31 thoughts on “The Gospels and Other Fiction, part 3”

1. This is why they want preachers to interpret for you, and why apologetics exists.

   It’s really a self contradicting piece of work, that no one should take seriously.

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2. It is a very real fact that a LARGE percentage of church-goers never read the bible (in fact, they only open it during sermons) and instead rely entirely on Christian preachers to tell them what it says. Those that turn to apologists are generally the ones who like to “defend” their faith to atheists in an (largely unsuccessful) effort to “convert” them. Case in point: this blog. 😊

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3. I’m reminded of Christian nationalist and pseudo-historian David Barton.

   There are people in the U.S. who don’t think our history is white enough or Christian enough. Barton steps in to fill that need. He makes a good living re-writing history, publishing books and doing the lecture circuit.

   Even in a world where fact checking takes just a few minutes from anywhere, people prefer to blindly and uncritically accept anything that supports what they want to believe.

   It is not hard to imagine, in a community clamoring for information about Jesus, that someone would step up to fill that need – whether there was reliable information to be had or not.

   “Oh, you want to know about Jesus? I can tell you about Jesus. . . ”

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   • people prefer to blindly and uncritically accept anything that supports what they want to believe.

     This TRULY sums things up in a nutshell.

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     • The easiest thing in the world is self-deceit; for every man believes what he wishes, though the reality is often different.

       Third Olynthiac, section 19 (349 BC), as translated by Charles Rann Kennedy (1852)
       Variants:
       A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.

       As quoted in The Routledge Dictionary of Quotations (1987) by Robert Andrews, p. 255

       There is nothing easier than self-delusion. Since what man desires, is the first thing he believes.

       _____
       —“Demosthenes – Wikiquote”. en.wikiquote.org.

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4. Neil A skilled author can make all of their characters speak in different and distinctive styles, with their own particular grammar and syntax.

   That is true. But it is not one author. There are three who reveal the same thing: Jesus had a distinct voice and style.

   But there is something else. As each Gospel writer collects and uses the logia of the Lord, a difference in the quality of the translation can be seen.

   I think we would agree that Jesus spoke Aramaic and his words in the Gospels are translations of his Aramaic words. But even in parallel passages his words often vary slightly. They are close, yes, but with variations. They are rarely verbatim the same in anything but short phrases.

   And translation quirks show up. Some change what Jesus would certainly have used, the waw consecutive to kia in Greek, which is what we read in Mark, to the more acceptable de. Some translations are polished; others are rough. Some retain the Hebrew idioms we would expect of a Hebrew/Aramaic speaker. Others do not. If that is intentional by the Gospel writers, they were far more sophisticated writers than most would give them credit for. And they would have to had to have worked in conjunction to produce those kinds of small variations – crafty devils that they were.

   And they don’t seem to be on the same page as far as intention is concerned. Wouldn’t it be more impressive if Jesus sounded very much as a Hebrew speaker with all the idioms and the same style of cadence? But he doesn’t. What we have is something far less thought out. It sounds like simple copying of sources that were different in quality and style but still retain the same message. In other words, the oral gospel.

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   • If you say so, though this theory is entirely your own, based on conjecture and supposition. The more straight forward explanation, which doesn’t involve the addition of an unreliable oral tradition (or two) and the unlikely and hitherto unheard of possibility that the writers collaborated, is that they copied from one other’s work, altering Jesus’ words to suit their own agendas. Occam’s razor, internal evidence and scholarship all lead to this conclusion. But, hey, you know best.

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     • Cf. “Intertextual production of the Gospel of Mark“. Wikipedia.

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5. [2:12] …I consider [the gospel authors] elite culture or elite persons within a particular you know stratum of culture .. those who have access to what’s called Paideia, so advanced education in the ancient world, and the number of people who actually had that kind of advanced education was really really narrow…

   [22:01] [HOST>>> What led you to the conclusion that it’s possible that Christians actually didn’t write the gospels]

   Well this is something that I’ve been a little surprised that people have taken away from the book, because what I say in the book is that I’m interested in what’s the most formative group that we can attribute the content of the gospels to…

   _____
   “Did The Greco-Roman Elite Class Write The Gospels?! – Professor Robyn Faith Walsh”. YouTube. History Valley. 24 May 2022.

