Ben C. Smith wrote:First, here are the hits that I get from the TLG (on Diogenes) for ἀχειροποίητος, once the obviously Christian texts have been removed:
3 hits in 2 different works. So yes, this is a pretty rare term. On the other hand, it is also just the usual negative prefix ἀ- added to the adjective χειροποίητος, which is much more common (and which appears quite a few times in the LXX). So I am not sure how much raw creativity the word shows on Paul's part. But the point remains: the negative form is a rare word.
Thanks, for the Thesaurus extracts, Ben. They are certainly useful in connection with Paul’s lexicon. I am not saying that Paul was necessarily coining new words, though Greek, like German allows words to be created by manipulation of existing words, so no big issue there in any case. It’s more the way Paul was “appropriating” words for his mystical semantics which makes him original. Crossan e.g. pointed out that Paul apparently talked himself as “demios Christou” in a figurative sense (although he believes that he also indicates he was incarcerated). I read Phm 1:1 as “prisoner of Christ”, not “for Christ”, on the strength of the mention of Epaphras in 1:23 as “synaichmalōtos en Christō",” and the “nyni” in Phm 1:9 as a later gloss by someone who was not clued in thought Paul was writing from jail where he had special visiting privileges. And again, if you have a minute, can you look up in TLG “euaggelion” as noun before Paul, if there is any hint anyone used as Paul in connection with the “preaching gospel to the afflicted” as per Isa 61:1? I suspect not.
Second, it is not necessarily clear to me that Mark uses the term "temple" as a metaphor for the body, though of course John certainly does. (Whether Mark does or not is part of the question on this thread; as such, it is a conclusion to be a defended, not a proposition to be assumed.) How indeed would the accusation still be false in Mark 14.58: "I will destroy this temple made with hands, and in three days I will build another made without hands," unless perhaps the only thing making it false, compared to the prediction in Mark 8.31, is who will destroy the temple (the authorities or Jesus himself)? And yet even here Jesus himself can be seen throughout the passion narrative (and even before) as bringing on his own fate, thus in some way destroying the temple of his own body. Is this enough to make the witness false? Is Mark playing with technicalities? If, on the other hand, the temple is the temple (and not a metaphor for anybody's body), then the witness could very well be false from the vantage point of this gospel. What do you think?
What makes the statement false IMO is that Jesus did not say the way it was presented at the trial. In 13:1-2 he clearly predicts the destruction of the temple; he does not threaten to demolish the structure himself. The accusation furthermore asserts that the witnesses heard the part of the “temple not built with hands”, which Jesus would (or would not) be telling a crowd which knew nothing of Paul’s teaching, simply because Paul was not around yet. This would have been hilarious nonsense to the ecstatics who were insiders (as per 4:10-11), and Mark punctuates it with his “they couldn’t get their story straight” in 14:59.
I think it is safe to assume that Mark wrote after Paul. It is also safe to assume that if Mark wanted to create an allegoric mystery around Paul’s corpus he would not make it easy to grasp by outsiders. Paul, contrary what is asserted about him in the Acts and here and there in the pseudo-Paulines, was not converting far and wide in all strata of society. That is a later church propaganda which reflects its ambitions a century or so later. Paul himself purposely restricted his audience saying that he preaches his wisdom exclusively “to the mature” (1 Co 2:6) and later in the chapter (14) :
“the unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned”. Jesus’ shocking denial of grace to wide audience in Mark 4:10-12 follows this declaration of spiritual election:
“And when he was alone, those who were about him with the twelve asked him concerning the parables. And he said to them, "To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again, and be forgiven."
These verses shock the modern theologians because because what Jesus says here does not fall with the portrayal of him as the universal Saviour. Jesus’ rather nasty denial of grace here bespeaks of a sharp divide between the cult of the elect who (already) have the capacity to “get the gospel text” and those who don’t. This is shocking because the seminaries and allied academia still operate on a totally unsustainable picture of a monolithic post-Easter church into which Paul – the great sinner who persecuted the church of God – was graciously accepted. So you have Markan scholars from Wrede to Raisanen, lamenting that Mark is impossible to crack, even though what Mark (ending at 16:8) wrote leaves no doubt that, a) the preaching of Christ crucified originated with Paul and not with James’ house in Jerusalem, and that b) the process of uniting the two main strands of Christians was not yet finished in Mark’s time. The disciples do not get the Paul’s gospel that Jesus preaches to them, and the word of his rising does not reach them. (Actually, it does, kind of, through Mark thumbing his gospel nose at them - and by extension those who follow them in his own time - as scattered sheep who do not get the news of Jesus’ resurrection because they do not have "faith"). Ergo….Mark either lied in presenting symbolically the Christian beginnings, or the tale of Jesus appearing to Peter and company post-mortem – thus certifying them as apostolic authority - did not arrive as yet. It is as simple as that ! Of course, ever since Peter, the guardians of Christian traditions have the option of running away from unpleasant realities and deny them three times before the cock crows.
