We are familiar enough with the claims that the mention of the sons of Simon of Cyrene who carried the cross of Jesus indicates that they were real people: the first audience of the Gospel of Mark must have known them personally because there is no other mention of them in the other gospels.
Well, I just came across the following while reading for another project . . . . .
Similarly with a certain Simon of Cyrene, a passerby coming in from the country, who is compelled to carry Jesus’s cross. Despite the fact that he is given an identification by place of origin, he is also identified through his sons, Alexander and Rufus (15:21), who are not further described. Mentioning them here in this way implies that they must be well known. But to whom? To Mark’s readers? But I would point out that it is not necessary to assume that Alexander and Rufus were in fact well known to Mark’s readers, because naming them in this way still performs the literary function of assuring the reader that the scene with Simon of Cyrene is attested by his better known sons. If Alexander and Rufus as the sons of this Simon were in fact so well known to Mark’s readers, he would not have had to mention them at all. (Miller 2017, 395)
Miller, Merrill P. 2017. “The Social Logic of the Gospel of Mark: Cultural Persistence and Social Escape in a Postwar Time.” In Redescribing the Gospel of Mark, edited by Barry S. Crawford and Merrill P. Miller. Society of Biblical Literature.
The best way to minimize international opprobrium and maximize support (however, grudging or covert) is to strike only when there is a widespread conviction that the Iranians were given but then rejected a superb offer—one so good that only a regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons and acquire them for the wrong reasons would turn it down. Under those circumstances, the United States (or Israel) could portray its operations as taken in sorrow, not anger, and at least some in the international community would conclude that the Iranians “brought it on themselves” by refusing a very good deal. (p. 39)
Other policy papers are also referenced in the interview below, papers that point to the US long term policy directed at Iran as a lynch-pin in its long-term goal of taking down Russia and China. The reason? It’s the capitalist ideology of the US, whereby the system has been structured to continually seek more profits, meaning the continual need to reduce the rest of the world to cheap resource suppliers and useful markets. — the danger: that a wounded great power would lash out in (unthinkably destructive) desperation if things started to turn against it.
Makes one wonder if the Christian Zionist and Israel lobby rise to dominance was not so “natural” within a “hapless” USA after all. Didn’t Woodrow Wilson invite propagandists to open up their channels in the USA in order to persuade those anti-war Americans to get fired up over the Kaiser and join in World War 1?
So Richard has stooped to changing his post in the light of my critique and I am unable to leave a reply to him on his blogsite. (He points out that he made a change to respond to me but only at the very end of a long comment trail.)
Carrier initially wrote: Vridar’s critiques are also a decade out of date . . .
To which I responded that I had posted one of René Salm’s (not my) critique of Dark and pointed out that my views were based on careful, critical study of Salm’s and Dark’s writings. I was responding to Carrier’s assertion that I was following Salm with some kind of “excess trust” and “reliance on assertions”.
Oh my god, so since then Carrier has added the following: Vridar’s critiques of Dark are also a decade out of date . . .
The point: Carrier is slapdash. He doesn’t check what’s before him. This is the same type of failure to actually read posts and comments in full, critically, to be sure he knows what they are saying before he responds as he has demonstrated earlier (see my criticisms of his use of Bayes and his posts on Pliny’s letter about the Christians). Carrier assumes certain persons are saying rubbish and so attacks them (including personally) — at least his attacks only demonstrate he has not read them with any serious intent in the first place. Presumably he is writing to persuade with rhetoric rather than honest argument that would require some work.
Plural. The link — please check it for yourself — is to posts where the word “Dark” appears in a title (e.g. “the Dark Side of”) or in the post (e.g. “dark green”)!!!!! There is ONLY ONE critique of Ken Dark!
Richard Carrier simply does not bother to read what he thinks he is writing against.
I do not believe Richard Carrier has bothered to even read René Salm’s arguments. I would like Carrier to demonstrate that he has done more than place trust and reliance on Dark’s assertions.
Carrier has since dismissed my post as “facesaving” and not worth a reply. In other words, he did not read it — or did not comprehend the meaning of critically reading and checking claims — something that seems quite alien to Carrier’s abilities when it comes to the archaeology of Nazareth.
Richard Carrier is in the same bucket as Bart Ehrman who notoriously demonstrated that he had not read the works he once wrote a diatribe against.
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I attempted to post the following to Richard Carrier’s site but was forbidden. Perhaps someone else can discreetly notify Richard and his readers what I have posted here:
Okay, Richard, My “face-saving” was simply to point out that I have actually critically read and checked Salm’s Nazareth arguments and compared them critically against Dark. I see you avoid giving any indication that you have actually read Salm’s work on Nazareth in a critical manner and compared with Dark as I have done. That would require some honest work.
and
Richard, you clearly do not always read what you write against. You spoke of my “critiques”, plural, of Ken Dark’s views of salm and linked to a page of mine that contained ONE critique and a whole lot of other posts with the word “Dark” in them! Oops.
If you read my “face-saving” response to you you would have seen that I was pointing out that I had actually critically read and studies Salm’s work on Nazareth and the various criticisms, including Dark’s, of his work. You offer no evidence that you have done that. I have never “trusted” the “assertions” of Salm as you claim — nor the “assertions of Dark” for that matter! — but demonstrated the basis for my sympathy for Salm’s studies.
You once again use sweeping dismissal to respond instead of actually doing some honest work and responding to the arguments and counter-claims critically.
Added: Richard Carrier has since posted a link in his blogpost to the following post of mine and said what I wrote is mere “facesaving” and not worthy of a reply. See the next post here for my response.
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though Salm also gets pilloried online (example, example, example). You’ll find some excess trust in him at Vridar, where in critiquing prior work by Dark I see too much reliance on the assertions of Salm, whom I find personally shady and untrustworthy.
That’s a snippet from Richard Carrier’s new post in which he delivers another polemical, ad hominem piece that attempts to use scholarship as a club in a rhetorically aggressive and often dismissive (borderline bullying) style. (Carrier also seems to think it demeans René Salm by linking his readers to three fundamentalist/evangelical articles protesting that anyone should dare challenge the Bible’s accuracy. — and what Carrier personally thinks of Salm is also introduced as a gratuitous character slur. Omg, let’s not revisit here what others have thought of Carrier personally!) René Salm can certainly hold his own so I will not speak for him in this post (my time is also very limited), but I do have to respond to Carrier’s accusation that I have placed “excess trust in [Salm]”. Carrier does not link to any post of mine that would demonstrate any “trust” at all, let alone “excess trust”. “Trust” suggests taking Salm at his word, and Carrier makes it clear this is exactly what he means when he goes on to speak of “assertions of Salm”. If I have argued on that basis, on trust in assertions, anywhere then I deserve to be so faulted.
That post was an introduction — an invitation — for readers to go to Salm’s article and read his criticisms of Dark. I pointed out in my introduction that I have had the same experience as Salm: we have both discovered that footnote citations too often do not support what the citing author claims they do. I will return to this point of sham footnotes.
In the last paragraph of that post I quoted Salm’s conclusion of the argument/evidence he presented in the linked article. That was an attempt to encourage readers to look at the linked article. If I was placing too much trust in Salm’s words and if Carrier or anyone else could demonstrate that Salm’s article does not support the conclusion I quoted, I can be faulted. Maybe I did not bother to read Salm’s article at all but just skipped to the last paragraph and quoted that conclusion in “excess trust” of what it asserted. Carrier could do readers the favour of demonstrating that Salm’s article did not overthrow Dark’s assertions, that the paragraph I quoted was mere assertion and unsupported by evidence. Then he would have a case and I would have to admit I was wrong, had misread Salm, had too much reliance on mere assertions.
My books by Salm are filled with pencil marks highlighting key points to follow up and mark steps in the argument. I have long made it my habit to check citations. Always follow up footnotes! Indeed, some time back I found myself uncomfortably having to write a series of posts demonstrating that too often Carrier’s own footnotes did not support what he claimed they did. I have found that fault all too often in scholarly literature and not even Carrier is an exception, unfortunately. (I don’t mean the authors are necessarily dishonest. I think sometimes an author assumes a certain passage says what he or she is in the habit of thinking it claims. Laziness is the more likely suspect than dishonesty.)
A key reference in one of Salm’s publications was a German text. It was not readily available in Australia. I managed to acquire a copy from Germany through interlibrary loan. I did not only translate the cited passage; I translated two full chapters. I like to be thorough, to be sure. I also followed up the articles and books Salm critiqued so I could get my own handle on the evidence and arguments from the different perspectives. I have also followed up critiques of Salm, including those by Ken Dark. I have found — not infrequently — that those critiques are misrepresenting or overlooking Salm’s arguments. The impression I have been left with is that the more savage critics of Salm — Tim O’Neill and Richard Carrier — tend to place excess trust in Dark’s word without following up and comparing it with Salm’s. This is essentially appeal to authority — one of the informal fallacies Carrier likes to point out in others: no detail, no evidence, just the assertions of a scholar against an amateur. I expect there will be more to say about these arguments in future posts.
The new blog post by Carrier makes sweeping assertions mixed with ad hominem and a worse sin than mere personal attack: punching down. It would appear that Carrier expects readers to trust his claims about what others have written. I am sure Carrier believes what he is writing but I also suspect he has not actually carefully (let alone critically) read Salm’s arguments for himself. It appears that he relies primarily on Dark’s and others’ representations of Salm’s points. I might be persuaded differently if Carrier could actually support his claim that at Vridar “you’ll find some excess trust in Salm — too much reliance on his assertions”.
Iran, imagine a sophisticated modern society — no, not some orientalist scenario of violent religious fanatics, nor some cruel despotic regime ruling by terror. But that alternative vision is very hard to see unless one makes some effort to pull aside the propaganda we are constantly being fed. I am posting the following link because it is the expression of a non-Iranian, an American military figure, a person one cannot mindlessly dismiss as an apologist for Iran:
“the mosques are largely empty” . . . “there is a renaissance of Persian culture and identity” . . . evidence that the January protests were “Mossad driven” . . . and an explanation for the targeting of hospitals and schools in Iran
—- with an added “reality check” on Ukraine
(Apologies if there are opening commercials)
Another perspective — I suspect the real motivation will be simple nationalism and dignity rather than religious faith, but I cannot argue against the rest. . . .
Maybe another time we can examine the life and status of women in Iran — again, it is not how it is most commonly portrayed in the West.
Persia, Iran, the Orient — images of cruelty, despotism, oppression and suffering of the masses beneath their tyrannical overlords, extremists, bloodthirsty, unnaturally libidinous, filled with murderous rage against the modern outside world that they cannot understand, deceitful, conniving, greedy, bribers, disloyal, cowardly, servile, childish even …. that is the Orientalist view that still today pervades so much of mainstream media, including much of the mainstream news in recent years and months relating to Iran. In one image they are called out in their millions by their blood-crazed leaders to chant in the streets “Death to America”; in the next image they are again out in the streets by their millions but this time trying to overthrow their tyrant rulers and being slaughtered in their tens of thousands. Maybe we are missing something here. Maybe the images we are being shown are not what they appear to be. Maybe they are both being framed by Orientalist perspectives. Maybe we should pause and dig a little to learn about the messages pushed into our homes and phones.
But Iran is not Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan. Its Islam is not of the Wahhabist variety so infamous in Saudi Arabia. The Taliban hate Iran. The world’s most deadly terrorist organizations are materially supported today by both Israel and the United States (in Syria, in Sudan…) — I mean Al Qaeda and ISIS — and they are also enemies of Iran.
Don’t get me wrong. I personally have no wish to live in any kind of state, constitutional and democratic or otherwise, where religion is a dominant cultural factor — and that includes not only Iran but also Israel and the United States. No thank you. One of the few (there are only a few) things Australia has going for it is its comparative secular culture — though we could do better even in that department.
But I do like the idea of learning about other cultures, of understanding them, even appreciating both their uniqueness and what they share in common with everyone else. And I am frustrated so often trying to find information about Iran that is not skewed by Orientalist bias.
Re the current war, some names I have found to be more informative than others — in their writings and in online interviews:
You will no doubt have many others on your lists, as do I. These are some of the more regular names I turn to.
And for some glimmer of light relief through sarcasm check out Normal Island News from time to time!
Meanwhile, I am beginning to think we can expect eventual regime change as a result of this war — I mean regime changes in the USA and Israel and Europe. The Middle East of Sikes-Picot will come to an end. The Gulf States may even cease to be. The US will be forced to withdraw from the Middle East. And the Zionist wings of Israel finally deeply clipped. Or am I dreaming? Should I be paying more attention to Trump and Hegseth and the Bible’s prophecies of Armageddon and CNN for the “facts on the ground”?
Before we get to Wrede, I’d like to quote from the Acts of the Apostles. First, from the Contemporary English Version, which proudly claims to be accurate and “faithful to the meaning of the original”:
Acts 5:30 (CEV) You killed Jesus by nailing him to a cross. But the God our ancestors worshiped raised him to life.
The New International Version, which is the most popular English translation in the world, has a somewhat different take on the same verse. Their team claims to translate scrupulously from the original Greek using word-for-word along with thought-for-thought methods.
Acts 5:30 (NIV) The God of our ancestors raised Jesus from the dead—whom you killed by hanging him on a cross.
Readers will no doubt remember this line from Peter’s speech before the Sanhedrin. Here’s another example from Acts 10:39. First, from the Good News Translation, which is still extremely popular. (The CEV and GNT both came from the American Bible Society.)
Acts 10:39 (GNT) We are witnesses of everything that he did in the land of Israel and in Jerusalem. Then they put him to death by nailing him to a cross.
And now the NIV:
Acts 10:39 (NIV) “We are witnesses of everything he did in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They killed him by hanging him on a cross . . .”
Peter is speaking here again. Curiously, the Jews disappear from the GNT and the CEV. We see minor differences, but one thing these verses have in common is the word “cross,” which does not exist in the original Greek. There are no nails or crosses here, only trees. These translations aren’t outliers, either. The New American Standard Bible (“Accuracy you can trust, in the English you speak!”) does it, too:
Peter Preaching in Jerusalem by Charles Poërson, 1642
Acts 10:39 (NASB) “We are witnesses of all the things He did both in the land of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They also put Him to death by hanging Him on a cross . . .”
What’s going on here? The translators have decided in these cases to substitute the word-for-word method with thought-for-thought. They presume to know what the author was really thinking, so they’re “fixing” (amplifying?) the text for modern English readers.
And we [are] witness of all [the] things he did in both the region of the Jews and [in] Jerusalem, whom also they put to death having hanged [him] on a tree.
I bring all this up, because a great deal of New Testament oddness remains hidden by our “accurate” English translations. The faithful translators will, of course, insist that tree is just a poetic synonym for cross. Do we really know that?
Diversity of Thought in the New Testament
They see themselves as faithful to the text, but they are faithful first to their conception of the Bible. That conception starts from the belief that the Bible is the inspired word of God. Here in the rural Midwest, we see billboards that ask “What does the Bible say about . . . ?” These questions reveal the foundational dogma that the Bible has a unified message at its core. The unspoken question for the faithful is “What is the Bible supposed to say?”
The translators of the NIV and CEV feel free to add “missing” words. In the Gospel of John, both translations add “pray” and “prayer” where they don’t exist in the Greek. In the same Gospel, the CEV actually adds the missing name of Jesus’s mother (see 2:1). Did the author of John know her name was Mary? Perhaps. But he never wrote the name.
Today’s NT scholars do admit that some diversity of thought exists in the New Testament. However, the extremely conservative British and American scholars of the early twentieth century were far less tolerant of such notions. When Wrede pointed out passages in scripture that strongly suggest various authors had divergent ideas about when Jesus became the Messiah, they were not amused. But Wrede went further. He said such divergence indicated an evolution of ideas:
Jesus became the Messiah at his death (Paul)
Jesus became the Messiah at the baptism (Mark)
Jesus was the preexistent Son of God (John)
Moreover, Wrede pointed out that our earliest Gospel is a mixture of Mark’s dogmatic invention along with received tradition, and he showed that the author was neither an eyewitness nor a disinterested historian. Finally, his somewhat favorable references to F. C. Baur and D. F. Strauss were certainly more than any self-respecting scholar could allow.
So we shouldn’t be surprised that pious Brits and Yanks savaged Das Messiasgeheimnis and its author, or that the book wasn’t translated into English until 1970. The tradition of reading and opining about Wrede, while diligently not reading Wrede has a long, proud history.
“The meaning of the item”
Mark had an entirely different view of what it meant to be the Messiah.
If they had read Wrede, they would have discovered that he identified a number of core problems with critical scholarship of the nineteenth century. Many of these problems persist.
In the affirmative answer to this question if Jesus was “the Christ, the Son of the Blessed” the high priest discerns blasphemy—and therefore a crime punishable by death. The blasphemy is usually thought to lie in arrogation to himself by a puny, weak and powerless man of the highest dignity known to Israelites, that of the Messiah sent by God. The tacit or explicit assumption behind this is that if the blasphemy lay in the pretension to divine glory and divine nature, Jesus like the high priest would have been taking the title “Son of God” to have a dogmatic, metaphysical sense and this is historically an impossibility. But to argue in this way is as dangerous as it is frequent. We must never say that if a particular item meant one thing it would not match up with the history of Jesus and that therefore it must mean something else. The meaning of the item is rather the prior question at all times. What history can make of it comes into consideration later. (Wrede 1901/1970, pp. 74-75, bold emphasis mine)
In a literary analysis especially, “the meaning of the item” must go back to the author, not to some imagined historical context. People still make this mistake. They gloss over the surface and look for what lies beneath. They leapfrog over the plain meaning of the text and evaluate matters as if they really happened, and they compare critically the terms Mark uses against the “normative” definitions found in other texts from roughly the same period.
As Wrede explains, calling oneself the Messiah would not constitute blasphemy. He writes:
[T]he mere assertion of messiahship does not, according to Jewish ideas, amount to blasphemy. But it is not any easier to see how a Christian author could find an instance of blasphemy here if he had only the Jewish idea of Messiah in mind. For when all is said the Messiah is not in Jewish eyes a divine being. On the other hand, if Mark understood “Son of God” in a supernatural and metaphysical sense, everything becomes quite clear. (Wrede 1901/1970, p. 75, bold emphasis added)
Many scholars have chastised Wrede for putting too many things under the umbrella of messiahship. Why keep healings and exorcisms a secret, they ask, when being acknowledged as some sort of wonder-worker doesn’t make a person the Messiah? Similarly, they note that nobody would have thought a Jewish Messiah would suffer, die, and be raised from the dead. Well, yes. That’s what Paul said: The claim that the Messiah had died was a “stumbling block” to the Jews. But Mark had an entirely different view of what it meant to be the Messiah.
