Sheshbazzar

Sorry guys, working from memory I really stuck my foot in it this time.
The Gospel of John has a elaborately detailed baptism account. :redface:
(Not that I believe a single word of it)

eta....but one where Jebus dosen't actually get baptized!
Guess ol' Johnny either didn't like, or didn't believe the tale being told by those other three stooges.

Apologies to Horatio, for missing and so messing up your point.



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Sheshbazzar

Perhaps. that is if there were still some adherents of the JtB sect still around in the 2nd century.
And consider, according to the tale, there was no sect known as the 'Christians' until Paul's missionary travels, where "the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch" (Greece) (Acts 11:26)
Most of the Messianic believers back in Jerusalem likely lived out their entire lives without ever even hearing this foreign word 'Christian'.





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ApostateAbe

Well, great, thanks, but what you should have been looking for was an attempted justification. I already realize that, for you, there is no such thing as a justification whenever I write any argument purportedly in favor of a historical Jesus, but you took it is a step further and claimed that I did not even try to justify my claims. In your defense, maybe you lost track of that distinction, and it isn't a big deal, anyway. Yes, and so are my sources.
I don't think so. The account of Josephus makes those first two points directly conclusive, and it is a very plausible inference that the cult competed with Christians given the nature of cults and the apparent overlap in societies and doctrines.
Well, basically, my position also has the advantages of explanatory power (details of the baptism account are strongly expected from the theory) and explanatory scope (theory explains many details of evidence at the same time). These points were developed in detail further in the thread's discussions.
OK, your own experience in research leads you in a different direction than my experience, apparently. The argument is a textbook example (literally) of the criterion of dissimilarity. See Bart Ehrman's The New Testament: A Historical Introduction, 3rd ed. (or via: amazon.co.uk), p. 221. Maybe you can give me an example of a scholar who disagrees, if you like, but it is not important. We can leave the authorities out of it.
Right. That is true for any historical texts about anything, at least before the details are explained and counterpoints are made to such a hypothesis. Then it can turn into the most bizarre and needlessly-convoluted hypothesis on the table.

blastula

Ehrman doesn't mention Mark specifically on that page.

ApostateAbe

Yes, that's right, though he does make an implicit allusion to the gospel of Mark. "In some traditions, Jesus is actually said to have been baptized by John." There would be only two relevant traditions--Matthew and Mark.

spin

Can you tell us all of any other such historical text, none of whose central narrative has been confirmed by external sources, yet much of whose central narrative can be dismissed as certainly not historical, that you would care to defend as historical or are you just making a special plea--cloaked in self-appeasing sugar-coated rhetorical gobbledygook--for the new testament as necessarily containing historical material?

blastula

He doesn't point blank say Mark is embarrassed by it. He says it's hard to imagine a Christian inventing the story. He doesn't offer much to say how he knows this. He seems to be assuming later Christianity. I'd like to hear what he'd say about Mark specifically, and how he would know.

Toto

Nope - I saw no attempt to justify extracting history from a legendary source. You did not indicate that there was any issue involved.

Ehrman says at p. 221 that Christians would not have invented the baptism of Jesus by John. He doesn't say that Mark shows any indication of actually being embarrassed by the scene. Read the scene for yourself - there is no hesitation, no indication of any embarrassment in Mark, unlike the later gospels. If you read any of the literature on this, commentators talk about the baptism being an embarrassment to the early church, not to the author of Mark.

I see nothing convoluted.

ApostateAbe

Yeah, I think that would be interesting, and we might get that in his upcoming e-book, but I doubt it.

