There have been two really weird and unexpected turns in mainstream peer-reviewed scholarship lately: multiple independent studies are redating the entire Bible—Old Testament and New—far later than consensus imagines.
What’s Up with the Old Testament?
The first trend is a concerted series of studies independently arguing that the entire Old Testament was essentially forged in the third or even second (!) century B.C. As that deals with Hebrew and pre-Classical ANE studies, which are not my field, I don’t have a strong opinion about this development, other than the general observation that when we see multiple independent studies converging on the same conclusion, the experts in that field do need to start taking it seriously. Especially when one of them comes from a bona fide expert of some renown, Yonatan Adler, whose 2022 study The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal (by Yale University Press) argues from archaeological evidence that Torah law did not even exist until the second century B.C. (convincingly, it seems: see Chad Spigel’s review), and from another expert with at least reasonable credentials, Philippe Wajdenbaum, whose 2019 study Argonauts of the Desert: Structural Analysis of the Hebrew Bible (published by Routledge) argues the same conclusion from a literary analysis of the OT texts themselves (perhaps less convincingly: see Peter Miscall’s review; though compare the reviews of the hostile Serge Frolov and the more sympathetic Robert Gnuse).
Other leading experts had already expressed suspicions aligned with these results, and in fact appear even to have inspired them (see Thomas Thompson, The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel, p. 230, and Niels Lemche, in a contribution to Did Moses Speak Attic?, pp. 220-24, and an article in the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures). So when people try to dismiss the amateur scholar Russell Gmirkin, who also published multiple studies to the point, also under legit peer review—Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible (Routledge, 2019), then supplemented by Plato’s Timaeus and the Biblical Creation Accounts (Routledge, 2022), and long preceded by Berossus and Genesis (T&T Clark, 2006)—they are on shakier ground than they might think. Multiple peer reviewed studies, by multiple expert authors, are coming to the same conclusion, however sound or not. See the exchange between Gmirkin and Stéphanie Anthonioz for perspective.
As a rule, I am inclined to stick with the consensus. These studies might change or soften the consensus, or might not. And it might fail to for illegitimate reasons (since bias against their results is considerable). But I will need to see that play out over the next few years. How many experts remain hostile or sympathetic over time is something to keep an eye on (particularly the secular scholars, as the believers will never allow this conclusion and thus their bias may be insurmountable). If the field tries the strategies of ignoring or even lying about the content of these studies rather than engaging with them, however, then that will be damning for the consensus from any objective perspective. Time will tell.
What about the New Testament?
A similar trend has arisen for the New Testament, with now two independent peer-reviewed studies arguing that it was all forged (or just about) in the second century A.D.—indeed, all manufactured to purpose, and not an actual record of anything. The most extreme position is in David Trobisch, On the Origin of Christian Scripture: The Evolution of the New Testament Canon in the Second Century (Fortress, 2023); the less extreme, in Markus Vinzent, Resetting the Origins of Christianity: A New Theory of Sources and Beginnings (Cambridge University Press, 2023). What is particularly astonishing is who published these: Fortress is a stalwart Christian academic press of great renown, usually known for publishing belief-friendly work—it is literally owned and operated by Evangelical Lutherans (although granted, they are more liberal than that sounds). Meanwhile, Cambridge University’s renown and status need hardly be explicated. That is as prestigious a publisher as any academic study could secure. (Indeed another study is soon to publish from Cambridge University Press arguing a similar thesis to these: The Letters of Paul in their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship, by Nina Livesey. So this is officially a mainstream trend.)
This is my field. So I do have an expert opinion to voice in the matter. And it is not what one might expect: I am not convinced. In fact, I am not even remotely persuaded. I do think Trobisch and Vinzent have in these books produced incredibly important, and almost entirely correct, critiques and corrections to the stale dogmas of the usual consensus (in much the way Robyn Faith Walsh did to “oral lore” theory). Very little of their studies actually concern their controversial conclusion that the entire New testament was forged or extensively redacted after the Bar Kochba revolt in the 130s A.D. They are both pushing (a proto-) Lukan priority. Indeed Vinzent believes Marcion himself wrote the first ever Gospel, the original draft of Luke; he differs from Trobisch only in allowing some other texts to come from the era of Paul, but even then he concurs with Trobisch in concluding that what those then said is now unrecoverable. But their books are mostly about something else.
Trobisch’s Origin of Christian Scripture is mostly about the editorial decisions made in composing and redacting the contents of the NT—and is the first study to consider that in such detail as crucial for understanding those contents. As such, Trobisch supplements Walsh (who focused on the literary production of the books of the NT) by adding a concomitant focus on the editorial production of those books in the NT. By contrast, Vinzent’s Resetting the Origins of Christianity looks outside the Bible at the context of Christian literature and propaganda that produced the Bible we have. His study is mostly about deconstructing the lies and fabrications of (particularly ancient) Christian ‘historians’, and thus demolishing the edifice that most studies of Christian origins are still (inexplicably) based on, like an overly gullible trust in the narratives of Tertullian or Eusebius or Irenaeus, and all their ideological kin.
As such, I welcome both projects. They not only contribute documentation of what are all-too-often neglected or scoffed-at realities, but they even support the findings of myself and Raphael Lataster. Their results undermine confidence in the historicity of Jesus by undermining confidence in the reliability of any early document we possess concerning him. I do believe, however, that they go well too far, and by a similar fallacy of reasoning: Trobisch finds abundant evidence of editorial alteration, selection, and presentation of the NT texts, and concludes they are therefore all fabricated propaganda; Vinzent finds no external evidence of any of these books existing before Marcion, and concludes they are therefore all fabricated by or after Marcion. These are non sequiturs. Indeed, they are the same non sequitur, ironically, that historicists rightly call out for Jesus: just because we have no external reports of a historical Jesus from his generation does not permit the conclusion that he did not exist (and indeed this is my own conclusion in On the Historicity of Jesus, Ch. 8).
I think their recourse to these non sequiturs reflects a failure to frame inductive logic correctly. This is why historians really need to learn Bayes’ Theorem. It would forestall these kinds of mistakes.
This Much Does Not Survive Scrutiny
I imagine most people may have thought I’d glom right on to the conclusions of Trobisch and Vinzent, given that I’d love for them to be right—it would almost at one stroke destroy the historicity of Jesus, dropping it back down to the base rate of magical founder-heroes being historical, which is no better than 1 in 3 (On the Historicity of Jesus, Ch. 6, there counting the base rate of one subset of heavily mythologized heroes, which proxies to the set of magical founder-heroes: see Jesus and the Problem of the Fraudulent Reference Class). But I only follow the evidence, and only nonfallacious reasoning. And as such, my own study (reinforced by the vetting of Lataster’s study) actually adduced quite a lot of evidence against this conclusion in Trobisch and Vinzent. In Bayesian terms, their theory does not make as likely the odd features I found in the book of Acts or the Epistles of Paul; or the contents of Hebrews and 1 Clement; or the oddity of different branches of Christianity placing Jesus in different periods of history; it doesn’t even explain well the oddities in the Epistles of Ignatius and the Hegessippan James Apocryphon (see Doing the Math: Historicity of Jesus Edition). These texts all contain features that are only probable if they were composed before the Jewish War or in ignorance of each other and especially of the agendas Trobisch and Vinzent allege.
But this is true even of the canonical Gospels. Though I find no evidence in them that makes Jesus any less likely to exist (apart from establishing him as a magical founder-hero), in arriving at that conclusion I document extensive examples of redactional activity that defies the timelines of Trobisch and Vinzent. For their excessive side-conclusions (but not the rest), they both require Luke or proto-Luke to be the first Gospel. But literary and structural analysis of Mark and Matthew shows that they had no knowledge of even proto-Luke, much less “Luke”; whereas it reveals many examples of Luke altering content from Mark and Matthew—and not the other way around. I even added a new recent example, Like, Can You Rebel Against Rome with Only Two Swords? which shows Luke making multiple coherent edits to Mark to refashion two whole chapters of material, which would be bizarre (indeed, practically unintelligible) as an elaborate program of coordinated deletion.
This is also supported by the arguments of Mark Goodacre already against Lukan priority (from editorial fatigue to redactional trends). Even our Gospel of John, which is a “response” to Luke, establishes this, in the extensive evidence (agreed by most Johannine experts today) that our John is a third and final redaction of an earlier Gospel which lacked all that Luke-responsive material. Trobisch and Vinzent cannot explain this. If someone were forging John to respond to Luke, it would be coherent, not a sloppy hash leaving numerous signs of messing up the original’s chronology and story arc. That entails there was a pre-Lukan John—one that again shows redactional reliance on (definitely) Mark and (possibly) Matthew as a source (see my summary in Historicity, Ch. 10.7), which further undermines Lukan priority.
Likewise, the same things that convince me the seven “authentic” letters of Paul really were authentic (even if edited) and predate the first Jewish war stand as a refutation of this thesis of Trobisch and Vinzent (see How Do We Know the Apostle Paul Wrote His Epistles in the 50s A.D.? and The Historicity of Paul the Apostle). For instance, the Epistles we have are mostly pastiches of multiple letters. As just one example (and there are dozens), 1 and 2 Corinthians are not two letters, but more likely two scrolls, containing pieces of all the letters Paul wrote to Corinth (which we know numbered more than two), with redactional edits or cuts stitching them together. For example, 1 Cor. 8 and 9 do not come from the same letter. The original material introducing and explaining the argument Paul is rebutting in 1 Cor. 9 has been stripped out, and the rest mashed to the end of 1 Cor. 8 without even an explanatory transition, merely because they discuss vaguely related themes. But it is clear the author of 1 Cor. 9 had been talking about something else (some other accusation or controversy) and not what is now preceding it in 1 Cor. 8.
Likewise all the other awkward transitions, double addresses, double introductions, and double endings across many of the letters: these all signal that someone has taken a dossier of letters and cut-and-pasted bits of them into running collections (rather lazily even). That is not what a forgery looks like. Forgers just fake the letter they want (see 3 Corinthians, for example). They don’t construct awkward Frankenstein’s monsters as if from some previous collection of material. Only someone who is editing an already-existing collection of material does that—and in this case, that already-existing collection demonstrably pre-date’s Marcion’s, because his collection of these letters already shows this redactional activity. The same follows for all the material even in his version that undermines all his supposed doctrines. A forger would just make documents entirely endorsing their views—they do not fabricate documents that only awkwardly fit them (and even then only with interpretive apologetics). Similarly, forgers would not produce arguments rendered obsolete by subsequent events (e.g. 1 Clement fails to know the excellent examples of its own points in the Judas narrative and the Jewish rebellion; while Hebrews is written in ignorance of the fact that the Second Temple, which it is trying to argue its readers to stop relying on, doesn’t even exist anymore—even someone pretending to write ‘before’ then would capitalize on this slam-dunk argument with at least prophetic declaration, not forget that the argument is even available, and conclusively settles their side).
The evidence against the radical Trobisch-Vinzent thesis extends even to specific particulars. For example, it is almost certain that 1 Cor. 14:34–35 is an interpolation (and Trobisch agrees: 150n16)—it has Paul insist women keep quiet in congregations, after the real Paul had just given rules for women speaking in congregations (there is also some manuscript evidence, and more than shows up in standard critical apparatuses: see my discussion of Pauline interpolations in Hitler Homer Bible Christ). Yet this verse was in Marcion’s edition. The anti-Marcionite edition added the forged Pastorals to double down on Paul’s fabricated misogyny. But they did not interpolate this sentiment into 1 Corinthians. Someone did that before Marcion. Which means Marcion did not “invent” 1 Corinthians. He inherited it—indeed, he inherited it from a whole chain of prior redactors. Because whoever pastiched the letters to Corinth into a single “First Letter to Corinth” is not likely the same person who added verses 14:34–35, because the pasticher notably did not add verses even to smooth over the stitches, so they were clearly not inclined to add verses at all. That wasn’t on their agenda.
Likewise, 1 Clement cannot have been written before the late 60s A.D., yet references Paul’s letters to Corinth, so we know such things existed then (see How We Can Know 1 Clement Was Actually Written in the 60s AD and Interpreting 1 Clement’s Supposed Descriptions of Fabulous Murders). 1 Clement had not yet heard of the legend of Paul being executed by Nero in Rome (which is all over texts of the late second century), because he still thinks Paul died in Spain (the ‘farthest reaches of the West’). 1 Clement had no knowledge of the Gospel narratives at all (as I mentioned, he fails to use the apposite Judas narrative in his examples of betrayal; he does not know the splitting of the woes sayings into two different places as in the Gospels, he still thinks they were one coherent saying uttered together; and so on: see Historicity, ch. 8.5).
Likewise, the describer of the Damascus incident in 2 Cor. 11 had not heard of the Damascus incident described in Acts 9 (they contradict each other on what happened and why: see How We Know Acts Is a Fake History); indeed, the author of Galatians had not heard of the completely contradictory narrative of Acts 6–9: the real Paul says he had never even been to Judea until after his conversion, whereas Acts places him there from the start; the real Paul says he went immediately to Arabia after his conversion, not Damascus, whereas Acts deletes the Arabian adventure altogether—even though it would obviously have better explained the Damascus incident described in 2 Cor. 11 (since having just fled Arabia would explain why Arabian marshals were chasing him, a detail Acts simply eliminates altogether, converting Paul’s enemies into local ‘Jews’ rather than foreign royal deputies). It is true that Acts was invented to change all of these things (it is deliberately rewriting Paul), but if you were planning to include Acts with these letters, and had total editorial control over both, why wouldn’t you harmonize them? And if Marcion fabricated this letter, why would he not explain these obscure references? It is unlikely he ingeniously created a coherent backstory for two obscure references across two letters, and then forgot to provide that backstory. It is much more likely the backstory is not there (yet multiple independent references to it are) because Paul was writing to congregations who already knew it. This device makes little sense as a product of a coordinated forgery.
More damning is the structure of Mark. I would be delighted to find that Matthew was the first Gospel after all, and Mark just a summary, because Matthew is the most fabulous (and thus most obviously entirely fictional) Gospel. That would all but destroy any hope that Jesus was a historical person, rather than a product of literary fantasy. But alas, the evidence for Markan priority is overwhelming, not just as documented by Goodacre, but as I and others document in respect to Markan structure. For example, all of Dennis MacDonald’s evidence of Markan emulation of Homer gets ignored by Matthew and Luke, who borrow material from Mark preserving some of the Homeric mimesis (so they know a text that has it—which would be Mark) but destroying its order and completeness (so they don’t know or care about the original Homeric composition of the text).
Similarly, all the other structure I find in Historicity (Ch. 10.4), which explains all sorts of oddities in Mark (like why he doubles the five miracles of Jesus into ten separate stories, a Mosaic decalogue, and constructs a strange, repetitive, criss-crossing of the Sea of Galilee from Jewish to Gentile lands and back that correlates to an elaborate triadic structure), but which was lost in Matthew and Luke, who took some of this (even repetitively) but destroyed the original structure that explained it all (replacing it with their own structural choices: Chs. 10.5 and 10.6). This means those stories originated in that structure—and therefore not in Matthew or Luke.
Similarly, Luke’s Nativity only makes sense as a correction to Matthew’s (reversing his account of the family of Jesus becoming literal outlaws into Luke’s account of them being obsessively obedient to the law, Jewish and Roman), not the other way around. Though Marcion skipped the Nativity altogether, it’s hard to explain how one would get tacked on to Luke that “fixed” and thus contradicted Matthew’s when one is supposing the same people wrote both narratives to correct Marcion. That is simply not a coherent theory. It is, rather, hopelessly convoluted. Its plausibility is crushed under the weight of its own epicycles.
This has not been an exhaustive list of examples. The evidence against Trobisch and Vinzent’s chronology is extensive, far more extensive than I’ve summarized. Their theory performs very poorly in explaining the redactional changes and agendas across Mark, Matthew, and Luke (as well as even our John), and in explaining the content or editorial mashwork of the Epistles (in and out of the canon). Their ultimate conclusion is therefore doomed. It has no prospect of being true. But Origin and Resetting are not dependent on these conclusions. The idea that the entire NT was written after 135 A.D. is not their core thesis, and thus it could be deleted from both books entirely and they would remain coherent, useful studies.
The Trobisch Case
Trobisch expands on his previously established theory (which was based on telltale signs in surviving manuscripts: see The First Edition of the New Testament) that the NT canon is really just a later endorsement of an actual published edition from the late second century, a collection of books assembled together to counteract the original NT edition of Marcion (which does not survive, but definitely predated ours). What Trobisch adds now are a lot of analyses showing specific editorial decisions across all the books chosen for that collection (most of which is reasonably argued, and valuable to consult); and then this additional punt to the idea that, therefore, the whole thing was fabricated for that function: Marcion fabricated all his stuff; these editors then redacted his stuff and fabricated more stuff; and voila, the New Testament. This is the bit that isn’t well argued.
For example, at one point Trobisch argues that Paul’s assistant “Tertius,” who scribed Romans (or at least part of what we now call Romans) on Paul’s dictation (Romans 16:22), must be made up because Tertius means “Third” and yet he is ironically a “third” party to the letter (neither author nor addressee, 180n38). But Tertius was also a well-known name in antiquity—both a Roman gens (family name) and first name (Tertius meant “Third Son” hence “Thirdson,” like Quintus, “Fifthson,” and Sextus, “Sixthson,” even more common first names than Tertius) and even a nickname (a cognomen; examples), but also a slave name. In fact naming slaves or freedmen with a number was even more common than for free men (Frank, p. 692). That the household of Gaius (from where Paul writes: Romans 16:23) also had a Quartus (whom Trobisch also tries to claim is a joke name; it’s not, it’s a real, well-attested name) suggests these are the slaves of Gaius, which is a Roman name, hence likely in this case a Roman citizen—evidently of some wealth, hobnobbing with a city magistrate even. There is nothing improbable here. Without any evidence to support Trobisch’s reason for the name to be here over the more obvious reason it is, the likelihoods are a wash; and without evidence in this case, since most appearances in the ancient record of the names “Tertius” and “Quartus” are real and not joke names or symbolical names, the priors favor these being real people. So we simply cannot claim what Trobisch is. And I am someone who is sympathetic to such arguments. But I have also been critical of the over-use of such hypotheses without adequate evidence or warranted confidence (I describe the required method in Proving History, 192–204).
Contrast the example of Cicero’s joke involving the name Tertia (the female form) attested in Suetonius: (1) the context establishes it is a joke (so we do not have to “posit” that it is) and (2) the joke is based on there being a real actual woman of that name. So it isn’t even a joke name there. It’s just a joke made out of a real person’s name. We cannot argue from this that therefore Junia Tertia didn’t exist, that Suetonius or Cicero made her up. We need better evidence than we have, if we want to get to a conclusion like Trobisch’s—and that means, in Bayesian terms, facts that are improbable on any other explanation than his. But a wealthy Gaius having some slaves or freedmen named with numbers isn’t improbable. Whereas, to the contrary, on Trobisch’s reading, the intended joke isn’t even well motivated. He suggests this is a device to fabricate eyewitness testimony, which was a thing (we have examples of authors doing that), but here there is no particular need of such a thing. It does no work. It doesn’t even explain why there are four witnesses listed here—because there are in fact eight, and Tertius is not the third one listed, nor is Quartus the fourth, nor is there a Primus or a Secundus to complete the list. The assignment of only two of these witnesses these numbers-for-names, while the others get nonnumerical names, simply makes no sense on Trobisch’s theory. It is ‘possible’ but there is no evidence to make it probable. We therefore can do nothing with it as a premise.
Trobisch would be on better ground in the Gospels, where fake names appositely chosen for their roles in the story is common (unlike the authentic Epistles, where there is not a single clear case of it; certainly none as clear as any in the Gospels). But alas, that’s not the context he is trying this on. And yet even there we have evidence. The name Nicodemus, for example, which means “Victory for the People,” has three improbable features rendering its fabrication likely: the name is otherwise unattested in Judea (and is a particularly weird name for a member of the Jerusalem Sanhedrin); and it is weirdly apposite in context, as Nicodemus stands up for the people (John 7:50) and is declared even by Jesus to be “Israel’s teacher” (John 3:10) and prevails in his judgment for their salvation (John 19:38–40); and he has been inserted into stories where he never appeared before (e.g., the Synoptics have Joseph tend the body; now Nicodemus shows up to help, a character never mentioned in any prior Gospel). Combined, all these things together are improbable unless this is a fictional character, whose name serves some symbolical function. Trobisch has nothing like this to offer for Tertius.
Trobisch commits all these same errors with other attempts to invent new narratives behind names and passages in the Bible. As, for example, when trying to argue (127) that the conclusion of Hebrews 13 was fabricated to invent a Pauline authorship for it—yet without just saying Paul wrote it, an omission that makes no sense on Trobisch’s theory: if that’s what the editors wanted, that’s what they would have done, not this elaborate word-game that Trobisch contrives, and for which he presents no evidence. It’s even more illogical given his assumption that these editors forged the whole letter. The other letters they forged clearly say Paul wrote them, with named secretaries even; why would they suddenly forget how to do that here? Why would they change their method—and only here? This evidence is simply far more likely if Hebrews was a pre-existent letter that they didn’t edit; that’s why its fit is awkward: its author’s name is missing (possibly because they deleted it, possibly because it was lost in transmission well before this); its style is aberrant; it never appeals to Pauline authority; and it is unaware that the one thing it was written to combat (a reliance on Jewish temple cult) was no longer a problem that needed addressing.
In the same fashion, Trobisch’s theory makes little sense of attributing letters to James and Jude (125): he wants this to have been the forging of an attribution to the authority of Jesus’s brothers, but that is conspicuously (and bizarrely) what these letters do not do. On Trobisch’s theory, we expect to a high probability that the forgers would have these authors identify themselves as the brothers of Jesus (or of the Lord or whatever). But they don’t. That’s simply improbable on his thesis. It is, however, entirely expected if these are not the brothers of Jesus, but early Apostles of these names—who were brothers of each other, not of Jesus. They also lack features expected if forged for the agendas of the mid-second century. For example, they show no knowledge of the concept of “Disciples,” knowing only of “Apostles” which is significantly not the same thing; they have no knowledge of any of the stories in the Gospels or Acts; and they appear to appeal to a context closer to the historical Paul’s, unaware of how all the fraught foci of debate had shifted after a hundred years. So Trobisch is just acting like because he can think of an “alternative history” for these letters and their contents that, therefore, as if by magic, his new narrative is then more likely. He never appeals to evidence for his theory; and he ignores all evidence against his theory.
On occasion I did catch Trobisch’s reasoning being based on a factually false premise, as when he tries to draw conclusions from the supposed fact that Romans 1:3 is the ‘only’ time Jesus is said to be related to David in the authentic letters of Paul (noting it appears otherwise ‘only’ in 2 Tim. 2:8: 178n20). But that’s not true: Romans 15:12 repeats the sentiment (it just doesn’t use the word “David,” but a metonym instead, “root of Jesse,” which is just a poetic way of saying the same thing). Also, he claims “nine out of ten letter collections published in antiquity” are fake (140), but cites only himself, and in a work I have no access to to check what he could mean by that, but I suspect this is inaccurate—I think such a result can only be reached by padding the category of “letter collections” with Christian forgeries of Paul’s letters (in the canon and out), making his counting a bit circular—and self-defeating, as it is precisely the difference between those forgeries and the “authentic seven” (or maybe six) that we know this, which is evidence for the authentic letters being real, not the other way around. They do not fit type. Otherwise, the letter collections of Epicurus, Cicero, Seneca, Pliny, Fronto, Libanius, Symmachus, Jerome, Paulinus, Ambrose, and Augustine already makes for ten legit letter collections, a lot more than “one” (and I stopped counting at the fourth century, in case his framing of “ancient” was meant to exclude beyond). I understand his logic of prior probability here (Christians usually forged letters, therefore we need reasons to believe any authentic) but it doesn’t warrant skipping over evidence that supports Paul’s seven being real.
