The Significance of Matthew's Alterations and Edits of Mark

[ARBITER01]

The way I approach it, as I do the entirety of the New Testament along with the Old, is to not assume that any piece of writing isn't subject to the varities of Historiographical considerations. I think it's a mistake to just assume ipso facto that every and all statements in the Gospels have the absolute backing and presumed articulated imprimatur of the Holy Spirit. They might not in a totalistic, mystical fashion.

I would disagree.

We are told to "let the words of Christ dwell richly within thee." I don't think that is by accident, there's a truth to that statement from Paul. Now granted, the accounts vary, but I don't see that as something that needs to be fixed somehow. The Holy Spirit has used various statements from Jesus in the gospel accounts to teach me over the years, so I don't agree with some batch of scholars arguing over who was first.

We are to be led by The Spirit of GOD, and those gospel accounts, as flawed as some people may think they are, will be what He uses to teach us from, as well as all the letters of Paul and the other apostles.

 

[Berserk]

"The way I approach it, as I do the entirety of the New Testament along with the Old, is to not assume that any piece of writing isn't subject to the varieties of Historiographical considerations. I think it's a mistake to just assume ipso facto that every and all statements in the Gospels have the absolute backing and presumed articulated imprimatur of the Holy Spirit. They might not in a totalistic, mystical fashion."

Arbiter01: "I would disagree. We are told to "let the words of Christ dwell richly within thee."

Ah, but what you don't get is the problem of determining how the "words of Christ" cam be distinguished from the words and purposes of the Gospel writers. e. g. Fundamentalists here have repeatedly ducked the crucial challenge to Jesus' reliability in the texts discussed in (5) below.

(5) An astute awareness of how Matthew (10:23 and16:17-28) edits and rewords Mark and the sayings source Q is important for defending Jesus against missionary doctor and NT scholar Albert Schweitzer's famous charge that "the historical Jesus is an offense to modern man." Among other things, Dr. Schweitzer meant that Jesus was a deluded apocalypticist who thought He would come again within the lifetime of His disciples.

(1) " For the Son of Man is to come with His angels in the glory of His Father, and then He will repay everyone for what he has done. Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see "THE SON OF MAN COMING IN HIS KINGDOM (Matthew 16:27-28)."

At first sight, the clear implication seems to be a promise that the Son of Man will return in judgment with His angels within the lifetime of some of His disciples. But that inference is refuted once we study how Matthew has reworded his source Mark here:

"Whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him the Son of Man will also be ashamed when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels." And He said to them, "Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see THE KINGDOM OF GOD COME IN POWER (Mark 8:38-9:1).""

Matthew has changed "the kingdom of God come with power" to the "Son of Man coming in His kingdom." Matthew confuses maters by omitting Mark's transitional phrase, "And He said to them," which changes the subject from the coming Son of Man to the kingdom of God. And when does Mark (or Jesus) think the kingdom of God will come in power? In the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost:
"But you will receive POWER when the Holy Spirit comes upon you (Acts 1:8)."

But Mark may also have the Transfiguration in mind when Moses and Elijah return from the heavenly kingdom of God to be present with a transfigured Jesus on a mountain (Mark 9:2-9). Mark rarely specifies the number of days between events, but here he implies that it took just "6 days" for the kingdom to come in power on the Transfiguration mountain. Thus, there is great spiritual benefit tin knowing that Mark is one of Matthew's key sources.

(2) "When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next; for truly I tell you, you will not pass through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes (Matthew 10:23)."

The urgency of the need to hurry to complete their mission before the coming of the Son of Man prompts many scholars to infer that Jesus expects His Second Coming to occur imminently even before His disciples' mission has taken them through all of Israel's towns. In his book "Why I Am Not a Christian," famed British philosopher, Bertrand Russel cites this verse as a key reason why he rejects the Christian faith. In reply, it is helpful to know that here Matthew is editing the mission instructions in Q preserved also in Luke 10:

"He sent them (His disciples) on ahead in pairs to every town and place WHERE HE WAS ABOUT TO COME (Luke10:1)."

So Jesus was not predicting His imminent 2nd Coming; rather, He was merely sending out His advance parties to alert and prepare towns for His upcoming ministry visits and He wanted His disciples to cover as much ground as possible before He began this extended mission. So the problem vanishes once it is recognized that Matthew again adds a reference to the coming Son of Man where it is missing in his source.


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[2PhiloVoid]

I would disagree.

We are told to "let the words of Christ dwell richly within thee." I don't think that is by accident, there's a truth to that statement from Paul. Now granted, the accounts vary, but I don't see that as something that needs to be fixed somehow. The Holy Spirit has used various statements from Jesus in the gospel accounts to teach me over the years, so I don't agree with some batch of scholars arguing over who was first.

We are to be led by The Spirit of GOD, and those gospel accounts, as flawed as some people may think they are, will be what He uses to teach us from, as well as all the letters of Paul and the other apostles.

That's fine if you want to start your engagement with the Bible from a top down level, if you so feel you must. But I'm simply saying that not only do I not do that, I'm also saying that I've never been able to do that. However, in the long run where faith is concerned, I found that the state of coming to "trust" the Scriptures didn't have to be pushed only through the Fundamentalist epistemological and ontological sieve in or to come to fruition.

So, you can disagree, brother. And that's find by me. Why? Because after I'm done with scrutinizing the Bible from a more existential, unassuming, scholarly level, I also find that it is spiritually meaningful and directs my mind to have faith in Jesus Christ. In fact, I'm sure that in the final analysis, we end up having some things, some doctrines even, quite in common as fellow Christians.

... it's just that we might use different terminology to describe our individual perspectives. And that's ok.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

Arbiter01: "I would disagree. We are told to "let the words of Christ dwell richly within thee."

Ah, but what you don't get is the problem of determining how the "words of Christ" cam be distinguished from the words and purposes of the Gospel writers. e. g. Fundamentalists here have repeatedly ducked the crucial challenge to Jesus' reliability in the texts discussed in (5) below.

(5) An astute awareness of how Matthew (10:23 and16:17-28) edits and rewords Mark and the sayings source Q is important for defending Jesus against missionary doctor and NT scholar Albert Schweitzer's famous charge that "the historical Jesus is an offense to modern man." Among other things, Dr. Schweitzer meant that Jesus was a deluded apocalypticist who thought He would come again within the lifetime of His disciples.

(1) " For the Son of Man is to come with His angels in the glory of His Father, and then He will repay everyone for what he has done. Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see "THE SON OF MAN COMING IN HIS KINGDOM (Matthew 16:27-28)."

At first sight, the clear implication seems to be a promise that the Son of Man will return in judgment with His angels within the lifetime of some of His disciples. But that inference is refuted once we study how Matthew has reworded his source Mark here:

"Whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him the Son of Man will also be ashamed when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels." And He said to them, "Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see THE KINGDOM OF GOD COME IN POWER (Mark 8:38-9:1).""

Matthew has changed "the kingdom of God come with power" to the "Son of Man coming in His kingdom." Matthew confuses maters by omitting Mark's transitional phrase, "And He said to them," which changes the subject from the coming Son of Man to the kingdom of God. And when does Mark (or Jesus) think the kingdom of God will come in power? In the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost:
"But you will receive POWER when the Holy Spirit comes upon you (Acts 1:8)."

But Mark may also have the Transfiguration in mind when Moses and Elijah return from the heavenly kingdom of God to be present with a transfigured Jesus on a mountain (Mark 9:2-9). Mark rarely specifies the number of days between events, but here he implies that it took just "6 days" for the kingdom to come in power on the Transfiguration mountain. Thus, there is great spiritual benefit tin knowing that Mark is one of Matthew's key sources.

(2) "When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next; for truly I tell you, you will not pass through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes (Matthew 10:23)."

