Prefaces to the Gospels

In his objective study of the texts, Maurice Bucaille clears' away many preconceived ideas about the Old Testament, the Gospels and the Quran. He tries, in this collection of Writings, to separate what belongs to Revelation from what is the product of error or human interpretation.

His study sheds new light on the Holy Scriptures. At the end of a gripping account, he places the Believer before a point of cardinal importance: the continuity of a Revelation emanating from the same God, with modes of expression that differ in the course of time. It leads us to meditate upon those factors which, in our day, should spiritually unite rather than divide-Jews, Christians and Muslims.

As a surgeon, Maurice Bucaille has often been in a situation where he was able to examine not only people's bodies, but their souls. This is how he was struck by the existence of Muslim piety and by aspects of Islam which remain unknown to the vast majority of non-Muslims. In his search for explanations which are otherwise difficult to obtain, he learnt Arabic and studied the Quran. In it, he was surprised to find statements on natural phenomena whose meaning can only be understood through modern scientific knowledge.

He then turned to the question of the authenticity of the writings that constitute the Holy Scriptures of the monotheistic religions. Finally, in the case of the Bible, he proceeded to a confrontation between these writings and scientific data.

The results of his research into the Judeo-Christian Revelation and the Quran are set out in this book.

Questions about areas of controversy or conflict between the Christian faith and the academic discipline can (and sometimes do) assume an easy dichotomy between the two. One's dual commitments to "the Faith" and the guild are often seen as competing allegiances, each vying for possession of the Christian soul. The guild may even be perceived as intolerant or antagonistic toward the Christian faith. Would-be Ph.D. students of evangelical backgrounds, for example, are often warned not to be naïve, but to be suspicious of secular institutions of higher learning. Such was my experience, as I left Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (M.Div.; Th.M.) for doctoral work in NT at Emory University. The problem with the aforementioned formulation, however, is the a priori "us versus them" mentality it fosters-a mentality that can foreclose genuine learning opportunities and undermine the very faith it seeks to defend. It also assumes a broad consensus among Christians on the identity and definition of those items of the faith in need of safeguarding vis-à-vis "the guild." Little did I know that upon returning to my alma mater, I would be the one suspected of having wavered from "the Faith."

The following is a pre-distributed paper discussed in the Gospel of Mark Section at the 2018 National Meeting of the SBL in Denver, CO.

The publication of Werner Kelber’s The Oral and the Written Gospel was a watershed moment not only for media-critical approaches to Mark, but for the study of the gospel generally. Kelber’s seminal monograph, however, has often been charged with propagating the so-called Great Divide approach to orality and textuality. Recent interpreters have distanced themselves from any perspective that claims that these modalities of communication are mutually exclusive or competing. Instead, these interpreters emphasize that orality and textuality interfaced in a complex manner in both the production and reception of texts. Yet there is little clarity about how this plays out at the ground level. The question of how a text like the Gospel of Mark simultaneously exhibits evidence of both oral and textual influence often goes unanswered. This paper aims to answer that question at the levels of both production and reception. It suggests that Mark existed (and still exists) at the borderland of orality and textuality. It is a “textualized oral narrative” composed via dictation. As such, there will have been multiple receptions of it, oral, aural, and literary, in antiquity. By proposing this thesis, I attempt to move further beyond the dichotomous terms that theories about the production and reception of Mark are often constructed in. The paper suggests that Mark will have been read performatively to groups and will also have been literarily received by individuals, rather than suggesting one mode of reception over and against the other. This thesis is argued on four counts. First, the linguistic style of Mark resembles spoken narratives, and this can be substantiated by modern sociolinguistic research. Second, the opening words of Mark, and specifically the term “gospel,” indicate that it is orally proclaimed news. Only after Mark was committed to the textual medium did this term come to refer to a literary genre. Mark’s existence at the borderland between orality and textuality helps to explain this development of the word. Third, early historical testimony from the likes of Papias, Clement, and Eusebius alleges that Mark was both produced and received as a tertium quid between writing and speaking. And fourth, several Markan exegetical “problems,” such as the location of the swine miracle in Mark 5 and the mix-up of Ahimelech and Abiathar’s names in Mark 2, and the solutions provided by the later Synoptic authors are less problematic when one understands Mark as a textualized oral narrative.

This short paper is simply designed to raise questions as to Markan priority in the solution of the synoptic puzzle. It gives a short and by no means comprehensive outline of the synoptic problem, and asserts that while there is no present day academic consensus regarding an alternative hypothesis to Markan priority, it does not mean Markan priority is a satisfactory theory explaining the data in the three gospels. It is not and many of its inadequacies are explained in this paper. The first half of the paper outlines some of the hypotheses put forward which attempt to explain the data, this culminates with Markan priority. The second half is a critique of the hypothesis based on the work of Farmer on the Griesbach hypothesis. The final conclusion is by no means certain.

This essay builds upon a basic Synoptic Hypothesis, in keeping with what most scholars believe to be the relations between the Synoptic traditions; distinctive, however, is the adding of the Johannine tradition to the mix, featuring Mark and John as "the Bi-Optic Gospels" and developing a new overall theory of gospel relations with John IN the mix. Put succinctly, Matthew and Mark built upon Mark; John (at least its first edition) built AROUND Mark. John is different in purpose. Published in my new contextual introduction to the New Testament: From Crisis to Christ (Nashville: Abingdon, 2014), 102-126.

The present study focuses on the first four prefaces of the Bălgrad New Testament, in an attempt not simply to identify the sources of the prefaces, but also evaluate the way in which the author makes use of them. Although Virgil Cândea and other Romanian scholars have taken upon themselves to demonstrate that the 1648 NT is the result of a thoroughly Orthodox initiative, the prefaces of the Gospels contain clues which suggest that the text printed by metropolitan Simion Ștefan stands “under the aegis of the Reformation” (as one Hungarian scholar has well put it). Up to now, no scholar has come up with a plausible explanation as to why the author of the prefaces (a) refers to the book of 2 Kings by using its Protestant name (“2 Samuel”), (b) is at variance with the venerable tradition according to which Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew, (c) uses Calvin’s triplex (“Christ as priest, prophet and king”) as an organizing principle of the content of the first two Gospels (Matthew and Mark).

This paper deals with the issue of the correct interpretation of τῶν πεπληροφορημένων ἐν ἡμῖν πραγμάτων, an obscure expression which appears in the Prologue of the Gospel of Luke. Several scholars read this passage as a reference to the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies, considering the rare verb πληροφορεῖν a synonym of πληροῦν and συμπληροῦν, with the meaning of ‘fulfill’. However, an overview of the Lukan passages in which these two verbs indicate the fulfillment of something pre-established by God shows a strong connection between this fulfillment and the place where it is meant to happen, namely the city of Jerusalem. Thus, in the expression τῶν πεπληροφορημένων ἐν ἡμῖν πραγμάτων, the words ἐν ἡμῖν can be interpreted as a reference to the first Christian community, who lived in Jerusalem, had the good fortune to witness the most important events in the Economy of Salvation, and first saw in them the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies.

A review of A Gospel Synopsis of the Greek Text of Matthew, Mark and Luke: A Comparison of Codex Bezae and Codex Vaticanus. Edited by Jenny Read-Heimerdinger and Josep Rius-Camp, in collaboration with Enric Muñarch. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Pp. xxi + 315. Cloth, $240.00.

Matthew C. Williams' "Two Gospels from One: A Comprehensive Text-Critical Analysis of the Synoptic Gospels" promises more than it can deliver, misleads readers with its subtitle, and stymies rather than advances the agendas of text-critical research and gospel criticism. Williams' study not only fails to shed new light on the synoptic problem, but also misappropriates (and misapplies) text-critical criteria to problems beyond their purview. The result is a work that amounts to little more than a cataloguing of well-known arguments for Marcan priority, encumbered by repeated attempts to tether a text-critical approach to the Synoptic Problem. Despite the appearance of copious detail, the work is selective in its treatment and founded upon a number of abstractions.

The paper, read February 11, 2021 at the Urshan Graduate School of Theology symposium, examines and evaluates Luke's historical and literary contributions designed to address the evolving political, sociological, and demographic situation of his dedicatee and implied readers. It also offers reflections on the implications of Luke's craft for doing ministry in the dynamic realities of today's world.

Contained here is the Abstract, Preface, Table of Contents, and Introduction to my recently defended dissertation at Marquette University.

Abstract:
This study compares two seemingly dissimilar ancient texts, the Gospel of Mark and Joseph and Aseneth. The former is a product of the nascent Jesus movement and influenced by the Greco-Roman βίοι (“Lives”). It details the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of a wandering Galilean. The latter is a Hellenistic Jewish narrative influenced by Jewish novellas and Greek romances. It expands the laconic account of Joseph’s marriage to Aseneth in Genesis 41 into a full-blown love story that promotes the romantic, theological, and ethical incentives of spurning idols and converting to Judaism. Generically, theologically, and concerning content the two texts are quite different.

Nonetheless, Mark and Joseph and Aseneth exhibit a number of remarkable affinities. As to language and style, both are paratactically structured and contain few long, complex periods. They are repetitive with respect to words, clauses, sentences, and pericopes. Each employs a similar proportion of active to passive voice verbs, as well as present and imperfect to aorist tenses. They are similar in length, and the direction of each narrative dramatically shifts at its midway point. Both are intertextually echoic, evoking Jewish Scriptures metonymically rather than by direct citation. And each has a multiform textual tradition that went unprotected from dramatic revisions by later authors and editors.

I argue that Mark and Joseph and Aseneth are similar in these respects because of their medium and mode of composition. Each was composed via dictation. They are what I will call “textualized oral narratives.” As such they represent one instantiation of the complex relationship between orality and textuality in early Judaism and Christianity. This thesis is argued on the basis of modern sociolinguistic studies that compare oral and written narratives, considerations of ancient media culture, and the linguistic and metalinguistic characteristics of the texts themselves.

Resumo: Este artigo trata da retórica inclusiva de João no prólogo de seu evangelho, onde sua opção pelo termo logos sugere seu desejo de falar não apenas a um público judaico, mas também grego. Para isso, analisam-se as opções lexicais à disposição do autor e o background hebraico, aramaico e grego do conceito de Cristo como Verbo. Aponta-se, além disso, para os indícios de um recebimento favorável do prólogo joanino por parte dos filósofos helenistas. Abstract: This article deals with John's inclusive rhetoric in the prologue of his gospel where his choice of the term logos implies his desire to speak not only to a Jewish audience, but also to the Greeks. In order to do that, it analyzes the lexical options available to the author as well as the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek background to the concept of Christ as Word. It points out, in addition, to the evidence of a favorable reception of the Johannine prologue by Hellenistic philosophers.

A preface is the author's endeavor to describe the text and indicates why the text has been written. It also underlines some of the author's references and the text's relevant point of concern. Thus, the preface functions as the author's introduction to the book. It is the section of the book in which the authors guide the reader about the text and share their opinions and beliefs on the text's content. Due to the importance of prefaces in textbooks, the present study attempts to explore the linguistic specificity in the preface section of the Pakistani academic soft discipline textbooks at Higher Secondary School Certificate (HSSC) and Bachelor's level. As specificity in writing is a crucial concept in using English for academic purposes. In a mix-method study, we have used the quantitative method (statistical percentage) in which the frequency along with percentage is recorded and further qualitatively interpreted with the help of concordance lines via AntConc software. The data of this study is compiled with the assistance of text fixer and file converter software. For the analysis of the corpus, Ken Hyland's (2009) model of lexical Specificity is adopted. The self-mention and hedges categories of the lexical specificity model have been analyzed for the preface section. The findings showed that there has been frequent use of the firstperson pronoun 'I and we' to build the authorial stance in the preface section. Further, the hedges like 'will and would' used in the preface section of the textbooks manifested the positive attitude of the authors by establishing solidarity for their readership and increasing the communicative tendency of the text. Thus, it is concluded that the preface of soft sciences textbooks would act as the mean with having dual communicative purposes, either to present the book and to publicize it to the potential readers.

s collection of essays renders an indispensable service to the discipline of NT textual criticism. Spanning nearly a half century of scholarly output, the essays afford readers an opportunity to accompany Elliott on his lengthy and arduous text-critical journey and track the thinking of one of today's premier practitioners of "thoroughgoing eclecticism." More than a series of text-critical exercises, Elliott's essays articulate trends in the field and disclose the necessary mettle to undertake such endeavors. The volume is an exemplar of the indefatigable industry and patience required of textual critics, but particularly of Elliott himself, where he is often the sole advocate for an approach that privileges the NT author's observable language, style, and theology over every other criterion for reconstructing the text.

Lk 1:57-80. Elisabeth autem impletum est tempus partendi, et peperit filium. Et audierunt vicini et cognati eius, quia magnificavit Dominus misericordiam suam cum illa, et congratulabantur ei. Ei factum est in die octave, venerunt circumcidere puerum; et vocabant cum nomine patris sui, Zachariam. Et respondens mater eius, dixit: Nequaquam, sed vocabitur Joannes. Et dixerunt ad illam: Quia nemo est in cognatione tua qui vocetur hoc nomine. Innuebant autem patri eius, quem vellet vocari eum; et postulans pugillarem scripsit dicens: Joannes est nome eius. Et mirati sunt universi. Apertum est autem illico os eius, et lingua eius; et loquebatur, benedicens Deum. Et factus est timor super vicinos eorum; et super omnia montana Judaeae divulgabantur omnia verba haec. Et posuerunt omnes qui audierunt, in corde suo,

This article tries to analyze the implications of a question commonly asked about the prologue in the Gospel of John: why did the apostle choose the word logos in reference to the Messiah instead of a less philosophically loaded word?
Este artigo tenta analisar as implicações de uma pergunta comumente formulada acerca do prólogo do Evangelho de João: por que o apóstolo escolheu a palavra logos para fazer referência ao Messias em vez de um termo filosoficamente menos carregado?

I also asked them for information as to what happen with the considerable sums of money that they charged for people to view them when they were on loan to Palace Green Library, Durham during 2013.
The reply is attached and below;
19th February 2015.
Thank you for your correspondence. As you pointed out, the Lindisfarne Gospels were once in the possession of Durham Cathedral Priory, according to Symeon of Durham, who refers to them in his twelfth-century ‘Tract on the Origins and Progress of this the Church of Durham.’ After this period there is very little information on how or when the Lindisfarne Gospels left Durham Cathedral Priory.
Lawrence Nowell, an antiquary and lexicographer, is known to have consulted the Lindisfarne Gospels in the 1560s, but he is not believed to have visited Durham. The name Thomas Turner also appears in the codex, and his annotations have been dated to the early sixteenth century. The sixteenth-century antiquary Thomas Bowyer (d.1569/70) may also have possessed the manuscript; by 1605, it was in the possession of his son, Robert Bowyer (b. c. 1560, d. 1621), a parliamentary official and politician, who inscribed his signature on the verso page of the second leaf of the manuscript.
In the first few decades of the seventeenth century Sir Robert Bruce Cotton (b. 1571, d. 1631) 1st baronet, antiquary and politician, acquired the manuscript. It was then passed on to his son, Sir Thomas Cotton (b. 1594, d. 1662), and grandson, Sir John Cotton (b. 1621, d.1702). The Cotton collection, including the Lindisfarne Gospels, was bequeathed to the nation ‘for Publick Use and Advantage’ by Sir John Cotton at his death in 1702. When the British Museum was established in 1753, these manuscripts formed one of the foundation collections of the Museum. The library of the Museum became the British Library in 1973.
As you note, the Gospels were recently loaned to Palace Green Library, Durham, for an exhibition, and the accompanying book Richard Gameson, From holy Island to Durham: The Contexts and Meanings of The Lindisfarne Gospels (2013) contains an excellent analysis of the manuscript’s history. The Library does not have details of the funding for that exhibition.
Regards
Mark Reaveley
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