You're welcome. As you posted elsewhere in the last few days, it seems you have BeDuhn's 2013 book (and Roth's 2015 book) -Ben C. Smith wrote: ↑Sat Nov 17, 2018 7:33 am
Thanks for that. There is so much that I agree with in that snippet.
First, let me note that, as I implied in my original statement above, BeDuhn does not, in fact, hold two contrary opinions at once. His approach is cogent and logical. While Klinghardt definitely pegs Marcion's as the first gospel, BeDuhn merely places it (or something like it) before canonical Luke. BeDuhn does not seem to suggest that Marcion's gospel also preceded both Matthew and Mark; he merely (and accurately, so far as it goes) says that Marcion's gospel ought to be considered as another synoptic. I am much more in agreement on this particular point with BeDuhn than with Klinghardt. I am by no means sure that Marcion's gospel precedes Mark, for example, and those two texts may evince the same kind of intertextuality that BeDuhn summarizes in his first paragraph.
Ben C. Smith wrote: ↑Wed Nov 14, 2018 11:50 amThanks for the link. I had some free Amazon points and went ahead and ordered this book, which arrived just today. Now I can compare BeDuhn, Roth, and Klinghardt, for whatever that might be worth.MrMacSon wrote: ↑Sat Nov 10, 2018 1:31 pm
The Oldest Gospel: Klinghardt Edition, Quiet Waters Publications, July 2018, by Matthias Klinghardt (Contributor), Stephen Trobisch (Translator), David Trobisch (Preface)... Klinghardt's 2015 reconstruction is presented here for the first time in an English translation. This gospel is presumed to be older than the canonical Four-Gospel book. https://www.amazon.com/Oldest-Gospel-Kl ... Klinghardt
1 Interestingly, Parker seems to concur with others, such as Vinzent, who are saying there were a at least one step of re-editing of some of the early versions of these gospel in relation to others; & even Klinghardt says that in his paper cited above -Ben C. Smith wrote: ↑Sat Nov 17, 2018 7:33 am Second, it is illuminating, I think, to compare that first paragraph from BeDuhn with a few paragraphs from David Parker which I have quoted on this forum now more than once:
David C. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels, pages 121-122:
... I am proposing a three-dimensional diagram, in which the third dimension represents a series of contacts between texts each of which may have changed since the previous contact. For example, Matthew copies bits out of Mark in reproducing a tradition; then a later copy of Mark is enriched by some of Matthew's alterations1; and next a copy of Matthew (already different from the one we began with) is influenced by something from the also changed Mark. Add in Luke, and oral tradition2, and any other sources3 that might have been available, at any points in the development that you please, and you have a process a good deal less recoverable than any documentary hypothesis. It is not at all the orderly business we had hoped, and looks instead like molecules bouncing around and off each other in bewildering fashion.
It may be that I will be considered to be offering what has been called a complex solution, in distinction to the simple solutions such as those of Streeter and Farrer. Such a solution is presented by Boismard, who discerns over a dozen documents, some existing in earlier and later forms. But there is a major difference. I am not attempting to identify and to name sources or to recover layers. I am suggesting that the evidence is not of a kind to permit one to demonstrate the existence of the many documents posited by such theories. Thus, while Boismard's solution, like Streeter's argument for Proto-Luke, along with other theories, may be close to mine in recognising more than one point of contact between the Gospels, we differ more than we agree.
The same must be said after comparing my suggestion with the Deutero-Markus theory. I agree that the copy of Mark used by Matthew will not have been identical to the copies available to us. I would add that Matthew's copy will have been different also from Mark's autograph (unless he used the autograph, which must be regarded as improbable), and that Luke's copy will have been different again. But Deutero-Mark is a document, an edition. In contrast to that, I am proposing that we should be thinking of a process, and that the solid blocks of the documentary hypotheses prove to be at best soft and crumbling rock, at worst slowly shifting sand. Let us suppose, for example, that somebody who has read newly written Matthew copies Mark from a manuscript already different from the version known to Matthew, and introduces (intentionally or inadvertently) a few Matthaeanisms, and that Luke worked with such a copy. Who is to say that such a thing is impossible? That such confusing things occurred at a later date may be demonstrated from the manuscripts. A manuscript may harmonise a passage in Luke to Matthew; when we look at the Matthaean parallel in that manuscript, we find that it has a quite different form of the text from that taken into the Lukan version. This phenomenon may be found many times in Codex Bezae, one of the most frequently harmonising manuscripts. At its most extreme, we might say that every copying of a Gospel is, in the sense required by source criticism, a separate document, for it will to a greater or lesser extent be different from any other copy.
All the sophistication employed by textual criticism for determining the oldest variants is of little use when the sought-after text is in fact a younger, secondary phenomenon. This insight applies to the other gospels as well: the evidence suggests that these gospels existed in older versions, and that they, too, were edited as they became part of the New Testament. Many of the older variants of these other
gospels also belong to the pre-NT stage.
... distinguishing between two editorial stages of the same text allows us to understand the early history of the textual transmission: taking the revised canonical edition17
17 cf. D. Trobisch, The First Edition of the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
2 oral 'traditions'/ sources are likely to be far less substantive contributions than has been previously asserted
3 other sources such as a proto-corea-Luke, ur-Marcion 'gods.pill' (sic) [I was comment recently that the term - 17th c., I think - was originally god.spell]
- Shelly Matthews' terminology