Tag Archives: Gospels

The Son of Man

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I started wondering why, if his creators believed him to be the Messiah, they have gospel Jesus habitually refer to saviour-figures in the third person? He does it Matthew 23 which we looked at couple of weeks ago, when he talks about there being ‘one instructor: the Messiah’, and he does it repeatedly in all four gospels when he refers to ‘the Son of Man’. The term comes from Daniel 7:13 where it is rendered as ‘one like a son of Man’.

In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of Man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence.

The interpretation of which, supplied in Daniel 7:27, is that:

The sovereignty, power and greatness of all the kingdoms under heaven will be handed over to the holy people of the Most High. His kingdom will be an everlasting kingdom, and all rulers will worship and obey him (my emphasis).

The phrase used for ‘son of Man’, bar enash, means simply ‘human being’ and is used to contrast with the ‘beasts’ of nations that the ‘prophecy’ says will rule prior to this. However, as Daniel explains, the human being in question is the nation of Israel – the holy people of the Most High – who will finally triumph over the four beastly nations that will dominate the Earth first. The nation of Israel will metaphorically emerge from the clouds and join the Ancient of Days to rule from Heaven. There is no mention anywhere in the Daniel dream-prophecy of a Messiah or individual human being who will accomplish any of this.

As Neil Godfrey puts it:

The coming of this “Son of Man” is within the realm where one expects deities to travel. The coming is, moreover, to another station within the clouds, namely the throne of the Ancient of Days. The context again explains that this “coming” is effecting a change of rule on earth. A kingdom is falling, and freedom is given to “the saints of the Most High”.

Nevertheless, it is this title – the now fully capitalised ‘Son of Man’ – that Mark has Jesus assume. The other three gospel writers copy it from him. Paul, writing decades before them, seems not to know that Jesus used it. Evidently the celestial Christ he encountered in visions and revelations didn’t feel the need to mention it. (Hardly surprising when Mark is freely inventing years later.)

So what does this tell us about Jesus, or, more specifically, about how the Jewish Christians of Mark’s community viewed him?

A number of scholars (e.g. Ehrman, Carrier, Goodacre, Westar Institute) have argued (as have I in my own amateurish way) that gospel Jesus is constructed from ‘prophecies’ lifted from Hebrew scriptures. Other commentators have demonstrated how he is, in the first two gospels at least, the personification of the nation of Israel*. This isn’t just because he identifies with the son of Man figure in Daniel. He also equates himself with the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 and elsewhere. Strictly speaking, he is made to identify with the Suffering Servant by Mark and the other gospel authors, particularly Matthew, who all copy Mark’s original idea. As Isaiah 53 makes clear, God’s Suffering Servant is not a person: it is Israel.

Not only is Jesus identified with Daniel’s son of Man and Isaiah’s Suffering Servant – the personification of the Jewish nation – but Isaiah 53 is used as a template for his trial, mockery, crucifixion and resurrection. It is the nation that is God’s servant which, as Mark was writing, was going through trials, tribulation, suffering and apparent death: the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, with thousands of Jewish people being crucified by the Romans.

So it will be Israel, Mark hints in his extended parable, that will emerge resurrected and who will ascend metaphorically through the clouds to sit at the right hand of God to rule the nations. He leaves out the details of this resurrection and ascension from the end of his gospel because at the time of his writing they had yet to happen. But, he tells his readers and listeners, they will. They have to because Daniel and Isaiah say so: after suffering comes God-assured victory. Mark’s Jesus story, then, is an allegory of the history of the Jewish nation and its projected future. The allusions to Abraham, Moses, the Exodus, Elijah, Isaiah’s Suffering Servant, Daniel’s son of Man and the accompanying ‘prophecies’ make this more than apparent.

Gospel Jesus is a metaphor (or indeed a simile, one who is like a son of Man/the Jewish nation), his life made to conform in every respect with the history of that same nation. He is an allegory as Mark makes clear throughout his gospel. 

The clues are there for all to discern and as Mark advises, ‘he who has ears, let him hear’.

