Mark's downer Gospel

[RandyHelzerman]

I gather it's not in the oldest Greek manuscripts,

This from: https://www.neverthirsty.org/bible-qa/q ... -mark-719/ an overtly apologetic website:

The chart reveals that four very old and reliable manuscripts do contain the Greek sentence and the key word καθαρίζων.....
These four manuscripts are the Sinaitiucs (ַָא), Alexandrinus (A), Vaticanus (B) and the Bezae Cantabrgiensis (D). That is, these highly respected and very old manuscripts all contain the reading “Thus He declared all foods clean.” On the basis of the manuscript evidence, the sentence does belong in Mark 7:19.

Bruce Metzger, the recognized scholar of textual criticism in the modern era, summarizes the evidence as follows,

The overwhelming weight of manuscript evidence supports the reading καθαριζων. The difficulty of construing this word in the sentence prompted copyists to attempt various corrections and ameliorations.

It's certainly not Jesus talking; its Mark explaining Jesus, and--man--since it's durn near the only thing Mark *does* explain in his Gospel, I'll take it.

it looks to me like whoever wrote it didn't understand the issue that the Pharisees had with Jesus. If Mk. 7:13 was about eating non-kosher food, don't you think the Pharisees would have made a fuss about that instead of eating with dirty hands in violation of the "tradition of the elders"?

Well, no doubt you *will* eventually make some observation and come to some understanding about Mark and Jesus which nobody else ever has. There's no lack of people, even on this forum, who claim to understand the text better than their earliest readers did, or even better than the authors themselves understood it. Personally, I think some of them are right.

But maybe you shouldn't rush to judgement just yet, there's other ways to read this, try this one on for size;

And Jesus just got done telling off the Pharisees about how they nullify what Moses said "in many cases" with their traditions. Does it make any sense for Jesus to immediately do the same thing?

The way I read it, Jesus isn't arguing with the Pharasees about *whether* the some of those laws need to be changed, but *which ones* need to be changed. Jesus is kinda making the same point I was--you can call it "reinterpretation" all you like and *claim* you are the one true bearers of the tradition, but your *practice*--what you actually are doing--nullifies the Torah just the same.

I mean, yeah, surprise surprise, Jesus agrees with me here hahahaha but as you point out--he *does* call out the Pharasees, and says *they* are changing the laws in reality if not in name, but he then goes on to point out that if you are going to do that anyways, why not do something which actually is a step in the right direction, by nuking all these arbitrary clean/unclean distinctions?

Or maybe I'm just as wrong as everybody else--who knows? Mark confuses the *hell* outta me. But really, before rushing to any kind of conclusion, think it over. We'll help you think it over if you'd like, but the whole process works better if you don't go into it so stuck to a theory that you fight to the death to defend it--by any means necessary, like crossing out lines or even whole books of the Bible.

Even Paul was willing to pretend to be Torah observant around Jews

Paul *was* a Pharasee--the last in a long line of Pharasees that Jesus reached out to--and if you take Galatians seriously that Paul got the straight scoop directly from Jesus himself, he was the only one who really *got* what Jesus was all about, so why not take him seriously here?

And James is the one who writes in his letter (2:10-11), "Whoever keeps the whole law but stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. For He who said, 'Do not commit adultery,' also said, 'Do not murder.' If you do not commit adultery, but do commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker."

I'm as big of a fan of James as the next guy, but is that really such a profound statement? If you murder somebody, you broke the law? Did anybody really think that not cheating on your wife gives you a license to kill?

As antinomian as Paul gets, even he isn't advocating complete chaos here. He might not think that you can explicitly write down a list of any and all ways to be righteous, or state once and for all time what it means to be righteous, but he does expect us to be righteous. I think that's what he means by Spirit of the Law vs letter of the law.

Who said I'm not at peace with Paul?

uh, you did

Do the words "rogue apostle" really strike you this way?

uh, yeah! I wouldn't call Paul a rogue apostle who was pretending to be Torah observant, etc etc if I didn't have a beef with him.

