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Noesis
The Journal of the Mega Society
 
Issue #181        June 2006
 
 
Special Issue: Biblical Scholarship
Contents

 

About the Mega Society

The Mega Society was founded by Dr. Ronald K. Hoeflin in 1982. The 606 Society (6 in 106), founded by Christopher Harding, was incorporated into the new society and those with IQ scores on the Langdon Adult Intelligence Test (LAIT) of 173 or more were also invited to join. (The LAIT qualifying score was subsequently raised to 175; official scoring of the LAIT terminated at the end of 1993, after the test was compromised). A number of different tests were accepted by 606 and during the first few years of Mega’s existence. Later, the LAIT and Dr. Hoeflin’s Mega Test became the sole official entrance tests, by vote of the membership. Later, Dr. Hoeflin's Titan Test was added. (The Mega was also compromised, so scores after 1994 are currently not accepted; the Mega and Titan cutoff is now 43—but either the LAIT cutoff or the cutoff on Dr. Hoeflin’s tests will need to be changed, as they are not equivalent.)

Mega publishes this irregularly-timed journal. The society also has a (low-traffic) members-only e-mail list. Mega members, please contact the Editor to be added to the list.

For more background on Mega, please refer to Darryl Miyaguchi’s “A Short (and Bloody) History of the High-IQ Societies,”

http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/history.html

and the official Mega Society page,

http://www.megasociety.org/

 

 

 

 

 

 

Noesis, the journal of the Mega Society, #181, June 2006.

Noesis is the journal of the Mega Society, an organization whose members are selected by means of high-range intelligence tests. Jeff Ward, 13155 Wimberly Square #284, San Diego, CA 92128, is Administrator of the Mega Society. Inquiries regarding membership should be directed to him at the address above or:

ward-jeff@san.rr.com

 Opinions expressed in these pages are those of individuals, not of Noesis or the Mega Society.

Copyright © 2006 by the Mega Society. All rights reserved. Copyright for each individual contribution is retained by the author unless otherwise indicated.

Editorial

Kevin Langdon

 

In Noesis #138 (September 1998) we printed an essay by Miriam Berg, “The Synoptic Problem,” in response to which several interesting articles on topics related to the Bible (primarily the Gospels) were submitted. I intended to create a special issue to include these articles but the project remained on the back burner until I received the submissions by Tom Hutton and Robert Dick included herein.

 

This special issue does not mean that the Mega Society has gotten religion. Our society, and the nonmember contributors responsible for the majority of the material in this issue, include both believers (in a variety of religious notions) and nonbelievers, and it would be inappropriate for Mega to endorse any one viewpoint, but the Christian scriptures are of considerable interest even from the point of view of a thoughtful skeptic and the ideas contained in this issue are meant to stimulate thought on these subjects. In the future we might do a special issue on Buddhism.

 

Jesus of Nazareth is one of the most interesting figures in history but there is very little in the way of direct documentation of his life and teaching. There are many schools of thought on who he was and what he did. These pages contain writings on this subject by several scholars, most of whom are not Mega members and none of whom are academic experts.

 

Dale Adams writes:

 

I started with “Streeter’s Gospels,” as a direct response to Ms. Berg’s article in Noesis that you kindly sent.  It assumes knowledge of her article. 

To present the substance of the Four-Source theory, I wrote “Underlying Sources of the Gospels”.  I stratify the Synoptic gospels by their stages of development

Displaying some original work for this project, “Resurrection Sources” separates the Resurrection stories verse by verse into two constituent parts.

This is a culmination of 35 years of work I have spent considering, investigating, and writing on this topic.

 

Miriam Berg writes:

 

I am now working on a third article called “The Gospel according
to Miriam” since everyone else seems to be writing theirs. It will be a summary of those incidents and sayings which I think are authentic. Incidentally, I’ve also written an article about the correct dating of the ancient Israelite and Judean kings (books I and II Kings in the bible) if you’re interested.

 

 

The deadline for Noesis #182 is August 15.

Origin of Scriptures

 

Albert Clawson

11/15/01

 

 

Many religions worship the bible instead of worshipping God: this is an abomination and the Old Testament contains a history of what this will lead to.

 

Many people misunderstand the nature and construction of the Bible—and if you lack knowledge of even the basic organization, how can you possibly understand the book as a whole?

 

There are two parts of the bible, the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament is exclusively the writings of the Jews.  The first five books are traditionally credited to Moses and contain, among other things, their legal code.  The remainder is largely a historical record with bits of poetry thrown in (Song of Solomon is considered by many scholars not to have been an inspired work, for example).  The New Testament is exclusively the writings of Christians, who say that Jesus was the Messiah that the Jews were waiting for, only they missed the arrival.

