October 9, 2023 • 56 mins
In this podcast episode, Jeramiah Giehl and Dennis MacDonald delve into their personal backgrounds and the origins of their interest in studying Christian origins.
MacDonald shares his research findings on the Gospels, revealing his discovery of classical Greek poetry imitations within them. He contends that the Gospels were crafted as works of historical fiction rather than straightforward historical records, drawing intriguing parallels between the adventures in Homer's epics and the Gospel narratives.
MacDonald articulates his argument for intentional literary imitation between the Gospels and Greek mythology, elucidating his seven criteria for mimesis and offering examples illustrating the parallels between the Gospels and Greek myth. Giehl raises questions about discerning historical from mythological elements in the Greek New Testament, exploring the possibility of redaction or invention in light of these similarities.
The conversation explores the contrasting perspectives on the New Testament—whether it leans more toward mythology or history—and delves into the growing body of scholarship investigating the influence of Greek poetry.
MacDonald emphasizes that his work doesn't approach the Gospels with hostility but seeks to enrich their meaning and diversity. Giehl expresses gratitude for MacDonald's insights and time. The dialogue encompasses various topics related to Gospel development, including the Gospel of Thomas, Papias, the Marcian Gospel, and the Hebrew Gospel.
In conclusion, they delve into the concept of the historical kernel of truth within the New Testament and stress the importance of grasping the creative energies of its authors.
Chapters & Topics - Chapter descriptions
0:06 Introduction and Background
4:35 Dennis MacDonald on his work and views on the Gospels
12:11 Influence of Greek mythology on the New Testament
12:54 Comparing Homeric Adventures to Gospel Stories
17:34 Criteria for Literary Imitation
23:11 The Role of Mythology in the Development of the Christian Narrative
31:34 The Q plus Papias Hypothesis
36:55 The Q document and its reconstruction
37:28 Gospel of Thomas, Papias, and Marcian Gospel
45:00 The role of Paul in the development of the Gospels
Paul and Torah Observance46:06
47:35 The reinterpretation of Torah observance in the early Christian community
52:13 Tensions between James and Paul in early Christianity
53:21 The Q Document and its Contents
57:52 Discussion on Gospel Scholarship and the Influence of Homeric Epic Imitations and Q Document
Key Questions
12:11 What evidence is there for the influence of Greek mythology on the New Testament?
39:58 How does the Q document fit into the development of the Gospels?
45:00 What was the relationship between Paul and the other Gospel authors?
Keywords: Hebrew Gospel, Jesus, Q Document, Luke, Paul, Matthew, Greek Poetry, New Testament, Parallels, Papias, Scholarship, Virgil, Odysseus, Synoptic Problem, Mimesis Criticism, Historical Jesus
Action Items
21:16 Further investigate the influence of Greek mythology on the New Testament.
34:26 Consider the role of Paul in the development of the Gospels and his relationship with other Gospel authors.
36:55 Read the Q document and explore its narrative framework and arguments.
47:35 Examine the reinterpretation of Torah observance in the early Christian community.
52:13 Explore the tensions between James and Paul in early Christianity.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:09):
All right, welcome to the Pulling the Threads podcast.
Today we are interviewing Dr. Dennis McDonald, and he's the
John Wesley Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins
at Claremont School of Theology in California.
I'm not familiar with the Claremont School of Theology,
but uh, seems like it's in my neighborhood.
So I like to start things off usually, but kind of like a
(00:31):
background on you. You mind telling me, I guess,
your upbringing and what broughtyou into, I guess, the study of
Christian origins? And what was your upbringing?
Were you in that more liberal Christian tradition or?
My father was a Baptist pastor. My parents were missionaries in
(00:53):
Italy. For 10 years I was a graduate,
believe it or not, of Bob Jones University.
So I was ready to be an evangelist or a a preacher and
win the world for Christ. But I became a scholar, and it
was clear that that was not the best way to understand Christian
(01:15):
origins. And along the way, I discovered
the intense and profound and remarkable.
Imitations of classical Greek poetry in the New Testament,
especially the Gospels. So I'm known for almost 20
books, including the Merrick epics in the Gospel of Mark,
(01:38):
Luke in the Politics of America,Imitation.
I've written on the Q document. I have a synopsis of epic
tragedy in the Gospels which came out within a year ago.
It's 570 pages and you can buy it now for about $30.00 on
(01:59):
Amazon. And it's my magnum opus, but I'm
also working on two more books. One is a reassessment of the Q
document. There was a Q document, but
unfortunately the way that it was constructed by the
(02:19):
International Q project. Was a hopelessly flawed and
there were two major flaws. We can talk about that, but I
said set up alternative criteriafor teasing out the influence of
a lost gospel. And that's been published in
(02:41):
several forms. One is the My book 2 Shipwreck
Gospels. That that is the lost gospel
cue, which I call the logo of Jesus by its likely title.
And the other is Papius's exposition of Loggia about the
Lord, which is the first external evidence that we have
(03:02):
of the Gospels. And both were lost.
And for similar reasons I'm and so that book is called.
The one I'm working on to go really soon is called Must the
Synoptics remain a problem? The book that I'm working on
now, in addition to that, I'm having so much fun.
(03:25):
It's it's called Synoptic Epistles.
It's my apocryphal gospel epistles of the gospel authors
writing to each other, saying what they don't like about the
their sources and how their workhas been used and why they wrote
the way they did. So there's a there's a fictional
(03:47):
book you wrote that about the the narrative or what is this?
That's what I'm writing now. It's it.
It's apocryphal. It it's fictional insofar as I'm
speaking on behalf of the gospelauthors, but it is heavily
supported by the evidence, so each page has about a third of
(04:09):
it devoted to chapter, verse, illusions.
Or cross references. And I stand by everything I I
wrote. I think it's a way of
reorganizing, by having the gospel author speak for
themselves of what was at stake in their compositions.
And it has been a lot of fun. So now you were raised a
(04:37):
Christian, you said, and then you went to Bible college, and
then historical scholarship kindof took you on a different path.
Well, actually, well, actually it was it that that's true.
And that's what I said, Jeremiah.
But more important to me was thecivil rights movement and the
war in Vietnam. My parents were very
(05:01):
conservative politically and they were not racist.
In fact, they were for fundamentalist Christians.
They were very advanced about antisemitism and racism, and my
father was a leader in his denomination in trying to
correct those things. But they certainly were
(05:22):
supportive of American military.In fact, when I was born, my
parents almost named me Adam Bobbecause I was born on the day of
an atomic test. So I helped start the Sojourner
magazine, which was evangelical alternative voice politically,
(05:46):
but even that was too conservative for me.
And so now I understand myself to be a Christian, identified
Theo, skeptic and humanist, and I'm trying to understand these
texts which I love and and devoted to.
In a In a way that's more humanistic and so that's that's
(06:10):
driving my work. Now you refer to the Gospels as
works of historical fiction. What leads you to feel like
that? Their works of historical
fiction? Because they intended to be
written that way. Otherwise they would not have
announced their imitations of classical Greek poetry.
(06:33):
The Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Luke and Axe are
particularly fond of imitating Greek poetry, largely to rival
Virgil's needed, which also imitates Homeric poetry, to
write a founding myth for the Roman Empire.
(06:57):
So the Gospels need to the canonical Gospels, not the Q
duck. But the canonical gospels need
to be understood in terms of founding mythologies, and they
are not intending to write histories.
Our fascination with history is a post enlightenment and these
(07:19):
authors were trying to write to their communities in a clever,
sophisticated way to say that our Lord.
Is more powerful than Greek deities, Greek heroes more
powerful than Moses, more compassionate than Moses, and so
(07:41):
on. So these are not to be
constrained. In fact, I would go so far as to
say this Jeremiah. I would not trust a single thing
in the Gospels, including the Gospel of Job, about Jesus.
That they did not derive from the Q document.
(08:02):
And even the Q document is has its own agenda.
It's not an agenda driven primarily by Greek poetry,
although one can see echoes of Greek poetry in it.
But it's primarily A rewriting of Deuteronomy to show that
Jesus is the prophet like Moses that was promised twice in in
(08:25):
the book. So what examples of, like Greek
poetry do you see within the news estimate you mentioned
within Mark, Luke and Axe? What what examples can you give
where they're using Greek? You know, poetry, like the
homework or Virgil or any of that?
(08:48):
There there are some 40 examplesthat are compelling, so you
don't want them all. So I'm going to give you a
couple of them. And I'm going to do it in a way
that allows you to be the readerand to tell me what this sounds
like in the New Testament. Jesus, I'm.
(09:13):
I'm sorry. I have to start with Odysseus.
Odysseus takes 12 men from his ship and he goes on an island.
And finds a cave, and inside TheCave is a nude monster, the
(09:35):
Cyclops Polyphemus. They don't know that the monster
is in The Cave. They help themselves to the
cheeses from his goats, but the monster comes back and he pulls
the door stone behind it and discovers Odysseus and his men
(09:55):
who are in. The The Cave he eats two of them
and Odysseus knows they have to kill or do something with
Polyphemus. But if they kill him then the
the the stone of the door will trap them.
So instead they blind him with apoker they offer him.
(10:21):
Before that they offer him wine,which inebriates him.
They ask him. The blind, the the, the monster
asked so Desius what his name is, and he lies.
He says that it's Utis. Nobody.
Nobody's what they call me. He blinds Paula Femus and Paula
(10:44):
Femus shouts in anguish. Other cyclopees come outside The
Cave door and call in Paula Femus.
What's bothering you? And he said, well, no one is
harming me now. A play on this word, Boutus.
So they say, Well, nobody is harming you, will.
(11:06):
It must be the gods who are giving you trouble and will
leave you alone. Eventually Odysseus and his men
escape on the bottom of the sheep, and they go to their ship
and while on the ship. Odysseus calls back to Paula
(11:26):
Famus and says Paula Famus, it'sI, Odysseus tell everybody that
I was the one who blinded you and then he sails away.
Does this sound like any exorcism story in the Gospel
Tier Gospel stories? I mean, I'm thinking of the
(11:49):
instant where Jesus is on the boat, and then he told Peter to
come to him. They saw him walking on water, I
know. That was a cave.
Let me coach a little bit. So Jesus and his 12 disciples
come sail to an unknown shore. They meet a nude person who
(12:09):
lives in the caves. Jesus asked him his name and he
lies. He says that we are legion
because there's a legion of demons inside of it.
Jesus cast the demons into swineand drowns them, and then he
(12:30):
gets on his boat and the. The the demoniac asks to be
taken on the book and to travel with Jesus and he says no and
stay. What say what the Lord has done
and the before that the neighbors who had lost their
(12:50):
swine came to the site and told Jesus that he needed to leave.
Now the story of turning this sothese demons into swine.
Echoes the Searcy story where C Cersei uses a drug to drug
(13:11):
Odysseus's man I and to turn them into swine so that she can
kill them and eat them later, and Odysseus rescues them.
So here you have two of the mostfamous stories from the Homeric
adventures, the Polyphema story and the Searcy story combined.
In a marvelous, complex story inthe Gospel of Mark and a Virgil
(13:37):
in the Anneed has his own version of the Polythema story,
and he mentioned Cersei in passing.
So the Huffer of the Gospel of Mark is competing with Virgil,
in my view. But whether you buy that or not,
the parallels between the two are verbal.
In many cases, they certainly are.
(14:00):
I have common themes and similarsequence now before it sounds
like this is all wishful thinking.
Jeremiah, I want to articulate my 7 criteria for a literary
imitation which we call mimesis.The Greeks called it mimesis,
imitation, literary imitation. The first of these criteria is
(14:24):
availability. So if I say that Mark is using
the Homeric epics. They have to be available,
potentially to the author. Well, there was no literature
that was more imitated or influential in Greek antiquity
than the home Eric Epics. That's a slam dunk.
(14:45):
The 2nd criterion is analogy. Do you have other people who are
imitating the same story so thatyou can say it's a part of the
intellectual? Scaffolding of ancient readers
and I just gave you example of Virgil and Searcy and
(15:08):
Polyfamous, but you have examples all strewn all over the
Greek mythological narrative andhistorical narrative.
The 3rd and 4th and 5th criteriahave to do with the intensity.
Of the parallels between the twoworks, one of them is How many
(15:29):
of the parallels do you have? That's density.
Do the parallels appear in the same sequence, or are they
simply random? If they're in the same sequence,
you more likely have Nemesis andyou have distinctive traits.
Are there things that you find only in these stories and very
(15:49):
seldom in stories of otherwise? And some of these distinctive
traits are used by authors to indicate that you have that
they're expecting you to notice the antecedents, and in this
case the obvious one is turning soldiers into swine, or they are
(16:09):
called legion. After all.
The next criterion is interpretability.
This is #6. Can you explain why an author
would imitate a text? And in this case, it's clear
Jesus is more compassionate thanpowerful than Odysseus?
(16:31):
And then the 7th one is tricky, but it's very it really is
important when it works. That is ancient recognition.
Do we have evidence that ancientreaders saw these parallels and
benefited from them? And in this case, we certainly
do. We have Byzantine poets,
Christian poets, who are rewriting the story of the
(16:54):
Garrison pneumoniac and they use13 lines almost without changing
in the same sequence in order tofrom from the Odyssey in order
to introduce that story. They undoubtedly saw the
similarities between those stories.
So those are the criteria. What uses?
(17:16):
So people sometimes have complained about parallelomania.
Well, what we know about the ancients is that they were
parallelomanias. They loved literary imitation
and they were taught how to do it in schools.
We can see it throughout the Greek narrative and imaginative
(17:37):
literature. And to think the Gospels were
not we're not influenced by it. When you have these parallels on
parallels that satisfy these criteria, you have to say that.
And I would say this now that I think when it comes to the
interpretation of the Gospels, biblical scholars now are
(17:58):
bankrupt unless they wake up to the importance of nemesis of
Greek poetry in the Gospels. It is so foundational that I, I
I really do feel that's the case.
I can give you another example from the Iliad.
(18:20):
Hector dies at the end of the Iliad and his death is very
similar to the death of Jesus. Well, of course it's got to be
the if there's a similarity and literary connection, it's got to
be the author of the Gospel of Mark, imitating the Iliad.
So, but anyway, parallels going or not, I didn't mean to
interrupt you. Oh no, that's fine.
(18:43):
So the literary, literary fiction, I mean this kind of
historical fiction was common within the Greek culture.
So kind of to the historical versus the mythicist.
The question is if within the Greek New Testament, the the
(19:04):
pistols, the Gospels specifically what you're talking
about here. If there's elements from Greek
mythology, does this speak to ithaving been layers of redaction
where they add this over time? Or as you know, some in the
mythicist camp suggest that it was just a totally invented
(19:27):
thing. So how does this play into
between the historical Jesus, and where do these mythological
elements play into? Okay, Jeremiah.
I would say the mythicist position is bankrupt too, and
I'm so tired of talking about it.
But it's important to talk aboutit because for some people it's
(19:48):
got such a dogmatic traction. We can use Paul.
We can use Josephus. We can use the Q document to
establish with a great deal of certainty not only that Jesus
existed, but what his role was inside of 1st century Judaism as
(20:15):
a teacher and an interpreter of Torah.
And this appears in the New Testament too, most obviously,
where Jesus is arguing with Pharisees.
Over the observation of Jewish law and it's the primary concern
(20:37):
that we have about Jesus in the Q document but you have that
also in Paul Paul's concern about the crucifixion and the
teachings of Jesus has to do largely with a reassessment of
Jewish law in the inclusion of gentiles.
(20:57):
And what does one do with circumcision for example you
have the same thing in the Josephus.
If one doesn't like what I mean,what Josephus says in the
Antiquities in Flavia, the testimony in Flaviatum, which is
certainly a Christian in circulation, you can still look
(21:20):
at what he says about John the Baptist and about Jesus's
brother Jacob, and you'll see that it's exactly the same
issues that are at work. These are challenges to
traditional Jewish tour enforcers, strict tour
observance, and Jesus is a spokesperson in a kind of
(21:44):
radical Hillel moment of trying to make the law more flexible.
So that in the Q document, at least as I understand it, the
only thing you need to do to be in the Kingdom of God is to obey
the love commandment. Now if you obey more of those
commandments, that's all the better.
(22:05):
And those who obeyed, even the least of them are going to be
called great in the Kingdom of heaven.
That is his community metaphor he uses for his followers.
But so it really is very fascinating.
So I don't think mythicists should be any longer taken
(22:27):
seriously as providing evidence that Jesus never existed.
In fact, I think we know where he was in the spectrum of Jewish
teachers at the time. By the way, very few Jewish
scholars of the New Testament would identify would agree that
Jesus never existed. They they can read the tea
(22:51):
leaves better than the many. So yeah, my question was more so
the influences of the Homer and Iliad and that what does it tell
us about the writing of the New Testament?
You know, the aristocratic class, the ones who had money to
(23:12):
reproduce text and copies of books.
What is it? What does it say to the
development of the Christian narrative that the Greek
mythology plays big and I guess the story developed?
No, that's a huge question. And I think the place that we
need to begin is the Gospel of Mark.
(23:35):
The Gospel of Mark clearly is written after the Jewish war,
and its author is trying to struggle to make a founding myth
that can rival Virgil's in need,which is the kind of the Bible
of his opponents, of the people who destroyed the Jerusalem.
(23:57):
And it is not going to work for that community to have a savior
who is simply a radical Jewish teacher.
