Theos-Talk Archives (February 2010 Message tt00293)

Dear friends


My views are:

The following quite new book "The Hebrew Gospel & the Development of the Synoptic Tradition" by James Edwards, october 2009, might be good to know about.......I say this not to offend the LCC "hats" and their rite on the "Blessing of a Church Bell", and Apostolic Succesions etc., but so that the truth might be known! 
:-)

Is it not impossible, that this book might be able to really rock the Christian religion away from its narrowminded fanatical stance? It seem to contain a possible impact levelling in scale a Dan Brown book or similar if not even more. Maybe a movie called something like "The Hebrew File" on the issue would change the worlds view about the Gospels.


>>>Professor's book 'controversial'<<<
By Natalie Johnson, Production Manager
Published: Monday, November 23, 2009
"In his new book, "The Hebrew Gospel & the Development of the Synoptic Tradition," professor of theology James Edwards challenges long-held assumptions about the Bible and sheds new light on the controversial theory of a fifth gospel.

Edwards' book is the culmination of 12 years of intensive study of the gospels and early Christian writings and research in monasteries and libraries around the world.

In his book, which was released in October, Edwards presents evidence for the existence of the Hebrew Gospel, an early account of Jesus' life that he says was written in Hebrew by the apostle Matthew and preceded the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke.

"If this book gets traction, it will cause a significant change in how early Christianity is understood," he said.

Edwards refutes in his book the increasingly popular theory of an early gospel called Q, saying there simply isn't evidence to support it.

"I wrote [this book] to redirect study of the gospels in a more fruitful way than Q has taken us," Edwards said.

Instead, Edwards says the gospel of Luke was based in part on the Hebrew Gospel.
"I am giving a new explanation for the source of the gospel of Luke," he said.
Edwards said that half of Luke is full of Semitisms, Greek words and phrases that indicate they are translations from Hebrew, which strongly suggests that they derive from an early Hebrew source.

"The major theories on the development of the gospels since the Enlightenment are based on internal evidence among the gospels alone, while largely rejecting what the early church had to say about the formation of the gospel tradition," he said. "My proposal has the advantage of interacting constructively with both internal evidence in the gospels and the testimony of the early fathers."

Edwards said the Hebrew Gospel has remained largely unstudied in the theological world and, in his opinion, has been scandalously overlooked.

"Most scholars don't know much about the Hebrew gospel and many deny that it existed," he said.

Throughout history, Edwards said, Christians have been hesitant to accept a Hebrew ancestor to the gospels. The theory of the Hebrew Gospel is still unpopular with many in the theological world.

Though no copies of the Hebrew Gospel are known to exist, Edwards' research and study of ancient manuscripts has convinced him to believe unwaveringly that it once did.
"We know [the Hebrew Gospel] did exist because it was referred to about 100 times in the first nine centuries of Christianity," he said.

In addition, some 40 quotations from the Hebrew Gospel exist in the first four centuries of Christian history, Edwards said. Although the Hebrew Gospel was never considered canonical, it was considered authentic and held in very high regard by early church leaders.

"From our perspective, the Hebrew Gospel appears to be an unknown or even phantom source," he said. "It was actually widely known in the early church.""
http://www.whitworthian.com/news/professor-s-book-controversial-1.2096941


"The Hebrew Gospel and the Development of the Synoptic Tradition"
 by James R. Edwards - is online at http://books.Google.com  
....
"The ever-increasing particularization in NT studies is one of the reasons for ignorance of the Hebrew Gospel. Spceialization inevitably results in a restricted field of vision, and knowledge of nineteenth-century scholarship is often a casualty of that restricted vision. Our chief witnesses to the Hebrew Gospel come from the patristic era, and nineteenth-century NT scholarship was, on the whole, remarkably well informed about the era. The nineteenth century, in fact, witnessed something of a "quest" for the Hebrew Gospel, less exalted to be sure than the quest for the historical Jesus, but a quest nonetheless. The rigor of the nineteenth-century NT scholarship, and its abatement has inevitably resulted in diminished contact with the Hebrew Gospel.
 The Large number of scholars who participated in the quest for the Hebrew Gospel and the sustained rigor with which they pursued it comprise a remarkable tradition of NT scholarship. No less remarkable, perhaps, is that the scope and gains of this tradition are largely unknown to modern scholarship."
......
"The first modern scholar to shine a light into the darkness of the Hebrew Gospel was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who in 1778 published a series of sixty-eight hypotheses in which he argued for an original Hebrew Gospel as the source of all three Synoptic Evangelists, each of whom employed it according to his authorial intentions."



M. Sufilight

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