Ken Olson wrote: ↑Mon Oct 31, 2022 8:14 am
I have a question for those who take the abomination of desolation, or desolating sacrilege in Mark 13.14 (or Matthew 24.15) to refer to the statue of Hadrian or the temple of Jupiter or something else in the reign of Hadrian such as the Bar Kokhba Revolt.
On this reading, to what does Mark 13.1 refer:
As he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” 2 Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”
This would seem to refer to the temple and the buildings which were destroyed in 70 CE in the fist Jewish War. The temple was not rebuilt after the first war, so it would seem that Mark 13.1 would have no clear referent to events in the second war. Did Mark's Jesus (or Matthew's) 13 refer to events about 60 years apart in chapter 13, conflating events of the two Jewish Wars? That is, of course, possible. Does it seem likely to you?
Best,
Ken
On any reading -- and I am one of those guilty of see-sawing between post 70 and post 135 dates for Mark -- Mark 13:1 is a reference to the 70 destruction. The reason for that interpretation is the narrative setting.
If we interpret Mark as some sort of
"shell-shock" response to the destruction of 66-70, we have a problem if we also think that Mark used writings of Josephus. (I'm thinking of Duran's
Power of Disorder. --
though Sinouhe, for one, is not impressed with this interpretation) If Mark was using Josephus (and I'm thinking here of Josephus's Cassandra story of the Jesus ben Ananias fiasco) then Mark is not writing in the immediate aftermath of the war but some time afterwards. (I'm assuming "Mark" would have learned the information and other details about the war from Josephus and not other sources.) Would not one think that such a time lapse would have given him and his audience opportunity to come to terms with the consequences of the war at least to the extent that he is not likely to be writing in a "shell-shock" bewilderment still trying to make sense of it all?
The aftermath of the 66-70/73 CE war did see outbreaks of wars and rumours of wars and possibly three messianic pretenders rising up, leading to more bloodshed, from Mesopotamia to Cyrene. There is some evidence that his violence was the consequence of dashed hopes for a rebuilding of the temple. (Trajan had reneged on what was taken to be a promise to rebuild it.)
(Some readers will know that I am not very strongly persuaded by the claims that the first Jewish war was related to messianic movements, but that the evidence of popular messianism are more discernable after the war.)
The text of Mark is loaded with doublets, with ironies and double-meanings. I see the narrative of Jesus in this gospel as little more than a personification of an ideal Israel who, because of the sins and blindness of those within, is crucified and buried. (His tomb carved out of a rock is a play on Isaiah's passage that speaks of the temple becoming a tomb -- as per Karel Hanhart.) The resurrection of Jesus is nothing other than what the "real Israel" has now become -- a spiritual nation, gone ahead into the "land of the gentiles".
The destruction under Hadrian was the cruelest dashing of hopes insofar as it was the dashing of the last hopes for a rebuilding of the temple and restoration of the "Jewish nation".
As you can probably guess, there is much more behind the above scenario than I have spelled out here. If a chief source for Mark was Josephus, then we are looking at a date no earlier than in the late, not early, 70s. But if Mark was written in the later 70s, how do we account for the failure of this writing to make any discernable impact in the historical record until the mid second century?
If we read Mark's Jesus as a personification of the Jewish people (idealized), then does that not suggest that the author has had time to reflect on events and to let them develop in his mind in a new theological scenario? If we also take Mark as expressing some dislocation, some failure to fully grasp the shock of the disruption, then does that not also suggest that he is writing very close on the heels of the disaster?
Given, as I said, Mark's penchant for ironies and doublets, are the above questions reconciled by placing Mark post 70, thinking through the meaning of all that has happened, in the meantime watching the aftermath play out with renewed and even greater violence against the Judeans infused with messianic and temple-rebuidling hopes, and writing in the immediate aftermath of the events of 135?