The Mystery of the Magi by Dwight Longenecker, Post #2

This is the second post of a series on Dwight Longenecker’s The Mystery of the Magi: The Quest to Identify the Three Wise Men.  You can read Post #1 here.  

Still discussing Introduction, Chapters 1 and 2. 

Joseph Comment:

Having spent entirely too much time with ancient texts both in and out of seminary, Fr. Longenecker's critiques and engagement are very refreshing for biblical texts. His analysis of the textual history of Matthew's Gospel is probably the most nuanced one that I've seen since you still see a lot of scholars trying to prop up the Q hypothesis despite its increasingly apparent problems and other scholars make oddly simplistic arguments for Matthean priority. That being said, the use of historical-critical "tools" like the criterion of embarrassment and the criterion of dissimilarity have their own problems, but if he's using them to beat the skeptics at their own game then I think it's a fair maneuver.

Kerstin Comment:

In "King Arthur and Santa" Longenecker writes:

 

The fact of the matter is that facts matter. If an event is historical, it is real, and if it is real, then it affects the rest of history. If an event really happened, we have to pay attention and fit it into our vision of reality. If we regard the Bible stories as fairy tales but then learn that they are historical, we are compelled to reconsider our understanding of history and the other claims of Christianity.

It is a sad fact when one has to state the obvious. The modernists have done their very best to discredit biblical stories they deem to be too fanciful and unbelievable. Unbelievable to whom? I would say it is those who've not only lost faith, but also have lost their sense of enchantment in this utilitarian age. In contrast, during the Middle Ages we still lived in a world where the seen and unseen intertwined and we weren't so worried about utilitarian facts stripped to their bones, but what is morally and spiritually true had equal value as well. So from this perspective the very notion that the Magi story got embellished over time has little or no bearing at all. They didn't change the meaning of the story or the spiritual insights.

 

When I first heard of Q it made no sense to me. A document so obscure - but essential! - that not even the Church Fathers mentioned it. It's something only an academic could make up.

My Reply:

I love the way Longenecker builds his logic. He reminds me of someone. Is it Chesterton? I think I hear echoes of Chesterton in a number of places.

 

Kerstin and Joseph, I agree with both your comments. I don't know if it was in this book or some other place I just saw but I completely support the argument that the Gospels were all written before 70 AD. I think it was in this book. I'll find it. But there was no way they could have written Christ's prediction of the Temple's destruction and yet not mention its fulfillment. I firmly believe in the Church's original dating of the Gospels, which is a lot earlier than current dating, and not this 68-100 AD the modern scholars have come up. I remember having a dispute with someone here on Catholic Thought in one of our Gospel reads over it.

Joseph’s Reply:

Agreed Manny. The assertion that the Gospels had to be written after the destruction of the temple is straight up Modernism. That being said, the traditional dating of St. John's Gospel is pretty late, possibly as late as the 90s. The synoptics though I agree were most likely written in that 50-70 time frame and the possibility of St. Luke having written at the later end of that spectrum is pretty slim, as Fr. Longenecker points out.

My Reply to Joseph:

I'm torn about John's Gospel. He makes no mention of the destruction of the Temple and he might be considered the most anti-Jewish of the four. Why would he not mention it? It would seem he would be the most likely to mention it if he wrote his Gospel after the fact.

Joseph’s Reply:

His is the most unique of all the Gospel accounts. Dr. John Bergsma did a graduate seminar on John which is available on recording where he discusses the dating, among other things. It's worth the listen if you have some time.

My Reply:

It also occurs to me that we assume John (or any of the four) wrote his Gospel in one sitting. It could be that he wrote it in layers over time and the married it all together. There are four distinct parts to John’s Gospel, all of which could have been written separately. There’s the intro in chapter 1, then the book of signs, and I would divide the book of glory into at least two parts, the last supper discourse and the passion events. And even the passion events could be divided into the passion and resurrection. It could be he wrote parts before the temple’s destruction and parts after. He may not have found a reason to bring it up in the parts he wrote after.

 

Bergsma is great. I’ll try to find that.

Casey Comment:

I found the introduction and bits of the opening chapter off-putting for its overemphasis on the skeptic. I feel the author's argument would be better served by offering the positive case of what's to come with a nod to the skeptic along the way. Chapter 2 it's really where we begin.

My Reply to Casey:

I did feel Longenecker was a little disingenuous by creating an equal balance between the skeptic and the "Believer with Blinders." I think he's a little more in tune with the Believer than the skeptic and it seems his primary purpose is to prove the skeptic wrong. That's just an impression on my part, and I could be reading my preference into the book.

Kerstin Reply:

 What I see Fr. Longenecker doing is wading through the morass of modernist interpretation first and pointing out why these are problematic.

Celia Comment:

The pastor of my parish loves to marry events in the Old Testament with those of the New. Identifying fulfillment of Old Testament prophesies in the New Testament is really his thing and now it is mine too. Tell me I have rose colored glasses on, but this sentence had my , well... upset.

 

"The skeptics have two problems with this. First, they don’t believe it is possible for someone to prophesy the future. Secondly, they suspect that the author of Mathew’s gospel invented stories deliberately to fulfill the prophecies."

 

Yes, the author says skeptics, but I never even thought there would BE skeptics.

My Reply to Celia:

Celia, there are lots of skeptics. The skeptics are at least two fold. (1) the atheists who are looking to tear down anything in religion and (2) the what I'll call the "semi-believers" who want to strip away all miracles from the Gospels and have everyone live with a religion that has no supernatural. While they may believe in God, they don't believe in the supernatural. I think both of these fall into Fr. Longenecker's category of "skeptics."

My Reply to Casey:

Casey wrote: "Yes, but it sets the book off immediately into a defensive mode and the rest of the book will now be read as a response to the skeptic.."

It does. I didn't particularly like the approach of finding a middle ground between the two views. On reflection from what you wrote Casey, I think you're right. He should have held knocking down both critics until the end in a summary section. I haven't gotten to the end, but I assume now he will have repeat himself.

My Comment:

I did find this fascinating on Matthew's Gospel:

 

Irenaeus wrote, “Matthew also published a gospel, written among the Hebrews in their own language, while Peter and Paul were preaching the gospel and founding the church in Rome.”1 The historian Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, writing in the early fourth century, records an even earlier witness—Papias, a bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor, who lived just fifty or sixty years after the death of Jesus. Drawing on those who knew the apostles, Papias asserted that “Matthew set in order the logia [sayings] of Jesus in a Hebrew dialect.”

 

I mentioned in comment 5 above having a dispute on the dating of the Gospels. We also disputed on whether Matthew was written first or Mark, which is the consensus opinion today. I held that Matthew was first, which the Catholic Church always held until recently. Now if Matthew's Gospel was originally a "sayings Gospel" in Hebrew and then rewritten to integrate Mark's narrative form, I can see how were would both be right. Longenecker brings up some really solid facts to support that.

My Comment:

Here Longenecker sums up Matthew's Gospel:

 

If the stories and sayings found only in Matthew’s gospel date back to that older, Hebrew redaction of oral traditions, then they are among the earliest recorded and must have come from people who had first-hand knowledge. As the renowned New Testament scholar Raymond Brown—no traditionalist—concluded, “The simplest explanation of the pre-Mathean background of the magi story is that it is factual history passed down from the time of Jesus’ birth in family circles.”

 

It has been my pet theory that all the Gospels based their events on isolated memories written down individually and disseminated. There was no Gospel Q but isolated scrolls that told individual stories. The Gospel writers then collected these stories and interwove them into a narrative. That's why each of the synoptic Gospels have some stories and don't have others. It's not that there was a Q, but a bunch of little Q's in various places.