Robert said
Most scholars think Jn 21 was a later addition by a subsequent editor, whereas I like the view of Frans Neirynck who sees it as an epilogue by the primary author. It isn’t just Jn 21,24 but the whole gospel claims to be rooted in the authority of this anonymous and/or beloved, idealized disciple whose presence stretches all the way back to the early disciples of John the Baptist, through the entire ministry of Jesus, and even with high level contacts with high priest in Jerusalem. This is a literary fiction. Even if Jn 21 was added by someone else it is reasonable to suppose that he may also have edited the rest of the gospel to some degree, and there are indeed literary seams that betray some editorial work. This fictional, idealized disciple who vouches for the legitimacy of the whole gospel is also killed off in Jn 21, effectively eliminating any attempt to verify or falsify his identity. It is the perfect crime.
The ‘we sections’ of Acts are not as disparate as is sometimes thought. Aside from one brief absence while visiting his place of origin, this anonymous supposed companion of Paul is present at all of the key events of the later ministry of Paul. This too is a literary fiction that imbues the whole narrative with quite a bit of authority. Non-pseudepigraphic forgery.
Quite interesting, thank you. So, to be clear, do you think all the mentions of the beloved disciple were added by the redactor, the original John didn’t have a beloved disciple?
As to the “we” passages, I should finish reading _Forged_ to see what BDE says; it would be quite interesting if we could show it was a invention. I haven’t studied the matter closely. I generally find Luke-Acts enigmatic; The author claims to be doing careful history, and indeed one gets the impression at points that the author is sincerely (if credulously) trying to get the facts straight from the sources he has–there are for example a number of minor historical details we are able to confirm where Luke seems to be remarkably precise. At the same time, he records a lot that is hard to believe (Saul getting letters from the chief priest to arrest people in Damascus? Really?) or that is just a bit too convenient to his larger narrative to be taken without uncritically (Saul being a disciple of Gamaliel), and of course, his itinerary for Paul’s journeys is irreconcilable to the itinerary such as we can construct from Paul’s own letters.
Robert said
CEJ said
We did indeed discuss this point, and I wasn’t trying to resurrect it here, but merely noting I got to hear Ehrman’s view in some detail. As to your certitude regarding Mark’s ending, I don’t share it. Neither did Metzger.
Nothing is certain; it is merely my opinion. I completely agree with Metzger’s text-critical conclusions; I don’t think he has ventured very far into the exegetical debate and, as far as I know, he did not engage the thesis of the Aristotelian plot design.
I’m not aware of him discussing the thesis. And I’m not aware of him changing his opinion that the language of 16:8 wasn’t suitable for a conclusion to Mark’s text. But having said that, it doesn’t escape me that current scholarly thought seems to favor that verse being the intended conclusion of Mark, with Ehrman and Pagels being two high profile scholars who hold so.
Stephen said
John is willing to change a significant detail of the narrative, the day of Jesus’ death, in order to make a theological point. Should we assume that he didn’t do this in other places? Should we assume Mark didn’t do this to his sources? I’m not saying the ancients didn’t have any concept of the literal. They interpreted reality like a story because reality was a story. But the characteristic of a story is that it can be interpreted on multiple levels only one of which requires asking whether or not it really happened. Brenmcg’s view of the “truth” as only that which can be said to have “literally happened” is a modern idea. If anyone disagrees please tell me what day Jesus died on?
All four gospels agree he died on the Friday of passover week on 15th Nissan.
Jesus is also the bread of life, the manna from heaven, for John. This manna stopped the day after the passover when Joshua led the Israelites into the promised land.
Joshua 5:11-12 “On the day after the passover on that very day they ate the produce of the land unleavened cakes and parched grain. The manna ceased on the day they ate the produce of the land and the Israelites no longer had manna”
So for theological reasons John would have wanted to leave the crucifixion as it was in Matthew, after the passover meal.
brenmcg said
All four gospels agree he died on the Friday of passover week on 15th Nissan.
