Jeff Querner



THE FOUR STAGES OF MYTHOLOGICAL DEVLEOPMENT

A Structual Analysis on the Evolution of

the Pentateuch, the Gospels, and Arthurian Legend

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Folklore, Romance, Epic History, and Polemic

When the name of St. George is brought up, the immediate image that comes to the mind of most people is that of the dragon slayer, as portrayed in the medieval romance St. George and the Dragon. This story, however, finds its origins during the Crusades, when the motif of the “soldier-saint” became a prominent part of Christian iconography. The dragon-slaying motif, which is interpreted as the symbolic conquest of paganism by Christianity, is itself largely believed to be an inheritance of pagan mythology. Pagan mythology used the same motif of dragon slaying for the same reasons, going all the way back to Canaanite mythology in which the storm god Ba’al slew the multi-headed sea dragon Lotan in order to bring order to the primeval cosmic chaos of the world before creation (Fishbane 39). St. George himself was better known before the second millennium not as a warrior, but a martyr, having been slain during the Christian repressions of the early fourth century. A cult celebrating this persona became established not long after the reign of Constantine, but even when George was canonized in 494 of the Common Era, Pope Gelasius referred to him as one of those saints “whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose acts are known only to God” (Herbermann 454). Christian hagiographies still exist that provide miraculous tales of his torture and execution, but it is the story of George as the dragon slayer that remains the most popular conception of him today. It seems ironic that a figure whose characterization is based on a tragic folktale would later be used as a figure of thematic romance, but each story reflects the circumstances of its respective time period: the hagiographies look back to an age of persecution against Christians, in which miracles associated with George’s death would prove to their reader that martyring oneself was a just cause, and the knightly romances written during the Crusades reflected its own age of religious militarism, in which George converts others through the force of arms rather than by selfless example.

In the same way many other mythical figures are often imagined as concrete icons of a particular ideal when in reality the story behind the icon has gone through a process of revision. Often times, the figure can go through multiple re-conceptions, each one building off of and reacting to previous incarnations. The inherent variability of stories as they are passed from person to person can be compared to the children’s game Telephone. As a message (or a rumor) travels from person to person, the integrity of the message is compromised by numerous small changes that eventually add up until the final message is unrecognizable to the original deliverer. Richard Dawkins has argued in The Selfish Gene that informational units consisting of vocal sounds or ideas, which he calls “memes,” can act like “living structures” that self-perpetuate in a fashion similar to genetic replication: “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms and eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, could be called imitation” (Dawkins 192). Of course, while genes must travel “vertically” from parent to child, memes are free to travel “horizontally” between people of no genetic relation. While genes propagate themselves by creating ever-evolving survival machines which pass themselves down to their offspring, memes propagate themselves by evolving into different linguistic formulations that happen to be useful to people and other organsims.

There are three particular historic figures in the western tradition that have gone through such massive and extraordinary change that they provide ample opportunity to compare and contrast the changes in character, plotline, and theme that each new iteration underwent as their mythologies progressed through time. These figures are Moses the Lawgiver whose Exodus from Egypt is narrated around the law codes within the Pentateuch that he was long believed to have written; Jesus, whose life has been laid out in dozens if not hundreds of ancient gospels, nearly all attributed “pseudo-graphically” to various “disciples” and apostles, but never to Jesus directly; and Arthur, whose own legends traverse a great amount of time, distance, and translation, but whose historical existence is generally considered to be the least likely out of the three. Sometimes the differences between the revisions of these stories have not been recognized because the earliest versions of their stories are short, unpopular, and hard to find, such as the earliest folktales about Arthur. Other times the differences are not noticed because the variant texts have been combined and redacted into one story, as in the case of Moses. Other times, the different versions of the story are right there for all to read, but go unnoticed because they have been canonized together and so are reinterpreted through the lens of Orthodox theology, as in the case of Jesus.

The questions I hope to answer in this thesis are: What changes have occurred by the editing, redacting, and recomposing of source texts detailing the exploits of these three mythical figures? Are there, consequently, patterns in the way these myths evolve? Do these patterns have meaningful parallels in different cultures? Can we trace earlier writings within a composite text through linguistic analysis? How certain can we be in dating various sources? Can we categorize certain texts by genre, plot, or theme, and if so, is there any relation to the time in which they were written? Are some narratives more “advanced” than others in scope, design, and ideology, or is this more a product of the hand that writes them? Are there storylines or genres that “compete” with one another for the attention of readers and compilers, or are characterizations more often integrated into the whole?

The argument of this thesis is that when the stories of these three mythological figures are arranged in their chronological order, a general pattern emerges that is precipitated by the text’s compilers as they are reacting to the traditions from earlier texts. Furthermore, my contention is that these iterations are not arbitrary but follow a discernible progression through different categories of literature, each with ever-increasing elevations of ideological complexity. The model for literary development I intend to prove is based on the abstraction that romances tend to be built from folklore, epic histories tend to be built from combinations of folktales and romances, and works of political or theological polemic tend to appear as the latest of these four groupings, usually because polemic is the most dependent on the myth already being popularly established. This four-stage model of mythological development helps to explain the common changes that evolve through the four hypothetical sources of the Hebrew Bible, the four Christian gospels, and the interwoven pagan and Christian legends associated with the Arthurian tradition. Folklore tends to be the earliest forms of literature and the closest in proximity to oral tradition. As a result of the protagonists becoming more popular, folklore tends to become more idealized or elegized as the tales are retold, causing them to change into romantic stories of good vs. evil. As the romantic hero grows even more popular, questions regarding the protagonist’s birth, infancy, and place in history are inevitably brought more to the forefront until someone compiles an epic history in order to place the protagonist in his proper historical context. Polemic is the most purpose-driven of the four narrative stages, and in fact bases this purpose on the popularity of the mythological figure by imposing the writer’s philosophical or theological ideology more directly into the narrative, most often in the discourse of the protagonist. Each stage in the four-stage model consists of a formula that is generally longer and takes more advanced preparation in construction. Therefore, the natural tendency for a mythical hero is to be rewritten in a form that is slightly more advanced than that of the author’s sources.

Comparison to movie genres; satire comes long after a story has been established

Tragedy – myth is based on the lost war: Dumuzi, Enkidu/Baldr (Elamtes), Freud’s Moses (Akhenaten’s Egypt), Josiah (Babylon), the Teacher of Righteousness (Seleucids), Jesus (Pompey), Gospel Jesus (Titus), Arthur (Anglo-Saxons)

In order to better understand the nature of these four mythological stages, I will provide a brief description of each. Folklore is often described as a set of traditional beliefs and practices that are passed down throughout a culture, usually through oral tradition. There have also been some long contentious ground drawn in defending the word throughout time. The word itself only appeared in the mid-nineteenth century and is very often defined in extremely broad terms, though it is often agreed that folklore is disseminated largely through oral tradition. Research into folklore has stressed the communal nature of folklore, as the genre tends to be produced by a combination of previous storytellers and the collaboration of the current folk community (Dégh 49). Due to its heavy reliance on oral tradition, it often contains a high proportion of poetry and songs. Some general characteristics of folklore include repetitive lines, animals that can talk, and magical items or effects. Very often folktales have problems with coherence and localization, and many folkloric texts have crucial portions of their story missing or misunderstood due to problems in transmission.

Romance has two general meanings in the current vernacular: the genre of fiction based on romantic love, and the genre of chivalric literature from the medieval and Renaissance eras. The latter genre, “chivalric romance” was originally designated as literature for the “vulgar,” written in the common vernacular of the Romance languages, like French and Spanish, as opposed to the standard Latin of the ecclesiastical classes (Penny 6). The term “romance” has also been applied to apocryphal Christian stories of fantastic events that happened to the apostles, emphasizing the triumph of good over evil and often told in the form of an allegory. The Hellenistic romance became popular in the second and third centuries of the Common Era, which also reflects the large number Christian romances written in the period. New Testament scholar Helmut Koester describes the Hellenistic romances as including: travel narratives, shipwreck stories, “[r]eligious and moralizing speeches by the hero, the overcoming of dangers and persecutions, divine commands, oracles and dreams—all these features can also be found in inferior historiography” (Intro I 137). Koester writes that these romances drew from popular legends and oral traditions rarely found in literary works. “The romance takes account of the larger geographical horizons which were opened up through the conquests of Alexander, but it places the human individual in the center of the plot, and it reconciles this human being with the powers of fate which often seem to render life meaningless; because at least the romance knows a happy end” (137). Hayden White describes romance as “fundamentally a drama of self-identification symbolized by the hero’s transcendence of the world of experience, his victory over it, and his final liberation from it – the sort of drama associated with the Grail legend or the story of the resurrection of Christ in Christian mythology. It is a drama of the triumph of good over evil, of virtue over vice, of light over darkness, and of the ultimate transcendence of man over the world in which he was imprisoned by the Fall” (8-9). Frye describes the romance as the literature of adventure, typically a quest into some dark world or land of the dead, from which the hero emerges triumphant, adding that “folk tales follow the trade routes; ballads and romances return from the great fairs” (Anatomy 57). Romance is more focused on human heroes and enemies, so that the reader puts all his or her hopes in the success of the protagonist. But the closer romance is to myth, the more inundated the story is with divine or demonic qualities. Because romances tend to be idealistic, their protagonists are often made into paragons of justice while their enemies are often described with purely negative attributes. Modern Disney movies work as an example of how folk tales are often rewritten in a more idealistic fashion, often with the protagonists censured from any misconduct, so that it may become relevant to an evolving audience.

The literary term “epic” is typically broken down into “folk epics,” which come down from oral tradition, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Odyssey, and “secondary epics” or “literary epics,” such as the Aeneid and Dante’s Commedia. “Literary epics” imitate folk epic, but are based far more on literary research than oral tradition. In Hugh Holman and William Harmon’s Handbook to Literature, epics are said to have six major characteristics: a legendary hero; a vast setting covering many lands; deeds of great courage and valor; supernatural forces such as gods, angels, or demons; an elevated style; and a measure of objectivity (Holman 178). Epics in general employ a larger scope than other story types, including a more diverse and numerous cast of characters. They tend to be more revered, longer in length, encyclopedic in nature, and often consisting of several smaller stories, each with its own climax. Unlike folklore or romance, epics tend to focus on the intellectual and philosophical contentions behind the story rather than the individual morality of the characters. While romances make their point by the hero’s example, epics normally map out an entire world for the reader, bringing order to it according to the worldview of the author. If the quintessential romance is the dragon quest, then the quintessential epic is a conflict between nations and peoples, as the epic tends to increase in scope and cast. The focus tends to move away from a single protagonist and instead works with an ever-widening web of relationships between a world of characters relevant to the overall plot. The more advanced ideological tendencies of the epic make its content more applicable to readers who are more educated or more interested in the subject matter. While folklore often confuses modern readers with obliquity and localization, the epic more often exhausts the novice reader with tedious lists, such as in the laws in the Book of Leviticus, or all the minor characters Paul meets in his voyages in the Book of Acts. The epics of the Pentateuch, the gospels, and Arthurian legend are each a particular type of epic, an epic history, marked by a departure from the mythmaking prevalent in folklore and romance into the realm of historiography.

Polemic, from the Greek word polemikos, meaning “hostile,” is typically a non-fictional dissertation written to “polarize” an issue. Whereas apologies were primarily works of defense, polemic is written as a formal attack on a philosophy or theology. In this stage of mythological development, the polemic does not usually teach generic moral lessons but instead argues for a fully formed ideology by turning the protagonist into the epitome of that ideal. Mythologized polemic often uses irony to turn the “standard” story around and place it into a different context, often using literary devices such back-story, dreams, visions, time travel, or inter-dimensional travel. Like the epic, the whole point of the “story” is to explain a particular ideological point, but it is not structured as an epic and is more overtly argumentative. Like Plato’s dialogues, the discussions characters have in rhetoric are more admittedly directed towards the reader, not as a means to move the plot forward, but as a desire to influence the minds of the readers. Action is so stilted that there is often no “plot” to speak of, nor is polemic designed to “capture the whole story.” Actual plot elements are all but nonexistent and are instead replaced by an expanded amount of rhetorical discourse. Often the entire text is presented as an extended dialogue from the protagonist himself, offering a direct empathic connection with the reader. If the protagonist’s dialogue takes up the entirety of the text, then it can be classified as a rhetorical treatise. One of the most common forms of rhetoric, satire, attacks romantic ideals through parody and sarcasm. But while satire attempts to appeal to amusement as a form of attack, its opposite form appeals to sorrow as a form of defense, as in the ironic tragedy, which conventionally tells the story of an innocent victim being punished for someone else’s wrongdoing.

In order to prove my thesis, I will devote each chapter to one of the three mythological figures and examine the history behind the critical scholarship associated with that mythology. In the cases of Moses and Jesus, I will provide alternative chronologies to the four texts and make an argument based on evidence that is separate from my mythological development model. After establishing a chronology, I will then attempt to prove that each of the four chosen texts is emblematic of each of the four stages of mythological development. In the case of the Pentateuch, I will argue that the primary author of Genesis wrote a folktale, that the primary author of Exodus wrote a romance, that the primary author of Leviticus and Numbers wrote an epic history, and that the primary author of Deuteronomy wrote an introductory polemic to a larger epic history called the Deuteronomistic History. In the case of the gospels, I will argue that the primary author of the Gospel of Mark wrote a folktale, that the primary author of the Gospel of Matthew wrote a romance, that the primary author of the Gospel of Luke wrote an epic history, and that the primary author of the Gospel of John wrote a work of polemic. In the case of Arthurian legend, I will argue that the primary author of How Culhwch Won Olwen wrote a folktale, that the primary author of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle wrote a romance, that Sir Thomas Malory wrote Le Morte d’Arthur as an epic history, and that Edmund Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene as a work of polemic. I intend to prove that the mythmaking process follows an inherent pattern of development based on similar parallel responses to earlier texts by later writers and increasingly overt ideological motives. By mapping equivalent changes in the variant narratives, I believe we can better understand how mythological figures typically develop over time.

Although none of the various authors and editors of these traditions were aware that their various contributions to the myth were following an underlying order, the similarities in how each of these mythologies evolve prove that they are following a kind of “literary determinism.” Probably the most immediate objection to “literary determinism” is that it follows a postmodern theory that attempts to take away from the individuality of the author or editor. To some degree, describing a structure superseding the author is exactly what this thesis is attempting to prove. However, far from proving the Death of the Author, as it were, I intend to provide illumination for the identity and motives of the individual authors and how their unique particularities affect the overall evolution of the myth even as it follows a predominate pattern. The correlation between the author and the readership can be compared to that of animals and the environment. The randomness of individuality often creates unique animals among similar environments, while at the same time many different kinds of animals follow identical yet independent paths of evolution from the ocean to the land and then to the air (or back to the oceans again). So it is with authors and their literary concepts. By consciously trying to build upon earlier traditions, the authors and editors of their respective traditions have unconsciously mapped out a single metanarrative on how a story tends to change over time according to the needs and interests of a co-evolving readership. The narrative stages, however, are largely based on generic attributes, and there are a large variety of ways in which an author can build upon the previous stage of mythological development and still remain within the parameters of the four-stage model.

There are also other modes of expression an author or editor can use in literature to distinguish his or her writing style from others of the same stage of development, and in order to add a second dimension to my model that is more subject to the individuality of the author, I will also divide each of the stages of mythological development into three modes based Northrop Frye’s Theory of Modes: the tragic mode, the comic mode, and the non-fictional thematic mode (Anatomy 33-67). These categorizations will gauge whether the author has provided an overall negative (tragic), positive (comic), or neutral (non-fictional) semblance to the narrative in order to provide a more complete analysis on the texts. However, in many cases, these categories also follow tendencies that are beyond the control of the individual authors. The biographies of Jesus or Arthur are naturally suited towards the tragic mode for historic reasons, so it comes as no surprise that the earliest authors of those myths chose the tragic mode to express their story. Not only that but, as will be elaborated on later, all three of the epic narratives have been written in the non-fictional thematic mode, a tendency that appears to develop more naturally in a mythological figure representing the cultural cornerstone of a priesthood or nation-state during the third stage of evolution.

Northrop Frye’s Modes of Historical Criticism

Herman Northrop Frye was the first twentieth century literary critic to devise a critical method for the systematic classification of genres. In his book The Anatomy of Criticism (1957), he argued that criticism should attempt to take on the qualities of a methodological discipline in order to give it a stronger association with the sciences, and argued that literature was not only “a piled aggregate of ‘works,’ but an order of words” analogous to the order of nature behind the natural sciences (17). Just as classic taxonomic classification is based on shared physical characteristics, Frye’s systemization was used in order to help provide a model of understanding the evolution of literature, he wrote that the “purpose of criticism by genres is not so much as to classify as to clarify such traditions and affinities, thereby bringing out a large number of literary relationships that would not be noticed as long as there were no context established for them” (Anatomy 247-248). Frye had much in common with the “new critics” of his time and agreed with their basic premise that a critic’s first effort should be to form a structural analysis on a given work, but argued that taking a purely structural approach has the same limitation as it does in biology in that it offers no explanation of where the subject came from or what its nearest relatives are (Frye, “Archetypes” 1447).

In the first of four essays in Anatomy, Frye constructed a chronological structure that attempts to describe the literary development of Western Classical civilization, which he divides into five epochs: Mythic, Romantic, High Mimetic, Low Mimetic, and Ironic. Frye divided the five epochs into the three different modes I am using in my model: the tragic fictional mode, the comic fictional mode, and the thematic mode. The tragic mode focused on the tendency to isolate the hero and is involved in the disintegration of society, symbolized by events such as the death of a god like Dionysus, or god-like (romantic) heroes like Arthur and Beowulf, or noble heroes (high mimetic) like Oedipus, or common class heroes (low mimetic) like Thomas Hardy’s Tess, or the pitiful (satire) like the traveling salesman Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis. The deaths of Arthur and Beowulf are hailed in elegies in the romantic form. The tragic fall of the noble hero in the high mimetic mode, like Oedipus, is typical of classical Greek tragedy, while the fall or death of the working-class hero was meant to provoke a passion, or pathos, in the reader. The ironic or satiric version of the tragedy was the story of the scapegoat, a hero who is forced to take the blame in the place of others (Frye, Anatomy 35-43).

In opposition to the tragic mode, the comic mode tended towards generic plots of the hero’s integration into society, moving towards a happy ending, as in the myth of Hercules attaining godhood by undergoing a number of trials or the concept of salvation from Biblical scripture. In comic romance, the hero integrated himself into an idyllic form of nature. High mimetic comedy had a strong protagonist who was able to create his own society through force while low mimetic comedy centered on the elevation of the hero and/or heroine, normally through matrimony. Examples of works in high mimetic mode include the plays of Aristophanes, who is known as the Father of (“Old”) Comedy for his comic dramas performed at the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens. In low mimetic mode, the hero is not superior to others and so is admired by the reader due to “a sense of his common humanity” brought on by finding analogies in their own experiences. According to Frye, this “gives us the hero of the low mimetic mode, of most comedy and of realistic fiction,” exemplified by the chief representative of the “New Comedy” in Greek drama, Menander (43-44). Ironic comedy moved towards the focus of inflicting pain on a helpless victim for the sadistic pleasure of the reader, such as tales of human sacrifice or murder mysteries.

Tragedy = Horror Precanonical

Romance = Action Precanonical

Comedy = Romance Canonical

Satire = Comedy Canonical

The third non-fictional mode focuses more on theme, or dianoa, the Greek word for “thought.” Instead of answering the question of how the story is going to turn out, literary works written in the thematic mode prompts the reader to ask what the point of the story is. The poet is allowed to “write as an individual, emphasizing the separateness of his personality and the distinctness of his vision” (54). The abstract content is more important than adherence to a formal plot because they are organized under the authority of a particular societal structure. In myth, this authority is God or the gods and presented as divinely inspired scripture, as in the writings of the Hebrew prophets or the Koran. In romance it is centered on a nomadic society, as in the myths of Homer and Hesiod. In high mimetic mode it is centered around a capital city in order to support nationalism, such as in Paradise Lost, and in low mimetic mode it is centered on the individual, as in the mythological poems of Blake, Keats and Shelley, while in irony it is centered on no one, providing the reader with the feeling of discontinuity in a deliberate attempt to denigrate the romantic idealization on the topic (55-62). The friction is set more between the writer and the writer’s society instead of the characters in the story, and “as soon as the poet’s personality appears on the horizon, a relation with the reader is established which cuts across the story, and which may increase until there is no story at all apart from what the poet is conveying to his reader” (52). According to Frye, all works of literature incorporate each of these three narrative modes to some degree and the importance of each is often left up as to the interpretation of the individual reader.

Frye’s writings contributed a great deal to the direction of “new criticism” throughout the late 1940s and 50s, a phenomenon whose popularity peaked in the early 60s and was then ultimately abandoned by mainstream scholarship. One of the most commonly identified flaws of “new criticism” was its stated intention of separating a text from its author and historical context. Frye wrote in 1990, shortly before his death, that it “would be ridiculous to be defensive about a book that I started to write 40 years ago,” but justified the separation of “internal” (text-only) and “external” (historical background) criticism, saying that the New Critics “had done their best, or worst, with the internal context.” (Response 223-224). What concerned Frye was an intermediate order between the internal and external that transcended the individual work but not literature as a whole, an order established by literary conventions and genres. However, in creating a model for the literary development of Western civilization, he sought not to “lock up all critics inside” the structure like a jail house but to undertake a heuristic experiment in order that “something [would] come out of it” (247).

Following this prerogative, I will be using his three-part separation of modes because I believe it will be a useful analytical tool in congruence with my four-stage model. But there are also some notable parallels between Frye’s five-stage model and my four-stage model, even though Frye’s model is vastly larger in both its scope and time frame than my own. Frye’s observance that romance is closely related to myth is congruent to the connection I make between romance and folklore. The intentions of the author of “epic history” also hold some similarities to Frye’s high memetic mode, in which a strong protagonist is able to create his own society. Finally, the whole-scale use of satire and irony is something we both attribute to the final stage of our respective models. Frye, in his Response, said that he still believed Western Civilization to be following the ironic mode, which he had expected would last “a long time, probably to the end of the century” (248). In my model, irony and satire are small but common elements in polemic, the final stage of mythological development in which plot and characterization has been completely superseded by rhetorical devices used to propagate the author’s ideology. The definitions are different, but the common attributes that irony and satire appear “late” in the evolutionary scheme are recognizable, and while Frye’s historical criticism was meant to look over an entire hemisphere for thousands of years, my own model is meant to cover only individual traditions over a few hundred or sometimes only a few dozen years. Nevertheless, the similarities may attest to an even more generic metanarrative describing overarching relationships between modes similar to the ones in our models, replicating themselves in different ways over vastly varying timeframes.

Since I will be using Frye’s modes as secondary terms labeled next to my four main stages, “folklore,” “romance,” “epic,” and “polemic,” some definitions and examples are called for. Fictional folklore tends to contain a larger amount of poetry while nonfictional folklore tends to center around chronicles, so the three modes of folklore I will be using for my model are 1) tragic folktales and poetry; 2) comic folktales and poetry; and 3) chronicles. As their names suggest, tragic poetry and folktales normally center on death and defeat while comic folktales center on positive themes such as success and marriage. Some of the most ancient folktales are the Sumerian myths revolving around the tragic death and resurrection of the shepherd/fisherman god Dumuzi, along with the comic marriage to the fertility goddess Inanna. Examples of tragic folktales from the Bible include the Gospel of Mark, the Book of Ecclesiastes and the Book of Lamentations. The early Arthurian tradition contains a plethora of tragic folktales and poems regarding tragic wars in which nearly everyone dies. Branwen Daughter of Llyr, Spoils of Annwyn, Y Gododdin, Elegy for Owain, and Stanzas of the Graves are few good examples. An example of a comic folktale is Pwyll Prince of Annwyn. Chronicles take the form of generic history such as the Triads of Isle of Britain, the Annals of Wales, and Historia Britonum.

Romance tends more towards the idealistic. According to Frye, the death of the hero in romantic tragedy “evokes a mood best described as elegiac . . . . unspoiled by irony,” while the romantic comedy “is best described as idyllic” (Anatomy 36, 43). Following these common motifs of romance, the three modes I will use are: 1) the elegiac romance; 2) the idyllic romance; and 3) and the thematic romance. The vast majority of romances follow the idyllic mode. Examples of this mode include: the Gospel of Matthew, St. George and the Dragon, Owein or The Lady of the Fountain, Gereint and Enid, Knight of the Cart, Beroul, Lanzlet, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Elegaic romances can be exemplified in stories such as the Deeds of English Kings and On the Instruction of Princes. The thematic romance tends to mix the historic with the idyllic and the elegaic, such as the Epic of Atra-Hasis and the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. The Epic of Atra-Hasis is essentially a morality tale involving an idyllic hero, Atra-Hasis, the Akkadian version of Noah. The Lancelot-Grail Cycle likewise seeks to make a separation between the earthly codes of chivalry, as portrayed in the earlier, more sensual adventures of Peredur, son of Evrawg, and the more chaste laws of heaven exemplified by Galahad.

Following the common motifs in epics, the three modes I will use are 1) the epic tragedy; 2) the epic comedy; and 3) and the epic history. As previously mentioned, the epic tends to have a much larger scope and cast and so typically revolves around a grander conflict like that of war between nations, as in the case of the battles in the Book of Numbers and Le Morte D’Arthur, or the competition between religious sects, as in the Book of Acts. If the epic ends in war or conflict, the outcome can be tragic even if won, while comic resolutions between the parties ensure a “happy ending.” Epic tragedies tend to end with the death a protagonist, such as the loss of Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the death of Beowulf or Achilles. The traditional ending for the epic comedy is unification of opposing forces, such as the Dante’s and Milton’s attempts to bring reconciliation to the theological problems that divided the Catholic and non-Catholic factions of their respective time periods. The Gospel of Nicodemus is the first version of the Christian “epic comedy,” which purports to give a historic account of Jesus entering the harrows of hell and rescuing many of the famous figures from the Old Testament. The epic history often takes an encyclopedic structure, such as Hesiod’s Theogony. Not all epic histories are composed the same way. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (c.1138) was developed from the “pseudo-historical” tradition, form using early folkloric chronicles like Gildas’ De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, and the Historia Britonum (Le Saux 94) while Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) was based more on the Lancelot-Grail Cycle’s “romantic” tradition of the thirteenth-century France and a number of English sources (Pratt 2).

In analyzing the forms and common motifs of polemic, the three modes I will use are the 1) ironic tragedy, 2) the satire, and 3) the rhetorical treatise. The ironic tragedy is the closest of the three subdivisions to contain a formal plotline, one in which an innocent victim is punished for someone else’s wrongdoing, often contrasting the victim with the corrupt society he lives in. Examples of ironic tragedy include the Book of Job, Plato’s Apology, and Shakespeare’s tragedies. The satire uses irony and sarcasm to attack a person or set of ideas in the story. Examples of relevant works of satire are Lucian’s The Passing of Peregrinus, the Jewish anti-gospel Toldoth Yeshu, and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Each of these stories attempt to deride the protagonists of their respective stories – Peregrinus the Cynic, Jesus, and Arthur – using irony to show that the values of the protagonist’s “true” character are in reality the opposite of which people normally attribute to them. Both tragedy and satire stress the perspective of the defeat of a hierarchy, although there is a fundamental difference between the two. The rhetorical treatise ironically transplants the present worldview of the author into that of the framework of the protagonist’s world, as in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Plato’s dialogues, or T.H. White’s The Book of Merlyn.

Using Frye’s Theory of Modes, I intend to describe the tonal changes for each mythological figure as the figure progresses through each stage of mythological development. In the first chapter, I will break the Pentateuch down into its four sources and show how the figure of Moses first appears in comic folklore, moves to idyllic romance, then epic history, and ends his literary career with a rhetorical treatise in Deuteronomy, which itself is an introduction to another epic history recounted in the Books of Kings known as the Deuteronomistic History. In the second chapter I will show how the figure of Jesus moves from a tragic folktale told in the Gospel of Mark, to an idyllic romance in the Gospel of Matthew, to a an epic history in the combined books of Luke and Acts, and concludes the set canon with an ironic tragedy in the Gospel of John. For the Arthur myth, I will analyze four Arthurian stories that are emblematic of the four general traditions from which the Arthurian legend grew, starting at its home as Welsh folklore, to when it was Christianized in French romance, to when it was historicized into Malory’s English epic, and then utilized into Spenser’s English polemic.

Four Narrative Stages Divided by Frye’s Fictional and Thematic Modes:

Folklore Romance Epic Polemic

Tragic tragic poetry/tale elegiac romance epic tragedy ironic tragedy

Comic comic poetry/tale idyllic romance epic comedy satire

Thematic chronicle thematic romance epic history rh. treatise

Hayden White’s Modes of Argument, Emplotment, and Ideology

Frye’s Theory of Modes and historical criticism are not the only systems of categorization conjectured in the Anatomy of Criticism. In the third essay, “Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths,” Frye argued that there was a general tendency on the part of great classics to revert to primitive formulas. He postulated four generic narratives, or mythoi, which are also associated with the four seasons: comedy (spring), romance (summer), tragedy (autumn), and irony or satire (winter) (140). The four mythoi established by Frye were later used and expanded on by Hayden White to describe metanarratives within the arguments and ideologies of nineteenth-century historians in his book Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. White notes that by using Frye’s terminology, he throws himself open to those who either oppose literary categorization or use a conflicting model, but found Frye’s tropes to be “especially useful for the analysis of historical works” (White 8f). White uses the four mythoi as tropes for four modes of emplotment, each of which is associated with a particular mode of argument. Each mode of emplotment and correlating mode of argument is also associated with a particular mode of ideological implication: anarchist, radical, conservative, or liberal. By categorizing historic narratives according to emplotment, argument, and ideology, White hoped to define the problem that prevents historians from establishing an acceptable resolution, the kind of “properly scientific account of reality” that the natural sciences were able to reach after the relative anarchy of different scientific systems up to the sixteenth century. White’s book was published as a “revolt against the positivist approach to history” during the high point of structuralism and represents a postmodernist shift towards textualism and constructivism (Bertens 324). Taking after Frye’s four mythoi, White lists four different modes of emplotment based on these romantic, tragic, comic, and satiric “metahistorical presuppositions.” White then associates each of these modes of emplotment with a particular ideology as well as one of the four theories of truth as identified by Stephen C. Pepper’s “world hypothesis:” Formism, which White associates with Romance and Anarchist ideology; Mechanism, which is associated with Tragedy and Radical ideology; Organicism, which White associates with Comedy and Conservative ideology; and Contextualism, which White associates with Satire and Liberal ideology. White writes:

I have suggested that a given historian will be inclined to choose one or another of the different modes of explanation, on the level of argument, emplotment, or ideological implication, in response to the imperatives of the trope which informs the linguistic protocol he has used to prefigure the field of historical occurrence singled out by him for investigation. I have suggested, in short, an elective affinity between the act of prefiguration of the historical field and the explanatory strategies used by the historian in a given work. (White 427)

Although White’s four modes of emplotment, argument, and ideology are specifically meant to describe nineteenth-century history writing, I believe the four modes of argument can be used when analyzing the explanatory strategies of more ancient “historians.” Folklore tends to be mechanistic in its attempt to explain history as being caused by non-random events. Romance tends to be formalist in the way it divides its morals into right and wrong or good vs. evil. Epics tend to be organistic in the way they optimistically integrate components in order to resolve the conflicts inherent in competing ideologies. Polemic tends to be contextualist in the way they remove the protagonist from his or her previous “historical” context so that the author can make more direct comparisons between the protagonist’s time period and his own. Thus, the authors of each mythological stage employ a specific metanarrative within the text on account of explanatory strategies that develop from common trends in mythological development.

Formism

Machanistic

Organistic

Contextualist

The Modes of Argument and Corresponding Modes of Emplotment and Ideology

Mode of Argument Mode of Emplotment Ideology

Formalist Romance Anarchist

Mechanistic Tragedy Radical

Organistic Comedy Conservative

Contextualist Satire Liberal

White’s Modes Used in the Four Stages of Mythological Development

Myth Stage Mode of Argument Mode of Emplotment

Folklore Mechanistic Tragedy

Romance Formalist Romance

Epic Organistic Comedy

Polemic Contextualist Satire

The earliest source in the Pentateuch, the primary author of Genesis, takes a “mechanistic” approach towards the way sons are punished for the sins of their fathers. Jacob fools his father Isaac into believing he was his twin brother by wearing goat-hide to appear hairy to his dim-eyed father, and it is ironically repaid on him by having his own sons deceive him into thinking Joseph dead by dipping the youngest son’s “robe of many colors” into the blood of a goat (Friedman, Hidden 39). The primary author of Exodus takes a “formist” approach in the way it attempts to exclude Aaronid priests by rebuking Aaron for fashioning the “golden calf.” The primary author of Leviticus and Exodus take a more “organistic” approach by establishing a huge corpus of laws within a far more structured approach to history, and a more “conservative” approach by accepting non-Aaronid Levites as priests while at the same time ranking them below Aaronid priests. Deuteronomy takes a more “contextualist” approach by taking a speech given by Moses to the desert and reapplying it so that he is speaking directly to the reader.

The gospels likewise use similar emplotment strategies. The Pauline epistles and the Gospel of Mark also show “mechanistic forms” of argument by associating the death of Jesus with the freedom from the Laws of Moses, in the case of 1 Corinthians by arguing that Jesus “became a curse” under the Law by being killed under the Law (3.13), and in the case of Mark’s “Little Apocalypse” by associating Jesus’ death with the destruction of the Jewish temple, which in effect made keeping the Law impossible (13.1). To Matthew, Jesus is idyllic, eleven of the disciples are idyllic, and even teachers of law who are good in Mark are made bad in Matthew, a black and white view that can be described as “formist.” Matthew’s author interprets the “Wedding Guests” parable in a way that excludes more guests (22.11), while the author of Luke interprets the story inclusively, inviting more guests in, matching Luke’s style of openness towards Gentile or Jew, woman or man, slave or free (14.22). Many other Christian sects are mentioned in Acts, but all are explained away as innocent mistakes in theology, which Paul is able to correct them by reconverting them. Thus, Luke attempts to portray “coherence of the historical field” that solves the “apparently tragic conflicts within it” (White 28). The decision to rationalize sectarian differences marks a more “conservative” and “organistic” approach similar to how Levites are accepted but rationalized to be beneath Aaronid priests. The Gospel of John and the apocryphal Gospel of Judas take a rhetorical approach as they are both written almost entirely as dialogue with little action. In the Gospel of Judas, the crucifixion is turned into a satire in which Judas is the only disciple who truly understands Jesus while the other disciples are shown a vision of how their teachings will create evil priesthoods. The Gospel of Philip drops all pretenses to a plot or setting and elaborates Gnostic theology around a number of wisdom sayings, some of which are attributed to Jesus. The Gospel of Truth takes this new rhetorical mode to its apex, elaborating on a similar Gnostic theology without using any sayings or story elements.

Each of the four canonical gospels can be said to reflect a certain point in time: the Gospel of Mark reflects Jesus’ tragic death and the expectation of his immanent return, the Gospel of Matthew reflects Jesus’ resurrection and the romantic conception that Christianity is based on a community of disciples. The Gospel of Luke and Acts reflects the foundation of Christianity as a national church that sought the “comic” resolution of a marriage of opposites (Gentile/Jew, slave/free, woman/man). Both the Gospel of John and the Coptic gospels like the Gospel of Judas reflect the splitting apart of the church into different sects, as told from the theological perspective of the sect’s mentor or spiritual icon, such as James for the Jewish Christians, John for the Presbyters, and Judas Thomas for the Cainites. The Gospel of Judas in particular portrays the dissolution of the ideal society by providing a vision that shows how all the other disciples besides Judas formed priesthoods that ironically turned to evil. Thus, like most Gnostic literature, the Gospel of Judas views morality of one’s actions in context with the period in which they lived. Although the disciples believed they were creating the ideal society, they were unaware that worldly trends would eventually corrupt the communities they founded.

In Arthurian legend, most of the earliest folklore centers on Arthur’s premature death and tragic battles in which only seven people survive. The story generally believed to be the earliest Arthur story, Culhwch and Olwen, is a comic folktale, but even this story contains references to a more tragic future. Culhwch and Olwen attempts to draw a “mechanistic” connection between Culhwch marrying the giant’s daughter Olwen and the giant’s death, symbolizing the inheritance of power from the old to the young. The Lancelot-Grail Cycle provides “formist” logic in barring Lancelot from the grail quest so that the son that achieved “celestial chivalry” would prove to hold the most glory. In Le Morte D’Arthur, Malory took a more “conservative” approach in minimizing Lancelot’s grail failure and a more “organistic” approach in sorting the long, twisted plot-threads of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle into neatly divided sections so that the reader could “contemplate the coherence of the historical field.” Spenser’s Faerie Queene likewise takes a more “contextualist” approach by removing Arthur and placing him within a fictional context, using Arthur as a part of an allegory meant to cover the twelve virtues in twelve books. By taking Arthur out of the historical element, Spenser was likewise able to connect the royal bloodline of the Welsh to that of Queen Elizabeth without the use of “prophecy.” Mark Twain’s Arthurian satire, Connecticut Yankee, likewise shows Arthur’s “ideal society” is also shown to be a false, overly-romantic lie by readjusting the literary context through the use of time travel, allowing Twain to make a direct comparison between the values and lifestyle of Dark Age warriors with that of the American Yankee. The use of time travel is very much in the same vein as the Gospel of Judas, when the disciples are horrified by the vision Jesus gives them of the future, in which they (metaphorically their followers) are sacrificing their wives and children as well as multitude of other sins. When analyzing the general traits of each of the four stages of mythological development, the relationships between the modes of argument and the modes of emplotment are present even amongst ancient writers.

The intention of my thesis is to call attention to the common factors present in the evolution of these three traditions: that the earliest sources of the Torah, J contains the most elements of folklore while E is better understood as a thematic romance, that these characteristics are subjugated in P to make for more serious history-writing combined with a far more elaborate system of law codes, and that the narrative in Deuteronomy is at its most rhetorical because at the time of its composition, when the narratives of the other texts were already widely known. This pattern can also be seen as being present in the gospels, so that Mark displays elements most in keeping with folklore, that these elements are changed into an idyllic romance in Matthew, that Luke’s choice to forego the climax of the death and resurrection of Jesus in order to add the stories of the apostles created an genre more line with history-writing, and that the latest gospels, John and Coptic gospels like the Gospel of Judas, establish a more rhetorical drive in order to establish a theological explanation. This pattern is also represented in the way the Arthurian tradition evolved from the folklore most prevalent in the Mabinogion, to the thematic romance of the puritanical French cycles, historicized in Malory’s epic history, and finally recontextualized to the world of poetic metaphor in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. In the next three chapters, I will take a more thorough examination of the critical scholarship of surrounding these three mythical figures, as well as provide a more detailed argument for the modes and stages of development that each of these sixteen authors inhabit. In doing so, I hope to provide conclusive evidence for a form of “literary determinism.”

Four Narratives of the Three Mythologies

Pentateuch Gospels Arthurian Legend

Folklore Yahwist (J) Mark How Culhwch Won Olwen

Romance Elohist (E) Matthew Lancelot-Grail Cycle

Epic Aaronid Priest (P) Luke-Acts Le Morte D’ Arthur

Polemic Deuteronomy John The Faerie Queene

Examples of Folklore, Romance, Epic, and Polemic

I. Introduction

A. Four Narratives

1. Folklore

i. Tragic Folktale/Poetry (Sumerian myths of Dumuzi and Inanna, Book of Ecclesiastes, Book of Lamentations, Gospel of Mark, Signs Gospel, St. George hagiographies, Branwen Daughter of Llyr, Spoils of Annwyn, Y Gododdin, Elegy for Owain, Stanzas of the Graves)

ii. Comic Folktale/Poetry (J, Pwyll Prince of Annwyn, How Culhwch Won Olwen)

iii. Chronicle (Triads of Isle of Britain, Annals of Wales, Historia Britonum)

2. Romance

i. Elegiac Romance (Deeds of English Kings, On the Instruction of Princes)

ii. Idyllic Romance (Gospel of Matthew, Owein or The Lady of the Fountain, Gereint and Enid, Knight of the Cart, Beroul, Lanzlet, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight)

iii. Thematic Romance (Epic of Atrahasis, E, Lancelot-Grail Cycle, St. George and the Dragon)

3. Epic

i. Epic Tragedy (Epic of Gilgamesh, Iliad, Odyssey, Beowulf, Paradise Lost)

ii. Epic Comedy (Labors of Heracles, Jason and the Golden Fleece, Aeneid, Dante’s Commedia, Paradise Regained)

iii. Epic History (Hesiod’s Theogony, P, Luke-Acts, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, Le Morte D’ Arthur)

4. Polemic

i. Ironic Tragedy (Book of Job, Plato’s Apology, Gospel of John, Shakespeare’s tragedies, The Once and Future King)

ii. Satire (Lucian’s Passing of Peregrinus and True History, Gospel of Judas, Toldoth Yeshu, Don Quixote, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court)

iii. Rhetorical Treatise (Book of Deuteronomy, Plato’s dialogues, Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Truth, Spencer’s Faerie Queen, Faust, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Book of Merlyn)

CHAPTER 2

THE FOUR SOURCES OF THE PENTATEUCH

The Documentary Hypothesis

To give a proper explanation of the Documentary Hypothesis, a brief summary of the Jewish and Christian traditions behind the first five books of the Bible is neecessary. The first five books of the Bible have a long Jewish and Christian tradition attributing authorship to Moses, though sometimes with the partial exception of the last sentences of Deuteronomy describing Moses’ death. Because of this tradition, these five books have been set apart from the other books in the Hebrew Bible. In the Jewish tradition, the five books are referred to as the Torah, meaning “Law,” or the Chumash, the Five Books of Moses. Together, they are considered to be the core of traditional Jewish faith, which is called the Tanakh, an acronym for the three divisions of the Hebrew Bible: Torah, Nevi’im (“Prophets”), Ketuvim (“Writings”), or TNK.[1] In Christian tradition, the Hebrew Bible is referred to as the Old Testament, or Old Covenant, and the Books of Moses are called the Pentateuch, meaning “Five [scroll] cases.”

Many scholars, however, have found it more useful to group the books a different way. Some, like Julius Wellhausen, added the Book of Joshua into the division, referring to it as the “Hexateuch,” so that the six-book narrative forms a complete story ending with the conquest of the Promised Land (Wellhausen 6). The next book after Joshua, the Book of Judges, is traditionally read as a continuation after Joshua, but many scholars, including Wellhausen, read it as an alternate (and more historical) version of how the Israelite tribes were formed. Other scholars, such as Frank Moore Cross, Professor Emeritus of the Harvard Divinity School, group the first four books together into a “Tetrateuch,” because the fifth book, Deuteronomy (lit. “Second Law”) is made up almost entirely of the D source (Cross, From 22).[2] It has since become widely accepted by critical scholars that the Book of Deuteronomy was originally an introduction to a multi-volume narrative called the Deuteronomistic History, made up from parts from Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, and 1 & 2 Kings (Blenkinsopp 17; Friedman, Who 104). Martin Noth, a German scholar of the Hebrew Bible, was the first to make the argument for the similarity in language and style between Deuteronomy and these later texts in his book, The Deuteronomistic History (1943).

The first recorded person to doubt the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch was Isaac ibn Yashush (982-1058), a Jewish court physician of a Muslim ruler in Spain. Isaac pointed out that some of the Edomite kings in Genesis 36 lived long after Moses’ time, and for this he was dubbed “Isaac the blunderer.” Abraham ibn Ezra gave him the name, although he nevertheless seemed to show some doubt towards certain contradictory passages, but simply brushed them aside with enigmatic comments like “if so be you understand the mystery of the twelve” (Blenkinsopp 2). In the 1500s, a Flemish Catholic named Andreas van Maes and two Jesuit scholars named Benedict Pereira and Jacques Bonfrere argued that Moses wrote the Pentateuch but that it had been heavily edited. Van Maes’ book was placed on the Catholic Index of Prohibited Books (Friedman, Who 18-20). Mosaic authorship remained a nearly universal opinion until the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. After Europe had suffered a number of religious wars, a new era of increasing skepticism and scientific analysis had begun. Baruch Spinoza developed a more naturalistic form of pantheism and Herbert of Cherbury’s book On Truth, as it is Distinguished from Revelation, the Probable, the Possible, and the False (1624) marked the beginning of English Deism. Rationalistic philosophy became popular with the writings of René Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz along with the mid-seventeenth century revival of the atomistic theories of Epicurius in the form of Pierre Gasendi’s Epicurean Atomism.

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes was the first to argue outright that Moses did not write the majority of the Pentateuch, noting in 1668 that the way the text described things as continuing on “to this day” proved that it had to have been written by someone much later (Hobbes 262). Four years later, the French Calvinist Isaac de la Peyrere wrote that the first line in Deuteronomy reads: “These are the words that Moses spoke to the children of Israel across the Jordan,” meaning east of Israel, where the author was writing and where Moses never stepped foot (McKee 465). His book was banned and burned and he was arrested and forced not only to recant but also convert to Catholicism, on the threat of imprisonment (Friedman Who 20; Garret 390). In 1670, Baruch Spinoza also pointed out that the third-person accounts, names of places that were acquired only after Moses’ death, and statements unlikely to have been made by Moses (like Moses being the “humblest man in the world”) all provide evidence that it was “clearer than the sun at noon that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, but by someone who lived long after Moses” (Spinoza 8.48). In light of his arguments, Spinoza was expelled from the Synagogue and his works were added to the Catholic Church’s blacklist (Ska 101). Shortly afterwards, Richard Simon, a French Catholic who converted from Protestantism, wrote and published a book in 1685 that criticized Spinoza. In it he argued that the core laws were from Moses but that prophets later edited the work under the divine spirit. Even this deviation from orthodoxy went too far so that Simon’s own works were banned and blacklisted. Simon was expelled from his order and Protestants eventually wrote 40 refutations of his “defense” of Mosaic authorship (Friedman, Who 21; Ska 101).

Many of earliest scholars to attempt a critical reading of the Bible were German ministers, theologians, and professors. Starting in the early 1710s, H. B. Witter, a German minister, and J. G. Eichorn, a German professor, were the first ones to separate and differentiate the J and E narratives in the Book of Genesis. Around the same time, W. Martin Lebrecht de Wette, a German theologian, linked the Book of Deuteronomy to the law code that was promulgated during the reign of Josiah, the seventh century king of Jerusalem (Rofé 62). In 1753, Jean Astruc, a French Catholic professor, wrote that Moses had used three sources to construct the Pentateuch, leading many of his proponents to name him the originator of the Documentary Hypothesis (Ska 103). A hundred years later in 1853, a German Orientalist named Hermann Hupfeld coined the term “Yahwist,” and hypothesized a “second Elohist,” later called P, and concluded that the sources were written in the chronological order of P, E, then J. However, the dates he used for the authors would later be dismissed (Ska 108).

In 1878, Julius Wellhausen assembled all of these principles into a four-source theory, the “Graf-Wellhausen Hypothesis,” arguing that J and E were combined before D was written, and that the P source, which he called PQ because he believed it was made up of two sources that he named R and Q, was written in the post-Exilic period (Wellhausen 29-38). This hypothesis would become the dominant model for source critics up to the late twentieth century. Wellhausen built part of his theory on the conclusions made by Professor Eduard Reuss and his student Karl Graf, along with Leopold George and Wilhelm Vatke, all three of whom were working independently from de Wette (Wellhausen 4). Wellhausen argued that although there was no idea of centralization of the Temple in J and E, the latter two emphasized it very strongly (34-35).

Most scholars today generally agree that J and E were written before P and D, with J usually considered the earliest source to be written, although there are still some who date E earlier than J. Richard Elliot Friedman concedes that E could possibly have been written before J, but nevertheless refers to J as the “first work of prose” (Who 84, 265). Catholic Biblical scholars Antony Campbell and Mark A. O’Brien also date J as the earliest of the four sources (Campbell 5). This is backed up by the fact that while the J source contains only the Ten Commandments given by Moses for its law code, the E source contains a much longer Covenant Code that includes many of the same commands from J’s Decalouge, indicating that J was expanded upon (Ex. 34.14-26; 21.1-23.19). And as Friedman points out, Aaron plays little to no role in the entire J text and so was in all likelihood added in by the Redactor while the Elohist introduces not only Aaron his sister Miriam and his ill-fated sons, Nadab and Abihu.[3]

Since the Aaronid Priest did not mention the Temple in his source, Wellhausen concluded that centralization was “commanded” in D and “presupposed” in P (his emphasis), indicating that P was written during the Second Temple period, but in fact the P text does demand centralization, and very often so, to the Tabernacle, which was the symbolic Temple (Wellhausen 35-38).[4] The Aaronid Priest says more than a dozen times that “the performance of these commandments at the Tabernacle is the law forever” (Friedman, Bible 23).[5] Priestly sacrifices that are mentioned only in the P source and in Chronicles are argued to be post-Exilic institutions that expanded on the more simple and spontaneous non-centralized sacrifices that accompanied any large meal with guests (Wellhausen 76).

According to Wellhausen, the turning point for this priestly legalization of cultic life was the reformation of Josiah, during which time Deuteronomy centralized sacrifices in Jerusalem, thus separating the cult from everyday life. Yet at the same time, “Deuteronomy did not contemplate such a result” because the standing phrase for sacrifice is to “eat and be merry” (Wellhausen 77). But most important was a quote from Ezekiel saying that in the future, only certain men from the “tribe” of Levi, descendants of Zadok, would be allowed as priests (Ez. 44.15). Both E and P use the name Elohim for God up until the divine name YHWH, or Yahweh, is revealed to Moses at the burning bush, but P is distinct in saying that only the descendents of Moses’ “brother” Aaron were priests and that other Levites were to be their attendants, whereas in E all Levites are considered priests. Since Zadok was David’s Aaronid priest, Wellhausen argued that the Zadokite priests took this prophecy as an inspiration when they came to power during the Second Temple, and the P text could not have existed during the time of Ezekiel since “[t]he distinction between priest and Levite which Ezekiel introduces and justifies as an innovation, according to the Priestly Code has always existed” (124).

This assumption, however, was wrong, as Chronciles records how king Hezekiah of Judah made the division between Aaronid priest and Levite even before king Josiah or Ezekiel (2 Chron. 31.2). August Dillmann, a pupil of the German Orientalist Heinrich Ewald and a friend of Wellhausen, agreed that the Law code got its “final shape” following the exile, but refuted the late dating of P because the Priestly Code contained laws that were completely irrelevant to the postexilic period, because laws one would expect in the postexilic period were not present, and because quotes from P could be found in Deuteronomy while nothing from Deuteronomy could be found in P (Weinfeld 65-67). But despite Dillmann’s arguments, it was Wellhausen’s J-E-D-P model that came to be adopted by critical scholars as the standard chronology to draw from up until modern times. To prove Dillmann’s contention, I will examine some of the modern critical scholarship on the four sources in the next section and provide arguments for P’s early authorship and disprove the chronologies contending with the J-E-P-D model.

Chronology of the Sources: The Kaufmann School vs. The Graf-Wellhausen School

The Graf-Wellhausen chronological model was groundbreaking in its ability to prove that the Pentateuch was made up of four primary sources, but some of the reasoning Wellhausen used for dating the P source to the Second Temple was flawed, and proponents of the Kaufmann chronology have since produced strong evidence for dating the Priestly source much earlier. It was an easy mistake to make because it was in fact the same group of Aaronid priests from the time of Ezra who would ultimately combine the JE source, the P source, and the Deuteronomistic History into a single canon of scrolls.

According to Wellhausen, nothing from the books of the Hebrew Prophets show any knowledge of the P source, but Friedman points out several examples of Jeremiah referencing P in his book, Who Wrote the Bible? In fact, Jeremiah often took passages from P and inverted them, such as taking the famous line “Now the earth was a formless void . . . God [Elohim] said, ‘Let there be light,’” and changing it to “I looked to the earth -- it was a formless waste; to the heavens, and their light had gone.” (New Jerusalem Bible, Gen. 1.1-3; Jer. 4.23).[6] The term “be fruitful and increase in number” is also referenced in the verse written by Jeremiah that says, “ . . . when your numbers have increased greatly in the land . . .” (NJB, Gen. 1.22; Jer. 3.16). Jeremiah also showed hostility towards the P source’s seven chapters worth of offerings and sacrifices given “in the day” that Moses commanded by rejecting and reversing the divine instruction in a verse that has Yahweh say that he “did not command them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt about matters of offering and sacrifice.” (NJB, Lev. 7.37; Jer. 7.22).

Ezekiel quoted P when he wrote that God brought the Patriarchs “to the land which I have lifted up my hand to give,” when he told his readers to “walk according to my statutes,” when he wrote “I shall bring the sword over you,” and when he referred to fathers eating their sons in a time of famine.[7] Wellhausen’s argument that P presupposes centralized religion is also contradicted by the way that P demands all sacrifices to be done at the Tabernacle, which Wellhausen himself argued was a fictional symbol for the Temple. To kill any animal outside the entrance to the Tent of Meeting, where the Tabernacle was located, was considered “spilling blood” punishable by exile (Lev. 17.3-4; Friedman, Who 167-171).

Moshe Weinfeld, in his book The Place of the Law in the Religion of Ancient Israel (2004), also refutes Wellhausen’s arguments that the cultic institutions were the product of the late ritualism of the post-Exilic priesthood. Wellhausen proposed that sin and guilt offerings were post-Exilic, but they are discussed in 2 Kings 12.17, Hosea 4.8, and Psalms 40.7, and implied in Micah 6.7 and Isaiah 53.10 (Weinfeld 26-27). Incense is mentioned in 1 Samuel 2.28 and Isaiah 1.13, 6.4-6; livestock tithes are likewise referenced in 1 Samuel 8.17 (Weinfeld 27-28, 32). The tradition of the Tabernacle and Tent of Meeting is said in the J source to go back to Eli (1 Sam. 2.22) and Nathan (2 Sam. 7.6), making it unlikely to be a retrojection from the post-Exilic period (Weinfeld 19). Hittite cultic and mythological texts also confirm contemporary pagan traditions of the “[t]ent as a basic cultic institution” (41). The blasting of trumpets and the belief that the people’s fate for the coming year would be determined on that day have parallels in contemporary Hittite and multiple Mesopotamian cultures (52).

Regarding centralization, Weinfeld points out that if Leviticus 17 were originally written in post-Exilic times, then “its effect would have been to ban the eating of meat for the majority of the people” (21). He instead contends that it is a pre-monarchal law that became used during King Hezekiah’s reign and that the centralization in P can instead be seen as a result of Sennacherib conquering all of Judah’s cities with the exception of Hezekiah’s Jerusalem (2 Kings 8.13). Weinfeld argues that “[u]nder such circumstances, Jerusalem could be proclaimed as the only legitimate place for worship, but this of course could not be continued after Judah was liberated, hence the deuteronomic permission of profane slaughter” (23). He also finds no basis for Wellhausen’s contention that the distinction between priests and Levites occurred during the reformation of King Josiah and were first legalized by Ezekiel (31).

There is linguistic evidence for promoting an early date for P as well. Linguistic analyses done by Avi Hurvitz starting in 1982 has confirmed that P was written in a later stage of Biblical Hebrew than J and E, but in an earlier stage than D, the prophets, and the Babylonian exile. As Hurvitz describes in “A Linguistic Study of the Relationship Between the Priestly Source and the Book of Ezekiel,” the Pre-exilic dating of P “is borne out by the decisive fact that P is linguistically earlier than Ez., and since it is Ez. which (within biblical literature) best represents the age of the exile, it follows that P should be seen as substantially pre-exilic” (Hurvitz 170). Five other studies from Canada and the United States have since confirmed that analysis.[8]

Hurvitz has also shown that the language in JE, including the books of Samuel, have far less Aramaic influences than those of books written after the Exile like Ezra, Nehemiah, and Zechariah. Even as far back as 1967, Hurvitz noted in the Harvard Theological Review that the Biblical Hebrew word for fine linen employed in the P source, šēš, was found only in earlier books such as Genesis and Proverbs, while its Aramaic equivalent, bŭs, is found only in later biblical writings such as Chronicles and Esther (Hurvitz, “Usage” 118-120).[9] The Book of Ezekiel, a product of the exile, makes a distinction between the Egyptian šēš and the Aramaic bus imported to Tyre from Aram or Edom (“Usage” 119). Analysis done on Hebrew inscriptions dated to the First Temple period “conclusively demonstrates that, by and large, there is a far-reaching linguistic uniformity underlying both the pre-exilic inscriptions and the literary biblical texts written in [Biblical Hebrew]” (Hurvitz, “Quest” 308).

Despite this linguistic evidence, there is still a large degree of scholarly acceptance for the Graf-Wellhausen chronology of the Documentary Hypothesis. According to Weinfeld, Kaufmann’s arguments for an early dating of P “has found considerable support among Jewish scholars in Israel and elsewhere” but “Christian scholarship has generally adhered to Wellhausenian approach” (Weinfeld xii). Noted Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein and American archaeologist Neil Asher Silberman, in their bestselling book, The Bible Unearthed, have said that P is still “dated by most scholars to post-exilic times” after 586, although the two scholars believed that “the basic framework and initial elaboration of the patriarchal narratives point clearly to a seventh century origin” (Finkelstein, Bible 45, 46f). According to them, even the earliest source, J, is dated to after the Assyrian conquest of Israel in 722, quite late in the historical record compared to the earliest estimates as originating from David’s court almost 300 years earlier! These late dates are associated with Finkelstein’s controversial arguments that the archaeological evidence points to widespread literacy and statehood only appearing in Judah in the 600s. Although this “low chronology” has taken on some popoularity within the circles of Finkelstein’s University of Tel Aviv, while those associated with the American School of Oriental Studies in Jerusalem defend the more orthodox “high chronology,” also known as the “Jerusalem School.”

Biblical Archaeology: The Jerusalem School vs. The Tel Aviv School

Biblical archaeology has been an important factor in understanding the history of Israel and Judah and how it relates to when and where the stories from the Hebrew Bible come from. In the center of Syro-Palestinian archaeology lies two main schools of thought: the “high chronology” of the “Jerusalem School,” whose proponents include American archaeologist William G. Dever and G. Ernst Wright, and the “low chronology” of the “Tel Aviv School,” led by archaeologists and co-authors Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman. The differences between the two schools revolves around how much of the archaeological evidence is interpreted, with the two main issues being the origin of the Israelites and when the mountainous southern country of Judah first became a state. Before reviewing these two schools, a brief history of the three “classic” archaeological models is needed.

One of the most important figures in the field was the “Father of Biblical Archaeology,” William F. Albright. As Director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, or the “Jerusalem School,” Albright taught some of the most famous names in Biblical scholarship, including G. Ernest Wright, David Noel Freedman, and Raymond E. Brown. Beginning in the 1920s, Albright defended the classic “conquest model” for the arrival of the original Israelites, as depicted in the Book of Joshua, arguing that the Israelites had conquered most of Judah and Israel in one massive military conflict (Dever, Who 41). Although Albright identified many archaeological sites with many stories from the Bible, none of these identifications have lasted the test of time. As accepted by nearly every modern archaeologist today, no remains of Late Bronze fortifications from Joshua’s time have ever been found, which means the story of the “walls of Jericho” falling could not have been on a real historical memory. The second Canaanite city to be destroyed in the Book of Joshua, “Ai,” which is Hebrew means “ruins,” was found to have been completely uninhabited between the Early Bronze Age city and the small Israelite village from the 1100s and 1000s (Mazar, Archaeology 331).[10]

During the 1920s, Albright’s “conquest model” came under attack by German biblcal scholars like Albrecht Alt and Martin Noth, who instead posited a “peaceful infiltration model.” A vision based more on the Book of Judges than Joshua, the praceful infiltration model saw Palestine being populated by nomadic tribesmen from the Jordan Valley who decided to settle down (Dever, Who 50). In 1985, American archaeologist Joseph Callaway published a book supporting Alt’s peaceful infiltration model but added that the Iron I hill country settlers had not been nomads but settlers with the knowledge of terrace agriculture and how to use rock-cut cisterns (147). Another German Biblical scholar named Manfred Weippert and Canadian Egyptologist Donald Redford also identified the early Israelites with a Transjordanian nomaidic group known to the Egyptians at the time as the Shasu.

Then in 1962, one of Albright’s “maverick” students, George Mendenhall, came up with a third model, called the “peasant’s revolt” model, arguing that a religiously-motivated internal revolution had caused the land to be transferred from the Canaanite city-states to God. In 1979, American Biblical scholar Norman Gottwald proposed a similar theory that crystallized the revolt model in Marxist terms, though Mendenhall opposed the work based primarily on what “Yahwism” was (Dever, Who 52-54). Gottwald has since abandoned his high Marxist ideals of egalitarianism and has since changed his terminology to that of an “agrarian social revolution” (Dever Who 111). Although this model was also largely abandoned, it was the first model to propose the now almost universally accepted premise that the Israelites were indigenous Canaanites (74).

By the 1960s, the old paradigm of biblical archaeology came crashing down and even Wright came to lose confidence in the ability for Biblical archaeology to provide objective answers in the face of historical ambiguiuty (David 144). William G. Dever originally entered the American School in Jerusalem in 1974 to study Christian theology under Albright’s pupil Wright but was soon drawn away by Wright from the subject into the more concrete endeavors of Biblical archaeology. Dever studied under Frank Moore Cross as well, eventually serving as head of the Jerusalem School, later drawing a great amount of controversy by challenging Wright’s equivalency of Biblical archaeology with Palestinian archaeology by arguing that the fields should be split in two because of the different questions being asked. He attempted to re-christian the field “Syro-Palestinian archaeology” – borrowing the term from Albright – so that the practice could become more professional and not “remain an amateurish affair not able to command the respect of scholars in other fields” (Dever, Archaeology 31). Studies Dever worked on in the 70s corrected many of the dating systems Albright used and helped demolish Albright’s defense of the patriarchal stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as an accurate portrayal of the Middle Bronze Age (Davis 140-141). At the same time, Dever also became the most outspoken critic against the “Bible as Literature” movement and other deconstuctionists who argue the entire Bible is completely void of any historical value. In many different ways, Dever forceably pushed Albright’s antiquated form of Biblical archaeology into the modern era while simultaenously leading the defense against assaults from the post-modern era.

Dever posited his own “agrarian frontier reform” model similar to Gottfield’s “peasant revolt” model, arguing that the early “proto-Israelites” were based on tight family communities with a strong anti-statist drive for land reform (Dever, Who 187-188, 194). Dever cites evidence for this in the story of Samuel protesting the Israelite’s desire to make a king because it would create a classed society that conscripts citizens. He also points to the anti-statist writings of Isaiah condemning those who “join house to house, and add field to field,” and of Micah complaing about the corrupt urban upper class as evidence that the Israelites were rebelling more against the Canaanite monarchy than the Canaanite gods.[11] Dever writes that “[i]ronically but not surprisingly, history repeats itself: Monarchic Israel becomes precisely the kind of oppressive, elitist state that early Israel came into being to protest, complete with Canaanite-style overlords who usurp the land” (Dever 198). Dever agreed with Callaway on the importance of the Israelite’s expertise in terrace agriculture to combat the daunting challenges of tilling food from the land (107-108). Dever also contends that the proto-Israelites lived in similarly-designed four-room complexes with two rooms devoted to stables, complexes which he claims have no Canaanite predecessors but appear suddenly at almost every Iron Age site at the dawn of the 1100s (105).

One of the first works that pioneered the current archaeological discussion on Israelite origins was Israel Finkelstein’s 1988 book, The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement, in which Finkelstein made the case that the early Israelites could be linked to 300 small 13th-century settlements which had not been formed above destruction layers of any Canaanite sites as the Book of Joshua had it, but had instead been founded through a network of agricultural villages in the hill country. This was the first hard evidence that ultimately forced most biblical archaeologists, including Dever, to abandon the conquest model and begin looking into indegenous origins (Dever, What 261). At the time, Dever criticized Finkelstein for using the ethnic term “Israelite” and instead opted for “proto-Israelite,” although both have since used the two terms interchangably. Then, in the mid-90s, Finkelstein reversed his position and joined the growing skepticism against determining ethnicity through pottery, yet he maintained that the lack of pig bones in excavated food remains could be used an ethnic marker to distinguish the proto-Israelites from other proto-Ammonite and Philistine sites (Dever, What 41-42; Finkelstein, “When” 78-79).

Both Finkelstein and Dever cite settlements in the early Iron Age, from 1150 to 900 B.C., showing an early dietary taboo against pork, providing evidence of a group of people who separated themselves culturally from their contemporary neighbors (Dever 113; Finkelstein, Bible 119-120). However, other archaeologists like Amihai Mazar disagree with the extent that this constitutes ethniticity, saying that “it does not seem that the hill country differed much in this respect from Canaanite dietary customs” and that the lack of pigs may instead be related to ecological conditions since pastoralists in general avoid pigs (Mazar, “Israelite” 93).[12] Finkelstein also argued that the four-roomed houses cited by Dever have been found in the lowland and Transjordan areas and are signs only of environmental and social factors rather than ethnic markers (“When” 78). Finkelstein also sees little evidence for such a large shift from the lowlands to the highlands as Dever envisions and instead argues that the overall character of the material culture in the highlands shows no evidence of large-scale migrations of new groups from outside (80-81).

After the turn of the second millenium, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman teamed up to write the bestselling popular book on Biblical archaeology, The Bible Unearthed (2001). In it, they outlined Finkelstein’s cyclical model in which the proto-Israelites originated from a third wave of settlers coming from a series of mass settlements followed by a crisis resulting in the mass site desertion (Finkelstein, Bible 114). While Dever sees a varied origin of Israel from the 1200s B.C. with more farmers than nomads, Finkelstein and Silberman described a large-scale settlement made up primarily of pastoral nomads between the late 1100s and 1000s. They argued against the importance of the hill terrace farming and plastered cisterns, pointing to recent fieldwork showing that both technologies had been mastered already in the Middle Bronze Age. They also criticized the “peasant revolt” models, saying that by the Late Bronze Age the rural sector of Canaanite society had become too destitute to have supplied the energy and manpower for a social revolution (Bible 337-338; “When” 76). Finkelstein and Silberman instead connected the site plan of a cluster of proto-Israelite houses with the oval-shaped tent sites of bedoiun encampments from both the early Iron Age and the twentieth century to argue that the new wave instead came from a pastoral background (Bible 111-112). They also adopted and elaborated on Redford’s theory that the story elements from the Exodus are better connected to the realities of the 600s B.C. than any time period that could be associated with Moses (65-68). As for the Israelite monarchy, they argued that none of the cities, with the possible exception of Lachich, showed any urban planning or monumental structures in any of Judah’s cities and so postulated that the United Monarchy of Solomon must have been the “golden age” fiction retrofitted back into the mythic past of David and Solomon (235-238). Judah, they concluded, was far too much of a cultural backwater to rule over the far more popoulated and urbanized northern country of Israel. “I think I destroyed Solomon, so to speak. Sorry for that!” said Finkelstein in an interview for National Geographic (85).

Dever agrees with Finkelstein on the cyclical nature of the settlementation but argues that Finkelstein’s own figures show that the ten-fold growth in population during the early Iron Age could not have come from the 10% of the population that was previously nomadic (Dever, Who 156-157). The population explosion can only be explained by a large influx of people and the tiny new Israelite villages were not founded on the ruins of earlier Bronze Age sites but in the sparsely populated hill country of Galilee, Israel, and Judah. Thus, to Dever, the peaceful infiltration model best fits the evidence because they seemed to be trying to avoid the military confrontations that were so prevalent in the much-contested lowlands (99). Israeli Archaeologist Amihai Mazar, who often presents a middle-ground perspective to the Dever-Finkelstein divide, sees a combination of the theories may best explain the hill-country settlement, believing the hill country settlers to be a combination of nomadic Shasu, local pastoralists, and dispossessed Canaanite peasants, though he adds that the culture who ultimately brought Yahweh worship to the land were the Shasu (94-95). More evidence on this later.

Despite their differences, Dever, Finkelstein and A. Mazar all agree that the Israelites were originally Canaanites who moved to the low country during the demographic “surge” from the Early Iron Age. Modern linguistics proves that Biblical Hebrew is a Canaanite dialect and the evenearly Israelite holy days such as Rah ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur are actually based on the Canaanite New Years festival (Dever, Who 168). Even Passover, with it’s myth of placing lamb’s blood on the door going back to Moses and the plagues of Egypt, is based on the Semitic early spring festivals that celebrated the birth of a new lamb (200).

On the more extreme side of Finkelstein are the “minimalists,” who argue that the entire Hebrew Bible was written very late, either during the Persian or Hellenistic eras, while those on the extreme side of Dever are the “maximalists” who believe the the entire Pentateuch was written by Moses and disagree with entire premise of Biblical sources. The “minimalist” school of critical scholarship is made up of scholars who take the position that the Hebrew Bible contains only a “minimal” basis in historical reality. Scholars such as Niels Peter Lemche, Thomas L. Thompson, Keith W. Whitelam, as well as many scholars from the Copenhagen School adopted the general conception that the entire Hebrew Bible was written after during the Persian era and in some cases the Macedonian era. The formation of Israel as a people and a state are dated very late. Archaeological evidence that is typically understood as correlating with Biblical verses are typically reinterpreted as referring to something else or as literary constructs rather than historical people.

As Dever points out, with the exclusion of the books of Daniel and Ezra, the Biblical writers knew well too many details of the monarchal era and shows not reflection of the collision of the Greek worldview such as the conception of the immortality of the soul. “Daniel is what a ‘Hellenistic Bible’ might look like; and it is atypical, indeed unique, in the corpus of the Hebrew Bible. The books of 1-2 Maccabees are even better comparisons” (Dever, What 276). Dever mercilessly targets Lemche, Thompson, and Whitelam for scorn in his books, arguing that the minamalists are “the new nihilists” and are ideologically motivated by a postmodern agenda (Dever, What 33). Dever calls into question Thompson’s “oblique writing style,” while describing his ideological background as being tainted with “[s]ocial constructionism and political activism, combined with an appeal to ‘New Age’ theo-babble” (31). Dever also points out that Thompson and the Copenhagen School consist primarily of theologians or literature specialists with no expertise in archaeology or Middle Eastern linguistics. In contrast, Finkelstein and Silberman say “from a purely literary and archaeological standpoint, the minamalists have some points in their favor” (Finkelstein, Bible 128).

As Dever points out, the name “Israel” meant many different things to many different groups of people, and even though “some ‘Israels’ are more idealistic retrojections than others,” that does not mean all of the variant Hebrew literature should be lumped together as complete fiction in order to declare ancient Israel non-existant (Dever, What 45-46). As evidence for one such ancient “Israel,” Dever points to the famed “Victory stele” of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah in the year 1210, which boasts that Israel was “laid to waste; its seed is not.” Israel is unique among the names on the list as they are designated a “people” rather than a kingdom or city-state (Dever, What 118). Regarding the “Victory stele,” Thompson says that the “text renders only the earliest use of a name. It does not refer to the ‘Israel’ we know from the Assyrian period and which is mentioned in both Assyrian and Palestinian texts” (Thompson 79). Finkelstein and Silberman point to more evidence for a historical Israel from the “Mesha stone,” found in southern Jordan which mentions Omri, king of Israel (Finkelstein, Bible 177). Thompson says that “[t]he literary nature of the Mesha stele needs to be taken seriously. It is quite doubtful that it refers to an historical person when it refers to Israel’s king” (Thompson 13). Thompson makes the same argument for an inscription found in an excavation in Tell Deir Alla in the Jordan valley that mentions the Moabite seer Balaam from Numbers 22-24: “It is precisely the story character of the prophet Balaam that the Deir Alla inscription gives evidence for” (Thompson 11).

In the center of the question regarding the evidence for the historicity of King David is an ancient inscription of an Aramean king boasting that he had “[killed Jeho]ram son of [Ahab king of Israel]” and “[Ahaz]iahu son of [Jehoram kin]g of the House of David”(Finkelstein, Bible 129). Although the inscription does not name the Aramean king, Finkelstein and Silberman say there is “hardly a question that it tells the assault of Hazael, king of Damascus, on the northern kingdom of Israel around 835 BCE” (129). In The Mythic Past, Thompson points not only to inconsistent stories of where the inscription was found, but also faults the interpretation of the inscription of bytdwd as meaning “House of David,” which he sees as an atypical term for “dynasty.” Thompson instead suggests the alternative translation “Temple of the Beloved,” with dwd referring not to David but to a religious epithet for a deity, possibly Yahweh (Thompson 203-204). Thompson sees the fragments of the inscription as actually belonging to two different related inscriptions and points out that other scholars, like Philip R. Davies, are convinced the published fragments are actually forgeries (Thompson 205). Dever rails against Davies in his book for the implication that a hoax had been “planted” on the “venerable Avraham Biran” and argues that “[t]he irony is that biblical scholars have long demanded that an archaeologist supplement our ‘mute’ artifacts with texts. But when we do find a spectacular text, they discard it!” (Dever, What 30).

Following the common use of the term “minimalist” for scholars like Thomas Thompson, other scholars and Bible enthusiasts who hold opinions opposite of the spectrum have dubbed themselves “maximalists.” Kenneth Kitchen, one self-styled Biblical “maximalist,” argues in his book, On the Reliability of the Old Testament, that modern data on treaty, law, and covenant place the texts in the late second millenium and that the claim that Hezekiah and Josiah engaged in a centralization process is “shaky” (Kitchen 400). Kitchen also says that the holy text found by Josiah was not Deuteronomy but the entire Pentateuch, authored by Moses (Kitchen 291). But the connection between Deuteronomy Law and the era of Josiah is one of the longest, most well-documented associations made in modern Biblical scholarship.[13] Kitchen dismisses the Documentary Hypothesis for not having any “tangible, material evidence” and points to the absence of any Biblical sources in the Dead Sea Scrolls as evidence of their non-existence, although most of the Dead Sea Scrolls were written some 600 years after the latest of the four unedited sources (Kitchen 492). Yet Kenneth, like most “maximalists,” does not make any concerted effort to dispute the textual and linguistic evidence or compare the hypothesis to other material proof of scriptual editing, such as in the case of the original “Short Jeremiah” found both in the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls. It can be generally agreed that “maximalists” are simply hostile against the source hypothesis because they feel it is a threat to the authority of the text. The differences between Dever and Finkelstein are many, even though each have been classified a “minimalist” and a “maximalist” by the opposing pole although the majority of their disagreements are based on archaeological methods, not theology or ideology.

Friedman’s Hidden Book vs. Finkelstein and Silberman’s David and Solomon

Aside from the Kaufmann and Wellhausen chronologies, the German scholar John Van Seters has also written several books on the sources of the Pentateuch and has adopted a “Supplementary Hypothesis” that the sources were not independent works that were later combined but continuous additions to one independent work, the D source. Van Seters proposes that the Deuteronomistic historian used very few sources other than the flood account from the Epic of Atra-Hasis, but instead created a fiction based on the historiographic traditions of the Greeks.[14] However, the source layers of JE and P can not be supplements because when the texts are separated, not only are the narratives still readable, but many of the contradictions inherent in the combined texts are solved. Van Seters also argues that J and E are from the same author, the Yahwist, and that he lived after the Exile some time after the Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History were written, although he believed the Yahwist used a great deal of source material in Genesis (Pentateuch 60-61). But in condensing J and E into one author, Van Seters also fails to explain noticeable contradictions, such as whether it was Judah (J; Gen. 37.26) or Reuben (E; Gen. 37.21) who tried to save Joseph from being sold into slavery. As described in Prologue to History, one reason Van Seters believes the Yahwist wrote E is because there are some instances where the name Elohim is used in the J source (161). However, these rare instances can be explained as the name being used by people in the story rather than the narrator or by previously established phrases like the Benei Elohim.[15] Hurvitz’s 1982 work, “A Linguistic Study of the Relationship Between the Priestly Source and the Book of Ezekiel,” also disproves Wellhausen and Van Seters through evidence that the language in the P source was older than that in the Book of Ezekiel.

Van Seters accepts Wellhausen’s placement of the Priestly source after the Deuteronomistic History and the Yahwist’s JE source, not based on Wellhausen’s “scheme about the evolution of Israelite religion” but “the fact that neither the early prophetic texts before Ezekiel, nor Deuteronomy and the DtrH and all of the earlier material it contains seem to reflect the highly centralized and hierarchical priesthood, the elaborate festival calendar and the sacrificial cult of the P Code” (Van Seters, Pentateuch 80-81). This position, however, assumes an amount of uniformity among sources and prophets, something that should not be taken for granted. And as Weinfeld argues, “[t]he idea that the priestly document was influenced by the writings of one prophet is far less credible than the opposite, i.e. that Ezekiel was one of many writers influenced by the priestly style” (Weinfeld 72). Friedman also notes that Van Seters cites Haran’s articles on book scrolls and literacy, but fails to address Haran’s early dating for P (Friedman, Hidden 375). Friedman also rightly criticizes Van Seter’s method, saying, “Van Seters does not address major webs of language and events that bind these stories together, while he out-Wellhausens Wellhausen in separating the texts on points that seem small by comparison” (372). From both a narrative and linguistic standpoint, Van Seters’ chronology is even less likely than Wellhausen’s.

Frank Moore Cross points out in dating Deuteronomy before JE that Van Seters “ignores the evidence of the linguistic typography of grammar and lexicon” as developed by linguistic scholars, including Hurvitz (Cross, From, 30f). However, Cross does agree with Van Seters that P was not a document in itself but a supplement to the JE “Epic,” and was one and the same with the Redactor (Cross, Canaanite 301, 305). Friedman, who like Dever studied under Cross, contested this assessment by pointing out that there are lapses in continuity in the Torah that suggest the interspersing of two complete texts (Friedman, Bible 13, 288f). For example, the children of Israel are mourning in Numbers 25.6, apparently from Moses deciding to kill all the Israelites who associated themselves with Ba’al Peor in the previous verse. But if you remove the five chapters of JE material that precedes it, the mourning picks up directly after the mourning for the death of Aaron, which is more appropriate. The P story of how Aaron’s son Phineas earned the covenant of eternal priesthood also makes more sense in the light of Aaron’s recent death as that is when the question of inheritance would come to mind. Thus, it makes sense that the two P stories were originally linked together in a completley separate source document. Another example is how the P source has Isaac tell Jacob to go to Paddan Aram in Genesis 28.7-9, the same place Jacob is when P picks up again at Genesis 35.9 following seven chapters of JE text. Had the P source been a supplement to the J source as Cross contends, then the Aaronid Priest would have had no need for superfluous verses that J already provided, and so would have an incomplete story when read on its own.[16] The consistency of the story line in P source after it is separated from the JE text proves that P was originally an independent document, as were the other three sources. Although it makes some sense for Cross to identify the Priest with the Redactor since they are both supportive of the Aaronid priesthood, the person who combined JE, P, and the Deuteronomistic History must have lived after the Babylonian Exile.

Both Cross and Friedman have made the argument that the Elohist and the Deuteronomist was a product of the Shiloh Levites, who at first were more concerned with issues in Israel, but following that nation’s fall, reinstated the centralization policies of Hezekiah. The Deuteronomist, as described by Friedman, had the following characteristics: 1) he wanted centralized religion, but not tied to the ark; 2) he cared about Levites but enfranchised only a central group of Levites; 3) he accepted kingship but limited it; and 4) he had a “premonarchy approach to matters of war” (Who 122). Working under the conclusions of Baruch Halpern, as described in “The Centralization Formula in Deuteronomy,” Friedman argues that D was written by someone from the Shiloh priesthood because: 1) they once had centralized worship in Shiloh under Samuel and did not want to relate it to the ark because Solomon was the one to expel them; 2) they urged the people to care for Levites because they were needy priests “without land or employment”; 3) they accepted kingship because Samuel had anointed Saul and David, but wanted limitations “since Samuel’s acceptance of the monarchy had been reluctant”; and 4) they preferred tribal drafts to professional armies because this is what made kings independent of the people (122). Like the E source, the D source emphasizes prophets, refers to Mt. Sinai as “Horeb,” and uses the phrase “place where Yahweh sets his name,” but unlike any of the earlier source authors, the Deuteronomist tended to use the term “Yahweh [your] Elohim.” Both consider Moses to be the turning point in history, both are critical of Aaron/Jeroboam’s establishment of the golden calves, and both portray all Levites as being priests (122-128).

Friedman’s The Hidden Book in the Bible attempts a full restoration of the original J source from parts of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, two verses from Deuteronomy, parts of Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, and the first two chapters of 1 Kings. The well-known literary critic Harold Bloom, working off of a restoration by David Rosenburg as transliterated in The Book of J, estimates that the Yahwist, who he identifies as female, ended the story at Numbers 24.19, and that the author of the “Court History” stories in 2 Samuel was her male literary rival (Bloom, J 37). The biblcal scholar and theologian Fr. Lawrence Boadt also sees the J source ending with the Book of Numbers (Boadt 100). Friedman’s restoration, however, provides a compelling catalogue of linguistic and thematic connections between the patriarch stories in Genesis and many of the stories appearing after the Pentateuch. These connections typically go by unnoticed because of the massive amount of P and D text, half of which are law codes, inserted between the era of the patriarchs and the era of the monarchy. The needs of the later editors to present their own stories chronologically greatly disturbs the natural continuity of the Yahwist’s original work.

For example, the Yahwist authored parallel stories of Jacob’s daughter Tamar and David’s daughter Dinah being raped. Tamar and Dinah are both “degraded,” both are violently avenged by their brothers or brother while their father takes a passive role, and both times the father rebukes the act of vengence (Hidden 15-17; Gen. 34.2-5, 2 Sam. 13.14-20). In fact, the invention of the literary character, Jacob, while acting first and foremost as a transparent literary symbol for the people of Israel, can also be interpreted as a literary prototype for J’s main protagonist, David. Another example is the story of the rapists surrounding Lot’s house in Sodom and the rapists surrounding the house of an old man in Gibeah are nearly identical. In Genesis 19.7, Lot says, “Don’t do bad, my brothers” and in Judges 19.23, the old man says “Don’t, my brothers Don’t do bad” (Friedman’s translation, Hidden 84, 186). Both stories contain very similar language and plot structure and both end with the destruction of their respective cities (Hidden 17-18). The Yahwist’s patriarch stories also provide a backdrop that foreshadows and legitimizes David’s prescribed military campaigns. In Genesis 13.18, J says that Yahweh made a covenent with Abrhaam that his descendants would have all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates in Mesopotamia, and in 2 Samuel 8.3, David conquers all the nations surrounding Israel all the way to the Euphrates (Friedman, Who 62). Friedman writes that his colleague David Noel Freedman first made the case to him by pointing out that both Jacob and David had twelve sons (Hidden 393). Israel Finkelstein, in contrast, sees Judges as a late Deuteronomistic book which doesn’t reflect the realities of the Iron Age I period but the ideology of seventh century Judah based on some earlier northern Israelite sources (Schmidt 73).

Probably one of the most contested decisions of Friedman was to leave out the Balaam story from his restoration. In his 2003 book, The Bible: With Sources Revealed, Friedman says that the Balaam story is “perhaps the hardest section in the Torah in which to dilineate souces” (280f). He explains that many scholars believe it to be a composite story because of repeated sets of ambassadors that are sent to Balaam and because Elohim tells Balaam to with the Moabites and then gets angry at him for going. However, he sees the repeated sets as a possible progression of the story and does not believe it to be easily resolved by separating the section into two sources. Although he finds a few terms and phrases that seem to come from the J source, most of the linguistic terms he identifies belong to the E source, leading to the tentative identification with the Elohist while excluding a few J terms so that the reader can “observe them and make of it what one will” (280f). In this case, Friedman himself makes a better case against his own position that the Yahwist authored parts of the story.[17]

Friedman’s restoration of the J text ends with the conclusion of the “Court History” with Solomon killing his brother in order to secure the throne, paralleling Solomon’s ancestor Cain, the first city-dweller, murdering his own brother, the shepherd. Solomon then makes an oath to execute a relative of Saul’s named Shimei by repeating the words “Didn’t I have you swear by YHWH and warn you saying, ‘In the day you go out and go anywhere, know that you’ll die’?” (Friedman’s translation, Hidden 29l; Gen. 2.17, 3.3). This mirrors another repeated formula found only one other time in the Bible, a warning given by Yahweh not to eat from the tree of knowledge, later repeated by Eve, saying: “In the day you eat from it: you’ll die!” (Friedman’s translation, Hidden 297; 1 Kings 2.37, 2.42). The words “knowledge,” “good,” “bad,” and “death” appear 15 times near the end of the text (297). Thus, the J source comes full cirlce by beginning and ending his work with the reoccurring themes of an expulsion, a story of brother killing brother, and the words “In the day... you will die” (Gen. 1.17; 1 Kings 2.37). The “golden age” of Eden in which life or death commands were given to man directly from Yahweh has now evolved into the “golden age” of Solomon’s vast empire in which life or death commands are given to man through Yahweh’s annointed king.

In contrast to Friedman linking the Yahwist to the Court History of David, Finkelstein and Silberman cite the German biblical scholar Leonhard Rost in separating the stories of David into three hypothetical works: the “History of David’s Rise” (1 Sam. 16.14-2 Sam. 5), the “Court History” (2 Sam. 9-20; 1 Kings 1-2), and the “Acts of Solomon” (1 Kings 3-11; Finkelstein, David 14-15). Later, Finkelstein and Silberman follow other biblical scholars in identifying 1 Samuel 16 to 1 Kings 11 as a a composite narrative making up part of the Deuteronomistic History, which goes on to span parts of Joshua and 1 and 2 Kings (David 183). Friedman’s restoration identifies the Yahwist as one of the main contributors to the hypothetical “History of David’s Rise” and main author of the “Court History” (Hidden 12).[18] The scattered and repetative nature of the text within the so-called “David’s Rise” source gives solid ground for suspecting multiple authors. For example, David is introduced to King Saul twice, once when he is looking for a harp player and again when he asks David’s name following the slaying of Goliath.[19] The two attempts by King Saul to marry his daughter off to David as well as twin accounts of David sparing Saul’s life also appear to have been created by the combination of sources.[20] As for the “Acts of Solomon,” 1 Kings 3-10 is very pro-Solomon but the eleventh chapter suddenly becomes very critical of him, as Friedman and Silberman point out (David 179).

In Friedman’s restoration of the J source, the battle with Goliath is very short, consisting of a description of Goliath’s weapons and armor and then one verse in which David slays Goliath (17.1-11, 50). But even the description of the armor seems to have been dated too early. Finkelstein and Silberman point out that the description of Goliath’s armor “bears little resemblance to the military equipment of the early Philistines as archaeology has revealed it,” and so must have been written by someone who was familiar with Greek hoplite armor from the the time of King Josiah (David 196). They also attribute several scenes from the story such as the describing of the armor, the speeches of the combatants, and the concept of a single match determining the outcome of a battle to concepts taken from Homer’s Iliad, which would have been very improbable before the late 700s B.C. (David 198). However, most of the verses in the story refer to Goliath simply as “the Philistine,” including the single verse describing the fight Friedman identifies as belonging to J, so there may still have been a short description of a fight between David and a nameless Philistine. Another verse in a story of “David’s Mighty Men,” apparently based off old folklore about David that preceded even the J source, identifies a man named Elhanan as the victor against Goliath (2 Sam. 21.19). Thus, the story of David and Goliath may have still been based on the legend of a battle, either between David and a Philistine or between Elhanan and Goliath, but the story itself is Greek-inspired and most likely part of the Deuteronomistic History.

Finkelstein and Silberman also point to evidence that the stories of David and the Philistine king Achish came from the late 600s (David 191-193). Archaeologists Trude Dothan and Sy Gitin discovered an inscription of a king Achish, or Ikausu, during excavations in 1996 at the ancient Philistine city of Ekron. Although David’s Achish was from Gath, not Ekron, there is also archaeological evidence that Ekron went through a period of large-scale urban devleopment, transforming it from a small town to become one an important olive oil production industry during the time of Josiah. Since the city was located near the Judahite hill country, Finkelstein and Silberman argue that “the olive growers of Judah must have provided a significant part of Ekron’s supply, first as part of its tribute to Assyria after Sennacherib’s invasion and later, under Manasseh, as he sought to expand Judah’s participation into the Assyrian imperial economy” (David 193). Thus, the story of an alliance between David and an ancient Achish would have been an effort by the Deuteronomist to explain or legitimize an alliance between King Josiah and Ekron.

Friedman mistakenly includes the stories of Achish in his restoration of J, and in doing so he keeps a plot contradiction left behind by the redactor. When King Achish tells David that he can not contribute in the battle against Saul because his allies are suspicious of his former connections with the king, David becomes very upset with Achish, saying, “what fault have you had to find with your servant from the day I entered your service to the present time, for me not to be allowed to go and fight the enemies of my lord the king?” (NJB, 1 Sam. 29.8). Yet later, in another part of the story Friedman identifies with J, David also becomes very upset after hearing of Saul’s death, going so far as to rip his clothes and bring all the people around him to mourn and fast. David’s all-consuming respect for the honor of royalty even brings him to kill the Amalekite messenger for having helped Saul commit suicide (2 Sam. 1.1-12). This would be very duplicitous of David to act this way if he actually wanted to help kill Saul himself, which would have left a gaping plot hole if this were a part of the original J text. The Yahwist more likely left David’s connection to Saul’s death out of his version of the story completely so as to portray David as the continuation of Saul, symbolized by David being brought Saul’s crown and band from the man who helped Saul kill himself (2 Sam. 1.10). Thus, there is both archaeological and literary evidence that the David and King Achish stories were not part of the original J narrative (1 Sam. 27, 29, 30.1-6, 8-31).

