Category Archives: The second century

The Hebrew Gospel—Pt. 4

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The slide into oblivion We have seen that the Church took considerable pains to erase the Hebrew Gospel from history. The fact that no manuscripts of this text survive is telling. Its annihilation is total. What makes that fact even more astonishing is that GHeb was not always denigrated by the Church. When one reviews the approximately 75 references of the Church Fathers to the Hebrew Gospel, it becomes evident that the farther back in history one goes, the more positively GHeb was esteemed. The converse is also true: with the passage of time GHeb went from being admired, to merely tolerated, then spurned, then denigrated, and finally completely eliminated. The text’s decline was slow—it took approximately four centuries: c. … Continue reading →

The Hebrew Gospel—Pt. 3

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[NOTE: This post (and many others on this website) treats Marcion conventionally as an arch-heretic of the second century. However, in 2022 I concluded that ‘Marcion’ was a convenient invention of the early Church.—R.S.] A second pre-synoptic gospel layer We must now add another source—and another layer—to the ongoing synoptic schema recently investigated on this blog. We recall that Matthias Klinghardt has elaborated a revolutionary schema of synoptic gospel development in his exhaustive 2015 volumes. His conclusions are summarized in graphic form below (left). Klinghardt proposes that the Gospel of Marcion (Mcn) preceded all the synoptic gospels, including that of Mark. For him, then, Mcn is the first pre-synoptic gospel layer (below). Klinghardt allows a rather generous chronological window to … Continue reading →

The Hebrew Gospel—Pt. 2

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In the last post we introduced the Hebrew Gospel, specifically through the work of James R. Edwards and his 2009 book The Hebrew Gospel and the Development of the Synoptic Tradition. Edwards successfully sunders the Hebrew Gospel from association with the canonical Gospel of Matthew. The Hebrew Gospel was indeed pre-Matthean and even pre-synoptic. However, it had links not with the Gospel of Matthew but with the “special Luke” material in the third gospel. Furthermore, Edwards gives indications that the Hebrew Gospel was “heretical”: it was used by Jewish Christians, was never canonized (pp. 104–05), and contained a defective christology and a rejection of Paul (192). Now, “defective christology” can mean only one thing: the Hebrew Gospel had a different … Continue reading →

The early bodiless Jesus—Pt. 2

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“It will certainly be to many a discovery that Jesus was known in the first century as the Wisdom of God.”           —Rendel Harris, 1916 (The Origin of the Prologue to St. John’s Gospel, p. vi) In the last post we looked at the Acts of Pilate (AcPil)—being the first half of the rather obscure Gospel of Nicodemus, a Jewish Christian work probably of the mid-second century CE. The work betrays a most unusual theology where “Jesus” is partly physical, partly spiritual, and somehow able to pass from one person to another. This ambiguous theology is the author’s focus. For example, the setting is scrupulously laid out whereby Joseph of Arimathea is locked into a sealed room (even without windows), and … Continue reading →

Part 4—Towards a new synoptic solution

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This is one of the longer and more significant posts on this website. Here we will look at the recent work of two German patristics specialists, both of whom propose that Marcion of Pontus (ostensibly fl. c. 130–c. 160 CE) presented the world with a gospel that predated all four canonical gospels. This in itself is mind-boggling, for it not only dates the canonical gospels much later (well into the second century) than is presently thought, but it also means that the heretic ‘Marcion’ was critically implicated at an early stage of the canonical gospel tradition. [Note: I have placed the name ‘Marcion’ in single quotes because—six years after originally writing this post—I concluded that ‘Marcion’ was an invention of … Continue reading →

Part 3—A revolution in the Synoptic Problem

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[Note: This post has been substantially updated.] The so-called Synoptic Problem can be defined as the search for the literary and redactional relationship between the three (obviously) extensively related “synoptic” gospels—Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Majority opinion has long favored the “two source theory”: Matthew and Luke primarily drew on Mark, and they also drew on a saying source not available to Mark known as “Q” (German abbreviation for Quelle, “source”). However, ongoing disagreements among New Testament scholars show that the two source theory is not satisfactory to many. Perhaps the biggest sticking point is that the Q source is entirely hypothetical. Despite a veritable library that has now been written about it (e.g., see John Kloppenborg’s massive works), Q is … Continue reading →

Part 2—Paul moves to the second century CE

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Powerful headwinds… One has to wonder how it is that, after literally centuries of research, the field of ‘biblical studies’ (encompassing the Jewish scriptures as well as the New Testament) still presents an opaque mass of mutually contradictory conclusions—and, indeed, no universally held conclusions at all! Whenever a promising breakthrough appears—or merely threatens to appear—a chorus of denials predictably rises from the entrenched institutions among us (church, synagogue, and academy) to return to the status quo ante. The correct inference to be drawn is not that (1) people are stupid, (2) researchers are blind, or (3) information is hidden (though a little of all three is probably true), but that in the field of religious studies change is intolerable. Inertia … Continue reading →

Part 1—“Paul,” the improbable phantom

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While Jesus mythicists have been focusing on the (a)historicity of Jesus of Nazareth, a related scholarly war has been raging behind the scenes, as it were: the (a)historicity of Paul of Tarsus—or, more precisely, the inauthenticity of his epistles. It is now becoming increasingly clear that the two issues are intimately linked. After all, if the Pauline epistles are inauthentic, then what basis remains to posit the historicity of their author? Other than the epistles, all that’s really left regarding the historical Paul is the notoriously contrived text known to us as the Acts of the Apostles. Of the thirteen letters ascribed to Paul in the New Testament (the Letter to the Hebrews is “anonymous”), six are considered even by … Continue reading →