Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Were Matthew and Luke plagiarists? Written by Bart Ehrman, read by Ken Toutch?
[00:00:08] Were Matthew and Luke plagiarists? They copied word for word passages from mark without any indication that they were using someone else's work. Today, that will get you fired or, say, removed from the presidency of an Ivy League school. But what about in the ancient world?
[00:00:25] Here I continue with my discussion of plagiarism in antiquity, citing some sources that talk about the phenomenon, only to condemn it before considering whether Matthew and Luke can be considered culpable.
[00:00:39] You may be surprised by my answer.
[00:00:42] First I give some more ancient writings, starting with where I left off with Vitruvius, a famous roman architect, not a famous volcano.
[00:00:52] Elsewhere, Vitruvius himself delivers a stringent judgment on those who engaged in the practice of plagiarism, while then these men, viz. Those who left a written record of past events and philosophies, deserve our gratitude. On the other hand, we must censure those who plunder their works and appropriate them to themselves. Book seven preface three the attitude coincides with other ancient discourse about the practice, as in Polybius's off the cuff comment on authors who discuss genealogies, myths, the planting of colonies, the foundations of cities, and their ties of kinship. Polybius laments the fact that since so much has already been written about such things, a modern writer who discusses them either rehashes what others have said, or, worse, represents the work of others as being his own, a procedure that he calls a most disgraceful proceeding. Equally harsh is Pliny the elder, who in his natural history discusses his own practices of citation, in contrast to those who are of a perverted mind and a bad disposition, and steal the work of others to pass off as their own natural history. Preface 20 to 23 for I consider it to be courteous, and to indicate an ingenious modesty to acknowledge the sources whence we have derived assistance, and not to act as most of those have done whom I have examined. For I must inform you that in comparing various authors with each other, I have discovered that some of the most grave and of the latest writers have transcribed word for word from former works without making any acknowledgment. For it is indeed the mark of a perverted mind, and a bad disposition to prefer being caught in a theft to returning what we have borrowed.
[00:02:44] It is a genuine question concerning how relevant the ancient discourse on plagiarism is to the unacknowledged borrowings found throughout the early christian literature. Assuming the two source hypothesis, Matthew and Luke both acquired considerable amounts of their material, often verbatim, from Mark and q, without acknowledgement. But if plagiarism is defined as taking over the work of another and claiming it as one's own, possibly the charge does not apply in these cases, as all the writings in question are anonymous. That is to say, the later synoptic authors are not claiming anything as their own, as they do not even name themselves.
[00:03:25] The same would apply to the extensive and often verbatim reproduction of the protivangelium jacobi in such later texts as the Gospel of Pseudomathew, in that the later author does not claim the earlier work as his own, since he is in fact writing pseudonymously.
[00:03:44] A comparable situation obtains in the wholesale incorporation of the didescalia apostolorum, the diddicy in the apostolic traditions in the fourth century apostolic constitutions. But here the situation is somewhat more complex. Two of these earlier works are anonymous, making it difficult to give credit where credit was due. The didiscalia, on the other hand, was inherited as a forgery. It falsely claims to be written by the apostles and is itself embedded in another work that is also a forgery, also allegedly written by the apostles. Why would a forger need to credit an earlier work that he allegedly but in fact did not write himself? Or consider the case of second Peter and Jude? There is little doubt that the former borrowed a good deal of the latter in its polemic against nefarious but unidentifiable opponents. But the source of the argument is a forgery, as is the text that uses the source. Can a forger commit plagiarism? In one sense he obviously has borrowed the work of another without acknowledgment or, as the ancient sources would put it, he has stolen his work. But in another sense he has not claimed that work as his own, since he does not give his own name so as to take credit for what his stolen material says. In all these instances we are dealing with complex literary relations that do not neatly line up in taxonomies of fraudulence, either ancient or modern.