They need to have a model, Martin, and that's why Mark's
writing so consistently about the Jesus's death and he becomes
(24:19):
a model martyr. But not only that, he embodies
some of the miraculous powers ofthe Odysseus, of Hector, of
Achilles in the Homeric stories and virgils in the Nias, in
(24:40):
order to show that Jesus is not just a teacher, but he's also
competitive with Greek heroes. So I think it makes lots of
sense that Mark would have gone out of his way to create a
founding myth that makes Jesus competitive with Greek heroes.
(25:03):
Which doesn't mean he didn't exist.
It just means that he becomes larger than life.
My I sometimes tell my students that Jesus would not at all have
been pleased to read a gospel. He would not recognize himself.
But one can understand sympathetically why authors like
(25:25):
Mark, Matthew, Luke are rewriting Gospel stories for
their communities because they need a hero to sustain their
identities and to to to give them guidance.
OK, so which like what role do you think?
(25:48):
OK, so the the writer of Mark was playing on these mess.
Why do you think he was pulling on?
I guess the Homer and and the Elliott and stuff like that to
create his mythological story. Okay Jeremiah.
His readers knew Homer better than they knew the Bible.
(26:13):
They knew Homer better than theyknew Greek tragedy, even though
some of the tragedies very popular rippities Buckeye, the
Menace of Heracles and so on. So you're they're contesting
what I call the canonical past of the Greeks and the canonical
(26:34):
past of Jews. That is on the one hand, Greek
poetry, especially Homeric poetry, was what they lost, what
what they read in school, which way, which it gave structure to
Greek identity. And that's what the Hebrew Bible
did for Jews. It was a so these are contested
(26:55):
canonical pasts and it's what new social groups do in order to
carve out their independent identity.
So we know this happens at Komran, where the new social
identities of Essens allows themto create a different kinds of
scriptures and to alter the scriptures in certain ways.
(27:20):
One finds it also in Greco Romanreligion, where you have
contestation of various texts, including Homer and the Greek
tragedy. So if you were going to decide
to write in contestation with the canonical past of the
(27:44):
Greeks, you would go first to Homer without a question.
Okay. All right.
So you mentioned earlier the Logos, which I'm assuming that's
like the Sayings gospel and you see two flaws in the Q
hypothesis. Could you speak on that a little
(28:05):
more? Sure.
Now. I used to be, for 10 years, the
director of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity at
Claremont Graduate University, and that was the center of the
International Cube project, under the leadership largely of
(28:25):
James Robinson, who was a friendof mine.
And in a way I succeeded him. So I'm a fan of the
International Cube project. One of their great virtues is
that they saw in Matthew Luke overlaps against Mark, evidence
of the use of another gospel. But the issue then became how
(28:51):
extensive was that influence, And in order to establish and
isolate that alternative influence, they started by
insisting that Luke did not knowMatthew.
So if Luke didn't know Matthew, and if Matthew didn't know Luke,
(29:17):
what they have in common comes from the lost gospel, and by
comparing the versions of Matthew and Luke with each other
and looking for the most primitive reading, one can
attribute that to the lost gospel.
The problem with that is Luke new Matthew, and I think the
(29:38):
evidence now is is accumulating such that math Luke had to know
Matthew, so that principle does not work.
The other principle was that in order to find the source that
Matthew and Luke were using in addition to Mark, you had to
(29:59):
remove all Mark and influence. So it was like taking a sponge
to the Gospels and trying to soak out all Mark and influence
and to see what is left. But the assumption, the
presumption is that Mark didn't know the same document.
(30:20):
But there's lots of evidence that Mark did know the same
document. So if Mark knows the same
document, how do you You can't simply absorb the parallels in
Mark with in in that way. You have to account for Mark's
use of the of the the same gospel.
(30:45):
So my theory, my methodology is now called and it has been
called this way for 20 years. The Q plus Papius hypothesis
because I use Papius's statements about the Gospels as
a very important witness to whatwas going on prior to the
(31:07):
composition of Luke. So Papius wrote before Luke by
the way, and the three he knew 3gospels.
He knew 1 attributed to Mark, but he knew two that had been
attributed to Matthew, and the one that we have and would would
know generally in the is the canonical Matthew.
(31:29):
But the other is the Q document,and if if one works with the
that hypothesis and applies it to the synoptic gospels, the
results are really quite astonishing.
And so that's that's where my Q comes in.
Now, Q does not exist in, as faras we know, in a physical
(31:56):
manuscript. So all of this is hypothetical,
but just because it's hypothetical doesn't mean it's
capricious. We have the same things.
True, in modern science you would have hypothetical cures or
science. But these hypotheses are built
(32:17):
on a previous science and a goodcriteria.
So my criteria for reconstructing cue obviously are
not the same ones that I have for memesis criticism.
Nonetheless, I think that they're going to stand up.
Well, now I wanted to say right away my reconstruction of Q in
(32:41):
Greek or and its translation is certainly not zero graphic of
what the Q document looked like.And we'll never have that unless
we find physical evidence for it.
But it certainly is provocative and it's it's clearly in advance
(33:02):
in my view on the previous cues.And Jeremiah, you may know
something about the synoptic problem.
I'm sure that you do actually. And right now there's huge
skepticism about the existence of a Q document and it's the
ability to reconstruct it. And I share the Q, the assess
(33:25):
the suspicions about the Q document as it's been
reconstructed. But I think the evidence is
overwhelming that there was sucha document and we simply have to
have more sophisticated ways of teasing out its influence on the
Synoptics. So have you heard the theory
(33:46):
that potentially an earlier version of the Gospel of Thomas
may have been a Sayings gospel or something similar to the CUE
Gospel? Well, it is a Sayings gospel.
And of course, I translated the Gospel of Thomas and Coptic kids
in Graduate School, and there are similarities.
(34:08):
But we know that the Gospel of Thomas also knew the Synoptics.
And there are two parallels, in fact, possibly to the Gospel of
John. So it's a derivative document,
and the author tells you at the beginning that he's not going to
write a narrative gospel becausethese are the hidden sayings of
Jesus that if you believe, you'll have salvation.
(34:30):
So he has a reason to make thesesayings more mystical, more
interpretably challenging. And so I think the Gospel of
Thomas says really nothing very serious about the got the
synoptic tradition, except that it's secondary.
(34:55):
Okay. And so you mentioned papayas.
When was when was Papayas's life?
And in addition to papayas, whatrole do you think Marcian's
gospel played into potentially influences on Luke?
(35:16):
OK, thank you for that. I I pronounced the name Papius,
or some people would say Papius.He apparently he wrote his
exposition of Loggy about the Lord, which was 5 volumes by the
way, and so extensive that Jerome decided he didn't have
(35:37):
the time to translate it all andonly fragments have survived,
but he wrote it around the year 110.
As far as we can tell, he did not know the Gospel of John,
even though he himself had associations with the Jihani
tradition. He did not know the Gospel of
(35:57):
Luke, either Marcian's Gospel orthe Gospel of Luke.
Why? Because John and Luke had not
yet been written, nor had Marcian's Gospel been written.
So the Gospels that he knew werepresumably the Q document
(36:20):
Matthew, which he and he took both to be translations of a
Hebrew Matthew and the Gospel ofMark.
Now, if we want to get really deep in the weeds, we could talk
about the furor that some are causing about the Marcian gospel
as an alternative to Qi. Think that's a total nonstarter.
(36:46):
And actually, in a couple of my books I've taken it on and the
the book on Must the Must the Synoptics Remain a Problem?
Dismisses that hypothesis ratherswiftly.
My interpretation of Marcian's gospel is twofold.
(37:08):
One's very positive and the other is not.
The one that's very positive is that ever since Harnack
attempted to reconstruct Marcian's Gospel, it has been a
very important document on the reception and the proliferation
(37:30):
and the reproduction of the Gospel of Luke.
It's unquestionably important, and now we have alternative
reconstructions of it that have gone, in some cases far beyond
what we had in our neck. And so we are in a much better
(37:51):
position, philologically, to make judgments about what
Marcian's gospel was, what it contained, what it omitted, and
its relationship to the canonical loop.
I'm convinced. And if we had time we could talk
about that. It simply is a truncated version
(38:15):
of the canonical gospel of Luke.And in that's to that extent the
heresiologists here in the ass. Epiphanius, for example.
I'm sorry to to Tooly and the Epiphanius are right that
(38:37):
Marcian or his party expunged a lot of the Gospel of Luke, did
not attribute it to Luke but to God, and we're responsible for
for its creation. We have people, though, who are
(38:58):
advocates of the priority of theGospel of Marcian arguing for in
one case that Marcian's Evangelic Evangelion and also
the Apostolic on the Letters of Paul were the first cannon of
(39:22):
the church. That has a certain amount of
plausibility, though. I don't buy it as it's usually
articulated. But some go so far as to say
that Marcian's Gospel representsthe earliest stratum of the
synoptic tradition, and I find that to be really entirely
(39:46):
unsustainable. So you mentioned the Hebrew
Gospel. Have you tried to reconstruct
the Hebrew Gospel? That may have been the cue
source or part of the cue source.
