Amaleq13

So the portrayal of Peter not understanding Jesus' teachings about his upcoming death/resurrection are only more efforts to undermine Jewish Christian authority? Unlike the Law issues, these depictions do not reflect an existing difference in theology?

We've got confirmation of Law disputes with Jewish Christians in Paul but nothing that obviously confirms a dispute about resurrection beliefs. Is that the basis for not reaching a similar conclusion?

Edited later to add:

Paul's appeal to the Corinthians (1Cor 15) suggests that there were people who believed in Christ but denied resurrection. Acts 23:8 identifies the Sadducees as denying resurrection but I don't see how a Sadducee could believe in Christ.

Kosh

Hey Vinnie,

is there any documentary evidence for what the Jeruselem school believed? What writings did they produce?

Vinnie

None that is direct as far as I am aware.

Vinnie

Vinnie

I am uncertain. There is a good chance they may be different. Unlike the food laws we don't have evidence of major disputes over this in the first stratum. Paul's creed that he received and passed on in Cor 15 which he said was handed on to him may have been shared by the Jerusalem school.

In fact, two of them are directly named as benefactors of Rez experiences as are the Twelve and others, members of the Jeruslame school.

Quote:

We've got confirmation of Law disputes with Jewish Christians in Paul but nothing that obviously confirms a dispute about resurrection beliefs. Is that the basis for not reaching a similar conclusion?

Yes, well partially. In counter we may note that the disciples may have claimed authority because they claimed to have seen the risen Jesus. It is possible Mark was playing that.

But on the other hand it is also possible Mark actually thought Jesus' post-resurrectional promise to the Twelve that they would see him in Galilee was fufilled. He may even have assumed his audience would know this.

In reality it can go either way. But since beliefs about certain men seeing Jesus were created during their lives, I am going ot have to lean towards them sharing this belief.

Quote:

Paul's appeal to the Corinthians (1Cor 15) suggests that there were people who believed in Christ but denied resurrection. Acts 23:8 identifies the Sadducees as denying resurrection but I don't see how a Sadducee could believe in Christ.

You might have to distinguish between people's rejection of the resurrection Jesus and the rsurrection of a Pharisaic (e.g. Paul's) belief in "bodily resurrection of everyone". Jesus was the first of the general resurrection according to Paul.

Paul actually uses their arguments to show that if followed through they would mean Jesus has not been raised. He actually appears to try and orce fit them into accepting his view by using the established//accepted belief in Rex of Jesus.

Aside from this the Corinthians were a breeding grounds of controversy as 1 Cor shows. Even if they did dispute certain things it in know way counts as evidence towards the views of the Jerusalem school. Remember, Paul is writing to Corinthians. Provenance is important. But at any rate, he uses Jesus' apparent rez as an driving force to get the Corinthians to accept belief in what I believe is termed the general resurrection. Jesus was the first fruits for Paul, who believed, as a Pharisee in the middle of the first century, bodily resurrection.

This of course is another "slight" evidence that Paul accepted an human Jesus, by the way. Though I suppose it could be argued his Pharisaic beliefs were compromised by.....but I'm not interested in that

I take it for granted that most early Jesus followers believed in a Jesus who rose from the dead. My reconstruction: they did not know what happened to the body but some of them had visions of a returning Lord just like that which ocnverted Paul. Unfortunately there are differences in "who saw Jesus" and the traditions as they occur have a lot to do with authority and little to do with history.

Early Christians could not agree on exactly who saw Jesus, where, in what order and what exactly his risen body was like.

If Jesus just walked out of a tomb and everyone knew it and it was all clea to early Christians then such confusion is rather difficult to explain. More uniformity in the record would be expected and less political manuevering.

Vinnie

Amaleq13

Right. It is the Galatians who appear to be under the influence of Jewish Christians, correct? I guess I was connecting the Corinthian rejection of resurrection to that of the Sadducees. Couldn't a Sadducee have believed in a spiritually resurrected Christ while denying the idea of a general resurrection?

"So," says the Corinthian, "if the resurrected body of Jesus wasn't walking around, why should I believe that any dead body will be raised?"

That seems like a reasonable interpretation but I wonder if it had more to do with a denial that the resurrection of Christ constituted the "firstfruits" of the expected general resurrection? Was Paul arguing against anti-eschatological beliefs amongst the Corinthians?

Perhaps but it might be better understood as another significant piece of evidence that Paul neither taught nor believed in a bodily resurrection of Christ.

Yuri Kuchinsky

Vinnie,

It's clear that, in our present-day canonical Mk, the disciples are often portrayed rather negatively. But the big question here is whether this negative portrayal was already in the earliest versions of Mk, or if it was added by later editors.

Regards,

Yuri.

Vinnie

That is a valid question but we know that the earliest version of Mark ended at 16:8 (Matthew and Luke diverge widely here). I assume this as background knowledge. Others might disagree but my views come from this position.

As I showed, this is a slam on the women who come ot the tomb too late to anoint Jesus. I take it then that a programmatic denigration was in Mark very early. Crossan finds parallels between the unnamed woman in Mark 14 and the named woman in Mark 16 and the named apostles all throughout Mark and the unnamed centurion in 15. Both the unnamed are portrayed positively as understanding whereas all the named figures are portrayed as incompetant dunderheaeds. This parallel does count as evidence in my book but it is notably, rather slight.

Further, there is no evidence it was not in the copies Matthew and Luke posessed for the very fact that their texts show that they disagreed with this treatment of the disciples by Mark. Except for part of Luke who possibly tries to smear Mary Magdalene by casting her with an intense demon-posession which shows, along with Mark's negative portrayal and John's undermining, just how popular and authoritative she must have been for some early Christian groups. No wonder later Gospels say Jesus kissed her on the lips often

As further circumstantial evidence would be Luke's prologue: I take it for granted that Luke did not like Mark very much and it was because of reasons other than its poor grammar!

Furthermore, none of the agreements of Matthew and Luke against Mark that are probative can be used here. The food laws, in theory could be a common omission but I would argue that neither accepted Mark's interpretation and just omitted it. Its not a probative case here.

I take it Mark slash of the woman which can be shown to have occured in the earliest versions of Mark is the clincher. The programmattic denigration of the apostles occured in a very early version of Mark and the evidence we have suggests it occured in the one used by both Matthew and Luke.

Vinnie

Vinnie

Notice from my article that this common omission actually appears to support that the denigration occured early in Mark:

Notice points 17 and 18 in my paper:

[17] In Mark 10 Jesus also tells them plainly about his fate (see vv 10:33-34) only to have the disciples (specifically James and John) respond with concerns for themselves (Mark 10:35-37).

[18] At this the other 10 disciples were very angry at James and John (v. 41) and Jesus has to intervene with a speech to explain things to them all: (Mk 10:42-45).

Matthew actually attests to this being found in Mark. So [17] and [18] and the slashing of the woman which is consistent with all the other cases of non-understanding in Mark and the fact that there are no valid reasons to remove them.

I'm pretty confident we should assign this programmatic denigration to the early text of GMark by ca. 70 C.E.

Vinnie

Amaleq13

I missed this before. I think there is clear that baptism was understood by Christians as a metaphor for the death of Jesus as early as Paul:

"Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life." (Rom 6:4, NASB)

Kosh

Emphasis mine. It seems that you're speculating a lot here. Once again, if we don't have any writings from the Jerusalem school, then am I correct in saying that all we have of them is what is told in the Gospels? So it seems that one can't argue that their belief in the Rez supports the Gospel claims, since that would be circular logic.

Sorry, where is this claimed? In Pauls letters? Which one? (One that's considered to be authentic and pre-Gospel?)


Isn't this just more speculation?

What is the documentary evidence that these beliefs were created during their lives? Where else do we know of these beliefs, other than from the Gospels? Are there documents, dated contemporaneously to the twelve, which spell out their beliefs?