Again, thank you for this information and for the comments as well. The reason for my interest is complicated, and it is more personal than intellectual.
But the information and the intellectual aspect of your essays is very important to me as I am aging and trying to understand how my Catholic education wounded me in unfathomable ways. I ache to be cured before my wonderful life ends.
Glad it's useful, and I'm sorry the process is a hard one. That kind of unwinding takes time. If there's a topic you want covered that would help, say the word.
"There are plenty of hypotheses about why the original Mark stops so abruptly, and the one I find most reasonable comes down to how books were put together."
Religion is something that people do. Mark was written about 70 CE - 40 years after the events described. The gospel was spread person to person in speech for forty years before being written. Tanner, professional scholars act like religion is enacted through literature. Many Christians like the affectation that their texts were divinely transmitted. But the gospels are not a video replay. What people said and did over a forty year time span that is forever lost, because all we have are these texts, can be deduced by motive, but not by pretending that mythical tales recorded in texts are literally true.
What does the resurrection of Jesus mean? Two things. It meant that the Mosaic Covenant was broken and there was a New Covenant. But it did not mean this to the disciples of Jesus who stuck with the Mosaic Covenant. The traditional belief was that resurrection was a reward for strict Torah observance, especially accepting martyrdom rather than violating it. Jesus met these criteria.
Why didn't the disciples accept the New Covenant? Why couldn't they have invoked the traditional reason for resurrection - and the New Testament's new and improved resurrection claim is a counterclaim to theirs. It's myth! Both resurrection claims are. People create myths and there are two opposing ones in the NT. Who had motive to create the 'New Covenant' myth in about 30 CE that broke the Mosaic Covenant? It was not the disciples.
Why read you, Tanner, and not Bart Ehrman? Maybe engage with me. (But Tanner the Apologist is hesitant to engage.)
Did Paul really receive info from Jesus? It requires belief in a supernatural claim to accept this. John the Baptist was beheaded for insisting upon other people's Torah observance. He deserved resurrection for his Torah zeal under the old system. And then suddenly the resurrection of Jesus (new meaning) broke the Covenant that John had enforced. Who benefited from that radical change in the meaning of resurrection, Tanner? Did God do that, or could it have been people named in the text who created the new myth for their own personal benefit?
Donor portraits can appear in texts. Who funded the ministry of Jesus according to the text? Mary Magdalene and Joanna did, and they also eye-witnessed the resurrection of Jesus which now newly meant something that benefited, rather than shamed, Herodias. (Joanna's husband, Chuza, was employed by Herodias's husband, Herod Antipas - in the royal palace.) Donor portrait? Or Mary Magdalene and Joanna actually left the palace in real life, so strongly identifying with the group that overtly disapproved of the marriage of Herodias, and then later, contrary to their expectation, the resurrection of Jesus exonerated their former associate Herodias - after they had unwittingly sided with her ideological enemies. Their former associate Herodias prevailed over her pious accuser unexpectedly. In myth!
Myths do not occur unexpectedly. Read it like myth that people created.
You're raising a really compelling socio-political take on the text—especially connecting the financial patrons like Joanna back to the court dynamics of Herod. Whether someone reads these texts through a historical-critical lens like Ehrman or a theological one, looking closely at oral tradition and human motive is essential to understanding how these early communities developed.
Good piece, but I don't think separating the gospel accounts is the unmasking you're framing it as. The Church wasn't caught flat-footed by these differences—it was arguing about them in the 2nd century, 200 years before the canon was even fully settled.
Start with St. Irenaeus, writing around AD 180 (Against Heresies III.11). He defends the necessity of four Gospels—not as four copies of one flat transcript, but as four distinct testimonies, deliberately preserved as separate voices. The differences you're pointing to weren't hidden from him; they were the premise of his argument.
A few decades later, Tatian took all four Gospels and wove them into one smoothed, harmonized narrative called the Diatessaron. It's literally the composite version you're describing, assembled in real time, in the 2nd century. It circulated for centuries in Syriac-speaking churches. But the wider Church eventually pushed it out, choosing to keep the four books distinct in the lectionary rather than replace them with the smoothed-over version. That's tradition choosing the messier original on purpose.
Then St. Augustine wrote four entire books on this exact problem around AD 400 called De Consensu Evangelistarum. The saint takes resurrection scene by resurrection scene through the discrepancies you're listing. He wasn't answering skeptical readers; he was answering Porphyry's disciples, pagan critics laying the same four texts side by side 16 centuries before Ehrman did. He took it seriously enough to write a four-book response. But he didn't take it as a threat to the resurrection.
So the real disagreement isn't whether the accounts differ—St. Irenaeus and St. Augustine already granted that, very publicly, in writing. It's what you think the resurrection is supposed to rest on. If it has to read like a single consistent legal deposition or it all falls apart, you're working inside a fundamentalist, verbal-inerrancy assumption, which is a 16th-19th century Protestant invention, not an ancient one. This is one of the many problems with Sola Scriptura.
The Ancient Faith's confidence was never "the text alone, perfectly harmonized." It's Scripture read inside a living Tradition—the resurrection proclaimed liturgically without interruption since the apostles, St. Paul reciting a creed he'd already taught in person (1 Cor 15:1), and the Church receiving four complementary testimonies rather than four competing witness statements.
Take away flat harmonization and you've only broken a fairly recent Protestant apologetic habit. The ancient tradition that had this argument from the start is still standing.
Interesting approach as an editor trying to makes sense out of conflicting oral history accounts.
Paul isn’t an eye witness. His account might be considered a retelling of the oral history to the Corinthians. He’s short on details because he’s not writing a narrative, just making a point of the resurrection & others could testify to it.
Mark is written as a third person account in an “as told to” narrative where John Mark is cited as the Boswell/Watson of the eye witness. Luke is similar as a chronicler relating the facts of the events to his reader Theophilus. Matthew & John take on the mantle of an eyewitness relaying the narrative according to their recollection.
What we have is an oral tradition eventually transcribed but not necessarily from the actual participants. Through the years anonymous scribes have edited the manuscripts to lend support for whatever theology the church needed to bolster its claims as to what Jesus uttered or meant in the message for their ends.
The core message of taking care of your neighbor still resides at the heart but the other variants are more supportive of parochial needs than spiritual ones.
Remember that before Paul’s epistles and the written Gospels, the story of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection was conveyed by word of mouth, and by multiple witnesses. Thus when the time came for a written account, it’s not surprising to find the oral accounts differed on some details. That is actually evidence that the story is genuine; a fabricator would at least attempt to clean up loose ends.
Forty years of independent retelling is indeed exactly the kind of process that produces divergence, which is what we see here. Consistency would be the surprising result.
Actually, there’s zero evidence that oral tradition lies behind the gospels. It’s a dogmatic assumption, because the alternative (that Mark is the creator of a fictional allegory) is unacceptable to Christian sensibilities.
If Jesus was crucified, then Rome did it to show what happens to the enemies of the state. In that case, it's highly unlikely Rome would hand the body back to the family for a dignified burial. It's more likely the body was dumped as trash. Crucifixion was meant to erase someone, and someone with a burial site isn't exactly erased.
Look at what happened to Bin Laden. Same strategy.
If The Jesus Tomb is correct, and Jesus was actually crucified on a Friday, then the corpse was placed in a temporary tomb before sundown Friday and then moved to a permanent tomb after sundown Saturday. The corpse then went through standard treatment for a wealthy Jew and ended up in an ossuary labeled 'Joshua son of Joseph'. That ossuary is now in a museum in Israel; the bones inside were returned according to Jewish custom.
If you look at Paul's writings, Jesus's resurrection was spiritual. If you look at the philosophies of Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes, the Sadducees didn't believe in resurrection, the Pharisees believed in bodily resurrection, and the Essenes believed in spiritual resurrection. So Paul converted from the Pharisee position to the Essene position, according to his account of his visions.
Where the Gospels mention the resurrection, what they describe is the Pharisee idea of resurrection.
Solid rundown of the ossuary evidence and the Pharisee/Essene resurrection distinction. The visions-not-corpse reading is one of the stronger naturalistic accounts out there.
What needs explaining is Rome handing a crucified man's body back to his family for a dignified burial, treating him like a wealthy war hero people could visit and keep the memory of alive.
The Romans were inclined to leave the bodies of the crucified on the cross to deteriorate and be fed on by scavengers. Jewish sensibilities and burial traditions were irrelevant to them. Eventually, the remains were tossed into a mass, unmarked grave. Welcome to real history.
Yes, Crossan covered that in one of his books. But we have an ossuary in a tomb that suggests an exception that proves the rule. Rich people are treated differently, and the Romans were no different.
The ossuary also argues against the physical resurrection of Jesus. It supports the idea that Jesus's early followers had visions of his resurrection, like Paul, because they knew where his bones were.
Lots of people in Judea were crucified by the Romans, like the young men who tore down the Roman eagle placed on the Temple in Jerusalem. We know about the incident because Josephus wrote about it; we don't know about those individuals.
So, why do we know about Jesus? Maybe because his wife was rich and able to create an oral network about him after his execution.
Once again, scripture in the hands of the disdainful, malicious unregenerate produces all manner of rancid “theology” suitable only to one’s self who spew shit just to have something to write.
Again, thank you for this information and for the comments as well. The reason for my interest is complicated, and it is more personal than intellectual.
But the information and the intellectual aspect of your essays is very important to me as I am aging and trying to understand how my Catholic education wounded me in unfathomable ways. I ache to be cured before my wonderful life ends.
Glad it's useful, and I'm sorry the process is a hard one. That kind of unwinding takes time. If there's a topic you want covered that would help, say the word.
Pity the Gospel of Peter wasn’t canonized. A giant talking cross and a Jesus whose head stretched to the heavens would have been a nice addition. 😂
That one plus the flying, talking cross would've made for a very different Easter mural tradition.
"There are plenty of hypotheses about why the original Mark stops so abruptly, and the one I find most reasonable comes down to how books were put together."
Religion is something that people do. Mark was written about 70 CE - 40 years after the events described. The gospel was spread person to person in speech for forty years before being written. Tanner, professional scholars act like religion is enacted through literature. Many Christians like the affectation that their texts were divinely transmitted. But the gospels are not a video replay. What people said and did over a forty year time span that is forever lost, because all we have are these texts, can be deduced by motive, but not by pretending that mythical tales recorded in texts are literally true.
What does the resurrection of Jesus mean? Two things. It meant that the Mosaic Covenant was broken and there was a New Covenant. But it did not mean this to the disciples of Jesus who stuck with the Mosaic Covenant. The traditional belief was that resurrection was a reward for strict Torah observance, especially accepting martyrdom rather than violating it. Jesus met these criteria.
Why didn't the disciples accept the New Covenant? Why couldn't they have invoked the traditional reason for resurrection - and the New Testament's new and improved resurrection claim is a counterclaim to theirs. It's myth! Both resurrection claims are. People create myths and there are two opposing ones in the NT. Who had motive to create the 'New Covenant' myth in about 30 CE that broke the Mosaic Covenant? It was not the disciples.
Why read you, Tanner, and not Bart Ehrman? Maybe engage with me. (But Tanner the Apologist is hesitant to engage.)
Did Paul really receive info from Jesus? It requires belief in a supernatural claim to accept this. John the Baptist was beheaded for insisting upon other people's Torah observance. He deserved resurrection for his Torah zeal under the old system. And then suddenly the resurrection of Jesus (new meaning) broke the Covenant that John had enforced. Who benefited from that radical change in the meaning of resurrection, Tanner? Did God do that, or could it have been people named in the text who created the new myth for their own personal benefit?
Donor portraits can appear in texts. Who funded the ministry of Jesus according to the text? Mary Magdalene and Joanna did, and they also eye-witnessed the resurrection of Jesus which now newly meant something that benefited, rather than shamed, Herodias. (Joanna's husband, Chuza, was employed by Herodias's husband, Herod Antipas - in the royal palace.) Donor portrait? Or Mary Magdalene and Joanna actually left the palace in real life, so strongly identifying with the group that overtly disapproved of the marriage of Herodias, and then later, contrary to their expectation, the resurrection of Jesus exonerated their former associate Herodias - after they had unwittingly sided with her ideological enemies. Their former associate Herodias prevailed over her pious accuser unexpectedly. In myth!
Myths do not occur unexpectedly. Read it like myth that people created.
Hi Russel,
You're raising a really compelling socio-political take on the text—especially connecting the financial patrons like Joanna back to the court dynamics of Herod. Whether someone reads these texts through a historical-critical lens like Ehrman or a theological one, looking closely at oral tradition and human motive is essential to understanding how these early communities developed.
Good piece, but I don't think separating the gospel accounts is the unmasking you're framing it as. The Church wasn't caught flat-footed by these differences—it was arguing about them in the 2nd century, 200 years before the canon was even fully settled.
Start with St. Irenaeus, writing around AD 180 (Against Heresies III.11). He defends the necessity of four Gospels—not as four copies of one flat transcript, but as four distinct testimonies, deliberately preserved as separate voices. The differences you're pointing to weren't hidden from him; they were the premise of his argument.
A few decades later, Tatian took all four Gospels and wove them into one smoothed, harmonized narrative called the Diatessaron. It's literally the composite version you're describing, assembled in real time, in the 2nd century. It circulated for centuries in Syriac-speaking churches. But the wider Church eventually pushed it out, choosing to keep the four books distinct in the lectionary rather than replace them with the smoothed-over version. That's tradition choosing the messier original on purpose.
Then St. Augustine wrote four entire books on this exact problem around AD 400 called De Consensu Evangelistarum. The saint takes resurrection scene by resurrection scene through the discrepancies you're listing. He wasn't answering skeptical readers; he was answering Porphyry's disciples, pagan critics laying the same four texts side by side 16 centuries before Ehrman did. He took it seriously enough to write a four-book response. But he didn't take it as a threat to the resurrection.
