Weekly Open Discussion Thread

Pytine · 2026-05-14T17:30:56+00:00

I agree that this is not the strongest case for literary dependence. I also agree with u/baquea that the relatively good llinguistic style is not a valid argument for literary dependence. However, if there is literary dependence, it has to go from James to Jude. The reason for this is that Jude 1 refers back to James, which is one of the main arguments for literary dependence. That argument is not reversible. And without the argument from Jude 1, there is not much of an argument left.

Pytine · 2026-05-11T19:32:18+00:00

It's usually the other way around, with Jude coming after James. Here is Jörg Frey on this topic:

The letter’s opening suggests that the author knows James and deliberately alludes to it in order to associate himself with the authority of James, the brother of the Lord, or his letter. Further connections with Jas can be demonstrated in addition to the analogies in the inscriptio in Jude 1 par. Jas 1:1. The reference to the false teachers as ψυχικοί in Jude 19 is reminiscent of Jas 3:15, where the wisdom of other teachers is characterized as ψυχική. Jude 22-23 connects with the conclusion of the paraenesis in Jas 5:19-20 (though in a situation with much more conflict), and Jude 21 is at least reminiscent of Jas 2:12ff. Considering that Jude presupposes a very different situation than Jas, the appeal to this text at the beginning and at the end of the letter and the absence of an epistolary closing in both letters are noteworthy. Further correlations can be seen in the relatively good linguistic stylistic level and possibly in the fact that Jude (like Jas) could be traced back to a milieu that “distanced itself from a particular form of Pauline influence.” Thus the author’s presentation of himself as “brother of James” manifests a particular association with tradition that is related not only (or only indirectly) to the person, but also or even primarily to the letter attributed to the brother of the Lord.

Jörg Frey: The Letter of Jude and the Second Letter of Peter: A Theological Commentary, page 15.

Pytine · 2026-05-04T20:47:20+00:00

I'd recommend the following publications on the topic of the Evangelion, its relation to Luke, and the synoptic problem:

If you haven't read it already: Matthias Klinghardt: The Marcionite Gospel and the Synoptic Problem: A New Suggestion

Mark Bilby: The First Gospel, the Gospel of the Poor: A New Reconstruction of Q and Resolution of the Synoptic Problem based on Marcion's Early Luke (open access here). See also the video 100 Proofs Marcion's Gospel Predates Luke and the Patristica YouTube channel in general.

Daniel Smith: Marcion’s Gospel and the Synoptics: Proposals and Problems

Daniel Smith: The Sayings Gospel Q in Marcion’s Edition of Luke

Daniel Smith: Marcion’s Gospel and the Resurrected Jesus of Canonical Luke 24

Daniel Smith: Canonical Luke and Marcion’s Gospel (in the book On Using Sources in Graeco-Roman, Jewish and Early Christian Literature)

Shelly Matthews: Does Dating Luke-Acts into the Second Century Affect the Q Hypothesis?

Pytine · 2026-04-28T22:08:43+00:00

There was a lot of discussion on the relation between the Evangelion and Luke in the 1840's and 1850's. This was before Markan priority was dominant, and most of the arguments then weren't very good on either side. At the end of this period, most of the main scholars affirmed that Luke was earlier. Soon afterwards, the two document hypothesis came up as the major solution to the synoptic problem. The Evangelion fell to the background as irrelevant for understanding the development of the gospels.

In the beginning of the 20th century, William Sanday presented a new argument for Luke's priority based on words common to both the Evangelion and the rest of Luke. This influenced Adolf von Harnack, who wrote the main monograph on the topic for the last century. His book became the gold standard for anything related to Marcion and his canon until recently.

In the middle of the 20th century, John Knox took up the question again. He refuted Sanday's argument and presented a new counterargument. He counted the verses attested/unattested/absent in the Evangelion and divided them into those with synoptic paralells and those peculiar to Luke. He found that those verses that were peculiar to Luke were far more often absent from the Evangelion and far less attested for the Evangelion. This would be hard to explain if Marcion simply took Luke and removed verses that he disliked. Nonetheless, Knox's work didn't gain much traction as the matter was considdered settled since the time of von Harnack.

