Category: Bible

Is the “integral age” theory an apologetics myth? 9 things to know and share

prophet1Why do we celebrate Christmas on December 25th? Why is the Annunciation on March 25th?

According to some authors, it’s due to something called the “integral age” view that was common among ancient Jews.

But this idea itself might be a myth.

Here are 9 things to know and share . . .

BE SURE TO READ THE UPDATE TO THIS POST BY CLICKING HERE.

 

1) What is the “integral age” view?

Supposedly, it is a belief that was common in ancient Judaism, and it held that prophets (and other holy men) died on the same day that they were born or—according to some accounts—the day they were conceived.

They thus lived their lives in whole or “integral” years (from the Latin integer = “whole”).

 

2) What does this have to do with the Annunciation and Christmas?

According to some early Christian authors, Jesus was crucified on March 25th.

If that were true, and if someone held the integral age view, then Jesus would have either been born or conceived on March 25th.

This would provide a rationale for why the Church celebrates the Annunciation of Jesus on March 25, and why it celebrates his birth on December 25th—nine months later.

 

3) Why is it relevant to apologetics?

If this is the rationale for the dates of Advent and Christmas then it would be clear that they weren’t picked because of pagan holidays. They were picked based on the day Christ was thought to have been crucified.

Thus, apologists sometimes cite the integral age theory.

 

4) Who said Jesus was crucified on March 25th?

Tertullian (c. A.D. 200) is frequently credited with saying this. He wrote that Jesus was crucified “in the month of March, at the times of the Passover, on the eighth day before the calends of April” (An Answer to the Jews 8).

On the Roman calendar, the calends were the first days of the month.

If Jesus was crucified eight days before the calends of April then he was crucified eight days before April 1st—in other words, on March 25th.

Tertullian seems to have been the earliest author to propose this date for the Crucifixion, though it was later picked up by other Christian authors.

 

5) Was Tertullian correct?

No.  Modern scholars have almost universally concluded that Tertullian was mistaken.

The reason is that the four Gospels agree that Jesus was crucified on a Friday at Passover during the reign of Pontius Pilate (after the 15th year of Tiberius Caesar; see Luke 3:1).

None of the Fridays at Passover during the relevant years fall on March 25th, so Tertullian was mistaken.

Still, if people thought that’s when he was crucified, and if they held to the integral age view, that would still provide a rationale for the Annunciation on March 25 and Christmas on December 25.

 

6) Did they hold the integral age theory?

This is where it gets interesting. I’ve been doing extensive searching, both online and off, and I can’t find any ancient Jewish source attesting this view.

I can find modern Christian sources talking about it (like the apologetic writings mentioned earlier), but not ancient Jewish ones.

I also don’t find mentions of this in the scholarly literature I’ve checked.

For example, I can’t find any mention of it in Jack Finegan’s outstanding Hanbook of Biblical Chronology (2nd ed.)—and I really would expect to see some reference to it there.

I searched my Verbum library, which is very large. Nothing.

So I started searching on Google.

 

7) What did you find on Google?

Google shows different people different results, but here’s what I got.

If you search on “integral age”, you get 6,200 results, but most of the top ones have nothing to do with our question. A lot of them seem to have to do with a New Age concept.

If you search for “integral age” prophets, you get 3,070 results, but the top results are almost all about Christmas.

That’s a danger sign.

If this is a well-attested Jewish view then why does it only seem to be bringing up results about Christmas. Could it be an apologetics myth?

I checked several of the results that came up, but none of them cited an ancient Jewish source (or even a scholarly source which would be expected to include a reference to an ancient one). The ones I checked just said it was a Jewish belief.

We might be able to force Jewish references to the surface if we eliminate “Christmas” from the search, so I then searched on “integral age” prophets –Christmas. I got 648 results.

Now the Annunciation held the top spot in the results Google showed me. So I pulled out the Annunciation, too, by searching on “integral age” prophets –Christmas –Annunciation. I got 619 results.

Some New Age references were back. And none of the links I checked provided any ancient Jewish or modern scholarly references.

This was bad.

The search results I was coming up with did not make it look like this was an ancient Jewish belief.

So I decided to include search terms for specific Jewish sources where you might expect such a belief to be mentioned—like the Mishnah, the Talmud, or in a midrash.

The results I got were, respectively, 1 hit, 70 hits, and 10 hits.

Many of these had the term Talmud or midrash struck out because Google was trying to show me additional results even though these terms were not present.

And none of the ones I checked cited an ancient Jewish or modern scholarly source.

 

8) Is the “integral age” theory just a Christian apologetics myth, then?

From what I’ve been able to find, it could well be.

That’s not to say it’s a modern one. It could have been an idea that some ancient Christians had about what Jews believed. I haven’t tried tracing how far back in Christian history the claim goes.

But I have tried finding it in ancient Jewish and modern scholarly sources and not come up with anything.

As a result, I don’t feel safe citing this argument in my own apologetics at this point, because I can’t back it up. It has the earmarks of an apologetics myth.

So I have a request: Can anybody provide a quotation from an ancient Jewish source that talks about this belief?

How about a modern scholarly source that cites an ancient source (Jewish or otherwise)?

I’d much appreciate anything anyone can come up with! I’d love to have an ancient source for this claim.

 

9) If it is a myth, what then?

If the integral age theory is a myth then it means we shouldn’t be using it when we talk about the dating of the Annunciation and Christmas.

Of course, if it is a myth, that doesn’t mean these two Christian holidays were ripoffs of pagan ones. That’s a whole different matter.

Also, the difficulty in finding actual ancient references to back up this common contemporary claim should serve as a caution and as an illustration of the value of checking one’s sources and testing their claims.

BE SURE TO READ THE UPDATE TO THIS POST BY CLICKING HERE.

Were the early Christians pacifists?

Men who came to Jesus: The Roman SoldierThere is a persistent claim that the early Christians were pacifists—in the strong sense of being opposed to all use of violence—and that it was not until the time of the Emperor Constantine that this began to change.

After Christianity became the official religion of the empire, the Church embraced the use of military force, with St. Augustine playing the part of the enabling villain, who came up with the idea of the just war.

This story plays with well-worn tropes: the fall from original innocence into corruption, the idea that Constantine corrupted the Church, that the Christianization of the empire was a bad thing, etc.

You may notice that these same tropes are often used in anti-Catholic apologetics stemming from the Protestant Reformation. That’s not surprising, since these tropes were needed to justify separation from the Church at the time of the Reformation.

It’s also not surprising that, relying on these same tropes, the denominations that historically have been strongly pacifistic stemmed from the Protestant community.

Most Protestants, of course, are not pacifists and recognize the legitimate use of military force, and there is a good reason for that: Protestants are the majority in many countries, just as Catholics are in others, and so they have been confronted with the task of ensuring the safety of their nations.

No nation can be safe if it is unwilling to use military force to defend itself. If, in the present, fallen state of the world, a nation were to suddenly renounce the use of military force and beat its swords into ploughshares, it would suffer a dire fate.

Either:

  • It would be conquered by its external enemies,
  • Its internal, criminal element would overrun it and turn it into a failed state,
  • Its more sensible-minded citizens would stage a coup and re-establish a government willing to use force to defend the nation, or
  • It would depend for its defense on another country that is less scrupulous about the use of force, making its safety and freedom dependent on the whims of that foreign state.

Any way you go, pacifism is not a stable, self-sustaining enterprise. It’s a dangerous world out there, and pacifists depend for their safety and security on the generosity and good will of non-pacifists.

Prior to the Christianization of the Roman empire, many Christians were not faced with the responsibility of defending the public and ensuring public order. As a result, some authors of this period had the luxury of entertaining pacifistic ideals without having to worry about keeping people safe.

But were they all in this condition? What about those Christians who were in the military?

What about the era of the New Testament itself? What attitude toward military service did it take?

Is the idea of a uniformly pacifist early Church accurate? Or does it distort what actually happened?

Here’s a video in which I take on the subject.

Click here to watch the video in your browser.

Did John Use Mark as a Template?

mark-and-johnThe Church Fathers on John’s Gospel

Clement of Alexandria gives the following account of when and how John’s Gospel was written:

[L]ast of all, John, perceiving that the external facts had been made plain in the Gospel, being urged by his friends, and inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual Gospel [preserved in Eusebius, Church History 6:14:7).

He notes that John was written last, that John was urged by others to write, and that he wrote his Gospel in a deliberately different style than the others, which had already presented “the external facts” about the life of Jesus.

A similar account is found in the Muratorian Fragment, which says:

The fourth of the Gospels is that of John, [one] of the disciples. To his fellow disciples and bishops, who had been urging him [to write], he said, ‘Fast with me from today to three days, and what will be revealed to each one let us tell it to one another.’ In the same night it was revealed to Andrew, [one] of the apostles, that John should write down all things in his own name while all of them should review it [Muratorian Fragment 9-16].

This account at least seems to agree that John was written last (though the reference to it being the “fourth of the Gospels” could be a reference to its canonical order).

It definitely agrees that John was urged to write it, and it indicates that John seems to have been initially hesitant to do so, not agreeing until there was a divine revelation. This hesitation might have been due to the existence of the other Gospels, which already recorded the basic facts of Jesus’ life.

 

John’s Gospel on John’s Gospel

The idea that John wrote to supplement the other Gospels and that he did so with some hesitation may be reflected in two passages in the Gospel itself:

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name [John 20:30-31].

This is the disciple who is bearing witness to these things, and who has written these things; and we know that his testimony is true. But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written [John 21:24-25].

The reference to the many other signs that Jesus performed “which are not written in this book” may be taken as a reference to other books—the other Gospels—in which they are written.

It could also reflect a hesitancy to write further about the author’s experiences with Jesus, because that would result in too long a work.

