Right… Not odd at all for Julius Caesar to have practiced clemency on a large scale to insurrectionists and rebels and given this kind of pardon for many of his opponents in the civil war, and for the political benefits of such practice to be further extolled by the likes of writers as Cicero and Seneca…
But a local governor giving a single act of clemency to one individual once a year to throw a bone to the population is utterly inconceivable…?
One additional thought… I don’t disagree with you in the least here, yet I think this is probably a major crux of our disagreements here.
For what it is worth, in the past, I used to believe largely as you did, if I may, having essentially an “either-or” perspective about such things… either a certain story is included in the Bible because it is fulfilling a certain theological purpose, it is communicating a narrative, it was crafted for the author’s larger theological purpose… or it might be be a historical fact that actually happened… but not both.
A friend challenged me in that… essentially asking why any account couldn’t very well be both? The gospel writers presumably had many more things they could have selected from… Luke for instance discarded 50% or so if Mark’s gospel that he had access to… who knows how much material he had access to in the supposed L and Q sources did he likewise disregard as it didn’t fit his purpose?
But more to the point, what Luke did select from, he selected for his own theological purpose, to construct his theological narrative, to emphasize those things he wanted to emphasize and to construct an overarching narrative consistent with his larger theological purpose.
Now, for the sake of discussion… suppose with me, hypothetically, that everything in Luke’s sources happened to be historically accurate… everything in Mark, Q, and L… And yet Luke specifically and carefully selected only those parts of all these true details, selecting only those that aligned with his theological agenda, and then he crafted all these details into a theologically driven gospel.
So even if this were the case that all the details that Luke selected from and sifted through to craft his unique gospel were in fact true, it would still be the case that “ The narrative would be so plainly theological in its extant form.”
But that would have no bearing on whether or not it was also historical or not.
I think this is at least one crux of our divergence here. You seem to assume that if something in a narrative is plainly theological or serves some obvious larger theological purpose, then de facto, it cannot be historical.
I consider that a plain non sequitur. The fact that something has been incorporated into a gospel for clear theological purpose, in itself, has no bearing in whether or not it is historical.
It could be rather that, given the breadth and number of specific details a gospel writer had access to, that he simply chose those particular details that would contribute to the theological purpose of his narrative. I find this again near axiomatic and self-evident now, though I had not seen that in earlier years.
And all this is quite acknowledged, of course… John says as much… there were plenty of things and events that he could have written about, but he selected those particular thi mg a he gathered into his gospel for an explicit theological purpose, the belief and salvation of his hearers:
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
Your defense is grasping at straws. Caesar’s actions were an exception to the rule and many involved Romans during a civil war.
Romans were often extremely brutal in war otherwise. When reconstructing history and what most likely occurred, the rule is what is important, not one potential exception. General Roman policy and treatment of Palestinian Jews is what matters in this discussion. The historical record of Pilate is what matters. The record of how Romans treated Jews in the first century is what matters. The point of crucifixion itselfs is what matters. The complete lack of any corroborating evidence for what we find independently in Mark alone is what matters. The fact that a Jew was violently revolting against Rome and committed murder is what mattered. That Caesar attempted clemency 80 years prior in a completely different situation does not matter.
Not to mention, as Caesar found out, this didn’t work since he was assassinated by some people he pardoned. His own soldiers had gripes with him as he was doing this. The lesson was learned and he had to fight some people multiple times. Marc Antony and Octavius, two of his immediate successors abandoned this practice and liquidated their enemies. Barabbas would not have been released. There is no reasonable or plausible way to justify this part of the narrative on historical grounds.
Vinnie
Glad to hear you know this with such unerring certainty. That clears everything up!
History doesn’t work like that nor does it operate under the principle that as long as you can come up with a logically possible harmonization that harmonization is the most likely scenario or the historical difficulty disappears. History, working only in terms of probability, is against parts of Mark’s narrative as it stands. Only theological antivirus software suggests otherwise. This is an issue of wanting the story to be historical because it’s in our Holy Book.
Vinnie
I stll cant grasp how Mark made a huge jump from recording down events and then all of a sudden drops a theology right there.I mean Jesus arrest and then bam .Theological content.Ive never seen this in the bible.For me its a problem i cant solve since it seems certain to me that Barabass wasnt a real person
OK, OK, OK. Premiss: the Resurrection is true. You’re an intelligent, literate eye witness to it. Forty years on, what do you write? And why? Would you really make stuff up to make some point?
Peter was a Galilean fisherman which means, like most of the people in his profession, he was probably illiterate. We can never be certain but proclaiming him literate is a bridge built too far.
“Mark” was not written by an eyewitness follower of Jesus. No one ever claimed this for hundreds of years. Some claim it’s based on Peter’s preaching and that it’s author may have been a secretary of sorts. Mark was named as the author by some and connected to Peter early (e.g. Papias ca 110). Only much later did anyone argue Mark was an original follower as well. That Mark is based on Peter’s preaching is hotly disputed. I think it was written by a Mark in antiquity, an EXTREMELY common name, and Papias who knew 1 Peter per Eusebius may have made this connection to the John Mark mentioned there associated with Peter. This explains the oddity of assigning it to a relatively unknown figure and the internal contents of the Gospels itself which do not look like direct eyewitness recollection.
And what eyewitnesses are you talking about at Jesus’ trial befor Pilate? According to Jesus’ prophecy in Mark 14 they all fled. It’s certainly
not impossible to imagine lines of transmission given the public nature of it but you seem to be implying an eyewitness of the event itself wrote this? Peter who was busy denying Jesus in the “courtyard below” certainly could have inquired after feeling remorse and hearing the cock crow. The apostles are not presented as an eyewitness of this in Mark:
27 “You will all fall away,” Jesus told them, “for it is written:
“‘I will strike the shepherd,
and the sheep will be scattered.’[d](Y)
28 But after I have risen, I will go ahead of you into Galilee.”(Z)
@Daniel_Fisher just saw this. Definitive proof Luke is aware of Galilean appearances and another piece of the resurrection appearance puzzle. Jesus himself tells them he will appear to them in Galilee. The sense is plainly for the first time.
Thats not an answer to my question Klax.Say you are writting an event of me going somewhere.And then all of a sudden you add either an allegory or something along the writting style.Theres absolutely no purpose to do that.Same with Mark
Nor does it work, I’m afraid, such that if you insist that “surely Pilate would never have ever offered clemency to anyone ever” because you feel strongly that he didn’t, even though other Roman rulers did so and other Roman writers recommended such, that it becomes the case that he never did.
Real history would acknowledge, simply, that Pilate “May or may not have offered clemency to political prisoners.” I’m afraid your near-clairvoyant insistence that he absolutely, positively, without question, never did or could have done so, betrays your desire to find an error on Mark’s part far more than it discloses anything about the real history of the Roman governors at this time.
History would deem it more probably than not that he didn’t do this. The evidence isn’t there.
Vinnie
You are assuming Mark has strict, historical and chronological narration throughout. That is a point to argue for in my view, not a point to argue from. While it contains many elements of it, Mark is not a biography, it is a proclamation of the Gospel written almost two-thousand years ago in a vastly different cultural milieu with different literary conventions and acceptable practices. Outside of the passion narrative, much of the material in Mark is “movable” and other synoptic authors do move and relocate parts of it.
Did Jesus cleanse then Temple more than once? If not, why does John place it at the beginning? Is that history remembered?
Vinnie
He migh did>But now that i think about it we dont have any extra biblical evidence for it either.But dont tell me that one was theological as well?
Very enlightening indeed.
Which, an objective reader would then acknowledge, meant that Luke is clearly aware of both Jesus’s post resurrection time spent with his disciples in Galilee AND his time spent with them in Jerusalem. AND that he finds no need to “suppress” the one in deference to the other, simply that for his literary purposes, he only wanted to discuss the one?
Otherwise, ought we similarly suggest that Luke, copying Mark, was aware of both the feeding of the 5000 and the feeding of the 4000, yet he was trying to “suppress” the knowledge of the one in preference for the other, since for some theological purpose he wanted his readers to be only aware of a single miraculous feeding?
Did Jesus feed the multitudes with a few loaves and fishes more than once?
Hence my question.
OK Vinnie. Believe me, I’m a rational man. HAH! So Peter was a pretty smart peasant fisherman, a step up or three from landless indentured peasants, who needed a secretary. Mark, John Mark, John, Mark the Evangelist, Barnabas’ cousin. I do love a good shave. Hippolytus and Eusebius notwithstanding.
There are multiple scenarios. As we all know, whoever wrote ‘Mark’ could have worked for The Times. Wrote like a reporter. The claim it was Mark was not made hundreds of years after it was written. Decades. By someone who overlapped with ‘Mark’. A certain Papias. Etc, etc, blah-di-blah.
The young man who ran away naked sounds like the eye witness reporter. Might one ask what looks like fill-dirt? Jesus’ followers were scattered but Pilate, the High Priest, Herod were surrounded by tiers of guards, clerks, advisers, servants. And although t’other John didn’t have an eidetic memory for the four chapters of Jesus’ Passover speech, the resurrected Jesus certainly did. Some time in the forty days after, it wouldn’t have taken much for that to be recalled and transcribed. ‘Got a pen John?’. Or even, ‘Hey our John, I made some notes for you.’. But that would mean that Jesus was what He said He was. Or He didn’t die. Nobody survived a Roman scourging mind, let alone with added crucifixion.
Modern scholarship is predicated on the Resurrection being bogus one way or another. So Mark 13 cannot predate the destruction of the temple as mythical Jesus could not have prophesied that (any more than ‘Daniel’ prophesied the Kings of the North and South). Etc, etc. I’m quite capable of coming up with a story or ten, fully sympathetic to all involved, in which Jesus was for real in every regard except that there is no God. In which case all of modern scholarship might as well apply or we can give the benefit of the doubt to all sources but still say there is no God so they deluded themselves and/or conspired. Not a problem.
But does scholarship to date work if there is God? Does scholarship have to come first and then God be posited on top? Made to fit? As in other science based scholarship - except He can only be allowed beneath? In the light of the Resurrection.
No.
The Resurrection and all that precedes it from the Incarnation is orthogonal to history, to scholarship. And in this, and only in this, scholarship has to defer where its rationalization makes the posit of Immanuel useless. And I’m radical enough to know that Jesus’ human epistemology can’t work now. He was still right.
So, do you believe that all the findings of scholarship are as valid as possible, have to come first AND in the Incarnation-Resurrection?
If so, how? And/or why?
That is most definitely right, but you also must say that they were persecuted by the Jewish establishment for preaching the gospel that Jesus is the Messiah. I am concerned about anti-Semitism, but that does not mean that I must pretend that the Jews and Christians were not theological opponents, and this resulted in persecution such as that in which Saul/Paul participated…
The issue was, Is Jesus the Messiah? and Was He political Messiah of the Jews, or the spiritual Messiah for everyone? This was not an abstract discussion, which led to a very bloody and destructive war and ended in the destruction of Herod’s Temple in 70 CE.
Christians fled Jerusalem did not support the Jewish war effort, which meant the final alienation of the two sides. Now should be skeptical all of a sudden story like the one of Barabbas shows up in 70 CE out of nowhere dramatizing the division of the Jews and the Christians over the Messiah/War, but I do not think that this is what happened. The division was there from the beginning. .Just because it was “convenient” does not make it false.
Interesting answers.Whats your opinion about what happened with Barabass.Did he existed?
Could is not did, I can write a million could haves regarding Christian origins and vague, problematic citations as you know. Traditional authorship is granted no presumption in historical inquiry. Multiple scenarios yes, with Mark being Peter’s eyewitness testimony being the least likely based on internal arguments. The overlap between Papias and Mark’s life is not very extensive (Papias born ca 60AD) in time (and you must also consider SPACE), but the former claims to have passed on the tradition from an elder if I remember correctly (the elder used to say). That chronological overlap is more extensive between the elder and Mark–it is quite early. Of course, where it comes from is another issue. So yes, assuming Papias, whose works are all lost to us, and whom Eusebius himself may or may not have relied on second hand sources for, mentions Mark and granting it is our gospel of Mark (since we have no precise quotations from Papias assuring us what he is referring to is our Mark), assuming we can trust this extremely apologetical and defensive tradition ascribing authorship to a Mark, who is connected to Peter existing at least before the turn of the first century (ca. 90CE), and giving the re-dating of Papias to just around the turn of the century (the older date of 130-40 is no longer to be preferred), the name Mark was certainly attached to the second evangelist quite early–assuming Papias quotes and understands the elder correctly (we have no access to him either). Now Papias also knows 1 Peter per Eusebius where Mark is called Peter’s son. Also, if Papias does refer to our Matthew, and I am sympathetic to his use of logia in a more broad sense, he gets it wrong. The experts broadly agree that Matthew is not a translation from Aramaic. In fact, as we know now, Matthew was dependent on the Greek text of Mark. There are far too many uncertainties and difficulties in the case of Papias to form any strong conclusions. The source material precludes certainty. At best, Maybe we can say is by the end of the first century, it appears that the second Gospel was connected to Peter very defensively, amidst significant criticism, by Mark, by an author who also knows 1 Peter where Mark is considered Peter’s Son. I the second century I am aware of Papias, Irenaeus and Clement, the latter two of which
The vague sounds like is not is. The naked young man is perplexing. Secret Mark? Ur-Markus? Canoninial Mark? Carpocratian Mark? Thank goodness for the synoptic problem. There is a host of proposed explanations for this obscure text, most of them speculative and none of them ultimately definitive
Possible but highly speculative. I don’t accept Act’s 40 days. The extant form of his his appearance stories are clearly theological to me (with Jerusalem only, the whole thing lasts 40 days like the 40 years in the wilderness (which I think you reject) and the 40 days in the desert (a highly symbolic number!), despite Luke suggestion it was 3 days. As far as I know the earliest appearance stories are those of Galilee, given Mark and Jesus’ prediction. John 21 gets it right to me. The apostles were 100 miles away in Galilee fishing, resuming their lives. Jesus was dead. They were broken. Jesus appeared to them. They were convinced he rose from the dead. The resurrection of Jesus and these appearances were the ultimate mustard seed.
Its not modern scholarship vs the resurrection. Its modern scholarship vs the 5 million miraculous and wild stories from antiquity, many of which you did a good job of dismissing from the Old Testament. Outlandish beliefs are a dime a dozen. History is an academic disciple and attempts to offer the most probable reconstruction of the past. A man rising from the dead after 3 days is about as improbable as an event could be. Humans being mistaken, hallucinating, having a vision or outright lying is more intrinsically probable than the universe’s rules turning on their head. I believe the resurrection because of my personal experience with God and being saved as I read the Bible and heard the good news. I personally don’t believe because I think there is historical proof of the resurrection. If I didn’t have that personal experience, all the supernatural elements regarding the ministry and resurrection of Jesus would be in the trash heap along with the rest from antiquity. Many exegetes, not grinding an axe with regards to their favorite holy books will just tell you that supernatural events from this type of source material simply can’t be reconstructed using sober canons of history. A story from 2,000 years ago, of a person’s hero walking on water, written 40 years after the fact, probably by a non-eyewitness, is not enough consider what we know about buoyancy to have been violated. Even if it was by an eyewitness, my Physics minor is still going with Archimedes’s principal. History is an academic discipline and it simply cannot do what Christian apologists want it to. If you believe in God, surely God, presumably an extra-dimensional being, can work miracles and supernatural events are very possible. But when history starts with that assumption, it is called theology.
