Tag Archives: Mark

An Anonymous Author Writes…

Posted on by
1

A little while ago I came across a group of enthusiasts who met locally to celebrate the chap who’d founded their group a few decades back. I paid them a few visits to see what they were about and when they learnt I was capable of stringing a few sentences together, asked if I would write a short biography of their Founder. Being an obliging sort, I said I would, not realising the challenges that lay ahead.

For a start, none of them had actually known the guy. He’d died soon after the group had started and none of the current membership had ever met him. Worse, they weren’t even sure what his real name was. Some said ‘Josh’, some ‘Jess’ and others ‘Manny’. They thought a guy who had known him was still alive, but couldn’t remember his name either. ‘Rocky’, they said, or maybe ‘Tiny’.

All the same, I’d said I’d have a go at the biography and didn’t want to disappoint them so I set about searching the Web. I soon discovered that both ‘Rocky’ and ‘Tiny’ had passed away, about the same time six or so years earlier. There was nothing online about any Rocky but there was quite a bit about Tiny. Or rather by him. He’d left a whole series of posts, mostly about he’d been contacted by the founder from beyond the grave. He said over and over that he could prove it really was the Founder he was channelling because, apparently, it said so in some old stories. He quoted these all over the place.

All weird stuff, but all I had to go on.

So I set to. I tried to make as much sense as I could of Tiny’s writing. I made stories out of his rambling, imagining what the Founder must’ve been like from the things Tiny claimed he’d told him. Like Tiny, I used old stories to fill out the narrative and included loads of metaphor. People love finding hidden meanings in things. I stopped short though at having the Founder come back from the dead at the end, not even metaphorically. Tiny insisted he had done but no-one in their right minds would believe it.

In the end, I thought I’d made a good job of it. The guys in the group thought so too. They were so pleased they suggested I publish it on Amazon, which I did. To my surprise, it started selling really well and got some very good reviews (and only a couple of poor ones.) To my annoyance, though, it wasn’t not long before a bunch of opportunists took to writing novellas about the Founder themselves, and (the nerve of it) lifting whole chunks of my story and ‘correcting the errors’! Errors? How could there be errors in something I’d made up? They even used my technique, lifted from Tiny, of borrowing bits from older books and making them fit their version. Their ‘Founder’ turned out to be different from mine, though not, I’m convinced, anywhere near as good.

I’ve decided I was going to retire from this writing lark. It’s too competitive and there are too many plagiarists around. Let them get on with their inferior sequels. Everybody will remember I was the first, and the best. Won’t they?

Mark and the Oral Tradition

Posted on by
26

Paul never refers to ‘the disciples’, the term used for Jesus’ inner circle in the later gospels. Instead, he refers to the founders of the cult as ‘apostles’ (literally ‘messengers’). Cephas is described as an apostle, as is Barnabas (Acts 14:14) and Paul himself. Paul defines the term more specifically as someone who has been commissioned directly by Jesus (1 Corinthians 9:1; Galatians 1:1-2). Evidently he himself was not: he encountered the risen Christ only in his head. He felt this was more than good enough. For Paul it was the only qualification anyone needed to be an apostle. He cites others who had encountered Jesus in the same way:

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. (1 Corinthians 15: 3-8)

What he goes on to say is crucial in understanding the nature of ‘the gospel’ that was in circulation in the years before Mark’s gospel:

But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them – yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. Whether, then, it was I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed (1 Corinthians 15: 8-11; my emphasis.)

What they preached was their visions of a celestial Saviour. The witness of these visionaries of the risen Christ was the only gospel they knew and, Paul suggests here and elsewhere, the only one that was being transmitted orally when he was active. As we saw last time, he knew no other details of Jesus’ life, had none passed on to him and passed none on to others, except for these visions and the teaching he worked out from them – his ‘revelations’. Let me say that again: the visions of the risen Jesus were all he, Cephas and others knew. Paul says so categorically. There was no other ‘oral tradition’.

