Stephen said

Bruce said:
…one of the more plausible stories would be with the connivance of enough in the crowd.

Just how popular would Jesus have been?  Mark describes an itinerant Galilean ministry and one trip to Jerusalem.   At the time of the Passover Jerusalem would have been full of people.  How many would have even known who Jesus was?  I’ll freely admit to a prejudice against any account that relies on Jesus being special. Jesus’ distinctiveness would have been assigned in retrospect. 
  

Note that while a walking palm frond demonstration while he rides into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey would have to be done by enthusiastic followers, the connivance of the crowd in the Temple scene doesn’t necessarily rest entirely on his own followers. If he read the room well and was engaging in an action that the crowd was enthusiastic about, then some of the connivance of the crowd may have been spontaneous.

To be clear, I am not going to argue that the contrary is implausible … to be crucified, Jesus would have done something to provoke the authorities, if at least some of his followers spread his teaching sometime in the immediate aftermath of that, people would have wanted the story of how that went down. If he was simply arrested after the provocation in the Temple courtyards, that really goes against the stories of David and Saul, where the spirit of God always warns David at the last minute that Saul or his forces are about to catch him, so he slips away. So the story shifting in the following decades from an arrest after the provocation in the Temple courtyards to slipping away and being arrested after a traitor sold him out to the authorities might indeed have been covering an embarrassment for a Royal Messiah, a new stem from the stump of Jesse.

So while I am not convinced that it is implausible that Jesus got away after executing a well planned provocation in the Temple courtyards, I am not going to argue that it is the only plausible way that the main public events in Mark’s narrative could become part of the assumed knowledge of Mark’s audience.

Yes, I am not inferring a “walking demonstration” of supporters waving palm fronds or using them as sun shades for their Rabbi riding a donkey into the city … rather, giving an example of an original event whose tale could grow in the telling into something quite like Mark’s account over a period of decades.

So if it could get there from being at least that … and someone would not have to be a deep student of the apocalyptic traditions to realize what was being referenced … there’s a range of possibilities up from there which could grow into a similar tale, because “crowds thronged the sides of the road, everybody hailing him, everybody waving palm fronds” seems like what the tale is going to be growing toward, given three or four decades and an expanding rather than shrinking base in Jerusalem proper and it’s hinterland.

There is also Prof. Tabor’s thesis that Jesus was brought into the John the Baptizer movement and, went off to run a branch operation, which would then imply that his ministry after John the Baptizer’s execution would already have a jump start as representing one of the factions among the post-execution evolution of John the Baptizer’s followers.

Under that thesis, “who is this Rabbi Yeshu’ of Nazareth that we’ve heard about” might have a lot more zing to it among John the Baptist’s followers and sympathizers than just some random Rabbi from Galilee might expect to receive. That could well make the Temple authorities (who would have to explain to the Romans the meaning of a Rabbi riding into Jerusalem on a donkey) even more careful about setting off a riot.

Robert said
If Jesus was baptized by John as depicted by Mark, he would have certainly traveled to or perhaps even lived in Judea at an important time in his developing sense of identity and mission. Sticking strictly with the gospel of Mark and avoiding the gospel of John for the time being, Jesus seems to have had contacts in and around Jerusalem to acquire the colt for his messianic entry into Jerusalem, to spend his evenings in Bethany with Simon the leper, to make arrangements for the Passover meal. These clues were sometimes used in the past to argue for Jesus already being part of a network of some kind in and around Jerusalem. I don’t think it is implausible to imagine that Jesus could have been a teacher of some repute in Jerusalem. Or he was more of a country bumpkin apocalyptic religious fanatic skandalized by the sausage-making temple-industrial complex during his first Passover visit to Jerusalem. How can we reliably decide one way or the other? 
  

What we can reliably decide would be much smaller things than this. Whether Jesus was baptized by John the Baptizer … the way that the synoptic gospels along with John work progressively to minimize it’s significance strongly suggests that it was so deeply embedded as a known fact that it had to be written around, when it would be more convenient to remove it.

The elephant in the room there is that being baptized by John would normally signify in a certain sense joining his movement, and while Mark and his plagiarists rapidly move to the execution of John the Baptizer, “John”, the gospel author, appears to have retain an indication that Jesus is more than just a mere member of his movement, in that he also begins baptizing. And there is also the situation of his disciples ask to be taught to pray as John the Baptizer prays.

Was he already an established Rabbi who decides to be baptized by John so he can spread his message among John’s flock? Was he recruited by John due to being from a known or reputed junior branch of David’s lineage … where the major branches had long since been pruned … a “stem from Jesse’s stump”? Was he a student of John the Baptizer, with the tutelage already pruned away in the decades before and the “graduation” into his own ministry at his baptism a point that had stubbornly refused to fall away? Maybe there are wisps of hints to the question in what the canonical gospel authors are trying to avoid saying, but with our seemingly earliest source seeming to care so little about the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, and likely 4 decades or more passing until the Mark that we have received is first written down, it seems likely that any strong evidence one way or the other has long since been taken out by entropy.

Robert said
.. I haven’t read Paula Fredriksen’s discussion of the temple pericope, but I suspect it may merely be part of her project to interpret Jesus and Paul as fundamentally if not necessarily typical 2nd-temple Jews. I have read and highly recommend her book on Paul, and I certainly subscribe to the Paul-within-Judaism school of interpretation, but I think she sometimes takes things a little too far in arguing for hyper-kosher interpretations.  …

And in a context with a high degree of factionalism, it is quite easy for it to be typical to not be a kind of “average” person of the time … we see in some parliamentary democracies where over 50% of support is attracted by the main center right and center left parties, and there is one or two “centrist” parties in between them which attract less than 10% of support, so the “typical” thing to be is “either center-right or center-left”, not “an average of left and right”.

So too in the array of members of the House of Hillel and House of Shammai, the kind of compromise between the two that was arrived at later might be by no means typical of Judeans or Judean background immigrants into the Galilee of the 1st century CE. Add on top that the typical Judeans of the period would not have been apocalyptic preachers, and it might be even more surprising if we are looking for people who are “typical” members of their society.

Which is, I hasten to add, a crying shame, because it would be a tremendous place to put our analytical lever if the contrary was more probable.

The equation we are talking of is a growth equation, C_t = [(1+g)^t]xC_0

As a back of the envelope estimate, 40% growth per decade takes the faithful from 1,000 in the middle of the 1st century to millions by the middle of the 3rd century. So the three puzzles are where the initial 1,000 come from, why it is able to grow at the outset, and why it is an ongoing exponential growth rather than a growth logistic, which starts out with exponential growth but then has diminishing growth until it reaches its carrying capacity.

Sketching things out a bit, for me, the real puzzle is the first one. Most religious sects in the Greco Roman world were not aggressive at proselytizing, but we know that the apocalyptic movements in 2nd Temple Judea under the Roman conquest were regularly sprouting up, aggressively preaching the need to do whatever was precisely necessary to do in the specific case to address the fact that the present age was coming to an end … and then fading away when the present age failed to come to an end.

For whatever reason the Jesus movement was growing prior to the destruction of the Temple, it’s growth did seem to involve attracting the interest of non-Judeans as well as Judean, which is not all that surprising given the already existing “God fearers”, but then there is a half century when the Jesus movement has a second wind as an apocalyptic movement, as the first sign of the ending of the age has, in fact, just happened, and there is a ready made explanation for the destruction of the Temple in Jesus already ascended to heaven as a direct intercessor, so God did not protect the Temple from destruction because it had become redundant. With the growing delay, the evolution of the Kingdom of God from being at hand as in the immediate future into at hand as in the divine realm in parallel to the secular one, which believers are put into contact with is the mutation which prevents the apocalyptic proselytizing from fading away but converts it into an ongoing proselytizing project. And then with the Bar Kohkba revolt, the destruction of Jerusalem, exile of Judeans faithful to the traditional beliefs and reconstruction as a Greco-Roman city suppresses the growth and development of the original Jewish core of the Jesus movement and freed the Gentiles among the faithful to continue adopting elaborations and developments which were most capable of maintaining growth of the faithful.

And then as it continued to grow, the magic sauce is that originally emerging from one of the rare monotheistic faiths, every convert to the Jesus movement reduced the ranks of believers in the old pagan ecosystem of gods and goddesses, so that by simply growing, it drained alternative established religious sects of their ability to stand in the way of its growth, which could well be why no religious sect indigenous to Greco-Roman society or polytheistic sect incorporated into the Greco-Roman religious ecosystem was able to do what the Christian faith ended up doing. They could only achieve a growth logistic, because they were growing into that pagan ecosystem, rather than supplanting it.