I might indeed, but I don’t think that was feminism, as Jesus saw it. It was more like he just stopped seeing gender as important (which would make sense if he thought there’d be no sex and reproduction in the Kingdom, or at least not as there had been before). Feminism thinks gender is supremely important.
Teresa of Avila is said to have been accepted as an equal by her fellow Spanish mystics (now all saints together), John of the Cross and Pedro de Alcantara–ordinary priests still treated her as a mere woman, but these monks respected her more than probably an man. The reason being that John saw bodies as just sheaths for the soul within, and Pedro tended to see men and women as ‘trees walking’, which I believe is from the NT, but I forget where. (Googles) Ah yes, Mark–the blind man who hadn’t quite regained his sight. And so saw more clearly. One can also point to the deep respect between Francis of Assisi and his former protegee, Clare.
I’m not saying this works for everyone, mind you. Well, nothing works for everyone.
I would have gone with Simone de Beauvoir, but my point was not to discard anything. My point is that feminism is the wrong word. It’s used as a catch-all for anybody who thinks women should be treated as individuals–as everyone ought to be. There was, of course, no such thing as feminism in ancient times, but that’s not the point either–you can be sympathetic to a school of thought, a social movement, interested in it, willing to learn from it, without identifying yourself as part of it. I am interested in Buddhism, but that don’t make me a Buddhist. I think it’s often useful to analyze history from an economic standpoint and I certainly believe class warfare is a thing, but I’m sure as hell no Marxist. In the fields of academe, feminism sells, so people looking to put a book out slap the word all over everything, like everybody knows what it means, when in fact almost nobody does. (Basically just people who read Simone de Beauvoir.) Well, this is getting offtopic.
I would not go so far as to say Jesus only treated women with respect because he was expecting the Apocalypse at any moment. I think it probably goes back to early formative experiences–possibly a very strong mother he both revered and rebelled against (an old old story where Jewish boys are concerned, and indeed boys in general, but some react differently than others). Pure speculation, but why is Mary such a big deal in the gospels when she never does anything? We don’t even know if John the Baptist had a mother. Well, you know what I mean.
If it’s all about how you treat people, how is it not about how you treat 51% of people? But more than that, women often get it more than the men do. He sees that, and he responds. As is true everywhere people are oppressed, women are the slaves of slaves in Palestine, and Jesus believes that nobody can be saved if they aren’t willing to serve. So women actually have a leg up on the men in that regard (as do literal slaves, another demographic Christianity appealed to early on).
Just talking to people who are accustomed to being treated as somehow subhuman as if they are fully human, as if their opinions and feelings mattered, would have set Jesus apart. He didn’t just preach to people, he conversed with them, took them seriously. We all know how that feels, how much it means, when you feel out of place.
The story of Mary and Martha isn’t feminist–it’s just human. Feminist would be Jesus offering to prepare the meal himself, but odds are he was a lousy cook. 😉
Robert said
If one assumes Matthew’s changes to Mark must have been due to Matthew knowing a independent tradition about Joseph of Arimathea, and if one also assumes that ‘John’ was completely independent of the synoptic gospels and secondary orality, one can arrive at the belief that there were at least two traditions prior to Mark’s gospel or his pre-Markan passion narrative. Those are not unreasonable assumptions, but nor is it unreasonable to attribute the changes in each of the post-Markan gospels to those authors.
What to do when faced with at two opposite assumptions–still a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest?
I’m not sure we need to settle on quite such reductionist apathy.
It’s perfectly fine to attribute reasonable probabilities to possible explanations. Is it possible that Matthew, Luke and John were each independently engaging in Markan redaction based on their own idiosyncratic ideas? Sure.
But is that more likely than that Matthew is writing based on an independent tradition — one that included a polemic against the rumor that Jesus’s disciples had robbed the tomb? and/or that Luke is doing exactly what he tells us he’s doing in the introduction to his gospel, i.e., drawing from earlier written accounts? and/or that John’s account has a nexus with a purported disciple of Jesus, as that gospel tells us?
