Get to know Thomas and the Synoptics.

If you're interested in that fascinating book called the Gospel of Thomas, there is one book fresh off the press (not even 6 months old) that might interest you from one of my teachers at Duke University, Mark Goodacre (see his blog here), titled, Thomas and the Gospels: The Case for Thomas's Familiarity with the Synoptics. I'm very happy to see this out in print as it was a book that was in its final stages when I took a course with Mark in my last year at Duke on the Greek Non-Canonical Gospels; he even let us read a chapter of the book that pertained to what we were discussing in class and it was great fun looking at the Greek fragments of Thomas that we currently have available. Check out the very chic cover:

I recently borrowed this book from Emory library and have been slowly reading it for leisure when I have some time to spare, and so far, I think it's vintage Goodacre. He is superb at doing careful analysis with various synopses which is a tool so often ignored in studies like this that compare two (or more) texts that are possibly related to each other literarily. I hope he's glad to know that I even recently used his method of using a colored synopsis when comparing Synoptic texts. I am TA-ing a class in the Candler School of Theology for their second semester NT interpretation class and as they are focusing right now on Luke 22:15-20, I hope it was helpful to the students to see a colored synopsis of Matt 26:26-29 // Mark 14:22-25 // Luke 22:15-20 to see what's happening in Luke at least from a redaction-critical standpoint. 

Eerdmans Publishing also released a video yesterday interviewing Mark about Thomas and his book. Check it out!



Now that you got that wonderful 8-minute introduction, what are you waiting for? Go purchase this book from Eerdmans (here) or even Amazon if that's your thing (here).

Luke the skeptic?

For a while, there was a very popular video on YouTube:

I remember watching this video with a bunch of church friends, going back and forth in debate about the feasibility of such a feat. We never came down to one firm conclusion, but I think everyone felt a bit skeptical of such thing. In our Synoptic Gospels class, we've been looking at various pericopae, and one thing that is striking is what's called Luke's "Great Omission," where he basically leaves off his Markan material from Mark 6:45-8:26. Particularly interesting is the first pericope that he leaves out of his own Gospel, Jesus' walking on water (Mark 6:45-52 + pars.). What's striking about this is that even John includes this in his Gospel which, to me, shows the prominence (or popularity?) of this scene in the Gospel sources. Why does Luke leave it out? Again, just like the video, our class didn't come to one satisfactory conclusion, but if you follow the Farrer Theory (as Dr. Goodacre does) or the Two-Source Theory (positing Q and Markan Priority), the absence of this pericope in Luke does a number on you.

What was it about Jesus walking on water that Luke felt compelled to leave out of his own Gospel narrative?

Gospel Communities?

I blogged earlier this week about Richard Bauckham, who, as I suspected was not a big fan of scholars who put much stock in viewing the communities of the Gospels as the limited main audience of the first four books of the NT. This was first confirmed to me by Nick Norelli in a comment he posted on my blog, suggesting that I read The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences, edited by none other than Bauckham himself. It just so happened that a chapter of it was assigned for class anyway, titled "For Whom Were the Gospels Written?" by Bauckham, and in it, Bauckham makes some pretty strong arguments against reading too much into the Gospel communities being the only audience in a limited, specific way. Here's one paragraph that I thought was very good:

[This is following his paragraph about the debate on the genre of the Gospels]

"However, the full force of the difference of genre will come home to us only if we add a second consideration. We need to ask, about both an apostolic letter and a Gospel, the question: Why should anyone write it?—by which I mean: Why should anyone put this down in writing? In the case of 1 Corinthians, for example, the answer is clear: Paul could not or preferred not to visit Corinth. Paul seems only to have written anything when distance required him to communicate in writing what he would otherwise have spoken orally to one of his churches. It was distance that required writing, whereas orality sufficed for presence. So the more Gospels scholarship envisages the Gospels in terms approximating to a Pauline letter, addressing the specific situation of one community, the more odd it seems that the evangelist is supposed to be writing for the community in which he lives. An evangelist writing his Gospel is like Paul writing 1 Corinthians while permanently resident in Corinth. Paul did not do this, so why should Matthew or the other evangelists have done so? Anyone who wrote a Gospel must have had the opportunity of teaching his community orally. Indeed, most Gospels scholars assume that he frequently did so. He could retell and reinterpret the community's Gospel traditions so as to address his community's situation by means of them in this oral context. Why should he go to the considerable trouble of writing a Gospel for a community to which he was regularly preaching? Indeed, why should he go to such trouble to freeze in writing his response to a specific local situation which was liable to change and to which he could respond much more flexibly and therefore appropriately in oral preaching?

This was a very persuasive argument to me, and since this is only one chapter of the book, I'm hoping to delve further into this issue as the semester goes on.

"Only a lunatic..."

