Didymus

Yes, but, as I said, it would not be easy. There would be occasions when the analogy would seem forced and off the mark. That's true of any such endeavor. (Try writing a story about modern Miami that's based on, say, the Elijah-Elisha cycle. It can be done, but it would take imagination and hard work. And you probably wouldn't end up with a precise analogy.)

Examples, please, of OT references in Mark that are better explained by unintentional derivation. :huh:

Not all the incidents and lessons of the gospels are derived from the OT. Some even have historical antecedents. For example, the use of crucifixion does not appear in the LXX, but was used against Jews by Greeks and Romans. Nor does baptism, but John the Baptist seems to have been a real historical character. And some have antecedents in common beliefs and sayings. And in some cases, even when there is a reference, the connection seems rather oblique.

Those seem to be points of agreement between us.

The difference seems to be that your (requested, but as yet unstated, and so imputed at this point) hypothesis seems to be that Mark got his gospel primarily from an oral tradition that accurately reflected the words and deeds of a historical Jesus, whereas I think that most of it was lifted and reconstructed from the OT. There is abundant evidence (see Turton) to support my position; you have only speculation to support yours.

(Of course, if you strip out the very obvious OT derivations, and the miracles and other impossibilities, the "historical core" that supposedly remains doesn't amount to a pippin. That's why I accept MJ theory; nobody seems to be able to tell us what the biography of miracle-free Jesus would look like, or why anyone would ascribe such astonishing performances to a nondescript individual.)

Well, call it a presumption if you like, but it's based on evidence.

Assuming that Paul was real etc. (as do I) I know that Paul's congregants received their doctrines from Paul. All else is speculation, because nobody knows what those believers learned "through the community tradition" of your hypothetical "previous generation of Christians." Other than what is "reported" in the gospels and Acts, there is not a shred of evidence for the existence of Christians before Paul.

I won't bother going into the differences between epistles and letters in the ancient world. Suffice to say, Paul's epistles are... epistles. They ranged far beyond mere discussions of "church problems." They addressed a wide variety of subjects of concern to Christians, including ethics, theology, salvation, faith and even diet!

Contrary to your implication, there would have been nothing out of place had Paul deferred to Jesus' authority by quoting his teachings on those matters. And there would have been nothing jarring or inappropriate about references to incidents in Jesus' life as edifying examples to Paul's congregations.

Didymus

Ben C Smith

Galatians 1-2? Romans 16.7? Or did you mean something else?

Ben.

Didymus

Well, that covers a lot of ground. I read it, but I'm still not clear about which part constitutes "evidence for the opposite." Perhaps you could be more specific? (Are we misreading each other? Hmmm.)

Please keep in mind that I fully recognize that Christians since the publication of the gospels, including the church fathers, have accepted the premise that Christianity began in Palestine, so you will find no lack of attestation to that effect. At this point, I think they have all been wrong. However, I acknowledge that this is not yet a fully developed hypothesis.

Yes. Is what we have here a failure of communication? Or was there nothing to communicate?

I think the best explanation for Jewish non-acceptance of Jesus as messiah is that they never heard of such a person from sources within Palestine. Eventually, they went along with the diaspora-based Christian belief that he existed - a small price to pay for peaceful co-existence. Or so they probably thought.

Didymus

Clivedurdle

Ellegard argues - I think quite reasonably - that there were xians before Jesus!!

Sparrow

I see, it's just a model for you, and now you can go about finding evidence that supports your model. By the way, my model is not 'The Invisible Man'. If I were to cite one literary work that got me to question how we know what we know in this area, it would be 'Behold the Man' by Michael Moorcock.

Now having not seen the movie 'Quo Vadis', I can't intelligently comment on the character Peter's resurrection speech. Are you now suggesting that an actual bodily resurrection took place some 2000 years ago?

Didymus

I'm not actually sure what I meant!

Perhaps this is what I meant: There is no other evidence of the "oral tradition" presumed by Crossan and others, i.e., pre-Pauline Jewish Christians transmitting accurate accounts about Jesus' life or teachings. That's my point.

I'll leave it at that and retract the "not a shred" sentence.

Didymus

Didymus

Jesus' granting of his sacred imprimatur to Cephas might not have stopped Paul, but what about public approbation? Paul didn't merely "oppose" Cephas, he bragged publically about insulting him and making a fool of him. Nowhere did he pay respects to Cephas as - if you are right - a trusted follower and hearer of the Lord during his days in Galilee. Nor did he ever acknowledge that John and James held that same special status.