It needs to be said though that if Mark was the last gospel, Christianity would have likely never become more than a curious mystery club for the spritualist connoisseurs whose New Age experimental psychotherapy faded somewhere in the third century. This was the Achilles heel of Paulinism – it was too self-consciously elitist. Mark, like Paul before him, trash-talked the “other Jesus” tradents (of Peter). That is why Matthew had to declaw and dumb down Mark; without it the gospel story would not have been readable by a wider audience. I think Mary Ann Tolbert was spot on in saying that the aim of Matthew was not simply to “editorialize” Mark. His aim was to defeat Mark’s (Paulinist) purpose. Jesus on the Mount (especially in ch 7) does a great job of it. Matthew was a publicity genius. His Lord’s prayer was not only brilliant piece of liturgy but a horribly effective put-down of Paul who complained that “we don’t pray as we should” (Rom 8:26). Now, imagine the "faithful" followers of Jesus who did not even know the Lord’s prayer ! Brilliant !
You may think it is “assuming too much” to see Paul’s teaching of the “body as temple” as the key to unlock with the conundrum created by Mark around the accusation against Jesus. Ok, what can I say ? All I can do is to point to John 2:21 and ask in turn, “whatever made
him interpret the saying that way” ? What are the alternatives here ? You want to believe that John actually heard what was said by Jesus in the temple ? Did Jesus really used Paul’s metaphors ? Or did the risen Lord tell Paul what he taught in Jerusalem and word spread until it was taken down by the ghost-writer of apostle John ? And how did this silly misapprehension of Jesus’ talking about the (edible) temple get into circulation such that it had fatal consequences in the early gospel while having no effect on the unfolding story in the latter one ?
Incidentally, my seeing John here as “outing” Mark’s hidden meaning is based on observation that he does the same thing in 19:24 in presenting the casting of lots for Jesus’ garments as the fulfilled Psalm 22:18. Mark, Matthew & Luke all describe the event but stay silent on the OT connection.
All of this is possible. I do not, however, think it follows directly from a judicious handling of a single motif and a single word in a single pericope of the entire passion narrative. Doubtless you have other arguments to bring to bear that cover the other pericopes.
Actually, Ben I have given you not one but two Paulinist motives in the passion drama. The temple-body mysterion and the two-pronged “trial” of Jesus which proleptically agrees with Paul’s maxim of crucified Christ as stumbling block to the Jews, played out by the Sanhendrin and the hostile throngs, and folly to the Gentiles, played dutifully by Pilate, of course on a blueprint with a Markan twist, in which he is made to release foolishly an anti-Roman insurrectionist in place of a harmless “furiosus”. This would have almost certainly brought the prefect before Caesar on a charge of maiestas.
The Gethsemane scene, as the little Apocalypse before, has strong links to 1 Thessalonians. The arrest is an ironic twist to 1 Th 5:2 : “ You yourselves know that the the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night”. In Mark it is Jesus who is picked by armed men who come against him as if he was a robber. (See John 10:1 to confirm that the lhsths-klepths sayings were interchangeable in the early church) Jesus admonishes his disciples in the fashion of the letter to “watch!” ( 1 Th 5:4-8). Jesus request correlates with Paul’s “but you are not in darkness, brethren, for that day to surprise you like a thief, .. therefore let us not sleep, as others do, but let us watch (γρηγορῶμεν) and be sober”. Peter and co fall asleep failing to heed the command to “… put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation”.
When Mark writes in 14:21 “For the Son of man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed (παραδίδοται) !” he without a doubt references the “scripture” of Paul: Rom 4:25 who was delivered up (παρεδόθη) for our trespasses and raised for our justification.
The Eucharist also comes from Paul, though I believe 1 Cor 11:23-26 is a later insert inspired by the Markan staging itself (probably via Luke). Mark builds up his Last Supper symbolism (as well as the preceding eucharistic “events”) from 1 Cor 10:16, and the hyperbolic imagined κυριακὸν δεῖπνον in 1 Cor 11:20, (referenced in 11:27-29).
Finally Peter: I have the strongest suspicion that the Hellenizing of Cephas to Petros comes to us also with compliments of Mark. It probably originated in his playful reading of Rom 9:33 in which he mischievously assigns the second descriptor of the stumbling stone, the πέτρα σκανδάλου to Cephas (though of course Paul meant both, lithos and petra in the verse as referring to Christ). If you don’t like that, I hope you agree at least that Peter’s shameful denial of Jesus seems to fit Gal 6:12’s reasons for the denial of the cross rather conspicuously.
Best,
Jiri
