Talk:Gospel

Lead

@Silverfish2024: the WP:LEAD summarizes the article, which is not what you are doing; you are pushing a specific pov. The statement

...they provide a good idea of the public career of Jesus, and most scholars tend to view the Synoptic Gospels as the useful primary sources or even reliable for Jesus.

is problematic for several reasons:

• "they provide a good idea of the public career of Jesus" - to my best knowledge, there is very little reliable knowledge about Jesus that scholars can extract from the Gospels;
• "most scholars tend to view the Synoptic Gospels as the useful primary sources [...] for Jesus" - Sanders, EB: "The Synoptic Gospels, then, are the primary sources for knowledge of the historical Jesus" - that's a subtle difference;
• "or even reliable" - the pov of Dunn cannot be generalized to "most scholars."

Joshua Jonathan - Let's talk! 20:14, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

See my comment above. Your claim that very little is known about Jesus does not seem to be what most scholars tend to think. My edit said 'useful or reliable', with Dunn's view being the latter, so I would not think I was claiming Dunn's view to be the absolute majority. Silverfish2024 (talk) 20:18, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

The claim the Gospels provide a good idea of the public career of Jesus has been on this page for a long time now (I don't know who first put it in).

Where did you get the idea almost nothing about Jesus is known? Silverfish2024 (talk) 20:20, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

It is what we consequently have argued on Wikipedia against the Christ Myth theory supporters, that very lityle seems to be sure, except his existence, baptism, and crucifixion; see the lead of Historical reliability of the Gospels.

Your quote from Sanders, EB, is WP:CHERRYPICKED; a fuller quote is

John, however, is so different that it cannot be reconciled with the Synoptics except in very general ways [...] Scholars have unanimously chosen the Synoptic Gospels’ version of Jesus’ teaching [...] The Synoptic Gospels, then, are the primary sources for knowledge of the historical Jesus. They are not, however, the equivalent of an academic biography of a recent historical figure. Instead, the Synoptic Gospels are theological documents that provide information the authors regarded as necessary for the religious development of the Christian communities in which they worked.

You should seriously consider if Wikipedia is the best place for you to vent your convictions; I don't think so. Joshua Jonathan - Let's talk! 20:48, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I agree that the Synoptic Gospels, not John, are the primary sources for Jesus, and it is good that you specified as such.

I still disagree with your first point. According to Casey, "the attestation of Jesus' ministry of exorcism and healing is so strong that the majority of New Testament scholars have argued that the tradition had a historical kernel." Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian's Account- page 237

Sanders has argued for 11 statements about Jesus almost beyond dispute. Of course there is not too much certain about Jesus, but I think there is a lot likely to be true. Silverfish2024 (talk) 22:58, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

I have tried my best to provide mainstream, high-quality sources and wish not to misrepresent them in any way. I would like to say I have an open mind about this subject, and if you feel I have misused any of my sources, feel free to object. Silverfish2024 (talk) 23:08, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

Eyewitnesses

I added that many, perhaps most scholars, view the author of Luke-Acts as an eyewitness to the Apostle Paul, presumably via the "we passages". I did not touch the claim that the Gospels are not eyewitnesses, though I specified that this was referring to Jesus. Silverfish2024 (talk) 04:36, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

“Made to convince people” NO!

The gospels were not created to convince people Jesus was the son of God and the word charismatic is unneeded and feels disrespectful.

The Bible, in the eyes of the followers of Jesus, is the word of God. It was made to SPREAD the word, translated so that as many people could read it to spread Jesus’ message as Jesus told his apostles that that was their mission after he passed. The gospels are the good news that Jesus has saved us.

There is a massive difference in sharing news and convincing. One allows for your own brain to think and choose, one may be deceptive. The gospels were written so that God’s free will always remains.

