Notes on the Gospel Tangents' Podcast "What does Sandra Tanner have to Say about Biblical Forgeries"



Podcast: What Does Sandra Tanner have to Say About Biblical Forgeries


I've been enjoying listening to this part of the interview between Rick C. Bennett and Sandra Tanner. Since my own area includes Gospels and Patristics, I thought I would chime in with few comments and corrections.  For the most part my comments follow the sequence of the discussion, and probably doesn't make much sense if you have'n't listened to the discussion.

(1) The context of Paul’s warning against people preaching other Gospels (Galatians 1) had to do, as becomes clear as one reads on in Galatians, with forcing Gentiles who converted to Christianity to become Jews first, through circumcision and what not. I have never encountered a New Testament scholar who would make the case that Paul was referring to Gnostic Gospels. I can’t say for certain that there is no scholar who does not make that case, but it would certainly be an idiosyncratic one.

(2) When what might be called proto-Gnostics make their appearance in the form of the docetists of the late-first/early second century. They argued not only that Jesus was not raised physically, but that he was not born physically either. The idea was that matter was evil, spirit was good, therefore Jesus would never have submitted himself to the indignity of actually being formed in the unclean womb of a woman, and that he therefore only "seemed" to be doing so (docetist comes from the Greek word meaning “to seem”).

(3) We see this very clearly laid out in the writings of Ignatius, the Bishop of Syria, who perished in the Flavian Amphitheater in Rome somewhere around 108 CE, but in any case before 117.  In the following summary of the Christian faith, Ignatius emphasizes the reality of Jesus's birth, suffering and resurrection by repeating the word TRULY:

  • “Be deaf therefore when anyone speaks to you apart from Jesus Christ, who was of the family of David, and of Mary, who was TRULY born, both ate and drank, was TRULY  persecuted under Pontius Pilate, was TRULY crucified and died in the sight of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth; who also was TRULY raised from the dead, when his Father raised him up, as in the same manner his Father shall raise up in Jesus Christ us who believe in him, without whom we have no true life.” (Trallians 9:1-2)
Ignatius of Antioch was a contemporary and friend of Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna, who in turn was a disciple of John the Apostle.  One of Ignatius's surviving seven letters was written to Polycarp, and another to the Church under his care at Smyrna.  What I have quoted above is not the only thing Ignatius said about the Docetists, and the fact that it was their teaching he had in mind when he repeated the word TRULY in the text above can be clearly seen from a passage in the second chapter of his letter to the Church at Smyrna:
  • "For he suffered all these things for our sakes, in order that we might be saved; and he truly suffered just as he truly raised himself— not, as certain unbelievers say, that he suffered in appearance only (it is they who exist in appearance only!). Indeed, their fate will be determined by what they think: they will become disembodied and demonic."

4) There were of course Jews in the time of Jesus who denied the resurrection. They were called Sadducees. Nevertheless, the Sadducees would have made common cause with the Pharisees and the Christians against the Docetists and their successors the Gnostics because the latter two groups viewed matter, the creation, as evil and very often even held that the God of the Old Testament was either a stupid sub-deity who falsely imagined he was the God of all, or the devil himself.

Of the three major sects of Judaism, Jesus was most affirming of the theology of the Pharisees. In the Gospels we find him opposing the views of the Sadducees and (without naming them) those of the Essenes as well.

(5) It is important to note, as Rick points out, that pretty much all scholars view the Gospel of Judas to be a later production with no connection to the historical Judas. The document is plausibly attributed to a sect called the Cainites by Irenaeus in Against Heresies 1.31 (c. 180). The Cainites were  a turn-everything-on-its-head kind of sect, which purportedly made all the good guys in the Bible bad guys and all the bad guys the real good guys, along the lines that Philip Pullman does in our own day in the His Dark Materials series.

