While recently focussed on translating older works I have been overlooking other works I have translated over the years and know that some readers may find of interest. Copyright forbids me from making many of them public but I could work my way through them one by one and see what can be shared. Here is one that I completed last year — though much of it is also available on Hermann Detering’s website in a series of posts.
by “the last of the Dutch radicals”, G. A. V. D. BERGH VAN EYSINGA
CONTENTS:
FIRST PART
PREAMBLE …….8
INTRODUCTION …….9
I. GOSPELS …….35
1. The Gospel according to Matthew …….35
2. Mark …….45
3. Luke……. 51
4. John …….58
5. Peter …….66
6. Scattered Gospel Fragments…. 68
II. ACTS …….76
1. The Acts of the Apostles …….76
2. ofJohn …….83
3. Paul …….89
4. The Martyrdom of Polycarp …….91
III. LETTERS …….94
1. The Epistle of Paul to the Romans … 100
2. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians … 107
3. ” Second Epistle of the Corinthians . . 112
4. Letter to the Galatians …….115
5. “”Ephesians …….121
6. “” Philippians …. 126
7. Colossians …….129
8. Both Letters of Paul to the Thessalonians …….133
9. Paul’s Letter to Philemon ………136
10. The Pastoral Epistles …….140
11. The Letter to the Hebrews …….146
12. The Epistle of James …….152
13. The First Letter of Peter …….156
14. The Second Letter of Peter …….159
15. The Letter of Jude …….161
16. The Three Letters of John …….162
SECOND PART
LETTERS (cont’d)
17. The Letter of Barnabas …….165
18. The First Letter of Clement to the Corinthians……… 171
19. The Second Letter of Clement to the Corinthians………179
20. The Letters of Ignatius and Polycarp……..183
21. The Letter of Ptolemy to Flora…….. 194
IV. REVELATIONS……..198
1. The Ascension of Isaiah……..200
2. The Revelation of John………203
3. The Revelation of Peter……. 210
4. The Shepherd of Hermas ……..213
V. RELIGIOUS TEXTBOOKS………223
1. The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles…….. 223
2. Athenagoras’ Resurrection of the Dead……. 229
VI. APOLOGETICS………233
1. The Plea of Aristides……..235
2. The Apologies of Justin Martyr……..238
3. Justin’s Dialogue with the Jew Trypho……..247
4. The Supplication of Athenagoras……….251
5. The Letter to Diognetus………….253
6. Tatian’s Speech to the Greeks…….256
7. The Octavius of Minucius Felix…….259
VII. READINGS…….264
1. A Psalm of the Nahassenen……..264
2. Benedictory Songs and liturgical texts from theActs of Thomas…….266
3. The Odes of Solomon…….274
VIII. THEOSOPHICAL AND EXEGETICAL FRAGMENTS…….281
Valentinus and his school………..281
Two weeks ago I posted my notice of a translation of Gustav Volkmar’s 1857 study of the Gospel of Mark that had been written for a general audience. This post is to notify interested readers of the availability of a translation of his far more academic 1876 work, Mark and the Synopsis of the Gospels according to the Documentary Text and the History of the Life of Jesus. Volkmar was clearly devoted to Jesus as the historical figure who changed the world but his study of the gospel narratives is intriguing for its scholarly and pioneering approach to identifying the sources of the Gospel of Mark, including his view that it was in part a reaction against the Book of Revelation. See the extract below of an essay by Anne Vig Skoven for further details.
Below is a copy of the static page that is now available in the right hand margin of this blog.
I have now translated two of Gustav Volkmar’s works:
Skoven, Anne Vig. “Mark as Allegorical Rewriting of Paul: Gustav Volkmar’s Understanding of the Gospel of Mark.” In Mark and Paul. Part II, For and against Pauline Influence on Mark: Comparative Essays, edited by Eve-Marie Becker, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, and Mogens Müller, 13–27. Beihefte Zur Zeitschrift Für Die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft Und Die Kunde Der Älteren Kirche; Volume 199. Berlin, Germany ; Boston, Massachusetts: De Gruyter, 2014. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110314694.13/html?lang=en
.
[Anne Vig Skoven who wrote this essay was a PhD student at the University of Copenhagen until her tragic, premature death in 2013]
Unlike exegetes of the patristic tradition and also unlike most of 20th century scholarship, biblical scholars of the 19th century were not foreign to the idea that Paulinism was to be found in the Gospel of Mark. The founder of the so-called Tubingen School, Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860), for instance, regarded the Gospel of Mark as a synthesis of Petrine and Pauline traditions. . . .
In 1857, the German exegete Gustav Hermann Joseph Philipp Volkmar (1809-93) characterized the Gospel of Mark as a Pauline gospel. Although Mark’s story was concerned with Jesus’ life and death, it was also, so Volkmar argued, permeated by Pauline theology. During his lifetime, Volkmar remained a solitary figure, and David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874) once considered him a “närriger Kauz” [= a ludicrous little owl]. Nevertheless, at the end of the 19th century knowledge of Volkmar’s thesis and writings was widespread among German speaking scholars. His thesis drove a wedge into German biblical scholarship; Adolf Jülicher (1857-1938) and William Wrede (1859-1906) both appreciated Volkmar’s work, Albert Schweizer (1875-1965) and his student Martin Werner (1887-1964) did not. . . .
. . . . From 1833 to 1852, he taught in various Gymnasien, in which he primarily worked within the field of philology and classical studies. In 1850 he published a book on Marcion and the Gospel of Luke, in which he claimed against Baur and Albrecht Ritschl (1822- 1889) that Marcion’s gospel was a rewriting of Luke.’ According to Adolf Jülicher, Volkmar had deserved a chair for this – today widely accepted – thesis. However, a series of dramatic events prevented that. Due to church political controversies, Volkmar was arrested in the classroom in 1852 and charged with lese majesty and dismissed from his job. In 1853, he was called lo Zürich where he was finally appointed professor of New Testament studies in 1863. In Zürich he published the works which are of special relevance to the present study:
Die Religion Jesu und ihre erste Entwickelung nach dem gegenwärtigen Stande der Wissenschaft (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1857); a popular work, which introduced Volkmar’s thesis of Mark as a Pauline gospel.
Die Evangelien, oder Marcus und die Synopsis der kanonischen und ausserkanonischen Evangelien nach dem ältesten Text mit historisch-exegetischem Commentar (Leipzig: Ludw. Fr. Fues Verlag, 1870); a scholarly commentary on the Gospel of Mark, in which Volkmar, against Baur, forwarded his thesis that Mark was the first gospel, Luke the second and Matthew only the third. The commentary was republished in a slightly edited second edition with a new title in:
Marcus und die Synopse der Evangelien nach dem urkundlichen Text und das Geschichtliche vom Leben Jesu (Zürich: Verlag von Caesar Schmidt, 1876).