*See Watts: Isaiah’s New Exodus and Mark and numerous Christian apologists who make the same point: Google ‘Jesus and Israel’.

End Of Term Test

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Which of the terms mythological, symbolic, theological is most appropriate when discussing biblical tropes?

Apparently, it’s ‘theological’ because it has an air of respectability, whereas the other terms suggest something with only theoretical underpinning. In fact, this also applies to ‘theological’, which by definition is the study of deities, for which there is no evidential verification. The use of ‘theological’ therefore is as unsubstantive as arguing that a concept is metaphorical or symbolic. None of these terms represents a sound, reliable way to determine the accuracy, historicity or truth of religious claims.

With this in mind see how you do with these questions:

1. Did the original hearers of the Genesis creation story regard it as –

a) true.

b) a theological statement.

c) an entertaining myth.

Of course we’ve no way of knowing what the story’s original hearers thought but there is nothing in the text that suggests they would have regarded the creation story as anything but true. The creators of Jesus’ script certainly seemed to think so, a few centuries later and its original hearers would not have felt the need to preserve it otherwise. In this belief they were wrong.

2. Which of these gospel stories is true, as in ‘really happened more or less as described’ –

a) The virgin birth with its surrounding detail.

b) Jesus meeting with Moses and Elijah (the transfiguration).

c) Resurrected corpses roaming around Jerusalem.

d) The resurrection.

The answer is that either all of them are true or none of them are. If only one of them is mythic, symbolic or ‘theological’ (and more than one of them most certainly is) then it is highly likely the others are too. If we are scrupulous, we cannot assert that one story is symbolic because it’s making a theological point while another equally implausible story is historically accurate because we want it to be.

The criteria for determining the historicity of any story from antiquity are corroborative evidence and, failing that, plausibility. We have already established that there is no independent corroboration for many of the gospel stories. There is no corroboration for some of them even in the Bible itself. We are left then with plausibility: how plausible is it that a virgin gave birth or that resurrected corpses presented themselves to Jewish authorities? Vanishingly small. Jesus’ encounter with Moses and Elijah is equally improbable.

Is his resurrection the exception? No, because dead people do not spring back to life 36 hours after being buried. If the virgin birth, the transfiguration and the resurrection of dead saints are all highly implausible (and they are) then so is the resurrection. It is at best, a story making a theological point but it is not history. The implausibility it shares with many of the other implausible stories in the gospels discounts it as history. There are no grounds for saying it is the exception.

There is also the cumulative effect of implausibility. It is highly unlikely that one of the implausible events above is historical, but it is impossible that all four of them are. Add all the other implausible stories in the gospels – the other miracles; the healings; exorcisms; Jesus sparring with the devil, walking through locked doors and beaming up to heaven: piling implausibility on top of implausibility doesn’t make any of the component implausibilities more plausible. It makes all of them less plausible and collectively impossible.

The things the gospels tell us happened to Gospel Jesus, and those they say he did himself, are equalled only by heroes of myth. Did Osiris or Romulus rise from the dead, as their stories claim? Did Augustus really become a god once he died? Of course not. These are the implausible, improbable events we find in myth. Jesus’ story is no different.

3. While many or all of the gospel stories are highly improbable as history because they are intended to convey a theological point, the words attributed to Jesus in the gospels –

a) are completely accurate.

b) are more or less what he said.

c) passed through an inestimable number of people, being invented, edited and altered in the process, before being written down 40+ years after Jesus supposedly uttered them.

d) are inventions of the gospel writers and/or their particular sect and frequently copied between gospels.

If you’re opting for a or b, you’re now making the logia the exception; the one oasis of historical truth in a desert of implausibility. That’s a big ask. To get this one off the ground, you have to call upon contrivances like –

completely reliable (but different and conflicting) oral traditions;

     hypothetical lists of sayings;

         Peter’s dictation to Mark;

             eyewitness authors;

                  secret teachings;

                     super-translators and

                         the odd spot of collaboration.

So, c and/or d is far more likely to be the answer to this one, representing the explanation that requires the least conjecture and fewest hypothetical components.

