Vorkosigan

1. "could have had" aramaic sources is not the same as having them. Hence, both are not right.

2. No one said Ehrman made that claim; we're talking about Thom Stark's opium-saturated claims about the writer of Mark being a Palestinian Jew.

3. There is no evidence of underlying Aramaic sources, merely evidence that the writer of Mark was probably thinking in Aramaic and writing in his second language.

jdl

For a writer to use Aramaic sources wouldn't he have to understand Aramaic? And wouldn't that imply he came from an Aramaic-speaking region? I'm afraid I don't get it.

Joseph

Diogenes the Cynic

This is what Adam said:
Adam is right.
AA did, and people sort of continued without that point really being clarified.
This is simply not accurate. There IS evidence of underlying Aramaic sources, in things like the idioms I mentioned above (and "son of man" is another one), and there are also instances where Mark gets his translations/transliterations wrong, indicating that Aramaic was not his first language (i.e. not the language he thought in), if indeed he knew it at all.

It's not dead cinch that Mark had Aramaic sources, but there is evidence that he did and perfectly reasonable arguments are made for it by experts in those languages (Maurice Casey, for instance).

aa5874

The errors in gMark do NOT only show the author was most likely NOT Jewish they also suggest the very readers of gMark was NOT expected to know of the errors themselves.

The very errors suggest gMark was written very LONG after the time period of the story and well away from the geographical setting.

If people of antiquity could have EASILY detected the errors then it would NOT make sense for the author to have written them.

Based on the errors in gMark both the author and the immediate audience were most likely NOT Jews and were NOT familiar with Jewish tradition and geography of the region round about Galillee.

Vorkosigan

1. There is no fixed translation/transliteration for Aramaic at that time. Hence Mark can't get them "wrong." Moreover, in Mark "wrongness" might well be a signal of the author trying to get your attention. Is Mark wrong or are we misunderstanding Mark?

2. The idioms are translations, not indicators of underlying Aramaic sources.

None of those arguments are reasonable. None of those scholars possesses any method to differentiate representations of Aramaic sources from simple translations from Aramaic. In those places where Aramaic is represented in Mark's gospel is almost always has very obvious alternative sources. The hunt for Aramaic sources is purely apologetic in nature.

I'd enjoy seeing this "evidence." Ehrman's is obviously shit. What else have you got?

Vorkosigan

outhouse

oral tradition

aa5874

Well, it can also be argued that the author of gMark was from a Latin speaking region since you claimed there are Latin words in gMark.

If the author used Latin sources then then would he have to understand Latin???

If the author used Greek sources then would he have to understand Greek???

And wouldn't that imply that he was from an Aramaic, Latin and Greek region and NOT just an Aramaic region.

You just don't get it!!!

The author may have been from Alexandria of Egypt.

Bernard Muller

Let me try that one: "Mark" was a Christian passable in Koine Greek but with Latin as his mother tongue. That "Mark" heard a Palestinian Jew (let say Peter) talking in Aramaic and immediately translated (word by word) by someone not expert for that kind of job. That was annoted some short time after, likely abbreviated, with some Aramaic transliteration in Greek. Some 20 years later, these got used inside Mark's gospel.
Would that explain the linguistic make up of the gospel?
I am not interested in defending Bart. This is only a hypothesis.

stephan huller

What I don't understand is how people can be so sure of things. Diogenes keeps saying we can be certain that Mark wasn't Jewish. How is this so? I think I am pretty aware of the evidence. There certainly are arguments made about who or what Mark was. I have never seen anything definitive. Perhaps he can enlighten me to the certainties about Mark.

An example to consider. The Acts of Archelaus are preserved in a horrible Latin but the text went back to a Syriac original (so Jerome and so Osrhoene). It passed from Syriac to Greek to barbarous Latin. Why couldn't the same thing be true with respect to Mark? I am not saying there is any solid evidence for an Aramaic original behind Mark but I can't get over the idea that canonical Mark is not the earliest form of the text.

spin

The Qumran quip is a crass blunder. Qumran literature is purely Jewish in nature. The messianism there is purely Jewish. The reference to JtB is probably also related to a poor understanding of Qumran ritual bathing. (JtB had nothing whatsoever to do with Qumran.)

Given the Latin substratum in Mark, the underlying sources are unlikely to be from Palestinian anything.

Not of Aramaic sources, but Aramaic abracadabra words, things like "little girl, get up", or "be opened" or the anachronistic "rabbi"... deep.

How do you "son of man" in the LXX which was used throughout the Jewish Mediterranean community?

One of Casey's classic examples is just as easily explainable with a Latin idiom and given all the Latin idioms identifiable in the text, I'd tend to go for Latin rather than Aramaic as the best explanation.

Try this in Aramaic: "Syrophoenician" (in Mk 7:26) what does it mean? In the Peshitta it's פוניקא (just "Phoenician"). How would it have become Syrophoenician?? It is a Latinism for the Romans made the distinction between Syro-phoenicians and Lybo-phoenicians (ie Carthaginians).