Is Paul at Odds with Matthew? In yesterday s post I indicated that I really very much wish that we could have some of the writings produced by Paul s opponents in Galatia. They believed that in order to be a follower of Jesus, a person had to accept and follow the Law of Moses as laid out in the Jewish Scriptures. Men were to be circumcised to join the people of God; men and women were, evidently, to adopt a Jewish lifestyle. Presumably that meant keeping kosher, observing the Sabbath, and so on. Anyone who didn t do this was not really a member of the people of God, since to be one of God s people meant following the law that God had given. Paul was incensed at this interpretation of the faith and insisted with extraordinary vehemence that it was completely wrong. The gentile followers of Jesus were not, absolutely not, supposed to become Jewish. Anyone who thought so rendered the death of Jesus worthless. It was only that death, and the resurrection, that made a person right with God. Nothing else. Certainly not following the Torah. I often wonder whether Paul and the author of the Gospel of Matthew would have gotten along. Matthew s Gospel was probably belong yet, WHY NOT JOIN! You get tons of good stuff for very little money, and it all goes to charity!
Q and the Passion Narrative This, I think (!), will be my last post for now on the Q source apparently used by Matthew and Luke for many of their sayings materials, a source that must at one time have existed (since Matthew and Luke appear both to have had access to it), that was written in Greek (otherwise Matthew and Luke could not agree word-for-word in places in Greek in their non- Markan sayings material), and that contained almost exclusively (or exclusively) sayings of Jesus. There are many other issues that we could discuss about Q, but for now I would like to end by mentioning just one. It is regularly and routinely maintained by New Testament scholars that one of the striking features of Q is that it contains a list of Jesus sayings and no passion narrative no account of Jesus death and resurrection. Scholars then draw a conclusion: the death of Jesus was not important to the community that produced the Q document. I have to admit, I m not completely convinced of this claim, even though I appear to be in the minority on this matter. My view is that we can t know whether this document copied by Matthew and Luke had a passion narrative. How could we know, really? The one and only access we have to this document, assuming it existed (as I do), is through passages that Matthew and Luke have in common that are not found in Mark. Technically speaking, if either Matthew or Luke drew any of its material from Q and the other did not, then we would have no way of knowing whether that material in Matthew or Luke (but not both) came from Q or from somewhere else (M, L, or the author s own imagination). In theory it is possible belong yet, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? CHRISTMAS???
Did Matthew Copy Luke or Luke Matthew? In this thread, which is supposed to be on the lost writings of early Christianity that I would most like to have discovered, I can t seem to get away from Q, Several readers have asked a pointed question about Q. If you recall, Q is the hypothetical document that contained principally sayings of Jesus, that was evidently used by Matthew and Luke (but not by Mark) in constructing their Gospels. The logic is that if Matthew and Luke both used Mark (which the vast majority of scholars agree about), then one has to explain why they have so many other materials (mainly sayings) in common not *found* in Mark. I have pointed out that Matthew does not seem to have gotten those sayings from Luke or Luke from Matthew, and so they both most have gotten them from some other one-time-existing source. That is what we call Q (for the German word Quelle: Source). But some readers have asked WHY it is unlikely that Matthew got these sayings from Luke or Luke from Matthew. It s a bit tricky, and I need to simplify a bit. But I ll try to explain as follows. This is partly drawn from my discussion in my textbook on the New Testament. The argument that follows is actually used (in the book) to establish Markan Priority that is, the view that Mark was prior to the other two Synoptics and was used by them as a source. But as I ll explain, the same argument is often appealed to as evidence that neither Matthew nor Luke got its sayings material from the other. It has to do with the sequence in which this sayings material appears in both Gospels.