 

The first four books of the New Testament were written with the purpose of convincing people that the man named Jesus who was recently killed was the Messiah.  One of the four gospels was written with the specific intent of convincing the Jews that Jesus was The Christ, the other three were written for somewhat disparate groups of individuals.  The remaining books of the New Testament were mainly administrative letters and dogmatic clarification sent to various bodies of believers, with some journalesque entries and historical narrative thrown in.  These were organized in order of size, largest to smallest, with the book of Revelation placed at the very end because it seems to refer to the end of the world.

 

With the possible exception of the Five Books of Moses, the writings which appear in the Bible were never intended to be collected as a single book: they were parts of a larger collection which were grouped together by a committee which was organized with the goal of getting the best and most important parts all together—there were thousands of letters, scrolls, teachings and other records from which to choose, but a decision had to be made.  Even today that decision does not have universal support—the Catholics, for example, also include within their canon the books which are known as the Apocrypha.  The Bible itself makes reference to various texts which have been lost through the years.  Even the name “The Bible” is a misrepresentation.  The title comes from the original reference of ta biblium which in ancient Latin meant “the books.”  Plural.

 

What many people consider to be a divinely inspired book which was written as a single unit and remained unchanged for centuries has a very complex and interesting history.  The four books known as the Gospels, for example, had no punctuation when originally written, let alone chapter and verse divisions.  Considering that the United States once lost hundreds of thousands of dollars because of a missing comma in a tax bill, it is easy to see how people could come up with something entirely different than the original intent because somebody broke everything up into convenient chunks several decades, if not centuries after the original authors had died.  This point alone renders suspect any claims that the Bible is “perfect” and “unchanged”—and unless this caution is firmly planted in mind, no serious study of the Bible can ever be accomplished.

 

The stories of the creation and the great flood as recorded in the bible are the account written down centuries after the fact.  The ‘Pentateuch’—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy—are said to have been written down by Moses.  As Moses obviously never met Adam, Eve or Noah, the stories written down were obviously part of an existing record passed down either orally or perhaps through written records of some sort.  For the parts about Moses, as everything is written in the third person there is always the possibility that the credit given to Moses is similar to the credit given to King James.

 

Genesis is an accounting of how the Jews got into Egypt in the first place—answering the question “where did we come from?”

 

Exodus is an accounting of why the Jews wanted to leave Egypt and how they did it, and ends with the creation of the tabernacle and the first accounts of God having complete oversight—the Jews are no longer under man (Pharaoh) but are instead living their lives devoted to God for the first time.

 

Leviticus and Numbers contain administrative and legal specifications—how to punish various deeds, the social contract—and a ledger of significant events of the time.

 

Deuteronomy is the farewell of Moses—he gave a recap of everything that had happened, a few final instructions to be good, a quick trip to the top of a mountain to look at everything that the people were going to inherit and then Moses disappears.  At this point it is obvious that these words are written at some point after the death of Moses (possibly a commission formed under the direction of Moses or a later prophet—you’d have to ask a biblical scholar exactly how this all works) as they state that nobody knew where Moses had been buried.

 

Much more information is to be had about the period of time covered: acting as prophets there is zero doubt that Moses, Abraham, Jacob and others had much more to say as they lived a life devoted to the God of Israel.  This all ties into my writings on the context of “The Bible” as we know it today: the Bible contains the Word of God in a holier fashion than the telephone book contains the phone numbers of individuals and businesses in a city.  A telephone book will have intentional omissions because not every number is intended for general access, and other numbers will simply fall through the cracks.  A telephone book will have the occasional error creep in as people make copies and corrections.

 

According to the Bible, Noah lived for several centuries—950 years, to be exact.  God gave us reason, so should anybody not apply reason to understanding the scriptures?  Is there any possible way that every inspired word and deed of a 950-year-old prophet could ever be included in a mere four chapters?  There is obviously a lot more to the story—perhaps it would make more sense if we had more information.

 

The Bible was never intended to rule our lives, to be worshipped or even used as a crutch.  As far as I can tell, God’s plan is to get a few nuggets of truth into our thick skulls and then step back to see what we do with it. Our lives, our destiny, our liberty, our choice, for good or for evil.  The Bible should be used as idea fodder to capture our attention just long enough to wonder if there really is something out there—actual relationship with God not included.

Common Sense Gospel Study

 

Dale Adams

 

 

The four Gospels and Acts can be shown by simple common sense to be very 

early in date.  Putting aside a priori theology that Christ is God on the one hand, or on the other hand historical method that proceeds as if supernatural events cannot happen, let’s see what the texts themselves show.

