my challenge to Than Christopoulos and Bram Rawlings on gospel authorship

 Christopoulos and Rawlings uploaded a video promoting traditional gospel authorship here.

My response was:

Barry Jones0 seconds ago

What would be unreasonable about the hypothesis that says Matthew and the author of Acts give inconsistent views about the risen Christ? Acts 1:3 says Jesus appeared to the apostles over a period of 40 days teaching things concerning the kingdom of God. Even assuming "40" is a figure of speech, it is obviously reasonable to assume the author wanted the reader to assume this risen Christ probably took longer than 15 seconds to teach about the kingdom of God. Matthew's version of the words of the risen Christ on the kingdom of God is so short, the entire thing could be uttered in 15 seconds. See Matthew 28:18-20. What exactly is "unreasonable" with the hypothesis that says it is highly unlikely that if Matthew believed the risen Christ's speech lasted over a period of days, or longer than 15 seconds, Matthew would most probably have given us more than a 15-second snippet? After all, wasn't Matthew interested in quoting the historical Jesus copiously? So can't we be reasonable to expect he'd also wish to copiously quote the risen Christ? What's "copious" about a 15-second snippet? Wasn't Matthew interested in the "kingdom of God" sayings of the historical Jesus? So can't we be reasonable to expect him to copiously quote many of the risen Christ's "kingdom of god" sayings? is it anywhere near "likely" that Matthew believed the risen Christ said anything more than what Matthew himself provides in ch. 28? How could you establish this with a skeptic who views the longer speeches of the risen Christ in Luke and John as fictional embellishment? Should I purchase Lydia McGrew's "Eye of the Beholder" and realize that the gospel of John is historically reliable? In other words, would you bid a spiritually dead atheist to have a more correct understanding of the gospel of John than all those spiritually alive Christian scholars Lydia criticizes in that book? Is it anywhere near "likely" that Matthew expected his originally intended readers to harmonize his account with Acts 1?

Screenshot:

Demolishing Triablogue: it's still reasonable to balk at Matthew's writing in the third-person

This is my reply to an article by Jason Engwer of Triablogue entitled

Writing About Yourself In The Third Person

Saturday, June 01, 2013

Critics of the Bible are often ignorant of ancient (and sometimes modern) literary practices that undermine their analysis of the Bible.

Ditto for most Christians.

For example, people will sometimes object to a document like the gospel of Matthew or the gospel of John on the basis that those documents shouldn't speak of Matthew and John in the third person if those men wrote the documents.

Because the third-person shows personal detachment, whereas you expect others to believe Matthew was written by some guy who became "amazingly transformed" by seeing the resurrected Jesus.  Writing in the third person is not an issue unless the author is claimed to have been all happy and excited beyond reason to provide the world his own account of some great miraculous thing.

But as Richard Bauckham explains:
"All of these passages [in the gospel of John] refer to him, of course, in third-person language. This is in accordance with the best and regular historiographic practice. When ancient historians referred to themselves within their narratives as participating in or observing the events they recount, they commonly referred to themselves in the third person by name, as Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Julius Caesar, or Josephus." (Jesus And The Eyewitnesses [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2006], 393)

But

a) the fact that the gospels represent a new type of genre might justify the skeptic to say the authors didn't feel compelled to imitate standard practice, and

b) many 1st century historians use the first person, Philo, Josephus.  Bauckham doesn't say most 1st century authors used the third person, he merely says "best and regular historigraphic practice".

c) doesn't matter if you are correct: using the third-person is unexpected under your other Christian assumptions that Matthew was "amazingly transformed" by seeing the resurrected Christ and therefore all happy and giddy to go around giving his personal testimony.  You can avoid this criticism by denying you think that way about Matthew, but then you raise the probability that Matthew wasn't quite as happy about his own experience of Christ as some Christians are today.

d) Jesus expanded the need for two or three witnesses to important events beyond the judicial context of its first appearance in the OT, (Matthew 18:16), so did Paul (2nd Cor. 13:1, 1st Timothy 5:19), so we are reasonable to expect that if the testmony in Matthew's gospel actually was written out by Matthew, he would find it important to make clear to the reader that he is the one doing the testifying.

Years ago, a skeptic told me that the phrase "I, Paul" in some of the Pauline letters was clear evidence that the documents are forgeries. Paul wouldn't have written that way. (See my response to that skeptic here.)

Probably because known forgeries before and after Paul use the same phrase to make the alleged author unmistakably clear, when this is nothing but pseudepigrapha.  See Daniel 8:15, Revelation, 1st Enoch, Infancy gospel of Thomas, Holy Constitutions, etc.  It could also mean Paul was gullible and thought such self-designation was the style of legitimately divine authors, so he chose to imitate it.

But I wouldn't push the point since Jesus' resurrection is abundantly steamrolled by my own arguments, which often allow early dating and apostolic authorship of everything in the NT.  Such as rendering Jesus resurrection irrelevant given that the OT gives Gentiles nothing to fear from god but physical death, and the NT doctrine of eternal conscious torment directly contradicts the OT.  Always use the earlier standard to test the newer standard.  I already accept that I will endure "annihilation" at death, so I'm not seeing how attacking the gospel puts me in any "danger".  If I'm not in "danger", then whether Jesus rose from the dead need never be anything mroe important than a mere intellectually curiosity for people who just naturally like to debate matters of ancient history.

A lot of critics don't make much effort to consult Biblical commentaries or other relevant scholarship.

I do.  It's why the draft of my book on justifying denial of Matthew's resurrection testimony is more than 700 pages long, I've written at least 50,000 pages of book draft (lost in a recent computer malfunction) not including 20 years of posting arguments on the internet.  It's why I constantly answer Triablogue posts in point by point fashion.  Clearly Romans 1:20 is true and I just don't like the idea of being accountable to a sky-daddy.  Yeah, that's it.  Sort of like the idiot Mormon who pontificates that the Triablogue boys are without excuse for rejecting the Book of Mormon.  Empty pontification is quite easy to engage in, and Paul apparently developed it into a science.

They make judgments based largely on their own ignorant impressions and poor reasoning as they read the Bible or other sources without much assistance. The results are often disastrous.

You could just as easily have been talking about Christians.  Nothing in your article tips the probability scale the least bit in the direction of Matthean authorship of the gospel now bearing his name.

Demolishing Triablogue: Steve Hays wants divinely inspired eyewitnesses to desire to use hearsay sources. Matthew and Mark

This is my reply to an article by Steve Hays of Triablogue entitled

Matthew and Mark

Saturday, April 16, 2016

i) A conventional objection to the traditional authorship of Matthew is that an apostle wouldn't make use of a secondhand source like Mark. There are several problems with that objection:

But none of them are very persuasive, therefore, we skeptics are well within the bounds of reasonableness to say that a person who not only had their own eyewitness memories but was promised by God himself to have special divine ability to recall the facts about Jesus to their own mind, would not very likely depend on a hearsay source to the great extent most Christian scholars believe Matthew depended on Mark:

 26 "But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you. (Jn. 14:26 NAU)

 However, we might expect somebody who has no divine inspiration, to do what most other authors do, and rely on prior sources to help create his story.

ii) According to Acts 12:12, Jerusalem was Mark's home town. So Mark may well have had firsthand knowledge of Jesus whenever Jesus came to Jerusalem.

"May"?  That's how you think you "win" a debate about what happened in history?  Positing mere possibilities?  I'm a really smart skeptic, I recognize that such a debate turns on which explanatory theory about historical events is most "probable".

You are also assuming that the "Mark" of Acts 12:12 is the exact Mark who authored the gospel, when in fact even conservative inerrantist Christian scholars admit Mark's name was very common:

A mediating position is that the book was written by someone named Mark, but not the John Mark of Acts. A major consideration in favor of this claim is that Mark was one of the most common Roman names.

Brooks, J. A. (2001, c1991). Vol. 23: Mark (electronic e.). Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 26). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

iii) Moreover, Mark hits many of the major points in the life of Christ. It's not as if Matthew is going to omit those events. Since these are key events in the life of Christ, we'd expect him to repeat them. And there's a rough chronology to the events, so why would Matthew make a special effort to change the plot?