But such mistakes are scant. When Trobisch errs, it’s typically only in logic, often with hasty inferences unchecked by attention to Bayesian priors or likelihoods. For example, he will just, out of the blue, declare “the odds are strongly in favor” of his theory of Mark and Matthew being riffs on Luke (139), without even presenting evidence for those odds—much less effective evidence, such as would get him a “strongly” favorable odds. Indeed, I am left to ask, what does he even think these odds are, or what range of odds he thinks counts as “strongly in favor”? Historians need to stop making mathematical statements without doing any math. But there isn’t even any evidence offered across the whole book for upping those odds; hence not even an implied mathematical argument. So when one reads this book, you need to attend carefully to his logic: many times he arrives at confident conclusions merely after proposing a hypothesis, forgetting to present any evidence that his hypothesis is probable (at all, much less more probable than the most likely alternative may be: for example, watch what happens across pages 110–11).
Other times Trobisch attends correctly to inductive logic and presents evidence (which means: facts that are improbable on any other theory than his, especially the most likely alternative to his, and conclusions that have, or that he has established have, already reasonable prior probabilities), and that’s where his book does well. But he himself will never tell you which is happening: you have to observe carefully to catch when either is going on. Sometimes that takes work, like when he will “interpret” editorial changes out of a text without giving evidence, but he did give evidence earlier supporting the general principles he applies, so you have to recall that to “see” the evidence backing specific applications of his interpretive hypothesis. Trobisch also performs poorly in modulating his confidence—almost every conclusion he hyperbolically asserts as strong, when often it is not. Many of his conclusions do achieve a balance of probability (his conclusions are more probably than not true), but not a strong confidence beyond that; and you often won’t see him admit this. Often, insteasd, you will have to “downtone” his statements of overconfidence without misreading that downtoning as warranting doubt of his conclusions. The matter is rarely so black and white.
Nevertheless, most of what Trobisch argues is logical. And his overall project is sound: his actual core thesis is that the New Testament must be treated as a concerted work of edited propaganda, assembled (and even written or edited) at a particular time, by a particular group, for a particular purpose. If you do not heed this context, every conclusion you reach will go astray, fooled by the very propaganda itself (and thus gullibly becoming yet another of its intended victims). Indeed the first third of his book teaches from examples outside the Bible of how propaganda operates in the domain of literature, which he then shows applies to the NT. Overall he does a good job of showing what Christian literature as a whole was doing (in and out of the Bible), what it was for, and the tactics it repeatedly employed to sell forgeries and lies to win doctrinal (and socio-political) points in ongoing (particularly timely) disputes, and that our NT as a single published unit belongs to this literature, indeed as a paradigmatic example of it, not an exception to it (and Vinzent shores this up with even more extensive examples).
For instance, Trobisch makes a good case that the Pastorals and the Johannines, and 2 Peter and Jude, and the final redaction of the Gospel of John were produced (literally made-to-order) by the editors of the anti-Marcionite edition—in other words, the same people who selected the books to publish together that would later become our familiar canon (see Three Things to Know about New Testament Manuscripts), those people actually wrote (or commissioned the intentional writing of) those forged epistles and that final edit of John. By the same logic this could also be true of our edition of Acts and the Nativity of Luke (if, IMO, we allow, contra Trobisch, the Nativity of Matthew to already be circulating for it to ‘rewrite’). His case for all this is reasonable—not conclusive, but it tips the odds at least a little in favor: the evidence does suggest all these texts and edits share a common purpose and ideology and a common period of production, all of which ultra-convenient to the entire purpose of the anti-Marcionite edition, which is at least a little less likely on any other thesis.
These forgeries needn’t share the same author, because this would have been a group working together or at an organizer’s behest—one tasked with producing the Johannines, another the Pastorals, etc. Which would explain the common style within them (the Pastorals all seem by the same hand, and one similar to our version of Luke’s; the Johannines, and the final redaction of John, by another). Trobisch’s thesis also makes more sense of what does appear to have been a coherent, coordinated program of propagandists in the last half of the second century. For example, he provides a good explanation of how and why the myths and legends of how the Gospels were written and preserved were invented (and thus are wholly fake); which is a project even more thoroughly completed by Vinzent.
Even when Trobisch’s more dubious thesis (of a wholesale late forgery of the entire NT) is abandoned, his arguments can survive to another effect: for example, when he argues that the editor brought Luke together with Mark and Matthew, this was “Theophilus” producing “the sources Luke had used” (138), in an effort to undermine Marcion’s alleged abuse of Luke’s Gospel, by producing its predecessor-texts—which happen to call into question Marcion’s program. For example, both prove continuity with Judaism and thus the antiquity rather than novelty of Christianity. To Trobisch, this is evidence that Mark and Matthew were forged to the purpose. But there is no evidence of that. More credibly, the reason Mark and Matthew were brought in for the purpose was that they were, in fact, Luke’s sources. That would have been even more effectual than suddenly coming up with alleged sources no one had ever seen before. Meanwhile, on this same reasoning, John was added to “correct” Luke (for examples of how it does that, see my analysis in Historicity, Ch. 10.7), which was then itself included to usurp its authority, controlling its interpretation rather than trying to condemn it, indeed passing off their expanded version of it as the real one. (This could also explain why there are two versions of Luke-Acts: if the even longer one not in the canon, such as is preserved in Codex Bezae, is the actual original, and Marcion’s and ours different edits thereof.)
In any event, that far better explains the problematic baggage of contradictions their inclusion brought to bear. Forgers would not self-sabotage like that. But propagandists including already-known texts would explain why they didn’t have perfectly suitable texts to use, just texts suitable enough—all problems ensuing could then be solved exegetically or apologetically. This would agree with my own theory that these four contradictory Gospels were brought into the edition because they were the texts most widely used in churches the anti-Marcionites most wanted to win over in their campaign to expel and marginalize Marcion. Which is the same reason the Nicene creed was contrived, despite being a hopeless tangle of unintelligible contradictions: it is a Frankenstein’s monster of all the creeds of all the churches chosen to be the “in group,” and which excludes all the churches politically selected for abolition, thus effecting the needed political in-group/out-group inclusion/exclusion protocol by Shibboleth (as is well argued in the closing chapters of Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God). Trobisch himself even describes such a theory for the assembly of the NT (28).
One final caveat to note is that I was confused reading synopses of this book describing Trobisch’s theory as proposing all the books of the NT “are” autographs. He does say this in the book, but he is using the word “autograph” weirdly, indeed double-weirdly, and it took reading the whole book to untangle what he actually means. Normally “autograph” means the actual, physical original (with ink actually placed on the papyrus by the author, or a scribe under his eye). Trobisch instead means just “written by who it says or implies.” Also, rather than meaning that these attributions are authentic, he means that they are fabricated: all the attributions, to every book in the NT, are false. As I’ve noted, I disagree with half those claims. But he does smartly discuss the techniques used to fabricate authenticity in the NT (such as, for example, his case for the editors faking a reference to a non-existent manuscript as a source in John 21:24: 89), and even when a specific claim he makes can be doubted, his points retain general validity (he is describing techniques that actually are attested across world literature, and ancient Christian literature in particular, as he well documents), and thus remain food for thought: his conclusions, even when wrong, still have to be ruled out, not merely dismissed. As such this book is useful even when it is in error.
The Vinzent Case
Vinzent shores up a lot of what Trobisch argues. He provides an even more detailed explanation of how and why the myths and legends of how the Gospels were written and preserved were invented (and thus are wholly fake), and thus why we should not trust them—and likewise everything else we are ‘told’ by Christian propagandists about their first century (or even early second). That is, in fact, the main occupation of his book, and as such, it is required reading now for anyone who would attempt to write (or even comprehend) a history of the origins or early development of Christianity. He starts with Gregory of Tours and works back, through Orosius, then Eusebius, and so on down (through the likes of Tertullian and Irenaeus all the way to Acts and its various iterations), and pulling back layer after layer of legendary development, propaganda, and telephone-gaming, until what we have left is…nothing. Which means most if not all of what we have been told about how Christianity began and developed is false, invented-to-purpose or exaggerated into existence by the desperation of faith (for my own example of what Vinzent does to a far greater extent: see How To Fabricate History: The Example of Eusebius on Alexandrian Christianity). With all that, I am on board. And this looks to be the most complete defense of that point yet.
Unlike Trobisch, I did not read Vinzent’s book in detail. I skimmed for sense, looking for conclusions, and what evidence he presented for them, and I was not as much concerned to vet either, because it was clear most of his project looks sound. So I did some spot-checking of Vinzent’s overall angle and found nothing amiss. But when I checked his specific extreme claim of the entire NT being a post-Marcion invention, just as with Trobisch I found no evidence at all, just a lot of fallacious reasoning. So these two components of his book need to be separated and treated differently. Vinzent also differs from Trobisch in allowing some versions of Revelation and the Pauline Epistles to predate Marcion (everything other than the Pastorals, which we all agree are post-Marcion), but his position is that we cannot recover the original text: all we have is Marcion’s edit overlayed with an anti-Marcionite edit. Which is contrary to the consensus position which is that we have the pre-Marcionite edition of those letters, with nevertheless perhaps some anti-Marcionite editing. An example of how this affects the debate is our trust in the authenticity of 1 Cor. 8:6 as we have it, whose reference to the Christ as Creator is more likely something Marcion deleted than that the anti-Marcionites added (likewise Colossians 1:16).
To be fair, Vinzent regards most of his “case” for, in particular, Lukan priority, to have been made elsewhere (Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels). But as best I can tell, that still leans on the same fallacy as repeated here. I haven’t read it (it’s beyond my means to acquire a copy), so maybe he goes into answering the text-critical, literary, and structural arguments against Lukan priority I just surveyed earlier; and maybe (?) it does so successfully, but I am not encouraged by what I saw here. This book makes essentially no arguments at all for Lukan priority, except occasional non sequiturs which don’t even mention the kind of evidence I have. And, like Trobisch, suddenly when this is the target, factual accuracy wanes as well as logic. I’ll just give one example as illustrative:
Vinzent argues that “there is no reason” Tertullian “should have fabricated and attributed to Marcion the notion that the four gospels were plagiarized versions of Marcion’s own gospel” (161), therefore Marcion said that and told the truth; therefore, Marcion’s Gospel (the first draft of what later was named Luke) must have predated the canonical four. This is both illogical and factually in error. First, obviously we could imagine Marcion would make such an accusation—that’s how propaganda works. For example, I have no doubt that the reason Matthew copies Mark almost verbatim is that he intended to pass his work off as the original and falsely accuse Mark of being the corrupted version. 2 Thessalonians even attempts to imply 1 Thessalonians is the forgery (2 Thessalonians 2:1–3, 3:16–17; it is, of course, the other way around). Trobisch documents this repeatedly as a common tactic of propaganda, then as now. So Vinzent’s argument lacks even logic. We cannot infer Marcion was telling the truth here. But it also is factually incorrect: Tertullian never says this.
Vinzent cites here Tertullian, Against Marcion 4.3.2. Read that all through. Tertullian never says Marcion claimed the other Gospels were written after his. What Tertullian actually says is that Marcion tried to discredit those other Gospels (destruendum statum eorum evangeliorum quae propria et sub apostolorum nomine eduntur, lit. ‘tearing down the status of those Gospels, which are genuine and produced under the name of the Apostles’). But he says Marcion did that by admitting those Gospels were written by Apostles but then claiming those Apostles perverted the message (apostolos praevaricationis et simulationis suspectos Marcion haberi queritur usque ad evangelii depravationem, ‘Marcion complains that the Apostles are suspected of prevarication and pretense, all the way to perverting the gospel’). Which means Marcion made, in fact, the opposite claim to what Vinzent alleges. We might doubt the honesty of Tertullian (he’s not an honest man), but even then we don’t have any evidence of this premise Vinzent invented—of Marcion claiming the other Gospels were written after his. To the contrary, we have here evidence Marcion recognized they preceded his—because the only argument he then had was that they were distorted. This turns Vinzent’s own reasoning against him: Tertullian would not have much reason to “hide” Marcion making Vinzent’s argument (as then Tertullian would need to rebut that argument); we can therefore trust that Tertullian is at least attempting to rebut the argument Marcion actually made.