   I have few disagreements with Walsh; and those are relatively trivial. And even where we disagree, she ably presents the data, which is of value in itself. The rest of her book is an excellent piece of extended argumentation, more than adequately establishing its case with cited evidence and scholarship throughout. It will not only persuade, but it will educate you on how Biblical studies ended up in the dead-end of romanticism, the pit Walsh is trying to drag it back out of; and on how much can be learned from reversing course back down the path of understanding the Gospels that we should have been on all along. Anyone who wants to better understand who the authors of the Gospels were in general, what their techniques and agendas and literary environments would have been like that influenced their every decision in constructing those texts, simply must read this book. As must anyone who wishes to resist its thesis and insist the Gospels are collections of oral lore and not the deliberate creative products of individual, elite authors; or insist the Gospels are unique and special, rather than quite typical examples of popular counter-cultural fiction of the time. If that is you, and you are the sort of person who responds rationally to evidence and argument, this book will disabuse you of those notions.

   _____
   —Carrier (9 January 2023). “Robyn Faith Walsh and the Gospels as Literature”. Richard Carrier Blogs.

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6. An edited version of Don’s latest essay. My comments in italics.

   What is the internal evidence the gospels plagiarised from each other? Don, I’m weary of presenting such evidence. Re-read earlier posts and comments instead of attempting to take us round in endless circles. Re-read scholars’ work, including the two you mention below and stop insisting everyone except you is wrong.

   I’ve read both of (Dr Strauss and Dr Wallace’s) argument for the “interdependence” of the Gospels. I would relish sitting down with them to talk through the texts and reasoning (and as a complete amateur with your own idiosyncratic view, put them right?).

   In particular related to both Wallace and Strauss is the failure to consider what I consider the better option for explaining the simlarities (Really? The ‘better’ option, the more realistic and more widely accepted option is that the gospel writers cribbed from one another)… is an oral transmission of the logia of Jesus by many during the period between Pentecost and the writing of Mark. By many? And you still think they’re going to be accurate?

   They had to be translated… not by some designated super translator (how do you know this?) but by anyone who had the ability. Those translators did not collaborate. (How do you know this? You’ve previously claimed, without any evidence whatsoever, the ‘super-translator’ was Matthew who met with Mark in Rome to sort out the translation of the logia. So which is it? No super-translator or super-translator Matthew? No collaboration or collaboration in Rome?)

   That rather messy situation (You’re not kidding, and you’re making it messier) in the first century provides an answer to almost all the apparent interdependence that Wallace and Strauss (and almost all other scholars) observe. (Sneaky use of ‘apparent’ there, Don. There is a great deal of interdependence that nothing other than plagiarism explains.) That does not mean that the Gospel writers did not know of Mark – and Peter’s oral gospel transcribed by Mark (You keep claiming this. Where’s your evidence Mark knew Peter’s ‘oral gospel’ and based his fiction on it?) But there is so much in Matthew and Luke that has no counterpart in Mark that it is simply not controversial that they had other sources (or, like John, they made it up.).

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   • Don:
     “ is an oral transmission of the logia of Jesus by many during the period between Pentecost and the writing of Mark.”

     You highlighted this Neil…it always comes back to the “telephone game” doesn’t it?
     And somehow Don thinks that the game is different with the gospels…they got it perfectly correct!

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7. Per “They had to be translated”,

   [The Criterion of Aramaic Context holds that] if there is evidence of an “Aramaic-language based unity between the participants, the events depicted, and concepts discussed” underlying the extant Greek text, then this suggests the account goes back to the original Jesus, who most likely conversed in Aramaic.

   The first difficulty with this criterion is that it isn’t easy to discern an “underlying Aramaic origin” from an author or source who simply wrote or spoke in a Semitized Greek. The output of both often look identical. And yet we know the earliest Christians routinely wrote and spoke in a Semitized Greek, and regularly employed (and were heavily influenced by) the Septuagint, which was written in a Semitized Greek. This is most notably the case for the author of Luke-Acts, and is evident even in Paul.

   Many early Christians were also bilingual (as Paul outright says he was), and thus often spoke and thought in Aramaic, and thus could easily have composed tales in Aramaic (orally or in lost written form) that were just as fabricated as anything else, which could then have been translated into Greek, either by the Gospel authors themselves or their sources. Indeed, some material may have preceded Jesus in Aramaic form (such as sayings and teachings, as we find collected at Qumran) that was later attributed to him with suitable adaptation. So even if we can distinguish what is merely a Semitic Greek dialect from a Greek translation of an Aramaic source (and we rarely can), that still does not establish that the Aramaic source reported a historical fact.

   Consequently, Semitic features in a Gospel pericope do not make its historicity any more likely, other than in very exceptional cases (where we can actually prove an underlying source that we otherwise did not already suspect), and even then it gains very little (since an underlying source is not automatically reliable). Whereas one might have hoped such features would lower [the probability of this evidence on non-historicity] relative to [the probability of this evidence on historicity], there is no evidence in [our background knowledge] that warrants that conclusion. Even the best cases would lower it but little; and most cases, not at all.

