Is the Gospel of Matthew a clever fake ?

by wobble 99 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

• 

  zoiks

  How does one disprove the bible? Strange wording, that.

  Do you mean disprove that the events it reports ever happened? Or disprove its supposed claim to be the inerrant word of god? Or disprove.... yada yada. There sure are a lot of claims made about the bible that are taken for granted by many.

  It seems to me that biblical scholars are a very curious, inquisitive bunch. Naughty, naughty scholars! The fact that many of their findings go against much of what was accepted about the bible speaks more about the claims of and about the bible than about the scholars, IMO.
• 

  Terry

  I remember when Ronald Regan told the emotional story at a press conference of two flyers in WWII; the tailgunner was wounded and dying and only the pilot was still alive. He held the dying man in his arms and said, "We'll ride this one down together...I won't leave you."

  Not a dry eye!

  Then, one brave soul asked....."Mr.President, if they both crashed and died....who was there to report what happened?"

  This is what we have a lot of in the New Testament reports of what Jesus said.

  I always asked bible lovers "..who overheard Jesus final prayer in Gethsemane to his Father? Everybody was asleep but Jesus?"
• 

  PSacramento

  Not sure HOW one can come to the comclusion that ANY Gospel is "fake".

  The Gospel of Matthew is the Gosple according to Matthew, not written by or "OF" Matthew.

  The Gospel is the Gospel of Jesus, Mattew's version has been dated anywhere from 60 to 85 AD:

  From wiki:

  Date of gospel

  Scholarship believes Matthew was composed between the years c 60 and 85 [ 71 ] [ 72 ] [ 73 ] , but a small minority claim that there is absolutely no way that it could have been written in this time given the average lifespan of most people at that time. [ 74 ] [ 75 ] Ignatius seemed to have knowledge of four Pauline epistles and the Gospel of Matthew" [ 76 ] , which gives a terminus ad quem of c. 110. The author of the Didache (c 100) probably knew it as well. [ 6 ] Many scholars see the prophecy of the siege and destruction of Jerusalem [ 77 ] as suggesting a date of composition after the year 70. [ 78 ] However, John A. T. Robinson argues that the lack of a passage indicating the fulfillment of the prophecy suggests an earlier date. [ 79 ] Furthermore the Gospel of Matthew does not mention the death of James in 62 nor the persecutions of the early Christians by Nero.

  This view has been challenged by two scholars almost a century apart, The Reverend C. B. Huleatt and Carsten Peter Thiede. In December 1994, Carsten Peter Thiede redated the Magdalen papyrus, which bears a fragment from the Gospel of Matthew, to roughly the year 60 on palaeographical grounds, and thus the Gospel of Matthew could have been written by an eye-witness to Jesus. [ 80 ] [ 81 ] [ 82 ]

  The Gospels are sort of "biographies", though John's is more of a eulogy because of how it was written, and as such, each author wrote according to what they were told by others ( Luke, Mark and probably Matthew) or what they saw (John).

  Now, some may argue about minor details, typically because they believe or once believed these thinsg to be error proof or soemthign like that, but I don't view thme this way.

  I recall the many Bruce Lee Biographies I have read and even when I spoke to people that actually knew Him ( Dan Inosanto for example) there was enough differences and "issues" that it made me understand that, with someone who was a celebrity in his time and died in the information age, if there was differences with his biogrpahy, of course there must be with Jesus ( as an example).

  Heck, Bruce Lee actaully WROTE his OWN stuff in his OWN words and even that is "interpreted" amongst those that knew him, knew of him, saw his movies and though he was cool.
• 

  Terry

  The fact that we cannot pinpoint nor corroborate any part of Matthew should give us pause when relying on the "prophecy" aspect

  of the destruction of Jerusalem.

  The originals, might I remind you, do not exist--only much later purported "copies" of copies of copies.

