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vern_humphrey
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Of course. He probably spoke to all the living Apostles. I mention Mary because Luke tells us what she treasured in her heart. He is explicitly citing her as a source. And how could he know unless she told him?
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SaberBob
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John has already referenced Dennis Barton’s excellent churchinhistory.org site, but the origins of Q derived from the late 18th early 19th century German scholars who pilled Deism or Atheism on top of Protestantism’s rejection of Patristic writers having any legitimate historical voice.
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Dovekin
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So she did not ponder in her heart, but instead talked to Luke about it?
Lk never says that Mary told him anything, just that she was silent about the events. The assumption that she told Luke is what makes this line of thought not the simplest. Add in Apostles and other witnesses, and you start getting a backstory for St Luke that really does not gibe with what we know of him from Acts. He was a gentile converted by St Paul in Turkey or Greece. The odds of him being able to understand Mary are not high.
OTOH, having a previously written account, or a copy, seems very likely.
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BartholomewB
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I think Holtzmann was the first to make the specific claim that the 230 or so sayings of Jesus found in both Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark, probably came from a shared source, to which later writers then gave the name Quelle or “Q.”
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vern_humphrey
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She did ponder in her heart, and Luke did talk to her. Otherwise, how would he know she pondered in her heart?
It is Catholic tradition that Mary was one of Luke’s informants.
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Dovekin
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Are you arguing that neither influenced the other?All of this talk of “deleting” and “inserting” still presumes a particular order!
I was asked earlier in the thread to provide examples of detsils that make Mk look like a source for Mt or Lk. I pointed to a list, and focussed on one particular example, the Lord’s Prayer. The issue raised is that if Mt is prior, Mark deliberately chose not to include it. If Mk is prior, he chose not to include it, but it was not as deliberate a choice.
That is to say, the discussion is about those deliberate decisions to insert or delete, not just what is or is not included. It is about which influenced, which was influenced. It is much easier to imagine the Lord’s Prayer being added to a Gospel without it, than it to imagine it being deleted. It is near impossible to imagine no “particular order.”
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Bithynian
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There is an interesting - and quite plausible - theory that Q was a shared oral (rather than written) source.
It parallels some of the research undertaken in the 20th century about the sources of Homer’s Iliad: there was renewed appreciation about how ancient authors and orators were quite meticulous and well skilled in memorising orally-imparted information. And the Iliad isn’t exactly a short poem: 19,985 words compared to 17,365 in the New Testament.
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C.Longinus
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The audience of Mark’s Gospel were formerly pagan Romans who were converted by Peter’s preaching and wanted a record of what Jesus did.
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C.Longinus
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And? Mark, if Matthew is in front of him, doesn’t have to use Matthew’s style every time. Rather, Mark has to meet the needs of his audience.
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Pattylt
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Point taken. Apologies…so it would be more accurate if you asserted “many do not believe Matthew to be an eyewitness account”…)
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JohnR77
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SaberBob
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I trust John will return with much more details on Markan priority is an inherited academic tradition rather than a proven position, but essentially the ONLY strong reason for proposing Mk was the first written gospel is just how BAD the Koine Greek is; near every translation cleans it up. If the bad Koine can be better explained by the Patristic texts, then the need for Markan priority vanishes.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by that. Could you expand ?
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Gorgias
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No. I’m merely pointing out that arguments that presume an order – without asserting that presumption is merely an opinion – aren’t fair game. We can discuss why we think a passage exists or not in a given Gospel, but once we start asserting “insertion” or “deletion”, we’re heaping presumption upon presumption.
That’s all.
Precisely.
I would disagree. Unless we know who preceded whom, we can’t really assert “decision to insert or delete”, and the discussion becomes a great big exercise in hand-waving…
On the other hand, we could defer addressing that question, and instead ask, “why would choose to include this passage?” or “choose not to include this passage?”, in terms other than “order of editorial development”.
No worries!
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Bithynian
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I’ll quote my Classics professor on this: “he speakada Gahreek funny”.
But more seriously: Mark writes in a very odd and colloquial way that’s very uncharacteristic of the language as a whole, even compared to the other Scriptural authors. Think of it as very “ethnic” Greek.
There are certain “Hebraicisms”: his constant use of the καί (‘and’) conjunction to introduce sentences (over half of the verses) is strongly suggestive that he’s importing Hebrew/Aramaic grammar (namely the conjunctive waw, which also means ‘and’) into his Greek.
His choice of certain words tends to be very colloquial, and sometimes bizarre. A good example is Mark 1:12 where he describes Simon and Andrew as ὰμφιβάλλοντας (amphiballontas). It’s a very ambiguous verb to use, and it seems that he used the Greek word for “fishing net” (ἀμφίβληστρον amphiblestron) to form a “new” verb, ἀμφιβάλλω “casting fishing nets”. This verb is used nowhere else in the Bible (Matt rewrites it as βάλλοντας ἀμφίβληστρον) and not in any fishing contexts in any extant piece of Greek literature up until his Gospel. It’s a bit like me using the word “booking” to describe me reading a book.
Scholars are unsure whether these features are because Mark was not especially fluent in the language, or because they were characteristic of the particular Palestinian Greek dialect that he was speaking.
