Different histories, same reference points. Which one is right?

The cliché “history is the victor’s story” is only partly true.  The not-quite victor and the thoroughly defeated also create narratives to explain (justify?) how and why circumstances occurred as they did, and how and why the consequences worked out as they did.

The early church held that the Matthean gospel was the earliest.  There are good reasons to suppose this is true.

However, Protestant scholarship, going back to the 19^th century, decided based on textual evidence, that the Markan gospel “had” to have been the earliest gospel, and that there was an earlier gospel that predated even that, from which both the Matthean and the Lukan gospels originated.  They call this “original” gospel “Q” from Quelle, the German word for source.

Why did Protestant scholars decide this?  Because accepting the early church’s version of events would mean the necessity of having to explain how the Protestant Reformation was NOT a logical event, how it was NOT a rebellion against and a rejection of the Church Catholic (from Greek Kata olikos—“according to the whole”). 

Protestant scholars discovered a need to reconstruct history to demonstrate that the early Church had been Protestant, (and the early Judeans had been divided into different sects as represented by the different source texts in the Torah), this making the Church Catholic an anomaly, which was “corrected” back to the “true” church of Protestantism(s).

My earliest indication of this came not when I was studying early Church history and was instructed on the differing “Gospel Communities” as represented by the different gospels, but when I was in conversation with a Protestant doctoral candidate who informed me (with a straight face) that Protestants have been oppressing the world for 2000 years.

I was surprised because according to the normative history I had studied, Protestants as a group have only been in existence since the 16th century, when, in 1529, objecting Princes in Germany signed a letter of protestation against the decision of the Diet of Speyer .  The decision of the Diet of Speyer affirmed the Diet of Worms’ 1521 decision to ban Martin Luther’s 95 theses.   Luther  nailed those theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral in 1517. No matter how you look at it, the origin (whether it was Luther's act of that of the Princes) does not precede 1500.

Those Lutheran princes, like Luther himself, were Catholic.  They were objecting to abuses they saw perpetrated in the Catholic Church. Luther himself was a Catholic priest, and remained so even after nailing his theses to the cathedral door.

The English Church separated from the Catholic Church in 1534 because Elizabeth wanted to be a queen, not an attainted bastard.

 All of this means that Protestantism has only been in existence for less than 600 years, not for 2000.

It also means that it is very likely that early church historians were right, and the Matthean gospel was the first, because it is more likely that historians who were closer in time and cultural connection to the documents would have a better perspective on them than historians who were separated by nearly 1800 years, by different culture, and by a change in theology, whose knowledge of the language of the text was acquired as a specialist skill rather than being acquired as a social and cultural norm, and whose texts had suffered numerous redactions due to their age and the many different hands through which they had passed in the course of the centuries.

The reason for these periodic interjections about the differing trajectories of history is that history is not a single narrative, but multiple narratives shaped by and for the audiences that receive them.  Those narratives will contain some common points of reference, but the cultural logic that underpins the narrative differs, and because of this the understanding of the import of those common references will be different.  This in turn means that the perception of the historical events and their consequences will be different.  The differences in perception will then be retrojected back onto the "original" history to shape it so that the result of historical actions will have, as their logical conclusion, the culture of the receiving audience which has, in turn shaped the narrative.

In the case of Catholic history, the narrative is “we won.”  In the case of the Protestant narrative, the story is “Wait for it, we’re going to win.”  In the case of the Jewish narrative (as the old joke says): “They tried to kill us.  We survived.  Let’s eat.”