Date: Fri, 19 Apr 1996 17:19:34 -0500 (CDT)
CC: KOPECEKT@central.edu
Message-Id: <960419171934.2041cd92@central.edu>
Subject: RE: Proverb to Narrative

Bob: This Davies chap hiding out in Penn's forest, the Robin Hood of American NT scholarship, is, as far as I can tell, the most successful purveyor of cyberspace addiction in the world. I KNEW I should not have responded to his Thomas/Mark position--and originally did so in a student computer lab (I don't have a computer in my office; I use it to prepare for classes and talk with students, not think) and originally intended the email to be a private message. But at the end I told Steve, oh hell, if you want to post it to crosstalk, be my guest.

First, when I was thinking about Mark's and Thomas' versions of the
saying/story Steve was discussing, I actually was using the normal American paradigm of Mk and Thom drawing on a similar "tradition" (Steve's black box) but was convinced that Thom's version sure looks far more "primitive".  Since then, I have become intrigued with Steve's "source" position, but we'll leave that for Steve to develop.

Second, Bob wrote:

***********

But if this "response" hypothesis was generally true, it raises some
interesting implications. If it is true that Paul was first out of the gate with his letters, why would Mark be next, if Mark presents a viewpoint similar to Paul's? Was there something else that had come out between Paul's letters and Mark's Gospel that Mark was responding to? E.g., Proto Matthew? But that might be pushing this theory too far. There are plenty of other reasons for Mark to write his Gospel, and if memory serves, I think Carl Connrad wrote a nice little summmary of Mark's purpose on Crosstalk several weeks ago.

***********

Let's try the following just for "historical" fun and games. Paul's letters tend to be rather polemical, right? If we grant that he wrote II Thess, which I think he did, he certainly was having to deal with people who may have been writing letters in his name (2:1-2) and he found it necessary not only to dictate the letter but to "sign" it (see the last few verses of II Thess). Galatians is, of course, even more polemical. And who is in Paul's view there? An old theory, which I find exceedingly plausible, is that some people came to the Galatian churches and put themselves forward as representing the position of the church of Jerusalem, attacking Paul, telling the Galatians who he REALLY was, revealing very clearly the way he had wreaked havoc in Jerusalem when he persecuted the church, giving the Galatians THEIR version of the Jeruasalem Apostolic Council, and THEIR version of Paul's relationship to REAL Christians, that is, circumcised, law-obedient followers of the "Way". Since Paul did not know the pre-Easter Jesus, it is hard for me to believe that such representatives of a more conservative Jewish form of Christianity than Paul's did not have a "portrait" of Jesus that they were promoting. I would suggest that it is plausible to think that it was THAT portrait that Mark, a Paulinist, was reacting against--and then the writer of the canonical Matthew tried to set the record straight, using Mark as a source, but his more "accurate" (in his eyes at least) community memory even more so. Call it Proto-Matthew if you like, but I haven't had time to reassess that whole hypothesis lately, especially not Stephen Carlson's fascinating suggestions in that ballpark. I could go on, but that is enough on that for now. But it would make a lot of sense of the author of Mark going after Peter, James, John and the family of Jesus, who, in Mark, think Jesus is insane (and Jesus returns the compliment by eschewing them as his real family anyhow). In Mark it is the "outsiders" who "get" Jesus, not the "insiders": it was the woman who "anointed" him, the centurion at the foot of the cross, Simon of Cyrene (whose offspring seem to have been known to the Markan community, if we can believe the aside Mark throws in)--"outsiders" like Paul. And in Mark Jesus conveniently is presented as having "declared all foods clean," a passage which Mt's gospel pointedly leaves out (too Pauline?). Etc, etc.

Third, one more of my "from the hip" statements:


>>What does this have to do with Steve's post? Trust Thomas on this one, not
>>Mark; Steve's reconstruction just happens to fit into a plausible "global"
>>interpretation of the first Christian century--in my book, at least.

To which you responded:

Trust Thomas not Mark? Is this a global trust you are suggesting, or is
there some particular issue (e.g., things about the family of Jesus?) that we should trust Thomas more than Mark?  I think that the kerygma of Mark, on the whole, is more trustworthy than the kerygma of Thomas (if anyone can tell me what it is).

Bob: what I was suggesting had only to do with the particular passage Steve was discussing, but, as you can see, it does fit into a plausible "global" interpretation of the relationship between what we can roughly call "Jerusalem" Jewish Christianity on the one side and Pauline Christianity on the other. Peter, James, and John (the Pauline "pillars" of Galatians) represented "Jerusalem": Mark couldn't very well put Jesus' brother James into the inner trio which accompanied Jesus during his life--and let him down in ghastly fashion at the end, running away, not burying him (in Mark even John the Baptist's disciples had the decency to do that for their master), and remaining in Jerusalem when Mark's "Jesus" wanted to "lead" them to "Galilee", etc. THAT was the kind of thing I had in mind, not particularly trusting the kerygma of Thomas versus the kergyma of Mark. As far as the history of Christian doctrine and piety is concerned, Thomas' kerygma has been irrelevant up to the present: it is Paul's kergyma, Mark's, Mt's, etc., all mixed together in that wonderful--and complex--Patristic synthesis which has constituted "historic" Christianity so far. What the JS, Crossan, Borg, Mack, Davies, et al. will be able to accomplish for the Christianity of the rest of the 20th and for the 21st centuries is another matter. God works in truly mysterious ways. I was raised as a Hussite in an overwhelming Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox Slavic ghetto in the US before the Second Vatican Council. Who would have thunk then that such changes could have occurred within the Roman church. Certainly not me!

Best, Tom