bacht

Well, there's the theme of the "righteous remnant", those who survive God's judgment against covenant-breakers. Is Mark addressing the "remnant" who survived the Revolt?

ynquirer

Yes, I think so. The Little Apocalypse is clear enough.

gstafleu

I'm not adverse to the apologetic interpretation of Mark. It does fit well in the larger scheme of things, which we should consider for a moment.

A Bit of History
When religion began, say in the Paleolithic, it started as a "pantheistic" enterprise, in the sense that spirits, the force of life, was seen to be pervasive in all of nature. This is still the view of current hunter-gatherer cultures, and the evidence for this statement comes from the correspondence between aspects of current hunter-gatherer societies and archeological and paleontological finds. In such a view the concept of "faith" is not relevant, as for the members of the culture this pantheism is simply how nature works. They can see it happening all around it and, if it is a shamanic culture, evidence of this is reported regularly by the shaman. Have a look at my infamous food plants thread for some of the myths and rituals typical for this kind of mythology.

Once agriculture was developed, societies got more centrally organized, and so did the gods. Just like there was now specialized leadership and specialized priests, so the gods were no longer all pervasive spirits: they were specialized, into pantheons, as well. This was the beginning of a problem that religion had to battle for thousands of years afterward: it was now easier to see that the religious concepts were by and large not factual. Animal and plant "spirits" are easy to see, just look around you. The force of life is also easy to see, after all both the plants and animals come back after you harvest/capture them and eat them. But it is much more difficult to spot an Inanna or Athena in the wild.

As Karen Armstrong describes it in A Short History of Myth (or via: amazon.co.uk), this led in the Axial Age (roughly the first millennium BCE) to many cultures, including the Greeks and the Hebrews, cluing in that these pantheonic gods were in fact man made concepts. So the pantheonic gods were no longer sustainable, but a completely remote god was. After all such a god shines in his not-being-thereness. But he is also pretty useless, because of his remoteness. This may be where apologies for the deity first became really necessary.

Back on topic
Now enter Christ, in an attempt to bring the remote god back down to earth. For the same reason that the pantheonic gods were not sustainable this Christ had to be of a non-obvious form as well, otherwise everyone would say: So where is this guy? Mark (finally back on topic ) therefore depicts Christ, in Ben's words, as not coming in glory, but rather in humility. You can't say "Where is this guy" if the whole idea is that he wasn't noticed much in the first place!

This whole scheme of a god who is there but not too noticeably did of course never really work all that well, but that is a different story. We can, however, in this framework see the necessity of an "apologetic religion." A problem for those who later study the documents of this type of religion is of course: how do we distinguish an apology from an outright rejection?

After all, both apology and rejection will have much the same features. Both will describe the "weak points" of the religion. The difference between the two, though, is that the rejection will either leave it at that, assuming the readers will draw the obvious conclusion, or it will, a la Celsus, explicitly say what nonsense the religion is. An apology on the other hand has to add something along the lines of "but you should still believe this."

It is this latter statement that seems absent from Mark. It could of course be that the conclusion "we should still believe it" was the obvious one for Mark's audience. But lacking more explicit evidence from Mark, it seems to me that we should hold both possibilities, Rejection and Apology, open.

Gerard Stafleu

Clivedurdle

Maybe Armstrong had her title wrong - instead of a history of God it should have been a history of gods.

Is xianity an innovation in the what are the gods debate - ie man is god?

ynquirer

Not quite, provided that belief in the apology is distinctively equated with fortitude and disbelief with weakness.

vid

One addition to meaning of "barabbas" topic earlier in this old thread. In the gospel of Nazoreans(supposedly jewish rendering of Matthew), "barabbas" is named "son of their teacher". Not sure if it holds some significance to its original meaning though.