brenmcg said

godspell said

brenmcg

Mark believed what every other new testament writer believed – Jesus was Lord, the Father was God, and the Lord was God.  

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You really need to avoid blanket statements like that.  

acts 2:36 “Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.”

acts 2:39 “The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call”

The writer of acts believed that Jesus was Lord and that the Lord was God.

The final line of acts 2 is “And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved”. The question is, and its an unanswerable question, who’s being referred to here? is it Jesus or is it God?

All four gospels (Mark is no exception) claimed Jesus to be a man

All four gospels claimed Jesus to be the Messiah

All four gospels claimed Jesus was the Son of God

All four gospels claimed Jesus was Lord (in the sense of of Isaiah 40:3)

There is no progression here.

 

The Scribes and Pharisees in the Pericope left.  There’s no reason for them to come back.  There’s no mention of them coming back.  They never did come back.  The story ends there.  And then gets inserted into the collection of stories in that chapter, long after its author is dead. 

It takes place in the temple courts. They “leave” one-by-one until Jesus is left alone with the woman. But the temple courts haven’t emptied, Jesus and the woman are “alone” despite being surrounded by people. He tells the woman to leave and sin no more and then begins speaking to the crowd in the temple courts again.

If you think the progression from the PA to John 8:12 is strange, the progression from the previous chapter to 8:12 is irreconcilable.  

Nobody is saying the temple courts are empty, but the Scribes and Pharisees left, and after that humiliation at the hands (or index finger) of a Galillean peasant, they are not coming back for more.  

The later reference to Pharisees doesn’t mention Scribes–why?  it’s not the same Pharisees, and the chapter never originally had the pericope, which doesn’t match up on any level–stylistically, or thematically.  It’s so obvious–unless you just don’t want to see it.  And you don’t.  

None of the quotes you list have anything to do with Jesus being God.  “Lord” doesn’t mean what you want it to mean.  

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Kyrios or kurios (Ancient Greek: κύριος, translit. kýrios) is a Greek word which is usually translated as “lord” “master” or “teacher”. … It is used in the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament. Kyrios appears about 740 times in the New Testament, usually referring to Jesus.

And in classical Greek, it referred to the head of a household.

“A man chosen by God” means Jesus is a man, and not God.

The process of divinization wasn’t complete even after John’s gospel was written.  Jesus to the author of John was the Incarnate Word of God, a divine pre-existent being, but still not the Supreme Being.  It took a lot of time for Christians to figure out some way to justify being a monotheistic religion that still believed in God in several persons.  NONE of the gospel authors believed Jesus was co-equal with God, but they hold to increasingly higher Christologies–which proves, yet again, that Mark came first.

As your repeated refusal to respond to my common sense declaration that your reasons for believing all this are entirely religious in nature proves that I hit the nail squarely on the head.  🙂

If Pilate knew Jesus to be innocent, why would he give the order for crucifixion?  The priests have literally no power over him at all.  He went out of his way to publicly flout Jewish beliefs and sensibilities. 

The entire exchange was fabricated after the fact.  Not necessarily by Mark, since Mark had earlier sources that are now lost, which might in some cases have been based upon events unrelated to the crucifixion of Jesus.  Accounts of the Passion are all heavily fictionalized, because so little was known about what happened, due to the confusion that reigned after Jesus’ arrest.  It was just too important an event for early Christians to say “We don’t know what happened.”  So they filled the gaps as best they could. 

Robert said

But Mark doesn’t begin his gospel saying Jesus’s father was Joseph and end it saying his father was Frank.   

Frank isn’t a very Jewish name.  🙂

Mark is using “Lord” to mean “Messiah.”  Not God.  John isn’t proclaiming the coming of God, but the coming of a man who is greater than himself, the true Messiah (who people think John is, and went on thinking well after he and Jesus were dead).  

The Messiah is supposed to be a mortal man in the Jewish tradition.  Mark sees Jesus as the Messiah, a mortal man adopted by God as his son. Lord has come to be a reference to God in the Christian tradition ONLY because Jesus was divinized later on, and Mark’s use of the word was then reinterpreted accordingly.  Jesus refers to God as ‘Abba’, using the Aramaic, which Mark dutifully translates for Greek readers.  He calls God his father, as any devout Jew might do, but he has a bit more right, since God has chosen him.  Why doesn’t he call God Lord in Gethesmane?  Because it’s not the right honorific.  The Messiah is Lord–and teacher.

Obviously many deeply religious scholars have concluded Mark came first–Bart did before he ever got around to being agnostic.  So again, your argument fails, and you refuse to answer the question, which IS answering the question.   

But in any event, we were discussing the pericope adulterae, and that’s not in any of the synoptics.  Nor was it originally in John, but my question is, if your main interest is in proving Mark didn’t come first, why do you care about whether the pericope is original to John?  Makes zero difference to the synoptic order of publication.  

