Steven Carr

So the conclusion to be drawn from John leaving out the baptism is that he did not believe that it happened.

Are you claiming Luke and Matthew knew independently of reading Mark that Jesus had been baptized? They had way more evidence than just reading Mark that Jesus had been baptised? Why didn't a scholar like Ehrman realise that?

TedM

No. The reverse is not true. Read my statement again: If someone says something happened and other people say it happened. John didn't say it happened so it doesn't apply to him.

Yes, that is what I'm saying is more likely. I can't speak for what Ehrman does or doesn't realize.

Steven Carr

So how do we know that Mark was embarrassed by what he had written? After all, it was perfectly feasible for him to omit all mention of a baptism, if other Christians could do so.

TedM

But MARK didn't omit it. That's how we can consider it likely to have happened. The unlikely excuses for his baptism and the overtly amplified language of John surrounding it give weight to this view. We can't KNOW Mark was embarrassed. That's why this is a question of probabilities.

dog-on

Of course, reading the later into the former is necessary to make the probability seem probable in the first place...

Do I have this correct?

TedM

No. Common sense and an understanding of human nature is what is necessary to understand these probability comparisons. Some people just can't put it all together.

I see what you are saying of course. And, I'm only reflecting an opinion. I can't support it. It requires experimentation to prove me out. I am not aware of studies that have gone back to do this. I assume historians who believe in the value of the criteria of embarrassment have seen it proven out for individual cases, but whether that equates to being any more than just by chance is something I don't know.

aa5874

We have the story of the baptism of Jesus in the NT and if HJers assume Jesus was an ordinary man who was ordinarily baptized then there could not have been any reason for the baptism of Jesus to be embarrassing.

Examine the story of the Baptism of Jesus by John.

The story OCCUPIES one verse if we reject the hocus-pocus.

Mark 1:9 - That is all to the baptism story.

There is absolutely nothing at all embarrassing about an ordinary man being baptized ordinarily in the river Jordan.

And in addition in gMark, nothing was written about Jesus before he was baptized.

beallen041

I guess using this criteria we can verify that Sherlock Holmes both existed and was a cocaine addict, since this embarrassing fact would not have gotten written about unless it were true. We can also conclude that Anakin Skywalker actually was brought over to the dark side and actually existed. According to this logic, no author ever manufactures an embarrassing fact to drive a plot point or create drama or tension.

ApostateAbe

I think we need to be discriminating both with the criterion and the reasons to dismiss them. We obviously can't use ANY historical methodology for known-to-be-fictional texts. Take the criterion of independent attestation: many fictional authors have independently incorporated Robin Hood into their own stories. Do we conclude, therefore, that the criterion does not work for any sort of historical decision making? Not in my opinion. In those peculiar cases where we have not yet decided that the written texts do not belong in the fictional genres, then all such criteria are useless. We need to take a step backward and decide the fundamental stuff. I recommend Argument to the Best Explanation for deciding whether or not the gospels were written as fiction. There is a thread on the topic here:

Bart Ehrman on the genre of the gospels (Greco-Roman biographies) and Neil Godfrey

johno

Having a passing interest in these issues and no technical expertise at all I shall restrict myself to the tone of the quotation in the OP. As a university lecturer I was conscious of the resentment of students when they feel that they are being talked down to. In my opinion Ehrman is talking down to the reader. The tone, as you might, children, have noticed, is strongly reminiscent of that adopted by C. S. Lewis in the Narnia stories.