thought. But it turns out that John is more accurate than the Synoptics on points of Palestinian geography, trips to Jerusalem, Jewish feasts, the chronology of the Passion, and other topics.
Moreover, the Logos literature drawn on in the Gospel is that of Jewish Wisdom writings, not Platonic philosophy.
This does not, of course, prove that the apostle was the evangelist. Raymond Brown originally accepted that hypothesis (2B lxxxviiicii) but he later came to the view that the evangelist was a follower of "the Beloved Disciple," an unidentified intimate of Jesus who formed a community dedicated to the doctrines he learned from him (3B 18998). Brown traced the development of this school, which produced at least three (and perhaps five) authors of the "Johannine" booksthe Gospel, the Epistles of John, and Revelation. Brown describes the development of the Gospel itself as having three stages.
First, the period when the Beloved Disciple followed Jesus, spread his words, and formed his school. Second, a time when followers of the Beloved Disciple taught and preached from the riches entrusted to them by the Beloved Disciple, culminating in the work of an especially talented follower, who wrote the first edition of the Gospel (this is the man Brown calls the evangelist). And third, the work of a redactor, who used some of the Beloved Disciple's teachings that the evangelist had left out. Though the redactor writes in the same literary style and mode of thought as the evangelist, he was a different man. He does not revise the original draft, but inserts his new material without making obvious adjustments to the first text (3B 18999).
According to this theory, John is still the latest of the Gospels, written perhaps in the nineties and redacted at the beginning of the second century (3B 21315), but it draws on early and sound traditions, carefully guarded by the school of the Beloved Disciple, which seems to have been widespread enough to have internal factions (reflected in the Epistles) and to have been centered in Asia Minor, perhaps around Ephesus.