   As Christopher Tuckett says: “We should not forget that Jesus was not the only person in first-century Palestine; nor was he the only Aramaic speaker of his day. Hence such features in the tradition are not necessarily guaranteed as authentic: they might have originated in an early (or indeed later) Christian milieu within Palestine or in an Aramaic-speaking environment [outside Palestine].”

   Or as I’ve noted, they might have originated in a Semitic-Greek-speaking environment (of which there were many across the whole Roman world), or even a pre-Christian milieu. Even a chronological trend is not dispositive, since Stanley Porter finds evidence the tradition could become “both more and less Semitic” [over time]. Unfortunately there are just too many ways a Semitic flavor could have entered the tradition of any saying or tale, and we have no way to tease out their relative probabilities. So when it comes to Jesus, this criterion effectively has no value for discerning historically authentic material.

   (pp. 185-186)
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   –Carrier, Richard (2012). Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-1-61614-560-6.

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   • Carrier The first difficulty with this criterion is that it isn’t easy to discern an “underlying Aramaic origin” from an author or source who simply wrote or spoke in a Semitized Greek.

     It is possible to discern the underlying Aramaic origin from the voices of the Gospel narrators. Matthew and Luke wrote in polished Greek with little sense of “semitized Greek.” Mark or actually Peter is another issue. He certainly did speak in a Semitized Greek; that is actually visible in English translations like the KJV. But it is clearly visible in the Greek. Mark, the narrator of the last several chapters, however, did not write with a hint of Semitized Greek.

     Carrier So even if we can distinguish what is merely a Semitic Greek dialect from a Greek translation of an Aramaic source (and we rarely can), that still does not establish that the Aramaic source reported a historical fact.

     There are a lot of ifs and could haves and might haves that Carrier presents as his argument. That is okay. Everyone speculates. but let’s not confuse that with fact. Or with evidence. That is what Carrier lacks most of all.

     To Carrier’s theory I present the bridge between those who knew Jesus personally and the next generation: Polycarp. With Polycarp (and Papias) we have primary evidence, something Carrier fails to present, that Jesus was not only the traveling rabbi he is described to be by the Gospels but that what he said was what he actually said. That is doing history. What Carrier does is opine and gripe.

     He comes across as someone trying to defend a conspiracy theory without any evidence. What he needs are primary sources and artifacts (texts) that support his theory.

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     • Yet another scholar you know better than. You’re so clever, and humble with it.

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     • Don: [I]n the Greek. Mark, the narrator of the last several chapters, however, did not write with a hint of Semitized Greek.

       I don’t own a commentary written in the last 100 years that argues in favour of the longer ending of Mark’s Gospel.
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       –Carter, Paul (26 June 2018). “What Do You Do With The End Of Mark’s Gospel?”. The Gospel Coalition | Canada.

       —————————————————————————

       I thank Jonathan Sheffield for funding and engaging in this debate. But with all due respect, I have to conclude he is delusionally obsessed with a claim about Apostolic church texts that he has no evidence at all for, and that all surviving evidence stands against. I can only conclude his religious convictions must be compelling him to ignore all facts and reason, and instead imagine irrelevant facts pertinent.

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       –Carrier (8 January 2019). “Was the Long Ending of Mark Original? Carrier’s Closing Statement”. Richard Carrier Blogs.

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     • I haven’t posted your most recent ‘comment’, Don, because it’s nothing more than a rant about Richard Cartier. As I’ve told you before, if you want to dispute him – and he’s far more plausible than you – then put on your big boy pants, go over to his site and make your accusations in person.

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8. OP: “Matthew and Luke copying from Mark (and each other?) while John invents his own unique dialogue, makes for a far better explanation of both the similarities and the differences.”

   Luke is simply freely redacting Matthew (and often being happier with the Gentile-friendly sequence and content of Mark than the overly-Jewish content of Matthew) or Luke and Matthew were both using a “Q” that included genealogies, birth narratives, baptism narratives, temptation narratives, resurrection narratives, suicide narratives, and even a crucifixion narrative (as noted above). But that sounds so much like Matthew, that Ockham’s Razor leads to no more probable conclusion: Luke is simply redacting select content of Matthew into his redaction of Mark. There is no actual evidence for any other hypothesis.