Paul builds his subsequent teaching on Jewish scripture, showing how his ‘revelations’ must be from the Christ because they comply with this scripture (even though he has to manipulate it to make it do so: in Romans 9, for example). Nowhere does he say he is referring to any history he has learnt, nor to anything passed on to him orally about Jesus’ teaching, ministry, life or miracles. Just the opposite in fact:

I want you to know… that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man nor was I taught it; rather I received it (directly) by revelation from Jesus Christ’ (Galatians 1: 11-12).

About seven years after Paul’s death, a literate member of the one of the cult communities – known to us as Mark – decided to set down Paul’s teaching about the Christ in allegorical form. He tells us this is what he is doing several times in his gospel, including Mark 4:11-12:

To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, so that “‘they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven’” (referencing and misquoting Isaiah 6:9)

Mark did not depend on any oral tradition for his information about Jesus’ life because apart from the ‘announcement’ built on Cephas’, Paul’s and others’ visions there was no oral tradition. Mark took Paul’s teaching and like him, used Jewish scripture as the basis for the story he developed from it. Thus, Paul’s ‘revelation’ of a bread and wine ritual (1 Corinthians 11:23-27) becomes the Last Supper (Mark 4:22-24); Paul’s teaching about forgiveness becomes Jesus’ teaching about forgiveness; Paul’s dispute with Cephas leads to a gospel Peter who is bungling and disloyal; Paul’s mention of The Twelve in 1 Corinthians becomes, with a miscalculation, the disciples; Paul’s instruction to obey the authorities (Roman’s 13:1) becomes Jesus’ (Mark 12:17); Paul’s, and Jewish scriptures’, promise of the spiritually blind (2 Corinthians 4:3-6) being helped to see becomes Jesus’ miracles of healing; Paul’s predictions about the end of the age (1 Thessalonians 4:15-17) become Jesus’ (Mark 13); Paul’s talk of the coming of the Christ in person (1 Thessalonians 4:13-5:11) becomes Jesus’ prophecies about the Son of Man appearing (Mark 14:61); Paul’s vision of the risen Christ becomes the resurrection. And on and on. There is nothing in Mark’s gospel that doesn’t derive from Paul’s teaching, and Jewish scripture in turn. it is, in short, made up.

All of this accounts for the absence of any resurrection appearances in Mark. His gospel ends with the discovery of the allegorical empty tomb and leaves off there because it is where his audience came in, as it were. They had been converted by hearing of the ‘appearances’ of the celestial Christ to Cephas and those Paul lists in 1 Corinthians. They already knew how the story ended or, more accurately, how it had begun: with those visions.

Later, Matthew, Luke and John would take Mark’s allegory and use it as the basis for their gospels, adding new, invented material of their own. The myth, in both the technical and popular sense, was born.

If not Metaphor, then what?

Posted on by
45

I’ve been arguing that everything in Mark’s gospel is metaphor (because he says so) but there are some pronouncements credited to Jesus in the synoptic that do seem to read as if they’re not. These look as if they are meant to be taken at face value: 

Mark 9:1 And he said to them, “Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God after it has come with power.”

Mark 10:21. Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.

Matthew 5:39. But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.

Matthew 5:40. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.

Matthew 5: 43-44. You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,

Matthew 6:24. No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.

Matthew 6.25. Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?

Matthew 7:6. Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

Luke 6:30. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back.

Luke 14:26 If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters – yes, even their own life – such a person cannot be my disciple.

Perversely, these are the very commands that most Christians insist are intended metaphorically. This includes those who oppose the idea that, Jesus’ parables excepted, the gospels are in any way symbolic. I know from experience that they have any number of unconvincing arguments of why Jesus doesn’t really mean what he is made to say. For example: ‘these pronouncements are too severe and impractical to be taken literally’; ‘the verses are being taken out of context’, and ‘they have a deeper spiritual meaning’ (oops – that’d be metaphor, wouldn’t it?). Ask these same folk if the statements are therefore metaphorical and you can expect to be met with barrage of abuse.

