A Common Written Greek Source for Mark and Thomas (Studies in Christianity and Judaism)

A classic case is Gospel of Thomas 65, which lacks precisely the elements that C. Dodd, long before the discovery of Thomas, has argued to be Markan and pre-Markan additions to an early Jesus-parable. On this view, Thomas provides an important window on the early Synoptic tradition and a valuable source for thinking about the historical Jesus. Occasionally the debate about literary dependence has been turned on its head. For example, Stevan Davies famously argued in two articles in Neotestamentica 30 []: Further, he argues that such a sayings source finds a credible place, given what is otherwise known of the early Jesus movement, and that in fact up to the mid-second century ce the traffic in the sayings of Jesus is far better attested than citation of narratives about Jesus.

The main part of the analysis treats the most likely candidates for a common source for Thomas and Mark. In each section Horman treats the likely editorial features of the Synoptic and Thomasine versions and arrives as a reconstruction of the hypothetical N, using Markan versification to denote each N unit.

But scholars supporting the three-stage Q development hypothesis, such as Burton L. Mack , argue that Q's unity comes not only from its being shared by Matthew and Luke, but also because, in the layers of Q as reconstructed, the later layers build upon and presuppose the earlier ones, whereas the reverse is not the case. So evidence that Q has been revised is not evidence for disunity in Q, since the hypothesised revisions depend upon asymmetric logical connections between what are posited to be the later and earlier layers.

Some biblical scholars believe that an unknown redactor composed a Greek-language proto-Gospel. It may have been circulating in written form about the time the Synoptic Gospels were composed i. The name Q was coined by the German theologian and biblical scholar Johannes Weiss. The relationship among the three synoptic gospels goes beyond mere similarity in viewpoint. The gospels often recount the same stories, usually in the same order, sometimes using the same words. Scholars note that the similarities between Mark, Matthew, and Luke are too great to be coincidental.

If the two-source hypothesis is correct, then Q would probably have been a written document. If Q was a shared oral tradition, it is unlikely that it could account for the nearly identical word-for-word similarities between Matthew and Luke when quoting Q material. Similarly, it is possible to deduce that Q was written in Greek. If the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were referring to a document that had been written in some other language Aramaic for example , it is highly unlikely that two independent translations would have exactly the same wording.

The Q document must have been composed before Matthew and Luke. Some scholars even suggest that Q predated Mark. A date for the final Q document is often placed in the 40s or 50s of the first century, with some arguing its so-called sapiential layer 1Q, containing six wisdom speeches was written as early as the 30s. If Q existed it has since been lost.

Some scholars believe it can be partially reconstructed by examining elements common to Matthew and Luke but absent from Mark. This reconstructed Q does not describe the events of Jesus' life: Q does not mention Jesus' birth, his selection of the 12 disciples, his crucifixion, or the resurrection. Instead, it appears to be a collection of Jesus' sayings and quotations.

The Origins of the New Testament

The case for Q's existence follows from the argument that neither Matthew nor Luke is directly dependent on the other in the double tradition defined by New Testament scholars as material that Matthew and Luke share that does not appear in Mark. But the verbal agreement between Matthew and Luke is so close in some parts of the double tradition that the most reasonable explanation for this agreement is common dependence on a written source or sources. Even if Matthew and Luke are independent see Markan priority , the Q hypothesis states that they used a common document.

Arguments for Q being a written document include:. The fact that no Q manuscripts exist today does not necessarily argue against its existence.

Many early Christian texts no longer exist, and we only know they did from their citation or mention in surviving texts. Once Q's text was incorporated into the body of Matthew and Luke, it was no longer necessary to preserve it, just as interest in copying Mark seems to have waned substantially once it was incorporated into Matthew.

A Common Written Greek Source for Mark and Thomas

Hence they preferred to make copies of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, where the sayings of Jesus from Q were rephrased to avoid misunderstandings, and to fit their own situations and their understanding of what Jesus had really meant. While the two-source hypothesis remains the most popular explanation for the synoptic gospels' origins, the existence of the "minor agreements" has raised serious concerns. These minor agreements are those points where Matthew and Luke agree against or beyond Mark precisely within their Markan verses for example, the mocking question at the beating of Jesus, "Who is it that struck you?

The "minor agreements" call into question the proposition that Matthew and Luke knew Mark but not each other, e. Luke might have indeed been following Matthew, or at least a Matthew-like source. Peabody and McNicol argue that until a reasonable explanation is found the two-source hypothesis is not viable. Secondly, how could a major and respected source, used in two canonical gospels , disappear? If Q did exist, it would have been highly treasured in the early Church. It remains a mystery how such an important document, which was the foundation for two canonical Gospels, could be lost.