But listen man, you were firing off the posts pretty fast and furiously there, so I'm not going to pillory you here after you've had some time to reflect. You re cool with Paul; I'm cool with you. If you can please be cool with me too, the circle will be unbroken. All good in the hood.

[RParvus]

To your second question: I think Jesus expected, based on either on some Scriptural prophecy and/or a personal revelation to himself, that God was going to intervene on the Mount of Olives to get rid of the Romans. Something along the lines of Hyam Maccoby’s proposal that Jesus had in view a prophecy from the book of Zechariah and was convinced its fulfillment would occur the night he was taken prisoner. (“Revolution in Judaea – Jesus and the Jewish Resistance, pp.142-144.)

Hence, you agree with the view that

the core of Jesus' activity was not armed struggle, but the preaching of Israel's national restoration. Only when he came to the conviction that an imminent eschatological manifestation of God in Jerusalem was at hand, whould he have demanded from his disciples a full cooperation with the angelic hosts, including to wield the sword. This last hypothesis seems to better explain the existence of a tradition of him as a spiritual master, and the fact that the traces of violence and conflict with Rome abound in the final section of the Gospel account. Moreover, such a scenario has a parallel in Qumran: an apparently pacific community envisaged a synergy of the righteous with the angelic hosts to fight against the armies of the Kittim, aligned with Belial.

(ibid., p. 189, my bold)

Yes, that seems about right to me. If Jesus were the violent sort, I don’t think the Simonians would have even attempted to make the case that he was their Simon in disguise. But because he was the non-violent sort, they were able to appropriate him for their own purposes.

Where I have reservations, however, is in referring to the historical Jesus as a “spiritual master.” For me it is still very much an open question as to how much of a teacher he was. It may be that he was just someone known for healing ability who happened to say out loud that he agreed with John the Baptist’s claim that the Reign of God was at hand. That wouldn’t make him a teacher; it would make him someone who agreed with a teacher. And if at some point he came to believe, by a revelation of some sort, that God had chosen him to be the earthly king in the Reign preached by John, well that too still wouldn’t make him a teacher. I suspect that much of what is referred to as teaching of Jesus was actually teaching of John the Baptist that in time got transferred over to Jesus.

[RParvus]

Perhaps for the historical Jesus it was a matter of interpretation. But I suspect that the author of GMark was Simonian and that, for him, it went far beyond that. Sabbath Law interpretation might be ok for showing your opponents that they don’t even understand their own law, but it is hardly necessary when your Jesus is “Lord of the Sabbath” (Mk. 2:28).

Who would know more about what God considers to be "work" than "the Messiah"/"Son of God"/Daniel's "son of man" figure? As Dan. 7:14 puts it, the "son of man" figure would be "given dominion, glory, and kingship, that the people of every nation and language should serve him," hence Jesus being "Lord of the Sabbath." If Jesus came to do away with the Sabbath, then what Sabbath would there to be for him to be "Lord" of?

John,

You probably haven’t been following my posts, but I’m the oddball who thinks GMark is basically a revision of an earlier Simonian text. And I think that the GMark “Son of Man” statements go back to that earlier text and are a cryptic way of designating the Simon that the Simonians worshipped. If I am right about that, then when Jesus/Simon says he is “Lord of the Sabbath” that is exactly what he means. He is Lord of the Sabbath and of a nature far above the lower angel who instituted the Sabbath (the Jewish god). And because Simon/Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath and its god, he can damn well do whatever he pleases on the Sabbath.

[John2]

I gather it's not in the oldest Greek manuscripts,

This from: https://www.neverthirsty.org/bible-qa/q ... -mark-719/ an overtly apologetic website:

The chart reveals that four very old and reliable manuscripts do contain the Greek sentence and the key word καθαρίζων.....
These four manuscripts are the Sinaitiucs (ַָא), Alexandrinus (A), Vaticanus (B) and the Bezae Cantabrgiensis (D). That is, these highly respected and very old manuscripts all contain the reading “Thus He declared all foods clean.” On the basis of the manuscript evidence, the sentence does belong in Mark 7:19.

