NT Pod 95: Interview with Ariel Sabar, Author of Veritas (mp3)
This is the sixth in a series of podcasts on the Gospel of Jesus's Wife. The links to the others are here:
I probably would have forgotten all about it if it were not for one of the journalists covering the Jesus's Wife story seriously wondering if there might be something in it when I told her about it for a laugh. Even so, they wisely did not publish on something so speculative. Andrew Bernhard and I have talked about this occasionally, and after chatting about it this morning, I have decided there is nothing to lose at this point in airing my fun speculation.
So I preface this with the comment: this speculation is probably ridiculous!
But here's the thing. The Urban Dictionary allows people to go in and create words and definitions of the kind of everyday slang that would never find its way into proper dictionaries. Back in September 2012, I was wondering how easy it would be for a forger to find the Coptic phrase tahime ("my wife") on the internet given that it would not have been possible for the forger to find it in Coptic Thomas. So I googled the transliterated tahime and found very little except this, in Urban Dictionary:
She is a girl that is very unique, cool ,calm, and a little bit loud. She has a temper. She is so pretty and very beautiful. She always has little self-confidence because she doesn't feel accepted or pretty. She thinks nobody likes her. That isnt [sic] true. She is loved by everyone! She is a sensitive girl and tries to make everyone happy. She doesn't bitch at people. SHE IS SOOO FUNNY!!! She is true and not fake. She will be your best friend till forever. She sometimes may act a little cocky and nerdy. She is so random at times but it will make you laugh. She loves friends.
"Hey that girl is so Tahime." "You mean she's unique?" "HELL YEAH BRO! "
I wouldn't have given it a second look but for a couple of things. "She is true and not fake" made me wonder, and then there is the author / date stamp:
by goo goo gaa gaa 456 December 07, 2011
The new book is out today, and I strongly encourage you to read it. It's very, very good: Ariel Sabar, Veritas: A Harvard Professor, A Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife (New York: Doubleday, 2020). I have podcasted my thoughts here:
NT Pod 94: Review of Ariel Sabar's Veritas (mp3)Thank you very much. Thank you, everybody. Thank you.
We’ve had a tremendous week uniting the country in our fight against the China virus. I have reminded people of the importance of masks when you can’t socially distance, in particular. A strong message has been sent out to young people to stop going to crowded bars and other crowded places . . . .
. . . .And I said, “There’s nothing more important in our country than keeping our people safe, whether that’s from the China virus or the radical-left mob that you see in Portland” — where I want to thank Homeland Security and others in law enforcement for doing a fantastic job over the last few days . . . .
. . . . Our goal is to protect our teachers and students from the China virus while ensuring that families with high-risk factors can continue to participate from home. Very important . . . .
. . . . Fortunately, the data shows that children are lower risk from the China virus, very substantially. When children do contact the virus, they often have only very mild symptoms or none at all, and medical complications are exceedingly rare. Those that do face complications often have underlying medical conditions. Ninety-nine percent of all China virus hospitalizations are adults. And 99.96 percent of all fatalities are adults. That means that children are a tiny percentage — less than 1 percent, and even a small percentage of 1 percent.
In a typical year, the flu results in more deaths of those under 18 in the United States than have been lost thus far to the coronavirus. Many different names. Many, many different names . . . .
. . . . We’re asking Congress to provide $105 billion to schools as part of the next coronavirus relief bill. This funding will support mitigation measures, such as smaller class sizes, more teachers and teacher aides, repurposing spaces to practice social distancing, and crucially, mask-wearing.Trump uses his idiosyncratic, problematic term "China virus" five times in the speech, and I think that each time he is editing "coronavirus" on the hoof, substituting the Trump term for the normal, accepted term. But then he lapses. He uses the correct, universally accepted term "coronavirus", and immediately realizes what he has done, and qualifies with "Many different names. Many, many different names", a standard Trump qualification for when he has veered away from his intended language. From here, he then uses "coronavirus" one more time, in the name of the "coronavirus relief bill", and "China virus" does not recur.
