Amaleq13

Does Koester offer any speculation as to why this story would be eliminated?

And what about the other scrap with the reference to Salome? Why would an author choose to delete something that seems to serve no other purpose than to explain a particular travel choice of Jesus?

Vinnie

For now it should be noted that Koester's view on Mark is a little more complex than my own. He thinks Mark came before Secret Mark. But He thinks canonical Mark came after Secret Mark.

There was a: original Mark. ---> this in turn was toyed with producing Secret Mark --> this in turn was edited producing canonical Mark.

Koester uses Mt and Lk double omission (agreement against Mark) of this naked young man as evidence of his early version of Mark. I simply think neither one liked the incident for the reasons I outlined. Why "would" they have retained this patchwork?

I'll answer the other questions later.

Vinnie

dantonac

Vinnie, if I am reading this correctly, there is only one human who has seen secret Mark.

If that is the case, why would anyone use it for anything? It could quite easily be a complete hoax.

Vinnie

The fact that this text convincingly explains several otherwise bizarre Markan elements that MT and Lk are quick to omit also must be taken into account as well. Could these be part of an elaborate hoax? Sure. If its a hoax its an extremely uber good one with very little motivation outside of senseless caricature and ad hominem (disparaging comments like Morton was a closet homo, he was an evil church hating atheist, etc).

Vinnie

Vorkosigan

I disagree. It has all the earmarks of a hoax. A scholar with an outre theory of Jesus goes to an obscure monastery and just by chance happens on a passage in a gospel that just by chance happens to support his theory of Jesus. It's suspicious, Vinnie, you have to admit. I don't believe SM, and won't until the manuscript is in the hands of mainstream scholars.

Vorkosigan

Vinnie

I agree that the issue is not fully solvable. Either you work with it or you don't. Not a very sound methodology of course but its what you get in NT research. Ergo, my parody.

Vinnie

Agnostic Theist

The deal is that Judas was gay and had a thing for Jesus, but Jesus was with Mary so Judas got enviouis and betrayed him.

Hows about

Jesus was a little bit left handed. I mean, he wasn't a poofter, he just liked to bat for Surrey on Sundays . Judas got a thing going with him, merely a tiff, but one (Judas) didn't realise he was being led on. Then Jesus married Mary etc.

Of course he may have been closeted, but society then wouldn't have accepted him: he'd have been shunned and his works would have gone unfulfilled. A case of necessary deceit....

rlogan

Just a brief overview of this very believable story:

Smith is cataoging manuscripts in this library. Written on the back flyleaf and binder pages of a 1646 Voss manuscript is a partially transcribed letter of Clement.

It is very short, and refers to a few bits of Mark that are "secret" from the public copies available in the 2nd century.

He immediately knows it is the find of a lifetime. So he takes photos.

But then he just doesn't give a shit about the Voss manuscript. Since he's the one charged with cataloging it, I guess we can't be hard on him for that. Someone allegedly hacks the back pages out of this priceless document - the very pages we are speaking of.

The pages are lost and not one other person can verify that they have seen the alleged transcribed partial letter of clement. Nobody can say they have seen the Voss manuscript with any letter at all written into the back pages.

As far as I know, nobody can find the Voss manuscript with the remains of any alleged missing pages.

Smith does not publish anything on his find until 14 years after its discovery.

Inside his book cover is the cryptic comment: "To the one who knows".


It isn't "elaborate" or particularly impressive. There is very little material involved. It could easily be a 17th century fraud. Or a modern fraud.

There is zero evidence of any other reference to "secret" gospels for some kind of "inner circle" of initiates or whatever.

Is there any reason to suspect fraudulent letters in Christianity?

Sorry Yuri! I know you disagree.

JoeWallack

JW:
Well, as the Humongous said in the classic Road Warrior, "There can be an end to the pain, an end to the suffering." Sure your theory had a few small problems like:

1) Lack of a single explict supporting excerpt from your primary source.

2) Lack of a single good implicit supporting excerpt from your primary source.

3) Attribute which would not have been tolerated by the culture of the time.

4) Lack of establishment in even your key piece of evidence, Secret Mark, that Jesus was gay or even open, so to speak, to homosexuality.

but from an entertainment standpoint I love what your straight eye for the Cuamrun guy has done with Jesus' short hairs. This whole thread was creepily similiar to Christians trying to argue with even less evidence than you had that God sacrificed himself to himself thereby conquering death by dying and bring to an end a Law which was Eternal.

You had mentioned in your response to me the "woman" who anointed Jesus:

Mark 14KJV)
3 "And being in Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at meat, there came a woman having an alabaster box of ointment of spikenard very precious; and she brake the box, and poured it on his head.
4 And there were some that had indignation within themselves, and said, Why was this waste of the ointment made?
5 For it might have been sold for more than three hundred pence, and have been given to the poor. And they murmured against her.
6 And Jesus said, Let her alone; why trouble ye her? she hath wrought a good work on me.
7 For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good: but me ye have not always.
8 She hath done what she could: she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying.
9 Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, this also that she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her.
10 And Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve, went unto the chief priests, to betray him unto them."

