Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles

25 October 2019

Many studies have argued the Gospel that came to be labeled “according to Mark” based some of its content on the Epistles of Paul. Here I’ll discuss this scholarship and its evidence. “Mark” is of course the earliest Gospel we have any surviving text or even any real evidence of. It was then used as a source by all the other Gospels now in the New Testament. So it’s particularly important to know if Mark (and we’ll continue to call him that, not otherwise knowing the author’s actual name) was writing independently of Pauline tradition, or actually mythologizing it.

It would be more accurate to say that the Gospels that came to be labeled “according to Matthew” and “according to Luke” are redactions of Mark, clearly intended originally to replace Mark—within the communities that produced, preferred, or promoted them. Only the Gospel that came to be labeled “according to John” actually used Mark the way other ancient authors used sources: writing his text in his own words, and simply following or altering what Mark said when it suited his purposes, or deliberately contradicting it to combat its message. John likewise used Luke this way, but even more to deliberately contradict and thus combat its message. Matthew similarly tried to combat and thus “fix” Mark by extensively adding material that would permit “reinterpreting” Mark as advancing a Torah-observant gospel—the exact opposite of what Mark originally intended.

Most of what Jesus is “known” for today comes from these later fabrications intended to override the original version of Jesus found in Mark. Mark gets mostly ignored. And yet his myth started it all, a lifetime after the fact, decades after Paul wrote his Epistles, which in turn were written decades after Jesus would supposedly have lived. And other than revelatory or theological data, and material not actually from or about Jesus, we actually can trace nothing in Mark to any sources prior. He appears to have created the whole thing. This is not a popular opinion in Biblical scholarship, which is still hung up on a desperate certainty that Mark must have been working from some collection of oral traditions; but that certainty is actually based on no evidence. And nothing based on no evidence should ever be treated as “certain.”

I demonstrate the mythic nature of Mark’s narrative—and why he was not simply collecting oral lore but constructing a deliberate, coherent mythograph from beginning to end—in Chapter 10 of On the Historicity of Jesus. I likewise demonstrate that attempts to “rescue” from Mark’s mythic narrative some kernels of supposedly historical fact all lack logical validity in Chapter 5 of Proving History.

All of this becomes more potent if we conclude Mark even as likely as not used Paul for much of his stories. So what is the evidence he may have done so?

Leading Scholarship

The principal works to consult on this (all of which from peer reviewed academic presses) are:

Michael Bird & Joel Willitts, Paul and the Gospels: Christologies, Conflicts and Convergences (T&T Clark 2011)
David Oliver Smith, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul: The Influence of the Epistles on the Synoptic Gospels (Resource 2011)
Tom Dykstra, Mark: Canonizer of Paul (OCABS 2012)
Oda Wischmeyer & David Sim, eds., Paul and Mark: Two Authors at the Beginnings of Christianity (de Gruyter 2014)
Eve-Marie Becker et al., Mark and Paul: For and Against Pauline Influence on Mark (De Gruyter 2014)
Thomas Nelligan, The Quest for Mark’s Sources: An Exploration of the Case for Mark’s Use of First Corinthians (Pickwick 2015)
Christine Jacobi, Jesusüberlieferung bei Paulus? Analogien zwischen den echten Paulusbriefen und den synoptischen Evangelien (De Gruyter 2015).
Mar Pérez I. Díaz, Jesus in the Light of Paul’s Theology (Mohr Siebeck 2020).
John-Christian Eurell, “Paul and the Jesus Tradition: Reconsidering the Relationship Between Paul and the Synoptics,” Journal of Early Christian History 12.2 (2022): 1-16.

Paradigmatic Example: Jesus on Taxation

In Romans 13, Paul writes up his own opinions about taxation, arguing Christians should dutifully pay their taxes. We know these remarks are just his own opinions; not only because he represents them in no other way and has to contrive arguments for them—yet never resorts to the most potent argument of all (“the Lord said!”)—but also because so far as we can tell, everywhere else when Paul had “a commandment from the Lord” on something he was arguing for, he said so. For example: 1 Corinthians 7:10-12, 1 Corinthians 7:25, 1 Corinthians 9:14, 1 Corinthians 11:23, 1 Corinthians 14:37, 1 Thessalonians 4:2, 1 Thessalonians 4:15 (see Ch. 11.6 of OHJ). So when we find a clever story about Jesus promoting the paying of taxes in Mark 12:13-17, where did Mark get that story? Why had Paul never heard of it, even after decades of “preaching Jesus” and engaging with other Christians, even the first Apostles, across a dozen or so provinces?

It’s quite obvious that Mark has taken Paul’s teaching and simply rewritten it into a pithier teaching from Jesus. Before Mark did that, there was no teaching from Jesus on the subject. Mark’s license to give authority to the teachings of apostles by attributing them to Jesus is a thing we will see many more examples of below; and many more are discussed in the literature cited above. And it’s the same as Matthew’s license in fabricating such elaborate discourses as The Sermon on the Mount, which mainstream peer reviewed scholarship has found to be a late invention of Greek authors that post-dates the Jewish War (see OHJ, pp. 465-68), and thus was never actually taught by Jesus. A conclusion all the more obvious from the fact that every parallel in it one might find in Paul comes from Paul’s own thoughts; Paul conspicuously shows no awareness of Jesus having ever said anything quotable on the same subjects. John likewise is generally agreed to have made up tons of speeches for Jesus as well. It’s what all other Gospel authors did. And if they all did it, we should assume Mark did too.

That Mark adapted Paul’s teaching about taxes into a teaching from Jesus is further confirmed by the Pauline Chiasmus (which we’ll get to shortly). It is the plainest instance of Mark doing this.

Paradigmatic Example: The Last Supper

Another example is “the last supper.” This began as a vision Paul had of Jesus relating to him what he spoke mystically to all future generations of Christians, as we see in 1 Corinthians 11:23-27. As Paul there says, he received this “from the Lord.” Directly. Just as he says he received all his teachings (Galatians 1:11-12; Romans 10:14-15; Romans 16:25-26). In Paul’s version, no one else is present. It is not a “last” supper (as if Jesus had had any others before), but merely “the bread and cup of the Lord.” And Jesus is not speaking to “disciples” but to the whole Christian Church unto the end of time—including Paul and his congregations.

The text in Paul reads as follows (translating the Greek as literally as I can):

For I received from the Lord what I also handed over to you, that the Lord Jesus, during the night he was handed over, took bread, and having given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in the remembrance of me.” Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, as often as you might drink it in remembrance of me.” For as often as you might eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
1 Corinthians 11:23-26

Notably, “until he comes,” and not “until he returns.” This becomes in Mark (emphasis added):

While they were eating, having taken bread, and having blessed it, he broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “Take; this is my body.” Then, having taken a cup, and having given thanks, he gave it to them, and they all drank from it. And he said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Truly I tell you, that never again shall I drink from the fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it anew in the kingdom of God.” And having sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.
Mark 14:22-26

Notice what’s changed. Paul is describing Jesus miming some actions and explaining their importance. His audience is future Christians. Mark has transformed this into a narrative story by adding people being present and having Jesus interact with them: now “they were eating” (Paul does not mention anyone actually eating) and Jesus gave the bread “to them” (does not occur in Paul) and instructs them to “take” it (no such instruction in Paul); and Jesus gave the cup “to them” (does not occur in Paul) and “they all drink it” (no such event in Paul); and Jesus describes the meaning of the cup “to them” (no such audience in Paul).