If they’re not metaphorical, why do we not find Christians striving to live according to them: renouncing wealth, giving to all who ask, selling all they have, resisting no-one, judging no-one, hating family, becoming a slave and having no care for their own welfare for the sake of the kingdom that Jesus promised was imminent.

Because they don’t believe him. Easier to disregard his words about the kingdom arriving within his disciples’ lifetime and the instructions for living in the short time until then. The hard stuff is treated as metaphorical when it makes demands on Christians themselves.

Possibly they’re right. I’d suggest that the pronouncements like those above were not Jesus’s at all. They’re cult-speak; the extreme demands of cult leaders seeking to control their acolytes. In case this sounds like an about face on my part, let me assure you it isn’t; I’ve long argued that among the metaphor and the reworking of Jewish scripture, the gospels include copious amounts of early cult rules.

Whether they’re metaphor or extreme demands once imposed on cult members, no-one today takes much notice of Jesus’ commands. What does this tell us about their worth? What does it tell us about Christians from the earliest days until now? What does it say about their willingness to crucify themselves (definitely a metaphor) in order to follow him?

Announcement

Posted on by
35

The story so far…

While he used to argue vociferously that the gospels are history – remember they must be history because Pilate and Herod are in them? – our resident apologist has backed away from this position. He says now they’re not history as such but are only ‘like’ history, which means they’re ‘historical but not written as histories’, whatever this means. He derides the likes of Ehrman and Tabor for their inability to recognise this (newly invented) fact. These no-nothings make a category error when they confuse the gospels with history.

I suspect Don wants to reclassify the gospels because he recognises they make rather poor history. It’s safer to pretend they’re designed to be something else, something that doesn’t require external evidence to verify it: ‘announcement’, for example.

This, however, merely sidesteps the question of where the gospel writers got their information from. Don has previously argued that the gospels are based on eye-witness reports, Peter’s dictation to Mark and a reliable oral tradition. But conjecture like this is only necessary if the gospels are history. If they’re not, but are ‘announcement’ instead, then their sources need  be neither historically reliable nor demonstrable.

If the accounts are ‘announcement’ rather than history then where does their ahistorical, announced information come from? Fortunately, Mark gives us a clue:

To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, so that “‘they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven’” (Mark 4:11-12, referencing and misquoting Isaiah 6:9)

In fact, the gospels’ ‘announcement’ is conveyed by a story constructed from supposed prophecies from Jewish scripture and the immediate concerns of the early cult communities, expressed in metaphors of the gospel writers’ making. All of the internal evidence supports this conclusion. In fact, the source of the gospels’ material is the same as Paul’s and that of other writers in the New Testament. Here’s how the great, self-appointed apostle puts it: 

My gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ [is] according to the revelation of the mystery which was kept secret for long ages, but now is made visible through the prophetic scriptures and is made known to all nations, according to the command of the eternal God, for the obedience of faith. (Romans 16:25-26)

Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. (1 Cor 15:3-8)

Compare this with:

Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. (Gospel Jesus in Luke 14:21)

He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself. (Gospel Jesus in Luke 24:25-27)

He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself. (Gospel Jesus in Luke 24: 25-27)

(Paul) reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that the Messiah had to suffer and rise from the dead. “This Jesus I am proclaiming to you is the Messiah,” he said. (Fictional Paul in Acts 17:2-3)

The revelation of the Messiah and the secrets and mysteries revealed to Paul and the other apostles are ‘explained and proved’ in their entirety by ancient scripture. But, these scriptures in and of themselves do not prophesy the kind of Messiah the early apostles envisaged. Rather, the scriptures are retrospectively pressed into service to match the revelations of the Messiah that Paul and the others experienced.

This is Don’s ‘announcement’: secrets and mysteries founded not on history but on revelation expressed through metaphor and the misapplication of scripture.