 

The proper starting point is the Gospel of Luke and its continuation, The Acts of the Apostles.  In the second half of the latter, the author at times slips into “we” (or “us” or “our”) sayings that indicate he was with Paul of Tarsus during the latter’s missionary journeys.  These three passages are Acts 16:10-17; 20:5-21:18, and 27:1-28:16.  At the conclusion of these, Paul is still alive and in Rome, which can be dated by reference to Paul’s epistles in the New Testament to be about 64 A.D.  The most sensible date for the Gospel of Luke and its complementary Acts is thus 64 A.D.  The author (presumably Luke) could have written this much later in his life, but it would by common sense analysis still be early.

 

The Lucan author employed sources, as he himself tells us in Luke 1:1-4. 

 

These would necessarily have been earlier.  At least one source bears some connection to the apostle Peter, whose name appears frequently in the Gospels and in the first fifteen chapters of Acts.  The mention in Acts 15:7-11 occurs in the context of Acts chapters 13 to 28 that focus on Paul, so the source connected with Peter seems to end at Acts 12:19.  The death of King Herod Agrippa I (12:23) sets the date at 44 A.D.  This likely sets the date of the writing of the source and also establishes the likely author, as this is when Peter “went to the house of Mary the mother of John, also called Mark.”  Church tradition also supports this logic, that Peter’s scribe was Mark, and critical scholarship calls this source “Ur-Marcus.”  It would have been as well titled “Ur-Lucas” to acknowledge that it underlies not just the Gospel of Mark, not just the Gospel of Luke, but also the Acts also written by the writer of Luke.

 

The earliest version of this Ur-Marcus was evidently written in Aramaic and included at least the Passion Narrative and the Feeding of the 5,000, as these are recounted in all four of the canonical Gospels.  The composition of the Fourth Gospel, John, seems best regarded as having been rotated in composition among a team of the apostles, making an early date sensible for it as well.

 

Peter (after Jesus, of course) is the focus of the Ur-Marcus Aramaic draft, but his name is primary in many other passages of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) as well.  Verbal identities in the Greek among these passages between the Gospels of Mark and Luke establish that this second (?) draft should be called Greek Ur-Marcus.  This stage of the collaboration between the men Peter and Mark would thus be most likely not long after 44 A.D.

 

The Gospel of Luke is widely regarded by critical scholars as containing a source we call “Q.”  Simply by comparing Luke with the Gospel of Matthew, anyone can see for himself that they share a large body of text in common that is not found in Mark.  However, it is over-simplifying to hold that all this common material traces back to a common source, Q, and that no other sayings are from Q.  The true-blue Q sayings are not verbally exact between Matthew and Luke.  Any verses that are verbally exact were copied into Matthew from Luke and are not likely from Q.  These are found largely in Matthew chapters 23 and 24, particularly 23:23 to 23:39 and 24:26 to 24:51.  This shows that Matthew was written later than Luke, but still was most likely complete by 70 A.D., as it does not mention the Fall of Jerusalem in that year.

 

One commonly hears that there are no Q passages in the Gospel of Mark.  This is incorrect.  The discovery of the complete text of the Gospel of Thomas at Nag Hammadi in 1946 revealed sayings in it that are in Mark, and not just from Matthew and Luke.  Although this could mean that the text of Thomas was based on the completed Synoptic Gospels, close study shows that it is more likely that the parts of Thomas that overlap the canonical Gospels are based on a source text they share in common, namely Q or some variant thereof.  Unless the writer of Thomas also had access to Ur-Marcus, this shows that Thomas picked up some of the same parables from Q that Mark included.  It thus seems that Ur-Marcus was almost completely narrative text with even fewer sayings than we commonly attribute to Mark.

 

The Q Source could have been written very early.  It was written in Aramaic, judging by the sections that Mark and Luke have in common that lack verbal exactitude.  The word “Twelve” (meaning the 12 Apostles) appears so often in this that it is commonly called the Twelve-Source.  The name Matthew (or Levi) occurs where this text begins (as at Luke 5:27), and early external tradition names the writer as this Matthew, so this material could have been from an eye-witness or could even have been first put in writing during the lifetime of Jesus.

 

Late dates for the Gospels have not disappeared from scholarship, as seen in Burton Mack.  However, the more fashionable tendency has been toward early dating.  No one has stepped forward to prove wrong the early dating reached by the liberal Anglican Bishop John A. T. Robinson.  In Redating the New Testament (1976, pp 352-354) he gave approximate dates for all four Gospels as between 40 and 65 A.D.

