Ben C Smith

I just reread your initial post, and I admit it does not seem as strident now as it did yesterday. I apologize for taking it too personally; I had a pretty rough day in 3-D yesterday and must have read things into your words that you did not intend. My fault.

I said that your point was worthwhile, and deserved comment, and I stick by that. Changing the rabbits to humans would indeed remove one whole set of implausibilities. Some Saturday morning cartoons portray famous historical events and figures using animated animal characters (like reenacting the American Revolution with talking barnyard animals).

The question Jake asked was: How are name motivations and saying for rabbits different than name motivations and sayings for human disciples?

You framed the issue as one of removing implausible attributes, and I will follow your lead. The difference, in your terms, is this: For the rabbits, one actually has to take that step and remove the implausible feature (their rabbithood). For the disciples, no such step is necessary. The implausibility score, as it were, is 1-0.

Sorry about the confrontation.

Ben.

Damian

No problem. I'm used to confrontation here, but admittedly i was a bit taken aback that you reacted that way. I thought my response was quite tame and had to reread my post several times to figure out what was so harsh about it. Thanks for returning to the discussion.

Ben C Smith

The words of Mark 9.1 are addressed to those standing around Jesus at the time:

And Jesus was saying to them: Amen, I say to you, there are some of those standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God having come with power.

Just as in Mark 14.30:

And Jesus said to him: Amen, I say to you that today, on this night, before a cock crows twice, you yourself will deny me three times.

Ben.

jakejonesiv

I offer this post to those who have an interest in Reader Response criticism. If this is not you cup of tea, please excuse this post.

Mark 16:1-8.

The women (two of the three Mary's) come to the tomb to anoint Jesus' body. They are completely unaware that this has already been done. Mark 14:8.

There they meet a young man in the tomb (16:5). Matthew transforms him into an angel, but we should not read that back into Mark. He informs the women that Jesus is risen. They fled from the tomb in fear and said nothing to anyone (16:8), thus the gospel of Mark ends.

This leaves the reader/audience to witness to the empty tomb. I should say reader/hearer. Due to the scarcity of and expense of written material, these writings were read aloud publicly. Thus the reader and the hearer are two aspects of the same event. "Let the reader understand" (13:14) and "He who has ears to hear, let him hear" (4:9, 4:23, etc) mean the same thing; the narrator is addressing his audience. The real communication is going on at the narrator level. It doesn't matter if the disciples are nominally in the scene at the story level. They are little more that stage props. They do not see, hear, or remember unless promptedwhat goes on around them. "Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not? and do ye not remember?" (Mark 8:18).

But to return to the empty tomb. It is left to the reader/hearer of the gospel to spread the word that Jeus is risen. Only they, and the young man (16:5) are unafraid to speak about it. But who is this mysterious young man? Only he has direct knowledge of the resurrection, even the reader/hearer of the gospel do not see it, they must rely on the young man's word.

The young man is none other than the narrator himself, stepped into the story. Until this point, he has intertwined himself almost completely with Jesus, blatantly in 13:14. He has finally and completely stepped from behind Jesus. Jesus has gone ahead to the allegorical Galilee, and the command of "Follow me" must be obeyed if one is to see him again. But the narrator stays behind. It is his story, and his telling. It is his word we have of the resurrection, and it is his empty tomb.

Jake Jones

jjramsey

As I mentioned before (on this thread, IIRC), it would not have required supernatural foresight to predict the trashing of the temple, merely a reasonable extrapolation based on the current tensions between the Jews and the Romans, which had broken out into violence before.

jakejonesiv

Whether Jesus existed or not, he never made these predictions. These are the words of the writer cast back into the mouth of Jesus.

In Mark 13, the numerous events predicted had already come to pass up through 13:23. This includes much more than "trashing the temple". These descriptions are accurate because they are not really prophecies. They had already come to pass in the writer's present time (not to be confused with the alleged time of the story).

But beginning with 13:24, the writer extrapolates into his future. From this point forward, the prophecies fail. The writer was simply wrong.

Jake Jones

jjramsey

There isn't really anything that specific except for the "desolating sacrilege." The closest thing to a real prediction is warning about persecution, and here, there is no indication that Jesus has an idea of an organized church per se being persecuted, only the disciples left behind after his death. Mark would at most be giving a paraphrase of what Jesus was saying, not his actual words, so it is neither surprising nor likely a coincidence that the examples of persecution that he gives look like something one would see in Acts. IMHO, it is more likely that this is merely Mark reading into a general warning on persecution--which is perhaps an echo of the tradition of persecution of prophets, or more likely just the general expectation of the messengers getting punished for delivering an unwanted message--rather that a wholesale fabrication. "Wars and rumors of wars" is stock apocalyptic, and offhand, aside from the Jewish War that led to the destruction of the temple, I'm not too sure there was another war before 70 A.D., so I think Jesus is not all that accurate. And again, it wouldn't take a genius to predict that there would be other messianic claimants.

Ben C Smith

There was another war in that period, the war between the Nabatean king Aretas and Herod Antipas during the imperatorship of Caligula. Some scholars have placed the penning of Mark 13 during the forties for this and many other connections. See especially Gerd Theissen, The Gospels in Context, and more recently James Crossley, The Date of Mark's Gospel.

Ben.

Vorkosigan

What? More faith statements from JJ?

The scene in Mark 13 is a fiction from top to bottom. It opens with Jesus on a mountain facing the temple. The Mount of Olives is where the messiah traditionally will begin his triumph and restoration of Israel (Zech 14:4). Note how in v3 Mark has set the Mountain and the Temple in opposition to each other, and how, once again, an epiphany is delivered on a mountain. Jesus was facing the Temple Treasury; now he faces the entire Temple. This opposition of Temple to mountain recalls the similar oppositions that occur in such eschatological texts as Zechariah 14, Joel 3, and Ezekiel 38-9, where Mt. Zion is opposed to the Temple and where God sits upon it to pass judgment on his enemies (Fletcher-Louis 1997). Zech 14 plays an important role in Mark. In Daniel 2 the Kingdom of Israel is envisioned as a mountain that fills the whole earth. This complex imagery is itself simply a subset of a larger myth complex of cosmic mountains that is found all over the ancient Near East.

The setting is probably also fictional in another way. The writer of Mark used as the backbone for his tale the Elijah-Elisha cycle of tales in Kings. There is a set of simple parallels here:

Jesus gives instructions to his disciples
Jehu gives instructions to his people to gather the priests of Ba'al.

no stone on another
Great stone of Temple of Ba'al thrown down

Jerusalem Temple destroyed
Temple of Ba'al destroyed

abomination standing in temple
Ba'al Temple used as latrine

I do not push this, but the writer is following the EEC throughout, so it may be that he is following here as well. Hard to tell without a linguistic connection, though.

This is fiction in another way, though. In Mark events function as typologies for each other. All of the authentic miracles from the hand of the original writer are typologies for events later in the story or in Christian history (they are not embellished fictions, but complete literary constructions). Here too the "prophecies" function typologically, laying out the passion tale

Disciples before Councils
Jesus before Sanhedrin
Disciples beaten in Synagogues
Jesus beaten after Sanhedrin Trial
Disciples before Governors
Jesus before Pilate
Disciples brought to trial and "handed over"
Jesus on trial and "handed over"
Brother betrays brother
Judas betrays Jesus
Disciples hated in Jesus' name
Reaction to Jesus' claim to be the Blessed One.

The obvious conclusion is that the Abomination of the Desolation is Jesus' Crucifixion, since it is the very next line. That insight forms the basis of an argument I am working on, which I have mentioned before, that Mark has Jesus crucified on the Temple Mount. Mark 13:1-31 is of course followed by the Parable of the Watcher, another typological construction, as Lightfoot pointed out a century ago: the times named in the Parable of the Watcher correpond to the times in the Passion Narrative -- Jesus is arrested in the evening at Gethsemane, tried at midnight by the Sanhedrin, betrayed at cockcrow by Peter, and handed over again and tried again in the morning by Pilate.

Hence, Jesus' words here in Mark 13 cannot be restricted to addressing only the characters themselves, but also address the hearer directly, as well as the smart reader who works out the parallels with the rest of the text (Mk 13:30 and Mk 9:1 work the same way; the reason that they commences with a "Truly I say to you" is that the writer is signaling the reader that this is addressed to him. 13;37 also functions this way).

There are other references to persecution in Mark. Clearly the writer is writing from somewhere in the Roman Empire outside Judea, where Christians suffer from persecution and this persecution is well known enough that it has to be addressed in a text meant for recruiting and baptism. Another telltale of Mark 13 is v23, with its "folk reassurance" found so often in ex post facto texts (with the tailing remark "...and it can be seen to this day!")

23: But take heed; I have told you all things beforehand.

Such reassurance is an indicator of later fraud.

The fascinating thing about jjramsey's position is not just that he maintains despite having no methodological or other justification -- it is merely a succession of faith statements. No, the fascinating thing is how clearly it illustrates just how small the Gospel of Mark becomes if you try to put it in a historicist cage. The historicist side did a terrible injustice to the writer of Mark. Remarks like this....

...are faith statements. The whole thing IS a wholesale fabrication -- out of the OT, and forming a neat typology of the future passion tale. Do you have a rational argument other than "IMHO" as though your opinion actually means something? Can you connect this back to Jesus somehow?

This also shows another good example of the way the historicist core is an irrefutable Popperian conventionalist twist -- no matter at what level of detail anyone can show the text is a fiction, JJ can maintain, faithlike, that there is a historical core. The reason "historical core" types never give up that argument is because it cannot be refuted. It's one of those arguments that one cannot be reasoned out of precisely because one has not been reasoned into it.

Vorkosigan

jjramsey

Thanks. Wasn't that around the time of JtB's death, according to Josephus?