I admit not hearing this argument before. Could you be specific, or refer to some online sources which explains this argument in full?
I'm struggling to find anything online, but there's a full concordance in Edouard Massaux, "The Influence of the Gospel of Saint Matthew on Christian Literature before Saint Irenaeus", Book 3, demonstrating the Didache's dependence on both Luke and Matthew.
I am not literate in Greek. Can you please provide the fuller translation of passage in a version which doesn't say it was Peter's memoirs?
I will, and I'll try to communicate the grammatical problem as well as I can. Very basically, the dispute concerns the Greek phrase "apomnemoneumata autou" (sorry, I don't know how to do Greek letters on Historum!!), which could be translated either as "accounts of him" or "memoirs of him". Clearly, the debate concerns who "autou", "of him", refers to. It may either refer to Jesus (the subject of the indirect statement in which the phrase is contained), in which case it should be translated as "accounts of Jesus", or it may refer to Peter, who has already been mentioned earlier in the sentence, in which case it should be translated as "memoirs of Peter". I naturally read the pronoun "autos" as referring to the subject of a sentence unless otherwise strongly indicated, since this seems to be the usual practice in classical Greek, so I would interpret it to mean "memoirs of Jesus". In which case, the passage should read -
"It is said that he [Jesus] renamed one of the apostles "Peter", and it is written in the accounts about Jesus that this happened ..."
There's a reasonably clear online discussion of this passage of Justin here -
Did Justin Martyr Cite the Gospel of Peter? | Earliest Christianity
The bolded part in my post #15 is the core of argument, to which you disagreed in following post, that some non-canonicals have equally good claim to having some historical truths in them as canonicals Matthew and Luke have. Only in post #18 you brought up Gnostic overtones as one of arguments, along with early attestation, antisemitism, etc.
Okay, fine, I think maybe we had different view of what the core of the argument was at this point! But I should add that I've never doubted the existence of other writings about Jesus before the canonical Gospels were written (I mentioned Q, M and L for a start), the problem is that as far as we can tell we don't actually HAVE these documents, since the surviving non-canonical gospels (Gnostic or otherwise) are not provably early enough.
I think I omited this one in my splitted "overnight" reactions. My answer is: here is the circular argument I was prophesying in post #28. You said Peter has to be dated late, because it has gnostic overtones (post #18), and now to substantiate that gnosticism must be late, you say it is because all support for it (such as Peter) is late. Because of this, I maintain that "gnostic overtones" in Peter cannot be used as argument for late composition of Peter, because it is exactly the point in question (date of composition of Peter) which is basis for dating the gnosticism.
Actually, I don't think this is a circular argument, and I'll explain why. As previously argued, there are other reasons for dating Peter late (increased hostility to Jews, lack of early attestation, which I'll come onto in a minute).
Peter is the only Gnostic-tinged document with any claim to early attestation - it would help its case if there was independent evidence for early Gnosticism, but there isn't. So we have a document which is not attested early, which incorporates the anti-Jewish tendencies of a later church, and which belongs to a tradition which is otherwise unattested at an early date. THIS is how its Gnosticism can count against it - the lack of plausible external context.
How is Matthew before Peter? Both are "solidly attested" by Justin for the first time. Or, if it's not Peter (depending on interpretation of the "memoirs of Peter" passage), then it is different non-canonical gospel. That doesn't really matter, remember your original point to which I objected was about all non-canonical gospels, not just about gnostic ones.
I don't remember assuming date for gnosticism. I only said that extant solid evidence for Peter with his gnostic overtones is on par with that for Matthew and superior to one for Luke. However, you did explicitly assume gnosticism was late, in a argument you made in post #18.
But we're back to Didache. I really regret not being able to find a decent discussion of this online, but then I guess even with the wonders of the Internet not everything is available yet! Didache seems to betray a clear dependence on both Luke and (to an even stronger degree) Matthew, which would suggest they were in existence prior to Didache, a very early document (as we can tell from the Christian society it describes). I think Didache, Tatian and Marcion are excellent indicators of an early date of Matthew and Luke, far far more plausible than Justin, which to my eyes doesn't refer to the Gospel of Peter at all.
I hope I haven't missed anthing. This is getting complicated!
