Difflugia wrote: ↑Sat Jul 24, 2021 11:30 am
I go back and forth with Luke. It looks to me like Luke had a copy of Matthew and was attempting to tone down the supernatural stuff. It's obvious that Luke is writing in the style of history, but I argue with myself over whether it's meant as literal or allegorical history. Part of that hinges for me on whether Luke expects his audience to know Mark or Matthew, because he changes what I would expect to be well-known traditions.
How many Christians nowadays recognize those as changes? Even in a highly literate society with all three gospels side by side in the same volume? Granted there are cases of simple dogmatism and obstinacy like the angels at the tomb or efforts to 'harmonize' the obviously different nativity stories, but I'm pretty sure that in most cases, most casual readers and particularly believers simply don't notice the changes in detail between the synoptics even reading them week to week. There'd likely be some folk going over them all with a fine-tooth comb in any era of course, but pretty sure Luke's duplicity would be even more likely to pass unnoticed in the 1st century than in the 20th.
Difflugia wrote: ↑Sat Jul 24, 2021 11:30 am
John the Baptist gets a much different introduction in Luke, for example. and the Baptist is often considered to be one of the more historical elements. In Luke 3, we have the Baptist doing baptisms in the Jordan (which is apparently important to the story) and Jesus is baptized (also apparently important), but Luke makes an effort to separate the two. Whereas in Mark and Matthew, Jesus and the Baptist have conversations establishing their relationship, it's not clear in Luke if they meet at all and I think the implication is that they didn't (John is baptizing, John is hustled off to prison, Jesus is baptized).
As you know, Jesus' baptism by John is considered particularly likely to be historical precisely
because gJohn, Luke and Matthew all in their own ways seem to have been uncomfortable about it, making it otherwise puzzling why (if the story had been invented) the earliest known version took the form of Jesus being baptized for repentance and forgiveness of sins.
Difflugia wrote: ↑Sat Jul 24, 2021 11:30 am
This is a rather different tradition than the one presented in Mark and Matthew, so the question for me is whether Luke is attempting to get people that already know the other tradition to see it in this new way or did he intend this to be the "new original?"
Presumably folk familiar with the older versions would take Luke's as being consistent with them, while folk not familiar with them were meant to accept Luke's new and improved story. It's not like he actually says "Jesus was not baptized by John," just glosses over the tricky bits. Although why do you think Luke wouldn't have simply accepted Matthew's version, if he was familiar with it? Luke (like Mark and Matthew) obviously wants John to be the "voice in the wilderness," not just some random preacher who eventually enquires about Jesus, and while it's made a little ambiguous it's still fairly natural to assume from Luke that Jesus was baptized by John. Seems to me that Matthew's solution of having John protest and Jesus saying it's a formality is much cleaner than Luke's ambiguity, both resolving the implied problem of Jesus' sinfulness and solidifying John's role as his herald... and that's a story which would fit even better with Luke having portrayed Elizabeth and Mary as cousins who already knew their sons' respective roles. It's a bit off topic, but things like that make me wonder whether Luke knew Matthew at all; if he wanted a tidier and more apologetically sound story, why would he pass up the few occasions on which Matthew offered good solutions? The story of the guards at the tomb would be another example, a godsend to apologists willing to take it seriously, which Luke easily could have modified to avoid explicitly bringing body-stealing to mind if that were a concern.
Difflugia wrote: ↑Sat Jul 24, 2021 11:30 am
This gets to
bluegreenearth's comment about originals. The final historical assertion in John ("This is the disciple that bears witness of these things, and wrote these things, and we know that his testimony is true.") is widely (though not universally) accepted as part of a later addition to the Gospel and not part of the original. That raises the question of whether the other historical affirmations are later interpolations to intentionally change a theological document into a historical one.
Without some kind of evidence from manuscripts or early quotations I generally try to take that kind of speculation with a grain of salt. Probably the second strongest / second most obvious discrepancy in the gospel is 14:31 ("rise, let us be on our way") into 15:1 (staying around for chapters of further dialogue), yet even that could just as easily be explained by the author finishing off on Friday afternoon and then having some new ideas over the Sabbath; in fact
more easily I'd say, since a redactor would likely remove such obvious traces. To my mind only the potential addition of 20:24ff offers any fertile ground for speculation, that I've seen at least, obviously alongside those for which documentary evidence exists (the story of the adulteress, added
much later, and the 'appendix' which isn't quite the same thing as redaction/modification of the original work).
Difflugia wrote: ↑Sat Jul 24, 2021 11:30 am
As it is, I don't have a problem with an otherwise fictional document including such affirmations as a form of verisimilitude, even though that raises the spectre of question-begging. I'd be tempted to see John as fiction with a form that is at least somewhat influenced by Luke's assertion of history. If Luke was intentionally fiction that reads as history, then the precedent would already have been set for such statements in John. Are they assertions of historical accuracy or an immersive component of the fiction?
My pet theory - partly under the wise scholarly influence of System of a Down's
Chop Suey - is that Jesus himself promoted the view of a core message and its effects being more important than details and mere facts. For starters much of his reported teaching in the synoptics consists of parables, metaphor and hyperbole. But more specifically, it may be that his goal or hope was to replace or at least mitigate the kind of messianic expectation and nationalism represented by folk like Judah of Galilee which would inevitably bring down the wrath of Rome - and indeed was prophesied by Daniel to result in the temple's destruction - firstly through his teachings and 'kingdom of God' rather than of men, but ultimately by intentionally provoking his own execution with his temple disturbance during Passover so as to become a martyr and (perhaps planned in advance with some disciples, perhaps not) eventually risen messiah. If he could ensure salvation from the Roman legions for even a fraction of his people by such means, that would surely be more important than the mere details of how the message was made to take root; that's something that he and others might be willing to die for, and to lie for.
The idea that Luke was intentionally fiction, total fiction, written and portrayed as history doesn't really gel to my mind; to what end would the author do that? What did he gain by it? And even John, the most overtly theological of the gospels, what would be the point of insisting here and there "Yes, this really did happen" if it was
purely theology? We can readily imagine a single author doing that for some reason or other, but why would (so far as we know)
all the early Christian story-tellers do it? Seems to me that if they all put their stories into a historical-seeming format - even John in places - it was because they were all interested in/inspired by a core historical story. But similarly each of the later three authors and presumably Mark also took considerable liberty with the details of that story, which to my mind implies that it really was just the core story or message that they considered paramount, and the rest merely a means to an end.