 

Proceeding beyond this point is somewhat supererogatory, but provides additional support for the main point I am making.  As I have said above, the earliest writing attributable to Peter was what I call Aramaic Ur-Marcus.  It must have included the sections in the Gospel of John that are also found in the Synoptics, which include the Feeding of the Five Thousand (John. 6: 5-21) and the Passion Narrative (John. 18:1-19,26-35, 38-40); and most of Ch. 19.  These elements are distinct from, but were early merged with, what most scholars agree should be called the Signs Gospel.  This is a biography of Jesus formed around what are thought to be seven miracles, and scholars acknowledge an early date for it.  The names Andrew and Phillip occur frequently in this stratum; thus one of them seems to be the eye-witness source.  However, the largest part of this Fourth Gospel is composed of teachings generally called Discourses.  Scholars (including many orthodox believers) tend to view these as having too advanced a Christology to be from the first generation of Christians.  This High Christology tends to be well respected by Christians whose Tradition teaches them that the Apostle John wrote this down during his very old age, and tends to be disparaged by critics who find its elevation of Jesus to Godhead to be late and unreliable.  However, this late dating would be reversed if we looked upon these discourses as very early and very rough notes of just the most startling things Jesus said.  “Why would this be?”, one would ask. 

 

Well, the Gospels make clear that Jesus had many enemies, particularly among the religious establishment.  In the Gospel of John a member of that hierarchy is mentioned, one Nicodemus.  Not coincidentally, I say, the extended teachings portion of John begins with the first mention of his name at John 3:1 and ends at the last mention at John 18:39.  He is mentioned at one other time, at John 7:50-52, at which time he is commissioned by the other Pharisees to “Go into the matter, and see for yourself: prophets do not arise in Galilee.”  But when Nicodemus did this investigation, he did not write down the general teachings of Jesus and included none of his moral code, but only the high-flown and self-exalting theology that proved Jesus to be a madman, a liar, or the God he claimed to be.  Unbelievers thus find the Gospel of John to be blasphemous or just ridiculous, whereas believers find in it the substance of their worship of Jesus as Christ.  When these notes by Nicodemus became incorporated in the Fourth Gospel, it made it seem to be irreconcilable with the Synoptic Gospels because all the other Gospel writers were interested only in the practical teachings of Jesus or were simply incapable of understanding theology.

 

My view of the Gospel of John leaves hardly any of it to be written by the supposed author, the Apostle John.  I limit him to the role of Editor, except that most of Chapter 13 can be attributed to him.  I acknowledge him to be the Beloved Disciple (John 13:23, 19:26, 20:2, and 21:20).  All in all I find this gospel to have been written as the Muratorian Canon says it was, by a team of apostles (I name them as Peter, Andrew, and John), incorporating the posthumous notes of Nicodemus.  The final work on this Gospel was done before 70 A.D. by John Mark, who was also an eyewitness as the son of Mary of Bethany—see Chapter 11, the raising of Lazarus.  (I went into this in great detail in my “The Significance of John” in the May-July 1988 Cincinnatus Society Journal no. 3, pp. 1-13.  My true name for it was “The Three Sources and Five Editions of John.”  I also have a book-length version I wrote in 1979.)

 

The rest is anti-climactic.  The gospels Matthew and Mark remain to be accounted for.  There are two or three chapters out of Mark’s sixteen that are not paralleled in Luke, mostly the sixth through eighth chapters of Mark.  Almost all of this is found in the Gospel of Matthew (although the Mark as we have it today adds a few verses and parts of verses).  The person, not likely the person Mark, who added this to Mark was also associated with the writing of Matthew.  This person seems not to have been a close associate of Jesus.  He seems to have gotten his information at second or third hand, including gossip on the street.  He adds a number of chapters worth of new teachings of Jesus, but they seem like Jesus’s other teachings, so are probably largely genuine.  This material is called Matthean, although few believe their source is the apostle Matthew. (Incidentally, the most questionable parts include the verses the Roman Catholics use to prove the primacy of the pope.)  

 

I have variously guessed that this writer was the James who was not an apostle or, of all people, Barabbas, the man who lived after Jesus died in his place.  It remains to mention that the author Luke found some teachings of Jesus that were not in any of his sources and added to the Gospel of Luke several chapters of obviously genuine teachings of Jesus (such as the parables of Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan).  With the possible exception of Matthew, which as I stated above paradoxically includes some Lucan material, all these four Gospels were written before 70 A.D.

