JoeWallack

JW:
Good X-Uh-Jesus should be rewarded. Yes, this is The Author finally emerging from The Shadows, allah, Elfredo Hitchcock Presents, and speaking directly to the Audience (as much as anyone can in a Script).

"Mark" is the same as Paul in that their Knowledge of the resurrected Jesus is Not based on Witness from The Disciples. It is based on Personal Revelation.

"Mark" cleverly describes "The Women" at The End the Same as he described The Disciples:

16: (NIV)
8 "Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid."

14: (NIV)
50 "Then everyone deserted him and fled."

The exact same Greek word is used (fled). "Bewildered", "saying nothing to anyone" and "afraid" are all descriptions of The Disciples after Jesus Predicts The Passion to them. The Author is making clear to all those who have Ears (and any young liberal Christians who may be Reading this) that The Women didn't tell of Jesus' Resurrection anymore than The Disciples did.

The Time to be Silent was during the Ministry when Jesus was Teaching and Healing but before he was Glorified by being Humiliated on the Cross. This was the time when The Disciples were Talking of Jesus (just like The Demons).

Once Jesus is Glorified by being Crucified The Disciples, just like The Women, are Silent. Now is the Time to talk of Jesus, Son of God, as the Centurion does (because unlike The Disciples, he Witnesses the Crucifixion) and as The Author is finally able to.


Joseph

Mark's View Of The Disciples

jakejonesiv

Hi Joesph,

Right. Just a small difference. The narrator appears as the young man in the tomb, not the author. It is a fine point to be sure, but the narrator apparently believes the story he is telling (otherwise the scenes with double irony wouldn't work). We can make no such assumption about the author.

I have enjoyed your comments in Mark's View Of The Disciples. Very good.

Did you notice that the women are dumber than dirt, just like Peter and the male disciples? They are on their way to the tomb before they realize they can't get it open!
Jake

Ben C Smith

I do not own either book, and am afraid I would only mislead you if I attempted to summarize from memory. When I summarized Garrow I had the book in front of me.

At any rate, IIRC, Theissen was not pegging the Nabatean conflict as the reason for Mark 13. He was just using it to help date the chapter.

See above, but IMHO Theissen is always worth further investigation, whether you agree or disagree with him.

Ben.

Chris Weimer

Now you're just splitting hairs here.

jjramsey

That is partially true. I definitely have a sound basis for concluding that they are embellished history: Assuming that the Gospels are either pure fiction or pure fact creates more problems than it solves. As for identifying the history in the stories, that is a lot trickier, and so far what I've pointed out about Mark 13 is a better argument against Vork's conclusions that Mark 13 must be wholesale fiction that it is an argument in favor of Mark 13 necessarily being correct in its broad strokes.

Some untidy thoughts about what is possible history:

• The crucifixion is more likely than not historical, for reasons I've said before. No one would want to make it up.
• The apocalypticism more likely than not goes back to Jesus. Apocalypticism pre-dates Jesus and could easily be picked up by him from the Jewish milleu. Signs of it are present in both the Synoptics and Pauline epistles, and signs of response to the failure of the end to come are in other NT material. I find it thoroughly implausible that Paul got the idea that the end would come soon from Jesus' purported resurrection alone. The attempt to recover a non-apocalyptic Jesus from the Synoptics by separating a non-extant and possibly non-existent document Q into layers based on textual seams that would mostly be lost due to Matthew and Luke's quoting from it seems driven less by data than by the need for a Jesus who is a sane moral teacher rather than the loony that an apocalyptic HJ might be.
• Jesus' Galilean background is an inconvenience that the birth narratives attempted to circumvent, and is probably not made up.
• Given the way that the Gospels are constructed of mostly self-contained units, it is quite possible that the Gospels are right about Jesus saying something, but wrong about where and when he said it.

jakejonesiv

Chris,

Sorry.

I don't mean to be splitting hairs.

If we are going to postulate that a historic Jesus went about purposefully emulating "OT" scripture, it makes sense to ask if being crucified was part of the plan.

According to a book I read as a teenager, The Passover Plot by Hugh Schonfeld this is exactly what Jesus did.

link I was more impressed with the book when I first read it than I am now.

Jake

And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. Luke 24:27.

Amaleq13

I'm avoiding signing in at Amazon at work so it won't screw up their suggested books.

I've got Zindler's book at home so I can just look it up. He might not say it on that page but I could have sworn he offered that possibility as a suggestion.

jakejonesiv

Yes, that is one of Zindler's suggestions.

jake

Ben C Smith

Right you are. Two issues on the possibilities strike me in this respect:

1. It is not unusual to wish for the death of a martyr. Many venerable saints have actually gone out seeking their own martyrdom (Anthony of Egypt and Francis of Assisi spring to mind).

2. It would also not seem unusual to me if the followers of a killed leader retroactively made it seem like he knew what was going to happen before it happened, or even made it seem like he was planning for it to happen.

So a close scrutiny of the evidence is called for. Did Jesus himself intend to die?

No, I am not volunteering... yet.

Ben.

Amaleq13

As I pointed out in my previous response to this claim:

Even accepting a crucified, Galilean, eschatological preacher only establishes a "historical core" around which everything else could very well be fiction (ie fiction with historical elements) as opposed to "embellished history" which certainly seems to suggest that the story contains more history than fiction.