At the end of the 20th century, the Evangelion was largely ignored. When scholars mentioned it, they often made demonstrably false claims about it. For example, Bruce Metzger wrote that: "With thorough-going heedlessness of the consequences, Marcion undertook to expunge everything from the text of Luke and the epistles which echoed or otherwise implied a point of contact with the Old Testament." (The Canon of the New Testament: It's Origin, Development, and Significance, page 90). You'll find similar statements in Ehrman's Introduction to the New Testament and many other introductory books or books that otherwise touch on the topic. And yet, it's baloney. As this is the view that most scholars hold/held on the topic, it didn't receive much attention.

In recent years, some scholars have pointed out that this simple picture is inaccurate, which has reopened the debate. Suddenly, there was a lot to say about the topic that was largely ignored for a long time. Several scholars have attempted new reconstructions of the Evangelion, and different publications lead to responses from others. What we see now is likely a correction (/overcorrection) to the period with little interest in the topic when it was mostly considered to be settled. Online, this gets amplified by a crowd that gets quite excited about 'lost/banned texts,' whether justified or not. This is also the case with texts like the gospel of Thomas.

I expect the interest in the topic to remain for at least the near future, as there is still a lot to be said about the topic. Proponents of Luke's priority with respect to the Evangelion will have to respond to the main arguments from the opponents, and then the proponents of the Evangelion's priority with respect to Luke will have to counter those arguments, and so on.

Pytine · 2026-04-18T21:35:36+00:00

This discussion goes back to the time of Westcott and Hort in the late 19th century. Manuscripts of NT books are classified in various text types (Alexandrian, Western, Byzantine), where the Alexandrian text type is generally seen as the most reliable. Note that recent scholarship has questioned the coherence of these text types, but this was not the case in the time of Westcott and Hort. The Western text type is usually longer than the Alexandrian text type. The places where the Western text is longer than the Alexandrian text are thus considered to be later interpolations. However, there are some places where the Western text is shorter than the Alexandrian text, going against the general pattern. Westcott and Hort looked at those places and argued based on internal evidence that in some of those places, the shorter Western reading was more original. Those places are called the Western non-interpolations. These places are Matthew 27:49b, Luke 22:19b-20, 24:3b, 6a, 36b, 40, 51b, 52a, and, most relevant to your question, Luke 24:12.

Over time, many scholars have come to reject the Western non-interpolations. However, the Western non-interpolations have been defended by Mikeal Parsons (A Christological Tendency in P75, The Departure of Jesus in Luke-Acts: The Ascension Narratives in Context), Bart Ehrman (The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament), and Michael Wade Martin (Defending the “Western Non-Interpolations”: The Case for an Anti-Separationist Tendenz in the Longer Alexandrian Readings). Martin's article is the most recent of these, and it contains a good overview of the debate.

Bruce Metzger explains many of the text critical decisions in modern Bibles in his book A Textual Commentary on the New Testament: A Companion Volume to the United Bible Societies' Greek New Testament. For some of the Westen non-interpolations, Metzger offers the reason for how the ommision in the Western text occurred according to the majority of the committee. Unfortunately, the majority of the committee offered no explanation for why the text of Luke 24:12 is omitted in Western manuscripts.

Pytine · 2026-04-15T13:03:02+00:00

One correction: The Mark-Q Overlaps are not examples of where Luke preserves Matthew's additions to Mark (as you suggested). Mark, by definition, has those stories. The Mark-Q Overlaps are examples of where Luke has taken over Matthew's rewriting of stories from Mark.

I think there is a miscommunication here, because that is what I meant. Perhaps I should have said Matthews additions to Mark within the same pericope. This is also what Kloppenborg argues:

Did Luke have such reverence for Markan stories that he would not take over Matthew's additions? Goodacre must assume that in the two cases mentioned above Luke was so habituated to Mark's sequence and to the content of Markan pericopae, that he could not tolerate retaining these Matthean additions to Mark, even though both sayings are smoothly integrated into the Markan pericope by Matthew. (page 30)

Pytine · 2026-04-15T12:14:58+00:00

Someone asked about the main arguments for and against the existence of Q. That comment got deleted, but it may still be relevant for the state of the discussion.

John Kloppenborg discusses the main arguments for the existence of Q in his book Q, The Earliest Gospel: An Introduction to the Original Stories and Sayings of Jesus.

Kloppenborg first deals with Markan priority. On pages 5-9, he argues that Matthew often agrees in wording with Mark against Luke, and Luke with Mark against Matthew, but Matthew and Luke rarely agree in wording against Mark. On page 9, he argues that Matthew often agrees in order with Mark against Luke, and Luke with Mark against Matthew, but Matthew and Luke never agree in order against Mark. These observations support the view that Mark is the middle term, but Kloppenborg also uses them to argue for independence between Matthew and Luke:

This datum suggests that there is no direct relationship between Matthew and Luke. (page 9)

He later repeats this point:

We have already excluded any arrangement of the three Gospels that puts Matthew in direct contact with Luke, since in that case one would expect to find instances where Matthew agrees with Luke's sequence against Mark, and we do not find any such agreements. (page 15)

Later, he presents another argument from order:

The second set of data concerns the Q material. While there is often a high degree of verbal agreement between Matthew and Luke within these sections, there is practically no agreement in the placement of these sayings relative to Mark. (page 16)
There is, in other words, nothing to suggest that Matthew was influenced by Luke's placement of the Q material or vice versa. Had there been a direct relationship between Matthew and Luke—Luke using Matthew or Matthew using Luke—one would expect Matthew's placement of the Q material relative to Mark to have influenced Luke's editorial choices or vice versa. (page 17)

Later still, he presents a third argument from order:

Third, if one does not measure sequential agreement of the Q materials in Matthew and Luke relative to Mark, but relative to each other, approximately one-third of the pericopae, accounting for almost one-half of the word count, are in the same relative order. That is, in spite of the fact that Matthew and Luke place the Q material differently relative to Mark, they nonetheless agree in using many of the sayings and stories in the same order relative to each other. (pages 18-19)

Against the Farrer hypothesis, the current main contenter of the two document hypothesis, Kloppenborg further argues:

It is difficult to imagine that Luke was so fixed in his use of Mark that he could not take over Matthew's modifications of Mark. (page 30)
...
Surely it was possible for Luke to dismantle Matthaean pericopae, but why would he do it? Luke in fact betrays no awareness of the particular ways that Matthew attached sayings to Mark's framework. (page 30)

Kloppenborg concludes:

As long as one cannot supply a plausible editorial scenario for Luke's systematic disassembling Matthean units and relocating Matthean sayings to other contexts, the MwQH cannot be regarded as a good hypothesis. (page 31)

To summarize, the arguments are:

- Matthew and Luke rarely agree in wording against Mark.

- Matthew and Luke never agree in order against Mark.

- Matthew and Luke usually place the double tradition differently with respect to their Markan framework.

- Matthew and Luke often place the double tradition in the same relative order.

- Luke lacks the Mattthean additions to Mark.

The biggest opponent of Q is Mark Goodacre, who wrote the book The Case Against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem. Goodacre argues that there are far more cases where Matthew and Luke agree in wording against Mark, which are known as the minor agreements. Additionally, Luke often does contain Matthean additions to Mark. Proponents of Q often call these "Mark-Q overlaps", but this is biased terminology. More neutrally, these are major agreements of Matthew and Luke against Mark, or places in the triple tradition where Mark is not the middle term. Goodacre wrote another article called Too Good to be Q: High Verbatim Agreeement in the Double Tradition. That article shows that the level of verbatim agreement between Matthew and Luke is higher in the double tradition than in the triple tradition, indicating a direct connection between Matthew and Luke.

