Archaic Christianity

Since it was New Year's Eve, I did what everybody else does on this great holiday. I went to the library (at DTS) and did some research. I was looking at the new books (I always do) and saw a new volume of the Oxyrhynchus papyri had been published. I took a gander and saw that it had four new papyri in it. Major cool...

Merry Christmas everyone!

Reicke begins his book The Roots of the Synoptic Gospels with a chapter which briefly details the history of the discussion of synoptic relations. It seemed to be just fine, but the meat of his argument did not begin until chapter two.

My birthday was about two weeks ago, Nov 20th to be exact. For my birthday I asked for money from the fam so I could buy books. Here's what I got...

I have commented on the book Three Views on the Origins of the Synoptic Gospels here and here. This brief discussion will be my last on this book for a while, I imagine. My reading of the chapter on the Two-Gospel Hypothesis (2GH) is my last in the book as I have already skipped ahead and read the gospel Independence view and the Two-Source/Four-Source/Markan Hypothesis (MH) view.

I discussed before my opinions on the independent view of synoptic gospel composition a couple days ago. I have continued my reading in the book (Three Views on the Origins of the Synoptic Gospels) and have moved on to the discussion of the Markan hypothesis, the two-source/four-source hypothesis.

Here are my next steps in solving the synoptic problem for myself:

1. Read Bo Reicke's The Roots of the Synoptic Gospels to get a better grasp of the Independent theory of solving the synoptic problem.
2. Next is Rethinking the Synoptic Problem ed. by Black and Beck. This book has defenses for both the two-document hypothesis (Markan priority) as well as the Griesbach hypothesis (Matthean priority).
3. Next I'll begin taking notes and applying principles to actual gospel pericopes. Eventually you have to move on from reading people's books to actually checking the data yourself...