Bruce Metzger, the recognized scholar of textual criticism in the modern era, summarizes the evidence as follows,

The overwhelming weight of manuscript evidence supports the reading καθαριζων. The difficulty of construing this word in the sentence prompted copyists to attempt various corrections and ameliorations.

Why do I keep hearing people say that the "oldest" manuscripts don't have 7:19? In any event, if that's not the case, I am fine with 7:19 being there, I just don't agree with whoever wrote it, nor, apparently, did the authors of NT Matthew and Luke (who used Mark, and assuming 7:19 was there), as noted here:

As we can see, Matthew’s version of this conflict plainly tells us that he understood Mark’s account to concern only ritual handwashing, not the Torah’s dietary laws. Perhaps it could be argued that Matthew made these adjustments because he differed from Mark theologically. However, a more plausible explanation is that Matthew emphasized the topic of this dispute to clear up any ambiguity so that his readers did not misunderstand Jesus to be saying something that he wasn’t.

Additionally, scholars recognize that Luke makes use of Mark 7 in his account of Jesus dining with the Pharisee in Luke 11:37-41. Like Mark 7 and Matthew 15, Jesus violated the Pharisaic handwashing ritual but not the Torah. If Luke understood Mark to be addressing the Torah’s dietary laws in Mark 7, we might expect him to include that detail in his use of Mark’s material, but he doesn’t. Luke portrays Jesus as rejecting only extrabiblical traditions, not God’s commandments.

Acts 10 is another passage that sheds light on Jesus’s teaching in Mark 7. Here, Luke records that Peter received a vision in which he was told to “kill and eat” unclean animals. Peter was shocked by this instruction and refused to violate the Torah’s dietary laws: “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean” (Acts 10:14). This is significant because Peter witnessed the conflict recorded in Mark 7 between Jesus and the Pharisees and heard Jesus’s private explanation of his teaching (Matthew 15:15). If Jesus abolished the dietary laws several years earlier in Mark 7, Peter’s response in this passage doesn’t add up.

Some might argue that Peter’s vision in Acts 10 teaches that the dietary laws were nullified, suggesting that Luke understood Jesus to have abolished the Torah’s dietary laws when he read Mark’s account. However, the text of Acts 10 does not say this. Luke confirms that this vision had nothing to do with eating unclean animals when he records Peter’s interpretation of the vision: “God has shown me that I should not call any person common or unclean” (Acts 10:28). The unclean animals in the vision were symbols meant to represent Gentiles. The point of the vision was that Peter must not consider Gentile believers unclean because God has made them clean through Christ. [9] Luke further illustrates this fact in Acts 11:5-18, where Peter recounts this event and says nothing about God abolishing the Torah’s dietary laws, which we would expect Peter to have mentioned had the vision been intended to convey that idea.


https://davidwilber.com/articles/did-je ... -laws-mark

Even Paul was willing to pretend to be Torah observant around Jews

Paul *was* a Pharasee--the last in a long line of Pharasees that Jesus reached out to--and if you take Galatians seriously that Paul got the straight scoop directly from Jesus himself, he was the only one who really *got* what Jesus was all about, so why not take him seriously here?

I don't take Paul's (or anyone's else's) vision of a resurrected Jesus seriously because I don't believe in resurrection of the dead.

Who said I'm not at peace with Paul?

uh, you did

When?

Do the words "rogue apostle" really strike you this way?

uh, yeah! I wouldn't call Paul a rogue apostle who was pretending to be Torah observant, etc etc if I didn't have a beef with him.

But Paul himself (and the way Jewish Christian leaders reacted to him) demonstrates that he was a rogue apostle, i.e., he overstepped the bounds of his agreement with James and the other pillars that he would preach his Torah-free gospel to Gentiles. And Paul says himself that he only pretended to be Torah observant after his conversion ("To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law.").

But listen man, you were firing off the posts pretty fast and furiously there, so I'm not going to pillory you here after you've had some time to reflect. You re cool with Paul; I'm cool with you. If you can please be cool with me too, the circle will be unbroken. All good in the hood.

I feel as cool as a cucumber, so this is an unexpected reaction and I'm sorry for coming across to you that way.

[RandyHelzerman]

Why do I keep hearing people say that the "oldest" manuscripts don't have 7:19?

You are talking to the wrong people Don't take anything I say uncritically either. I *would*, however, read Metzger and take him very seriously.

In any event, if that's not the case, I am fine with 7:19 being there, I just don't agree with whoever wrote it, nor, apparently, did the authors of NT Matthew and Luke (who used Mark, and assuming 7:19 was there), as noted here:

It's pretty amazing how freely the evangelists felt in dropping/adding/modifying the text, and flat-out contradicting each other. Can't say as I blame them tho; I can't make heads or tails out of Mark.

Nevertheless, there's a reason all 4 of them were bound together. All efforts, like the Diatesseron, of further harmonizing them just died on the vine. We're *supposed* to be puzzled about all of this.

As for the rest, man, I try not to indulge in too many autobiographical remarks here, but did you read the post where I said I used to believe that Jesus *didn't* abolish the clean/unclean distinction for foods? I kept kosher until I was 27, for all of the reasons you wrote below. I've heard it all before, and I've said it all before. But the more seriously you take oral tradition, the more seriously you have to take the fact that the vast majority of Christians don't keep kosher. They didn't just make that up.

Let's keep a firm distinction here between (1) Reading these texts for apologetic/theological purposes, and (2) reading them for critical scholarship. I don't see any problem with anybody *really believing* and *really practicing* their faith, and reading their scriptures theologically according to their traditions. Indeed, reading them any other way is reading them against the intensions of the very people who wrote them.

But that's not critical scholarship. I mean, did you really expect that when you started seriously digging into these texts, you'd find *nothing* surprising, disturbing, confusing?

What am I saying, when I started seriously examining these texts, that was exactly what happened to me. I certainly was expecting to find all kinds of new stuff, but I did expect it would end up confirming what I already knew. But now, I can see that couldn't possibly turn out that way. I learned about these texts as a child, from people who had carefully elided all the confusing parts, presenting them in a way appropriate to children. But these are adult texts, dealing with real-life, adult issues.

I loved all those stories about Sampson, for example, imagine how horrified I was when I finally *did* crack open the book of Judges, read that "the spirit of the LORD" came upon Sampson, and what did it have him do? Chop off 100 dicks from the people in the next town over, so he could bang this chick. Forgive the crude language, but this is *REAL* life, real Judges. Yeah I know, he was supposed to kill these guys to "deliver Israel" yadda yada, but don't tell me you never thought that it was strange that the OT god seemed so different from the god of Jesus.

Embrace the mystery man.

[John2]

Perhaps for the historical Jesus it was a matter of interpretation. But I suspect that the author of GMark was Simonian and that, for him, it went far beyond that. Sabbath Law interpretation might be ok for showing your opponents that they don’t even understand their own law, but it is hardly necessary when your Jesus is “Lord of the Sabbath” (Mk. 2:28).

Who would know more about what God considers to be "work" than "the Messiah"/"Son of God"/Daniel's "son of man" figure? As Dan. 7:14 puts it, the "son of man" figure would be "given dominion, glory, and kingship, that the people of every nation and language should serve him," hence Jesus being "Lord of the Sabbath." If Jesus came to do away with the Sabbath, then what Sabbath would there to be for him to be "Lord" of?

John,

You probably haven’t been following my posts, but I’m the oddball who thinks GMark is basically a revision of an earlier Simonian text. And I think that the GMark “Son of Man” statements go back to that earlier text and are a cryptic way of designating the Simon that the Simonians worshipped. If I am right about that, then when Jesus/Simon says he is “Lord of the Sabbath” that is exactly what he means. He is Lord of the Sabbath and of a nature far above the lower angel who instituted the Sabbath (the Jewish god). And because Simon/Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath and its god, he can damn well do whatever he pleases on the Sabbath.

