I haven’t been able to move past this subject. It really seems to me absolutely critical questions whether the gospel authors believed their historical claims and whether they intended their readers to believe those claims. We may of course, not be able to adjudicate between the possibilities, but we should at least be aware that the possibilities are discrete and each bears its own distinctive implications about the history of Christianity.

Given the way Matthew and Luke rework Mark, if they believed their own historical claims, the only way I can make sense of the gospels they left is to think they were working with a multitude of conflicting sources and trying to reconcile them into a coherent narrative (a bit like Tatian harmonizing the conflicting Gospels in the Diatessaron, or like scholars today sorting through early Christian literature to try to find the historical Jesus)–they couldn’t have been just reworking Mark and fitting in some sayings from Q because, if that’s all they had, they were way too free with their use of those sources to believe that what they were writing was historically true; if they believed what they were writing then they must have had other sources that somehow justified the significant changes they made to their sources. 

I haven’t deeply considered the proposal that they didn’t believe their historical claims but intended them to be believed (i.e., they were lying), but it is interesting in part because it might actually preserve a lot of history. If they wanted to be believed then they would have had to conform to the facts that were already widely known. Even the worst propaganda has a lot of truth in it; you just have to sort through it really carefully. 

I have found myself fascinated by the possibility that some of them (particularly Mark, I haven’t really started considering whether this works with the others yet) didn’t believe his historical claims, but also didn’t expect those claims to be taken as historical fact–he was deliberately writing historical fiction. If that was the case, then it would again bear significant implications for the history of early Christianity. 

Let me start here: My understanding is that in paganism there are often a large number of people who practice the religion but don’t accept the mythology as historically true. The insistence on belief–orthodoxy–seems to me largely an invention of the monotheistic religions. Sure the rustic and unlettered often accept the pagan theology at face value, but the urbane and educated often didn’t; what unified believers was orthopraxy: It was observing the feasts and rituals–not believing truth claims–that made you an adherent of the religion. (I believe this is still the case in Hinduism, for example; you can also see this in Socrates, who seems to be a monotheist, though he will speak about “the gods” and kept various pagan festivals). Thus too, we see poets freely making up stories about the gods and weaving new mythology, e.g., Homer in the Iliad, Virgil in the Aeneid, Aeschylus, and so forth. 

I’m a lot less confident, but we might also see something like this in the redactors of the Torah; consider that they freely rework their sources (if we accept something like the documentary hypothesis), but they also seem to do a really miserable job disguising the fact that they are freely reworking their sources: look at doublets or the inconsistent use of the names for God–all the things that tip the modern critics off to multiple documentary sources are actually pretty obvious things that a decent redactor could have covered up and smoothed out if he’d wanted to disguise what he was doing; this suggests to me that they weren’t really aiming to make a convincing forgery. (I think this is suggestive but not at all conclusive, btw.)

So let’s take it as an established fact that in the ancient pagan world (and possibly also in the Jewish world) there was an established attitude to religion that (a) you didn’t have to believe everything, (b) authors could freely rework previous mythology and write new mythology in their literature. 

Well, why not read Mark as doing just that? It is historical fiction, like a movie “based on” a true story–but improved in various ways to make it a better story and to make explicit the morals and themes that Mark wants to advance. 

Now you object: There is no other example from the ancient world of a work that is 1) historical (in the sense of based on or presented as if a true story) 2) narrative 3) prose, 4) not obviously fictional.

Well, first of all (4) is hard to assess: was the Aeneid obviously fiction? Was the Exodus story? Was Mark’s Gospel? If you think Mark isn’t obviously fiction, I don’t see why you would think the Iliad is obviously fiction. 

As to (1-3), yes, the gospels are somewhat odd in that combination. If we take the Pentateuch as a parallel, that would count as a precedent. It isn’t certain that it is parallel, but remember, Mark seems to be working in a non-Jewish context–even if first century Jews all took the Pentateuch as history, a gentile reader, with a pagan background might very well have taken it as myth, analogous to his own culture’s mythology. 

But set that aside: We have cases of non-narrative historical fiction in prose (Plato’s dialogues–to what degree is Plato’s Socrates historically accurate and to what degree is he a literary character used both to voice and to illustrate Plato’s philosophy? It is impossible to say, but he clearly has at least an element of the literary); we have examples in verse of narrative historical fiction (basically all epic poetry, with gods intervening left and right, as the authors think appropriate). It isn’t that big of a leap from those established conventions to move to the combination I’m suggesting in Mark–narrative, prose, historical fiction. 

Finally we might find a precedent in the original, pre-Herodotan “historians”–the Ionian logographers of the 6th-5th centuries BC, who wrote in prose concerning a wide variety of subjects, including mythology. As with the Pentateuch, whether they happened to believe that the mythology they recorded was historical isn’t the issue; what matters is how first century readers would have understood their mythological writings (assuming they were known at the time).

Finally, Mark has a real literary sophistication (not to say linguistic sophistication) that his readers certainly would have picked up on. And he is writing to a gentile audience that would have been accustomed to the idea of historical fiction of one sort or another. I don’t see why his executing historical fiction in narrative prose should force us to discount the possibility that his gospel is fundamentally a work of historical fiction. Is it that hard to imagine a gentile from a pagan background hearing the basic story of Jesus–a charismatic preacher and wonder-worker who was claimed to have been the long prophesied messiah fo the Jews, who taught a message of love and selflessness, and who was then betrayed and brutally executed, but whose followers say they have seen him risen from the dead–and thinking dang, that is a really compelling plot; I could make that into one heck of a story? 

Aside from this being largely a speculative suggestion, the main problem I see in it is that Paul is earlier than Mark and he is clearly concerned with historical veracity of at least one of the narrative elements–1 Cor 15:14–though it is also remarkable and noteworthy how few historical facts about Jesus can be gleaned from Paul. Likewise, even in Mark we get the importance of “faith” (e.g., Mk 5:34)–though faith may very well not have meant for Mark what it meant for later proto-orthodox. 

Again, there is something awkward in this recentness of this mythology. Usually mythology is set far in the past. But on the other hand, this mythology, though recent, was set in the foreign east and piggy-backed on an ancient and respected, though strange to Romans, religion of Judaism and their ancient prophecies. 

I suppose what I am kicking the tires on could be fleshed out something like this (again it is highly speculative–lots of imagination and little evidence): there was a strain of early Christianity that got picked up by the Romans and functioned essentially as one of the mystery cults (I think we have some archeological evidence of such a strain of Christianity, practiced in secret and spread by Roman military officers; and we know that the mystery cults were sufficiently like Christianity that Justin Martyr could, in the second century, claim they were corruptions of Christianity). As a culturally pagan mystery cult, whether it was historically true or not wasn’t critical to its own practitioners. In continuity with the religious ideas of the Greco-Roman world, orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy was definitive. Mark belonged to or was at least influenced by this strain of Christianity, and was–in continuity with Greco-Roman ideas about religion and myth– writing a mythology. In fact, Mark might be an early artifact of the specific religious movement that would eventually emerge as gnostic Christianity (which makes loads of sense if we take Secret Mark seriously; it also firs well with the messianic secret).  

There were of course other strains of Christianity, including a more Pauline version that emphasized the historicity of the resurrection, and a Jewish version (seen in James and later in the Didache). And these tended to cross-pollinate, so that mark influences and gets adopted by the proto-orthodox who had been influenced by Paul. 

What think you?