does jesus' family think that he is mental?

[Ben C. Smith]

I think, then, that it is possible you do not mean Irenaeus. You mean Epiphanius, who in Panarion 42.11.6, 17 alleges that the Marcionite gospel lacked Luke 8.19 (the Lucan parallel to Mark 3.31). I have the relevant data posted here: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1765#p39313.

I definately was thinking of someone included in the old Philip Schaff collection of Ante-Nicene fathers. Now Tertullian does talk about the idea the man is testing Jesus in On the Flesh of Christ ch 7 and Against Marcion 4.19 as an interpretation of Marcion and Apelles. But I still think one of the fathers in this collection made a mention of unnamed heretics and specifically copies of Mark lacking this verse, or it comes right after talk about heretics who only use Mark. So I'll have to dig for it.

I would love to see what you have in mind, if you are able to locate it.

[toejam]

The problem with this is that the context is likely to have been added by Mark.

But Ehrman is talking about the way the verse reads in the Gospel of Mark, so for the purposes of his argument it's irrelevant whether this is an addition by a Markan redactor to something that no longer exists...

[Michael BG]

The problem with this is that the context is likely to have been added by Mark.

But Ehrman is talking about the way the verse reads in the Gospel of Mark, so for the purposes of his argument it's irrelevant whether this is an addition by a Markan redactor to something that no longer exists...

You are correct Ehrman is talking about the lack of a virgin birth in Mark’s gospel, he is saying that what Mark has in fact means that Mark doesn’t know about a virgin birth. My comment is more to do with historicity. It is not clear which James_C is interested in.

However I am not sure that Ehrman is correct that Mark is talking about Jesus’ family in 3:21. I think he is just giving us what he had without making it clear he means Jesus’ family, unlike in 3:31 where he has “his (Jesus’) mother and his brothers … (were) standing outside”.

[Paul the Uncertain]

Just an opinion, based on a theater project I'm working on. Mark 3:19-34 is a unit, a build of three (triplet ...).

- Jesus comes home (it would seem), draws a crowd and those who are close to him (in an unspecified sense) seek to take him away because he is unbalanced (beside himself, unwell ...)

- The ever-popular scribes accuse Jesus of being possessed, which elicits the incoherent and non-responsive (however popular and widely quoted) "house divided" speech and ends with Jesus cursing (!) those who accused him.

- His immediate family comes looking for him, and Jesus denies them outright while promoting strangers (who do the will of God) to family status (*).

Those who want to nab Jesus in the first step might be his family, but I don't think so, given that they show up in the third step and are very precisely designated there (not just siblings, but gendered, brothers and sisters, plus Mom) (**). On the other hand, that they show up at all is what suggests he has come home, rather than just set up at any old household he's visiting.

In the second and third steps, Jesus visibly isn't quite all there, but neither is he portrayed as unable to function, or posing a danger to himself or others. "Unbalanced" respects some of the nuance of the Greek while striking a moderate tone in the English idiom. (As to whether Jesus' difficulty is chronic or acute, how would these people know?)

Finally, that accusation of possession (not just being in cahoots, repeated for emphasis) is worth noting. Much is made of how "authoritative" Mark's Jesus appears to be with the demons he encounters. To an unenchanted observer (like the hapless and now accursed scribes), maybe that "authority" looks like a shamanic display, something which also attracts descriptive phrases like "beside himself" in English, as well as "possession."

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(*) Family abandonment as a virtue is a theme in Mark, and this instance is an interesting "proof text" that the phrase "brother of the Lord" is not necessarily referring to a biological kinsman, nor even to somebody who grew up with or near Jesus.

What is it with so many Christian apologists? Jesus (as reported in the canon) says something in as many words, and to hell with that.

(**) Obviously, I cannot exclude that this a "sandwich," rather than a "build" (or it could be both), and so those who set out in step 1 are the immediate family of step 3. "Just an opinion ...," something for discussion.

[outhouse]

“he has gone crazy.”

Yes that is the context of the NT authors.

It was created to address negative oral traditions against the Hellenistic movement.

My opinion is that there were traditions floating around from real followers or family condemning the Hellenistic perversion of their Judaism, so the authors were painting the family in a negative light that they were the ones who did not understand Jesus message.

Remember just about everything in the NT was strange to Aramaic Judaism

[Kunigunde Kreuzerin]

.
Tim Widowfield
Did Jesus’ Mother and Brothers Lose Faith in Jesus?

He said, she said, they said

Sometimes I like to lull myself to sleep at night by reading obscure books about Biblical Greek. I recently picked up a real snore-fest by Maximilian Zerwick called Biblical Greek: Illustrated Examples. Early in the book Zerwick talks about a phenomenon in Greek, which also exists in English, in which the third person plural refers to some general, anonymous group, usually best translated as “they say” or “people say.”

In German and French, there’s a singular form (“man sagt” and “on dit“), but in English we have the same sort of thing as in Greek. For example:

They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it’s not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. –Terry Pratchett (Equal Rites, emphasis mine)

As Zerwick rightly points out, we usually see the indefinite plural with verbs of telling, hence in Latin: “dicunt, ferunt, tradunt.” It’s possible that indefinite plurals were common in Aramaic, which Zerwick suggests may have influenced Mark. He writes:

This is perhaps why it occurs with especial frequency in Mk, often, in parallel passages, corrected by Mt, and still oftener by Lk. . . . n Mk (3,21) we read a text which seems offensive to the honour of the Mother of God: ἀκούσαντες οἱ παρ’ αὐτοῦ ἐξῆλθον κρατῆσαι αὐτόν, ἔλεγον γὰρ ὅτι ἐξέστη [akousntes hoi par’ autou exēlthon kratēsai auton, elegon gar hoti exestē]. These παρ’ αὐτοῦ [par’ autou] are later (v. 31) said to be “His mother and his brethren.” Were they necessarily the ones who thought Jesus was deranged? (Zerwick, 2011, p. 2)

In most English translations, the meaning seems to be that Mary and Jesus’ brothers thought he had come unhinged.
... read more

note:

And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him,

would it not make sense

for it was said, “He is out of his mind.”

[iskander]

Dr Ehrman said :

The word EXESTH literally means “to stand outside of oneself.” It is a phrase comparable to the English phrase “to be out of your mind.” In other words, it means “he has gone crazy.”

And so 3:21-22 can be translated “Now when his family heard these things they came out in order to seize him, for they were saying “He is out of his mind.”

Some translators don’t like that way of putting it, not because of any grammatical or lexical issues with the Greek, but simply because they can’t get their heads around Jesus’ family members thinking that he has gone crazy. And so, to avoid the problem, they sometimes change the translation – not because of what the Greek says, but because of what they think it *ought* to say. And so they translate it as saying that his family has come to take him out of the public eye because “people were saying that ‘He is beside himself.’” (Thus the RSV, for example.)

https://ehrmanblog.org/does-marks-gospe ... gin-birth/


can i have clarification on this

can i have clarification on this

Does the clarification on Mark 3 :20-22 make the text more meaningful for you?