Hoffmann Tales

In the debates following the appearance of Bart Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist last March, R. Joseph Hoffmann weighed in with a scathing manifesto dissmissing  the “mythicist” theory in general and one of its leading spokesmen, with a special gusto.  Introducing Carrier, as man from a “Freethought Blog Ghetto”,  an “atheist” and a “part-time Jesus-denier” in a self described rant titled Mythic Pizza and Cold-cocked Scholars  Hoffmann deplored the “sewer of internet-facilitated nastiness…flowing into what used to be called academic discussion”. 

              My curiosity was whetted instantly. As someone on the record saying that the “Jesus existence” debating is a hopeless group-think which has no greater purpose than badmouth opponents , I am thrilled whenever I see my theoretical insights confirmed by the behaviour of well-known scholars.   And Hoffmann is overly generous in that regard.  Right off the bat, to make a point about the “sewer” Hoffmann chose to engage not Carrier himself but some unknown blogging wit who was mighty pleased with Carrier’s response to Ehrman. This is a popular technique of attacking a dumber proponent of a theory rather than a smarter one as a way to score debating points quicker.   There are of course risks associated with this manoeuvring, as the demoliton of this sophistry  by Rees-Mogg in Dawkins’ anti-theist argument  illustrated.  That Hoffmann has a certain weakness for the nutty type of equation becomes evident quickly.  God deniers are Jesus deniers are mosquitos, and mosquitos carry dengue  and malaria.  Mosquitos, the train of thought goes on, like Alex Forest (the crazy woman from Fatal Attraction) will not be ignored.   By what method did she get into the academic perspective of Hoffmann ?  He does not tell but it is  obvious why Glenn Close’s mongoose stare needs to be embedded in the paragraph.  It takes no divine to conclude that more than a bunny rabbit is in a mortal danger from Jesus-dengueing mosquitoes ! 

         “The disease these buggers spread is ignorance disguised as common sense”, Hoffmann states matter-of-factly. Care to run that one by us one more time, prof ?  Would that be the bunny-boiling buggers or the buggers who together with rum and cat-o-nine-tails made Winston's navy the best in the world ?  It is not clear !
            The incensed academic of course deplores the lack of couth and finesse at the Freethought Ghetto, and recalls in wistful threnodies  the gentlemanly bygone age in the Ivory Towers  on the very next blog.  But lest he stand accused of lack of  “sewer” biting skills,  he will tear into Carrier for his estimate of him as “crazy”.  In his exercise of gentlemanly standards, Hoffmann somehow manages to follow a sentence in which he complains of Carrier’s uncivil, unscholarly, temperamental outbursts, with one which calls him “Dick” and “Carrier the Terrier”.   There seems to be – and I am not claiming any academic credentials for saying this – a screw or two loose in professor Hoffmann’s nomenclatura.  For whatever perceived inanities Richard Carrier is guilty of,  it is plainly unwise to return them in the self-same artless form if one is bent on claiming a higher professional standard.    

         Something else caught my eye here:  the idea that one can actually fake common sense.  True, C. Wright Mills observed more than half a century ago that common sense seems often more common than sense. But still. In the high altitude of academia, it rarely matters what people without eligible degrees think, especially not in the academic disciplines where the expertise consists in gathering evidence of what God (or his duly appointed emissaries) actually did and said. They are those who pretend to study New Testament as literature but some of them  too will turn into raving madmen should one suggest that the gospels are nearest to fiction. The disciplines relating to the texts, professor Hoffmann seems unaware,  have long been held by the smarter common folk to be basically the Great Science of Talking through the Hat, i.e. having no greater object than to condescend to people about things that no one can really know in the absence of evidence.  It is not just Steven Carr or PZ-EZ who would scoff at the idea of an “independent historical investigation” the final product of which are assertions about artefacts that noone has seen, or the opinion on the therapeutic merit of spitting into the patient’s eyes as a way of returning sight to him.   Nor is the disdain of the people who have common sense for religious or quasi-religious patter something dependent on Internet technologies. My sixteen-year old son says the New Testament is “random bullshit…marketing”. He should know better; he attends Catholic high school !  (my concession to his mum).  He has never visited a Jesus chat group.  But he already belongs to the greater pool of intelligent people who read the texts and will not mince words in saying the gospel factuality is historically imponderable.  Most will hold off on whether  that means Jesus did not exist. That is where the common sense lives as far as I can tell.  

The mythicists as a group have convinced themselves they know the figure of Jesus did not exist in history. Is that possible ?  Sure it is. And the more Ehrman, Hoffmann and the Tweedles of Nottingham U. sing a historical positivist looney tunes to them, the greater the conviction that the religious fanatics smuggled Jesus into history.  I don’t think they have made their case, but that is not my point.  My beef here is  with the academic competence dervishes who should make themselves familiar with a few lines from Omar Khayyam’s Rubiyat:

These fools by ignorance most crass
think they in wisdom all mankind surpass

And glibly do they damn as infidel,

Whoever is not like them, an ass.

In slandering and reviling you persist,

Calling me infidel and atheist:

My errors I do not deny, but yet

Does foul abuse become a moralist ?

A shaikh beheld a harlot and quoth he:

‘you seem a slave to drink and lechery’,

And she made answer, ‘what I seem I am,

but master are you all that you seem to be ?’

                                                (tr. by Richard Le Galienne)

Hoffmann’s  Jesus Process Contortium   

    Late in April, Professor Hoffmann announced a new scholarly “consortium” called “Jesus Process” with a subtitle which left nothing behind:  “A Consultation on Myth, Method, and Madness in New Testament Studies”.  Its objective, clear as day, is to heap scorn on the perceived misperceptions and misdeeds of the mythicists, with special focus on the application of Bayes Theorem to Historical Jesus by Richard Carrier, although that topic was flogged to multiple deaths on the blog all of the past year.  (FWIW, I was in agreement that Bayes theorem is for all intents and purposes useless for the task at hand, as the real differentiator lies in the factual reliability of the inputs, not in the algorithmic mechanics).  Beside Hoffmann, Maurice Casey and Stephanie Louise Fisher announced their contribution. The latter two advertise themselves as ‘independent historians’ though evidently not independent of each other.  “Steph” Fisher is (was?)  Maurice Casey doctoral student.  Casey praised Fisher’s as yet unpublished work in his 2010 volume, “Jesus of Nazareth”.  Not exactly regular fare as academic standards go.

The essays appeared on the New Oxonian site on May 22.  Hoffmann’s own contribution to the debate (“Controversy, Mythicism, and Historical Jesus”) sets the tone. It more or less confirms and promotes a new sub-species of historical positivism regarding Jesus of the gospel which was hinted at by Ehrman in his latest book and which is best exemplified by the writings of Maurice Casey and his protagonist, Stephanie Louise Fisher. 

 Already the first sentence of Hoffmann’s essay presents the kind of irreducible proclamation, or ipse dixit, which precludes reasoned debate:

“While the New Testament offers the most extensive evidence for the existence of the historical   Jesus, the writings are subject to a number of conditions that have dictated both the form and content of the traditions they have preserved.”

               The professor should know that one cannot assume what one seeks to prove, i.e. that the gospels were intended to recount actual events, rather than, say,  assert the mysterious workings of God in the end of times.  If it seems obvious that the gospels follow the doings and sayings of a person called “Jesus the Nazarene/of Nazaret(h)/Nazara”, but there is nothing in the text or surrounding it which would confirm the verdict Hoffmann seeks and which at least theoretically is plausible: an historical account, distorted by religious beliefs about, and associated with, the protagonist.   But the plausibility of such understanding of the texts does not in any way exclude other interpretations. It is illogical and manifestly false to claim that this is the only possible reading of the gospels or that the admissibility of such a scenario proves the existence of a single historical person as the source of the narratives.  All sorts of interpretations can be constructed  on the evidence of the gospels: they may seek to personify wisdom and deposit it in a fictitious character in manufactured historical settings.  Or, they may allegorize theological teachings, maxims and oracular revelations and connect them loosely via a set of historical settings with a legendary figure, with whose followers the earliest narrative was at cross purposes (pun intended).   The fact that Hoffmann wants to believe that the mythicist case is fatally flawed generically may be just a case of fatally flawed logic.  G.A.Wells argued in a paper written for the 1986 Ann Arbour CSER conference (Hoffmann is surely aware of this), that just because a theory has been argued poorly, does not mean it cannot be argued well.  I have little to quarrel with Hoffmann when he says that the attempts of mythicists to show that Jesus did not exist, "has been largely incoherent, insufficiently scrupulous of historical detail".  This is of course true of most proponents of the theory, especially those working from “diffusionist” mythological models or, in the case of Doherty, from an improbable theo-philosophical schema.  Fair enough.  The problem is however that the prof seems to conclude that non-existence of Jesus cannot fly because he knows of a better way to talk through the hat.

Paul and Mark: key to the Historical Conundrum ?