There never was a Hebrew Gospel of Matthew.
(40:09):
There never was. This was John the Elder and
Papius's way of trying to make sense of the deviations they did
not like between the two Greek gospels that had been attributed
to Matthew. That is the Q document, and what
we know is Matthew. So they were doing source
(40:30):
criticism. They were imagining that there
was a Hebrew Gospel that Matthewwrote and he got the sequences
all in the right direction. But unfortunately 2IN that
translators botched it, and so Papius says he wants to put it
back together in in the order, presumably the order that he
(40:51):
thought Matthew had it originally.
OK, so you don't think there wasactually a Hebrew Gospel?
No. In fact, I don't know any
scholar who now holds that. Right.
So do you believe the epistles of Paul came before the gospels?
(41:11):
The writing of the Gospels? Do you hold to that view?
Yes, they certainly. Paul wrote prior to all the
canonical gospels. The question is what is the
relationship of the Q document to Paul?
(41:32):
And I would say the Paul is evenearlier than the Q document.
So would you say that Paul had influence on the development of
the Q Gospel or his writings Possible?
Not on the Q document, no. But it's possible that there was
some influence of Paul already in Mark.
(41:54):
I'll let other people scratch atthat.
OK, what do you make of Paul? It seems that because you talked
about the Torah Orthodox Judaismof the 1st century, but Paul
seems to be speaking more in. The Hellenistic tradition and
(42:18):
very more accepting of Roman culture.
What do you see as the difference between the tour
orthodox view of Jesus? Potentially more in that
framework. But Paul?
He seems to be more in the idea of, you know, like making very
(42:39):
little burdens for gentile adherence to.
The the message he was declaringWell, first of all, let's be
really clear that Paul always was Jewish.
Okay, so let's. But he's trying to make the
(43:03):
message of Jesus more global. And so he has these missions
among Gentiles. And he faces certain questions
that are related to how do the fortunes and scriptures of
Israel relate to Gentiles? And this the new situation He's
(43:25):
facing. And he's not against Jews
observing their law, their Torah, and he says that he
himself does. But in order to expand the the
followers of Jesus, he has to make certain allowances that
(43:49):
make Gentiles more likely to join the community.
Now, already in the Jesus tradition you have challenges to
the abiding nature of the law ofTorah.
Yes, it is going to exist forever.
(44:11):
This was a common among Jews andChristians both.
But the status of the law is going to change depending on the
situations, and This is why Jesus and Galilee can say the
long the prophets were until John the Baptist.
After that, it's the Kingdom of God.
And that is a very important statement.
(44:34):
And Paul is dealing with the same thing.
Yes, we should be nurtured by the biblical tradition, but on
the other hand, he can say we have died to the law.
Whoa, what does that mean? The law.
We have died to the law and now the now it's faith that's more
(44:57):
important and that then becomes more a part of what it is going
to attract Gentiles. So I think it is hard for modern
Christians to understand the challenges of Torah observance
and flexibility. It's all over in the New
(45:18):
Testament. It's all it's.
It's important for Paul. It's important for the canonical
gospels. It's not so important for the
Gospel of John, by the way. So that is a huge struggle and
you can see it in the Acts of the Apostles, the opening of the
(45:38):
of the Kingdom of God to Gentiles, beginning with the
Ethiopian eunuch, but especiallyCornelius and the message, the
Kingdom of God ending up in Rome.
So what's happened is that the law had to be renegotiated given
different social situations and if the Kingdom of God was going
(46:01):
to survive after the Jewish war and in the Gentile world, it
would have to be adjusted. Its its status was the the Torah
had great status, but it's status changed depending on the
needs of the people at the time.And that certainly is true for
(46:25):
Paul. Are you familiar with Robert
Eisenman and James de Boer's? They write about the conflict
between James and Paul. What do you make of the conflict
between James and Paul within Paul's writings and Galatians?
The New Testament, and I guess you're not a fan of it.
(46:46):
So, I mean, what is your response to Robert Eisman, James
De Boer's idea? I don't, I haven't read them
recently enough to be able to talk about it.
If the yes, there was certainly a disagreement between the
Pauline tradition and what we find in the book of James,
(47:06):
There's no doubt about that. We also know that those tensions
continued at least into the 3rd century because of the pseudo
Clementine letters and so on. So this struggle to redefine
Torah observes went on for centuries.
(47:27):
Now remember, during this time the Jerusalem Temple no longer
existed, so that there was no longer a center of Jewish life
the way there had been before. You no longer have chief
priests. You no longer have sagacies.
What you have are rabbis and synagogues that are trying to
(47:47):
make sense of Torah without a centralized authority.
And so these rabbis and synagogues in different places
are struggling to make Torah work for them, because the
promises of the Pentateuch were that God would bless Israel if
(48:11):
Israel obeyed all the commandments, but punish them if
they didn't. What does it mean to obey all
the commandments? And so you have the school of
Shamai and Kilil in Judaism, butyou also have the tensions
between James and Paul. And to understand the tensions
that intellectually of early Christians, you have to account
(48:34):
for the struggle over tour observance.
But you also have to say with that is, it's a contestation of
the Jewish canonical past. But they were also contesting
the canonical past of the Greeks, namely Greek mythology,
especially as it's articulated in Greek poetry.
(48:56):
All right. So within your hypothesis
regarding the Q, you have Q plusso.
You have additional material youinclude, including your cue
hypothesis. And what kind of what material
do you include that's not in thestandard cue gospel theories?
Well, mine is twice as long as the traditional cues.
(49:19):
Probably more than that. It actually has a narrative
framework so that it is not justa random collection of sayings
like cue, but it it actually hasan argument and a development
inside of it. But let me give you, Jeremiah, a
few things that are in that document that are not in other
(49:41):
queues. The story of Jesus for giving
the sinful woman is in the queuedocument.
I'm sure it was there 1st and there again you have this
attitude toward Torah. The elders bring a woman who's
accused of being a sinful woman,Promiscuous woman.
(50:01):
She's not an adultress in the inthe history of the the
transmission. You're talking about the
pericophy adultery, yeah, the pericophy adultery.
And and the elders say Moses said women like this need to be
stoned and Jesus refuses to do it.
So what is he writing in the dirt?
(50:23):
He's writing the same legislation, Deuteronomy 2221,
in the dirt, to show that it's not written in stone, but it's
ephemeral. And then he says if you've not
offended one of the commandments, right, you can
cast the stone. So he's opposing those who are
(50:45):
insisting that everyone should obey all the commandments and
the woman never repents. He doesn't even say in the
earliest version story go and don't send anymore.
She never repents. The point is Jesus forgives a
woman who Moses said should be stoned.
(51:06):
Another thing that's in my Q document is that Jesus actually
does say I will destroy this temple and build another, and
it's an eschatological threat against the temple.
And Mark and the other gospel authors do their their best to
distance Jesus from saying that.But I'm sure that Jesus said it
(51:30):
in the Q document. There are a number of other lots
of the disputes with Pharisees that we find in Synoptics.
Not all of them, but probably about half of them did appear in
the Q document, apparently. So it's these.
(51:52):
I encourage you to get a copy ofthe Q document and read it, and
I think you'll just be blown away by its sophistication, by
its compassion. It's put another way, it's
written by a radical Jew. It's not written by a Christian.
It's a radical Jew who likes Rabbi Jesus because he's making
(52:14):
the law more manageable for people who are marginalized in
society. So that's why Jesus says in the
Q document I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.
That's not just to make them Torah observant, it's to give
them a place in the Kingdom of God, which is the banner which
(52:36):
he uses for his alternative interpretation of Judaism.
Now the frankly adultery many critical scholars consider that
to be. In interpolation later on one of
the early notes, it looks like it might have been a note from
Marcian and his gospel that eventually found its way in.
So that that is interesting thatit finds its way into your your
(53:00):
your Q document. No, no Papius knew about it.
According to you Cvius, Papius knows the story about the woman
who was in many sins and she's forgiven.
Now where did Papius know about it?
He only talks about 3 documents that he knew.
(53:21):
One is Matthew, one is Mark. They're not in those books,
right? The percopy adultery is not in
those books. It probably was in the lost
Gospel of Matthew, which is the Q document.
That's the nature of the argument.
So I think Papius's witness to the story is absolutely crucial.
And Luke, remember, Papius didn't know Luke, he didn't know
(53:44):
John. So we didn't know the stories
from that. By the way, I want to, I want to
ask a question of you Jr. about it.
Some of this might get It is my guess that some of this could be
blowing your mind that I don't think you've heard much of this
among the biblical scholars you talked to.
Now maybe you have. You certainly are well read and
(54:09):
knowledgeable about the trends in gospel scholarship, but I
don't think you've had people onyour podcast or that you've read
that are saying things that are quite what I'm saying.