A few problems here from a plausibility standpoint:

1) "Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, this also that she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her." Regrettably, the woman's name had already been forgotten by the time the story was written.

2) No apparent reason why Judas turned traitor here other than contrivance. Maybe Judas was the precursor of the first Jewish Super Agent and sensing that his client's market value could suffer a significant decline if he was no longer alive he made a quick and Judicous decision to get what he could for him while he still had some value.

What I do find interesting here is the idea of anointing a Messiah in anticipation of death. The exact opposite of Messiah treatment in the Tanakh but well paralleled in Egyptian mythology. In Emmerich's script for Gibson's movie (she claimed that the naked young man was non other than a John, er, John, by the way) she describes Jesus' wounds being "embalmed" apparently relying heavily on "John" and the 100 pounds of spices brought to the tomb. Course there's a translation issue with "embalmed" as Emmerich's trances were in German, translated into French and then translated into English.

Anyway, I'm going to start a thread here about comparing the anointing of Jesus to the embalming of Osiris, all inspired by this thread. Maybe I can beat my record for number of posts before ending up in Elsewhere.


Joseph

ANOINT, v.t.
To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Errors...yguid=68161660

http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/abdulreis/myhomepage/

Vinnie

"""""3) Attribute which would not have been tolerated by the culture of the time."""""

Um, the guy was crucified. He need not have broadcasted it (which hinders your other complaints as well).

Though I agree I made all sorts of leaps and tenuous arguments. I think my rhetorical skills were brilliant here. I managed to convince quite a few people as well.

I think my parody was useful and will be more so when I incorporate it into my methodological studies, juxtaposing existing scholarship that is just as tenuous.

For example, Toto writes that the norm is marraige (I agree and said so in the article). But I would counter that the norm was a) not for a man to start up a religious movement, b) not for a man to leave his job and work, c) not for a man to leave family life for an itinerant lifestyle, d) not for a man to do and say certain things that led (directly or indirectly) to his crucifixion, e) it was not normal for a man to have open table fellowship with tax collectors and sinners, f-g) for a man to be as accepting of women and children, and on and on and on.

Very little about Jesus allows him to be classified according to "typical" statistics. Why do you think John Meier calls him A Marginal Jew and he has an imprimatur on his work!

Peter Kirby asked on Ebla about my allusion to Meier in a defense in my article to which I responded:

Moving on, that Jesus was not accused of not having a wife is irrelevant. There is a celibacy saying and also the church only tended to retain material that was useful to it (e.g. the sabbath controversy and so on). But we must also note that Jesus was rejected by his hometown (I do not think this is Markan invention). They would have known he did not lead a traditional life better than anyone. The fact that we know Jesus did all the things above shows he was "shamed" in an honor and shame society. His homoetown would have reacted to him in that way. That is simply factual with or without Mark's statement.

Also, the silence of any mention whatsoever of a wife anywhere in any text to me is more indicative of Jesus lacking a wife than is the silence of a "direct accusation that he didn't". How do we settle this issue?

But notice Toto's point:

"""""""Ranke-Heinemann's theory is that marriage was the norm for a Jewish male, that it was a requirement for each Jewish male to get married shortly after puberty and start a family; and that if Jesus had not been married, that fact would have been so remarkable that we would have heard about it. Since we have no indication of his marital status, the default is that he was married. Every other Jewish prophet seems to have married, and Jesus did not preach asceticism like John the Baptist.""""""""

To throw a monkey wrench in we note that most believe Jesus started his "ministry" later in life. Did he have a homelife before this? Or do the Gospels simply falsely invent a short ministry? How do we tell?

We must also remember that Jesus WAS a follower of JBap under most reconstructions and then broke away. If John taught asceticism and Jesus was originally a disciple of John then abracadabra the rabbit comes out of the hat.

Lets look at Toto's next point:

How is this even credible in light of what's been posted? This is a perfect example of tenuous leaps of logic. Why is this any more credible than me pulling a gay Jesus out of the texts that I did?

Also if we mention that many third questers posit an apocalyptic Jesus who believed in an imminent end and soon world-altering intervention by God his celibacy would be all the more credible.

Toto writes this: "If you look at every other cult leader or founder of a new religion, leaders have and use a lot of sexual energy. "

Hell, maybe Jesus was gay then and had lots of gay sex. That we have no objections ot this practice is irrelevant as Jesus need not have broadcasted it. We know nil in regards to everyday routines of Jesus and what his personal life was actually like. Toto is making all sorts of leaps.

His inferring the non-existence of Jesus on this basis is no more and possible far less rational than my arguments for a "gay Jesus".

The parody makes fun of:

1) Conservative Apologists and thier defense of the Gospels and Rez and all that.
2) Jesus Mythicists and all their tenuously bad arguments.
3). Fringe Scholars who posit sensationalism and dead theories over and over again.
4. Jesus scholars in general who make all sorts of leaps in logic and suspend their own methodologies in the process.
5. Anyone who thinks the HJ has something to "offer us" (doing theology and calling it history--this applies to almost ALL Christian swcholars)!

Hell, I think I managed to spoof virtually all camps in the NT field in a single paper. My next step is to show comparisons of where scholars make similar leaps in logic.

Vinnie