Jesus said to his disciples: Compare me, tell me whom I am like. Simon Peter said to him: You are like a righteous angel. Matthew said to him: You are like a wise philosopher. Thomas said to him: Master, my mouth is wholly incapable of saying whom you are like. Jesus said: I am not your master, for you have drunk, and have become drunk from the bubbling spring which I have caused to gush forth (?). And he took him, withdrew, (and) spoke to him three words. Now when Thomas came (back) to his companions, they asked him: What did Jesus say to you? Thomas said to them: If I tell you one of the words which he said to me, you will take up stones (and) throw them at me; and a fire will come out of the stones (and) burn you up.
Christ's call - "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!" could (and should) be understood as an invitation: "Come, enter the Kingdom of Heaven! The way to get in is to repent and be changed!"
BTW, some time ago you considered whether Saul/Paul had ever seen Jesus in the flesh. Here's another reference: Acts 16:4 "Indeed, all the Jews know my way of life from my youth up, which was from the beginning among my own nation and at Jerusalem." (This is in his defense speech before Herod Agrippa.) So it seems that although he was born in Tarsus, a Roman city, and thus he was a Roman citizen, he and his family moved to Jerusalem about the time for his Bar Mitzvah at age 12. Then he studied the Torah under Gamaliel (see Acts 5:34-39 - a sympathizer of the disciples) and became a Pharisee. So it seems to me very likely Saul had seen and heard Jesus in Jerusalem, and had been very stirred up by His message.
Sigh. I didn't set out to write so long a comment, but... I did. Again. Sorry, Joseph!
I have already been developing a few new posts regarding what I have termed "the Syndicate of the Freedmen [Libertini]" (Acts 6:9) which will attempt to re-situate the Pauline-friendly gospel tradition around Luke-Acts within the historical shuffle.
What I will say in the comments here, however, is that the argument that the Gospel of Mark is the first or earliest gospel might need to be refined; but on the question of Luke-Acts is one that I fully agree with you: "Luke" pulls (badly) from Mark [and Q/Hebrew Matthew, more below] to craft his own narrative toward his own agenda and ends.
I will argue that it is Matthew's written gospel which predates the production of Mark's.
While I acknowledge that scholars date the *GREEK* translation of Mark as the earliest of the Greek-translated gospels, I also firmly argue that Matthew was not originally in Greek but in Hebrew.
This fact is confirmed by Papias, who makes clear that Matthew wrote everything down, first-hand, in Hebrew, what he personally observed Yehoshua doing and saying. Papias, who received his stewardship/ambassadorial commission from Philip d'Beit-Saida [who himself moved to Hierapolis with his four prophetic daughters in the early 40s or 50s CE], specifically notes that Mark "wrote down everything he could remember from Peter, though he did not always write things down in the correct order." Mark's Greek-translated gospel was secondhand, incomplete [insofar as Papias implies Mark and Peter didn't remember everything], and some of the sequencing of events was incorrect. In the exact same breath, he situated Matthew as closer (in timing and presence), first-hand, and in the language Yehoshua actually spoke.
Among scholars, there has long been a search for the "Q" document that they believe undergirds all of the so-called synoptic gospels. They have never found it and, I suspect, if they continue to look for it in Greek they'll never find it. Because the "Q" source is Matthew's own hand-written, Hebrew-language, logia and chronicle. Scholars often also refer to "the Gospel of the Hebrews" and "the Gospel of the Ebyonim" and the "Gospel of the Netsarim" and many of our earliest sources refer to each of these as semi-synonymous for each other. Irenaeus unintentionally validates this, in making time to call the Ebyonim "heretics", to say that they "only read a version of the Gospel of Matthew" and "Judaize" from that tradition.
So, to me, any assertions on gospel production must first contend with this fact-set from history before offering an alternative ordering - particularly one that favors Greek renderings over Hebrew and even Aramaic ones, ones written in the same western Semitic language groups over those of later Indo-European interpolations.