If Paul's Peter was the Peter of the gospels, his insults would have been viewed by his fellow Christians as slaps in Jesus' face. He could only have gotten away with that behavior if Cephas were nothing more than a rival churchman.

Didymus

Chris Weimer

What real evidence is there that Jesus granted Cephas such a title? From Paul's own works, we gather that Cephas was subservient to James, not wanting to offend him when he was around.

jjramsey

We already talked about it: Jesus calling fishermen as disciples. There is a faint echo of the account of the calling of Elisha, but it isn't an obvious parallel the way that the 40-day temptation is a parallel to Israel's 40 days in the wilderness, and no attention is called to the parallel at all. The outline of the account of the fishermen isn't even that close to the account of the calling of Elisha except at one point. That is easily explained if whoever was creating the account wasn't trying to base it off of the account of Elisha, but was too familiar with the OT to avoid its influence.

And this is what makes Turton's model problematic. The relationship between Mark and the OT is messy. Someone doing a wholesale intentional derivation from the LXX would have made the relationship tidier.

Who said anything about the oral tradition being accurate? Considering that one of the indicators of oral tradition that I mentioned earlier was the presence of multiple versions of what is basically the same story, accuracy was obviously not the issue. Indeed, if we are talking about oral tradition that had come from Jewish Christians, then that is another way for the OT references to get into Mark, and one which accounts for the untidiness in the OT references in Mark, unlike Turton's model.

There is abundant evidence of use of the OT, but not in way Turton would have it.

How about this for a biography of a miracle-free Jesus? An apocalyptic preacher who started out under John the Baptist, starts his own ministry, and gathers some followers. He goes to Jerusalem on Passover, where it is crowded with Jews who are chafing at the irony of celebrating a holiday about God freeing them from a foreign oppressor while being ruled by those that they regard as foreign oppressors. In this charged environment, Jesus engages in some behavior that could potentially start a riot, and the Jewish authorities see this and, in their role as liasons between the Jewish populace and the Romans, inform Pilate, who takes care of Jesus with prejudice. Why you think such a Jesus would be a "nondescript individual," I don't know.

But not just Paul, or else there would not be a letter to the Galatians, nor would Paul complain in 1 Cor. 1:12 that "each of you says, 'I belong to Paul,' 'I belong to Apollos,' or 'I belong to Cephas,' or 'I belong to Christ,'" and then goes on in 1 Cor. 3:5 to imply that he and Apollos are working together under God. Note too that Corinth and Galatia are not that close to Jerusalem, where Peter is. So then, which is more likely, that Peter was known in the Gentile world only to a city in Greece and a region in what is now Turkey, or that he was known more broadly, with the churches in Corinth and Galatia being a sample of the churches that knew of him?

The previous generation of Christians that I had in mind were the recipients of Paul's letters and their contemporaries, as opposed to the later generation of Christians who became the recipients of Mark. This should have been clear from the context of one of my earlier posts. Basically, if Cephas/Peter were not a follower of Jesus in the flesh, one would have expected the contemporaries of the recipients of Paul's letters to know this. For the generations of Christians who came after them to not recognize Mark radically rewriting the history of Peter in the way that you claim had happened, the recipients of Paul's letters would had to have neglected to relate what they knew about Peter to the next generation of Christians.

An epistle is a kind of letter, but a letter nonetheless.

It was the church problems that prompted the discussions on ethics, theology, salvation, faith and diet. The Corinthians had problems with sexual morality and divisiveness, so Paul answered accordingly. The Thessalonians were unclear on eschatology, so Paul addressed this. The Galatians were faced with the question of whether to follow Jewish law or not, so Paul addressed this. While the church problems led to discussions of a broad range of subjects, that range of subjects was not comprehensive, nor was it meant to be.

But this is beside the point. Your argument from Paul's silence depends on the premise that if Jesus were historical, then Paul should have mentioned certain things. It is not sufficient to establish that Paul could have said certain things but happened not to. You have to establish that if Jesus were historical, not saying those things was an unlikely option. Further, mentioning that Peter had followed Jesus in the flesh would have been a needless digression. Mentioning certain details about Jesus like him being from Nazareth in Galilee would also have been a digression. Those aren't even in the same category as a saying or an incident in Jesus' life.

GakuseiDon

The whole question was over how Gentile Christians were to be treated by the Jewish Christians. Since Paul believed that he received his commission to the gentiles directly from the Risen Jesus, wouldn't he have regarded NOT opposing Peter as a slap in Jesus' face (at least on that topic)?