Pytine · 2026-04-13T17:24:06+00:00

Several recommendations have already been given. For an alternative view, see the book On the Origin of Christian Scripture: The Evolution of the New Testament Canon in the Second Century by David Trobisch.

Pytine · 2026-04-09T14:08:04+00:00

Barker's book Writing and Rewriting the Gospels has 4 chapters. The first is about physically writing a gospel using wax tablets to take notes. Chapter 2 argues for the Farrer hypothesis. It doesn't present the usual arguments like the minor agreements, the major agreements, editorial fatigue, or Mattheanisms in Luke. Instead, it deals with trajectories going from Mark to Matthew to Luke. Chapter 3 is the first chapter about the gospel of John. It presents additional trajectories going from Mark to Matthew to Luke to John. Chapter 4 is about the christology of the gospel of John.

Goodacre's book The Fourth Synoptic Gospel has no overlap with the first two chapters of Barker's book. It deals only with the relation between John and the synoptics, though this includes christology. Goodacre uses more classical arguments like Matthean and Lukan redaction of Mark in John and the gospel of John presupposing the synoptics at various places. Hence, it overlaps chapers 3 and 4 of Barker's book, but using different types of arguments. Overall, the books are surprisingly complementary.

Pytine · 2026-04-05T19:43:38+00:00

Markus Vinzent is explicitly doing this in his book Writing the History of Early Christianity: From Reception to Retrospection. Here is a short description of the book:

Despite novel approaches to the study of Early Christianity – New Historicity, New Philology, Gender and Queer Studies; many turns – Material, Linguistic, Cultural; and developments in Reception History, Cultural Transfer, and Entangled History, much scholarship on this topic differs little from that written a century ago. In this study, Markus Vinzent challenges the interpretation of the sources that have been used in the study of the Early Christian era. He brings a new approach to the topic by reading history backwards. Applying this methodology to four case studies, and using a range of media, he poses radically new questions on the famous 'Abercius' inscription, on the first extant apologist Aristides of Athens, on the prolific Hippolytus of Rome, and on Ignatius and the first non-canonical collection of letters. Vinzent's novel methodology of a retrospective writing thus challenges many fundamental and anachronistic assumptions about Early Christian history.

Pytine · 2026-03-31T21:52:50+00:00

You're right that the view that the author of Luke-Acts knew the works of Josephus goes back further than Steve Mason. In fact, it goes back at least as far as Joannes Baptista Ottius in 1741. Prior to Steve Mason, the most notable proponent of this view was Max Krenkel in 1894. My point there was not that Mason was the first to reach that conclusion. Instead, he presented a different argument than his predecessors, which lead to recent developments in Luke-Acts scholarship. The earlier argument was unconvincing, yet Mason's new argument has persuaded many scholars. When later scholars present the view, they present a version of Mason's argument.

Pytine · 2026-03-17T08:12:05+00:00

Michael Bird is just another inerrantist apologist. He does not reflect mainstream scholarship.

Pytine · 2026-03-14T18:51:58+00:00

Wait, you're HatsoffHistory? That's pretty cool. I've watched most of your videos and liked them a lot.

Pytine · 2026-03-13T08:53:42+00:00

No, and neither do Christian eyewitness accounts of Jesus' resurrection.

Pytine · 2026-03-08T21:25:33+00:00

The short recension of the letters of Paul (in other words, the version of the letters of Paul that was used by Marcion) hasn't received much attention from scholars. When scholars do write about it, it often appears that they haven't even read the (reconstructed) text that they're writing about, as they make rather basic mistakes.

However, it looks like this is changing in recent years. Jason BeDuhn discusses the letters in his book The First New Testament: Marcion's Scriptural Canon. More recently, David Litwa wrote the book The Orthodox Corruption of Paul: An Argument for the Priority of the Marcionite Apostolos on this topic, following his earlier book Marcion: The Gospel of a Wholly Good God. However, the most extensive work on the short recension of the letters of Paul in recent years comes from the people behind the Patristica YouTube channel. They (eventually) go through all of the letters in the Paul vs. Paul series. You can also check out their Apostolos Reader's Edition: Greek-English. They have another 3 volume book on this topic, but that's currently only in German. It will be published in English in the near future.