(6) It should be said in terms of competing written Gospels being referred to in the New Testament that in fact the great proliferation of alternative Gospels really only begins with a late second-century figure named Marcus. (Although we do have Basilides the Gnostic being accused of writing a Gospel in the first third of the second century).

 Prior to Marcus, the  various Gnostics and similar groups tended for the most part to feature not alternatives Gospels but rather one of the four canonical Gospels over the others. So, for example, the Marcionites favored an edited version of Luke, the Ebionites, Matthew, the Carpocratians, Mark, and the Valentinians, John. The first Commentary on a New Testament book was by the Valentinian commentator Heracleon in the later second century

(7) Referring to what Rick says about our having no idea who wrote the Gospels. First a clarification. In introducing his discussion he uses the terms forgery and pseudepigrapha. But in the case of the Gospels the most that scholars are claiming is that they were misattributed, after the fact. There is no attempt on the part of the authors of the Gospels themselves to attach their works to any particular author. This is a distinction Bart Ehrman makes in his larger volume on forgery.

(8) To say that the Gospels are anonymous in terms of our having no idea of who wrote them really emerged only after the Reformation as part of the Roman Catholic anti-Protestant apologetic: “You Protestants say that you don’t accept tradition, well if that is so you cannot even have any idea who wrote the Gospels!” The argument itself was fallacious, since the Protestants did not reject tradition as such, only tradition that was given the same authority as Scripture.

(9) The reality is that the Early Church was, so far as I have ever seen, unanimous as to the who wrote Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It was further universally understood that Matthew and John were members of the twelve Apostles and that Mark and Luke were not. Further there are no manuscripts of manuscript fragments of the four Gospels that include any other attribution than the traditional ones.

(10)The fact that the four Gospels did not attempt to establish their authorial bona fides by attributing themselves to prominent early figures in the Jesus movement certainly does nothing to undermine confidence in the traditional attributions. One of the marks of pseudepigraphical compositions is the over-eager attempt on the part of their authors to identify themselves with well-known eye-witnesses, by saying thing like“I, Matthew the Scribe, who sat at the Master’s feet on many cool Judean evenings taking down his sublime utterances word for word as they fell from his blessed lips.” Such introductory formulae scarcely instill confidence of authenticity.

(11) To insist that the author must name him/herself within the text of a work, or that we “know nothing about who wrote it,” unless (s)he does, really runs counter counter to common practice across the board. Philostratus, for example, does not begin his Life of Apollonius of Tyana by saying “I, Philostratus, lover of wisdom, and friend of truth will now embark on a description of a most remarkable figure, bla, bla, bla." And yet nobody says we “know nothing about who wrote” the work.  Philostratus wrote it.

The same is true in the case of the lives of St. Francis of Assisi. In neither of his two Lives does Thomas of Celano start by saying, "I, Thomas, a monk and eye-witness our beloved Francis's holy acts and deeds.” The statement would have been true, but he doesn’t say it. Or again, although Bonaventura provides details of how his biography of Francis came about which gives clues to his identity, he does not name himself. And yet no one doubts that Thomas and Bonaventure were the authors. The reason for this is that in each case the identification of the authors was preserved in the tradition. The same is true of the Gospels. We could perhaps make arguments that the early Church were wrong about their attributions. Richard Baucham in his book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, argues, for example, that the Gospel of John was written not by the Apostle but by another John. But we can’t say we have no idea. What we can say is that at the end of the day, the evidence for the traditional attribution of all four Gospels is actually quite substantial.


(12) Were all four Gospels written after 100 AD?

Actually the towering majority of New Testament scholars no matter how liberal or conservative tend to see all four Gospels being written during the first century. Some earlier some later. In terms of earlier dates, we may think for example of John Shelby Spong’s mentor J. A. T. Robinson, who saw
John as being written much earlier before the other three. Let me offer a few quotes from the more liberal wing of Christian scholars.