The latter understanding seems to be reflected in the second passage’s statement that, if all of Jesus’ deeds were written, “I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”

There may even be a reference to the elders who urged John to write when the second passage identifies the beloved disciple as the author and then says, “and we know that his testimony is true.” That statement may be the collective voice of the elders intruding into the text and endorsing John’s testimony.

All of this is disputed.

 

Isolated Evangelists?

In the last several decades, it has become fashionable in biblical scholarship to say that the Evangelists were all writing for individual communities and that their Gospels were not intended to be widely circulated, so they wrote with little awareness of each other’s work. According to a common view:

  • Mark wrote first and so didn’t know the work of any other Evangelist.
  • Matthew knew Mark but not Luke or John.
  • Luke knew Mark but not Matthew or John.
  • John didn’t know any of the other three Evangelists’ work.

Of course, like everything in biblical scholarship, each of these claims is disputed.

thegospelsforallchristiansBritish scholar Richard Bauckham published a major assault on the idea that the Gospels were written for narrow, isolated communities in a book that he edited and co-authored with several other individuals, entitled The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (New Testament Studies).

It’s awesome.

GET IT HERE!

 

Did John Know Mark?

One of the essays that Bauckham contributed to the book is entitled “John for Readers of Mark.” In this piece, he argues that John not only knew Mark but that you can show this because John seems to have used Mark as a template or an outline.

In other words, John sequenced his own narrative in and around the elements in Mark’s narrative so that the two Gospels fit together like puzzle pieces.

If this view is correct, you should be able to make a table using parallel columns to show how the two Gospels fit together.

Bauckham did not provide such a table, and though he provided impressive arguments for his proposal, he did not go through the entirety of the two Gospels or test the proposal against the ideas that John might have used Matthew or Luke rather than Mark.

I decided to continue Bauckham’s investigation along these lines.

 

How Mark and John Fit Together

First, here is the table I came up with of how the two Gospels fit together (italics and parentheses indicate material that is in a different sequence in one Gospel than the other):

No.

Section

Mark

John
1. Prologue

—

1:1-18
2. John the Baptist, Jesus’ Baptism, & Testing

1:1-13

—
3. Early Ministry I

—

1:19-2:12
4.       Clearing the Temple

(11:11-25)

2:13-22
5. Early Ministry II

—

2:23-4:43
6. The Official’s Son

—

4:44-54
7 Galilean Ministry I

1:14-6:6

—
8. Sending the Disciples

6:7-13

—
9. Fate of John the Baptist

6:14-29

—
10. Visit to Jerusalem

—

5:1-47
11. Disciples Return

6:30

—
12. Feeding the Five Thousand & Walking on the Water

6:31-53

6:1-71
13. Galilean Ministry II

6:54-9:50

7:1-9
14. Judean Ministry I

10:1a

7:10-10:39
15. Transjordan Ministry

10:1b-31

10:40-42
16. Judean Ministry II

—

11:1-57
17. Travel to Jerusalem

10:32-52

—
18.    Anointing with Oil

(14:1-11)

12:1-8
19. Triumphal Entry

11:1-10

12:9-19
20. Clearing the Temple

11:11-25

(2:13-22)
21. Before the Supper

11:27-13:37

12:20-50
22.    Anointing with Oil

14:1-11

(12:1-8)
23. The Last Supper

14:12-26

13:1-14:31
24. Extended Discourse

—

15:1-17:26
25. After the Supper

14:27-52

18:1-12
26. Before Annas

—

18:13-23
27. Before Caiaphas

14:53-65

18:24
28. Peter’s Denial

14:66-72

18:25-26
29. Before Pilate

15:1-15

18:28-19:16
30. Crucifixion & Burial

15:16-47

19:17-42
31. Resurrection Narrative

16:1-8
(or 16:1-20)

20:1-21:25

 

Did John Use Mark as a Template?

I then went through the table, looking for evidence for and against the proposal. Here is a summary of my findings (most of these points I got from Bauckham, but some—especially those regarding the Last Supper—are original to me):

  • John’s prologue introduces John the Baptist (John 1:6-8, 15) and can be seen as interacting with the beginning of Mark (Mark 1:1-13).
  • John 1:19-4:43 can be seen as fitting between Mark 1:13 and 1:14.
  • In John 1:19-34, John the Baptist gives an account of his own ministry and of how he identified Jesus as the coming one that reflects Mark 1:1-13.
  • The fact that John does not directly record the baptism of Jesus (a major event!) suggests that his audience already had a written account of it.
  • John 3:24’s reference to an incident that occurred when “John had not yet been put in prison” seems to be intended to clarify when the events of John 1:19-4:43 fit into Mark’s outline.
  • In Mark 6:7-13, Jesus sends the disciples on a mission from which they will return in Mark 6:30. The material between these verses is thus a time when Jesus does not have the disciples with him. This period seems to be reflected in John 5:1-47, which is a period in which the disciples are not mentioned. Further, in both John and Mark, these sections contain material recording or referring to the death of John the Baptist, with John seeming to presuppose that the audience already knows how the Baptist died (presumably from Mark’s account).
  • John 7:1a seems to summarize a continuation of the Galilean ministry that is recorded in Mark 6:54-9:50. Further, John 6:4 and 7:2 imply a period of six months spent in Galilee that John does not otherwise record and that seems to correspond to Mark 7-9. This period is the last time that Jesus will be in Galilee until after the Resurrection.
  • Mark 10:1a and John 7:10-10:39 record a period in which Jesus ministered in Judea.
  • Mark 10:1b-31 and John 10:40-42 record a period in which Jesus ministered in the Transjordan.
  • The way that the Last Supper is recorded in Mark 14:12-26 and John 13:1-14:31 suggests supplemental intent on John’s part. John omits virtually everything Mark records happening before and at the supper and provides additional material about it not found in Mark. Even when he records the one event that the two have in common (Jesus’ prediction of Judas’s betrayal) John provides supplementary detail not found in Mark. Also, the events that John narrates seem to interweave easily with the events that Mark records. The fact that John does not record the institution of the Eucharist (another major event!), which he has already foreshadowed in John 6:26-71, is strong evidence that his audience already had a written record of its institution.
  • John’s supplemental intent may be illustrated by his giving names to figures that are otherwise unnamed in Mark (e.g., Peter and Malchus in the incident where Peter cuts off Malchus’s ear; cf. Mark 14:47, John 18:10).
  • John 18:13-23 discusses the relationship between Annas and Caiaphas, provides additional detail about how Peter got into the courtyard of the high priest, and preserves an account of Jesus’ appearance before Annas, which is not mentioned in Mark. All of these may be seen as an effort to supplement Mark’s account.
  • John 18:24 refers, in a single verse, to the appearance of Jesus before Caiaphas, which is described in detail in Mark 14:53-65. This may be evidence of John taking Mark’s account as read.
  • In John 19:7, the Jewish authorities charge Jesus before Pilate with making himself out to be the Son of God. This charge is not found in John’s account of Jesus’ appearances before the Jewish authorities, but it is found in Mark’s account (Mark 14:61-64).

On the other hand:

  • The clearing of the temple and the anointing with oil are placed differently in Mark and John.
  • John records Jesus’ prediction of Peter’s denial as occurring during the Last Supper, but in Mark it appears just after the supper.

These differences could be counted as evidence that John was not using Mark as an outline, but it also can be understood in other ways, such as John providing additional clarity on precisely when these events occurred (or, in the case of the clearing of the temple, that it happened more than once). The dislocation of these events thus does not overcome the positive evidence that John used Mark.

 

Did John Use Luke as a Template?

I then used the same methodology—making a table of how Luke and John might mesh and then reviewing each section for evidence that John might have used Luke. Here is a summary of my findings:

  • There is a possible agreement between Luke and John if the healing of the Centurion’s servant (Luke 7:1-10) is the same as the healing of the Official’s son (John 4:44-54). If they are different events (my preference) then there is no such interaction.
  • A similar, possible interaction is the miraculous catch of fish recorded in Luke 5:1-9. If this is the same event as the miraculous catch recorded in John 21:1-14 then it could be a case of John providing greater clarity about when this event occurred chronologically. However, if these are two different events (my view) then there is no such interaction.
  • There is also one notable agreement in that Luke and John place the prediction of Peter’s denial within the Last Supper (Luke 22:31-34, John 13:36-38), rather than after it (Mark 14:26-31).

These, however, pale in comparison to the differences in sequence that make it much less likely that John used Luke for a template compared to Mark. These include the following:

  • John would have had to skip the first 132 verses of Luke and begin by relating his prologue to material in Luke 3.
  • Luke 4:14 does not mention that Jesus began his Galilean ministry only after John was imprisoned (it thus fails to set up John 3:24)
  • Luke omits the Transjordan ministry found in John 10:40-42
  • Luke does not provide an account of Jesus’ encounter with Caiaphas, so John 18:24 could not be a summary of such an encounter.
  • And—most especially—the major disruptions posed by Luke’s travel narrative and the fact that John—with a known interest in clarifying chronology—would not have passed over them without doing anything to resolve them.

It thus appears more likely that John used Mark as a template than that he used Luke.

But what about the idea that he might have used Matthew?

 

Did John Use Matthew as a Template?

Finally, I repeated the procedure on Matthew. Here is a summary of my findings:

  • There is a possible agreement between Matthew and John if the healing of the Centurion’s servant (Matt.  8:5-13) is the same as the healing of the Official’s son (John 4:44-54). However, these may very well be two separate events (my preference), in which case there is no such agreement.

This single possible agreement is more than offset by elements that make it less likely that John used Matthew for a template than Mark. These include the following:

  • John would have had to skip the first two chapters of Matthew and begin by relating his prologue to material in Matthew 3.
  • In John the death of John the Baptist seems to be announced while Jesus’ disciples are out on mission, but in Matthew the disciples return to Jesus before the death of John the Baptist.
  • Matthew 19:1 seems to blur together the Judean and Transjordanian ministries recorded in John 7-10.

