In a recent post, Neil cited a paper by Dr. Alan Kirk called “Memory Theory and Jesus Research.” While Kirk does an adequate job of explaining the current state of play in memory theory, I couldn’t help but notice yet again some misunderstandings in the ways Memory Mavens remember German critical scholarship in general and form criticism in particular. I’ve been putting off this dismally inevitable task, but the time has come to offer some corrections and commentary.
Pale Residues
First, Kirk takes a swipe at William Wrede. He writes:
. . . Wrede’s bifurcation of Markan tradition into surviving elements of empirical history on the one hand and Easter-engendered dogma on the other, with the latter occluding the former, was precursor to the form critics’ model. Of a “historical view of the real life of Jesus,” wrote Wrede, only “pale residues” survive. (Kirk 2011, p. 809-810, emphasis mine)
Kirk argues that the form critics, taking their cue from Wrede, believed memory and personal eye-witness recollections were synonymous and that the Jesus traditions which effectively buried those recollections were something entirely different.
While memory traces of this sort lay at the origins of the tradition, they were a residuum, largely inert with respect to developments in the tradition itself. The salient image was of so-called authentic memories of Jesus coming to be buried under multiple layers of “tradition.” Tradition, in other words, had little to do with memory. (Kirk 2011, p. 809)
How does Kirk’s analysis square with what Wrede actually said? Kirk’s wording may lead the casual reader to infer from the first citation above that Wrede was referring to the general state of Mark’s sources or, to put in another way, the overall character of the various streams of oral and written tradition available to the author of Mark.
But that would be wrong.
Mark’s Conceptual Framework
Instead, Wrede was writing specifically about the finished written product: The Gospel of Mark. After a sustained and closely argued investigation of Mark, Wrede concluded the author of the gospel certainly used a historical framework, but his overall perspective was that of theology.
It is axiomatic that Mark has a whole series of historical ideas, or ideas in a historical form. (Wrede 1971, p. 131)
Wrede did not deny that Mark conceived of a historical outline, onto which he placed various stories and scenes. However, Mark’s purpose, he said, was to convey dogma, not history. The character of Jesus himself is “dogmatically conceived.” Other important elements of his gospel “are also theologically or dogmatically conceived.” (p. 131)
These motifs and not just the historical ones represent what actually motivates and determines the shape of the narrative in Mark. They give it its colouring. The interest naturally depends on them and the actual thought of the author is directed towards them. It therefore remains true to say that as a whole the Gospel no longer offers a historical view of the real life of Jesus. Only pale residues of such a view have passed over into what is a suprahistorical view for faith. In this sense the Gospel of Mark belongs to the history of dogma. (Wrede 1971, p. 131, emphasis mine)
We need to stress this point, because up until Wrede, many NT scholars, once they had generally concluded Mark was the first written gospel, had deluded themselves into thinking Mark had written some kind of unvarnished folk biography. Wrede clearly showed that the evangelist used multiple sources (even when those sources contradicted one another) and imprinted his own theological views on the existing tradition.
Moreover, since Mark adhered to his “view” (in German: anschauung, which I would translate here as “concept” or perhaps even “conceptual framework”), identifying what is historical, original, secondary, or redactional may not even be possible. He wrote:
The way traditional material and Mark’s own [material] are apportioned in individual circumstances will also not be uniformly capable of being settled by a special investigation. It has to be left as it is — an admixture. (Wrede 1971, p. 146, emphasis mine)
Contrary to Kirk, Wrede is describing something other than bifurcation.
And despite his lack of what we might today call a “social memory vocabulary,” Wrede’s conception of how tradents and authors in the early church worked sounds like something Maurice Halbwachs himself could have written:
I should never for an instant lose sight of my awareness that I have before me descriptions, the authors of which are later Christians, be they never so early — Christians who could only look at the life of Jesus with the eye of their own time and who described it on the basis of the belief of the community, with all the viewpoints of the community, and with the needs of the community in mind. For there is no sure means of straightforwardly determining the part played in the accounts by the later view — sometimes a view with a variety of layers. (Wrede 1971, bold emphasis mine)
“Difficult to Believe”
Next, Kirk takes aim at Bultmann. He writes:
In Bultmann’s additive model, dominical sayings were the tradition’s primary point of departure. But authentic sayings, in his view, exercised only an anemic influence upon the expanding tradition, and accordingly he found it “difficult to believe that the changes and revaluation of such meshalim as are to be found in the tradition have in fact retained some reminiscence of such changes and revaluations by Jesus.” (Kirk 2011, p. 811, emphasis mine)
What did Bultmann mean by “such meshalim“? Was he calling into question all dominical sayings, as Kirk implies?
Absolutely not. In fact, Bultmann was talking about a specific kind of meshal — an existing proverb that Jesus took on, rewording it and perhaps revaluing or transvaluing it, making it his own. Here’s what Bultmann actually wrote:
In this discussion I have in the first place postponed any question as to the genuineness of the logia. But in regard to it there are a number of possibilities. It is quite possible that
[1] Jesus sometimes took a popular proverb and altered it, and
[2] he could certainly sometimes have coined a secular proverb himself.
But it is also possible for [3] secular proverbs to have been turned into sayings of Jesus by the Church when it set them into the context of its tradition.
(Bultmann 1968, p. 101, numbering and formatting mine)
Note that we have three possibilities, all of which seem equally likely in the absence of original context or external evidence. We see no hint here that Bultmann rejected outright the possibility that the memory of an actual proverb coined by Jesus could have persisted in the tradition.
But now the question arises, “How can we tell?”
Are there any criteria by which we can make decisions in particular instances? In general it may be said that the tradition would hardly have preserved the occasional use of a popular proverb by Jesus; and it is also difficult to believe that the changes and revaluation of such meshalim as are to be found in the tradition have in fact retained some reminiscence of such changes and revaluations by Jesus. (Bultmann 1968, p. 101)
Generative forces
Now that we see the fragment in its original context, it becomes obvious that Kirk, while fishing for quotes to prove his case, has badly snagged his line. Kirk believes Bultmann viewed memory as entirely disconnected from tradition.
Bultmann’s analysis was in fact characterized by a programmatic disconnect between memory and the growing tradition, his occasional gestures to “reminiscence” notwithstanding. (Kirk 2011, p. 811)
Kirk’s readers might never know his out-of-context citation appears just two sentences before this:
It is much more likely that we have among the logia many sayings coined by Jesus, and the more so as their individual content is greater or the more they show Jesus as the preacher of repentance and the coming kingdom, as the one demanding truthfulness. (Bultmann 1968, p. 101)
Some disconnect, eh? Kirk focuses solely on Bultmann’s belief in “the decisive generative forces for tradition in contemporary social factors.” (p. 811) However, he misses the fact that for Bultmann these generative forces in the gospel tradition are, at the same time, the decisive preservative forces. As I’ve said before: “Social memory preserves what it wants, erases what it doesn’t want, and generates what it needs.”
Unfortunately, even when Bultmann acknowledges the role memory played in the development of tradition, it isn’t enough for Kirk. He howls in italics: “The development of the gospel tradition, in other words, was driven by virtually every force except the salient past itself.” (p. 813)
Gosh.
“Who are my mother and my brothers?”
I will have more to say in later posts about the relentless distortion of form criticism, but for now, I wish to talk about the focus of Neil’s previous post, namely Kirk’s analysis of what Bultmann referred to as the pericope of The True Kinsmen (die wahren Verwandten)
Even for those who merely skim or quote-mine Bultmann, his language should be clear enough to understand. He had serious doubts that any single occasion of saying would be remembered verbatim; however, he did believe that the community remembered and kept alive the gist of Jesus’ message. Modern scholars have made the same argument, namely that Jesus probably uttered the same saying with subtle variations on many occasions and in many locations, and that the scenes in the gospels are merely “typical” renderings of the ideal occasion. This is precisely Bultmann’s point here:
The individual controversy dialogues may not be historical reports of particular incidents in the life of Jesus, but the general character of his life is rightly portrayed in them, on the basis of historical recollection. And just as such recollections were preserved in connection with certain places (see below) without the localization of a particular dialogue being necessarily historical, so is the Tradition also capable of using recollections that are otherwise historical, e.g. in the statement about the attitude of his relatives to Jesus in Mk. 3:31 . . . or about his intercourse with the tax-gatherers. (Bultmann 1968, p. 50, emphasis mine)
Keep in mind this is the chap whom Kirk accused of generally ignoring memory as a concept. He’s also the same guy who insisted the story of the True Kinsmen “manifestly rests upon good and ancient tradition.” (Bultmann 1968, p. 30)
Reading Kirk’s discussion of Bultmann’s analysis of Mark 3:31-35, we may note that he seems to agree with much. The genre (form) of the story tends to set the confines of what the tradition can convey. The simplicity and the repetition of the story help Christians remember the saying. Yes, we detect begrudging notes of approval. But then comes the dreaded, but inevitable, “Bultmann-failed” sentence.
Though an acute observer of the features of the genre, Bultmann failed to recognize its mnemonic orientation and integration. Consequently, he viewed the narrative settings as owing their existence primarily to pedagogic and aesthetic impulses—they were “pictorial concretions” of “universal truths” expressed by the dominical sayings, giving “vividness” or “lively” expression to the latter. (Kirk 2011, p. 832, emphasis mine)
And yet Kirk doesn’t deny that many dominical sayings must have circulated as discrete items in the tradition, not connected with any particular occasion. Nor does he deny that over time Christians connected these sayings to secondary narratives.
So, what’s his beef?
What memory analysis does, however, is destroy Bultmann’s grand evolutionary tradition-history inferences, for it shows that memory strategies, enacted in various genres, are an inherent property of the tradition. (Kirk 2011, p. 833)
As far as I can tell, slogging through the jargon-laden quagmire of Kirk’s prose, he’s taking Bultmann to task for not understanding memory the way he understands memory and specifically, for the naive belief in the separability of secondary tradition from supposedly genuine history. I am somewhat sympathetic. Bultmann did seem to be overly sure of himself in many cases. And at times, he did not heed Wrede’s warning that the tradition had in many places fused together into an inseparable admixture.
But at other times, Kirk is simply dueling with a Bultmann of his own creation.
Bultmann failed to recognize the essential memorializing connection of the forms of the tradition with the life of Jesus. For Bultmann, symbolic representation and historical representation were mutually exclusive. (Kirk 2011, p. 836)
Problems in NT scholarship
Perhaps one of the biggest problems modern scholars have with respect to understanding Bultmann is their ignorance of his context and the state of scholarship at the time of Bultmann’s ascendance. At the time, he could write about “laws of transmission” in folklore and legends, and be confident that most scholars — especially in Europe — would know exactly what he meant.
Today, the English-speaking world dominates NT scholarship, and the strong swing toward conservatism reflects this domination. The conservative trend in biblical scholarship means far more than the increased appearance of apologetics masked as scholarly research. It also helps explain the inward-looking nature of NT scholarship in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. We see this problem even in those scholars who would look outside the guild for new ideas — in social-scientific criticism and social memory theory, e.g. — which they often misapply, since they lack a firm grounding (or a genuine interest) in either history or sociology.
When Bultmann pointed to the laws of transmission, he wasn’t referring to an idea unique to form criticism. Instead, he was applying the ground-breaking work of Axel Olrik. I checked, and we’ve mentioned Olrik only once so far here on Vridar. In Neil’s review of John Dominic Crossan’s The Power of Parable, we learn that stories in Mark often contain patterns suggesting they came from an oral folklore source. And Crossan is referring not only to Jesus’ parables but also to the narratives in the gospels. That’s a rare thing.
In most cases, Olrik is ignored altogether. Occasionally, modern authors may mention him as a misguided voice from the past, whom no one today takes seriously.
Before we attempt to analyze Mark 3:31-35 in light of the laws of transmission, we should address Kirk’s revelation that “memory strategies . . . are an inherent property of the tradition.” I would submit that at best Kirk has rediscovered something scholars have known for a long time.
Olrik’s Laws Applied to the Pericope of the True Kinsmen
You can find an English translation of Olrik’s seminal essay in Alan Dundes’s The Study of Folklore (1965). It isn’t long, and it’s easy to read.
As Dundes explains in the introduction to the essay, Olrik envisioned his laws a “superorganic” — a kind of “autonomous, abstract process” that exists outside and “above” human processes.
Because Olrik’s epic laws are conceived to be superorganic, they are presented as actively controlling individual narrators. The folk narrator, according to this view, can only blindly obey the epic laws. The superorganic laws are above any individual’s control. This kind of thinking, although it apparently makes folklore somewhat akin to a natural science, takes the folk out of folklore. With this approach, it becomes almost irrelevant that folklore is communicated by human individuals to other human individuals. (Dundes, p. 130)
For our purposes here, I should rather think of Olrik’s laws as extremely strong influences and tendencies at work in oral transmission, which arise for various reasons. Tradents use repeated familiar patterns sometimes because of cultural norms and aesthetics, but mostly because they work. By that, I mean these patterns provide the storyteller a set of easy-to-use tools to capture attention, keep attention, emphasize what’s important, and help the listeners remember what they need to remember.
Let’s begin.
3:31 Then His mother and His brothers arrived, and standing outside they sent word to Him and called Him. (NASB)
Don’t assume the first word of this sentence has anything to do with a smooth transition from one time to the next. Mark simply wrote Kai (and). In the previous story, Jesus was engaging with those who accused him of casting out devils in the name of Beelzebul. Abruptly thereafter, it seems, Jesus’ family appears outside the house.
Many commentators argue, nevertheless, that verses 3:31-35 represent the close of a Markan intercalation that began in verse 20. Jesus enters a house with a crowd. And then we find out Jesus’ kinsmen have heard what their relative is doing and wish to intervene.
3:21 When His own people heard of this, they went out to take custody of Him; for they were saying, “He has lost His senses.” (NASB)
The original Greek — παρ’ αὐτοῦ (par’ autou) — is probably better translated as “his family.” And so Jesus’ family is on the way to him in verse 21, and they finally arrive at verse 31. From a form-critical perspective, we are looking at a literary phenomenon. Mark has created literary suspense with another story.
The pericope of The True Kinsmen, on the other hand, is a self-contained story.
3:32 A crowd was sitting around Him, and they said to Him, “Behold, Your mother and Your brothers are outside looking for You.” (NASB)
In Mark, the crowd is often a character that speaks and acts like one person. Here, the two characters — Jesus and the crowd — talk to each other. The family members stand outside, still and mute. The disciples are mere shadows. Why should this be so?
Olrik explains:
Two is the maximum number of characters who appear at one time. Three people appearing at the same time, each with his own individual identity and role to play would be a violation of tradition. The Law of Two to a Scene (das Gesetz der scenischen Zweiheit) is a strict one. The description of Siegfried’s battle with the dragon can serve as an example. Throughout, only two people appear on the stage at one time: Siegfried and Regin, Siegfried and his mother, Siegfried and Odin, Siegfried and Fafnir, Siegfried and the bird, Siegfried and Grani. The Law of Two to a Scene is so rigid that the bird can speak to Siegfried only after Regin has gone to sleep (and this is entirely superfluous in terms of the epic itself). (Olrik 1965, pp. 134-135, emphasis mine)
Let us restate with emphasis that we are witnessing an oral phenomenon. In literature, three or more people engage in conversations all the time. But in oral folktales, the rule is one-to-one. We can see practical reasons for this convention. Afterward, as we try to recall the story, we need to remember what was said. Adding interlocutors could produce confusion. In the case of Jesus and the crowd, does it matter who he is talking to? Of course not. What matters is the content of Jesus’ speech. Secondarily, the fact that Jesus addresses the crowd and not just his disciples shows this dominical saying is not some private teaching, but something everyone needs to know.
The conversation, such as it is, contains a bit of repetition:
Crowd: “Behold, Your mother and Your brothers are outside looking for You.”
Jesus: “Who are My mother and My brothers?”
Jesus: “Behold My mother and My brothers!”
Why the recapitulation? Olrik puts it this way:
In literature, there are many means of producing emphasis, means other than repetition. For example, the dimensions and significance of something can be depicted by the degree and detail of the description of that particular object or event. In contrast, folk narrative lacks this full-bodied detail, for the most part, and its spare descriptions are all too brief to serve as an effective means of emphasis. (Olrik 1965, pp. 132-133)
Why three times?
The repetition is almost always tied to the number three. But the number three is also a law in and of itself. . . . Three is the maximum number of men and objects which occur in traditional narrative. Nothing distinguishes the great bulk of folk narrative from modern literature and from reality as much as does the number three. Such a ruthlessly rigid structuring of life stands apart from all else. When a folklorist comes upon a three, he thinks, as does the Swiss who catches sight of his Alps again, “Now I am home!” (Olrik 1965, pp. 133)
The observant reader will notice that there appears to be a problem with our assessment since we have a fourth element in the list.
3:35 “For whoever does the will of God, he is My brother and sister and mother.” (NASB)
Both Dibelius and Bultmann noticed the fourth occurrence in v. 35 is different from the first three. Dibelius considered the object story in 30:31-34 original with the “sermonic saying” stapled on later. As Bultmann put it: “a secondary construction which extracts a universal moral from the story.” For his part, Bultmann thought it far more likely that the dominical saying came first, and the instructional story arose from it. In other words, the Kinsmen story is secondary (a polite way of saying “fiction”) and exists to reinforce the original saying. (Bultmann 1963, pp. 29-30)
Conclusion
In either case, we would be wrong to worry about any supposed historical features of a marvelously detailed recollection, since this scene never took place. What happened to Jesus’ family after his pronouncement? Did they protest? Did they give up and go home? It doesn’t matter. Where did it happen? Whose house was it? It doesn’t matter. This story is not a recollection; it is a construction. It is, in Bultmann’s words, “an imaginary situation.”
Once Jesus utters the pronouncement, the purpose of the story has been fulfilled. Mark whisks us off to the next scene, in which Jesus is teaching a crowd by the sea.
We might add here that Olrik’s Importance of Final Position and Concentration on a Leading Character play a part in the way Mark presents this story. The only named character, Jesus, is the only person with anything important to say. Everything else — the time, the place, the crowd, the family, the disciples — is peripheral.
However, the most important point is this: The story’s basic contours look the way they do because the story arose as an oral folktale. Why is there threefold repetition? Because the storyteller wanted to emphasize a certain point so that we recognize it is important and that we must remember it. The magnificent “revelation” of the Memory Mavens — that “mnemonic orientations and integrations” played a role in the formation of NT traditions — is something we’ve known well before biblical scholars stumbled upon Halbwachs.
A society keeps memories alive through oral tradition.
The mind through memory carries culture from generation to generation. How it is possible for a mind to remember and out of nothing to spin complex ideas, messages, and instructions for living, which manifest continuity over time, is one of the greatest wonders one can study, comparable only to human intelligence and thought itself. (Vansina 1985, p. xi)
I’m not saying we can learn nothing from memory theory. Far from it. But I object to the idea that nobody had ever thought about the effects of memory before the mavens came to town. It’s a matter of focus. Redaction criticism focuses on the way the evangelists edited their sources. Rhetorical criticism focuses on the way writers used known methods of rhetoric to convey their messages. Narrative criticism focuses on narrative methods. All of these disciplines give us different perspectives on the New Testament, and all are useful. But we would be fools to assume that no one had ever heard of or took seriously genre, forms, redaction, narration, rhetoric, or sociology before scholars shifted their focus to them.
Bultmann, Rudolf
History of the Synoptic Tradition, 1963, Hendrickson Publishers, Inc.
Kirk, Alan
“Memory Theory and Jesus Research” in Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus, ed. Tom Holmén and Stanley E. Porter, 2010, Brill
Olrik, Axel
“Epic Laws of Folk Narrative” in The Study of Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes, 1965, pp. 129-141 (orig. German pub. in 1908)
Vansina, Jan
Oral Tradition as History, 1985, The University of Wisconsin Press
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A lot of this is based on quite old work. I think the evidence is overwhelming that there was no folk-history at all. The whole story was made up from beginning to end by the writer of Mark. The story is thoroughly derived from the Pauline letters. There is no oral tradition at all behind Mark. “Mark” is the inventor of the narrative.
The case for this is extensive, and actually goes well beyond what I laid out in my book, which really just scratches the surface.
David Oliver Smith’s work shows just how deeply Mark is rooted in Paul. It’s everything, Paul is everything. Every aspect of the story flows from Paul’s letters.
The narrative can’t be a part of an oral tradition either, because the whole narrative is entirely driven by the First Jewish-Roman War. The narrative has no reason to exist prior to the war. None of the scene make sense in a pre-war context. The narrative only makes sense after the war and would only be invented after the war.
The whole talk of oral traditions is nonsense. Mark is a purely literary invention.
Who is G.Mk’s audience? Supposedly the ninety five percent illiterate urban poor. G.Mk looks like unpolished Greek probably because of its unpolished audience, the same for its being mistaken to have oral sources and being cast as it is. If it looks like an oral folktale, it probably looks that way because of its audience. Your six year-old will watch Shrek and love a story pitched at six year-olds; you will appreciate it too because of the nuance aimed at adults. Paul writes of milk and meat; psychics and pneumatics; the literal and the spiritual. G.Mk unsurprisingly seems to pick up in similar vein.
I’m not sure about the idea that GMark is intentionally written with unpolished Greek to appeal to a poor audience. It’s more likely, IMO, that the writer was a native Aramaic writer or that there is some other explanation for the prose, including the possibility that what people have identified as grammatical errors are really elements of literary references and parts of oracular formulas. Unfortunately I don’t know Greek so it’s difficult for me to assess on my own.
I also don’t think that GMark is intended for a poor audience, it rather seems to be directed at an audience that is very scripturally literate.
Whoosh. G.Mk, like Shrek, seems aimed at multiple audiences and seems to have multiple levels of meaning. Its Xtianity is pretty much agreed to have Paul at the root of it and Paul aimed explicitly at the widest possible audience. Much of Paul is pitched at trying to put right misunderstandings of what he was teaching that arose almost indubitably because the last thing his audience was was educated very much; either in torah or Philosophy.
Josephos’ telling of trying to save three crucified friends occurs in the Vita, which is dated to c.100. How long would it have taken for it to have been sufficiently well known to be used to fashion G.Mk? Joseph ben Mathias and “Joseph of Arimathea” seem too coincidental, with their similar actions on top, not for one to have suggested the other. A lot more likely than the rampant speculations of Gregory.
We don’t seem to be able to go much further than ranking plausibilities that rarely get to a useful level of confidence. It’s a very odd hobby for atheists to speculate about books we think are wholey babble. we might be protesting too much. 🙂
That’s not really how I see it. I don’t see either the letters of Paul or the Gospel of Mark as having been produced for the purpose of establishing a religion like Roman Catholicism. That wasn’t the goal of those writers; that wasn’t what they had in mind when they were producing their works.
Their works were used by later 2nd century+ Romans to create a religion based on their misunderstanding of such works. Certainly Paul had an agenda to create converts, but what became of his works was surely well beyond his own possible comprehension and the worship of a Jesus that Paul himself had no conception of.
I don’t think that Mark was written for “dual audiences”. I don’t think there was any oral component to it, that it was intended to be recited, that is was derived from oral stories, that it was part of some ministry, etc. It’s a story that was meant to be studied by scriptural scholars. It’s written much more in line with many of the works from Qumran. It’s like Qumarnic writing meets Virgil’s Aeneid, except GMark is way more sophisticated than the Aeneid.
It is common for literary works to be interpreted in ways well beyond the intention of the author. I think the Gospel of Mark is the ultimate example of that.
I don’t know if that is even plausible. I don’t think anyone was consciously trying to create a religion as you describe. I’ve seen it argued – and I tend to agree with the argument – that Christianity was the first religion as we understand the term; Early Christianity was sui generis.
How do we understand the term? What was different about Christianity than earlier religions?
What exactly do you mean?
G.Mk . . . seems aimed at multiple audiences
Severa, Jiri (2012) [now formatted]. “This Parable Do You Not Understand This Parable ? : Mark’s Recursive Paradoxes as Key to His Gospel”. academia.edu. p. 2.
Perhaps driven by someone reflecting on accounts of it, such as Josephus’s accounts ??
That is certainly a possibility.
r.g. price I am intrigued by your statement: “The narrative [of GMk] can’t be a part of an oral tradition either, because the whole narrative is entirely driven by the First Jewish-Roman War. The narrative has no reason to exist prior to the war. None of the scene make sense in a pre-war context. The narrative only makes sense after the war and would only be invented after the war.”
Do you discuss this in your book? Is there some other key article or two that discusses or establishes that point to your satisfaction? Or, if no bibliography is easily able to be cited, could you briefly elaborate upon or explain that statement here? I am not disagreeing, just interested in assessing the strength of the argument, e.g. does the Passion Story require post-War to make sense? Does the role of John the Baptist? And so on. Thanks (and thanks for your many interesting comments in general).
Yes, I discuss this in my book, some portion of which can be read here: http://www.decipheringthegospels.com/preview.html
The scriptural references in the Gospel of Mark overwhelmingly relate to passages about destruction befalling the Jews. In addition, wars were the main inspiration for prophetic stories like this. When we look at comparable stories from Greek and Jewish literature, almost all of them are written in reaction to wars, either as explanations for the success of a people or as an explanation for a defeat. The events of the war are frames as having been foretold or as having been part destined.
Robert Miller explains in Helping Jesus Fulfill Prophecy (https://www.westarinstitute.org/blog/helping-jesus-fulfill-prophecy/) how tradition use of Jewish prophecy had interacted with Greek oracular traditions to yield the types of prophetic usages that we see in the Gospels. We actually find precedent for this in the Qumranic writings.
I also talk about this in a new piece a did finished for a John Loftus anthology, called “Why the Romans Believed the Gospels” (that’s my section, his book is “The Case Against Miracles”).
Basically, in the Qumranic writings is where we see the reinterpretation for old scriptures for new contexts, as this is a features of Greek prophecy. Both Paul and the Gospel of Mark use scriptural reinterpretation in the exact same way that we see in the Qumranic writings.
But to be specific, in GMark we find stuff like Jesus’ foretelling of the destruction of the Temple, which is clearly a post-war oracle. But this post-war oracle relates to the the temple cleansing scene, and the temple cleansing scene is also based on a scriptural reference to Hosea 9, which is a passage about how god will send foreign armies to destroy the Jews for being unfaithful to him. Again, a post-war theme on top of a post-war theme. Furthermore, the temple cleaning scene is foreshadowed in in the opening of Mark via Mark 1:2 which refers to Malachi 3:1, which refers to the Lord coming to his temple which presages the unleashing of the Lords wrath.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. The destruction of the temple is central to the story and is alluded to in multiple ways many times throughout the story.
On top pf that we have stuff like the recognition of Jesus by the centurion after he dies on the cross, while all the disciple have abandoned him, and essentially all the Jews have turned against him. We find nothing in the pre-Gospel writings to suggest such a view, but such a view makes sense in light of the destruction of the war, as an explanation for why the Jews suffered and were defeated by the Gentiles. And keep in mind, that the Qumranic writings are filled with discussions of the Last Days (which are presented as coming very soon) in which it is supposed to be the Jews who triumph over the Gentiles. The First Jewish-Roman War is essentially exactly what the Qumranic sect was predicted, as massive battle between Jews and Gentiles, but what was supposed to happen according to them was that the armies of heaven were going to come down and join forces with the Jews to lead them to victory. That didn’t happen. The story of Jesus in mark is presented as the explanation for why that didn’t happen.
Thank you r.g. Your argument of post-War does seem strong. I see from your book, Deciphering the Gospels, that you argue that the Gospel of Mark “is what introduced the idea that Jesus was a real person who had lived on earth. Every biography of Jesus descends either directly or indirectly from this one story” (p. xxii).
Let me cross-examine that. About 300 CE Sossianus Hierocles, as told by the later Lactantius, “affirmed that Christ Himself was put to flight by the Jews, and having collected a band of nine hundred men, committed robberies” (Lactantius, Divine Institutes, 5,3).
I think I know where Sossianus got that: the reference is to what Josephus calls “Jesus, the brigand chief on the borderland of Ptolemais … with his force, which numbered eight hundred … band of brigands” (Vita 104-111). In other words, Sossianus represents Jesus Christ as having been that Jesus active at the time of the Revolt. As a separate point, there is little doubt to me that that that Jesus of Josephus is the same as Jesus ben Sapphias “archon” at Tiberias (Vita 66, 134), “ringleader … of the party of the sailors and destitute class, joined by some Galileans”, “unrivaled in fomenting sedition and revolution”, who is also the same figure as “Jesus son of Sapphas, one of the chief priests” named as one of the original commanders of the Revolt (War 2.566). I further believe that this is also the same “Galilean named Jesus, was staying in Jerusalem, who had with him a company of six hundred men under arms” who escorted a delegation of officials from Jerusalem sent to depose Josephus as governor of Galilee (Vita 200), and that that explains why Jesus ben Sapphias is described as functioning in the role of what Josephus describes as “archon” at Tiberias appearing to conduct a hearing or trial of Josephus over some charges. In short, this Jesus was a major figure of the Revolt. Spelling variants on the patronymic suggest that the variants are versions of how Jesus’s patronymic may have sounded in hearsay or orally. I am considering whether Jesus ben Sapphias might be the son of Joseph Caiaphas (Joseph without the theophoric prefix –> “sapphas”).
Based on some further spelling variant similarities (this point requires further study), I am also looking at whether Jesus ben Sapphas may have been “Jesus son of Thebuthi” the high priest who surrendered the wealth of the temple to the Romans during the siege of Jerusalem, said to have done so with the assistance of temple treasurer “Phineas” who I suspect may be the same “Phanni, son of Samuel”, high priest of the temple installed by the zealots in 67 CE (War 4.155). Josephus gives no further information concerning who functioned as high priest after that, in the period 67-70 CE, though the default assumption has always been that it would continue to be Phanni since Josephus never specifies differently. It occurs to me however on the basis of who was surrendering the temple wealth at the end, that Jesus son of Thebuthi (= Jesus ben Sapphas, arguably) could have been either the final functioning high priest of the temple or in control of the temple at the end; also to be identified with the otherwise-unspecified high priest named Jesus said to have surrendered during the siege at War 6.114. The surrender would have been done in exchange for a pledge of his life from the Romans, but such pledges were not always kept. Josephus never identifies who was the one out of three crucified at whose intercession he was able to save one alive, other than that he knew him, but the Josephus story certainly sounds like it turns up in the Gospel Passion story of Jesus taken down from the cross at the intercession of Joseph of arimethea and seen alive again, peshered as having been a resurrection from the dead fulfilling the scriptures.
That is, the Gospel of Mark identifies Jesus Christ with the unnamed crucifixion survivor of Josephus of 70 CE, just as the later Sossianus of 300 CE identifies Josephus’s Jesus ben Sapphas of 68 CE as Jesus Christ. Reasoning backward from the Gospel Passion Story (as possibly deriving therefrom), combined with plausibility as to time and place in the Josephus account, it is tempting to consider that the unnamed crucifixion survivor out of three of Josephus of 70 CE was a double-crossed Jesus ben Sapphas, who surrendered on a pledge from the Romans for his life which was not honored (but who then on the intervention of Josephus fortuitously did survive the cross). The medieval Josippon, for what it is worth with its extraneous traditions from who knows where, has “Jesus ben Schaftai” (= gr. War text Jesus ben Thebuthis), the high priest who surrendered the temple wealth, made by Titus and Josephus second in command under Josephus of all the surviving priests of Jerusalem, following his surrender.
Then I want to look further at “Jesus ben Damnaeus”, named as briefly having been high priest 62 CE of Ant. 20, perhaps to be identified with the Jesus “called Christ” brother of James of the immediately preceding context. Nothing whatever is known of Jesus ben Damnaeus apart from the internal possible exegetical reading that he may be the brother of the James mentioned just before (and therefore possibly identified by either a marginal gloss or Josephus, whichever it was, as Jesus Christ). Is the otherwise apparently unattested name “Damnaeus” conceivably not a proper name but derivative from an epithet, from Latin damnatus, “damned” (condemned, or damnatio memoriae, erasure of memory)?
The question is: is Sossianus’s identification of Christ Jesus as Josephus’s Jesus ben Sapphas at the time of the War a confusion of identities of Josephus’s Jesus ben Sapphas with GMark’s different Jesus? Or was it not a confusion of identity, but simply a different and arguably historical tradition of the same Jesus who otherwise appears in the Gospel of Mark?
All that said, I agree your case is powerful in arguing that “the entire narrative is a postwar narrative, developed entirely after the war, in reaction to the war” (p. 321). What I am bringing to attention is that there is a significant Jesus figure, an historical Jesus, playing an important role as a figure in that Revolt, even though told by Josephus in fractured ways. If the War shaped the storytelling of the Gospel of Mark, is it possible even more specifically that this Jesus did as well?
Yes, I see your point. Also, BTW, sorry for all the typos in the prior post :p lol
Yeah I think what you say is possible, but that still wouldn’t make such a Jesus “the historical Jesus Christ.” At best it would be Josephus’ story that was used as inspiration for a small element of the story. But that would still certainly be significant. Yet, one would wonder why Jesus’ execution is set under Pilate if that were the case. That’s one ting I’m trying to figure out: why “Mark” chose to set the story in the time of Pilate.
But trying to sort out all of these details becomes impossible at a certain level, especially when we are dealing with confusion on top of confusion. So much stuff is mis-attributed by ancient writers it’s hard to really establish much certainty about anything.
I’m not convinced that the writer of Mark used Josephus, but I don’t think it’s unlikely. Basically I’m not convinced that he did nor am I convinced that he didn’t. It might not be possible to really prove it, but there are certainly several things that such a proposition would seem to explain.
I agree r.g., the dating to the time of Pilate calls for explanation. But consider this. The trial of James, brother of Jesus, by high priest Ananus ben Ananus of ca. 62 CE of Ant 20, may reflect a wider high-priestly-family rivalry, and Josephus’s account suggests charges and trials were wider than James alone. The high priest immediately preceding Ananus ben Ananus was Joseph Cabi ben Simon. Perhaps “Cabi” is another instance of a surname spelled as its sound was heard, and that spelling reflects a variant of the sound underlying the name “Caiaphas”. If so, then there is the combination “caiaphas” (cabi), who was high priest that year, and another high priest Ananus (= Annas), the same two names of high priests who figure in the Gospels’ story of Jesus’s trial–at the same time as Jesus’s brother and others associated with him, perhaps Jesus himself, were tried by a sanhedrin led by Annas. Such a sanhedrin may well have included as a leading participant the preceding high priest of that year Joseph Cabi, in its deliberations 62 CE.
From this, and on the assumption that the stories of the trial of Jesus reflected in the Gospels are from a single composition (probably not earlier than 90s CE, if coeval in composition with the composition of GMark itself), one could get an explanation by simple mistake, in the dating of the trial of Jesus misunderstood as dated to the time of the earlier Joseph Caiaphas, from which the Pilate dating would have been generated.
In the Gospels, Annas the second high priest of the trial of Jesus comes out of nowhere in a 30s CE context, whereas in 62 CE Annas actually is the name of the high priest running the trial. All of the versions of the trial of Jesus of the Gospels even have traditions that Jesus was released (as “barabbas”) as the outcome of his trial instead of condemned. But never mind that: I am focusing on the juxtposition of 62 CE which has both a short-lived high priest Joseph Cabi, high priest that year, and a leading role of a high priest Annas (completely anomalous in the conventional 30 CE understanding), at the inferred time of circles associated with James the brother of Jesus being tried on capital charges. The hypothesis would be that a story of a trial of Jesus in 62 turns up in the Gospels’ version mistakenly misdated to the time of the earlier Joseph Caiaphas and Pilate.
I don’t know if this is a viable explanation or not. Just brainstorming.
On the assumptions that both Seutonius and Tacitus’s Christ references are genuine, which I do not contest, it seems to me Seutonius is referring to a garbled report of messianic agitation and by inference implies the existence of a non-Jesus davidic-messiah-named anti-Roman Fourth Philosophy ideology, with the name “christian” having originated secondarily as an outsider description therefore not attested as applied to Judah of Jerusalem (from Galilee), the sophist credited by Josephus with having innovated the anti-Roman ideology which Josephus calls the fourth philosophy, a philosophy associated on other grounds with anti-Roman davidic-messianism. Therefore there is no Jesus in Seutonius’s Claudius-era Chrestus agitation among Jews in Rome (= garbled reference to non-Jesus Jewish anti-Roman messianic agitation). Tacitus’s 116 CE reference to Christ dated to the time of Pilate would reflect information from contemporary Christians and establish a terminus ad quem of 116 CE for when the Jesus/Pilate dating became believed by Christians.
Yeah. there are a variety of possible explanations, but none entirely satisfactory. What Giuseppe mentions is possible, though I don’t find that entirely convincing.
Other possibilities I think are that whoever “Paul” was, he actually died during the reign of Pilate. In Mark Jesus is heavily based on Paul, and it could be that “Mark” knew Paul died at that time and thus set the Crucifixion at that time. This is likely never be provable.
Another possibility is is that the writer of Mark made use of materials from the Qumran group. I find several things that lead me to believe that the writer of Mark was familiar with material from Qumran. According to a prophecy from Qumran, the Final Battle was to begin 40 years after the death of the Teacher of Righteousness. If you go back 40 years from 67 CE that gets you to 27 CE, which is during the reign of Pilate.
So, if the writer of Mark was treating the First Jewish-Roman War as “the Final Battle”, and he was using the prophecy that the Final Battle would begin 40 years after the death of the Teacher of Righteousness, and he was conflating Jesus with the Teacher of Righteousness, that would cause him to put Jesus to death during Pilate’s reign.
Again, likely not provable.
Gregory wrote, –
A pertinent question might be: was this account of Sossianus Hierocle a literary device of Lactantius? ie. was it Lactantius using Sossianus Hierocle to “affirmed that Christ Himself was put to flight by the Jews”?
Do you think there is a case to be made that Sossianus did not write or mean what Lactantius has represented? Could you elaborate?
Why did Mark connect thd his invented Jesus with Pilate?
In the Old Testament the word תורה ( ּi.e., Torah) is used for God’s Word, especially
referring to the whole of the Pentateuch. With that said, the noun torah comes from verb, yarah, that means to throw something, a javelin (Latin Pilum), say, so that it hits its mark. The word that hits its mark is torah.
Within the New Testament the penetrating nature of the Word is also shown in Hebrews 4:12:
“For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”
Not coincidentially Pilate divides the spirit (Jesus called Christ) from the soul (Barabbas).
Pilate (homo pilatus, the man armed with javelim), is allegory of the Law (Torah) that kills. While the Spirit gives life.
I read from this book (of a mythicist author) that the reason the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel is 50 years old, is because the his author had confused the Annas of the previous Gospels with the historical Annas of 62 CE, hence placing the Jesus trial in that context.
What Greg is saying is that “Mark” (author) did the reverse operation: the historical Jesus lived in 60 CE and he was transposed by “Mark” under Pilate.
Exactly Giuseppe. And thanks for bringing to attention the reference, Etienne Weill-Raynal, La Chronologie des Evangiles (1968) (which I have just ordered). I was not aware that the suggestion had been made in reverse.
Why Pilate?
Following the Greg’s suggestions, I speculate about the possibility of a confusion of identity between a certain Pinchas and Pilate:
http://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5128#p98556
It would be intriguing to find some evidence about Jesus ben Saphat condemned by the high priest Phanni, son of Samuel or, that is equivalent, by the Zealots.
Thanks for the link Giuseppe. You cite San. 106b, “At 33 years Balaam the lame was killed by Pinchas (Phineas) the robber”, in which Balaam seems to mean Jesus. The name Phineas seems drawn from Phineas son of Eleazar son of Aaron of Num 31:6, but the way it is used seems to stand in for the killing of Jesus which seems somewhat odd. You raise the question whether the name in the rabbinic tradition could be related to the temple treasurer at the time of the surrender of Jesus ben Thebuti of 70 CE. If Jesus ben Thebuti was crucified by the Romans despite a pledge of safety (per conjecture), the question would be whether the rabbinic tradition alludes to a role of Phineas in Jesus’s fate.
I don’t know, but I can develop the case for identifying Jesus ben Thebuti as Jesus ben Sapphas (to my knowledge, not previously argued), as follows.
War 3.450-452 Loeb edition (Thackeray) has “Jesus son of Saphat (Σαφάτου)”; “the ringleader of this band of brigands”; “troops of Jesus”. But a footnote of Loeb says “Most mss. have τούφα”, i.e. a manuscript variant confusion between SAPHAT and TOUPHA, with Thackeray preferring the reading Saphat of two codices, Marcianus and Vaticanus, over the other Greek manuscripts which read “Toupha”.
At Vita 66, 134, this Jesus is (Loeb reading) “son of Saphias” (Σαπφίας), “ringleader … of the party of sailors and destitute class”. Joined by some Galileans he set Herod’s palace on fire, which Josephus blames on Jesus even though Josephus also indicates Jesus was working in coordination with Josephus’s direction (seemingly in some arrangement in which Josephus was civilian governor and Jesus was leading a military wing by arrangement with Josephus, with Josephus claiming credit for Jesus’s military actions at times, and blaming Jesus for actions from which Josephus wishes to distance himself, at other times). “Jesus and his followers then massacred all the Greek residents of Tiberias and any others who, before the outbreak of hostilities, had been their enemies.”
At Vita 134 (above) Loeb (Thackeray) has a footnote: “mss Σαπιθα” (Sapitha). That is, Thackeray emends without any manuscript support the Greek spelling from what all of the Gr. manuscripts actually read, “Sapitha”.
War 6.387-391, Loeb, “one of the priests named Jesus son of Thebuti (Θεβουθεῖ), after obtaining a sworn pledge of protection from Caesar, on condition of his delivering up some of the sacred treasures, came out and handed over the wall of the sanctuary two lampstands similar to those deposited in the sanctuary, along with tables, bowls, and platters, all of solid gold and very massive; he further delivered up the veils, the high-priests’ vestments, including the precious stones, and many other articles used in public worship. Furthermore, the treasurer of the temple, by name Phineas, being taken prisoner, disclosed the tunics and girdles worn by the priests [more listed] … procuring for him [Phineas], although a prisoner of war, the pardon accorded to the refugees”.
Josippon (medieval, not regarded as reliable in mainstream scholarship, regarded as drawing from Latin translations of Josephus and other unknown sources), has as parallel: “Josua a priest, sonne of Schaftai the hygh priest” (I am quoting from a republished English translation of Josippon of 1575-1579, emphasis mine). Gr. War texts “Thebuti” = Josippon “Schaftai”, and in Josippon Schaftai/Thebuti is said to have been a high priest (Gr. War only says “priest”).
War 2.566 “Jesus son of Sapphas, one of the chief priests” (Σαπφᾶ [Loeb]), but Loeb has a footnote indicating that is an emendation from mss. reading Σαπφὼ or Σαπφὰν) is listed among other commanders, most from high-priestly-family circles, at the outset of the Revolt. Because this Jesus son of Sapphas is sent as a military commander to Idumea, some scholars think he must be a different figure from the brigand leader/military organizer-for-Josephus Jesus son of Sapphas of Galilee with whom Josephus dealt. But the names are the same and Josephus’s writings reflect multiple and often-contradictory sources cobbled together with inadequate (to put it mildly) final editing to harmonize. In this light the two Jesus ben Sapphas figures can be identified as references to the same Jesus.
The Josippon name “Schaftai” for gr. Jesus ben Thebuti seems to reflect the gr. name “Sapitha” which is the mss. reading of the patronymic of Jesus ben Sapphas at Vita 134. And at War 3.450 the patronymic of the gr. mss reading Jesus “ben Toupha” (= ben Sapphas) sounds as if it could be a variant of “Thebuti” (ph/b interchange).
Therefore there is confusion of names of the patronymics of the two Jesuses, such that the question is raised whether these two Jesuses are two or one. In light of Josephus’s known cobbling together from sources with inadequate cross-referencing or harmonizing of contradictions, I believe the preponderance of evidence weighs in favor that these are the same Jesus, with the variant spellings of the patronymic reflecting differences in pronunciation with reference to the same individual in testimonies and hearsay in sources used by Josephus.
Greg,
about Jesus ben Tebuthi last high priest, coincidentially or not, there was also another Tebuthi in Jerusalem during the 70 CE, according to Eusebius/Hegesippus.
William Adler, “On the Priesthood of Jesus”, pp 69-108 in vol. 1 of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, ed. T. Burke and B. Landau (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016). Flavio G. Nuvolone, “La Legende du Christ, XXIIe et dernier pretre du temple de Jerusalem: priorite du texte long”, pp. 203-232 in Anthropos Laikos: melanges Alexandre Faivre a l’occasion de ses 30 ans d’enseignement, ed. M.-A. Vannier, O. Wermelinger, and G. Wurst (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires, 2000). (Most of the Adler article is readable on google books.)
“On the Priesthood of Jesus” aka “the Confession (or, Apology) of Theodosius”, is a 7th-8th CE story of Jesus being selected and registered as a priest following debate concerning Jesus’s paternity and genealogical qualifications, which, however, were satisfied. Nuvolone and Adler suppose there was a prior Jewish source of obscure origins underneath the story in its present form. In this story, Jesus being a priest is claimed to have been verified in the writings of Josephus. Again, it seems as if some ancient exegete has read a Revolt-era priest Jesus as Jesus Christ. Also, the character Theodosius in the story tells of his discovery that no other name appears after the name of Jesus in a written registry of priests kept by the Jews in the temple until it fell to the Romans. Theodosius concluded that Jesus was the final priest after which “kings and priests have ceased in Israel”.
Readings of Hebrews and Revelation would take on new meaning if Jesus was the last high priest of the temple destroyed in 70. I am convinced that Revelation reflects a series of oracles from 70 CE composed during the siege of Jerusalem; that Rev 11 was written at the time of beast head #6 = Vespasian (with the preceding three being skipped, and Nero #5), and #7 and the expected terrible return of Nero #8 as genuine prophecy (i.e. future); and that Rev 11:1-2 dates the start of the 42 month period to a time-setting in the siege when the city was taken by the Romans but the rebels continue to hold the temple, datable to September 70 per Josephus. The authoring voice of the oracles expects doom on the righteous as well as on the wicked. There are no illusions at this stage in this anti-Roman text that the Revolt will succeed. Instead, the vision is of future heavenly vengeance which will destroy the Roman empire and vindicate the presently-doomed righteous.
I have noticed that those oracles of Rev cease, by coincidence, at the time Jesus, who may have been the leading priest in control of the temple and its activities, surrenders to the Romans. I am beginning to suspect that Jesus may be the source of the oracles of Revelation, even though Revelation is published in the name of “John”. It would be an elegant explanation of why Revelation has such focus on Jesus, if Jesus was the high priest inside the besieged temple who produced the oracles. When Jesus quit the temple and surrendered, the oracles of Revelation also stopped. All that needs to be supposed is that those oracles were subsequently collected and organized with glosses, written with Jesus as the recently slain Lamb who was now in heaven, in a narrative framework in the name of John in a finished composition with cover letters to the seven churches of Asia Minor, as a possible reconstruction. The message of hope of Revelation would be the genuine prophecies of the return of the slain Lamb from heaven; the new Jerusalem coming down; the defeat of the returned Nero; the destruction of the city of Rome; etc. and etc., all still future. In all this time it has been considered bedrock fact that no writing of Jesus exists. I do not know if this is correct, but I consider it possible that some of Revelation, which reflects the exact circumstances, authoritative status, intimate temple-ritual knowledge, time-setting, and anti-Roman, pro-Revolt Tendenz as that of the high priest Jesus of the Roman siege of 70, may have been authored by that Jesus, and that this ultimately could become a first-ever identification, meeting a threshold of credibility to historians, of possible writing from Jesus.
“Phineas”, who Greg suspects may be the same “Phanni, son of Samuel”, high priest of the temple installed by the zealots in 67 CE (War 4.155), remembers someway the description of Simon of Cyrene coming “out of the country”:
By fortune the lot so fell as to demonstrate their iniquity after the plainest manner, for it fell upon one whose name was Phannias, the son of Samuel, of the village Aphtha. He was a man not only unworthy of the high priesthood, but that did not well know what the high priesthood was, such a mere rustic was he! Yet did they hail this man, without his own consent, out of the country, as if they were acting a play upon the stage, and adorned him with a counterfeit thee; they also put upon him the sacred garments, and upon every occasion instructed him what he was to do.
Only, they are the Zealots to move him, not the Romans. Is there some irony in action?
If Phineas was crucified while the priest Jesus was freed thanks Josephus (so Vermeiren), then this Phineas would play the role of the Cyrenaic, who was crucified in the place of Jesus according to some “heretical” voices.
The Jesus ben Panthera of talmudic memory may be the same Jesus ben Saphat, since “Pan Thora” may deride the Jesus’s presumption of possessing the whole law “into his hands”:
…and it was Jesus, the son of Sapphias, who principally set them on. He was ruler in Tiberias, a wicked man, and naturally disposed to make disturbances in matters of consequence; a seditious person he was indeed, and an innovator beyond every body else. He then took the laws of Moses into his hands, and came into the midst of the people, and said,” O my fellow citizens! if you are not disposed to hate Josephus on your own account, have regard, however, to these laws of your country, which your commander-in-chief is going to betray; hate him therefore on both these accounts, and bring the man who hath acted thus insolently, to his deserved punishment.” (Life, 27)
Greg,
there would be another evidence in P52 about Titus being mentioned and not Pilate:
http://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5132
It is a suggestive possibility.
Alert eyes Giuseppe. Having done quite a bit of work reading fragmentary Qumran texts studying specks of ink in slides under a microscope this is the kind of question I find interesting. However I think the commenter Kunigunde Kreuzerin at the link you gave explained the matter: it is a routine Pi as expected for “Pilate” and the lower part of the right vertical stroke is incomplete due to being at the edge. The top horizontal stroke has a slight gap but that is common defacing as seen in other letter strokes. The parts of the letter that survive match Pi and do not match the examples of Tau on the same fragment. From what I read expert estimates of palaeographic dating for P52 seem to center ca. second half of 2nd CE as most likely, with earlier 2nd or early 3rd also possible. The Passion Stories of all four gospels always have Pilate (no textual variants with a different name to my knowledge), and P52’s agreement with Jn 18 indicates it is a copy of the canonical text, so Pi starting Pilate is expected at that position, in agreement with the remains of the letter that survive.