 

Scholarly Note:  Regarding the information above, whatever I say about the Synoptic Gospels can be said to represent an amalgam of consensus scholarship of the last 100 years.  (Well, combining some scholarship of the mid-20th Century no longer regarded as consensus with some new scholarship not known in the mid-20th Century, that is.)  What I say about the Gospel of John is largely based on idiosyncratic scholarship combined (together with my original contributions) in a way that is uniquely my own.  To cite the scholars whose source-criticism is buried within my own would include books in the 1970’s by Howard Teeple, Sydney Temple, Robert Fortna, and W. Nicol; and Urban von Wahlde’s article in the 1979 Journal of Biblical Literature.  Proper source-criticism of John only became possible after the 1966 publication of photocopies of ancient papyri such as P66 and P75.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Streeter’s Gospels

Dale Adams

     In Miriam Berg’s “The Synoptic Problem” in Noesis #138, September 1998, she presents a substitute for the widely accepted Four-Source solution to the origin of the first three gospels.  She starts with a generally serviceable review of early attempts at Higher Criticism of the synoptic gospels.  She winds up touting what she calls the 5-source hypothesis devised in 1899 by Ernest Dewitt Burton.  She claims to have had access to the “Records” preserved by this school.  Are the diagrams she appends to her article a synopsis of this model?

     Ms. Berg attacks the conventional Four-Source hypothesis and its proponent, B. H. Streeter.  Her knowledge of his work is apparently second-hand.  She observes, “Streeter himself pointed out three questions which the 4-source theory didn't answer, however.” She takes this as a platform to demonstrate that the 5-source theory solves the difficulties Streeter found in the 4-source model.  Ms. Berg apparently was unaware that Streeter used these three difficulties as a springboard to perfecting an even more extreme version of the 4-source theory.  Streeter's idea is known as Proto-Luke.  I not only believe in Proto-Luke as the solution to the Synoptic Problem, I can even show who wrote it.

     Let me first show why conventional scholarship regarding the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke fails and why it continues to confuse so many people.  Mark is commonly acknowledged to be a precursor of Luke as we now have it.  Over-simplifying, most scholars assume that almost the entirety of Mark was available to the writer of Luke.  Ms. Berg follows Burton and these over-simplifiers.  The 5-source hypothesis requires us to assume that Luke had a definite process of editing that eliminated certain portions of Mark from usefulness to him. Closely examined in page 14 of her article, the Burton theory makes arbitrary and unprovable assumptions throughout, at all of his points 1 through 7. 

Mark and Q

     We should not assume the ancient writers made sophisticated, systematic editing decisions.  The evidence is much more that documents just tended to grow.  Yes, the basic building blocks were Mark and Q, but neither of these is just simply delineated.  Even Mark had several stages of development.  Originally there was a very short version in Aramaic that is found wherever the Synoptics overlap with the Fourth Gospel, John.  This is mostly the Passion Narrative plus the Feeding of the Five Thousand.  This can be established simply by comparing the two gospels and seeing that wherever they overlap, the agreement of words is so loose that both must have been translated independently into Greek.  In contrast, wherever Mark overlaps with the other two gospels, the words are so often the same that a Greek translation must have already existed for most of the document, best called Greek Ur-Marcus.  (The other portion I would call the Twelve-Source.)  But this was still not as big as our present Mark.  (6:17-29, 6:53-8:26 was missing.)  This shorter version was used by Luke.  The above is very elementary, yet all kinds of phony arguments are based on ignoring this simple, gradual growth.

     The next obvious source is Q.  Q is basically the portions where Matthew and Luke overlap.  Scholars tend to over-simplify again and say that Luke took Mark and Q and then added in his special material from L, his own source or sources.  The genius of Streeter was to recognize that Q and L were first joined together before the material from Mark was added in.  He called this Proto-Luke.

Proto-Luke

     This Q-Twelve-Source text remained in Aramaic. Next came a further stage of additions in Aramaic.  The traces of who did this can be discerned by looking for personal clues.  We need active characters in Luke who appear nowhere else in the Synoptics.  The key name is Simon. The personal experience introduced at this stage starts with a Simon and ends with a Simon.  I call this stage of the document “Proto-Luke”, a modification of B. H. Streeter’s theory.  Luke 7:36-50 tells of Jesus going to a dinner at the home of Simon the Pharisee. Luke 24:13-35 is about the resurrected Jesus on the road to Emmaus with two disciples.  One is Cleopas.  As to the other, “The Lord has indeed risen and has appeared to Simon.”  Traditionally everyone assumes this refers to Simon Peter.  However, scripture does not mention any prior appearance of the risen Jesus to Peter.  No, the plain meaning is that Jesus had appeared to Cleopas and a different Simon.  Just as the Q-Twelve-Source ended at this point, so did Proto-Luke.

     This Simon may be a well-recognized figure in the early Christian Church.  The so-called brothers (probably cousins) of Jesus were James, Joseph, Jude, and Simon.  James was the first leader of the Church.  When he was killed (c. 62 A.D.), Simon, his brother, became Bishop of Jerusalem.

