Hello, and welcome back to Doubts Aloud.

I'm your guest host, I suppose John Nelson, and I'm here with Ed Francis and Andy.

Hello.

John, welcome, hope to see you again.

Hello, it's to be back.

Great, great?

Yeah, when is your last time?

So?

I think last time we were we were discussing mcgreevyism, which is a sort of a coinage of of my friend Josh Peric and yeah, discussing all things all things Lydia and Tim McGrew, undesigned coincidences and things like that.

Hopefully we'll be able to move beyondyond that.

Well, it is quite greedy in terms of scholarship.

Yeah, groovy Bible scholar.

I think you're currently now been on four times.

You could be almost seen as our resident Bible scholar.

Yeah, podcast, So anyway, Ed, Yes, So do you want to sort of just sort of kick off where we're going to go with John today?

Yeah?

Well, since John was last on, he has started something called Behind the Gospels, which is I think a blog is a fair way of calling it.

Yeah, I think sort of Substack called it a newsletter.

I've called it, maybe somewhat pretentiously an academic blog, which I think I was thinking about this today.

Maybe a slightly misleading, but it is a sort of digest of I mean, some of my own opinions.

But also what sort of critical scholarship on the Gospels.

In what respect would it be misleading?

I mean, you know, just as one of us, just one of your subscribers, it seems academic to.

Me, and me, yeah, I mean I suppose I am.

I am digesting a lot of scholarship, but it's also one of those things where it has I suppose the facade of scholarship in that I'm drawing on some of the things I've researched, and I'm often providing footnotes and that sort of thing.

But maybe it's not academic in the sense of I don't want to present this as you know, my studied opinion on every topic.

Some of it is more sort of opinion based.

And I'm also you know, I do call myself a teacher, writer, and scholar of the Gospels, but I mean my day job is as a teacher of theology and philosophy in a secondary boys school.

And I think also, I mean we were just talking about this before the show began, but I think some people think that if you have a PhD in the New Testament or any subject, that you are therefore able to talk upon a myriad of subjects within that sort of discipline.

And I'm sort of very much aware, you know now that I've sort of finished my vhually of just the limits of my knowledge.

So I am trying to do something in behind the Gospels, which is quite generalist.

I would say, I'm trying to sort of treat a number of sort of introductory issues and some issues in sort of more more depth.

But I also would like to say that, you know, I'm not a I'm not a proper scholar in the sense that I you know, I don't have ten ure at the university.

I'm not sort of I'm not doing research in my sort of day to day life.

So this is just it's a it's a little bit of fun, I think for me and a way of you know, keeping me in keeping me up to date with what's going on in the field that I really love.

So those are a few sort of caveats I suppose.

Well, I can wholeheartedly recommend your newsletter or academics blog or whatever people want to call it.

I think it's great.

Yeah, in case we forget, just give us a guidance just how to find it.

So it is www dot behind the Gospels dot com.

So behind the Gospels is a title I actually stole from a book that I really love by my master's supervisor at Oxford, Eric Eve.

He wrote a fantastic book called Behind the Gospels Understanding the Oral Tradition.

But I noticed there wasn't there wasn't any sort of blog called behind the Gospel, so I thought I'd take it as a blog name, so hopefully hopefully not too not too much copyright in Frinland there, right.

I've really I've read some of your bloggers, of course I've signed up.

It sort of pops up in my email on the way to work, you know, it goes and the font all comes up pretty well, ready to read and everything, and it's like, oh, I'll just look at why about Matthew?

That was the recent one I was listening to, sorry reading, And then I think the way that it works is actually it's very readable.

It's very so in one sense you are bridging the gap between scholarship in there all the way from the big names to even unknown people.

But who are researchers, and then you're putting it into a very understandable package to read and you go, oh, yeah, I hadn't thought about that, and I and you made a lot of points.

Even with the Matthew one, I briefly mentioned this to Ed that I thought, oh, I never thought about that.

That's a very interesting insight, do you know what I mean?

And it's those things that I love because we in the podcast may have research subjects and come across things, but then there's always so much more.

You just realize we don't know what we know most of the time.

Yeah.

Absolutely, Yeah, but we thought that could be a good test case to start start us off, for you to sort of explain what's in that that that blog we'll call it, so we know what you're coming from.

Yeah, I suppose.

I suppose behind the Gospels is it's trying to it's trying to digest what's happening in or things that people know in the university, in the academy, but which aren't often talked about, maybe in a church background.

So I'm trying to appeal both to people maybe who come at it maybe from your ow perspective, in terms of as as critics or skeptics or non blo or maybe ex Christians, but also trying to talk to people within the church as well.

So often within the posts, I'll do sort of arguments for, arguments against, or I just try to unpack something.

And something that some of my subscribers have been saying is that they appreciate that this is critical scholarship.

You know, this is serious scholarship, but it doesn't have the sort of like hostility.

I'm not trying to I'm not trying to deconstruct people's ideas or whatever.

I'm just trying to let you know what's going on.

So I mean, maybe the authorship of Matthew is a sort of good example of that, not so much in terms of doing a lot of the arguments for and against, but just trying to unpack the kind of the critical opinion in the Academy on the authorship of Matthew, because I think this is one of I mean, Matthew's Gospel is a great sort of case study in terms of, you know, what people have thought throughout the centuries, and yet what may be critical scholarship over the past two or three hundred years is saying about Matthew you know, obviously, Matthew was believed to have been the first Gospel to be written, whereas the most critical scholars are sort of a short result of modern critical study of the Gospels is that Mark was the first gospel to be written, and Matthew was traditionally associated with Matthew, the tax collector of Jesus, whereas today most people would say that the gospel was probably anonymous, and certainly this sort of Aramic speaking tax collector wouldn't have had the ability to write this text down in Greek.

So I think I sort of in that post I unpack a number of reasons why Matthew probably didn't write Matthew.

I think one of the interesting things is that often people cite Papeus.

So I think, for example, there was a book by bart Petre, a sort of Catholic New Testament professor, and he cites Papius, if I recall correctly, to Papias is a bishop in the second century place called Hirapolis, and he says that, you know, Matthew wrote down the Loggia the sayings.

Of the Lord.

So people go, okay, this is Matthew.

This is the Matthew that we have today.

But it's not.

Papiers is very direct that these sayings are in Aramaic or Hebrew.

So this does not comport with our Greek Gospel of Matthew.

So it's not really until the late second century you have this kind of developing story with Ernaeus that we have the Gospel of Matthew cited as the Gospel according to Matthew.

And interestingly that's the same for our other gospels as well.

So you hear this idea often, don't you, that the gospels are anonymous.

You know, this is a kind of this is a classic line in sort of critical scholarship that the gospels didn't originally come with titles.

And one of the reasons why scholars believe that is because the titles are not These texts are not being cited according to the titles they have today early on in the church.

But what happens with a writer called Iernaeus in the late second century is we get these titles, and interestingly, all of the titles are the same.

So the Gospel according to Matthew, the Gospel according to Luke, et cetera.

And so the best I think, maybe the simplest hypothesis for how all of these individual texts came to have the same name, is that they were given those names when they came together as a fourfold canon, maybe sometime in the late second centuries, maybe sometime even before Erineus.

So I mean, this is this is a good reason to think that we might say, how then did Matthew come to be associated with the tax collector?

Maybe it's because of this.

There was already a tradition that Matthew had written something down, so we have that in Papius, and this this text seemed as good as any to associate with Matthew, especially given that Matthew is the character in the Gospel.

So maybe that's just one of the reasons why most people don't think that Matthew was originally involved, because we have this evolving story where Matthew originally writes down sayings in our Americ or Hebrew, and then later on he becomes the author of the Greek Gospel.

But we might question, you know, how plausible is it that even a tax collector, you know, had the ability to sort of write this, write this Greek text.