Then Jesus says he will not drink “again” until the kingdom comes, a statement that fits a narrative event, implying Jesus drank, and here drank, and often drank, and will pause drinking until the end times. Likewise Jesus “blesses” the bread (which also doesn’t happen in Paul), implying the actual literal bread he has in his hand is thereby rendered special to the ones about to eat it; whereas in Paul that makes no sense, because no one is there to eat it, Jesus is just depicting and explaining a ritual others will perform in his honor, not that he is performing for them. So it is notable that all of these things are absent from Paul. There is no narrative context of this being the last of many cups Jesus has drunk and of Jesus pausing drinking or of his blessing the bread and giving it to people present. In Paul, the whole scene is an instruction to future followers, not a description of a meal Jesus once had.

This is how Mark reifies a revelation in Paul, relating Jesus’s celestial instructions for performing a sacrament and its meaning, into a narrative historical event. Mark has even taken Paul’s language, about Jesus being “handed over,” which in Paul means by God (Romans 8:32, exact same word) and even by himself (Galatians 2:20, exact same word), not by Judas, and converted it into a whole new narrative of a betrayal by “the Jews” (the meaning of Judas, i.e. Judah, i.e. Judea). Paul has no knowledge of a betrayal. Indeed in Paul, all of “the twelve” get to see Jesus right after his death and are recognized as apostles (1 Corinthians 15:5; see Proving History, pp. 151-55).

Mark in fact constructed his own Judah-as-betrayer narrative and integrated it into his equally fabricated “last supper” narrative from a pastiche of scriptures, including lost scriptures, wherefrom Mark gets whole chunks of his narrative (see Proving History, ibid.). We are only lucky enough to be sure of this because it’s exposed by 1 Clement, who clearly wrote before Mark’s narrative existed (or was known to the author of 1 Clement). Clement also has no knowledge of any betrayal by anyone, much less a Judah—and also is unaware of the destruction of Jerusalem, so this letter must predate 66 A.D., contrary to a much later tradition placing it in 95 (see OHJ, Ch. 8.5). More importantly, Clement frequently quotes scriptures, both ones we know and ones now lost, as being “the words of our Lord Jesus,” evidently under the belief that Jesus spoke through the ancient prophets, and thus their words are his words.

So when Clement says:

Remember the words of our Lord Jesus, for he said, ‘Woe to that man! It would have been good for him not to be born, rather than cause one of my chosen to stumble. Better for him to have a millstone cast about his neck and be drowned in the sea than to have corrupted one of my chosen’
1 Clement 46.7-8

He doesn’t even know about Judas. For several pages Clement’s whole discourse is on examples of betrayal; not one of which is the paradigmatic Christian betrayal narrative, that of Judas—which means that that legend had not yet formed; Mark probably invented it, as an allegory for his overall message and as a useful tale for missionaries to tell, precisely to meet the need Clement struggled to find examples for.

Here, Clement appears to conflate into one saying two different things Mark has Jesus say. But we know Mark must have written after, and Clement is the one quoting a complete coherent saying. In fact this appears to be a quotation from a lost scripture, whom Clement is again assuming is the voice of Jesus speaking through an ancient prophet. So Mark just clipped a line from this scripture and used it to form part of his Judas tale.

As I wrote of Clement’s quotation in OHJ:

This is clearly represented here as a quotation of one unified saying, yet in the Gospels it is two completely unrelated ones: one part spoken during Jesus’ ministry, in the presence of a group of children, about people tempting his followers to sin (‘Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung round his neck and he were thrown into the sea’ [Mark 9:42]…), another part spoken about Judas at the Last Supper (‘Woe to that man, by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been good for that man not to be born’ [Mark 14:18-21]…). Clement clearly does not know of the Judas story, and the phrase ‘Woe to that man! It would have been good for him not to be born’ was evidently never originally anything Jesus said about Judas, but a generic statement about those who lead the Lord’s ‘children’ to sin, meaning Christians (Jesus’ ‘chosen ones’…). Which means Jesus almost certainly never said this—because it reflects the concept of a church community, of ‘believers’ in Jesus that did not exist until after he had died.
OHJ, pp. 311-12.

So we can see clues here to how Mark is fabricating his story of the last supper, turning a ritual vision in Paul into a story of a historical meal, and integrating an allegory of betrayal throughout that was unknown to Paul, using other sources, e.g. lost and extant scriptures, to build that in.

Or Is Paul Just Using Rabbinical Terminology?

Some might challenge what I just argued by claiming Paul’s language in 1 Cor. 11:23 actually means he learned his account through witnesses, even though he doesn’t say that, and mentions no witnesses being present. The usual line is that the Greek word Paul uses here for “received,” parelabon (from paralambanô), is a “rabbinical” term for receiving a tradition orally from a distant teacher in the past, and does not imply a vision. That isn’t true. And it’s necessary to end this myth here and now.

There is no example anywhere in the New Testament of the verb paralambanô being used in the first-person singular to refer to oral tradition from a distant past teacher, Rabbinical or otherwise. In fact, so far as I can tell, there is no example of such a use in the whole of Greek literature. Whereas this is exactly the same word Paul uses in first person singular in Galatians 1:12, where he explicitly says he means a revelation—and then goes on to swear up and down that he learned nothing he preached from anyone prior. Paul’s probably lying about that; but the significant point is that Paul clearly taught that all his information came from visions, not conveyors of a tradition (“tradents”). Therefore he cannot mean tradents in 1 Corinthians 11:23. He can only mean what he repeatedly swears to in Galatians 1.

In fact, Paul’s phrase in Galatians 1:11, “I would have you know, brethren, the gospel” that he says he preached to them, but for a trivial change of particle (from gar to de), is literally word-for-word identical to the same phrase in 1 Corinthians 15:1, “I would have you know, brethren, the gospel” that he says he preached to them. Yet in Galatians he says “I did not receive [that gospel] from a man,” using that same word, paralambanô, again in the first person. So he cannot mean tradents in 1 Corinthians 15, either. Because he swore up and down in Galatians he didn’t learn anything that way. In fact, it’s clear Paul would have been declared a fraud if he had—his whole argument in Galatians entails only revelations were an acceptable source for whatever he preached about Jesus, that his congregations would have accepted no other claim. And so indeed Paul says, for several years he did “not consult any human being” about what he preached (Galatians 1:16); and even when he did meet others years later, he says “they added nothing” to what he preached (Galatians 2:6).

This means Paul cannot have meant he “received” the information about the Eucharist from tradents (whatever the truth was); he can only have meant he received it in a revelation. For when Paul says “I received from the Lord what I also handed over to you” in 1 Corinthians 11:23, he is using the exact same language as elsewhere, and talking about what he claims he had been preaching for years before consulting anyone. So he must mean the exact same thing he means when using that same language in 1 Corinthians 15 and Galatians 1: he only ever handed over to his congregations what he received directly from the Lord (which could include scripture, though Paul usually distinguishes revelations and scripture as his sources—and never mentions having any other source than these). Not necessarily all at the same time (Paul refers to ongoing revelations, e.g. in Galatians 2:2 and 2 Corinthians 12), but necessarily in no other way.

