{"id":63903,"date":"2017-01-15T07:00:44","date_gmt":"2017-01-15T14:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/?p=63903"},"modified":"2017-01-14T14:33:10","modified_gmt":"2017-01-14T21:33:10","slug":"anonymous-gospels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/2017\/01\/15\/anonymous-gospels\/","title":{"rendered":"Anonymous Gospels?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-63905\" src=\"http:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Anonymous.jpg\" alt=\"Anonymous\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" srcset=\"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Anonymous.jpg 620w, https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Anonymous-300x199.jpg 300w, https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Anonymous-600x399.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/>This week I heard a talk on the Gospel of John by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thesacredpage.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Dr. Michael Barber<\/a>\u00a0at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.olmcsandiego.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In the early part of his talk, Dr. Barber discussed the question of authorship of the Gospel. He mentioned how modern sceptical scholars often say that the Gospel was originally anonymous, and that the text <span style=\"color: #993300\">&#8220;The Gospel according to John&#8221;<\/span> was a\u00a0later addition. I have often heard claims such as these, so I was delighted to hear\u00a0Dr. Barber present some potential problems\u00a0with this position&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>The main issue in\u00a0asserting that the Gospel was original anonymous is that the <strong>manuscript evidence<\/strong>\u00a0does not support this\u00a0hypothesis at all. Where the manuscripts survive, we find the text present. Not only that, there are some other problems which flow from this&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>If the original Gospel was anonymous and the association with St. John was a later development,\u00a0<strong>why don&#8217;t we find divergent attributions<\/strong><strong>?<\/strong>\u00a0Since St. John is not identified as the author within the narrative itself, surely one would expect <strong>many<\/strong> divergent attributions to develop? Why was the Gospel never associated with, say, St. Peter? The obvious answer is that\u00a0the text <span style=\"color: #993300\">&#8220;The Gospel according to John&#8221;<\/span> was in there from the beginning.<\/p>\n<p>If the sceptics are right, the text had been copied as an\u00a0anonymous Gospel and distributed throughout the Empire. Why is it that manuscripts from <strong>all these different regions<\/strong> bear the text claiming Johannine authorship?\u00a0It would have been an impossible task to gather up all these different manuscripts retrospectively in order to\u00a0&#8220;fix&#8221; them with an agreed-upon author, particularly since they were in different languages (Greek, Latin etc). Once again, the simplest explanation for consistency in all these manuscripts in all these areas in all these languages is simply that\u00a0the text <span style=\"color: #993300\">&#8220;The Gospel according to John&#8221;<\/span> was in there from the beginning.<\/p>\n<p>These reasons, coupled with <strong>the universal testimony of the Early Church Fathers<\/strong>, should give us great confidence that, from the very beginning, this Gospel opened with the words <span style=\"color: #993300\">&#8220;The Gospel according to John&#8230;&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week I heard a talk on the Gospel of John by Dr. Michael Barber\u00a0at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church. In the early part of his talk, Dr. Barber discussed the question of authorship of the Gospel. He mentioned how modern sceptical scholars often say that the Gospel was originally anonymous, and that the text &#8220;The Gospel according to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63906,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[4233,50,2969,2664,2645,4232],"class_list":["post-63903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faith","tag-anonymous-gospel","tag-dr-michael-barber","tag-featured","tag-john-paul-the-great-catholic-university","tag-our-lady-of-mount-carmel","tag-the-gospel-of-john"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Anonymous-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63903"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63911,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63903\/revisions\/63911"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}