I mean, there would be other things as well, So I point out Matthew's use of sources so we now think that Matthew was reliant, with very strong reasons to think that Matthew was reliant on Mark, which is a very strange thing to do, because Mark, at best was reliant Again, according to Papias here and papeis isn't the most reliable figure, was reliant upon some of Peter's preachings or anecdotes.

So if you are sort of an eyewitness of all of the events in Jesus ministry, is one of his closest disciples, why do you rely upon a second hand account?

It sounds rather strange.

Who wasn't a disciple?

And yes, yea his work.

I'll tell you what, I'll use that of a non eye witness for my gospel.

Yeah.

But also not only that, but there is there is material that is common to Matthew and Luke which is known and will be known to many listeners by the letter Q, which is short the German work, the short for a German word quella, which just means source.

So there is this source that Matthew and Luke seem to have shared.

I mean, people debate whether this source existed and the exact Listeria relationship between the gospels, But if Matthew was reliant upon you, as I think still today the majority of scholars think, then again, why is there this sort of tendency to rely upon written sources when they are themselves an eyewitness of the events.

And then just something else that I think is significant is that there doesn't really seem to be anything about the Gospel that is sort of you know, particularly Methan.

I mean, one one big problem is.

That Matthew takes over a story from Mark in which you have the calling of a tax collector, and this tax collector is called Levi, and the author of Matthew changes the word Levi to Matthew.

Now, let's suppose that Matthew was the author of this gospel.

Why to tell his own story, the story of his call?

Does he need to take over a generic story about the calling of a tax collector rather than just tell it in his own words, you know, and just to change.

One of the details.

So it's very strange.

This is where.

Yeah, and this is this is this is by the way, this is not like some sort of you know, liberal you know, anti traditional bias or anything.

This the argument that I just made there is made by Richard Borcam in a book defending the the eyewitness nature of the Gospels.

But he says, you know, we can't.

We can't think that Matthew was written by Matthew.

So whether it's liberals or evangelicals, contents, whatever, people agree that Matthew did not write this source.

And I think also if you look at things like, for example, when Jesus rides in on a donkey and the fall of a donkey, which is kind of this interesting thing where in Mark you have a donkey.

In Matthew, you have a donkey and the fall, so you have sort of two donkeys, and what's going on here?

A lot of people think that maybe Matthew is fulfilling Zechariah literally, so Zecharia nine, verse nine talks about you know, the king coming on a donkey and the fall of a donkey.

So if Matthew is trying to fulfill that, precisely he wants to have two donkeys.

So, I mean, this is the sort of thing where you know, if you're sort of a close up eyewitness of events, are you writing history in this way?

Are you dacting your sources as Matthew adacts them.

It seems on the probability of evidence that there are many good reasons to think that Matthew wouldn't have written Matthew, and very few good reasons to think that he did.

So that's kind of something I am.

Can I just bring up what you mentioned about Papius.

I think this is very interesting.

We were talking our fair about Wes Half, this this apologist that sort of was on Joe Rogan podcast.

He mentions, I believe he mentions in that particular discussion while he's arguing for all the traditional authorships for the Gospels, and he was I'm sure he quoted Papiers in this classic sense that apologists do.

But the way You've just mentioned Papiers and the way I've read Papiers and I did some extensive research into it, is that it causes more problems when you look into it closely, because, like you said, he he references as sayings gospel in Hebrew, which is not what we've got.

It's not a saying's gospel and it's not in Hebrew originally our current gospel you and like you said, the eyewitness, he clearly makes Papiers clearly makes Mark a non eyewitness.

So that causes problems right there.

Not only that, though there are other things about Papiers where he talks about you must have mentioned this judog the death of Juda is blowing up as big as a street and bursting and all the rest of it.

And these apologists never go there because that it doesn't look oh he was crazy there.

But over here we're going to build out tradition of the authorship of the gospels.

But actually Papiers is pretty negatively seen with other quotes from Jesus that aren't even in the Bible, things like that.

And I noticed that they never bring up that.

They don't go all by the way, it's a bit shady.

So I won't build on this.

They build on it.

They build on this quote that you just mentioned, you know.

Yeah, And I mean maybe, for example, if there was really really good evidence to see Mark as a petrine gospel, you know, as related to Peter, maybe we would look at Papiers and we would go, oh, okay, maybe there is something here.

So I mean, Rich should walk and makes many arguments for thinking that Mark and Peter are sort of somehow related.

But I mean a lot of people look at those arguments and don't find them convincing.

But yeah, so I think we should we should take Papists, I think with a bit of a grain of salt, because that there, you know, he he does make that, he does have that legend about Judas he has there's another saying preserved I think in another texts, which no one thinks goes back to the historical Jesus.

I mean, there's loads of stuff floating around in the second century.

So I think we need to be we need to be careful here.

And doesn't he downplay the written word anyway?

Did you?

Did you mention that when you were talking?

But Papias actually goes for what's called the abiding voice.

Yeah, he's not a man of the words and written he's a man of the abiding voice.

I need the tradition that's passed down orally.

That goes against the idea that we're trying to cement these gospels.

I don't know if you did you mention that.

I thought you did just briefly.

No, No, I didn't.

I didn't mention that.

But that's another good point as well as an interesting point.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well I'm fascinated about the Gospels, and so I'm loving the blog, and well, I'm one thing is a kind of feel partly from scholarship and partly from your your understanding of where the scholarships at as to really what the mix is in the gospels.

And I can imagine it's just like a big pie chart if you're on board with that, and you have lots a few slices of the pie chart.

So obviously a big slice that people are looking for is things that actually happened and are accurately reported, And then another slice could be things that are completely made up by the particular author of that gospel, often for theological purposes.

Another one might be things from the Hebrew scriptures, and then another one things from Hebrew and Greek culture.

And you might find that putting those three together has sort of made up and taken from existing tradition with scriptures or Greek and Roman culture.

You might want to put them all together.

And then another category might be things that developed in the church between Jesus' either death or ascension, depending on how you see it and the time of the writing.

So so a lot of questions.

I guess the first one would be, what do you make of that categorization before we try.

And yeah, yeah, I think it sort of reminds me a little bit of what the Jesus Seminar were doing, you know, in I think the nineteen eighties when they were they sort of go around.

It was a little bit like.

A circus I've been told, where they would sort of go go from place to place and sort of headlines where sort of, you know, local newspapers would write about that Jesus Seminar coming, and that Jesus Seminar would sort of vote, they deliver papers.

They would deliver papers, and then they would vote with beads, you know, and so a black bead might represent that Jesus definitely didn't say this, and then you know, I don't know, a green bead or whatever would represent that he did.

We can be sort of certain of this, and then there were sort of various colored beads in between.

And I think this is a sort of more I think, a more positivist approach to historical Jesus studies, which sort of characterized that period of time.

And I think maybe historical Jesus scholars today are slightly more skeptical of this kind of sorting between you know, what can be attributed to the church and what goes back to the historical Jesus.

And I think partly the reason for that is due to things like the influence of something like social memory on the church, so and also memory studies.

So I think one of the one of the.

Key insights there is that memory is not like it's not like a filing cabinet.

It's not like you go back to your filing cabinet and you put pull out, pull out the same document that you put in, say, thirty years ago.

Rather it is not it's not a matter of retrieval.

It is actually itself a recon instruction.

And the way that you reconstruct the memories from the past is going to have a social element.

You're not just doing this as an individual.

You're pulling out memories for a particular purpose.

I mean, I'm doing this right now.

You know, with a podcast with you folks might be different from a podcast with say if I went on a popular Christian podcast and was talking to them about the Gospels.

So, our social context and our present is always going to shape our memory of the past.

And what that does.

I think for a lot of historical Jesus scholars, that kind of memory scholarship is it sort of frustrates this kind of easy bifurcation between say what what arose in say the Palestinian you know, Aramic speaking church, and definitely goes back early on and then the kind of like the later sort of gentile influence of Christianity.

