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.Inerrantist Craig Blomberg argued just the opposite:
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.
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).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.Blomberg, C. (2001, c1992). Vol. 22: Matthew (electronic ed.). Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 155). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.
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).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).
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.
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
“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.Eusebius says a "Levi" was the "13th" Bishop of the church in His.Eccl. Book IV Chapter 5.NPN, Clement: “Stromata” book 4, ch. 9
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.
D.A. Carson refers to some problems with how Bauckham goes on to handle the remainder of the evidence:All of the ones who were on lunch break?
"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?
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").I'm almost done answering all of your posts on that subject point by point.
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.
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.
