Part 4 Refutting Doherty's Evolution of Jesus: Rise of the Q Community

Doherty assumes what we have just disproved, the latter development of Cross and tomb, in order to assert a fictional Q community that lacked knowledge of Jesus and set up the basic Q document:

"If, on the other hand, the "biography" of Jesus of Nazareth was something unusual which went against the grain of current knowledge and belief, one can understand how early versions of the Gospels, written around the turn of the century, would have enjoyed only limited use and isolated reworking for at least a generation."

The Gospels would certainly be limited in acceptance even if the cross and the tomb were early and well known. Doherty wants us to think its because something totally new is being introduced into a tradition that never had it before, and that is true, but that doesn't mean the new element is the cross/tomb part of the story, nor is it an earthly Jesus. What's new is the introduction of written sources as more authoritative than oral sources. Papias complains that he likes to hear the spoken word better than the written word, this indicates that even as late as the early second century some oral tradition was still lingering. The Gospels do not have to have been written by their namesakes to be inspired but even with Apostolic backing they would still take time to spread, and still take time to gain authority. No one thought of these sources as scripture. We have always known scripture, for the early church, meant the Old Testament, not what we call "the New Testament." The gospel authors didn't think of themselves as writing "the Bible." Of course the whole assertion has been disproved anyway because the early Christian writings were full of quotations and allusions to the Gospels.

At this point Doherty makes one of his most crucial moves, grounding the canonicals in the Q tradition. He tries to establish the primacy of Q as an older and more authoritative source, then he will try to separate it form Jesus completely and argue that the Christians took it over form some other group noting to do with Jesus to begin with. We shall examine this on the next page

The core of the historical Jesus precedes the Gospels and was born in the community or circles which produced the document now called "Q" (for the German "Quelle," meaning "source"). No copy of Q has survived, but while a minority disagree, the majority of New Testament scholars today are convinced that Q did exist, and that it can be reconstructed from the common material found in Matthew and Luke which they did not get from Mark.

Of course this is very misleading because there is no Q document. What we have are traces of some tradition, but it could as easily be a version of Matthew or Matthew's "Logia" (of which Papias speaks) or Thomas, or even non existent. A lot of scholarly movement is found back in the direction of anti-Q feeling, and one need not abandon Marcan priority to abandon Q (Mark Goodacre "Fallacies at the Heart of Q" and Alen J. MacNichol "Has Goulder Sunck Q?"). Trying to attach Q to a historical community is especially amazing since we don't even know what Q was.

Doherty rightly points out (according to theory) that Q was not a narrative but a "saying source," and in that sense not a conventional "Gospel" as we think of Gospels. It was filled with ethical sayings and prophetic utterances, but none of the statements about the cross or the tomb fall within the Q range of sayings. Of course that would be true because they are used in all three synoptics. If Q is automatically assumed based upon material shared by Matthew and Luke but not in Mark (of course they do allow for overlaps but that's another issue) then automatically the tomb and cross would be excluded because it's in all three. That in no way proves that it was missing from Q. Its' just a matter of dogmatically excluding such sayings from that which we call "Q." Since don't have a copy of Q it makes it very easy to say "the cross and the tomb were not in Q."

In accessing Q's origin Doherty says: "It was the product of a Jewish (or Jewish imitating) sectarian movement located in Galilee which preached a coming Kingdom of God." Koster warns to be careful of the assertion that it was from Galilee. The assertion is based upon the only place names in Q, but there could be other reasons why those are the only place names used:

Helmutt Koester (remember page 1? Doherty quotes him as an authority) warns us not to do exactly what Doherty is doing, assuming a fictional group based upon the cynical sounding nature of some Q passages!

Helmut Koester:

Q 10:13-15 announces the coming judgment explicitly with the view to two Galilean towns, Chorazin and Bethsaida: even Tyre and Didon will be better off in the coming judgment. And the same saying threatens that Capernaum will be condemned to Hades. Except for the lament over Jerusalem (Q 13:34-35) and the localization of John the Baptist's activity in the area of the Jordan (Q 3:3), these are the only names of places which occur in Q. It is, therefore, tempting to assume that the redaction of Q took place somewhere in Galilee and that the document as a whole reflects the experience of a Galilean community of followers of Jesus. But some caution with respect to such conclusion seems advisable for several reasons. One single saying provides a very narrow base. Polemic against the Pharisees cannot confirm Galilean provenance - Greek-speaking Pharisees could be found elsewhere in the Diaspora, viz., Paul who persecuted the church in Greek-speaking synagogues, probably in Syria or Cilicia. Even the sayings used for the original composition of Q were known and used elsewhere at an early date: they were known to Paul, were used in Corinth by his opponents, employed perhaps in eastern Syria for the composition of the Gospel of Thomas, and quoted by 1 Clement in Rome at the end of the 1st century. The document itself, in its final redacted form, was used for the composition of two gospel writings, Matthew and Luke, which both originated in the Greek-speaking church outside of Palestine. (Ancient Christian Gospels, p. 164).

Doherty links the first layer of Q with counter cultural non Christian movements, (as Koster warns against) hatching out for himself a bogus history for his fictional Galilean cynical non Jesus worshipping Q community:

Scholars have concluded that Q was put together over time and in distinct stages. They have identified the earliest stratum (calling it Q1) as a set of sayings on ethics and discipleship; these contained notably unconventional ideas. Many are found in Matthew's Sermon on the Mount: the Beatitudes, turn the other cheek, love your enemies. A close similarity has been noted (see F. Gerald Downing, "Cynics and Christians," NTS 1984, p.584-93; Burton Mack, A Myth of Innocence, p.67-9, 73-4) between these maxims and those of the Greek philosophical school known as Cynicism, a counterculture movement of the time spread by wandering Cynic preachers. (Mack has declared that Jesus was a Cynic-style sage, whose connection with things Jewish was rather tenuous.) Perhaps the Q sect at its beginnings adopted a Greek source, with some recasting, one they saw as a suitable ethic for the kingdom they were preaching. In any case, there is no need to impute such sayings to a Jesus; they seem more the product of a school or lifestyle, formulated over time and hardly the sudden invention of a single mind.

He's making the assumption that Q is the oldest Christian teaching, because it has an older strata. But that in no way means it's the oldest of Christian teaching. Just because Q goes through a development form cynical sounding ethical sayings to concrete history of Jesus life in no way indicates that the church's understanding went through that evolution. The PMR that embodied the Tomb/cross tradition could be just as old. Here we are comparing narrative action with ethical teaching. If one has only a concept of writing down teachings and sayings, not story lines, how does one include a narrative in a list of sayings? That doesn't prove the narrative didn't exist. All it proves is that Christian literary consciousness expanded. It moved from the static saying source to a dynamic narrative account, but this took several decades. No one had ever written a Gospel before, the communities that invented the Gospels invented the literary form. There is a good reason why the ethical saying would be older than the narrative too, because they originated out of Jesus own teachings while he was alive. That's a very good reason why the group of original disciples would have Jesus ethical says already memorized and already being copied before they got to any narrative action. They probably already had them memorize before Jesus went to the cross. So of course the body of ethical teachings could be set aside as a separate unit and preserved in the memory of the group apart from the story.

Let's consider this argument. We have indications that in the latter part of Jesus ministry he began to attract a lot of people. Women were following the camp and taking care of things (cooking, cleaning). Lots of people were always about. Jesus sends out 72 disciples (Matthew 13) to preach and work miracles. Where did he get them? From the body of followers that had began to surround him. Matthias replaced Judas. The Apostles said "he has been with us from the beginning." So clearly there were other disciples who followed Jesus and who made a camp and regularly around him. wouldn't these people, and new followers as well, want a list of the teachings they were signing up to learn and follow? Jesus was telling them how to live, so they were memorizing sayings about ethics and daily living. The Sermon on the mount was a classic example of Jesus' ethical teaching and thus we find ethical teachings in Q. What if Q represents a list of ethical teachings largely compiled before Jesus had even died? That would be a good reason for it to leave out the cross and the tomb. It may have been used to teach new camp followers about the ethical system Jesus was teaching. After Jesus died they would save the list, they would copy it and pass it on. It is our conditioning to think Jesus = Gospels, that conditioning tells us they had to add a narrative. There is a very good reason why they would not have added the narrative to the sayings list. They were not running a six o'clock news program, they all knew he died. They knew about the empty tomb. They were probably re-telling the women's finding of the tomb every night in their communal meals. There would be no need to add these things to list of teachings, but the sacrosanct nature of the teachings given by the Master before he died and went away would be reason enough to keep the list intact. I'm not saying this is anywhere near proven, but it's alternative that explain the situation without the radial conclusion that the early community did not have knowledge of the cross or the tomb.

Doherty is also assuming from the outset, dogmatically, that they are not Christians in the sense of having a Jesus story. He assumes that Jesus emerges from their ranks and the sect was already going as a cynical group oriented around some body of ethical teaching. He has absolutely no reason to assume this whatsoever, and it seems the Galilee is a major part of his assumption, and of that Koester warns us not to make too much. Of course that's convenient for Doherty because it "explains" why Jesus would come from Galilee. The group put him forward, Doherty will argue because they needed a heroic figure to counter John the Baptist. But we will get to that latter. The fact of the saying having a cynical flavor in no way means they were not Jesus' teachings or that there was any original group to which Jesus belonged. It could just as well be that the cynics were on to something and Jesus' actual teachings coincide with theirs. Of maybe he liked the cynics. That doesn't create Doherty's fictional group. Actually, the sayings are not that close to the cynical mind set. They no more the cynics than any number of ethical view points. At that point Doherty has no reason to assume that these sayings were taken over by a Jewish group with eschatological expectations. He needs this to explain the rise of the Jesus myth form this group (the need for a leader). But there is no reason to assume it. He can't show a reason why a Jewish eschatologically oriented group would be concerned with cynical teachings.

There probably had to be a group that produced the Q document (assuming there was a Q document) but to assert that it was cynical, that it was pre Christian, that it knew nothing of Jesus, is all uncalled for and to assert that it did not know Jesus death is just plain wrong. The Burton Mack assumption that Q lacks a death of Christ is totally wrong, and this opens the door to the notion that the cross was expunged from Q material. But be that as it may, there is good reason not to understand these cynical sounding Q statements as indication of a group producing Q material prior to a Christian group.

David Seely argues that the cynical expression had become so popular among Greek speaking Jews that it could be found everywhere, and that it was used as a means of framing the Jewish understanding of prophetic death. Jesus death was then dealt with by early community in way that the deaths of the OT prophets were dealt with, which means framing it in a cynical outlook:

David Seeley

JESUS' DEATH IN Q

[This article first appeared in New Testament Studies 38 (1992) 222-34; it appears here by permission of Cambridge University Press. The Greek of the original has been transliterated.]

The Sayings Gospel Q is notable for lacking an account of Jesus' death./1/ It is surprising that one early Christian document is apparently so indifferent to an event which plays a profound role in others (e.g., Romans, Mark). Scholars have, to be sure, observed that the issue of persecution and/or death is often referred to in Q, and many have come to believe that these references are casting an implicit glance at the death of Jesus himself. According to this line of thought, early Christians would have used the deaths of the prophets to connect Jesus' death with those of his followers. I do not intend to argue against this. Rather, I will propose that there is also another view according to which Q related Jesus' death and those of his followers. This view involved common, Cynic-Stoic ideas of the time.

The Deuteronomistic-Prophetic Understanding of Jesus' Death in Q In Q, there are six passages which deal with the issue of violent persecution and/or death (Q 6:22-23, 6:27-29, 11:47-51, 12:4, 13:34-35, and 14:27)./2/ Three of these mention the prophets./3/ Q 6:22-23 cautions Jesus' followers not to sorrow over being persecuted, for the prophets received similar treatment. Q 11:47-51 refers to the deaths of the prophets and apostles. Q 13:34-35 refers to the deaths of the prophets alone. These verses imply that Q may have understood Jesus' death in terms of the deaths of the prophets. This implication has grown easier to follow in light of O. H. Steck's work. Steck has argued that, by the first century CE, two important ideas had coalesced: 1) a belief that prophets were habitually killed by the recalcitrant Israelites; 2) the deuteronomistic view of Israel's repeated disobedience against God's laws./4/ Steck has termed this coalescence the deuteronomistic-prophetic view. According to it, the Israelites would sin, God would send his messengers to admonish them, and the people, compounding their sin, would kill those messengers. Nehemiah 9:26 provides important evidence for Steck's argument: "[the Israelites] were disobedient and rebelled against thee [God] and cast thy law behind their back and killed thy prophets, who had warned them in order to turn them back to thee, and they committed great blasphemies."

In conclusion Seely argues that the framing of Jesus death in this way would have been a very widespread element throughout Jewish culture of the time:

This article has done three things. First, it has pointed out that Q 14:27 does not match the deuteronomistic-prophetic interpretation of Jesus' death, even though the verse seems to address that death more directly than other Q passages. Second, it has proposed that 14:27 does match Cynic-Stoic views on the nature of a teacher's death and its relationship to disciples' deaths. Third, the article has asserted that this kind of influence is plausible from a cultural, chronological, and social standpoint. Though the arguments presented here are obviously not the only ones that can be entertained concerning this verse, they nevertheless deserve serious reflection./50/

Meanwhile, Doherty moves on to the next stage in the development of Q. He's trying to hitchhike his bogus notion of the fictional Jesus story being born out of this evolution of the Q group. He's trying to graft one on to the other.

This formative stage of Q scholars call "sapiential," for it is essentially an instructional collection of the same genre as traditional "wisdom" books like Proverbs, though in this case with a radical, counterculture content. Later indications (as in Luke 11:49) suggest that the words may have been regarded as spoken by the personified Wisdom of God (see Part Two), and that the Q preachers saw themselves as her spokespersons.

Here he is making several major assumptions not in evidence. He's making a connection that shouldn't be made, he wants us to think that because some wisdom traditions embodied a personification of wisdom, that must be the case with all wisdom literature. Solomon's Ecclesiastes is a wisdom tradition and that uses the vehicle of the wise but flesh and blood Solomon as it's author, not some idealized wisdom figure. Doherty wants to splice together these ideas of the idealized personification of wisdom with the eternal Jesus because group needed a wisdom figure. But this way of doing it is so clumsy and so contrived. I want Doherty to show me one example of any group anywhere in the world that ever did things this way. As I have argued before, he has mythology running backwards. No group first exists as an amorphous blob loosely connected to some set of ideas, decides that it needs a mascot to focus it's ideology and then drafts some ethereal being and then shapes it into a concrete historically bound story.

One also wonders what the group was about in the first place. He has a group of cynics, apparently organized around a set of sayings, and those saying are taken over by a Jewish eschatological group, which then has a crisis of leadership and needs to make up a wisdom figure to embody the sayings and give the group a new leader after the loss of the old one (John the B) but wouldn't the first set of sayings require a leader to say them to begin with? How could they just take over this group of sayings from a pagan religion and then work them into the fabric of their group separate and apart form the teachings of their own leader, then cram them into the mouth of their new fictional leader. How would all work for group cohesion in real life?

He pulls this splicing of ethereal Jesus with need or wisdom figure in the coincidence of the prophetic layer of Q.

The next stratum of Q (labeled Q2) has been styled "prophetic," apocalyptic. In these sayings the community is lashing out against the hostility and rejection it has received from the wider establishment. In contrast to the mild, tolerant tone of Q1, Q2 contains vitriolic railings against the Pharisees, a calling of heaven's judgment down on whole towns. The figure of the Son of Man enters, one who will arrive at the End-time to judge the world in fire; he is probably the result of reflection on the figure in Daniel 7. Here we first find John the Baptist, a kind of mentor or forerunner to the Q preachers. Dating the strata of Q is difficult, but I would suggest that this second stage falls a little before the Jewish War.

Here He has the community turning to the prophetic as a means of attack against the rejection they have already encountered. Who would reject and who would identify with this amorphous blob oriented around a few sayings of the Greek cynics? If there was pre Christian Q community that was oriented around the Greek cynics, they would probably have been placid and boring; the cynics were akin to the stoics, they took everything in stride and avoided emotions, if they lived in a Rodenberry universe, they would be Vulcans. Why were they rejected exactly, prior to finding this mascot (Jesus) what drew them together as a group? Just for a few cynical sayings? I think we have to do better than this. Of course its much more likely that Jesus emerged as a real flesh and blood person out of Galilee because that was a political hotbed rife with revolutionaries. It's far more likely that Jesus had this burning concept of the prophetic because real people who actually lived in Galilee thought that way, not like the placid cynics or stoics; It's really much more likely that Jesus was into this prophetic frame of mind because the Jews were into that way of thinking at that time, and because the Galilee was the hotbed of such thinking. The placid nature of a group oriented around cynicism would not fit the revolutionary zeal of the Galilee. Cynicism was popular and could fit into a larger background, but Doherty is assuming the group was oriented around the Q sayings which are cynical in nature, but he can't furnish us with a notion of the nature of the original group. Of course one might argue that if Jesus existed Christians must accept that he really thought those things so he had to more than just a revolutionary, but a thinker deeper than mere politics. That's true, but it works better with a real person. That's the kind of inconsistency one finds in real people. It's harder to see how it would it capture the imagination of a group without a real leader.

The only real clue Doherty can give us about the nature of the group is that it would be Jewish, and thus oriented around some notions of Messianic expectations of the end times. To that extent it seems a contradiction in character that their whole ethical teaching would be based upon the cynics. Now one might argue, "hey but Jesus has the same problem." But Jesus was as a real flesh and blood man could draw criticism and be seen as a challenge to authority and gain the ire of others, but as a fictional mascot who knows? Doherty assumes that the Q group would delve into the end times, understands that the son of Man comes from Daniel but seems oblivious to the fact that this was a standard epithet for the Messiah. So when Jesus speaks of himself as "son of man" in third person he is actually saying "I am the Messiah." This would have been a commonplace for the Jews.

There is good reason to conclude that even at this stage there was no Jesus in the Q community's thinking. That is, the wisdom and prophetic sayings in their original form would have contained no mention of a Jesus as speaker or source. They were pronouncements of the community itself and its traditional teachings, seen as inspired by the Wisdom of God.

one can only wonder why, Out of a hotbed of revolutionary zeal a placid cynic-stoic group (cynicism and stoicism when hand in hand) with a bland message (Love your neighbor) suddenly feels put upon, when in reality they would have been totally ignored in the revolutionary world of the Galilee? One wonders why they would muster prophetic sayings anyway with nothing more than "love your neighbor" and the like as the center of their group identity.

Doherty hitchhikes on the back of Q in seeking to play textual critic. He tries to show a disjunction between the persona of Jesus of Nazareth and the ethical says and the "son of man" statements of Jesus. He's arguing that these statements are being put in Jesus mouth, and this is supposed to prove that the Q group existed without any Jesus in their ranks and separately from any idea of a flesh and blood earthly rabbi named Jesus of Nazareth.

For while Matthew and Luke often show a common wording or idea in a given saying core, when they surround this with set-up lines and contexts involving Jesus, each evangelist offers something very different. (Compare Luke 17:5-6 with Matthew 17:19-20). This indicates that Q had preserved nothing which associated the sayings with a ministry of Jesus, a lack of interest in the source of the teaching which would be unusual and perplexing.

Or it could indicate that the evangelists organized their material in terms of the needs of their contemporary community. That's what scholars think they did, how then can this be evidence for the addition of a fictional Jesus? I think what he's talking about is what scholars call "pericopes" (per-ic-op-pees) which are independent units of story. An example would be Jesus healing the leper. That can be taken out and put in any number of places and not ruin the flow of the overall narrative. We find this happening all the time. For example In John Jesus cleanses the temple at the beginning of this ministry, in the synoptics he does it at the end as part of the Eastern weekend, and high drama leading up to the arrest. For John cleansing the temple serves to kick off Jesus ministry, for the synoptics it serves as a plot device to lead to the arrest. The evangelists weren't too concerned with chronology of each saying or each incident. They had more or less a free flowing narrative. Doherty sees this as proof that there is no history to the Jesus story, most scholars see it as an indication that these guys were not historians but preachers. They did not have a concept of writing history but were writing sermons for the community. Moreover, this device, the pericope was brought out by Bautlmann in his development of form criticism. It probably developed in this manner as indicative of oral testimony. In trying to memorize a long story one works with small independent units. Then in writing it down the redactors realized that they could play with the chronology of the units. Again this is proof, not that the Jesus story evolved over time as though it was fiction, but that the church learned, little by little, how to write.

Let's examine the two passages Doherty mentions:

Luke 17:5 And the apostles said unto the Lord, Increase our faith.

Luke 17:6 And the Lord said, If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamore tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you.


Mat 17:19 Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said, Why could not we cast him out?

Mat 17:20 And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.

These are clearly very similar statements but not identical. For one thing Jesus might actually used these two different illustrations at different times. Of course the structure of the statement is close enough that they are clearly following a pattern. No one talks in such a way as to use the very same syntax over and over again. Still the fact that there is a minor difference (one is dealing with a tree, the other a mountain) might indicate that there is a reason why similar statements are put in two different contexts. To just conclude "O well its' because it's all made up and there' no history to base it on" is absurd. Looking at the context one can see that the notion of fitting the statement to the needs of the community is probably the answer.

Doherty sees the content of Gospel discourse infused with material from a pre-Christian sect devoted to Jewish prophetic expectations in Greek cynical format. He finds that the "son of man" sayings are indicative of this barrowing. The "son of man" is a common euphemism for Messiah, it probably comes from the statement in Daniel that the prophet saw in a vision "one like unto a son of man" (meaning he was extraterrestrial but looked human). Doherty sees the third person usage of this terminology as barrowing because it is as though Jesus is referring to someone else:

Nor are the apocalyptic Son of Man sayings (about his future coming) identified with Jesus, which is why, when they were later placed in his mouth, Jesus sounds as though he is talking about someone else. When one examines John the Baptist's prophecy at the opening of Q (Luke 3:16-17), about one who will come "who is mightier than I," who will baptize with fire and separate the wheat from the chaff, we find no reference to a Jesus or an enlightened teacher or prophet who is contemporary to John. Rather, this sounds like a prophecy of the coming Son of Man, the apocalyptic judge, a prophecy put into John's mouth by the Q community.

What Doherty is unwittingly doing here is stumbling onto Jewish Messianic expectations, since he doesn't know anything about them, he's making assumptions based upon surface appearance. First of all, the statements about the "son of man" as they would be used in Daniel and in inter testamental literature would not be connected to any particular person. Secondly, of course there is a link between John's "one who is coming" and the son of man, of course both do represent the Messiah. John does not detach them from Jesus. They were detached as they appear in other venue, but since John questioning Jesus directly he's connecting them to Jesus. That just leaves the mystery as to why Jesus speaks of the "son of man" In third person. It could be a sort of royal we. I have always felt this is what I call 'signature fulfillment.' Certain things Jesus did that make no sense except as a way of leaving a finger print; he's saying 'I am the Messiah!' One example is before the arrest telling the disciples to guy a sword so they would be numbered among transgressors. What a useless idea, and they didn't even intend to use it. why would he do that? To be numbered among transgressors was a Messianic expectation. Why does he go out of his way to make a self fulfilling prophecy? Because he's signing his name, he's saying "I am the one about whom this was written." So in referring to himself as "son of man" he's saying "I am the son of man." Would we have him speak in an awkward fashion and say "I will come, btw I am the son of man" rather than "when the son of man comes." He doesn't have to add "that's me folks" because we know by the fact that when we read it we think "hey but that's him, why is he speaking of it in third person when it's him?" Doherty's argument about it proves the point, it's efficacy in forcing one to confront the signature. It serves its purpose when it makes us think, but wait, the "son of man" is supposed to be him, so why is he using third person?"

 

Part 3 Refutting Doherty's Evolution of Jesus: The Ancient Tradition of the Cross and the Tomb

Doherty says:

"Only in Justin Martyr, writing in the 150s, do we find the first identifiable quotations from some of the Gospels, though he calls them simply "memoirs of the Apostles," with no names." This is already been disproved. I've already pointed out quotations and allusions in all the major Apostolic fathers, in Paul and in pre Mark Redaction. Doherty seems mainly to be carping on the fact that no one sties chapter and verse, as though he doesn't know they didn't write in chapters and verses.

Doherty evokes Koster, but as we see with the myther penchant for quoting Cumont, it's clear he has not read Koster closely enough:

"Scholars such as Helmut Koester have concluded that earlier "allusions" to Gospel-like material are likely floating traditions which themselves found their way into the written Gospels. (See Koester's Ancient Christian Gospels and his earlier Synoptische Uberlieferung bei den apostolischen Vatern.) Is it conceivable that the earliest account of Jesus' life and death could have been committed to writing as early as 70 (or even earlier, as some would like to have it), and yet the broader Christian world took almost a century to receive copies of it?"

But what does Koester really say? Here he speaks of how Papyrus Egerton 2 indicates an independent tradition, but that tradition is common with the canonical material and the cross and tomb are part of that tradition.

Koster:

"There are two solutions that are equally improbable. It is unlikely that the pericope in Egerton 2 is an independent older tradition. It is equally hard to imagine that anyone would have deliberately composed this apophthegma by selecting sentences from three different Gospel writings. There are no analogies to this kind of Gospel composition because this pericope is neither a harmony of parallels from different Gospels, nor is it a florogelium. If one wants to uphold the hypothesis of dependence upon written Gospels one would have to assume that the pericope was written form memory....What is decisive is that there is nothing in the pericope that reveals redactional features of any of the Gospels that parallels appear. The author of Papyrus Egerton 2 uses independent building blocks of sayings for the composition of this dialogue none of the blocks have been formed by the literary activity of any previous Gospel writer. If Papyrus Egerton 2 is not dependent upon the Fourth Gospel it is an important witness to an earlier stage of development of the dialogues of the fourth Gospel....(Koester , 3.2 p.215)

But that earlier stage, and therefore the independent tradition is independent in that it is not merely copied form the canonical Gospels, but it does stand behind them as part of the material upon which they draw. But that material included almost word for word what is the canonicals, this table is but two examples presented by Koster:

Egerton 2: "And behold a leper came to him and said "Master Jesus, wandering with lepers and eating with them in the inn, I therefore became a leper. If you will I shall be clean. Accordingly the Lord said to him "I will, be clean" and immediately the leprosy left him.

Mark 1:40: And the leper came to him and beseeching him said '[master?] if you will you can make me clean. And he stretched out his hands and touched him and said "I will be clean" and immediately the leprosy left him.

Egerton 2: "tell us is it permitted to give to Kings what pertains to their rule? Tell us, should we give it? But Jesus knowing their intentions got angry and said "why do you call me teacher with your mouth and do not what I say"?

Mark 12:13-15: Is it permitted to pay taxes to Caesar or not? Should we pay them or not? But knowing their hypocrisy he said to them "why do you put me to the test, show me the coin?"

(all of that looks better in the chart on Doxa, in fact this whole pages does--scroll down).

As we can see these are the same stories, they are in a slightly different form, older (according to Koster) than those found in the canonicals, but basically the same stories. If we must assume that the tradition was a whole, why would the Orthodox just barrow from certain stories of a tradition that was totally alien to their view? The tradition as a whole must have included the cross and the tomb, and the textual evidence shows that these elements are part of the PMR and are as old as the writing itself.

Gospel of Peter

Fragments of the Gospel of Peter were found in 1886 /87 in Akhimim, upper Egypt. These fragments were from the 8th or 9th century. No other fragment was found for a long time until one turned up at Oxyrahynchus, which were written in 200 AD. Bishop Serapion of Antioch made the statement prior to 200 that a Gospel had been put forward in the name of Peter. This statement is preserved by Eusebius who places Serapion around 180. But the Akhimim fragment contains three pericopes. The Resurrection, to which the guards at the tomb are witnesses, the empty tomb, or which the women are witnesses, and an epiphany of Jesus appearing to Peter and the 12, which end the book abruptly.

Many features of the Gospel of Peter are clearly from secondary sources, that is reworked versions of the canonical story. These mainly consist of 1) exaggerated miracles; 2) anti-Jewish polemic. The cross follows Jesus out of the tomb, a voice from heaven says "did you preach the gospel to all?" The cross says "Yea." And Pilate is totally exonerated, the Jews are blamed for the crucifixion. (Koester, p.218). However, "there are other traces in the Gospel of Peter which demonstrate an old and independent tradition." The way the suffering of Jesus is described by the use of passages from the old Testament without quotation formulae is, in terms of the tradition, older than the explicit scriptural proof; it represents the oldest form of the passion of Jesus. (Philipp Vielhauer, Geschichte, 646] Jurgen Denker argues that the Gospel of Peter shares this tradition of OT quotation with the Canonicals but is not dependent upon them. (In Koester p.218) Koester writes, "John Dominic Crosson has gone further [than Denker]...he argues that this activity results in the composition of a literary document at a very early date i.e. in the middle of the First century CE" (Ibid). Said another way, the interpretation of Scripture as the formation of the passion narrative became an independent document, a ur-Gospel, as early as the middle of the first century!

Corosson's Cross Gospel is this material in the Gospel of Peter through which, with the canonicals and other non-canonical Gospels Crosson constructs a whole text. According to the theory, the earliest of all written passion narratives is given in this material, is used by Mark, Luke, Matthew, and by John, and also Peter. Peter becomes a very important 5th witness. Koester may not be as famous as Crosson but he is just as expert and just as liberal. He takes issue with Crosson on three counts:

1) no extant text, its all coming form a late copy of Peter,
2) it assumes the literary composition of latter Gospels can be understood to relate to the compositions of earlier ones;
3) Koester believes that the account ends with the empty tomb and has independent sources for the epihanal material.

Koester:

"A third problem regarding Crossan's hypotheses is related specifically to the formation of reports about Jesus' trial, suffering death, burial, and resurrection. The account of the passion of Jesus must have developed quite early because it is one and the same account that was used by Mark (and subsequently Matthew and Luke) and John and as will be argued below by the Gospel of Peter. However except for the appearances of Jesus after his resurrection in the various gospels cannot derive from a single source, they are independent of one another. Each of the authors of the extant gospels and of their secondary endings drew these epiphany stories from their own particular tradition, not form a common source." (Koester, p. 220)

"Studies of the passion narrative have shown that all gospels were dependent upon one and the same basic account of the suffering, crucifixion, death and burial of Jesus. But this account ended with the discovery of the empty tomb. With respect to the stories of Jesus' appearances, each of the extant gospels of the canon used different traditions of epiphany stories which they appended to the one canon passion account. This also applies to the Gospel of Peter. There is no reason to assume that any of the epiphany stories at the end of the gospel derive from the same source on which the account of the passion is based." (Ibid)

What this means is that the individual sittings of Jesus at the end of the Gospels came from different sources, were perhaps embellishments, but the basic story, the basic tradition from which all the other sources, canonicals, Peter, Thomas, Q, Egerton 2 all of them derive, included the cross and the tomb.

Raymond Brown, in Death of the Messiah demonstrates brilliantly that the story of the guards on the tomb as reported in Peter is not derived from Matthew, but is an independent tradition, perhaps as old or older. He demonstrates the independence of Peter's Passion narrative and tomb sequences in a huge and brilliantly constructed chart, which cannot be reproduced here, but which is elaborate. He uses the same argument that Koester uses above, not one forged s a document or redacts or copies a document by taking every other word. When one finds this kind of divergence in the working is indicates a separate tradition.

GPet follow the classical flow from trail through crucifixion to burial to tomb presumably with post resurrectional appearances to follow. The GPet sequence of individual episodes, however, is not the same as that of any can canonical Gospel...When one looks at the overall sequence in the 23 items I listed in table 10, it would take very great imagination to picture the author of GPet studying Matthew carefully, deliberately shifting episodes around and copying in episodes form Luke and John to produce the present sequence. [Brown, Death of the Messiah, 1322]

This work Brown did upon the independent tradition of GPet was the work that made his initial reputation as a major scholar.

Gospel of the Hebrews

We do not possess any copies of this work. It exists only in quotations from church fathers, but that's the similar situation with Q as well. GHebrews includes the atonement and the resurrection, and the tradition is independent of the canonicals and is traced to mid fist century. This gives us several sources that show a pre Mark tradition not derived from the canonical Gospels that is at least as old as the hypothetical tradition to which Doherty alludes; it contains Jesus, it contains the cross and the tomb:

Peter Kirby:

Early Christian Writings, Gospel of the Hebrews.

Unlike other Jewish-Christian gospels, the Gospel of the Hebrews shows no dependence upon the Gospel of Matthew. The story of the first resurrection appearance to James the Just suggests that the Jewish-Christian community that produced this document claimed James as their founder. It is reasonable to assume that the remainder of the gospel is synoptic in flavor. The Gospel of the Hebrews seems to be independent of the New Testament in the quoted portions; unfortunately, since the gospel is not extant, it is difficult to know whether unquoted portions of the Gospel of the Hebrews might show signs of dependence.

Cameron makes these observations on dating and provenance: "The earliest possible date of the composition of the Gospel of the Hebrews would be in the middle of the first century, when Jesus traditions were first being produced and collected as part of the wisdom tradition. The latest possible date would be in the middle of the second century, shortly before the first reference to this gospel by Hegesippus and the quotations of it by Clement and Origen. Based on the parallels in the morphology of the tradition, an earlier date of composition is more likely than a later one. Internal evidence and external attestation indicate that Egypt was its place of origin."

Brief note on Gospel of Thomas

Peter Kirby gives a good summary of the ms attestation of Thomas:

The Gospel of Thomas is extant in three Greek fragments and one Coptic manuscript. The Greek fragments are P. Oxy. 654, which corresponds to the prologue and sayings 1-7 of the Gospel of Thomas; P. Oxy. 1, which corresponds to the Gospel of Thomas 26-30, 77.2, 31-33; and P. Oxy. 655, which corresponds to the Gospel of Thomas 24 and 36-39. P. Oxy 1 is dated shortly after 200 CE for paleographical reasons, and the other two Greek fragments are estimated to have been written in the mid third century. The Coptic text was written shortly before the year 350 CE.

Even though scholars date the actual MS to the third or fourth century, a large camp of scholars, including those who discovered Thomas, date the actual writing in middle first century. Does this work indicate a separate tradition growing up along side the canonical Gospels, a tradition that lacked the cross and the empty tomb? It does constitute a MS tradition that is not derived from the canonical Gospels, but that is not proof of "another" Church that lacked the atonement or the resurrection as central pillars of its testimony to Jesus. What it proves is that by the time these sources manifest themselves as second century or later Gnostic "other Gospels" they are minus those elements because the Gnostics would allow them to slip out. First, piece of proof on this point, GThom was heavily redacted. In fact we possess it four separate versions:

Ron Cameron (The Anchor Bible Dictionary, v. 6, p. 535):

Substantial differences do exist between the Greek fragments and the Coptic text. These are best explained as variants resulting from the circulation of more than one Greek edition of Gos. Thom. in antiquity. The existence of three different copies of the Greek text of Gos. Thom. does give evidence of rather frequent copying of this gospel in the 3d century. According to the critical edition of the Greek text by Attridge (in Layton 1989: 99), however, even though these copies do not come from a single ms, the fragmentary state of the papyri does not permit one to determine whether any of the mss "was copied from one another, whether they derive independently from a single archetype, or whether they represent distinct recensions." It is clear, nevertheless, that Gos. Thom. was subject to redaction as it was transmitted. The presence of inner-Coptic errors in the sole surviving translation, moreover, suggests that our present Gos. Thom. is not the first Coptic transcription made from the Greek. The ms tradition indicates that this gospel was appropriated again and again in the generations following its composition. Like many other gospels in the first three centuries, the text of Gos. Thom. must be regarded as unstable.

It would seem that the tradition of the Gospel of Thomas is varied and the text has been through several redactions.

Arguing Thomas' independence from the Synoptics Stephen J. Patterson (quoted by Kirby) compares the wording of each saying in Thomas to its synoptic counterpart with the conclusion that Thomas represents an autonomous stream of tradition (The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus, p. 18):

Patterson (quoted by Kirby): If Thomas were dependent upon the synoptic gospels, it would be possible to detect in the case of every Thomas-synoptic parallel the same tradition-historical development behind both the Thomas version of the saying and one or more of the synoptic versions. That is, Thomas' author/editor, in taking up the synoptic version, would have inherited all of the accumulated tradition-historical baggage owned by the synoptic text, and then added to it his or her own redactional twist. In the following texts this is not the case. Rather than reflecting the same tradition-historical development that stands behind their synoptic counterparts, these Thomas sayings seem to be the product of a tradition-history which, though exhibiting the same tendencies operative within the synoptic tradition, is in its own specific details quite unique. This means, of course, that these sayings are not dependent upon their synoptic counterparts, but rather derive from a parallel and separate tradition.

That proves that GThom was independent, that it was not derived by copying the canonicals, but it doesn't prove that saying pertaining to the Cross and the Tomb weren't just left out. Cameron argues that he can prove this:

Cameron (537) quoted by Kirby: Those who argue that Gos. Thom. is dependent on the Synoptics not only must explain the differences in wording and order, but also give a reason for Gos. Thom.'s choice of genre and the absence of the gospels' narrative material in the text. To assert, for example, that Gos. Thom. erased the passion narratives because Gnosticism was concerned solely with a redeeming message contained in words of revelation (Haenchen 1961: 11) is simply not convincing, since the Apocryphon of James (NHC I, 2), the Second treatise of the Great Seth (NHC VII, 2), and the Apocalypse of Peter (NHC VII, 3) all indicate that sayings of and stories about the death and resurrection of Jesus were reinterpreted by various Gnostic groups. For any theory of dependence of Gos. Thom. on the NT to be made plausible, one must show that the variations in form and content of their individual sayings, together with the differences in genre and structure of their entire texts, are intentional modifications of their respective parallels, designed to serve a particular purpose.

This last criterion that Cameron lays down, that "the variations in form and content of their individual sayings, together with differences in genre and structure of their entire texts, are intentional modifications of their respective parallels, designed to serve a particular purpose," why is it necessary to show that? All they had to do was leave out the bits about the cross and the resurrection. If we assume that both canonicals and GThom have a common ancestor, some group or body of sayings that they both draw from, that's pretty obvious, or there would not be such parallels, the Gnostic use of that tradition could very as greatly as just leaving out the key expressions of doctrines hey no longer included in their tradition. There are numerous parallels not only between GThom and canonicals, but E2 and the canonicals. So it's clear that these "other gospels" drew upon the same parent sources, since it is equally clear that they did not just copy the canonicals. This might indicate that the groups producing Q, Thomas and E 2 did not use sayings pertaining to the cross and the resurrection. There is evidence that they had traditions that hinted at them, and the heavy redaction might indicate purging of such sayings. Let us not forget we are dealing with sayings and not narrative. Talk of context is not the same as if we were dealing with the expunging of a part of the plot in a narrative structure. All they have to do is leave out certain sayings. There are hints this may have been done. We can see from the chart above (parallels between E2 and John) that there are passes that deal with arresting Jesus and doing violence to him. That opens the door to the possibility that cross sayings have been expunged from the overall tradition.

Let us just assume for a moment that Doherty's hypothetical case is true and there was a Q community that is also represented in general by other words, such as E2 and GThom. The overall tradition must have at one time included some references to arrest and violence toward Jesus. Thus I am arguing two things:

(1) the door is open through the heavily redacted nature of the ms to have expunged sayings not in harmony with group ideology, at some later point of transmission after the composition of the individual works. if not


(2) good indications exist that some notion of Jesus being arrested and killed existed in the general tradition and were merely not included, either left out of these individual works (Q, E2, GThom) or they fell out before the composition of these works.

As to the argument that other Gnostics deal with the cross and the tomb, so why not these? The reason for that might be because those other works were not part of the early tradition. If these sources under discussion emerged form the mid first century, the other works Cameron mentions (Apocryphon of James, Seth literature from Nag Hammadi) were much latter works. The latter came form after the Orthodox church was more pervasive and the passion and resurrection were undisputed; those events had gained so much ground in the story they could not be ignored. In the early days, the mid firs century, groups that looked down upon the flesh and deemphasized or were embarrassed by those events merely left them out and stopped dealing with them at some point. So they were either expunged from the parent sources that E2 and GThom used, (meaning the source itself was reshaped to exclude them) or they just weren't included in latter copies from which these latter were produced. At that point, only 18 years after the original events, in the groups of the original community, eye witnesses would still be alive to correct error, but in rough groups breaking off or in groups scattered far away (Egypt, Antioch) they would have been able to de-emphasize the cross at that time. Basically we need more information before we really know what the infant church taught.

Now we must turn Doherty's fantasy of a "Q community" because it is the crux of his whole argument. That is where he develops the idea of this "other tradition" that began as the original infant church.

Aside from all that, the Gospel of Thomas does actually contain a reference to the cross of Christ:

GThom:55: Jesus said: He who does not hate his father and his mother cannot be a disciple to me. And (he who does not) hate his brothers and sisters and take up his cross like me, will not be worthy of me.

Argument From Consciousness

I will return to the Doherty stuff in a couple of days. I want to change focus for a moment to the arguments about consciousnesses. Atheists Almost unanimously accepted the idea that consciousness can only be the result of brain chemistry (thus only something a biological organism can experience). This is by no means proved, and to illustrate how weak it is I present a God argument based upon what we know about consciousness.



Argument:

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(1) Conscousness is irreduceable to physical property:

a) Hard Problem

b) Doward Causation

c) Veto Power

(2)Therefore, consciousness/mind is a basic property of nature.

(3) Grand Unfified theory posits the need for a centeral organizing principle which would be the key to all organization.

(4) Mind is the best exaple of such an organizing principle.

(5) Since consciousness is part of the basic structure of nature, and since that structure requires a single unifying principle of which mind is the best example, it stands to reason that a conscious mind was the original structure that put consciousness into the universe.

---

Athiests seem to almost universally assume that science solved every aspect of the brian/mind problem. It's all reduced to chemicals in the head, and there's no point in questioning further, and that all sciences agree completely.The truth is little is know about consciousenss at this ponit, and it is far from settaled that brain chemestry alone "causes" conscoiusness, or that conciousness reduced to chesestry.

The New York TimesApril 16, 1996Arizona Conference Grapples With Mysteries of Human ConsciousnessBy SANDRA BLAKESLEE[T] UCSON, Ariz.

http://www.as.wvu.edu/~tmiles/myster.html

"The next major group of consciousness seekers might be called modern dualists. Agreeing with the hard problem, they feel that something else is needed to explain people's subjective experiences. And they have lots of ideas about what this might be.According to Chalmers, scientists need to come up with new fundamental laws of nature. Physicists postulate that certain properties -- gravity, space-time, electromagnetism -- are basic to any understanding of thee universe, he said."My approach is to think of conscious experience itself as a fundamental property of the universe," he said. Thus the world has two kinds of information, one physical, one experiential. The challenge is to make theoretical connections between physical processes and conscious experience, Chalmers said.Another form of dualism involves the mysteries of quantum mechanics. Dr. Roger Penrose from the University of Oxford in England argued that consciousness is the link between the quantum world, in which a single object can exist in two places at the same time, and the so-called classical world of familiar objects where this cannot happen.Moreover, with Hameroff, he has proposed a theory that the switch from quantum to classical states occurs inside certain proteins call microtubules. The brain's microtubules, they argue, are ideally situated to perform this transformation, producing "occasions of experience" that with the flow of time give rise to stream of consciousness thought.

Let's examine each of these premises in detail:

(1) Consciousness is irreduceable.

(a) Hard problem

The frist objection to this argument, which is almost universally accepted by atheists, and fervently beileved, is that science proves conscousness is just a property or side effect of brain chemestry. This is far from the truth. David Chalmers (Philosophyer U. Arizona) argues that it is not even consciousness that the functionalists study, but congrnative function. That is to say, the functionalists study the way the brain processes information and the way it is produced. Yet, the do not study and cannot explain the aspect of consciousness itself. This means they are merely "losing the phenomena." That is, they are "reducing" consciousness out of existecne, ignoring it, swtiching something else in its place. Unitl the hard probelm is solved, conscoiusness cannot be understood. Charlmers explians:


David J. Chalmers
Department of Philosophy
University of Arizona

[Scientific American, December 1995 pp. 62-68. N.B. As always at Scientific American, this was heavily edited. For a more careful treatment of this material, see my "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness".]

The Puzzle of Conscious Experience

The easy problems of consciousness include the following: How can a human subject discriminate sensory stimuli and react to them appropriately? How does the brain integrate information from many different sources and use this information to control behavior? How is it that subjects can verbalize their internal states? Although all these questions are associated with consciousness, they all concern the objective mechanisms of the cognitive system. Consequently, we have every reason to expect that continued work in cognitive psychology and neuroscience will answer them.

The hard problem, in contrast, is the question of how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience. This puzzle involves the inner aspect of thought and perception: the way things feel for the subject. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations, such as that of vivid blue. Or think of the ineffable sound of a distant oboe, the agony of an intense pain, the sparkle of happiness or the meditative quality of a moment lost in thought. All are part of what I am calling consciousness. It is these phenomena that pose the real mystery of the mind.

To illustrate the distinction, consider a thought experiment devised by the Australian philosopher Frank Jackson. Suppose that Mary, a neuroscientist in the 23rd century, is the world's leading expert on the brain processes responsible for color vision. But Mary has lived her whole life in a black-and-white room and has never seen any other colors. She knows everything there is to know about physical processes in the brain - its biology, structure and function. This understanding enables her to grasp everything there is to know about the easy problems: how the brain discriminates stimuli, integrates information and produces verbal reports. From her knowledge of color vision, she knows the way color names correspond with wavelengths on the light spectrum. But there is still something crucial about color vision that Man does not know: what it is like to experience a color such as red. It follows that there are facts about conscious experience that cannot be deduced from physical facts about the functioning of the brain.

Indeed, nobody knows why these physical processes are accompanied by conscious experience at all. Why is it that when our brains process light of a certain wavelength, we have an experience of deep purple? Why do we have any experience at all? Could not an unconscious automaton have performed the same tasks just as well? These are questions that we would like a theory of consciousness to answer.

b)Doward Cauastion


Glenn Miller, Christian Think Tank:

6. "We know from non-linear systems that emergence can exercise downward control in OTHER systems. If consciousness IS such a system, then there is no theoretical objection to downward causality--indeed, given the definition of such systems, it would be EXPECTED. [Journal Conciousness Studies:1.1.92] And, indeed, this is exactly what we find at the nervous system and other metabolic levels.(For an detailed treatment of various non-linear effects in the nervous system, see Kelso [CS:DPSOBB, chapter 8], where he describes nonlin effects at the microscale, mesoscale, and macroscale levels. Also see Mainzer on subcellular and metabolic oscillation phenomena," CS:TIC:91.)

"We have studies of neuronal changes induced by mental processes (with the interface mechanism unspecified) [JCS:1.1.124]: "for example, neural activity (as indicated by measurements of regional blood flow or metabolic rate) has been shown to increase selectively in the supplementary motor area (SMA) when the subject is asked to imagine moving his fingers without actually moving them."

Rosenberg (Ibid.)

"Take the matter of 'downward causation' to which Harman gives some attention. Why should this be an issue in brain dynamics? As Erich Harth points out in Chapter 44, connections between higher and lower centers of the brain are reciprocal. They go both ways, up and down. The evidence (the scientific evidence) for downward causation was established decades ago by the celebrated Spanish histologist Ramon y Cajal, yet the discussion goes on. Why? The answer seems clear: If brains work like machines, they are easier to understand. The facts be damned!"[Miller quoting Rosenberg, Journal of Consciousness Studies, op. cit.]

c)Veto Power


Glenn Miller, Christian Think Tank:

"The studies of neuronal timing by Libet has demonstrated that conscious will exerts a veto effect on action sequences initiated at an unconscious level [Journal Conciousness Studies:1.1.130; CS:TSC:342f]. In other words, an unconscious process may get a muscle ready to move, but when that readiness becomes 'visible' to the conscious mind, that conscious mind can let the action continue, or shut it down! Elsewhere [CS:TSOC:113], Libet explains the implications of this veto-power, over against those who would ASSUME that even the veto was "upwardly caused":

"It has been argued that the appearance of the conscious veto would itself require a prior period of unconscious neural development, just as for conscious intention; in such a case even this conscious control event would have an unconscious initiating process. However, conscious control of an event appears here after awareness of the impending voluntary action has developed. Conscious control is not a new awareness; it serves to impose a change on the volitional process and it may not be subject to the requirement of a preceding unconscious cerebral process found for awareness. In such a view, a potential role for free will would remain viable in the conscious control, though not in the initiation, of a voluntary act. These findings taken together have a fundamental bearing on the issues of voluntary action, free will and individual responsibility for conscious urges and actions."

In case you didn't get that--the veto cannot have antecedent unconscious processes (before it becomes aware), since it only appears in as the initiated action has ALREADY become aware--it controls with a go/nogo decision THEN.

For a boat load of data and other arguments on irreduceablity of mind to brain...

(see my pages on the issue of Conciouness overall, including mind, spirit, what the Bible means by "soul" and "spirit."


(2) Mind is basic property of nature

Chalmers (Ibid)

propose that conscious experience be considered a fundamental feature, irreducible to anything more basic. The idea may seem strange at first, but consistency seems to demand it. In the 19th century it turned out that electromagnetic phenomena could not be explained in terms of previously known principles. As a consequence, scientists introduced electromagnetic charge as a new fundamental entity and studied the associated fundamental laws. Similar reasoning should apply to consciousness. If existing fundamental theories cannot encompass it, then something new is required. Where there is a fundamental property, there are fundamental laws. In this case, the laws must relate experience to elements of physical theory. These laws will almost certainly not interfere with those of the physical world; it seems that the latter form a closed system in their own right. Rather the laws will serve as a bridge, specifying how experience depends on underlying physical processes. It is this bridge that will cross the explanatory gap.