Finkelstein and Silberman argue that David probably did contribute in some way to the fall of Saul’s kingdom, not by the Philistines, but by the Egyptian pharaoh Shishak a century after the traditional dating of David’s kingdom. According to 1 Kings, Shishak lived during the time of David’s grandson, Rehoboam, and was responsible for stealing all of the amazing wealth and riches of Solomon’s vast kingdom, economic conditions that Finkelstein and Silberman say contradicts the archaeological record. They instead point to evidence attesting to the destruction and abandonment of several cities north of Jerusalem as belonging to the same cluster of locations conquered by Egypt, as related to in the Karnak relief constructed by Sheshonq I. Although part of the relief is damaged, neither Jerusalem nor any of the southern towns around it appear to have been targeted, either because they posed no threat to the Egyptian king or because they were allied with him against the northern polity of Israelite cities ruled by Saul. The description of David being relieved of his command before the fateful battle in which Saul is killed was part of the Deuteronomist’s attempt to take a “forgotten betrayal” reflecting national rivalries between Israel and Judah and explain it as the tragic and undesired personal conflict between David and Saul brought about by the growing madness of Saul (81-83). Amihai Mazar finds the theory “farfeteched” and instead suggests that a surrender of the city may have kept Jerusalem’s name off the list or that it may be listed in a part of the damaged text (Mazar “Search” 124). But if Jerusalem was the capital of a great and powerful kingdom, then how could it not be put at the top of the list whether it surrendered or not?

Since the Philistines lived so far away from Saul’s territory, Finkelstein and Silberman argue that the only reason they would have been involved in the battle is if they had been mercanaries of Sheshonq. The idea is highly controverial, and Finkelstein and Silberman admit that other than one verse in “David’s Mighty Men” in which one of David’s mighty men killed a huge Egyptian with the Egyptian’s own spear, all associations between David and Egypt must have been lost (2 Sam. 23.21). But the fragments of folklore found in “David’s Mighty Men” mixed in with some other Deuteronomistic stories following the “Court History” does portray David more as a bandit leader than a king, a description Finkelstein and Silberman believe better fits the archaeological data showing Judah to be a poor, mountainous hinterland made up of a small population of illiterate farmers (2 Sam. 23.8-39; David 30-32).

In comparing Friedman to Finkelstein, each appear to have their own strong points. As one might suspect, Friedman, as a Hebrew language scholar, is much better at identifying dating the sources through language and plot direction, while Finkelstein is better at dating parts of the text that can be attested to in archaeology. Unlike Friedman and Dever, Finkelstein tries to address questions on both the Biblical and archaeological fronts, yet he seems to suffer some the lack of expertise from both sides due to this literary roundness. Much of what Finkelstein considers to be part of the Deuteronomistic History can be shown to belong to the J source through language, while parts of the story of David and Goliath and the king of Achish can be archaeologically attested to originate from the Deuteronomistic Historian’s time. But before I address the questions regarding the empire of Solomon and the dating of the Pentateuch sources, I would first like to step back and look at the literary relationship between the names of Yahweh and Elohim and how they relate to the question of when the Jewish religion first became monotheistic.

The Origin of Elohim

Although the Yahwist appears to be the earliest source, the name Yahweh is described in each of the first sources as coming after the name Elohim. According to the Yahwist, the name Elohim is first used by the snake, after which Eve repeats it (Gen. 3.1-2). But Eve is also the first character in J to speak the name Yahweh, in this case after she gave birth to Cain. The Yahwist then writes that it was around the time of Lamech and Noah that “it was begun to invoke the name YHWH” (Gen. 4.1; 4.26b; Friedman, Bible 40).[21] According to the Elohist and the Aaronid Priest, the name El Shaddai was used by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob until Yahweh first reveals his real name to Moses (Ex. 3.13-15; 6.2-3).[22] Does this mean Elohim and El Shaddai are the older gods equated with and replaced by a later deity named Yahweh, or is the Yahwist correct in equating the names at a much earlier date?

Let’s look at the history behind the name Elohim to see if this question can be answered. Elohim literally means “gods” – it is actually the plural for El just as the Hebrew word Ba’alim is the plural for Ba’al – but the grammar surrounding the word Elohim in most of the Heberw Bible instead promotes translators to render it singular. For example, if it were transliterated correctly, Genesis 1.27 would read, “The gods created man in the image of himself.” However, one noticeable exception to this rule comes right before this verse, which surprisingly reads that Elohim said, “‘Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves . . .” (NJB 1.26). The New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia cites the same use of plurality to denote a single god in inscriptions from Phoenicia and Tel Amarna in Egypt. Another traditional interpretation is that the plurality refers to heaven’s angelic host but a more modern hypothesis is that the author of the creation story was edited from an earlier polytheistic myth so that Elohim could be identified with a single god, Yahweh.

Many of the stories in the first nine chapters of Genesis have parallels in much earlier polytheistic myths from ancient Sumer in southern Iraq. As William Hallo says, “[t]t remains for future investigators to trace the chain of transmission by which Sumerian precedents passed via Akkadian, Amorite, and Canaanite intermediaries to their Hebrew reformulation, but the connection is apparent” (Hallo 170). For instance, the story of Cain and Abel is derived from a Sumerian myth of two arguing gods, both sons of the Air Lord Enlil, named Summer and Winter. In the story of Cain and Abel, Cain the farmer kills Abel the shepherd, but is then cursed so he could no longer grow crops, forcing him to wander the land of Nod until he built the first city, Enoch, which was named after his son. In the earlier Sumerian version of this story, it is perhaps not surprising that it is instead the farmer, Winter, who is vindicated by their father Enlil rather than the shepherd, Summer, since the Sumerians were city-dwellers who thrived during the winter on stored crops while the Hebrews were largely a pastoral society who thrived when livestock increased during the Summer (Kramer, Mythology 72-73). Each version of the story provides a perspective on the perpetual conflict between cities and pastoral groups. The story of Romulus and Remus are also very similar: both shepherds, both build Rome’s capital, and Romulus ends up slaying his brother. Thus, the Sumerian, Hebrew and Roman theme of twin founders may have each been based on an even earlier myth.

While most of the gods in the Sumerian pantheon were identified with bulls and cows, there were two notable exceptions: 1) the fertility goddess, Inanna, who was identified with the lioness; and 2) the mother of all the gods, Nammu, identified with the primeval oceans of chaos which preceded the world’s creation. But while Inanna was an immensely important deity in Sumerian litearture, Nammu played a very limited role in the mythology’s plotlines, despite the fact that she was said to have been the oven which baked the clay-formed humans fashioned by the wisdom god Enki and the earth goddess Ninhursag. Statues of Inanna dated to about 4,000 years ago also show some resemblance to the ancient “Venus” figurines that have been discovered scattered throughout Europe and Asia and carbon dated as far back as 11,000 to 35,000 years ago!

In fact, all the way up until the time of the first Sumerian cities, goddess figurines far-outnumbered god figurines, as attested in archaeolgical excavations in Cyprus, Turkey, and Jericho, dated between 9,000 and 13,000 years ago and there was definitely a distinct change in the Eurasian manufacture of idols from female to male between 7,000 and 4,000 years ago, riding right on the cusp of written language and civilization.[23] The earliest male deities to be found in Israel are from a sanctuary in the city of Dan, which William G. Dever finds highly significant since “in the 10th-6th centuries B.C. that out of some 3,000 Israelite figurines that we have, none but these four are demonstrably male…” (Dever, Did 147). The degree of similarity between the Venus figurines are quite astounding considering they have been discovered in France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Turkey, Israel, Mesopotamia, Russia, and as far east as Mal’ta in Siberia, just north of China. The most noticeable similarities include tiny arms and hands grasping oversized breasts, beaded heads, extremely broad hips and an artistic style using massive curvatures to emphasize childbearing features (Clark 58). Certainly by our common understanding of ancient deities being highly variable among different tribes of people, archaeological findings of such vast differences in distance and time should not have such obvious simialrities.

[pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic]

Venus figurines, spread out across Europe and Asia,

and carbon dated between 11,000 and 35,000 years ago

[pic][pic]

Sumerian Statues of Inanna dated to around 4,000 years ago

How is it possible that the products of a single artistic expression could become sperad out and at the same time survive so long? But what is even more surprising is the lack of confidence in many archaeologists to postulate an explanation for this discrimination for the female figurine over the male. Dever is among the scholars who find no problem positively identifying the female figurines from Israel as goddess figurines used for religious purposes. Some scholars gone so far as to dismiss the figurines as dolls, something Dever sarcastically refers to as the “Barbie doll syndrome” (Dever, Did 188). Yet Dever also repudiates the idea that there was ever a “single ancient ‘Goddess,’” arguing that each culture must be appreciated for its diversity and that the “monolithic Goddess” is “an illusion, created by modern psychological needs” (Did 307). And in fact it is the majority opinion among scholars that the Venus figurines do not represent the same goddess (Rodrigues 110).

If the question posed is only one of whether the goddess went by different names and had a diversity of cultural traits associated with them throught different cultures and different time periods, then there is no question they are “different” goddesses, but if this goes further and seems to assume there is no common heritage between the figurines or that is does nothing to change the previous assumptions about totemistic animism and patriarchal polytheism being the earliest forms of religion. Certainly it would be amazing enough if 24,000 years of human existence brought only a great array of female figurines of different makes and models, but each of these figurines exhibits specific charactersitics of motherhood while standing in the exact same posture. How much more “monolithic” do the figurines need to be? What hypothetical evidence would be needed to prove that there was a “monolithic Goddess”?

In Mesopotamian cities, the “Queen of Heaven” was typically identified as the spouse or daughter of the city’s patriarch, but Sumerian myths typically identified her as Inanna, the young wife of the vegetation god Dumuzi, whose name meant “Good Son.” Inanna has a Semitic equivalent known as Ishtar and has also been linked to a similar Canaanite fertility goddess, Asherah, whose name means “She who treads/subdues the Sea,” as well as with the Greek Aphrodite, who was also connected to the sea (Did 210, 236). Another Canaanite goddess associated with Aphrodite is Astarte, whose name is the masculine version of Ishtar, is mentuioned in derision several times in the Hebrew Bible (Wyatt 109).[24] The mythological correlations between the Sumerian Inanna, the Akkadian Ishtar, the Canaanite Asherah and Astarte and the Greek Aphrodite are well-accepted in scholarship despite the fact that the “same” goddess took on many different names and even different roles and personalities in the many myths written about her, so why would the same not be assumed for the Venus figurines, who are even more homogenized in artistic style?

The polytheistic religious literature had profound effect on the Hebew Bible. The Sumerian love poetry between Dumuzi and Inanna had a heavy influence on the composition of the Hebrew scripture known alternatively as the Song of Songs or the Song of Solomon. The “Song of Jacob,” which Cross, Friedman and Freedman identify as a core poem from premonarchic times, includes the “blessings of the breasts and womb” (Did 258; NJB Gen. 49.25). When Abraham is first called, he is first sent to Shechem and set up camp at the holy tree of Moreh (Gen. 12.6). And again, when Abraham was said to have been staying in Beersheba in the land of the Philistines, he planted a tamarisk tree and called out to “El Olam,” which means “El the Everlasting,” a name similar to an epithet for the Canaanite El in ancient texts from Ugarit (Did 259; Gen. 21.33). The metaphoric “Lady Wisdom” from the Proverbs attributed to Solomon identify her with the “tree of life” (Did 301; Prov. 3.18). The prophet Jeremiah makes a failed protest against Israelite women who worshipped the Queen of Heaven by baking her cakes called kawwanim, a loan word from the Mesopotamian cake, kamanu, that was baked for Ishtar. Clay molds from the city of Mari on the Euphrates have shown that these cakes were baked in the image of the goddess in her iconic wide-hipped pose holding her breasts (Did 234). The priestly prophet Ezekiel also lamented the “abomination” that women were “weeping for Tammuz,” the West Semitic name for Dumuzi, at the very door of Jerusalem’s temple (Ez. 8.14).

In Sumerian myth, Dumuzi is chosen by his wife Inanna to be her substitute in the netherworld following an unsuccessful attempt by her to conquer the netherworld’s throne from her older sister, Ereshkigal. But when Ereshkigal hangs Dumuzi on a stake, Inanna regrets her decision and weeps over his death. The two sisters then come to an agreement that Dumuzi would stay in the netherworld with Ereshkigal for half the year and on the earth with Inanna for the other half of the year (Kramer, Mythology 120-138). A similar myth has Dumuzi’s Greek equivalent, Adonis, being divided between the goddess of love, Aphrodite, and the Queen of the netherworld, Persephone. Thus, the death and resurrection of the vegetation god symbolized the changing seasons as well as offered a very unique prefiguration to the death and resurrection of Jesus on the spring equinox.

Semitic versions of Dumuzi, called Tammuz, proliferated for thousands of years, with different aspects of the story of a youth’s tragic death finding their way in the mystery religions of Syria, Turkey and Greece under the gods Adonis, Attis, Orpheus and Dionysus (Leeming 73). In Greek myth, Adonis was born from a myrrh tree, a tree not found in Greece but which does predominate the desert lands of Mesopotamia. Adonis is killed by a wild boar and so the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite sprinkled nectar on his body, causing the river Nahr Ibrahim flowing out of Mount Lebanon to turn red and Adonis was reborn, symbolzing the death and rebirth of seasons. A variant of the name Adonis, Adonai, which means “lord,” is often used in Hebrew scripture to refer to Yahweh. Attis, the Syrian father god, was said to have been born of a virgin goddess named Nana and to have died underneath a pine tree. Orpheus was a poet who was said to have gone into Hades and returned alive and is credited with inventing the Dionysian mysteries.[25] From some relics like ceremonial bowels, it can be determiend that the Dionysian mysteries included not just drinking wine but also the taking of bread as part of a ritual to mark his death, mirroring the same symbolic rites of the Last Supper. The Orphic priest/mathematician Pythagoras often described the soul being entrapped in the body as punishment, a belief similar to bodily lusts which war against the soul in early canoincal scripture (Rom. 8.15; 1 Pet. 2.11). Each of these divine mysteries appears to be rooted in an ancient matriarchal religion.

The Sumerian pantheon contained around the same number of gods and goddesses, but the male gods played a far more dominant role. Each of the Sumerian cities in Mesopotamia had a temple built to a particular god and in Eridu, their temple was dedicated to Enki, who in at least one myth is identified as Dumuzi’s father. Further up the Euphrates was the city of Uruk, which held the temple of the sky god An, and further up from it was the city of Nippur, which held the temple of the air god Enlil, and further up from there was Kish, which held the temple of the relatively Semitic war god Zababa. According to the Sumerian king lists, there was always one city that held “kingship” for a number of years before being “carried” away to a different city after the former city had lost political dominance. After a great flood similar to that in the story of Noah’s ark, kingship is said to have been taken from the ark-builder’s city of Shurrupuk to the city of Kish, whose rulers carried Semitic names by the third millenium (Kramer, Sumerians 44). And in fact an archaeological dig in Shurrupuk does attest to an ancient flood hitting the city around 2900, around the same time defensive city walls and written language can first be attested to.

Many ancient Mesopotamian texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Epic of Atrahasis also tell of a flood story very similar to the ones related by the Yahwist and the Aaronid Priest. The Sumerians also had several versions of the flood story and it appears to be one of the most famous ancient myths of all time, as different versions of the story can be found as far east as India and as far west as Greece. There are also several different versions of the flood myth used throughout the history of Mesopotamia, each story using a different name for the protagonist who builds the ark. In the earliest version of the story, the flood is created by the god of the sky, An, and his son the air god, Enlil, and it is the god of wisdom, Enki, who warns king Ziusudra of the ruling city of the time, Shurrupuk, to build the ark. In this earliest version, it is only a local flood, but later versions from Mesopotamia describe it as a world flood, requiring the protagonist to take with him the “seeds” of all the animals on the earth.

Hindu mythology includes three versions of the flood myth, one of which says that the builder of the ark was Manu, who afterward became the first king of all mankind. The story says that an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu named Matsya warned Manu of the flood in the form of a fish and then helped pull the ark after growing into a gigantic horned fish. Much like Adam, Manu asks for a companion and after a year, his wife appeared from his sacrifice (Whitney 237-239). Amazingly enough, the similarty of Manu’s name to the English word “man” is not a coincidence: the Old English word “man” is derived from the proto-Germanic word mannaz, which in turn is rooted in the proto-Indo-European word “*manu-s,” which is also the root of the Indian name Manu (Pokorny 726-728).

The flood story is intimately connected to the nearly universal myth of the island garden of immortality that the Yahwist called Eden, the Sumerians called Dilmun, and the Persian Zoroastrians called pairidaeza, or “paradise.” In each of these three stories, as well as in Plato’s legend of Atlantis, the island of the gods consists of water flowing out from the ground forming four rivers. According to the Yahwist, two of these rivers were the Tigris and the Euphrates. The Irish Land of Eternal Youth, Tír na nÓg, which inspired the apple-laden island of Avalon in Arthurian legend, as well as the island garden of Hesperides, from which the Greek hero Heracles stole the golden apples of immortality, are both certainly derived from the same ancient myth. In the Sumerian text Enki and Ninhursag, Dilmun is described as a place where “[t]he lion did not slay, the wolf was not carrying off lambs . . .” echoing the famous verse from First Isaiah: “The wolf will live with the lamb, the panther lie down with the kid, calf, lion and fat-stock beast together . . .” (NJB, Isa. 11.6).

Various dynasties took power for the next 500 years, some from the northern Semitic-speaking cities, some from the southern Sumerian cities. However, neither Enki’s city in Eridu nor Enlil’s city in Nippur appear to have ever taken part in taking “kingship,” yet Nippur’s priesthood clearly took on an important role in the religious recognition of kingship. The most popular hero throughout all of Mesopotamia for the next three millenia was the Sumerian king Gilgamesh, who ruled Uruk some time around the 2600s.[26] The north and south were finally unified under king Lugal-Zagesi of Kish, but in 2334, the king’s royal cupholder, Sargon, rebelled and overthrew him and began forming an empire around the now-lost city of Agade, beginning of one of the first empires in history, the Akkadian Empire. Although Sargon did not found the city of Agade as some scholars previously believed, this decision was nevertheless monumental since Kish had been such an important capital to the Semites that the title “King of Kish” remained a popular epithet long after the city had lost any strategic value. Had Sargon not moved the capital, the Akkadians would today be known more appropriately as the Kishians. For over a millenia, Sumerian and Akkadian language and culture had developed as an ingrained symbiosis of mutual influence, but Sargon’s newly formed empire heralded a new era of Semitic dominance that eventually surmounted all of Mesopotamia.

According to the Yahwist, Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, each of whom fathered all the major races of the world. Shem, whose name is the Hebrew word for “name” and the root word for the family of Semitic languages, had sons with names corresponding to lands in Mesopotamia, while his brother Japeth fathered lands in Europe and Ham fathered lands that were controlled by Egypt. Cush, who the Aaronid Priest identifies as the son of Ham, is said by the Yahwist to have been the father of Nimrod, a “mighty hunter in the eyes of Yahweh,” who took power over the earth (NJB 10.9). Later Jewish apocrypha such as pseudo-Philo and the Talmud make Nimrod out to be an evil pagan “rebel” to the monotheistic Abraham, and other Jewish writers such as Josephus even identify him as the builder of the Tower of Babel, but the small amount of what the Yahwist says about him seems positive. The mainstays of Nimrod’s empire were said to be Babel, Uruk, and Sargon’s capital city, Agade, but the next verse mentions an expansion – whether by Nimrod or another king named Asshur is unclear – into several Assyrian cities. The Yahwist obviously looked up to the “hunter,” but after Sargon II of Assyria completed the conquest of Israel, the name appears to have become more nortoreus as reflected in Micah 5.6, until he became a straight out villian in the Talmud and pseudo-Philo.[27] It is a popular theory among scholars that Sargon adopted his reignal name, Sargon, or more correctly, Sharru-Kin, meaning “Legitimate King,” as a political decision designed to contest popular opinion that the betrayal of his former king made him illegitimate, a detail that also matches closely with the long pseudographical tradition of Nimrod being a rebel. A sandstone in the city of Susa depicting Sargon’s grandson holding the world’s first known composite bow have caused some scholars to attribute Sargon’s success in building his empire to the invention of the high-quality weapon. This prompts a possible explanation for Nimrod’s fame as a “mighty hunter.”

After the fall of the Akkadian Empire, kingship was taken to Uruk before the land was conquered by foreign Gutians from northern Iran. After the foreigners were put out, kingship went back to Uruk shortly before a Neo-Sumerian Empire became established in 2112 at Ur, a city neighboring Eridu, but after about a century the empire fell to an attack by the Elamites from southwestern Iran. Despite the disappearance of the Sumerians themselves, Sumerian culture, technology, and religion continued to have a vast impact on Mesopotamia and Asia Minor that was even broader than Rome’s extensive cultural reliance on Greece. The Sumerian language, unrelated to any other known languages, continued to be used in priestly rites similar to the way Latin continued to be used in Europe long after the Western Roman Empire lost power. The fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur (Ur III) and the rise of Hammurapi’s Babylon would remain on the minds of Mesopotamian theologians for the next two millenia, as reflected in ancient texts like the Babylonian Chronicle of Early Kings.

For at least 30 years before Ur’s fall, the area had been experiencing a large influx of Semitic-speaking Amorites to the point that the Neo-Sumerian king Shu-Sin built a 170-mile wall from the Tigris to the Euphrates to keep them out. Although it is unknown exactly where the Amorites came from, the name Amorite means “Western Semite,” and they can generally be equated with the Canaanites (Dever, Who 219). The Book of Amos describes the Amorites as being as tall as cedar trees and holding dominion over Israel in the early 700s B.C. (2.9-10). Following the fall of Ur, many Amorites began to ascend to places of power, and after about another century an Amorite dynasty was established in the city of Babylon ten miles west of Kish.

That dynasty’s sixth king was the famous Hammurapi, an emperor who by the mid-1700s succeeded in conquering all of Mesopotamia, thus establishing the first Babylonian Empire and making its capital the largest city in the world at the time. Hammurapi became most famous during the twentieth century when a stone monument listing 282 laws decreed by the king was found by French archeaologists amongst ancient plunder taken to the Elamite capital of Susa in Iran. Though typically praised at the time as a great leap forward for the advancement of law and order, the laws are actually quite harsh and superstitious compared to older Sumerian codes discovered much later. For decades, Hammurapi fought against Assyria, led by another Amorite dynasty in northern Iraq, until the Babylonian emperor conquered their capital city of Asshur and expanded his empire. An independent source in Genesis 14 tells how Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed not by angels and fire from the sky but by an alliance of kings led by “Amraphel king of Shinar,” most likely a reference to Hammurapi. After this, Abraham is said to have routed the victorious forces with only 318 men in order to rescue his nephew Lot (NJB 14.1). Like Sargon, Hammurapi’s empire remained strong while he was alive, but his successors proved themselves unable to harness the same level of support and the Babylonian empire continuously lost more of its influence until Babylon itself was finally sacked by the ancient Indo-European-speaking Hittites from modern Turkey some time around the 1600s B.C. Although the Hittites took the statue of their god Marduk away from Babylon to mark their victory, the statue was retrieved and brought back by the Kassites, who somehow took power in Mesopotamia for themselves, ushering in a dark age in which few records have survived.

One myth that did survive from the Kassite period tells of a priest who served as advisor to the first Sumerian king of Eridu, Alulim. Another copy of the story was found in the library of the seventh century king of Assyria, Ashurbanipal. The priest’s name was Adapa, which like its Hebrew cognate “Adam” means “man.”A third century Babylonian priest, Berossus, later identified Adapa as Oannes one of the ancient “Seven Sages,” a mythical motif found in Sumerian, Hindu, Chinese and Greek myth (Dalley 182). The Myth of Adapa says that the fish-priest Adapa brought the first arts of civilization to Eridu and that these arts, according to some versions, came from the Island of Dilmun. The myth tells how Adapa was out on the boat when the South Wind came and capsized him, which causes him to break the South Wind by calling down a curse. For this, Adapa is called to answer for himself before Anu in the heavens. Adapa’s patron god, Ea, the Akkadian name for Enki, follows the same role as the snake of the Garden of Eden in J, providing Adapa with advice that causes him to forfeit eternal life.

The tablet starts the story off by explaining this theme, saying, “He (Ea) made broad understanding perfect in him (Adapa), to disclose his design of the land, to disclose the design of the land. To him he he gave wisdom, but did not give eternal life” (Dalley 184). When Adapa reaches the gates of heaven, he finds two gatekeepers: Inanna’s husband, Dumuzi, and a netherworld deity of nature and medicine named Ningishzida. Following Ea’s advice, Adapa acts as if he is in mourning for the two “dead” gods while pretending not to recognize them as the same deities he is heart-broken over. Dumuzi and Ningishzida laugh at Adapa and let him to meet Anu. After Adapa explains why he broke the South Wing to the god of heaven, Anu forgives him and offers him the bread and water of eternal life, but following Enki’s advice, Adapa refuses, believing them to be the bread and water of death. Although the rest of the Adapa myth is in fragments, there does seem to be some kind of “Fall of Man” scenerio in which evil and sickness is brought down on mankind, perhaps due to Adapa’s actions.

The Yahwist’s Tower of Babel story also appears to have been based on the gigantic pyramid-style temples called ziggurats built in the cities of Sumer and Akkad. The story relates how those who lived in “Shinar,” or Mesopotamia, decided to build a great tower so that they would not be conquered and scattered across the earth (Gen. 11.1-9). Yahweh decides to “go down” and balal, or confuse, the language, thus making the people “babel” to one another. The people stop building the city are ultimately scattered across the earth, and it is for this reason that the Yahwist claims Babel (Babylon) was given its name. In the Akkadian language of the Babylonians, Babel actually meant “Gate of El.” But the Babylonian capital did have a ziggurat, and it was well attested to have been in varying forms of repair both long before and long after the J source was written. It’s name, Etemenanki, meaning “Temple of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth,” also shows a minor correlation in the description in J of a tower “reaching heaven” (NJB 11.4; Gardner 146).

The capital city of the Neo-Sumerian Empire is also referred to in Genesis, but this time by the Aaronid Priest rather than the Yahwist. While the Yahwist had Abraham’s birth place as Haran, the Aaronid Priest instead placed it in “Ur of the Chaldees,” apparently attempting to link the lost heritage of the Neo-Sumerian Empire with the Hebrew forefather, Abraham. The Redactor solved this problem by Abraham come ultimately from Ur but stop off at Haran (Friedman, Bible 50f). Haran is also listed as a brother to Abraham in the P source, but he dies in Ur before Abraham and his family leave the city (11.27b-30).[28] Many scholars have attempted to reinterpret “Ur of the Chaldees” to mean a specific location near Harran, in southeast Turkey, but as Friedman points out, these complicated solutions are unnecessary if one assumes J and P prescribe different birthplaces. Although the name “Chaldees” actually refers to the Neo-Babylonian Empire from only 2,500 years ago, the name was commonly used to refer to Mesopotamia in general. The name “Hebrew” means “cross over,” referring to the the Semites who crossed over from Mesopotomia to Canaan, symbolized by Abraham’s move from Ur (Dever, Who 74).

As control over Mesopotamia shifted from the Sumerians to the Akkadians to the Amorites, changes surfaced in how the gods were worshipped. When Sargon took control of all of Mesopotamia, he did not promote Kish’s temple deity but instead adopted the most popular gods, referring to himself as an annointed priest of the sky god Anu (the Sumerian An) and the governor of the air god Enlil. He gave his daughter, Enheduanna, the position of high priestess for the moon god Nanna in Ur, yet she wrote poetry primarily about Nanna’s more popular “daughter” Inanna (Kramer, Sumerians 205). Like Lugal-Zagesi before him, Sargon appears to have focused his attention especially on Enlil, whose increase in popularity was most likely linked to the desire for the Semites and Sumerians to unite under one patron deity just as they were now uniting under one emperor (324). As the conflicts between Sumerian and Akkadian cities grew into conflicts between Babylonian and Assyrian nation-states, myths began to change from plots about multiple bull-gods with conflicting interests to plots about a young man-god named Bel ascending to supremecy by defeating a great threat to the world’s order.

With the dramatic popularization of Bel worship, the traditional worship of Sumerian and Akkadian polytheism, based on the temple priesthoods of independent cities, gave way to a newer Amorite myth presenting a worldview that was focused on one particular deity while acknowledging the existence of other gods. The nineteenth-century German philologist and Orientalist Max Müller used a generally inclusive definition of this belief system that he dubbed “henotheism” (Müller 479). In general, this would be worshipping one deity in a pantheon while respecting the worship of other deities in the same pantheon. Julius Wellhausen caused a great controversy when he argued that the Commandment to have no other gods before Yahweh presumed the existence of other gods, meaning that the ancient Israelites were not monotheists but “monolatrists,” worshippers who believed that there may be other deities for other peoples, but that everyone in their group should only worship one god. In combinign the two, we can probably say with some good amount of certainty that “henotheism” was practiced more during times of peace and “monolaterism” was praciticed more during times of war. Both marked a general trend towards a single deity which appears to have been a sociological phenomenon produced by the expanding cultural unity forced on the Mesopotamian priesthoods by expanding power bases as tribes grew into kingdoms. In doing so, the tribal totem, or animal, was lost and the godhead became a human who rode on top of stormclouds. Many of the earlier totem characteristics were instead transferred to the storm god’s “bodyguard,” which became the main function of the angelic cherubim.

To the Babylonians, Bel’s given name was Marduk while the Assyrians called him Asshur; and to the Canaanites, he was a relatively minor Sumerian god named Hadad, who the Aramaeans called Hadad-Rimmon (Zec. 12.2). Ancient Semites in Egypt identified Bel with the Egyptian storm god Seth despite the fact that most Egyptian theological texts are extremely abstract and show little resemblance to the hero-dramas of Mesopotamian and Greek mythology. A victory stone established by King Mesha of Moab explains that thir own “Ba’al,” named Chemosh, had allowed the Israelites to dominate Moab because of his anger but had the storm god fought with them to regain their independence, mirroring the same theodicean apologetics used in ascribing victories and defeats to the “God of Israel” in the Hebrew Bible.[29] Phoenicians, Ammonites, Canaanites and Hebrews also worshipped another Bel named Moloch, who many of prophets Judah’s and authors of scripture condemned. According to Hesiod, Melqart, the Ba’al of the Phoenician city Tyre, was often referred to as the “Tyrian Heracles.”

Both “El” and “Bel” could be translated as the word “Lord,” but while the connotation behind El is that of a father, the connotation behind Bel is that of a husband. From a literary point of view, El can be said to have taken over Anu’s role as the passive, fatherly king who gave orders from heaven while Bel can be said to have taken over Enlil’s role as the active warrior-husband who led men into battle on earth. In one Canaanite poem from the city of Ugarit, El’s penis is said to be “drooping,” signifying his impotence (Dever, Did 210). Although some Bels appear to have been sons of El, others were identified as the sons of Ea, or Enki, including Marduk and Ashur. In Canaanite mythology, El the Bull was a long-bearded father god who appeared to waver between helping the protagonist Ba’al Hadad and his rival Yam. The Ugaritic Ba’al Cycle portrays El as first giving favor to the sea god Yam – whom El refers to by the personal name Yaw, a possible reference to Yahweh – until Hadad defeated Yam, after which, El permited Hadad to build his own palace. Hadad then fought the god of death, Mot, and was thought killed, but after his sister Anath, the “Canaanite Artemis,” took vengence for him on Mot, Hadad mysteriously returned (having either escaped or been raised from the dead) to build his palace on Mount Zaphon. A “Passover letter” from a 2,400-year-old Jewish community in Persia-occupied Egypt identified Anath as the wife of Yahweh.

According to a Phoenician author named Sanchuniathon, as it comes down to us through Eusebius of Caesera, El had ruled over the panethon ever since he overthrew the sky god. In this myth, El is identified with the titan Kronos and associated with child sacrifice and circumcision. The Hurrian and Hittite myth, Kingship in Heaven, says that in the beginning, Anu overthrew the original king Alulu and that his own son, Kumarbi, bit off his genitals, causing Kumarbi to beomce pregnant with Teshub, the storm god fated to overthrow him. Scholars have recognized this Anatolian myth as the main influence behind the creation story in the Greek poet Hesiod’s Theogony, where Kronos overthrows Ouranos by castrating him and is in turn overthrown by his own son, the storm god Zeus. These stories about sons overthrowing fathers appear to explain the reason the earlier Elohim, or Titans, were replaced by the Ba’alim, or Olympians, as the dominate form of religious expression. This three-era chronology of the sky god, air god, and storm god even appears to have been alluded to in the “Song of Moses,” a long poem from an older source that was inserted near the end of Deuteronomy:

“When the Most High [El Elyon] gave the nations each their heritage,

when he partitioned out the human race,

he assigned the boundaries of nations

according to the number of the children of God [sons of Elohim],

but Yahweh’s portion was his people,

Jacob was to be the measure of his inheritance.” (NJB 32.8-9; empahsis mine)

In this formula, El Elyon, or the “Highest El,” takes the role of Anu as he gives orders from heaven, assigning the borders of the nation-states according to their respective storm god. The implication here is that Yahweh, one of the “sons of Elohim,” was alloted the boundaries of Jacob (Israel) just as Yahweh’s brothers (Marduk, Asshur, etc.) were alloted their respective nation-states. Some later editor changed “sons of Elohim” to “sons of Israel” in the Masoretic version of the Hebrew Bible in order to defend later monotheistic beliefs, but the original henotheistic theme has remained preserved in the versions found in the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The veneration of bull gods in Israel had over a thousand years of cultural tradition with mythologies mirroring some of the earliest and most famous stories from Genesis, beginning at the cusp of civilization in Sumer and Akkad. Amihai Mazar discovered the earliest hill shrine in 1981, an open-air hilltop from the 1100s B.C., in the hill country of Ephraim and Manasseh near Dothan, along with a “golden calf”-style bronze bull very similar to another 14th-century bull found by Yigael Yadin at Hazor in a “Canaanite” context (Did 135-136). This tradition appears to have been naturally inherited from the northeast where the Tigris River fed a line of cultivation known as the Fertile Crescent. According to the the Aaronid priest Ezekiel, “Adonai Yahweh” tells the people of Jerusalem that: “[b]y origin and birth you belong to the land of Canaan. Your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite” (NJB, 16.3).

But if Yahweh was used in the same socio-political role as any other Middle Eastern Bel or Ba’al, does that mean that Elohim predated Yahweh? Did the worship of Yahweh really begin with Moses on a mountain as the Elohist and Aaronid Priest say? Even if the Elohist and Aaroniod Priest both portray Moses as the first prophet to reveal the “proper name” of Elohim, the name may not have come until a later time. Since all four sources originate from either within or near Jeruaslem, it is possible that the name came into local popularity at the time of David or even later and other Levites may have used other divine names. If the Hebrews worshipped Elohim before Yahweh, does this mean that Moses also imparted montheism to the Hebrews, as the Biblical tradition seems to suggest? Moses is the first Biblical figure to delivers laws forbidding the worship of other gods, and while this does not necessarily rule out the belief in the existence of other gods, it may be interpreted as a starting point for what could be called a monotheistic tendency. In order to determine whether the connection between Yahweh and Moses is legitimate, we will need to examine some extra-biblical evidence on the name Yahweh and the story of Moses and the Exodus.

The Origin of Yahweh

Moses is described as both the first prophet to reveal the name Yahweh and the first prophet to deliver laws forbidding the worship of any gods ahead of Yahweh. However, there is a theory that Moses originally propounded a new Egyptian monotheistic religion to the Hebrews and that it was initially rejected only to resurface later, after the acceptence of the Midiainite god Yahweh during the years of “wandering” the Sinai. This theory was put forward by Sigmund Freud in his final book, Moses and Monotheism, the majority of which he published only after fleeing Nazi-controlled Austria. Akhenaten, father of the famous boy king Tutankhamun, was the undoubtably the most controversial phraraoh of the fourteenth centrury. Although Akhenaten had tried to destroy all mention of Amun from Egyptian records, and even on the name of his father Amunhotep III, pharaohs after Akhenaten would in turn attempt to erase the heretic pharaoh from the historic record. Several years after the pharaoh Akhenaten closed down all the temples of the powerful Amun-Ra priesthood, the ensuing conflict led him to lead his own exodus to a newly-built Egyptian capital called Akhetaten, or “Horizon of the Sun,” which today is called Armana. Most of the information that comes from this time period comes from tablets found in excavations of the city. These “Armana tablets” include a copy of the Myth of Adapa.

Quoting Jamse H. Breasted, Freud suggested that the name Moses had originally come from the second half of an Egyptian name (“-mose” means “son of . . .”), and that the first half of the name was redacted because it would have belonged to an Egyptian god (like Ra). Freud went a step further and suggested that not only his name but also his racial origin was in fact Egyptian, pointing out that the story of the baby being exposed on the river was a mythical device that went all the way back to the Akkadian king Sargon (Freud 8-9). Freud pointed out that long before Akhenaten’s monotheistic revolution, there had been a monotheistic trend in Egypt eminating from a school of priests in Heliopolis, which the Bible calls “On.” (36). The Elohist and Aaronid Priest identify the House of On as the same priesthood that Jacob’s son Joseph married into and Akhenaten is known to have built a temple in the city as well (Gen. 41.45, 46.20). Both the sun god of Heliopolis Atum and Akhenaten’s sun disc Aten were said to be self-created and like many other deities, they were identified with Ra. Freud pointed out that one of the two cities built by the Hebrews is Pithom, meaning “House of Atum,” corroberating the connection the Egyptian sun god (E: 1.11; Finkelstein, Bible 59). Freud also noted that during the 18th dynasty of Egypt’s New Kingdom had “become accessible to foreign influences; some of the king’s wives were Asiatic princesses,” possibly including Akhenaten’s wife Nertiti (Freud 22-23). These Asiatic invaders were known by the 3rd century B.C. Egyptian historian Manetho as the Hyksos and his account of a lightning fast campaign by powerful invaders was originally taken at face value by early scholars, but subsequent studies have shown that the Hyksos were really slow-moving Canaanite migrants, paralleling the story of Joseph taking Israel into Egypt during a famine (Finkelstein, Bible 54-55).

Freud also makes the astute observation that the description of the mountain where Moses received the Ten Commandments sounds very much like that of a volcano. In the story of the Exodus, Moses finds a burning bush “blazing,” but “was not being burnt up”, attributes that could describe lava (NJB Ex. 3.2); the Hebrews are led to the mouintain by a column of “cloud” during the day and a column of fire at night (13.20); when the Hebrews arrive, the mountain trembles and smoke eminates from the top “like smoke from a furnace,” and then, when Moses returns from the mountain, the skin of his face is “radiant,” and it becoems necessary for Moses to veil himself (NJB 19.18; 34.29). The plagues visited upon Egypt are also similar to ecological effects that come about from the resulting ash being injected into the atmosphere. Unlike the god of Moses, the Midianite god Yahweh is described by Freud as a demon who differs little from the other Ba’als of the surrounding areas.

If a compromise like the one Freud suggested really did exist, then the Egyptian priests must have lost most of their entire literary tradition, as the only Hebrew scripture that associates Yahweh with Atenism is Psalm 104, which some scholars have very loosely connected to the “Great Hymn to the Aten” inscribed in Akhenaten’s tomb. Also, the nearest volcano is in Arabia and could not have had anything to do with Aten worship, so Freud argued that the original Moses was killed and that his monotheistic religion was rejected but that after several geneartions it was ultimately combined with the Yahweh worship of the Arabian Midianites.[30] The second Moses, according to Freud, is the Moses who married into the family of a Midianite priesthood and lifted a brazen serpent as a healing god since the Egyptian Moses abhored any form of magic and sorcery (Freud 41). The sin which caused the first Moses’ death, although ambiguous, appears to have involved being impatient while the Hebrews fought against him over no water (Ex. 20.11-12; Deut. 32.51; Freud 42). Freud references Ernst Sellin in pointing to what they believe is a hidden trace of tradition regarding the murder of Moses in the Book of Hosea, which reads:

By a prophet Yahweh brought Israel out of Egypt and by a prophet Israel was preserved. Ephraim gave bitter provocation- Yahweh will bring his bloodshed down on him, his Lord will repay him for his insult. (NJB; Hosea 12.14-15)

Freud postulated that the Levites were originally Egyptian priests of Aten and that after some two generations following Moses’ downfall, they made some kind of compromise with the Midianite religion (Freud 46). One of the religious practices the Egyptian Levites were able to keep in this compromise was circumscision, which scripture says was introduced to set the people apart even though the author must have known the practice originated in Egypt and was still practiced by Egyptians in their own time.[31] The Jewish prohibition against eating swine is likewise identical to an Egyptian taboo which Herodotus associates with the myth of the Egyptian god Horus being injured by a black boar in the guise of Set (34f). Discounting the myth that the Egyptian army was consumed by a tidal wave, Freud argued the best time frame for the Exodus to have occurred was during the anarchy following Akhenaten’s death and before the general Horemheb took control of the government (59).

Interestingly enough, there is both a Ra-Mose and a Ptah-Mose who served as vizier under both Akhenaten and his father Amenhotep III. An empty and unfinished tomb of a Ra-Mose who was mayor of Thebes shows a relief of him cleanshaven, wearing an Egyptian wig and a heavy heart necklace, holding a staff, and presenting himself before the traditional Egyptian god Osiris. The eleventh Southern tomb in Armana also contains a Ra-Mose who despite being “Royal scribe,” “Commander of troops of the Lord of the Two Lands,” and “Steward of Nebmaatra,” was strangely undecorated.

Other scholars have added on to Freud’s theory. Ahmed Osman identified Akhenaten’s maternal grandfather, Yuya, as Joseph for several reasons: 1) he is the only ruler known to to gain the title “Father of Pharaoh,” which was also given to Joseph in Gen. 45.9; 2) he is the only known mummy to have his hands placed beneath his chin, not crossed armed, indicating a foreign religion; 3) his body is larger than most Egyptians and his nose has a more prominent bridge, suggesting a Semitic origin; and 4) he has a beard without a mustache, a look more indicative of Israelites than clean-shaven Egyptians. Added to these links is the fact that his name of Yuya has been found spelled five different ways, indicating it was probably a foreign name. Yuya’s title of “Master of the Horse” may indicate he came from the Hurrian-speaking nation of Mitannian, where Egypt seems to have obtained its knowledge of horses and chariotry (Osman 14). It is also the area where the Yahwist places Abraham’s original homeland.

The story of the bronze serpent Nehushtan stands as an important exception to the taboo against religious iconography. But rather than this being the survivng folklore of Freud’s second Moses, it seems more likely that the Elohist was attempting to link a Canaanite snake idol with Moses in order to legitimize it in his own time. It was ultimately destroyed by king Hezekiah in his bid to centralize all worship at Jerusalem’s temple. Then during Josiah’s reign, the Shiloh Levites came into power and since they also wanted to centralize worship at the temple, the Deuteronomistic Historian defended Hezekiah’s destruction of the bronze serpent by blaming the decision on people who were burning incense to it, legitimizing both the opinion that it was a relic linked to Moses and the opinion that it was an idol prohibited by Mosaic Law (2 Kings 18.4).

The ancient symbol of the caduceus, a snake wrapped around a staff representing a tree, is most famously associated with the Greek god Hermes and the Roman god Mercury, but the stymbol has also found being assocaited with the Sumerian god Ningishzida (the companion of Dumuzi), the Egyptian god of wisdom Thoth, the Syrian goddess Mari (the equivalent to Inanna and Asherah), and the neo-Platonic sage Hermes Trismegistus. It also seems very likely that the Yahwist was using the same symbol when describing the snake in the Tree of Wisdom, which he associates with Eve. The cadeucus has often been assocaited with medicine and one form of the symbol can even be found on the back of every ambulance today. According to Dever, destroying Nehushthan was aimed at polytheism in general and the goddess Asherah in particular (Dever, Did 286-287). Assuming the caduceus was meant as a goddess symbol, Miriam may have originally been an unrelated priestess from Hebrew lore, in which case it is not surprising that in what little the Elohist tells us about Miriam, she is portrayed as denegrating Moses and being divinely punished.

There is some evidence that the symbol may have originated from the same earth mother religion that the ancient Eurasian Venus statuettes and the Inanna cult came from. Dumuzi often had the epithet “Mother Dragon of Heaven,” a title that was perhaps inherited from his “grandmother” Nammu since she was certainly an older goddess who became overshadowed by more popular gods in the Sumerian era. The Ubaid culture, which existed in the far south around Eridu and Ur and either gave birth to or were conquered by the Sumerians, formed many snake or lizard-headed clay figurines which archaeologists have subsequently dug up (Meador 26). The god of wisdom Enki, who the Sumerians identified with Mercury, is said to have fought a great monster named Kur (meaning “Netherworld” or “mountain”) while on a boat in the primeval sea. This myth later inspired the battle in the Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, between Bel Marduk, identified as Enki’s son, and the goddess of the primeval sea, Tiamat (Nammu), in a symbolic act of bringing order to primordeal chaos (Kramer, Mythology 112; Dalley 228-277). Although Tiamat was not depicted as a dragon, she was said to have given birth to dragons for Marduk to fight. The domination of the young storm god over the sea goddess the Sumerians called Nammu is often interpreted as the patriarchal order of the Amorites suppressing a fading matriarchal order.

The Hurrian and Hittite storm god Teshub also slayed a great dragon named Illuyanka, a tale paralleled in many Greek myths such as Apollo slaying the giant snake Python and Zeus fighting the great snake-monster Typhon. Greek mythology also associated ancient goddess worship with snakes, such as Medusa, Alexander’s mother Olympias, or Medea and her dragon-chariot. In Canaan, Ba’al slays a “fleeing” and “twisted” seven-headed sea dragon of chaos, Lotan, a direct parallel to the mythopoetic description of Yahweh slaying the multi-headed sea dragon Leviathan, who in Isaiah is also described as both “fleeing” and “twisted” (Ps. 74.14; Isa. 27.1). Even in Norse mythology, Thor was said to have defeated the Midgard Serpent, Jormungand, who was wrapped around the great World Tree, Yggdrasil, by throwing it back into the sea, though Thor would be killed by the venom of the serpent during the Norse Armaggedon known as Ragnarok. Psalms refers to the cosmic duel as primordeal event just as the other creation myths do, but Isaiah transfers the clandestine battle into the future, which in turn inspired the cosmic battle between Jesus and the Red Dragon in the Book of Revelation. The Yahwist historicized the myth into the Garden of Eden story about the serpent in the tree of wisdom, and as Old Testament theologian Richard E. Averbeck points out, Yahweh’s prediction that Eve’s seed would crush the head of the serpent parallels the theme of the dragon heads being crushed by Hadad/Yahweh (Gen. 3.15; Averbeck 352). The Aaronid Priest likewise uses a creation myth derived or reacting against the world myth by having Elohim divide the primeval waters, and bringing order to the formless chaos, which in Hebrew is called tehom, a cognate of the Akkadian/Babylonian word “Tiamat” (Averbeck 349).

The myths surrounding the wise god Enki appear to have been adapted to the stories of the titan Prometheus in Greek mythology. Both Enki and Prometheus form humans out of clay in the same fashion the Yahwist has Yahweh form humans out of the dust, although Enki does it with the help of the earth goddess Ninhursag and Nammu (Gen. 2.7). In Sumerian myth, Enki held the secret arts of human civilization in his underwater temple until Inanna got him drunk and took off with them. When Enki woke up, he tried to stop Inanna, but after talking to her, he relucantly agreed to allow mankind to benefit from these sacred arts (Kramer, Mythology 97). In Hesiod’s Theogony, Prometheus tricked Zeus into allowing man to sacrifice the bones and fat of an animal instead of the meat, so in retribution, the storm god took fire away from man (Hesiod 21). When Prometheus saw how the men were freezing to death in the cold, he stole fire from Hephaestus and gave it to them, but in retaliation Zeus had Hephaestus fashion the first woman, Pandora, and then had Prometheus bound to Mount Caucasus where an eagle ate his regrowing liver every day. Zeus breathed life into Pandora in a similar fashion to the way Yahweh did to Adam, and just as Eve brought forth all the evil of the world by eating the fruit of the forbidden tree, so too did Pandora, despite a warning from Prometheus, unleash all the evils of the world by opening a forbidden jar symbolizing the womb. In a parallel to the Prometheus story, Hermes was known as the inventor of fire, and like Dumuzi was associated with shepherds.

The Books of Enoch, a series of apocryphal Jewish works which expand greatly on the pre-flood J story of the”sons of Elohim” coming down and marrying the “daughters of man,” tells how one-third of heaven’s occupants, led by the archangel Samyaza, disobeyed God and fathered a race of giants, and how another archangel Azazel taught men how to make weapons and stone-cutting and taught women how to use makeup and jewelry, leading to all the evils of the world being unleashed and the necessity for God to bring down the flood.[32] For their part in the corruption of the world, Samyaza, Azazel, and all the fallen angels were banished to eternal hell. This ancient worldmyth of divine punishment can also be seen as a prefiguration of the Christian conception of Satan, who like Prometheus, is said to be guilty of “hubris,” typically translated as pride, but actually rooted in the Greek word hybris, meaning presumption against the gods. In fact, the entire background regarding Satan and his demonic armies is almost entirely lacking in the canonical texts save for a few brief and enigmatic descriptions in the Revelation of John.

Although all the angels of early Hebrew scripture are unnamed, Enochian literature provides long lists of divine names, sources which some scholars think are rooted in the Babylonian captivity.[33] Another apocryphal work found in the Dead Sea Scrolls called the Book of Giants identifies the Sumerian demigod Gilgamesh as one of the giants born from the union between fallen angels and the sons of Adam. This shows some desire to construct myths that were “compatible” with the Sumerian and Akkadian myths revered by the Semites of the Middle East, but the main worldview presented by Enochian literature of a divine army of angels led by a deity of good fighting an eternal army of demons led by a deity of evil have stronger parallels in Zoroastrianism, probably inherited during the Persian era following the Babylonian captivity.

While First Isaiah is criticizing a Babylonian king for his foolish pride, the prophet makes reference to a well-known myth about the rise and fall of deities from heaven associated with the morning and evening stars, a phenomenon caused by the rise and fall of Venus. Isaiah writes, “[h]ow did you come to fall from the heavens, Daystar, son of Dawn? How did you come to be thrown to the ground, conqueror of nations?” (NJB 14.12). The meaning of this verse is illuminated by another Canaanite myth from Ugarit in which El roasts a bird for two human women by the sea shore and by them fathers two sons named Shahar and Shalim, or “Dawn” and “Dusk.” “Morning star, son of Dawn,” or “Helel, son of Shahar,” was translated into St. Jeome’s Latin as “Lucifer, son of the Dawn,” and was associated by early church fathers like Tertullian and Origen with Satan. Thus, First Isiah assocaites this myth of divine retribution of El throwing Helel from the clouds into the netherworld with the king of Babylon, who likewise wishes to establish for himself a kingship over all the earth but is fated to be overthrown. The Septuagint translates the name Helel as Heosphoros, or “Dawn-bearer,” which was also an epithet of Venus.[34]

Hephaestus, the blacksmith god of the Greeks, may have originally been another prototype for the Promethean story of divine punishment as there are two different stories of him being thrown out of heaven, just as Helel was envisioned as plummeting from the clouds in the form of the evening star “falling.” In the Illiad, Homer says Hephaestus was thrown from Mount Olympus after releasing his mother Hera from a golden chain that his father Zeus had fastened to her. In this version, Hephaestus describes how “the whole day day long I was carried headlong, and at sunset I fell in Lemnos, and but little life was in me.” The impact was said to have caused him to become lame.[35] The second version has his mother Hera throwing him off herself when she sees how grotesque and misshapen he is. The worship of Prometheus was centered in Athens, where Hephestus also enjoyed a cult there as husband of Athena and father of an early Athenian ruler.

Hephaestus was also associated with one other important phenomenon that we have already touched upon in this section: volcanoes. His Roman name was Vulcan, and the volcanic island Vulcano, just a few miles north of Sicily, is the origin of the name “volcano.” Juno, the Roman Hera, threw him from heaven for having a “small and ugly with a red, bawling face.” In return, Vulcan was said to have made Juno a throne that magically trapped her until Jupiter offered Venus to him as his bride. The smoke that came out of the volcano was interpreted as coming from Vulcan’s smithery while the volcanic eruptions were likened to Vulcan striking the smith.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Hephaestus was said to have had an arranged marriage with the Greek Venus, Aphrodite, but that when she took the god of war, Ares, as a lover, the blacksmith god caught the two of them together in a net and exposed them to the rest of the Olympian gods. The adultery could possibly symbolize a tendency for the Promethean god to be replaced by the god of war as the pantheon, typically entailing a marital connection to prototypical fertility goddess associated with Venus. The Canaanite equivalent of Aphrodite was Asherah and she too was associated first with Yahweh the volcano deity and then Yahweh of Armies, the state god of Judah.

But is there any archaeological evidence that backs up the hypothesis that the name Yahweh originated as a polytheistic deity from Arabian Midianites in Qadeš, between the Sinai and Arabia, as posited by E. Meyer and Freud? In 1975-76, archaeologists led by Ze’ev Meshel discovered a storage jar dated between 850 and 750 B.C. in a small Iron Age “stopover station” for ancient travellers named Kuntillet ‘Ajrud in the eastern Sinai desert (Dever, Did 160). The jar had an inscription paying homage to “Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah” which crossed directly over a painting of two standing gods and a woman playing a lyre. Some scholars suggested the gods depicted on the jar are bulls, the deities lack horns and look nothing like the bull gods of Mesopotamian religious iconography. But as many other scholars, including Dever, have noted, the two standing deities look exactly like the Egyptian lion god Bes. The name Bes is believed to come from the Nubian word for cat, and the earliest depictions of Bes show him in his furriest incarnations. As Bes became depicted more like a human, his jointed hind legs became portrayed as short and stout, giving Bes a more dwarf-like appearance, though his large eyes and ears betray a feline inheritance.[36] There is also mention of “Yahweh of Teman,” referring to Yemen, not far from where Mount Sinai is typically located. There are hundreds of Egyptian-style good luck amulets from the Iron Age found in Judean tombs, and among the most common of these are figurines of Bes (Did 133).

[pic][pic]

A 2,700-year-old image painted on a jar from the eastern Sinai (left)

portrays “Yahweh of Samaria” as an Egyptian lion god similar to Bes (right).

One of the world's leading epigraphers, André Lemaire, identifies the two figures with Bes, but presents this as the primary reason for not identifying either of them with Yahweh (Lemaire 300). Lemaire also argues that the word “asherah” refers not to a deity but to a symbol or sanctuary of Yahweh. Meshel, under the assumption that Yahwism was originally monotheistic, sees the artistry of the inhabitants as “mixing their Yahwistic principles with pagan influences” and so accepts the possibility that the Bes figures may be depictions of Yahweh and his consort, calling it “a thoroughly blasphemous notion, but one which seems consistent with the diverse religious influences at Kuntillet Ajrud” (Meshel 287, 291). Dever identifies the standing figures with Bes and the sitting figure with Asherah, noting that the chair she sits on is the “lion throne” Asherah is always depicted sitting on (Dever, Did 164-165).[37] However, Dever stops short of identifying Bes with Yahweh. Other inscriptions from pottery and storejars and on the walls have the names Yahweh, Asherah (often paired alongside Yahweh), El, and Ba’al, but not Bes (162-163). The simplest explanation for the lack of Bes’ name is that there was no “mixture” of religions being practiced at this traveller’s station, but rather the “purer” form of polytheistic “folk religion” (Dever’s term) in which Yahweh was a lion god in the Egyptian style of Bes rather than a bull god in the Canaanite style of El.

Of the two standing Bes figrues, the first one is the larger and perhaps older of one. Both have what appear to be exposed phalluses hanging between their legs, but they may be lion- or leopard-skin tails. The second has two circles on its chest, just like the lyre-woman sitting to the right, which means they could represent breasts, but the mouth of the second figure is covered with what appears to be a full beard. Dever says that a female Bes may appear odd but “it does not pose a problem, since Bes is an adrogynous deity and can appear as either male or female” (Did 164). The fact that the first deity appears to be a larger, more developed version of the second deity indicates that they are meant to be father and son: El and Yahweh, or Yahweh and his own son. But if the second deity is a female, then perhaps she is Anat, the wife of Hadad/Yahweh, with the lyre woman representing El’s wife, Asherah.

Dever also found another piece of evidence connecting Yahweh to Asherah while excavating a Judean bench tomb west of Hebron dated to the 700s B.C. named Khirbet el-Qom. Inscribed in the soft limestone walls of the tomb-cave was a a handprint, along with an inscription reading:

“For ‘Uriyahu the governor (or the rich), his inscription.

Blessed is ‘Uriyahu by Yahweh:

From his enemies he has been saved

By his Asherah

[Written] by ‘Oniyahu. (Dever, Did 131-132)

Although Dever published this as evidence that Yahweh had a consort as far back as 1968, he laments that scholars ignored it for nearly a decade.

Added to that, Dever also identifies a complex in Arad as a temple of Yahweh rivaling the one in Jerusalem, based on the term “temple of Yahweh” being written on “documents written in ink on pieces of broken pottery” (Did 171). According to Dever, other pieces also contain names of priestly families known in the Bible. A bronze lion is found near the altar and there are two massebot stones, one smaller than the other, in the temple cella, signifying that not only Yahweh but also Asherah was being worshipped there (175). Nevertheless, the identification of the complex as a temple to Yahweh or a temple at all is highly controversial.

The connection between the traditional Mesopotamian pantheon’s fertility goddess with the lion totem stretches back to 6,000-year-old depictions of Inanna posed with one foot on top of a lion during the Sumerian era. A 2,900-year-old Israelite cult stand found in Taanach portrays Asherah seated between two lions with a hand on each of their heads. A small house shrine – called a naos, Greek for “inner sanctum” – carries within it an empty double-throne, suitable for both god and goddess, the door flanked by two pillars resting upon crouching lions (Dever, Yahweh). The Anatonian lion god likewise had a companion called Kybele or Omphale, known in Greece as Dejaneira (a daughter of Dionysus) and in Syria as Dalilah, meaning “vine branch.” The same god is identified with Sandan of Sicily, Sardan of Lydia, both names originate from the Iranian word “sard,” meaning “year,” proving that the festivals in which the god’s ritual death and resurrection had a long and expansive history (Krappe 144). The “year god” is also identified with the Ba’al of Tyre, Melqart, long connected with Heracles, whose first labor involves him slaying the Nemean lion and using its invincible hide as a cloak, symbolizing the transformation of the lion god into the man god by portraying the new god slaying the old god and adopting his powers.

Heracles worship apparently had the same ambivalent relationship with goddess worship that Yahweh worship had in that his name means “glory of Hera” and yet Hera is always portrayed as being hostile towards him, even causing him to go insane and kill his wife and children. The theme of Hephaestus being thrown from heaven for being misshapen, especially due to having a “small and ugly red face,” brings to mind the dwarf-like Yahweh from the Sinai jar, whose feline qualities may have been a source of antipathy for worshippers of more anthropomorphic deities. Thus, the rejection of Hephaestus may have symbolized the rejection of the lion totem just as the Olympians defeating the Titans symbolized the human gods dominating over the totem animal gods. Like Hepheastus, Yahweh was “thrown from Heaven” because of his ugliness and became “demonized,” and like Enki and Prometheus, he created man out of dirt and initiatied all the evil in the world through the first woman, and it is from Hephestus’ smithery that Prometheus steals the fire to give mankind as well as the first weapons and armor that Enochian literature identifies with the Fall of the Angels.

The use of lion iconography was also an important symbol for Judean royality, an association that is believed to be derived from Egypt (Strawn 104). The early “Song of Jacob” used by the Yahwist says that “Judah is a lion’s whelp; You stand over your prey, my son. Like a lion he crouches and lies down, a mighty lion: who dare rouse him?” (NJB Gen. 49.9). First Isaiah uses lion imagery as a metaphor for the courage of “Yahweh of Armies”:

“Yes, this is what Yahweh has said to me: As a lion or lion cub growls over its prey, when scores of shepherds are summoned to drive it off, without being frightened by their shouting or cowed by the noise they make, just so will Yahweh Sabaoth [of Armies] descend to fight for Mount Zion and for its hill.” (NJB 29.7)

The Deuteornomist tells a story in 1 Kings in which a nameless prophet predicts in front of Jeroboam that his altars will be destroyed by the future king Josiah, but later the nameless prophet is tricked into breaking Yahweh’s command not to eat while away and is punished by being mauled by a lion (1 Kings 13.24).

The earliest identification of the name Yahweh, although controversial, comes from two religious texts from Egypt: one from a fifteenth-century temple of Amenhotep III, the father of the “heretic king” Akhenaten, the other a thirteenth-century temple of Ramesses the Great. Both texts refer to “Yhw in the land of the Shasu bedouins,” and in one of the lists there is a reference to “Seir in the land of the Shasu Bedouins.”[38] Thus, it appears that this “Yhw” is to be found in the southern Sinai, the same general location that Yahweh was said to have revealed his name to Moses. In one of the oldest parts of Judges, “The Song of Deborah” refers to Yahweh first coming out of Seir and marching on Edom (Jud. 5.4). “The Blessing of Moses” at the end of Deuteronomy, also identified as an old, separate source, also refers to Yahweh rising from Seir to shine on Mount Paran.[39] The minor prophet Habakkuk says, “Eloah comes from Teman, the Holy One from Mount Paran (NJB, Hab. 3.3). Significantly, when pharaoh Necho II deposed king Josiah and replaced him with Josiah’s eldest’s son, the pharaoh changed the young man’s name from Eliakim (“El will establish”) to Jehoiakim (“Yahweh will establish”), indicating that Yahweh may have been more preferable than El as a deity associated with the south and with Egypt (23.34).[40] This evidence appears to confirm what Freud long suspected: that Yahweh-worship originated from a polytheistic Midianite religion.

The Israeli Egyptologst Raphael Giveon was the first in 1971 to identify the Israelites as descendants of a Transjordanian nomadic group the Egyptians called the Shasu. He was followed by the German biblical scholar Manfred Weippert in 1974, and more recently by Anson Rainy in 1991 and Canadian Egyptologist Donald B. Redford in 1993. Frank Moore Cross has likewise adopted the “Kenite-Midianite hypothesis,” and Dever, Finkelstein, and A. Mazar all believe that the Shasu contributed to the mix of Israelite origins and are in the least open to the possibility that the name Yahweh originated from them.[41] The name “shasu” meant “plunderers,” and they were typically portrayed as such by Egyptian sources, including the Armana letters shared between Akhenaten and the Egyptian governors of Canaan. They are depicted as wearing a specific headdress or hairdo and were shown on a stele from Moab standing in front of an Egyptian diety (Mazar, “Israelite” 94). The Shasu are often linked with another outlaw social class known as the “Habiru” in various Middle Eastern manuscripts dating all the way back to Sumerian times. Many have postulated a linguistic connection between “Habiru” and “Hebrew,” but the Akkadian word for “Habiru” means “freebooter” and as mentioned earlier, the word “Hebrew” means “cross over,” referring to the Semites who moved from Mesopotamia to Canaan following the fall of the Neo-Sumerians (Dever, Who 74). Besides, the word Habiru is too widespread and generic to be able to refer to a single race.

The Shasu are also related to the land of Edom in several Biblical and Egyptian sources. This may help explain why Israel and Edom were seen as ethnically identical through the literary concept of Jacob (Israel) and Esau (Edom) being twin brothers, with Edom being the older by several seconds and his younger brother grasping his heel as they were born. Later conflicts with Seir and Moab appear to have contributed to this origin being obscured. Examples include the anti-Midianite themes in P such as when the Israelites fight them, and Ezekiel condemning the Midianites by saying, “Son of man, turn towards Mount Seir and prophecy against it” (Num. 25.6; Ez. 35.2).

It’s entirely possible that David was the first king to popularly adapt the polytheistic lion deity Yahweh into “Yahweh of Armies,” a henotheistic Bel of Judah in the style of the Amorite storm/war deity (NJB 1 Kings 11.4). In fact, following the chronology of the Hebrew Bible, David is the first to use the term “Yahweh of Armies” during the Deuteronomistic Historian’s story of David and Goliath (1 Sam. 17.45). The post-exilic 1 Chronicles 14:7 lists one of David’s son as Beeliada (“Ba’al knows”), a name which appears to have been changed for revisionist purposes to Eliada in 1 Chron. 3.8 and 2 Samuel 5.13-14. Friedman designates 2 Samuel 5.13-14 as belonging to the Yahwist, but it is a list that gives the names of characters long before they are introduced in the story, while also breaking the flow of the narrative, suggesting that it is actually a later addition. David’s beloved companion Jonathan also had a son named Merib-Ba’al (“Beloved of Ba’al”), but the name was later changed to Mephibosheth (“Exterminator of the Shameful One”) by the Deteruonomistic Historian (1 Chron. 8:34; 2 Sam. 4:4). One of David’s “Mighty Men” also had the name Be’aliah, whose name means “Ba’al is Yah” (1 Chron. 9.40, 12.5; 2 Sam. 4.4). Since two of the pre-Davidic kings from Jerusalem have the name Zedek in their names, some have supposed that Zedek was a Jebusite deity. Regardless of whether the deity was Zedek or another Bel, it’s possible that David may have identified Yahweh of Armies with the Jebusite deity, as would be typical for laying the foundations of a new capital with the culture and religion of the previous population playing an important part in the ascendance of a conquering king. Thus, the forging of David’s nation-state appears to be the naturally identifiable context for which the Bes-inspired Midianite god to have become re-associated with the Judean version of Zeus.

In contrast, the much-demonized Ba’al of Israel, Hadad, is heavily associated with the House of Omri in the 800s. When king Ahab of the Omri dynasty married the princess of the Sidonians, he built a temple to Ba’al in Samaria to the chargin of the Deuteronomist (16.31). Those Israelites who opposed the Omri state perhaps worshipped the older tribal sky god El against the “foreign” nation-state Bels. At some point, before even the earliest Hebrew poems predating the sources were written, an alliance was made, most likely between a pro-state group in Judah and an anti-state group in Israel, and Yahweh began being identified with El in contrast to the rival Ba’als of the Omri dynasty.

This hypothetical situation matches pretty closely with the conflict between the prophets Elijah and Elisha and the House of Omri as well as having links to Mt. Horeb, and possibly Beersheba in Judah (1 Kings 19.3,8). Elijah is quoted as saying he is zealous for “Yahweh, the [Elohim] of Armies,” and own name appears to be derived from the political and religious statement that “El is Yah” (WEB; 1 Kings 19:10).[42] Elijah is depicted in 1 Kings as fiercely anti-Omri, having had 450 of Ahab’s priests of Ba’al slaughtered, and when Ahab annexes Naboth’s vineyard for the state, he is compared disfavorably with the Amorites “whom Yahweh had dispossessed for the Israelites” (NJB, 1 Kings 21.26). When Ahab’s son Ahaziah sent messengers to the Philistine city of Ekron to ask Ba’al-Zebub if he would survive an injury taken falling through the floor of a building, Elijah sarcastically asked Ahaziah’s messengers, “Is there no [Elohim] in Israel, for you to go and consult Baal-Zebub god of Ekron?” (NJB, 2 Kings 1.3). Hebrew scholars Alexander Rofé and Steven L. McKinzie date the verse on Ba’al-Zebub to some time after the Deuteronimistic Historian based on the its literary familiarity with other late verses as well as the predominance of the the suffix yahw in place of yahu, rendering Elijah’s name ‘Elijahwe’ (McKinzie 94).

Elijah’s follower, Elisha, is said to have anointed king Jehoshaphat’s son Jehu as the new king of Israel so that he would kill Ahaziah and his mother to consolidate the throne (2 Kings 9). The Deuteornomistic Historian, writing in the 600s, praises these violent acts despite the fact that Jehu “did not give up the sins into which Jeroboam son of Nebat had led Israel,” that is, worshipping El as a bull god (NJB 10.31).[43] The prophet Hosea, writing in the 700s, condemns Jehu’s massacre but has Yahweh declare that the day will come when “you will call me, ‘My husband [ishi]’, no more will you call me, ‘My [Lord/Husband] Baal,’” confirming that Yahweh and Ba’al were still popularly identified with one another and that Hosea looked forward to the day when that was no longer the case (NJB Hos. 1.4, 2.18). Dever identifies the first social protests of the northern “folk religion” as being rooted in the teachings of Elijah and Elisha, followed by Amos and Hosea, confirming that this “Yahweh is Elohim” group correlates with his agrarian social revolution (Dever, Did 282-283).

Following this assumption, the connection between Yahweh and El must have been present in the early monarchy, probably rooted in the generation before Elijah. Although the afore-mentioned Dead Sea Scroll and Septuagint version of the “Song of Moses” identifies Yahweh as a son of Elohim and grandson of El Elyon, most of the earliest songs and folktales written before the four sources, such as the “Song of Deborah,” the “Song of Jacob” and the “Song of the Sea,” connect Yahweh with El in some way (Deut. 32.8-9; Jud. 5.3; Gen. 49.25; Ex. 2.1). The Yahwist through Yahweh’s connection to Jacob (Israel) implicitly identifies Yahweh with Elohim. The author of J also implicitly identifies him with the earlier version of Elohim, Enlil, through the use of Sumerian and Akkadian stories like those of Cain and Abel, Noah, and Sargon. The Elohist, however, was the first to explicitly identify Yahweh with Elohim by introducing the idea that the divine name was first revealed to Moses, and before that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob worshipped the same god as El Shaddai.

From the following investigation, one possible scenerio appears for the origin of the divine name in Hebrew scripture: The Bes deity starts off as a lion god in Ethiopia and moved to Egypt where he became a dwarven god of wine and sex who protected the family. Bes was adopted by some of the migrant Hyksos escaping a famine in Canaan move into Egypt, mixing in with the Aten worship symbolized by Moses, El the Bull worship symbolized by Aaron, and Asherah worship symbolized by Miriam. Following a breakout of plague, the Hyksos were exiled to the Sinai, where at some point Bes adopts the name Yahweh and through Freud’s “Midianite compromise” becomes associated with a Midianite volcano god, symbolized by Moses’ stepfather, the Midianite priest Jethro. The image of the man god was then popularized through the Bel worship that rise of various city-states, leading to the denegration of the totem animal symbolized by Bel dividing the great sea dragon to create the world and Heracles slaying the Nemean lion. Yahweh then moved north into Edom and Moab where he took on properties of the resurrected vegetation god Tammuz in the countryside “folk religion” and the storm/war god Bel in the official priesthoods of the city-states. David, who is descended from Moab, transforms the deity into the Amorite storm/war deity, “Yahweh of Armies,” perhaps associating the deity with the Jebusite Bel after conquering Jerusalem. Conflicts between the House of David and the House of Omri around the time of Elijah then necessitated an alliance between Yahweh worshippers and anti-Omri El worshippers.

But the greatest turning point in the popular conception of Yahweh came when he became became embedded into the early Hebrew history by the four source authors. The Yahwist drew from all these sources and added his own, portraying Yahweh as a god of family, war – and most importantly – history. While the Yahwist only implicitly identified Yahweh with Elohim, the Levitical Elohist from Shiloh explicitly identified Yahweh with El Shaddai by explaining it to be the proper name of God revealed by Moses. An Aaronid Priest from Jerusalem then attempted to revise the stories to make them appear more historical and added the creation myth in which Elohim formed the earth of the oceanic firmament similar to that of the Babyloian Marduk and Assyrian Asshur. The Deuteronomistic Historian continued this conception of Yahweh as the god of Jewish history and provided an apology for the earlier king Hezekiah destroying the Nehushtan by blaming it on the way it was being worshipped. After a large portion of Jerusalem’s priestly class was captured and taken away in the Babylonian Exile, Yahweh became more of a god of the people than a god of the land. After the Persian king Cyrus freed them, the captives returned to Jerusalem and directed the Aaronid scholar-priest Ezra to go to Jerusalem to enact a religious reform that entailed redacting and canonizing the first Hebrew Bible.

Dating Solomon and the J Source

Now that the origins and Elohim and Yahweh have been explored, let us take a more focused approach to identifying the time and place each of the four sources were written and map out how they were combined into the Pentateuch. While most scholars who have adopted the Kaufmann chronology like Richard Elliott Friedman and Moshe Weinfeld believe P can be put in the context of king Hezekiah, and agree with those who have adopted the Graf-Wellhausen chronology like Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman that D is best put in the context of king Josiah, there is a much larger realm of disagreement as to when to date J and E. Linguistics tells us that J and E came before P, but not by how much. As it turns out, a comparison of David and Solomon with some of the later kings from the Books of Kings and Chronicles may provide clues as to what time periods the source authors lived.

The Yahwist may be a man or a woman (Friedman, Hidden 51-52). It’s nearly universally agreed that he or she lived in the southern hill country of Judah because of the extended attention the author gives the area (Boadt 94). One example of the Yahwist’s pro-Judah perspective can be found in the intertwined JE narrative in which Joseph is sold by his brothers. In the J verses, it is Judah who tries to save Joseph from his brothers, while in the E verses, it is Reuben, father of the northern tribe of Reuben (Gen. 37.26, 21; Friedman, Who 65). In the “Blessing of Jacob,” Jacob criticizes his eldest son Reuben for defiling his bed and curses Simeon and Levi for being angry and violent before praising Judah and promising that the scepter would never depart from Judah (Gen. 49.1-12). In the J narrative, perhaps elaborated on by the Yahwist, this is taken to mean that Reuben slept with his father’s concubine, and that Simeon and Levi avenged the rape of their sister by slaughtering the inhabitants of the northern capital of Shechem.

Most scholars believe both the J and E texts could not have been composed any earlier than the 700s B.C. (Dever, Did 69). In the past, one of the most popular identifications of the Yahwist was with a scribe in the court of Solomon, working under the assumption that such a detailed description of the lives of David and Solomon must have entailed the recording of information from someone with first-hand knowledge of the events. Unlike the other three source authors, the Yahwist doesn’t center the entire narrative on Moses but devotes nearly the same amount of material to Joseph and even more material on David, proving the interest in developing the legacy of Jerusalem’s royal dynasty. Richard Friedman says that J “might conceivably” have been written that early but stresses that the ark and the command against molten gods instead point to a time after Solomon’s kingdom was divided (Friedman, Who 86-87). He shows that in J, Isaac prophecizes that Esau would break Jacob’s “yoke” from his neck, which would indicate it was written after the Edomites won independence from Judah in 848 (Gen. 27.40). He also notes that the J narrative refers to Simeon and Levi being dispersed but none of the other tribes, which he takes to mean the other tribes must have still existed, putting the source before the fall of Israel to the Assyrians in 722 (Gen. 49.5). However, as Friedman himself points out, this is part of the “Blessing of Jacob,” identified by Frank Moore Cross and David Noel Freedman as a pre-monarchic source edited into the J narrative, which means the Yahwist took the poem and expanded it into story elements in the patriarch stories of Genesis (Friedman, Who 85-87; Bible 114f).

Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman instead date J after the collapse of the northern Israelite kingdom under the Assyrians, when a refugee crisis would have caused a burst of literary development, making it an ideal time for J to “redefine the unity of the people of Israel” (Finkelstein, Bible 45). The story of Abraham defeating Mesopotamian kings and chasing them all the way to Damascus and Dan is cited by Finkelstein and Silberman as corresponding to the territorial ambitions of seventh-century Judah after the fall of Israel (Gen. 14.14; Finkelstein 46f). However, according to Friedman, Genesis 14 is not part of J but is a separate narrative source independent of the main four sources (Friedman, Bible 52f). This makes sense because it is a different version of the story about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah than the one the one involving Lot’s wife being turned into a pillar of salt, as told by J (60). The writing style of the story is also very different than that of the Yahwist’s, supporting Friedman’s identification as an independent document, making Finkelstein and Silberman’s late dating of J very flimsy.

Finkelstein and Silberman argue in their their second book, David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition, that while king Solomon was a real historical king, the Deuteronomistic Historian’s reconstruction of his life was based on a recasting of Hezekiah’s “idolatrous” son, Manasseh, who ruled during the first half of the 600s (David 31, 155). Finkelstein and Silberman date the first evidence of writing in Judah to the late 700s, when they believe fortresses, storehouses, administrative centers, new villages, offical inscriptuions and public literacy can first be attested (David 123). They contend that the earliest stories of David and Solomon as folk heroes were then changed into “court drama” characters of a later era, after the monarchy had long been established. And as mentioned earlier, Finkelstein and Silberman argue that the target of Pharaoh Sheshonq’s invasion in the 900s was the kingdom of Saul, not Solomon.

In the mid-1950s, Yigdael Yadin, the second Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, who later became an archaeologist, linked a large six-chambered gate he excavated at Hazor to a similar gate excavated in Megiddo and then another one excavated in Gezer in the 1900s, believing all three to have been built by King Solomon (1 Kings 9.15). This became the first and primary link that the majority of biblical archaeologists cite as evidence for a Solomonic state. William Allbright and Yadin dated the “palaces city” to the time of Solomon and the later “stables city” to the time of Ahab, although many argued that the gate may not have even been built before the “stables city” (Mazar, “Search” 131). William Dever explains that he and Yadin had dated the gates to Solomon’s times “on commonly accepted ceramic grounds – not a naïve acceptance of the Bible’s stories about ‘Solomon in all his glory’” (Dever, What 132). Dever also argued that the plan for Solomon’s temple “turns out to be the standard LB and early Iron temple plan throughout Syria and Palestine, with nearly 30 examples now attested” (145). Dever came to the conclusion that: “[i]f the biblical Solomon had not constructed the Gezer gate and city walls, then we would have to invent a similar king by another name” (133).

Finkelstein and Silberman instead argue the gates in Hazor and Gezer were built earlier than the Meggido gate and were connected to a casemate wall while the Megiddo gate was connected to a solid wall. Finkelstein instead links building and pottery uncovered in Jezreel, firmly dated to king Ahab’s time in the mid-800s, with buildings and pottery found in Solomon’s Megiddo. Like Yadin and Dever, Finkelstein and Silberman link the gate to the “palace city” but following Finkelstein’s “Low Chronology” they date the “palace city” to Ahab and the “stable city” to the time of king Hezekiah’s son, Manasseh. The story of Solomon as the great horse-trader of wealth and wisdom as portrayed in 1 Kings 3-10 is connected by them to the new prosperity of the Assyrian world economy from the reign of king Manasseh in the 600s, but the story of Solomon as the “senile apostate, who is led astray by the charms of his foreign wives,” as portrayed in 1 Kings 11.1-13, comes from the Deuteronomistic Historian, who they believe represented a coalition of groups in dispute with Manasseh’s policies (David 180-182; Handy, Age of Solomon 71). In their minds, the tradition of Solomon’s 40,000 horse stalls and chariots instead come from the memory of Israel’s famed equestrian skills consequent to being part of the main line of Kushite and Nubian horses being traded between Africa and Assyria during the late 700s (165). One description of Solomon’s territory from 1 Kings 4.24 is listed as stretching out from the Euphrates to Gaza, “a vision of Assyrian kingship as the ultimate ideal,” while another description of Solomon’s kingdom from Kings 4.25 is simply made up of the combined lands of Israel and Judah (176).

As for Solomon building the first temple in Jerusalem, Finkelstein and Silberman argue that “[a]s the son of a local chief of a small, isolated highland polity, he would not have had access to resources to do much more than erect or renovate a modest local dynastic shrine of a type well known in the ancient Near East” (David 172). Finkelstein and Silberman claim Carbon 14 analyses confirm their “Low Chronology” by showing that the destruction layers traditionally linked to conquests David made around the year 1000 were instead dated to the mid-900s and the monuments linked to Solomon’s reign have been dated to the early 800s, during the era of the Omri dynasty (281). M. L. Steiner came to similar conclusions, stating that there probably would not have been any Jerusalem royalty before the 800s with evidence for fortified walls not appearing until the late 700s. An extensive socio-archaeological analysis of Judah done by D. W. Jamieson-Drake provided no evidence for production, centralization, and specialization necessary for statehood until the 700s. Many other scholars have come to similar conclusions (Stavrakopoulou 83). “To make a long story short, tenth-century Jerusalem—the city of the time of David and Solomon—was no more than a small, remote highlands village, and not the exquisitely decorated capital of a great empire” (Finkelstein, “Truth” 113).

Amihai Mazar, however, finds the “total deconstruction of the United Monarchy” as described by Finkelstein to be “unacceptable” and that “history cannot be written on the basis of socio-economic or environmental-ecological determinism alone, as was common during the procuessual phase that dominated historical studies and archaeology in the 1970s and 1980s” (Mazar, “Search” 138).[44] Mazar agrees that the chronology needs to be changed but instead offers a “Modified Conventional Chronology,” in which the “Solomonic gate” can be associated with either Solomon or Ahab, although he thinks Yadin’s link more tenable because Assyrian records confirm that Ahab owned many chariots, which would be characteristic of the “stables city,” plus the “palaces city” was unfortified and Ahab’s royal enclosure in Jezreel had huge fortifications (131). Mazar also points out that the Jezreel pottery which Finkelstein and Silberman used to link Megiddo to Omri was also found in construction fills of a royal enclosure “probably” associated with an earlier pre-Omri town which could itself be tenth century (119). Mazar also links pottery excavated from the earliest settlements of Arad, a city mentioned on Pharaoh Sheshonq’s stele from the late 900s, to pottery from Beer-sheba and Lachish traditionally linked to the 900s, a link Finkelstein “surprisingly” accepts since “by doing so he pulls the rug out from underneath his own theory” (121).

Amihai Mazar and Ch. Bronk Ramsey also published a study revising the Carbon 14 analyses that had previously seemed to confirm Finkelstein’s “Low Chronology.” By calculating in the destruction of other three major sites (Megiddo, Yoqne’am, and Tell Qasile), the transition from Iron I to Iron IIA was averaged out to the early 900s, although Mazar admitted “the study has also shown how sensitive statistical models of 14C are” and that new data could “change the results substantially” (Mazar 123). Mazar also agrees with Dever that the details surrounding the construction of Solomon’s Temple as described in the Bible closely matches the Iron Age temples from the time such as the ones in Tell Tayinat and ‘Ain Dara in northern Syria (128). Two short Hebrew inscriptions reading “Hanan” found in contexts dated to the 900s match the place name “Elon Beth Hanan” from Solomon’s second administrative district, adding validity to a Solomonic administrative list surrounded by legendary material (1 Kings 4.9; Mazar 132). Mazar finds demographic studies to be “strewn with methodological problems” but finds an approximation of 20,000 people in Judah and 50-70,000 in Israel during the 900s to be “realistic” (134). Mazar points out that while literacy in the northern lands of Israel during the 800s is undisputed, there is little material of evidence of this just as there is little material evidence for literacy in Judah, and so concludes, rightly I believe, that the “few inscriptions incised on stones or pottery vessels for daily use from a tenth century context hint at the spread of literacy already in this time” (135). Although Mazar admits that Jerusalem was smaller and less fortified than most of the major cities surrounding it, but he considers the question as to the realism of Jerusalem being the seat of a developed state as “probably unanswerable in archaeological terms” (Mazar, “Jerusalem” 268). In a supreme irony, Mazar cites “our postmodern way of thinking” as one of the main reasons for siding with the post-modern-deriding modernist Dever against Finkelstein in order to explain how “the role of the individual in history has gained weight again” (268).

Probably the strongest argument made by Finkelstein and Silberman against Solomon’s United Monarchy was the lack of evidence for large architectual achievements from Solomon’s time in Jerusalem, though Dever attributed this to the limits placed on digs on or around places deeemed holy like Mount Zion. More recently, a very large structure uncovered south of the Temple Mount in old Jerusalem, known as the “Stepped Stone Structure,” was dated by pottery in its foundations to no later than the 1100s-1000s (A. Mazar, “Seach” 125). Excavations in 2005 led by third generation Israeli archaeologist Eilat Mazar have revealed an enormous building with walls over two meters wide extending beyond the limits of the excavation site in all directions. Eilat Mazar dated the pottery to the 900s and identified it as the palace David built with the help of king Hiram of Tyre in 2 Samuel 5.11. “This is the end of Finkelstein’s school”, said Eilat Mazar to National Geographic (75).

Our preminent “centrist,” Amihai Mazar, says a more plausable identification is the Jebusite “Fortress of Zion” that was renamed the “City of David” in 5.7, 9 (“Search” 127). Finkelstein, however, dates the Stepped Stone Structure much later, pointing to other evidence that the building was first built in Hellenistic times and added on to during the Roman era, including Herodian pottery found around the site and a Herodian ritual bath built on the same strata level. K. M. Kenyon and Y. Shiloh date the terraces to the Iron Age I period but while Kenyon dates the “mantle wall” to the Hellenistic period, Shiloh dates it to the 900s, and M. L. Steiner dates it between the 900s and 800s (Mazar, “Jerusalem” 260-261). The monumental building unearthed by Benjamin Mazar and Eilat Mazar on the southern edge of the “Ophnel” north has only been dated by a few shards found close to the bedrock, “too few to provide a secure date for the construction of the monumental buildings in the area” (266).

In Ferburary 2010, a defensive wall was re-excavated by the team and ancient artifacts found cermaics that were of a level of sophistication common to the second half of the 900s B.C. Religious figurines and seal impressions on jar handles with the inscription “to the king” were discovered at the site. Although Finkelstein said the wall may well come from Solomon, he was more than a little cautious in accepting Eilat Mazar’s dating. “Of course we’re not looking at the palace of David!”, said Finkelstein in the National Geographic interview, “I mean, come on. I respect her efforts. I like her—very nice lady. But this interpretation is—how to say it?—a bit naive.” Eilat Mazar took a less backhanded approch in disparaging the attention that Finkelstein regularly receives, saying, “He doesn’t even use science—that’s the irony. It’s like giving Saddam Hussein the Nobel Peace Prize” (85). No consensus has been reached for the dating of the wall so far.

In arguing against Finkelstein’s downgrading of Solomon, Amihai Mazar asks: “[s]hould Solomon be removed from history, who then would have been responsible for the construction of the Jerusalem Temple?” (Mazar, “Search” 128). Finkelstein and Silberman say that although they “simply do not know who built the first elaborate Temple in Jerusalem. . . [i]t is possible that the description in 2 Kings 12 of the extensive renovation of the Temple in the days of King Jehoash (c. 836-798 BCE) is significant” (David 172).

In fact, there are more connections than they realize.

The story tells how Jehoash hired all kinds of carpenters, builders, masons and stonecutters for the job and that it took many years to complete, indicating that the construction may have been more than simply “repairs” (2 Kings 12). Like Solomon, Jehoash was also an unlikely king who only inherited the throne following the death of older brothers brought on by dynastic conflicts. Like Solomon, he is said to have turned away from Yahweh in his old age and allowed Asherah poles and idols to be worshipped in the temple. Like Solomon, he is said to have reigned 40 years (2 Kings 12.1). Solomon’s mother is named Bathsheba, meaning “Daughter of the Oath;” Jehoash’s mother is from Beersheba, which means “Well of the Oath.” Solomon is said to have secured his throne by ordering Benaiah, son of a priest named Jehoiada, to carry out political killings against several people, including Solomon’s half-brother Adonijah. Jehoash had his throne secured for him when a priest named Jehoiada ordered political killings against several members of Judean royalty including Jehoash’s “grandmother,” the queen. Solomon rewards Jehoiada’s son Benaiah by giving him the slain Joab’s position over the army (1 Kings 2.35). Jehoash also appears to have given Jehoiada’s son Zechariah an important position since Zechariah later plotted from within the court to overthrow him (2 Chron. 24.20-21). Solomon, influenced by his foreign wives, built “high places” to the gods of Moab and Ammon, and the Deuteronomistic Historian says it was because of this that Yahweh tore most of the kingdom away from Solomon’s son (1 Kings 11.7-13). After being wounded in a battle against the Arameans, Jehoash was murdered by two conspirators within his court, identified as the son of a Moabite woman and the son of a Ammonite woman, indicating Jehoash may have been betrayed by the children of his foreign wives or concubines, an act that would no doubt have caused the Judean court to become very suspicious of foreign wives (2 Chron. 24.25-27).

Baruch Halpern argues that the story of David’s affair with Bathsheba and how Solomon succeeded his father’s throne was used as a powerful political statement aimed at countering rumors that Solomon was really Uriah’s son and not of David’s blood.(Halpern, David’s 402-403). But considering the fact that Jehoash was said to have been hidden away during a purge against his bloodline only to re-emerge and claim the throne at the tender age of seven, the story may have been meant to defend Jehoash, who would certainly to have needed to fight rumors that he was not really being descended from David. The reign of Jehoash would have been an ideal time for the Yahwist to write a story about how king David had conquered many outside lands for Judah just as king Asa did, how he had served under the northern king Saul just as king Jehoshaphat served under Ahab, and how Solomon had survived dynastic conflicts with his family despite his questionable heritage just as Jehoash did. Since Jehoash’s rise to the throne around 835 also entailed the death of a queen associated with the Asherah cult and replacement with a male-dominated priesthood, this could also explain the Yahwist’s declaration that Eve would be subserviant to Adam (also known as Adapa, the first Sumerian priest in Kassite myth). The beginning of Jehoash’s reign was also within 15 years of the Edomite rebellion, making the topic still prescient to the Yahwist’s audience. So while the J source could have been written any time between 848 and 722, the ideal time for its composition would have been during the beginning of Jehoash’s 40-year reign in the 830s.

Dating Jeroboam and the E Source

Now that we have a general date for the Yahwist’s time period, let us move on to the Elohist. Since the linguistic evidence points to J and E being written around the same time, we should expect to find the date and time for the Elohist not too far away from this time period as well. The Elohist is generally agreed to be a Levite priest from the northern plains of Israel. The source author fleshes out the character of Moses to a greater magnitude, with Joshua acting as Moses’ faithful assistant and the only Israelite not to worship Aaron’s golden calf. Unlike the Yahwist, he referred to Abraham as a prophet, was more suspicious of authority than J, and took a stronger stand against “foreign gods” (Boadt 101-102). The Elohist’s depiction of the deity was typically less anthropomorhic than the Yahwist’s with the exception of Jacob wrestling with El at Penuel. The E source pays particular attention to the hill country of Ephraim, which was also the tribe of the northern war-hero Joshua and the Levite priest Samuel, who crowned David (Josh. 24.30, 1 Sam. 1.1). The Elohist could be described as the northern literary rival of the Yahwist in that he was following the same plotline as J, while changing many of the details to reflect the perspective of the Northern Kingdom. The Elohist’s political rivals, however, were the Aaronid priests in Jerusalem and Bethel.

Richard Elliot Friedman and Lawrence Boadt dated the E source to some time between the division of Solomon’s United Monarchy in 922 and the fall of Israel to Assyria in 722.[45] Friedman adds as an endnote that his research has led him to believe that it was written some time after the mid-700’s (Who 47-48). At some point in time, J and E were combined into a single story by a redactor, called RJE, who is believed to have lived in Judah due to the priority given to the J source over E. It is generally believed that this was done after Israel’s fall in 720s, when Israelite refugees might have taken the E text into Judah (Friedman, Who 87-88; Boadt 95). The eighth century prophet Hosea, who mentions the Assyrian war against Israel, refers to stories of Jacob and Esau that are in both J and E, indicating some circumstantial evidence for J and E being combined during that time (Hos. 12:4-5; Friedman Bible 16-17). The Deuteronomistic Historian claimed that Israel was conquered during Hezekiah’s reign, but because of a discrepency in the timelines between the annals of Israel and Judah, most scholars (including Albright, Thiele, Friedman and Kitchen) attempt to harmonize the datings by assuming a number of co-regencies between some of the younger Judean kings and their fathers, thus placing the fall of Israel during the co-regnecy of Hezekiah and his father Ahaz. Boadt argued that the E source is the most fragmentary of the texts and so is often said to have never been a self-contained document but rather reflects an Israelite tradition added to J (Boadt 103). Others have argued that JE was written by a single author who collected various legends of both Yahweh and Elohim, to which Friedman notes that the RJE redactor combined J and E so exquisitely that “he has successfully fooled my colleagues who think that J and E are one work” (Friedman, Hidden 360).

Frank Moore Cross and Friedman postulate that the best candidates for both the Elohist and Deuteronimist are Levitical priests whose main shrine was located in the town of Shiloh, just north of Jerusalem on the border of Israel and Judah. Priests from Shiloh like Samuel and Jeremiah were not only priests but also prophets, which matches up with the Elohist’s interest in prophets. Cross and Friedman argue that the tension between Moses and his “brother” Aaron as presented in the Pentateuch is a symbol for the conflict between two different priesthoods: the Levitical priests who were descended from Moses, and the Aaronid priests of Bethel who were descended from Aaron. Cross argues that many of the contradictions within the Pentateuch can be answered “if we posit an ancient and prolonged strife between priestly houses: the Mushite priesthood which flourished at the sanctuaries of the local shrines at cArad and Kadesh opposed to the Aaronite priesthood of Bethel and Jerusalem” (Cross, Canaanite 206). Although the Aaronid Priest tries to cover this division up by representing Aaron as a descendant of Levi, the Elohist makes no distinction between different Levitical priesthoods, leading Cross believe that the Aaronid Priesthood was actually not related in any way to Moses and the Levites. Dever points out that neither the “Song of the Sea” from Exodus 15 nor the “Magnalia Dei” from Deuteronomy 26.5-10 mention Moses in connection with the Exodus, and that Jeremiah and Micah are the only prophets outside the Pentateuch that actually refer to Moses (Jer. 15.1; Mic. 6.4; Dever, Who 235-236).

Cross explains that the golden bulls set up by king Jeroboam I in Dan and Bethel representing the traditional Levantine god El the Bull were most likely connected to the iconography of the Aaronid priesthood, while the Levite priests descended from Moses used the iconography of the cherubim throne identified in many representations of the same god (69, 198-199). Cross also cites an “archaic tradition” in the Book of Judges, which Friedman identifies as being a part of J, placing Phineas, the grandson of Aaron, at the sanctuary of Bethel at the same time the ark was there (Jud. 20.26-28; Canaanite 199). Friedman points out that while the Elohist has Moses destroy the tablets holding the Ten Commandments, there is no Elohist narrative in which Moses writes them back again, which he interprets as an attack on the legitimacy of the Ark of the Covenant in Jerusalem’s Temple (1 Sam. 3.3; Friedman, Who 73-74).

This separation of Moses and Aaron helps explain why Aaron is described as fashioning the golden calf yet is not executed for it like those who bow down before the idol. The Elohist could not escape the fact that Aaron was associated with El the Bull, so he wrote that the people forced Aaron into fashioning the idol, providing an excuse for Yahweh not to punish him, since any punishment would have caused him to lose his status as high priest.[46] The connection is strengthened by the fact that Aaron’s sons are Nadab and Abihu and Jeroboam’s sons are Nadab and Abi-Yah. Aaron’s sons are killed by divine wrath for making an offering with “unauthorized fire” while Abi-Yah died of sickness and Nadab from war, reportedly on account of Jeroboam setting up the golden calves.[47] Although it is the pro-Aaron P source that records these deaths in the combined Pentateuch that has come down to us, it may be based on a discarded part of the E source since it is the E source that first mentions the two sons (Ex. 24.1). The P source also has two other sons of Aaron not mentioned in E, Eleazar and Ithamar, who conveniently take their brothers’ places, and P also describes an event in which a fifth son, Phinehas, earns the right to inherit the priesthood for violently purifying Yahweh’s assembly of Midianite intermarriage.[48]

As mentioned earlier, the stories about Solomon appear to be a mixture of pro-Solomon and anti-Solomon material, with the Deuteronomist Historian supplying the negative material (1 Kings 11). The Elohist refers to the Egyptian taskmasters working over the Hebrew slaves as the “officers of missim,” using the same word that is later used for Solomon’s forced labor policy (1 Kings 9.15; Friedman, Who 66). Cross and Friedman take this to mean that the Elohist must have supported Jeroboam I in favoring the division between Judah and Israel. They also suggest some of this hostility comes from the fact the fact that the Davidic high priest from Shiloh, Abiathar, is portrayed at the end of the J narrative as supporting Adonijah against Solomon, causing him to be exiled by Solomon, leaving the Aaronid priest Zadok the sole high priest of Jerusalem (1 Kings 2.26; Cross, Canaanite 208). King Jeroboam I, the king reported to have caused Israel to rebel against Solomon, was himself coronated by a priest from Shiloh (Friedman, Who 48). Friedman argues that even though Jeroboam I did not reciprocate this accommodation by installing Shiloh priests in Bethel and Dan, Judah and Jerusalem probably offered even less hope of legitimization at the time, while Dan and Bethel could conceivably dismiss its current priestly occupants. Thus, according to Friedman, the Elohist “favored that kingdom’s political structure while attacking its religious establishment” (74).

The Copenhagen minimalist Thomas Thompson instead makes the unlikely argument that Jeroboam I was written to supply an iconic enemy for the Maccabeans in 100s B.C., because “[t]he north’s abandonment of the house of David in Chronicles mirrors the Seleucid’s rejection of the true sucessors of Alexander: Egypt Ptolemies” (Thompson 208). Aside from this hypothesis going against linguistic evidence that the J and E sources are much older than that, the thematic similarities between David and the Ptolemies or Jeroboam and the Seleucids are non-existent.

Nevertheless, there actually is a far more likely candidate to serve as the symbol for Jeroboam I.

In 2 Kings, another unrelated king of Israel, also named Jeroboam, restored his nation’s old boundaries and recovered Damascus and Hamath from Judah (14.25-28). Jeroboam I is famed for erecting the golden bulls in Bethel and Dan and establishing priesthoods there, but less well known is the fact that the prophet Hosea also criticized Jeroboam II for making golden calves, and we know Jeroboam II had loyalty from Bethel’s priesthood because a priest from there warned him of the prophet Amos conspiring against him (Hosea 8.5; Amos 7.10). Just as Solomon’s son Rehoboam is portrayed as unjustly increasing the “yoke” of Jeroboam I and the Israelites ten-fold, Jehoash’s son Amaziah, when he became king of Judah, attempted to unjustly conquer Israel during the reign of Jeroboam II’s father (whose name was also Jehoash) (1 Kings 12.14; 2 Kings 14.11). Jeroboam I wins the battle against Rehoboam and king Shishak of Egypt later takes away all the gold shields from Solomon’s Temple, just as Jehoash of Israel defeats Amaziah of Judah and takes away all the gold and silver from the “repaired” Temple (1 Kings 14.25; 2 Kings 14.14). The Deuteronomistic Historian has a prophet named Ahijah predict that Jeroboam I’s bloodline would be cut off because of his idol worship and that his son would die as soon as the boy’s mother set foot in the pre-Omri capital of Tirzah, while Jeroboam II’s bloodline was cut off when his son was assassinated within six months of succeeding his father, after which the assassin was himself killed within a month when a man from Tirzah took control of the Omri capital in Samaria (1 Kings 14.12-17; 2 Kings 15.10-14). And since Jeroboam II was the great grandson of Jehu, a prince of Judah, he could also have been seen as a rebel from the David’s royal house, just as Jeroboam I was. Added all together, it seems very likely that Jeroboam I and Jeroboam II are the same person.

There have been some attempts at proving the historicity of Jeroboam I through two archaeological associations. The first is a jasper seal discovered in Megiddo which reads, “belonging to Shema” and “Minister of Jeroboam” with a roaring lion in between. The seal has been dated by most scholars to the reign of Jeroboam II, though a few archaeologists such as Shmuel Yeivin, Gosta Ahlstrom, and David Ussishkin instead date it to Jeroboam I’s time. Ussishkin argues that the unpierced seal should be connected to another unpierced griffon seal, called the Asaph seal, found in a 10th-century gate about a meter east and below from where the Shema seal was found (Ussishkin 422). However, many seals are unpierced and besides the Asaph seal could have fallen onto the foundational ashlars of the gate from above where it was found. That leaves the best evidence to be an epigraphical analysis of the Hebrew lettering, which dates the Mesha seal to the 700s (Mykytiuk 136-137). The seal is also markedly similar to two Neo-Assyrian seals that are probably from the 600s (Strawn 105).

The second connection, made by Dever and Biblical scholar Ziony Zevit, links the golden calf stories of Jeroboam I to a 10th-century cult center found in Dan, with Dever arguing that Jeroboam I restored the pre-monarchic shrines in Bethel and Dan to harken back to the “El the Bull” cult (Dever, Did 151, 282). The “high place” was refashioned during the reigns of Ahab and Jeroboam II, and a monumental staircase was added during the later’s reign as well (Isserlin 245). Another 10th-to-8th-century shrine in Israel, Tell el Far’ah, an archaeological site identified with the city Tirzah, has two of the same features as the Dan shrine: a standing stone and a basin used for olive oil or anointing (Did 154). Bronze bulls from the Bronze Age have been found by Yigael Yadin in the city of Hazor in Galilee, dating to the 1300s B.C., and by Amihai Mazar just east of Dothan in Samaria, from the 1100s B.C. (Dever, What 175). But no bull iconography has ever been found in a 10th-century context at either Bethel or Dan.

Neither of these attempts to prove the historicity of Jeroboam I are very compelling. However, one problem with my hypothesis is that both Jeroboam I and Jeroboam II are said to have been listed in the “annals of the kings of Israel,” which gives some very credible numbers for the reigning years of other kings. Jeroboam I is said to have reigned 22 years while Jeroboam II is said to have reigned 41 years (1 Kings 14.19; 2 Kings 14.23). In contrast, the legendary “golden age” elements used for Solomon in 1 Kings 3-11 appears to have to been largely taken from “the annals of Solomon,” the name of which lends itself to the argument that it was probably a fictional account meant to symbolize the current reign of king Jehoash (1 Kings 11.41). But even if the 10th-century Jeroboam was nothing more than an eponymous ancestor of the 8th-century Jeroboam, it seems unlikely that the mythical Jeroboam could have been invented by Judean scribes and placed in the “golden age” of Solomon if the Deuteronomistic Historian could credibly claim to have taken his material on Jeroboam I from the “annals of Israel.” If the name really was in Israel’s royal annals and not some counterfeit created by Judean scribes, then Jeroboam I would have to have been the invention of Israelite scribes, either to legitimize Jeroboam II’s reign or mythicize Jeroboam’s adoption and restoration of the Bethel and Dan shrines.

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, Friedman’s research had led him to date E to some time after the mid-700’s and in fact the reign of Jeroboam II lasted from some time in the 780s to the 740s (Who 47-48). Although Cross, Friedman, and Boadt assume that the Elohist is referring back 200 years to a Jeroboam of the Solomonic era, it would have been far more priscient that the Elohist be referring to the Jeroboam of his own time.

Dating Hezekiah and the P Source

Some time after the distribution of the JE text, the Aaronid Priest wrote an alternate version of the same narrative, with Yahweh being even more cosmic and less anthropomorphic (Friedman, Who 188; Boadt 103).[49] Just as E denigrates Aaron and aggrandizes Moses, the P text denigrates Moses and aggrandizes Aaron, making the sons of Aaron the only official Temple priests for Jerusalem with regular Levites serving only for other priestly duties (Friedman, Who 197-198; Blenkinsopp 153). Unlike the Elohist and Deuteronomist, the Aaronid Priest also made no room for “prophets” in his theology (Who 191). He has Moses try to get out of confronting pharaoh by complaining that he is “slow of tongue” so Yahweh has Aaron speak for Moses, crystallizing the message that the priests of Aaron should speak for the Levites who were descended from Moses. Something happens to Moses on the mountain that makes it impossible for anyone to see his face, which Friedman points out is not really appealing (Who 201). The Aaronid Priest also changes a rebellion against Moses by the tribe of Reuben, led by Dathan, Abiram, and On, into a rebellion by Korah, Moses and Aaron’s cousin, for not being allowed to practice the priestly functions of the Aaronid priests (Num. 16; Friedman, Who 196). Cross and Friedman argue that the rebellion of Dathan and Abiram was at one time independent of the traditions of Korah, which is confirmed by a verse from Deuteronomy mentioning only the JE story of Dathan and Abiram.[50]

Connecting the P source to the reign of Hezekiah, from 715 to 687, forms the basis for the Kaufmann chronology used by Frank Moore Cross, Richard Friedman, and Moshe Weinfield. The connection is based on the centralization of worship toward the Tabernacle in P and Hezekiah being the first king to perform a full scale purge against the “high places,” sacred stones and Asherah poles situated all throughout Judah. Also, the Aaronid Priest is the first author to make a distinction between Aaronid priests and Levites, just as 2 Chronicles, also written by Aaronid priests, relates how “Hezekiah re-established the priestly and levitical orders, each man in his proper order according to his duties, whether priest or Levite . . .” (NJB, 31.2; Friedman, Who 210). Hezekiah also destroyed the bronze serpent Nehushtan that Moses was said to have made, which Friedman believes was done as an affront to the Levites of Shiloh (Who 211; 2 Kings 18.4). Dating P between 715 and 687 also fits with it being written after the fall of Israel in 722, which the combination of JE is typically associated by with, but before Jeremiah’s references to P written some time after King Josiah’s death in 609 (Who 210).

This time period was also the era of the prophet Isaiah, who lived during the reigns of Hezekiah and the three previous kings, and is portrayed in 2 Kings as a kind of mentor of Hezekiah (2 Kings 19-20). Though Dever admits that we know little to nothing about Isaiah on a personal level, he nevertheless argues that the prophet’s disdain for idols supplied the thological rationale for Hezekiah’s reforms (Dever, Did 286). However, I find it unlikely that a reform that included the distribution of the P law codes, which are so focused on ceremony and sacrifice, is compatible with the anti-ceremony, anti-sacrificial, anti-establishment message in the discourses of First Isaiah (Isa. 1.11-17).

The Aaronid laws in P are so notably absent of social concerns like giving to the poor, helping widows and orphans, and limiting the power of government that Deuteronomy is very often excessively praised by Dever, Finkelstein, and Silberman for introducing such concepts in the “Second Law” of Deuteronomy despite other inhumane laws such as the death penalty for all male captives of a conquered city or anyone who worships other gods (Deut. 20.13, 13.10). Yet First Isaiah is even more concerned with social justice and the power of the monarchy than Deuteronomy is, providing a rebuke against those in Jerusalem and its government, saying, “Your princes are rebels, accomplinces of brigands,” and even going so far as to prophecize the restoration of the judges “as in bygone days” (NJB, 1.23-26). There is no possible way for Hezekiah or any king of Judah to have accepted this as supportive of their policies.

As J. Blenkinsopp says:

The insertion into the book of the image of the prophet as a “man of God” who heals, works miracles, gives signs, predicts the futures, counsels the ruler, but does not challenge the political status quo introduced a strong tension between this profile represented by the Isaiah the discourses. We owe it to the people whom we refer to, for lack of a better word, the Deuteronomists, that the idea as essentially the phenomenon belonging to the past came to predominate, and the profile of the prophet as social critic and critic of political establishments came to be submerged—and submerged so successfully that it was only rediscovered as one of the most important factors in the uinderstanding of biblical prophecy in the early modern period. (“Hezekiah” 118-119)

Despite the picture from the Deuteronomistic Historians of a dutiful Hezekiah who consults Isaiah on important matters, there is also strong evidence that Isaiah was actually hostile towards king Hezekiah. Isaiah criticizes one of Jerusalem’s kings for allying with Egypt without consulting Yahweh (through Isaiah), calling Jerusalem’s rulers “rebellious children,” and Egypt “a broken reed” that “pierces the hand of the person who leans on it,” and in fact Hezekiah in particular is said to have overrelied on Egypt when Judah rebelled against Assyria (NJB, Isa. 30.1, 36.6). Assyrian records show that it was the new Ethiopian rulers in Egypt who had originally invited not only Hezekiah but also the rulers of Edom and Moab to rebel (Dunn 496). Thus the envoys that Isaiah is criticizing in 30.4 must belong to Hezekiah (Blenkinsopp, “Hezekiah” 120).

There has been a large degree of agreement among commentators that the devastation spoken about in Isaiah’s opening diatribe refers to the Assyrian invasion of 701.[51] “Rejection of the religious efficacy of the temple cult in the same diatribe (1:11-17) was no doubt dictated by its political function of providing religious legitimation for policies pursued by the court, including decisions about war and peace and foreign alliances,” says Blenkinsopp (119). Although the canonical version of Isaiah 33.8 reads that “Agreements are broken, witnesses held in contempt, there is respect for no one,” the Dead Sea Scrolls version implies that the reason the envoys of peace are weeping and that the streets are deserted is because “(the enemy) has broken the covenant, has despised witnesses and has regard for no one” (Abegg 320). The covenant spoken of here can be nothing other than the pledge Hezekiah made to Assyria (Blenkinsopp 121).

When Hezekiah fell ill, Isaiah is said to have prophecized the king’s death, though 2 Kings and the Book of Isaiah concurrently report that after Hezekiah prayed to remind Yahweh that he had served him faithfully, Yahweh told Isaiah to go back and let Hezekiah know that 15 years had been added to the king’s life (2 Kings 20; Isa. 38). This story seems very out of place. Traditionally, if a prophet prophecized a king’s death, it was meant as a curse for some misdeeds done by that king. It seems likely that it became well known that Isaiah had cursed Hezekiah by prophecizing his death so this story was meant to counter the claim by explaining that a heart-filled prayer from the king had convinced Yahweh to correct the fate that had been given to him. Thus, the Deuteronomistic Historian appears to have harmoized the conflicts between Hezekiah and Isaiah just as they harmonized the conflicts between the Aaronid and Shiloh priesthoods.

There is more. While First Isaiah describes Yahweh of Armies as a storm god slaying the sea dragon of chaos common to most Bels, the Yahweh of the Aaronid Priest is more like the god of heaven, Anu, creating all existence through verbal commands and never taking humanoid form to walk among mortals (Isa. 27.1; Gen. 1.1). The P source is centered on the JE narrative and derives its legal authority from Moses and Aaron, but the closest Isaiah gets to any JE narratives is an enigmatic reference to the “House of Jacob,” a synonym for Israel and Judah first used by him, and a reference to the raising of a staff over the waters, not by Moses, but by Yahweh![52]

Dating Josiah and Deuteronomy

Deuteronomy, the fourth and last source, had at least two authors, not including the Deuteronomistic Historian. Deuteronomy is made up of two parts, each composed at different times but by the same “school” or, according to Friedman, the same person (Friedman, Who 145-146). The first part, Dtr1, focuses on the idea of an eternal Davidic kingdom and mentions landmarks surviving “to this day” when they would have been lost following the Babylonian captivity (2 Sam. 7.13, 1 Kings 9.3). The correlation of Dtr1 and the lost Book of the Law “discovered” in Jerusalem’s Temple in 622 during the reign of Josiah is the core identification of the Documentary Hypothesis, agreed upon by both scholars of the Kaufmann and Graf-Wellhausen chronologies. The second part, Dtr2, instead “prophecizes” the exile in 587, saying, that “Yahweh will send away both you and the king whom you have appointed to rule you to a nation unknown either to you or to your ancestors, and there you will serve other gods, made of wood and stone,” and blames the conquest of Judah on Hezekiah’s son, Manasseh.[53] The first version, Dtr1, follows a disordered version of the same events as JE and P, but consistently agrees with JE over P; while its supplement, Dtr2, revised Deuteronomy in light of its tragic history and added extra songs and other material, reaching its current form some time between 587 and 538 when Babylon fell to the Persians.

Deuteronomy is the last book in the Pentateuch, but as the German scholar Martin Noth successfully argued in his 1943 book, Uberlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien, it also acts as the first book of the D source (Cross, Canaanite 271). The extended D source, the Deuteronomistic History, acts as an epic history that continues on through Joshua, parts of Judges (1-8.29), 1 Samuel, and the two books of Kings. Biblical scholar and theologian David Carr says that, “[a]lmost no one would date the overall Deuteronomstic History earlier than the seventh century, and most would date its various redactions across the seixth century (Carr 222). Dever likewise places the D material in the 600s (Dever, Did 69). Friedman dates both Deuteronomy and Deuteronomistic History during the reign of Josiah as well (Friedman, Who 130). This is confirmed by a “prophecy” made in 1 Kings in which an unnamed “man of Elohim” condemns Jeroboam I’s golden calves and tells how the altar will be destroyed by “a son… born to the house of David, Josiah by name” (NJB 13.2).

Although Friedman originally argued in the first edition of Who Wrote the Bible? that the Deuteronomist was none other than the prophet Jeremiah, he later ammended this hypothesis to say the Deuteronomist was more likely written by the person who wrote the prose portions of the Book of Jeremiah, possibly Jeremiah’s scribe Baruch son of Neriah, concluding along with many other scholars that Jeremiah wrote the poetic portions of the Book of Jeremiah (Friedman, Who 147). Verses that hold parallels in both Deuteronomy and Jeremiah include: “listen to Yahweh’s voice,” “[c]ircumcize the foreskin of your heart,” “to all the hosts of the heavens,” Yahweh bringing the Hebrews “out of the iron furnace, from Egypt,” and “[w]ith all your heart and with your soul.”[54]

The heroes of the Deuteronomistic History in 1 and 2 Kings are Elijah and Elisha, two of the earliest prophets to identified Yahweh with Elohim. Elisha anoints Jehu son of Jehoshaphat king of Israel and orders Ahab’s family, his father’s superiors, to be slain. Jehu kills the son of Ahab, Jehoram, as well as Jehu’s own nephew, king Ahaziah of Judah, who had been allied with Jehoram against Hazael, the king of Aram. It was this civil war between Jehu and the House of Omri that David’s bloodline was (nearly?) wiped out, after which Jehoash, the inspiration for Solomon, was reinstated over Ahab’s daughter by the priest Jehoiada. The second book of Kings reports that Jehoram had been injured in a battle with Hazael before Jehu assassinated him, but the Tel Dan Stele reports that the two kings were in fact killed by the Aramean king who constructed the stele. Many scholars have reconciled this by assuming Hazael ordered Jehu to do it, although this would invalidate the Deuteronimistic narrative that Jehu was primarily following Elisha. However, it also seems possible that the two kings died fighting Hazael and the injury was invented to give Jehu a greater role in the fall of the House of Omri than just killing Ahab’s wife Jezebel. Unlike many of other parts of the Kings narrative which involve a king being assassinated or some other important event being described in a single sentence taken from the annals, the narrative on Jehu slaying Jehoram and Ahaziah is long, acting more like a folktale.

Strangely, the Deuteronomistic Historian also reports that Jehu’s own brother, whose name was also Jehoram, was ruling Judah at the time. In fact, the two Jehorams appear to have taken the reign of their respective nations around the same time and died at the same time. Jehoram of Judah married a daughter of Ahab and Jehoram of Israel was a “son” (-in-law?) of Ahab. Even stranger, the king who reigned before Jehoram of Israel was his brother, not father, and his name was Ahaziah, which was also the same name of Jehoram of Judah’s son, and just like Ahaziah of Israel, he reigned only one or two years. Archaeologist James Maxwell Miller and Old Testmanet scholar John Haralson Hayes suggested in their book A History of Ancient Israel and Judah that the two Jehorams may have been one person (Miller 280-282).[55] The mistake may have been brought about in combining the annals of both Israel and Judah, but at the same time it also covered up the fact that it was the House of Omri that ruled over a United Monarchy, not the House of David. Not only that, but had Jehoram of Judah been identified with Jehoram of Israel, that would have meant that the Deuteronomistic Historian would have had to have said that the Edomites rebelled against Israel, not Judah, and thus Josiah would not have any claim to “reconquer” them. Although the Deuteronomistic Historian tried to make the alliance between Jehu’s father Jehoshaphat and the House of Omri appear equal, the context of Jehoshaphat fighting on the behalf of Omri makes it clear that he was actually subserviant to Ahab’s family.

Dating Ezra and the Pentateuch

Finally, some time after the Babylonian Exile, all four sources were edited together by a Redactor, R. In order to smooth over the transmission from the P creation story to the Yahwist’s Eden story, the Redactor added “Elohim” after the name Yahweh as a double identification “Yahweh-Elohim” in chapters 2 and 3 of Genesis. As Friedman shows, the Redactor also took the liberty to add a few other passages in order to smooth over some of the combinations, such as adding Adam’s third son Seth, a vision Abram has regarding the slavery in Egypt, and several passages involving Aaron.[56] As mentioned earlier, Cross argued that the Redactor was actually P, and that the Aaronid priest framed the P narrative around the JE story (Cross, Caananite 294-295). Friedman, instead, makes a valid argument that P is a continuous narrative and meant to be a counter-narrative to JE. The P narrative is framed around the core JE story, which would give the impression that a scribe from Judah combined them, but the continuity of the text when separated from JE is strong evidence that P was originally a complete document (Friedman, The Bible 13).

Most biblical scholars, starting with de Wette and including Finkelstein and Silberman, date the final redaction of the Pentateuch to the early Second Temple period, while Friedman and Dever go a step forward and identify the Redactor as the priest-scribe Ezra or someone from his immediate circle.[57] Friedman points out that Ezra was known as a “scribe versed in the Law of Moses” and also had the backing of the Persian emperor, Artaxerxes, who authorized him to “investigate how the Law of your God, in which you are expert, is being applied in Judah and Jerusalem.”[58] The Book of Nehemiah tells how Ezra and a large group of exiles went back to Jerusalem, where the people assembled to listen to Ezra read the Book of Law from a platform in the town square (Neh. 8; Ska 112). The apocryphal second book of Esdras, written some 1900 years ago, records another tradition that the Law had been “burned” so that God sent the Holy Spirit to Ezra so that he could recite it (2 Esdras 14.21; Komroff 29).[59] St. Jerome, the first translator of the Latin Vulgate Bible, was also aware of the tradition and even quoted the verse in Deuteronomy in which Moses dies, saying, “We must certainly understand by this day the time of the composition of the history, whether you prefer the view that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch or that Ezra re-edited it” (Jerome 7). If the priestly scribe Ezra can be identified with R, then the origin of the Pentateuch can be dated to around 400 B.C. Dever points out that Ezra making the people give up their foreign wives marked a huge turning point for the Jewish religion, saying: “It is difficult to imagine a more radical departure from traditional folk religion, which was centered upon the family. Now, conformity with the written law supersedes the old family values; theology trumps real life” (Did 296).

John Day in his 2000 book, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan, made the case that “absolute monotheism was first given explicit expression by the prophet Deutero-Isaiah in the exile and became fully operative in the post-exilic period” (Day 228; Dever, Did 42). Within a single generation, the consensus amongst biblical scholars from from taking monotheism of the ancient Israelites for granted to an acknowledgement that “true monotheism” only emerged after the Babylonian exile (Dever, Did 295). Dever argues that in Jerusalem, worshippers of Yahweh were isolated, but now they “had to take other national gods seriously,” and following Jerusalem’s fall, “the ‘monarchic’ metaphor for earthly and heavenly kings was less convincing” (298-299). The Persian period from 500s-300s B.C. shows “the complete absence of all the evidence of polytheism” such as “high places,” local shrines, and sanctuaries, Hebrew cultic inscriptions, and female figurines from surveys of previous eras. All of it ends these “foreign” idols end the mid-500s with an important exception (299-300).[60]

Now that every source and redactor has been explored, let us make a brief summary of our timeline. The earliest known source of Ezra’s canon, J, was written after the Edomites won independence from Judah because it contains a prophecy that Esau would break Jacob’s yoke from his neck, but before the Assyrians invaded Israel because J only refers to Simeon and Levi being dispersed, leaving a time frame between 848 and 722. The detailed Court History of David, the predominance of locations in Judah throughout the story, and J’s favorable inclination towards Solomon and Jacob’s son Judah in the Joseph story all provide strong evidence for the source being authored in Judah. The E source is normally placed in the northern land of Israel, and as Cross and Friedman have shown, was probably authored by a Shiloh priest some time between Israel’s independence and its fall -- between 922 and 722 years before the Common Era -- but was probably written after J. The two documents were then combined, perhaps after E was carried to Judah after the Assyrian invasion, by a redactor, RJE, who preferred the J source over the E source.

That an Aaronid priest wrote the P source can be shown by the Priest’s distinction between Levites and descendants of Aaron. Friedman and Weinfeld argue that P was written some time after the fall of Israel in 722 but before its verses were inverted by Jeremiah and quoted by Ezekiel in 628. There is strong evidence for the P code being promulgated during the reign of King Hezekiah, between 715 and 687 years before the Common Era, due to a reported division between the priests and the Levites during his reign. The D source, which Friedman links to Jeremiah, starts with Deuteronomy and extends through parts of the Hebrew Bible up to 2 Kings, making up what is known as the “Deuteronomistic History.” The Book of Deuteronomy itself is made up of two parts, a pre-exile version called Dtr1 “discovered” in 622, which contains eternal covenants, and a supplement called Dtr2 that “prophesizes” the exile in 587. The similarities between E and D, as well as the matching hostility towards Aaron, Solomon, and Jeroboam, their reluctant acceptance of the monarchy, and their pre-monarchal approach to war, all provide evidence for D being authored by the Shiloh priesthood. Finally, an Aaronid priest from the Second Temple era, probably Ezra, combined JE, P, and Deuteronomy to form the Pentateuch.

Characteristics of the Different Versions of the Pentateuch Story

Author Protagonist Favored High Priest Prophet Name of God

Yahwist (J) David Solomon Zadok Nathan Yahweh

Elohist (E) Moses Joshua Abiathar Samuel Elohim, then Yahweh

JE Redactor(RJE) David/Moses Yahwist (J) Hosea Yahweh or Elohim

Aaronid Priest (P) Moses/Aaron Aaron Phinehas Ezekiel Elohim, then Yahweh

Deuteronomy Moses Josiah Jeremiah Yahweh Your-Elohim

Redactor (R) Moses/Aaron Aaron Yahweh-Elohim

Setting of the Source Authors and Redactors

Author Date King (High Priest) Priesthood Location Background

Yahwist (J) 830s Jehoash (Jehoiada) Judah Court History

Elohist (E) 780-740 Jeroboam II Shiloh Shiloh (Israel) Golden Calves

JE Redact. (RJE) 720? Ahaz/Hezekiah? Judah? Fall of Israel?

Aaron Priest (P) 715-687 Hezekiah Aaronid Jerusalem Centralization

Dtr1 622 Josiah (Hilkiah) Shiloh Jerusalem Eternal Kingdom

Dtr2 587-538 Nebuchadnezzar Shiloh Babylon Babylonian Exile

Redactor (R) 400 Artaxerxes (Ezra) Aaronid Jerusalem Second Temple

[pic]

Kaufmann Chronology for the Documentary Hypothesis

J: core of Genesis; parts of Exodus, some of Numbers, 1st part of Joshua, 2nd part of Judges, parts of 1 Samuel, core of 2 Samuel, 1st 2 chapters of 1 Kings

E: parts of Genesis, 1st part of Exodus, some of Numbers

RJE: redactor who combined most of J with parts of E

P: parts of Genesis; 2nd part of Exodus; all of Leviticus; core of Numbers

DH1: core of Deuteronomy; 2nd part of Joshua; 1st part of Judges; parts of 1 & 2 Samuel; almost all of 1 & 2 Kings

DH2: some of last parts of Deuteronomy; last 2 chapters of 2 Kings

R: redactor combined JE, P, and DH2; “Yahweh” changed to “Yahweh-Elohim” in Genesis 2-3; Festival of Booths added to Leviticus 23.39-43

Adam (Adapa the Priest) | [] | [] }- Creation World Myth - Creation from primeval

Noah (King Ziusudra) | [] | [] } waters to destruction by primeval waters

Emperor Nimrod (Sargon) | [] | [] paralleled in Mesopotamian myth

Abraham & Hammurapi | [] |[] []

Isaac | [] |[] []--Yahwist Source (J) - folklorist from Judah;

Jacob (Israel) | [] |[] [] from Eden to Solomon

Joseph (brother of Judah) | [] |[] []

Moses and Aaron |[][] |[]-[]-- Elohist Source (E) - from Shiloh, a priesthood

Joshua (of Israel) [] |[] [] in southern Israel descended from Moses;

Deborah & Samson (Judges) [] | [] variant pieces from Abraham to Solomon which

Eli (of Shiloh) [] | [] were combined by a redactor to form JE

Samuel (of Shiloh) [] | []

King Saul (of Israel) [] | []

King David (of Judah) [] |---[]-- JE Redactor (RJE) – edited J and E together

King Solomon (of Judah) [] | []

Kings Rehoboam/Jeroboam I [] ^----- Priestly Source (P) - priests from Jerusalem

King Omri (of Israel) [] descended from Aaron; connected to Zadok;

King Jehu (of Israel) [] epic history from creation of the world to Joshua

King Hezekiah and Isaiah []

King Josiah and Jeremiah []------ Deuteronomistic History (DH) - priest of

King Zedekiah (of Judah) [] Shiloh; rhetorical treatise and epic history

Nebuchadnezzar (of Babylon) [] from Mt. Horeb to fall of Judah

Cryus the Messiah (of Persia)

Ezra and Nehemiah (Babylon)^--------- Redactor (R) - Second Temple priesthood

General Division of the Source Authors and Redactors

The J Source as Comic Folktale

Who is the Yahwist? Without a doubt, the first of the four main Biblical authors far surpassed the other four source authors in literary ability. As Christian theologians Robert B. Coote and David Robert Ord say, “[o]f the four strands, J contributes the greatest quantity of the Pentateuch’s story, including the majority of the more familiar episodes, much as Mark’s Gospel serves as the basis of Matthew’s, which is a composite of Mark and other traditions” (Coote 8). The Yahwist was first and foremost a collector of myths and legends who managed to geniously string along a kaleidescope of multinational folktales into a single massive geneaology by linking each story to one of the family members in a continuous family line starting with Adam and ending with Solomon. It is therefore a very advanced work far larger and more coherent than most folklore. “In the Day,” as Friedman calls the work – following the Jewish tradition of naming the work after its first phrase – can be divided into two main parts: the first is the prehistory, made up of the Sumerian chronicles (Adam to Noah), the patriarchal narratives (Noah to Joseph), the exodus (Joseph to Joshua), and the era of Judges (Jerub-Baal to Samuel); the second part is made up almost entirely of the Court History of David.

The first myths the Yahwist uses originate from Mesopotamia: the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, half of Noah’s Ark, and the Tower of Babel, each modified so that either Yahweh or humans took on the roles of the gods in the originally polytheistic myths (Kramer, Sumerians 147, 163). The stories of the patriarchs, each of whom symbolized a particular tribe or group of people, and their actions were meant to prefigure events in the era of the Judges and David’s kingdom. These stories include: Abram in Egypt, Sarai Punishes Hagar, Angels Destroy Sodom and Gommorah, Jacob and Esau’s Birth, Isaac in Gerar (a doublet of Abram in Egypt), Jacob Tricks Esau, Jacob Marries Leah and Rachel, Simeon and Levi Destroy Shechem, half of Joseph Sold Into Slavery, and the Song of Jacob, which is told on Jacob’s deathbed. Many scholars have noted the story of Joseph refusing the advances of his Egyptian lord’s wife is very similar to the 13th-century Egyptian folktale, “A Tale of Two Brothers.” Common themes among these stories are interfamilial strife, sex deception, and redemption. Friedman argues that we can understand why J “did not develop the distinction between the names of God before and after Moses. For him something extremely important had happened before Moses. This writer was concerned with the ruling family of Judah, David’s family. He therefore emphasized the significance of God’s covenant with the patriarchs. It was tied to the city of Hebron, David’s first capital” (Who 83). While the P and D sources would expand Moses into four-fifths of the Pentateuch, the Yahwist concentrates far more on the patriarchs and devotes nearly as much ink to Joseph as to Moses.

The Judean author is also responsible for stories from Exodus and Numbers like: Baby Moses on the Nile, Moses Kills an Egyptian and Flees, half of the Burning Bush story, the Song of the Sea following the escape from Egypt, a very short version of the story of (the lesser-known) Ten Commandments at Mt. Sinai, the Rebellion of Dathan and Abiram (which R combined with P’s story of Korah’s rebellion), and part of Balaam and Balak. The Yahwist also contributes stories to the books of Joshua and Judges, and then wrote the massive Court History of David which is scattered through 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel and the first two chapters of 1 Kings. The same interfamilial strife that plagues Jacob and his sons now plagues the House of David, portraying a perpetual cycle of jealousy begetting violence, tragic consequence, and comic redemption.

From Abraham to Jacob, the Yahwist adds a string of patriarch stories that symbolize Judah’s genealogy using characters as tribal icons, a practice common to folklore. The stories also grow longer as the narrative moves forward: Jacob’s story is larger and more complex than Abraham’s story and the same is true for Joseph and Moses, respectively. But as the narrative progresses, Yahweh also acts less and less directly with humankind: Yahweh’s direct dialogue with Adam and Eve becomes more distanced with later generations. Abraham is still able to talk directly to Yahweh, gradually dissuading him from destroying Sodom and Gomorrah for the sake of ten worthy men, but by the time of David, Yahweh talks through prophets like Nathan instead.

The comparatively short stories of the Patriarchs are often used to provide models for how events in the future will turn out. For example, Dinah’s rape by Shechem being avenged by her brothers parallels the rape of David’s daughter Tamar, which is likewise avenged by a brother (Gen. 34; 2 Sam. 13). The attempted rape of Yahweh’s angels cause the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the same way that the rape and murder of a slave woman brings about the near-destruction of the tribe of Benjamin (Gen. 19; Jud. 19). Jacob tricks his father Isaac using a coat, which is followed by his own sons tricking him, again with a coat (Gen. 27.15, 37.31). Cause and effect is intrinsic within the choice between good and bad, starting with Eve’s choice to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree. As Friedman says, “[i]t is a recognition that humans make choices and that choices have consequences. The knowledge of good and bad means learning what each produces. The work conveys that deception and cruelty in a family fester and spread, and that the most likely way to stop it all is for one member of the family who is entitled to recompense to choose not to take it and forgive” (Hidden 56).

As mentioned in the introduction, folklore is circulated largely through oral tradition, and often contains a high proportion of poetry and songs, repetitive lines, animals that can talk, and magical items or effects. They often have problems with coherence and localization: complex historical details are simplified through symbol and allegory and many folkloric texts have crucial portions of their story missing or misunderstood due to problems in transmission. The J source more than any of the four main sources contains these attributes.

Most scholars believe the J source is primarily based on oral tradition (Fleming 206n). German biblical scholar Jean-Louis Ska points out that majority of the debate surrounding the Yahwist is on how much of it is oral tradition (Ska 129). Coote and Ord write, “Various oral and written stories sources contribute to the story of J” (Coote 9). Lawrence Boadt also notes that the J source contains the largest number of story elements common to folk tradition, listing the motifs of the conflict between brothers, the triumph of the younger brother over the older brother, and the wife who cannot bear children (Boadt 99). Even John van Seters, whose “supplimentary hypothesis” dates J after the other sources, defends Wellhausen’s argument that J is made up of a “large amount of folklore, both myth and legend, derived from the oral tradition” (Van Seters, Prologue 20). Frank Moore Cross, nevertheless complains that Van Seters “sets aside all evidence of the oral background of much of the Yahwist” in dating J to the Babylonian Exile (Cross 30n). Friedman, however, downplays the oral tradition argument, saying, “[t]he author was a writer, not a collector of oral tales. The work does not have the character of oral composition, though it is possible the author incorporated elements from oral sources” and “I present this text not as a collection of folktales preserved from unknown oral storytellers but rather as the crafted design of a gifted writer” (Friedman, Hidden 51, 54).

Even if the Yahwist personally used nothing but written sources and invented Abram, Isaac and Jacob wholecloth, the J source would still be “a collection of folktales” heavily indebted to oral tradition, especially compared to the other three sources. The J source contains the Song of Jacob and the Song of the Sea (Gen 29; Ex. 15). It is the J text that contains both the talking serpent in Eden and (as I argued above) Balaam’s talking donkey. The story of Eden would have been understood by J’s contemporary readers as the mythical land of the gods universal to most ancient Eurasian creation myths. The J source also contains the magical “brimstone and fire” that is rains down on Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19.23). The story of Laban substituting Jacob’s wife with her sister is a common motif known as the “bed trick,” a folklore theme made famous in Shakespeare’s comedies (Frye, Shakespeare 151). One of the few times the name Elohim is found in the J source is when the “sons of Elohim” came to the daughters of man shortly before the flood, which the 19th-century Orientalist Duncan Black Macdonald described as “the Hebrew parallel to the Greek stories of demigods and heroes” (Macdonald 113).

According to Frye, the earliest “literary epoch” is the “mythic” mode, which could be divided into two fictional modes, the tragic or “dionysiac” myth, and the comic or “apollonian” myth, and one non-fictional mode, the thematic mode of “scripture.” Following the literary theorist Northrop Frye, my model of mythological development divides folklore into three different modes, two fictional and one non-fictional: the comic folktale, the tragic folktale, and the chronicle. In the early stories of J, from Adam to Noah, the J narrative acts much like a chronicle, but the patriarch stories, from Abraham to Jacob, read like a series of comic folktales which largely foreshadow the Court History of David. This may seem paradoxical that fantastic stories like the Garden of Eden and Noah’s Ark get classified as a non-fictional “chronicle” while the realistic patriarch stories are considered fictional “comedy.” However, the entire ancient Middle East accepted variants of the Eden and ark stories and the way the Yahwist simply breezes through them while providing only a few sayings or tidbits of information proves that it was only a review of well-established “world history,” while the patriarch stories are more fully developed into morality tales using possibly original characters named after the tribes and factions they symbolized. Van Seters refers to the first 11 chapters of Genesis (from Adam to Noah) as the “historicization of mythology,” while the patriarchal stories, however fictional, are nevertheless “history writing” (Van Seters, Prologue 330-331).

In the Court History that the patrarich narratives are meant to foreshadow, the protagonist David grows from a simple shepherd boy to become a king beloved by Yahweh and his people, a correspondence to what Frye calls “the mythical comedy,” corresponding to “the story of how a hero is accepted by a society of gods” (Anatomy 43). Each of the four source authors are in some fashion a propagandist for either the House of David or to one priesthood or another, but the Yahwist is the only one who transcends this role by also telling a story for the story’s sake. The Yahwist knew how to write good tragedy, intertwining elements from different stories such as the coats of Jacob and Joseph or the rapes of Dinah and Tamar, yet the overall outlook of the story is a positive one that is concerned with the integration of man and woman with their society. As the literary critic Harold Bloom writes, “J is at once the greatest and the most ironic writer in the Hebrew Bible; she is essentially a comic author, however surprising that judgment at first must seem” (J 26).[61] Robert Coote makes a similar argument for the positive nature of the J source, saying, “J is an upbeat, optimistic document that assumes basic acquiescence to its projection of an ethnic identity” (Coote 29).

The J source or the combined JE texts are sometimes referred to as “epics,” and in the sense of the story being ambitious in scope, numerous in its cast, and massive in content, the label is an apt one. The J source is very complex for a folktale, far more complex than the folklore from Psalms or the Deuteronomstic folklore regarding David. The Court History of David has so much depth and character development that it could be considered a romance in and of itself, though it still references folk songs like the “Lament of the Bow” and folk pun etymologies like David naming Baal Perazim after the “break out” victory he achieved there (2 Sam. 1.19-27, 4.20). Some authors are able to transcend the traditional limits placed on general literature: folktales are by their nature chaotic in continuity, simplistic in plot flow, and incoherent in exposition, yet the Yahwist created a master narrative that is highly unified, deeply complex, and yet marvelously readble, so much so that even today the majority of the popular oral traditions from the Bible originate from the J source. The Yahwist managed to collect folktales from a large number of diverse sources and piece them together into a combined whole so that the protagonist David stands out as the emodiment of Israel’s long patriarchal history. Yet despite its great artistic merit and surprising complexity, the J source is most definitely the text closest to the world of oral tradition and mythic story elements symbolizing forgotten lore.

The E Source as Thematic Romance

The Elohist uses an idealistic mode of characterization than the Yahwist and takes a more revereant attitude towards both the patriarchs and to Moses. Important characters are far more polite and caring towards one another in the E source. The Elohist often describes characters kissing one another and weeping in joy, situations that do not appear in the other sources (Gen. 32.1, 33.4; Ex. 4.27). Although the Elohist does not have Yahweh “walk” with the patriarchs, the Elohist does portray men coming face to face god. Although the E source is J’s sister-text by virtue of identical plot lines and the fused narratives created from their combination by the RJE redactor, the Elohist takes a decidedly more reactionary approach to the familial story that the Yahwist authored.

If the Elohist wrote anything about Adam or anyone before Abraham (or Abram), then it has been left out. In fact, the entire introduction to the E source, and the text begins “in the middle of things” with Abraham and Sarah in Gerar (Gen. 20.2). The folkloric episodes of Abraham that the Elohist is responsible include Sarah exiling Hagar and Ishmael, Abraham in Beer-sheba, the sacrifice of Isaac, and Abraham marriage to Keturah. When Jacob leaves his father-in-law, Laban chases after him, and after making peace with him, the patriarch comes to the city of Peni-El, where one night he wrestles with “a man” until sunrise, an example of folkloric etymology for Israel (“Wrestles with El”). Jacob declares that he saw Elohim face-to-face, and later Moses brings up 72 elders with him up the mountain to see “the Elohim of Israel” standing on saphire in the skies while on the mountain (Ex. 24.10). Jacob then makes peace with Esau and Rachel dies at Beth-El. Joseph is sold to Midianites and/or Medanites instead of Ishmaelites and it is Reuben and not Judah who tries to save him. Joseph not only has dreams that divine the future as in J but also has the ability to interpret the dreams of other people (Gen. 40-41). He dies in Egypt but by his own request his bones are taken with the Exodus to be buried in Shechem (Friedman, Bible 20). The holy mountain where Moses and Aaron take the Hebrews is called Horeb instead of Sinai, Moses’ father-in-law is called Jethro instead of Reuel, and Moses receives a Covenant Code of laws is given in place of Ten Commandments. While the Yahwist’s Ten Commandments forbids molten idols, the Elohist forbids all idols of silver and gold, and demands sacrificial altars must be made of natural uncut stone, apparently a form of favoritism of tribal religion over state religion. It is thus noteworthy that J has the stone tablets rest inside a golden ark with two gold-plated cherubs on top of it (21). The E source also contains a more complicated process of dileberations between Moses and Pharoah, leading to plagues which hit Egypt. The northern hero Joshua also takes a more distinguished role as Moses’ successor, and the Elohist adds to him the same role the Yahwist gave the southern folk patriarch Caleb, father of the Calebites (Friedman, Bible 20) .

In the E source, Moses rather than David is the protagonist, and while the tone the Yahwist takes towards David is apologetic, the Elohist addresses sets Moses apart from all the other kings and prophets. While the Yahwist says that Moses saw an angel of Yahweh inside the fire of the burning bush (Ex. 3.2), the Elohist exalts Moses by saying God called Moses directly from the bush, saying, “Moses, Moses!” (NJB, Ex. 3.4). When Miriam and Aaron speak out against Moses – supposedly for having a Cushite wife, although the subject strangely opens with a discussion about whether Yahweh had spoken through Moses or all three of them – the Elohist says that Moses was “extremely humble, the humblest man on earth” (NJB, Num. 12.3).

Moses is also made into a more sympathetic character, appealing to Yahweh that he cannot bear the burden that put on him (Friedman, Who 79). In the Book of Numbers, Moses cries out to Yahweh:

“Why do you treat your servant so badly? In what respect have I failed to win your favour, for you to lay the burden of all these people on me? Was it I who conceived all these people, was I their father, for you to say to me, “Carry them in your arms, like a foster-father carrying an unweaned child, to the country which I swore to give their fathers”? Where am I to find meat to give all these people, pestering me with their tears and saying, “Give us meat to eat”? I cannot carry all these people on my own; the weight is too much for me. If this is how you mean to treat me, please kill me outright! If only I could win your favour and be spared the sight of my misery!” (NJB, Num. 11.11)

Unlike the Yahwist, whose plots are developed through the flaws of Adam, Jacob and David, the Elohist paints as sympathetic a picture of Moses as possible. As Friedman points out, both E and D regard Moses as “good, and more than good. He is at a turning point in history and singularly crucial to it. His personality is carefully and extensively developed” in ways incomparable to the portrayals of Moses given by J and P (Friedman, Who 128). Rather than conflict being bred from the hero’s flaws as J constantly narrated, the only conflict for Moses in E is in saving an ungrateful people from their own sins toward God. As Friedman points out, “E is a source which particularly emphasizes Moses as its hero, much more than J does. In this story, it is Moses’ intercession with God that saves the people from destruction. E also especially develops Moses’ personal role in the liberation from slavery, in a way J does not. In E there is less material on the patriarchs than on Moses; in J there is more on the patriarchs” (Friedman, Who 71-72).

According to Frye, the romantic mode can be divided into two fictional modes, the “elegaic” romance and the “idyllic” romance, and one non-fictional mode, which he called the “chronicle” (emphasing its departure from “myth”), but which I will call the “thematic romance” (Anatomy 36-58). Like other romances, the thematic romance centers on human heroes and enemies, and is essentially a morality tale that attempts to create as much sympathy for its protagonist and antipathy towards the protagonist’s enemies as possible. However, the thematic romance also combines elements of myth and history, putting more emphasis on the symbols behind the story and using the story’s environment to challenge the protagonist as a means to serve as an example for the reader. However, even thematic romances contain elements of idylism and eulogy. The Elohist uses Moses both as a source of an idyllic hero and the center figure in the tragedy of the exodus’ hardship. If Freud was correct in believing the Hebrews killed the original Moses, then the tragic theme of Moses being unjustly scapegoated for those hardships was meant to eulogize the circumstances of his death.

The most striking example of the Elohist’s movement from folktale to romance is the way in which two stories regarding the marriage of Abraham’s sister-wife Sarah are told. Traditionally, when two patriarchal groups mean to ally themselves to one another, they arrange a marriage with the inferior group “giving away their daughter” as a hostage chip in order to provide good faith to the superior group (Kolenda 99). When the Yahwist tells the story of Abraham and Sarah going to Egypt, Abraham gives Sarah to the Pharaoh as a wife, indicating that they were in the inferior position, which makes sense because they were forced to leave Israel due to a famine. It is implied that the marriage was consummated when the pharoah complains to Abraham about a disease that plagues his house, saying, “Why did you not tell me she was your wife? Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her to be my wife?” (NJB, Gen. 12.18-19) The Elohist, in a parallel version of the story in which Abraham gives Sarah to the king of Gerar, emphasizes that King Abimelech “had not gone near her” (NJB, Gen. 20.4). There is even a dream sequence in which the king protests his innocence, and in which Elohim says to him: “‘Yes, I know . . . that you did this with a clear conscience and I myself prevented you from sinning against me. That was why I did not let you touch her.’” (NJB, Gen. 20.6). This episode shows that while the Yahwist is trying to use the patriarchs as icons of ethnographic folklore, the Elohist follows the romantic theme of fashioning the protagonists into icons of virtue.

A later elaboration of the story of Sarah’s marriage to Pharaoh found in the Dead Sea Scrolls called the Genesis Apocryphon, or 1QapGen, takes the romanticization of Abraham even further, telling the story from the first-person perspective of Abraham:

And seeing her, he was amazed by all her beauty and took her to be his wife, but me he sought to kill. Sarai said to the king, ‘He is my brother,’ and so I, Abram, was spared because of her and was not slain. And I, Abram, wept aloud that night, I and my nephew Lot, because Sarai had been taken from me by force. I prayed that night and I begged and implored . . . (Barnstone 204)

By telling how Abraham prays in grief to stop his wife from being “defiled” by Pharaoh, the apocryphal author provides a far more elaborate explanation to save Sarah from the detested form of exogamy that the Yahwist originally established as a part of an ethnographic history of Judah and Israel.

Another exmple of the romanticization of folklore is in the way the Elohist changed one of the Yahwist’s typical plot devices based on stories in which characters are symbols for tribes. In the J source, Ishmael needed to be sent away so that he could become father of the Ishmaelites, but the Elohist makes Abraham protest the idea to prove that doing so did not mean he did not love his son (Gen. 21.11). These apologetic character promotions provide strong evidence for framing the characters from J as romantic heroes who do not sacrifice their wives to powerful kings or coldly exile their sons, even if it forfeits the symbolic associations with history that created the story in the first place. Once the J source’s stories of family reconciliation replaced the oral tradition of competing tribes as the dominant history of Judah and Israel’s literate population, the symbolic associations behind the story, which the characters originally symbolized, became forgotten, so that the acceptability of the characters’ personalities became more important than historical events the fables originally represented, thus establishing the need to censor the more risqué and uninspiring themes in order to create a more romanticized past.

Later in the Exodus story, Yahweh punishes Miriam by causing her skin to turn pale-white, Moses cries out for her to be healed and Yahweh instructs him that she would have to be separated from the camp for a week (Num. 12). Yahweh suddenly tells Aaron and Miriam to leave the Tent of Meeting, so that when he inflicts Miriam with leprosy it does not make the Tent of Meeting ritually unclean. Outside, Yahweh tells all three of them directly that Moses was the only person that Yahweh ever talks to directly, while other oracles had only been spoken to in dreams (Num. 12.4-8). But after chastizing both Aaron and Miriam, Miriam alone is inflicted with leprosy; Aaron escapes punishment just as he escaped punishment after fashioning the golden calf. As Friedman points out, any act of punishment on Aaron from God would have caused him to lose his status as high priest (Friedman, Who 72).

The Elohist uses Aaron and Miriam as foils to romanticize the superior chaeracter of Moses, just as he sought to romanticize the descendants of Moses, the priests of Shiloh, over the prisets of Aaron and priestesses of Miriam. Moses is the reluctant savior, taking the people of Israel under his wing in order to lead them to the Promised Land. Joshua is his heroic successor, personally chosen by Yahweh, and Abraham is willing to sacrifice even his own son for the will of Elohim. This romantic characterization the Elohist takes is crystallized in the typical introduction of Elohim calling each of these three by their name twice, to which each of them identically replies, “I am here.”

The P Source as Epic History

While the Yahwist dealt with folktakes that were close to oral tradition, the Aaronid Priest obviously lived in a world where the literary world meant a great deal more than what was practical in the real world. This is epitomized in the Aaronid Priest’s obsession with the Tabernacle, which mentioned over 200 times, along with the “congregatin” mentioned over 100 times. The laws of the Tabernacle’s upkeep easily drown out the comparatively small amount of contributed story elements (Friedman, Bible 9-11). While the Yahwist and the Elohist use the word “died,” the Aaronid Priest says people “expire” (“gw’”) (11). There is no mention of angels, dreams, or prophets: all instructions from God were given to priests alone. There are also no words on mercy or repentance, as atonement for sin was expideated by Aaronid priests through sacrifice at the tabernacle alone (12).

The most obvious trait of the Aaronid priest is that he is highly concerned with statistical records on ages, dates, and measurements, as shown by the Seven Days of Creation, the 375-Day Flood, the Records of Noah’s Sons, and the Records of Terah (Friedman, Bible 11-12). The Aaronid Priest also provides the story of Abraham’s circumcision covenant with El Shaddai, although Freud believed the practice actually originated from Moses’ Aten religion since Herodotus said the practice originated from Egypt and there is “an especially obscure passage” where Yahweh is about to kill Moses or his son and his wife Zipporah saves him by performing a circumcision.[62] The P source also has the story of Abraham buying the cave of Machpelah from the “sons of Heth” in Hebron for Sarah’s tomb, most likely an important source of contention in the author’s own time, as it becomes identified as the moussiary of each of the patrairachs up until Joseph. The Aaronid Priest is also responsible for the Records of Ishmael, the Records of Jacob and Esau, and the Records of the Children of Israel who came out of Egypt.[63] Not only Joseph but Jacob is honored in the upper echelons of Egypt as the Elohist has Jacob bless the Pharaoh, after which Jacob asks that be buried in the Cave of Machpelah with his forefathers. El Shaddai reveals the name Yahweh to Moses, after which, Moses and Aaron, both in their 80s, confronts Pharaoh. It is Aaron’s staff, not Moses’ staff, which becomes a serpent, and the plagues happen all at once instead of following a series of negotiations (Friedman, Bible 133f). The Aaronid Priest also presesnts a story of Moses instilling the Commemeration of Passover before discussing the 430 years in Egypt. It is also the Aaronid Priest who tells the stories of Yahweh splitting the sea, Manna from heaven, and the Seven Days at Mt. Sinai. Following this is six chapters on the creation of the tabernacle (Ex. 25-31). After this, Moses climbs Mt. Sinai, and it is only in this narrative that Moses’ face is said to have been changed (or burned?) on Sinai (Ex. 34.29-35).

All of these story elements are just an introduction to an extended discourse on the rules of the Tabernacle and Aaronid priesthood, stretching from Exodus 35 all the way to Numbers 10.27. The tabernacle is referenced over 200 times in P, as opposed to three times in the E source and none in J or D (Friedman, Who 163). No subject takes up more space than explaining the Tabernacle. Halfway through the story of Moses, the P source inserts a huge corpus of law that is now the Book of Leviticus, followed by ten chapters in Numbers with more laws and more information on the tabernacle. Just as reading the Commedia can be cumbersome for those unfamiliar with the minute details of Florentine history and Christian theology, so too is P burdensome for those not versed in the minutiae of Middle Eastern religious ritual.

Some time during either the reign of Hezekiah or his father, Judah was going through an existential crisis. The Assyrian king Sennacherib had conquered Israel, causing a large number of refugees to flee south to Jerusalem, and began to threaten Judah as well (2 Kings 18). Hezekiah hoped to centralize Judah’s religion around Jerusalem so that he could resist the more powerful Assyrian Empire. According to 2 Kings, Sennacherab put Jerusalem under siege and forced Hezekiah to pay him a tribute of 30 talents of gold to leave (18.14). But then either Hezekiah defied the king again, or more likely, an alternate ending was inserted in 2 Kings, one in which Isaiah correctly predicted that Hezekiah would win and Sennacherab’s army would be killed by an angel of Yahweh. The version of the story in 2 Chronicles has only one invasion and leaves out the paying of tribute. Assyrian records suggest that Hezekiah paid the tribute to make them leave (Finkelstein 260). But regardless of whether there was a plague at the siege of Jerusalem or not, Hezekiah became famous for standing up to the Assyrian king. Following unimpressive archaeological finds for conquests any time before the late monarchies, Finkelstein and Silberman establish that Hezekiah, despite his poor military record, was the closest thing to a conqueror the country had ever had up to that point (Finkelstein 257).

Hezekiah is also said to have assembled “the [Aaronid] priests and Levites” to purify the temple’s defilement by removing its incense and burnt offering altar and to have reinstated the Passover, which is said to have not been celebrated “since the priests had not purified themselves in sufficient number, and the people were not assembled in Jerusalem” (NJB, 2 Chron. 29.4, 30.3). He is then said to have destroyed competing altars on the “high places” in Judah, “re-established the priestly and levitical orders,” and “established a king's portion from his possessions for the morning and evening burnt offerings, and the burnt offerings for the Sabbaths, New Moons and festivals, as laid down in the Law of Yahweh” (NJB, Chron. 30.1-3). Hezekiah then distributed the taxes levied to names found in the genealogical records, records which can only be found only in the P source (2 Chron. 16-18; Num. 1-2, 26).

Thus, the literary evidence provides ample cause to connect P’s national epic to the Law promulgated by Hezekiah and the Aaronid priesthood in order to centralize animal sacrifice at the Jerusalem Temple, culturally linking all Jews and Israelite refugees to the city of Jerusalem. The drive for nationalization centered in Jerusalem helps explain why the mythic stories of Judah’s origin needed to be historicized in order to provide an authoritative history of Judah and Israel’s cultural and religious unity. The conflict with Assyria provided a likely explanation for the circumstances in which there would be a popular desire to pool the area’s political and religious resources into a single city, even more so after Sennacherab had conquered and looted all the other cities besides Jerusalem.

According to Frye, the Romantic mode is followed by the High Mimetic mode, which can be divided into two fictional modes and one non-fictionla mode. These are the “classic tragedy,” referring to classic Greek tragedy; the “Aristophanic” epic, referring to the famous Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes; and “nationalism” epic. Following after Frye, I have divided the epic into the “epic tragedy,” the “epic comedy,” and the “epic history,” which most Old Testament scholars refer to as the “national history.” Unlike the previous two sources, P provides elaborately detailed annals of all the families who took part in the exodus and an even longer and more elaborate law code in order to historicize the Moses myth described in JE into a national epic.

The Aaronid Priest transformed the JE folktale/romance into an epic history by increasing the scope, cast, and detail of the narrative in order to strengthen its historical validity. While the JE story if vague in terms of dates, the Aaronid Priest has created a timeline out of the patriarch’s ages. The cast of P’s exodus story is vastly increased through the use of massive genealogical lists, revealing a large number of grandsons of Jacob, more sons of Aaron, and more exiles who are named. A far more logistically descriptive account of the size of Noah’s ark and provides detailed lists of Levitical laws and border descriptions (Gen. 6.9-22, Lev.; Num. 34). The authors of epics also tend to attach the story to a formal philosophy or ideology, just as the Aaronid priest centers the entire narrative on his theological concern for the Tabernacle and its ritualistic role in centralization of Yahweh worship in Jerusalem.

The heavy use of historical statistics typified by the Book of Numbers proves that it was the intent of the Aaronid Priest to write an official national history. The E source says only that Moses took 600,000 men and women on foot (Ex. 12.37); P attempts to prove it by listing them all by camp (Num. 1.17-54). The annals used by the Aaronid Priest must have been written to turn what was originally myth into a thoroughly documented history. P is also the first source to “historicize myth” by creating a timeline out of the patriarch’s ages. These ages in the Masoretic text are different than the ones in the Septuagint, and the Samaritan text has yet another set of numbers (Skinner 134).[64] Each time the ages were changed, they were done in a systematic way to every patriarch, proving the changes are linked not to the patriarchs themselves but to an overall chronology. P similarly maps out the days of Noah’s flood so that the episode lasts a year (Friedman, Who 59). While the genealogies in J are obviously based on mythical figures from a distant pagan past, the genealogies of P take the form of annals, complete with population figures (Num. 1-4).[65] The extant patriarch stories are little more than genealogical annals as well, with the exception of Noah and Abraham.

The Aaronid priest uses a set of laws referred to as the “Holiness Code” in place of a similar but far more limited set of laws from the Elohist’s “Covenant Code.”[66] The strong connection between the P narrative and the P laws shows that the Moses story had advanced in authority past the point of being ideas to a promulgation for ideas being put into action. The Covenant Code in E provides a starting point for this advance, as punishments for crimes are included, but this material comprises less than three chapters of laws with little in terms of proof they were ever enforced. The Levitical laws by contrast comprise more than an entire book’s worth of legal material, and there is strong evidence that this law code was promulgated in Jerusalem during the time of Hezekiah (Friedman, Who 210-211).

One problem with using the term “epic” is that scholars have long used it to describe different stages of the Pentateuch’s development. Lawrence Boadt uses the term “epic” for the J source due to its combination of “old poems, stories, and songs of the exodus” and because of its “fine sense of storytelling” (his emphasis) (Boadt 98-99). Frank Moore Cross uses the same term for the JE tradition (Cross, Canaanite viii). Finkelstein and Silberman refer to the Deuteronomistic history as a “national epic” and an “epic saga” (Finkelstein 47, 283). Dever uses similar terminology – “epic history” and “national epic” – for the same source (Dever 100). Since P is the only source not referred to as an “epic” by these authors, it might at first seem to be a poor label for P. However, we must remember that there are many different meanings that can be attached to the word. Among scholarly works, a narrative can be referred to as a folktale, a romance, and an epic without there being any obvious contradiction, but my own particular use of these terms are to differentiate them from one another to describe a model of change. Boadt’s primary term for J may be an “epic” but “old poems, stories, and songs of the exodus” which include “themes from folk tradition” better fit the parameters for the folktale as laid out in my introduction. Cross, in the introduction to Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, elaborates on his own distinction between epics and history:

Epic in interpreting historical events combines mythical and historical features in various ways and proportions . . . In epic narrative, a people and their god or gods interact in the temporal course of events. In historical narrative only human actors have parts. Appeal to divine agency is illegitimate. Thus the composer of epic and the historian are very different in their methods of approach to the materials of history. Yet both are moved by a common impulse in view of their concern with the human and temporal process. By contrast, myth in its purest form is concerned with ‘primordeal events’ and seeks static structures of meaning behind or beyond the historical flux. (Cross viii)

Cross’ description of a movement from mythmaking to historical writing runs in rough correlation with my own more detailed four-phase model. Whereas Cross uses “Epic” to describe the earlier, more myth-centered sources, Finkelstein, Silberman, and Dever instead use the word to describe the most history-laden sources in the spectrum. I agree that the Deuteronomistic History is also an “epic history,” an Aaronid history parallel to that of the Shiloh-inspired Deuteronomistic one, but P is the first text to be promulgated by the official priesthood of Jerusalem and its abstract theological background and centralization motifs are significant enough to consider it the first “national epic” of Judah, not the Deuteronomistic History.

Deuteronomy as a Rhetorical Treatise

The D source can be broken down into two parts: the Book of Deuteronomy, which acts as an introductory treatise to the second part, the rest of the Deuteronomistic History, a national epic of the Davidic dynasty made up of various passages from Joshua to 2 Kings (Finkelstein, Bible 13). The objective of Deuteronomy is not really a history but uses “historic” events as part of a complex rhetorical argument.

While the Yahwist, the Elohist and the Aaronid Priest structured their story chronologically, the Deuteronomist departs from this format and begins in medias res, “in the middle of things,” eleven days march from Mt. Horeb, where Moses had brought down the Ten Commandments. It opens with the words, “These are the words which Moses addressed to all Israel beyond the Jordan” (NJB, Deut. 1.1). The speech acts as a theological treatise that takes up all 33 chapters of the Pentateuch’s final book. The speech draws from JE stories, starting with a back-story (1-4), then the golden calf story (5-9) and the story of Moses chiseling a second Decalogue “like the first one” after breaking the first set (10-11); then the Deuteronomist moves to an independent document called the Deuteronomic law code (12-26.15) before returning to some more speeches (26.16-30). “Deuteronomy” itself means “second law,” the first being the Aaronid corpus in the Book of Leviticus and parts of Exodus and Numbers. The last four chapters contain most of the action of the entire book, chronicling Moses’ farewell and death (31-34).

One feature that distinguishes Deuteronomy is that it is the first text to use a more elaborate system of theological monotheism, moving further away from the henotheisms and monalatrisms of the past. Moses is made to say, “[l]isten, Israel: Yahweh our God is the one, the only Yahweh. You must love Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength” (NJB, Deut. 6.4-5). In modern times this speech is still considered one of the most popular definitive statements for Jewish identity. Compare this passage to one of the most popular definitive statements for Christian identity: “For this is how God loved the world: he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. For God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but so that through him the world might be saved. No one who believes in him will be judged; but whoever does not believe is judged already, because that person does not believe in the Name of God’s only Son” (NJB, John 3.16-18). Thus, both Deuteronomy and John focus not just on the history of the religion, but on theological particularities coinciding with the movement away from storytelling and into formal declaration of faith.

Deuteronomy is also the only book to tell the reader directly to make sure that the laws of Yahweh be taught to their children:

In times to come, when your child asks you, “What is the meaning of these instructions, laws and customs which Yahweh our God has laid down for you?” you are to tell your child, “Once we were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt, and Yahweh brought us out of Egypt by his mighty hand. Before our eyes, Yahweh worked great and terrible signs and wonders against Egypt, against Pharaoh and his entire household. And he brought us out of there, to lead us into the country which he had sworn to our ancestors that he would give us. And Yahweh has commanded us to observe all these laws and to fear Yahweh our God, so as to be happy for ever and to survive, as we do to this day. For us, right living will mean this: to keep and observe all these commandments in obedience to Yahweh our God, as he has commanded us.” (NJB, Deut. 6.20-25)

The attempt by the author to persuade the reader to pass along the Deuteronomistic Law to his children shows an increase in utilizing psychological methods to ensure the Laws will be passed on to multiple generations. This “commercialization” of Moses’ law follows the continuous pattern throughout the four sources of the Pentateuch of an increasing focus on how information is disseminated and how it can inspire national and cultural loyalty. Dever describes these rhetorical strategies as “propaganda, designed to give theological legitimacy to a party of nationalist ultra-orthodox reformers, what has been called (along with the prophetic reform movements of the time) a ‘Yahweh alone’ party” (Dever 100).

Finkelstein and Silberman argue that part of this propaganda was using the figure of Joshua as a “metaphorical portrait of Josiah, the would-be savior of all the people of Israel.” They cite work done by Bible scholar Richard D. Nelson to show that Joshua is described in the Deuteronomistic history using terms normally only given to kings (Finkelstein 95). According to the Deuteronomistic history, Josiah was the greatest king ever: “No king before him turned to Yahweh as he did, with all his heart, all his soul, all his strength, in perfect loyalty to the Law of Moses; nor did any king like him arise again” (NJB, 2 Kings 23.25). Josiah, however, was killed in a battle around 600 B.C. by the Egyptian king Osammetichus I (23.29). Within the next quarter-century, four kings ruled over Judah before the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar conquered the kingdom and exiled many of its people to Babylon.

Finkelstein and Silberman also state that the prospect of conquering Israel under the Davidic dynasty served as the reason for producing the Deuteronomistic history:

The withdrawal of the Assyrians from the northern regions of the land of Israel created a situation that must have seemed, in Judahite eyes, like along-expected miracle . . . Finally it seemed possible for Judah to expand to the north, take over the territories of the vanquished northern kingdom in the highlands, centralize the Israelite cult and establish a great, Pan-Israelite state. Such an ambitious plan would require active and powerful propaganda. (Finkelstein 283)

Although the themes behind the other Pentateuch sources, especially P, could be considered “propaganda,” it is the Deuteronoimist that clearly takes the narrative to a new level of indoctrination.

The fourth stage of mythological development is polemic, which uses irony to retell the mythology through a different context. According to Frye, the fifth and final mode of the litereary “epochs” is irony, which can be divided into two fictional modes, the ironic tragedy (or “scapegoat”) and the ironic comedy (“sadism”), and one non-fictional mode, labelled “discontinuity.” According to Frye, the ironic tragedy tells the story of a scapegoat who is isolated by society, while the ironic comedy tells the story of an absurdist melodrama or satire (Frye 41, 47). Following these general qualities, I have divided polemic into the two fictional modes: the ironic tragedy and the satire; and the one non-fictional mode: the rhetorical treatise.

The Book of Deuteronomy can be distinguished apart from the Deuteronomistic History in its unique drive towards advancing the ideology behind the narrative, which, along with its first person narrative structure, provides ample reason to classify Deuteronomy as a rhetorical treatise. Rather than acting as a “history” in the normal fashion of starting at the beginning and moving chronologically, it acts more like a rhetorical thesis with historic points as support for a larger theological argument. The rest of the Deuteronomistic History can be classified as an epic history.

The quintessential format of the rhetorical treatise is to take a formal argument made by the author and to turn it into the dialogue of the protagonist, and in fact the entire Book of Deuteronomy is set up as a speech given from Moses directly to the reader of the text. When Moses calls out to the people of Israel, continuously repeating the words “Listen, Israel,” he is addressing the reader directly (4.1, 5.1, 6.4, 9.1). Moses’ monologue serves not to advance a plot but to persuade the reader to follow the laws of Yahweh, by providing these laws to the reader directly from the mouth of Moses from the start to near the end of the text. While romances like E use their characters as moral examples to follow, and epics like P create their plot around their arguments, the appeal from polemic such as D is more direct and personal.

Deuteronomy also shows qualities of ironic tragedy in the way it turns Moses into a divinely ordained scapegoat. The Deuteronomist uses ironic tragedy in blaming the death of Moses on the sin of the Israelites for their being afraid to take the Promised Land: “I then pleaded with Yahweh: ‘ . . . may I not go across and see this fine country on the other side of the Jordan, that fine upland country and the Lebanon?’ But, because of you, Yahweh was angry with me and would not listen.” (NJB, Deut. 3.23-26). Moses speaks to his readers “directly” in the first person, so that the readers are subsequently witnesses to his unjust death sentence by Yahweh, brought on by the ironic tragedy that Moses is punished for the sins of the people he saved.

T.H. White associated “Irony” and “Satire” with the “Contextualist” mode of argument, a perspective in which the writer picks out an element in history and then follows “the ‘threads’ that link the event to be explained to different areas of context . . . . both backward in time, in order to determine the ‘origins’ of the event, and forward in time, in order to determine its ‘impact’ and ‘influence’ on subsequent events” (White 18). The Deuteronomist likewise uses the point in time in which Moses is speaking to the people eleven days after leaving Mount Horeb and then traces the contextual threads both backwards to the events of the Exodus and forward to the reader’s time period. Thus the Deuteronomist provides an exemplary example of how a skilled rhetorician can break away from the storyteller’s limitations in following chronology and instead use history to support more direct arguments.

One final point of comparison to make the case that the Pentateuch story continued to be read and comprehended through the fourth stage of literary development is how it ultimately fits into the authoratative background in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Discovered inside multiple hidden caves in the desert west of the Dead Sea are 2,000 year-old-scrolls of every book in the Old Testament (except for Ruth). Alongside these canonical works are the unique non-biblical scrolls detailing various rules, hymns and poems, horoscopes, liturgies, blessings and curses, prophecies, wisdom literature, apocryphal works, and biblical interpretations used by the community, the vast majority of which can be classified as rhetorical treatises. Unlike Deuteronomy, these “secondary texts” do not even need to explain the Exodus story because because the reader is already assumed to be familiar with the “primary text.” The canon is instead used as the bedrock from which rhetorical arguments can be extrapolated.

The story of the Pentateuch serves as an ample example for the four-stage model of mythology developing from folklore into romance, from romance to epic, and from epic to polemic. By deconstructing the Pentateuch, much has been learned about the four source authors and two redactors of the story of Moses. When these phases of literature are put together, we see within the Old Testament a constant restructuring of the narrative by two rival priesthoods. Each narrative iteration up to and including the Redactor marks a pendulum swing between these two factions vying for dominance until all of the stories were synthesized into one set of narratives divided among five books. Each time the source text needed to be “updated,” the subsequent author advanced the story alonside a chain of necessities linked to receptibility and importance the subsequent narrative had become, starting with its romanticization, to its historicization, culminating in its commercialization. Just as the four sources of the Pentateuch came to be drawn together into one a single law-code/narrative, so too were the gospels and the Arthurian traditions inevitably drawn together into ever increasing sections of text, as the next two chapters will attempt to prove.

CHAPTER 3

THE FOUR GOSPELS OF THE APOSTOLIC TRADITION

The Synoptic Problem

The search for the historical Jesus, borne from a more critical examination of the New Testament, grew out of the German Enlightenment. Herman Samuel Reimarus, a German Deist and Enlightenment philosopher from the eighteenth century, is credited as the father of the Quest for the Historical Jesus for his seminal work The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples (1778), outlining the first known critical analyzation of the historical Jesus from a secular perspective. Reimarus envisioned Jesus as a political revolutionary who attempted to overthrow the Roman government through a peasant’s revolt, first when he sent his disciples out and then a second time when he marched on Jerusalem Temple grounds (Reimarus 62). Both the gospels and the epistles showed expectation of an immanent return of Jesus, and according to Reimarus, no number of miracles could change the fact that the Paraousia did not occur in the first century (86).

By the end of the eighteenth century, biblical scholars were debating the “Synoptic Problem,” the study of the complicated editorial relationship between the first three gospels, each of which exhibits a different background and goal while sharing a very large amount of common text. Before the 1800s, most Roman Catholic scholars accepted the traditional explanation from St. Augustine that the disciple Matthew had written his gospel first, that an apostle of Peter named John Mark had written the Gospel of Mark second, that a physician known to Paul named Luke had written the third gospel before the disciple John finished the fourth gospel at a very elderly age.

The German biblical critic Johann Jakob Griesbach first made the proposition that Mark was a short synopsis of Matthew and Luke during an address at an Easter celebration at the University of Jena in 1783. Six or seven years later, he drew up a more detailed “Demonstration that the Whole Gospel of Mark is Excerpted from the Narratives of Matthew & Luke,” arguing that Matthew had been written first and Luke second. This came to be known as the Griesbach Hypothesis, although it had been proposed earlier by the Welsh theologian Henry Owen in 1764 (Porter 3). Although Griesbach never mentioned Owen, an inventory of his estate shows he owned a copy of Owen’s work and Griesbach had visitied England.

David Friedrich Strauss, another German theologian who was greatly influenced by Reimarus, as well as Hegel and Darwin, wrote his own Life of Jesus (1835) some 50 years later. It became very popular. As the famed twentieth-century German theologian Albert Schweitzer puts it, the critical study of the life of Jesus “falls, immediately, into two periods, that before Strauss and that after Strauss” (Schweitzer 10). His book argued in favor of the Griesbach Hypothesis. Strauss studied theology at the evangelical seminary in Blaubeuren under the founder of the Tübingen school of New Testament interpretation, the famous German theologian, Ferdinand Christian Baur. Baur applied Hegel’s theory of dialectic to the history of religion in order to envision second-century Christianity as a synthesis of the thesis of Jewish Christianity and its antithesis, Pauline Christianity. Strauss himself worked on his book while he was a tutor for the school in Tübingen and then resigned in 1831 in order to study under Hegel in Berlin, only to have Hegel die soon after he arrived from a cholera epidemic.

Like most of the critical scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth century, Strauss considered the Gospel of John as greatly inferior in authenticity to the three Synoptics (Strauss, Critically 88). Rather than deciding whether Jesus’ eschatology was spiritual or political, Strauss combined the two, saying that Jesus “expected to restore the throne of David, and, with His disciples, to rule over a people freed from political bondage, but in this expectation He did not set His hopes on the sword of human followers . . . but upon the legions of angels and heavenly powers that He surrounds Himself . . .” (Strauss, Critically 296). Strauss at first viewed the eschatological passages as being the most authentic, just as Reimarus and Schweitzer did, but in 1864 he published A New Life of Jesus, also called Life of Jesus for the German People, in which he, in the words of Schweitzer, “undertook to draw a positive historic picture of Jesus” and “renounced his better opinions of 1835, eliminated eschatology, and instead of the historic Jesus, portrayed the Jesus of liberal theology” (Schweitzer 96). In this second book Strauss sought to purify Germany’s Protestant Reformation of ceremony and superstition by presenting a sympathetic if idealistic teacher who himself sought to purify Judaism of its worldly and political elements and turn people towards a more spiritual ethic of love.

Staruss’ works became infamous and he was heavily criticized from many different sides. Even Baur, who believed that Mark was written before Matthew, said that Strauss did not base his history on the manuscript traditions of the documents themselves. A former student of Hegel, Bruno Bauer, led the attack against Strauss from the scholarly side, criticizing his methods and arguing that he should not have taken the liberty of speaking for the Hegelians in his book. Strauss countered Bauer’s attacks in his book In Defense of My Life of Jesus Against the Hegelians (1837), arguing that the Hegelians simultaneously wanted and did not want his ideas to be associated with them, and referring to Bauer as a Right Hegelian and to himself as a Left Hegelian (Defense 38, 43).

Although Bruno Bauer had been an early leader of the Young (or Left) Hegelians, he had firmly rejected the teachings of his friend and student Karl Marx and espoused a republican alternative to liberalism and socialism while at the same time criticizing religious conservativism. The Young Hegelians as a group generally broke from Hegel’s metaphysics but retained his dialectical method as a critique on religion. Both Marx and Friedrich Engels began their studies as Young Hegelians, using the arguments to criticize the religious establishment in Prussia, but the two of them eventually broke with the group before their collaboration on the Communist Manifesto. Marx would go on to write several works against Bauer, including On the Jewish Question, completely rejecting his politics, but also wrote a tract shortly after Bauer’s death supporting his historical perspective on Christianity. A young Friedrich Nietzsche visited Bauer in his later years, during which time Nietzsche was convinced to write criticisms against Strauss as well (Waite 189; Nietzsche 278).

Bauer began his own investigation into the Historical Jesus and eventually came to the conclusion that not only the Gospel of John but also the Synoptic gospels had no historical value, arguing that the life of the gospel Jesus was a composite figure embodying not the experiences of the historical Jesus, but of the Church, and that the morals of Christianity were largely taken from a mixture of Philo’s Neo-Platonic Judaism, the religion of the “Therapeutae” mentioned by Philo, and the Stoic philosophy of Nero’s tutor, Seneca. Although Bauer started off believeing that the figure of Jesus must have been based on the personality of some distant figure, he eventually came to the conclusion that there never was a historical Jesus, as outlined in his work, Christ and the Caesars: How Christianity Originated from Graeco-Roman Civilisation (1877). Bauer’s book was not the first to dispute a historical Jesus. Constantin-François Chassebœuf and Charles François Dupuis, French Enlightenment philosophers from the 1790s, had hypothesized a mythical Jesus before him, but Bauer’s work marked the first time the position was taken up by a theologian. Bauer also saw the philosophy of Seneca in the Pauline epistles and so rejected the authenticity of all them, going even further than Baur and the Tübingen School, who claimed only the first four as being authored by Paul. The position that none of the Pauline epistles are historic was a very radical position for its time, and still remains so today, although it persists in the Dutch “Radical Criticism” represented scholars like the historican and theologian Allard Pierson.

Both Strauss and Bauer suffered from reactions against their works in their own time. Strauss was relieved of his theology position at University of Zürich before he even started and Bauer was banned from teaching in Prussia by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Despite their enormous influence on the beginnings of the Quest for the Historical Jesus, the central tenants to their theses would be quickly eclipsed by later work on the subject. Bauer’s conception of a mythical Jesus ultimately had little effect on the subsequent historical Jesus scholarship that followed, and the Griesbach Hypothesis, the Matthew-Luke-Mark chronology that Strauss had bitterly defended, was eventually replaced by the Two-Source Hypothesis, which gave Mark priority over the Synoptics.

In 1780s, the English theologian Herbert Marsh traveled to Germany where he learned the “Higher Criticism” of the Bible and upon his return became the first person in theological school to preach in English instead of Latin. He spoke out against the doctrines of justification by faith of the Calvinists and eventually became bishop of Llandaff. In 1801, Marsh devised a hypothesis of the inter-reliance of the Synoptic gospels that included a common collection of parables and wisdom sayings used by both Matthew and Luke, which he named Beth.

In 1835, the German philologist Karl Lachmann proposed in his thesis “De Ordine Narratonium in Evangeliis Synopticis” that the Gospel of Mark was the earliest gospel and that Matthew and Luke had copied from him. Three years later, Christian Gottlob Wilke came up with the same hypothesis independently in his work, The Earliest Evangelist. That same year, Christian Hermann Weisse combined the hypothesis of a common sayings source, or Logia, used by both Matthew and Luke with the hypothesis Markan priority two form what is today called the Two Source Hypothesis (Koester, Ancient 128). Weisse believed that the Logia was reproduced more faithfully in Matthew than in Luke (something most scholars today would disagree with), although divergences were greater in copying from the Logia than from Mark (Weisse 123-124). By the 1850s, Weisse came to accept a hypothetical third lost source, called “Ur-Markus,” a lost first edition of Mark that had been used by Matthew and Luke and was subsequently revised into the canonical Mark.

Weisse’s arguments for the “Two Source Hypothesis” were that it had the simplest plan among the gospels; that traces of a common plan for Matthew and Luke could only be found in Mark; and that when all three Synoptic gospels agreed, the “agreement” was mediated through Mark. In 1832, German theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher had come to a similar conclusion based on a quote from an early bishop of Hierapolis named St. Papias, as copied down by the fourth century church historian Eusebius:

Mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately whatsoever he remembered. It was not, however, in exact order that he related the sayings or deeds of Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied Him. But afterwards, as I said, he accompanied Peter, who accommodated his instructions to the necessities [of his hearers], but with no intention of giving a regular narrative of the Lord’s sayings. Wherefore Mark made no mistake in thus writing some things as he remembered them. For of one thing he took especial care, not to omit anything he had heard, and not to put anything fictitious into the statements. Matthew put together the Logia [of the Lord] in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best he could. (Eusebius, Church History 3.39.14-17)

This quote from St. Papias, given by fourth-century Father of Church History, Eusebius of Caeserea, is the earliest reference to Mark and Matthew as authors and is believed to have been originally written around 140 A.D. Of particular importance to the Synoptic question is the fact that it names Mark’s gospel first and a Logia of Matthew second (Ellegård 183). The word “Logia” was typically interpreted as designating a full-fledged Gospel of Matthew written in Hebrew or Aramaic, but Schleiermacher took the word to mean a collection of primitive wisdom sayings from which both Matthew and Luke had drawn. Thus, the Gospel of Matthew may have been named after one of its sources. Schleiermacher further concluded that the version of Mark that Papias referred to was also an earlier source and conjectured that it consisted of a more historical version of the canonical gospel (Farmer 15). Eusebius quoted Papias as claiming that he got his information from “the Lord’s disciples,” but Eusebius himself was skeptical regarding Papias’ literalism since other accounts were “more mythical” and “he appears to have been of very limited understanding, as one can see from his discourses” (Eusebius 3.39).

Weisse later adapted Schleiermacher’s idea of the Logia, as well as Ur-Markus, into his own hypothesis, but it was not popularized among German critics until the Protestant theologian Heinrich Julius Holtzmann endorsed the idea in 1863. Holtzman argued purely on literary standards the separation of the “sayings” source from the gospels, which he renamed Lambda, concluding that Luke had been truer to the original order of the sayings than Matthew, which most scholars today agree with (Mack 48). Only after his literary arguments for the existence of the sayings source did he use the Papias quote as a secondary confirmation. However, increased scepticism towards the Papias quote in the scholarly world in the twentieth century caused the Logia source to be given a more neutral term, Q, for the German word Quelle, meaning “source” (Hultgrin 27). The term is even more apt today as many scholars believe that the Q source contains more than just wisdom sayings.

Markan priority and the Q source have since become the bedrock of modern New Testament studies. Craig Blomberg writes in his book The Historical Reliability of the Gospels that the “virtual unanimity of support” was “due largely to the magisterial study from a previous version in 1924 by B. H. Streeter, The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins” (13). Streeter argued that there had been two other logia sources other than Q that contained nothing but wisdom sayings: Special Matthew, or M, and Special Luke, or L, each known only to their respective evangelists. This variant of the Two Source Hypothesis is known as the Four Source Hypothesis. Like Q, both M and L appear to have originated by authors using collections of “stray” sayings from a larger pool of oral tradition. Streeter argued that Q had come from Antioch, that M was a Jewish source from Jerusalem, that L was from Caeserea, and that Mark was a combination of traditions from Jerusalem, Antioch and Rome. Streeter noted that in the third gospel, there were large blocks of Mark combined with large blocks of Q and L, which he took to mean that Q and L were used to create a Proto-Luke gospel before Mark, after which the Infancy narrative of the third gospel was added in by “Luke.” While the majority of scholars went on to accept the existance of M and L, the existence of a Proto-Luke has become all but forgotten, but for a few stragglers (Hultgren 58).

Nevertheless, some scholars are still skeptical of the hypothetical source. In 1955, Anglican theologian and philosopher Austin Farrer wrote On Dispensing With Q, arguing that the hypothetical source was unnecessary since it was sufficiently plausible that Luke simply copied from Mark and Matthew, a model now called the Farrer-Gould Hypothesis. Wilke and Bauer had themselves envisioned a similar model in which Matthew had copied from Mark and Luke.

