³Whoever is not with me is against me,
And whoever does not gather with me scatters.²

The Greek of this aphorism is identical in Mt 12:30 // Lk 11:23. In Mark,
however, there is what appears to be an equivalent which reads "Whoever is
not against us is for us". There should be little doubt that Matthew and
Luke preserve the more original version. Parallelism is a characteristic of
many of the early aphorisms. Also the exclusivity is what we might expect
from the early Jesus movement under James, the brother of Jesus. So it looks
as if Mark has deliberately reversed the default, and this would be
consistent with his more open outlook in which the "few" to be saved in the
early aphorisms are replaced by "many" in Mk 10:45.

My reconstruction of the logia shows the saying in its pre-70 context. It is
in the mission section (which I called section B) as saying B14, and the
"gather" clearly alludes to the harvest in saying B3, with its appeal for
labourers. These two sayings thus form an 'inclusio' or frame for the
mission section.


Ron Price,

Derbyshire, UK

http://homepage.virgin.net/ron.price/syno_sQet.html


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

My reading of this incident, Ron, makes me connect it with the exorcism in Mark
9:38. I take it that the basic idea behind this incident is that Jesus sees
himself engaged in a cosmic war between the Devil and his angels and demons on
the one side and God and the host of heaven on the side of righteousness. In
such a contest he saw only two sides and I think that the quotations you have
given are merely elaborations on this thought. Dennis Dennis GoffinChorleywood
UKTo: Synoptic@yahoogroups.com
From: ron-price@...
Date: Thu, 2 Feb 2012 11:00:45 +0000
Subject: [Synoptic-L] Whoever is not with me is against me




























       ³Whoever is not with me is against me,

And whoever does not gather with me scatters.²



The Greek of this aphorism is identical in Mt 12:30 // Lk 11:23. In Mark,

however, there is what appears to be an equivalent which reads "Whoever is

not against us is for us". There should be little doubt that Matthew and

Luke preserve the more original version. Parallelism is a characteristic of

many of the early aphorisms. Also the exclusivity is what we might expect

from the early Jesus movement under James, the brother of Jesus. So it looks

as if Mark has deliberately reversed the default, and this would be

consistent with his more open outlook in which the "few" to be saved in the

early aphorisms are replaced by "many" in Mk 10:45.



My reconstruction of the logia shows the saying in its pre-70 context. It is

in the mission section (which I called section B) as saying B14, and the

"gather" clearly alludes to the harvest in saying B3, with its appeal for

labourers. These two sayings thus form an 'inclusio' or frame for the

mission section.



Ron Price,



Derbyshire, UK



http://homepage.virgin.net/ron.price/syno_sQet.html



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


















[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

To: Synoptic / GPG
In Response To: Ron Price
On: Gathering and Scattering
From: Bruce

RON: Whoever is not with me is against me,
And whoever does not gather with me scatters.

The Greek of this aphorism is identical in Mt 12:30 // Lk 11:23. In Mark,
however, there is what appears to be an equivalent which reads "Whoever is
not against us is for us". There should be little doubt that Matthew and
Luke preserve the more original version. Parallelism is a characteristic of
many of the early aphorisms.

BRUCE: Parallelism is a characteristic of Semitic style generally; it is
what we might expect of any author who is trying so make something sound
Biblical. By an analogous stylistic test, Luke's conspicuously Semitic and
markedly poetic Birth Narrative could be said to be authentic and early. I
think that conclusion would be risky, and I suggest that arguments from
general features of form or style, in the absence of other factors, are
generally risky. The ancient writers knew at least as much as we do about
styles in their own language. If we can detect a difference, they were
probably able to create and manipulate that same difference. See again the
literary strategies of the DeuteroPaulines.

RON: Also the exclusivity is what we might expect from the early Jesus
movement under James, the brother of Jesus.

BRUCE: There is no evidence that the early Jesus movement had anything to do
with James the Brother. If we credit Mark at all, James the Brother and the
rest of the family thought Jesus was out of his mind. That James later came
aboard is undoubted, but nobody has ever said how that happened, and even
after he did see the point, James had influence only at Jerusalem (in Acts,
he simply turns up there, unannounced and unexplained), whereas the main
preaching of Jesus (again, I am venturing to be influenced by Mark) was
solely in Galilee and points north.

How exclusive was that preaching? Jesus ignored food purity rules, he
ignored Sabbath rules. He consorted with the unclean, with tax collectors
and other people beyond the Pharisaic pale. The sense one gets from Mark is
that Jesus was trying to widen the horizon of the potentially saved (that
is, within Judaism), not narrow it. Everything we hear of James, in any
century, suggests the opposite: hyperpious, hyperclean, hyperpriestly,
hyperinvolved with the sacrificial pieties of the Temple. A Quisling of the
Quislings, who because of his hyperpiety survived at Jerusalem in the
persecution which killed the more radical original disciple James Zebedee
(and maybe John also) and drove the more radical original disciple Peter
into distant places. I cannot imagine a sharper contrast with what the
earliest sources suggest about Jesus, let alone his well attested inner
circle.

RON: So it looks as if Mark has deliberately reversed the default, and this
would be consistent with his more open outlook in which the "few" to be
saved in the early aphorisms are replaced by "many" in Mk 10:45.

BRUCE: That is exactly the contrast. But who is replacing whom? I suggest
that James is replacing Jesus, with all that their respective characters
suggest that this means for the future character of the movement. Do we have
a trajectory here, from Jesus's inclusiveness to James's (or let's confine
ourselves to saying, the Mt/Lk) exclusiveness, and then on to the dictum of
the Johannine Jesus: "No man cometh unto the Father but by me?" (Jn 14:6).

I see a progression here, from open to closed in substance, and for that
matter, from simple to affectedly Biblical to ominously draconic in style.

* * * * CONTEXT

In both Mt and Lk, the gathers/scatters bit is appended directly to the
respective Beelzebul Accusations, Mt 12:22-29 and Lk 11:14-22. It has no
obvious organic connection with that story; it is a narrator's comment.
There  is a Markan parallel to the Beelzebul Accusation (Mk 3:22-27), but
none to the gathers/scatters verse.  In Mk, the accusation is a late insert
into the concerns of Jesus's friends and family for his sanity; the notion
of demon possession may have suggested this placement of the interpolated
passage. Both Mt and Lk provide a lead-in for the story, and it is the same
lead-in, an exorcism that provides a better immediate narrative rationale
for the objection. In Mt, the demoniac is blind and dumb; in Luke he is
dumb. Do these differences, which are clearly not copied from Mark, since
nothing of the kind exists in Mark, give any hint as to their
directionality? We might note that Luke is big on narrative consecutiveness,
and tends to provide it where Mark's sequence is choppy or unmotivated. We
might also note Matthew's insane propensity for doubling everything in
sight, from one demoniac to two in one instance, and (most laughably of all)
from one animal to two as Jesus rides into Jerusalem. These two traits of
the respective writers suggest the likelihood that the narrative fix is
original in Luke, and was (as Matthew mistakenly thought) improved by
Matthew. Then this narrative prefix belongs to what I have called Luke A,
the pre-Matthean state of Luke.

Do we find the same directionality in the "gathers" bit tacked on at the end
in both? Not necessarily. Goulder Paradigm 2/505 makes this interesting
point:

"A feature of Matthew's discourse is his ability to end a paragraph with an
epigram, often of a balanced kind. The following paragraph, on blasphemy,
ends, "By your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be
condemned," and before he goes on to that, he closes the present topic with
"He that is not with me is against me, and he that gathers not with me
scatters." In Matthew this makes the point effectively - the Pharisees who
are not 'with' Jesus are opposing his kingdom and its growth. Luke copies
out the verse verbatim, but the eclat is gone. The SKORPIZEI looks as if it
takes up DIADIDWSIN, but then it is Jesus who is the 'stronger,' and does
the distributing, and it is his adversaries who 'scatter.' "

So far Goulder. I am not prepared to decide eclatness, but if the device of
a parallelistic capping phrase is typical Mt, and if its applicability to
Lk's context is less, then in this case, as not in the other, we would have
Mk > Lk. As far as I can see, Goulder's points are well taken, and I have
marked my synopsis accordingly.

One reason for the lack of fit in Lk is that Mt has the *Pharisees* accusing
Jesus of demonism, so that the opposition expressed in the final maxim fits,
whereas Luke (who, here as often, is softer on the Pharisees than either Mk
or Mt) has the accusation not come from Mk's "scribes from Jerusalem'" but
from some of the onlookers.  Not only is this softening seen elsewhere in
Lk, but the greater narrative continuity is his trait also. In Mk, who alone
at this point Lk A is following, the interruption of the interpolated
passage is conspicuous, and Luke gets a better flow by having the accusation
come, not from some suddenly and awkwardly imported Jerusalem figures, but
from the same crowd who witnessed the exorcism (which crowd, in any case, is
Luke's creation). But it is exactly this feature that makes the fit with
"gathers" less good, the second time round. The copied piece in Luke B does
not fit the version of the preceding story as it previously stood in Luke A.

It would be nice if these Mt/Lk directionalities all ran the same way,
either Mt > Lk (as expounded by Goulder) or the opposite. I can't find that
they do. I find that they run both ways, but in two stages, Luke being both
before (Lk A) and after (Lk B) Matthew. It is this possibility, the seeming
two-stagedness of Luke (which is required by the independent evidence of the
moved passages in Luke, see my presentation some years ago at SBL) which
permits the bidirectionality of the two texts to be accounted for on
something other than an outside-source hypothesis.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

On 02/02/2012 11:52, "Dennis Goffin" <d.goffin@...> wrote:

> My reading of this incident, Ron, makes me connect it with the exorcism in
> Mark 9:38. I take it that the basic idea behind this incident is that Jesus
> sees himself engaged in a cosmic war between the Devil and his angels and
> demons on the one side and God and the host of heaven on the side of
> righteousness. In such a contest he saw only two sides and I think that the
> quotations you have given are merely elaborations on this thought.

Dennis,

Perhaps Mark, and possibly even Jesus, saw such a connection, though the
logia gives no indication of it.

Ron Price,

Derbyshire, UK

http://homepage.virgin.net/ron.price/syno_home.html

BRUCE: ..... I suggest that arguments from general features of form or
style, in the absence of other factors, are generally risky.

RON: I did include a second factor which has nothing to do with style.

- - - - - - -

BRUCE: There is no evidence that the early Jesus movement had anything to do
with James the Brother.

RON: Oh I think there is .....

BRUCE: ..... That James later came
aboard is undoubted, but nobody has ever said how that happened .....

RON: ..... and the fact that the NT provides no clue as to the reason for
the apparently sudden conversion of so important a character as James the
brother of Jesus, should make the critical observer a tad suspicious. See
also Painter, "Just James", p.270ff..

- - - - - - -

BRUCE: Jesus ignored food purity rules, he
ignored Sabbath rules. He consorted with the unclean, with tax collectors
and other people beyond the Pharisaic pale.

RON: What I don't understand is why you take Mark's portrayal of Jesus in
these story incidents as historical, when Mark had a clear motive to broaden
the horizons of the Jesus movement. It is indisputable that the Jesus
movement started inside Judaism and ended outside Judaism. This trajectory
must have left traces in the synoptic gospels. And here in these Markan
portrayals I see clear evidence of the first synoptic writer pushing the
Jesus movement along this trajectory.

BRUCE: The sense one gets from Mark is
that Jesus was trying to widen the horizon of the potentially saved (that
is, within Judaism), not narrow it.

RON: Having reconstructed the collection of early aphorisms behind the
synoptic gospels, it's clear to me that the Jesus movement initially thought
the potentially saved to be "few" (Mt 7:14 and Mt 22:14). Mark's Jesus did
indeed try to widen the horizon, but Mark was an evangelist not a historian,
and this widening was entirely Mark's doing.

- - - - - - -

BRUCE: I cannot imagine a sharper contrast with what the
earliest sources suggest about Jesus, .....

RON: First you need to correctly identify the earliest sources. Yes, Mark
was the first of the synoptic gospels, but behind all three was an earlier
source which can be reconstructed, given the right approach.

- - - - - - -

BRUCE: In both Mt and Lk, the gathers/scatters bit is appended directly to
the respective Beelzebul Accusations, Mt 12:22-29 and Lk 11:14-22. It has no
obvious organic connection with that story; .....

RON: True.

BRUCE: ... it is a narrator's comment.

RON: Not really. Rather Matthew thought it a suitable place to park one of
the sayings attributed to Jesus, and Luke followed him in this.

BRUCE: There is a Markan parallel to the Beelzebul Accusation (Mk 3:22-27),
but none to the gathers/scatters verse.

