Jim writes:
<< 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. >>
My own opinion, for whatever that's worth, is in agreement with the
scholarship you've read concerning a date for John, and I suspect closer to
90 than 130. I'll also agree that it bears quite a few marks of historical
reliability -- even, perhaps, of being an eyewitness account, though I'm
more reluctant with this -- but must add that it also bears quite a few
marks, certainly more than the synoptic gospels, of at least sections of
fiction, of creative elaboration, of deliberate literary composition.
And:
<< 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. >>
I don't know what you mean by "traditionally," but Marcan priority, as it's
called, is, like so much else, the result of a very productive era of
Biblical scholarship in Germany, and is a hypothesis only a few centuries
old. Both of the other synoptics enjoyed a period of being called the
original, with Matthew being the clear favorite of Augustine and the early
church. These days, though, most everybody's with the Germans on this.
And the idea of an original in Aramaic is quite old, though ordinarily only
held by orthodox groups who have used an Aramaic New Testament as long as
anybody can remember. Recently a bit more scholarly support has gone their
way, particularly, as you say, with the case of Matthew, but the
overwhelming majority are still convinced of original composition in Greek
for the whole New Testament.
And:
<< 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). >>
Quelle, abbreviated Q, does mean "source."
The idea of Marcan priority first arose in Germany when some scholars began
to pay close attention to the repeated passages and incongruities between
the synoptic gospels. The first facts to become apparent are that Mark is
substantially shorter than Matthew or Luke, and that Matthew and Luke both
seem to cover most everything that happens in Mark along with extras that
Mark doesn't tell. Also, where Mark is similar to Matthew and Luke, the
latter seem to tell things very similarly, and in many cases following the
Greek of Mark to the letter. Thus it was thought that Mark came first, and
that the authors of Matthew and Luke both used it as a source.
But there are also many other passages in Matthew and Luke that are
strikingly similar, sometimes verbatim, and which are not in Mark. Certain
specific incongruities led to the belief that neither author read the
other's book, so the German scholars came to think that there was some other
source aside from Mark that both authors had available to them. In the late
19th century the idea became big enough that the German word for source,
Quelle, became a proper noun to refer to this hypothetical document, and is
now universally abbreviated Q. Some more recent scholarship (and sometimes
I'm reluctant to call it scholarship) has attempted to reconstruct the Q
document.
Many have also been claiming that Q was largely or entirely a list of
sayings of Jesus, and it does look like it said nothing about the
crucifixion or resurrection. This has contributed to the idea that Jesus
had in the first century a group of Jewish followers who did not take him to
be the messiah.
It must be insisted upon, though, that Q is not a book but a hypothesis.
Unless somebody turns up a fortuitous clay pot with some goat-skin in it, it
will remain up for debate. The majority of scholars do accept something of
a Q, though without the confidence to assert anything else about it than
that it might have existed. There are a notably minority who reject it
outright. The whole business is, of course, surrounded with academic
politics.
A good history of Q scholarship is given in an Atlantic Monthly article that
can be read here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96dec/jesus/jesus.htm
And Jim writes:
<< 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. >>
I don't know of anyone calling it crude. It certainly has a small
vocabulary for a Greek text, and even smaller than most of the other books
in the New Testament, but crude? A sharply limited vocabulary is
characteristic of many traditions, very notably including that of Hebrew
prose -- especially Biblical Hebrew prose. It has in fact been suggested
(particularly based on comparisons of Biblical Hebrew and the later Rabbinic
Hebrew) that the vocabulary and style of Biblical Hebrew was so sharply
limited as to qualify as a special literary dialect, distinct from whatever
was spoken at the time.
Historically there has been some prejudice against Koine Greek, which was
only rather recently recognized as the standard spoken dialect of the era
(and is perhaps closer to how Classical Athenians actually spoke in the
agora than any polished Attic prose we have known). Perhaps this has
something to do with what you remember reading, but, to be honest, the claim
that John is "crudely written" -- even the MOST crudely written in the New
Testament! -- would surprise me even still. Limited vocabulary and
occasional Semiticism or not, there is all the difference in the world
between a cadenced, dignified simplicity of language and "crude" writing.
Perhaps you've crossed some wires in your mind and are mistaking John for
Revelation. Revelation is traditionally -- and, I think, absurdly --
believed to be from the same author as the Gospel of John, and this is
usually dismissed by scholars precisely because the Greek of the gospel is
fluent and beautiful while that of Revelation IS plainly choppy and crude,
even the crudest in the New Testament. (Some try to rescue the tradition by
claiming that John the apostle wrote Revelation in Aramaic, but that a crude
Greek translation is all the survives)
Is this what you're thinking of?
Jim quotes me:
<< 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. >>
And he responds:
<< 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? >>
I wasn't very clear. Hellenization, of course, had already been going on
for quite some time and even had considerable effect on the Judaic world --
especially in Egypt, and generally as one got further from Jerusalem -- by
the first century CE. What I was talking about was a sort of Hellenized
Judaica, which certainly existed before Jesus but which Christianity -- and
by this I specifically mean the Christianity that we inherited, largely of
gentiles and focusing on crucifixion and resurrection -- virtually came to
typify.
There were probably different and widely varied sects of Christians (or
Jesus-followers of whatever sort), especially in the Middle/Near East in the
first century, but it's very hard to say much about them because if they
were Jews or gave the impression of being Jews they became a target for the
Romans in the 60s and 70s CE. We must remember that the Sadducees, who
appear often in the New Testament and who were second only to the Pharisees
as a Jewish sect, were essentially wiped out of existence. If any survived
the Romans they were few and inconsequential enough to disappear from
history. The second half of the first century was an especially volatile
time in a habitually volatile region, and any sect(s) following Jesus would
likely have disappeared unless far away or very clearly distinct from the
Jews.
(As has already been said, anyone interested in this era should read Flavius
Josephus' The Jewish War. He was an eye-witness, a Pharisee who
participated in the war; and who bafflingly ended up living very well in
Rome, taking a Roman name, giving Roman names to his children, and writing
Jewish books in Greek, or writing them in Aramaic and translating them
himself into Greek. The war as he describes it, which is consistent with
everything else we know, was massively destructive and enormously bloody.)
It is impossible to sort out how much of what I'm vaguely gesturing at as
Hellenic was the result of a specific tradition that survived the first
century (or several that unified) on the one hand or Jesus the Man on the
other. I have no idea how "Hellenic" or otherwise Jesus himself was, or his
immediate followers. But I think that the Christianity we've inherited,
particularly as it can be seen in some of its earliest surviving texts, is
importantly Judaic and importantly Hellenic, and it is exactly this
confluence that I'm so interested in, and which I was (unclearly) referring
to before.
And concerning my claim of an importantly Hellenic Gospel of John, Jim
writes:
<< 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. [. . .] 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. >>
It is debated to some extent, though not so much scholarship goes to John
compared to the others, I think. Most of those who don't seem to like the
idea of a very Hellenic John, I think, seem to be Christian writers who have
some sense that an additional worldly origin for aspects of Christianity is
theologically undesirable. In any case, what is not debated is that among
the gospels John is the most Greek (or most gentile, as it is sometimes
safer to say) and the most critical of the Jews, though I think it runs much
deeper than that.
It has even been rather widely claimed, though it is by means generally
agreed, that John was written neither by a Jew nor for an audience of Jews.
I personally think that both claims are too hasty. John and Philo are very
different, I offer no argument there, but it is my belief that a great
marriage occurs in John, at the very heart of the book, and that missing
either its Hellenism or its Jewishness is to make a great mistake.
As I said before, I've been working very closely with this book for a few
years, and my thoughts on it are now such that it would be impossible for me
to go much deeper than this without writing perhaps dozens of pages. I've
already produced quite a bit of material on it, and probably more to come in
the next few months, and if I ever am satisfied that it has come together
into something presentable (I thought this would happen a long time ago, but
it hasn't yet) I'll let you know.
And:
<< 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. >>
I think you're probably right, but it remains sometimes difficult to sort
out the respective Jesuses we see in the different gospels, as it seems to
me. I don't think Jesus was referring to military conquest in the bit about
coming with the sword, but it seems to me that such violent rhetoric is more
consistent with a first century Palestinian Jew than with our modern idea of
a pacifist, which was my point.
And:
<< 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. >>
This is true and important, I agree, but I never meant to suggest that
Palestinian Jews as a group were accepting the confluence I was talking
about with open arms.
And:
<< 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. >>
These might very well be related, but the tension has to do probably as much
as anything with immediately observable differences in language and
religious custom.
(And in case anybody is interested in a bit more trivia: What few Samaritans
are still around -- Yes, they're still around -- live near Nablus and are
recognized as Israelis under the Law of Return. And it was only in the 17th
century when, according to their reckoning, the last descendent among them
of Aaron brother of Moses died, and until then it was these descendents who
served as High Priests. Since that line ended, the new line of High Priests
are supposed to be descendents of Uzziel ben Veliat, the uncle of Aaron.)
-robbie
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Received on Fri Jul 25 00:45:21 2003
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