Which means take it or leave it but it’s not a tool TO convince someone. The Bible is NOT there to convince you, it is there to teach, spread the word, and share the gospel, the good word that we are saved.. It’s not some con job attempt.

please do better and do not choose a side, be neutral. This is not neutral, this is all atheist perspective. 108.53.6.160 (talk) 08:02, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Most of the editors aren't atheists. Do not conflate mainstream Bible scholarship with atheism. tgeorgescu (talk) 11:55, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

The New Oxford Annotated Bible

Fifth Edition (2018)

Introduction to The Gospels

Page (1380)

"neither the evangelists nor their first readers engaged in historical analysis. Their aim was to confirm Christian faith. Scholars generally agree that the Gospels were written forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus. They are not eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus’s life and teaching. Even the language has changed." Vejeke (talk) 08:51, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

apocrypha

@Joshua Jonathan Some scholars think that the "Odes of Solomon" and the "Ascension of Isaiah", which are older than the "Gospel of Mary", include the concept of the Perpetual Virginity of Mary. I'm not exactly sure of the best wording for conveying that the "Gospel of Mary" includes the concept first in the view of some scholars but not in the view of others. I think this phrase might even be best left out, as accurately wording it could result in a difficult and confusing sentence to read and I don't know what benefit mentioning it brings to the article. 987123123Adjective (talk) 19:10, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Mass Deletion

@Achar Sva Please stop trying to delete huge swathes of reliably sourced material you seem to disagree with. My claim about the Gospels being written within eyewitness lifetimes is supported by Bas van Os's statistical analysis, published by T&T Clark, and the renowned Ed Sanders's classic book on the historical Jesus. Scholarship assumes that the Gospels rely on oral traditions and memories of Jesus (Ehrman 2012). In fact, as far as I can tell there are no major works ever arguing or disagreeing with my claims, let alone a consensus. Also much of the material you blanked is not related to eyewitnesses, but you removed them without cause regardless. Can you provide any sources for the consensus you assert? Silverfish2024 (talk) 02:29, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

Silverfish, your additions to the article (and they are editions - the article has been stable without them for a very long time)tle ignore the scholarly consensus in favour of an extreme Evangelical hypothesis. The consensus is more sophisticated, and is summarised in the article as follows:

In the immediate aftermath of Jesus' death, his followers expected him to return at any moment, certainly within their own lifetimes, and in consequence there was little motivation to write anything down for future generations, but as eyewitnesses began to die, and as the missionary needs of the church grew, there was an increasing demand and need for written versions of the founder's life and teachings.[56] The stages of this process can be summarized as follows:[57]

• Oral traditions – stories and sayings passed on largely as separate self-contained units, not in any order;
• Written collections of miracle stories, parables, sayings, etc., with oral tradition continuing alongside these;
• Written proto-gospels preceding and serving as sources for the gospels – the dedicatory preface of Luke, for example, testifies to the existence of previous accounts of the life of Jesus.[58]
• Gospels formed by combining proto-gospels, written collections, and still-current oral tradition.

You can find the sourcing in the article. I hope this clarifies things for you, but please desist from trying to add your material to the article wile this talk page discussion is in progress.Achar Sva (talk) 02:42, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

Your claim that other written Gospels existed prior to the canonical ones does not conflict with the existence of oral tradition or eyewitness involvement in it. Indeed, your quote notes that the oral traditions was 'still-current' by the time the Gospels were formed. Your edit summary claiming "the consensus is that all the gospels rely largely on written mazterial" is clearly false, as Chris Keith attests:

...there remains considerable disagreement among Q advocates regarding what exactly Q was...Some consider Q a literary product, while others consider it subliterary. There is also disagreement over its stages of development, how scholars are to reconstruct those stages, how those stages relate to particular socio-historical circumstances, and even whether the early stages might actually be oral tradition.

...there is no incontrovertible evidence that the Jesus tradition circulated in these forms prior to the textualization of Mark's Gospel. Therefore, although I do not deny the possibility of pre-Markan written Jesus tradition, I affirm a robust interaction of oral, and written tradition before, during, and after Mark's textualization...I nevertheless commence with Mark's Gospel as the first clear instance of narrativized Jesus tradition in the written medium.

Keith, C. (2020). The Gospel as Manuscript: An Early history of the Jesus Tradition as material artifact. page=75-77.

Instead, James Dunn notes that scholars largely agree Jesus' life and sayings were preserved orally and that this oral transmission was the source of the canonical Gospels in his book The Oral Gospel Tradition pp 290-291. To put it simply, I argue that the Gospels we have today are the result of the textualization at least in large part of oral traditions ultimately originating from and shaped by contemporaries of Jesus, alongside the necessary interaction with the present of the Christian churches where they were written, and the academy agrees with this.