To me, based on the evidence available to us (which is considerable on this issue), I think it’s more probable than not that Mark, Matthew, Luke and John are drawing on independent traditions in discussing the burial of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea.
And truthfully, pretty much everybody in this field (or kibbitzing online, which is all we’re doing) is, to some extent, hearing what he or she wants to hear (even if it’s simply because they want to believe they have the right end of the stick, picked the correct theory). So be honest and admit it. Get the log out of your own eye first.
The odds that nobody wrote a single word about Jesus’ life before Mark–not great. But until recently, I might well have believed that. Now I don’t. And I really don’t think there’s any scholarly consensus on that. But if there is, I’m not taking the word for somebody on this forum about it. Because nobody on this forum is a scholar. 🙂
** you do not have permission to see this link **
The Universe?
As a general rule, if I don’t use the quote function, I’m following up on the post right before mine. In this case, concurring with and adding to the general point vergari made.
I understand you’re not feeling well, but if you’re going to take offense so easily, when clearly none was intended, maybe you need to take a break and apply a hot compress. Something along those lines. Spirited debate is nothing to take umbrage at.
EVERYBODY has a goddam log in their eye! You’ve read Mark’s gospel how many times now, and you haven’t figured that out yet? If you mean the reference to the General Sherman Sequoia, that was specifically for Stephen.
Good post about early biographies, btw. And following up on that, Mark’s gospel is much too good to be the very first attempt at one, though it may well be the most complete attempt to that point. There is clearly a strong scholarly consensus that Mark had written sources. Not so much about what they were, or what languages they were written in.
‘Offence’? Where are you typing this from? What time is it where you are?
Robert said
Reductionist apathy? Please no insults. I am not at all apathetic about these issues, having spent many years studying them intensely. Judging from the very high quality of work of some scholars who think otherwise than you, I am reluctant to merely accept your say-so as to which is more probable. Do you have any real arguments for saying which options are most probable?
I’m really sorry if that came off as an insult. Truly that was not my intention.
“Reduction apathy” was in response to your statement (to paraphrase) that there are different explanations advanced and everyone has his own idea. I think we all get that, but that on its own doesn’t get us anywhere.
I did NOT mean to suggest that you are personally apathetic. Not at all.
As to probabilities, I’d love to discuss and will continue to do so. Perhaps continuing in a follow up post.
And you don’t have to explain why you spell offense with a ‘c’ if you don’t want to. But again, that post was specifically addressed to vergari, and the log thing was a sort of generalized commentary. You may at times resemble that remark, as may I, but it was not addressed to anyone personally. You don’t have to believe me, but I should find it most offencive if you do not.
Robert said
godspell said
… The gospel accounts of him all disagree to some extent, concurring only on his name and that he had Jesus properly entombed. That means there has to have been an earlier source, or perhaps several, that we don’t have now.
Mark says he was a member of the council in Jerusalem who had some sympathy with Jesus’ Apocalyptic ideas (perhaps because he was a believer in John the Baptist, Jesus’ former master).
Matthew says he was a wealthy follower of Jesus (Again, Matthew dislikes imputing any decent action to any Jew who hadn’t converted, and certainly does not want to believe any Jew on the council would behave this way.)
Luke agrees more or less with Mark, but doesn’t just repeat what Mark says–he indicates that Joseph disagreed with the council’s actions, which in Mark is only implied.
John echoes Matthew, but in different language–Joseph was a secret disciple of Jesus (because to openly follow him would bring about his own downfall, although surely paying for Jesus’ burial would have tipped his hand). …If one assumes Matthew’s changes to Mark must have been due to Matthew knowing a independent tradition about Joseph of Arimathea, and if one also assumes that ‘John’ was completely independent of the synoptic gospels and secondary orality, one can arrive at the belief that there were at least two traditions prior to Mark’s gospel or his pre-Markan passion narrative. Those are not unreasonable assumptions, but nor is it unreasonable to attribute the changes in each of the post-Markan gospels to those authors.
