God, I hate the quote format.  Let me cut through all that.  

Matthew typically uses the word ‘Jew’ as a perjorative.  He knows perfectly well Jesus and his followers were Jews, but I assume we agree Matthew wasn’t one, and held all Jews who hadn’t become post-mortem followers of Jesus (isn’t it easier to say Christians?) in pretty low esteem.  You are being overly nitpicky, and not for the first time.  And starting a response with “Really?”  Really, Robert?  I mean, really.  

I largely agree Matthew is copying Mark where they are both telling the same story.  In this case, however,  he’s radically changing the story, and I don’t know what to think about that.  He may have been working from a different tradition.  But I wouldn’t put it past him to just throw Mark’s story out the window, but keep the part about the tomb, because he needs that.  Why assume he needed Mark for this particular story?  You really think without Mark we’d have Jesus rotting on the cross in Matthew and Luke?  Really?  

So no, in short, I don’t think it’s a proven fact that either Matthew or Luke were dependent on Mark’s version of what might have been a very well known story throughout the Christian world.  They don’t use his language, they change a lot, they mainly just agree there was a guy named Joseph from Arimathea, who did something nice for a dead guy, and none of them agree why.  

What is your basis for assuming Matthew is just rewriting Mark?  You don’t believe Matthew had no other sources.  

The language isn’t at all the same.  The story is radically different, and for once, Mark’s is longer and more embellished–Matthew is actually editing Mark (nobody tell bren!)  

Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the Council, who was himself waiting for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for Jesus’ body.⁴⁴ Pilate was surprised to hear that he was already dead. Summoning the centurion, he asked him if Jesus had already died. ⁴⁵ When he learned from the centurion that it was so, he gave the body to Joseph. ⁴⁶ So Joseph bought some linen cloth, took down the body, wrapped it in the linen, and placed it in a tomb cut out of rock. Then he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb. ⁴⁷ Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joseph saw where he was laid.

As evening approached, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who had himself become a disciple of Jesus. ⁵⁸ Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus’ body, and Pilate ordered that it be given to him. ⁵⁹ Joseph took the body, wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, ⁶⁰ and placed it in his own new tomb that he had cut out of the rock. He rolled a big stone in front of the entrance to the tomb and went away.

Why does Mark say Pilate was surprised?  How would he know?  What difference does it make?  (To Mark, this might be one more example of somebody not understanding Jesus–he died quickly because he wasn’t trying to survive).  

Why does Matthew say it was Joseph’s own tomb?  That’s not in Mark.  And why would Pilate give the body to a disciple of Jesus? (Not just a follower).  Matthew never talks about this ‘disciple’ anywhere else–there were just twelve!  He didn’t get that from Mark.  Was there a later story that made Joseph a disciple, and Matthew would rather believe that than a member of the Sanhedrin showed generosity?    

There are a few similar phrases (you can read Greek, so you’d know more about that).  But for the most part, there is zero chance of any plagiarism charge.  Matthew generally hews pretty close to Mark when he uses him.  If he doesn’t, it can be because he doesn’t like the way Mark tells the story.  But here it’s more like he has information Mark doesn’t.  Obviously he knows what Mark wrote, but doesn’t entirely trust it.  So is he rewriting Mark, or is he blending two or more versions of a widely known story together, to create something that cuts to the chase much faster?  Because there’s a lot in Mark’s story that bothers him.

For the record, I’m not arguing for or against the historicity of Joseph.  I am arguing that this is an old tradition, far pre-dating Mark, with many variations, which makes sense given that no Christian could have witnessed this (unless Joseph was a Christian, which would explain why they’d claim he was).  Please do not start in with the “Christian is anachronistic” thingy.  You were the one who referred me to a book about Jesus the Feminist.  🙄

You’re not an expert.  I’m not an expert.  Anybody can type a word in French. Let’s see you type an argument.  No consensus-mongering.  If you’re not here to form and defend opinions of your own, what the hell are you here for?  En garde!

Well, that was a whole lot of nothing.