Thus, a complete theory will have two components: physical laws, telling us about the behavior of physical systems from the infinitesimal to the cosmological, and what we might call psychophysical laws, telling us how some of those systems are associated with conscious experience. These two components will constitute a true theory of everything.

(3) Grand unified theory posits single organizing principel like a mind

Major Physicists propose Unitive principle they call "God."


Stephen Hawking's God

In his best-selling book "A Brief History of Time", physicist Stephen Hawking claimed that when physicists find the theory he and his colleagues are looking for - a so-called "theory of everything" - then they will have seen into "the mind of God". Hawking is by no means the only scientist who has associated God with the laws of physics. Nobel laureate Leon Lederman, for example, has made a link between God and a subatomic particle known as the Higgs boson. Lederman has suggested that when physicists find this particle in their accelerators it will be like looking into the face of God. But what kind of God are these physicists talking about? Theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg suggests that in fact this is not much of a God at all. Weinberg notes that traditionally the word "God" has meant "an interested personality". But that is not what Hawking and Lederman mean. Their "god", he says, is really just "an abstract principle of order and harmony", a set of mathematical equations. Weinberg questions then why they use the word "god" at all. He makes the rather profound point that "if language is to be of any use to us, then we ought to try and preserve the meaning of words, and 'god' historically has not meant the laws of nature." The question of just what is "God" has taxed theologians for thousands of years; what Weinberg reminds us is to be wary of glib definitions.

(4) Mind is the best example of organizing principel.

well, ok, within our limited human expeirnce. Sure, there could be some impersnoal principle that organizes the universe for us, and holds physical laws in place and unifies everything and makes it work; of course we could evoke the fine turnning argument to show that such an impersonal force, to the extent that it would display no pruposiveness, would not bother to actually fine tune the fine tunning. There are immpersonal, or seemingly impersonal forces that are organizing principles, such as survivle of the fittest, chaos theory, and so forth. It would be begging the question to assert either way tht this or is not indicative of true organizing, or that is turely personal or the product of sheer blind forces. But in so far as we understand, given our limited sample of the uinverse, planed, purposive, consciously directed organizing works a lot better most of the time, than blind forces. When we see unbelieveable complexity organized eligantly and effecitvely, we can't help but assume that it is the product of mind; of course now we are in design argument country.


(5)Since consciousness is part of the basic structure of nature, and since that structure requires a single unifying principle of which mind is the best example, it stands to reason that a conscious mind was the original structure that put consciousness into the universe

Here I'm combining the suggestion of mind or purpose in the organizing with the probablity of conscouisness as a set structure or property in nature. It seems too coincidental that we could have both and one is not the prior structure that is respionsible for the other.

Physicists are begining to think of conscousness as basic to reality:

"Scientific Proof for The Existence of God"
An Interview with Amit Goswami, by Craig Hamilton

What is Enlighement magazine.
Issue curret as of April 7, 05.


"Goswami is convinced, along with a number of others who subscribe to the same view, that the universe, in order to exist, requires a conscious sentient being to be aware of it. Without an observer, he claims, it only exists as a possibility. And as they say in the world of science, Goswami has done his math. Marshalling evidence from recent research in cognitive psychology, biology, parapsychology and quantum physics, and leaning heavily on the ancient mystical traditions of the world, Goswami is building a case for a new paradigm that he calls "monistic idealism," the view that consciousness, not matter, is the foundation of everything that is."

"A professor of physics at the University of Oregon and a member of its Institute of Theoretical Science, Dr. Goswami is part of a growing body of renegade scientists who in recent years have ventured into the domain of the spiritual in an attempt both to interpret the seemingly inexplicable findings of their experiments and to validate their intuitions about the existence of a spiritual dimension of life. The culmination of Goswami's own work is his book The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World. Rooted in an interpretation of the experimental data of quantum physics (the physics of elementary particles), the book weaves together a myriad of findings and theories in fields from artificial intelligence to astronomy to Hindu mysticism in an attempt to show that the discoveries of modern science are in perfect accord with the deepest mystical truths."

"Quantum physics, as well as a number of other modern sciences, he feels, is demonstrating that the essential unity underlying all of reality is a fact which can be experimentally verified. Because of the enormous implications he sees in this scientific confirmation of the spiritual, Goswami is ardently devoted to explaining his theory to as many people as possible in order to help bring about what he feels is a much needed paradigm shift. He feels that because science is now capable of validating mysticism, much that before required a leap of faith can now be empirically proven and, hence, the materialist paradigm which has dominated scientific and philosophical thought for over two hundred years can finally be called into question."

Objections

Objection #1. Brain damage changes mind.

this argument is made everytime the issue comes up.They always say "if you hit someone in the heard hard enough they wont be conscious anymore." For many skeptics the relation between mind and brain is very sipmle requires no exploration.

Answer: This brings us to an important epistemological question. The alternative to the skeptics conclusion is that brain function gives us access to consciousness, if the brain is damaged we are denied access, but a consciousness is still in there; just as damaging the monitor denies access to soft ware, but it doesn't prove that soft ware is nothing more than a side effect of monitor.No amount of scientific data can ever resolove this issue, because any data could always just be data from access not the thing itself. The real issue can't be resolved until we can resolve the hard problem.

Doherty's Evolution of Jesus part 2: Primative Tradition and Gospels

Doherty makes the claim that the Gospels were not received as an authoritative contribution to the Christian tradition until after the close of the first century. The importance of this claim should be obvious, if the Gospels were not authoritative the elements that make them distinct from the other tradition must be late inventions. Thus the cross, the tomb, Jesus himself are all added late and not historical elements!

But equally important is attestation. When do the Gospels start to show up in the wider record of Christian writings? If Mark is as early as 70, and all four had been written by 100, why do none of the early Fathers—the author of 1 Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, the author of the Epistle of Barnabas— writing between 90 and 130, quote or refer to any of them? How could Ignatius (around 107), so eager to convince his readers that Jesus had indeed been born of Mary and died under Pilate, that he had truly been a human man who suffered, how could he have failed to appeal to some Gospel account as verification of all this if he had known one? (Doherty, Ibid)

While it is true that Clement of Rome hardly ever quotes Gospels in is epistle (1 Clement) it is not true that he never does so at all. From the ethereal library's translation and footnote scheme of 1 Clement: he quotes or alludes to Matt 23:35 in chapter 24 (FN 102). In Chapter 56 FN 210 he alludes to Matt 18:6, 26:24, Mark 9:42, Luke 17:2. Secondly, there are good reasons why Clement wouldn't quote many Gospels. For one thing, John was from the circles of Asia minor. While these churches were probably on speaking terms with the Pauline churches there, they probably had little or no discourse with the churches in Rome. For another thing, if the traditional dates hold up John was written sometime in the 90's and 1 Clement is traditionally assigned the date of 95. So John would only have been within a five year period, and in fact might not have yet been written yet at all. So that would explain why Clement doesn't quote John. It either had not had time to reach Rome and build up authority, or it didn't exist yet. He does quote Matt, Mark, and Luke. Matthew had more authority and more ethos than did Mark. Clement quotes Matthew more than the other two Gospels.

Secondly, Doherty misses the fact that Gospels didn't have chapter and verse at that time, people didn't use footnotes, and the allusion to an author was sometimes all one Gave. Igtantus orinary habit seems to have been quoting major works without reference to who wrote them, but this was not uncommon. Clement does the same thing. Given this understanding, Ignatius quotes from or alludes to the Gospel of John a great deal.

Ethereal Library, Philip Schaff

Philip Schaff, 1882 provides several possible quotations of John by early church fathers, who are said by skeptics not to mention him. This is an outdated source, but it makes really good use of the Apostolic fathers and that information has not changed.

But we can go still farther back. The scanty writings of the Apostolic Fathers, so called, have very few allusions to the New Testament, and breathe the atmosphere of the primitive oral tradition. The author of the "Didache" was well acquainted with Matthew. The first Epistle of Clement has strong affinity with Paul. The shorter Epistles of Ignatius show the influence of John's Christology.30 Polycarp (d. a.d. 155 in extreme old age), a personal pupil of John, used the First Epistle of John, and thus furnishes an indirect testimony to the Gospel, since both these 'books must stand or fall together.31

32John 1:40-43; from which it has also been inferred that he knew the fourth Gospel. There is some reason to suppose that the disputed section on the woman taken in adultery was recorded by him in illustration of John 8:15; for, according to Eusebius, he mentioned a similar story in his lost work.3334

Here from the footnotes where he lines up the quotations. Quotations of Ignatius drawing upon the 4G..

quote:

"Comp. (FN 1065) such expressions as "I desire bread of God, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ ... and I desire as drink His blood, which is love imperishable," Ad Rom., ch. 7, with John 6:47 sqq.; "living water," Ad Rom. 7, with John 4:10, 11; "being Himself the Door of the Father," Ad Philad., 9, with John 10:9; [the Spirit] "knows whence it cometh and whither it goeth," Ad Philad., 7, with John 3:8. I quoted from the text of Zahn. See the able art. of Lightfoot in "Contemp. Rev." for February, 1875, and his S. Ignatius, 1885.

[here quotes Polycarp](FN1066)
31 Polyc., Ad Phil., ch. 7: "Every one that doth not confess that Jesus Christ hath come in the flesh is Antichrist; and whosoever doth not confess the mystery of the cross is of the devil." Comp. 1 John 4:3. On the testimony of Polycarp see Lightfoot in the "Contemp. Rev." for May, 1875. Westcott, p. xxx, says: "A testimony to one" (the Gospel or the first Ep.) "is necessarily by inference a testimony to the other."Eusebius32 According to Eusebius, III. 39. See Lightfoot in the "Contemp. Rev." for August and October, 1875.

