Undesigned coincidences vs. Literary Devices (archived from May, 2018)

 (Originally posted at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at "permalink" below.)

Undesigned coincidences vs. Literary Devices on Bellator Christi [Updated]

by Lydia McGrew

[Update: I've decided to put into this post itself a list of some counterexamples to Licona's misleading claims about his, and others' positions. See below. These are also in the podcast on Bellator Christi.]

I had the privilege today to be on the Bellator Christi podcast with Brian Chilton discussing the contrast between the view of the Gospels supported by undesigned coincidences and that of the "literary device" theorists.

The link to the podcast is here. It was great fun being on the show and bringing these various strands together. These really are very different views of what kind of documents the Gospels are. I say this not because I start from an unargued assumption that the Gospels are artless, historical reportage but rather because this is what I find the Gospels to be upon investigation. Undesigned coincidences are just one portion of that argument. Brian was an excellent host, and we had a great conversation.

The podcast is a good introduction generally to undesigned coincidences, and the first good-sized segment of the show is devoted to that positive argument.

Brian introduced the discussion by mentioning the fact that the apologetics community is divided concerning the merit of the literary device theories. Brian mentioned that Tim Stratton has recently hosted a series of conversations with Michael Licona about his (Dr. Licona's) views and suggested that listeners give both sides a hearing.

Naturally, this doesn't mean that I was giving a point-by-point response to what Dr. Licona said in those interviews. For my detailed response to Dr. Licona's actual views, which he has not rebutted or confronted, please see the wrap-up post here of my series and browse from there to posts as your interest and time allow.

One point that I did want to reply to, though, is a completely incorrect characterization that Dr. Licona has made of the views that I (and Esteemed Husband, see here) are criticizing--those of himself, Craig Evans, and Dan Wallace, for example. At minute 23 and following here, in one of the interviews with Tim Stratton, Dr. Licona states that none of these evangelical scholars "who have become targets" (as he puts it) are saying that Jesus did not say the things reported in the Gospels but rather only suggesting that Jesus may not have used those words. They are, he says, saying that some of the reports in the Gospels might be a "loose paraphrase."

This is just false, and even a quick look at my wrap-up post will give examples to the contrary. I do reply to that point in this interview with Rev. Chilton. Please listen to the entire podcast, but that portion begins at about minute 31 in the podcast, here. Here are the counterexamples I give there:

--One idea promoted by scholars Dan Wallace and Mike Licona is that Jesus did not historically, at all, say, “I thirst” while he was on the cross. This isn’t just saying that he really said, “Please give me some water” instead but that there was nothing like that at all. Instead, he said, “My God, why have you forsaken me” and John changed that into “I thirst.” "I thirst" is not even a "loose paraphrase" of "My God, why have you forsaken me."

--Licona has argued (most recently in a debate with Bart Ehrman) that Jesus did not appear first to his male disciples in Jerusalem at all but rather first in Galilee and that Luke “moved” the first appearance to Jerusalem in his gospel for literary reasons. This is not just a matter of our not having Jesus' exact words, nor is it a loose paraphrase of something else. Indeed, this claim of "moving" itself calls into question the historicity of the entire Doubting Thomas scene, since John makes it quite clear that that occurred in Jerusalem before they went to Galilee, and Thomas would have been very unlikely to travel to Galilee if he hadn’t yet seen Jesus at all. This is part and parcel of Licona's theory that Luke "made" all of the resurrection appearances occur on one day rather than forty days.

--One theory, promoted by Craig Evans, is that Jesus never historically said “I am the light of the world” or “I am the bread of life.” Not because he used somewhat different words and said, “I am the lamp of the world” or something instead, but because these sayings didn’t occur historically at all. They were just dramatic portrayals by the “Johannine community” of their theological reflections on Jesus’ other teachings. See video for several minutes here. This is not just a matter of a loose paraphrase, much less of our not having Jesus' very words.

--Another idea, which Dr. Licona attributes to “many Johannine scholars,” is that Jesus would not have been as explicit about his deity as we find him being in John, and saying things like, “Before Abraham was, I am” or “I and the Father are one.” Instead, he just presented himself as God as we find him doing in Mark, by claiming to be able to forgive sins and do these other deeds, and John wrote up these other scenes, which didn’t really occur, in which Jesus makes these “more explicit” claims to deity for himself. See the argument Licona presents for that view here, particularly this statement: "Now, if Jesus was hesitant to announce publicly that He is the Messiah, we would not expect for Him to be claiming to be God publicly and in such a clear manner as we find John reporting." Obviously, this is not just a matter of John's making a "loose paraphrase" of Jesus' historical words and deeds as we find them in Mark but rather of his inventing whole sayings and scenes in which Jesus claims to be God publicly and in such a relatively clear manner as reported in John.

I would like to emphasize again, in addition to what I said in the podcast with Brian, that these examples are not even "loose paraphrases." Jesus' saying, "I thirst" is not even a "loose paraphrase" of "My God, why have you forsaken me." And so forth.

One example I didn't mention in the podcast (but again, there are so many) to the contrary is Dr. Licona's own suggestion on pp. 180-181 of his Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? that John may have invented the scene in which Jesus breathes on his disciples and says, "Receive the Holy Spirit." Allegedly he did so in order to "weave mention" of Pentecost into his own Gospel, since he would not be writing about that event directly. (Were the many references to the coming of the Comforter in Jesus' words in John 14-16 not enough of a mention?) Obviously, if that event didn't happen at all, this is a great deal more than merely saying that Jesus may not have used those words! Nor is it even to say that we have a "loose paraphrase" of an historical teaching of Jesus in that real, historical context, where Jesus engaged in a real action (breathing on the disciples). It's an invention of an entire incident.

If we are going to discuss these matters intelligently and with care, it's very important that we be clear about what we're discussing. It is extremely unhelpful for Dr. Licona or anyone else to suggest that these are mere matters of verbal changes or paraphrase or even "loose" paraphrase. When entire sayings of Jesus or events in Jesus' life are said not to have occurred historically at all, these do not turn into "paraphrases" of something else merely because we say that these invented events are true to the general meaning or spirit of Jesus' completely different teaching or self-presentation in other events. That is simply not what is meant by any sort of "paraphrase." And that is aside from all of the alleged literary devices in which other factual matters besides Jesus' words are changed.

Those considering these matters, both scholars and laymen, should not be chivvied by way of a false dilemma. The false dilemma is the insinuation that either you are opposed to reasonable paraphrase such as what can occur in real, literal historical reportage or else you must adopt the theories of Licona, Evans, et. al., including those "many Johannine scholars" that Dr. Licona keeps talking about who think that the real Jesus would not have claimed to be God in such a clear and public manner as we find John reporting. (See Dr. Licona's own characterization of that argument in those terms to the effect that Jesus would not have claimed to be God in such a clear and public manner, here.) That is not a paraphrase view. That is an outright dehistoricization of Jesus' unique Johannine claims to deity.

We must be clear, and I think that once we are clear, it will become evident that these questions are worth looking into. They are not just trivial differences of opinion. Do the results of scholarship really force us to believe that the Gospels are like bio-pics, including made-up dialogue, made-up scenes, and factually altered events? I have argued, in detail, that there is no such evidence--not from Plutarch and not from the Gospels themselves. And there is much evidence to the contrary. That argument has not been answered. Again, I strongly urge those who are interested to look into these matters for themselves.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on May 4, 2018 4:56 PM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (Licona) (New Testament)

More on ur-source theories vs. undesigned coincidences

 

More on ur-source theories vs. undesigned coincidences

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)

Several years ago, after receiving a question by e-mail, I wrote this post about attempted "ur-source" hypotheses as an alternative explanation of undesigned coincidences. If you're interested in this question, I strongly urge you to read that post (if you haven't already). This post is meant to be a supplement to it, not a replacement.