So I think there's a little bit of a lag and delay in this, but
I mean, I've heard the things you've had to say before.
(54:30):
But yeah, OK. So we've got some pretty good
topics over this today. Is there anything that you would
like to summarize as kind of like a final thing you'd like to
say regarding the, I guess the Gospel of Q and the influence of
the Homer and the Iliad and stuff like that on the New
(54:51):
Testament? Unfortunately, many people have
interpreted my work as being hostile to the Gospels.
It is not. It is sympathetic to them.
If you want to understand them, you need to understand them on
their own terms and not on construction of Christian
theology or PIE. And I'm a great fan and I taught
(55:17):
in theological seminaries for most of my career.
And so my goal was to make thesegospels more meaningful to my
students and more appreciated and more diverse in their
understandings. So I guess that's what I'd like
to say, that I don't understand myself.
(55:40):
I I understand myself to be a critic and I am an atheist.
But that doesn't mean that I don't think these stories and
and what I'm uncovering should be threatening to anyone.
I think they actually throw a new light on creative energies
of these people that are trying to make sense of the world,
(56:00):
which is what all of us are trying to do too.
All right. Yeah.
Well, that's a good summary. You know, as critical
scholarship, you know we try to undercover you know the
historical kernel of truth and what that means to us.
And so, yeah, I want to thank you for taking your time to.
Answer my questions and come on here.
And yeah, thank you. I appreciate that.
(56:22):
OK, Jeremiah, nice to. Meet you informative.
All right, welcome to the Pulling the Threads podcast.
Today we are interviewing Dr. Dennis McDonald, and he's the
John Wesley Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins
at Claremont School of Theology in California.
I'm not familiar with the Claremont School of Theology,
but uh, seems like it's in my neighborhood.
So I like to start things off usually, but kind of like a
(00:31):
background on you. You mind telling me, I guess,
your upbringing and what broughtyou into, I guess, the study of
Christian origins? And what was your upbringing?
Were you in that more liberal Christian tradition or?
My father was a Baptist pastor. My parents were missionaries in
(00:53):
Italy. For 10 years I was a graduate,
believe it or not, of Bob Jones University.
So I was ready to be an evangelist or a a preacher and
win the world for Christ. But I became a scholar, and it
was clear that that was not the best way to understand Christian
(01:15):
origins. And along the way, I discovered
the intense and profound and remarkable.
Imitations of classical Greek poetry in the New Testament,
especially the Gospels. So I'm known for almost 20
books, including the Merrick epics in the Gospel of Mark,
(01:38):
Luke in the Politics of America,Imitation.
I've written on the Q document. I have a synopsis of epic
tragedy in the Gospels which came out within a year ago.
It's 570 pages and you can buy it now for about $30.00 on
(01:59):
Amazon. And it's my magnum opus, but I'm
also working on two more books. One is a reassessment of the Q
document. There was a Q document, but
unfortunately the way that it was constructed by the
(02:19):
International Q project. Was a hopelessly flawed and
there were two major flaws. We can talk about that, but I
said set up alternative criteriafor teasing out the influence of
a lost gospel. And that's been published in
(02:41):
several forms. One is the My book 2 Shipwreck
Gospels. That that is the lost gospel
cue, which I call the logo of Jesus by its likely title.
And the other is Papius's exposition of Loggia about the
Lord, which is the first external evidence that we have
(03:02):
of the Gospels. And both were lost.
And for similar reasons I'm and so that book is called.
The one I'm working on to go really soon is called Must the
Synoptics remain a problem? The book that I'm working on
now, in addition to that, I'm having so much fun.
(03:25):
It's it's called Synoptic Epistles.
It's my apocryphal gospel epistles of the gospel authors
writing to each other, saying what they don't like about the
their sources and how their workhas been used and why they wrote
the way they did. So there's a there's a fictional
(03:47):
book you wrote that about the the narrative or what is this?
That's what I'm writing now. It's it.
It's apocryphal. It it's fictional insofar as I'm
speaking on behalf of the gospelauthors, but it is heavily
supported by the evidence, so each page has about a third of
(04:09):
it devoted to chapter, verse, illusions.
Or cross references. And I stand by everything I I
wrote. I think it's a way of
reorganizing, by having the gospel author speak for
themselves of what was at stake in their compositions.
And it has been a lot of fun. So now you were raised a
(04:37):
Christian, you said, and then you went to Bible college, and
then historical scholarship kindof took you on a different path.
Well, actually, well, actually it was it that that's true.
And that's what I said, Jeremiah.
But more important to me was thecivil rights movement and the
war in Vietnam. My parents were very
(05:01):
conservative politically and they were not racist.
In fact, they were for fundamentalist Christians.
They were very advanced about antisemitism and racism, and my
father was a leader in his denomination in trying to
correct those things. But they certainly were
(05:22):
supportive of American military.In fact, when I was born, my
parents almost named me Adam Bobbecause I was born on the day of
an atomic test. So I helped start the Sojourner
magazine, which was evangelical alternative voice politically,
(05:46):
but even that was too conservative for me.
And so now I understand myself to be a Christian, identified
Theo, skeptic and humanist, and I'm trying to understand these
texts which I love and and devoted to.
In a In a way that's more humanistic and so that's that's
(06:10):
driving my work. Now you refer to the Gospels as
works of historical fiction. What leads you to feel like
that? Their works of historical
fiction? Because they intended to be
written that way. Otherwise they would not have
announced their imitations of classical Greek poetry.
(06:33):
The Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Luke and Axe are
particularly fond of imitating Greek poetry, largely to rival
Virgil's needed, which also imitates Homeric poetry, to
write a founding myth for the Roman Empire.
(06:57):
So the Gospels need to the canonical Gospels, not the Q
duck. But the canonical gospels need
to be understood in terms of founding mythologies, and they
are not intending to write histories.
Our fascination with history is a post enlightenment and these
(07:19):
authors were trying to write to their communities in a clever,
sophisticated way to say that our Lord.
Is more powerful than Greek deities, Greek heroes more
powerful than Moses, more compassionate than Moses, and so
(07:41):
on. So these are not to be
constrained. In fact, I would go so far as to
say this Jeremiah. I would not trust a single thing
in the Gospels, including the Gospel of Job, about Jesus.
That they did not derive from the Q document.
(08:02):
And even the Q document is has its own agenda.
It's not an agenda driven primarily by Greek poetry,
although one can see echoes of Greek poetry in it.
But it's primarily A rewriting of Deuteronomy to show that
Jesus is the prophet like Moses that was promised twice in in
(08:25):
the book. So what examples of, like Greek
poetry do you see within the news estimate you mentioned
within Mark, Luke and Axe? What what examples can you give
where they're using Greek? You know, poetry, like the
homework or Virgil or any of that?
(08:48):
There there are some 40 examplesthat are compelling, so you
don't want them all. So I'm going to give you a
couple of them. And I'm going to do it in a way
that allows you to be the readerand to tell me what this sounds
like in the New Testament. Jesus, I'm.
(09:13):
I'm sorry. I have to start with Odysseus.
Odysseus takes 12 men from his ship and he goes on an island.
And finds a cave, and inside TheCave is a nude monster, the
(09:35):
Cyclops Polyphemus. They don't know that the monster
is in The Cave. They help themselves to the
cheeses from his goats, but the monster comes back and he pulls
the door stone behind it and discovers Odysseus and his men
(09:55):
who are in. The The Cave he eats two of them
and Odysseus knows they have to kill or do something with
Polyphemus. But if they kill him then the
the the stone of the door will trap them.
So instead they blind him with apoker they offer him.
(10:21):
Before that they offer him wine,which inebriates him.
They ask him. The blind, the the, the monster
asked so Desius what his name is, and he lies.
He says that it's Utis. Nobody.
Nobody's what they call me. He blinds Paula Femus and Paula
(10:44):
Femus shouts in anguish. Other cyclopees come outside The
Cave door and call in Paula Femus.
What's bothering you? And he said, well, no one is
harming me now. A play on this word, Boutus.
So they say, Well, nobody is harming you, will.
(11:06):
It must be the gods who are giving you trouble and will
leave you alone. Eventually Odysseus and his men
escape on the bottom of the sheep, and they go to their ship
and while on the ship. Odysseus calls back to Paula
(11:26):
Famus and says Paula Famus, it'sI, Odysseus tell everybody that
I was the one who blinded you and then he sails away.
Does this sound like any exorcism story in the Gospel
Tier Gospel stories? I mean, I'm thinking of the
(11:49):
instant where Jesus is on the boat, and then he told Peter to
come to him. They saw him walking on water, I
know. That was a cave.
Let me coach a little bit. So Jesus and his 12 disciples
come sail to an unknown shore. They meet a nude person who
(12:09):
lives in the caves. Jesus asked him his name and he
lies. He says that we are legion
because there's a legion of demons inside of it.