The debate around the Synoptic Problem marked the general scholarly focus of the first quest of the historical Jesus. However, in 1901, German Lutehran theologian William Wrede made an effective argument in his book The Messianic Secret in the Gospels that the “Messianic Secret” was a literary invention by Mark, throwing far more doubt on the earliest gospel’s historicity. Moreover, Albert Schweizer’s analysis of the first quest for the historical Jesus had produced a failed apocalyptic prophet that was unappealing to modern minds and his emphasis on the psychological motivations of the researcher went a long way in undermining popular confidence in the idea that an objective account of the historical Jesus was even possible. By exposing some of the liberal biases of Strauss, Holtzmann, Jülicher, J. Weiss, and others, Schweitzer helped bring the first quest of the historical Jesus full circle, back to the eschatological interpretations of Reimarus. Many scholars see Schweitzer’s criticism of the liberal scholarship of his own time as the “collapse of the quest of the historical Jesus” (Theissen 5).

The “New Quest” and the Jesus Seminar

Following the collapse of the original Quest for the Historical Jesus, interest in the subject waned for a long time, until it reemerged in a quieter form in 1953. The central figure in this “new quest” for the historical Jesus was the German Lutheran theologian and New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann. Interest in the subject grew primarily from a lecture in Marburg by one of Bultmann’s students, Ernst Käsemann, called “The Problem of the Historical Jesus.” The proceedings behind the second quest were developed primarily among Bultmann’s pupils, most prominently Käsemann and Günther Bornkamm, as well as other religious scholars like James M. Robinson, John A. T. Robinson, Edward Schillebeeck. Following Bultmann, the theologians of the “new quest” called for a distinct division between the earthly Jesus of history and the “kerygmatic” Christ of theology.

Proponents of the “new quest” for the historical Jesus often sought to use a priority of dissimiliarity to distinguish the historical Jesus by assuming that any content that different from religious opinions that grew up around is the most likely to have originated from the historical Jesus. Their methodological basis was to find a minimum of authentic Jesus traditions through a “criterion of difference” that excluded material derived from either Judaism or early Christianity (Theissen 7). However, this strategy would ultimately be abandoned as flawed according to a bias towards Orthodox Christianity and against Judaism and Gnosticism. Since 1907 Jewish scholarly research had been conducted alongside the “new quest” that sought to “bring Jesus home to Judaism” by portraying Jewish law as being central to his ideas and philosophy. D. Flusser’s Jesus (1969) and G. Vermes’ Jesus the Jew (1973) represented this Jewish tradition of historical Jesus scholarship that stayed clear of the “criterion of difference.”

The most important contribution from the “new quest” was that of form criticism, a method of literary deconstruction in an attempt to rediscover the original kernel of meaning, originally developed by Hermann Gunkel and his student K. L. Schmidt as a way to analyze the Old Testament. Gunkel, Schmidt and Bultmann then applied form criticism to the New Testament to make the case that the gospels were made up of small units shaped primarily by community needs rather than historical validity (Theissen 6).

In 1941, Rudolf Bultmann argued in his book The Gospel of John: A Commentary that the author of the Gospel of John had used a previous source that focused its narrative around seven particular miracles, or “signs,” a source text he dubbed the Signs Gospel. These seven signs are typically attributed as: 1) the Wedding at Cana (2.1-11); 2) The Official’s Son (4.46-54); 3) The Lame at Bethesda (5.1-9); 4) Feeding the Five Thousand (6.1-14); 5) Walking on Water (6.16-21), 6) Healing the Blind Man (9.1-38); and 7) The Resurrection of Lazarus (11.1-44) (Mack 178). Evidence that extra text was edited between the original signs includes a reference in John of “signs that he did” (NJB, 2.23) between “the first of Jesus’ signs” (NJB, 2.11) and “the second” (NJB, 4.54). The hypothesis of the Signs Gospel has since gained a fair amount of scholarly acceptance (Ellegård 190; Funk, Five 16; Mack 178). However, Bultmann not only separated a Signs Gospel from John, but also delineated portions of John that were changed by a later redactor, separating the fourth gospel into three distinct editions: 1) the Signs gospel, 2) a Gnostic redaction, and 3) an Orthodox redaction. Just as proponents of the Four Source Hypothesis have largely accepted Burnett Streeters’s hypothetical “M” and “L” sources while dismissing his estimation of a “proto-Luke,” so too have proponents of the Signs Gospel largely ignored Bultmann’s argument for an intermediary Gnostic layer.

Historical Jesus scholarship became popularized once again in 1985 when Robert W. Funk and John Dominic Crossan established the Jesus Seminar through the sponsorship of the Westar Institute, a non-profit organization based in Santa Fe, California, principally founded by Funk and dedicated to promoting liberal Christianity. The goals were to produce new translations of the New Testament and apocrypha and to enact a consensus on the authentic sayings and acts of Jesus. The proceedings resulted in three scholarly books: The Five Gospels (1993), which focused on the authentic words of Jesus; The Acts of Jesus (1998), which concluded that Jesus was an itinerant sage who was executed by the Romans as a public nuisance and did not rise from the dead; and The Gospel of Jesus (1999), which sought to combine the authentic sayings and actions into a single historical gospel story.[67]

The Five Gospels posits two possible models for the Synoptic Problem: Weisse’s Two Source Hypothesis and Streeter’s Four Source Hypothesis, minus proto-Luke. In defense of the hypothetical Q document, the Jesus Seminar cites the 1945 discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, a list of Gnostic or Semi-Gnostic sayings, as proof of an earlier written tradition in which there were only sayings and no exorcisms, healings, or crucifixion (Funk, Five 14-15). Although written in Coptic and dated around 340 A.D., the discovery of fragments of an earlier Greek version, labelled Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 655, proves that the sayings gospel format has a long history beside it. James M. Robinson’s work in the International Q Project dividing the Logia into compositional layers using form criticism, marks a transitional phase bridging the second and third quests for the historical Jesus. These early layers of Q have now become the focus for the modern scholars of the quest of historical Jesus, including the critical work of the Jesus Seminar, of which he is a member.

The Fellowship has also attributed Bultmann’s Signs Gospel to Jewish Christians, referred to as “Messianists” (Miller, Complete 176). Robert T. Fortna, one of the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar, reconstructed a version of the Signs Gospel in his work, The Fourth Gospel and its Predecessor (1988). Both it and Urban von Wahlde’s The Earliest Version of the Gospel of John (1989) were used for a Scholar’s Version of the Signs Gospel in The Complete Gospels (1992) (Miller 178). This assignment, however, is questionable. Despite its Jewish characteristics and a Messianic perspective, the Signs gospel uses the miracle of turning water into wine, which seems to be a reference to the more Hellenistic rite of the Eucharist. The reference in the Signs Gospel to catching 153 fish seems to be a reference to the Pythagorean “measure of the fish,” originating from pagan sacred geometry. This is a formula attributed to Archimedes to find the width and height ratio of two intersecting circles (265/153, or the square root of 3), forming a figure identical to the Christian fish symbol.

The agenda of the Jesus Seminar was to take an inventory of all the words attributed to Jesus within the first three centuries, cutting off at the Edict of Toleration issued by Constantine in 313 (Funk, Five 35). As one of their rules of evidence, the members gathered what is known about the transmission of oral tradition and found that people only remember sayings that are “short, provocative, memorable – and oft-repeated.” Working under this rule, it was assumed that the “earliest layer of the gospel tradition is made up of single aphorisms and parables that circulated by word of mouth prior to the written gospels” (Funk, Five 28). The agreed-on model by the academics was to vote on each Jesus saying using a four-point system and to create a “red-letter” edition of the New Testament with pink, gray, and black representing ever-lessening historic authenticity.

The sayings from the Gospel of Thomas were also included alongside the verses taken from the four canonical gospels. For all the controversy stirred up by allowing a single apocryphal gospel into the voting arena, no original sayings in Thomas were given a red rating and only two original and completely uncontroversial sayings were given a pink rating. However, the apocryphal gospel was still considered instrumental in providing an independent source for confirming the historicity of common sayings in the Q source (Five 549-552). Sayings that appeared in both Q and the Gospel of Thomas were given comparatively higher marks. In contrast, the entire Gospel of John – with two minor exceptions – was rendered completely in black.

The ultimate conclusion of the Jesus Seminar was that Jesus was a “laconic sage” who was “passive,” never initiating any debates, and never claimed to be the Messiah or the Son of God. The sayings attributed to Jesus in red lettering include: “turn the other cheek” (Funk, Five 143), “love your enemies” (145), a few of the beatitudes for the poor and hungry (289), the story of the Good Samaritan (323), and “pay to the emperor what is the emperor and to God what is God’s” (378); all of these are sayings that are most often associated with the “liberal Jesus,” though Jesus Seminar fellows like Crossan are more apt to identify him as “radical” rather than “liberal.” The apocalyptic sayings of Jesus, which had been so central to the historic conceptions of Reimarus and Schweitzer have all been relegated to pseudonymous attributions by apocalyptic followers after Jesus’ death. However, unlike the assumptions made by most of the scholars of the “first quest,” the dileneations are deduced from an analyzation of the texts using form criticism and were not so easily dismissed as psychological retrojections of their adherents.

In The Five Gospels, Funk shows that the “Little Apocalypse” in Mark refesr to events that could only have been known by writers from the First Roman-Jewish War in 70 A.D., such as the “abomination of desolation” and the famine that beset Jerusalem during the war (Funk 107-112). Many of the Q sayings also have apocalyptic meanings related to the “Son of Man” from Daniel, but Crossan shows that these two are part of a editorial layer that does not stretch back to Jesus. For example, Crossan points out that John 19.34-37 references Zechariah 12.10 as a prophecy about the Messiah being pierced and that Revelation combines this reference (”every one who pierced him”) with a prophecy from Daniel 7.13 about “one like a son of man,” which in this context translates as “one who looks like a human” (1.7, 1.13; Crossan, Historical 246). And even though 1 Thess. 4.13-18, Didakhe 16, Hebrews, and Revelation 1.13 all refer to the apocalypse of Daniel 7.13, they use different terms than the one Jesus uses in the Synoptic Gospels, such as “Lord” in 1 Thess. or “one like a son of man” in Revelation. Crossan argues that had Jesus used the titular “Son of Man” term as an apocalyptic prophecy for himself as he does in the Synoptic gospels, then the “Son of Man” as a title should have been present in each of these texts. Rather, the tradition appears to have started with various Christians ruminating on Zechariah 12.10 and then moving on to combining it with Daniel 7.13 (247).

Crossan also compares the Q saying from Luke, which says those who acknowledge Jesus will be acknowledged by the “Son of Man… in the presence of God’s angels” and what appears to be a later version from Matthew in which Jesus himself, not the “Son of Man,” declares the acknowledgment in heaven (12.8-9, 10.32-33). But since Crossan assigns the “Son of Man” to Mark, he reconstructs the original Q verse to say “Every one who acknowledges me before men will be acknowledged before the angels of my Father,” a stage removed its apocalyptic connotations as in the verse given to Jesus in Revelation: “I shall not blot that name out of the book of life, but acknowledge it in the presence of my Father and his angels” (NJB 3.5). These three layers in which Jesus is increasingly associated with the apocalyptic figure from Daniel can be seen in the “thief in the night” metaphor: the “thief” is identified as “the Lord” in 1 Thessalonians, “the Son of Man” in Q, and as Jesus in the first person in Revelation (1 Thess. 5.2; Luke 12.39-40, Matt. 24.43-44; Rev. 3.3, 16.15; Crossan, Historical 247-251).

Luke also holds the more authentic Q saying: “For just as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so will the Son of man be a sign to this generation,” whereas Matthew has: “For as Jonah remained in the belly of the sea-monster for three days and three nights, so will the Son of man be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights” (NJB 11.30; 12.40). Apocalyptic material regarding the people of Ninevah and the Queen of the South follows this verse, using the same “For as… so will” pericope found in Matthew. Other pericopes following the same theme can be found in Luke: “For as [ligthtning/Noah/Lot], so will it be like on the day of the Son of Man” (Luke 17.24-27). Since none of these apocalyptic pericopes appear in Mark but a reduced form of the Jonah verse does, it stands that the Jonah story is older and that the additions are part of an editorial layer of Q that attempted to reinterpret some of Jonah verse in light of the “Son of Man” theology (Crossan 251-253).

Crossan also notes that out of six versions of the pericope “Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour” found in two contexts in Matthew, two contexts in Luke, one in Mark and one in the apocryphal Didakhe, only one from Luke contains the apocalyptic title “Son of Man” (253-254). Nevertheless, the theme of “watching for Lord” still seems to have apocalyptic overtones. The metaphor of the landlord returning unexpectantly in Luke 12.35-39 attracted enough pink votes from the Jesus Seminar to be weighted in the gray range, but the members of the Seminar who considered it authentic believed the root metaphor to be rooted in a “secular sense” (Funk, Five 342).

Crossan believed that Jesus used the term “son of man” to mean “human,” as in the verses “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests; but the son of [humans] has nowhere to lay his head” or “the son of [humans] is lord even of the Sabbath.” This was also the original meaning behind the verse from Mark: “In truth I tell you, all human sins will be forgiven, and all the blasphemies ever uttered; but anyone who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven, but is guilty of an eternal sin.'” (NJB 3.28-29). The verse is confusing but the equivalent version in the Didakhe supplies what is probably the closest interpretation: “Do not test or examine any prophet who is speakiung in a spirit, for every sin shall be forgiven, but this sin shall not be forgiven” (Crossan 258). But once again, the verse was eventually reinterpreted in light of the apocalyptic Son of Man theology, so that in the second layer of Q it became “Everyone who says a word against the Son of man will be forgiven, but no one who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will be forgiven” (Luke 12.10 // Matt. 12.32). The Gospel of Thomas then confused the interpretation further by fitting it into a Trinitarian conception, saying: “Whoever blasphemes against the father will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against the son will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the holy spirit will not be forgiven on earth or in heaven” (Crossan 258).

Crossan also uses the contrast the gospels make of the “feasting” and “drunken” disciples of Jesus to the “fasting” and “wailing” of John the Baptist in Mark 2.18-20, Luke 7.31-35 and Matthew 11.16-19, interpreting this to mean that “John lived in apocalyptic asceticism and that Jesus did the opposite” (260). Yet in the conclusion of Thomas’ version of the banquet parable, Jesus says, “Buyers and merchants [will] not enter the places of my Father,” but rather, as in Luke, it is “the poor and maimed and blind and lame” that attend (261). So while Jesus’ followers were not ascetic, they also did not follow the normal ways of the world. Thus, the “kingdom” for Jesus was neither an apocalyptic endtime nor a typically Jewish understanding of the afterlife but an egalitarian “society of brotherhood in which there will be no rich and poor, in which no distinctions of rank and status save those between believers and non-beillvers will exist” (264). Crossan argues that Jesus originally adopted the apocalypticism of John but that at some point after John’s death he came to the conclusion that this understanding was not good enough (237-238). Jesus continued to think along escahatological terms, but here Crossan makes an important distinction in that eschatology is “the wider and more generic term for world-negation extending from apocalyptic eschatology, as just described, through mystical or utopian modes, and on to ascetical, libertarian, or anarchistic possibilities. In other words. All apocalyptic is eschatological, but not all eschatological is apocalyptic” (238). In other words, Jesus did speak of the kingdom as a utopian model of egalitarianism, and may have even insinuated as being some point in the future, but he did not emphasize it in terms of an imminenent violent destruction of the world like John did.

The verses that best describe Jesus’ attitude towards eschatology, if any were recorded, are “But if it is through the finger of God that I drive devils out, then the kingdom of God has indeed caught you unawares” and “The coming of the kingdom of God does not admit of observation” (Luke 11.20, 17.20). The Jesus Seminar ranked both of these verses pink. Funk explains it by saying that “Jesus conceived of God’s rule as all around him but difficult to discern. God was so real for him that he could not distinguish God’s present activity from any future activity. He had a poetic sense of time in which the future and the present merged, simply melted together, in the intensity of his vision. But Jesus’ uncommon views were obfuscated by the more pedestrian conceptions of John, on the one side, and by the equally pedestrian views of the early Christian community, on the other” (Funk 137).

The German New Testament scholar Dieter Lührmann was the first to recognize the apocalyptic “Son of Man” material belonged to a later redactional layer of the Q sayings in his 1969 book Redaktion der Logion-Quelle. This was followed up by John S. Kloppenborg’s 1987 book, The Formation of Q, which became an instrumental source for both Crossan and one of Bultmann’s students, the German-born American New Testament scholar Helmut Koester. In his book, Ancient Christian Writings, Koester writes that “[t]he sayings which speak about the coming Son of man for the final judgment and the addition of the title Son of man to older sayings belong to the second stage of this document which originally presented Jesus as a teacher of wisdom and as a prophet who announced in his words the presence of the kingdom” (Koester, Ancient 87). He deduces that of the 79 sayings in the Gospel of Thomas, 46 have equivalents in the original saying, Q1, but none of the material from the Q2 redaction is present (87-89). For example, Thomas 68 reads: “Blessed are you when you are hated and persecuted, and no place will be found, wherever you have been persecuted,” while Q2/Luke 6.22 reads: “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when people exclude you and reproach you, and cast your name as evil on account of the Son of man” (89). Thomas 20 correctly identifies the mustard seed as a “plant” or seasonal shrub, but in Q2/ Luke 13.18 it becomes the apocalyptic world tree of Daniel 4.12-22, which was to be cut down during the End Times (Koester 88; Crossan, Historical 276-279; Funk, Five 484).

Finally, almost a century after Schweitzer’s devastating critique on the vanity of “liberal scholarship” on the historical Jesus, the Jesus Seminar and their like-minded colleagues had been able to provide compelling textual proof that the rampant Jewish apocalypticism found in nearly every book of the New Testament was not present among the core teachings of Jesus. While Bible readers often interpret Jesus’ apocalyptic predictions as a prophecy about today’s future, no competetant secular historian could allow such a blantly biased assumption and so would have to concede that any Jesus who spoke of the apocalypse would have to been promising it for people in his own time, as in the Mark 9.1: “In truth I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power” (NJB) By relegating this negative personality trait of Jesus into a second stratum of editors, the Jesus Seminar was able to present a historical Jesus that could truly be a secular and religious hero, one that sought to create a brotherhood based on equality rather than one who made false promises about the sudden defeat of the Romans.

However, in doing so, the conclusions from the Seminar brought Jesus away from the nominal Judaism of which many of the Fellows themselves would like to place him. Their own approach has firmly connected the earliest stratums of wisdom sayings to a vulgarized form of Hellenistic philosophy, just as David Strauss’ nemesis Bruno Bauer had claimed over a century ago. Crossan makes a connection between variant directives given by Jesus in all three Synoptic gospels about journeying with a cloak, wallet, and staff to the Cynic philosophers who were famous for never going anywhere without their ragged cloak, wallet, and staff. A pseudographical letter attributed to the Cynic philosopher Diogenes lists the three traveling items on several occasions (Crossan, Jesus 115-118). Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher and former slave who espoused a “brotherhood of man” to the poor and humble, is quoted as saying that to be a Cynic one “[m]ust be flogged like an ass, and when he is flogged, he must love those who flog him,” a saying extremely close in spirit to Jesus’ famous commands to “[l]ove your enemies” and “pray for those who treat you badly” (Epictetus, Discourses 3.22.54; NJB, Luke 6.27-28). Crossan notices that the Epictetus sounds a little “too much like Jesus” as he criticizes apologies made to differentiate Jesus’ and Epictetus’ sayings on patient endurance, the virtues of celibacy, and even a metaphyiscal “kingdom,” although Crossan seeks to accentuate slight differences as well (Jesus 121). Cynic philosophy was more urbanized and based on self-reliance, while the wisdom sayings of Jesus are more rural and refined towards the community. Both acted as peaceful revolutions not against Rome in particular, but the exploitative nature of civilization itself. Despite these similarities, Crossan ultimately concludes that there is “no way of knowing for sure what Jesus knew about Cynicism” and that it is possible he “was just reinventing the Cynic wheel all by himself” (122).

Yet the similarities between the wisdom sayings and the Cynic movement do not end there. Nero’s Stoic philosopher, Seneca, taught that “[i]t is a petty and sorry person who will bite back when he is bitten” and quotes Socrates as saying, “[l]et whoever wishes insult you and harm you, but you still won’t suffer at all provided that you have virtue,” which is comparable to the verses, “You have heard how it was said: Eye for eye and tooth for tooth. But I say this to you: offer no resistance to the wicked. On the contrary, if anyone hits you on the right cheek, offer him the other as well” (Matt. 5.38-39). The “turn the other cheek” saying is believed to be a Q saying, while the introductory remark about “eye for an eye,” quoted from Ex. 21.24, is typical of the previous two beatitudes which have been introduced with “You have heard…” statements linked to Old Testament passages that are unique and typical to Matthew’ Gospel.[68] In Plato’s play Crito, Socrates is given a chance to escape execution but instead follows a voice that tells him to die in innocence rather than following Crito’s advice to escape and “go forth, returning evil for evil, and injury for injury.” Peter seems to take on a role similar to Peter in the gospels by trying to convince his master not to fulfill his fate as a martyr (Mark 8.33; Plato 16). The Epistle to the Romans also relates a tradition to “[b]less your persecutors . . . Never pay back evil with evil,” although it does not attribute the saying to Jesus (NJB, 12.14-17).

New Testament scholar Burton Mack, who takes a position very similar to the Jesus Seminar, writes in his 1989 book Who Wrote the New Testament? that the earliest layer of the sayings source, Q1, contains wisdom sayings that have a “remarkable resemblance to the Greek tradition of popular philosophy characteristic of the Cynic” while Q2 shows signs of a social formation that has become ostracized, with members choosing their families over the movement and Q3 reflected a period after the Roman-Jewish war (Mack 50). Mack sees the themes of Cynics and the “Jesus people” as “largely overlapping,” both seeing themselves as “physicians” whose profession was to diagnose the ills of society and reverse the normal standards of honor and shame. When Jesus is criticized for keeping bad company he says: “It is not the healthy who need the doctor, but the sick. I came to call not the upright, but sinners” (NJB Mark 2.17; Q1/Luke 5.32; Laertius 219). When Antisthenes, whom many late writers credit as founding the Cynic philosophy, was criticized for keeping bad company, his reply was said to be: “Well, physicians attend their patients without catching a fever” (55). The difference, as Mack sees it, was in the seriousness the “Jesus people” took new social vision, reflecting “the influence of a Jewish concern for a real, working society as the necessary context for any individual well-being,” so that they sett strict social codes for how to represent the movement in visited towns (51). Mack believed that it was only later that the “Jesus people” invented the gospel Jesus as a “self-referential authority for their founder-teacher” (60).

Koester compares the testimonies of the Stoic philosopher Dio Chrysostom on the Cynic ideal of self-sufficiency to the scriptural words, “I have learned to be content in whatever state I am... plenty and hunger, abundance and want” (Phil. 4.11-12; Koester, Intro I 359). Like Jesus, Dio criticized having to worry about wealth and property, saying, “...but in preference to wisdom are you going to seek riches...? You will become their slave... and will spend all your life worrying over them” (Discourses 10.16). Dio also called on people to “[c]onsider the beasts yonder and the birds, how much freer from trouble they live than men,” an allusion to a saying his mentor, the “Roman Socrates” Musonius Rufus, who when given the excuse of poverty for being unable to feed one’s children, gave the reply: “[w]hence do the little birds, which are much poorer than you, feed their young...? Well, then, do they put away food and store it up?” (Rufus 99). These words are comparable to a block of text in Matthew made up of sayings paralleled in both Q1 and Thomas:

“Do not store up treasures for yourselves on earth... But store up treasures for yourselves in heaven... No one can be the slave of two masters... You cannot be the slave both of God and of money. That is why I am telling you not to worry about your life and what you are to eat, nor about your body and what you are to wear... Look at the birds in the sky. They do not sow or reap or gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they are?” (NJB, Matt. 6.19-26)

The Stoic Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose own persecutions brought about the death of Justin the Martyr, quotes Antisthenes as saying, “It is royal to do good and be abused,” which can be compared to the beatitude from the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are those who are persecuted in the cause of uprightness: the kingdom of Heaven is theirs” (Aurelius, Meditations 7.36; Aurelius 39; NJB, Matt. 5.10). The Greek biographer Diogenes Laertius reports a similar quote said to be from Antisthenes, in which after being told that Plato spoke ill of him he replied, “It is a royal privilege to do well, and to be evil spoken of” (Laertius 218).

Cynics taught their ideas not only to aristocratic elites but also in street theater performances among the peasant class. They acted as populist preachers in the marketplaces and pilgrimage centers, “defacing the currency,” that is, the false values of the dominant culture (Branham 24). E. Vernon Arnold traces a “Stoic strain” within Christianity, describing it as part of a larger matrix of ascetic philosophies spreading across the Greco-Roman world, by comparing Stoic concepts like flesh/soul dualities and “seed-power” principles to identical language found in the Pauline epistles (Arnold 410, 421). Canadian historian and classical scholar Earl Doherty describes how not just the ideas of the wisdom sayings but the structure of their presentation was similar to the Cynic chreia, in which the teacher would respond to an objection with a surprising anecdote (Doherty 160). Stoics believed the governing principal within the universe was the Logos but it was the Platonics who turned the concept into “the channel of divine aid to the world” and “the image of God according to which humans were created” (Doherty 88). The second century Apostolic Church apologist Tertullian said that the heretical Christians used Hellenistic philosophy in their theology, accusing the Pauline heretic Valentinus of taking his system from Plato and that “Marcion’s better god, with all his tranquillity; he came of the Stoics” (Prescription 7). Another apologist, St. Irenaeus, asked what the point of sending Christ into the world if philosophy could reveal the truth about God (Against Heresies 2.14.6-7; Ehrman, Lost 191-192). Even the apocryphal book 4 Maccabees shows a fusion of Stoic ethics and Jewish history characteristic of the gospels (Arnold 23).

The uniquely Christian concept of the soul being trapped in the body was itself first popularized by Plato, and it is believed that his ideas were heavily influenced by Pythagoras and the Orphic and Dionysian mystery religions (Doherty 33). However, Plato himself describes Orphic initiates as vagrant beggar-priests who went door to door among the rich offering purification for the atonement of sins. Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé points out that Cynics often criticized the religious mysteries of their time for imparting the idea that people were automatically saved just by becoming initiates and reproached prayers that seemed relatively unimportant or were a substitute for action (Goulet-Cazé 65).

The Syrian satirist Lucian of Samosata complained that second century Cynicism had been pushed into the direction of a religious cult by writing a satire of the false prophet Peregrinus, who takes advantage of gullible Cynics before taking advantage of a group of Christians by using the same pseudo-philosophical rhetoric characteristic of the times (Branham 19-20). Other Hellenistic concepts from the Cynic and Stoic philosophies can also be found in the earliest parts of the Pauline epistles, along with descriptions of ship travel, imprisonment, stoning, itinerant preaching, and conflicts over kosher food being very similar to the legends surrounding Paul. A. A. Long writes that “[o]usted from the mainstream of Hellenistic philosophy, Cynicism degenerated into popular moralizing, satirical commonplaces, and charlatan street preaching” (Long 41). The author of Luke-Acts also seemed to be aware of the ambiguous connection Greek philosophy had with Christianity by writing a story about how Paul was able to convert some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers from Athens while other philosophers sneered at the idea of resurrection (Acts 17.16-34).

Certain famous references in Luke-Acts can also have literary connections to a play by the Greek tragedian Euripides about Dionysus called The Bacchae. Like the heavenly Jesus, Dionysus makes a reference to the futility of “kicking against the goad” (NJB, Acts 26.14; Bacchae 971). The chains of repressed initiates to the mystery miraculously fall off by themselves (Acts 12.7, 16.25; Bacchae 554). Like Jesus, Dionysus allows himself to be arrested and interrogated, saying, “Nothing can touch me that is not ordained” (Bacchae 484), just as the Gospel of Luke has Jesus say, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (23.34). Divine retribution is also promised in the play, where Dionysus says, “But I warn you: Dionysus who you say is dead, will come in swift pursuit to avenge this sacrilege” (Bacchae 548).

Although “liberal Jesus” scholars like Crossan typically give more focus on the Hellinistic philosophy steeped in the earliest layers of Christian literature than “apocalyptic Jesus” scholars like Schweitzer, a minor third group of “mythical Jesus” writers typically do a better job exploring the similarities between Christianity and the Hellenistic mystery religions of Dionysus. “Mythical Jesus” authors, most of who are outside the realm of theological scholarship, make the argument that the gospel Jesus is completely fictional and is based on a long line of Oriental deities following identifical motifs of death and resurrection.

While the author of Mark seems to have used a source with the same sayings as ones found in the “James” layer, redacted sayings from the appended version of Thomas or a similarly Gnostic-flavored sayings document can be found in the Gospel of John (111, 115).

The Two-Source Hypothesis vs. Griesbach Hypothesis

The literary arguments made for Mark being the earliest of the four gospels is exceedingly strong. Mark’s grammar and diction is more primitive and less literary than Matthew’s and Luke’s, and is more prone to redundancy (Streeter 29). If the author of Mark had copied from Matthew and Luke, then he would have had to have taken polished grammatical sentences and made them awkward and ungrammatical in his own gospel. The author of Mark also makes more factual mistakes which appear to be corrected by Matthew and Luke, such as Mark’s reference to “the days of Abiathar the high priest” (2.26), when in fact Abiathar was not high priest until long after the point of time brought up in the story. Matthew often has episodes with appended passages in which it would make no sense for Mark to leave out, such as additional arguments in defense of picking grain on the Sabbath (Talbert 353). Many passages in Mark appear to be far more authentic than in Matthew. For example, in Mark 10.35-41 portrays James and John as selfishly desiring power, but Matthew 20.20-28 augments the story by making their mother ask Jesus for this power on their behalf. Biblical scholar Robert Funk lists four reasons in The Five Gospels for accepting the priority of Mark: 1) Agreement between Matthew and Luke begins where Mark begins and ends where Mark ends; 2) Matthew reproduces about 90% of Mark while Luke uses 50%, often in the same order as Mark, and when they disagree, either Matthew or Luke supports the sequence in Mark; 3) In the “triple tradition,” where all three sources tell the same story, the verbal agreement is about 50%; and 4) Mark very often agrees with Matthew or Luke against the other but only rarely do Matthew and Luke agree against Mark (10-11). But perhaps most striking of all is that Mark has the lowest Christology of the four gospels, providing the simplist and most human portrayal of Jesus in relation to God and the cosmos.

New Testament scholar Delbert Burkett dileneated a chapter of linguistic analysis to prove that the Matthew has a redactional layer absent from Mark, proving that Mark could not have copied directly from Matthew (43-59). Matthew’s favorite word “then” (τότε), which is used 90 times in Matthew’s gospel, is found in only five of the 44 instances where there is a parallel verse in Mark and only seven of the 40 instances in Luke. Matthew uses the word “came” (προσελθὼν) at least 51 times, but it is found in only three of the 34 instances where there is a parallel in Mark, only five of the 27 instances where there is a parallel verse in Luke, and never in Luke’s version of Q. A form of the word “say” (φημί) is used 16 times by Matthew but not in the 16 parallels in Mark and only once in the 15 parallels in Luke. There are similar absenses in Mark and Luke of Matthean terms such as “called” (λεγόμενος), “from there” (ἐκεῖθεν), “withdraw” (ἀνακάμψαι), “do homage” (προσκυνῆσαι), “leave” (μεταβῇ), “it happened” (καὶ ἰδοὺ), and the “presence” signifying the end of the world (παρουσία). Matthean phrases like “This took place to fulfill…”, “to heal every disease and every sickness”, “he had now finished…”, and “I desire mercy not sacrifice” are more often than not missing from Mark and Luke without a good explanation.

The author of Matthew also corrects Mark’s use of the word “king” for Herod, instead substituting the more accurate title of “tetrarch” in the beginning of the story of John the Baptist’s beheading (NJB, Mark 6.14; Matthew 14.1). However, in what is considered proof of the phenomenon of “editorial fatigue,” the author of Matthew then relapsed into quoting directly from Mark by using the term “king” (NJB, 14.9). The author of Matthew shows similar fatigue in not editing out the portion in Mark that says Herod did not want to kill John the Baptist. In Mark, the passage reads: “Herod was in awe of John, knowing him to be a good and upright man, and gave him his protection. When he had heard him speak he was greatly perplexed, and yet he liked to listen to him” (NJB, 6.20). In Matthew, Herod “wanted to kill him but was afraid of the people” (NJB, 14.5). Both versions say that Herod becomes “distressed” by Herodias’ request for John’s head, but considering Herod’s desire to kill the Baptist, Matthew’s context moves against the flow of the story (NJB, 14.9; Goulder 376-77). An even stronger instance of “editorial fatigue” in Matthew can be seen when Jesus cures a man of leprosy and then tells the man not to talk to anyone about it even though they were surrounded by “large crowds” at the time (NJB, 8.1). At the equivalent part in Mark, Jesus and the blind man are alone (1.40), so it is more likely that Matthew was quoting Mark without considering the context, especially since Matthew’s author differs from Mark in being unconcerned with Jesus keeping his powers a secret (Goulder 319).

The late twentieth century saw a withering in support for the Griesbach Hypothesis, though it was defended by Harold Riley in his 1989 book, The Making of Mark: An Exploration, devoting a commentary on the entire gospel to explain the reasoning Mark may have had in creating a synopsis gospel out of Matthew and Luke. As Riley points out, the Griesbach Hypothesis renders impossible the generally accepted characteristics that are attributed specifically to Mark, such as the unfavorable portrayal of the disciples as well as the “Messianic Secret,” which hides knowledge of Jesus being the Messiah until after the resurrection (Riley 213). However, these themes are important to the plot in the Gospel of Mark and can hardly be dismissed as a product of the imagination of recent critics. As Paula Fredriksen says, “Much of Mark’s gospel is structured around this paradox of hiddenness and recognition, and much of his story is about not understanding the story” (Fredriksen, From 46).

Like the Farrer-Gould model, the Griesbach Hypothesis also rules out the existence of Q, a possibility that became far less acceptable to scholars before the discovery of the sayings document known as the Gospel of Thomas (Ehrman, Lost 57). But despite what could be called a confirmation of the “sayings gospel” genre, some scholars such as Phillip Jenkins believe the Gospel of Thomas to be based on the canonical gospels and that any relationship to Q is coincidental (Jenkins 71; Barnstone 300). The existence of a Q document provides the best explanation for why some material common to Matthew and Luke is more primitive in Matthew and other material is more primitive in Luke. For example, the passages in the Gospel of Luke in which Jesus tells the people to “[l]ove your enemies” uses the more original form of Semitic poetry, while Matthew breaks the poetry apart to make it more appropriate for prose literature (NJB, 6.27-36). If Luke had been copying from Matthew, then the evangelist would have had to break up a formally written passage into a style more suited to Semitic oral tradition that is completely uncharacteristic of his gospel.[69] A similar instance happens in which the author of Luke preserves the more poetic style in his warning about Noah and the flood, while the parallel in Matthew appears to be a secondary version.[70] In the middle of Matthew’s version of the Sign of Jonah, a story common to Matthew and Luke, there is a verse about how the Son of Man will be in the earth for three days just as Jonah was swallowed for three days (12.40). As New Testament scholar Charles Talbert points out, this verse “interrupts the entire thought of Luke” and “makes complete nonsense of the condemnation of ‘this generation’ as evil and adulterous and the declaration that no sign will be given” (Talbert 361). Given that Luke in this case uses the more original form of the story, it is unlikely that he was copying from Matthew.

The central claim of Riley’s book is that Mark alternated between Matthew and Luke, creating a “zigzag” pattern that he says many Markan priorists recognized but could explain (Riley xiv-xv). However, a clear “zigzag” is only readily apparent in one portion of the table of equivalent gospel verses the Synoptic gospels listed side-by-side. In this portion, it appears as if the author of Mark has moved from Luke’s “Parable of the Covered Lamp” to Matthew’s “Mustard Seed/Yeast Parables,” to three Luke stories (“Calming of the Storm,” “Gerasene Exorcism of ‘Legion’,” and the “Raising of Jarius’ Daughter”), to Matthew’s “Rejection at Nazareth,” to Luke’s “Commission of the Twelve.”

Table showing “zigzag” Matthew Mark Luke

The Meaning of the Sower 13.18-23 4.13-20 8.11-15

Parable of the Covered Lamp 4.21-25 8.16-18

Mustard Seed/Yeast Parables 13.31-35 4.26-34

Calming of the Storm 4.35-41 8.22-25

Gerasene Exorcism of ‘Legion’ 5.1-20 8.26-39

Raising of Jarius’ Daughter 5.21-43 8.40-56

Rejection at Nazareth 13.53-58 6.1-6

Commission of the Twelve 6.7-13 9.1-6

Herod’s Concern 14.1-2 6.14-16 9.7-9

Death of John the Baptist 14.3-12 6.17-29

Return of the Twelve 6.30-31 9.10a

(Table based on Riley xi)

The “zigzag” correlation is compelling, but there are literary problems with the assumption that the author of Mark was switching between sources. In fact, all the examples in Mark listed in Riley’s “zigzag” show a connection to both Matthew and Luke. In the “Parable of the Covered Lamp,” Mark and Matthew both use the word “tub” as the first metaphorical lamp cover, while Luke uses the word “bowl,” meaning Mark was probably not copying only from Luke.[71] Since Matthew is the only one to reference Psalm 78.2 following the Parable of the Mustard Seed, both Luke and Mark would have needed to independently drop the reference for no apparent reason.[72] Mark and Matthew, but not Luke, have Jesus say “Why are you so frightened?” to his disciples during the “Calming of the Storm” (NJB, Mark 4.40; Matt. 8.26; Luke 8.25). In the “Raising of Jarius’ Daughter,” Mark and Matthew also agree in quoting the words of Jarius and the thoughts of the sick woman directly to the reader, while Luke shortens the narrative through a quick description, again proving Mark could not have copied solely from Luke (NJB, Mark 5.23; Matthew 9.18; Luke 8.41). Even Riley admits that “Mk 5:28 follows Mt 9:21 in explaining the woman’s motive for touching Jesus” (Riley 62). In the “Gerasene Exorcism of ‘Legion’,” Mark and Matthew agree that the people from Gerasene “implore” Jesus to leave, while Luke says that they “ask” him to go.[73] In the “Rejection at Nazareth,” Matthew 13.54 leaves out the detail included in both Mark 6.2 and Luke 4.16 that Jesus was teaching on the Sabbath (Painter 38). Mark and Matthew use the term “spirits of uncleanliness” while Luke in this instance uses “demon,” although he had no problem using the term “unclean spirit” as in Luke 11:24.[74] If we take all these points into consideration and add in some references missing in Riley’s graph, we see that the “zig zag” quickly loses its shape.

The “zigzag” dissipates Matthew Mark Luke Thomas

Parable of the Sower 13.1-23 4.1-20 8.1-15 9

Parable of the Weeds 13.24-30 57

Parable of the Covered Lamp (5.15-16) 4.21-25 8.16-18 33

Jesus’ Mother and Brothers (12.46-50) (3.31-35) 8.19-21 99

Parable of the Growing Seed 4.26-4.29 ~21d

Parable of the Mustard Seed 13.31-32 4.30-32 (13.18-19) 20

Parable of the Yeast 13.33 (13.20-21) 96

Things Hidden in Parables 13.34-35 4.33-34

Calming of the Storm (8.23-27) 4.35-41 8.22-25

Exorcism of ‘Legion’ (8.28-34) 5.1-20 8.26-39

Raising of Jarius’ Daughter (9.18-25) 5.21-43 8.40-56

Weeds Parable Explained 13.36-43

Parable of Hidden Treasure 13.44 ~109

Parable of the Pearl 13.45 76a

Parable of the Net 13.47-52 ~8

Rejection at Nazareth 13.53-58 6.1-6 (4.14-30) ~31

Commission of the Twelve (10.1-42) 6.7-13 9.1-6

Herod’s Concern 14.1-2 6.14-16 9.7-9

Death of the Baptist 14.3-12 6.17-29

Return of the Twelve 6.30-31 9.10a

However, there are problems with assuming that Matthew and Luke copied each of these stories from Mark independently. While Mark and Matthew may share the “tub” reference in the “Parable of the Covered Lamp,” Riley does have a point in connecting Mark with Luke since both refer to a bed that Matthew curiously leaves out, but then Matthew and Luke both extend the metaphor to a house being lightened after the lamp is put on the lampstand, though the language is not exactly the same. Mark and Luke both ask an introductory question to the “Parable of the Mustard Seed” that Mathew leaves out, which is another point against Riley, but both Matthew and Luke use the word “tree” while Mark does not.[75] Both of these cases seem to hurt the Two Source Hypothesis although in these cases it could be argued that Matthew and Luke took the non-Markan material from the Q sayings source. However, “Jesus Calms the Storm” is an especially troublesome story for the Two Source Hypotheses because not only do Matthew and Luke use the word “disciples” in the same spot missing from Mark, but they both leave out Mark’s references to other boats, Jesus’ cushion, the disciples sarcastically waking Jesus up, and Jesus’ command “Quiet now! Be still!” (NJB, 4.39; Burkett 10).[76] It would be very strange that a miracle story would be in the middle of a sayings source like Q and that both Matthew and Luke chose it over the longer version of the story in Mark.

In the “Raising of Jairus’ Daughter,” Mark and Matthew includes inner dialogue from the woman with a blood issue that Luke does not have while Mark and Luke have an exchange between Jesus and his disciples after the woman touches him that Matthew lacks. Matthew mentions the crowd being forced outside and Luke names three disciples allowed in the room with Jesus while Mark seems to combine both story elements, mentioning both the crowd being thrown out and unnamed disciples going in. Although this hurts Riley’s “zig-zag” hypothesis, it nevertheless supports the Griesbachian concept that Mark is a synopsis of Matthew and Luke.

In the “Commission of the Twelve,” Mark is also the only one of the three that says the twelve disciples were sent out two by two even though Luke later has Jesus send out 72 followers in this fashion (Luke 10.1). When Jesus sends out the disciples in Mark, he only gives them authority over demons while both Matthew and Luke include the power to cure diseases, preach the gospel, and heal the sick, an uncanny coincidence if they were copying from Mark independently or an out-of-place biographical detail if they were both copying from the sayings source. The German Biblical scholar Andreads Annulat has counted around a thousand such “minor agreements” between Matthew and Luke against Mark (Burkett 9).

Although Riley’s “zig-zag” has major problems, theologian Thomas R. W. Longstaff, in his book, Evidence of Conflation in Mark? A Study in the Synoptics Problems, has put forth six notably smaller zig-zag examples to support the Griesbach Hypothesis, two of which are rather compelling. The first example is in the story of the preperation for Passover, in which Longstaff shows how Mark zig-zags from Matthew to Luke to Matthew to Luke to Matthew to Luke to Matthew again as he conflates the two of them:

Matthew 26.17-19: “Now on the first day of Unleavened Bread the disciples came to Jesus to say, ‘Where do you want us to make the preparations for you to eat the Passover?’ He said, ‘Go to a certain man in the city and say to him, ‘The Master says: My time is near. It is at your house that I am keeping Passover with my disciples.’ The disciples did what Jesus told them and prepared the Passover. When evening came he was at table with the Twelve.” (NJB)

Luke 22.7-13: “The day of Unleavened Bread came round, on which the Passover had to be sacrificed, and he sent Peter and John, saying, ‘Go and make the preparations for us to eat the Passover.’ They asked him, ‘Where do you want us to prepare it?’ He said to them, ‘Look, as you go into the city you will meet a man carrying a pitcher of water. Follow him into the house he enters and tell the owner of the house, ‘The Master says this to you: Where is the room for me to eat the Passover with my disciples? The man will show you a large upper room furnished with couches. Make the preparations there.’ They set off and found everything as he had told them and prepared the Passover. When the time came he took his place at table, and the apostles with him.” (NJB)

Mark 14:12-21: On the first day of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover lamb was sacrificed, his disciples said to him, ‘Where do you want us to go and make the preparations for you to eat the Passover?’ [13] So he sent two of his disciples, saying to them, ‘Go into the city and you will meet a man carrying a pitcher of water. Follow him, and say to the owner of the house which he enters, ‘The Master says: Where is the room for me to eat the Passover with my disciples? He will show you a large upper room furnished with couches, all prepared. Make the preparations for us there.’ The disciples set out and went to the city and found everything as he had told them, and prepared the Passover. When evening came he arrived with the Twelve. And while they were at table eating, Jesus said, ‘In truth I tell you, one of you is about to betray me, one of you eating with me.’ They were distressed and said to him, one after another, ‘Not me, surely?’ He said to them, ‘It is one of the Twelve, one who is dipping into the same dish with me. Yes, the Son of man is going to his fate, as the scriptures say he will, but alas for that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! Better for that man if he had never been born.’” (NJB)

Table showing zigzag Matthew Mark Luke

“The first day of Unleavened Bread” 26.17a 14.12a ~22.7a

“Passover… sacrificed” 14.12b 22.7b

“preparations for you to eat the Passover?” 26.17b 14.12c ~22.8

Sends two disciples (Luke: Peter & John) 14.13a 22.8

“Go to” (“Ὑπάγετε εἰς τὴν”) 26.18a 14.13b ~22.10a

“meet a man carrying a pitcher of water” 14.13c-16 22.10b-12

“When evening came… with the Twelve” 26.19 14.17-21 ~22.13

It would not be out of place for Matthew to leave out some parts of Mark or for Luke to rewrite parts of Mark, but it would be quite a coincidence for Matthew to leave out the exact same parts that Luke chose not to rewrite (Longstaff 138). Although this is evidence towards the argument that Mark conflated two sources, it does not necessarily prove that those two sources were Matthew and Luke rather than sources shared by Matthew and Luke (Burkett 121). Although it is possible that Mark would have changed Luke’s “Peter and John” to two unnamed disciples since neither Petter nor John is given a flatering portrayal by the evangelist, we know that Luke had a habit of pairing Peter and John together, as in Acts 3-4, so it would make more sense for Luke to identify the two unnamed disciples as Peter and John.

Longstaff also shows how Mark combined the elements from two versions of the story in which Jesus heals Simon’s mother-in-law. Luke says that Jesus left a synagogue to go to Simon’s house and Matthew says that Peter’s mother-in-law was “in bed and feverish” (NJB 4.38; 8.14). Mark says that Jesus left a synagogue to go to Simon’s house, where Simon’s mother-in-law was “in bed and feverish.” Luke says that the disciples asked Jesus to do something, and Matthew says that Jesus touched her hand to heal her. Mark says the disciples ask Jesus to do something, and so Jesus takes her by the hand and helps her up, which heals her (1.29-31). Matthew says that in the evening many broght the demon-possessed to Jesus and Luke says that at sunset the sick were brought to him (8.16; 4.40). Mark says “[t]hat evening, after sunset,” both the sick and the demon-possessed were brought to him (NJB 1.32). Now, even though Luke does not say the demon-possessed were brought to Jesus, it does say, almost as an afterthought, that “[d]evils too came out of many people,” an expression shared by Mark. Thus, in this case, it appears Matthew’s short version of Jesus healing the sick was the earliest, then Luke’s version changed “evening” to “after sunset” to imply it was dark and had demon-possession appended to the end, then Mark’s version combined the two, saying it was both “in the evening” and “after sunset,” and cleaned up the phrasing so that both the sick and demon-possessed were brought to Jesus.

Burkett has determined that out of the seventeen examples in which Matthew and Luke each use only one of Mark’s dual temporal expressions (such as “in the evening” / “after sunset”), fourteen of them involve Matthew using one expression and Luke using the other. For example, Luke says “the news of him travelled all through [εἰς πάντα τόπον] the surrounding countryside,” while Matthew says that “[h]is fame spread throughout [εἰς ὅλην] Syria” (4.37; 4.24 NJB). Mark combines these these experessions to say: “his reputation at once spread everywhere [πανταχοῦ], through all [εἰς ὅλην] the surrounding Galilean countryside” (1.28 NJB; Burkett 124). In another example, Matthew says that crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judaea and Transjordan follow Jesus, while Luke says that crowds from Judaea, Jerusalem, Tyre and Sidon follow him (4.25, 6.17). Mark combines these to say that the crowds came from Jerusalem, Idumaea, Transjordan, Tyre and Sidon (3.8). Whereas Luke says a possessed man “had been living… in the tombs” and Matthew says that two possessed men came “out of the tombs,” Mark relays that one possessed man “came out from the tombs” and that he “lived in the tombs” (NJB 8.27; 8.28; 5.2-3). The demons inside the possessed man ask that they be sent “into the herd of pigs” in Matthew or “into these” in Luke, but in Mark they ask, “Send us to the pigs, let us go into them” (NJB 8.31; 8.32; 5.12). Luke says Jesus tells two disciples to go to a village where they will find a colt “as you enter it,” Matthew says they will find a colt and a donkey “at once,” and Mark says that “as you enter it you will at once” see the colt (NJB 19.30; 21.2; 11.2). Luke has Jesus warn Peter that “today”(σήμερον) he will deny him three times, Matthew says that it will happen “this very night,” and Mark says that it will happen “this day [σ ήμερον], this very night” (NJB 22.34; 26.34; 14.30). Matthew says that Joseph of Aramathea came “[w]hen it was evening,” Luke says he came on “Preperation day,” and Mark says that he came when “[i]t was now evening, and since it was Preparation Day” (NJB 27.57; 23.54; 15.42; Burkett 123-126). Burkett calculates the odds of this happening all fourteen times by coincidence as being 155 to 1 (127).

There is also evidence that distinct Markan language did not transfer over the Matthew and Luke despite no evidence that it went against the latter two evangelists’ writing styles. An analysis of the Synoptic gospels shows that Mark’s wording was not used by Matthew 60% of the time and Luke 74% of the time. One of the distinctive grammatical signatures of Mark is his use of the word polus, or “many” (πολὺς) and its variations. Out of the 58 times Mark uses a version of the word, Matthew uses the same term only twelve times and Luke only nine times. This is especially prevalent in the “Raising of Jairus’ Daughter,” where three forms of the word in seven different places are missing from both Matthew and Luke (14-17). Mark also uses the word “again” 15 times and is each time dropped by both Matthew and Luke (17-18). In nine instances of the word “see,” Matthew uses a variant of the word four times and Luke two times, but in none of the cases did Matthew or Luke use the exact form of the word (18-19).[77] Burnett Streeter, the first biblical scholar who introduced the Four Source Hypothesis, noticed that the “Central Section” of Luke includes seven short “doublets” of sayings that can be found elsewhere in Luke derived from a Markan context (Streeter 204). He also pointed out that while Mark 1:14 says that Jesus went to Galilee, Matthew 4:13 and Luke 4:16 both say that Jesus went to “Nazara,” a unique form of the word “Nazareth” not found anywhere else in the New Testament (206).

Not only words but certain themes and motifs of Mark also appear to be missing from Matthew and Luke without good reason. In thirteen cases where Mark describes Jesus or his disciples looking around in a circle, or being in a circle of people, or going “around about” villages, Matthew has no mention of the “circle” in all twelve equivalent verses he shares with Mark, and Luke has only two of eleven equivalent verses: once when Jesus looks around and once when Jesus is going “round about” villages (Burkett 24-25). Two-thirds of Mark’s references to Jesus or his disciples teaching are missing from Matthew and Luke (26-27). Out of seven episodes in which Jesus is described as being mobbed by crowds, an equivalent episode appears eleven total times between Matthew and Luke, yet none of them carry over Mark’s theme of pressing crowds (27-28).

Typically Markan language like “amaze,” “argue,” “rush,” “about,” “at-once,” and “asked” and similar forms are usually missing from both Matthew and Luke (28-30).[78] For example, Mark 9.14-16 reads: “As they were rejoining the disciples they saw a large crowd round them and some scribes arguing with them. At once, when they saw him, the whole crowd were struck with amazement and ran to greet him. And he asked them, 'What are you arguing about with them?'” (NJB). Yet Matthew 17.14 and Luke 9.37 mention only that the crowd met with Jesus, providing strong evidence that Mark expanded this passage from a prior source using his own linguistic style. Not only that, but the parts of the exorcism story in Mark 9.17-27 that are missing from Matthew and Luke, when removed, seem to make up an alternative exorcism story that Mark must have conflated with the one in used by Matthew and Luke (Burkett 32-35).[79] The exorcism shared with Matthew and Luke is on an “unclean spirit” causing seizures and focuses on the faith of the disciples while the one unique to Mark is on an “unspeaking and mute spirit” and focuses on the faith of the father (35). The crowd is already present in the first story in verse 14 yet but arrives for the first time in the second story in verse 25 and while the boy is immediately cured in the first story, he dies and is resurrected in the second story.

Mark uses the word efn for “he-said” six times and out of the ten total times the equivalent verse appears in Matthew or Luke, all ten use either eipen or legei, different words with the same meaning as efn. Yet out of the sixteen times Matthew uses efn, Mark fails to use it all eight times and Luke all ten times that they have the equivalent verse. And out of the eight total instances where either Mark or Matthew has a verse containing one of Luke’s eight uses of efn, only once does one of them (Matthew) use the same word. The most likely explanation for this three-fold statistic is that Mark, Matthew and Luke each used one or more sources that did not include the word efn very much and that all three of them decided to abbreviate other equivalent words by replacing them with that one, but because they did so independently, the changes were made in different places (19-21).[80]

The evidence indicates that neither the Griesbach Hypothesis nor the Two Source Hypothesis are strictly true. While Griesbach theorists correctly detected the verse-by-verse combinations that Mark made with a Matthew-like gospel and Luke-like gospel, they fail to acknowledge the independent departures that Matthew and Luke from its general structure. And while Two Source theorists have a better grasp the archaic nature of Mark, they in turn missed or explained away the “minor agreements” between Matthew and Luke as late and unimportant scribal changes. By having combined elements from different versions of the same story, the Gospel of Mark has in many places slightly longer and more detailed episodes than his counterparts in Matthew and Luke, but Matthew and Luke both possess a much larger archive of stories, most of which Mark probably would have used if he had known about them. But a general explanation of Markan priority is not good enough. In order to provide the most accurate solution to the Synoptic Problem, we will need to examine more complex models involving multiple lost Proto-Markan gospels.

The “Secret Gospel of Mark”

So, what other possibilities are there besides the Two Source Hypothesis and the Griesbach Hypothesis that could account for all of these differences? Julius Holtzmann, the scholar mentioned earlier who had named the Q sayings source lambda, posited in 1863 that there was an earlier version of Mark’s gospel which he called Ur-Marcus. If all three of the canonical gospel authors had used Ur-Marcus as a source, then that would explain the similarities between Matthew and Luke absent in Mark, making it a popular conjeture among Mark prioritists, but a single proto-Markan gospel would not explain the combinations of Matthew and Luke in Mark as inherent in the Griesbach hypothesis.

Ur-Marcus, however, would not stir up anything close to the kind of controversy surrounding the Gospel of Mark over a century later. In 1973, a professor of ancient history and former Episcopalean priest named Morton Smith claimed to have discovered a secret correspondence between the second century theologian Clement of Alexandria and a fellow Christian named Theodore outlining and even quoting from a now-lost version of Mark, transcribed to the appendix of a 17th century printed edition of Ignatius of Antioch. The letter was a response to an inquiry by Theodore about the Secret Gospel of Mark, which Clement explains was a second more “spiritual” gospel written for the more spiritually elite in Alexandria. Quoting the secret gopel, Clement reveals a passage reminiscient of the Lazarus story from the Gospel of John:

And they come into Bethany. And a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and says to him, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me.’ But the disciples rebuked her. And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightway a great cry was heard from the tomb. And going near, Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb. And straightaway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand. But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb, they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Jesus told him what to do, and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan. (Barnstone 342)

Clement, however, explains to Theodore that, unlike in the Caprocratian version of the “secret gospel,” the text does not say “naked man to naked man” and that the Carpocration sect had added that part to the secret gospel to explain their own debauched carnal rituals. Clement then quotes another verse soon afterwards:

Then he came into Jericho. And the sister of the young man whom Jesus loved was there with his mother and Salome, but Jesus would not receive them. (Barnstone 342)

Clement is about to describe the spiritual signifigance of this passage when the letter suddenly cuts off, leaving the reader hanging.

The “secret gospel” sent shock waves through the circles of Biblical scholarship. Gospel scholars naturally wanted the ink to be tested to ensure its authenticity. Smith claimed to have left it in the monestary library, which was largely closed to the public, so the only proof of the text was in Morton Smith’s photos. But despite the lack of chemical evidence, there were many literary elements to the “secret gospel” that made a compelling case for its authenticity. For example, the episode in Jericho appeared to explain a long-debated problem in the Gospel of Mark because the canonical text says only that “they” entered the town and then “he and his disciples” left without it explaining what they did in the town (10.46). It also provided a context for the mysterious young man wearing only a linen cloth in Gethsemene (14.51).

Experts in the linguistic intricacies of Clement studied the document and came to the conclusion that it was in fact Clement. “In fact,” said New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, “it is so much like Clement that it would be well nigh impossible to imagine someone other than Clement being able to write it, before tools like those produced by modern Clement scholars such as Stählin were available” (Ehrman 78). Experts in the Gospel of Mark then studied the snippet of Mark and came to a similar conclusion: the text had unmistakable linguistic and literary characteristics matching Mark. As Ehrman put it: “For this to be forged, someone would have had to imitate an eighteenth-century Greek style of handwriting and to produce a document that is so much like Clement that it fools experts who spend their lives analyzing Clement, which quotes a previously lost passage from Mark that is so much like Mark that it fools experts who spend their lives analyzing Mark. If this is forged, it is one of the greatest works of scholarship of the twentieth century, by someone who put an uncanny amount of work into it” (82). For these reasons, the majority of biblical scholars today believe the letter is authentic (80).

Although Ehrman has inspired some skepticism towards the “secret gospel” while refraining from dismissing it himself, he nevertheless managed to drop a lead strengthening the insinuation of the gospel’s authenticity that no one else had been able to provide up to that point: someone else who claimed to have actually seen the book in Mar Saba after Morton Smith. During a social event, Ehrman met “a professor of comparitive religions at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a respected expert in early Christianity,” Guy Stroumsa, who told him that he had managed to track down the elusive library book with Clement’s letter and had seen it with his own eyes. According to Stroumsa, in 1976, when he was a graduate student, he was discussing the “secret gospel” with his teacher, David Flusser, a New Testament and early Judaism scholar who believed the letter was probably forged. Deciding to find out for themselves, they called up another scholar and a Greek Orthodox monk connected to the monestary, who happened to be doing his Ph.D. there at the time, and “piled into Stroumsa’s car and drove out to the monestary” (Ehrman 84). After fifteen minutes of seaching, one of the monks found it, and although Stroumsa wanted to have it tested, the only agency that could do it was the Israeli police department, and the Greek Orthodox librarian, Archimandrite Meliton of the Patriarchate, would not allow their treasured tomes to be handed over to Israeli authorities.

The next year, the book was taken by Meliton to Jerusalem and upon its return, another librarian from Mar Saba, Father Kallistos Dourvas, had the letter removed from the book, claiming that the two items were kept together until he stopped being the library in 1990. Yet in 1996, another librarian, Father Aristarchos, was only able to produce the book, not knowing what happened to the pages of the letter. Though the letter was now missing, Father Kallistos had taken color photos of the letter that were far superior to Smith’s black and white photos and passed them along to two inquiring scholars, Charles W. Hedrick and Nikolaos Olympiou. Father Kallistos believed the missing pages could still be in the Mar Saba library, but four subsequent searches in 1999 and 2000 turned up nothing (Brown 25).

In his 1999 book, Mark’s Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith’s Controversial Discovery, Christian Origins scholar Scott G. Brown argues that the new color photos shows the letter’s ink to be faded into a rusty brown, confirming what also appeared to be faded letters in Smith’s black and white photos. Brown points out that such fading could only occur to ink stored in poor conditions – conditions unlike the one in Mar Saba’s library – for 25 to 100 years (Brown 27). The pages were also browned, which comes from the oxidation process caused by the iron gall ink, more evidence that the ink could not have been applied so recently. Although Brown admits that “a die-hard skeptic” could entertain that Smith artificially aged the ink and the paper, the method for aging the paper would involve subjecting loose leafs to 100 °C for a few days, which would be hard to do without causing the papers to come loose fom the binding (28).

Although the “secret gospel” says nothing about baptism or even water, Morton Smith identified the “mystery of the Kingdom of God” passage as a mystical baptismal rite between master and student. Most of today’s biblical scholars agree with him on this assessment. Romans 6.1-6 refers to the process of baptism as being “united” in Christ (80). But then Smith went further and also suggested that it provided evidence that the historical Jesus participated in homosexual unions during these kinds of ecstatic magical rites. This idea, surprisingly enough, was not as well accepted. In an interview with The New York Times just before his books on the “secret gospel” were released, Smith is quoted as saying, “Thank God I have tenure” (Shenker). In general, most modern biblical scholars generally interpret the stories as allegories and do not believe any specific miracle episodes go back to the historical Jesus. As New Testament scholar Helmut Koester writes: “Attempts to reconstruct an older form of the Gospel of Mark (Ur-markus) that would bring us even closer to the actual life of Jesus are misguided. But one may still ask whether the gospel as it is preserbed in the manuscripts of the New Testament is identical with the original work of Mark” (Koester, History 168). “Ur-Marcus” is typically the name given to the earliest version of Mark for any given hypothetical model attempting to trace the first three gospels back towards the Synoptic core.

Koester interpreted the story in Secret Mark as a reference to a later Christian baptism ritual, and posited in his conjectured in his 1990 book, Ancient Christian Writings, that the “secret gospel” was one of the later phases of a continuously revised set of editions of Mark that culminated in the canonical version. He noticed that there was a particularly large section of stories in Mark that was not reproduced in Luke and that these unreproduced stories were themselves doublets of episodes that had already been told. For example, the story of Jesus feeding 4,000 followers was a doublet of the earlier story of Jesus feeding 5,000 followers. The string of stories also begins and ends in the town of Bethsaida. So Koester argued that this section was added into Mark only after it had been used as a source for Luke. Thus, Luke had used an early version of Mark as a source while Matthew had used a later version that contained a section of doublets, dubbed the “Bethsaida section.”

Next, Koester pointed out that Mark 10.38-39 added references to baptism into a verse about martyrdom that is not present in Matthew or Luke’s version of the story. Koester ingeniously postulated that the lines “…or be baptised with the baptism with which I shall be baptised?” and “…and with the baptism with which I shall be baptised you shall be baptized…” were added by the same gospel editor who added the “mystery of the kingdom of God” ritual in Secret Mark since it also combined a story of death and resurrection with a baptism ritual (NJB 10.38-39). In the original version of my 2009 Masters thesis, I concluded that these extenuating circumstances appeared to back up Koester’s argument that the Clementine passage was a late addition to Mark, but nevertheless earlier than the canonical version.

So, according to Koester’s model, there were at least five versions of Mark that can be attested to: 1) the earliest version of Mark, which the Gospel of Luke is descended from; 2) a version that includes the “Bethsaida section,” which begins and ends in Bethsaida and contains doublets of other Markan material common to Matthew (Mark 6.45-8.26); 3) the “Secret Mark” version that adds a rhetorical connection between baptism and resurrection, including a now-lost baptism and resurrection sequence of the “young man” in Gethsemene (Mark 10.34); 4) the canonical version, which deleted the baptism/resurrection sequence but kept the references to the baptism/martyrdom motif in Mark 10.38-39; and finally, 5) various endings were appended to Mark during the second century, the most popular of which is the “long ending” in which Jesus appears to the women from the tomb and the remaining disciples (Koester, Ancient 284-286). A complex multi-staged evolution of Mark such as this would help explain many of the inherent complications of the Synoptic Problem that the Two Source Hypothesis fails to account for.

Koester’s identification of the “secret gospel” passage as belonging to a Christian sect using a mystical baptismal rite made sense because there were many Gnostic sects of that kind in the second century. In fact, one sect of western Valentinian Gnostics was known for inducting both a physical baptism of the bodily Jesus for the forgiveness of sins and a spiritual baptism of the redemption of Christ for perfection. This sect was called the Marcosians, named after their leader Marcus, or Mark. Not only that, but the Valentinians were also known to have used the Gospel of John, which could explain the common story element of the resurrection in Bethany. The motif of the “young man” likewise appeared to be nearly identical to the motif of John’s “Beloved Disciple,” who in both cases appear to be symbolic of the gospel’s author. New Testament scholar Robert M. Grant came to a similar conclusion in 1974, identifying Secret Mark as a Gnostic revision written after the first century on evidence that the passage contained elements from each of the four gospels (Grant 58-64). Former Catholic priest and New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan, one of the central figures in the Jesus Seminar, has taken a similar position, arguing that the “secret gospel” passages were written to explain the late introduction of Christian baptism since the rite had been more heavily associated with John and does not seem to have been part of Jesus’ mileau (Crossan, Four 108).

[pic]Model for Koester’s Multi-Source Hypothesis

However, there are also problems with the “secret gospel.” The Clementine nature of the letter is literally too perfect. The letter is more like Clement than Clement. In other words, it has too many linguistic “Clementisms” for such a small work (Ehrman 85-86). And while the text may read like Clement, down to the vocabulary, writing style, modes of expression and ideas, the letter’s portrayal of theologian as a secretive sycophant willing to order his disciples to lie rather than reveal the truth of the “secret gospel” does not appear to match with his known character. In Miscellanies 7.16.105, Clement writes that Christians “must never adulterate the truth” (85, 267). Smith himself recognized that contradiction and believed that no modern forger so knowledgable of Clement would have made such an obvious error, which only proved to him that it was authentic. There also appears to be no copy errors for such a supposedly old document. And most suspicious of all, the text breaks just as Clement is about to explain the significance of Jesus not receiving the women, “right as the reader’s hopes are raised but before they can be met” (86).

Smith himself also behaved in a way that drew some questions. Of the two books Smith authored on “Secret Mark,” one was dedicated to his favorite Harvard professor, Darby Nock, who called it a forgery that was “mystification for the sake of mystification,” though he apparently did not think it was a modern forgery created by Smith, and the other book Smith wrote was mysteriously dedicated to “The One Who Knows,” which many skeptics have concluded must have been the one who helped forge the letter. A four volume critical edition of Clement, along with a complete vocabulary list along with detailed indexes, had became available in 1936 and in fact Smith himself used this book to help validate the letter (Ehrman 78). In 1975, New Testament scholar Quentin Quesnell published a lengthy article in the Catholic Biblical Quarterly suggesting that Smith had forged the letter, but after Smith issued a fierce rebuttal, Quesnell withdrew his accusations. Ten years later, Swedish Biblcial scholar Per Beskow also took the gospel to be a forgery in his book Strange Tales, but this time Smith threatened to sue the publisher for “a million dollars,” causing the publisher amended the paragraph. Perhaps because of the ferocity with which Smith defended any accusation of fraud, few others attempted to publicly dismiss the letter during Smith’s lifetime.

In 2005, Stephen Carlson, a patent attorney and one of Ehrman’s Ph.D. students, published a book called The Gospel Hoax, arguing that Morton Smith had engineered the hoax and had left behind certain clues to his identity as the forger. For example, Carlson looked at a verse from the letter that references Matthew 5:13/Luke 14:34: “For the true things being mixed with inventions, are falsified, so that, as the saying goes, even the salt loses its savor.” According to Carlson, this line assumes that free-flowing salt was being mixed with an inexpensive adulterant, but in ancient times, salt wasn’t granulaized but came in clumps, and so could not be mixed with anything. Though Carlson admitted this could have been an oversight, he believed the more likely answer is that it was a clue to the forger’s identity, since the first company to granulize salt was the Morton Salt Company (Carlson 60).

Carlson also pointed out that even before the discovery of the “secret gospel,” Morton Smith had postulated that the “mystery of the kingdom” in Mark 4.11 had connections with forbidden sexual relationships in his book, Tannaitic Parallels to the Gospels (Smith, M. 155-156). Carlson then took a look at the Jericho passage in which Jesus “would not receive” three women. To the modern reader who had just finished reading about Jesus spending the night with a naked male, this mysteriously uncommented text appeared to confirm that Jesus was an exclusive homosexual, uninterested in showing the “mystery of the kingdom of God” to his female followers. Carlson argues that the ancient reader would not have related to this kind of modern exclusive homosexuality, making it an anachronism.

Although analyses tend to focus on the ritual portion of the “secret gospel,” this unexplainable snub by Jesus to the women is in many ways harder to explain as being authentic than the naked man. It is true that there are other instances where Mark’s gospel in particular makes Jesus appear to be rude, but these slights are typically reversed and can be interpreted as an allegory for the church (NRSV 7.27, 1.41f). In fact, it is probably the only story in the Synoptics that can not be interpreted allegorically. This would not be an argument against its authenticity provided it was a later addition as suggested by Koester, except that the Clement letter proports to offer an allegorical interpretation that just happens to have been lost. By leaving out this interpretation, the letter appears to invite the modern reader to insinuate that the gospel verse was historical but was misinterpreted by theologians like Clement using some spiritual explanation whereas the modern reader is supposed to make the connection that he could not: that Jesus was an exclusive homosexual. Even the fact that “Secret Mark” mentions that the young man was naked underneath his linen cloth would have been unimportant and superfluous to the ancient reader since all baptisms at the time were done naked without any hint of there being a sexual nature to them. By mentioning the youth’s nudity, it induces a modern insinuation. Carlson goes on to point out that there is also no evidence that the Caprocratians practiced homosexuality, as Clement implies in his letter, only that they shared their wives. All of these details become more significant when compounded with the fact that homosexuality in itself is a far more popular and controversial topic for the 20th century than the 2nd or 17th centuries and that Smith himself was a homosexual.

Finally, Carlson contested the letter on epigraphical grounds, identifying what he called a “forger’s tremor” in which letters are shown to have been written very slowly and that the letter theta and lambda had an unusual formation shared by Smith. Carlson also brought in a professional forensic document examiner, Julie C. Edison, to confirm what he believed to be numerous examples of letters using more than one stroke, a quality of forgery known as “patching.” Edison agreed that numerous examples where what appeared to be connecting letters were actually letters individually constructed together.

In 2010, the Biblical Archaeological Review commissioned two more experts to study the handwriting. Venetia Anastasopoulou, another forensic handwriting expert, compared the Clementine letter to Smith’s handwriting and concluded that he probably did not write it. But the paleographer, Agamemnon Tselikas, director of the National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation and the Mediterranean Research Institute for Paleography, Bibliography and History of Texts, concluded that the text was a 20th century forgery of an 18th century script, and that the most likely forger was either Smith or someone he knew. There is also the fact that the fourth century heresiologist Epiphanius wrote that the Carpocratians only used a version of Matthew. Philip Jenkins, a professor of history and a co-director for the Institute for Studies of Religion, and Robert M. Price, a theologian and professor of biblical criticism, have both pointed out that the Clement letter holds many similiarities to the plot of a 1940 fictional novel called The Mystery at Mar Saba, in which a suppossedly long-lost text, which is actually forged in order to embarrass Christianity, is found in the monestary. The next chapter will look at another model to answer the Synoptic Problem that does not include the “secret gospel,” and in fact provides a different explanation for the discrepancy in the Jericho passage, thus eradicating one of the cenral planks to the authenticity of “Secret Mark.”

Burkett’s Multi-Source Hypothesis and Crossan’s Cross Gospel

The problems inherent in the Two Source Hypothesis are well known to those who argue for Markan priority, and although some attempts are made at explaining them through editorial discretion, many times the problems are brushed aside with the axiom that the answer still makes more sense than the alternative answer provided by those arguing for the Griesbach Hypothesis. While technically true, that attitude may have forestalled attempts at looking at more complicated solutions for an Occam’s razor that favors unexplainable editorial decisions over that of too many hypothetical sources. In his book, Rethinking the Gospel Sources, Vol. 1: From Proto-Mark to Mark, Dilbert Burkett provides a new groundbreaking model that has so far been the best solution for answering the Synoptic Problem. This new multi-source hypothesis tears apart three age-old assumptions of Markan Priority made by mainstream scholars:

1) It shows that there is some truth to the Griesbach Hypothesis’s argument that Mark combined elements of Matthew with elements of Luke

2) It shows that the “Secret Mark” is unnecessary to resolve the problem with the Jericho passage

3) It shows that the “long ending” of Mark 16:9-20 is probably not a late appendix but was edited out

Burkett came up with his hypothesis by taking a more analystic approach to examining how gospel material was arranged in Matthew and Luke compared to Mark. Matthew or Luke often put the stories common to Mark in a different order. In some instances, there is a good reason why the stories were moved, but if Matthew and Luke were only copying from Mark alone, then the order should not diverge as much it does. For example, those who argue for the Two Source Hypothesis have run into problems trying to explain why Matthew would have re-arranged the stories in Mark 1:22-5:20 to their position in Matthew 7:28-9:34, but the arrangement makes more sense as a Markan combination since Mark’s divergences from Matthew can be explained under the assumption that Mark was following Luke. If rearrangement of the mateial was the only explanation, then the order would not be the same in each gospel (Burkett 61-66).

Burkett shows that if you remove the material in Matthew that is out of order from Mark and divide it into two other categories forming three distinct sequences, each sequence has the same order as the corresponding material in Mark, with a few explainable exceptions. Likewise, if you remove the material in Luke that is out of order from Mark, you can create a nearly identitical set of three columns that, again with a few noted exceptions, follows their corresponding chronologies. Presumably, if Matthew and Luke were independently copying directly from Mark, the changes in sequence would be done for literary reasons and would be mostly random. But if Mark, Matthew and Luke were each copying from the same sources independently, then the sequences would retain their basic chronology while becoming mixed according to how each editor decided to arrange the material (73). In other words, the evangelists would have followed the general order of their sources, but inserted them at different points in respect to each other.

Burkett refers to these three sources as “A,” “B” and “C,” each of which was introduced into the editorial process at more than one stage of the gospels’ development. Since the bulk of the A material shared by Mark and Matthew comes from a full gospel, Burkett’s dubs this common material “Proto-Mark A,” while Luke, taking the majority of B material from another full gospel, used what Burkett calls “Proto-Mark B.” Proto-Mark A and Proto-Mark B, in turn, both derive from an even earlier source, which Burkett calls “Proto-Mark.” Burkett posits that the A and C sources were added to Proto-Mark to make Proto-Mark A and that the B source was added to another copy of Proto-Mark to make Proto-Mark B. Yet because Luke uses doublets from the same B source, Burkett sees Luke as taking not only from Proto-Mark B but from the earlier B source as well. Proto-Mark itself was not the original “Ur-Marcus” because even its author drew on previous sources, including the C source, which appears to be the earliest and most common source for the Synoptic evangelists (157). As Burkett points out, “[t]he ubiquity of C among the evangelists indicates it was a well-known collection of material at the time” (222). According to Burkett, Matthew copied from Proto-Mark A, B, C, Q and M; Luke copied from Proto-Mark B, A, B, C, Q, and L; and Mark copied from Proto-Mark A, Proto-Mark B, A, B, C, and a Mark-only source Burkett dubs “K” (141).

Burkett’s A source also contains the doublet stories from Mark 6.45-8.26, what Helmut Koester called the “Bethsaida section.” Burkett further cites a similar yet simpler model proposed by French author Phillippe Rolland, in which a kind of Proto-Mark A and Proto-Mark B (called “AC” and “BC”) are derived from a “Gospel of the Twelve,” a Hebrew or Aramaic gospel Rolland dubbed “C,” and that AC and BC were conflated into Mark just as Burkett sees PMA and PMB being conflated in the same manner (Rolland 358-362). However, it does not match with Burkett’s examples showing that there must have been more than one common source between Mark and Matthew and more than one common source between Mark and Luke (Burkett 140-141). However, Rolland was not the first to propose a multi-source model. As early as 1798, bishop and scholar Herbert Marsh wrote a dissertation on the Synoptic gospels in which he believed that two Proto-Marks, Aleph1 and Aleph2 (Proto-Mark A & B), both descended from an Ur-Markus he called Aleph (Proto-Mark) and both of them conflated to create the canonical Mark (Marsh).

Evidence for multiple sources can be seen in the way overlapping material is often copied from two sources, forming doublets. For example, Matthew follows a sequence in Proto-Mark A in which Jesus returns to Galilee (4.12b), preaches repentence for the coming kingdom (4.17), drove out the demons of the possessed (8.16), was followed by many (12.15b), is accused by the Pharisees of driving out demons by Baal-Zebul (12.24), then felt compassion for a crowd of sick people (14.14a). A very similar sequence can be found in more compact terms in the C source, where Jesus went throughout Galilee preaching the kingdom (4.23), drove out the demons of the possessed (4.24), was followed by large crowds (4.25), is accused by the Pharisees of driving out demons by Baal-Zebul (9.34), and then felt compassion for a crowd of helpless people (9.36) (Burkett 88). A similar phenomenon happens in Luke when the evangelist copied doublets that were common to both Proto-Mark B and C, so that in one sequence: news of Jesus spreads (4.37), a large crowd from Judea, Jerusalem, Tyre and Sidon follow him (6.17), and he utilizes his power to heal them (6.18b, 19b); while in another sequence, news about Jesus spreads (4.14b), Pharisees and teachers of law come from Galilee, Judea and Jerusalem (5.17d), and he utilizes the power of the Lord to heal them (5.17e) (Burkett 117).

Burkett also shows how in one story, Mark conflated four different sources to create Mark 3.7-12:

Matt. Luke Luke

Conflation in Mark Mark Matt(C) Luke(C) (PMA) (PMB) (Par)

Jesus withdrew 3.7a 12.15a

with is disciples 3.7a 6.17a

to the sea 3.7b 5.1b

A crowd followed 3.7c 4.25a (5.17b) 12.15b 6.17cd

From Galilee 3.7d 4.25b 5.17c

Judea, Jerusalem 3.7e-8a 4.25d 5.17d 6.17e

From Idumea 3.8b

Across Jordan 3.8c 4.25e ------

Tyre and Sidon 3.8d 6.17f

Hearing, they came 3.8e 6.18a 5.1a

A boat for escape 3.9 5.3ac

He healed many 3.10a ------ 5.17e 12.15c 6.18c

They touch him 3.10b 6.19a

Demons know him 3.11 ------- ( 4.41b

He enjoins secrecy 3.12 12.16 ( 4.41c

(Burkett 129-130, 234-238)

For Mark to have been the original source in this case, Matthew and Luke would each had to have both broken this story up into different pieces independently then duplicated and scattered parts of it around their respective gospels for no discernable reason. Even if we assumed Q had a parallel story, Matthew and Luke agree more closely with Mark than they do with each other. The best explanation is that Mark took parts of Proto-Mark A, Proto-Mark B, C, and parable discourse common to Luke, and combined them into a summary about Jesus’ ministry to the crowds.

As mentioned earlier, Burkett’s hypothesis also gives an alternate explanation for why Mark has Jesus enter and leave Jericho without doing anything there. Burkett himself does not mention this explanation in connection with disproving “Secret Mark” but only remarks in a footnote that questions have been raised about the authentiticity of the letter and that, in any case, there is not enough content in “Secret Mark” to make a detailed comparison with Mark (Burkett 136f). Earlier, in describing Longstaff’s examples of Markan conflation, we saw that Burkett had found 14 out of 17 instances in which Mark had used dual temporal expressions where one was used by Matthew (Proto-Mark A) and the other used by Luke (Proto-Mark B). One of those instances is the Jericho passage: Proto-Mark B says that he met the blind man as he was entering Jericho while Proto-Mark A says that they were leaving Jericho when they came upon two blind men (Luke 18.35; Matt. 20.29; Burkett 125). Thus, Mark conflated the two so that Jesus both entered and left Jericho at the same time before meeting the blind man, just as he had conflated “in the evening” and “after sunset” to “in the evening, after sunset” However, there was also the idiosyncancy that “they” entered but “he and his disciples left.” According to the “secret gospel” this was because the “they” included the young man Jesus had “raised,” so that “he and disciples left without him.” In Burkett’s model, the conflation runs into a slight complication since the two pronouns do appear conflated, yet it is Luke/Proto-Mark B that says “he” entered Jericho and it is Matthew/Proto-Mark A that says “they” exited Jericho, which means that Mark would have switched the pronouns in his conflation for some reason. Nevertheless, it remains a plausible explanation: Proto-Mark contained the original Jericho episode, but while Proto-Mark A has the blind men before Jesus enters, Proto-Mark B places them after Jericho, to which Mark conflates them both.

Burkett also identifies six features in the “longer ending” of Mark that suggests that Mark was responsible for writing it (Burkett 255). There is also material conflated in the longer ending that can be found in Matthew and Luke, very similar to how Mark conflated other narratives from Proto-Mark A and Proto-Mark B together. Thus, it would be a coincidence if a later scribe decided to append an ending by combining Matthew and Luke (but not John), just as Mark’s original editor had done in the rest of the gospel. Matthew and Luke agree against Mark that the women reported the news to the disciples, that Jesus appeared to them, and that he charged them to preach to all the nations of the world, which also happens to be the same three things that the shorter ending of Mark has, though the same wording is not used. The language in the shorter ending is also written in a more ornate style than the rest of Proto-Mark, so Burkett suggests that a scribe later added the short ending in his own words to the truncated version of Mark, probably from reading being aware of Proto-Mark though Burkett leaves open the possibility that he simply reinvented the Proto-Mark ending by combining Matthew and Luke (258).

Although there is no evidence in the meager B source to prove that it had an account of Jesus’ death, elements of a Passion narrative can be found in both the A source and the C source (180, 216). Mark appears to have used passion narratives from Proto-Mark A, Proto-Mark B, and C (247-252). In fact, Mark seems to have conflated equivalent taunts from the Passion narratives of Proto-Mark A and C together, combining Proto-Mark A’s “king of Israel” (Matt. 27.42) with C’s “the Christ of God” (Luke 23.35) to form “the Christ, the king of Israel” (Mark 15.32) (217). Burkett also shows that both Proto-Mark A and Luke independently combined the Lord’s Supper tradition, which came from oral tradition as described in 1 Cor. 11.23-26, with the Passover tradition from C (218-220). Luke combines them one after the other, creating two distinct meals, while Proto-Mark A combined them into one meal (Luke 22.15-18, 19-20; Mark 14.22-25). The resurrection must have also been part of C since the last element of the source is a final mission charge from Jesus to the disciples to preach to all nations (221).

[pic]

Model for Burkett’s Multi-Source Hypothesis

Burkett, however, does not remark on the Passion narrative found in the Gospel of Peter in his book. This gospel was found among the Nag Hammadi scrolls and is believed to be the same Gospel of Peter first referenced by a bishop of Antioch named Serapion from around 190 A.D. Origen also refers to a Gospel of Peter that claims the Virgin Mary was a perpetual virgin, but this must have been a different gospel since the Nag Hammadi gospel contains only a passion narrative. One longstanding debate within historical Jesus scholarship is the question of whether the short but detailed passion narraive is a late harmony of the four gospels or if “Peter” or if it is based on an earlier passion narrative used by all five evangelists (Crossan, Cross 13-14). R. Joseph Hoffman, a historian of religon, argues that the well-developed hostility to the Jews, the favorable view of Pilate, and the reference to Jesus’ descent into Hell is proof that the entire Gospel of Peter is a late harmony linked literarily to the post-gospel Acts of Pilate and acted as “a sermon or catechetical lesson for proselytes” (Hoffman, Jesus 101). But if Peter is nothing but a harmony of the four gospels, why is it that none of the material unique to both Matthew and Luke can be found in Peter? Koester believes that the authors of Mark, John, and Peter each used a now-lost passion narrative as the main source to use for their gospels’ conclusion (Intro II 48). Crossan goes even further, deducing that the passion narrative source was used by all four canonical authors and that it is not lost but can be reconstructed by editing out the later redactions. He calls this hypothetical source the Cross Gospel.

Crossan writes that the gospel’s content can be divided into three categories: 1) an early “Cross Gospel,” 2) Synoptic material that was added to it by a later redactor, and 3) a first person narrative, probably added by the same redactor, in the form of an “apostolic memoir” of Peter. In his book, The Cross That Spoke, Crossan lays out ten cases for the direction of influence being the canonical evangelists taking elements from the Cross Gospel:

1) The tradition that Pilate and Herod conspired to kill Jesus in the beginning of the Cross Gospel goes back to an earlier tradition reflected in Acts 4.25-28 and Justin’s First Apology (40), as opposed to the later tradition of Pilate being innocent from beginning to end, reflected in the change of narrative from people vs. authorities to Romans vs. Jews (Cross 111-113);

2) The brief details of abuse are taken from verses in Isaiah (50.6, 58.2) and Zechariah (3,1-5, 12.10), after which the evangelists expand on certain chosen elements, such as the piercing of the reed being misused by Mark as striking with a reed, the reed being used as a scepter in Matthew, and the the stabbing with a spear in John (Mark 15.19; Cross 156-159);

3) The stories of the good thief in Luke and breaking of legs are each expanded “redactional creations” based on elements of the rebuking thief story element in the Cross gospel (173-174);

4) The Cross gospel’s more original theme of silence while suffering abuse inspired by Isaiah 50.7/53.7 was later changed by the evangelists to the theme of silence while under interrogation (Cross 187);

5) The Synoptic gospels use the common word for “lots” (as in dice), the same word used in the Septuagint of Psalm 22.18, and since the Synoptics cite them as a prophecy for Jesus, there is no reason for it to be changed to the more uncommon word for “lots” that is used in the Cross gospel, plus the Gospel of John uses a variant of the common word for “lots” when copying from the Cross gospel, and the uncommon word when citing the psalm, similar to the way John takes a word meaning “nudging/piercing” that the Cross gospel uses for “nudging” and changes it to mean “piercing,” then uses a different word for “pierce” just a few verses later (Peter 3.9; John 19.31-37; Cross 196-197);

6) The Cross Gospel’s use of the term “gall with vinegar,” also found in the Gospel of Barnabas (7.5), is closer to the original theme of gall as poisonous food paralleled with vinegar as sour drink from Psalms (69.21) and the Sibylline Oracles (8.303) than the expanded form in Mark’s gospel, which splits the drinks into wine with myrrh as an anesthetic (15.23) and a sponge of vinegar as a “death-delaying” drink (15.36; Cross 208-217);

7) The immediacy between the dialectical death cry “My power, O power, thou hast forsaken me!” and the point at which Jesus is “taken up” to heaven is the original point behind the reference to Psalm 22.1, and matches Origen’s Commentary on Matthew (140), but this has been degraded by Mark, who doubled the death cries just as he doubled the trials and abuses, and inserted a verse about Elijah between the two death cries (Cross 220-224);

8) The theme of burial by enemies in the Cross Gospel corresponds to the more original tradition of Jesus being buried by enemies than the canonical tradition of being buried by friends, beginning with the invention of Joseph of Aramateha, an enigmatic figure who was a member of the same Sanhedrin whose “unanimous” verdict condemned Jesus to death yet ambiguously “lived in the hope of seeing the kingdom of God” (NJB, 14.63, 15.43), and reaching its zenith in John with Joseph and Nicodemus wrapping Jesus’ body with myrrh and aloes, in order to facilitate an ever-increasing need to portray an adequate burial for Jesus (John 19.39; Cross 248; Crossan, Who 172-173);

9) In Q/Matthew 27.63, the chief priests and Pharisees demand guards from Pilate based on Jeuss’ reference to the Sign of Jonah from Matthew (12.38-40; 16.4), which is slightly more plausible to have been an attempt by Matthew to reference the Cross Gospel’s unexplained decision from the Pharisees and elders to watch over the tomb for three days than for the editor of Peter’s gospel to have completely omitted the Sign of Jonah from his harmony (8.30), but more importantly, the Cross Gospel clearly emphasizes the combination of Jewish and Roman authorities while Matthew confuses the narrative by leaving the identity of the guards ambiguous, seemingly wanting Jewish authorities sending Jewish guards to the tomb, although the guards still report to Pilate (Cross 270-278);

10) The guards in the Cross Gospel are more integral to the coherence of the narrative than in Matthew, plus the story in Mark of Jesus’ Transfiguration before Peter, James, and John can best be explained as Mark retrojecting the story element of the escorted Resurrection from the Cross Gospel back into Jesus’ public ministry, changing the illuminous beings into Moses and Elijah, followed by the angelic figures returning to their roles as escorts to the Resurrection in the Acts ascension story (1.10) and Matthew attempting an ackward communal Resurrection of the holy ones between the crucifixion and the resurrection (Matt. 27.52; Cross 349-360, 399-403).

This last case conflicts with Burkett’s model of the “long ending” of the resurrection appearance being a conflation of Proto-Mark A and Proto-Mark B. The Transfiguration story is also in Matthew and Luke, so if it is a retrojection of the Resurrection, then the version of Mark’s gospel with the “missing ending” in which the women run away from the tomb and say nothing about Jesus must be have been around since Proto-Mark, though the resurrection appearance would still be the more original ending since some version of it is known to have been present in the C source. One easy solution would be to say that the Transfiguration is not a retrojection, but a foreshadow: in other words, Proto-Mark simply added the Transfiguration as a way to explain the mysterious angelic beings from the tombs as the spirits of Moses and Elijah that appear later in the story. However, that would mean it was just a coincidence that a later redactor of Mark would remove the same part of the story that Proto-Mark decided to foreshadow. Of course, the alternative is that it is just a coincidence that a later redactor of Mark conflated Matthew and Luke for Mark’s ending the same way Mark had conflated Proto-Mark A and Proto-Mark B.