Would anyone ever, who read John without knowing the synoptics, ever conclude that the crucifixion took place on the day of passover?
I know one can interpret John as giving the same chronology of the last supper and crucifixion as the synoptics, but you basically have to say he went out of his way to be ambiguous, and indeed, ambiguous in a way that was almost calculated to cause predictable confusion and misunderstanding.
Porphyry said
Would anyone ever, who read John without knowing the synoptics, ever conclude that the crucifixion took place on the day of passover?
I know one can interpret John as giving the same chronology of the last supper and crucifixion as the synoptics, but you basically have to say he went out of his way to be ambiguous, and indeed, ambiguous in a way that was almost calculated to cause predictable confusion and misunderstanding.
Any ambiguity would be due to the fact of Jesus having been executed on the 15th already being firmly established in the minds of Christians. If John had intended Jesus to have been executed on the 14th his wording would still be ambiguous anyway.
Anyway after Jesus’s speech at the end of chapter twelve John writes in John 13:1 “Now before the festival of the Passover Jesus knowing that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”
John is saying Jesus gave this speech knowing his hour had come because it was just before the Passover. During which his passion and execution would take place.
Jn 13:1 is giving the context for the last supper, so I don’t see how its saying the last supper was before Passover advances your thesis that the last supper was a seder. (I realize you could try to argue that John is reckoning days from midnight to midnight rather than sundown to sundown, so the night of the seder is, by John’s reckoning, actually the evening of the day before the feast of passover, but that is a big “if” and it isn’t really suggested by the text.)
And that is the problem, you have a whole string of big ifs you have to concatenate to make John agree with the synoptic chronology (“the day of preparation of the passover” in Jn 19:14 means not “the day of preparation for the passover” but “the day of preparation for the Sabbath that happens to fall within the weeklong passover/unleavened bread feast”; when the Jewish leaders don’t go into the praetorium in order that they might eat the pasche, Jn 18:28, “pasche” means not the lamb or the seder but the unleavened bread they would eat every day for a week.) John would have had to be a poor writer to use words in such misleading ways. Just because an expression admits of a meaning doesn’t mean that meaning would be natural in a given context. When there is a natural ambiguity–one expression really could naturally be taken to mean two different things–good writers are alive to it and try to clarify their meaning–unless they are deliberately being vague.
S you might be able to make it work, but it isn’t the obvious reading. That’s why people have been arguing about this since the beginning of christianity: we’ve know you can force it to agree, but we also realize that that harmonizing reading is unnatural.
And there’s the thing, you said it in the first line: No one would read the text that way lest the crucifixions being on the 15th was already (= antecedently and independently) firmly established in their minds.
There is a real cost to such harmonizing readings: you then have to write off John’s literary master stroke (having the “lamb of God” die while the lambs were being sacrificed) as a mere coincidence arising only from a misreading.
Porphyry said
Jn 13:1 is giving the context for the last supper, so I don’t see how its saying the last supper was before Passover advances your thesis that the last supper was a seder. (I realize you could try to argue that John is reckoning days from midnight to midnight rather than sundown to sundown, so the night of the seder is, by John’s reckoning, actually the evening of the day before the feast of passover, but that is a big “if” and it isn’t really suggested by the text.)
He is giving the context of the speech of chapter 12, which is during the day just before the passover.
When Jesus tells Judas to go quickly the disciples think he means to buy something for the feast. When Judas leaves night immediately falls. Why does he need to go quickly if the feast isn’t for another day? Isn’t John implying the feast is about to begin?
