Archaic Christianity

I am finally back at home. While at SBL I missed my family and my study. While in SE Texas I missed my study. It is so nice to be able to sit in my super-groovy study room in my super-comfy recliner. So nice.

It is also nice to be back from the land of dial-up internet. Having to wait 15 seconds for web pages to come up is just horrible! It's like going back into the stone ages. But since I was not preoccupied with the niceties of the internet I did get some good reading done. More on that soon. Tonight my time will be spent hangin' with the wife and preparing for Sunday School tomorrow.

As I believe I have mentioned before, at FBC Parker we are working through the Gospel of Mark for Sunday School. I was planning on, and hoping, to teach Mark 3:20-35 but that Sunday fell this weekend while I am away at SBL. In lieu of teaching the pericope, I figured I would chat about it here.

This morning I read through the 14th and 15th chapters of the Protoevangelium of James (abbreviated Prot. Jas. by the SBL Handbook of Style, btw...). There was one difficulty and I found a few interesting things. For context, chapter 14 is Joseph's inner dialogue on what he's going to do about the mysteriously pregnant Mary. Chapter 15 is Annas the scribe's discovery of a big (ὀγκωμένην) Mary and the scandal that brings up.

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...

All four papyri are from the gospel of John. Images can be viewed here. The manuscripts are as follows:

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.

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:

So I have been reading Three Views on the Origins of the Synoptic Gospels (edited by Robert Thomas) lately. If you don't know, this book is a debate book, with one chapter arguing for Markan priority, one for Matthean priority, and one for independent composition, with different writers (all evangelicals) defending the different viewpoints. I've been focusing on just the question of dependence, i.e., were the gospels written entirely independently or did Matthew use Mark, or Mark Matthew, etc. That question has to be answered before one can move on to other questions like Markan and Matthean primacy, or the existence of Q. I am defaulting at the moment to dependency because that makes most sense to me in light of what I see in my gospel synopsis, but I am going back to review this to make sure I am not wrong. The answer to this question determines so much else in gospel studies.