Here is what I say in the book: belong yet C MON!! JOIN!!! It doesn t cost much and every penny goes to charity! Q and The Gospel of Thomas Before I move on to discuss other lost books from early Christianity that I would love to have discovered (I know, this thread could go on forever, since I would like *every* early Christian writing to be discovered) I need to answer a couple of queries that I have received about the Q source. First, several people have asked me whether it is possible that the Q source is actually what we now call the Gospel of Thomas, one of the books discovered among the so-called Nag Hammadi Library in 1945. I don t want to go into great depth about the Gospel of Thomas here since, well, it has been discovered and this thread is about book s that have *not* been discovered. But I do need to say some basics about Thomas and its relation to Q. By way of background, let me say something a bit more about the Q-hypothesis. When 19 th century German scholars established with a reasonable level of certainty that Mark was the first Gospel written and that Matthew and Luke had both used it as one of their sources (that is the view known as Markan Priority Mark is prior to the other Gospels), they naturally had next to explain the parallel passages in Matthew and Luke that were not found in Mark.
Two things struck scholars about these other passages such as the Lord s Prayer and the Beatitudes. belong yet, JOIN!!! It doesn t cost much, and all the money we raise goes to charity. Evidence that the Synoptics Are Copying (one another? other sources?) In yesterday s post, when talking about the one-time existence of Q, I indicated that scholars have long recognized that there must be some kind of literary relationship among Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the Synoptic Gospels, since they have so many similarities: they tell many of the same stories, often in the same sequence, and sometimes lots of times in the very same words. That is to say, someone must be copying someone else, or they are all using the same written sources. Some of my students have trouble seeing that if two documents are word-for-word the same, one must be copying the other (or they both are copying a third source). Older adults don t seem to have any problem seeing that, right off the bat. But younger adults need to be convinced. And so I do a little experiment with them that more or less proves it. I do this every year
in my New Testament class, which normally has 200-300 students in it. I come to class a minute or two late to make sure everyone is there, and then I start fiddling around I take off my jacket, take my books out of my bag, check the computer hook up, take a drink, put my coat back on, rummage around some more in my bag, and so on. Students wonder why I m not starting the lecture. And then I tell them that I want everyone to take out a pen and a piece of paper. They think I m going to be giving them a pop quiz. Nope. I ask everyone in the class to write down everything they ve seen me do since I came into the room. After three or four minutes belong yet, JOIN ALREADY!!! The Lost Q Source I can now return to my thread dealing with a question asked by a reader: if I could choose, which of the lost books from Christian antiquity would I want to be discovered? My first and immediate answer was: the lost letters of Paul. My second answer is what I will deal with here. I would love we would all love to have a discovery of Q. Many readers of the blog will know all about Q. Many will know something about Q. Many will have never heard of Q. So here s the deal.
Scholars since the 19 th century have worked out the relationship of the Synoptic Gospels with one another. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called synoptic because they tell many of the same stories, often in the same sequence, and sometimes in exactly the same words. Synoptic means seen together. You can see these Gospels together by laying them side by side and noting their abundant similarities (and differences). But the only way they could have such extensive similarities (especially the verbatim agreements) is if they were copying one another or are copying a common source. It has long been known that Mark was the earliest Gospel and that Matthew and Luke used it as a source for many of their stories. But Matthew and Luke have a number of traditions about Jesus in common that are not found in Mark for example the Lord s Prayer and the Beatitudes. Almost all (not entirely all) of these traditions are sayings of Jesus. And so scholars in 19 th century Germany who worked out a solution to the Synoptic Problem (the problem of explaining why the Synoptics have such precise similarities among themselves and yet so many differences) suggested that since it appears that Matthew did not get these sayings from Luke or Luke from Matthew (see below), they hypothesized a one-time source, now lost, that they called the Sayings Source. The German word for source is Quelle. And so this hypothetical document is called Q for short. Some scholars today doubt belong yet, JOIN ALREADY!!! Your membership fees all go to important charities!
