[HN Gopher] Is the Q source the origin of the Gospels?
___________________________________________________________________
Is the Q source the origin of the Gospels?
Author : Tomte
Score : 102 points
Date : 2024-11-04 11:55 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thecollector.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thecollector.com)
| berkeleynerd wrote:
| The absence of recent work on reconstructing and contextualizing
| Marcion's Evangelion and Apostolikon is disappointing,
| particularly given the implications for understanding early
| Christian texts and the development of the synoptic gospels. The
| pre-Lukan theory, which suggests Marcion's gospel may represent a
| version of Luke predating the canonical text, challenges
| traditional views on the formation of the gospel narrative. This
| theory raises important questions about the so-called "Q" source,
| a hypothetical collection of Jesus' sayings used by Matthew and
| Luke.
| panick21_ wrote:
| People are working on Marcion, actually Marcion and things
| surrounding Marcion is a hot topic right now. Look at the work
| by Markus Vinzent. He is currently working on the Paul version
| of Marcions letters.
| vertnerd wrote:
| I am no theologian, but this seemed like an interesting topic
| until I started reading the article, which likely could have been
| summarized in a paragraph or two. The relentless onslaught of
| advertisements and white space made me want to claw my eyeballs
| out. Then the author plagiarized himself in his own article,
| telling us TWICE that "Q" is short for the German word "Quelle,"
| meaning "source". It reads like a high-school essay that has to
| reach a word count.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| [flagged]
| userbinator wrote:
| Wrong Q.
| tyre wrote:
| that's what they want you to think
| jcmontx wrote:
| I love this area of study. Bart Ehrman has very interesting books
| on the topic.
| freedomben wrote:
| Second this. If you have any interest in the scholarship behind
| the ancient world, Bart Ehrman's books are phenomenal. He is
| one of the few people who can be both world leading scholar,
| and great writer who can really connect with a layperson and
| academic alike. He is also genuinely one of the best human
| beings I know, and I don't say that lightly.
|
| 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.
| prophesi wrote:
| ReligionForBreakfast is a Youtube channel I'd also recommend.
| Henry has hosted Bart Ehrman several times.
| berkeleynerd wrote:
| Seconded. Great scholarship is represented on this channel.
| david927 wrote:
| Me too. I can recommend Dan McClellan, who's an Oxford-
| education biblical scholar and has some books and makes videos
| on the topic.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| I also recommend Pheme Perkins.
| runjake wrote:
| For others that may be curious:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/stores/Bart-D.-Ehrman/author/B001I9RR...
| azangru wrote:
| Richard Carrier's "On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might
| Have Reason for Doubt" is great. He wrote about Q (he isn't a
| fan) in his blog, which seems to be struggling at the moment.
|
| https://www.richardcarrier.info
| User23 wrote:
| No, probably not.
|
| 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| There is a dead comment here talking about how bad the writing is
| here.
|
| 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.
| moomin wrote:
| It also repeats itself. The question is interesting, but the
| article is blogspam and could be AI-generated.
| dragontamer wrote:
| I concur. It reads like AI to me.
|
| 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??
| freedomben wrote:
| Indeed. This is one of those articles where I struggle to
| decide to upvote. I wish I could upvote the discussion
| without upvoting the article itself, because this article
| does not deserve it
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Not a Bible scholar, so I am wondering why John is _not_
| considered a synoptic gospel. What does his gospel cover? The
| same ground but not as similar to the other three?
|
| 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Johns writing style is extremely different. It's clearly
| unrelated to the other three and written in its own way.
|
| 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.
| gadflyinyoureye wrote:
| >>> None of them are historical work as different events are
| taking different orderings (or are missing from the other
| gospels).
|
| 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.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVR0jXxJDn0
| dragontamer wrote:
| I'm a Catholic so trust me, I believe the events happened.
|
| 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.
| tiahura wrote:
| Historical doesn't mean true.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. The
| historicity of Jesus is more or less accepted by
| mainstream historians. Not that he necessarily died, was
| resurrected after three days, and will return to judge
| the quick and the dead and all that. But that there was a
| Jewish rabbi named Yeshua or Jesus who came from
| Nazareth, was baptized, preached in the Holy Land, and
| was crucified under Pontius Pilate.
| chungy wrote:
| > The gospels are the best historical records available
| for Jesus but they have their flaws
|
| 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.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| John is much more philosophical in nature rather than
| narrative. It's also written later so the author is explicitly
| trying to emphasize elements that aren't a priority to the
| others, for example about the nature of God and Jesus and the
| relationship between them and the people/church.
|
| https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gospel-According-to-John
| moomin wrote:
| A good way of illustrating this is that John doesn't even
| attempt a nativity story. He starts "In the beginning was the
| Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Yeah exactly, it was already covered twice before, by
| Matthew (where the wisemen visit) and Luke (where the
| shepherds visit). John's emphasis is on Jesus as God rather
| than a son of young Jewish parents.
| KK7NIL wrote:
| > John's emphasis is on Jesus as God rather than a son of
| young Jewish parents.
|
| 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.
| KK7NIL wrote:
| He didn't retell the nativity story because it didn't
| matter to the Greek speaking gentiles, instead he told them
| Jesus is the Logos (unfortunately translated as Word in
| English), which was already a core concept in Greek
| philosophy, especially Platonism and Stoicism.
|
| 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).
| bonzini wrote:
| Apart from the passion there are very limited points of contact
| between John and the others. Most of the "more famous" miracles
| or parables are in either John or the others (either all of
| them, or some of them), but almost never in both. While Matthew
| and Luke have "unique" episodes, they also have a lot of shared
| content between themselves and Mark.
|
| 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).
| jemfinch wrote:
| "Synoptic" is simply the adjectival form of "synopsis":
| Matthew, Mark, and Luke all strive to give a synopsis of Jesus'
| life, organized primarily around a chronological retelling of
| his approximately three-year ministry. Matthew and Luke include
| details of his birth and genealogy.
|
| 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.
| Suppafly wrote:
| So the reason it's not synoptic, is because it literally
| isn't synoptic. I love when the definition of a word explains
| what it means. No offense to the parent commenter but it's
| great when the answer to "why isn't x this thing with a
| definite meaning" answered by "because that definite meaning
| doesn't apply to x". I suspect most people have never
| considered that Synoptic might have a real definition and not
| just some hand-wavy religious one.
| sheepdestroyer wrote:
| "The vast majority of people" would use words without
| thinking they have etymology and meaning?
|
| 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.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >"The vast majority of people" would use words without
| thinking they have etymology and meaning?
|
| 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.
| lolinder wrote:
| > 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.
| da_chicken wrote:
| The vast majority of people learn the definition of words
| by hearing them used in context repeatedly. Very few
| people look up the definition of words, and nobody looks
| up the definition of most words they know.
|
| In this case I doubt many people have heard the word
| "synoptic" in any other context. That makes it a rather
| meaningless word.
| danieka wrote:
| I've always understood synoptic to mean "see together", that
| is, the synoptic gospels are meant to be seen together, since
| they are so similar.
