Are you saying that plausibility of a narrative is a reason we should believe it to be true?Bernard Muller wrote: ↑Sun Sep 10, 2017 3:52 pm
If "Mark" invented the wording of the sign on the cross, he would have "the Christ" instead.
Are you saying that we can tell fiction from history by reading implausible details in fiction and plausible ones in history?
If so, I have to wonder if you have read very much fiction, including ancient fiction, at all. Pick up Rosenmeyer's Ancient Epistolary Fictions, or better still, read ancient critics discussions of rhetoric, including literary criticisms. Verisimilitude, plausibility, were what fiction writers very often strove to achieve, and very often did so most successfully. And even ancient biographies and histories included some very plausible details we learn from other sources were in fact fiction.
What if Mark wanted to use "king of the Jews" because it fit in with a lot of other possible agendas of his -- including the culmination of the triumphal procession to the cross, and the dramatic effect it accomplished.
There are dozens of reasons we can imagine why our unknown author chose to use "king of the jews" -- and the idea that he did for no conceivable reason other than it really happened is just astonishing, sorry. If you want plausible historicity, then you imagine a scene where no-one sympathetic to Jesus even saw such a sign on the cross before it was taken down that same afternoon.
You also imagine a scene where, if such a sign were made at all in the first place, said "Charlatan/Pretended/Claimed to be King of the Jews" -- you would not plausibly have had a historical sign that just so neatly happened by luck to serve Mark's ironic agenda.
It sounds like you are implying that an author is incapable of creating confusion and doubt for some of his readers. But surely whether confusion and doubt is created among readers depends entirely on the preconceptions of the first readers. How do you know who those first readers were and what their preconceptions were?Bernard Muller wrote: ↑Sun Sep 10, 2017 3:52 pm
Because "Mark" made excuse on some facts & sayings which was not serving his theological/christological agenda. If these facts and sayings were not believed true, then there could not be invented because that would create confusion and doubt.
For example: why would Peter keep secret the title, Christ, he gave to Jesus? "Mark" provided the excuse that Jesus asked the disciples should tell no man of him (Mk 8:29-30). That's confirmed by other clues in the NT, including Paul's epistles, showing that Peter & James never became Christians.
Of course, that would be embarrassing if Peter and other disciples were never heard to say Jesus was the Christ.
Have you heard of a book by a certain WIlliam Wrede titled "The Messianic Secret"? That, and not a few other scholarly works since then, explain Mark's theological agenda by referencing the evidence of Peter's "secret confession".
On what grounds do you determine the gospel's theological agenda by denying that parts of the gospel serve his theological agenda? That sounds like you are choosing to select just bits of the gospel that support what you think "should" be the gospel's agenda. That's a circular argument.
You are arguing by means of rhetorical questions again. Rhetorical questions are merely another form of question begging. They are not scholarly evidence-based arguments.
Why can't the whole story simply be a holy-fiction about Peter? Why do you think it has to be historical?