99% of what you’re arguing here doesn’t even have anything to do with Markan priority.  If Mark thought Jesus was God, and all the other gospel authors thought so, then that isn’t an argument for anyone’s priority.  So obviously it’s more important to you that all Christians thought of Jesus as God from the start than it is to determine who said it first.  Q.E.D.  But you have to admit the divinity of Mark’s Jesus is hardest to justify–so you’d like to undermine Mark, by taking away his priority.  Say that he just edited Matthew and Luke, with their deeply conflicted nativity stories that were tacked onto the original story, which didn’t have any virgin birth in it.  

It’s not hard to figure out.  But it’s pointless trying to get you to admit it.  Far as I’m concerned, by refusing to respond honestly, you have conceded the argument.  

brenmcg said

godspell said
If Pilate knew Jesus to be innocent, why would he give the order for crucifixion?  The priests have literally no power over him at all.  He went out of his way to publicly flout Jewish beliefs and sensibilities. 

Yes but he was warned by tiberius to stop doing it.

The chief priests are part of the ruling class and Pilate has to work with them to keep the peace. If they want something enough, if it doesnt hurt Rome, and they warn of a possible riot, Pilate will give them what they want.  

This is the same Tiberius who expelled thousands of Jews from Rome in 19AD, after compelling many others into military service, from which they were normally excused, because a Roman woman converted?  Yeah, he was a mensch, that one.  

Ah, there’s the cock crowing.  Took you long enough to answer a very simple question.  Your motives for obsessively arguing Matthean priority remain ambiguous.

The fact remains, Pilate, for quite a long time AFTER his reported upbraiding by Tiberius, got away with very brutal treatment of the Jews in Palestine.  Tiberius cared nothing for the feelings of Jews, as his past behavior indicates–the only goal was to avoid having to expend blood and treasure subduing a rebellious province.  Pilate was eventually removed from his position because it was felt he was unnecessarily provocative, but who seriously thinks that refusing to crucify a minor cult leader (accused of being an insurrectionist himself) was going to provoke an insurrection?  The temple leaders were not militants, their positions (and their lives) depended on peace as much as Pilate’s did, and if they did desire Jesus’ death, it was to prevent him from exciting the populace.  (They didn’t understand him much better than Pilate, but at least they could engage him in conversation–Pilate and Jesus did not have a shared language to converse in.)

There is no historical basis for Pilate’s words and actions in the Passion story (or any tradition of freeing a prisoner for Passover)–his desire to free Jesus doesn’t track with his known patterns of behavior–he is known to have executed other Jews who were clearly innocent of any serious wrongdoing.  He would perceive Jesus as a Jew, but a Jew who was unpopular with the most influential of his co-religionists, and therefore someone whose death would not cause any unrest (and in fact it didn’t, in the short run).  He’s informed Jesus aspires to be king, he sees no reason to doubt this, and as Bart says, he probably didn’t even speak to Jesus at all.  

Jesus was tried and found guilty by the Sanhedrin, and handed over to the secular authority for execution (ironically, later supposed followers of Jesus would follow this same pattern during the Inquisition).  He had defied both the temple and Rome, and I would say they were collaborators in his death.  But Pilate probably never gave the decision a second thought.  It was hard for Christians to accept that the death of the Messiah (and later, the Son of God, and then God Himself) could be so inconsequential.  

Matthew has a story nobody else has, about Pilate’s wife (unattested to anywhere else) telling him she had a prophetic dream, and that he should avoid having this man’s blood on his conscience.  What this proves is that the author of Matthew knew Pilate’s behavior as described in Mark (which he had read) made no sense.  

You argue that his behavior (which you seem to consider to be a historical fact) is motivated by fear of Tiberius, but Matthew argues otherwise.  Because nobody in that time period would believe Pilate would get in any trouble for killing an accused aspirant to kingship in Palestine, who had no influential defenders among his own people.  Matthew is trying to make Mark’s story more credible, but in fact the story Mark tells about Pilate and Barabbas has no basis in fact at all, and is probably not Mark’s own creation, but rather a legend that came into being to fill very significant gaps in the knowledge of early Christians about what had happened after Jesus’ arrest.

There is no historical basis for there having been any significant unrest in Jerusalem around that time–Josephus is very thorough in his recounting of such events.  So where did these prisoners who had committed murder come from?  Roger David Aus provides a potential answer–a much earlier insurrection against the Herodian client kingship, which led to Herod the Great’s son pardoning some of the people involved in that uprising–one of whom had a name very similar to Barabbas.  Bar Abban.  Aus thinks Mark was copying an account written after Pilate was replaced with a much less sanguinary governor, who took a more conciliatory tack with the Jews. 