     This Proto-Luke hypothesis easily answers the objections to the 4-source theory stated by Streeter himself.  The three points are listed by Ms. Berg on page 14.  (1) “Why did Luke insert portions of L only into Q, and never into Mark?”  Answer: the writer of Proto-Luke had only Q to work with, thus could only insert L items into Q.  Only at the next stage did Luke combine Proto-Luke with the original Ur-Marcus material.  (2) The “unrelated quotations” in the middle third of Luke came from Proto-Luke.  Luke takes its chronological and geographical settings mostly from the later strata from Ur-Marcus.  Proto-Luke was dominated by sayings material from Q, and Lucan (L) sayings tended to be interspersed therein.  Throughout Luke the L and Q materials seem to be interwoven from one source and the other.  (3) “Why does Luke vary so much from Mark and Matthew in the very beginning of the story and in the final week in Jerusalem?”  Streeter’s answer was that the final week in Luke comes basically from non-Markan sources.  As for the beginning, either at the Proto-Luke stage or at the Luke stage the Infancy Narrative came in from its special source (presumably Mary or a close relative, by my hypothesis Simon, her son or nephew).

Thomas

     As shown, the Proto-Luke hypothesis best answers Streeter’s own objections to the standard 4-source hypothesis.  Let me continue on to demolish some of the further details of Burton’s 5-source theory.  Burton believed there were several distinct sub-sets of Q.  Fifty years after Burton wrote, the discovery of a complete Greek text of the Gospel of Thomas gave us a way to gauge the nature of Q.  In Thomas the parables of Jesus come from all parts of Q and from Matthew and Luke as well.  Scholars have largely agreed that Thomas did not have all the Synoptic gospels to work from, but that he worked from underlying sources or source, namely Q.  If that is so, then much of the material only in Matthew or only in Luke is nevertheless from Q. Q was both a bigger document and not so easily divided as Burton guessed.

     A further complication.  The comparison with Thomas readily shows that the primary parable in Mark, the Parable of the Sower, is also in Thomas.  There is no reason to think that Mark was available to Thomas.  The presence in Mark of the Parable of the Sower thus means that Mark had access to Q!  This messes up all the neat divisions between Mark and Q that so many over-simplifiers use to bolster their weak arguments.  Note that Q was used by all writers in the Synoptics.  It must have been very early.  It could even have been written when Jesus was alive.

     Why did Q disappear?  No gospels survive in Aramaic, so this is not surprising at all.  It is easy to demonstrate, from the word-use in Matthew and Luke in most of their shared Q passages, that they must have had to translate independently from the Aramaic Q.  We thus have no evidence that a Greek Q ever existed.  A further note: there are passages where word-use is identical between Matthew and Luke.  However, Boismard has demonstrated that these are passages where the author of Matthew has copied from Luke.  See Matthew 23:23-24:51 and compare the Greek text with the comparable passages scattered throughout Luke.  (Note that this means that these passages are probably not from Q, as almost everyone heretofore had believed.)

     I agree with Ms. Berg where she attacks the Jesus Seminar.  These radical critics (in their book, The Five Gospels) have deviously misused the evidence from the Gospel of Thomas.  (See my article “The Five Gospels Deep-Sixed” in  the August 1995 Vidya [the journal of the Triple Nine Society] #145/146.) 

The Resurrection

     As for the most substantive issue, Ms. Berg notes the absence of birth or resurrection stories from Burton’s best sources.  Birth stories would have to come from special sources, as these were private events from thirty years earlier than the public ministry of Jesus.  The author of Proto-Luke had such knowledge. Simon was the son or nephew of Mary.  The author of Matthew is unknown, as is where he obtained his information.  His story of the Virgin Birth is more general, as if coming from public sources. The lack of agreement between the two gospels proves nothing one way or the other.

     As for the Resurrection, Ms. Berg (following Burton?) is not insightful in drawing parallels.  The stories are basically the same in all four gospels.  The differences are what would be expected from different eye-witnesses telling about a period of time when they rarely were all together when Jesus appeared to them.  John has the story from Aramaic Ur-Marcus (from Peter, probably) and from its own special eye-witnesses (John or John Mark).  (I have shown in my “The Significance of John (Five Strata)”, May-July 1988 Cincinnatus Society Journal, No. 3, that John was very early.)  The Synoptic Gospels drew less from Ur-Marcus, utilizing the Twelve-Source (probably from Matthew or Levi) heavily.  (Yet Matthew 28:9-10 is similar to John 20:11-18.)  The Journey to Emmaus appears only in Proto-Luke, from Simon.  The Ascension described in Acts 1:6-11 bears similarities to Matthew 28:16-20.  (See also my “Doubting Apostles” in the December 1988 Vidya #98.  More generally see “Disproving Resurrection not Easy” in the November 1996 Telicom [the journal of the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry] XII,5 and the November 1997 “The (Wrong) Way: Some Truth and Light,” XII, 16.  Also available is my unpublished “Q, Twelve-Source, or Both”, where I grapple with  the details of source-separation, especially pertaining to the Resurrection.)