In addition to Volkmar’s traditional commentaries on the Markan text, the books from 1870/76 offer an early reception history of the Markan narratives. . . . .
In his biographical sketch of Gustav Volkmar from 1908, Adolf Jülicher characterizes Volkmar as an exegete whose work was framed to the one side by Baur’s Tendenztheorie and to the other side by Strauss’ scepticism (772 f). Yet, he differs from both schools on two important issues: historicity and Markan priority. With regard to Strauss, Volkmar welcomes his critique of the rationalistic and harmonizing exegesis of early 19th century scholarship. But he is also critical of Strauss’ concept of the gospel narratives as mythoi, instead he prefers the term “Poësie”. Unlike Strauss Volkmar emphasizes the historicity of the gospel narratives.Yet, his understanding of historicity, as well as his method are closer to those of 20th century redaction criticism than to the Leben Jesu Forschung of his own century. With regard to the Tübingen School, Volkmar treats the early Christian literature as Tendenzschriften. His overall project was to reconstruct the history of the gospel traditions as a reflection of the developments in early Christianity. But unlike the Tübingen exegetes, he accepted, as already mentioned, the thesis of Markan priority. Consequently, he rejected the idea of an “Ur-Evangelium” which was needed for the Tübingen explanation of the gospel relations. Likewise he rejected the idea of a Spruchbuch or Schriftquelle (1870, vili-xi; 1876, 646) – later identified as Q. According to Volkmar, Mark’s only sources were: the Old Testament writings, four Pauline letters (Romans, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians), the oral tradition of early Christian communities – and, surprisingly, Revelation.
(pp 13-16)
The works I have translated and made available here are Volkmar’s 1857 Die Religion Jesu and Marcus und die Synopse der Evangelien (1876)
The Religion of Jesus and its first development according to the current state of scholarly knowledge
. . . he told me that while she wasn’t a stupid person, he described her as “someone who’s always had trouble finding a place in life, in terms of career and goals, and what her wants are and what her drives are. And as a result, she’s always been—as smart as she is—easily pulled into various groups and things. . . . The Deep State narrative, Eric felt, was attractive to her because it explained things to her “on some sort of abstract level as somebody who’s just sort of struggled to find their place in the world.
Colin Dickey, Under the Eye of Power — all excerpts from Apple Books
That passage reminded me of what I had read about the appeal of Donald Trump back in 2016: Understanding Trump’s Rise, Presidency — and a Positive Resolution to the Crisis — It painfully reminded me, too, of so much I have come to learn (and share in many posts here) about the appeal of cults, terrorist groups and suicide bombers. The same process of radicalization appears to me to be common to all.
We are family
As Miranda lost some of her friends, they were replaced by another community, one online that not only provided support and reassurance, but welcomed her as a soldier in a tremendous battle. “Take up this cause, because it’s the right cause—here’s all these people who know this is the right cause and will back you up and believe the same things that you do. And it’s got the extra bonus of ‘You’re special,’ on top of it, because “most of the world doesn’t even know that this is happening.”
The problem with dismissing “these people”
This attitude—that on some level we are being manipulated by deceitful journalists, and our emotions are being tweaked by social media algorithms, creating a landscape where conspiracy theories are allowed to flourish as they never have before—is a common one. But it creates a picture where conspiracy believers are themselves oddly passive: they are blank slates, onto which Fox and Facebook project harmful content, and, like children, they are powerless to resist. In the same way that Christian moralists argued that listening to heavy metal would lead impressionable teenagers to become Satanists, we have come to believe that social media companies like Facebook are so powerful that merely logging on can transform someone from a rational, thinking human being into a conspiracy obsessed paranoiac.
This argument has the benefit of offering a reassuring narrative to those of us not in journalism or on the board of Facebook: it’s not my fault I was exposed to this disinformation, I’m a passive consumer. Focusing on algorithms, on social media giants, and on journalists all has the soothing effect of encouraging us to see ourselves as powerless, passive receivers of information, rather than people who actively are shaping our reality.
As Twitter’s cofounder Evan Williams put it in 2017, there is a problem with the Internet, in that it rewards extremes. “Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The Internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it tries to supply them.” Which is to say, of course the Internet enables our worst behavior. But the behavior is ours to begin with. We believe things not just because Facebook feeds them to us; we believe them because we want to.
This emphasis on social media and the Internet also opens up space for the belief that a movement like QAnon is somehow new, something that has appeared from nowhere, a spontaneous upswelling of paranoia and ignorance. As should also be evident by now, conspiracy theories have been a hallmark of American democracy from its inception. Conspiracy theories—particularly those surrounding politics, which inevitably includes fears of secret groups—have been used time and time again to ameliorate unreconcilable contradictions that spur cognitive dissonance. A vital fact about QAnon necessary to understanding its allure is that it is neither sui generis—it is not some unique and abnormal thing unlike anything in America’s history—nor is it ex nihilo—it didn’t spring from nothing. Conspiracy belief has repeatedly caused riots and murders, ruined lives and careers, and reshaped America time and time again since its inception—as horrible as the past few years have been, they are part of a repeating pattern.
Something new this time
Why was the need to believe this narrative so strong among QAnon adherents that they were willing to buy a story with such a laughably improbable origin?
QAnon did offer one seemingly new aspect: an interactive component. As Mike Rothschild explains in his book The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything, “Q talks directly to the people, and the people talk back to Q. It’s not monologing, it’s dialogue. Q encourages collaboration, and rewards anons who go above and beyond in their theorizing and interpretation.” QAnon mirrored the structure of true crime Reddit forums and other online communities, where amateur sleuths could build their own epistemic capital by connecting the dots and sharing their findings with others.
Waiting … doing nothing …
. . . echoes of another long-standing American tradition: prophecy behavior. “Watching, waiting, and working for the millennium,” . . .
Facts alone rarely persuade
But for those who are in a position to combat these delusions and conspiracy beliefs, it’s important to note that it involves more than simply fact-checking. While factual debunking is vital, it remains less important than first understanding the psychological need that drives the conspiracist to seek out alternative stories.
Often, as Miranda’s story suggests, believers are looking for purpose, and conspiracy theorists—like cult leaders—don’t look for unintelligent people so much as they look for directionless people, people lacking meaning and purpose, who’ve lost family ties (at one point, Eric said of Miranda that she disliked the fact that she lived so far from her family in Florida, even though she came to California in part because she never quite fit in with them in the first place). As tempting as socially isolating these people may be, it’s the kind of behavior that becomes a vicious circle, driving them further into the arms of a community that welcomes them and nurtures feelings of victimhood and persecution. Whatever ability we have to try to reintegrate these people into other arenas of social life helps break that cycle.
In addition to community, conspiracy groups offer adherents a simplified narrative to dispel chaos in one’s life. They may also provide a cover story to justify racist, homophobic, and transphobic beliefs, ideas that a person may believe but feel they can’t publicly display. Such theories liberate believers and encourage a kind of free play for forbidden thoughts.
The eternal return
But a good part of the reason why such problems never get solved is due to the way they’re allowed to fade into obscurity almost as soon as the heat of the moment has passed. The prevalence of such moments depends on the destruction of a communal memory of these past outrages, a constant culture of forgetting, an almost state-sponsored amnesia designed to treat each emerging moral panic as entirely new.
Dickey, Colin. Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy. New York, NY: Viking, 2023.
Skoven, Anne Vig. “Mark as Allegorical Rewriting of Paul: Gustav Volkmar’s Understanding of the Gospel of Mark.” In Mark and Paul. Part II, For and against Pauline Influence on Mark: Comparative Essays, edited by Eve-Marie Becker, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, and Mogens Müller, 13–27. Beihefte Zur Zeitschrift Für Die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft Und Die Kunde Der Älteren Kirche; Volume 199. Berlin, Germany ; Boston, Massachusetts: De Gruyter, 2014. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110314694.13/html?lang=en
.
[Anne Vig Skoven who wrote this essay was a PhD student at the University of Copenhagen until her tragic, premature death in 2013]
Unlike exegetes of the patristic tradition and also unlike most of 20th century scholarship, biblical scholars of the 19th century were not foreign to the idea that Paulinism was to be found in the Gospel of Mark. The founder of the so-called Tubingen School, Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860), for instance, regarded the Gospel of Mark as a synthesis of Petrine and Pauline traditions. . . .
In 1857, the German exegete Gustav Hermann Joseph Philipp Volkmar (1809-93) characterized the Gospel of Mark as a Pauline gospel. Although Mark’s story was concerned with Jesus’ life and death, it was also, so Volkmar argued, permeated by Pauline theology. During his lifetime, Volkmar remained a solitary figure, and David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874) once considered him a “närriger Kauz” [= a ludicrous little owl]. Nevertheless, at the end of the 19th century knowledge of Volkmar’s thesis and writings was widespread among German speaking scholars. His thesis drove a wedge into German biblical scholarship; Adolf Jülicher (1857-1938) and William Wrede (1859-1906) both appreciated Volkmar’s work, Albert Schweizer (1875-1965) and his student Martin Werner (1887-1964) did not. . . .
. . . . From 1833 to 1852, he taught in various Gymnasien, in which he primarily worked within the field of philology and classical studies. In 1850 he published a book on Marcion and the Gospel of Luke, in which he claimed against Baur and Albrecht Ritschl (1822- 1889) that Marcion’s gospel was a rewriting of Luke.’ According to Adolf Jülicher, Volkmar had deserved a chair for this – today widely accepted – thesis. However, a series of dramatic events prevented that. Due to church political controversies, Volkmar was arrested in the classroom in 1852 and charged with lese majesty and dismissed from his job. In 1853, he was called lo Zürich where he was finally appointed professor of New Testament studies in 1863. In Zürich he published the works which are of special relevance to the present study:
Die Religion Jesu und ihre erste Entwickelung nach dem gegenwärtigen Stande der Wissenschaft (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1857); a popular work, which introduced Volkmar’s thesis of Mark as a Pauline gospel.
Die Evangelien, oder Marcus und die Synopsis der kanonischen und ausserkanonischen Evangelien nach dem ältesten Text mit historisch-exegetischem Commentar (Leipzig: Ludw. Fr. Fues Verlag, 1870); a scholarly commentary on the Gospel of Mark, in which Volkmar, against Baur, forwarded his thesis that Mark was the first gospel, Luke the second and Matthew only the third. The commentary was republished in a slightly edited second edition with a new title in:
Marcus und die Synopse der Evangelien nach dem urkundlichen Text und das Geschichtliche vom Leben Jesu (Zürich: Verlag von Caesar Schmidt, 1876).
In addition to Volkmar’s traditional commentaries on the Markan text, the books from 1870/76 offer an early reception history of the Markan narratives. . . . .
In his biographical sketch of Gustav Volkmar from 1908, Adolf Jülicher characterizes Volkmar as an exegete whose work was framed to the one side by Baur’s Tendenztheorie and to the other side by Strauss’ scepticism (772 f). Yet, he differs from both schools on two important issues: historicity and Markan priority. With regard to Strauss, Volkmar welcomes his critique of the rationalistic and harmonizing exegesis of early 19th century scholarship. But he is also critical of Strauss’ concept of the gospel narratives as mythoi, instead he prefers the term “Poësie”. Unlike Strauss Volkmar emphasizes the historicity of the gospel narratives.Yet, his understanding of historicity, as well as his method are closer to those of 20th century redaction criticism than to the Leben Jesu Forschung of his own century. With regard to the Tübingen School, Volkmar treats the early Christian literature as Tendenzschriften. His overall project was to reconstruct the history of the gospel traditions as a reflection of the developments in early Christianity. But unlike the Tübingen exegetes, he accepted, as already mentioned, the thesis of Markan priority. Consequently, he rejected the idea of an “Ur-Evangelium” which was needed for the Tübingen explanation of the gospel relations. Likewise he rejected the idea of a Spruchbuch or Schriftquelle (1870, vili-xi; 1876, 646) – later identified as Q. According to Volkmar, Mark’s only sources were: the Old Testament writings, four Pauline letters (Romans, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians), the oral tradition of early Christian communities – and, surprisingly, Revelation.
(pp 13-16)
The work I have translated and made available here is Volkmar’s 1857 Die Religion Jesu. Perhaps I will also be able to make either his 1870 or 1876 work available in time.
The Religion of Jesus and its first development according to the current state of scholarly knowledge
The many fair-haired blue-eyed Indigenous Australians (who often trigger scepticism and resentment in non-Indigenous Australians) were usually raised by Aboriginal mothers or removed from their Aboriginal mothers and placed in brutal institutions. They identify as Aboriginal because their white fathers, and often grandfathers too, never lifted a finger to help, or were only fleetingly in their lives. Their formative loving relationships were with their Aboriginal family.
It is one more reason why I am voting Yes – because our parliamentary representatives do not read Aboriginal memoirs and show no compassion for the decades of personal abuse inflicted on generations of Aboriginal families.
If you don’t know, please pick up any of the brilliant Aboriginal autobiographies that have been published over the past 50 years. They are all great reads and insights into this country and its history.
(I’ve referenced Libby Connors before …. see my post, Where None Shall Hunger. I quoted from her historical research published as Warrior — a book that opened my eyes to many aspects of the lives of the Aboriginal people who were once at home in the region where I now live.)
I can’t go beyond the following case for voting Yes in the coming referendum:
Massacred. Raped. Poisoned. Enslaved. Their children stolen. Their lands taken. Their religions, their culture and their languages destroyed.. yet there’s a No campaign?
I dearly hope that the positive emphasis of the Yes campaign will turn back the shame that looms from the efforts of its opponents: A No vote will be Australia’s Trump moment.
Some critics have portrayed me as being like a moth fluttering to the nearest flame, as one who is always attracted to the latest most radical viewpoint, and therefore my views cannot be taken seriously. What those critics generally fail to recognize, however, is the consistency of my readings of the sources and the fact that my approach is for most part taken for granted among scholars who specialize in other fields of historical research.
Let me explain.
The historians of ancient Rome have their text sources: Tacitus, Suetonius, etc. Those historians have been trained to read those texts in a critical manner: What is the bias of the author? How could the author have known the details we are reading? etc.
At first glance, it appears that critics of the Gospels follow the same approach, and at a certain superficial level they do: What is the theological bias of the author of this gospel? What are the implied or likely sources for this or that episode or saying?
But there is a fundamental difference too often overlooked in the literature of New Testament scholarship that changes everything.
Before I explain that fundamental difference, let me narrate how I came to discern the great chasm between historical inquiry into “secular” ancient history and “biblical” history.
It was some years ago when I suppose I was still feeling somewhat raw from having discovered how wrong “about everything” I had once been in a religion that I had left behind. I had learned many lessons from my experience of having been so wrong — think of “In Praise of Failure” of my previous two posts — and had become hyper-sensitive about repeating mistakes and falling into a new set of misdirections. So when I encountered Earl Doherty’s case for Jesus being non-historical my instinctive reaction was extreme caution and scepticism. Was this just another idea that had no basis, was entirely ad hoc, a fancy for hobbyists?
I dedicated a lot of time to trying to work through exactly how we know anything at all “for a fact” about the ancient past. I read widely but found that most historians seemed to take for granted certain data that they read in their sources. They had their reasons for rejecting this or that detail, but I rarely found a clear explanation of how they came to conclude that, for instance, Julius Caesar really was assassinated, or that there really was a Great Fire in Rome in the time of Nero. That Julius Caesar and Nero really existed was evident enough from material evidence – coins and monuments. But what about Socrates? The historians seemed to have an abundance of data but I searched without much success to find a clear explanation for why they seemed to take certain information for granted (e.g. the existence of Socrates).
It took some time but I eventually came to identify the foundations of their knowledge.
The existence for Socrates, for whom we have no surviving physical monuments, was accepted for essentially the same reason they accepted the historicity of Julius Caesar: the evidence of one source was corroborated independently by another contemporary source. Even literary sources could corroborate one another. Historians focussed on areas for which they had sources whose provenance they could reasonably understand and trust, and that were demonstrated to be of the kind that had good grounds for conveying largely reliable information. Such sources are on the whole independently corroborated. Such understanding is the bread and butter of historians and many do seem to take it for granted so that it “goes without saying”.
But not every detail in those sources is taken for granted as historical, of course. Take the case of the plague of Athens during the Peloponnesian War. That there was a plague would seem to be corroborated by the fact that our main source for it — Thucydides — we know from other information was evidently an eyewitness and in a position to know and record the fact. It does not follow that every detail Thucydides wrote was historical, however. We also have fictional dramatic works describing plagues and since we see these closely mirrored in Thucydides’ description of the Athenian plague, it is reasonable to conclude that Thucydides drew upon those fictional sources to dramatize his otherwise historical narrative.
Can a historian sift historical information from the Gospels in the same way he or she does from Thucydides? The answer is a resounding No. That is because we have no contemporary or reliable information about the identity of their authors. We don’t even have any independent evidence to help us decide when they were written — except that they had to be some time before the middle or late second century because that’s when we find them discussed by Church Fathers. Moreover, and here is a point I find commonly misunderstood, they do not even evince core characteristics of other historical writings of the time: they do not even seek to give readers explicit or implicit reasonable grounds for trusting them. Yes, the Gospels of Luke and John do point to “eyewitnesses” but they do so in such vague and cryptic terms that doubts inevitably arise among readers who are familiar with similar yet more detailed and testable claims by other historians. The authors hide their identities, or leave readers guessing about their ability to trust them. The Gospel of Matthew plays with the word “mathete” in a way that leads readers of the Greek text to suspect the author is indeed a certain Matthew, but who that Matthew was we have no idea; Luke in his second volume (Acts) slips into “we” as if he himself is an eyewitness reporter, but again it is all very vague and cryptic. We don’t know who this supposed eyewitness is. And the final word must be that the Gospels are clearly theological narratives advocating belief in a miracle story. Anyone familiar with the historical writings of the era cannot fail to notice the stark differences.
I have spoken of independent corroboration. Independent corroboration has to come from contemporaries or from persons who have access to information contemporary with the composition of the texts being studied. A document that appears decades after the source text can do no more than tell us what someone believed (or wanted others to believe) in their own time. One of the reasons historians reject the claim that Martin Luther committed suicide lies in the fact that it first appeared only “twenty years” after his death.
We have no independent evidence to pin down a date for the creation of the Gospels. We may surmise from internal evidence (e.g. the prediction of the destruction of the Temple) that a work was composed around the time of its destruction but that is essentially nothing more than speculation.
Our extant evidence compels us to keep the following factors in mind when reading the Gospels as historical sources:
We do not know who wrote them or the circumstances in which they were written;
We do not know when they were written (short of somewhere between the early first century and the mid to late second century);
We do not know what sources were used for their narratives and sayings (short of some episodes and speeches being clear adaptations of Old Testament writings).
New Testament scholars long relied upon what they called “criteria of authenticity” to try to establish strong probabilities for the historical veracity of certain details but that method is alien to the methods used by other historians. Example:
If an episode points to a negative act by a Church hero such as Peter’s denial of Jesus, it is likely to be true – “the criterion of embarrassment”.
Such methods have long been dismissed as logically fallacious by other historians and are finally being acknowledged as flawed by New Testament scholars. In the case of the above example, it is reasonable to imagine the embarrassing story is created to encourage other followers that know that God can forgive and rehabilitate those who are weak and fall.
Some New Testament scholars have turned away from the criteria of embarrassment and have turned to “memory theory” instead. But again, we are in the realm of circularity: we begin with the assumption that there is a historical event that has spawned the Gospel narrative, but we believe that there is a historical event at the start because we we can see “how it has been modified” by various interests before reaching the Gospel author.
We can hypothesize how Gospel stories originated, that they came to the authors by means of oral traditions, but hypotheses can never be more than hypotheses unless we can find indisputable evidence that lifts them beyond that status.
My approach to reading the Gospels is through the acknowledgement of these realities. This perspective is grounded in the all but taken for granted approach of historians who undertake research into other times and places. As long as certain questions about the source documents remain open those documents cannot be read or used in the same way as sources for which those questions are definitively answered.
This is not hyper-scepticism or straining to be some sort of contrarian. It is acknowledgment of the realities about our sources.
There is much in Costica Bradatan’s In Praise of Failure that I would like over time to address but let’s begin with the portion of Prologue that I quoted yesterday:
. . . . human existence is something that happens, briefly, between two instantiations of nothingness. Nothing first—dense, impenetrable nothingness. Then a flickering. Then nothing again, endlessly. “A brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness,” as Vladimir Nabokov would have it. . . .
That remark followed from his description of the feeling that we imagine would follow from surviving what at the time felt like plummeting to a certain death. I was reminded of that feeling from a real-life experience when I listened to the news last night about the death of the commander of 108 men who had fought off an attack of a 2500 strong enemy in the battle of Long Tan in 1966. He was quoted as having said that it was only a short time after the three hour battle that the full realization that he was “still alive” fell upon him.
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged— the same house, the same people—and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.
As I quoted yesterday, Bradatan sees our “myths, religion, spirituality, philosophy, science, works of art and literature” as products of our efforts to make an “unbearable fact a little more bearable.” Continuing that thought, he writes,
One way to get around this is to deny the predicament altogether. It’s the optimistic, closed-eye way. Our condition, this line goes, is not that precarious after all. In some mythical narratives, we live elsewhere before we are born here, and we will reincarnate again after we die. Some religions go one step further and promise us life eternal. It’s good business, apparently, as takers have never been in short supply. More recently, something called transhumanism has entered this crowded market. The priests of the new cult swear that, with the right gadgets and technical adjustments (and the right bank accounts), human life will be prolonged indefinitely. Other immortality projects are likely to do just as well, for our mortality problem is unlikely to be resolved.
But this approach is not for everyone…
No matter how many of us buy into religion’s promise of life eternal, however, there will always be some who remain unpersuaded. As for the transhumanists, they may know the future, but they seem largely ignorant of the past: “human enhancement” products have, under different labels, been on the market at least since the passing of Enkidu of Gilgamesh fame. Compared with what the medieval alchemists had to offer, the transhumanists’ wares seem rather bland. Yet thousands of years of life prolongation efforts haven’t put death out of business. We may live longer lives today, but we still die eventually.
Simone Weil (Wikipedia photo)
The Bullfighting way?
Bradatan finds himself siding with the views of Simone Weil:
Another way to deal with our next-to-nothingness is to confront it head-on, the bullfighting way: no escape routes, no safety nets, no sugarcoating. You just plow ahead, eyes wide open, always aware of what’s there: nothing. Remember the naked facts of our condition: nothing ahead and nothing behind. If you happen to obsess over your next-to-nothingness and cannot buy into the life eternal promised by religion or afford a biotechnologically prolonged life, this may be “right for you. Certainly, the bullfighting way is neither easy nor gentle—particularly for the bull. For that’s what we are, after all: the bull, waiting to be done in, not the bullfighter, who does the crushing and then goes on his way.
Human beings are so made,” writes Simone Weil, that “the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening.”* Pessimistic as this may sound, there is hardly a higher form of human knowledge than the one that allows us to understand what is happening—to see things as they are, as opposed to how we would like them to be. Besides, an uncompromising pessimism is superbly feasible. Given the first commandment of the pessimist (“Whenever in doubt, assume the worst!”), you will never be taken by surprise. Whatever happens on the way, however bad, will not put you off balance. For this reason, those who approach their next-to-nothingness with open eyes manage to live lives of composure and equanimity, and rarely complain. The worst thing that could befall them is exactly what they have expected.
Above all, the eyes-wide-open approach allows us to extricate ourselves, with some dignity, from the entanglement that is human existence. Life is a chronic, addictive sickness, and we are in bad need of a cure.
The bolding is my own. I think that is worth taking in …. “there is hardly a higher form of human knowledge than the one that allows us to understand what is happening – to see things as they are”.
Somewhere in there we can find the real gift that can come from failure, or from the humility that it brings.
Bradatan, Costica. In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility. Cambridge, Massachusetts: *Harvard University Press, 2023.
The opening words of the book — “a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness”
Picture yourself on a plane, at high altitude. One of the engines has just caught fire, the other doesn’t look very promising, and the pilot has to make an emergency landing. Finding yourself in such a situation is no doubt shattering, but also illuminating. At first, amid the wailing and gnashing of teeth, you cannot think in any detached, rational fashion. You have to admit it, you are paralyzed by fear and scared to death, just like everyone else. Eventually, the plane lands safely, and everybody gets off unharmed. Once you’ve had a chance to pull yourself together, you can think a bit more clearly about what just happened. And you start learning from it.
You learn, for instance, that human existence is something that happens, briefly, between two instantiations of nothingness. Nothing first—dense, impenetrable nothingness. Then a flickering. Then nothing again, endlessly. “A brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness,” as Vladimir Nabokov would have it. These are the brutal facts of the human condition—the rest is embellishment. No matter how we choose to reframe or retell the facts, when we consider what precedes us and what follows us, we are not much to talk about. We are next to nothing, in fact. And much of what we do in life, whether we know it or not, is an effort to address the sickness that comes from the realization of this next-to-nothingness. Myths, religion, spirituality, philosophy, science, works of art and literature—they seek to make this unbearable fact a little more bearable.
A little further on in the Prologue — “how we relate to failure defines us”
The failure-based therapy that I offer in this book may seem surprising. After so much worshipping of success, failure’s reputation is in tatters. There seems to be nothing worse in our world than to fail—illness, misfortune, even congenital stupidity are nothing by comparison. But failure deserves better. There is, in fact, much to praise about it.
Failing is essential to what we are as human beings. How we relate to failure defines us, while success is auxiliary and fleeting and does not reveal much. We can live without success, but we would live for nothing if we didn’t come to terms with our imperfection, precariousness, and mortality, which are all epiphanies of failure.
“Only humility”:
In Praise of Failure is not about failure for its own sake, then, but about the humility that failure engenders, and the healing process that it triggers. Only humility, a “selfless respect for reality,” as Iris Murdoch defines it, will allow us to grasp what is happening. When we achieve humility, we will know that we are on the way to recovery, for we will have started extricating ourselves from the entanglement of existence.
So, if you are after success sans humility, you can safely ignore this book. It will not help you—it will only lead you astray.
We come to the Epilogue:
Every morning, when we wake up, there is a moment—the briefest of moments—when our memory hasn’t come back to us. We are not yet ourselves because we don’t have a story to tell. We can be anyone at this stage, but right now we are no one. We are a blank sheet of paper waiting to be written on. As our memory gradually returns, we start recalling things: where we are, what happened before we fell asleep, what we need to do next, the tasks of the day ahead. We start becoming ourselves again as the memory of these things comes back and slowly forms a story. When everything has fallen into place, and the story is complete, we can be said to have come back to life. We now have a self. The sheet is covered with our story—we are our story.
This is the most significant moment of every day, and philosophically the most gripping: the process through which we come into existence, and our self comes back to us, every time we wake up. If, for some reason, things failed to fall into place and form a coherent narrative, we would never find ourselves. The sheet would remain blank. We would miss ourselves in the same way we would miss someone who didn’t show up for a meeting.
Human beings are fundamentally narrative-driven creatures. Our lives take the shape of the stories we tell; they move this way or that as we change the plot. These stories are what gives our existence consistency, direction, and a unique physiognomy. We are irreducible individuals not because of, say, our DNA, but because no story can be told in exactly the same way twice. Even the slightest change of rhythm and diction produces a different story. Another person.
At our most intimate, then, we are what we tell ourselves we are. The German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey called this process the “coming together of a life”—Zusammenhang des Lebens. The stories we tell about our life are sometimes more important than life itself. They are what brings that life together and makes it what it is: our life. Without them, we would remain only some insignificant occurrence in the planet’s biosphere.
As storytelling animals, we need stories not just for coming into existence every morning, but for pretty much everything—for things big and small, important and trivial, ennobling and shameful. We need a good story to live by and to die for, to fall in love with someone and out of love with her, to help us fight for a cause or betray it.
We likewise need a story to cure ourselves of the umbilicus mundi syndrome. To achieve true humility it is not enough just to be humble. We also need to weave a story that structures our self-effacing efforts and gives them sustenance, continuity, and meaning. We have to narrate our way into humility. And that’s what renders humility one of the most difficult stories to tell. For the self that narrates is the same one that longs for self-effacement and seeks to be lowered and subdued. The narrator’s voice, so vital to storytelling, has to be silenced. But how are we going to tell a story with silence? How can we narrate ourselves and reduce ourselves to dust at the same time? Dust has never had any stories to tell. That puts humility and storytelling seriously at odds with each other.
Costica Bradaton reminds readers here of the stories he has told in the previous pages: of Simone Weil, of Mahatma Gandhi, of E. M. Cioran, of Osamu Dazai, of Seneca, of Yukio Mishima.
The final words:
At any given moment, we may find our life to be empty and our existence meaningless, but we know, at some deeper level, that we are not done yet. Our story is just not over, and it’s frustrating—profoundly, viscerally so—to quit a story before the end, whether it’s a book, a film, or your own life. Once we have reached that point, we may decide that there is nothing left to tell, but quitting the story while it is still being told is a violation not just of narrative but of nature. The longed-for meaning may be revealed at the very end, and we will no longer be there to receive the revelation. It is written, after all, that the “pearl” we are supposed to retrieve can only be found at the story’s end.
Can a story save my life, then? Yes, it can. The truth is, only a story can redeem our lives. And not just our lives, but life itself. That’s the reason why, in case you’ve wondered, there are so many stories in this book, from beginning to end. Without stories, we would be nothing.
There is enough to think about in the above to make it superfluous to add any of my own commentary at this point.
I have uploaded new files containing an English translation of Christian Hermann Weisse‘s Gospel History (Die evangelische geschichte, kritisch und philosophisch bearbeitet) on Vridar.info. Weisse published his case for the priority of the Gospel of Mark at the same time as, but independently of, Christian Gottlob Wilke.
For anyone who may have missed it through my recent corrupted post and reposting …. Danila Oder’s book is available gratis for anyone interested in a personal copy or to donate to a library. The content is, of course, publicly available at archive.org, and I rely heavily on that source for many references. But it is also sometimes good to have a hard copy for a different kind of perusing, reference and reminder. As per the previous notice from Norman Oder,
Also, if any of your readers are interested in a free copy of the printed book (for personal use or donation to a library, not for re-sale), I have a few available.
Please have them contact me by email [normanps@hotmail.com] with their mailing address, using the subject line “Danila Oder book request.” I then can ship by Media Mail.
I don’t know if Media Mail would post outside the United States, but no doubt alternatives can be arranged by contacting Norman.
I would normally visit the earlywritings forum to post a notice like this since I know there are potentially serious readers there, but I cannot endure to return there for some time because of the flack I have consistently received from a moderator-backed troll there, so someone else reading this might do the honours and place this notice there. Perhaps others can share this with likeminded persons on other media.
I was shocked this morning to find the email below in my inbox. I know many readers here will also be very saddened. Danila Oder took a fresh and cross-disciplinary approach to the Gospel history and was always a pleasure to engage with. Her argument for the earliest gospel being intended for dramatic performance was thought provoking and I often found myself returning to the possibility and rethinking through the evidence she had set forth. Others have raised the possibility of the Gospel of Mark having been composed for performance but Danila was the one who explored that possibility in step by step detail.
a note for Vridar: the passing of author Danila Oder + copies of her book The Two Gospels of Mark
Dear Mr. Godfrey,
I write to inform you and your readers of the passing, on July 20, of my sister Danila Oder, an independent scholar and author of the book, The Two Gospels of Mark: Performance and Text, which was discussed in this March 2020 Vridar posting. I know she held Vridar in high regard.
Before she passed, Danila ensured that herwebsiteand bookwould be preserved in the Internet Archive.
Also, if any of your readers are interested in a free copy of the printed book (for personal use or donation to a library, not for re-sale), I have a few available.
Please have them contact me by email [normanps@hotmail.com] with their mailing address, using the subject line “Danila Oder book request.” I then can ship by Media Mail.
Thank you, Norman Oder Brooklyn, NY
Danila most recently contributed to the Vridar blog in comments here and here.
I somehow managed to complete a first draft of a translation of the entire near 700 pages of one of the major works that established the case for the Gospel of Mark being the first gospel.
It can be accessed here on my vridar.info page. Link is to a PDF – 27 MB.
I have updated the Wilke page in the right margin where the link can always be found.
I have been advised that for my final act I should attempt the same for Weisse. Maybe…. but 1100+ pages…. ?
Aparna Gopalan describes how Hindu nationalists have been defending the surge in the Hindu human-rights violations (including a reinforcement of the caste system) in India by openly comparing their historical experiences and modern criticisms with the experiences of the Jews. Just as criticism of the policies of the state of Israel is often met with charges of antisemitism, so criticism of Prime Minister Modi and extremist treatment of India’s Muslims is being denounced as Hinduphobia — thus attempting to silence the opposition.
Faced with rising scrutiny over India’s worsening human rights record, Hindu groups have used “the same playbook and even sometimes the same terms” as Israel advocacy groups, “copy-pasted from the Zionist context,” said Nikhil Mandalaparthy of the anti-Hindutva group Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR). Hindu groups have especially taken note of their Jewish counterparts’ recent efforts to codify a definition of antisemitism—the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition—that places much criticism of Israel out-of-bounds asserting that claims like “the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” constitute examples of anti-Jewish bigotry.
The comparison has been conscious and deliberate and extends into political action within the U.S.
Since the early 2000s, Indian Americans have modeled their congressional activism on that of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and AIPAC; Indian lobbyists have partnered with these groups to achieve shared defense goals, including arms deals between India and Israel and a landmark nuclear agreement between India and the US.
As for the historical comparison, it becomes a little strained:
ON DECEMBER 8TH , the HAF hosted a webinar with the Israel-advocacy organization StandWithUs, the first event in a three-part series titled “Shine a Light on Antisemitism & Hinduphobia: What Hindus and Jews Can Learn from Each Other.” StandWithUs national director of special programs Peggy Shapiro greeted the audience with a “Namaste.” Shukla followed with a “Shalom.” The exchange kicked off a call-and-response structure that carried through the next 75 minutes, with Shapiro presenting a piece of information about antisemitism, and Shukla following with a sound bite about Hinduphobia. The speakers presented even their personal histories in parallel: After Shapiro introduced herself by saying, “I was born in a refugee camp in Germany. My parents were Holocaust survivors,” Shukla followed with, “I was born in California to parents who had left dire situations in India.” (The HAF did not provide answers to a follow-up question about the conditions under which Shukla’s family emigrated.)
History is being recast for Hindus as a history of victimization. The purpose is to justify the actions of the dominant political party of extremist nationalist Hindus in India.
In facing off against anti-caste activists, such Hindu groups generally position themselves as the victimized party, arguing that the critiques in question “scapegoat” Hindus and Hinduism. In 2006, Sangh-affiliated organizations began a months-long campaign to cut mentions of caste discrimination from sixth grade history textbooks in California; that same year, the HAF sued the state in an attempt to get the textbooks thrown out altogether (allied organizations pursued a similar suit in 2017).
Universal History Archive/UIG/Shutterstock
The same article notes that Prime Minister Modi is a longtime member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist paramilitary force that originated in the 1920s being inspired by Mussolini’s Black Shirts and Nazi “race pride.”
Still on the side of the Nazis, I recall one high school history teacher expressing outrage over the propaganda infusing a movie his class had had to watch about the Second World War: one scene that stood out was of Ukrainian civilians lining the streets cheering the German army marching through as liberators from Russian rule. I was present at the time and that scene came to mind when I read about a New York Times article rewriting history to blame Russia for the start of that war . . . .
Not Hitler, but … Russia started World War 2 —
In its latest foray into the realm of historical falsification, the New York Times on Tuesday published a news analysis pinning the blame for World War II on the Soviet Union. The lengthy article authored by Andrew E. Kramer, entitled “A Current War Collides with the Past: Remnants of World War II in Ukraine,” makes no mention of either the Holocaust or the Nazi war of annihilation against the Soviet people.
The author, Andrew Kramer, initially wrote that the war began with Soviet invasion of a Polish controlled area of Ukraine:
World War II began in what is now Ukraine in 1939 with a Soviet invasion into territory then controlled by Poland in western Ukraine, at a time when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were in a military alliance. When that pact broke down in 1941, Germany attacked and fought from west to east across Ukraine.
The Times, confronted with a flood of hostile letters, cynically altered the sentence, without explanation, and in a manner that perpetuates the aim of the original falsification. The sentence was changed to read, “World War II reached what is now Ukraine in 1939 with a Soviet invasion into territory then controlled by Poland in western Ukraine…” The surreptitious verb swap does nothing to alter Kramer’s intention. The reader is meant to believe that the Soviet Union “started” WWII.
‘There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,’ he said. ‘Repeat it, if you please.’
“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” repeated Winston obediently.
“Who controls the present controls the past,” said O’Brien, nodding his head with slow approval. ‘Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?’
Again the feeling of helplessness descended upon Winston. His eyes flitted towards the dial. He not only did not know whether ‘yes’ or ‘no’ was the answer that would save him from pain; he did not even know which answer he believed to be the true one.
O’Brien smiled faintly. ‘You are no metaphysician, Winston,’ he said. ‘Until this moment you had never considered what is meant by existence. I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?’
‘No.’
‘Then where does the past exist, if at all?’
‘In records. It is written down.’
‘In records. And- ?’
‘In the mind. In human memories.
‘In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?’
Antonio da Correggio, The Betrayal of Christ, with a soldier in pursuit of Mark the Evangelist, c. 1522 (Wikimedia)
How much has been written about that young man fleeing naked from those who came to arrest Jesus in Gethsemane — how many literary analyses, how many theological interpretations. . . . But what if. . . .
Here is the passage — in Mark 14
43 Just as he was speaking, Judas, one of the Twelve, appeared. With him was a crowd armed with swords and clubs, sent from the chief priests, the teachers of the law, and the elders.
44 Now the betrayer had arranged a signal with them: “The one I kiss is the man; arrest him and lead him away under guard.” 45 Going at once to Jesus, Judas said, “Rabbi!” and kissed him. 46 The men seized Jesus and arrested him. 47 Then one of those standing near drew his sword and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear.
48 “Am I leading a rebellion,” said Jesus, “that you have come out with swords and clubs to capture me? 49 Every day I was with you, teaching in the temple courts, and you did not arrest me. But the Scriptures must be fulfilled.”50Then everyone deserted him and fled.
51 A young man, wearing nothing but a linen garment, was following Jesus. When they seized him, 52 he fled naked, leaving his garment behind.
Strange details stimulate creative imaginations and I once wrote of a view known to many — that the youth was to be identified with the young man in the tomb after Jesus’ resurrection: That Mysterious Young Man in the Gospel of Mark.
Renowned literary critic Frank Kermode wrote about this young fellow in The Genesis of Secrecy and compared his strange intrusion into the narrative to the stranger in the Macintosh in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Kermode begins with Joyce:
Let me remind you about the Man in the Macintosh. He first turns up at Paddy Dignam’s funeral, in the Hades chapter. Bloom wonders who he is. “Now who is that lanky looking galoot over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I’d like to know?” And Bloom reflects that the presence of this stranger increases the number of mourners to thirteen, “Death’s number.” “Where the deuce did he pop out of? He wasn’t in the chapel, that I’ll swear.” . . . (p. 50)
After some discussion K comes to the next instance of a cryptic character appearing suddenly out of nowhere….
“And a young man followed him, with nothing but a linen cloth about his body; and they seized him, but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked.” And that is all Mark has to say about this young man.
Kermode continues:
The difficulty is to explain where the deuce he popped up from. One way of solving it is to eliminate him, to argue that he has no business in the text at all. Perhaps Mark was blindly following some source that gave an inconsistent account of these events, simply copying it without thought. Perhaps somebody, for reasons irrecoverably lost, and quite extraneous to the original account, inserted the young man later. Perhaps Matthew and Luke omitted him [if they had him in their copies of Mark] because the incident followed so awkwardly upon the statement that all had fled. [It is also conjectured that the Greek verb translated as “followed,” sunekolouthei, might have the force of “continued to follow,” though all the rest had fled.*] Anyway, why is the youth naked? Some ancient texts omit the phrase epi gumnou, which is not the usual way of saying “about his body” and is sometimes called a scribal corruption; but that he ran away naked [gumnos] when his cloak was removed is not in doubt. So we have to deal with a young man who was out on a chilly spring night (fires were lit in the high priest’s courtyard) wearing nothing but an expensive, though not a warm, shirt. “Why,” asks one commentator, “should Mark insert such a trivial detail in so solemn a narrative?” ** And, if the episode of the youth had some significance, why did Matthew and Luke omit it? We can without difficulty find meanings for other episodes in the tale (for instance, the kiss of Judas, or the forbidding of violent resistance, which makes the point that Jesus was not a militant revolutionist) but there is nothing clearly indicated by this one. . . . (pp 55f)
* Kermode cites Taylor’s commentary, but compare also one of the points I copied recently from Wilke
** cites Cranfield’s commentary
Kermode lists common explanations and one of his own (my formatting):
If the episode is not rejected altogether, it is usually explained in one of three ways.
First, it refers to Mark’s own presence at the arrest he is describing. Thus it is a sort of reticent signature, like Alfred Hitchcock’s appearances in his own films, or Joyce’s as Macintosh. This is not widely believed, nor is it really credible.
Secondly, it is meant to lend the whole story verisimilitude, an odd incident that looks as if it belongs to history-like fortuity rather than to a story coherently invented – the sort of confirmatory detail that only an eyewitness could have provided – a contribution to what is now sometimes called l’effet du réel. We may note in passing that such registrations of reality are a commonplace of fiction; in their most highly developed forms we call them realism.
Thirdly, it is a piece of narrative developed (in a manner not unusual, of which I shall have something to say later) from Old Testament texts, notably Genesis 39:12 and Amos 2:16. Taylor, with Cranfield concurring, calls this proposition “desperate in the extreme.”
And his own “incorrect” option?
I suppose one should add a fourth option, which is, as with Macintosh, to give up the whole thing as a pseudoproblem, or anyway insoluble; but although commentators sometimes mention this as a way out they are usually prevented by self-respect and professional commitment from taking it.
That one hurts. A problem without a solution and thus not a real problem?
But what if….?
But Christian Gottlob Wilke whose searching in the early nineteenth century for the original gospel led to the now widely accepted view that the Gospel of Mark was the first written of our canonical gospels believed that someone for reasons unknown, or maybe for the sake of one of the options above, set forth reasons he believed the episode could not have been penned by the original author.
Wilke’s reasons for proposing to cut the scenario out of the original account:
1. the larger passage is about the fleeing of the disciples when the authorities come to arrest Jesus — the flight of the young man is an irrelevant intrusion
2. the account of the flight of the young man is out of place in the way the story is worded: it suggests the authorities were attempting to arrest the followers of Jesus before the arrest of Jesus
3. the point of the story is to tell us that only one person followed Jesus, viz Peter.
4. the story begins with the express statement that Jesus went with the twelve disciples only, and then says that it was those twelve who fled — leaving the introduction of the young man out of context.
Bruno Bauer drew attention to Wilke‘s conclusion and added that no other evangelist thought it fit to repeat the episode — suggesting it was not there to begin with.
I would add that Matthew loved to bring in as many explicit prophecy fulfillments as he could and even he passed up this opportunity to refer to the Amos prophecy of the flight of the youth naked.
It would follow, then, if we accept the above factors, that it was never part of the original gospel after all.
Of course, even if it were not part of the original narrative, we have no way of knowing if early Christians who liked Mark’s gospel thought the addition to be an improvement. Maybe even the author himself was persuaded to add it at some later point? We simply don’t know.
Wilke, Christian Gottlob. Der Urevangelist oder exegetisch kritische Untersuchung über das Verwandtschaftsverhältniss der drei ersten Evangelien. Dresden ; Leipzig : Gerhard Fleischer, 1838. http://archive.org/details/derurevangelisto0000wilk.
While recently focussed on translating older works I have been overlooking other works I have translated over the years and know that some readers may find of interest. Copyright forbids me from making many of them public but I could work my way through them one by one and see what can be shared. Here is one that I completed last year — though much of it is also available on Hermann Detering’s website in a series of posts.
