TedM

One can assume this, but I don't think the evidence for 37CE is as compelling as people do assume. See prior threads in the archives on this matter.

ted

spin

I note that working from bad memory I said 37 CE rather than say a year before the war between Aretas and Herod Antipas. Beside that, I've been involved in a lot of these threads, TedM.


spin

TedM

I'm not referring to the specific date of 37CE. The conclusion that Josephus is saying that JTB was arrested a year before the war is IMO not particularly strong. It depends on how one interprets Josephus' wording.. The archives have the arguments..

ted

spin

Yeah, the year is reasonable and generous.


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TedM

Even if so, I don't think it the evidence is strong enough to say with any conviction what you said about Mark: "One must assume that the writer was confused and the reference is untrustworthy."

If we had stronger evidence than just the Josephus passage which can certainly be read differently then we can more reasonably make such an assumption. Without it, it is IMO not worthy of such an assumption, and I think we would have to rely on other evidence to be able to conclude when the book of Mark might have been written.



take care,
ted

spin

Further signs of the Marcan confusion are that the writer believed that the Herod involved was a king (GMt had to correct that) and that the girl who danced was Herod's daughter (according to W&H, thn yugatron autou herodiadon, "his daughter Herodias", while the Byz trad: thn yugatron authn thn herodiadon, preserving the now unnecessary autos, while correcting the information; Mt 14:6 goes for the clearer thn yugatron thn herodiadon, "the daughter of Herodias".)

Remembering that GLk doesn't contain the dance story, we may be able to see the evolution of the passage from the adaptation of a historical note referring to the death of John as a passing comment in the Jesus narrative with either the writer or his source providing the erroneous title of king; this is placed in a gospel context well before the death of Jesus; then the brief comment gets extended on the arrival of the sweet dance story. Mk is apparently under the misapprehension that this girl is the daughter of both this "king" Herod and the woman who was currently married to Herod, ie Herodias. Of course the girl doesn't choose possessions for her reward, but something that was of no value to her, despite the offer of up to half of "king" Herod's "kingdom". By today's standards the story has been cobbled together with a fishhook -- it is so messy. (The Matthean rewrite tidies the story up a lot.)

I think that there are quite a few problems with the material -- the Josephus material being only one -- that should make us suspicious of the value of the Marcan narrative. The mess over this pericope is further evidence that GMk was written well out of the context it is talking about. I've argued in the past for the text having been written in a Latin context. The geographical dislocations also help to place the writer out of the context. Would you really want to argue that GMk can be used as a historically reliable witness for anything?

(I've gone on in several posts about not knowing where or when these texts were written and this is for the reason that if a witness cannot be placed at the scene of the crime they describe, their statements are usually taken as not having any weight.)


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TedM

I agree that further signs are helpful for making a case. However, I wonder how unusual either of these things you label 'confusion' would have been to someone during that day? Was Herod never called a 'king' by others, and is it really all that odd to refer to his wife's daughter as his own daughter? I personally don't know that answer, but it seems that these points MAY not be very strong evidence of much either, as they both MAY fall under the category of 'overly nitpicky'.

To what end, though? What do we conclude if Mark was not literally accurate about a number of things? That he entirely made up everything entirely? That he made up some things? That he had a bad memory? That it probably wasn't written as a particular point in time? etc..

ted

spin

Mt shows that these things are not 'overly nitpicky' by correcting them.

That one cannot make any claims for any of the substantive content of the gospel, as the writer didn't evince enough signs that he knew the subject matter he was dealing with enough to get even simple local knowledge right. In short, you can't separate the bs in Mk from the non-bs. So how do you know what's tenable and what's not? Plain answer: you can't.


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TedM

Sorry. That doesn't work because one could simply conclude that Matthew was being as overly nitpicky about the issues as you are. What must be done is show whether the fact that Herod was incorrectly referred to as 'king' and his stepdaughter as his 'daughter' is anything other than nitpicky. What meaning should really be given to such inaccuracies?

I think it requires a careful study of each of the items that are being labeled inaccurate to determine whether it is anything truly substantive to whatever position one is taking. Even if Mark has 50 minor inaccuracies, they may be rather unimportant to the value of the substantive content, depending on their specifics....And, I wonder, if Mark had zero minor inaccuracies, would that really bolster it's position as an accurate historical document? Many would say 'no' simply because the 'substantive content' is of a supernatural nature. So to them it really doesn't even matter.

ted

spin

All the other texts which mention this Herod (Mt, Lk, Ac, Josephus), clarify that he was a tetrarch. I guess they were all being nitpicky. Let's face it: Mk is simply, grossly wrong.

What I think is necessary is witness vetting. We have with Mk a Latin background to the writing (including a Latin expression translated literally into Greek and therefore not very meaningful in Greek, unless you knew the Latin). There are the geographic difficulties in the Marcan narrative which people have often noted in threads here. There are the factual errors which a local would be less likely to make, such as the reference to "king" Herod, and the reference to Herod's daughter corrected to Herodias's daughter in the Byzantine tradition of Mk, which agrees with the Mt version. (Both Mt and a later Marcan scribe thought it was necessary to correct Mk regarding whose daughter she was.)

These different problems, linguistic, geographical and historical, point to an origin of the text which was dislocated from the narrative's context. This suggests an untrustworthy witness. If the text was not written in the historical context, we cannot show that the writer can know what they are talking about. Tests of plausibility are worthless if someone is attempting to write a plausible account. This is especially true when you cannot place the witness on the spot at the time.


spin