Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Peter Kirby wrote:No worries. This thread is developing so quickly, I'm also having a hard time keeping up and making sure that I don't miss replies.

I think you may have missed one of mine in response to Neil, where I pointed out that Matthew keeps the names of the sons of Mary after all.

Ben.

Peter Kirby wrote:I have no idea what the connection is, but the Gospel of Thomas has the enigmatic saying, "Be passers-by."

Jesus "passes by" or at least walks as if to pass by the disciples when on the sea.

Whether there is significance in the different words used I don't know: παρελθεῖν for Jesus and παράγοντά for Simon.

I am beginning to think my ignorance is being reinforced with this thread. The questions are becoming more numerous, the answers seem more distant than ever.

What is illuminating to me is how great a role subconscious mental stuff seems to play in our interpretations. It seems hard for some of us to wrap our head around the idea that the reference to Simon might be glowingly positive, while it seems patently obvious to Peter that it might well be so. We are all reading the same text, I think. And I hope we are all trying to be reasonable and open-minded. There must be something in our backgrounds or general make-up that makes it hard to accept things that others accept without hesitation.

Ben C. Smith wrote:

neilgodfrey wrote:Fwiw: Notice that Mark names the two sons of Mary at the end, too -- Joses and James. (If indeed this is the same Mary or even the mother of Jesus.)

Matthew keeps Mary but drops the names of her sons.

Matthew names the two sons in 27.56.

Ben.

So he does. Thanks.

And once again he rewrites Mark to make the narrative sound more "natural", removing one more of Mark's apparent incoherences or illogicalities (which I think are explicable in terms of symbolism/theological messages that Matthew wanted to disown).

Ben C. Smith wrote:Here is an example of something I was not understanding:

Peter Kirby wrote:And he is following Jesus, if you picture it in your head, quite literally.

When you used the term literally (which you also used in the post I was responding to), I was picturing Simon dragging the cross, with Jesus being forced along the road ahead of him. Literally. But when I read the verse, my mind was not sure whether to picture Jesus walking ahead of Simon, behind him, or to the side of him. That is where the term literally took me, until I realized that perhaps you meant that he was following Jesus in the act of taking up the cross; first Jesus did it, then Simon did it. But that possible understanding of your words came only later. So again, I will reevaluate and try to understand what you are saying.

Ben.

I'm not making a big deal out of this or saying that I can clarify the exact mental image that should be invoked. But I am mentioning it in the context of the argument that the reference to Simon is negative because Simon is 'not following Jesus' and is only 'passing by'. He is more than a passerby. (Also, the fact that he is passing by could even, hypothetically and with reference to other ancient texts, be a positive point.)

neilgodfrey wrote:I am beginning to think my ignorance is being reinforced with this thread. The questions are becoming more numerous, the answers seem more distant than ever.

Ben C. Smith wrote:What is illuminating to me is how great a role subconscious mental stuff seems to play in our interpretations. It seems hard for some of us to wrap our head around the idea that the reference to Simon might be glowingly positive, while it seems patently obvious to Peter that it might well be so. We are all reading the same text, I think. And I hope we are all trying to be reasonable and open-minded. There must be something in our backgrounds or general make-up that makes it hard to accept things that others accept without hesitation.

Fair points all.

Honestly at this stage I think we are only collecting hypotheses and arguments. We need not rush into forming a final analysis.

Ben C. Smith wrote:It seems hard for some of us to wrap our head around the idea that the reference to Simon might be glowingly positive, while it seems patently obvious to Peter that it might well be so. We are all reading the same text, I think. There must be something in our backgrounds or general make-up that makes it hard to accept things that others accept without hesitation.

No, no, no. I'm not denying the positive role of Simon of C at all. Of course it is "patently obvious". But there are other interpretations out there that do indeed have grounds for them -- whether we agree with them or not. In a discussion like this I think it is important to consider seriously all possibilities -- not just be arguing for our pet theories if we haven't yet considered carefully alternatives.

But it is so damn hard to be sure we are reading Mark without the baggage of Matthew and Luke and John and the whole Christian tradition thing. When I first read Mark as a teenager I recall being shocked at how dark it sounded. I have long since lost much of the depth of that sense of shock. I am sure that has much to do with the larger Christian tradition dominating my thinking.

