Any ideas on who wrote the Gospel of St. Mark?

[Agathon]

Or, are you claiming:

Peter becomes an apostle
Matthew becomes an apostle
Mark becomes Peter’s disciple
Peter tells Mark some stuff that happened before Matthew became an apostle
the common material between Mark’s Gospel and Matthew’s Gospel is the stuff that Peter told Mark (but which Matthew never experienced personally)

Took you a while.

 

[Agathon]

(p.s., the info we have on Matthew is that he wrote his Gospel in Hebrew (or Aramaic), not Greek. )

www.tektonics.org/qm/qmhub.php
www.agapebiblestudy.com/Matthew_Gospel/Matthew_Lesson_1.htm

 

[Gorgias]

Took you a while.

Nah. I was already there (if you read my post).

Here’s the problem: if you want that theory to work, then you have to take the entire set of correspondences between Mark and Matthew and ascribe all of them to things that happened between the calling of Peter and the calling of Matthew. And that’s quite a difficult assertion to swallow, given the set of correspondences.

Otherwise, your solution doesn’t solve anything: you end up with correspondences that have no explanation (which is what your solution was intended to solve).

 

[Gorgias]

Gorgias:

(p.s., the info we have on Matthew is that he wrote his Gospel in Hebrew (or Aramaic), not Greek. )

www.tektonics.org/qm/qmhub.php
www.agapebiblestudy.com/Matthew_Gospel/Matthew_Lesson_1.htm

Umm… you realize that the citations you gave me are saying what I’ve been telling you, right?
Agape Bible Study:

We do not know the date or composition of the Greek text [of Matthew].

And, your citations disagree with the assertions you’ve put before us here:
Agape Bible Study:

The Catholic Church accepts the testimony of the Church Fathers. Many Catholic scholars support a two-Gospel Matthean Priority argument in which Matthew composed an eyewitness account of Jesus’ ministry, making use of other eyewitness sources and his personal notations.

… The two-Gospel Matthean Priority argument proposes that … Mark’s Gospel was composed from St. Peter’s eyewitness account and also made use of information from Matthew and Luke’s Gospels.

Tektonics:

Greek Matthew is a post-Markan product … but with certainty is an artifical construction

And, your sources make assertions that are straight-up out-of-thin-air and without attribution:

Finally we have Greek Matthew, which was not just a Greek compositional original but was also substantially reorganized for use as a teaching tool.

(I mean, that might be true… but we don’t have any ECFs who make that claim. It’s all based on source analysis. But you claimed that Papias and Irenaeus weighed in on it, right? So… ?

 

[Agathon]

Umm… you realize that the citations you gave me are saying what I’ve been telling you, right?

I use excerpts from my sources so not a problem for me.

Here’s the problem: if you want that theory to work, then you have to take the entire set of correspondences between Mark and Matthew and ascribe all of them to things that happened between the calling of Peter and the calling of Matthew. And that’s quite a difficult assertion to swallow, given the set of correspondences.

How would I have to say all of the correspondence?

 

[Aulef]

Very interesting discussion

I’d say the saints each of the gospels represent (Matthew, Mark/Peter, Luke/Paul and John, are there to denote ultimate authorship and style and matter and so on.

Who actually wrote it might not be so important…

 

[Gorgias]

How would I have to say all of the correspondence?

The whole reason to posit ‘Markan priority’ or ‘Matthean priority’ is as a means to explain the commonalities in the two Gospels. That’s the real problem that’s being attempted to be solved here – in other words, if the two Gospels share material, from whom are they getting it? One from the other? Both from a different source?

So, if Mark says “A, B, C, D, E, F” and Matthew says “A, C, F, G, H”, then Markan Priority asserts “Matthew got A, C, and F from Mark”; Matthean Priority asserts “Mark got A, C, and F from Matthew.”

(On the other hand, if we posit a third source, then we might say “Mark and Matthew have A, C, and F in common. We don’t know which of these they got, one from another, and which they got from some other unknown source (oh, heck, let’s call it the ‘Π’ source (from the Greek word for source, ‘πηγή’)).”

Here’s the problem, though: if we want to posit one of these (let’s use Markan priority, since that’s what you’re asserting), but we only want to say “Matthew got A & C from Mark, but not F”… then we’ve got a real problem:

• How can we convince ourselves that A & C are from Mark, if we’re willing to say that F isn’t?
• Given that we’re willing to throw away ‘F’ as Markan material that passed down to Matthew, how can we convince ourselves that it isn’t really “A&F” or “C&F” or “A only” or “C only” or “F only” that was passed down?.. or even that there’s no common material at all?
• Worse yet, how do we explain the common material if we deny that one got it from the other?

If we begin to pick and choose… then the ‘priority’ argument falls apart. It literally has no raison d’etre or explanatory power if you’re willing to willing to pick it apart arbitrarily.

 

[Agathon]

What priority do YOU hold to?

 

[Gorgias]

What priority do YOU hold to?

I’m not definitively sold on one over the other. Both have their upside and downside. I am suspicious about the ‘Q’ theory, though. “There should be something here, and although it’s neither extant nor mentioned by anyone in history, I’m gonna posit it exists anyway” doesn’t hold up well, to my mind.

The problems, it seems, include explaining the brevity of Mark vis-a-vis Matthew and the relationship of Hebrew Matthew to Greek Matthew. Markan priority helps explain the former, but if Hebrew Matthew preceded Mark, then we’re in trouble. On the other hand, if Mark preceded both language versions of Matthew… then we still have to explain the similarities between Mark and Greek Matthew. On the other hand, if Matthew (of either stripe) preceded Mark, then we have to explain why Mark’s Gospel removed Gospel material!

So, in my best Pirsig voice, I respond “mu”.