I’m not impressed – he’s not reading the text like a first-century Jew, among other things. Here’s the text:
In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinius was governing in Syria. And all went to be registered, each to his own town.
And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the town of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David
For starters, he’s ignoring the context of the first bolded text, which defines the second bolded text. The first fits with what we know of at least some Roman censuses, as Cargill actually describes in the article. The second bolded text is explaining which was Joseph’s town – Bethlehem. A Jewish reader would know that someone whose “house and lineage” was of David, then that someone would have at least a share of ancestral property in Bethlehem since that was where David’s father’s portion of the Land was, and under Old Testament law that portion could not be transferred permanently. This would fit one type of Roman census which required people to return to ancestral property they still owned.
Cargill’s statement that “the Gospel of Matthew . . . depicts Joseph and Mary as already living in Bethlehem” is quite incorrect – Matthew says no such thing, he merely notes that Jesus had been born in Bethlehem. All that can be concluded from Matthew is that after Jesus was born Mary and Joseph remained in Bethlehem.
The Gospels are not journalistically accurate or researched history. The purpose of the Gospels is not to recount history or even to repat verbatim what Jesus (or anyone else) said.
The Gospels have one basic purpose, to witness and report the Gospel story. It matters little which came first or where they precisely got their material from. What matters is how they present it and what message they are trying to get across. Each Gospel has its own focus and uses the material to promote that purpose.
There was no electronic media to record precisely what happened. Why are people looking for modern accuracy from documents that predate electricity?
That is a good point, and I think I would agree with that. They were humans after all and historicity wasn’t their main goal. I think it is important though, that a historical case for Christ CAN be made, and it not just be a few peoples writing full of errors. Not saying that it is necessarily the most important thing
A couple of comments. First there are a number of differences in the accounts about Judas (who bought the field, what happened to the money etc), not just one. This should make us wary of uncritically harmonizing them. Second, it was common to see appropriate endings to individuals in antiquity. Immediately harmonizing Matthew and Acts on this assumes both are writing narratives with correct and accurate historical details. Third it seems like special pleading because like most Christians, you offer no comment on the third account of Judas’s death from the same general time period. Papias wrote ca 105 CE and he is the one apologists attempt to use to argue Mark, a companion of Peter is behind GMark and Matthew the apostle is behind Matthew. Curiously though, his comments don’t easily refer to our Matthew and he has a very different ending to Judas’s life than Matthew. His works are lost but Apollinaris of Laodicea quotes mentions him:
“Judas did not die by hanging, but lived on, having been cut down before choking. And this the Acts of the Apostles makes clear, that falling headlong his middle burst and his bowels poured forth. And Papias the disciple of John records this most clearly, saying thus in the fourth of the Exegeses of the Words of the Lord”
He goes on to quote Papias but two different citation show up in the record:
Papias: Judas walked about as an example of godlessness in this world, having been bloated so much in the flesh that he could not go through where a chariot goes easily, indeed not even his swollen head by itself. For the lids of his eyes, they say, were so puffed up that he could not see the light, and his own eyes could not be seen, not even by a physician with optics, such depth had they from the outer apparent surface. And his genitalia appeared more disgusting and greater than all formlessness, and he bore through them from his whole body flowing pus and worms, and to his shame these things alone were forced [out]. And after many tortures and torments, they say, when he had come to his end in his own place, from the place became deserted and uninhabited until now from the stench, but not even to this day can anyone go by that place unless they pinch their nostrils with their hands, so great did the outflow from his body spread out upon the earth.
Papias: Judas lived his career in this world as an enormous example of impiety. He was so swollen in the flesh that he could not pass where a wagon could easily pass. Having been crushed by a wagon, his entrails poured out.
So for me, this harmonization isn’t about figuring out what happened in the past, it’s about protecting the Gospel narratives from a perceived threat under the incorrect assumption both authors must be writing historically accurate accounts.
Fourth, not to mention if you look at Peter’s speech carefully the part about Judas seems redactional.
