Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

I can't imagine a true pauline who invents a Jesus who, even if he is a pauline Jesus who does and says pauline things, remains afterall a Jesus never met by Paul.

So I wonder: is Matthew the earliest Gospel?

In this way you can explain at once time:

1) why Jesus has to be earthly (against Paul)

2) why there is not Paul (against Paul)

3) why a pauline Mark has to accept, velim nolim, points 1 and 2.

My question to the experts of the forum: is Mark's priority a rock certainty?

A possible objection against a Matthean priority:

1) Matthew has to accept a negative (and therefore previous) portrait of the disciples.

2) only a pauline would invent a Messiah who is killed by the Jews.

It may be that Matthew is patently designed against the Marcionite/Pauline idea of the Law being overturned.

Take note of the following:




The above references, subtextually, are to Paul, or Pauline Christianity. What's more is that this scene doesn't appear in Matthew, while Mark and Luke are seemingly apologetic towards him.

The could mean that, either Mattew is aware of Mark and Luke and wanted to expunge this apology, or Mark and Luke are aware of Matthew's criticism of Marcion and Paul.

But then you have the Simon of Cyrene figure appear in all of the Synoptics, but is absent from John. This is (to me) a conscious effort to at once diffuse the Johannine tradition associated with Marcion, and to incorporate said tradition into the proto-Orthodoxy. The reason for this is because John (or ur-John) is itself designed to promote the one who comes after Jesus, that being the Paraclete: i.e. Paul.

And I'm thinking that Simon does make an appearance in the John. He is the Beloved disciple. Compare the possible root of Charinus, carus (favoured, loved one, dearest) in association with the Beloved. And then compare the Greek Kharinos to Kyrēnaios, Cyrene.

All of this is to say that Simon of Cyrene was himself a later figure derived from the Beloved disciple (and possibly conflated with Lucas-Andrew. Indeed even the figure of Lucas of Cyrene and Leucius Charinus bare conspicuously similar names).

So Paul is indirectly referred and alluded to in the Gospels.

Giuseppe

How much of a fact is it?

By choosing to frame his story within Jesus' public career, Mark cannot have Paul as a character as such. Nothing prevents Mark from having a "Paul surrogate" character, however, and I think that he does, in the unnanmed scribe who feeds Jesus a softball question after the contentious "should we pay taxes?" and "come the resurrection, whose wife will the lady be?" debates.

https://uncertaintist.wordpress.com/201 ... met-jesus/

If so, then we see once again what I think is obvious from Mark having created one of the most beloved, sympathetic and widely imitated characters in world literature, his Peter (the "same guy" who was Paul's nemesis and James' boys' patsy in the letters).

While it is clear that Mark and Paul share an interest in (if not necessarily share agreement about) many issues, if Mark is partisan towards Paul and against the disciples, then he does a great job keeping this to himself. If the scribe is a surrogate Paul, then despite displaying a clearer and far more sophisticated understanding of Jesus' message than any of the disciples ever does, he doesn't join up. That is, his performance is not so different from that of the disciples, whose realitically depicted shortcomings provide one of the bases for imagining Mark to be "against" them.