An even greater mystery is why the extensive Church catalogs compiled by Eusebius and Nicephorus would omit such an important work yet include such non-canonical accounts as the Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas. The existence of a treasured sayings document in circulation going unmentioned by early Church Fathers remains one of the great conundrums of modern Biblical scholarship. Some scholars argue that the Gospel according to the Hebrews was the basis for the synoptic tradition.

But not only is Q not where it should be at the top of Jerome's list, this treasured work recording the Logia of Christ is mentioned nowhere by Jerome. This view has come to be known as the Farrer hypothesis. Since the 19th-century , historians have learned much more about the early Christian community.

Ferdinand Christian Baur applied Hegelian philosophy to church history and described a 2nd-century Christian community fabricating the gospels. Adolf Harnack was the leading expert in patristics, or the study of the Church Fathers , whose writings defined early Christian practice and doctrine. Harnack identified dramatic changes within the Christian Church as it adapted itself to the pagan culture of the Roman Empire.

He also claimed early dates for the gospels, granting them serious historical value. Early texts such as the Didache in 2nd-millennium copies and the Gospel of Thomas in two manuscripts dated as early as about and have been rediscovered in the last years.

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The Didache , from the 1st century, provides insight into the Jewish Christians of the Jerusalem church. The Gospel of Thomas apparently reflects the beliefs of 1st-century, proto-gnostic Christians in Syria. In the 20th century , scholars became more likely to see early Christian faith and practice as evolving out of the religious beliefs and practices of Second Temple Judaism and Hellenic pagans, rather than standing out in sharp contrast to them.

Modern historians have come to accept Jesus' Jewish identity and that of the apostolic church referred to as Jewish Christianity. The relationship of Paul of Tarsus and Judaism is still disputed. The anti-Jewish Jesus of the gospels is now recognized as a later interpretation, perhaps Marcionite , as are the universalist themes in Acts and Luke.

Wells , in his Outline of History, depicted Jesus as a man and Christianity as a religion of no divine distinction. Scholars such as Walter Bauer and Bart Ehrman have emphasized the diversity of early Christianity, with Proto-orthodox Christianity being one thread, against the traditional account of catholic unanimity.

The historical and contextual time of the early church. In its first few centuries, Christians made up a small minority of the population of the Roman Empire. The religion attracted little attention from writers with other religious beliefs, and few artifacts have been found to document Christianity in its earliest days. Most of the surviving documentation was written by Christians.

Also according to the New Testament, he was baptized by John the Baptist and, after John was executed, he began preaching in Galilee. According to the New Testament, he preached the salvation, everlasting life, cleansing from sins, Kingdom of God , using parables. According to the New Testament, he sent his apostles to heal and to preach the Kingdom of God.

Later, he traveled to Jerusalem in Roman Judea , where he caused a disturbance at the Temple , also, according to the New Testament. It was the time of Passover. The Gospels say that temple guards arrested him and turned him over to Pontius Pilate for execution. Apostles who had witnessed Jesus's teachings travelled around the Mediterranean basin , where they established churches and began oral traditions in various places, such as Jerusalem , Antioch , Caesarea , and Ephesus , all cities with sizable Jewish populations. These oral traditions were later written down as gospels.

When those who had heard Jesus's actual words began to die, Christians started recording the sayings in writing. The hypothetical Q document , a collection of Jesus' sayings, is perhaps the first such record c Historians use the extant gospels to surmise the nature and content of the oral tradition and the Q source. The Gospel of Mark was written during c. The Gospel of Matthew was written c. Finally, the Gospel of John was written, portraying Jesus as the incarnation of the divine Word , who primarily taught about himself as a savior.

All four gospels originally circulated anonymously, and they were attributed to Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John in the 2nd century. Various authors wrote further epistles and the Apocalypse of John. In the one-hundred-year period extending roughly from AD 50 to a number of documents began to circulate among the churches. Also included were epistles, gospels, acts, apocalypses, homilies, and collections of teachings.

While some of these documents were apostolic in origin , others drew upon the tradition the apostles and ministers of the word had utilized in their individual missions. Still others represented a summation of the teaching entrusted to a particular church center. Several of these writings sought to extend, interpret, and apply apostolic teaching to meet the needs of Christians in a given locality. Among the writings considered central to the development of Christianity are the Pauline epistles , letters written or more accurately "dictated" [Note 1] by Paul of Tarsus to various churches.

Many of these are now regarded as scripture. Some scholars think Paul articulated the first Christian theology: General epistles , written by other hands than Paul's, circulated in the early church. Many of them, including one written as late as c , [7] were eventually included in the New Testament canon. Many later epistles concern issues of church leadership, discipline, and disputes. Apocalyptic literature also circulated in the early church; one example, the Book of Revelation , was later included in the New Testament. Debates about scripture were underway in the mid-2nd century, concurrent with a drastic increase of new scriptures, both Jewish and Christian.

Debates regarding practice and belief gradually became reliant on the use of scripture. Similarly, in the 3rd century a shift away from direct revelation as a source of authority occurred. Beyond the Torah the Law and some of the earliest prophetic works the Prophets , there was no universal agreement to a canon , but it was not debated much at first. By the mid-2nd century, tensions arose with the growing rift between Christianity and Judaism , which some theorize led eventually to the determination of a Jewish canon by the emerging rabbinic movement , [8] though, even as of today, there is no scholarly consensus as to when the Jewish canon was set, see Development of the Hebrew Bible canon for details.

Regardless, throughout the Jewish diaspora newer writings were still collected and the fluid Septuagint collection was the primary source of scripture for Christians. Many works under the names of known apostles, such as the Gospel of Thomas , were accorded scriptural status in at least some Christian circles. Apostolic writings, such as I Clement and the Epistle of Barnabas , were considered scripture even within the orthodoxy through the 5th century.

A problem for scholars is that there is a lack of direct evidence on when Christians began accepting their own scriptures alongside the Septuagint. Well into the 2nd century, Christians held onto a strong preference for oral tradition as clearly demonstrated by writers of the time, such as Papias. The acceptance of the Septuagint was generally uncontested even the Peshitta appears to be influenced [10]. Later Jerome would express his preference for adhering strictly to the Jewish canon, but his view held little currency even in his own day.

It was not until the Protestant Reformation that substantial numbers of Christians began to reject those books of the Septuagint which are not found in the Jewish canon, referring to them as biblical apocrypha. In addition, some New Testament books were also disputed, see Antilegomena. The Historicity of the canonical Gospels refers to the reliability and historic character of the four New Testament gospels as historical documents.

These gospels, Matthew , Mark , Luke and John recount the life, ministry, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Historians subject the gospels to critical analysis, attempting to differentiate authentic, reliable information from what they judge to be inventions, exaggerations, and alterations. Many prominent mainstream historians consider the synoptic gospels to contain much reliable historical information about the historical existence of Jesus as a Galilean teacher [11] [12] and of the religious movement he founded, but not everything contained in the gospels is considered to be historically reliable.

The Gospel of Mark , believed by scholars to be the first Gospel written, narrates the historically authentic baptism of Jesus , his preaching, and the crucifixion of Jesus. Matthew and Luke follow Mark's narrative, with some changes, and add substantial amounts of Jesus' ethical teaching, such as The Golden Rule. Elements whose historical authenticity is disputed include the two accounts of the nativity of Jesus , as well as certain details about the crucifixion and the resurrection. The canonical gospels, overall, are considered to have more historically authentic content than the various non-canonical gospels.

While some Christian scholars maintain that the gospels are inerrant descriptions of the life of Jesus, [19] other scholars have concluded that they provide no historical information about his life. The teachings of Jesus in the Gospel of John are very different from those found in the synoptic gospels. Few scholars regard John to be at all comparable to the Synoptics in terms of historical value. Sanders and other critical scholars conclude that the Gospel of John contains an "advanced theological development, in which meditations of the person and work of Jesus are presented in the first person as if Jesus said them.

The Gospel of John also differs from the synoptic gospels in respect of its narrative of Jesus' life and ministry; but here there is a lower degree of consensus that the synoptic tradition is to be preferred. In particular John A.

Robinson has argued that, where the Gospel narrative accounts can be checked for consistency with surviving material evidence, the account in the Gospel of John is commonly the more plausible; [27] and that it is generally easier to reconcile the various synoptic accounts within John's narrative framework, than it is to explain John's narrative within the framework of any of the synoptics. Some scholars today believe that parts of John represent an independent historical tradition from the synoptics, while other parts represent later traditions.

Nevertheless, John is not entirely without historical value. Critical scholarship in the 19th century distinguished between the 'biographical' approach of the three Synoptic Gospels and the 'theological' approach of John, and accordingly tended to disregard John as a historical source. This distinction is no longer regarded as sustainable in more recent scholarship, which emphasizes that all four gospels are both biographical and theological.

According to Barnabas Lindars , "All four Gospels should be regarded primarily as biographies of Jesus, but all four have a definite theological aim. Jesus' first disciples may once have been followers of the Baptist cf.

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There is no a priori reason to reject the report of Jesus and his disciples' conducting a ministry of baptism for a time. Even John's placement of the Last Supper before Passover has struck some as likely. From an early date the title "Father" was applied to bishops as witnesses to the Christian tradition. Only later, from the end of the 4th century, was it used in a more restricted sense of a more or less clearly defined group of ecclesiasical authors of the past whose authority on doctrinal matters carried special weight.

According to the commonly accepted teaching, the fathers of the church are those ancient writers, whether bishops or not, who were characterized by orthodoxy of doctrine, holiness of life and the approval of the church. Sometimes Tertullian , Origen and a few others of not unimpeachable orthodoxy are now classified as Fathers of the Church. The earliest Christian writings other than those collected in the New Testament are a group of letters credited to the Apostolic Fathers. Taken as a whole, the collection is notable for its literary simplicity, religious zeal and lack of Hellenistic philosophy or rhetoric.

Fathers such as Ignatius of Antioch died 98 to advocated the authority of the apostolic episcopacy bishops. Post-apostolic, or Ante-Nicene , Fathers defined and defended Christian doctrine. The Apologists became prominent in the 2nd century. This includes such notable figures as Justin Martyr died , Tatian died c. They debated with prevalent philosophers of their day, defending and arguing for Christianity. They focused mainly on monotheism and their harshest words were used for ancient mythologies.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of about documents, including texts from the Hebrew Bible , discovered between and in eleven caves in and around the ruins of the ancient settlement of Khirbet Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea in the West Bank. The texts are of great religious and historical significance, as they include the oldest known surviving copies of Biblical and extra-biblical documents and preserve evidence of great diversity in late Second Temple Judaism.

They are written in Hebrew , Aramaic and Greek , mostly on parchment , but with some written on papyrus.

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The Dead Sea Scrolls are traditionally divided into three groups: The New Testament apocrypha are a number of writings by early Christians that give accounts of Jesus and his teachings, the nature of God , or the teachings of his apostles and of their lives. These writings often have links with books regarded as "canonical". Not every branch of the Christian church agrees on which writings should be regarded as " canonical " and which are " apocryphal " See the Gospel according to the Hebrews. The Gnostic Gospels are gnostic collections of writings about the teachings of Jesus , written from the 2nd — 4th century.

That year, twelve leather-bound papyrus codices buried in a sealed jar were found by a local peasant named Mohammed Ali Samman. In his "Introduction" to The Nag Hammadi Library in English , James Robinson suggests that these codices may have belonged to a nearby Pachomian monastery, and were buried after Bishop Athanasius condemned the uncritical use of non-canonical books in his Festal Letter of AD.

The contents of the codices were written in Coptic language , though the works were probably all translations from Greek. After the discovery it was recognized that fragments of these sayings attributed to Jesus appeared in manuscripts discovered at Oxyrhynchus in , and matching quotations were recognized in other early Christian sources.

Subsequently, a 1st or 2nd century date of composition c. The once buried manuscripts themselves date from the 3rd and 4th centuries. To read about their significance to modern scholarship into early Christianity , see the Gnosticism article. The works of Josephus provide crucial information about the First Jewish-Roman War and are also important literary source material for understanding the context of the Dead Sea Scrolls and late Temple Judaism. Josephus includes information about individuals, groups, customs and geographical places.

His writings provide a significant, extra-Biblical account of the post-Exilic period of the Maccabees , the Hasmonean dynasty, and the rise of Herod the Great. He is an important source for studies of immediate post-Temple Judaism and the context of early Christianity. The Annals is among the first-known secular-historic records to mention Jesus which Tacitus does in connection with Nero 's persecution of the Christians.

The passage contains an early non-Christian reference to the origin of Christianity , the execution of Christ described in the Bible 's New Testament gospels , and the presence and persecution of Christians in 1st-century Rome. While a majority of scholars consider the passage authentic, some dispute it. Some who argue against authenticity assert: The surviving copies of Tacitus' works derive from two principal manuscripts, known as the Medicean manuscripts , which are held in the Laurentian Library , and written in Latin. It is the second Medicean manuscript which is the oldest surviving copy of the passage describing Christians.

In this manuscript, the first 'i' of the Christianos is quite distinct in appearance from the second, looking somewhat smudged, and lacking the long tail of the second 'i'; additionally, there is a large gap between the first 'i' and the subsequent long s. Georg Andresen was one of the first to comment on the appearance of the first 'i' and subsequent gap, suggesting in that the text had been altered, and an 'e' had originally been in the text, rather than this 'i'.