Calvin’s approach was redactional: “I think it probable that this account of the death of Judas was inserted by Luke, and I therefore set it withinma parenthesis to distinguish it from the address
of Peter. For what object was there in recounting what the disciples well knew? Further it would have been absurd to declare before them that the field bought with the proceeds of the betrayal was called by the Jews in their own tongue, Aceldama. . . . Besides, how could the word Jerusalem be suitably used, when Peter was delivering his sermon in that place? Why should he interpret in Greek among Jews a word of their own mother-tongue? There- fore Luke himself inserts this sentence, in case readers ignorant of the events should find Peter’s words obscure” (Jean Calvin, The Acts of the Apostles [trans. James W. Fraser and William J. G. McDon- ald; Calvin’s Commentaries vols. 6–7; Grand Rapids:
This is Luke talking to a much later church, not Peter ca. 35 CE.
Fifth, both deaths seam to conjure up conventional figures stories (Absalom, Nadan etc). which strikes me a literary technique or trope, not history…
That may incorrectly assume (1) the text is first century (consensus puts it very late first century), (2) it was not primarily intended for Gentiles or Hellenized Jews (3) that first century Judaism was more uniform than it actually was.
In fact, reading Acts account of Judas death suggest reading it like a Gentile. A few lines above I quoted the scholar Calvin who has something relevant to say.
That is a mighty bold assertion. Can you please substantiate this with citations from the first half of the second century showing exactly what you think the Church thought about martyrs and list all the sources that explicitly narrate the deaths of Peter and Paul from that same time frame? I only ask because I think most trained scholars would disagree with you here. A Roman-friendly author (or one with an eye to Rome) can write a period piece in the 2d century, allude to Paul’s death but simply end the account when his own task is complete: showing how the Gospel went from Jerusalem to Rome. Ending with Rome killing the book’s two heroes might not have been high on his theological agenda. For all we know, Luke was writing to (an) educated Roman(s).
The article says “do not settle for easy answers” but just asserts “Luke the physician is more interested in the bloodshed.” The article says: “(Luke uniquely has Jesus’s sweat falling to the ground like drops of blood). Appropriately, then, where Matthew focuses on Judas’s asphyxiation, Luke focuses on Judas’s blood-spilling (Acts 1:18–19) and thus reflects the grim irony of Judas’s fate. (Those who side with Jesus’s enemies in life die a sorry death.)”
This exegesis is laughable. Luke is s a physician so he must prefer describing a hanging death as a dead corspe falling (headlong–did he hit a bunch on the way down)? To justify this psuedo-scholarship: Look in Luke alone, Jesus’s sweat was like drops of blood. Luke loves blood and that show we harmonize these wildly different stories. This is poor and tenuous exegesis. And as the final paragraph goes: “in assuming the Bible is accurate in all it narrates I have determined it is accurate in all it narrates.” The article should have just led with that. God wrote them so they cannot contradict. Thus I’ll make things up like claiming Luke was so interested in blood as a physician (assuming Luke wrote Luke of course) he would purposefully describe a hanging death like this.
What I have seen of this issue is it is another bad attempt at avoiding the obvious:
"Another method of getting around this pesky chronological problem, is to reinterpret the passage. It is common to see evangelical apologists to claim modern translations are incorrect and that Luke 2:2 should be read as depicting the first registration, before the one when Quirinius was governor.[1] It is essentially argued that the word “first” (prṓtē) could mean prior.