How did you do? I expect most of you aced this end of term quiz. If not, better get down to some extra study and repeat the semester next year.

The Circular Reasoning of Apologists

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This is what what we’ve got so far:

Human behaviour is controlled by beings from an invisible, undetectable spiritual realm. We know this invisible, undetectable spiritual realm exists because of the effect it has on human behaviour (even if dumb old atheists can’t wrap their minds round the fact.)

Circular reasoning, not evidence.

The synoptic gospels rely on an earlier oral tradition. We know there was an earlier oral tradition because the synoptic gospels rely on it.

Circular reasoning, not evidence. (The same applies to Q.)

We know the stories about Jesus are indisputably true because they’re in the gospels that no-one at the time disputed. We know the gospels are indisputably true because they tell us stories about Jesus that at the time no-one disputed.

Circular reasoning, not evidence. There is no corroborative, independent evidence for any of the stories about Jesus. (I’ll get to the indisputable claim soon.)

 

 

The Gospels and Other Fiction, part 2

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‘The gospels were written as history. Their writers did not make things up.’

History, as koseighty has reminded us, is not littered with angels, devils, demons, spirits, apparitions, miracles, voices from the sky and resurrected corpses. Real history was being written at the same time as the gospels, by Josephus and Suetonius for example, who do not include the supernatural but do reference their sources, something the gospels never manage.

And of course the gospel writers did make things up. They invented numerous stories for Jesus to make it appear he is fulfilling prophecy (even when that ‘prophecy’ wasn’t prophecy to begin with.) This included making up ‘history’; Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents (a rewrite of a fiction about the infant Moses), the crucifixion eclipse, the rending of the temple curtain and more. These are all symbolic events. They didn’t really happen. Jesus’ own resurrection can safely be added to the list. It’s ironic that those who defend the gospel authors against the charge they made stuff up are the same who invent stories themselves: Mark and Luke knew each other? Mark proof-read Luke’s first draft? There were people who would fact check the gospels and point out any errors? But the original Christians wouldn’t do such a thing. Except they did.

‘There are no Inconsistencies, contradictions and inaccuracies in and between the gospels, but if there are, these are irrelevant. It’s the bigger picture that counts.’

Jesus is different in all four gospels. Despite Matthew and Luke’s plagiarising of Mark, they alter him to reflect the Jesus they believe in. John’s Jesus is so far removed from Mark’s that he’s a different character altogether. The inconsistencies do matter: did Jesus perform signs and wonders or not? Was he crucified on Thursday or Friday? Was it Peter, John or Mary who was first to see him resurrected? Did he hang around for one day or for 40? These conflicting details tell us that the creators of the Jesus story were more than happy to alter it when it suited their purposes. This is not how history is written. It is how propaganda is created. The ‘bigger picture’ is, in any case, made up of these smaller details. They work collectively and cumulatively to create the bigger picture. If we can’t rely on their being accurate how can we be sure the bigger picture is? When the gospel writers are unreliable in the smaller details, how can we be certain they’ve got the bigger picture right, given they’re all copying it from the same source, Mark, and giving it their own spin?

‘There is corroborating evidence of the gospels’ accounts’.

There is? Where? Just because there is some evidence that Nazareth existed doesn’t mean Jesus performed miracles, any more than Dunsinane castle’s existence proves Macbeth murdered King Duncan (he didn’t). Just because Pilate was a real historical figure doesn’t mean he crucified Jesus, any more than the existence of King’s Cross Station means Harry Potter catches his train there. And these, surely, are merely the small details. There is no corroboration at all for the bigger picture. Mention of the followers of Chrestus in Suetonius confirms at best that there were Christians in Rome at the time of Claudius, but no-one is disputing that. At worst, for the apologist, this curious reference has nothing whatever to do with Jesus. Later references to incidents from his story, by the much vaunted Church Fathers, are derived from the gospels and are therefore dependent on them. As such, they don’t constitute independent corroboration.

‘Everything Jesus prophesies or predicts in the gospels will come to pass, then sceptics will see that everything in the Jesus story is true.’

This one is from a commenter on Don’s blog. (I only went there by accident, honest.) The problem with this one is that everything Jesus is made to promise should already have come true, two thousand years ago. The Son of Man should have appeared in the sky with the heavenly host to usher in God’s Kingdom on Earth, while sending most of mankind to the fiery pit or outer darkness or some other damn place. Both he and Paul claimed that this would happen within their and their followers’ lifetimes. The trouble with Christianity is it is always winter and never Christmas. Its fulfilment God’s – God’s Kingdom on Earth, life after death, the final judgement – is always going to be at some indeterminate time in the future, a time and fulfilment that never quite arrives. It never will; part of ‘the big picture’ we can be confident we will never see.

More to come (unlike Jesus). 

‘

The Gospels and Other Fiction, part 1

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Christian apologists vigorously deny the idea that the Jesus story is fiction even though all of the evidence, both internal and external, points to the fact that it is. I’m not going to rehearse that evidence in this post (I address it in several earlier posts, including here and here, and there are always primary sources that, God forbid, defenders of the faith could read for themselves.) I’m interested here in looking at Christians’ defence of scripture as truth. What arguments do they have and better still, what evidence, that the gospels are historically accurate depiction of events in 1st century Palestine? Most of these arguments have been offered by our resident apologist, Don Camp, and although I’m fairly sure Don makes things up as he goes along, I’ll not reference other sources except where I’m introducing an argument he hasn’t offered.

‘Church Fathers believed the gospels were accurate, therefore, because they lived closer to the time of the gospels’ composition, they’re more likely to be right.’

Church Fathers, such as the unreliable Eusebius,, Papias, Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp were predisposed to believe the gospels were accurate; they had already converted to the faith and had a vested interest in seeing it promulgated and preserved. They were also steeped in the thinking of the age, typified by Paul and other NT writers, that the Earth was at the centre of a cosmic war between God and the forces of Satan. Above all, the Jesus story was theirs, a new revelation from God that didn’t, as far as they were concerned, belong to Jewish tradition or any other. It was new and it belonged to them: they wanted and needed it to be true. Later scholars, from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, did not come with these particular encumbrances and while of course not entirely free of prejudices of their own, considered the texts more dispassionately as history and found them to be wanting.

‘‘Mark’ is an accurate record of the disciple Peter’s time with Jesus.’

There is no evidence at all for this claim. Analysis of Mark (and also Matthew and Luke) demonstrates how the story is constructed around supposed prophecies from Jewish scriptures. Mark also incorporates much of Paul’s gospel to the Gentiles, a feature Matthew is at pains to ‘correct’. His Jesus is distinctly Jewish.

‘There was an oral tradition that accurately preserved the stories about Jesus until such time as they could be written down.’

There is no evidence that this tradition, if it existed, was accurate. It is, as Bart Ehrman shows in Jesus Before The Gospels, highly unlikely that it was. We know that stories conveyed orally are altered, embellished and modified with successive retellings.

‘There was an earlier document that preserved sayings of Jesus’ until such times they could be incorporated into the gospels.’

Then it simply vanished so that no fragment of it survived. The Church Fathers don’t appear to know anything about it. Wouldn’t such a priceless document have been preserved somehow, somewhere by someone? Q, as it’s called, is entirely hypothetical. It’s unlikely it existed. Even if it did, it is considered to have been a sayings gospel. It did not preserve details of Jesus’ life, death or resurrection. We’ll get to the so called ‘logia’ in part 3.

‘The gospels were written by eye-witnesses or associates of eye-witnesses.’

We know with certainty that this is not the case. All of them were written in Koine Greek and are carefully constructed literary creations. None was written in Palestine but much further afield and all reflect the concerns of the later cult. Over a hundred years after they were written, Irenaeus ascribed the names by which they are now known without any evidence that the authors were called Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. Later compilers of the New Testament didn’t even know of ‘Mark’s’ primacy, which is why ‘Matthew’s’ gospel appears first in the New Testament. ‘Matthew’ and ‘Luke’ are heavily dependent on ‘Mark’ (as is ‘John’ for its overall structure), an incongruous and inexplicable approach for Matthew to take, and John too, if they were eye-witnesses themselves. Eye-witnesses do not need to rely on the testimony of people who weren’t.

