TedM

One can always point to conflicts between accounts as a reason to discount any claim made within them. It can be discounted as being a lie, a later interpolation, a misunderstanding, or an honest error. I guess my argument in the end primarily comes down to silence of anyone explicity saying these are stories or were believed to be stories at some point before they were believed to be references to an actual man. And further, my own semi-conviction about it is based on a 'sense' from reading of the gospels and Acts of some amount of historical truth perhaps more than my ability to display it.


I think it is unrealistic to think that a fictional creation of all of the specific miracle accounts would have been considered the "Truth" to those who made them up. Rather, I think they came from real traditions-- and as such some of them probably would have been derived from real events, even if no such miracles actually happened. But, I may be naive. To me, either the author(s) really didn't believe it was the Truth, or they did believe it and it came from actual events.


If we have references by Ignatious to a historical Jesus around 100AD and Mark wasn't written until 90AD, where is the gap? Where is the suggestion in any of the documents within 50 years of the gospels that people doubted that Jesus had really even walked the earth? And, if Mark wrote around 60-70AD, where is the evidence that any of the Paul converts and others had a problem with his blatant contrasting representation of Christ from any they had been taught, as would have been expected because of the time period Mark put Jesus in? To me any way you slice it there would have been tremendous dissention in the Christian community over this very basic issue, yet we don't see it. The lack of this kind of evidence to me is a decent reason to make that assumption.

ted

TedM

My agenda is to try to discover for myself interesting likely historical truths based on what seems reasonable given what we know. It's that simple. What's your agenda?

ted

TedM

Sure, but IMO Mark presents Jesus as the Messiah. The Messiah probably would not be expected to fail at doing mighty works--thus the request in the gospels for 'signs', but yet he does fail in Mark. That is something I wouldn't expect of a Messiah, though I might expect it of Frodo or Huck Finn.


myYou don't find it puzzling for the a man Mark represents to be a very public Messiah to not be able to perform miracles, to defend not being in the line of David, and to have so many miracles witness only by one or two people? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense for the greatest literary genius of all time to not have put those elements in his story?

I haven't studied the issue, but would think that the content reveals a lot about who the audience was.

Perhaps. Do you think the document Papias refers to is contained within Mark? Why or why not?

ted

Johnny Skeptic

In your opinion, is the bodily resurrection of Jesus a historical truth? Do you believe that it matters what world views people have? If so, which ones to you think are the best world views?

Regarding historical truths, is your interest mainly limited to historical truths regarding claims made in religious books, and specifically in the Bible? Do you care very much whether or not Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River or whehter or not Christopher Colubus discovered America?

My agenda is to help destroy fundamentalist Christianity because fundamentalist Christians frequently attempt to legistlate religion, for example their attempts to prohibit physician assisted suicide and same sex marriage. I don't care what people believe, but I care a lot what they do. I believe in live and let live, but the majority of fundamentalist Christians do not even though they claim that they do.

Ben C Smith

Vorkosigan:

All right, I accept this distinction. However, the chapter that I had foremost in mind was Luke 21, not Mark 13. And Luke 21 both cites and appears to parallel the OT (verses 20-24 coming from the early going of 2 Kings 25):

1. Jerusalem surrounded by armies (Luke 21.20; 2 Kings 25.1).
2. The flight from Jerusalem (Luke 21.21; 2 Kings 25.4, though the Marcan wording is based on 1 Maccabees 2.28, and Luke knew both Mark and 1 Maccabees).
3. The hardships of siege (Luke 21.22-23; 2 Kings 25.3, though the Lucan wording comes straight from Mark).
4. Exile (Luke 21.24; 2 Kings 25.11).

This OT basis even explains the apparent Lucan anomaly that Jesus tells his disciples to flee Jerusalem only after they see the besieging forces around the city. The question often posed is how anybody could have escaped Jerusalem once Titus had surrounded the city with his legions. The answer is in 2 Kings 25.4, in which the men of war manage to skirt the Babylonian lines by night, right in the middle of the siege.

Yet none of this paralleling means that Titus did not really surround Jerusalem with armies, that nobody really tried to escape the city, that the siege was not really a very difficult time, or that the Jews were not really scattered to the four winds after the fall of the city. The first, third, and fourth are detailed in Josephus, and the second is narrated in Eusebius, History of the Church 3.5 (take it for what it is worth).

Another observation. Paralleling is not really so difficult a feat that it must be done on the fly in free composition, is it? Luke managed to incorporate materials from Mark into his parallelism, as well as other OT passages (the days of vengeance in Luke 21.22 derive from a frequent motif of Isaiah; see 34.8, for example), and still keep (at least!) 3 of my four points firmly rooted in the historical facts of the fall of Jerusalem.

Paralleling need not go so far as overwriting. I stated in another post that I do regard historicity as harder to recover, especially on the level of details, when parallels have been exploited.

Look at Luke 21.20-24 and consider what we could learn about the fall of Jerusalem in 70 if this passage were our only extant source for the event, preserved on some scrap of papyrus from the desert. We would learn (presuming that we read between the lines and recognized that this is a retrojected prediction)…:

1. …that a siege of Jerusalem took place.
2. …that the siege itself was very hard on the Jerusalemites.
3. …that the besiegers won.
4. …that the surviving Jerusalemites were scattered afterward.

