As Derrida demonstrated, we always have to be careful about drawing conclusions about the sources for stories based on the content of those stories. For example, consider the Temple Cleansing story and the plethora of possible source-explanations for it:
(1) Maybe the story is accurate and Jesus caused a disturbance at the temple.
(2) On the other hand, maybe the episode never happened, because there would have been guards there to prevent such a disturbance. Maybe Mark was part of an anti-temple sect similar to the Qumran sect and so was presenting in the story the idea that just as it was no longer the season for figs (the withering of the fig tree story), so too was it no longer season for the temple (the temple tantrum being sandwiched between the fig story).
(3) Maybe the story started out as a sermon Jesus liked to give about the corruption of the temple, and that sermon simply morphed over time into the temple cleansing episode that Mark inherited.
(4) Maybe the temple cleansing episode started out as a dream someone had about Jesus, which morphed, over time, into the temple tantrum story that was passed down to Mark.
(5) Maybe Mark was apologetically justifying after the fact that the Jews really didn’t need the temple, in the wake of its destruction by the Romans
(6) And this could go on indefinitely …
Anyway, Derrida’s point is that when we draw conclusions about sources that lie behind narratives we need to be very careful, because often times our analysis can just be wishful, lazy thinking.
Robert said
Bart and other Jesus Questers (eg, EP Sanders, John P Meier) claim that the ‘Temple Cleansing’ story is independently attested by the synoptic gospels on the one hand and the gospel of John on the other, but that view is not shared by other likewise highly respected scholars (eg, CK Barrett, Frans Neirynck, etc) who think ‘John’ knew or knew of one or more of the synoptic gospels or parts thereof.Of course, even if one assumes such independent attestation, that does not guarantee that some such historical event actually occurred. It just means that the story predated both the gospels of ‘Mark’ and ‘John’.
Josephus also knew of a certain Jesus (son of Ananus) of his own time who went around disrupting temple feasts by predicting the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple for 7+ years until it was under siege by the Romans and he himself was said to have been killed by one of the Roman missiles. When he first started his prophetic woes against Jerusalem, he was (like the earlier Jesus of Nazareth) handed over to the Roman procurator to be scourged. See the story ** you do not have permission to see this link **(Judaen War 6.5.3 Whiston [= 6.300-309 Niese]).
Did this story about Jesus son of Ananus morph into Jesus of Nazareth’s lament over Jerusalem (Q 13,34-35) and his previously unknown and therefore esoteric, ie, private prediction of the destruction of the temple (Mk 13 et par, including Jn 2) after its prophetic ‘cleansing’ (Mk 12 et par, including Jn 2)? Or were Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem, his public prophetic gesture disrupting temple activities, and his private prediction of the destruction of the temple reduced to a tragic and even somewhat comedic tale eventually recounted by Josephus? Or are the points in common between the two stories merely coincidental?
By the way, how familiar are you with the work of Jacques Derrida?
Assuming that the historical Jesus ben Ananias story unfolded 62 – 69 CE, there may have been too little time to “morph” into the version supplied in the hypothetical Q document.
Robert said
I tend to agree. But it is the ending of the Jesus ben Ananias story that is most suspect so the historical kernel could have taken place anytime in the lead-up to the war, even before 62, and some people do date Q very late (eg, 70 CE Fleddermann). It is also worth noting that Mark presents Jesus’ prophecy of the war and destruction of the temple as a private teaching for the disciples only, which could have been done because Jesus was not known to have publically predicted the destruction of the temple prior to Mark’s gospel. Fleddermann (and some other scholars) think that Mark was dependent on Q and date Mark to 75 CE.
I agree that the ending of Josephus’ Jesus story probably is too good to be true. But since Josephus was intimate with Jerusalem and was present there at the outbreak of the war, there is good reason to think that he knew the core of the story first-hand, although the Urban Legend daemon has given it a minor brush-up. A lesson to draw from it is the way the Jewish magistrates passed the buck to the Romans, and the kind of standard procedure the poor fellow was subject to.
It is a very hard to think Mark was directly dependent on Q, and still left out the Sermon on the Mount material and the Lord’s prayer. Most top scholars seem to think so. The date of Q is difficult , but sometime between Paul and Mark, that is, the sixties, at the latest.
Robert said
There are some important Mk-Q overlaps that do indicate that there was at least some contact between Q-traditions and Markan traditions. Fleddermann’s view is that Mark wrote a genuine narrative and did not need to incorporate extensive teaching material because the Q document would have remained in use alongside Mark’s narrative. It is definitely a minority position but it has been defended by some excellent scholars (eg, Lambrecht, Schmithals, Schenk, Catchpole, Fleddermann & Mack) and cannot be excluded from consideration when approaching overlapping texts from a diachronic perspective.
Matthew and Luke did not think so. Independently they thought Mark and Q should be merged. So would most likely Mark have thought, too, had he known Q.
The hypothesis would require that Mark selected only narrative elements from Q. This is not very likely.
Postmodernism and Biblical Hermeneutics is an interesting issue!
(2) On the other hand, maybe the episode never happened, because there would have been guards there to prevent such a disturbance. Maybe Mark was part of an anti-temple sect like the Qumran sect and so was presenting in the story the idea that just as it was no longer the season for figs (the withering of the fig tree story), so too was it no longer season for the temple (the temple tantrum being sandwiched between the fig story).
(3) Maybe the story started out as a sermon Jesus liked to give about the corruption of the temple, and that sermon simply morphed over time into the temple cleansing episode that Mark inherited.
(4) Maybe the temple cleansing episode started out as a dream someone had about Jesus, which morphed, over time, into the temple tantrum story that was passed down to Mark.
(5) Maybe Mark was apologetically justifying after the fact that the Jews really didn’t need the temple, in the wake of its destruction by the Romans
(6) And this could go on indefinitely …
“I was walking by the beautiful, bright window with an adorable dog peeking through. I wanted it.” – Searle asks: Does the person want the dog or the window?
So too do we need to be careful when we, as Ehrman does, infer that a writer has new sources because there is material unique to his gospel. For instance, as Carrier points out, there is new information communicated about Moses from later writers outside canonical sources, but we would not infer these later writers had new sources that went back to Moses. Similarly, it would be a paralogism to conclude that just because Luke has material unique to his Gospel, that this material reflects a unique source – let alone one that goes back to the historical Jesus (especially given the way we know Luke invents material for Acts, given that we can fact-check Acts against Paul’s letters – much is also assumed, for instance in Mark, because we have no documents to fact-check Mark against).
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert