jdl

Michael wrote a commentary on Mark's gospel some time ago. You can read it if you want to know where he's coming from. He's not as new to this "scholarship" stuff as you assume.

Joseph

Vorkosigan

Lessee.... this has nothing to do with what I said.

Hahahha.

...still not there....

Legion, those are all useful works, all misunderstanding this aspect of Mark. If you really want to understand how Mark is structured, you need to start with Brodie, The Crucial Bridge. Mark's narrative is well organized, or rather, was, until some a$$hole whacked away a great big chunk in the middle and re-arranged it, deleting some parts and adding others. But in the main the writer's original structure is still very visible. It is organized in three major parts, the introduction that parallels the gospel in miniature, then two parallel sections divided by the Temple Cleansing. The individual pericopes are tightly structured and the major miracles all relate to the resurrection.

The fact that this deep and pervasive structuring is not visible to so many people is a comment on them, not on the writer - they can't see the structure for the Greek (forest - trees), and frankly, in NT studies, erudition in Greek is frequently used as a substitute for imagination in analysis, not to mention as a form of social display. That fact is that were I to produce a document like GMark in Chinese, my second language (or, all gods forbid, in Swahili or Spanish), it would no doubt exhibit all the "negative" qualities of Mark's Greek. But it would be very finely structured and logically ordered. This means that it would seem completely illogical to Chinese readers -- just like to Thall above who does not seem to realize that not only is the writer of Mark not developing a logical argument (d'oh) but even if he were she simply lacks the cultural flexibility to spot it.

Not only that, Legion, but one reason for the emphasis on the incompetence of the writer of Mark is apologetic -- the more incompetent we make Mark, the more we can assign his tales to some oral source rather than his own creativity. This is a deliberate practice. It is a great injustice to one of the great writers of ancient history, copied extensively, but never improved on (well, maybe The Stars My Destination is an improvement over the original).

Vorkosigan

LegionOnomaMoi

Yes, I mentioned that in the section you quoted.

Quirks are one thing. What the author of Mark does is something else. With a few exceptions (notably the passion narrative) the entire gospel is almost a list of bullet points, with a bit of topological structure and internal commentary thrown in. Clearly, the author has specific points/themes/etc. in mind, but we aren't simply dealing with badly crafted connectives. Telling stories is a cross-cultural universal, and it doesn't take artistic talent to tell a story which appears to be coherent or to flow. However, what the author of Mark has done is take a fair amount of tradition and awkwardly forced it into a overarching design, editing/commenting here and there, but mostly just juxtaposing this or that element with another without any narrative "grace."

Certainly.

dog-on

Why isn't the author of Mark writing in a style found in the LXX (which is actually in evidence) not significantly more likely than the author of Mark translating unknown aramaic sources, (sources for which we have no existing evidence other than hypothetical)?

In your opinion.

thief of fire

I posted about this in another thread, so i might as well post about it here. As a sceptic I find it funny that anyone can be taken seriously to
(a) Say this work is not well organized but if I take away some parts and add others it will be.
(b) Imply some massive conspiracy theory of which no details are even hinted at, that some group , at some unknown time destroyed every original copy of the work.

Does anyone else find any reason to be sceptical about such unsupported claims?
How many people here consider themselves sceptics?

thief of fire

The writer of mark does write in a simlar style of the LXX. The same semitic peculiarities we see in the LXX we see in Mark. Both use semtic word orders which are unusual in greek. Semitic grammar tends to repeat a preposition before a noun in a series of words it governs. This happens in mark and in the LXX.

Steven Carr

So Mark translated when writing his gospel, and the author can't be translating.

What a load of garbage you write.

Diogenes the Cynic

Casey doesn't say Mark has sources for the whole book, only some of it, and he says that Mark made a lot of it up.

dog-on

So, like a wax tablet with the word Abba written on it?

Or was that one from the original aramaic text of Romans?

I get so confused by all of these sources...

aa5874

Again, you are pointing out the author of gMark is NOT regarded as credible.

Once your source is NOT credible then every single statement made about any character or event MUST, MUST, MUST be corroborated BEFORE it can be accepted.

There is NO corroboration for any event which involves Jesus and the disciples in any version of gMark.

It is EXTREMELY significant that we understand that authors of the Canon MADE STUFF UP or used sources with stuff that MUST have been made up.

We can IDENTIFY some of the events and characters that were MADE up in the Gospels, Acts of the Acts and the Epistles.

Once it is ADMITTED that authors of the Canon made stuff up or used made up stuff then NOTHING at all in the Canon can be accepted as credible regardless of its plausibilty without corroboration.

The words of the Pauline writers MUST be corroborated but there is a Massive PROBLEM.

There is NO corroboration for the Pauline writers ONLY forgeries.