Parables

Posted on by
12

Jesus’ parables are analogies: similes or metaphors. ‘The Kingdom of heaven is like’; ‘there once was a man…’ Every one of the parables tells a story that didn’t actually happen. There was no literal Good Samaritan, no Prodigal Son or Sower. Jesus, or more probably the gospel authors, made up these stories to illustrate ‘mysteries’ (μυστήριον; gnosticism anyone?) What do they say about the parables? The majority appear in Matthew’s gospel, though Mark and Luke also include them. There are none in John. Did he, a supposed eye and ear- witness, not know of them?

Mark has Jesus say to his disciples:

To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, so that “‘they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven’” Mark 4:11-12

Mark lets his readers in on the ‘secret’ (μυστήριον again) because there are mysteries within the cult, secrets available only to the initiated. Remember, the parables were written – they are almost certainly literary creations – 40 years after the cult was established. Only cultists would understand the secrets/mysteries embodied in the parables. Parables, Mark tells us, are intended to disbar those who are not spiritually attuned from salvation/the kingdom of God/eternity.

The word translated as parable also means ‘riddle’, designed to puzzle or obfuscate. But Mark doesn’t just say the parables are intended to do this. He says ‘everything is in parables’. What did he mean by ‘everything’? All of the teaching he attributes to Jesus? All of the episodes he relates? Could it be that the entire Jesus story, crucifixion and resurrection included, is one long, extended parable? A metaphor, if you like.

You bet it is.

Related:

Stories about Jesus

The Jesus Story v. Reality

Cruci-fiction

Inventing Jesus

The Son of Man

Posted on by
7

I started wondering why, if his creators believed him to be the Messiah, they have gospel Jesus habitually refer to saviour-figures in the third person? He does it Matthew 23 which we looked at couple of weeks ago, when he talks about there being ‘one instructor: the Messiah’, and he does it repeatedly in all four gospels when he refers to ‘the Son of Man’. The term comes from Daniel 7:13 where it is rendered as ‘one like a son of Man’.

In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of Man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence.

The interpretation of which, supplied in Daniel 7:27, is that:

The sovereignty, power and greatness of all the kingdoms under heaven will be handed over to the holy people of the Most High. His kingdom will be an everlasting kingdom, and all rulers will worship and obey him (my emphasis).

The phrase used for ‘son of Man’, bar enash, means simply ‘human being’ and is used to contrast with the ‘beasts’ of nations that the ‘prophecy’ says will rule prior to this. However, as Daniel explains, the human being in question is the nation of Israel – the holy people of the Most High – who will finally triumph over the four beastly nations that will dominate the Earth first. The nation of Israel will metaphorically emerge from the clouds and join the Ancient of Days to rule from Heaven. There is no mention anywhere in the Daniel dream-prophecy of a Messiah or individual human being who will accomplish any of this.

As Neil Godfrey puts it:

The coming of this “Son of Man” is within the realm where one expects deities to travel. The coming is, moreover, to another station within the clouds, namely the throne of the Ancient of Days. The context again explains that this “coming” is effecting a change of rule on earth. A kingdom is falling, and freedom is given to “the saints of the Most High”.

Nevertheless, it is this title – the now fully capitalised ‘Son of Man’ – that Mark has Jesus assume. The other three gospel writers copy it from him. Paul, writing decades before them, seems not to know that Jesus used it. Evidently the celestial Christ he encountered in visions and revelations didn’t feel the need to mention it. (Hardly surprising when Mark is freely inventing years later.)

So what does this tell us about Jesus, or, more specifically, about how the Jewish Christians of Mark’s community viewed him?

A number of scholars (e.g. Ehrman, Carrier, Goodacre, Westar Institute) have argued (as have I in my own amateurish way) that gospel Jesus is constructed from ‘prophecies’ lifted from Hebrew scriptures. Other commentators have demonstrated how he is, in the first two gospels at least, the personification of the nation of Israel*. This isn’t just because he identifies with the son of Man figure in Daniel. He also equates himself with the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 and elsewhere. Strictly speaking, he is made to identify with the Suffering Servant by Mark and the other gospel authors, particularly Matthew, who all copy Mark’s original idea. As Isaiah 53 makes clear, God’s Suffering Servant is not a person: it is Israel.

Not only is Jesus identified with Daniel’s son of Man and Isaiah’s Suffering Servant – the personification of the Jewish nation – but Isaiah 53 is used as a template for his trial, mockery, crucifixion and resurrection. It is the nation that is God’s servant which, as Mark was writing, was going through trials, tribulation, suffering and apparent death: the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, with thousands of Jewish people being crucified by the Romans.

So it will be Israel, Mark hints in his extended parable, that will emerge resurrected and who will ascend metaphorically through the clouds to sit at the right hand of God to rule the nations. He leaves out the details of this resurrection and ascension from the end of his gospel because at the time of his writing they had yet to happen. But, he tells his readers and listeners, they will. They have to because Daniel and Isaiah say so: after suffering comes God-assured victory. Mark’s Jesus story, then, is an allegory of the history of the Jewish nation and its projected future. The allusions to Abraham, Moses, the Exodus, Elijah, Isaiah’s Suffering Servant, Daniel’s son of Man and the accompanying ‘prophecies’ make this more than apparent.

Gospel Jesus is a metaphor (or indeed a simile, one who is like a son of Man/the Jewish nation), his life made to conform in every respect with the history of that same nation. He is an allegory as Mark makes clear throughout his gospel. 

The clues are there for all to discern and as Mark advises, ‘he who has ears, let him hear’.

*See Watts: Isaiah’s New Exodus and Mark and numerous Christian apologists who make the same point: Google ‘Jesus and Israel’.

Myths and Endless Genealogies

Posted on by
51

I’ve been reading Richard Carrier’s recent post about Docetism. Docetism, as you’ll know, is the idea that the Christ’s human body was illusory. Carrier questions whether this idea existed as a belief system in ancient times; the term, he says, was invented by modern theologians to describe a few vague notions that appeared only towards the end of the 2nd century.

He finds no evidence for Docetism as a movement at any time and certainly not when the books of the New Testament were being composed. Along the way, however, he discusses 1 Timothy 1:3-4, written either in the late first or early second century (and therefore not by Paul who died in AD 64):

…Command certain people not to teach false doctrines any longer or to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies. Such things promote controversial speculations rather than advancing God’s work – which is by faith. (My emphasis)

‘Myths and endless genealogies’: interesting. What could these myths and genealogies be? Where were they to be found? In what way did they promote controversial speculations? How did they deplete faith?

The ‘myths’ are mentioned again in 2 Timothy, also not written by Paul but by someone using his name, again in the late first or early second century:

For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. (2 Timothy 4:3-4)

Not, you’ll note, ‘(they will) turn aside to false doctrines or heretical teaching’, which is how this verse is usually interpreted and applied by nit-picking evangelicals today, but ‘they will turn aside to myths‘. Some in the early second century church were being distracted by such myths – spurious stories about Jesus – and the writer(s?) of 1 and 2 Timothy feel compelled to warn against them.

The author of 2 Peter, who certainly wasn’t Peter/Cephas, issues a similar warning in his letter of 80-90:

For we did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. (2 Peter 1:16)

What can these myths have been? What ‘cleverly devised stories’ about Jesus were circulating in the late 1st century and early 2nd? There were no ‘Docetic’ texts at this time, no ‘Gnostic’ ones, none of the more far-fetched, downright weird gospels, which all appeared later.

The use of ‘genealogies’ in 1 Timothy is a clue. Which documents with ridiculously contrived genealogies were circulating in the churches of the late first and early 2nd centuries? We know of none – apart from Matthew and Luke’s gospels. Could the forgers of 1 & 2 Timothy and 2 Peter be referring to these? Did they object to the fictional backstory Matthew, Luke and Mark had created for their heavenly saviour? Were these the myths to which believers were turning to instead of gazing heavenward at the ‘majesty’ of the celestial saviour who was soon to come in power to the Earth, as 2 Peter 1:16 suggests?

It certainly could.

End Of Term Test

Posted on by
64

Which of the terms mythological, symbolic, theological is most appropriate when discussing biblical tropes?

Apparently, it’s ‘theological’ because it has an air of respectability, whereas the other terms suggest something with only theoretical underpinning. In fact, this also applies to ‘theological’, which by definition is the study of deities, for which there is no evidential verification. The use of ‘theological’ therefore is as unsubstantive as arguing that a concept is metaphorical or symbolic. None of these terms represents a sound, reliable way to determine the accuracy, historicity or truth of religious claims.

With this in mind see how you do with these questions:

1. Did the original hearers of the Genesis creation story regard it as –

a) true.

b) a theological statement.

c) an entertaining myth.

Of course we’ve no way of knowing what the story’s original hearers thought but there is nothing in the text that suggests they would have regarded the creation story as anything but true. The creators of Jesus’ script certainly seemed to think so, a few centuries later and its original hearers would not have felt the need to preserve it otherwise. In this belief they were wrong.

2. Which of these gospel stories is true, as in ‘really happened more or less as described’ –

a) The virgin birth with its surrounding detail.

b) Jesus meeting with Moses and Elijah (the transfiguration).

c) Resurrected corpses roaming around Jerusalem.

d) The resurrection.

The answer is that either all of them are true or none of them are. If only one of them is mythic, symbolic or ‘theological’ (and more than one of them most certainly is) then it is highly likely the others are too. If we are scrupulous, we cannot assert that one story is symbolic because it’s making a theological point while another equally implausible story is historically accurate because we want it to be.

The criteria for determining the historicity of any story from antiquity are corroborative evidence and, failing that, plausibility. We have already established that there is no independent corroboration for many of the gospel stories. There is no corroboration for some of them even in the Bible itself. We are left then with plausibility: how plausible is it that a virgin gave birth or that resurrected corpses presented themselves to Jewish authorities? Vanishingly small. Jesus’ encounter with Moses and Elijah is equally improbable.

Is his resurrection the exception? No, because dead people do not spring back to life 36 hours after being buried. If the virgin birth, the transfiguration and the resurrection of dead saints are all highly implausible (and they are) then so is the resurrection. It is at best, a story making a theological point but it is not history. The implausibility it shares with many of the other implausible stories in the gospels discounts it as history. There are no grounds for saying it is the exception.

There is also the cumulative effect of implausibility. It is highly unlikely that one of the implausible events above is historical, but it is impossible that all four of them are. Add all the other implausible stories in the gospels – the other miracles; the healings; exorcisms; Jesus sparring with the devil, walking through locked doors and beaming up to heaven: piling implausibility on top of implausibility doesn’t make any of the component implausibilities more plausible. It makes all of them less plausible and collectively impossible.

The things the gospels tell us happened to Gospel Jesus, and those they say he did himself, are equalled only by heroes of myth. Did Osiris or Romulus rise from the dead, as their stories claim? Did Augustus really become a god once he died? Of course not. These are the implausible, improbable events we find in myth. Jesus’ story is no different.

3. While many or all of the gospel stories are highly improbable as history because they are intended to convey a theological point, the words attributed to Jesus in the gospels –

a) are completely accurate.

b) are more or less what he said.

c) passed through an inestimable number of people, being invented, edited and altered in the process, before being written down 40+ years after Jesus supposedly uttered them.

d) are inventions of the gospel writers and/or their particular sect and frequently copied between gospels.

If you’re opting for a or b, you’re now making the logia the exception; the one oasis of historical truth in a desert of implausibility. That’s a big ask. To get this one off the ground, you have to call upon contrivances like –

completely reliable (but different and conflicting) oral traditions;

     hypothetical lists of sayings;

         Peter’s dictation to Mark;

             eyewitness authors;

                  secret teachings;

                     super-translators and

                         the odd spot of collaboration.

So, c and/or d is far more likely to be the answer to this one, representing the explanation that requires the least conjecture and fewest hypothetical components.

How did you do? I expect most of you aced this end of term quiz. If not, better get down to some extra study and repeat the semester next year.

The Gospels and Other Fiction, part 2

Posted on by
80

‘The gospels were written as history. Their writers did not make things up.’

History, as koseighty has reminded us, is not littered with angels, devils, demons, spirits, apparitions, miracles, voices from the sky and resurrected corpses. Real history was being written at the same time as the gospels, by Josephus and Suetonius for example, who do not include the supernatural but do reference their sources, something the gospels never manage.

And of course the gospel writers did make things up. They invented numerous stories for Jesus to make it appear he is fulfilling prophecy (even when that ‘prophecy’ wasn’t prophecy to begin with.) This included making up ‘history’; Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents (a rewrite of a fiction about the infant Moses), the crucifixion eclipse, the rending of the temple curtain and more. These are all symbolic events. They didn’t really happen. Jesus’ own resurrection can safely be added to the list. It’s ironic that those who defend the gospel authors against the charge they made stuff up are the same who invent stories themselves: Mark and Luke knew each other? Mark proof-read Luke’s first draft? There were people who would fact check the gospels and point out any errors? But the original Christians wouldn’t do such a thing. Except they did.

‘There are no Inconsistencies, contradictions and inaccuracies in and between the gospels, but if there are, these are irrelevant. It’s the bigger picture that counts.’

Jesus is different in all four gospels. Despite Matthew and Luke’s plagiarising of Mark, they alter him to reflect the Jesus they believe in. John’s Jesus is so far removed from Mark’s that he’s a different character altogether. The inconsistencies do matter: did Jesus perform signs and wonders or not? Was he crucified on Thursday or Friday? Was it Peter, John or Mary who was first to see him resurrected? Did he hang around for one day or for 40? These conflicting details tell us that the creators of the Jesus story were more than happy to alter it when it suited their purposes. This is not how history is written. It is how propaganda is created. The ‘bigger picture’ is, in any case, made up of these smaller details. They work collectively and cumulatively to create the bigger picture. If we can’t rely on their being accurate how can we be sure the bigger picture is? When the gospel writers are unreliable in the smaller details, how can we be certain they’ve got the bigger picture right, given they’re all copying it from the same source, Mark, and giving it their own spin?

‘There is corroborating evidence of the gospels’ accounts’.

There is? Where? Just because there is some evidence that Nazareth existed doesn’t mean Jesus performed miracles, any more than Dunsinane castle’s existence proves Macbeth murdered King Duncan (he didn’t). Just because Pilate was a real historical figure doesn’t mean he crucified Jesus, any more than the existence of King’s Cross Station means Harry Potter catches his train there. And these, surely, are merely the small details. There is no corroboration at all for the bigger picture. Mention of the followers of Chrestus in Suetonius confirms at best that there were Christians in Rome at the time of Claudius, but no-one is disputing that. At worst, for the apologist, this curious reference has nothing whatever to do with Jesus. Later references to incidents from his story, by the much vaunted Church Fathers, are derived from the gospels and are therefore dependent on them. As such, they don’t constitute independent corroboration.

‘Everything Jesus prophesies or predicts in the gospels will come to pass, then sceptics will see that everything in the Jesus story is true.’

This one is from a commenter on Don’s blog. (I only went there by accident, honest.) The problem with this one is that everything Jesus is made to promise should already have come true, two thousand years ago. The Son of Man should have appeared in the sky with the heavenly host to usher in God’s Kingdom on Earth, while sending most of mankind to the fiery pit or outer darkness or some other damn place. Both he and Paul claimed that this would happen within their and their followers’ lifetimes. The trouble with Christianity is it is always winter and never Christmas. Its fulfilment God’s – God’s Kingdom on Earth, life after death, the final judgement – is always going to be at some indeterminate time in the future, a time and fulfilment that never quite arrives. It never will; part of ‘the big picture’ we can be confident we will never see.

More to come (unlike Jesus). 

‘

The Gospels and Other Fiction, part 1

Posted on by
37

Christian apologists vigorously deny the idea that the Jesus story is fiction even though all of the evidence, both internal and external, points to the fact that it is. I’m not going to rehearse that evidence in this post (I address it in several earlier posts, including here and here, and there are always primary sources that, God forbid, defenders of the faith could read for themselves.) I’m interested here in looking at Christians’ defence of scripture as truth. What arguments do they have and better still, what evidence, that the gospels are historically accurate depiction of events in 1st century Palestine? Most of these arguments have been offered by our resident apologist, Don Camp, and although I’m fairly sure Don makes things up as he goes along, I’ll not reference other sources except where I’m introducing an argument he hasn’t offered.

‘Church Fathers believed the gospels were accurate, therefore, because they lived closer to the time of the gospels’ composition, they’re more likely to be right.’

Church Fathers, such as the unreliable Eusebius,, Papias, Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp were predisposed to believe the gospels were accurate; they had already converted to the faith and had a vested interest in seeing it promulgated and preserved. They were also steeped in the thinking of the age, typified by Paul and other NT writers, that the Earth was at the centre of a cosmic war between God and the forces of Satan. Above all, the Jesus story was theirs, a new revelation from God that didn’t, as far as they were concerned, belong to Jewish tradition or any other. It was new and it belonged to them: they wanted and needed it to be true. Later scholars, from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, did not come with these particular encumbrances and while of course not entirely free of prejudices of their own, considered the texts more dispassionately as history and found them to be wanting.

‘‘Mark’ is an accurate record of the disciple Peter’s time with Jesus.’

There is no evidence at all for this claim. Analysis of Mark (and also Matthew and Luke) demonstrates how the story is constructed around supposed prophecies from Jewish scriptures. Mark also incorporates much of Paul’s gospel to the Gentiles, a feature Matthew is at pains to ‘correct’. His Jesus is distinctly Jewish.

‘There was an oral tradition that accurately preserved the stories about Jesus until such time as they could be written down.’

There is no evidence that this tradition, if it existed, was accurate. It is, as Bart Ehrman shows in Jesus Before The Gospels, highly unlikely that it was. We know that stories conveyed orally are altered, embellished and modified with successive retellings.

‘There was an earlier document that preserved sayings of Jesus’ until such times they could be incorporated into the gospels.’

Then it simply vanished so that no fragment of it survived. The Church Fathers don’t appear to know anything about it. Wouldn’t such a priceless document have been preserved somehow, somewhere by someone? Q, as it’s called, is entirely hypothetical. It’s unlikely it existed. Even if it did, it is considered to have been a sayings gospel. It did not preserve details of Jesus’ life, death or resurrection. We’ll get to the so called ‘logia’ in part 3.

‘The gospels were written by eye-witnesses or associates of eye-witnesses.’

We know with certainty that this is not the case. All of them were written in Koine Greek and are carefully constructed literary creations. None was written in Palestine but much further afield and all reflect the concerns of the later cult. Over a hundred years after they were written, Irenaeus ascribed the names by which they are now known without any evidence that the authors were called Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. Later compilers of the New Testament didn’t even know of ‘Mark’s’ primacy, which is why ‘Matthew’s’ gospel appears first in the New Testament. ‘Matthew’ and ‘Luke’ are heavily dependent on ‘Mark’ (as is ‘John’ for its overall structure), an incongruous and inexplicable approach for Matthew to take, and John too, if they were eye-witnesses themselves. Eye-witnesses do not need to rely on the testimony of people who weren’t.

More next time…