But even in this scenario, what does Jesus do in Mark other than healing and plucking a few grains of wheat on the Sabbath that makes his version of the Sabbath significantly different from a normative one? To me all it seems to amount to is Jesus having a more lenient interpretation of what constitutes "work" on the Sabbath. Unless I'm overlooking something, Jesus attends synagogues and doesn't do any serious labor on the Sabbath.

Healing on the Sabbath is okay in Rabbinic Judaism, so that difference that Jesus had with the Pharisees doesn't seem very radical. And it's not as if Jesus and his followers were seriously reaping or intending to do any serious reaping on the Sabbath. They plucked a few grains and the Pharisees were being nit-picky. Is this all that "Simon" does differently as "Lord of the Sabbath"?

[John2]

... don't tell me you never thought that it was strange that the OT god seemed so different from the god of Jesus.

Jesus overturns tables and chairs in the Temple and predicts that the Temple will be destroyed and that various woes and calamities will occur and that he will resurrect from the dead and go to heaven and come to Earth as a spiritual being to meet his followers and condemn everyone else on Earth. That seems God-like to me. As Jesus says in Mk. 8:38, “If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will also be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels."

[RandyHelzerman]

And it's not as if Jesus and his followers were seriously reaping or intending to do any serious reaping on the Sabbath. They plucked a few grains and the Pharisees were being nit-picky. Is this all that "Simon" does differently as "Lord of the Sabbath"?

Fun fact, Jesus doesn't pluck any grains, only his disciples. As much Mark wanted to write a "Gentile-Friendly" gospel, Mark himself probably considered himself a card-carrying, Torah-observing Jew, and perhaps is showing some discomfort here with actually having Jesus break the Sabbath.

Jesus overturns tables and chairs in the Temple...

I'm sure you've come to terms with it along the way, but yeah, don't tell me you never wondered about that.

P.S. You've got to wonder about this scene....Jesus and his disciples are way out in a field...did the Pharasees have a continuous Torah-police patrol wandering around looking for cheaters? What were *they* doing out there?

[John2]

Why do I keep hearing people say that the "oldest" manuscripts don't have 7:19?

You are talking to the wrong people Don't take anything I say uncritically either. I *would*, however, read Metzger and take him very seriously.

I've already conceded that 7:19 could be genuine and addressed the implications of it from my point of view. It doesn't change anything about my argument beyond having to think that Mark or someone else had an erroneous takeaway from Jesus' argument with the Pharisees about eating with dirty hands. And that Matthew and Luke don't pick up on it indicates to me that either 7:19 was not original or that whoever wrote the NT Mathew and Luke shared my view that whoever wrote Mark 7:19 didn't know what he was talking about.

As for most Christians not keeping kosher, well, most Christians are and have been Gentiles, and even Jesus didn't teach Gentiles to observe the Torah, so that seems immaterial. And the only food requirements that later Jewish Christian leaders had for Gentiles was to not eat food sacrificed to idols (reflected in the Didache and Paul), to not eat blood (which is required of all people in the Torah) and to not eat improperly slaughtered animals (which is another kosher-like requirement). But Gentiles could otherwise eat whatever kind of meat they liked, I guess.

The issue is whether or not Jewish Christians should continue to keep kosher, and by all accounts they did (e.g., Peter's declaration in Acts 10:14: "“I have never eaten anything impure or unclean” and on down to Epiphanius' time by Nazarenes).

[John2]

Jesus overturns tables and chairs in the Temple...

I'm sure you've come to term with it along the way, but yeah, don't tell me you never wondered about that.

There's no mystery about it to me. Jesus says that he was inspired by Jer. 7:11 ("Has this house, which bears My Name, become a den of robbers in your sight?"). This indicates to me that Jesus cared about the Temple and thought its merchants and money changers were ripping people off (perhaps in accordance with Lev. 19:35-36: "You must not use dishonest measures of length, weight, or volume. You shall maintain honest scales and weights, an honest ephah, and an honest hin").