This is the last article in my account of what I learned and heard at the SBL conference in Denver last month. My previous accounts (of the Saturday and Friday I spent there) you can catch up on with those links.

Sunday: The Morning Section

Sunday morning I attended the Historical Jesus Section. There was one of those in nearly every time slot the entire conference, but only a few had interesting enough papers listed. For example, the panel I attended the previous day on “first century synagogues” was actually the Historical Jesus Section for that time slot. This day, the panel had a more diverse set of presentations.

Joan Taylor of King’s College gave a talk on interpreting the words used in the Gospels for how Jesus was dressed, and what that may have been communicating about his status and values. Basically, the conclusion was, he was described like an itinerant Cynic philosopher, a.k.a. “a bum.” Which makes as much sense for fiction communicating a community’s desired or expected images of Jesus, as for any actual memory of him. So we can’t really trust this as evidence of how Jesus actually dressed.

Murray Smith of Macquarie University surveyed studies of theophany and parousia to see if we can discern what the “real” Jesus taught about these things, rather than what the authors of the New Testament texts wanted to portray Jesus as having said or thought. But the takeaway was pretty much “we don’t know.”

T.C. Schmidt, a graduate student from Yale, presented a paper trying to argue in favor of the authenticity of the Testimonium Flavianum (or TF) that literally ignored all arguments and research findings on the matter published in the last twenty years. Honestly. Why is that allowed? It would earn an F grade even as an undergraduate essay. Sigh. Worse, his arguments were rife with bad logic:

• “Eusebius didn’t use the content of the TF apologetically, therefore it must be authentic.” That begs the question of what apologetic uses Eusebius was actually interested in making of it (and ignores the fact that he may have wanted to play down his uses of it precisely so as not to draw too much suspicion to his having invented it), but more importantly, this is a non sequitur, as it assumes Eusebius could have any knowledge of its authenticity. If both the major and minor TF were introduced by Pamphilus before Eusebius had even arrived at the Library this manuscript was in, Eusebius would be none the wiser—and it looks very much like that’s exactly what happened. So we can learn nothing from his uses of it.
• The phrase in the TF “received the truth…with pleasure” is actually a negative statement, because pleasure should have nothing to do with the gospel and is sometimes used to indicate flighty audiences. This argument was way too strained to be convincing. Indeed, even if Eusebius would balk at using these words, again, that doesn’t rule out Pamphilus or any other culprit at the Library before Eusebius and after Origen…who shows no sign of having ever seen the TF in the copy present when he was alive. It also doesn’t rule out Eusebius intentionally trying to make the passage not sound like him—as forgers often tried to do, failing only in the subtle ways only identifiable to modern stylometrics, which peg the whole paragraph as Eusebian.
• The phrase “brought over” to his philosophy is also used of charlatans, “therefore this is a negative passage.” Even more illogical. The phrase is used of any kind of philosophy, positive and negative. It thus has neither connotation.
• The word “ephanê” can mean “seemed” to appear and “therefore this is a negative passage.” This is totally off the rails. Ephanê is a routine Biblical word for legit appearances, including of Jesus! So it surely implied no negative indication to any Christian composer. By this point Schmidt was stretching logic so thin as to tear sense in two.
• A Christian would not say “he was the Christ” but “he is the Christ.” That’s another non sequitur. Even a forger would want to keep the tense in the past, as he is sneaking it into a history book. Which is writing about a person in the past. Had the forger made this an unambiguous declaration of Jesus’s continuing immortality, the jig would have been totally up.

As these are some of the lamest apologetic arguments ever, and are snuffed out by a vast quantity of far clearer evidence of the TF’s forging, I can only conclude Yale has lost all standards for hiring in its theology department.

After that dismal showing, N. Clayton Croy, an independent scholar, gave a really interesting, well structured, and engaging talk arguing that the Nativity stories—though surely embellished with exaggerations, myths, and errors—really cover up a commonplace story in human history: a teen girl getting pregnant out of wedlock and being hustled out of town before anyone noticed, to await birth in secret somewhere else, so she can return with babe in arms, now married, and thus retaining the semblance of being all legit.

The underlying theory is plausible: that’s indeed a thing that has happened a lot, then and after, even right up to the 1960s. But as a claim to fact in this case it requires two presuppositions, neither argued for (though understandably, for want of time): that there even was a Jesus; and that the Nativity stories weren’t made up out of whole cloth simply to emulate a common hero narrative about dangerous babies. Matthew, after all, is just making Jesus out to be Moses; and many another mythical hero had similar tales told. Croy also struggled against Matthaean priority, as his arguments worked better if Luke’s was the original Nativity. Questioners in the audience pointed this out. His thesis really seemed to tank at that point.

