The earliest Gospel (Jesus, tradition, gnostic, Hebrew)

[Rex]

I'm not limiting this to the 4 canon gosepels.

Which are believed to be the earliest gospels? I know there are some 200+ gospels out there. So which one would be the closests to the time of Jesus.

[linwood]

Thats an excellent question I wish someone would answer.

I`m curious now too.

[Scuba Pete]

I look forward to hearing this one.

[No*s]

Originally Posted by Rex_Admin

I'm not limiting this to the 4 canon gosepels.

Which are believed to be the earliest gospels? I know there are some 200+ gospels out there. So which one would be the closests to the time of Jesus.

I'll go with traditional view that Matthew was composed in Hebrew or Aramaic, and that this was the original .

[pcarl]

I think most scholars now agree that Mark was the first canonical gospel, 60-70
Mt--70
Lk--80
Jn--90
The earliest NT writings are from Paul---50-60
From what I have read most of the non-canonical gospels are later than the canonicals, first to middle 2nd century

[Sunstone]

Just a hunch, but I'd be willing to bet that some of the gnostic writings, such as the Gospel of Thomas, were writen before the canon.

[pcarl]

<Just a hunch,....>

Yes, since the canon was not finalized until 367. I have it that the Gospel
of Thomas was a late fourth century "gospel" found about 1945 at Nag Hammadi and
written in Sahidic Coptic, a collection of sayings of Jesus dating about 140

[Chris]

Though I believe that God is a collective conscience, an inevitable fabrication of the collective human imagination, and a tool for fear in maintaining power.

Actually, I think the scholars date it to mid 2nd century - a full century after most of the other gospels were written.

[Bright-ness' Shadow]

Gospel of Thomas
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/thomas.html

[size=2]On dating, Ron Cameron states (op. cit., p. 536):

Determining a plausible date of composition is speculative and depends on a delicate weighing of critical judgments about the history of the transmission of the sayings-of-Jesus tradition and the process of the formation of the written gospel texts. The earliest possible date would be in the middle of the 1st century, when sayings collections such as the Synoptic Sayings Gospel Q first began to be compiled. The latest possible date would be toward the end of the 2d century, prior to the copying of P. Oxy. 1 and the first reference to the text by Hippolytus. If Gos. Thom. is a sayings collection based on an autonomous tradition, and not a gospel harmony conflated from the NT, then a date of composition in, say, the last decades of the 1st century would be more likely than a mid-to-late-2d-century date

Patterson writes on the dating and provenance of Thomas (op. cit., p. 120):

While the cumulative nature of the sayings collection understandably makes the Gospel of Thomas difficult to date with precision, several factors weigh in favor of a date well before the end of the first century: the way in which Thomas appeals to the authority of particular prominent figures (Thomas, James) against the competing claims of others (Peter, Matthew); in genre, the sayings collection, which seems to have declined in importance after the emergence of the more biographical and dialogical forms near the end of the first century; and its primitive christology, which seems to presuppose a theological climate even more primitive than the later stages of the synoptic sayings gospel, Q. Together these factors suggest a date for Thomas in the vicinity of 70-80 C.E. As for its provenance, while it is possible, even likely, that an early version of this collection associated with James circulated in the environs of Jerusalem, the Gospel of Thomas in more or less its present state comes from eastern Syria, where the popularity of the apostle Thomas (Judas Didymos Thomas) is well attested.

Passion narrative
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/passion.html

The inspiration for the subsequent discussion comes from the suggestion of R. Pesch that the passion narrative must have been written before 37 CE because "the high priest" is mentioned without any name. Although this argument is not secure, given the counter-example that the pharaoh in the exodus story is not named either, it leads Theissen to undertake a comprehensive evaluation of the way in which people in the story are mentioned.

Theissen finds another reason for the anonymity of the high priest; it was not necessarily for the reason that the writing took place before 37 CE. Rather, during the period between 30 and 70 CE, "there was no time when Caiaphas and his family were not powerful" (p. 173). For this reason, reasons Theissen, "Traditions circulating in their sphere of influence were well advised not to mention their names in a negative context" (p. 173). By contrast, as shown by Philo and Josephus, Pilate "was the subject of more negative tradition than many other prefects and procurators," and so the creators of the original passion narrative had no reason not to mention Pilate by name and to place blame upon him. This situation is changed in the period after the First Jewish Revolt in the writings of Matthew and Luke, in which Pilate is exonerated and the high priest is named without hesitation.

On the naming of "James the younger," Theissen writes, "It would have been particularly necessary in Jerusalem to distinguish a 'James the younger' (or 'the less') from the 'older' (or 'greater') bearers of that name in the period circa 30-65 C.E." (p. 178) Theissen speculates that the "Mary of James the younger and the mother of Joses" is to be indentified with the mother of Jesus in Mk 6:3, and thus that "James the younger" is James the brother of Jesus. If this is the case, the expression belongs to the time before 44 C.E., when James the son of Zebedee was more prominent.

Lost Sayings Gospel Q
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/q.html