nonsense. nothing of the kind. that's silly.Diogenes the Cynic wrote:The internal evidence alone excludes any possibility of eyewitness testimony.
BS! prove it! show me some documentation on anachronisms? Even so that's not proof that it's not based upon eye witness testimony. they don't have to claim that it does, they all knew what the writing was, the distillation of their oral tradition.They don't claim to come from witnesses. they are riddled with historical anachronisms and errors, they are clearly post-70 (no matter what Roger says, he knows the scholarship is not with him on this),
BS. my professor called them illiterate. you are imagining your so called chiastic structure.they are written in educated Greek (even Mark. His Greek may superficially appear to be casual and crude, but his chiastic structures indicate formal training).
why do you guys persist in making these silly mistakes? that is not any of kind of proof. they were a culture that was really oriented around their sacred book. anything to do with God they wanted to compare and tell it in terms re told the structure of the sacred book. so that they do that is not just any kind of proof that it's based upon a real event.Mark can be shown to be sometimes re-writing Septuagint narratives (see Randel Helms Gospel Fictions for an excellent demonstration of this via key words and phrasings which parallel the LXX in Greek). Matthew copies Mark. Luke is obviously very late.
I have done that with my own life. I have a wonderful garden like childhood, an evil serpent caused us to move, and we were cast out of the beautiful garden and my life went to pot as I grew up. So that was impossed from my own fundie background, but it happened.
It's obviously a saying source because that's what Logia means. Then there's no reason why his logia can't form the basis of the version of the Gospel we have now.The most I'd be willing to concede plausibility is that the Logia described by Papias could have been an ur-Q Gospel of some sort - an Aramaic or Hebrew sayings Gospel similar to Thomas which by some tradition or rumor had been attributed to Matthew, later been translated into Greek (although an Aramaic or Hebrew origin for Q would be hard to prove) then combined with Mark's narrative.
that's wrong. I've seen those so called geographical mistakes exploded.Mark as a secretary of Peter is simply untenable - it makes no such claim on its own behalf, it is filled with geographical and legal mistakes that could not have come from a witness,
it clearly draws on the Old Testament for story material,
they all did it.I tel my life story in relation to Genesis. I did for years before a friend pointed it out to me. does not prove a damn thing.
that's beause it's not a memoir. what features would you expect. 18th century one's of cousre.it does not show any features of being a memoir, moreover it describes scenes that Peter, even according to GMark itself, did not witness. How did the trial before the Sanhedrin come from a memory of Peter? He wasn't there. Nobody was there but Jesus and the priests. How did Peter know what Jesus prayed at Gethsemane? How did he even know about the empty tomb, when Mark says the women didn't tell anybody?
In my opinion, the only parts of Mark that seem like they could have come from authentic memoirs are some of the Gailean healing stories, they contain Aramaisms, they are not gaudy, they at least have some tenor of remembered legend to them as opposed to de novo fiction, which I think a lot of Mark is.
Papias never indicates knowledge of the Canonical Gospels and doesn't quote them. He describes two books which later church fathers only guessed were Canonical Mark and Matthew.[/quote]
On authorship, evidence for Peterian backing:
*Most of the Gospel is set in Galilee.
Neil and Write indicate that Galilee is for Mark the world of goodness where honest people seek God, Judea is the world of hate into which the Savior goes to seek and save the lost. Of course Papias the second century church historian tells us that Peter gave Mark the material in his gospel and Mark wrote it out of order (see Koester). Peter was from Galilee as was Jesus. Thus the world of Galilee is pictured as the good realm and most of the reminiscences are set there.
*Geogrphical data accruate.
Koster points out that when the redactor sticks to his sources the information about Galilee and Palestine is fairly accurate. Peter would know Palestine and we should expect that his reminiscences would be fairly accurate.
*Underlying Aramic Statua
There is strata of Aramaic words underlying the Greek of Mark. Peter needed Mark as an interpreter and would have spoken Aramaic in relating his memories of Christ.
*single source passion narrative.
The Passion Narrative is taken from a single source shared by all four canonical and the Gospel of Peter. Why would one preliminary source be so influential that it would inspire and be used by all the major redactors of Gospels? Because it was from a very authoritative source.
Community as Author?
Thus it is a possibility that Mark's account of Peter's reminiscences stands behind the actual redacted gospel that bares his name. But that is only speculation and cannot be proven. What can be proven is that earlier material stands behind the account. Koster and Crosson both see the Passion narrative as coming from the earlier period, probably the middle of the century. Thus we can assume that the community is the author and that the material used has a certain historical validity as it would be produced by a community containing many eye witnesses.
"We are thus brought back to the earliest stage of the formation of the Gospel tradition. Originally the episodes and the accompanying, circulated singly among the believers. At a very early date some of the single traditions may have coalesced, through similarity of subjection or verbal correspondence. For the most part this tradition is oral--the stories pass from mouth to mouth; but quite soon after the death of Jesus the first steps may have been taken. It is not difficult to imagine how self-contained units of Christian teaching came to be hammered out, first orally than witten flysheets or tracts--often in several differing though related shapes, occurring to the contexts in which they were used.When therefore John Mark (for example) sharpened his reed pen and dipped it in ink to write, he had already behind him a considerable tradition of Christian speaking and writing. by Peter and many others--recognized patterns of argument and exhortation, of defense and attack,ofinstruction and challenge--from among which me might select his material and sayings. The earliest Christian writers were probably heirs to an already considerable body of tradition.'
"To what do we owe the preservation of these stories? There can be only one answer, the belong to the history of the community and particularly to its character as a worshiping community."(Neil p.239 quoting C.F.D. Moule).
That this was an effective means of passion on accurate information is clear. There are not a vast plethora of differing Christ legends from the first century. There are not counter traditions which have Jesus dying in other cities, in other ways, or not at all. There are not counter gospels with Jesus not claiming to be the son of God, or setting the action in far off places, change the principle characters. Jesus is always sounded by the 12 Apostles, he is always crucified, and in Jerusalem, and raises form the dead after three days, and so on. The communities that first told the stories would have been filled with eye witnesses and probably told the stories with the witnesses in attendance and probably as the featured story tellers. The stories were set in stone at least in so far as their basic details and passed along in a form that was set from the beginning. This is probably because the whole community saw what happened. The whole community knew that Jesus rose from the dead and told the story and just 19 years latter when the "cross Gospel" or the Passion narrative were written down there were plenty of eye witnesses to keep them stairght. Thus the community may well be the true author of Mark and the community probably did a good job.
in terms of the so called geographical problems sounds like Randel Helm.We should not expect to find that the material is arranged in such a manner as to form a history book. While the mistakes in geography and other aspects of Palestinian Jewish life do indicate that the author is not Jewish, there is also an indication that the "author" is really a redactor. It is not the original source of the material that is not Jewish but the redactor who put it in its present form probably in Syria around A.D. 70. But a much older layer of material stands behind this surface reading, a layer of historical material which does link the Gospel of Mark with he original events and may actually link the work with its namesake and with Peter's Testimony.