I think the latter is preferable. Mark is a skilled editor who has no problem conflating different episodes into a single comprehensible unit, yet the “long ending” in Mark instead treats the resurrection appearances to two unnamed followers in Luke and the 11 disciples in Matthew as separate events, reflecting a more “completist” than “conflationist” predisposition. Likewise, Mary Magdalene is clumsily introduced as if she had not been mentioned before with a reference to her being possessed by seven demons, an attribute only mentioned in Luke. Burkett argues that Mark may just be following Proto-Mark A, using a variant source in which Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene alone (Burkett 253-354). But if Mark does such a good job conflating his sources before, why would he make such an obvious mistake like this now? And why would any early source Mark would be using bring up the seven demons of Mary Magdalene when it has nothing to do with the resurrection? It seems more plausible that a later redactor would take the verse from Luke so as to fill in details he believed Mark had missed. Also, since the Coptic Gospel of Mary Magdalene speaks of seven powers of wrath that affect the soul, it is reasonable to infer that the story of the seven demons is meant as a criticism of Gnosticism, and so finds a more realistic date in Luke rather than Proto-Mark B. The “snake-handling” proclamation from 16.18 also seems very out of place for Mark since there is no mention of this practice anywhere else in the gospel. Such practices seem more suited to the backdrop of the Phrygian cults of second century Asia Minor rather than the Cynic-minded itinerants of first century Syria.

Crossan holds an impressive command over a quantative array of obscure apocryphal texts to acentuate his comparisons, yet he seems unfamiliar with the Toledot Yeshu, an ancient “anti-gospel” of Jesus from a Pharisic perspective. Nevertheless, many of the same themes from the Cross Gospel that Crossan identifies as pre-canonical match the Jewish anti-gospel. Crossan writes: “Although it defies historical plausibility, it is “the people” who crucify Jesus and not the soldiers. One should imagine “the people” stoning Jesus to death, but it took soldiers to execute by crucifxion” (Cross 395). Of course this “historical implausibility” makes more sense if the author of the Cross Gospel is trying to link the crucifixion of the gospel Jesus with the stoning death of Yeshu. The Toledot Yeshu also follows the original “burial by enemies” theme paralleled in the Cross Gospel. Crossan deduces that the original Cross Gospel used only the word presbyteros, or “elders,” to reference the Jewish authorities and that as time progressed, other labels like “chief priests,” “scribes,” and “Pharisees” were added into the canonical gospels and the Gospel of Peter through “redactional word integration,” explaining that his reasoning for choosing “elders” was because “it is the only word used in every group” (Cross 265). The Toledot Yeshu does not use any of the words “chief priests,” “scribes” or “Pharisees,” but only used the words “wise men” and “elders.” The Jewish Life of Jesus also includes an original abuse element common to the Cross Gospel in which Yeshu’s head is covered, struck with a pomegranate staff, and told to prophecy who hit him. As Zindler points out, this appears to be the more authentic version of the verse from Mark which Jesus is struck with a reed, as mentioned in #2 above (Mark 15.19; Zindler 435f). The common elements prove there must be a literary connection between the Toledot and the Cross Gospel.

The Jesus of a Previous Century

In 1962, Alvar Ellegård, a Swedish linguist, wrote the book, A Statistical Method for Determining Authorship, in which he was able to use a computer-aided analysis of letters to identify the anonymous 18th-century political writer known by the psuedonym Junius. By comparing the content of the letters to 230,000 words taken from known works, Ellegård was able to confidently identify Junius as Sir Phillip Francis through 458 lexical features, concluding it was 300,000 times more likely than not that the two authors were the same person (Crystal 68).

Thirty-seven years later, in 1999, Ellegård published Jesus: One Hunrdred Years Before Christ, which argued that the Jesus figure represented in the gospels was a fictional creation of the second century A.D. while the Jesus spoken of in the epistles and early apocrypha was none other than the enigmatic Teacher of Righteousness from the Dead Sea Scrolls, believed to have lived some time between 75 and 150 years before the gospel Jesus. While Ellegård concocted this hypothesis entirely on negative evidence, there actually is an enigmatic text loosely dated to the fourth century A.D., unknown to the late Ellegård, called the Sepher Toldoth Yeshu, or Toledot Yeshu, which independently confirmed his suspicions in portraying Jesus living during the reigns of Alexander Jannaeus and Salome Alexandra, whose combined reign was between 103 and 67 B.C.

The name Yeshu has been used in Jewish literature as an acronym yemach shemo vezichro, “May his name and memory be obliterated,” and refusing to utter the name of a heretic was a common Jewish practice. There are several different versions of the Toledot Yeshu story, and two in particular, called The Jewish Life of Jesus and The Jewish Life of Christ, which were first translated from Hebrew to German by the Talmudic scholar Samuel Krauss in 1902, are in substantial agreement with the so-called Persian text from nineteenth-century Bukhara, Uzbekistan, and are related in type to a text published in Germany in 1681 by Oriental linguist Johann Christoph Wagenseil. These texts were then republished by G.R.S. Mead, an acolyte of the Russian-born spiritualist Helena Blavatsky, in the exceedingly well-researched book, Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.?, from 1903, and were then republished again in the appendix of atheist writer Frank Zindler’s self-published book, The Jesus the Jews Never Knew, exactly one hundred years later. If there are other versions that have been distributed in their entirety by a major publisher within that century, they have eluded me. While The Jewish Life of Christ has anachronisitic elements that appear to have been added to help make the story conform more with the canonical gospels, The Jewish Life of Jesus appears to be a genuinely original Hebrew tradition of Jesus and the only tradition completely independent of Hellenistic philosophy, neither of which can be said regarding the entirety of the New Testament tradition, whether canonical or apocryphal. Most theologians and biblical writers, however, have completely ignored not just the importance of, but the very existence of the Toledot Yeshu, leaving all but the most diligent of inquirers into biblical criticism literature even aware of its existence.

Sometimes referred to as an “anti-gospel,” the Toledot Yeshu portrays unique confrontations between Yeshu and his uncle Yehoshua ben Perachiah, the leader of the Sanhedrin Simon ben Shetach, and a “Queen Helene.” Far from being derivative of the Greek gospel as is sometimes assumed, the text reveals a layer of original folklore independent of the Greek gospels (Hoffman, Jesus 50). Although the history of transmission is obviously erratic, William Horbury attempted to reconstruct the source of the original Toledot story (Horbury 433-435). Since the Toledot includes verses and story elements and that do not appear to have been invented solely to mock Yeshu, the Toledot itself may be based on a very short, very early gospel story that predates even the Greek canonical gospels.

The Jewish Life of Jesus says that Yeshu, originally named Yehoshua ben Perachiah after his uncle, was the bastard son of Mary and that he was able to work his magic tricks by virtue of learning the ineffable name of God after sneaking into a sanctuary that held a special stone blessed by Jacob in Genesis which had the “Shem,” or name of God, written on it. After sneaking into the temple, Yeshu is said to have sewn the name into his thigh, which Zindler suggested may have been a metaphor for a tattoo (Zindler 156). The Jewish Life of Christ instead places the stone at the Jerusalem Temple, changing its guardian statues from dogs to Judean lions, and includes a story of how Yeshu took two millstones, made them float on water, and sat on top of it catching fishes for the multitude, a parallel to both Jesus walking on water and the “Feeding of the Multitude.” The story also explains that when Yeshu was a child he and his uncle were forced to escape into Egypt because of the growing conflict between Alexander Jannaeous and his uncle Yehoshua ben Perechiah, a parallel with the Gospel of Matthew’s story of Jesus’ family escape into Egypt.

The central conflict of both versions of the story revolves around Yeshu’s wavering relationship with “Queen Helene,” which The Jewish Life of Christ identifies as Queen Salome Alexandra of Jerusalem although it mistakenly identifies her son as Monobaz II, the son of Queen Helene of Adiabene in Mesopotamia. This later queen became a Jewish proselyte who spent some time in Jerusalem and Lud between 46 and 60 A.D. after taking a Nazarite vow and studying under the Rabbis of Hillel’s school. However, as Mead and others have pointed out, the story itself portrays “Helene” as a Gentile, referring to Jewish law as “your law” and consulting Jewish scribes to learn about prophecies regarding the Messiah. The earlier Life of Jesus leaves her identity a mystery. Krauss believed that Helene was a reference to the mother of Emperor Constantine, whose legendary stories of entering the Holy Land to find the True Cross would have made her an ideal use for parody, but as Mead points out, this is highly unlikely since the queen plays such a central part to the plot of the story, saying, “It is impossible not to believe that there was the mention of some queen in the oldest deposit of the Toledot-saga, and difficult to believe that the name given her in it was anything else than Helene… If there is any ancient element in the Toldoth, it is precisely the figure of the queen, before whom the most dramatic and critical incidents of the whole story take place” (Mead 308-309). Zindler reluctantly accepts Queen Salome Alexandra as the intended reference, confused with Queen Helene of Adiabene.

There is however, a third contender that no one so far has suggested. There was also Queen Cleopatra Selene I of Syria, originally a princess of Egypt, who lived at an advanced age around the same time period. This would rectify her depiction as a Gentile Queen needing Jewish scribes to explain Jewish tradition to her and realign Yeshu’s location to match his Galilean heritage as portrayed in the gospels. Queen Cleopatra Selene also had five different husbands, two of them her brothers from Egypt and three of them kings of Syria, each a political marriage following the rise and fall of different regimes. A lost echo of this tradition may appear in John 4.17 as Jesus correctly prophecizes that a Samaritan he meets by the Well of Jacob has had five different husbands and lives with a lover. It’s possible that the original Signs Gospel was set in the first century B.C. as well and that a conversation with Queen Selene connected to the Stone of Jacob was rewritten into a conversation with a Samaritan at the Well of Jacob.

Yeshu is able to cure the lame and lepers by using the magic of the Shem, although the story portrays this as a “trick” rather than a genuine miracle. In The Jewish Life of Christ, the way that Yeshu is able to resurrect the dead is very strange: “And when they were brought, he put all the bones together and covered them with skin, flesh, and nerves, so he that had been a dead man stood up on his feet alive” (Zindler 377). The theme of bodies being opened and closed up are repeated in the way Yeshu hides the name of God inside his own body by sewing it up. The stories of Yeshu curing the lame and the diseased may be symbolic of performing medicine, and the heights of medical science were long achieved in Alexandria, one of the few places where the taboo of dissection was allowed on the bodies of criminals, both alive and dead.

Yeshu is called to the court of Queen Helene twice, and the second time her horsemen find Yeshu, he is turning clay birds into real birds, a miracle that the infant Jesus did in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Yeshu at first able to convince the queen that he is the Messiah by claiming he can raise the dead. Following this is a legend about Yeshu fighting Judas Iscariot in a mid-air battle similar to the apocryphal legends of Simon Magus, but this episode was probably a later addition. The scribes then capture Yeshu, put a bag over his head, then had different people strike him on the head while asking for him to prophecize who was hitting him, a story element repeated in the gospels of Mark and Matthew.

But Yeshu’s disciples manage to rescue their master and they escape to Antioch until Passover. Yeshu travels to Jerusalem for Passover but is betrayed when a man named Gaisa sneaks into his tent while he is sleeping and opens up his body to steal the Shem, taking away his powers. In The Jewish Life of Christ, Gaisa is named Judas and he reports what he did not to nameless elders but to the Queen Salome’s brother, Shimeon Ben Shetach. Gasia, or Judas, explains that Jesus had come to Jerusalem disguised and that he had taken an oath not to identify him, but nevertheless worked up a plan with them for him to signal who Jesus was by giving him a bow. Gaisa takes them to Yeshu’s hideout at a school and betrays Yeshu not with a kiss but a short greeting. This time his disciples are unable to rescue him and Yeshu is stoned to death and then hung on a cabbage stalk in a garden, which in Life of Christ belongs to Judas.

When people continuously come to look at Yeshu’s body, the garden owner, who is Judas in the Jewish Life of Christ, decides to hide the body under a river, causing the disciples to claim that Jesus had risen from the grave, and when the Queen hears this she demands that the elders produce Yeshu’s body in three days or face execution. In that time, one of the old men, Rabbi Tanchuma, runs into the garden owner and is able to produce the body, which is then dragged around the streets of Jerusalem in condemnation. Frank Zindler points out that Tertullian knew of a literary tradition in which Jesus’ body is stollen by the gardener to stop the disciples from trampling on his cabbages (Zindler 283). Tertullian mockingly compares the story of Jesus’ body being hidden away to stop the trampling of cabbages to the story at the ending of the Gospel of Matthew, which says that the chief priests met with the elders to bribe the Roman guards of Jesus’ body to say that his disciples stole the body: “So they took the money and carried out their instructions, and to this day that is the story among the Jews” (27.15).

The manner of death that Yeshu suffers in the Toledot cannot so easily be dismissed as a Jewish invention. Both the Gospel of Matthew and Luke connect Judas to a strange “garden of blood” though each provides contradictory explanations for the connection. The Gospel of John has a strange episode in which Mary Magdalene mistakes Jesus for the gardener, however the Toledot Yeshu may help provide an explanation for why. The Gnostic Gospel of Judas portrays Jesus’ “betrayer” as the loyal “twin” of Jesus and the last redaction of the Gospel of John knows and purposely contradicts this legend, but if the gardener was also Jesus’ twin then it would make sense that Mary Magdalene would mistake one for the other. Zindler is likewise certain that the gardener played a much larger role in earlier versions of the Gospel of John. An early version of the crucifixion story that was popular among docetic sects of Christianity was that someone else (sometimes Judas) was crucified in Jesus’ place, a version that even today is accepted as Islamic orthodoxy. An earlier Gnostic version of John may have had Mary Magdalene learn that it was Jesus’ twin Judas who was crucified in Jesus’ place.

The Mishnah, a rabbinical commentary from about 220 A.D. that is part of the Talmud, also refers to a bastard born from an adulterer who was executed by stoning for seducing Israel into idolatry. Zindler argues that the references to Yeshu’s adultery in the Talmud are only a Jewish reaction to the late Christian theological belief in the virgin birth, but there are reasons to believe that Christians were dealing with such accusations relatively early. Saying #105 of the Gospel of Thomas says, “Whoever knows the Father and the Mother will be called the child of a whore.” Biblical scholar James Tabor, who discounts the Panthera legend but believes Jesus must have lived with the stigma of not having a father, has pointed out that the four women mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew’s geneaology list includes Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Uriah, “each of these four women was a foreigner who had a scandulous reputation in the Old Testament” and “don’t belong in a formal geneaology of the royal family. . . It is as if he [the evangelist] is silently cautioning any overly pious or judgmental readers not to jump to conclusions. It is the most revered geneaology of that culture, the royal line of King David himself, there are stories of sexual immorality involving both men and women who are nonetheless honored in memory” (Tabor 50-51).

The later sixth-century Gemara, which comments on the Mishnah, adds that “Ben Pandira” was a heretic whose followers whose Egyptian mode of healing was treated as some kind of taboo. The Gemara also refers to Yeshu as “Ben Stada,” such as the quote from Rabbi Eliezer: “Did not Ben Stada bring spells from Egypt and cut which was upon his flesh?” In the Seder Nezikin of the Talmud, it says: “Our rabbis taught that Yeshu had five disciples: Matti, Necki, Netsur, Burni, and Toda.” (Sanhedrin 43a). In The Jewish Life of Jesus, four of Yeshu’s disciples are caught: Matthai, Naki, Boni, Netzer (Toda goes unmentioned). Each of the four prisoners is asked to cite proof from scripture of their cause had been prophecized, to which each cites an unlikely passage in which a word resembles their name, and in response to each attempt, the disciples are in turn cited an equally unlikely passage proving that their execution had been prophecized.

The Jewish Life of Christ then says that 30 years after Yeshu was hung (around 33 B.C.), twelve men, called “bad offspring of foul ravens,” traveled through Israel as apostles, popularizing Yeshu’s faith. Acts also mentions Seven “Grecian Jews” (NIV, 6.1) or “Hellenists” (NJB) who were chosen by the Twelve Disciples to overlook the daily distribution of food; these men were “full of Spirit and wisdom” but were nevertheless given a back-handed denigration by “Luke” in that they given this task so that the Twelve would not have to “neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on tables” (NIV, 6.2). These seven are located in Cyrene and Alexandria, as well as in Cilicia and Asia, and one of them, “Philip the evangelist,” lived in Caeserea (NJB, 6.9, 21.8). The Gospel of Mark has two episodes where Jesus feeds 4-5,000 people, and soon after the second episode, Jesus tells his disciples when they are complaining about food that after he broke five loaves for 5,000, there were twelve left over, and after he broke seven loaves for 4,000, there were seven left over (8.19-21). This appears to me to be symbolic of the five original disciples of Yeshu “feeding” the inspiration of 5,000, with twelve apostles left over 30 years later, and of the seven “evangelists” feeding the inspiration of 4,000, presumably leaving another seven “evangelists” in their place. The author appeals for the numerical significance in the code by having Jesus ask his disciples the number of loaves left over after each episode and then remarking to them: “Do you still not realise?” (NJB, 8.21).

Although the Talmud confirms that Yeshu was executed on Passover eve stoning is placed at Lydda rather than Jerusalem. In 1971, G. A. Wells, a German professor of philosophy and natural science, wrote in his book, The Jesus of the Early Christians, that it “is remarkable that the compiler of the Tosephta makes Jesus die in Lud (viz. Lydda), not in Jerusalem, and by stoning. This does not suggest a reminiscence of the events alleged in the gospels. Incidentally, Jesus is nowhere in the Talmud said to have been executed by the Romans; his death is represented as solely the work of the Jews: and nowhere is his alleged Messiahship mentioned, not even as a reason for putting him to death” (Wells, Early 200). A particularly important reference in 1 Thessaloneans says that Christians there “suffered the same treatment from your own countrymen as they have had from the Jews, who put the Lord Jesus to death,” causing many Biblical scholars like John Dominic Crossan to assume the verse to be a late interpolation (NJB, 2.14-15).

Setting aside the reasoning for predating the historical Jesus by a century, it makes little sense for a Jewish writer to take blame away from the Romans and place it solely on Jewish leaders. Other than the verse from Thessaloneans and a mystical attribution to demonology in 1 Cor. 2.6-8, the early epistles are unnaturally silent about the exact circumstances of Jesus’ death. In fact, none of the canonical epistles or early apocrypha dated to the first century makes a direct statement that the Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem on a Roman cross. Even the references in the Greek Koine to Jesus being “crucified” can be equally translated as him being “hung.” As discovered by Biblical scholar Delbert Burkett, the hagiographic description of the apostle Stephen’s martyrdom by stoning in Acts, far surpassing the glossed-over death of the apostle leader James, is derived from the same “Sanhedrin Trial Source” used in part of Jesus’ trial in the Synoptic gospels where both judgment and execution is presided over by Jews alone, which Burkett believes is linked to the Taldmudic tradition of Yeshu’s stoning (Burkett 178; Mark 14.53-64; Matt. 26.57-66, Luke 22.66-71, Acts 6.12-7.60).

In looking over the historical evidence in the Pauline epistles, Wells says that nothing about Jesus, even regarding his crucifixion, is given a historical setting:

“His letters tell only of a cult, Jewish on origin, in which a crucified Jesus, called the Messiah, figures as an atoning sacrifice, but counts for absolutely nothing as a teacher and wonder worker… Paul of course, believes that at some time in the past this deity appeared on earth, was born of a woman, as a descendant of David and was crucified. But nothing he says suggests that he knows or cares when this happened. He says only that it occurred just as the right time (Rom. V, 6; Gal. Iv, 4) and does not imply that it happened recently enough for any of the apostles to have known Jesus while he was on earth” (Wells, Early 146-148).

Wells goes on to explain that nothing in the epistle of James can be identified as Christian and concludes that: “James might never have heard the man Jesus” (152). The author of the epistle of Jude, which pointedly identifies himself not as the brother of Jesus but the “brother of James,” quotes the apocryphal First Book of Enoch, which was also found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but says nothing of the earthly Jesus. The epistle of 1 Peter makes no claim that the author knew Jesus personally, nor does it say anything about Jesus other than to say that the resurrected Jesus had been recently “revealed” (NJB, 1 Peter 1.5). The next epistle, 2 Peter, which most scholars agree was written much later by another author since it didn’t even make it into St. Irenaeus’ canon from 177-180 A.D., says: “When we told you about the power and the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, we were not slavishly repeating cleverly invented myths; no, we had seen his majesty with our own eyes” (NJB, 2 Peter 1.16). These do not appear to be pagan enemies making the claim that Jesus was a myth, but “false prophets” who “try to make a profit out of you with untrue tales,” a description typically used for Gnostic Christians (NJB, 2.1-3). The First Epistle of John mentions Jesus, but also uses uncommon terms for him like “the Righteous One” and “the Holy One,” which means it may have be an edited epistle that was originally about the Teacher of Righteousness. Like 2 Peter, 2 John condemns as the Anti-Christ all the “deceivers at large in the world, refusing to acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in human nature” (NJB, 1.7). Had the gospel Jesus been a historical person, such a suggestion would be unthinkable: it would be like followers of Martin Luther King Jr. disagreeing with each other whether he was real or myth.

Another lost tradition hidden amongst hundreds of pages of early Christian commentary is a quote from Epiphanius, a bishop and heresiologist from Salamis on the island of Cyprus. In his book, Panarion, meaning “Medicine Chest,” he defends the Orthodox reading of the four canonical gospels and dates Jesus to the time of Pontius Pilate, writing:

“For with the advent of the Christ, the succession of the princes from Judah, who reigned until the Christ Himself, ceased. The order [of succession] failed and stopped at the time when He was born in Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of Alexander, who was of high-priestly and royal race; and after this Alexander this lot failed, from the times of himself and Salina, who is also called Alexandra, for the times of Herod the King and Augustus Emperor of the Romans; and this Alexander, one of the Christs and ruling princes placed the crown in his own head... After this a foreign king, Herod, and those who were no longer of the family of David, assumed the crown.”

Needless to say, Epiphanius has his history wrong. He is obviously combining a legend that Yeshu was rightful heir to the throne of Jerusalem following the death of Alexander Jannaeus with the gospel tradition of the baby Jesus living during the time of Herod and Augustus. In reality, Alexander’s wife, Salome Alexandra, took the throne after him, giving the high priesthood to her younger son Hyrcanus II, though her older son Aristobulus II tried to take it from her by force. The resulting civil war brought Pompey, fresh from his victory over the Armenian Empire, into Judea to arbitrate the matter as a minister to the newly expanded Roman Republic. Both of the Hasmonean brothers tried to buy Pompey’s support and though Aristobulus was able to buy the favor of Pompey’s deputy, Marcus Scaurus, for a while, Pompey ultimately sided with Hyrcanus. Pompey put Jerusalem to siege and blasphemed the Temple by entering its Holiest of Holies before setting Hyrcanus up as high priest. This would begin a long and complicated history of wars between the Romans and the Jews. Hyrcanus allied himself with a rich foreigner named Antipater the Idumean, who was made chief minister of Judea by Caesar after he defeated Pompey. After Antipater was poisoned for his being a Roman puppet, the throne of Judea then passed to his vengeful son, Herod the Great.

The tradition that Jesus lived during the time of Alexander Janneus survived for over a millenium in Jewish tradition. The 12th century Spanish philosopher, physician, and historian, Abraham ben Daud, is recorded in Dr. Adolph Neubauer's Medieval Jewish Chronicles from 1887 as saying:

"The Jewish history-writers say that Joshua ben Perachiah was the teacher of Yeshu ha-Notzri, according to which the latter lived in the day of King Janni; the history-writers of the other nations, however, say that he was born in the days of Herod and was hanged in the days of his son Archelaus. This is a great difference, a difference of more than 110 years."

There is yet another little-known record of an unidentified “wise king,” identified in a letter from a Syrian prisoner named Mara Ben Serapion dated some time between 73 and 165 A.D. The “wise king” mentioned is also a teacher whose teachings survived despite his execution by the Jews, a rare identification that is also shared with the gospel Jesus:

What advantage did the Athenians gain from putting Socrates to death? Famine and plague came upon them as a judgment for their crime. What advantage did the men of Samos gain from burning Pythagoras? In a moment their land was covered with sand. What advantage did the Jews gain from executing their wise king? It was just after that their kingdom was abolished. God justly avenged these three wise men: the Athenians died of hunger; the Samians were overwhelmed by the sea; the Jews, ruined and driven from their land, live in complete dispersion. But Socrates did not die for good; he lived on in the teaching of Plato. Pythagoras did not die for good; he lived on in the statue of Hera. Nor did the wise king die for good; He lived on in the teaching which he had given.

It has been suggested to me that the Jewish kingdom being abolished could be a reference to the seige of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., but that event is better known for the Temple being destroyed, which goes unmentioned. Jewish rebels had only been thrown off the yoke of the Romans for a less than three years and there were still several sects fighting for domination when Emperors Vespasian and Titus came and reconquered the city. It would be hard to believe anyone would interpret that anything more than a rebellion being put down, certainly not the fall of a kingdom.

The most important source for delivering definitive proof of a historical Jesus crucified by the Romans during the age of Pontius Pilate comes from a tiny excerpt from Antiquities of the Jews, by the Jewish-Roman historian and defected general, Titus Flavius Josephus. Assuming the source to be valid, it would mark the sole unbiased eyewitness to the Gospel Jesus’ existence from someone who was a near-contemporary of Jesus, having been born only seven years after the established date of the crucifixion. In the third chapter of Book 13, the text as found reads:

But Pilate undertook to bring a current of water to Jerusalem, and did it with sacred money…. However the Jews were not pleased…. So he [Pilate] bade the Jews himself to go away; but they boldly casting reproaches on him, he gave the soldiers that signal… and equally punished those that were tumultuous, and those that were not, nor did they spare them in the least… and thus an end was put to this sedition.

At this time, there appeared Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one should call him a man. For he was a doer of startling deeds and a teacher of people who receive the truth with pleasure. And he gained a following both among many Jews and among many of Greek origin. He was the Messiah. And when Pilate, because of an accusation made by the leading men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him previously did not cease to do so. For he appeared to them on the third day, living again, just as the divine prophets had spoken of these and countless other wondrous things about him. And up until this very day the tribe of Christians, named after him, has not died out. (Italics added)

About the same time also another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder; and certain shameful practices happened about the temple of Isis in Rome….”

Scholars are virtually unanimous in accepting that it would have been impossible for Josephus to identify Jesus as being the Messiah in such an understated and unexplained fashion. However, that has not encouraged the majority of New Testament scholars into dismissing the entire Josephus Testominium as a forgery. A litany of New Testament scholars including John Dominic Crossan, Robert Funk, Bart Ehrman, R. E. Van Voorst, A. N. Wilson, and Paula Fredriksen all agree that some amount of the Josephus reference to Jesus is authentic, but that the more obviously ahistorical material, rendered above in italics, was later added by a Christian copyist. Although the text does indeed appear to be an amalgamation of Christian and non-Christian sources, the literary evidence that Josephus did not write any of it is considerable.

In 1912, William Benjamin Smith, a professor of Mathematics at Tulane University in New Orleans, showed that in an examination of the two paragraphs that mention Jesus, dividing it into five parts: 1) Pilate attempts to bring Caligula’s effigies into Jerusalem but is stopped by protestors for five days, after which Pilate decides to massacre them but changes his mind after seeing the Jewish protestors kneel and bear their necks to him in a show of self-sacrifice; 2) Pilate massacres protestors who try to stop him from using sacred money to create a water supply; 3) the story of Jesus; 4) “And about the same time another terriblemisfortune confounded the Jews…”; and 5) 4,000 Jews are banished from Rome. Smith argued that Josephus meant for this to be a list of massacres, and that the “terrible misforune” mentioned in (4) could only be a referece to the massacre in (2), meaning the entire Testimonium regarding Jesus must be a forgery. Smith had argued in a series of books since 1894 that the lack of historical details in the New Testament epistles implied Christianity had originated from a Nazorean sect derived from the Essenes (Wells, Early 191). A German philologist named Eduard Norden also wrote a similar argument for the Josephus passage being a forgery independent of Smith a year after him (191f). Doherty, in his book, The Jesus Puzzle, also points out that "In the case of every other would-be messiah or popular leader opposed to or executed by the Romans, he has nothing but evil to say" (Doherty 210).

Things get even more complicated when we look at a later passage of Josephus that mentions “James, the brother of Jesus, who is called the Christ.” Despite detailing many would-be Messiahs, these are the only two instances in which Josephus uses the word “Christ,” and not much after this reference, Josephus brings up a certain “Jesus, son of Damneus,” indicating that the phrase “who is called Christ” is probably a later interpolation. The fact that Josephus writes far more material on James than on Jesus is further indication of the fallacy that Josephus wrote even a portion of the Testimonium. Wells points out that Origen referenced “James, the brother of James” three times as proof of how “wonderous” it was that Josephus reported how the “justice of James was not at all small” even though he did not accept Jesus as Christ, yet Origen never cited the far-more important Jesus reference as a proof (Wells, Early 192). In fact, Origen writes that his version of Josephus claimed that the Jewish Temple had been destroyed because of the martyrdom of James, an element that is not found in any of the known versions of Josephus that have been survived (Zindler 38f). The first to mention the Jesus quote is Constantine’s church historian, Eusebius of Caeserea. Zindler says “it has long been believed by Atheist scholars and others that Eusebius was the forger of the Testimonium,” and although Zindler believes the Testimonium ultimately derived from an altered Arabian version of Josephus, he believes Eusebius is responsible for changing “He was believed to be the Christ” into “He was the Christ” (Zindler 58-59).

Philo, a contemporary author of the gospel Jesus, likewise, is strangely silent on Jesus concerning his particular focus on the politics and religion of Galilee. Even John Chrysostom, writing a century after Eusebius, fails to cite the Jesus Testomonioum, yet in in his 13th homily to the Gospel of John, he writes that Josephus imputed the war to John the Baptist’s death, indicating that he possessed a copy different from both Origen’s and the surviving copies (Zindler 45). In the ninth century, Photius I of Constantinople wrote two reviews of Josephus’ Antiquities, yet not only did he not mention the Jesus Testimonium, he complained that the now-lost writings of Justus of Tiberias, a Jewish historian writing in Galilee around the year 80, “does not make the smallest mention of the appearance of Christ, and says nothing whatever of his deeds and miracles” (Wells, Jesus Myth 204).

Another problem with the historical significance of Jesus would have been his particular importance to Josephus’ earlier work, The War of the Jews, yet there is no mention of him in the primary texts. However, some time in the thirteenth century, a Christian revision of a Greek version of War of the Jews that included the Testimonium about Jesus was made and soon translated into Old Russian, creating what is now known as the “Slavonic Josephus” (Zindler 60, 67).

The second outside source independent of the gospels to cite the historicity of Jesus is a letter written in 112 by Pliny the Younger to the Emperor Trajan describing how he tortured and interrogated Christians before asking the emperor how he should proceed. Although it was attested to early and most modern scholars accept the letter as authentic, Remsberg found the descriptions of the actions by men otherwise known for their acts of justice to be questionable and pointed out that many of the early German critics rejected its authenticity. Regardless of the letter’s authenticity, it speaks only of how the Christians sang “a hymn to Christ as to a god,” a phrase not particuarly effective for proving that Pliny’s Christians believed in a historical Jesus.

The third and last outside source comes from the Roman senator and historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus, in his Annals, dated to 115-120 A.D., less than a century after the events he is recording. It reads:

“[Nero] inflicted the most exquisite tortures on those men, who, under the vulgar appelation of Christians, were already branded with deserved infamy. They derived their name and origin from Christ, who, in the reign of Tiberius, had suffered death, by the sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate. For a while this superstition was checked; but it again burst forth, and not only spread itself over Judaea, the first seat of this miserable sect, but was even introduced to Rome, the common asylum which receives and protects whatever is atrocious.”

The passage goes on to describe how confessions of seized Christians allowed many of their accomlices to be convicted “not so much for the crime of setting fire to the city as for their hatred of the human race.” After being sentenced to death, their bodies were then used in the torches to light Nero’s gardens. Wells points out that the passage is “genuinely Tacitean, especially the cynical aside about Rome. And what Christian interpolator would refer needlessly to the temporary setback of Christianity or to the Christian’s betrayal of their fellows and the hatred of the human race?” (Wells, Early 186). Zindler, however, cities a critical review of Tacitus by the secularist author, John E. Remsberg, whose book, The Christ: A Critical Review and Analysis of the Evidences of His Existence, which argues that the passage “if genuine, is the most important evidence in Pagan literature. That it existed in the works of the greatest and best known of Roman historians, and was ignored or overlooked by Christian apologists for 1,360 years, no intelligent critic can believe. Tacitus did not write this sentence” (Reyes 511). Remsberg argued that the quote sounded like something from the Dark Ages and not from Tacitus and that the reference should have been cited by Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen. He pointed out that Suetonius condemned Nero’s reign yet said that his public entertainments ensured humans were not sacrificed, “not even those of condemned criminals,” and that Tacitus himself was not in Rome but at Atium. Zindler adds that there is also no mention of Nero’s outrage in his earlier work, Histories (Zindler 8).

Zindler even goes so far as to assume the entire Annals is a forgery. J. P. Peebles successfully refutes these assumptions in his 2006 book The Christ Question Settled, which cites the famous astronomer Ptolemy as mistakingly refering to the location of Frisian insurgents as “Siatontanda,” due to a Greek misreading of Tacitus’ Latin phrase “Ad sua tutanda disgressis rebellious,” meaning “to protect their quarters, the rebels digressed.”). Peebles also points out that John of Salisbury quoted the Annals in the 1100s and that there are now versions of the Annals that scholars date to a time earlier than Bracciolini but had fallen into disuse by the 1400s.

Peebles successfully defends the battle for the authenticity of the Annals, but Zindler ultimately wins the war. Even assuming Wells and most scholars are correct in authenticating the passage, the statement that Tacitus makes in mistakenly refering to Pontius Pilate as a prefect rather than a procurator proves he could not have taken the statement from official Roman records (Zinlder 6). After the death of King Marcus Agrippa in 44 A.D., the Herodian puppet strings were finally cut and Rome officially appropriated Judea, after which all Roman governors known as prefects became known as procurators. Although the job position was essentially the same, the error definitively places Tacitus’ source as being dependendent on the erroneous gospel tradition, first conceived some time after 44 A.D. A limestone block excavated from the ruins of the Caesarea Maritima amphitheatre in 1961 has an inscription that confirms Pilate was “prefect of Judea.”

Of course, it would have been asking too much for a Roman senator to confirm the historical validity of the beliefs of a “superstition” he is mocking. Wells comes to this conclusion as well, stating: “[e]ven if records of executions in Palestine ninety years earlier were available, and even if it had been his practice to consult original documents (which, according to Fabia, 90, p. XIII, it ws not), why should he have undertaken such an inquiry in this particular instance, when all he appears to have aimed at was to give his readers some idea of who these disreputable Christians are?” (Early 187). Wells also cites J. Whittaker, who argued in his 1909 book, The Origins of Christianity, that the year 64 was far too early for a “great multitude” of Christians to be in Rome, and that Tacitus must have them confused with Messianic Jews (Early 188).

However, while it is highly unlikely that Josephus wrote anything about a Jesus of Nazareth, he may very well have written about Yeshu ben Perachiah. In Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus refers to “righteous man” named Onias who was “especially loved God.” He recounts how Onias had brought rain during a drought and that Onias had hid himself during a conflict that erupted between Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II just before Passover, similar to how Yeshu is said to have escaped to Antioch just before the Passover, and also similar to how just as Jesus “no longer went about openly among the Jews, but left the district for a town called Ephraim” (NJB, John 11.54). Honi, Yeshu, and Jesus are then each put to death on Passover.[81]

When Aristobulus besieged Hyrcanus inside Jeruslem, Onias was captured and brought to Hyrcanus, where he was ordered to curse Aristobulus’ army. Onias instead spoke to the crowd saying, “Oh God, King of the universe, since these men standing beside me are your people, and those who are besieged are your priests, I ask you not to pay any attention to them against these men, nor to bring to pass what these men ask you to do against those others” (14. 23-24). This final act, calling God not to bring his wrath on either side, is comparable to a late verse that was interpolated into to the Gospel of Luke, in which Jesus asks God to forgive those who were crucifying him “for they do not know what they are doing.” (23:34). For fooling Hyrcanus, Onias was stoned to death, and “[a]s a result, not only the Jews, but many people of other nations as well, were indignant and angry over the unjust murder of the man.”

In the Mishnah there is a story of a scholar known as Honi the Circle-Drawer, who performed miracles in the tradition of Elijah and Elisha during the reign of King Jannaeus and Queen Salome. The gospels of Mark and Matthew likewise compare Jesus to Elijah nine times. When there had been no characteristic winter rains in Israel, it was said that Honi prayed for rain (Ta’anit 3:8). When that did not work, he drew a circle around himself in the dust and swore on God’s name that he would not move until God “had compassion on his children.” Rains did come, but they were at first too light, and then too hard, flooding the city of Jerusalem before stopping. Honi’s ability to control the weather appears characteristic of the story of Jesus calming the storm, one of the few Synoptic miracle stories that doesn’t involve healing.

Rabbi Simon Ben Shetach, the brother of Queen Salome, then sent Honi a message saying, that if it had not been him who had been him who acted so petulant before God, he would have excommunicated him: “But what shall I do to you, for you act like a spoiled child before God and He does your will for you, like a son who acts like a spoiled child with his father and he does his will for him?” Simon Ben Shetach is the also the Pharisee who conspired with Judas in the Life of Christ to have Yeshu captured. The Gospel of Mark, which is hostile towards the disciples, especially Simon, James, and John, has the reincarnated Jesus implicitly compare Simon ben Shetach to the apostle Peter by giving Simon his name and then having Simon Peter take part in denying Jesus at the same part of the story that Simon ben Shetach betrays Yeshu.

In 40 B.C., the son of Aristobulus II cut the ears off Hyrcanus II so as to make him ineligible for the office of high priest. The gospel story of one of Jesus’ disciples cutting off the ear of the servant to the high priest may have been an attempt to make a symbolic reference to this historic event. If so, it may also bring about a more macabre understanding behind the strangely repetative call in the sayings of Jesus: “Let those who have ears hear.”

Josephus and Maccabees describe how the Onias dynasty was the official Zadokite high priest family that ministered over the Jerusalem Temple before the tyrannical Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes deposed Onias III. Onias was eventually lured out of the sanctuary of Daphne near Antioch by an usurper priest named Menelaus under the sworn pledge of nonviolence. Onias’ son, Onias IV, was bought some land near Heliopolis and had a Jewish temple there. Ever since the Onias dynasty was plundered of its birthright, the priests of the line of Aaron had not ministered the Temple as demanded by Leviticus, for even after the Hasmonian set up an independent Jewish kingdom, the Maccabean kings had found it necessary to keep control of the Temple’s finances in order to pay tribute or hire mercenaries. Philo spoke of how Egyptian Jews, including himself, paid homage to the temples in both Egypt and Jerusalem.

As shown by Randel McCraw Helms, the Book of Daniel identifies Onias III as the Messiah in its coded prophecy of the Apocalypse, which reads:

Know this, then, and understand: From the time there went out this message: “Return and rebuild Jerusalem” to the coming of an Anointed Prince, seven weeks and sixty-two weeks, with squares and ramparts restored and rebuilt, but in a time of trouble. And after the sixty-two weeks an Anointed One put to death without his . . . city and sanctuary ruined by a prince who is to come. The end of that prince will be catastrophe and, until the end, there will be war and all the devastation decreed. He will strike a firm alliance with many people for the space of a week; and for the space of one half-week he will put a stop to sacrifice and oblation, and on the wing of the Temple will be the appalling abomination until the end, until the doom assigned to the devastator. (NJB 9:25-27; Helms, Who 30).

The seven ‘weeks’ represents the 49 years between the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in 587 B.C. to the building of the second in 538 B.C. The 62 ‘weeks’ represents 434 years from the issuing of the decree to rebuild Jerusalem in 605 B.C. until Onias III was assassinated in 171 B.C. The ’half-week’ represents the 4 years between then and Antiochus putting an end to sacrifices and offerings in 167 B.C., when he set up a the “abomination that causes desolation,” a clear reference to the sacrifice of pigs upon an altar of Zeus which was set up in the Jerusalem Temple by Antiochus. The last ‘week’ represents the seven years between the death of Onias III and the rededication by Judas Maccabee in 164 B.C. Thus, the “70 years” originally prophesized by Jeremiah became 70 ‘weeks’ of years, or 490 years, divided into a seven-week period, a 62-week period, and a final one-week period (Helms, Who 28).

If Honi the Circle Drawer was a descendant of the Onias dynasty, then it’s possible that Yeshu had a claim to be high priest of the Temple as well as a Messianic legacy backed by scripture. This could explain the role of high priest given to him in the Epistle to the Hebrews, which says: “When Christ came as high priest, he went through the greater and more perfect tabernacle that is not man-made, that is to say, not a part of this creation” (9:11). But if Honi the Circle-Drawer came into conflict with Shimeon Ben Shetach over the rights of the Jerusalem Temple, then we might expect some reflection of this in the gospel tradition. In fact, the Gospel of Mark records a story Jesus tells after the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem in which a man plants a vineyard before going away on a journey, affter which he keeps sending servants to collect some of the fruit from the tenents he hired, but each time the servant is beaten and run off. The vineyard owner then sent his son thinking the tenents would respect his son, but the tenents instead kill the son for the inheritance, after which Jesus asks, “Now what will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and make an end of the tenants and give the vineyard to others” (NJB 12.9). This parable in particular scares the Pharisees and the gospel says it was at this point that they began to try to look for a way to have him arrested. The vineyard is symbolic of the temple in Jerusalem, but if Jesus was a simple peasant from Nazareth, what right would he have to the Temple?

However, if the power dynamic behind the priestly rights to the Temple was part of the motive behind the conflict in the mystery surrounding the Honi dynasty, then the expected tradition handed down through the Gospels would be one of respect and admiration for the Jerusalem Temple. The prophecy Jesus makes of the temple’s downfall does not prove any personal hostility towards Temple itself. Even the story of Jesus clearing the Temple of merchants could be interpreted as a symbolic cleansing of the temple, a ritual done many times historically whenever the Temple had been descrated. But the problem with the episode is the assumption that sacrificial animals should not be sold at the temple, which seems to insinuate that either sacrificial animals are meant to be led through the city from outside Jerusalem in order to be slaughtered or that animals should not be slaughtered at the Jerusalem Temple in complete violation of Leviticus. Considering a large number of early Christian sects were vegetarian, the second option should not be so quickly dismissed. It is possible that the antagonism towards the Temple was a later addition but the equal distribution of the story through all four gospels makes the episode appear to be an early part of the story.

The passive aggressive undertone against the Temple in the gospel becomes even more pronounced in apocrypha. The Gospel of Thomas quotes Jesus as saying, ““I will destroy [this] house, and no one will be able to build it [again].” (71). The Gospel of John seems to reacting against this assumption that Jesus was hostile towards the Temple when he uses an obviously redacted saying: “Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (NJB 2.19). Although “the Jews” think Jesus is talking about the Temple, John assures his reader he was really talking about his body. It is possible that after the Jerusalem temple was destroyed in 70 A.D., Hellenistic writers decided to rewrite Jesus as being hostile towards the Temple to align better with their dualistic theology of ignoring earthly ceremonies, or, considering Tertullian claimed Jews regularly denigrated Jesus as a “Samaritan,” it could be that Yeshu decided to ally himself with Samaritans hostile to the Jerusalem Temple and the tradition of Jesus’ hostility towards the temple is genuine.

There is also another Talmudic story in the Mishnah in which Honi meets a man planting a carob tree that won’t “bear fruit” for another 70 years, but the man explains to Honi that he is planting the tree for his children just as his his father and grandfather planted carob trees for him. Honi then went to sleep on a rock and woke up next to a carob tree 70 years later. He went to the house of study, where he overheard the sages say, “‘This tradition is as clear to us now as it was in the days of Honi the Circle Maker,” for whenever he came to the academy, he would settle any difficulty the sages had,” but when Honi identified himself, no one believed him (Ta’anit 23a). The concept of “bearing fruit” as a symbol for the handing down of a religious tradition is one of the most common metaphors in the gospel parables of Jesus. The story is a representation of how traditions change far beyond what their original founder intended. If the gospel traditions of Jesus are ultimately derived from the folktales surrounding Honi the Circle-Drawer, then the writers of the Mishnah were more prophetic than any of them could have known. Seventy years is also the span of time between when Honi was killed and when the Gospel Jesus would have been born.

Added together, we have seven sources supplying evidence for dating Jesus to the Hasmonian age: The Toledot Yeshu, the Talmud, Epiphanius, Neubauer, Ben Serapion, the Splitting of the Loaves, and the Sanhedrin Trial Source, yet the argument is not even entertained in the majority of popular scholarship. In his book, Jesus Outside the New Testament, biblical scholar Robert E. Van Voorst said the Toledot “may contain a few older traditions from ancient Jewish polemic against Christians, but we learn nothing new or significant from it. Scholarly consensus is correct to discount it as a reliable source for the historical Jesus.” Strangely, after summarily discounting the Toledot and Talmudic traditions, Van Voorst says that the Jewish references to Jesus “provide an even stronger case than those in classical literature that [Jesus] did indeed exist,” (133). Van Voorst ponders over why there are not more contemporary references to Jesus, conceding that the Jewish sources are more corroborative to his existence – though not as reliable in historical content – as the entire canonical tradition, yet without even a deliberation on the question as to whether the historical Jesus may have lived when they say he lived.

Although Ellegård appears to have been premature in identifying Jesus with the Teacher of Righteousness since there is increasing evidence the Techer of Righteousness lived closer to 150 B.C., his intuition in dating the Jesus of the Pauline epistles to living a full century before the letter’s author is no less prescient today than when he wrote it. Ever since the literalistic form of Apostolic Christianity promoted by St. Irenaeus in the late second-century A.D. became the most popularly accepted sect of Christianity following the Council of Nicaea, the primary theological assumption of New Testament scholarship has been that the gospels are being historical in referring to Jesus as being crucified and that the references in the epistles attribuited to Paul, James, and Peter of Jesus being “hung on a tree” are symbolic of the wooden cross, but the evidence presented here completely reverses that assumption: it has always been the epistles that were being historical and the gospels that were being symbolic by associating the destruction of the Jewish Temple and subsequent cruficixion of the messianic rebels in 70 A.D. with the earlier martyr figure who helped inspire some of them.

“His disciple said to him, ‘Twenty-four prophets spoke in Israel, and all of them spoke of you.’ He said to them, “You have omitted the one living in your presence, and have spoken (only) of the dead” (Thomas 52).

“There are perhaps traces in 2 Maccabees of a “hero novel” concerning the high priest Onias III, whose unjust execution in the days of the Maccabean Revolt is followed by his appearances to the Jewish guerillas” (Wills 42).

Honi is often compared to Jesus because of similar powers (42-43) but “It os often overlooked, ohowever, that there is connected with him the motif of hero/people antagonism, just as there is with the Greek hero” (43). The Talmud only suggests it by having him pray for death (43). Josephus has his death punished by wind similar to the resolution of Aesop and other Greek hero narratives (43).

“The Tol’doth Jeshu differs from the Gospel accounts in so many respects that the theory of literary dependence of the former on the latter must be rejected” (Hoffman 51).

Robertson, J.M. "The Crucifixion Legend"

 

"When, however, we investigate the relation of the Gospels to the Epistles, and find only that Paul's spectral Jesus has no traceable connection with the teaching "Jesus the Nazarite" or "Jesus of Nazareth," but that the Gospels them-selves betray plain traces of a factitious connection of these cognomens, and that the original Jesus of the first Gospel had no cognomen at all, we see cause to suspect that the movement really originated with the Talmudic Jesus Ben Pandira, who was stoned to death and hanged on a tree, for blasphemy or heresy, on the eve of a Passover in the reign of Alexander Jannaeus (B.C. 106-79). (Robertson 292).

 

Ben stada stoned in Lydda; Stada is bound up with the name Mary Magdala (292).

 

"We have seen that certain important passages were interpolated; but the refernces to a crucified Jesus are contstant, and offer no sign of interpolation. But if Paul's Jesus, who was taught nothing, and done nothing but die, be really the Jesus of a hundred years before, it becomes readily intelligible that, even if he had been only hanged after stoning, he should by that time have come to figure mythically as crucified. For, as we shall see, the cross was itself a myth element peculiarly likely to be bound up with the cult of any Savior God of the period. The historic crucifixion, scourging, and subsequent slaying of Antigonus, the last Asmonean king of the Jews, by Mark Antony, would further supply the motive for the story of Jesus having been crucified with a parade of the kingly title, as [293] Antigonus doubtless would be. And, historically speaking, it is probably enough that a crucified king should have had set on hs head, in mockery, a crown of straw and thorns, by way of heightening his degradation. Yet again, Philo tells a singular story of how, during the reign of Caligula, King Agrippa was insulted at Alexandria by the populace, who took a lunatic named (oddly enough) Karabbas, honored and dressed him as a mock king, and hailed him "Maris," the Syrian name for king. But here, as in the case of Antigonus, possible history is over-lapped by mythology, and it is necessary to take into account the latter factor" (Robertson 292-293).

 

Lawrence M. Wills: “Paul Wendland suggested in 1898 that the mock-king ritual of the Roman Saturnalia had influenced the mocking and scourging of Jesus in the passion narrative, but James Frazer responded by arguing that a better parallel than the mock-king of the Saturnalia festival is that of the Babylonian Sacaea” (Wills 37).

Crown of thorns is an ancient nimbus for Sun God, but Prometheus and Herakles also wore a mock crown (Robertson 293). When Prometheus is released, Jupiter forces him to wear a crown  of osiers and an iron ring as memory. Quotes from the lost Prometheus Unbound and the "Sphinx" of Aeschylus say worshipes wear a crown in honor of Prometheus. Herakles' mock crown is the wisp-pad he made while Atlas held the heavens. Tertullian says a symbolic crown of some sort was used in the Lord's Supper (293). In Magian Mithra worship, the sacrifical victim was crowned (293-294). Athenaeus asys crowns of thorns were used in Egypt (294). Herodotus says the Egyptians crowned Herakles with garland and led him in a procession, intending to sacrifice him to their Supreme God, but were instead slain by him, although Herodotus repudiates the story since Egyptians had no human sacrifices. But the ritual was probably in use at Abydos (294).

 

Drinking gall figured into the mysteries of Demeter (294). The Herakles cult and his Phoenician double, the sun god Melkarth, worshipped at Gades, had two pillars symbolizing the limits of the course of th esun, figuring into the pillar legends of Samson (294). Just as Samson carries off one of the gateposts of Gaza just as Herakles carries his pillars and dies where he sets them up in the Tyrian form of the legend, just as Samson dies tearing the pillars of hte Philistine Hall down (294-295). Simon of Cyrene is fro Libya and is equivalent to Samson/Shem/Shamash/Ba'al. The God Simon was worshipped in Samaria. "The two versions of the cross-bearing satisfy us that the story is a myth: is any hypothesis more probable than that of Simon the Cyrenian's task is variant of that of the Cyrenian Simon-Herakles?" (295).

 

Cross is a phallic symbol but also associated with fire-sticks from the Aryans in India (295-296). In the Vedas, Agni, the fire god, is represented by two crossed sticks (296). In Mihr Yasht ritual, in Zend Avesta, Mithra drives his chariot acorss the heavens with his arms lifted up towards immortality, variant of Ixion cruficied on a "four-spoked fetter," as Pindar calls it, symbolizing the un god cruciifed on a sun wheel (296).

 

"Despite some reent German skepticism, the connection of Prometheus, the fire-bringer and fire-stealer, with the Sanskrit Pramantha, or fire-generating boring stick, and the variant word pramathyus (borer or robber) seems sufficently well made out; and the mythical chaining of Prometheus on a rock on the Caucasus, in such wise that he connot heep the eagle of Zeus from gnawing his liver, implies the posture of crucifixion" (296).

 

"Phoroneus, son of Inachos the water god (probably = Noach = Enoch), who in Argos was revered as a fire-bringer, as Prometheus was elsewh[e]re, had for mother the nymph Melia (the ash); and though Steinthal perhaps assumes too readily that he was figured as a bird, from the derivation of his name from the Sanskrit epithet of Agni, bhuranyus (rapid, darting, flying), still the Greek name of his motherconnects him with the tree. And the fact that on the one hand Prometheus was said to have made men from clay, and taht on the other Phoroneus was fabled by some to be the first man, brings us still further into connection with the Greco-Jewish significance of the God-Christ, who as Logos hd presided over the creation of the world" (297).

 

Tree is also linked to Attis, as a pine tree was cut down, and decorated with violets at the Temple of the Great Goddess as a symbol of castration/lost demi-god, and he was sought after for three days, after which there was celebration. A picture was sometimes bound to the tree. In Isaic mysteries, the coffin of Osiris may have been a hallowed out pine tree, and in the mysteries of PErsephone, the sacred tree was cut and formed the images of a virgin, over which the worshippers lamented for 40 nights, burning it on the last night. Attis risen became "Papa," Father and Lord; as Osiris remains the Father-God and Savior. Dionysus, the most popular god in the period just before Christianity, is in the same way a god of the sacre tree, a savior, and sacrifice (297). In one story he is persecuted and killed by Titans (298).

 

In Gaul, victims were crucified in the temple and then eaten in a cannibalistic holy communion. In Mexico, the sacred tree was made into a cross (the name of which meant "tree of our life, or flesh"), on which were exposed dough figures of a savior god, which were then sacramentally eaten. The priest, wearing the skin of a female victim, spread his hands out like a cross before the image of the war god (298). Justin Martyr cites Plato's Timaeus, which says God compounded the soul into two parts and joined them together "in the figure of a x," and so imposed it on the world, to justify the Logos. Antioch during Julian's reign referred to the Christian reign of Constantius as the time of "Chi and Kappa," which signified their savior god's name by the initial letter which itself was one of the names of the cross (299). "The ritual lamentation of teh divine sisters, Isis and Nephthys, for Osiris is found in the temple remains of hte island of Philae expressely connected with the representation of Osiris in the form of a crucifix, the God's head standing on the top of four-barred Nilometer, faced by the mourning [300] female figures. Here, too, he represents th Trinity, combining the atrributes of Phtah-Sokari-Osiris. The need then be no perplexity for rationalist students in regard to the text of Revelation (11:8) about "the great city which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also their [in many Greek versions our, as in our A.V.] Lord was crucified." (300) Hermes, the Logos in Greek theosophy was also symbolized by a cross (300).

 

The back of the Aries (ram/lamb) was 10 degrees in lengths and equinoctial colure, or intersecting line, would pass through it at one part or another during 7 centuries, forming a quasi-crucifixion (300). The entrance of the sun into Aries signaled the new year. Hermes as "lamb-bearer" suppleied the art type of the good shepherd and the lamb-haired, lamb-fleeced Apollo was called the "chaste God" The Greek hagnos (chaste) was certainly coupled with the Latin agnus (lamb) throughout the Roman Empire (300-301). Apollo's priestess gave her oracle after tasting the blood of a sacrificed lamb. The Passover was also figured by astronomical bsis, its date based on th esun and moon. "To sum up, then: the story of the crucifixion, first, may rest on the remote datum of an actual crucifixion of Jesus Ben Pandira, the probably Jesus of Paul, dead long before, and represented by no preserved biography or teachings whatever. But had this Jesus really been only "hanged on a tree," the factors of a crucifixion myth were strong enough to turn the hanging into a crucifixion (301).

 

The rock tomb, the sacred cave, the Lord's Supper, and the resurrection mystery were adopted from Mithraism (303). The descent into hell was "especially familiar in the mysteries of Dionysos, who descended into Hades to bring back his mother Semele^ and carry her to heaven; and in the worship of Attis, whose "flight," "concealment," "vanishing," and "descent into the cave" are all specified by Julian as part of the mysteries of the vernal equinox (303). The banquet of the "seven Pii Sacerdotes", the seven holy priests, part of a syncretic cult of Mithras-Sabazios, was probably a feature of the Dionysus cult (also identified with Sabazios), is connected to the risen God appearing to the seven disciples by the sea of Tiberias (303-304). "it is significant that in the supposed Christian catacomb paintings which represent the banquet of the seven--and which orthodoxy supposes to represent the episode in the fourth Gospel, without a word of regard to the admittedly Mithraic remains--there are commonly eight basketfuls of bread." In one picture, the seven are nude. The frequency of the subject compared to the Lord's Supper adds proof that "it rested on some broader and older basis than the solitary narrative of the fourth Gospel" (304).

 

"But Christianity arose, in an atmosphere of thickening superstition, with the decline of ancient knowledge and civilzation; and the ascension of myth, once set for modern Christendom, is thus far no more expungable by the science of Copernicus and Newton than were the pellmell of pagan myths by the better knowledge of antiquity. Absit omen." (305). Firmicus said "the Devil has his Christs" (306). "In all probability there has been no long break for many thousands of years in the celebration of the sacred birthday on Christmas Day at the Tammuzcave at Bethlehem; and only a slight variation in the dramatic ceremonial of the death of the god at Easter, which is still regularly performed at Jerusalem" (306).

 

“Happily shall I live without possessions . . . Happily shall I live without ties . . .Happily shall I live without struggling anxiously among the strivers . . . Happily shall I live without hostility among the hostile” (Ghandhari Dharmapada 167; Gruber 124).

“Judge not the mistakes of others, neither what they do or leave undone, but judge your own deeds, the just and the unjust” (GDh 271-272; Gruber 126).

“O Vasettha, those Brahmins who know the three Vedas are just like a line of blind men tied together where the first sees nothing, the middle man ses nothing, and the last see nothing” (Tevijja-Sutta, Dighanikaya, 13:15; Gruber 127).

Streeter noted that the Sermon on the Mount was close to the Buddha (Gruber 129-130).

A clay statuette of an Indian woman in Memphis was dated to 200 B.C. (Gruber 176) Buddhist symbols have been found at Dendera (176-177). Dion Chrysostosmos (40-112 A.D.) spoke of Indians in Alexandria after the start of the new millennium (177).

In 1894, Robertson Smith suggested vegetarianism in the Theraputae may have been influenced by missionaries sent by King Asoka (181). Zacharias P. Thundy says the name comes from Sanskrit/Pali term theravada, the name of the Buddhist school created by Asoka (183).

Gruber, Elmar R. & Holger Kersten. The Original Jesus: The Buddhist Sources of Christianity. Rockport, Massachusetts: Element, 1995.

The Macmillan Bible Atlas by Yohanan Aharoni and Michael Avi-Yonah. New York: Macmillan, 1968.

Dating the Gospel of Mark and the Early Sources

Most scholars date the four canonical gospels to the late first century with the First Roman-Jewish War between 66 and 73 being the central reference point in estimation comparisons. Randel McCraw Helms argues that “Mark” wrote his gospel after 70 but mistakenly expected the Second Coming in 74 and so must have written a year or two before that date (Helms, Who 9). John Dominic Crossan also dates Mark to soon after the end of the war in 73-74 (Crossan, Who Killed 17). Bart Ehrman, however, allows for the possibility of an educated guess about the temple’s fate starting with the beginning of the war in 66 (Ehrman, Lost 19). Burton L. Mack places it somewhere in the 70s and Earl Doherty pushes it back to the late 80s (Mack 5; Doherty 3). Alvar Ellegård instead ascertains that the canonical gospels were written in the second century, concluding that through the advancement of linguistic criteria, the four gospels could actually be dated “with some probability” after many of the apocryphal and semi-apocryphal texts typically dated after the canonical Gospels, including: 1 Clement, Pastor of Hermas, the Didakhe, the Gospel of Barnabas, the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Book of Revelations (Ellegård 183; Crane 112, 145, 197).

Many of the sayings within Mark, as well as Matthew and Luke, are believed to by most scholars to go back to Jesus. Many scholars believe tht Mark took most of his sayings from a common pool of Cynic wisdom sayings that survived in oral tradition for up to 10 years or so before being written down as sayings gospels such as Q and Special Luke, where they copied for 30 years until Mark became the first evangelist to recontextualize the saying gospels into the “biographies.” The Logia common to Matthew and Luke, Q, is generally believed to have been first down to paper somewhere around Galilee between the years 30 and 60 of the first century after travelling by oral tradition for years if not decades.

Some scholars separate Q into two layers, the earliest layer being a collection of Cynic wisdom sayings that stress self-denial and universal forgiveness, and the second layer being apocalyptic and judgmental, especially of everone on the outside. The second layer speaks of a crisis over followers having to leave their families to join the church. Burton L. Mack tentatively dates Q1 toward the end of the first twenty years of the movement, around the year 50, and argues that the conflicts identified in Q2 “took place during the 50s and 60s although some of the sayings are best understood as language coined in the very shadow of the Roman-Jewish war.” Mack, and many others, also posit a third introductory layer of Q, written after the destruction of the Temple, which brings Jesus up to “the level of the divine” by having him “talking to God as his Father and debating with Satan as his tempter” (Mack 51-53). There are some peculaiarities common to Matthew and Luke that do not involve wisdom sayings, like the three temptations of Satan and the addition to John the Baptist’s pronouncement from Mark: “I have baptised you with water, but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit [and with fire];” and although it’s very likely the Q source went through more one revision within its lifetime, the evidence appears to me that the extra-Logia commonalities are not so overwhelming that they con explained away by oral tradition or of the evangelist being familiar with other gospels while not using them as a direct source (NJB, 1.8).

Burnett Streeter’s hypothetical M and L sources are also believed to be “saying gospels,” listing nuggets of Cynic wisdom one after the other in the vein of the Q source. Streeter’s view that Special Matthew had a Judaic character is supported by findings from the Jesus Seminar that the parables from Special M are typically apocalyptic in character (the good seed, the fishing net, the ten virgins, etc.)[82] Special Luke, on the other hand, is generally believed to be made up mostly of authentic Jesus sayings, although the Jesus Seminar discounted a couple, such as the parables of the tower builder/warring king and the slave’s job because they appear to be proverbial wisdom that was common to both Judaism and Hellenism.[83] Both are generally believed to have been composed at the same time or shortly after Q, between 40 and 60 A.D.

The Gospel of Thomas, another related sayings source, has been given a diverse array of dates ranging from 50 to 180. It was discovered by Egyptian farmers in 1886 among many other Gnostic codices in a sealed earthenware jar buried near the town of Nag Hammadi, most likely due to the books being banned in Egypt some time in the second century. Although aome bible scholars such as Robert M. Grant and Ernst Haenchen have argued that the sayings in Thomas are late Gnostic interpretations of quotations lifted from the canonical gospels, the literary evidence for the prevalence of early sayings sources have led Koester and the Jesus Seminar to conclude that Thomas is the sole survivor of this long lost “saying gospel” genre (Koester, Ancient 85). Many of the Thomas sayings preserve an earlier version of equivalent sayings found in the canonical gospels, although it appears canonical sayings may also have been added to it as well. One of the sayings prompts readers to follow James for spiritual authority, but another has Jesus bestowing wisdom to Thomas in a Gnostic-like fashion, leading Crossan and other scholars to argue that Thomas is made up of two layers. The “James” layer has many sayings in common with the earliest layer of Q; the second layer, which emphasized Thomas over Peter and Matthew, adds unique sayings that are more mystical and dualistic, emphasizing hidden secrets and knowing oneself over practices of prayer, diet, charity, fasting, and piety. Crossan dates the “James” layer to the 50s or 60s and a “Thomas” layer to the 70s or 80s (Crossan, Who 27).

“They curse those who fast, saying that one should not fast, since fasting is from the archon who made the age” –Epiphanius (Amidon 77). Cf. Thomas 6: “His disciples asked him and said to him, ‘Do you want us to fast? How should we pray? Should we give to charity? What diet should we observe?’ Jesus said, ‘Don’t lie, and don’t do what you hate, because all things are disclosed before heaven’.”

“What we eat, meat or vegetables or bread or whatever else, we eat as a favor to those creatures, collecting from everything the soul and carrying it with us to the heavenly places. So they partake of all meats saying: Let us pity our kind.” –Epiphanius (Amidon 79). Cf. Thomas 7: “Lucky is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes the human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion still will become human.”

Crossan dates the Cross Gospel to the 40s and suggests that its pro-Roman stance might indicate a location in Galilee like Sepphoris (Crossan, Who 223). Although the reasoning behind Crossan’s gospel deconstruction is very compelling, I believe his dating methods are flawed since there are references in the Cross Gospel which suggest that it was constructed after the war.

Since Proto-Mark assumes those who follow Jewish law are “righteous” and centers on questions about Old Testament scripture, such as what actions are lawful on the Sabbath, Burkett believes that Proto-Mark has a Judaistic character that can be seen in texts such as Q, M, the Letter of James, the Didache and the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions (158). Burkett sees Proto-Mark as being written by the inner circle of Peter, James and John, citing as evidence the Transfiguration in which only those three disciples participated in, eschatological warnings of the “abomination of desolation,” the lack of Hellenistic salvation theology, the focus on David, less portrayals of the top three disciples in a negative light, and the link between the story of Jesus Feeding 5,000 with 12 baskets with the 5,000 Jewish Christians in the Jerusalem community (Burkett 158-164). However, he admits that “[I]n two instances, however, Proto-Mark does give a more negative portrayal of Jesus’ disciples. It criticizes the disiples for lack of faith when they are unable to cast out a demon (Mark 9:19 par) and it includes the story in which Peter denies Jesus” (162). He also sees the story of Jesus recognizing the people around him as his true family as a symbolic point of conflict between Peter and the sons of Zebedee against Jesus’ family, dating the gospel to 70 A.D., “prior to the time that James the brother of Jesus rose to power” (162).

The story of the Freeding of the 4000, a story doublet from the A source, in the Bethsaida section, appears to be associated with Jerusalem “Hellenists” since it replaces the number 12, symbolizing the 12 disciples, with the number 7, which symnbolizes the 7 evangelists of the Jerusalem “Hellenists” from Acts 6:1-6 (181). The A source is also noted for criticizing the “inner circle” of Proto-Mark, such as Jesus rebuking Peter and the sons of Zebedee desiring undeserved exaltation, signifying a tension between the Judaic “inner circle” and the “Hellenists.” Since the A source three times identifies Galilee as the place where Jesus would meet his disciples after the resurrection, Burkett believes that it was probably written there. Ther B material, which is far less extensive than A, seems to center more on possession and locates Jesus’ main stay of residence as Capernaum (187). The C source was apparently a passion gospel that focused on “preaching the gospel,” leading Burkett to dub it the “evangelion source” (199). It was incorporated into both Proto-Mark and Proto-Mark A, an overlap that led Matthew and Luke to include doublets of the material while Mark consistently conflated the different versions (195). Finally, Mark added material that reflects a Gentile perspective, such as explaining to the reader the Jewish custom of hand washing (7.3), an argument that ritually impure food had been “cleansed” (7.19), and an added phrase “Let the children be fed first” to the story of the Syrophoenician woman’s faith, implying that the Greeks should be “fed,” that is, taught, after the Jews (7.27) (Burkett 245-247).

In fact, there is strong evidence that the earliest stratum of the miracle stories from the gospels were also composed for an audience with a great amount of sympathy for the fall of Jerusalem. Parables and prophecies tend to hold symbolic messages that point to events connected to the war. The first example is Jesus’ prediction of the Second Temple’s destruction (13.1-2), which ultimately happened when Titus ended the Roman-Jewish war by conquering Jerusalem and burning the temple down. The theme of the temple’s destruction does not appear to be a late addition to Mark as even the Cross Gospel contains the part of the passion story in which the curtain of the temple is torn at the moment of Jesus’ death (Mark 15.38). Crossan instead argues that the curtain ripping is an act of symbolic destruction that the historical Jesus made against the Jerusalem temple, meaning the story element was, in a sense, prophetic by accident. Although I agree with Crossan that story elements like the Clearing of the Temple insinuates hostility towards the Temple administration, I find the ripping of the curtain to be another element of symbolic “prophecy” of the Temple’s historic destruction.

There are elements from the miracle stories in the Gospel of Mark which herald back to the First Roman-Jewish War as well. Most tellingly of a post-war mindset is the story in which Jesus exorcised a large number of spirits named “Legion” out of the man and into a group of two thousand pigs, all of who ran crazed into the sea (13.14). “Legion” appears to be a symbol for the Roman tenth legion “Legio X Fretensis,” which not only took part in the siege of Jerusalem, but may also have destroyed the Qumran community near the Dead Sea Scrolls site (Dabrowa 13). Shortly thereafter the Tenth Legion helped dispose of the last remaining Jewish rebels in Masada. Thus, as Crossan and Richard Watts point out, just as Jesus had sent two thousand pigs into the sea, Mark had written a secret prophecy that when the Messiah returned, he would realize the dream of every Jewish freedom fighter: to push the Roman legion into the Mediterranean Sea (Crossan, Answers 72-73). As Werner Kelber says, “[t]he narration of the drowning of the army of swine vents anti-Roman sentiments and encourages wishful thinking with regard to the occupying troops,” giving us a “rare glimpse into political risks taken by early Christian storytellers” (Kelber 53). More importantly, the story dates one of the earliest story components, an exorcism miracle story, to the post-war era.

Another story element appears to hint at a compositional date soon after Nero’s time. In a portion of the Gospel of Peter that Crossan attributes to the Cross Gospel, a centurion named Petronius is given soldiers to guard the tomb of Jesus so that his followers will not steal the body. The name Petronius is most famous for being the name of a courtier of Nero who is believed to have authored an ancient epic called the Satyricon about the licentious adeventures of a gladiator and a slave, a Latin work so massive that the surviving portions are believed to make up only a small amount of the original enycylopediacal work. The epic has no officially-named author and the subject was of who wrote the work was hotly debated during the Renaissance, and although one written tradition ascribes is to a certain “Titus Petronius,” nearly all modern literary critics identify him with Gaius Petronius Arbiter of Nero’s time, based on literary connections the novel has with Seneca and the Stoic philosopher’s nephew Lucan (Petronius xiii).

In one of the many digressions of the storyline, the Satyricon’s protagonist produces a tale he says happened within his own lifetime. There was once a widow who diligently tried to starve herself at her dead husband’s grave but then surrendered her affections to a centurion after being talked out of suicide. When thieves steal the body of a crucified man while the two are sleeping together, the centurion is about to commit suicide so that he will not be crucified as punishment, but the widow urges the centurion to use her dead husband’s body as a substitute for the stolen body, saying, “I’d rather see a dead man crucified than a living man dead” (Crossan, Who Killed 161-162).

Crossan makes no suggestion that there might be a connection between Gaius Petronius and the Petronius in the Cross Gospel, but instead points out that a Syrian governor named Petronius was portrayed by Josephus as a “Stoic saint” for risking martyrdom by disobeying Caligula’s orders to put a statue of the emperor in the Jewish Temple, an important precurosor to the rebellion and the Temple’s destruction, though disaster was averted by Caligula being assassinated before he could respond to Petronius’ plea. Crossan leaves it to the reader to consider whether the name was meant as an allusion to the governor’s heroism (Crossan, Who Killed 92).

As mentioned earlier, many of the teachings of Jesus have parallels to the Stoic lessons of Nero’s tutor, Seneca. Tacitus and Seutonius mark Nero’s reign as the first to persecute Christians, with Tacitus speaking of Nero blaming the Great Fire of Rome in 64 A.D. Petronius, like Seneca, was forced to commit suicide by Nero in 65, and he spent his last hours bleeding himself while speaking of light poetry and describing Nero’s shameful debaucheries in lurid detail. Part of the Book of Revelation also appears to have been composed shortly after Nero’s death since the Number of the Mega Therion, or “Great Beast,” 666, has long been known the be a letter-code for “Caesar Nero,” just as the reference of the return of the Beast from the Abyss corresponds to a well-known myth from Jewish texts against Roman imperialism that Nero would return from the dead and lead the Parthians against Rome not long later Nero’s own suicide in 68 A.D. (Crossan, God 220).

Another important reference, this one found in Mark’s passion story but missing from the Cross gospel, is that of Simon of Cyrene, who in the gospels carries the cross for Jesus for a short while. The Jews of Cyrene, in modern day Libya, followed Jerusalem and revolted in the year 73 A.D. during the reign of Vespasian, but like Jerusalem was crushed by the emperor, making Simon of Cyrene a potent symbol of how Cyrene “carried the cross” of Jerusalem. This is another important symbol linking Mark to the First Jewish-Roamn war.

"Aramaic" is not to be equated with "authentically spoken by Jesus." Against Jeremias it has been noted that an Aramaic-speaking community could as well invent "words of the Lord" as a Greek-speaking one; and that Aramaic terms and Semitisms do not even necessarily represent an early stage in the development of the tradition" (Wells 208).

 

The name Mark probably comes from 1 Peter 1.1, 5.13. It has Pauline theology and Mark is mentioned in Col. 2.10. Papias is responsible for the name Matthew (Wells 210). "We" passages ascribe Luke (210-211).. "John" is unknown until after 175. John is picked because James died early (211).

 

Polycarp (120-135) quotes Matthew, possibly Ignatius (110) too, which would mean Mark existed by 110. Koester (and Elegard) think Ignatius and Matthew are drawing independently from common background (211).

 

Mark mistakes Palestinian geography and must explain Jewish practices (211). Thus Mark must be later than Paul since the Law is still a burning issue in Paul's time (211-212).

 

Taylor suggests Mark took two stories and made them doublets, variant versions of the same story, because the disciples forget the first (problem: Jesus points that out!) (212). Another doublet is to dual references to deceives (13.5-6, 21-23).

 

"To allow time for post-Pauline traditions (collected and arranged in a sequence by the evangelist) to have developed, a date of composition earlier than about A.D. 70 is unlikely, and it is today seldom challenged (212). Some say Mark 12.9 presupposes the temple's destruction. Brandon pressed for 71. Jewish payment of tribute was vital in 71, but "injuctions to submit to authorities and pay taxes is also in Rom. 13.1-7 (which, if genuine and not interpolated,11 is pre-Marcan), as well as in epistles of late first and early second century" (Mark 12.13-17, Wells 212). Curtain in temple displayed in Rome, but that curtain doesn't seem to have been ripped (more likely symbolic) (212). Naive that Galilean disciples saw it for first time, so Luke changes it to "people" (213).

 

If he expected the end soon, then he must have written the gospel within a few years of 70 (Wells 215). But no one references it and 13.7-10 suggests the author was explaining why it didn't happen. That the gospel has to be preached to all nations presupposs the world will not end soon. Wells now thinks this is another unmaterialized threat that all Christians in the empire would have to "flee to the mountains" so as not to worship at pagan altar (215-216). Thus there's no conflict between the sacriliedge and the late apocalypse. 8:27-9:1, 13:13 assumes persecution when there wasn't any in 1st century. Winter correlates the "name" Christian being a capital offense to the letter in Trajan asking whether the "name" is sufficient evidence (216).

 

Mark written between 70 and Polycarp's reference in 135 (217). Matthew and Luke both quoted by Polycarp no later than 135. McNeile dates Matthew after 80, and Kilpatrick and Grant favor 90 A.D. Q abandoned the idea of the second coming and so couldn't be early. "Palestinian" Semitisms can be explained without it being authentic Jesus (217).

 

That he excludes Jewish persecution to Jesus' ministry and excludes it from the distant future may point to a date after 90 A.D. because that is when Christians were excluded from the synagogue so that the "floggings in synagogues" (10:17) are a thing of the past (218-219).

 

Chapter 23 shows lack of detachment as hypocracy is used whether both groups do it or it can be called hypocracy (219). It must be later than Luke's woes because Luke distinguishes between Pharisees and rabbis whlie Matthew conflates them, saying "the scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat" as if the lay members were all authoratative in the Torah. Hare thinks this means it must be before 90 but it contradicts 16.5-12, 12.33-35, 15.14 "blind guides", and 23.4 "heavy burden," 23.8-12, so if he's open to these contradictions, he couldn't be too sensitive to rabbinic liturgical modifications.

 

Schmiedel argues tht Luke used Josephus' Antiquities (221), and Cadbury finds it "very persuasive," dating it after 93.

Dodd believes the "basic tradition of John was shaped before 66 (Wells 224).

 

Wells dates John around 100 A.D. Grant argues for early 2nd century (224). Wells says John must have existed by 125, but that only proves Signs existed by then. Polycarp likely used both Matt. and Luke (120-135).

 

Reason to believe Matt. was used only in Palestine and John inTurkey (226n).

 

Ignatius says John baptized Jesus (that all righteousness might be fulfilled by him," similar words to Mathew (Koester 60; Wells 226n).

 

Clement is the first to link Mark with Rome and Eusebous claims Papias confirms this, but Wells thinks this is just a refence to 1 Peter 5.13. If Mark was it Rome, it must be after 96 because Clement of Rome has no knowledge of it. Shulz says Tyre, Sidon or Transjordan (Shulz 9). Taylor makes a case for Antioch (5, 32; Wells 226n).

 

Although Rom. 13.1-7 have long been recognized as a self-contained unit, Kallas' reasons for setting it aside as a second-century interpolation are not fully convincing (Kallas 365-374; Wells 226n).

 

Farmer date Mark between 100-125, but says its dependent on Matt. and Luke (200-226; 226n). Trocme' proposes 85 as an upper limit but dates the first 13 chapters as early as 50 (193, 203, Wells 226n-227n).

 

A mystical logion from Q (Matt. 11.25-27, Luke 10,21-22) is claimed by Jeremias (228) as "Palestinian" and is in fact parallel in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Davies, 136ff). Mose commentators agree that its based on OT quotes put in Jesus' mouth (Wells 227n).

Ur-Marcus was the first to combine a list of Cynic Wisdom Sayings with wandering healer miracle stories and conclude it with the Cross Gospel. Jesus sends out twelve disciples, but they are unnamed.

Koester believd it came from several written sources that were partly Aramaic, but as we have seen…

No Sign But Jonah (Tertullian beginning ch 27)

Can’t be in Q, must be in original Mark, then changed to no sign (8.12)

Tertullian and Epiphanius record a short version of Sign of Jonah in Marcion’s gospel

John the Baptist not in Q; Variant Jonah sayings

“Fire” started by Luke:

1) Tongues of fire (Acts 2.3)

2) Fire and sulfur in Lot’s age (7.29)

3) Fire down on Samaritan town (9.54)

4) Adds baptism to “bring fire to earth”.(12.49)

(ref. To James/John baptism/death in Bethsaida Mark 10.38)

Antioch source: Spirit and Fire, John’s woe to Pharisees, Sign of Jonah, Woe to Korazin and Bethsaida (10.13-15), [Six Woes (11.39-52) are in Marcion (Tertullian 4.27)], “Apocalyptic Correlatives” based on “Prophetic Correlatives” from Bible Hisotry “As with Lightning/Noah/Lot, so also…” (Amos 3.12, Is. 10.10) (Crossan, Historical 253)

Crossan originally thought Mark had the more original version of the Jonah story but was persuaded by Kloppenborg that denying public legitimations was a personal characteristic of Mark that would make him want to abbreviate the saying. Since Q never explicitly refers to the resurrection, they consider Luke’s explanation to be the more original. (Crossan, Historical 252). Sign of Jonah older than Q or Mark, but the apocalyptic interpretation begins with the “apocalypric layer,” Q2 (253).

Link to Ur-Toledot

If Ur-Marcus used Cross faithfully, Luke wouldn’t need Cross gospel?

Bethsaida Mark adds Mark 6.45-8.26

Koester says although Mark could have just been missing some pages, the section is distinct because of repeat elements

Jesus feeds 5000 (6.30-44) 4000 *8.1-6)

Choosing of the seven (Acts 6.5) Philip, Nicolas

Philip at Caeserea = 4 virgin prophetesses: similar to Montanist

Nicolas of Antioch – convert to Judaism (either ascetic or hedonistic)

People overwhelmed with amazement (7.37, fright 9.5, 10.24,26a)

Warns not to describe Transfiguration – apocalypse secret (9.9)

Day and Hour Unknown (13.33-37) not in Luke

Counterfeit Messiahs 13.18-25 not in Luke

Request of James and John 10.35-44 (Baptism=death Luke 12.50)

Divorce 10.1-12 (from Wisdom saying Luke/Lord 16.18)

9.2-10, 14-29a (Criticism of Peter, James, and John added to Luke-Acts)

No Sign of Jonah as in Mark, assumed to be in Q (Ep. 1.11.6)

Calling Elijah; wine vinegar (15.35-37a)

L is from Caeserea. M is from Jerusalem. Q originally in Aramaic.

Counter-evidence: Disciples in Mark/Luke

1)Peter 10.28 in Luke 18.28

2)John complaining in Luke 9.49, not in Lord?

3)Peter’s confession 9.18-22)

Secret Mark

Ties martyrdom to baptism

Marcosians

Link to Valentinian John

Mark’s “young man” combined with Beloved Disciple

Mark

Alexandria?

Luke-acts uses Mark as a source

Epilogue 16.9 based on Luke-Acts

All of these examples provide compelling evidence that the Cross gospel and some of the earliest layers of Mark to shortly after the First Roman-Jewish War.

Epiphanius on Marcion: acestic, fasts on Sabbath “so as to nothing congenial to the God of the Jews”, resurrection of the soul, not flesh; uses water in mysteries, up to 3 baptisms for remission of sins because of his seduction of the virgin (1.3.3-1.3.), Jesus went down to save Cain, Esau, and other Gentiles who didn’t know the God of the Jews, but left Abel, Noah, Moses, etc. b/c they recognized the Creator instead of devoting themselves to the invisible one. Permit women to administer baptism. Celebrate mysteries in front of new converts (catechumens), reincarnation, transmigration from body to body. Galatians first, Cor., Rom., 1 & 2 Thes., Eph., Col., Phil., Philip., Laod.

Dating the Gospel of Matthew and the Early Apologists

Most scholars date the Gospel of Matthew to the 80s A.D., around the same time they believe Luke-Acts was written. Bart Ehrman dates Matthew to the early 80s while John Dominic Crossan and Burton L. Mack date it to the late 80s, and Earl Doherty places Matthew as some time between 100-120.[84] Most scholars place the gospel in Antioch. For identifying Jesus as the Messiah, Peter is rewarded with the power to bind people in heaven from the earth, a detail most likely invented to secure the authority of the Antioch church (16.18-19). Peter is often identified with Antioch, like when Paul opposes him there in Galatians 2.11, and Antioch is the only place where two didrachmae was the official tax, as implied when Jesus gives Peter the money to pay his taxes (Matt. 17.24). Moreover, the traditions that are closest to Matthew come from Ignatius of Antioch and the Didakhe, a Jewish-themed treatise credited to the Twelve Apostles, which scholars also place in Syria. Certain editorial changes in Matthew, like changing “Blessed are the poor” to “Blessed are the poor in spirit” have led many scholars to stipulate that the Matthew community was wealthy, and assuming this is true, it would depreciate the chance of it being written in Jerusalem or Palestine after the Jewish war. There are also some strong similiarities between some of Matthew’s citations from the Septuagint and citations made from a Christian who worked in Antioch named Lucian who was martyred in 312 A.D (Sim 58).

As mentioned in “The Two Source Hypothesis and the Four Source Hypothesis,” the first reference to the names Mark and Matthew comes from a quote attributed to St. Papias, a Presbyter from Hierapolis in western Turkey, which reveals a tradition that the evangelist Mark had based his gospels on sayings and deeds passed down to him from Peter and a “Sayings of Matthew,” which he said had originally been written in Hebrew. Scholars originally identified the Q source with the logia of Matthew, and based largely on the Papias quote, the assumption that a Greek logia was based on an earlier Aramaic logia was popular among scholars at the beginning of the twentieth century, including Helmut Koester (Intro II 172). But while there are Semitisms and evidence of formulations made by someone whose mother tongue was Aramaic in the apocalyptic sayings of the Q tradition, a general consensus has since been reached that all the books of the New Testament were written in Greek and that there is no proof any of them were translated from Aramaic or Hebrew (Robinson 27-30; Koester, Ancient 133; Doherty 266).

Crossan dates Papias’ writings as coming before the mid-150s (Crossan, Who Killed 74). Helmut Koester and Burton Mack date the writings circa 130 while Alvar Ellegård tentatively places the Papias reference around 140 (Koester, Intro II 3; Mack 153; Ellegård 183). However, the Papias quote may yet prove to have some validity to it. Papias refers to the act of translation for both the Sayings of Matthew and the Gospel of Mark. The way the evangelists recontextualized the popular wisdom sayings in different ways may have some relationship to the statement made by Papias that “each one interpreted them as best he could.” Despite the fact that Q does not appear to have ever been written in Aramaic, the tradition of ascribing Matthew to Q may have followed the sayings source when it ws transcribed to the Gospel of Matthew, as Koester points out (172). The name Matthew is found replacing the disciple Levi in Matthew’s gospel alone, but it is unknown if an oral tradition inspired the name change or the name change inspired the gospel’s name. On the other hand, the “Sayings of Matthew” could just as likely be the offical name of the “Special M” Source. Mark’s “translation” of Peter may likewise be a rationalization of the Gospel of Mark using the passion narrative from the Cross Gospel, which was probably associated with Peter before or after it was rewritten as the Gospel of Peter. Although there is nothing in the hypothetical Cross Gospel that attributes its authorship to the hand of Peter, the later canonical stratum writes as Peter in the first person. In this sense, Papias may be accurately describing the developmental processes behind the gospels of Mark and Matthew without even realizing it.

The next second century author to reference the gospels is St. Justin the Martyr, better known as Justin Martyr. Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho quotes verses found in the gospels of Matthew and Luke extensively, speaks of Peter’s “memoirs,” and makes a reference the “Sons of Thunder,” a title given to the disciples James and John that is found only in the Gospel of Mark (Koester, Ancient 274). Koester dates Justin’s First and Second Apology to shortly after Justin arrived in Rome in 150, with the Dialogue written not long afterwards (Intro II, 342). Most other scholars, including Ellegård, place the Dialogue in the 150s as well (Ellegård 183).

Although Justin did not seem to be familiar with the Gospel of John, his pupil, Tatian, who would later be labeled a heretic, created an “uber-gospel” for the Syrian church between 172-175, combining all four canonical gospels into one narrative, popularly referred to as the Diatessaron. Other attempts to create one canonical harmony gospel by cutting and pasting different sources together are known to have existed by ultimately failed outside of Syria, and even there, Tatian’s work remained canonical only until the 400s when it was replaced by the bishop of Edessa. The Presbyter churches in Turkey, France, and Rome ultimately opted for a canon that included not just the four separate gospels, but also the Book of Acts and several epistles.

St. Irenaeus was the first known Christian to claim more than one gospel for the Apostolic canon, some time between 177 and 180, and his success in reversing the excommunication of the Presbyter church of Turkey from Pope Victor I in Rome may have ensured that the ultimate victory of his legacy. The four-gospel canon would eventually become the defining orthodoxy for the Rome-centered church, dubbed the Apostolic Church after Irenaeus’ claim to being the sole church descended from the original apostles of Jesus. Irenaeus claimed apostolic authority through his teacher St. Polycarp, a contemporary of Papias who Irenaeus believed was a student of John the disciple and author of the fourth gospel and Revelation. However, a quote by Papias as recorded by Eusebius appears to make a distinction between th disciple “John” and “the Presbyter John (Church History 3.39.4). Besides that, 170 years between the time of Jesus’ birth and Irenaeus’ writings is a wide gap for Irenaeus to have been a pupil to someone who knew one of the original twelve disciples. John and Polycarp would both have needed to have lived a long time for the math to work. Most scholars are skeptical of this identification and instead refer to this shadowy figure who taught Polycarp as “John the Presbyter.”

In Irenaeus’ anti-heresy book, On the Detection and Overthrow of the So-Called Gnosis, typically dubbed Against Heresies, Irenaeus claimed that there had been four gospels from the beginning, just as there were four winds and four “corners” of the earth, but that, surprisingly enough, each of the four gospels had been individually hijacked and misused by a different heretical sect. The accusation is absurd on its face, yet most of modern Biblical scholarship operates under the assumption that these heretical versions, now lost to the sands of time, are either identical or edited versions of the more authentic canonical gospels. Rather, it is far more likely that the gospels Irenaeus inherited were actually “heretical” gospels redacted to conform to the late second century theology of the emerging Apostolic church in Turkey, France, and Rome.

Each of these “one-gospel sects” are known to have similar beliefs associated with attributes modern scholars have linked to the gospels Irenaeus associates the sects with, yet the parallels between the gospels and “heretical” sects are too often ignored. Irenaeus wrote that the Adoptionists preferred Mark, that a Jewish sect called the Ebionites used Matthew only, that the Stoic Marcion had “mutilated” the Gospel of Luke for his Gentile sect, and that the followers of Valentinus, another Alexandrian Gnostic, used the Gospel of John (Irenaeus 3.11.7). New Testament scholars have long noted that the Gospel of Mark in particular can be read in an Adoptionist fashion since there is no Virgin Birth narrative, that Matthew is a “document of Jewish Christianity” (Mack 162), that Luke’s gospel was “directed toward gentiles” (Mack 170), and that the first known readers and commentators of John were Valentinian. Yet the same scholars who have pointed out these characteristics either assume Irenaeus was correct in his accusation that the heretical sects took the canonical gospels and made their own revisions to them or they make no mention of Irenaeus altogether.

According to Ireaneus, it was not just the Ebionites, but also the Platonic Jewish sects of the Cerinthians and the Carpocratians who refuted Paul and used only the Gospel of Matthew but did not believe in the Virgin Birth (Irenaeus 1.26.2). According to Epiphanius, Cerinthus personally used the Gospel of Matthew and some of the Ebionites were Adoptionist while others believed in the Virgin Birth. From Tertullian we know that the Marcionites, who followed Paul, also didn’t have a prologue with the Virgin Birth or Infancy stories. Cerinthus is typically dated to around 100 A.D. and Marcion came to Rome in 138 and was excommunicated in 144, a good time before Irenaeus’ own writings (Koester Intro II, 204; Helms 164). With at least four different sects were known to have used a version of the gospel that the lacked Virgin Birth, two of them dated much earlier than Irenaeus’ own writings, there is good reason to question the authenticity of Matthew’s prologue.

Matthew’s epilogue in 28:16-20 where Jesus establishes the Great Commission of the disciples to convert the Gentiles, is another component believed to have been added on to the gospel at a later time (Luz 139-140). When Jesus sent his disciples out to heal and drive out demons in 10:56, he tells them not to go to the Gentiles or Samaritans but only “the lost sheep of Israel” (NJB, 10.6). The Great Commission at the end of the gospel has Jesus reference his prior command for the disciples to preach only to Israel and then reverses it, telling them to preach his word to all the Gentiles.

Without the prologue or the epilogue, the Gospel of Matthew matches fairly well with the Jewish character and Adoptionist theology of the Ebionites. The “Spirit of God” descends on Jesus like a dove when he is baptized, similar to how the “Spirit” desends on Jesus in Mark, which appears to contradict the idea that his divinity was already present at birth (NJB, Matt. 3:16). The “Special M” source uses parables focused on the end times, which exentuates its Jewish character. The Ebionites were the only heretical sect to consider Paul to be an apostate, while most of the other heretical sects were said to have been founded by him, and in fact the Gospel of Matthew contradicts the Pauline epistles by having Jesus tell his listeners to continue following the laws of the Septuagint:

‘Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have come not to abolish but to complete them but to complete them. In truth I tell you, till heaven and earth disappear, not one dot, not one little stroke, is to disappear from the Law until all its purpose is achieved. Therefore, anyone who infringes even one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be considered the least in the kingdom of Heaven; but the person who keeps them and teaches them will be considered great in the kingdom of Heaven.

‘For I tell you, if your uprightness does not surpass that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never get into the kingdom of Heaven.

‘You have heard it said to our ancestors, You shall not kill; and if anyone does kill he must answer for it before the court. But I say this to you, anyone who is angry with a brother will answer for it before the court; anyone who calls a brother “Fool” will answer for it before the Sanhedrin; and anyone who calls him “Traitor” will answer for it in hell fire . . .

‘You have heard how it is said, You shall not commit adultery. But I say this to you, if a man looks at a woman lustfully, he has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (NJB, Matt. 17-22, 27-28)

Not only were the gospel’s readers supposed to follow the Law, they were to take it to an even greater extreme than the scribes and Pharisees. The two examples given make the silent accusation that the scribes and Pharisees only followed the letter of the Law, while followers of Jesus should try to temper their minds into a lifestyle of passivity and self-denial that separates them even from the temptation, an adequate description of the ascetic lifestyle that separated the scribes and Pharisees from the Essenes and the majority of the Christian sects of the second century, including the Ebionites.

Scholars believe that there was more than just one non-canonical Jewish gospel that has been subsequently lost to history, but between all the surviving verses that have come down to us through Epiphanius, Eusebius, and Jerome, there is a massive amount of confusion as to how many there were, the names they went by, and what language it was they were written in. Twentieth century biblical scholarship eventually settled on a distinction between three different Jewish gospels: 1) a “Gospel of the Nazoreans,” revered by Clement, Origen, and Jerome; 2) an Aramaic “Gospel of the Hebrews,” used by the Ebionites and Nazarenes and connected to James; and, 3) an anonymous Greek gospel used by the Ebionites that modern scholars subsequently dubbed the “Gospel of the Ebionites.”

The Gospel of the Nazoreans was not a heretical text but a revered gospel used by Clement of Alexandria in the late 100s and also known to his pupil Origen, which means it may have an Egyptian origen. However, the fact that it is written in Aramaic or Syrian would suggest it may have been meant to be read in Syria or Palestine. Jerome claims to have translated it into Greek and Latin for dissemination, but Koester says that it can be proven that the quotations he gives could never have existed in a Semitic language (Koester, Intro II 201). In this gospel, Jesus protests being taken by his mother to be baptized by John the Baptist for the remission of sins unless she can tell him how he had sinned. The Hebrew gospel also has Jesus declare that the Father had allowed him to choose the most worthy for heaven. When the rich man asks Jesus what he must do for eternal life, Jesus tells him to “fulfill the Law and the Prophets,” not just the commandments (Matt. 19.17). When Jesus enters the temple, ways of fiery and starry light shoot out from his eyes (Matt. 21.12). These and other additional materials not found in Matthew give strong evidence that rather than the Gospel of the Nazoraeans being an “original” was a Greek-to-Hebrew translation that was dependent on the canonical Matthew. As Philipp Vielhauer explains, the gospel “cannot be explained as a retroversion of the Greek Mt; the novelistic expansion, new formulations, abbreviations and corrections forbid that,” adding that it “may be best be characterized as a targum-like rendering of the canonical Matthew” (Vielhauer 652).

“The Gospel of the Hebrews” is a very common title, as each of the Jewish gospels is referred to by this name by at least one of the early Christian witnesses, but most scholars use the name for a common gospel believed to have been quoted by Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and the fourth-century bishop of Jerusalem, Cyril. None of the surviving verses can be tied definitively to any canonical text, but it is written in the Synoptic style. The eight-century Patriarch, Nicephorus I of Constantinople, recorded that his “Gospel of the Hebrews” had 2200 lines, just 300 lines less than Matthew, implying that the Aramaic gospel was a more primative version than Matthew. Since Clement of Alexandria knows the gospel, Albertus Klijn dates it to 150 A.D.

Jerome also refers to a certain “Gospel of the Hebrews” as being equivalent to the “Gospel of the Nazarenes,” and in it the seditionist Barabbas happens to be the son of Jesus, and James is the first disciple that Jesus appears to after his resurrection, which seems to link it to the same James sect that contributed to the Gospel of Thomas. Epiphanius first mentions the Nazarene sect in the fourth century, placing them in Pella, northeast of Jerusalem, and describing them as a sect that kept Jewish law, claimed pre-Christian origins, and did not believe in the Virgin Birth. As mentioned in the previous section, “Bar Abba” means “son of the father,” and in fact, early Greek versions of the Gospel of Matthew use the name “Jesus Barabbas,” which would make “Barabbas” a title rather than a name: “Jesus, son of the father.” This would imply that Barabbas was Jesus Jr., and in fact the Jewish Life of Jesus does say that Yeshu entered Jeruslam with his sons! The story element appears in Mark but not in Peter, so Crossan presumes that Barabbas is a symbol of the people of Jerusalem choosing “an armed rebel over an unarmed savior,” and so classifies the story element as a post-war literary invention by Mark (Crossan, Jesus 143). However, since it is older versions of Matthew’s gospel that have the original name “Jesus Barabbas,” then it is also possible that it is a story element originating from Matthew’s passion and making it’s way back to Mark through one of his recensions.

Epiphanius describes what appears to be another anonymous Ebionite gospel as a truncated version of Matthew that lacks both a geneaology and a Virgin Birth narrative, and, according to Jerome, was attributed by the Nazarenes to the disciple Matthew. In this gospel, John the Baptist eats cake instead of crickets, which most scholars believe was edited to conform to the Ebionites’ vegetarianism. Quotes from Origen indicate that it has parallels to two components in Matthew’s gospel: the “I have not come to abolish the Law” quote and the redaction of an episode that masks Mark’s hostility toward Jesus’ mother and brothers (Matthew 5.17, 12.46-50). Epiphanius, who calls it the “Hebrew gospel,” concluded from the gospel that the Ebionites believed Christ to be an archanel and that Jesus had come to abolish sacrifices (Broadhead 202). Albertus Klijn dates the gospel to the first half of the 100s, and connects it literalily to the “Journeys of Peter,” an Ebionite text written east of the Jordan River (Klijn 28-29).

Some of the abbreviated verses attributed to the Ebionite gospel belong not just to Matthew, but also Luke, and probably Mark as well (Cameron 103-106; Kloppenberg 437; Klijn 29). Epiphanius’ quote of the Ebionite gospel includes what appears to be a highly abbreviated harmonization of canonical Matthew and Luke: In it, John the Baptist tries to deter Jesus from being baptized (Matt. 3.14) and the Baptist’s parents are listed as Elizabeth and Zechariah (Luke 2.57-59). Koester noted that when Justin quoted from the gospels, he did it in a harmonized form, and so came to the conclusion that he was using a gospel that harmonized the three Synoptic gospels related to Epiphanius’ Ebionite gospel (Koester, Intro II 202). Bruce Metzger refutes this hypothesis arguing that there were multiple traditions that included a ray of light at Jesus’ baptism and little evidence Tatian used a fifth gospel in his Diatesseron (Allert 10). Although it is possible that Tatian used Justin’s uber-gospel as a source in the creation of his Diatesseron, and there is evidence that Ttian may have used a Syntopic harmony as a source, the focus of the Diatessorn is clearly on harmonizing the four canonical gospels using a maximalist approach with little regard to extra-canonical sources.

There may also be a fourth Jewish gospel called the “Gospel of the Twelve,” mentioned by Origen, Ambrose, Jerome, Philip of Side, Venerable Bede, and Theophylactus. Most scholars identify it with the “Gospel of the Ebionites,” although some have linked it to the “Gospel of the Hebrews,” based largely on connections made by Epiphanius and a questionable reading of Jerome, the latter of whom is in any case late and unreliable, especially compared to Origen who distinguishes the two apart from one another.[85] The context in which Origen mentions the book implies a late Gnostic origin, but he nevertherless describes it as a Synoptic-type gospel. Epiphanius quotes the “Hebrew” gospel as a first person plural narrative in the form of a “memoir” written by the twelve apostles, similar to that of the Gospel of Peter: “There was a certain man, Jesus by name, and he himself was about thirty years old, who elected us” (Haer. 30.13; emphasis mine). Most scholars identify this quote as coming from the so-called “Gospel of the Ebionites,” but Wilhelm Schneemelcher suggests that the derivative nature of the quote implies that it is instead drawn from an independent “Gospel of the Twelve” (Schneemelcher 166). Although both the Gospel of Peter and the “Gospel of the Twelve” are written as first person memoirs, Peter nevertheness seems dependent on the Gospel of Mark since the name Levi is used, while the “Gospel of the Twelve” follows the same tradition from the Gospel of Matthew by using the name Matthew instead of Levi.

The same quote from the “memoir” of the Twelve Apostles includes a tradition about a great shining light during the baptism of Jesus, a description that also shows up in Justin’s Dialogue and his student Tatian’s Diatesseron (Allert 10). Thus the “Memoirs of the Apostles,” that Justin mentions, which is perhaps responsible for his harmonized quotes, may in fact have been the “Gospel of the Twelve (Apostles),” written in the memoir style.[86] Tatian’s Diatesseron also quotes Jesus as telling someone to show himself to the priest to “fulfill the Law,” a more Ebionite-flavored reading than Matthew’s equivalent verse, which tells the man to “make the offering prescribed by Moses, as evidence to them.”

Much of this confusion between the names and content of the Jewish gospels stems from Irenaeus’ decision not to give any quotes from the Ebionite version of Matthew that he knew about. Even if the quotes from Epiphanius and Jerome were not sparse and unreliable, the fact that they are commenting on gospels from the 300s and 400s undercuts our ability to judge their relation to the Ebionite gospel that Irenaeus spoke of in the 180s. Since the core of Matthew demands adherence to Jewish law, which runs in contradiction to the pagan heritage of the Virgin Birth narrative, and is subsequently reversed in the Matthew’s epilogue, it stands to reason that Irenaeus referred to as the Ebionite Matthew of the second century is the more authentic version, an “Ur-Matthew,” the original text that was created by a Torah-revering Jew by combining the “Bethsaida edition” of Mark with Q and “Special M” to create a new gospel that was more reverential to the twelve disciples and even more critical of the Pharisees than Mark.

If Epiphanius’ claim that Cerinthus personally used a version of Matthew is true, then the Ebionite Ur-Matthew must have been written some time between 80 and 100 A.D. However, since Irenaeus fails to make any connection between the gospel and Cerinthus, or even the Cerinthians of his time, but only connects the gospel to other Ebionites, it opens up the likely possibility that Epiphanius is making the claim that Cerinthus used it based on a 4th century tradition or maybe just an assumption based on the fact that the Cerinthians of his own time were using a version of the gospel. Thus Ur-Matthew could have been written at any time Matthew was written, between 80 and 150 A.D.

Dating the Epistles and the Gospel of Luke

The earliest Pauline epistles (Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians and Galatians) are dated to the 50s and are generally believed to reflect the earliest unedited written tradition about Jesus. Scholars attribute many of the late epistles, such as Colossians, Ephesians, and 2 Thessalonians, to later pseudographical authors, mainly for stylistic reasons, and are virtually unanimous in attributing the “Pastorals” (Titus and 1 & 2 Timothy) and 2 Peter to second-century authors (Ehrman, Lost 10-11; Mack 206-207; Ellegård 13, 148).

Extremely little information about a historical Jesus is given in the epistles. None of the people or places from the gospels are named in the epistles with the exception of three “apostles” and Pontius Pilate. The three apostles mentioned, James, Cephas (Peter?), and John, are not identified as disciples or even contemporaries of Jesus, nor do the epistles claim that the Cynic-like ideas being expressed originated from the earthly Jesus or his followers. Pontius Pilate appears only in one: the second century Pastoral epistle, 1 Timothy (6:13). Many other names unfamiliar to the gospels are given, but none of these people appear to have any links to Jerusalem or Nazareth: only Turkey, Greece, and Alexandria.

Burton Mack dates Luke as late as 120

Joseph B Tyson, author of “Marcion and Luke-Acts: a defining struggle” dates Luke-Acts to 100-150. (Tyson 50)

Some supplementary evidence for this possibility is given in the Toldoth Yeshu, which places both “Simon Cephas” and “the Ancient of Christians” (Paul?) in the second century, and parallels between the description of Peregrinus and the biography of Paul.

Hippolytus makes a point to argue that Mark and Marcion were two different people, insinuating that some believed they were one and the same. The Mark from Acts may be a symbol for Marcion. When Peter escapes prison and goes to Mark’s house in Acts, the Christians there refuse to believe it and argue that he is an angel, a literary device found also in Luke’s gospel and used in this case to parody the docetic beliefs (12.12-15). Acts also shows hostility towards Mark by having Barnabas break off from Paul because Mark had deserted them previously (15.36). St. Clement of Alexandria speaks of Marcion as practicing while Peter was still alive. This answer would best explain why Mark is traditionally connected to both to Paul and Peter despite the fact that the earliest Christian epistles portray Paul and “Cephas” as being antagonistic to one another (1 Cor. 1.12; Gal. 2.11).

The Gospel of Luke may also have inherited its name from an earlier source used in parts of Acts, most likely a now-lost “Epistle of Luke.” Often referred to as the “we” source, the sections in Acts are easily identified by a first person narrative from the point of view of an unnamed companion of Paul. Thus, there are some minor indications the names of the gospels were inherited from the names of their sources.

Marcion is the first known person to use the word “gospel” to indicate a written document rather than a general message delivered by an apostle, and his sect was the first to establish a set canon of holy texts. Marcion was excommunicated in 144 but even by the time Justin Martyr wrote his First Apology around 150, Marcion’s church was said to have established itself throughout the world (Koester, Ancient 36). Marcion took the same Gentile perspective as the author of Mark in assuming the “disciples” of Jesus did not really understand him. Instead, Marcion considered Paul to be “the Apostle” who revealed the true nature of Jesus’ God, which was different than the Jewish God. Instead of referring to Jesus under the Jewish title of Christos, Marcionites used the title Chrestos, meaning “the Good One” or “the Perfect One” (Mead, Fragments 249).

According to Tertullian, Marcion edited out all Jewish references in the Pauline epistles and Gospel of Luke because of this bias. Despite the fact that Tertullian is hardly an unbiased source himself, the Latin Church father’s statement is too often taken for granted.[87] Tertullian, like Irenaeus, was a part of the Apostolic Church when he wrote those words, so it is it is only natural that he would assume that the Presbyter versions of the gospels would be the more authentic. Why should Marcion cut over half the content of the Pauline epistles instead of just writing his own spurious copies? If Marcion redacted Luke by cutting out all the Jewish parts, why did he not do the same for Acts? As it turns out, cutting out the Jewish content from the Pauline epistles leaves behind a narrative less sporadic with fewer contradictions and a far simpler and more comprehendible theology than the canonical texts.[88] Marcion’s version of Luke, which he called the Gospel of the Lord, was almost certainly the more original version. This is evidenced by a reference made by Tertullian showing that Marcion’s gospel, unlike Luke, places Jesus in Capernaum before quoting Jesus as saying he had just come from that city.[89] Crossan also identifies a change in context between the last chapter of Luke and the first verses of Acts that takes emphasis away from the community and places it specifically chosen apostles.[90] John Knox’s Marcion and the New Testament (1942) is the first book to claim that Luke-Acts is a reworked version of Marcion’s gospel that was done some time in the mid-100s (Knox 124). In it, Knox argues that it would make little sense for Marcion to canonize a gospel known to be associated with Acts, a book that contradicted the belief that Paul was independent of the Jerusalem apostles (Knox 119-123). Earl Doherty, in his book The Jesus Puzzle (2005), also makes the case that Acts of the Apostles was written after the Marcionite gospel in an attempt to tie Paul in with the Jerusalem apostles while at the same time creating a “unified view of the Christian apostolic movement” as it spread throughout Rome starting in the “Golden Age” in Judea (Doherty 269).[91]

As I have mentioned, St. Irenaeus claimed around 180 that each of the four gospels had been misused by a different heretical sect. St. Irenaeus also claimed that Marcionism flourished during the reign of Pope Anicetus (155-166), but it is generally believed Marcion travelled from Asia Minor to Rome in 139 or 140. Most scholars tend to agree with this chronology, placing Marcion’s sect in the 140s (Mack 251; Ehrman, Lost 104; McGiffert 58). Ellegård instead cites Joseph Hoffman’s study, “Marcion: On The Restitution of Christianity (1984),” which argues that Marcion was active as early as the turn of the second century, around the same time traditional dating puts Marcion’s birth (Ellegård 148; Ehrman, Lost 104). However, despite the legend that Marcion himself wrote the Gospel of the Lord, it is still very likely that Marcion simply appropriated the gospel for his own sect, so a date of composition as early as the 80s is still very possible. Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria speak of Marcion being an old man in the late 130s. There is also evidence that the author of Luke-Acts used Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews as a source, which would place it some time after the year 94.[92] Justin also mentions an anti-docetic phrase describing Jesus “sweating blood” in Gethsemane, a phrase that is not found in the earliest versions of Luke (22.44); this absence indicates that, barring the possibility that Justin was quoting from a different source, the latest version of Luke-Acts must have been written by the 150s.

Antioch Source for “historically valuable material” in Acts 6-12, 15; “We” 16-28 (Koester, Intro II 50)

John the Baptist introduced as if not yet mentioned like in Mark, Baptist still questions Jesus despite history like in Mark

“The author no doubt intended to write a historical work. . . The incorporation of numerous miracle stories and legendary materials demonstrates that the author was just as uncritical as many other historians of his time, but it has a serious consequence: large parts of the book read like an apostolic romance, not a historical book. This impression is reinforced by the lengthy narrative of the shipwreck (Acts 27-28) which is so typical of the Hellenistic romance” (Intro II 51)

Evidence the earliest versions of the Epistles are Phrygian (Montanist):

1) The Epistle to the Galatians reads like the central theological document defining Phrygian theology against Cephas’ Antiochian form of Jewish Christianity, which is supported by Marcion’s canon places Galatians at the top of the list of epistles. Galaita is Phrygia’s western neighbor.

2) Peregrinus, who holds many biographical details in common with Paul, was from Phrygia.

3) Montanus was from Parium/Parion in Phrygia’s western neighbor, Mysia. Epiphanius equated the Montantists with a sect called the “Phyrgians.” Montanus was known to advocate speaking for the Father through the Spirit (1 Cor. 2.6). The practice aroused a great distrust in prophecy afterwards.

4) The Quintillians, Pepuzians, and Pricillians, following the example of Montanus, allowed women bishops and presbyters. Epiphanius writes: “They have women bishops, women presbyters, and everything else, all of which they say is in accord with: “in Christ Jesus there is neither male nor female” (Gal. 3.28; Epip. 49.3.2; Amidon 174).

5) Hippolytus’ listing of the Montanists come directly after the Adoptionists, saying that the Montanists affirm the Father is the Son. This seems to correlate with the Trinitarian passage in Gal. 4.4-6: “but when athe completion of the time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born a subject of the Law, to redeem the subjects of the Law, so that we could receive adoption as sons. As you are sons, God has sent into our hearts the Spirit of his son crying, ‘Abba, Father.’”

6) Montanists and Valentinians believed in a Paraklytos, a theoogical concept that appears only in the Gospel of John and 1 John, which are located in Asia Minor. A churchman from Rome during the episcopacy of Zephyrinus (199-217) believed Cerinthus, an Adoptionist connected to Asia Minor, wrote both the fourth gospel and the Johanine epistles. The references to the “Comforter” in the Gospel of John appear to come from the Valentinian portion, but it was probably inherited from Cerinthus.

Kidd, Beresford James. A New Eusebius: Documents illustrative of the history of the church to A.D. 337. London: SPCK, 1957.

Luke-Acts Epistles Lucian Tolodth Yeshu

Student of Gamaliel High-level Pharisee High-level Pharisee

“Thorn in the flesh” Molested young boy

Helped kill Stephen Violent man Killed his father

Persecuted Christians Persecuted Christians Betrayed Pharisees to Romans

Jesus vision near Damascus Son of God vision Talmud: Metatron vision

Converted near Damascus Convert before Arabia Converted in Syria Hellenized

Imprisoned in Damascus Imprisoned in Syria

(Apocrypha: Thecla bribes to sleep in cell) Girl bribes to sleep in cell

Spirit of Jesus forbids passage to Mysia (16:7) Originally from Parium in Mysia

No conflict with Peter Conflict with Cephas (Gal. 2:11) Conflict with Cephas

No kosher conflict Kosher conflict Kosher conflict

Council with Peter & Paul Peregrinus banned; Council with Cephas

Riot in Jerusalem Conflict in Jerusalem

(Peter denies Christ) Cephas sides w/ James Cephas forced convert

Didn’t buy citizenship(22:28) “Stole money” Buys citizenship

Imprisoned in Jerusalem Imprisoned in Judaea

Called Zeus and Hermes (14:12) Takes shelter in Temple of Zeus

Stoned in Lystra (12:19) Stoned in Pisa

Implicitly compared to Socrates (17:16-34) Called “The New Socrates”

Hurricane at Cyprus Peregrinus sick from winds

Shipwreck on Malta (Epiphanius: Valentinus shipwrecks on Cyprus)

Riot in Ephesus (19:24) Riot in Pisa

Demetrius the Silversmith Alexander the Alexander the False Prophet

causes the riot Metalworker does harm

to Paul and Luke (2 Tim. 4:14)

“Great is Artemis!” chant (19:28) “Out with the Christians!” chant (Alex. FP)

Dating the Gospel of John

John 2 was written in Ephesus around 100 as a reaction against this gnostic belief (Helms 164).

Koester also places the canonical redaction of John at the very end of the first century (Koester, Ancient 267).

He posited that all four of the gospels as we have them today were not finished until the second century and that the earliest extent canonical gospels are from the third or fourth century.[93]

However, the Gospel of John also shows strong Hadrianic qualities, making it more probable to have been written during his reign between 117 and 138.

Crossan, Funk, and Ehrman date the Gospel of John to the early 90s; Mack places it in the same time frame as Luke (Crossan, Who 17-20; Funk, Five 18; Ehrman, Lost 19-20; Mack 5).

Ehrman: Mark 65-70 (19), John 90-95 (20)

Robert Fortna reconstructs the Signs Gospel from the Gospel of John, arguing for the inclusion of a passion narrative as told in John and dates the source to the 50s or 60s (Fortna 77, 225). Burton Mack, following Rudolf Bultmann, consigns only the seven “sign” episodes (up to John 11.44) to the earliest stratum of John and instead dates the central plot behind the passion narrative as “a postwar Markan creation” constructed after the year 70. Mack argues that the account follows Mark far too closely for the Signs Gospel not to have some textual dependence on the Synoptic passion story but also postulates that the water to wine and resurrection of Lazarus miracles must have been added to a list of five other miracles with Markan equivalents some time prior to the 60s (Mack 178-180). The Signs source is typically believed to have some kind of passion narrative complete with post-resurrection sequences (Von Wahdle, Johannine 7). Traditional Christian scholars often date the gospels long before the destruction of the Temple it “predicts,” even as early as the 50s.

The Gospel of John has likewise gone through a complicated re-editing process, first being formed out of a Signs source originally composed of seven miracle stories, and then redacted by a later editor to its current canonical form. Since Irenaeus believed the Valentinians were using a version of John’s gospel, the Gnostic symbolism in Signs may be attributes originating from their sect. Building on Bultmann’s hypothesis, Willi Marxsen argued that the author who used the Signs Source, “John,” sought to portray apocalypticism, Baptism, and the Eucharist as a misunderstanding of Jesus’ true message.

Irenaeus claimed that John wrote the fourth gospel in Ephesus to combat the heresy of the Cerinthians and Nicolatians. This theology, taught by a man educated in Greco-Egyptian philosophy named Cerinthus, who despite obstensibly following Jewish law, was said to hold the erroneous belief that the world was created by an imperfect power separated from God called the Demiurge, a concept popularized by Plato and adopted by Gnostics. Irenaeus also claimed Cerinthus taught a heresy referred to as Adoptionism, the belief that Jesus was born a normal human being until the Holy Spirit “adopted” him at his baptism and that he only died after this spiritual power left him on the cross. Although Irenaeus claimed the Gospel of John was written to combat Cerinthus, the fourth-century apologist St. Epiphanius later said there were Cerinthian Christians who believed their own Gnostic teacher, Cerinthus, had written the fourth gospel himself (Panarion 51.3.6).

In fact, both may be true. The earliest layer of John, the Signs Gospel, is often referred to by scholars as a Jewish gospel, yet, as Dr. Randel McCraw Helm points out in Who Wrote the Gospels?, two of the seven “signs,” the water turning into wine and the resurrection of Lazarus have Egyptian parallels, are based on an Alexandrian tradition combining the Old Testament Books of Kings with an Egyptian myth of the god Horus resurrecting “El-Osiris,” or Lazarus, (Helms, Who 124-125). Helms also argues that “John 1” was a Cerinthian-like Gnostic who wrote his gospel in Alexandria in reaction to the Gospel of Mark’s arrival from Syria, and that the Redactor, or “John 2,” was a Presbyter who wrote the final, canonical layer so as to re-emphasize apocalypticism, rituals like baptism and the Eucharist, and the physical resurrection of Jesus in opposition to the Cerinthians and Nicolatians (Helms 127-128, 137, 145, 162-164).

Helms describes how Irenaeus claimed that John the disciple had gone to Ephesus in order to “remove the error which by Cerinthus had been disseminated among men, and a long time previously by those termed Nicolaitans” (3.11.1), yet at the same time, “Epiphanius, in his book against the heretics, argues against those who actually believed that it was Cerinthus himself who wrote the Gospel of John! (Adv. Haeres. 51.3.6)” (Helms 162-163). This would indicate, as Helms argues, that a “now-lost version” of John could have been read “in a Cerinthean, gnostic fashion” and that “John 2” was written in Ephesus as a reaction against this gnostic belief (164). Helms argues that John the Presbyter wrote the canonical-layer story about certain followers of Jesus withdrawing because they could not handle the literal interpretation of the Eucharist because the Presbyter wanted these fall-aways to represent the followers of Cerinthus and Nicholas who were appalled at the idea of eating Jesus’ flesh (164).

However, there are problems with Helm’s identification. Cerinthus was an Adoptionist who believed Jesus became Christ at his baptism and the middle layer of John that Helms identifies with Cerinthus contained no baptism (Irenaeus 1.26.1). As Helms points out, the major theme of “John 1” was the spiritualization of the earthly rituals so that water “did not mean literal water, even of baptism,” although the Redactor, or “John 2,” did away with all of these metaphors and “tried to turn Jesus back into another John the Baptist” (Helms 155-156). Cerinthus was also said to have used a version of the Jewish Gospel of Matthew that presumably included the baptism and the Eucharist, and the Cerinthians were often compared to the ascetic Ebionites who, according to Epiphanius, baptized themselves daily like the Essenes and took a Eucharist of bread and water (Haer. 30.15; cf. Clem. Hom. 12.6). Irenaeus tells a story about how John had once refused to enter a public bath in Ephesus because Cerinthus was inside and he was afraid the man’s curse would bring the ceiling down on both of them, and Epiphanius repeats this story but uses the name “Ebion” in place of Cerinthus (Irenaeus 3.3.4; Epiphanius, Haer. 30.25). Most importantly, Rudolph Bultmann and Randel Helms both describe “John 1” as an anti-apocalypticist who re-interpreted the future eschatology of the kingdom of God into a present eschatology regarding salvation, and Cerinthus was a known apocalypticist who taught that Christ would return to establish a 1,000-year earthly kingdom of sensuous pleasure prior to the general Rapture (Rev. 20.4). All in all, Cerinthius still followed the Jewish rituals and apocalypticism that “John 1” dismissed.

The Gospel of John that was attributed to Cerinthus is therefore more likely to have been the Signs Gospel, since its Jewish attributes combined with the two “signs” based on Egyptian myth makes Cerinthius the ideal author. As mentioned earlier, when Irenaeus goes through his list of heretical sects which took one of the four gospels, he does not list the Cerinthians, but the Valentinians as the pre-eminent heretical sect associated with the Gospel of John, and in fact the fragments of the first commentator on John, the Valentinian Gnostic Heracleon, appears to be familiar with the middle layer authored by “John 1”.

Portrayals by “John” of people making physical misinterpretations of Jesus’ spiritual message include: the Samaritan woman misinterpreting the “living water” as physical water (NJB, 4.10-15), a crowd misinterpreting “the bread of life” as physical bread (i.e. the Eucharist) (NJB, 6.34-35), Martha misinterpreting the “resurrection” as last day eschatology (NJB, 11.25), and Peter misinterpreting symbolic foot-washing with full immersion baptism (13.9). Future eschatology is changed into present eschatology by portraying Jesus as saying, “ . . . whoever listens to my words, and believes in the one who sent me, has eternal life; without being brought to judgement such a person has passed from death to life” (NJB, 5.24). “John” also portrays the Beloved Disciple as constantly outperforming Peter (13.23, 18.10, 18.16).

It was a later redactor who added the prologue detailing the Incarnation of the Logos into flesh as well, attached an appendix emphasizing the physical resurrection of Jesus, and reintroduced future eschatology, Baptism, and the Eucharist.

“John 2” writes that “the Word became flesh” (NJB, 1.14) and portrays the risen Jesus as eating fish (!) shortly before reinstating Peter to the position of the primary disciple that the Beloved Disciple implicitly stole away from him (21.10-19). John 2 reintroduces references to the “last day” (12.48), claims that Jesus and not just his disciples baptized (3.22), and warned that the Eucharist was necessary for salvation (6.51). Marxsen also identified the Redactor as the author of the First Epistle of John, which identifies docetic conceptions of Jesus with the Anti-Christ (Marxsen, Intro 262).

Helms makes an argument for Signs being written in Alexandria based primarily on Morton Smith’s discovery of an ancient reference by Clement of Alexandria to a “Secret Gospel of Mark,” which includes a resurrection story very similar to the raising of Lazarus in John (John 11.38). The lost letter from Clement, as translated in Smith’s book, The Secret Gospel, says that Secret Mark was read only to advanced initiates in Alexandria, while also referring to a Carpocratian version of Mark’s gospel which also had the resurrection story in it (Helms 128). Although Fortna discounts the Secret Gospel of Mark as derivative of the canonical gospels, Helms argues that Secret Mark and the Signs author both used the same tradition which “as far as we can tell circulated only in Alexandria,” and was based on a variation of a story of Elijah resurrecting a young man (2 Kings 4.8-37; Helms 122-123). Other pagan elements were then added onto the story, such as Jesus changing water to wine, which came from the myth of Dionysus (117), and the name Lazarus, which Helms sees as an amalgamation of “El-Osiris,” an Egyptian god who, like Lazarus, had two sisters, Isis and Nephthys, and was resurrected (Helms 124-125).

Helms agrees with Fortna in placing the Signs source in the 40s or 50s and dates John 1 to the Heretic Benediction in the late 80s, when Jewish authorities banned Christians from the Synagogue, and John 2 to the 100s (John 9.22; Helms 126-127). This is roughly equivalent with Koester’s dating of the canonical redaction of John to the very end of the first century (Koester, Ancient 267). The fragment of the John 18.31-33 discovered in Egypt appears to belong to John 1, although the original gospel itself may have been the canonical version. However, this proves that the Signs Gospel must have been redacted by John 1 before 160 and probably before 138. Both John 1 and John 2 seem to have been familiar with some version of the gospels of Mark and Luke.

A story in Luke of a fisherman catching a large number of fish is retold in John so that Peter is emphasized and the number of fish is set at 153 (Luke 5.4; John 21.7). According to Helms, “John 2 has borrowed a scene from Luke, or from the same oral tradition that Luke used, to begin his restoration of Peter as head of the church” (Helms 160). The similar emphasis on Peter happens when the apostles refuse to believe Mary Magdalene’s story of Jesus rising only to have Peter race to the tomb and find strips of linen. The Gospel of the Lord probably had Mary Magdalene find the linen since John has both Peter and the Beloved Disciple racing to the tomb with both of them finding linen (Luke 24.9-12; John 20.3-8). In Luke, Jesus asks that the disciples to touch him and then eats fish in front of them to prove that he has been raised physically, an episode that would not have been in Marcion’s Gospel of the Lord (24.42). In John, Jesus asks Thomas in particular to touch his wounds since Thomas would not believe in the physical resurrection (20.25), and breaks bread and fish with their disciples after the miraculous catch in the appendix (21.13). The fact that the disciples do not recognize him is reminiscent of the story of the two men who encountered Jesus on the way to Emmaus in Luke (24.30). If Mary Magdalene originally found the linen in the Gospel of the Lord, she may also have been the “Beloved Disciple” in John 1 as well, which would explain some of the contradictions present in John’s gospel. As Ramon Jusino has pointed out in “Mary Magdalene: Author of the Fourth Gospel?”, the Beloved Disciple appears at the crucifixion with Mary Magdalene without being listed and Mary Magdalene appears at the tomb even though there is no mention of her going there (19.25, 20.11). The theme of referring to a man as someone “who Jesus loved” probably began with Secret Mark’s use of a “youth that Jesus loved,” although John 2 could just have easily used later editions of the gospel.

There are some small details John has that are common only to Gospel of Matthew, such as the reference to Zechariah 9.9 in connection with Jesus’ Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, but the parallels are ambiguous and easily dismisssable as coming from a common oral tradition (Matt. 21.5; John 12.15; Smith, D. 22). D. Moody Smith writes that scholars such as Benjamin W. Bacon, Burnette Streeter, Charles K. Barrett, and Werner Kümmel “are inclined to say that John certainly knew Mark, probably knew Luke, and possibly knew Matthew, although the last is much less certain” (Smith, D. 85).

By following clues left behind by the authors and redactors of the gospel stories, scholars have instead been able to map out a complex web of evolving mythology, starting from small outcroppings of sayings chronicles and passion narratives to fully-formed gospel narratives. The Gospel of Mark, which I consider to be a tragic folktale, is normally dated by scholars to the First Roman-Jewish war, in the 70s of the Common Era, although the reference to Simon of Cyrene must have come after the Jewish revolt at Cyrene in 73. Helms places Mark as originating in Syria, although it could also have been written in Alexandria or Rome. The “long ending” was appended to Mark some time before Matthew and Luke used it in the 80s, but before Irenaeus quoted it around 180. The Gospel of Twelve, revised from Mark into an idyllic romance, is placed around Syria or Palestine some time between the 80s and when Papias mentioned the gospel around the 140s. It was then rewritten as the Gospel of Matthew, probably around the time of Justin Martyr in the 150s, and later into the Gospel of the Ebionites quoted by Epiphanius. Marcion’s idyllic romance, the Gospel of the Lord, was rewritten by a Prebyter into the epic history known as Luke-Acts some time after Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews in 94 and before Justin Martyr quoted it in the 150s, while Marcion adopted his canon some time between 100s and 140s. The original core of the Gospel of John, the hypothetical Signs Gospel, is dated by the Jesus Seminar to the 40s or 50s, but if it included a passion narrative based on the Cross Gospel (or Mark), then it was more likely written after 70. According to Helms, the Signs Gospel was rewritten some time between 85 and 90, possibly by an Alexandrian Jewish Gnostic, into an ironic tragedy that polemicized a theology of “present eschatology” and anti-ritualism. A fragment in Egypt provides a ceiling date of 160, although the language places the text as being written by 138. The Redactor, a Gentile Presbyter dubbed John 2, possibly John the Presbyter of Ephesus, then redacted the Gnostic gospel again some time between after Luke-Acts was written and when Tatian used it for his harmonized Diatesseron in 172, adding his own polemic in order to reinstate Baptism, Communion, and the End of Days.

The canon as we now know it was finalized in Turkey, but as we peel back the layers of theology hidden between the lines, we can find earlier and earlier texts layered one on top of the other like geological layers. The outermost layer is largely uncanonized: rhetorical treatises like The Gospel of Truth and The Gospel of Philip or satires like The Gospel of Judas and the Toledot Yeshu. Commentaries by early church fathers quoting earlier scripture fall into this group as well, although 1 Clement was accepted as canon in some early Christian communities as well. The Gospel of John, although techniquely a story, has had so much dialogue shoe-horned into the Passion narrative that its content is closer to that of other rhetorical treatises within the Apocrypha layer.

Pull back the Apocrypha layer, which is best associated with the Polemic stage of mythical development, and we have have the canonical layer, which can be equated with the Epic History stage, as shown by its intense interest in establishing a historical past, complete with pseudographical autobiographies. The New Testament canon was made official some time between 170 and 180 A.D., as exhibited by the Muratorian fragment, and far more importantly, St. Irenaeus’s On the Detection and Overthrow of the So-Called Gnosis. St. Irenaeus lived in what was now Lyons, France, was a student of Polycarp in Turkey, and managed to secure a theological alliance with Pope St. Victor I in Rome around 190 after Polycarp’s Presbyter community in Turkey came under threat of excommunication over what date Easter was to be celebrated. Irenaeus claimed that Polycarp’s teacher, John, was one the twelve disciples and the author of the fourth gospel and Revelation, but this was disputed by many early sources, including Eusebius of Caeserea, the “Father of Church History,” who quoted Papias to prove there had been two Johns: Polycarp’s teacher, John the Presbyter, and the Jesus’ disciple, John son of Zebedee, the author of the gospel. My own research leads me to believe that John the Presbyter originated neither work but was the final editor of both.

Polycarp was a close friend of Ignatius of Antioch, and a library of Messianic pseudographia in Antioch appears to be the location of texts from which the Presbyters of Turkey drew from. It was from Antioch that first attempted to claim authority through Peter’s association with the city long before the Rome usurped the idea for itself. The Seven Churches of Asia Minor, centered at Ephesus, accepted the very pro-Peter Gospel of Matthew, and 1 Peter (adding 2 Peter to it), but they left behind the Gospel of Peter, and added in a prohibition against women teachers in 1 Corinthians. It is probably from the same pseudography mill where the Presbyters got the shorter version of the Gospel of Mark and then added an epilogue to authorize snake-handling and the Luke-Acts narrative, and where the author of Luke most likely procured the long speeches for the protagonists in Acts.

Behind the Antioch layer is a purged Gnostic layer, glazed with the Stoic theology of the Marcionites and the Platonic theology of Valentinus, and best associated with the mythological stage of Romance. Both the Marcionites and the Valentinians believed that the Creator god that the Jews worshipped was an evil Demiurge which emenated from the more perfect Monad. The Marcionites used an earlier version of Luke and appears to have provided some of the sailing stories of Paul in Acts, both of which a Presbyter from Turkey used as sources for Luke and Acts. The Marcionites also took the original four Stoic-themed epistles of the Montanists (Gal., Cor., and Rom.) and added 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Laodiceans, Colossians, Philemon, Philippians, giving “Mark” (Marcion) authority in Colossians 4.10, after which, Christian scribes in Antioch took them and added voluminous amounts of Septuagint commentary to give them a more Jewish-themed history and then wrote 1 Peter to supplement them.

Valentinus was said to have had a vision of the Logos and the fourth gospel, the only one to identify Jesus with the Logos and was known to be a favorite of the Valentinian school. When Valentinus or a student of his re-wrote the Signs Gospel, he or she attempted to demystify materialistic rituals by leaving the Baptism and the Eucharist out of the story, as well as invalidated apocalypticism by shifting the “kingdom” to the present, but John the Presbyter added the rituals of Baptism and Eucharist back in through the teachings of Jesus, and revalidated a vaguely close apocalyptic end. Valentinian and Sethian Gnosticism also adopted as their iconic disciple Judas, “the twin of Jesus” who learned all of Jesus’ teachings before reluctantly “betraying” him. The Sayings Gospel of Thomas and the Sethian Gospel of Judas are both named after the same “thirteenth disciple,” although John the Presbyter attempted to cover this up by drawing a distinction between Judas Thomas and Judas Iscariot. Valentinus had such a large following that his sect split between east and west: the western Valentinians became known as the Marcosians, led by the Valentinian Gnostic Marcus (Mark), who taught a theology that the redemption of Christ was a second spiritual baptism analougous to the earlier physical baptism to forgive sins, a very similar theology of which is present in the Secret Gospel of Mark, known by Clement of Alexandria to be an earlier version of Mark. While the Gnostics attributed all the inconvenient Levitical laws to an egotistical Demiurge, the Antioch

If we then pull back the Gnostic layer of gospel text, we find a more Platonic layer of Adoptionist theology best identified in the “proto-Gnostic” Cerinthians, who followed their teachings on Cerinthus, an Egyptian-learned teacher who, like the Hellenistic Jew Philo, combined Platonic philosophy with a strict adherence to Mosaic law. That Cerinthius wrote the Gospel of John and Revelation was known by Origen’s student Dionysus, Gaius of Rome, and the “Alogi” Christians in Turkey who denied the doctrine of the Logos. The earliest version of the fourth gospel, the Signs Gospel, contains five traditional miracle stories and two based on the Osiris myth, matching Cerinthius’ Egyptian education, and Cerinthius is also known as the originator of the legend that Jesus would return an reign 1,000 years on earth, which is a prominent teaching in Revelation 20.3-8. Like Cerinthians, Montanus also proclaimed a “New Jerusalem” in Papuza, Turkey and used a version of the fourth gospel. Cerinthus also believed in the Demiurge, but accepted the Creator as a holy emenation of God, providing a theological bridge between Valentinus and the true teachings of Plato. An earlier version of Secret Mark, called Bethsaida Mark, includes the story of Jesus interpreting the miracle of the five and twelve loaves and the miracle of the seven and seven loaves, which may also linked it to the seven “evangelists” of Cyrene, Alexandria, and Caeserea (Mark 8.19-20; Acts 6.5-9, 21.8).

Behind the Adoptionist layer, there is a more angry and violent Apocalyptic layer, whose teachings were typically identified with either Matthew or James. These Jewish Christian gospels included the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Gospel of the Nazarenes, the Gospel of the Ebionites, and the Gospel of the Twelve; the last gospel is probably the Jewish-themed gospel the Antioch scribes rewrote into the Gospel of Matthew. The original source of Revelation, which coded “Caesar Nero,” into the “number of the beast,” prophecized an imminent reckoning that Cerinthus edited into a thousand-year reign of a “New Jerusalem” on earth. Both the second layer of Q and the “James” layer in the Gospel of Thomas contain strict demands to leave one’s family and warnings of an imminent judgment, reflecting a crisis from followers having to choose between the movement and their families. Aside from obvious chapters like the “Little Apocalypse,” even some of the earliest miracle episodes, such as the exorcism of “Legion” being sent to drown in the sea, betray a revenge-fantasy of the Messiah returning to destroy the Roman armies.

Finally, underneath all six layers of sectarian editing, the earliest detectable layer within the New Testament canon is also the shortest: the Wisdom Sayings, or “Good Tidings,” such as Q1, L, M, and the original source behind the Gospel of Thomas. These typically originated as lists, stating, “Jesus said:” followed by a piece of common advice reminicent of Greek Cynicism, and are best associated with the Folklore stage of mythological development. Any knowledge of the Old Testament or Judaism, such as a passing reference to Solomon’s riches, is superficial. The Cross Gospel, the earliest version of the Passion narrative that was later redacted in Antioch into the Gospel of Peter, is also heavily inundated with Greco-Roman references to Stoic philosophy, is probably the first actual story narrative involving Jesus, after which it evolved into Ur-Marcus as wisdom sayings and miracle episodes were added to it. Ur-Marcus is what the Marcionites would use as a source for the Gospel of the Lord (Proto-Luke), but it twould go through the “Bethsaida revision” before the Jewish author of the Gospel of the Twelve (Proto-Matthew) used it. It is through the detection of this split that “Liberal Jesus” scholars are able to argue that the historical Jesus was not an apocalypticist like John the Baptist.

[pic]

Figure 2: A Combination of Hypotheses From Weisse, Bultmann, Streeter, Knox, Mead, Koester, M. Smith, Crossan, and Helms

Chart of Christian Texts and the Narrative Stages of Mythological Development

Gospel/Text Location Dating Association Narrative

“Q1” Galilee? 30s-130s “Logia of Matthew” sayings chronicle

“Q2” Galilee? 30s-130s Jewish Apocalyptic sayings chronicle

“M” Galilee? 30s-130s “Special Matthew” sayings chronicle

“L” Galilee? 30s-130s “Special Luke” sayings chronicle

“James” Jerusalem 50s-130s Thomas source sayings chronicle

Thomas Syria/Egypt 70s-140s (Semi?) Gnostic sayings chronicle

Paul Epistles Judean prison 50s-140s (Proto?) Marcionite chronicles

Canon Epistle Ephesus? 80s-150s Gentile Presbyter chronicles

“Signs” Alexandria? 40s-100s Valentinian? tragic folktale

“Cross” Sepphoris? 70s Pro-Roman Galilean tragic folktale

“Ur-Marcus” Syria? 70s Adoptionist tragic folktale

“Beth Mark” Bethsaida? 70s-130s 6.45-8.26 Added tragic folktale

“Secret Mark” Alexandria 80s-140s St. Clement of Alex. tragic folktale

Mark Rome 80s-140s Abbreviated gospel tragic folktale

“Ur-Matthew” Antioch 80s-150s Jewish Adoptionist idyllic romance

Matthew Antioch 80s-150s Gentile Christian idyllic romance

Ebionites Syria/Palestine 80s-170s Jewish Ebionite idyllic romance

Lord Aegean Sea 80s-140s (Proto?) Marcionite idyllic romance

“John 1” Alexandria? 85-138 Jewish Cerinthian ironic tragedy

Luke-Acts Ephesus? 94-150s Gentile Presbyter epic history

John 2 (R.) Ephesus 94-172 Gentile Presbyter ironic tragedy

Long Mark Rome/Lyons 150s-180s St. Irenaeus of Lyons tragic folktale

‘Peter’ Egypt 150s-190s Gentile Presbyter idyllic romance

The Gospel of Mark as Tragic Folktale

As we have seen, the earliest strata of the gospels were made up of wisdom literature, inserted into the mouth of Jesus in different contexts by each of the evangelists. This wisdom literature is generally believed to have traveled by oral tradition for a time before it was written down and was easily conflated with the oral performances of the Cynic “beggar-priest.” Out of the four canonical gospels, Mark shows the greatest evidence of oral tradition. Streeter’s work has shown Mark’s language to be more primitive and redundant and less literary than the other gospels. Vladamir Propp makes the similar point that Mark has a “two-fold quality of a folktale: it is amazingly multiform, picturesque and colorful, and, to no less a degree, remarkably uniform and recurrent” (Propp 19). Many of the details of the Gospel of Mark provide evidence for it being at the lowest stratum of mythological development. The desired knowledge for Jesus’ ancestry, birth, and infancy had not accumulated to a necessary level at the time Mark was written and the “messianic secret” motif allowed the author to offset the expectation of historicity.

Kelber, in his book The Oral and the Written Gospel, devotes four sections to “Mark’s Oral Legacy” (Kelber 44-89); he argues that the ten “heroic stories,” three “polarization stories,” and six “didactic stories” follow a versatile three-part sequence divided into a series of auxillary motives typical of oral tradition, and that the six “parabolic stories” function as “menemonic triggers that help recall information incidentally, rather than mechanistically” (57). Mark’s gospel follows the rules of “scenic duality,” which says that oral tradition prefers personalized stories involving the protagonist and one other person. Kelber points out that in Mark Jesus is almost always talking to a sick person or someone who is seeing him because of a sick person, and so “it is the plurality, uniformity, and variability of the healing stories that attests to their oral production and quality of performance” (51). Another characteristic of oral tradition is the way the repetition of features moves the story forward. The exorcisms, for example, show uniformity in their structure but variance in the narrative performance, providing evidence for “the art and economy of oral composition of narrating in verbal and thematic commonplaces” (54). The way short stories in Mark link together through stereotypical devices constitutes the “backbone of the narrative,” and reveals how the first thirteen chapters of Mark pertain “to the text’s transparency on a storied, oral heritage.” As Kelber says, “[t]ake the stories away, and the narrative of Jesus’ life is gone” (64-65). The narrative is almost completely “activist syntax” because narrated action is easy to visualize. Other rhetorical features that denote an oral tradition are the “folkloric triads” embedded in the narrative: three main disciples out of the twelve, three predictions of death and resurrection, three episodes in which the disciples fall asleep in Gethsemane, three entrances to Jerusalem, and three denials by Peter (66). Frans Neirynck assembled a vast amount of Markan pleonasms, redundancies, and repetitions, which Kelber interprets to be a necessary strategy employed by oral tradition for retention (Neirynck 45-50; Kelber 66-67). None of the disciples are fully realized in Mark’s gospel, which is typical of oral tradition since “[c]haracter development is not the strength of stories rooted in orality” (69). In The Complete Gospels, a book released by the Jesus Seminar, Robert J. Miller also supports this reading of Mark as being close to oral folk tradition, noting Mark’s “rushed, folksy, and vivid style” (Miller 11).[94]

The Gospel of Mark holds many similarities to that of the J source. Harold Bloom goes so far as to make a direct parallel between the two pioneering narratives: “[a]s literature, Mark’s Gospel is considerably more impressive in the English Bible than in the Greek original, where an extraordinary sensibility struggles with inadequate language. Mark oddly fuses a kind of Yahwistic realism with an extremely abrupt narrative style, in which speed and immediacy are emphasized” (Bloom, Jesus 59). Both J and Mark have methodically woven a very large number of smaller stories and parables into a surprisingly cohesive narrative. Just as J exhibits the folkloric quality of having a talking snake, the Gospel of Mark employs a voice from heaven (Gen. 3.1; Mark 1.11). An even more direct parallel can be made with the talking cross in the Gospel of Peter, assuming Crossan’s Cross Gospel was an earlier source for Mark (Peter 10.42; Crossan, Who 226). And just as the J source features oral traditions through the insertion of poems, such as the Blessing of Jacob (Gen. 49) and the Song of Miriam (Ex. 15), the author of Mark uses the poetry in Psalms of David as “an integral part of the multifaceted characterization of Jesus and Markan theological concerns” (Ahearne-Kroll 1). The unique creativity shown by both J and Mark in producing parables with hidden symbols referencing the historical politics of their time period imparts upon the reader an expertise in crafting various symbolisms into a simple yet engrossing plot narrative. J is the first source known to use the concept of the “twelve sons of Israel” to create mythological personalities to symbolize their tribal equivalents; Mark, likewise, is the first known source to use the concept of the “twelve disciples,” a number of which, like “Thomas” and “Simon the Zealot,” may also symbolize larger religious sects. Both are often cold-bloodedly brutal in their storytelling, especially in the creation of tragic figures, and have an unflinching grasp of the macabre that is habitually polished over by later authors.

Mark’s Jesus suffers not only a tragic death but also a tragic life as well. He has no father (3.31). His mother believes that he is crazy (3.21). He is disrespected in his hometown (6.4). Even his own disciples do not understand him (8.14-21) and are more interested in their own glory (10.35).[95] Mark’s Jesus also feels that his mission is to spread the word of God, but is instead inundated with requests to be healed (1.38, 2.2). After healing some people in Capernaum, Jesus leaves to be in a solitary place, only for Peter to find him and let him know that everyone was looking for him. Jesus decides to go to the nearby villages so he can teach rather than heal. When yet another leper came begging to be healed, Jesus became “filled with anger” (later edited by a scribe to say “filled with compassion”) but ultimately decided to heal the man (Mark 1.41; Ehrman, Misquoting 134; Crossan, Jesus 83). Jesus told him to keep the healing a secret, which the man fails to do, and once again Jesus finds himself overcrowded. Mark is also the first gospel to say that Jesus went to Gethsemane and was “overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death” (14.34). In the passion narrative, Jesus is mocked both at his trial and his crucifixion, and it is only after the loud cry at his death is he accepted by a centurion as Son of God (15.39).

But are these tragic motifs only a perspective created by Mark or is Mark following a tradition of Greek tragedy? The earliest “Cynic” stratum of the wisdom sayings provides the perspective of a community that is more interested in Jesus’ teachings than his death. The general epistles such as James and Jude in the New Testament also provide examples of correspondence based on positive religious instruction without any hint that the tragic nature of Jesus’ death has any special theological meaning.[96] Unlike these early epistles, however, later letters put an unmistakable emphasis on death of Jesus as a core tenant of the religion. The Epistle to the Hebrews says that the sacrifice of Christ’s body replaced the need for sacrifices and burnt offerings (10.10). The Epistles credited to Peter and John also speak of Jesus only in the context of his death. A careful study of the earliest Pauline epistles show that Christ’s death was not just the central issue regarding Jesus, it was the only issue. In the Pauline Epistles: “Has Christ been split up? Was it Paul that was crucified for you . . . ?” (NJB, 1 Cor. 1.13); “None of the rulers [archons] of the age [aeon] recognized it, for if they had recognized it, they would not have crucified [estaurosan] the Lord of glory” (NJB, 1 Cor. 2.8); “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires” (NJB, Gal. 5.24).[97] “But may it never be that I should boast, except in the cross . . . through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (NJB, Gal. 6.14). The tragic nature of the death of Christ occupies the narrative of the Pauline epistles to the extent that nothing else appears about Jesus the historical person.[98] The references say nothing about Jesus being a teacher, the son of a tekton, or that he came from Nazareth, but the same letters speak volumes about the tragic death of Jesus and resurrection of Jesus being intimately linked to the resurrection at the Parousia.[99] The first “sign” of Jesus turning water into wine in the Signs Gospel and the overall Synoptic gospel structure beginning with John baptizing with water and ending with Jesus sharing bread and wine as a symbol of his body and blood presents a symbolic conceptualization of the Essene baptizing right being replaced by the Hellenistic mystery of Communion that had long been part of the Orphic and Dionysian mysteries.

Neither the original Gospel of Mark nor the passion narrative used by the evangelist contained a physical resurrection of Jesus after he is crucified. The Cross Gospel in Peter portrayed angels carrying the spirit of Jesus out and taking him up into the heavens while the Gospel of Mark has the women meet the mysterious young man who fled naked in the garden meet them in the tomb and tell them that Jesus had gone ahead to Galilee.[100] Mark’s Jesus speaks of dispensing secret knowledge to his disciples like that of the Gnostics, but unlike the Gnostic gospels, he only provides interpretations to the wisdom sayings.[101] Mark’s shortened ending takes on the same secretive quality that the evangelist’s conception of Jesus exhibits, with both author and protagonist giving the impression that they are keeping secrets. What is unique about Mark’s gospel is that for all the pathos expressed at Gethsemane and in the passion narrative, everything that happens is a natural consequence of Jesus’ actions, from triumphantly entering Jerusalem, to clearing the temple, to being disconcerted by the disciples’ inability to keep watch at Gethsemene, to refusing to defend himself to Pilate, to the crowd choosing the zealot to be released over Jesus, events move along mechanically, highlighting the futility of trying to understand the will of God in a world of conventional tragedy. But by “taking up the cross” and enduring righteous suffering, Jesus is able to find life in the denial of the material world. Like the “radical” ideological orientation that Hayden White associates with the tragic mode, the earliest Christian writers were “inclined to view the utopian condition as imminent” in order to inspire deep commitment to an unorthodox way of life, whether that utopia was the Jewish Parousia or the Cynic ideal of freedom (White 25). The author of Mark’s use of folkloric language, numerology, and motifs, along with the gospel’s basic structure of as a Greek tragedy makes the earliest gospel a prime example of the earliest stratum of Christianity’s mythological topography.

The Gospel of Matthew as Idyllic Romance

“Although Matthew used the general framework of the Gospel of Mark, the composition and outline of his gospel are fundamentally different. The passion narrative no longer determines the whole conception of the writing, and the ministry of Jesus is no longer seen as simply the prelude to the passion. . . . The foundation of the church is not Jesus’ death, but his ministry. In this ministry the emphasis clearly lies on the discources of Jesus, namely on his teaching and not on his working of miracles” (Koester, Intro II, 172-173).

Romances typically do not begin with genealogies because they are not meant to relay history and long lists of names are counter-intuitive for storytellers who wish to maintain an audience. Infancy stories are also rare in romances because they disrupt the succinct nature of the mythological stage’s developmental impetus. Genealogies and infancy stories are written in order to prove a mythological figure is historical, but romance writers who are reworking legendary figures from poetry and folktales are typically still trying to impress their audience with how great their hero is, not with how real they are. Matthew’s genealogy, however, appears to have been a late addition to an earlier, more Jewish stratum that the Ebionites later adapted for their own gospel. This earlier stratum can be called the “Gospel of the Twelve” because it was meant as a response to the Gospel of Mark, which, like the Marcionites, showed hostility towards the disciples, especially Peter, James, and John. Just as the Elohist rewrote many of the story elements of J to reflect the beliefs and allegiances of the Shiloh priesthood, the author of “the Twelve” rewrote many of Mark’s story elements so that the Twelve are proven to be worthy followers of Jesus and to support his own Jewish theology. Like the E source, the Gospel of Matthew is a text reacting against the earlier folktale, reworking it the fit the theology of the Jewish author.

While the Marcionite Gospel of the Lord polarized Jesus against the Jews by expanding on the Nazareth episode so that the people in Jesus’ hometown try to kill him, the “Gospel of the Twelve” polarized Jesus against the Gentiles by telling the disciples not to enter any town of the Gentiles or Samaritans but only to the “lost sheep of Israel” (NJB, Luke 4.28-30; Matt. 10.6). Yet, even though the Jewish gospel was as hostile to Gentiles and Samaritans as the docetic gospel was to the Jewish disciples and the synagogue worshippers from Nazareth, the “Gospel of the Twelve” did share a noticeable kinship with its Hellenistic antagonist. Both gospels have independently turned Jesus from a tragic hero who lived a trying and hard-fought life in seeming futility into the idyllic hero whose glory precedes him and whose own greatness allows every obstacle to the surpassed without any show of weakness. Both evangelists have noticeably turned Jesus into someone the reader should want to admire and imitate, even though what that conception of Jesus is to them is completely different. Since the genealogies and infancy stories found in Matthew and Luke are both completely original and mutually exclusive to one another, it can even be assumed that the “Gospel of the Twelve” and the Marcionite Gospel of the Lord were both independently historicized after they had been independently romanticized.

Despite the genealogy and infancy story, the Gospel of Matthew is still essentially writing in the fictional mode. As Ulrich Luz writes, “the Gospel of Matthew is a story of Jesus that can only be understood when one traces it and tries to grasp what it wished to covey to its intended readers” (Luz xi). Like most romances, the Gospel of Matthew is at once more receptive to broad audiences and at the same time more reactionary, divisive, and combative. Matthew was also using a source that was far more idyllic in its content than Mark’s gospel. Had the author of the “Gospel of the Twelve” or the Gospel of the Lord decided to author a romance following the same tragic literary path Mark had taken, the story would have placed ever-more Cynic-like elegies on Jesus for enduring ever-increasing hardships. The author of “the Twelve” instead idealizes Jesus and the Twelve in much the same way the Elohist idealized the more human patriarchs from the J source. Instead of James and John selfishly asking Jesus to sit on his right or left, it is their mother, a symbol of the spiritual Wisdom, who intercedes with Jesus on their behalf (20.20). The author of the Gospel of the Lord instead took an opposing route, making the disciples even worse than Mark. When the three women come back from the tomb of Jesus, the disciples do not even believe them (24.11). While both the Yahwist and Mark are using their protagonists to unfold a wider plot, the Elohist and Matthew often sacrifice the logic of the plot in order to promote Jesus’ character with prophecies or represent the traditions of the author’s community. For example, a floating verse about the Son of Man spending three days in the belly of the whale has been inserted in the middle of a Q2 saying without the redactor realizing that the passion narrative has the resurrection only two days later (12.40). In another passage, the tombs open and the saints come out at the moment Jesus dies but it is not until after his resurrection that they begin to enter the cities and appear to people (27.51-53).

According to Fredriksen, Matthew’s community “assumed a new stature and dignity, which Matthew protected by reworking offending passages in Mark” (Fredriksen 190). Jesus also shows no reluctance in healing the sick as he did in Mark; this is now part and parcel with his preaching mission. He now has an “upright” father who, despite his unscripted assumption that his wife has cheated on him, wanted “to spare her disgrace” and “decided to divorce her informally” (NJB 1.19).[102] The reaction against the passage in Mark in which Jesus was baptized by a lesser prophet had to be explained by having John at first deter Jesus by saying “It is I who need baptism from you” (3.14). The passage in which Jesus becomes angry with the man with leprosy for asking to be healed is edited out (8.2). Instead of telling the expanded story in Mark wherein Jesus’ family comes to look for him saying he is out of his mind, the Gospel of Matthew instead copies the more original saying about followers being one’s true family.[103] Jesus’s hometown still disrespects him, but rather than saying “he could work no miracle there” (6.5) because of their lack of faith, Jesus instead “did not work many miracles” (13.58).

Not only are Jesus’s companions portrayed more positively but his enemies are also portrayed more negatively. While in Mark’s gospel, Jesus finds at least one teacher of the law who liked Jesus’s sayings, Matthew’s gospel instead reads that the expert in law “put him to the test” (22.35). Jesus’s family is ideal, his disciples are ideal, and even his enemies are ideal. Jesus is even able to call down twelve legions of angels to stop his arrest if he had wanted to, a story element that never could have worked in Mark’s gospel since the reader would never sympathize with the challenges he faced (26.53).

While Mark’s gospel contains elements from the Septuagint—mostly poetic quotes from Psalms and Isaiah to bring emphasis to his plot—the more than 60 references to the Greek-translated Old Testament found in Matthew are instead used as Midrash-like “proofs” to identify Jesus as a prophet in the line of Moses. In contrast to Mark’s Jesus defining his beliefs through his actions, complex webs of integrated wisdom sayings bog down the narrative flow of Matthew’s gospel. Rather than using the massive space to spell out a formal doctrine, the skeleton of the Synoptic narrative is used as a repository for anecdotal traditions. The use of the term “kingdom of Heaven” in place of “kingdom of God” (‘Theos’ or ‘Zeus’) is also a notable Jewish literary trait of avoiding direct reference to the deity that still has its modern equivalent in the use of the term “G-d.” The laws of Moses, which the Marcionites considered to be part of the “world of the flesh” and which the Presbyters argued had been nullified by Christ’s death, were still considered to be in effect by the Jewish evangelist even after the Jerusalem temple’s destruction. The warning against those who teach others to break the laws of Moses being the least in the kingdom of Heaven is almost certainly directed at Pauline Christians since this warning is reported in the Pauline epistles and even Acts records that the Jerusalem followers of Jesus believed Jesus took this position.[104] While Luke-Acts tells story after story about zealous Jews trying to murder Paul, in Matthew it is the Gentiles who are predicted to persecute the disciples (10.18).

According to Hayden White, romances tend to take the “hard line” attitude of the “formist” mode of argument, which tends to be “dispersive” in its analytical operations rather than “integrative” (15). Divisions between the Pharisees, Hellenistic Christians, and the Jewish author’s community come to the forefront in this argumentative gospel, more so than in either Mark or Acts.[105] For example, in the Gospel of Mark, the disciple John stops another exorcist because he was “not one of us,” in response to which Jesus tells John not to stop the exorcist because “no one who works a miracle in my name could soon afterwards speak evil of me. Anyone who is not against us is for us” (NJB, 9.38-40). The Jewish evangelist instead uses the Q2 saying: “Anyone who is not with me is against me, and anyone who does not gather in with me throws away” (NJB, 12.30). The fact that both the Jewish and Marcionite evangelists were able to employ Q2’s derisive condemnations about “this generation” -- essentially against each other -- exemplifies the “formist” explanatory strategy, which “tends to be wide in ‘scope’--ample in the kinds of particulars it identifies as occupying the historical field--its generalizations about the processes discerned in the field will be inclined to lack conceptual ‘precision’” (White 15).

Each of the Synoptic gospels from the Apostolic church’s canon have had their endings changed by later copyists to correlate with the romantic ending of Jesus’s resurrection appearances. The Gospel of Lord’s narrative about Jesus’s ghostly appearance to the two men traveling on the road to Emmaus is noticeably generic, with two postscript characters having an experience with a stranger that is still somewhat open to interpretation (24.13). Matthew’s author, however, was more interested in establishing the resurrection appearance as a way for Jesus to reveal that “[a]ll authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” just as all authority in heaven and earth had been given to Peter and the Antioch church as an appendix to the story of Peter identifying Jesus with the Messiah (28.18). Mark’s long ending referenced by Irenaeus was likewise added to give more legitimacy to the Acts of the Apostles, which no doubt ran counter to the histories of the other Christian sects of the second century (16.17). As the “radical” ideology of an immanent appearance of the Son of man became more controversial, emphasis on the resurrection as a past event allowed readers to compartmentalize the Golden Age of the end times into the past. The ideological implication associated with White’s romance mode is “anarchism,” which is “inclined to idealize a remote past of natural-human innocence from which men have fallen into the corrupt ‘social’ state” so that it can be detached from the temporal plane as a perpetual but indefinite possibility (White 25). This can be summed up with the parting words of the resurrected Jesus added in by Matthew’s author, saying, “make disciples of all nations; . . .teach them to observe all the commands I gave you. And look, I am with you always; yes, to the end of time” (28.20).

Luke-Acts as Epic History

The combination of Luke and Acts makes up the largest amount of material by one author, comprising more than a quarter of the New Testament. Because Luke sets the story of Jesus within the larger story of the church, “Jesus is not the prime mover of the narrative, though he is, of course, its central figure. It is God who determines the course of events in the story” (Miller, Complete 115). Like Matthew, Marcion’s gospel was an idyllic romance, having also moved away from the “messianic secret” and the tragic Stoicism of Mark’s gospel, but it was later converted, perhaps in several stages, into an epic history meant to connect the gospel romance to the romance narratives of the apostles, as well as harmonize the competing churches of Paul (Turkey), Peter (Antioch), and James (Jerusalem). The life of Jesus became a product that was separate from his teachings, and needed to be understood within the crux of historiography. The epic relies on a treasure trove of historic and mythical traditions as background to make the case for a highly developed theology to audiences who were more willing to interpret the gospel story as nonfiction.

By the time Luke-Acts was composed, gospel-writing had well outgrown the need to appeal to a broad audience and was now attempting to answer questions about its own origins and relationship to the rest of the world. The increasing authority given towards the gospel story as an important doctrine called for an increasing amount of historical elaboration so that readers would be able to learn “the whole story.” In order to respond to these new questions, Luke uses an encyclopedia of lore to argue contentions regarding the legacy of individual apostles, nominally to readers already educated in the subject. The birth and infancy stories used are longer and more complex than the ones found in Matthew, and are crafted to show that Jesus and his family were not only Jewish, but came from a legitimate Judaean background, and that he was raised to follow the Law of Moses.[106] Both Luke and Acts are addressed to one Theophilus, but this is probably pseudographical since the gospel was more likely written for a much larger audience than one person, as shown by the reason Luke gives for writing the gospel: “so that your Excellency may learn how well founded the teaching is that you have received” (NJB, 1.4).[107] While the Gospel of Lord was written with a disposition against the disciples and Jews in general, the author of Luke-Acts attempts to portray the disciples as an important bridge between Jesus and Paul. Acts appears to be made up of three main layers of text: 1) a Pauline layer, which includes what may be an “Epistle of Luke” told from the first person perspective of his companion; 2) an Antioch layer centered on Peter which says that the Jewish Law was put into effect by angels; and 3) an Ephesus layer that tried to reconcile the “Epistle of Luke” to Jewish sensibilities. The author of Luke-Acts is almost certainly responsible for this third layer, as the main theme of the overall epic is a reconciliation between Gentile and Jew, slave and free, and woman and man.

“The ancient title Praxeis was a term designating a specific Greek literary form, a narrative account of the heroic deeds of fdamous historical or mythological figures.” (Fitzmyer 47). Other examples: Acts of the Early Kings, Acts of Pompey, Strabo, Nicolas, Livy, Hercules, Alexander, Hannibal, Apollonius of Tyana (47-48).

Fitzmyer, Joseph A. Acts of the Apostles: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. New York: Doubleday, 1998.

“But although it failed and passed away, Montanism had a marked influence on the development of the Church. In the first place, it aroused a general distrst of prophecy, and the result was that the Church soon came to the conviction that prophecy had entirely ceased. In the second place, the Church was led to see the necessity of emphasizing the historical Christ and historical Christianity over against Montanistic claims of a constantly developing revelation, and thus to put great emphasis upon the Scripture canon. In the third place, the Church had to lay increased stress upon the organization-upon its appointed and ordained officers-over against the claims of irregular prophets who amight at any time arise as organs of the Spirit.” –Peter Kirby, Commentary to Anonymous Anti-Montanist,

Sir J. Hawkins

Luke 3.1 opens with an “elaborate chronological statement… as if it was originally written as the opening section of a book” (Streeter 209). Starts with L rather than Mark.

“If we look up these passages in Mark in a Synopsis of the Gospels and notice the incidents which immediately precede and follow them, we shall see that Luke reproduces everything else in the neighborhood from Mark in the original order, but that he simply omits Mark’s account of these incidents. The alternative versions which he gives are always given in a completely different context—presumably, then, their context in the source from which he took them” (Streeter 210).

Luke prefers non-Mark to Mark, “is explicable only if the non-Marcan material formed a complete Gospel so considerable as to seem worthy not only of being compared with, but even of being preferred to, Mark” (212). Luke’s 15 uses of the word Kurios (“Lord”) are divided between Q and L (Streeter 212-213).

It also explains the “great omission” in Mark 6.45-8.26 “which linguistic statistics2 [by Oxford Studies p. 61] show clearly was an original part of Mark” (Streeter 214).

“Its account of the actual Crucifixion, and probably also of the Entombment, seems to have been quite brief—possibly little more than a barestatement of the facts—so that from xxiii. 33 to xxiv. 10a Luke reverses his ordinary procedure and makes Mark his main source1” (Streeter 217). Luke wrote both Proto-Luke, Luke, and the “we” source (218). Proto-Luke may have not been published extensively and accepts the possibility from Dr. Headlam that it is only a stage of the writing process (221).

Matt. says the kingdom is "in the midst of you" (17.21) (Wells 221). Matthew adds "Hereafter" (26.4) and Luke changes it to "From now on, the Son of man shall be seated at the right hand of the power of God" (22.69). Luke has no "immediately" like Matt. and he drops "days are shortened for elect" (Luke 21.25; Wells 228n). Luke 12.54-56 reworks endtime saying to say that "the present time" in verse 56 means the Church, from Jesus to Luke, a time of divisions, into a statement about judging the present correctly, as Klein argues (Matt. 16.26f, Conzelmann, 30--31, 150,151; Wells 228n).

 

Proto-Luke consisted of Q + L before Mark. Wells sees this as an attempt to authenticate Luke by making them pre-Marcan and therefore based on eyewitness accounts (222). Kummel dismisses it as untenable. Mark's passion material appears in the middle. Creed says its unlikely that Luke would have interpolated only occasional sentences and verses from Mark (222).

 

Luke did not have Mark 6.45-8.26. Just before it is the common feeding 5000 story, then Jesus "went into the hills to pray (Mark 6.46) but in Luke's copy this seems to be followed by Mark 8.27, where he "questioned" his disciples. Luke makes it "As Jesus was praying alone, the discuples were with him and questioned him" (9.18; 222-223). Haenchen calls it a "desperate atempt" to combine 6.46 and 8.27, adding that it was common for leaves to be missing from the middle of a codex (223).

 

Lawrence M. Wills agrees with Burkett that the Long Ending is more likely the earlier version because its emphasis on faith, like that seen in the Signs Gospel, is more in line with the cult of remembrance that “was instrumental in the formation of their group identity” (Wills 48).

quoted by Ireneaus around 180 and still found in most versions of the Bible today (Mark 16.9-20; Irenaeus 3.10.5; Koester, Intro II 23-29). This long ending makes references to events that happen in Acts, which places the final redaction of Mark after Luke-Acts.

Just as the P source was the first national epic to create a complete historiography of the Jewish and Israelite peoples, Acts has fashioned an epic of a nation within a nation, establishing a first century Jewish and Gentile church to bridge the gap between the past and the author’s present. The Aaronid Priest’s key to historicizing the JE romance was to create a timeline by giving the patriarchs in Genesis overextended ages in order to frame a clear historical context. Luke likewise historicized Jesus by associating his birth with a census of Caesar Augustus while Quirinius was governor of Syria (2.1).[108] The Presbyter redactor also increased the link between Jesus and John the Baptist by making them relatives, similar to the way Aaron first became a blood relative to Moses in the P source.[109] By retroactively tying the bloodlines of Jesus and John together, the author of Luke-Acts hoped to make conversion more appealing to followers of the John. The author of the “Gospel of the Twelve” used Q2 sayings to emphasize the “kingdom” movement over John the Baptist’s sect, just as the Elohist sought to belittle the Baptizer’s purported ancestor, Aaron. The author of Luke-Acts instead has instead co-opted Peter, Paul, and the disciples the same way the Aaronid Priest co-opted Moses and turned the E source’s negative literary perception of Aaron into a positive one, along with the addition of some nobler sons.[110] Luke attempts to root the foundation of his church, not just in Peter as Matthew did, but also in the other disciples and in Paul, all of them acting as one unified body, and all authenticated by the Holy Spirit.

Unlike romances, epics are more responsible for providing the reader with a larger scope, a larger cast of characters and an idea of what all of the protagonists’ rival perspectives entail. The scope of the gospel story is extended from Galilee and Judea to Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome, as Paul sails across the Mediterranean converting the Gentile world.[111] What was originally represented as a self-contained personal conflict has now expanded to describe the real world events the gospel story originally symbolized. Not just the scope of the landscape, but also the scope of the gospel narrative had to be extended past anecdotal wisdom sayings in order answer questions about what happened before Jesus’ baptism and after his death and to explain how Christianity had spread throughout Rome. The third person limited narrative mode is replaced with the third person omniscient. Luke-Acts is also the earliest known story that developed the twelve disciples beyond just names into living, breathing people, as well as the first to more than double the number of characters that appear in the story. Many of these new characters are popular historical figures rather than cyphered name references the earlier gospels relied on. Luke-Acts is also the first gospel to give the reader some concept, beyond vague riddles, of what differentiated followers of Jesus from followers of John the Baptist and Greek philosophers. Luke is interested in assuring his readers that Christianity is no longer a Jewish sect but a multi-national religion comparable to the Greek philosophies.

The author of Luke follows a completely different perspective than the earlier evangelists in that his gospel is meant to be an “ordered account” of history, not a story, as we had with Mark and Matthew (NJB, 1.3). As Mack writes, “Luke’s lasting achievement with regard to views of the ‘historical’ Jesus was that his story created the Christian sense of Jesus’ importance as historical” (Mack 170). The author of Luke-Acts was clearly responding to a growing apprehension from Gentile Christians for a connection to the historical Jesus due to a disconnect between the gospel Jesus and the “apostolic age” of Paul, Peter, and the other “disciples.”[112] The awareness that the gospels could be interpreted as either story or history is exemplified by a verse in 2 Peter that reads, “[w]hen we told you about the power and the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, we were not slavishly repeating cleverly invented myths; no, we had seen his majesty with our own eyes” (1.16).[113] The author of Luke-Acts appears to have reacted to these arguments with an overly active sense of literalism. A wisdom saying from Q2 in which Jesus tells the followers of John the Baptist that “the blind see again, the lame walk. . .” is preceded by separate miracle stories connected to each metaphorical healing listed, except that of restoring sight, which is instead given a quick mention right before Jesus is asked whether he is the predicted Messiah (7.21). The Q2 saying that the difference between John and Jesus is that Jesus would baptize with spirit instead of water is also taken literally, as the Holy Spirit is spread throughout Rome literally by a laying on of hands, a rite confirmed by the speaking of tongues (19.6).[114] The physical resurrection of Jesus is likewise a historical fact, proven by Jesus’ own words and a show of eating fish (24.39-43).

Luke-Acts describes quintessential historical incidents from the first century that act as hallmarks to answer what has caused the misunderstandings between the different Jewish and Gentile sects. These stories typify how those outside the church’s community got off on the wrong start, such as how a story about how Simon the Magus was converted by Philip was edited so that Simon is then admonished by Peter for offering to pay for the Holy Spirit (8.9-25). In Acts, the author compares the correct faith of Paul to that of the now-outdated sect of Alexandrian Jews who followed John the Baptist, as in the case of Apollos, an “eloquent man” who is brought into the home of Paul’s followers so that they could give him a “more detailed instruction about the Way”(NJB, 18.24-26). Apollos gladly complies and gets adopted into the canon the same the P source “adopts” the Levites as lesser priests to the Aaronid line following E’s denigration of Aaron. One of the earliest conflicts that separated the Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus were the questions of circumcision and eating at non-kosher tables. The Epistle to the Galatians attempts to prove that Cephas, a “pillar” of the Jerusalem Church traditionally identified with Peter, was in the wrong when he became intimidated by followers of James, another “pillar” of Jerusalem, and stopped eating with Gentiles (NJB, 2.9-14).[115] However, Acts contains some passages, which are edited into an earlier vision of Peter’s concerning Gentiles being saved, in which God tells Peter that non-kosher animals are now clean, after which Peter is able to convert the entire Jerusalem church to this new revelation (10.9-11.18). It wasn’t that the leaders of the Jerusalem Church were wrong, an argument made in Galatians, but that Jewish Jesus movements in Luke’s time were ignorant of their own history.

This kind of historical incorporation is only possible after enough time has passed for the original controversy that antagonized the two sects against each other has been forgotten or otherwise dismissed. The natural tendency for “conservative” ideologies to follow up and build on “anarchist” ones develops from the common tendency for systems to attack first and consume afterwards, whether it be an organism consuming another, a kingdom that makes war and then seals the peace with a marriage, or a corporation attempting to devalue its competitor before buying it out. Therefore, the common Lukan dualities between Gentile and Jew, woman and man, slave and free, can be interpreted as a natural universalizing tendency within “organicist” epics arising from the need to resolve the conflicts indicative of “formist” romances.[116] In the J source, Simeon and Levi are bad and Zadok, whose ancestry is identified with Aaron, is good; in the E source, Simeon and Levi are good and Aaron is bad, while in the P source, all are good. Similarly, the Pauline epistles and Mark portray Peter (or Cephas) as bad and Paul as good while Matthew portrays Peter as good and lawbreakers like Paul as bad.[117] Peter (Antioch) won out and it was Paul who was reformed, not to drop his Cynic philosophy, but combine it with Hellenized midrash of the Old Testament. Then Peter was reformed from dietary regulations for the sake of John (Ephesus).

The “radical” ideologies of Cynic philosophy and Jewish apocalypticism found in Mark and the Pauline epistles focused on the death of Jesus had descended into “anarchist” sects represented by differing “formist” perceptions of the risen Jesus. Now that even more time had passed, people began taking on the more “conservative” approach of acting to preserve the church’s present condition, pulling the focus of the story away from the gospel Jesus to the historical apostles. By redirecting emphasis on the church’s present, the author of Luke-Acts showed that Presbyter church was “taking stock for the long haul” by “showing it how to understand its past (its Jewish roots) and how to live in an open-ended present, by following the teachings of Jesus . . .” (Miller, Complete 117). Unlike the tragic ending of Mark or the romantic ending in Matthew, Acts ends with the “comic” resolution in which no one side truly dominates over the other, as what happens in Rome is the same thing that happens at most of the places Paul visited: “some were convinced by what he said, while the rest were sceptical” (NJB, 28.24).

As opposed to the earlier gospels that attempted to divide Gentiles and Jews, the author of Luke-Acts took the more “conservative” approach of adopting historic figures to become reconciliatory figures in his historiography. Luke-Acts lays out a complete sectarian theology by combining the gospel story of divine exclusion with a two-part story of divine supplement. Where Mark ended with death, and Matthew ended with resurrection, Luke ends his story with the formation of a new church. By adding the history of the apostles after his gospel, Luke changes the structure of the narrative to reflect a history of divine providence over the tragedy of divine exclusion. The theme of death and resurrection, which in the Pauline epistles, Mark, and Matthew had been associated with the immanent Parousia, had now been changed to one of spiritual nation building.

The Gospel of John as Ironic Tragedy

Lawrence M. Wills says “The ironic contrast of the great benefactor who is an ugly creature is hardly new to Aesop; it is the stock treatment in Greek culture of the satirical outsider, or what John Winkler calls the Grotesque Outsider, the antisocial miscreant who, as a result of his or her marginal position, has a higher, penetrating understanding of humanity. This figure is found in the Iliad as Thersites, who criticizes Achilles and is killed ass a result, and Plato’s description of the death of Socrates is shaped by the vita of the outcast poet.

The satire thus probably comes from the pen of an aristocrat who finds humor in turning the world upside down. This is what we find in the plays of Plautus, and even more to the point, in the Roman novels Satyricon and The Golden Ass, as Winkler emphasized” (Wills 26).

The Passing of Peregrinus is a satire that “constitutes an inverted gospel, a story of the ministry, passion (actually more an extended social protest), death, and resurrection of Peregrinus, all told as a parade of examples of his shameless hucksterism” (Wills 34).

The hero was often anti-social, like Achilles abandoning his comrades, but “The philosopher dies because of his love of humanity, as Socrates, the quintessential martyrto truth, dies witnessessing to the obligation to live a just life” (35).

“Also closely related to the hero cult in Greece and Rome is the tradition of the scapegoat. It may in fact be the case that the Greek pharmakos and therapon of the hero cult is an elaborated subset of the scapegoating process. Here we note the examples of scapegoating where on figure becomes a itual sacrificial victim to restore balance or safety to the community, or one figure is exiled into the ”abyss” outside the city’s borders in order to take impurity and [37] danger away from the community” (36-37).

It is a common motif for an oracle, esp. the oracle of Delphi to demand or predict the sacrifice of the hero. The high priest Caiaphas, an exact analog, says: “It is expedient that one man should die for the people, so that the whole nation should not perish.” (44).

Mark 10:45 expressing Jesus’ “ransom for many” is supposedly “dropped by Luke,” but Burkett shows that it was actually added by the author of Proto-Mark A (Bethsaida Mark). (Wills 45; Burkett 159). “To be sure, the very earliest traditions of the Lord’s Supper were not likely associated with the death of Jesus, or with the [47] Passover, but looked forward to an aschatological in-gathering of the faithful and a “messianic banquet” with Jesus (Didache 9-11). Still, when this tradition is attached to the gospel narrative it takes on an association with the death of Jesus. Thus in Mark the telling of the story reenacts the sacrifice of Jesus, just as the eucharist may have also.” (46-47).

John 5:1-16: Judeans complain about carrying mat. “This reaction of the Judeans is depicted as an ironic but offensive pettiness. It is a typical Johannine technique to create an ironic contrast between the obtuseness of the opponents and the reality of Jesus’ presence. The satirical tone is unmistakeable, and is not unliketh irony of Plato’s dialogues: the true sage is condemned by a narraow interpretation of the letter of the law over the spirit of the law . . .” (Wills 69). Fortna suggests John 5:1-9a originally stood alone as a miracle story with no reference to the Sabbath (69-70).

Wills, Lawrence M. The Quest of the Historical Gospel: Mark, John, and the Origin of the Gospels Genre. New York: Routledge, 1997.

The Gospel of John is made up of at least three sources: two long-opposed theological arguments wrapped around a core of extended miracle stories.[118] The Signs Gospel set the structure of the narrative as focusing on several key episodes in which Jesus gives a “sign,” instead of using the Synoptic tradition of editing an increasingly large string of short miracle stories to set the context for a list of quick-and-punchy axioms. The increasingly glutted wisdom sayings in Matthew and Luke-Acts, often confusingly re-edited to fit the values of the copyists, show how a collector of folklore could only go so far before the objective of the author becomes lost in the conflicting anecdotes. The Signs Gospel hides its meanings behind mythological symbols and both the Cerinthian and the Presbyter theologies are completely based on insubstantial metaphysics, so the Gospel of John as we have it is completely void of parables and exorcisms, and “barely gives ethical teaching” (Miller, Complete 196). The author of Luke-Acts intended to prove that the Presbyter sect was the authentic representative of the Synoptic Jesus by historically linking Paul to Ephesus, but the Gospel of John begins with an assumption of authority and delivers assertions like “In all truth I tell you, before Abraham ever was, I am” that would not normally be taken at face value from just any Galilean peasant (NJB, 8.58). John 1 focuses on the Cerinthian theology of light and darkness and spirituality over ceremonial rites while John 2 promotes the theology of the Father being equal to the Son and conserving a combination of Jewish and Hellenistic rituals. By adopting a different format than the standard Synoptic gospels did, the authors of John were more free to break away from the familiar miracle-criticism-response venue and design their own personalized gospels. Rather than a short itinerary from Galilee to Jerusalem as the Synoptics use, John portrays Jesus as making multiple trips to Jerusalem over a longer amount of time. While the Signs author appears to have based the number of Sign episodes on the astronomically significant number seven, John 1 was able to create a hybrid of the Synoptic gospel and the Gnostic theological treatise. As Koester says in describing John, “[b]iography is the vehicle of this polemic thesis” (Ancient 271). John 2, in turn, was able to import some of the more Platonic abstractions into the nominally Stoic tradition endorsed by Synoptics.

Just as the Deuteronomist alternated from P’s chronological mapping of Judah and Israel’s histories as biographies of long-lived patriarchs into the realm of unrestrained dialogue, so too does the Gospel of John abandon Luke’s apostolic historiography for what could be called Plato’s realm of the forms.[119] The introduction to the gospel begins with the dawn of time, imitating Genesis by saying “[i]n the beginning was the Word,” or Logos (NJB, 1.1). The Deuteronomist was likewise able to begin his story at a more unconventional setting, several days away from Mt. Horeb, because the combined JE text and its rival P epic had already become established, allowing the Deuteronomist to establish the direction of the narrative according to his own priorities. Verses from two different sources from John’s gospel explaining that there were many other miracle stories about Jesus out there likewise relieved the evangelists of the duty to write a complete biography (20.30, 21.25). The defense also appears to have been used as a license to make similar drastic changes to chronology of the Synoptic narrative. This strategy is exemplified by the story of Jesus clearing the Jerusalem temple’s vendors being moved to the beginning of the gospel to replace the resurrection of Lazarus as the prime modus operendi for Jesus’ execution. Just as the Deuteronomist was able to appeal more to the reader personally by telling most of the story in the first person, the Gospel of John gives the reader a far intimate picture of a religious figure whose readership, now abreast of the figure’s biographical details, wanted a better semblance of hero’s personality. Many of the Coptic Gospels from the Nag Hammadi, which are mostly dated very late, have been written in the same polemical manner as John 1 and John 2. The Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Truth likewise ascend into highly abstract arguments about “light” and “darkness,” or “truth” and “error.” Koester points out that the Apocryphon of James consists of a farewell dialogue similar to John 14-16 (Koester, Ancient 200).

The circumstances surrounding the death of Jesus are particularly ironic compared to that of the Synoptic gospels. John 1 parodies Baptism by having Peter mistake Jesus’ example of washing others’ feet with bathing and then establishes an ironic reversal of Communion by having Jesus pass some bread dipped in wine to Judas as a sign to the Beloved Disciple about who would betray him (13.9, 26). When the chief priests and Pharisees gather together, they worry that all the “miraculous signs” will cause everyone to believe in him and it will cause the Romans to come and destroy the temple, saying, “you fail to see that it is to your advantage that one man should die for the people, rather than that the whole nation should perish” (NJB, 11.49-53). This seems like an astute political decision based on maintaining the status quo, but it results in the death of the King of the Jews and the temple is destroyed anyway. Following this is another passage, probably inserted by John 2, that says “[h]e did not speak in his own person, but as high priest of that year he was prophesying that Jesus was to die for the nation- and not for the nation only, but also to gather together into one the scattered children of God.” This presents a paradox that seems to strike at the ostentatious nature of Johannine theology, in that the crucifixion was necessary for human salvation and Caiaphas, as head of the villains trying to kill Jesus, was actually following the will of God. Since the Father is also equal to the Son, the verse could even be interpreted as a direct command from Jesus.

