Socrus Petri [BGE v4.06]

Patristique

This episode originally aired Aug 25, 2024 on youtube.com/Patristica   Mark's First Gospel LODLIB is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3927056   Exploring the latest release (version 4.06) of Mark's pioneering, evolutionary solution to the Synoptic Problem and reconstruction of Marcion's Gospel and its two sources. Volume 6 is newly released, with a curated collection of almost all primary source quotations attesting to Marcion's Gospel, as well as accompanying, original, expert translations.   All audio-visual content © 2024 Clavis Consulting, LLC (Kansas). All rights reserved. None of this audio-visual content may be used as data for large language models, neural nets, or machine learning projects without prior written permission from the content creator, his heirs, or designees.   Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/patristica   Github - https://www.github.com/mgbilby   ORCID - https://www.orcid.org/0000-0003-0100-6634   Google Scholar - https://www.scholar.google.com/citations?user=dlsBqrAAAAAJ   Qn & Marcion's Gospel  - https://www.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3927056   Marcion's Apostolos Translated - https://www.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8271823   e-Clavis: Christian Apocrypha - https://www.nasscal.com/e-clavis-christian-apocrypha

Transcript

00:01Welcome to the Petrosica Podcast. I'm your host today, Mark Bilby. I'm going to be talking about

00:07the new release of my open gospel, first gospel, LODLIB, linked open data, living informational

00:13book, version 6. It's Sunday. For me, researching the gospels using a scientific approach is church.

00:24The latest update has about a half million words in it, which is comparable to what it was

00:31previously. I had many data sets that were part of this. Those data sets have been published in the

00:37Journal of Open Humanities data, sometimes with various collaborators. We're probably going to

00:43have more coming out in the not-too-distant future in collaboration with Marcus Vincent.

00:49But today's version of what I call the first gospel, LODLIB, is now available. It's version

00:574.06. I finally got through with breaking it all out into separate volumes. It was getting unwieldy

01:06because it was such a massive book. I needed to break it apart into various volumes. Essentially,

01:13volume 1 is the introduction and would fit on like normal book pages size. But volumes 2 and 3 have

01:23huge like 11 by 17 layout because the amount of data that you have to deal with and trace in

01:33terms of

01:33an evolutionary model or a cascading model is so vast and complex that it just requires a much larger

01:41page format than a traditional academic book and religious studies would involve. Other volumes are

01:49sized according to what contents they have in there. So I have updates about all that stuff on my Patreon

01:55if you want to look at that and see what the rationale was for dividing the book this way. But

02:01essentially,

02:01now we have six volumes. One volume is brand new in terms of being released. This is a volume that

02:08I

02:08largely put together in 2020 and 2021 as I went through all the attestations to Marcion's gospel

02:19and then just provided fresh translations. So I looked in the primary source text,

02:24not just relying on Dieter Roth's work, although that's an excellent work in terms of gathering the

02:29attestations. I went to the sources myself, confirmed page, updated. There were various places where Roth made

02:36mistakes in terms of the transcription of the Latin or the Greek text. I corrected those. But as a move

02:44toward accessibility and just analysis, I translated those. So most of those translations are already

02:50available in the footnotes of my main work in the big like synopsis with the side-by-side gospels. In

02:57the footnotes to those, I very carefully, meticulously curated attestations, commentary, statistical analysis,

03:06this kind of stuff. But if you want to just look at the attestations and that's all, and you want

03:12a

03:12nice like cleanly organized place to get at those, you can now look at those in volume six. Again, all

03:18this stuff is open access. Just something I believe very strongly in is open science, open data, open and

03:26transparent research. If research is being done behind a paywall, it's probably not reliable or trustworthy

03:33research. If classes are being offered behind a paywall, probably not reliable, trustworthy

03:39classes if they're hiding that stuff from the public and from other scholars. You don't know where

03:45those sources come from. You don't know where the material comes from. You don't know what is by that

03:52scholar and what is taken from other scholars, maybe without credit. So I just encourage people to be very

03:57strong advocates for open access and transparency in scholarship because otherwise you're running the

