In my first reading of “Christ Before Jesus,” I initially ignored Britt’s and Wingo’s summary. Initially, I contemplated doing so here as well, because honestly, after getting to this point, having gone over the text thoroughly, it was just a lot and I wanted to be done with it.
But to be as thorough as possible, I decided not to skip over it. Instead, we will briefly go through each point, and maybe a summary will be seen as useful. Here, I will quote their summary point by point, and then discuss what we actually saw.
1. Marcion’s Evangelion came before canonical Luke. The content missing from Evangelion matches Acts more closely than the content found in Evangelion, indicating that it was written by the author of Acts and not Evangelion. As Evangelion was published around 144, this puts our canonical version of Luke and Acts after this date, as well as the rest of the canonical gospels.
Marcion’s Gospel wasn’t named Evangelion. Evangelion means Gospel, or good news. Stylometry doesn’t tell us dates, and thus their arguments about dating really fall flat.
No real evidence was given for the idea of Marcion priority, so we can also just dismiss it here. As for the missing content and how it was clustered with Acts, what we saw instead was that Britt and Wingo manipulated what their dendrogram showed, either because they don’t know how to read such data, or because it simply fit their preconceived ideas.
2. The Long Ending of Mark found in chapter 16 is not authentic and was added around the same time canonical Luke and Acts were sent to Theophilus of Antioch – around or after 160.
The long ending of Mark is not authentic, that’s true. This isn’t surprising and has long been known. Again though, stylometry does not determine the date of a text, so their results are irrelevant. What their results did demonstrate though is that within their methodology, if we take it seriously, a shorter passage, as in the longer ending of Mark, can mask the author of the majority of the text.
To put it simply, there is no reason to think all of Mark 16 was added later on. Yet, according to their results, that is what we are led to assume.
3. Paul was not one person and likely did not exist at all. A community of Marcionite authors in the second century wrote the majority of what is attributed to Paul, along with the possibility of some letters or parts of letters having been lifted from other authors and then attributed to Paul. The Pastoral Epistles are an exception, having been written even later in the second century by a group or author opposed to Marcion’s movement.
None of this was demonstrated. As was conclusively shown, the authors’ methodology was flawed beyond reason. Because of this, the separations they made were baseless. More so, while they correctly argue that there were literary schools in the ancient world, that doesn’t mean that we can just assume that Marcion had a literary school that produced the Pauline letters.
4. The close relation between the letters of Ignatius of Antioch and Paul’s so-called Prison letters seems to indicate a relationship or even common authorship or shared authorship circles. This is further evidence that Paul’s work was not written until the second century. We believe that the author of some of the Prison Letters went on to either become Ignatius of Antioch or otherwise be responsible for his letters, such as Onesimus, a figure who appears in both sets of letters.
There was no real relation here. Instead, what we saw was an inability to read a dendrogram, or a purposeful manipulation of the data. We also saw a conflation of names, such as Onesimus, who Britt and Wingo claimed had to be the same person whenever the name was mentioned, even though there was no reason to assume such.
5. The “Little Apocalypse” in the Synoptic Gospels where Jesus predicts the destruction of the Temple was not written by the same author as any of the gospels. It was added into Mark at some point likely around or after 136 CE.
What Britt and Wingo demonstrated here was that they never read the equivalent passage in Luke, or Marcion’s Gospel, which they claim was the original, that clearly shows what was being discussed was the First Jewish Revolt. More so, what they demonstrated was not only an unfamiliarity with the Bar Kokhba Revolt, but also a misrepresentation of Mark 13.
6. 2 John and 3 John were written by the same person or group of people that wrote the Pastoral Epistles, but not 1 John, Revelation, or the Gospel of John. We believe this was Polycarp of Smyrna, and that Irenaeus, student of Polycarp, put them under John’s name as an attempt to increase the Johannine content in the New Testament.
Once again, what Britt and Wingo demonstrated was that they can’t read a dendrogram, or they purposely misrepresented it, as 2 and 3 John were not connected to the Pastoral Epistles as a whole. In fact, what their graph showed was that 1 and 2 Timothy were distant from even Titus. Their argument as to who the author is was never supported, and thus we can just dismiss it.
7. 1 Peter was a Pauline letter, written by someone responsible for some of the content found in Paul’s letters. Either the author was from the same community of authors as Paul’s letters and it was written around the 140s or it is someone very intentionally and closely imitating the works attributed to Paul, placing it slightly later.
What we saw from Bitt and Wingo here was an appeal to authority, something we see quite often, yet no authority is ever mentioned. Instead, we got the claim that some scholars think this, but who those scholars are is a mystery. Instead, what I demonstrated was that the reason 1 Peter has some similarities with the Pauline letters was because it was influenced by them.
8. 2 Peter is also a very late text, chronologically closer to the Pastoral Epistles. The same goes for the Epistle attributed to Jude.
Again, stylometry doesn’t determine the date of texts. This is one of the basic mistakes that Britt and Wingo made, which really leads to a serious question about their understanding of stylometry in general.
9. 1 John is associated with the Gospel of John, likely a member of the same community if not a contributor to the gospel itself. We can confirm that there was a Discourse Source for John 14-17 that was a single author within the Johannine community in the second century. The Gospel of John itself likely dates to around 160, with 1 John dating to around that time as well.
We see some of the same mistakes as we saw above, such as using stylometry for dating, making an appeal to authority without citing any authority, and misreading their dendrogram. Beyond that, what was shown was that their argument was contradictory.
10. Revelation had at least three authors and was originally a Jewish text, likely originally written in Hebrew. When the Septuagint (the translation of the Jewish scriptures in Greek) is added into the equation, Revelation 4-22 acts more like the Septuagint than any Christian material. The letters in chapters 2-3 were from a Christian author in the second century, as was chapter 1, though it likely came from a third author.
What we saw here was possibly some of the largest missteps by Britt and Wingo. First, there was no evidence that Revelation was written in Hebrew. That’s a conspiracy. We also saw that Revelation contained hundreds of references to the Old Testament, and was written in a style that imitated Hebrew scripture, which explains why it appears with the Septuagint.
11. 1 Clement is a composite second-century piece of literature. This undermines the belief that Paul was mentioned in the first century, and also throws into question other aspects of church history regarding the early development of the church.
This was never shown. What was shown was that Britt and Wingo have no background in this area and often just claim that some scholars say something, without ever backing up such a claim. In this regard, their so-called scholars could not be found.
We also saw a massive red flag on their methodology, as they arbitrarily broke up 1 Clement and then assumed their results had some meaning. Finally, they demonstrated a lack of understanding of what a letter was in the first century.
12. The Epistle of Barnabas is also a second-century composite work. The end of the text was likely taken from another text and added on by the author of the earlier parts of the letter.
What we saw here instead was that one of the favorite claims of Britt and Wingo is that a text is a composite text. Yet they are never able to show this. More so, they conflated composite with one author utilizing other sources.
13. Hebrews was not written by Paul and tends to show up closer to mid-second-century documents from the church in Rome.
Hebrews has long been rejected as Pauline. Even some of the earliest Christians rejected such. What was most surprising here though was that Britt and Wingo made the claim that the author of Hebrews purposely wrote in the style of Paul, when that clearly isn’t the case. In fact, it is because it wasn’t in the style of Paul that early church fathers cited issues with the text.
And do I need to continue pointing out that stylometry can’t be used for dating texts?
14. James is a second-century text likely produced by the Roman church, as well.
None of this was shown. Instead, what was demonstrated was that Britt and Wingo seemed to be unaware that 1 Clement relied on James, which would mean that James was written before 1 Clement. This oversight largely invalidated much of their other arguments.
15. Mark was stitched together over time. With Mark 13 dating to 136 CE at the earliest (and likely not added until quite some time after that) and Mark 16’s longer ending dating to at least the 150s-160s, it looks as though it went through numerous edits throughout the century.
Both of these were already discussed above in the summary, so why they are repeating these points is odd. Not to mention that they never show that Mark was stitched over time. It appears that they are just adding in extra conclusions here.