Lastly, for fun, there is a particularly entertaining apologetic scholar/researcher, Nehemia Gordon, who (as a Karaite, that is a Yahwist who rejected the Oral Law of the Pharisees, as Yehoshua himself did) claims to have found a faithful Hebrew rendering of the Gospel of Matthew that survived outside of the traditional gospel accounts that were preserved by the Roman church. I have included a link below for peer-review. That said, I lean only very lightly on the productions of Dr. Gordon, and only to reiterate what the earliest primary sources already establish.
And, because we're reading these various gospels in their already-Hellenized/colonized forms [Greek language, glossed by Platonic and Aristotelean definitions over western Anatolian ones], we continue to misunderstand what "apocalypse" was, what the "urgency" was, what "sins" and "forgiveness" truly meant when they came out of his mouth, and what the Apostles believed about the Commonwealth of YHWH [which we continue to disastrously translate as "Kingdom of God"].
We cannot hope to understand anything about this incredible figure from history if we refuse to engage with the language he spoke, with definitions that HE meant [not the lenses of tradition we use to read these badly-translated texts], drawn from traditions we absolutely can and must recover from historical sources, toward a hermeneutic end that actually accounts for the fact that the people of Galilea in the first century were NOT morons and rubes, convinced by smoke and mirrors of superstitiously imported Hellenized ideas about the world.
In other words, in order to find "the historical Jesus", we must first abandon the texts devoted to "Christ" as, in my opinion, those are not the same figures and represent entirely alterative interpretations of what happened between ca. 25 (when the Immerser began his Tevilah for Teshuva campaign) and ca. 50 CE (when Paul fully broke from Jerusalem to develop the Cult [Latin "collegia"] of Xristos).
Follow up question. Given all this, would you say modern Christianity primarily emerged out of Paul’s Christ-movement rather than the Jesus you’re trying to recover through Hebrew language and first-century Jewish ways of thinking?
Your generosity in humoring me continues to inspire my gratitude. Here we go again! Haha.
I think you've nailed my "thesis" (if anything I produce approaches enough coherence to be called a thesis) pretty well.
I'll just make one small, pedantic and annoying adjustment: Rabbinical Judaism (and Jewish identity), in my historical recovery, does not exist until ca. 200 CE, with the development and publication of the Mishna in the post-Temple, post-Jerusalem (Capitolina Aelia) era.
In my writings I rely more on the term "Yahwist" to describe the many different expressions of devotion to the hyper-being known as YHWH. During the first century, these Yahwists expressed their devotions in various ways.
Temple Sadducees [who I consider to be false/imposter Tzaddoqiim] were Yahwists, but they were not Jewish.
Qumrani Essenes [ha-Asaya, "the Healers"] were Yahwists, but they were not Jewish.
Alexandrian Therapeutae [again, Greek for "the Healers"] were Yahwists, but they were not Jewish.
Lower-Galilean, Perean, and Nabatean Netsarim [like John the Immerser and Yehoshua the Just One] were Yahwists, but they were not Jewish.
Upper-Galilean Qanayiim ["Zealots"] and their Sikarii [assassin/dagger-men] radicals were Yahwists, but they were not Jewish - ONLY because they were all killed prior to the Mishna and the Talmud.
Diaspora, wealthy, and urban Hillelim "ha-Perushim" [the branded-"Pharisee" party of Beit Hillel] were Yahwists, but not *yet* Jewish. Their opposition in the Sanhedrin, also called Pharisees, Beit Shammai [who held the role of Av Beit Din, "father" of the rabbinical Sanhedrin court], and were tied more closely to the Qanayiim and Sikarii rebels [who revolted in 46 BCE, 6 CE, 45 CE, 48 CE, 66 CE, and 130 CE] than any other group, were also Yahwists. But they didn't live long enough to become Jewish like their Hillelite cousins.
Their Pharisaical traditions [Takkanot/Oral Interpretive Regulations] would later be the primary feeder for the Mishna, the Jerusalem Talmud, and the Babylonian Talmud. And by the time the Johannine texts were being published and circulated (ca. 100-115 CE), the very first canonical New Testament texts began to specifically associate the Hillelites as "Ioudos", a Hellenized/Romanized administrative label for the "ethnos" of subjects from-or-associated-with Yehudah [Judah/Yisra'el].
I say ALL of that to say that one of the biggest obstacles to my achieving clarity on understanding the events of the first century Levant was conflating all of these different Yahwistic traditions, related and intermingling and in discourse as they were, with the only surviving tradition that made it out of the second-century intact: Rabbinical Judaism.
Judaism is a beautiful religion, in almost every modern and historical form that we've seen. The Jewish people are miraculously and blessedly among the last surviving direct inheritors of the older Yahwistic traditions; as such, they hold deep and irreplicable intimacy with these traditions. I would see so many more among their people return to the Covenant of Moshe's Sinai Torah and abandon their ethnostate ambitions, remembering Samuel's lament on behalf of the Guardian, and become once more the people of YHWH, but I will leave that aside.
As such, I use what I believe to be a respectful, more expansive category of "Yahwist/ic" tradition to avoid participation in the long tradition of anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic tropes born from flattened and conflated identities. In this way, I hope the nuance earns me the credibility to say with sincerity and a lack of contradiction, as I believe Yehoshua would have said:
"Long live the people of YHWH. Burn the takkanot of ha-Perushim in the valley of Gehenna. Teshuva B'rit ha-Torah d'Moshe [return/restore the covenantal constitution of Moses]. Onward unto Jubilee."
Thank you again for humoring me, Joe. You're a good dude.
Brilliant analysis connecting textual evidence to socio-economic context. The observation that Jesus becomes progressivly less stern moving from Mark to John likely reflects evolving communty theology as apocalyptic urgency faded. Reminds me of how early Christian texts show similar shifts when the parousia delay became undeniable, commuities had to reconceptualize eschatology to fit lived experience rather than imminent expectation.
If Jesus was in fact the Hebrew God incarnate as most Christians believe... Then didn't we already have a pretty good description of his "personality" in the Torah?
I think this is a credible portrait. By any measure, the historical Jesus must have been a person of deep emotion, both incoming and outgoing.
Thanks!
Check out the Gospel of Thomas, saying #13:
Jesus said to his disciples: Compare me, tell me whom I am like. Simon Peter said to him: You are like a righteous angel. Matthew said to him: You are like a wise philosopher. Thomas said to him: Master, my mouth is wholly incapable of saying whom you are like. Jesus said: I am not your master, for you have drunk, and have become drunk from the bubbling spring which I have caused to gush forth (?). And he took him, withdrew, (and) spoke to him three words. Now when Thomas came (back) to his companions, they asked him: What did Jesus say to you? Thomas said to them: If I tell you one of the words which he said to me, you will take up stones (and) throw them at me; and a fire will come out of the stones (and) burn you up.
Interesting! I honestly didn’t give Thomas any consideration while writing this. Thanks for sharing.
Christ's call - "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!" could (and should) be understood as an invitation: "Come, enter the Kingdom of Heaven! The way to get in is to repent and be changed!"
BTW, some time ago you considered whether Saul/Paul had ever seen Jesus in the flesh. Here's another reference: Acts 16:4 "Indeed, all the Jews know my way of life from my youth up, which was from the beginning among my own nation and at Jerusalem." (This is in his defense speech before Herod Agrippa.) So it seems that although he was born in Tarsus, a Roman city, and thus he was a Roman citizen, he and his family moved to Jerusalem about the time for his Bar Mitzvah at age 12. Then he studied the Torah under Gamaliel (see Acts 5:34-39 - a sympathizer of the disciples) and became a Pharisee. So it seems to me very likely Saul had seen and heard Jesus in Jerusalem, and had been very stirred up by His message.
Sigh. I didn't set out to write so long a comment, but... I did. Again. Sorry, Joseph!
I have already been developing a few new posts regarding what I have termed "the Syndicate of the Freedmen [Libertini]" (Acts 6:9) which will attempt to re-situate the Pauline-friendly gospel tradition around Luke-Acts within the historical shuffle.
What I will say in the comments here, however, is that the argument that the Gospel of Mark is the first or earliest gospel might need to be refined; but on the question of Luke-Acts is one that I fully agree with you: "Luke" pulls (badly) from Mark [and Q/Hebrew Matthew, more below] to craft his own narrative toward his own agenda and ends.
I will argue that it is Matthew's written gospel which predates the production of Mark's.
While I acknowledge that scholars date the *GREEK* translation of Mark as the earliest of the Greek-translated gospels, I also firmly argue that Matthew was not originally in Greek but in Hebrew.
This fact is confirmed by Papias, who makes clear that Matthew wrote everything down, first-hand, in Hebrew, what he personally observed Yehoshua doing and saying. Papias, who received his stewardship/ambassadorial commission from Philip d'Beit-Saida [who himself moved to Hierapolis with his four prophetic daughters in the early 40s or 50s CE], specifically notes that Mark "wrote down everything he could remember from Peter, though he did not always write things down in the correct order." Mark's Greek-translated gospel was secondhand, incomplete [insofar as Papias implies Mark and Peter didn't remember everything], and some of the sequencing of events was incorrect. In the exact same breath, he situated Matthew as closer (in timing and presence), first-hand, and in the language Yehoshua actually spoke.
Among scholars, there has long been a search for the "Q" document that they believe undergirds all of the so-called synoptic gospels. They have never found it and, I suspect, if they continue to look for it in Greek they'll never find it. Because the "Q" source is Matthew's own hand-written, Hebrew-language, logia and chronicle. Scholars often also refer to "the Gospel of the Hebrews" and "the Gospel of the Ebyonim" and the "Gospel of the Netsarim" and many of our earliest sources refer to each of these as semi-synonymous for each other. Irenaeus unintentionally validates this, in making time to call the Ebyonim "heretics", to say that they "only read a version of the Gospel of Matthew" and "Judaize" from that tradition.
So, to me, any assertions on gospel production must first contend with this fact-set from history before offering an alternative ordering - particularly one that favors Greek renderings over Hebrew and even Aramaic ones, ones written in the same western Semitic language groups over those of later Indo-European interpolations.
Lastly, for fun, there is a particularly entertaining apologetic scholar/researcher, Nehemia Gordon, who (as a Karaite, that is a Yahwist who rejected the Oral Law of the Pharisees, as Yehoshua himself did) claims to have found a faithful Hebrew rendering of the Gospel of Matthew that survived outside of the traditional gospel accounts that were preserved by the Roman church. I have included a link below for peer-review. That said, I lean only very lightly on the productions of Dr. Gordon, and only to reiterate what the earliest primary sources already establish.
https://store.nehemiaswall.com/products/the-hebrew-gospel-of-matthew-by-george-howard
And, because we're reading these various gospels in their already-Hellenized/colonized forms [Greek language, glossed by Platonic and Aristotelean definitions over western Anatolian ones], we continue to misunderstand what "apocalypse" was, what the "urgency" was, what "sins" and "forgiveness" truly meant when they came out of his mouth, and what the Apostles believed about the Commonwealth of YHWH [which we continue to disastrously translate as "Kingdom of God"].
We cannot hope to understand anything about this incredible figure from history if we refuse to engage with the language he spoke, with definitions that HE meant [not the lenses of tradition we use to read these badly-translated texts], drawn from traditions we absolutely can and must recover from historical sources, toward a hermeneutic end that actually accounts for the fact that the people of Galilea in the first century were NOT morons and rubes, convinced by smoke and mirrors of superstitiously imported Hellenized ideas about the world.
In other words, in order to find "the historical Jesus", we must first abandon the texts devoted to "Christ" as, in my opinion, those are not the same figures and represent entirely alterative interpretations of what happened between ca. 25 (when the Immerser began his Tevilah for Teshuva campaign) and ca. 50 CE (when Paul fully broke from Jerusalem to develop the Cult [Latin "collegia"] of Xristos).
I love your responses. Deeply fascinating.
Follow up question. Given all this, would you say modern Christianity primarily emerged out of Paul’s Christ-movement rather than the Jesus you’re trying to recover through Hebrew language and first-century Jewish ways of thinking?
Your generosity in humoring me continues to inspire my gratitude. Here we go again! Haha.
