QUESTION:

If the strongest explanation for Luke’s alteration/omission of the centurion’s declaration that Jesus was the Son of God at the crucifixion is that he wants to anchor Jesus’s divine sonship at least as early as his birth, then why does he later associate that same divine sonship AND innocence with Jesus’s death and resurrection in Acts 13?  Luke is combining a variety of early traditions that are at odds at WHEN it happened in order to stress that he really WAS the Son of God.  (Similar problem in Luke-Acts with other titles for Jesus as well: Christ and Lord.  He gets *made* those at the resurrection but is *already* those before he dies!)

 

RESPONSE
Yes indeed!  It’s one of the major questions to be addressed about Luke’s Christology.  Why does he state that Jesus became Son of God at his conception (1:35); at his baptism (3:21 – that’s the wording of the original text, probably); and at his resurrection (speeches in Acts).  I deal with the issue in Orthodox Corruption in my discussion of the textual variant of 3:21.

Luke would not have denied that Jesus was Son of God at his death but his account is different from Mark’s.  In Mark the confession of the centurion is the point at which someone *realizes* Jesus is the son of God: until then it’s been a secret;  that’s not the case in Luke who has removed a good bit of Mark’s messianic secret.  His emphasis is less that Jesus’ death shows he was the son of God than that he was wrongly executed, since he was completely innocent.  You can see that emphasis especially by comparing carefully Mark and Luke’s trials before Pilate, where the innocence is unmistakably heightened in significant ways.

QUESTION:

I am unable to wrap my wits around one fundamental question about Jesus’ three-year ministry: why did his disciples, his main followers, stick around month after month? The answer is not obvious. If the historical Jesus were in no way a miracle worker, then how did he establish his bona fides with them? Given that Jesus was very smart, very astute, intense, straight-shooting, a strong personality with lots of charisma, it still does not ring true that a young person would drop everything to follow this man not just for a week or a month or two, but for years. The fact they did follow suggests deep conviction and solid commitment, which seems way way too much of a personal investment for what appears to be on offer. Sure, the kingdom of God was a wonderful promise, but it was just a bunch of well-fashioned words that tell of a future event. Is your view that Jesus did in fact make such a compelling case that, all by itself, could have earned this kind of ‘all in’ commitment of his followers?

 

RESPONSE:

Part of the problem is that we don’t know how long Jesus’ ministry was.  In Mark it begins in the summer when fields are ready to be harvested (ch. 2), and everything after that happens right away (“immediately,” “immediately,” “immediately” — one of Mark’s favorite ways of staring his stories); Jesus goes to Jerusalem in the fall (Passover feast).  It appears that in this earliest Gospel, Jesus’s ministry lasts only a few months, half a year or so.

People believe the ministry lasted “three years” because in John’s account Jesus celebrates three separate Passover feasts (it’s an annual event).  I don’t know if that’s historical, but you don’t find it in any of the other Gospels.

Apart from that,, there are many religions in the world in which people have abandoned everything to follow a teacher — apart from society and experiencing hardship — for years!  The key is that they consider the message true and trust messenger.

 

QUESTION:

Let us at least consider the implications of four gospels circulating anonymously before they are each eventually assigned an author by the time of Papias. Most scholars hold that “Matthew” and “Luke” relied on “Mark”. But for the theory of anonymity to work this must mean that two people relied on a gospel they knew not who wrote it. Yet they both considered it authoritative. This is very strange if they had no idea who wrote it. Had it already become “textbook” gospel? But why?

Again, how does a book even circulate anonymously? Are we to imagine a “Mark” laboring late at night, concealing his project from family and friends (Christians), then dropping his final draft at some door of some primitive house-church and stealing off into the night?

I wonder what would happen if we applied this degree of skepticism to other works. Does Plutarch announce himself as the author in the “Lives” attributed to him?

RESPONSE:

I don’t think Matthew and Luke necessarily did consider Mark “authoritative.” It provided them with a number of their stories with wording they often thought was satisfactory. But the fact that they changed it so extensively shows they didn’t think it was authoritative per se.

You’re right that when we say Mark was circulated anonymously we’re not saying that his original audience didn’t know who he was. The key point is that when it got copied and taken to other places, his identity was soon forgotten. That happened a *lot* in the ancient world, even with numerous classical authors, not just, famously, “Homer,” but all sorts of writings which were later attributed to someone who obviously did not write them.

As it turns out, there there is an entire field of scholarship devoted to this issue, scholars figuring out who wrote all those anonymous writings back there that eventually were attributed to Socrates or Plato, or, in the Christian realm: Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Hippolytus, etc