I think these are not sort of so easy binaries anymore.

And so and I also think that something can technically speaking, not be historical and yet contain a lot of memory that is reflective of the historical Jesus.

So one of my recent posts was called was Jesus Tempted in the Wilderness?

And I gave arguments four and I gave arguments against.

And then I said, does this really matter?

So let's assume that I mean the dial the event takes place in sort of two different ways.

In Mark, it's just this short passage that Jesus was driven into the wilderness by the spirit and he was tempted there, and then he came out of the wilderness, you know, something like that.

In Matthew and Luke, you have this dialogue between Jesus and Satan, and they're basically exchanging Bible verses and going back and forth.

And the Bible verses that Jesus cites, at least in Matthew, are all from Deuteronomy six, verse eight, and a lot of people would say, you know, this sounds a lot like a rabbinic dialogue.

When you look at the later urbinic literature, this is what the rabbis do.

But you also find there's a story in rabbinic literature about Abraham and Satan, and basically the same thing that goes on between Abraham, Jesus and Satan goes on between Abraham and Satan.

You know, they're quoting Bible verses back and forth.

And of course no one thinks that that dialogue between Abraham and Satan actually happened.

It's just a sort of reflection on the scriptures.

And so I would say it's sort of the same with Jesus and Satan.

You know, I don't think this happened.

I think this is sort of penned by a rabbinic scribe.

And yet are we to say, therefore that this has no bearing on what the historical Jesus was like, Well, of course not.

I mean this memory of.

Jesus, this this idea that this this idea of floating around in the early Church, that Jesus had a dialogue with Satan and said these sorts of things, is reflective probably of aspects of the ministry of the historical Jesus.

For example, you know, you find even the very fact that Jesus withdraws into the wilderness is some that we find Jesus doing repeatedly in the Gospels, in all four gospels.

The fact that Jesus is quoting scripture, you know, something we see very often.

The idea that he sort of a skewed worldly power is also I think probably historical.

I think that Jesus probably wasn't leading some kind of armed revolt against the Romans.

So there's even though I think that dialogue is completely made up by a Christian scribe, reflecting on Dutonomy six, verse eight, I actually think that there is a lot in that which contains things, probably about the historical Jesus.

But also another reason why I think that maybe this kind of easy bifurcation to things that happened and things that were made up is complicated is because what are the building blocks of the gospels.

The building blocks are what were known in Greek as crea or crai.

They are these anecdotes, these sort of short stories.

You know.

The Gospels are made up of what scholars called perickopee, which is a Greek word meaning to cut around, the idea being that you could cut these stories out.

I mean they're perfect for electionary for you know, Sunday service reading, because they're just discrete units that the Gospel alters put in different places, and they can sort of be chopped up and put in different in different settings.

So but I mean, these are fundamentally what are they.

They are anecdotes, and when we die, people are going to tell anecdotes about us.

And I think most of these anecdotes are probably going to be told because they capture something of our memory, you might say, the essence or the gist of who we are.

But also you can frequently hear anecdotes where you're just like, that did not actually occur.

You know, someone told me about when a New Testament professor had died and they were sort of meeting up with other scholars and who were exchanging memories about this professor, and they were like, no, like this, none of these things did not actually happen.

And yet I can see why they were told because they can apture something about the character of that subject.

And I think, I mean.

If we view the Gospels broadly, speaking and I'm speaking very broadly here as ancient biographical literature.

There is a kind of flexibility to that genre.

I think that genre sort of slips into fiction, maybe slightly more than other genres, other historical genres, precisely because you're trying to capture the essence of the subject, and maybe strict historical accuracy is secondary to that overall sort of portrayal of the character.

So I think also those are a few of my reservations about the chopping up the pieces.

Also the fact that I just think history is so complicated and I'm not even sure that we have the tools or resources to be able to sort of finally extricate, you know, layers of sources, and you know, to say this thing is more primitive than this other thing.

I mean, just to give you an example of that, you know, you've got different sayings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.

Is it blessed are the poor as in Luke or is it blessed.

Are the poor in spirit?

Well, some people go, oh, the shorter form is more primitive, you know, and the other has been elaborated.

I mean, these are subjective judgments.

They're just kind of made up.

There are no rules for how things exactly develop.

So, I mean, the form critics way back in the early twentieth century thought that there were rules that we could sort of all sort of you know what, we could work back finally just by applying these laws.

But I think it's just I think history is so much more complicated than that.

So I mean, and also the fact that Jesus would have said many things in many different ways, and I think it's I think it's I think it's rather complicated.

That said, I mean, there are some things that I would say we can be more confident about and less confident about.

So give us an example of what you're more confident about.

Well, I think a lot of scholar have tended to say that something like the parables of Jesus are the bedrock of the tradition.

I think that was yakimieremiis sort of coined that phrase, the sort of the bedrock of the tradition, and a lot of it doesn't really seem to.

I mean, some of the stories do reflect a more sort of Christiological bias, but a lot of those just sort of fit into that Palestinian storytelling tradition.

A lot of them, I would say, I mean, HDD has this lovely quotation where he talks about how they bear the distinctive genius of a particular mind, and I think, you know, it's it's much easier to suppose, Okay, we have these parables.

They look like the sort of thing that a Jewish teacher might say, and they don't.

A lot of them don't reflect any sort of particular sort of Christological bias.

So those are the things that we can probably be pretty sure about.

And I think I would sort of apply that kind of reasoning.

I think that's pretty good.

I would say that maybe things that I'm less sure about are the sorts of things that we would, you know, we would be a bit more cautious about if we found it in any secular history.

I mean, for example, I think, I mean, maybe the best example are the infancy narratives.

So the you know, these are these are found only in Matthew and Luke.

Interestingly, Mark and John don't have them, and they're just sort of full of the sort of fantastical kinds of conventions that one finds in birth narratives in the ancient world.

So I would say, if you're trying to think, like, how can I come up with a story that is the birth of the Son of God.

I think that's how you do it.

So one of my posts on behind the Gospels was called how to write an Ancient infancy narrative A seven step guide, because I think you almost can just sort of you can see all of the conventions and add them together and you get something like what you find in the Gospels.

So I think those sorts of things are maybe less well attested, and are the sorts of things you might expect invention of because if you think about it, I mean, why do you why do you remember someone?

It's not because of how they were born.

It's because of what they did in their adult life, you know.

And in the case of Jesus, you know the fact that he was the founder of this movement and so on.

So I think most people don't know about what how someone was born.

So in the ancient plausibility structure, it's it's almost a working backwards.

It's almost, well, how could this figure whom we believe to be the Son of God?

How could that figure have been born?

Well, it must have been in this sort of dramatic supernatural sense.

But gospels.

Yeah, the same thing.

Yeah, absolutely, so, yeah, you almost find Jesus.

It's a little bit like those medieval paintings where it's like Jesus already looks like an adult.

You know, it's similar things.

It's this sort of we go back, you know, I say, I think there's a the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which has Jesus going to school and and he's sort of like schooling his teachers, and he's already like the Messiah, the son of God, and it's like it's obvious that he's like so much superior to his to his teachers.

Now, obviously in that instance, it's a little bit more difficult to say whether you know, that's a serious attempt to recapture the life of Jesus.

But something like, for example, Luke's story where Jesus is the sort of the boy Jesus is in the temple.

I think he's around the age of twelve, and he's asking questions and he's schooling the Pharisees.

You know, he's already doing he's already up to what he's going to be up to later in the gospel.

And that's a kind of convention you find in other ancient biographies as well, So you find that sort of you know, Alexander the Great when he's a boy, he tames this wild, untameable horse, and then his father comes up to him and says something like, you know, you're going to sort of tame the Mediterranean or something like this.

Or in Cyrus, King Cyrus of Persia, in his kind of biographical account, we have him at age.

Of around twelve or thirteen.

