gmx wrote: ↑Sun Sep 04, 2022 12:02 am
I'll just restate my earlier view that the absence of textual support for the OP hypothesis (comparing with the Mark 16 situation) adds strongly to the view that references to Jesus in the Pauline Corpus are original.
I hold no brief for the OP (who is, after all, simply asking a question) and I believe that I understand your point about the ending of
Mark, but I am unsure whether the situations are closely comparable.
Either the consensus chapter 16 arises by omission of an existing block of text or the canonical and other longer versions arise from extensive prose compositions likely by different authors and visibly in competition with one another for adoption. Adding "Jesus" early and often requires no selectivity and little or no creativity or literary skill.
Further, the competitors to conclude
Mark all have ideological constituencies among the "judges" of the competition, the scribes and their sponsors. Women are unreliable (16:8), the post-resurrection appearances may or may not have been only visionary (16:14), or all's well that ends well (16:20), to name three. In contrast, in a competition between a Jesus-free and Jesus-heavy version of the same text, it is plausible that the latter would attract copying resources far more readily from the Christian communities, however diverse they might otherwise be.
Given the combinatorial explosion of ways to add "Jesus" but still preserve some instances of unmodified "Christ," "The Lord," etc., there would almost need to be a single autograph of the variant (an assumption familiar to text critics, but often inconsistent with what we observe among writers and their processes - this would be a case where the assumption wasn't gratuitous). If so, then we wouldn't expect "intermediate forms" nor could we expect to identify Goodacrean "editorial fatigue" in the original innovator's work even if it occurred.
This is an interesting question, then, for those who think carefully about Hitchens's Razor (what can be introduced without evidence can be dismissed without evidence) or look to Popper to define the meets and bounds of scholarship (logicist falsifiability as a prerequisite for admissibility). Fun, too, for those whose idea of rebuttal is to allege "conspiracy theory" when disturbing thoughts present themselves as reasonable questions.
To refresh everyone's recollection about what you wrote.
CW, the mention of the ending of GMark is an interesting parallel.The "last page of Mark" either never existed (intentionally or otherwise) or has been lost (intentionally or otherwise), but 16:9-20 is known to be very early. So if you hold that 16:9-20 is a corruption of the "Original", yet is very early, it is significant that this corruption has not been able to be cleaned up by the "Production Processes" you refer to. The ending of Mark, as far as the manuscript record is concerned, is shambolic. The fact that we do not have this situation with the Paulina lends weight to the argument that the presence of "Jesus" in these documents is original.
