dbz wrote: ↑Sat Aug 24, 2024 12:10 am
Mark then uses John as a
deus ex machina by which Jesus can go through a baptism and thereby represent for Mark’s readers what a baptism is—an adoption by God to become a Son of God (
making this Mark’s birth narrative for Jesus), and an anointing of the messiah, and at the same time
a symbolic death and resurrection. Which is why
Mark has Jesus begin his story with a symbolic death and resurrection, and end his story with an actual death and resurrection, so readers would get the point what a baptism is: what Jesus went through, so shall you. There are many elements borrowed and reversed between the two stories as I show in
OHJ.
There is nothing here Mark wouldn’t readily invent. So we can’t know that any of it is true.
... Mark is reversing the “Moses in the wilderness” narrative, where the Jews went through temptations in the desert and failed, then crossed the Jordan into the holy land. In both cases by “Jesus” miraculously parting the Jordan: Joshua, remember, is the same name [through the Greek Iesous]. Mark has Jesus “part the Jordan” symbolically through baptism. He even retains the literal reference to a “parting” with the parting of “the heavens”
...
[...]
--Carrier (December 2019).
"Tim O'Neill & the Biblical History Skeptics on Mythicism".
Richard Carrier Blogs.
I looked at Mark 1 and 2 yet still
wondered what Carrier was getting at here: I wondered if he was referring to Jesus' baptism or the sojourn in and return from the wilderness. It would have been lazy to ask, so I consulted
OHJ and searched the word, 'symbolically.'
... John the Baptist is exploiting Exodus symbolism by baptizing in the Jordan: the waterway crossed from death to life (from the slavery of Egypt to the paradise of the Holy Land—by way of ‘the wilderness’ in between), using...a baptismal re-birthing ceremony.
Carrier, R. On the Historicity of Jesus, p.113; Sheffield Phoenix Press. Kindle Edition.
.
the
Golden Ass of Apuleius (also known as the
Metamorphoses), which is a kind of Acts for the Isis cult...which medieval Christians preserved intact...tells us many things about the religion, including its initiation ritual, [which,] Apuleius tells us, resembles a ‘voluntary death’ (
instar voluntariae mortis), after which one is ‘reborn’ (
renatus). After you were baptized into the cult (literally, with an ablution of water), the day of initiation became a new ‘birthday’ and the priest who initiated you became your new father.
As Apuleius describes it,
‘I approached the border of death, and once the threshold of Proserpina [Lady Death] was crossed, I was conveyed through all the elements, and came back [to life]’ (all of which he again calls a ‘rebirth’).
Christianity’s initiation ritual also involved a baptism, and was conceptually identical: you symbolically underwent death and resurrection, and are thereby ‘reborn’ with a new ‘father’ (in this case, God—see Element 12—although, just like in the Isis cult, in earliest Christianity the one who initiated you could also be called your father: 1 Cor. 4.15).
Mithras cult also involved an initiatory baptism. As did the Eleusinian cult, which even practiced substitutionary baptism on behalf of the dead (to bring salvation to those who hadn’t yet been baptized in life), centuries before Christians adopted the same practice, as evident already in the earliest known churches (1 Cor. 15.29), which is yet another unlikely coincidence. In many if not all the mystery cults, these baptisms effected salvation in part by washing away sins, exactly the same function claimed of Christian baptism.
On the Historicity of Jesus, pp.143-144. Kindle Edition.
.
Element 12: From as early as we can ascertain, Christians believed they became ‘brothers’ of the Lord Jesus Christ through baptism (Rom. 6.3-10), which symbolized their death to the world and rebirth as the ‘adopted sons of God’, hence they became the brothers of the Lord, the son of God. Thus, Jesus was ‘the firstborn among many brethren’ (Rom. 8.29).
On the Historicity of Jesus, pp.150. Kindle Edition.
.
eta
I missed the point here
(two commas added here):
baptism is—an adoption by God to become a Son of God (making this Mark’s birth narrative for Jesus), and an anointing of the messiah, and, at the same time, a symbolic death and resurrection.
