Markan priority is the prevailing view. According to it, Mark was written first, and Matthew and Luke came later, each independently using Mark as a source and smoothing out its rougher edges. Q is the hypothetical second common source that Matthew and Luke both drew on beyond Mark.
The alternative view holds that Q never existed, and the material Matthew and Luke share beyond Mark comes from Luke having had direct access to Matthew.
I wonder if I could get a comment on this, as it's an issue that further clouds the matter. We used Ehrman in my Gospels class, and he mentions in a sidebar that the reason for the goofy continuity around John 8 is that the story of the woman taken in adultery wasn't added till the 9th century. Is this an oddity or were emendations of this sort being made for centuries after the canon was "set" around 387 CE? The construction and selection of what we consider canon today is fascinating, and I've settled a lot of this in my mind by deciding that, no matter who wrote what, it constitutes sacred history, much like the early books of the Hebrew Bible.
The pericope adulterae isn't in the earliest and best manuscripts (Sinaiticus, Vaticanus), the vocabulary and style don't match the rest of John, and where later manuscripts do include it, it shows up in different places, sometimes after John 7:52, sometimes at the end of John, sometimes tucked into Luke. So mainstream scholars, including the Christian ones, agree the scene was a later addition. It isn't even a subject for debate.
The 9th-century date is for when it becomes a fixture in the Greek manuscript tradition. There's earlier evidence for the story circulating, Papias apparently knew something like it in the 2nd century, and it shows up in some Latin manuscripts by the 4th or 5th century. So it's less "invented in the 800s" and more "a story that existed for centuries before finding a permanent home in John." That said, even the 4th or 5th century is 300 to 400 years after Jesus died, and for the story to be true, it would have had to travel thousands of miles uncorrupted through oral tradition alone, leaving no trace behind.
What happened in the 4th century (Athanasius's Easter letter in 367, the councils you're thinking of) was closer to ratifying which books counted as scripture, not freezing the wording of those books. Scribes kept copying by hand for another thousand-plus years, and copying by hand means variants: some accidental, some scribes smoothing out a contradiction, some adding a phrase because it matched what they already believed. Remember, for much of its history the Bible was a list of approved books. It became a single entity that could be read from cover to cover, one that could be considered a book in itself, only after the invention of the printing press.
The Ascents of Isaiah (maintained by the Ethiopian Church) tie the martyrdom of Peter to the suicide of Nero, so that we have a specific date for Peter, namely, the ides of October, 64 CE, after the Great Fire of Rome. Clement wrote that Peter came to Rome and was arrested, implying that Peter didn't have much of a ministry beyond his trial.
So if there were a Marcus who followed Peter around writing down what he said, that Marcus would have been in Jerusalem and understood Aramaic. And what he would have written, if it existed, has been lost. It also would not have contained any information after 62 CE, which is the latest date that Peter left Jerusalem for Rome.
Regarding Markan priority, it was common to start a book with "In those days...". We see that in Mark 1:9. The first 8 verses in Mark appear to be taken from Matthew, and describe who John the Baptist was. Given that the oldest copies of Mark are way later than the first edition, there has been plenty of time to amend Mark from Matthew. For the same reason, I consider Matthew's genealogy and nativity stories to be additions to the original text. So both the original Matthew and Mark start with Jesus's baptism by John. This is when Jesus became the Messiah.
Papias said that the original Gospel of Matthew was a collection of the sayings of Jesus. That has been lost, unless it was the origin of what we now call the Gospel of Thomas. The archeology of the Gospel of Thomas indicates that it was also added to over the centuries before it became suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church in the 5th Century.
The Ascension of Isaiah is a Christian apocalypse from the late first or early second century, and its account of Nero's death is itself wrong (Nero didn't saw anyone in half, he stabbed himself with help from his secretary). Using it to fix Peter's death to a specific date treats a text full of visions and flying demons as a chronicle. Clement's line about Peter's arrest doesn't establish a short ministry either, since it's a single sentence written more than a century later with no source cited.
The bigger problem is what you'd need for a pre-70 Marcus. He'd have written in Aramaic-inflected Greek from firsthand knowledge of Palestinian geography, and gotten the geography wrong anyway (Tyre-Sidon-Decapolis, Gerasa's pigs, Dalmanutha). An author working from oral tradition at a distance explains those errors. An eyewitness companion doesn't.
