Do you think that God added to the teachings of Jesus after His Ascencion?

I really do think that this incident was so traumatic and experience for the author that he made mention of it. If it had happened to you I think that it would have been sharp in your memory as well.
That's a big if ... I'm not sure that the author of Mark was 'there'.

Surely you do not think that this gospel was written by an experienced story-telling literary author?
Actually I do, and there has been a growing number of scholars who do, too.

In their view, Mark is writing to a popular audience, in a popular style, and very successfully, whereas Luke, for example, is writing more for the literati, an educated audience.

I mean, Dan Brown's English is execrable, but he's certainly popular.

Because it happened, a memory so traumatic that the author made mention of it. If it had not been exactly this then your 'why?' question would be much stronger.
Well there's no actual evidence that it was exactly 'this'.

On the other hand, if the scholars are right and Mark is writing a fast-paced and dynamic tale to be 'performed', then such a device would be very useful – not the least to imply the author was 'there' and add another layer of drama.
 
Surely you do not think that this gospel was written by an experienced story-telling literary author?
I think it was written by a determined follower with basic literary skills.
:eek: I thought you were a fan of Mark! 🤣

I've read a couple of really complementary accounts of Mark's Gospel – Hart, my go-to theologian-of-the-moment, is a firm supporter. I'll dig out some comments of his if I can track them down.
 
That's a big if ... I'm not sure that the author of Mark was 'there'.
Oh no. That gospel looks to me as if it was written (partially) as direct evidence, and the only one that I've ever seen.
Actually I do, and there has been a growing number of scholars who do, too.

In their view, Mark is writing to a popular audience, in a popular style, and very successfully, whereas Luke, for example, is writing more for the literati, an educated audience.
No no..... In my opinion this was a gospel written to put the record(s) straight. Popular a count? No, I used to write witness statements for the courts and they needed to be accurate and true, and Mark reads like that to me, not as a popular piece of work for the intelligentsia.
Well there's no actual evidence that it was exactly 'this'.

On the other hand, if the scholars are right and Mark is writing a fast-paced and dynamic tale to be 'performed', then such a device would be very useful – not the least to imply the author was 'there' and add another layer of drama.
If those scholars believe that G-Mark was only writing a dramatic tale, a performance, then it cannot (in their opinions) be very much of a deposition. It seems to me like they would need a good cross examination.
 
:eek: I thought you were a fan of Mark! 🤣
Very much so. I am placing my respect upon it being first and good second hand evidence.
I've read a couple of really complementary accounts of Mark's Gospel – Hart, my go-to theologian-of-the-moment, is a firm supporter. I'll dig out some comments of his if I can track them down.
That would be interesting to read
 
For @badger – from Telling the Tale Reflections on the Resurrection

It is an old and unanswerable question whether the original Gospel of Mark ended at the eighth verse of chapter 16 or whether instead a longer narrative followed ... There are also debates, I should mention, that we no longer possess the original beginning of the Gospel, and these too defy resolution, if only because one cannot disprove a negative.

I would have to say that I think it very possible that neither beginning nor end of the Gospel as originally written has been lost. I believe that the book’s narrative properly begins with John the Baptist’s annunciation of one who is yet to come, greater than he, followed by the baptism of Jesus and the voice from heaven declaring either Jesus’s eternal identity or his adoption as God’s Son; and I also believe, with slightly less conviction but still pretty firmly, that it ends with the women who have discovered the empty tomb hastening away in fear and astonishment. My only hesitation in the latter case has to do with a small matter of consistency: if indeed the women told no one what they had found, then it is unclear how the evangelist came upon the story. But that is probably to read too much into the Gospel’s final words.

This is not to say that I imagine that the evangelist was unaware of stories of encounters with the risen Christ; as far as we can tell, testimonies regarding such miraculous appearances constituted the principal substance of the Easter kerygma in its most original form, at least if Paul’s account of the matter is typical of the early decades of the faith. I have no strong beliefs regarding what the evangelist may or may not have omitted from his story or what he may or may not have expected his readers to know or believe about the days following Easter Sunday.

My true reasoning on the issue is one of literary form, in two senses.
First, for all the roughness of the Gospel’s Greek and all the small errors with regard to geographical places and names and so forth, the book has a fairly elegant narrative structure, beginning with a mysterious arrival and ending with a mysterious departure, in the interval rising to a dramatic climax in the story of the Transfiguration before reaching its dramatic conclusion on Golgotha.

And then, second, there are all the ways in which the earliest of the canonical Gospels appears to draw upon literary conventions and motifs common in the age in which it was written, among which an inexplicable disappearance or the discovery of a vacant tomb or coffin serves as a sign of some man’s divine or, at any rate, supernatural status. Romulus and Apollonius of Tyana both supposedly simply vanished from human history, the latter most certainly (or so Philostratus would have us believe) by being rapt up into heaven. King Numa’s coffin was supposedly empty when it was opened long after his death. Enoch was understood in Hellenistic Jewish literature to have been assumed into heaven as well, as a divinized and ‘angelized’ mortal, as was Elijah after him. And so on. Richard C. Miller has produced a catalogue of around thirty examples of such tales in Graeco-Roman literature, some of which are admittedly a bit of a stretch as analogies to the Gospel’s story, but most of which give evidence of a very real pattern in the late antique cultural imagination.

And there has also been a very great deal of illuminating scholarship in recent years on the consonance between early Christian literature, the Gospels in particular, and the literature of late antique pagan culture.

Whatever the case, the fact remains that, if we possessed the Gospels in their present form but Christianity had died out in the early centuries, they would not strike us as noticeably unusual or out of place in the late classical canon, and we might take them as consciously constructed fictions, in much the same way as we now read Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius. We would find them wholly and charmingly ordinary and typical of a certain ancient milieu. Just another wonderworker, just another sage uttering impenetrable oracles, just another mysterious itinerant holy man harboring secrets he could divulge only to his inner circle, just another divine mortal unfairly arraigned before human judges blind to his glory. So too, we would not be amazed or shaken to our cores by the signs of his divine, daimonian, or angelic prowess: his ability to command the elements, to heal the sick, to multiply bread and fish, to walk upon water, to shine with a supercelestial radiance, to evoke voices from the heavens, and even to raise the dead. Neither would we be especially surprised, let alone convinced, by the story of the empty tomb, which we would take as no more than a conventional trope meant to provide one last, ineffable indication of his special nature and blessedness. In that sense, formally speaking, the Gospels are not a unique literary or religious phenomenon, except in the trivial sense that every story possesses incidental details special to itself.

The picture that has begun to emerge, then, in certain academic quarters is of the Gospel of Mark as a fairly typical late antique novel written not so much as an attempt to gather up and synthesize oral traditions and writings already in circulation within the larger Jesus movement, but as an entirely fantastic confection produced by and for a literate elite. Then, supposedly, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke added to this account not so much by synthesizing it with other preexisting materials from the nascent religion, but by adding yet more of the typical motifs of Hellenistic tales about miraculous and charismatic sages or prophets or demigods: divine impregnation, marvelous tales of infancy and boyhood, wise or mystifying teachings, post-mortem appearances, and so forth.

Dennis R. MacDonald even proposes that Mark’s Gospel was consciously modeled on the Homeric epics, with a particular emphasis on the Odyssey (which is an enchanting suggestion, I grant, but not particularly persuasive as MacDonald lays it out).

The Gospels do reflect the diegetic and religious idioms of their time and place, and clearly contain elements that are meant to be illustrative of a spiritual claim rather than documentary accounts of events witnessed and recorded by persons present at the time.

Yes, the Gospels are late antique Hellenistic ‘novels’; and yes, they employ any number of common mythic motifs to advance the plot and to make whatever points the authors intended. Nor is it possible to prove one way or the other whether they were written within and for communities of faith or only as the exercises of fabulists, though they certainly seem to me—every one of them—to have a very different tone and urgency from what one finds in the fictions of the period.

Then too, just as it is an anachronism to mistake the Gospels for documentary biographies of the sort we would write today, so too it is utterly anachronistic to assume an absolute distinction between fiction and factual narratives in the minds of late antique readers. Many may indeed have recognized the liberties taken by the evangelists in framing their tales, but they would not necessarily have therefore assumed that the Gospels were pure invention. Neither should we, for that matter. The assumption that the conscious artistry of the narratives is evidence against their incorporation of prior oral or written traditions is an unwarranted one and, in some respects, quite incredible. And the suggestion that the Gospels were not written for a community of believers is diverting, but not compelling.

From the very first in Mark’s Gospel, there is an obvious attempt to place the itinerary of Christ’s ministry within the geography of Galilee and Judaea, rather than within the more fantastic and casually imprecise geography one would expect of a consciously crafted legend, that clearly seems to indicate a real historical memory about who this man was; even the evangelist’s errors on that score suggest an honest effort to repeat information about a region of which he was not a native.

And yet—there is always an ‘and yet’—other aspects of this scholarship cannot be gainsaid. The literary forms of the Gospels do reflect the literary conventions and idioms of the time. How could they not? They do incorporate motifs and tropes and episodes that were part of the common grammar of a kind of literature that aspired not to historical accuracy, as we now reckon such things, but rather to illustrative epitomes of some deeper truth about its subjects. Some stories, such as that of the Transfiguration, correspond so perfectly to the religious expectations of late antiquity regarding deified or angelic men, both pagan and Jewish, that it is perfectly natural for many scholars to see them as nothing but symbols or dramatic narrative developments or even just ornamental fillips rather than stories their authors intended to be taken in what we today would consider a ‘literal’ manner. And this brings us back to the question of the stories of the empty tomb and of the resurrection appearances of Jesus to his followers.

Without question, the accounts found in the four canonical Gospels, even the abrupt and unadorned version found in—or in what remains of—the text of Mark, are inconsistent with one another while being largely consistent with the late antique atmosphere of spiritual longings and expectations. In that sense, they are evidence of nothing, taken in themselves, other than the fixed intention of the evangelists to portray Jesus of Nazareth as what Hellenistic culture would recognize as a divine man—even a son of God. Certain details of the story are unique to Christian scripture, but all fall within a continuum of narrative types and shared religious imagery. If all we had, then, regarding the resurrection of Christ were the Gospel accounts, we might very well say that all we can deduce about the early Christian proclamation of Christ’s Lordship and about the faith of Easter is that these novelistic conventions excited a response far in excess of their intended purpose and that, mostly as an accident of history, they were seized upon by a credulous readership and progressively transformed from fictions into histories.

But, of course, they are not all we have, and the early Christians’ faith in the resurrection of Jesus cannot be reduced to the accidental metastasis of literary entertainments into scriptures. Something more—much more—was at work.
 
Hi Longfellow

The reason that my comments remained in the context of INDIVIDUAL and PERSONAL revelation rather than a larger group ALL being inspired is that I think there may have been several individuals on councils who were inspired, yet many of the councils (in my estimation) were dominated by individuals who were NOT inspired and the decisions and policies of such councils was NOT inspired.

Let me offer some policies that I do not think represented inspiration.

For example

Council of Nicaea, 325 :
Canon 15 Because of great disorder and rioting it will be necessary to abolish the old custom of allowing a bishop, priest, or deacon to move from one city to another. If any presumes to do this , he shall be sent back to the city in which he was ordained.

Canon 16 Priests, deacons, or others living under the canon who frivolously and irresponsibly leave their churches will be forced to return to them by all possible means. If they refuse to return they shall be deposed. If anyone steals a cleric against a bishop’s will and ordained him to serve in his own church, the ordination shall be void.”


Council of Encaeniss (Antioch), a.d. 341
Canon 3 A priests or deacon who moved permanently to another place and ignores his bishop’s appeal to return must lose the right to all office; if he goes to work for another bishop he must be punished to the bargain for breaking church law.

Canon 9 Bishops in every province must understand that the bishop in the metropolis has charge of the whole province because all who have business to transact come from all directions to the metropolis.

Canon 11 Any bishop, priests, or any churchman at all who dares to go to the emperor without a letter from his metropolitan shall be ejected utterly, not only from his church, but from his priesthood

Canon 16 When a bishop seizes a vacant seat without the okay of a full synod, he must be deposed, even though the people have elected him.

Canon 18 A bishop who cannot take over a church because the congregation will not have him must remain in honor and office but may not meddle in the affairs of the church where he is forces to remain.



Sardika a.d. 347
Canon 1 No bishop ever moves from a larger to a smaller city but only in the other direction (the size of the city increasingly become the measure of ambition and domination).

Canon 2 If it can be proven that a man has bribed parties to stir up a clamor for him as bishop “so to make it seem that the people are actually asking him to be their bishop,” he shall be excommunicated. (the reason such a rule had to be established should be obvious)



Epaon, a.d. 517
Canon 3 If the king acts against us, all bishops will withdraw to monasteries, and no bishop shall stir out again until the king has given peace to each and all bishops alike.

Canon 20 No layman may arrest, question, or punish a cleric without okay of the church. When a cleric appears in court, it must be with okay of his bishop, and no sentence may be passed without the presence of his spiritual superior.

Canon 32 Descendants of church slaves who have found their way back to the original place of their ancestors must be brought back to the church slavery, no matter how long or for how many generations they have been free. (Increasingly, the canons will favor the accumulation of money, property and individual lives)



Paris, a.d. 557
Canon 1 No one may hold that church property changes political denominations : no one can claim that church property ever passes under another ruler “since the dominion of God knows no geographical bounderies.” No one may claim that he holds as a gift from the king property that once belonged to the church. All property given by King Chlodwig of blessed memory and handed down as an inheritance must now be given back to the church.



Macon. A.d. 585
Canon 15 Whenever a layman meets a higher cleric, he must bow to him. If both are mounted, the layman must remove his hat. If the layman alone is mounted, he must dismount to greet the cleric.



Toledo, a.d. 589
Canon 20 Many bishops burden their clerics with intolerable compulsory services and contributions. Clerics thus cruelly oppressed may complain to the metropolitan.



Nabonne, a.d. 589
Canon 13 Subdeacons must hold curtains and doors open for superior clergy. If they refuse to do so they must pay a fine; lower clergy who refuse must be beaten.



Reims, a.d. 624-625
Canon 13 No one, not even a bishop, may ever sell the property or slaves of the church.(such a rule would mean that the church can only continue to gain property and financial value but it can never decrease it’s holdings.)



Toledo, a.d. 633
Canon 67 Bishops may not free slaves of the church unless they reimburse the church out of their private fortunes, and the bishop’s successors can reclaim any thus freed.

Canon 68 A bishop who frees a slave of the church without reserving the patrocinium [financial holdings] for the church must give the church two slaves in his place. If the person freed makes any complaint about the way he was treated while he was a slave, he must again become a church slave



Toledo a.d. 638
Canon 3 Thank God for the edict of King Chintila banishing all Jews from Spain, with the order that “only Catholics may live in the land…Resolved that any future king before mounting the throne should swear an oath not to tolerate the Jewish Unglauben [unbelief]…If he breaks this oath, let him be anathema and maranatha [excommunicated] before God and food for the eternal fire.”


Toledo a.d. 656
Canon 6 Children over ten years of age may dedicate themselves to the religious life without consenting their parents. When smaller children are tonsured or given the religious garment, unless their parents lodge immediate protest, they are bound to the religious discipline for life.



Emerita a.d. 666
Canon 15 It often happens that priests who fall sick blame church slaves for their condition and torture them out of revenge. This must cease.

Canon 16 Bishops must stop taking more than their third. They must not take from the church’s third for their private use.



Toledo a.d. 694
Canon 8 Jews must be denied all religious practice. Their children must be taken from them at seven years ande must marry Christians. P 130



Boniface a.d. 745
Statute 13 Pasquil [jokes about the authorities] must be severely punished, even with exile.



Paderborn a.d. 785
Canon 21 anyone engaging in pagan rites must pay a heavy fine. If he cannot pay, no matter what his station, he becomes a slave of the church until he has paid up.

Canon 23 Soothsayers and fortune-tellers shall be given to churches and priests as slaves.



Lateran IV, a.d. 1215
Canon 3 All condemned heretics must be turned over to the secular authorities for punishment…Their property must be confiscated by the church. Those who have not been able to clear themselves of charges of heresy are excommunicated and must be avoided by all. If they remain a year under the ban, they must be condemned as hereticks. All civic officers must take a public oath to defend the faith and expel from their territories all heretics. Whoever, when ordered to do so by the church, does not purify his district or domain of heretics will be put under the ban. If he does not give satisfaction within a year, he must be reported to the pope, who will absolve his vassals from all duty to him and declare his lands open to legitimate conquest by Catholics : those who participate in the attack will receive the same privileges as regular crusaders. …. Anyone who preaches without the authorization of a bishop is excommunicated…A bishop must inspect his diocese. His officers are authorized to have all inhabitants swear an oath to expose to the bishop all sectarians that can be discovered…anyone who refuses to take the oath automatically makes himself a traitor. ….


Often, such decisions by church councils seem to support a goal of oppression, and gain of riches and control rather than representing the characteristics of the original Christian theology.

I believe that such policies would, over a period of several hundred years, bring to the roman religious movement, the very things such rules and actions were designed to bring to them (riches, power, influence, oppression for self gain, etc.)

As the clergy asserted greater and greater control of government, private life, and family life, the accumulation of power and resources would have happened at an increasing rate.

So. My assumption is that, scattered throughout the many religions, (even if the are a minority among those on councils) there are those who are inspired, even prophetically, but that these individuals are, as the dead sea Scroll described, "sprinkled" throughout the earth and often do not represent the majority of individuals making up church councils.

At any rate, good luck coming to your own models and conclusions regarding inspiration, its purpose and how to recognize it.
 
The picture that has begun to emerge, then, in certain academic quarters is of the Gospel of Mark as a fairly typical late antique novel written not so much as an attempt to gather up and synthesize oral traditions and writings already in circulation within the larger Jesus movement, but as an entirely fantastic confection produced by and for a literate elite. Then, supposedly, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke added to this account not so much by synthesizing it with other preexisting materials from the nascent religion, but by adding yet more of the typical motifs of Hellenistic tales about miraculous and charismatic sages or prophets or demigods: divine impregnation, marvelous tales of infancy and boyhood, wise or mystifying teachings, post-mortem appearances, and so forth.
Do those other novels have the sage or prophet gathering a group of disciples and giving public talks and private lessons about how to live, with many examples of those lessons, and numerous allusions to scriptures? Is there evidence of a new way of life being practiced around their teachings, in cities across the empire?
 
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Do those other novels have the sage or prophet gathering a group of disciples and giving public talks and private lessons about how to live, with many examples of those lessons, and numerous allusions to scriptures? Is there evidence of a new way of life being practiced around their teachings, in cities across the empire?
It would seem not ... Hart – who knows the literature – says:
"The Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain, for instance, do not look very much like the sort of wisdom Hellenistic writers placed on the lips of sages and sorcerers.

"As much as I like the figure of Apollonius of Tyana at his philosophical best ...

(Aside: Apollonios of Tyana, whose name means “Follower of Apollo,” was a wandering philosopher, ascetic, and miracle worker, often described as a prophet, religious reformer, and teacher. He lived c15-100CE.)

"... and as congenial as I find a number of his counsels, nothing attributed to him has anything like the very specific and quite unusual combination of the pragmatic, the moral, and the mystical that one finds in the two later Synoptics.

"Neither is it very likely that the echoes of the prophets of Israel in Jesus’s teachings, or his invocations of the Second Temple imagery of divine judgement, or his pronouncements upon the ministry of John the Baptist, or (most especially) the burning ferocity of his hatred of injustice and the equally burning tenderness of his love of the poor and excluded, were not grounded in real memories and records – oral or written – of the ‘Jesus of history’. Apollonius was capable of a serene compassion at times, and at other times of a mysterious implacability toward others; but there is nothing in Philostratus’s account as radical and scandalous as the social latitude and ‘open commensality’ (to use Crossan’s phrase) of Jesus, or of his genuinely political denunciations of the wealthy who exploit the poor under the cover of religion and respectability, or of his willingness to consort with lepers, prostitutes, and tax collectors.

"... the concrete concerns and prophetic resonances in Christ’s teachings are of a far more specific and irreducibly Jewish kind, which would have struck the ears of a literate elite hungry for charming fables and gestes as either absurd or unintelligible.

"I might also note that it is hard to see how a writer attempting to glamorize a largely fictional construct several decades after the death of the original model would think it useful for his purposes to record his protagonist as promising an imminent eschatological denouement to history when evidently nothing of the sort had come to pass and few readers among the ‘literate elite’ would be likely to take such language seriously.

"Something out of the ordinary—something of urgent concern to a community already attached to memories or memories of memories, unlike the edifying fables of divine men popular in the late antique world—seems to lie behind the polished literary surfaces of these narratives.
 
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For @badger – from Telling the Tale Reflections on the Resurrection

It is an old and unanswerable question whether the original Gospel of Mark ended at the eighth verse of chapter 16 or whether instead a longer narrative followed ... There are also debates, I should mention, that we no longer possess the original beginning of the Gospel, and these too defy resolution, if only because one cannot disprove a negative.

I would have to say that I think it very possible that neither beginning nor end of the Gospel as originally written has been lost. I believe that the book’s narrative properly begins with John the Baptist’s annunciation of one who is yet to come, greater than he, followed by the baptism of Jesus and the voice from heaven declaring either Jesus’s eternal identity or his adoption as God’s Son; and I also believe, with slightly less conviction but still pretty firmly, that it ends with the women who have discovered the empty tomb hastening away in fear and astonishment. My only hesitation in the latter case has to do with a small matter of consistency: if indeed the women told no one what they had found, then it is unclear how the evangelist came upon the story. But that is probably to read too much into the Gospel’s final words.

This is not to say that I imagine that the evangelist was unaware of stories of encounters with the risen Christ; as far as we can tell, testimonies regarding such miraculous appearances constituted the principal substance of the Easter kerygma in its most original form, at least if Paul’s account of the matter is typical of the early decades of the faith. I have no strong beliefs regarding what the evangelist may or may not have omitted from his story or what he may or may not have expected his readers to know or believe about the days following Easter Sunday.

My true reasoning on the issue is one of literary form, in two senses.
First, for all the roughness of the Gospel’s Greek and all the small errors with regard to geographical places and names and so forth, the book has a fairly elegant narrative structure, beginning with a mysterious arrival and ending with a mysterious departure, in the interval rising to a dramatic climax in the story of the Transfiguration before reaching its dramatic conclusion on Golgotha.

And then, second, there are all the ways in which the earliest of the canonical Gospels appears to draw upon literary conventions and motifs common in the age in which it was written, among which an inexplicable disappearance or the discovery of a vacant tomb or coffin serves as a sign of some man’s divine or, at any rate, supernatural status. Romulus and Apollonius of Tyana both supposedly simply vanished from human history, the latter most certainly (or so Philostratus would have us believe) by being rapt up into heaven. King Numa’s coffin was supposedly empty when it was opened long after his death. Enoch was understood in Hellenistic Jewish literature to have been assumed into heaven as well, as a divinized and ‘angelized’ mortal, as was Elijah after him. And so on. Richard C. Miller has produced a catalogue of around thirty examples of such tales in Graeco-Roman literature, some of which are admittedly a bit of a stretch as analogies to the Gospel’s story, but most of which give evidence of a very real pattern in the late antique cultural imagination.

And there has also been a very great deal of illuminating scholarship in recent years on the consonance between early Christian literature, the Gospels in particular, and the literature of late antique pagan culture.

Whatever the case, the fact remains that, if we possessed the Gospels in their present form but Christianity had died out in the early centuries, they would not strike us as noticeably unusual or out of place in the late classical canon, and we might take them as consciously constructed fictions, in much the same way as we now read Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius. We would find them wholly and charmingly ordinary and typical of a certain ancient milieu. Just another wonderworker, just another sage uttering impenetrable oracles, just another mysterious itinerant holy man harboring secrets he could divulge only to his inner circle, just another divine mortal unfairly arraigned before human judges blind to his glory. So too, we would not be amazed or shaken to our cores by the signs of his divine, daimonian, or angelic prowess: his ability to command the elements, to heal the sick, to multiply bread and fish, to walk upon water, to shine with a supercelestial radiance, to evoke voices from the heavens, and even to raise the dead. Neither would we be especially surprised, let alone convinced, by the story of the empty tomb, which we would take as no more than a conventional trope meant to provide one last, ineffable indication of his special nature and blessedness. In that sense, formally speaking, the Gospels are not a unique literary or religious phenomenon, except in the trivial sense that every story possesses incidental details special to itself.

The picture that has begun to emerge, then, in certain academic quarters is of the Gospel of Mark as a fairly typical late antique novel written not so much as an attempt to gather up and synthesize oral traditions and writings already in circulation within the larger Jesus movement, but as an entirely fantastic confection produced by and for a literate elite. Then, supposedly, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke added to this account not so much by synthesizing it with other preexisting materials from the nascent religion, but by adding yet more of the typical motifs of Hellenistic tales about miraculous and charismatic sages or prophets or demigods: divine impregnation, marvelous tales of infancy and boyhood, wise or mystifying teachings, post-mortem appearances, and so forth.

Dennis R. MacDonald even proposes that Mark’s Gospel was consciously modeled on the Homeric epics, with a particular emphasis on the Odyssey (which is an enchanting suggestion, I grant, but not particularly persuasive as MacDonald lays it out).

The Gospels do reflect the diegetic and religious idioms of their time and place, and clearly contain elements that are meant to be illustrative of a spiritual claim rather than documentary accounts of events witnessed and recorded by persons present at the time.

Yes, the Gospels are late antique Hellenistic ‘novels’; and yes, they employ any number of common mythic motifs to advance the plot and to make whatever points the authors intended. Nor is it possible to prove one way or the other whether they were written within and for communities of faith or only as the exercises of fabulists, though they certainly seem to me—every one of them—to have a very different tone and urgency from what one finds in the fictions of the period.

Then too, just as it is an anachronism to mistake the Gospels for documentary biographies of the sort we would write today, so too it is utterly anachronistic to assume an absolute distinction between fiction and factual narratives in the minds of late antique readers. Many may indeed have recognized the liberties taken by the evangelists in framing their tales, but they would not necessarily have therefore assumed that the Gospels were pure invention. Neither should we, for that matter. The assumption that the conscious artistry of the narratives is evidence against their incorporation of prior oral or written traditions is an unwarranted one and, in some respects, quite incredible. And the suggestion that the Gospels were not written for a community of believers is diverting, but not compelling.

From the very first in Mark’s Gospel, there is an obvious attempt to place the itinerary of Christ’s ministry within the geography of Galilee and Judaea, rather than within the more fantastic and casually imprecise geography one would expect of a consciously crafted legend, that clearly seems to indicate a real historical memory about who this man was; even the evangelist’s errors on that score suggest an honest effort to repeat information about a region of which he was not a native.

And yet—there is always an ‘and yet’—other aspects of this scholarship cannot be gainsaid. The literary forms of the Gospels do reflect the literary conventions and idioms of the time. How could they not? They do incorporate motifs and tropes and episodes that were part of the common grammar of a kind of literature that aspired not to historical accuracy, as we now reckon such things, but rather to illustrative epitomes of some deeper truth about its subjects. Some stories, such as that of the Transfiguration, correspond so perfectly to the religious expectations of late antiquity regarding deified or angelic men, both pagan and Jewish, that it is perfectly natural for many scholars to see them as nothing but symbols or dramatic narrative developments or even just ornamental fillips rather than stories their authors intended to be taken in what we today would consider a ‘literal’ manner. And this brings us back to the question of the stories of the empty tomb and of the resurrection appearances of Jesus to his followers.

Without question, the accounts found in the four canonical Gospels, even the abrupt and unadorned version found in—or in what remains of—the text of Mark, are inconsistent with one another while being largely consistent with the late antique atmosphere of spiritual longings and expectations. In that sense, they are evidence of nothing, taken in themselves, other than the fixed intention of the evangelists to portray Jesus of Nazareth as what Hellenistic culture would recognize as a divine man—even a son of God. Certain details of the story are unique to Christian scripture, but all fall within a continuum of narrative types and shared religious imagery. If all we had, then, regarding the resurrection of Christ were the Gospel accounts, we might very well say that all we can deduce about the early Christian proclamation of Christ’s Lordship and about the faith of Easter is that these novelistic conventions excited a response far in excess of their intended purpose and that, mostly as an accident of history, they were seized upon by a credulous readership and progressively transformed from fictions into histories.

But, of course, they are not all we have, and the early Christians’ faith in the resurrection of Jesus cannot be reduced to the accidental metastasis of literary entertainments into scriptures. Something more—much more—was at work.
To me, this writing seems to be written by an educated person, but it is still quite speculative.
I don't see any evidence that the beginning of Mark's account is missing. It would also have been possible that Mark had ended his account in 16:7 without the last sentence: with the message of the resurrection. But, the last sentence is
So, the women left the tomb and ran away, trembling and bewildered. And in their fear they did not say a word to anyone.​

