spin

Is it earlier than a Jewish messianic movement in Galilee, which featured Judas the Galilean?

You're the one doing the evaluating. I simply noted that there was a historical Jewish messianic movement related to Galilee, which may have had some sort of impact.

I don't go around dropping opinions without having some evidence to back it up. Can you supply a method of extracting relative dates from parts of literary works made of other literary works involving the relation with one of those parts??

You mean in preference to Samaria or Judea? The answer I think depends on information unavailable to us.

I merely gave a possibility. How can we get beyond that?

Mark who?

Nothing is simple in this business: everything is overdetermined. If there was a Jesus and he had disciples, why were there twelve? There may have been twelve, but it may have been one of those mystical numbers relating to the number of tribes of Israel, which may relate to the number of months in a year, which in turn may relate to...

The gospel of Mark is certainly not a work of original material hot off the brain of a gospel writer. It assumes stuff about communities, about traditions in circulation, and those responsible for the production of Mark themselves don't seem to show direct interest in prophecies because they don't give it the importance of the Matthean tradition. It's certainly in the Marcan tradition, but not of too much interest to our writers. Prophecies can at best provide bare events, if they are the sources of much of the narrative. However, once you have the skeleton, the flesh can mysteriously appear.

Which could come first, the prophecy of the event?

Is there any good reason to assume that there was a Galilean movement other than the one led at one stage by Judas the Galilean?

You're being literalist here and unable to accept a statement by analogy. There is nothing new under the sun. What we have today are things that came from before, which came from other things prior again. It is only in the elaboration that new ideas sneak in, and only in hindsight can we see them. What you seem to want to do is identify a moment in a flow and say that everything came from there.

We have teachers wandering about the hills of the Peloponesis with their students, along the Ionian coast, through the wildernesses of Palestine, and who knows where else. Prophecy of origin merely gives a location for an origin. How it may be related depends on what those who contributed brought to it. If they knew of a wandering teacher from Gaulanitis, then that teacher may supply some shadow in the story.

With just a name to go by, Tertullian added information to a non-entity he knew was called Ebion, though there was no eponymous founder of the Ebionite movement. Later writers added more to the story. How stories develop is pretty inconsequential usually.

You're quite guided in your insistence on origins. I've already given you my thoughts on this question.

How do you go beyond a literature which has no historical pegs to relate it to anything beyond that literature? Answer: you can't. We can only eke out of that literature those few things that we can. There may have been real events behind the literature, but those events are irrecoverable, as we only have the literature.

Now as those events include information which don't fit our understanding of reality -- people don't walk on water, people don't bring others back from three days dead -- and there is no way to check the validity of a literal interpretation of the literature (which is after all just one interpretation of the literature), then alternative explanations which require fewer presuppositions should be considered and if they at least explain the same information then they should be considered as valid. As a totally literary explanation of the development of the traditions that interest us seems feasible, then that also has to be considered valid. I personally, don't consider it worth the effort to go into such explanations, be they literal, literary or some other means. I prefer to deal with what I consider can have a fair chance of being substantiated.

This is why I would prefer to talk about the dead sea scrolls, though almost no-one gives a fig about the scrolls except for the wrong reasons, what they reveal about Jesus, which is nothing, other than some minimal background information to the new religion.


spin

Vorkosigan

Stolen, from JMS of B5 fame....

the_cave

No. So you think this movement may have served as the origins of the story?

I'm also asking your opinion!

Interesting. Ok.

No. If you're saying there's no way of knowing, that's fine.


So you're saying it's unknowable...again, that's fine, just trying to get a handle on your position.

I mean the first person to write down gospel events set in Galilee.

No contest there!

Seemingly true...

But of course there was an actual event whereby it did appear--namely, someone wrote it down, for whatever reason, whether fictional or otherwise.

So you don't think there is a good reason?

Basically there needs to be a reason why the original author of the Galilean events set them in Galilee. Just because this Judas was from there doesn't seem to be enough of a reason--we don't even know if he was active there. Also he doesn't seem to have been a wonderworker. But maybe Josephus is leaving things out, who knows? Furthermore, Josephus says his sons were executed later--does this mean that a movement continued there after Judas' death? Or were they active elsewhere? We don't know. Judas is a possible explanation, but not a very good one, so I think the question is left open.

But real events actually do happen! And every one of them is unique (though they often resemble one another.)