Matthew could have relied on his own allegedly divinely inspired eyewitness memories to compose the gospel...without changing Mark's plot or relying on Mark at all.  The reliance is reasonably construed to mean the Matthew author did not have his own first hand memories of Jesus' life, which of course would necessarily imply the author wasn't one of the original 12 apostles.

iv) But here's another factor that's overlooked. Mark's mother hosted Christian gatherings in her home.

More objectively, the mother of a guy named Mark did that.  Whether that was the exact "Mark" who allegedly wrote a gospel is far from reasonably secure.

Peter knew the location of her home. Indeed, the slavegirl knew the sound of his voice (v13), so he must have been a frequent visitor.

Only if you are an anti-supernaturalist and deny that God could cause her to recognize Peter's voice.  Wow, I didn't know Steve Hays adopted the fallacy of naturalism.

But then, it must have been known to the other apostles. It stands to reason that Mark had many opportunities to befriend other apostles, as long as he and they were in Jerusalem.

As long as you can make the case for the Mark of Acts 12 being the Mark of the gospel, more reasonable than the other theory that says Mark was too common of a name to pretend that all NT references to it surely refer to one and the same man.

So what if Matthew was one of his informants? If Mark writes about some things he didn't personally observe, what was his source of information? Given his access to some of the apostles, they'd be a prime candidates.

Except that conservative Christian scholars refuse to blindly assume that because a church father said Mark followed Peter around, surely everything in Mark's gospel is rooted in Peter's preaching:

Petrine influence cannot be proved or disproved, but it should be acknowledged as a possibility. Even if that part of the tradition were false, the part about Mark being the author could still be correct.

Brooks, J. A. (2001, c1991). Vol. 23: Mark (electronic e.). Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 27). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers

At the same time, the evangelist had no inhibitions about employing traditional motifs, vocabulary, and style in his own redaction. Consequently, for the most part, one can only speak generally and tentatively when seeking to delineate between tradition and redaction. This conclusion does not dispute Mark’s use of traditional materials or the availability of multiple sources, but it does mean that one cannot precisely reconstruct or always identify the exact content of his source or sources.
...Without doubt a close examination of Mark’s material will show that the evangelist did not simply write his Gospel based on his notes or memory of Peter’s teachings. The amazing similarity in language, style, and form of the Synoptic tradition between the Markan and non-Markan materials of Matthew and Luke (cf. John’s Gospel) hardly suggests that Mark’s materials were shaped by one man, be he either Peter or Mark.

Guelich, R. A. (2002). Vol. 34A: Word Biblical Commentary : Mark 1-8:26. Word Biblical Commentary (Page xxxv, xxvii). Dallas: Word, Incorporated

Hays continues:

Indeed, he may have gotten information from several apostles, but if only two of them wrote Gospels, that's our only basis of comparison. We wouldn't recognize the input from other apostles who never penned Gospels.

 We also don't recognize anything distinctively 'Petrine' about Mark's gospel.  Indeed, one could argue, on the basis of Mark's shorter version of Peter's confession of Christ and Christ's bestowing him with special power (Mark 8:29, crf. Matthew 16:16-19) that the author of that portion of Mark didn't really like Peter.   See my blog piece on that specific synoptic parallel here.  See here for another blog piece on the problems of the early church associating Mark with Peter's preaching.

Suppose he questioned Matthew about Jesus, and incorporated that into his Gospel. Later, Matthew reads Mark and thinks to himself, "Well, as long as Mark is using my material, I might as well write up my own recollections to include additional material that I didn't mention to Mark." Or something like that.

Suppose he didn't. 

Would Matthew be using Mark?

under your hypothetical, yes, of course.  But unless you sacrifice your high view of Matthew's eyewitness status and divine ability to recall Jesus' words to his own mind, the mere fact that you can trifle about how an eyewitness could possibly want to use a hearsay source isn't going to disturb the reasonableness of the skeptical position that says such a person as Matthew likely would not use such a source.  At least not as extensively as most Christian scholars say Matthew used Mark. 

It might appear that way, given the order in which they were published. But the Apostle Matthew can one of Mark's sources even though his Gospel was published after Mark's Gospel.

Sure, and I believe Matthew very early wrote out sayings of Christ in Hebrew, Mark could possibly have used such a thing.  But you aren't going to persuasively argue that Matthew's Hebrew original was every bit as extensive as the canonical Greek version.

In that case, Matthew isn't using Mark; rather, Mark is using Matthew. It's just that Mark published some of Matthew's material before Matthew got around to publishing his own material. To some degree, it was Matthew's material all long.

But not to a large degree, so the eyewitness's using a hearsay source remains a significant problem refusing to be answered by the desperate trifles of those who cannot see anything but biblical inerrancy.

Mark borrowed from Matthew before wrote his own Gospel. Indeed, Mark's Gospel may have given Matthew the stimulus to do his own.

That doesn't get rid of the fact that under your own laudatory assumptions about Matthew, such a man simply is not likely to find sources less direct than his own divinely inspired memories as sufficient material to help him compose a gospel.  If Matthew came into the scene at 9:9, then he can rely on his own memories for everything that happens thereafter.  And when he doesn't, its probably because the author is not an eyewitness.

Incidentally, if Papias is right, it's possible that Mark made use of some catechetical material that Matthew originally produced in Aramaic.

That doesn't show the unreasonableness of saying a divinely inspired eyewitness normally doesn't desire to use sources less authoritative than his own brain.

v) If that sounds convoluted, here's a comparison. Wayne Grudem is one of John Frame's students. Grudem published a popular systematic theology.

Over 20 years ago, Frame mentioned in class that reading Grudem's Systematic Theology was a bit of a deja vu experience because he noticed that Grudem had incorporated some of Frame's lecture material into his systematic theology. Years later, Frame began turning more of his own classroom lectures into hefty books.

Now, a keen-eyed reader who compared the two, reading them horizontally, might be struck by parallels between Grudem and Frame. Since Grudem wrote before Frame, he might conclude that Frame borrowed from Grudem. But it's really the other way around. You can't infer the order of conceptual dependence from the order of publication. Grudem borrowed from Frame, not vice versa.

Once again, Matthew's Hebrew original was likely limited mostly to a few sayings of Christ.  So even if Mark used that Hebrew original, that is not the equal of Mark using the more extensive canonical Greek Matthew.  The problem of an eyewitness apostle relying on a hearsay source doesn't go away by merely showing a tiny bit of an apostle's testimony was the earliest source.

vi) Incidentally, this can be a cause of bitter feuds in the history of math and science. The question of priority. A scientist or mathematician may have been the first person to discover something or formulate a theory. And he scribbled it down. But he didn't publish it right away. Sometimes he's scooped by another scientist or mathematician who got it published first. Sometimes that's an independent development, but sometimes the published scientist or mathematician got it from the unpublished scientist or mathematician in private conversation or private correspondence. Watch the fur fly when he steals his thunder.

So I'm not making some outlandish proposal. This is a pretty commonplace distinction, both in principle and practice.

The skeptical theory that says a divinely inspired tax-collector capable of writing inerrantly on his own likely wouldn't think he needed any source beyond his own infallible memories for everything between Matthew 9:9 and 28:21, is, also, not an outlandish proposal.  You therefore fail to show that the skeptical theory (i.e., Matthew's author using a hearsay source makes it likely the author is not eyewitness Matthew) is improbable.

Demolishing Triablogue: Richard Bauckham is reasonable to deny Matthew's authorship

This is my reply to an article by Jason Engwer of Triablogue entitled

Richard Bauckham Is Wrong About Matthew's Authorship

Monday, May 29, 2017

 I deal with Engwer's trifles here since I believe Matthew and Levi were seperate persons only equated due to corruption in the earliest gospel traditions. Such a problem is part of my very extensive justification for denying Matthew's authorship of the gospel now bearing his name.

He's mostly right about gospel authorship issues. 

