Prior Judgements

An excellent programme on Codex Sinaiticus on Radio Four this morning was marred by Roger Bolton's presupposition of Markan Priority (the theory that Saint Mark's Gospel was the first to be written, and that Saint Matthew and Saint Luke copied out great chunks of it word for word) and of the inauthenticity of the longer ending of Saint Mark's Gospel.

That strange and increasingly unfashionable thing, Biblical criticism, purports to read the Bible "as if it were any other ancient text", but in fact subjects it to a series of methods that would be laughed out in any other literary of historical discipline. Those methods are carefully constructed to "prove" the presuppositions of that strange and increasingly unfashionable thing, liberal theology.

Thus, if two Biblical books are word for word alike (as Matthew, Mark and Luke certainly are in parts), then they must have been copied from each other, since there is no way that God could have inspired them all and, funnily enough, done so in such a way that they confirm each other's accounts. If Mark ends with what looks like a sort of synopsis of the post-Resurrection events recorded in the other Gospels, then that ending must be a later accretion, since there is no way that those events could actually have happened.

Jesus simply did not claim divinity for Himself, so that rules out John at a stroke. Miracles simply do not happen, a position not even compatible with agnosticism. Style simply does not develop (seriously), so Saint Paul cannot have written several of the Epistles beginning with the words "From Paul".

And so on, and on, and on.

Academia is at last moving away from this sort of thing. When will the BBC?