dbz wrote: ↑Mon Aug 28, 2023 6:32 pm
- Dr. Sarah has the following open question:
So the question is not just ‘why would someone write fictional biographies about the imagined earthly life of a heavenly being just to show him making pronouncements to people?’, it’s also ‘having done that, why would they not even show him making the pronouncements they wanted made?’ But, if the gospel authors were working with stories handed down about an actual Jesus, it makes complete sense; they’re not writing his life from scratch, they’re trying to portray an actual person of whom they have some records as holding a viewpoint he didn’t actually hold.
Comment by Dr Sarah June 25, 2023 at 5:29 am per "'Deciphering The Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed' review: Chapter 9, Part 1".
Geeky Humanist. 13 June 2023.
Which implies that if gMark is a Pauline gospel then it should of made it more clear to the plebes that Torah law is not necessary for redemption now and other talking points.
But I suggest that gMark was not intended as an encyclopedic recapitulation of every point made by Paul. Rather every iota of gMark (as R.G.Price opines) implies why the Temple cult perished do to ignorance or outright antipathy towards key talking points made by Paul!
Nice call out dbz. But here Dr. Sarah is falling into another typical apologetic trap: Assuming that the agendas of the Gospel writers were shared and assuming that the agendas of any given writer corresponds to the agenda of what became orthodox Christianity. This also related to the supposed criterion from embarrassment.
The problem here is that there is no reason at all to think that the writer of the Gospel of Mark didn't write exactly what he wanted to write. The criterion of embarrassment assumes that certain claims would have been embarrassing to the writer, and thus the fact that the writer wrote them anyway proves that it must be true, or else the writer would have excluded the claim to avoid embarrassment, but presumably he didn't because it was a "known fact".
This is, of course, preposterous, because it assumes that the claim would have been embarrassing to the writer BECUASE it was embarrassing to
later Christians. A key example here is Peter's denial and abandonment of Jesus.
Apologists claim that the fact that the Gospels say that Peter denied Jesus and abandoned him means that the accounts must be based on historical fact, because the abandonment of Jesus by Peter was an embarrassment to the church, so the fact that it was recorded means it must have been true.
But, this all assumes that the writer of the story had the same perspective and agenda as the later church, for which there is no evidence at all!
Rather, it is quite clear that the writer of the Gospel of Mark was opposed to Peter and had every intention to undermining his authority and credibility. For the writer of Mark, Peter is a foil. The writer of Mark wasn't embarrassed to say that Peter abandoned Jesus,
he was intentionally throwing him under the bus!
And why, of course?
Galatians 2: 11 But when Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he stood self-condemned, 12 for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction. 13 And the other Jews joined him in this hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. 14 But when I saw that they were not acting consistently with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the gentiles to live like Jews?”
Because the writer of Mark is a "Paulinist", writing a polemic allegory that identifies Paul as the one and only true apostle who is the only one who received and revealed the true gospel of Jesus Christ. That later Christians were embarrassed by this has nothing to do with the agenda of the original writer.