| defgeneric wrote:
| This is the correct, the above relation to "synopsis" is a
| false etymology that only sounds plausible because of the
| sense of the common syn- prefix.
| lolinder wrote:
| I was about to assert the same as you with as much
| confidence, but the etymology source I trust most
| (EtymOnline) nearly agrees with OP [0]:
|
| > 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.
|
| [0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/synoptic
| Archelaos wrote:
| To my knowledge, the term "synoptic gospels" originates from
| an edition of Matthew, Mark and Luke arranged in tables of
| three columns for each of this gospels made by the German
| scholar Johann Jakob Griesbach[1]. This was originally part
| of what is generally considered to be the first critical
| edition of the New Testament, published in 1774/1775. In 1776
| he republished it independently under the title "Synopsis
| Evangeliorum Matthaei, Marci et Lucae"[2] ("evangelium" =
| "gospel"). This became a very prominent tool for studying the
| details of the textual relationship between these three
| closely related gospels.[3] As a consequence biblical
| scholars started to speak of the "synoptic gospels" as a
| shortcut if the wanted to point out the contrast between
| Matthew, Mark and Luke on the one hand and John at the other.
|
| 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_th
| e_F...
| bluGill wrote:
| John is mostly very different - it covers only a small number
| of events that are in the other gospel. John is thought to have
| been with Jesus (one of the disciples) and likely took his own
| notes so we can't say he didn't know what Jesus did, but the
| events he wrote about are almost entirely different. It is
| possible (but this is speculation) that John had some of the
| other gospel's and choose not to cover anything already in them
| unless it was really important, but it is just as possible he
| didn't know of (or maybe had heard of but never had access to?)
| the other gospels and wrote things all on his own.
| 5555624 wrote:
| Matthew was one of the disciples, as well.
| bluGill wrote:
| Mark is thought to be Peter's son, and the gospel does read
| like Father telling his son the stories. (We know Peter had
| a son Mark, I don't know how sure we are that this is the
| same Mark though)
|
| 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.
| sramsay wrote:
| I'm pretty well read in this area, and I have never come
| across the theory that the Gospel of Mark was written by
| Peter's son (or even that Peter _had_ a son, never mind
| his name). Where are you getting all of this?
|
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| I Peter 5:13 identifies Mark as his son. It might just be
| a metaphor, but the text is clear enough that you should
| be aware of it.
| sramsay wrote:
| I'm aware of the verse. I'm not aware of any scholar
| taking that meaning literally and concluding that 1 Peter
| (the author of which is unknown) is referring to Peter's
| biological son and further concluding that this son is
| the author of the Gospel of Mark (the author of which is
| also unknown).
|
| I guess at this point, I'm legitimately asking who holds
| this view such that one can say "It is thought that . .
| ."
| bluGill wrote:
| Well it was in the introduction of first bible I was
| given years ago - but that was 40 years ago and I can't
| find it anymore to give you more details. I've heard
| others say it - they might be a group repeating each
| other, but still that is two different groups.
| DANmode wrote:
| What is the generally accepted meaning?
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| None of the names associated with the gospels had anything
| to do with the writing of said gospels. All of them were
| composed after the deaths of these people.
| hyfbjtdeh wrote:
| We know this. Because someone said it. And someone else
| wrote it down.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| There are writings from early Christianity which
| reference the Gospels. Bart Ehrman has said it isn't
| until circa AD 170 where the the gospels have an author's
| name attached to them.
| Shawnj2 wrote:
| Ehh for Mark and Matthew yes. I think that John and Luke
| are at least supposed to be from the perspective of John
| and Luke mainly because Luke uses first person language
| in Acts and the entire premise of John is that it's from
| John's perspective.
|
| It's also possible that Eg they're written down from an
| earlier oral tradition which originated with them
| chasil wrote:
| The Beloved Disciple is not mentioned in any of the others.
|
| That's the big thing.
| david927 wrote:
| > _Curious too when the various disciples lived, wrote_
|
| My understanding is that in spite of the names, the disciples
| didn't write them.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| Indeed, I believe most of the disciples (except Matthew, I
| think) were illiterate. I don't believe he's generally held
| to be the author of The Gospel of Matthew, though.
|
| 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.
| vineyardlabs wrote:
| Luke would have been literate. Paul states elsewhere that
| Luke is a physician, and in the book Luke states he was
| contracted by a third party to write the book.
| vineyardlabs wrote:
| Questions about authorship aside, note that only Matthew and
| John claim to be disciples/people who directly interacted
| with Jesus. Luke is purported to be a physician/associate of
| Paul who was paid by an unnamed benefactor to document the
| life of Jesus based on interviews with eyewitnesses and
| research from earlier sources, and Mark is purported to be
| writing down an account of the life Jesus based on Peter's
| eyewitness testimony in Rome several decades after the fact.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > Curious too when the various disciples lived, wrote.
|
| 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.
| mrandish wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| drekipus wrote:
| [delayed]
| jfengel wrote:
| The synoptic gospels have a huge amount of overlapping text
| between them. Over three-quarters of Mark's content is found in
| both Matthew and Luke, and 97% of Mark is found in at least one
| of the other two synoptic gospels. Much of that is word-for-
| word quoting.
|
| 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.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Well, it contains things not found in the other three - the
| wedding at Cana with the water into wine bit etc.
| neallindsay wrote:
| If you like this, you will definitely like the Data Over Dogma
| podcast.
| redwoolf wrote:
| Beyond this being an interesting puzzle and fodder for articles
| in academic journals, I have to wonder if such discussion has any
| value at all? Having grown up in the church and attending a
| Christian university, I see most Christians as completely
| disinterested and even actively opposed to scholarship like this.
| At the college I went to we were all required to take courses on
| the Bible and we all received a minor in Bible.
|
| In classes like those on the Synoptic gospels where we discussed
| the Q hypothesis, most of the students were bored and frustrated
| as they were only interested in how they would write sermons
| based on the Bible and didn't want to know anything about the
| texts themselves. Very few Christian leaders know any Koine Greek
| beyond what they read in Strong's Concordance [1]. Indeed, the
| way that many pastors and preachers develop their sermons eschews
| any historical or textual context, with many using the
| aforementioned concordance to cherry-pick verses that have a
| topical relationship in order to the make the point they want to
| make, not the point the biblical authors were trying to make.
|
| By and large, Christians are extremely anti-intellectual and
| hostile to research into the origins of the Bible as they believe
| the Bible is divinely inspired. Some even go so far as to talk
| about literal possession of the Bible authors by the Holy Spirit.
|
| So who is this research for? Whether or not there was a Q of
| Jesus' sayings doesn't inform our understanding of the text or
| the history of the early church in any meaningful way. We can
| confidently assume that there were plethora of similar texts
| circulating through the ancient world that are lost to us today,
| but since the Council of Hippo anything non-canonical is seen
| with suspicion or contempt.
|
| The two things I learned from my experience at the Christian
| "University" are 1) Don't discuss a topic that requires nuance
| with a Christian, and 2) don't expect a quality liberal arts
| education from an institution where a class on 20th century
| American literature is opened with prayer. I'm an atheist now.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Strongs-Expanded-Exhaustive-
| Concordan...