On Markan priority: the Baptist material in 1:2-8 is Mark's own construction, built from an Isaiah/Malachi citation Mark himself misattributes to Isaiah alone. Matthew and Luke both expand Mark's spare account, not the reverse. The standard synoptic argument holds up for one main reason: Matthew and Luke never agree against Mark in triple-tradition material without Mark also having a variant reading behind it. If Mark were abridging Matthew, you'd expect Mark to occasionally preserve Matthew's distinctive wording against Luke, which doesn't happen.
I'm afraid I didn't make it clear; I don't consider the received Mark to be anything like what Papias described. Since Papias described a Matthew that was a collection of the sayings of Jesus, and other Christian authors also argued against that Matthew, we know that Matthew existed. Therefore, it is reasonable to suppose that a similar collection of the sayings of Peter once existed. Unfortunately, we have no quotes from such a text. Perhaps because they were derogatory towards Paul. Perhaps because they would contradict everything written about Peter in the New Testament. The only thing they could use was the name to stick on the Greek Gospel they created.
There's actually a collection called the "Preaching of Peter" which is cited by Clement of Alexandria and I think a couple of others. What very little we have of it sounds very Synoptic-like. IMO it's a dark horse for being the document Papias is referring to. But then a huge question is why did it remain so obscure and eventually fade completely from history?
The Ebionites were said to have a Hebrew Gospel of Matthew which has been lost. I don't know if that is a possible candidate for what Papias was referring to. The Gospel or Gospels of the Jewish Christians (we don't know how many) survived at least until the 4th century and possibly longer.
Papias preferred listening to people tell him what they knew vs. reading text. Perhaps Papias thought he could detect when people were lying. Of course he couldn't do that with text, and he might have had a justified suspicion that a lot of text in those days was lies.
If anything, "ghost writers" undersells it. These were writers working openly, signing their theological commitments onto stories that had circulated for decades before they picked up a pen. Nobody was hiding who did the writing. What got hidden was that the writing happened at all, buried under attributions assigned after the fact to make four unsigned books sound like eyewitness testimony.
Your discussion of Psalm 22 and the crucifixion reminded me of Michael Turton’s Historical Commentary on the Gospel of Mark. He points to parallels that extend into Mark’s stories: Jesus calls working fishermen who leave their work to follow him (Mark 1:16–20), much as Elijah calls Elisha (1 Kings 19:19–21). Jesus sleeps through a storm until his companions wake him (Mark 4:35–41), as Jonah does (Jonah 1:4–6).
Two others struck me even more. Jairus comes to Jesus about his dying daughter, who is later raised (Mark 5:21–43), recalling Elisha’s encounter with the Shunammite woman and her son (2 Kings 4:8–37). And Jesus feeds a crowd despite an objection that there isn’t enough food, with some left over (Mark 6:30–44), much as Elisha does (2 Kings 4:42–44).
These parallels don’t settle whether Mark shaped remembered events or composed scenes from scripture, but they suggest the question extends well beyond the crucifixion. Some of these examples would be a good addition to this article or for a follow up.
Re: why Mark, the question still falls to why did Papias have a tradition of a Marcus writing down Peter's words? If it's all BS why not just say Peter wrote it? To me, a probable explanation is one of gradual embellishment. A "Mark" in Rome who heard Peter preach (once? Twice?) wrote the Gospel. This "hearer" of Peter gradually morphs into a companion and then to a personal interpreter and secretary.
Irenaeus is an unreliable source, writing 4 to 6 decades after the first appearance of a gospel. (He also says Jesus was in his fifties when he died.) The obvious answer is that Marcion, who produced the first gospel, wrote the first gospel, gMark, as Raschke persuasively argues.
Chiastic structures in Mark are compatible with both oral tradition and later editorial arrangement, and the evidence points more toward the latter for the large-scale patterns. Small chiasms (a saying arranged ABA') show up naturally in oral speech, since that's a mnemonic device. But the big architectural chiasms scholars find across whole sections of Mark, like the bread section in 6:30-8:21, require a level of structural control you get from someone composing with the whole text in view, not from stories passed hand to hand.
The catch is that a lot of proposed large-scale chiasms in Mark are more visible to the scholar drawing the diagram than they would have been to a first-century listener. I'd treat any specific claim with more suspicion the larger the span of text it covers.
Eusebius quotes Papias explicitly attributing the Mark tradition to an earlier source, and independently, Irenaeus in the 180s already has the Peter-Mark connection decades before Eusebius wrote anything. Eusebius inherited the tradition and passed it along, complete with his own doubts about Papias's reliability. If Eusebius had fabricated the attribution, he'd have had no reason to also tell readers Papias was a man of limited intelligence.