That would be enough for skeptics, if they chose, to view Bauckham's view as at least as reasonable as any other view. Reasonableness doesn't require post-graduate studies, nor does it require that one can defend one's views from skeptical attack, otherwise, most Christians would be unreasonable since they accepted Jesus at a time when they were horrifically ignorant of most biblical issues. would you ever counsel a biblically ignorant unbeliever from accepting Christ as their savior, if in fact they only confessed his bodily resurreciton and full diety, but had no clue how to defend such orthodoxy from the "heretical" arguments?  Probably not.  So even fanatical inerrantists are forced to agree one can possibly be reasonable to adopt viewpoint X, even if they cannot defend the view from attack.  Maybe you should hesitate before you label the ignorant skeptic "unreasonable".  Reasonableness doesn't require that she refute any attack.

He thinks Matthew may have had some sort of role in the origins of the gospel attributed to him, accepts the traditional authorship attributions of Mark and Luke, and attributes the fourth gospel to a close disciple of Jesus named John. But he doesn't think Matthew is responsible for the first gospel as we have it today, and he thinks the John who wrote the fourth gospel wasn't the son of Zebedee.

Which would be enough for a skeptic to conclude that Bauckham, a conservative, did not reach those conclusions lightly, but only reluctantly, since his obvious tendency, as a conservative and somebody interested in defending eyewitness authorship of the gospels, would be to make any plausible argument in favor of Matthew's authorship.  That is, a skeptic could be reasonable to say a guy like Bauckham would never have admitted the weakness of Matthew's authorship, unless he felt compelled by the evidence to do so.  You aren't going to demonstrate that any skeptic who accepts Bauckham's conclusions is "unreasonable". You may as well say sphere-earthers are unreasonable if they cannot "refute" flat-earther arguments.  The boys at triablogue couldn't really say exactly how much scholarly tit-for-tat the skeptic needs to research, before she can become "reasonable" to adopt a position on a biblical issue.  Instead, they blindly insist that as long as they can come up with some type of reply the skeptic hasn't quite answered yet, then presto, another vindication of the fool who wrote Romans 1:20. 

Now that the second edition of Bauckham's Jesus And The Eyewitnesses (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2017) is out, I want to revisit the issue of gospel authorship with a focus on his material on the subject in that book. This post will mostly be about the authorship of the first gospel. A later post, which I'll link here when it becomes available, will respond to Bauckham's view of the authorship of the fourth gospel.
You can search the archives for posts we've written over the years that cite some of Bauckham's comments on Mark and Luke. See, for example, here, here, and here.
Regarding Matthew, Bauckham argues (108-12) that it's highly unlikely that a first-century Jew living in Israel would have had two Semitic personal names as common as Matthew and Levi.

Inerrantist Craig Blomberg argued just the opposite:

Only Matthew uses the name “Matthew” here (but cf. Mark 3:18; Luke 6:15; Acts 1:13). Mark and Luke call this disciple Levi. It was common for first-century Jews to have two or three names. Sometimes more than one name was Jewish; more commonly one was Jewish and one Greek (cf. Saul-Paul).

Blomberg, C. (2001, c1992). Vol. 22: Matthew (electronic ed.). Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 155). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

 If we find that two respectable very conservative Christian scholars take opposite positions on how likely it was for a first century Jew to have two first names, it might make the skeptic reasonable to conclude the issue is not capable of reasonable resolution, and to therefore do what most Christian scholars do anyway and simply choose for himself the argument he personally finds the most compelling.

It's very unlikely, then, that Matthew is the Levi referred to in Mark 2:14 and Luke 5:27. And if Levi were another name for one of the Twelve, Mark surely would have explained that in his list of the Twelve, where so many other details are included (108). Since the author of the gospel of Matthew uses a passage about another man to tell his readers about Matthew's calling (Matthew 9:9), the author must have been somebody other than Matthew.

I think Bauckham was only making a probability argument, I wouldn't expect a person as knowledgeable as he about historiography to mischaracterize the issue as who the Matthew-author "must" have been.

"Matthew himself could have described his own call without having to take over the way Mark described Levi's call." (112) Bauckham also thinks the replacement of "his house" (Mark 2:15) with "the house" (Matthew 9:10) suggests that the author of the gospel of Matthew was only applying Mark 2:14 to the apostle Matthew and didn't think the rest of the passage was applicable (111).
What about the unlikelihood of somebody being named both Matthew and Levi? There are extremely rare names and combinations of names, sometimes even unprecedented ones, in every culture. Why do we conclude that people with such names exist? Because the prior improbability that somebody would have such a name is just one factor among others that have to be taken into account as well, and those other factors can outweigh the prior improbability that somebody would have that name. How reliable is a source who reports that somebody had such a name? How likely is it that such a report would exist if the person under consideration didn't have the name in question? And so on. In his book, Bauckham often accepts a highly unusual name if there are ancient sources attesting it, even just one source. He does it in his section on Matthew's authorship, where he mentions some ancient Jews who are referred to with two names, including at least one that's "unusual" or "very unusual" (109-10). The many comments he makes elsewhere in his book about how popular or unpopular various names were assumes that some unpopular names existed, even ones attested only once. Even if naming somebody both Matthew and Levi would have been "virtually unparalleled", "very unlikely indeed", etc. (109-10), we should go on to look at the other evidence pertaining to Matthew's names and Matthean authorship of the first gospel. We should try to determine the significance of the improbability Bauckham is appealing to in light of the evidence as a whole.

The gospels never specify that Jesus gave Matthew another name, despite specifying that he gave new names to other apostles (John 1:42, Mark 3:17).

Origen thought "Lebes" (Levi) was a tax-gatherer but different from Matthew, and said the view that equates them as one single person is not supported in the NT except in one copy of Mark:

And after such statements, showing his ignorance even of the number of the apostles, he [Celsus] proceeds thus: “Jesus having gathered around him ten or eleven persons of notorious character, the very wickedest of tax-gatherers and sailors, fled in company with them from place to place, and obtained his living in a shameful and importunate manner.” Let us to the best of our power see what truth there is in such a statement. It is manifest to us all who possess the Gospel narratives, which Celsus does not appear even to have read, that Jesus selected twelve apostles, and that of these Matthew alone was a tax-gatherer; that when he calls them indiscriminately sailors, he probably means James and John, because they left their ship and their father Zebedee, and followed Jesus; for Peter and his brother Andrew, who employed a net to gain their necessary subsistence, must be classed not as sailors, but as the Scripture describes them, as fishermen. The Lebes also, who was a follower of Jesus, may have been a tax-gatherer; but he was not of the number of the apostles, except according to a statement in one of the copies of Mark’s Gospel. And we have not ascertained the employments of the remaining disciples, by which they earned their livelihood before becoming disciples of Jesus. I assert, therefore, in answer to such statements as the above, that it is clear to all who are able to institute an intelligent and candid examination into the history of the apostles of Jesus, that it was by help of a divine power that these men taught Christianity, and succeeded in leading others to embrace the word of God.

NPN, Origen: Against Celsus, book 1, ch. 62

Clement of Alexandria distinguished Matthew from Levi:

“And when they bring you before synagogues, and rulers, and powers, think not beforehand how ye shall make your defense, or what ye shall say. For the Holy Spirit shall teach you in the same hour what ye must say.” In explanation of this passage, Heracleon, the most distinguished of the school of Valentinians, says expressly, “that there is a confession by faith and conduct, and one with the voice. The confession that is made with the voice, and before the authorities, is what the most reckon the only confession. Not soundly: and hypocrites also can confess with this confession. But neither will this utterance be found to be spoken universally; for all the saved have confessed with the confession made by the voice, and departed. Of whom are Matthew, Philip, Thomas, Levi, and many others. And confession by the lip is not universal, but partial.

NPN, Clement: “Stromata” book 4, ch. 9

Eusebius says a "Levi" was the "13th" Bishop of the church in His.Eccl. Book IV Chapter 5.

Skeptics have quite sufficient evidence to insist that Matthew and Levi were separate persons and that a corruption in the gospel tradition, or foul play on the part of a gospel author, is why the gospels attribute the same actions to each.