Asking questions and already showing his intelligence.

So I think that's the sort of story which I think is probably a later legend which has been put back into the life of Jesus because of course, you know, that's probably what Jesus was up to when he was twelve or thirteen.

But interesting that that's a much more scribal picture than Luke has.

Well, that's a much more scribal picture of Jesus than the sort of Jesus who is a tech tone or a craftsman or a son of a tech tone that we find in Mark and Matthew.

When Jesus starts teaching, they're like, who is this guy that he can teach with authority?

Isn't this guy just a handyman?

You know?

So Luke kind of.

I think Luke downplays that.

Actually, I think Luke gets rid of the tech tone reference in the same scene because he already has Jesus as much more sort of scribal in his nature.

So yeah, that would be an example of something I would see as a legend and not actually reflected of the historical Jesus.

Sorry, can I say to jump in or I've got.

Oh well, I can just want to sort of round this off with I agree that actually putting every single verse into a category is ridiculous, but the overall feel of it would be to me from what you're saying, is probably less than half is going to be things actually happened.

It's either distortions of what happened, or developments of what happened, or what happened with memory problems, and more than half would be the additions and the like, the birth narratives, and maybe feeling the five thousand would be a good case study because it is an Old Testament story hmm, and it's been told by Luke, who changes details in quite a sniff away from Mark.

But putting it be savor of for example, and the kind of tentions that produces, so that kind of standard gospel story.

How much of that do you think is rooted in history?

Ah, well, and it's something you've studied a lot.

Yeah, So I think that story is it looks like it's a sort of rewrite of Two Kings.

I think it's two Kings four where Elisha feeds one hundred people one hundred men.

I think we're twenty with twenty loaves of bread, So it's sort of much less miraculous feet.

But I think is already being portrayed as miraculous when Elisha does that.

So we have here the sort of this Alisha typology.

Maybe we have some sort of Moses typology, because it says that in Mark's Gospel that he's motivated because he has compassion on the crowds who are like sheep without a shepherd.

And I think Moses when Moses, when he's looking for his sort of you know, he's looking for his successor, he says, you know, you know that the people of Israel are like, you know, sheep without a shepherd.

But then also you've got maybe a little bit of dividict typology going on there, because you've got not only is the longer waited Messiah going to come and he's going to sort of shepherd the people.

And we've got to remember that David was a shepherd, and shepherding is already a very sort of regal image, a kingly image in antiquity.

So I think you've got all this sort of typology going on.

And so that's why something even like the Green Grass, which just at first glance looks like a flash of eyewitness memory and yet is actually maybe something like an allusion to the Messianic Age.

And of course it could be both.

I mean, I wonder whether if there is a historical kernel to this.

I wonder whether it's that Jesus did lead crowds or crowds did follow him into a wilderness setting.

And the reason I think that's not in plausible is loads of other people do it at the same time.

So you find various characters described by Flavius Josephus, the first century Jewish historian, and he talks about them sort of doing things like going into the wilderness, leading people there and trying to sort of perform the miracles of old.

We also know that Jesus, like one of the things that people really remembered about him was the way that he ate with people, so he ate with you know, tax collectors and sinners, and here he's sort of eating with the great crowds.

And Mark deliberately sets this up to look like, you know, Jesus has this banquet with all of these people from Judea, and it's sort of you know, the twelve baskets.

This is a very sort of it's the whole people of Israel.

It's the fifties.

He gathers them into fifties and hundreds, which reminds us of the way that the people of Israel are gathered into fifties and hundreds in the and I think also tens maybe or twenties.

I can't remember that that fifties and hundreds looks very Moses like or Messianic, like, you know, the dead, the Comaranic community at Camaran, the proprietors of the dead seas gulls.

You know, they imagine that when the Messiah comes, he's going to bless bread and they are going to be in those fifties and hundreds and so on.

So this is a very Messianic image.

And those things that at first look like they're oh, you know, this is probably just how it was, they're actually highly symbolic, like the fifties and the hundreds, like the green Grass, and so I think that, I mean, maybe there is something to it in that maybe there is some memory of Jesus.

And certainly I think that, say, if Jesus was already remembered as a healer, and Alisha is one of the famous healers of the Old Testament, then the difficulty is historically like other things would begin to be attributed to Jesus, because of course, if Jesus is a sort of new Alaisha type figure, then Jesus probably did other Elisha type things.

I think there's that sort of rationale going on.

So maybe those typologies would have molded the sort of social memory of various events in the life of Jesus.

So I think it's very, very difficult to sort of extract history from non history.

But I mean a lot of people are going to look at this and say it's a rewriter of a story and therefore it's just completely made up.

But of course I think it's difficult.

I mean, there is this practice of imitacio or mimesis, where you basically just like rewrite a story.

But I mean, I.

Think social memory can also do similar things, so or maybe it's a case of, you know, this story was rewritten about Jesus because Jesus was known as like an Elisha like figure, So maybe there's some history to it, but I think it's very difficult to know what that is.

And I think it's also striking.

What sort of strikes me as a little bit odd about that story is that there's no real response to it.

You know, usually you get some kind of like, oh, this is amazing, or they were all amazed, whereas in the Feeding of the five Thousand, you just get this kind of you know, and then it happens, and then you also have this problem of like, then he feeds four thousand, so afterwards maybe maybe in a more gentile area, so it's like, you know, he feeds the Jews, then he feeds the gentiles.

It's this complete messionic image.

Then there's this whole sort of riddle about the bread.

So it's it's I think it's quite I think it's quite difficult to just read this as sort of plain historical fact.

I think there are too many other things that could be going on.

I mean, even apart from the kind of the fact that if you saw this in another ancient text, you would almost certainly go, oh, you know, maybe this is some kind of legend about this person.

So it's difficult.

But even even legends can have some sort of kernels to them.

So but of course we can't.

We can't.

We can't actually get behind the gospels in that sense.

So it's difficult.

So one thing I'd like to bring up with John on this is that once there's some benefits of this, I find not that would sit with evangelicals very well, but once you can realize that actually the actual historicity of what happened is behind the gospels.

It's not the Gospels that are giving you the you you.

I mean, you may have changed with this over the years from when we first spoke many many years ago, but contradictions themselves seem to go away when you have this view, because you are reading a book at the moment called Rescripting Jesus.

Don't know if you've heard of it.

I've heard of it.

Yeah, it's very good.

It goes into things like the feedling of the five thousand.

It goes into and you get the impression that above history they are rescripting.

And so to me, the way that we've all tried to deal with contradictions or evangelicals do.

It's like, well, did this happen and you harmonize, But no one would dream of harmonizing James Cameron's Titanic with the previous Titanic movie and say, well, on there the guy jumped over first, and on here the phone call was later.

You wouldn't do that, say they sat down and they rewrote it, because both of them may not actually be tied to actually what happened, because you know, the eyewitnesses are very maybe detailed on this, but not on this, and so this is slightly different.

But I feel that contradictions then it is you can relocate in a rewrite of a script.

You can say Luke can say, well, I'll put it over here and I won't mention the sea and the other person mentions in the boat and the other side, And it doesn't matter if it's a rewrite of a script as long as you then you are sacrificing historical accuracy.

But at the same time you're not getting into and trying to do this fanciful harmonization to get everything to work like they do.

What would you say to that.

Yeah, I think that's a really really brilliant point.

I think that because there's not enough of a I mean someone like, for example, you know, Jesus mythesist.

They will say the whole thing is symbolic, and then the fundamentalists or you know, very very conservative people will push back and they will say, no, no, the whole thing is just literal, and then they miss the sort of they missed the symbolism of it.

And I think we just need a sort of moderate approach here.

But we say, you know, there is there is some historical Jesus, and there is some you know, there is something going on here historically, but there is also symbolic and metaphorical shaping.

And some of that shaping was some of those metaphorical trajectories were probably put in place by the historical Jesus himself.