The story Mark copied and adapted would not necessarily be meant to be taken literally–it was in a tradition of Jewish religious literature where different stories would be combined to make a larger point.  But later Christians, who (like Mark and probably all the gospel authors) were not Jewish, would fail to understand the context of the earliest Christian writers, who were raised in the Jewish tradition, and still considered themselves Jewish, as Jesus did.  Many things were lost in translation, and I don’t just mean from Aramaic and Hebrew to Greek.  

There was a regrettable desire among these new Christians to separate themselves from the very people who had produced their savior, motivated partly by a desire to not be seen as insurrectionists themselves.  Depicting a Roman governor as hard but fair (if unable to understand the man he was executing, which is true enough) was useful.  Nobody really knew what had happened, because there were no witnesses to be questioned.  No Christians (and probably no Jews) saw any putative dialogue between Jesus and Pilate, and Jesus and Pilate would not have been able to have engage in any such dialogue, because they had no common tongue.  

Your primary concern is Matthean priority, for reasons you have not chosen to share.  But as I’ve already said, there was no reason for Mark to cut out Matthew’s explanation of Pilate’s attempt to show mercy–the prophetic wife.  Mark cares about motivations as well, but the story he’s copying provides none, since the original readers were supposed to understand that this isn’t meant as a literal recounting of Pilate’s actions but rather an interpolation of an earlier story about a different client ruler.  Matthew doesn’t understand this, so he tries to improve on Mark’s story.  And in so doing, proves Mark came before him.  But not first.  Let me make that very clear.  We do not now, nor probably ever will, have the very first written accounts of the arrest, trial, and crucifixion of Jesus.  They would have been written in Aramaic, and when most Christians were unable to read that language, those accounts ceased to be copied, and were lost to history.  

As a courtesy, I would ask you to refrain from using the quote function, which unnecessarily complicates our exchanges.  Simply type your answers to the points I’ve made.  I would also request that you be concise, but as the saying goes, judge not lest ye be judged.  😉

My personal library in this field is pathetic.  But (as you may be referencing) I work for a pretty decent university library, which does give me the opportunity to broaden my reading, when I have the time.  Mainly I just download Bart’s stuff to my Kindle, though we do have pretty much all his stuff up in the stacks.  

I agree with Bart that Mark was not Jewish.  He probably knew some Jewish Christians (the knowledge of Aramaic argues for that), but he was not one himself.  So I think it unlikely he would have been familiar with the Archelaus story himself, or that he would have the idea of using it to plug holes in the existing Passion narrative.  It makes much more sense for a Jewish writer to remember the much earlier story (that none of the early Christian writers would have witnessed), which was a huge thing for them, but not for anyone else, which is why it basically never gets talked about outside of Jewish circles.  An internal quarrel tends to remain internal.

If Mark knew the author of this hypothetical work, he would be familiar with its genesis, and in that case I don’t believe he’d use it.  It wouldn’t resonate for him the way it did for the earlier writer.  The reason Aus thinks this lost book would have been out in the years after Pilate was removed, is that the new Roman governor was much easier on the system, and this created a more positive feeling towards Roman governors in general, that retroactively gets applied to Pilate.  This author is Jewish, but he’s at odds with most of his fellow Jews, and particularly with the Temple authorities of that time (who are also gone by the time he writes).  

How did the Old Testament writings become Holy Writ?  They were originally just things people wrote for a small educated audience, and had no authority whatsoever.  But when rediscovered, a generation or so later, with the authors no longer around, they took on authority–a work that has no living author (or none you can find) feels more authoritative.  You can build your ideas upon this pre-existing foundation, and the author isn’t around to tell you you’ve misunderstood.  For all intents and purposes, God (Or Moses.  Or Mark.  Or Matthew. Or etc.) becomes the author.  

Aus’ argument is hard to summarize, particularly when it involves so many things I’m not conversant with (or languages I’m not  conversant in).  But I am a connoisseur of good arguments, and I think he makes one here.  At least it’s some kind of explanation for a story that otherwise makes no sense on any level.  There were no people named Barabbas (though there were names that could get turned into that).  There was no tradition of releasing prisoners, and there probably weren’t a lot of prisoners to release, because there had been no recent insurrectionary violence (Matthew may have known this, and thus avoids repeating Mark’s mistake of identifying what Barabbas was charged with–keeps it vague).  Most importantly, Pilate was not even the least bit inclined towards clemency when it came to radical Jewish leaders, whether they were violent or not.  

Aus believes the work was fairly popular among Aramaic-speaking Christians who could read, which wasn’t a huge audience, but it would have included Mark.  But Mark not being Jewish, and coming along decades later, he didnt’ quite understand what he was reading.  

I’m not saying I know this is what happened.  I’m just saying it’s the best explanation I’ve seen to date for a story that has bugged me a long time now.  And not just me, as you well know.