Joe is right. Just reading Mark without any other knowledge of Christianity we really do have to ask just how positive Joseph of A is. Were the thieves crucified either side of Jesus (as substitutes for James and John) positive roles? Maybe they were. But there is a lot to consider here.

Mark's theology is not the theology of Matthew and Luke.

And it was not common practice for ancient authors to drop in names known to readers just for the wink value.

neilgodfrey wrote:Mark's games with names:

First, a no-name, the "mother in law" of Peter who has a fever. Compare hamah (mother-in-law) and hommah (fever).

Judas Iscariot. -- I think we know the associations there, at least for Judas.

....

And is not Cyrene also a likely pun on the meaning of Golgotha where Mark explains it as the Κρανίου τόπος -- the place of the skull (15:22)?

Thanks for the list. I have found many of the items unpersuasive in the past; others I find more likely; some I have not really considered before. I shall mull it over.

Ben C. Smith wrote:It seems hard for some of us to wrap our head around the idea that the reference to Simon might be glowingly positive

neilgodfrey wrote:I'm not denying the positive role of Joseph of A at all.

neilgodfrey wrote:Just reading Mark without any other knowledge of Christianity we really do have to ask just how positive Joseph of A is

I'm not completely sure, but maybe you were intending to write Simon here.

(You've corrected that now, so perhaps some of the following is moot.)

If not, the whole Joseph thing is a different subject and one that I evaluate differently (as the subjects are different).

It is only the whole named=bad thing that attempts to rope them in together, but I also reject the absolute and unforgiving named=bad idea, which seems particularly inapplicable if the person named here (for 'Simon') is actually Paul, which is the only hypothesis that I've been considering lately under which the reference to Simon was positive. This is a very specific hypothesis about a very specific named person. If that hypothesis is rejected, perhaps the reference to Simon would have to revert to another hypothesis where the referent is negative or non-positive, although I'm not completely sure why.

(I've also advanced a hypothesis under which the reference to Simon was very negative, but I was uncomfortable with it due to the way in which this Simon is proleptically described as one who takes up a cross in the saying, which is hard for me to square, not sure of all the fancy distinctions proposed in this context: i.e., named versus unnamed person as something that the reader should understand as significant, literal obedience versus symbolic obedience to Jesus as something the reader should understand as significant, the importance of not having the cross that is borne imposed by others, etc.)

neilgodfrey wrote:And it was not common practice for ancient authors to drop in names known to readers just for the wink value.

But it is common practice to repeat points that tend to misrepresent in a subtle manner the position of others that we either don't completely understand or are not very sympathetic towards. If there are people that have said that 'names were dropped' and that this was 'just for the wink value', then I don't know who they are, but they are not in this thread. It may be helpful to repeat what I've written upthread in a similar context:

neilgodfrey wrote:As for what the first readers had to go on are we not are overlooking Lemche's advice.

I have not suggested anything against the idea that the mention of the names contributed to a purpose. I'd suggest that the mention does. These concepts are not necessarily at odds. What we're interested in, I suppose, is what that purpose might have been. I agree it's not enough to say that the Gospel of Mark's author would have included a nod to Rufus and Alexander merely if they were people known to him nearby. There must also be a purpose.

I've suggested one or more that are possible, in the Simon=Paul context, that (a) they showed the spiritual offspring of Simon, thus forming part of the general reversal we see (which you have noted) where people are identified by their offspring, and/or (b) they showed powerfully the authoritative connection that these people had to an important person Simon, a source of authority better than the inferior befuddled disciples who had fled, and/or (c) they had the very prosaic function of further identifying Simon, which is how the text seems to present it on the surface anyway.

neilgodfrey wrote:

Ben C. Smith wrote:It seems hard for some of us to wrap our head around the idea that the reference to Simon might be glowingly positive, while it seems patently obvious to Peter that it might well be so.

No, no, no. I'm not denying the positive role of Joseph of A at all. Of course it is "patently obvious".

I am so confused. I said Simon, not Joseph of Arimathea. Did you mean Simon, and Joseph was a typo? Or did you read me as saying Joseph? ...?

But it is so damn hard to be sure we are reading Mark without the baggage of Matthew and Luke and John and the whole Christian tradition thing.

Totally agreed.

When I first read Mark as a teenager I recall being shocked at how dark it sounded.

I had the same experience. I used to call him Stark Mark. But Dark is good, too.

Ben.