What to do when faced with at two opposite assumptions–still a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest?
Now this is addressed to you, Robert. I missed this one earlier, and didn’t have a chance to respond until now. For the record, I’m not assuming anything. I just never noticed the discrepancies between the four accounts of Joseph’s intervention. It doesn’t really read like Matthew rewriting Mark, so much as choosing to ignore what Mark wrote in favor of something else. Luke is in agreement with Mark, but doesn’t simply replicate what Mark wrote. One gets the feelings there were a lot of different readings of the basic story, and nobody really knew what the facts of the case were (which would tend to indicate that Joseph, if he existed, was not a Christian, which of course he wasn’t, if he was on the Sanhedrin).
My own feeling about John’s gospel is that the author is trying to replace and supersede all previous biographical writings on Jesus, blot them out. I think he would be horrified to know that people today read three other gospels in the NT before getting to his. This is just my reading of him based on what he wrote. There’s all these wrong ideas out there (Jesus didn’t need baptism!), and he’s going to fix them, and that will be that.
The scholarly consensus regarding John is that he went his own way–and that being the case, we can’t really form an opinion as to which if any of the earlier gospels he knew. Matthew and Luke definitely knew Mark, but with John there’s no way of being sure. By the time John was writing, there may have been few literate Christians who didn’t know at least one of the synoptics. So John may have felt he couldn’t get away with just copying. But my own suspicion is that he was trying to write the gospel to end all gospels, and I guess you could say he succeeded. (Except for all the ‘Gnostic’ Gospels, which would horrify him even more.)
Mark says Joseph was a devout Jew who shared some of Jesus’ ideas about the Kingdom, and didn’t want to see his remains shown the ultimate disrespect. (And for any Jew, it would be painful to see the body of even a heretic rabbi treated this way.)
Matthew says Joseph was a follower of Jesus (therefore, as Matthew would see it, no longer really a Jew) who somehow happened to be sitting on the most influential Jewish council in Palestine.
You don’t have to believe either story (I think we would agree which version is less unbelievable), but that’s not rewriting the story. That’s melting it down and recasting it. I don’t think you have to assume Matthew had another source, but if he didn’t, that means he just found Mark’s story intolerable, because it showed a member of the Sanhedrin behaving decently. There were a lot of Christians who felt this way by the time Matthew’s gospel was written; still more by the time John’s was.
But let’s look at this from the POV of scholarship.
1)Multiple attestation–all four gospels.
2)None of the stories quite agree, meaning we have no reason to assume Mark was the original source and the others just followed his lead. This was a well-known story before Mark was written, and there were probably multiple accounts.
3)Doctrine of dissimilarity–this was an embarrassment, because many Christians at the time the gospels were written didn’t want to believe anyone on the Sanhedrin would behave so generously. Matthew and John change the story to blot that out. Mark and Luke try to say it was because Joseph was a different sort of Jew. But you know, he could have just been someone with a well-developed conscience who hated to see a devout co-religionist rot out in the sun, eaten by dogs and scavenger birds. So they all have to explain the act away–the counter to that is that they all wanted to believe in the tomb, and needed some means of explaining how Jesus happened to get one.
Bart and others say that no one convicted of insurrection would be granted any such courtesy, but there was never any actual insurrection. Nobody rose up and attacked Rome’s authority. Feelings wouldn’t run so high. But if they believed Jesus was important enough to crucify, they might also believe that desecrating his corpse would run the risk of provoking the civil unrest they were trying to avoid. Pilate was a notably cruel man, but no reason to think he had any personal feeling of vindictiveness towards a man he probably barely spoke to. Nothing personal, just business. If somebody on the council wants to bury him, why not? I doubt the rules were all that cut and dried. They never are, really. With any government. It depends on who you know, you know?
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert