“The neomodernist stranglehold is exemplified by the treatment accorded Fr. Jean Carmignac, who died in 1986. Perhaps the greatest French Bible scholar of the century, who dated the writing of each of the four Gospels between A.D. 40 and 50, he was never allowed to publish
his research, on orders of the French bishops. They accused Carmignac of
"an obsession of struggling against the majority of exegetes".”
Paul Likoudis
Then came Dr. Carsten Peter Thiede with his dramatic evidence for a
radical early dating of the Gospel of Matthew. We read a little of it in the
following account:
Christmas Eve 1994
would have come and gone like any other, had it not been for three tiny papyrus
fragments discussed in The Times of London’s sensational
front-page story. The avalanche of letters to the editor jarred the world into
realizing that Matthew d’Ancona’s story was as big as the discovery of the Dead
Sea Scrolls. The flood of calls received by Dr. Carsten Peter Thiede, the
scholar behind the story, and the international controversy that spread like
wildfire, give us an inkling as to why the Magdalen Papyrus has embroiled
Christianity in a high-stakes tug-of-war over the Bible.
Thiede
and d’Ancona boldly tell the story of two scholars a century apart who stumbled
on the oldest known remains of the New Testament–hard evidence confirming that
St. Matthew’s Gospel is the account of an eyewitness to Jesus. It starts in
1901 when the Reverend Charles B. Huleatt acquires three pieces of a manuscript
on the murky antiquities market of Luxor, Egypt. He donates the papyrus
fragments to his alma mater, Magdalen College in Oxford, England, where they
are kept in a butterfly display case, along with Oscar Wilde’s ring. For nearly
a century, visitors hardly notice the Matthew fragments, initially dated to
a.d.180-200; but after Dr. Thiede redates them to roughly a.d. 60, people flock
to the library wanting to behold a first-century copy of the Gospel.
But what
is all the fuss about? How can three ancient papyrus fragments be so
significant? How did Thiede arrive at this radical early dating? And what does
it mean to the average Christian? Now we have authoritative answers to these
pivotal questions. Indeed, the Magdalen Papyrus corroborates the tradition that
St. Matthew actually wrote the Gospel bearing his name, that he wrote it within
a generation of Jesus’ death, and that the Gospel stories about Jesus are true.
Some will vehemently deny Thiede’s claims, others will embrace them, but nobody
can ignore Eyewitness to Jesus.
[End of quote]
Paul Likoudis, writing for EWTN in 1997, has more to say
on the matter.
I (Damien Mackey) would not necessarily agree with him,
though, that “Matthew's is the
first Gospel”. Fr. Jean Carmignac
(mentioned in this article) made an excellent case for (if I recall correctly) Mark’s
being basically the Gospel of St. Peter – and therefore the first gospel - translated
by Mark into Greek.
New Book Claims Four Gospels Written Before Fall Of
Jerusalem
….
The hundred years' war on
the Gospels-led by Rudolf Bultmann, who charged that "we can know
practically nothing about Jesus' life and personality," and escalated by
some of the most prominent Catholic Bible scholars working today-has produced
the intended results of religious indifference, agnosticism, and atheism.
Typical of the
Bultmann-inspired Catholic exegetes is Fr. Jerome. Murphy O'Connor, O.P., who,
writing in the December, 1996 issue of the Claretians', pontificates that the
Gospels are "mythical embellishments," that Jesus didn't know He was
God and didn't know where His power came from, that Mary considered Him an
embarrassment to the family, that she was not at the foot of the cross as the
evangelists relate, and more.
"Do the Gospels Paint a
Clear Picture of Jesus?," he asked. Definitely not, he tells his students
and readers.
At the core of the dissident
biblical exegesis which has produced such disastrous consequences for Catholic
life, liturgy, catechetics, and scholarship is a refusal to believe that the
Gospels were written by eyewitnesses of the events described.
Though there has been no
shortage of genuine Catholic exegetes, archaeologists, and historians who have
insisted on an early dating of the Gospels to within a decade or two of Jesus'
life, these scholars have often found it difficult to break through the
controls put in place by an oppressive neomodernist establishment in both
Catholic and Protestant institutions.
(The neomodernist
stranglehold is exemplified by the treatment accorded Fr. Jean Carmignac, who
died in 1986. Perhaps the greatest French Bible scholar of the century, who
dated the writing of each of the four Gospels between A.D. 40 and 50, he was
never allowed to publish his research, on orders of the French bishops. They
accused Carmignac of "an obsession of struggling against the majority of
exegetes.")
Now comes a German
scientist, Carsten Peter Thiede, director of the Institute for Basic
Epistemological Research in Paderborn, who, with Matthew D'Ancona, is about to
dash to pieces the Bultmann-built edifice of modernist exegesis.
Their recently published
book, (Doubleday, 1996), is about a small piece of papyrus held at Magdalen
College, Oxford, which is the oldest fragment of in existence today.
The fragment contains
disjointed segments of 26, but even more important than the writing style,
which Thiede pinpointed to the time of Jesus' life, is the use of KS, an
abbreviated form of [missing], to refer to Jesus as Lord God- meaning that the
ancient author believed that Jesus is divine.
Thiede, a papyrologist,
furthermore concludes that must have been the first Gospel written.
The implications of this are
enormous. As Thiede and D'Ancona write in their book:
"Bultmann was wrong:
The authors of the Gospel could hear far more than the faintest whisper of
Jesus' voice.
Indeed, the first readers of
may have heard the very words which the Nazarene preacher spoke during his
ministry, may have listened to the parables when they were first delivered to
the peasant crowd; may even have asked the wise man questions and waited
respectfully for answers. The voice they heard was not a whisper but the
passionate oratory of a real man of humble origins whose teaching would change
the world."
The issue of the dating of
the Gospels has implications, furthermore, for believers and nonbelievers
alike. "... We have come to realize the extent to which this new claim is
directly relevant to the fundamental faith questions which all people, Christian
and non-Christian, atheist and agnostic must ask themselves. The redating of
the fragments, in other words, has a life beyond the confines of the academy. .
.
"The redating of the
Gospels- a process which is only now beginning in earnest-may seem an
enterprise appropriate to its times, to the mood of the millennium's end. There
is now good reason to suppose that the [missing], with its detailed accounts of
the Sermon on the Mount and the Great Commission, was written not long after
the crucifixion and certainly before the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70;
that the was distributed early enough to reach Qumran; that the belonged to the
first generation of Christian codices; and that internal evidence suggests a
date before A.D. 70 even for the nonsynoptic .... These are the first stirrings
of a major process of scholarly reappraisal."
International Upheaval
Thiede's findings are
causing an international upheaval among Bible scholars, particularly Catholic
exegetes who have bought the Bultmann line that separates the Gospels to a
generation or more from Jesus' contemporaries (making them the unreliable voice
of an uncertain community) ….
Two hundred years ago, one
of the leaders of the Enlightenment, Reimarus, described the task of
Church-haters to be to "completely separate what the Apostles presented in
their writings (i.e., the Gospels) from what Jesus himself actually said and
taught during his lifetime."
….
Footnote
Among the brief sections of
the Gospel on the Magdalen fragment is: "Then one of the XII, who was
called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priest and said, 'What will you give
me for my work?'"
….
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