How much historical information about Jesus does the Gospel of Mark present?  How do you date an ancient manuscript?  Why does Mark have a “messianic secret”?

These are among the very good questions I’ve received recently, and here is how I’ve tried to answer them succinctly.

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QUESTION:

How much of the historical Jesus does Mark capture, either purposefully or accidentally?

RESPONSE:

Well, it’s impossible to put a percentage on it.  For one thing, if it’s correct that Jesus’ lived for, say, 30-33 years (who knows?), it’s worth noting that Mark’s Gospel takes roughly two hours to read/recite.  Necessarily he would have captured only a tiny fraction of the historical Jesus’ life, even if he is 100% accurate.

He’s clearly not 100% accurate, so the question for most historical scholars is not how much of his life does he capture but how accurate is the information that he does give.

That’s impossible to quantify definitively, in no small measure be because different scholars would give different responses (though none of them in a percentage!).

What most agree on is that of the four surviving primary sources, Mark is the oldest, the basis for two of the others, and on balance somewhat more likely to be providing relatively accurate material than the others.  None of them can be used on their own, though; as with all historical sources for anything or anyone, they have to be used in combination and in light of each other.

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QUESTION

What is the process of assigning an ancient text to a certain a year? For example, where do you get 375 CE for the earliest text of Matthew? Do the authors write the year? Thanks!

RESPONSE:

I think you’re not asking when the text of Matthew was written (which was 80-85 CE or so) but when the oldest particular manuscript that has a complete copy of Matthew was produced.  The two oldest are called Codex Sinaiticus (because it was discovered at St. Catherine’s monastery on Mount Sinai) and Codex Vaticanus (because for centuries it had been kept in the Vatican library.  Why do we (I) typically say they date from around 375 CE?

There’s a discipline called “palaeography” (literally “ancient writing”) that dates  manuscripts, principally on the basis of handwriting analysis.  Since everything in antiquity was written by hand (no photocopiers!); and since the styles of writing in ancient languages changed over the course of decades/generations; and since some (not many!) manuscripts in, say, Greek and Latin have dates attached to them, we can know what handwriting generally looked like in this generation and that.  Expert Greek palaeographers can date a manuscript within about 50 years.  These two were both probably written somewhere between 350  and 400 CE or so, and so we can say 375 CE, plus or minus 25 years.   As you can imagine, different palaeographers come up with different dates for various manuscripts, and while there can be broad consensus sometimes, there is rarely any date that is absolutely definitive.

You can also carbon 14 date the writing material — in this case parchment — but that requires using small pieces of it that are destroyed in the analysis, making it a less preferred method.  When used, of course, they take small pieces that don’t have any ink on them!   In any event, since it is based measuring the half-life of carbon 14, found in all organic material until it dies, this kind of text can certainly tell you (again) a range of dates within which it appears the the animal whose skin is being used  (or the plant that is being used, in the case of papyrus) died, but not when the skin (or plan) was processed into a writing material or when, later, it was written on.   Its usually thought that if the animal/plant was killed at a relatively determinable time, it was processed into parchment/papyrus and used as a writing material not long after, but that’s not necessarily always the case.

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QUESTION:

Is the “Messianic Secret” indicative of an oral tradition that Jesus never said he was the Messiah and Mark had to come up with a reason why?

(Quick) RESPONSE:

That’s one of the explanations people have. The way to evaluate it is to see if there are any indications that Jesus did call himself the messiah (that is, historically, apart from the fact that in a Gospel such as Mark he tries to keep it secret).

My sense is that he did tell his disciples, and that’s how the authorities found out about it and crucified him for it. But it wasn’t widely talked about in his life, and Mark may be explaining *that*.