A Source for the Birth Narratives in Matthew and Luke? QUESTION: What s your take on the independence or interdependence of Mt 1-2 and Lk 1-2. Do you think Luke s infancy narratives are based on Matthew s? Or vice versa? Or on some other unknown earlier common source? Or neither and they re both independent? It sounds like you re advocating independence. But if they are separate and independent, then we have to account for common elements in the two. Some commonalities are easier to explain (e.g., location in Bethlehem [Micah 5.2]; mother s name Mary [Mk 6.3]), but others less so (e.g., both have the same name Joseph for Mary s husband even though that name is not in Mark or Q; both have the unexpected and unprecedented miracle story of a virgin birth). Thoughts? RESPONSE: This is a great and very perceptive question. It is rooted in my thread, just finished, on Bethlehem and Nazareth, in which I argued that both Matthew and Luke have given us stories to explain how Jesus could be the messiah who (in their opinion) was to be born in
Bethlehem if, instead, he was actually from Nazareth. My argument was that both accounts are implausible (wisemen following a star; census for the whole world to be registered under Caesar Augustus; etc.) and that they are hopelessly at odds with one another. So neither one is historical. But then what is their relation to one another? The question summarizes the situation well: even though they differ in almost every way, the stories agree at several key points. Jesus mother was a woman named Mary, betrothed to a man named Joseph; she gave birth while still a virgin; and it happened in Bethlehem, even though Jesus was raised in Nazareth. Don t these points of agreement indicate that one knew the other or that they are both based on a common source? In my view, the answer to that question is belong yet, JOIN!!! Your membership fee goes to charities to fight hunger and homelessness. Bethlehem and Nazareth in Luke: Where Was Jesus Really Born? Yesterday I discussed Matthew s account of how it is that Jesus came to be born in Bethlehem, if in fact he came from Nazareth. For Matthew it is because Joseph
and Mary were originally from Bethlehem. That was their home town. And the place of Jesus birth. Two or more years after his birth, they relocated to Nazareth in Galilee, over a hundred miles to the north, to get away from the rulers of Judea who were thought to be out to kill the child. (That in itself, I hardly need to say, seems completely implausible, that a local king is eager to kill a peasant child out of fear that he will wrest the kingdom away from him.) Luke has a completely different account of how it happened. In Luke, Bethlehem is decidedly not Joseph and Mary s home town. The whole point of the story is that it is not. They are from Nazareth. But then how does Jesus come to be born somewhere else? In the most famous passage of the birth narratives, we are told that it is because of a decree that went out from the ruler of the Roman Empire, Caesar Augustus. All the world had to be enrolled that is, there was a world-wide census. We are told that this was the first enrollment made when Quirinius was the governor of Syria. Since Joseph is of the house and lineage of David, belong yet, JOIN UP!! Your Membership fees all go to fight hunger and homelessness! Bethlehem and Nazareth in
Matthew In my last post I showed why it is virtually certain that Jesus home town was Nazareth. All of our sources agree that he was from there, and it is very hard to imagine why a Christian story teller would have made that up. But now the question is whether that was also his place of birth. The only two accounts we have of Jesus birth, Matthew and Luke, independently claim that even though he was raised in Nazareth, he was actually born in Bethlehem. So isn t that the more likely scenario? Born in Bethlehem but raised in Nazareth? You might think so, given the fact that this is what is stated in our only two sources of information, and that they independently agree about the matter (based on their own sources, the no longer existing M Matthew s source or sources and the no longer existing L Luke s source or sources). But there are reasons for thinking that we cannot trust these accounts, for three reasons: belong yet, GET WITH THE PROGRAM!!! Matthew s Filling Full of Scripture In the last post I indicated one way that Matthew understood Jesus to have fulfilled Scripture a prophet
predicted something about the messiah (to be born of a virgin; to be born in Bethlehem, etc.) and Jesus did or experienced what was predicted. There s a second way as well, one with considerable implications for understanding Matthew s portrayal of Jesus. Here s how I talk about it in my textbook on the New Testament ******************************************************* ********** The second way in which Jesus fulfills Scripture is a little more complicated. Matthew portrays certain key events in the Jewish Bible as foreshadowings of what would happen when the messiah came. The meaning of these ancient events was not complete until that which was foreshadowed came into existence. When it did, the event was fullfilled, that is, filled full of meaning. As an example from the birth narrative, Matthew indicates that Jesus family flees to Egypt to escape the wrath of Herod in order to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying, `Out of Egypt I have called my son' (2:15). The quotation is from Hos 11:1, and originally referred to the Exodus of the children of Israel from their bondage in Egypt. For Matthew, Jesus himself fulfills that event, that is, he fills it full of meaning. The salvation available to the children of Israel was partial, looking forward to a future time when it would be made complete. With Jesus the messiah, that has now taken place. Understanding this second way. belong yet, REMEMBER: THE END IS NEAR!!