RON: Mark's version of said verse was parked elsewhere (Mk 9:40).

- - - - - - -

Ron Price,

Derbyshire, UK

http://homepage.virgin.net/ron.price/syno_home.html



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

The proverbial saying seems to go back to various
remarks made in Graeco-Roman times about people involved,
or not involved, in situations of stasis or of civil war.
(There have been a few of those lately around the globe.)
Cicero was using both halves of this double proverb
back in 46 BCE
nos omnes adversarios putare qui non nobiscum essent;
te omnes, qui contra te non essent, tuos.
Cic. pro Ligario 33, a passage cited in relation to
Matthew 18.30 at least since 1751.

Did someone first use this double proverb, and then half of it
wound up in Mark, and half in the logia, or did someone
first use one half of it, and someone else then respond
by citing the other half?

Interestingly one half of the proverb turns up in a passage
from the DT about exorcism, and the other half in a
passage from Mark also about exorcism.  Here the civil war
or stasis is seen in a cosmic context, in which the good and
evil forces are imagined as both human and as "other" than
human.

David M.



---------
David Mealand,     University of Edinburgh


--
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

To: Synoptic / GPG
In Response To: Ron Price
On: Gathers/Scatters (Mt
From: Bruce

Ron is convinced that his version of Q (that is, of material in Mt/Lk but
not in Mk) is earlier than all other sources, a claim which is also made by
proponents of other versions of Q. I find, on the contrary, that these Mt/Lk
passages, and their placement, and the surrounding material itself, are
pretty intelligible in terms of what else we know about Mt and Lk as authors
and as crafters of a Jesus image (by no means the same Jesus image; Mt liked
money and Lk extolled poverty, etc). I further find that they fit a model of
the Synoptic evidence in which Mark is earliest and Mt/Lk in their canonical
form are later, with John of course later still (my own refinement of that
position is that Luke was written in two stages, A and B, only the latter
being post-Matthean). The question here is whether we can tell whether one
of those models gives a better reading of the "gather/scatter" passage in
Mk/Lk. Ron has also cited, not a parallel, but a contrasting passage from Mk
(he who is not against us is with us," referring to the "strange exorcist"
(Mk 9:38).

Sorry for the length of this, but it seemed more intelligible to include
much of the previous exchange.

BRUCE (earlier, and concluding a sample demonstration): I suggest that
arguments from general features of form or style, in the absence of other
factors, are generally risky.

RON: I did include a second factor which has nothing to do with style.

BRUCE (now): That factor was, and I quote, " Also the exclusivity is what we
might expect from the early Jesus movement under James, the brother of
Jesus." I dealt with that separately; see below. I think the point must
stand, that tossing all the alleged sayings of Jesus into the same hat, and
from that hatful identifying the authentic Jesus sayings by their stylistic
features, as many (including the influential Bultmann) essentially do, is
worthless. Anybody can, and some contributors to Synoptic occasionally do,
slip into a "Biblical" or "gnomic" style for momentary effect. Anybody could
do it, later inventors as well as Jesus himself. Further, the thought that
Jesus was invariably a gnomic speaker in the first place, rather than a
consecutive preacher, is an assumption which is favorable to the Cynic (or
Nice) Jesus model which many would be glad to reach. But that assumption is
not itself grounded; it is merely built into the procedure. Methodologically
speaking, if we put Gnomic in, we are going to get Nice out. The result is
circular; that is, it is foreordained. I think the whole procedure is
invalid.

- - - - - - -

BRUCE (earlier): There is no evidence that the early Jesus movement had
anything to do with James the Brother.

RON: Oh I think there is .....

BRUCE (now): By early, I mean before the Jerusalemization of the Jesus
movement, or significant parts of it.

- - - - - -

BRUCE (earlier): ..... That James later came aboard is undoubted, but nobody
has ever said how that happened .....

RON: ..... and the fact that the NT provides no clue as to the reason for
the apparently sudden conversion of so important a character as James the
brother of Jesus, should make the critical observer a tad suspicious. See
also Painter, "Just James", p.270ff..

BRUCE: I am more than a tad suspicious; I go the whole frog. See above.
Painter 270f is pushing Zadokite priests. He relates James the Brother to
Dead Sea materials which show an extreme food-purity pattern like that which
post-1c legends attribute to James the B. That helps to identify where James
the B was coming from; and so far so good. The question of whether this was
original Jesus doctrine remains to be settled. To put that question in
general terms, I ask which was earlier: laxity in food matters, or rigidity
in food matters (to the point of vegetarianism in some cases, avoiding blood
altogether)? For this we have an outside witness: Paul. According to him, he
secured an agreement from Jerusalem for his brand of Christianity, including
(he wants us to think) food taboos, and Peter when visiting in Antioch went
happily along with no-taboo commensality. Then came "some from James,"
taking a harder line on food taboos, and Peter, and even Barnabas, caved in
and abandoned the sharing of table with Gentile Christians. Then the lax
version, even at Jerusalem, came before the strict version. Peter, and
Jerusalem policy when he had an influence on it, was loose, while James, and
Jerusalem policy when he took it over, was strict.

What is going on? Frank Beare has an interesting suggestion in JBL v62
(1943) 295-306, "The Sequence of Events in Acts 9-15 and the Career of
Peter," at the very end, which is that the "James" who gave Paul the green
light in Jerusalem was the still living James Zebedee, whereas the James who
sent spies to Antioch was James the B. Then Paul visited Jerusalem when the
two Zebedees and Peter were still among those in charge, meaning before the
persecution at the end of Herod Agrippa I's reign, which killed one of the
Zebedees and drove Paul out of town (leaving the other Zebedee as the only
remaining member of the original troika still on the ground in Jerusalem).
This needs careful study of the dates, including Paul's elapsed time
figures, much (though I think, not quite all) of which Beare provides. But I
think he has it fundamentally right, and that he has cleared up one of the
stubbornest problems in Pauline chronology, and with it, the question of
when James the B came to prominence at Jerusalem. It was in the early 40's,
following the Agrippa purge. That is more than a decade after Jesus's death.
I think we might usefully define "early Christianity" as that phase of
Christian history coming before the leadership of James at Jerusalem.

- - - - - - -

BRUCE (earlier): Jesus ignored food purity rules, he ignored Sabbath rules.
He consorted with the unclean, with tax collectors and other people beyond
the Pharisaic pale.

RON: What I don't understand is why you take Mark's portrayal of Jesus in
these story incidents as historical, when Mark had a clear motive to broaden
the horizons of the Jesus movement.

BRUCE: It's not hard to understand, and of course I have said it before.
Briefly, I take seriously the developmental trajectories linking all the
Gospels in a single large sequence, in which Jesus is progressively
divinized, the family of Jesus (most conspicuously his mother) are
progressively respected, John the Baptist progressively fades from the scene
as the mentor of Jesus, and the Jerusalemization of Jesus's career proceeds
to absurd lengths. For a short version of that argument, see

http://www.umass.edu/wsp/alpha/method/index.html

and click on Gospel Trajectories, partway down. It will be noted that this
Methods page contains standard stuff, nothing idiosyncratic to myself;
nothing that Tischendorf would have been surprised at (in fact, Tischendorf
contributed one of its mainthreads).

The presumption, that is, the statistically and historically likely
conclusion, for any Gospel passage is that a passage in Mark is likely to be
earlier than its counterpart (or its replacement) in any other Gospel or
Gospels. As to James, who in Mark is included with Jesus's mother and his
other brothers in thinking Jesus crazy, this is one of the passages noted
already by Hawkins as likely to have been altered or ignored by the later
Gospels as unbecoming to the later image of Jesus. I think he has the right
of it. And I think the Pauline evidence above cited goes far to reinforce
his case. Not that it much needed reinforcing, but confirmation is always
welcome.

RON:  It is indisputable that the Jesus movement started inside Judaism and
ended outside Judaism. This trajectory must have left traces in the synoptic
gospels.

BRUCE: It not only left traces, it is celebrated as history in Acts II (the
second version, which carries the story of Christianity to the point of
final separation from Judaism, and an exclusive concentration on the
Gentiles). It is interesting to see how the various Gospels handle the
Gentile mission. Luke B (not Luke A) invents a whole separate Mission of
Seventy to the Gentiles (symbolized by the Samaritans), but this is merely
to say that Luke A pretty much ignored it. As for Mark, it has been noticed
that a group of Mark incidents, including the Second Feeding, is something
of a constructed parallel to the group including the First Feeding, and I
find that this is a correct estimate. That is, the Second Feeding was added
at some point to the growing text of Mark. That the second Feeding was meant
(via the Seven Baskets symbolism; seven = seventy = everything) to refer to
the Gentiles is something that Mark himself pounds into the heads of the
disciples, meaning, dear reader, you and me. So here is a passage that was
(a) interpolated later, and (b) one whose meaning Mark himself insists on.
Then within the timespan subtended by the composition and recomposition of
Mark, the author of Mark came to accept the validity of the Gentile Mission.
That the early Jesus movement, including the time when Jesus was in charge
of it, focused on the Jews, including (see the address formula in the
Epistle of James) the diaspora Jews, seems to be a required conclusion. (The
Syrophoenician Woman story belongs to an earlier layer of Mark, and
represents the official ruling of that time: that Gentile converts are not
exactly to be forbidden, but as of that time, they are not the point of the
mission).

What we are seeing in these textual details, not only in Luke (who
constructs a whole separate structure for the Gentile Mission) but in Mark
(who layers a second series of stories onto an earlier series of stories in
order to symbolize the Gentile Mission), is that (1) the Mission to Jews
came first, and was for a time the whole content of Jesus movement
proselytizing, and that (2) the Mission to Gentiles came later. This is how
we can distinguish the directionality of these two events.

RON:  And here in these Markan portrayals I see clear evidence of the first
synoptic writer pushing the Jesus movement along this trajectory.

BRUCE: I don't think Mark is pushing anything; I think he is keeping his
story up to date with what is going on in the Christian movement with which
he was in touch. He can create an answer, but I doubt his power to create
the question. Overall, I see the following stages in the propagation of
Christianity, with their reflection in Mk:

(1) Jews only; Mk's preaching stories generally (some of them in synagogues)
(2) Gentile converts inadvertently made, but not welcomed into the movement
(the Syrophoenician Woman: the Gerasene Demoniac, who wants to join, but is
told to missionarize in his own area, on his own).
(3) Preaching to Gentiles by others (eg, Paul, as Loisy thought) tolerated
as at least not hurtful to the main Jesus movement: the Other Exorcist
story, summarized in "he who is not against us is with us."
(4) The acknowledged and intentional Gentile mission: symbolized by the
Feeding of Four Thousand.

That is quite a lot of positions, some of them mutually contrary, for one
text to take. So we next ask: Is Mark  simply a rubble heap of material of
various dates, thrown together promiscuously, or is Mark an accretional
text, in which the later positions are laid down on top of the earlier ones?
This is a question which philology can answer, and the answer is: The late
ones are laid down on top of, and sometimes interpolated within, the early
ones. Then Mark is a single, but accretional, text, and it covers a time
span at least up to and including the execution of Jacob Zebedee, in the
reign of Agrippa I. I think this is a useful result, not least in that it
gives a window on that moving object, the early evolution of the Jesus
movement as it expanded from a purely Jewish one to a wider
Gentile-inclusive one. (It was left for Acts II to record a still later
phase: the separation of the Gentile segment as the whole of the movement).

I find this both philologically and historically convincing. Then we had:

----------

BRUCE (earlier; referring to the still Jewish-only phase of the movement as
reflected in Mark): The sense one gets from Mark is that Jesus was trying to
widen the horizon of the potentially saved (that is, within Judaism), not
narrow it.

RON: Having reconstructed the collection of early aphorisms behind the
synoptic gospels, it's clear to me that the Jesus movement initially thought
the potentially saved to be "few" (Mt 7:14 and Mt 22:14). Mark's Jesus did
indeed try to widen the horizon, but Mark was an evangelist not a historian,
and this widening was entirely Mark's doing.

BRUCE: Reconstructing a life of Jesus from a group of aphorisms, admittedly
selected simply because they qualify *as* aphorisms, strikes me as a
perilous procedure. And on a recurrent point: I don't think Mark was in a
position to create Christian history, or to insert a Gentile Mission into a
movement which did not already have a Gentile Mission. I think that he is
largely reportive. The way he phrases his report is likely to be his own
(except at point where someone has told him a Jesus story in their own
fashion), and the spin he gives events may well be his own also. I have no
doubt that he invented many details of the Crucifixion scene to give a
particular Scriptural flavor to the scene. But, to keep to that example, I
don't think he invented the Crucifixion.

