I think there's enough evidence to suggest that whoever the people that wrote Matthew and Luke were, they were capable of introducing their own errors, along with embellishments, from their source material.
Given they wrote in Koine, and exhibit some ignorance of the geography of the area, and almost definitely never met anyone that met Jesus, it's reasonable to assume no spoken Aramaic accounts were part of their source material.
The only evidence I've seen points in the opposite direction; e.g.:
- The frequency and granularity of place names mentioned match other documents where we're pretty sure the people actually travelled there; vs other documents where we're sure they never travelled there
- The frequency of names and requirements for disambiguation (e.g., Jesus has two disciples named James, but only one named Bartholomew)
Regarding Aramaic: I'm just learning Biblical Greek, and one common pattern is rather than saying "X replied, '...'", to say 'X replied, saying '...'" (or "Replying, X said '...'". A Jewish friend who is a classicist told me that this pattern was a "semitism" -- i.e., not something you'd hear in native Koine Greek, but something imported from Aramaic / Hebrew. This would indicate at least that the original source material was written by native Aramaic speakers. (This latter bit is lower significance, because it was an offhand comment she made when discussing something else.)
Hmm, there's a LOT of inaccuracies between the gospels and trusted historical documents - the bottom section of rationalwiki's Gospel page [0] has some examples - though these are more historical than geographical.
I was probably thinking of the author of Mark who had his Jesus doing the roundabout trip via Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, or the same author having Jesus stepping out of his boat and into a region that is actually 45km from the shore [1].
With regards Hebrew phrasing - I believe the author of Matthew was almost definitely Jewish, not sure on the authors of Mark (who I think was writing for a non-Jewish audience) or Luke. So they were writing in common Greek, but almost definitely were either Jewish, or spoke Hebrew, and/or were well versed in Jewish lore.
Given the earliest copies we have date from a couple of hundred years after the alleged events, and would have been transcribed numerous times by then, we can't confidently read too much into the phrasing nuances, can we?
> And on the other hand, if Mark received his Gos-
pel from Peter, why is it that the other Gospels have more anecdotes about Peter, including for example, Je- sus telling him, “You are Peter the rock, and upon this rock I will build my church”? Would Peter himself for- get such an incident? It gets worse. Mark shows no un- derstanding of the social situation in the Holy Land, making numerous errors that no one living in early first century Judea would have made. Interestingly enough, when you compare Matthew’s and Mark’s Gospels, one finds that the author of Matthew is constantly correcting Mark’s blunders about all aspects of Jewish society, re- ligion, the calendar, holidays, customs, attitudes – even repeated misquotes of scripture.
I'm afraid this is just not informative at all, and doesn't give me a good impression of the rest of the book.
Why did Mark not include it? The simplest answer is that he didn't think it was important. Mark is the shortest book -- there are lots of things that mark could have included and didn't. His implication is that somehow Mark didn't know where Peter / Cephas / Rock's nickname came from, which I find much more hard to believe than that he just decided not to include it. This is hardly the kind of evidence you can follow with "it gets worse".
But it gets worse. There's absolutely no detail here -- what social situation is Mark allegedly showing no understanding of? What kinds of "errors" is he making? I can't go and verify what he's saying, or consider the claim critically myself. Is Mark's change an "error", showing a basic lack of knowledge about the societal situation? Or is it a deliberate "contextualization", to make the stories accessible to a Greek audience without having to explain loads of irrelevant cultural background? No way to check and judge for myself; I'm expected to just take it on his authority.
And re the geographical "blunder" -- I someone in Cambridge, UK today said, "I'm going by way of Manchester to London", nobody would say they were committing a "geographical blunder". They'd understand that person to mean that they are going to first visit Manchester briefly, and then go to London.
This sort of thing is exactly in line with other things I've read claiming that Jesus didn't exist; I've never seen anything to make me think it's worth spending more of my time digging into.
> I'm afraid this is just not informative at all, and doesn't give me a good impression of the rest of the book.
Coincidentally, this fairly describes the reaction of a sceptic reading the book of Mark.
Anyway, you quoted entirely the wrong section, given your earlier question.
> "“from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis,” a trip 50 miles out of his way, on foot!"
Someone going from Cambridge to London via Manchester .. would take the train, or a bus, or drive.
