Biblechat

[The Mikado]

A thread for you to just shoot the s**t about the Bible and related holy texts (Joseph Smith's stuff, the Apocrypha, etc.). I'm open to a Quranchat, but I think it should be a separate thread.

Open to superficial observations and serious discussion alike.

I'm going to get us started with saying that I'm consistently disappointed that people seem to miss the point of one of my favorite Bible books: Judges. Judges has a deeply political meaning and the entire point is summed up in the final verse:  "In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes." (Judges 21:25) This verse follows the most gruesome and horrifying story in the entire book (and arguably the entire Bible): the story of the Levite and the Concubine.

A lot of people single out atrocities like the Levite and the Concubine and wonder what it's doing in a Holy Book, as a representation of something God's People had done. That last line is your answer for that question, as well as the related questions of why all the holy heroes in Judges are so horribly flawed, from the daughter-murdering Jephthah to the moronic oversexed brute Samson to the assassin Ehud to the cowardly Barak (Gideon gets a pass, he's alright): they were warlords in a period of lawless chaos. They aren't supposed to be good or righteous people...Samson isn't even particularly faithful to God, he just likes killing Philistines. When there was no king in Israel, men did what they saw right in their own eyes. When the Levite sees his concubine's murder, he thirsts for vengeance, and the way he decides to do that is to cut her corpse in twelve pieces and mail them to all the tribes to let them know the horror that has befallen and shame them into action. This story should be repellent because it shows how hard it was to achieve justice against an indefensible criminal rape and murder gang. The very next book, the people demand a monarch over all Israel and Judah, "a king like all the other nations." This famous demand has to be read in the context of the Judges story: anyone who had lived through the horror of the Levite and the Concubine story would be demanding a King to put an end to this lawless chaos. Judges shows the horror of the anarchic state the Israelites were leaving: even with Samuel's eloquent denunciation of monarchy, what person in his right mind would oppose a King rather than continuing on in a state of lawless free-for-all war, crime, and murder?

Judges is a very important book for understanding the case for the rise of the Monarchy. It is often stripped out of context as the "Book about rape and murder," which it does have a lot of, but it's also just about the most eloquent contemporarily ancient story of why so many early peoples ended up adopting monarchy: it gives an unflinching narrative of the horror and chaos that preceded monarchy.

[The Mikado]

Come on, people! Surely SOMEone here has something to say about the Bible.

[TJ in Oregon]

Q almost certainly doesn't exist and Matthew was written first. Discuss

[The Mikado]

Q almost certainly doesn't exist and Matthew was written first. Discuss

So does that mean you're in on the old "Mark is a synopsis/abridged version of Matthew" camp?

Mark includes some details that are especially awkward and seem to be sort of elided out of the other Synoptic Gospels (especially the high status of John the Baptist and the presence of Jesus' siblings) and it would make more sense if Mark came first, but Matthew first is not an unheard of position.

[TJ in Oregon]

Q almost certainly doesn't exist and Matthew was written first. Discuss

So does that mean you're in on the old "Mark is a synopsis/abridged version of Matthew" camp?

Mark includes some details that are especially awkward and seem to be sort of elided out of the other Synoptic Gospels (especially the high status of John the Baptist and the presence of Jesus' siblings) and it would make more sense if Mark came first, but Matthew first is not an unheard of position.

Yup. I find it far more likely that Mark abridged Matthew's gospel and threw in a few pieces of oral tradition than hypothesizing an extra document (Q) that we have absolutely no direct evidence for or reference to in the tradition.

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

Q almost certainly doesn't exist and Matthew was written first. Discuss

So does that mean you're in on the old "Mark is a synopsis/abridged version of Matthew" camp?

Mark includes some details that are especially awkward and seem to be sort of elided out of the other Synoptic Gospels (especially the high status of John the Baptist and the presence of Jesus' siblings) and it would make more sense if Mark came first, but Matthew first is not an unheard of position.

