Another dead bot and an old thread that just never took off, although interesting.
I’ve wondered if there is a relationship between Mark’s lack of a description of post-resurrection Jesus experiences and the fact he has Jesus demonstrate his magic powers in the body of the gospel. I’m not really talking about healings and exorcisms but episodes like Jesus walking on the water and the Transfiguration.
Mark 6-
When evening came, the boat was out on the sea, and he was alone on the land. When he saw that they were straining at the oars against an adverse wind, he came toward them early in the morning, walking on the sea. He intended to pass them by. But when they saw him walking on the sea, they thought it was a ghost and cried out, for they all saw him and were terrified. But immediately he spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” Then he got into the boat with them, and the wind ceased. And they were utterly astounded…
Mark 9-
Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling bright, such as no one on earth could brighten them.
If, as scholars think, Jesus was made the divine Son of God at his Baptism in Mark, his ontological status must also have changed. He now has powers beyond the human. The disciples can heal. The disciples can cast out demons. But Jesus has something else. Something demonstrating his divine status before his death and resurrection.
Why would Mark end his gospel at 16,8 and then recount the narrative of Jesus’ life as a series of not merely mundane miracles, but even multiple epiphanies? Were these two choices related?
While the author’s original intentions are occluded from us we can examine the effects that are achieved by the portrayal as we have it.
We have two references to Jesus “going ahead” of the disciples to Galilee after the crucifixion.
But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.
-Mark 14,28 NRSV
But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.
-Mark 16,7 NRSV
Of course many folks have used these passages to speculate that we have lost the original ending which presumably would have described an “appearance” by the resurrected Jesus. But, if as many suspect 16:8 is the original ending, why include this promise? I begin to wonder exactly what is being promised here? Just an appearance of Jesus? Or is Mark saying that the Parousia itself will take place in Galilee? Mark knows that the Temple and the city of Jerusalem are destroyed. He probably knew that there was a substantial Jesus community there at least up until the Revolt. Does Jesus’ command for the community to return to Galilee mirror the historical movement of the Jesus community from Jerusalem back to Galilee in wake of the destruction resulting from the Revolt? Mark associates the fate of the Temple with the imminent Parousia but perhaps these for him still future events will take place in Galilee?
Those are questions. Not claims.
To the larger issue of what Mark is up to, I think the gospel would turn out to reflect a transitional phase of the movement. The earliest view was that Jesus was made divine at his resurrection. Mark has him divinized at his Baptism. I think Mark still views the resurrection as an apotheosis. But by creating (or using) the Empty Tomb in the way he does, he makes possible the later views of the resurrection as some sort of resuscitation. If 16:8 is the ending then the Empty Tomb becomes an aniconic image of the resurrection. No “appearances” are required. An empty grave is all you need to know. So everyone get to Galilee like Jesus told you.
In his commentary on 1 Enoch, Nickelsburg discusses the evidence that during the Hellenistic period the Galilee was a hotbed of Jewish apocalyptic thought. Scholars often speculate about where a figure like Jesus could have received his ideas. It’s interesting to think about Jesus being raised in an area with such a past association.
You know, I wonder: Sepphoris–in Galilee, near Nazareth–surrendered during the first Jewish revolt without fighting, and so were spared much devastation.
I wonder whether that was the subtext of Mark’s ending: Had the women related the message, had the early followers done as instructed (setting up shop in their old stomping grounds, rather than Jerusalem), they might have escaped the destruction.
As a Markan completist I note that Lohmeyer’s commentary still hasn’t been translated into English. Who dropped the ball? My German is strictly WWII movie level (Achtung! Verboten!). Robert, if you read German get on it. Baby Jesus weeps until this mission is accomplished.
If Mark expects the Parousia in Galilee then it would imply that he is writing in the afterglow of the destruction and not late enough for the fervor to die down. Right?
Xeronimo74, you’re the only author of any of these dead threads I’ve rejuvenated to come back.
By the way, I’ve just used chatGPT to transcribe and translate the first chapter of Lohmeyer’s book. I know German and can read Fraktur (although very slowly). The result seems to be quite good:
I. The Problem.
1.
