ChuckE99

I'm intrigued. Which specific passages in GMark allude to him decending from heaven to begin his mission? I too see GMark as a fiction, but hadn't heard this interpretation before. (If this is a derail, feel free to just email me links.)

Toto

I've forgotten who proposed this.

The theory is that Mark 1:2-13 and the first phrase in 14 were added later, and the action in Mark originally started with

Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God,

It is a bit speculative.

aa5874

"Jesus descended from heaven at the age of 30"? There is something wrong, here.

You mean Jesus descended from heaven in the 15th year in the reign of Tiberius as stated in the reconstructed gospel of Marcion?

Steven Carr

Josephus has a story of himself at the age of 14 where all the high priests and principal men of Jerusalem came to him for advice.

Luke seems to draw heavily upon Josephus.

Perhaps he thought it was a good story, and so used it for his Jesus.

Toto

By 30, I meant that Jesus was 30 years old.

The reconstructed gospel of Marcion

The assumption is that this is based on Luke, but Luke presumably was based on Mark.

Toto

That's a possibility, but it was also a common boast about famous men, so Luke had more than one possible source. I think we went through this before, somewhere.

lpetrich

It's not very common to learn about someone's childhood. But that absence becomes significant when we learn about someone's infancy, as we do with Jesus Christ.

Lord Raglan noted that such a childhood gap is a common part of hero stories, and thus wrote it into his Mythic-Hero profile.

There is an exception that shows up here and there: child-prodigy stories, like Jesus Christ in the Temple or Augustus Caesar hushing up some noisy frogs.

But we don't see anything that's a relatively "normal" sort of event. To see what I mean, consider that one of the first to document someone's childhood is St. Augustine, who wrote about his own in his autobiography Confessions. He moaned and groaned at great length in it about an extremely terrible sin that he had committed in his childhood: he and some other boys stole some pears from a neighbor's pear tree.

aa5874

There is no age mentioned for the Jesus that descended out of heaven. He was supposed to be a phantom, he had no human parents at all, nor was he born on earth, therefore no birthday or known age.

The Jesus in gLuke, the one that went to Capernaum in the 15th year of Tiberius was supposed to be about thirty years of age. This Jesus was supposed to be born on earth and Mary was his so-called mother.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Roger,

It seems to me to be a theologically based judgment that the gnostic gospels postdate the canonical gospels. I have never found a coherent argument or any historical evidence for this postulate.

Also, as I recall, the members of the Jesus Seminar were strongly suggesting that the Gospel of Thomas might predate the canonical gospels.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

mountainman

Hi Philosopher Jay,

There is also the argument as to the testimony of the C14 dating citations regarding the earliest evidence in respect of christian texts, and the only two dates that I know of are for non canonical texts. I dont know if there are any C14 dates for canonical literature, but if the 3 or 4 main old NT greek codices were C14 tested, they might match the current estimate of the late fourth century.

So on the face of the evidence alone, and rejecting this paleographic romance story of reading papyri and divining by handwriting the date of the text, we are left with the non canonical texts before the canon.

Best wishes,


Pete