Bart doesn’t believe any of the evangelists were Jews.  Thing is, you can find credible scholars with a wide variety of opinions, but weren’t you all about consensus up to now?  Matthew’s gospel is widely considered the most Jewish in its approach, but that is not proof Matthew himself was Jewish.  That the gospel is deeply antipathetic to Jews is not something anyone can believably contest, and Matthew is consistently hostile when referencing any Jew who doesn’t become a follower of Jesus, which by the time he’s writing, means not really a Jew anymore.  This approach continues and intensifies in John.  I can believe there were earlier sources written by Jews that expressed hostility to other Jews who opposed the cult of Jesus, but this is something else again.  

You don’t have to present a counter-argument–you can just say what you think.   What, in fact, do you think is the reason for four distinctly different stories about Joseph of Arimathea?  

You’ve put yourself in some kind of imaginary position of authority here, which is a common thing on message boards of all types.  But a very limited authority–you can shoot down everybody else’s opinions, but can’t recall offhand you presenting one of your own.  You just quote this or that scholar (or refer vaguely to ‘consensus’).  I believe in scholarship, I believe in the importance of a body of opinion, but all these opinions only came about through scholars sticking their necks out and trying something new.

If your approach had been the norm, we’d still think the gospels were literal accounts of events experienced by the begotten Son of God.  You just don’t have the nerve to take a position that might be vulnerable to attack, so you hide behind the opinions of others.  What do you think?   We’re just two unqualified people on an unmoderated forum.  We have no credibility to lose here.  And no conversation if you won’t put some skin in the game.  

If you didn’t want a discussion, why’d you act like you did?

Joseph was a member of the Sanhedrein who felt some affinity with Jesus’ ideas about the Kingdom. 

Joseph was a wealthy disciple of Jesus with no connection to the Sanhedrin who happened to have an unoccupied tomb he’d created for his own use. 

Joseph was a member of the Sanhedrin who thought Jesus got a bum rap. 

Joseph was a secret disciple of Jesus, and didn’t tell anybody because he was scared of the Jews (implying that he himself was not Jewish). 

How can it be the same story when it’s four different protagonists?  (Though two very distinct types of protagonist–Mark and Luke, Matthew and John.)

There is no way all of this came from just revising Mark.  And there is no way Mark just made Joseph up out of whole cloth.  None of which means there was such a person (could be a story repurposed from somewhere else), but the story predates all the surviving gospels.  That’s my position.  Not so hard to figure out.  I still have no idea what your position is, because you just want to pick away at mine, without getting picked at in return.  No guts, no glory.  I know damned well my position is shaky, but yours is nonexistent. 

You know what you think you know, and you don’t like being told that you don’t really know it.  Nobody does.  😉

You’ve given me no reason to change my view, either.  You actually know Greek, right?  Where’s your textual analysis?  Oh right, you’re not qualified to do that just because you can read Greek.  It’s an enviable ability, but Bart has gone into some detail about how in itself it doesn’t give you enough context. 

Matthew isn’t using Mark’s story.  He’s telling his own, and he’s not just changing a word here or there.  It’s radically different.  Now that could definitely be him just making things up to suit himself, but is that your position?  That he fabricated a different background and motivation for Joseph, to avoid making a member of the Sanhedrin look good?  That until Matthew came along, nobody said Joseph of Arimathea was a follower of Jesus?  And until Mark came along, nobody talked about him at all?  It’s not really clear.  I’m being clear.  I think Joseph was being talked and possibly written about, well before then.  What do you think?  And are you saying John did read some or all of the synoptic gospels? 

Do you believe nobody talked about the empty tomb before Mark?  That everybody came to believe in this because of one book?  If so, say so.

If there was no tomb, it didn’t just appear out of thin air.  It took time for that story to develop, and there was widespread disagreement among later Christians as to how it happened and why.  The one point of agreement is somebody named Joseph from Arimathea.  Which incidentally, is not a town we have any record of outside the gospels. 