When the theological propaganda of Rome has become our consensus history, the Roman record is inadmissible to the case when the Roman record is what is in the dock.
Eusebius was part of the Gospel factory, Irenaeus part of the redaction and authorisation machine of Rome. The same as who wrote the records we now assume is history.
That Irenaeus is part of the the prosecuted who overturned pre-extant Egyptian cum Greek philosophy/science into a tale of a man of Judea is no basis for evidencing that the Romans did not turn Simon bar Giora into the Holy benben of Ptah known as Peter for propaganda purposes.
When the Demiurge inheritance of mid 1st millennium Greece holds precision of scientific natural forms and ratios directly inherited from the Ptah/Atum form - as Great Architect and Craftsman of the universe which arose in the ms of the celestial pole, and sky lore geometry which created through logos - and Ptah/Atum became the Lord who spoke the word, Atum's dyadic monad became Adam and Eve, Jesus, and Osiris became Moses, centuries prior to Christianity, you have to look further than the Roman record and redactions, and see through the 'pious frauds' to the proper provenance of Christianity. It reaches back to the Egyptian Ennead that holds a Tetractic structure to describe the entirety of creation.
Irenaeus and what remains of his evidence lies strictly in a rewrite more than 2 millennia after the Egyptians formulated the prime system that was inherited by the Greeks and which became both philosophy and science. An inheritance they remain oath-bound to not reveal explicitly, and which also required care to defend against threat of - initially Greek - prosecutions by ruling and prevailing authorities already in the throes of redacted soap-operas taken as realities. No historical Jesus, David, Saul or Solomon, nor Moses nor Exodus nor Adam is in the historical evidence. It remains attached to a theological ideal of ages and sky lore that has not changed much over millennia, except where the rotations around the pole as the stars of the duat nun have drifted around the void that, according to the Egyptians, first uttered the word of the Lord into being as the entirety known as Atum. Whose body became the all, the forms and the spirit which dwells in forms. This is what is held in the Gnostic record Ireneaus is attempting to deny and make heresy.
Rome is the greatest liar in history. Please do not not assume their history is more than propaganda for the masses to embrace as salvation.
This way, Rome consolidated their business model from one that relied on massive logistical cost and maintenance - taking from nations by the sword - to a collective of men with books the natives could not read for themselves. Which in a few generations allowed their troops to defend Rome's local interests whilst the natives gave Rome what once took energy to take. All roads lead to Rome, including the evidence of their own fraud known as the Bible.
The soap operas of Rome have left a washing of memory leaving suds for scholars to attempt to reconstitute into an original bar. This is like attempting to find light in the shadows of the cave without leaving it to witness where the light source originated those shadows. And exactly as per Plato, the cave dwellers will fight like hell to maintain their sophistry that the shadows constitute reality. And for the longest time, Rome and its extension - the Church, would kill for it also, in order to maintain status, wealth and power whilst preaching the masses need turn the other cheek and render all unto Caesar/The Holy See.
Eusebius remains the evidence against concoction for profit projected as necessary 'truth' with authority. Irenaeus remains evidence that Egyptian and Greek science was defamed and the feminine ratio redacted as per the unnatural unipolar monotheistic 'God' that is against all natural sciences and logic, known earliest as demiurge and Theos - long before Rome. The PyTHian or serpent wisdom known to Solon, injected into Judea by story tellers as Saul, and Cleisthenes reforms injected into Judea as David - the Orion shepherd boy that is first the sah of light traversing the sky to the union with godhead of Ptah for rebirth as the mesu child known as iusa - the ever-coming son, and imhtp, the ever coming peace - all epithets of Ptah/Atum from Egypt long before Egypt hosted the Levantine Hyksos cult.
To reparse your comment through the data and evidence:
"Rome quotes Roman propaganda explicitly attributing the Roman propaganda tradition to an earlier source, and accordingly, Irenaeus in the 180s already has the Roman propaganda connection decades before the admitted liar wrote anything. Eusebius inherited the authorised propaganda tradition and passed it along, complete with his own necessarily feigned projection of 'doubts' about Papias's reliability. If Eusebius had fabricated the attribution, he'd have had EVERY reason to also tell readers Papias was a man of limited intelligence."
