Re: Blasphemy & the passion narrative before Mark.
Posted: Sun Mar 11, 2018 12:56 am
I am not entirely sure what it is about Mark's narrative that is supposed to be incoherent. It is perfectly clear that his focal character is on a suicide mission. Jesus says so three times to his staff before being killed in the performance of the mission. The mission and its suicidal character are on the page.
There are two elements to a suicide mission: volunteering to die (check), and not dying prematurely, before accomplishing the objective. For example, the Kamikaze pilot who is shot down en route to his target has failed, even though he has died in action, as agreed.
One go-to technique for avoiding premature death that Jesus uses is the non-responsive answer to a direct question (for example, when accused of consorting with a demonic commander, Jesus replies with a disquisition on demonic tactics, the "house divided" speech; equally famous, when asked about taxation policy, he comes back with a tutorial on numismatic design). Another technique is his signature oratorical device, the parable (spontaneously volunteered "coded messages" of various kinds, from snappy one-liners to mighty speeches).
The turning point in his capital trial will be when he actually gives a straight answer to a direct question. That's a fatal step, but by then it's time to wrap up the mission. Even so, he goes back to his habitual non-responsiveness with Pilate. Perhaps the Spirit was speaking at trial, not Jesus.
Mark's Jesus' mission profile calls for him to preach before being killed (1:38). A recurrent problem with that objective is crowd management. Like "suicide mission," "crowd management" is a nuanced task. One wants to have some crowd to manage, but not so much and such kind of a crowd that it cannot be managed effectively.
Not all members of a crowd present equal management challenges. Non-ambulatory sick people and their companions (e.g. litter bearers) take up more space and impede traffic flow around them more than ambulatory sick people or demoniacs. Healthy people take up the least space most flexibly, and need the least attention per capita.
Also, not all members of the crowd fall equally within the mission profile. Jesus has to be coaxed into one early healing, and we're all familiar with the famous wrangling among critics about whether Jesus was put out by the request, or instead discovered compassion. Either reading makes sense within a coherent preaching-mission framework. Exorcism is a special case, both because Jesus can be crisp at it (he does it remotely for the SyroPhoenician woman's daughter - managing to spend more time arguing over the request than fulfilling it) and because demons are dangerous blabbers (how did that woman find Jesus when he was keeping a low profile?).
Jesus, as a character trait, is a mediocre crowd manager, and his staff isn't much help. It will be a poorly managed crowd that pressures his killer into crucifying him, when his staff are altogether absent, offstage somewhere crying.
Requests for discretion can help avoid premature death (best for the demons not to share what they know, and the appearance of having raised Jairus' daughter is fraught; John, another able storyteller, will orchestrate his Jesus' death around his version of the incident). Nevertheless, the distribution of Jesus' requests to keep quiet suggests crowd control as a prominent objective. The 9000 healthy people are not asked to keep the feeding miracles to themselves. However dangerous chatty demons are, chatty former demoniacs apparently are safe. One of them is outrightly commissioned to preach; two of them, if 16:9 is allowed.
Even among the sick, the ambulatory bleeding woman who invents the cost-efficient clothing-touch technique is not asked to keep silent, and her clothing thing does catch on (6:56). Among those who receive silence directives, Jesus tries a variety of approaches besides direct prohibition, starting with limited disclosure (please just tell the priests, as necessary to comply with Mosaic law) and ending with "Don't go through the villiage, don't tell anybody there."
Perhaps those of us here mean different qualities by coherence. When I see purposeful action plausibly conducive to the achievement of a stated objective, then I call that coherence. I do not demand that all such action be efficacious, nor do I demand the arguably related quality of non-adaptive consistency (e.g. doing again and again what hasn't worked yet, without at least some variation from time to time). It is also irrelevant to coherence whether some sheltered critic would do things differently in centuries-later hindsight.
There are two elements to a suicide mission: volunteering to die (check), and not dying prematurely, before accomplishing the objective. For example, the Kamikaze pilot who is shot down en route to his target has failed, even though he has died in action, as agreed.
One go-to technique for avoiding premature death that Jesus uses is the non-responsive answer to a direct question (for example, when accused of consorting with a demonic commander, Jesus replies with a disquisition on demonic tactics, the "house divided" speech; equally famous, when asked about taxation policy, he comes back with a tutorial on numismatic design). Another technique is his signature oratorical device, the parable (spontaneously volunteered "coded messages" of various kinds, from snappy one-liners to mighty speeches).
The turning point in his capital trial will be when he actually gives a straight answer to a direct question. That's a fatal step, but by then it's time to wrap up the mission. Even so, he goes back to his habitual non-responsiveness with Pilate. Perhaps the Spirit was speaking at trial, not Jesus.
Mark's Jesus' mission profile calls for him to preach before being killed (1:38). A recurrent problem with that objective is crowd management. Like "suicide mission," "crowd management" is a nuanced task. One wants to have some crowd to manage, but not so much and such kind of a crowd that it cannot be managed effectively.
Not all members of a crowd present equal management challenges. Non-ambulatory sick people and their companions (e.g. litter bearers) take up more space and impede traffic flow around them more than ambulatory sick people or demoniacs. Healthy people take up the least space most flexibly, and need the least attention per capita.
Also, not all members of the crowd fall equally within the mission profile. Jesus has to be coaxed into one early healing, and we're all familiar with the famous wrangling among critics about whether Jesus was put out by the request, or instead discovered compassion. Either reading makes sense within a coherent preaching-mission framework. Exorcism is a special case, both because Jesus can be crisp at it (he does it remotely for the SyroPhoenician woman's daughter - managing to spend more time arguing over the request than fulfilling it) and because demons are dangerous blabbers (how did that woman find Jesus when he was keeping a low profile?).
Jesus, as a character trait, is a mediocre crowd manager, and his staff isn't much help. It will be a poorly managed crowd that pressures his killer into crucifying him, when his staff are altogether absent, offstage somewhere crying.
Requests for discretion can help avoid premature death (best for the demons not to share what they know, and the appearance of having raised Jairus' daughter is fraught; John, another able storyteller, will orchestrate his Jesus' death around his version of the incident). Nevertheless, the distribution of Jesus' requests to keep quiet suggests crowd control as a prominent objective. The 9000 healthy people are not asked to keep the feeding miracles to themselves. However dangerous chatty demons are, chatty former demoniacs apparently are safe. One of them is outrightly commissioned to preach; two of them, if 16:9 is allowed.
Even among the sick, the ambulatory bleeding woman who invents the cost-efficient clothing-touch technique is not asked to keep silent, and her clothing thing does catch on (6:56). Among those who receive silence directives, Jesus tries a variety of approaches besides direct prohibition, starting with limited disclosure (please just tell the priests, as necessary to comply with Mosaic law) and ending with "Don't go through the villiage, don't tell anybody there."
Perhaps those of us here mean different qualities by coherence. When I see purposeful action plausibly conducive to the achievement of a stated objective, then I call that coherence. I do not demand that all such action be efficacious, nor do I demand the arguably related quality of non-adaptive consistency (e.g. doing again and again what hasn't worked yet, without at least some variation from time to time). It is also irrelevant to coherence whether some sheltered critic would do things differently in centuries-later hindsight.