Ranking the Gospels

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AG has a point though he might have put it better.

The beginning of Luke says he compiled information for a specific person “that you may know the certainty of those things in which you were instructed”. Compare that to the end of John: “This is the disciple who testifies of these things, and wrote these things; and we know that his testimony is true.” This could indicate that the former was meant to be informative and the latter persuasive.

One thing that always set of alarm bells in my head, was John naming himself as the disciple that Jesus loved best. Both Mark and Luke report disputes among the disciples about who would be the greatest while Jesus was still among them. This could be seen as an attempt to elevate himself above the others when Jesus was not there to correct him.

It can be more informative, depending on the context, but the issue is that it is often less informative if we are trying to find out what happened in an event, not the time afterwards. You see, polemics give insights into the debate that is going on, but they don't necessarily give as much insight into the subject matter being debated, and this can be seen with modern apologetic efforts, as some of them are so off-base that they don't actually conform to truth at all, BUT they can tell us how those people think. The issue here is that "reliability" doesn't refer to how early Christians thought, it refers to what actually happened with Jesus, and well... a pure polemic is less useful than a biography.


Well, not really, it tells us more about the theological debates within early Christianity, but the issue is that "reliability" as was put forward usually means "reliability in talking about the issues of Christ's time". Being theological in this case likely means that John was trying to construct a view of Jesus rather than reporting some notion of fact. Now, the facts are prone to literary editing to some degree, but John, in trying to build a much more theological account, is by the nature of that going to be constructing something more fictional, just as if one of us were writing a philosophical account of WW2. We present our ways of thinking, but we are more likely to turn real people and complex events into puppets to mouth our ideas, y'know, Hitler may turn into an anti-Christ, and the USA may turn into the incarnation of virtue. This isn't what is being looked for in reliability.

As I've mentioned before, none of the disciples really come off very well in the Gospels, which is quite interesting. You would think that Priority Numero Uno if we were dealing with a hoax would be to make the leaders of the church perfect and unquestionable, to create a cult around their personalities as well as the deity in question. Instead, none of the disciples come off very well at all. The one who's actually selected to be the leader of the church in particular comes off as a loudmouth with no self-control, and even with the reinstatement of Peter at the end, it's like a footnote...most of his appearances in the Gospels are not flattering. (Though to my modern eye I think he had ADHD to make it worse!) John does come off as arrogant in the other Gospels--he has to be rebuked for asking Jesus to call down lightning on their enemies. Paul gets REALLY bad introduction...he's an outright murderer. And later in the book of Acts, even when he's become a Christian, he still falls out with Barnabas for whatever reason. Both are still referred to as Christians, and as legitimate...but we still have the one-sided depiction of whatever it was that went wrong. It was a failure on their part, and nobody's hiding it.

These are incidents that one would think church leaders would've been keen to edit out, if they were writing a PR piece to promote themselves and suppress all questioning of them.

Let me give you another example...look at the FLDS cult. The cult is not only built around Mormonism, but also in particular around each "prophet" like Warren Jeffs, and great pains are taken to make him seem godlike and without flaws. Obviously this is not trustworthy in any way, and we're right to be suspicious of any such claims from a clearly flawed individual.

In the Gospels, however, everybody's flaws are on display for the world to see...which comes off to me more as honest reporting, including the bad with the good.

Honestly, it is hard to say who wrote these scriptures. However, it is unlikely a central authority wrote them, and it is more likely that the writing was inspired by word of mouth and later written down as history. Some conservatives have doubts, but the mainstream usually does uphold the non-witness nature of the Gospels given some of the anachronisms.

I've never heard anyone say that the Gospels were all written down RIGHT after events occurred, though Paul's letters, of course, were written at the time the particular situations described occurred and were, I believe, the earliest parts of the New Testament. (When you get down to it, we're reading his mail...though they had a more public concept of certain types of mail back then.) The Gospels would have begun as oral tradition--that much seems obvious from what we know of the disciples. Matthew is the only one of the original 12 disciples whose occupation would be expected to be literate (though he may still have been functionally illiterate by modern standards or even by the standards of someone like Paul, who was most definitely trained in law, rhetoric, and writing)...others might've been, but I think literacy would not have been a requirement in those days for the rest, in their occupations.

