judge

The idea of "coming on clouds" with great power or a similar metaphor is used many times in the Hebrew Bible and elsewhere too probably (think of baal rinding clouds in Ugaritic texts)

Later christians interpreters changed the meaning of this metaphor to be some kind of physical second coming.

EarlDoherty

Your question is a bit difficult to follow. In what way has Mark "switched" to a real flesh and blood character in the second? The expectation of the Christ which we find in the NT epistles is of a divine figure who is regarded as a part of God, and in the background to the Gospels (in Q) it is of a lesser divine entity known as the Son of Man. The two were quite distinct before they became merged. Neither one is "flesh and blood" in the human sense.

Mark created Christianity as we know it by merging two different religious expressions on the first century scene, originally unconnected. The Gospel story of the ministry of Jesus, involving the teachings, miracle-working and apocalyptic prophecy, was representative of a Kingdom of God preaching movement centered in Galilee. It had nothing to do with a savior figure who had undergone a sacrificial death and a resurrection, which is why those things are not to be found in the Q document.

The other element was the cultic Christ movement, as represented in Paul and the other NT epistles, along with several non-canonical documents of the first century. It believed in a spiritual Son of God who had undergone a death and resurrection in the spiritual world (you have to know something about the mystery cults and the Platonic cosmology of the period to understand how that worked). Mark took that separate element and brought it down to earth, adding the death-resurrection part of his story to the ministry part, setting it in recent history.

There is nothing mystical about it. It is a classic case of religious syncretism, embodied in a symbolic story which combined the two expressions in a piece of fiction, drawing on the beliefs and practices of the Kingdom-preaching community as the setting for the ministry and using scriptural passages to construct most of the portrayed events in both the ministry and the Passion, in a process known as midrash.

Earl Doherty

ible

Nobody has found anything in the Q document, because nobody has even found Q, right? How do you know the death and resurrection wasn't found in Q? I guess I've heard that Q is the religious teachings of somebody (who in the mystical view was later interpreted to be Christ by Christians), but I don't know how limited its scope is.


And this view makes more sense than some historical guy inspiring the stories by actually dying and rising from the dead?

boneyard bill

I thought Q was common to Matthew and Luke and excluded from Mark.

jeffevnz

We haven't found Q per se, but we have a document that very strongly supports the hypothesis, appears to be related, and gives us a good idea of what was in Q.Uh, yeah. Let's see. We know of plenty of other examples of different religious views merging and mixing together. Can you give us other known examples of dead people coming back to life and floating up to the sky?

Lugubert

Please forgive me for butting in on this rather Americans only debate, but I have to tell you that if you were to mention any "second coming" to a member of the used-to-be-official Lutheran Evangelical Church of Sweden or to any other citizen hereabouts, you would probably just get a blank stare.

JoeWallack

JW:
This is the type of nonsense that passes for scholarship at Tweeb.

JW:
You need to deal with the Text and not avoid it. The context of "Mark" in total is clearly sooner rather than later. Giving all you have to charity in order to follow Jesus so that you have to get all you have from charity can only last for so long.

The simple explanation is that "Mark" has intentionally made his Jesus give a false prophecy. The External evidence indicates "Mark" is second century. At the Text level "Mark's" Jesus is clearly a Failure. His Mission is to convince the Disciples that he will be resurrected. They never believe that he will be and when he is actually resurrected they still don't believe it. How Ironic. If "Mark" is writing 2nd century than his audience would know that the prophecy of 13:30 was a Failure.



Joseph

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

Amaleq13

In your view, are Matthew and Luke trying to "correct" Mark or did they both miss the point?

Jane H

Guessing…you’re not a Kim Possible fan, and you mean TWeb. Actually I’m more of a Ship of Fools poster, where they crucify bad Christian argument without a second thought.
I completely agree with both of those. Indeed my point is that rather than seeing this section as a prophecy of the end of the world, it was the immediate context of the destruction of the Temple/ end of Second Temple Judaism that was in view.

I’m not sure where you’re going with the two highlighted passages, but very briefly; 13:26 is a reference to Daniel 7, so Jesus is aligning himself with that prophecy there; 13:27 “angels” - “angeloi” can equally naturally be “messengers”. Jesus is speaking of spreading his message around the world. Deuteronomy 30:2-5 is the relevant allusion here.



In what way is this explanation “simple“? It’s creative, for sure.

On dating of Mark, and an explanation of what I’m trying to say from a source you’re much more likely to trust:

http://web.archive.org/web/200502150....com/mark.html

It’s not just the atheists who valued that site…

bacht

Joe and others here see gMark as some kind of fiction or allegory, rather than a straight account of actual events. Thus instead of victory, Mark is giving us a failed messiah, presented with irony rather than reverence [apologies if I've messed up the paraphrase]

R.G. Price has a similar take in his essay The Gospel of Mark as Reaction and Allegory
http://www.rationalrevolution.net/ar...ospel_mark.htm