33 Eusebius, H. E., III. 39, closes his account of Papias with the notice: "He has likewise set forth another narrative [in his Exposition of the Lord's Oracles] concerning a woman who was maliciously accused before the Lord touching many sins, which is contained in the Gospel according to the Hebrews."

Here From Justin Martyr The quotation is not literal but from memory, like most of his quotations: Justin, Apol., I. 61: "For Christ also said, Except ye be born again [ajnagennhqh'te, comp. 1 Pet. 3:23], ye shall in no wise enter [eijsevlqh'te, but comp. the same word In John 8:5 and 7] into the kingdom of heaven (the phrase of Matthew]. Now that it is impossible for those who have once been born to re-enter the wombs of those that bare them is manifest to all." John 3:3, 4: "Jesus answered and said to him [Nicodemus], Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born anew [or from above, gennhqh'/ a[nwqen], he cannot see [ijdei'n 3: 5, enter into] the kingdom of God. Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?" Much account has been made by the Tübingen critics of the slight differences in the quotation (ajnagennhqh'te for gennhqh'/ a[nwqen, eijselqei'n for ijdei'n and basileiva tw'n oujranw'n for ba". tou' qeou') to disprove the connection, or, as this is impossible, to prove the dependence of John on Justin! But Dr. Abbot, a most accurate and conscientious scholar, who moreover as a Unitarian cannot be charged with an orthodox bias, has produced many parallel cases of free quotations of the same passage not only from patristic writers, but even from modem divines, including no less than nine quotations of the passage by Jeremy Taylor, only two of which are alike. I think he has conclusively proven his case for every reasonable mind. See his invaluable monograph on The Authorship of the Fourth Gospel, pp. 28 sqq. and 91 sqq. Comp. also Weiss, Leben Jesu, I. 83, who sees in Justin Martyr not only "an unquestionable allusion to the Nicodemus story of the fourth Gospel," but other isolated reminiscences.

Doherty tries to deride the whole Orthodox chain of testimony by undermining the authority of Papias. Papias is a crucial link because he's one of only two early second century writers who knew eye witnesses to Jesus ministry..

Doherty:"Eusebius reports that in a now-lost work written around 125, bishop Papias mentioned two pieces of writing by "Matthew" and "Mark." But even these cannot be equated with the canonical Gospels, for Papias called the former "sayings of the Lord in Hebrew," and the description of the latter also sounds as if it was not a narrative work."

Why can't these works to which Eusebius refers, the "logia" mentioned by Papias, and the work by Mark, be equated with the Gospels of Matthew and Mark? The piece mentioned by Mark is said to be his gospel. The piece by Matthew may not be his Gospel because it is said to have been written in "his native language" (either Aramaic or Hebrew). The Gospel of Matthew was written in Greek and scholars say it was not translated from another language. On the other hand, Papias says all translated as best they could. There are arguments that Matthew uses loan words and translation words.. Another reason it can't be the Gospel is because it is called "the logia" or writings or sayings. This would seem to indicate it was not a narrative Gospel. In the Gospel section of Doxa I argue that this is probably a Matthew saying source that stands behind the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew put in the sayings and someone else reworked it into a narrative in Greek. See my page on Gospel behind the Gospels, and also my page on Matthew. I show that the Hebrew saying source to which Papias alludes probably stands beyond the Gospel of Matthew. There's no way to prove that assertion of course, but it is entirely Possible. Doherty's theory is no less speculation and is just as circumstantial as mine. Doherty is also making the mistake of thinking that the Gospels have to be written by the name sakes to have historical significance or authority. See my essay on community as author to dispel this myth.

"Moreover, it would seem that Papias had not possessed these documents himself, for he simply relays information about them that was given to him by "the elder." He makes no comment of his own on such documents (in fact, he continues to disparage written sources about the Lord), while Eusebius and other later commentators who quote from his writings are silent about him discussing anything from the "Mark" and "Matthew" he mentions. All that Papias can tell us (relayed through Eusebius) is that certain collections of sayings and anecdotes (probably miracle stories) were circulating in his time, a not uncommon thing; the ones he speaks of were being attributed to a Jesus figure and reputed to be compiled by legendary followers of him."

Of course, he totally ignores the fact that Papias says he has heard these people speak himself. He is not just quoting rumors, he actually heard the witnesses. He speaks of Arietion and the Elder John in present tense, he is in contact with them now. But Doherty goes on:

"What is most telling, on the other hand, is that even a quarter of the way into the second century, a bishop of Asia Minor writing a book called The Sayings of the Lord Interpreted did not possess a copy of a single written Gospel, nor included sayings of Jesus which are identified with those Gospels.

Of course we don't know that he doesn't quote them, because we don't have his five books. For all we know four those books might be chock full of Gospel quotations. Moreover, Doherty seems to imply that Papias comes to us only from Eusebius. That is certainly not true. A lot of what we know of Papias comes from Irenaeus, and even more from many other sources, some discovered in the middle ages. St. Jerome is one of these other sources. See my page on the testimony of Apostolic fathers to historical Jesus. This also brings us to a second category, that of extra canonical literature and the testimony of that literature to the canonical Gospels.

Pre Marcan Redaction

As we can see Doherty is quite wrong about the status and use of the Gospels among the Apostolic fathers. In addition to this problem, he also underestimates the early date and use for the same material in previous form, such as the pre Marcan redaction (PMR), early versions of Mark, the Q source and the like. In this category we can start with the Pauline corpus which demonstrates a wide use of the Gospel material, to such an extent that Koster theorizes that Paul had his own saying source that contained Q material and PMR material.

Koster, Crosson, Cameron and other textual critics have found PMR to constitute an independent source, barrowed by the canonical sources but not dependent upon them. They trace this to AD 50, and that is where the writing of Egerton 2 is placed. This involves the use of anther kind of literature, writings from outside the Bible, Gnostic ms and fragments of "other Gospels." There are three main sources that Doherty uses to indicate another church tradition, one without Jesus in the beginning, and without the cross and the empty tomb. These three sources include: Q, which is a hypothetical source derived from sayings in the "synoptic Gospels" (Matt, Mark and Luke) but supposedly representing another source which we no longer have. I will deal with Q latter, as it is the lynch pin of Doherty's argument. Also there is "The Unknown Gospel of Papyrus Egerton 2 (E2) and the Gospel of Thomas (GThom).

Peter Kirby summarizes the facts about E2:

"The Egerton Gospel is also known as Papyrus Egerton 2. It is known from an ancient manuscript that is rivaled only by the John Rylands fragment p52 in its antiquity. Ron Cameron states in his introduction in The Other Gospels, "On paleographical grounds the papyrus has been assigned a date in the first half of the second century C.E. This makes it one of the two earliest preserved papyrus witnesses to the gospel tradition."

E2, Q, and Thomas all date to middle of the first century for their initial writing of their primary material. Egerton 2 demonstrates many canonical parallels:
Parallels between Egerton 2 and Canonicals 

Debate over Credentials (l. 1-24)	John 5:39, 5:45, 9:29, (John 3:2, 5:46-47, 7:27-28, 8:14, 10:25, 12:31)
Attempt to Seize Jesus (l. 25-34) [Further Violence Against Jesus (l. 89-94)]	John 7:30, 7:44, 8:20, 8:59, 10:30-31, 10:39, Luke 4:30
The Healing of the Leper (l. 35-47)	Mt 8:2-4, Mk 1:40-44, Lk 5:12-14, 17:12-19, (John 5:14, 8:11)
Debate with False Questioners (l. 50-66)	Mt 22:15-22, Mk 12:13-17, Lk 20:20-26, (Mt 15:7-9, Mk 7:6-7, Lk 6:46, John 3:2)
Miraculous Fruit (l. 67-82)	No exact parallels, but words and reminiscences.

 The ancient use of Q material

Helmut Koester comments on the provenance of Q (Ancient Christian Gospels, p. 164):

"Even the sayings used for the original composition of Q were known and used elsewhere at an early date: they were known to Paul, were used in Corinth by his opponents, employed perhaps in eastern Syria for the composition of the Gospel of Thomas, and quoted by 1 Clement in Rome at the end of the 1st century. The document itself, in its final redacted form, was used for the composition of two gospel writings, Matthew and Luke, which both originated in the Greek-speaking church outside of Palestine."

Udo Schnelle writes about the dating of Q (The History and Theology of the New Testament Writings, p. 186):

The Sayings Source was composed before the destruction of the temple, since the sayings against Jerusalem and the temple in Luke 13.34-35Q do not presuppose any military events. A more precise determination of the time of composition must remain hypothetical, but a few indications point to the period between 40 and 50 CE: (1) Bearers of the sayings tradition, which possibly extends all the way back to pre-Easter times, included both wandering preachers of the Jesus movement as well as local congregations. Thus the conditions in which the Sayings Source originated included both continuity with the beginnings and with the developing congregational structures across the region. (2) The Sayings Source presupposes persecution of the young congregations by Palestinian Jews (cf. Luke 6.22-23 Q; Luke 11.49-51 Q; Luke 12.4-5 Q; 12.11-12 Q). About 50 CE Paul mentions in 1 Thess. 2.14-16 a persecution of Christians in Judea that had already taken place. The execution of James the son of Zebedee by Agrippa I (cf. Acts 12.2) occurred around 44 CE. (3) The positive references to Gentiles in Q (cf. Luke 10.13-15Q; Luke 11.29-31Q; Matt. 8.5-13 Q; Matt. 5.47 Q; Matt. 22.1-10 Q) indicate that the Gentile mission had begun, which is probably to be located in the period between 40 and 50 CE.

