Ben C Smith

Okay, I would place the date for Mark at about 70.

Ben.

Roger Pearse

This doesn't work for most ancient texts. Hermias isn't referred to by anyone in antiquity at all.

We certainly have the statements of the 2nd century fathers.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

judge

And yet the very first quote from the HB in Mark agrees with the Hebrew text and disagrees with the septuagint.

rlogan

And there you have it. Aside from the most extreme apologia, dating ranges from about there to sometime in the second century.

And you pick the earliest possible, which is still a generation removed from the alleged events.

So even with you picking dating that is most generous to what appears to be your position in this thread - Mark itslef is not a "contemporaneous" witness to astonishing miracles by a god-man.

Now you have also not disagreed with my observation that elsewhere you have admitted to Mark being an "exaggeration" or "legandizing" of Jesus with the miracles and all. (I refrain from the term "myth" to avoid a red herring over rhetoric).


So it makes me wonder what the hell you are doing disagreeing with me when your own position, by deduction, is that after roughly a generation the gospel of Mark depicts legendary, not factual, tales of Jesus.

mountainman

After the fall of the temple ...
ROME, circa 311-317 CE

Ben C Smith

No, the earliest that I have seen argued is the forties. James Crossley, for example, recently argued for this date. Most of the other scholars who have argued for such an early date I imagine you would tag as Christian apologists. But Crossley is, I think, unavailable as a candidate for that tag.

Because, as I mentioned before, I think that the miracle stories themselves arose earlier than Mark was written.

Since I gave a hypothetical date of 45 for the miraculous feeding story to have arisen (and I am extending the same courtesy to the raising of the daughter of Jairus), it is my position, at least for the purposes of this discussion, that legendary tales of Jesus arose about 15-18 years after the alleged events took place, not nearly a full generation.

Now, please show me why my hypothesis is not possible. Why can the legends of the miraculous feeding and the raising of the daughter of Jairus not have arisen in the forties?

Thanks in advance.

Ben.

Koyaanisqatsi

Of people that appeared to the extremely ignorant, ancient laypeople of the time to be dead, but were apparently not? Absolutely.

In the first instance, especially, since, if memory serves, the "oil" typically used to annoint the dead was a concentrated derivative of poppies and other indigenous herbs that could more readily account for someone thought by laypeople to be dead "reviving."

But see, that's the problem when you mix extreme medical ignorance with superstition; you end up getting "cures" like exorcism of demons and the like, when all the person may have needed was a dose of heroin or concentrated opium on their tongue, however inadvertantly.

Or, perhaps, just enough infant coma/unconsciousness, as a result of trauma or inadvertant poisoning that the infant body was fighting in a dormant state due to the severity of whatever it was that happened, to wake up at a coincidental time for it to be declared a "miracle" by those predisposed to believing in such things.

Curious, however, that our current medical knowledge of such likelihoods does not get retroactively applied to claims from people centuries away from the discovery of such basic things as "germs."

You know, there actually was a practical reason for placing bells in caskets.

:huh:

rlogan

Forget it Ben. I am not engaging with disengenuous garbage.

You don't put out "hypotheticals" as evidenciary positions.

Your own position is that Mark was written a generation removed from the alleged events, and that these are legends to begin with.

So I'm not going to play your coy little game about what if some "hypothetical" was true.

Demonstrate how you arrive at a date for a specific legend about Jesus arising, as you say here, 15-18 years after the event.

Show us how you arrived at that figure.

Koyaanisqatsi

It takes but a first telling of a story (particularly to a captive, ignorant, superstitious audience preconditioned to accept the authority of their elders as sacrosanct) for it to be a myth (or exaggerated, or biased, etc.), especially about an individual's exploits who is now "15-18" years dead.

So, I'm not quite sure what your point is for the "legendary tales of Jesus" to have first circulated 15-18 years after they allegedly occurred.

If you're suggesting that this comparatively shorter time span made any significant difference in the supernatural claims of the myth, I'd like to see some support for that, beyond the ridiculous and fatally flawed apologetic that such a legend could be "checked out" (or otherwise investigated) due to the alleged still living eyewitnesses, so no one would therefore make up such a myth.

Well, not to sidetrack from the more academic discussion you're having with rlogan, but from a "creating of a myth" standpoint, they could easily have arisen (and probably did orally) in the forties and just weren't written down until decades later. That, however, wouldn't change anything about the supernatural claims of those legends, so, again, I don't really see your point.

Pardon for the intrusion.

Gamera

As someone mentioned earlier, the complete lack of any references to a written gospel by Paul suggests Mark is written at the very earliest around 70. Paul's epistles refer to the gospel being preached in many contexts, but the reference always appears to relates to an oral rendition, not a written one. Indeed, he references false gospels being preached, which presumably would have become difficult after Mark's gospel was written down and distributed widely.

Since we have some sense of the historicity of Paul, this leads me to conclude that Mark is a later as opposed to an earlier phenomenon, and like Crossant and Miller, I suspect Mark owes a lot to Paul rather than vice versa.