Engwer continues:

D.A. Carson refers to some problems with how Bauckham goes on to handle the remainder of the evidence:
"Yet whatever the onomastic improbability, the identification of Levi (Mark's gospel) with Matthew (here [in Matthew 9:9]) seems less implausible than Bauckham's explanation: the unknown evangelist knew that Matthew was a tax collector (like Levi), and knew he was one of the Twelve, and so simply transferred the story across (on the assumption that the conversion of one tax collector would be very much like the conversion of another?)." (The Expositor's Bible Commentary, Revised Edition, Vol. 9: Matthew & Mark [Gran Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2010], 263)
What's mentioned in Matthew 9:9 isn't what we'd expect of the calling of every tax collector, most of them, or even one other tax collector. How many tax collectors would be in their booth at the time of the calling and would be sitting while Jesus walked by?

All of the ones who were on lunch break?

How many would immediately leave their work and follow Jesus upon being told "Follow me"?

I'm a skeptic:  I don't believe every last little details of everything reported in the gospels.  Jesus might have had disciples, but I don't think they "left everything" quite as quickly as the bible insists.

How many would experience all of those things? It's doubtful that the author of the gospel of Matthew would have thought that the story of the calling of this tax collector would be so applicable to another tax collector.

Or maybe the real Matthew only wrote out Jesus' sayings, and only the non-Matthian author responsible for canonical Greek Matthew thought, for unknown reasons, that Matthew and Levi were the same person.
Or that the authors of Matthew were not trying to harmonize anything, we are simply seeing disparate traditions about two people in Matthew and Mark/Luke, and the only people insisting Levi=Matthew are later readers who have mistaken biblical inerrancy for something that deserves anybody's attention.  Like the lunatics at Triablogue.

Bauckham is wrong in commenting that "The story, after all, is so brief and general it might well be thought appropriate to any tax collector called by Jesus to follow him as a disciple." (111), since the story isn't "so brief and general". The appropriate response to Bauckham's claim that "Matthew himself could have described his own call without having to take over the way Mark described Levi's call." (112) is that anybody could have. There wouldn't have been anybody, whether Matthew or somebody else, who would have needed to use Mark's account about the calling of another man to describe the calling of Matthew. And it's very unlikely that the author of the first gospel would have wanted to tell Matthew's story in that manner. Why give such a significant figure in early Christianity such secondhand treatment, especially if the author of the gospel was associating his work with Matthew as much as Bauckham thinks he was?

Maybe because the later author knew that Matthew was more prominent in early circles, but faded in popularity over a few decades.

The scenario Bauckham is proposing is highly improbable.But he makes a good point about Mark's list of the twelve apostles. You'd think Mark would mention that Matthew was also known as Levi, if Mark had held that view. Luke's list of the Twelve isn't as detailed as Mark's, so the lack of clarification in Luke's list is less important, but it's significant that Luke, like Mark, doesn't explain to his readers, inside his list of the apostles or elsewhere, that Matthew and Levi are different names for the same person.

Agreed.  So skeptics can be reasonable to assume Matthew and Levi are two different people.  The problem is created by the inerrantist who wants to harmonize the Matthew of Matthew with the Levi of Mark, but the historical evidence indicates the reason the accounts give different names is because they were different people.  It could also just as easily be that the Matthew-author invented the name, or wanted to change Levi's name.  Engwer is doing nothing to foist an intellectual obligation upon skeptics to accept the equation of the persons.

However, there's other evidence Bauckham doesn't discuss that suggests that Mark and Luke viewed Levi as one of the Twelve. It follows that though Mark and Luke don't tell us who among the Twelve had the alternate name of Levi, they thought somebody among the Twelve did. That weakens Bauckham's argument about what's "clear" from Mark's list of the Twelve and how Mark "surely" would have included the detail that Matthew had that other name if he'd known about it (108).

Feel free to reduce "surely" to "it is reasonable to conclude".  John and Mark reveal when apostles were given new or surnames, so we are reasonable to conclude that, had Mark known Levi was later named Matthew, he would have said so.  The belief of Origin and Clement that Matthew and Levi were separate men remains significant.

In Mark and Luke's passages about the calling of Levi, the language, themes, and placement of the text are reminiscent of the calling of other apostles, which suggests that whoever is being called in the passage is an apostle as well. Compare Mark 1:16-20 to 2:14-17. Compare Luke 5:1-11 and 5:27-32. In both gospels, the calling of Levi is narrated in close proximity to the calling of those other apostles, with similar language and themes, leading up to the nearby choosing of the Twelve by Jesus and the listing of them by the gospel authors (Mark 3:13-19, Luke 6:13-16). Jesus is walking by and looks at the individual(s) in question and says "Follow me" and is immediately followed, which involves leaving a profession (fishing or tax collecting), in both contexts in Mark (1:16-20, 2:14). That theme of leaving a profession makes sense for the calling of an apostle in the sense of being one of the Twelve, since that sort of apostleship would require so much devotion. Similarly, both of Luke's passages have the individuals in question "leaving everything" to follow Jesus (5:11, 5:28). That theme of the apostles leaving everything is repeated elsewhere (Mark 10:28, Luke 18:28). Their leaving the professions they were involved with was important, "so that they would be with him [Jesus] and that he could send them out" (Mark 3:14). So, the passages in Mark and Luke about Levi have a series of connections both backward to the call of Peter and his associates and forward to what's said of the Twelve. Even without reading Matthew, the accounts about the calling of Levi in Mark and Luke look like the calling of a member of the Twelve.

You aren't refuting anything I believe.  I don't see how pointing out that Matthew puts Matthew in the same position that Mark and Luke had placed Levi in, does anything to hurt my arguments. Yes, the gospels as we now have them in their final polished form, certainly appear to say identical things about Matthew and Levi.  So?  We can assume Origin and Clement would have seen the similarities between the calling of Matthew and Levi, if we assume their own copies of the gospels textually read the same as ours do today.  Were these church fathers simply blind?  Or might their copies of the gospels have made it reasonable to assume Matthew and Levi were different men?

Some passages in Mark and Luke about people other than apostles refer to themes like following Jesus and leaving possessions and making other sacrifices to follow him. But those other passages have less similar language and themes and less significant placement in the text of the gospels. Something like Jesus' call to discipleship in Mark 8:34-38 or his interactions with Zaccheus in Luke 19:1-10 is somewhat reminiscent of the calling of the apostles, but also significantly different. Jesus walks by Zaccheus and looks at him (verse 5), and Zaccheus gives up possessions to follow Jesus (verse 8), for example, but Jesus is only staying in Zaccheus' house briefly (verse 5), there's no reference to his leaving his profession, the passage is far removed from the appointing of the apostles earlier in the gospel, etc. Likewise, Jesus' exchange with the rich young ruler (Mark 10:17-31, Luke 18:18-30) involves a call to discipleship and to giving things up to follow Jesus, but the man doesn't follow Jesus, the passage is far removed from the context of the calling of the apostles, and so on. Both passages contrast the rich young ruler's rejection of Jesus' call and the apostles' acceptance of it (Mark 10:28-31, Luke 18:28-30). While the calling of individuals like Peter and Levi is similar to Jesus' interactions with other people elsewhere in Mark and Luke, there are substantial differences as well. The calling of Levi is significantly similar to the calling of Peter and his associates in a way in which other passages in these gospels aren't. So, independently from the gospel of Matthew, Mark and Luke give us reason to place Levi among the Twelve.

Sure, but they also render skeptics reasonable to assume Jesus had more than 12 apostles, and the later redactors did a less than perfect job of reducing the historically true number of Jesus' closest disciples to the conveniently typological 12.

But they don't refer to any of the Twelve as Levi when they list the apostles, nor do they tell us elsewhere which apostle went by that name. They also leave out other information about apostolic names. Peter is referred to as Simon Barjona in Matthew 16:17, but not anywhere in Mark or Luke. Similarly, Luke doesn't tell us that James and John, the sons of Zebedee, were referred to as Boanerges, a detail that Mark does include. And so on. Bauckham doesn't claim that Mark and Luke are exhaustive about apostolic names. More significantly, Bauckham thinks the identification of Thaddaeus (Mark 3:18) with Judas the son of James (Luke 6:16) is "very plausible" (108), but neither Mark nor Luke offers that identification, even though Bauckham thinks Luke used Mark as a source and appeals to such sources in the opening of his gospel.

Well maybe Bauckham is not a fanatic who thinks it cannot be true unless a gospel author specifically admits it.

That's an instance in which Luke knew about a potential confusion over apostolic names, but didn't offer a clarification. Still, Luke's failure to clarify something potentially seen as a discrepancy between what he wrote and what's in a source he used and that many of his readers would be familiar with (Mark) isn't the same as a failure to clarify something that people could misunderstand in his own writings (that Levi and Matthew are the same person). I'm just giving some examples of Mark and Luke's failure to provide details and clarifications they could have provided about apostolic names, even though the examples I've cited in this paragraph are less significant than not clarifying the relationship between Levi and Matthew.

The fact that Origen and Clement think Matthew and Levi are different, is quite sufficient to render reasonable the skeptic who says they are, and who says inerrantist attempts to converge them into a single person in the name of biblical inerrancy are not convincing.   But I'm sure you'll attribute stupidity to any church father whenever expediency dictates.  But that certainly doesn't impose an intellectual obligation upon the skeptic to back off from saying Origin's NT probably didn't make an equation between Matthew and Levi very clear.  Origen often defended the gospels from charges of historical unreliability and was a great textual scholar himself. If the gospel manuscripts in his day made it clear that Levi and Matthew were the same person, we would expect he would not view them as separate persons.

Chrysostom, Homily XXX,  says Mark and Luke intentionally "concealed" Matthew's identity under the name "Levi", so if he is correct, we'd only be honoring the intent of Mark and Luke to continue "falsely" believing the two names referred to two men:

And we have cause also to admire the self-denial of the evangelist, how he disguises not his own former life, but adds even his name, when the others had concealed him under another appellation.

Engwer continues:

What's most important to recognize in this context is that identifying Levi and Matthew as two different individuals still leaves you with a substantial lack of clarity in Mark and Luke.

That doesn't bother anybody except inerrantists.

If Levi isn't Matthew, then which member of the Twelve is he, given the evidence cited above that he's portrayed as a member of the Twelve in the two gospels under consideration?

Fallacy of loaded question, there is the equally reasonable option, in light of Clement and Origin, that Jesus had more than 12 official 'disciples'.  My view is that Jesus had probably about 100 "disciples" and was later said to be most close to 'twelve' because some such disciples would naturally be closer to him than others, and the gospel authors couldn't resist changing historical fact for purposes of typological correspondence with the OT.

Or if you deny that Mark and Luke meant to portray Levi as one of the Twelve, why did they use language, themes, and text placement that are so suggestive of Levi's identity as one of the Twelve?

I think they did an imperfect job of whittling down the number of "disciples" to "12".

I don't see how a significant lack of clarity in Mark and Luke is a problem only for those who consider Levi and Matthew the same person. There's a substantial clarity problem for Bauckham's position as well.

I don't argue that position the way he does.  Good luck.

What should we think of the change from "his house" in Mark 2:15 to "the house" in Matthew 9:10?

Maybe a desire on the part of the author to do something modern apologists don't want him to do, and taunt the reader with hints of his identity, but without wishing to make it explicit, thus testifying against any claim that he was "amazingly transformed" and justifying the skeptic to consider such an author unworthy of serious consideration.

It could easily be an attempt on Matthew's part to clarify the passage rather than an attempt to distance verses 10-13 from verse 9. As Bauckham notes (111), the "his" in Mark 2:15 is sometimes taken as a reference to Jesus rather than Levi, so Matthew may have changed "his" to "the" in order to avoid that confusion.

Sounds like Matthew thought Mark wrote in a way that facilitates confusion.  Not a happy day in inerrancy-land.

Luke makes the passage clearer by referring to how "Levi gave a big reception for him in his house" (5:29). Perhaps Matthew intended to provide clarification. Or he may have just chosen different terminology than Mark without any intention of clarifying anything and without intending to distance verses 10-13 from verse 9 in the way Bauckham suggests. Furthermore, how would changing "his house" to "the house" have the implications Bauckham claims? To the contrary, the lack of qualification for "the house" motivates the reader to look at the surrounding context for indications of what house is in view. Why would the author send his readers to the surrounding context if he wanted them to avoid the conclusion that verse 9 provides the context they're looking for? The most natural way to take "the house" in verse 10 is as a reference to Matthew's house, since Matthew's booth had just been mentioned, and the reference in verse 9 to Jesus' traveling makes it more likely that he'd be in somebody else's house rather than his own.

Sorry, the only significance I see in the change from "his house" to "the house" is mere stylistic preference.  You may as well write a 5,000 page article psychoanalyzing Matthew and asking why 13:52 doesn't include the "among his own relatives" phrase given that he was copying Mark 6:4 anyway.  I deny that inability to answer such trifling questions suddenly tilts the probability scale in favor of the apologist.

And since I already have good grounds for saying somebody other than Matthew is responsible for the canonical Greek version we have today, I'm not under any obligation to give a fuck why a later anonymous redactor would have wanted to change "his house" to "the house".  It could also be that the later redactor changed it because HE thought this was Matthew's own house.  The option of saying Matthew is the guy making the change and wanting the reader to notice that the house was owned by the author of that gospel, is not the only reasonable option.

If the author of the gospel of Matthew had wanted to distance verses 10-13 from verse 9 as much as Bauckham suggests, he could have put one or more other accounts between the content of verses 9 and 10 or changed or added language to verses 10-13 to distance those verses from verse 9 rather than keeping them together and so undistinguished (e.g., he could have referred to "the house of Levi, a tax collector").
Most of the evidence for Matthew's authorship of the gospel isn't addressed by Bauckham. See here for a collection of posts discussing a lot of that evidence.

I'm almost done answering all of your posts on that subject point by point. 

Notice the number, variety, and strength of the factors involved: the unlikelihood of fabricating attribution to such a minor apostle,

But such attribution can just as easily argue that he wasn't minor in the very early period, he merely faded from view and now you fallaciously view him as always having been minor.

the universal acceptance of Matthean authorship while the authorship attributions of other documents were being disputed,

the early church was also universal that Matthew was written first, which is now found highly unlikely by most Christian scholars who adopt Markan priority.  This particular skeptic doesn't feel the least bit moved by "universal acceptance".  Neither do desperate apologists who reject the majority scholarly acceptance of Markan priority view merely because they don't like how easy Markan priority makes it for skeptics to justify denying Jesus' resurrection.

hostile corroboration of Matthew's authorship,

You forgot Jerome's comment that "many" in his day viewed Gospel to the Hebrews as "authentic Matthew", as if they only came to such view after investigating two different gospels each claiming to be from Matthew.

how well Matthean authorship explains the early prominence of the gospel, etc.

Ditto for GoH. 

Demolishing Triablogue: Skeptics are reasonable to complain that Matthew doesn't testify of his own faith

This is my reply to an article by Jason Engwer of Triablogue entitled:

Why Doesn't Matthew Say More About His Conversion?

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

In another thread about Matthew's authorship of the gospel attributed to him, a commenter wrote:

Hi Jason, the first person I heard use Mt 9:9-13 to challenge Matthean authorship of The Gospel According to Matthew was Richard Bauckham. It has long troubled me. The external evidence highly favors the view that the apostle Matthew wrote the gospel attributed to him, but it seems so counterintuitive that Matthew would use Mark’s account of his own conversion rather than write his own. That is the one place you would expect him to pen his own unique account. You rightly point out that Matthew did not copy Mark verbatim, but the differences are so miniscule (no greater than in most other places where Matthew uses Mark) as to be relatively insignificant. Minor changes to Mark’s account of Matthew’s own conversion is not what we would expect at all. It’s the most personal element of his story. He adds lots of non-Markan material throughout the rest of His gospel on matters he may not have even witnessed Himself, so why use Mark’s version of his own conversion story rather than telling his own story in his own way with a lot more detail? It doesn’t seem probable and counts against Matthean authorship in my mind. How do you reconcile this?

You can find a collection of some of my material on Matthean authorship linked in a post here. Steve Hays has written some posts on the subject as well, like here. Here's my response to the commenter quoted above:

See my earlier article I linked above, the one here. If Matthew delegated the composition of his gospel to one or more other individuals, then it’s not a matter of what Matthew wrote. It's a matter of what others wrote on his behalf, with his approval of the final product.