And that is the problem, you have a whole string of big ifs you have to concatenate to make John agree with the synoptic chronology (“the day of preparation of the passover” in Jn 19:14 means not “the day of preparation for the passover” but “the day of preparation for the Sabbath that happens to fall within the weeklong passover/unleavened bread feast”; when the Jewish leaders don’t go into the praetorium in order that they might eat the pasche, Jn 18:28, “pasche” means not the lamb or the seder but the unleavened bread they would eat every day for a week.) John would have had to be a poor writer to use words in such misleading ways. Just because an expression admits of a meaning doesn’t mean that meaning would be natural in a given context. When there is a natural ambiguity–one expression really could naturally be taken to mean two different things–good writers are alive to it and try to clarify their meaning–unless they are deliberately being vague.
It might be ambiguous to us but that doesn’t mean it was ambiguous to people at the time. Matthew and Mark both call the 14th the “first day of the festival of unleavened bread”. Who at the time calls it “the day of preparation for the passover”?
Mark also tells us what παρασκευὴ means, Mark 15:42, where it just means “Friday”. Didache says “But let not your fasts be with the hypocrites for they fast on the second and fifth day of the week but fast on the fourth day and the Preparation”. Who at the time used it to mean any day used in preparation for the next?
In John 18:28 they want to be able to eat the pascha. And in John 18:39 Pilate says “it is my custom to release to you a prisoner in the pascha.” Why would anyone think the word is being used differently 11 verses apart?
There is a real cost to such harmonizing readings: you then have to write off John’s literary master stroke (having the “lamb of God” die while the lambs were being sacrificed) as a mere coincidence arising only from a misreading.
But the lambs are slaughtered at twilight. Between the 14th and 15th and eaten during the night with nothing left for the morning. Why would he have Jesus executed at midday before that? Paul also thinks Jesus is the lamb of god so its not John’s invention. But Jesus is also the manna from heaven in John which in a possible literary master stroke ended after celebrating the passover (not before).
Harmonization is only necessary if you insist that the different accounts must agree in all details. I doff my proverbial cap to the cleverness of fundamentalists. Some of the attempts to harmonize the Nativity stories are utterly brilliant. Occam’s Razor is not a rule of the universe but it is a reliable working principle.
Mark has Jesus killed on the the Day of Passover, the morning after the Passover meal. Jesus was crucified that morning at 9 a.m. on Passover day. John has Jesus killed on the Day of Preparation, the day before the Passover meal, sometime after noon. The Day of Preparation was at the same time that the lambs were being prepared for the Passover feast later that evening, at the beginning of Passover Day. Is it really a coincidence that John refers to Jesus as the “Lamb of God”?
My own hypothesis, for what it’s worth, is that the actual historical tradition was that Jesus was killed sometime around the Passover. Mark made it the day he did for his own theological reasons and John made it the day he did for his. What day, what year, did it actually happen? Who knows?
Porphyry said
….Finally, as to the mystery cult context: several elements in Mark are, it seems, very deliberately obscure–the young man who runs away naked and shows up again at the tomb to announce the resurrection, the “let the reader understand” in the little apocalypse. There is also the claim that the author has access to a secret teaching of Jesus not heard by the crowds: e.g., Mk 4:34.
So what do you make of the unnamed character who runs away and why do you take him to also be the the young man in the tomb? And why would the authorities try to seize him?
brenmcg said
Porphyry said
Jn 13:1 is giving the context for the last supper, so I don’t see how its saying the last supper was before Passover advances your thesis that the last supper was a seder. (I realize you could try to argue that John is reckoning days from midnight to midnight rather than sundown to sundown, so the night of the seder is, by John’s reckoning, actually the evening of the day before the feast of passover, but that is a big “if” and it isn’t really suggested by the text.)
He is giving the context of the speech of chapter 12, which is during the day just before the passover.
Why do you think 13:1 should be taken with the speech at the end of ch. 12, rather than with the supper and washing of feet that immediately follow?
When Jesus tells Judas to go quickly the disciples think he means to buy something for the feast. When Judas leaves night immediately falls. Why does he need to go quickly if the feast isn’t for another day? Isn’t John implying the feast is about to begin?
Everyone is confused by the remark. That was the point–they couldn’t figure out what Jesus was telling Judas to do.
But to answer you last question, no, John is not implying the meal is about to begin, he has already told us that the meal has started (see Jn 13:2); On your proposal that this meal is the seder, not only is it rather late in the game to send someone out for whatever provisions (note it is plural) were overlooked, it is scarcely likely that the local shops would be open in Jerusalem during the actual passover meal.
Now admittedly, it’s weird on my timeline too–why would you send someone out in the middle of supper to get supplies for a meal that you won’t eat for another 24 hours? It is a bit strange–just go out in the morning. But again, the point is that the whole exchange was weird to the apostles; they were confused and didn’t know what to make of it, and the possibility that Jesus was sending him to buy supplies for the feast was just one of several (incorrect) guesses.
But weird thought it be, it seems more plausible to me that some apostles might have thought Jesus would abruptly send someone out the night before the seder to buy supplies for passover than that he would send someone out during the seder itself to buy supplies for the seder they were already eating at a time when businesses were certainly closed.
As to night immediately falling, it says “it was night (en de nux)” It doesn’t say “night immediately falls” or anything equivalent.
And that is the problem, you have a whole string of big ifs you have to concatenate to make John agree with the synoptic chronology (“the day of preparation of the passover” in Jn 19:14 means not “the day of preparation for the passover” but “the day of preparation for the Sabbath that happens to fall within the weeklong passover/unleavened bread feast”; when the Jewish leaders don’t go into the praetorium in order that they might eat the pasche, Jn 18:28, “pasche” means not the lamb or the seder but the unleavened bread they would eat every day for a week.) John would have had to be a poor writer to use words in such misleading ways. Just because an expression admits of a meaning doesn’t mean that meaning would be natural in a given context. When there is a natural ambiguity–one expression really could naturally be taken to mean two different things–good writers are alive to it and try to clarify their meaning–unless they are deliberately being vague.
It might be ambiguous to us but that doesn’t mean it was ambiguous to people at the time. Matthew and Mark both call the 14th the “first day of the festival of unleavened bread”. Who at the time calls it “the day of preparation for the passover”?
Mark also tells us what παρασκευὴ means, Mark 15:42, where it just means “Friday”. Didache says “But let not your fasts be with the hypocrites for they fast on the second and fifth day of the week but fast on the fourth day and the Preparation”. Who at the time used it to mean any day used in preparation for the next?
There is no question that it could mean the day before the Sabbath. The question is whether it only means Friday. We do find paraskue (and the aramaic that stands behind it) being used unambiguously to name the day of preparation for feasts (other than the weekly Sabbath), but, I’m sure you know, they come after the first century.
Better still, the question is whether paraskoue tou pascha means the preparation for the passover or the Friday that falls within the feast of unleavened bread. The problem is we don’t, so far as I’m aware, have any parallel from the first century for such an expression; the only parallels we have are later. So if you want a first century attestation, I can’t give you one.
In John 18:28 they want to be able to eat the pascha. And in John 18:39 Pilate says “it is my custom to release to you a prisoner in the pascha.” Why would anyone think the word is being used differently 11 verses apart?
It is an analogous term; even on your interpretation the two uses have related but distinct meanings. In v. 28 the pascha is something one eats, a meal or a food. In v. 39 it is a time, a day or a season. We know that pascha, as used to name a time, was used to refer to the whole feast of unleavend bread. At any rate, even if it was used only to refer to the day of the feast of Passover strictly taken, I believe the preposition is ambiguous and could mean either “on” the passover or more vaguely “at” or “around” the passover.
There is a real cost to such harmonizing readings: you then have to write off John’s literary master stroke (having the “lamb of God” die while the lambs were being sacrificed) as a mere coincidence arising only from a misreading.
But the lambs are slaughtered at twilight. Between the 14th and 15th and eaten during the night with nothing left for the morning. Why would he have Jesus executed at midday before that?