More next time…

Jesus: Practically Perfect In Every Way?

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Was Jesus a gracious, gentle and humble as Christians like to claim or was he intolerant, self-important and frequently wrong? What do the gospels say?

He’s intolerant and self-important when:

He insists people should love him more than their own families (Matthew 10:37).

He says he’s not a peacemaker but intends creating strife (Luke 12:51).

He claims anyone who doesn’t follow him deserves to be burnt (John 15:6).

He wants the world to be destroyed by fire (Luke 12:49).

He commands people not to call others ‘fools’ (Matthew 5.22) but tells those he doesn’t care for that they’re ‘swine’, ‘dogs’, ‘snakes and vipers’, ‘whitewashed tombs’, and, yes, ‘fools’ (Matthew 7:6; 15:26; 23:33; 23:27; 23:17 & Luke 11:40).

He deliberately speaks in riddles so that people won’t understand him and won’t find forgiveness (Mark 4:12).

He tells his followers to love their enemies but says he’d have his own killed (Luke 19:27 & Matthew 13:41-42).

He endorses slavery and the cruel treatment of slaves (Luke 12:47-48).

He says people would be better off if they cut off their hands, plucked out their eyes and castrated themselves (Mark 9:43-48 & Matthew 19:12).

He endorses the Jewish law that demands the death penalty for those who disrespect their mother and father (Matthew 15:4-7).

He disrespects his mother (Matthew 12:48-49).

He tells people not to get angry but loses his own temper (Matthew 5:22 &Mark 3:5).

He callously kills a herd of pigs and, in a fit of pique, destroys a fig tree (Matthew 8:32 & Matthew 21:19).

He takes a whip to people (John 2:15).

He tells his mates he’ll soon be king of the world and promises them that they’ll rule alongside him (Matthew 19:28).

Are these the marks of a tolerant, compassionate man? Or the characteristics of an unpleasant, delusional megalomaniac?

As for frequently wrong: first, the false promises –

I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son (John 14:13).

Very truly, I tell you, if you ask anything of the Father in my name, he will give it to you (John 16:23).

These signs will accompany those who believe: …they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover’ (Mark 16:17).

Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?” But strive first for the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well (Matthew 6:25-7.1).

and then there’s the failed prophecies –

For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels… I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his Kingdom (Matthew 16:27-28). Just in case we don’t get this the first time, he tells us again in Matthew 24:27, 30-31, 34 and in Luke 21:27-28, 33-34.

Did he return with the angelic host and establish God’s kingdom on Earth before his disciples died? He did not.

Christian zealots unable to accept the evidence of the gospels themselves will no doubt have a hundred and one clichéd, implausible excuses for Jesus’ many failures: ‘he was speaking metaphorically’; ‘you lack the spiritual insight to see what he really meant’; ‘you’re quoting him out of context’, blah blah, blah.

All I ask is that they please, please don’t inflict these excuses on us here when we’ve heard them all so many times before.

Cruci-fiction

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Given the birth, baptism and wilderness narratives are fiction, why not then the other parts of Mark and Matthew? We’ve already seen how the trial and crucifixion in Mark are literary creations, which Matthew lifts and embellishes. The resurrection stories are also invented, which is why the different accounts are confused and contradictory. The likelihood that everything between the beginning and the end – Jesus’ ‘ministry’, miracles and preaching – is invented too, either by the authors of the gospels themselves or by those who preceded them. My money would be on the former; the stories are so carefully arranged, forming an integral part of a clever literary construct.

I have a growing, sneaking admiration for what Mark and Matthew, and later Luke and John, achieved. They consciously set about creating myth. When Paul and others preached that their Christ had died and risen again ‘according to the scriptures’ that’s literally what they meant; the Christ was discernible in Jewish scripture, his story laid out there for those with eyes to see it. Mark tells us as much in Mark 4:9: ‘He who has ears to hear, let him hear.’

