Re: Restored (and a final story for Luke and Daniel)

I guess now is as good a time as any to jump back into this discussion.
I agree with most of Robbie's responses to Tina. More additions to them
below.

L. Manning Vines wrote:

>I would bet that you're correct about John's being the last written of the
>gospels (or at least that it is the last substantial addition of new
>material to the gospels), though nobody really knows this and I'm curious
>about how you came to seem so sure (you sound like you've been reading Hyam
>Maccoby). In any case, the oldest fragment we have of any of the gospels,
>only about the size of a credit card, is referred to as P52 and is
>recognizably a fragment from the Gospel of John, dating to approximately 125
>CE. To people who pay attention to the dates on these things, that is Very
>Early. It was very probably not written by anyone who ever saw Jesus, true
>enough (there's at least a decent chance that none of the New Testament
>was), but that doesn't render it pure crap in any sense, even in a
>historical one.
>
Most NT scholarship I've read consistently identifies the Gospel of John
as the latest gospel written, placing it somewhere between 90 and 130
CE. Interestingly, it also bears the most marks of really being an
eyewitness account. So Tina's assumption that because it is the latest
it therefore offers us the least reliable information about Christ
doesn't necessarily work. Mark is traditionally seen as the oldest
gospel, Matthew and Luke following, but some recent scholarship argues,
from the presence and kind of semitisms in Matthew, that Matthew was
originially written in Aramaic and later translated into Greek, making
it the oldest Gospel. Most traditional NT scholarship sees the
synoptics as drawing from a "sayings source," Q or Quelle (I forget what
this means in German - probably just "source" or something like that).

Anyway, any decent NT survey can give anyone interested the reasons for
the dating of the Gospels, and the better ones can give the reasons for
most recognized alternate datings. Donald Guthrie's _Introduction to
the New Testament_ is pretty good, but it's over 30 years old now. More
recent scholarship can be found in the Word Biblical Commentaries, which
provide the commentator's own well annotated translations along with
extensive bibliographies, and most of these volumes were prepared in the
late 80s and during the 90s, so it's more recent scholarship. I think
Robbie's insistence that it's really hard to know is what's really
important here. Whatever we guess, it's still a guess based upon
scanty, questionable evidence and whatever we can determine from
tradition. I think there is a recognizable difference between first
century Greek and second, but if we're staying within the first century,
I think it's much more difficult to tell what was written when.

>I don't think it qualifies as "insane" either, though on a sliding scale
>which includes everything, I suppose it is more insane than the other three.
>It is certainly the most complex. The suggestion that it is in any way
>unfamiliar with Jewish politics and traditions is utterly false. Of the
>gospels it is probably the most critical of the Jerusalem Jews, but it
>remains a fundamentally Jewish book, and while its Greek is the most
>beautiful and fluid of the gospels (even of the New Testament) it is not
>wholly free from pointed Hebraisms. I expect that it was written for Jews,
>at least primarily, and probably for Hellenized Jews some distance away from
>Jerusalem.
>
Your assessment of the Greek of John's Gospel is pretty interesting.
The most common view has been that it's the most crudely written of all
the NT books, or at least, the writer was working with the smallest
vocabulary. It could be that they're comparing John to more literary
Greek writers of around the same time period -- Plutarch, maybe? --
rather than just accepting koine as a legitimate dialect in its own
right and judging it by internal standards. I'm not sure.

Now back to robbie's earlier, neglected post...

>In any case, there's not much reason to think that Jesus himself was
>introducing much strict Hellenism, or even that he was especially familiar
>with it -- but it wasn't long after him that his movement began a process of
>Hellenization that at times and in places was profound.
>
I think we both know that Hellenization started well before the time of
Christ, after the conquests of Alexander the Great. That's not to say
that Christianity didn't contribute to the process of Hellenization, but
I'm not sure where it would have done this. I'm pretty sure
Christianity was far more successful around Europe than in the Middle
East or Africa, and the Christianity of the Middle East and North
Africa, to my knowledge, isn't quite the same as the European varieties
that arose. Could you go into more detail about this?

>John's Gospel, which is a book I've been working very closely with for about
>two years, is profoundly Hellenic, not just superficially and not just
>parallels to Philo. Being myself very intimate with both Athens and
>Jerusalem, there are places in John where I wonder which tradition it
>favors. If ever there were a book that with complete success married the
>two -- and I do refer to marriage with Kana firmly in mind -- it is that
>one. (The Gnostics, while much more obviously Greek, have nothing like
>John's success or brilliance, and are more confused about Judaica.)
>
This is pretty widely debated in NT scholarship, to my knowledge. I
mentioned Philo because, of course, both imported ideas from Judaism
into their appropriation of the idea of the logos. I think Philo
identified the logos with the character "wisdom" in the book of
Proverbs. But even among those who recognize the parallels, many also
emphasize differences, arguing that John's theology is radically
different from Philo's despite perhaps only surface similarities in
language.

Of course anything that takes Hebrew ideas and expresses them in the
Greek langauge is already Hellenized.

>You might be right that "turn the other cheek" itself, or the ethic behind
>it, is purely Judaic. I wasn't drawing a sharp distinction between the
>reported teachings of Jesus and the tradition that they are a part of. It's
>especially hard when we also receive statements like "I come with the
>sword."
>
In context, the sword seems to refer to social divisions rather than
military conquest, which Christ pretty consistently refused to entertain
even the idea of among his disciples, or would-be disciples. I don't
think you'd disagree with this, though.

>When I said the degree of Greek confluence is unclear, I didn't mean to
>suggest that Jesus had read Aristotle, but only that it's impossible to sort
>out how much of the native culture of the Hebrews and how much of larger
>Greek culture informed the early tradition and perhaps even Jesus' own
>formative thinking. As a carpenter in Galilee, he would certainly have
>worked in nearby Greek towns, must have known the language, and lived on the
>edge of mingling cultures. The title on the cross was written in three
>languages, we're told, and the man under it or at least a part of the
>following he soon would have might be said to stand at a sort of crossroads
>between the three.
>
Yeah, that's a legitimate observation. We need to keep in mind the
tension, though, between the Hellenization of the entire region and the
deep opposition of Palestinian Jews to Hellenization. Even in the early
church of the book of Acts, Palestinian Jewish widows seemed to get a
fairer share of financial support than Hellenist Jewish widows, and this
led to some division in the church. This resistance to Hellenization is
also part of what was motivating the deep bias of Palestinian Jews to
Samaritans, which were seen as "half breeds" of sorts and syncretists in
religion.

>And:
><< I would say that if "common sense" doesn't lead to the same conclusions,
>then it is no longer "common," and when the conclusions are mutually
>exclusive, one group will think the other is lacking sense. >>
>
>Maybe we're just going to disagree on this. My contention from the start
>was that the common part, together with different premises, can produce
>different conclusions. You are certainly right that one group will often
>think the other is lacking sense, but this is usually an immature position.
>
>-robbie
>

When I wrote that response, I had let slip from my mind that you were
speaking of "common sense" as a method rather than as a product. We'd
really need to establish that to progress in this part of the
discussion, and I think that'll be pretty difficult. While what you
call immature is indeed immature, it's also very common. I think the
only sense most of us really have in common is the sense to think others
are lacking in it when they disagree with what seems obvious to us.

All the more reason we can't trust "common sense" until we've really
questioned it.

Jim

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Received on Thu Jul 24 09:25:58 2003