We might, of course, also surmise that some fled the city during the siege, and this may or may not be accurate. We might, in other words, get some bad information along with good. But such a contingency is not unique to the NT by any means.

I have become suspicious of all criteria for or against historicity. You yourself make a good argument, for example, against the positive criterion of embarrassment, and I have come to agree that it is an index of relative antiquity, not of absolute originality. But then you rely on other criteria, such as the negative criterion of OT parallelism and citation, which are just as problematic.

Agreed. (And that, I think, is even how modern fiction often works.) But such an observation absolutely depends on our prior judgment as to authorial intent and genre. Making the case that Mark is intentional fiction comes before individual decisions on individual pericopes, not after.

I look forward to that. Your stuff is fun and informative. (I like Weeden, too, though often disagreeing; his XTalk decimation of Kenneth Bailey on informal controlled oral tradition was spine-tingling.)

Why one would have to go so far afield to find raw elements for the triumphal entry when Zechariah and the Maccabees are so handy I do not understand.

But the triumphal entry points up a specific problem with your criterion for ahistoricity. Somebody has certainly built OT parallels into the entry into Jerusalem on a donkey. But how can one tell whether this somebody is the author or the participants?

Take the following snippet from Josephus, for example (Antiquities 20.5.1 §97-99, English translation slightly modified from Whitson):

Φαδου δε της Ιουδαιας επιτÏ?οπευοντος γοης τις ανηÏ? Θευδας ονοματι πειθει τον πλειστον οχλον αναλαβοντα τας κτησεις επεσθαι Ï€Ï?ος τον ΙοÏ?δανην ποταμον αυτω Ï€Ï?οφητης γαÏ? ελεγεν ειναι, και Ï€Ï?οσταγματι τον ποταμον σχισας διοδον εχειν εφη παÏ?εξειν αυτοις Ï?αδιαν. και ταυτα λεγων πολλους ηπατησεν. ου μην ειασεν αυτους της αφÏ?οσυνης ονασθαι Φαδος, αλλ εξεπεμψεν ιλην ιππεων επ αυτους, ητις απÏ?οσδοκητος επιπεσουσα πολλους μεν ανειλεν, πολλους δε ζωντας ελαβεν, αυτον δε τον Θευδαν ζωγÏ?ησαντες αποτεμνουσι την κεφαλην και κομιζουσιν εις ΙεÏ?οσολυμα. τα μεν ουν συμβαντα τοις Ιουδαιοις κατα τους Κουσπιου Φαδου της επιτÏ?οπης χÏ?ονους ταυτ εγενετο.

Now it came to pass while Fadus was procurator of Judea that a certain enchanter, whose name was Theudas, persuaded a great part of the people to take their effects with them and follow him to the river Jordan, for he told them that he was a prophet, and that he would by his own command divide the river, and afford them an easy passage over it; and many were deluded by his words. However, Fadus did not permit them to make any advantage of his wild attempt, but sent a troop of horsemen out against them, who, falling upon them unexpectedly, slew many of them and took many of them alive. They also took Theudas alive, and cut off his head and carried it to Jerusalem. This was what befell the Jews in the time of the leadership of Cuspius Fadus.

By your standards, this story is a rip-off of the crossing of the Jordan in Joshua 3. That Theudas called himself a prophet, but was actually a fraud, is constructed on Deuteronomy 18.15-22. Fadus taking the head of Theudas to Jerusalem is obviously concocted from David taking the head of Goliath to Jerusalem in 1 Samuel 17.54 (which act, since Jerusalem supposedly still belongs to the Jebusites at this stage, opens a whole can of worms in the OT history, but that is not pertinent here). Slaying many and taking many alive is Josephan redaction, as this motif appears elsewhere in Josephus.

In other words, this pericope by your method is clearly a Josephan fiction built up from OT references on the sentence level and the OT story of crossing the Jordan on the narrative level. The story transvalues the successful crossing of the Jordan by the children of Israel because Josephus has an abiding interest in blaming the Jewish War on a generation of frauds like Theudas instead of on (inter alia) absolute Jewish incompatibility with foreign rule.

The same would have to hold true of the story of the Egyptian in Antiquities 20.8.6 §167-172 and the miscellaneous frauds of Antiquities 20.8.10 §188, and of other stories of insurrectionists in Josephus. In each of these the participants are acting according to an OT script, usually one based on either the exodus from Egypt or the conquest of Canaan. We know that Josephus knows his OT, so surely he has simply spun all of these incidents whole-cloth from the scriptures, right?

Or is it possible that the participants themselves (Theudas, the Egyptian, and the rest) knew the OT stories too? Could it not be that they were symbolically reenacting the events of yore in hopes of expelling the Romans by miraculous or providential means, just like the children of Israel had expelled the Canaanites by miraculous and providential means?