Paul refers to various appearances of the risen Lord. In 1 Cor 15:3–8 he lists five of them and names as the sixth and last the one granted to him. He also touched on their differences in the manner of the individual appearances; all are introduced uniformly by a ὅτι, the place where they occurred, the time is completely unmentioned, only the persons by whom “he was seen” are briefly named. What he transmitted and in part received as transmitted is more a list than a report. In contrast, the Gospels possess a great and colorful wealth of manifold features; they narrate, they do not just list. Matthew reports two appearances of Jesus: the first takes place before the two women who had visited his tomb on Easter morning (Matt 28:9f.). As they hurried back into the city of Jerusalem to report to the disciples what they had seen and heard at the grave, Jesus meets them. A second time he appears to the eleven disciples on the Galilean mountain, to which he had “summoned” them through the women. Matthew, as is known, recounts no such event, but lets the angel, who speaks to the three women in the tomb, recall previously reported words of Jesus (16:7, cf. 14:28): “He goes before you into Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you.” All the more detailed is Luke. At the beginning of his Easter narrative stands the deep and beautiful story of the two disciples who are walking to Emmaus; it lies sixty stadia from Jerusalem. On their way, Jesus joins them unrecognized and is recognized by them in the breaking of bread. At the end of this account, when the disciples have hurried back to Jerusalem, they report that Jesus was also “seen by Simon.” And immediately, a new appearance before “the eleven and their companions” follows (24:33ff.). It takes place in a room in Jerusalem and ends with Jesus “leading them out as far as Bethany.” There “he withdrew from them, and they returned to Jerusalem with great joy and were continually in the temple” (24:50–52). If one adds what the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles reports, then Jesus “presented himself alive” to the apostles, appeared to them “through forty days,” and spoke to them “about the kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3). And all this happened in or near Jerusalem; for he commands them “not to depart from Jerusalem” (1:4). Luke tells of no Galilean appearances, indeed he outright excludes such by the given command, which the disciples follow faithfully until and beyond Pentecost. The fourth Gospel reports differently again. On Easter morning, Jesus reveals himself to Mary Magdalene at the tomb; in the evening of the same day, he appears to “the disciples” who had gathered behind closed doors for fear of the Jews, and this appearance repeats eight days later when Thomas is with the disciples. To these two appearances is finally added, according to chapter 21, a third. The place is no longer Jerusalem, as before, but the Sea of Tiberias; the time is very vaguely indicated: μετά ταῦτα – a phrase which in the fourth Gospel usually denotes a significant temporal interval – but the disciples who experienced this third appearance are all the more precisely listed: Simon Peter, Thomas, Nathanael, the sons of Zebedee, and “two others of his disciples” (21:2).
2.
So appearances of the Risen One in Jerusalem stand alongside or opposite such in Galilee. The difference is not limited to the canonical Gospels, but is also preserved in apocryphal writings. From the ending of Mark, which is attributed to the presbyter Aristion (16:9–20), we learn nothing new; it names no place and offers only an epitome of the reports of Luke and John. But the Gospel of the Hebrews tells previously unknown things (according to Jerome, De viris illustribus 2): “But when the Lord had given his linen cloth to the servant of the priest, he went to James and appeared to him… And shortly thereafter the Lord said: Bring a table and bread! … He took the bread, gave thanks, broke it and gave it to James the Just and said to him: My brother, eat your bread, for the Son of Man has risen from among the sleeping.” It may not be without substantive significance that again no place of the appearance is named here; yet it probably follows from the event that this appearance took place in Jerusalem rather than in Galilee.
The Gospel of Peter reports something else. It knows a report of the finding of the empty tomb by the women, which resembles that of Mark, also in the closing remark: “Then the women fled full of fear.” But then follows immediately, in Hennecke, New Testament Apocrypha 2 (p. 63, No. 58): “Now it was the last day of the Unleavened Bread, and many went home to their houses, as the feast had ended.
But we, the twelve disciples of the Lord, wept and were full of grief; and each one went home grieving over what had happened. But I, Simon Peter, and Andrew, my brother, took our nets and went to the sea; and with us was Levi, the son of Alphaeus, whom the Lord…” Here the fragment breaks off. It therefore knows no appearances of the Risen One until the end of the Passover feast, which is known to last eight days; it thus excludes narratives such as are found in Luke and John. But it has surely been able to live from another kind of revelation of the Risen One; it may, as the appearance with the nets and the fishing seems to indicate, have been similar to what is reported in John 21. Important is that this appearance of the Risen One took place at the Galilean sea. What Matthew tells of a mountain in Galilee as the site of such an event continues in Gnostic and anti-Gnostic writings. The Epistula Apostolorum puts revelations to the disciples into the mouth of the risen Lord; they are given in Galilee. According to the introductory words of the Coptic Sophia of Jesus Christ, he had, “after he had risen from the dead, taught his twelve disciples and seven women disciples on the mountain in Galilee, which is called …” These last two reports will be rated historically quite low, and one will also have to compare that the Pistis Sophia lets similar revelations take place on the Mount of Olives. But they do show a trend of the tradition, above all in the negative sense, that to appearances of Christ in Jerusalem no such teachings and revelations are ever attached.
3.
What is the significance of the fact that at one time such appearances are reported to us in Galilee, another time in Jerusalem; that one Evangelist follows only the Jerusalem tradition (Luke and the Gospel of John), another only the Galilean (so apparently Mark, then Matthew and the Gospel of Peter); that only the Gospel of John includes both traditions, although aside from the place they align with his own and the previous two, whereby it should be noted that the Galilean appearance is reported only in the appendix, chapter 21; and finally, that Paul and similarly Mark 16:9–20 are silent on all place indications? It seems necessary to distinguish three different lines of local tradition. Of these we can leave the third relatively unconsidered; it was probably more widely spread than one would initially suppose. For would one not also have to count among it such motifs as John 14:23: “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word … and we will come to him and make our home with him,” or the well-known word from Revelation 3:20: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him”? However one may interpret such sayings, all these appearances are not interested in the day of Easter. But what is the situation with the Jerusalem and Galilean accounts? The problem is old and much discussed. One has attempted to eliminate the contradiction by inventing for the latter a place “Galilee near Jerusalem”; we can here remain silent on such attempts and efforts of artificial harmonization. If one does not wish to settle with the contradiction more poorly than well, only the possibility seems to remain to declare either the one or the other tradition as “inauthentic.” Johannes Weiß forcibly eliminated the Galilean tradition as an old error of Mark. But how can a tradition be refuted to which all later reports about the beginnings of the early community seem to contradict? More thoughtfully and more profoundly grounded was the objection of G. H. Bousset against the Galilean accounts; and to him Kirsopp Lake has, though with some reluctance and a slight modification, joined. If one admits the Galilean appearances, then the early community would have had its center in Galilee, but not, as Acts and Paul teach, in Jerusalem. Moreover, if Peter had truly seen the Lord in Galilee – “and it was God’s testimony to Peter’s decision, which was decisive” – then the much greater difficulty arises of explaining why he returned to Jerusalem; one would have to invent a new appearance that countermanded this command, as under other circumstances the well-known Quo vadis? story expresses. Thus the appearance to Peter could also have taken place only in Jerusalem; “this, and not the old lands, was the holy ground – Jerusalem, not Galilee.” These reasons certainly and weightily speak for the originality of the Jerusalem tradition, and it is undecided whether they are refuted by an exception, as most recently formulated by M. Goguel: the Galilean stories are the oldest tradition; the Jerusalem ones only a “substitute” tradition for these Galilean ones, understandable from the importance that the Jerusalem early community gained for the history of the early Christian movement. However, even in light of Bousset’s reasons, the question remains from what origin this Galilean tradition stems and to what purposes it serves.
All these discussions show with great clarity – and G. H. Bousset has sharply emphasized this one point – that the problem of the relationship between the Jerusalem and Galilean appearances cannot be solved in isolation, but only in connection with the larger question of the beginnings of the early Christian community. But it also points not only necessarily forward into the history of the emerging Christian church, but equally backward into the history of Jesus. For by what should Galilee precisely be appointed as a site of these appearances other than by the fact that Jesus and his disciples originated from it, and that the Master chiefly worked there? By what should also Jerusalem and its surroundings be analogously graced other than by the fact that here his life and work came to an end, and this not only in an external sense? Finally, the problem is also not only of topographical and historical, but also of theological nature. Bousset has called Jerusalem, not Galilee, the holy ground, which the appearances of the Risen One as such have consecrated. If it were so – we will later see that the view is at least one-sidedly formulated – the question remains, for what theological reasons such holiness was due to one place and not to the other. But all these questions first press toward a more precise analysis of the Gospel accounts.
another small mistake: ‘that one Evangelist follows only the Jerusalem tradition (Luke and the Gospel of John)’ > that should be (Luke and the Gospel of the Hebrews)
I am doing this as an amateur with not much time. I would need to carefully verify the original text and the transciption. at a first glance I’d say though that at least 95% is correct.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
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Robert