What he and, to an even greater extent, Matthew did, was construct a Saviour story from these elements. They saw him, or thought they did, all over the place. Whether or not there was an actual Jesus is beside the point. as is the extent to which the gospel writers may have used existing stories about him. Gospel Jesus is their imaginative creation from start to finish. His life, deeds and many of his sayings are put together by cutting and pasting scripture.

Cite any episode in Mark and Matthew’s gospels and it will have a precedent in scripture, either a prophecy (that invariably isn’t a prophecy) or episode (that was never about a future suffering Messiah) or character (usually legendary in their own right.) You can believe, as many True Believers do, that these ‘Old Testament’ episodes foreshadow the events of Jesus’ life. That he miraculously fulfilled prophecy through everything he did and said while here on Earth. Or you can take the view that doesn’t rely on faith in the miraculous, and recognise that he’s merely written that way. He’s the literary embodiment of scattered scraps of scripture.

On this much more realistic view, everything Jesus is made to do, particularly his miracles and crucifixion, is symbolic; a fictional enactment of scripture. Other aspects are drawn from Paul (the Last Supper/Eucharist, for example), claims of inner-visions (the resurrection) and early cult rules (behavioural expectations.) The events of Jesus’ earthly existence, as created by the gospel writers, have no historical basis; they didn’t really happen. I maintain that all of the gospel writers were fully cognisant of this as they created their respective symbolic lives for him.

A Star Is Born

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Did you know that the original, 1937 version of A Star Is Born may well have been based on a true story, first aired in an earlier, 1932 movie called What Price Hollywood? Yet every word of dialogue in the original Star Is Born was invented, all of its characters fictional, all of its scenes made up.

By the time of the 1954 remake, the female lead had gone from being an aspiring actress to an aspiring singer, played by Judy Garland, looking for her big break. Her mentor is still the addictive personality of the original film but this time he’s a has-been singer, not an actor, and crucially he doesn’t commit suicide before the film’s end (apologies for the spoiler.) Practically everything about this remake – its dialogue, characters, songs (songs? Where’d they come from?) settings and scenes – is different and, once again, is completely made up.

In the Barbra Streisand 1976 version, the female lead is once again a singer, her mentor a rock star whose career is on the slide. This film is about the perils of a rock’n’roll lifestyle and the passionate relationship between the two protagonists. It bears only the scantest relationship to its predecessors, never mind the original true-story that inspired the first film. Again, everything in it is pure invention.

Which brings us to the fourth version, starring Lady Gaga, that borrows a little something from all of the previous films. All the same, it alters the story, creating completely new scenarios, dialogue, songs and settings. It would be unrecognisable to the original audience of the first A Star Is Born, as different from that film as… well, as John’s gospel from Mark’s.

As the various versions of the film demonstrate, stories evolve. They are fluid and in their telling and retelling they change. Their creators adapt them and ‘improve’ them to meet the evolving tastes of their intended audience. They happily invent new episodes, new scenarios and new dialogue.

And so it is with the gospels: Mark’s original based on the visions of a few people from 40 or so years earlier; Matthew and Luke’s based on Mark’s – with their own largely invented additions – and John’s (the Lady Gaga of the set) a wild reimagining of all three. Apart from the outline of the story (which they get from Mark), every one freely adapts everything else: dialogue, scenarios, pericopes and, yes, songs.

We’ll look in detail next time at the evidence, still apparent in today’s versions of the gospels, at how we know this to be the case. 

Tailor Made

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So where did the stories of Jesus life on Earth come from? The traditional answers to this question are wholly inadequate. As we’ve seen, they didn’t seem to be around when Paul was writing; the hypothetical Q is an unconvincing way of explaining them while unreliable memory, coupled with the so-called oral tradition, don’t offer any means of conveying accurate verifiable information about Jesus.

