Robert, I don’t really care about convincing you or anyone else here. Therefore, I don’t accept any ‘burden of proof’. I just want to have a conversation, which you don’t seem capable of, because you want to see yourself as representing consensus, which of course you don’t. You aren’t qualified to do that. You are not nor ever will be a real scholar, and using scholar-ese in your posts doesn’t change that. This is a forum for NON-scholars.
Maybe you’re just unusually formal in your mode of speech (I doubt very much you express yourself this way in person). But essentially, you act like some kind of gatekeeper and we have to know the magic words to gain entry. Nuh-uh. Nope. No way. I don’t recognize your authority. I just respect your opinions. When I can figure out what they are.
So there we are. I think we’ve made some progress here, but it’s been in spite of you, not because. You could just opt out of the exchange, but you can’t, because you need to control the process, and this is the only place you feel you can do that.
vergari made a very convincing presentation–that probably took more effort than it was worth–to show you that you’ve actually been all over the place on this. Because it’s not about exchanging ideas with you–it’s about controlling the process through which ideas are communicated. Well, good luck with that. Peace, out.
Robert said
I’m still not sure what you mean by embarrassment. If Matthew wants to portray especially the Judean leadership (and also the people following their direction) as completely opposed to Jesus, then he might want to portray Mark’s righteous member of the council otherwise than as a member of this council. Is that what you mean by embarrassment? Matthew is not embarrassed by Joseph of Arimathea. Rather he transforms him into someone who was not a member of the evil Sanhedrin but rather into one of the good guys, someone who had been ‘taught/discipled by Jesus’.
I do have to say this is getting really frustrating.
I never once made any argument about embarrassment. Godspell did. And then you adopted it for purposes of making your own argument. Exactly why you keep asking me to explain an argument made by someone else, that you have already utilized in your own argument, doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
“Matthew transforms Joseph into someone who was not a member of the evil Sanhedrin but rather into one of the good guys, someone who had been ‘taught/discipled by Jesus’.”
Okay, but what is the point of Matthew doing that on his own, without an independent source for this information? Do we have an example of any other character that Matthew transforms from Mark into a disciple of Jesus?
Robert said
vergari said
I should add here that the historicity of the burial of the body was never a matter of dispute, even with followers of Judaism and Islam, until the concept of mythicism came around in the 19th Century.Rather, the earliest polemic against resurrection was not that Jesus wasn’t crucified and buried, but that (following crucifixion) his body was stolen from the tomb by his disciples. This, obviously, makes it into Matthew. It also survives well into post-War Judaism and is reflected in the 2nd Century Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho and later makes it into the Toledot Yeshu.
Islamic traditions dating to the 8th and 9th centuries hold that Jesus didn’t really die at all. But these seem to be laid on theological foundations, rather than historical ones.
I would actually characterize skepticism of the burial as a subset of mythicism, to wit: a simple, not supernatural claim (like Jesus’s existence, apocalyptic preaching and crucifixion) is treated as non-historical.
All of this is going far afield from merely trying to understand Matthew’s redaction of Mark’s statements about Joseph of Arimathea, whether Matthew is necessarily relying on a separate tradition about Joseph or modifying the story from his own redactional perspective. This question need not be weighted with questions related with Islamic theology or modern Jesus mythicism.
Oh I disagree. Particularly when denying an independent source for Joseph is used as a stalking horse to argue for the non-historicity of the burial in a tomb.
Robert said
The point, as I see it, is that Matthew is making the members of the Sanhedrin worse so so someone who is courageous, who is waiting for the kingdom of God, who dares to request the body of Jesus and to bury it, doesn’t really fit as a member of the Sanhedrin. Rather he was one of the good guys.I don’t think Matthew’s treatment of Joseph is necessarily part of a general tendency to Christianize characters in general. But nor have I ever done a study of how Matthew treats other figures from Mark’s gospel so I can’t say off-hand.
He does make John the Baptist into more of a believer in Jesus than Mark or Q did:
Mk 1,9 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee [] and was baptized by John in the Jordan.
Mt 3,13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. [14 John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” 15 But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented.]
Do you think the benefit of the doubt should be given to Mt 3,14-15 being derived from an earlier written source?
So two things can be true at once, right? Mt 3:14-15 may reflect a fictional embellishment meant to demonstrate that even John was a believer in Jesus. But that doesn’t mean that it didn’t come from an earlier source or tradition that Matthew was drawing upon.
What’s interesting about this example is that, if Q was one document which Matthew and Luke both faithfully copied, then this wasn’t in Q. Does that mean Matthew invented the story? Not necessarily, but if he did, the motives seem far clearer than to recast Joseph as a disciple.
Yes, oh mighty gatekeeper. Took you a long time to get to that. 😀
Mark’s gospel is the least embellished, but individual stories may be longer, probably because he got them from sources that go into some detail. Matthew and Luke don’t always find the extra detail convenient. But boy, do I hope bren doesn’t find this thread.
Robert, the more you deny you said this or that, the more it becomes impossible to see what we’ve been arguing about.