   This even explains why most of the content of “Q” consists of “sayings.” Because what we mean by Q is actually just Matthew, and most of what Matthew did to Mark was add five enormous speeches, which are in fact coherent literary products, in Greek, reliant on the Septuagint (a popular Greek translation of the Scriptures). They are not random collections of sayings. They are, like almost all speeches in all stories and histories of antiquity, the inventions of the author: Matthew. And Luke simply didn’t like that literary model. Long, ponderous speeches breaking up the action; and the heavy-handed Moses parallel in having five of them. So he broke them up, changed them up, dropped what he didn’t like or need, and used the rest as he wished. But he also borrowed and adapted lots of other stuff Matthew added, stuff about John the Baptist, the birth of Jesus, the suicide of Judas, and more. Some he took verbatim. Some he rewrote. Just as he did with Mark.

   Since the above facts are then added to the even more incredible fact that there are hundreds of cases where Luke follows Matthew’s version of Mark and not Mark directly (in phrasing, grammar, vocabulary, and other elements), the notion that Luke did not use Matthew as a source is absurd. And if Luke used Matthew, there is no evidence left for Q, and no remaining justification for supposing there to have been one.

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   –John W. Loftus (12/10/2018). “Richard Carrier On the Non-Existence of Q”. Debunking Christianity.

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   • Godfrey, Neil (13 February 2020). “How Luke Reworked Mark’s Ending”. Vridar. This post looks at the evidence for Luke having reworked Mark’s ending. (The Gospel of Mark appears to have originally ended with verse 8 with the women fleeing from the tomb in fear.) The next post will identify the evidence for Luke having simultaneously used and changed Matthew’s ending.

   • Godfrey, Neil (14 February 2020). “How Luke Reworked Matthew’s Conclusion?”. Vridar. Continuing here from the previous post that looked at evidence that Luke was reworking Mark’s conclusion. The following tables distil and simplify key points from Jeffrey Peterson’s chapter in Marcan Priority Without Q: Explorations in the Farrer Hypothesis.

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9. H1 == Mark knew Peter’s ‘oral gospel’ and based his fiction on it.

   H2 == Peter as the putative founder of Christianity may have created or obtained a pesher that he used to recruit followers to his cult. This hypothetical pesher would have revealed God’s plan for Jesus to bring about salvation. The Markan text was written at least forty years after the Christian religion began (then an average human lifetime), and thus was responding to recent events (the destruction of Jerusalem). We can not explain the origins of Christianity by appealing to the Markan text or to the author’s motives; The Markan text is a latecomer that was responding to profound changes in the religion and its circumstances. The religion itself began long before it was known that the Romans would actually destroy Jerusalem (early Christian thinking was then more in line with Daniel, which never mentions this, but only the temple’s “desecration,” after which God and his angels would destroy everything). [Comment by Richard Carrier—13 June 2021—per “Was Jesus-Is-Michael an Early Christian Mystery Teaching?”. Richard Carrier Blogs. 2021-06-11.]

   H3 == The earliest and prior existing Chrestianity came to be hijacked by Christianity. The order of MSS authorship is: Thomas, John, Marcion – and then Mark, and Luke\Matthew. “Chrestianity precedes Christianity, such is for sure. Mark started the movement that countered what Thomas, John and then Marcion had set in motion, and as we can see it wasn’t until around 500 CE that texts testify to Christianity gaining the upper hand over Chrestianity – and it has also become evident how, well over 500 years after that, the latter still was a legacy that got attested to at will, freely and openly” (Martijn Linssen) [Cf. “Martijn Linssen | Leiden University”. Academia.edu.]

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   • There is little evidence for hypothesis 1 and I find H-3 less then convincing, though perhaps Linssen provides evidence for it elsewhere in his writing. H-2 seems to me the most plausible of the possibilities presented here.

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     • H-2 seems to me the most plausible of the possibilities presented here.

       But is very problematic for Apologists!

       Modern Christianity must always reckon with the possibility of having to abandon the historical figure of Jesus … he should never be considered its foundation.

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       –Schweitzer, Albert (2001) [1913 in German] (in en). The Quest of the Historical Jesus [Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung]. Fortress Press. ISBN 978-1-4514-0354-1. translated by John Bowden et al.

       ——————–

       (1) The Gospels are the only definite source for a historical Jesus we have (everything else either derives from them or is too ambiguous to determine the question), yet they portray Jesus more similarly to other mythical persons than any historical person (even historical persons we know were also mythologized), therefore we need good evidence to prove Jesus is the exception among those similar characters; otherwise, we should conclude he is just like all the others, i.e. just as mythical as they are.

       (2) The Epistles that predate the Gospels should provide such evidence, but instead exhibit no clear evidence that Jesus was ever known to have visited Earth; they appear only to know of a revelatory Jesus who was only ever met or spoken to in visions.