Some also try to claim Paul’s use of the Greek preposition apo for “from” in 1 Corinthians 11:23, instead of para (as in Galatians 1:11), indicates an ultimate and not immediate source. But there is no evidence of such a distinction between those words in Paul, nor any evidence of it being common elsewhere in a first-person construction like this. To the contrary, were that what Paul meant, he would sooner say “we” received it from the Lord, not “I” received it from the Lord. Or he would say it in the third person with a different verb, for example saying “as was handed down” or “as the Lord handed down,” on the model of Luke 1 or Acts 6 (and those passages use a distinctively different word, paradidômi, “hand down, transmit”). Instead, Paul’s actual wording establishes himself as a direct tradent: from the Lord, to him, to them. Just as in Galatians. Which implies a vision, not a tradition.

It was thus Mark who first converted this abstract lore of Paul’s (and possibly even Peter’s) revelations into a narrative of an event in history attended by the first apostles. No such concept appears before.

Paradigmatic Example: The Pauline Chiasmus

Mark 12:25 has Jesus say, “When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.” Notably, Paul had no knowledge of such a saying when he had to struggle to justify his view of the resurrection as being an abandoning of fleshly life and entering into uncorruptible celestial bodies (1 Corinthians 15:36-54; see my most thorough discussion in The Empty Tomb and its associated FAQ; Mark also lifts Paul’s distinction between bodies made by hands and those not, and puts it into the mouth of Jesus, by metaphor making exactly the same point as Paul regarding the nature of the resurrection—almost verbatim). So where did Mark get the idea that Jesus said this thing about angels and marriage? It seems quite evidently from Paul. By inventing a simple proverb for Jesus to have uttered, Mark is simplifying Paul’s discourse into a single line, as anyone who can figure out why “they will neither marry nor be given in marriage” and what it means “to be like the angels in heaven” will have sussed Paul’s entire discourse on the resurrection body. Thus illustrating again how Mark adapts Paul’s teaching by simplifying it into a story about Jesus.

But there is something even more remarkable about this parallel: it comes in the middle of a chiasmus Mark has constructed within Mark 12 that demonstrates his dependence on Paul. This was first discovered by Michael Turton and is used to significant effect under peer review by David Oliver Smith. As I showed in OHJ (Ch. 10.4), Mark is fond of chiastic structure and uses it often. And here we have an instance that demonstrates Mark’s knowledge of Paul’s Epistles. I here adapt this model from Turton’s demonstration:

A	Romans 8:31-38, References Psalm 118, verse 6; then warns of persecution and denounces all religious authorities but Jesus = Mark 12:10-12, Quotes Psalm 118, verses 22-23; then mentions the religious authorities want to kill Jesus.
	B	Romans 13:1-7, Paul exhorts to obey your government and pay your taxes = Mark 12:13-17, Jesus declares “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.”
		C	1 Corinthians 15:12-34, Paul confronts those who deny resurrection = Mark 12:18-23, Jesus confronts the Sadduccees who deny resurrection.
		C’	1 Corinthians 15:35-50, Paul answers what the resurrection body is like, after declaring the folly of those who don’t know (15:36) = Mark 12:24-27, Jesus answers what the resurrection body is like, after declaring the folly of those who don’t know (12:24).
	B’	Romans 13:8-10, Paul explains how love fulfills the Law = Mark 12:28-34, Jesus explains how love fulfills the Law.
A’	1 Corinthians 15:24-28 references Psalm 110, verse 1 (in 15:25), and declares Jesus will defeat all enemies and authorities = Mark 12:35-40, Quotes the exact same verse in Psalm 110, then preaches to beware of the religious authorities.

These coincidences and parallels are so statistically improbable as to render any other explanation effectively impossible: Mark is adapting and playing off of specific content in Romans and 1 Corinthians.

Thematic Examples

Scholars have long suspected Mark knew the Epistles because Mark is full of memorably Pauline themes.

Paul of course equated Jesus with both the Passover and the Yom Kippur sacrifice, both rolled into one (his death atones for all sins like the Yom Kippur, and saves us from death like the Passover lamb), even though they are months apart in the Jewish ritual calendar. And yet Mark also merges the two themes into one: having Jesus die on Passover (indeed at the very same hour as a temple sacrifice) and enact at the same time a Yom Kippur ritual (with Barabbas as the scapegoat; see OHJ, pp. 402-08).

Likewise Mark reifies Paul’s theme of a Torah-free Gospel (by use of metonymy, one feature standing in for all): Mark 7:15 says “nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them,” and in 7:19 that Jesus “declared all foods clean,” just as Paul says “I am convinced, being fully persuaded in the Lord Jesus, that nothing is unclean” (Romans 14:14) and “all food is clean” (Romans 14:20). Indeed, Mark 7 has Jesus speak of the clean and unclean, and literal washing, transferring it to a message about internal cleanness replacing literal cleanness, exactly as Paul does in Romans 14. Extending the same reasoning to every other Torah command would then form a major component of Mark’s community’s mission—which was also Paul’s.

Mark 10:1-12 has Jesus also teach the same thing about divorce that Paul did. Though in this case Paul does say he has that teaching from Jesus (likely, as we just saw, from some revelation or spirit conversation). But Mark still inaccurately has Jesus mention women divorcing husbands (Mark 10:12), as Jewish law did not provide for women to initiate a divorce (see Divorce in the Bible and Divorce in Judaism); whereas Paul, working with Gentile congregations, assumes they could as a matter of course in his own teachings on divorce (in 1 Corinthians 7). Mark then has Jesus teach essentially what Paul did. Which shows Mark has gotten Jesus’s teaching through the filter of Paul. Just as Paul says, “A wife must not separate from her husband, but if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband,” Mark’s Jesus says “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her and if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery.” It’s the same teaching. Yet this specific form of it can only have come from Paul, not Jesus.

Another example is how Mark 14:36 puts in the mouth of Jesus Paul’s repeated duplicative “Abba, Father” (despite both words meaning the same thing, in Romans 8:15 & Galatians 4:6), and does so in a similar context: Mark has Jesus utter it in a prayer for strength to endure and not fall away from his faith in God’s salvation; and Paul references it in discussing precisely the same subject (Galatians 4:7-20 & Romans 8:16-30). In fact the parallels are so apposite, the otherwise inexplicable narrative in Mark (why is Jesus, who well knows who he is and what will really happen, at all concerned about this?) makes more sense when read in light of these passages in Paul, as if Mark knew a reading of Paul would complete one’s understanding of what he was narratively portraying: Jesus as a model for the ideal Christian believer, and as a fellow heir to the promise of resurrection.