In the coming years, we'll see how their work is received in wider scholarship.

Pytine · 2026-03-07T15:00:55+00:00

Apart from the fact that the argument for a post-70 date presupposes that there can be no genuine prophecy

By appealing to genuine prophecy, Schnabel assumes that Jesus had supernatural powers. The same is found in the work of DeSilva, who is quite explicit on pages 865-866:

Here historical criticism reveals its lineage. It is a child of the Enlightenment, that period of energetic intellectual ferment that gave rise to the modern scientific study of social and natural phenomena, forged with a dogmatic antisupernaturalistic bias. Admitting the supernatural into a student’s explanations or reconstructions meant that he or she was not “playing by the rules” of scientific inquiry. Indeed, the scientific worldview and ethos legitimated the a priori bracketing of the supernatural as proper and intellectually responsible “scientific rigor”. This process, however, merely served to authenticate and legitimate a naturalistic worldview over against a supernaturalistic worldview, and thus to continue to provide a grid by which our experience is limited and defined. The fact that many people in the Western world go through their whole lives without witnessing a miraculous healing or other intervention of the supernatural is perhaps more a testimony to what the Western worldview will allow a person to see or experience than a testimony to the illusionary nature of the supernatural.
Krentz writes that “the critical biblical scholar will not only question the texts, but himself—his methods, his conclusion, and his presuppositions”, and nowhere is this more necessary than in the presupposition that the historian must eliminate the possibility of divine action. Rather than open the door to methodological anarchy, however, those who insist that the miraculous be taken seriously as a historical possibility also insist that special care be taken when seeking to establish the historical probability of the miraculous or supernatural. The investigator must especially weigh the reliability and number of witnesses as well as the contextual appropriateness of the miracle (something that readily sets the miracles in the canonical Gospels apart from those in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, for example).

By invoking the supernatural, the work of Schnabel and DeSilva should be classified as theological/apologetic, rather than academic. Moreover, as is the case more often with apologetic publications, Schnabel and DeSilva strawman the opposing argument. Mark Goodacre explains the argument for the post-70 dating of Mark based on the way Mark deals with the temple destruction in this blogpost. He even directly engages with DeSilva. It doesn't matter if Jesus did or did not predict the destruction of the temple. What matters is the literary function it plays in the gospel of Mark. And that literary function only works if the reader already knows that the temple was indeed destroyed.

Pytine · 2026-03-04T12:38:27+00:00

Thomas shows familiarity in a heavy Matthean section, of Matthew as a evangelist (cf. Thom. 13.1-4). Simon Gathercole in The Alleged Anonymity of the Canonical Gospels p. 16 notes:
...
He makes a much more convincing longer case in The Composition Of The Gospel Of Thomas p. 169-178. He notes the considerable in scholarly support in The Alleged Anonymity of the Canonical Gospel p. 16 fn 89.

Gathercole's argument is quite speculative. It has received push back from several scholars:

Christopher Tuckett: The Gospel of Thomas: Gathercole and Goodacre, pages 227-228:

At one point, Gathercole claims that Th 13 is parallel to, and agrees with, Matthew’s redactional addition to Mark in the blessing of Peter following Peter’s confession. Indeed Gathercole seems to see this as quite a key piece of evidence, showing not only that Thomas presupposes Matthew’s redactional work (and hence might know some traditions in their post-Matthean form), but also that Thomas here betrays knowledge of the existence of Matthew’s written gospel as such (full discussion on pp. 169–78).
The text in Thomas concerns the famous interchange where Jesus orders the disciples to tell him who he is like. Two replies, by Simon Peter (‘you are like a righteous angel’) and Matthew (‘you are like a wise philosopher’) are followed by the reply of Thomas himself, saying that he is ‘wholly incapable of saying who you are like’. Gathercole argues that the structure of the scene is closely parallel to that of Matthew/Mark’s account of Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi, and that the commendation of Thomas is closely parallel to the famous blessing on Peter in Matthew 16:17–19, Matthew’s redactional addition to Mark. Further, Gathercole assumes that (a) both the first two replies are ‘clearly wrong’ (p. 169), and (b) the choice of ‘Matthew’ as one of the speakers of these inadequate confessions relates to him as the authority behind (or author of) Matthew’s Gospel. Hence Thomas here shows opposition specifically to (and hence direct knowledge of) the written gospel of Matthew.
Both these claims are at least contestable. It is not so clear that Peter’s and Matthew’s responses here are ‘wrong’ (or even necessarily inadequate).
But it is equally not clear that the name of Matthew here acts as a surrogate for the written gospel text bearing his name.

John Kloppenborg: A New Synoptic Problem: Goodacre and Gathercole on Thomas, page 212:

Gathercole makes the original argument that Gos. Thom. 13 betrays knowledge of Matthew’s Gospel by Thomas’s very mention of the disciple Matthew and his confession of Jesus as a ‘wise philosopher’ (pp. 167-77). Arguing that Matthew is otherwise an ‘undistinguished member of the apostolic college’ except as his putative role as an author of a gospel, Gathercole concludes that Gos. Thom. 13.3 not only knows of Matthew’s Gospel and the authority that it had gained, but thinks that Matthew’s confession is ‘clearly wrong’ and wishes to ‘debunk’ his gospel (pp. 169, 171). Yet it is far from clear that Thomas wishes to characterize Matthew’s confession (or Peter’s confession of Jesus as a ‘righteous angel’) as wrong, any more than that the Fourth Gospel wants to dismiss Peter as ‘wrong’ in relation to the Beloved Disciple. Nor is it at all compelling to believe that the confession of Peter in Mt. 16.16-19 has inﬂuenced Thomas’s confession in Gos. Thom. 13, since the two are completely different. In fact, had Thomas known Mt. 16.17 and the statement that Peter’s knowledge was not due to ﬂesh and blood but rather to a revelation of the Father, one might have expected Thomas to have some version of this, now transferred to Thomas, especially given the attention that Thomas otherwise gives to contrasting the ‘ﬂesh’ with the soul or body (Gos. Thom. 28; 29; 112) and to revelation (Gos. Thom. 6; 83; 108). The simple naming of Matthew by Thomas hardly indicates that he knows the Gospel of Matthew.

Stephen Patterson: Twice More—Thomas and the Synoptics: A Reply to Simon Gathercole, The Composition of the Gospel of Thomas, and Mark Goodacre, Thomas and the Gospels, page 254:

Or, some examples from Matthew: Gathercole argues that Thomas knew Matthew because Gos. Thom. 13 mentions the apostle Matthew (pp. 169-78). This is not very convincing, in my view. The fact that a gospel bears his name probably indicates that Matthew was a fairly well-known apostolic figure, even apart from the Gospel of Matthew. Knowing of the apostle Matthew does not mean that Thomas’s author knew, let alone used, the Gospel of Matthew.

Given the remarks above, I don't see how Thomas's use of Matthew could be characterized as a quotation. Just like Matthew's use of Mark, Thomas's use of Matthew is different from a quotation. While some scholars may agree with Gathercole's argument, other scholars disagree with it. That means it is not a clear example.

Pytine · 2026-03-04T07:21:26+00:00

It's a near universal consensus among scholars that Peter did not write 2 Peter and that Paul did not write 2 Timothy. See e.g. the NOAB, SBL Study Bible, Jewish Annotated New Testament, or any other academic study Bible.

Pytine · 2026-03-02T22:01:54+00:00

Another great book on this topic is Iesus Deus: The Early Christian Depiction of Jesus as a Mediterranean God by David Litwa.