Capable scholars have argued that Jesus, his disciples (especially?), and the crowds are doing exactly that in the case of the triumphal entry. Why is it impossible, or even improbable, that the participants in that story are the ones drawing on the OT for inspiration? That Jesus chose to ride a donkey precisely in order to tap into Zechariah 9.9?

Now, perhaps such a view is entirely mistaken. Perhaps Mark did freehand the whole thing from the OT, some Hellenistic παÏ?ουσια motifs and novelistic elements, and his own vivid imagination. When I read through your historical commentary on this pericope, however, I do not find even the barest hint of a discussion arguing for free composition over and against a decision made by Jesus and his followers, no hint of an argument explaining why it was Mark alone who decided to play things out along scriptural lines. It is as if you found the parallels and cites, and that was enough. The parallels and cites themselves ruled out historicity.

I used to be virtually a mythicist (many moons ago). My present form of Christianity was made possible only by coming to see some semblance of historicity where before I had seen none.

But my religious beliefs are not the issue. What counts is the argument.

It is not my purpose in this thread to offer any reason to think that there is history in Mark. It is my purpose to critique an approach that rules out historicity prematurely. I am not (at this stage) arguing for a positive. I am arguing for a non liquet. And, if I ever do argue for a positive, it is unlikely to be based on a list of criteria.

Very good question, but outside the present inquiry, and certainly not decidable (is that a word?) by finding parallels and citations.

Precisely because it was something major. So major that the Jewish scriptures just had to have foretold it.

The first way is of less interest to me at this point than the others, not least because it would be no great trick to fill in the bare framework either with historical data, received tradition, or sheer invention, or some combination of all three. In fact, truth be known, I do not tend to put much stock in the overall structure of Mark myself (Galilee to Judea to Jerusalem), but for external reasons as much as anything.

The other two ways I have fleshed out in Luke 21.20-24 for your entertainment.

On its face any historian writing about the ill-fated German invasion of Russia in winter under Hitler has a source for the tale in the ill-fated French invasion of Russia in winter under Napolean.

Invitation declined… at least for now. Rick Sumner accurately summarized my purpose here. The criterion from OT parallelism is what is on the block. Not historicity overall.

If your point is that if Mark turns out not to contain history at all then at least we know of some good sources for the story, that is one thing. If your point, on the other hand, is that Mark contains no history because we know of some good parallels for the story, that is what I am arguing against.

Many thanks for the stimulating exchange. I am a very frequent visitor to your weblog.

Ben.

TedM

I much more curious in what the history of Christianity, and don't think my world view is an issue here.

Best to you,

ted

Amaleq13

I see Believers make this same mistaken assumption all the time and it is crucial to understanding the mythicist argument that you abandon it because it simply makes no sense. They were NEVER considered to be "just stories" by anyone with faith in the risen Christ. They were ALWAYS considered to be messages of The Truth by the faithful. The only people who considered them to be "just stories" were non-believers like Celsus.

Given how thoroughly inundated our culture is with the notion that the Gospels and Acts offer history, that is not surprising.

I think you are imposing 21st century sensibilities on 1st century minds.

I don't know that we can trust what is attributed to Ignatius as having actually been written by him but I also don't think the author of Mark created his story in a vacuum. If there had been a historical figure, however, I would certainly expect some of the fragments of references to details (eg naming the mother) attributed to Ignatius to be found in Paul.

The gap is between c.70CE and c.150CE.

What blatant contrast do you find between the expressed theologies of Mark and Paul?

I Don shares this view but I think it is based on a flawed conception of the faith of the earliest Christians. I don't think these stories would have mattered one bit to them because they would still lead people to have faith in the risen Christ and THAT was all that was important. I think this holds true whether the original Christ was entirely spiritual as Doherty suggests or if there was virtually nothing known about the historicl figure. That Paul felt free to completely ignore his life clearly indicates it was irrelevant to his faith. As long as a given story lead a person to have faith in the salvific power of the death/resurrection of Christ, the historical reliability of the details would have been considered irrelevant even if they had such a notion.

Johnny Skeptic

What is your definition of history? Fundamentalist Christians consider the bodily resurrection of Jesus to be a historical event. They make no distinction between the proper means of authenticating ordinary historical claims and authenticating claims of the supernatural. Do you?

Do you only want to know what people believed back then, or do you also want to know what actually happened back then?

Are you only interested in Christian history? How about the history of other religions? Do you visit Muslim web sites? There are over one billion Muslims, and Islam is growing faster than Christianity is.

Do you have children, or nephews and neices? If so, do you ever discuss their world views with them?

TedM

I don't want this thread to focus on me so let's let it suffice for me to say I am pretty skeptical of any claims for the supernatural, ok?

Johnny Skeptic

Excellent. Now I finally know where you stand. You are skeptical of claims of miracles. That is a good thing. If you are a deist type of skeptic, that is fine with me. It seems to me that you are simply a religious history buff and nothing more, and that for some reason you have chosen to specialize in the history of Christianity. If such is the case, then I will no longer reply to any of your posts. Everyone but you in this forum considers the choice of a world view to be very important and are trying to convince people to either accept or reject Christianity.