Underlying Sources of the Gospels

 

Dale Adams

 

 

Ur-Marcus

 

            The sources underlying the gospels can be established by general comparison and by detailed analysis.  The general picture is that even John has textual overlaps with the other three gospels, the Synoptics.  This shows that there was originally a gospel with only a few chapters covering the life of Jesus .  Comparison with the Acts of the Apostles shows that there is no reason to assume that this text stops with the end of Jesus’s life in 29 A.D.  If we look for the logical end-point, it comes near the end of chapter 12.  Just before the death of Herod Agrippa I in 44 A.D., the Apostle Peter arrives at the home of John Mark.  The underlying text had focused on Peter to this point.  Since we hear of Peter only once again, we can assume that this source ends here.  It is best called “Petrine Ur-Marcus”.  It was written in Aramaic at that time.  It can be found in Mark (and comparable verses in Matthew, Luke, and even John):

 

Mark 1:16-28, 2:17-3:5, 5:1-43, 6:30-52, 8:27-9:13, 9:30-31, 9:38-42, 10:13-34, 11:27-33, 12:18-23, 12:35-13:15, 13:28-31, 14:1-9, 28-42, 14:46-54, 15:1-27, 34-40, and continuing in Luke 24:1-3, 9,11-12, 36-47, 51; John 20:1-23, 26-27; and Acts 1:6-4:31, 5:17-42, 9:32-11:18, 12:1-17.

 

            No other Synoptic sources were employed in the Gospel of John, so we can deduce that 44 A.D. slightly preceded the major development of the writing of John. Its textual mark is identity of word-use between Mark and Luke, but not with John.  This shows that it must have been translated into Greek by the time it was used in Mark and Luke.

 

Q (or Twelve-Source)

 

            The other major source of the Synoptic gospels is generally acknowledged to be Q.  Q is usually assumed to be the portions of Matthew and Luke that overlap, but are not in Mark.  This is only generally true.  The truly Q material underlies Matthew, Luke, and also Mark as an Aramaic original that causes the word use to be different in the derivative gospels.  The parables in Mark are generally not exact in word-choice with Luke, so this is a bold statement, but comparison with the (non-canonical) Gospel of Thomas shows that the Q material Thomas draws from also includes texts used in Mark.  (Scholarship has had fifty years to absorb this, but still resists learning it.  The Jesus Seminar is the worst example of continuing misuse of Thomas.)

 

            Once the barrier is broken that Q material exists in Mark, the radical change is that even narrative in Mark may be from Q.  The portions of Mark not already listed above could be largely from Q.  The narrative material in question is called by scholars the Twelve-Source. We cannot tell whether Q and Twelve-Source are distinct.  

 

            That Q and Twelve-Source are not distinct is suggested by external criticism. Tradition says that Matthew wrote this gospel.  The Higher Critics have suggested that this may have been Q, limited to sayings that occur only in Matthew and Luke.  Conservatives have continued to hold that Matthew wrote the gospel with his name.  I say split the difference.  Acknowledge that Matthew wrote most of the Q discourses, but also allow for the Twelve-Source narrative, which would seem most likely to have come from him.  His name (=Levi) occurs first at Mark 2:14, and very little occurs before that.  The Q-Twelve-Source in Mark is the following:

 

Mark 1:9-15, 1:29-2:16, 3:13-4:41, 6:2-16, 9:14-29, 9:33-37, 10:41-11:11, 1:15-19, 12:1-17, 24-34, 13:17-23, 33-37, 14:10-25, 14:43-45, 62-72, 15:29-32, 15:42-16:8.

 

            As I stated above, the mark of this document is that it was not available in Greek at the time it was utilized to bring in to Mark and Luke.  As an Aramaic text, it was not likely to survive.  Conversely, the Petrine Ur-Marcus did get translated into Greek in time.  Why then has it survived?  Likely because it was soon merged in with the Twelve-Source to form Greek Mark. 

 

            That Q was available for Mark and yet so little was used, seems strange.  We do know, of course, that we have a text, our Mark, that for the most part excludes Q.  More to our common sense, another text developed that included all this Q, the Twelve-Source.  The additional Q portions not in Mark are as follows in Luke:

 

Luke 11:29-36, 11:52-12:38, 12:47-13:17, 13:23-30, 14:3-33, 15:1-16:31, 17:22-25, 19:11-27.

 

Viewed this way, the sayings from Q in Mark are of significant quantity compared to the omitted passages.