Jesus could have predicted the temple’s destruction before hand. There is nothing implausible about a Jew in the 30s seeing corruption in the temple and prediction God would destroy it or allow it to be destroyed (this might have meant the same thing). The problem is that much in the Gospel of Mark seems clearly to have been written regarding events that happened 70C.E. I am not sure about you, but when I read a narrative where Moses wrote down the details of his death, I am immediately convinced this narrative was written after the fact by someone else. There are a lot of apologetics sites claiming Moses was given knowledge by God of his death before-hand. Personally, I think that is just nonsense. Likewise, I would never believe someone telling me a story about fish multiplying 40 years earlier, and probably not even by an eyewitness from 3 days ago. It doesn’t mean I reject the Gospel account (or accounts) of the feeding of the multitude. I am willing to believe it based on who Jesus is and that God could have given him the ability to perform supernatural feats in his human form. Yet the skeptic in me asks how you speak to 5,000 people without a microphone, or how, logically how long it took Jesus, assuming he used his apostles, to actually pass out food to 5,000 people and collect and measure the scraps.
The resurrection doesn’t require all the details in the Canonical gospels to be inerrant or historically accurate. We have four different portraits of the Good News and I have a tendency to stress the humanity of Jesus during the incarnation. Over time the Galilean Jew in the first third of the first century becomes the cosmic Christ, an ethereal figure in John floating around, transcendent and in control of virtually everything. I don’t consider that history remember. I consider the gospel of John true, just not historically true in many details. Forest over the trees.
Of course I don’t believe all the findings. Scholars disagree on quite a lot. From a pet project I am working on
Chapter 5: What did Jesus Say About the Bible
The Historical Jesus vs the Christian Jesus
Can the Jesus of history ever be the Jesus of Christian faith? Earlier in this work I noted that miracles are events that simply defy the probability judgments of historical criteria. I asked what is expected of an unbiased historian when they read an account of someone narrating the details of their own death? A historian cannot reconstruct genuine, nature defying miracles based upon these sources. This is not to say they did not happen or that for some of them, there could even be better historical evidence for an ancient origin than not. Historians use probability to gauge what happened in the past using patterns and the constancies of experience to filter historical witnesses. Confirming the validity of miracles, the least probable events imaginable, is beyond the scope of sober historical investigation which seeks to recover what is most probable. With that being said, Christians believe the Jesus of our faith is the actual Jesus of history, but he cannot be the minimalistic, historically reconstructed scholarly version of Jesus. Meier stated the issue succinctly in the first volume of his five volume work on the historical Jesus:“. . . the Jesus of history is not and cannot be the object of Christian faith. A moment’s reflection will make clear why that must be so. More than a millennium and a half of Christians believed firmly in Jesus Christ without having any clear idea of or access to the historical Jesus as understood today, yet no one will deny the validity and strength of their faith. The same can be said of many pious Christians in developed as well as developing countries today. But, even if all Christians were acquainted with the concepts and research connected with the historical Jesus, the Church could still not make the historical Jesus the object of its preaching and faith. The reason is obvious: What historical Jesus would be the object of faith? Albert Schweitzer’s or Eduard Shweizer? Herbert Braun’s or Joachim Jeremias’s? Gunther Bornkamm’s or E.P. Sanders’s? Jesus the violent revolutionary or Jesus the gay magician? Jesus the apocalyptic seer or Jesus the wisdom teacher unconcerned with eschatology? The constantly changing, often contradictory portraits of the historical Jesus served up by scholars, however useful in academia, cannot be the object of Christian faith for the universal Church.”
Jesus is of utmost importance to me. He is my Savior. I continue to study the Gospels because of this. I am a skeptic by default and I have to keep pushing. I think the Bible is inspired in some form. I try my best to understand what the evangelists meant and where they are coming from. To me there is a lot of truth in how these communities understood Jesus, even if it isn’t all historically factual. Since i don’t accept Biblical inerrancy, I like to evaluate stories like Barabbas from a historical perspective. Its not a question of my faith whether or not the Jews demanded the release of a murderous insurrectionist over Jesus. I understand the account is true regardless of whether it happens or not. Pride gets in the way, money, the world. All people (my thread about God setting us up to fail not withstanding) choose the wrong Jesus, the wrong savior and this brings death and destruction. Whether it happened or not, we are the crowd, Barabbas is our sin and next to him is the Answer --Jesus, the sacrificial Lamb of God who brought salvation and grace.
Vinnie
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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