re gospel dating benedikt rosenau writes the argument goes as follows q oid quotes appear in john but not in the almost codified way they were in matthew or luke however they are considered to be similar enough to point to knowledge of q as such and not an entirely different source assuming you are presenting it accurately i don t see how this argument really leads to any firm conclusion the material in john i m not sure exactly what is referred to here but i ll take for granted the similarity to the matt luke q material is different hence one could have almost any relationship between the two right up to john getting it straight from jesus mouth we are talking date of texts here not the age of the authors the usual explanation for the time order of mark matthew and luke does not consider their respective ages it says matthew has read the text of mark and luke that of matthew and probably that of mark the version of the usual theory i have heard has matthew and luke independently relying on mark and q one would think that if luke relied on matthew we wouldn t have the grating inconsistencies in the geneologies for one thing as it is assumed that john knew the content of luke s text the evidence for that is not overwhelming admittedly this is the part that is particularly new to me if it were possible that you could point me to a reference i d be grateful unfortunately i haven t got the info at hand it was i think in the late s or early s and it was possibly as old as ce when they are from about why do they shed doubt on the order on putting john after the rest of the three because it closes up the gap between supposed writing and the existing copy quit a bit the further away from the original the more copies can be written and therefore survival becomes more probable and i don t think a one step removed source is that bad if luke and mark and matthew learned their stories directly from diciples then i really cannot believe in the sort of big transformation from jesus to gospel that some people posit in news reports one generally gets no better information than this and if john is a diciple then there s nothing more to be said that john was a disciple is not generally accepted the style and language together with the theology are usually used as counterargument i m not really impressed with the theology argument but i m really pointing this out as an if and as i pointed out earlier one cannot make these arguments about i peter i see no reason not to accept it as an authentic letter one step and one generation removed is bad even in our times compare that to reports of similar events in our century in almost illiterate societies the best analogy would be reporters talking to the participants which is not so bad in other words one does not know what the original of mark did look like and arguments based on mark are pretty weak but the statement of divinity is not in that section and in any case it s agreed that the most important epistles predate mark c wingate the peace of god it is no peace but strife closed in the sod mangoe cs umd edu yet brothers pray for but one thing tove mangoe the marv lous peace of god