The lambs were slaughtered in the afternoon–Josephus says between the 9th and 11th hours (roughly 15:00-17:00). And Jesus wasn’t crucified at noon (according to John); at noon he was still in front of Pilate on trial (Jn 19:14). Per John, he would both have been actually put on the cross and later died sometime after noon but before sundown (roughly 18:00), so he would have died right about the time Josephus says the lambs were being slaughtered.
But Jesus is also the manna from heaven in John which in a possible literary master stroke ended after celebrating the passover (not before).
I don’t really follow the argument here. I mean, yes, Jesus is the bread come down from heaven for John. And yes, the manna, in Joshua, stopped appearing after passover. Is the argument that the disappearance of the manna at the end of the Israelites’ wandering in the wilderness corresponds to Jesus being dead? That is an interesting connection, but it doesn’t seem quite as . . . vivid as Jesus dying at literally the same time that thousands of lambs are being sacrificed a few thousand feet away.
CEJ said
Porphyry said
….Finally, as to the mystery cult context: several elements in Mark are, it seems, very deliberately obscure–the young man who runs away naked and shows up again at the tomb to announce the resurrection, the “let the reader understand” in the little apocalypse. There is also the claim that the author has access to a secret teaching of Jesus not heard by the crowds: e.g., Mk 4:34.
So what do you make of the unnamed character who runs away and why do you take him to also be the the young man in the tomb? And why would the authorities try to seize him?
I really don’t know. It’s little more than a guess.
But what the man is wearing in the garden, the cloth he leaves behind is a sindon–it occurs only 6 times in the NT and four of those are in Mark: twice in this episode (Mk 14:51-52) and twice again at Jesus’ burial (Mk 15:46). (The only other times the word occurs outside of Mark are in Lk and Mt’s parallels to 15:46: Mt 27:59 and Lk 23:53).
So basically: you get a mysterious, unnamed young man (neaniskos) in the garden wearing a sindon, who appears for the altogether strange episode and disappears just as suddenly, then you get a sindon as the burial cloth at the tomb, then the body disappears from the tomb and you have another mysterious unnamed neaniskos at the tomb who came out of nowhere. Oh, and he is wearing white robes; they aren’t, alas, called a sindon, but still the very fact that both these young men’s clothes get noted in the text creates a parallel between them. Maybe calling the man at the tomb’s robes a sindon again would have been too heavy handed for Mark. Or maybe the point is precisely that though he is now clothed he is wearing proper robes rather than a burial shroud.
Or maybe I’m connecting dots that aren’t there.
At any rate, I have a hard time thinking there isn’t some connection between the two, even if that connection isn’t ultimately one of identity.
If it was necessary that all legal cases had to be be built only on witness testimony and evidence that totally agreed, almost no one would ever be arrested or come to trial, or being arrested and coming to trial being convicted. Again, this observation does not mean that we have to accept everything that the gospels and NT (or OT) say at face value, but we need to understand how people see, absorb, remember and transmit accounts.
Porphyry said
CEJ said
Porphyry said
….Finally, as to the mystery cult context: several elements in Mark are, it seems, very deliberately obscure–the young man who runs away naked and shows up again at the tomb to announce the resurrection, the “let the reader understand” in the little apocalypse. There is also the claim that the author has access to a secret teaching of Jesus not heard by the crowds: e.g., Mk 4:34.
So what do you make of the unnamed character who runs away and why do you take him to also be the the young man in the tomb? And why would the authorities try to seize him?
I really don’t know. It’s little more than a guess.
But what the man is wearing in the garden, the cloth he leaves behind is a sindon–it occurs only 6 times in the NT and four of those are in Mark: twice in this episode (Mk 14:51-52) and twice again at Jesus’ burial (Mk 15:46). (The only other times the word occurs outside of Mark are in Lk and Mt’s parallels to 15:46: Mt 27:59 and Lk 23:53).