 

Proto-Luke

 

            This Q-Twelve-Source text remained in Aramaic. Next came a further stage of additions in Aramaic.  The traces of who did this can be discerned by looking for personal clues.  We need active characters in Luke who appear nowhere else in the Synoptics.  The key name is Simon.  The personal experience introduced at this stage starts with a Simon and ends with a Simon.  I call this stage of the document “Proto-Luke”, a modification of B. H. Streeter’s theory.  Luke 7:36-50 tells of Jesus going to a dinner at the home of Simon the Pharisee. Luke 24:13-35 is about the resurrected Jesus on the road to Emmaus with two disciples.  One is Cleopas.  As to the other, “The Lord has indeed risen and has appeared to Simon.”  Traditionally everyone assumes this refers to Simon Peter.  However, scripture does not mention any prior appearance of the risen Jesus to Peter.  No, the plain meaning is that Jesus had appeared to Cleopas and a different Simon.  Just as the Q-Twelve-Source ended at this point, so did Proto-Luke.

 

            This Simon may be a well-recognized figure in the early Christian Church.  The so-called brothers (probably cousins) of Jesus were James, Joseph, Jude, and Simon.  James was the first leader of the Church.  When he was killed (c. 62 A.D.), Simon his brother became Bishop of Jerusalem.

 

Luke

 

            At the final stage the Proto-Luke text was used by Luke the Physician in writing his gospel in 63 A.D.  He translated it into Greek in his own style. A Greek text of most of Mark came available to him.  He added in whatever portions of Mark were not in Proto-Luke.  This was the early Petrine Ur-Marcus material.  Sometimes he just copied phrases or sentences of this Greek translation.  Also, he followed the order of events in Mark. 

 

            Luke is thus a particularly complex text.  Its foundation is Matthew’s Q-Twelve-Source Aramaic document.  (The parts of this in Mark are usually not regarded as Q.)  Simon added much from his personal experience in Proto-Luke.  Luke brought in Petrine material that had already been translated into Greek “Proto-Mark”.  Luke also brought in other sources.

 

Matthew

 

            Once Luke was finished, some of Simon’s or Luke’s additions were copied over into Matthew.  These passages usually mislabelled as Q are found at Matthew 23:23-39 and 24:27-51. (Word-use is too exact to be possible in translations from a common Aramaic source.)  So Matthew had to be later than Luke, but not later than 70 A.D. (The Fall of Jerusalem, to which it does not refer.)

 

            The final phases of Matthew and Mark were written before 70 A.D., as was John.  For the Synoptics, the classic 4-source theory still fits.  I have already dealt with the Marcan source, the Q-Twelve-Source, and the L source (Proto-Luke additions to Luke).  The M source should be understood as not just the additions to Matthew, but as also the late strata in Mark (Mark 1:1-8, 3:6-12, 6:14-29, 6:53-8:26, 9:43-10:12, 11:12-14, 20-25, 13:24-27, 14:55-61, but not the even later 16:9-20).

 

            As for John, it is not classed among the Synoptics, though I have shown there is reason to do so.  In any case, I have written up my work in “The Significance of John”, Cincinnatus Society Journal, No. 3, May-July 1988.

 

Resurrection Sources

 

Dale Adams

 

 

 The sources underlying the four gospels are quite different from those presented by Miriam Berg in the September 1998 Noesis, “The Synoptic Problem.”  Let me focus on the crucial claim she made, “None of the resurrection stories in any of the four gospels agree with each other or with the reports in the epistle to the Corinthians by Paul.  The earliest manuscripts of Mark do not contain a resurrection story. . . .”

 

 Some apologia is necessary to explain how the texts reached their present status.  The earliest extant manuscripts of Mark break off before completing the resurrection story, true.  A fairer assessment would be that the earliest manuscripts did have a complete resurrection story, we just lack proof of what they were.  Most scholars accept Ur-Marcus and Q as very early texts, to which I and some others would add the Twelve-Source (unless the Twelve-Source is simply the narrative portions of Q, as I believe it is).

 

 The text of Mark 16:1-8 is so similar to Matthew 28: 1-8 that we can see it is probable that the remainder of Matthew continues it, particularly 28:9-10, 16-20.  Compare 16:16-7, “. . . he has risen, he is not here. . . .  Go and tell his disciples and Peter, He is going ahead of you to Galilee . . .”, with Matthew 28:16, “Meanwhile the eleven disciples set out for Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had arranged to meet them.”  It continues with a resurrection story, so there is one at least.  But is it the earliest?

 

 The prime source underlying the Synoptic gospels is the Twelve-Source.  It is identified by what is common to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but is not in John.  Applying this to the resurrection accounts, the following is extracted as the Twelve-Source: