He saved others?

During the crucifixion narrative, in Mark 15v31 it says: 

"In the same way the chief priests and the teachers of the law mocked him among themselves. “He saved others,” they said, “but he can’t save himself!"

This seems a bit like an anachronism to me, because at this point in the story, Jesus hasn't 'saved' others. He has healed a lot of people, sure. And the Greek word for heal appears to be the same word as for rescue or save; σῴζω (or 'sōzō'). But it makes no sense for people observing the crucifixion to make any connection between someone healing people of diseases and having the ability to rescue themselves from the cross. Its like they are saying 'oh, he was a doctor, he must be a good escapologist as well...'; it makes no sense, in the context.

Where it does make sense is later, after Jesus gained a reputation for being a saviour - one able to save others from going to hell. Once there are Christians who believed in Jesus as saviour, it would make sense to look back on the cross and wonder why he couldn't save himself.

For these reasons I think this detail in the crucifixion story is not historically accurate, but was probably a literary construct, written by a Christian some time after the fact, putting words into the mouths of his imagined characters. I can't see how anyone would have really said that, when watching a real crucifixion.

The Resurrection and the 'Minimal Facts' approach.

James, brother of someone.

I've recently read "The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus" by Gary Habermas and Mike Licona, and discussed that book on a weekly basis with one or two Christians for a few weeks in November last year. The case presented in this book seems to be the best case that Evangelical Christianity has that the resurrection of Jesus was a true, historical event.

I've touched on this subject before (in these blog posts from 2012: 1, 2, 3, & 4), but that was over 5 years ago and I have read much more on the subject since, so it may be worth revisiting my thoughts on the subject now.

The case rests squarely on the shoulders of four or five 'minimal facts', and the discussion goes from there. I guess we need to start by asking what 'facts' are. Dictionary.com defines fact as:

1. something that actually exists; reality; truth
2. something known to exist or to have happened
3. a truth known by actual experience or observation
4. something said to be true or supposed to have happened

This doesn't help us much as the final definition of 'fact' includes the possibility that a fact may, in fact, not be true. To claim that something is a fact, is not necessarily to demonstrate that it is true!

The astounding thing about the 'minimal facts' presented in this argument, is that Habermas and Licona do not, at any point in this book, set out to prove that the minimal facts are, in fact, true facts. There are layers of reasoning and explanation and 'proof' for various things in this book, but they are all based on the assumption that the four (or five) minimal facts are true.

The argument goes like this, if these four (or five) facts are true, then the resurrection appears to be more probable than the alternatives. For the most part I agree with this argument. Where it falls down, of course, are the four (or five) alleged facts.

So what are these 'facts'? Well they are:

1. Jesus died by crucifixion
2. After this, his disciples believed that they saw him alive again
3. Paul, the persecutor of the church, became a Christian following what he believed to be an encounter with the risen Christ
4. James, the skeptic brother of Jesus, became a Christian following what he believed to be an encounter with the risen Christ
5. Jesus's tomb was found empty

The last of these is put out of sequence, because this is the least attested 'fact' in there and is not relied upon in the book. Habermas & Licona's case is made using the first four 'facts' and the fifth is simply used as the icing on the cake, as it were.

For Habermas & Licona, these are established as 'facts' because the majority of biblical scholars hold them to be true, irrespective of their personal beliefs. That is, even skeptical and non-believing scholars hold these to be true.

I think that there is a huge selection bias in this. What sort of person becomes a biblical scholar? Only someone raised in a Christian context, who probably began their studies as some flavour of believer. Even if they then abandoned their faith, they most likely started their study of the bible with presumptions that some (at least) of the biblical stories were true and historical.

If you took a thousand Islamic scholars and asked them if Mohammed encountered the angel Gabriel in a cave, I'll bet that the majority think this is historical fact. Just because a majority believe something does not establish it as fact. 

I'll bet if you took all the religious leaders in Judea in 40AD and asked them if Jesus was the son of God, the overwhelming majority would say no he was not. Would that establish the truth? No. So why should a headcount establish historical truth here?

The 'minimal facts' argument is only a valid argument if you can defend the four (or five) facts without an appeal to authority or majority. Habermas and Licona do not do this, so their case is still unproven.

So why don't I believe these supposed facts? Lets take them one by one, starting with the last.

The Empty Tomb

What evidence have we for the empty tomb? Only the gospel accounts, or later texts which are derivative of them. So the empty tomb can only be considered a historical fact if we can accept that the gospels contain historical information. Habermas & Licona don't even attempt to prove that the gospels contain historical information. They simply assume it, noting that some biblical details can be verified from secular historical sources. Then they go further in suggesting that if there is a historical claim in any book in the bible that cannot be verified from secular sources, we should give the bible the benefit of the doubt and take it on trust that the biblical facts are true. Huh? What kind of historian does this? "The Bible" is a collection of 66 books by multiple authors, many of whom are unknown to us. Even if some of those authors included reliable historical facts in their books, this tells us nothing about the reliability of the authors of the other books. If the book of 2 Kings contains historical information, does this imply that the book of Jonah does? Of course not.

So do the gospels contain historical information? Well, certainly there are characters in the gospels who are known to secular history - two Herods, Pilate, and John the Baptist, but that's about it. Aside from the census, recorded only in Luke, there are no historical events in the gospels that can be confirmed using independent sources. Not even the death of Jesus, as we'll see below. So we really have no way of knowing if most of the stories on the gospels have any connection to real historical events.

However, the main problem with the empty tomb is that we would never have heard of it had it not been part of the larger story of the death and resurrection of Jesus. It is not independent data. Given that, we can't use this as evidence for the 'historical' resurrection of Jesus as it only exists as part of a story that makes this claim. Trying to argue from the empty tomb to the resurrection is like trying to prove that the exhaust ports on the Death Star were badly designed, using the evidence that Luke Skywalker destroyed the Death Star by firing a torpedo into it. The two 'facts' are part of the same story and you can't have one without the other. If one of them is questionable, the other must also be questionable.

There is also no case to be made for multiple attestation within the gospels here, as a couple of centuries of textual criticism have convincingly demonstrated that the account of the crucifixion in Mark is dependent on the Psalms, the accounts in Matthew and Luke are dependent on Mark, and that the account in John is probably dependent on Luke. The crucifixion looks like a literary construct, and the empty tomb forms part of the same (fictive?) story.

It doesn't matter if a whole heap of biblical scholars believe this to be history, I'm not convinced.

The death of Jesus by crucifixion

Let's jump to the first (and least contested) of the minimal facts next; Jesus death by crucifixion. Pretty much everyone accepts this as true, right? Indeed, but it suffers from the same problems as the empty tomb - there are no stories of the death of Jesus that don't go on to involve the resurrection. All accounts of the death of Jesus are followed by major miracle claims, and claims that Jesus is or was divine. You really can't separate one from the other. If the stories of Jesus dying on the cross are taken as facts written by reliable historians, then the resurrection is also a fact written by a reliable historian! You can't assume one to be a fact of history, and the other to be questionable. If the resurrection is questionable, then Jesus death by crucifixion is just as questionable. If one is fact, the other should be assumed to be fact. We have no independent data about one that does not also concern the other!

All secular references to the death of Jesus are entirely dependent on the stories told by believing Christians. And as far as we can tell, the earliest believers believed that he was raised just as much as they believed that he died. If they were wrong about one, they could equally be wrong about the other. The observation that one story is miraculous and the other non-miraculous is irrelevant here. In a story containing many unbelievable and impossible events, we can't simply take all the mundane and possible events as probably true.

To establish that Jesus died by crucifixion we would need an account of his life and death that did not feature miracles and did not feature any resurrection claims. As far as I know, no such evidence exists. Literally everything we know about the life and death of Jesus comes to us from the accounts of those who fundamentally believed that he had triumphed over death and had risen. If they were wrong about that, what else were they wrong about?

The conversion of James

I'm even less convinced by this claim than by the empty tomb, even though more biblical scholars are apparently convinced by it. The problem with this 'fact' is that it is not part of the biblical story, even if it is apparently derived from there. I wrote so much on this 'fact' that I decided to make it a separate blog post in its own right, which you can read here. Suffice it to say that I very much doubt the 'fact' of the conversion of James from skeptic to church leader.

The conversion of Paul

This is probably the strongest of the five minimal facts. Most people, even those who doubt the existence of Jesus, believe that there was a guy called Paul in the 1st century, who wrote epistles. That guy claimed, in those letters, to have been a persecutor of the early Christians, and that he had a transformative experience of the risen Christ, becoming an apostle and firm believer in the resurrection.

I read Hermann Detering's book "The Fabricated Paul" a few years ago (indeed, I have an unpublished, half written blog post about it, which may surface eventually, although considering it has been half written since 2013, it may never see the light of day). In this book, Detering makes the case that none of the epistles attributed to Paul were actually written by anyone called Paul. While I'm not entirely convinced by Detering's argument (he makes an excellent case that several of the epistles were written by different authors from each other, but can't really prove that none of them was authentic), I do accept that some of the other epistles were definitely not written by the guy who wrote 1 Corinthians. I'm currently working through Robert M. Price's "The amazing colossal apostle", which makes much the same case, but goes one step further than Detering in claiming that there was no Paul at all. I'll possibly offer some thoughts on that once I get to the end of it.

While both the above books possibly go further than I am willing to go, I am convinced that some of the epistles by 'Paul' were written by others (later) in the name of Paul. That is, some of the epistles are forgeries and pseudepigraphal. That probably entails that some of the historical or biographical 'facts' in some of the epistles are fictional or, certainly, were related by persons who were not there and did not witness any of the events claimed.

Given that, it is tricky to piece together a coherent picture of what the 'real' Paul did, said, experienced, wrote, etc. Even if we take the epistles as all being authentic, it is quite hard to piece together a biography of the letter writer. In what way did he persecute the church? This is unclear. When did he do this? Also unclear. What made his stop the persecution? Fairly unclear. To iron out the uncertainties in the life of Paul, most folk turn to the Acts of the Apostles and find his story there. But there are good reasons not to take Acts as a reliable history. For one thing, it actually contradicts things said in the name of Paul in the epistles. For another thing, it presents Paul and Peter as basically having parallel lives - for every miracle Paul experiences, Peter has an identical experience; their preaching is virtually indistinguishable from each other; they say the same things and do the same things. This is not history, this is someone trying to level the playing-field by demonstrating that these two characters are equal. The Acts seminar's primary conclusion was that the book of Acts was a 2nd century fiction, containing virtually no historical data. If they're right about that, then we really know nothing about Paul's 'pre-conversion' life and persecution of the church, and we hardly know anything about his 'conversion' or 'post-conversion' life either.

Was Paul transformed from anti-Christian-persecutor to believing-Christian-apostle through a visionary experience? Maybe. Is there any link we can make between this experience and the real historical Jesus guy who may have died on a cross a few years earlier? Nope.

So what we are left with is a claim of the conversion of someone from one religion to another. That happens all the time, and in no way provides evidence for the truth of the religion that the person ends up believing in.

The resurrection appearances

Finally we get to this one. I find that this is where Habermas and Licona, and others using this argument completely over-state their case to the point of absurdity. The claim is that all the disciples experienced resurrection appearances.

Really? Well, the gospels and Acts chapter 1 have the disciples encountering the risen Jesus. But none of these writings are first-person claims. As far as I know, we have no writings from Andrew, or Thomas, or James son of Alphaeus, or Thaddeus, or Phillip, or whoever relating their alleged experiences. Of course, Paul does, but he never saw Jesus during his lifetime, so he has nothing to confirm that his vision in any way relates to the real Jesus.

We have a few letters claiming to be written by Peter. None of them relate any post-resurrection experiences. They are far more concerned to claim that the author saw Jesus when he was alive the first time. So that doesn't help us. And of course, the authenticity of these letters is debated, so we really have no data supporting the claim that the author of these letters actually had a post-resurrection experience of Jesus.

Once again, the 'fact' of the resurrection appearances really turns out to be simply an unverifiable claim of early Christians which has been repeated many, many times over the past two thousand years.

We don't know what the 'original' disciples experienced, because they did not tell us. And the stories relating what they apparently did experience (and the stories of their subsequent lives, ministries and martyrdoms) are at best second or third had accounts, and quite possibly works of fiction.

In conclusion

So there you have it, for me, none of the five 'minimal facts' stands up to scrutiny. They are all just unverifiable claims, most of which rely on a particularly orthodox reading of the source documents. I'm not sure any of the "facts" approach the standard of 'balance of probability' let alone 'beyond reasonable doubt', so these claims do not prove that the resurrection happened.

Christianity, to be proven true, needs better evidence. I've been looking for it for years and still can't find it.

James, the brother of the Lord

This post is an offshoot from another post that I have half written, and which will emerge in due course. It concerns the 'Minimal Facts' approach to 'prove' the resurrection. One of the main four minimal facts concerns the initial skepticism, conversion, and rise to church leadership of James, the brother of Jesus.

However, I'm not sure this extrabiblical story has any solid grounding in history, so let's look at the character of James in the new testament and in the early church writings.

James in the Gospels

In the gospel of Mark (the first gospel written), James exists only as a name in a list of Jesus' brothers in one verse (Mark 6v3)

"Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him."

That is the only place where James is named in the gospel of Mark. He is also named in an equivalent verse in Matthew (13v55), but is not named in the other two gospels. There is no character of James the brother of Jesus in any of the gospels.

Jesus' (unnamed) brothers do have a very minor role in the gospels. After the wedding in Cana in John chapter 2, Jesus, his mother, brothers and disciples spend time together. No antagonism between Jesus and his brothers is implied, quite the opposite.

However, the (skeptical) character of James in the gospels is inferred largely because of this verse:

"Jesus’ brothers said to him, “Leave Galilee and go to Judea, so that your disciples there may see the works you do. No one who wants to become a public figure acts in secret. Since you are doing these things, show yourself to the world.” For even his own brothers did not believe in him." John 7v3-5

This is a confusing statement, verses 3 and 4 imply that the brothers know that Jesus is doing some form of wondrous works (i.e. they apparently believe in his power), but verse 5 states that they didn't believe in him (in what way did then not believe?). Furthermore there is this story in Mark 3v20-21:

"Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.”"

So, by inference, James (assumed to be part of 'his own brothers' or 'his family') thought that Jesus was 'out of his mind' and 'did not believe in him'. From this somebody deduced that James was not a follower of Jesus, and was therefore 'a skeptic'. Sorry, what? Is that really the best we can do? It is really, really unclear to me that we know anything at all about the character of James from the gospels. Surely on this basis we have to list Mary as a skeptic too?

It is interesting to note that Matthew's retelling of Mark's story in chapter 12 omits the verse about Jesus' family thinking he is 'out of his mind'. In Matthew, the family just turn up and want to speak to Jesus, and he ignores them. We learn nothing at all about the character of Jesus' mother and brothers from Matthew. Likewise in Luke.

In Summary, Matthew and Luke have nothing negative to say about James or any of Jesus' other family members, they are really non-characters. Mark names James in a list, and while he does note that Jesus 'family' thought he was out of his mind, there is no explicit mention of James in connection to this. John does not name James anywhere. But Jesus' unnamed brothers do express a very minor degree of skepticism.

Based on gospel evidence, it is far from clear that James the brother of Jesus did anything at all, or had any massively negative views about Jesus or his message.

Before we move on, I'd like to think through this again. The claim made by apologists is that Jesus' brother James was skeptical about his ministry, then later had a post-resurrection appearance by Jesus, changed his mind, became a follower and then became one of the main leaders in the Church in Jerusalem. He was later martyred.

Keep that sequence in mind. At the time of writing of the gospel accounts, generally taken to be post 70AD, James would have been a legend of the early church - one of the pioneering Church leaders, one of the most notable martyrs, someone important. Basically, he'd be considered a core character in any history of the early church that anyone would write. If you want to suppose that Mark was written pre-70AD, the same sort of reasoning applies, but James might still be a key character in the church, having not yet died.

Now consider the evangelists writing their gospels. Knowing who James would become, would Mark leave James as merely a name on a list? Would he mention the apparent skepticism of James in such an oblique way? Would he not have made James more of a character? I think if Mark knew who James would become, he would certainly not write about him in the way presented here. My conclusion - the first evangelist did not know the stories about James, the brother of Jesus, converting and becoming a leader in the Church.

What about Matthew and Luke? If they knew about James's story would they have modified Mark's story to make James even more anonymous? I doubt it. Conclusion, it looks unlikely that Matthew or Luke knew the story of James.

Finally John, who doesn't even name James in his gospel. Did he know about the conversion and rise of this skeptic to be the leader of the Jerusalem church? No. It doesn't look likely at all.

Basically, I think that the gospel stories themselves suggest that James the brother of Jesus was not a key player in the life of the early church. Maybe there was a James who was important, as we will see, but the gospel evidence suggests that this character was not identified with the brother of Jesus.

Before we move on, it is worth mentioning at this point that the gospels list two other characters called James - one the brother of John and son of Zebedee, and the other one the son on Alphaus. These are both characters, not merely names on a list.

James in Acts

Next we go to Acts. What does it tell us about James the brother of Jesus after the death of Jesus? Nothing. 

None of the mentions of any character named James in the book of Acts explicitly refer to him as the brother of Jesus. None of them.

James the brother of John is killed in Acts 12v2. After this there are three references to someone called James who is a leader of the church in Jerusalem. The book of Acts does not tell us who this James is; if this is James brother of Jesus, or James son of Alphaus. But given that Luke-Acts has never even mentioned that Jesus had a brother called James, our only reasonable conclusion is that the second James in Acts is the only other James previously mentioned, James son of Alpheus. Luke-Acts gives us no other character to assume. It would also make sense if the James in question was one of the disciples, not some non-character who hadn't been on the scene or part of the story before. If the other James was an outsider from the original apostle group, surely the writer of Acts should have introduced him in some way?

James in Paul

So from where do we get the idea that the leader of the Jerusalem church (after the death of James son of Zebedee) was James the brother of Jesus? We get it from one reference in Galatians 1v19:

"18 Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Cephas and stayed with him fifteen days. 19 I saw none of the other apostles—only James, the Lord’s brother. 20 I assure you before God that what I am writing you is no lie."

That's it. About three years after his conversion, Paul met someone called "James, the Lord's brother" in Jerusalem, and he lists him in the same breath as mentioning the apostles.

No other mention of James in the writings of Paul specifies which James he means. In fact, it sounds as if Paul thinks there is only one James of note. Poor James son of Zebedee and poor James son of Alphaus, if Paul means the other one. Paul, it would seem, doesn't rate them.

In the creed at the end of 1 Corinthians, someone called James is named as being one of the recipients of a post-resurrection appearance of Christ. It doesn't say which James. Again, if you read Paul, it looks like he only knew of one James. Paul knows of no James who was martyred and then replaced by another James. Paul's writings only refer to one James, and aside from the Galatians verse above, he doesn't add any describing words.

It looks to me like somebody, sometime after the writing of the epistles and the gospels, contrived the skeptic-appearance-church leader story out of this very limited information. Apparently that is enough to make it a 'fact'. It all hangs on one verse in Galatians.

But let me go back to that one verse again before I move on. The plain reading of the verse is confusing. It suggests that the James under discussion was not an apostle. Paul plainly says "I saw none of the other apostles". These verses might have said 'the only apostle I saw was Peter, and I also saw James, the brother of the Lord'. What can we do with this? On one interpretation it suggests there was a character called James, who wasn't one of the original disciples, the group now known as apostles. This fits with the story. Or maybe this verse should be read the way it traditionally has, something like 'I saw none of the other apostles, except James, the brother of the Lord, I did see him', which would label this character as both a brother of Jesus and as an Apostle.

The creed in 1 Corinthians 15 says:

3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. 6 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8 and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

There is a parallel here between verses 5 and 7. V5 has "to Cephas, and then to the Twelve" whereas V7 has "to James, then to all the apostles". Were the apostles and the Twelve different groups of people? I've heard it suggested that they were. The Twelve (a symbolic name, I guess, because if the gospel accounts are accurate, then Judas was gone by this time) were the disciples who knew Jesus during his lifetime, the apostles were those who claimed to have post-resurrection visions of Jesus. These need not be the same groups of people.

I've also heard it claimed that this creed was an early attempt to unite two rival branches of early Christianity - the one that viewed Cephas and the Twelve as the founding fathers, and the one who viewed James and the apostles as the original guys. By putting both groups in the same creed, with equal standing, the author of this creed (pre- or post-Pauline? Certainly not Paul himself) tried, successfully as it seems, to unite the two rival proto-religions into one big happy family that became the Catholic (universal, i.e. unified) church.

James beyond the NT

If we go beyond the NT, the sources muddy the water quite a lot. There are snippets in Eusebius (3rd/4th century), some of them attributed to Hegesippus (mid/late 2nd century), whose writings are now lost to posterity, other than the quotes in Eusebius.

There is also one reference in Josephus (late 1st century) which, if judged to be authentic, would be the closest in time to the real character, if there was one. This is in Antiquities of the Jews, Book 20, Chapter 9, where it says:

"so [Ananus] assembled the sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned"

This passage doesn't tell us much about James, or about Jesus, other than that James was considered by the sanhedrin to be a lawbreaker and was executed by stoning. According to Josephus, this execution was unpopular and led directly to the removal of Ananus as high priest and the appointment of someone called Jesus ben Damnaus as high priest.

Richard Carrier observes that if the clause 'who was called Christ' is removed from the Josephus passage, the story still makes sense but has a different spin - James the brother of someone called Jesus is executed, and as some form of recompense for this someone called Jesus is promoted to high priest. It makes a lot of sense if these two Jesus characters are actually the same character. Carrier supposes that some reader of this text added a marginal note "who was called Christ" (perhaps even questioning this?) at some point and when this document was copied, the scribe, thinking that this was an omission from the earlier document, inserted it into the text. Its possible, and has certainly happened in the transmission of other ancient documents.

Hegesippus, quoted in Eusebius, says this:

"James, the brother of the Lord, succeeded to the government of the Church in conjunction with the apostles. He has been called the Just by all from the time of our Saviour to the present day; for there were many that bore the name of James. He was holy from his mother’s womb; and he drank no wine nor strong drink, nor did he eat flesh. No razor came upon his head; he did not anoint himself with oil, and he did not use the bath. He alone was permitted to enter into the holy place; for he wore not woolen but linen garments. And he was in the habit of entering alone into the temple, and was frequently found upon his knees begging forgiveness for the people, so that his knees became hard like those of a camel, in consequence of his constantly bending them in his worship of God, and asking forgiveness for the people. Because of his exceeding great justice he was called the Just, and Oblias, which signifies in Greek, ‘Bulwark of the people’ and ‘Justice,’ in accordance with what the prophets declare concerning him."

Does this sound at all like the child of a carpenter from Nazareth? Whoever this James was, he was raised as a Nazirite, and became the high priest - the only one permitted to enter the holy place in the temple; so he must have come from a priestly family.

Were it not for the 'the brother of the Lord' clause in the above passage, we would not consider this description as in any way coherent with the descriptions of Jesus' brothers in the gospels. Hegesippus' description leaves no room for the skeptic-turned-believer hypothesis - the James described here was holy from before he was born!

I suspect what we have here is a legend of a Jewish (not necessarily Christian!) holy man, possibly a high priest, called James. This is coherent with my supposition above that the James named by Josephus was brother of Jesus ben Damnaus, who must have also come from a priestly family as he became the high priest.

At some point along the way though, possibly due to Hegesippus himself, this character was merged with the largely unknown character of James, the brother of Jesus, who had just been a name on a list until then. My suspicion is that Hegesippus co-opted the well known character of James the Just, and made him a Christian saint, by identifying him as the brother of Jesus.

If that's not the case, then either Hegesippus is wrong about the character of James the brother of Jesus, or the gospels are wrong about him. We can't keep both as reliable historical accounts of the man, that's doublethink.

Clement of Alexandria (late 2nd/early 3rd century) also briefly mentions James the Just, claiming that following the resurrection, Peter, James & John deferred to James the Just as bishop of Jerusalem. While the whole notion of a 'bishop' in Jerusalem immediately following the resurrection seems a bit anachronistic, this shows that James the Just and James the brother of Jesus were clearly identified as the same person by the late 2nd century (which is consistent with Hegesippus as well). However, this is fully a century after the alleged guy lived!

In conclusion

So it looks to me like this:

• The earliest Christian documents (Paul's letters) know of only one character called James, who is a leader in the Jerusalem church. Only one verse in Galatians 1 identifies him as the brother of Jesus.
• The other early Christian documents (the gospels & Acts) know nothing about the character of James, the brother of Jesus. This seems inconsistent with later claims about his character.
• From the mid 2nd century onwards, James (the brother of Jesus), James the Just (a 1st century priest and holy man) and James (the 'bishop' of Jerusalem) were merged into one character.

Were it not for that verse in Galatians, the whole thing simply looks like a legend that has grown in the telling. So what are we to do with the verse in Galatians?

Robert M. Price, in his commentary on Galatians in "The Amazing Colossal Apostle" (which I am still reading and will review on this blog eventually), agrees with the claims of W.C. Van Manen (1842-1905) that Galatians was written not by Paul, but by Marcion in the early 2nd century. This claim appears to be largely based on the observation that Tertullian wrote that Marcion 'discovered' the letter of Paul to the Galatians, that is, this epistle was unknown to the church before Marcion. Price's analysis suggests that Marcion wrote the core of the epistle, but that the 1st chapter - including the verse we are discussing here - was added at a later date, by another editor, which places this verse squarely in the mid 2nd century. This coheres with all my suppositions above, resolving the problem in the chronology.

So there you have it. A very long winded rebuttal of one of the five 'minimal facts' used as part of Habermas & Licona's apologetic. For this one at least I am convinced that this isn't a 'fact'. But I guess I have a long way to go to bring down the whole argument!

A guy walks out of a tomb...

Just listened to the recent Unbelievable show featuring 'Science Mike' and a more conventional Christian called JD Walters. I don't have much to say about the show except that on a few occasions Mike referred to the resurrection using phrases along the lines of "Jesus walked out of the tomb..."

Maybe I've been getting the wrong end of the stick all these years, but I always thought that the whole point of the stone being rolled away was to demonstrate that the tomb was actually empty, not to facilitate the risen Christ leaving? Jesus has no problem in the post-resurrection stories of simply appearing in locked rooms, so I had always assumed that the idea was that he could and did vanish (bodily) out of the tomb, and then appeared wherever later on, like on the road to Emmaus.

Do you think he walked out of the tomb?

I always thought that the tomb was empty before the stone was rolled away. Jesus didn't need the stone to be moved in order to get out. The rolling away of the stone was only to allow the witnesses to see an empty tomb.

Other boats?

There is a peculiar detail in Mark's gospel that I've never noticed before. It is found as part of the story of the stilling of the storm in Mark 4:

35 That day when evening came, he said to his disciples, “Let us go over to the other side.” 36 Leaving the crowd behind, they took him along, just as he was, in the boat. There were also other boats with him. 37 A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. 38 Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” 39 He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and it was completely calm. 40 He said to his disciples, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?” 41 They were terrified and asked each other, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!”

Have you ever noticed that short statement at the end of v36? Jesus and his disciples are in one boat, travelling across the sea of Galilee, but there were other boats travelling with them. These other boats explicitly do not contain members of 'the crowd' as v36 says they left them behind.

These other boats play no further role in the story, and appear to be entirely absent by the time of the storm and the miraculous calming. So why mention them at all? Matthew (ch8) and Luke (ch8) omit this detail of the story in their tellings of it.

This is one of the peculiar details in Mark that may reveal something about the sources Mark used for his gospel. Mark is clearly adapting an earlier story to present here. It looks like the earlier story included multiple boats, and even though Mark's telling of the story does not require the other boats for the narrative to make sense, he keeps the short statement about them anyway. Matthew and Luke, realising the redundancy of this statement, remove it.

So what possible function could the other boats have in the earlier story, the one that Mark adapted? A few options seem reasonable. It could be that these other boats were lost in the storm, and only the boat containing Jesus was saved. That would make narrative sense, and also be a good theological analogy. But that's an analogy that Mark doesn't make, so perhaps that suggests that this is not the original story.

Dennis R. MacDonald makes a compelling case in his book "The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark" (which I am reading at the moment) that this story about Jesus is based on a story about Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey.  I won't detail the parallels here, but suffice it to say there are clear narrative and vocabulary parallels between one specific passage in the Odyssey and this passage in Mark. In Homer, there are other boats, and these do play a minor role in the story. If MacDonald's case is true, then Mark used elements of a story about Odysseus, which which many of his readers would probably be familiar, as the basis for a story about Jesus. I've read elsewhere that this was actually fairly common in ancient literature (written in Greek), writers adapted well known stories so that they could highlight certain features of their hero (in this case Jesus) - that is, showing the ways in which their hero is like the well known hero, and sometimes highlighting the ways in which their hero is even better than the well known hero. Here Jesus is shown to be better than Odysseus, as the latter merely survived the storm, but the former demonstrated power over it.

The question for us, however, is whether or not events told in this way actually happened or not? Was there a real story about Jesus which has been told 'through the lens' of Homer, or is this a story of Homeric origin which has been fictionally recast with gospel characters to demonstrate just how much of a hero Jesus was to a Greek-literate audience?

We actually face this question again and again in Mark, the story as presented reveals details of an older source text, so is the source text the sole origin of the story, or is Mark's telling of the story a fusion between an earlier Jesus story and an older written document? This question becomes most important when we get to the crucifixion narrative. Is that a fusion of an earlier story about Jesus with the framework of Psalm 22, or is it a work of midrash, fictively expanding on Psalm 22? I'll leave that quandary for another time.

For now the question is whether the stilling of the storm story is a fusion of a Jesus story with an Odysseus story, or is it a fictive riff on the Odysseus story to show how Jesus is better than the Greek hero? How could we even tell? If we had access to any pre-Markan Jesus stories set on lakes, then maybe we could parse this story, but as it happens we do not, and therefore cannot.

I'm reasonably won over by MacDonald's thesis that the Sea of Galilee stories of Jesus are fictive attempts to put Mark's Jesus into similar situations as Odysseus. Indeed, it would seem that before Mark wrote his gospel, nobody ever referred to this small lake in the 'Holy Land' as anything other than a small lake. It was never a 'sea' before this. Mark, it would appear, beefed up the designation of this lake to a 'sea' so he could set Odysseus-style stories on it. The 'other boats' are just a little editorial oversight that Mark forgot to remove for his retelling of the story.

Of course, all this could be waaaay off the mark. Maybe the other boats had a completely different origin in Mark's non-Homeric source. I'd love to hear other opinions about what these boats are doing in this story.

Question Mark, Part 4

Welcome back to the world's slowest Bible study... two years ago I began slowly going through the gospel of Mark and so far I have managed to get to the end of... verse 1 of chapter 1. You can read the first two posts here and here. Hang on, you might be thinking, the title of this post says 'Part 4', what happened to 'Part 3'?

Well, I'm now about to annoyingly jump over ten verses and think about verses 12 and 13 of chapter 1. I'll come back to verses 2 to 11 in 'Part 3', which will follow at a later date. For now let's look at:

12 At once the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness, 13 and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.

Hmmm. That's not how you remember this story is it? You remember all the details of the temptation from Matthew's expansion of this story. This version is really short in comparison, and seems fairly pointless.

First we need to talk about the word "πειράζω" or "peirazō", translated in the NIV (above) as 'tempted'. As far as I can tell, the word here translated tempted generally means 'tested'. In this context it is clear that Jesus is being tested to show that he is up to the task that lies before him. Here Satan is fulfilling the divinely appointed role that he has in most of the OT, he is acting on behalf of God to test someone to see if they are truly righteous or not. Satan here is not God's adversary, but rather seems sent by God to test Jesus.

There are four characters in the story here: Jesus, the Spirit, Satan and the angels. God the Father, having popped up in verse 11 has again vanished off the stage and plays no active role here.

Jesus was directed by the Spirit into the wilderness, where he was tested by Satan. We are not told the nature of the tests, we are not even told if Jesus passed the tests! The reader actually has to make up their own mind about what they think happened. I guess this is why Matthew felt the need to be explicit about the nature of the tests and to be explicit in showing that Jesus passed them. Mark feels no such need to explain anything. Once again I am reminded of Robert M. Fowler's book "Let the reader Understand" - Mark doesn't give his audience everything, he expects them to work things out for themselves.

Maybe we should rephrase my comment above about the four characters in the story, there are actually five witnesses to the events - Jesus, the Spirit, the Satan, the angels, and the reader.

But why was the testing necessary? Did God the Father need to do this in order to find out that Jesus was up to the task? Well, that very much depends on your pre-conceptions of the Father. Did Jesus need to know for himself that he could pass the test? I don't think the angels really needed to know. Whether Satan needed to know would depend very much on your pre-conceptions of Satan. But really, I think, the main audience who need to know if Jesus passed the test are Mark's readers themselves. This story is for them. Nobody else in this story needs these events to have happened. That, in itself, should put a very big question mark over the actual historicity of this event, the event itself presupposes an audience, but as presented there was no audience present.

If we take for granted the Trinity, as generally believed in modern Christianity, this story makes no sense. Why would one member of the Trinity need to get another member of the Trinity to direct the third member of the Trinity to the place of testing? In this concept, God the Father must already know that God the Son is up to the task set before him, as they have been in communion together for eternity past. God the Father does not need to test God the Son, and certainly does not need the direction of God the Spirit to assist in this. From a Trinitarian point of view, the only way we can make sense of this passage is if Satan is the devil, and the point of the exercise is to demonstrate to the devil just who Jesus is. This seems to be the way that Matthew understands the story, but it is not at all clear in Mark's version. Various theologies in other parts of the NT rely on the assumption that the devil did not know who Jesus was, so they, at least, are inconsistent with this view of this event.

Put aside the idea of the Trinity for a moment, though, and the story makes a whole lot more sense. If God in heaven had chosen a righteous man, Jesus, to become his Son, and had poured his Spirit into this man (that's something to be discussed in the part of this study that we have temporarily jumped over), then he'd need to be sure that the man he had chosen was up to the task. From a non-Trinitarian (and, indeed, an adoptionist) point of view, this passage makes perfect sense. Here God is simply double checking that he made the right choice. And so from here on in, the reader can be sure that God made the right choice too.

I think this is the lens through which we need to view the rest of the gospel of Mark. Jesus is just a man, chosen and empowered to be the Son of God, but not part of the Trinity and not pre-existent.

Thinking in this way also makes this passage make sense from Jesus's point of view as well. Jesus himself needs to know that he can pass the test. He needs to know the power of the Spirit which is now within him. Having been through this, Jesus himself now knows that he is ready for the rest of the gospel, and so does the reader.

Before we move on, one final comment that, I think, contradicts what Matthew will later do with this passage when he expands it. Nothing in this passage suggests that Jesus is without food. Indeed, the angels 'attending' him would imply that they brought him whatever he needed, including food. For some reason this short passage makes me think of 1 Kings 17 where Elijah is ministered to by ravens, who bring him food. Perhaps it is even closer to 1 Kings 19, where an angel brings Elijah food. Either way, if this inference is correct, then Matthew's story, in which Jesus has no food for 40 days, contradicts this.

So there we have it, I think this short passage is clearly non-historical, and reveals an underlying theology which is at odds with current Christian belief.

"If Christianity is true, then people don't really die..."

I heard the Unbelievable radio show featuring David Smalley and Frank Turek last month. It annoyed me as both contributors seemed to keep misunderstanding and misrepresenting the views of the other. Possibly deliberately. But for some reason I then went on to download the Dogma Debate episodes that were recorded after this, which again featured Smalley (he's the host of Dogma Debate) and Turek. That's episodes 298 and 299 of Dogma Debate. Once again they seemed to misunderstand each other, although I think that for the most part it was Smalley who did most of the misunderstanding. But anyway, I don't want to review either show, I just want to mention one thing that Turek said in part 2 of the Dogma Debate show. About 1 hr, 16 minutes into episode #299, Turek says:

"If Christianity is true, then people don't really die, they just change location."

Wow. That's a strong statement. And I know exactly where Turek is coming from here, I used to believe much the same thing myself. But when I heard it expressed this way, coming just a few minutes after the discussion of what Christ achieved by dying on the cross, I suddenly saw a problem. 

Using the logic of the above statement, if Christianity is true, then Jesus did not die on the cross, he merely changed location. It suddenly seems a lot less of a thing that Jesus changed location for your sins, how could changing location atone for anything?

Where was Jesus in the days following his death 'at the ninth hour' on Good Friday, and his resurrection at dawn on the first day of the week? The harrowing of hell isn't actually in the Bible (there's a compelling case that the 1 Peter 3 verse is a mistranslation, and refers to Enoch, not Jesus). If Jesus changed location, where did he go? Does it actually matter where he went? Surely what matters is whether he lived or died?

Was he actually dead? Did the Trinity become a Duality for 2 or 3 days? I don't know anyone who would actually claim that. Fundamentally, Christians believe that Jesus was somewhere and was (in at least some sense of the word) alive during that time. So, essentially, Jesus did not die on the cross. Sure, his earthly body died, but his Spirit remained alive somewhere, and then changed location back into his resurrection body a couple of days later. So what was the sacrifice? Jesus took on flesh when he incarnated, and that flesh died on the cross, but Jesus himself was eternal, did not die, and lives eternally, at least if we believe some of the claims of the NT.

Sounds to me that if the above claim of Christianity is true, then other claims of Christianity must be false...

The gospel before the gospel

I've recently read Richard Carrier's "On the Historicity of Jesus" (OHJ). Its a big book. More thoughts likely to follow in later posts. But for now, this issue strikes me as important:

In Zechariah chapters 3 and 6 there is a character Carrier describes as 'Jesus Rising'. That is, in an old testament book, there is a character called Jesus (=Joshua, it's the same name) who rises in some (poorly defined) way. In the new testament, of course, Jesus rises from the dead. 

Carrier suggests that the Christian belief that Jesus rose from the dead could, in part, derive from a pre-existing belief that someone called Jesus would rise / had risen. Here's a bit of chapter 6 from the NIV:

9 The word of the Lord came to me: 10 “Take silver and gold from the exiles Heldai, Tobijah and Jedaiah, who have arrived from Babylon. Go the same day to the house of Josiah son of Zephaniah. 11 Take the silver and gold and make a crown, and set it on the head of the high priest, Joshua son of Jozadak. 12 Tell him this is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘Here is the man whose name is the Branch, and he will branch out from his place and build the temple of the Lord. 13 It is he who will build the temple of the Lord, and he will be clothed with majesty and will sit and rule on his throne. And he will be a priest on his throne. And there will be harmony between the two.’ 14 The crown will be given to Heldai, Tobijah, Jedaiah and Hen son of Zephaniah as a memorial in the temple of the Lord. 15 Those who are far away will come and help to build the temple of the Lord, and you will know that the Lord Almighty has sent me to you. This will happen if you diligently obey the Lord your God.”

Erm, nothing about 'rising' there at first glance. The word in question, in verse 12, is translated 'Branch' in the NIV. More literal translations render this as 'sprout' rather than branch. That is 'sprout' in the sense of 'sprout out of', like a budding branch, or a plant breaking out of the ground. Still not 'rising'. If you translate your Bible from the original Hebrew into English, then 'sprout' or 'branch', or possibly 'emanation' is the best that you can do.

But have a look at the Septuagint (LXX). In the LXX, the word ἀνατολή ("anatole") is used as the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word צֶמַח ("tsemach"). Strong's definition of tsemach (H6780) is "sprout, growth, branch", whereas Strong defines anatole (G395) as "a rising (of the sun or stars)" or "the east (the direction of the sun's rising)". So a reader of the LXX would not understand the above passage to be referring to a 'branch' or even a 'sprout', but would only really have the image of the rising sun in mind. Something like:

11 Take the silver and gold and make a crown, and set it on the head of the high priest, Jesus son of Jozadak. 12 Tell him this is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘Here is the man whose name is Rising, and he will rise up from his place and build the temple of the Lord. 

So if a reader of the LXX took the words in verse 12 ('here is the man') to refer to the high priest in verse 11, he would indeed think he was reading about a priest called Jesus, whose name is Rising. That is "Jesus Rising". Maybe Richard Carrier is right?

But. Its a fairly convoluted path we've had to take to get to this point, isn't it?

It seems unlikely that many people would jump through all these hoops to end up with a belief that a priest called Jesus would in some (undefined) way rise up. Certainly, this is far from the mainstream interpretation of these verses. So is it too 'out there' to be worthy of consideration?

I don't think so. You see, nobody ever claimed that Christianity or Christian belief ever emerged from the mainstream Jewish consensus belief. They started as a fringe group, with some pretty 'out there' beliefs.

All it really would need is someone to interpret the LXX as speaking about a character called Jesus who would in some way rise up, and then speculate about what kind of even this 'rising' might be (we've all heard of believers like that), and teach others about that speculation (we've all heard of preachers like that), and it is entirely plausible that a minority belief could arise that there would be a high priest called Jesus who would rise (or had risen) (into the sky? from the dead?). If that rolling stone gathered a small amount of moss, its not implausible to see how this belief could have entered proto-Christian thinking before the early 1st Century. Zechariah wrote sometime BCE, possibly two or three hundred years before the emergence of Christianity. It is totally plausible that this belief could have become part of Jewish belief, on the fringes of orthodoxy, in that time.

So we could have had a proto-gospel, decades or centuries before the gospel message we know about.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

How could Paul know?

I've just been listening to a debate between Atheist Dan Barker and Catholic William Albrecht, which I found on a random podcast while searching for something to do with Dan Barker. The subject of the debate was "Did Jesus rise from the dead?"

Barker's basic case was that historical methods can never lead us to a conclusion that a miracle happened, as they only operate in the realms of probability and repeatability. In general, he gave a good, but hardly spectacular defence of this.

Albrecht, on the other hand set out to prove that not only was Jesus raised from the dead, but that he was raised in a physical body. The main body of the discussion in the debate ended up arguing about the meaning of the phrase 'spiritual body' as used by Paul in several places in his letters. 

Albrecht seemed to think that if he could show that Paul meant something physical by using the phrase "spiritual body" that this would somehow prove the resurrection, and prove it was physical. Barker seemed to think that if he could show that Paul meant that Jesus was raised as a spirit (i.e. non physical) then this would prove that Paul's experience of Jesus was purely in the form of visions, which would not entail any kind of resurrection, physical or otherwise.

I felt that this whole aspect of the debate was utterly irrelevant. Because why should it matter what Paul meant by what he said in the letters? 

How on earth could Paul possibly know anything about the nature of Christ's resurrection body? 

He never knew Jesus pre-crucifixion, and he never met Jesus post-resurrection, except in the form of an appearance or vision. He did not touch Jesus.

So on what basis could Paul say anything at all, with authority, about the physical nature of the post-resurrection Christ? All he knew was what he has seen (but not touched), what others may have told him, what he deduced from the OT scriptures, and what he received by revelation or inspiration.

In a historical investigation of the question, we can't appeal to inspiration, revelation, interpretation of scripture, so the only authority Paul could have on this issue (the physical nature of Christ's resurrected body) would have to have come from others. Perhaps Cephas or James, both of whom Paul mentions speaking to in Jerusalem. Paul never says where he got this information. 

It is debatable whether or not Paul actually meant a physical resurrection, but even if he did believe this, his authority is entirely second hand. Paul believed it because some unspecified person told him. That's not great authority.

And going further down this line of thought, how could many of the people who apparently saw (and may have touched) Jesus in the period between resurrection and ascension could definitely say that his flesh was "incorruptible"? Did anyone try to corrupt it? According to John, Thomas didn't even take Jesus up on the offer of touching him. Nobody could make this claim on experiential grounds. It can only be made on the basis of deduction, revelation, or inspiration.

So how did Paul know? He didn't. He asserted it because it fit with his theology, but Paul's opinion can tell us nothing about whether the resurrection was a historical event.

Mary and Joseph. No, not them, the other ones...

The synoptic problem fascinates me. I'm not sure we'll ever get to a complete resolution to the problem, but as of now I am reasonably convinced that Mark is the earliest gospel we have, and that both Matthew and Luke used Mark as their primary source when writing their own gospels. Matthew (probably written before Luke) certainly used Mark as the basis and template for his gospel - he includes almost all of Mark and some of it is even word-for-word the same. But in writing his own gospel, Matthew sometimes leaves some bits of Mark out (presumably because he does not like them), modifies some bits of Mark (presumably to make them more coherent with his own beliefs) and then adds in lots of other stuff that Mark doesn't have. Some of this may have come from other sources, some of this may have been the invention of Matthew.

One of Matthew's additions to Mark regards Mary, the mother of Jesus. Mary, mother of Jesus only appears in one verse in Mark:

Mark 6v3: "Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him."

There is another character in Mark who is often assumed to be Mary, the mother of Jesus, but this character is never named as such, or even implied to be such in the gospel. This Mary is "Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joseph" (Mark 15:40), "Mary the mother of Joseph" (Mark 15:47) and "Mary the mother of James" (Mark 16:1).

There are a few possibilities here. One is, of course, that this Mary was actually the mother of Jesus, and that James (the younger) and Joseph were two of Jesus's brothers. The problem here is that Mark, who quite often calls a spade a spade, never says so. Why would Mark place the mother of Jesus at the tomb scene and not say directly who she was? Is this one of those places where Mark is trying to make the reader work things out for themselves? I don't think so. There is no great insight to be gained by working out that Jesus's mother was at the tomb. So I find myself considering another possibility.

What if Mark 6:3 is not original to Mark? We know that the text of the gospels has been modified as it passed through the hands of those who copied it. Sometimes they inserted stuff. What if this verse was one of the insertions? Well, why would anyone do that? Before I get there, think what the implications would be for Mark's gospel if 6:3 was not there - the story of Jesus would never mention named family members, the only place they would show up would be in chapter 3, where they get instantly dismissed as irrelevant, and Jesus doesn't interact with them. If Mark 6:3 was not part of the original, then Mary the mother of James and Joseph would only be described in this manner to distinguish her from Mary Magdalene, there would be no connection to Jesus implied. She was just some follower, who happened to be called Mary. Maybe James and Joseph were important people when the gospel was being written, so that's why she is designated this way? (e.g. "OK, so our guy James wasn't important in the Jesus story as it happened, but look, his mother was right there at the centre of things...")

So why would anyone insert Mark 6:3? Well, to big-up the role of James and the other brothers! (e.g. "OK, so our guy James wasn't important in the Jesus story as it happened, but he was his brother!") By adding in this verse the gospel editor makes James and Mary his mother become major players. So there's a possible agenda here which would add the verse in.

So, for the rest of the post I'm going to assume that Mark 6:3 is not part of the original, and was added early on, before Matthew got his hands on the copy of Mark that he would modify into his own gospel. I can't prove this point, I don't necessarily believe this point, but I'm going to speculate on the assumption anyway. Sometimes that takes you interesting places.

But before we go on with speculation about Mary, we need to do some other speculation about Joseph.

Joseph, husband of Mary and presumed father of Jesus does not feature in the gospel of Mark. He is simply not there, and there is no role for him to play in the story. The only two Josephs in Mark are Joseph, brother of James and son of Mary, who is named in the gospel but doesn't feature as a character, and Joseph of Arimathea, who appears abruptly in Mark 15:43-46 asks for Jesus's body and buries it, he has no other role in the gospel. It is possible that these two Josephs are the same character. Indeed, without Mark 6:3, there really is no need to specify Joseph as the son of Mary unless he has some role to play in the story or in the early church. (NB, James certainly has a role in the early church, but Joseph...?) So it seems possible that Joseph is introduced (in Mark 15:40) as Mary's son, just before he appears in the story to play his part in the story.

I don't think I'm over-stating my case too much to say that the two most important characters at the end of the gospel story, one involved in the burial of Jesus and one (actually two) involved in the discovery of the empty tomb, were Joseph and Mary (two Marys). Let me just say that again. The two named characters at the end of the gospel who oversee the burial and find the empty tomb are called Mary and Joseph. Other sources say these are the names of the parents of Jesus, there at the very beginning of the story: Mary and Joseph at the start and Joseph and Mary at the end, what's the chances of that? Well, pretty slim if this is a real story, but not at all unlikely if there is any literary invention going on.

My conjecture is this: that between the writing of Mark's gospel, and the writing of Matthew's gospel, the Jesus story grew in the telling (possibly in written form as a modified version of Mark, or as a proto-Matthew, now lost), and new characters called Mary and Joseph were invented to 'bookend' the gospel, to match the Joseph and Mary at the end.

Why call them the same names? Well, because the writers of books in bible times (old and new testaments) loved writing in "chiastic structures" (see Wikipedia for an explanation) to give their stories symmetry. That is, the first part of the story is mirrored by the last part, the 2nd part is mirrored by the 2nd last, and so on. Mark's gospel has no birth story to mirror the death story, so someone invented it, and simply used the two names that were already there at the end to mirror in the beginning. Having named Jesus's mother as Mary in this way, it now makes sense to tie up the loose ends by inserting Mark 6:3 and implying that James's mother Mary is the same as Jesus's mother Mary, which only goes to boost the profile of James.

So by the time Matthew and Luke write their gospels, tradition has it that Jesus mother was called Mary and his presumed father was called Joseph.

It is interesting to note that both Matthew and Luke have Mary the mother of James at the empty tomb, but don't join the dots to make her Mary the mother of Jesus. Meanwhile (or possibly much later) John has "the mother of Jesus" at the crucifixion, not the empty tomb, but never calls her Mary.

Make of all that what you will.

Happy Christmas to everyone who has read this far!

Question Mark, Part 2

The Gospel of Mark starts with a verse that contains so much it needs its own blog post:

"The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God"

Mark 1v1; NIV

As far as Mark (or whoever the anonymous author was, for simplicity I'll just keep calling him Mark) is concerned, the "good news" about Jesus starts here. Mark gives no birth stories for Jesus, he tells us nothing here about Jesus's mother. So, on the assumption that this book was written before Matthew and Luke, who added birth stories when they rewrote Mark later in their own gospels, we have two options. Either Mark did not know the birth stories of Jesus or he did not think they were important. Either way, they are not part of his 'good news'. Furthermore, Mark does not trace the 'beginning' of his story back to the creation of the world, like John does. John's story starts with a pre-existent Christ, Matthew and Luke start with the immaculate conception of Jesus, Mark starts here, with a fully grown man, called Jesus. What happened before this point seems to be irrelevant to Mark. It sounds like the 'good news' is about what Jesus did, not where he came from.

Next, we have to consider what the "good news" (εὐαγγέλιον; euaggelion) actually is. This is a word that is actually used less frequently in the gospels than you might expect. Neither Luke or John actually use the word. Matthew uses it only four times, and each of them is in content he borrowed from Mark. Mark uses the word seven times (there is an eighth in the non-Markan bit at the end of Chapter 16, but we'll ignore that for now), and in most of them the word refers to the message that Jesus himself actually taught. In other words, the message spoken by Jesus, not the message about Jesus. Here, in verse one, the word cannot refer to Jesus's teaching as he hasn't said anything yet.

I think Mark is being quite clever here (and this thought is not original to me, I get it from Robert Fowler's book "Let the reader understand" which I have recently read, and which will get several future mentions in this series of posts), what he is doing is intentionally muddying the waters so that the reader - from the outset - comes to consider this written 'good news' as being synonymous with the preached 'good news' of Jesus. So when we read later on that "The good news must first be preached to all the nations" (Mark 13:10), we subconsciously think that it is this book, this message, which is the thing that must be preached all around the world. Mark is covertly claiming ownership over the gospel message.

Up until Mark writes, in the early history of the church, as far as we can tell, the "good news" was the message preached by Paul. The epistles use the phrase 'good news' far more frequently than the gospels actually do. Here Mark is attempting to co-opt the gospel. To make it his own. I think he managed it. We hardly ever refer to the writings of Paul as 'gospels' we always refer to the four story books of Jesus by that name. Right from the word go, Mark has taken the gospel away from Paul, even to some extent away from Jesus, and made it his own.

I think that might be important. Is Mark a rival to Paul? We know there were many factions in the early church, much more separate in doctrine and ethos than contemporary divisions in the church, who were in competition with each other. Is Mark writing to a different one than Paul was?

But who is this Jesus that Mark tells us about? From the outset, Mark makes the claim that Jesus is both 'Messiah' and 'Son of God'. But what did he mean by those phrases?

He never actually explains what he means when he uses these words. He either expects the reader to know what he means, or he expects the reader to work it out as they read. What he does not do, at all, in this gospel, is explain things.

I'm going to start with "Son of God" and come back to "Messiah".

Did Mark even originally write 'Son of God' here? This wording is not in some of the many manuscripts we have - was it removed from them by someone who objected to this phrase, or was it added to the others by a later redactor with a point to make? I don't know. We'll keep both possibilities in mind here.

A few characters in the gospel of Mark say that Jesus is the "Son of God", but not the ones you might expect. In 3:11 and 5:7 evil spirits say this of Jesus, and both times he rebukes and silences them. In 15:39, just after he has died on the cross, a Roman says "Surely this man was (the) Son of God" (the Greek contains no definite article, so the reader does not know if the Roman thought Jesus was 'the' son of God or merely 'a' son of (a) god). On two occasions (1:11 and 9:7) a voice out of thin air says "this is my son" but the speaker is never explicitly identified as God. Finally, during his trial (14:61), he is asked if he is the son of "the Blessed", which implies God, to which Jesus responds "I am". That's it for this gospel. Aside from the opening verse, the narrator never calls Jesus 'Son of God' and aside from the answer in his trial, Jesus never says this of himself. Also of interest is that the disciples never, at any point, say that Jesus is the Son of God, not even at the Caesarea Philippi confession by Peter (he does in Matthew, but not here in Mark).

So the title "Son of God" features in the first verse, which implies it is important, but then doesn't feature much in the rest of the gospel, which suggests otherwise. And it must be noted that this gospel is written such that all the important material comes from the mouth of Jesus or the voice of the narrator, and secondary characters in the story usually get things wrong and make wrong statements. So when "Son of God" is mostly to be found on the lips of the demonic enemies, we have to wonder whether "Jesus is the Son of God" is actually a message the author is trying to convey. (Especially if he didn't originally have it in verse 1.)

What did the early readers of this gospel understand by the phrase "Son of God"? The challenge here is to not read too much later belief into the earliest days of the Church. What is clear is that Mark doesn't mean "second person of the Trinity" here. As far as I can tell, the Trinity concept wouldn't come along until after John was written. Here we are most likely dealing with the belief that God is the only one monotheistic God, and Jesus is, in some sense, his son.

As far as I can tell, ancient readers of this phrase would have understood this in one of two ways: either he was the son of God in the same manner as King David was in the OT - God's chosen, appointed and beloved agent, or it was understood in the same manner as Hercules was the son of God - literally the offspring of a sexual liaison between a god and a human woman, a semi-divine demi-god. I can see no third option in ancient thinking. Once again, the problem the reader of Mark has is knowing what exactly Mark means. He doesn't say. I suspect the lack of interest in Jesus's mother in Mark might suggest that the demi-god option is less likely, but we  can't be sure.

Finally we get to the word "Messiah" and again we need to avoid two thousand years of Christian thinking clouding our thoughts about this word. Insofar as there was messianic expectation in the time that this was written (and some have claimed that there wasn't half as much messianic expectation as Christian theologians would have you believe), the expectation was for a conquering king to arise and throw the oppressors out of Judea and restore 'true' religion to the temple in Jerusalem. There was no expectation of a 'messiah' who could be killed, who wouldn't throw out the Romans and, furthermore, who would allow the Romans to utterly destroy the temple. None of that was part of messianic expectation. So when Mark says Jesus is the Messiah, his readers can only understand that this is the guy who has come to smash the Romans. So  when the Romans smash him, the reader should be shocked. This defies all expectation. But in some ways I think that is the intention of Mark - he sets the reader up with some expectations and then pulls the rug out from underneath.

One of the main things I've taken away from Robert Fowler's book is that Mark doesn't tell the reader things directly, he wants the reader to make up their own mind, but sometimes he provides contrary statements and allows the reader to choose. Is Jesus the messiah? The Son of God? Is  this message even good news? Mark actually doesn't tell us.

But let's dive in and see some of the things he does tell us... next time.

Question Mark, Part 1

It is a long time since I read an entire book of the bible, beginning to end. It is even longer since I studied an entire book of the bible, beginning to end. Last time I did either of these two things, I read and studied the various books of the bible under the assumption that I was reading the Word of God. 

Over the last five years I have slowly, and somewhat reluctantly, come to the understanding that the bible is not the Word of God. The bible was written by human people with human motives, and while some of them might have felt inspired to write these words, there is no strong evidence that any divine being had any part in the composition and compilation of this book. (Note: the question of whether or not there is a divine being is an entirely separate one - the lack of divine inspiration of the bible does not entail that there is no God.)

Sloughing off the assumption of divine inspiration or authorship leaves me with a different set of assumptions when I read the text of the bible. It means I come away from reading the book with different questions and different conclusions. Its almost like reading a different book.

So I want to return to a few books of the bible and read/study them again, through different eyes. Before I would read the bible to learn something new about God or to find guidance in its pages, now when I read the bible I have a whole load of new questions to ask: Who wrote this? What was their purpose in writing it? Who were the intended audience? Did the author intend these words to be taken literally? Was the source material reliable? Is any of this true? Has anyone edited or rewritten these words since the original author wrote them? And so on. Previously the answers would always have been: God; To instruct me; Me; Yes; Yes; No; etc.

So I am returning to the Gospel of Mark, to read it through new eyes. My intention is to post my thoughts and questions here as I go along. Maybe I'll come to some conclusions along the way, maybe not. We'll see.

Why Mark? Well, because it is generally held to be the earliest of all the gospels we have, and the others are somewhat derivative of it. Some hold that Mark is actually the very first gospel. So its a good starting point. Also, it is quite short. So let's begin.

I'm going to begin by not assuming anything, insofar as I can. We don't know who Mark was. We don't know if he was called Mark. Mark was the most common name in the ancient Roman world, so this name could have been added to make it the gospel of everyman. The gospel according to Joe Bloggs. There is no particular reason to suppose that Mark (for simplicity, I'll continue to use the traditional name) is the same as the character of John Mark who makes a brief appearance in Acts. There is no particular reason to suppose that Mark was an eyewitness of the events presented, or even knew eyewitnesses. 

Another thing we don't really know is when the gospel was written. Some hold that it must have been written before the fall of Jerusalem in 70AD. Some hold that it must have been written after that event. I've even heard some claim that the work was written in the early 2nd century, not the late 1st century. And some, who see Marcionite content in the gospel, say that it is Marcionite in origin, which forces it a decade or two into the 2nd century, at the earliest. But let's just start by saying we don't know when it was written and go from there.

We also don't really know where it was written or who it was written to, although various theories have been proposed over the years. It is written in Greek, but was it originally in Greek or is the earliest version we have a translation of an earlier version? These are all questions we will address as we go.

So let's start with something I am reasonably sure of. I am reasonably convinced that the version of Mark we are able to read nowadays is pretty much unchanged since the mid 2nd century, which is when the NT documents began to be duplicated on mass, and widely distributed. The transmission chain may go back much earlier than that, but we can't be totally sure what happened earlier than the mid 2nd century.

I am reasonably convinced that the version of Mark we now have is basically a copy of a copy of a copy (etc.) of the gospel that was 'published' and distributed in the mid 2nd century. Prof David Trobisch says Polycarp was probably responsible for the compilation, duplication and publication of the NT canon, and who am I to argue with him? I find his case compelling.

What happened before this 'publication'? Well there are various theories. If we put all the possibilities together, we get a chain of events that could be as long as this:

1. Events occurred. 
2. Stories about these events were transmitted orally, perhaps for several decades.
3. Some of those stories may have been embellished in transmission.
4. Some of the stories may have been lost.
5. Other stories were made up.
6. The fictional stories were transmitted orally, perhaps for several decades.
7. Some of those stories may have been embellished in transmission.
8. Someone (lets call him Mark) collected some of these stories and wrote a gospel of Jesus out of them.
9. He may have invented some scenes in the gospel to provide a bridge/narrative framework between stories he got from his sources.
10. He may have also invented some stories that fitted his agenda and added them to his gospel to flesh it out. We now have what some scholars refer to as "Ur-Marcus".
11. This gospel was used by a community of people somewhere.
12. As the needs of the community changed, stories could have been dropped, edited or added to the gospel.
13. This could have happened several times.
14. It may have been picked up by other communities, with different agendas to the first, who may have modified it to fit their own purposes.
15. Eventually the gospel came into the hands of the final editor, who may have modified the gospel to make it consistent with the other books in his collection.

Some claim there may even be more steps in the chain than that.

I'm not saying that I believe all these steps happened. This is a compilation of all the theories that I've heard. I think it is highly unlikely that all these steps occurred, but probably some of them did. The most conservative evangelical view is probably that 1, 2, 8, 11 and part of 15 occurred, while 3, 5, 8, 10, 12, etc. didn't. The most radical critical view is that 1-4 did not happen and everything started with the made up stories at point 5 or 10. I expect the truth is somewhere between those two extremes.

Occam's razor would have us shave away all the 'unnecessary' items on that list. So as we go through the book of Mark I'll highlight things that might suggest that some of those items are 'necessary', or at least possible, and should not therefore be discounted out of hand.

So having said all that, let's begin with Mark, chapter 1, verse 1... (in a future post)