The "original" ending of Mark (present the cases)

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Kunigunde Kreuzerin
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Re: The "original" ending of Mark (present the cases)

Post by Kunigunde Kreuzerin »

rgprice wrote: Thu Sep 29, 2022 8:25 am It seems to me that what we have is a harmonization, in which the ending of Mark was harmonized to an extent with the others when it was put into the four Gospel collection, and every copy of Mark we have derives from the four Gospel collection.

Are there reasons to reject such a proposition?
The old R.G. Price had that opinion
Unlike the endings of the other canonical Gospels, and the other endings that were later appended to this Gospel, this ending is not triumphant or inspiring. There is no ascension, there is no meeting with the disciples, there is no issuance of a decree to spread the gospel, there is only terror and fear and failure on behalf of the followers.

This ending, in fact, makes perfect sense for the original message of the story, which is about despair and failure and loss, the despair and failure and loss of the war between the Jews and the Romans. Once again, this story is about justifying the loss of the Jews to the Romans and the utter destruction of their civilization. This story is about rationalizing the loss of the Jews as a failure of their own making and of their own character.

One way to read the ending, and perhaps the way that was intended by the author, is that Christ triumphed over death but the Jews and the early apostles of the Christ movement utterly failed. God is now on the side of the Gentiles, not the Jews.

Sometimes I really wonder if it's the same person who is now writing here under rgprice
rgprice
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Re: The "original" ending of Mark (present the cases)

Post by rgprice »

Kunigunde Kreuzerin wrote: Thu Sep 29, 2022 9:57 am Sometimes I really wonder if it's the same person who is now writing here under rgprice
Done a lot more research since then...
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Re: The "original" ending of Mark (present the cases)

Post by Kunigunde Kreuzerin »

rgprice wrote: Thu Sep 29, 2022 10:09 am
Kunigunde Kreuzerin wrote: Thu Sep 29, 2022 9:57 am Sometimes I really wonder if it's the same person who is now writing here under rgprice
Done a lot more research since then...
My impression is that the old R.G. Price made observations on the text and based his interpretations on those observations. I liked that.

Now you seem to interpret all texts from a certain perspective and this perspective has a lot to do with whether a text was viewed as canonical or not while content specifics play a lesser role.
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Re: The "original" ending of Mark (present the cases)

Post by rgprice »

The texts are just much more complex than I previously realized. I used to argue for first century authorship of all the synoptics, but no longer think that either. I no longer think that GJohn is a unity. I think the whole situation is vastly more complex than I realized a couple years ago.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: The "original" ending of Mark (present the cases)

Post by neilgodfrey »

rgprice wrote: Thu Sep 29, 2022 2:59 am
16:7 seems almost impossible to reconcile with the rest of the story. The entire narrative of Mark works diligently to discredit Peter specifically and all of the disciples in general. Peter and the rest of the disciples had just abandoned Jesus. They were not witnesses to the crucifixion. Why would they be summoned now? Are they really going to be made witnesses to the resurrection when they didn't even witness the crucifixion? I hardly think so.
Τhe above and other remarks concerning the work of redactors run into a fundamental problem, I think: they run against the principle of the more difficult reading being more likely to be the original.

Is it not adding to the difficulty of interpretation if we imagine a copyist adding a passage/s that run counter to the whole thrust of the gospel without any further additional text to at least somehow attempt to support or smooth out what is apparently a blatant contradictory statement that goes against the entire narrative? How could such a copy ever be accepted by anyone else at the time with such a blatant stain in the text?

I suspect our problems with interpreting Mark result from our tendency to try to see it in the same way we read the other gospels -- as narratives with a more self-consistent story line.

The introductions of new characters at the end is not an oddity in Mark when we realize that Mark throughout the gospel introduces then drops from view one-time characters. They are not likely to all be interpolations.

The most obvious difficulty we have with Mark is its 16:8 ending. And we have on record how various copyists attempted to deal with that. But not so for the other problems you raise.

It is more likely, I suggest, that Mark contains many riddles that are explained by a context that is obscure or lost than that those riddles are the result of various editing efforts of different copyists along the way.

The ending of Mark is left hanging. I used to write often about this on my blog. It is well explained as an appeal to its readers to be left with questions unanswered: what happened to Peter? We don't know. What happened at the end? The author doesn't tell us except to say that no-one heard the story - that doesn't make sense. No, the audience is being challenged by the author to respond to a fable. The fable has power beyond mere fanciful imagination because it is about the war that brought about the deaths (many by crucifixion) of the Judean "nation". The characters -- we see this in various clues throughout -- represent the different factions that contributed to the ruin of that nation and its temple and cultic identity. What is left? Nothing, but the call to readers to come to terms with what has happened and follow the new nation called to save the world, the spiritual new nation, in Capernaum, the land of gentiles and Judeans.

Jesus is a literary figure in Mark's gospel, a personification of Israel and the new Israel.

(Christianity itself could not have started from such a concept of Jesus. Nor, I think, does such a Jesus explain the origin of the many other ideas of Jesus in our earliest sources.)
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Re: The "original" ending of Mark (present the cases)

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Is it not adding to the difficulty of interpretation if we imagine a copyist adding a passage/s that run counter to the whole thrust of the gospel without any further additional text to at least somehow attempt to support or smooth out what is apparently a blatant contradictory statement that goes against the entire narrative? How could such a copy ever be accepted by anyone else at the time with such a blatant stain in the text?
Not necessarily. There are many examples of this in the NT canon. 16:7 seems like it could be explained as a later editor wanting to quickly and simply pull the story back in line with expectations that Jesus accepted and supported Peter.