| currymj wrote:
| there are other Christian communities than American-style
| Evangelical Christianity who tend to be more intellectual and
| do like arguing about this kind of thing.
| redwoolf wrote:
| You're right. I'm extremely colored by my Evangelical
| upbringing and the contemptuous American Evangelical
| community.
|
| That being said, even if we did find Q or something like it,
| would it change much about our understanding of that time in
| history?
| dragontamer wrote:
| I think a lot of people are interested in a more academic
| treatment of the time of the Acts of the Apostles up though
| Paul's journey.
|
| There is a huge amount of early Catholic/Christian history
| that comes down to oral traditions and the flowery language
| of the Bible. Which forces us to wonder what parts are
| metaphor and which parts were real history.
|
| Like we know St. James somehow ended up in Spain (erm,
| Iberia or whatever it was called back then). But did they
| take with them oral tradition alone or did they have books
| to help keep the story consistent?
|
| If Q existed, it may have been a book or reference for the
| early Bishop/Apostles. It's be insight to how they lived
| and worked.
|
| --------
|
| Oral Tradition is how the world worked back then. But it
| also existed in a time of writing and documentation (see
| the Roman Empire around that time).
|
| I think most people are happy with oral tradition as an
| explanation. But the gospels seem too similar for oral
| tradition alone.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Interestingly, just read something that "Evangelicals",
| 50-80 years ago, used to think more, and thought religion
| and government should be separate, hence they believed they
| should stay out of government. They were only recently
| 'radicalized' like other fundamentalist religions into a
| more terrorist 'like', leaning group.
| moomin wrote:
| I've read things that basically say the group re-
| integrated with politics when Jim Crow stopped being a
| thing.
| prewett wrote:
| Is that implying that Evangelicals are essentially
| racists? Jim Crow stopped about the time that the Sexual
| Revolution got going strong, so there's some confounding
| factors there. Since the Sexual Revolution values are
| clearly against the Christian "rules", which at the time
| somewhat matched the legal rules, and there was a secular
| movement removing the legal rules, it would seem likely
| that this was the motivating factor, especially given the
| existence of groups named like "Moral Majority" (ick).
| Also, Evangelicals are not just a southern thing, and
| I've never heard Evangelicals (I've not been to the
| South) argue for any return to anything remotely near Jim
| Crow, but I've heard lots of talk deploring sexual mores.
| bluGill wrote:
| Perhaps, but only for a short time in history, go back
| 150 years ago and the various churches often were telling
| you who to vote for.
| moomin wrote:
| I think it would be operationally of great interest to
| those who maintain Bible translations. I read a book by
| someone who worked on the New Jerusalem text and they read
| every source they could for clarification. New Jerusalem
| is, of course, officially a translation of the Vulgate,
| which to the best of my knowledge is the only translation
| that is claimed to be divinely inspired.
|
| But, imagine if we did find a Q text. Let's assume that it
| was the real one. We'd still be debating it till kingdom
| come.
|
| And yes, that's my experience of evangelicals as well.
| Almost an anti-curiosity about the source of their beliefs.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| Christian "University" in the USA tends to be extremely
| hardcore biblical literalists (and in modern times
| explicitly right-wing politically). Within that context you
| are correct: the likes of Bob Jones, PCC, etc are extremely
| anti-intellectual and teach very anti-biblical belief
| systems. You'll often find the same thing in primary school
| education curriculum from Abeka, ACE (Accelerated Christian
| Education), etc.
|
| It was eye-opening for me to get out from under that sort
| of lifestyle (thankfully pre-college). I began to
| understand there is a much wider set of beliefs under the
| "Christian" label, many of which are not anti-science nor
| politically motivated.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >That being said, even if we did find Q or something like
| it, would it change much about our understanding of that
| time in history?
|
| I'm not a biblical scholar by any means, but I don't think
| Q needs to be a specific individual source (although it
| could be), you just need to understand that the later books
| all incorporate shared material that came from somewhere
| other than mark. It could be that all incorporate the same
| subset of oral histories, or the same material from
| multiple sources. It's just the idea that there is some
| larger source of material that predates mark that the
| others are pulling from.
| bonzini wrote:
| > Having grown up in the church and attending a Christian
| university
|
| Out of curiosity, Catholic or Protestant?
| redwoolf wrote:
| Worse, Assemblies of God (speaking in tongues).
| bonzini wrote:
| Ouch. Young Earth and all that, I suppose. Speaking of
| which...
|
| > By and large, Christians are extremely anti-intellectual
| and hostile to research into the origins of the Bible as
| they believe the Bible is divinely inspired. Some even go
| so far as to talk about literal possession of the Bible
| authors by the Holy Spirit.
|
| At least in the catholic world, the history of biblical
| studies is very much tied to philology and philosophy. For
| example, pretty much no one in the catholic clergy will
| look at creation as a description of real facts, because
| the genre is not that of a historically accurate
| description. The idea is that any tool is good if it helps
| taking more out of what was purportedly inspired by the
| divine.
| redwoolf wrote:
| Right, which is probably part of why most Evangelicals
| think Catholics aren't Christian.
|
| After I finished my BA in English, I considered going for
| a MA in Catholic Studies because it offered an
| opportunity to study Philosophy, Theology, and Literature
| in a way that was fascinating to me, but by that time my
| faith had withered and died.
| graemep wrote:
| Literalists do more than anyone else to drive people away
| from Christianity.
|
| > Right, which is probably part of why most Evangelicals
| think Catholics aren't Christian.
|
| Someone who thinks most Christians are not Christians
| (even more so historically) and their own traditions and
| scriptures were passed on to them by people who are not
| Christians are rather undermining their own claim to be
| Christians.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Literalists do more than anyone else to drive people
| away from Christianity.
|
| At least they are honest about their beliefs, as odd as
| they are.
| throwaway1492 wrote:
| This is why I became catholic as an adult. I was raised
| baptist, and became agnostic. Then started attending mass
| with my now wife. Imo Protestants border on bible (the
| physical book) worship over all else, and ignore the
| reality of Jesus sacrifice. Plus the Catholic Church
| doesn't require that I lobotomize myself to be a
| believer.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| > I see most Christians as completely disinterested and even
| actively opposed to scholarship like this.
|
| If they are Catholics, it's not that big of a deal (for better
| or worse), they do studies all the time.
|
| If it's Protestants, there's 34,000+ groups of them. Among
| those groups, huge surprise, there is strong distrust for other
| people's opinions, just like there are with any group. There's
| also questions regarding the underlying motives - do the people
| who want to find Q, do it to glorify God or to encourage
| questioning scripture? (I am sure the church of HN hates the
| opinions of the church of Apple; even though the church of
| Apple has objectively won consensus ;) )
|
| On that note, I'm not convinced by the Q Thesis, and there are
| good counterarguments (most notably, zero mention by Saint
| Jerome, who would have almost certainly known).
| redwoolf wrote:
| You're absolutely right. The thing is that in America,
| Catholicism isn't the cultural force that it is in other
| parts of the Americas or in Continental Europe. Protestantism
| is the brand of Christianity that fights the culture wars
| here. So for me "Christian" has become a shorthand for
| "Evangelical Christian." This is somewhat intellectually
| dishonest and definitely sloppy.
| moomin wrote:
| I can tell you that when I went to university the catholic
| chaplaincy maintained a library, and none of it was about
| how to prep a sermon for youth group.
|
| There's plenty to criticise about the Catholic Church, but
| it takes scholarship extremely seriously.
| ruthmarx wrote:
| > I see most Christians as completely disinterested and even
| actively opposed to scholarship like this.
|
| The more evidence we have to show their myths are false, the
| closer we come to educating the next generation and moving past
| religion as a species.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| > The more evidence we have to show their myths are false
|
| Dude; we literally just proved mathematically that monkeys on
| typewriters could not complete Shakespeare within the current
| scientific consensus of the lifespan of the universe. To
| quote them, 200,000 monkeys typing for 1 * 10^100 years (1
| googol) has a 6.4 x 10^-7448254 chance of ever completing
| Shakespeare.
|
| Now weigh the odds that, if the entire world population of
| monkeys hitting random letters can't even make Shakespeare
| within the amount of time from the Big Bang until the Heat
| Death, that we reached the level of human intelligence. Until
| such questions are answered, a God is still quite reasonable.
| dingdingdang wrote:
| Yes, exactly this. Shutting down faith based by replacing
| it with another faith does not even satisfy basic
| "rational-lens" observation.
|
| We are dealing with something that needs our attention
| (i.e. the origin and meaning of existence) not something
| that needs to be shut down by what is essentially even more
| religious (than religion itself!) behaviour. We have come a
| long way since Galileo and few, if any, of the major
| religions are themselves "anti-science" at this point so
| it's almost humorous that now is the time that science
| starts becoming faith based when it should by all means
| stick to Karl Poppers fundamental falsification thesis.
| ruthmarx wrote:
| Science isn't faith based for rejecting an absurd premise
| on its face.
| wolfram74 wrote:
| 1) 200,000 monkeys is considerably fewer than the
| trillions, nay, quadrillions of single celled organisms
| doing mutations through out biological history 2) They are
| not generating random ACTG strings ~3 billion pairs long,
| they are permuting a few at a time from a working starting
| point of the first tiny clump of self catalyzing chemicals.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| > 200,000 monkeys is considerably fewer than the
| trillions, nay, quadrillions of single celled organisms
| doing mutations through out biological history
|
| All of those single celled organisms didn't come from
| nowhere, overnight. There was, at least at some point,
| the first single celled organism. Not only the first one,
| but the first one that was able to reproduce. There could
| have been millions, billions of single celled organisms
| incapable of reproduction that died. The odds of just
| getting one single celled organism, by itself, without
| the ability to reproduce, is already ludicrous.
|
| > first tiny clump
|
| Your "tiny clump" is still much longer and more
| improbable than Shakespeare.
| drrotmos wrote:
| > All of those single celled organisms didn't come from
| nowhere, overnight. There was, at least at some point,
| the first single celled organism. Not only the first one,
| but the first one that was able to reproduce. There could
| have been millions, billions of single celled organisms
| incapable of reproduction that died. The odds of just
| getting one single celled organism, by itself, without
| the ability to reproduce, is already ludicrous.
|
| The general thinking among researchers is that single-
| celled organisms were preceded by self-replicating and
| self-catalyzing molecules, like RNA. Abiogenesis is a
| fascinating area of research.
| drrotmos wrote:
| > Now weigh the odds that, if the entire world population
| of monkeys hitting random letters can't even make
| Shakespeare within the amount of time from the Big Bang
| until the Heat Death, that we reached the level of human
| intelligence. Until such questions are answered, a God is
| still quite reasonable.
|
| That's only an apt analogy if genetic mutations didn't
| include any kind of feedback mechanism. Natural selection
| makes them very different scenarios.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| > That's only an apt analogy if genetic mutations didn't
| include any kind of feedback mechanism. Natural selection
| makes them very different scenarios.
|
| You're assuming the odds that there was even the
| structure in place, that natural selection can work its
| magic. Even natural selection needs a structure. The odds
| of that structure even forming, and maintaining the
| structure over the requisite long period, is lower odds
| than typing Shakespeare.
|
| Think about, for example, a single celled organism. The
| odds that one came into existence? Exceedingly low. The
| odds that it was able to reproduce? Astronomically low.
| The odds it was able to do this for the requisite
| hundreds of thousands of years uninterrupted to the point
| we got the first multi-celled organism? Limit as x
| approaches 0 low.
|
| Even if 1 million single celled organisms spontaneously
| formed, I would hardly believe even 1 was capable of
| self-reproduction. If even 1 was capable of self-
| reproduction, I could hardly believe it would not have
| been extinct, one way or another, after 1 million years
| of geological change. The first self-reproducing cell,
| odds in the trillionth, and it just got splashed by lava
| and died.
| drrotmos wrote:
| > You're assuming the odds that there was even the
| structure in place, that natural selection can work its
| magic.
|
| I'm not assuming anything, I'm merely claiming that the
| situations aren't analogous.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Saying "God did it" only raises more questions around odds
| and reasons, it's not a solution when trying to rationalize
| something through statistics.
|
| > Now weigh the odds that, if the entire world population
| of monkeys hitting random letters can't even make
| Shakespeare within the amount of time from the Big Bang
| until the Heat Death, that we reached the level of human
| intelligence.
|
| Given that humans are around, it doesn't matter the odds. I
| have a 1/52 chance of drawing a specific card every time I
| draw from a deck, but every time I draw some specific card
| always gets drawn. It's a mistake to think that human
| intelligence was the end goal, and not an artifact of
| random chance and one of any multitude of other results.
| ruthmarx wrote:
| > Until such questions are answered, a God is still quite
| reasonable.
|
| Agree to disagree. God as a theory, specifically a god from
| a manmade religion and not as an abstract concept,
| continues to be absurd.
| jokellum wrote:
| > Until such questions are answered, a God is still quite
| reasonable.
|
| I'm sorry, what is the monkey typewriter supposed to prove
| or disprove about God?
|
| The original post isn't even about evolution, its related
| to textual and historical analysis, so I don't see how this
| is related.
|
| Even worse, even if evolution disappeared as a theory, that
| wouldn't change the truthiness of specifically the claims /
| myths in the bible, and wouldn't in anyway make the
| existence of the Christian god any more likely.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I'd like to hear more about this Monkey-God, randomness-
| universe-age, cross-over theory.
|
| If it had been proven opposite, that Monkeys could create
| Shakespeare, would that have disproven the existence of
| God?
| Suppafly wrote:
| >If it had been proven opposite, that Monkeys could
| create Shakespeare, would that have disproven the
| existence of God?
|
| No, it's clear from his comments that he'd just jump to
| the next item on the creationist checklist. He's not
| expressing original thoughts, just regurgitating things
| he's been handfed.
| rsynnott wrote:
| The Shakespeare-typing monkeys are a terrible metaphor for
| evolution, because there's no selection (also, of course,
| 200,000 monkeys is really very few monkeys; for instance
| there are estimated to be about 10^30 bacteria on earth at
| any given time).
| wussboy wrote:
| Is this a goal to which we should aspire? I'm a former
| evangelical, now atheist and I thought that it was but now
| I'm not so sure. Darwin's Cathedral made me rethink this
| position and I encourage you to read it.
| ruthmarx wrote:
| I haven't read Darwin's Cathedral, but my answer to your
| question is a resounding yes.
|
| Religion has no redeeming qualities, or at least not enough
| to justify the cost. It's an anachronism and an
| embarrassment that we as a species can be as advanced as we
| are yet we haven't managed to purge it from modern global
| society yet.
| card_zero wrote:
| I thought I'd be fair and read the Wikipedia page about
| this (rather old) book, and see what it even says.
|
| _Wilson posits that religions are adaptive systems that
| have evolved to enhance their adherents ' survival and
| reproductive success. [...] mechanisms that promote group
| cooperation and cohesion._
|
| He mentions Balinese water temples, which had (have?) a
| practical, municipal function in regulating water
| distribution for farming. There's an implication about
| the connection between religion and morality.
|
| Religious types _love_ the connection between religion
| and morality (almost as much as they love claiming that
| non-religion is just another religion). And humanists
| make the valid point that the connection is weak, and
| that we can have better morality on our own without
| getting any sky-faries involved.
|
| However, practically, _given_ these ancient worldwide
| memes serving a moral function, maybe it would be bad for
| them to vanish overnight. So in that sense religion is
| doing some good. But it won 't vanish overnight anyway,
| so the question is really whether it would be harmful for
| it to be replaced with reasoned morality.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >Religious types love the connection between religion and
| morality //
|
| I can only speak to my experience of Christians (in the
| UK, of a broad swathe of denominations), but a central
| tenet is that all people are sinners. Never have I heard
| it expressed that Christians are more moral than others
| except in strawman arguments suggesting that the
| immortality of a/some Christians demonstrates God does
| not exist. Indeed even in a small parish CofE church in
| rural England {mainstream, not progressive, conservative}
| I've heard the opposite preached.
|
| Perhaps some Christian leaders have expressed this view
| and it passed me by? Maybe it's a Roman Catholic thing?
|
| Many things that are more reasonable to believe are
| false, I don't see how 'we could be more moral without
| religion' proves anything?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Either the beliefs of religion are true, or they aren't. If
| they're true, then they are worth upholding, if they aren't
| then they aren't. That's all that matters. "Moving past
| religion" as an end unto itself is not a worthy goal and is
| in fact giving into man's base instincts to hate on the
| outgroup.
| throwaway1492 wrote:
| Until science can offer an explanation of "why am I here?
| what is meaning?" other than random chance, there will
| always be religion. Some may find random chance comforting
| and meaningful, but most don't. Belief in God can never be
| proven or disproven, it's a question of faith. Faith is not
| logical. Nor is the reality that terrible things happen to
| random people; good or bad. The challenge for any of us
| individually is to not participate in tribalism and hate.
| But to act in the best spirit of whatever faith (or belief
| system) we do hold, for the benefit of all, and ourselves.
| timcobb wrote:
| > So who is this research for?
|
| Secular Jews :)
| dingdingdang wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your experience.. I do find that it's a lot
| of negativity expressed against Christians supposed lack of
| intellectual curiosity though. Especially given that this is
| off the back of a fairly* well written article concerning the
| origin of the gospels.
|
| My own experience is completely opposite in that I grew up in a
| completely secular atheist environment and found it direly
| lacking in spiritual and philosophical enquiry and have later
| in life found faith. The type of Christianity I'm exposed to
| (ranging all the way from the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin to
| modern day Baptism) is, and has been, a fresh breath of life
| for me and has lend me far more zest for science and life in
| general than atheism ever did. The caveat here is of course
| that I never attended a faith based university - I may well
| have ended up writing a very different comment!
|
| *actually feel it's got a touch of GPT here and there..!
| keiferski wrote:
| This is an ignorant comment. Christianity is an extremely large
| and diverse group, the vast majority of which doesn't agree
| with your statements here. The approaches taken by American
| Baptists, Russian Eastern Orthodox, and South American
| Catholics are very, very different from each other.
|
| Even then, the entire history of the Western world, of
| publishing, and even of information itself is pretty much
| directly because of interest in the Bible. It's relevant purely
| in a historical sense.
|
| IMO it's a tragedy that "religious literature" has become
| designated as something non-religious people shouldn't bother
| with, because it's pretty much just willingly ignoring the
| entirety of human culture and history.
| redwoolf wrote:
| I recognize what you're saying and you're right. I'm well
| aware of different approaches and traditions. And I
| completely agree that ignoring religious writings across
| history deprives us of understanding the full range of human
| experience. I for one am not one of those people. I realize
| that I'm engaging a bit in the very thing I'm criticizing,
| but this is a comment on HN not a well thought out and twice
| revised essay.
| sapphicsnail wrote:
| I can only speak for the US but I've also found that I can't
| speak about the Bible with most Christians. Most of my
| experience has been with Catholics and various flavors of
| Evangelicals. It's very frustrating. I can read Ancient Greek
| and have a degree in Classics and that makes no difference.
| I've had people argue with me that the NT was written in
| Aramaic or Latin or that Jerome's translation is more
| authoritative than the earlier Greek texts. I was raised
| Christian and I can't discuss religion with anyone I grew up
| with regardless of how respectful I am. There are opend-
| minded Christians but they are very rare.
| graemep wrote:
| Most Christians I know about are extremely interested in the
| origins of the Bible, and tend to be intellectual. What you are
| saying is true for American evangelicals, and not even all of
| them. Have you ever, for example, met a Jesuit?
|
| "they believe the Bible is divinely inspired"
|
| There is a big difference between divinely inspired, and
| divinely dictated.
|
| Many of the people who do this research are Christians. The
| people who buy books and read the articles about it are mostly
| Christians. The same with the many books on topics such as
| interpreting "books" of the Bible in the context of the
| original culture and what we know of authors, intended
| audience, etc.
| FjordWarden wrote:
| There is also a difference between "bible study" and
| "historical criticism", where the later is devoid of any
| specific religious interpretation.
|
| I am secular person and I find it interesting how ideas
| evolve over time. I think it was around the year 1000 that
| Jewish scholars started to wonder why the old testament
| didn't mention the planets which where a Greek discovery and
| cultural "meme". People where worried about things like that,
| but couldn't formulate a good answer. Also most people don't
| know but ancient Judaism was a polytheistic religion, and
| only became monotheistic after the return from the Babylonian
| exile.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Most Christians I know about are extremely interested in the
| origins of the Bible, and tend to be intellectual.
|
| I think a lot of christians give this impression, but
| ultimately mostly of them give up studying when their studies
| start to diverge from what they've been taught or what they
| want to believe. The ones that are actually interested in
| fact finding tend to stop being christians after a while.