If a new idea sneaks in, it must sneak in at a specific time and place. That's all I'm saying.

Ok. Then the question is, how much did they know? How much would be sufficient to produce the Gospel of Mark? Did that wandering teacher actually exist? If these questions can't be answered, fine, I'm just saying that of course there must be some explanation, whether it can be known or not.

Well, then that event is arguably the source for Ebion!

But we don't know if they were complete inventions, or if they took shadowy knowledge, as you put it, and attached it to a name. Maybe they did, and maybe they didn't. You can't rule out either possibility.

Yes, I am!

Ok, that's a valid positon.

I agree that it's valid.

Huh. Well, I certainly agree they're interesting, from the little I know. Though they seem to be equally subject to interpretation...

the_cave

Seems like an awfully elaborate way to fulfill a prophecy. In Matthew, Bethlehem is taken care of in a single chapter.

Well, sort of...I had a gander at it, and it doesn't seem like it really involved Galilee. But please feel free to show me better.

But it's quite a creation! If the movement was based elsewhere (like Jerusalem), why would Jesus say he would appear to the apostles in Galilee *after* he died? Why not in Jerusalem, or Bethany, or a mountain or something? It seems to me that Galilee must have been actually significant for some reason.

That's because we disagree about Mark. I think Mark is full of prior sources--you're a fan of David Ross, right? What do you think about his Bethsaida Gospel theory? (He even says it's the original source of the water & feeding stories, and in my rather uninformed opinion I kind of agree...) If he's right, then "Gennesaret" at least (possibly Gadara) was a part of the earliest gospel stories. Maybe not necessarily exactly in Galilee, but close...

Well, shoot, I can play that game too! Suppose you, like me, date the gospel of Mark into the first century. Then Galilee enters the tradition in the first century! See how easy that was?

Ok, well, at least I know where you're coming from.

rlogan

"The movement" appears to be synonymous with the gospel Jesus in your world view.

Jesus was superimposed on "the movement" or "movements" after-the-fact.

the_cave

For now, I'm only arguing for the existence of an early Christian movement in Galilee. I'm happy to leave the question of a human Jesus for later.

Vorkosigan

The general movement of the Elijah-Elisha Cycle is north to south. That cycle of stories forms the basis for Mark's plot. Mark uses Isaiah repeatedly in his story to create details for the plot skeleton. The appearance of Galilee is a good example. You don't need to find Galilee in the beginning of the EE cycle to see the general parallel.

You are right; it is elaborate. But then Mark is a very complex and elaborate Gospel, more so than the others. And saying an idea is "elaborate" is not a valid critique of it; just a register of subjective disdain.

Yes. Because it is in Isaiah 9:1. It's the OT that provides significance in Mark. Isaiah said Jesus would come out of Galilee, so that's where he'll come from.

Just look at the way Galilee is portrayed in Mark. Few or none of its major cities rate a mention. The landscape is bereft of political and social tension (read Mk 12:13-17 carefully. Does Mark make it clear that there is any sociopolitical tension present?). The major cities and market towns near Jesus' alleged home in Nazareth, Sepphoris and Tiberias, go unmentioned. Mark knows "Herod" is in change but I am not entirely certain he knows which one. In Mark Galilee plays a narrative role -- the land of the Jews -- opposed by the areas across the Sea of Galilee, which stand for the Gentiles. When Jesus crosses the Sea of G, he goes from one world to the other. Mark's geography is entirely imagined and allegorical. There's nothing real about this Galilee that you want to think is so important.

Note that the Isaiah quote also explains the prominence of the Sea of G in Mark.

I do too! It's just that Mark's prior sources are the OT and other Hellenistic traditions. You and I disagree on the nature, not the existence, of the prior source....in my view there are no valid prior sources from Jesus' life in Mark, as far as I can see. Just a tradition of Crucifixion.

I disagree, alas. The Elijah story frame, prominent all the way to Chapter 14, disappears during the Bethsaida section and then resurfaces when it is done. The miracles there look suspiciously like doublets of previous miracles. I tend to see that section as a later addition. But I will re-read Ross' excellent site on that.

I don't think you get it. Regardless of when it enters the tradition, the point is that it enters the tradition with Mark. "Galilee" does not exist outside of the Four Gospel/Acts hothouse, and in it Galilee first shows up in verses that are clearly from Mark's hand. If you want to claim that Galilee had some historical basis, then the onus is on you to demonstrate it with powerful counterevidence, for it appears only in fictions and then in later strata of the Jesus story.

