Julian

I don't necessarily have a problem with this since it fits perfectly with my pet theory of GMark, which would need someone who knew Peter (or at least of Peter) and was from the Pauline churches a generation of two after Paul himself.

I would never use Acts as any kind of evidence, though, since the relationship between Paul and Peter is so contradictory in that book to what we know from the Pauline epistles as to be a clear piece of fiction, IMHO. I suspect that Luke simply used a common name or picked Mark from the epistles because some readers would be familiar with the name.

Julian

Ben C Smith

And, as we all know, that is the most basic evidentiary test, whether or not it fits with our pet theories.

(Just kidding!)

Ben.

Julian

I am rather fond of theories that fit my theories... Call me crazy. Luckily for the rest of you guys, my theories change all the time so chances are that I'll agree with you on something at some point in time. I know that must be a great relief to you all. Now, carry on.

Julian

jakejonesiv

The testimony attributed to Papias is useless heresay. See link here.

Jake Jones IV

Doug Shaver

There had to be four. Irenaeus said so.

kbrown45

Greetings and Best Regards to all

I read this on Doherty's site in the reader feedback section.

Abe writes:

In one of the Gospels Jesus is quoted as telling some
of his followers that they would still be alive at the time
of his glorious return on the clouds. If this Gospel was
written in the second century, wouldn’t that have appeared
to all who read it as a false prophecy, since nobody from
c.33 CE would have been alive at that time? Could this
indicate that the Synoptics had to be written within 40 to
50 years after the supposed time of the crucifixion?

Response to Abe:

“The present generation will live to see it all. . .”

My view of the Gospel of Mark is that it was written as a piece of symbolism and midrash. The pre-passion ministry of Jesus represented the beliefs and activities of the preaching community of which Mark was a part, while the passion story, constructed in midrashic fashion out of passages from scripture, gave a new significance to the traditional tale of the Suffering Righteous One. Mark and his initial audience would have known that the Gospel was symbolic and that its central character Jesus of Nazareth served partly as an allegory of the life of the community itself. Consequently, Jesus’ ‘prediction’ represented the predictions that were being made at the time the Gospel was written, and thus the problem of fulfilment would only have arisen a generation or two after the writing of Mark.

One might ask how those who started to view the Gospel story as historical (sometime in the first half of the second century) felt about the inordinate lapse of time following Jesus’ supposed prediction. No doubt they found ways to rationalize it, just as believers over the centuries since then have been forced to do so. Papias, by the way, a bishop of Hierapolis some time in the 130s or 140s, is reported to have claimed that those raised from the dead by Jesus survived into the reign of the emperor Hadrian (117-138), so perhaps the Gospel of Mark could safely have been written even well into the second century!

However, I do not date Mark in the second century, but prefer a date around 85-90. (My new book, The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin With a Mythical Christ? discusses these matters at length, including the question of the dating of Mark.)

http://pages.ca.inter.net/~oblio/rfset10.htm#Abe

Someone calling themselves Abe got a good answer to the original post question of this thread. The author(s), editor(s), redactor(s) of Mark simply and most likely created Mark for the reasons Doherty lays out. Occam's razor leaves Earl's parsimonious hypothesis unscathed. The people in the community of faith where the gospel of Mark orginated simply screwed up by inclusion of an end time apocalyotic prophecy set wtihin a finite measurable time limit. The mythic case stands tall and strong as the most likely explanation for the rise of early xanity.

On another note. has anyone on this thread bothered to define what they actually mean by the phrase "historical Jesus". I would like to suggest the standard xanitian definition of historical Jesus as the character portrayed in the synoptic gospels. Is this OK?

Best Wishes

Doug Shaver

Not that I've noticed, but one can usually infer, from the arguments for a historical Jesus, something about what the arguer has in mind.

It would be fine for some people. There are those, though, who think that although there was a historical Jesus, the gospels contain almost no factual information about him.

Others can speak for themselves, and they probably will, but I'm going to venture that in the minds of most non-Christians (as well as many liberal Christians), the historical Jesus (1) was a charismatic preacher who said some of things that the gospel authors attributed to him, (2) was executed by Pontius Pilate for reasons about which we can only speculate, and (3) sometime after his death was believed by certain of his followers to have returned to life.

jjramsey

The problem with this is that it is an ad hoc hypothesis with no support. We know how the Gospel of Mark was received by the broader Christian community, and it was not as an allegory. Interestingly enough, Doherty's reference to Papias makes clear that Papias read Jesus' predictions of the end of the world as being made to those in Jesus' audience, not Mark's. Also, Paul advice in 1 Corinthians 7:29-31,

doesn't make much sense if the end is expected to come during the later generations somewhere from the tail end of the first century and into the second, rather than in the lifetime of Paul's generation. Paul indicates elsewhere that expected to see the apocalypse in his lifetime (1 Thessalonians 4:15; 1 Corinthians 15:51), or at least in the lifetime of his converts (1 Thessalonians 5:23).

Toto

How do we know this? Our primary evidence of gMark is its use by the authors of Matthew and Luke, and both of those authors felt free to alter or correct parts of Mark. So you have any other evidence of how Mark was viewed by the early Christian communities?

jjramsey

I pointed it out above. Look at Papias' use above, for example. Also, notice that the allegorical interpretation of Mark of which Doherty speaks would have the apocalypse be imminent a few generations after Paul, which doesn't sync with Paul's indications that the end would happen in his own generation. Also, while Matthew and Luke altered and corrected parts of Mark, they nonetheless incorporated his material in works that they presented as history, not allegory.