| tzs wrote:
| > There is a big difference between divinely inspired, and
| divinely dictated
|
| Isaac Asimov had an amusing very short story about the
| practicalities of divine dictation [1].
|
| [1] https://www.patheos.com/blogs/religionprof/2011/12/how-
| it-ha...
| burlesona wrote:
| I think you're over generalizing. I understand you're speaking
| from your personal experience, and I believe that's what you
| encountered, but still, n=1.
|
| There are, unfortunately, a huge range of people with widely
| varying beliefs who refer to themselves as "Christians." Some
| of them are indeed not actually interested in theology, only in
| their own subcultural tradition.
|
| But there are also Christians who are extremely interested in
| textual analysis, understanding the original languages of the
| texts, seeking out archaeological evidence to understand events
| better, etc. In my experience these are also the people who
| follow Jesus' teaching to love their neighbor, not judge
| others, and to "give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's" (ie.
| don't be a political movement).
| redwoolf wrote:
| I am most definitely over generalizing. I could have been
| more thoughtful in my word choices to narrow the scope of my
| comments.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| You will find no bible more dogeared and highlighted than
| from an American evangelical, who so strongly needs to
| justify the reasons for their superiority and hatred that
| they will beat a concordance to death. They aren't interested
| in facts, they're interested in their version of "truth,"
| which are two completely disparate and antithetical concepts.
| Just look at their support for the idea of the Rapture, a
| concept which is found nowhere in the Bible, and whose very
| idea has been incredibly harmful given how religion informs
| voting decisions in the US.
| mekoka wrote:
| > By and large, Christians are extremely anti-intellectual and
| hostile to research into the origins of the Bible as they
| believe the Bible is divinely inspired.
|
| I have yet to find a strongly dogmatic tradition where this
| doesn't apply, religious or not. Many intellectuals also fit
| your description, you just have to find the right context.
|
| Despite what they might say outloud, most people (including
| many who identify as intellectual or rational) are not looking
| for truth, but rather confirmation for their dear held beliefs.
| Beliefs they're sometimes unaware that they hold, but around
| which rest the foundations of a sizable part of their identity.
| An expensive investment. Nobody wants to be told, "yeah, you
| were doing it wrong all these years". Better people find out
| after we've passed. In that context, research is a gamble, a
| risk, as each truth invalidates multiple wrongs. Very
| upsetting.
| Animats wrote:
| > By and large, Christians are extremely anti-intellectual
| and hostile to research into the origins of the Bible as they
| believe the Bible is divinely inspired.
|
| Some books of the Bible don't even claim to be divinely
| inspired. Corinthians is a set of administrative memos. From:
| Paul, head of the church. To: Christians at Corinth. Subject:
| Plans and operating rules
| ldargin wrote:
| Well, most PEOPLE are disinterested in history, except when
| it's presented to confirm their own views. That's a shame for
| those Bible school students because learning those things
| involves learning how people respond to religion, which can
| profoundly help them in ministry.
| bjourne wrote:
| Sorry, but your flame bait is written from a point of
| ignorance. You don't know how deep the rabbit hole goes. Your
| Bible courses mean that you have perhaps brushed the surface,
| but not more. The standard track for priests is 5.5 years in
| Western European countries (same as for engineers) followed by
| one or more years of working as an adept. There are of course
| multiple courses about Koine Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. As
| I've learned, the quality of American institutions varies a
| lot, so perhaps you attended a particularly bad one?
|
| Btw, it is a myth that the Council of Hippo established the
| Christian canon.
| tengwar2 wrote:
| Your experience is probably of American conservative
| evangelicals. Even within that triple subset I could find you
| people deeply interested in the origins of texts (e.g. the
| translators responsible for the NET Bible
| (http://netbible.org). Your experience is narrow. If I can give
| an analogy from IT, this is like talking to a few people
| training for an MCSE, and concluding that no-one is interested
| in computer science.
|
| > So who is this research for?
|
| The first work on links between the gospels goes back to about
| the 3C, and there have been discussions on the origins of the
| different books since before there was a canon of the Bible -
| in fact this was one of the early motivations. The academics
| currently working on origins of texts are a mixture of
| Christians and non-Christians, and as such, their motives
| differ. These academics are usually found at traditional
| universities, not the Bible colleges you refer to. Non-
| Christian scholars have the usual motives of academics.
| Christian scholars have the same motives, but add the drive to
| get back to the original teachings as far as possible. As to
| who uses it: generally priests, preachers and the like
| preparing services, and Christians in private study. It tends
| to be discussed in commentaries working at the level of whole
| books of the Bible rather than verse-by-verse commentaries. For
| the specific case of Q (or the alternative Farrer hypothesis),
| this will generally be found under the heading "The Synoptic
| Problem", though verse-by-verse commentaries will often discuss
| parallels between gospels.
|
| By the way, for those who are interested, there is a
| reconstruction of Q here:
| https://www.livius.org/sources/content/q-text/ - but bear in
| mind that this assumes a single Q document, which to my mind is
| not necessarily true.
| mrozbarry wrote:
| If you were ever looking for "good" Christianity. I attended a
| bible college in Canada, and to put it politely, I was
| heartbroken over the types of people who were being trained to
| lead and manage churches. I'd say a good majority of them were
| sent by their parents rather than on their own initiative; they
| were culturally, ethically, and spiritually not Christian. I'm
| not perfect, either, but you expect a certain level of effort
| to be put into spiritual and theological mental investment,
| which unfortunately was not the case.
|
| After that experience, I basically left the church for 10
| years, I was so frustrated with many human-related aspects of
| the church, and I knew I couldn't sit under the leadership of
| the types of people I went to college with.
|
| ---
|
| Now, to answer your first question, yes there is value. In the
| same way I'm a programmer, but I don't care about the
| historical authenticity of who actually discovered the
| Pythagorean theorem. Some people care, and I think that's
| great, that's an area of interest for them. Now, the flip side
| is, Christians should care that they can trust the documents
| that form the basis for their beliefs.
|
| For your next statement, "most of the students were bored and
| frustrated...didn't want to know anything about the texts
| themselves," a person who has no historic knowledge of the
| scripture should never be a pastor. It sounds like you went to
| university with people who liked the idea of being a respected
| leader, and the power that comes with it, and you'll find
| people like that everywhere, even in your secular workplace.
|
| If you truly believe Christians are extremely anti-
| intellectual, you need to remember, basically every educational
| organization (ie even secular universities) were originally
| founded by Christians in the western world, and many of them
| were likely far more intellectual than you or I. What's crazy
| is you can also find extremely anti-intellectual non-
| Christians, too - there are anti-intellectuals everywhere.
| Typically big sweeping statements like this are from hurt
| people, and that's horrible that people claiming to be part of
| the church were so destructive on the things you previously
| believed.
|
| There are a lot of bad apples in the bunch, even the bible says
| a little leaven will work it's way through the whole dough [1]
| [2].
|
| [1]
| https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Galatians%205%2...
| [2] https://www.gotquestions.org/little-leaven-leavens-whole-
| lum... (does a decent enough overview of the verse and other
| references)
| currymj wrote:
| Another point: while there are some unique religious aspects to
| your experience, it also sounds pretty similar to complaints
| about secular universities.
|
| Very common to hear about students who don't care about the
| material at all, they just want a job. So they are bored and
| frustrated by anything, especially theoretical material, that
| isn't going to be obviously useful for interview prep or their
| future careers.
| rsynnott wrote:
| What variety of Christians were these? I'm guessing evangelical
| Protestants? Catholics and Anglicans are often far more into
| this sort of thing, and of course there are plenty of non-
| religious theologians as well.
| sramsay wrote:
| > The two things I learned from my experience at the Christian
| "University" are . . .
|
| You also seem to have become a bit of anti-intellectual
| yourself. Dismissing a fundamental question in textual
| criticism (about one of the most influential texts of all time)
| to a mere "interesting puzzle" and "fodder" for academic
| journals strikes me as openly hostile to scholarship as such.
|
| But even leaving that aside: Do you really think it would make
| no difference to our understanding of early Christianity were
| it conclusively demonstrated that a collection of Christian
| logia were circulating prior to the writing of the canonical
| gospels? Or, conversely, that no such collection existed?
|
| People have devoted their scholarly lives to this, because the
| question is so rich. Did Paul have any knowledge of this
| collection (and if he did, why doesn't he appear to quote it)?
| Did only Mark have access to it, or is it the source of sayings
| in more than one gospel? What is its relation to the Gospel of
| Thomas (and is the GoT itself a "sayings gospel" akin to Q?) If
| Q existed, why wasn't it preserved? What if (and this isn't a
| mainstream view) some kind of "proto-Matthew" existed in, say,
| Aramaic? Could Mark -- again, a minority view -- be, as some
| ancient commentators seemed to have believed, a condensation of
| Matthew?
|
| It just goes on and on. I fail to see why the idea that "most
| Christians" (an already problematic generalization) are bored
| by the subject has any bearing on whether this is important
| work. It's like saying, "theoretical computer science has no
| bearing on the lives of working programming. So who is it
| actually for?"
|
| The answer is, other scholars trying to understand the the
| subject at hand more deeply.
| empath75 wrote:
| Based on nothing other than that "people don't really change", I
| would guess that pretty soon after the death of Jesus, people
| started misattributing quotes to him. 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.
|
| 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.
| graemep wrote:
| The gospels were written not all that long after Jesus died
| -within the lifetimes of people who could remember him.
|
| > 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.
| empath75 wrote:
| Not everyone involved in a religion is a believer. A lot of
| people get involved for their own purposes. But yes, the
| desire of believers to be accurate is why I'd expect
| something like Q to be written down eventually.
|
| 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.
| berkeleynerd wrote:
| This is not at all the consensus of scholars working at
| public secular institutions not affiliated with religious
| institutions of higher learning. A late dating of the
| formation of the canon is just as viable if not more so among
| this academic community.
| hyfbjtdeh wrote:
| Cui bono? -- in both directions
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| "cast the first stone" -- This was actually a criticism that
| the law required the accusers to bring the woman AND the man
| and the eyewitnesses, and the eyewitnesses must cast the
| first stone. Their absence invalidated the trial.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > The gospels were written not all that long after Jesus died
|
| 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.
| prewett wrote:
| Since Mark 13 talks predicts the destruction of the Temple
| yet has no record of the fulfillment of that prophecy when
| the Temple was burned and destroyed and Jerusalem razed in
| 70, which would have been a cataclysmic event for the
| church, which would have had it's center in Jerusalem.
| Eusebius notes in his church history that no Christian
| died, because they left Jerusalem when the Roman army
| withdrew briefly because of the prophecy. So it's hard to
| date Mark to after 70, even if you don't believe that Mark
| was the written account Peter promised in one of his
| epistles (and presumed to be written by the Mark that acts
| talks of); Peter's death is usually dated to 64.
|
| > [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.
| timeon wrote:
| > within the lifetimes of people who could remember him.
|
| 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).
| mrandish wrote:
| > 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...
|
| 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.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| If you like this, head over to /r/AcademicBiblical
| asimpletune wrote:
| I highly recommend Dan McClellan's YouTube channel to anyone who
| is interested in a factual understanding of the Bible.
| https://www.youtube.com/@maklelan
| Suppafly wrote:
| Shame he doesn't do long form videos.
| derbOac wrote:
| Wikipedia provides a good overview of the different theories of
| the Synoptic gospels' origins (see the summary at the end of the
| entry especially):
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels#The_synopti...
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Most scholars thing the hypothetical "Q" gospel would have been a
| "sayings" gospel--which is to say, it was mostly a collection of
| quotes from Jesus, rather than a narrative. The Gospel of Thomas
| would be a comparable "sayings" gospel, for an example of what
| that would look like.
|
| 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/...
| alsetmusic wrote:
| Going off topic a bit, I've been reading a number of scholarly
| works on early Christianity over the past year. These include,
| "The Origin of Satan," "The Gnostic Gospels," "The Gospel of Mary
| Magdala," "The Passover Plot," "Jesus the Jew," "How Jesus Became
| God," and "From Jesus to Christ." To be clear, I am an atheist
| and a history nerd and I'm really enjoying the scholarship of
| these works.
|
| 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.
| gnatman wrote:
| Great post! One book that got a lot a press a few years back
| was Reza Aslan's "Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of
| Nazareth". It works to establish the historical Roman &
| Judaical context that Jesus the person would have been
| operating in. Probably a lot of crossover with the other books
| you've been reading.
| cxr wrote:
| Aslan is such a dishonest broker that it would be difficult
| to take a recommendation seriously even if without so many
| anti-endorsements from historians:
|
| > "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."
| squeegee_scream wrote:
| I'm a Christian and a history nerd. If you're interested in the
| counter arguments to what you've read, for historical and
| academic purposes or perhaps curiosity, start with NT Wright,
| or more broadly "The New Perspective on Paul" which is a
| movement similar to "The Search for the Historical Jesus".
| tiahura wrote:
| Isn't the timeframe a little short?
| flotzam wrote:
| Wikipedia has a neat table of "notable synoptic theories" with
| diagrams like the one in the article:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synoptic_Gospels#Theories
| panick21_ wrote:
| The problem with all of these is they act as if these works
| came into being fully formed at time X. Any real solution has
| to overcome that and start to think as these text are in
| motion.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| That's much more true for the new testament than the old. The
| main four books (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) emerged in
| such a condensed time frame with such similar structure and
| content it's very difficult to reason about the genesis of
| them outside of comparisons to each other. This gets even
| more complicated when you realize that names are re-used and
| authors likely intentionally made use of pseudonyms, so it's
| very hard to draw conclusions of authorship from third-party
| sources. By the time historians start to mention it
| Christianity had been wildly popular for centuries.
|
| 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.
| cxr wrote:
| They aren't assuming that, and it's weird that you would
| claim they are. Where do you get this? Those in the field of
| textual criticism are well aware of the existence of "variant
| texts"--those "textual witnesses" (documents) that differ for
| various reasons from the sources they were copied from.