Similarly, Mark 8:31-33 crafts Jesus’s rebuke of Peter after Paul’s rebuke of Peter (Galatians 2:11-14). The many congruences are well analyzed in Dykstra (Mark, pp. 97-99). For example, Paul says, “Am I now seeking the favor of men, or of God?”; Jesus says, “You are not thinking of the things of God but of the things of man.” Then Mark 8:34-37 adapts material from Philippians 3:7-8. For example, Paul says, “Whatever gain [kerdê] I had, I counted as a loss [zêmian]” and “I suffered the loss [zêmian] of all…that I may gain [kêrdêsô] Christ”; Jesus says, “What does it profit a man to gain [kêrdêsai] the whole world and lose [zêmiôthênai] his life?” rather than, Jesus explains, “losing” all for Christ and his gospel in exchange for eternal life. The links continue (as summarized by Dykstra), but you get the point.

And on and on…

Mark also reifies Paul’s teachings about Christian baptism being an adoption by God as his son (compare Mark 1:11 with Romans 8:14-17 and Galatians 3:26-27).
Mark repeatedly has Jesus refer to his future Christian followers as “children” (at least thirteen times), just as Paul did (at least twenty-eight times: in Philippians, Romans, Galatians, 1 Thessalonians, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians; likewise Hebrews).
Mark is conspicuously as fond of the “stumbling block” metaphor for sin as Paul was (compare Mark 4:17, 6:3, 14:27, 14:29, and especially Mark 9:42-47, with Romans 9:32-33, Romans 11:9-11, Romans 14:13-20, 1 Corinthians 1:23, 1 Corinthians 8:9, 1 Corinthians 8:13, 1 Corinthians 10:32, 2 Corinthians 6:3); and in another odd agreement, both include frequent admonishment against “causing” others to stumble.
Mark is equally as fond of the “kingdom of God” metaphor as Paul was.
Mark gets the idea from Paul (in Philippians 3:5-6) that “Pharisees” persecute Christians, and thus makes the Pharisees into Jesus’s main foils—even though in fact most real Pharisees would have actually taken Jesus’s position in nearly every argument Mark depicts (more then being in the tradition of Hillel than the more conservative Shammai: see Harvey Falk, Jesus the Pharisee from 1985, and Hyam Maccoby, Jesus the Pharisee, from 2003).
Mark gets the idea from Paul (in Galatians 2:7-9 and 1 Corinthians 15:5) that there were originally twelve apostles and that the “pillars” were Peter, James and John, with Peter at the top, and James and John his right hand men; and in exact accord with Paul’s criticism of them, Mark depicts them as hypocritical and faltering (as well analyzed in Dykstra, Mark, pp. 109-25).
Mark also gets from Paul the idea of messianic secrecy, a weird yet repeated theme in Mark’s Gospel, Paul having said Jesus’s identity was kept “a mystery,” “hidden,” so that “none of the rulers of this age understood it,” lest by knowing who he was they’d stop the crucifixion (from 1 Corinthians 2:6-10).
Mark could even get the idea from Paul of having Jesus announce himself everywhere as a “Son of Adam” (the actual meaning of “Son of Man” as adapted from the then-familiar Septuagint expression), Paul having called Jesus “the last Adam” (1 Corinthians 15:45), and Hebrews 2:5-9 identifying Jesus with a prophesied “Son of Man.”

These curious parallels continue. For instance, have you ever wondered where Mark got the idea of inventing a whole narrative sequence of Jesus emulating Moses in miraculously feeding the multitudes in the desert and crossing and manipulating the sea? Just read Paul, 1 Corinthians 10:1-4:

Our ancestors were all under the cloud and they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.

The coincidence is improbable even unto itself; even more so in conjunction with all the other examples, above and below. As I show in OHJ, this sequence in Mark is elegantly constructed and definitely fictional (pp. 412-18). We can see now he was allegorizing the teachings of Paul. By contrast, Paul has no knowledge of any such stories about Jesus. The direction of influence is thus apparent.

Likewise, Mark 4:9-20 describes spreading the Gospel as like “sowing” seeds, exactly as Paul does (1 Corinthians 9:11); equates evangelizing as cultivating a field, exactly as Paul does (1 Corinthians 3:9); uses the “root” as a metaphor for one’s inner depth of commitment, exactly as Paul was believed to have (Colossians 2:7 & Ephesians 3:17); and uses the same words in the same metaphor of increasing one’s agricultural yield by spreading the gospel on good ground (auxanomena, “increasing,” and karpophorousin, “bearing fruit,” in Colossians 1:5-10). Which is another case where “Paul” is speaking his own mind, in his own words and his own metaphor, which Mark has converted into something taught by Jesus. The author of Colossians had no idea Jesus ever could be quoted in that passage, because Jesus never said any of that. Mark invented it—using Colossians.

Likewise Mark 12:1-11 relates the parable of the wicked tenants, in which “the beloved son” they kill (obviously Jesus) after several other messengers had been sent and abused (obviously the prophets of old), specifically because this son is the designated “heir,” and so they will inherit, which is a peculiar detail to add, unnecessary to the story. Indeed it would be weird that mere renters would think they were next in line to inherit the property. But this all tracks exactly the teachings of Paul: the Epistles often describe Jesus as God’s “heir” (e.g. Hebrews 1:2, Romans 8:17, Galatians 3); and with respect to the parable’s message, in Romans 11:1-10 Paul speaks on the same subject, quoting scripture in verse 3, “Lord, they have killed your prophets and torn down your altars; I am the only one left, and they are trying to kill me.” This is then immediately explicated using a similar tending-to-agriculture metaphor (Romans 11:11-24), teaching exactly the same lesson as Mark’s parable. Basically Mark’s entire parable comes out of Romans 11. Paul, meanwhile, had never heard of it, and thus never knew he could have quoted Jesus to bolster his teaching the same point. Because Mark invented it—using Romans.

Even overall Mark’s whole Gospel feels like it has been inspired by Paul’s teachings. Its narrative is inordinately concerned with Gentiles and the criticism of Jewish legalism. Jesus is portrayed as constantly trashing Jewish laws and traditions, embarrassing and pissing off their advocates, even while justifying it all as a superior actualization of Judaism—just as Paul does throughout his letters (see Dykstra, Mark, pp. 82-90). And Jesus visits Gentile lands, dines with Gentiles, interacts with Gentiles favorably quite a lot, and Mark has even carefully structured his whole book to emphasize this fact (see OHJ, pp. 414-17, with further support in Dykstra, Mark, pp. 69-82, 131-32). It’s all an important part of Mark’s message—which makes little sense as history, but perfect sense as a narrativization of Paul’s mission and theology.

In fact, Mark’s entire choice of Galilee as the land Jesus comes from and spends most of his time in—and after his resurrection tells his followers to go to to find him (Mark 16:7)—may have been inspired by this very connection: for it was known as “Galilee of the Gentiles” (Isaiah 9:1) precisely because of its peculiar Gentile connections and presence. Mark’s messaging could hardly be clearer. And indeed, the fact that it was so-known in a prophecy that the messiah would indeed come from there (Isaiah 9:1-7) would give Mark a double cause for choosing it as his primary setting.