In the last few days I've been writing quite a bit more about this type of objection to undesigned coincidences because I received some questions about it again. I wrote up so much material in response that I've decided to post some of it here for others who might find it useful.

As used in this post, an "ur-source hypothesis" intended to explain away an undesigned coincidence would go something like this: The accounts we have in our actual Gospels are separated pieces of what was a larger, earlier, oral tradition. They fit together in an explanatory way because the earlier "tradition story" fit together in a plausible way, though it may or may not have been true. It could be seen to be probably true only by some other argument--for example, because it was in existence early. Of course, we do not have this earlier oral tradition and are only conjecturing about its content and appearance. Then (goes the theory), our gospel authors chose to report different parts of that earlier oral ur-source, which produced the appearance of a coincidence between the gospel accounts that we have.

I urge you (again) to read the earlier post, which makes several very important points in response to this. These include, for example, the implausibility of a copier's leaving something highly surprising and inexplicable unexplained by copying only a fragment of an earlier tradition. Also included in the earlier post is the fact that any critic like Bart Ehrman who implies that the unique material in the Gospel of John was invented much later than the other Gospels cannot consistently, simultaneously, hold that the unique Johannine material existed in a stable oral tradition, combined with material now found in Mark and the other synoptic Gospels, before the Synoptic Gospels themselves were even published.

I am not going to deal in this post with a different version of an "earlier source" hypothesis according to which only a portion of what we now find as a UC was already "known to the community" and a later fictionalizer simply added fictional aspects to the story that fit in with other facts already present "in the tradition." That type of theory is already extensively dealt with in Hidden in Plain View itself, since in the book I assume for the sake of the argument that Mark was available to Matthew and Luke, Matthew was also available to Luke, and all three of the Synoptics were available to John. I then discuss, repeatedly, the implausibility of a later fictionalizer's subtly connecting his fictions with material already available in the earlier written Gospels. The very same considerations I give there apply to already available oral versions of the stories.

Concerning "ur-source" hypotheses according to which both sides of a UC were present in some oral ur-source and just got separated in the Gospels we have, I have decided from my more recent correspondence that it is very important to emphasize this: The mere fact that many scholars think that there were some kind of earlier oral traditions in existence prior to the writing of the Gospels does not mean that such earlier "oral traditions" took a form that would make an ur-source hypothesis a good alternative to an undesigned coincidence between the accounts we have. Some kind of earlier oral traditions could mean many different things. Such a phrase, for example, could merely mean that the eyewitnesses themselves talked about their experiences. That is not the same thing as a compendium including both/all parts of an undesigned coincidence. Even if some witness's version of his story were repeated by others fairly faithfully and (say) Luke got hold of it at a couple of removes and put it into his Gospel, it would still be just one side of the story and hence could easily participate in a UC with something told in John. It wouldn't in that case be an "ur-source" from which Luke broke off a piece.

An idea that is popular (partly popularized by Richard Bauckham) is that there were stable, oft-told story versions of the stories in the Gospels (particularly the Synoptic Gospels) and that these were presided over by "tradents" (e.g., the apostles) to make sure that their retelling did not stray from the truth of what actually happened.

Bauckham is using such a theory as an alternative to the much more liberal ideas of form criticism, of which he is an opponent. The more liberal alternative is that the retellings of the stories varied without control and that what has made it into our Gospels is something many times removed from what actually happened and greatly morphed. In other words, Bauckham is arguing against the "telephone game" idea such as one hears from Bart Ehrman.

But it's important to remember that, if a Gospel author either was an eyewitness himself or talked to eyewitnesses, he would not need to rely on such formal, oft-told versions of a story. Bauckham expressly denies Matthean authorship, so he apparently considers the "traditional story" theory to be particularly relevant both to Matthew and to Luke. He thinks that Mark shows strongly the witness perspective of Peter and that John (though not John the son of Zebedee) was a disciple of Jesus and an eyewitness of many things, so the "tradent-certified story version" theory seems most relevant, in Bauckham's view, to Luke and Matthew. If Matthew was an eyewitness (as I believe he was and as patristic evidence supports), the theory becomes even less relevant.

Even for Luke, it's important to remember several things: An oft-told, preserved story version could have been much like the one-sided story we have in our Gospels, not at all like a larger ur-source. (This is similar to what I said above about what could have been the case even if Luke got his version of a story at a couple of removes.) And if the author was able to talk to a witness himself, such a formal version, told by a non-eyewitness, is an unnecessary theory. Since we know that Luke probably did have such opportunities, although it is not impossible that he got some stories at multiple removes, we should not assume that his Gospel is heavily dependent upon formal earlier "oral traditions" as opposed to informal interviews. And we certainly have no reason whatsoever to think that Luke's Gospel is heavily dependent upon formal oral traditions that looked very unlike what he records, off of which he has broken bits and pieces.

The fact that a theory of tradent-certified oral traditions is an improvement over an ever-morphing telephone-game tradition, finding its way ultimately into our Gospels, does not mean that we should settle on the idea that our Gospels were constructed out of such oral traditions as opposed to being known in more natural ways.

Of course, the theory that the Gospels were written by witnesses or in direct consultation with eyewitnesses is "on the table" only because we know on independent grounds that this is historically quite possible. If we knew independently that they were written several hundred years later, they would have to be based upon some kind of earlier, preserved materials, whether oral or written, though that wouldn't (even so) mean that these earlier materials took the form of umbrella sources containing all the material, subsequently dispersed into multiple documents. (Even in the case of Old Testament stories in Kings and Chronicles, where the books themselves may have been compiled long after the fact, we rightly do not assume that what lies behind somewhat different versions of a story in Kings and Chronicles was some ur-source that somehow combined both.)

Any hypothesis that a Gospel was constructed out of much earlier oral traditions is even more implausible, if possible, for the Gospel of John, where the plethora of unique material (which has so often been used to argue against the Gospel's historicity) is actually evidence that the Gospel was written by a witness who wished to supplement what was already known. At least, that is the case once we see John's unique material confirmed over and over again, as it is by undesigned coincidences and external confirmations.

It is possible that the idea that the Gospels (including John) were constructed out of earlier oral traditions is thought to be independently supported because of some term usages by New Testament scholars. "Moderate" NT scholars have a "complimentary" way of using a phrase like "based on earlier tradition" that absolutely must not be allowed to confuse us. When, for example, such a scholar comes upon a case where he believes that a pericope satisfies one or more of the famous "criteria of authenticity," he may magnanimously confer upon that pericope the accolade of "based on earlier tradition." This does not mean that there is some evidence there in the contents that the story was based on earlier tradition as opposed to being based more directly or more informally on reality. It does not mean that the pericope shows that it was based on oral tradition rather than being written directly by an eyewitness (the author of the gospel) or rather than being based on an interview with an eyewitness. On the contrary. The evidence of historicity is ipso facto evidence that supports more simple and direct connections with reality, at least in cases where this is otherwise possible, as it is for the Gospels. It is simply that the scholar does not want to say that. He prefers, thinking of himself as being somehow "cautious" and "careful," to speak of being "based on tradition." The alternative he has in mind, the more "liberal" alternative he is rejecting, is that the pericope was mostly made up out of whole cloth. That is why the phrase "based on earlier tradition" is considered a compliment. But let us not become confused into thinking that this means that there is independent evidence that strongly supports a vast network of earlier, formal, oral tradition, recited regularly by non-eyewitnesses, predating that particular Gospel, out of which the Gospel was constructed.

D.A. Carson explicitly notes that C.H. Dodd uses a phrase like "based on tradition" in a sense indistinguishable from "historical." (Carson, “Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel: After Dodd, What?", p. 106) In other words, Dodd uses this phrase as a compliment to a passage in the Gospel of John, to single that passage out as something that he thinks may actually be historical. This doesn't mean that Dodd has objective evidence for an oral tradition predating John as opposed to John's having witnessed the event or having spoken to an eyewitness. Far from it. It's just that he prefers "based on tradition" to "based on reality."

It may be some improvement over, "The Johannine community made up this incident" to say, "This incident is based on earlier tradition." But when the "tradition" hypothesis begins to be set up as a competitor to "based on reality," we must speak up and point out that such a competitor has never been established at all. It would be ironic indeed if evidence supporting historicity (e.g., criteriological evidence that leads a scholar to say that a story in some Gospel is "based on earlier tradition") were ultimately taken to undermine other evidence for historicity (such as undesigned coincidences) because the bias of scholars makes it appear that "based on earlier tradition" is the most that we can ever say.

One almost wonders if scholars have the faulty idea that postulating some source or tradition rather than reality is always "simpler" than postulating reality. No doubt such a confusion could arise from the mere pressure of scholarly trends. Saying that John or Matthew "knew what happened" is taken to sound naive and incautious. So saying instead that they appear to be "based on earlier tradition" is a use of scholar-ese that signals that you are not one of those hasty fundamentalists and are taking the more "careful" and hence (allegedly) the more justified position. But this is not actually true. As I pointed out in the earlier post, never talking about reality but always about traditions is a history-dissolver. It means we literally never get around to talking about reality! It is also a violation of simplicity to hypothesize an extra layer of "tradition" in between what we actually have and the events as they occurred when this is unnecessary, when the author could have known of the events in some more direct way. After all, reality is out there. So the intervening "tradition" is just an extra entity. And it becomes all the more complex as one has to attribute to the "tradition" a set of highly specific characteristics in order to use it as a replacement for reality in our model.

But someone might ask, "Is there not evidence in Paul's epistles of the existence of earlier oral traditions?" Yes, there is some, but by no means in a sense that would support an "ur-source" hypothesis for undesigned coincidences. The existence of something like the "creed" in I Cor. 15 indicates only (at most) that early believers were catechized using traditional formulas. It does not mean that any of the Gospels themselves were composed by putting together formal, oral traditions as opposed to being based upon reality more directly. (It's worth noting here that no such "creed" is incorporated into the text of any of the Gospels.)

At this point, readers may be wondering about the two-source hypothesis and Markan priority. But the two-source hypothesis concerning the synoptic gospels does not at all mean that the synoptic Gospels, nor even Matthew and Luke, were based upon a large network of pre-Gospel oral traditions. Mark itself is neither a hypothetical entity nor an oral entity. It is a document that we possess and can evaluate on its own merits. If Matthew and Luke are based on it in part literarily, it does not follow that Matthew and Luke are, for their other information, based upon formal "oral traditions."

In any event, Matthew may have been an eyewitness himself. Luke had opportunity to interview eyewitnesses. And, as I point out repeatedly in Hidden in Plain View, the evidence of undesigned coincidences cuts across the "synoptic problem" and the two-source hypothesis, because Matthew and Luke show evidence of independent access to the truth at multiple points, even in some places where their narratives bear similarity to that of Mark. There is no good reason to infer that, since Luke and Matthew may have been partly based literarily on Mark, they are otherwise composed by putting together formal oral traditions as opposed to witness testimony--their own or that of others. And it would be even more implausible to think that they were composed by putting together mere fragments of such oral traditions.

When I went back to Hidden in Plain View recently, I was especially struck by how many of the undesigned coincidences discussed in it bring together information from more than one incident--more than one "pericope," as they are called. For example, the UC concerning Jesus' trial and the claim that he threatened to destroy the Temple brings together that trial scene and a completely different context--his words in John when he cleanses the Temple in John 2: "Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up." The explanation of John the Baptist's words, "I saw and bare record that this was the Son of God" in John 1:32-34 brings together that scene, in which John the Baptist is later talking about the baptism of Jesus, and the actual story of Jesus' baptism as told in the Synoptic Gospels. The UC concerning Peter's boast that he will never deny Jesus and Jesus' later words to him, "Do you love me more than these?" in John 21 also brings together different scenes and incidents. And there are many more.

I had brought this point up briefly in the earlier post, but I hadn't realized just how many of the UCs have this feature. It comes up again and again. This is especially relevant for any attempted ur-source hypothesis concerning "oral traditions," because any common "oral tradition story" idea will concern specific stories as told in standardized form. Thus a parable might (allegedly) have circulated in such a "tradent-cerified" form, or the story of a healing, and so forth. Hence, the idea of such earlier oral stories does nothing to explain away the occurrence of UCs that cut across two or more pericopes in the Gospels. There is no reason to think that a "tradition story" of Jesus' words as told in John when he cleansed the Temple (if there even was such a thing, which there may well not have been) would dovetail with the "tradition story" of the accusation against him at his Sanhedrin trial unless both were true. In other words, in that case the same UC argument that applies to the Gospel accounts would apply to separate "tradition stories." If a "tradition story" of a single pericope is a conjectural entity (as it is), a single "tradition story" that just happened to contain two completely different pericopes concerning different parts of Jesus' life is truly wildly conjectural and is not even what is usually meant by the concept of an "oral tradition."

This is not to say that an "ur-source" theory works at all well even for a single incident, such as the feeding of the five thousand. For all the reasons given here and in the earlier post, a conjecture of a composite "tradition story" of the feeding containing all the information needed for the UCs surrounding that incident, which later fragmented into the Gospels we currently have, is highly implausible and unjustified. But the "ur-source" hypothesis is, if possible, epistemically even worse if one were to try to apply it to UCs that cut across multiple incidents.

One more topic has occurred to me in this most recent exchange on ur-sources, which I didn't discuss in the earlier post: Apparent discrepancies.

Take, for the sake of concreteness, the feeding of the five thousand. I can think immediately of two apparent discrepancies concerning the feeding which have puzzled scholars for a long time: 1)The apparent difficulty concerning "pros Bethsaidan" in Mark and the statement in Luke that the feeding took place near Bethsaida. I discuss that here. 2) The apparent discrepancy between Mark 6:45 and John 6:15-16 concerning whether the disciples went away by boat before or after Jesus went up into the mountain by himself. Nor are these the only apparent discrepancies in the feeding of the five thousand.

If there is one thing that apparent discrepancies are good for, it is opposing various causal dependence theories. And an ur-source theory is a causal dependence theory. (This is an area of my professional specialty in probability theory.)