I remember learning about this in seminary. It reverses the narrative that has Mark being the simplest of the Gospels ("a passion narrative with a long introduction") because it was the first to be written down and (my view) has it come last (and still be the simplest) because it's essentially a Cliff's Notes version of Matthew and Luke.
Jesus was born in Bethlehem, in Judea, and grew up in Nazareth, in Galilee. Jerusalem, where he died, sits in Judea too. None of that appears in the piece above, since it doesn't discuss Jesus' birthplace or Jerusalem's provincial location. If you're thinking of a different passage, point to it and I'll address the specific claim.
I lean towards Jesus not being born in Bethlehem. Here's a couple sections of an article I wrote recently:
MATTHEW
Matthew appears to begin with Mary and Joseph already living in Bethlehem.
There is no journey there and no census.
Jesus is born in Bethlehem.
Magi arrive looking for the “King of the Jews.”
Herod sees the child as a possible rival and tries to kill him.
The family escapes to Egypt and later settles in Nazareth.
Matthew shapes the story to echo both Moses and Israel.
A violent ruler kills children.
The chosen child escapes.
The family goes into Egypt.
God then calls his son out again.
Matthew presents the return from Egypt as the fulfillment of scripture:
“Out of Egypt I called my son.” —Matthew 2:15 WEB
Matthew is quoting Hosea 11:1, which looks back to Israel’s Exodus from Egypt.
He applies the words to Jesus, presenting him as reliving Israel’s story —as both a new Moses and a new embodiment of Israel....
LUKE
Luke also places Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem.
But he gets the family there in an entirely different way.
In Luke, Mary and Joseph already live in Nazareth.
A census ordered by Caesar Augustus requires Joseph to travel to Bethlehem because he belongs to the house of David.
Mary accompanies him, and Jesus is born while they are there.
Shepherds visit the child after receiving an angelic announcement.
Jesus is later presented at the temple in Jerusalem, and the family returns to Nazareth.
There is no star.
No magi.
No massacre of children.
No escape to Egypt.
Luke’s census journey creates a historical difficulty.
Joseph travels to Bethlehem because he belongs to the family of David, who had lived roughly a thousand years earlier.
Luke does not say that Bethlehem was Joseph’s birthplace or home.
Roman censuses were used to register people and property for taxation.
We have no evidence of an empire-wide census requiring families to travel to the hometown of a distant ancestor.
The journey does, however, serve an important purpose in Luke’s story. It moves Mary and Joseph from Nazareth to Bethlehem, the city of David, so that Jesus can be born there and connected to the expected Davidic Messiah....
SO WHERE WAS JESUS BORN?
Matthew and Luke both say Bethlehem.
But their very different stories appear to explain how someone known as Jesus of Nazareth came to be born in David’s city.
Jesus’ connection to Nazareth is more secure.
Mark introduces him as coming from Nazareth.
John knows him as a Galilean.
Throughout the Gospel tradition, he is remembered as Jesus of Nazareth.
To believe that there were additions to the text is not the same thing as believing that Mark was not the author of whatever original manuscript there might have been.
As I understand what you have written, the problem with the text comes through the belief that there cannot be divine prophecy and/or foreshadowing. If these are allowed there is no reason to believe that Mark was not the author.
Mainstream Catholic biblical scholarship, including work published with the Church's own approval, accepts that the gospels are formally anonymous. The anonymity of the gospels is the consensus of mainstream biblical scholars in general, Christian and secular alike.
I understand that many biblical scholars believe the gospels had a source unknown to us, and it's named Q, which is an abreviation of a German word.
Markan priority is the prevailing view. According to it, Mark was written first, and Matthew and Luke came later, each independently using Mark as a source and smoothing out its rougher edges. Q is the hypothetical second common source that Matthew and Luke both drew on beyond Mark.
The alternative view holds that Q never existed, and the material Matthew and Luke share beyond Mark comes from Luke having had direct access to Matthew.
I wonder if I could get a comment on this, as it's an issue that further clouds the matter. We used Ehrman in my Gospels class, and he mentions in a sidebar that the reason for the goofy continuity around John 8 is that the story of the woman taken in adultery wasn't added till the 9th century. Is this an oddity or were emendations of this sort being made for centuries after the canon was "set" around 387 CE? The construction and selection of what we consider canon today is fascinating, and I've settled a lot of this in my mind by deciding that, no matter who wrote what, it constitutes sacred history, much like the early books of the Hebrew Bible.
The pericope adulterae isn't in the earliest and best manuscripts (Sinaiticus, Vaticanus), the vocabulary and style don't match the rest of John, and where later manuscripts do include it, it shows up in different places, sometimes after John 7:52, sometimes at the end of John, sometimes tucked into Luke. So mainstream scholars, including the Christian ones, agree the scene was a later addition. It isn't even a subject for debate.
The 9th-century date is for when it becomes a fixture in the Greek manuscript tradition. There's earlier evidence for the story circulating, Papias apparently knew something like it in the 2nd century, and it shows up in some Latin manuscripts by the 4th or 5th century. So it's less "invented in the 800s" and more "a story that existed for centuries before finding a permanent home in John." That said, even the 4th or 5th century is 300 to 400 years after Jesus died, and for the story to be true, it would have had to travel thousands of miles uncorrupted through oral tradition alone, leaving no trace behind.
What happened in the 4th century (Athanasius's Easter letter in 367, the councils you're thinking of) was closer to ratifying which books counted as scripture, not freezing the wording of those books. Scribes kept copying by hand for another thousand-plus years, and copying by hand means variants: some accidental, some scribes smoothing out a contradiction, some adding a phrase because it matched what they already believed. Remember, for much of its history the Bible was a list of approved books. It became a single entity that could be read from cover to cover, one that could be considered a book in itself, only after the invention of the printing press.
The Ascents of Isaiah (maintained by the Ethiopian Church) tie the martyrdom of Peter to the suicide of Nero, so that we have a specific date for Peter, namely, the ides of October, 64 CE, after the Great Fire of Rome. Clement wrote that Peter came to Rome and was arrested, implying that Peter didn't have much of a ministry beyond his trial.
So if there were a Marcus who followed Peter around writing down what he said, that Marcus would have been in Jerusalem and understood Aramaic. And what he would have written, if it existed, has been lost. It also would not have contained any information after 62 CE, which is the latest date that Peter left Jerusalem for Rome.
Regarding Markan priority, it was common to start a book with "In those days...". We see that in Mark 1:9. The first 8 verses in Mark appear to be taken from Matthew, and describe who John the Baptist was. Given that the oldest copies of Mark are way later than the first edition, there has been plenty of time to amend Mark from Matthew. For the same reason, I consider Matthew's genealogy and nativity stories to be additions to the original text. So both the original Matthew and Mark start with Jesus's baptism by John. This is when Jesus became the Messiah.
Papias said that the original Gospel of Matthew was a collection of the sayings of Jesus. That has been lost, unless it was the origin of what we now call the Gospel of Thomas. The archeology of the Gospel of Thomas indicates that it was also added to over the centuries before it became suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church in the 5th Century.
The Ascension of Isaiah is a Christian apocalypse from the late first or early second century, and its account of Nero's death is itself wrong (Nero didn't saw anyone in half, he stabbed himself with help from his secretary). Using it to fix Peter's death to a specific date treats a text full of visions and flying demons as a chronicle. Clement's line about Peter's arrest doesn't establish a short ministry either, since it's a single sentence written more than a century later with no source cited.
The bigger problem is what you'd need for a pre-70 Marcus. He'd have written in Aramaic-inflected Greek from firsthand knowledge of Palestinian geography, and gotten the geography wrong anyway (Tyre-Sidon-Decapolis, Gerasa's pigs, Dalmanutha). An author working from oral tradition at a distance explains those errors. An eyewitness companion doesn't.
On Markan priority: the Baptist material in 1:2-8 is Mark's own construction, built from an Isaiah/Malachi citation Mark himself misattributes to Isaiah alone. Matthew and Luke both expand Mark's spare account, not the reverse. The standard synoptic argument holds up for one main reason: Matthew and Luke never agree against Mark in triple-tradition material without Mark also having a variant reading behind it. If Mark were abridging Matthew, you'd expect Mark to occasionally preserve Matthew's distinctive wording against Luke, which doesn't happen.
I'm afraid I didn't make it clear; I don't consider the received Mark to be anything like what Papias described. Since Papias described a Matthew that was a collection of the sayings of Jesus, and other Christian authors also argued against that Matthew, we know that Matthew existed. Therefore, it is reasonable to suppose that a similar collection of the sayings of Peter once existed. Unfortunately, we have no quotes from such a text. Perhaps because they were derogatory towards Paul. Perhaps because they would contradict everything written about Peter in the New Testament. The only thing they could use was the name to stick on the Greek Gospel they created.
There's actually a collection called the "Preaching of Peter" which is cited by Clement of Alexandria and I think a couple of others. What very little we have of it sounds very Synoptic-like. IMO it's a dark horse for being the document Papias is referring to. But then a huge question is why did it remain so obscure and eventually fade completely from history?
The Ebionites were said to have a Hebrew Gospel of Matthew which has been lost. I don't know if that is a possible candidate for what Papias was referring to. The Gospel or Gospels of the Jewish Christians (we don't know how many) survived at least until the 4th century and possibly longer.
Yes, that is probably what Papias meant.
Papias preferred listening to people tell him what they knew vs. reading text. Perhaps Papias thought he could detect when people were lying. Of course he couldn't do that with text, and he might have had a justified suspicion that a lot of text in those days was lies.
So, that which we call the New Testament is pretty much fan fiction by ghost writers, not necessarily Holy Ghost writers?
That’s gonna harsh the mellow of the inerrancy & Marist crowds.
If anything, "ghost writers" undersells it. These were writers working openly, signing their theological commitments onto stories that had circulated for decades before they picked up a pen. Nobody was hiding who did the writing. What got hidden was that the writing happened at all, buried under attributions assigned after the fact to make four unsigned books sound like eyewitness testimony.
Your discussion of Psalm 22 and the crucifixion reminded me of Michael Turton’s Historical Commentary on the Gospel of Mark. He points to parallels that extend into Mark’s stories: Jesus calls working fishermen who leave their work to follow him (Mark 1:16–20), much as Elijah calls Elisha (1 Kings 19:19–21). Jesus sleeps through a storm until his companions wake him (Mark 4:35–41), as Jonah does (Jonah 1:4–6).
Two others struck me even more. Jairus comes to Jesus about his dying daughter, who is later raised (Mark 5:21–43), recalling Elisha’s encounter with the Shunammite woman and her son (2 Kings 4:8–37). And Jesus feeds a crowd despite an objection that there isn’t enough food, with some left over (Mark 6:30–44), much as Elisha does (2 Kings 4:42–44).
These parallels don’t settle whether Mark shaped remembered events or composed scenes from scripture, but they suggest the question extends well beyond the crucifixion. Some of these examples would be a good addition to this article or for a follow up.
I'm 78.
I no longer say, "Jesus said."
I say "The story about Jesus."
Thus, emphasizing to MYSELF that these could not possibly be historical.
My motivation is ACCURACY.
I do similarly with respect to the word LOVE with respect to God, Jesus.
The fact that the writers in the Old and New Testaments CALL their entities LOVE
In NO WAY means that my idea of LOVE applies to either.
Both were genocidal.
Nobody seems to notice that the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount becomes the leader of the battle of Armageddon.
Attention to accuracy.
The account of no religion, or another nation's story, is historically true.
Nor do those stories need to be true.
That the animals in Aesop’s fables did not speak Greek in no way detracts from their value
Re: why Mark, the question still falls to why did Papias have a tradition of a Marcus writing down Peter's words? If it's all BS why not just say Peter wrote it? To me, a probable explanation is one of gradual embellishment. A "Mark" in Rome who heard Peter preach (once? Twice?) wrote the Gospel. This "hearer" of Peter gradually morphs into a companion and then to a personal interpreter and secretary.
Irenaeus is an unreliable source, writing 4 to 6 decades after the first appearance of a gospel. (He also says Jesus was in his fifties when he died.) The obvious answer is that Marcion, who produced the first gospel, wrote the first gospel, gMark, as Raschke persuasively argues.
What do make of the chiastic structures in Mark? Is this more likely a feature of oral tradition or authorial invention?
Chiastic structures in Mark are compatible with both oral tradition and later editorial arrangement, and the evidence points more toward the latter for the large-scale patterns. Small chiasms (a saying arranged ABA') show up naturally in oral speech, since that's a mnemonic device. But the big architectural chiasms scholars find across whole sections of Mark, like the bread section in 6:30-8:21, require a level of structural control you get from someone composing with the whole text in view, not from stories passed hand to hand.
The catch is that a lot of proposed large-scale chiasms in Mark are more visible to the scholar drawing the diagram than they would have been to a first-century listener. I'd treat any specific claim with more suspicion the larger the span of text it covers.
Whilst the data is coherent here, it has an alternative context.
Eusebius wrote Mark and the rest was post-fitted, whilst John retains the original Egyptian root of the Bible:
https://ivanfraser.substack.com/i/174358247/i-the-forensic-disqualification-of-eusebius
Eusebius quotes Papias explicitly attributing the Mark tradition to an earlier source, and independently, Irenaeus in the 180s already has the Peter-Mark connection decades before Eusebius wrote anything. Eusebius inherited the tradition and passed it along, complete with his own doubts about Papias's reliability. If Eusebius had fabricated the attribution, he'd have had no reason to also tell readers Papias was a man of limited intelligence.
When the theological propaganda of Rome has become our consensus history, the Roman record is inadmissible to the case when the Roman record is what is in the dock.
Eusebius was part of the Gospel factory, Irenaeus part of the redaction and authorisation machine of Rome. The same as who wrote the records we now assume is history.
That Irenaeus is part of the the prosecuted who overturned pre-extant Egyptian cum Greek philosophy/science into a tale of a man of Judea is no basis for evidencing that the Romans did not turn Simon bar Giora into the Holy benben of Ptah known as Peter for propaganda purposes.
When the Demiurge inheritance of mid 1st millennium Greece holds precision of scientific natural forms and ratios directly inherited from the Ptah/Atum form - as Great Architect and Craftsman of the universe which arose in the ms of the celestial pole, and sky lore geometry which created through logos - and Ptah/Atum became the Lord who spoke the word, Atum's dyadic monad became Adam and Eve, Jesus, and Osiris became Moses, centuries prior to Christianity, you have to look further than the Roman record and redactions, and see through the 'pious frauds' to the proper provenance of Christianity. It reaches back to the Egyptian Ennead that holds a Tetractic structure to describe the entirety of creation.
Irenaeus and what remains of his evidence lies strictly in a rewrite more than 2 millennia after the Egyptians formulated the prime system that was inherited by the Greeks and which became both philosophy and science. An inheritance they remain oath-bound to not reveal explicitly, and which also required care to defend against threat of - initially Greek - prosecutions by ruling and prevailing authorities already in the throes of redacted soap-operas taken as realities. No historical Jesus, David, Saul or Solomon, nor Moses nor Exodus nor Adam is in the historical evidence. It remains attached to a theological ideal of ages and sky lore that has not changed much over millennia, except where the rotations around the pole as the stars of the duat nun have drifted around the void that, according to the Egyptians, first uttered the word of the Lord into being as the entirety known as Atum. Whose body became the all, the forms and the spirit which dwells in forms. This is what is held in the Gnostic record Ireneaus is attempting to deny and make heresy.
Rome is the greatest liar in history. Please do not not assume their history is more than propaganda for the masses to embrace as salvation.
This way, Rome consolidated their business model from one that relied on massive logistical cost and maintenance - taking from nations by the sword - to a collective of men with books the natives could not read for themselves. Which in a few generations allowed their troops to defend Rome's local interests whilst the natives gave Rome what once took energy to take. All roads lead to Rome, including the evidence of their own fraud known as the Bible.
The soap operas of Rome have left a washing of memory leaving suds for scholars to attempt to reconstitute into an original bar. This is like attempting to find light in the shadows of the cave without leaving it to witness where the light source originated those shadows. And exactly as per Plato, the cave dwellers will fight like hell to maintain their sophistry that the shadows constitute reality. And for the longest time, Rome and its extension - the Church, would kill for it also, in order to maintain status, wealth and power whilst preaching the masses need turn the other cheek and render all unto Caesar/The Holy See.
https://ivanfraser.substack.com/p/huxwelled-the-manipulation-of-the
Eusebius remains the evidence against concoction for profit projected as necessary 'truth' with authority. Irenaeus remains evidence that Egyptian and Greek science was defamed and the feminine ratio redacted as per the unnatural unipolar monotheistic 'God' that is against all natural sciences and logic, known earliest as demiurge and Theos - long before Rome. The PyTHian or serpent wisdom known to Solon, injected into Judea by story tellers as Saul, and Cleisthenes reforms injected into Judea as David - the Orion shepherd boy that is first the sah of light traversing the sky to the union with godhead of Ptah for rebirth as the mesu child known as iusa - the ever-coming son, and imhtp, the ever coming peace - all epithets of Ptah/Atum from Egypt long before Egypt hosted the Levantine Hyksos cult.