This is not the most obvious way to translate this passage and it seems hard to deny anyone positing it are simply being forced to as they are committed to defending their a priori belief in inerrancy. There is a valid reason modern Bible translations and the majority of commentators simply do not translate it as such. As Fitzmyer writes, “The comparative sense of prṓtē is attested. But the following gen. is a gen. absolute, since the first word is ptc. If Luke had written hēgemonos tēs Syrias Kyrēniou, then this would be possible. But the use of the ptc. And the word-order are fatal to such interpretations. Moreover, it is obviously a last-ditch solution to save the historicity involved. It is trying to make Luke more accurate than he really is.”[1] As the evangelical Christians Darrell Bock similarly wrote in a recent commentary on Luke, “The major problem with this view is that the syntax of Luke 2:2 is cumbersome at best. This view is possible, but is not very likely.”[2]"
David lived a thousand years earlier, he would have had millions of descendants spread out all over the place. Who wasn’t David’s son? And everyone (day laborers and farmers with livestock and such) returning to their ancestral hometowns (no cars and poor access to public records) many centuries removed is a bureaucratic nightmare. What ancestor’s hometown, in your long line of them, do you even return to?
Or it turns out in a time without easy to access calendars, where people probably didn’t know their own birthday, Luke simply appealed to a major well known event in the past in the general period and ended up at odds by a few years with Matthew’s gospel. Why is this such a problem? Why do we have to jump through all these hoops? You seem to be assuming Luke must be accurate history and must be getting things correct. I don’t share that outlook. His chronology is at odds with Matthew’s but close enough. Matthew may have patterned the death after one figure (Absalom) and Luke had in mind another (Nadan). Thus their details contradict.
Q was most likely a written source by the time of Mt and Lk. There are some very strong agreements.
And Luke seems to get parts of her purification rituals wrong so seeing her as the source behind the Lucan infancy narrative is fraught with peril.
Matthew and Luke either created or had a tradition of Jesus being from Bethlehem. Yet they seem to get him there in contradictory ways. In Matthew, Bethlehem seems to be where Mary and Joseph live considering its where they want to return to after their sojourn in Egypt but elect to “retreat” to Galilee because one of Herod’s sons (Archelaus) is ruling Judea (Mt 2:19-23). The wording of this settling in Nazareth does not, in Meier’s words, sound like a “return to the old homestead” as he formally introduces Nazareth for the first time and uses the same words in 4:13 when Jesus left Nazareth and settled down in Capernaum.[1] This decision comes through a warning in a dream (Mt 2:22), curiously, just after the Lord told him in a dream that those seeking to kill Jesus are now dead and it is safe to return to Israel (2:21). Was the angel of the Lord wrong in sending Joseph back? Was it or was it not safe? Also, this account becomes even more implausible if we ask whether or not the angel of the Lord knew that another of Herod’s sons (Herod Antipas) was ruling Galilee at the time? The angel basically says its safe, the men chasing after you have died, go back to Israel. It turns out its not actually safe in Judea since Herod’s son is in charge. So Joseph goes to Galilee where Herod’s other son is in charge! One cannot prove an error on this alone but it is a very peculiar account. Given the convoluted narrative Matthew has created, with a sojourn in Egypt meant to cast Jesus in light of the Exodus as a new Moses, he appears to struggle to get Jesus to where everyone knew he was actually from—Nazareth. It is of note to me that the NIV labels this section “the return to Nazareth” despite Matthew not presenting it as a return. The NRSV more soberingly refers to it as “the return from Egypt.” Luke has a pregnant Mary accompanying Joseph, who clearly lives in Nazareth, to Bethlehem for a census (Luke 2:4-7). At the end of it all they “return to their own town of Nazareth.” (Luke 2:29)
[1] John Meier A Marginal Jew, Vol 1 pg. 212. He also argues on page 211 that the plain sense of the words even before the return from Egypt is that they live in Bethlehem: “In the case of Matthew, the first place name that occurs in his narrative proper (1:18-2:23) is Bethlehem of Judea (2:1). Since no indication of a change of place is given at this point, the reader who knows only Matthew’s story would naturally take the preceding story of “the annunciation to Joseph” (1:18-25) as located in Bethlehem too.” This fits in with the magi finding the child in a house (presumably theirs) as opposed to a cave or manger, and Herod killing all the boys in Bethlehem and surrounding areas two and under.
He is treating the text fairly. It’s the harmonizing Christians who are not treating the text fairly. They are treating it like something it is not, much in the same way YECs treat the Bible like a science text.
Luke’s claim is that he researched and wrote accurate history. Accuracy is a matter of competence, diligence and integrity, not modern technology. Modern technology provides some great tools, but the output is no better than the integrity of the writer.
We like to think of ourselves as more competent than our predecessors. But that is not the case–who was it that called this “chronological snobbery”–CS Lewis I think.
In Luke’s case because he explicitly said he “followed all things closely” which is an indirect way of saying he’s confident he got things right. Of course he’s not claiming infallibility, but is more like saying, “This is as good as it gets”.
That actually goes back a long ways; just how far I’m not sure but at least to the tenth century. I wouldn’t be surprised if it can be found in one or more of the Fathers. It’s got substantial scholarly backing as well. And as I read it in the Greek I note that “μὲν οὖν” (sometimes found as “μενοῦν”) is a disjunctive, meaning it can be use to break a thought, and since the Greek flows much better as a speech if vv. 18 & 19 are skipped, I can see why that scholarly backing is hefty.
I was thinking about that and thought, “If these are actual history, it’s a divine co-inky-dink!” I wouldn’t put it past God to do that, but . . . .
True, especially given the phrase “called in their own language Akeldama”.
At least one church Father (Cyprian?) exhorted people to seek martyrdom, while another found that Christians were so enamored of martyrs that they would rather sit and listen to one behind bars than to their own bishop.
Sort of depends on who “Theophilus” was – I knew one professor who insisted it wasn’t a real person!
That’s not a new observation; it goes back to the Fathers.
I see that as an observation, not an assertion, though I wouldn’t have put it that way, I;d say Luke was interested in what happened to the body.
That’s silly – I’d give it some credence if the word order was different, with “first” following “took place”, but as it stands that’s clumsy. It’s also totally unnecessary since Quirinius was in fact a hegemon in Syria before 2 BCE and oversaw another census as imperial Legate.
You don’t unless you have property there.
What hoops? Quirinius was an official in Syria within the sense of the word and at the right time that it fits.
Not that I can find. He doesn’t mention the timing, so he didn’t get that wrong, and he got the required sacrifice right – where’s the error?
Our interests and profession direct our focus, at least to some extent. Someone interested in geology would note stones that others ignore and would interpret the messages the stones tell; a birdwatcher like me notes birds and what they indicate. A physician would be more interested in sweat that look like blood than other people because he would know what hematidrosis signals - extreme physical or emotional stress.
Because Jewish evidence that exists prior to the find in early 1960’s amounts to biblical writings…science doesnt accept those as fact…if it did, you along with everyone else here would agree with a literal Creation, Flood, Sodom and Gomorah…but you dont accept any of these literally based on faith.
Strangely enough, the physical or external evidence for the resurrection of Christ amounts to exactly ZIP, and yet individuals here pretty much all believe that on faith apparently!
Then we start to attack the gospel writers in order to try to weed out any evidences contradictory to our belief (i do not agree that we should be doing such a thing)
None of that tells me why an ancient physician, granted the author of this text was one,—something not established—, has so much more interest in a body bursting and blood gushing out than a hanging that he completely removes any and all details of the hanging. The actual manner, method and cause of death are completely absent. This is extremely poor and speculative exegesis whether it turns out to be true or not. It pious imagination meant to harmonize two accounts that clearly have contradictory details.
Not to mention are you not assuming that Luke made up this speech? This alleged Physician is reporting the alleged words of Peter, who he calls “unlettered”, a fisherman—not a physician. If we are allowed to read people’s minds and engage in unbridled speculation, the connection to Absalom and David would
be more on the mind of a Galilean Jew like Peter and I would expect him to mention the hanging. This is Luke ascribing to Peter comments that give a fitting death to Judas that simply contradicts Matthew’s account. It’s okay. Giving appropriate deaths to infamous individual happened a lot back then.
If my understanding is correct, some think the earliest proto-gospels (what some might call Q) were just the sayings of Jesus and lacked the narratives seen in the canonical gospels. The Gospel of Thomas is very much like this. I wouldn’t be surprised if Luke referenced or copied what others had already written down.
It could be that Jesus’ words were recorded much closer to the time period of his ministry than the narratives in the canonical gospels. I would count this as something in favor of the “red letters” being accurate, or at least trustworthy.
What are you talking about? We must be discussing different things. I posted two accounts from the first century of Jews who mentioned Pilate. Biblical vs
Non-Biblical writings means nothing when discussing history. It’s just all ancient sources that have to be vetted.
Regarding the apparent quote from Papias, the problem is there appears to be a number of versions of that, quoted by others, and unsurprisingly scholars debate whether all, part or none of it actually originates from Papias. Even if part of it is from Papias, it is clearly exaggerated for effect which I would suggest warns us to take it with a pinch of salt. It is in strong contrast with the short and straight-forward wording in Matthew and Acts in respect of Judas’ death.
Regarding your comments on Papias and Peter being the main eyewitness for Mark’s Gospel, scholars such as Richard Bauckham have spelled out the textual evidence for that, so even if you were to dismiss Papias’ apparent understanding, there is still strong evidence for that.
I accept that there are differences between the texts and harmonization of everything should not be the goal.
I also think that the differences may add interesting aspects to the messages - we should not automatically interpret everything as unreliable telling just because we observe apparent contradictions. The authors definitely did not report everything, only details they considered to be important. Missing details in the story are not evidence of absence.
I think we should progress stepwise: first think if the apparent contradictions are in fact something that reveals interesting aspects of the story/message/background. If that does not seem to be true, the second step is to classify the apparent contradiction as a likely contradiction.
I think I would agree. I think it’s also worth mentioning that on top of the disciples living in an oral culture, there was already a creed acquired by Paul and written in paper form fairly early. Furthermore, they repeated the message so much throughout their lives (assuming the bible is true) it would be hard to forget what happened, what was said, and what was done. I think personally, only Dementia or Alzheimer’s could cause them to forget, which, it would appear they wrote everything down before that was possible.
That’s as may be but people seem to delve into the minutia of words to squeeze out meanings that may or may not have been the intent, even down to whether Jesus said My God or not (to deny the Trinity)
Especially the times Jesus’ speaking Aramaic is recorded.
He took her by the hand and said to her, “Talitha koum!” (which means “Little girl, I say to you, get up!”).
Mark 5:41, NIV
What’s interesting is that certain manuscripts write “koumi”. Apparently the Galilean dialect did not pronounce the feminine ending “i”.
Another miracle:
He looked up to heaven and with a deep sigh said to him, “Ephphatha!” (which means “Be opened!”).
Mark 7:34, NIV
And just before his arrest:
“Abba, Father,” he said, “everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.”
Mark 14:36, NIV
The story of Lazarus (John 11) is also interesting. It comes from Aramaic “Eleazar”. But Galileans would drop the first “e”, so it becomes “Lazar”. Add the Greek ending -os, and you have “Lazaros”, which is then Latinised in most translations.
So Jesus’ Aramaic sayings are all said within the context of miracles, or the story of his trial and execution. Thus there is also good evidence that certain narratives are early. (Jesus as a miracle worker and him viewing his death as necessary in God’s plan.)
That brings to mind my backpacking on the Pacific Crest Trail and in a couple of wilderness areas. More than once my companions nagged at me to “stop looking at all the rocks”, before they found out they could get interesting stories from me for some of those “rocks”.
Why? I oppose literal readings of the Genesis Creation texts because they’re the wrong kind of literature and reading them from a modern worldview strips away the message.
Because those are the words we have, they’re what the Holy Spirit affirmed. You hav to work with what you have.
I know that they have the approval of the Holy Spirit – that’s what matters.
The caveat there is that when things a rabbi taught got spread around people would say things like, “When we were sitting by the beach at Capernaum, rabbi X said…” and that often got attached as an introduction as sayings were passed on. Mark may have started out exactly that way.