Maybe you just neet a bit more work at communicating your viewpoints and your dissents? Because you know, vergari and I are not at all slow on the uptake (not that you said we were, don’t start complaining that I’m misquoting you!) If we’ve misunderstood you, as you keep insisting, it’s not because we want to, or because we’re not capable of understanding. You can’t say it’s just me. vergari has produced some very well-written posts here, that express complex viewpoints without descending into scholar-ese, a dialect best left to professional scholars, and even they should try to avoid it when possible.
I’m glad you agree with me on so many points. I’m sorry it took us scores of posts to arrive at that conclusion.
Robert said
Of course, two things can be true at once, and of course Matthew could also have been drawing from an earlier fictional embellishment (this was my argument above re Joseph and the historicity of the tomb), but I asked you if you thought the view that the benefit of the doubt should be given to Mt 3,14-15 being derived from an earlier written source? Is the burden of proof necessarily upon anyone who sees this as Matthean redaction?Recall also that I only brought up Matthew’s portrayal of John the Baptist in response to your unrelated question and explicitly not as support for an understanding of Matthew’s redaction of the Joseph of Arimathea pericope.
Now that we’ve gotten that illicit comparison out of the way, can you explain what it is you find unclear about Matthew’s recasting Joseph of Arimathea as a ‘disciple’? Is it because you are still interpreting this as some kind of embarrassment, contrary to the sense in which I have elucidated it?
We might be splitting hairs on the word “embarrassment.” Your formulation —
“The point, as I see it, is that Matthew is making the members of the Sanhedrin worse so so someone who is courageous, who is waiting for the kingdom of God, who dares to request the body of Jesus and to bury it, doesn’t really fit as a member of the Sanhedrin. Rather he was one of the good guys.”
** you do not have permission to see this link ** — sounds quite a bit like embarrassment, to wit: the version of the story as Matthew found it confused and distressed him, because it did not comport with his preconceived notions of how a Sanhedrin should behave, while simultaneously being a key figure in the most important event in Matthew’s faith. Maybe that’s not technically embarrassment, but your description has a lot in common with embarrassment.
As to Matthew’s recasting of Joseph as a “disciple,” I tend toward the simpler explanation that Matthew was simply aware of a separate tradition or source. This also conforms to John’s gospel, which has Joseph as a disciple, but a secret one.
As Luke’s formulation agrees with Mark’s–there are righteous Jews, and of course we pray for them to see that Jesus is Messiah, but they can enter the Kingdom simply for being righteous. Matthew is moving away from that, and John rejects it altogether. Accept Jesus as savior or face eternal death.
There was no Joseph of Arimathea, because there was no Arimathea, and we can be pretty sure no Christians knew the inner workings of the Sanhedrin at the time of Jesus’ ‘trial’. But there would have been later conversations with unconverted Jews in Jerusalem, and some would have said they strongly disagreed with handing one of their own to Pilate for execution (the Pericope Adulterae, among other things, indicates that many Jews bitterly resented Rome reserving the right of capital punishment to itself). That would be a very controversial decision by Caiaphas, given the increasingly strong influence of the Zealots, who would eventually plunge Palestine into rebellion. There were many divisions of opinion among Palestinian Jews, not just one or two.
So what do the increasingly gentile Christian onlookers to the inner turmoil of the Jewish majority make of this? Some, like Matthew and John, say that the only good Jews are converted Jews, and the others are beyond help–they are more guilty than unconverted pagans, precisely because Jesus came to them first, and they rejected and betrayed one of their own–his blood is on all of them and their children, forever, unless they convert, since sins can only be forgiven through Jesus.
Others, like Mark and Luke, hope for reconciliation, and Joseph becomes a symbol of the righteous Jew, as certain non-Jews in the OT are held up as examples of righteous gentiles, who are drawn to YHWH from outside Judaism. Not so much a difference of belief as a difference of temperament.
But in the end, Joseph has to be made not merely into a Christian, or a disciple, but a saint. And much later, the first Christian missionary to the heathen English. Oy vey.
It all began with Jews telling stories about other Jews. Then converted pagans, lacking the context to fully understand the stories, making those stories over into something else.
Robert said
No. I’ve already responded to this above. If you have any specific argument for why this must be so, let’s here it.
“No, you’re missing the point entirely. Your use of a continuum of ‘more Jewish’ to ‘less Jewish’ to relatively date the gospels is not valid. ” comment 89
How about lower christology to higher christology. Is that a valid way to date the gospels?
If Mark has a lower christology than Matthew is that evidence for Mark being earlier than Matthew?
Robert said
Not necessarily. Paul had an early very high christology, arguably higher than any of the synoptics.
This would be a correct response if I’d asked “is a higher christology proof of a later gospel”?
A higher christology is not proof of a later gospel but it is evidence for it. A more Jewish oriented passage is not proof of an earlier gospel but it is evidence for it.
Is it only true claims that can have evidence? or can false claims have evidence supporting them?
Can Matthean priority have any evidence supporting it? Or do observations only count as evidence if they support Markan priority?
Can you give rationale for why the presence of the Our Father in Matthew but not Mark does not count as evidence for Matthean priority; but in such a way that the same rationale can’t be used to discount all forms of evidence when deciding on priority?
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