THE GLORIOUS ACHIEVEMENTS OF MODERN NEW TESTAMENT SCHOLARSHIP

 Probably no books have been studied by more scholars than the four gospels.  Year after year hundreds of scholarly articles and books about various aspects of gospels.  Better and better understanding?  More and more certainty?  No!  Almost reverse!  Last time: theories on Luke.  Conzelmann: Luke writing an apology, showing Christianity no threat to Rome.  Cassidy: Jesus a revolutionary, challenging every aspect of Roman society.

 Why such different interpretations?  Because there is no truth?  Because it's impossible to figure out Luke's meaning?  Not at all.  Partly, because there is so much in these gospels that every time you come to them you find something else.  So we are like proverbial blind man with elephant.  (Tree, snake, rope, fan: each partly in the right, all wrong.)  Notice Jim's quite obvious solution: Gospel written to gentiles, also to Jews/some ways critical of Rome/some ways noting that Roman government can be useful.

 But another reason that scholarly study of the Bible hasn't tended to clarify things.  Scholars, beginning in the 18th century, but even more in the 19th and 20th centuries, made a series of fundamental mistakes in their approach to the Bible.  And particularly, they made some serious mistakes in their approach to the gospels.

 The problem with scholarly mistakes is that, rather than being corrected, they tend to be amplified.  (Being a scholar means never having to admit you're wrong no matter how wrong you are.  Also means you don't have to listen to people who don't have your credentials, because they are obviously ignorant.   Be not called Rabbi, Rabbi. . .)

 Example of type of problem: authorship of Pauline epistles. (F.C. Bauer/Tubingen school: Hegelian interpretation: Romans/Galatians early: James early.  No evidence: just a theory--yet widely accepted.  Slowly, coming back around to belief that everything church believed written by Paul written by Paul--except pastorals.  Here too--solid evidence for Pauline authorship.  Hurst and Charlesworth conversation.  "No scholar with a recognized chair in NT studies believes Paul wrote pastorals."  What has that got to do with truth?

   Scholars got off track as far as the gospels are concerned with the adoption of source criticism in the early part of the 20th century.

 --Gospels alike, one must be source of others (just like profs with identical papers from students.  Who copied whom?  One student confronted with paper from earlier semester: how did he copy my paper?"--time travel.
 --Mark first
 --Luke and Matthew common material not in Mark (Q)
 --L and M

 Problem is, many passages where it doesn't look like Mark first, e.g. temptation of Jesus.  Far easier to understand Matt. and Luke as first.  As one compares accounts, sometimes Luke's version looks like the original, sometimes Matthew's, sometimes Marks.

 Problems here led to a new style of criticism, form criticism

 --pericopes
 --healing/saying/etc., evolving from root

 Obvious objection to this that Gospels are not beads on string but well woven books.  So, study books as a whole?  No.  Next step: Redaction criticism uses alleged changes made by gospel editors as clue to their meaning.

 Redaction criticism was the way to make your mark in NT studies in the 1960's and 1970's, but in the 80's a significant number of scholars began to question the basis for the whole thing.  Redaction criticism tries to explain the theology of Matthew or Luke by alleged changes they have made in Mark.  But what if Mark isn't first?  The whole thing collapses--and, indeed, the weight of evidence now is that Mark is not first.

 Which gospel did come first?  Many scholars have moved to the Griesbach hypothesis, old view that said Mark simply combined Matthew and Luke.

 Behind all this, an odd blindness--a refusal of most scholars even to consider the most probable relationship among the gospels.
 What is relationship of synoptics?  Very early church tradition says that Matthew wrote in Hebrew an original gospel, and that this was the basis for the other synoptics.  And this is satisfactory enough.  But it seems to me that the most likely explanation of the relationship of these gospels is that they are cooperative works.

 Let me explain. ("What's it all about.").  Something like this, I think, is what happens in the case of the gospels.  Biographical evidence from the letters puts Paul, Peter, Luke, Timothy, and Mark in Rome in the 60's.  Paul specifically instructs Timothy to bring "books, but especially the parchments.  Paul also makes a specific request that Mark come "for he is profitable to me in the ministry."  (note earlier split).  Almost certainly written gospels are coming together.  This alone accounts for the phenomena we see among the gospels: flexible among themselves: Matthew, Luke, Mark free to tell stories in different ways--but no one else with authority to challenge later.

  This idea, that gospels are the products of cooperative effort of Peter, Paul, Luke, Mark almost never even considered by scholars, though it accts for all the evidence and does this in the simplest way possible.  (Ockham's razor).

 Why is the most obvious possiblity seldom even considered?  Scholarly community has a deep-seated disbelief in Jesus portrayed in Gospels, and is consequently always trying to find an alternative Jesus, a "historical" Jesus.  They claim to be telling us what Jesus really like: in recent years" magician, political revolutionary, social reformer, Galilean peasant, proto-pharisee, essene: but never as the figure the gospels portray him to be.

 The clue that something is wrong is that the "Jesus" who emerges from each of these studies is almost always philosophical agreement with scholar doing study.  What happens: tremendous acclaim--then shot down, then "new" historical Jesus.