Yup. I find it far more likely that Mark abridged Matthew's gospel and threw in a few pieces of oral tradition than hypothesizing an extra document (Q) that we have absolutely no direct evidence for or reference to in the tradition.

I would agree with this.  It was only an intro class, but the two-source hypothesis was the only one that was really explored in my New Testament class a couple years back, and I think it's a really weak hypothesis because there is no mention of the Q source outside contemporary Biblical scholarship.  The theory itself is a fairly recent one.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Markan priority is just about the most universally agreed-on fact in New Testament textual criticism iirc.

One simple example is Mark 2:26, where Mark names Abithiar as high priest when David entered the sanctuary, when 1 Samuel says it was Ahimilech. Both Matthew 12:4 and Luke 6:4 avoid the error by omitting the name of the high priest. In terms of priority, which is more likely: that Matthew and Luke were copying Mark and spotted and removed the error (as later copyists of Mark itself tried to), or that Mark was copying Matthew and decided to add in the the wrong high priest?

Also, supporting Markan priority has nothing to do with whether Q existed or not. Lots of scholars are sympathetic to the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farrer_hypothesis which argues that Luke simply used Matthew.

[Mr. Reactionary]

Q almost certainly doesn't exist and Matthew was written first. Discuss

I agree with this. We were taught markan priority in college and at least there are arguments there, but the idea that it is more likely that the commonalities between luke and matthew are due to an undiscovered book rather than just 1 borrowing from the other seems weak.

Also, im sympathetic to the idea that the early sayings gospel was one of the Thomas gospels.

[DC Al Fine]

Since its been a few days...

Approximate datings of the Gospels. Go!

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Since its been a few days...

Approximate datings of the Gospels. Go!

Mark: 80s AD
Matthew: about a decade after Mark
Luke: early 2nd century AD
John: early 2nd century AD

[The Mikado]

Does anyone want to talk Old Testament? It's the part I care more about and know more about.

[RFayette]

I understand you come from a Jewish background and my understanding is that their tradition considers the suffering servant referred to in Isaiah 53 as Israel.  If this is the case, how does one explain Isaiah 53:8 when it refers to him (the servant) being punished for the sins of "my people," since the author himself was Jewish?  For me (and many others) this is by far the most compelling Messianic prophesy and so I am very curious what the non-Christian perspective on it is.

[The Mikado]

I understand you come from a Jewish background and my understanding is that their tradition considers the suffering servant referred to in Isaiah 53 as Israel.  If this is the case, how does one explain Isaiah 53:8 when it refers to him (the servant) being punished for the sins of "my people," since the author himself was Jewish?  For me (and many others) this is by far the most compelling Messianic prophesy and so I am very curious what the non-Christian perspective on it is.

Excellent question. The answer mostly comes down to context: the author of the later parts of Isaiah (the scholarly idea that Isaiah 40 and on was written by a different person than Isaiah 1-39, but even if you don't accept that it's not really material to this argument) has a continuing metaphor of a servant as Israel in earlier areas. When Isaiah is talking to Cyrus in Isaiah 45, he says "For the sake of my servant Jacob, and Israel my chosen, I call you by your name, I surname you, though you do not know me."

Isaiah 49 is even more explicit:

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Isaiah is explicitly talking about Israel in this passage and doing so in much the same language he'd use in 52-53. He calls Israel a light to the nations and says that just recovering the scattered tribes of Israel and Judah is not enough: that there is a mission for Israel to redeem the entire world. It also echoes Isaiah's language in 52-53 that the Servant will suffer and be despised and abhorred, but would one day have the rulers prostrate themselves to it.

That said, it absolutely can be fairly read as a Messianic prediction. The rabbinic tradition had several prominent figures argue that the Servant should be read as a person, either as a Messiah or as a reference back to the life of Moses or even Isaiah himself (I don't really think that it works as a description of either of the two of them, but whatever).

[Greatest I am]

Some of my favorite biblical lines are spoken of in this link. Enjoy.

https://vimeo.com/7038401

Regards
DL