Except that you have no fucking clue whether Matthew ever did "approve" of any such thing, or simply walked away, trusting his friends to 'get it right'.

That was a common practice in the ancient world, and it's common today (ghost writers, group authorship, editorial assistants, research assistants, etc.).
However, even if Matthew hadn't operated that way, where did Mark's account of Matthew's conversion come from?

You elsewhere accept as true the patristic accounts that say Mark is a record of Peter's preaching, so your own answer would (or should) be "Peter's preaching".

If it came from Matthew (with or without intermediaries), which is a reasonable scenario, then why think the account found in Matthew's gospel should differ more from the account found in the gospel of Mark?

Yes, IF IF IF he got the story from Matthew, we wouldn't expect significant changes.  That's a pretty big if.

But then maybe we would expect an apostolic author who was "amazingly transformed" by seeing the risen Christ, to wish to say something about his own personal experience...just like we rationally expect all serious Christians to testify.  So since nothing of the sort shows up in the gospel called "Matthew" that can be reasonably counted against Matthean authorship.  Especially if it was written in 55 a.d., which means Matthew still doesn't want to give his personal input even after 20 years of developing the Jesus-sayings and traditions.

You suggest that Matthew should have included "a lot more detail" about his conversion. Why?

Because most serious Christians have a personal testimony which they wish to tell, and this is consistent with most of the NT authors.

And because he would know that leaving his own personal details out might cause readers to wonder whether he was "amazingly transformed".  The reasonablenes of these concerns cannot be trashed merely because it's always going to be "possible" that an amazingly transformed person might have their own reasons for not giving their personal testimony. You don't win the historiography debate by positing mere possibilities.

He wasn't writing in a modern American context, in which individualism, writing lengthy accounts of your experiences, and such were as popular as they are in our culture.

But desire to write of one's own personal religious experience isn't limited to modern America.  Read acts and the pastorals.

Even the vast majority of liberal scholars think that Paul wrote several of the letters attributed to him, yet Paul didn't provide "a lot more detail" about his conversion in those letters, including the letters where his conversion is mentioned.

But Paul still provided some personalized details about his life and commission.  That's more than Matthew.

And Paul's conversion was in some ways more significant than Matthew's.

When you forget that Matthew allegedly was hand-picked by the real earthly Jesus and studied under him for three year of real-world time, yes.  But some people would insist that the sheer improbability and absurdity of Paul's "partially empirical" experience on the road to Damascus is completely unworthy of serious attention.  Paul has precisely nothing but a vision and his own desire to hold apostolic office independent of the original apostles.  At least Matthew allegedly had authority that wasn't this controversial.

If Matthew was asked to compose a gospel in response to the popularity of Mark's gospel, which I think is most likely what happened,

Sounds like Matthew denied Mark's sufficiency and inerrancy. 

then the people who approached Matthew about writing a gospel probably would have been people who already knew a lot about him, including his conversion. Besides, he was writing a biography of Jesus, not a biography of Matthew.

Paul wasn't writing a biography of Paul in any of his letters, but we still expect, and receive personal details from him.

For me the issue is less why Matthew follows Mark's version of Matthew's "calling", and more an issue of whether Matthew's lack of personal stories and lessons makes it reasonable to assume the author had no such stories to tell.

Demolishing Triablogue: The Jewish objection to the empty tomb is a reasonable justification for skepticism

This is my reply to an article by Jason Engwer of Triablogue entitled

Early Jewish Acknowledgment Of The Empty Tomb

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

A few early Christian sources tell us that their Jewish opponents acknowledged that Jesus' tomb was found empty after the body had been placed there. Were the later sources just repeating what the first one, Matthew, told them?
Even if so, there's no good reason to reject Matthew's report.

You are blindly assuming we are obligated to believe anything we read in ancient religious history unless somebody comes along and proves the source unreliable.  You are high on crack.  I have about as much intellectual obligation to believe Matthew's report as I have to believe 1st Enoch.  You couldn't demonstrate the unreasonableness of complete apathy toward the gospels if your life depended on it.  FUCK YOU.

The gospel seems to have been written by a Jew and seems to have been written for an audience with a lot of knowledge of Judaism, Israel, and other elements of Christianity's early Jewish context.

Which is precisely why Matthew's failure to say anything that might support apostle Paul is telling.  Matthew was a Judaizer.

R.T. France notes that the idea of non-Jewish authorship of the gospel "enjoyed quite a vogue" during the third quarter of the twentieth century, "but is now not widely supported" (The Gospel Of Matthew [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2007], n. 26 on p. 15).

Ok, then you cannot complain if a skeptic bases some of their reasonableness-arguments on the fact that some belief is "widely accepted".

Grant Osborne comments that "One major consensus is that Matthew writes a Jewish gospel." (Matthew [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2010], p. 31) Matthew comments that acknowledgment of the empty tomb by Jewish opponents of Christianity originated just after Jesus' death and existed "to this day" (Matthew 28:15), a claim that easily could have been falsified if untrue.

You are blindly assuming that the Christians made such a big spectacle of the resurrection preaching that opponents would have cared enough to "refute" it.  Since Acts is a combination of history and fiction, I don't really give a fuck if it presents the Jews as angry at Christian preaching.  And it is far from certain that the Jews would have known which exact tomb Jesus was buried in.  Must it be that Joseph of Arimathea told them where it was?  Must it be that the cemetery was crowded with people when Joe was putting Jesus inside the tomb?

And like so much else in Christian history, it remains possible that the Jews DID falsify the empty tomb theory, but accounts of this were suppressed or destroyed (at least one wasn't, Justin knew of such account).   Indeed, the Jews could have done such a thing in less than one day's time, and there's no reason to suppose a written record of that would have been made or would have survived.  So quit implying the impossibility of the skeptical theory.

And of course, Jesus' resurrection can be falsified on numerous grounds independent of your trifles about the empty tomb.  IMO, the only reason there was early tradition about Jesus being buried in a rich man's tomb was because this was a fiction invented to make his death conform more to Isaiah 53.  Under stupid apologist reasoning, skeptics have no reasonable choice except to believe anything that is "multiply attested"...such as Matthean priority.

William Lane Craig discusses some other evidence that Matthew's account is reliable.

Around the middle of the second century, Matthew's account is corroborated by a passage in Justin Martyr in which he seems to quote from a Jewish source on the subject.

Gee, 1st Enoch also "corroborates" Genesis 6.

In section 108 of his Dialogue With Trypho, Justin seems to cite a Jewish document or tradition, in which Jesus is referred to as a "deceiver" and reference is made to Jesus as Him "whom we crucified", apparently speaking from the perspective of non-Christian Jews ("we"). This passage in Justin contains multiple details not found in Matthew's gospel. For example, Michael Slusser's edition of Justin has him referring to how the Jews "chose certain men by vote and sent them throughout the whole civilized world" in order to argue against Christianity, including by accusing the disciples of stealing the body from the tomb (Dialogue With Trypho [Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University Of America Press, 2003], p. 162). It's not as though people would have been dependent solely on Matthew for information on such subjects. Justin had more than Matthew's account to go by. And he seems to be quoting some sort of Jewish document or tradition.

It may well have been that the Jews said the disciples stole the body.  I don't see the problem, as that's a very reasonable criticism, since Christians cannot deny that at least some of the original players knew where Jesus was originally buried (Matthew 27:61).  So you cannot deny their ability to steal the body.  Then we also have a motive to steal the body if we assume historicity of the accounts in Acts.  You will insist they were cowards without a motive at Jesus' crucifixion, but I don't believe everything in the gospels the way you do.  Such stories of cowards can easily be accounted for by the theory that by making them into cowards, their "transformation" upon seeing Jesus seems more dramatic.

You will say they wouldn't have stolen the body because they later died for their beliefs as martyrs.  But the best that can be gleaned from such legends is that the apostles were executed for being Christians.  I'm not aware of any reliable accounts that say any apostle was given a chance to deny Christ and live.  So the fact they were executed, if true, does not increase the probability that they endured such death willingly.  But since I say the original bodily resurrection story was rooted in nothing but visions, we are dealing with fanatics who could easily deceive themselves so much as to be willing to die for beliefs that had no external corroboration.