As noted, this was a walking journey. It could be hand-waved away, but aren't you curious why someone would mention an 80km detour but not give the reader any tidbits about why, or what went on in Sidon that was worth a) the massive detour & effort, and b) mentioning?
I agree, however, that this is not, by itself, a compellingly damning piece of evidence. I hope you don't think it was meant as such.
> But it gets worse. There's absolutely no detail here.
Again, you're echoing the sentiment of people reading these works and wondering why there's no source citations, why the authors don't identify themselves, why there's no record of dates, why there's no critical analysis offered.
That book I pointed you at contains a lengthy bibliography, and in fairness was intended to provide an overview of the field.
There are certainly much more detailed works - including that author's follow-up trilogy Mything In Action, which I can highly recommend.
Obviously Price, Carrier, et al, provide a wealth of very detailed analysis, if you are indeed genuinely interested.
> I've never seen anything to make me think it's worth spending more of my time digging into.
Are you perhaps strongly invested in a particular position on this subject?
> Are you perhaps strongly invested in a particular position on this subject?
I'm strongly enough invested in the truth to ask you for references, read them, and engage critically with them. I can honestly say that if I was wrong, I would want to know. I've even thought carefully about what kind of evidence could be presented to me to convince me that I was wrong. Can you say the same?
> Again, you're echoing the sentiment of people reading these works and wondering why there's no source citations, why the authors don't identify themselves, why there's no record of dates, why there's no critical analysis offered.
The difference is, Mark isn't a 21st century skeptic claiming to represent scholarship. He's a first-century author trying to write down what's happened for common people to read. The proper thing to compare him to is other books of his time to which we give credence.
> As noted, this was a walking journey. It could be hand-waved away, but aren't you curious why someone would mention an 80km detour but not give the reader any tidbits about why, or what went on in Sidon that was worth a) the massive detour & effort, and b) mentioning?
The key thing here is that Tyre and Sidon are "foreign" places in the same region. You make a big deal about how far away they are, but almost everywhere in the New Testament they're lumped together. For example, in the Matthew version of this story (15:21-29), Matthew says, he "withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon". It then tells the story, followed by "Jesus left there and went along the Sea of Galilee". Mark, on the other hand, says "Jesus... went to the vicinity of Tyre"; then tells the story, and then says "Jesus left Tyre and went through Sidon, down to the Sea of Galilee".
Nobody would at all wonder why, if I was in Paris, I decided I wanted to visit Lyon first before returning to London; or why if I was in Manchester I'd visit the Lake District before returning to Cambridge. Mark mentions Sidon for the same reason Matthew mentions Sidon: they think it's important to let us know that Jesus wasn't stuck south of Galilee, and/or that opposition at some point literally drove him out of the country. He doesn't tell any stories about Sidon for the same reason Matthew doesn't: nothing that happened there was worth the space on the scroll. That he went there, not what he did there, was the point. If anything, the fact that Mark feels it necessary to add a chronology (Tyre first then Sidon) when he could well have glossed over it like Matthew did, is a small amount of evidence that he's trying to be more accurate.
A more evidentiary approach here would be to look at other uses of the word "dia" (the word translated "by way of" in that verse) in ancient Greek. If other ancient sources exclusively use "ek X dia Y eis Z" (from X through Y to Z -- those are the prepositions used in that verse) to mean that Y is between / on the way from X to Z, then that lends credence to the "Mark is bad at geography" theory. If we have other examples of that pattern being for large-ish detours, then it undermines the "Mark is bad at geography" theory.
> That book I pointed you at contains a lengthy bibliography, and in fairness was intended to provide an overview of the field.
What you'd normally do in this case is to include the most convincing or most representative pieces of evidence. If among the top bits of evidence against Mark are, "He didn't include the story of how Peter got his name", and "He said Jesus went from Tyre to Galilee through Sidon", it gives me a lot more confidence in Mark.
I mean, sure, I'll take a quick look at Price et al; but my experience so far leads me to expect more like this -- people eager to find something to quibble with, uncritically making large lists of things that don't really mean anything.
You haven't stated your position, which highlights your side-stepping of revealing what kind of evidence you'd need to change your mind.
You refer to 'Mark' a lot - are you aware we don't know the author's name?
Comparing that work to actual historians of the time does that work no favours at all. Generally (at least the ones we have the most trust in) were identifying themselves, identifying their sources, writing about contemporary events, and so on.
It's unsurprising the mistake in Mark is repeated, slightly modified, in Matthew, given the way the latter lifted much of the former.