Specific Examples

There are many more examples. Just consider the following list, adapted from a list collected by Michael Turton that David Oliver Smith also subsequently worked from, and which I’ve expanded with a few examples from other scholars I listed, especially Dykstra and Nelligan:

Mark 1:1 uses Paul’s phrase “the beginning of the Gospel” verbatim (Philippians 4:15); and “Gospel of Christ,” otherwise unique to Paul (e.g. Romans 15:19, 1 Corinthians 9:12, 2 Corinthians 2:12, Galatians 1:7, 1 Thessalonians 3:2).
Paul then goes on to talk about how he was sent forth to preach it; likewise Mark immediately follows with a quotation of Isaiah declaring God hath sent his messenger, only switching the reference from Paul to John the Baptist introducing Jesus, the Gospel-reified. Dykstra also makes a good case that Mark has modeled his John the Baptist after Paul (Mark, pp. 147-48).
Mark 1:14 uses Paul’s phrase “Gospel of God,” verbatim (Romans 15:16; 2 Thessalonians 2:2), and when introducing the rest of his narrative purpose (just as Paul does in Romans 1:1).
Mark then immediately juxtaposes the Gospel with manual labor (in Mark 1:16-20) just as Paul does (in 1 Thessalonians 2:9).
Mark 1:29-31 indirectly reveals Peter was married, just as Paul indirectly reveals Peter was married (1 Corinthians 9:5).
Mark 2:16 describes Jesus being wrongly chastised by Pharisees (Mark’s principal stand-in for any arch-conservative Jews) for eating and drinking with “sinners and tax collectors” (i.e. Gentiles), just as Paul describes Peter being wrongly chastised by conservative Jews for doing the same thing (Galatians 2:11-14). Mark and Paul’s message is the same.
Mark 3:1-5 borrows themes and vocabulary from Paul’s discussions of the very same issue: Jesus looks upon his Jewish critics “with anger [orgês] and grieved [sullupoumenos] at their hardness [pôrôsei] of heart”; in Romans 9 Paul said he was for that very same reason grieved [lupê, v. 2] and God was for that very same reason angry [orgên, v. 22] at their hardness [v. 18], which Paul later describes with the same word used by Mark [pôrôsis, 11:25].
Mark 4:10-13 relates Mark’s model for the whole Gospel as disguising deeper truths allegorically within seemingly literal stories (“parables”); and in doing so declares that the uninitiated will not be allowed to see or hear the real meaning, just as Paul says (in e.g. Romans 11:7-10, 1 Corinthians 2:9-10, etc.).
Mark 6:7 imagines Jesus sending missionaries in pairs; Paul often says he was paired with someone on his missions (1 Corinthians 1:1; 1 Corinthians 9:6; 2 Corinthians 1:1; Philippians 1:1; Philippians 2:22; Philemon 1:1).
Mark 6:8-10 has Jesus assume missionaries will be fed and housed by others, reifying into visceral and poetic terms Paul’s mention of the fact that “the Lord has commanded that those who preach the gospel should receive their living from the gospel” (1 Corinthians 9:14).
Mark 7:20-23 lists as the sins that make one unclean “sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.” Accordingly, Paul says, “Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 6:9-10) and likewise those who pursue “envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice” and are “gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful” (Romans 1:29-31); and elsewhere says those will be excluded from the kingdom who pursue “sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery, idolatry and witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like” (Galatians 5:19-21). The other lists are nearly identical, Mark only ending with the catch-all “arrogance and folly” to encompass the otherwise-unmentioned idolatry, God-hating, insolence, drunkenness, strife, boasting and gossiping and so forth (while lewdness is a catch-all that would include “men who have sex with men” and “orgies” etc.).
Mark 7:26-29 reifies into a whole story the sentiment of Paul that God’s rewards must go to the Jew first, the Gentile second (Romans 1:16).
Mark 8:12 has Jesus lament to the Jews, “Why does this generation ask for a sign? Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to it,” reifying Paul’s declaration of the very same thing, that only in their folly “Jews demand signs,” which renders the Gospel “a stumbling block” to them (1 Corinthians 1:22-23).
Mark 8:15 has Jesus warn against “the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod,” thus reifying into allegorical story-form Paul’s more general warning against “the leaven of malice and wickedness” (1 Corinthians 5:8).
Mark 8:17-18 has Jesus declare, “Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear?” echoing Paul’s citation of scripture on the same point, that only insiders will correctly see and hear, and thus “get the point” (1 Corinthians 2:9-10); a concept I just noted Mark had reified earlier in Jesus’s explanation of secret teachings (Mark 4:10-13), which really is a key to Mark’s entire Gospel, including the scene in Mark 8, which isn’t really about Jesus having historically created food, but is an allegory for the Gospel itself.
In that same passage, Mark has Jesus seemingly quote Isaiah 6:9, just as Paul does in making the same point in Romans 11:8. But in Isaiah the order is hearing, then seeing; Paul switched the order to seeing, then hearing. Thus the fact that Mark also did that further evinces his reliance on Paul.
Mark 9:34-35 has Jesus say, “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and the slave of all” (and Mark 10:43-44 likewise); Paul said he was the “last” of those chosen and “the least” of the apostles (1 Corinthians 15:8-9) and had made himself “a slave to all” (1 Corinthians 9:19).
Mark 9:43-47 has Jesus advocate cutting off your hand or foot or eye that provokes you to sin, lest you be cast into hell; but this may be an allegory for banishing members of the community who provoke brethren to sin—because Paul likened the brethren to limbs of a body (1 Corinthians 12:12-31), and recommends banishing sinners from the community, literally “handing them over to Satan for destruction of the flesh” (1 Corinthians 5:4-7), just as Mark has Jesus speak of sinners being cast into hell to destruction.
Mark 9:50 has Jesus declare “be at peace with each other,” which teaching comes from Paul, not Jesus: Paul says “be at peace with each other” (1 Thessalonians 5:13), again without any knowledge of Jesus having said this.
Mark 10 has Jesus give the same reason God burdened the Jews with Torah law that Paul does (e.g. in Romans 7 and Galatians 3).
Mark 11:22-26 has Jesus claim faith can move mountains, as long as one has belief and forgiveness in one’s heart. Paul wrote, “If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:2).
Mark 12:35-37 quotes the same messianic verse that Paul does (1 Corinthians 15:25-26).

There is actually a great deal more than that. If one surveys all the literature I listed at the beginning, one will find numerous other parallels analyzed (e.g. on shared vocabulary, see Dykstra, Mark, pp. 143-47), as well as further and corroboratory analysis of the examples I have listed. The extent of them is simply too vast to be accidental.

It’s thus also notable that many of Mark’s central constructs about Jesus can be derived from Paul: Jesus’ crucifixion and burial; his rising “on the third day”; his status as a “son of David”; engaging the Eucharist the night he is delivered up, even reimagining that deliverance as a betrayal by using a play on Paul’s choice of words; and, as we already saw, the idea of there being “twelve” first apostles, led by a Peter, whose right-hand men were a James and a John; and so on. Even Jesus’s having family. For even if Mark understood Paul to mean only cultic family, for instance, Mark could still get the idea of a literal family from it to teach what having a cultic family meant—which is precisely what Mark does with the device (Mark 3:31-35 & Mark 6:1-2, the only appearances Jesus’s family ever make in Mark’s Gospel), showing no knowledge of any brothers of Jesus subsequently being apostles, but imagining Jesus had simply renounced them.

Frankly, when you add everything up, it looks like Mark’s only source of knowledge about Jesus are the letters of Paul. Combined with a creative reading of ancient scriptures, and his own imagination, he appears to have required none other.

Parables & Miracles: A Markan Invention

Depicting Jesus as teaching through “parables” appears to be an invention of Mark. It’s nowhere in Paul (or 1 Peter or Hebrews or 1 Clement or any earlier account of how and what Jesus taught). Mark is thus the most likely inventor of that technique, which later Evangelists picked up and riffed on, building their own parables on Mark’s model and attributing them to their versions of Jesus. Occam’s Razor leads to no other conclusion. No evidence of any kind leads to any other conclusion.

Most scholars still confidently assume parables were distinctive of Jesus…on a basis of no evidence at all, and some evidence against. More likely the parable was simply one of the innovative ways Mark chose to “reify” the teachings of Paul and the Pauline community by creating a version of “Jesus the clever preacher,” in much the same way as other ancients relied on cleverly contrived sage myths (from Aesop to The Seven Sages to legendary Rabbis) to communicate their own thoughts, values, and mores. It’s how Mark even composed his own Gospel, as merely a system of parables featuring Jesus as a character (as rightly argued in J.D. Crossan’s The Power of Parable).

This ancient practice of invention was literally a mainstay of Greek education at the time, taught everywhere at the composition stage of learning, which we know all the Gospel authors had gone through, for they could not be composing such literary works without it, and their techniques match what was taught in schools of the time (see OHJ, pp. 397-98), and resemble how other ancient authors composed fiction about both mythical and historical persons (see OHJ, pp. 218-19), albeit with a strong syncretic influence from Jewish literary traditions and techniques as well (such as found in Deuteronomy, Daniel, the Kings and Samuel literature, and more recent novels and mythography, too, from Tobit to the Biblical Antiquities).

Mark also invented all the miracle stories, which subsequent Evangelists again riffed on, constructing new like tales from Mark’s model. Because Paul has no knowledge of Jesus having worked miracles or exorcisms. In fact, Paul says Jesus abandoned all his powers in the incarnation (Philippians 2:6-7), and worked no wonders or signs (1 Corinthians 1:21-24). Rather, Paul implies Jesus acquired these powers after his resurrection (Philippians 2:9-10), and thus bestowed them upon those living “in Christ,” thereby sharing his spirit within his new body, the Church. Hence the only miracles and exorcising of demons (which Paul calls works “of power”) that Paul has any knowledge of are the eschatological powers now manifest in the Church (cf. 2 Cor. 12:12, 1 Thess. 1:5; a conclusion corroborated by Hebrews 2:3-4), which include exorcism, healing, and prophecy. So Mark must have invented the idea of Jesus as exorcist and miracle worker, as a model for, and based on, Christian missionaries. There is no evidence of any such notion prior.

Hence when we look at the order of development, first we have Paul saying Jesus’s victory over the forces of evil accomplished by his death was evinced by believers performing miracles; then Mark borrows those same motifs to have Jesus perform those miracles. From Paul, to Mark. When I first wrote this article I had not yet read Robyn Faith Walsh’s Origins of Early Christian Literature. Now I can quote it:

[In Paul’s letters Mark] finds talk of Jesus as Christ, possessing divine pneuma (Rom. 8:9; Mark 1:10); a divine lineage of Abraham (Rom. 3, 4, 9; Mark 1); “pneumatic” demonstrations (1 Cor. 2:4-5; Mark 2:8, 5:1ff., 5:41ff.), including divination; demonstrations of power over demons, archons, and unclean pneuma (Rom. 8:38-39; 1 Cor. 15:24; Mark 1:23, 39, 5:2ff., 7:25): Jesus as a prophet for a new age (Rom. 3:21-22; Mark 1:1-15) or a New Adam (1 Cor. 15:45; Mark 1:12ff.); a failure to recognize Jesus as the messiah during his lifetime (1 Cor. 2:6-8; Mark 4:41, 6:2, 8:29, 11:27ff.); and an active principle of God’s pneuma bounding people “in Christ” through baptism (Rom. 6; Mark 1). He even finds talk of fellowship meals and a meal hosted by Jesus anticipating his death (the so-called Last Supper) with dialogue (1 Cor. 11:23-25; Mark 14:22-25) and mention of other characters like James and Peter (e.g., Gal. 2; Mark 3:20-21, 31-35, 8:31-33, 14:26, 66). The proper interpretation of Judean law and allegory also looms large in these letters (e.g., Gal. 1:6-11; Rom. 1:16-17, 1 Cor. 9:16; Mark 1:1, 2:18ff. [and one might add Mark 4:10-13–ed.]), as one might expect from a Pharisee.
Walsh, Origins, p. 132

So what Paul says the Christians were doing in general, Mark has Jesus do in particular, as a model. As I explained in both On the Historicity of Jesus and Proving History:

Mark’s Gospel’s main function is to illustrate what the gospel means and to provide a system of models for Christian life (particularly missionary life) and for use in teaching its social ideals and theology. In many scenes in Mark’s Gospel, for example, Jesus is made to say and do things that symbolize how Christians, especially Christian missionaries, are to behave or think. He gives us a model of what baptism means (adoption by God, and symbolic death and rebirth); a model of how to face martyrdom (the trial and crucifixion); a model of how to react to family pressure (one must follow Jesus and leave any stubborn family behind and adopt instead one’s new kin group: Mk 3.31-35); models of healing and exorcism; even models of what not to do (such as doubt or fear or the military messianism of Barabbas, or the internecine betrayal of a Judas—or any putting of self before the group, the message of Mk 10.35-45).

As I concluded in Proving History, ‘that Jesus had enemies who slandered him, that Jesus went to parties with sinners to save them, that Jesus’ family rejected him’, are all stories that reflect the realities of Christian missionaries and the situations they face, so Mark is crafting these stories to model how they are to deal with them.
OHJ, pp. 442-43 (cf. PH, p. 156)

Mark invented the miracle stories to the same purpose: in some cases as models for missionaries who likewise performed them (and thereby faced the same problems of miracles failing to succeed or evoking accusations of insanity or Satanic influence, and so on), but also as allegories for the message of the Gospel (the power of the Christian community to feed the poor reified as a miraculous multiplying of loaves and fishes, of faith moving mountains reified in walking on water and calming storms, of God’s cursing of the temple cult in the image of a fig tree, and so on). I analyze numerous examples in Ch. 10.4 of On the Historicity of Jesus. Mark is weaving these stories to convey a deeper meaning than the literal narrative pretends. And he is doing it creatively, using models from the Septuagint (e.g. Moses and Elijah) and other pagan and Jewish lore.

If most of it is like this—fiction Mark has obviously contrived for his own purposes and from various literary and contemporary models—why should we assume any of Mark is anything else but more of the same? Wholesale invention of discourses for Jesus, miracles for Jesus, storylines for Jesus, is unquestionably a fact, as much in Mark as in dozens of other Gospels. So “it can’t have happened” is no argument against concluding it did.

Conclusion

Mark composed his mythical tale of Jesus using many different sources: most definitely the Septuagint, probably Homer, and, here we can see, probably also Paul’s Epistles. From these, and his own creative impulses, he weaved together a coherent string of implausible tales in which neither people nor nature behave the way they would in reality, each and every one with allegorical meaning or missionary purpose. Once we account for all this material, there is very little left. In fact, really, nothing left.

We have very good evidence for all these sources. For example, that Mark emulates stories and lifts ideas from the Psalms, Deuteronomy, the Kings literature, and so on, is well established and not rationally deniable. That he likewise lifts from and riffs on Paul’s Epistles is, as you can now see, fairly hard to deny. By contrast, we have exactly no evidence whatever that anything in Mark came to him by oral tradition. It is thus curious that anyone still assumes some of it did. That Mark’s sources and methods were literary is well proved. That any of his sources or methods were oral in character is, by contrast, a baseless presumption. Objective, honest scholarship will have to acknowledge this someday.

84 Comments

jiohdi on October 25, 2019 at 7:43 pm

Marcion claimed that he followed the “original” gospel, the only valid one, which he claimed was dictated by Paul to Luke… Tertullian argued that Marcion’s gospel could not be the true one as it was a smaller version of Luke… but could it be that Marcion actually meant MARK as the original dictated by Paul to Luke?

Papius claims that the first “Mark” was nothing like the one we have now… He says the first one was an out of order arrangement of sayings that Peter dictated to his son Mark. He claims he was told this by those who knew the original apostles in person.
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- Richard Carrier on October 27, 2019 at 1:00 pm
  
  First, I’m not sure Marcion actually claimed his gospel text was the first. Note we have nothing from him. Only the words of his polemical critics, all of whom have reputations as unreliable sources for just these sorts of things. And I don’t think any of them even say that exactly.
  
  Second, no, Tertullian gives us many quotations of Marcion’s text; it clearly was a redacted Luke. And Luke is a late redaction of Mark, IMO also reliant on an earlier redaction of Mark, Matthew. Since literary analysis shows Luke was a coherent text, it’s unlikely Marcion’s was a previous redaction of Luke, although that’s possible. There were already two redactions of Luke-Acts in circulation (and we have these; e.g. the longer text is in Codex Bezae), and the canon only contains the shorter of them, while some scholars wonder if the original text is closer to the longer version. So we don’t know which direction things went: cutting, or adding.
  
  Third, Papius does not say Mark was “nothing like” the Mark we know. All he did say was that Mark lacked chronological order and represents the teachings of Peter, neither of which can be true. Papias was a notorious fool however. Odds are, he was too stupid to know those two things couldn’t be true, and he just gullibly believed whatever rumors he heard. Likewise what he says about Matthew, which is even more false. It’s also “possible” he was referring to some other books by these names that we don’t have. We can’t tell. He never quotes either (or at least, none of the extant quotations of Papias do; you see, we don’t have any of Papias’s books either).
  Reply
  - Alif on October 29, 2019 at 11:07 am
    
    Why ‘redacted’ Luke and not ‘Proto’ Luke?
    And why ‘Marcion’ and not ‘Mark John’?
    The latr seems a tipical ubscuremunt game cristians ar wont t play.
  - Richard Carrier on October 30, 2019 at 1:32 pm
    
    A Markjohn reading of the name doesn’t give us any usable information. And Luke’s narrative and style is too coherent for the process to have gone the other way around (or at least, for that to be “likely”). A comparative case is Mark 16:9-20, for instance, where we can show it was clearly added (and not subtracted) because it’s in a totally different style (see my chapter on that in Hitler Homer). Whereas Luke 1-2 is in very Lukan style. Secondly, for example, the Emmaus narrative riffs on content in Luke 2, which means whoever wrote the Emmaus narrative did so after Luke 2 was added, which means Marcion must have removed Luke 2, not found a proto-Luke that lacked Luke 2 but contained the Emmaus narrative. And so on.
Scarlett on October 25, 2019 at 8:29 pm

Hi Richard, the oldest Christian church found by archeology is a Marcionite church dedicated to “Jesus Chrestus.” Codex Sinaiticus uses Chrestus, not Christ. How, when and why did the transition from Chrestus to Christ take place?
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- Richard Carrier on October 27, 2019 at 12:47 pm
  
  None of that is true.
  
  No archaeology has ever discovered a Marcionite church.
  
  The earliest archaeological evidence of Christians is an inscription that is Valentinian, not Marcionite, and that’s late second century, long after the NT was written. Plenty of papyrus scraps of the NT have been found that could be as early as late second, early third century. But no Marcionite papyri have ever been found.
  
  Codex Sinaiticus does not use “Chrestus.” It always uses an abbreviation for Christ that lacks the vowels. A practice called nomina sacra. I think you have confused this with a different fact, that in all three cases that Christian (not Christ) appears in the NT, the original Sinaiticus scribe wrote “Chrêstian” and someone then went back in and corrected it. In Codex Vaticanus, of the same date, it’s written Chreistian (uncorrected). Many manuscripts have both variants. Unfortunately we have no copy of any of the three passages that date earlier than either codex, so we have no idea if these are late or early corruptions. As Chrêstianoi means “Good People” (or “Handy People”), there were known reasons to want to change the appellation.
  
  But also, the iota and eta were starting to sound alike in spoken Greek, and we have many examples of words in Greek that we know as “correctly” spelled with an i, being spelled with an eta instead (and vice versa), or conflating i and ei, or ê with ei. It was so common it has a name: iotacism (or itacism). In fact, it commonly occurs throughout Codex Sinaiticus, so much so that scholars have concluded the Sinaiticus scribe was copying by dictation, i.e. someone read out the text, and several scribes transcribed what they heard (a faster way to produce a high volume of copies), which resulted in numerous spelling errors by mis-hearing sounds, as can be seen throughout—even in words unrelated to Christ or Christian (see Scribal Habits of Codex Sinaiticus).
  
  Pagans also confused the sounds and thus the words (hence in the late second century Tertillian wrote “But Christian, so far as the meaning of the word is concerned, is derived from anointing—yes, and even when it is wrongly pronounced by you “Chrestianus” (for you do not even know accurately the name you hate), it comes from sweetness and benignity,” Apology 3; likewise in the third century, Lactantius, “But the meaning of this name must be set forth, on account of the error of the ignorant, who by the change of a letter are accustomed to call Him Chrestus,” Institutes 4.7. They were elite pedants precise in their pronunciation. Most people were not. Misspellings were consequently routine in the ancient world.
  Reply
  - Alif on November 2, 2019 at 7:56 pm
    
    It mayn’t be the place here but I’ll bravit.
    
    i. the earliest Gallic Wars manuscript is datid 800ce. Du u cunsidr this reliabl?
    
    ii. Mark is duing myth clad as histri. Du we no this from inturnal eviduns or ixturnal or a presuppusitional naturalistic starting block?
    
    As I undrstand all secular histries cuntain suprnatural, miracls, absurd and the like.
    