       (1) + (2) = Jesus was more likely mythical than historical.

       Note this is not “Jesus was mythical.” Rather, “more likely” to be. In OHJ I still conclude with a 1 in 3 chance there was a historical Jesus.

       Also note that (1) is crucially distinct and different from “the Gospel stories were made up.” A biography merely being made up [as found in the Gospel stories] is not the same thing as fashioning a character [possibly 40+ years prior] entirely according to pagan and Jewish tropes for mythical persons.

       _____
       Comment by Richard Carrier—20 December 2020—per Carrier, Richard (2020). “Jesus from Outer Space?”. The Bible and Interpretation.

       ———————

       I don’t think we are ignoring the possibility the Gospels record oral lore. We simply have no reason to believe it—and every reason to disbelieve it. We’ve moved on. Scholarship needs to join us. Because until they do, all they are doing is chasing a ghost of their own making.

       _____
       –Carrier (31 July 2021). “The GCRR eConference on the Historical Jesus: A Retrospective”. Richard Carrier Blogs.

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     • I do, Neil. Needless to say, that requires a bit more than a few pages. My book unlocks over 2,000 pages of research, bit by bit.
       Thomas shares 35 logia with Mark, and 6 parables. “LukeMatthew” doubles that score to 70, and 13 parables.
       *Ev / Marcion sits right in between, going by Klinghardt’s reconstruction: 57 parallels with Thomas

       Thomas is the Quelle to Chrestianity of which John is the first gospel, and *Ev the main one. *Ev in turn is the Quelle to Christianity, of which Mark is the first gospel. Matthew redacted *Ev into Luke while writing his own on the side, and canonical John was redacted to close the fourfold gospel. Irenaeus’ four pillar story (Against heresies III 11,8) is in the order John, Luke, Matthew, Mark

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10. Neil Luke makes a terrible job transferring this parable from Mark to his own gospel.

    Vis-a-Vis ‘And these are the ones sown on the good soil: they hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.’ (Mark 4:20) v. ‘But as for that in the good soil, these are the ones who, when they hear the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patient endurance.’ (Luke 8:15)

    There is virtually no difference between the two. The key phrases are they hear the word and accept it (Mark) and they hear the word, hold it fast </i? (Luke)

    The words that is different are "accept" and "hold fast." Those words are paradechomai (Mark) and katechó (Luke). Both mean pretty much the same thing, that is to hold onto it tightly and to receive or take up (according to Strong’s Concordance).

    In both cases they are translations from Jesus’ original Aramaic. As you know, translators may choose from a number of words because every word has a pool of meaning. So, what you are observing are two translations of one original in which the two translators used two slightly different words.

    It happens that this is exactly what I have been saying about the sources of the Gospels: the logia come from oral sources which are often slightly different, though almost always the idea or message is the same.

    Now, if Luke actually was copying Mark we might fault him for his inattention to the Markan text. But he is not.

    BTW did you compare Matthew? The word there is suniémi. It means to understand and consider. Is he also equally inattentive?

    So, tell me how the messages of Matthew. Mark and Luke are different in this passage.

    I have to say, this fuss is all rather silly.

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    • But what about the parts you ignore?

      “Luke omits the part of the parable where the seed sprang up quickly because it lacked depth of soil. However, he still provides an interpretation for that part of the parable!
      Where Mark’s seed on the rock withered “because it had no root”, Luke changes the reason to be that “it withered for lack of moisture”. However, his interpretation addresses Mark’s original version — that it withered because it had no root. His interpretation does not address the lack of moisture.
      Luke removes Mark’s reference to the sun the scorched the seed on the rocky ground, yet he provides an interpretation for it: the “testing” that causes people to fall away.”
      Mark Goodacre https://ehrmanblog.org/editorial-fatigue-in-luke-more-from-blog-guest-mark-goodacre/

      You’ll defend ‘God’s word’ by whatever underhand means necessary, won’t you. The ‘fuss’, Don, is all yours.

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    • You can’t even begin to address textual parallels unless you do so in the original language: bible translations are inherently inaccurate.

      Next to that, it would help to be knowledgeable in Greek: the alleged koine Greek of the NT (and the Christian LXX, mind you!) is absolutely horrific and filled with military terms and Roman loanwords: oral tradition is absolutely out of the question even when we consider the very long and complex evolution from the Coptic texts of the Nag Hammadi Library down to the Greek Christian Gospels, the Pauline Epistles, and the Christian LXX – in that very specific order

      Only an ignorant fool would assume that any of these texts started out in Aramaic or Hebrew – and indeed there have been quite a few of those who tried to make a case for their folly, and failed miserably. Nicolas Perrin is one of those, who turned out to base his entire book on the English translation of Thomas instead of the Coptic, by clubbing together native Coptic words and their Greek equivalents, or by e.g. treating the two different words for fire as one and the same.