- - - - - - -

BRUCE (earlier): I cannot imagine a sharper contrast with what the earliest
sources suggest about Jesus, .....

RON: First you need to correctly identify the earliest sources. Yes, Mark
was the first of the synoptic gospels, but behind all three was an earlier
source which can be reconstructed, given the right approach.

BRUCE: That is a statement of methodological faith. I have already stated my
doubts about the methodology. This is not to say that Matthew and Luke had
no sources, or even that Mark had no sources. It has been suggested, for
instance, that certain passages in Mk and Lk derive from the John the
Baptist movement, which we already knew from Mark continued to exist
alongside the early Christians. Boismard goes much further on this than had
earlier occurred to me, but having spent some time on the Mandaean
literature, I am prepared to go even further than Boismard. Does everyone
know that the Book of John is now being translated into English, and that a
specimen of the translation is available online? See

http://www.umass.edu/wsp/alpha/jb/mandaeans.html

and click on the link at the end of the second paragraph. I agree with
Jorunn Buckley and several others, that the Mandaean origin myth (exodus
from Jerusalem) is probably rooted in fact; we are currently arguing about
the exact date (for a statement on that, click on the link at the end of the
*third* paragraph, above).

So there is a lot out there, and we need not fear to leave ourselves
comfortless if we abandon certain conjectural constructs. This is actually a
pretty good decade to be looking for Gospel sources.

- - - - - - -

BRUCE (earler): In both Mt and Lk, the gathers/scatters bit is appended
directly to the respective Beelzebul Accusations, Mt 12:22-29 and Lk
11:14-22. It has no obvious organic connection with that story; .....

RON (earlier): True.

BRUCE (earlier): ... it is a narrator's comment.

RON: Not really. Rather Matthew thought it a suitable place to park one of
the sayings attributed to Jesus, and Luke followed him in this.

------------and in parallel:---------------

BRUCE (earlier): There is a Markan parallel to the Beelzebul Accusation (Mk
3:22-27), but none to the gathers/scatters verse.

RON: Mark's version of said verse was parked elsewhere (Mk 9:40).

BRUCE: Mark's inclusive remark was replaced in Mt/Lk by an exclusive remark.
It is not simply a question of the same saying in all three. As to whether
Mt made the new narrow version and Luke copied it, or vice versa, I think I
have already given my support to Michael Goulder's take on this passage
(Paradigm 2/505f).

More generally, I have trouble, for reasons repeatedly given above, with the
verb "parked." It implies a single  assembly from a bag of mixed pieces. The
whole structure of the text tells me different. Mark is a very early
original consecutive narrative, ending where Adela Yarbro Collins says it
did, with later events registered by added material of more or less extent
(some of them coming in the sequence that Vincent Taylor says they did). As
Meyer realized, the Twelve material is exiguous in Mark, and constitutes a
layer (Meyer thought it a source, but this does not work; the source of the
Twelve layer in Mark is the Twelve event in the outside world). The
Resurrection material in Mark constitutes another layer, and includes some
of the material which Adela found nonoriginal in the Passion Narrative,
including the Empty Tomb sequence. And so on. I very much doubt that a text
assembled from a basketful of disconnected sayings would have the form of a
consecutive but repeatedly interpolated text.

Did not Charles Darwin say something of the sort, of the geologically
suggestive scenery of the lake country, shouting out its story of glacial
advance and retreat, while Darwin and his friends, on an early visit, saw
merely a lot of pretty scenery? I also like Charles Kingsley's remark about
Henry Gosse's attempt to argue that the earth had been created by God in six
days, as the Bible says, but already possessing, at the moment of its
creation, the signs of immemorial age. Kingsley's remark is methodologically
immortal, and I will end by quoting it from p99 of my 1937 edition of Edmund
Gosse's "Father and Son:"

"[I can not] give up the painful and slow conclusion of five and twenty
years' study of geology, and believe that God has written in the rocks an
enormous and superfluous lie."

E Bruce Brooks
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Bruce:  In both Mt and Lk, the gathers/scatters bit is appended directly to the
respective Beelzebul Accusations, Mt 12:22-29 and Lk  11:14-22. It has no
obvious organic connection with that storyDennis: The fact that this is a poor
version of  " Who is not for us is against us" should not blind us to the fact
that Jesus and Mark for that matter regarded an exorcism as a battleground, with
Beelzebul and his demons on one side and God, the angels and God's agent, the
exorcist, on the other.Jesus is involved in a cosmic war which he hopes God will
end by installing his kingdom.             I am unable to go along with Ron's
idea that a collection of aphorisms, similar presumably in essence to the
socalled Gospel of Thomas can tell us anything other than that, like Thomas,
oral sources got written down on more than one occasion, but like Thomas, the
result is often not more than a ragbag with no major significance.   Dennis
Dennis Goffin

Chorleywood UK

  To: Synoptic@yahoogroups.com
CC: gpg@yahoogroups.com
From: brooks@...
Date: Fri, 3 Feb 2012 16:36:46 -0500
Subject: [GPG] RE: [Synoptic-L] Whoever is not with me is against me




























       To: Synoptic / GPG

In Response To: Ron Price

On: Gathers/Scatters (Mt

From: Bruce



Ron is convinced that his version of Q (that is, of material in Mt/Lk but

not in Mk) is earlier than all other sources, a claim which is also made by

proponents of other versions of Q. I find, on the contrary, that these Mt/Lk

passages, and their placement, and the surrounding material itself, are

pretty intelligible in terms of what else we know about Mt and Lk as authors

and as crafters of a Jesus image (by no means the same Jesus image; Mt liked

money and Lk extolled poverty, etc). I further find that they fit a model of

the Synoptic evidence in which Mark is earliest and Mt/Lk in their canonical

form are later, with John of course later still (my own refinement of that

position is that Luke was written in two stages, A and B, only the latter

being post-Matthean). The question here is whether we can tell whether one

of those models gives a better reading of the "gather/scatter" passage in

Mk/Lk. Ron has also cited, not a parallel, but a contrasting passage from Mk

(he who is not against us is with us," referring to the "strange exorcist"

(Mk 9:38).



Sorry for the length of this, but it seemed more intelligible to include

much of the previous exchange.



BRUCE (earlier, and concluding a sample demonstration): I suggest that

arguments from general features of form or style, in the absence of other

factors, are generally risky.



RON: I did include a second factor which has nothing to do with style.



BRUCE (now): That factor was, and I quote, " Also the exclusivity is what we

might expect from the early Jesus movement under James, the brother of

Jesus." I dealt with that separately; see below. I think the point must

stand, that tossing all the alleged sayings of Jesus into the same hat, and

from that hatful identifying the authentic Jesus sayings by their stylistic

features, as many (including the influential Bultmann) essentially do, is

worthless. Anybody can, and some contributors to Synoptic occasionally do,

slip into a "Biblical" or "gnomic" style for momentary effect. Anybody could

do it, later inventors as well as Jesus himself. Further, the thought that

Jesus was invariably a gnomic speaker in the first place, rather than a

consecutive preacher, is an assumption which is favorable to the Cynic (or

Nice) Jesus model which many would be glad to reach. But that assumption is

not itself grounded; it is merely built into the procedure. Methodologically

speaking, if we put Gnomic in, we are going to get Nice out. The result is

circular; that is, it is foreordained. I think the whole procedure is

invalid.



- - - - - - -



BRUCE (earlier): There is no evidence that the early Jesus movement had

anything to do with James the Brother.



RON: Oh I think there is .....



BRUCE (now): By early, I mean before the Jerusalemization of the Jesus

movement, or significant parts of it.



- - - - - -



BRUCE (earlier): ..... That James later came aboard is undoubted, but nobody

has ever said how that happened .....



RON: ..... and the fact that the NT provides no clue as to the reason for

the apparently sudden conversion of so important a character as James the

brother of Jesus, should make the critical observer a tad suspicious. See

also Painter, "Just James", p.270ff..



BRUCE: I am more than a tad suspicious; I go the whole frog. See above.

Painter 270f is pushing Zadokite priests. He relates James the Brother to

Dead Sea materials which show an extreme food-purity pattern like that which

post-1c legends attribute to James the B. That helps to identify where James

the B was coming from; and so far so good. The question of whether this was

original Jesus doctrine remains to be settled. To put that question in

general terms, I ask which was earlier: laxity in food matters, or rigidity

in food matters (to the point of vegetarianism in some cases, avoiding blood

altogether)? For this we have an outside witness: Paul. According to him, he

secured an agreement from Jerusalem for his brand of Christianity, including

(he wants us to think) food taboos, and Peter when visiting in Antioch went

happily along with no-taboo commensality. Then came "some from James,"

taking a harder line on food taboos, and Peter, and even Barnabas, caved in

and abandoned the sharing of table with Gentile Christians. Then the lax

version, even at Jerusalem, came before the strict version. Peter, and

Jerusalem policy when he had an influence on it, was loose, while James, and

Jerusalem policy when he took it over, was strict.



What is going on? Frank Beare has an interesting suggestion in JBL v62

(1943) 295-306, "The Sequence of Events in Acts 9-15 and the Career of

Peter," at the very end, which is that the "James" who gave Paul the green

light in Jerusalem was the still living James Zebedee, whereas the James who

sent spies to Antioch was James the B. Then Paul visited Jerusalem when the

two Zebedees and Peter were still among those in charge, meaning before the

persecution at the end of Herod Agrippa I's reign, which killed one of the

Zebedees and drove Paul out of town (leaving the other Zebedee as the only

remaining member of the original troika still on the ground in Jerusalem).

This needs careful study of the dates, including Paul's elapsed time

figures, much (though I think, not quite all) of which Beare provides. But I

think he has it fundamentally right, and that he has cleared up one of the

stubbornest problems in Pauline chronology, and with it, the question of

when James the B came to prominence at Jerusalem. It was in the early 40's,

following the Agrippa purge. That is more than a decade after Jesus's death.

I think we might usefully define "early Christianity" as that phase of

Christian history coming before the leadership of James at Jerusalem.



- - - - - - -



BRUCE (earlier): Jesus ignored food purity rules, he ignored Sabbath rules.

He consorted with the unclean, with tax collectors and other people beyond

the Pharisaic pale.



RON: What I don't understand is why you take Mark's portrayal of Jesus in

these story incidents as historical, when Mark had a clear motive to broaden

the horizons of the Jesus movement.



BRUCE: It's not hard to understand, and of course I have said it before.

Briefly, I take seriously the developmental trajectories linking all the

Gospels in a single large sequence, in which Jesus is progressively

divinized, the family of Jesus (most conspicuously his mother) are

progressively respected, John the Baptist progressively fades from the scene

as the mentor of Jesus, and the Jerusalemization of Jesus's career proceeds

to absurd lengths. For a short version of that argument, see



http://www.umass.edu/wsp/alpha/method/index.html



and click on Gospel Trajectories, partway down. It will be noted that this

Methods page contains standard stuff, nothing idiosyncratic to myself;

nothing that Tischendorf would have been surprised at (in fact, Tischendorf

contributed one of its mainthreads).



The presumption, that is, the statistically and historically likely

conclusion, for any Gospel passage is that a passage in Mark is likely to be

earlier than its counterpart (or its replacement) in any other Gospel or

Gospels. As to James, who in Mark is included with Jesus's mother and his

other brothers in thinking Jesus crazy, this is one of the passages noted

already by Hawkins as likely to have been altered or ignored by the later

Gospels as unbecoming to the later image of Jesus. I think he has the right

of it. And I think the Pauline evidence above cited goes far to reinforce

his case. Not that it much needed reinforcing, but confirmation is always

welcome.



RON:  It is indisputable that the Jesus movement started inside Judaism and

ended outside Judaism. This trajectory must have left traces in the synoptic

gospels.



BRUCE: It not only left traces, it is celebrated as history in Acts II (the

second version, which carries the story of Christianity to the point of

final separation from Judaism, and an exclusive concentration on the

Gentiles). It is interesting to see how the various Gospels handle the

Gentile mission. Luke B (not Luke A) invents a whole separate Mission of

Seventy to the Gentiles (symbolized by the Samaritans), but this is merely

to say that Luke A pretty much ignored it. As for Mark, it has been noticed

that a group of Mark incidents, including the Second Feeding, is something

of a constructed parallel to the group including the First Feeding, and I

find that this is a correct estimate. That is, the Second Feeding was added

at some point to the growing text of Mark. That the second Feeding was meant

(via the Seven Baskets symbolism; seven = seventy = everything) to refer to

the Gentiles is something that Mark himself pounds into the heads of the

disciples, meaning, dear reader, you and me. So here is a passage that was

(a) interpolated later, and (b) one whose meaning Mark himself insists on.