If there were ever (implausibly enough) some compendium version of the feeding of the five thousand story that contained all of the details now found dispersed in various gospels, or all of the details used in a given undesigned coincidence, we would expect that compendium version to be at least coherent in the sense of resolving such apparent discrepancies. Jesus would either appear to dismiss the crowd and go up into the mountain before the disciples leave in their boat or after, not both. Such a version of the story (being just a single version) would be expected to be somewhat clearer about what direction they rowed after leaving the place of the feeding so as not to appear (even prima facie) to contradict the statement that the event occurred near Bethsaida. A well-honed official story version has the opportunity to smooth out these rough edges or to avoid producing them in the first place. Indeed, part of the job of creating one version of a story that will be told over and over again would presumably be making choices about which direction to go if one's underlying evidence had some apparent discrepancies in it already.

But separate witness testimonies, as cold-case detective J. Warner Wallace has repeatedly pointed out, often contain small apparent discrepancies concerning ancillary parts of the story. Hence, the apparent discrepancies between the feeding accounts are yet another characteristic that makes them look like independent witness testimonies in the form that we now have them, not like broken-off parts of a pre-existing ur-narrative from which they were copied.

It cannot be stressed too strongly: The fact that NT scholars have an unfortunate tendency to construct sources or traditions at the drop of a hat and to endow them with all sorts of specific characteristics on the basis of no independent evidence does not mean that doing so is reasonable or constitutes an epistemically problematic challenge to UCs. Undesigned coincidences tend to support a simpler model, and if that simpler model is regarded as "radical" when compared with the more convoluted approach that one might expect "critical scholarship" to take, we need to let the data speak for themselves. Hobbling the conclusions that can be drawn from UCs by pointing out that a scholar or a skeptic could make up a hypothetical "ur-source tradition" and gerrymander it so that it included everything found in the Gospels' separate stories is not a good scholarly practice.

Nor does such a practice deal with the inconvenient fact that, when all is said and done, the Tradition mountain in the middle has, now that the Gospels exist, magically turned back (in the accounts we have) into varied accounts with the properties that we find normal witness testimony to have--puzzling incompleteness, casualness, inclusion of vivid and unnecessary details, fitting-together with other partial accounts, and occasional apparent discrepancies. That is quite a coincidence if these are merely broken-off fragments of some ur-tradition rather than being independent testimony to reality.

As I said in the earlier post, contemporary NT scholars appear to be largely unaware of or uninterested in undesigned coincidences, though one does see occasional positive references to them (whether by that name or not) in the works of more conservative scholars. Both Leon Morris and Craig Blomberg discuss them in the context of supporting the historicity of John's Gospel.

The fact that there is no contemporary, back-and-forth literature to speak of on undesigned coincidences means that the NT scholarly guild has not yet taken much of a whack at explaining them away. This is just as well from my perspective. I tend to think it would be a weariness of the mind and flesh to have to read the convoluted theories that critical scholars, motivated to discredit UCs as independent evidence for the Gospels' historicity, might try to come up with. But so far, we must conjecture about what they "would say."

Since ad hocness, construction of phantom sources on a case-by-case basis, and rampant violation of simplicity are pretty common faults of the discipline, it is possible that some sort of ur-source hypotheses will end up being the favored "go-to" if and when more "mainstream" critical scholars start trying to dismiss undesigned coincidences. The fact that the question comes up from time to time among my correspondents may indicate that the wind will blow in that direction. That will be particularly interesting to see insofar as it involves the Gospel of John: Will we then see a scholar who has talked expansively of the inventive proclivities of the late-1st-century "Johannine community" suddenly start solemnly telling us that John's story of Jesus' trial before Pilate was part of a larger, oral ur-source that existed before Luke and that John's version of the feeding of the five thousand is a broken-off piece of a larger, oral ur-source that was standardized in the Christian community prior to Mark? I suppose anything is possible, and NT critics are, in practice, great believers in the maxim that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. I would like to think that, if that happens, there will be plenty of others besides me around to point out, once again, that the Emperor is unclad. If needed, these posts should enable us to make that point in some detail.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on August 29, 2018 9:26 AM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (Gospel of John) (New Testament) (undesigned coincidences)

Dancing with the distinguished professor--Post I

 

Dancing with the distinguished professor--Post I

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)

Late last week the podcast aired of my debate, recorded April 11, with Craig A. Evans on the subject "Is John's Gospel Historically Accurate" or (as stated on the podcast) "Does John's Gospel Present an Historically Accurate Picture of Jesus?" Here is the link. (Note to the podcast-averse, among whom I count myself: Evans's and my debate does not take the whole of the podcast. Our section goes to about 1 hour and 11 minutes. There is also a transcript available now thanks to reader Sean. See here.) Here are Part II and Part III of my analysis.

The debate represented a disappointing performance on the part of Dr. Evans, who (as we were reminded repeatedly) is the Distinguished Professor of Christian Origins at Houston Baptist University. Not only did Dr. Evans seriously misrepresent his own statements from 2012, he also was extremely unclear concerning his own current positions on the historicity of John, shifting within the course of this debate itself. To make matters worse, he repeatedly made use of outright false statements of fact in order to give various impressions. These included most prominently the false statement that there are seven "long I am discourses" in the Gospel of John, both preceded and followed by repeated references to these supposed (plural) "I am discourses."

My remarks on the debate will not follow any highly organized order and for that reason will be organized under headers for easier browsing.

A couple of links to positive evidence

I hope to write much more on the positive evidence for the historicity of John's Gospel. I had hoped that we would have more time in this debate to get into that material, of which I prepared a great deal, but Dr. Evans's habit of talking at length while not answering questions directly made it difficult to get to that point, and I was able only to include a few references.

Let me remind the reader that I have an entire book, Hidden in Plain View, that is particularly relevant to John's Gospel. In Hidden in Plain View I point out more than once that John's Gospel has more undesigned coincidences for its unique material than any other Gospel. This directly contradicts the portrait of John as embellishing more than the synoptic authors. To the contrary, the more unique material John gives us, the more opportunity we have to confirm his knowledge of (and literal trustworthiness concerning) events and of the words and doings of Jesus. So please get and read or re-read Hidden in Plain View if you are interested in positive evidence for the reliability of John.

In my webinar on maximal data, beginning about here, I also discuss the presence of unexplained allusions and unnecessary details in John and the way that these show his intention to be understood historically. They give serious verisimilitude to his narrative and show it to be exactly the opposite of an allegory or a parable.

In the course of the debate with Dr. Evans I mentioned other points, such as the unity of Jesus' personality and character throughout all four Gospels, with John mentioning separate sayings and incidents that show the same Jesus as what we find in the synoptics.

I also mentioned two particular points on which some people have asked for links, so I wanted to put those here early in this post. The chart by the unitarian author James Drummond showing that John does not actually have Jesus talking longer than he does in Matthew is found here. The section of Stanley Leathes in which he gives parallels between Jesus in John and in the synoptics is found here.

It has been such a privilege for me to get to know various older authors and to begin to recover what has been lost. That knowledge, which came from Esteemed Husband, Tim McGrew, is what gave rise to Hidden in Plain View. We must continue the important work of fighting chronological snobbery and recovering perspective from the democracy of the dead.

Outright inaccuracies concerning Scripture and Wisdom literature

It is sometimes said that only those with a particular credential in either New Testament studies or classics have any right to address matters of New Testament studies. This sort of pointless credentialism, used as a sheer distraction from the arguments, is all-too-common among devotees of literary device theories. Given this sort of credentialism, it is particularly striking that Evans repeatedly, throughout the debate, made use of overtly, objectively false statements about the contents of Scripture itself, which is supposedly his specialty rather than mine. Perhaps just knowing the Bible is sometimes more helpful than being a New Testament scholar.

