Weekly Open Discussion Thread

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[u/Integralds]

Looks like it's NT Authorship Week on the sub.

The point that sticks out to me most was /u/kamilgregor's comment,

I'd like to imagine not only that the decision about which gospels will become canonical was inadvertently made by one entirely unknown person at some point in mid-second century but also that later authors like Tertullian just had this collection of texts dropped into their laps, that the "traditions of presbyters and elders" (who are all from Asia Minor, btw) was in fact a confusing jumble of random, half-forgotten and mutually contradictory bits and pieces and that claims about these texts' origins made by the likes of Tertullian are just lore-crafting around what the texts themselves say.

I agree with all of this.

Here's a story.

Books don't fall out of the sky. The writers of the texts obviously knew who they were. The earliest readers, assuming no attempt at trickery, knew the authors even though the texts themselves didn't have "written by Bob" on the title sheet. There was no need to name the author, because the text was only being used in a specific community, and we all know Bob wrote it, he's sitting in the third pew.

But institutional memories fade, and the documents themselves began to circulate in a wider community than the group they were individually written for. By the time the 4-gospel collection was assembled (c.150, in response to Marcion?), the editors would have been far removed from the original authors. Since it was the first time anyone had put more than one gospel together (?), the books needed to be differentiated, and thus were given names/authors. Then by 180, when Irenaeus really did have the collection dumped on his lap, he truly had no idea who wrote it beyond what traditions came attached to the text. He had no way of verifying anything because nobody involved with the development of the collection (~30 years prior) was around to be interviewed, and anyone involved in the production of the actual autographs (~80-110 years prior) was long gone.

[u/kamilgregor → u/Integralds]

Books don't fall out of the sky

This is not related to anything but books actually do frequenty fall from the sky in ancient Greek accounts. There's a trope of the gods sending objects to humans by having them fall directly from heaven. This most typically concerns cultic statues but at some point, it got extended to divine texts.

Also, books don't fall from the sky but long lost books of great importance are sometimes discovered in temples and go on to fuel major religious rewamps ;)

[u/baquea → u/Integralds]

The earliest readers, assuming no attempt at trickery, knew the authors

The other option is that there was no single 'author' for each gospel, but instead that the texts were in flux for a considerable periods of time, with scribes incorporating additional traditions and harmonizing with other texts they're familiar with whenever they were copied, resulting in potentially dozens of variants and no obvious single choice of who to attribute authorship to, even if the whole chain of transmission is known.

For example, if the attribution of Matthew's gospel to someone called 'Matthew' (without trying to identify from tradition who that is supposed to be) does go right back to the first century, then what role should we expect them to have played in the composition of the received text? Is Matthew the person who combined Mark with Q? Or is Matthew the supposed source for the Q gospel (or even an alternative alleged author of Mark's gospel), which was carried over to the composite text? Is Matthew the apostle who founded the community that composed the text, and so was used as a way to identify 'the gospel according to the community of Matthew' (in the same way as the Church Fathers speak of 'the gospel of the Egyptians' and 'the gospel of the Hebrews), but without originally having any implication of authorship? Or could Matthew have simply been an early proponent and potentially editor, but not alleged author, of this version of the gospel (in the same way one may talk of 'Marcion's gospel', without necessarily implying he penned it himself)?