Comment on The Jebus Said So.
kromem@lemmy.world 9 months agoI don’t get why you buy into Bible Literalism.
I don’t, and I’m not sure where you get the sense that I do.
There’s a very wide gulf between thinking that a historical person named Jesus existed and that the New Testament depiction of that person is accurate.
There’s a ton of things in there that are pretty clearly BS, but the way in which they are BS seems much more like an attempt to spin historical events than to invent them from scratch.
For example, Peter’s denials.
Dude is nicknamed after a “hollow rock” which is actually a terrible thing to try to use as a foundation, but it’s an incredible nickname for someone regularly missing the point and arguing with you.
Then around the time Jesus is being tried approximately three times Cephas is also denying Jesus three times, even seen going back into a guarded area where a trial is taking place to do so.
But it’s all okay because a rooster crowed?
That sounds a lot more like there had been earlier eyewitness testimony or rumors about “hollow rock” having had a more prominent role in testifying against a historical figure which needed to be spun to be a lesser offense which was explained away as acceptable than it sounds like a fabrication originated by a religious organization owing itself to “hollow rock.”
There’s many places where the earliest layers of the NT are sort of engaged with a phantom tradition we can no longer see directly, and only in reflection of its opposition. Things like Mark pointing out that the women saw the empty tomb but didn’t tell anyone or that Thomas doubted the resurrection but then changed his mind. Given Paul was combating the disbelief in physical resurrection in Corinth in 1 Cor 15 among what was a community following some version of Jesus, maybe traditions later on that owed themselves to female teachers, prominently had females receiving sayings from Jesus separate from the other disciples, and had an over-realized eschatology such that it rejected physical resurrection like the proto-Thomasine group were a bigger deal earlier on than the church would like to let on?
My point is that this kind of undermining and spin - “yes Cephas denied him but it was prophesied” or “no, the women actually saw the empty tomb they just didn’t tell anyone, we pinky swear” - is the kind of thing we should expect from a very early split around a cultush origin and not something like Mithraism where a mythologized narrative is adapted and embellished from purely fictional origins.
As for publishing - I’d like to and plan to one day probably at least do a video series on the topic. But this is a hobby and people take religion very seriously to an irrational degree so I’m probably not going to be comfortable linking my real world self to a counter-cannonical Christian public stance until I’m retired. On the upside that gives me many more years to continue to find out more nuances.
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Come on man. We have been over this. You can’t dump all this at once.
Peter denying Jesus comes from Mark and Mark was advocating against the apostles pushing for Paul being the leader of the church. The central message of the story is the apostles didn’t get it. Heck Jesus is basically a stand in for Mark. All the interesting stuff happens on the non-jewish side of the Sea of Gallie. Which isn’t even a sea. He was trying to make Jesus in the image of Paul.
As for the earlier layers we know what they were. The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Elijiah mostly. Almost everything Mark says is right from there or the letters. For the very few things that aren’t I have no problem with an oral tradition but that doesn’t mean the oral tradition was accurate.
As for why Mark ended the way it did (originally) I admit I am not sure. I can speculate that he was trying to diminish Mary but again this doesn’t matter. We know Paul was in Jerusalem and makes no mention of the tomb additionally he does say buried.
I am sorry but the evidence just isn’t there, which is why all 4 quests have failed.
Also yeah I get your hesitation. Do what you got to do. I am just saying I do respect your work on the Gospel of Thomas and would love if you put something out there. Help you as well, you can deal with actual scholars not amateurs like me who suck at Greek.
kromem@lemmy.world 9 months ago
(1) You’d have a difficult time showing the dependence of John on Mark, and John also has Peter’s denials. That work claims to be based on an earlier work by the beloved disciple who is depicted as separate from the later apostle tradition within the work, so there may have been an earlier narrative work both John and Mark share, absent the sayings work Mark would have been relying on which is one of the places it differs noticably from John. I agree that Mark is largely written to set up Paul (if you haven’t, check out Dykstra’s Mark, Canonizer of Paul), but given Paul’s claims are that Peter directed him to the areas he was active in and that he had studied under Peter (but no one saw him except James) in Gal, the work still needs to prop up Peter as the successor who then passed things on to Paul.
(2) Where is Mark 4:3-9 in Elijah? Or Mark 13:1-2? Both public statements that are expanded upon in private instructions in the text. These were very likely known to the audience Mark was being written for and proceeded the work in saying form, which is why it characterized them as being said in public while trying to spin them with the private parts (which it should be noted may well be a later reactive layer to Mark anyways). You might find it interesting to reread Mark closely paying attention to when it breaks off for private instructions or secret disclosures (such as the secrecy around Messianic claims - claims completely absent in something like Thomas).
(3) Correct, the empty tomb was likely a later embellishment, which would make sense given Paul himself likely developed a lot of the eschatology around resurrection and a sin sacrifice. The Corinthian Creed did possibly predate him, but even then it would have only been a core part of it, and Paul expanded on the mythos quite extensively. It’s not that Mark is introducing the empty tomb that’s remarkable, it’s that he’s having his only witnesses not tell anyone about it. You see something similar in John where Peter and the unnamed beloved disciple race to the tomb, Peter loses the race, but then the other disciple doesn’t go in. There was clearly an effort to try to fit figures like the women or the unnamed beloved disciple (who takes the women into his household at the end of John) into an empty tomb narrative as silent or reluctant witnesses, which would make sense if a competing tradition connected to such ‘superapostles’ wasn’t saying anything about the tomb or resurrection.
Quests? Like Arthur and the holy grail?
It was pretty awesome spending nearly every day for years participating in /r/AcademicBiblical alongside PhDs and very knowledgeable fellow contributors. I definitely learned a lot, and was honored to be labeled as one of the sub’s Quality Contributors (their label for a handful of participants without a Master’s or PhD who had high quality comments or posts). But unfortunately Reddit administration killed a good thing with their greed, and now I’m on Lemmy and probably won’t be back to Reddit again.
If I do get around to a video series one day, the network of some of the people I befriended in that sub who produce the same kinds of material will be a good sounding board though - it’s one of the things motivating the eventual effort.
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 9 months ago
No difficulty at all. John borrowed from Mark and altered the text. All of them did things like that. None of them were historians and all of them lied
I didn’t say all of it. The public denials were a Mark invention to downplay Cephus.
Glad you agree that the tomb narrative never happened. You are nearly there btw. Only 1% more and Jesus is gone completely.
Quests for the historical Jesus. There have been 4.