That's not an ending. There must have been more

 
For @badger – from Telling the Tale Reflections on the Resurrection

It is an old and unanswerable question whether the original Gospel of Mark ended at the eighth verse of chapter 16 or whether instead a longer narrative followed ... There are also debates, I should mention, that we no longer possess the original beginning of the Gospel, and these too defy resolution, if only because one cannot disprove a negative.
Ah yes. People 'build' questions from thin air for the purposes of proposing what whas lost, when G-Mark looks complete to me, and without those added verses.
I would have to say that I think it very possible that neither beginning nor end of the Gospel as originally written has been lost. I believe that the book’s narrative properly begins with John the Baptist’s annunciation of one who is yet to come, greater than he, followed by the baptism of Jesus and the voice from heaven declaring either Jesus’s eternal identity or his adoption as God’s Son; and I also believe, with slightly less conviction but still pretty firmly, that it ends with the women who have discovered the empty tomb hastening away in fear and astonishment. My only hesitation in the latter case has to do with a small matter of consistency: if indeed the women told no one what they had found, then it is unclear how the evangelist came upon the story. But that is probably to read too much into the Gospel’s final words.
Yes there was a Baptist who was doing a powerful job at the Jordan. People from the North travelling south HAD to come via the Eastern bank of the Jordan if they didn't want to risk the hazards of Samaria, and John was there to catch them before they went further to get fleeced of all their hard earned money at the Temple. John could hear them, give them as much redemption as they could have received at the Temple and inject a feel good factor to them through the whole experience, all cemented in to memory through immersion in the river. He needed many disciples because so many wanted the experience so that they could turn back home with their money. No wonder that Antipas was instructed to go out and fetch him in!
And Jesus? Simon's brother was a disciple, I believe, and took Jesus with others to see the Baptist. The Christian version, complete with God's voice and all, is spin, imo.
This is not to say that I imagine that the evangelist was unaware of stories of encounters with the risen Christ; as far as we can tell, testimonies regarding such miraculous appearances constituted the principal substance of the Easter kerygma in its most original form, at least if Paul’s account of the matter is typical of the early decades of the faith. I have no strong beliefs regarding what the evangelist may or may not have omitted from his story or what he may or may not have expected his readers to know or believe about the days following Easter Sunday.
I have no doubt that the word 'Christian' did not exist for the followers of Jesus at the Passover feast.
My true reasoning on the issue is one of literary form, in two senses.
First, for all the roughness of the Gospel’s Greek and all the small errors with regard to geographical places and names and so forth, the book has a fairly elegant narrative structure, beginning with a mysterious arrival and ending with a mysterious departure, in the interval rising to a dramatic climax in the story of the Transfiguration before reaching its dramatic conclusion on Golgotha.
My true reasoning concerning G-Mark was that it was a deposition based upon some experiences but mainly on the words of a friend not present. Christian additions were inserted, definitely.

Matthew and Luke were clearly Christian authors, and John was clearly written for the Church, in my opinion.

And here I had to stop, there isn't enough time for me to reply to all just now. I could answer other paragraphs as time permits.
 
My true reasoning on the issue is one of literary form, in two senses.
First, for all the roughness of the Gospel’s Greek and all the small errors with regard to geographical places and names and so forth, the book has a fairly elegant narrative structure, beginning with a mysterious arrival and ending with a mysterious departure, in the interval rising to a dramatic climax in the story of the Transfiguration before reaching its dramatic conclusion on Golgotha.
I can't answer for G-John, but G-Mark is not intended as an elegant narrative structure. It was not selling Christianity but making a statement (a deposition) about Jesus and his activities. Christians certainly interfered with the statement later.
And then, second, there are all the ways in which the earliest of the canonical Gospels appears to draw upon literary conventions and motifs common in the age in which it was written, among which an inexplicable disappearance or the discovery of a vacant tomb or coffin serves as a sign of some man’s divine or, at any rate, supernatural status.
Jesus was taken away quickly but he did not disappear, eventually he saw his old friends at Genesseret.
Christianity had to produce a supernatural God for success, imo.
But, of course, they are not all we have, and the early Christians’ faith in the resurrection of Jesus cannot be reduced to the accidental metastasis of literary entertainments into scriptures. Something more—much more—was at work.
The only substantial foundation that Christianity has is the content within the gospels.

Much of Christianity needs to be drawn in to some kind of religious euphoria through the rhetorical skills of priests, or should I say savants and scholars?

I should start a thread titled 'To heaven with savants and scholars' because people don't seem to read the gospels for themselves. Honestly, I wonder if many Christians could answer a simple ten question test about the account without needing to ask a favoured scholar for their lengthy replies.
 
@badger -

Is there a different definition under British law of “deposition” than the definition in the United States?
 
@badger -

Is there a different definition under British law of “deposition” than the definition in the United States?
Hello Rabbio, in the UK a deposition is a sworn statement, a serious declaration about something seen, heard, said or done.

A good example is shown in Luke 1:1-4
Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us,...................
 
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