#carsten thiede

[thirstygargoyle]

It is odd that the question of accurate witness has been accorded so little significance by recent scholars, given that it was clearly so important to the New Testament authors themselves. The Lucan Evangelist says that his history was handed to him ‘by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word’ (Luke 1:2, REV). The author of St John, likewise, stresses that his account of the soldier piercing Jesus’s side when he was on the Cross is based on eyewitness evidence: ‘He who saw it has borne witness – his testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth – that you may also believe’ (John 19:35 REV). Later the Evangelist is identified as ‘the disciple who is bearing witness to these things, and who has written these things; and we know that his testimony is true’ (John 21:24, REV). This suggests, like John 1:14, that the author also included many of his readers among the eyewitnesses of Jesus’ life and resurrection. This, it might be said, is merely a literary device to establish the credentials of the Evangelist. Yet, at the very least, the use of this particular device indicates that the communities for whom the Gospels were written valued accurate testimony. To be a witness of Christ was to be part of a spiritual elite. In Acts 10:41, Jesus is said to have appeared ‘not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses’ (REV). It was not a claim made lightly or simply for show. The question of reliable witness was evidently one of deadly seriousness. In a series of influential books, the textual scholar Birger Gerhardsson – following his mentor Harald Riesenfeld – has shown how important the accurate transmission and learning by heart of holy tradition were in the Jewish milieu of the first century AD. Diligent memorization of important texts and sayings, he argues, was a sacred task. Paul speaks often of a tradition which was handed over and received between Christians. So does Matthew in chapter 15 of his Gospel. The transmission of the good news from witness to witness, from witness to convert, from convert to scribe, was probably ‘conscious, deliberate, and programmatic’. This, as Gerhardsson is the first to point out, does that mean that the Gospels were a stenographer’s account of the life and work of Jesus. Equally, however, ‘there is no reason to suppose that any believer in the early church could create traditions about Jesus and expect that his word would be accepted.’ […] If St Matthew was written before the destruction of the Temple – perhaps many years before – it was written for men and women who would look upon the events it described as recent reality rather than generations-old folklore. Some of them would have had direct experience of Jesus’s ministry; many more would know those who claimed to have seen the miracles, the raising of the dead, even the risen Christ. Their faith was a tradition in the sense that it was a shared, recent experience rather than a body of folklore that had taken decades to evolve.

Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew D’Ancona, The Jesus Papyrus, 190-191.

[thirstygargoyle]

Jesus himself was brought up in Nazareth, only six kilometres or on and a half hours’ walking distance from Sepphoris which was being rebuilt as the capital of Galilee during his youth. Some scholars maintain that Jesus and Joseph, both builders by profession, played an active part in the construction of this place: the Greek word tekton in Matthew 13:55 does not mean ‘carpenter’ as most Bibles mistranslate it, but ‘builder’. Its etymological traces can still be recognized in the modern word ‘architect’. Sepphoris, again, was a profoundly Hellenized place, as is clear from contemporary inscriptions and the magnificent theatre which was built while Jesus was a young man. Even in Palestine, plays were performed in Greek for a population remarkably familiar with that tongue. In Sepphoris, a town of 25,000 inhabitants, it is striking that the theatre was capable of seating an audience of 5,000. This suggests that a command of the language sufficient to understand Greek drama was not confined to the upper echelons of first-century Galilean society.

Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew D’Ancona, The Jesus Papyrus, 151.

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A Roman of Theophilus’s stature had easy access to the scriptoria of the imperial administration, to individual scribes awaiting his commissions and, most importantly, to the so-called tabellarii, the highly efficient postmen of the Empire. Using an irregular but reliable network of couriers, everybody could send mail even to distant destinations. But it was the privilege of the nobility and of those in public service to use the imperial mail which could cover vast distances in a short time. Both systems were capable of remarkable feats: Corinth (Greece) to Puteoli (Italy) in five days was a normal delivery-time and in favourable weather conditions it was possible to send a letter from Rome to Alexandria in only three days. Documents sent from Thessaloniki in north-east Greece routinely reached Ascalon in Palestine within twelve days. These delivery-times surpass even today’s postal services. Who in 1996 could hope for a letter posted in Rome to reach Alexandria three days later?

Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew D’Ancona, The Jesus Papyrus, 127-128.

(Putting aside the question of whether Theophilus was indeed a Roman civil servant or whatever, rather than, say, a literary construct like the ‘Malcolm’ of C.S. Lewis’s On Prayer, the points about the courier and postal services of the Roman empire are well-made. The Christian communities of the first century were not hermetically-sealed islands, but were part of a thriving communications network and could share information with remarkable ease. )

[thirstygargoyle]

Into the details of that dispute I do not propose to go. I only want to point out that the arguments used are such as no critic would ever dream of applying to a modern book of memoirs written by one real person about another. The defects imputed to St John would be virtues in Mr Jones, and the value and authenticity of Mr Jones’s contribution to literature would be proved by the same arguments that are used to undermine the authenticity of St John. Suppose, for example, Mr Bernard Shaw were now to publish a volume of reminiscences about Mr William Archer: would anybody object that the account must be received with suspicion because most of Archer’s other contemporaries were dead, or because the style of G.B.S. was very unlike that of a Times obituary notice, or because the book contained a great many intimate conversations not recorded in previous memoirs, and left out a number of facts that could easily be ascertained by reference to the Dictionary of National Biography? Or if Mr Shaw (being a less vigorous octogenarian than he happily is) had dictated part of his material to a respectable clergyman, who had himself added a special note to say that Shaw was the real author and that readers might rely on the accuracy of the memoirs since, after all, Shaw was a close friend of Archer’s and ought to know – should we feel that these two worthy men were thereby revealed as self-confessed liars, and dismiss their joint work as a valueless fabrication? Probably not; but then Mr Shaw is a real person, and lives, not in the Bible, but in Westminster. The time has not come to doubt him. He is already a legend, but not yet a myth; two thousand years hence, perhaps–‘

Dorothy L. Sayers, quoted in Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew D’Ancona, The Jesus Papyrus, 61-62.

[thirstygargoyle]

There is a world – I do not say a world in which all scholars live but one at any rate into which all of them sometimes stray, and which some of them seem permanently to inhabit – which is not the world in which I live. In my world, in The Times and the Telegraph both tell one story in somewhat different terms, nobody concludes that one of them must have copied the other, nor that the variations in the story have some esoteric significance. But in that world of which I am speaking this would be taken for granted. There, no story is ever derived from facts but always from somebody else’s version of the same story. […] In my world, almost every book, except some of those produced by Government departments, is written by one author. In that world, almost every book is produced by a committee, and some of them by a whole series of committees. In my world, if I read that Mr Churchill, in 1935, said that Europe was heading for a disastrous war, I applaud his foresight. In that world, no prophecy, however vaguely worded, is ever made except after the event. In my world, we say, ‘The first world war took place in 1914-1918.’ In that world they say, ‘the world-war narrative took shape in the third decade of the twentieth century.’ In my world, men and women live for a considerable time – seventy, eighty, even a hundred years – and they are equipped with a thing called memory. In that world (it would appear), they come into being, write a book, and forthwith perish, all in a flash, and it is noted of them with astonishment that they ‘preserve traces of a primitive tradition’ about things which happened well within their own adult lifetime.

A.N.H. Green-Armytage, John Who Saw, quoted in Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew D’Ancona, The Jesus Papyrus, 60-61.

