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.)