Then within the timespan subtended by the composition and recomposition of

Mark, the author of Mark came to accept the validity of the Gentile Mission.

That the early Jesus movement, including the time when Jesus was in charge

of it, focused on the Jews, including (see the address formula in the

Epistle of James) the diaspora Jews, seems to be a required conclusion. (The

Syrophoenician Woman story belongs to an earlier layer of Mark, and

represents the official ruling of that time: that Gentile converts are not

exactly to be forbidden, but as of that time, they are not the point of the

mission).



What we are seeing in these textual details, not only in Luke (who

constructs a whole separate structure for the Gentile Mission) but in Mark

(who layers a second series of stories onto an earlier series of stories in

order to symbolize the Gentile Mission), is that (1) the Mission to Jews

came first, and was for a time the whole content of Jesus movement

proselytizing, and that (2) the Mission to Gentiles came later. This is how

we can distinguish the directionality of these two events.



RON:  And here in these Markan portrayals I see clear evidence of the first

synoptic writer pushing the Jesus movement along this trajectory.



BRUCE: I don't think Mark is pushing anything; I think he is keeping his

story up to date with what is going on in the Christian movement with which

he was in touch. He can create an answer, but I doubt his power to create

the question. Overall, I see the following stages in the propagation of

Christianity, with their reflection in Mk:



(1) Jews only; Mk's preaching stories generally (some of them in synagogues)

(2) Gentile converts inadvertently made, but not welcomed into the movement

(the Syrophoenician Woman: the Gerasene Demoniac, who wants to join, but is

told to missionarize in his own area, on his own).

(3) Preaching to Gentiles by others (eg, Paul, as Loisy thought) tolerated

as at least not hurtful to the main Jesus movement: the Other Exorcist

story, summarized in "he who is not against us is with us."

(4) The acknowledged and intentional Gentile mission: symbolized by the

Feeding of Four Thousand.



That is quite a lot of positions, some of them mutually contrary, for one

text to take. So we next ask: Is Mark  simply a rubble heap of material of

various dates, thrown together promiscuously, or is Mark an accretional

text, in which the later positions are laid down on top of the earlier ones?

This is a question which philology can answer, and the answer is: The late

ones are laid down on top of, and sometimes interpolated within, the early

ones. Then Mark is a single, but accretional, text, and it covers a time

span at least up to and including the execution of Jacob Zebedee, in the

reign of Agrippa I. I think this is a useful result, not least in that it

gives a window on that moving object, the early evolution of the Jesus

movement as it expanded from a purely Jewish one to a wider

Gentile-inclusive one. (It was left for Acts II to record a still later

phase: the separation of the Gentile segment as the whole of the movement).



I find this both philologically and historically convincing. Then we had:



----------



BRUCE (earlier; referring to the still Jewish-only phase of the movement as

reflected in Mark): The sense one gets from Mark is that Jesus was trying to

widen the horizon of the potentially saved (that is, within Judaism), not

narrow it.



RON: Having reconstructed the collection of early aphorisms behind the

synoptic gospels, it's clear to me that the Jesus movement initially thought

the potentially saved to be "few" (Mt 7:14 and Mt 22:14). Mark's Jesus did

indeed try to widen the horizon, but Mark was an evangelist not a historian,

and this widening was entirely Mark's doing.



BRUCE: Reconstructing a life of Jesus from a group of aphorisms, admittedly

selected simply because they qualify *as* aphorisms, strikes me as a

perilous procedure. And on a recurrent point: I don't think Mark was in a

position to create Christian history, or to insert a Gentile Mission into a

movement which did not already have a Gentile Mission. I think that he is

largely reportive. The way he phrases his report is likely to be his own

(except at point where someone has told him a Jesus story in their own

fashion), and the spin he gives events may well be his own also. I have no

doubt that he invented many details of the Crucifixion scene to give a

particular Scriptural flavor to the scene. But, to keep to that example, I

don't think he invented the Crucifixion.



- - - - - - -



BRUCE (earlier): I cannot imagine a sharper contrast with what the earliest

sources suggest about Jesus, .....



RON: First you need to correctly identify the earliest sources. Yes, Mark

was the first of the synoptic gospels, but behind all three was an earlier

source which can be reconstructed, given the right approach.



BRUCE: That is a statement of methodological faith. I have already stated my

doubts about the methodology. This is not to say that Matthew and Luke had

no sources, or even that Mark had no sources. It has been suggested, for

instance, that certain passages in Mk and Lk derive from the John the

Baptist movement, which we already knew from Mark continued to exist

alongside the early Christians. Boismard goes much further on this than had

earlier occurred to me, but having spent some time on the Mandaean

literature, I am prepared to go even further than Boismard. Does everyone

know that the Book of John is now being translated into English, and that a

specimen of the translation is available online? See



http://www.umass.edu/wsp/alpha/jb/mandaeans.html



and click on the link at the end of the second paragraph. I agree with

Jorunn Buckley and several others, that the Mandaean origin myth (exodus

from Jerusalem) is probably rooted in fact; we are currently arguing about

the exact date (for a statement on that, click on the link at the end of the

*third* paragraph, above).



So there is a lot out there, and we need not fear to leave ourselves

comfortless if we abandon certain conjectural constructs. This is actually a

pretty good decade to be looking for Gospel sources.



- - - - - - -



BRUCE (earler): In both Mt and Lk, the gathers/scatters bit is appended

directly to the respective Beelzebul Accusations, Mt 12:22-29 and Lk

11:14-22. It has no obvious organic connection with that story; .....



RON (earlier): True.



BRUCE (earlier): ... it is a narrator's comment.



RON: Not really. Rather Matthew thought it a suitable place to park one of

the sayings attributed to Jesus, and Luke followed him in this.



------------and in parallel:---------------



BRUCE (earlier): There is a Markan parallel to the Beelzebul Accusation (Mk

3:22-27), but none to the gathers/scatters verse.



RON: Mark's version of said verse was parked elsewhere (Mk 9:40).



BRUCE: Mark's inclusive remark was replaced in Mt/Lk by an exclusive remark.

It is not simply a question of the same saying in all three. As to whether

Mt made the new narrow version and Luke copied it, or vice versa, I think I

have already given my support to Michael Goulder's take on this passage

(Paradigm 2/505f).



More generally, I have trouble, for reasons repeatedly given above, with the

verb "parked." It implies a single  assembly from a bag of mixed pieces. The

whole structure of the text tells me different. Mark is a very early

original consecutive narrative, ending where Adela Yarbro Collins says it

did, with later events registered by added material of more or less extent

(some of them coming in the sequence that Vincent Taylor says they did). As

Meyer realized, the Twelve material is exiguous in Mark, and constitutes a

layer (Meyer thought it a source, but this does not work; the source of the

Twelve layer in Mark is the Twelve event in the outside world). The

Resurrection material in Mark constitutes another layer, and includes some

of the material which Adela found nonoriginal in the Passion Narrative,

including the Empty Tomb sequence. And so on. I very much doubt that a text

assembled from a basketful of disconnected sayings would have the form of a

consecutive but repeatedly interpolated text.



Did not Charles Darwin say something of the sort, of the geologically

suggestive scenery of the lake country, shouting out its story of glacial

advance and retreat, while Darwin and his friends, on an early visit, saw

merely a lot of pretty scenery? I also like Charles Kingsley's remark about

Henry Gosse's attempt to argue that the earth had been created by God in six

days, as the Bible says, but already possessing, at the moment of its

creation, the signs of immemorial age. Kingsley's remark is methodologically

immortal, and I will end by quoting it from p99 of my 1937 edition of Edmund

Gosse's "Father and Son:"



"[I can not] give up the painful and slow conclusion of five and twenty

years' study of geology, and believe that God has written in the rocks an

enormous and superfluous lie."



E Bruce Brooks

University of Massachusetts at Amherst


















[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

On 04/02/2012 10:16, "Dennis Goffin" <d.goffin@...> wrote:

> I am unable to go along with Ron's idea that a collection of aphorisms,
> similar presumably in essence to the socalled Gospel of Thomas can tell us
> anything other than that, like Thomas, oral sources got written down on more
> than one occasion, but like Thomas, the result is often not more than a ragbag
> with no major significance.


Dennis, Bruce et al.,

The result in the case of the logia is no ragbag. Rather it is a very
carefully crafted piece of poetry, as you can see if you look at the web
page below.

More importantly, historians know nothing about the author/editor of GTh,
except possibly his name. On the other hand, the logia was edited by an
apostle called Matthew, no doubt with the full authority of James the
brother of Jesus. Therefore it gives us a unique insight into the beliefs of
the early Jesus movement ca. 45 CE before Paul came along and utterly
transformed it.

Ron Price,

Derbyshire, UK

http://homepage.virgin.net/ron.price/syno_sQet.html

Forgive my tongue in cheek comment, Ron, I do actually respect what you have
done, but I would respect it a lot more if these aphorisms could be demonstrated
individually to have arisen from Aramaic complete with Aramaic wordplays. THAT
would really interest me.  There is nothing in the collection that cannot be
found either in the  Wisdom literature, the DSS or the Apocrypha &
Pseudepigrapha. Jesus was in fact only very slightly original but most of his
ideas are of the time, confused and unoriginal and the way to make sense of him
and the NT is to start in about 300BCE and work forward from there. Dennis
---------------------

Dennis Goffin

Chorleywood UK

  To: Synoptic@yahoogroups.com
From: ron-price@...
Date: Sat, 4 Feb 2012 10:40:29 +0000
Subject: RE: [Synoptic-L] Whoever is not with me is against me




























       On 04/02/2012 10:16, "Dennis Goffin" <d.goffin@...> wrote:



> I am unable to go along with Ron's idea that a collection of aphorisms,

> similar presumably in essence to the socalled Gospel of Thomas can tell us

> anything other than that, like Thomas, oral sources got written down on more

> than one occasion, but like Thomas, the result is often not more than a ragbag

> with no major significance.



Dennis, Bruce et al.,



The result in the case of the logia is no ragbag. Rather it is a very

carefully crafted piece of poetry, as you can see if you look at the web

page below.



More importantly, historians know nothing about the author/editor of GTh,

except possibly his name. On the other hand, the logia was edited by an

apostle called Matthew, no doubt with the full authority of James the

brother of Jesus. Therefore it gives us a unique insight into the beliefs of

the early Jesus movement ca. 45 CE before Paul came along and utterly

transformed it.



Ron Price,



Derbyshire, UK



http://homepage.virgin.net/ron.price/syno_sQet.html


















[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

To: Synoptic / GPG
On: The Supposed Logia
From: Bruce

My characterization of the Mt/Lk common material as unorganized has drawn a
certain amount of objection (along, perhaps, with a certain amount of tacit
agreement). I must say, I find these passages better organized in Luke (one
of our two sources for them) than in any other arrangement so far proposed.
Better because more functional. Matthew, for example, clearly scrapes things
together to fit his own number-generated groundplan. More amenable to
discussion from present evidence were these other points:

RON: More importantly, historians know nothing about the author/editor of
GTh, except possibly his name.

BRUCE: Loss of evidence is not much evidence for anything, one way or
another. But to take what we have: A text which identifies its source as
Thomas is unlikely to have been *by* Thomas, and the text does not even make
that claim. I note also that in addition to the name of Thomas, gThos at an
earlier point gives the name of James the Brother (Thos 12) as the chief
authority figure for the church after the death of Jesus. This claim is not
compatible with the Thomas mentions, which now frame the text (though Thomas
and the Brother do turn up as associated in other extracanonical texts).
This would seem to imply text growth, with James adopted by its writer as an
early patron figure, and Thomas as a later one. No reason for suspecting an
author exists in any of these facts, but I think there are reasons for
eliminating both James and Thomas from consideration.

RON: On the other hand, the logia was edited by an apostle called Matthew, .
. .

BRUCE: The figure of Apostle Matthew is strangely dim. What region did he
preach in, and how does that relate to the Gospel we have? Commentators on
Matthew tend to duck these questions. Clearly, at some point the name
Matthew was associated with our canonical Gospel, but as the commentators
love to point out, and I think with reason, no real Apostle could have
written a book based on the presumably non-Apostolic Gospel of Mark, and the
Gospel of Matthew is manifestly based on just that non-Apostolic Gospel. If
we momentarily suspend this attribution (I will return to it in a moment),
what is left? Very little from the 1st century, and I have feel doubtful
about Patristic testimony, direct or indirect, from the 2nd century. I do
not think that certainty is warranted here; certainly not certainty founded
on 2nd century evidence. The Gospel of Matthew itself is 1st century
evidence, perhaps a little underexploited in recent discussion.

RON: . . . no doubt with the full authority of James the brother of Jesus.

BRUCE: Perhaps some doubt. There is reason (in Paul and elsewhere) for
thinking that James the Brother was hostile to the original Three (Peter and
the Zebedees). His relations with Matthew might have been more workable. If
my interpretation of the Klausner list of Five (accepting an improvement by
Hirschberg 1942) as the names of the surviving Apostles at Jerusalem after
the death of James Zebedee is correct, Matthew or Matthias was one of that
group. He may have gotten along better with the newly ascendant James than
did the surviving Zebedee (John), or the other holdovers from earlier days
(Andrew, Thaddaeus, and Simeon Zelotes). It's possible, but still
conjectural. My problem is that the socalled logia are still more
conjectural.

RON:  Therefore it gives us a unique insight into the beliefs of the early
Jesus movement ca. 45 CE before Paul came along and utterly transformed it.

BRUCE: It seems to me that this chronology is badly off. Paul had come along
(that is, quit killing Christians and begun proselytizing nonChristians) not
many years after the death of Jesus; most Paul chronologists put that date
somewhere in the 30's, and Paul's own testimony, though apparently a little
overwrought and hyperdefensive (Paul is hyperdefensive on any point touching
his Apostolic credentials and his personal independence), largely agrees.
Consistently with this, the Gospel of Mark, probably completed not long
after 45 (its latest terminus a quo), as I think I have mentioned, shows
traces of the gradual growth, and from a Jerusalem point of view, the
gradual acceptance, of the Gentile mission, again mostly well before 45.
Then the "transformation" had already made considerable progress in the late
30's and early 40's. The doctrine of the Atonement, which became
psychologically central for Paul, appears already in the very late layers of
Mark (10:45, 14;24) - but not earlier. On these grounds, I don't think it
valid to put the Gentile transformation, in which Paul surely had a large
part, subsequent to 45. It would seem to have come in, and to have affected
Jewish Christian self-perceptions, well before that. It continued to do so
in later decades, to be sure, as the final version of Acts is there to tell
us, but the tremors of that earthquake seem to have been felt already in the
30's.

Someone working after 45, with a Jamesian Jerusalem agenda (which for one
thing would have been strongly pro-Law), might have produced some of the
statements in gMt (like the one about every jot of the law remaining valid).
So I can see a possible connection between the Jerusalem Matthew and the
Gospel of Matthew. That the same Matthew had separately produced what (it is
claimed) would later have become a *source* for both Matthew and Luke does
not seem to make much sense. I think we must choose, and I think the extant
Gospel agrees better with what little we know or can responsibly infer about
Matthew than do the conjectural Logia.

LOGIA

The center of all these Logia theories, I suspect, is the wish to make the
Sermon on the Mount central to the approved image of Jesus. But the Sermon
is not original Matthew, *its* core comes from the Lukan Sermon on the
Plain, whose Beatitudes are obviously earlier in form that the Matthean
ones; the Lukan Lord's Prayer (not part of Luke's sermon, but packed into
Matthew's more capacious one) is also typologically earlier than the
Matthean expansion. And so on through a whole list of Lk > Mt
directionalities, several of which I have earlier mentioned (there is an
independent stylometric test for these Lk > Mt passages: they are the ones
on which Goulder Paradigm is less fun to read than the others). It is in
Luke, not in Matthew (as Q experts have in effect acknowledged, by judging
the Lukan order of the passages in question more primitive than the Matthean
order), that we seem to be getting close to what people like best about the
Lk/Mk common material. That "Matthew" by himself, before either Gospel was
written, wrote or collected all these passages, in a form available both to
himself and to his somewhat contrary contemporary Luke,  goes contrary to
this other tendency. Luke is more likely to be closer, at least to the less
draconic part of the material.

So the Historical Matthew might have been on terms of reasonable personal
coziness with the Historical Brother, at least after c45, but as near as I
can discern from what seems the best evidence, neither of them seems likely
to have written, or on the textual record (as far as Matthew is concerned,
since he typically rewrote Luke's material) even to have been entirely
comfortable with, the more primitive Lukan material.

Wherever it was written, gMt stinks of Jerusalem. It is the Gospel for
Bishops; it is the Gospel of Rules. Luke, very likely working further north,
and in a low-rent area at that, took a distinctly different view of wealth,
and of other things as well. These tensions survive in the common material,
to which both of them have made their contribution (Luke by counseling
nonresistance to any enemy, etc; Matthew by thundering damnation against the
Galileans, etc). Those tensions within the material are obvious enough, I
should have thought, to somewhat discourage the idea that all of it comes
from the same hand, or is otherwise mutually consistent.

I continue to counsel that discouragement, and to recommend looking under
other stones for the earliest witnesses to Jesus - and for that matter, the
earliest witnesses to the concerns and solutions of his followers, in the
decade or so directly after his death.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

BRUCE: ..... tossing all the alleged sayings of Jesus into the same hat, and
from that hatful identifying the authentic Jesus sayings by their stylistic
features, as many (including the influential Bultmann) essentially do, is
worthless.

RON: That is a parody of what I have done. The web page below and its sequel
describe a logical approach.

BRUCE: Methodologically speaking, if we put Gnomic in, we are going to get
Nice out. The result is circular; that is, it is foreordained. I think the
whole procedure is invalid.

RON: What nonsense. There is nothing inherent in the aphoristic style which
makes their content "nice".

- - - - - - -

BRUCE: ..... (1) the Mission to Jews
came first, and was for a time the whole content of Jesus movement
proselytizing, and .... (2) the Mission to Gentiles came later.

RON: Then you should recognize that Mt 10:5b and Mt 10:23 (both of which are
gnomic) constitute early testimony to an outlook which Mark and Luke
declined to include in their more gentile-friendly gospels.

- - - - - - -

BRUCE: I don't think Mark is pushing anything; I think he is keeping his
story up to date with what is going on in the Christian movement with which
he was in touch.

RON: Mark was an evangelist and the pioneer who created the gospel genre. He
was no passive recorder.

- - - - - - -

BRUCE (earlier): There is a Markan parallel to the Beelzebul Accusation (Mk
3:22-27), but none to the gathers/scatters verse.

RON (earlier) : Mark's version of said verse was parked elsewhere (Mk 9:40).

BRUCE: ..... I have trouble, for reasons repeatedly given above, with the
verb "parked." It implies a single assembly from a bag of mixed pieces. The
whole structure of the text tells me different. Mark is a very early
original consecutive narrative ..... I very much doubt that a text
assembled from a basketful of disconnected sayings would have the form of a
consecutive but repeatedly interpolated text.

RON: Again this is a parody of my position. The backbone is provided by the
narrative. The aphorisms incorporated in Mark constitute between 5% and 10%
of the text, and they were inserted at appropriate points in the pre-planned
structure.

Ron Price,

Derbyshire, UK

http://homepage.virgin.net/ron.price/syno_dblt.html



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

On 04/02/2012 13:16, "Bruce Brooks" <brooks@...> wrote:

> The center of all these Logia theories, I suspect, is the wish to make the
> Sermon on the Mount central to the approved image of Jesus.

Bruce,

Having parodied my position twice in your last contribution, you now turn to
questioning my motive, and apparently the motives of the majority of NT
scholars.

This is no way to carry out a rational discussion.

I can assure you I had no such motive when I investigated the logia.

Ron Price,

Derbyshire, UK

http://homepage.virgin.net/ron.price/index.htm



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

To: Synoptic
In Response To: Ron
On: Aphorisms
From: Bruce

Ron disputes the niceness of his set of Sayings, and denies an intention to
make them so. The Q cluster, by any other name and in any version of which I
am aware, including Ron's, does indeed contain some hard stuff. It also
contains some nice stuff, and empirical research could probably establish
that it is the latter which overwhelmingly occupies the attention of Q
proponents and their converts. But let's take a more nuanced view. Here
goes.

RON: RON: What nonsense. There is nothing inherent in the aphoristic style
which makes their content "nice".

BRUCE: As a principle of selection, I am afraid there is. (1) Restriction to
sayings and exclusion of actions wipes out, in advance of any determination
about their value, any hints of what Jesus may have DONE, and most
critically, anything he did that led to his death. This is already a
distortion; a limitation of what one is willing to hear about. It eliminates
the Messiah figure in favor of the Preacher figure. (2) Among sayings, some
of which in Mark (but not in Q) are directly Davidic, the aphorisms tend to
be wisdom talk, able to be received as detached and nonsituational. That's
two selection principles so far, and for me, it's two too many.

But the Q net, or anyway the sorting principle with which classical Q
proponents start, does indeed bring in some strange fish. We might consider
some of the less nice of the Q sayings (limiting ourselves to those in Ron's
smaller set), and see what their Jesus credentials might be, since that is
their claim on our attention.

(A4). It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away
than for one stroke in a letter of the law to be dropped.

Comment: This is an extreme legalism, which the Markan Jesus would seem to
have consistently opposed. Jesus in practice ignored many of the
conventional pieties, and he also disputed Moses' rule on divorce. Not
credibly Jesuine; rather, characteristically Matthean.

(B10) Do you think that I have come to bring peace on earth?
I did not come to bring peace but a sword.
For I have come to set son against father,
and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her
mother-in-law.

Comment: Likely reflects the difficulties of the early Church, when families
were denouncing each other to Paul or the later Roman murderers. The logic
of it is this: If Jesus can be seen as predicting my troubles, then by
definition, my troubles are somehow OK. This is something practical to tell
to the suffering faithful (those who visit the sick in our time will know
what I mean), but the sufferings here described are likely those of the
posthumous Christian period. There is no hint in Mark of any reprisals upon,
or even any danger to, those who follow and believe Jesus (only to Jesus
himself). That stuff came later. Not plausible, then, as an original remark
of Jesus.

(C12) Truly I tell you, among those standing here there are some who will
not taste death
  before they see the kingdom of God come with power.

Comment: Unfortunately, this did not come about, a fact on which the
commentators do not greatly dwell. Did Jesus say it and was he mistaken? I
am quite ready to discover a Jesus who made mistakes, and Mark shows a
number of those mistakes. But this saying too is typologically an
encouragement to the later faithful, a renewal of an earlier guarantee that
seemed not to have been honored (hence the emphatic, Amen, I tell you). What
is the probable date of this, in terms of Years After Jesus? The promise is
that not everyone in the present generation will die before the promised
Return occurs. Then some have already died, raising the doubt which this
saying is meant to dispel. I don't have actuarial figures for probable rates
of death in the cohort of Jesus followers, nor do I know their median ages
or their number. But I would guess we are somewhere at least 10 years out
from the death of Jesus. Then not plausibly Jesuine.

(C21)  Truly I tell you, when God's kingdom comes,
and the Son of Man is seated on his glorious throne,
you who have followed me will likewise sit on twelve thrones,
judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

Comment: see above, and note again the emphatic reassurance, the Amen. A
specific promise to specific individuals. Where is the fulfillment? Answer:
Nowhere. This is then another consoling or encouraging remark, made in times
of seeming adversity, which the near future is expected to redeem. Only (and
I think we need to face this), it didn't. Is it out of the question that
Jesus himself might have been mistaken? On the contrary. But this and the
preceding have the same character, and the structure of the Markan version
of the preceding shows that at least one comment of this type is late in the
Markan tradition. If late, then presumptively inauthentic.

(D114) Keep awake, then, for you do not know on what day your master is
coming.
Be sure of this: if the householder had known at what time of night the
thief was coming,
  he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into.
So you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do
not expect.

Comment: At some point (and that point can be localized, if one wants to
consider the evidence), the shepherds of the post-Jesus flock ceased making
time-specific promises, for obvious reasons including the repeated failure
of those promises, and confined themselves to more general counsels of
readiness, like this one.  I understand the tactic, but it is a tactic which
is most intelligible in the post-Jesus years. In this case, most likely the
rather late post-Jesus years.

----------------

In short, all of these are intelligible as arising in the later history of
the church, and as highly relevant to the situation of that church. Since
(for the most part) they turn up in what are demonstrably the Second Tier
Gospels, and since one likely motive for the writing of Second Tier Gospels
in the first place is precisely to address previously unexperienced
difficulties, or to give new and more convincing answers to old but still
unsolved problems, the presumption for anything in those Gospels, whether
rewritten from Mark or newly invented, is that it arises for reasons rooted
in the experience of the later church. That's the presumption, which seems
to me to be fulfilled in the above samples.

