judge

Well this is definitely the view of scholars.
The Church of the East maintain that their peshitta is the original.
There does not seem to be an awful lot of serious consideration of this idea by western scholars.

Ted Hoffman

1. One error (5:1) has been demonstrated/admitted "Gerasa is ridiculously far from the Sea of Galilee" Or maybe Mark forgot to add "after two days..."

But the iredeemable error in Mark 5:1 is that they have to go "across the lake to the region of the Gerasenes" yet Gesarenes and wherever they were at the time is at the same side of the lake. This is his journey: Mark 2:1 he is in capernaum Mark 3:7 he is preaching at the sea of Galilee then he crosses to the "other side" in Mark 4:35 (the other side of Capernaum is where Gerasenes is).
Then in Mark 5:1 they have to go "across the lake to the region of the Gerasenes" - Yet they are already on that side! This is an abject, glaring error.

2. Regarding Mark 8:10, its strange that Vinnie can agree with Holding against someone who is objecting to the lack of MA for Dalmanutha. Very interesting.

3. Regarding 7:31, arguing that Mark "has no reason to add in the extra step", is pure apologetic. How does one (vinnie for example) deduce when Mark has no reason to add an extra step and when he does?
And so is offering Mark's desperation "to maximize Jesus' contact with Gentiles" as an explanation. Or "theological itinerary" as opposed to geographical one. Pure apologetic.
With this approach, one can explain away ANY error.

4. Another error: Mark 5:13 treats Gerasa as being close to the sea of Galilee:
Mark 5:13
You cannot watch pigs rushing down a 30 miles/50 Kms bank (since Gerasene is like 30 miles from the sea).
IREDEEMABLE. Even Matthew couldn't rescue it.

This is what Funk had to say about this error:
Funk, et.al. The Acts of Jesus: p79

Ted Hoffman

And I hope Vinnie also intends to address non-Geographical errors in Mark sometime soon.
Perhaps in cities with tall buildings - because the skyline can look very different because of what the building 'allows' you to see and sometimes, harmonizing travelling by car and walking can create confusion.
In the past, there were no skyscrapers and it was clear which direction particular things lay: routes followed by camels, donkeys or travellers were well set. Crossing points for rivers, harsh terrains, waterpoints etc were all known. Hills, the plains, mountains all added up to help one know when one would need to cross a lake or not.

Vinnie

It has to be admitted that even natives of a land can make geographical errors. Thus these considerations do not really factor into the authorship issue very much.

Vinnie

Vinnie

Your village atheism is ridiculous. The point is that whether or not the passage is erroneous cannot be demonstrated, There is a plausible motive for Mark to have purposefully written this. I demonstrated it. Notice the text in bold.

Vinnie: Mark is creating a tour through Gentile territory, not coincidentally just after the nullification of the food laws and the account with the Syrophnecian (sp?) woman. Mark tries depsarately to maximize Jesus' contact with Gentiles.

You simply want to assume any potential error is an error I guess. I don't play those games. In some instances plausible resolutions are possible. This is one of them.

Also, my statement "Mark has no reason to add an extra step" is arguing against Holding//Miller apologizing of the passage which if you bothered to actually read and understand what I wrote you would clearly see. I went on to suggest there may be a reason for the extra step. Mark decided to get creative after several gentile related incidents just occured in his gospel. It is entirely plausible.

You should read the page from Joel Marcus that I put up. And Mark certainly has a theologicxal itinerary. That is just factual.

You just have strange ways of evaluating early Christian writings. There is not enough evidence to state whether Mark was correct or false here. The complete silence of any reference to this place anywhere else makes us cautious. But its not enough to conclusively show it did not exist.

The point is that historians always speak of Mark's numerous geography errors. I believe there is at least one very obvious error. The point in this thread was to evaluate all them. Several of them turn out to be not so easily labeled errors. Some of them I don't even understand why they are called errors.

I went through this one in my first post. It is clearly an error. I put up a map and everything.

