Historical Jesus

Faith & Science Conversation
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Hi Marvin…Thanks for the quote. I had to look up Kurt Marti (1921-2017) and that is about the most I got about him on Wikipedia — died in Bern, Switzerland. And that is all I know. German is also foreign to me but the online translator rendered your quote this way

“A belief that is focused on one’s own survival after death remains hopelessly egocentric. Isn’t the desire to live forever the human primal crime anyway, to want to be like God, the only Eternal?”

If this is your translation of the Marti statement, then Marti has a rather stilted view of biblical theology—that is if he thinks (truly) that all that the Bible – or those who talk about it — refers to is “one’s own survival after death”. He knows better than this-- NOW, at least. We do survive death — recall the story of the rich man in the gospels, the witch of Endor account in the Old Testament… and more.

The “human primal crime” was rooted in not understanding something God had said or instructed people to do, thus developing a suspicion about God’s motives, then wanting to be independent from, or as knowledgeable and “just as smart as” or “just as good as” God, and finally defying His commands…see the earliest chapters of Genesis…

All of this leads away from the biblical theology that we were created to have a relationship with God and others, not separation. Our desire to “do our own thing” has led the world into nothing but trouble—and you only have to read your own newspaper or watch your coworkers to see that one.

“He has showed you, O man, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).

We could go on for quite some time on this. The requirement to “act justly” assumes that there is more to all this than just wanting to avoid death…and that there is also more to theology than surviving death. "Am I still to forget, O wicked house, your ill-gotten treasures
and the short ephah, which is accursed? Shall I acquit a man with dishonest scales, with a bag of false weights? …Therefore I have begun to destroy you, to ruin you because of your sins…Therefore I will give you over to ruin and your people to derision; you will bear the scorn of the nations> " (Micah 6:8, 10-11, 13, 16) …

I do not have to argue “that we have to pay a price for sin” — Micah does. All the Bible does. You and I do too!! In my country, at the moment, there is a cry (on various parts) for a former president to pay a price for something…some, whose great-great grandparents were enslaved, still want the great-great grandchildren of those slaveholders to pay reparations. If “we” do not forget offenses, then why should we think God does? There is , for example, no statute of limitations on a murder investigation. There is the cry “Never again” from survivors of – or co-religionists of victims of — the Holocaust.

The couches of psychiatrists the world over are populated by people who are troubled either by past behaviors from which they have never escaped, or past ill treatments from which they have never recovered. “The blood of righteous Abel” cried (probably not literally) from the grave in Genesis, crying for justice.

If someone stole your car—you want justice (or at least compensation) for that offense against YOU.

The call for justice is so innate in us that we do not question it on the horizontal plane — that is, the realm of human relationships. There is no company without an HR department that must not deal, from time to time, with relationship issues amidst the employees of that firm. We leave a job if we feel inequities or abuses have been ignored.

We WANT justice…and we wonder “where was God when that happened?” etc…

Why should we not think then that God is not concerned about justice? Why should we think our own consciences more keen than His in this area? Why should we think that there is no price to be paid for sin? “There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death” (Proverbs 14: 12).

Why also do you think that “believing in Christ make[s] you get away with sin?”

There is NO teaching in the Bible that believing in Jesus is somehow “getting away with sin”. That, of course, IS what some of us fallible humans think, of course. But is it biblical teaching? “Fools mock at making amends for sin…” Proverbs 14:9…

What the Bible DOES teach is that God shows mercy in spite of the fact that we do not deserve it. …"…that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy" (1 Peter 2 9,10).

Receiving mercy is not “getting away with sin.” It is something that is ALWAYS done — even at times by you and me in some situations — with full knowledge of an offense. And the act of mercy is always based on something, or made possible by something. “For God so loved the world that He gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16 NIV). “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all…It is God who justifies----” (Romans 8: 32-33, fragments of these verses.) There is no assertion here that God justifies everyone — just that He justifies (or will) many who do not otherwise have it coming. And there is going to be a judgment someday.

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I find it entertaining never the less. That we had no parents is even better, makes it sound like we are truly self-made man.

So what is the inheritable sin and what is it that made Christ free of sin - if you believe he was?

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Klax…I assume your “C4th” is the 4th century A.D./C.E. and thus you are referring to mss from that date…priestly elite etc…“bodged”? I like the word there — kind of original. And yes the story of the woman in adultery is believed to have been tacked on at some point…As for your priestly elite — by the end of the 1st century the number of Christians in the Roman Empire was/is est to be just under 7500 —and just under 9 mill by 312 A.D., according to one author I have read.

