Finn Damgaard - Rewriting Peter as an Intertextual Character in the Canonical Gospels

REWRITING PETER AS AN INTERTEXTUAL CHARACTER IN THE CANONICAL GOSPELS

Peter is a fascinating character in all four canonical gospels, not only as a literary figure in each of the gospels respectively, but also when looked at from an intertextual perspective. This book examines how Peter is rewritten for each of the gospels, positing that the differing portrayals of this crucial figure reflect not only the theological priorities of each gospel author, but also their attitude towards their predecessors. Rewriting Peter as an Intertextual Character in the Canonical Gospels is the first critical study of the canonical gospels which is based on Markan priority, Lukes use of Mark and Matthew, and Johns use of all three synoptic gospels. Through a selection of close readings, Damgaard both provides a new critical portrait of Peter and proposes a new theory of source and redaction in the gospels.

In the last thirty years there has been an increasing appreciation of the gospels literary design and of the gospel writers as authors and innovators rather than merely compilers and transmitters. However, literary critics have tended to read each gospel individually as if they were written for isolated communities. This book reconsiders the relationship between the gospels, arguing that the works were composed for a general audience and that the writers were bold and creative interpreters of the tradition they inherited from earlier gospel sources. Damgaards view that the gospel authors were familiar with the work of their predecessors, and that the divergences between their narratives were deliberate, sheds new light on their intentions and will have a lasting impact on our understanding of the gospels.

Finn Damgaard was a post-doc in the Biblical Studies Department, Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen. He is now a minister in the Danish Church. He is the author of Recasting Moses (2013).

COPENHAGEN INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR

General Editors: Ingrid Hjelm and Thomas L. Thompson

both at the University of Copenhagen

Editors: Niels Peter Lemche and Mogens Mller,

both at the University of Copenhagen

Language Revision Editor: James West

at the Quartz Hill School of Theology

Available:

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Finn Damgaard

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REWRITING PETER AS AN INTERTEXTUAL CHARACTER IN THE CANONICAL GOSPELS

Finn Damgaard

First published 2016

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2016 Finn Damgaard

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Damgaard, Finn.

Rewriting Peter as an intertextual character in the canonical gospels /

Finn Damgaard. -- First [edition].

pages cm. -- (Copenhagen international seminar)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Peter, the Apostle, Saint--Biblical teaching. 2. Bible. Gospels--Criticism,

interpretation, etc. I. Title.

BS2515.D255 2015

226.092--dc23

2015016893

ISBN: 978-1-138-92202-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-68217-4 (ebk)

This book is the result of my appointment as a post-doc scholar in the Velux project, The Gospels as Rewritten Bible, at the Biblical Studies Section at the University of Copenhagen. I am grateful to Mogens Mller and Jesper Tang Nielsen for having invited me to collaborate on the project. I would also like to thank the other participants in the Velux project and the Velux seminars and my other colleagues at the Biblical Studies Section at the University of Copenhagen for a warm (Danish: hyggelig) atmosphere and for fruitful discussions. Thanks also to the Velux foundation for financial support and to Ingrid Hjelm and Thomas L. Thompson for accepting my work for the Copenhagen International Seminar series and to Jim West for revising my English.

Parts of have been published in Mark and Paul: Comparative Essays Part II. For and Against Pauline Influence on Mark, eds. Eve-Marie Becker, Troels Engberg-Pedersen & Mogens Mller, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fr die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 199 (Berlin & New York: De Gruyter, 2014), 295310, and in Peter in Early Christianity, eds. Helen K. Bond & Larry W. Hutardo (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 12129. I thank the editors and publishers for permission to publish the material in its present form.

The power of differences

During the last 30 years there has been an increasing appreciation of the gospels literary design and of the gospel writers as authors and innovators rather than merely compilers and transmitters. At the same time, however, gospel critics have continued their search for and reconstruction of the gospels sources as reflected in the publication of the volumes in the series Documenta Q: Reconstructions of Q Through Two Centuries of Gospel Research Excerpted, Sorted, and Evaluated (since 1996) and in The Critical Edition of Q published in 2000 by the International Q project. Since literary critics tend to read each gospel in splendid isolation, their appraisal of the gospel writers as creative authors has only had little effect on hypotheses of the gospels relationship to each other. As long as the gospels were considered to have been written for isolated communities, results from narrative criticism did not have much effect on the reconstructions of the gospels sources, which went hand in hand with reconstructions of Q. But if the gospels are understood as works composed for a general audience as Richard Bauckham has convincingly argued (Bauckham 1998: 948), narrative critics would have to turn their attention to the gospels relationship. For if the gospels were not written for relatively isolated communities, it becomes difficult to suppose that Luke was written independently of Matthew, or that John was written independently of the synoptic gospels (cf. also Peterson 2000: 670), and we will therefore have to reconsider the relationship between the gospels. The two-source hypothesis also loses probability if Luke (and Acts) was written considerably later than Matthew (which was probably written sometime in the 80s). Since we have no certain attestation of Luke (and Acts) before Justin as Andrew Gregory concluded in his discussion of the attestation of Luke (Gregory 2003), the interval between Luke and Matthew could have been several decades (cf. also Mller 2012: 236). If we assume that the gospel authors were bold and creative interpreters of the tradition they had inherited from earlier gospel sources,