Toto

There is no need to posit a hidden conspiracy. All of the documents passed through the hands of Christian scribes, and it would be naive to think that these Christians valued accuracy over othodoxy. Do you have a problem with that? Every commentator (with a few true believing exceptions) admits that Josephus was tampered with. Once you admit that, there is no way to be sure what was originally written.

If that be conspiracy, make the most of it.

dog-on

Abe, Spin did not change the topic. He went right to the heart of it.

That you cannot, or will not, see this speaks volumes.

Atheos

Abe, in my opinion your explanation presumes far too much about what each writer was attempting to accomplish, and what each one believed about the developing myth.

Might there have been later christians who didn't like what was written by the author of GMark? Certainly. That has no bearing on the content of GMark. This writer's agenda (if one existed) is best discovered by looking at the content of the document.

GMark begins by describing "Jesus Christ" as "The Son of God". Nowhere does Mark ever make the claim that Jesus started off sinless. Like other God/Men Jesus could easily have had some growing up to do before he was ready for the task ahead of him. So this earliest and most primitive canonical gospel starts off with him putting off whatever old life he may have lived, repenting and being baptized in order to get ready for his destiny.

After getting baptized by John, Jesus goes out into the desert and gets tempted. GMark neither details the nature of the temptations nor does the writer make the claim that Jesus actually resisted all the temptations. This is all part of the "getting prepared" for his destiny.

Just like Darth Vader had to start off as a padawan to Obi-wan Kenobi but eventually became much more powerful, so Jesus starts the story getting baptized by John the Baptist. But the wonderful works he would accomplish would put him way over the top by the end of the tale.

GMark's Jesus was a God/Man. Like Hercules, Perseus, Osiris, etc., he had special powers. He dealt with adversity and accomplished great feats. One sees petty human traits (such as anger, partiality, bigotry, even deceptiveness), intermingled with more noble traits such as self-sacrifice, empathy and nurturing.

GMark's Jesus even denied being perfect/sinless in 10:18 when he rebuked the rich young ruler for calling him "Good". "Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God."

It was only as the myth developed that these earmarks of humanity were weeded out and/or apologized for. The later gospel redactors downplayed characteristics of the myth that they didn't like and emphasized those they liked. It's unlikely that any of them were shooting for a semblance of solidarity in message.

Your criterion of embarrassment is faulty because it assumes a consistent agenda from start to finish. The evidence weighs heavily against such an assumption. Then, as now, there were many different opinions and agendas in operation. Modern christians aren't embarrassed at all by Jesus's baptism. They've rationalized it in countless ways. Why would earlier christians be embarrassed by it?

The "Jesus" stories are best explained as pure myth. Any semblance to any persons living or dead were purely coincidental. The criterion of embarrassment is useless in this context of such widely variegated origins.

ApostateAbe

He made an argument concerning comparisons with other historical texts. I personally don't think his argument carries much weight, but that opinion doesn't matter. It has very little to do with the topic of the accounts of the baptism of Jesus, if anything. If spin's argument has a lot of strength, then great, but it says nothing about the strength or weakness of the argument based on the accounts of the baptism of Jesus.

dog-on

....it has to do, specifically, with the assumptions upon which your argument is based...

ApostateAbe

I think you have made a very good point about the gospel of Mark's perspective of Jesus being sinful, or at least not-necessarily-sinless. Mark 10:18 implies at the least, that Jesus didn't wish to be called, "good," but I think it is also important to take note of Jesus' argument: "...there is none good but one, that is, God." This means that even the most moral almost-perfect human hero on Earth is not "good," according to Jesus' definition, so don't make too much of it. Throughout all of the gospel of Mark, Jesus is portrayed as nothing less than an extremely good person--resisting the temptations of Satan, bravely preaching moral truths, truthfully prophesying the apocalypse, enacting miracles, encouraging absolute adherence to the law, and getting resurrected after an unjust execution.

