rgprice wrote: ↑Sat Oct 14, 2023 11:29 am
Getting at this late, but regarding the OP:
Glad you came tho, always interested in your take.
How are we supposed to get on board with such a program? What *is* the good news? Why would anybody write such a thing?
I believe the answer is that this was an introduction to a narrative about Paul, Acts of the Apostle, where Jesus appears to Paul and everything came together in his ministry.
One of the obstacles in our way of understanding Mark is the current cannon, which buries Mark as much as it can in the middle of other, more happy Gospels. But almost everybody who has read Mark--from Matthew and Luke, to the authors of the various later endings, get the impression that the story is incomplete, and that *something* has to follow it.
So hypothesizing that its *not* a standalone book, but just kind of a chapter with a cliffhanger ending, and it was originally part of some larger collection which has been obliterated by later cannons, i a very plausible hypothesis and, IMHO, a very promising line of research.
In support of your particular hypothesis, I've mentioned in other threads that the first couple chapters of Marcion's Galatians *is* pure, first person narrative about Paul, one which had many of the same characters (the 3 apostles) which feature in Mark, and many of the themes of Mark (that they just don't get it) and is perhaps the textual smoking gun you are looking for. I consider it as evidence in support of your view.
Perhaps those two chapters have been snipped off of a longer first person narrative about Paul, one which perhaps included the "we' passages of Acts (with 'I' searched-and-replaced by 'we', to give Luke some street cred). I don't have the text-critical skills to speak authoritatively as to how well those go together linguistically, stylistically, etc, but my (lay) ear can't detect any reason why they couldn't, and I hope somebody who *does* have those skills will take this hypothesis seriously enough to investigate it.
The cannon as we have it *does* contain the gospels, followed by a lengthy narrative about Paul (and other apostles), followed by a letter collection, and I take that as evidence in support of your hypothesis as well. Gospel(s) followed by a narrative about Paul *is* a discernible pattern we do see in cannons.
Perhaps there was an ancestral cannon, consisting of Mark, followed by a narrative about Paul, introducing a collection of some of Pauls letters. And perhaps as the letter collection was expanded to include letters from more apostles, the narrative was also expanded to include stories about them as well. On this view, Marcion's cannon wound't be the first cannon, but one of the intermediate reshufflings, consisting of an expanded gospel, with some of the narrative elements distributed across the letters. The current cannon might be another reshuffling of Marcion's, or they may have thought the best way to domesticate Marcion and Paulinism would be to go back to that earlier cannon and expand that.
Like I said, I'm not really in a position to speak definitively about this, but I don't see anything obviously wrong about it, and I hope others will pitch in and kick the tires of this hypothesis as well.
Even today, there's no real consensus on Paul's views about exactly how much of the OT law is still applicable. Paul is by no means clear himself on this; indeed, we may see his views evolving and changing on this from letter to letter, so there may not even be a coherent theology there to get right. Everybody who has grappled with this, from the author of Luke/Acts talking about the Jerusalem council, on out, seems to judiciously leave things as ambiguous as the source material in Paul does. And Mark follows suit here. Jesus clearly rejects some laws, but on others (e.g. categorically forbidding divorce) he's even *more* strict than Moses was. And exactly where the line should be drawn, what's in and what's out, is never clearly delineated here any more than it is anywhere else.