The most prominent of these is the statement at minute 18:30ff, alluded to throughout the entire debate, that there are many "I am discourses" in the Gospel of John that constitute one of the most "distinctive features" of that Gospel. In response to a deferential request from the host that Evans would specify ("for those who are not as familiar as you are, obviously, with these texts") what he is referring to as "I am discourses," Evans says,

One of the most distinctive features about John is where Jesus just begins to speak at length, nothing like this in the synoptics....But in John, Jesus will say "I am the light of the world," and he'll go on and on and on for many verses.

Besides, "I am the light of the world" Evans lists at this point, "I am the bread of life," "I am the way, the truth, and the life," "I am the good shepherd," and "I am the resurrection and the life." At about minute 19:15 he says,

These are the I am discourses. There are about seven of them. They're very thematic. They're very theological. They have a very high Christology. And Jesus speaks more or less as Wisdom speaks.

Throughout the debate, this supposed set ("The I am discourses") serves various functions for Evans. He uses references to the "I am discourses" most prominently in the early part of the debate to imply that his position in 2012 concerns merely these "discourses" and hence that it was limited and had nothing to do with a generalized questioning of the historicity of John's genre--an obvious misrepresentation if one reads his lengthy and emphatic remarks at that time. He also uses the phrase "the I am discourses" or "the long I am discourses" to imply that, since length is an issue he emphasizes as an alleged feature of these many discourses, he is not questioning the "I am" sayings themselves but merely our having these alleged lengthy discourses from "top to bottom." The truth comes out on that, however, later in the podcast (51:15) when he actually says that it is the phrase "I am" itself that arouses his suspicions that John is rewriting Jesus' words to make Jesus "sound like Wisdom." This abandons the pretense that the question is merely about the verbatim recording of full, lengthy discourses. But earlier in the debate, the claim of many "I am discourses" is useful to Evans for that purpose. The host, Justin Brierley, believes Evans (why wouldn't he?) that there are these many "I am discourses" and even attempts to correct me (minute 41:46) when I am defending the historicity of the so-called Farewell Discourse in John 14-16. Justin thinks I'm talking about a passage that Evans isn't talking about, since Evans is allegedly talking about the (plural) "I am discourses" instead. But in fact (as I pointed out at minute 39:25), my addressing the Farewell Discourse was an attempt to try to talk about something Evans might have had in mind, since it is the longest discourse in John, sometimes questioned for that very reason (as Evans himself emphasizes length of Jesus' discourses as allegedly unusual in John), and since it contains a short section (eight verses) in which Jesus says and expounds on, "I am the true vine." (John 15:1-8) Some of the surrounding dialogue at the beginning of chapter 14 (which is sometimes treated as part of a continuous discourse, though in fact it is not) contains "I am the way, the truth, and the life." Hence it seemed to me, since I knew that the reference to plural "I am discourses" is incorrect taken literally, that the Farewell Discourse might be a candidate for Evans's skepticism.

That there are not seven, nor even several, "long I am discourses" in John can be seen simply by opening one's Bible. Check out "I am the light of the world," which Evans explicitly claims inaugurates such a discourse in which Jesus "goes on and on and on." On the contrary, it is a short saying that takes up one single verse (John 8:12) and is immediately followed by a challenge from the crowd to the effect that Jesus' testimony is not true since he is testifying to himself. This inaugurates a back-and-forth dialogue, not about his being the light of the world but about testimony, Abraham, and who their father is and who Jesus' father is, culminating in "Before Abraham was, I am" in verse 58, at which point they try to stone him. There is no long discourse anywhere in sight. If instead Evans meant to refer to John 9:5, where Jesus also says, "I am the light of the world," he's also out of luck. For Jesus' comment there is immediately followed, in the next verse, by his healing the man born blind.

What about "I am the resurrection and the life"? That's John 11:25. Jesus' short saying about himself there ends with his asking Martha if she believes what he has told her. This is followed by further dialogue with Mary, whom Martha fetches, and by the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Again, there is no long "I am" discourse anywhere. What about "I am the good shepherd"? This occurs in John 10:11 and is followed by a few verses (through verse 18, to be precise) in which Jesus expands upon this particular metaphor, but that hardly qualifies as a long discourse in which he "goes on and on."

What about "I am the way, the truth, and the life"? Nope, no luck there. Jesus says that in John 14:6-7. Right after that Philip asks him to show them the Father, and Jesus answers by talking about his union with the Father through verse 11, followed by other topics. There is no long, thematic discourse at all based on "I am the way, the truth, and the life," and in fact it is followed immediately by dialogue.

And so it goes. Though "I am the true vine" (John 15:1) (which Evans stated in 2012 was not historical) occurs within the course of the Farewell Discourse, Jesus' thematic exposition of that particular claim about himself continues for only eight verses, after which a new topic is introduced.

For all of the "I am" statements in John (both with and without predicates) with a single exception (which I'll come back to in a moment), one of the following is true: Either 1) The statement occurs only in a single verse, followed by dialogue or action, or 2) the statement inaugurates only a brief thematic exposition of its topic.

The single exception is "I am the bread of life," which (depending on where one starts counting) is the theme of a discourse encompassing about twenty-five verses from John 6:32-58. Even this is broken up by exclamations from the crowd at verses 31, 41-42, and 52, so it is not continuous discourse, but after each outbreak, Jesus does continue with the same theme.

Thus, there is only one (slightly) long "I am discourse" in the entire Gospel of John. If one really wanted to stretch it, one could amalgamate Jesus' comments on sheep, shepherds, robbers, and two sayings--"I am the door," and "I am the good shepherd"--in John 10 to piece together a so-called "I am discourse" from John 10:1-15, but such a procedure would be straining. No "I am" saying even occurs in that passage until verse 7 ("I am the door of the sheep).

When Evans refers to seven "I am discourses" he is presumably thinking of the seven "I am" sayings with predicates. But these do not correspond, as he claims, to anything remotely close to seven long, thematic "I am discourses." Evans is simply conflating scholarly doubts about the "I am" sayings with scholarly skepticism about alleged lengthy discourses in John, which creates nothing but confusion.

Another outright falsehood was this claim from Evans concerning "Wisdom literature" at about minute 51:15

Second one is, the 'I am' way of speaking--"I am this," and "I am that," various attributes--is a feature that we find in wisdom tradition both inside canonical scripture and outside in the approximate time, the century or two leading up to the church, and so that then makes us wonder, "Hmm, maybe John is taking Jesus' teaching..." ... and presenting it as though Jesus is Wisdom speaking.

Notice how specific Evans is. He does not simply say that Wisdom praises herself and Jesus also praises himself. He does not simply say that both Wisdom and Jesus (since they are praising themselves) use the word "I" quite a bit. Instead, he claims specifically that there is an "I am way of speaking" that is characteristic of the personification of Wisdom. This fits with his statements in 2012 about the allegedly allegorical nature of the "I am" sayings, where he said, upon being challenged by Ehrman about a whole list of "I am" sayings, that in the Old Testament allegories of Lady Wisdom, no one takes this to have recounted a literal occasion when such a person walked around and talked.

Evans's claim about an "I am way of speaking" that characterizes Wisdom literature is simply false. The only reference he gives (at about minute 19:15) is Sirach 24, available in translation here and in the Septuagint Greek here. Other places where Lady Wisdom is personified are Proverbs 1 and Proverbs 8 and 9.

In not a single one of these places does Wisdom use "I am this" and "I am that" followed by various attributes. Go ahead; read for yourself. In Sirach 24:24 (sometimes listed as verse 18), the English translation gives "I am the mother of fair love", but in the Septuagint the verb is understood. There is no "ego eimi," nor would the occurrence of such a single instance amount to a typically Wisdom-like "I am way of speaking" in any event.

This "I am way of speaking" as typical of Lady Wisdom is entirely an invention of Evans's. It does not occur in the text he cites nor in other candidate passages. To be sure, Wisdom praises herself and says a lot of high-toned things about herself, but it would sound like a much less impressive parallel to say, "Lady Wisdom praises herself when personified, and when Jesus uses 'I am' sayings he is also praising himself, so maybe John changed Jesus' words and wrote up passages that were never uttered by Jesus in order to make Jesus sound like Lady Wisdom."

In case I was overlooking something, I consulted Old Testament scholar C. Jack Collins of Covenant Theological Seminary, and he confirmed what I was finding. He gave me permission to quote him on this topic:

First, there is (AFAIK) nothing distinctively wisdom-ish about the combination egō eimi; in fact, this combination is not frequent in Proverbs & Wisdom of Solomon & Sirach (Prov. 8:30 hardly establishes a style). The combination of words is clear enough, BTW, so there’s no reason to associate the words with a particular style or way of speaking.

Second, even should there be such a style, I have no idea how that leads to the conclusion that we are free to discount the likelihood that Jesus actually said these things.

Third, I do think that the personification of Wisdom in Proverbs 1–9 (added with a number of other factors) does underlie NT Christology (I have argued in print, for example, that it lies behind the “hymn” of Colossians 1). But if that’s true, there’s no reason why Jesus wouldn’t have known it of himself, and said so.

These are not the only inaccuracies in Evans's factual statements (even aside from his inaccuracies about his own words in 2012). For example, he also claims that the additional material in John at the beginning of Jesus' ministry is before the baptism of John (minute 35:30), but this is false. The additional material at the beginning of Jesus' ministry is after the baptism of John but before the beginning of Jesus' Galilean ministry. This is fairly minor, but worth noting in passing.

Recall as well, as noted in my previous post, that back in 2012 Evans made the inaccurate statement that there were church fathers who questioned the canonicity of John.

I bring all of these up both because these matters lie within Evans's area of specialty and (allegedly) not within mine and also because in the cases of the claims about Wisdom literature and about the supposed seven "I am discourses," the false statements played an important role in Evans's self-presentation and/or his argument. It thus becomes important to point out that Evans's factual claims must be checked rather than accepted uncritically, even within his own area of expertise.

Inaccurate portrayal of his own remarks in 2012

At several points Dr. Evans represented his own remarks from 2012 in ways that simply were not accurate. Here I have to point out that Evans was not (as one might have thought) relying only on hazy, six-year-old memories. On the contrary. Last September, only eight months ago, a clip showing the first segment that I have transcribed here came to light. Some concerned people wrote personally to Evans to ask for his clarification. He implied to them quite clearly that he watched the segment, then he proceeded to misrepresent his remarks in the same manner that he did here in the debate on Unbelievable--namely, that he was merely saying that the "I am discourses" were not recorded "verbatim." (I also quoted several of his own remarks to him at minute 11:27.)

Evans makes the same false statements concerning the "I am discourses" and the supposed only point he was making to Ehrman in this debate at minute 17:30 and following. He even goes so far as to say that he did not address "Before Abraham was, I am," and that Bart didn't ask him about it, which is absolutely false. Bart asks him about that statement emphatically. See the transcript. Again, this false statement concerns the portion of his comments that were brought to his attention, that he was asked about, and that he watched on video just last fall.

At minute 21 he states, again, that the "only point I was trying to make to Bart Ehrman" was that John shapes the "I am discourses" in a way that "sounds like Wisdom" rather than recording verbatim. Once again, this is a severe misrepresentation of his statements in 2012, which are all a matter of public record. At that time he did not in any way limit his remarks to some particular discourses, nor was his "only point" about some particular discourses or about verbatim transcription. Rather, he suggested again and again that John in general is a different genre from the synoptics, that it is not historical in genre, that it contains only "nuggets" of history, and so forth. Here are just a few selected comments. Again, please see the transcript for more, and watch the videos if you have the slightest doubt:

So I suspect we [he and Ehrman] don’t have too much difference on John. My view is the gospel of John is a horse of another color altogether. It’s a different genre.

I think John is studded with historical details. Maybe you called them nuggets. That’s not a bad way of describing John. But I think the synoptics are more than just some nuggets.

And by the way, Bart, I object to saying it’s not historically accurate. Well, if something isn’t exactly historical, how is it not historically accurate? It’d be like saying, "You mean the parable, the parable was a fiction Jesus told? It’s not historically accurate?"

Ehrman: Okay, you are not going to use John as a blueprint for writing the historical life of Jesus. Because you think it’s metaphorical.

[Evans nods]: Fair enough.

On a historical level let us suppose we could go back into time with a camera team and audio and video record the historical Jesus and we followed him about throughout his ministry. I would be very surprised if we caught him uttering, “I am this” and “I am that” and one of these big long speeches that we find in John. Okay, so I’m just taking a different tack, but I’m saying the same thing I said before. This aspect of the Gospel of John I would not put in the category of historical. It’s a genre question.

The real question then would be, do these from a theological point of view reflect an accurate theological understanding of Jesus’s person, his accomplishment, what he’s achieved, what he brings to his believers. Is he the light of the world? Is he, y’know, the way, the truth, the life? Is he the bread of life? See? And that’s what Christians can affirm.
[snip]

So you could say, theologically, these affirmations of who Jesus is in fact do derive from Jesus. Not because he walked around and said them. But because of what he did, what he said, what he did, and because of his resurrection. And so this community that comes together in the aftermath of Easter says, “You know what? This Jesus who said these various things, whose teaching we cling to and interpret and present and adapt and so on, he is for us the way, the truth, the life, the true vine. He is the bread of life,” and so on. And so that gets presented in a very creative, dramatic, and metaphorical way, in what we now call the Gospel of John.

So I’m urging people here, traditional Christians or conservative Christians, to take a new look at John and not fret over how you can make it harmonize with the synoptic Jesus.

Obviously, these comments, including those which Evans watched just last fall and some from later in the Q & A of the 2012 debate, are saying a great deal more than just that we would not historically find an "I am discourse" "top to bottom" and "verbatim." Moreover, Evans was not merely correcting a false dichotomy on the part of Ehrman. In conversation with Ehrman he was meeting him more than halfway, agreeing that John is "metaphorical" and assuring him emphatically that John is only incidentally historical. Then in response to the audience informing them that conservative Christians need to stop attempting to harmonize the Jesus of John with the Jesus of the synoptics.

If, as he tried in some measure to imply early in the debate, Evans now wants to embrace an almost entirely historical Gospel of John, except for some carefully circumscribed "discourses" (once he figures out which discourses those are), this is a vast change from his position in 2012, and he should admit as much. There, the emphasis was precisely the opposite: For 2012 Evans, history in John was to be found only in "nuggets," while the Gospel as a whole was a "horse of a different color."