The urgency of the need to hurry to complete their mission before the coming of the Son of Man prompts many scholars to infer that Jesus expects His Second Coming to occur imminently even before His disciples' mission has taken them through all of Israel's towns. In his book "Why I Am Not a Christian," famed British philosopher, Bertrand Russel cites this verse as a key reason why he rejects the Christian faith. In reply, it is helpful to know that here Matthew is editing the mission instructions in Q preserved also in Luke 10:

"He sent them (His disciples) on ahead in pairs to every town and place WHERE HE WAS ABOUT TO COME (Luke10:1)."

So Jesus was not predicting His imminent 2nd Coming; rather, He was merely sending out His advance parties to alert and prepare towns for His upcoming ministry visits and He wanted His disciples to cover as much ground as possible before He began this extended mission. So the problem vanishes once it is recognized that Matthew again adds a reference to the coming Son of Man where it is missing in his source.


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That's kind of my point. Where historiography is concerned, I don't think it follows all that easily to say "Matthew confuses matters by omitting Mark's transitional phrase."

To say that Matthew "confuses" matters is to infer that in some way, Mark was "correct." But honestly, we don't know all of the social contexts by which, and within which, the author(s) of Matthew [or Luke] COMPARATIVELY wrote. If we actually knew about these contexts, we could answer more fully the "who, what, where, when, why and how" of their writing.

And if we instead insist that it's not that Mark was "correct" but that he was offering a "harder" reading attuned to implying a specific conceptual framing of the nature of the "coming of the Kingdom," then all we really have is Mark's interpretation of what it is He thought Jesus had said about the coming of the Kingdom.

Maybe Matthew had his reasons for wanting to amend something he saw in Mark's text, assuming he even had Mark's text itself and not some other, proto text, or Q text, etc. For all we know, maybe the later author, or Luke for instance, found out more expansive details from later investigation with more people. It could also be that with the similar data at hand, Matthew interpreted the received date differently and, thus, changed the semantic nuances and rearticulated earlier traditions to clarify.

Truth is, we don't know. Personally, I think the whole Synoptic Problem, along with the Q theorizing, is way too simple of an explanation.

By this I don't mean that I, instead, have the right answer or view or theory of it all: no, I'm going the more skeptical route and say that since none of us has a time-machine by which we can go back and have a face-to-face with the authors and observe their lives and settings, we're just left surmising. And if we're going to surmise, then when doing so, we need to be aware of the possible historiographical contingencies that were surely at work on a broader scale in the life, thought and social setting of each biblical author.

But here we are today, with a number of scholars both Liberal and Conservative just so very sure that "they know" the historical veracity of their respective perspectives.

 

[The Liturgist]

Matthew also uses the sayings source Q and his own unique M material. that is the scholarly consensus.

That’s a bit of an oversimplification.

Also we have no way of knowing the hypothetical Q source, if it even existed, was a sayings document. Indeed I think the idea that it was a sayings document is a bit suspect, considering the only sayings document we have of this sort is the corrupt Gospel of Thomas, which unfortunately is contaminated with Gnostic interpolations.

It is also by the way equally possible that St. Mark found that St. Matthew had not adequetely expressed what our Lord had said with all of its fullness, so He corrected the other way.

However, I find all of these lines of thought disagreeable because they have the effect of lifting up one canonical Gospel at the expense of another. Although the fact that Matthew is annoying you in this manner could perhaps be related to the flaw with the whole idea of the Revised Common Lectionary, in that people are in a position to grow weary of one of the Synoptics after only having the chance to hear one of them for an entire year. The traditional one year lectionaries are much superior, in that they allow for the use of the most appropriate Gospel for each liturgical occasion rather than imposing two arbitrary restrictions, firstly, that only one Synoptic Gospel may be used for the year (which obviously is a rule that has to be broken in Year B when it comes to the Nativity, since only St. Matthew and St. Luke address this), and also that the Gospel of John is to be limited to certain special occasions. Interestingly the Byzantine Rite does something similar, but reads Matthew preferentially except where St. John is called for until mid September, when the “Lukan Jump” occurs, and then Luke is used until Septuagesima, the Sunday of the Publican and Pharisee, at which time Mark is used until Pascha. But this at least keeps everything focused. It is also interesting in that the lectionary overlaps the end of the ecclesiastical year (the Church Year begins on September 1st, which was also the start of the year on the Byzantine Civil Calendar).

