Matthew 1:18-25 - Marital strife between Mary and Joseph

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jimkenney12 said:
I believe the scholarly consensus makes less sense than Luke reading Matthew and deciding he needed to write a different Gospel to serve his own agenda.
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They had no printing presses in the late first century. You are assuming an early wide distribution of Christian texts that requires evidence.
The scholarly consensus identifies the sayings source Q as the major sayings source used by Matthew and Luke, but not by Mark or John. Your theory is not consistent with the existence of Q. The claim that the sayings shared by Matthew and Luke stem from Luke's use of Matthew can be refuted by all the cases where Luke preserves the more original wording: e. g.

(1) "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother...cannot be my disciple *(Luke 14:26)."
"Whoever loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me (Matthew (Matthew 10:37).
Luke preserves the Hebrewism, the use of "hate" not as a venomous emotion, but as an expression of priorities. Matthew cleans up the saying for his Gentile readers to remove the offense, while capturing the intended meaning.
(2) Matthew expands and spiritualizes Luke's 6 beatitudes ("poor" into 9 (Luke 6:20-23 // Matthew 5:3-12). Matthe spiritualizes "poor" (Luke) into "poor in spirit" and "hunger now" (Luke) into "hunger and thirst for righteousness."
All scholars agree that Luke has truncates the Lord's Prayer (11:1-4) preserved in its original form in Matthew 6:9-13, whose wording is attested in Didache.
(3) Why would Luke's infancy narrative omit the story of the magi following the Star of Bethlehem? And why would Luke omit Matthew's Galilean resurrection appearance and the Great Commision that the Risen Lord authorizes there?
More importantly, you bear the burden of proof to buck the scholarly consensus and identify evidence for Luke's dependence on Matthew.

jimkenney12 said:
They both might have also referred to the gospel of Thomas.
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The sayings in the Gospel of Thomas are structured after the pattern of Valentinian Gnostic initiation formulae from around 140 AD. (Princeton paid me $1,000 for my painstaking demonstration of this pattern in my Master's thesis.) Apart from the dating problem, Luke would hardly use a heretical Gnostic sayings source for his Gospel. He used Q instead.
jimkenney12 said:
John probably had copies of all three synoptic Gospels and saw little need for another biography. The Gospel of John is a set of theological claims served in a carefully designed story. The I AM claims and the miracles are carefully designed components of an argument.
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There is not a shred of evidence for John's awareness of the 3 Synoptic Gospels. Indeed, Cambridge U professor C. H. Dodd wrote a book demonstrating that where John and the Synoptics run parallel, John preserves the more historically accurate version. In fact, most scholars explain the few parallels in terms of overlapping oral tradition that crept into John's sources.
 
jimkenney12 said:
Luke might have found the story of the Magi too hard to swallow.
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Or, being from that culture, recognized that it was a story meant to convey a message and maybe did not feel that was the message he wanted to convey, or the way he wanted to convey it.
 
The Magi were certainly an alien civilization ... a bunch of movers that believed in learning and intelligence instead of focussing on volition alone ... a bill of goods as a metaphor? Word play ... as if you can mess with God (the word) with some gram ari cally bound sorts ...

What's a Calic? Possibly related to a Celt for all we know about thin spaces ... and how words shape shift when passing through various densities! Imagine light words passing through salt crystals ... perhaps a code preservation for when you 're fishing for the right one to prove that you know nothing ... for intelligence is despised in emotional settings ... especially when SET seen through Horus Iris ...

Horus is significant in shifts in communication as evolution denied ... Horus Ass I and then the second as Beta ... codes alter acrooss time ... counter to some BS!
 
Horus and Assi come up in the nihilism of the Egyptian system of imagination about Isis for death, the Hebrew suggesting of a word for passing wisdom ... OS ... or the bones of wisdom as it when ... dunn gone ! Nothing left but the hard stuff ... as the easy was wasted ... it went down as brain drain ... imagine an old generation that loved nonsense in learning and here we are up against severe MO's about refusing any change whatsoever.

Thus we march over the disappearing nebulae on the horizon of existence ... refusing to take a lesson from Beau Gest ... close to the boggist it is ...
 
Mystic said:
Apart from the dating problem, Luke would hardly use a heretical Gnostic sayings source for his Gospel. He used Q instead.
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If there was a version of Thomas earlier than that (or a precursor to what became the Gospel of Thomas) Luke would not have neccesarily have seen it as heretical. Determining Gnosticism to be heretical was a later development.
 
GordW said:
If there was a version of Thomas earlier than that (or a precursor to what became the Gospel of Thomas) Luke would not have neccesarily have seen it as heretical. Determining Gnosticism to be heretical was a later development.
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There is no evidence for an earlier version of the Gospel of Thomas. In any case, almost all scholars accept the saying source @ from which Matthew and Luke drew most of their saying material. And no, Gnosticism was considered a heretical development in the late first century. The Scholarly consensus documented in Raymond Brown's massive NT Introduction dates the deutero-Pauline Pastoral Epistles between 80 and 100 AD and recognizes and opposes the Gnostic heresy there.
\I challenge you to identify a single NT scholar from the 21 century who argues for Luke's use of Matthew.
 
There is little evidence of anything in theory ... and some philosophers say everything is theoruy and theory is everything even giving hopes that some theories about intangibles may persist ... this falls into the great chasm of thought ... it is vast given what is rejected in the determinacies of mortal ...

Indeterminate matters are not considered by those of great determination about what thye know ...