At the time it was written, the Gospel of John was meant to be taken seriously but not literally since it does not even attempt to shroud the Johannine community’s more contemporary convictions in symbols and anecdotes within the appropriate historical context. The long arguments are often portrayed in highly unrealistic situations, often against mobs of violent Jews who nevertheless hold off to continue arguing and speak with one voice (8.33-34).[120] The polemical nature of the Gospel of John gets very heated against the “Jews,” with Jesus saying, “[w]hy is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire” (8.43-44). The Synoptic gospels often used the disciples’ identities to make a point, such as Jesus denying that James and John would be at his right and left hand in heaven and predicting they would be carrying their own crosses in Jerusalem, but the symbolic meaning was hidden within the context of the story. In John’s gospel, Jesus ironically addresses the religious sects they represent directly in much the same way Moses addresses the reader directly. In a similar way, when Jesus calls out for God to glorify His name, a voice from heaven thunders out like in the Synoptic baptism story, declaring that God’s name has and will again be glorified. Some believe in a real voice while others believe it was only thunder, mirroring the conflict between literalist and symbolic readings of the gospel story in the evangelist’s own time, after which Jesus says to the crowd, “It was not for my sake that this voice came, but for yours” (NJB, 12.30). Here, John 2 is making an ironic theological argument for the literal interpretation of the gospel baptism sequence by writing a nearly identical “voice from heaven” story in his own gospel, which as it so ironically happens, became interpreted literally by the Apostolic church. Of course, the voice was described not for the sake of people in Jerusalem but for the actual reader, much as how the Deuteronomist had Moses address the reader directly.

This ironic juxtaposition is emblematic of the “contextualist” mode of argument, in which the author “proceeds to pick out the ‘threads’ that link the event to be explained to different areas of the context . . . both backward through time, in order to determine the ‘origins’ of the event, and forward in time, in order to determine its ‘impact’ and ‘influence’ on subsequent events” (White 18). Characters like Jesus and his disciples are removed from their natural setting and placed in a new environment representing the author’s time. After Jesus appears to the disciples while the door is locked, Thomas demands to touch the nail marks in Jesus’ body in order to believe his resurrection. Jesus appears a second time just to prove the previous appearance from John 1 was not to be interpreted as a spiritual appearance as Thomas Christians did (20.19-29). Thus, John 2 traces the “origins” of Thomas Christians back to the personal character of their representative disciple and provides a scenario to explain their lack of faith in his own time period. This correlates with the “liberal” ideological tendency to “favor what might be called the ‘social’ rhythm of the parliamentary debate” (White 24).

The central tragedy of the crucifixion as told by John’s gospel is also a very different than the one in Mark. In Mark, the tragedy is one of pathos: Jesus is rendered isolated and pathetic through a stoic commitment to destroy the market system associated with the Jerusalem temple. John’s passion became an ironic reversal of Mark’s passion. Now that the passion was a divine plan for salvation, people had to be told about it before it even happened. Although Mark had Jesus predict his death, John’s Jesus speaks much more matter-of-factly about it, and even comforts the disciples over it (14.1). Jesus could no longer beg in Gethsemane for God to “[t]ake this cup away from me” because that would indicate he was unaware of God’s plan (NJB, 14.36). Instead, Jesus stops Peter from fighting in his defense by saying, “[p]ut your sword back in its scabbard; am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?” (NJB, 18.11).[121] Jesus even has to identify himself twice to the Romans before they are able to arrest him, the first time causing a force to knock the Romans down by the use of the words “I am he” (NJB, 18.6). As Frye says, “[t]ragedy is intelligible because its catastrophe is plausibly related to its situation.” Mark’s final moment of pathos in which Jesus cries out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is changed by John 1 to the solemn and Paraousia-diminishing “It is finished” (15.34, 19.30). John’s concept of Jesus as the scapegoat is far more in line with the ironic tragedy in Deuteronomy in which Moses takes on the sins of his people. Frye explains that as “[i]rony isolates from the tragic situation the sense of arbitrariness, of the victim’s having been unlucky, selected at random or by lot, and no more deserving of what happens to him than anyone else would be” (Frye 41). John’s Jesus and Deuteronomy’s Moses both act as an incarnation of the pharmakos, or scapegoat. While the romances that were built on Mark retained the torture and humiliation of the crucifixion, the circumstances surrounding the rest of Jesus’ life were made idyllic. But the divine providence given to the Christian community as portrayed in Luke-Acts is taken by John and retrofitted backwards into the gospel story so that instead of being rendered pathetic through torture and humiliation, Jesus escaped both and was glorified in death as well as life (13.31, 17.1).

Now that the four-stage model of mythological development has been shown to accord with both the four sources of the Pentateuch and the four gospels, it can be tested against a more secular mythology, that of the Arthurian legends. However, unlike these previous two cases, the four stages will instead be applied to selected Arthurian works since there is no canon from which there are already four distinct texts to compare. Instead, the four-stage model will be compared to what can already been considered to be the four basic stages of Arthurian literary history: the Welsh folklore, the French romances, the English psuedo-histories, and the English sixteenth-century literature and beyond. As in the previous two cases, it will be shown that a metanarrative within the mythological framework has guided through an evolutionary process very similar to Jewish and Christian literature, starting from poems and folktales and ending with abstract theological treatises.

CHAPTER 4

THE FOUR TRADITIONS OF ARTHUR

Introduction

The first chapter attempted to prove that the four main sources of the Pentateuch could be understood as evolving from J, a comic folktale; to E, an idyllic romance; to P, an epic history; and then to Deuteronomy, a rhetorical treatise introducing another epic history known as the Deuteronomistic History. The second chapter attempted to prove that the four gospels of Irenaeus’ late second-century canon, when rearranged in chronological order, shows evidence of evolving from gospels like Mark, a tragic folktale; to gospels like Matthew, an idyllic romance; to Luke-Acts, an epic history; and then to gospels like John, an ironic tragedy. This chapter will try to prove that Arthur also went through four stages of mythological development by choosing four Arthurian stories that are emblematic of the general nature of Arthurian literature during their time. Arthurian literature developed over a long period of time, even longer than the time span that separated the four sources of the Pentateuch, and unlike the previous two cases there are no four predetermined texts to guide the discussion on Arthurian legend. There are, instead, accepted genres that are specific to particular times and places. The more folkloric stories of Arthur have long been the home of Welsh legend, while Arthurian romances are generally connected to France, and the pseudo-chronicle tradition is seen as a particularly English convention. As such, the comparisons made for the model will not be limited to one or two texts but to localized genres in general.

According to John Matthews, there are three different Arthurs. The first Arthur is a military leader described by ancient chroniclers like Gildas, Nennius, and Bede (Matthews, King 19). The second Arthur is a figure from Welsh mythology, the pseudo-historical King Arthur of Culhwch and Olwen and The Spoils of Annwn (28). Matthew’s third Arthur is the hero of medieval courtly romance, starting with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, but finding its true form in France (56). Although Arthur was only one king among many, Geoffrey’s very romanticized epic history caught so much attention that a “veritable avalanche of Arthurian romances followed,” beginning in the late 1100’s (57). Matthews stops at three Arthurs, but I would like to extend this model by two more. The Arthur of Le Morte D’Arthur, an English emperor acting as a beacon of nationalistic aspirations, changed the standard conception of the Arthurian myth that even today it is generally considered to be the “definitive” Arthur story while Malory’s sources are generally unread outside Arthurian studies. In reaction to the pseduo-historical tradition continued by Sir Thomas Malory’s epic history, a fourth Arthur emerged in Spenser’s Fairie Queene in order to incorporate abstract theological and political polemic into his poetics using a highly recognizable icon for English chivalry.

Arthurian legend was born from the second of these five genres, so I will divide the ages of Arthurian literature according to four main traditions: 1) Welsh folklore; 2) French romance; 3) Anglo-Norman pseudo-history; and 4) Epic poetry. The four stories I have chosen to represent these four genres are: 1) How Culhwch Won Olwen, a comic folktale about Arthur’s cousin Culhwch found in a collection of short Celtic-flavored stories called The Mabinogion; 2) The Lancelot-Grail Cycle, a five-volume thematic romance compiled by Cistercian monks in northern France; 3) Sir Thomas Malory’s famous epic history, Le Morte D’Arthur; and 4) Edmund Spenser’s complex allegorical poem, The Faerie Queene, a rhetorical treatise dedicated to polemicizing Christian virtues.[122] I have chosen How Culhwch Won Olwen because it is “the longest and the earliest of the surviving native prose tales given written form in medieval Welsh” (Roberts 73). Rather the examining the earliest French romances of Chrétien de Troyes, I have instead chosen to focus on one of its final forms, the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, also known as the Vulgate Cycle. This choice builds on the literary dependence Le Morte D’Arthur has with the Cycle is undisputed. Despite the fact that the French romances show a greater quality of dependence on the Welsh folktales than they do with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia, the only connections that can be made between the first and second stages of Arthurian mythology are corrupted names, Christianized themes of valor, and vague memories of magic swords and cauldrons. While both Geoffrey of Monmouth and Sir Thomas Malory wrote epic histories on Arthur, Geoffrey’s creation was too early to build off a fully realized “story” tradition of Arthur and so in effect creates an epic folktale. As Richard M. Loomis writes, “[w]hile ordered as history, Geoffrey’s work dramatizes folklore and legend” (“Arthur” 60). While immensely popular, Geoffrey never brought Arthur past the concept of a distant historical figure to that of a living, breathing protagonist. Malory’s epic integrated the romantic Arthur into a story that both started and finalized the genre of the English Arthurian epic. Edmumd Spenser’s Faerie Queene was chosen because it is the earliest example of an author who decided to move away from building on his role as a historical figure to using him as a rhetorical figure under the subordination of the poet. In the following section, “Dating the Arthurian Traditions,” I will provide some of the scholarly opinions of the dates of the Arthurian texts. Then in the second half of the chapter, I will make the argument that How Culhwch Won Olwen is a comic folktale, that the Lancelot-Grail Cycle is a thematic romance, that Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’ Arthur is an epic history, and that Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is a rhetorical treatise.

The Quest for the Historical Arthur

Most of the earliest Arthurian folklore is short and sparse, and unlike Culhwch and Olwen, almost all of these other tales draw on the tragic mode, especially on the motif of “the war that killed all but seven men.” Elegies for the fallen heroes such as Geraint son of Erbin and The Clawing Cat predominated throughout the ninth and tenth centuries of the Common Era (Bollard 15-18).[123] The Triads of the Isle of Britain likewise lament a lost golden age brought down by a petty quarrel between Guinevere and her sister, focusing almost entirely on “Unbridled Ravagings,” the “Unfortunate Counsels,” the “Faithless Wives,” and “Futile Battles.” The oldest versions of the Triads come from the thirteenth century, but the information they contain is “demonstrably older” (Bollard 21).[124] The Spoils of Annwyn continuously repeats a refrain about how only seven men returned from the tragic assault on an island tower in Annwyn. The first known author to have set the tragic mode for the Arthurian era was Gildas, a monk who wrote a rhetorical treatise in 547, On the Downfall and Conquest of Britain, blaming it primarily on a certain “proud tyrant,” probably the figure later known as Vortigern, who allowed the German Saxons to enter Britain to help in his fight against local enemies (Wilhelm 3). How Culhwch Won Olwen alone keeps the story rooted in a time when Arthur was at his most powerful and jovial. But even this children’s tale is a “comedy with shadows,” as Richard M. Loomis describes in an introduction to the story, as there are still allusions to Arthur’s fall, such as a reference to Arthur’s last battle at Camlan (“Culhwch” 30). This folktale is also one of the few early stories to give a location for King Arthur’s hall, placing it in Cornwall, with the action taking place in the geography of South Wales, where the story was apparently compiled. As argued by Susan Pearce, the “history” behind Arthur appears to have come from North Britain while Arthurian “tradition” appears to have started in Cornwall (Pearce 146, 150). The “Thirteen Treasures of the Island of Britain” listed in the Traids have likewise proven to have associations with the “Old North of the British Heroic Age” (Roberts 86).

The quest for the Holy Grail and Arthur’s tragic final battle have generally been traced in the romances and by Malory as happening in conjunction with one another, but both appear to originate from a common myth of a great hero sailing to an island to retrieve a woman, a magic dish or cup, and other riches, only to have both sides lose the battle. The Spoils of Annwyn, which is dated between 850 and 1150, frames the folktale as King Arthur sailing to the Otherword, Annwyn, to retrieve a magical cauldron that brought the dead back to life. In the story of Branwen from the Mabinogion, a giant named Bran the Blessed is also said to have gone, along with Manawydan and several others, to Ireland after the “Celtic Holy Grail,” and like the folktales later said about Arthur, only seven men returned from the expedition. The Historia Britonum and a book of Irish mythology called the Book of Invasions, both originating from the 800s, tells of the ancestors of the Irish people coming upon a glass tower in the middle of the ocean, inhabited by a people called the Milesians who do not speak to them. This story element parallels Arthur’s problem speaking to the watchman in Spoils of Annwyn (Loomis, R. 127). The parallel may be a reference to the problems inherent in speaking different languages, but Patrick Sims-Williams suggests that in both cases the problem in speaking is based on a common legend of undead being raised up from the magic cauldron (Sims-Williams 56). The Irish attack and only one ship survives the battle, paralleling the loss of forces by Bran and Arthur (Hopkins 277). In Irish folklore, Cú Roi and Cú Chulainn also go to Fir Fhálgae, the Isle of Man, to carry off a woman, magic cauldron, and other spoils. The story of Branwen also has correlations with another Irish folktale from the 700s, the Voyage of Bran, in which Bran Mac Feabhail is lured to a magic realm by music from a silver apple tree branch holding an otherworld woman, meets Mananán (Manawydan) along the way, and then comes to an island where people do not talk to him but only laugh.[125] After finally reaching the Island of Woman, he stays for a year but time passes much quicker than it seems and only after realizing that he can never go back to Britain without dying of old age, he writes the Irish alphabet and departs for the sea forever (Ó hÓgáin 50).

The Historia Brittonum, also from the 800s, refers to the hunting of a giant boar, called Twrch Trwyth Cafal, by Arthur the warrior, and that Arthur’s giant dog, “Horse,” made a footprint so large into a particular stone it caused the hill to be called “Carn Cabal” or “Stoneheap of the Horse.” The word “carn” feminized means “stoneheap” but masculinized it means “hoof,” so that a secondary interpretation has been linked to a story about a stone that returns to its original location after a day, possibly a reference to the confusion of having a moorland tract 14 miles away called “Rhos y Gaffallt” (Doob 153; Roberts 90-91). That this legend is old is proven by a reference to Arthur’s dog in Culhwch and Olwen (Gantz 146). The tragic ending in which Arthur kills his son Mordred is both corroborated and contradicted by a reference to Arthur killing his son Amr, probably a reference to Arthur’s son Amhar, who is otherwise benign in the surviving stories that mention him. The stories behind the stoneheap and Amr’s grave both originate from “folkloric explanations of topographical features” which prove that by the 800s “Arthur had become a popular hero inasmuch that folklore motifs were being attached to his name and that he was a figure of sufficient fame to attract local legends into his orbit” (Roberts 92).

The Mabinogion has been unquestionably influenced by the French language, but How Culhwch Won Olwen appears among the “earliest stratum of Celtic material” (Gantz 24). Gantz establishes six points of reference in order to determine whether the themes of the Mabinogion better reflect Celtic or French culture: 1) location, 2) setting, 3) nomenclature, 4) costume, 5) manners, and 6) modes of combat. Regarding location, the early tales, including How Culhwch Won Olwen, remain confined to the British Isles, just as most Irish sagas confine themselves to Ireland. The elaborate Irish houses described in “Bricriu’s Feast” and “The Destruction of Dá Derga’a Hostel” are analogous to courts and dwellings set in Welsh tales. As to the nomenclature, the Mabinogion uses Celtic names, but has a “vague sense of geography” which suggests dependence on a French predecessor not fully remapped onto Wales. The descriptions of clothes stress texture rather than color, and the use of silk is suspicious since it appears to have been borrowed from the French word. Regarding manners, the Mabinogion is concerned more with hospitality than the courage and valor usually demonstrated in Irish sagas. And in combat, there is no mention of the chariots the Celts drove to war as in the tales of Cú Chulaind. In How Culhwch Won Olwen, Arthur and his men fight on foot, but in Dream of Rhonabwy, his men wear armor and fight with lances (Gantz 22-23). Gantz also points to other themes that are distinctly Celtic: “pleasure in feasting and entertainment, juxtaposed with a yearning for the otherworld, and with a sense of tension and ambivalence between the two.” (24). Even the late stories in the Mabinogion show a much greater resemblance to the Irish sagas than anything from Chrétien de Troyes. The strengths of the stories come from “the vibrant and imaginative nature of the Celtic tradition; in the deft and sensitive handling through which this tradition is rationalized and presented; and in the degree to which characteristic (courage, generosity, hospitality) and uncharacteristic (patience, moderation, a sense of fair play) Celtic virtues inform the action” (28). The Mabinogion, then, appears to be a hybrid of authentic Celtic folklore and French editing, mostly along the “romantic” mode of censoring some of the sexuality from stories.

Although there have been many theories as to who the historical Arthur is, the strongest case is that brought by David E. Caroll in his book Arturius: A Quest for Camleot. Caroll identifies Arthur with Artur mac Áedán, prince of Dál Riata, the first Scottish kingdom and one of the first Christian kingdoms in England. Artur’s father, Áedán mac Gabráin, was crowned king of the Scots in 574 and in 590 he sent his sons Artur and Eochaid Find to the Isle of Man where both were killed. St. Columba is said to have prophecized their deaths beforehand (Caroll 65-66). This Artur even had a sister named Morgein (93). This Artur also had a son named Bran, which could link him to the story of Branwen in the Mabinogion. Despite the strong connections, Mike Ashley lists Artur mac Aedan as only one of ten contending Arthur figures, but few of these other figures seem to have contributed much to the Arthur legend (Ashley 6). Caroll identifies King Lot with King Cennalat, who had allies in the Orkneys similar to how Lot ruled that area (Caroll 61).

There are also a lot of details in the early Arthurian lore that have parallels in many Irish folk tales. Arthur, for example, holds many traits in common with the Risih hero Manannán mac Lir, who makes an appearance in the Mabinogion story of Branwen. A twelfth-century text has Manannán visiting Cormc Airt and bringing members of the king’s family to a mystical otherworld with singing golden apples which has obvious parallels to Avalon (Ó hÓgáin 287). An eighth-century text tells of Manannán travelling to the Isle of Man to beget the hero-king Mongán, who like Mordred is conceived illegitimately (287, 301). Like Mordred’s mother, Mongán is a sorcerer. Mongán, although not killed by his father, is killed by a Briton named Artur ap Bicoir (301). Morgán’s stepfather was also Fiachu mac Baodáin, or Fiachu Find (“the fair-haired”), brother to Artúir mac Aedan (201-202). Manannán’s father, Lir, is also described in a Irish called The Children of Lir, in which Llyr’s children are turned into ageless swans for 900 years, a myth with some correlation to the legend of Arthur being taken away only to return centuries later (272).

Like Guinevere, Manannán’s wife also finds a foreign lover named Cú Chulainn. Like Lancelot, Cú Chulainn devotes most of his energy to saving Manannán’s kingdom of Ulster from the forces of Medb, daughter of Eochoid Feidlich’s, who may be equivalent to Artur mac Aedan’s brother Eochoid Find (and Fiachu Find?). Like Lancelot, Cú Chulainn also takes on a battle-frenzy and ends up killing his son similar to the way Lancelot ends up killing Sir Gareth. The Wooig of Eimhear, a story in which Cú Chulainn must go on several quests to marry Eimhear, also has many similarities with How Culhwch Won Olwen (Ó hÓgáin 134-135). Cú Chulainnn’s grandfather, Cian, father of Lugh, is able to change himself into a pig and is killed while in that form, which may explain the Culhwch’s name “pig-run.” Cian is also one of three brothers, including Cú and Cethen, and in some early stories Cian’s wife is said to have been impregnated by all three brothers, similar to how Lleu (Lugh) is born of a woman with three courtiers in Math Son of Mathonwy, and how the three brothers, Lot, Urien, and Ambrosius are also linked to Morgan and Morgana. Another Irish myth, the tragedy of Deirdre, also has the king’s intended carried off by three brothers, who are hunters with hounds, which likewise connects to the name Cú. Although Eimhear normally puts up with Cú Chulainn’s affairs with women, she makes an exception to his love affair with Manannán’s wife, Fand. Emer expels Fand just as Guinevere expels Elayne in the later romances. Cúchulainn and Emer then drink potions of forgetfulness similar to the one in the story of Tristan and Isolde. These Irish folktales provide corroboration of many of the later story elements that have been delegated to the invention of later authors and are certainly parallel traditions regarding an ancient failed alliance between the Scots and the Irish in the face of oncoming Anglo-Saxons.

Dating The Arthurian Traditions

How Culhwch Won Olwen is believed to be the oldest surviving Arthurian tale. The story survives along with several others in two Welsh manuscripts from the 1300s, along with a few fragments in an early manuscript dating from around 1225 (Gantz 21). The White Book of Rhydderch, dated to around 1325, contains the older version of the story, but only in a fragmentary state. A complete version of the tale can be found in the Red Book of Hergest, which was compiled some 75 years later, and it is unknown if the red book is a copy of white one or not (29). Although the proper name for the work is “The Mabinogi and Other Early Welsh Tales,” it is usually referred to as the Mabinogion for short (Gantz 31-33).[126] Jeffrey Gantz presumes that the stories approximated their present form some time between 1000 and 1250 and “what they were like before that is simply beyond conjecture” (21). Most scholars believe that How Culhwch Won Olwen is the oldest Arthurian story and the oldest text in the Mabinogion. Richard M. Loomis contends that the linguistic evidence coupled by textual references support the theory that the majority of the intact story must have been written around the late 1000s (“Culhwch” 25).[127] John Matthews goes much further, boldly arguing that How Culhwch Won Olwen and Dream of Rhonabwy can be dated “no later than the ninth century, and . . . almost certainly circulating in oral tradition long before that -- possibly soon after the end of the actual Arthurian era” (King 33). However, the author of Culhwch makes use of a far briefer catalogue of Arthur’s men found in the poem Black Book of Carmarthen, which is tentatively dated to the 900s (Roberts 78). The story predates Geoffrey and is only a century older than Nennius but has no relation to either (Ashley 188). A conservative estimate for the date for the written form of Culhwch and Olwen is between 950 and 1250.

In 1066 the Normans conquered England, and some time between 1136 and 1138 a clergyman named Geoffrey of Monmouth from southern Wales drew up the Historia Regum Brittaniae, claiming to have translated it from an old book in the “British tongue.” Both Caesar and the Saxons are portrayed as being invited into the nation only to turn on their hosts, expunging the embarrassment of being invaded. By making the Saxons the “bad” conquerors, Geoffrey defended Romanized Britain by portraying the Normans as the restorers of a classical Welsh heritage (Hodges 64). The portion on Arthur, none of which comes from the Mabinogion, greatly popularized the figure’s role as a king (Gantz 25). As Glyn Burgess says, “Arthur’s rule is recounted in a predominantly epic mode, with lavish descriptions of the pomp and splendour surrounding state events. But what truly makes it stand out is the king’s aura of predestined glory” (Burgess 95). In 1190, William of Newburgh said that most of the history was made up “partly by himself and partly by others, either from an inordinate love of lying, or for the sake of pleasing the Britons” (Jones 69). Robert Fletcher offers the possibility that the Welsh book Geoffrey claims as a source is really just a joke. “This would mean that his whole attitude, at times, was far from serious, and that he was willing that readers of penetration should understand that his so-called history was really a romance” (Fletcher 56).

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s epic history became one of the most popular medieval texts to be copied, so that even today there are still 215 medieval copies of the manuscript, many of which have additions and other textual variants.[128] Although Geoffrey is largely believed to have created the Arthur of medieval romance single-handedly, Fletcher argues that for the French romances like those of Chrétien to have come out within 30 years, there must have been independent romance cycles alongside Geoffrey’s.[129]

Richard M. Loomis writes that “[w]hile ordered as history, Geoffrey’s work dramatizes folklore and legend” (Loomis, R. 60). Geoffrey had taken many “[m]ythical traits and bits of folklore” and Normanized them, centering his narrative of Arthur around a court of distinguished heroes, taking on “characteristics of knight-erranty which appear in French romances” (Fletcher 107). However, despite the aura of French romance, scholars typically place Geoffrey in the literary tradition of pseudographic chroniclers using Christian historiography, although it is his famous work that typically marks the beginning of Arthurian romance.[130] As Fletcher says, “Geoffrey has brought an undeniably romantic element into his narrative, though in general he is, in form and style, rather a chronicler than a romancer . . . . Geoffrey was the first to introduce the romantic atmosphere into the chronicles, and the first to connect it with Arthur in a work which was widespread and had lasting popularity” (114).

Thus, Geoffrey of Monmouth became the epicenter of two different genres: the romance and the pseudo-history. The romances concerned themselves with love and court intrigue, while the pseudo-histories were more annalistic, basing the narrative on chronology and conquest. Chrétien de Troyes made “obvious structural and narrative differences” to the Arthur legend, making the stories episodic and focus on the adventures of one Arthurian hero per story in contrast to the pseudo-histories that covered all of Celtic Britain’s history using Arthur as one among many dynastic heroes (Le Saux 93). For the English, the pseudo-histories were important for their dynastic implications and for providing “a unifying account of national origins and a focus for patriotic spirit,” which, “naturally meant little to the French” (Hodder 71). In 1301, Edward I quoted Geoffrey’s Historia in letter to Pope Boniface VIII to justify his right to invade Scotland (Blake 17). However, despite its popularity among the Welsh and the Normans, Geoffrey’s work opened up a new age of Arthurian literature not focused on the epic nationalism that his own pseudo-history encapsulated, but on the court intrigues of the French romances.

In 1095, Pope Urban called on the First Crusade, the only Christian military campaign in the hundreds of years of Crusader history to successful enter the Levant and conquer Jerusalem, which it did in 1099 (Howarth 40). This hugely historic event, largely accomplished by Frankish armies, would become so ingrained in the minds of Christian Europe that even centuries after the loss of all the Holy Land, popularity for the Crusades still remained very high until the Enlightenment. Visions of St. George were said to have helped the Crusaders take Antioch (40). This development would provide an important background for the gradual shift in the literary development of the Arthurian traditions. While the pseudo-historical tradition had focused on Arthur as a dynastic king, Lancelot began to be used in French romance as the archetypal Christian warrior, who, unlike Arthur, ventures out from the his home court to fight against evil for the Holy Grail.

Then, in 1154, King Henry II rose up to become the first “king of England,” as opposed to “king of the English,” and had come into continuous conflict with the Catholic Church over restricting ecclesiastical privileges and curb the power of the Church courts. The aforementioned Anglo-Norman poet Wace dedicated a French version of Geoffrey’s work, which he called Roman de Brut, to Henry’s ascension and it very quickly became the prima facie version of the Arthur story in French, surviving in 32 copies today (Le Saux 96). Wace’s Brut was also the first to add the Round Table and the topic of fin amor, both of which would become mainstays of Arthurian romance. It was also the first to change Arthur and his warriors into medieval knights following the code of chivalry (Blake 13-14).[131] Like Geoffrey, Wace would contribute much to the French romances while his writings themselves are “generally regarded as a deliberately epic form” (Le Saux 101-103). Wace’s use of the historical mode was vitally important to the providential sense of nationhood Henry wished to impart.

In 1166, Henry II allied himself with a Norman invasion of Ireland that ended the High Kingship of Ireland, stretching back to the 400s, with legendary figures going back even further. Henry took direct lordship over Ireland in the 1170s, but he was also facing rebellions from the Scots and his own sons, and a conflict with the Catholic Church after some Crusader knights murdered the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, following one of Henry’s many heated arguments with his old friend over ecclesiastical court privileges. In 1184, there was a devastating fire in Glastonbury that brought about a financial crisis in the area, shortly before a dig turned up the remains of King Arthur. The find garnered Glastonbury a huge amount of tourist attraction that made the locals very sympathetic to he public interest. It also opened up a massive door to late and unreliable legends connecting Joseph of Arimathea to Arthur and Avalon to Glastonbury (Blake 13-15). According to Gerald of Wales, it was Henry who suggested the dig, which would not be surprising since “in the 1180s Henry had good reason to remind the Welsh that Arthur was dead and buried (and in English territory at that)” (Carley 48). The discovery of Arthur’s tomb in 1191 would allow Henry to “silence Celtic expectation of his return” (King 73). Following his conflict with the archbishop, Henry may also have wanted to provide competition for Canterbury as the definitive origin of English Christianity (Carley 48). Later pseudo-histories like Arthur (c.1350-1400) and the Alliterative Morte Arthure (c. 1400), placed the action at Glastonbury and ended with Arthur being killed and buried in a tomb, using a strategy that “allowed for Arthur’s historicity, even as it removes the hope for his Messianic return” (King 73).

The earliest known Arthurian romances were written by Chrétien de Troyes, who between the years 1160 and 1190 penned four Arthurian romances, Erec et Enide, Cligés, Yvain, and Lancelot.[132] At least two of the poems were dedicated to Marie de Champagne, the daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Wace’s patron. These stories included the first surviving mention of Camelot, Lancelot, Percival, and the quest for the Holy Grail (Blake 13). Chrétien was also the first to create the romance structure of a story beginning and ending in Arthur’s court and the first to identify ‘romans’ as a genre (Batt, “Romance” 63, 66). Catherine Batt and Rosalind Field write that the “quasi-spiritual narrative context for Arthur appears to lie behind the continental trend for extended Arthurian material in prose, which by the late twelfth century claims ascendancy over verse as the medium of authoritative truth” (66). While Wace presented the reign of Arthur as “a locus of idealized British history” for the prevailing Anglo-Norman dynasty, Chrétien instead attempted to fill the void of the dark age of the Celtic world “as a heightened version of contemporary courtly society,” with fantastic stories of magic and quests so that “the quintessential romance hero becomes a knight of Arthur’s court” (Batt 61). However, unlike many later romances, Chrétien did not portray “idyllic versions of an Arthurian past” but “a society the constituent elements of which lie in uneasy relation to one another, and to the worlds of the readers” (66). Rather than a youthful warrior, Arthur was now portrayed as a “benevolent middle-aged monarch” who presided over the court and provided the knights opportunities to prove themselves through quests, but was still rendered inactive: “distracted, dejected, or simply asleep” (Lacy, Handbook 68).

Just as Chrétien’s literary career was ending in 1190, Layamon of Worcestershire translated Wace’s Roman de Brut into English while also adding in his own material, moving the theme of the story away from the French romance of courtly love to a distinctly English epic with stronger emphasis on heroic warfare. Instead of being king of the Britons, Layamon makes Arthur king of the English race. Layamon is believed to have written his Brut between the death of Henry II in 1189 and the early 1200s. The very next year after Layamon’s Brut was written, Arthur’s grave was suddenly “discovered” by the Glastonbury monks. The name Glastonbury was then linked by a false etymology to the “glass tower” on the Isle of Man. Around the same time Robert de Boron wrote the first Arthurian romance that included a back-story for the grail quest, one that explained how the Holy Grail was brought to Glastonbury by Joseph of Arimathea shortly after the death of Jesus. This supposed member of the Sanhedrin had already been a useful literary invention that had allowed Jesus’ passion narrative to be changed from Jesus’ burial by enemies, as portrayed in the Cross Gospel and the Toldoth Yeshu, to a burial by friends, and now the same figure was being used as a literary invention to connect Christianity to the Celtic grail lore. De Boron appears to have written the story some time between the Glastonbury discovery in 1191 and when Robert’s benefactor, the Lord of Montfaucon, went on the Fourth Crusade in 1202 (Lacy, Encyclopedia 457). It appears that de Boron quoted Chrétien with the sentence, “and so the rich Fisher King departed – of whom many words have since been spoken,” although its possible that they both used a common source (De Boron 3).

In the mid-1220s, the Cistercian monks of northern France compiled a five-volume Arthurian story following the French romance tradition. The main protagonist of the massive story, however, was not Arthur but Lancelot, revered for his love of Guinevere yet condemned to fail his spiritual quest for the Holy Grail on account of their adultery. The Lancelot-Grail Cycle, or Vulgate Cycle, was the “longest and most coherent of all Arthurian romances” (Matthews, King 93).[133] Despite its length, the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, along with Tristan, became the “preferred form of romance composition” (Walters 461). The author of the Cycle claims to be the early-13th century Welsh writer of Latin, Walter Map, but Map was already dead by the book’s composition in 1215; besides that, the writing style garnered from the only other book attributed to Map is composed mainly of rumors and anecdotes about current events and history, not the kind of pattern taken by the author of a huge, sprawling work of romance.[134] The Lancelot-Grail Cycle became a “medieval bestseller” based on the number of surviving manuscripts (Kennedy 274). Karren Hodder, David Burnley, Lesley Johnson, and Carole Weinberg write that while the pseudo-chronicle tradition provided nationalistic significance for English readers, these influences for writing in the historical “naturally meant little to the French.” It was only the “shadowy, temporally and geographically vague” world of the Arthurian era created by Chrétien and the romantic writers, with the “locus for chivalric adventures and a crucible for the proving of courtly values” that instead found relevance to the continental establishment (Hodder 71).

The first two volumes, L’Estoire del Saint Graal and Merlin, provide backgrounds for the Holy Grail and for Arthur and his court. The main story, Le Lancelot proper, chronicles the adventures of Lancelot and his love for Queen Guinevere and sets up the conception and birth of Galahad, who is destined to discover the Grail in La Queste del Saint Graal. The story then ends with the death of Arthur and the disappearance of the Grail in La Mort le roi Artu. The Cycle also presents the concept of evil in the witch Morgan le Fay, and develops of the theme of Arthur’s downfall being a product of his incest with his sister and the infidelity of Lancelot (Vinaver, Rise 130-131). Although the story begins and ends with the Grail, the contradictions within the story belie the fact that its current structure had not been planned from the beginning. Elspeth Kennedy argues that the original version did not have a grail story, indicated by the fact that there are two versions of the story following Lancelot becoming a knight of Camelot. The earlier, pre-Cycle version of the story alludes to Perceval sitting on the Perilous Seat and accomplishing the grail quest, while the Cycle version prepares the way for the quest to be accomplished by Lancelot’s son Galahad (Kennedy 274-275).[135] A Post-Vulgate Cycle was written not long afterwards combining Lancelot-Grail with an early version of the prose Tristan (Bogdanow 342).

For over 200 years, the Lancelot-Grail Cycle and the Post-Vulgate Cycle remained the most advanced and definitive retellings of Arthur. Then in 1469 a 70-year-old English knight named Sir Thomas Malory finished his translation and redaction of French and English romances into one “hoole book” of eight tales only two years before his death (Hardyment xv-xvi; Malory, Works 726). The widespread fame of Le Morte D’Arthur has made it the most popular version of the Arthurian story in the modern period (Blake 18). He was born in 1416 and was knighted in 1441, represented Warwickshire in the parliament of 1445-6, but in 1450, according to later accusations, began a career of crime, including attempted murder, rape, extortion, theft of livestock, and the robbing of an abbey. By 1452 he was in prison and the authorities made sure his day in court never took place, but he seems to have been freed when the Yorkists seized power in the 1460s (Field, “Le Morte” 226). He was also married and had at least two sons (Hardyment 39, 43). According to public record, Malory was a career criminal starting when he was 44, having been charged with ambushing the Duke of Buckingham in the woods, raiding an abbey shortly after breaking out of prison, raping a married woman, extorting money, stealing livestock, sheltering horse thieves, and causing 500 pounds sterling of damage to a deer park (Hardyment xi-xvi). Malory spent much of his time in jail, as noted in some of his chapter appendixes. Because these allegations run so counter to the themes of Le Morte D’Arthur’s narrative, the life of Thomas Malory has been steeped in controversy, with some scholars arguing that Malory’s life did not live up to his own chivalric ideals, or that most of the charges were trumped up, or that the author must have been one of the other Thomas Malorys alive at the time. However, research by Peter Field has proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel was the author of Le Morte D’Arthur (Field, Life 33). Field and Christina Hardyment argue that most of the charges were probably politically motivated, given Malory’s reformist views and activity in the War of the Roses.[136] In 1461, the king Malory owed his chivalric alliance to, King Henry VI, was driven from his throne from a Yorkist usurper, Edward IV (Hardyment 19). Among Malory’s many exploits, he fought with his Knight Hospitaller uncle, Robert Malory, to protect the Hospitaller headquarters from Turks in Rhodes (18-19). He was unusually throrough in his research, having read at least 20 French romances, and wrote that the reason he told these stories was to impart the ideals of knightly chivalry to his readers (20).

Whereas Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote an epic history out of the more folkloric elements of Arthurian legend, Malory was the first to combine the chronicle and the romance traditions together into a far more advanced epic than that of Geoffrey’s. While scholars have long established Malory’s debt to his French sources, Malory also used a number of English romances, including the Alliterative Morte Arthure (c. 1390s) and the Stanzaic Morte Arthur (c. 1400s), in order to fashion “his own idiosyncratic history of King Arthur” (Hardyment 20; Ashley 327). In Malory, Arthur “is caught between the chronicle tradition with its claims to historical veracity and a more fabulous romance tradition inherited from the French. He is at once both historical precursor and legendary romance hero” (Finke 173).[137] Le Morte D’Arthur incorporated both the nationalism of Geoffrey’s epic Arthur and the morality of the Cistercian monks’ romance, while at the same time bringing the courtly dialogues and extensive cast of the romances in line with the massive battles and nation-building themes of the pseudo-histories. Malory’s epic became the most definitive account of Arthur, so much so that little to no Arthurian literature appeared to compliment it as had happened with the ever-appended plot lines of the French romances. Although the French Arthurian romances were adapted in Spain, Italy, and Germany, all of it became “dead and forgotten,” while Malory’s work alone “defied all changes in taste, style, and morals” (Vinaver 126-127).

The historicity of Arthur became more of a controversial subject in the sixteenth century as Tudor circles continued using the king as a pretext for sovereignty rights. In 1531, the Duke of Norfolk had approached the ambassador of France with proof of Arthur’s historicity by quoting his tombstone but was given the reply that many other nations had made great conquests as well but had since fallen. When an Italian historian named Polydore Vergil dismissed Arthur as a fairy tale in 1534, antiquarians such as John Leland and Humphrey Llwyd rose to defend the king’s historical record. In 1580, the astrologer and occultist John Dee presented Queen Elizabeth with a book legitimizing the English conquest of America by claiming that Arthur had conquered America in his own time (Blake 20-21). Dee also defended the historical Brutus and even claimed to have the “Welsh book” that Geoffrey continuously referenced (Escobedo 59-60).

Although John Dee continued the tradition of the third tradition of Arthur, his contemporary became the architect of the fourth and final tradition of Arthur: a figure who leads British inspiration through quests of virtue in a world even more fantastic and metaphysical than the French romances. In 1590, Spenser published the first three books in the huge, unfinished poem, The Faerie Queen.[138] In a letter to Walter Ralegh during the poem’s construction, Spenser said that he labored to portray Arthur as what he was before he was a king, a brave knight perfected in the twelve moral virtues (Artese 130-131). James Carley explains that by Spenser’s time “Arthur no longer represented a viable historical exemplum. Although Joseph of Arimathea would resurface in the context of the justification of the Church of England, Arthur retreated into the land of faerie, only to re-emerge quite transformed in the next generation as Prince Arthur, the ostensible hero of Spenser’s great epic poem” (Carley 57). Spenser “recast” Arthur in a mythological scheme to celebrate Elizabeth, demonstrating how his “construction of a new mythological representation of Elizabeth involves the ‘overgoing’ of the known history of Arthur” so that Arthur could “be used as a surface on which to portray the perfection of the twelve private moral virtues” (Woodcock 53-54). By reinventing Arthur through poetic license, Spenser was able to provide an alternate reason for paying respect to tradition while at the same time placating followers of the pseduo-historical tradition like Dee by not imposing on their territory. By creating his own fiction, Spenser “explicitly states that he chose the ‘historye of king Arthure’ (and, by extension, the fairy queen) as a means of talking about other things, highlighting the presence of deeper ‘meaning’ to stimulate the reader’s interest” (55).

It was the occupation of poets and dramatists to promote the cult of Elizabeth and Spenser did this by introducing Elizabeth into his poem by the names Gloriana and Belphoebe (Weir 223). However, Gloriana is so abstract a character in the poem that she plays no part in the action, but rather provides the motivation for the action in the story. Spenser kept the ancestral relationship Arthur was said to have had to founder of the Roman Republic, Brutus, but condensed the genealogy for the sake of brevity, and set “Prince Arthur” on a quest to find Gloriana, “but his allegorical adventures in quest of Gloriana, embodiment of Tudor restoration of the glory of England, focus on her rather than him” (Barron 35). Most of the original Arthurian stories that have came out since then have either taken from or built on Malory’s combined romance/pseudo-historical tradition or, more recently, followed Spenser in reintroducing Arthur to a completely different literary context, such as Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court or Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon.

By placing the Arthurian works within their historical context, we see how localized politics and events, even a fire, has vastly affected the direction of the Arthurian tradition as it has come down to us. The historical Arthur, or the closest version possible, comes down to us in only the scantiest of ancient records from the 600s to 800s, making him a war hero in the north. The first traditions of Arthur as an adventurous king derive from the Welsh folklore from the 800s to 1000s, best expressed in How Culhwch Won Olwen. How Culhwch Won Olwen is typically dated between 950 and 1250, although regardless of its actual date, is most reflective of the more original Celtic tradition. After the Normans conquered England, Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote the Latin epic history Historia Regum Brittaniae in 1138, which is credited with opening up both the second tradition of Arthur, the French romantic tradition, and the third tradition of Arthur, the English pseudo-historical tradition. Later pseduo-histories like Arthur (c. 1350-1400) and the Alliterative Morte Arthure (c. 1400) moved the final battle south to Glastonbury with the sanction of Henry II. The second tradition of Arthur is that of the passive monarch in the French romances of the late 1100s and 1200s, beginning with Chrétien de Troyes, who wrote between 1160 and 1190, and following through to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle of the mid-1220s, and ending with the Post-Vulgate Cycle soon afterwards. It wasn’t until 1469 that the romances themselves became adapted into the English pseudo-historical tradition by virtue of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. This third tradition of Arthur is the Anglo-Norman pseudo-history, which although began with Geoffrey of Monmouth even before the French romances, did not reach its pinnacle of fame until Malory remade him in the image of a medieval emperor with Crusader knights from the late 1300s and 1400s. The fourth tradition of Arthur is the wandering “faerieland” warrior of Spenser’s epic poetry, starting with Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590-1596). As the next four sections will show, each of these four traditions complies with one of the four stages of mythological development.

[pic]Figure 3: A Diagram of the Pseudo-Historical and French Romance Traditions

Chart of Arthurian Texts and the Source Traditions Compared to Narrative Stages

Date Language Tradition Narrative Mode

Spoils of Annwyn 850-1150 Welsh Welsh folklore tragic folktale

Welsh Triads ?-1200 Welsh Welsh folklore chronicle

Culhwch ac Olwen 950-1250 Welsh Welsh folklore comic folktale

Geoffrey of Mon. 1138 Latin pseudo-history epic history

Wace’s Brut 1154 French pseudo-history epic history

Chrétien de Troyes 1160-1190 French Fr. romance idyllic romance

Robert de Boron 1191-1202 French Fr. romance idyllic romance

Layamon’s Brut 1189-1250 English pseudo-history epic history

Lancelot-Grail Cycle 1225 French Fr. romance thematic romance

Post-Vulgate Cycle 1230s French Fr. romance thematic romance

Arthur 1350-1400 English pseudo-history elegiac romance

Alliterative Morte A. 1390s English pseudo-history elegiac romance

Stanzaic Morte Arthur 1400s English Fr. romance elegiac romance

Sir Thomas Malory 1469 English romance/pseud. epic history

Edmund Spenser 1590-1596 English epic poetry rhetorical treatise

How Culhwch Won Olwen as Comic Folktale

The story of Culhwch and Olwen is “perhaps the most important for the Arthurian student” because “[w]ithin its complex structure many of the characters who were later developed into the leading lights of the Arthurian legends can be found in possible their original form” (Dixon-Kennedy 79). The story begins with Culhwch being born in a pig pen, hence his name “pig-run” (Gantz 135). After giving birth, his mother grows sick and warns her husband not to remarry until thorns grow over her grave, and even though she has her confessor trim the grave after her death, the confessor stops after seven years. Culhwch’s father remarries and his new stepmother attempts to force her new stepson to marry her daughter. When Culhwch resists, the evil stepmother curses him to marry the daughter of a chief giant named Ysbaddaden. Culhwch’s father suggests that he go to his cousin Arthur to “have your hair trimmed, and ask for Olwen as your reward” (136). Loomis points out that the cutting of hair is “symbolic recognition of consanguinity; once the blood-tie is acknowledged, Culhwch can tap the generosity that flows in a kinsman’s veins. The narrator’s way of recounting the hair-cutting heightens its apparent absurdity as a strategy for going against a giant; farcical discontinuity hanging by a thread of sense is a frequent comic turn in the tale” (27).

Culhwch goes to the hall of Arthur and instead of calling out a list of followers to the porter, Culhwch issues forth a long list of Arthur’s companions for the sake of the reader. Arthur agrees to help and they go to the giant’s estate where they find Olwen, who tells Culhwch that her father will not let her marry him because it will mean his death, but if he promises to do anything the giant asks, she could be his wife. Culhwch and the others stay several days, and the giant continuously makes excuses before launching an unexpected attack with a spear, only to get it thrown back at him more successfully each time. Finally, the giant gives an amazingly long list of impossible feats for Culhwch to perform, most of them having to do with the preparations of the wedding feast. With the help and Arthur and his companions Culhwch is able to perform them all, even though only a few are described, and fewer still in great detail. The longest quest is the hunt for Twrch Trwyth, a cursed boar-like creature with poisonous bristles. After the quests are completed, the company returns to the giant’s court and Caw of Scotland shaves the giant’s beard “flesh and skin right to the bone and both ears completely” (Gantz 175). The ending is ripe with nonsensical humor as Culhwch asks the giant if he has been shaved, and the giant actually replies in the affirmative and admits that his daughter now belonged to Culhwch and that it was time to kill him. Goreu son of Custenhin cuts off the giant’s head, the party seizes his fortress and his lands, and Culhwch marries Olwen so that “as long as he lived she was his only wife” (176). The story follows the typical comic ending of a hero and heroine reunited and married.

Like all the stories in the Mabinogion, the story of How Culhwch Won Olwen has all the themes and motifs of a folktale. Culhwch contains the traditional comic ending of the young man overcoming a giant or parental figure (in this case both) and marrying his bride. The theme of the quest to marry the princess is one typical of the folktales; some typical dragon slayers include Perseus, Yamata no Orochi, and Tristan, but localized versions of the myth are found in various folktales throughout the world. Richard Loomis points out that the story fits the shaping of the international folktale motif, “Six go through the whole world” (“Culhwch” 25). Other attributes of folklore that Loomis identifies are “punning inventions, nonsense, a sprinkling of Irish heroes, and possible allusions to eleventh-century contemporaries of the storyteller” (27). Brynley Roberts contends that the long list of tasks given to Cuhlwch “appear to have been established folk-tales” (76). These include quests to hunt fierce boars, seize people or their possessions against their will, win prized feeding vessels or magical weapons, and one to shave off a giant’s beard. Roberts suggests that the author “tried to utilize the existing stories, giving them the yunifying motivation provided by his basic tale-type” (76). The list provided is different than the fulfillment stories that get played out, but the author tries to add context to the “complex amalgam of stories” by having Arthur repeatedly ask which quest on the list they should tackle next. Although the quest to marry the princess provides the story with a coherent structure, “some of its elements are not fully integrated” (78). Many of the names listed “show occasional indications of triadic groupings and contain a few annotations but in the lists of the Thirteen Treasures of the Island of Britain, described above, the names have been given their narrative contexts as is done in some of the Triads” (88-89). Culhwch also includes a character named Rhita Gawr who is another folk tale that Geoffrey of Monmouth used in which the Rhita fights Arthur in order to use it for a cloak he’s making (Blake 124). The social context of the story, like all those in the Mabinogion, is remarkably different, proving that the Welsh folktales did establish “[a]n Arthurian world, not yet chivalrous perhaps, but wonderous, dangerous and defended by the leader” (Roberts 78).

How Culhwch Won Olwen has many elements that are similar to the J source from the Pentateuch and the Gospel of Mark. The J source, the Gospel of Mark, and How Culhwch Won Olwen each intersperse their folktale with short chronicles they have collected. The Yahwist and the author of Culhwch also frame their narratives in the form of an expanded chronicle, where many different stories of varying length have all been compiled into one text. Just as in J and Mark, the plot in Culhwch is completely centered on the action, with the protagonist moving very quickly and using very brief dialogue so that much gets done with very few words. The elusive figures listed in Culhwch can be compared to the J’s “sprinkling” of pre-deluge genealogies which are based on earlier Sumerian kinglists and other sources. Culhwch, like J, appears to allude to a massive corpus of references to mythical figures and events that are now lost to the modern reader.[139] Characters such as Lamech, Methuselah, and Melchizedek from the J source in Genesis also seem to be references to local heroes who have either been long forgotten or well-known heroes with now-unfamiliar names (4.17-5.32). Some of these short references in the early chapters of Genesis make little sense to modern readers, such as Lamech singing to his wives about how he killed someone, or the One named “Division” because in his time the world was divided (Gen. 4.19, 10.25). Strange references appear in Culwhch as well, such as the Twrch Trwyth monster and the comb, razor, and shears growing from its body. One possibility is that it is a vague reference to the concept of civilizing barbarians by giving them a shave and a haircut, but any interpretation of the meaning behind the Twrch Trwyth monster is far from conclusive. Similar lost references have been exercised from Mark, such as the sisters of Jesus or the sons of Simon of Cyrene (6.3, 15.21).

Many of the names given to Arthur’s men are also comical: Echel Mighty-thigh; Enough son of Too-Much; Oh, Cry and Shriek; and their three grandchildren Plague, Want, and Need; and their three daughters, Bad, Worse, and Worst of All (Gantz 35-38). The Arthurian adventure is also filled with ridiculous events like Arthur breaking into song about Kei, similar to how the Yahwist portrayed his characters spontaneously belt out the Blessing of Jacob and the Song of Miriam (Gen. 49; Ex. 15; Gantz 171, 168). The episode in which Culhwch lists Arthur’s men to the porter may also be a comic reversal of the standard roles between protagonist and porter as exemplified in a porter story from the Black Book of Carmarthen (Roberts 78). All of these comic elements run in direct opposition to the general flow of the earliest Arthurian lore, which as described earlier centered almost compulsively on Arthur’s final battle and the fall of his kingdom. Roberts postulates that the darker elements among the folktale references, such as Bedwyr’s list of deeds which go unwritten, references to Kei’s desertion, Arthur avenging Kei’s death, and the defeat at Camlann, had already been long established to the reader and so did not need to be explained in great detail (79, 84). Roberts identifies the core mode of emplotment as that of Arthur’s tragic fall, describing how “Camlan became the symbol of irreversible, calamitous defeat, so that when the last native prince of Wales was killed in 1282 the poet Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch saw the event in terms of Arthur’s downfall – Llawer llef druan fal ban fu Gamlan (‘Many a wretched cry as at Camlan’).” By the late 1200s and early 1300s, Arthur’s legend had become so imposing that he became “an irresistible attraction for the figures and episodes of unrelated story-cycles” (85). Richard Loomis also points out the noticeable contrast between Culhwch’s comic nature and its references to a much darker tragedy, describing it as a tale that “edges its comedy with shadows” (“Culhwch” 58, 30). John Matthews describes how the earliest tales of Arthur before the romances were “[b]y turns, brutal, dark and amusing . . . They presented not a high king with a rich and noble court, a vast round table and a code of honour, but an altogether more savage picture of a warrior who lead a ragtag band of heroes into battle against the Saxons and endured a timeless struggle against forces of the other world” (Book 8).

The distinction between the Arthur of the Welsh chronicles and the Arthur of Culhwch and Olwen can be likened to the distinction between the Jesus of the earliest epistles and the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark. While the early chronicles of Jesus and Arthur give very sparse details, the first folktales are inundated with names and references that are often difficult to cross-reference or interpret. Whereas in the earlier texts there are only vague memories of an long-ago hero, the introduction of the figure into fiction allows the protagonist to be fully fleshed out by the myth-maker. The gradual transition between Arthur the warrior from the chronicles and Arthur the warrior-king from Culhwch can be likened to the change from prophet as portrayed in the General Epistles to the sage-prophet from the early gospel literature.[140] The Arthur of the earliest folklore was generous but also vengeful and his wars were said to have devastated the land for seven years. This early Arthur, unlike the Arthur of the later folklore and especially the romances, was not meant to be a role model for the virtuous, but a legend marking the tragedy of the Welsh defeat and the “radical” desire for the immanent return of a powerful warlord who would “mechanically” bring cultural autonomy back in much the same way the author of the “Little Apocalypse” in the Gospel of Mark looked forward to an golden age of Jewish retribution and autonomy.

The Lancelot-Grail Cycle as Thematic Romance

Although the folktale and the epic are in some ways diametrically opposed, both tend to be written as chronicles or histories when the author is writing the non-fictional thematic mode. Romances like the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, by contrast, tend to become increasingly “morally educational” as they shift towards the thematic mode. The situations the characters in the story come across, though not at all realistic, are neither idyllic nor elegaic but act as a symbolic narrative for how the reader should act in his or her own time and place. Like the Elohist and the author of Matthew, the author’s main concern is how the reader’s interpretation of the story will affect him or her in the present. The Cistercian monks are mindful to place King Arthur within the context of a dualistic worldview of God versus Satan, with no Celtic polytheism present even in the story’s villians. While Chrétien still worked within some framework of the original Celtic grail quest lore, the Lancelot-Grail Cycle’s Queste del Saint Graal “rewrites chivalric heroism in the language and morality of Scripture as Galahad wins the Grail” (Batt, “Romance” 67). Moving away further away from grandiose stories of strength and valor, the romances instead focused on “celestial chivalry” (Lacy, Reader ix) While the original Prose Lancelot that the Lancelot-Grail Cycle was based on focused on contrasting the romantic love between Lancelot and Guinevere and the comradeship between Lancelot and Galehot, the Vulgate Cycle explores the conflicting desires of love and friendship, such as when Galehaut helps Lancelot become a knight:

Now, riding away with his companion, Galehaut was both happy and unhappy: happy that he had his companion with him and unhappy that he had become part of King Arthur’s household, for he was sure tat he would thereby lose him forever. And he had given him his heart with a love greater than loyal companionship alone could make a man feel for someone outside his family. (Rosenberg 142)

Galehot arranges a meeting between Lancelot and Guinevere even though he knows their love will eventually separate them. Contradictions in what courtly love means can be found between the chapters, leading many scholars to speculate that they are based on conflicting sources, although others argue the narrative was originally compiled to act as a kind of dialogue on possible interpretations of love.

The Lancelot-Grail Cycle continues the French tradition of changing Arthur from an adventurous king to that of a passive monarch, eclipsed by the more active and romantic figure of Lancelot. Because the French were unconcerned with the lineage of Arthur, the authors could instead make him the epicenter of the many convoluted plot lines while at the same time portray him as a typical medieval king who stays home rather than a feuding warrior-king who leads his men into battle. These differences followed in the form of the story they took: Geoffrey’s and Wace’s epic histories based on the theme of empire-building, written in the interest of nationalism as epic history is typically crafted, but the French romances were based on stories of personal triumphs like that of saving damsels or the various “test” devices associated with the grail quest. These sets of entertaining morality tales make up the heart of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, and unlike the epic histories of Geoffrey and Wace, they drew on Celtic themes of the cauldron/grail from the earlier Arthurian folklore, albeit in heavily Christianized terms.

The Lancelot-Grail is particularly thematic romance because it uses the fantasy world to explore the relationships between the characters in a creative way while leaving the reader confident in the author’s intentions to provide a moral framework from which to tackle the arising conflicts.[141] Catherine Batt and Rosalind Field point out this narrative trends that separates the French from the English tradition:

The possibility of correspondence between secular and sacred, the courtly and religious world, that Chrétien begins to explore in Perceval, is especially fruitful ground for later French writers, whose enthusiasm for a quasi-spiritual narrative context for Arthur appears to lie behind the continental trend for extended Arthurian material in prose, which by the late twelfth century claims ascendancy over verse as the medium of authoritative truth . . . These continental prose works contextualize Arthurian time within various historical models, fabulous, Scriptural or apocalyptic, whereas English adapters will set Arthur in localized historical contexts, just as their treatments of Joseph of Arimathea reflect the saint’s established cult at Glastonbury Abbey. (Batt, “Romance” 66)

Chrétien and most likely many others began the romantic tradition by simply taking the structure of older Celtic folktales and fashioning them out in as idyllic romances. The Lancelot-Grail, however, has gone far past this, building off of Robert de Boron’s tradition linking the Holy Grail to Joseph of Arimathea, and expanding it’s thematic boundaries by adapting more religious symbolism, including more symbolic tests involving perilous seats and destined swords (Lacy, Reader 310, 336). Unlike idyllic romances, in the Lancelot-Grail neither Lancelot nor Arthur is perfect, but the reader is as likely to learn from a character’s downfall as from his achievements. What begins as a sympathetic romantic love triangle between Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere becomes moralized, thematically blaming the fall of Camelot on Lancelot’s sinful nature, as well as the incest of Arthur.

Arthur and Lancelot are not providing a model to admire as they would in an idyllic romance; instead, the lessons of the story are told thematically by how they are rated in the grail quest. The idyllic nature of the romantic hero is instead transferred to Galahad, who is used in the mold of Percival to achieve the grail quest so as to contrast the failings of Galahad’s father, Lancelot. This contrast is even further effected by Lancelot’s name originally being Galahad, hence portraying his son as the man Lancelot should have been. Percival and Bors are allowed secondary positions of witnessing Galahad’s triumph and ascension. Like most idyllic romances, however, the Lancelot-Grail Cycle still attempts to remake some of its more famous heroes from earlier folklore, like Gawain and Gaheriet, into icons of virtue. Although Gawain does demand revenge for the death of his brother in this cycle, Gawain was even more hotheaded in earlier folklore. The Grail knight in the Mabinogion, Peredur, was a lusty traveler who slept with women from nearly every new place he went, while Percival and Galahad are noted particularly for their asceticism. In one example, Gawain comes upon a king who has stripped a woman, leaving her naked in a cold stream, and so the knight challenges the king to a fight, defeats him, and rescues the woman. The folkloric Merlin who is said to have been killed in the woods while still in his madness is instead explained as a false rumor that was spread saying, “Merlin was dead and that peasants had killed him in a wood where they said they had found him behaving like a wild man” (Lacy, Reader 61). Instead, Merlin merely leaves Uther Pendragon and goes to Blaise in Northumberland for two years to explain his “disappearance.”

The prime motivation of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle is to promote “celestial chivalry” over that of “worldly chivalry.” While the Arthurian folklore of the Welsh king could sometimes be violent and bawdy, the French romances instead try to instill a new sense of religious responsibility as conceived by the Cistercian monks who produced the Cycle.[142] The quest for a magic cauldron in Welsh folklore was associated with a mysterious island and a tragic battle in which almost everyone died, but the Holy Grail of the French romances instead became a symbol of moral purity, one that Lancelot had lacked due to his affair with Guenivere, so that the achievement of the Grail was instead bestowed upon Lancelot’s son, Galahad. This plot line, which was grafted into the story after its original construction, thematically sets the story to separate earthly and heavenly chivalry using a “formist” mode of argument. Eugéne Vinaver writes:

The object of the Queste was to show how after achieving his greatest triumphs in the world of Arthurian chivalry Lancelot failed, and how his son Galahad succeeded, in the quest of the Grail; and the object of Mort Artu . . . . by condemning ‘earthly’ chivalry in the name of a religious ideal hitherto ignored by Lancelot; but it was also part and parcel of the entire Cycle, the purpose of which was to present the issue in contrasting terms, and so to integrate seemingly contradictory themes in a structure of the greatest possible diversity. (Vinaver 130)

By creating a fantasy world in the past, romance authors were free to consider the paradoxes of ideals in practice and to test ideals by considering examples in which characters meet with deep moral questions and the various consequences of each; at the same time the author provided a firm moral standard in the narration, even while the protagonists make the mistakes that will bring about the tragic fate associated with the earliest Arthurian folklore.

As typical of the romance genre, sexual licentiousness in the folkloric figures is absolved and apologized for by the narrator, and while the torrid love affairs behind the dynastic conflicts are still necessary to drive the plot, the polygamous sensibilities of the Celtic tradition are covered up as much as possible. For example, when Arthur sires Sir Mordred with King Lot’s wife, he does it while Lot is at church and without her knowledge:

“And Arthur, who had noticed that the king had gone away, got up and went to the lady’s bed and lay down with her. And after he had got in bed with her, he turned his back to her, for he did not dare do anything else. And it so happened that the lady awoke and, still half asleep, turned toward him, for she truly thought that he was her husband, and she put her arms around him. When Arthur saw that she had embraced him, he understood that she had not noticed who he was, so he put his arms around her and lay with her fully, and the lady gave him much pleasure, and she did it willingly, for she thought he was her husband. And this is how Mordred was conceived.” (Lacy, Reader 75)

This kind of “explaining away” the adultery is very similar to the way the Elohist changed the details of Abraham’s wife sleeping with the Pharaoh or the way the Virgin Birth masks the implications of his single parentage as portrayed in the Gospel of Mark. Lancelot likewise ends up sleeping with Elaine without knowing it. So even while Arthur and Lancelot are accepted as flawed heroes, they were nevertheless instilled with some amount of modesty befitting the purity of a Christian king or knight.

Conversations in the romances are not particularly realistic but artificial and overly polite. Even Merlin and Viviane speak as if they are Catholic monks:

After Merlin had long been deep in thought, he went forward and greeted her nevertheless. And when she saw him, she answered, like the well-bred girl she was, “May the Lord who knows all thoughts bestow on you the will and the heart to treat me well, and may He bestow on me as well the worth and honor that are my due . . . . And who are you, fair, dear friend?” . . . . “Lady,” he said, “I am a wandering apprentice, seeking my master; he used to teach me my trade, which is mostly praiseworthy. (Lacy, Reader 79)

Stories like “Lancelot and the Cart” are established as tests of character similar to the romance of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, not realistic descriptions of typical encounters either in Arthur’s age or the author’s, but a means to extol on a point made by the author. Lancelot is forced to endure humiliation by riding in a cart when his horse his killed in pursuit of Guinevere’s kidnappers, emphasizing moral virtues over earthly pride.

Although the earliest references to Arthur have him dying in a final battle on the Isle of Man, the romantic tradition of Arthur has him brought away by his sister Morgan so as to return and rule once again. This exemplifies Arthur as the figure of the past and ambiguously, the future, in the archaic phrase: “the Once and Future King,” equivalent to the resurrection of Christ being symbolic of the desire for Jewish sovereignty. In the Stanzaic Morte Arthur the reader does not see Arthur die, and this tradition is continued somewhat in the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. The last of Arthur’s knights, Girflet, throws Excalibur back to the Lady of the Lake and then returns to see the king taken by Morgan, although he later comes upon Arthur’s grave (Lacy, Reader 76). The Post-Vulgate Cycle, however, amends this innovation by attaching an ending in which Arthur’s grave is empty except for a helmet, providing the more “authentic” romantic ending (x-xiii). The theme of the “unsubstantiated resurrection” takes on a form not unlike that of the “empty tomb” in the Gospel of Mark, which Matthew and Luke further romanticizes by substantiating it at the gospel’s conclusion. Not long before the Lancelot-Grail author’s own time, the wish for Arthur’s return in more Celtic-centered communities caused Henry II to instigate the search for Arthur’s tomb “in order to silence Celtic expectation of his return.” As King describes:

Arthur’s historical identity resides in his death, and his romance identity resides in his disappearance and the promise of his return. In the first, he submits to the process of time, and in the second he is able to defeat the process . . . a reconciliation of Arthur’s historicity and his coming again seems impossible. Rather than offering a way back through time, here the thing which is ‘still there’—Arthur’s corrupted body—records the victory of time itself. Examining the treatment of Arthur’s ending in some key Middle English texts will help to build a set of concerns which is central not only to these texts but also relevant to Malory’s and Spenser’s reception of the Arthurian tradition. (King 73)

While other romance heroes conceived as symbols of English identity, like Guy and Bevis, also died at the end of their stories, it was only after saving their kingdoms to provide a happy ending for everyone else. But as for Arthur, “time apparently runs out, so the possibility of his eventual return is needed to relocate him as a romance hero, as one who providentially or magically able to defeat his enemies” (75). This reflects the natural desire for the romantic conception of the “return of the Golden Age.” The grail quest itself is a device used to provide a “formist” argument separating worldly and heavenly values. Lancelot’s failure in the grail quest is rectified by his abandonment of worldly desires through his taking of the priestly orders (Lacy, Reader 399). This naturally reflected the values of the Cistercian monks, who followed the “anarchist” ideological mode by portraying the desire to “abolish ‘society’ and create a ‘community’ of inidviduals held together by a shared sense of their common ‘humanity’” (White 24).

Le Morte D’Arthur as Epic History

Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur is probably the most influential of all the Arthurian stories ever told. Malory’s book brought together a huge medieval corpus of stories that would have otherwise been lost and “transmitted it to future centuries in what turned out to be the most acceptable of many potentially competing forms” (Field, “Le Morte” 225). Malory also made his story more coherent by introducing minor characters from other sources, a practice which allows a slow growth of factions within Arthur’s knights. Followers of Lancelot, Gareth, and Tristram have to choose between Lancelot or Arthur “much as Malory’s own contemporaries had to choose in the England of the War of the Roses” (241). The Morte Darthur is not a life of Arthur; it is not a narrative based on his birth and death but on the story of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, as Malory ascribes, just as Luke-Acts attempts to be a story not of just Jesus but of Jesus and the Tweleve Disciples. Malory’s world is more naturalistic, with time being measured by the church calendar, and unlike in the romances, “[t]here are no overmighty subjects left for the Round Table knights to put down, and mysterious strangers no longer appear in Arthur’s court to challenge them to quests” (239). Conflicts instead come from within the Round Table as well as without. English romances also played a large part in the way Malory interpreted his French sources, including the unravelling of the Vulgate Cycle’s interlaced structure, cutting out the magic and psychological introspection and instead replacing it with the localization of events and history (King 109).

The combination of multiple texts also bring about doublets that mirror the confusion of names found in Acts. For example, the Sword in the Stone is broken but is then replaced by Lady of the Lake, a clear example of working in two different legends about the same sword (Malory, Works 7, 35). Two knights, Harleuse and Peryne, are killed in the First Tale and then come back in the Fifth. This doubling is similar to the way James appears as leader of the Jerusalem Church in Acts, but is killed only to be replaced by another James without a distinguishing epithet or an explanation (Field, “Le Morte” 242; Acts 12.2, 15.13). Throughout Le Morte D’Arthur Malory often breaks narration to provide his own opinions or commentary on the characters, describing them as if they were real historical figures from the past. Of Queen Guenevere, Malory writes an aside “for whom I make here a lytyll mencion, that whyle she lyved she was a trew lover, and therefor she had a good ende” (Malory, Works 649).[143] The advancement of Arthur as a historical English king and ancestor of the powerful Tudor dynasty provided a literal basis from which many chose to read Malory’s tale. Hodges writes, “[h]ow England fits into world history and how the individual emphasis of chivalry fits with the needs of a nation are questions that become more urgent the more nearly Arthur becomes an epic hero . . . . Genres close to epic thus had to deal with foreign intrusions, and how to define an England (or a Britain) that was repeatedly invaded was vexing for writers” (Hodges 63).

Caxton’s prologue to Malroy’s Le Morte D’Arthur identifies King Arthur as the best of three best Christian men of all time, alongside Charlemagne and Charles the Great (Malory, Works xiii). The prologue can be compared to the one in the Gospel of Luke, which is also the first gospel to provide a context into which the story is being told.[144] By identifying Malory’s text as history, Caxton was in a sense canonizing the work, and indeed Malory’s version of the Arthurian saga became the standard. Finke says that by publishing Malory’s epic as a history, “Caxton chose to make available the fifteenth-century reading public his preference for chivalric materials and his decidedly popularizing bent, aspects of Caxton’s work that have been noted by almost all his biographers. These contradictory impulses -- toward a private coterie audience of patrons and toward a larger and more popular public readership -- suggest the ways in which Caxton’s project looks both backward to a feudal economy of patronage relationships and forward to symbolic economies dependent upon representations of an English nation imagined as a corporate and covering entity” (Finke 161). Patronage is one of the more enduring hallmarks of the epic, as works by professional authors were often endorsed by a higher official, and like most of the Arthurian epics from the pseudo-historic tradition, Le Morte D’Arthur was used as a cultural anchor for English nationalism. To those who mocked the historicity of Arthur, Caxton quotes the gospel, saying, “no man is accept for a prophete in his owne countrye” (Malory, Works xiv; Luke 4.14).

A large portion of Malory’s story was a redaction of the massive Lancelot-Grail story, aimed at being at once more economical and comprehensive than his French predecessor. Malory’s writing also took on the more “objective” quality of the pseudo-historical tradition. As P.J.C. Field writes, “There is no hint of the future in Malory’s prose. If Dunbar is pure literature, Malory is very impure literature indeed. Of all the great English authors, he shows the least interest in words for their own sake. This is not what we expect in a prose romance . . . . the romances nearer in time to Malory, including his own French sources and Lord Berners’ Arthur of Little Britain, display a style discernibly more literary than Malory’s” (Field, Romance 36-37). Malory uses very common, “uninformative” words “which gives the marvels in his story their seeming objectivity and verisimilitude” (67). The lack of physical descriptions that Malory imparts, even to the point that we do not know the color of most of the characters’ hair, is “characteristic of chronicles concerned more with the matter than the manner of their story” (84).

Malory disentangled the interlaced French narratives by separating them into self-contained units of condensed narrative, and deleting the psychological analyses, the supernatural events, and long theological commentary of hermits in the Queste Del Saint Graal.[145] Malory also moved away from the fantastic nature of the romances and attempts to provide a more realistic realm for King Arthur. Malory “took a skeptical view of the supernatural” and “his conception of the role and purpose of chivalry was practical rather than idealistic” (Vinaver, Rise 123). Magic is often converted or downplayed and Merlin’s prophecies are used more for foreshadowing than for acts of supernatural power. Malory dispenses with the romantic distinction between worldly chivalry and celestial chivalry, leavuing the terms “worship” and “chivalry” ambiguous enough so that “we can agree that Malory’s style was morally emphatic, without having to say precisely what his morality was” (Field, Romance 86). Consequently, Malory also divorces Lancelot’s failure in the Grail quest from the downfall of Arthur’s court. When the queen asks Lancelot about the Grail quest upon his return, Lancelot replies, “I was but late in the quest of the Sankgreall; and I thanke God of Hys grete mercy, and never of my deservynge, that I saw in that my quest as much as ever saw ony synfull man lyvynge, and so was hit tolde me” (Malory, Works 611)[146] Even after the fall of Camelot, when Guinevere enters the convent out of guilt for her part in the tragic ending, it is not Lancelot but Guinevere who is overcome by the guilt of their sin. Only when Guinevere pledges herself to a convent does Lancelot pledges asceticism to be true to her, and when Guinevere tells him that she thinks he will return to the world and take a wife as she bids him, he replies that he had forsaken vanities and arrived in second place in the quest for the Holy Grail, saying:

“For I take recorde of God, in you I have had myn erthly joye, and yf I had founden you now so dysposed, I had caste me to have had you into myn owne royalme. But sythen I fynde you thus desposed, I ensure you faythfully, I wyl ever take me to penaunce and praye whyle my lyf lasteth, yf that I may fynde ony heremyte, I praye you kysse me, and never no more.” (Malory, Works 721)[147]

The Cistercian diligence towards the creation of the Vulgate Cycle provides a fuller, more detailed story, while Malory’s redaction offered a more manageable epic style of writing coupled with the personal intrigues of the romance tradition in a more biographical format and the more “serious” atmosphere of the pseudo-historical tradition. The result was not just a new story but a new Arthur, an English Arthur that regained his stature as a hero by Malory setting all his adventures in the beginning and attaching all the stories about his knights afterwards, in effect co-opting the personal glory of the romance for the greater glory of the nation, Malory’s Camelot. Felicity Riddy writes:

“French writers were not, by and large, interested in the issues of nationhood that the legend could be made to bear. In the late fifteenth century, however, Malory’s Le Morte Darthur goes back to the regnal structure; for the first time in English outside a chronicle he writes the whole reign, expanding the traditional biography with material drawn from the French and English romances. Malory’s Arthur is a king of England, not of Britain – or as Caxton puts it, ‘of thys noble royalme thenne callyd Bretaygne’ (xv.6) – and the narrative is written from an English point of view.”(Riddy 64)

Riddy also points out an important difference in Malory’s ending. While in Malory and the Alliterative Morte Arthure it is Arthur’s war with Rome that is interrupted by Mordred’s betrayal just as Arthur was about to take his rightful throne as king of the world, Malory moves the war with Rome all the way to the beginning of his story, allowing Arthur to live throughout most of the story as a crowned emperor (Riddy 65). Hodges likewise argues that the editing move changed the relation between England and Rome in Arthurian myth. While Geoffrey of Monmouth marks war with Rome as the end of British Glory, Malory “marks Britain as a post-Roman nation built on a foundation that includes it successful contact with a fallen Rome” (Hodges 65).

Just as Luke changed the gospel story from one of Jewish-Christian dispossession to one of Gentile-Christian dispensation, Malory changes Arthur’s war with Rome from tragic defeat, as portrayed by Geoffrey, to comic triumph. As Riddy says, “The death of Arthur, no longer held in place by the grand narrative or necessitated by the larger sweep of history, is freed to create new meanings. And Arthur, who had originally been part of narrative of dispossession, is now part of a narrative of empire; in an extraordinary political reversal, which happens only in the mid-fifteenth century, Arthur is now the conqueror of Rome” (64). Not only that, but Sir Belyne and Sir Bryne are British rulers of Rome, and Constantine has a British mother, making Uther the only recent British king not to rule Rome (Hodges 65). In Malory’s version of the Grail quest, where one would expect values of piety and purity to predominate, the quest is instead recast as a kind of heavenly tournament. When Galahad, Bors, and Percival appear at the Grail, they encounter similar trios from Gaul, Denmark, and Ireland; although the equal count of knights from those countries provides some kind of parity between Arthur’s kingdom and other nations, it is Galahad, representing England, who wins the competition (Hodges 115; Malory, Works 602).[148] In the Winchester version of Le Morte D’Arthur the Romans are portrayed as bad lords; unlike Arthur, their leaders do not pay their followers (Hodges 239). Caesar ransomed Scotland’s elders but Arthur rules justly. After Arthur defeats Emperor Lucius, Arthur finds three surviving senators and orders that they take the dead bodies to Rome, saying, “And I command you to say when ye shall come to Rome, to the Potestate and all the Council and Senate, that I send to them these dead bodies for the tribute that they have demanded” (Malory 159). As Hodges says, “[t]he justifications also approach Benedict Anderson’s definition of a nation as a community imagined to be both limited and sovereign” (Hodges 67).

Malory writes in a distinctly “organicist” fashion, integrating the many Arthurian stories into eight main tales that are “reductive in their operations” (White 15). Rather than each knight acting as the protagonist within their own romance, they instead act as “components of synthetic processes” acting within a “microcosmic-macrocosmic relationship.” Like many “organicist” historians, Malory authored a notably nationalistic history of Arthur and his knights. Intstead of ending the story with the death of Arthur and Lancelot, Malory adds a more resigned ending by having the surviving knights martyr themselves on a Crusade, proving that Malory had the “conservative” tendency to focus on the present rather than the past or the future. The miraculous nature of the martyrdom does not present the reader with a happy ending, but does show Malory working towards a kind of reconciliation between the official tragic ending of the Arthurian saga and the more resolved ending of the comedy.

The Faerie Queene as Rhetorical Treatise

In his introduction to the Faerie Queene, Spenser says that he followed Homer, Virgil, and the Italian poets Ariosto and Tasso because they each had “ensampled a good governour and a virtuous man.” The hero of the first book is a Christian “everyman” named Redcrosse, who searches for his lady Una, a symbol for truth, and hopes to kill the fierce dragon that has captured her parents, who symbolically represent Adam and Eve. Many of the encounters that Redcrosse has are meant to work as a political allegory attacking the “false truths” of the Roman Catholic Church and defending the “true” Christianity of Anglicanism. The main protagonist, Redcrosse, is a Christian “everyman” (Hamilton 259) who arms himself with the metaphysical “armor of God” from the Epistle to the Ephesians (6.13). Spenser opens up a “quasi-Arthurian world to epitomize the Elizabethan world of chivalry in his Faerie Queen (1590), but despite Arthur and Merlin being the main framing characters, and the mood being brilliantly evocative of the romances of old, it is clearly one step removed and not really an Arthurian work” (Ashley 496). Although every single encounter or action within the narrative does not have a symbolic equivalent, the main purpose behind the story is not to learn morality through the character’s actions, but to read into the rhetorical treatise that lies underneath the literal meaning. Spenser claims that the history of Arthur is his subject, and Arthur appears in every book, but he is central to none. As David Lee Miller points out, “Gloriana occupies a place in Spenser’s narrative analogous to that of the Grail in the Morte D’Arthur” (Miller, D. 145).

This sporadic, non-chronological perspective can be compared to that of Moses’ non-chronological flashbacks in Deuteronomy and the multiple trips to Jerusalem temple in the Gospel of John. The chronology of Spenser’s Faerie Queen was to be determined by a rhetorical architecture rather than one determined by plot. By placing the setting in “faerieland,” Spenser sought to expand the creative boundaries of the Arthur myth to make a formal rhetorical treatise in order to present Arthur as the Christian role model. Douglas Waters writes, “In the theological allegory of The Legende of Holinesse Spenser uses Prince Arthur as a symbol of the moral virtue of magnanimity or greatness of soul, a ‘christianized’ concept of Aristotle’s megalopsychia” (Waters 53). Much like the Logos of the Gospel of John, Arthur has completely transcended his human form and become a name. Spenser also references St. George as a patron of the Christian warrior:

“And Patrone: thou Saint George shalt called bee,

Saint George of mery England, the signe of victoree.”

(Spenser, Works 139; FQ 1.10.61)

Continuing anachronistic concepts of St. George to perpetuate the concept of the Christian warrior.[149] Una represents the true Protestant religion, brought to England by Joseph of Aramathea, but under the influence of St. Augustine of Cantebury, England betrays its ancient religion for Una’s double, Duessa/Fidessa. Redcrosse’s double is Archimago, who disguises himself as St. George (Hamilton 260). Duessa is also the Whore of Babylon, who is further paganized by her “Persian mitre.” (Spenser, Works 22; FQ 1.2.13). The dragons that Arthur and Redcrosse slay are ironic parodies of the “pagan” dragon-slaying motif from St. George (Hamilton 260). The dragon-slaying motif had been adapted from Sumerian mythology by the Babylonians to mythologize the defeat of the mother-goddess Nammu/Tiamat of the Sumerians. Yahweh was likewise pictured slaying the serpent Leviathan even as the Davidic kings Hezekiah and Josiah went into the “high places” of the country side to destroy and burn down the Asherah poles of Yahweh’s consort, Hezekiah even going so far as destroying Moses’ bronze serpent Nehushtan. Dragon-slaying motifs were likewise used by second-temple Jews in the story of Bel and the Dragon, in which the fake dragon bursts open from barley-cakes in parody of Tiamat bursting open from Marduk’s winds, to symbolize the defeat of the Babylonian religion by Judaism. Catholic Crusaders later adapted the myth to St. George to mythologize the defeat of “pagans” (lit. “country-dwellers”) in the Holy Land, i.e. Muslims, Turks, and Jews. Now the dragon-slaying myth was adapted by Protestants to mythologize the defeat of “pagans” in the Catholic Church.

In Book I, Spenser tells a story of a robber who steals from the church and gives to a monastery full of deaf, dumb, and mute monks, and is killed by a lion that is otherwise friendly to Una. The lion is then itself by killed an evil man named Sansloy. The lion represents natural law, which is fully capable of dealing with the robbers who steal from the church and give to monasteries that Spenser believed were ignorant of their purported crimes due to their seclusion. Although the lion as natural law had an affection for Christian truth it had no power over Sansloy, whose name means “without the law of God,” because he operated outside the lion’s domain. Redcrosse is tricked into believing Duesse, or “false truth,” is the real truth, and is captured by a giant, but Una is able to get Arthur’s promise to free him. The two arrive at the giant’s castle and Duessa appears riding a seven-headed beast, marking a common Protestant allusion to the Catholic Church being the Whore of Babylon from the Book of Revelation. Arthur chops off one of the heads of the beast, but is knocked down and nearly killed but for his mirrored shield, which blinds the beast and the giant. Arthur kills the giant and Una and Arthur rescue Redcrosse: once outside, they strip Duessa of her clothes so that everyone could see that she was really a witch. As Matthew Fike writes, “Actual grace, an external force personified by Arthur, helps liberate Redcrosse from spiritual pride and from the damnation to which is leads” (Fike 11). At the end of Book I, Redcrosse is injured by the dragon two times, but magically falls into a well or a woodland from which God’s grace allows him to heal. On the third attempt, Redcross enters the mouth of the dragon and slays it as a symbol of Christ entering the mouth of hell of being raised back to life on the third day (Works 145; FQ 11.12).

Arthur’s primary role in Spener’s poem is to quest for the Faerie Queene, paralleling RedCrosse’s quest for Una (Hamilton 262). By keeping Arthur a young prince, he is able to pair Arthur up with the Faerie Queen instead of Guinevere, providing a more ideal setting for Arthur the symbol. While Arthur is sleeping, he has a dream of the Faerie Queen, and when he wakes up, finds evidence that she had been there:

And slombring soft my hart did steale away,

Me seemed, by my side a royall Mayd

Her dainte limbes full softly down did lay:

So faire a creature yet saw never sunny day.

Most goodly glee and lovely blandishment

She to me made, and bad me love her deare,

For dearly sure her love was to me bent,

As when just time expired should appeare.

Was never hart so ravisht with delight,

Ne living man like words did ever heare,

As she to me delivered all that night;

And at her parting said, She Queene of Daeries hight.

When I awoke, and found her place devoyd,

And nought but pressed gras, where she had lyen,

I sorrowed all so much, as earst I joyd,

And washed all her place with watry eyen.

(Works 113; FQ 1.9.13-15)

Gloriana is elusive and transcendental, seemingly analogous the Holy Grail in the earlier Arthurian myths (Miller, D. 145). Although it is unknown if Spenser ever intended the Queen to make an appearance, the interpretation may be that she could not stay in Arthur’s world for long because it was the reader’s world in which the real Gloriana exised.

While Malory worked in the same vein as the author of Luke-Acts, unraveling and rewriting older stories to place the mythical hero into a historical context, Spenser worked in the same vein as the authors of John, taking the hero out of his normal historical context and placing him in “faerieland,” a realm of the mind in which ideas become personified in people. But just as Luke and the last redactor of John were writing for a Presbyter audience, Spenser worked towards the same aim of promoting the Tudor line. The long discourses from Deuteronomy and the Gospel of John likewise parallel the Faerie Queene’s long historical discourse given by Merlin in Canto iii of Book 3, which connects Arthur and the legendary founder of England, Brute, to Queen Elizabeth. Charlotte Artese compares John Dee’s historical approach to Spenser’s fictional approach, saying that “[a]lthough they disagree about whether narratives of the ancient conquest of America are history or fiction, Spenser and Dee share the same approach to generic instability: both find places for their works in chronological ‘gaps’ in the histories of Arthur and of America. By inserting their works in the absences in the historical, they reveal their dependency on the lack of distinction between historical and fictional narrative” (Artese 128). Just as Jesus is taken out of his historical context in order to argue points of future points of theology, Spenser’s Arthur is literally removed from his own historical context and enters a fantasy plane of the mind comparable to Plato’s forms. The philosophical arguments which fueled the engine of the epic history have at this point expanded and consumed the plot narrative in order for the author to speak more directly towards his audience. Textual events become meaningless in comparison to the theological argument making up the poem’s subtext. The chronological method of the epic history is changed so as to place the protagonist, and thus the reader, into a different context. As Jane Apteker has written, “[t]he Faerie Queene as a whole is less an epic or a romance than, to perverted chronology, a widely expanded metaphysical lyric” (Apteker 3).

While previous chroniclers of Arthur subordianated their creativity to changes they made in editing the stories, Spenser instead takes a more “free-form” method of creating a new kind of story built almost entirely out of allegory. As Michael Dixon says, “[t]heorists traditionally classified allegoria as a trope, a figure of elocutio functioning as a somewhat extended metaphora, but in Spenser’s practice it has evolved into a genre and hence into an element of inventio” (Dixon 5). Although these allegories do break down as the story advances, the excessive use of symbolism opens a new form of writing that intends to make non-fictional arguments through fictional events. In this way, the story takes on its own “contextualist” logic behind the narrative, almost as a kind of continuous code for a rhetorical argument. Similar to the way the “anti-Christ” is used in the Second Epistle of John to describe heretical concepts of Jesus who had not come “in human nature,” Spenser creates a “satire” out of Elizabeth’s antithesis as Errour, the symbolic falsehood of the endless train of propaganda that was written out against the crown, and as such, her imagery is allegorized as a printing press, including “[h]er vomit full of bookes as inke” and “cole black bloud,” refering to the Queen’s risk of degradation in the printer’s press (Quitslund 34; Spenser, Works 10-11; 1.1.20-24). Just as the Gospel of John takes follows the “liberal” ideology of fighting the conflict in the marketplace of ideas, Spenser works hard to create a work of art worthy to inspire his readers to faith in Elizabeth. In this way, the Faerie Queene “becomes a ‘narrative of courtship’ in purpose as well as content, its tales of questing knights from Gloriana’s court compose an artifact of suasive devices compose to court a meeting of minds between the poet and his estranged audience” (Dixon 17). Further evidence of his polemical mind is that “Spenser is the first canonical author of his time and nation to write both his own biography and his own literary commentary” (Cheney 20). The subtext behind the stories of the romance have now become the actual text, with the character of Arthur acting like a puppet on strings in a shadow play. This fourth legend of Arthur is the same commercialized Arthur of modern times, a source of “authority” that can be attached to products to be “sold” on the market of ideas.

Conclusion:

Through the systematic dating and deconstruction of twelve different texts across a spectrum of three different multicultural traditions, I have hoped to prove that there is a metahistorical narrative persists within the evolving structure that causes the hero to go through four stages of mythological development. Although each narrative was a product of its time and fashioned to adapt to specific audience, they all nevertheless grew and changed according to a single particular pattern. This pattern is formed by the common experiences that devotees have while they find themselves and their belief structure adapting to universal changes inherent in the system’s increasing popularity. New myths begin as oral traditions, and those that first take hold of new ideas typically meet with adversity from people maintaining older ideas, so that the people with the new ideas start to envision their community or world as “tragically” misguided and so take the “radical” position that most fundamental questions can be answered in “mechanical” mode of argument often accompanied by the idea of an immanent end or justification. After time, the new idea grows and then splits off into different “anarchist” sects, each of which attempt to justify the division using “formist” arguments in order to maintain the “romantic” concept that they can return to the “golden age” when the myth was first unified. After more time, the adherents of the various sects realize that there will be no immanent reformation and so attempt to augment the myth with a more serious history to legitimize the long-standing existence of the sect. Finally, the historical mode is abandoned to provide more direct arguments, from author to reader, so that the original myth can be appropriated to open a polemical debate on the more rhetorical and theological aspects of the sectarian divisions.

Many times the effect of a myth moving on to the next stage is caused by a competing group or sect writing in reaction to another text. Other times a myth will split off into two different directions. While the four-stage model is especially useful in that it can be boiled down to four stages, four modes, four sources, four gospels, and four legends, the situation is a little more complicated with the New Testament since there are actually multiple evolutionary paths starting from Mark, and with the Arthurian legends since its romance tradition is coexistent with the epic histories from its pseudo-historical tradition. However, when considered as a whole, we can be sure that these common details that both associates otherwise unrelated texts to each other and differentiates each texts from the same mythological tradition. Below is a short classification of the various groups and their allegiances in order to provide an overall conception of how group dynamics played a part of the evolution of the myths. By connecting the strands of influence between the different traditions, we can compare how various evolutionary patterns match with the primary four stage model of mythological development. In the case of the Pentateuch, there is only one tradition due to the lack of sources, but in the case of the gospels, there are five distinct paths of tradition: the Adoptionist tradition, the Jewish Messianic tradition, the Gentile docetic tradition, the Gnostic tradition, and the Johannine tradition. The Johannine tradition of the Presbyters, in essence, took over all three of these traditions at the end. In the case of the Arthur legends, there are two distinct traditions: the pseudo-historical tradition and the French romantic tradition. By understanding how and why mythological texts evolve the way they do, we can have a better understand the “mechanical” processes behind how ideas spread. In some sense, that is what the commercial industry makes its living. But when a form of art becomes so old that many of the details which provided its context to the real world are lost to the modern reader, it can be hard to even understand which is the original and which is the parody, or which is the original artform and which is the “commercial.” By mapping out the mythological development of three of the most popular mythological traditions, light can finally be shed on the mysteries of the common lost history which has so much effect in our world and yet are still waiting to be found despite thousands of years of digging.