But I mean, because obviously Jesus had to be significant already in some way to be remembered.

But some of it is development and it's very difficult to tell what is what.

But yeah, I mean, for example, I mean, the famous contradiction between John and the Synoptics on the date of jesus death is really glaring, and there are many ways in which you can try to resolve it.

But the big problem with those harmonizations is that you miss what John is trying to do.

If you if you harmonize them, you know, if you say, if you say that John is writing, you know, John just says the same thing as the synoptics, that Jesus died after eating the passover meal.

You miss what John is trying to say, which is that Jesus died as our passover lamb on the same day that the passover lambs were sacrificed.

And maybe that's not historically accurate, but that is what John.

Is trying to teach us.

He's trying to teach us that spiritual meaning where you say, oh, I know, but then Jesus wouldn't be the pass over lamb if he wasn't zacrificed on that day.

You know that.

Isn't the theology dependent on the history?

Well, no, of course it's not, because Jesus isn't actually a passover lamb.

He is a human being.

This is all.

It's all metaphor and meaning.

It's being applied to Jesus to bring out the significance of his life.

So yeah, I think if we adopt a more sort of literary approach.

We can we can you know, appreciate what they're doing in rewriting each other's texts.

And I think Origin is quite instructive on this, you know, sort of third fourth century church father who says that you know, he he doesn't see the Gospels as you know, just plainly historical.

When when the Gospels contradict with one another, he says that this is pushing us to see some deeper meaning in the text, which I think is kind of missed.

And actually, I think if you told a lot of people, yeah, a lot of Christians, you know, oh, look, these texts are actually on a plain level, they just contradict one another.

But maybe there's some sort of deeper reason for that, maybe there's some rewriting going on, to narrative rewriting.

Most people would actually be fascinated by that.

Most Christians would would not reject that.

I think they would really want to learn about this as many as many of us do.

So I think there is a fear of letting the Gospels just be what they are and not harmonizing them.

But actually there is nothing really to be afraid of there.

Obviously, the rewriting can be fed into a kind of you know, atheist framework or whatever, but it can also be accommodated within a Christian theological framework.

Yeah, I mean the Christian the Christian tradition has had four Gospels rather than one.

So it's not some sort of you know, kuranic you know, this has fallen from heaven type model of scripture that the Church landed on.

Yeah, parhatis Yeah, okay.

I'd like to ask you John a question about the about John.

And you know, when I say John, I mean the author of the Gospel according to John, rather than rather than either you yourself or any other John, but that the author was the author familiar with the other gospels, the which called the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

Well, this is this is very interesting.

It's a question I want to look into more.

But for basically nineteen centuries, everyone thought that John did know the Synoptic Gospels.

I mean that was the sort of the traditional view.

And then in the sort of early twentieth century form criticism came along and essentially started to analyze the gospels as oral traditions.

I mean maybe late eighteenth nineteenth century, so late nineteenth twentieth century analyzing the Gospels as oral traditions, and then the thought was, Okay, we have Matthew and Luke, and Matthew and Luke clearly no Mark.

But that's like not clearly the case with John, because you know, John has just a very very different portrait of Jesus to Mark Matthew and Luke, which are often called the synoptic Gospels because they are seen together in this synopsis.

So John then becomes sort of seen as independent from the earlier gospels.

What this does not account for is the fact that Matthew and Luke and the way that they use Mark is actually anomalous in a way that people would tend to rewrite ancient texts.

So you know, their whole Matthew and Luke, you know, copying out verbatim of them large portions of Mark's Gospel.

That's not really the way that you rewrite an ancient text.

For example, Josiphus in his Antiquities, which is his you know, his big history of the Jews from creation to the present, he rewrites a lot of Jewish scripture.

And we know that he has the Jewish Bible, you know, he's reading it.

But like there are only maybe a few places where it's like this direct correspondence.

For the most part, it is, you know, it is a substantial rewriting.

So I would say if we use that kind of framework, which I think scholars are beginning to attend to now, then we can actually see that John is probably reliant on one or more of the Synoptic Gospels.

In twenty eighteen, there was this group of sort of international I mean elite sort of scholars.

They were going to I think the Society of New Testament Studies.

But before that meeting they met to discussed this question is John dependent on Mark?

So you know, these are your people like you know, my supervisor, hell and Bond, Catch Williams, Mark Goodacre, Chris Keith.

These are like the big.

International scholars and thinking through these questions.

And they got together and they were all going to give papers on what they thought was the relationship between Mark and John.

And you know, it was an open question what is that relationship?

The paper after paper, without exception, all of these scholars were saying John rewrote Mark.

So the book that came out of this, which I have not entirely read, is called John's Transformation of Mark.

So it is this idea that so scholars are coming round to this approach now that John was actually rewriting Mark.

So can you gi give us an example of where they found the evidence.

Where are they finding Mark in John?

Well?

I mean, even the overall structure of Mark's gospel is extremely interesting because I think if you read, I mean, it's Martin Kaylor, this German theologian.

He he famously said that the Gospels are extended passion narratives with introductions.

I they they you know, they focus the lot on the death of Jesus.

And there's almost I think a one to one correspondence in the way that sort of Mark and John treat the death of Jesus in terms of the sort of the proportion that they give.

So the overall structure that John has struck on in his gospel looks an awful lot like Mark.

I mean, they also sort of begin around the same place.

Obviously, John does have the prologue, but John does not have an infancy narrative.

I mean, there are there are Harold's.

Atridge in his essay.

He has like a substantial number of minor verbal similarities.

So and there's like page upon page of like verbal similarities, but also like whole stories are repeated in John's gospel.

I mean, I mean one of them is the feeding of the five thousand.

But you also have the anointing at Bethany, so and there are similarities.

For example, you've got the garden scene as in both gospels.

So I think what they're trying to say is, look, there's no knockdown sort of expression where you go, Okay, John has to know Mark's gospel.

But it's this sort of overrull impression, which is that you know, if you took John on its own, and you can, and you take Mark, and you look at the ways in which other ancient writers rewrote earlier texts, This certainly falls within the bounds of that.

That general rewriting.

So that's not a lot by the way of detail, because I need to look into this question more myself, but I think that general argument does seem quite persuasive.

And this is I mean, this was the view of the early church as well.

I mean Clement of Alexandria.

He famously said that the others set forth the sort of natural course of Jesus life.

And then John came along and wrote a spiritual gospel.

But interestingly, a lot of the a lot of scholars thought that John in the twentieth century thought that John was independent of the synoptics, because if he wasn't independent, then he would have basically been correcting the earlier gospels, which they didn't seem to sort of countenance as a possibility.

But it's sort of in a number of places.

But a lot of people now are starting to say, oh, maybe John was actually serving as a corrective of Mark in some in some places.

So, I mean this has.

Been quite a revolutionary idea that one gospel could be wrong and the other, you know, you had to pick your gospel.

Yeah, I mean it's interesting.

I think, for example, you look at something like, yeah, the garden scene which John shares with Mark.

You know, when Jesus is in the garden of Gethsemane.

Jesus says, I'm paraphrasing here, but Jesus says something like, you know, should I say take this cup from me?

You know, he's he is he's still afraid, I think in John, but he's actually it seems like he's more willing to go to his death.

There's this sort of composure about it, and he carries his own cross, for example, like there's there's there isn't this reference to Simon of Cyrene who sort of comes in and sort of carries it.

So there are these minor points in which maybe John is actually correcting Mark.

Or for example, even in the temple scene.

You know, John places the temple scene, which by the way, is the trigger for his death in the Synoptic Gospels, he places it all the way at the beginning of Jesus Ministry.

So maybe this is maybe John has some sort of you know, respect for Mark as a text, but also wants to or sees Marker's normative in some sense, but also wants to sort of substantially rewrite it for his own sort of theological agendas, which some people will say, maybe that's also why you have the the author of the Gospel, this sort of enigmatic beloved disciple outruns Peter to the tomb because he's now you know, he's now replacing almost this this narrative.

I mean that that's one idea is not necessarily one that I hold.

So I think I think it's interesting.

I think I'm not like firmly decided on it, but I think this this, this, this general idea that John could be a rewrite of earlier Gospels I think is you know, it seems seems very plausible to me.

So perhaps a somewhat similar question that would like to take up with you is the relationship between Luke and the Acts and Josephus.

Yes, say, yeah.

Yeah, So we'd like to know your view on that.

Yeah, well, I haven't spent I haven't spent a lot of time in Acts, and I believe that a lot of the correspondences between the similarities between Luke, Acts and and Josephus are found in Acts.

But it is interesting.

So Steve Mason, who I believe is one of the world's leading experts on Josephus, he says, I mean somewhat tentatively, but he says that Luke has read Josephus.

It's it's it doesn't look like he's necessarily like quoting from Josephus because there aren't those like substantial linguistic similarities.

But I think Mason's argument is that he has read Josephus and and I think the way that he argues this is partly because Luke seems to have misremembered parts in Josephus.

So that if that's the case, say Josephus's Antiquities was written in ninety two ninety three, you know, ad that that would help us to place acts after that after that period.

But what's particularly interesting, I think from what I've read, is that there are three rebel figures who are mentioned in Josephus that sort of Josephas selects.

And these are in no particular order, Theudas, Judas, the Galileean, and this figure who's only known as the Egyptian.

And these are all rebels, and I think he's as he says horrible.

Things about them, but they But interestingly, these are the three rebels that appear in Acts.

And that may not seem sort of like overly striking, but Josephus tells us that there were like innumerable rebels at the time.

So the fact that you know, the author of Luke Acts has landed on these three rebels maybe is sort of like a little bit significant.

For example, with the Egyptian, Luke says that or one of the characters in Luke says that the Egyptian is this character who led out four thousand Sakari into the wilderness.

The word Sakari, you know, comes from a Latin word meaning dagger, and these were like assassins, so they'd high daggers, you know, on themselves and then sort of like slit the Romans and then sort of disperse into the crowds again.

And that's quite interesting because Luke in Acts he talks about the Oh, say, Luke has the Egyptian lead out the Sakari, these four thousand Sakari.

But in Josiphus, the Egyptian is not leading out Sakari, He's just leading a great crowd.

But he does happen to mention the Sakari in the same passage.

So the argument there.

From Steve Mason would be, Okay, maybe Luke has read Joe Ciphus and has sort of misremembered this connection and has confused the Egyptian with the Sakari because they're mentioned in this same passage, even though in Joe Siphas the Egyptians just leading out a great crowd, he's not leading out Sakari.

So that would be one example of an argument that Luke is actually dependent on Josiphas.

There's another one as well.

Maybe I can just pull this up with I think with Thudas as well.

So Luke has this character character called Theudas, and he places him before Judas the Galilean.

So these are the two sort of rebel characters who lead people out into the wilderness, I think.

But the thing with Theudis is that Theudis is actually after Judas the Galilean.

I think Theudas is in the forties, so that that's interesting Luke.

Has Luke made a mistake here?

Well, what Mason suggests is that in another passage, Josephus mentions Judas and then he mentions Theudas, So maybe Luke has sort of got that from has has sort of misremembered again his reading of Josephus.

Other people say that maybe the Theodis, I mean, Thetis is like a fairly common name, is just like a different Theodis if there were many rebels, or maybe Jocephus has made a mistake or whatever.

But it's just interesting that there are these sort of similarities and that they strike on what looks like, at first glance, the same three figures.

So I mean there are sort of there.

Are broader parallels between Luke, CAx and Josephus, such as their treatment of the Pharisees and so on.

But I would say that those are some of the ones that sort of strike you as quite interesting, especially I mean, the Saicari one's really interesting because Sakari is a Latin word, so it's probably not the word that the Judean group is using to describe themselves.

It's probably what those in elite Roman circles are calling the Judean group.

So it's kind of like, maybe, you know, maybe that enhances the sort of argument that Luke has relied upon Josephus for this, But I mean, it's not a question I've explored in a lot of detail, but I am sort of that was some detail.

This pushes the date back, of course for Acts, which would be like there's a new again, a lot of scholarships happening, so many different things at the moment that are changing, even paradigms that critical scholars held in the fact that there's a push now for Acts to be around about one point fifteen a d.

And one of the reasons would be, oh my gosh, if it is actually Luke needed or the author needed to have read Josephus, then we're going to go there.

But was the.

Tradition the other way around then, and at one point that Josephus must have known Luke known acts, I mean, or what would have been the last.

I don't think.

I mean, I don't know of any scholars who've said that.

I think the general response is to say, actually, when you look a little bit closer at these events, that they are just independent or common traditions, or maybe you know, Josephus has made a mistake, because obviously, if if one is relying on the other, you would expect that Joe Ciphus is probably the one being relied upon as like a major, major historian who's like in the court of I don't know if he's in the court, but you know, being funded I think by Vespasian.

I mean, that was his whole gig.

He kind of like prophesied that Vespasian would rule and then he got it correct.

So this Beijian was like, here's a library.

So I think I think it's more likely that, you know, I don't think it's likely that Josephus is relying upon this like minor you know, Luken character, whoever they are.

I think it's probably the other way around, right, Yeah.

But it's it's it's a very interesting it's a very interesting argument.

I mean Steve Mason does not I mean someone like, for example, Richard Carrier has said like it's almost it's like almost certain that Luke Axe is dependent him on Josephis.

Interestingly, Steve Mason is much more cautious.

He says, like, firstly, you know, scholars don't really hold this view.

It's definitely a minority view.

And also secondly, like I'm willing to be proven wrong if there are alternatives which I find more convincing.

So it's not driven by this polemical agenda.

It's just like Steve Mason has just stumbled upon this, and I think, I don't think it's original to Steve Mason, but he is persuaded.

No, no, I don't think it is.

I'm Mark.

This leads actually to the next question that we've got after, Yeah, the one that France has asked.

It's just something that I threw in here because Mark Goodacre has I saw a podcast with him on a YouTube video and he really is persuaded quite strongly by Steve Mason.

And he wasn't for a while, and then he finally did and he said that that of course pushes Axe back, and then of course he thought, I think he's done a book on John, and I think John for some reason comes after Luke and ats so pushes John back in.

So it's like wow.

But then Mark Goodacre is kind of slightly absolutely one of the top scholars in the world, but is also on the fringe compared with the mainstream in many many ways.

Well not the fringe in the terms of wacky fringe, but I mean just the minority views.

But he would actually now hold something that I found really really fascinating that if you then he's famous for dispensing with Q, so you've got rid of that source.

So therefore it's it's Luke having Matthew and Mark to get basically most of those information.

And so the question remains.

And now he's done a book that is going against what was the tradition, at least for a while, that John didn't know the synoptics.

He's now arguing very strongly that John does know syednoptics.

In this John's transition of Mark.

That's right.

This is fascinating because this means that in Mark Goodacre, and who am I to argue against someone like that?

You know, by any means, But this would this would mean that actually we've got everything hangs on Mark because and because Mark, even John's rewriting Mark and Luke and is copying Mark and Matthew and no Mark, none of the rest in the same way that it's happened historically.

And if Mark was say, if we know the motives of Mark, how accurate was Mark?

How historical was Mark?

How much if you go with say Robin faith Walsh's view of how Gospels came about, it's much more on the side of literary motives and scripting, and it's kind of making it up and get getting further away from history.

You've actually got something.

Now you'd know why mythesis would jump on this as well as strange bedfellows of evangelicals, because I've noticed a lot of evangelicals do want to get rid of Q which is interesting or at least fundamentalists fundamentalists because they don't like the idea of something behind something that we've lost.