BTW, getting rid of Q doesn't solve the historical problems posed by Q. Matthew still got those stories from somewhere. So be comforted; perhaps there is a tradition in that material.

Vorkosigan

Amaleq13

I don't know about an early "Christian" movement but I think you can use Q to argue for an early movement involving wandering preacher/prophets teaching about a coming Kingdom of God.

spin

1) the writers were attempting to recount events that they know happened,
2) they were constructing from a miscellany of information that came there way what happened,
3) they weren't interested in real world events, but were setting mystical events in a real landscape, based on the garbled reports they found,
4) they were collecting the messianic tales that came their way and knew nothing more than those,
5) they were simply inventing a nice story for their moral and religious needs,
6) they were convinced the messiah had come but had no real information, so they assumed they would get it from biblical prophecy,
7) need I continue?

How a particular trope got incorporated into a tradition is quite often unrecoverable, but some of them last for thousands of years. How do items from the epic of Gilgamesh end up in a Sinbad story from 1001 Nights?

How does a text written in Rome, which I'm pretty sure Mark was get its information? That's slightly more complex again.

We don't know enough about his life or his followers to comment meaningfully. He may have had devout religious followers who collected information about his life and that information may have tainted the gospel narrative. It is important to understand that though you are correct that Galilee had to have entered the story somehow, it doesn't mean that it was really important or central to the mixture.

So? I mentioned Judas as a means of connecting Galilee to a messianic tradition. You are trying to be literal without grounds for being literal. Was Jesus really born in Bethlehem, or was that just a part of the messianic undergrowth pillaged from the HB in believers' efforts to learn about the messiah? One doesn't need a Jesus for a tradition to develop with the messiah born in Bethlehem. One doesn't need a messiah to have lived in Nazareth to have a tradition which says that he would be a Nazorean (Jgs 13:7) which is taken to mean a person from Nazareth. Messiah from Galilee! Lived in Nazareth! Did various miraculous things thrown into a Galilean landscape -- as I said, it could have been any landscape.

That's useful of you: "there must be an explanation". Thank you for that revelation.

I missed it. What event? I don't think Tertullian invented the name. It came to him as tradition.

We work with what makes sense, what has meaning, what is probable, what is viable. We use Occam's Razor to reduce the possibilities, for there is little point in thinking of more complex solutions when simpler ones explain all the data. When the simpler solution doesn't explain all the data, then it is abandoned and a better solution is taken on.

DSS:
There is a lot more tangible information to go by and once that filters into the industry the scrolls will become less subject to interpretation, or at least their context.


spin

the_cave

But that suggests that the selection of Galilee was arbitrary.

But it does mean that the question becomes "Why did Mark write such an elaborate explanation of the prophecy?"

But the young man at the tomb isn't saying Jesus will come from Galilee--he's saying the resurrected Christ will appear in Galilee.

You would think they would be if Mark were making it up...it appears to be a problem either way.

Quite possibly. Interesting. (Though of course he would have done just that if he were in fact preaching to the Gentiles! And since we know the early church did preach to the Gentiles...it suggests that *someone* was making similar journeys!)

It seems important on the face of it.

We may have to agree to disagree at this point, b/c I don't think we can resolve the problem of Mark's originality right here.

But Jesus can't be an Elijah figure--that was John. Jesus must be an Elisha figure, if anything. (And even that doesn't make complete sense--or was Elisha a Messianic figure?)

Ah, maybe we need to decide which "Mark" we're talking about. I tenatively agree there is someone who wrote a basic gospel, with travels, miracles, and probably a Passion Narrative at the end. But I think this gospel does appear to have been edited. I can't really decide which sequence of these miracles came first--there's something to be said for both. Also, it's unclear what the original order was, or if miracles have been revised or combined or moved or removed altogether.

Well, it certainly shows up in the verses from the hand of whomever first wrote it down...I'm happy to admit that was "Mark", i.e. the original author of the gospel. But as I noted above, the proclamation of the young man at the tomb indicates that at some point, there was an understanding that the risen Jesus appeared in Galilee.

If the proclamation of the young man at the tomb is a fiction, it makes no sense--it speaks to nothing and no one--without the notion at least that something happened in Galilee.

Hm, alright. Interesting.