re gospel dating in article mimsy umd edu mangoe cs umd edu charley wingate writes 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 no the argument says john has known q ie a codified version of the logia and not the original assuming that there has been one it has weaknesses of course like that john might have known the original yet rather referred to q in his text or that the logia were given in a codified version in the first place the argument alone does not allow a firm conclusion but it fits well into the dating usually given for the gospels 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 not necessarily luke may have trusted the version he knew better than the version given by matthew improving on matthew would give a motive for instance as far as i know the theory that luke has known matthew is based on a statistical analysis of the texts 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 yep but it will take another day or so to get the source i hope your german is good enough 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 i still do not see how copies from allow to change the dating of john 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 yes but an if gives only possibilities and no evidence the authencity of many letters is still discussed it looks as if conclusions about them are not drawn because some pet dogmas of the churches would probably fall with them as well 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 well rather like some newsletter of a political party reporting from the big meeting not necessarily wrong but certainly 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 yes but the accuracy of their tradition is another problem question are there letters not from paul and predating mark claiming the divinity of jesus benedikt