I suppose you refer to-- in your C4th remarks --.the various codices that we know of and which remain from the 4th to 6th centuries AD/CE. But some of them (at least) have “ancestors” in fragments from the first century A.D. There is also the issue of the mysterious Q, M, L documents that are said/presumed to have preceded those gospels – which mostly developed in the mid to late 1st century. The fragment of the gospel of John that is known, dates to within 25 to 30 years of the time of composition…This is pretty “close to the time of composition,” no matter how else you look at it. Most other historical personages or events do not have that kind of textual proximity in their heritage.

I have read in a couple places that you could reconstruct the NT from the quotes in sermons, commentaries, letters etc surviving from the second or third centuries…all of which aids in determining the original text.

All of the above makes for some level of continuity between the lifetime of Jesus and His teachings. Additionally, there is the tradition that rabbis of Jesus’ time expected their disciples to memorize their words. It is also said (by scholars in this field) that students of those rabbis could at times take notes. Yes, I know there is a question about literacy rates in that era, but evidently some or enough were literate enough to take notes. So if you relied on oral transmission plus you also had some few who made notes, there is also the possibility of random compilations forming rather early — and maybe eventually becoming formalized in scrolls, then codices. “Progressively late” is misleading if there were earlier notes or documents of some sort floating about. And a gospel that was written as an original could have been copied immediately by the original writer — so that one gospel went west and another east… I do not know about Paul’s letters being a “mythic humanist personality cult” …He (Saul who became Paul) was certainly not trained to look for “humanist strands of ethics to be brought together” – he had his Scriptures and he lived in a culture that looked down upon the unfortunates who were not blessed to be descended from Moses, etc… …and while the idea that a Jewish man would come who would one day be both Messiah and God was much more within the realm of his social milieu and theological mindset than something with a “transcending cultures” theme— it is also true that Crucifixion would have lent NO credibility to that teacher’s words for those who knew crucifixion to be a sign of God’s curse. While the beliefs of Saul’s era looked for resurrection, it was a Last Days kind of thing…they were not really looking for a Messiah who was God to be crucified and resurrected.

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Evolution made us. Pre-wired us for experience like no other creature on Earth. We had no choice in the matter. We’re self-made in the sense that the strongest pressure to evolve came to be from ourselves.

As the concepts of inheritance and sin come from two non-overlapping magisteria, I wouldn’t use them together except poetically. What made Christ’s humanity morally perfectable was His divinity. Prince trumps toad every time.

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Aye Robin, follow the arrow of time. Bodge is a proper Shakespearian English word. I always spurn spurious accuracy, there is no way a figure like 7,500 can be justified for 100 AD, ten thousand OOM yes, and a thousand times that two hundred years later.

Yeah I have no problem with any of that, being a postmodernist I always give the benefit of the doubt to the text.

That will be done if it hasn’t already by some Ph.D. student I’m sure.

John certainly didn’t memorize Jesus’ farewell discourse, unless he was chosen because he had an eidetic memory. So he took notes. Routinely. The disciples weren’t peasants. His and others’ notes became source material for decades later edits. Humanism emerges progressively in the OT from the beginning, over a thousand years of oral and written tradition, paralleling its emergence in the Greek world and all the way east; in 30s Judea the time was ripe. Riper in the 40s-50s when Paul was writing. If Jesus was only human, then He was the greatest moral thinker, teacher, practitioner, communicator, leader of his time, entirely due to cultural forces. The novel practically writes itself doesn’t it?

I want to believe and therefore the same material that can be easily dismissed as honest fiction easily allows for that.

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I don’t know who Riper was…and humanism is another subject entirely…probably not defined or considered in 50 AD/CE as we do now…if at all…

As for the number of Christians in the population of the Roman Empire at 100 C.E., you suspect

“there is no way a figure like 7,500 can be justified for 100 AD, ten thousand OOM yes, and a thousand times that two hundred years later…”

you will have to debate that assertion with others…7500 x 100,000? Is that your idea here? or 7500 x 1000? … and then 1000 x that in the Roman Empire 200 yrs later? Lotsa babies happening there! 75 million followers of Jesus in the Roman Empire of 100 CE? or 750,000? In an era in which the population of the world in 33 C.E. is est at 250 million (see Duriez)? The population of the Greco Roman world in Jesus’ day is est 70 million, at least per a lecturer I heard in 2019 at a local evangelical college. A number like the latter — however sourced — seems more consistent with the Duriez numbers. Maybe I have my decimal pt in the wrong place w/ re to you “00M”. But the “just under 7,500” number I cited came from Stark who was citing Goodenough, Grant, MacMullen etc. You will have to defend your calculations with them, I suppose.

At any rate, this priestly class who wrote at some “progressively” later date – certainly transcribed things and so on — but this does not relegate NT documents to a “progressively later date.” There is reason to think they were originally done in a less manufactured manner and not so far removed from events as you seem to suppose/…

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I don’t have to defend a thing. Those making claims of two significant figures really need to show their workings.

The more early is pushed the more later has to be and vice versa. The consensus is later than Paul, which even you defer to. I suppose only what should be supposed. You?

All the texts cohere around the central claim, the greatest in history. The substance of which is completely outside history. Therefore it is reasonable to try and make the texts work without it, even though that introduces other philosophical entities; they are reasonable.

I want it to be true. I really want it to be true. More than anything. Don’t make it so.

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…ripe. Riper… Did you miss that? You know, the immediate context?

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not sure ultimately what your issue is here…except that you disagree with others’ assertions about the population of the Roman empire…a number that others have debated and presumably researched (using some sort of sources) but which you dismissed out of hand as unjustifiable…fine enough. But if these various other researchers are closer to the truth than your “00M” figure, the, your presumption of .a priestly class of the late 1st century for a group of less than 7500 people is not quite so likely, as someone else pointed out to you—or maybe it was you pointing it out to you…

and yeah…got the Riper idea ,

Wanting it to be true is a good thing…and you are right that wanting something does not always make it so ( I want donuts to be zero calorie )…but the reality is that much of human history is accepted on less data than what is known about Jesus…and the timeframe for the writing of the various canonical texts of the NT is not unreasonable…I have seen scholars arguing for the reliability of histories of other figures (Alexander the Great, for example) with less written resources to go on…

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For the 2nd time, the priestly class had been up and running for centuries by the time the PA was bodged on to John. The fact that there were OOM ten thousand Christians a century after Christ says what about His disciples making the claim and believing it?

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I only have time for a few short replies, but here goes:

What you describe isn’t an afterthought, but an imperative. Remember the times. Writing was a specialized skill, and the first disciples had more pressing concerns than setting down their memoirs. The second generation, beginning with Mark and followed closely thereafter by Luke, felt the need to set things down on papyrus. It’s also worth remembering that their writings still came within the lifetime of living witnesses. I was 10-11 when Watergate happened. Even discounting all “news” accounts, I still knew enough of events to have recognized a distortion or outright lie 30 years later, simply by listening to my parents and their friends talk about it. An account written in AD 70-90 is 40-60 years removed from Jesus’ death, which is within the memory of a multitude of people still alive. If a false account of Nixon’s life was written today, I and many others would immediately object.

That’s essentially the challenge Paul laid down in 1 Cor. 15:6 “After that He appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom remain until now …”

It doesn’t take brainwashing. The same set of facts, whether the composition of the gospels or the evolution of humanity, can always be interpreted as “for” or “against” Christ and YHWH. We have been placed in an ambiguous situation that reason alone cannot decide. Nevertheless, a decision must be made. The leap must be taken.

Reason isn’t the only, or even the primary, source of religious belief. Pascal attributed belief to reason, intuition, and custom. “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of… We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart.” What we feel by intuition, in the heart, we make our own by habit. It’s like Alcoholics Anonymous says, “Fake it till you make it.” Only half joking.

Back to Kierkegaard and the “leap,” with a bit of Dallas Willard thrown in. Faith is not a set of facts believed to be true. It is a commitment to a certain way of life, of imitating Christ. It’s my experience that habit eventually is confirmed by experience. Seek and you will find. If it turns out in the end that you believed a falsehood, death will spare you even the embarrassment of learning that you were wrong, as Pascal noted. Meantime, at least you would have (or should have) lived a life that contributed to others, which is meaningful in itself. I usually find that thought enough to quell my cynical side.

This is interesting. I would observe that many ancient religions were not reconcilable with humanism. For instance, the Greek and other ANE religions were contradictory to humanism in too many ways, so they could not stand the onslaught of new ideas. The OT, on the other hand, was flexible enough to stand the test of time. It was a radical thought to say that male and female are the image of God, when contemporary religions maintained that the king was the image of God personified. The OT contains the seeds of what would develop. Jesus, of course, was the culmination of that trend, and Paul saw the logical and spiritual end when he wrote the equally radical idea that “there is neither … male nor female … but all are one in Christ Jesus.” None of those thoughts were due to cultural forces, but were actually countercultural and prefigured where we should be headed, which is the obliteration of cultural and gender distinctions. (If the last clause is too political, the mods have my permission to delete it.)

There’s a reason it’s called “The Greatest Story Ever Told.” I read the gospels as a teenager and fell in love with the story and the person of Jesus. All the rest is just gloss.

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it clearly has been one of the biggest misunderstandings of Genesis to believe that God said:
If you eat from that tree I am going to kill you.
The price for sin is not set by God but by our own sinful nature, that what got us into trouble to start with, as suffering death is the logical consequence of identifying as a self in our material body. Usually we have children to propagate the self, a problem most obvious in the “male heir” syndrome in aristocracy.
There have always been people who justify their selfish thinking with bits of the bible, but once you see the fall as the poetic description of the problem of puberty and can project yourself into the role of the loving father you see things differently and think about how you would react as a father.
Your revenge attitude may be very biblical according to the OT that you want revenge, but it is not at all Christian. One could think you have never heard of him to suggest to turn the other cheek.

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To be fair, the manuscript P52 cannot be securely dated to 125 AD. In fact, it could be as late as the late 2nd or early 3rd century at the limit. See this paper:

That being said, there are other ways to date these Gospels. For one, the longer ending of Mark (Mark 16:9-20) can be securely dated to have been added between 100-140 AD. This longer ending, in turn, can be shown to rely on Luke and so Luke predates it. Luke likely used Matthew and Matthew likely used Luke. So, based on this alone, the three Synoptic Gospels must date in a range of decades ahead of 100-140 AD. Of course, this is not the only datum.

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The original pronouncement was “You are free to eat from any tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die” (Genesis 2:16-17.

How this “reads” to you and I may be as difficult as it was (apparently) to the individuals to whom it was first spoken. Is it a “if you eat from that tree I am going to kill you” statement? or is it a “don’t eat this because it is bad for you and you will die because of it” sort of statement?

If you point to a box of rat poison on a shelf in your garage and tell your kids “Eat from this and you will die” — are you threatening to kill them? or trying to prevent a terrible thing from happening to your children?

That is as far as we can go with the statement in Genesis 2. You or I can “try” the revenge motif in it, but the possibility still stands – that it is a statement of consequences for disobedience or rebellion. (Modern parallels like “drive your car too fast and you will get a ticket” apply.)

These original people (or couple, however you take it) had everything going for them (all the other trees in the garden) but they could no more understand (or accept, I suppose) what God was saying about ONE tree, than you and I probably would, given the same situation.

The remarks by the serpent in Genesis 3:5 are a marketer’s dream: “You will not surely die…God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5)

In this passage — as elsewhere in both OT and NT --“the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23). The original people had their eyes opened and realized (possibly in part) that they had been tricked by that original marketer (in the guise of a serpent), who had (ultimately) no real interest in these humans becoming “like God” or not. The serpent’s objective was accomplished in their rebellion and destruction. Exit Stage Left!

As for you and me, the statement in Romans 6 is a re-statement of the consequences, and also an announcement that through Jesus the price has been paid (His bodily death and resurrection). This is not a “revenge attitude.” It is a demand for—a need for – justice on the part of a holy God—and a statement that the penalty has been paid — not by us, since we are not able to, but by God Himself through the death and resurrection (physically in both cases) of God the Son… And the assertions about sin and its consequences are as firmly rooted in the New Testament as in the Old.

Yes I have read Matthew 5. “Turning the other cheek” has to do with personal relationships, and also with not exposing oneself to evil. And it hardly overrides statements like that in the subsequent (Matthew 21) parable of the tenants or the wedding banquet (Matthew 22) where some are tossed “into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth”…

As it says (also): “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10)

OK…nuff for now. Thanks for your thoughts.

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Thanks. Good stuff. Without looking back, I don’t think I said P52 was “securely dated” to 125. Virtually every artifact, from papyrus to fossil, are dated within a range. In this case we’re talking about handwriting analysis, but eventually I expect a test on the writing materials, whether ink or paper, to give a firmer answer. In the meantime, the consensus tends toward earlier rather than later, so I give weight to that. As well, @Klax asked for a case to be made for an early date to the gospels, which I supplied.

Do you have a source to the secure dating of the longer ending of Mark? As far as I know, all extant copies of Mark contain the longer ending. I would also suggest that the longer ending relies on the sequel to Luke, which is Acts. That seems clear from internal evidence.

Right. The situation in the garden wasn’t a test; it was a warning of consequences.

I’ll draw from an upcoming article of mine.

The temptation the snake represents is threefold: First, it questions the “rightness” of the command; second, it denies the consequences of disobedience; third, it questions the motives of the lawgiver. As the man and woman are archetypes, so is their temptation and fall.

In The Moral Development of the Child, Jean Piaget studied children of various ages playing games and concluded that the younger ones regarded rules “as sacred and untouchable, emanating from adults and lasting forever. Every suggested alteration strikes the child as a transgression.” This matches quite well the attitude of many interpreters toward the command not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. The first humans should have accepted it without question, obeyed it and, presumably, lived forever in paradise. But is unquestioned acceptance of the rule a mature moral choice? Unquestioned acceptance of rules characterizes the state of childhood.

Updating Piaget’s work, developmental psychologist William Kay observed, “A young child is clearly controlled by authoritarian considerations, while an adolescent is capable of applying personal moral principles. The two moralities are not only clearly distinct but can be located one at the beginning and the other at the end of a process of moral maturation.” In what could be called the first instance of peer pressure, the serpent introduced doubt from the outside, and the woman determined her personal moral principles vis-à-vis the command. She applied her own moral judgment, a phenomenon that begins in adolescence and continues throughout the rest of life, and weighed whether the rule was hypothetically non-binding and contrary to her own self-interest (the fruit was “good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom”). The universal nature of temptation and sin appears at the end of a process of moral maturation that all children undergo. In the end, the adolescent applies her own moral principles, considers her self-interest, and declares her independence, albeit prematurely. In the second instance of peer pressure, the man takes the fruit from the woman and eats it without apparent thought. If everyone else is doing it, me too!

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Nice…

I like your responses to Maniacal Vesalius re P52…the dating issue on this piece of parchment is somewhat defiend by Egerton 2 papyrus — cited by some scholars — which seems to lend itself to the “earlier” 125-130 A.D./C.E. date. And you are correct that papyrus, like fossils etc, are dated within a range…

And interesting references to Piaget’s book which is (I think) from the 1930s and maybe dated? One online reviewer says of his work…

"Piaget uses qualitative methods (observation and clinical interviews). His research is based on very small samples. His methods are not standardised and therefore not replicable.

It is impossible to say from his research how generalizable the results are. His is exploratory research, which is useful for generating new ideas rather than for the rigorous testing of hypotheses."

This all sounds fascinating…esp for those dealing with young children. My experiences with young children are limited to how they behave in certain aspects of school settings, and sometimes that can be amazingly involved…

The biblical account describes an event (which the writer evidently believed occurred) in which a couple (or several?) people were persuaded to abandon loyalty and disregard the boundaries set by the authority figure in their lives — to see whether the promised consequences really would amount to anything. They evidently presumed it was all a scam, designed to deprive them of their obvious rights to become godlike (have their eyes opened) and accept a promotion in the divine hierarchy. Did they know this was wrong? Were they showing some adolescent stage of independence (except for when they need the car keys). Were they exercising independent and critical thinking? Hard to say exactly. Unquestioned acceptance of the divine edict apparently — within the confines of this story – would have been the mature response, not the childlike response. It would have signified willingness to live within an accepted set of boundaries for the benefit of themselves as well as others — in other words, “do the right thing.” The “others” who might have benefitted from a more mature response on their part – well, they are us. The alternative, which they took, had consequences, and we are living with them still.

I am sure that Piaget’s work is/was interesting. But that is a discussion of human development, whereas the Garden of Eden story describes a “fall,” which would not be optimal in terms of its developmental impact. I think Piaget’s ideas “interesting” but I fail to see any theological impact in them.

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the one thing Genesis establishes is the existence of death prior to the fall as otherwise the warning about death would be meaningless to them as would be the assertion of the serpent, the one speaking with the split tongue that they would not die. Does the marketeer say “you will not surely die” or “you will surely not die”?

The parallel of do not touch a live high voltage cable as you will die is better than talking about a speeding ticket which is at best a may be. Read it as “the reward of sin is death” as the price or wage is not about what the other side demands but what is accrued by you by your action and you have a right to expect. Death is not a demand by God, nor a legal retribution for something “done against him” but the logical consequence of not defining yourself in the eternal God but in your own material - non eternal- self. If you created children, as a loving father, do you have a right to their obedience?

In Jesus the law of logic is fulfilled as the price is paid e.g. the money is given to him and his physical death is achieved, but as he was never separated from God he still lives on in me and you, I hope, as he or God is alive as long as his will is done, e.g. his will is still moving matter/energy. After all, life is meta-physical, as in the ability to move matter/energy at will. Look at the marketeer who tells you “you will surely not die” who tells you that you will be physically resurrected. Ask him that in you-mark2 you want to make sure you are issued with certain “extra’s” for the Rimmer like hard light hologram, you want to be the new you :slight_smile:

By the way, death is not a thing in God’s eye as our physical death just removes the barrier between us. If the death was already the penalty, the final judgement would not make sense.

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Justin Martyr cites the long ending of Mark in his First Apology ch. 45. In order for the longer ending to have been added to Mark and become widespread enough for it to appear in Justin’s copy, one would have to admit that the longer ending cannot be considered to have been added anywhere after 140 AD. It could also have been solidly earlier. Because of this, we have a lower anchor for when the longer ending must have been composed.

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Piaget is a founding father of developmental psychology, and he continued to publish almost until his death in 1980. He did so much over his long career that it’s hard for me to know whether your online reviewer was responding to one book or another. Either way, the reviewer is far too harsh and simply wrong that the research couldn’t be replicated. Many have followed in Piaget’s footsteps and expanded/corrected his ideas. My wife just finished a Master’s-level course in childhood development, and Piaget still figures prominently in the textbook.

On his book about moral development, yes it was written in the 1930s, and his overall conclusion has been superseded by more recent findings. His experiments were based on kids being told the rules to a game and observing how children of various ages played the game and observed the rules. Subsequent research disputed his conclusions for older kids, but his observations about very young children have held up to scrutiny. Their “morality” is rule-based and authoritarian.

What Piaget missed is that school-age children begin to differentiate between types of rules. Violations of etiquette are less serious than physical violence or theft, for example. By the time children reach adolescence, they have begun to question the validity of the rules themselves. Anyone who’s parented teenagers can verify the validity of this claim. Haha. I should also note that questioning the rules isn’t always a bad thing. For example, a child who grows up in a racist environment accepts that culture at face value when young, but a teenager will (should) start to wonder about the “rightness” of racism as a rule, and apply his/her own value judgment to that question.

I’m glad you left room for more than one couple! In my article, I argue that the “fall” was a historical event, and “the man” and “the woman” are archetypal figures. The longstanding definition of a literary archetype is a character or situation that represents a universal pattern in human experience. Thus, their experience personifies the universal human experience of the loss of innocence. That means it applies to the collective as well as the individual. Humanity passed through the same stages of moral development as every individual – from unquestioned childhood acceptance of the rule to adolescent questioning of the rule. Humanity took the same collective journey that each of us took.

I would disagree. Unquestioned acceptance of the rules is a childish reaction. The “fall” occurred when people threw off boundaries that were a benefit to themselves and others in favor of selfish interests. Adolescents don’t foresee long-term consequences. They think mainly about immediate rewards. Genesis 2-3 portrays a realistic, if truncated, progression of moral development from childhood to adolescence, when each of us becomes morally responsible for our actions. The loss of innocence is archetypal – universal to both humanity and every individual person.

Both humanity writ large and every individual child undergo development. Every individual experiences a personal “fall,” when he/she knowingly chooses evil, and humanity likewise experienced a “fall” that required cognitive and moral development to reach. Irenaeus interpreted the first humans as children at their creation. There is a theological impact to these ideas, but I’ve veered pretty far from the OP. I’ll link you to the article when it appears and you can make a new thread out of it. Forum rules won’t allow me to do that for myself. :wink:

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I’ll take your word for it on Justin Martyr’s citation, but a link is always nice. Your logic is reasonable, and it applies to the Gospel of Mark as a whole, since every copy of Mark contains the later, longer ending. I’ve seen two equally plausible explanations of the longer ending. Mark intended to end with the women fleeing and telling no one, or the last leaf of the original was lost shortly after the original began circulating, and some very early scribe supplied an “improved” ending. Both have problems. The former ending would be unprecedented among ancient writers, who preferred “tidy” endings, and the latter presumes something we cannot know, that the “original” ending was lost.

Edit: Dang! I forgot to mention that Mark’s gospel seems certainly the first one written, since both Matthew and Luke draw on it as a source, and the longer ending of Mark relies on Acts, which is a sequel to Luke’s gospel. That means Acts was written well before the longer ending of Mark was tacked onto the gospel, which is a strong argument for an early version of Mark.