Which means Marcion did attest to those other Gospels predating his, and even evinced or supported the belief that they were written by actual Disciples! This is why Tertullian’s response is to argue against the claim that the Apostles could have distorted the text, by noting it is then even less likely someone who wasn’t an Apostle (Luke) would preserve it reliably. What never occurs to Tertullian is to present arguments for those Gospels predating Marcion’s. He simply takes that for granted as acknowledged even by Marcion. So Vinzent’s argument here is not only illogical, it’s contrary to fact—it fails to mention that the fact appears instead to be that Marcion denied Lukan priority. There are almost no arguments for Lukan priority in this book, and when you stumble on any, they are always like this (162): illogical and factless.
However, that does not undermine the rest, as once we excise this claim everywhere from Vinzent’s book, as best I could tell the rest holds up as factually accurate and well argued. But as I said, I did not thoroughly verify that. So if you read the book more closely and find any other boners in there, do please mention them in comments, or ask about any fact-claims or inferences you find in Resetting that you aren’t sure of.
Conclusion
I am not yet convinced of either new trend: that the Old Testament was forged by committee in the second century B.C. I am not yet convinced of because I cannot vet the case and I need to see OT experts address it fairly first; while that the New Testament was forged by committee in the second century A.D. I am not yet convinced of because the evidence is non-existent and countered by a vast swath of evidence against it. Nevertheless, you must avoid this black-or-white fallacy, as all others: I agree with pieces of what they are saying. Roughly half of the NT has been forged, probably for the very purpose (and around the very time) that Vinzent and Trobisch document; while the other half has gone through untrustworthy editorial hands, and some even originates dubiously regardless (e.g., the Gospels and Acts, for example, are mythologies, not histories in any legitimate sense). So my rejecting their extremest conclusion does not warrant embracing the opposite extreme bandied by modern apologists: Trobisch and Vinzent prove the editorial and agenda-driven dishonesty in the production of the NT and its every book is real and of concern. Because most of their books isn’t even concerned with the extreme conclusion, but the more measured one, developing extremely useful, and often correct, analyses of early Christian propaganda, in and out of the Bible. And this is something all historians must now be aware of and take seriously even wherever they might still disagree.
Hi dr. Carrier,
I invite you to read Vinzent’s Christ’s Torah (2023) where he makes his case on the priority of Marcion over even Mark. I remember that Vinzent is based strongly, even if he recognizes so only in a little note, on the Couchoud’s identical case of the Marcionite priority (the dense commentary of Couchoud about the Evangelion is found in the second volume of the his Creation of Christ, available freely here). Note that Paul-Louis Couchoud was the past Mythicist to which Earl Doherty, by his own confession, was more indebted, even more than the various A. Drews, W. B. Smith, etc, since Couchoud argued better than others for the celestial crucifixion in Paul.
A point where both Vinzent and Couchoud sound persuasive to me, about the priority of Marcion on Mark, is when they point out that Mark broke the secrecy about the identity of Jesus as the Jewish Messiah (son of YHWH), not coincidentially, just where the parallel passages in Marcion the secrecy is preserved (raising doubts about YHWH being really the divine father of Jesus, and not rather the Unknown God adored by Marcion).
First parallel: in Marcion you have an alien descended from above in the incipit. As Trobisch puts it: The first sentence of the Marcionite gospel book gives the fifteenth year of Tiberius as the date and has an unknown character walk down to “Capharnaum, a city in Galilee,” where people call him “Jesus of Nazareth.” (E. Trobisch, On the Origin of Christian Scripture, p. 106)
Mark broke the secrecy by making it clear that Jesus is adopted by YHWH as his beloved son during the baptism by John.
Second parallel: in Marcion Jesus doesn’t answer to the Pharisees questioning the origin of the his authority, and continues to not answer also after.
Mark broke the secrecy by making Jesus answer immediately after by introducing the Parable of the Vineyard (absent in Marcion), where the Pharisees realize that Jesus is the son of the master (i.e.: YHWH) of the Vineyard.
Third parallel: in Marcion/Luke 22:70-71 you have:
They all asked, “Are you then the Son of God?”He replied, “You say that I am.” (Meaning: tu dices, ego non)
Mark 14:61-62 broke the secrecy by having:
Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” “I am,” said Jesus.
How can I exorcise the suspicion that Mark is correcting Marcion there? Note that it is not necessary for the Vinzent’s case that Marcion wrote the Evangelion. It was sufficient the ‘dangerous’ association of proto-Luke with the Marcionite interpretation of it to provoke the anti-marcionite reaction by Mark, Matthew, Luke-Acts and John.
Thanks in advance for any answer.
Giuseppe
Can you summarize the evidence he presents there? (Or is it only the following argument about secrecy elements?)
And would you say that book is a better one for that argument than Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels?
That is, does Torah include all the arguments in Dating, or improve or add to them? Or would I be better off reading Dating, because it is more thorough and Torah adds nothing new?
That argues the other way around: that suggests Mark is primitive (closer to Paul’s secrecy theology), and Luke “fixing” it to make it more modern (when the secrecy idea no longer made sense). See Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles.
Only in the first century does “inserting” a secrecy element work narratively. It would make no sense for a redactor of Luke to then insert it. That wouldn’t fit the context or do any work theologically.
And there is no evidence of this (e.g. Tertullian never makes an argument out of this disparity, so as to justify why anyone would have created it).
Nor does it make coherent sense. A redactor who wanted to recreate secrecy would not add a secrecy element and then break it; they would remove the breaking of it. Whereas this author clearly intended to combine both, e.g. Jesus tells the exorcized not to speak, and they speak anyway; this actually tracks the theme mirrored from beginning to end (John speaks boldly; the women don’t: OHJ, 421). So whoever is composing this version of the story clearly wants both elements present, and that’s as likely to be the case before Luke as after (and for the reasons noted above, is actually less likely to be the case after).
Seems a slam dunk that the TaNaKh was invented to legitimise the Hasmonean political religious project. But where does the material come from that it is based on? I don’t think you can sanely argue it is a creation from whole cloth; most of this material almost must have existed in some form or other; even if it has been added to and redacted creatively.
Quite a few scholars have reconstructed to a greater or lesser degree Marcion’s ‘Euagellion’ and ‘Apostolikon’ and find it is more or less the same content as reflected in the Western Text and there is a substantial amount of Torah flavoured material that simply wouldn’t be there if Marcion wrote the whole thing up anew. I’m satisfied he was working with found texts that preceded him. I incline to an expansion of ‘Mark’ rather than a proto-‘Luke’; but the texts preceded him whatever the case. His ‘Apostolikon’ of ten letters already includes forgeries.
Because the ‘Little Apocalypse’ maps better the circumstances of the Bar Kochba War, I can see the creation of “gospels” as simultaneous and post that; but the core of ‘genuine’ epistles? Hardly, they simply don’t reference what became the established Jesus story and in fact obviously contradict it, which is hardly likely if they were written by the folk peddling what became the party line!
Trobisch might be going OTT because of his ‘Museum of the Bible’ experience, with all the content that turned out to be very dubious; stolen; or both. Enough to drive anyone to it being forgeries all the way down!
Consensus? The latest defensive position established by religious loonies after the previous half dozen fell to the shock armies of reason. Laudable I’m sure; but you’ll inevitably find yourself fighting in the Chancellery Garden while Errorman shoots himself in the Bunker. 😉
This is covered by the authors handling the literary argument. The short answer is Plato, (mostly) lost Greek writers on the history of Egypt and the Levant, popular Hebrew lore (firecamp tales of the era; what historians would charitably call “oral lore” but which all anthropologists know is not history but mythology and folklore, the equivalent of “urban legends” and “alternative facts” today), and individual creativity (i.e. much of it is just made up, the same way as the forty or so Gospels and three dozen or so Acts).
In fact, how history gets fabricated, based on all those sources (invention to the moment, riffs on popular literature, and contemporary folklore), is precisely the point of Vinzent’s study—for the Christians. And to an extent also Trobisch. Their books together provide all the tools and concepts and precedents one needs to apply to the Hebrew case: because they did literally all the same exact things, only four hundred years earlier (or so the literary thesis holds; which is supported by the archaeological thesis, as the literary thesis predicts the archaeological results while the traditional theory doesn’t).
It cannot. Because it still has the temple standing to be destroyed and Jerusalem inhabited. By the time of the Bar Kochba revolt, Jerusalem was an uninhabited ruin, and the temple had been razed. The author of Mark 13 had no concept of this. Likewise, Mark 13:30 is an obvious apologetic to kick the can down the road (from Paul’s “in our generation” to, now, the last standing member of that generation—an apologetic that only works for the first Jewish War, not the second, when it was completely inconceivable anyone from 30 A.D. would still be alive).
Mark 11 also has the fig tree / temple clearing ring structure which is all based on explaining why God destroyed the temple, and Mark 12 is a Passover Haggadah leading from 11 to 13, so the author of Mark 11–13 is constructing an apologetic for the first Jewish War, not the second (see OHJ, 427–28, and for contextual relevance, 432–35).
A better fit is John: our redaction of that has removed all the apocalyptic timeline stuff altogether. That sounds like someone writing after the Bar Kochba revolt (or possibly a decade before at most).
Kicking the can was no longer plausible by then. The apocalypse had to be abstracted away into an unexpected future time (hence John 5:28–29 says the dead will soon hear the news—but only “will” rise, a future imperfect, meaning an unspecific future time—it is also vague as to “how” people will come forth, as it could describe a secret afterlife in heaven or hell, rather than an actual terrestrial apocalypse).
Or even John 21:22–24 could be a can kick designed to stretch Mark’s saying an impossible timeline out (as now we have someone God is miraculously keeping alive and thus we are no longer constrained by natural lifespans).
Maybe. But he was already heading this way before then (his thesis of the NT being a deliberately edited anti-Marcionite edition was already the well-proved conclusion of his First Edition, years before he was hired by the Museum of the Bible).
I’m not sure I understand your point about the dating of Mark 13 before the Bar Kochba Revolt? My understanding is that part of the impetus for the break out of war in 132 was that Hadrian had founded Aelia Capitolina when he visited Judaea in 130. And that created a backlash that fed into the revolt because up until then there had been a prevailing belief that eventually Rome would relent and allow the resumption of Temple sacrifice in Jerusalem. But in any case, i don’t understand why whatever changes arose in public belief after bar kochba make less likely Mark 13’s remarks on the destruction of the temple would be written. Will you please clarify what you mean about that?
As I explained already:
Mark 13 has Jesus explain why the temple was destroyed—as well as why the world had not immediately ended in result. The temple was not destroyed in the bar Kochba revolt. It was a pile of rubble then and had been for half a century. So the author of Mark 13 neither knows about the bar Kochba revolt nor is explaining anything pertaining to it.
Mark also has Jesus re-predict the world would end soon thereafter (within the generation still living in the 30s, which means before the bar Kochba revolt, by any math you do). So he clearly did not imagine the world would still exist in the 130s AD (or else hoped no one would notice the discrepancy in his prediction if it did).
Tertullian claimed that Marcion claimed, that the very first gospel and only valid one, the Gospel of the Lord, was dictated by Paul to Luke… Tertullian claimed to demonstrate that Marcion’s gospel was just a hacked up version of the current Luke… but what if the one Marcion referred to was actually our current Mark? Perhaps Marcion was told of the earlier dictation and assumed the hacked luke was the same but the real original was our Mark and the Luke and luke-light were made in the 2nd century? Papias’ Matthew and Mark are obviously not the ones we have today, perhaps other distortions of the transmission of the gospels occurred along the way. If Marcion was correct about Paul’s hallucinating the gospel to Luke, then we have the first book of Mormon model which seems to be what exists rather than any historical account of a real man.
Please cite where Tertullian says Marcion claimed his was “the first” gospel.
Speculation is idle. We are only interested in what is probable; not what is merely possible.
For what is probable see my books On the Historicity of Jesus (esp. chs. 8 to 11 and the summary in 12.3) and Jesus from Outer Space (esp. ch. 7).
Dr. Carrier wrote:
Likewise do you have an explanation as to what reason could Luke have for writing a contradictory geneology to Matthews? If we had access to Matthew’s Gospel and copied at least some from that when why would he not use that, but instead create one of his own that contradicts it?
This question is vexed by the fact that the Bezae text of Luke has yet another genealogy that is a hybrid of both (so we have three different genealogies transmitted in the Gospels).
I have yet to see a wholly satisfactory explanation. Clearly there was a reason (as something had to cause this continual meddling with the genealogy). But we are not sure of what it is.
The matter is even more complicated by the fact that the Pastorals condemn all genealogies (if these are the genealogies meant; the word could also mean pedigree and thus be attacking fake apostolic succession lists rather than the ancestry of Jesus).
For examples of struggling with these things see the classical articles of Waetjen and Kurz.
My best hypothesis at present (and it is not one of high confidence) is that Luke (or whoever) didn’t like Matthew’s genealogy because (1) it included women of ill repute (a famous fact scholars have much remarked upon—why women should even be in the genealogy is itself a question, but why all the ones who are are “morally dubious” by ancient sexual standards is indicative of a deliberate choice, in Matthew’s case probably to emphasize God’s use of the humble to achieve his messianic goals) and Luke wants to remove all implications of outlawry (so he cleans up the genealogy to make sure everyone on it has impeccable credentials for the purpose) and (2) it is messed up (the data don’t actually make sense, as Waetjen points out), and Luke wants to fix that (his genealogy is more credible). But this isn’t a perfect or complete explanation either.
Hi Richard,
it so happens I have read the two latest by Gmirkin (very compelling and convincing really) as well as Adler as well as the books you mention of Vinzent and Trobisch.
Regarding peer review I want to point out Trobisch’s explicit ‘Because the four authors Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John appear in the exact order as they do in the Four-Gospel volume, Irenaeus is most likely depending on the Canonical Edition.’ (page 14), while citing only the first two sentences to Against Heresies Book 3 Chapter 11 verse 8. Needless to say, this is false (the order there is “For that according to John … But that according to Luke … Matthew, again … Mark, on the other hand …”) – and has passed peer review
On topic: I read Vinzent in German:
…Irenäus von Lyon im späten zweiten Jahrhundert als Kronzeuge für die Sammlung von Schriften gilt, die wir heute mit dem Neuen Testament identifizieren. Vor ihm finden sich allerdings Hinweise zumindest auf einige der darin enthaltenen Bücher auch bei anderen Autoren, deren Werke z.T. fragmentarisch überliefert sind. (Page 19)
Vinzent has repeatedly argued in his latest books that, as I paraphrase in my latest, Justin Martyr mentions no names and numbers, and within two decades Irenaeus suddenly relates to most all. I find Trobisch to argue for the same in his latest.
Likewise the argument is that the canon was formed, and closed, de facto, by Irenaeus – and these are the shocking findings:
1) in 155-160 CE we find the first Patristic (who even calls himself Chrestian, as I have noticed) namely Justin Martyr. Justin indeed doesn’t mention any label of any kind, mostly “memoirs of the apostles”, save for:
First Apology 66 For the apostles, in the memoirs composed by them, which are called gospels;
Dialogue with Trypho 10 Moreover, I am aware that your precepts in the so-called gospel are so wonderful and so great;
Dialogue with Trypho 12 The Lawgiver is present, yet you do not see Him; to the poor the gospel is preached, the blind see, yet you do not understand;
Dialogue with Trypho 100 but also in the gospel it is written that He said: ‘All things are delivered unto me by My Father.’
Memoirs (of the apostles) are encountered in First Apology Chapter 66 and 67, and Dialogue with Trypho Chapters 100-107.
And that is it. No names, no numbers, no nothing.
And then
2) Irenaeus presents us with a full canon “as we know it” give or take a handful only two decades later
That is the time window, and there is nothing before that time window but scraps here and there.
There is no talk about internal or external witnesses, and you appear to misunderstand what they label the first gospel: that by “Marcion”, labelled *Ev by Klinghardt. Contrary to what the Patristics allege, “Luke” redacted *Ev and not the other way around. The votes are not out on whether *Ev was an original composition or a mere redaction, or even only a collection – but it is the “proto-Luke” that you are referring to, which obviously can’t be confused at all with Luke
I cordially invite you to read the 1400 page masterpiece by Klinghardt, or BeDuhn’s reconstruction, or the one by Bilby, who has recently made available BeDuhn’s in Greek as well. Again, you are misrepresenting the facts when you equate “proto-Luke” to Luke, and name “Lukan priority” when discussing the work of Vinzent and Trobisch
From Trobisch’s “On the Origin of Christian Scripture: The Evolution of the New Testament Canon in the Second Century” $11:
“Who is Mark?
Gospel according to Mark, the other gospel book Luke used, also distinguishes between the editorial title, Gospel according to Mark, and Mark’s title, “Gospel about Jesus Christ the Son of God”.
Which book by Trobisch are you referring to, when you claim “For example, he will just, out of the blue, declare “the odds are strongly in favor” of his theory of Mark and Matthew being riffs on Luke (139)”?
Regarding some of Vinzent’s that you argue against: AM IV 4,2 is quoted, not IV 3,2, when he states
“Tertullians Argument verdeutlicht den Vorwurf, den Markion in seinem Vorwort erhoben haben muss: Sein eigenes Evangelium sei durch vier Evangelien, die nach Tertullian die Namen von Aposteln und Apostelschüler trugen, also den vier uns später als kanonisch bekannten Mt, Joh, Mk und Lk, gefälscht worden, er spricht von Kollusionen, Plagiaten und Imitationen (praevaricationis et simulationis suspectos, adulteratio, aemulatio).220”
Regarding the “OT”; Gmirkin uses the time frame of 290-270 BCE, certainly not second century
I’ll leave it at this; you can buy Vinzent’s ebook for 40 bucks by the way, and I must say that I find the 170 for the hard copy to be offensive. IIRC the German ebook was 30, but it’s been a while
Concluding: I strongly advise you to get your dates right, and your terms; “Lukan priority” is idiotic in this context. Second, Marcionite Priority “is a thing” and not going away – I take that even further as it cannot be a coincidence that both Marcion as well as Luke share 57 Thomasine logia, going by Klinghardt’s reconstruction. I do posit that “original John” (for lack of a better term) does precede *Ev (and directly succeeds Thomas) – but that’s quite another story.
Third, the Patristics as well as all extant manuscript finds attest to nothing Christian prior to 150-ish CE – whereas those same Patristics abundantly attest to “heresies” prior to that date, of which “Marcion” is one.
First: Note that no one claims peer review is a 100% guaranteed fact-check of every sentence in a volume. It is simply a bar to pass that weeds out most of the bad.
But it is important nevertheless to correct them. And you are right: Irenaeus does not give the order that Trobisch claims. Which is similar to Vinzent not correctly describing what Tertullian claimed Marcion said about the other Gospels. Factual errors both. There are no doubt others. And as I noted already, from what I saw, their error rate is greater when it comes to their radical thesis, and lower when it comes to their general thesis.
Second: Correct. Justin cites apocryphal Gospels (he says the cave birth is in them; which is the Protevangelion of James, not in the canon). His student, Tatian, is then working with the canonical four, which correlates with Irenaeus more or less. Hence Trobisch places the edition in the 160s; Vinzent, in the 140s. They have their reasons, but I deem this a conservative range: their theory is compatible with both, and so I put it as “circa” 150 in Three Things to Know.
Third: I well know they claim Ev. was first and our Luke was a redaction later. I am making clear that that is not the current consensus view; and the current consensus view has far more evidence to its credit than theirs. So you seem to be the one confused. You are acting like the consensus view is their view. It is not. Their view is radical and improbable. I am working from the mainstream position and then only describing their view when I am speaking of their view. You may need to reread my article then, since you misunderstood this. I’ll add one clarification to help.
Fourth: Their only evidence for that is the argument from silence, which is wholly fallacious here. We have no documents in which to expect an earlier reference to the other Gospels (or our Luke), e.g. no Christian writings about the Gospels even exist from the first century, and none but fragments for the early second. You cannot argue from the silence of documents you do not have. See my discussion of the correct logical structure of Arguments from Silence in Proving History (index). Their methodology is therefore illogical.
Fifth: I am referring to the books my article is about. So when I cite a page in Trobisch, I am citing the book this article is discussing the content of. That should not require an explanation. And regarding Vinzent, he does in fact cite AM 4.3.2. In the book I am discussing. Perhaps he made a mistake. But AM 4.4.2 would appear to be the mistake, as that is simply a continuation of the argument in 4.3.2, and does not contain any such statement from Tertullian either.
Sixth: AM 4.4.2 simply repeats the same mode of argument as I document in 4.3.2. It adds only Marcion’s claim that his Luke was older than the canonical Luke, because the latter was interpolated; but Marcion does not say it was interpolated after him. He is saying the opposite: that our Luke predated his canon, and he “chose” to claim the reduced Luke he used as being the older one (and this is the claim Tertullian there argues against; this is no longer a discussion of the other Gospels at all).
You seem to be confusing this with Vinzent’s view that Marcion was lying about that and wrote his Luke, and then our Luke was expanded from his. That is not the view Tertullian is ascribing to Marcion; he is saying Marcion was claiming both editions of Luke existed when Marcion started out, and that Marcion decided the “unexpanded” Luke was the original Luke and the most reliable Gospel—not the “first” Gospel. Marcion could have been lying as Vinzent agrees he was. But that doesn’t help Vinzent’s radical thesis. And it doesn’t make what Vinzent says about what Tertullian said about Marcion true. It remains false—even if both Marcion and Tertullian were liars (and they were).
Seventh: Please read the article you intend to respond to. Literally its second paragraph says “was essentially forged in the third or even second (!) century B.C.” I am describing all the authors together. Gmirkin is the reason I included the third century in this sentence. You will notice I never say Gmirkin argues for the second century.
Eighth: There is no e-book of Marcion and the Dating at Amazon. Where might I find this?
Vinzent definitely goes into more detail in his Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels book on the order of publication and subsequent falsification. I highly recommend it. IIRC (it was 2018 when I read this, Trobisch’s First New Testament, and Crossan’s The Cross That Spoke in a span of 3 weeks, thanks to interlibrary loan, and the three flicked a lightbulb in my brain). His argument was Markion wrote an unpublished (by ancient standards) gospel, that was then picked up/(stolen? see Tertullian’s laughable claim to cover that he was the third person editing previous heresiological treatises against MarkION) and bastardized by others, and he responded by officially (by ancient standards)publishing (possibly more edits, the details escape me) his NT canon which included the Gospel, Apostolikon, and the Antithesis.
I’m not sure I get the same impression from Trobisch’s book that you do on de novo creations of NT texts, he did after all, write a similar book to both The First NT and the one you critique above on Paul’s Letter Collection where he argued that at least some aspect of the Paulines (IIRC he goes with 4 authentic) were edited by Paul and redacted in the style of ancient letter collections by their very authors (or autographists to use his idiosyncratic use of the term as you noted).
The view you attribute to Trobisch is not in this new book. Possibly that is his oversight. But as it stands, I cannot know what position he holds between them, if it is not the one he appears to argue in this new text, which is of wholesale anti-Marcionite forgery.
The outline you present of Vinzent seems to confuse hypothesis with evidence. You have described an even more epicycle-heavy and convoluted hypothesis. You have not mentioned any evidence for that hypothesis.
Only one small quibble as someone who grew up Lutheran. There’s a bit of name confusion in the synod differences. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) is a far more relaxed and liberal synod than the name might imply, even so far as accepting that the Bible is not inerrant and performing and accepting all forms of monogamous marriage rites and ordaining those across the gender spectrum. They are typically the farthest in similarities from the other “evangelical” denominations. It would be more impressive if it was the Missouri synod, Evangelical Lutheran Synod (yep, it’s a different thing), or the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod.
So while it’s important and impressive, it’s like the UU church publishing this than Evangelical Baptists.
Thank you for that clarification. It’s helpful data. I’ll emend the article to suit.