If you were a lunatic editor, what kind of tendencies would you display in editting a text? There's an answer in one of the readings for this week for my Synoptic Gospels class. It is B.H. Streeter's classic, The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins, an older but very insightful book. In a chapter titled, "The Fundamental Solution" (that is, a solution to the 'Synoptic Problem'), he has some words to say about the strength of the argument for Markan Priority:

"The attempt has recently been made to revive the solution, first put forward by Augustine, who styles Mark a kind of abridger and lackey of Matthew, "Tanquam breviator et pedesequus ejus." But Augustine did not possess a Synopsis of the Greek text conveniently printed in parallel columns. Otherwise a person of his intelligence could not have failed to perceive that, where the two Gospels are parallel, it is usually Matthew, and not Mark, who does the abbreviation. For example, the number of words employed by Mark to tell the stories of the Gadarene Demoniac, Jairus' Daughter, and the Feeding of the Five Thousand are respectively 325, 374 and 235; Matthew contrives to tell them in 136, 135 and 157 words. Now there is nothing antecedently improbable in the idea that for certain purposes an abbreviated version of the Gospel might be desired; but only a lunatic would leave out Matthew's account of the Infancy, the Sermon on the Mount, and practically all the parables, in order to get room for purely verbal expansion of what was retained."

Busy

Apologies to my readers for my lack of much blogging lately. The workload at Duke is definitely pretty hefty, but my first semester went well and the second semester already began last week at full speed. Right now, I'm reading an article from John Kloppenborg titled "Synopses and the Synoptic Problem" which was presented at an Oxford conference in 2008 that I believe now can be found as a chapter in a Festschrift for Christopher Tuckett published in 2011. The question that we're thinking about is: are all synopses necessarily biased (that is to say, must they assume a particular stance to the Synoptic problem before presenting the evidence)? And if so, what do we do about it?

Q?

I'm currently reading through Studying the Synoptic Gospels by EP Sanders and Margaret Davies as introductory material to my Synoptic Gospels class this semester. In one section, they showed a diagram of one scholar's solution to the 'Synoptic Problem':

This is FC Grant's 'Multiple Source Theory,' an elaborate cousin to what's widely known as the 'Two Source Theory' that posits Markan Priority for the Synoptic Gospels as well as the presence of a hypothetical source called Q (Quelle, German for 'source'). But my reaction when I saw this chart was not 'Ohh, I finally get it.' but rather 'What!?!' It's so complicated that I couldn't bear to really think through the implications of all those lines and sources. I know my professor, Mark Goodacre, is a proponent of the Farrer Theory, which posits Markan priority without the necessity for Q. I'm still not sure yet where I stand on this issue and it'll be interesting to see where I land as the semester unfolds. He'll have us create our own synopses and color-code various tradition materials (Double-tradition, Triple-tradition, etc.), which I think will be an excellent way to get our feet wet in the Synoptic Problem.

My question for you is: What's your take on Q and why?

Luke

I've been reading through C. Kavin Rowe's Early Narrative Christology: The Lord in the Gosepl of Luke lately. I had heard that he's been doing excellent work and as you can see from his Duke profile, it's pretty obvious that he's one of the young bright NT scholars in the world. I corresponded briefly with Dr. Richard Hays at Duke and he also pointed to Dr. Rowe's works for my own interest in the biblical studies department at Duke.

"Jesus is κύριος from the inception of his life. This is not simply an "anticipation" or foreshadowing of Acts 2:34-36, though it is that. More importantly, that Jesus' very existence and his identification as κύριος are coextensive means that κύριος is in a crucial way constitutive of his identity. The root idem in identity is proper here: for Luke there is no point at which Jesus is not κύριος. Lukan christology, therefore, does not allow for a separation between Jesus and his identity as ὁ κύριος."

Synoptics vs. John

In a subsection titled, "The Question of the Kingdom of God," R. Brown says:

"The omission in John of the formula basileia tou theou, "kingdom of God [or of heaven]," except for 3:3, 5, is a difficult problem, although not so formidable an obstacle to Johannine ecclesiology as it might first seem. The Synoptic emphasis on the basileia making itself felt in Jesus' activity seems to have become in John an emphasis on Jesus who is basileus ("king") and who reigns. John refers to Jesus as king fifteen times, almost double the number of times that this reference occurs in any of the other Gospels... If the Synoptic basileia is like leaven working in a mass of dough, the Johannine Jesus is the bread of life. If there is a Synoptic parable of the shepherd and the lost sheep, the Johannine Jesus is the model shepherd. If the Synoptics record a parable where the basileia is like the vineyard that shall be handed over to others (Matt 21:43), the Johannine Jesus is the vine. This change of emphasis means that in John there is less apparent reference to collectivity than there is in the Synoptic concept of basileia. But we must not exaggerate. If the Johannine Jesus is "the King of Israel" (1:49), he has an Israel of believers to rule over; if Jesus is the shepherd, he has a flock that has to be gathered; if Jesus is the vine, there are branches on the vine."

Raymond Brown, An Introduction to the Gospel of John, 229.