04:05risk of being hoodwinked by people who are using religious studies as a grift and a way to make money

04:11off of you instead of just advancing the scientific discourse. Unfortunately, a lot of religious studies

04:17is geared to make a lot of profits for a very few amount of people and that's just not how

04:23it should

04:23be. Particularly texts that are about Jesus being a poor slave, which is probably what the earliest

04:29gospel was all about. So I think it is dishonoring to scholarship and it's dishonoring to the very origins

04:36of Christianity to turn it into, you know, a grift. So this is open access. Let's start going through

04:48what's new to this. So I mentioned the attestations. I'll go ahead and bring those up so you can take

04:52a

04:52look at those. Here we go. Here's like sample page of attestations where you can go through, see what the

05:01Latin text is. Get the exact page number. Lots of abbreviations here may not be familiar to people

05:07unless you're scholars. SC is which is a dual Greek or Latin French critical edition of the text. Evans is

05:16Ernest Evans who did a major version of Tertullian's commentary against Marcion. Epiphanes is

05:26Panarion. You know, if you start looking into these you can figure out and I have other resources in other

05:30places in the book where you can get at this kind of stuff. So I hope that that's useful to

05:35you.

05:37And then some also just some I've annotated this throughout. I have a list of witnesses here just

05:43to show that we have over 20 different witnesses to Marcion's gospel. I also have these like little

05:48symbols and abbreviations I use to indicate what the significance is of a various, you know,

05:54of a given attestation, whether it has a significant variant or not, whether that variant

06:00actually makes any difference to the restoration or not. So all of this is very meticulously

06:05researched and I just want to surface this stuff. This is a text I, for example, shared with Badoon.

06:10I don't know that he used it when he was putting his final revisions on the Greek additional Marcion's

06:15gospel that we did together, but it was a text, a resource that I shared with him back in the

06:20day

06:20about a year and a half or two years ago. All right. For the, the intro, this is, you know,

06:26you could read through this, but now there's a separate table of contents for every volume of the

06:30book. So it just makes it a lot cleaner, easier to, to download smaller files for each volume,

06:37all those kinds of things. So I want this to be maximally useful and usable, accessible. So again,

06:44most of this stuff has been out here for four years. This is not new stuff. And, you know,

06:49I think it started to have a pretty significant impact on scholarship. And I just want to put that

06:55invitation out there again for scholars to peer review this work. You know, some of my colleagues

07:00have certainly used this, cited this work, written, you know, brief reviews, but I would love for

07:06serious scholarly engagement with this work and collaboration. Tell me where I'm right. Tell me where

07:11I'm wrong. Uh, or be a part of this book, this as this kind of a movement and open science

07:16movement

07:17and contribute. Maybe you want to take a chapter of Marcion's gospel and do the translations for it.

07:22Um, you know, maybe you want to disagree and come up with a different model, uh, for these texts. But

07:27I think, uh, as opposed to 99% of prior gospel scholarship, I've actually got a viable scientific

07:36based solution to the synoptic problem. Um, people like Goodacre or Kloppenberg,

07:41they only got it about 20% right. They were, their modeling was about 80% wrong and 20%

07:47right.

07:48This is the first time in history that scholars are close to an 85 to 90% correct modeling of

07:56the

07:56gospel in terms of modeling data flow, uh, which should be what this is all about. But unfortunately,

08:02most scholarship is just about like regurgitating mythical authorship and, um, just non-viable models

08:10that are simplistic flow charts rather than truly evolutionary or cascading models, uh, of the

08:16gospels of these texts as signals and tracing the process of signal transmission and signal synthesis.

08:23Uh, let me bring open. Yeah. Uh, I just thought I'd show some of the new stuff. So, um, I

08:31have fresh

08:31English translations now of everything in chapter four. There's quite a bit of chapter five and chapter

08:37six that are also have full English translations alongside the Greek. Scholars looking at the stuff

08:43have to analyze the Greek. You can't start from the English text and derive a serious, uh, scientific

08:50analysis of this. The only way, uh, to do a serious, uh, scientific approach to these texts is to research

08:56them in their original languages. It's unfortunate that the classics are disappearing from most schools,

09:01most universities. Now, a lot of people might not have the tools to learn this, but there are various

09:07ways that you can learn and become more competent with Greek. But, uh, I provide this dual language,

09:14Greek and English as well as, you know, in their Latin attestations and Syriac attestations. I provide

09:19those in the footnotes, but this is a nice passage, uh, you know, to show another sort of data flow,

09:25correct data flow modeling of these relationships. Again, traditional models would say, you know,

09:30like Mark and priority, you know, maybe Mark's first and Luke is second, Matthew's third, or Mark is first,

09:37uh, Matthew is second, Luke is third, or Luke and Matthew are independent, but they use Mark and Q.

09:43All those models just fail to do justice to a passage like this, where almost certainly the first

09:49tradition that we have is in Luke, but it's not in Marcion's version of Luke, but this is probably a

09:56late tradition. And it's part of the restoration of Peter. And we see when we read various texts,

10:02including John probably in its first edition, uh, but also the other, other texts, early version of

10:10Mark, early version of Matthew, early version of Luke, there's a lot of negative characterization of

10:16Peter. And in later versions, uh, there's a redemption of Peter. There's an attempt to try to make Peter

10:23look better or look like he was restored and wasn't just the one who betrayed Jesus

10:28and so on. And part of this redemption of Peter, uh, re-characterization of Peter in the later

10:35traditions is part of a proto-orthodox move. So, uh, late Luke or Luke 2, LK2 as I call it,

10:43because I use,

10:44I use these abbreviations as basically scientific terminology rather than hagiographical,

10:50mythical terminology for these texts. Um, it, it gives basically the simplest form. Uh, there are

10:58a few details in canonical Luke that don't occur in Matthew and Mark, but by and large, most of this

11:04stuff reoccurs. Um, so, you know, a general rule for tracing signals in the gospels is to look for

11:10elements that are unique and not present in the others. You know, like if you, if you just shuffled

11:15these in a deck and you took the names off, how, you know, how would you determine which comes first,

11:20second, and third? You can compare Luke and Matthew and see commonalities, distinctive

11:25commonalities between them. You can compare Matthew and Mark and see distinctive commonalities between

11:29them. You can compare Luke and Mark and see distinctive commonalities between them.

11:33So is this just, you know, a head, a head game? Is this just, um, you know, an unsolvable

11:40mystery? No, it's not. It's actually not that complicated. Scholars just make it ridiculously

11:45overcomplicated. I know this looks complicated, but this is actually, uh, an enormous way of

11:51simplifying the problem just by looking at this in, in terms of pure data flow. Again, taking,

11:57taking the labels off, how would you trace the signals here? And if you look carefully and do a

12:03word by word comparison, you see certain elements that are only in Mark and not available in Luke and

12:09Matthew. So if you're going to say Mark and priority, then why did they just skip immediately

12:15and coming out that, that participle? And then this list of the three disciples, Andrew and Jacob and

12:22John and approaching, and then the word immediately again, and the word grasping. So all those elements

12:27are not in Matthew and Luke. So you have to, in this, in that scenario of Mark and priority, you

12:33have to

12:33have some kind of explanation where Matthew and Luke both happen coincidentally to just

12:38skip over all the same words when they see immediately. Neither one of them likes that

12:43word. When they see the three extra disciples, they don't like that. So they skip that. They

12:47skip the word immediately twice. They skip the word approaching. They skip the word grasping.

12:51So Mark and priority here is honestly ridiculous. The far hypothesis, good acre. It's just foolishness.

12:57It's garbage. Um, the, these are additional new traditions and they're clearly elaborations,

13:04adding three more characters to the narrative. Again, an unbiased person who's not starting

13:10with a hagiographical model of these texts is going to say, yeah, this probably came in later. This,

13:15this is reminiscent somewhat of the transfiguration by adding three extra witnesses and as named

13:21disciples. Um, but there's more than that. And this word, the synthesis model, kind of a Hegelian model

13:28of, uh, mapping data flow comes in because not only are there unique elements held in common between

13:33Luke and Mark, uh, sometimes it's, you know, the precise case of the word, like taste synagogue

13:40gaze. That's a precise parallel between Luke and Mark. That's not in Matthew. So that has to be explained

13:48somehow, uh, into the house of Simon. That is a precise parallel between Luke and Mark. That's not in

13:55Matthew. It's partly in Matthew into the house, but Matthew renames the, the, the main character

14:02here, Peter, rather than Simon. So in some ways, Mark is closer to Luke, but then some ways Mark is

14:08closer to Matthew. Um, so the, the participle here being fevered, which in Greek is, uh, puresusa

14:18right here, there is no participle for that in Luke. It does have the word pureto, which is fever,

14:24but it doesn't have a participial form of it. It doesn't like personify, um, or it doesn't, it

14:31doesn't characterize the condition, uh, using a more elaborate form, puresusan here in Matthew. So

14:39Matthew has a more elaborate, more complex, more grammatically sophisticated way of talking about this

14:45disease. It's part of even like a participial chain here that looks like it's new and like it's a

14:51modification. Um, and then in Matt and Mark, it's, it's, uh, modified, uh, from an accusative to, um,

15:01a nominative. Um, but that's a unique linkage between Mark and Matthew. And we have several other

15:06things as well. They're like that, like the word raise, um, in Luke, Jesus rises, but he doesn't raise the

15:14woman. But in Matthew, he touches the hand of hers and then she is raised in a passive form.

15:21But in Mark, there's kind of an amplification. One might say a Christological heightening

15:26because Jesus entering raises her. So it almost takes on a resurrection kind of significance

15:34that might be reminiscent of the story of Lazarus. Uh, the raising of Lazarus was might have been before

15:39this, uh, grasping the hand. That's a new participle. It's a new concept. Um, there's no focus on the

15:46hand of the woman at all in Luke, but there is in Matthew Jesus touched her hand, but in Mark,

15:54Jesus grasps her hand. It's a more and like more sophisticated, more elaborate, more thoughtful

16:00construction, um, in terms of participial chaining going on here. And, um, and then we have, uh, the fever

16:08kind of being personified, uh, in a way like the fever does things. In Luke, Jesus censures the fever.

16:15He like rebukes it. Um, maybe in a passive sense, maybe it has like a demonic sense. Um, but in

16:21Matthew and Mark, the fever becomes personified. It actually does things. So the fever leaves her.

16:27It takes on the nominative form. Um, and, and what you see throughout here, the being fevered, the raised,

16:34the, the mention of the hand, these are all elements in Matthew that aren't in Luke. But what, what you

16:41see when you put these things side by side and you just map every single word is that you have

16:46a

16:46synthesis in Mark here. You have a synthesis of Luke, Luke and material and methane, uh, material

16:53that's combined, smooshed together and, uh, and reworked. That's the most sensible, the most logical,

17:01the most natural, uh, way of mapping this data. So, um, that's, that's the new English translation of

17:08this text. There are various others that we, we could look at here, but I'll just hold that up as

17:13a,

17:14oops, excuse me, as a good example of that particular, um, you know, a data flow pattern of from going

17:23from

17:24Luke to Matthew to Mark. Again, straight contradictory to the way most scholars have approached those

17:32texts through the years. That'd be a very minority position in scholarship. But if you don't start

17:36with the assumption that these were one-off texts, if you look at each one as its own, as a

17:42multi-stage

17:42text that's evolving through the years, then we can be open to these more complex scenarios. Here's another

17:50one that's somewhat comparable, um, about John being, John the Baptist being imprisoned and died.

17:55If you look at the traditions about John in, as it relates to John being in prison in the Gospel

18:02of

18:02John, it's very, very simplistic. Marcion's text has nothing about John. Uh, it does have John speaking

18:08from prison, but there's no elaborate story about why he gets thrown in prison or what happens to him

18:13when after he's thrown in prison or, you know, how he gets executed. Um, but in John, so in John,

18:20there's,

18:21there's a brief reference to John being in prison. Um, but in Luke, there's a much more elaborate story.