The Second Tier Gospels are not exclusively Nice territory (they only become
so when selectively read); they are also cursing territory. Luke curses the
rich, Matthew curses the Galileans, thus vacating the entire tradition of
Jesus's preaching. And by the way, why the latter, which is verbally
identical in Mt = Lk and thus a prime Q candidate, is not in Ron's
collection, I cannot guess. Perhaps he can enlighten us.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

(A4). It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away
than for one stroke in a letter of the law to be dropped.

Comment by Bruce: This is an extreme legalism

Reply: Might that not depend on the tone of voice used
when spoken?  Could that possibly have been one of
exasperation?


David M.


---------
David Mealand,     University of Edinburgh


--
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

Is it not true also that by the time of Jesus, the Torah was held in such high
esteem that the Law was considered to have existed from before the Creation.
Given that the physical universe was also expected to be destroyed in some
circumstances, it is not a difficult thing for  a Jew to make such a statement
of belief at this juncture in the religious development of Judaism.
Dennis
---------------------

Dennis Goffin

Chorleywood UK

  To: Synoptic@yahoogroups.com
From: D.Mealand@...
Date: Sat, 4 Feb 2012 18:40:44 +0000
Subject: Re: [Synoptic-L] Aphorisms & tone of voice






























(A4). It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away

than for one stroke in a letter of the law to be dropped.



Comment by Bruce: This is an extreme legalism



Reply: Might that not depend on the tone of voice used

when spoken?  Could that possibly have been one of

exasperation?



David M.



---------

David Mealand,     University of Edinburgh



--

The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in

Scotland, with registration number SC005336.


















[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

To: Synoptic / GPG
In Response To: David Mealand
On: One of Ron's Logia
From: Bruce

I had suggested . . . well, here is the suggestion:

(A4). It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one stroke in
a letter of the law to be dropped.

BRUCE: This is an extreme legalism

DAVID: Might that not depend on the tone of voice used when spoken?  Could
that possibly have been one of exasperation?

BRUCE: I confess to being uneasy with this suggestion. If we are free to
treat any given awkward saying as exasperated, or ironic, or otherwise to be
interpreted in the opposite of its surface sense, we can certainly make a
more consistent panSynoptic Jesus. I find the technique intrinsically
suspect, in part a priori, because I don't see convincing signs of it in the
texts. (Shakespeare's sarcastic "So are they all, all honorable men" has
been ground deep into the literary consciousness of all modern persons, but
that does not make it any less a modern attitude). Whole books have been
written to show that Jesus was rigidly Torah-observant, but it seems to me
that Matthew, not any earlier source, is home territory for this
Torah-observant interpretation. I think for instance of "These you ought to
have done, without neglecting the others," as preserving the whole Torah
(meaning, the whole Pharisee list of minute purity rules and observances)
while still directing emphasis to its more important parts.

OTHER VIEWS

In other texts, I get a very different view of the little rules, which is
that they are too burdensome to be observed. Together with the rule that
infraction of one is infraction of all, they condemn all who recognize their
validity to being violators of the law. This idea is taken up by Paul (the
Law kills), but it is also in the parts of Mark that seem philologically to
be pre-Pauline. it seems, in short, to be Jesuine. It is common currency
among Didache specialists (has everybody been going to those SBL sessions?
If not, it is now too late, since 2011 was the last one) that the Didache
recognizes only "the Second Table of the Law [Decalogue]." The point of
interest, which I have tried with modest success to urge on the Didache
people, is that the Markan Jesus does exactly the same thing. He is firm on
the "honor thy father and mother" part, but contemptuous of the sacrificial
piety part (Sabbath), not to mention the fine points of householding
(washing of vessels, washing of persons, all that stuff). Second Table.
(This is not a precise designation, but those who use it know what they mean
by it, and so does everybody else, so it will do as a label).

Accordingly, and on the merits of the larger evidence, I think that we have
here two Jesuses, one Matthean and Full Torah, one Markan and Second Table.
I think we must choose, and I think the historically responsible choice is
in favor of the Markan Jesus as the authentic one. Matthew is then a Torah
Reactionary, which is what I mean by saying that he is a Jerusalemite at
heart. Since the Rabbinic hit list of five includes him, and since that list
would fit the Jerusalem scene after the Agrippa purge (one Zebedee, not two;
no Peter, etc), I think it is reasonable to put the Matthew mentioned on
that hit list as being in Jerusalem in c45. It is this line of thought that
leads to the idea, previously suggested in partial support of one of Ron's
points, that Matthew may have gotten along not all that badly with the
latecomer Jerusalem Biggie, James the Brother.

Did that same Matthew write the Gospel of Matthew? If so, at least according
to my calculations, it was considerably later, since Luke A had to come
first, and we can deduce some things about Luke A. That the original Matthew
was pre-70 is shown by his retaining without revision the Markan Caligula
prediction (whereas at some point Luke, and most likely it was Luke B, did
add a line unmistakably referring to Titus's siege).

But it need not be long pre-70; I should think that sometime in the early
60's would suffice.

THE BIG PICTURE

If we now go to the Roman world and squint through that end of the
telescope: What would be the most likely external stimulus for the emergence
of the Second Tier Gospels?

One motive for writing down the life and/or sayings of some leading figure
is the death of that figure; whence the Analects of Confucius (in its first
layer); whence the Gospel of Mark (ditto). But history marked another strong
line of division with the deaths of the two leading Apostles, Peter and
Paul, both probably by the end of 64 (that Nero continued to burn Christians
while in exile from Rome seems not among the likelier speculations). That
defined the end of an era, and allowed others to take up the burden of
making authoritative pronouncements; in fact, of filling the empty Apostolic
function of authoritative pronouncement. There were three foci from which
such an effort might have been made: (1) Galilee or other focus of primitive
Christianity, (2) Jerusalem, or other focus of reactionary Christianity, and
(3) Ephesus, or other focus of Pauline Christianity. I think all three were
heard from within a couple of years, as follows: (2) Luke A, expressing a
somewhat radical poverty development of the primitives, (3) Matthew,
expressing the pro-Torah and otherwise conservative Jerusalem view, and (3)
the entire deuteroPauline literature, starting with the collection of the
letters known to their compiler and the composition of Colossians as an
summary and introduction to the rest.

These people all take part in the general trends affecting Christianity as a
whole, but they also express their different and sometimes conflicting
views. In fact, even among the deuteroPaulines there are three lines of
development and replacement: 2 Thess on updating the Second Coming
expectation, by then an extreme problem; the Pastorals, pushing local church
organization in the disappearance of the wandering authority pattern of the
Apostolic age, and the Colossians-Ephesians Gnostic sequence (whose Gnostic
tendencies are in fact deplored in the Pastoral group; the Paulinists
themselves had factions and differences of opinion).

This is a messy picture, but if we are to get all the NT on the
flannelgraph, some messiness is inevitable. We can only try to make it the
appropriate messiness. I submit that the Matthew/Luke split and opposition,
on some key points of doctrine and practice, is analogous to the
intraPauline wars. It seems to me that everybody, in their sometimes waspish
way, is trying to pick up the torch of authority which had just been dropped
by the two leading figures - figures of the time when the satellite churches
could successfully be run by correspondence and occasional visits of persons
of recognized standing, working from a central headquarters.

Not only do we know from Paul that both Peter (on the primitive side) and
James the Brother (on the strict reactionary or Jerusalem side) went about
filling precisely that roving-supervisory function, but we know that they
took their wives along when they did it. A homey touch, that.

CONCLUDING

Matthew and Luke are, or aspire to be, the replacement for that suddenly
inoperative process. The authorities for all Christians. There is a race for
the tomb of Peter and Paul, just as cJn recounts the race of two disciples
to be first at the Tomb of Jesus. On evidence so far, Matthew seems to have
won that race over Luke, if only by a few steps, and except for a few weeks
around Christmas time.

Which is a long way of saying, No, I don't think any of these sayings can be
read in an opposite sense. I think that all the sayings, the remembered and
especially the invented, attest the passions of the day. It is merely that
the passions of the day were so often doctrinally and organizationally
opposed to each other. Stuffy rich Matthew and economically radical Luke. I
should think that no one familiar with the intricate and fratricidal Left
Deviationism and Right Deviationism in the communist persuasion of recent
memory will need any further help in imagining the Christian scene in the
late 60's and beyond.

Respectfully suggested,

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

(A4). It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away
than for one stroke in a letter of the law to be dropped.

Bruce (or at least my extract from his posting)
...Matthew is then a Torah Reactionary...

David
The version of the saying under discussion
was the one found in Luke, and the issue what
it might have been before Matthew phrased his
version as he did.

David M.



---------
David Mealand,     University of Edinburgh


--
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

To: Synoptic / GPG
In Response To: David Mealand
On: Legalism
From: Bruce

David had recapitulated a bit of my previous note to Ron, and then added his
own comment. Here is the entire group, beginning with my quote of Ron's
saying A4:

(A4). It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one stroke in
a letter of the law to be dropped.

Bruce (or at least [David's] extract from [that] posting) ...Matthew is then
a Torah Reactionary...

David: The version of the saying under discussion was the one found in Luke,
and the issue what it might have been before Matthew phrased his version as
he did.

Bruce (now):  I think the issue is the directionality. Is Luke B taking on a
Matthean saying, or is Matthew incorporating a Lukan A one?

Matthew's Sermon on the Mount is at its core a transfer (and
middle-classification) of Luke's Sermon on the Plain, Beatitudes and all
(though not the Woes), and so my default presumption is that the other bits
of the Matthean Sermon which have parallels in Luke were all scrounged by
Matthew from Lukan A originals. But the default presumption is not always
the final conclusion, and I think the present case is a good example.

On the Matthean side, we have a continuous exposition, from Mt 5:17 (our
passage) to 5:48 inclusive, showing how one must exceed the conventional
law: not only love your neighbor, but love even your enemy (this detail is
indeed from Luke). The theme of this whole section of the Matthean Sermon is
given at the end of the 5:17-20 passage (no Lukan parallel): "Unless your
righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never
enter the Kingdom of Heaven." This is what I call "extreme legalism." There
is here no question of a Lukan or other outside original.

On the Lukan side, we have three sayings which come from nonconsecutive
places in Mt:

Lk 16:16. Law and prophets were until John ( ~ Mt 11:12-13)
Lk 16:17. Easier for Heaven/Earth to pass away ( ~ Mt 5:18, SM)
Lk 16:18. Against divorce ( ~ Mt 5:32, SM)

M Goulder (2/629-632) argues for Lukan secondarity, as of course he would.
He makes some perhaps useful points about Luke cleaning up Matthew's
diction. The meaning of "violently" in Lk 16:16 has exercised the
commentators greatly; I can't solve it either. But on the larger scale, I
think MG misses, or rather gets wrong, the most impressive bit of evidence
for Lukan secondarity of all three of these short passages, which is that as
a group they interrupt a very consecutive sequence in Luke, on the theme of
contempt for worldly riches and concern for heavenly riches. Thus:

Lk 16:1-13. The Canny Steward (give away money)
Lk 16:14-15. The money-loving of the Pharisees is an abomination in the
sight of God
- - - -
16:19-31. Dives and Lazarus (the rich will go to hell)

I have put in a little dotted line where the three verses under discussion
go. I think it is obvious that the main sweep of Lk 16 is on the riches
theme, and that the three verses now coming between the Avaricious Pharisees
and the Condemned Rich Man are thematically (and given their brevity, also
formally) intrusive.

Then the implied order is here Mt > Lk for all three. If the Lukan saying on
the tittles of the Law is milder than the Matthean thundering on the same
subject (and thus perhaps more attractive for a modern florilegium), it is
still a Matthean theme, which Luke A as a whole did not share, and which in
Luke B is formally intrusive. It represents Luke B moving toward the
Matthean position, as he does at many other places also, not least the
Gentile Mission (where again, its introduction causes formal and thematic
inconsecutivity in the final Luke).

We can't really get next to the Sermon on the Mount until we can distinguish
its borrowed and transfigured Lukan A elements from its firm and confident
and portly Matthean additions. There may be a presentation on this subject
at SBL in November; time will tell.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

To: Synoptic / GPG
On: The Sermon on the Mount
From: Bruce

My recent note on the Matthean Sermon was perhaps just a trifle brief. One
should preferably deal with that subject at Hans Dieter Betz length (and at
his prices, and while we are at it, I should get 15%). Herewith a tiny
followup. I was arguing that the Tittles of the Law bit is Matthean, not
Lukan, and that it expresses an extreme Legalism typical of Matthew. I
should have added that the Tittles bit is not merely typical: by position,
it is the cardinal statement of the Matthean Sermon. And why? Because it is
the takeoff for the longest single segment of the Sermon, and because it is
the first piece in the Sermon that is not warmed-over Luke, and instead
comes straight out of Matthew's own worldview.

It takes not much sensitivity to texts and text variants to discern that
Mt's Beatitudes are spiritualized versions of the Lukan Beatitudes. By
"spiritualized," I mean economically watered down. Luke, as he shows in his
Parable of Dives and Lazarus, finds wealth punishable and poverty a ticket
to Heaven. When he says "Blessed are you poor, for yours is the Kingdom of
God," he thus, demonstrably, means exactly that. Matthew mutes this to
"Blessed are the poor *in spirit* for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven." He
means it too, in the sense that even the rich can have their
disappointments, their existential downs, their moments of Angst, and by
having them, they are headed straight for the Kingdom. So again with the
blessing on the hungry, who in Matthew become "those who hunger and thirst
after righteousness,* not those with a perilously low Engels quotient;
another removal of the economic qualification, and a substitution of pious
intention. We next come to the Salt remark and the Light Under a Bushel
remark, which are not merely recycled Luke, but reprocessed Mark. We have
not yet seen the naked hand of Matthew.

We first get it at Mt 5:17-20, which is precisely where the reinstatement of
the entire Law occurs. (I have earlier argued, with a little help from
Michael Goulder, and won't here repeat, that the Lukan parallel here - not
shown in all synopses, but it should be - is derivative, not primary,
because it and its neighbors are interruptive in Luke).

Mark's Jesus, it will be remembered, acknowledged only the intrahuman
portion of the Decalogue. See for instance Mk 10:19, where Jesus lists the
relevant commandments: five from Moses and one, the one against fraud, of
his own coinage (with a little help from other parts of the Pentateuch).
Jesus wanted to get rid of the Pharisaic handwashing baggage, which by its
sheer weight and its status as law was keeping good people out of the
Kingdom (however conceived). None of this for Matthew: he reaffirms the
entire package. And what next? He proceeds to scoop up various pre-existing
law statements *and extend them.* He opens this series by saying that unless
your righteousness (law-conformity) exceeds that of the scribes and
Pharisees, you are out of the Kingdom. This is not the Jesus line, but a
reversal of it. Matthew continues, "You have heard that you shall not kill,
but I say unto you, even he who is angry with his brother will be liable to
judgement." That is, he will be guilty of the crime he was tempted to
commit. No credit here for resisting temptation, and not after all killing
your brother. For most people, not killing your brother would count as a
meritorious abstention, but not for Matthew; the very thought condemns you.
(Mt 5:21-26).

And so on down the list, multiplying crimes of intention.

As we go, with an eye on the Lukan parallels where they exist, we can hardly
help seeing that Matthew systematically excises every line that would count
as unsound business practice. Out, for instance, goes Luke's command to
"lend, expecting nothing in return" (Lk 6:35, cf the hole between  Mt 5:47
and 5:48). Out goes Luke's command in Lk 12:33 (not unlike that of Jesus in
Mk 10:21, that piece being paralleled in place by both Mt and Lk, but
perhaps a little mechanically in one of those cases) to sell everything you
own, replaced by a vaguer command to lay up treasures in Heaven. The laying
up part is congenial to Matthew; the divesting part he tends to dodge.

The Sermon on the Mount contains some fine things, all of them at second
hand, and some of them slightly damaged in transit. When it is done,
Matthew's income and investments are still intact. Not for him any emotional
time, any purse time, spent on the decamisados of this world.

CONCLUSION

People can like one or the other (it is just that those who go with Matthew
will have more company), and I don't care which, but the present
philological point is that Matthew and Luke are very easy to distinguish,
and that the retention of Pharisaic minutiae, and the extension of crimes of
commission into crimes of intention, are distinctively, and centrally,
Matthean.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Bruce (now): I think the issue is the directionality.
Is Luke B taking on a Matthean saying, or is Matthew
incorporating a Lukan A one?

Reply
Well to focus on just this and not the other 650 words
in the response:

You think that Mark included this in his text first
   \O  OURANOS KAI \H GH PARELEUSONTAI  \OI DE LOGOI MOU
OU MH PARELEUSONTAI

(Matthew and Luke both presumably know that, as they both
include it with minimal changes.)

Then your assertion is that either one, or the other,
of these writers _created_  either the version of the aphorism
that we find in Luke (the one under discussion), _ or_ the
one found in Matthew, (which are differently formulated),
and you consider the latter more likely.

Have I understood you correctly?

I am not demanding what I am told is the brevity some
tea party or other specifies, but I would appreciate
the focus being on the aphorism.

David M.




---------
David Mealand,     University of Edinburgh


--
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

Gentleman,



I would like to ask a question. I am not in your class as a Biblical scholar and
if my question is intrusive I will quickly crawl back into my hole.



It seems to me that much of the debate centres around the question of whether
the direction of Synoptic interrelationships demonstrates a very Jewish Jesus
(in the sense of adherence to the Law) whose message was corrupted by Paul, and
the Gospel of Mark, for the sake of a Gentile mission; or whether the historical
Jesus was as revolutionary in much the same terms as Paul and Mark, and that the
Gospel of Matthew is an attempt to claw him back for Judaism.



In the previous post Bruce Brooks has portrayed Matthew as an ideological
Pharisee, selectively editing and expanding Synoptic material so as to portray
Jesus in the same light. Matthew's programmatic statement is found in Matthew
5:17-20. With particular reference to this Matthean passage, I am wondering how
the argument of John P. Meier has fared in the debate. In his 1978 book, The
Vision of Matthew, Meier argues that the statement that the Law will not pass
away is time-conditioned by two clauses within verse 18: "Until heaven and earth
pass away" and "until all is accomplished". Briefly stated, his argument is that
the permanence of the Law is time-conditioned by the two "until" passages which
show that the Law does not continue for ever, but is terminated by
eschatological events. He further argues that the second conditional clause
modifies the first. He asserts that in Matthew it is always events in the life
of Jesus which fulfil what is written. Finally he points to the way in which
Matthew pulls out all plugs to portray the death/resurrection of Jesus as *the*
eschatological event which includes the resurrection of the saints, and which
terminates the Law. There is more to Meier's argument, especially in dealing
with the notion of prophetic fulfilment and the way in which the Law itself
"prophesies" in Matthew's Gospel.



If Meier is right, then Matthew certainly presents himself in Pharisaic
ideological terms, but with the purpose of subverting that very stance with an
eschatological argument. I don't know how well Meier's argument has been
received, but Meier himself certainly has not retreated into obscurity, being
the author of the 4 volume "A Marginal Jew", a former president of the Catholic
Biblical Association, and I believe currently Professor of New Testament at the
University of Notre Dame.



Greg



From: Synoptic@yahoogroups.com [mailto:Synoptic@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of E
Bruce Brooks
Sent: Monday, 6 February 2012 11:29 PM
To: Synoptic
Cc: GPG
Subject: [Synoptic-L] The Sermon on the Mount





To: Synoptic / GPG
On: The Sermon on the Mount
From: Bruce






[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

To: Synoptic
In Response To: David Mealand
On: Directionality
From: Bruce

David had set up the problem of the "shall not pass away" saying this way:

------------

Bruce (earlier): I think the issue is the directionality. Is Luke B taking
on a Matthean saying, or is Matthew incorporating a Lukan A one?

David: You think that Mark included this in his text first
   \O  OURANOS KAI \H GH PARELEUSONTAI  \OI DE LOGOI MOU OU MH PARELEUSONTAI
(Matthew and Luke both presumably know that, as they both include it with
minimal changes.)

Then your assertion is that either one, or the other, of these writers
_created_  either the version of the aphorism that we find in Luke (the one
under discussion), _ or_ the one found in Matthew, (which are differently
formulated), and you consider the latter more likely.

Have I understood you correctly?

Bruce: Yes, except that I would not call the Tittle saying a version; I
would call it a derivative. Jesus's word in Mk 13, coming at the end of a
vivid description of the Last Days, has its context here: [13:30] "Truly I
say to you, this generation will not pass away before all these things take
place. [31] Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass
away."

This promises two things: (1) The End Days will occur within the present
generation, and some now living will see it, and (2) Despite the end of all
other things, Jesus's word (his promise as to the survival of the elect)
will not pass away, but will hold firm. There is nothing in this about the
Law.

Mt 5:17, on the other hand, has nothing to do with the End Days, it has to
do with the permanence of the Law (right to the end of the End Days. The
same can be said of the briefer but similar Lk 16:17. One of the two has
then taken a guarantee about Jesus's promise to the faithful, whose
permanence he guarantees, and borrowed a sonorous phrase from it to make a
saying about the permanence of the Law.

Of Mt and Lk, which one did this borrowing and adaptation? We can look at
two kinds of evidence: (1) the characteristic emphases of Matthew and Luke,
for which see my previous post, or (2) the structure of the respective
sayings in context, which I venture to repeat. The point here is that Lk
16:7 and its two neighbors, all with counterparts in Mt, are as a group
intrusive into a series of poverty pronouncements and parables in Lk. Notice
that Lk 16:14-15, criticizing the avarice of the Pharisees, segues very
smoothly into Lk 16:19-31, the Dives and Lazarus parable, which illustrates
it by showing that it is poverty, not wealth, which goes to Heaven. Then Lk
16:17 and its neighbors are later introductions into Lk 16, while Mt 5:17,
which is perfectly consecutive in its Matthean context, is original.

This makes it a Matthean creation, based on a phrase picked up from Mark and
used to quite a different end.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

To: Synoptic
In Response To: Greg Crawford
On: Jesus Criteria
From: Bruce

GREG: It seems to me that much of the debate centres around the question of
whether the direction of Synoptic interrelationships demonstrates a very
Jewish Jesus (in the sense of adherence to the Law) whose message was
corrupted by Paul, and the Gospel of Mark, for the sake of a Gentile
mission; or whether the historical Jesus was as revolutionary in much the
same terms as Paul and Mark, and that the Gospel of Matthew is an attempt to
claw him back for Judaism.

BRUCE: I think it is (or ought to be) about simply what the Synoptic
sequence tells us, never mind exactly whose expectation that fulfills. The
Synoptic order (Mk > Mt > Lk [in its final state] > Jn)  is a relative
order, and that is already very helpful, but the absolute dates also make a
big difference. The usual view is that all the Gospels are later than Paul,
and thus presumptively more compromised than Paul as sources about the
original Jesus group. Since Paul insists that he is not interested in Jesus
prior to his death, that leaves a sort of tabula rasa. My conclusion is that
Mark is early, not late, and that it was composed over a timespan of about
15 years, ending more less with the persecutions of Herod Agrippa I in
Jerusalem (Mk knows about the death of James Zebedee, c44, but nothing
later). This makes it overlap chronologically with Paul, but also to be in
part earlier than Paul. To me, this changes the evidential values very
significantly. I think it moves this kind of research importantly forward.

As to the Markan Jesus, I find him very Jewish (it is the Second Tier
Gospels which adopt a more cosmopolitan horizon), but NOT in the sense of
Torah observance; rather, Jesus in Mark appears as a very Jewish reform
prophet, with many precedents in Jewish tradition (and not a few parallels
in contemporary Jewish thought and feeling), who was trying to get back to
the essentials rather than the frills of the Law. So were the Essenes in
their way. There is more than one way of being Jewish, you see. It must then
follow that the word "Jewish" is too broad to have any analytical value. I
venture to make that suggestion.

GREG: In the previous post Bruce Brooks has portrayed Matthew as an
ideological Pharisee, selectively editing and expanding Synoptic material so
as to portray Jesus in the same light. Matthew's programmatic statement is
found in Matthew 5:17-20. With particular reference to this Matthean
passage, I am wondering how the argument of John P. Meier has fared in the
debate. In his 1978 book, The Vision of Matthew, Meier argues that the
statement that the Law will not pass away is time-conditioned by two clauses
within verse 18: "Until heaven and earth pass away" and "until all is
accomplished". Briefly stated, his argument is that the permanence of the
Law is time-conditioned by the two "until" passages which show that the Law
does not continue for ever, but is terminated by eschatological events. He
further argues that the second conditional clause modifies the first. He
asserts that in Matthew it is always events in the life of Jesus which
fulfil what is written. Finally he points to the way in which Matthew pulls
out all plugs to portray the death/resurrection of Jesus as *the*
eschatological event which includes the resurrection of the saints, and
which terminates the Law. There is more to Meier's argument, especially in
dealing with the notion of prophetic fulfilment and the way in which the Law
itself "prophesies" in Matthew's Gospel.

BRUCE: To say that the Law holds until the universe itself comes apart is to
make the Law valid for all finite intents and purposes. And as Greg notes,
there is more about Law in Matthew than just that passage. I quoted some of
it. Matthew's great message is Fulfilment of Scripture, and of course also
Fulfilment of Law; for him, the Law and the Prophets are aspects of the same
thing: the ongoing validity of past Jewish tradition - *as interpreted by
himself.* Matthew is the great architect of the Predicted Jesus; notice the
ten conspicuously Hebraic (not Septuagintal) quotes in Matthew, all of which
have the same quotation formula, and all of which predict Jesus or the
things that happen to him. This is how, for Matthew, the Law and the
Prophets converge in Jesus. But on the way to that grand vision, Matthew
also reinstates, as permanently valid and as binding on individuals, the
small Pharisaic (or other) additions to the Law whose validity the Markan
Jesus - who is presumptively nearer than Matthew's construct to the
Historical Jesus - had very conspicuously and consistently denied. I don't
know if "claws back" is the right verb for this, but I do agree - I assert -
that Matthew is trying to rehabilitate Jesus from something like a Jerusalem
Establishment point of view: to make Jesus strictly Torah observant.

Matthew is holistic in regard to scriptural prediction, and he is holistic
with respect to the law. He may be motivated in having Jesus himself affirm
the validity of the entire Law by a wish to meet contemporary Jewish
objections that Jesus had blasphemed against Moses. For an echo of that
charge, see the story of Stephen in Acts (Ac 6:11), which is typologically
modeled on the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin. See also Klausner on the
objections to Jesus in Rabbinical tradition.

GREG: If Meier is right, then Matthew certainly presents himself in
Pharisaic ideological terms, but with the purpose of subverting that very
stance with an eschatological argument. I don't know how well Meier's
argument has been received, but Meier himself certainly has not retreated
into obscurity, being the author of the 4 volume "A Marginal Jew", a former
president of the Catholic Biblical Association, and I believe currently
Professor of New Testament at the University of Notre Dame.

BRUCE: If we are measuring by avoirdupois, Meier is even more impressive
than that, since I am told that volumes beyond v4 are on the way. But as to
impressiveness in general: it is surely not much of an argument. I hate to
reveal this seemingly professional secret, but Professors (and for that
matter, Universities) come in all grades and shades. Some professors are
outright dishonest (it is considered bad form to name names in this area,
though insiders know them very well), and some institutions systematically
condone or even encourage dishonesty. But even in honest mode, some people
are just better at their trade (or luckier in their efforts) than others.
Hence the futility, as well as the endlessness, of arguing from names as
though names were authorities. Names are not authorities. We can only
examine the respective arguments, as best we can, and see if they appear
sound.

The point is not whether Meier says something, but what evidence he uses to
arrive at what he says.

Meier himself (in Marginal 1/168f) has listed his Historical Jesus criteria.
I seem to recall doing an analysis of these, some time back, on this list or
one of its cousins. I won't attempt to hunt it up now. But in brief, I find
that the Meier criteria tend not to be very good, and much worse, they
ignore very strong evidence of different kinds, including the Gospel
sequence (and presumptive probity as evidence) mentioned above.

It would be nice if there were some substitute for one's own judgement, or
for the judgement of careful people in general. I haven't found one so far
(every person or institution to which one hopes to delegate one's own duty
of judgement somehow turns out to be fallible). If someone has a suggestion,
though, I am all ears. Thinking is a lot of work, and I could probably put
the time to good use elsewhere.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

It is interesting that amongst the followers of Jesus there was not only Simon
the Zealot but there was also Judah the Sicarius.
The Pharisaic movement was a broad church which included not only those who were
prepared to try to bring in the kingdom of God by force of arms but also those,
the Sicarii, who were prepared to assassinate those Jews who they regarded as
collaborators.
  Jesus himself was clearly a Pharisee, since his views regarding the afterlife
matched theirs entirely. Where he differed however was that he belonged rather
to the quietistic side of the movement which was happy to accept Roman rule as
long as the Jews retained religious freedom. This attitude however would have
been unpopular with the more hotheaded nationalistic members of the movement who
could not even stomach a half Jew as a king, let alone the Romans.
  It is easy to see therefore that if it became a choice for the general
population between Jesus bar Abbas, a guerilla leader and stalwart patriot who
had risked his life with his companions fighting the Romans and Jesus of
Nazareth, the Jews were always going to choose the fighter against the pacifist.
  It was no good Jesus preaching that his kingdom was not of this world, a
popular wonder worker such as he was easily aroused the messianic hopes of the
multitude, much to the discomfiture of the Jewish establishment. It is
unsurprising therefore that the Jewish authorities took the opportunity to
remove him from circulation by passing him over to the Romans for condemnation
on a charge of sedition. It would seem also that Judah the Sicarius became
disillusioned with the pacifist approach of Jesus, which is why he was prepared
to assist the Jewish authorities.
Dennis
---------------------

Dennis Goffin

Chorleywood UK




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Dennis,



There is no such person in the Gospels as "Judah the Sicarius"; it is rather
Judas Iscariot. The attempts to derive "Sicarius" from "Iscariot" join a long
list of derivations of dubious philology. These include the notion that
"Iscariot" meant "the man of lies", the man who "handed over", the many who dyed
things red, a fruit grower, a man with red hair or a ruddy complexion, the man
from Kerioth, the man from Askar/Jericho/Kartah or the man from "the city" (i.e.
Jerusalem).



The derivation of "saccarii" from Iscariot is not only one in a long list of
dubious derivations, it runs into the problem that the sicarii do not seem to
appear until the 40s and 50s of the 1st century - too late for Jesus.
Furthermore, the identification of Judas as "Iscariot" seems to derive from the
fact that his father was Simon Iscariot (John 6:71; 13:2, 26).



Greg



From: Synoptic@yahoogroups.com [mailto:Synoptic@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of
Dennis Goffin
Sent: Thursday, 9 February 2012 12:03 AM
To: gpg@yahoogroups.com; crosstalk2@yahoogroups.com; synoptic@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Synoptic-L] JUDAS THE SICARIOS







It is interesting that amongst the followers of Jesus there was not only Simon
the Zealot but there was also Judah the Sicarius.
The Pharisaic movement was a broad church which included not only those who were
prepared to try to bring in the kingdom of God by force of arms but also those,
the Sicarii, who were prepared to assassinate those Jews who they regarded as
collaborators.
Jesus himself was clearly a Pharisee, since his views regarding the afterlife
matched theirs entirely. Where he differed however was that he belonged rather
to the quietistic side of the movement which was happy to accept Roman rule as
long as the Jews retained religious freedom. This attitude however would have
been unpopular with the more hotheaded nationalistic members of the movement who
could not even stomach a half Jew as a king, let alone the Romans.
It is easy to see therefore that if it became a choice for the general
population between Jesus bar Abbas, a guerilla leader and stalwart patriot who
had risked his life with his companions fighting the Romans and Jesus of
Nazareth, the Jews were always going to choose the fighter against the pacifist.
It was no good Jesus preaching that his kingdom was not of this world, a popular
wonder worker such as he was easily aroused the messianic hopes of the
multitude, much to the discomfiture of the Jewish establishment. It is
unsurprising therefore that the Jewish authorities took the opportunity to
remove him from circulation by passing him over to the Romans for condemnation
on a charge of sedition. It would seem also that Judah the Sicarius became
disillusioned with the pacifist approach of Jesus, which is why he was prepared
to assist the Jewish authorities.
Dennis
---------------------

Dennis Goffin

Chorleywood UK



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Since you quote John, Greg, that must mean that you accept the accuracy of  11:
47-50. Is that so ?Dennis

---------------------

Dennis Goffin

Chorleywood UK

  To: Synoptic@yahoogroups.com
From: g.c@...
Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2012 01:08:30 +1100
Subject: RE: [Synoptic-L] JUDAS THE SICARIOS




























       Dennis,



There is no such person in the Gospels as "Judah the Sicarius"; it is rather

Judas Iscariot. The attempts to derive "Sicarius" from "Iscariot" join a long

list of derivations of dubious philology. These include the notion that

"Iscariot" meant "the man of lies", the man who "handed over", the many who dyed

things red, a fruit grower, a man with red hair or a ruddy complexion, the man

from Kerioth, the man from Askar/Jericho/Kartah or the man from "the city" (i.e.

Jerusalem).



The derivation of "saccarii" from Iscariot is not only one in a long list of

dubious derivations, it runs into the problem that the sicarii do not seem to

appear until the 40s and 50s of the 1st century - too late for Jesus.

Furthermore, the identification of Judas as "Iscariot" seems to derive from the

fact that his father was Simon Iscariot (John 6:71; 13:2, 26).



Greg



From: Synoptic@yahoogroups.com [mailto:Synoptic@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of

Dennis Goffin

Sent: Thursday, 9 February 2012 12:03 AM

To: gpg@yahoogroups.com; crosstalk2@yahoogroups.com; synoptic@yahoogroups.com

Subject: [Synoptic-L] JUDAS THE SICARIOS



It is interesting that amongst the followers of Jesus there was not only Simon

the Zealot but there was also Judah the Sicarius.

The Pharisaic movement was a broad church which included not only those who were

prepared to try to bring in the kingdom of God by force of arms but also those,

the Sicarii, who were prepared to assassinate those Jews who they regarded as

collaborators.

Jesus himself was clearly a Pharisee, since his views regarding the afterlife

matched theirs entirely. Where he differed however was that he belonged rather

to the quietistic side of the movement which was happy to accept Roman rule as

long as the Jews retained religious freedom. This attitude however would have

been unpopular with the more hotheaded nationalistic members of the movement who

could not even stomach a half Jew as a king, let alone the Romans.

It is easy to see therefore that if it became a choice for the general

population between Jesus bar Abbas, a guerilla leader and stalwart patriot who

had risked his life with his companions fighting the Romans and Jesus of

Nazareth, the Jews were always going to choose the fighter against the pacifist.

It was no good Jesus preaching that his kingdom was not of this world, a popular

wonder worker such as he was easily aroused the messianic hopes of the

multitude, much to the discomfiture of the Jewish establishment. It is

unsurprising therefore that the Jewish authorities took the opportunity to

remove him from circulation by passing him over to the Romans for condemnation

on a charge of sedition. It would seem also that Judah the Sicarius became

disillusioned with the pacifist approach of Jesus, which is why he was prepared

to assist the Jewish authorities.

Dennis

---------------------



Dennis Goffin



Chorleywood UK



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


















[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

On 2/8/2012 9:37 AM, Dennis Goffin wrote:
> Since you quote John, Greg, that must mean that you accept the accuracy of 
11: 47-50. Is that so ?Dennis

Since you note that Jesus thought that his Kingdom "was not of this
world",  does that mean that Jn 18:36 is "accurate"?

Jeffrey

--
---
Jeffrey B. Gibson  D.Phil. Oxon.
1500 W.  Pratt Blvd
Chicago, Il.
jgibson000@...

Jeffrey: Since you note that Jesus thought that his Kingdom "was not of this
world",  does that mean that Jn 18:36 is "accurate"?Dennis: The writer of John's
Gospel, like the Synoptics, had no way of knowing what exchange took place
between Jesus and Pilate. He therefore adopted the accepted convention of his
day, and put in Jesus' mouth what he considered his response to be, from what he
knew of the beliefs of Jesus from tradition. In so far as these beliefs would
seem to correspond with those prevalent in that sector of Judaism at that time,
I consider them "accurate".. Dennis
---------------------

Dennis Goffin

Chorleywood UKTo: Synoptic@yahoogroups.com
From: jgibson000@...
Date: Wed, 8 Feb 2012 09:54:20 -0600
Subject: Re: [Synoptic-L] JUDAS THE SICARIOS




























       On 2/8/2012 9:37 AM, Dennis Goffin wrote:

> Since you quote John, Greg, that must mean that you accept the accuracy of 
11: 47-50. Is that so ?Dennis



Since you note that Jesus thought that his Kingdom "was not of this

world",  does that mean that Jn 18:36 is "accurate"?



Jeffrey



--

---

Jeffrey B. Gibson  D.Phil. Oxon.

1500 W.  Pratt Blvd

Chicago, Il.

jgibson000@...


















[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

At the end of chapter 40, where he discusses Lk 22:17-20, Tertullian refers to
wine several times. However, he does not
use the phrase "fruit of the vine," as seen in Lk 22:18 (and also Mk 14:25 and
Mt 26:29). At least, that's what we see
in English. Could anyone who has access to Tertullian's Latin tell me whether he
actually says "wine," or does he use
something that could be seen as a Latin translation of the Greek for "fruit of
the vine?"Alternatively, does anyone know
of any versions of Lk 22:18 in other languages that contain something other than
a translation of "fruit of the vine?"

David Inglis, Lafayette, CA, 94549



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]