andrewcriddle

I've suggested before that the question of how one would interpret say Mark in the absence of any other information whatsoever about Christianity is more problematic than appears at first sight.

IF all evidence of Christianity had disappeared and then an archaeological dig found a copy of the Gospel of Mark in a tomb from the time of Trajan, then it might well be very difficult to interpret it.

Part of the basis of interpreting Mark is that it was written by some sort of Christian believer to be read by other Christian believers.

IF we had, apart from Mark, no evidence that anything like Christianity had ever existed then we would lack this background to help us in interpreting it.

Andrew Criddle

aa5874

The author of gMark is not known. It cannot be verified what the unknown author believed or if the author was actually a Christian.

The author could have been a deceiver, i.e, he may have written gMark to mis-lead his readers deliberately. Perhaps that is the reason the author did not identify himself.

andrewcriddle

I think my statement could be rewritten as wihout affecting my central point.

My point is that Mark is to be interpreted in the context of a Christian movement of which it is a result. This would be much less clear if Mark existed in splendid isolation without us having any other evidence that a Christian movement ever existed.

Andrew Criddle

aa5874

The author of Mark did not ever claim in the Gospel to be a Christian believer. The name Mark was first provided as the author of gMark by Irenaeus about 150 years after the death of the so-called Jesus of Nazareth .

Again, the author of gMark is unknown, the date of the writing of gMark is also not known. It is not known when the sect who were followers of Jesus of Nazareth of the NT really began.

The Christian movement and the movement of the followers of Jesus of Nazareth can be ambiguous and may not be the same.

It appears to me that there may have been many Christs and their followers who may have preceeded the Jesus of Nazareth and his sects.

Mark 13.6 I am of the opinion there may have been many Christs that had already deceived many before gMark was written.

And "Mark" seemed to exist in splendid isolation.

spamandham

But we are effectively in that position, since we really have few clues (if any) as to what the earliest form of Christianity really was.

Ben C Smith

Your position is that, apart from Mark, we have no evidence that anything like Christianity ever existed?

Ben.

spamandham

No.

Ben C Smith

It sounds like you are saying that we do not have enough evidence to evaluate what kind of writing Mark is.

Ben.

dog-on

Ben, that one is obvious.

Fiction.

spamandham

That's close, but not exactly what I'm saying. I'm saying that we do not have any relevant evidence that tells us the intent of the author. The evidence we do have is all much later than Mark, or in the case of the Pauline epistles, irrelevant toward determining what the proper genre of Mark is (regardless of when they were written).

It's analogous to the situation I outlined a few posts above. AFAIK, it's only because of a tendency to retroject biases into the text, that we assume it's some unique form of biography.