 

[ARBITER01]

That's fine if you want to start your engagement with the Bible from a top down level, if you so feel you must. But I'm simply saying that not only do I not do that, I'm also saying that I've never been able to do that. However, in the long run where faith is concerned, I found that the state of coming to "trust" the Scriptures didn't have to be pushed only through the Fundamentalist epistemological and ontological sieve in or to come to fruition.

So, you can disagree, brother. And that's find by me. Why? Because after I'm done with scrutinizing the Bible from a more existential, unassuming, scholarly level, I also find that it is spiritually meaningful and directs my mind to have faith in Jesus Christ. In fact, I'm sure that in the final analysis, we end up having some things, some doctrines even, quite in common as fellow Christians.

... it's just that we might use different terminology to describe our individual perspectives. And that's ok.

I think our ambitions are slightly different.

I don't have a relationship with my bible (like a few people on here), I have one with the risen Son of GOD. I don't try to derive faith from the written word, I am connected to the Living Word, and He gives me all the faith I need to fully understand what is in His word. Everyday.

I don't need scholars and their opinions to know that the ending of Mark is genuine, I have The Holy Spirit inside me witnessing to it. He is the one Who leads me into all truth, not worldly men and their opinions.

Jesus set the standard for all of us who are born again,...

Joh 14:12 Verily, verily, I say unto you, the-one that believeth on me, the works that I do shall that-one do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto the Father.

His works,..... healing, prophesying, etc,... there is no disclaimer here. We are to have His works happening in our lives. It can't just be faith without His works, that is nothing more than religion/churchianity.

While my engagement might be, as you say, from a top down level, I do understand that my faith is to have action involved also. It is not just to be words, it is to be GOD through me, to HIs glory. That is the example that Jesus gave us to emulate.

Anyways, nice chatting with you.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

I think our ambitions are slightly different.

No, I don't think they are.

I don't have a relationship with my bible (like a few people on here), I have one with the risen Son of GOD. I don't try to derive faith from the written word, I am connected to the Living Word, and He gives me all the faith I need to fully understand what is in His word. Everyday.

I also don't have a "relationship" with my bible. I also have a direct worship of Jesus Christ, the Lord, the risen Son of God, Alpha and Omega.

Everyday.

I, like Paul, strive to also have zeal "with knowledge." Everyday.

I don't need scholars and their opinions to know that the ending of Mark is genuine, I have The Holy Spirit inside me witnessing to it. He is the one Who leads me into all truth, not worldly men and their opinions.

And I don't need the ending of Mark to have a genuine faith in Christ or to know that the Holy Spirit is at work in His Church.

Jesus set the standard for all of us who are born again,...

Yes. I don't think anyone is denying that here.

Joh 14:12 Verily, verily, I say unto you, the-one that believeth on me, the works that I do shall that-one do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto the Father.

His works,..... healing, prophesying, etc,... there is no disclaimer here. We are to have His works happening in our lives. It can't just be faith without His works, that is nothing more than religion/churchianity.

Yes. And you and I may interpret the Bible in different ways.

While my engagement might be, as you say, from a top down level, I do understand that my faith is to have action involved also. It is not just to be words, it is to be GOD through me, to HIs glory. That is the example that Jesus gave us to emulate.

And I never implied you didn't have any action in your faith. Obviously, most of us know that faith that is lived comes with actions.

Anyways, nice chatting with you.

Same here.

If you were to understand the minds of folks like Blaise Pascal or Soren Kierkegaard, you might come to see that on some level you and I aren't so different as you might think.

