aa5874

You have identified the problem. People here have forgotten that the short and long gMark were Falsely attributed to Mark.

stephan huller

Well but why is Mark so mysterious? In Islam for instance Mohammad receives the revelation. In Manichaeanism it was Mani. You go through a list of sects back to Moses and its the same - cut and dry.

Yet with Christianity it is all verkakte. Why? If you look at the so-called 'Pauline heresies' it all seems to come down to a person named Paul. He is the Paraclete, the second incarnation of Jesus. So it appears to be straightforward except for this other paradigm involving Peter and Mark which only appears to be a warped image of the early Roman tradition of Peter and Paul the twin apostles. Even the heretics have a similar conception of Peter and Paul receiving successively better revelations of God.

Something is just odd here. It is hard to reconcile Paul with Mark. Mark stands in the place of Paul. When the Philosophumena says that the Marcionites - a Pauline sect - have a longer gospel according to Mark and Tertullian says that the Marcionites explicitly do not attribute their gospel to Paul (strange for a Pauline sect), it is even more baffling.

Something isn't quite right. When you cut through all bullshit there is this repeating paradigm of two gospels build on top of one another as a 'gnostic superstructure' (to quote Clement on 1 Corinthians 2 - 3:12). This understanding is at the core of the early Christian tradition and then Clement again whispers something about this other gospel being attributed to Mark but he admits he will deny it upon oath.

Why all the secrecy? Moreover without the Letter to Theodore there is no explicit testimony to Mark having an episcopal see anywhere in the world. He's just a kind of throw away appendage. Paul on the other hand was originally paired with Peter at Rome but then in the third century he is stripped of his see and becomes something of a homeless wanderer like Mark.

It is hard not to believe that there is something being hidden here. A great secret. More unusual still is the fact that neither Paul nor Mark ever see Jesus in the flesh. Maybe there was no Jesus to see in the flesh. Maybe that's the great secret.

But the whole thing about Christianity is that it all makes sense to people as long as they suppose a few things to be true. If you believe for instance that there really was a Peter and there really was a band of disciples and they 'saw' Jesus live and in the flesh, then all the action 'happened' in the months leading up to the crucifixion in the fifteenth year of Tiberius (longer if you accept the gospel of John). But if you accept the idea that Jesus was a heavenly being, it isn't just the historical Jesus that fades away, all the people in the foreground - the disciples and 'witnesses' also become uncertain. Scholars never get this because they are still hung up on the historical Jesus.

tanya

I remain unconvinced that it is just "him". Here's why:

Our oldest extant (single) copy of portions of Mark (4-9, 11-12) is found in P45, and dates, by paleography, to mid third century, or, at least, one can affirm that the text type corresponds most closely to Codex W.

and alternate readings from conventional text of Mark include

One could argue scribal error, but, it would appear that P45 and W use a common template, suggesting at least two different texts as starting points. The question remains, which of the two main versions (W/P45 versus Vaticanus/Byzantine) represents the original version, and which is then the more revisionist?

Answering that question requires access to W, our third oldest text. I observe no reason to imagine a single author, in view of the evidence.

sotto voce

stephan's hoping for a papal knighthood.

stephan huller

tanya,

I don't understand your point. But back to the main difficulty. Modern observers unconsciously foist their own approaches to the New Testament onto the problem. When Ken declares that he 'doubts' that etymologies of the name Mark had any place in the ancient world he is flatly contradicted by the evidence. Of course he isn't aware of the evidence because like most scholars - great and less great - they come from evangelical mindset which basically approaches the text as 'settled' - i.e. a 'history' ignoring the entire body of commentary on the material preserved in the Church Fathers.

A couple of examples - Ephrem connects the name Marcion with the root mrq which is connected by other later Patristic witnesses with Mark. Similarly Isidore connects the name Mark with rqy = height, firmament, heaven.

It is not me who is 'inventing' this interest in etymology. Look at Peter = rock. His real name was Simon.

stephan huller

I guess my point is that so-called 'mythicists' aren't going far enough. It isn't just the person of Jesus which is questionable. Even the basic framework for how this 'historical narrative' about the questionable person of Jesus is dubious. We don't have a firm historical author of the gospel. Some people say Paul wrote the first gospel without writing it (WTF that means = Marcionites). I don't know of any ancient Catholic Fathers who acknowledge Mark as the original evangelist (although the Copts claim their ancestors held it first). This is a thoroughly modern invention. But even here the Fathers aren't sure who is/what Mark's real name is (i.e. whether he is 'John Mark').

All that consistently emerges from the earliest reports is that there were two gospels - a less perfect and a polished text. The less perfect text is associated with Peter and was probably written original in Aramaic. The polished text was written in Greek and was associated with Mark or Paul. But Mark could have been called John too and Paul was called something else originally. The Catholics say his name was 'Saul' but the heretics certainly denied that because they denied the source - Acts.

So where exactly are we with the 'history' of how the gospel was composed. Nowhere except that all our sources originally 'agreed' at first it came as a heavenly revelation rather than eyewitness testimony. This was later changed to an emphasis on the first hand testimony of the 'apostles' (Matthew and John) but the heretics (Marcionites cf. Dialogues of Adamantius) said that these gospels were not based on eyewitness testimony but were corruptions of an original gospel based on a 'revelation.' So where are we exactly? There is no reliable or universally agreed upon 'history' not just with respect to the person of Jesus but in fact WTF the gospel is. how it was created, what the name of the original author was and who the f*** he was. Why don't people emphasize this enough? How can any of us act as if this stuff is settled? It's just a bunch of evangelicals and former evangelicals getting a room and confirming the biases of their parents. That's all. Catholics still act as if a holy wind blew into four people in different parts of the world. Why do we act as if we know anything about anything?

Nietzsche once quipped few of us have the courage for what we really know. I say it goes even further in Biblical scholarship. Few of these eggheads are honest enough to admit how little we really know

Iskander

Harnack wrote that Gnostics were the first Theologians of Christianity. Gnostics were the first to transform Christianity into a system of doctrines (dogmas).

Theologians are the architects of religion.

sotto voce

Everyone knows what the gospel is. The nitty gritty is, it's Jesus wanting us to do as he would do, because we owe him. Not such good news, is it, if we don't give a cuss about our evil ways, or deny they exist. So, everyone knows, but not so many want to know.

What do we see, on the internet? People so terrified of the gospel that they claim to be atheist, yet try very hard to convince every reader that an infamous, authoritarian, stinking pile of filth, the RCC, represents the gospel. People so terrified of the gospel that they try to make out that Christians are in debt to this same shit-heap for their Bible, so they ought to obey said heap. The very same pile that, a decade or two back, formed the principal reason for not being a Christian, on ten thousand threads. A pile that kept real Christians up half the night persuading that the RCC was historically the chief enemy of Christians, until they eventually succeeded. That's desperation. So we now know that everyone believes.

Because it's of no importance. Why do people keep fussing about this, when they have been told it's of no importance?

No doubt true, in America. (Not that these people are real evangelicals.) The reason that phoneys get together in rooms is out of fear that somebody might be converted, goddamit. It happens, you know. There are places outside Texas, or so it is believed, and it is in these strange places that these terr'ble accidents occur.

It scares the wotsit out of them, too, wherever they were.

Especially himself. Artful fellow, Nietzsche.

Yet it's more than enough.

sotto voce

If they are much like Harnack, they are estate agents for hazardous ruins.

MrMacSon

This is illogical - "because we owe him"??


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