Minor Edits Dept.: found one “Trobish”, one “swatch” where I suspect “swath” was intended, and one “extremest” which may or may not have been intended (as “most extreme”) rather than “extremist”.
no-skin-in-the-game itch-scratching rabbit-hole I-was-already/still-convinced-of-Markan-priority Dept.:
even if (let’s pretend!) there were no other reasons to conclude Markan priority than the structural comparisons, would it still be a waste of effort [e.g. in defense of Lukan priority] to posit that gMark’s elaborate/tight structure could have been an ‘upgrade edit’ imposed upon sloppier Luke/Matt?
(I am about to poke around in my copy of OHJ, and if the answer is there let’s just assume I’ll find it; ditto if answered in any of the posts you linked above, which I have open now)
pure appreciation for the headaches Dept.:
“And it doesn’t make what Vinzent says about what Tertullian said about Marcion true. It remains false—even if both Marcion and Tertullian were liars (and they were).”
flashback to reading about ‘The Ignatian Vexation’ quite some years ago [but still in the current millennium, even if it doesn’t feel like it]. thanks for the belly-laugh! (and all the work)
I did mean extremest (not extremist). But the rest I corrected. Thanks!
As to the question: there are always reasons to posit theories and explore them; the only issue is what we conclude to be probable (or what is neither probable nor improbable enough to rule in or out), not what possibilities we explore.
Indeed, exploring contra-factual possibilities is the only way to discover their alternatives to be true. So it matters whether Vinzent has any good arguments. If they are all like what I have been shown so far, he doesn’t. But maybe there is something in his books I’m missing, so I’ll check at least the latest I was recommended here.
Hi Dr Carrier,
Surely in Christ’s Torah prof Vinzent makes a better argument than in Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels since in the latter book he focuses only on the presumed extra-gospel evidence for Marcionite priority, while it is in Christ’s Torah where he, assuming the reconstruction of *Ev ( = Evangelion) made by Klinghardt, compares it with Mark and the other gospels, and decides further for the Marcionite priority. hence my warm advice is: ignore Dating and read Christ’s Torah (and, if you can, also the chapters from Couchoud’s Creation of Christ on Marcion).
There has been an error of interpretation by you about my previous comment: Vinzent argues for *Ev preserving always the secrecy about Jesus’ real identity (identity interpreted by Vinzent as being from an Unknown Father different from YHWH), and Mark breaking a such secrecy in at least three points. If Mark felt compelled to break the secrecy (by making it clear that Jesus was the son of YHWH), as the argument goes, then it was because Mark was disturbed by the implication of a such secrecy (that the divine father of Jesus could be not YHWH, but a different alien god).
In my opinion, I have appreciated especially the point where Vinzent shows that Mark, by introducing the Parable of the Vineyards, has dissipated the halo of ambiguity about the identity of the true father of Jesus (the previous episode of the pharisees questioning the autority of Jesus).
The anomaly is not that Mark reveals who Jesus is by the Parable of the Vineyard. The anomaly is that he does so immediately after the episode of the Jesus’ silence before the Pharisees, i.e. by “coincidence”, an episode that (in *Ev) can be easily interpreted along the lines of a Marcionite antithesis (John known vs Jesus unknown). As to the first verse, there also Mark reveals who is Jesus (“you are my beloved son”), and by “coincidence” the incipit of *Ev doesn’t say who is the entity called Jesus who has just descended from above.
In short: if I use the secrecy as criterion of antiquity, then Marcion precedes Mark.
Oh, you don’t mean Luke erasing most of the Messianic Secret stuff (as he does), you mean something more obscure. You are saying Vinzent is arguing that somehow Luke’s text includes allusions to a different origin for Jesus (between the OT God and the “True” one)?
I still don’t see how this theory counts as evidence. Marcion could just be altering Luke precisely to this purpose. What we need is evidence of the causal order. The mere existence of the phenomenon does not evince the causal order of it (assuming it even does exist; I’m unclear on that, as the evidence sounds like itself an interpretive hypothesis, which would render this kind of argument circular).
I also don’t see how Mark can be disturbed by the secrecy element. His text is more littered with it than any version of Luke.
So the evidence must be something more specific and particular than that. And I haven’t seen it presented here. I assume I’ll have to read Torah.
the strongest argument for marcionite priority: the secrecy is peculiar to *Ev, while it is broken inexcusably by Mark precisely where the latter is disturbed by the anti-YHWH implications of a such secrecy.
You can’t deny that in *Ev the identity of the entity descended from above is unknown (meaning that nowhere you have in *Ev a clear confirmation of Jesus being the son of YHWH) hence allowing easily an interpretation along marcionite lines (the father of Jesus is not YHWH but an alien god). As to the specific case of Mark 11 and the Parable of Vineyard, judge from yourself:
As already stated in the first comparison of this scene, the question of John’s baptism, namely whether it is a heavenly or a human endeavor, is central here. According to Marcion, which is followed by all three Gospels, the people consider John a prophet, so Jesus’s interlocutors cannot simply dismiss his baptism as a human act. In both Marcion and Luke, Jesus refuses to give information about the origin of his own authority as a rebuke to the Pharisees for being afraid to take a stand. Nevertheless, the story suggests that, left to their own devices, they might very well have taken John for nothing other than a man. This, however, is followed by the criticism of any belief in prophecy on the part of the people, with which Marcion establishes the antithesis between Jesus, whose authority actually has a heavenly origin, and John, to whom this heavenly authority is only attributed by the people, whether out of ignorance on the part of the people or out of fear on the part of the Pharisees. It is out of the same fear that the Pharisees finally want to lay hands on Jesus. The three synoptic gospels cannot leave the story at this antithetical point, so they follow it up with a parable (Mark, Luke) or two (Matthew), which shift the direction of the whole passage. In Mark, Jesus addresses his parable to the same interlocutors. This particular parable is no exactly a literary gem; rather, it is a simple allegory that expresses the divine threat of judgment and at the same time offers Scripture-based evidence that Jesus was sent by the Lord. Narratively, the parable stands in contrast to the final sentence taken from the Gospel of Marcion, according to which Jesus does not want to explain the origin of his authority, since the parable does just that, albeit in a somewhat clumsy way. At the same time, Jesus is presented as the son and heir of the one who wants to collect from the tenants what is due to him at the time of the ripening of the grapes. They, the listeners, are even called murderers and desecrators of the rightful heir, his Son. The result, thus, is also an antithesis but one that differs considerably from that in the Gospel of Marcion. Here the tenants who are destroyed by the Lord and whose tenure is given to others are contrasted with the vinedresser’s son who was rejected and killed by the tenants but who has become the cornerstone of a new building. Matthew adopts the same pattern from Mark but introduces a slight transition at the beginning, probably because he notices the narrative contradiction in Mark between Jesus’s refusal to make a statement about the provenance of his authority and the fact that the parable provides just such a statement. Consequently, in Mt 21: 28, Jesus asks, What do you think? Moreover, Matthew provides a second parable
(Markus Vinzent, Christ’s Torah , my bold, Kindle positions 6827-6835, Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition)
That argument is illogical. Both the Argument to Added Secrecy generally, and this paragraph you quote, which is simply describing an elaborate hypothesis about the text, not presenting any evidence that that interpretation of the redactional history of this material is at all probable.
For example, the order of causation can well go the other way. Marcion, after all, is a fabricator. So we expect him to alter and fabricate material to make “go away” material in earlier Gospels (and earlier versions of his own Gospel). Theorizing a way that maybe the order is the other way around is not an argument. It’s just speculation. It’s GIGO. And I find this kind of failure at logic extremely annoying. These guys should know better. Honestly.
So I’m going to need to see evidence for these elaborate theories. Not just the theories themselves.
Maybe it’s in Torah. So on your recommendation I’ll check that out.
Thanks for the article!
I just wanted to comment about your sentence here about Marcion deleting vs anti-Marcionites adding (somewhat tangential to the main point of your article, but this is a topic I find quite interesting):
After reading Against Marcion Book 1 and seeing the massive amount of time and effort Tertulilan spends arguing against Marcion’s theology of 2 Gods, it is impossible for me to read passages like 1 Cor 8:6 and Colossians 1:16 and not immediately think of Marcion’s 2 Gods theology. My strong inclination is to assume that statements like this were added as reactions to Marcionite theology rather than being indicative of a theology that pre-dates Marcion that Marcion deleted. I have never looked at so many things in early Christianity the same after reading AM1, e.g., the creeds saying, “we believe in one god the father almighty, ****maker of Heaven and Earth****, of ****all things seen and unseen****” sounds like a direct rejection of Marcionite theology quoted in Tertullian.
One of the major points that Jason BeDuhn made in his book, The First New Testament, was that lots of scholars have assumed that Marcion was deleting things that in reality he probably didn’t actually delete.
Am I correctly interpreting your sentence as meaning that you are of the opinion that verses like these are actually more likely things that Marcion deleted rather than post-Marcionite interpolations?
I would love to see an article explaining your thoughts on the degree to which Marcion influenced the canonical epistles. The question of whether the canonical epistles derive from Marcion’s collection or are a pre-Marcionite collection redacted in response to Marcion sounds very interesting. My rough understanding is that you probably think there was some collection of Paul’s letters in circulation even before Mark, but if Marcion was really as big of a deal as many second century Christians made him to be, and if he published the first known collection of Pauline epistles, almost all of which appear in the canon, it seems like we have to seriously consider the possibility that his collection may very well have been the primary source of the modern cannon’s collection.
It is correct that one needs to check before assuming one way or the other (whether edits are Marcion’s or his opponents’). But that does not warrant the converse, that we can just always assume Marcion’s is the original; plenty of evidence already indicates it isn’t. And so without evidence at all (much less any that’s any good), you can’t claim it isn’t.
The 1 Cor. 8 example illustrates: if someone wanted to add such material, it’s strange that they make it so casually vague, and strange that they put it there of all places. Whereas it would not be strange for an editor who didn’t like it to simply cut it. The former theory requires more epicycles to get the result.
Likewise, there is too much in Paul that is even in Marcion’s edition that contradicts Marcion (there is no demiurgic theology, but instead a continued support for Judaism and its scriptures as the word of God; and the bad guy is always Satan and his demons, not Yahweh). So the priors don’t favor that line either. Marcion seems more inclined to delete, than his detractors seemed to have added.
To get a different result is going to require a lot more evidence than I have seen offered.
The mere fact that Marcion caused a scandal by publishing a combined codex first is not evidence that he invented everything in it or accurately preserved anything in it. As I noted, the evidence is the other way around: the structural and textual evidence proves no version of (Proto-)Lukan priority remains credible; Marcion himself admitted the other Gospels and the longer version of Luke predated his edition; the letters of Paul contain too many elements that make no sense coming from either Marcion or his detractors but as from someone long predating them; and so on.
The latter includes the pastiche structure, preserved in Marcion, which proves he was working from an edition of the letters published before his. One should not confuse “an edition of the letters” with “an edition of the New Testament.” What Marcion innovated was to combine an edition of letters and a Gospel. That is what was then answered by an anti-Marcionite combo.
To see what an anti-Marcionite forgery looks like, just look at the Pastorals—and the final redaction of the Gospel of John. There is a reason these so well fit the hypothesis that they are deliberate edits to undermine Marcion (at least to a balance of odds). That those elements are missing from the other letters then means this evidence is missing for them. The opposite conclusion then follows.
So the burden of evidence is on anyone who claims any verse has been altered. The rate of alteration is measurable in the manuscripts at between 1 in 200 to 1 in 1000 verses per century. So to just pick a verse and say “Marcion’s detractors added that” starts you at odds against of no better than 200 to 1. Which means you need pretty damned good evidence before you can say it’s likely otherwise.
So it’s not my job to prove every verse authentic. It’s the job of anyone who would doubt it to prove any verse inauthentic. The only thing the suspicion establishes is that we might want to at least check; so attempts are respectable and not absurd. But you still have to do it. You can’t just say “this book is under suspicion, therefore its every verse is false.” That is invalid reasoning.
Dating and authentication in biblical studies is the weakest element of the process. Here we have Paul’s letters, dated by content to 40-63CE. The problem is that the letters are known only from the Corpus Pauline which, according to consensus, was created around 100 CE (G. Zuntz’s famous hand-drawn diagram). It contains 10 letters written by 2-3 ghostwriters and subjected to intensive editing. Is Paul as an author a historical or invented figure? No biblical scholar can answer this. This alternative has no solution.