Are you willing to die for Jesus?

And yet you are not an eyewitness, right?  See how that works?  You CAN get to the point of having a martyrdom complex even when you have no first-hand knowledge.

Justin is familiar with many Jewish responses to Christianity, as his interactions with their scripture interpretations, for example, demonstrate. He "shows acquaintance with rabbinical discussions" (ibid., n. 9 on p. 33). Bruce Chilton writes that Justin "appears to adapt motifs of Judaism", and Rebecca Lyman comments that Justin "is aware of Samaritan customs as well as some patterns of rabbinic exegesis" (in Sara Parvis and Paul Foster, edd., Justin Martyr And His Worlds [Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 2007], pp. 83, 163). He wasn't just repeating what he read in the New Testament documents. He's aware of Jewish arguments outside of those reflected in the New Testament, and he's aware of post-apostolic developments in Judaism. His willingness to compose a work as lengthy as his Dialogue With Trypho tells us something about his interest in Jewish arguments against Christianity.
Though Justin wrote around the middle of the second century, he sets his dispute with Trypho earlier, around the year 135. And the Jewish tradition he's citing in the passage I mentioned above would date even earlier.

So?  I don't see anything unreasonable in accusing the disciples of stealing the body, as I take the gospel descriptions of the post-crucifixion disciples as cowards, to be mere hyperbole or straight up lying, since the gospels also expect us to believe they were obstinately stupid even after watching Jesus perform genuinely supernatural stunts for three years.

If you think "multiple attestation" proves me wrong, then apparently you are a dipshit who is not aware of how a single false belief can take root and become repeated by thousands of others.  See Acts 21:18-24.  Multiple attestation is not a worthless criteria, but you push it too god-damn hard and act as if skeptics have nowhere to run as soon as one report is "corroborated".

And since most Christian scholars posit a theory of literary interdependence between the Synoptics, it is less likely these are three independent witnesses to disciple cowardice and only one report that is merely being repeated with fictional modification by the later gospels.

  You also don't acknowledge that two contrary positions can be equally reasonable, probably because you have no objective criteria for reasonableness.  Probably because if you did, you'd eventually have to explain why most professional historians don't find the gospel narratives particularly believable.

Late in the second century, Tertullian summarizes Jewish arguments concerning the empty tomb:
"This is He whom His disciples secretly stole away, that it might be said He had risen again, or the gardener abstracted, that his lettuces might come to no harm from the crowds of visitants!" (The Shows, 30)
Notice that Tertullian mentions something that neither Matthew nor Justin had reported.

Which means we have no choice but to accept it as gospel truth.

Apparently, the argument that the disciples stole the body was still the primary Jewish response.

Which is reason enough to take the Jewish response seriously, instead of dismissing it with "the Jews sure did care about Christianity immediately after Jesus died!  Wouldn't they have exhumed the body and put forth all that effort to suppress the resurrection message!?!"

But some Jews had argued that the body was moved by a gardener, perhaps because of how implausible the argument for theft by the disciples had become in light of the suffering and martyrdom of the disciples.

No, you cannot historically justify saying the disciples were "martyred".  It could very well be that in addition to the correct theory, another theory to explain the empty tomb became popular.  1st century Palestine was a hotbed of false rumor.  Read Josephus.  Early Christianity was a hot-bed of fictional claims that attracted ignorant converts.  Read the pastorals.

Keep in mind that the argument that the disciples stole the body originated before any of the disciples died as martyrs and before they had suffered much. The argument was better early on than it would become later.

No, you find the Jews declaring the "disciples stole the body" argument in Matthew, then you blindly assume the Jews were saying such things in 34 a.d.  But most scholars date Matthew to 70 a.d., which is right when most of the apostles would have already died.  That is, the author safely delayed his accusations of what Jews were saying in 34 a.d. until the actual Jews that would know better, were likely dead.

Now what are you going to do?  Suddenly discover that Matthew was  published in 34 a.d.?

It should also be noted that Tertullian, like Justin, wrote an entire treatise against Judaism (An Answer To The Jews). The idea that he would have been dependent solely on Matthew for his knowledge of the Jewish response to the Christian claim about the empty tomb is unlikely.

So?  Once again, I think accusing the disciples of stealing the body is reasonable, and so would anybody else who is objective and doesn't blindly insist on biblical inerrancy, or misunderstand rules of historiography as infallible guides.

All three of these early Christian sources include information not mentioned by the others. All three would have had easy access to the Judaism of their day, and they all show interest in interacting with Jewish arguments against Christianity. Matthew and Justin are making highly public claims that could easily have been discerned to be false if they had been false (e.g., "to this day" in Matthew, men "sent throughout the whole civilized world" in Justin).

And since most scholars date Matthew to 70 .a.d., we are reasonable to say the earliest date Matthew publicized such story of Jewish scheming was 70 a.d.  You have no fucking clue the extent to which Matthew's oral preaching repeated anything in his written gospel.  But I'm sure you will pretend that the only reasonable conclusion is that he would have preached every bit of the written form....something that would identify him as a Judaizer and opponent of Paul.

And once again, you continue pretending that the the earliest Christian resurrection preaching would have bothered the Jews enough for them to desire to go exhume Jesus' body, when in fact it is likely they would not wish to rob such grave, it was illegal, and they'd need Roman permission which likely wouldn't be granted.

 I also believe the original resurrection belief was "visionary", so that the Jews would be even less worried to "refute" such mindless bullshit.

All three include information unlikely to have been made up by a Christian (see Craig's article about Matthew; Justin seems to be citing a Jewish source; Tertullian or a Christian source he relied on probably wouldn't have made up an alternate argument about the removal of Jesus' body that avoids the main problem with the theft argument). For reasons like these, and because there isn't any good argument to the contrary, it seems likely that there was early and widespread Jewish acknowledgment of the empty tomb.

Except that the earliest gospel, Mark, candidly acknowledges that an anonymous "man" wearing a "white robe" was at the open tomb and had been there for some time before the first witnesses, the women, got there.   You'll kindly pardon me if

a) I don't get "angel" out of "white robe" or "man", and
b) I have an alternative theory that this man moved the body, and Mark has simply morphed a grave-robbery story into a resurrection story.

The pastorals and Acts 21 make it clear that the earliest Christians had a habit of making up false claims and successfully hoodwinking thousands of others about what the apostles did.

Demolishing Triablogue: Significant Resurrection Narratives Did Not Come From Sources Who Were Named And Known

This is my reply to an article by Jason Engwer of Triablogue entitled

The Resurrection Narratives Came From Sources Who Were Named And Known

"All four Gospels are anonymous in the formal sense that the author's name does not appear in the text of the work itself, only in the title (which we will discuss below).

Which is a problem since most NT authors and 1st century historians did include their names in the text of their writings despite in most cases their intended audiences already knowing who they were.  So you can kiss your predictable "they didn't mention their names because they already knew their audiences" excuse goodbye.

Therefore, we can be reasonable to conclude that the gospel authors intentionally broke with standard practice, therefore, we can be reasonable to conclude they didn't want to be identified, therefore, we can be reasonable to conclude that desire to identify them only started with later generations.  We can therefore be reasonable to conclude that we cannot possibly go wrong in fulfilliing the author's desires, and refusing to discuss their identifies, if we so choose.

And if god inspired the gospel authors, then god also didn't want them to include their names in those works, which means God is less interested in proving the human authorship of the gospels than today's apologists are.  Hence it can be reasonable for the atheist to conclude that any "god" that might exist, wanted the written testimony to Jesus' resurrection to be of more dubious origin than as wished by today's apologists.  Whose wishes are more important to respect?

But this does not mean that they were intentionally anonymous. Many ancient works were anonymous in the same formal sense, and the name may not even appear in the surviving title of the work. For example, this is true of Lucian's Life of Demonax (Demonactos bios), which as a bios (ancient biography) is generically comparable with the Gospels. Yet Lucian speaks throughout in the first person and obviously expects his readers to know who he is.

