My recreation of the opening of the First Gospel

[Peter Kirby]

The "title" of the Gospel: Mark 1:1 "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ", was created by the first revisor. When this person copied only the first part of the story from his source, he identified it with this descriptor. The writer of the story wants the identity of Jesus to be a mystery and would not tell the reader in the first line that Jesus is the Christ. The revisor says that this is "the beginning" because he literally just copied out the first HALF of the story, the other half being about the revelation of Jesus to Paul and Paul's ministry.

Then we have Mark 1:9: "In those days Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan." This is at least modified by the second revisor, who was conforming the story to Matthew by saying that Jesus came "from Nazareth in Galilee". Nothing else in the Gospel of Mark treats Jesus as having come from Nazareth. He is referred to as a Nazarene, which must have meant something like Holy One or one with a Secret Identity. If anything, according to Mark Jesus was from Capernaum.

So right here we already have evidence of two instances of modification in Mark 1.

I follow the argument in these two instances, and I have made similar points before on the plausibility of these suggestions. I'm also aware of how difficult it can be to demonstrate even such modest points in the absence of more objective and unambiguous evidence. I am sympathetic to the project of identifying revisions and hypothetical sources. Indeed, one of the projects to which I would like to return at one point is the study I had begun of 1 Clement in this way. Yet even to the multiple considerations named in that blog post, Dr. Carrier could remark only that I may be committing a possibiliter fallacy, as that was what seemed right to him. I had entered into my study of 1 Clement with no idea to entangle it with other hypotheses of the development of Christian origins but rather as a matter of text criticism first and foremost. I also intended to present the considerations in such a way that anyone else who studied the matter would have easily been able to follow the same steps to reach similar conclusions themselves. Perhaps I was not successful, even then. In any event, it's not easy to cut through the combinatorial explosion of possible hypotheses that can be speculated, to do more than just mention a single hypothesis but to show that it in particular should be accepted. It's not surprising when most suggestions do not carry the difficult burden, even if a few do.

[StephenGoranson]

If I get this right, you, rgprice, have written that Mark was a genius but that Matthew and Luke totally misunderstood his supposed-by-you fiction and then added to it mistakenly from other sources as if not fiction, and that Mark was originally shorter except when it was originally longer.

[rgprice]

If I get this right, you, rgprice, have written that Mark was a genius but that Matthew and Luke totally misunderstood his supposed-by-you fiction and then added to it mistakenly from other sources as if not fiction, and that Mark was originally shorter except when it was originally longer.

Partly right. I think that the "original Gospel", let's not call it "Mark", opened with John the Baptist similarly to how Mark does now, but it ended after Paul's trial (not entirely sure if Paul would have been tried in Ephesus or Jerusalem in that narrative).

The original story gave the account of the ministry, arrest, trial and crucifixion of Jesus, and then went on to tell about the revelation of the risen Jesus to Paul and then to narrate Paul's ministry, arrest, trial and "escape".

That's why the first verse in the canonical Gospel of Mark says that it is "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ". Because someone literally only copied the first half of the story and described the story with a heading indicating that he had only copied, "the beginning". And its also why the ending of Mark is cut off at Mark 16:8. People always recognized that the ending had been lost, but they had no idea what the actual ending was. The original ending was largely what we read in the second half of Acts of the Apostles. Of course Acts has been heavily modified in its canonical form, but it is derived from the original ending of the first Gospel.

So the structure of Luke/Acts is actually based on the first Gospel, which told the story from the ministry of Jesus all the way through the ministry of Paul.

[StephenGoranson]

So many exceedingly-ffy, unevidenced, presumptions.