Religious foo: not-so-special gospels

[alpharaposa]

Last night, collinsmom called me because she was working on a paper and needed to talk to somebody. Not necessarily to get help, though I was happy to offer what I could.

She was working on something for a class on the New Testament, and was telling me about this theory that was being debated in class. This theory stated that three of the gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) were all written off of one big document, and that's why some passages are so similar.

She said, and I agreed, that when different people see the same events and get a chance to talk about it with each other afterwards, the accounts are going to have similarities. There will also be differences- after all, they came from different backgrounds. There's at least one person in my friends list who works in insurance, and she sees car accidents far differently than most of us who haven't.

I find it fascinating, all the different theories that scholars and pundits can come up with to make the gospels less special. There's the one that states that none of the gospels were written until a handful of generations after the fact- an idea which has gained a lot of traction in popular thought. This theory being debated in collinsmom's class would essentially make all three of those gospels secondary accounts instead of primary sources. In fact, it seems that all of these theories do just that- they contradict the idea that these are eyewitness accounts of things.

And what does that do? It places in room for whoever's favorite method of making things less true. If what you have are a collection of stories written a hundred or more years later, then you can argue that the virgin birth didn't really happen, and was just added as a product of local mythology to give legitimacy to the cause. (What cause that might be is a bit addled- after all, the early church went out of its way to leave Caesar up to Caesar, and only got involved when Caesar suddenly was one of their own.)

If your stories are all secondary accounts from one source, then you only have to disprove one source or say that one author got it wrong to argue for your favorite change in the story. Again, it makes it easier to say that, while the stuff in the Bible is a good story, there's no reason to go around taking any of it for, ahem, 'gospel truth'.

What does that give us? Well, it gives us a whole bunch of people who can feel good for 'knowing better' than us poor yokels who actually believe what's there. They're special; enlightened. It's similar to what the gnostic texts do- allows a bunch of people to feel that they have the real truth, rather than what everybody else knows. It's an appeal that works well in our modern thinking, and worked well in the past, if the pages and pages of argument expended and still available to be read are any measure.

All this runs contrary to the very gospels themselves. Here is a big, amazing, wonderful story, and one of the things we are told is to tell it to everybody. There are no secrets here- and the story itself needs none to be special. These are events that changed all of creation. You can't top that.

And yet, people try. They marginalize what's there, or they comb the pieces, looking for ways to be bigger than the biggest thing that ever happened.

Go figure.

collinsmom, if you want to quote any bit of this for your paper, you've got permission.

Comments

[prester-scott.livejournal.com]

"Q" stands for "Quelle", German for "source", and its existence is by no means proven. There are a number of other theories extant as to how a significant amount of material came to be shared. In the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, I think the Gospels were written in canonical order.

Moreover, a single-source hypothesis does not necessarily relegate the Synoptics to the 2nd century. Recall that all the apostles were together in Jerusalem for a considerable time (including at some points Paul, who is said to have been a major influence on Luke's writings). There is every reason to believe that they shared their reflections on the Lord's life and sayings, and developed a common oral record, which would later form the basis of the written Gospels.

[stryck.livejournal.com]

I wasn't trying to link the 2nd century stuff to the Q theory, I was mulling over how they can be used to do similar things when arguing.

The implications over these theories can get nasty, especially if they get picked up by folks with axes to grind.

[prester-scott.livejournal.com]

Well of course, anyone can pick up any theory about anything and use it as a bludgeon. There are Christians that do this too, as well as anti-Christians.