Finally, John Peters of Regent University then gave a talk on ancient observations about historians being liars. He did not tie this in so well as relevant to Jesus research, so the connection was a bit forced. All he established was that lots of people back then expected most historians often lied about stuff, and complained about it a lot. Kind of what we already knew. Ancient history wasn’t especially reliable compared to modern (see, just for example, Michael Grant’s Greek and Roman Historians: Information and Misinformation and Mary Lefkowitz’s Lives of the Greek Poets). And the ancients were well aware of that fact. Historians are thus often highly cautious and skeptical when using ancient historians, for anything more than overt or mundane, and usually public political facts. We’ve known this in my field for ages. Biblical studies seems not to have gotten the memo. I guess Peters was trying to deliver that memo?

Sunday: The Afternoon Section

Next I attended a section on “Disputed Paulines.” Meaning, the letters of Paul widely agreed to be forged. Not every presenter was ready to accept that wider consensus, though they did acknowledge it was the wider consensus. But mostly what went on here was some really cool analysis of the forgeries as forgeries. In other words, these scholars were asking, what interesting things can we learn from a close analysis of their content, even indeed given that they were forged?

Illustrating both features together, the first talk by D. Clint Burnett of Boston College argued that the terminology of the apocalyptic section of 2 Thessalonians (esp. 2:4) matched known epigraphic and literary evidence of a widespread and well-known royal and imperial practice of seating statutes of reigning monarchs in the temples of greater gods, indeed at the right hand of the larger statue of that temple’s god. He made an excellent case for that; this was clearly the practice the author of 2 Thessalonians was conjuring. But Burnett then tried to use this fact to argue that this proves the letter predates the end of the Jewish War (whether authentic or not).

And there Burnett’s argument was more strained.

2 Thessalonian’s author need not have had accurate knowledge of the actual status of the temple ruins or its expected fate during the Bar Kochba revolt, for example (in the 130s AD), and so may have been writing to drum up apocalyptic fervor in light of that event or some other (though of course, as with the forgers of Daniel, they wanted to portray this as a prediction Paul made nearly a century earlier, so they are trying not to be too anachronistic).

2 Thess. is also not so clear that it means the Jerusalem temple. The most pertinent passage says a certain villainous ruler “will oppose and exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped,” which very conspicuously includes all temples of all gods. So when it immediately then says that in result of this this villain will “set himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God,” the author may have intentionally been stretching the meaning of “God’s temple” to fit current circumstances. His vagueness is then actually better explained: if he was well informed, he can’t have Paul say “the Jewish God’s temple” or “the Jerusalem temple” or anything so clear, as informed readers would know that that didn’t exist anymore, so this letter would be convicted of false prophecy. Although again we can’t be sure, as who knows how informed the forgers or their audience were on such particulars (the letter wasn’t likely written by anyone in Palestine, for example), or what they thought was going on, or rumored or threatened to be, during or before the Bar Kochba rebellion.

Even if we saw past all that somehow and agreed this author must mean interference in the active Jerusalem temple cult, though Burnett wants the letter to be authentic (despite its stylistic deviance), he agreed that even if it dated before 70, and its author was commenting on imminent expectations of Romans defiling the standing Jerusalem temple, it could still be a forgery (composed perhaps in the mid-to-late 60s, representing itself as being written in the 50s). It can’t of course have been written in the reign of Caligula (who was rumored to have suggested setting up a statue of himself in the Jerusalem temple), as 2 Thessalonians portrays itself as written after 1 Thessalonians, and trying to push 1 Thessalonians into the late 30s would screw over every plausible timeline of Paul’s Epistles. (Although for serious doubters, if Paul was actually writing in the 50s B.C., 2 Thessalonians could indeed be a forgery of the late 30s A.D.! A conclusion Burnett would probably be mortified to discover he’d just presented evidence for.)

So, that paper was informative and interesting, but didn’t really get very far.

