Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Telling Your Source He Doesn't Know What He Is Talking About. GJohn as Denial of GMark


JW:
Witness is like Real Estate in that it has 3 important criteria to determine its value:

• Source, source and source.

For purposes of this Thread it will be assumed:

• 1) That GMark is the original Gospel narrative
  
  2) and therefore the primary source for GJohn
  
  3) That GMark has a primary objective of discrediting the Disciples as witnesses
  
  4) That GJohn has the opposite primary objective of crediting the Disciples as witnesses.

We have the ironic result than that while using GMark as the primary source, GJohn does not simply edit or just change GMark's primary objective, but makes it the opposite. This conclusion is useful in the raging MJ/GJ/HJ/AJ debate as it is support that "John" (author) had no available historical witness and relatively minor alternative legends casting doubt on HJ. In general, for "John" to have an objective of crediting disciples as historical witness and being forced to use as the primary source something (GMark) which had the opposite primary objective of discrediting the Disciples as historical witness suggests there was no source available for GJohn which credited the Disciples as historical witness. Specifically, CBS (Christian Bible Scholarship) claims as major evidence for HJ that individual pericopes in GJohn provides independent witness to HJ from the Synoptics. But to the extent these parallel are reactions to individual pericopes in GMark, they are potentially evidence of the opposite of HJ since they are better evidence of literary creation than historical witness.

What this Thread will be concerned with than is not whether GJohn is a reaction and denial of GMark's presentation of the Disciples as witnesses because this reaction and denial is an assumption of this Thread, but rather how GJohn reacts and denies.

On to the evidence:

Comparison of The Calling of The First Disciples

[url=http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php?title=John_1]John 1[/url]

Description of	GMark 1:16-18	GJohn 1:35-40	Commentary
Preparation for the Call	None	Waiting For	GJohn has implication that they were actively seeking the Messiah
Discovery Context	No	Yes	GMark setting is job site while GJohn setting is Teacher/Disciples
External Identification	No	Yes	John the Baptist explicitly identifies
Internal Identification	No	Yes	Jesus immediately identified as Messiah
Simon was the first?	Yes	No	-
Contrived Ending	Yes	No	In a relatively short space "Mark" finishes with "fisher of men" pun

To the extent GJohn provides opposite reaction to GMark is evidence of literary creation (fiction) rather than historical witness.

Word.


Joseph

"He who denies that "John's" Jesus is denying "Mark's" Jesus is the liar." - JW

ErrancyWiki

I think the end of John 7 is significant -

John 7 (ESV)
37 On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. 38 Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” 39 Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.

Division Among the People
40 When they heard these words, some of the people said, “This really is the Prophet.” 41 Others said, “This is the Christ.” But some said, “Is the Christ to come from Galilee? 42 Has not the Scripture said that the Christ comes from the offspring of David, and comes from Bethlehem, the village where David was?” 43 So there was a division among the people over him. 44 Some of them wanted to arrest him, but no one laid hands on him.

45 The officers then came to the chief priests and Pharisees, who said to them, “Why did you not bring him?” 46 The officers answered, “No one ever spoke like this man!” 47 The Pharisees answered them, “Have you also been deceived? 48 Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in him? 49 But this crowd that does not know the law is accursed.” 50 Nicodemus, who had gone to him before, and who was one of them, said to them, 51 “Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?” 52 They replied, “Are you from Galilee too? Search and see that no prophet arises from Galilee.”

1) That GMark is the original Gospel narrative

2) and therefore the primary source for GJohn

3) That GMark has a primary objective of discrediting the Disciples as witnesses

4) That GJohn has the opposite primary objective of crediting the Disciples as witnesses.

If it is true (and I think it is most of the time), then we have to wonder why "Mark" would invent disciples for HJ and then would discredit them as witnesses. More so when later "John" found this was not right and changed all that: how could the Son of God on earth and his magic tricks not credited by them?

Cordially, Bernard

My assumption is that canonical Mark is not the first gospel. Something associated with Peter a 'gospel' in some sense came before Mark and even the Marcionite gospel. It may well have assumed a historical person crucified on the cross. There are a number of sources which point to a text before Mark but the obvious sign in canonical Mark is that he seems to specifically reference Aramaic phrases which can't be explained by Mark being an eyewitness or hearing these Aramaic terminology through witnesses. Instead for some inexplicable reason Mark has decided to copy out an Aramaic source (or perhaps alternatively 'make it seem' as if he was working from a pre-existent written source).

Well, well, well...

Stephan Huller wrote:My assumption is that canonical Mark is not the first gospel. Something associated with Peter a 'gospel' in some sense came before Mark and even the Marcionite gospel. It may well have assumed a historical person crucified on the cross.

You have stumbled onto the Truth. Amazing. "Peter", from "Upper Galilee" (probably "Jabnit") IS the subject of this Story. It is a Noir Story, since Peter saves a Priest who gets Crucified 12 years later.

There are a number of sources which point to a text before Mark but the obvious sign in canonical Mark is that he seems to specifically reference Aramaic phrases which can't be explained by Mark being an eyewitness or hearing these Aramaic terminology through witnesses.

One thing leads to another. One Aramaic line is from the Priest who was saved by Peter 12 years earlier: "My God, my God, for this was I spared?".

Instead for some inexplicable reason Mark has decided to copy out an Aramaic source (or perhaps alternatively 'make it seem' as if he was working from a pre-existent written source).

'N there it is. Mark is a Construction.

CW

The one that first comes to mind is gJohn's rejection that Jesus would ask the Father to remove his upcoming hour of suffering. He does this explicitly in the synoptics. Yet in John he denies that he will do this and seemingly never does. Similarly you won't find the quote from John in the synoptics.

Mark 14:35
And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. He said, “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.”

John 12:27
“Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. 28 Father, glorify your name.”

I'm not convinced that the author of gJohn had a copy of Mark in front of him, but I think there are too many clues to show that he is clearly responding against many of the synoptic traditions.

I can't play because I deny each of the four presuppositions.

wonderful. Thank you Jebus.

There's something that bothers me about this, Joe.

Nobody shoots first and claims that X, Y, and Z suck.

Before you say that Obama sucks, Obama has to be on your radar. Before you say that reality TV sucks, reality TV has to be on your radar. Someone has to pump this up a bit first, before you can try to let out the air.

So, yeah, maybe Mark came before John, and maybe John is inverting or contradicting Mark.

But what the hell was Mark discrediting? (Or was he just that deep of a literary author that he creates his own characters just to hang them?)

The literary function of the disciples in g"Mark' was to act as the questioning voice of the author so that his principal character had questions to answer.
Somebody has to ask the questions that JC answers, its his answers that are the key to the story.
In g"Mark" its the job of the disciples, the crowd and the scribes/Pharisees to provide the props to propel the story..
Each in the own way, serving different literary purposes.
The crowd get amazed, the scribes/Pharisees are antagonistic, the disciples ask questions of a more personal nature than the crowd, they are the inner circle, the crowd of the outer.
But if we had an inner circle then how come no one knows who this fella JC is in the age that the author is writing his story?
3 reasons conveniently supplied by the author explain JC's anonymity - the messianic secret, the dum dum disciples who can't get anything right and even reject JC at the critical times [in the garden and after the arrest] and the women who tell nobody.
So the disciples serve several literary functions and as such are what they are in g"Mark"

Which doesn't suit the gospel writers who come later, but they are stuck with their presence in the story so the later authors simply change the presentation of the disciples to suit the change of needs of each gospel.