Jesus cast the demons into swineand drowns them, and then he
(12:30):
gets on his boat and the. The the demoniac asks to be
taken on the book and to travel with Jesus and he says no and
stay. What say what the Lord has done
and the before that the neighbors who had lost their
(12:50):
swine came to the site and told Jesus that he needed to leave.
Now the story of turning this sothese demons into swine.
Echoes the Searcy story where C Cersei uses a drug to drug
(13:11):
Odysseus's man I and to turn them into swine so that she can
kill them and eat them later, and Odysseus rescues them.
So here you have two of the mostfamous stories from the Homeric
adventures, the Polyphema story and the Searcy story combined.
In a marvelous, complex story inthe Gospel of Mark and a Virgil
(13:37):
in the Anneed has his own version of the Polythema story,
and he mentioned Cersei in passing.
So the Huffer of the Gospel of Mark is competing with Virgil,
in my view. But whether you buy that or not,
the parallels between the two are verbal.
In many cases, they certainly are.
(14:00):
I have common themes and similarsequence now before it sounds
like this is all wishful thinking.
Jeremiah, I want to articulate my 7 criteria for a literary
imitation which we call mimesis.The Greeks called it mimesis,
imitation, literary imitation. The first of these criteria is
(14:24):
availability. So if I say that Mark is using
the Homeric epics. They have to be available,
potentially to the author. Well, there was no literature
that was more imitated or influential in Greek antiquity
than the home Eric Epics. That's a slam dunk.
(14:45):
The 2nd criterion is analogy. Do you have other people who are
imitating the same story so thatyou can say it's a part of the
intellectual? Scaffolding of ancient readers
and I just gave you example of Virgil and Searcy and
(15:08):
Polyfamous, but you have examples all strewn all over the
Greek mythological narrative andhistorical narrative.
The 3rd and 4th and 5th criteriahave to do with the intensity.
Of the parallels between the twoworks, one of them is How many
(15:29):
of the parallels do you have? That's density.
Do the parallels appear in the same sequence, or are they
simply random? If they're in the same sequence,
you more likely have Nemesis andyou have distinctive traits.
Are there things that you find only in these stories and very
(15:49):
seldom in stories of otherwise? And some of these distinctive
traits are used by authors to indicate that you have that
they're expecting you to notice the antecedents, and in this
case the obvious one is turning soldiers into swine, or they are
(16:09):
called legion. After all.
The next criterion is interpretability.
This is #6. Can you explain why an author
would imitate a text? And in this case, it's clear
Jesus is more compassionate thanpowerful than Odysseus?
(16:31):
And then the 7th one is tricky, but it's very it really is
important when it works. That is ancient recognition.
Do we have evidence that ancientreaders saw these parallels and
benefited from them? And in this case, we certainly
do. We have Byzantine poets,
Christian poets, who are rewriting the story of the
(16:54):
Garrison pneumoniac and they use13 lines almost without changing
in the same sequence in order tofrom from the Odyssey in order
to introduce that story. They undoubtedly saw the
similarities between those stories.
So those are the criteria. What uses?
(17:16):
So people sometimes have complained about parallelomania.
Well, what we know about the ancients is that they were
parallelomanias. They loved literary imitation
and they were taught how to do it in schools.
We can see it throughout the Greek narrative and imaginative
(17:37):
literature. And to think the Gospels were
not we're not influenced by it. When you have these parallels on
parallels that satisfy these criteria, you have to say that.
And I would say this now that I think when it comes to the
interpretation of the Gospels, biblical scholars now are
(17:58):
bankrupt unless they wake up to the importance of nemesis of
Greek poetry in the Gospels. It is so foundational that I, I
I really do feel that's the case.
I can give you another example from the Iliad.
(18:20):
Hector dies at the end of the Iliad and his death is very
similar to the death of Jesus. Well, of course it's got to be
the if there's a similarity and literary connection, it's got to
be the author of the Gospel of Mark, imitating the Iliad.
So, but anyway, parallels going or not, I didn't mean to
interrupt you. Oh no, that's fine.
(18:43):
So the literary, literary fiction, I mean this kind of
historical fiction was common within the Greek culture.
So kind of to the historical versus the mythicist.
The question is if within the Greek New Testament, the the
(19:04):
pistols, the Gospels specifically what you're talking
about here. If there's elements from Greek
mythology, does this speak to ithaving been layers of redaction
where they add this over time? Or as you know, some in the
mythicist camp suggest that it was just a totally invented
(19:27):
thing. So how does this play into
between the historical Jesus, and where do these mythological
elements play into? Okay, Jeremiah.
I would say the mythicist position is bankrupt too, and
I'm so tired of talking about it.
But it's important to talk aboutit because for some people it's
(19:48):
got such a dogmatic traction. We can use Paul.
We can use Josephus. We can use the Q document to
establish with a great deal of certainty not only that Jesus
existed, but what his role was inside of 1st century Judaism as
(20:15):
a teacher and an interpreter of Torah.
And this appears in the New Testament too, most obviously,
where Jesus is arguing with Pharisees.
Over the observation of Jewish law and it's the primary concern
(20:37):
that we have about Jesus in the Q document but you have that
also in Paul Paul's concern about the crucifixion and the
teachings of Jesus has to do largely with a reassessment of
Jewish law in the inclusion of gentiles.
(20:57):
And what does one do with circumcision for example you
have the same thing in the Josephus.
If one doesn't like what I mean,what Josephus says in the
Antiquities in Flavia, the testimony in Flaviatum, which is
certainly a Christian in circulation, you can still look
(21:20):
at what he says about John the Baptist and about Jesus's
brother Jacob, and you'll see that it's exactly the same
issues that are at work. These are challenges to
traditional Jewish tour enforcers, strict tour
observance, and Jesus is a spokesperson in a kind of
(21:44):
radical Hillel moment of trying to make the law more flexible.
So that in the Q document, at least as I understand it, the
only thing you need to do to be in the Kingdom of God is to obey
the love commandment. Now if you obey more of those
commandments, that's all the better.
(22:05):
And those who obeyed, even the least of them are going to be
called great in the Kingdom of heaven.
That is his community metaphor he uses for his followers.
But so it really is very fascinating.
So I don't think mythicists should be any longer taken
(22:27):
seriously as providing evidence that Jesus never existed.
In fact, I think we know where he was in the spectrum of Jewish
teachers at the time. By the way, very few Jewish
scholars of the New Testament would identify would agree that
Jesus never existed. They they can read the tea
(22:51):
leaves better than the many. So yeah, my question was more so
the influences of the Homer and Iliad and that what does it tell
us about the writing of the New Testament?
You know, the aristocratic class, the ones who had money to
(23:12):
reproduce text and copies of books.
What is it? What does it say to the
development of the Christian narrative that the Greek
mythology plays big and I guess the story developed?
No, that's a huge question. And I think the place that we
need to begin is the Gospel of Mark.
(23:35):
The Gospel of Mark clearly is written after the Jewish war,
and its author is trying to struggle to make a founding myth
that can rival Virgil's in need,which is the kind of the Bible
of his opponents, of the people who destroyed the Jerusalem.
(23:57):
And it is not going to work for that community to have a savior
who is simply a radical Jewish teacher.
They need to have a model, Martin, and that's why Mark's
writing so consistently about the Jesus's death and he becomes
(24:19):
a model martyr. But not only that, he embodies
some of the miraculous powers ofthe Odysseus, of Hector, of
Achilles in the Homeric stories and virgils in the Nias, in
(24:40):
order to show that Jesus is not just a teacher, but he's also
competitive with Greek heroes. So I think it makes lots of
sense that Mark would have gone out of his way to create a
founding myth that makes Jesus competitive with Greek heroes.
(25:03):
Which doesn't mean he didn't exist.
It just means that he becomes larger than life.
My I sometimes tell my students that Jesus would not at all have
been pleased to read a gospel. He would not recognize himself.
But one can understand sympathetically why authors like
(25:25):
Mark, Matthew, Luke are rewriting Gospel stories for
their communities because they need a hero to sustain their
identities and to to to give them guidance.
OK, so which like what role do you think?
(25:48):
OK, so the the writer of Mark was playing on these mess.
Why do you think he was pulling on?
I guess the Homer and and the Elliott and stuff like that to
create his mythological story. Okay Jeremiah.
His readers knew Homer better than they knew the Bible.
(26:13):
They knew Homer better than theyknew Greek tragedy, even though
some of the tragedies very popular rippities Buckeye, the
Menace of Heracles and so on. So you're they're contesting
what I call the canonical past of the Greeks and the canonical
(26:34):
past of Jews. That is on the one hand, Greek
poetry, especially Homeric poetry, was what they lost, what
what they read in school, which way, which it gave structure to
Greek identity. And that's what the Hebrew Bible
did for Jews. It was a so these are contested
(26:55):
canonical pasts and it's what new social groups do in order to
carve out their independent identity.
