Ktotwf

It is well known that the resurrection per se is not featured in the earliest Gospel copies we know of.

Why? Why is the Gospel of Mark incomplete? Is it incomplete at all? What does it say about early Christian doctrine?

Toto

A theory with some traction on this board is that Mark is complete. The gospel is full of irony and attacks on other Christians, and it is meant to show why they all missed the boat. It ends with the women who learned about Jesus' resurrection going off and not telling anyone.

jakejonesiv

The "empty tomb" was Mark's literary invention. The women didn't tell anyone--which explains why no one had ever heard of it before.

Either that, or Mark's dog ate the ending.

Ktotwf

I'm not sure I fully understand.

I've seen the mentions of the Gospel being ironic, but to what end? In what sense did other Christians miss the boat?

If the 2 women didn't tell anyone the story, how did anyone know Jesus had been resurrected at all...?

Loomis

:banghead:

Toto

The idea is that Mark was written by a gnostic heretic to demonstrate that the proto-orthodox church was deluded. But the proto-orthodox adopted his gospel and tweeked it to make them look better.

If you put yourself in the story, it shows why no one knew anything.

Of course, Jesus was not resurrected, so no one could know it - until they read the gospel according to Mark and found out.

Ktotwf

But isn't the Gospel account supposed to be in some way the origin of the Jesus-as-Earthly-Being story?

I was under the impression that the MJ position was that the Gospels created the notion of a historical Jesus, not the other way around.

How could a Proto-Orthodoxy exist to jab at if the Gospel story wasn't in common circulation?

show_no_mercy

There are two lines of thought here. There's the "gospel" as in simply the good news (the word is actually evangelia, which is "good news", which was transliterated on its way to our modern English as "god spell" from which we get "gospel") of just Jesus' resurrection, and the "gospel" as in the entire narrative.

The good news of Jesus' resurrection was in place before the gospel narrative. I believe that Mark was either writing entertainment or a proto-gnostic made up story to explain the mystery/good news of the Christ. I don't think that Mark's gospel was trying to be history, like the other two Evangelists (Matt and Luke) did. Mark was primarily writing theology/allegory/a play or something other than history. The other gospel authors didn't like Mark's veiled gnosticism so they wrote "history" based on Mark's narrative and included resurrection sightings.

Prior to the gospel narrative, there isn't really one way or another to determine how Jesus existed on Earth. The two competing christologies at the time of the writing of Mark was that of a spirit being who simply looked human to slip past the demiurge (which is explained by Mark's irony - no one understands that Jesus is the Christ other than demons and jews/gentiles without names,), or the traditional, "current" Christian Jesus. This explains the current gospel of John's (the last canonical gospel written) most obvious motive - to show that Jesus really was a physical being and not just a spirit being that looked human.

Petergdi

The gospel is neither of these things. The resurrection of Christ is not the gospel. The account of the life of Christ is not the Gospel. The gospel both what Jesus taught and what he made possible for the rest of us.


Peter.

Deus Ex

Paul did not give a flip about Jesus' teachings, and he definitely harped on the resurrection.