Diogenes the Cynic

It was Mark who expected the end to come after the destruction of the Temple, not Jesus. Matthew 23 is about the destruction of the Temple (and the punishment of Israel) but has nothing to do with the end of the world. It is irrelevant to Matthew that Mark expected the end of the world to follow the destruction.

jjramsey

With apologies to CFLarsen over at the JREF forums ... evidence?

Amaleq13

Providing examples of allegories where the referents are made obvious by the author does not mean that all allegories contain hints identifying their referents nor that it is reasonable to expect readers two thousand years later to easily recognize any hints provided. IOW, an inability to find hints within the text does nothing to establish or even suggest that the story was not or certain characters were not intended as allegorical representations.

Judging from Mark 13, the author wrote the story shortly after the Temple's destruction and appears to have believed it was the Beginning of The End.

Diogenes the Cynic

Evidence that Mark made the claim or evidence that Jesus did not? The first is evidenced by the Gospel of Mark, the latter is easily proven by the fact that Jesus could not have known about the destruction of the Temple.

Strictly speaking, though, it is your burden to prove that any claim in the Gospel of Mark originated anywhere but with Mark, not mine to disprove it. This is especially true if you have any desire to assert the historicity of impossible phenomena such as predictive prophecy.

jjramsey

It is always possible to claim just about any text as an allegory and find a way to interpret it as such. It does not follow from this that this is a natural way to interpret the text. What I see missing are indications that it was ever understood as wholly allegorical and not historical.

Ah. I misunderstood and thought you were saying that Mark tacked on the prediction of the end of the world to Jesus' prediction of the destruction of the Temple.

Anyway, it would not have taken supernatural abilities to predict the Temple's destruction. There were already tensions between the Jews and the Romans. If one presumes that Jesus also predicted the end of the world as well, then his hit rate really isn't that good, certainly no better than an ordinary person extrapolating from current events.

Amaleq13

There are also no indications that the story was originally intended or originally accepted as wholly historical and not allegorical so, again, there appears to be no basis for your dismissal of the alternate interpretation. I tend to consider magic-filled stories of the origins of a religion as something other than an attempt to record history but you are free to make other assumptions.

That a subsequent author rewrote the story to appear at least somewhat more historical tells us nothing about the intent or reception of the original version. That he clearly fabricated portions of his "historical" record (eg absurd census) certainly calls into question any assumption of historicity in the sense we define it, today.

jjramsey

Basically, you are saying that there are no indications that the Gospel of Mark was meant to convince its readers that a Galilean Jew did miracles, got crucified, and then resurrected. Funny then how the Church accepted the Gospel of Mark as if that is what that Gospel was meant to do.

Well, if one (mistakenly) thinks that these stories were a part of history, then it is hardly unexpected for someone who thinks he is writing a history to include them.

Ben C Smith

This kind of reading might hold up for further scrutiny for Luke 9.27, but it appears to fail at its parallel in Mark 9.1:

And Jesus was saying to them: Truly I say to you, there are some of those who are standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God after it has come with power.

Surely an aside aimed directly at the reader would not be prefaced with an explicit statement of its address to the original audience. You and I have also discussed the same problem on Olivet, where Mark frames the entire discourse as a private message to four particular disciples. That is not how an author normally writes when he is deliberately aiming over the heads of the inscribed audience.

Ben.

As an aside, on the passing away of the generation that others on this thread have mentioned, I suspect that the number forty would have held special meaning for an ancient Jew in that regard, since in Numbers 14.22-32 God swears that no one who left Egypt will enter the promised land, except Caleb and Joshua, and in 14.33-35 we learn how long it will take for this present generation to pass away: 40 years.

Ben C Smith

How would you go about determining the genre of Mark? Studying how contemporaries treated a given work seems a very reasonable approach to genre questions, but you appear to rule out that approach:

Note that with such an hypothesis we are back to conspiracies. Matthew (who appears to take the empty tomb, for example, very seriously) and Luke (who appears to aspire to some kind of historical narrative) knew Mark was fiction, but decided to treat it like history and fool everybody.

Another issue. Do you have any outside parallels in mind for what we find in the gospels? I can point to a number of ancient and medieval examples of the kind of process that I imagine led to our canonical gospels; what examples can you provide as analogous to your view?

Ben.

Vorkosigan

The problem is that in Mark "Truly I say to you" often appears to set off a general point that could be read as "dual application" to both the present company in the text and the wider world of listeners.

I disagree. This insight on Mark 13 came out of reader-response criticism (let the reader understand!)

Vorkosigan