         It is interesting that Hoffmann should believe the earliest gospel of Mark exhibits ‘Roman historical interest’ rather than the ‘Anatolian eclecticism [sic] as reflected by Paul’.  One has to ask how much the prof has read in the modern Markan scholarship that starts with Willi Marxsen and Norman Perrin.  He seems blissfully unaware of the nearly impenetrable opacity acknowledged by nearly everyone between Wrede and Räisänen plunging into the depths of Mark’s ingenious tale. "Blessed are the ones who speak plainly", commented Wrede sarcastically, "for they shall be understood".   And indeed, there is so much of what professor Aichele described as ‘fantasy'  in Mark which not only clashes with any putative ‘Roman historical interest’ but clobbers such an idea outright.  Aichele acknowledged  that most of the miracles and healing feats in Mark are standard professions of belief. They are strictly addressing themselves to the object of faith – as ‘believe it or not’.  In that respect, he says, the stories are not any different from other sacred texts in other religions or mystical cults.  But, says Aichele, there is also  an inexplicable residuum…an irreducible, opaque remainder of the text [that is] not finally consumed and absorbed along with the rest. What does he mean ?  The difficulty of answering questions along these lines: why do people forget about feeding themselves when they are around Jesus ?  Why is that a sign to those who know Jesus best that it is he that is out of his mind and needs to be restrained ?  What does the physical oppression of Jesus (e.g. 2:4, 3:9, 5:31) signify ?  Why would mourners in Jairus’ house burst out laughing when Jesus announces the girl was only sleeping ?  Is that sort of reaction explicable in the context for which it is given, i.e. human life apparently lost, and a hope for it rekindled by an expert brought in to return her to life ?  How about Jesus adding a commandment to the Decalogue in 10:19 (μη αποστερειτε), one that was actually formulated by Paul (1 Cr 7:5) in different context ? Or the visits to Jericho and Bethany with no action recorded ?  How about removing the roof and making a patient descend to Jesus in exchanging roles of the act of heavenly salvation ?  How about – when we are on the subject of Roman historical interest – the fantastically twisted idea that a governor of a Roman province would have acceded to a request to release from custody someone who is portrayed as adversus securitatem regnum Romanum  in place of a harmless furiosus ?  These are just some examples of Mark’s dramatic ploys which point to a writing project radically different than recording, or redacting previous reports of, historical happenings. 

                  A welcome relief from the droning of Ehrman, who more or less claims that the “Jesus mythicism” is an Internet-age conspiracy theory, or at any rate, gives minimum outline of how the idea of Jesus non-existence developed, is Hoffmann description of second century Gnostics as “mythicizers”.  Of course, we know that there were people in the second century (and probably earlier) who denied that Christ came “in flesh”, in other words, that (nearly) from the beginning the term designated no more than certain passing psychic phenomena (rare but not uncommon), available to great seers and mystics and ordinary psychos (in Mark's idiom the demons who knew Jesus), around which most of the lore was built. We know that because the second letter of John declares such views the work of anti-Christ. So, in truth “Jesus mythicism” is not a new, or modern phenomenon.  It is good that Hoffmann acknowledges that.

As expected though, the prof takes an unfriendly line to the Gnostics. To him they truly were lthe original version of the lamentable “mythicizers”  whom the church fathers valiantly fought and defeated.  Hoffmann it seems missed Schweitzer’s poking fun at the exasperated  “theologians championing the historicity of Jesus” fighting the Jesus myth proponents in his time who so resembled the church fathers fighting heresy in the middle of 2^nd century. “Like them they felt themselves called upon to protect the spiritual welfare of the defenceless masses who were in danger of being craftily deluded…As the polemical works for and against the historicity of Jesus were on the whole written rather quickly and were intended to be within the intellectual grasp of ….the widest possible readership, their level of scholarship was not generally very distinguished, and sometimes, in view of the authority of the writer, remarkably low. “  (Quest, ed. John Bowden, Minneapolis 2001, p. 395).

Given the tenor of the essay, and its obssessive concretization of the gospel metaphor, it is not surprising to find that Hoffmann considers Paul's influence on the whole marginal. If Paul's spiritualism does not fit the theory it needs to be carefully censored.  So, Hoffmann  teaches thqt Paul's reputation was 'para-canonical rather than original to the tradition'. The apostle's prestige was 'forced on the church writers' by 'a specific heresiological crisis'.  Really ?  That is news to me. Not only the Pauline allegory of Mark confirms that (at least in the eyes of the Markan community) the disciples were as clueless about the novel concept of resurrection as some in Paul's Corinthian audience, but also that they did not know the cross. The women running from the tomb tell nothing to noone; the news of Jesus' rising gets out through the gospel itself.  That of course, in the eyes of some, makes Paul the de facto originator of the Christian tradition.  He did not invent Jesus but certainly supplied the theological ground for him to walk on. The attempts to dress up the unknown historical Jesus as self-conscious Messiah fulfilling his earthly fate selon Paul are - well, laughable. Mark's tragi-comical farce of Paul's cosmic spirit of the Lord being mistaken for the parochial Jewish Messiah who would restore the old kingdom - by his own disciples and the Sanhedrin - is a brilliant brief on the historical, fissiparious Jesus' idolatry meeting the earliest Christian faith.  When Matthew re-wrote Mark to make Jesus' corpse rise with zombies scaring kids in Jerusalem, the hard core of Paul's faithful would have nothing to do with the caricature of their original Christian faith. They would bolt to Gnostic cults. On the positive side for the historicist zealots, the gospel became dumbed down sufficiently to assure mass following, the spiritual conquest of the planet and the continued worship of nonsense in the related academic disciplines.  All we have left of the original gospel are the two asses on whose back Jesus rode to Jerusalem -  the plagiarist's thumbing his nose at the two geniuses who created it in the two literary formats of the New Testament.     
  