So the real disagreement isn't whether the accounts differ—St. Irenaeus and St. Augustine already granted that, very publicly, in writing. It's what you think the resurrection is supposed to rest on. If it has to read like a single consistent legal deposition or it all falls apart, you're working inside a fundamentalist, verbal-inerrancy assumption, which is a 16th-19th century Protestant invention, not an ancient one. This is one of the many problems with Sola Scriptura.
The Ancient Faith's confidence was never "the text alone, perfectly harmonized." It's Scripture read inside a living Tradition—the resurrection proclaimed liturgically without interruption since the apostles, St. Paul reciting a creed he'd already taught in person (1 Cor 15:1), and the Church receiving four complementary testimonies rather than four competing witness statements.
Take away flat harmonization and you've only broken a fairly recent Protestant apologetic habit. The ancient tradition that had this argument from the start is still standing.
Interesting approach as an editor trying to makes sense out of conflicting oral history accounts.
Paul isn’t an eye witness. His account might be considered a retelling of the oral history to the Corinthians. He’s short on details because he’s not writing a narrative, just making a point of the resurrection & others could testify to it.
Mark is written as a third person account in an “as told to” narrative where John Mark is cited as the Boswell/Watson of the eye witness. Luke is similar as a chronicler relating the facts of the events to his reader Theophilus. Matthew & John take on the mantle of an eyewitness relaying the narrative according to their recollection.
What we have is an oral tradition eventually transcribed but not necessarily from the actual participants. Through the years anonymous scribes have edited the manuscripts to lend support for whatever theology the church needed to bolster its claims as to what Jesus uttered or meant in the message for their ends.
The core message of taking care of your neighbor still resides at the heart but the other variants are more supportive of parochial needs than spiritual ones.
Remember that before Paul’s epistles and the written Gospels, the story of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection was conveyed by word of mouth, and by multiple witnesses. Thus when the time came for a written account, it’s not surprising to find the oral accounts differed on some details. That is actually evidence that the story is genuine; a fabricator would at least attempt to clean up loose ends.
Forty years of independent retelling is indeed exactly the kind of process that produces divergence, which is what we see here. Consistency would be the surprising result.
Actually, there’s zero evidence that oral tradition lies behind the gospels. It’s a dogmatic assumption, because the alternative (that Mark is the creator of a fictional allegory) is unacceptable to Christian sensibilities.
I wonder what really happened with the body of Jesus ?
If Jesus was crucified, then Rome did it to show what happens to the enemies of the state. In that case, it's highly unlikely Rome would hand the body back to the family for a dignified burial. It's more likely the body was dumped as trash. Crucifixion was meant to erase someone, and someone with a burial site isn't exactly erased.
Look at what happened to Bin Laden. Same strategy.
If The Jesus Tomb is correct, and Jesus was actually crucified on a Friday, then the corpse was placed in a temporary tomb before sundown Friday and then moved to a permanent tomb after sundown Saturday. The corpse then went through standard treatment for a wealthy Jew and ended up in an ossuary labeled 'Joshua son of Joseph'. That ossuary is now in a museum in Israel; the bones inside were returned according to Jewish custom.
If you look at Paul's writings, Jesus's resurrection was spiritual. If you look at the philosophies of Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes, the Sadducees didn't believe in resurrection, the Pharisees believed in bodily resurrection, and the Essenes believed in spiritual resurrection. So Paul converted from the Pharisee position to the Essene position, according to his account of his visions.
Where the Gospels mention the resurrection, what they describe is the Pharisee idea of resurrection.
Solid rundown of the ossuary evidence and the Pharisee/Essene resurrection distinction. The visions-not-corpse reading is one of the stronger naturalistic accounts out there.
What needs explaining is Rome handing a crucified man's body back to his family for a dignified burial, treating him like a wealthy war hero people could visit and keep the memory of alive.
The Romans were inclined to leave the bodies of the crucified on the cross to deteriorate and be fed on by scavengers. Jewish sensibilities and burial traditions were irrelevant to them. Eventually, the remains were tossed into a mass, unmarked grave. Welcome to real history.
Yes, Crossan covered that in one of his books. But we have an ossuary in a tomb that suggests an exception that proves the rule. Rich people are treated differently, and the Romans were no different.
The ossuary also argues against the physical resurrection of Jesus. It supports the idea that Jesus's early followers had visions of his resurrection, like Paul, because they knew where his bones were.
Lots of people in Judea were crucified by the Romans, like the young men who tore down the Roman eagle placed on the Temple in Jerusalem. We know about the incident because Josephus wrote about it; we don't know about those individuals.
So, why do we know about Jesus? Maybe because his wife was rich and able to create an oral network about him after his execution.
You interchange "raised" and "risen." They're different, you know, right?
Good catch. Thank you.
Once again, scripture in the hands of the disdainful, malicious unregenerate produces all manner of rancid “theology” suitable only to one’s self who spew shit just to have something to write.