In the debate I discussed in my last post, Alex O'Connor raised a common objection to the resurrection accounts in the gospels. Supposedly, the earliest gospel, Mark, has the simplest material on Jesus' resurrection, and each gospel after that gets increasingly advanced in the claims it makes on the subject. See Alex's comments here. He especially discusses an increase in the number of resurrection appearances in each gospel - in the order of Mark, Matthew, Luke, John - though he doesn't limit his development argument to that issue.
There are a lot of problems with that sort of objection. As Jonathan McLatchie mentioned in the debate, the material on the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 predates all of the gospels, yet is more advanced in some ways. I want to add some other points.
There are some significant reasons for dating Mark first and John last. But we don't have much evidence to go by to determine whether Matthew predates or postdates Luke. That substantially lessens the confidence anybody can have in an argument like Alex's.
And as I explained in my last post, Luke and Acts are companion works. What's the significance of looking at something like the number of resurrection appearances in Luke without including Acts if Acts predates John and the two Lukan works reference each other (Luke 1:1 anticipating Acts and Acts 1:1 referring back to Luke, as discussed in my last post)? If Acts is added to Luke, as it should be, then Luke/Acts has more resurrection appearances than John. Even without adding the resurrection appearances of Acts to come up with a total number for Luke/Acts, Acts is relevant in providing some context for Luke. As Acts 1 demonstrates, Luke 24:36-53 is meant to refer to at least two appearances of Jesus, even though they could wrongly be counted as one. And verse 34 refers to an appearance to Peter without narrating it. So, even without counting the number of appearances in Acts, Luke includes more appearances than people often suggest. The gospel of Luke alone has at least as many resurrection appearances as John. (Whether Luke has more depends on how many are in Luke 24:36-53.) Luke/Acts has more than John, even though John probably was written after Luke and Acts were published.
Furthermore, we have to look at more than just the number of resurrection appearances. 1 Corinthians 15:6 has the most advanced material in terms of the number of witnesses to an appearance. Matthew's gospel has the most advanced evidence for the empty tomb. Luke mentions more women at the tomb than any other source, is the only one to narrate an appearance to a non-Christian (Paul in Acts), is the only one to narrate an appearance in which Jesus' body has the sort of glorious form commonly expected of resurrected individuals in ancient Judaism (the appearance to Paul), etc. Though John probably was the last gospel written, he makes a couple of references to Jesus' not being recognized after his resurrection under ordinary circumstances, even after he had begun speaking (20:14-16, 21:4-7). That's something that can be, and has been, used against Christianity. In that sense, John's material is the least advanced. Luke has the men on the road to Emmaus not recognizing Jesus, but Luke explains that "their eyes were prevented from recognizing him" (24:16, 24:31). Should we conclude that Luke was correcting John by suggesting that any failure to recognize Jesus was only because of Divine concealment, so that Luke's gospel must have been written after John? I suspect we'd be hearing that line of reasoning a lot if the situation were reversed, with John referring to Divine concealment while Luke had material like John's. Then we have Luke's reference to "many convincing proofs", "forty days" (Acts 1:3), and James' conversion (1:14), all of which go beyond what John reports. These are just several examples among others that could be cited.
John's material is the most advanced in some ways, such as the length of the appearance narrative in John 21. But Luke/Acts is more advanced overall. And, as I've argued elsewhere, Acts probably was completed no later than the mid 60s. I doubt that Luke/Acts predates Mark, but Luke could easily have been written and published second among the canonical gospels, and it's very likely to have been written before John. It probably was written something like two or three decades before John, for reasons I've discussed elsewhere.
That brings up another problem with arguments like Alex's. The amount of time from one gospel to another is highly unlikely to have been significant on every occasion. I've argued that the similarities among the Synoptics make the most sense if those three gospels were written closer in time rather than further apart. I suspect all three were published within less than a decade. But even if you don't hold a view like that, you have to ask what significance the differences in dating have. If Mark was published something like five or eight years before Matthew, for example, so what? How much evolution is likely to have occurred in that sort of timeframe?
If Mark deliberately left out material he could easily have included (e.g., the 1 Corinthians 15 appearances, the appearance anticipated in Mark 14:28 and 16:7), how is it favorable to arguments like Alex's if Matthew includes much less material than Mark was aware of and chose not to include and did so something like five or eight years after Mark was published? Whatever view a person holds of Mark's ending, we know that more appearances than the ones mentioned in Matthew's gospel were widely known before Mark was published. It's highly unlikely that Mark hadn't heard of that material or rejected all of it. You can't judge Christians' or Mark's view of Jesus' resurrection at the time Mark was published, or their view of resurrection appearances in particular, solely by Mark's gospel. All writers are selective, have certain unspoken assumptions, write with a particular purpose in mind and not another purpose, have a particular audience in mind, and so on. The principle in John 21:25 is applicable to Mark as well.
Alex' argument relies on the assumption that each Gospel was intended to supplant previous versions having both the same audience and approach in mind. This is clearly not the case:
ReplyDelete1. No attempt to round up and replace previous versions was made.
2. While there seems to be material shared among them, each one was clearly unique in its contemporary audience and approach for conveying information about Jesus Christ, including his resurrection accounts. More important than when they were released was to whom they were released and from which Apostolic authority. We could just as rightly name them something like:
The Gospel of Matthew to the Jews,
The Gospel of Peter to The First Greek Mission Churches As Compiled by Mark,
The Gospel of Paul to the Romans As Researched By Luke and Continued in Acts,
The Gospel of John to Everyone to Complement the Other Accounts.
This doesn't match Alex' assumption whatsoever.
Yes, these are all important points showing the poverty of a developmental thesis. Every single such developmental thesis I've ever examined about the gospels falls apart upon examination. The evidence is cherry-picked, stated in a tendentious way, and so forth. The points you make here show that to be the case here. Of course, the issue of the ending of Mark *all by itself* casts a huge question mark over the assertion that Mark is somehow more primitive *because* it doesn't include appearances. The "count the appearances" thing is obvious nonsense, especially since they are *different* appearances. E.g. Matthew has an appearance in Galilee but John has a different appearance in Galilee. Luke has the Emmaus appearance and not the Doubting Thomas appearance, John has Doubting Thomas but not Emmaus. And so forth.
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