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:
“It gives me the greatest pleasure to say, as I do from the bottom of my heart, that never in the history of the country, in any crisis and under any conditions, have our Jewish fellow citizens failed to live up to the highest standards of citizenship and patriotism.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“The technologist was the final guise of the white missionary, industrialization the last gospel of a dying race and living standards a substitute for a purpose in living.”
—Max Frisch (1911–1991)
“The problem is that we attempt to solve the simplest questions cleverly, thereby rendering them unusually complex. One should seek the simple solution.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)