 

Conclusion

It thus appears that John more likely used Mark as a template than either Luke or Matthew. I thus think Bauckham is right: John likely meant his Gospel to interweave with Mark’s Gospel.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that John didn’t know Matthew’s or Luke’s Gospels. He may have; he just doesn’t seem to have used them as a template the way he did Mark’s.

Also, the above are simply a summary of my findings—not a full study—though I did such a study in brain-crushing detail, which you can read online.

CLICK HERE TO GET BRAIN-CRUSHING DETAIL!

Have they discovered a new “lost Gospel” that says Jesus was married?

lost-gospelIt’s getting near Christmas, and you know what that means. That’s right! It’s time for another book to be released telling us the sensationalistic “truth” about Christianity.

This time we have The Lost Gospel: Decoding the Ancient Text that Reveals Jesus’ Marriage to Mary the Magdalene by Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson.

You may remember Jacobovici from his involvement in previous biblical-archeological shenanigans like the discredited “Jesus family tomb” claims of a few years ago—in which Jacobovici similarly claimed that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.

So what do he and sensationalist co-author Barrie Wilson have in store for us this time?

 

Zecharias Who?

The key text used in their new book is preserved in a set of writings attributed to Zecharias Rhetor (i.e., Zecharias the Rhetorician), also known as Zecharias Scholasticus (i.e., Zecharias the Scholar), also known as Zecharias of Mytilene.

He was a native of Gaza who lived in the late A.D. 400s and early 500s and who became the bishop of Mytilene.

He wrote a number of works in Greek, including a work on Church history that was later translated into Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic), with various editorial changes.

It is this Syriac text, brought to the British Museum in 1847, that Jacobovici and Wilson are using in their new book.

 

What They’re Claiming

Among other things, Jacobovici and Wilson claim that they have discovered a lost gospel that is written in code and, when properly decoded, states that Jesus was married, likely to Mary Magdalene, and that they had two sons.

None of this is true.

 

Not Lost.

First, the text in question is not “lost.” It is not some newly discovered work that scholars were previously unaware of.

The particular manuscript that Jacobovici and Wilson rely on was brought to the British Museum for more than a century and a half ago, and the same text has been known through other sources for centuries.

The scholarly community has been well aware of it, and translations of it in English and other languages are common.

To give you an idea of how not-lost this work is, it’s been in print for centuries, I have it in my own library, and here’s a version you can read online from a book printed in 1918.

 

Not a Gospel.

The work is also not a Gospel. Although some scholars use the term “Gospel” in surprising and misleading ways, a Gospel (in the literary sense) is a book about the life and/or teachings of Jesus.

That is not what this text is. This text is not about Jesus. The story it tells is not even set in the first century, when Jesus lived.

It’s set more than a thousand years before the time of Christ.

 

Not a Code About Jesus.

The work is also not a coded version of the story of Jesus. Instead, it’s a work of historical fiction about two figures we already know from the Old Testament: Joseph and Asenath.

 

Who were Joseph and Asenath?

Joseph was one of the sons of Jacob. He angered his brothers, who sold him into slavery.

Eventually, he ended up in Egypt, where he rose to prominence and married an Egyptian woman named Asenath, who was the daughter of an Egyptian priest.

She and Joseph later had two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, who became the patriarchs of two of the tribes of Israel.

You can read the biblical account of Joseph in Genesis 37-50, and we read about his marriage to Asenath in Genesis 41:45, 50, and 46:20.

 

Why are these two figures discussed in Zecharias’s writings?

If you go into a Christian bookstore today—be it Protestant or Catholic—you are likely to find novelizations of the lives of various biblical and historical figures.

These may be fictionalized lives of Old Testament saints, like Abraham and Moses, New Testament saints, like Peter or Paul, or saints from later Church history, like Augustine or Francis of Assisi.

Out of the same impulse, a desire to know and imagine more about what famous religious figures’ lives were like, Jews and Christians in the ancient world sometimes wrote fictionalized lives of their forebears, and that’s what the ancient work known as Joseph and Asenath is: It’s a fictionalized account of the lives of the Old Testament patriarch Joseph and his wife.

 

What happens in the story?

A bunch of things, but basically it falls into two parts. The first part is devoted to Asenath’s conversion to the Hebrew faith.

As the daughter of an Egyptian priest, she was raised a polytheist and an idolater, and in later ages, Jewish men were forbidden from marrying foreign women because of their idolatry and how they would tempt their husbands to worship other gods.

This raised a question: How could the patriarch Joseph have married a foreign woman—an Egyptian, even!

The first part of the novel answers this by proposing that Asenath repented of her idolatry and embraced the worship of the true God, making her a fitting bride for Joseph.

The second part of the novel deals with an adventure in which the son of Pharoah tries to get Asenath for himself, but Asenath prays to God, who intervenes to save the situation. Pharoah and his wicked son die, and Joseph becomes the regent of Egypt until a different son of Pharoah is old enough to reign.

 

So this isn’t a coded story about Jesus?

No. It’s a straightforward historical novel about two familiar Old Testament figures.

It addresses questions that an ancient Jewish audience would have, like how a pagan priest’s daughter could marry a biblical patriarch.

Its mention of Joseph’s and Asenath’s two sons—Ephraim and Manasseh—is not to tell us about sons of Jesus and Mary Magdalen. They are mentioned because they were the patriarchs of two of the later tribes (or “half-tribes”) that everyone in ancient Israel knew about.

And it contains a thrilling tale of how God answers prayer and will protect those who turn to him from the machinations of others—just like multiple accounts in the Old Testament.

 

Are there unanswered questions about the work?

Sure. Like a lot of ancient literature, we aren’t sure who wrote it or when. There is even debate about whether Joseph and Asenath was a Jewish or a Christian work, or possibly a Jewish work with Christian edits.

There are also some strange things in it—like material involving bees and a honeycomb—that some have suggested is meant to teach some kind of spiritual lesson, though it is hard to figure out.

However, the idea that Joseph and Asenath is a coded life story of Jesus is without foundation.

 

Are there particular reasons to think that Jesus was not married?

Yes. Among other things that could be said, Jesus points to celibacy as a spiritual ideal, saying that this gift is not given to everyone but should be accepted by those to whom it is given (Matt. 19:11-12). Since Jesus was considered himself the paragon of spirituality for Christians, it would be strange for him to propose this spiritual ideal if he himself did not meet it.

Further, Jesus depicts himself as a bridegroom (Matt. 9:15, 25:1-10, cf. John 3:27-30), but the marriage he has is a mystical one, not a literal one, for the New Testament portrays the bride of Christ as his Church, not as an individual woman (2 Cor. 11:2, Eph. 5:22-33, Rev. 19:7, 21:2, 9).

It is difficult to see how this understanding of the Church as the bride of Christ could have arisen if there were a literal “Mrs. Jesus.”

By virtue of her marriage to Jesus, she would have instantly become a prominent figure in early Christianity, and her status as the literal bride of Christ would have prevented the understanding of the Church as the mystical bride of Christ from developing.

 

Where can I read more?

Here’s the Asenath home page, maintained by New Testament scholar Mark Goodacre.

Here are some comments by New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham from when the pair first announced their “lost Gospel” book.

Here are some comments by classicist Bob Cargill that go directly to Jacobovici and Wilson’s claims (brief bad language warning).

St Luke: 10 things to know and share

st_lukeOctober 18th is the feast of St. Luke the Evangelist.

Who was he and what do we know about him?

Here are 10 things to know and share . . .

 

1) Who was St. Luke?

St. Luke is mentioned by name in three passages of Scripture:

  • In Colossians 4:14, St. Paul writes: “Luke the beloved physician and Demas greet you.”
  • In 2 Timothy 4:11, Paul writes: “Luke alone is with me. Get Mark and bring him with you; for he is very useful in serving me.”
  • And in Philemon 23-24, Paul writes: “Epaphras, my fellow prisoner in Christ Jesus, sends greetings to you, and so do Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, and Luke, my fellow workers.”

Since Luke is mentioned in three letters, we can infer that he was a frequent companion of St. Paul.

He also shared in Paul’s labors, since he is referred to as one of Paul’s “fellow workers.”

The fact that Paul says, in his final letter, that “Luke alone is with me” suggests that he was a particularly intimate and faithful companion.

Finally, the reference to Luke as “the beloved physician” indicates that his “day job” (as opposed to his apostolic efforts) was as a medical practitioner.

 

2) What books of Scripture did St. Luke write?

St. Luke is identified by early (2nd century) tradition as the author of the third Gospel and as the author of the book of Acts.

He also may have had a role in composing some of the letters attributed to St. Paul (see below).

Even if he only wrote Luke and Acts, though, he still wrote more of the New Testament than any other author! Luke and Acts together total almost 38,000 words, or 24% of the whole New Testament.

 

3) What debt do we owe to St. Luke for his Gospel?

St. Luke’s Gospel is one of the three “Synoptic Gospels,” which means that it covers much of the same territory as those of St. Matthew and St. Mark.

As a result, if Luke’s Gospel had not been written, there would still be a great deal of the Jesus story that would have been preserved (not only by Matthew and Mark but also by John). However, there are certain things that only Luke records.

Among them are these passages (plus a number of others):

  • The Birth of John the Baptist Foretold (1:5-25)
  • The Birth of Jesus Foretold (1:26-38)
  • The Visitation (1:39-56)
  • The Birth of John the Baptist (1:57-80)
  • The Circumcision and Presentation of Jesus (2:21-40)
  • The Finding in the Temple (2:41-52)
  • The Widow of Nain’s Son (7:11-17)
  • The Mission of the Seventy (10:01-20)
  • The Good Samaritan (10:29-37)
  • “Mary has chosen the good portion” (10:38-42)
  • The Friend at Midnight (11:5-8)
  • The Parable of the Rich Fool (12:13-21)
  • The Parable of the Lost Coin (15:8-10)
  • The Parable of the Lost Son (15:11-32)
  • The Parable of the Shrewd Steward (16:1-8)
  • Lazarus and the Rich Man (16:19-31)
  • Ten Lepers Cleansed (17:11-19)
  • The Parable of the Persistent Widow (18:1-8)
  • The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (18:9-14)
  • Dinner with Zacchaeus (19:1-10)
  • Who Is the Greatest? (22:24-32)
  • Jesus Before Herod Antipas (23:6-12)

If these weren’t recorded in Luke’s Gospel, we wouldn’t know about them, because they aren’t recorded elsewhere in the New Testament.

 

4) Where did Luke get the information for his Gospel?

At the beginning of his Gospel, Luke writes:

Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you [Luke 1:1-3].

Luke’s reference to narratives of the events in the Gospel that preceded his and his reference to having followed “all things,” with those forming of his own account seem to indicate that he used written sources for some of his information.

Given the similarities that Luke has to Matthew and Mark (the other two Synoptic Gospels), it is likely that he used one or both of these.

He also says that he drew information from “eyewitnesses and ministers of the word.”

One of the eyewitnesses he likely interviewed was the Virgin Mary herself. Luke records the material in the infancy narrative in a way that implies Mary was the source of much or all of it (Luke 2:19, 51; more here).

One of the ministers of the word he likely used as a source was St. Paul. One way of showing this is that the words of institution for the Eucharist in Luke’s Gospel (see Luke 22:19-20) is very similar to the formula used by St. Paul (see 1 Cor. 11:24-25). It is less similar to the formula used in Matthew and Mark (see Matt. 26:26-28, Mark 14:22-24). It is likely he used the formula used by St. Paul because he frequently heard Paul saying Mass and this was the most familiar version to him.

An individual who was both an eyewitness and a minister of the word that Luke likely interviewed is St. Peter. We have good reason to think that St. Peter was one of the sources of Acts (see below), and if Luke interviewed him for that, he likely interviewed him for his Gospel as well.

 

5) What debt do we owe to St. Luke for his writing the book of Acts?

Acts covers the earliest history of the Church after the earthly ministry of Jesus.

It covers a period stretching from A.D. 33 to A.D. 60.

Without Acts we would be able to deduce few things about this period from the letters in the New Testament (e.g., that churches existed in the cities that the letters were sent to, a few events in the life of Paul).

However, we would otherwise be completely ignorant of this period. Luke thus did us a huge service by not stopping with the end of his Gospel and by continuing to record the history of the early Church beyond Jesus’ death and resurrection.

He immeasurably enriched our knowledge of this period.

 

6) Where did Luke get his information for Acts?

As with the Gospel, Luke likely got his information for Acts from both written sources and from interviews with eyewitnesses and ministers of the word.

He also, notably, witnessed many of the events in the Gospel himself. This is indicated by what are known as the “we” passages in Acts—places in which the author speaks of what “we” did and where “we” went, indicating that the author was present for these events.

There are four such passages:

  • Acts 16:10–17
  • Acts 20:5–15
  • Acts 21:1–18
  • Acts 27:1–28

A written source that Luke likely used is a travel diary that was kept of Paul’s journeys. Luke himself may have been the author of this diary, though it may have been kept by someone else in the Pauline circle.

There are also three individuals who likely served as major sources for the book:

  • Peter (featured in Acts 1-6 and 9-12)
  • Philip the Evangelist (featured in Acts 8)
  • Paul (featured in Acts 9, 11, and 13-28)

The “we” passages indicate that he had frequent access to Paul, and we know he had access to Peter and Philip the Evangelist as well:

  • He would have had access to Peter during the two years that Paul stayed in house arrest in Rome (Acts 28:30), where Peter was also ministering.
  • He would have access to Philip the Evangelist during the two years that Paul stayed in custody at Caesarea Maritima (Acts 23:33, 24:27), where Philip the Evangelist lived (Acts 21:8-9).

 

7) When were Luke’s Gospel and Acts written?

They were written as companion pieces and dedicated to the same individual (Theophilius). They were thus likely written at the same time.

Since Acts cuts off suddenly in A.D. 60, before Paul has had a chance to appear before Caesar, this is likely when Acts was finished.

Both Luke and Acts were likely written at Rome in A.D. 59-60.

 

8) Did Luke have a hand in any of Paul’s letters?

Luke is never named as one of Paul’s co-authors, but Paul frequently used secretaries in the process of writing his letters (see, e.g., Rom. 16:22).

Such secretaries—known as amanuenses—could be tasked with writing a letter on behalf of another, based on talking-points given to him by the one for whom he was writing.

Particularly when he was in prison, Paul may have used Luke in this capacity, and some have noted similarities in the style of Luke-Acts and some of the letters attributed to Paul—particularly the pastoral letters (1-2 Tim., Titus).

The fact that, in 2 Timothy, Paul says that “Luke alone is with me” (2 Tim. 4:11) may indicate that Luke was the scribe that Paul used to write this letter.

Although the book of Hebrews does not attribute itself to Paul, many have noted the similarity of the style of this book to Luke-Acts also, and Luke has been proposed as a possible author for it.

 

9) Was Luke a Jew or a Gentile?

Though some have argued that he was a Jew, it is normally thought that Luke was a Gentile. One of the reasons is that, in Colossians he is mentioned separately from those “of the circumcision”:

Aristarchus my fellow prisoner greets you, and Mark the cousin of Barnabas (concerning whom you have received instructions—if he comes to you, receive him), and Jesus who is called Justus. These are the only men of the circumcision among my fellow workers for the kingdom of God, and they have been a comfort to me. . . . Luke the beloved physician and Demas greet you [Col. 4:10-14].

 

10) What do the Church Fathers say about Luke?

We can’t review what the Church Fathers have to say in detail, but here is part of what St. Jerome wrote about Luke in his Lives Illustrious Men:

Luke a physician of Antioch, as his writings indicate, was not unskilled in the Greek language.

An adherent of the apostle Paul, and companion of all his journeying, he wrote a Gospel, concerning which the same Paul says, “We send with him a brother whose praise in the gospel is among all the churches” and to the Colossians, “Luke the beloved physician salutes you,” and to Timothy, “Luke only is with me.”

He also wrote another excellent volume to which he prefixed the title Acts of the Apostles, a history which extends to the second year of Paul’s sojourn at Rome, that is to the fourth year of Nero, from which we learn that the book was composed in that same city. . . .

He was buried at Constantinople to which city, in the twentieth year of Constantius, his bones together with the remains of Andrew the apostle were transferred [Lives of Illustrious Men 7].

What’s missing from the Book of Acts? More than you might think!

PaulShipwreckedThe book of Acts does not tell us the full story of early Church history. It provides only partial information.

This is obvious from the fact that it just covers the period between A.D. 33 and 60, when it suddenly stops (providing us an important clue to when it was written).

Even within that time frame, though, it is only a partial record . . .

 

The How Many Apostles?

For example, the book of Acts tracks the activities of three individuals:

  • Peter (ch.s 1-6, 9-12)
  • Philip (ch. 8)
  • Paul (ch.s 9, 11, 13-28)

That gives us a big clue about who Luke’s main sources were in composing the book for those parts that he didn’t personally witness (the so-called “we” passages later in the book).

Luke tells us almost nothing of the activities of the other apostles, or of other Christians, and so the book is also incomplete in that way.

It does not give us a complete record of what even its main figures did:

  • Peter vanishes from the narrative after chapter 12, except for a brief reappearance in chapter 15.
  • Philip has only a single chapter devoted to his activities.
  • And, as we will see, Acts does not record many of the activities of Paul.

 

It’s About Time

Some time ago, I did a study of the flow of time in the book of Acts. Periodically Luke will provide time cues, saying that Paul spent three years in Ephesus (20:31) or that he stayed in Thessalonica for three weeks (17:1-2) or that they sailed from Mitylene and the next day arrived at Chios (20:14-15).

As a Bible chronology geek, I couldn’t resist going through the book of Acts and making a list of all the explicit time cues—as well as providing estimates for the implicit ones (such as when Paul goes from one place to another and we can estimate how long it took based on ancient travel times and methods) and the vague ones (so if Luke says Paul spent “many days” somewhere, I might reckon that as a month).

I wanted to add all these up and see if they fit within the chronological framework that the book as a whole covers. For example, could all of the activities ascribed to St. Paul have taken place in the years within the book that he was active?

The good news, from an apologetic perspective, is that they do. Acts appears to cover a period of 27 years (A.D. 33 to 60), but my time estimates for the events it mentions only came to 13 years in total.

That means that there is plenty of room in the 27 years that the book covers for all of the events Luke records—and more!

So Luke passes that test as a historian. He does not give us an impossible chronology.

But he also does not give us a complete chronology.

 

The Perils of Paul

We know that the record is incomplete because of the information recorded in St. Paul’s letters. For example, in 2 Corinthians there is a famous passage where Paul is so frustrated with some of the people at Corinth that he has an epistolary meltdown, and during the course of it he says some very interesting things about what he has done in his life. He writes:

Five times I have received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I have been beaten with rods; once I was stoned. Three times I have been shipwrecked; a night and a day I have been adrift at sea (2 Cor. 11:24-25).

 So here are the totals:

  • Forty lashes minus one from the Jews: 5
  • Beaten with rods: 3
  • Stoned: 1
  • Shipwrecked: 3
  • Adrift at sea for a night and a day: 1

How many of these does Luke record in the book of Acts?

 

Exactly Two

The thing is, 2 Corinthians was written some time between A.D. 55 and 57 (depending on which chronology you accept).

No matter what, though, it was written before St. Paul went to Jerusalem for the final time, because in 2 Corinthians 9:1-5 he tells the Corinthians to be ready to make donations so that he can take them to the Jerusalem church when he makes his final visit to it.

This visit is already underway—and he has passed the city of Corinth—by Acts 20:5-6, when St. Paul is in Troas—a city to the east of Corinth.

2 Corinthians had to be written before this point on his final journey to Jerusalem, and so what is found in 2 Corinthians must have happened before Acts 20:5.

This means that all the perils Paul mentioned above must occur before this point in Acts.

But only two such perils occurs before this point:

One is the stoning at Lystra that occurs in Acts 14:19. This is the single stoning that Paul mentions in his list. (Another stoning, at Iconium, was attempted in 14:5, but it was apparently unsuccessful because Paul only mentions being stoned once.)

The second is in Acts 16:22-37, where Paul is beaten with rods at Philippi.

That’s likely one of the three beatings he refers to in 2 Corinthians.

But these are the only events in 2 Corinthians that can be referred to in Acts.

 

Missing Events

There must, from this fact, be two other beatings with rods that happened during the period that Acts covers but that are not mentioned in Acts.

In addition, all five of the times that Paul received the “forty lashes minus one” from the Jews are not mentioned in Acts.

Nor are the three times he was shipwrecked, because the only shipwreck of St. Paul is mentioned in Acts 27, which is after his final journey to Jerusalem and thus after 2 Corinthians was written.

Furthermore, when that shipwreck occurs, Paul and his companions slam into a bay on the island of Malta (27:44-28:1). They do not spend a night and a day in the sea. That must refer to an earlier event.

 

More Missing Events

There are a number of other events mentioned in Paul’s letters that aren’t found in Acts.

Some of these are in the pastoral epistles (1-2 Timothy, Titus), but these letters may have been written after the book of Acts closed.

This is not the case, however, for events found in Galatians, which was clearly written during the time period covered by Acts.

An example is the fifteen-day visit Paul made to Jerusalem where he saw only Peter and James the Lord’s brother (Gal. 1:18-19). That’s not in Acts.

Neither is the much more consequential visit that Peter (Cephas) made to Antioch while Paul was staying there. There were fireworks between the two during this meeting (Gal. 2:11-16), but Luke does not mention it in Acts.

 

What Acts Is Missing

We thus see that Acts is not just a limited record of a few key figures (Peter, Phillip, Paul), it is restricted even in what it records about all of these three.

Undoubtedly, each did many more things than are recorded in Acts.

In particular, St. Paul experienced many things that aren’t mentioned in the book even though they fell in the period it covers.

Why didn’t Luke record them?

In some cases, he may not have wanted to because he didn’t want to distract the reader from his overall message. For example, if he included Paul’s rebuke of Peter at Antioch, it could have distracted from the fundamental agreement (present both in Acts and Galatians) between Peter and Paul.

In other cases, Luke may not have know about the event. He wasn’t by Paul’s side during the whole time of his ministry. Indeed, the first “we passage” doesn’t occur until Acts 16:10-17, so there was a lot of Paul’s ministry that he didn’t witness.

Paul may have recounted some of them to Luke, though, just as he did for the readers of 2 Corinthians.

Why wouldn’t Luke include those?

Likely, because they would have been too repetitive for his own readers. Recording five lashings, three beatings with rods, and three shipwrecks before we get to the one in chapter 27 could be seen as overkill.

It also could have taken more space than Luke felt he had available to him if he were going to keep Acts approximately the same length as his Gospel. (Indeed, there might have been an early, private draft of Acts that was longer and that Luke trimmed to size in preparing the final, canonical edition.)

Luke thus may have had good reasons for not recording everything that happened to Paul.

Still . . . it would be fascinating to know more.

The Procurator and the Peasant

Ecce_homo_by_Antonio_Ciseri_(1)I’m currently doing some work on the chronology of the book of Acts, and one of the key chronological benchmarks is in Acts 24:27, when the Roman procurator who presently has Paul in custody (Felix) is replaced by his successor (Festus).

You’d think that it would be easy to simply look up in secular sources when this change of government officials took place, but we can’t do that. We don’t have the records, and dating the beginning of Festus’s tenure is tricky.

In fact, as Ben Witherington points out:

About Felix’s successor, Porcius Festus, very little can be said, for our sources are limited to what we find in Acts 25–26 and in Josephus, Ant. 20.182–97 and War 2.271 [The Acts of the Apostles: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, 717].

Got that?

The sources we have about Festus are limited to Acts and a couple of passages in Josephus.

Now, Festus was an important man. He ruled the entire province of Judaea (more than just the Southern territory of Judea). He had a huge number of subjects. He’s one of the successors of Pontius Pilate. Further, he was one of the few (some say the only) good procurator that the Romans sent to Judaea.

And yet we know only a tiny amount about him.

From this, several things suggest themselves . . .

 

1) The footprint left in ancient historical sources by even as important a person as the Roman procurator of Judaea can be very slight.

No doubt, in his own day, there were many more literary references to him–in all kinds of works, from official government documents to private letters–but except for the references in Acts and two passages of Josephus, they have all perished.

 

2) This should help us calibrate our expectations regarding other people in the ancient world.

If the Roman procurator has only two ancient authors mentioning him, then we would expect the vast majority of his subjects to go completely unmentioned in historical sources–as, indeed, they do.

We know the names of only a handful of Festus’s subjects, and they are people who have significant stature, like the high priests of his day.

 

3) We should not make excessive demands about mentions of Jesus in ancient sources.

Jesus came from the peasant class (Luke 2:24; cf. Lev. 12:8), and we would expect the events of his early life to leave no traces at all in surviving secular sources.

It was only after his ministry began that he became such a public figure that he might be expected to be mentioned in non-Christian sources, as he and the movement he founded is:

  • Suetonius, writing around A.D. 121
  • Tacitus, writing around A.D. 116
  • Pliny the Younger, writing in A.D. 110 or 111
  • The Emperor Trajan, writing back to Pliny in A.D. 110 or 111
  • And Josephus, writing around A.D. 93 (including the undisputed passage regarding his brother James the Just)

Comparing this to the single non-Christian source mentioning Festus (Josephus), and the number of early, non-Christian sources mentioning Jesus is quite ample!

He left a bigger footprint on the literature of his day than did this Roman procurator!

 

4) We shouldn’t dismiss the historical value of biblical evidence

A historian of the Roman empire would have two early century sources to tell him about Porcius Festus: Luke and Josephus.

It would be foolish to ignore either of these and, indeed, secular historians do not discount things Luke says simply because his works are in the New Testament.

Only hyper-skeptical individuals dismiss the New Testament as a historical source out of hand.

Sober historians treat it like they do other historical sources. One coming from a secular approach will not regard it as divinely inspired, but that does not mean it is without historical value.

The idea that everything the New Testament says should be considered false unless otherwise confirmed by outside sources is nonsense.

Historical evidence found in the New Testament is just that . . . historical evidence.

Did Mark Abridge Matthew’s Gospel?

St_Augustine_-_Lightner_MuseumAccording to a view that St. Augustine proposed when he began his Harmony of the Gospels, Mark was the second Gospel to be written, and it was basically an abridgement of Matthew.

Luke then wrote third, and John last.

This idea is known as the “Augustinian hypothesis.”

Despite its historical popularity, there are several reasons to think that it is incorrect.

 

Augustine’s Arguments

St. Augustine wrote:

Mark follows him [Matthew] closely, and looks like his attendant and epitomizer.

For in his narrative he gives nothing in concert with John apart from the others: by himself separately, he has little to record; in conjunction with Luke, as distinguished from the rest, he has still less; but in concord with Matthew, he has a very large number of passages.

Much, too, he narrates in words almost numerically and identically the same as those used by Matthew, where the agreement is either with that evangelist alone, or with him in connection with the rest [Harmony of the Gospels, I:2:4].

Augustine thus argued that Mark followed Matthew (he was “his attendant”) and that he shortened Matthew (he was his “epitomizer”). He therefore offers two arguments for his proposal:

1) Mark has a great deal of material in common with Matthew compared to Luke and John.

2) Mark’s wording is very similar to that of Matthew compared to Luke and John.

 

The Argument from Parallels

It’s quite true that Mark’s Gospel has a great deal in common with Matthew’s Gospel.

It is commonly estimated that 90% of the material found in Mark is also found in Matthew (B. F. Streeter, The Four Gospels, 160). Nine out of ten verses in Mark are paralleled in Matthew!

There are more parallels between Mark and Matthew than in any two other pairings of Gospels, so there does seem to be a special relationship between the two.

Augustine could be correct, then, that Mark took Matthew’s Gospel and abridged it, but it could also be the other way around: Matthew could have taken Mark’s Gospel, used nine tenths of it, and then added traditions from other sources.

Like many arguments concerning the Synoptic Problem, this one is reversible. Either Gospel could be using the other, so more evidence is needed to decide the question.

 

The Argument from Language

A problem for Augustine’s argument based on similarity of language is that, even if he is right that Mark’s language is most similar to Matthew’s, the argument would be reversible.

Just as with the previous argument, such similarity of language could be explained either by Mark using Matthew or by Matthew using Mark.

We still need to look for more evidence.

 

Matthew the Eyewitness

Some have argued that if, as traditionally has been held, Matthew was the author of the Gospel that bears his name then he would have been unlikely to use the Gospel of Mark.

It is pointed out that Matthew was an eyewitness of Jesus’ ministry, whereas Mark was not. Would an eyewitness really base his Gospel on one written by a non-eyewitness?

Some have suggested that the answer is no, he would not be likely to do that. Therefore, since there is a relationship between Matthew’s and Mark’s Gospels, this relationship is better explained if Mark—the non-eyewitness—used Matthew’s Gospel rather than the other way around.

How good is this argument?

One could challenge it by arguing that Matthew didn’t write the Gospel attributed to him, but I support the traditional authorship view, so I don’t have an interest in going that route.

I do, however, think the argument is open to serious critique.

 

It’s Weak

First, each of the Gospels uses material that the author was not an eyewitness of. None of them are simply memoirs of what someone experienced when they were with Jesus.

This demonstrates that the Evangelists were not averse to describing events that they did not witness and for which they had to rely on sources.

Second, Matthew’s Gospel indicates that he was not among Jesus’ first disciples. That group was recruited in chapter 4, but Matthew doesn’t appear until chapter 9.

While Matthew likely heard the content of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7) multiple times during his time with Jesus, he is dependent on others for what happened before he joined Jesus’ band of disciples.

Third, the issue is not whether a text was written by an eyewitness but whether it is accurate.

If Matthew thought that Mark’s Gospel was accurate then he could use it as a source whether it was written by an eyewitness or not. Indeed, he could have found that Mark corresponded well with his own memories of Jesus’ ministry and used it as a source.

Fourth, the earliest evidence we have—evidence that dates from the first century figure known as John the Presbyter (who may or may not be the same as John the Apostle)—indicates that Mark was based on the preaching of Peter, and Peter was an eyewitness.

Indeed, Peter was an even more authoritative eyewitness than Matthew (cf. Matt. 16:18). He was also one of Jesus’ first disciples and had been with Jesus longer than Matthew.

The view that Mark’s Gospel was based on Peter’s preaching was present in the first century, and for precisely this reason Matthew might have chosen to use it as one of his sources.

Furthermore, according to Acts, Matthew and Peter seem to have spent more than a decade living and preaching in Jerusalem after the ministry of Jesus. Matthew thus would have heard Peter’s preaching on many occasions and would have been able to recognize Mark as an accurate record of it.

 

My Own Experience

I can also speak from my own experience, here.

In the ancient, pre-copyright age, authors borrowed much more freely from each other than they do today.

This was particularly so in anonymous works, which both Matthew’s and Mark’s Gospels were in the sense that their names are not recorded in the text itself.

If Matthew came across Mark’s Gospel and realized that it presented the core of the story of Jesus in much the way he would present it then he would have been inclined to use it as a laborsaving means.

Why reinvent the wheel? Why not use what’s already there, supplement it, and polish it?

This is an experience I have had many times. For over twenty years, I have worked in an educational ministry that publishes a lot of resources, often without bylines.

In this informal, collaborative environment, I have had the occasion many times to take a text originally written by someone else, apply it to a new purpose, and modify it accordingly.

I don’t do that for books, articles, or blog posts that are meant to be copyrighted and published under my name. Modern rules about copyright and plagiarism apply to those.

But there is another class of materials (e.g., materials the ministry publishes without a byline or that are attributed to “staff”) where those rules do not apply, and different internal authors may freely borrow from one another.

If I was producing such a text, and a prior text of the same category was available that did much of what I wanted the new text to do, I would not hesitate to use its language—extracting, expanding, abridging, and editing it to fit the new purpose.

This environment is much like the one that seems to have prevailed among the Synoptic Evangelists—where they were all united in the common purpose of telling the story of Jesus and questions of authorial “ownership” of their texts were secondary.

Since Matthew was not producing a memoir but a biography, he was willing to use sources to describe things that he didn’t see. Given that, he likely would have been willing to use sources to describe things he did witness—rather than insisting on deliberately starting from scratch to describe them.

Based on my own experience, I have no difficulty imagining Matthew taking Mark’s Gospel in hand and saying, “This does much of what I want. I’ll use it as a base text and expand and modify it to suit the purposes I want my own Gospel to fulfill.”

The argument that Matthew would not have used Mark because Mark was not an eyewitness thus strikes me as very weak.

 

Mark the Epitomizer?

Augustine said that “Mark follows him [Matthew] closely, and looks like his attendant and epitomizer” (Latin, Marcus eum subsecutus, tanquam pedissequus et breviator ejus videtur).

Many moderns may be puzzled by the meaning of this, because for us the term “epitome” is usually understood to mean an outstanding example of something (e.g., “George was the epitome of a Southern gentleman”).

In the ancient world, though, an epitome was something else: It was a shortened version of a literary work—something like the Reader’s Digest “condensed” books that were popular some time ago.

If you’re too young to remember those then think of the book summaries published by CliffNotes or SparkNotes, though those aren’t as close a parallel.

Epitomes allowed ancient readers to get the gist of a work of literature without having to read the whole thing, which could often be quite long–and expensive, given the ancient cost of producing books.

By saying that Mark “looks like” Matthew’s epitomizer, Augustine means that Mark appears to have made a condensed version of Matthew.

 

A New Opportunity

The idea that Mark is an epitome of Matthew opens up a new way to shed light on our question because it allows us to ask: “If Mark is an epitome of Matthew, does it fit the model of other ancient epitomes?”

If Mark works like other ancient epitomes then it would strengthen Augustine’s case.

On the other hand, if Mark does not work like other ancient epitomes then it would weaken it.

It is clear that Mark looks like an epitome of Matthew in two respects:

  1. It is shorter than the original.
  2. It parallels much of the substance of the original rather than just a part or a few parts of it.

In every other way, though, Mark does not look like an epitome of Matthew.

This is perhaps why Augustine uses somewhat cautious language, saying that Mark “looks like” Matthew’s epitomizer rather than fully asserting it. Augustine may realize that Mark didn’t fit the model of other ancient epitomes.

 

Ancient Epitomes

In 2001, Robert Derrenbacker published a fascinating doctoral thesis entitled Ancient Compositional Practices and the Synoptic Problem (online here). He has a very helpful discussion of ancient epitomes and how they worked (see, esp., pp. 79-86).

One of the things that Derrenbacker brings out is the fact that ancient epitomes tended to be abridgements of much longer works.

For example, 2 Maccabees is an abridgement of a five-volume history by Jason of Cyrene (2 Macc. 2:23). This means that 2 Maccabees, which originally fit in a single scroll, was a condensation of a work that originally filled five scrolls.

Another thing Derrenbacker brings out is that ancient epitomizers didn’t just shorten works. That’s something they could do simply by deleting sections of the work. Instead, they also tightened up individual sections—or pericopes (per-ih-ko–PEEs)—of the works.

Thus, in the case of a historical or biographical epitome, they would recount incidents found in the original book but use fewer words to tell the story.

This was one of their key tools in making the epitome shorter than the original since it allowed them to save space without losing substance.

 

Mark vs. the Epitomes

When we compare the Gospel of Mark with the kind of epitomes used in the ancient world, we find that it is dramatically different on both of the counts just mentioned.

Matthew has 18,345 words in the Greek New Testament, while Mark has 11,304. This means that Matthew is only 1.6 times as long as Mark. (Put another way, Mark is 62% as long as Matthew.)

Contrast that to the original work of Jason of Cyrene, which was at least 5 times longer than 2 Maccabees.

Furthermore, Matthew was itself a fairly short work that could fit inside a single scroll. Given its word count, it could be read out loud in less than two hours.

Matthew was thus not the kind of work that called for an epitome. It was too short for that.

And it certainly didn’t call for an epitome that was 62% the length of the original. That’s not a great deal of space savings, and so there wouldn’t have been a great deal of demand for such a work.

 

Mark’s Pericopes

Another striking way in which Mark does not look like an epitome of Matthew is the fact that the individual pericopes within it don’t tend to be shorter than the parallels in Matthew. Instead, they tend to be longer.

B. H. Streeter notes:

For example, the number of words employed by Mark to tell the stories of the Gadarene Demoniac, Jairus’ Daughter, and the Feeding of the Five Thousand are respectively 325, 374 and 235; Matthew contrives to tell them in 136, 135 and 157 words [The Four Gospels, 158].

So Mark typically uses more words to tell a given story about Jesus than Matthew does.

But that is not what ancient epitomizers did. As we said, they tended to tighten up stories and use fewer words to recount them because this was a key tool in making an epitome: It allowed the author to save space while retaining substance.

The fact that Mark does the opposite would make him unlike any other epitomizer in the ancient world, and thus we have evidence that he wasn’t epitomizing.

Instead, the fact that Matthew uses fewer words to tell the same stories as Mark suggests that Matthew was producing an expanded edition of Mark—keeping 90% of the substance but tightening up the stories for reasons of style and perhaps to make room for all the additional material he wanted to include.

This brings us to the question of editorial choices the Evangelists made about what material to include.

 

Important Material Cut Out?

If Mark is an epitome of Matthew then we must ask the question of why he omitted the particular parts of Matthew that he did.

Doing so surely saved space, but he could have achieved the same goal by omitting other parts of Matthew—so why did he skip the ones that he did?

Here’s a list of the pericopes of Matthew that Matthew would have had to leave out:

  • The Genealogy of Jesus (Matt. 1:1-17)
  • The Birth of Jesus (Matt. 1:18-25)
  • The Slaughter of the Innocents (Matt. 2:1-23)
  • The Beatitudes (Matt. 4:23-5:12)
  • The Value of the Law (Matt. 5:17-20)
  • Teaching About Killing and Anger (Matt. 5:21-24)
  • Make Peace with Your Accuser (Matt. 5:25-26)
  • Teaching on Adultery and Lust (Matt. 5:27-30)
  • Teaching on Divorce and Adultery (Matt. 5:31-32)
  • Teaching on Swearing (Matt. 5:33-37)
  • “Love Your Enemies” (Matt. 5:38-48)
  • Piety Before Men and Alms (Matt. 6:1-4)
  • Piety Before Men and Prayer (Matt. 6:5-8)
  • The Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6:9-15)
  • Piety Before Men and Fasting (Matt. 6:16-18)
  • “Treasure in Heaven” (Matt. 6:19-21)
  • “The Lamp of Your Body” (Matt. 6:22-23)
  • “You Cannot Serve God and Mammon” (Matt. 6:24)
  • “Do Not Be Anxious About Your Life” (Matt. 6:25-34)
  • “Judge Not, Lest Ye Be Judged” (Matt. 7:1-5)
  • Pearls Before Swine (Matt. 7:06)
  • “Ask, Seek, Knock” (Matt. 7:7-11)
  • The Golden Rule (Matt. 7:12)
  • The Narrow Gate(Matt. 7:13-14)
  • “No Good Tree Bears Bad Fruit” (Matt. 7:15-20)
  • Putting Jesus’ Teaching into Action (Matt. 7:21-27)
  • The Centurion’s Servant (Matt. 8:5-13)
  • Excuses for Not Following Jesus (Matt. 8:18-22)
  • Healing Two Blind Men (Matt. 9:27-31)
  • Exorcizing a Mute Demoniac (Matt. 9:32-34)
  • “The Harvest is Plentiful” (Matt. 9:35-38)
  • Fear and Comfort (Matt. 10:26-33)
  • Jesus Brings Division (Matt. 10:34-36)
  • The Cost of Discipleship (Matt. 10:37-11:1)
  • A Question from John the Baptist (Matt. 11:2-19)
  • Woe to Unrepentant Cities (Matt. 11:20-24)
  • Hidden from the Wise (Matt. 11:25-30)
  • “By Your Words You Will be Justified” (Matt. 12:33-37)
  • “The Sign of Jonah” (Matt. 12:38-42)
  • The Unclean Spirit Returns (Matt. 12:43-45)
  • The Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds (Matt. 13:24-30)
  • The Parable of the Leaven (Matt. 13:33)
  • The Parable of the Weeds Explained (Matt. 13:34-43)
  • The Parable of the Treasure in the Field (Matt. 13:44)
  • The Parable of the Precious Pearl (Matt. 13:45-46)
  • The Parable of the Net Thrown into the Sea (Matt. 13:47-52)
  • Does Jesus Pay the Tax? (Matt. 17:24-27)
  • The Parable of the Lost Sheep (Matt. 18:12-14)
  • Forgiving the Brother Who Sins (Matt. 18:15-22)
  • The Parable of Unforgiving Debtor (Matt. 18:23-35)
  • The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Matt. 20:1-16)
  • Jesus in the Temple (Matt. 21:14-17)
  • The Parable of the Banquet (Matt. 22:1-14)
  • Woe to the Scribes and Pharisees (Matt. 23:1-36)
  • “Your House Is Forsaken” (Matt. 23:37-39)
  • “The Son of Man Is Coming at an Unexpected Hour” (Matt. 24:42-51)
  • The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (Matt. 25:1-13)
  • The Parable of the Talents/Pounds (Matt. 25:14-30)
  • The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matt. 25:31-46)
  • Securing the Tomb (Matt. 27:62-66)
  • Explaining the Empty Tomb (Matt. 28:11-15)

One can imagine Mark omitting material he considered to be of lesser importance, but that does not seem to be a description of much of the material in this list.

Mark would have deleted everything concerning the genealogy, birth, and early life of Jesus, the Sermon on the Mount, and most of Jesus’ parables, as well as other notable passages.

While we might suppose he would omit some of the items above for space reasons, some are simply too important—in contrast to what Mark retained—to suppose that this is the answer.

For example, is the Lord’s Prayer—which he would have omitted—really less important than the encounter with the Syrophoenician woman or the healing of the man with the withered hand—both of which he would have chosen to retain?

 

Unimportant Material Added?

On the epitome hypothesis, Mark didn’t just omit material from Matthew. He also added new material of his own:

  • Exorcising an Unclean Spirit in the Synagogue (Mark 1:23-28)
  • Departure from Capernaum (Mark 1:35-39)
  • Jesus Teaches by the Sea (Mark 2:13)
  • Jesus’ Family Hears (Mark 3:20-21)
  • The Kingdom Like Seed (Mark 4:26-29)
  • Healing a Deaf Man (Mark 7:32-37)
  • Healing a Blind Man (Mark 8:22-26)
  • The Unauthorized Exorcist (Mark 9:38-41)
  • Visiting the Temple (Mark 11:11)
  • The Widow’s Mite (Mark 12:41-44)
  • Jesus Appears to Two Disciples (Mark 16:12-13)

Again: Is this material of sufficient value to warrant omitting much of the material he would have excluded?

Is the Lord’s Prayer really less important than Mark’s note about Jesus departing Capernaum or his family hearing about what was happening with Jesus before they show up?

Is it worth omitting the bulk of Jesus’ teachings as found in Matthew in order to add material that largely concerns additional stories about healing and exorcism and that duplicate other, similar accounts?

By contrast, if Matthew used Mark then, given the minor importance and largely duplicative nature of this material, it is easy to see how Matthew could have omitted it in interests of space (so he could add all Jesus’ teaching material) rather than the other way around.

 

An Unsuccessful Epitome?

One of the things that Derrenbacker brings out in his discussion of epitomes is that they tended to replace the works that they abridged.

Very often the epitome was more popular than the original, and so more copies of it were made than of the original. This allowed the epitome to survive the ages while the original perished.

A case in point is 2 Maccabees. We have this epitome, but Jason of Cyrene’s original, five-volume history is lost.

The reason for this phenomenon is that the epitomes were of more value to the ancient audiences than the original. It was a case of “less is more”:

  1. The epitomes took much less time to read and absorb, while still allowing the reader to get the gist of the original.
  2. Also, being shorter, they were much cheaper in an age in which books had to be hand written and so were much more costly than today’s printing technology makes possible.

But what value did Mark think he would be adding for the reader by producing an epitome of Matthew?

He wasn’t giving them extra value in terms of dramatic space savings. And he wasn’t giving them extra value in terms of new material. The handful of minor, reduplicative stories he would have added would scarcely offset the loss of the huge bulk of teaching material in Matthew that he would have had to set aside.

This lack of added value—both in terms of space and content—would have set Mark up to be an unsuccessful epitome.

And, in fact, Mark’s Gospel was by far the least popular of the four Gospels in the early Church. One of the ways that we know this is by counting the number of early manuscripts of the Gospels that have survived.

Of the Gospel manuscripts that date to the second and third centuries a.d., there are 12 of Matthew, 7 of Luke, 16 of John, and only 1 of Mark! (Larry W. Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts, ch. 1). The fact that so few manuscripts of Mark have survived from this period compared to the others suggests that there were fewer copies of Mark in circulation.

Given that there are twelve ancient manuscripts of Matthew and only one of Mark, it is clear that Matthew was quite a bit more popular than Mark.

This means that Mark, if it was an epitome of Matthew, was a spectacularly unsuccessful one that did not, in the eyes of the ancient readers, add significant value over its original. Indeed, as the number of surviving manuscripts suggests, they saw it as quite a bit less valuable.

The Case Against the Augustinian Hypothesis

We have seen a number of reasons to be skeptical of St. Augustine’s proposal that Mark was the second Gospel written and that it was an epitome of Matthew:

  • Both of the arguments that Augustine proposes are reversible and can support either the view that Mark used Matthew or that Matthew used Mark.
  • The idea that Matthew wouldn’t use Mark because the latter was not an eyewitness is unconvincing.
  • We have first century evidence, via John the Presbyter, that Mark was based on the preaching of Peter rather than on Matthew.
  • Matthew is not a long enough a work to need an epitome.
  • Mark is not a major abridgment of Matthew, being 62% as long as the proposed original.
  • By regularly using more words rather than fewer to recount the same stories, Mark would have been behaving very unlike ancient epitomizers and rejecting one of the key tools they used to make their abridgments.
  • Much of the material Mark would have omitted seems more important than what he retained.
  • The material that Mark would have added to Matthew seems much less important than the material he omitted.
  • By adding so little value in terms of space savings and content, Mark would be a badly designed and unnecessary epitome which went on to be very unpopular.

In view of these facts, Augustine’s impression that Mark “looks like” Matthew’s epitomizer is true only in a very superficial sense. A closer examination of the matter suggests that Mark’s Gospel is not an epitome of Matthew.

 

Augustine’s Later Doubts?

In his initial discussion of the matter, Augustine used cautious language—only asserting that Mark “looks like” or “seems like” Matthew’s epitomizer.

He may have become even less confident of this idea as he worked on his Harmony of the Gospels, because there is a later passage that some scholars have taken as a modification of his initial view.

After having worked through and carefully compared the three Synoptics, Augustine makes this statement:

Mark . . . either appears to be preferentially the companion of Matthew, as he narrates a larger number of matters in unison with him than with the rest . . . or else, in accordance with the more probable account of the matter, he holds a course in conjunction with both [the other Synoptists]. For although he is at one with Matthew in the larger number of passages, he is nevertheless at one rather with Luke in some others [Harmony of the Gospels 4:10:11].

Here Augustine seems to make two proposals.

  • The first seems to be a restatement of the view he expressed at the beginning of his harmony—that Mark accompanies or is “the companion of Matthew” as he writes his Gospel.
  • The second acknowledges that as he writes his Gospel he “holds a course in conjunction with both” Matthew and Luke, though he follows the first more than the second.

This may mean that, after his close comparison of the Gospels, Augustine had reason to modify his view of Mark as an apparent epitome of Matthew and that he may have concluded that “the more probable account of the matter” was that Mark used both Matthew and Luke.

This would be consistent with the modern Griesbach Hypothesis, though we must be careful here, because Augustine is not fully clear in what he says.

By speaking of Mark accompanying and “holding a course” with the other two Synoptic Evangelists, he may simply be noting the parallels in sequence that occur between them, without supposing a particular theory of how they were composed.

If so, he would have arrived at the insight that many moderns have proposed—that Mark is the “middle term” between Matthew and Luke. This, however, can be explained in more than one way. The Griesbach Hypothesis is one proposal that makes Mark the middle term, but there are others.

Thus David Pearson, who wrote a key paper on this topic, cautioned:

The question of whether or not Augustine had two views of the order in which the gospels were composed just as he had two views of their mutual relationships must remain open [“Augustine and the Augustinian Hypothesis: A Reexamination of Augustine’s Thought in De consensu evangelistarum,” in New Synoptic Studies: The Cambridge Gospel Conference and Beyond (ed. William R. Farmer, Macon GA: Mercer University Press, 1983) 37-64].

Regardless of whether Augustine later changed his view of the order in which the Gospels were composed, his initial proposal that Mark was an epitome of the Gospel of Matthew appears to be mistaken.

Celebrating the Archangels: 7 things to know and share

archangelsSeptember 29th is the feast of St.s Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael—archangels.

These are the only three angels whose names are mentioned in Scripture, and this is their day.

Here are 7 things to know and share . . .

 

1) What is an archangel?

The word “archangel” (Greek, archangelos) means “high-ranking angel”—the same way that “archbishop” means a high-ranking bishop.

Only St. Michael is described as an archangel in Scripture (Jude 9), but it is common to honor St.s Gabriel and Raphael as archangels also.

 

2) Why are they called “saints” if they’re angels rather than humans?

The word “saint” (Greek, hagios) means “holy one.”

It does not mean “holy human being.” As a result, it can apply to holy ones that aren’t human.

Since St.s Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael all chose to side with God rather than the devil, they are holy angels and thus saints.

All angels that sided with God are saints, but these three’s names are known to us, and so they are picked out by name in the liturgy.

 

3) Does this day have any other names?

Yes. Traditionally in English it has also been called “Michaelmas” (i.e., the Mass that celebrates St. Michael, on the same principle that “Christmas” is the Mass that celebrates Christ’s birth).

 

4) What do we know about St. Michael?

His name means “Who is like God?” (The implied answer is: Nobody; God is the greatest there is.)

St. Michael is mentioned by name in three books of Scripture:

  • In Daniel, he is described as “one of the chief princes” in the heavenly hierarchy (Dan. 10:13). He is also described to Daniel as “your prince” (Dan. 10:12). The meaning of this phrase is later clarified, and Michael is described as “the great prince who has charge of your people” (Dan. 12:1). He is thus depicted as the guardian angel of Israel. These same passages also refer to Michael doing battle against the spiritual forces at work against Israel.
  • In Jude 9, Michael is said to have contended with the devil over the body of Moses. On this occasion, we are told, “he did not presume to pronounce a reviling judgment upon him, but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you.’”
  • In Revelation, Michael and his angels are depicted fighting the devil and casting them out of heaven (Rev. 12:7-8). He is also commonly identified as the angel who binds the devil and seals him in the bottomless pit for a thousand years (Rev. 20:1-3), though the name “Michael” is not given on this occasion.

 

5) What do we know about St. Gabriel?

His name means “God is my warrior” (meaning, essentially, “God is my defender”).

St. Gabriel is mentioned in two books of Scripture:

  • In Daniel, he is assigned to help Daniel understand the meaning of a vision he has seen (Dan. 8:16). Later, while Daniel is in a prolonged period of prayer, Gabriel comes to him (Dan. 9:21) and gives him the prophecy of “seventy weeks of years” concerning Israel’s future (Dan. 9:24-27).
  • In Luke, he appears to Zechariah the priest and announces the conception and birth of John the Baptist (Luke 1:13-19). Later, he appears to the Virgin Mary and announces the conception and birth of Jesus Christ (Luke 1:26-33).

 

6) What do we know about St. Raphael?

His name means “God heals.”

St. Raphael is mentioned in a single book of Scripture: Tobit.

In Tobit, the blind Tobit and the maid Sarah, whose seven husbands have been killed by the demon Asmodeus, pray to God.

The prayer of both was heard in the presence of the glory of the great God. And Raphael was sent to heal the two of them: to scale away the white films of Tobit’s eyes; to give Sarah the daughter of Raguel in marriage to Tobias the son of Tobit, and to bind Asmodeus the evil demon, because Tobias was entitled to possess her (Tob. 3:16-17).

Raphael thus becomes a travelling companion of Tobias, posing as a relative named Azarias son of Ananias (Tob. 5:12). He eventually binds the demon, enabling Tobias to safely marry Sarah, and provides the means for Tobit to be healed of his blindness.

Afterward, he reveals his true identity, saying:

I am Raphael, one of the seven holy angels who present the prayers of the saints and enter into the presence of the glory of the Holy One (Tob. 12:15).

 

7) How is this day celebrated?

In addition to its commemoration in the liturgy, there are various local ways of celebrating this day. See here for some examples.

See also here.

It might also be a good day to say the Prayer to St. Michael:

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.
Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray,
and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly hosts,
by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan, and all the evil spirits,
who prowl about the world
seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

Don’t Hate on Q

q-redRecently, I’ve been doing a series of blog posts about how the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke relate to each other.

In biblical studies, this is known as the Synoptic Problem.

Today the most popular solution to this problem is known as the “Two-Source Hypothesis.”

According to this view, Mark was the first Gospel to be written, and it was used by both Matthew and Luke.

In addition, this view holds that Matthew and Luke also used a lost, hypothetical source known as Q.

 

Q and Me

Personally, I am a Q skeptic. That’s why I’ve written more than once about reasons to doubt the existence of Q.

I think that the data that advocates of Q appeal to likely can be explained in other, better ways.

Before resorting to hypothetical, lost documents to explain the fact that Matthew and Luke have a large number of verses in common, we should give serious consideration to the idea that Luke drew these verses from Matthew or that Matthew drew them from Luke.

 

Hating on Q

I’ve been surprised, in the comments boxes and on Facebook, at the amount of hostility that some folks have displayed toward the idea of Q.

For example, some have dismissed Q as “the claptrap of modernistic historical criticism” and declaring it “a diversion from the truth” and similar things.

But while disagreement with the Q hypothesis can be justified, outright hostility toward it is uncalled for.

 

The Basis for the Idea

The idea behind Q is that there was a source—likely a written source—behind the 235 verses in Matthew that are paralleled in Luke but not in Mark or John.

This is a large number of verses, and it amounts to more than a fifth of Matthew and Luke.

Given that amount of material in common—and the fact that the material is sometimes presented in the same order—it isn’t unreasonable to propose that there is a source behind this material.

In fact, we’ve already seen two such proposals: Matthew was Luke’s source for this material, or Luke was Matthew’s source for it.

Either of these possibilities would explain both the content of the material and the elements of common order that it displays.

 

But If . . .

But if one could show that both of these possibilities are unlikely for some reason then it would not be unreasonable to propose that there was a third source that both Matthew and Luke drew upon for the material.

Neither would it be unreasonable to propose that this source was written.

Luke even alludes to previous written accounts of Christ’s ministry (Luke 1:1).

Since he says that he wrote his own Gospel after “having followed all things closely for some time past”—with “all things” seeming to include the previous written accounts—it is very likely that Luke used such written sources.

Indeed, virtually everyone agrees that he either used Matthew or Mark as a source (possibly both), so there is no reason to be hostile to the idea that he used another such source.

 

A Lost Source?

Since we don’t have any manuscripts of Q today, if it ever existed, it has been lost.

But the idea of a lost source is not intrinsically problematic.

Indeed—all of the sources that the Evangelists used, whether written or oral, seem to have perished, leaving only the Gospels themselves.

 

An Objection

One could object that many of the people who advocate Q—including some of its earliest advocates—have tried to use the claim to undermine the authority of the Gospels.

This is true, but it does not ultimately matter.

The idea that there is a common source behind the 235 verses Matthew and Luke have in common does not do anything, of itself, to undermine the authority of the Gospels.

The Gospels are based on sources—as Luke acknowledges—and so the idea of sources behind them is not intrinsically threatening.

The proposal that a common source is behind these 235 verses is an idea that needs to be evaluated based on the evidence—not who proposed it or what their motives were.

 

Ad Hominem Arguments

Indeed, arguments that attack an idea based on who proposed it or what that person’s motives were—rather than evaluating the evidence for and against it—are known as ad hominem arguments (i.e., arguments “to the man” rather than to the evidence).

Such arguments are at high risk of committing a logical fallacy.

More generally, rejecting an idea because of where it came from risks committing the genetic fallacy.

 

A Better Way

A better way of approaching the question is to set aside these issues and look at the Q proposal objectively, weighing the evidence for and against it.

If you want to go after Q based on the evidence, have at it!

I do that myself!

In fact, here’s a book by Mark Goodacre that can help you do that.

And here’s another.

 

Faithful Q Scholars

While it may be true that some advocates of Q have an agenda of undermining the authority of the Gospels, they are by no means the only Q advocates out there.

There are also lots of biblical scholars who thoroughly uphold the authority of Scripture and who endorse the Q hypothesis.

Indeed, in a 2003 speech, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) addressed the Pontifical Biblical Commission and noted that the Two-Source Hypothesis (which proposes Q as one of the sources behind Matthew and Luke) is “accepted today by almost everyone” [Relationship Between the Magisterium and Exegetes].

That “almost everyone” includes lots of faithful Catholic biblical scholars, as well as lots of non-Catholic ones who support the authority of the Gospels.

 

A Present Minority

Actually, the fact that Q-skeptics, such as myself, are a small minority today is something that provides us with another reason to keep the rhetoric cool.

If you want to get people to change their minds about Q, a calm, reasoned approach based on the evidence will get you a lot farther than just dumping on the view of the majority.

And there is another, even more fundamental reason to take this approach . . .

 

The Golden Rule

Majorities can often ill-treat minorities, and it’s certainly been the case that some advocates of Q have used inflammatory, insulting language regarding those who are skeptical of Q.

Indeed, if you read the books of Q skeptics, they point out the inflammatory language that has been used against them and their proposals.

Naturally, they don’t like being treated that way in print.

Fortunately, many of them—including many of the most effective Q skeptics—have resisted the temptation to answer in kind.

After all, didn’t Jesus say something about treating others the way that you would like to be treated?

That statement is found in Matthew 7:12 and Luke 6:31, but it isn’t found in Mark or John.

Ironically, it’s part of the Q material!

And whether Q was a separate, written source or not—this saying of Christ is authoritative.