And by speaking in the first person, that much is clear.  Unfortunately for you, none of the 4 gospels speaks in the first person.  They always characterize the apostles in the third-person. It doesn't matter how you can spin that, and it doesn't matter that eyewitnesses "can" use third person, this doesn't automatically mean "eyewitness who is choosing to use the third-person".  Third-person narrative usually automatically implies "the author was not one of the story characters", and the burden is rightfully on the fundie to overcome such presumption.  You certainly cannot seriously say skeptics are unreasonable to infer anonymous authorship from the third-person writing style.  Especially in light of the fact that we naturally and justifiably expect honest eyewitnesses to make it clear to the listeners that what they have to say is their own story, instead of asking the listeners to make imperfect judgment calls about how much tesitmony is "eyewitness" and how much is "later redactor modified this and modified that".

Such works would often have been circulated in the first instance among friends or acquaintances of the author who would know who the author was from the oral context in which the work was first read.

But that didn't stop apostle Paul and most other NT authors from identifying themselves.  You may not like the fact that the gospel authors bucked the trend, because of the skeptical inferences that can be justified therefrom, but that's tough shit.

Knowledge of authorship would be passed on when copies were made for other readers, and the name would be noted, with a brief title, on the outside of the scroll or on a label affixed to the scroll.

That would also be true even if the belief about the author were merely the earlier copyist's best guess.

In denying that the Gospels were originally anonymous, our intention is to deny that they were first presented as works without authors.

Then you aren't combating my specific type of gospel skepticism. I can allow for apostles authoring originals without putting myself under intellectual obligation to credit the final canonical form entirely to said apostles.  But if it is reasonable to say that various portions of the gospels originally came from later redactors, that is sufficient to justify skepticism toward their resurrection narratives, especially in light of the fact that scholars cannot agree on which portions of the gospels reveal redactional activity.

This idea that we have to show absolute anonymity before we can be reasonable to deny apostolic authorship, is total bullshit.  Life is far more complex than what you get walking into a church...or a preschool.

The clearest case is Luke because of the dedication of the work to Theophilus (1:3), probably a patron.

Which is also a point of unending debate, since Theophilus could also be a mere metaphor for the entire church.

But even assuming it was a real individual person, the reasonable assumption is that Luke intended to write for that guy, and the burden is on YOU to show that Luke intended for anybody else to read that work (by which argument scumbag apologists suddenly discover the infallibility of saying Theophilus was a metaphor for a large group of people).  As I've argued elsewhere, when you say the gospels were inspired by God, you are making reasonable those who attribute to god's own will any of the human author's discernible intent.  Unless you are a Calvinist and insist that just whatever happens is surely within the will of God, you cannot leap from "popular!" to "intended for the world!".  Luke appears intended for the church, as it makes no effort to rebut the kind of objections skeptics would have made in the 1st century (i.e., Jesus' miracles are just tricks employed by hundreds of other "faith-healers", sometimes involving dishonest assistants and third persons).

It is inconceivable that a work with a named dedicatee should have been anonymous.

Not "inconceivable" if the author already knew the dedicatee.

The author's name may have featured in an original title, but in any case would have been known to the dedicatee and other first readers because the author would have presented the book to the dedicatee....In the first century CE, most authors gave their books titles, but the practice was not universal....

In the first century, most authors also identified themselves in the text of their work, and most NT authors do so, therefore, we are reasonable to conclude that the gospel authors made a deliberate choice to avoid associating their names with their stories.  Not exactly the definition of "reliable".

Whether or not any of these titles originate from the authors themselves, the need for titles that distinguished one Gospel from another would arise as soon as any Christian community had copies of more than one in its library and was reading more than one in its worship meetings....In the case of codices, 'labels appeared on all possible surfaces: edges, covers, and spines.' In this sense also, therefore, Gospels would not have been anonymous when they first circulated around the churches.

Even if you are correct, the very fact that Jerome says "many" in the early church thought the Gospel to the Hebrews was "authentic Matthew" shows how little usefulness there was in the original gospels naming their authors...unless you wish to credit Matthew as the author of that heretical work?

A church receiving its first copy of one such would have received with it information, at least in oral form, about its authorship and then used its author's name when labeling the book and when reading from it in worship....no evidence exists that these Gospels were ever known by other names." (Richard Bauckham, Jesus And The Eyewitnesses [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2006], pp. 300-301, 303)

But you don't know if they ever did so "label", you don't know how long they waited before producing the copies that might motivate them to attach labels, and yet it is equally reasonable to suppose that the oral tradition about the author is all the individual church community thought was necessary for several decades.

But again, so what?  The fact that all church fathers never testify to a Greek Matthew but only Hebrew until Jerome makes it reasonable to assume they did not have any tradition that Matthew authored anything in Greek.  You don't make that reasonableness disappear merely by trifling that maybe they just miraculously chose to focus only on the Hebrew original.  Those were mostly Gentile churches, where the Greek Matthew would be used more had it been believed authored by Matthew.

"Nevertheless the fact remains that it is utterly improbable that in this dark period, at a particular place or through a person or through the decision of a group or institution unknown to us, the four superscriptions of the Gospels, which had hitherto been circulating anonymously, suddenly came into being and, without leaving behind traces of earlier divergent titles, became established throughout the church.

I'm not one of those who say the gospel titles suddenly came into being at a late stage.  And once again, Matthew likely authored a less detailed "sayings-source", and this + anonymous scribe creating a Greek edition is why Matthew's name now appears on canonical Greek Matthew.

None of these trifles increase the probability that the gospel resurrection narratives escaped scribal modification, and if they didn't, then the gospel resurrection narratives lose significant historical value, since we are forced to conclude that at least some resurrection testimony has also been modified by later scribes.

Nevermind that more and more conservative inerrantists are admitting to Matthew mingling history and fiction in his resurrection narrative (i.e. "fiction" = "apocalyptic imagery").

Let those who deny the great age and therefore basically the originality of the Gospel superscriptions in order to preserve their 'good' critical conscience, give a better explanation of the completely unanimous and relatively early attestation of these titles, their origin and the names of authors associated with them.

I accept your challenge.  As far as Matthew, he likely authored a Hebrew sayings-source that was later reworked into Greek by a redactor who added substantial blocks of "narrative", so that Matthew's resurrection testimony is infected with hearsay of unknown extent, rendering the skeptic reasonable, if they choose, to disregard it.

As far as Mark, I can allow that a guy named Mark wrote it, and Mark's tendency to abandon the ministry to the point that Paul didn't deem him a worthy missionary (Acts 15:38) might help explain why he deserted his own gospel and made Jesus' resurrection one of the least important aspects.  The more Mark copied from Peter's preaching, the more "hearsay" it is, and since we cannot reasonably determine Mark's relation to Peter beyond debateable references in the NT, we have no reasonable way to gauge the reliability of such hearsay, thus justifying a skeptic, if they choose, to disregard it.

As far as Luke, if most Christian scholars are correct that Luke copies off Mark, then Luke was lying by omission in saying he consulted with eyewitnesses, since he leaves the impression that everything in his gospel about Jesus draws from eyewitness sources.  Mark was not an eyewitness of Jesus' ministry, especially if the fundies are correct that Mark is just a record of Peter's later preaching in Rome.

As far as John, enough Christian scholars admit much of what he puts in Jesus mouth was never actually mouthed by Jesus, to render reasonable the skeptic who says apostle John's authorship only hurts that gospel's reliability.

Such an explanation has yet to be given, and it never will be.

Bang on the pulpit, and yell "bless ma soul".

New Testament scholars persistently overlook basic facts and questions on the basis of old habits." (Martin Hengel, The Four Gospels And The One Gospel Of Jesus Christ [Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press International, 2000], p. 55)

Wow, if even NT scholars "persistently" get things wrong, one reasonable option for a skeptic to exercise is to simply toss all NT scholarship in the trash as too complicated and convoluted for them to reasonably believe they will ever be able to draw reasonably certain conclusions beyond what Jesus' gender was.

And since Triablogue says a lifetime of neutrality toward Jesus cannot protect the unbeliever from hell,  the skeptic who exercise the above-stated option may as well avoid neutrality and tell himself David Hume already proved that miracles are impossible. Life is more fun if you go around thinking you'll never be held accountable by an invisible man living in the sky.  It's also easier to sleep at night when you don't think there is a monster living under your bed.