18:28Again, this part of the canonical form of Luke and Acts, which is much more concerned with like

18:34characterization, elaboration, political intrigue and drama, all of this. And then in Matthew, we have

18:40an expansion of that, uh, where there's even more details. Uh, now we have a direct quotations being

18:47added to the story. Uh, we have elaboration of family relationships that were not in Luke.

18:54And then Mark finally in here, this again goes together with observations that Vincent has made

19:00for decades really about Mark, maybe being the last gospel. It's not always the last gospel, but in many

19:06cases, Mark has the last tradition. It's the most elaborate, it's the most involved and it's the

19:13most synthesized. Again, merging elements and recombining elements that are distinctive to Luke

19:19and Matthew and making a new synthesis. Uh, that's what we see in Mark again here. So this is kind

19:24of a

19:25similar thing to what we saw before, but if we go on to the story of the execution of John,

19:30there's nothing in

19:31Luke. So while Luke, you know, tends to be very, very, uh, interested in court drama and political

19:39intrigue and elaborate backstories, all this kind of stuff that you find in like the nativity or in

19:45the trial of Jesus, it's quite elaborate. Uh, here we're probably looking at quite late traditions

19:52of the death of John the Baptist. So the idea that Mark here is the earliest text

19:57is just absurd. It has an enormously expanded, highly involved, highly meticulous, but again,

20:04with tons of material, tons of elements that are not in Matthew. And again, like the problem with

20:12the whole idea of Mark and priority is you have to, you have to from that construct the idea that

20:17Matthew was an abridgment or that Luke was an abridgment, but there's no abridgment here. So your,

20:22your explanation is that Luke, a text that loves backstories, political intrigue, drama,

20:29all of this stuff decided, and, and even had a story of, uh, the beginning of John the Baptist

20:34decided to leave out the story elaborate, like amazing story of the, of the death of John the Baptist.

20:40Um, and even explaining Matthew as an abridgment of Mark here does not make sense because it doesn't

20:46read as a distillation. It reads as a different story. It just has, uh, it has a different framework.

20:53It has a simpler framework. Um, and Matthew, or Mark is just far more involved adding far more

21:01characterization, um, much more intrigue, more characters, um, circumstances, political terminology,

21:11right? All this stuff that, uh, yeah, if you're just copying a text, uh, and, and then things like

21:18even haste, these are things we find in canonical Luke. So it may even be here that this portion of

21:24Mark was redacted by the editor of canonical Luke, right? Uh, or by a close associate of that person who

21:30liked this kind of court elaborate, uh, uh, elaboration because things like haste, that's

21:36a very common, uh, narrative technique in canonical Luke, but we don't find it here in the story in

21:42Luke. Instead we find it in Mark. So we, it may be here that canonical Mark is actually being edited

21:48by

21:49the same person or one of the, you know, a group of people that includes, um, a person or just

21:54somebody

21:55who's been influenced by the storytelling that you find in canonical Luke, where there's this constant

21:59emphasis on haste, uh, and court drama and all these kinds of things. So, uh, so that's more,

22:06uh, those of you who are interested again in, um, in reading this in English, please, please enjoy

22:11those who would be interested potentially in collaborating with our team. Uh, please reach

22:16out. And, um, if you would like to, again, write a review or give some critical feedback on any part

22:21of

22:21this, all of it is open to correction. It's an iterative work, so it can always be improved. There are

22:26plenty of mistakes, uh, in here and plenty of things that need to be corrected. Um, but overall,

22:32this is probably the most significant and substantive work on the gospels that you will be able to read or

22:37find in existence today. And I think it charts and pioneers a new path, uh, for how we understand and

22:44analyze these texts. And there are going to be pretenders and derivatives, uh, that are pretending to do

22:51work that is this meticulous and involved and serious and scientific, but, um, there's just

22:57nobody yet who's done this. So, uh, bring it on, you know, for the scholars out there, bring it on.

23:02That's all I got for today. I hope you have a good weekend. Peace out.

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