Letter from Edwin A. Abbott to Percival Gardner-Smith dated Jan. 26, 1892. In the letter Abbott enclosed a circular on behalf of his sister, offering a home for young Indian children. Abbott also alludes to a "big book" he has in the press. He writes that the book will be too big to send and requests that Gardner-Smith get a copy from Mudie's.The letter is reproduced in high quality at the above link, in Brown Digital Repository. But the date given, 26 January 1892, is surely wrong. Gardner-Smith was born on 3 February 1888, so he was not even 4 years old at the time. The letter asks Gardner-Smith:
". . . to pigeon-hole the enclosed circular which my sister has recently issued, in case any of your pupils' parents may want a home for young Indian children."
Braeside
Willow Road
Hampstead N.W.
26 Jan. 92
My dear Percival,
After all good wishes, and deprecations [for "depredations"?] of influ-enza — this is to ask you to pigeon-hole the enclosed circular which my sister has recently issued, in case any of your pupils’ parents may want a home for young Indian children. My sister is ?bright or motherly, and my niece is fond of children — almost to excess: so I think the little people wd be happy with them. At the same time she does not limit herself to the very young children, nor to those of Indian parents.
I hope you will hear of me again soon in the literary sphere. I have a big book in the press, so big that I shall not be able to afford to send it to you: but you must get it from Mudie’s. I think it will be interesting; I hope it will not be too irritating.
Yours ever
Edwin A. Abbott
"The Cardinal stayed with Percival for a few days. From this time onwards Percival often wrote to him, and being in Rome in 1887 sent him a painting of his Church — San Pietro in Vellabro, — which Newman always kept in his room and caused to be hung at the foot of his bed when he was dying." (p. 78).So of course Percival would have been interested in Abbott's massive book about Newman.
In sum, it cannot be too strongly emphasized that the only support for this hypothetical Q, which so mysteriously completely vanished and of which no slightest mention is to be found in any of the Fathers, is the assumption that neither Matthew nor Luke could have been satisfied to use the other, had he known it, so meagerly. What that really means is that we could not have so done. It is easy to forget that none of these writings, which we prize so highly today, was "Holy Scripture" or "canonical" to the other writers. Obviously, both Matthew and Luke found Mark of great use, but neither hesitated to alter, shorten, or correct to a degree that a modern critic might weIl hesitate to follow. I cannot avoid the conclusion that these hypothetical sources which no one has ever seen -- be they Q or L or proto-Luke or M -- are simply the consequence of the very modern notion that one holy evangelist could not deliberately have altered or violated the writings of another. Thus these deviations, as notably Luke's flat contradiction of Mark's account of the Passion, with the Galilee chapter deftly avoided and the disciples remaining in Jerusalem awaiting their reception of the Spirit, are commonly explained as due to the utilization of a different source. Sourceomania, if I may so phrase it, is a disease from which many critics have suffered. The point to be remembered is that each of the evangelists was apparently dissatisfied with the work of his predecessors and thought he could do a better job. Else he would not have written. They were not joining with respected colleagues in contributing chapters for a Festschrift (2364; emphasis added).The second use of the term comes when Enslin is discussing Luke 9.51-6 (Samaritan Village):
To me the basic weakness in much source analysis is the assumption of the use of some different source every time one author alters or changes another. Luke corrects Matthew because he thinks Matthew incorrect, not because he chances to find a different version of the event in some source which he chances to have in his hand or in his memory. One of the fatal symptoms of what I have styled "sourceomania" is the inability to recognize the evangelists as authors who had ideas and were ready to express them. They did not conceive themselves as weighted down by the awesome responsibility of preserving unaltered a series of facts for future generations who would study them under the critical magnifying glass as contained in Holy Scripture (2374; emphasis added).Although Enslin himself does not provide a definition of the term, it seems pretty clear that his problem relates to the instinctive appeal to imagined sources in lieu of even considering the possibility that a given feature might come from the author of the work one is reading. If I might attempt a definition, it would go something like this:
The "sourceomania" (the word is taken from Enslin. . .) that has characterized New Testament scholarship for so long has paradoxically minimized the most obvious sources, namely the canonical gospels themselves, with the result that important insight into early Christianity has been neglected.
In sum, it cannot be too strongly emphasized that the only support for this hypothetical Q, which so mysteriously completely vanished and of which no slightest mention is to be found in any of the Fathers, is the assumption that neither Matthew nor Luke could have been satisfied to use the other, had he known it, so meagerly. What that really means is that we could not have so done. It is easy to forget that none of these writings, which we prize so highly today, was "Holy Scripture" or "canonical" to the other writers. Obviously, both Matthew and Luke found Mark of great use, but neither hesitated to alter, shorten, or correct to a degree that a modern critic might weIl hesitate to follow. I cannot avoid the conclusion that these hypothetical sources which no one has ever seen -- be they Q or L or proto-Luke or M -- are simply the consequence of the very modern notion that one holy evangelist could not deliberately have altered or violated the writings of another. Thus these deviations, as notably Luke's flat contradiction of Mark's account of the Passion, with the Galilee chapter deftly avoided and the disciples remaining in Jerusalem awaiting their reception of the Spirit, are commonly explained as due to the utilization of a different source. Sourceomania, if I may so phrase it, is a disease from which many critics have suffered. The point to be remembered is that each of the evangelists was apparently dissatisfied with the work of his predecessors and thought he could do a better job. Else he would not have written. They were not joining with respected colleagues in contributing chapters for a Festschrift.Enslin has a delightful turn of phrase, and I am reminded of Farrer's own "golden eloquence". I particularly like his coining of the term Sourceomania, and I am planning to post on this tomorrow. While he does appear to be aware of Austin Farrer's "On Dispensing with Q" (2365 n. 16, misspelt as "Farrar"), his views were developed long before Farrer's 1955 article, and if there is any influence, it is more likely to have gone in the other direction, from Enslin to Farrer.
Even in the Third Gospel, in spite of the amazingly fortunate accident that a primary source Mark and a probable clue to a second source by virtue of a parallel Matthew are preserved, we quickly reach an impasse in source analysis, as is abundantly evidenced by the total disagreement of scholars, vide the happy proto-Luke, our inability to determine the size or nature of Q, which now waxes, now wanes, and finally the indications that we shall awake some morning to find that it has become orthodox again to believe that Luke actually used Matthew. And this is true simply because Luke was a skilled author, not an adept with scissors and paste pot. If this is the case for the Gospel -- and I do not feel the picture overdrawn -- how much more difficult is it in Acts which stands alone. ("A Notable Contribution to Acts", JBL 52/4 (1933): 230-8 [238]).I rather like "scissors and paste pot". I don't think I've seen that variation before. The thinking does resemble Farrer's. He was endlessly frustrated by what he called "paragraph criticism" and obsession with sources, at the expense of appreciating the the gospels as wholes. Farrer repeatedly delved into the patterning and structure of Mark, and was fascinated with the attempt to understand his mind. Enslin thinks similarly, and says of Mark:
Few books of greater power have ever been penned. On every page the unfettered author is to be seen, not the docile reteller of his teacher's sermons. That it was the death or retirement of Peter which led Mark to this new step in Christian literary activity, while often suggested, appears to me most unlikely. Rather it appears far more probable that it was the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, which convinced our author that the long expected fulfillment of Jesus' predictions of the momentary coming of the kingdom of God was now at hand ("Luke and Matthew", 2363).Enslin's essay goes on to explicate several passages that he sees as troubling for the Q hypothesis, often anticipating arguments that Michael Goulder would use. On Matt. 4.1-11 // Luke 4.1-13 (the Temptation Story), for example, he writes:
The simplest and most natural explanation of the Matthean-Lukan form of the temptation story is that it is secondary to the Markan narrative and a deliberate recasting of it, not a parallel story from another source which Matthew and Luke independently preferred and substituted for the Markan. Attempts to see it as a more primitive story -- or at least as one preserved in a source earlier than Mark, and possibly known to him -- appear to me, as already remarked, too ridiculous to demand serious reply. And by all rules of the critical game, if a fancied Q is to be seen as providing the non-Markan parallels of Matthew and Luke, this ornate and scarcely primitive-sounding story must be seen as one of its incidents ("Luke and Matthew", 2375).I can't help smiling at "too ridiculous to demand serious reply". Perhaps I will write like that when I am eighty.