Lyn Kidson of Macquarie University then gave an interesting talk demonstrating that “the widows” of 1 Timothy (esp. 5:3-15) were actually a specific order within the church. In other words, “widows” does not mean simply women who happened to be widows. It meant something like The Order of Widows, and being a Widow as a title like Deacon (or Sparrow, for Game of Thrones fans). It involved taking specific oaths and undertaking specific duties, in exchange for receiving certain benefits that not just any “widow” could claim. Kidson also showed evidence in this letter of tension between elder and younger members of this order, and that the letter was forged in part to try and resolve these problems. (Notably, Kidson, like all British-trained scholars at this conference, used the cardinal phrasing for the numbered letters, e.g. “One Timothy,” rather than the American ordinal phrasing, e.g. “First Timothy,” which reminded me of how funny it was that Donald Trump gave away his ignorance of American Evangelical idiom but couldn’t claim a British education as excuse! For those who’ve noticed, I was trained by a Brit.)

Andrew Langford of the University of Chicago then gave a really brilliant talk resolving a long-standing curiosity in 1 Timothy 5:23, a verse that seems so out of place that many have concluded it must be a transposed line from somewhere else in the letter. Langford convincingly argued it was actually entirely sensible in context, and that once you understand the rhetorical purpose of the letter’s forging and rhetorical framework, the role of that verse becomes finally understood, particularly precisely where it is placed. This was genius to watch, so well argued for so difficult a conundrum. He’s surely right. And we can understand this letter far better now because of it.

The oddity is that in that chapter the (fake) Paul is explaining to the (fake) Timothy how to handle heresies in his church, what trial procedures to use and advice to follow, and suddenly interjects personal dietary advice, “Stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses.” “WTF?” is what scholars have been saying in response to that weird interjection for decades. Langford shows the whole letter is using medical imagery for this (a point that had also just been demonstrated by Langford), then compares it to “philosopher physician” texts of the period that do similar things, and shows that the author wants to portray Paul as a medical genius solving all of Timothy’s problems (and hence, in purpose, advising all pastors) by advising behavior that avoids the appearance of dissolute living when one has potentially visible ailments, which could be mistaken as indicating sin. Wine was a commonly regarded cure for all manner of ailments—indeed so much so that one of the most famous medical schools of the time, the followers of Asclepiades, was based on its judicious application. Paul is thus being made to say “avoid the appearance of sin by treating your physical ailments” so as to appear pure, wise, and upstanding. Hence the line makes perfect sense in context (here in brackets are words not in the text but probably meant to be understood):

²² Do not be hasty in the laying on of hands, and do not share in the sins of others. Keep yourself pure.

²³ [So] stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses.

²⁴ [Because] the sins of some are obvious, reaching the place of judgment ahead of them; the sins of others trail behind them.

In other words, the letter is giving advice for how not to appear morally compromised. And doing it under the guise of a specific example, that one can then cite to defend a generalization.

(For those who noticed another name on the schedule, Dan Nässelqvist of Lund University was scheduled to present on this panel, but couldn’t make it owing to weather shutting down several airports or flights that weekend.)

Finally, David Trobisch presented a quick paper showing a connection between Acts and the Pseudo-Paulines. Trobisch was until recently curator of the Museum of the Bible in D.C. That’s right, the Museum of Hobby Lobby fame. He was hired years ago because they wanted to launch with an unquestionable scholar at the helm; and Trobisch is himself a bona fide and liberal Biblical scholar, not a fundamentalist or apologist. He has since moved on, having completed what he was hired to do, though he continues on in an advisory capacity. Here he argued that the letters of Paul were collected, selected, and where necessary forged, specifically to match or justify the travel narrative in Acts—or else the travel narrative in Acts was conjured up from this artificial juxtaposition of texts. He was of course right, but still one can’t know the order of causation, or the ultimate purpose.

Sunday: The Evening Section

There were so many awesome panels I couldn’t attend in this slot because I simply could not skip the piece de resistance competing against them all: a section on the Synoptic Problem keynoted by none other than Mark Goodacre himself!

The famed Goodacre (of Duke University) presented a much-needed paper brilliantly refuting a recent attempt to revive the “Luke First” theory, i.e. the view that Matthew copied Luke, not the other way around (much less used any hypothetical “Q”). His paper was basically titled “Why Can’t Matthew Have Used Luke?” A question he decisively answered. Overall, Goodacre showed stylistic elements demonstrable throughout Matthew appear in Luke only where Luke would be borrowing Matthew, but never do we see particularly Lukan stylistic elements where Matthew would be using Luke. Stylistics including both vocabulary and structural tendencies. (A fact also a problem for defenders of Q, who have to suppose Matthew just “borrowed” Q’s style throughout, even when he redacts Mark.)

Goodacre also shows his fatigue thesis reveals the same conclusion. Goodacre has already famously demonstrated that authors, when copying a source, vary that source more early on than later on, thus showing “fatigue” in their creativity over time, which demonstrates their use of a source. This is clearly demonstrable in both Matthew and Luke in their use of Mark. Goodacre shows that Luke gets lazy half way through copying Matthew; but we don’t see Matthew doing that with anything in Luke (for instance, Luke screws up the number of talents in the Parable of the Talents, forgetting he changed the number at the start from Matthew’s version; whereas Matthew’s version shows no such inconstency). Goodacre also shows instances of Luke being aware of what’s in Matthew but peculiarly Matthew seems never to know what’s in Luke, such as the specific titles of rulers and other political and contextual historical facts. It’s hard to explain why Matthew would elide such detail. Whereas it’s easier to explain Luke as having added it (to make his redaction of Mark and Matthew match his stated purpose in Luke 1: to seem more like a “history”).

This all of course made more trouble for the Q theory as well. As Goodacre points out, advocates of Q lean a lot on presuppositions about how they think Luke “should” have composed his texts, rather than on evidence that their assumptions actually matched Luke’s. A claim like “Luke would not spoil Matthew’s order” become without evidence “Luke did not spoil Matthew’s order.” And yet even the premise has not been established—why wouldn’t Luke “spoil” Matthew’s order? He spoiled Mark’s. So why would he scruple against changing up Matthew as well? Luke wanted his own order. As all authors did. Just look at how Matthew used Mark; and John, the Synoptics. So there is no basis at all for believing Luke “would not” do that. It’s all the more absurd since the Q theorists must necessarily agree Luke altered (and thus “spoiled”) the order in Q. Or else that Matthew did! “Authors wouldn’t do that” is thus refuted by the Q theory itself. Rendering Q self-contradictory as a thesis.

Another example Goodacre gave was how “Luke is sometimes more primitive than Matthew” becomes without evidence “Luke is usually more primitive than Matthew.” When in fact both are “more primitive” than each other, thus demonstrating this cannot be used as a feature to demonstrate the existence of Q, other than by circular argument. Which was notable because in the same panel came another brilliant paper on this very point…

Alan Taylor Farnes of Brigham Young University gave a masterful talk thoroughly refuting the all-to-common principle in textual and literary analysis of the Bible called lectio brevior potior, “the shorter version is more likely the original version.” You’ll hear this said in different ways, like, “Luke’s use of Q is more primitive, therefore Luke’s text is closer to Q than Matthew’s” (therefore “Luke didn’t use Matthew,” and “therefore there really was a Q,” as the argument then continues to its target conclusion). The alternative requires Luke to have frequently abbreviated Matthew. But the Q theorists say, “No way would anyone abbreviate, so surely Luke isn’t abbreviating Matthew, therefore there must have been a Q!”

Farnes so thoroughly refuted this argument it was beautiful to behold. He showed with numerous examples and extensive comparative charts of shared pericopes and passages, that Luke frequently, in fact usually, abbreviated Mark. Thus already refuting the major premise (that authors didn’t abbreviate their sources, or that Luke specifically didn’t abbreviate his sources). Fares also showed Matthew had a similar tendency, often to abbreviate Markan material, even when expanding it with his own material. So the practice wasn’t even unusual for the Gospels generally, much less for Luke particularly. The principle is invalid. And thus so is any argument for Q that requires it. Of course this point had been made before (I noted it myself in Why Do We Still Believe in Q?), but Fares decisively proves it. And I just love watching that happen. The data collection was immense and valuable.

Right before Farnes, meanwhile, Jonathan Potter of Emory University presented a good corrective paper on the misuse of the word “midrash” in describing the Gospels. He pretty much destroyed the notion, noting that “midrash” actually meant commentary, and the Gospels are not commentary, nor even “rewritten scripture,” since they are not paraphrases or expansions on OT stories, but take OT stories and change them out into entirely new places, characters, and historical eras: e.g. making Jesus into Moses in Matthew (and into Elijah-Elisha in Mark and Luke) is not “midrash” nor “rewritten scripture” but something else. I’ve suggested in the past “midrashic haggadah” or “haggadic midrash” might better suit, but even those aren’t ideal terms, and IMO, we should just drop the comparison.