(a) Robert Funk: "Scholars...speculate that Mark was composed in the decade of the 70s; Matthew and Luke were probably written a decade or two later The Fourth Gospel probably appeared at the end of the first century." Funk was the founder of the Jesus Seminar.

(b) Marcus Borg: “Thus for our knowledge of Jesus’s life, we are almost completely dependent on the four gospels of the New Testament: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Written in the last third of the first century.” (Marcus Borg)

(c) James M. Robinson: “They were composed in the last thirty years of the first century…but all four Gospels are of course cited here by their traditional names, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.” Robinson was the editor of the Nag Hammadi Library.

(d) Bart Ehrman: "...these Greek compositions [the Gospels] to the end of the first century, with Mark probably being the first Gospel, written around 70 CE or so; Matthew and Luke being a bit later, possibly 80– 85 CE; and John being last, around 90– 95 CE.”

I should say that even these dates are probably too late as a result of the date of Mark being pushed up to around 70 and those written in dependence on him being written later.  But actually the best guide to begin with to get a more accurate idea of the date of Mark is to start with the fact that Luke's book of Acts likely dates to around the time when it ends, namely after Paul had been in Rome for two years (Acts 28:30), and thus before Paul's death in the 60s.  Had Acts been written long after Paul's death, the ending of Acts would make no sense. Once we have that clearly in our mind, we must work backward from there. Before Luke wrote Acts, he wrote the Gospel of Luke, which relied on Mark, the latter of which would have therefore have had to be written even earlier.  This pushes the probable date of Mark back by perhaps 20 years or more from oft-repeated 70 date.

(13) Was F.F. Bruce Bart Ehrman's Teacher?

F. F. Bruce wasn't Bart Ehrman's teacher, Bruce M. Metzger was. Perhaps Sandra misspoke. Bruce's student Ward Gasque was one of my readers on my Masters thesis on the Gospel of Matthew, and I certainly do recommend the book by Bruce that Sandra recommended.

Bennett responded by saying, "Yes, Sandra sent me a message saying she misspoke, and meant Bruce Metzger."

(14) Rick C Bennett asked Sandra whether the Gospel of John could have potentially been a Gnostic gospel. Sandra didn't really respond directly, so he put it to me.  Here is my answer:

There's a long and rather complicated interpretive history on that, but I won't go into it here. Short answer. No. A key feature of Gnosticism was denying the essential goodness of the material world, which included the human body. That's why they denied the incarnation of Jesus and his physical resurrection. But these things were precisely what John defended both in his Gospel and his epistles. Thus John 1:14 stresses how in Jesus "the Word (logos) became flesh and dwelt among us." In the first chapter of his Gospel, John's use of the term "Word" (logos) resonates on the one hand with Genesis 1, where God creates everything by his Word, and secondarily with the Stoic idea of the Spermatic Logos, in its function of "enlightening every person."  So it does, I think echo some extra-Jewish ideas but not the the denial of the goodness of the flesh nor the goodness of creation ("Though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.  He came to that which was his own...." [John 1:10-11]). John's posture on this comes through even more strongly in his Epistles, where he says things like: "Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist (1 John 4:2-3).

Further, in a docetic work like, say, the Gospel of Peter, Jesus is presented as not suffering on the cross at all.  How could he suffer, he's not really there in the flesh? The Jesus of John's Gospel of John does suffer, he gets tired (John 4:6), thirsts (John 19:28), and can be overcome with grief (John 11:35).

Thus even though the forth Gospel was particularly cherished by the Valentinian Gnostics in the second century, the early Orthodox believed it had actually written against an early form of Gnosticism.

Finally there is the colorful story told by John's disciple Polycarp about how John was once in the bath house in Ephesus, but when he saw  that the Gnostic teacher Cerinthus was there too he got up and rushed out, saying basically, "Let's get out of here lest God strike the place and its collapses from His displeasure at the presence of this enemy of the truth." (The story is related by Irenaeus, who had seen Polycarp as a youth, in his Against Heresies 3.3.4).