You're writing a lot of words to try to rationalise this one fairly trivial mistake. A simpler explanation exists - whoever wrote Mark wasn't familiar with the area, did not have access to maps (unsurprising), was not referring to any earlier source material, etc.
If you're relying on etymologies around via to provide legitimacy to this story, I'd suggest your complaints that I'm not providing substantive evidence in neatly tied up packages are disingenuous.
I don't believe you're sincere in your research, but on the off-chance I'll reiterate my recommendation for Fitzgerald's three-book work, Mything in Action.
If you find the material insufficiently detailed then his bibliography is a good place to pursue your search for points of view orthogonal to your beliefs.
The frequency of personal names demonstrate conclusively that all accounts are wholesale fiction.
Jesus ("Yeshua") was the single most common name among Jews of the time, with numerous examples noted in Josephus. Yet, they have no account of their puppet encountering a single example in a year's wandering the region.
Sure, but would they all make the same error? Either there was no error or they all inherited it from another source or Matthew and Luke inherited it from Mark.
There is some evidence in Matthew that it could have originally been written in Aramaic.
I thought it was fairly non-contentious [0] that the authors of Matthew and Luke borrowed heavily (almost exclusively) from the author of Mark's work, along with this unknown source (usually referred to as Q).
It seems fairly reasonable then to assume it was a literary device made by the author of Mark - his writing is actually pretty good as far as allegory goes - that was subsequently lifted near verbatim by the later two authors.
> There are some parts of Matthew and Luke that neither come from Mark nor Q so they each also have one or more other sources unique to themselves.
Given that we know nothing about the provenance or contents of 'Q' - it's lost to time, and its hypothetical existence is effectively intuited by some researches - I do not understand how we can identify the set of things 'not in Q' (or indeed 'in Q').
I'd also note that there's zero evidence to suggest the unknown authors of Matthew and Luke had other sources - there's more evidence to suggest they were simply making stuff up.
Q is literally 'source' - with unknown author and unknown content - so we don't know what's in it nor what's not in it.
Therefore I challenged the claim by parent that 'anything not in Q ...' because that's an objectively ludicrous statement.
My 'theory', inasmuch as I have one, is that the authors of Luke and Matthew had different target audiences, different incentives, but predominantly the same (probably two sets of) materials.
They made different mistakes than the author of Mark, and indeed each other, though were presumably much more earnest.
The author of Mark was probably just writing allegorical fiction.
The author of Matthew for instance was the only one to talk about saints / zombies rising from the graveyards and walking into town, being seen by many people, etc - which is an odd thing for everyone else to have missed or not think to be worth mentioning.
There's a beautiful graphic showing % breakdowns of the Mark / Luke / Matthew content about half-way down this page: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gospels
EDIT: that whole page is worth a read to get a better idea on the bleed between the different texts, a historical context for when they were probably written, and a reminder of the earliest copies we can reliably put dates to.
I think earnestly citing RationalWiki is enough to give me pause to take the rest of your 'theory' seriously. You know it's a humor website for teenagers, right? It's essentially ED for a different kind of edgy post-reddit nerd, it's not really a serious place to learn about theology.
I was defending my earlier logic (we don't know what's in Q, therefore we don't know what's not in it). Have you identified a flaw there?
I would prefer to earnestly cite Price, Carrier, Fitzgerald etc, but those citations are less convenient, especially for casual readers (clicking a link rather than obtaining books).
Disliking the style of rationalwiki seems insufficient reason to discount the clear assertions made, explained, and with original sources cited on that page.
Can you identify matters of factual error in that graphic I pointed at, or other material on that link?
I note this is the only comment you've made on the entire thread. I don't believe it moves us forward.
The simplest inference is that Luke simply cribbed what he liked directly from Matthew, and omitted what he didn't.
There is not a hint of evidence for unattested "sources" beyond their fevered imaginations. Making shit up was just how the stuff was produced, at the time, as illustrated by the (literally!) dozens of other "gospels" and forged epistles from the same period.
Have you tried actually reading the proponents arguments instead of relying on arrogance? That might be a better way to find out why the consensus is what it is.
If you could cite some rational sources that describe what you're alluding to, I'd be delighted to read them.
As I noted in a sibling comment, the consensus is Marcan Priority, but a) it's not a huge majority, and b) it's ultimately a tallest dwarf competition anyway.
This barely scratches the surface of the many opinions held about the collections of smaller books that are bound as versions of "The Bible"; which books, which translations, which interpretations, etc.
I'd suggest a large portion of self-identified Christian believers really haven't thought much about it at all, beyond (as you say) some orthodox assumptions about divine nature etc.
But as per my link above to wikipedia (Marcan Priority) the larger consensus amongst religious historians / researchers is that Mark was written first, Luke & Matthew were written subsequently, and based heavily on a combination of Mark + some unknown source ('Q').
Fascinating! Thanks I’ll have to read up on this mysterious Q figure and why it’s believed to be a ghost writer of sorts (is that accurate? Or is possibly just information lost to time?)
Q is a not a figure, but a document or a number of documents. It could have been written by a single figure, or compiled by many individuals.
What is interesting is that is appears to be a book of quotations, rather than a narrative - so Matthew and Luke agree more than expected when directly quoting Jesus. At the time the theory was proposed we hadn't discovered any gospels like this, but now at least one such book of Jesus quotations has been found.
I had a look around for this recently discovered book, but can't find references -- can you point me towards some please, it'd be fascinating to read the contents / context.
'Recent' needs to be interpreted in biblical terms - the book I was thinking of is the Gosple of Thomas - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Thomas - discovered in 1945 (the 'Q' hypothesis having been made around 1900).
Okay, Thomas - lots of dispute about when it was written, and the anthology style makes timing even harder to determine, while increasing the chance it was modified over the centuries.
I recalled something about the intrigue over some parchments from this collection, and found this recent story [0] about the alleged illegal sale, recovery, translation efforts, and (this year) publication of some fragments.
One of the researchers is quoted in that article with a 'This is not Q' statement.
Yes - before I go on, please note this is not my area of expertise, but just something I am interested in.
I haven't seen anywhere which suggests that Thomas is Q, but to me if a book of biblical quotations is hypothesised when none has previously been found, and forty-five years later a book of biblical quotations is discovered (which, despite uncertainty about its timing, certainly dates to at least a millennium before the hypothesis) that lends some weight to the hypothesis.
Of course, given my general ignorance in this area, perhaps books of quotations from this time are common, and hypothesising the existence of one is like hypothesising the existing of a website for a popular TV show in 2023 (i.e. a meaningless proposition).
No, that sounds fairly reasonable - not necessarily the 'hypothesised and then discovered, therefore credible' (that may be survivorship bias), but certainly the potential for that document to be 'Q'.
Given 'Q source' (tautology, forgive me) was a conceptual construct to try to explain a part of the synoptic problem, there's no reason to believe it was necessarily a single document in the modern sense, or that earlier versions (that we don't have) may be subsets of things we actually subsequently got our hands on.
I can’t find anything either. Q is probably an aggregate of the best creative free form half truth conspiracy writings that one was able to gather from various internet sources mixed with a garden variety of new age mystical belief and a dash of pure fn magic.
The best current scholarship is that there was no such thing as a "Q", and that what is in Luke and Matthew but not in Mark, the author of Luke just cribbed directly from Matthew.
"Q", like "oral traditions", Docetism, and Gnosticism, turns out to be a fever dream of "biblical scholars" working before sound textual analysis had been invented.
I think a more charitable (and interesting, sociologically) interpretation is that certain Protestant groups want the authority of God to not be vested in a temporal organization like the Catholic Church, and so the book itself serves as a replacement for this. The problem of determining what that means arises then, and not initially from a desire to only follow the book directly.
Such a belief would be heretical and very much outside the bounds of any canonical Christianity.
(The phrase you're looking for is "divinely inspired", but Christianity also teaches that all of world history is also divinely inspired. It's a very broad category.)
Isn't it an article of faith for some Christian groups that the King James version of the Bible was produced by 100 scholars each translating a Greek text independently, and each producing the exact same English translation, thus proving that God had directly guided them in this translation, and essentially making the KJV almost literal word of God?
Maybe for some very fringe groups but probably not. That sounds more like someone confusing the KJV with the Septuagint, which has a similar legend - that 70 Hebrew scholars independently produced the same Greek Translation of the Old Testament.
Given they wrote in Koine, and exhibit some ignorance of the geography of the area, and almost definitely never met anyone that met Jesus, it's reasonable to assume no spoken Aramaic accounts were part of their source material.