I think you've nailed my "thesis" (if anything I produce approaches enough coherence to be called a thesis) pretty well.
I'll just make one small, pedantic and annoying adjustment: Rabbinical Judaism (and Jewish identity), in my historical recovery, does not exist until ca. 200 CE, with the development and publication of the Mishna in the post-Temple, post-Jerusalem (Capitolina Aelia) era.
In my writings I rely more on the term "Yahwist" to describe the many different expressions of devotion to the hyper-being known as YHWH. During the first century, these Yahwists expressed their devotions in various ways.
Temple Sadducees [who I consider to be false/imposter Tzaddoqiim] were Yahwists, but they were not Jewish.
Qumrani Essenes [ha-Asaya, "the Healers"] were Yahwists, but they were not Jewish.
Alexandrian Therapeutae [again, Greek for "the Healers"] were Yahwists, but they were not Jewish.
Lower-Galilean, Perean, and Nabatean Netsarim [like John the Immerser and Yehoshua the Just One] were Yahwists, but they were not Jewish.
Upper-Galilean Qanayiim ["Zealots"] and their Sikarii [assassin/dagger-men] radicals were Yahwists, but they were not Jewish - ONLY because they were all killed prior to the Mishna and the Talmud.
Diaspora, wealthy, and urban Hillelim "ha-Perushim" [the branded-"Pharisee" party of Beit Hillel] were Yahwists, but not *yet* Jewish. Their opposition in the Sanhedrin, also called Pharisees, Beit Shammai [who held the role of Av Beit Din, "father" of the rabbinical Sanhedrin court], and were tied more closely to the Qanayiim and Sikarii rebels [who revolted in 46 BCE, 6 CE, 45 CE, 48 CE, 66 CE, and 130 CE] than any other group, were also Yahwists. But they didn't live long enough to become Jewish like their Hillelite cousins.
Their Pharisaical traditions [Takkanot/Oral Interpretive Regulations] would later be the primary feeder for the Mishna, the Jerusalem Talmud, and the Babylonian Talmud. And by the time the Johannine texts were being published and circulated (ca. 100-115 CE), the very first canonical New Testament texts began to specifically associate the Hillelites as "Ioudos", a Hellenized/Romanized administrative label for the "ethnos" of subjects from-or-associated-with Yehudah [Judah/Yisra'el].
I say ALL of that to say that one of the biggest obstacles to my achieving clarity on understanding the events of the first century Levant was conflating all of these different Yahwistic traditions, related and intermingling and in discourse as they were, with the only surviving tradition that made it out of the second-century intact: Rabbinical Judaism.
Judaism is a beautiful religion, in almost every modern and historical form that we've seen. The Jewish people are miraculously and blessedly among the last surviving direct inheritors of the older Yahwistic traditions; as such, they hold deep and irreplicable intimacy with these traditions. I would see so many more among their people return to the Covenant of Moshe's Sinai Torah and abandon their ethnostate ambitions, remembering Samuel's lament on behalf of the Guardian, and become once more the people of YHWH, but I will leave that aside.
As such, I use what I believe to be a respectful, more expansive category of "Yahwist/ic" tradition to avoid participation in the long tradition of anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic tropes born from flattened and conflated identities. In this way, I hope the nuance earns me the credibility to say with sincerity and a lack of contradiction, as I believe Yehoshua would have said:
"Long live the people of YHWH. Burn the takkanot of ha-Perushim in the valley of Gehenna. Teshuva B'rit ha-Torah d'Moshe [return/restore the covenantal constitution of Moses]. Onward unto Jubilee."
Thank you again for humoring me, Joe. You're a good dude.
Brilliant analysis connecting textual evidence to socio-economic context. The observation that Jesus becomes progressivly less stern moving from Mark to John likely reflects evolving communty theology as apocalyptic urgency faded. Reminds me of how early Christian texts show similar shifts when the parousia delay became undeniable, commuities had to reconceptualize eschatology to fit lived experience rather than imminent expectation.
Thanks!
If Jesus was in fact the Hebrew God incarnate as most Christians believe... Then didn't we already have a pretty good description of his "personality" in the Torah?