In any case, where there exists shared content between Mark, Matthew and Luke, the latter two are often less “rough” than Mark. Some scholars see this as evidence of Marcan priority: Matt and Luke borrowed from Mark and then patched up his wobbly sentences. Other scholars see differently: Mark borrowed from the other two and framed it in his own particular style appropriate for oral delivery to his local community.
I think what @SaberBob is noting is that Patristic texts might indicate that Mark’s style was in fact purposeful rather than just an indication of it being bad Greek due to lack of fluency.
My personal lay observation from reading Patristic texts in Greek: most Greek Fathers wrote in a very elevated, classicising style, and most of them weren’t especially local to Mark’s Palestine to clear up any peculiarities of the local dialect.
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SaberBob
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Re Dennis Barton and supporters of the Clementine/2 Source Theory: Mk is SO bad in Koine that it hard looks like a secretary doing an unrushed composition, rather Mk is far more like a verbatim or near verbatim transcript of an oral address of an Aramaic speaker whose not too comfortable in Koine, and this is exactly what we’d expect from the apostle Peter speaking to "Caesar’s knights’.
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Gorgias
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… “talking out of both sides of his mouth”?
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Bithynian
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Oops, I was a little inaccurate in what I wrote in that paragraph: the perils of a vague memory. I double checked my lexicon and edited in a more accurate summary.
But yes, it still stands that the verb is very ambiguous. It has the general meaning of “throwing something around on both sides”: most of the time in extra-Biblical literature it’s used in the sense of “hug” or “embrace”, i.e. wrapping arms around someone. Sometimes it also means “putting clothes on someone”.
There’s a very abrupt semantic shift from “hugging/clothing” to “casting fishing nets”.
But yes, it still stands that the verb is very ambiguous. It has the general meaning of “throwing something around on both sides”: most of the time in extra-Biblical literature it’s used in the sense of “hug” or “embrace”, i.e. wrapping arms around someone. Sometimes it also means “putting clothes on someone”.
There’s a very abrupt semantic shift from “hugging/clothing” to “casting fishing nets”.
Yeah, I know
(although my own NT teacher made a convincing case for the “strangeness” of Mark’s Greek not being strange at all, but rather a singular gift for punchy narration).I’m just not connecting the dots with how the Greek Fathers feature in the equation, and what their own mastery of Greek proves, as there are way too many factors weighing in on linguistic skills.
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CRM_Brother
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There are multiple possibilities why it was omitted, but to understand them you need to look at the setting in which it was written.
Mark was a close aide to the Apostles, traveling with Barnabas (his cousin), Paul and Peter. He was with Peter at his martyrdom. The Gospel of Mark is generally seen by Catholic scholars as Mark’s attempt to preserve Peter’s past preaching either before or immediately after his death for use in the continuing evangelization in Rome. This is attested to by both Eusebius and Irenaeus.
One of the theories is that Peter heavily leaned on the Lord’s Prayer in his day to day preaching, that he used it so much that it was already ingrained in the minds of the Roman converts. Also remember that the Church in Rome predated Peter’s arrival by a good deal so it is also possible that the Lord’s Prayer was already common knowledge. Mark was primarily writing the broad narrative of Christ’s life which Peter normally preached but which he did not have time to relay to the Romans upon his arrival.
Another was that Mark’s gospel was primarily focused to a specific group in Rome called ‘Proselytes of the Gate’ by the Jews. These were the uncircumcised pagans which regularly attended the Jewish Synagogue in Rome, but would not be circumcised or submit to the Jewish dietary laws. They already held belief in a monotheistic God and basic Jewish morals, but were shunned by the Jews and converts to Judaism at the Synagogue. The theory was that, despite the Lord’s Prayer already being known among many of the converts, he consciously left it out so that the Proselytes of the Gate wouldn’t feel that Christians were trying to gradually force them into the Jewish laws and practices which had originally kept them from conversion. They would be evangelized as to who Christ was before being introduced to the reality of the Lord’s Prayer.
Mark was a close aide to the Apostles, traveling with Barnabas (his cousin), Paul and Peter. He was with Peter at his martyrdom. The Gospel of Mark is generally seen by Catholic scholars as Mark’s attempt to preserve Peter’s past preaching either before or immediately after his death for use in the continuing evangelization in Rome. This is attested to by both Eusebius and Irenaeus.
One of the theories is that Peter heavily leaned on the Lord’s Prayer in his day to day preaching, that he used it so much that it was already ingrained in the minds of the Roman converts. Also remember that the Church in Rome predated Peter’s arrival by a good deal so it is also possible that the Lord’s Prayer was already common knowledge. Mark was primarily writing the broad narrative of Christ’s life which Peter normally preached but which he did not have time to relay to the Romans upon his arrival.
Another was that Mark’s gospel was primarily focused to a specific group in Rome called ‘Proselytes of the Gate’ by the Jews. These were the uncircumcised pagans which regularly attended the Jewish Synagogue in Rome, but would not be circumcised or submit to the Jewish dietary laws. They already held belief in a monotheistic God and basic Jewish morals, but were shunned by the Jews and converts to Judaism at the Synagogue. The theory was that, despite the Lord’s Prayer already being known among many of the converts, he consciously left it out so that the Proselytes of the Gate wouldn’t feel that Christians were trying to gradually force them into the Jewish laws and practices which had originally kept them from conversion. They would be evangelized as to who Christ was before being introduced to the reality of the Lord’s Prayer.
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