(15) It is odd how often it is assumed that Jerald and Sandra never examined the claims of critics of the Bible. She notes in the interview that she never learned Greek or Hebrew not pursued an education which would give her particular expertise in those areas. Neither did Jerald. But in fact Jerald did address many of those issues in various books. These would include the early works Archeology and the Mormon Bible (1969) and Mormon Scripture and the Bible (1970). And most particularly Jerald’s A Look at Christianity (1971). In the last mentioned book, Jerald takes on such questions as whether Jesus every really existed. Very likely he wrote this book as an answer to his atheist father George, as was the case as well with his 332, 81/2 x 11 page, Views on Creation, Evolution and Fossil Man (1975). The weakness of both works was the extent to which he had to rely on quoting experts due to his own lack of expertise in those subjects. This was a feature of his earliest works on Mormonism too, but with time, he gained real expertise of his own.

Comments

  1. Ron, I appreciate the writeup. One question I had was this. Sandra mentioned the Tanners were professors at BYU, so stating Jerald's father was an atheist surprised me a bit. Do you have further background on this?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Jerald and Sandra Tanner weren't professors nor was his dad. George Tanner was a meteorologist. The Tanner educators went further back. Two sons of Myron Tanner from two different wives went to Harvard, Jerald's grandfather Caleb Tanner, and his half brother (by a sister wife) Joseph Marion Tanner. Joseph Marion was the father of O. C. Tanner.

      Delete
    2. Do you know who taught at BYU? (I thought Sandra said some Tanner relatives taught at BYU.)

      Delete
    3. I don't remember off hand, I think that Jerald's grandfather Caleb taught there. It seems to me I have seen a picture of early faculty there with him in it.

      Delete
    4. Yeah. You can see the picture here: https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6891dw3

      Caleb is the second from the left in the very back row.

      Just for the record, who's asking?

      Delete
    5. This is Rick. Not sure why name shows up as Unknown.

      Delete
    6. I looked at photo. How is Caleb related to Jerald? Photo saw 1890s. I was under impression it was more recent than that.

      Delete
  2. Caleb was still living when Jerald and Sandra married. I can't tell you more. Maybe Sandra was thinking of the Tanner descendants of Myron Tanner. I don't know that George ever taught at BYU, but its possible. It would have been early on in his life. I (you) would have to ask Sandra. He always held the fact that he attended MIT over Jerald's head (Jerald only had one year of college). But his MIT education was soomething less than what Jerald imagines (I go into it in the book). I don't know whether O.C. Tanner taught at BYU, but I believe he taught at the U of U and Stanford. O. C. wrote of his father Joseph Marion as went on to become “perhaps the most distinguished educator of his place and time, at least one of the most distinguished.” He was the president (or principle) of Brigham Yong College, for awhile. Joseph Marion ultimately ran afoul of the Church by refusing to give up polygamy.

    ReplyDelete
  3. In relation to my comments about the Tanners and BYU, that stems in part from my meeting many of Jerald’s relatives at Caleb Tanner’s funeral in 1960. Caleb was Jerald’s grandfather and had been the Utah State Water Commissioner. Vasco M. Tanner, professor of zoology at BYU, was at the funeral, along with a plethora of other Tanners, all in their white shirts and black suits. It looked like General Conference. Here is a link to an article on Vasco M. Tanner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasco_M._Tanner

    Vasco’s brother Wilmer W. Tanner, was also a professor at BYU and may have been at the funeral. I can’t remember the names of all the Tanners I met at that time.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmer_W._Tanner

    Anyway, Jerald's mother made quite a point of the fact that so many prominent Tanners came to the funeral.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Timeline of David Alexander, Celebrity Ex-Evangelical Convert to Mormonism

Four Key Differences between the Essenes and Jesus

Sex & the Spiritual Teachers: Spiritual Sexual Predators in the SBNR Community