History questions not worth their own thread IV

[_random_]

What about Matthew indicates a non-Hebrew origin? Is it just a matter of Marcan priority or what?

 

[Plotinus]

Marcan priority is the main reason. It's virtually certain that Matthew's Gospel is based, in some way, upon Mark's, although there are disagreements about the details. Since both are in Greek, and correspond word-for-word much of the time, there's no way to slip a Hebrew original of Matthew into the story.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Does good history content exist on YouTube? I'm guessing no, but I'd like some confirmation or refutation.

 

[sophie]

Does good history content exist on YouTube? I'm guessing no, but I'd like some confirmation or refutation.

Depends on the kind of depth you're looking for.

CGP Grey has put out some decent basic English/London history, for example:


Link to video.

It's mostly correct, although I take issue with his implication that the 1st Grand Lodge (located in a square adjacent to Drury Lane where I work) is located in The City of London. It is not. It's located near to Covent Garden in Westminster, about 5 blocks away from the edge of The City.

 

[Ajidica]

Does good history content exist on YouTube? I'm guessing no, but I'd like some confirmation or refutation.

I've found some good stuff from the BBC, but most of it is pseudo- or pop- history rubbish.

 

[LightSpectra]

What about Matthew indicates a non-Hebrew origin? Is it just a matter of Marcan priority or what?

Marcan priority is the main reason. It's virtually certain that Matthew's Gospel is based, in some way, upon Mark's, although there are disagreements about the details. Since both are in Greek, and correspond word-for-word much of the time, there's no way to slip a Hebrew original of Matthew into the story.

I'm assuming by "Hebrew", you two mean "Aramaic", since that's usually the question in the air about the original language Matthew was written in.

Anyway, to Plotinus' claim, I have heard a reasonable explanation (albeit with somewhat circumstantial evidence) that says it's plausible that Matthew was originally in Aramaic, and whoever translated it into Koine Greek then inserted large amounts of Mark into it (either to enhance the overall narrative of Matthew, or to establish some sort of intertext continuity). I'm not an expert on Biblical studies so I would be useless in defending that thesis, but it's something to ponder.

 

[Traitorfish]

It's mostly correct, although I take issue with his implication that the 1st Grand Lodge (located in a square adjacent to Drury Lane where I work) is located in The City of London. It is not. It's located near to Covent Garden in Westminster, about 5 blocks away from the edge of The City.

Since when did central London possesses anything like a coherent system of city blocks? Just while we're being picky, ken.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

How exactly does one distinguish between a loosely translating a text from a different language and creating a new text based largely on a text from a different language? Many of the church fathers believed that Matthew was translated from the Gospel of the Hebrews, but they admitted that there were places where one text were different (it starts with Christ's baptism instead of his nativity, it has a longer explanation of why the rich young man won't be entering the kingdom of heaven, ect). It isn't like even the staunchest proponents of Marcan priority deny that Matthew used any other sources. Couldn't our Gospel of Matthew be Gospel Harmony produced from both the Gospel of the Hebrews and the Gospel of Mark?

 

[LightSpectra]

How exactly does one distinguish between a loosely translating a text from a different language and creating a new text based largely on a text from a different language? Many of the church fathers believed that Matthew was translated from the Gospel of the Hebrews, but they admitted that there were places where one text were different (it starts with Christ's baptism instead of his nativity, it has a longer explanation of why the rich young man won't be entering the kingdom of heaven, ect). It isn't like even the staunchest proponents of Marcan priority deny that Matthew used any other sources. Couldn't our Gospel of Matthew be Gospel Harmony produced from both the Gospel of the Hebrews and the Gospel of Mark?

I don't disagree with anything you say. A lot of what people hear about Biblical textual criticism is based off of weirdly restrictive and frequently fallacious reasoning. I'm just responding to the notion that Matthew couldn't have originally been written in Aramaic because our modern, finished Gospel of Matthew has a lot of copy/paste from a different text which was in Greek.

 

[Plotinus]

The Gospel of Matthew as we know it doesn't merely contain a lot of text from Mark. The whole thing is based on Mark, to the extent that some have called it effectively a re-edition of Mark. Something like 60% of Matthew's Gospel is taken from Mark, with over 90% of Mark's Gospel being replicated in Matthew. Matthew is structured the same as Mark, with the material appearing mostly in the same order. Most of the actions attributed to Jesus in Matthew - as opposed to the sayings - are taken from Mark (the only major exceptions being the birth narrative and the resurrection appearances). Where Matthew diverges from Mark's (and Luke's) ordering of the material, it's generally to group different bits of material together thematically. Just look at a parallel synopsis such as this one and you'll see what I mean.

Matthew without Mark would be equivalent to what scholars today standardly call Q plus M (Q being the material that is in Matthew and Luke but not Mark, and M being the material that is unique to Matthew). Q plus M would not be a Gospel, it would be mainly a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, just as Q itself, assuming that it really was a document in its own right, is thought to have been.

Now the bulk of Q+M would be Q - the material that's also found in Luke. Given that much of this material is word-for-word the same, that means that Matthew and Luke both used the same Greek version. Perhaps there was an Aramaic original of Q, but if there was, Matthew didn't use it, because if he translated it into Greek himself on the fly then it would be hard to explain how Luke comes to use the same Greek translation.

That leaves M - the material that's unique to Matthew. I don't see any reason to reject the theory that Matthew found this material in Aramaic and translated it - although I don't see any reason to accept that theory either.

The problem is that, yes, we can say that Matthew found M in Aramaic and added the material he took from Mark and Q to it, thereby composing Matthew's Gospel as we know it. But that isn't a case of an early version of Matthew's Gospel existing in Aramaic and then being expanded, because M, even if it was a single document, was not an early version of Matthew's Gospel in any meaningful sense. It's a case of somebody using a number of different sources to create a completely new text. Which is exactly what scholars think happened. I don't think that this can be reconciled with Irenaeus' account without distorting the meaning of what Irenaeus says beyond recognition.

I'd say personally that I think that Matthew's Gospel is one of the most brilliant books in the Bible. If you study Mark in depth and then turn to Matthew, it's something of a revelation to see how he has re-ordered and re-interpreted his material. It's not a simple mash-up of a couple of earlier texts - it's a very careful and very skillful creation of a new text, with its own themes and concerns and its own elaborate structure, incorporating material from earlier sources. I think that any theory that makes Matthew's Gospel as we have it just a later edition of some earlier, more fragmentary version in Aramaic really undermines the brilliance of the text that we have. I don't see the value of denigrating Matthew just to pander to Irenaeus.

 

[LightSpectra]

I certainly don't think Irenaeus is an infallible source, but again, I believe there's some needless restrictive conclusions in there, Plotinus. Just because the final version of Matthew is mostly made from Mark doesn't necessarily mean that the original document created by the evangelist-called-Matthew, possibly in Aramaic, didn't have its own narrative; maybe it did, and it was abrogated when it was translated into Greek since the translator wanted to save time/effort by simply inserting Mark whenever they were describing the same essential event.

The flaw in the idea that author 'M' inserted 'Q' and some of his own material into Mark is that it presupposes that Q existed at all. There is no evidence for the existence of a Q document. It's hypothesized based on the fact that Matthew and Luke have stuff in common that wasn't also in Mark, potentially meaning they had two sources in common. But that's not necessarily the case. The Augustinian hypothesis supposes that Matthew was first, somebody shortened it to create Mark, and then Mark and Matthew together were used to make Luke. The flaw in this theory is that it then supposes that a more complex Gospel, Matthew, preceded the simpler one Mark, and textual analysts would prefer to believe that the Gospels ascend in complexity over time; but again, that's sort of an assumption that's not entirely proven. There's many other theories that could explain the synoptic similarities as well.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Q plus M would not be a Gospel, it would be mainly a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, just as Q itself, assuming that it really was a document in its own right, is thought to have been.

Er, I do have to ask, why wouldn't that be a Gospel? If we ended up with Q+M, what might it be called?

 

[ParkCungHee]

Also, at what point did African-Americans start filtering into the Democratic Party?

I realized that my mental narrative goes

1860-1919 - Democrats are the party of anti-reconstructionism and segregation
???
1947 - Harry Truman pushes for civil rights plank in the Democratic Platform, even though he knows it would split the party.

Surely there must have been African-American and Afrophilic members of the Democratic party at this time, but what motivated them to enter into the Democratic party?

 

[Plotinus]

Er, I do have to ask, why wouldn't that be a Gospel? If we ended up with Q+M, what might it be called?

Well, sometimes documents like that are called Gospels. The Gospel of Thomas is just a collection of sayings. But more often scholars reserve the term "Gospel" for a text that has a plot, that tells the story of Jesus rather than simply preserving his words.

I certainly don't think Irenaeus is an infallible source, but again, I believe there's some needless restrictive conclusions in there, Plotinus. Just because the final version of Matthew is mostly made from Mark doesn't necessarily mean that the original document created by the evangelist-called-Matthew, possibly in Aramaic, didn't have its own narrative; maybe it did, and it was abrogated when it was translated into Greek since the translator wanted to save time/effort by simply inserting Mark whenever they were describing the same essential event.

This is entirely possible. But then the original document we're talking about wasn't an early version of what we call Matthew's Gospel. It was one of the sources that the author of Matthew's Gospel used when writing his Gospel. This is a very different picture from the simple translation of an Aramaic text into Greek that Irenaeus implies.

The flaw in the idea that author 'M' inserted 'Q' and some of his own material into Mark is that it presupposes that Q existed at all. There is no evidence for the existence of a Q document. It's hypothesized based on the fact that Matthew and Luke have stuff in common that wasn't also in Mark, potentially meaning they had two sources in common. But that's not necessarily the case. The Augustinian hypothesis supposes that Matthew was first, somebody shortened it to create Mark, and then Mark and Matthew together were used to make Luke. The flaw in this theory is that it then supposes that a more complex Gospel, Matthew, preceded the simpler one Mark, and textual analysts would prefer to believe that the Gospels ascend in complexity over time; but again, that's sort of an assumption that's not entirely proven. There's many other theories that could explain the synoptic similarities as well.

[/QUOTE]

Of course it's not necessarily the case. All that we actually have are the Gospels that we have, and anything else, including the existence of possible sources for them, is inference. But that doesn't mean there's no evidence for the existence of Q. You say yourself what the evidence is: the fact that there's a lot of material that's in both Matthew and Luke that isn't in Mark. Yes, you are right that there are alternative explanations for this fact. I think the Augustinian hypothesis - and its modern descendant, the Griesbach hypothesis - is just too implausible. Of course one can't prove that Mark wasn't written by condensing Matthew, but an examination of what this would involve makes it just much less likely than the other way around.

The only real alternative to the Q hypothesis, as far as I know, is the Farrer hypothesis, according to which Matthew was based on Mark and Luke was based on both Mark and Matthew. I.e. Luke got the "Q" material direct from Matthew. This also seems implausible to me, though not as implausible as the Griesbach hypothesis. The main objection, as I see it, is that Matthew is just so much better written than Luke! He organises the material in a more sensible and thematic way, including the "Q" material. It doesn't make sense to me that Luke would take this material from Matthew and muddle it up. Neither does it make sense to me that Luke would take Matthew's nicely constructed, distinct speeches that he attributes to Jesus at key points of his narrative, chop them up, and bung the bits into a long series of disconnected saying stories in the middle of his Gospel.

He might have, of course, but history is a matter not of proving or disproving that something happened but of weighing the evidence and considering what best explains it. I think that the majority of scholars are right to think that the Q hypothesis best explains the text of the Synoptic Gospels. That's not to say it has no problems. It certainly does have problems, not least those texts where Matthew and Luke agree with each other but not with Mark. There are possible solutions to these problems; but even without them, I think the problems raised by the Q hypothesis are a lot less severe than those raised by its rivals.

 

[Cutlass]

The first big migration of African Americans into the Democratic party happened during the Great Depression. While FDR failed to actually put a stop to the Depression, he did manage to mitigate much of its worst aspects, and at least convince most people that the government gave a crap and was trying to help them.

 

[say1988]

Also, at what point did African-Americans start filtering into the Democratic Party?

I realized that my mental narrative goes

1860-1919 - Democrats are the party of anti-reconstructionism and segregation
???
1947 - Harry Truman pushes for civil rights plank in the Democratic Platform, even though he knows it would split the party.

Surely there must have been African-American and Afrophilic members of the Democratic party at this time, but what motivated them to enter into the Democratic party?

My understanding is that it was FDR's New Deal Coalition that brought the black vote into the Democratic Party, which was solidified by backing the civil rights movement.
Prior to the 1930s the black vote leaned Republican.

 

[Louis XXIV]

Yeah, FDR started it, LBJ solidified it, and Richard Nixon cemented it by making sure African Americans didn't want to go back to the Republican party.

 

[Traitorfish]

I think that the significance of the multi-racial and industrial unionism of the CIO needs to be recognised, here. Black workers were entirely capable of acting as political subjects in their own right, without the guiding hand of politicians or "community leaders", and many came the Democrats not just as a nebulous party of progress, but more specifically as a party of labour.


There's an unhelpful tendency to approach the history of African-Americans as the history of the middle-class- of the growth and self-assertion of the black middle class, and the growth and self-assertion of an anti-racist white middle class- which excludes the majority of blacks, and also the majority of their interactions with whites, who were likewise working class, and I think that we should avoid that.

 

[Dachs]

I think that the significance of the multi-racial and industrial unionism of the CIO needs to be recognised, here. Black workers were entirely capable of acting as political subjects in their own right, without the guiding hand of politicians or "community leaders", and many came the Democrats not just as a nebulous party of progress, but more specifically as a party of labour.

The Great Migration is relevant there as well; one can't really talk about blacks being a meaningful component of the industrial labor force until the late 1910s and the 1920s.

 

[LightSpectra]

Yeah, FDR started it, LBJ solidified it, and Richard Nixon cemented it by making sure African Americans didn't want to go back to the Republican party.

Huh? Nixon's desegregation and Equal Rights Amendment were wonderful things.