Your claim that I am pushing an "extreme Evangelical hypothesis" is simply not true. All my sources are highly respected mainstream scholars who publish with mainstream academic presses. van Os was with T&T Clark, and Alan Kirk quoted him as well. EP Sanders was a professor at Duke and revolutionized scholarship around Paul, the historical Jesus, and Second Temple Judaism, an extraordinary feat. Helen Bond (University of Edinburgh) claimed she "can't imagine any book, or course, or even conversation about Jesus that doesn't start-and often end-with the work of E.P. Sanders". Samuel Byrskog is professor at the University of Lund (not an Evanglical seminary) and was the President of the Swedish Academy of Biblical Studies from 2003 to 2008 and chaired seminars at SNTS. Dale Allison (Princeton Theological Seminary), who has nothing to do with my eyewitness claim, though you deleted him nevertheless, is a leading historical Jesus scholar - Chris Keith actually called him the best scholar alive today on a podcast, which I can link if you would like. I could go on and defend every source I edited in, but this should suffice.

Summary: My edits concerning eyewitnesses and oral tradition are academically mainstream and consistent with the view the final written Gospels were written by noneyewitnesses, as is the consensus, while your claims about written Gospels before the canonical Gospels being the consensus neither conflict with my edits nor are necessarily true. I strongly argue that your removal of my content is misguided. Silverfish2024 (talk) 03:24, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for bringing this to Talk. First, you say that I claim that were written gospels before the canonicals, but I made no such claim. I'm at a loss as to where you get this idea.

Second, you seem to be pushing the idea that the four gospel-writers relied on eyewitness accounts. This is not the consensus, which is as set out in the dot-points copied above - eyewitness accounts lay in the distant background, but the writers were getting this at second or third or fourth hand. They were also quite happy to simply make things up, such as the genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke. Disentangling the oldest layers from those that came later is probably the major occupation of modern technical biblical study today.

Third, my problem with your edits is that they simplify a very complex picture, giving the quite erroneous impression that the gospels are based on direct eyewitness testimony. Only the most extreme evangelicals would support this view. Therefore, leave the article as it is, unless you can improve it. Achar Sva (talk) 08:22, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

You had an edit summary claiming "the consensus is that all the gospels rely largely on written mazterial"; whether they were some sort of proto-Gospel or a sayings source or something else was not made clear. Your points clearly mention written proto-gospels though. I agree the current most popular view in scholarship is that the Gospels' writers were not eyewitnesses (tradition also implies Mark and Luke were not eyewitnesses, interestingly), but there is nothing in your points that suggests this (it is found elsewhere in the Wiki article). Furthermore, your points cannot be consensus since Keith clearly demonstrates the disagreement found among scholars on the pre-Gospel traditions and the lack of evidence for a written tradition. It simply shows what Delbert Burkett advocated in 2002. Of course I do not wholly (or even largely) disagree with him, but I do not see how this can be consensus. Your points do not support your assertions about eyewitnesses laying in the "distant background".

The consensus is the oral transmission ultimately began with and involved eyewitnesses; how else could one claim Jesus existed? My claim cited Byrskog, who I demonstrated is not only a reliable source but highly prominent in the scholarly community, and I cited Anthony Le Donne as well. As Ehrman notes in <ens>Did Jesus Exist?</ens> (2012):

...they [The Gospels and other written traditions] were based on oral traditions that had already been in circulation for a long time, how far back do these traditions go? Anyone who thinks that Jesus existed has no problem answering the question: they ultimately go back to things Jesus said and did while he was engaged in his public ministry, say, around the year 29 or 30...

To be clear I do not share Ehrman's view on oral traditions, but this statement is very much in line with most historical Jesus scholars. There should be no doubt the Gospels are connected to memory of Jesus.

My edit explains the traditions behind the Gospels that they used. The Gospels do not appear like direct eyewitness testimony but rather a community textualization, as Alan Kirk notes, but that does not mean they are wholly disconnected from Jesus. I simply noted the role of eyewitnesses, not that they were the sole factor.