Gospels. Klinghardt and Vinzent tried to prioritize *Ev by introducing another ghostwriter as author. This was not convincing due to the problematic linguistic solutions required. Gramaglia claims that the author of *Ev is ghostwriter Luke. Gramaglia claims that *Ev itself is already a compilation of texts. Klinghardt dates *Ev to 90 CE, Vinzent dates it to 140 CE based on Tertullian.
Klinghardt abandoned Marek’s priority in favor of *Ev. Mark’s precedence leads to the theory of many of Burkett’s or Boismard’s hypothetical sources.
Theoretically they are right. They are practically drawing the wrong conclusion. The Gospels were created in parallel by a group of writers and editors working together in one scriptorium. Their first product commercially used on a large scale was *Ev. Historical Jesus is a content product of one scriptorium around 100 CE. End of story
This is all incorrect.
We do not know the “Corpus Pauline” came together “around 100 CE” (the evidence suggests it predated the Jewish War, in time for Mark to use it as a handbook a decade later: see Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles; but even apart from that, there is no evidence at all for any specific decade prior to 140).
We do not know the “Corpus Pauline” contained all those ten letters. 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, and Laodiceans (Ephesians) almost certainly were added in by Marcion (whether he wrote them or not; but they probably existed separately before he edited them in—for example, 2 Thess. is based on a pre-Marcionite interpolation in 1 Thess. and therefore cannot have been in the original Pauline corpus); and it is unclear whether Philemon belongs with the other seven (it was unused by Mark, suggesting it did not exist then or not in that collection).
As for Paul being invented, that’s unlikely. And yes, we have evidence. See The Historicity of Paul the Apostle and How Do We Know the Apostle Paul Wrote His Epistles in the 50s A.D.?.
And finally, the idea that the Gospels were a coordinated effort is refuted by their own redactional content: they can only have been written by authors arguing against each other, and using and altering each other to do it; not by authors coordinating a coherent mission. Their predating Marcion (including our Luke predating Marcion) is supported by all the evidence I listed here, and more, including Marcion’s own admission of the fact.
Everything else you say is just wild speculation based on no real evidence I am aware of.
The oldest evidence of Paul’s letters is 1 Clem, dated 97-140CE. It contains quotations from various letters, including non-Pauline ones. Zuntz’s reconstruction is the consensus – it was presented by Ehrman in the debate with Wallace. The Gospel of Mark could have been written in the 70s, 80s or 90s it is a konsensus by mainstream biblical scholars like Mark Goodacre. The distribution of the probability of the creation of the gospel between 70 and 97 CE is flat. 70 is as good as 90. Therefore, Marek could have known the letters from Pauline Corpus, which for Zuntz is the only source of letters. If the letters were written in 40-60 CE, there is no evidence about them for 40 years. We have no evidence for Marcion’s addition of letters apart from Tertullian’s record, which indicates the Galatians in an ambiguous manner. All three canonical gospels contain material M, L, Mtt.
Ghostwriters write what they are asked to write and do not play editorial roles. They also have no right to vote and their texts will be mixed with them. In *Ev there is the language of Luke and Matthew. Ghostwriters are like fish, they have no voice. Paul’s texts are cut up in the same way. The one who wrote them had nothing to say when others corrected his work.
None of the 2SH, 2GH models work. Klinghardt’s thesis is also not convincing.
Boismard and Brukett, wanting to keep Mark’s priority, create ProtoMark, dividing it into two versions A and B and several texts. All this has independent distribution and only in the 3rd iteration creates the canonical version of Mark. A dozen or so boxes in three rows and a dozen or so arrows. Just no trace of these documents. So you need to find an equivalent. The equivalent of intensive exchange of many documents and sharing common sources is simply group work. The guys worked in one scriptorium.
As for Marcion, he didn’t write anything. He was a leader – he took what was best on the market to have something to teach the missionaries. The money he gave to Rome was earned by his missionaries. Its structure was the first to show how to independently finance missions and generate surpluses.
There are too many errors and confusions in your comment to bother addressing.
Just for starters, 1 Clement most likely dates to the 60s; and it only mentions Paul’s letters, it does not quote any so as to verify what version or what letters are meant. While Mark certainly knew and even used the corpus (and from his employments we can tell the corpus had at least the same authentic seven letters we do). Arguments from silence here are fallacious (you cannot argue from the silence of documents or witnesses you do not have). You are confusing theories and facts (what Marcion did or did not write or do is a theory). And so on.
You are way behind the curve here.
I rather like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s take on all this:
“Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief—that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never meditated nor intended. So they said to one another:
“‘Let’s join together and make a great book that will last forever to mock the credulity of man. Let’s persuade our more erotic poets to write about the delights of the flesh, and induce some of our robust journalists to contribute stories of famous amours. We’ll include all the most preposterous old wives’ tales now current. We’ll choose the keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be more magnificent than any of them, and yet so weakly human that he’ll become a byword for laughter the world over—and we’ll ascribe to him all sorts of jokes and vanities and rages, in which he’ll be supposed to indulge for his own diversion, so that the people will read our book and ponder it, and there’ll be no more nonsense in the world.
“‘Finally, let us take care that the book possesses all the virtues of style, so that it may last forever as a witness to our profound scepticism and our universal irony.’
“So the men did, and they died.
“But the book lived always, so beautifully had it been written, and so astounding the quality of imagination with which these men of mind and genius had endowed it. They had neglected to give it a name, but after they were dead it became known as the Bible.”
You know, I always thought Russell Gmirkin’s thesis, however true it was, it would make for a great novel. The way he puts it, the opening scene sorta writes itself: the people in the temple at Jerusalem c. 270 BC receive a letter from the library at Alexandria summoning them to translate their “laws of Moses” into Greek for the library. They say among themselves, “who the fuck is Moses!?”
So much for claims of your dogmatism regarding mythicism!
Looking forward to the sequel to your Jesus book! I hope it comes out in time for Mel Gibson’s sequel to his Jesus movie! 💀🤘
The gospel of Matthew is the first gospel. Goodacre is wrong on that point
This is proven by many language and style related things. It was originally discovered by Griesbach in the 1780s. But it’s already the correct order in Ireneaus ca. 180: Matthew – Luke – Mark – John
To simplify it, in Mark, there are no parents and no Mary. Still in Mark, Jesus is called “Mary’s son”. This is because the author knows of the tradition from Matthew and Luke
A similar thing could be said about the Vinzent–Klinghardt belief in the priority of Marcion, representing the magical Q
In the reconstructions of this gospel, John the Baptist is nowhere to be seen in the beginning. Still, he appears later, excactly as in Luke 7:18–35, when his messengers ask Jesus questions
This shows Marcion is a redaction of Luke, exactly as Tertullian claimed, and not the first gospel
The order is
Matthew
Luke
Marcion or Mark
Marcion or Mark
John
Steve Mason made it clear Luke post-dates Jewish Antiquites written by Josephus in 93–94. I think, when you look at all the small stories about Herod in Matthew, Herod did this and that, he was evil in this and that way, also Matthew is influenced by Jewish Antiquities, i.e. post-dates it.
So I would say:
Matthew, ca. 100–120
Luke, ca. 110–130
Mark, ca. 120–140
John, ca. 140–170
I don’t see any rebuttal of Goodacre’s evidence here. Nor do I see any evidence being presented for the contrary.
Mark is inventing the names of his mother in Mk. 6:3 (the sister of Moses, after whom Miriam’s Well was named, which is the Rock of Christ, and so Christ is the son of Miriam: 1 Cor. 11:1–4: OHJ, pp. 455–56, n. 137; see Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles and Was the Entire New Testament Forged in the Second Century?).
Matthew riffs on Mark’s 6:3 by building out a story for it. This is how mythology tends to develop (e.g. Genesis 6:4 inspired the elaboration of the Book of Enoch; many other passages in the OT get elaborated into whole stories in the first century Biblical Antiquities; etc.).
In the Gospels we have other examples: Matthew’s line about some apostles doubting (28:17) got elaborated into John’s myth of the Doubting Thomas (in John 20); Luke’s parable of Lazarus got elaborated by John into an entire mythology of a risen Lazarus (see OHJ, ch. 10.7); etc.
So there is no way to argue from this that Mark is working from an existing myth rather than inventing it, and Matthew merely elaborating it (and Luke then redacting Matthew). The latter explanation is more in line with trend. And the former explanation has no particular evidence to commend it.
Five arguments for the priority of Matthew and the posteriority of Mark
(1)
”…four distinctive uses of the word polus (many) occur in Mark a total of twenty-three times (10 adverbial polu or polla; 8 polloi referring to a crowd of Jesus; 3 ‘many others’; 2 ‘many such’). On the theory of Markan priotity, Matthew and Luke both dropped all twenty-three occurences. Put otherwise, Matthew and Luke taken together had forty-six chances to preserve at least one occurrence of one of these uses. Yet not a single one survived. The theory of Markan priority would have us believe either that Matthew and Luke shared an aversion to these common expressions of size and degree or that the editorial process resulted in the conincidental elimination of this word to a highly improbable degree. Recurring features of this type in Mark are more easily understood as instances where Mark added his own language and themes to the shared tradition. Since Matthew and Luke show no knowledge of these additions, it appears they did not know Mark’s gospel.” From Burkett, An Introduction to the New Testament and the Origins of Christianity (2002).
(2)
All the so-called church fathers commenting on the subject put Matthew first: Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Eusebius and Augustine. Not a single person puts Mark first. The first one who did so was the German theologian Gottlob Christian Storr in 1786. The theory of the priority of Mark would have us believe that for +1,600 years every person commenting on the subject had the wrong idea of which gospel was first until an anti-Enlightenment, very conservative German theologian, collaborating with the king of Württemberg, believing in all biblical magic, came up with the correct solution in 1786.
(3)
The so-called church fathers quote from Matthew and Luke extensively. Very seldom, if at all, Mark is quoted. The first possible proof of the existence of the gospel of Mark is in Justin, The Dialogue with Trypho, ca. 160. The first who has definitive knowledge of it is Irenaeus in ca. 185. This would not be the case if Mark was the first, well-known gospel, and the source of Matthew and Luke. In fact, Mark is the least favored gospels in the Christian tradition, which would not be the case if it was the origin of everything.
(4)
Since the origin of Christianity is Judaism, the first gospel being the most Jewish makes very much sense. It makes no sense for it to start with a less Jewish version and then for someone to make it more Jewish, when the origin is Judaism. Matthew’s argument is against the Jewish establishment in Jerusalem, the pharisees and the scribes, not against some other evangelist. He knows nothing of another evangelist (and, by the way, of a different religion). Probably some aversion to the idea of the origin of Christianity being Judaism, i.e. German Christian antisemitism, is involved in the very late construction of the theory of the priority of Mark.
(5)
Almost everything in Mark is found in either Matthew or Luke. But Mark does not fully align with either, sometimes aligning with Matthew and sometimes with Luke. After a passage aligning with Matthew, he starts to align with Luke, etc. The reason for this is the very simple fact that the person writing the gospel of Mark had the gospels of Matthew and Luke at hand, i.e. post-dates them. If Mark is first, Matthew and Luke must have collaborated in some strange way, deciding in between them that they can only follow Mark one person at a time, to make the argument of the German theologian of 1786 feasible. Since they lived ~1,700 years earlier and did not collaborate, which is evident from the many differences in their versions, this is not the case.
Also, check out this document, summarizing the many arguments of William Farmer for the posteriority of Mark:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/churchplantmedia-cms/delreychurchca/matthean-priority-farmer.pdf
None of these work logically; all have already been addressed in the literature.
Because Luke used Matthew. Luke often prefers Matthew’s version of Markan material. The evidence for this is extensive, with resources cited in OHJ and my articles here on Q (The Backwards and Unempirical Logic of Q Apologetics and Why Do We Still Believe in Q?).