So basically: you get a mysterious, unnamed young man (neaniskos) in the garden wearing a sindon, who appears for the altogether strange episode and disappears just as suddenly, then you get a sindon as the burial cloth at the tomb, then the body disappears from the tomb and you have another mysterious unnamed neaniskos at the tomb who came out of nowhere. Oh, and he is wearing white robes; they aren’t, alas, called a sindon, but still the very fact that both these young men’s clothes get noted in the text creates a parallel between them. Maybe calling the man at the tomb’s robes a sindon again would have been too heavy handed for Mark. Or maybe the point is precisely that though he is now clothed he is wearing proper robes rather than a burial shroud.
Or maybe I’m connecting dots that aren’t there.
At any rate, I have a hard time thinking there isn’t some connection between the two, even if that connection isn’t ultimately one of identity.
I read in a source I can no longer recall that ancient baptisms sometimes involved the initiate wearing a sindon to enter the water that he would remove to be dunked naked, after which he would be wrapped in a white robe.
That may explain the imagery, but not the authorities’ interest in this individual. Why try to nab him of all people?
Someone whose name now eludes me claimed John 12:9-11 may explain the interest in him.
CEJ said
Porphyry said
CEJ said
Porphyry said
….Finally, as to the mystery cult context: several elements in Mark are, it seems, very deliberately obscure–the young man who runs away naked and shows up again at the tomb to announce the resurrection, the “let the reader understand” in the little apocalypse. There is also the claim that the author has access to a secret teaching of Jesus not heard by the crowds: e.g., Mk 4:34.
So what do you make of the unnamed character who runs away and why do you take him to also be the the young man in the tomb? And why would the authorities try to seize him?
I really don’t know. It’s little more than a guess.
But what the man is wearing in the garden, the cloth he leaves behind is a sindon–it occurs only 6 times in the NT and four of those are in Mark: twice in this episode (Mk 14:51-52) and twice again at Jesus’ burial (Mk 15:46). (The only other times the word occurs outside of Mark are in Lk and Mt’s parallels to 15:46: Mt 27:59 and Lk 23:53).
So basically: you get a mysterious, unnamed young man (neaniskos) in the garden wearing a sindon, who appears for the altogether strange episode and disappears just as suddenly, then you get a sindon as the burial cloth at the tomb, then the body disappears from the tomb and you have another mysterious unnamed neaniskos at the tomb who came out of nowhere. Oh, and he is wearing white robes; they aren’t, alas, called a sindon, but still the very fact that both these young men’s clothes get noted in the text creates a parallel between them. Maybe calling the man at the tomb’s robes a sindon again would have been too heavy handed for Mark. Or maybe the point is precisely that though he is now clothed he is wearing proper robes rather than a burial shroud.
Or maybe I’m connecting dots that aren’t there.
At any rate, I have a hard time thinking there isn’t some connection between the two, even if that connection isn’t ultimately one of identity.
I read in a source I can no longer recall that ancient baptisms sometimes involved the initiate wearing a sindon to enter the water that he would remove to be dunked naked, after which he would be wrapped in a white robe.
That may explain the imagery, but not the authorities’ interest in this individual. Why try to nab him of all people?
Someone whose name now eludes me claimed John 12:9-11 may explain the interest in him.
Well, if secret mark is authentic, that would fit.
CEJ said
I read in a source I can no longer recall that ancient baptisms sometimes involved the initiate wearing a sindon to enter the water that he would remove to be dunked naked, after which he would be wrapped in a white robe.
I’m just thinking through this, and I’m sure it’s already occurred to you, but that would fit really nicely with the image of baptism as being buried with Christ so one can rise with him, e.g., in Rom 6:4.
If we could say this was an image of Baptism, intended to be understood by the initiates, there could also be a hint of “putting on Christ” in there too (E.g., Gal 3:27).
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