Getting to the crux of the issue, the problem is that you argued my edits were based on unreliable sources and against consensus, but it is obvious they are reliable and that the consensus you cited is both not truly a consensus and does not conflict with my edits.

You also removed other edits unrelated to pre-Gospel traditions or eyewitnesses, and you have not justified these. This is the main issue of my talk, not discussion on how close the Gospels are to the Jesus of history. Silverfish2024 (talk) 17:35, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

This is only tangential to the main issue, but your view that the Gospels were happy to simply invent things conflicts with the general scholarly view that the Gospels reworked what they believed were the memories of Jesus. Additionally, Paul attests to Jesus's descent from Abraham and King David (Le Donne 2018 p=72). Scholarship is moving away from attempts to identify the oldest layer of traditions as well as finding hypothetical sources in favor of understanding the canonical Gospels themselves and hypothesizing about what historical circumstance would have led them to write what they do. Disentangling the supposed oldest layers is unfeasible. Silverfish2024 (talk) 17:44, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

Silverfish2024, what you're doing here is discussing the article topic, which is not what Wikipedia is for - no one cares for your view, or mine, or those of any other editor. What the Talk page is for is discussing improvements to the article. Let's try to keep to that.

I deleted the following passages from the article, all added by you. The first is:

• [The gospels were probably written between AD 66 and 110], "which puts their composition likely within the lifetimes of various eyewitnesses, including Jesus's own family."

The material between square brackets was the end of the sentence in the original article, the material after that, in quotes, is you addition. Someone born in, say, AD10, would be dead by AD80 at the latest, especially given the short life-spans of Galilean peasants of the time, but the problem here is not so much the actuarial tables as the implication that the gospel-writers were travelling to Palestine, tracking down eyewitnesses, and recording their accounts. This is not the consensus among modern scholars. That consensus is given in our article in the section headed Composition and sourced from Delbert Burkett's Introduction to the New Testament and the Origins of Christianity, published 2002 (see above in this thread). That puts oral traditions at the beginning of a complex process that your edit glosses over. This is why I deleted it - it's simplistic and therefore misleading.

Your second addition is this:

• [Almost certainly none were by eyewitnesses, and all are the end-products of long oral and written transmission "(which did involve eyewitnesses)." Here you've added the clause in brackets about eyewitnesses - you seem to have an obsession with the subject. I don't see that this adds anything to what's already there, and again it gives the reader the misleading impression that the gospel writers were interviewing eyewitnesses. There's no evidence for this, but the overwhelming opinion of scholars is that they were relying on written sources. Matthew and Luke, for example, rely heavily on Mark and on Q, Mark had his own largely written sources (the Passion Narrative is well known), and John seems to have, had his own sources, which, whatever they were, were not depositions from eyewitness.
• Your third addition is this:

[The Gospel of Mark probably dates from circa AD 66–70, Matthew and Luke around AD 85–90, and John AD 90–110,] "which puts their composition likely within the lifetimes of various eyewitnesses, including Jesus's own family." Apart from the fact that this paragraph is about dates, which makes this insertion gratuitous, we have again this obsession with eyewitnesses and the implication that the gospel-writers were relying heavily on eyewitness reports. And again I have to stress that this is not the consensus of scholars regarding their composition.

Your fourth addition:

• [Most scholars agree that none were written by eyewitnesses to the Historical Jesus,] "though most scholars view the author of Luke-Acts as an eyewitness to Paul." Most scholars do NOT regard Acts as the work of a companion/eyewitness to Paul - your source, Craig Keener, does, but he represents the minority view, and quite a small minority. A case can be made that the "we" passages are from a companion, but that's as far as most scholars would go, and that's questionable.
• "Alan Kirk praises Matthew in particular for his "scribal memory competence" and "his high esteem for and careful handling of both Mark and Q", which makes claims the latter two works are significantly theologically or historically different dubious." What on Earth is "scribal memory competence"? It can't mean that he's working from memory, since your source explicitly mentions the way the Matthew-author uses Mark and Q. That Mark and Q have significant differences amounting to contradictions is pretty well universally accepted, by the way. Unfortunately I can't access your source, Alan Kirk, so can you provide a link? Otherwise I can go up to the library of St Mark's seminary, which is not far away, but an online link would be useful.