Why am I doing all the heavy lifting here?  Because again, you’re acting like a one-man doctoral committee.  I have no doctoral thesis to defend.  But if I did, I sure as hell wouldn’t be defending it from you.  🙂

Bart is not much help on this.  He leans heavily towards there having been no tomb, but he doesn’t want to 100% commit to that.  He thinks Joseph is a story Christians came up with to explain how there was a tomb, which is reasonable enough, but he shies away from committing to where this story came from.  He definitely does not commit to Mark being the original source.  And he doesn’t get much into the very interesting differences between the four gospel stories, which to me are fascinating in and of themselves.  Obviously some scholars have, and Bart may have done as well, away from the blog, but searches on the blog just come up with articles about how Romans didn’t allow decent burials of crucifixion victims.  History is full of exceptions to rules, and if Jesus wasn’t exceptional, nobody ever was. But for the record, I don’t believe any of the gospel stories about Joseph, as written.  They’re still interesting as hell to compare and contrast, and even when NT texts are clearly non-factual, they are still factual in that they tell us about bodies of opinion within the growing cult. 

I think either Joseph is a repurposed story from some earlier event in Jewish history (as may have been the case with Barabbas), or there was some minority faction on the Sanhedrin that didn’t like the idea of handing a non-violent and deeply devout rabbi, however weird, over to the Romans for execution.  They managed to wangle a compromise, to avoid seeing a man with some popular support  (and connected to the much more popular and recently martyred John the Baptist) be treated as a common criminal. 

But in either case, the story had to come from somewhere, and I don’t think it originated in Mark’s gospel.  It is reasonable to assume that Matthew read Mark, but Matthew had other sources, some of which might have also mentioned Joseph. Luke clearly is agreeing with Mark, but tweaking a bit. 

If there was no earlier source, that unequivocally means committing to John having read Matthew, since there’s no other possible explanation for their stories matching up so well.  That’s something I think most scholars would be wary of committing to, since John is such an outlier.  

And that’s about all I have to say, at least until I do a bit of reading up on the subject.  But I don’t expect to find a definitive answer.  Like there are any.  😉

That’s a very weak response.

Which is about what I expected, but still. 

Yes, when nobody has responded, and I think of something else to say, I edit posts.  There’s an edit button for a reason.  It disappears after some else posts after you.  Fair enough. 

You don’t think the most influential human in history, who died as a penniless criminal at the hands of an empire that ended up worshiping him as God, and who you spend much of your free time discussing, is exceptional?  Interesting. 

And that’s enough one-sided discussion for now.  Your agreement that there are earlier sources for the story that we don’t have (in what language?) is noted.   Do let me know the doctoral committee’s decision.  🙂

Would you mind translating that for us laypeople?  Maybe with a bit less blatant name-dropping.  🙂

Well, I see that Roger Aus has written an entire book about the Passion story and its possible antecedents, and it’s up in the stacks.  I’ll just go have a look after lunch. 

Robert said

The two names I used are essential to the import of the discussion. Two former students of the two unequivocal poles of the former scholarly discussion have agreed that the former short-lived consensus has been significantly eroded. Even D Moody Smith has himself already admitted this. One can no longer claim that there is a consensus of scholars holding to Johannine independence of the synoptics. This does not mean that one must admit that John read each of the synoptic gospels because some secondary orality would most likely have occurred before John would have ever come into possession of an earlier gospel and this is more than enough to obviate any claims of independent attestation. In addition to this middle position, there are other source-critical attempts to construct middle positions that both of us and others generally find less likely, but they still witness to the dependence of a final version of John upon synoptic content.   

Still written as if you were submitting it to a journal, but clear enough, thanks.  But all you’ve really done is highlight how tenuous and fraught a thing scholarly consensus is.  So many cracks beneath the surface. Always shifting, like tectonic plates. 

For the record, I never have believed John’s gospel is independent attestation, though there are, as you know, first-rate scholars like Richard Bauckham, who still insist John knew Jesus, and waited until the very end of his life to write about him.  Even Bart is impressed by Bauckham’s grasp of the material, his ability to write a first-rate paper for other experts in the field.  So respected he got to write one of those Very Short Introductions Oxford puts out–the one about Jesus. 

He’s in the club.  You, and I, and everybody else here–not so much.  If we met Bauckham, and tried to argue with him, he’d dismantle us all, effortlessly.  But he’s still wrong.  Isn’t he.