      Likewise, the Greek of the NT evidently is based on and written by Romans with a limited command of Greek: Mark and Matthew. Luke and John are much more fluent in their tongue even though heavily redacted – but let’s cut to the chase, shall we?

      Matt 13:3 And He told them many things in parables, saying, “A farmer went out to sow his seed.
      καὶ ἐλάλησεν αὐτοῖς πολλὰ ἐν παραβολαῖς λέγων· ἰδοὺ ἐξῆλθεν ὁ σπείρων τοῦ σπείρειν.
      13:4 And as he was sowing, some [seed] fell along the path, and the birds came [and] devoured it.
      καὶ ἐν τῷ σπείρειν αὐτὸν ἃ μὲν ἔπεσεν παρὰ τὴν ὁδόν, καὶ ἐλθόντα τὰ πετεινὰ κατέφαγεν αὐτά.
      13:5 Some fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow.
      ἄλλα δὲ ἔπεσεν ἐπὶ τὰ πετρώδη ὅπου οὐκ εἶχεν γῆν πολλήν, καὶ εὐθέως ἐξανέτειλεν διὰ τὸ μὴ ἔχειν βάθος γῆς.
      13:6 But [when the] sun rose, [the seedlings] were scorched, and they withered because they had no root.
      ἡλίου δὲ ἀνατείλαντος ἐκαυματίσθη, καὶ διὰ τὸ μὴ ἔχειν ῥίζαν ἐξηράνθη.
      13:7 Other [seed] fell among thorns, [which] grew up and choked [the seedlings] .
      ἄλλα δὲ ἔπεσεν ἐπὶ τὰς ἀκάνθας, καὶ ἀνέβησαν αἱ ἄκανθαι καὶ ἀπέπνιξαν αὐτά.
      13:8 Still other [seed] fell on good soil and produced a crop— a hundredfold, sixtyfold, [or] thirtyfold.
      ἄλλα δὲ ἔπεσεν ἐπὶ τὴν γῆν τὴν καλὴν καὶ ἐδίδου καρπόν, ὃ μὲν ἑκατόν, ὃ δὲ ἑξήκοντα, ὃ δὲ τριάκοντα.
      13:9 He who has ears, let him hear.”
      ὁ ἔχων ὦτα ἀκουέτω.

      Mark 4:3 “Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed.
      ἀκούετε.
      Ἰδοὺ ἐξῆλθεν ὁ σπείρων σπεῖραι·

      4:4 And as he was sowing, some [seed] fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it.
      καὶ ἐγένετο ἐν τῷ σπείρειν, ὃ μὲν ἔπεσεν παρὰ τὴν ὁδόν, καὶ ἦλθεν τὰ πετεινὰ καὶ κατέφαγεν αὐτό.
      4:5 Some fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow.
      καὶ ἄλλο ἔπεσεν ἐπὶ τὸ πετρῶδες ὅπου οὐκ εἶχεν γῆν πολλήν, καὶ εὐθὺς ἐξανέτειλεν διὰ τὸ μὴ ἔχειν βάθος γῆς.
      4:6 But when the sun rose, [the seedlings] were scorched, and they withered because they had no root.
      καὶ ὅτε ἀνέτειλεν ὁ ἥλιος, ἐκαυματίσθη καὶ διὰ τὸ μὴ ἔχειν ῥίζαν ἐξηράνθη.

      4:7 Other [ seed ] fell among thorns, [which] grew up and choked [the seedlings] , and [they] yielded no crop.
      καὶ ἄλλο ἔπεσεν εἰς τὰς ἀκάνθας, καὶ ἀνέβησαν αἱ ἄκανθαι καὶ συνέπνιξαν αὐτό, καὶ καρπὸν οὐκ ἔδωκεν.

      4:8 Still other [seed] fell on good soil, [where it] sprouted, grew up, and produced a crop— one bearing thirtyfold, another sixtyfold, and another a hundredfold.”
      καὶ ἄλλα ἔπεσεν εἰς τὴν γῆν τὴν καλὴν καὶ ἐδίδου καρπὸν ἀναβαίνοντα καὶ αὐξανόμενα καὶ ἔφερεν ἐν τριάκοντα καὶ ἐν ἑξήκοντα καὶ ἐν ἑκατόν.
      4:9 Then [Jesus] said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
      καὶ ἔλεγεν· ὃς ἔχει ὦτα ἀκούειν ἀκουέτω.

      Luke 8:4 [While] a large crowd was gathering and [people] were coming to [Jesus] from town after town, He told [them] [this] parable:
      Συνιόντος δὲ ὄχλου πολλοῦ καὶ τῶν κατὰ πόλιν ἐπιπορευομένων πρὸς αὐτὸν εἶπεν διὰ παραβολῆς·
      8:5 “ – A farmer went out to sow his seed. And as he was sowing, some [seed] fell along the path, where it was trampled, and the birds of the air devoured it.
      ἐξῆλθεν ὁ σπείρων τοῦ σπεῖραι τὸν σπόρον αὐτοῦ· καὶ ἐν τῷ σπείρειν αὐτὸν ὃ μὲν ἔπεσεν παρὰ τὴν ὁδὸν καὶ κατεπατήθη, καὶ τὰ πετεινὰ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ κατέφαγεν αὐτό.
      8:6 Some fell on rocky ground, and when it came up, [the seedlings] withered because they had no moisture.
      καὶ ἕτερον κατέπεσεν ἐπὶ τὴν πέτραν, καὶ φυὲν ἐξηράνθη διὰ τὸ μὴ ἔχειν ἰκμάδα.
      8:7 Other [seed] fell among thorns, [which] grew up with [it] [and] choked [the seedlings] .
      καὶ ἕτερον ἔπεσεν ἐν μέσῳ τῶν ἀκανθῶν, καὶ συνφυεῖσαι αἱ ἄκανθαι ἀπέπνιξαν αὐτό.
      8:8 Still other [seed] fell on good soil, [where] it sprang up [and] produced a crop— a hundredfold.” As [Jesus] said [this] , He called out, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
      καὶ ἕτερον ἔπεσεν εἰς τὴν γῆν τὴν ἀγαθήν, καὶ φυὲν ἐποίησεν καρπὸν ἑκατονταπλασίονα. ταῦτα λέγων ἐφώνει· ὁ ἔχων ὦτα ἀκούειν ἀκουέτω.

      The beauty of Berean Study Bible, although still imperfect, is that it put between brackets words they usually are put out in English while they don’t exist in the Greek text. But let’s just compare the first scene where the unnamed seeds fall on the Proverbial Path – at least, that’s what happens in the original story:

      Matt

      ἄλλα δὲ ἔπεσεν ἐπὶ τὰ πετρώδη ὅπου οὐκ εἶχεν γῆν πολλήν, καὶ εὐθέως ἐξανέτειλεν διὰ τὸ μὴ ἔχειν βάθος γῆς.

      Mark

      καὶ ἄλλο ἔπεσεν ἐπὶ τὸ πετρῶδες ὅπου οὐκ εἶχεν γῆν πολλήν, καὶ εὐθὺς ἐξανέτειλεν διὰ τὸ μὴ ἔχειν βάθος γῆς

      Luke

      καὶ ἕτερον κατέπεσεν ἐπὶ τὴν πέτραν, καὶ φυὲν ἐξηράνθη διὰ τὸ μὴ ἔχειν ἰκμάδα

      Matthew follows Mark verbatim, tweaking a word form here and there. Luke on the other hand certainly is different – and indeed he is, as Luke is based on what these days is known as *Ev, the oldest and original Evangellion by “Marcion” – even though we can see the toddler construction “because-of the not having” twisted when it pertains to moisture

      Now observe the BSB translation, and realise they such still is a translation made by Christians who believe in Jesus and such. In actuality, the Greek of the NT is much, much worse

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11. What I do is look for plausible reasons for the differences rather than look for reasons to condemn the so called plagiarism.

    So, “plausible?” Goodacre’s observation of the apparently omitted features of Mark’s parable which Luke alludes to in the Interpretation are interesting. But “editorial fatigue” is less so. What editorial fatigue implies is that Luke (and Matthew), having Mark before him, simply fail to tell all the details that were in Mark, though those are implied in the explanation of the parable.

    It is possible, of course, but pretty surprising. But Goodacre is focused on supporting his Markan priority theory which includes not just the idea that Mark was written first but that Matthew and Luke were dependent on Mark, at least for this parable Goodacre mentions.

    I would say that it is at least equally plausible that they all three are relying on prior oral sources for the parable (Luke indicates that he did use oral sources and history and the text of Mark indicates his source is Peter’s oral gospel) and that those sources are where we would find the omissions.

