I would like to raise only a question.rgprice wrote: ↑Mon Sep 17, 2018 12:09 am This is an interesting, if not old, thread. Hakeem's comments from 2017 were exactly right.
It's not just that GMark is contra Peter, GMark is contra the entire movement, especially Peter, James and John.
What I argue in my new book (Deciphering the Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed) is that GMark is based on the letters of Paul and is pro-Paul, contra Peter, James, John. The real message of the story is as Hakeem said, it's a story meant to show that the Jews brought the war upon themselves and that the leaders of the early Christian movement, along with the Jews themselves, were failures.
The whole issue is made clear with Mark 10:44. Compare to 1 Cor 9:19.
GMark 10:44: "whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all."
1 Cor 9:19: "For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all"
GMark is based on the letters of Paul. The only people that really get any kind of good treatment in the story are gentiles, the audience of Paul's letters.
What do you think about the fact that Mark introduces a separationist christology, i.e. one where the divine Christ possessed the man Jesus from the baptism and abandons him on the cross ?
Note that Irenaeus said that the original readers of Mark were separationist Christians.
As one who would want to follow fully the RG Price's argument that Mark was written as fictional political propaganda about the Jews etc, I fear that just the absence of an explanation about the Mark's separationism is the top of iceberg of a wider problem: was Mark separationist in the full context of a Marcionite polemic about the true nature of Jesus ?
Under the hypothesis of a marcionite priority (a context where Mark was written under Marcionite influence) the separationism would make a lot of sense: the Jews see only a man (the man Jesus) but they don't realize the nature, even more so the origin [from a higher god, different from the Jewish god], of the divine Christ who talks via his temporary human recipient.
. But what about the Markan separationism under the hypothesis of RG Price?