We should not allow Evans to change the past, for if we allow the past to be obscured, we will also allow truth to be obscured both about the present views of Evans and other scholars and also about the Gospel of John itself.

In my next post I will begin by discussing the highly specific question I asked Evans about two particular sayings of Jesus and his surprising answer.

Part II

Part III

Posted by Lydia McGrew on May 21, 2018 6:55 PM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (Craig Evans) (Gospel of John) (New Testament) (undesigned coincidences)

New undesigned coincidence: The parable of the wicked tenants

 

New undesigned coincidence: The parable of the wicked tenants

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)

There are some very minor differences in wording among Matthew's, Mark's, and Luke's accounts of Jesus' parable of the wicked tenants during Passion Week. You can read Matthew's here, Luke's here, and Mark's here.

Mark's, as is so often the case, is the shortest. Each of Luke and Matthew contains some material that Mark doesn't have, including some small material that each other do not have.

A difference that redaction critics have made a particularly big deal of is between Matthew and Mark. Mark says that Jesus said this, at the climax of his story:

"What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others." (Mark 12:9)

Matthew actually shows the surrounding audience answering Jesus' rhetorical question:

"When therefore the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” They said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons.” (Matthew 21:40-41)

Luke is similar to Mark at that point in that it shows only Jesus answering his own question, not the crowd. It also contains a small bit extra:

"What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others.” When they heard this, they said, “Surely not!” (Luke 20:15b-16)

The "surely not" response of the crowd is unique to Luke.

Redactive critics focus on the fact that Jesus asks and answers his own question in Mark and Luke and that the crowd (or religious leaders) answer the question in Matthew. A critic with a theological/ideological redactive focus will usually suggest that this is Matthew's attempt to stick it to the Jewish leaders by making them pronounce their own judgement. A critic with a literary focus will suggest that Matthew is composing a short dialogue based on Mark's account in which only Jesus speaks. Presumably for the sake of greater literary interest. The similarity in Matthew is undeniable to the account of Nathan coming to David and telling him a parable about a rich man who stole a poor man's one ewe lamb and killed her. David said that the rich man should die, and Nathan then said, "Thou art the man!" Here, too, Jesus tells a parable and the audience says that the wicked tenants deserve severe punishment without realizing at first that the parable is directed against them.

Matthew continues:

Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures:

“‘The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
this was the Lord's doing,
and it is marvelous in our eyes’?

Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits. And the one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him.”

When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they perceived that he was speaking about them. And although they were seeking to arrest him, they feared the crowds, because they held him to be a prophet. (Matt. 21:43-45)

All three gospels have the quotation from Psalm 118. All of them say that the leaders saw that Jesus was speaking about the nation, wanted to arrest him, but feared the people. Matthew and Luke both have Jesus' additional words about falling on the stone and being crushed by the stone. Unique to Matthew is Jesus' explicit statement in verse 43:

Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits.

The redactive hypotheses of "turning into a dialogue" and/or casting the religious leaders in a bad light by making them pronounce their own judgement are both unnecessary. As I have always said, once we take seriously the possibility that Matthew was an eyewitness or even had eyewitness sources, yes, even when he is telling a story that is told in Mark, we have more resources available to us. The preference for Mark over Matthew, ubiquitous in NT scholarship, also needs to be challenged. Here it is entirely plausible that some in the crowd did speak up, as recorded in Matthew, and answered the question about what the king will do to his wicked tenants. There are often some members of an audience who like to participate by answering a rhetorical question asked by the teacher. We don't even know for sure who the "they" were who piped up. If Jesus then said something like, "That's right; that's exactly what he will do," this may well have been remembered by Peter (say) as Jesus' having affirmed that the owner would come and destroy the wicked tenants, and he may have told the story in that extremely moderately and recognizably paraphrased version to Mark. Alternatively, Jesus and the crowd could have spoken at approximately the same time. (Biblical critics, especially those with a redactive bias, typically overlook the possibility that multiple people spoke at once.)

A clue that Matthew's unique material in this passage is actually true, based on knowledge of the events rather than his desire to amplify the events from his imagination, comes from an undesigned coincidence with Luke.

Notice that, as Luke tells the story, something is left unexplained: The members of the audience say, "Surely not!" when Jesus says that the owner of the vineyard will come and destroy the tenants. (The Greek in Luke is something like, "May it not be!" the equivalent of "God forbid!" in modern English.)

But at that point, they and Jesus appear in Luke still to be talking about the parable. Nobody has pointed out the point of the parable. Why would they "jump the gun" by showing so much sympathy for the wicked tenants? Please remember that this is not a world full of pacifists! The audience would not be expressing horror over the king's destroying just anybody, because "destroying" is cruel! Clearly, in Luke, the audience recognizes the application of the parable to the Jewish nation and is responding to that. But nobody has made that application in Luke, and it seems a little bit much that the audience would simply make the leap all on their own to that application and exclaim in horror at the prediction of the punishment of their own nation for wickedness. Normally people don't rush to make unflattering applications to themselves and accept those applications!

Matthew, here, explains Luke. If we suppose that Jesus' words in Matthew 21:43, stating explicitly that the kingdom will be taken from them and given to another people, came prior to their exclaiming, "May it not be!" as given in Luke 20:16, everything makes sense. Jesus expressly pointed the moral of his parable, and the people cried out in horror.

This does mean that probably the order of Jesus' words overall was a tiny bit different from that given in Matthew. For example, he may have quoted Psalm 118 after rather than before giving the moral of the story. But such a difference in order falls well within the bounds of recognizable paraphrase based on simple memory variation.

Luke does not include Jesus' pointing the moral of the story. The people's exclamation is left oddly unexplained in Luke. Matthew does not give the exclamation at all; he simply records Jesus' statement that the kingdom will be taken from them. A classic undesigned coincidence.

The important point is that we shouldn't jump to the conclusion that, if a story is both in Mark and Matthew, Matthew got it from Mark with no independent knowledge of his own. This is not the only case of this sort concerning Matthew or Luke and Mark; I give a couple of others in Hidden in Plain View. Sometimes even when there are close verbal similarities among the synoptics, Matthew and/or Luke (in this case, both) have information not found in Mark, and we should never just assume that this information is something they added out of their own imaginations, whether literary or theological. The fact that that information fits together as in this instance cautions against such an assumption.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on March 25, 2018 10:20 AM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (New Testament) (undesigned coincidences)

New Undesigned Coincidence: The women from Galilee

 

New Undesigned Coincidence: The women from Galilee

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)

I've recently been enjoying reading Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses straight through. At some point I hope to have the time to write more about my big-picture assessment of the book. Right now I'm involved in some other publishing projects and don't have the time to do that at any length. So all I will say here is that Bauckham's book is worth reading, extremely interesting and well-written, and has some good information and arguments, but that I don't "buy" all of his arguments, even when their conclusions are congenial to me. For example, I'm unconvinced by his claim to have discovered a literary indicator that he calls "the inclusio of eyewitness testimony" by which the authors allegedly tagged their eyewitness sources. I'm afraid, much as I'd like to agree with him, that the inclusio of witness testimony is a mirage. Again, I hope to write more about Bauckham another time.

So far, one of the most valuable effects of my reading Bauckham has been to inspire me to notice things that I hadn't noticed before. The undesigned coincidence that I give here is based upon one of Bauckham's (ultimately unsuccessful, in my view) attempts to support an "inclusio of witness testimony," but by focusing on the texts in question, I noticed a previously un-noted coincidence among the documents.