Authors often redact into their own preferred idiom. There are countless examples. This is how we identify each author’s style (see my discussion of stylistics in respect to Mark and the Long Ending in Hitler Homer Bible Christ). For example, you will find as many vocabulary swaps the other way around: so if Mark used Matthew, then Mark also made as many vocabulary-swaps as this in other cases; so such switching of words to preference cannot indicate direction of borrowing. Every author “adds his own language” to his source material.
By extensive examples, we know they are completely unreliable on things like this; and they had no credible evidence on which to base it—much less text-critical evidence (of which they offered none). It is therefore not a usable datum.
This is of no use because all of them are quoting the fourfold Gospel (see Three Things to Know about New Testament Manuscripts), so they are quoting the same edition Mark was in. This therefore cannot evince they didn’t know about Mark. They are simply preferring Matthew because the anti-Marcionite edition placed Matthew first (and it was more useful in combating Marcionite sympathizers), and because his Greek was more polished; as well as because they believed in the myth of Matthaean priority on no sound evidence.
It can make sense. But this is not evidence of anything. It’s just a hypothesis. It also makes sense for Mark to reify Paul’s Gospel to Gentile (Greek) audiences (hence why it is in Greek), and for Matthew to oppose this move by redacting that into an anti-Pauline edition. Both make sense. So you need evidence to distinguish them. A hypothesis is not evidence.
This is true of Matthew and Luke. And it is true even if Mark redacted Matthew. So it is incapable of indicating direction of editing. In fact when you look at the specifics of structure in Mark and Matthew (see OHJ, Ch. 10.4 and 10.5), either way you have to propose either author changed the structure of the other so as to destroy and replace it.
But when you look at how structure explains origin, there are many examples where Mark’s structure explains Mark’s content, but when it was ported into Matthew outside that structure, the origin of the material is no longer explicable. This demonstrates Markan priority. We have examples in Homeric emulation as well as Septuagintal emulation in Mark and Mark’s development of material and its structure from the Epistles (see Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles).
That’s three completely independent lines of redactional evidence all pointing in the same direction: to Matthew cannibalizing and revising original material from Mark.
By contrast, we have no evidence of this the other way around: there is nothing in Matthew that is structurally relocated in Mark such as to break its explicability.
And so on.
There is no “new” argument you can advance here. This is all half a century old. And it has been refuted a hundred times since. You can’t just keep repeating refuted arguments as if no one had thought of them before. You have to answer the refutations. And that means going in and looking at the evidence we are presenting to you and explaining how you can get it to reverse the order of redaction by any plausible mechanism.
We all would love Matthew to have been the first Gospel. That would undermine Christianity by placing the most fantastical and unbelievable Gospel first and all the rest as just attempts to tone it down. But alas, the evidence is overwhelming that Matthew redacted Mark.
🙂
I’m afraid your statements are wrong.
The arguments above strongly points to the priority of Matthew and have never been disproved anywhere.
Few academics have even engaged with them. Goodacre surely does not, only repeating and illustrating the belief, inherited from his teachers, that Mark is first.
Matthew is the first gospel.
Then comes Luke.
Mark comes third.
There is zero evidence for the priority of Mark, as always when something is 100% wrong.
For example, the idea that Matthew read the words ”son of Mary” in Mark, which made him so inspired he invented the whole family tree, the angel coming to tell the mother, the virgin birth, the flight into Egypt, the magi and the magical star, the involvement of Herod, the massacre of the innocents, the return to Nazareth etc. is ridiculous. This is not how it works when writers are influened by each other. It has to be something more vivid than ”son of Mary”. In Mark, there is no Mary but still Jesus is ”son of Mary”. Of course because Mark knows the tradition from Matthew and Luke.
You can also see it in the temptation narrative in Mark 1:12–13, which he has shortened to the point of unintelligibility, that he knows the longer version in Matthew.
When you study the first chapters of Mark, it is evident he works from copies of both Matthew and Luke.
In Mark 1:1–20 he follows Matthew 3:1–4:22 until the Sermon on the Mount, where he cuts off.
Then he turns to Luke and in Mark 1:21–3:19, he inserts the whole long passage of Luke 4:31–6:16, except for 5:1–11, until the Sermon on the Plain, where he again cuts off, and returns to Matthew.
If Mark was first, there is no way he can have long passages of both Matthew and Luke, in both instances cutting of before the long speeches.
This shows he’s on some mission to simplify things, avoiding long speeches, removing most of the references to prophesies, to make the material more available to his audience, probably because some group of Christians asked him to do so. Perhaps they wanted him to harmonize the two main versions because of some controversy. It’s not improbable at all that he’s influenced by the Marcionite gospel, from around the same time, since he takes the whole infancy narrative out, just as they do there. So the gospel of Mark could be seen as harmonizing three gospels: Matthew’s, Luke’s and Marcion’s Luke.
Or it could be that he removes the infancy narrative because of the differences between Matthew and Luke there, which he wants to avoid, just as he removes the two different versions of the main sermon: the one on the mount in Matthew and the one on the plain in Luke. That seems quite likely.
Anyway, the evidence is overwhelming that Mark redacted both Matthew and Luke because of some purpose, the opposite of what you stated.
No-one has disproved the arguments of J. J. Griesbach, William Farmer, etc., since they are built solidly on detailed and careful textual analysis, intelligence and rationality, while the tradition from the supranaturalist G. C. Storr via German 19th century theologians and the bizarrely complicated and speculative drivel of B. H. Streeter to today’s mainstream theologians is certainly less so.
In fact, most of this was shown very clearly and convincingly already in 1789–90 by J. J. Griesbach, only available in the original latin version until it was translated by Bernard Orchard in the 1970s. See ”A demonstration that Mark was written after Matthew and Luke” in J.J. Griesbach: Synoptic and text-critical studies 1776–1976, ed. Orchard & Longstaff (1978).
When you compare this clear and logical text with the complicated idiocy of B. H. Streeter, claiming six(!) non-existent texts alongside Mark was the source for Matthew and Luke, it’s evident who’s right and wrong. Streeter has no arguments at all worth mentioning. What he calls arguments are simply illustrations of the belief that the similarities are because Mark is first, nothing actually pointing in that direction.
Nothing you are now saying is responding to what I have said. You are just repeating the same ineffectual arguments I just refuted, both directly (identifying their logical fallacies) and indirectly (heaping other contrary evidence up against it).
There simply is no evidence Mark redacted Matthew. Much less “overwhelming” evidence. All the actual evidence points the other way.
Perhaps you do not understand that evidence for a theory is a fact that is more probable on that theory (more expected to be observed if that theory is true) than on any plausible competing theory. You do not seem to have a good grasp of the probabilities and expectancies in redaction generally, much less in this case in particular. And I just can’t help you with that.
The idea of all four gospels being produced as a response to Marcion seems problematic, indeed; I’m only halfway through Vinzent’s book though, maybe in the last chapters he will elaborate on it more convincingly.
But what about his idea that all canonical gospels were produced in the same decade? We’re used to the “traditional” 70-80-90-100 dating, but what is the basis for it, actually? I’m not talking about the exact dates, let’s suppose all of them were written post-70. But the idea that every gospel sparked a reaction about 10 years after each other? A year, two, maybe three. But 10? I never really thought about it, but now it does seem a bit weird.
So my question is: where exactly does the “70-80-90-100” consensus come from? Again, I’m more interested in the supposed large time span between each gospel, not the exact dates. Is it possible that all gospels were produced in about one decade?
I share your skepticism.
As to the possibility they all were run off in a couple of years, you’re quite right: there is no reason that can’t have happened (see my related argument regarding Daniel, in which search down to “reverse incredulity”).
The problem is the other way around: we have no evidence that that happened. So it can’t ever be a premise in an argument. “Maybe” does not get you “Probably.”
For myself, I follow the latest consensus simply to avoid contentious premises (it’s argument a fortiori: if my conclusions follow even on mainstream premises, then they follow all the more if we abandon them), as I actually explain in Ch. 7 of OHJ. In short, I don’t need any other thing to be the case; so if we agree there is no evidence at all as to what is the case, we may as well just follow the consensus (even if it is dubious).
As to how the consensus arose, that’s a long story. But it’s basically a political compromise between apologists who want the dates to be early and skeptics who suspect the dates are late. In truth (as I explain in Ignatian Vexation) the dates should more typically be stated as termini post and ante quem and not stated as fixed dates or even decades (due to the ideological abuse the latter encourages).
But, in short:
Dates are fuzzed to a decade because we have no precise information and conventional base-ten numbering of time entails “ten” as the standard “rough number” (if we were Babylonians, we might fuzz the dates to a twenty year period because of our then base twenty numbering system).
Mark appears to be a reaction to the Jewish War (abundantly evident, from Mk 13 to the fig tree story), so it seems increasingly unlikely for it to be decades afterward. The 70s is the most plausible decade. Add to that how Mark appears to know Josephus’s Jewish War and that would put it late 70s.
Given Mark is “most” likely from the “late 70s” and Matthew is a response to Mark, it seems unlikely Matthew could be more than a decade later, and if it’s a few years to a decade later and Mark is “late 70s,” that makes Matthew most likely written “in the 80s.” That does not require an exactly ten year wait. Anything “a few years” after the late 70s will be the 80s. We say 80s simply to be appropriately fuzzy. We don’t know; so, a few to ten years it is.
Luke used to be assumed to the same time frame for want of any further data, but is now increasingly dated to the early second century because of two facts: Luke used the Antiquities of Josephus, which puts Luke mid-to-late 90s at the earliest; and Luke used Matthew (even if there was a Q, most proponents now admit Luke also knew Matthew), so Luke has to be “a few to ten years” after Matthew. So we say “90s.
But the distance can be more in this case, because Luke is not reacting to Matthew in the same way Matthew was reacting to Mark; Luke appears to be responding to some moment in church history (something going on politically in Luke’s background), not to those publications. So when he decided to try to “reconcile” those two competing views in his harmonizing agenda could be decades later for all we know.
So we are less sure Luke would be “a few to ten years” after Matthew. The trend is therefore now to set Luke in the early second century (e.g. Pervo argues for circa 115). The reasons are various and not always sound. But what we know for sure is that that well could be the case. Unlike relative dating of Matthew and Mark, where greater distance seems increasingly improbable given why they were written.
Then since the widest consensus is that John knew Luke, “a few to ten years” after Luke puts John “circa 100.” But this suffers an even bigger problem than Luke: in addition to John representing the same scenario as Luke (John is reacting to some external political situation, and not to the prior Gospels; he has complaints about those Gospels, but those complaints appear evoked by something other than their mere existence), which means the “few to ten years is more likely” assumption is no longer viable (John could be decades later for all we know), but on top of that: our John is a double redaction of the original.
This means we don’t have “John.” We have “John, Edition 3.” Which is like having two other Gospels in between, say Gospel according to Lazarus, lost, which was redacted into Gospel according to Schmo, lost, which was redacted into “John” (the internal evidence for these stages has convinced pretty much all Johannine experts now). So now, if we assume “a few to ten years” separates these, we are most likely decades after Luke.
But this still could all have happened in a single year for all we know.
It’s just that’s not specifically in evidence.
The most we can say is that Mark 70s and Matthew 80s (being possibly one to ten years apart) is more likely than later or more precise dates; that Luke “90s to 120s” is about as precise as we can get for Luke; and that John “100s to 140s” is about as precise as we can get for our edition of John (the earlier lost editions are another story).
The Evolution of the Gospel: New Translation of the First Gospel, with Commentary and Introductory Essay
by J Enoch Powell argues for matthean primacy.
There have been lots of books doing that over the last century.
It doesn’t mean they succeed.
There’s a historian named Nina Livesey coming out with a book called “The Letters of Paul in their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship”.
https://www.amazon.com/Letters-their-Roman-Literary-Context/dp/1009487051/
It basically makes the argument that all of the Pauline epistles are forged.
It’s not available yet. If you do read it, I’m sure you’d be critical of it. But it is interesting that this is now becoming a position that historians are willing to take.
That is at least a real study (Cambridge University, by an author with real credentials), so I will definitely take a look at it. I’m skeptical of course. But although her arguments and methods do not sound any better than past efforts, maybe she finally accomplishes what others failed to.