Some of us as we age begin to be coherent about the great unknown ... and grow a great appreciation and respect ... while powers down play it in descent ... thus the bottom line of the myth! Can it possibly be understood while in an emotional state?

Some say the hind is something to be respected ...
 
jimkenney12 said:
There is also no physical copy of Q. The early existence of a sayings source is speculation by scholars.
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And that illustrates the true importance of the 114 sayings comprising the Gospel of Thomas. Q represents the sayings source that circulated west of the Jordan River and the Gospel of Thomas represents a sayings source that initially circulated east of the Jordan and is commonly traced to Edessa in eastern Syria, later finding its way to Egypt.

The scholarly consensus for the existence of Q is so unanimous that I doubt you could an article on this Gospel material published in a scholarly biblical journal without taking it for granted. Why is this? Well, Q refers to the double tradition Gospel material, sayings cited in Matthew and Luke, but not Mark.
The 3 options are: Matthew and Luke derived this material independently from a sayings source Q
Matthew derived this material from Luke or vice versa
Because the wording of some of the Lucan Double Tradition material and structures are more original than their Matthean counterparts and some of Matthean wording and structures are more original than Luke's, the natural inference is that they both use an independent sayings source. When Q is isolated from the unique sources used only by Matthew and Luke, M and L, then the style and theology of these other 2 sources makes more sense.
 
OK. So there are enough scraps of documents from the first century to identify documents that circulated in each area?
 
jimkenney12 said:
OK. So there are enough scraps of documents from the first century to identify documents that circulated in each area?
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The scholarly consensus is that Matthew was written in Antioch or somewhere else in western Syria and that Luke was written either in Antioch or Achaia, the province of Greece where Corinth is located. The fact that they both used Q's availability to both is what suggests its composition in the west, that is, near the Mediterranean. We know very little about the origin of Christianity east of the Jordan and in the Egypt/ North Africa region. But early Christian tradition identifies Judas Thomas as the apostle who evangelized east of the Jordan and important traditions localize him at Edessa. Thomas didn't write the sayings collection that bears his name, but may somewhat reflect oral tradition brought there. The reference in the Gospel of Thomas to "Judas" Thomas distinguishes him from our Gospels' Thomas and argues further for an Edessan origin.

I'm uncomfortable hiding behind the scholarly consensus, which I know very well from many New Testament Introductions and from attending the Society of Biblical Literature for many years. I'm thinking of eventually starting a thread focused on specific texts that illustrate how and why Synoptic Gospel authors change their sources. Such specificity might make the issues we're discussion more productively discussed instead of my needing to pontificate about what modern scholarship thinks!:censored:
 
To get back to my original point:
The scholarly consensus is correct that belief in the virgin birth precedes the use of Isaiah 7:14 as a prooftext (Matthew 1:22-23), which is absent from the very different virgin birth traditions of both Luke and Ignatius. One way of tracing this belief to Jesus' lifetime is the hostile Jewish identification of Jesus as "the son of Mary" in Mark 6:3, a label that implies illegitimacy in a patriarchal Jewish culture and is part of the "scandal" of Jesus' claims. Skeptic and believer alike agree that Joseph is not Jesus' natural father. Ancient rabbinic tradition claims that Jesus is actually the son of a Roman soldier named Panther.

But there is another type of evidence that points in the same direction. John Chrysostom was bishop of Antioch, which is a short distance away from Aleppo, the last bastion of Jewish Christianity that ultimately originated in Jerusalem. It is surely from Aleppo that John Chrysostom gets his tradition that Mary marries Joseph's brother Clopas after Joseph dies before Jesus' public ministry. Such a "levirate marriage" would only be legal if Joseph dies without any natural children, in which case Deuteronomy 25:5-10 would make it mandatory! Such a marriage would explain the otherwise inexplicable tradition that Jesus' brothers were also his cousins (so Hegrsippus). When Uncle Clopas marries Mary, his sons, formerly Jesus' cousins, would legally become His brothers after Clopas's marriage. Such a marriage implies a family belief that Jesus is NOT Joseph's natural son! The hostile Jewish belief that Jesus is the illegitimate son of Panthera may be traceable to the Greek "pentheros," which means "brother-in-law"--hence originally "son of the brother-in-law! Clopas was Mary's brother-in-law!

John Chrysostom's Commentary on John presumes an rekevant translation of John 19:25:
At the cross were His mother and His mother's sister, namely Mary the wife of Clopas (His mother) and Mary Magdalene (His mother's sister!)."
Joseph figures in no story of the Jesus' public ministry and is presumably dead because he is unavailable to take care of his wife, Mary, whom, says John Chrysostom is now Clopas's wife. Mary Magdalene's compound name removes the difficulty of two sisters named Mary. Jewish women could have the same first name, if they had such a compound name.
 
Machiavlli had it down pat ... with all the burning of tomes and burying of books and manuscripts as sacred ... we of the present are left in the dark ... and the powers even eliminated Machiavelli ashe exposed the secrets of corrupt powers ...

We praise such positions as we search for power ourselves while many Muses went into relief in the depression in the stone tableau ... thus thoughts are thus obscured ... by the skin of the outside thing ... a hide? Sometimes called vellum ... there rests the narrative ... on one huge cowed thing ... Mo'an? Voices sometimes rise from these sources as Eris' n dissonance ... that augers ... thus bored and reamed ...

For those that get beyond such powers ... a piece of ineffable depth ... no vanity intended to exceed the buddae ... the geist in the narrative?

The Torrinae must be tamed ... that stirring must find a hommoe ... that's John ... a common place ... pithy?
 
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