So, for the gospel of Mark, at the least, the point about the embarrassment of the baptism still holds. It is not just that the explanation roughly accommodates the evidence of the baptism. It is that the explanation strongly expects the evidence. For example, the gospel of Mark has John the Baptist extremely deferential toward Jesus. This is actually out of line with the theme of the gospel of Mark. In Mark, the esteemed religious authorities did not tend to understand or accept Jesus' message, not even Jesus' own disciples, but only the lowly disrespected outsiders understood Jesus and accepted his message and authority. Mark breaks out of this theme with John the Baptist, and the reason for it seems obvious to me--he needed an apologetic point against the rival Baptist cult. He needed John the Baptist to be clearly seen as the servant of Jesus, not the other way around.

And that same explanation applies to Mark's account that God alights on Jesus like a dove at the baptism and proclaims Jesus to be his blessed son. Mark paints John as the underling of Jesus at every turn.

So, if the alternative explanation is that the baptism story was invented to help Jesus get prepared for his destiny, then why not just stick with the story of Satan's temptations in the wilderness? Why invent such a story that seems to need to be very tightly wrapped up in apologetics in order to be an evangelistic advantage? Why not just have the Transfiguration, as another example?

Jesus really was baptized, and Mark had to spin it his own way. So did Matthew, Luke and John--each of them spun the stories in their own special ways. The gospel of John actually kept John the Baptist AND the alighting of the spirit of God in the form of a dove on Jesus, but the baptism itself is omitted! This theory strongly fits with the historical context--Josephus wrote of there being a cult of John the Baptist at the same time and place as Jesus.

And these are the kinds of details that a rival theory needs to explain. Doesn't have to be the same details, but it is easy to be dismissive with any historical text and claim, "There is no reason that someone could not have just made that all up." We should be caring about evidence and the most probable explanation, in my opinion. And, with evidence, the details matter.

If it were actually true that, as you said, "Any semblance to any persons living or dead were purely coincidental," then maybe the best explanation for all of this stuff really would be that it is all pure myth. However, we have very good evidence for the existence of Pontius Pilate, John the Baptist, Peter, John the disciple, and James the brother of Jesus. The semblance of those characters in the early Christian writings to actual persons is most certainly NOT coincidental. That isn't to say it is proved that Jesus was likewise human, but any theory that claims Jesus was just a myth needs to explain the gospel accounts of these persons using the details of the evidence and having explanatory power and plausibility.

ApostateAbe

No, it doesn't. You talked about that. Not spin.

spin

I guess we have to deal with your idiosyncrasies.

James is not a central figure in the gospel tradition. The James you talk of is a node of presuppositions loosely attached to the name of a person who takes no part in the central narrative.

Pontius Pilate is a pretty desperate attempt to squirm past the notion of central narrative. You may as well mention Herod Antipas or Herod the Great or Tiberius.

Let's say I don't have an especially low standard.

You seem to work under the notion that if you can kick the ball you've scored a goal.

Good history is done using an established historical context. Said context is the historical equivalent of the observation statements that underpin the "best explanation" and that you persistently refuse to supply. This suggests that you are not concerned with history at all.

Your own personal assumptions are as subject-laden as anyone else's. When you retroject a biased modern notion of "doomsday cult leader" into the material we are dealing with, you are merely performing eisegesis. You are too busy twiddling texts to worry about history. History requires you to demonstrate something about the past, not just repackage it.

spin

Actually we don't have very good evidence for any of them beside Pontius Pilate. Pontius Pilate obviously comes out the best, featured in an inscription, several undisputable passages in Josephus and the gospel tradition, two, probably three, observably independent sources. John the Baptist is eked out from a single reference in Josephus and the gospel tradition, perhaps two independent sources. None of the others reach any level of historicity.

bacht

I think someone already pointed out that the simplest explanation for the JtB episode is to justify the rite of baptism already practiced by believers when Mark was written. His appearance is clearly meant to evoke Elijah, a key figure in OT prophecy.

John the Baptizer isn't mentioned by Paul, who personally met the apostles Cephas and John. Surely one of these three would know about such a remarkable figure, yet he is never mentioned in the epistles or Acts, while secondary apostles like Apollos get noticed :huh: