Browsing by Author "Goodacre, Mark S"

The question of Matthew’s missiology in modern scholarship frequently centers the relationship between contradictory commissions in 10:5-6 and 28:19-20. Does Matthew believe that the mission to Israel is the primary focus of the nascent church, or that the gentile mission has replaced it? Or does Matthew believe that the mission that began in Israel has now expanded to include all nations? The goal of this dissertation is to complicate this question by expanding our object of study to other passages in the Gospel that discuss missions. We begin with Matt 10. In Matt 10, missionary work is an ethnically and geographically limited project. Missionaries are sent as envoys of Jesus. They depend on their targets for hospitality. They focus on Jews, though gentiles are present as onlookers. The missionary project forces confrontation with Jewish leadership, particularly Pharisees. Neither Jews nor gentiles are singled out as persecutors. The mission is associated with imminent eschatology, and it is underway when Matthew writes. We compare this missiology with five passages that precede the final commission: the parable of the tenants (21:33-46), the wedding banquet (22:1-14), the woes against scribes and Pharisees (chapter 23), the tribulation (chapter 24), and the parable of the sheep and the goats (25:31-46). What becomes clear is that Matthew’s missiology is unified. He entertains a mission that is no longer restricted, but other tropes from Matt 10 reappear. This continuity reemerges again in the final call to international mission (28:16-20). Matthew’s missiology is not discontinuous, but stable. He introduces a missionary task in 10:5-42, places it in Israel, and expects that this work will continue in the rest of the world. Outreach to Jews and gentiles bleeds into each other from the beginning, given Matthew’s awareness of gentiles in Palestine and of Jews in the Diaspora. The question of whether Matthew intends his message to go to Jews, or gentiles, or both, therefore, is significantly more complicated than it first appears.

This dissertation situates the synoptic gospels in the context of first and second century pluriform literary traditions. The treatment of Mark by the authors of Matthew and Luke is far from typical of contemporary historical writings. The conservatism of the latter evangelists with the wording and scope of their literary sources resembles, rather, a compositional procedure associated with technical literature. Independent religious experts appropriated this convention of re-writing from rival teachers as an appropriate method for demonstrating their mastery of received knowledge while, simultaneously, revising that disciplinary tradition. The synoptic gospels were, therefore, understood as discrete books by identifiable authors composed on the same substrate of content, called a hypothesis. Two second century Christian teachers illustrate the origin of synoptic-type gospels in the educational marketplace of Greek-speaking cities. Both Marcion and Tatian were independent Christian teachers in major urban areas. Both composed new gospels according to the conservative conventions evinced in the synoptic gospels.

The field of orality studies has provided new perspectives and insights on a vast array of literature, including the Gospel of Mark and the Qur'an. Despite numerous historical and literary parallels between these two works, the enriched perspectives gained by orality studies have not often been brought to bear upon one another. This thesis brings Mark and the Qur'an together under an oral lens with the aim of mutually elucidating intriguing characteristics of both texts. After introducing the field of orality studies and assessing the oral characteristics of both texts, it will be concluded that both Mark and the Qur'an were composed primarily for oral recitation, that the controversial bookends of each work are a result of codifying oral tradition, and that these early texts, once codified, spurred the production of elaborative material within their own traditions.

This dissertation investigates the text of Paul's Epistle to the Galatians and its history, how it changed over time. This dissertation performs a stemmatic analysis of 92 witnesses to the text of Galatians, using cladistic methods developed by computational biologists, to construct an unoriented stemma of the textual tradition. The stemma is then oriented based on the internal evidence of textual variants. After the stemma is oriented, the textual variants near the base of the stemma are examined and the text of Galatians is established based on stemmatic and eclectic principles. In addition, two branches of the textual tradition, the Western and the Eastern-Byzantine, are studied to assess the nature of textual variation in their history. This study reaches the conclusion that a modified stemmatic approach is an effective way to study both the text of a New Testament book and its history.