| mhuffman wrote:
| Also this youtuber[0] is extremely good at visually (and
| verbally) describing current scholarly understandings of this.
| Similar (but different) to 3blue1brown in that way.
|
| [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6PrrnhAKFQ
| panick21_ wrote:
| I have been getting quite into this topic recently and this whole
| 'Q' theory more and more sounds like field hanging on to its
| older theories despite it not really making sense. I find it
| really hard to defend this view in my opinion.
|
| 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.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >The idea that these text are just written in 1 go and depend
| on each other doesn't really make sense.
|
| 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.
| berkeleynerd wrote:
| There is indeed great scholarship here with major contributions
| from Jason BeDuhn, Matthias Klinghardt, and Dieter Roth in
| addition to Vinzent, Bilby, and Bull who you mentioned. I'm
| really excited by this research and did a deep dive reading
| Tertullian's Against Marcion and the idea that anyone could
| possibly take the arguments set forth there over the more
| modern critical approaches is mind boggling. I can't imagine
| anyone arguing for Lukan-Priority based on these patristic
| sources has ever read them as the argumentation is specious at
| best.
| echelon_musk wrote:
| I've read half of this article and learned nothing more than was
| explained in the opening paragraph. It feels as if I've just had
| the Q theory explained to me 5 times by the TFA.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Almost as if there was a single original source which was then
| adapted by multiple followers
| cxr wrote:
| I've noticed this happens a lot in this field. If you read Bart
| Ehrman's books, you'll get the same sense of repetitiveness,
| and then if you you read the blogs from folks who are from the
| same sphere, the effect is bad there, too--not just someone
| repeating the same thing in every post, like a friend who has
| run out of stories to tell, but they'll have written a bunch of
| stuff where they repeat themselves several times within a
| single post. It's very odd.
|
| Having said that, I just read the article, and it's not as bad
| as some of the others.
| cperciva wrote:
| I was really hoping for a wacky fan theory about Star Trek here.
| fsckboy wrote:
| "Based on your historical documents, wouldn't it make sense
| that your gospels came from the Q Continuum?" - the Thermians
| pyuser583 wrote:
| I was hoping for an even wackier theory about the Q programming
| language <https://code.kx.com/q/learn/startingkdb/language/>.
| Maybe something by Terry Davis.
| noworld wrote:
| Better article: Questioning Q
|
| https://jimmyakin.com/2014/08/questioning-q.html
| irrational wrote:
| > The Farrer hypothesis proposes that Matthew used Mark as a
| source, but Luke used both Mark and Matthew as a source. This
| approach is simple and negates the need for a Q source
| altogether.
|
| > 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.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| You would think so, until you realize that Matt and Luke have
| some narratives in common to the exclusion of Mark.
|
| That has to be accounted for, which is where Occam's Razor
| would falls short. It's probably the strongest argument in
| favor of a Q source.
| Cacti wrote:
| Which ones do they have in common?
| prewett wrote:
| I interned for a year with a public speaker who had five or six
| autobiographical stories he told regularly. I found it
| interesting that his stories ended up like how the gospels tell
| Jesus stories. His messages had a main point, but he spoke
| extemporaneously, so depending on what he had been saying before
| he got to the story, he would included different elements into
| the story. One of the last messages I heard, he incorporated a
| few pieces of context at the beginning that I had never heard him
| tell before, and although I had heard him tell that story
| multiple times by that point, it completely changed the meaning
| of the story. Not that it invalidated the previous tellings, but
| that bit of context made a big difference to the meaning of the
| story. The gospel stories read a lot like that. Jesus may have
| told the stories differently depending on the context, and/ or
| the writer may have told the story different depending on the
| points he was making with the story.
|
| 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.
| jbaber wrote:
| This is a new-to-me and reasonable idea: that Q is the union of
| a collection of things.
| foxglacier wrote:
| What's the relevant difference between a written Q and oral
| tradition? Surely people repeating the stories to each other
| would also have established a fixed wording just as if it was
| written down. If the gospels were written ~80 years after Jesus's
| death, there had to be some intermediate source since the authors
| wouldn't have been personally alive when Jesus was so I don't
| really see that there's any question to resolve. Is the
| alternative hypothesis that they all had different sources, like
| their grandpas or someone with independent lineage back to Jesus?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| John, generally thought to be the last of the four canonical
| gospels, is the only Gospel that potentially dates to 80 years
| after Jesus's death.
|
| 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.
| foxglacier wrote:
| Oh, I thought CE started exactly at crucifixion but I guess
| that wouldn't really be possible if people didn't know when
| it really was. So it's accepted that those 3 authors may have
| personally seen Jesus and followed him around collecting
| stories?
| cameron_b wrote:
| Q being their lived experience is not out of the question.
| Finding a written Q would for some detract from the quality
| of the gospels as a primary source.
|
| 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...
| chungy wrote:
| It's clearer to use the original term and meaning: Anno
| Domini is "in the year of our Lord", and follows the same
| year numbering system that has been followed by various
| kings in history (even Japan still does for their
| Emperors). The birth of Jesus Christ signified his reign on
| earth, and that's when AD 1 happened. It's estimated he
| lived about 33 years until being killed on the cross, but
| since our current numbering is based on a 16th-centry
| estimate of how long ago it was, there is room for debate
| about Jesus's birth being shifted around a few years.
| Instead of changing our year numbers ("We've decided that
| 2024 is actually 2030..."), we instead talk about "maybe
| Jesus was born in 6 BC"
| DavidWoof wrote:
| You're _greatly_ overestimating how much an oral tradition
| leads to fixed wording. This is a pretty well-studied field at
| this point in time, and non-poetry oral traditions just don 't
| generate the kind of long word-for-word identical passages that
| we see in Luke and Matthew.
|
| 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.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| I read about this hypothesis many years ago.
|
| 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
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| So looking at this chart for the moment:
|
| 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?
| kyle_grove wrote:
| As I understand it, the Q-hypothesis is often situated within
| the hypothesis of Marcan priority (Mark was the source for Luke
| and Matthew), and Q is a way of explaining agreements within
| Luke and Matthew that are not also found in Mark. The
| hypothesis would be that Luke and Matthew each combined text
| from Mark with Q.
| bill_from_tampa wrote:
| The author mentioned that some of the "Q" sayings in Matthew have
| been modified and are worded a bit differently in Luke, and
| seemed to believe that this was an argument more for a separate
| "Q" source than for the hypothesis that Matthew added the
| "sayings of Jesus" to the framework of Mark to produce the gospel
| of Matthew. This does not make any sense to me -- Luke could have
| altered the wording of the "Q" document just as easily as the
| "Jesus sayings" in Matthew! And both Matthew and Luke tell the
| story a bit differently than Mark, and sometimes this is for
| pretty obvious theological reasons or to 'fix' problems they
| believed Mark contained. If Matthew didn't see the need to edit
| and change Mark, and Luke see the need to edit and change both
| Mark and Matthew, why did they write new gospels anyway?
|
| tl;dr The Farrer hypothesis seems much simpler and more likely.
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