And your first error:

More village atheism. Where did you come up with this nonsense? The skeptics annotated Bible? Why are you disconnecting 4:35 from 5:1? They go together, there were no chapter distinctions in the original. Here is the text:

35That day when evening came, he said to his disciples, "Let us go over to the other side." 36Leaving the crowd behind, they took him along, just as he was, in the boat. There were also other boats with him. 37A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. 38Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, "Teacher, don't you care if we drown?"
39He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, "Quiet! Be still!" Then the wind died down and it was completely calm.
40He said to his disciples, "Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?"
41They were terrified and asked each other, "Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!"

end of 4th chapter

Then 5:1 says: "They went across the lake to the region of the Gerasenes.[1] 2When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an evil[2] spirit came from the tombs to meet him. "

This should all be read continuously. 5:1 describes where the gang went upon deciding to cross the sea.

Vinnie

Vinnie

I said this before on 10:1:

Nineham in his commentary on Mark disagrees with me. Page 263. I'll put up a full quote later.

His suggestion is that if Mark is deliberately putting in a joruney back over the Jordan to Perea then he must have pictured Jesus approaching Judea along the east coast of the border and he gets the names in the wrong order, like Behtpage and Bethany (ch. 11).

The point is if you are approaching from Jerico, which a Perea journey would entail, you would come to Bethany then Bethphage.

So this would trade in one error for another.

I think Weeden said in a paper on Markan provenance that Mark has good knowledge of Judea at times so maybe the other should be viewed as the error?

I'll have to dig up a quote later. Looks like we have a second geography error here though.

Vinnie

dost

Hi there,

I am interested in one particular possible geographical error in Mark:

"As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of his disciples, saying to them, "Go to the village ahead of you, and just as you enter it, you will find a colt there which no one has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you,'Why are you doing this?' tell him, 'The lord needs it and will send it back shortly.'" They went and found a colt outside in the street, tied at a doorway. As they untied it, some people standing there asked, "What are you doing, untying the colt?" They answered that Jesus had told them to, and the people let them go. When they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it, he sat on it. Many people spread their cloaks on the road, while others spread branches they had out in the fields. Those who went ahead and those who followed shouted, "Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming of the kingdom of our father David! Hosanna in the highest!" Jesus entered Jerusalem and went to the temple. He looked around at everything, but since it was already late he went out to Bethany with the twelve." (Mark 11:1-11)

In Mark 10:46 we read that Jesus was in Jericho. This seems to indicate that Jesus travelled from Jericho to Jerusalem via Bethphage and then Bethany.

Matthew, on the other hand, says the following:

"When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives..." (Matthew 21:1)

So Matthew removes the reference to Bethany completely from Mark's account, presumably because he saw a problem with it.

Apologists, however, argue that Matthew was simply summarizing Mark's account, rather than "correcting" it. It is also argued that Mark does not state that Jesus went to Bethpage AND THEN to Bethany.

Randel Helms writes:

"Mark writes on the basis of a vague knowledge of Judaean geography, not knowing that one approaching Jerusalem from the east on the road from Jericho would reach first Bethany and then Bethphage, not the reverse order he indicates. However, the important location is the Mount of Olives; typology, not history, is at work here. The typological fiction continues on the basis of Zech. 9:9 LXX:

'Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Sion; proclaim it aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem; behold, the king is coming to thee, just and a Saviour [sozon, "saving"]; he is meek and riding on an ass, and a young foal [polon neon, a "new (unridden) foal"].'

It is only with this passage that we can understand why Mark has Jesus specify that his diciples obtain a "colt [polon] which no one has yet ridden" (Mark 11:2). Mark ignores the danger and unlikelihood of riding on an unbroken, untrained animal, assuming its miraculous tractability; typology rather than history is operative here."

Gospel Fictions page 103

Recently I came across the following critique by Mr J. P. Holding to the above:

"To be quite candid, Helms here is just doing his usual schtick...quoting liberal NT scholars uncritically. There are several things to note here before we go charging Mark with an error:

First, it is far from certain that "and Bethany" ought to be part of the text in the first place. While the phrase is found in almost all manuscripts, it is absent in three of them. It is also missing from the parallel verse in Matthew 21:1, though not from the parallel verse at Luke at Luke 19:29. This is enough for some liberals to withhold judgment of error; but we'll assume here that the text is genuinely from Mark. (The wording of the verse is also awkward, but this may be simply typical of Mark's less sophisticated grammar.)

