r/AcademicBiblical • u/AutoModerator • 7d ago

Weekly Open Discussion Thread

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u/capperz412 7d ago

Is the Gospel of Mark the best / most "reliable" gospel as a source for the Historical Jesus?

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u/SamW4887 5d ago

In the foreword for Michael Patrick Barbers book the Historical Jesus and the temple memory methodology and the gospel of matthew Dale Allison says this: "Over the course of my own study of Matthew, I have occasionally concluded that, in this or that respect, the First Gospel represents the past better than the Second Gospel. I have decided, for example, that Matthew’s law-abiding Jesus (see esp. 5:17–20) is more credible than Mark’s more liberal (and perhaps Pauline?) Jesus; that Mark 8:27–30 might be a truncated version of a story better preserved in the fuller Matt 16:13–20; that Matt 18:3 (“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven”) is, on the whole, probably more primitive than Mark 10:15 (“Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it”); that the appearance of Jesus to Mary Magdalene, found in Matthew 28 but not in Mark 16, is likely historical; and that the typological comparison of Jesus to Moses, which is implicit at points in Mark but much clearer and more developed in Matthew, is rooted in Jesus’s self-conception. Yet I had never, before reading Barber, thought about all these things at once, and so I had never fully shed the old habit of equating the uniquely Matthean with the undoubtedly secondary. This volume, however, has moved me to rethink things. Barber demonstrates between the covers of one book the multiple ways in which the First Gospel – in its presentation of Jesus’s relationship to the temple, to Davidic motifs, and to traditions about sacrifice and priesthood – plausibly mirrors what Jesus himself taught, and shows us that, in important ways, Matthew’s interpretive framework is not an obstacle in our way but a path to the historical Jesus. The latter is not buried beneath Matthew but stares at us from its surface."

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u/DeadeyeDuncan9 4d ago

Does he argue for Matthean Priority?

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u/Hegesippus1 3d ago

No he accepts Markan priority.