You know what if it was inspired, you know, so we've got this non inspired source that has got into our inspired scriptures in a way in terms of a fundamentalist view, So I can there's strange bedfellows here.

But what about this whole idea that it all hangs on Mark rather than these incredible different sources that we normally have traditionally argued for.

Yeah, I mean I think I think most of it does hang on Mark.

But I mean there's so much material in say that, there is so much material that's shared by Matthew and Luke which they have got from they have got from somewhere.

You know, even if just this is originally in Matthew and then is and then is sort of broken up or whatever used by Luke, and Luke has his own parables, and and I think when you appreciate that Mark has his own sort of theological agenda and his own sort of sort of selectivity, I mean, there's there's clearly more things to the Jesus tradition than what is found in Mark.

I think Mark would have had to be selective with his sources.

He's not just this sort of as as maybe the form critics.

He used to think this sort of chronicler of traditions where he's just like stitching together everything he knows there's other material out there.

But yeah, I do think that there's also I do think a lot of it does.

Yeah, a lot of the Jesus story does hang on Mark.

But there's also a substantial amount of material, whether you attribute it to qu.

Or not, in math.

And then I think John, I mean I had a little bit more skeptical that John is relying on sort of and you know, something like an eyewitness.

I think I think John is just quite a creative rewriter of earlier tradition.

And but I mean, I'm willing to be proven wrong on that.

I just I just hunch with John is just like this is just such a I mean, if we look at the sort of the gist of the historical Jesus, who is the historical Jesus in Matthew, Mark and Leake in the Synoptic Gospels, it's pretty much the same thing.

It's it's someone who comes along as sort of a Jewish prophet and messiah who proclaims the arrival, the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God and hells parables and has healings and exorcisms and then dies.

In John's Gospel, that portrait is not really there.

You know, there are no exorcisms apart from maybe the one great exorism with where Jesus cast out Satan on the cross.

There isn't this proclamation of the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God that's replaced by, you know, the eternal life here and now you know, eternal life being not just sort of quantitative, but qualitative, this relationship with Jesus, there is this kind of you know, Boltman famously said, and this is a bit too simplistic, but the historical Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom of God, whereas the gospels proclaim the historical Jesus.

And I think that, but there is something to that.

I think I came across the idea the other day that John is kind of the first apocryphal gospel, and I think that it kind of does make a little bit of sense.

I think John is sort of such a such a rewrite even in terms of so we've mentioned the kingdom of God, we mentioned the lack of exorcisms, and just like there are you know, quite a few miracles in there which are really astounding miracles which are not found in the earlier gospels as well, such as you know, the raising of Lazarus, such as the wedding of Cana.

So it sort of doesn't and there's so much rewriting going on in terms of the overall portrait of Jesus that I just think that this is this is probably not a sort of a reliable eyewitness source.

I mean, all of the characters talk in the sort of this same Johannain's style, and a lot of the dialogues sort of look like they're sort of expanded theological reflections upon the earlier material.

For example, you know.

Any talks and talks and talks and talks and talks in John compared with the pithy statements that you might get in Mark.

Yeah, yeah, I mean something like you know, conversations, you know, the dialogue with Pilots, or the dialogue or the high priestly prayer, you know, going on for chapters as a sort of farewell discourse.

I think this is, this is theology, and it is it would have been placed in the mouthpiece of Jesus, just as someone would place something in the mouthpiece of Plato, or an ancient biographer would invent a speech, you know, because oh, these are the sorts of things which capture you know, what it is the significance of this person.

But it's not it's not his.

You know, no one was.

I think they're at the Last Supper writing something down, as you know, as to how it actually went.

I think this is this is an extended theological reflection on the person of Jesus in that sense.

I think Clement of Alexandria was right.

I think we've actually come round to something like his view.

The synoptic tradition gets the gets the gist correct, and John sets out to sort of unpack the spiritual.

Meaning of jesus life.

Yeah.

I mean you see that in for example, the Feeding of the five Thousand discourse, where you know, Jesus starts talking about himself as the bread of life and so on.

So it's sort of like unpacked what this actually means, inter the spiritual meaning of it.

Yeah, I can't remember your original question though, well, no original.

Question, which everything hang on the fact.

That everything sort of hangs on Mark when you sent you think hang around.

But even I listened very carefully to Mark Goodacre on this because I thought one thing that came up in my mind was the beginning of Luke, which is very interesting.

When he goes many have sought to write up an account, and I wanted to.

I need to hear what Mark thinks about that, and he said that he felt that it was more of a hyperbolic statement because obviously many to have two others Matthew and Luke is Matthew and Mark.

Sorry, is from a Luke's perspective.

If John was going to come after to say many is not the right word, is it.

It would just say there were two others or a couple of others.

But to say many, you know, so even Mark Goodacre was saying, well, maybe there are other sources and everything, but we don't need them, or it's like hyperbole.

But that was very interesting because I thought, you've got to do something with that passage, you know.

Yeah, And you know, I mean this may be links to something else you wanted to talk about, which I don't know much about, which is you know, some people would say that that many is also a.

Reference to Marcian.

Marcian who is this almost Bishop of Rome who sort of has this view that there is really, you know, one gospel writer Luke, he's the best one one apostle, which is Paul.

And you know these both take a sort of you know, a kind of anti view of the Jewish law, and so it's this kind of Marcian thinks that the Jewish God is evil and so on, and is the creator of the world.

So I think I don't know a great deal about Marcian.

But some people have said that actually Marcian's version of the Gospel of Luke pre dates our current version of the Gospel of Luke, in which case, if that is true, and some people have seen that maybe our finished version of Luke is kind of anti Marcianite in a couple of places or whatever, then the many would refer to Mark, it would refer to Matthew, but it would also refer to Marcian.

So then we would really get our many.

It would not just be a couple that said.

I think that sometimes these sort of prologues, you know, they're a bit kind of rhetorical.

I'm trying to think of what Philo says in his Life of Moses, but I think, you know, he's kind of got this idea that you know, I'm going to set the matter straight.

I think so if I if I recall correctly, so, I mean, to what extent is it just rhetorical?

It could be over to Yeah, I mean, I'm doing my research at the moment, I've just really got fascinated by the Marcian thing because I think there are some Bonifider scholars in a group of them now who have done work Apparently in the last fifteen to twenty years, it's been on the rise, and it's not a new view.

It's a view that Marcian's Gospel was the first version of Luke was actually a Bower I think, or one of the Bowers, Frederick Bauer, I think in eighteen something or other, and it's sort of it was held sway for quite a while, and I didn't know this.

I didn't know this, and then it sort of came down to the idea that basically because of the church fathers liked Italian and others, they were saying that Marcian took scissors to the Gospel of who can chocked out all the bits.

I mean, I'm sure ed that's what you might have heard or whatever.

We've talked about this, But these scholars are making the case in a very very good argument.

I must have been sometimes when you hear aview you think, oh, is this gonna wash?

And I'm thinking that's a good point.

I like it.

I like that, you know, I'm quite yeah, I think that's a reasonable point.

And then a guy makes another point.

I'm going that's another reasonable point.

And even in things like the classics, like Marcian only had ten of Paul's letters, which is fascinating because you know, the scholarship currently and for a long time now is that certainly the pastorals are not Paul.

So this one of the persons with this argument was actually saying this means, of course, Marcian was actually more he didn't know it, but he was more reliable than our Bible because we we've got three pseudonymous things, and of course I know there's a few others like Colostions and everything else.

So that got into Martian's canon.

But the idea and then apparently there's things like Marcian didn't have chapters fifteen and sixteen of Romans, and it's like they were told that Marcian cut them out, but apparently there's manuscripts before that without or there's manuscripts found without fifteen and sixteen, and so argued that maybe Marcian was dealing with a version of Romans that didn't have it, and it was nothing to do with him cutting them out, and that's the points that people are trying to make, and I thought, wow, okay, so what do I know.

