Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

GakuseiDon wrote: ↑Sat Aug 24, 2024 9:44 pm The difference is that Jesus is declared Son of God after the Spirit descends on him at his baptism by JohnB...

• Jesus magically withers a fig tree (11:12–15, 19–25).

• The sky tears open and a magical bird flies down to live inside Jesus’s body (1:10).
• God’s voice booms from the sky declaring Jesus his beloved son (1:11).

GakuseiDon wrote: ↑Sat Aug 24, 2024 9:44 pm

dbz wrote: ↑Sat Aug 24, 2024 12:10 amJesus from the start of gMark is based on Paul's Christology...

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Jesus is declared Son of God after the Spirit descends on him at his baptism by JohnB, whereas Jesus is declared Son of God by the Holy Spirit at the Resurrection
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Also, what do you mean by Jesus's divinity is "allegorized"?

Carrier wrote:

Carrier wrote: Mark having Jesus say—literal stories that are false—[that] are told to keep the secret allegorical truth hidden that will only be told to initiates. Just as Plutarch says the Osirians did with the biographies of Osiris. [...] Then, for the first time ever, John comes along and outright says it’s not allegory, it’s literally true, and you’d better believe it because it’s literally true.

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--December 28, 2019 at 1:55 pm

Mark 4 is a cipher that explains they are representing their story as history to disguise the truth from outsiders. Just as other religions did (e.g. Osiris cult). What John does differently is stop doing that: he denies he is doing that and insists what he says is literally true and is to be taken as literally true even by believers. And he is the first author ever to say that.

Thus it goes:

1. Mark writes an extended parable to disguise the teaching.
2. Matthew makes it look like scripture to disguise the teaching.
3. Luke is then the first to make it look like a history to disguise the teaching.
4. John is the first to insist he isn’t disguising anything but writing what even insiders had better regard as literally true.

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--Comment by Richard Carrier on December 28, 2019 at 2:03 pm per "Tim O'Neill & the Biblical History Skeptics on Mythicism". Richard Carrier Blogs. 22 December 2019.

Mark was a Pauline. We thus know he believed in the preexistence and divinity of Jesus.

You seem to be confusing his extended parable (the literal story meant to deceive) with what Mark actually believed (and what insiders would actually be taught his text meant, per Mark 4). John is not “increasing” the mysticism of Jesus belief. He is simply making it more literal and explicit—he has ceased using the allegorical tricks of the synoptics, and in fact repudiating them, by now insisting he isn’t writing allegory but literally true stories. The beliefs represented aren’t new. All the Synoptic authors will have believed the same things of Jesus. You keep confusing their technique of hiding their beliefs behind allegories with John’s decision to stop doing that, a decision that represents an increasing historicization of Jesus.

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----Comment by Richard Carrier on January 5, 2020 at 2:09 pm per "Tim O'Neill & the Biblical History Skeptics on Mythicism". Richard Carrier Blogs. 22 December 2019.

GakuseiDon wrote: ↑Sun Aug 25, 2024 2:22 pm And Mark got that from Paul, right? But he wanted to obscure it, for some reason...

Mark 4:10-13 relates Mark’s model for the whole Gospel as disguising deeper truths allegorically within seemingly literal stories (“parables”); and in doing so declares that the uninitiated will not be allowed to see or hear the real meaning, just as Paul says (in e.g. Romans 11:7-10, 1 Corinthians 2:9-10, etc.).
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I just noted Mark had reified earlier in Jesus’s explanation of secret teachings (Mark 4:10-13), which really is a key to Mark’s entire Gospel, including the scene in Mark 8, which isn’t really about Jesus having historically created food, but is an allegory for the Gospel itself.
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Robyn Faith Walsh’s Origins of Early Christian Literature. Now I can quote it:

[In Paul’s letters Mark] finds talk of Jesus as Christ, possessing divine pneuma (Rom. 8:9; Mark 1:10); a divine lineage of Abraham (Rom. 3, 4, 9; Mark 1); “pneumatic” demonstrations (1 Cor. 2:4-5; Mark 2:8, 5:1ff., 5:41ff.), including divination; demonstrations of power over demons, archons, and unclean pneuma (Rom. 8:38-39; 1 Cor. 15:24; Mark 1:23, 39, 5:2ff., 7:25): Jesus as a prophet for a new age (Rom. 3:21-22; Mark 1:1-15) or a New Adam (1 Cor. 15:45; Mark 1:12ff.); a failure to recognize Jesus as the messiah during his lifetime (1 Cor. 2:6-8; Mark 4:41, 6:2, 8:29, 11:27ff.); and an active principle of God’s pneuma bounding people “in Christ” through baptism (Rom. 6; Mark 1). He even finds talk of fellowship meals and a meal hosted by Jesus anticipating his death (the so-called Last Supper) with dialogue (1 Cor. 11:23-25; Mark 14:22-25) and mention of other characters like James and Peter (e.g., Gal. 2; Mark 3:20-21, 31-35, 8:31-33, 14:26, 66). The proper interpretation of Judean law and allegory also looms large in these letters (e.g., Gal. 1:6-11; Rom. 1:16-17, 1 Cor. 9:16; Mark 1:1, 2:18ff. [and one might add Mark 4:10-13–ed.]), as one might expect from a Pharisee.

Walsh, Origins, p. 132

So what Paul says the Christians were doing in general, Mark has Jesus do in particular, as a model. As I explained in both On the Historicity of Jesus and Proving History:

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--Carrier (25 October 2019). "Mark's Use of Paul's Epistles. Richard Carrier Blogs.

The Gospels clearly allegorize. Especially Mark. They are not saying anything literally. They are also keeping secrets, reserved for the oral instruction of converts (as taught by example in Mark 4:10-13; much of this instruction, backfilling the understanding of converts, may even derive from Paul). So if you want to find Pauline teachings in them, you have to look for the allegories, hiding those secret teachings by signaling them rather than explicitly stating them, just as Jesus himself is made to warn the reader.

Paul’s entire soteriology is: merge with Christ through baptism and communion (which shares in his death and resurrection); God will then adopt you as his son (thus making you a brother of Christ); in consequence of which, you will co-inherit with Christ God’s future Kingdom; and thus be raised from the dead; because Jesus paid for all your sins already (thus negating any need for the temple cult).

This is taught from the Baptism scene (it is a symbolic death and resurrection culminating in adoption by God: Mark 1:9-14; on its parallels to the crucifixion and resurrection narrative at the end, see my section on it in OHJ) and Communion scene (which is almost verbatim from Paul: Mark 14:22-25).

So fictive kinship replaces actual (as taught in Mark 3:31-35), the temple cult is negated and replaced (as taught in Mark’s fig tree/temple sequence, again see discussion in OHJ), because Jesus’s death replaced the atonement of Yom Kippur and the saving-from-death of Passover (the entire Barabbas-Crucifixion narrative: see discussion in OHJ).

The fate of the anonymous “young man” (loss of linen “body,” acquisition or transformed “body,” allegorically through his changed body from the Arrest scene to the Empty Tomb scene) then establishes what happens to those saved: the role of garments as body symbolism is even from Paul, as I prove in detail in my chapter on this in The Empty Tomb.

So Paul’s entire system is there. It just isn’t presented “literally.” Because that isn’t what the Gospels do. Indeed you’ll notice no Gospel ever explains what “the gospel” is yet says Jesus taught it a lot (so why don’t we hear what it is?); they instead have Jesus talk around it a lot, in metaphors and parables, and Mark even has him outright say that only insiders will ever be told what those things mean—so they won’t be in the written text at all.

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--Comment by Richard Carrier on March 23, 2023 at 12:23 pm