Second, Helms and the liberals are simply playing the old game of making verses say more than they actually do. Simply because the cities are listed a certain way does not mean that Mark (or Luke) is saying that this is the order that they are approached; no more so does approaching Minneapolis-St. Paul from the St. Paul side, or Dallas-Ft. Worth from the Ft. Worth side, mean we have to reverse the order of the cities to make it clear what direction we are coming from. As long as Mark does not say, "we went from Jericho to Bethphage, and then to Bethany" he is not in error (unless the disciples were taking an unusual route for a purpose).

Finally, it is far more likely that Mark is listing the approach to Jerusalem in reverse order, in order to stress the importance of their Jerusalem destination. The order of Bethphage and Bethany is simply being determined by their relationship to Jerusalem.

In short, no error here, except due to the usual problem of skeptical overreading."

http://www.tektonics.org/bethbeth.html

Are there any responses and critiques available of the above defence?

Vinnie

Actually, the Bethphage Bethany thing appears problematic no matter how you slice it.

On Meier's maps of roads on road leads directly to Jerusalem. If they travelled that they woul have hit Jerusalem before these two places which means they would have needed to jump off the road towards tye end since Mark only has only narrates one final climactic journey to Jerusalem in his Gospel this wouldn't otherwise fit. The other road comes from Jericho. So then Perea or no Perea this one appears to be off base.


Gundry tries to apologize this by saying Mark mentions Jerusalem, the place of fulfillment first and works his way out from their as a Jerusalemit woulkd to Bethphage then Bethany. In defense he cites two successive by unappositional phrases beginning with [ei5], "to" which shows how intent on Making Jerusalem the center Mark was.

He suggests seeing 7:31 and 10:1 for other instance of mentioning an ultimate destination before an intermediate one.

"The order Jerusalem-Bethphage-Bethany does not betray topographical ignorance, for the succeeding narrative shows knowledge that Jerusalem is Jesus' destination, not an intermediate point on the way to it."

Interesting to note that Gundry says Galilean pilgrims usually avoided going through Samaria to reach jerusalem which also makes the Jericho entrance inevitable.

But Gundry says Mark was working outwards from and prioritizing Jerusalem in his thought.

On the other hand Nineham says the reverse order indicates that we should think that the author did not know the positions of the two villages on the Jerico road.

I get the suspicion that Gundry is just apologizing here. He thinks John Mark, a Palestinian Jew actually wrote Mark so that may explain it.

Vinnie

Vinnie

I disagree with Holding. THis looks like an attempt at softening the skepticism with a red herring. As Nineham notes there is some MSS variation but the weight of the MS. evidence is for this being the text as is.

The textual critical standpoint adopted here of "be more textually skeptical if it could be an error" does not apply to me.

The narration here in the reverse order is considered akward and it is out of place for a Gospel which generally gives its own order in a [created!!]chronological fashion of Jesus' ministry for Mark to list them out of place like this. Matthew drops it and I take it the few MSS fluctuations are also from this same awkwardness. The fact is that they should be listed the other way around.


While this is certainly possible. I did just quote Gundry arguing this. Of course IU would love to see other instances of Ancient authors doing this rather thanattributing it to mark alone. But Holding is preachign to the choir with his "it is far more likely" line. He can't read the mind of the Marcan author anymore than anyone else. Either its a Marcan error or Mark reversed the order to speak as a Jerusalemite to prioritize this final climactic place in his Gospel. How he surmises that the latter is "far more likely" than the former can only be the case if we assume a Palestinian Jew with good knowledge of the Jericho rode and Judea wrote the text. Personally, I find this issue to have an important bearing on that very question thus it should not be found in any part of our judgment. So Hiolding slips a circular assumption into his answer which otherwise is worthy of consideration.

Like I said though, was this a common ancient practice? If we could document it elsewhere we ould be on firmer ground. If not...

Vinnie

Ted Hoffman

Vinnie,
I can see your debating style has changed. "Village atheism" is Turkel's pet phrase and I can see you have started employing it without restraint. I don't know what else you have learnt from Turkel regarding how to make your point when someone disagrees with you.

I have great difficulty seeing the relationship between 'village atheism' and what I have posted. But I know that I don't need the aggravation right now.

After your research, I hope to see a summary of what you are willing to concede are geographical errors.