Toto's claim was, "Most critics who read Mark do not find any evidence that Mark was embarrassed by the baptism scene." It is an exaggeration on Toto's part. If Toto had said, "Most critics who read Mark do not mention any evidence in Mark that Mark was embarrassed by the baptism scene," then Toto would be correct. Most of the time, when the topic is discussed, Mark's account is regarded as relatively unembarrased, and the focus is on the later gospels, which most clearly show signs of embarrassment. These scholars would include Bart Ehrman. Redaction-critical method based on comparisons between Mark and later gospels allows the evidence of embarrassment to be far more conclusive in the later gospels. Since Mark was the earliest gospel, we can't use redaction-criticism to know the perspective of Mark as well. Perhaps the main reason they would conclude that Mark was likewise embarrassed by the baptism account would be the mere presence of the baptism account in Mark and Mark's religious proximity with Matthew, Luke, and John.

Some scholars do, however, write about direct evidence of embarrassment of the baptism account in Mark, not just in Matthew, Luke, and John, albeit more uncertainly. They use the criterion of dissimilarity, the same arguments that I have given in the OP, and more. Kilian McDonnell wrote in The Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan: the trinitarian and cosmic order of salvation (or via: amazon.co.uk), pp. 2-3,

As to the purity of the tradition that Mark hands on, we are not sure that the Markan version is without retouching. Mark, the only independent witness to the baptism among the Synoptics--Matthew and Luke depend on him--arranges this material to demonstrate Jesus' superiority to John. If Jesus stands in the inheritance of John, much more is he heir to the Old Testament prophecies, which themselves explain why Jesus is superior. Mark associates the Baptist with Malachi, Isaiah, and Elijah, and he goes out of his way to relate the baptism of Jesus to imagery of the crossing of the Red Sea by Moses. The rending of the heavens is the instrument of a theophany, attested already in Judaism. The heavenly voice proclaims that Jesus is God's Son in an expansion of the words of Psalm 2:7, "You are my Son, the Beloved." The words in Mark are addressed to Jesus, not to the onlookers; Jesus is informed of his status for the first time. These are the words Yahweh addresses to the Davidic king on the day of his enthronement. The words of Psalm 2:7 and the symbolic "anointing" with the Spirit suggest that this Son is also the promised Davidic Messiah. The phrase "with you I am well pleased" comes from Isaiah 42:1, making Jesus the Servant of Yahweh, the mysterious transcendent figure whom God endows with the spirit to reestablish the covenant community by his sacrificial and atoning death, vindicated by his resurrection. The superiority of Jesus is stressed. "You," not John, are "my Son"; "you," not John, are the beloved of the Father; "you," not John, are the Messiah; "you," not John, are the Servant of Yahweh.

Yet the case must not be overstated. When Jesus is asked the basis of his authority ... , his counter-question, whether the baptism of John came from heaven or from men, should not be taken simply as a dodge. Rather, if taken seriously, it means "My authority rests on John's baptism"...

Robert L. Webb wrote in "Jesus' Baptism: Its Historicity and Implications," Bulletin for Biblical Research, 10.2 (2000), pp. 274-275,

The discussion above concerning multiple attestation of the baptismal accounts would also apply to the theophany accounts. The existence of four independent witnesses would support the historicity of the theophany. However, a number of problems arise concerning the historicity of the theophany. First, of all, to portray Jesus as endowed with the Spirit and identified as God's Son fits very well with early Christian theological reflection concerning Jesus. Applying the criterion of dissimilarity calls the historicity of the theophany into question.

Second, it also serves the early Christians well from an apologetic perspective to address the problems of Jesus' baptism by John. We saw above that the developing tradition increasingly emphasized the theophany and downplayed the baptism. Even in Mark, where the two items are given more equal weight, the very presence of the theophany immediately succeeding the baptismal account helps to mitigate the difficulties with the baptism. Crossan calls this "theological damage control."

I found these sources just now on Google scholar, and it is refreshing to find them, since before now I didn't know for sure whether or not my arguments--about the humility of John the Baptist and God's spirit alighting on Jesus at the expense of John the Baptist--would be shared among anyone in the scholarship. Such arguments did strike me as damned powerful when I thought of them.

ApostateAbe

I'm done with you.