 

[ARBITER01]

If you were to understand the minds of folks like Blaise Pascal or Soren Kierkegaard, you might come to see that on some level you and I aren't so different as you might think.

I didn't mean that to sound as if I was being combative with you or that I was signaling you out in my post. I spent 20 years in the military and sometimes I get very direct in what I'm saying, even when I write. There's others on here that that was more directed at.

To be honest with you, I don't really have a desire to read other people's works unless The Lord has a purpose in it. For instance, I've spent some time here lately, and in the past, looking at one of our Evangelists here in America, Maria Woodworth Etter. Her life and story are a major documentary on how GOD can operate in power through a person. For 45 years she was a walking revival wherever she went. In fact, after reading some of her books GOD had her write about her day to day experiences and some of the newspaper reports about her, I would say that she had a more powerful ministry down here than about anyone else, including our original Apostles. And that is saying a lot.

That's the sort of knowledge that I'm interested in. How did she reach that point, what was GOD doing through her, and how often was GOD doing it, etc. I obviously have a thirst for that sort of truth.

But like anything, we can get too far down the rabbit hole with our thirst for knowledge down here, hence why I was relating about having not just faith, but GOD operating through us with that faith. GOD didn't adopt us into His family for our brains but for our heart, and it is not so hard at all to get completely off track in our ambitions and desires. We have to maintain a solid relationship daily with Jesus to keep ourselves from veering away from Him, which it is easier to do than we might think.

Anyways, later on.

 

[Berserk]

That’s a bit of an oversimplification.

Also we have no way of knowing the hypothetical Q source, if it even existed, was a sayings document. Indeed I think the idea that it was a sayings document is a bit suspect, considering the only sayings document we have of this sort is the corrupt Gospel of Thomas, which unfortunately is contaminated with Gnostic interpolations.

The key points about the Gospel of Thomas are (1) that it is independent of the Synoptic Gospels and sometimes preserves the more original wording of sayings of Jesus and (2) that is supports the existence of Q by attesting the circulation of sayings sources in the NT era.

It is also by the way equally possible that St. Mark found that St. Matthew had not adequetely expressed what our Lord had said with all of its fullness, so He corrected the other way.

In seminary, I wrote a 65 page research paper wanting to prove precisely that possibility and was reluctantly forced to accept tohe ppposote view of M<atthean reliance on Mark. You need to abandon vapid generalizations and actuallly get into the nitty-gritty of comparing these gospels versse by verse. start by responding IN DETAIL to posts #41 and 43. which everyone here is understandably ducking.

However, I find all of these lines of thought disagreeable because they have the effect of lifting up one canonical Gospel at the expense of another.

And that bias blinds you to the obvious implications of a text vs. text comparison.

 

[The Liturgist]

The key points about the Gospel of Thomas are (1) that it is independent of the Synoptic Gospels and sometimes preserves the more original wording of sayings of Jesus and (2) that is supports the existence of Q by attesting the circulation of sayings sources in the NT era.

On point 1, we agree, although my theory is that it is a Coptic translation of an edit by one of the Syrian Gnostic schools (rather than the Roman Gnostics such as the Valentinians and Marcosians) of a legitimate document, possibly written by St. Thomas or one of his disciples, perhaps Saints Addai or Mari, that was used in the early Syriac speaking church before Tatian compiled the Diatessaron (before then himself converting to Gnosticism; also the Diatessaron as reconstructed based on the information we have as to its contents is, like most Gospel harmonies, remarkably dull). It would not be until the Vetus Syra that the Syriac speaking Christians would have the four canonical Gospels, and interestingly, the Vetus Syra, like the Vetus Latina, uses the so-called “Western text type” which is a mystery I wish more Biblical scholars would study. The Western text type, Classical Armenian Studies, Classical Georgian studies, and Ge’ez studies are the areas of Christian documentary research that I feel we need more of, along with the perenniel need for more Syriac studies. In fact if we could just create twenty robotic duplicates of Sebastian Brock that would provide us a wealth of additional information.

Now, in response to your second point, my problem with the Q source hypothesis is the idea that it must be a sayings document. The idea is antiquated, dating from a period (the turn of the previous century) frankly known for some of the great disasters of textual scholarship, for example, the unwarranted preference for the Alexandrian text type and the lack of scholarly research into the tragically obscure Western text type, and also a naive, rationalist view that ignored information that we have that indicates that people in the past, due to the expense of writing materials, were much better at preserving oral traditions. So insofar as I consider Q to be a possibility, I agree with scholars that at most, it is a mix of written and oral sources, although I think it likely that the Q source would actually be a person.

We have moved too quickly to disregard the tradition of the early church that the Gopsel of St. Mark the Evangelist was written based on the recollections of St. Peter, and that of St. Luke the Evangelist on the basis of the recollections of St. Paul and other apostles in his circle, and those of Saints Matthew the Apostle and John the Theologian based on their personal recollections from their own apostolate, combined, in the case of St. John, with the incorporation of some important doctrinal information which the other evangelists had omitted, for example, John 1.

 

[The Liturgist]

In seminary, I wrote a 65 page research paper wanting to prove precisely that possibility and was reluctantly forced to accept tohe ppposote view of M<atthean reliance on Mark. You need to abandon vapid generalizations and actuallly get into the nitty-gritty of comparing these gospels versse by verse. start by responding IN DETAIL to posts #41 and 43. which everyone here is understandably ducking.

I shall write such a response, as you wish, subsequently, because I read in post 43 what you are trying to do and I admire it, but at the same time I also feel thoroughly unthreatened by the likes of Dr. Albert Falls (sorry, a joke about Dr. Shweitzer that will be understood only by those who have been on the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland repeatedly), and more concerned about his modern successors, like Karen King, Marcus Borg, John Shelby Spong (who, like James PIke, really should have been deposed by the Episcopal Church for failing to adhere to church doctrine), Jean Dominic Crossan, and their ilk. Although I take the view of the previous dean of St. Vladimir’s Seminary, Fr. John Behr, that the pursuit of the Historical Jesus is irrelevant, and concerning the authenticity of various newly discovered texts, his attitude is “who knows, and who cares?” This seeming anti-intellectualism however has a motive by it, which Fr. John Behr explained in his lecture “The Heresy of Orthodoxy,” and now he is at Oxford, holding the job previously held by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, memory eternal. What we need to do with the text really is to get people back onto the Byzantine text, since the Alexandrian Text Type is theologically defective in comparison, albeit not heretical, and we need to stress Orthodox doctrine, and we will not get there with Lower Criticism, which tends to move in an opposite direction., or if we allow ourselves to be terrorized by the specter of Dr. Schweitzer, a man whose lack of piety at first glance seems surprising given his line of work, until one notices the rampant heterodox views in the 19th century such as the Rationalism and Pietism that infected German Lutheranism, aided by the forced unification of the Lutheran and Reformed churches in Prussia (which fortunately have since become separated in America, allowing the LCMS, LCC and AALC to practice Lutheran Orthodoxy on a level we haven’t seen since the 17th century.

And that bias blinds you to the obvious implications of a text vs. text comparison.

Not necessarily; it depends on how the text vs. text comparison is done. The differences between the four canonical Gospels are a delight to me, and I also accept the Orthodox tradition concerning their composition, which does take into account why the Gospel of Matthew is not in Aramaic, by the way (and there are two prevailing approaches to this, but the one I particularly like preserves the relationship between the gospels according to St. Matthew and St. Mark, in that these were both intended for a Jewish audience; that of St. Peter being intended for Jews in Rome as opposed to ordinary Romans, who were the responsibility of St. Paul, but the focus of the Apostles operating in the West was clearly on the Hellenic Jews, while it was St. Thomas operating in Syria, Mesopotamia and Kerala, India, on the trade route set up by Alexander the Great, which had a substantial Jewish population which remained until the 20th century (Vidal Sassoon being a Kochin Jew). Both of these Gospels were written by scribes fluent in Greek, St. Mark the Evangelist in the case of the Gospel bearing his name (perhaps he included some of his own memories in it as well, since he did own the Cenacle), and an unknown scribe in the case of St. Matthew, or perhaps St. Matthew himself, there being substantial reason to believe he was literate, and he would have been literate in Greek as a tax collector.

What we must avoid is asserting that any Gospel is a corruption of another pre-existing Gospel made for doctrinal reasons as this is contrary to the basic principles of the Christian faith, as it imputes a sinister motive onto one of the four Evangelists, and this violates what Christ our True God taught us, which is “judge not, lest ye not be judged.” We have no right to ascribe sinister intent or even destructive actions to the Apostles in the absence of incontrovertible evidence, which simply does not exist. Indeed I should like to call your attention to the fact that the Q Source hypothesis is a mere conjecture; it has not earned the right to call itself a Theory, and the same is true for most of the speculations of textual criticism, which is not to say that such hypotheses are devoid of value, but rather, given that these hypotheses have not acquired sufficient evidence in support of them to be considered theories, adjusting them to fit the framework of theological orthodoxy is not only justifiable but desirable, as a means of avoiding the liberal postmodern theology that now dominates the mainline Protestant churches in the US, which were very dear to both you and I.

By the way, I am curious what seminary you went to? It seems to me that the manner in which your paper concerning the possibility of Matthean priority was rejected and you were made to accept the unproven hypothesis of Markan priority was something of a disservice, and reminds me of some of the garbage i saw at my UCC seminary, which I regard as being a thoroughly worthless institution, aside from their library, which was rather good, but not as good as that of Harvard Divinity School.

Indeed among mainline Protestant-affiliated seminaries in the US, there is only one which I have a positive opinion of at present, and that is Nashotah House. But I think it as at best at parity with St. Joseph of Arimathea Seminary (operated by the Anglican Province of Christ the King) and other Continuing Anglican seminaries, and in general I think the best scholarship in a North American seminary occurs at St. Vladimir’s, although St. Tikhon’s is just as good in terms of priestly formation, and Holy Trinity Seminary also does excellent scholarship, particularly in Church Slavonic, and is probably better in terms of formation.

 

[The Liturgist]

Also @Berserk if I were you, given what you are trying to do, I would ask this thread be moved to Traditional Theology, as that is the most calm forum for the discussion of this sort of thing. Recently, people have unfortunately taken over Christian Scriptures, which used to have many discussions on these lines, and used it for making preachy and annoying posts in large quantities based on their own peculiar and often heterodox doctrinal views.

Controversial Christian Theology is only needed if you intend to debate topics such as Universalism or Full Preterism, and I propose that what your thread consists of is mainstream theology, and since you are a Methodist pastor from a liturgical denomination, that facilitates your participation in Traditional Theology, which is a safe space for people like you and me who are liturgical Christians.

And I have agreed to assist you through a careful analysis of your points in post 43, since I do respect your efforts to protect the idea of the Historical Jesus against the idiocies of Dr. Schweitzer and his ilk. Although I am not entirely sure that this kind of textual criticism is going to get us there, but I am willing to engage in it with you seriously. I just felt compelled to express my views on the broader subject. I myself, being a scholar of the liturgy, bask in a field of greater obscurity but relatively little controversy, but among clergy, regardless of denomination, surprisingly few know that much about liturgiology. They might have an excellent grasp of liturgical theology, but not liturgiology, which is to say, the history of the liturgy and what we know about the provenance of each liturgical tradition. And you might well consider my liturgiology to be of little value; one Archbishop of Canterbury around 1911 likened it to stamp collecting, which struck me as rather uncharitable of him, but it takes all sorts and conditions of men I suppose.