No Robots

Don't forget that Judas was a common name. Heck, Jesus even had a brother of that name!

Of course, one commonly finds anti-Jewish intentions in representations of Judas: he alone is given Jewish features, while the other disciples are shown as good old white boys.

jjramsey

What tells me of the author's goals? He tells a sequence of events about a guy named Jesus. These stories are placed in a first-century context that includes real people and places. While the story certainly has incredible elements, it lacks the melodrama of a Greek historical romance. (Jesus is no Indiana Jones, and he doesn't get the girl. ) It even ends for the most part on a down note, namely the crucifixion, with an anticlimactic deus ex machina at the end, namely the resurrection. Judging from this, his goal is apparently to tell a biography of this Jesus.

Why would allegory not fit the goals of the time? Because his goal is to write a biography. Strictly speaking, one could try to write something that is simultaneously allegorical and biographical, especially if one is being loose with the truth, but to do two-tiered writing like that is more difficult.

If you read more carefully, then you'd notice that what I was saying is that if there were no literary clues in the text to indicate allegorical intent, then short of a word from the author, there is no reason to see allegorical intent as likely.

Amaleq13

Biography? What nonsense! Until you come to grips with the actual nature of the story, your confusion is likely to continue. The "guy named Jesus" appears in the story as a fully-grown adult and is immediately adopted to be something far greater than just "a guy named Jesus". He procedes to fulfill a divine destiny while preaching wisdom to those who would listen. The author is clearly telling a story about the origins of his religious faith which is founded on a central belief in Jesus as the risen Christ. The stories are clearly not "about a guy named Jesus" but about why the author (and, presumably, his "community") has faith in Jesus as the risen Christ. The inclusion of allegory in such an effort is clearly a reasonable possibility and only more so for any scene that cannot have happened as described (eg the drowned pigs, Temple disruption, Barabbas offering).

I understand what you are arguing and recognize it as flawed.

Those who offer an allegorical meaning for a particular story do see "literary clues" and use them in describing the allegory.

jjramsey

Mark 1:9-11: Story about Jesus getting baptized
Mark 1:16-20: Story about Jesus recruiting four fishermen as his disciples
Mark 1:21-28: Story about Jesus casting out a demon
Mark 1:29-31: Story about Jesus healing Simon's mother-in-law.

For a book that doesn't have stories about Jesus, it sure has a lot of stories about Jesus. Also, did it occur to you that the point of the book is that its author has faith in this Jesus Christ because of these stories about what he said and did? With all this talk about the "risen Christ," you seem to be confusing Mark for a liberal Protestant like Rudolf Bultmann.

Fair point, but it depends on the scene. The Barrabbas offering does look "staged," so to speak. The stark difference between the peaceful Jesus and the violent Barabbas is a literary cue, and the story clearly has a polemical point. I will grant you that. On the other hand, the geographical problem in the drowned pigs story is not what I'd call a literary cue. A story does not become allegorical because it has a mistake. There is also the matter of whether these stories started out as polemical allegories, only to become taken literally. For a far-flung example, the Adam and Eve account certainly has literary cues that indicate allegory, but the way that it is integrated into the book of Genesis indicates that its redactor treated it literally, since the children of Adam and Eve become the ancestors of personages that were taken to be human beings. There is also the matter of Mark being a propagandist and making up a polemical "allegory" himself that he means to be taken literally. Actually, one catch in this discussion is that like some allegory, propaganda is stylized and makes use of exaggerations and stereotypes. The Barnabbas story, for example, could be said to be allegory, but the exaggerations could also be said to be polemical propaganda that says, "See, the Jews would prefer a seditious brigand to the real, peaceful Messiah. Those Jews are much less safe to Rome than we Christians."

Further, there is a big difference between claiming that Mark took self-contained allegorical pericopes and added them to his account much in the same way that he added other pericopes, and claiming that Mark wrote his story in a two-tiered fashion. It does not follow from the staging of the Barabbas offering that the author of Mark expects Mark 9:1 to not be taken as a prediction that the end of the world would come in the lifetime of some of Jesus' hearers, rather than in the lifetime of Mark's readers.

Amaleq13

As I've already pointed out, this scene is about Jesus' transformation/adoption into the Son of God while the other scenes depict Jesus' subsequent magical abilities. To suggest this is a biographical story about "about a guy named Jesus" is simplistic to the point of absurdity.

Your straw men are becoming tiresome.

I would think that my understanding of that point was implicit in my characterization of the story. Apparently, it does not occur to you that characterizing the story as a "biography" completely ignores the clearly fundamental fact that the author is describing his own religious faith.

You think the author worshipped the living man?

Chunk

If Matthew, Mark and Luke were supposed to be writing the sayings down of a man who lived more than one generation ago, why would they make him claim that this would happen within one genration?

Surely they are writing down something which has already failed to come true.

Would it not have been better for them to simply leave it out, or change it a bit?

jakejonesiv

The generation was the current one of the reader.

Jake Jones

jjramsey

I think this thread must be getting long in the tooth, since it is starting to repeat itself:

http://iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?p...10#post3216710

To get the idea that Mark 9:1 is aimed at the original audience's generation, you have to assume that the audience had an interpretive key--now lost--that would indicate that the text does not mean what it appears to say.

Doug Shaver

I didn't mean to suggest that anybody had said it. As you note, he obviously was not. My point is that the rapidity with which he was deified after his lifetime is a problem for historicists.

Paul's Christ looks godlike to me.

We don't know what the disciples did. We only know what Paul did. We have no contemporary documentation for what the disciples, assuming they existed, came to believe about Jesus after his death, assuming it occurred.
Paul does not tell his readers what the leaders of the Jerusalem church believed about Jesus. He hints that they were in general agreement with him but does not explicitly say so. He does claim that the risen Christ had appeared to some of them. There is no other clue that they had ever had any other contact with the Christ.

That is a possibility. Another is that gentile influence in the form of Hellenistic philosophy enabled Jews like Paul to accept the existence of godliike beings provided there was no suggestion that they had ever been human. Several years later, non-Jewish Christians could then have conflated Paul's Christ with a fictional charismatic rabbi who had suffered a martyr's death.

jakejonesiv

No, Judas was not a historical character. It has been noted that in the earlier version of the tale, the betrayer was unnamed, merely "he who was betraying him."

Judah and his brothers (Deut 37:23) sold Joseph (the beloved son Gen 37:3) for 20 pieces of silver (Duet 37:28).

The name Judas Iscariot is a riff on Judah and his brother Issachar, who are consecutive items in the list of Deut 27:12. This is clinched a few verses latter. "Cursed is the man who accepts a bribe to kill an innocent person." (Deuteronomy 27:12,25).

Jake Jones IV