One of my favorite undesigned coincidences given in Hidden in Plain View is the one between Matthew 14 and Luke 8 where we discover how the Christians could have known what Herod was saying to his household servants. Matthew refers to Herod's superstitious musings to his servants that Jesus might be John the Baptist risen again. This is the lead-in to Matthew's account of the beheading of John the Baptist. Luke, in an entirely different context, lists some women that gave money to Jesus' ministry in Galilee and traveled with him, and in this list he includes Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod's steward. This provides a very natural route by which the chit-chat between Herod and his servants could have reached the Christian community, including the author of the Gospel of Matthew. One of the nicest things about this coincidence is that it confirms a unique phrase in Matthew within a passage (the story of John the Baptist's death) that otherwise looks very "Markan," thus confirming Matthew's independent access to events even when a given incident is also found in Mark.

I now see the same verses in Luke (8:2-3) as participating in a coincidence both internal to Luke and between Luke and Mark/Matthew. Here is Luke's information about these women in chapter 8:

Soon afterward he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. And the twelve were with him, and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod's household manager, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their means. (Luke 8:1-3)

The women listed are Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna, though Luke notes that there were others as well. They are said to have traveled with Jesus and to have given money to him. The connection with Galilee from Luke is found both in the reference to Magdala (which is on the coast of the Sea of Galilee, south of Capernaum) and in the previous chapter's reference to Jesus as being in Capernaum and in Nain, which is about six miles south of Nazareth. So Luke doesn't explicitly say here that these women began their association and travel with Jesus in Galilee, but this is a plausible inference.

Fast-forward to the crucifixion, and we find that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all mention that there were women at the cross who had followed Jesus to Jerusalem from Galilee. Luke mentions this very briefly just after recounting Jesus' death (Luke 23:49) but names none of them at that point. He simply says that the women who followed Jesus from Galilee as well as some of Jesus' (male) acquaintances "stood at a distance watching these things." Later in the chapter (vss. 55-56) Luke again mentions "the women who had come with him from Galilee" and says that they saw the tomb and how Jesus was laid and then returned home to prepare spices and ointments. Again, Luke gives no names at this point.

But Matthew and Mark do. Here is Mark 15:40-41 on the women at the cross:

There were also women looking on from a distance, among whom were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome. When he was in Galilee, they followed him and ministered to him, and there were also many other women who came up with him to Jerusalem.

Matthew's list is similar, though not identical to Mark's in wording:

There were also many women there, looking on from a distance, who had followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering to him, among whom were Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joseph and the mother of the sons of Zebedee. (Matthew 27:55-56)

Scholars have enjoyed debating over whether Mark's "Salome" is to be taken to be the same as "the mother of the sons of Zebedee" in Matthew. If so, Matthew seems to have access to some independent information about her, or else Matthew knows the identity of yet a different woman present at the cross. Regardless, is it not interesting that the only overlapping name between Matthew and Mark's lists of women from Galilee here and Luke's list in 8:1-3 is Mary Magdalene? Yet it really looks like the same group of women is in view in all three gospels. Matthew and Mark expressly refer to the women from Galilee at the cross as those who traveled with Jesus and ministered to him, which sounds an awful lot like the group Luke mentions in chapter 8 who traveled with him and provided for him out of their means.

It's extremely unlikely that Luke invented his unique mention of these women back in chapter 8 based upon his knowledge of the crucifixion passages in Mark and/or Matthew. For one thing, Luke's list in chapter 8 is already partially confirmed through its connection with Chuza and the household of Herod. Beyond that, if Luke were fictionally inventing his chapter 8 list ("Hey, we don't see these women earlier; they just crop up suddenly at the cross. Maybe I'll put them into my story earlier!"), why would he have made the names differ so much? Would he not have included Mark's Salome in chapter 8 and left out Joanna and Susanna? And why would he have not driven home the connection between his own gospel and Mark's (and Matthew's) by naming the women at the foot of the cross and at the burial? (Mark and Matthew both name Mary Magdalene and the other Mary--Mary the mother of Joses, in Mark--as seeing where Jesus was laid.)

So we have an undesigned coincidence confirming that there was a group of women, consisting at least of Mary Magdalene, Salome, Mary the mother of Joses, Joanna, and Susanna, and possibly separately (if she isn't Salome) the mother of the sons of Zebedee, who came from Galilee and eventually traveled with Jesus to Jerusalem, helping him materially along the way. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all fit together to confirm this.

But there is a little more information to this effect as well, from Luke alone.

Luke does not expressly name at first the women who went to the tomb on Easter morning, though one infers from the continued use of "they" from the previous chapter that it was the same group of (in Luke, unnamed) women from Galilee who had gone home to prepare spices.

But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel. And as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise.” And they remembered his words... (Luke 24:1-8a)

Bauckham notes that the words of the angel "Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee..." and the statement that the women "remembered his words" indicates that these women had actually been with Jesus in Galilee. No other Gospel records this aspect of the message of the angel. The women were not only told to give a message to the disciples; they were also reminded of what they, personally, had heard Jesus say in Galilee about his suffering and death.

The names in Luke come up only in verse 10:

and returning from the tomb they told all these things to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James and the other women with them who told these things to the apostles, but these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. (Luke 24:9-11)

Based on other harmonistic considerations (which, again, is just good historical practice), I would argue that Luke is "chunking things in" here and that the women did not remain together throughout all of these events. Mary Magdalene probably did not see the angels at the same time that the other women saw the angels, because (per John's account) she apparently ran back to get Peter and John immediately upon seeing that the stone was rolled away. At some point in the day, these various women spoke to some or all of the apostles and told them what they had seen. But notice the names: Luke's list includes Joanna, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James (who presumably is also Mary the mother of Joses) and makes it clear that there were other women involved as well. Matthew's parallel list of women at the tomb on Easter (28:1) mentions only Mary Magdalene and "the other Mary." Mark's (16:1) mentions Salome, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James.

It is quite clear that no one in this situation is trying to copy someone else. Bauckham believes (and I think he is right here) that the variations in the names of women coming and finding the empty tomb indicates scrupulousness on the part of the evangelists--namely, that they were careful to include only those who they, individually, had strong reason to believe were present. Perhaps Matthew and Luke had not spoken to Salome and decided to let her presence rest on Mark's account alone. Joanna is unique to Luke's Gospel entirely; no one else mentions her. Luke apparently had reason to know that she was there.

Here in the account of the words of the angel and the women's memory, Luke's gospel ties together very nicely the resurrection with Luke 8 by making it clear that these women had really known Jesus in Galilee. But Luke does not press or emphasize the point at all. When he finally gets around to names in chapter 24, he does not even include Susanna! Perhaps Susanna was present, but Luke doesn't mention it, if so. And he mentions Mary the mother of James, who wasn't in his own list in chapter 8 at all. Joanna and Mary Magdalene do overlap with the chapter 8 list, thus confirming casually within Luke's gospel that these are members of the same group of women mentioned there.

Luke 8, the three accounts of the women at the cross and the burial, and the accounts of the women at the tomb all fit together in a beautiful but uncontrived mosaic to give a picture of this group of women from Galilee who were with Jesus in his ministry, in his darkest hours, and on to his victory from the grave.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on January 24, 2018 2:48 PM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (New Testament) (undesigned coincidences)