The writers of the gospels, particularly Mark the creator of the first, would have known this. The gospels are not collections of the speculative tales that were doing the rounds. They might have made some incidental use of them, but all of the gospels are carefully constructed, designed to make theological points about their hero. Particular kinds of stories were required for this and the gospel writers thought nothing of making them up. It’s possible they made use of existing tales, but if they did, they almost certainly retooled them to suit their purposes. The stories we find in the gospels are tailor made to illustrate these purposes. None of the gospels is history: they are all carefully crafted literary creations.

What were the purposes and the agendas of the gospel writers? Propaganda, designed not so much to convert non-believers, but to explain to those who were already part of the cult, and their own sects in particular, what belief in Jesus entailed. To this end, they created allegories, symbolic stories about his life on Earth.

Mark began the process. He constructed his narrative by adapting Paul’s teaching ;and inventing stories based on ‘prophecies’ from the scriptures to create a symbolic narrative every part of which makes a theological point. He may also have retooled existing stories while borrowing features of existing myth that fellow cultists would expect to find in an account of a demi-god’s adventures.

Matthew and Luke then followed his lead, lifting what they thought was of relevance to their own agendas, dropping or amending the rest and inventing their own symbolic stories.

You think they didn’t? I’ll show you that they did, and how, using Mark, Matthew and Luke’s gospels, in a couple of posts time. But before that: a slight and relevant diversion.

In Search of the Lost Q

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Where did the stories about Jesus that we find in the gospels come from?

2. Q

Q is a hypothetical document said to be a collection of Jesus’ sayings. It was first hypothesised in the late 19th century and developed by minister B. H. Streeter in 1924. it was intended to explain why Matthew and Luke’s gospels shared material that wasn’t plagiarised from Mark. Streeter speculated they must both have had access to an alternative source that he christened Q (after the German for source, Quelle.)

While the idea caught on and is still assumed by many scholars (including Bart Ehrman) there are numerous problems with it:

Q doesn’t exist and has never existed. There is absolutely no evidence for it, aside from the duplication of material in Matthew and Luke, the very context it was designed to explain. There are no surviving copies, nor even fragments of any written collection of Jesus’ sayings (unsurprisingly for a non-existent document.) Nor is a book of Jesus’ sayings referred to in any form by any New Testament writer (again, unsurprisingly.)

Q is unnecessary. As other scholars, including M. A. Farrer, Mark Goodacre and Richard Carrier, have pointed out, there is a far simpler explanation for Matthew and Luke’s sharing of material they didn’t get from Mark. Either Matthew or Luke had access to the other. It is generally accepted that Matthew’s gospel predated Luke’s by a few years. It is likely therefore that Luke took certain stories from Matthew, as he had others from Mark, and made them his own. Doesn’t he say at the start of his gospel that he intends to collate material about Jesus that was already in circulation? Occam’s Razor also leads to the conclusion that this is a far better explanation of the duplication than a hypothetical third document.

Q doesn’t answer the question of where the stories came from in the first place. Arguably, it moves the solution back a stage but that’s all. If for the sake of argument we assume Q did exist, we still don’t necessarily know where it got its material from. Q really gets us no further forward.

Q is conjectured to be a collection of sayings. They are not set in any context; Q lacks a narrative structure so cannot be where Matthew derived his accounts, for example, of the Temptation in the wilderness (4:1-11), the Sermon on the Mount (5:1-12) or the healing of the centurion’s servant (8:5-13) that Luke would later copy and adapt. These are stories, not mere sayings. Even if Matthew got the sayings they include from some now lost written source from where did he get their context? Eyewitnesses? Unlikely, given he was writing 50 years after the purported events when most eyewitnesses would be dead. He was certainly not an eyewitness himself; he would not have needed to copy large swathes of Mark if he was. Nor does Matthew claim to be using eyewitness testimony. Like all the gospel writers he comes nowhere close to citing his sources.

Matthew is, however, notorious at making up stories he thinks make Jesus fit prophecy. He invents still others to make theological points. It’s quite possible he invented these particular accounts too.

Or perhaps, as apologists like to claim, Matthew and the other gospel writers got at least some of their stories from the so-called oral tradition, a grand name for the tales about Jesus that circulated for the 40-70 years before the gospels were written.

We’ll take a look next time.