Finally, James Barker of Western Kentucky University gave a talk on what the purpose of writing extra Gospels was. He argued against the thesis that the intention was replacement; but also against the thesis that the intention was to supplement. He argued the intention was to create a comparative text, because everyone knew people would collect and read side-by-side multiple versions of the same story. He gave many examples outside the Bible of where this was the common practice, e.g. having collections of different accounts of Alexander the Great.

I wasn’t very convinced by Barker’s argument, though. That many readers would collect different versions of things to compare them, does not mean this is what the original authors had intended. Indeed even if they knew such practices were inevitable, they still could have intended only one Gospel for their community, and for their community to make the argument that any comparison should settle their version as the authentic or more original or accurate one. In the same way Mark may have intended to replace Homer as a foundational moral and mythical text (as plausibly argued by Dennis MacDonald in the Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark), even while knowing readers might keep both on their shelf for comparison; so also Matthew may have intended the same effect from rewriting Mark, and Luke from rewriting Mark and Matthew, and John from rewriting Mark and Luke.

The collection together of these four (and no others) into a single sect’s “canon” may instead have resulted from a later political desire to integrate under their umbrella the four extended communities who used each of those Gospels, so as to maximize their membership against opposing sects. Because otherwise, the Gospels all seem quite clearly to be arguing against each other, and aiming to replace each other as the authoritative text. This was more comparable to how the Lives of Aesop came to be repeatedly redacted; and how the book of Acts was heavily redacted into a new “version” that was clearly intended to replace the other (as it in fact did in some extant Bibles); and in Christian literature, how the Epistles of Ignatius came to be redacted, so as to “replace” an old version and pass the new off as “authentic.” These are far more analogous to what Matthew is doing with Mark, for example; and indeed is almost explicitly what Luke says he is doing with Matthew and Mark (in Luke 1:1-3).

Monday: The Morning Section

For my last, the next morning before driving on to parts West, I chose to attend a section on The Canon. This was educational but not terribly illuminating.

Fritz Graf of Ohio State University presented a study of other canons in ancient literature, such as of Orpheus, Plato, Hippocrates, and Homer. I didn’t get much out of the comparison. They seemed to be unrelated in purpose and function. Although there were some interesting comparisons to be had from ancient debates over authentic vs. spurious texts in all these other “canons.”

Hindy Najman of the University of Oxford presented on how we should understand pseudepigrapha. Her talk was full of elitist jargon and peculiarly devoid of evidence for any statement she made. She tried resurrecting the old dead horse that forgeries were not meant to deceive, a thesis thoroughly refuted with extensive evidence by Bart Ehrman years ago. She seems not to have heard any of his arguments. So this seemed like more arguing in a vacuum that would get an undergrad an F grade.

Jens Schroeter of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin gave a talk on what the term “canon” even meant and its evolution in meaning and use over time. I suppose that would be interesting to some, even essential to a few. But I found it too tediously trivial for any of my purposes. But for those interested, the gist was that “canon” started out meaning “rule” and in particular “rule of faith,” eventually meaning that which doctrine cannot contradict (whereas texts merely for edification could not establish doctrine independently of “canonical” texts). Although I did find notable that Schroeter argued (as I have) that all the NT texts were intended and disseminated as manuals for teaching.

Finally, Lewis Ayres of Durham University and Australian Catholic University also could not present as scheduled due to weather delays. The authors of The Biblical Canon Lists presented a summary of their recent book instead. They note all the extant lists show a lot of consistency, even if varying a little on the edges, but I noted a key problem with this is that we only have the lists from the same continuous sect that triumphed in achieving imperial power. There may have been many completely different lists circulating in other churches. The authors also added that canon lists never say which version of any of the books listed are canonical (a problem for, e.g., Acts and Daniel, which each circulated in at least two significantly different forms). Nevertheless, their book is clearly a handy resource for anyone wanting to study the phenomenon of canonization, within those limits.

Conclusion

I had to leave after that. So I didn’t attend any further panels, which continued into Tuesday. But Sunday and Monday were even more worthwhile than Saturday, which itself wasn’t so bad overall. The panel on the Synoptics was the most exciting and educational of all. It just further nuked Q, as well as other attempts to defend novel solutions to the Synoptic problem. And that’s rewarding to see. Because Q is an idea that needs to die. The stubborn and irrational trend to keep defending it even after it has long died and continues to stink from its own rot is really getting old. The rest was more esoteric or trivial, but nevertheless fascinating and educational for any Bible geek.