So we know this happens at Komran, where the new social
identities of Essens allows themto create a different kinds of
scriptures and to alter the scriptures in certain ways.
(27:20):
One finds it also in Greco Romanreligion, where you have
contestation of various texts, including Homer and the Greek
tragedy. So if you were going to decide
to write in contestation with the canonical past of the
(27:44):
Greeks, you would go first to Homer without a question.
Okay. All right.
So you mentioned earlier the Logos, which I'm assuming that's
like the Sayings gospel and you see two flaws in the Q
hypothesis. Could you speak on that a little
(28:05):
more? Sure.
Now. I used to be, for 10 years, the
director of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity at
Claremont Graduate University, and that was the center of the
International Cube project, under the leadership largely of
(28:25):
James Robinson, who was a friendof mine.
And in a way I succeeded him. So I'm a fan of the
International Cube project. One of their great virtues is
that they saw in Matthew Luke overlaps against Mark, evidence
of the use of another gospel. But the issue then became how
(28:51):
extensive was that influence, And in order to establish and
isolate that alternative influence, they started by
insisting that Luke did not knowMatthew.
So if Luke didn't know Matthew, and if Matthew didn't know Luke,
(29:17):
what they have in common comes from the lost gospel, and by
comparing the versions of Matthew and Luke with each other
and looking for the most primitive reading, one can
attribute that to the lost gospel.
The problem with that is Luke new Matthew, and I think the
(29:38):
evidence now is is accumulating such that math Luke had to know
Matthew, so that principle does not work.
The other principle was that in order to find the source that
Matthew and Luke were using in addition to Mark, you had to
(29:59):
remove all Mark and influence. So it was like taking a sponge
to the Gospels and trying to soak out all Mark and influence
and to see what is left. But the assumption, the
presumption is that Mark didn't know the same document.
(30:20):
But there's lots of evidence that Mark did know the same
document. So if Mark knows the same
document, how do you You can't simply absorb the parallels in
Mark with in in that way. You have to account for Mark's
use of the of the the same gospel.
(30:45):
So my theory, my methodology is now called and it has been
called this way for 20 years. The Q plus Papius hypothesis
because I use Papius's statements about the Gospels as
a very important witness to whatwas going on prior to the
(31:07):
composition of Luke. So Papius wrote before Luke by
the way, and the three he knew 3gospels.
He knew 1 attributed to Mark, but he knew two that had been
attributed to Matthew, and the one that we have and would would
know generally in the is the canonical Matthew.
(31:29):
But the other is the Q document,and if if one works with the
that hypothesis and applies it to the synoptic gospels, the
results are really quite astonishing.
And so that's that's where my Q comes in.
Now, Q does not exist in, as faras we know, in a physical
(31:56):
manuscript. So all of this is hypothetical,
but just because it's hypothetical doesn't mean it's
capricious. We have the same things.
True, in modern science you would have hypothetical cures or
science. But these hypotheses are built
(32:17):
on a previous science and a goodcriteria.
So my criteria for reconstructing cue obviously are
not the same ones that I have for memesis criticism.
Nonetheless, I think that they're going to stand up.
Well, now I wanted to say right away my reconstruction of Q in
(32:41):
Greek or and its translation is certainly not zero graphic of
what the Q document looked like.And we'll never have that unless
we find physical evidence for it.
But it certainly is provocative and it's it's clearly in advance
(33:02):
in my view on the previous cues.And Jeremiah, you may know
something about the synoptic problem.
I'm sure that you do actually. And right now there's huge
skepticism about the existence of a Q document and it's the
ability to reconstruct it. And I share the Q, the assess
(33:25):
the suspicions about the Q document as it's been
reconstructed. But I think the evidence is
overwhelming that there was sucha document and we simply have to
have more sophisticated ways of teasing out its influence on the
Synoptics. So have you heard the theory
(33:46):
that potentially an earlier version of the Gospel of Thomas
may have been a Sayings gospel or something similar to the CUE
Gospel? Well, it is a Sayings gospel.
And of course, I translated the Gospel of Thomas and Coptic kids
in Graduate School, and there are similarities.
(34:08):
But we know that the Gospel of Thomas also knew the Synoptics.
And there are two parallels, in fact, possibly to the Gospel of
John. So it's a derivative document,
and the author tells you at the beginning that he's not going to
write a narrative gospel becausethese are the hidden sayings of
Jesus that if you believe, you'll have salvation.
(34:30):
So he has a reason to make thesesayings more mystical, more
interpretably challenging. And so I think the Gospel of
Thomas says really nothing very serious about the got the
synoptic tradition, except that it's secondary.
(34:55):
Okay. And so you mentioned papayas.
When was when was Papayas's life?
And in addition to papayas, whatrole do you think Marcian's
gospel played into potentially influences on Luke?
(35:16):
OK, thank you for that. I I pronounced the name Papius,
or some people would say Papius.He apparently he wrote his
exposition of Loggy about the Lord, which was 5 volumes by the
way, and so extensive that Jerome decided he didn't have
(35:37):
the time to translate it all andonly fragments have survived,
but he wrote it around the year 110.
As far as we can tell, he did not know the Gospel of John,
even though he himself had associations with the Jihani
tradition. He did not know the Gospel of
(35:57):
Luke, either Marcian's Gospel orthe Gospel of Luke.
Why? Because John and Luke had not
yet been written, nor had Marcian's Gospel been written.
So the Gospels that he knew werepresumably the Q document
(36:20):
Matthew, which he and he took both to be translations of a
Hebrew Matthew and the Gospel ofMark.
Now, if we want to get really deep in the weeds, we could talk
about the furor that some are causing about the Marcian gospel
as an alternative to Qi. Think that's a total nonstarter.
(36:46):
And actually, in a couple of my books I've taken it on and the
the book on Must the Must the Synoptics Remain a Problem?
Dismisses that hypothesis ratherswiftly.
My interpretation of Marcian's gospel is twofold.
(37:08):
One's very positive and the other is not.
The one that's very positive is that ever since Harnack
attempted to reconstruct Marcian's Gospel, it has been a
very important document on the reception and the proliferation
(37:30):
and the reproduction of the Gospel of Luke.
It's unquestionably important, and now we have alternative
reconstructions of it that have gone, in some cases far beyond
what we had in our neck. And so we are in a much better
(37:51):
position, philologically, to make judgments about what
Marcian's gospel was, what it contained, what it omitted, and
its relationship to the canonical loop.
I'm convinced. And if we had time we could talk
about that. It simply is a truncated version
(38:15):
of the canonical gospel of Luke.And in that's to that extent the
heresiologists here in the ass. Epiphanius, for example.
I'm sorry to to Tooly and the Epiphanius are right that
(38:37):
Marcian or his party expunged a lot of the Gospel of Luke, did
not attribute it to Luke but to God, and we're responsible for
for its creation. We have people, though, who are
(38:58):
advocates of the priority of theGospel of Marcian arguing for in
one case that Marcian's Evangelic Evangelion and also
the Apostolic on the Letters of Paul were the first cannon of
(39:22):
the church. That has a certain amount of
plausibility, though. I don't buy it as it's usually
articulated. But some go so far as to say
that Marcian's Gospel representsthe earliest stratum of the
synoptic tradition, and I find that to be really entirely
(39:46):
unsustainable. So you mentioned the Hebrew
Gospel. Have you tried to reconstruct
the Hebrew Gospel? That may have been the cue
source or part of the cue source.
There never was a Hebrew Gospel of Matthew.
(40:09):
There never was. This was John the Elder and
Papius's way of trying to make sense of the deviations they did
not like between the two Greek gospels that had been attributed
to Matthew. That is the Q document, and what
we know is Matthew. So they were doing source
(40:30):
criticism. They were imagining that there
was a Hebrew Gospel that Matthewwrote and he got the sequences
all in the right direction. But unfortunately 2IN that
translators botched it, and so Papius says he wants to put it
back together in in the order, presumably the order that he
(40:51):
thought Matthew had it originally.
OK, so you don't think there wasactually a Hebrew Gospel?
No. In fact, I don't know any
scholar who now holds that. Right.
So do you believe the epistles of Paul came before the gospels?
(41:11):
The writing of the Gospels? Do you hold to that view?
Yes, they certainly. Paul wrote prior to all the
canonical gospels. The question is what is the
relationship of the Q document to Paul?
(41:32):
And I would say the Paul is evenearlier than the Q document.
So would you say that Paul had influence on the development of
the Q Gospel or his writings Possible?
Not on the Q document, no. But it's possible that there was
some influence of Paul already in Mark.
(41:54):
I'll let other people scratch atthat.
OK, what do you make of Paul? It seems that because you talked
about the Torah Orthodox Judaismof the 1st century, but Paul
seems to be speaking more in. The Hellenistic tradition and
(42:18):
very more accepting of Roman culture.
What do you see as the difference between the tour
orthodox view of Jesus? Potentially more in that
framework. But Paul?
He seems to be more in the idea of, you know, like making very
(42:39):
little burdens for gentile adherence to.
The the message he was declaringWell, first of all, let's be
really clear that Paul always was Jewish.
Okay, so let's. But he's trying to make the
(43:03):
message of Jesus more global. And so he has these missions
among Gentiles. And he faces certain questions
that are related to how do the fortunes and scriptures of
Israel relate to Gentiles? And this the new situation He's
(43:25):
facing. And he's not against Jews
observing their law, their Torah, and he says that he
himself does. But in order to expand the the
followers of Jesus, he has to make certain allowances that
(43:49):
make Gentiles more likely to join the community.
Now, already in the Jesus tradition you have challenges to
the abiding nature of the law ofTorah.
Yes, it is going to exist forever.
(44:11):
This was a common among Jews andChristians both.
But the status of the law is going to change depending on the
situations, and This is why Jesus and Galilee can say the
long the prophets were until John the Baptist.
After that, it's the Kingdom of God.
And that is a very important statement.
(44:34):
And Paul is dealing with the same thing.
Yes, we should be nurtured by the biblical tradition, but on
the other hand, he can say we have died to the law.
Whoa, what does that mean? The law.
We have died to the law and now the now it's faith that's more
(44:57):
important and that then becomes more a part of what it is going
to attract Gentiles. So I think it is hard for modern
Christians to understand the challenges of Torah observance
and flexibility. It's all over in the New
(45:18):
Testament. It's all it's.
It's important for Paul. It's important for the canonical
gospels. It's not so important for the
Gospel of John, by the way. So that is a huge struggle and
you can see it in the Acts of the Apostles, the opening of the
(45:38):
of the Kingdom of God to Gentiles, beginning with the
Ethiopian eunuch, but especiallyCornelius and the message, the
Kingdom of God ending up in Rome.
So what's happened is that the law had to be renegotiated given
different social situations and if the Kingdom of God was going
(46:01):
to survive after the Jewish war and in the Gentile world, it
would have to be adjusted. Its its status was the the Torah
had great status, but it's status changed depending on the
needs of the people at the time.And that certainly is true for
(46:25):
Paul. Are you familiar with Robert
Eisenman and James de Boer's? They write about the conflict
between James and Paul. What do you make of the conflict
between James and Paul within Paul's writings and Galatians?
The New Testament, and I guess you're not a fan of it.
(46:46):
So, I mean, what is your response to Robert Eisman, James
De Boer's idea? I don't, I haven't read them
recently enough to be able to talk about it.
If the yes, there was certainly a disagreement between the
Pauline tradition and what we find in the book of James,
(47:06):
There's no doubt about that. We also know that those tensions
continued at least into the 3rd century because of the pseudo
Clementine letters and so on. So this struggle to redefine
Torah observes went on for centuries.
(47:27):
Now remember, during this time the Jerusalem Temple no longer
existed, so that there was no longer a center of Jewish life
the way there had been before. You no longer have chief
priests. You no longer have sagacies.
What you have are rabbis and synagogues that are trying to
(47:47):
make sense of Torah without a centralized authority.
And so these rabbis and synagogues in different places
are struggling to make Torah work for them, because the
promises of the Pentateuch were that God would bless Israel if
(48:11):
Israel obeyed all the commandments, but punish them if
they didn't. What does it mean to obey all
the commandments? And so you have the school of
Shamai and Kilil in Judaism, butyou also have the tensions
between James and Paul. And to understand the tensions
that intellectually of early Christians, you have to account
(48:34):
for the struggle over tour observance.
But you also have to say with that is, it's a contestation of
the Jewish canonical past. But they were also contesting
the canonical past of the Greeks, namely Greek mythology,
especially as it's articulated in Greek poetry.
(48:56):
All right. So within your hypothesis
regarding the Q, you have Q plusso.
You have additional material youinclude, including your cue
hypothesis. And what kind of what material
do you include that's not in thestandard cue gospel theories?
Well, mine is twice as long as the traditional cues.
(49:19):
Probably more than that. It actually has a narrative
framework so that it is not justa random collection of sayings
like cue, but it it actually hasan argument and a development
inside of it. But let me give you, Jeremiah, a
few things that are in that document that are not in other
(49:41):
queues. The story of Jesus for giving
the sinful woman is in the queuedocument.
I'm sure it was there 1st and there again you have this
attitude toward Torah. The elders bring a woman who's
accused of being a sinful woman,Promiscuous woman.
(50:01):
She's not an adultress in the inthe history of the the
transmission. You're talking about the
pericophy adultery, yeah, the pericophy adultery.
And and the elders say Moses said women like this need to be
stoned and Jesus refuses to do it.
So what is he writing in the dirt?
(50:23):
He's writing the same legislation, Deuteronomy 2221,
in the dirt, to show that it's not written in stone, but it's
ephemeral. And then he says if you've not
offended one of the commandments, right, you can
cast the stone. So he's opposing those who are
(50:45):
insisting that everyone should obey all the commandments and
the woman never repents. He doesn't even say in the
earliest version story go and don't send anymore.
She never repents. The point is Jesus forgives a
woman who Moses said should be stoned.
(51:06):
Another thing that's in my Q document is that Jesus actually
does say I will destroy this temple and build another, and
it's an eschatological threat against the temple.
And Mark and the other gospel authors do their their best to
distance Jesus from saying that.But I'm sure that Jesus said it
(51:30):
in the Q document. There are a number of other lots
of the disputes with Pharisees that we find in Synoptics.
Not all of them, but probably about half of them did appear in
the Q document, apparently. So it's these.
(51:52):
I encourage you to get a copy ofthe Q document and read it, and
I think you'll just be blown away by its sophistication, by
its compassion. It's put another way, it's
written by a radical Jew. It's not written by a Christian.
It's a radical Jew who likes Rabbi Jesus because he's making
(52:14):
the law more manageable for people who are marginalized in
society. So that's why Jesus says in the
Q document I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.
That's not just to make them Torah observant, it's to give
them a place in the Kingdom of God, which is the banner which
(52:36):
he uses for his alternative interpretation of Judaism.
Now the frankly adultery many critical scholars consider that
to be. In interpolation later on one of
the early notes, it looks like it might have been a note from
Marcian and his gospel that eventually found its way in.
So that that is interesting thatit finds its way into your your
(53:00):
your Q document. No, no Papius knew about it.
According to you Cvius, Papius knows the story about the woman
who was in many sins and she's forgiven.
Now where did Papius know about it?
He only talks about 3 documents that he knew.
(53:21):
One is Matthew, one is Mark. They're not in those books,
right? The percopy adultery is not in
those books. It probably was in the lost
Gospel of Matthew, which is the Q document.
That's the nature of the argument.
So I think Papius's witness to the story is absolutely crucial.
And Luke, remember, Papius didn't know Luke, he didn't know
(53:44):
John. So we didn't know the stories
from that. By the way, I want to, I want to
ask a question of you Jr. about it.
Some of this might get It is my guess that some of this could be
blowing your mind that I don't think you've heard much of this
among the biblical scholars you talked to.
Now maybe you have. You certainly are well read and
(54:09):
knowledgeable about the trends in gospel scholarship, but I
don't think you've had people onyour podcast or that you've read
that are saying things that are quite what I'm saying.
So I think there's a little bit of a lag and delay in this, but
I mean, I've heard the things you've had to say before.
(54:30):
But yeah, OK. So we've got some pretty good
topics over this today. Is there anything that you would
like to summarize as kind of like a final thing you'd like to
say regarding the, I guess the Gospel of Q and the influence of
the Homer and the Iliad and stuff like that on the New
(54:51):
Testament? Unfortunately, many people have
interpreted my work as being hostile to the Gospels.
It is not. It is sympathetic to them.
If you want to understand them, you need to understand them on
their own terms and not on construction of Christian
theology or PIE. And I'm a great fan and I taught
(55:17):
in theological seminaries for most of my career.
And so my goal was to make thesegospels more meaningful to my
students and more appreciated and more diverse in their
understandings. So I guess that's what I'd like
to say, that I don't understand myself.
(55:40):
I I understand myself to be a critic and I am an atheist.
But that doesn't mean that I don't think these stories and
and what I'm uncovering should be threatening to anyone.
I think they actually throw a new light on creative energies
of these people that are trying to make sense of the world,
(56:00):
which is what all of us are trying to do too.
All right. Yeah.
Well, that's a good summary. You know, as critical
scholarship, you know we try to undercover you know the
historical kernel of truth and what that means to us.
And so, yeah, I want to thank you for taking your time to.
Answer my questions and come on here.
And yeah, thank you. I appreciate that.
(56:22):
OK, Jeremiah, nice to. Meet you informative.
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