I'm just researching it.

But you know, interesting, a.

Lot of that, a lot of that goes into a lot of deep textual criticism I'm not really I'm not really equipped to handle.

So it is very complicated and very sophisticated as an argument.

The only thing is.

Because we don't have Martian's text, it's all a little bit it's difficult how to interpret like silences.

Obviously we're just getting Marcian as he's created.

So I did find in Italian that Italian actually says that, you know, Marcian's text did not have an attribution to Luke's Gospel or to Luke.

It's not attributed to the to Luke, which obviously, if Marcian knew that this was Luke, he would want to mention that.

So I've seen that point being brought out for example.

Actually, it doesn't, it doesn't.

It's not certain that Luke did write Luke Ax, because we have this early tradition in which yeah, it's not attributed to Luke.

Interesting, I'm really fascinated by this sort of thing so much.

Yeah.

Yeah, so we've been going for what now and ten minutes.

Or so, it seems yeah.

I don't know if it's worth sipping in something really quickly, and then we could pick up again on another occasion.

But yeah, yeah, something, And that is the Jesus tradition between eighty thirty and Marx Gospel.

So that we must assume that there are were stories about Jesus circulating the church.

It couldn't have been any other way, but actually what was the status of that tradition?

And I would have the view that it was circulating, but there the church had a problem in that they didn't know what was authoritative and what wasn't authoritative, and that's why creeds became more important, it seems, than Jesus stories in that period.

So this is connecting to what we had a big discussion on lots of blogs to and fro five years ago.

Maybe I don't know, so let's not get into that.

But that's one of three lines of evidence that I would say that that there was a tradition, but it couldn't have been treated as authoritative.

There was something preventing people.

One is that just basically the differences between the Gospels, and we've obviously talked about Mark and John being so different, and a big aspect of that is actually the nature of Jesus himself.

Jesus is the sort of secret messiah in Mark and loud and proud, I am the father of one spoken in Jerusalem, I think in John.

Yeah, So that's like two ends of a spectrum.

So there's this difference between the gospels.

Would suggest that there isn't this strong authoritative tradition that the Gospel authors felt they could abandon.

Well, it depends, because there, I think in your comments there you seem to be making this assumption that almost the assumption that John is independent and is just drawing on his own traditions, Whereas that's of rubs up slightly against what we're talking about in respect to John literally being a creative rewriter of the earlier traditions.

So maybe it's the case that John doesn't have like his own independent sources, but John has Mark, say, and then his rewriting, and then his rewriting Mark or rewriting.

Then yes, I'm not just pisching that.

What I'm saying is is that if there was authorisative traditions, then John didn't have wouldn't have had the freedom to do that.

Oh I see, yeah, that is interesting.

I do.

Yeah.

I don't think that there is yet a sense of these things as scripture necessarily, although I think it's interesting that, you know, John, in rewriting Mark, has to in some way incorporate Mark, you know, because there is that sort of general outline of you know, what is Mark doing.

He's writing this, this life of Jesus.

And when John comes to write his own Life of Jesus, he does it in a sort of Obviously the content feels very different, but the sort of overall style feels quite similar.

So is that recognizing to some degree the some kind of normativity of the earlier text is one possibility.

I also think Paul does seem to think that when he does recite a Jesus tradition, that it is authoritative, because say, in one place he says, you know, you know, I'm not I'm not God.

You know, I think I've got the Hay spirit, but I'm not you know, I'm not or I'm not Jesus.

I don't have a sort of saying of the Lord.

So that would suggest, you know, if he did have as if he did have a saying of the Lord, that would be quite you know, significant, So there are it does seem like, you know, it's interesting.

Well, that's what I'm saying is that authoritative material on Jesus is very hard to come by in that period.

The authority comes from the church making up or using creeds, and the authority is the Old Testament.

So when Paul and the other letter writers quote, that's what they quote.

There's quite a few creeds in Paul's letters, we think, and a massive amount of Old Testament used as authoritative scats.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

I just wonder though, whether that is a matter of authority or whether it is whether it is a matter of Paul has been trained to cite, and many others, you know, many other sort of ribbonic like scribes had been trained to use scripture in exactly that sort of creative, theological, argumentative way.

So maybe it hadn't dawned on the early Christians to use Jesus tradition like that.

Though that does not necessarily mean that Jesus tradition wasn't authoritative in the sense that if they did have something from Jesus, it would have been you know, they would have held it in high esteem, as Paul does.

Seem to hold Jesus words in high esteem, for example, you know, inciting the Last Supper or Jesus laws on divorce.

You know, he seemed to find that a kind of semi finding.

The Last Supper.

One is said to be a creed by by Melly.

But he says he's received it from the Lord, which which obviously is interesting in itself because some people have ed.

And I have disagreed about this before this particular one, where whereas there's some people are saying it's a creed and others saying that Paul is it may have come from that passed on, but he's writing it as if it didn't.

It came straight from God.

I received this from the Lord a bit.

Yeah, because obviously it's like on the night he was betrayed.

So it seems like this is a tradition about the early earth Jesus.

But yeah, it's it seems like a tradition about the earthly Jesus.

So could Jesus.

Could Paul have got.

This tradition just through this sort of mode of divination or whatever it is, sort of personal communion or mysticism.

I'm not sure.

It feels to me like he's saying I got this from the Lord, but like through the apostles, as he kind of says elsewhere.

But yeah, it's it's difficult, it's difficult to say exactly.

But so I think, yeah, I think I.

Would say that the Jesus tradition does hold some authority, but it's probably not the same.

I mean, I doubt that they would have seen this as having the same authority as as the scriptures.

I think that probably comes more when the Gospels have been composed, And I would argue that the Gospel writers are deliberately, in some of their style, kind of aping the books of the Jewish scriptures, so they're kind of giving their books this biblical flavor.

So maybe early on they are hoping that these are received as as writings, as like authoritative writings.

But the point is that we absolutely know that Matthew and Luke had a copy of Mark in front of them and didn't feel restrained to treat them like scriptures in terms of making quite significant edits that didn't just change the flavor bit change.

Well, yeah, I mean, and that's that's also true of Jusephus as well.

Like you know, he will write his history of the Jews, but also feels like quite free to you know, rewrite or paraphrase a lot of the scriptures.

So it's kind of interesting that.

It's also true of chronicles and kings in the Old Testament.

Yeah, so there's a lot of rights or deuteronomy or you know, Jubileese is the kind of update of the law to modern context.

So the thing is, I think that ancient Jews operate with the different understanding of scripture to a lot of you know, modern day conservatives in the sense that, you know, they think that scripture is the sort of you know, it's almost like this fertile ground out of which many things can grow.

It's not this kind of you know, this bound thing that you know, you have to sort of stick to.

It's it's it's more fluid than that and can be appropriated in different context in different ways.

So yeah, it's so much to talk about.

Yeah, yeah, that was great, Thank you.

I guess actually this is a good place to one up for now.

Yeah, we definitely have to do.

Such a privilege to have you with us again.

Yeah, you're an amazing guest.

Yeah, terrific stuff.

Get into into your research and mind there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, so we've really enjoyed behind the Gospels and keep it all, keep up.

That can work, it's brilliant.

Thank you, thanks a lot.

So I hope to see a Mastian Night one.

I'm not quite but hopefully I'm going to write one on Luke Luke Axe and Jose Oh good, even if it is like a sketch of some of the key arguments, because sometimes with this literature it's a bit it's a bit hazy.

You just need almost like a chat at GBT to come along and really just pass out all of the key points.

So I'll do a little bit of that.

I think great, but don't you jay I please No, I am great, thank you, fantastic, Thanks having though.

Yeah, So until next time, I've been Andrew one of your hosts, and.

I've been Francis another one of your hosts, and.

D A Post and Joel Nelson John Nelson.

Thankye bye