Four Stages of Mythological Development:

Folklore (1) ( Romance (2) ( Epic History (3) ( Polemic (4)

Moses:

Background: Middle Eastern Mythology

GROUP A: Judean Yahweh Worshippers (Pro-David/Solomon/Zadok)

Psalms (Ps.): portrays Yahweh as dragon-slayer and storm god (1)

First Isaiah: Yahweh as dragon-slayer with virgin daughters (1)

Yahwist (J): Court History presents David’s 12 sons as Jacob’s 12 “tribes” (1)

JE Redactor (RJE): redacted J and E into JE, favoring J (2)

GROUP B: Shiloh Prophet-Priests (Pro-Moses/Joshua/Samuel; Anti-Solomon/Aaron)

Elohist (E): Yahweh equated with Elohim; portrays Aaron as Jeroboam (2)

Deuteronomy (Deut.-1): rhetorical treatise from Moses introducing DH (4)

Deuteronomistic History (DH-1): epic history ending in 2 Kings (3)

Revised Deuteronomy (Deut.-2): changed after Babylonian Exile (4)

Revised Deut. History (DH-2): reflects fall of Temple and Davidic line (3)

GROUP C: Aaronid Priesthood (Pro-Aaron/Phineas)

Aaronid Priest (P): legitimizes Aaronid line above other Levites (3)

Second/(Third?) Isaiah: portrays Cyrus the Great as saving Messiah (1)

Redactor (R): JE, P, and DH compiled into sources into Hebrew canon (Ezra?)

Ezra: chronicle on building of Second Temple; rejection of intermarriage (1)

Nehemiah (Neh.): chronicle on Jerusalem’s walls, Ezra reading the Torah (1)

1 Chron.: chronicle listing genealogies from Adam to David (1)

2 Chron.: Aaronid edition of 1 & 2 Kings from Solomon to Exile (3)

Shiloh Tradition:

J + E ( JE ( Dtr1 + DH1 ( Dtr2 + DH2

A1 + B2 ( A2 ( B4 + B3 ( B4 + B3

Aaronid Tradition:

J + E ( JE ( P ( JE + P + Dtr2 + DH2 + 1 Chron. + 2 Chron. (

JE + P + Dtr2 + DH2 + 1 Chron. + 2 Chron. + Ezra + Neh.

A1 + B2 ( A2 ( C3 ( A2 + C3 + B4 + B3 + C1 + C3 (

A2 + C3 + B4 + B3 + C1 + C3 + C1 + C1

Jesus:

Background: Cynic Wisdom Sayings

GROUP A: Jewish Cynics/Stoics (Pro-Diogenes/Seneca)

“Q1,” “L,”: Cynic wisdom sayings (1)

“Miracle Stories”: feeding of the multitude, walking on water, healing, etc. (1)

“Paul-1”: seven Stoic-themed epistles on the end times (1)

“Cross Gospel”: original source of the gospel passion narrative (1)

“Ur-Markus”: miracle stories written around “James” and “Cross Gospel” (1)

GROUP B: Judaic Apocalypticists (Pro-Twelve; Anti-Paul; Anti-Nero/Vespasian/Titus)

“Toledoth Source”: original story of Yeshu hung on a tree in 63 B.C. (1)

“Rev. of John of Giscala” (“Rev-1”): prophecy on siege of Jerusalem 70 A.D. (1)

“James,” “Q2”, (“Q3”?), “M”: apocalyptic prophecies & woes on unbelievers (1)

“Gospel of the Twelve”: Jesus sent only to “lost sheep of Israel” (2)

GROUP C: Hellenized Adoptionists (Pro-Seven; Pro-Philip; Anti-James/John)

“Bethsaida Mark”: ‘Seven Loaves’ and other parallel miracle stories added (1)

Gospel of Cerinthus: probably a redacted version of “Twelve” gospel (2)

“Rev-2”: Cerinthian edition adds 1000-year reign before 2nd resurrection (1)

“Signs”: Cerinthian gospel on 5 Synoptic and 2 Osiris-themed “Signs” (1)

GROUP D: Hellenized Docetics and Marcionites (Pro-Paul; Anti-Twelve)

Gospel of the Lord: docetic gospel denigrating the Twelve (2)

Paul-2: Col., 2 Thes., Lao. added; “Mark” given authority in Col. 4.10 (1)

“‘We’ Source”: chronicle of Luke (?) and Paul sailing the Mediterranean (1)

GROUP E: Egyptian Gnostics (Pro-Paul; Pro-Plato)

Thomas: (Semi-?) Gnostic sayings added to the earlier “James” layer (1)

“John-1”: Valentinian gospel adds Logos; drops Baptism and Eucharist (4)

Gospel of Truth: Valentinian rhetorical treatise on Logos (4)

Secret Mark: Marcosian gospel links secret baptism rite to martyrdom (1)

Gospel of Judas: satire criticizing churches of Twelve and praising Judas (4)

GROUP F: Antiochian Christians (Pro-Peter; Anti-Paul; Pro-Barnabas/Saul)

Matthew: portrays Peter as “cornerstone”; adds pro-tax apology (2)

“Saul-3”: 1 Peter added; massive insertion of Septuagint interpretations (1)

Epistle to the Hebrews: rhetorical treatise on Jesus as High Priest (4)

Mark: secret baptism rite removed; baptism/martyrdom references kept (1)

“Antioch Acts Source”: focuses on Peter and on “Barnabas and Saul” (3)

Gospel of Peter: adds pro-Peter harmonization with canonical gospels (2)

GROUP G: Ephesian Presbyters (Pro-John)

Luke-Acts: connects gospel story to Paul and Ephesus through the Twelve (3)

John-2: Presbyter redaction reinstating rites of Baptism and Eucharist (4)

Paul-4: 2 Peter and Pastorals added; female teachers prohibited in 1 Cor. (1)

Long Mark: resurrection summary citing Luke-Acts added as conclusion (1)

Rev-3: redacted into an epistle to Seven Churches of Ephesus (1)

GROUP H: Jewish Pharisees/Rabbis (Anti-Yeshu)

“Toledoth Yeshu”: anti-gospel defending execution of Yeshu as magician (4)

Jewish Life of Jesus: includes an appendix on 5th century saint Simeon Stylites

Jewish Life of Christ: mistakes Selene for Salome; dog statues edited to lions (4)

Cynic Tradition:

James + Wisdom Sayings + Miracle Stories + Cross ( Ur-Markus (

Beth. Mark ( Secret Mark ( Mark ( Long Mark

A1 + A1 + A1 + A1 ( A1 ( C1 ( E1 ( F1 ( G1

Levitical Tradition:

(Wisdom Sayings ( Q1 ( Q2) + M + Cross + Bethsaida Mark ( Twelve ( Matthew

(A1 ( A1 ( B1) + A1 + A1 + C1 ( B2 ( F2

Stoic Tradition:

(Wisdom Sayings ( Q1 ( Q2) + L + Cross + Ur-Markus + Paul-1 ( Lord + Paul-2 ( Antioch Source + Saul-3 (

(Lord ( Luke) + (‘We’ Source + Antioch Source ( Acts) + Paul-4

(A1 ( A1 ( B1) + A1 + A1 + A1 + A1 ( D2 + D1 ( F3 + F1 (

(D2 ( G3) + (D1 + F3 ( G3) + G1

Platonic Tradition:

(Miracle Stories + Cross + Rev-1 ( Signs + Rev-2) + (James ( Thomas) (

(John-1 ( John-2) + Rev-2 (

Matthew + Long Mark + Luke + John-2 + Acts + Paul-4 + Rev-3

(A1 + A1 + B1 ( C1 + C1) + (B1 ( C1) (

(E4 ( G4) + C1 (

F2 + G1 + G3 + G4 + G3 + G1 + G1

Rabbinic Tradition:

Miracle Stories (Toledoth Source ( Toledoth Yeshu-1 (

Toledoth Christ + Toledoth Yeshu-2

A1 ( B1 ( H4 ( H4 + H4

Arthur:

Background: Scottish/Irish Battle Chronicles

GROUP A: Welsh Folklorists (Pro-Arthur)

Welsh Legends, Triads, Spoils: early Celtic-themed folklore (1)

Mabinogion: Celtic-themed folktale collection centered on four “branches” (1)

GROUP B: Anglo-Norman Royalists (Pro-Arthur)

Geoffrey of Monmouth: epic history of Arthur among other British kings (3)

Wace, Layamon: chivalric versions of Geoffrey; Wace adds Round Table (3)

Arthur, Alliterative Morte: copies of Wace have Arthur die at Glastonbury (2)

Stanzaic Morte: English romance summarizing Vulgate’s final book (2)

Malory: unravels French romances into pseudo-historical tradition (3)

Spenser: places “Prince Arthur” in Fairieland to teach twelve virtues (4)

GROUP C: French Romantics (Pro-Lancelot/Percival/Galahad)

Chrétien: court stories on knights; first mention of Camelot and Grail quest (2)

Lancelot-Grail (Vulgate): huge, intertwining Lancelot story by monks (2)

Post-Vulgate: combines Vulgate with Tristan prose (2)

French Romantic Tradition:

Welsh ( Chrétien ( de Boron ( Vulgate ( Post-Vulgate + Stanzaic Morte

A1 ( C2 ( C2 ( C2 ( C2 + B2

Pseudo-Historical Tradition:

(Welsh ( Geoffrey ( Wace ( Allit. M) + Vulgate + Stan. M ( Malory ( Spenser

(A1 ( B3 ( B3 ( B2) + C2 + B2 ( B3 ( B4

Comparison of the Nine Traditions:

Shiloh Tradition: A1 + B2 ( A2 ( B4 + B3 ( B4 + B3

Aaronid Tradition: A1 + B2 ( A2 ( C3 ( A2 + C3 + B4 + B3 + C1 + C3 (

A2 + C3 + B4 + B3 + C1 + C3 + C1 + C1

Enochian Tradition: A1 + A1 + A1 + A1 ( A1 ( C1 ( E1 ( F1 ( G1

Messianic Tradition: (A1 ( A1 ( B1) + A1 + A1 + C1 ( B2 ( F2

Pauline Tradition: (A1 ( A1 ( B1) + A1 + A1 + A1 + A1 ( D2 + D1 ( F3 + F1 (

(D2 ( G3) + (D1 + F3 ( G3) + G1

Cerinthian Tradition: (A1 + A1 + B1 ( C1 + C1) + (B1 ( C1) (

(E4 ( G4) + C1 ( F2 + G1 + G3 + G4 + G3 + G1 + G1

Rabbinic Tradition: A1 ( B1 ( H4 ( H4 + H4

French Romantic: A1 ( C2 ( C2 ( C2 ( C2 + B2

Pseudo-Historical: (A1 ( B3 ( B3 ( B2) + C2 + B2 ( B3 ( B4

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abegg, Martin, Jr., Peter Flint, and Eugene Ulrich, eds. The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible: The

Oldest Known Bible Translated for the First Time in English. San Francisco:

Harper, 1999.

Ahearne-Kroll, Stephen. The Psalms of Lament in Mark’s Passion: Jesus’ Davidic

Suffering. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 2007.

Allison, Dale. Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999.

Apteker, Jane. Icons of Justice: Iconography and Thematic Imagery in Book V of

The Faerie Queene. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.

Arnold, E. Vernon. Roman Stoicism: Being Lectures on the History of the Stoic

Philosophy With Special Reference to Its Development Within the Roman

Empire. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1911.

Artese, Charlotte. “King Arthur in America: Making Space in History for The Faerie

Queen and John Dee’s Brytanici Imperii Limites.” Journal of Medieval and Early

Modern Studies 33 (2003): 125-141.

Ashley, Mike. The Mammoth Book of King Arthur. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005.

Aurelius, Marcus. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Trans. George Long. Mineola,

NY: Courier Dover, 1997.

Barron, W. R. J., Françoise Le Sauz, Lesley Johnson. “Dynastic Chronicles” In The

Arthur of the English: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval English Life and

Literature. Rev. ed. Ed. W. R. J. Barron. Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press, 2001. 11-46.

Barnstone, Willis, ed. The Other Bible. San Francisco: Harper, 2005.

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Trans. Richard Howard. Aspen 5/6 (1967).

1 May 2009 .

Batt, Catherine and Rosalind Field. “The Romance Tradition” The Arthur of the

English: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval English Life and Literature. Ed. W.

R. J. Barron. Rev. ed. Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press, 2001. 59-70.

Bauer, Bruno. Christ and the Caesars: How Christianity Originated from Graeco-Roman

Civilisation. Berlin, 1877. Trans., Ed. Frank E. Schacht. James Island:

Charleston House, 1999.

Bertens, Johannes Willem, Hans Bertens, and Joseph P. Natoli. Postmodernism: The

Key Figures. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2002.

Blake, Steve and Scott Lloyd. Pendragon: The Definitive Account of the Origins of

Arthur. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2002.

Blenkinsopp, Joseph. The Pentateuch: An Introduction to the First Five Books of the

Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1992.

Blomberg, Craig. The Historical Reliability of the Gospels. Downer’s Grove:

InterVarsity Press, 1987.

Bloom, Harold and David Rosenburg, trans. The Book of J. New York: Vintage, 1991.

Bloom, Harold. Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine. New York: Riverhead Books,

2005.

Boadt, Lawrence. Reading the Old Testament: An Introduction. New York: Paulist Press,

1984.

Bollard, John K. “Arthur in the Early Welsh Tradition” The Romance of Arthur: An

Anthology of Medieval Texts in Translation. Ed. James J. Wilhelm. New,

Expanded Edition. New York: Garland, 1994. 11-24.

Bogdanow, Fanni and Richard Trachsler. “Rewriting Prose Romance: The Post-Vulgate

Roman Du Graal and Related Texts” The Arthur of the French: The Arthurian

Legend in Medieval French and Occitan Literature. Ed. Burgess, Glyn S. and

Karen Pratt. Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press, 2006. 342-392.

Bonz, Marianne Palmer. The Past as Legacy. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000.

Bradley, Marion Zimmer. The Mists of Avalon. New York: Random House, 1982.

Branham, R. Bracht and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, eds. The Cynics: The Cynic

Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy. Berkley: University of California,

1996.

Bultmann, Rudolf. The Gospel of John: A Commentary. 1941. Louisville, KY:

Westminster John Knox Press, 1971.

---. History of the Syntopic Tradition. Trans. John Marsh. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson,

1994.

Burgess, Glyn S. “Arthur of the Chronicles” The Arthur of the French: The Arthurian

Legend in Medieval French and Occitan Literature. Cardiff, UK: University of

Wales Press, 2006. 93-111.

Campbell, Antony F. and Mark A. O’Brien. Sources of the Pentateuch: Texts,

Introductions, Annotations. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993.

Carley, James P. “Arthur in English History” The Arthur of the English: The Arthurian

Legend in Medieval English Life and Literature. Ed. W. R. J. Barron. Rev. ed.

Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press, 2001.

Caroll, David F. Arturius: A Quest for Camelot. Castleford: Ivory Printers, 1996. 1 May

2009. .

Cheney, Patrick. “Life.” A Critical Companion to Spenser Studies. Ed. Bart van Es.

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 18-41.

Chrysostom, Dio. “Diogenes, or On Servants” Discourses. Loeb Classical Library

London: W. Heinemann, 1932. 1 May 2009

.

Coote, Robert B. and David Robert Ord. The Bible’s First History. Philadelphia: Fortress

Press, 1989.

Cross, Frank Moore. Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of Religion

of Israel. Cambridge, UK: Harvard University Press, 1973.

---. From Epic to Canon: History and Literature in Ancient Israel. Baltimore: John

Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Crane, Frank, and Solomon J. Schepps, eds. The Lost Books of the Bible. New York:

Crown, 1979.

Crossan, John Dominic. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. San Francisco:

HarperCollins, 1994.

---. Who Killed Jesus?: Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel in the Gospel

Story of the Death of Jesus. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995.

Dabrowa, Edward. Legio X Fretensis. Eurasburg, Germany: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1993.

Damian-Grint, Peter. The New Historians of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance: Inventing

Vernacular Authority. Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, 1999.

Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Oxford

University Press, 2006.

De Boron, Robert. Merlin and The Grail: Joseph of Arimathea, Merlin, Percival. Trans.

Nigel Bryant. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2001.

Dégh, Linda. Folktales and Society: Story-telling in a Hungarian Peasant Community.

Trans. Emily M. Schossberger. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1989.

Dever, William G. What Did the Biblical Writers Know & When Did They Know It?

Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001.

Dixon, Michael F. N. The Polliticke Courtier: Spenser’s The Faerie Queene as a Rhetoric

of Justice. Quebec City, Canada: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1996.

Doherty, Earl. The Jesus Puzzle: Challenging the Existence of an Historical Jesus.

Ottawa, ON: Age of Reason Publications, 2005.

Doob, Penelope B. R. Nebuchadnezzar’s Children, Conventions of Madness in Middle

English Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974.

Ehrman, Bart D. Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never

Knew. Oxford, UK: Oxford University, 2003.

---. Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. San

Francisco: HarperCollins, 2005.

Ellegård, Alvar. Jesus: One Hundred Years Before Christ. New York: Overlook

Press, 1999.

Epictetus. Discourses. Ed. G. Long. Raleigh, NC: Hayes Barton Press, 2005.

Epiphanius of Salamis. Panarion. Trans. Frank Williams. Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill,

1987.

Escobedo, Andrew. Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee,

Spenser, Milton. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Euripides. Bacchae. Trans. David Franklin. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge, UK

University Press, 2000.

Eusebius of Caeserea. The Church History: A New Translation With Commentary. Trans.

Paul L. Maier. Grand Rapids: Kregal Publications, 1999.

Farmer, William Reuben. The Synoptic Problem. Macon, GA: Mercer University,

1976.

Field, P. J. C. The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory. Cambridge, UK: Brewer,

1993.

---. Romance and Chronicle: A Study of Malory’s Prose Style. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1971.

---. “Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur” The Arthur of the English: The

Arthurian Legend in Medieval English Life and Literature. Ed. W. R. J. Barron.

Rev. ed. Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press, 2001. 225-246.

Fike, Matthew A. “Prince Arthur and Christ’s Descent into Hell: The Faerie Queene,

I.viii and II.viii.” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and

Reviews 12 (1999): 6-14.

Finke, Laurie A. and Martin B. Schichtman. King Arthur and the Myth of History.

Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2004.

Finkelstein, Israel and Neil Asher Silberman. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New

Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origins of Its Sacred Texts. New York: The Free

Press, 2001.

---. David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the

Western Tradition. New York: Free Press, 2006.

Fishbane, Michael. Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2003.

Fletcher, Robert Huntington. The Arthurian Material in the Chronicles: Especially Those

of Great Britain and France. New York: Haskel House, 1965.

Flusser, David. Jesus. Trans. Ronald Walls. New York: Herder and Herder, 1969.

Fortna, Robert Tomson. The Fourth Gospel and Its Predecessor: From Narrative Source

to Present Gospel. New York: T&T Clark International, 1988.

Freke, Timothy & Peter Gandy. The Jesus Mysteries: Was the ‘Original Jesus’ a Pagan

God? New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999.

Fredriksen, Paula. From Jesus to Christ. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University, 2000.

Friedman, David Noel. Divine Commitment and Human Obligation: Selected Writings of

David Noel Friedman. Ed. John R. Huddlestun. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.

Friedman, Richard Elliot. Who Wrote the Bible? San Francisco: Harper, 1987.

---. The Hidden Book in the Bible. San Francisco: Harper,1998.

---. The Bible With Sources Revealed. San Francisco: Harper, 2003.

Frye, Northrop. The Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.

---. “The Archetypes of Literature.” The Norton Anthology: Theory and Criticism. Ed.

Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. 1445 – 1457.

---.”Response” Eighteenth-Century Studies. 42 (1990-91): 243-249.

Frye, Northrop and Robert Sandler, ed. Northrop Frye on Shakespeare. Yale, Yale

University Press, 1988.

Funk, Robert W. “The Jesus Seminar and the Quest.” Jesus: Then & Now. Ed. Marvin

Meyer and Charles Hughes. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2001.

---. The Gospel of Jesus. San Francisco: Harper, 1999.

Funk, Robert W. and the Jesus Seminar. The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic

Deeds of Jesus. San Francisco: Harper, 1998.

Funk, Robert W., Roy Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar. The Five Gospels: What Did

Jesus Really Say? San Francisco: Harper, 1993.

Gantz, Jeffrey, trans. Mabinogion. New York: Dorset Press, 1985.

Garret, Don. The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge

University Press, 1996.

Geoffrey of Monmouth. The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth I. Ed.

Neil Wright. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1985.

Gildas. “The Works of Gildas” Old English Chronicles. Trans. William Gunn. Ed.

John Allen Giles and Charles Bertram. London: G. Bell & Sons, 1901. 293-380.

Goodacre, Mark. “Fatigue in the Synoptics.” New Testament Studies 44 (1998): 45-58.

Goulder, Michael. Midrash and Lection in Matthew. London: Society for Promoting

Christian Knowledge, 1974.

Goulet-Cazé, Marie-Odile. “Religion and the Early Cynics” The Cynics: The Cynic

Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy. Berkley: University of California, 1996.

Guenter, A. R. “A Diachronic Study of Biblical Hebrew Prose Syntax: An Analysis of

the Verbal Clause in Jeremiah 37-45 and Esther 1-10.” Diss. University of

Toronto, 1976. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976.

Halpern, Baruch. “The Centralization Formula in Deuteronomy.” Vetus Testamentum 31

(1981): 20-38.

Hamilton, A. C., ed. The Spenser Encyclopedia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,

1990.

Haran, Menahem. Temples and Temple-service in Ancient Israel: Inquiry Into the

Character of Cult Phenomena and the Historical Setting of the Priestly School.

Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d'Urbervilles. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1891.

Hardyment, Christina. Malory: The Knight Who Became King Arthur’s Chronicler. New

York: HarperCollins, 2005.

Head, Peter M. Christology and the Synoptic Problem: An Argument for Markan

Priority. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 1997.

Helms, Randel McCraw. Who Wrote the Gospels? Altadena, CA: Millenium

Press, 1997.

Herbermann, Charles George, and Knights of Columbus Catholic Truth Committee. The

Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution,

Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church. New York: Encyclopedia Press, 1913.

Herbert, Edward of Cherbury. On Truth, as it is Distinguished from Revelation, the

Probable, the Possible, and the False. Paris, 1624. Trans. Meyrick H. Carré, 1937.

London: Thoemmes Continuum, 1999.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. Richard Tuck. Revised Student Edition. Cambridge,

UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996

Hoffman, Joseph, R. Marcion: On the Restitution of Christianity: An Essay on the

Development of Radical Paulinist Theology in the Second Century. Chico, CA:

Scholars Press, 1984.

Hodder, Karen, David Burnley, Lesley Johnson, and Carole Weinberg. “Dynastic

Romance” The Arthur of the English: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval

English Life and Literature. Ed. W. R. J. Barron. Rev. ed. Cardiff, UK:

University of Wales Press, 2001. 71-112.

Hodges, Kenneth. Forging Chivalric Communities in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. New

York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Holman, Hugh C. and William Harmon. A Handbook to Literature. New York:

Macmillan, 1986.

Howarth, Stephen. The Knights Templar. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1982.

Hopkins, S.M. and John.T. Koch, The Celtic Heroic Age: Literary Sources for Ancient

Celtic Europe and Early Ireland and Wales. Ed. John T. Koch and John Carey.

Malden, MA: Celtic Studies Publications, 1995.

Hultgren, Stephen. Narrative Elements in the Double Tradition: A Study of Their Place

Within the Framework of the Gospel Narratives. New York: Walter de Gruyter,

2002.

Hurvitz, Avi, “Continuity and Innovation in Biblical Hebrew—The Case of ‘Semantic

Change’ in Post-Exilic Writings” Abr-Nahrain: Supplement Series 4 (1995): 1-10.

---. “The Historical Quest for ‘Ancient Israel’ and the Linguistic Evidence of

the Hebrew Bible: Some Methodological Observations.” Vetus Testamentum

47 (1997): 301-315.

---. “A Linguistic Study of the Relationship Between the Priestly Source and the Book of

Ezekiel.” Cahiers de la Revue Biblique 20 (1982): 117-118.

---. “The Relevance of Biblical Hebrew Linguistics for the Historical Study of Ancient

Israel.” Proceedings of the Twelfth World Congress of Jewish Studies:

Jerusalem, July 29-August 5, 1997. Ed. R. Margolin. Jerusalem: World Union of

Jewish Studies, 1999. 21-33.

---. “The Usage of שש and בוץ in the Bible and Its Implication for the Date of P.” Harvard

Theological Review 60 (1967): 117-121.

Irenaeus. St. Irenaeus of Lyons Against the Heresies. Trans. Dominic J. Unger. Ed. John

J. Dillon. New York: Newman Press, 1992.

Jefferson, Thomas. The Life and Morals of Jesus. Ed. Forrest Church. Boston, Beacon

Press, 1989.

Jerome of Stridonium. “The Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary: Against Helvidius.”

The Catholic Encyclopedia. Ed. Kevin Knight. New York: Robert Appleton

Company, 1912. 1 May 2009 .

Jenkins, Phillip. Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way. Oxford, UK:

Oxford University, 2002.

Johnson, Luke Timothy. The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historic Jesus and

the Truth of the Traditional Gospels. San Francisco: Harper, 1996.

Josephus, Flavius. The Life of Flavius Josephus. Trans. William Whiston. The Complete

Works of Flavius-Josephus. Chicago: Thompson & Thomas, 1901.

---.The Jewish War. Trans. William Whiston. The Complete Works of Flavius-Josephus.

Chicago: Thompson & Thomas, 1901.

---. Antiquities of the Jews. William Whiston. The Complete Works of Flavius-Josephus.

Chicago: Thompson & Thomas, 1901.

Jones, William Lewis. King Arthur in Myth and Legend. Detroit: University of Michigan

Press, 1914.

Jusino, Ramon K. “Mary Magdalene: Author of the Fourth Gospel?” 1998. 23 Apr. 2008

Justin of Caeserea. Saint Justin Martyr. Trans. Thomas B. Falls. Washington D.C.:

Catholic University of America Press, 1965.

Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004.

Kelber, Werner H. The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and

Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Paul, and Q. Bloomington: Indiana University,

1983.

Kennedy, Elspeth, ed., Michelle Szkilnik, Rupert T. Pickens, Karen Pratt and Andrea M.

L. Williams. “Lancelot With and Without the Grail: Lancelot Do Lac and the

Vulgate Cycle.” The Arthur of the French: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval

French and Occitan Literature. Ed. Burgess, Glyn S. and Karen Pratt. Cardiff,

UK: University of Wales Press, 2006. 274-324.

King, Andrew. The Faerie Queene and Middle English Romance: The Matter of Just

Memory. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2000.

Kitchen, Kenneth. On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: W. B.

Eerdmans, 2003.

Knox, John. Marcion and the New Testament. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1942.

Koester, Helmut. Ancient Christian Gospels. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International,

1990.

---. Introduction to the New Testament. 3 vols. New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1982.

Kolenda, Pauline. “Woman as Tribute, Woman as Flower” American Ethnologist 11

(1984): 98-117.

Komroff, Manuel, ed. Apocrypha. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1994.

Kramer, Samuel Noah. The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1963.

Lachmann, Karl. “De Ordine Narratonium in Evangeliis Synopticis.” Theologische

Studien und Kritiken (1835): 570-799.

Lacy, Norris J. The Lancelot-Grail Reader. New York: Garland Reference Library of the

Humanities, 2000.

---. , Geoffrey Ashe, Debra N. Mancoff. The Arthurian Handbook. 2nd ed. London:

Taylor & Francis, 1997.

---. , ed. The Arthurian Encyclopedia. Ass. Ed. Geoffrey Ashe, Sandra Ness Ihle,

Marianne E. Kalinke, and Raymond H. Thompson. New York: Garland, 1986.

Layamon of Worcestershire. Brut. London: Echo Library, 2007.

Laertius, Diogenes. The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. Ed., Trans.

Charles Duke Yonge. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Le Saux, Françoise Le Saux and Peter Damian-Grint. “The Arthur of the Chronicles”

The Arthur of the French: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval French and Occitan

Literature. Ed. Glyn S. Burgess and Karen Pratt. Cardiff, UK: University of

Wales Press, 2006. 93-111.

Loomis, Richard M. “Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth.” The Romance of Arthur: An

Anthology of Medieval Texts in Translation. Ed. James J. Wilhelm. New,

Expanded Edition. New York: Garland, 1994. 59-93.

---. “Culhwch and Olwen” The Romance of Arthur: An Anthology of Medieval Texts

in Translation. Ed. James J. Wilhelm. New, Expanded Edition. New York:

Garland, 1994. 25-58.

Loomis, Roger Sherman. The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1991.

Long, Anthony A. “The Socratic Tradition: Diogenes, Crates, and Hellenistic Ethics.”

The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy. Berkley:

University of California, 1996. 28-46.

Lucian of Samosata. “The Death of Peregrine.” The Works of Lucian of Samosata.

Trans. H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1905. 79-

95.

Luz, Ulrich. The Theology of the Gospel of Matthew. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge

University, 1993.

Macdonald, Duncan Black. The Hebrew Literary Genius: An Interpretation Being an

Introduction to the Reading of the Old Testament. New York: Russel & Russel,

1968.

Mack, Burton L., Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of Christian Myth. San

Francisco: Harper, 1995.

Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte D’Arthur. Ed. John Matthews. London: Cassell, 2000.

---. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory. 3 vol. Ed. Eugène Vinaver. 3rd ed. London:

Oxford University Press, 1971.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Trans. Samuel Moore. Ed.

Gareth Stedman Jones. New York: Penguin Classics, 2002.

Marx, Karl. On the Jewish Question. Paris, 1844. Trans. Helen Lederer. New York:

Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, 1958.

Marxsen, Willi. Introduction to the New Testament. Trans. G. Buswell. Philadelphia:

Fortress Press, 1968.

Matthews, John. The Book of Arthur: Lost Tales From the Round Table. King Arthur:

Old Saybrook, CT: Konnecky & Konnecky, 2002.

---. King Arthur: Dark Age Warrior and Mythic Hero. New York: Carlton Publishing

Group, 2004.

McGiffert, Arthur Cushman. Early and Eastern, From Jesus to John of Damascus. Vol. 1

of A History of Christian Thought. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s

Sons,1932.

McKee, David Rice. “Isaac De la Peyrére, A Precursor of Eighteenth-Century Critical

Deists.” PMLA 59 (1944): 456-485.

Mead, G. R. S. Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.? London: Theosophical Publishing Society,

1903. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1968.

---. Fragments of a Faith Forgotten. New York: Cosimo, 2007.

Milgrom, Jacob. Studies in Levitical Terminology. Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1970.

Miller, David Lee. “The Faerie Queene (1590).” A Critical Comopanion to Spenser

Studies. Ed. Bart van Es. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 139-165.

Miller, Robert J. Ed. The Complete Gospels, Revised and Expanded Edition.

San Francisco: Harper, 1994.

Miller, Robert J., ed., Dale Allison, and Marcus J. Borg. The Apocalyptic Jesus: A

Debate. Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2001.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost and Other Poems. Ed. Edward Le Comte. New York:

Penguin Group USA, 1981.

Neirynck, Frans. Duality in Mark: Contributions to the Study of Markan Redaction.

Louvain: Louvain University, 1972.

The New Jerusalem Bible. Ed. Henry Wansbrough. New York: Doubleday, 1985.

Noth, Martin. “The Deuteronomistic History.” Schriften der Königsberg Gelehreten-

Gesellschaft Geistewissenschaftliche Klasse 18 (1943): 43-266. Sheffield, UK:

JSOT Press, 1991.

Ó hÓgáin, Dáithí. Myth, Legend, and Romance: An Encyclopaedia of Irish Folk

Tradition. New York: Patient Hall, 1991.

Painter, John and Dwight Moody Smith. Just James: The Brother of Jesus in History and

Tradition. 2nd ed. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2004.

Pearce, Susan, “Cornish Elements in the Arthurian Tradition.” Folklore 85 (1974): 145-

63.

Penny, Ralph John. A History of the Spanish Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge

University Press, 2002.

Pepper, Stephen C. World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1966.

Petronius Arbiter. The Satyricon. Trans. Patrick Gerard Walsh. Oxford, UK: Oxford

University Press, 1997.

Plato. Crito. Plato Unmasked: The Dialogues Made New. Trans. Keith Quincy. Spokane,

WA: Eastern Washington University, 2003.

Polzin, Robert. Late Biblical Hebrew: Toward an Historical Typology of Biblical Hebrew

Prose. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1976.

Porter, Stanley E., ed. Reading the Gospels Today. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004.

Pratt, Karen. “Introduction.” The Arthur of the French: The Arthurian Legend in

Medieval French and Occitan Literature. Ed. Glyn S. Burgess and Karen Pratt.

Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press, 2006. 1-7.

Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. Trans. Laurence Scott. 2nd ed. Austin:

University of Texas, 1968.

Quitslund, Jon A. Spenser’s Supreme Fiction: Platonic Natural Philosophy and The

Faerie Queene. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

Rendsberg, Gary. “Late Biblical Hebrew and the Date of P.” JANESCU 12 (1980): 65-

80.

Reimarus, Hermann Samuel. The Goal of Jesus and His Disciples. Trans. George Wesley

Buchanan. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1970.

Rendtorff, Rolf and John Bowden. The Old Testament: An Introduction. Philadelphia:

Fortress Press, 1991.

Riddy, Felicity. “Contextualizing Morte Darthur.” A Companion to Malory. Ed.

Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1996.

55-73.

Riley, Harold. The Making of Mark: An Exploration. Macon, GA: Mercer University,

1989.

Roberts, Brynley F. “Culhwch ac Olwen, The Triads, Saints’ Lives.” The Arthur of the

Welsh: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Welsh Literature. Ed. Rachel

Bromwich, Rachel, A. O. H. Jarman, and Brynley F. Roberts. Cardiff, UK:

University of Wales Press, 1991. 73-96.

Robinson, James McConkey, Paul Hoffman, and John S. Kloppenborg. The Sayings

Gospel Q in Greek and English: With Parallels from the Gospels of Mark and

Thomas. Sterling, VA: Peeters, 2001.

Rofé, Alexander. Introduction to the Composition of the Pentateuch. Sheffield, UK:

Sheffield Academic Press, 1999.

Rogers, Gillian, Diane Speed, David Griffith, and John Withrington. “Folk Romance.”

The Arthur of the English: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval English Life and

Literature. Ed. W. R. J. Barron. Rev. ed. Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press,

2001. 197-224.

Rosenberg, Samuel N. “Part III.” The Lancelot-Grail Reader. New York: Garland

Reference Library of the Humanities, 2000. 142-179.

Rufus, Caius Musonius. The Roman Socrates. Trans. Cora Elizabeth Lutz. Yale: Yale

University, 1947.

Schneemelcher, Wilhelm and Robert Lachlan Wilson. New Testament Apocrypha:

Gospels and Related Writings. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press,

2003.

Schweitzer, Albert. The Quest for the Historical Jesus. Trans. W. Montgomery.

New York: Dover, 1911.

Schnelle, Udo. The History and Theology of the New Testament. Canterbury, UK: SCM

Press, 1998.

Seneca the Younger, Lucius Annasus. Minor Dialogues: Together with the Dialogue on

Clemency. Ed. and Trans. Aubrey Stewart. London: George Bell and Sons, 1889.

---. “On Anger.” Moral Essays. Vol. 1. Trans. John W. Basore. The Loeb Classical

Library. London: W. Heinemann, 1935. 1 May 2009 .

Sims-Williams, Patrick. “The Early Welsh Arthurian Poems.” The Arthur of the

Welsh: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Welsh Literature. Ed. Rachel

Bromwich, Rachel, A. O. H. Jarman, and Brynley F. Roberts. Cardiff, UK:

University of Wales Press, 1991. 33-72.

Ska, Jean-Louis. Introduction to Reading the Pentateuch. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns,

2006.

Skinner, John. A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis. Endinburgh, UK:

T&T Clark, 1930.

Sommer, H. Oskar. The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances: Edited From

Manuscripts in the British Museum. 7 vols. Washington: Carnegie Institution,

1911.

Smith, Dwight Moody. John Among the Gospels. 2nd ed. Columbia: University of South

Carolina, 1992, 2001.

Smith, Morton. The Secret Gospel. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.

Spenser, Edmund. The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser: With the Life of Edmund

Spenser. London: W. Pickering, 1852.

---. The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition. Ed. Edwin Greenlaw, Charles

Grosvenor Osgood, and Frederick Morgan Padelford. 2nd ed. Baltimore, MD:

John Hopkins, 1958.

Spinoza, Benedict. A Theologico-Political Treatise. Hamburg, Germany: 1670. London:

G. Bell and Sons, London, 1883. Charleston, SC: Forgotten Books, 2008.

Strauss, David Friedrich. In Defense of My Life of Jesus Against the Hegelians. 1837.

Trans., Ed. Marilyn Chapin Massey. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1983.

---. The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. 1835. Ed. Peter C. Hodgson. Trans. George

Eliot. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972.

---. A New Life of Jesus. 1835. London: Williams and Norgate, 1865.

Streeter, Burnett Hillman. The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins. Oxford, UK:

Macmillian and Company, 1924.

Stirnemann, Patricia. “Some Champenois Vernacular Manuscripts and the Manerius

Style of Illumination.” Les Manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes. Ed. K. Bubsy, T.

Nixon, A. Stones, and L. Walters. Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1993. 195-226.

Talbert, Charles H. and Edgar V. McKnight. “Can the Griesbach Hypothesis Be

Falsified?” Journal of Biblical Literature 91 (1972): 338-368.

Tertuillian, Quintus Septimius Florens. The Five Books of Quintus Sept. Flor.

Tertullianus Against Marcion. Trans. Peter Holmes. Edinburgh, UK: T. & T.

Clark, 1868 .

---. The Prescription Against Heretics. Trans. Charles Dodgson. Oxford, UK: J. H. Parker, 2004.

Theissen, Gerd and Annette Merz. The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide.

Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996.

Thompson, Thomas. The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of History.

Basic Books: New York, 1999.

Tobin, Paul. “The Reliance of Luke-Acts on the Writings of Flavius Josephus.”1 May

2009 .

Twain, Mark [Samuel Clemens]. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. New

York: Harper & Brothers, 1917.

Vinaver, Eugéne. The Rise of Romance. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Wace. Roman de Brut. Trans. Le Roux de Lincy. Paris: É. Frère, 1838.

Waite, Geoff. “The Politics of Reading Formations: The Case of Nietzsche in Imperial

Germany (1870-1919).” New German Critique 29 (1983): 185-209.

Walters, Lori J. “Manuscript Compilations of Verse Romances.” The Arthur of the

French: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval French and Occitan Literature. Ed.

Glyn S. Burgess and Karen Pratt. Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press, 2006.

461-487.

Waters, Douglas D. “Prince Arthur as Christian Magnanimity in Book One of The Faerie

Queene.” Studies in English Literature 9 (1969): 53-62.

Weinfeld, Moshe. The Place of the Law in the Religion of Ancient Israel. Leiden,

Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 2004.

Weir, Allison. The Life of Elizabeth I. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003.

Wellhausen, Julius. Prolegomena to the History of Israel. Trans. J. Sutherland Black and

Allan Menzies. Edinburgh, UK: Adam & Charles Black, 1885.

Wells, G. A. The Jesus Myth. Chicago: Open Court, 1988.

White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Ninteenth-Century Europe.

Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins Library University Press, 1973.

White, T.H. The Book of Merlyn. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988.

Wilke, Christian Gottlob. The Earliest Evangelist. Dresden, Germany: Arnold, 1841.

Wilhelm, James J. “Arthur in the Latin Chronicles.” The Romance of Arthur: An

Anthology of Medieval Texts in Translation. Ed. James J. Wilhelm. New,

Expanded Edition. New York: Garland, 1994. 3-10.

William of Newburgh. Historia Rerum Anglicarum. Ed. R. Howlett. Rolls Series 82:

London, 1884.

Woodcock, Matthew. Fairy in The Faerie Queene: Renaissance Elf-Fashioning and

Elizabethan Myth-Making. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004.

Wrede, W. The Messianic Secret in the Gospels. Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck &

Ruprecht, 1901.

Van Seters, John. The Pentateuch: A Social Science Commentary. Sheffield, UK:

Sheffield Academic Press, 1999.

---. Prologue to History. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992.

Vermes, G. Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels. 1973. London: Student

Christian Movement, 1983.

Vinaver, Eugéne. The Rise of Romance. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Von Wahlde, Urban C. The Earliest Version of John's Gospel: Recovering the Gospel of

Signs. Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1989.

---. The Johannine Commandments: 1 John and the Struggle for the Johannine Tradition.

New York: Paulist Press, 1990.

Yadin, Yigdael. “The Fourth Season of Excavations at Hazor.” The Biblical

Archaeologist 22 (1959): 2-20.

Zevit, Zinoy. “Converging Lines of Evidence Bearing on the Date of P.” ZAW 84

(1982): 502-509.

Zindler. Frank R. The Jesus the Jews Never Knew: Sepher Toldoth Yeshu and the Quest

of the Historical Jesus in Jewish Sources. Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press,

2003.

-----------------------

[1] There are several different versions of the Hebrew Bible. The majority of English translations use the Hebrew version, called the Masoretic Text (MT), based on the Leningrad Codex, which was copied a thousand years ago in 1008. The gospel writers, however, quoted from the Greek version, called the Septuagint (LXX), which was copied in Koine script about 2200 years ago. The Samaritans, who consider only the first six books of the Hebrew Bible (the “Hexateuch”) to be canonical, also have a version of the Books of Moses in their own language called the Samaritan Pentateuch (SP) (Abegg x). There is also a Dead Sea Scroll version, extracted from scrolls buried in the caves of Qumran, making it the only version that has gone uncopied and unedited from between 2250 and 1900 years ago (Abegg xiv).

[2] There are short reports of Moses’ death given by J (Deut. 34.5-7) and P (Deut. 34.8-9) edited in by the Redactor (Friedman, Bible 367-368).

[3] Ex. 15.20; 24.1; Friedman, Bible 152f, 146f, 160f

[4] Lev. 1.3,5; 3.2,8,13; 4.5-7,14-18; 6.9,19,23, 14.11, 16.1-34, 17.1-9; Num. 5.17, 6.10, 19.4

[5] Ex. 27.21, 28.43, 30.21; Lev. 3.17, 6.11, 10.9, 16.29,34, 17.7, 24.3,8; Num. 18.23, 19.10

[6] The New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) is preferred in this study for its rendering of the proper name “Yahweh” in place of the more common practice of substituting the word “LORD” in its place. Translating the Tetragammaton literally is an important aspect of my discussion and is intended to make the connections between Yahweh and the Yahwist stand out without resorting to bracketed reminders. In some cases, I will instead use direct translations from Biblical scholars in order that comparisons between far-ranging Bible verses use consistent wording. The New Jerusalem Bible is a Catholic translation published in 1985 direct from the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

[7] NJB, Ex. 6.8; Ez. 20.28; NJB, Lev. 26.3; Ez. 5.7, NJB, Lev. 26.25; Ez. 5.17, Lev. 26.29; Ez. 5.10

[8] These studies are: Studies in Levitical Terminology (1970) by Jacob Milgrom, Late Biblical Hebrew (1976) by Robert Polzin, “A Diachronic Study of Biblical Hebrew Prose Syntax” by A. R. Guenther (1976), “Late Biblical Hebrew and the Date of P” (1980) by Gary Rendsburg, and “Converging Lines of Evidence Bearing on the Date of P” (1982) by Ziony Zevit. Added to these studies is David Noel Friedman’s work on the “Primary History,” found in Divine Commitment and Human Obligation (1997), and Menahem Haran’s work on evidence for the earliness of P as described in his book, Temples and Temple Service in Ancient Israel (1979).

[9] Hurvitz has written on the linguistic evidence in “Continuity and Innovation in Biblical Hebrew—The Case of ‘Semantic Change’ in Post-Exilic Writings” (1995) and in his contribution to the Twelfth World Congress of Jewish Studies, “The Relevance of Biblical Hebrew Linguistics for the Historical Study of Ancient Israel” (1999).

[10] Schechem, however, is actually one of the few towns that does correlate archaeologically with the Book of Joshua since Joshua 24 does not say that it was conquered but that there was instead an important tribal assembly and covenant made there (Dever, Who 61-62).

[11] 1 Sam. 8; Isa. 5.8; Mic. 2.2; Dever, Who 186

[12] On a different subject, Dever says that the common answer for why pigs are non-kosher, that insufficiently cooked pork can cause trichinosis, is irrelevant since the ancient “could not possibly have known that” (Did 267). But this argument hardly holds ground since it assumes the ancient person would have to know about germ theory to make the simple connection between eating pork and getting sick. For example, the law in Deuteronomy 23.12-14 specifying that armies cover up their excrement no doubt stems from health concerns yet it attributes the causal agent od harm to be Yahweh seeing the excrement as he moves about the camp.

[13] According to the Deuteronomist, there was never “such a prophet in Israel as Moses, the man whom Yahweh knew face to face” (NJB, Deut. 34.10) just as “no king before him turned to Yahweh as [Josiah] did” (NJB, 2 Kings 23.25). Only Josiah turns to Yahweh “with all his heart… soul and… might” just as Moses is described as doing (Deut. 6.5; 2 Kings 23:25). There are many other literary and linguistic connections that provide strong evidence that the original author of Deuteronomy also wrote large portions of the Deuteronomistic History, content from the books of Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, as well as the vast majority of 1 and 2 Kings: (Deut. 17.8-12, 2 Kings 22.13, 18); (Deut. 17.11, 20, Josh. 1.7, 23.6); (Deut. 31.24-29, 2 Kings 22.8); (Deut. 31.11; 2 Kings 23.2); (Deut. 9.21, 1 Kings 13.2, 2 Kings 23.15); (Deut. 12.3, 2 Kings 23:6, 12); (Deut. 4.16-25, 5.8, 27.25, 2 Kings 23.6); (Friedman, Bible 24-26)

[14] Friedman writes that in a 1994 meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in San Francisco, Van Seters was asked by J. Maxwell Miller how the Deuteronomistic historian could have described Pharaoh Shishak’s actions so accurately in 1 Kings 11.40 and 14.25 if that was the case. After the suggestion that the Deuteronomist could have gotten the information from monuments was found to be unsatisfactory, Van Seters responded to a repetition of the question by answering, “I wish I knew” (Friedman, Hidden, 364-365).

[15] The Benei Elohim were the “Sons of God” or ”Sons of the gods” who married the “daughters of man” shortly before Noah’s flood (Gen. 6.4).

[16] Compare these equivalent verses: J 6.5-6 to P 6.11-12; J 7.1 to P 6.13; J 7.5 to P 6.22; J 8.13b to P 8.14.

[17] As to the question of whether the problem of Elohim’s anger with Balaam being resolved, if we assume that the verse in Numbers 22.22a was written by the JE Redactor in order to smooth over the transition between Elohim telling Balaam to go to Balak in 22.20 and Balaam angering Yahweh by going to 22.22b, then a separation between J and E sources does in fact resolve the contradiction (J: Num. 22.2, 4d-5a, 7c-8a, 13, 15, 18b, 22b, 23-35; 23.1-6a, 11-17, 25-30; 24.1a, 10-14; E: Num 22.3-4ac, 5b-6, 7a, 8b-12, 14, 16-17, 19-21, 22c, 36-41; 23.6b; 24.1b-2, 23b-25; RJE: Num. 22.22a; R: Num. 22.1, 4b, 7b; 23.7-10, 18-24; 24.3-9, 15-23a). The story of Balaam’s talking donkey is also more likely to have been written by the Yahwist since he was also the author of the Garden of Eden story with the talking snake. The talking donkey story includes the phrase “to turn right or left,” a common J phrase, and the phrases “a sword in my hand,” “struck,” and “I’ve sinned,” which are common E phrases. Although there are more phrases attributable to E, the plot itself is far more typical of J. The pronouncements of Balaam which Friedman designates as belonging to E also refers to Seth, the third son of Adam, who is apparently late as he appears only in text designated to the Redactor (Gen. 4.25) and the Book of Records of Adam (Gen. 5.1,-3). Friedman himself points out that the introductory verse in Numbers 22.1 and the references to the “elders of Midian” in 22.4 and 7 must have come from the Redactor, so by all accounts, the Balaam story appears to have been edited by both redactors (RJE and R).

[18] 1 Sam. 16; 17.1-11, 50; 18.6-13, 16, 20-21a, 22-29; 19.1-24; 25-29; 30.1-6, 8-31; 31.1, 8-13

[19] 1 Sam. 16.21, 17.58

[20] 1 Sam. 18.20-21a; 18.17-19, 21b; 1 Sam. 24; 26

[21] The New Jerusalem Bible interprets this to mean Eve’s third son Seth from verse 4.25 was the first to invoke the name Yahweh, but, as mentioned earlier, Friedman attributes the verse about Seth to the Redactor. The Revised Standard Version and the New Internation Version translate the verse as saying “men began to call (up)on [NIV footnote: Or to proclaim] the name of the LORD” (4.26).

[22] Typically translated in Bibles as “Almighty,” the word shaddai was understood to mean “he who is sufficeint” in early Judaism, but has been popularly linked to an Akkadian word found in Babylonian texts, sadu, meaning “mountain” (Mettinger 70-71). An earlier interpretation was that the word is linked to the Hebrew word sod, meaning “violence” or “destruction,” as in the often-used phrase “destruction of El Shaddai” in the Old Testament, but this is largely thought to be a pun rather than a linguistic-historical derivation (Isa. 13.6; Joel 1.15).

[23] Hundreds of bear goddess figurines have also been discovered around Celtic Gaul and Britain and dated to 7,000 years ago. The figurines typically portray a mother bear nursing her cubs. The association of fertility to the mother bear is also the origin of the linguistic term to “bear children,” coming from the Scottish word for child, “bairn,” which in turn was derived from the Anglo-Saxon word for bear, “beran.”

[24] Judges 2.13, 10.6, I Sam. 7.4; 12.10, 1 Kings 11.5, 2 Kings 23.13.

[25] Of all the mystery cults, the one that was considered the most important were the Eleusian Mysteries, based out of a small town near Athens called Eleusina, began their religious practices some time during the Mycenean some 3,500 years ago but eventually became so poular it spread all the way to Rome. In the Republic, Plato writes of vagrant beggar-priests of Orpheus who went around giving purifications to the rich, carrying with them holy books written by Orpheus and his disciple Musaeus (364). Yet Plato himself seems to have taken his own theological premises about reincarnation, the soul’s imprisonment in the body, and Tartarus as “hell,” seem to have come from the same or similar source, which some scholars believe ultimately derives from India.

[26] The king who ruled Uruk immediately before Gilgamesh on the Sumerian king list was called “Sumuzi the Fisherman,” and Sumerian stories identify Enki, whose symbol was the fish, as Dumuzi’s father. “Dumuzi the Fisherman” may also be the inspiration behind the famous “wild man” hero, Enkidu, who fought along- side Gilgamesh in Sumerian folklore. Much as in the “Dumuzi the Shepherd” myth, Enkidu eventually comes to a tragic end, and in the later seventh-century Akkadian epic, The Epic of Gilgamesh, this prompts Gilgamesh to search for eternal life by finding the Noah-figure, Utnapishtim, at the Island of Dilmun. Just like in the Noah myth, the gods “smell” the sacrifice that Utnapishtim made for trhem (Jackson 82). Gilgamesh eventually finds a fruit of eternal life, but in a slight correlation to the Eden story, it is stollen by a snake while Gilgamesh is sleeping. Snake or lizard-headed clay figurines have also been found dating back 6,000 years to the Ubaid culture in Eridu and Ur.

[27] Another problem with the geneaology as we presently have it is that Nimrod, whose empire was centered in Mesopotamia, was the son of Cush, who is identified with the far more western territories of Canaan, Egypt, Put (Libya), and Cush. The Aaronid Priest must have identified Cush, son of Ham, as being in Arabia since Cush’s five other sons are the names of five Arabian tribes, but the Yahwist possibly could have identified Cush with the Akkadian city of Kish because Sargon was the “son” of one of the most popular kings from the city (P 10.7; J 10.8; Friedman, Bible 47). Alternatively, J may have originally identified Nimrod as the son of Shem since the Akkadians spoke a Semitic language and the text was later changed to disassociate the Semitic lineage from the villainous role later fostered upon on the once-heroic Nimrod just as Noah’s lineage was changed to disassociate him from the sons of Cain. Complicating the matter even more is the fact that the Greek Septuagint version of scripture identifies the Cush of Genesis with Ethiopia, perhaps in reference to the sixth-century prophet Jeremiah mentioning some Cushites who had another skin color, but this appears to be (another?) misidentification based on similar names. Although there is no surviving J text naming Cush’s father, it would make more sense culturally and linguistically if the original version had Kish as the son of Shem since the Akkadians spoke a Semitic language. In J, Ham is the father of Canaan, but the Aaronid Priest includes the more southwestern regions of Egypt and Libya, so reassociating Cush with Arabia appears to run along that author’s particular scematic (J 9.18; P 10.6).

[28] The Record of Shem also lists Abraham’s father and brothers, but Friedman identifies this section as a source independent of the four main sources (11.10b-26).

[29] According to 2 Kings, the Israelites achieved victory after victory against Mesha until the Moabite king sacrificed the son who was to succeed him on the city wall. The NJB says that this “alarmed” the Israelites and made them to withdraw, while the RSV says a “great wrath came upon Israel” made them leave (3.27). The NIV says that “[t]he fury against Israel was great,” casuing the retreat, while the KJV translates it as a “great indignation against Israel.”

[30] This solution would assume the story of the plagues must have taken an earlier form before Egypt became introduced to the storyline, and according to Friedman, both the Elohist and the Aaronid Priest contributed to their list.

[31] Freud acknowledges that scripture instead credits the patrairch Abarham with this covenant but points to a strange episode in which Moses’ wife saves him by circumscising their son (Ex. 4.24-4.26; Freud 29).

[32] In Leviticus, the Day of Atonement was marked by the release of two goats: one for Yahweh, and the other for Azazel and the sins of all the Israelites were said to have been expunged (16.8). Janowski, Wilhelm, and Hoffner believe “Azazel” is derived from the Hurrian/Hittite offering term azazhiya, refering not to a wilderness demon but to the goal of the action or method of the offering (Hoffner 188).

[33] Most of the angelic names end in –el, derived from El, including Gabriel, who also appears in the Book of Daniel and the Gospel of Luke.

[34] The name is often conflated with the word phospohros, an element associated with Venus in Greek mythology because of its soft white glow.

[35] The cliché of the lame blacksmith was quite popular in the Bronze Age as the lame were often left behind to mend weapons during battles and the use of arsenic to harden copper would have contributed to lameness through mass skin poisoning, meaning the lame became blacksmiths and blacksmiths became lame.

[36] Bes might best be described as the Egyptian god of wine, women and song. But he was also a protector of the family and protected against evil spirits, especially for children and childbirth. Although there have been no temples found dedicated to Bes, masks and tattooes of the lion god were very popular during Egypt’s New Kingdom, and he appears to have been especially popular with the Phoenicians. Bes was originally worshipped as a household protector in Nubia who scared off evil spirits with his swords and intimidating appearance. He was also said to assist the goddess of childbirth, Tawaret. Although Tawaret was depicted as a pregnant crocodile in Egypt, her arms and legs were that of a lioness and a statue belonging to King Anlaman depicting a pregnant lioness may be an early version of her. Bastet, who started off as a 4,000-year-old lion goddess but eventually changed into a cat goddess over two millenia, was often paired up with Bes.

[37] On the Sinai jar, the seated female is spotted just like the two male gods are, implying she too is a feline, correlating with 3,200-year-old Ugarit texts describing Asherah as a mother lioness (Kien 104). The connection between the traditional Mesopotamian pantheon’s fertility goddess with the lion totem stretches back to 6,000-year-old depictions of Inanna posed with one foot on top of a lion during the Sumerian era. A 2,900-year-old Israelite cult stand found in Taanach portrays Asherah seated between two lions with a hand on each of their heads. A small house shrine – called a naos, Greek for “inner sanctum” – carries within it an empty double-throne, suitable for both god and goddess, the door flanked by two pillars resting upon crouching lions (Dever Yahweh).

[38] Mettinger 26; Dever 128; Mazar, “Israelite” 95

[39] Deut. 33.2; Friedman, Bible 364f; Mettinger 24; Dever, Who 236-237

[40] Nebuchadnezzar II, the king of Babylon, also forced Matthaniah (“Gift of Yahweh”) to change his name to Zedekiah (“Righteousness of Yahweh”). Although the reason for this is perhaps unfathomable, one possibility is that the “gift” in question was some kind of military goal like Israel (24.17). Another possibility is that the Babylonian king was attempting to associate Yahweh with a hypothetical Jebusite god named Zedek. According to the “Jebusite Hypothesis,” the names of pre-Davidic rulers of Jerusalem such as Melchizedek and Adonizedek suggests that Zedek was another name for the Jebusite god.

[41] Mazar, “Israelite” 94; Dever, Who 150-151; Finkelstein, “When” 81

[42] NJB: “Yahweh Sabaoth”; NIV: “Lord God Almighty”

[43] Although the inspiration for this act is said to have been the prophet Elisha annointing the Judean prince, Jehu had a far more important alliance with Assyria for which he severed ties with Phoenicia and Judah to promote (9.3). A black obelisk in Assyria shows “Jehu son of Omri” kissing the ground before King Shalmaneser III, referring to Israel as “Omri.”

[44] Mazar adds that “the role of the individual personality in history should be taken into account particularly when dealing with figures like David and Solomon. Such an approach has received renewed legitimacy in post-moernist thinking” (“Search” 138).

[45] As of writing this, Boadt has passed away just over a week ago (8/8/10).

[46] Taking a que from Freud, this may also be an accurate representation of how Egypt-oriented priests were pressured by local Canaanites into adopting the bull totem against their own iconoclastic nature.

[47] NJB, Lev. 10.1-3; 1 Kings 14.1-17, 15.28-30; Friedman, Bible 160n, 204n

[48] Lev. 10.2, Num. 25.7; Friedman, Bible 204f

[49] Boadt dates P after Ezekiel, who lived some time in the 500s (Boadt 103).

[50] Deut. 11.6; Cross, Canaanite 205; Friedman, Who 193-196

[51] Isa. 1.2-26; Blenkinsopp, “Hezekiah” 119; J. A. Emerton, “Historical” 34-40; Childs, Assyrian Crisis, 20-22; Childs, Isaiah 1-39 176-188. Clements, Isaiah 32-36.

[52] Isa. 2.5, 10.26. According to Friedman, Moses reaching his hand over the sea is from the Aaronid Priest while JE has only Yahweh driving back the sea (Ex. 14.23; Friedman, Bible 143).

[53] NJB, Deut. 28.36; Cross, Canaanite 285; Friedman, Who 141

[54] Friedman, Who 127; Deut. 28.1, Jer. 17.24; Deut. 10.16, Jer. 4.4; Deut. 4.20, Jer. 11.4; Deut. 10.12, 11.13. 13.4, 32.41

[55] Miller and Hayes also point out several problems in the story of king Ahab, fighting alongside Jehoshaphat, dies in a battle against king Ben-Hadad of Aram: 1) Assyrian records indicate that the king at the time was Ben-Hadad’s son Hadadezer; 2) Ahab is said to have been killed in battle yet the text reads that he “rested with his fathers,” meaning he died peacefully; 3) The story typically refers to the king of Judah as Jehoshaphat yet cryptically refers to Ahab as “the king of Israel”; and 4) The part of the story where unnamed prophets ally with “the king of Israel” against Ben-Hadad would make more sense during Jehu’s time than during Ahab’s time (1 Kings 20; Miller 262-274).

[56] Gen. 4.25-26; Friedman, Bible 40; Gen. 15.13-17; Bible 54; Ex. 6.12-13, 26-28; Bible 128-129; Num. 26.8-11; Bible 289

[57] Friedman, Who 223; Dever, Did 295; Finkelstein, Bible 310

[58] NJB, Ezra 7.6; Rendtorff 68; NJB, Ezra 7.14

[59] The apocryphal 2 Esdras begins by referring to itself as the “second book of the prophet Ezra,” but it is referred to as 4 Esdras by St. Jerome in the Latin Vulgate. Modern scholars often refer to it as 4 Ezra.

[60] One exception to this are magic bowls with the name “Lilith” found in Jewish populations of Nippur, the city of Enlil in Mesopotamia, dated to the 500s-600s A.D. “Lilits” were spoken of even in Sumerian writings from the 2000s B.C., but became especially feared in the eastern Mediterranean in late antiquity.

[61] As noted earlier, Bloom follows a translation in The Book of J that places the end of J in the Book of Numbers, so here he is only talking about the earliest J material. And as exhibited by the quote, Bloom makes the admittedly conjectural argument that J was a woman. Before Bloom’s book, Friedman argued that J was the only one of the four authors who may have been a woman (Who 86). According to Friedman, Bloom took up his suggestion and “transformed it into a full-blown claim that the author of J was in fact a woman. Ironically, . . . . Bloom spoke of the author of the Court History as her male rival!” (Hidden 52).

[62] Freud 29; Gen. 17.10; Ex. 4.24-26

[63] Gen. 25.13-18, 20; 36.230; 46.6-27

[64] The Masoretic text is the primary Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible and most Christian translations of the Old Testament, based on scrolls copied by Jewish scribes called Masoretes between 1400 and 1000 years ago. The Septuagint is a Greek copy of the Old Testament copied in Alexandria between 2000 and 2200 years ago and used as the primary source by the gospel writers. The Samaritan Pentateuch is a third version used by the Samaritans.

[65] Genealogies in the J source include: Gen. 4.17-24; 10.8-19, 21; 10.24-11.9.

[66] The Holiness Code is listed in Lev. 17-26 (Friedman, Bible 17) and the Covenant Code can be found in Ex. 21-23 (Friedman, Bible 21, 154f).

[67] In the introductory page of The Five Gospels, Funk credits Strauss as the one “who pioneered the quest of the historical Jesus.” The other two men the introduction dedicates The Five Gospels to are Galileo Galilei (1820), “who altered out view of the heavens forever” and Thomas Jefferson “who took scissors and paste to the gospels,” a reference to Jefferson’s prolonged literary project, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Now known as the Jefferson Bible, it was a redaction of the four gospels that exercised all references to miracles, the divinity of Jesus, and the resurrection.

[68] Seneca, On Anger 2.34; Seneca, Letters 71.1; Seneca 26; Luke 6.29

[69] Crossan, Who 16-17; Luz 14; Ehrman, Lost 98; Bloom, Jesus 7; Talbert 358-359

[70] Luke 17.26-30; Matt. 24.37-39; Talbert 364-365

[71] The word for “tub” in Koine Greek is modion (mðoðdðiðoðnð;ð ðNJB, Mark 4.21; Matt. 5.15) and the word for bowl is skeuei (sðkðeðuðeðið;ð ðNJB, Luke 8.16).

[72] The Gospel of Matthew very often traces a detail to a quotation from the Old Testaμοδιον; NJB, Mark 4.21; Matt. 5.15) and the word for “bowl” is skeuei (σκευει; NJB, Luke 8.16).

[73] The Gospel of Matthew very often traces a detail to a quotation from the Old Testament not cited in other gospels, so it makes more sense that this reference was added to the Gospel of Mark at a later date.

[74] The word for “implore” is parakalein (παρακαλειν; NJB, Mark 5.17; Matt. 8.34) and the word for “ask” is hrwthsen (ηρωτησεν; NJB, Luke 8.37).

[75] The term “spirit of uncleanliness” is pneuma tous akathartos (πνευμάτων τῶν ἀκαθάρτων; “unclean spirit” in NJB). The word “demon” is daimonion (δαιμόνιον ; NIV Luke 9.1; “devil” in NJB).

[76] The word for “tree” is dendron ( δένδρον; NJB).

[77] The word for “disciples” in mathaytes (μαθητής). Streeter argues Matthew and Luke edited them independently because Mark mistakenly implied the disciples “took charge of the situation” (Streeter 302).

[78] The word Mark typically uses for “many” is polus (πολύς) and “again” is ide (ἴδε).

[79] The Greek words are ekthambeisthai (ἐκθαμβεῖσθαι), suzhteite (συζητεῖτε), suntreko (συντρέχω), peri (περὶ), aspazomai (ἀσπάζομαι), euthus (εὐθύς), and eperotao (ἐπερωτάω), respectively.

[80] Mark 9.17c, 18b, 21, 23-25a, 25c, 26b-27.

[81] In the eight cases Mark uses efn (ἔφη), Matthew uses eipen four times (εἶπεν) and legei one time (λέγει) while Luke uses eipen five times. In the 14 times Matthew uses efn, Mark uses legousa once (λέγουσα), eipen once (ειπεν), legei three times (λεγει), apekrithn once (“answer”; ἀπεκρίθη), legontos once (λέγοντος), and elegen once (ἔλεγεν). In the two times Matthew uses the word fhsin (φησίν), only one verse in Mark has an equivalent and it uses the word legousa. Luke uses fhsin once and efn seven times, and out of those, Matthew and Luke use the same four verses but Matthew instead use legei twice (λέγει), “deny” arnhsato once (ἠρνήσατο), and efn once (ἔφη), while Mark uses the term “started again telling” nrkato palin legein once (ἤρξατο πάλιν λέγειν), hrneito once (ἠρνεῖτο), eipen once, and legei once.

[82] Unlike the Gospel of John, the Synoptic gospels instead use the Passover meal as the Last Supper, putting the crucifixion shortly after Passover, while the Gospel of John uses the Passover death to emphasize Jesus’ role as the “Lamb of God,” slaughtered at the same time the lambs were being slaughtered inside the Temple.

[83] Matt. 13.24, 13.47, 25.1; Funk, Five 194, 197, 254

[84] Luke 14.28, 17.7; Funk, Five 354, 363

[85] Ehrman 19; Crossan, Who Killed 16; Mack 161; Doherty 196

[86] Peuch 374; Cassels 419-422; Parker 471; Schneemelcher 166

[87] (NJB, Matt. 8.4; Allert 10f). Justin the Martyr quotes from the “Memoirs of the Apostles” and some scholars have identified this with the “Gospel of the Hebrews.” (Lillie 111-134; Burlinghame 278). Jerome identifies the “Gospel of the Twelve” with both the “Gospel of the Hebrews” and the “Gospel of the Nazoraeans.”

[88] The Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles are generally accepted by most scholars to have written by the same person, and are often combined into one title, Luke-Acts, to illustrate its unity (Crossan, Who 18-19). Koester writes that Marcion “published his revised edition of the letters of Paul” including “a purified version of Luke’s Gospel” (Koester, Ancient 36). Mack says Marcion’s canon “contained ten (excised) letters of Paul and one abbreviated Gospel of Luke” (Mack 253). Ehrman writes: “In a manner reminiscent of the later Jefferson Bible, Marcion removed all the passages offensive to his views. In the words of his proto-orthodox opponent, Tertullian, Marcion interpreted his scripture ‘with a pen knife’” (Ehrman, Lost 108). The reason for unifying Luke and Acts is not due to tradition alone, but also on literary grounds: Luke ends by promising the readers an explanation of “what the Father has promised” and this is answered in the beginning of Acts with an explanation that while John baptized with water, the apostles would baptize with the Holy Spirit (NJB, 24.49; 1.4-5). However, despite layers of Jewish-friendly text that has been added on by the author of Luke-Acts, docetic and anti-Jewish themes from an earlier literary stratum can still be identified.

[89] The earlier Marcionite layer in the epistles can be identified by the use of the terms “Christ Jesus,” “God,” and “Spirit,” while the later Old Testament-influenced redaction uses “Jesus Christ,” “Lord,” and “Holy Spirit” (Romans 1.1, 8-13, 18; 2.2-8; 3.5a, 6-8, 22b-26; 4.4-5; 5.1-4, 6-10, 12, 15ac-17a, 18-19; 6.1-13, 15ac, 16-23; 8.19ac-10, 11b, 12ac, 13, 15a, 16-34ac, 37-39; 9.19-20a, 22-23, 30-32; 10.3, 14-15a, 17; 11.6-7a, 28a, 29ac; 12.1-19a, 21; 13.1-8a, 13, 14b; 14.16-17a, 18a; 15.5-6a, 13a, 14-15a, 17-19a, 22-24, 29, 30ac, 31a, 32-33a; 16.1-25ac, 26ac, 27a).

[90] In Luke 4.23, Jesus says, “[s]urely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘[p]hysician, heal yourself! Do here in your hometown what we have heard you did in Capernaum’” but Jesus had not performed any miracles in Capernaum up to that point. And, in fact, the very next thing he does is go to Capernaum and exorcize a demon there (4.33). Although Marcion’s gospel is now lost, Tertullian quotes the introdoductory sentence in his book Against Marcion: “[i]n the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius (for such is Marcion’s proposition) he ‘came down to the Galilean city of Capernaum’” (4.7.1). This is a composite sentence of Luke 3.1a and 4.31, which just so happens to overlap the “physician, heal thyself” narrative. Mark and Matthew agree with this chronology since they also have Jesus beginning his ministry in Capernaum (1.21; 4.13). Considering the first three chapters of Luke, we can see how the gospel is meant as part of a reaction against the Marcionite original, giving Jesus (and Paul) a Jewish pedigree by adding a blood relationship with John the Baptist, two stories of Jesus being taken to the temple in compliance with Jewish law, a genealogy, and another introduction in which Jesus begins his ministry in Nazareth using a quote from Isaiah. The story still ends with an anti-Jewish element that must have come from the Marcionite original: the Nazarenes deny Jesus and, going much further than Mark ever insinuates, “took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him down the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way” (4.30). Ellegård points out that the name Nazareth itself may be a folk etymology connecting Jesus to the nazoraios, a term for Syrian Christians that “may also form a link between Essenes and Christians” (Ellegård 239). The original intent of the story is to show that Jesus’ own people had rejected him. The confusing Deus ex machina resolution can also be explained by the fact that the Marcionites were known to be docetic, a belief that Jesus’ body was only an illusion, that he was a “phantom” (Tertullian, Against Marcion 5.7.5).

[91] Crossan compares the last chapter, in which everything “happens to the general community,” to the opening statement in Acts, where the author claims to have previously described in his first book “all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day where he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen” (Crossan’s italics; Who 205-206). Crossan, however, does not take this contradiction as evidence of conflicting traditions from multiple authors but of a change in emphasis that occurred between the time the same author wrote Luke and Acts. A claim of spiritual descent from Peter and the other disciples is a common element of Presbyter documents like 2 Peter and the final version of the Gospel of John, while Marcionites believed the more direct followers of Jesus misunderstood him and that Paul was the Apostle who brought the true message of Chrestos. So it would make sense that the Road to Emmaus story came from the earlier Gospel of the Lord since it does not involve the main disciples and Acts was added on later by the Presbyter “Luke.”

[92] The German professor Udo Schnelle instead argues in The History and Theology of the New Testament (1998), that “the extensive linguistic and theological agreements and cross-references between the Gospel of Luke and the Acts indicate that both works derive from the same author” (Schnelle 259). However, Acts of the Apostles itself seems to be divided into at least two parts: one in which the disciples make long speeches connecting Jesus to the Old Testament, and the other in which the journeys of Marcion’s hero Paul are the sole focus. It seems very likely that this second part belongs to earlier Marcionite or proto-Marcionite apocrypha and that other sections of the first part come from the Peter-centered church in Antioch. The docetic instances in the Gospel of Luke and the predominant focus on Paul in the second part of Acts are both qualities that make the heritage of Luke-Acts characteristically Marcionite. This framework not only better fits the textual evidence we have in continuity of the canonical Luke but also fits into the model of the epic history being constructed from an earlier fable of tragic romance. Like the author of Matthew, Marcion’s gospel was clearly attempting to tell a story of a romantic hero.

[93] Paul Tobin’s “The Reliance of Luke-Acts on the Writings of Flavius Josephus” describes how both Josephus and “Luke” place undue importance on a census for the revolts in Judea (Antiquities 18:1:1-6, Jewish War 2:8:1; Luke 2.1; Acts 5.37). Josephus mentions three names among many “deceivers” from the time period, Judas the Galilean, Theudas, and an unnamed Egyptian prophet, each of them used by Luke (Antiquities 20.5.1; Acts 5.36-37, 21.38). Josephus mentions the Egyptian prophet leading a group of dissidents to the Mount of Olives in between an account of some sicarri and an account of some other “deceivers” who lead a multitude out into the desert, but these three separate accounts are conflated by “Luke” into a single account of the nameless Egyptian leading sicarri out into the desert. Luke has Judas the Galilean rise up after Theudas which follows Josephus’ sequence of writing but not the correct chronology. Josephus, in his autobiography, also claims to have had arguments with the principle men of Jerusalem when he was 14, similar to how “Luke” writes that Jesus did the same when he was 12 (Life 2).

[94] With the exception of some early fragments of a John-like gospel fragment found in Egypt that have been dated by paleography to between 100 and 160 (Ryland’s Library Papyrus P52).

[95] Miller writes, “[t]he Gospel of Mark is written in a lively and direct story-teller’s style. The Greek prose employed is the informal language of ordinary men and women who made up the common eastern Mediterranean culture of the first century. Instead of the polished style of an accomplished artistic writer, in this gospel we find an intimacy with simplicity of description; a certain harshness and awkwardness in expression; repetition of favored words and constructions; a sketchiness in characterization. These features have led scholars to believe that Mark’s story is still close somehow, both stylistically and historically, to the oral preaching environment” (Miller, Complete 11).

[96] As Crossan says, “[t]hroughout his gospel, and with increasing rather than diminishing emphasis, Mark criticizes the Twelve Apostles, then the special Three who named first among them and given special privileges, and, finally or especially, Peter, who is clearly their leader” (Who 18).

[97] The Epistle of James, for example, says nothing about looking at the martyrdom of Jesus as a source inspiration, but instead reads, “[b]rothers, as an example of patience in the face of suffering, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord” (my italics; 4.10). The Epistle of Jude quotes the now-apocryphal First Book of Enoch, which was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls and was considered canonical to the Ethiopian Church, evidence Ellegård uses to argue that the letters date back to an earlier Essene Church of God (Ellegård 125).

[98] The Greek word archon can mean either a temporal or spiritual power. In Gnosticism, aeons are emanations of God and archons are servants of the Demiurge. The word estaurosan can mean either “staked” or “crucified,” but it should be noted that none of the early epistles mentions a Roman cross. The reference to Deuteronomy about being hung on a tree is a specifically Jewish punishment. Authors who argue that the gospel Jesus is a myth (such as G.R.S. Mead) point to Greek mystery religions in which Dionysus or Bacchus was hung on a tree in the tradition of Middle Eastern fertility gods, as in the case of Freke and Gandy’s The Jesus Mysteries, and to Jewish records in the Toldoth Yeshu and the Talmud which allege that Jesus was a magician who was stoned according to the Law of Moses and hung on a tree about a hundred years before the gospel Jesus would have lived.

[99] There is one exception in 1 Corinthians, in which a vision “received from the Lord” reveals that Jesus participated in a Last Supper, but even that is “on the night he was betrayed.” This is probably an interpolation since the narrative interrupts the flow of a larger point about good table manners (11.17-22). But even an early dating of that phrase does little help historically because it could equally be referring to a figure from the distant past such as the Essene Teacher of Righteousness or Honi the Circle Drawer.

[100] Typically translated as “carpenter,” a tekton was a generic word that could mean “tinker” or “stonemason.”

[101] This ending may have been written by the editor of Secret Mark since the “young man” is probably identical to the “young man” who is resurrected by Jesus and then performed a baptism rite with him (Peter 10.39; Mark 16.5).

[102] The canonical Mark reads, “'To you is granted the secret of the kingdom of God, but to those who are outside everything comes in parables,” but Secret Mark uses the term “mystery,” further associating itself with the Osiris mysteries (NJB, 4.11).

[103] This detail matches the addition of a stipulation on Mark’s teaching on divorce that a man could divorce his wife if she was unfaithful to him (Mark 10.7, Matt. 19.9)

[104] This saying is also found in the Gospel of Thomas (Mark 3.20; Marr. 12.46; Thomas 99).

[105] ‘Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have come not to abolish but to complete them. In truth I tell you, till heaven and earth disappear, not one dot, not one little stroke, is to disappear from the Law until all its purpose is achieved. Therefore, anyone who infringes even one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be considered the least in the kingdom of Heaven; but the person who keeps them and teaches them will be considered great in the kingdom of Heaven. For I tell you, if your uprightness does not surpass that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never get into the kingdom of Heaven” (NJB, Matt. 5.17; Acts 21.21)

[106] Fredriksen writes: “This is a combative gospel, and its main figure, the spokesman for Matthew’s position, is a combative Christ. He constantly tangles with the representatives of ‘official Judaism,’ the scribes and Pharisees, who seem at times almost demonic” (38).

[107] According to The Complete Gospels, “Luke resets Jesus so as to be intelligible to Greco-Roman readers. He sets Jesus’ birth in the context of world history (2:1) and traces his genealogy (3:23-38) all the way to Adam (not simply to the Jewish progenitor Abraham, as in the genealogy offered by Matthew).”

[108] The name may be intended as a reference to Theophilus ben Ananus, high priest in the Second Temple in Jerusalem from 37 to 41, and son of the high priest Annas, to whom Jesus is brought in the Gospel of John (18.12), shortly before being brought to Joseph Caiphas, Theophilus’ brother-in-law.

[109] This strategy, however, contradicts the story of Jesus being born during the reign of Herod the Great, who died almost 10 years before Quirinius was governor (Josephus, Antiquities 17.355, 18.1-2; Matt. 2.22).

[110] Luke 1.36; Ex. 6.20

[111] As Mack notes, “[t]his interlocking of Jesus, John, Jerusalem, the temple, and the epic of Israel as recorded in the scripture was Luke’s way of fitting Mark’s story of Jesus into the great sweep of God’s history that Luke had in mind” (Mack 171).

[112] Marianne Bonz argues that because the Pauline churches were situated at the intersection of the Jewish Diaspora and Greek cultural life, it should come at no surprise that “that Luke-Acts contains many points of contact with the contemporary Latin epic literature that anticipated the ultimate renewal of the mythological Golden Age and celebrated the Roman people as the new elect” (Bonz 94).

[113] Fredriksen observes that “Luke, conscious of standing in an extended tradition, writes like a historian: he has carefully considered the ‘many’ other narratives written about Jesus, and he now intends to supersede them with his own more reliable career of the apostolic church, and especially Paul, of Part 2, the Book of Acts” (Fredriksen 27).

[114] The following verses go on to claim that the disciples were there at Jesus’ baptism when they literally heard a voice from heaven, but this story contradicts Mark’s Gospel, which says that Jesus met Simon after his baptism (1.8, 1.16).

[115] This also designates a more advanced theology as the earliest narratives refer to it as “the Spirit of Christ” or simply “the Spirit.”

[116] The word cephas is a Greek transliteration of the Aramaic word for “rock,” which is also what the Greek name Peter means. However, Galatians uses both names and in different contexts. Peter is an apostle who was given the task of spreading the gospel just as Paul was (2.7), but Cephas was a “pillar” of the church who stayed in Jerusalem (1.18, 2.9). According to Eusebius’ Church History (1.12.2), St. Clement of Alexandria distinguished Peter and Cephas apart from one another. The apocryphal Epistula Apostolorum also lists both names side by side (Ep. Ap. 1.42; Schneemelcher 252). But regardless of whether they were originally different people, the Gospel of John identifies the two as the same person, and it’s very likely that the author of Luke-Acts did the same.

[117] Helms points out that while Mark uses a garbled combination of Malachi, Exodus, and Isaiah to introduce John the Baptist as the one following the “voice crying aloud in the wilderness,” Luke went back to the Book of Isaiah in the Septuagint and quoted a longer version so as to include a continuation of the verse, concluding with the verse, “and all flesh shall see God’s deliverance” (Isa. 40.5; Luke 3.4-6; Helms 80). The reference to “all flesh” opens the door for Gentiles as well as Jews, providing an even more universalist tone.

[118] This approach is exemplified by the way that James warns Paul about “many thousands of Jews” who “have believed, and all of them are zealous for the law.” These “zealots” have informed James that Paul taught Jews who lived with Gentiles not to circumcise their children or live according to their customs (21.20-21). According to some verses in the Pauline epistles, this is exactly what he taught, but Acts has James set up a situation where Paul would pay for some Jewish purification rites at the temple to prove that he still accepted the laws of Moses, during which a riot breaks out when many of the Jews recognize him (Gal. 3.10, 6.12; Acts 21.17).

[119] Examples of these speeches include Jesus teaching Lazarus (31-21), John the Baptist’s testimony about Jesus (3.22-36), Jesus talking with a Samaritan woman (4.1-42), Jesus’ teaching on the Father and the Son (5.16-47), Jesus’ teaching on the Bread of Life (6.25-71), Jesus teaching at the feast (7.1-53), Jesus talking about the validity of his testimony (8.12-58), Jesus teaching about the shepherd and the flock (10.1-42), Jesus predicting his death (12.20-36), and his long speeches on the Father, the Holy Spirit, the vine and branches, and the disciples (14-17).

[120] Fredriksen describes the prologue to John as “the timelessness of the upper realm,” while the prologue to Luke evokes the opposite: “a world of eyewitnesses to past events, chains of transmission, researched narrative—in brief, the horizontal plane of human history that John’s double context devalues” (Fredriksen 27).

[121] Doherty points out how unrealistic the rhetorical narrative is compared to the Synoptics: “The evangelist portrays Jesus as standing up in the marketplace or in a synagogue and simply declaring to all the world the most mystical, pretentious pronouncements about himself. ‘I am the light of the world.’ ‘I am the door of the sheepfold.’ ‘I am the resurrection and the life.’ Is it any wonder the Jews are portrayed as responding so negatively?” (Doherty 131).

[122] In the synoptic gospels, the sword-bearer is not named, a strong indication that Mark’s passion narrative is the earlier version.

[123] The Lancelot-Grail Cycle and Faerie Queene both extremely long works, so I will only be working on a small portion of these texts, specifically Book I for the Faerie Queene.

[124] The tragic poetry of Y Goddodin runs into numerous problems in dating, with some scholars placing it some time soon after the actual battle the poem commemorates, near the year 600, and others dating it as far as the late 1200s.

[125] The Triads, along with similar texts, portray a society of relatively settled kingdoms ruled by kings with many powers, notably the public enforcement of legal obligations.

[126] Patrcik Sim-Williams considers these similarities to be vague, noting that the name Bran (“raven”) is a very common name (57).

[127] In 1849, Lady Charlotte Guest translated the stories in the red book into French and named it Mabinogion, a noun she believed meant “a story for children.” Guest seems to have concluded this from the fact that ‘mab’ was Welsh for ‘boy’ (Gantz 31).

[128] Other scholars have suggested the oral tradition behind the story circulated for around 100 years before it was written down (Ashley 188).

[129] Mike Ashley refers to Historia Regum Brittaniae as a “medieval best-seller” (4). Peter Damian-Grint suggests that the popularity attested by the 215 surviving manuscripts may have been based on the success of scandal, as many of Geoffrey’s near contemporaries attacked the validity of the work (46).

[130] As corroboration, Fletcher cites the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman poet, Wace, who was quoted as saying so much of Arthur was being “turned into fables,” saying, “[n]ot all of them are false and not all true; not all foolishness and not all sense; but the story-tellers have told so much and the writers of fables fabled so much to embellish their tales, that they have made the whole seem fables’” (Fletcher 99-100).

[131] Finke writes that, “Geoffrey slowly draws his readers into his revision of history. Even as he takes stylistic and factual liberties with received materials, Geoffrey remains close enough to his sources, at times even quoting them directly, to convince his audience that nothing really unusual is happening. Chronological markers, which establish a time frame in relation to biblical time, make the text seem, as Susan Schwatz has remarked, ‘steeped in the traditions of Christian historiography’” (Finke 43).

[132] Le Saux and Damian-Grant similarly argue that Wace is a “precursor of the later Arthurian romances,” which gave later Arthurian romance the round table, his well-crafted poetics, and his lively descriptions (Le Saux 101). Catherine Batt and Rosalind Field likewise credit Wace and other vernacular writers from the French and Anglo-Norman courts in the 1100s with shaping Arthur into the king he would be in the French romances (Batt, “Romance” 59).

[133] Although the dates for the romances are earlier than the earliest extent copies of the Mabinogion, Christian themes like that of those found in Chrétien like that of the Holy Grail betray inspiration from earlier Celtic myths, such as the magic cauldrons. Actual dates are not as important as literary dependence, so even if all the Welsh folklore with uncertain dates were conceived and written after the romances, the Welsh stories still provide themes that better reflect the now-lost Celtic Arthur that long preceded the French imagining.

[134] A full, untranslated version of the Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances has been compiled by H. Oskar Sommer in 1911, but a far more popular version, The Lancelot-Grail Reader, has been more recently edited by Norris J. Lacy.

[135] Map was part of the court of Henry II, so it would make sense why he as a folklorist would become associated with Arthur even though was never known to write any works on him (Ashley 357-359).

[136] P. Stirnemann dates the pre-Cycle version of the story between 1215 and 1225, while Kennedy places it around the same time in the early 1200s (Stirnemann 207; Kennedy 274-275). The Rennes Manuscript, which contains a version of the story in which Galahad is foreshadowed as the grail winner but is also missing some of the continuation in Merlin, has been dated to the early 1220s (Kennedy 277).

[137] Hardyment points out that the Duke of Buckingham sued over 60 people, that no explanation was given for Buckingham being in the woods or for why no one was killed, and that the complaint was not registered for over a year (Hardyment 13, 265). She argues that Malory may have raided the abbey to get his possessions back after being falsely imprisoned, noting that no one was killed, that only 40 pounds were stolen, and that no mention of the raid was made in the Register de Cumba (285-287). Citing Malory’s disdain for rape in Morte D’Arthur, Hardyment suggests that Malory may have rescued Joan Smith from an abusive husband, since the law used against him allowed elopement to be considered rape and had only been cited once prior to Malory. There is also no mention of Malory forcing himself on the woman and this accusation did not come until a year later (295-303). Hardyment argues that Malory may have been persecuted for having reformist views (290).

[138] Before the Winchester manuscript was found, it was not known how stylistically dependent Malory had been on the account of the war with Rome in the Alliterative Morte Arthure (Kennedy 27).

[139] The next three books were published in 1596, but Spenser died before finishing the twelve books he had planned.

[140] John Matthews says that each of Arthur’s men “has a striking or unusual epithet, suggesting their unique skill or ability . . . At one time, we may assume, there was a story belonging to each of these individuals. We can only guess at the nature of these but ‘Culhwch and Olwen’ itself gives us a strong impression” (King 33-34).

[141] Roberts notices a similar evolution, saying that “[b]etween the Early and Later Versions of the triads, his companions, his court, his role, were growing in identity so that Arthur’s name and person were a central feature in Welsh story and legend, strong enough to oust other characters from their proper stories, and to attract to himself other narrative traditions . . . The triads, however, sometimes suggest that a negative portrayal was part of the tradition. (81)

[142] Gillian Rogers, Diane Speed, David Griffith, and John Withrington make a similar contrast between the idyllic romance and thematic romance by contasting the “chivalric romance” with the “folk-lore romance”: “The texts grouped together . . . . as chivalric romances share a narrative preoccupation with adventure and a thematic concern with chivalrous conduct. But they show a general tendency for narrative to dominate theme, and for theme to concentrate upon personal behaviour and social interaction rather than that demonstration and analysis of codes which constitutes the art of the roman courtois. The consequent exposure of narrative patterns highlights the extent to which the English romances share the structures, motifs and expressive means of folk-tale. Its narrative circularity, tripartite structures and formulaic characters feature in French romance also, but there such stereotypes are disguised by art and rhetoric. Art is not lacking in the exploitation of folk elements in English romances, from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight where their power to evoke basic human experiences and values provides the foil to an aspiring idealism undermined by human fallibility, to Lybeaus Desconus where characteristic episodes from the career of a folk-hero are given no more than a veneer of chivalry” (Rogers 197).

[143] As Norris Lacy says, “[i]n this romance, traditional chivalric values are supplanted by an ideal of ‘celestial chivalry,’ which is both a religious ideal and an extraordinarily rigorous moral standard that precludes from final success in the Grail quest not only those who have sinned but even those who have ever been tempted to sin” (Lacy, Reader ix).

[144] The equivalent phrase can be found in John Matthew’s edition of Le Morte D’Arthur (Caxton 18.25; Malory, Le Morte 798)

[145] King writes, “[b]y 1485, the historicity of Arthur, or at least of certain aspects of his career, had been opened to challenge. Ranulph Higden, in the fourteenth century, and other medieval historians were troubled by their failure to locate in Continental and Anglo-Saxon historical writings confirmation of Arthur’s overseas and domestic campaigns. Caxton’s ‘Preface’ to the Morte is a document belonging to the debate concerning Arthur’s historicity and his appropriateness as a national figure—even if the views of the ‘Preface’ chiefly derive from a desire to sell the work” (King 117).

[146] Field writes that, “[t]he Queste del Saint Grail is made into his Sixth Tale, which he says is ‘chronicled as one of the truest and holiest in the world’ (1037.8-11). It is also the only source where he relates all the contents in the same order, many times word for word. However he still “changed its mystical and severely ascetic ethos into a more humane spirituality. Among other things, Lancelot becomes a would-be-repentant sinner suffering from instability of purpose” (“Le Morte” 238).

[147] This passage can also be found in John Matthew’s edition of Le Morte D’Arthur (Malory, Le Morte 750; Caxton 18.1).

[148] A clearer version of this passage can be found in John Matthew’s edition (Malory, Le Morte 888; Caxton 21.9).

[149] The equivalent passage can also be found in John Matthew’s edition (Le Morte 741; Caxton 17.19).

[150] The Spenser encyclopedia says that “[i]dentification of Redcrosse with the nation’s patron saint is not a simple theological statement that perfected holiness is sanctity but an affirmation that Redcrosse is England itself in its quest for holiness. That is, Book I is in the technical sense of the word allegorical of England’s return to Christ under Elizabeth and her Protestant church: ‘Saint’ George reminds us that England saw herself as the divinely elected leader of Protestant reform in late sixteenth-century Europe” (Hamilton 260).

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download