The Tale Wagging The Dogma. Which "Mark" Wrote GMark?

[Bernard Muller]

to JW,

Second "Mark"

Source: Eusebius referring to Clement

Date: Eusebius c. 324, Clement c. 200

Description: Follower of Peter but not the Cephas (Peter) that Paul knew.

From where did you get what I bolded?

The whole thing about "Mark" the author of the gospel started with Papias (110-140), quoted by Eusebius:
"Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not indeed in order, whatsoever he remembered of the things done or said by Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but afterward, as I said, he followed Peter, who adapted his teaching to the needs of his hearers, but with no intention of giving a connected account of the Lord's discourses, so that Mark committed no error while he thus wrote some things as he remembered them. For he was careful of one thing, not to omit any of the things which he had heard, and not to state any of them falsely."

Cordially, Bernard

[Mental flatliner]

The whole thing about "Mark" the author of the gospel started with Papias (110-140), quoted by Eusebius:
"Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not indeed in order, whatsoever he remembered of the things done or said by Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but afterward, as I said, he followed Peter, who adapted his teaching to the needs of his hearers, but with no intention of giving a connected account of the Lord's discourses, so that Mark committed no error while he thus wrote some things as he remembered them. For he was careful of one thing, not to omit any of the things which he had heard, and not to state any of them falsely."

Cordially, Bernard

This is an erroneous statement by Eusebius, and it's one of the things that identifies Peter as the true source of the gospel of Mark.

Things left out by Mark:
--Peter walks on water (the story is told, but this detail is omitted)
--Peter called "the rock" (the story is told, but this detail is omitted)
--Peter lops off the ear of Malchus (the disciple who did it went unnamed)

These are obvious intentional omissions that indicate Peter's humility (and perhaps a desire to be unidentified in a capital crime).

**************
On the other hand, Mark went to great detail to tell these stories:
--Peter's being surnamed "Satan"
--Peter's denial (in fact, Mark's version is as specific as you would expect from an eye-witness of the event)

[Bernard Muller]

To mental flatliner,

Peter walks on water (the story is told, but this detail is omitted)

About Jesus & Peter walking on water (it is not clear in gMark that Jesus walked on water but "Matthew" fixed that):
http://historical-jesus.sosblogs.com/Hi ... b1-p95.htm

There are many things Peter or other disciples did not tell about on important items which were very much favorable to Jesus as being divine. But they appear in gMark (most likely fabricated). And "Mark" used all kind of devices to explain the silences. Was it because Peter wanted to make Jesus humble?

Disciples getting gag order from Jesus:
a) NOT saying Jairus' daughter was resurrected (5:43)
b) NOT claiming Jesus was Christ (8:30)
c) NOT telling about the events on the high mountain, which included transfiguration, God saying Jesus is his Son and Moses & Elijah alive in bodily forms (9:9-10)

Disciples being ignorant or kept in ignorance:
a) NOT aware of the (Christian) meaning of Jesus' future passion (8:33)
b) NOT understanding what "rising from the dead" meant (right after seeing Moses & Elijah!) (9:10)
c) NOT asking about the meaning of (among other things) Jesus' future rising (9:32b)
d) NOT told about the Empty Tomb (16:8)

Disciples being too dumb (or "closed") to notice extraordinary events:
a) NOT "seeing" the miraculous feeding(s) (6:52, 8:4, 17-21)
b) NOT considering "walking on the sea" or/and the following stoppage of the wind as divine miracle(s) (6:52)
http://historical-jesus.sosblogs.com/Hi ... racles.htm

Cordially, Bernard

[JoeWallack]

JW:
Young Matthew Ferguson has a, as Larry David would say, pretty, pretty good article regarding the issue of authorship of the Canonical Gospels. Since GMark appears (so to speak) to be the original Gospel narrative that all subsequent Gospels are based on it's really the only Gospel with much potential to have a minimum source of historical witness. Ferguson does not say much specifically about GMark but does make many good points about Gospel authorship in general that would apply to GMark:

Why Scholars Doubt the Traditional Authors of the Gospels

To provide a good overview of the majority opinion about the Gospels, the Oxford Annotated Bible (a compilation of multiple scholars summarizing dominant scholarly trends for the last 150 years) states (pg. 1744):

“Neither the evangelists nor their first readers engaged in historical analysis. Their aim was to confirm Christian faith (Lk 1.4; Jn 20.31). Scholars generally agree that the Gospels were written forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus. They thus do not present eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings.”

Unfortunately, however, much of the general public is not familiar with scholarly resources like the one quoted above; instead, Christian apologists often put out a lot of material, such as The Case For Christ, targeted towards lay audiences, who are not familiar with scholarly methods, in order to argue that the Gospels are the eyewitness testimonies of either Jesus’ disciples or their attendants. The mainstream scholarly view is that the Gospels are anonymous works, written in a different language than that of Jesus, in distant lands, after a substantial gap of time, by unknown persons, compiling, redacting, and inventing various traditions, in order to provide a narrative of Christianity’s central figure – Jesus Christ – to confirm the faith of their communities.

The above is a mixture of evidence and conclusions that support doubt of Christianity's traditional authorship assertions. The evidence:

• 1) "written in a different language than that of Jesus". The different language (Greek) between the Gospels and the Gospel setting (Aramaic) is evidence of a distance between authorship and Jesus.
  
  2) "in distant lands". The setting for the creation of the Gospels seems more likely to have been outside of Israel. More distance.
  
  3) "after a substantial gap of time". The multiple anachronisms in GMark suggest a time well after the destruction of the Temple (c.70). If c. 90 than GMark would be about 60 years after Jesus died. Literary freedom needs about two generations so that most people no longer know anyone who knew the historical person.
  
  4) "to confirm the faith of their communities". The point is that the primary purpose is to promote Christianity and not to provide a historical account based on historical witness. Apologists try to exorcise that primary purpose from the discussion and only talk about the genre of the Gospels, arguing that it is Greco-Roman biography, and that that is evidence of historical witness.

Ferguson goes on to make many good related observations about authorship of the Gospels in general and a few which are specific to GMark. Ironically, I think he misses the three best reasons to doubt the traditional Christian assertions of Markan authorship:

• 1) Since GMark consists primarily of the impossible it would be impossible to have a historical witness to it.
  
  2) GMark has a primary theme of discrediting supposed historical witness.
  
  3) Subsequent Gospels which unlike GMark wanted to credit supposed historical witness apparently had no other Gospel narrative to use or any other source crediting supposed historical witness which forced them to use a Gospel that discredited historical witness.

Joseph

Church Tradition, n. A mysterious entity that unlike Jesus who was only able to incarnate once, can be magically incarnated at an Apologist's whim to support Christian assertian as reliable and undisputed evidence and than disincarnate just as quickly as only the word of men and not Scripture when it goes against Christian assertian.

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