Youtube now has a PowerPoint presentation of Lena Einhorn’s hypothesis on Jesus and the Egyptian Prophet/the Shift hypothesis.
It is a somewhat longer version (45 min. ) of the presentation Lena made at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting in 2012. I like the idea of visual presentations over text posts. I might do something similar one day.
We have posted a few times on Lena’s Time Shift hypothesis on Vridar.
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I’ll have to look into her book. I see two basic possibilities:
1) The writer of Mark had read The Jewish War and used it, along with the letters of Paul and the Jewish scriptures to craft his narrative.
2) The writer of Mark had not read The Jewish War, but the fact that both he and Josephus were writing about the war led to similarities in their narratives.
The case for #1 isn’t so far fetched given that we have to explain how the writer of Mark had knowledge of the war to begin with. Either the things that Josephus recorded were common knowledge, the writer of Mark experienced the events himself and had a similar perspective to Josephus, or he learned about the war from Josephus.
Given that we already know for certain that the writer of Mark was creating a story based on literary references, it isn’t unfathomable that he used one more.
But man, if he did, what a maniac!
Can you imagine trying to fit together a coherent narrative by essentially cutting and pasting material from (depending on how you count it) 4 different sources? (The letters of Paul, Elijah-Elisha, the psalms and prophets, and Josephus).
If this is how it happened, then that guy was even more of a genius that I thought.
But, the more I consider this, the more it seems plausible. The main issue for me is, I do think the story (GMark) is about the war, but how do we explain “Mark’s” knowledge of the war? The author of Mark had to have learned about the war from someone. Why not Josephus?
Still, I’m not fully convinced, but I definitely see it as plausible.
“Can you imagine trying to fit together a coherent narrative by essentially cutting and pasting material from (depending on how you count it) 4 different sources?”
I don’t see why we should consider Mark’s story as particularly coherent. But either way, it’s not particularly a genius move to write fan fiction based on lots of different sources. Just look a tiny bit into modern day writing and you’ll see the same kind of thing all over the place.
Or for a more obvious example, look at the recent Star Wars movies. They are constantly reworking ideas and stories from the original trilogy. Much of the logic isn’t real world logic, but stuff that only makes sense when read through the lens of popular culture of the day, that being previous scripture. I mean previous Star Wars movies.
Now that is a Gospel According to luke I can be comfortable with! 🙂
Don’t forget Homer, the Orphics, and the rest! Very inventive guy, our Mark, apparently. 🙂