[thirstygargoyle]

In addressing the question of the Gospels’ origins, Martin Hengel noticed a technique customary in the making of scrolls which ensured that an author’s name was likely to be recorded early in the life of a text. Literary scrolls had tags glued to them, strips made of parchment, papyrus, or leather. The tag – in Greek, a sillybos or sittybos – was affixed to the handle or otherwise attached to the back of the scroll in such a way that it was clearly visible to the bookseller or reader. It fulfilled the same purpose as the spine of a modern book. Instead of unrolling the beginning of a scroll to discover its author and title, readers simply read the sittybos. Hengel points out that such a tag would also have been attached to a Gospel scroll. When there was only one such text, the sittybos might simply have read ‘Gospel’ or ‘euangelion’ in Greek. Until a second text was produced, such an identification would have been sufficient for readers seeking this particular, precious scroll. But, as Hengel notes, ‘At the latest when the communities had two different copies of the Gospels, titles had to be used to distinguish them, in order to avoid confusion. Where the author was well-known to the community, a verbal reference would have been enough, but as soon as his work was copied, sent to other communities and put in an archive there, a title was absolutely necessary to distinguish it from other works. We may assume that at least the larger communities got hold of the newly composed Gospels relatively quickly because of the lively interchange between the communities… If, as is usually argued today, the earliest Gospels were anonymous or lacked titles, because of the pressing need to distinguish them in community libraries a variation of titles would have inevitably arisen, whereas in the case of the canonical Gospels (in contrast to that of the countless apocryphal writings) we can detect nothing of this.’

Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew D’Ancona, The Jesus Papyrus, 54-55.

[thirstygargoyle]

Many other arguments have been put forward in favour of a later rather than an earlier date for the composition of the Gospels. One is the claim that they were written only after the first Christians accepted that the Second Coming of Jesus was not imminent. The earliest communities, it is argued, expected the risen and ascended Jesus to return sooner rather than later, to herald ‘the end of the Age’ during their lifetime. Given this expectation, it has been claimed, these Christian apocalyptics would see no reason to preserve, collected and disseminate narratives about Jesus’ life and works. Only later, when the first generation of eyewitnesses had passed away and disappointment at Christ’s failure to return had given way to new doctrinal thinking, would it have seemed necessary to compile such texts – or so it has been argued. Yet there is no real evidence for the messianic expectation upon which this theory depends. In Mark 9:1, Jesus says: ‘Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power’ (RSV). If one assumes that this does refer to a prospective Second Coming, one is left with a paradox: if Mark was written only when the first Christians had changed their mind about Jesus’ return, why would they have recorded a prophecy which they had come to accept was not to be fulfilled? Why, in other words, commit to writing a prediction which had proved entirely mistaken? In fact, one can avoid this logical quagmire altogether because the reference in Mark is not to the Second Coming but to the Transfiguration of Jesus, which is reported in the verses that follow, ‘six days later’. Here Jesus is revealed as God’s only son, in the full glory of God’s power invested in him.

Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew D’Ancona, The Jesus Papyrus, 49-50.

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Schadewalt’s philological conclusions were striking: ‘As to the substance of the narratives and sayings, I would say that if, as often in philology, we make a comparison in terms of good tradition, bad tradition, and very good tradition, on this scale of values we would say that the Synoptic Gospels are very good tradition.’ This does not mean, of course, that every word in these texts should be taken at face value. More than factual recollections, the Gospels are proclamations of the good message (the evangelion or good spell, gospel) about Jesus, in which historical facts are ordered with a clear purpose; thus, some sermons are omitted or given a different setting in different Gospels. The author of St John, likewise, had his own priorities, preferring the more intimate and personal remarks made by Jesus to his major public speeches. But such discrepancies are not necessarily evidence that the Gospels are unreliable or that they were written over a long period of time. The first evangelists and those who later decided to preserve all four canonical Gospels (as opposed to just one, as suggested by the second-century heretic Marcion) well appreciated that the transmission of four partially independent testimonies was a strength rather than a weakness. It would assist historical recollection and facilitate the spread of the Word.

Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew D’Ancona, The Jesus Papyrus, 48.

(To describe The Jesus Papyrus as flawed would be an understatement, and it would likewise be unwise to think of Thiede as a sober scholar; among other things, he has a tendency to omit counter-arguments to his theses, which tend towards the reckless. That said, where he is valuable is as a critic of the lazy orthodoxies that can so easily mark New Testament scholarship. 

I’m reminded of Chesterton’s observation in the 28 October 1922 Illustrated London News that ‘The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.’)