  A fair-minded person with a standard of truth and verification might consider this an insuperable divide between fact and pious fraud.
• 

  THE GLADIATOR

  I don't understand how the word 'clever' got into this Question.
• 

  PSacramento

  The originals, might I remind you, do not exist--only much later purported "copies" of copies of copies.

  Which, as you know, is the case with the vast majority of any and all historical writings we have today.

  What criteria would we use to decide that Matthew, or any Gospel, was Fake?
• 

  BurnTheShips

  What do you think ? (Leo ? )

  I think you have a fascinating speculation.

  PSac, your information on Bruce Lee is interesting.

  BTS
• 

  PSacramento

  PSac, your information on Bruce Lee is interesting.

  You can pretty much grab any person , famous or not, and have 4 people write their biographies and you will get 4 different stores with some commonalites between them.

  I would be worried if ALL of them were identical.
• 

  THE GLADIATOR

  What criteria would we use to decide that Matthew, or any Gospel, was Fake?

  Prophecy was at no time brought by man’s will,

  but men spoke from God as they were borne along by holy spirit.

  1 Peter 1:20

  The criteria is explained in the bible itself. Was God speaking through these men or were they just postulating?
• 

  Leolaia

  There are two separate issues discussed here, whether Matthew is a "clever fake" by its use of unhistorical literary contrivances (such as the lack of sources for the prayer in Gethsemane or the trial) or whether it is a "clever fake" for "pretending to have been written early by an eyewitness". The first point is certainly relevant to the book's historicity but not so much as to its authorial intent, as even the best ancient Greek historians invented much in their accounts (such as speeches or genealogies), but this does not mean that they construed themselves as "faking" their histories as opposed to arriving at the truth in some other way than the use of specific sources (see Paul Veyne's Did the Greeks Believe Their Myths? for a discussion of this point). With respect to the literary convention of pseudonymity, it is similarly not necessarily the case that those who composed the pseudepigrapha conceived of themselves as "faking" their accounts or revelations; it is possible that some believed they were copying down a book given to them in a vision (this is a very common motif in the revelatory literature). With respect to the gospels themselves, I have earlier written on this subject and how invention in gospel writing does not necessarily imply an intent to deceive (http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/watchtower/bible/167595/1/Are-the-gospels-just-midrash).

  On the second point, I see absolutely no reason to think that Matthew is "cleverly" written to appear to be an eyewitness account composed prior to the destruction of Jerusalem, as I see nothing in the book that suggests this. The book is anonymous, there is no use of the first person (unlike, say, in the Gospel of Peter), and the descriptions of the Temple and its functions are naturally to be expected in a story set during the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate. The allusion to James' martyrdom in Matthew 20:22-23 is muted compared to that in Mark 10:38-39, but this is probably a consequence of Matthew utilizing an earlier edition of Mark. The prophecy of the Temple's destruction in Mark looks rather much like it was written before the fact because it relies mainly on Danielic apocalyptic traditions and doesn't fit too well with the events of AD 70; it is the Lukan version that makes the connection with AD 70 explicit. The author of Matthew was writing after AD 70 and has clearly interpreted the Markan apocalypse in light of these events; he has thus disentangled the destruction of the Temple from the conclusions of "all things" by modifying the disciples' question in 24:3 (whereas in Mark 13:4 the two are closely linked) and the time reference in 24:29, and by introducing the theme of apparent delay in the parousia through the insertion of three parables with delay or a prolonged wait as their central theme. The eschatological expectation was that the parousia would not closely follow on the heels of the Temple's destruction but it is still imminent and would occur in the lifetime of those who witnessed Jesus. This fits the probable date of the book (circa AD 80) quite well. It would make no sense to not just preserve but expand on the Markan promises of imminence in Mark 9:1 and 13:30 (as the author of Matthew does in 10:23) if they still weren't of any value to the book's intended audience. For a good lengthy discussion of the eschatology of Matthew and the role of the "generation" expectation, see David Sim's Apocalyptic Eschatology in the Gospel of Matthew.