I think I've covered them all. The general message is that you're obscuring the academic consensus in favour of the ultra-fundamentalist project of trying to redefine the gospels as products of a curated oral tradition. That began (pace Bultmann) quite recently, as a reaction to the Jesus-was-a-myth movement - the oralists were saying that the Jesus tradition was reliable because the ancient world had strict structures in place for preserving the words and acts of revered teachers, especially ones who were claimed to be sons of gods (Jesus wasn't the only son of God around at the time). The idea enjoyed some popularity for a while, but has now been dropped by mainstream scholars (not by fundamentalists like Keener). So that's why I deleted your additions - but I'd like that link to Alan Kirk, I'm genuinely curious to see what he's talking about. Achar Sva (talk) 05:13, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

• "The gospels were probably written between AD 66 and 110, which puts their composition likely within the lifetimes of various eyewitnesses, including Jesus's own family."

This is supported by van Os's analysis and EP Sanders's introduction. If you have opposing sources, you need to post them yourself. The average lifespan in the Roman Empire for people who survived to their teens was 48-54 according to Saller's Book Patriarchy, Property and death in the Roman Family, and we can expect many more to survive long after this all the way to the end of the First Century.

• "Someone born in, say, AD10, would be dead by AD80 at the latest, especially given the short life-spans of Galilean peasants of the time"

Do you have any sources for this claim? Van Os has disproven this, so I do not see the importance.

My claim is that the traditions the Gospel-writers accessed was shaped in large part by eyewitnesses, not necessarily that they interviewed them themselves. Your Burkett quote actually both confirms that oral traditions were continuing throughout the time of the Gospels' composition, not simply the beginning of the process.

• "Gospels formed by combining proto-gospels, written collections, and still-current oral tradition"

I already disproved your assertion that the overwhelming majority of scholars agree the Gospels rely on written sources. Keith mentions that belief in hypothetical sources si declining in recent scholarship (The Gospel as Manuscript pp=142).

Most scholars do indeed view Luke as an eyewwitness to Paul. I cited James Dunn and Joseph Fitzmyer's Yale Anchor Bible Commentary. These are some of the greatest scholars Bible studies has seen recently.

You removed my references to Allison, Le Donne, and Keith as well. After three talk messages you still have not covered this. Your characterization of Bultmann as advocating for a reliable oral tradition is untrue; he was highly skeptical about what we could know about the historical Jesus, and most modern scholars are more confident than him. The idea that ancient Jewish oral tradition was reliable actually probably originates from Harald Riesenfeld and Gerhardsson in the mid-twentieth century after Bultmann, if I recall correctly, and while the latter's theories are not completely supported by scholarship, his actions have helped revolutionize studies in oral tradition in the New Testament to this day. Silverfish2024 (talk) 05:45, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

I apologise if I removed some of your sources, it wasn't intentional. It seems we agree on quite a lot - Jesus was real, and, most importantly, the gospels are based on the memories of those who knew him, Unfortunately that 's not the impression your edits give. By harping on eyewitnesses you make it seem that the gospels are based on direct eyewitness testimony. If that's not your intention, please let me know. If it is what you think, what are your sources? Achar Sva (talk) 06:01, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for the apology. It is greatly appreciated, and I am glad that our views are not so far apart as they seem. My view is that oral tradition was generally freer than the strict Rabbinic memorization model of Gerhardsson, though I'm sure there were multiple modes of transmission that led to the Gospels. My claim about eyewitnesses chiefly concerns the traditions passed on before they finally arrived and were reconfigured by the Gospel writers, and my source is Byrskog, whom I cited earlier. My sources for the claim that the oral tradition goes back to the Historical Jesus (I'm not sure I put this in the article though) are Dunn and Ehrman's works, which I cited earlier in the talk page, and from both works it seems that this is shared by most New Testament scholars, perhaps even indeed a consensus. The article makes clear that most scholars view the final Gospels as not written by eyewitnesses already, so I simply wished to note how the Gospels came to be and how they might relate to the history they at least attempt to portray. Silverfish2024 (talk) 06:24, 19 December 2024 (UTC)