I believe tradition holds that Mark was a companion of Peter's, so a second generation. (On the literacy issue, I was just reading Peter's letters last night, and he does mention having help writing that letter, from Mark.) Matthew may have been the apostle himself; it's definitely not out of the question. Luke is a similar situation to Mark--a companion of Paul's (and the most methodical and journalistic of the four). John didn't draw much off of Mark, and his writing in the Gospel does not show the same facility with Greek that Paul and Luke had...less education, perhaps. (Which does not mean less intelligence, of course, but less formal schooling.) Regarding John, there is question as to whether the author of the Gospel and 2 Epistles is the same individual as John of Patmos who wrote Revelation, and if THAT individual is in fact John, son of Zebedee.

I even heard one theory that suggested the author of that Gospel might even be Lazarus (the same guy raised from the dead). It's interesting to note that the only other time we get a description of "the one Jesus loved" in the Gospel is when referring to Lazarus, and also that particular Gospel seems more confined to the area around Bethany rather than traveling out with the rest of the disciples. Certainly not solid evidence, but I would say it's not impossible. (And it might also fit with the mysticism in that particular Gospel, as well, if we consider what happened to Lazarus.) If we WERE in fact dealing with a gospel of Lazarus, so to speak, then we would be dealing with an eyewitness but one who is ONLY witness to events in a small local area.

One final point. I would not dismiss oral history as something that can never be believed. For happenings in our day I think it's particularly untrustworthy because we weren't educated to have the retentive capacity for that sort of thing (nor would our teachers be well equipped to instill it) as compared to what we do by reading and writing. Also, we have to be careful not to make the assumption that illiterate automatically means stupid or indiscriminate, especially not in a past era where literacy was not a requirement to function in society as it is now, but rather only a requirement (and to differing extents) for certain occupations. Someone who does not know how to read or write can still have enough common sense about how the world works, about what they see and what they hear day to day, that they can still tell when something's not right. And ESPECIALLY if literacy is not directly correlated to intelligence, due to it being only optional, this is more likely than it is now (where you pretty much either have to have a learning issue, or have been screwed over by the school system).

Honestly, we don't actually know who wrote the Gospels. Talking about them as if they were written by actual apostles is thus kind of silly. "Mark" is just a name given to the author, but we don't know if it even was anybody named Mark at all. It's just a name granted to the author a long time after it was anonymously written. Pretending it must be any Mark in scripture is thus kind of silly, particularly given that the Gospel of Mark was written outside of a Jewish context, and makes geographic mistakes that are kind of strange for a native to Israel.

The Gospel of John actually shows more philosophy than the rest of the Gospels. John pretty explicitly brings reference to philosophical ideas not found in the other writings, so I have a difficult time thinking that the author of John was the least educated. I also doubt that John was written by Lazarus, but in all likelihood, John was influenced by the rising Gnostics, and the Gnostics were mystics with a more philosophical orientation in many places.

As for your last point, there are a few issues with oral history:
1) It is passed on between people. So, a person keeping up with oral history isn't keeping up with what they perceived, but rather with what somebody else told them, and this allows for some errors in both conveying the idea, and understanding it.
2) Memory is by nature reconstructive, not literal. This mean that even with memorization techniques, it is still very likely that errors will creep into the reconstructions.
3) Fisherman don't have this special memory training anyway. The people who would be trained to memorize would be scholars, but fisherman are still fisherman, they just happen to be illiterate in this case.

You are right that illiteracy doesn't necessarily mean stupid or indiscriminate. The issue is that illiterate is more likely to result in people are indiscriminate and less capable of assessing things. Literacy puts people into contact with a greater world of facts and ideas, and being separate from this is going to reduce one's ability to evaluate things in a good manner. Our own skepticism and criticism isn't just a matter of culture, but also due to our exposure to a broader world in which these traits are valuable, which we get through literacy and education. "Common sense" isn't really the issue though, as it doesn't really work well enough to give the ability to evaluate claims.

Finally, no matter who these people are, these facts were expressed by members of the Jesus cult. Now, I say cult because at the time, that is really what it was. And joiners of this cult are likely like any other person who joins a cult. They are not high on objectivity, but rather they are passionate converts drawn from the pools of society that have less education on how to deal with these matters, and they themselves probably have less "common sense" than their peers, who have the "common sense" to stick with the status quo.

but dont you think god would want to make it absoultley clear as to the path of salvation? why would he leave it to someone else to interpet what he ment? i mean really. anyways are you practicing blind faith? i guess im just practical. i mean if i was gonna be thrown into a burning house tied up the last thing on my mind would be praying to an invisible guy to put the flames out

If I am in a burning house, I am going to act...I will pray for assistance in my actions, but I will act. To put it simply, I see it as a joint project.

But what you're getting at mainly is the role of choice. Love, and any of the sub-virtues that come from it, must be by choice; they cannot be coerced. Love by its very nature can be envisioned not as a static thing, but as an active--a feedback loop, essentially, that reflects from one party to the other and intensifies on each revolution. It requires active participation by two parties with their own minds who have entered into a relationship by choice. For God to simply overwhelm our faculties and to deprive us of choice is not only to degrade the nature of that love, but to make us automatons. God is not the Borg Queen, in other words. In fact, it is my belief that to override our free will in such a way as to leave no other choice would be an atrocity on a higher order even than to extinguish every physical life in the universe. It would be the outright erasure of the soul.

Instead, we must choose a relationship--and that is not something I go into blindly...it is an open-eyed decision, and not a decision that closes my eyes or my mind.

I do realize that we can't be completely sure of who wrote what, though as far as certainty, we get closest with with Paul and Luke. As far as what I said about the possibility of Lazarus, I also stated that it was exactly that and not proven.

John may be more of a theological book, but it's still quite separated from Gnostic theology. (I'm afraid I don't have time to run through the details as I would like to given that I work full time, but this is the case.) We can't conflate all mysticism or philosophy with Gnosticism, of course.



There are still checks and balances against this, though. Remember that with the authorship of the Bible, this was done in a time when many eyewitnesses (and remember, the twelve disciples are far from the only people who could report on what they heard and saw...many of the things we see in the Bible would've been major public events) would have still been alive and easily available to provide corroborating or denying evidence. So if something sounded wrong, one could gather multiple accounts of the event in question to figure out what holds from account to account, rejecting the variances. That process can be undertaken both in writing and by speech.



However, they would still be more adept at functioning in that kind of society than we would, and the society itself would offer more ways in which to do so. They may not have the highest forms of training that those who studied in the Temple would've had, but they would still be better equipped and able to function in their society than most of us would be.



Yet there are many practical skills that, however versed I may be in certain fields of study, I lack. I would not know, for instance, without someone else's help, if I was being lied to by a car mechanic because I lack the practical skill that others--many of whom are likely nowhere near my level of educational attainment--would recognize as obvious. These are alternate means of developing the ability to analyze and criticize. Some will inevitably be lazy and refuse to engage in these processes, and some people are just less capable no matter what they're exposed to, but even with as much study as I have, I don't think literacy is by any means the be-all end-all of intelligence and sense.



Depends on what the status quo is, of course. The situation we see at that time was actually much like what it is if you go somewhere that is dominated by fundamentalists who approach things from a very literalist, legalist perspective (this is the same way we get onerous blue laws, to draw on a more modern comparison). In a case like that, going against the status quo can be a very good thing. As to the converts, they actually came from all walks of life, ranging from the less-educated to the highly educated; the generalization doesn't hold. Still, we're dealing with a lot of things that--unlike with a cult--happened out in the open where there were many witnesses who could've called BS.

Anyway, sorry for not being able to give a longer answer, but I at least wanted to give what I had the time for.

Well, actually, we get closest with Paul. Luke is still a much disputed matter, as there are questions about the portrayal of Paul, and certainly if Luke came first that would change our views on the authorship of the Synoptic Gospels.


I didn't say I was. Many scholars actually believe that John is a more Gnostic Gospel than the others, and we can discuss this to some degree. It is true that John isn't full hard-core Gnostic, however, the Gospel of John is often discovered in collections of Gnostic writings, showing that it is an influence on Gnosticism, and some of the themes do match Gnostic themes.


Well, the problem with that solution is that not all of the writings in scripture were written to eyewitnesses or in areas where eyewitnesses may be very common. As it stands, anachronisms in the Gospels can be detected, where Greek lifestyles are spoken to by Jesus despite the fact that Jesus spoke in a Jewish context lacking those tendencies. Even further, eyewitnesses might not be as much of a check as desired if there is a bit of a fervor over the matter, as it is found in certain points in time that myths can spontaneously arise about a figure despite the attempts of reputable authorities to crush these efforts, which is pointed out in the case of Sabbotai Sevi in a much later time period, more recent so we have better documentation. As it stands, most of the New Testaments writings are Greek, but most of the witnesses were likely poor Aramaic speaking and illiterate peasants. They likely couldn't do much to correct any mistakes made in those documents, as the language would be "greek to them", so to speak.

As it stands, I don't think the "checks and balances" provide nearly as much force as you require, because if your earlier response doesn't work, I don't think that these checks and balances will be much of a safeguard. Particularly given that reconstructions are easily influenced by the opinions and feelings of others(keep in mind the phenomenon of "repressed memories of abuse" that became so common for a short period of time in the 20th century due to the power of suggestion), so your idea might not work much at all. (Heck, given that one could reasonably infer that scripture itself is misquoted by the New Testament, it *really* doesn't seem that this feedback structure was effective)


But they wouldn't have had the training. Living in a society where people have special memory skills doesn't mean you osmose it, particularly if this isn't of special interest to your life. A fisherman might not need this at all. So, I don't think that your rationale really works or even gives us a slight reason to believe that these illiterate fisherman had special memory talents.


Well, ok, but please tell me then how being an illiterate fisherman gives you an ability to identify true or false messiahs, or avoid being taken in by superstition or miracles. The reason being that I don't actually see this at all, and rather would think that an "illiterate fisherman on the bottom rung of society" is the most likely candidate to be led to believe something false. After all, even today, we have tons of people who get sucked into cults and whatever have you, and sometimes these claims can be easily verified as false, such as with Scientology claims about L. Ron Hubbard, but people still get into this stuff.


Not really, the status quo is generally considered "common sense" in most societies, regardless of what it happens to be. Now, you might say that going against the status quo can be a very good thing, but the same could be said about any status quo that one disagrees from.

As for the converts, yes, some of them were from highly educated backgrounds. The BULK came from less educated and lower class backgrounds. I think that point is pretty well-known, but I am sure that if I had to justify that I could find a source.

Umm.... witnesses DID call BS. That's why they executed Jesus as a false teacher. That's why they came around to scoff at the Christian teachings. That's why most Jews stayed Jews, with Christians often coming from a Gentile background. (the earliest Christians were Jews, then they started allowing Gentiles into the mix, then Gentiles became dominant, and most Jews still didn't join Christianity)

That is not how the anti-semites interpret these things. Lots of pogroms and dead Jews indicate that this is the case.

At the time Jesus presumably lived, ninety percent of the Jews lived in the Exile or Dispersion in Persia and other distance parts of the world. They probably did not know Jesus even existed or was supposed to exist. Of the Jews that lived in the Holy Land (Judea and Palestia) very few knew about Jesus and his followers other than tales and hear say. Only the people in Jerusalem or places where Jesus preached could have any direct contact or knowledge.

ruveyn

ruveyn

I don't think it is, it is only the beginning of John's gospel that suggests a gnostic influence.

It is interesting though, that there is a Apocryphon of John discovered at Nag Hammadi that actually claims to be written by the son of Zebedee (which I don't believe) that might have been the source of gnostic myth.

Well, this issue is brought up by wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_ ... c_elements

choice, well i like choices, and it would be easier to choice if the choice was absolutley crystal clear if you know what i mean

I think the level of clarity you're asking for might be dangerous to the life of the body.

But in all seriousness, I do believe God does not wish to override our wills with His power, which is to such a degree that in most circumstances, all but the most delicate exercise of power will.

lets just agree on the wierdness of god if he is real. i mean what a wierdo
would you follow your own rules if you had the ability to change the game?!