Thus the material in Egerton 2, Q, and Thomas (some of which overlaps between Q and Thomas) was existing at a very early date. The problem is the Doherty assumption that it constitutes a separate and therefore earlier tradition and was taken over by canonical sources latter and pressed into service for the cross and tomb crowd, but originally is found independently of any group that assumed Jesus was crucified or risen. He also argues that much of the saying source material originated among cynics and stoics and wasn't even Christian at all. We will deal with these assertions on the next page. At this point is important to observe that the Cross and Tomb were just as ancient and present in the PMR as Koster observes based upon Diatesseronic readings and textual criticism. Doherty has no leverage from which he can demonstrate that the non Cross/tomb groups were any older or that their stories came first.

page 3: The Ancient Tradition and the Cross/tomb story

Refutation of Doherty's Evolution of Jesus: part 1

Non canonical sources such as Gospel of Thomas and Egerton 2 establish an ancient and independent tradition of Christian witness that did not rely upon the canonical Gospels. Though much of that material is used in the canonical, scholars argue that the infant church was diverse and not all groups clung to the cross or the empty tomb. Doherty uses that as a thin end of the wedge to argue that these sources weren't even Christian and knew nothing of Jesus, they were taken by Christians for whom Jesus was a mythological and ethereal being, and only in the second century evolved into a historically grounded story. I argue that the cross and the tomb prove to be just as old, and the fact that the canonical used the material indicates that its tradition, while not dependent upon canonical writing, nevertheless, agreed with it. The sources used for this "other tradition" are late Gnostic sources. While they make use of early material the cross and the tomb have merely been expunged.

Jesus mythers often tip their hands by quoting the wrong sources. It is common to find the fource Franz Cumont on most of their bibliographies. But they have not read Cumont because he says that Mithraism copied Christianity. That totally defeats their copy cat savior idea.

In the same vein Doherty uses a source as an authority which totally destroys his entire thesis. He quotes Helmutt Koester, probably the major textual critic in the world today, trying to use him as support for the Jesus puzzle theory. But Koester disproves Doherty's theory by showing that the historical aspects of the Jesus story, including the empty tomb, were being written as early as AD 50 (see Ancient Christian Gospels 218). This makes them as old as any tradition Doherty can draw upon.

all of my criticisms in these five pages will come form Doherty's one page:

Earl Doherty

Jesus Puzzle Part 3:

Evolution of Jesus of Nazareth.

Doherty wrongly assumes that Justin Martyr is the on Christian writer before the end of the 150s to make identifiable quotations from some of the canonical Gospels. This will be soundly disproved latter. He also makes other assertions:

"Scholars such as Helmut Koester have concluded that earlier "allusions" to Gospel-like material are likely floating traditions which themselves found their way into the written Gospels. (See Koester's Ancient Christian Gospels and his earlier Synoptische Uberlieferung bei den apostolischen Vatern.) Is it conceivable that the earliest account of Jesus' life and death could have been committed to writing as early as 70 (or even earlier, as some would like to have it), and yet the broader Christian world took almost a century to receive copies of it? (Jesus Puzzle, part 3:Evolution of Jesus Of Nazareth"

The problem is Koester himself says that people were writing Gospels as early AD 50.(Ancient Christian Gospels)

Moreover he's already distorted what Koester says. Nowhere does he argue that the early Gospel traditions blew in from non Christian sources, or merely "floating traditions" that found their way in late. Koester presents a cogent picture of a unified tradition that is use by all the canonicals and non canonical such as Peter, Thomas, Q and the Unknown Gospel of Egerton 2. Where he speaks of "floating traditions" is only in the epiphanies, the various sittings of the risen Christ after the discovery of the empty tomb. Those sittings be believes come from many sources, but the main story, including the empty tomb he seems coming from a single ancient source that predates all of the above mentioned gospels. In this regard Doherty has not done his homework.

Koester:

"A third problem regarding Crossan's hypotheses is related specifically to the formation of reports about Jesus' trial, suffering death, burial, and resurrection. The account of the passion of Jesus must have developed quite early because it is one and the same account that was used by Mark (and subsequently Matthew and Luke) and John and as will be argued below by the Gospel of Peter. However except for the appearances of Jesus after his resurrection in the various gospels cannot derive from a single source, they are independent of one another. Each of the authors of the extant gospels and of their secondary endings drew these epiphany stories from their own particular tradition, not form a common source." (Koester, p. 220)

"Studies of the passion narrative have shown that all gospels were dependent upon one and the same basic account of the suffering, crucifixion, death and burial of Jesus. But this account ended with the discovery of the empty tomb. With respect to the stories of Jesus' appearances, each of the extant gospels of the canon used different traditions of epiphany stories which they appended to the one canon passion account. This also applies to the Gospel of Peter. There is no reason to assume that any of the epiphany stories at the end of the gospel derive from the same source on which the account of the passion is based." (Ibid)

Doherty, Ibid

Doherty asserts a gulf between the world of the epistles and the world of the Gospels. He also asserts the conventional dating schemes are hard and fast such that the Gospels are written after the Epistles. While that is true of the Gospels in their final forms, the forms in which we know them, it is not true of the material in them.

"To move from the New Testament epistles to the Gospels is to enter a completely different world. In Parts One and Two, I pointed out that virtually every element of the Gospel biography of Jesus of Nazareth is missing from the epistles, and that Paul and other early writers present us only with a divine, spiritual Christ in heaven, one revealed by God through inspiration and scripture. Their Jesus is never identified with a recent historical man. Like the savior gods of the Greek mystery cults, Paul's Christ had performed his redeeming act in a mythical arena. Thus, when we open the Gospels we are unprepared for the flesh and blood figure who lives and speaks on their pages, one who walked the sands of Palestine and died on Calvary in the days of Herod and Pontius Pilate."

Paul speaks of Jesus as flesh and blood in four passages, and Hebrews clearly states that Jesus had a life on earth in the flesh. John's Epistles speak directly of 'that which we heard which we touched stating clearly that he was flesh and blood. John goes so far as to denounce as anti-Christ anyone who denies that Christ came in the flesh. The problem is Doherty's assertion that the world of the Gospels was constructed after that of he Epistles. but the very scholar he looks to as an authority dispels that myth by arguing for a pre Marcan redaction (PMR) which places the Passion narrative and empty tomb, and a flesh and blood Christ in History, as penned as early as AD 50, before most epistles were written! That in itself invalidates almost everything Doherty says. (see Gospel Behind the Gospels.)

Doherty assumes that must be the products of their namesakes in order to be valid. He grounds the chain of redaction in the Ur mark, the original composition that latter became Mark, and ascribes the creativity of all Gospels to that single author. He even alludes to modern scholars who find connections between Mark and John: "This picture of Gospel relationships is really quite astonishing. Even John, in its narrative structure and passion story, is now considered by many scholars (see Robert Funk, Honest to Jesus, p.239) to be based on Mark or some other Synoptic stage." (Ibid). While new connections have been found between Mark and John, this is not due to mere copying, but to the mutual dependence upon the single source, the PMR. (see Koster, Ibid).

Doherty assumes that this is evidenced by haphazard growth of the early church in all directions, the same basic story, following Mark, is still kept in line even when a supposed Apostle writes it (Ibid.). Of course what he's missing is the fact that the four Gospels were products of core communities which strove to control the telling of the basic story. The fact that there is only one story, and that the facts of it were kept in line, serves to illustrate the historical nature of the material. Secondly, he completely misses the fact that the Ur mark is placed at the beginning of a process which probably started in the 40's. It's many editions prove that it was not written for the first time in AD 70 but many years before that.

He also misses the fact that many pre marcan sources existed, saying sources like Q and narrative material, and all of this existed on different trajectories all going back to the original preaching of the Christian message. The link between mark and John is explained by Koster in this Pre Marcan Redaction which dates to AD 50; all four canonical gospels used that same material. What all of this means is, what Doherty just ignores, the assertion that Jesus concrete historicity comes in the second century is empirically disproved through Koster and his textual criticism. But Doherty can't face that fact, instead he distorts the information and bends it to his own purpose, which would be to place the actually making of the Gospels as late as possible. The tendency now is to place them early, certainly textual evidence proves this.

In his attempt to stretch the dates of writings out to as late as possible, Doherty Places them in the second century, which almost no scholar does now days.

"When were the Gospels—or their earliest versions—written? Mark is usually dated by its "Little Apocalypse" in Chapter 13, which tells of great upheavals and the destruction of the Temple, spoken as a prophecy by Jesus. This must, it is claimed, refer to the first Jewish War (66-70); thus Mark wrote in its midst or shortly after. But even Mark is presumed to have drawn on source elements, and some think this Little Apocalypse could originally have been a Jewish composition (with no reference to Jesus), one that Mark later borrowed and adapted. Or, if Chapter 13 is by Mark, it could well have grown out of a later period, for other documents, like Revelation and some Jewish apocalypses, show that vivid apocalyptic expectations persisted until at least the end of the century. In fact, 13:7 has Jesus warning his listeners not to regard the End as imminent even when the winds of war arrive. Nothing in Mark should force us to date him before the 90s."

Almost all modern scholars date Mark to AD 70, and not without good reason. Doherty is right that that reason revolves around the destruction of the temple. That is a good reason to assume that the writing was after the destruction, but there is no reason at all to put it as late as 90. Placing the writing of Mark in 90 would put it in a totally different period, when the concerns of destruction of the temple would be over. The Evangelist could be reflecting upon a past event to show Jesus' prophetic gift, but why that event? The reason for choosing that event would be its timely nature. It seems more likely that writing in 90 would have him reflect upon events in 90. As a persecution was starting at that time, and the Jews were holding the council of Jamnia, these would seem more likely since they would seem more related to current events..

But that is as much a reason to date Mark in the early 60's rather than after 70. The winds of war were predictable, since they had not come yet, it would make sense to say "don't panic with the first winds of war begin to blow." It would make no sense to say that after the temple has been destroyed. The total lack of any military imagery or any statement to the effect of the temple being destroyed by the Romans would seem to indicate that the idea was more hypothetical and the writing prior to 70. Besides the idea of the end of the temple being connected with the coming of Messiah was already part of Jewish thinking (see Alfred Edersheim, Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah).

He asserts that the parting of the ways between Jews and gentiles is used as the major key to dating the gospels, and that took place as a consequence of the war of 66-70.But again, he forgets (a) that conflict began long before AD 70 and was ripe by the time of the revolt, (b) he's talking about the final form of Mark's redaction, but there were different versions of Mark. It's the process which we know took place and the evidence from textual criticism that shows the many prior versions and the concrete historical nature of Jesus as early as mid century.


Page 2 of the essay: "Primitive Tradition and the Gospels"


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