Jewish-Christian Gospels - History of Scholarship in The Jewish-Christian Gospel Problem

History of Scholarship in The Jewish-Christian Gospel Problem

The early church fathers who are our sources for the Jewish-Christian gospels - Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Eusebius, Didymus the Blind, Epiphanius and Jerome - range from the late 2nd to the early 5th centuries. They frequently confuse one gospel with another, and all with a supposed Hebrew version of the gospel of Matthew. Nor were they all aware that there were different Jewish Christian communities with varying theologies, or that some of them (or at least one) was Aramaic-speaking and others knew only Greek.

This confusion has created uncertainty for modern scholars. There is agreement that the fragments cannot be traced back to a Hebrew/Aramaic version or revision of Matthew's gospel, as most of them have no parallel in the canonical gospels. There are good reasons for thinking that there must have been at least two Jewish-Christian gospels, since there are two differing accounts of the baptism and good evidence that some fragments were originally in Aramaic and others in Greek. Most modern scholars have concluded that there was one Jewish-Christian gospel in Aramaic/Hebrew and at least two in Greek. Most have argued that the total number was three (Bauer, Vielhauer and Strecker, Klijn), a minority that there were only two (Schlarb and Luhrmann).

Read more about this topic:  Jewish-Christian Gospels

Famous quotes containing the words history of, history, scholarship, gospel and/or problem:

    Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.
    Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)

    What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
    Thomas Mann (1875–1955)

    The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo- scholarship which actually destroys its object.
    Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

    A good man was ther of religioun,
    And was a poure persoun of a toun,
    But riche he was of hooly thoght and werk.
    He was also a lerned man, a clerk,
    That Cristes gospel trewely wolde preche.
    His parisshens devoutly wolde he teche.
    Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)

    The problem is simply this: no one can feel like CEO of his or her life in the presence of the people who toilet trained her and spanked him when he was naughty. We may have become Masters of the Universe, accustomed to giving life and taking it away, casually ordering people into battle or out of their jobs . . . and yet we may still dirty our diapers at the sound of our mommy’s whimper or our daddy’s growl.
    Frank Pittman (20th century)