To reparse your comment through the data and evidence:
"Rome quotes Roman propaganda explicitly attributing the Roman propaganda tradition to an earlier source, and accordingly, Irenaeus in the 180s already has the Roman propaganda connection decades before the admitted liar wrote anything. Eusebius inherited the authorised propaganda tradition and passed it along, complete with his own necessarily feigned projection of 'doubts' about Papias's reliability. If Eusebius had fabricated the attribution, he'd have had EVERY reason to also tell readers Papias was a man of limited intelligence."
https://ivanfraser.substack.com/p/return-of-the-storm-god-appendix-5c6
I remember learning about this in seminary. It reverses the narrative that has Mark being the simplest of the Gospels ("a passion narrative with a long introduction") because it was the first to be written down and (my view) has it come last (and still be the simplest) because it's essentially a Cliff's Notes version of Matthew and Luke.
AS soon as you misnamed Judea where Jesus was born, where Jerusalem was located at the time Jesus lived AS RECORDED BY ROME ITSELF.
(that is blatant pandering not accuracy and you know better. My question is why? and that is also rhetorical to you. )
Jesus was born in Bethlehem, in Judea, and grew up in Nazareth, in Galilee. Jerusalem, where he died, sits in Judea too. None of that appears in the piece above, since it doesn't discuss Jesus' birthplace or Jerusalem's provincial location. If you're thinking of a different passage, point to it and I'll address the specific claim.
Why do you consider the nativities historical? Why did Mark and John consider Jesus' origins irrelevant?
My answer describes what Christian theology says happened. Whether it's historical is a separate question.
The charge is you missused a political ‘word’ magnet to draw eyes not relate history. I am asking you to prove that charge wrong.
Theologically show me Palestine in the Bible as reference to this area of the world.
And you would probably shit a brick at my version of the Nativity. Loal
Mark especially
I lean towards Jesus not being born in Bethlehem. Here's a couple sections of an article I wrote recently:
MATTHEW
Matthew appears to begin with Mary and Joseph already living in Bethlehem.
There is no journey there and no census.
Jesus is born in Bethlehem.
Magi arrive looking for the “King of the Jews.”
Herod sees the child as a possible rival and tries to kill him.
The family escapes to Egypt and later settles in Nazareth.
Matthew shapes the story to echo both Moses and Israel.
A violent ruler kills children.
The chosen child escapes.
The family goes into Egypt.
God then calls his son out again.
Matthew presents the return from Egypt as the fulfillment of scripture:
“Out of Egypt I called my son.” —Matthew 2:15 WEB
Matthew is quoting Hosea 11:1, which looks back to Israel’s Exodus from Egypt.
He applies the words to Jesus, presenting him as reliving Israel’s story —as both a new Moses and a new embodiment of Israel....
LUKE
Luke also places Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem.
But he gets the family there in an entirely different way.
In Luke, Mary and Joseph already live in Nazareth.
A census ordered by Caesar Augustus requires Joseph to travel to Bethlehem because he belongs to the house of David.
Mary accompanies him, and Jesus is born while they are there.
Shepherds visit the child after receiving an angelic announcement.
Jesus is later presented at the temple in Jerusalem, and the family returns to Nazareth.
There is no star.
No magi.
No massacre of children.
No escape to Egypt.
Luke’s census journey creates a historical difficulty.
Joseph travels to Bethlehem because he belongs to the family of David, who had lived roughly a thousand years earlier.
Luke does not say that Bethlehem was Joseph’s birthplace or home.
Roman censuses were used to register people and property for taxation.
We have no evidence of an empire-wide census requiring families to travel to the hometown of a distant ancestor.
The journey does, however, serve an important purpose in Luke’s story. It moves Mary and Joseph from Nazareth to Bethlehem, the city of David, so that Jesus can be born there and connected to the expected Davidic Messiah....
SO WHERE WAS JESUS BORN?
Matthew and Luke both say Bethlehem.
But their very different stories appear to explain how someone known as Jesus of Nazareth came to be born in David’s city.
Jesus’ connection to Nazareth is more secure.
Mark introduces him as coming from Nazareth.
John knows him as a Galilean.
Throughout the Gospel tradition, he is remembered as Jesus of Nazareth.
You dodge my accusation nicely. I’ll give you that.
To believe that there were additions to the text is not the same thing as believing that Mark was not the author of whatever original manuscript there might have been.
As I understand what you have written, the problem with the text comes through the belief that there cannot be divine prophecy and/or foreshadowing. If these are allowed there is no reason to believe that Mark was not the author.
Mainstream Catholic biblical scholarship, including work published with the Church's own approval, accepts that the gospels are formally anonymous. The anonymity of the gospels is the consensus of mainstream biblical scholars in general, Christian and secular alike.