Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Lost knowledge


I'm going to comment on two related phenomena. 

i) Many OT numbers seem peculiar to modern readers. There are scholarly explanations for these numbers. Some are plausible. In a few cases, these may be transcriptional errors, but that doesn't explain everything. 

Yet I'd like to make a general point: even though these numbers seem peculiar to modern readers, presumably they didn't seem peculiar to the narrator or his intended audience. 

Authors normally write to be understood. The numbers made sense to the intended audience. 

If, therefore, they seem "wrong" to a modern reader, that's not because they are wrong, but because we must be missing something which the first readers implicitly understood. 

ii) Likewise, modern scholars find it challenging to harmonize the genealogies of Christ in Matthew and Luke. However, whatever else we may say about that, presumably the genealogies made sense to Matthew, Luke, and their intended audience. 

To my knowledge, there was never a Matthean faction in the church, over against a Lukan faction. There were never rival Matthean and Lukan churches. The ancient church, from earliest times, always acknowledged both Gospels. Both Gospels were accepted as authentic accounts.

Given all the schisms in the ancient church, if there had been disagreement, we'd expect that to leave traces in the historical record. 

So even though a modern reader finds the relationship between their respective genealogies puzzling, that doesn't mean one or both are wrong. Rather, that means we are missing something that was clear to Matthew, Luke, and the intended audience. A bit of inside knowledge that was lost over time. 

Surely comparisons were made very soon. Quite likely within the lifetimes of Matthew and Luke. The NT church was a pretty close-knit community. They shared the same books. 

It's like having elderly relatives. Sometimes, after they die, you think of questions you wish you had asked them when they were still alive. It's too late. They knowledge they had, which fills in the lacuna, is gone unless that's passed on. As a result, we're sometimes left with puzzles about family history which would be easily resolved if a member of that generation was available to ask. 

1 comment:

  1. Steve Hays wrote:

    "To my knowledge, there was never a Matthean faction in the church, over against a Lukan faction. There were never rival Matthean and Lukan churches. The ancient church, from earliest times, always acknowledged both Gospels. Both Gospels were accepted as authentic accounts."

    Yes, and here's an illustration. Clement of Alexandria lived much of his life in the second century, and he cites earlier church leaders who trace their view of the unity of the gospels back to the first century and refer to the apostle John's approval of the Synoptics.

    Eusebius refers to Quadratus and many others around the time of the apostles distributing copies of the gospels to non-Christians they were evangelizing (Church History, 3:37), which implies that the gospels were widely accepted collectively. Around the middle of the second century, Justin Martyr gives us a description of church services in the city of Rome (First Apology, 67). He mentions that the gospels or the Old Testament scriptures are read during those services. We know, from other parts of his writings, that Justin included both Matthew and Luke among the gospels and considered them harmonious. The regular reading of the gospels along with Old Testament books in church services implies a widespread high view of the gospels collectively. Even heretics widely accepted the gospels. Irenaeus tells us that some heretics rejected some New Testament documents (Against Heresies, 3:11:7), but that most "do certainly recognise the Scriptures; but they pervert the interpretations" (ibid., 3:12:12). Eusebius commented that "every believer" had attempted to harmonize the genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke (Church History, 1:7:1), a comment that assumes the normativity of the acceptance of both gospels and both genealogies. Julius Africanus refers to relatives of Jesus who had verified the accuracy of the genealogies (in Eusebius, Church History, 1:7:14).

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