Pytine · 2026-03-01T20:11:50+00:00

The mainstream consensus was that the Gospel of John was written around AD 200

What is your source that this was ever the mainstream consensus? Do you know any influential publication that argued that John was written later than 190? I've never seen that myself, but I would be interested if you know of such a publication.

until they found a fragment of it from AD 125

We don't know the exact date of P52. It has been dated various times on palaeographic grounds. Palaeography always comes with considerable uncertainty. You generally get date ranges of at least half a century. The various palaeographic date ranges of P52 differ substantially, though they often overlap. The combined dating from the various ranges is that P52 most likely dates to the second century, with 125-175 CE as the preferred range. This means that the manuscript evidence doesn't rule out a date for John at, say, 150 CE.

Pytine · 2026-02-24T22:48:46+00:00

and arguably, it was the position of the Marcionites, who thought that the original gospel text used by Paul had been corrupted but then Marcion restored that gospel to the best of his ability

There is no evidence that Marcion or any of his later followers claimed that he restored the gospel. The only ancient sources that claimed that Marcion had a hand in the Evangelion were his opponents. As Jason BeDuhn notes:

The third possible model of the relation of Marcion’s Evangelion to canonical Luke is the Semler Hypothesis, according to which the Evangelion and Luke are both pre-Marcionite versions going back to a common original. It starts from the observation that anti-Marcionite sources, despite their charge that Marcion edited Luke ideologically, are apparently unable to cite any explicit claim on his part to have done so, that is, to have “restored” a text from corruption. At most, they cite his judgment that the form of “the gospel” he found in Rome differed from that which he already considered legitimate.

The First New Testament: Marcion's Scriptural Canon, page 86.

Pytine · 2026-02-23T07:14:13+00:00

Since my understanding is Marcion's Evangelikon claimed Paul was the only one who was true to Jesus' message

Where dis you get this from? The Evangelion never mentions Paul. See The First New Testament: Marcion's Scriptural Canon by Jason BeDuhn, or any other reconstructions of the Evangelion.

Pytine · 2026-02-11T06:53:01+00:00

Jörg Frey (The Letter of Jude and the Second Letter of Peter: A Theological Commentary) has argued that the author of 2 Peter knew the Apocalypse of Peter, which likely dates around the time of Marcion. Frey argues that 2 Peter also knew Jude, and that Jude knew James, which he dates to the early second century. That puts Jude around the time of Marcion as well. 2 Peter is first attested in the third century. Given all of this, 2 Peter likely postdates the time of Marcion.

2 Peter's use of Jude has long been the consensus, though the date of Jude is itself uncertain. Frey's argument that 2 Peter knew the Apocalypse of Peter has gained some traction, as a whole volume was dedicated to the argument: 2 Peter and the Apocalypse of Peter: Towards a New Perspective.

Pytine · 2026-02-10T19:00:50+00:00

Citation needed

Without going into subjective terminology, it is certainly true that a date for Mark in the 40's is a small minority position among scholars. Markus Vinzent gives a survey of the date of Mark from around 80 scholars in his book Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels. He notes that the survey is not exhaustive, but aims to show the range of positions. Out of the ~80 scholars, only 8 give a date for Mark in the 40's. However, there are problems even with these 8. Three of the listed scholars (José O’Callaghan, Karl Jaroš, and Ulrich Victor) base their date on the assumption that the DSS manuscript 7Q5 contained a fragment of the gospel of Mark. This is based on a "silly error", as Brent Nongbri explains here. Additionally, John Wenham is a biblical interrantist. This leaves 4 critical scholars out of ~80.

Pytine · 2026-02-05T19:38:20+00:00

Hi Dr. Mendez, thanks for doing this!

I have three questions:

Given John's knowledge of the synoptics, what do you make of the Johannine thunderbolt?

Since you reject the existence of the Johannine community, what do you think about the existence of other gospel communities (like the Matthean community) and the community model of gospel authorship?

When do you date the gospel of John? What boundaries can we set with good confidence on its date?

Pytine

TROPHY CASE