Did Paul Meet Jesus' brother ?

I have had an exchange with Hoffmann about this on his blog which ended up with his expunging my final post after I had caught him mistaking James the Zebedee for James the Jesus brother.  Oh, well !  

Hoffmann, like Ehrman, suffers from the delusion that there exists a way of connecting James the brother of the Lord, of Gal 1:19 to the James, the brother of Jesus (Mk 6:3, Mt 13:55) and further to the James of Acts 12:17.  There isn't because Luke does not know Jesus brother by the name of James.  But of course that is not the end of the problems.  

        Gal 1:19 is likely interpolated, as I have shown here (How many times was Paul in Jerusalem?) .   But even if it is not Hoffmann's analysis is flawed.  He argues with Drews, whose position would not be the preferred one among the current breed of mythicists.  Price, Carrier, Wells and Doherty have all indicated that the 'brother of the Lord' is not to be understood as a rank-and-file member of the cultus but as as something of a rank or functional description of an inner circle of the Jerusalem assembly.  In this they agree with E.P. Sanders, who described the 'brothers of the Lord' (and the apostles) as leaders of a 'Jewish eschatological movement'.   So there is a difference between the αδελφοι εν κυριω (Phl 1:14, generic brother, member of the cult) and αδελφοι του κυροιυ (1 Cr 9:5, church leaders).  

         It is to be noted that 1 Cor 9:5 describes what appears to be privileged members of the Jerusalem assembly, a group into which Paul himself by all appearances had not been accepted (1 Cr 9:2).  That the Jerusalem temple worshipping dignitaries would have been referring to Jesus by the near absolute "Lord" (which Paul used to describe as the visionary entity which at times overwhelmed him, and which he understood to be the son of Lord-God) strikes me as a non-starter. 
        Further, other than the interpolated "James, brother Jesus called Christ" in Josephus Ant XX.9 there is nothing in the earliest Christian history indicating that James the Just was thought of as Jesus' relative.  Luke knows nothing about it. Neither does the writer of the letter of James. Nor the Gospel of Thomas. The first person historically who is recorded to have made the connection was Hegesippus in the middle of 2nd century. But nothing has survived of Hegesippus. His belief was recorded by Eusebius a century and a half later, who was plainly skeptical of a blood relationship between Jesus and James (H.E.1.12). Heggesippus account of James is obviously legendary as it affects to credit that for thirty odd years he operated a church in Jerusalem dedicated to the memory of his executed brother without the authorities being aware of it.  When they naively ask him to renounce Jesus, and he refuses, they promptly throw him down the parapet and stone him to death.    
       Of course none of this will sway the historicist passionnés. They will deny the possibility of  reading of 'brother of the Lord' as something other than plain admission of kinship.  Bad for them that not only the author of the Acts of James but Origen was struck by the improbability of the idea:  Paul, a genuine disciple of Jesus, says that he regarded this James as a brother of the Lord, not so much on account of their relationship by blood, or their being brought up together, as because of his virtue and doctrine. [Contra Celsum 1.47]. One has to wonder how Origen figured that.

Mark's Recursive Gospel

It has been noted by many that ideas in Mark’s narration have a strange quality to them. Paula Fredriksen, for example, believes the oddities of Mark’s expression are due to his lack of couth and education. Richard Carrier notes the gospeller’s bend on thwarting the expectations, both of the reader and the characters in his story. Ben Wetherington points to the inherent veiledness and indirectness in the Markan Jesus metaphorical speech. A related, interesting take on the strange feel of Mark’s logic and his testimony of Jesus, has been posted on CrossCurrents website. It comes from a Michigan professor George Aichele who sees in the gospel classical mythical elements that are processed by the reader’s belief or disbelief. But there is also something else in the earliest gospel, the professor says, an “inexplicable residuum…an irreducible, opaque remainder of the text [is] not finally consumed and absorbed along with the rest.” Mark seems to be as free of grammatical, propositional and story-telling rules as his Jesus was of gravity on the Sea of Galilee. Could the two liberties be related ?

The gospel stories self-validate and self-propagate athwart logic and meaning, and at times seem to veer off the deep end. I think professor Aichele’s is right: within the paradigm of the story, Jesus has unlimited authority and potential for doing good. Those attributes have certainly nothing unusual about them. When Jesus parries against the Pharisees who accuse him of effecting cures on behalf of the prince of devils this is strictly mythical business. The ‘house divided cannot stand’ is a clever riposte and one entirely predicated by Jesus being able to effect real, lasting cures, and not just hopes for them. The proposition that Jesus cannot –despite appearances – be an agent of a malicious entity, is sustained by belief in Jesus’ skills as a healer. Mind you, in real life, many gifted healers can perform remarkably well even though they are observed to be mentally ill. Wilhelm Reich, one of Freud’s star pupils, struggled with his manic-depressive demons since his twenties, but was successfully treating his patients even as his diary recorded the molesting of his dog by aliens. But that is not really important since Mark's story should be strictly believe-it-or-not. The same is true also about the occasional minor slip in logic. In one of them, 9:40, Jesus declares a rule of ‘who is not against us is for us’, in overruling his disciples and allowing someone who does not follow his group to cast out demons in his name. Unfortunately one cannot use the example given to formulate such a principle, as transparently the ‘not against us’ attitude in the incident is one ‘for us’ except that it was not authorized. But again, this minor glitch would fall within the explainable dimension and the belief/unbelief filtering process. This would not be an exhibit of opacity in Mark, if I understand professor Aichele correctly.

Jesus going into Jericho and coming out of there without incident in the same verse (10:46) would be. Morton Smith had an explanation for that one – a fragment of Secret Mark which records some action that took place there; alas, the letter of Clement to Theodore looks like a modern forgery to many experts. Luckily for my own theory, nothing is remembered also of Jesus’ visit to Bethany (11:11-12), ergo the question remains. If Mark was recording actual events which took place and were remembered what would be the purpose naming the locale of events without memories attaching to them ? Those are obscure intents. And there is more: people around Jesus can’t eat and it is taken as a clue by his family that it is Jesus who must be out of his mind and needs to be restrained. Clearly not an absorbable idea. To make things even more bizzare the canard that people around Jesus are so busy they can’t to feed themselves is advertised also in 6:31 and 8:1. When Jairus’ daughter rises from her death, Jesus orders casually that she be fed. Why would she not feed herself, if we dare to presume her happy to be alive again ? Further, the mourners in her house burst out laughing when Jesus minutes before offers that she is not dead but only sleeping. What’s with that ? And what’s with the throngs of people who physically converge on, and oppress, Jesus in the most unseemly fashion (2:4, 5:31), even threatening to crush him (3:9) ? Jesus tells his disciples in private to go by themselves to a secluded place to rest, but people from all over the place run there ahead of the party. The storyteller says there is one loaf of bread in the boat but the disciples (in the story he wrote) deny there is bread in the vessel – after arguing around it. Mark says Jesus said ‘what’s there to discuss ?’ Yeah, I suppose both have a point. Bartimaeus throws away his cloak when he is invited to join Jesus’ entourage. Obviously, that would be an important act to record for posterity. Jesus, after passing through Bethany of which he or Mark can't remember anything, curses a fig tree because it did not yield fruit to him a few weeks ahead of market. The mocking guards slap around Jesus cupping his eyes asking him to prophesy. What does that mean ? Well, Matthew explains that mystery, does he not ? He says the guards told Jesus to prophecy who hit him, i.e. to entertain them with a little vaticinium ex eventu. He even removes the captor’s hands from Jesus’ eyes to make it plain he sees no occult designs in Mark at all. Neither do I. These events or non-events, I will argue elsewhere were actually attempts by Mark to describe the uncanny inside of the spirit, that most of those to whom he wrote were as intimately familiar with as he was. But for now let us stick to the formal issues of all this strange stuff.

In the briefest of terms: Mark has raised a set of mythical props within his storyboard and then allowed the characters in it, including Jesus, to challenge them in order to defeat their rebellion and thus re-enforce his hypnotic narration of a mystery. Not certain you follow what I am saying ? Ok, let us play it out: imagine the family of Vivian, Lady of the Lake, appearing on the scene at the moment of her imprisoning Merlin in the tower she conjured up around him. They wave their hands and scream over one another: “Hello, please excuse us, …no, please, no tower, no way Vivian can do that sort of thing,…please excuse her;....you are right,... she is not an architect, not an engineer ...no, she cannot be ... not yet the twentieth century...…yes, quite right,... she is out of her mind”. That sort of intervention would surely look ‘veiled’ if Merlin at the same time was struggling to break into the tower’s armory. See what I mean ? This would not be the same kind of challenge offered by an antagonist to Harry Potter flying a broom in aerial combats around Hogwarth. This is not a challenge to a hero within the myth, but a challenge to the myth itself baked right into the myth.

Ok, let me then, before passing on to the gospel’s circular design, get back to the hypnotic suggestion of Jesus walking on the sea. It is my favourite example of Mark’s application of the re-referencing technique, seen in many places of the narrative: the disciples in an unsteady boat see Jesus passing by and think it is a ghost. Mark, a staunch Paulinist, mocks here the Jesus idolatry of the original Petrine tradition which refused to accept the cross, and venerated Jesus as a man of flesh and blood who was sent to them as the prophet of the coming messianic kingdom. So when the disciples scream in fear at the sight of Jesus as the Spirit strolling on water, “Jesus” changes his mind and levitates towards the distressed crew to reassure them that he is no Pauline ghost, and announces : “It is I; have no fear”. I can imagine Mark’s friends convulsing in laughter when reading this elaborate lampooning of Petrine miracle-mongering and their disdain for Pauline pneumaticism. Mark’s Jesus confirms Paul (1 Cr 1:23, Mk 8:12) in saying ‘no sign’ will be given, and he is not contradicting himself if one reads the story the way it is proposed here. There are no miracles in Mark - the paradoxical events are the allegorically rendered artifacts of altered consciousness and cognitive gaps brough about as the effect of pneuma. Even Matthew was evidently impressed by Mark’s cleverness if he returned it by ridiculing Pauline church’s high horse of being Christ’s imitators in showing that Peter ('flesh and blood' as they are) tried it on the sea and it did not work.

The core purpose of Mark’s gospel

Mark’s Pauline mantle would be doubted in most exegetical circles and a number of reasons would be given for it. For example a number of Markan scholars believe that Mark, unlike Paul, was an adoptionist. I don’t think it was as clear-cut as that. Paul saw himself if not quite pre-existent, then definitely pre-destined for his mission, which was activated in medias res (Gal 1:15) as he gave up on material things and pleasures of this world. So, if the disciples of Paul were to be his imitators, as he was of Christ, then the prefiguring of the role of God’s servant and receiving a commission on it in mid-life would not be a contradiction to a Pauline.

But there are other elements of Mark that do not quite square with Paul’s outlook. The son of man does not figure in Paul’s writing, and undoubtedly originates in the Palestinian traditions which Paul purposely ignored. Neither is the central message of Mark’s Jesus, as I perceive it: repentance. Again, in my view of Paul and his saints, they repented by swearing to a puritanical orgiastic fantasy of themselves individually nailed to a piece of wood, which was not how the Palestinian tradents understood metanoia. Paul did not like to baptize because he was not into making people feel clean by rituals; he was sent to preach the gospel. He preached his gospel to a select audience of those who were mature and wise. The ideas and social graces of Mark’s Jesus are sometimes clearly estranged from Paul’s agenda. Mark's idea of the risen Lord socializing with publicans and sinners would have probably made Paul go glossolalic.

This is what I think happened in a nutshell. The war of 66-70 added Nazarene (Nazorean) exiles to the Jewish communities in the near Diaspora. Bitter squabbles and finger-pointing arose among Jewish factions and their Pauline Gentile auxiliaries, over the catastrophe of the loss of the Temple as the central symbol of Jewish identity. It was a three-way struggle between the Phariseic-dominated mainstream, the Nazarene sectaries and Paul’s churches. The Paulines had the advantage of independence from the Temple as the religious hub, as Paul tried but failed to gain access to it through James’ poor saints in Jerusalem. By all indications, he went alone, and his following built, and prided itself in, a separate, self-sustained base. In contrast, the Nazarenes – assumed a minority in the Jewish communities – were the ones worst off by far. They found themselves cut off from the rabbinical Jews who blamed their messianic obsessions for the mayhem, and from the Pauline swarms, which held them in contempt as the deniers of the cross and the perverters of Christ’s gospel, who received their comeuppance. Doubtless, they found it hard to proselytize in the proximity of either of their rivals. In this situation many were re-considering the proposition the Jesus himself was the Proclaimed as Paul taught and not just a proclaimer as Jesus saw himself.

In the other camp, after Paul was gone, his taboo on the ‘historical Jesus’ (1 Cr 2:2, 2 Cr 5:16) rapidly lost its lure. Yes, naturally some of the things that would have irked and offended Paul, the lore of letting the dead bury their dead, or the son of man who has nowhere to lay his head, or the birds in the air whom our heavenly Father feeds with no effort required, the yoke that was light, or kids who hate their parents, would still remain beyond pale with Paul’s followers . But the natural human curiosity about the earthly career of the man who Paul taught visited them as the ineffable heavenly Spirit in their ecstasies, would have come sooner or later. And, they too had something to gain from uniting into a single church. Paul considered the followers his workmanship in the Lord, and the proof of seeing him. So an extended believer base meant Paul was right again and confirmed they did not just see things.

I believe this is how Mark came to be written. Behind his gospel was an original idea of uniting the two views of Jesus : the Nazarenes’ proclaimer of the coming son of man (not himself) and Paul’s Christ, which remained separated by the antagonism of Paul and the Nazarenes. It was masterfully conceived as a story of Jesus empowered by Pauline spirit, from its appearance at the Jordan to its extinguishment on the cross, in the death of Jesus the Nazarene. Throughout the gospel Jesus has a dual identity, which is at once advertised and at once hidden to those who do not understand what the presence of the spirit means or feels like. He speaks of the heavenly kingdom; they think it is coming to earth. Peter idolizes him as the Messiah but Jesus does not want anyone to know until he is dead.

This is again a hugely misapprehended smart-alecking of Mark: Jesus doesn’t want it known publicly that he is Messiah for a very simple reason: it has to be Paul (and his gospel allegorized by Mark) who will be first to proclaim Jesus as the Christ ! That is why an obscure entity called many censures Bartimaeus who calls Jesus 'Son of David' and not the disciples, who of course rebel against the gospel. Mark's irony here is in that the appellation comes from someone who is blind, spiritually blind to be sure. Mark rejects the Davidic descent of Jesus. First, the idea is lampooned in the story of a blind beggar, and then Jesus himself rejects Christ's Davidic line in a clever use of Psalm 110:1 in 12:36-37. His target would not be just the "scribes" but those Jewish Petrine exiles, who competing with Paul for converts, claim the Davidic descent the Nazarene Jesus. (I believe the idea of Jesus as a Davidic king 'kata sarka' is un-Pauline, and Rom 1:3, a later insert).

The reason many Markan scholars since Wrede have struggled to get a handle on the messianic secret is that they allow themselves be hypnotized by two suggestions. One is the Markan mystery mongering . Two, they have allowed themselves to be talked by the patristics into the dogma that "crucified/resurrected Christ" was the lingua franca of the church since Jerusalem. But Mark mischievously lets Jesus talk to the exterior of the story, re-referencing himself from the distance of forty years later (as in the example of Vivian I gave above) building the passion plot around the pig-headed refusal of the Nazarenes to accept the cross of Christ. To the disciples inside the story, Mark's Jesus says the son of man must die and be resurrected and Peter is upset because he wants him to be a different Messiah - the king on the throne of Israel. The future “pillars” don’t get the transfiguration on the mountain as the glory of the risen Lord (2 Cr 3:18 And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed (μεταμορφούμεθα) into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.). They reject Paul’s Jerusalem above, resisting the idea when it comes from the mouth of Jesus they know, and do not recognize his metamorphosis as the post-mortem spiritual transformation. It scares them, as it scared them on the lake and as the missing corpse will scare the women at the loop of the gospel. Leaving the mountain, the three can’t figure out what the resurrection from the dead is about (cf. 1 Cr 15:12-19) even though it was just demonstrated to them. They cling on to the hope of a messianic kingdom on earth which so enraged Jesus who evidently read the whole chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians, if you get my meaning. The Zebedees could not be talked out of that idea: they wanted some of that Herod’s palace seating for private use after Jesus’ coup d’etat.

Mark’s gospel terms are harsh: he offers to the Petrine Nazarenes, in the proverbial wilderness, three propositions. One: you will repent and accept the cross of Christ as taught by Paul; two, you will accept the spiritual nature of Christ as taught by Paul and his resurrection (!!); and three, you will accept that there is but a single gospel (as per Gal 1:7-8) lest you be damned. In the three core verses 4:10-12, the gospel purpose and structure is laid out (KJV):

And when he was alone, they that were about him with the twelve asked of him the parable.

On the principles shown, this is how the koan reads: When Jesus was alone, those who had access to him through the Spirit (from outside of the local time and place), i.e. not the Twelve (!), asked him about the sower parable.

And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all [these] things are done in parables:

It is to you, the true faith of the sower ( 2Cr 9:9-10, 1 Cr 3:6), that the mysteries of the kingdom are revealed, to those on the outside, ἐν παραβολαῖς τὰ πάντα γίνεται - everything, i.e. the entire gospel, is made up out of (undecipherable) parables. In other words, the entire gospel is an allegory.

That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time (μήποτε) they should be converted, and [their] sins should be forgiven them.

Repent ! Paraphrasing Isaiah 6:9, Mark demands through Jesus that the Petrines accept the gospel of the cross, and become faithful, as the pre-condition of their entering the kingdom !

The story unfolds to its inevitable conclusion and culminates in Jesus’ passion, as he predicts it (vaticinium ex eventu). Peter and the disciples run away as prophecied, and hush up the cross so as not to be persecuted for it (Gal 6:12). Jesus is captured by men, tried and condemned twice to be crucified: first, by the Sanhedrin offended by Jesus’ paradoxal self-proclamation and then by a bemused Gentile governor who thinks it is folly to crucify a harmless furiosus, but gives in to the mob to fulfill both ends of 1 Cr 1:23.

The Function of the Empty Tomb in Mark

Even though the view is growing within the NT scholarly community that the abrupt ending at 16:8 is indeed what Mark intended, the meaning of the scene eludes the traditional exegesis. This would be the final example of obscurity in the gospel of Mark. I have outlined a reading of Mark here in which the gospel is open-ended . In the malleable design of the narrative and its recursive structure, this ending has the function of the loop’s end. As one of the humourous definitions of recursion says:

Recursion
If you still don’t get it, see ‘Recursion’.

In this intuitive paralogic, the meaning of the process is not spelled out but suggested by circumlocution. To get ‘Recursion’ you have to loop a few times through the definition, until you gain the insight that recursion itself is looping through the definition.

In an analogy with Mark’s gospel, the Markan insider would have grasped the scene’s import at once, as it stands as the second milestone in the prophecy of Isaiah [sic] which is fulfilled in a two-stage baptismal process. The scripture (of Paul’s Romans !) would explain what the neaniskos was doing in the empty tomb prior to the arrival of the women: Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his (Rom 6:3-4). The community would understand the spiritual pun of the missing body of the Nazarene Jesus. A reference to the “scripture” would yield Paul’s 1 Cr 12:27: Now you are the body of Christ (σωμα Χριστου) and individually members of it. Paul’s church was in the mythical Galilee where Jesus was to meet his disciples. The empty tomb fully supports Mark’s narrative design. It is the third instance of Jesus resurrectional transfiguration (the previous ones being on the lake, and on the mount).

I believe the bizzare ending of verse 16:8 in the majority of the manuscript was fully intended. The conjunction γαρ (for) which strangely ends the whole gospel was likely to be "shared" as a connector to verse 1:2. (which likely was the first verse of Urmark) . In this manner, on the second pass, the messenger of "Isaiah" refers to both, John the Baptist and the young man in the tomb, who as I said is most likely self-referencing Mark.

The scene is cleverly set up by the request by Joseph of Arimathea to Pilate to give him the body of Jesus. This would be the again one of the exhilarating misunderstandings in the story: the noble Sanhedrin member who himself expected the coming of the kingdom of God (ος… αυτος ην προσδεχομενος την βασιλειαν του θεου), desired the body of Jesus (το σωμα του Ιησου) . This formula suggests that Joseph really wanted the ecstatic ‘body’ of Jesus which for the Nazarenes signified the imminent coming of God’s kingdom to Israel (alluded to in Acts 2:2-4). But Pilate (15:44) figures the request to mean that Joseph (Αριμαθαια, I am persuaded by professor Paul Nadim Tarazi, stands for Har-rimmat(h)aim , Hebrew for 'mount of decay') wants Jesus’ corpse ( πτωμα). The empty tomb mystery is then predicated by the punning of σωμα and πτωμα, i.e. that which Joseph wanted (and did not get) is now in Galilee.

Plausibly, the young man in the tomb discovered by the women is Mark himself, indicating that he too ran in the terror on the night of the Spirit's capture(likely alluding to Amos 2:15) .

He later repented and received his vision. The women running away from the Pauline baptist and messenger and not telling anything to anyone, assure that it is through Mark’s text that the gospel gets out. This, I believe was the idea behind the Messianic Secret. The disciples (or their followers) may not proclaim the gospel of Jesus passion, his death and his rising. It will be Paul and then Mark through his allegory.

The gospel of Mark then is a cycle between the two baptisms - that into the life of the Spirit (i.e. John the Baptist) and that into its death (i.e. Paul/Mark's) in the tomb. The reader gets out of cycle when he or she captured the full allegorical meaning of Mark's gospel. The newness of life that Jesus experienced at baptism, will have been fulfilled by those initiated into his death.

Unlike the Pauline spiritualists, someone reading Mark in search for meaning without understanding the community, its ways and spirit nomenclature, would be left bewildered by the ending. The Petrine sages who were sent the script were no doubt intrigued. Mark’s narrative gnosticism* looked formidable. After some early fumbling (the interpolated 1 Cr 15:3-11 ?) they found a way to deal with Mark’s offer. The cross of Messiah, yes, but Davidic Messiah; the gnostic supremacy of Paul – no way; single gospel ? you are dreaming, if you think it is going to be yours: the magic circle of gnosis between the baptism of John and the baptism of Paul in Mark’s allegory will have to be broken. The genius who found a solution to the challenge of Mark became known to us as Matthew.

*/ The term is used by Jan Wojcik in the Road to Emmaus to describe Luke's gospel