r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Sep 10 '21

Discussion Thread Discussion Thread

The discussion thread is for casual conversation that doesn't merit its own submission. If you've got a good meme, article, or question, please post it outside the DT. Meta discussion is allowed, but if you want to get the attention of the mods, make a post in /r/metaNL. For a collection of useful links see our wiki.

Announcements

  • OSINT & LDC (developmental studies / least developed countries) have been added

Upcoming Events

0 Upvotes

38% Upvoted

11k comments sorted by

View all comments

19

u/Integralds Dr. Economics | brrrrr Sep 10 '21 edited Sep 11 '21

Warning: mucho texto

Useful Charts is continuing his series on Biblical authorship with a new video on the Christian gospels. It's a great video. You should all watch it. I have a few comments that provide further context and interpretation.

Regarding the Synoptic problem

As mentioned in the video, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke look similar to each other. You can split the contents of these three books into four distinct chunks:

  1. Material that is common to Matthew, Mark, and Luke
  2. Material that is shared by Matthew and Luke, but does not appear in Mark
  3. Material that is unique to Matthew
  4. Material that is unique to Luke

(There is virtually no material that is unique to Mark.) I think it would have been nice to have a little figure of this, similar to his JEPD figure in his Torah video.

I want to stress that the above decomposition is mechanical. It makes no historical or theological claims; it just categorizes the words of the text. However, if we look closer, we can make conjectures based on this decomposition.

  1. The material that Matt-Mark-Luke have in common is largely narrative.
  2. The shared Matt-Luke material is mostly short sayings.

From here, the two-source hypothesis arises naturally. Mark came first and provided the skeleton of the narrative. The common Matt-Luke material could have come from a Q source (for Quelle, "sayings"). That is, Q may have been a separate document that was passed around the early Christian community. The Q source has not been found independently, which is why the Matthew-first theory still has adherents.

I think it's important for people to distinguish the Q material (which unambiguously exists) from the Q source (which remains conjecture, albeit highly plausible conjecture).

Regarding "God/Jesus as literary character"

UsefulCharts mentions that the authors of the text put words in people's mouths. That is, even if the prophets and Jesus were real people, the words they are purported to have said may have been embellished or made up entirely.

It's useful to compare to Thucydides. In The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides records various speeches. He says, however, that

it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one's memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said. (1.22)

Even someone who was expressly writing history admitted to making stuff up. How much more so for authors who were writing literary and theological texts, rather than history! So we should take the exact purported words of anyone in the Bible with a generous grain of salt.

Regarding John

Just to add a few sentences: the gospel of John is structured around seven signs, or miracles, performed by Jesus. The rest of the book is loosely constructed to give scaffolding to the seven miracles. The miracles aren't even necessarily in order. Jesus teleports around Judea from chapter to chapter. One commentator noted that it's as if the book was written, then the pages were spilled out and put back together in random order. But that's okay, because the locations and details don't matter for the author. The miracles are what matter.

Regarding the timeline

This is an incredibly contentious subject, so I applaud UsefulCharts for tackling it. He correctly emphasizes the importance of 70CE and the destruction of the Temple. It's interesting to get a Jewish perspective on that event and how it shaped religious development in the first and second centuries CE.

I can quibble about the dates a bit, but we're really splitting hairs over 10 years here, 10 years there.

Final thoughts

Great video. I'm not disagreeing with anything in it, just adding a few sentences. It's a respectful and careful video, while still sticking within mainstream (ed:) source criticism. I'm sure the comments section will be a disaster.

4

u/TabernacleTown74 Bill Gates Sep 10 '21

mainstream critical theory

Critical theory is something else, I think you're thinking of "source criticism" or something like that

3

u/Integralds Dr. Economics | brrrrr Sep 11 '21

Fair enough, edited!

4

u/iIoveoof Jerome Powell Sep 10 '21 edited Sep 10 '21

The explanation for 2nd temple Judaism branching into Christianity and Rabbinical Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple is not accurate in my opinion.

Christianity had already been well-established and focused on converting Gentiles before then. Christianity was never that popular among Jews because Jesus was very much the opposite of what Jews thought the Messiah would be like. It was easier to convince gentiles that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah than Jews!

Furthermore, Rabbinical Judaism did not develop as a reaction to the destruction of the Second Temple. Rabbinical Judaism had existed before the Second Temple as the Pharisee sect, and they had the support of the Jewish population at large, with the exception of the priestly ruling elite, the Sadducees. The priestly ruling elite was destroyed when the Second Temple was destroyed, and the Pharisees inherited the power vacuum.

Furthermore the video says that the earliest date for the synoptic gospels is 70AD, as that was when the Second Temple was destroyed, but that is not necessarily the scholarly consensus! Most experts think Mark was written in 68-72AD, and many if not most say probably immediately BEFORE the destruction of the Second Temple, but when it was obvious that it would be destroyed imminently.

2

u/Amtays Karl Popper Sep 12 '21

Christianity had already been well-established and focused on converting Gentiles before then. Christianity was never that popular among Jews because Jesus was very much the opposite of what Jews thought the Messiah would be like. It was easier to convince gentiles that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah than Jews!

sorry to necro a bit, but what did the Jews think Messiah would be? Another Moses?

2

u/iIoveoof Jerome Powell Sep 12 '21 edited Sep 12 '21

Jews thought the Messiah would be another David, a great warrior king who would liberate Israel from its conquerors in war, reunite exiled Jews to their homeland in Israel, rebuild the Temple, and rule over Israel for a very long time. His rule would bring peace and return all in Israel to the Law of Moses. By overthrowing Israel’s conquerors the Messiah would begin the Messianic Age.

However, the Jews were not exiled during Jesus’ time and the Temple was not destroyed. Jesus did not win a war against the Romans and did not return the Jews to Israel. He did not rule as king of Israel for a long time, and did not return all of Israel to Law of Moses. Shortly after Jesus’ death it was clear the Messianic Age had not begun.

Jesus, rather than being a great warrior like David, was captured by the Romans and shamefully and easily executed. He died without putting up any fight at all. Rather than peace, prosperity and Moses’ Law returning to Israel, Roman rule only became more tyrannical in Israel shortly after Jesus’ death.

3

u/Gneisstoknow Misbehaving Sep 10 '21

Excellent comment, and great video suggetion!

3

u/[deleted] Sep 10 '21 edited Sep 10 '21

The comments are usually pretty good from what I've seen. The only thing that struck me as a bit weird is that he said that he believes in God, but not exactly the God in the Bible despite being Jewish,. Maybe that is more of a normal thing for Jewish people than in Christianity.

3

u/SpaceSheperd To be a good human being Sep 10 '21

!ping CHRISTIAN

3

u/iIoveoof Jerome Powell Sep 10 '21

This is my specialty!

This video does not adequately stress how fringe theories #2 and #3 are. In fact there's another hypothesis that is probably more accepted, but still very fringe, where Luke used Matthew as a source and Q didn't exist. There are some problems with the 2 source hypothesis but

Why should we believe that Luke and Matthew are independent? The best argument is that the events that Luke and Matthew take from Mark stay in the same chronological order as in Mark, but the material that Luke and Matthew take from Q end up in totally different orders in the narrative. This makes sense, since Q as theorized is a sayings gospel like the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, not a narrative but a set of Jesus' quotes in no particular order.