Wikipedia:Peer review/Gospel of the Ebionites/archive1

Gospel of the Ebionites

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This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I want to get it ready for GAC. Please review the entire article for completeness, consistency, verifiability, NPOV, and adherence to the Manual of Style. Thanks for all your hard work in helping to improve the article! Ovadyah (talk) 01:29, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by Llywrch

First item that stood out is that after the lead section there are several one-paragraph sections. A series of short sections like these make the article appear professional, suggesting that either someone who contributed to this article couldn't prioritize her/his material coherently or that there is a lot more that could be said in these topics & more work needs to be done here. I'd try to combine these sections into one larger overview section.
I'd move the paragraphs which address the name, providence, & date up to a position immediately after the lead. These are the facts that we can expect a reader will want to find, in preference to discussing the "Gospel of the Hebrews" or "'Gospel of the Ebionites' as quoted by Epiphanius", & even explaining who the Ebionites are. Maybe combine the four elements of name, origins, date of composition, & who the Ebionites were into one section.
I notice that there is a reference to the Encyclopedia Britannica in this article (note 7 in the revision I'm looking at). Don't cite or reference other Encyclopedias in Wikipedia articles -- unless you are using a signed article by an acknowledged authority in the field, & in that case be certain to reference that specific article. Citing an encyclopedia implies that (1) Wikipedia is not as reliable as that Encyclopedia, &/or (2) the person who added the reference was lazy, & couldn't be bothered to research the matter for her/himself. (Every time I see a reference like this I wish I had a Browning so I could release the safety. Even though that urge is something unsaid in polite society, & wouldn't accomplish anything -- unless the gun were loaded & I had something I could legally shoot at.)
I'm uncomfortable with the categorical statement "The standard critical edition is found in Schneemelcher's New Testament Apocrypha", even if it is true. From what I know of Schneemelcher, he is an accepted authority, but there is something about the tone of this assertion which I can see will lead to unnecessary disputes, most likely because it appears in the lead section. Were any other critical editions published before or since its publication date? If you could compile a list of these editions, this material would best fit at the end. Especially if you could compile a list of scholarly reviews of each critical edition.
Something that I missed in this article was an explanation of why this lost work is important. In the lead section there is a brief mention that this is "one of the Jewish-Christian Gospels" -- why is this significant? You need to explain the context for this lost work: what the ancient authorities thought of it, & how they reacted to its contents.
Another omission in the version I read is that it defines the Gospel as "the description by Epiphanius of Salamis of a Gospel used by the Ebionites". Why don't the experts use the title Epiphanius uses? He calls it the Gospel of the Hebrews, as this article notes. (And as an aside, instead of writing "No Gospel by that name was mentioned as being in circulation during the time of the Early Church", I would express that idea "No surviving document of the Early Church mentions that gospel" -- only a fraction of the works written by or about Christians before AD 500 has survived, & nowhere near most of them until the invention of print.
A last omission I'll mention is a discussion of this text's relationship with other gospels -- such as the Gospel of the Nazoraeans & the Gospel of the Hebrews. Some authorities believe these to be the same work under different names; others argue that they are different works. And until copies of all of these lost works are recovered, no one will be certain about which opinion is correct. (Then there is the disagreement/conversation over the relationship between the Gospel of the Ebionites & the Gospel of Matthew -- is the GoE a "defective Matthew", the "original Matthew", or both adaptations from a lost document?)
You have a section concerning vegetarianism in this document, yet you fail to mention this in the lead section. Think of the lead section as a summary of the larger article: the point of every section needs to be mentioned in the lead, so not to surprise the reader.

I hope I don't sound too critical in this review. This is an important subject & worth the effort. And I felt this article does an acceptable job in many of the sections. But if you want to know where to start to improve this article, & make it better than what the Encyclopedia Britannica has on it, these are the places where I would start. -- llywrch (talk) 22:47, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, this is great feedback, and not over-critical at all. Ovadyah (talk) 00:02, 21 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Comments by John Carter

A few general ideas. First, I think it might make sense to combine some of the short sections. Perhaps a first section on "Epiphanius and the Ebionites" might work, which could discuss the relevant information about Ebionites and Epiphanius together. It might also include some of the other material from Epiphanius about the Ebionites, particularly if that information can be seen to be linked, even indirectly, to one or more of the quotations. This might be followed by a section on the quotes themselves, perhaps with subsections ("defined" subsections or as separate paragraphs) which would include the original quote(s) and any hypotheses or speculations which might be related to them. The question regarding the identity with other gospels seems to me, at least, right now, to be fairly clearly that the various gospels which had previously been potentially identified as the same maybe/probably are not identical. If that is the case, then that information could be a separate section to follow, as it is less clearly related to the text per se but rather to later ideas about it. Other more recent speculations about the work could be included in the same section. John Carter (talk) 17:30, 26 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your suggestions. Ovadyah (talk) 23:21, 26 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]