    It is possible that copying from a written source one might omit something. (I could easily do that.) But it is far more likely that an oral source for the parable that had been told and retold would omit something or even add some detail that seemed reasonable. It is equally possible that two hearers of the parable and the explanation might remember imperfectly. There were after all at least twelve disciples who heard the explanation. Could some of them have remembered imperfectly? Sure. And it is 30 plus years after the event before any of the Gospel writers wrote it down.

    So, the question is which theory has the most support and logic? I think, because of the statement by Luke that he did use oral sources and because Mark’s version was the transcription of an oral source PLUS the lack of real evidence for Luke or Matthew copying from Mark gives weight to the oral source theory.

    Add to that the differences between most others parallel passages, and the logic becomes greater that Mark was not the source for the parallel passages in Matthew and Luke but that various oral sources were. If Mark was the primary source, the “editorial fatigue” would have been pretty serious. But variations in the oral sources is a theory that does not require that we consider Matthew and Luke incompetent.

    Finally, the additions of details such as in Matthew 9:16,17 that fit perfectly the flow and style of the passage yet are not in Mark suggest that Matthew is working from a different source and not from Mark.

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    • What a fuss you’re making, Don.

      What I take from your overlong comment is that Mark Goodacre, Professor of New Testament Studies, is wrong because you, as usual, know better.

      However, to make your theory work you have to deny the priority of Mark even though it’s the universally accepted position and rely instead on your shaky oral traditions.

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      • I don’t deny the primacy of Mark if by that one means that Mark was the first written gospel. But as one of the wiki articled you recently linked said, the gospel was being preached prior to Mark. That almost certainly meant that the oral sources were part of the mix of sources for all three of the synoptic gospels. (If there is anything upon which the scholars are in consensus it is this.)

        So, what we are debating – and it is not just me – is whether or how much Mark’s written Gospel influenced the others. Neil, that is a legitimate debate among almost every scholar including Goodacre, Wallace, Stauss and even Dr. C.

        I have an interest in that. I also have sufficient skills and education to engage intelligently in it. Does that mean I am right? No. Does it mean I think myself superior? No. The issue is complex, and I doubt anyone who really knows how complex it is would say absolutely they have it right. But that does not and should not keep us from debating it and defending our opinions.

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      • No one is disputing there were beliefs about Jesus prior to Mark. There were many, often conflicting, ‘gospels’. We know this from Paul; there were contentious factions right from the start. Bizarrely though, Paul refers to very few of the details of Jesus’ life that Mark later provides in his gospel.

        What did the apostles believe about Jesus? We have to concede we don’t really know, apart from the importance they attached to circumcision; the Jerusalem church was destroyed in AD70 along with whatever they preached, practised or wrote.

        From this point, Mark had a blank canvas on which to create his version of Jesus, based on what? It’s highly unlikely it was Peter’s recollections; hearsay (aka the oral tradition), Paul’s teaching and his own imagination seem far more likely.

        That his story was then plagiarised by Matthew is in no doubt, despite what you claim, Don. Matthew added more material of his own though doesn’t cite his sources and there is good evidence he invented much of it himself: the birth narrative, for example, to make Jesus fulfil so-called prophecy and the literary Sermon on the Mount with its Greek, not Aramaic, structure. This and more from someone you desperately want to regard as an eye-witness?

        Luke similarly uses a good portion of Mark, again with his own embellishments (or those of his sources) and even John uses Mark’s general outline while inventing ‘logia’ on an industrial scale.

        None of this is in serious dispute, Don, though you want to find alternative explanations because the idea that so much of the gospel version(s) of Jesus is plagiarised from a single source and invented is anathema to you.

        You would think wouldn’t you, that the most important message ever, which the Creator of the Universe wanted to make known to humankind, would be so much clearer than this, not muddled, controversial and open to so much debate. It’s as if it isn’t from a god at all.

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      • I find it interesting that “someone” wrote in the Wiki article that “the gospel was being preached prior to Mark.” First, who says? And second, “preaching”? Perhaps discussing the events among friends, but hardly preaching as defined today. Which, once again, points out how modern day folks continue to view the gospels from the century in which they live.

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      • The word is properly “proclaimed.” The preaching we are used to today is probably the creation of the second century when preachers preached to Christians.

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12. OP: “The final part of my critical look at Christians’ defence of scripture as truth.”

    And perhaps as an appendix .. §. “Concerning the Gospels” per,

    Carrier (10 July 2023). “An Ongoing List of Updates to the Arguments and Evidence in On the Historicity of Jesus § Concerning the Gospels”. Richard Carrier Blogs.

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