The thing about the NT works is that a lot of what was done really does look simply sloppy. Luke is the perfect example. I'm absolutely convinced that Luke 1, 2 & 24 (well parts of 24) were written by a different person than the rest of the work, and whoever wrote 1, 2 & 24 was absurdly lazy and ridiculously sloppy.

I mean they tack on this beginning in which they tout Jesus' mother Mary as a supreme pillar of virtue, and then they don't even bother to add her into the main story line and leave in the most insulting line toward Jesus' mother in the whole canon? That shows just how sloppy and ill-conceived the editing was. They didn't even bother to harmonize the names of John the Baptist either.

Look at how poor the addition of 1 Cor 15 is. That chapter is a mess. 15:3-11 is totally butchered. I'm convinced that the stuff about Abraham in Galatians and Romans is later addition too, and how many commentaries are there on these passages that find them almost incomprehensible? Many.

Look at the Gospel of John. That thing is a cobbled together scrap book.

This stuff is a mess. I used to think along the lines of "surely no one would make such editorial errors", but no longer. This was a lot of material. It seems clear that at some point a lot of work was being done in a short period of time by very few people or maybe one person and many oversights were made.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: The "original" ending of Mark (present the cases)

Post by neilgodfrey »

rgprice wrote: Thu Sep 29, 2022 12:55 pm
Is it not adding to the difficulty of interpretation if we imagine a copyist adding a passage/s that run counter to the whole thrust of the gospel without any further additional text to at least somehow attempt to support or smooth out what is apparently a blatant contradictory statement that goes against the entire narrative? How could such a copy ever be accepted by anyone else at the time with such a blatant stain in the text?
Not necessarily. There are many examples of this in the NT canon. 16:7 seems like it could be explained as a later editor wanting to quickly and simply pull the story back in line with expectations that Jesus accepted and supported Peter.
Are you sure? It has taken centuries for people to notice certain contradictions in texts that suggest interpolations but they are still controversial in many cases. The sorts of contradictions you are positing in Mark, I suggest, are a different order and rely on an interpretation that runs counter to many other interpretations.

What worries me about your thesis that the editor was in haste is that it sounds like an ad hoc attempt to patch up a theory. Can you provide a sound historical reason for such haste that goes beyond speculation?
rgprice wrote: Thu Sep 29, 2022 12:55 pm
The thing about the NT works is that a lot of what was done really does look simply sloppy.
The examples you have given are debatable, though. That's a silly statement to make, I know, because everything is debatable, of course. But I think you are running the risk of interpreting the gospels in such a way as to set up a scenario to make your point, while risking leaving others behind because they read the gospels quite differently and in ways that do make coherent sense of some of those "contradictions" -- especially in the case of Mark. Or in other cases, where contradictions are certainly real on any reading, do they all have the same explanation of "sloppiness" or is there something more to be discerned. Example, in Paul's letters, we can see evidence of attempts to change the message of a letter by supporting one contradiction by adding others to at least change the overall message of Paul.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: The "original" ending of Mark (present the cases)

Post by neilgodfrey »

I should add that I agree with you that there are many instances where there are signs of doctrinal wars -- these explain some of the additions to the texts. But I don't see how some of the problems you identify in Mark are explained by that context.
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Re: The "original" ending of Mark (present the cases)

Post by rgprice »

neilgodfrey wrote: Thu Sep 29, 2022 1:15 pm What worries me about your thesis that the editor was in haste is that it sounds like an ad hoc attempt to patch up a theory. Can you provide a sound historical reason for such haste that goes beyond speculation?
Following Trobisch, the first edition of the NT was produced in the mid second century. It was put together to counter Marcionism/Gnosticism. The first edition of the NT is what Irenaeus was reading, and essentially all proto-orthodox and orthodox readers subscribed to it.
The examples you have given are debatable, though. That's a silly statement to make, I know, because everything is debatable, of course. But I think you are running the risk of interpreting the gospels in such a way as to set up a scenario to make your point, while risking leaving others behind because they read the gospels quite differently and in ways that do make coherent sense of some of those "contradictions" -- especially in the case of Mark. Or in other cases, where contradictions are certainly real on any reading, do they all have the same explanation of "sloppiness" or is there something more to be discerned. Example, in Paul's letters, we can see evidence of attempts to change the message of a letter by supporting one contradiction by adding others to at least change the overall message of Paul.
The editing problems in Luke 4 & 5 are other major issues. The writer of Luke has Jesus go to Nazareth first, where he makes the statement about repeating the deeds he has done in Capernaum, except he hasn’t been to Capernaum yet. While this might be viewed as just some strange anomaly, it happens in chapter 4 again just a few verses later, when Jesus goes to Simon’s house (Luke 4:38) before meeting Simon (Luke 5:5-11).

It seems to me as though generally more revision was done to the beginning and ending of many works, with much of the content in the middle being left unrevised, even when it contained problems.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: The "original" ending of Mark (present the cases)

Post by neilgodfrey »

rgprice wrote: Thu Sep 29, 2022 1:53 pm
neilgodfrey wrote: Thu Sep 29, 2022 1:15 pm What worries me about your thesis that the editor was in haste is that it sounds like an ad hoc attempt to patch up a theory. Can you provide a sound historical reason for such haste that goes beyond speculation?
Following Trobisch, the first edition of the NT was produced in the mid second century. It was put together to counter Marcionism/Gnosticism. The first edition of the NT is what Irenaeus was reading, and essentially all proto-orthodox and orthodox readers subscribed to it.
Does that explain such a rush job, though?
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