    This is a commun trope: u riject mark for x, y, z – so u shud plutarch for x, y z. (if u address this in a book, please refer).
  - Richard Carrier on November 6, 2019 at 5:19 pm
    
    I don’t understand your questions or their relevance. Please write more coherent English. And ask questions actually pertaining to the article you are posting a comment on.
  - Scarlett on February 24, 2020 at 1:28 am
    
    Thanks for your answer. I have no reason to disagree, however “Chrestus” is a real word in its own right, I sense there is more to the transition from “e” to “i.” Could it be that Sainaticus used nomina sacra when using the word Christ, to hide this ambiguity?
  - Richard Carrier on February 25, 2020 at 10:25 am
    
    Unknown.
db on October 25, 2019 at 11:30 pm

Malformed link in OP: Mark could even gethttps://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Galatians+3&version=NIV the idea from Paul
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- Richard Carrier on October 27, 2019 at 11:54 am
  
  That’s weird. That wasn’t there before. And I didn’t put it there. WordPress must have gone glitchy somehow. I’ve removed it.
  Reply
Pieter Kuiper on October 26, 2019 at 10:32 am

Interesting. So this would mean that the origins of the New Testament would be late and closer to Rome than to Jerusalem, close to the world of characters like Clemens and Marcion. Maybe the Dutch Radicals had a point afterall.
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- Richard Carrier on October 27, 2019 at 11:37 am
  
  Not really. We have always known this. That’s why the Gospels are in Greek and explicitly address Gentile audiences (even Matthew is targeting Gentiles, though with the case that they should convert to Judaism).
  
  Clement has no knowledge of the Gospels or any of the stories in them.
  
  Marcion edited a late Gospel, a hundred years after the religion began, indeed one of the last to be written (Mark had gone through two whole redactions, Matthew and Luke, by then, and Marcion produced a fourth redaction on top of that). And did so half a century after Mark most likely wrote. So Mark was not using Marcion’s edition of Paul’s Epistles.
  
  And so on.
  Reply
David Oliver Smith on October 26, 2019 at 10:57 am

Richard, Thank you for citing my work in your excellent blog article. I would note that my book came out in 2011. You have it dated 2015. Just being picky.

David Oliver Smith
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- Richard Carrier on October 27, 2019 at 11:33 am
  
  Fixed! Thanks.
  Reply
Charles McGuyer on October 26, 2019 at 1:57 pm

Why do you think Mark put the words of Paul as the words of Jesus? Is he saying Paul is Jesus? Knowing that it’s all a myth? Or giving Paul credit for the Jesus Myth?
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- Richard Carrier on October 27, 2019 at 11:10 am
  
  It’s the same reason the Jews kept inventing things for the mythical Moses to say (producing not only multiple books of the the Bible, but subsequent material, including the Mishnah and The Biblical Antiquities and the Lives of Moses): this is how you mythologized a doctrine. You put its teachings, the things you want people to regard as your sect’s teachings, in the mouth of its mythical founder. Every religion did this. Including Judaism. So we should expect so did Christians.
  Reply
Barry Rucker on October 26, 2019 at 2:49 pm

Recommended minor corrections:
1. Paragraph 1, line 1 should have “of” after “some.”
2. After “Mark 14:22-26”, paragraph 2, line 1, “come” should be “comes.”
3. The second paragraph before “Specific Examples”, line 5 should have “Mark” before “have.”
4. In section “Mark 1:14”, line 2, should “and” be deleted?
5. In the second paragraph before “Parables & Miracles: A Markan Invention”, line 4, “lead” should be “led.”
Reply
- Richard Carrier on October 27, 2019 at 11:03 am
  
  Thank you.
  
  Again, though, it’s much easier if you quote the whole line or sentence segment that requires correction. Searching a text string is far faster and less subjective than trying to count multiple things.
  Reply
- Richard Carrier on October 27, 2019 at 11:06 am
  
  Case in point, by my count, “the second paragraph before “Specific Examples”” does not contain the word have in any line.
  
  So I don’t know what you are referring to, and it took me awhile even to find that.
  
  Quote the whole line. Then I can reliably find it in under 5 seconds.
  Reply
- Richard Carrier on October 27, 2019 at 11:07 am
  
  In section “Mark 1:14”, line 2, should “and” be deleted?
  
  No. The “and” is there on purpose. It’s not one point being made. It’s two.
  Reply
Art. 25 on October 26, 2019 at 3:33 pm

Every time I read one of dr. Carrier’s articles, my mind is having a feast ! Even if sometimes I have to “chew” on a sentence or paragraph to get the full flavor of it 🙂 !

First, I find it quite acceptable that the unknown author we call Marc would find it tempting to “romanticize” the teaching of Paul. I mean, here’s a teaching Marc very much likes, since it promises eternal life and whatnot, but it is written in quite a paternalistic, dry and boring way. You don’t have to be a literary genius to think, hey, I can do better than that ! Let’s make a movie out of it ! (Well, a written epos was like a movie in those days, wasn’t it 🙂 ?)

Secondly, I find it as acceptable that in that process, Paul’s words are put in the mouth of Jesus, i.e. God himself ! Marc was not materially capabel – or just lazy – to distinguish what thoughts came from Paul and what from his imaginary friend. Marc must have thought : for the sake of simplicity and marketing, let’s make them from the latter ! A bit like what happend to the Qur’an that is claimed to contain the words of Allah. But it certainly does not, at maximum it can claim to contain the word of the archangel Dzjibriel, the messenger who brought the message. So, the subtitle of the Qur’an should read : The words that the prophet Mohammed believed and claimed to come from Allah. And this is not meant to be Islamophobic or even sarcastic. It’s a fact.

And finally, if Marc invented the literary form known as “parabel”, and he let Jesus make use of it plenty o’times in his gospel, I find it quite acceptable to sate that the whole gospel is a parabel. That would be a self-containing literary trick that every author (even a contemporary one) would be proud of ! That means of course that Jesus himself is a fictional (or “mythical” if you prefer a more reverend adjective) character. And now dr. Carrier response is : “But that’s what I was saying from the beginning !” 🙂
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db on October 26, 2019 at 6:41 pm

Is it correct to say:

• The literary work of fiction Gospel According to Mark, presents Pauline tenets (true originals or those perceived as such)—and theological functions—as an allegorical narrative composed with copious intertextual allusions.

If so, is there any identifiable method to Mark’s selections from the Jewish Septuagint such as: Paul used the same; other sects used the same; or there is a reoccurring pattern in the OT (being lost, then called, then obeying, then falling away, then punishment, then restoration).

Or is it that Mark had no respect for the original context of the quotations and allusions to Old Testament writings in his text.

Or perhaps both?
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- Richard Carrier on October 27, 2019 at 11:01 am
  
  Is it correct to say…
  
  That sentence was too convoluted for me to be sure, so I don’t know. But I think so?
  
  …is there any identifiable method to Mark’s selections from the Jewish Septuagint…?
  
  Yes. In fact, not only has that research been done, it’s mainstream now. Pretty much every scholar admits to it in some degree.
  
  To see how Mark riffed on the OT, what his purpose was and his techniques, see Randel Helms’ short introduction and Crossan’s Power of Parable, which I had already cited here. For more detailed scholarship, see MacDonald’s Two Shipwrecked Gospels and Brodie’s Birthing of the New Testament.
  
  I of course survey and discuss all of this and more (finding examples in such mainstream scholars as Allison, Evans, Crossley, et al.) in Ch. 10 of On the Historicity of Jesus.
  Reply
  - babaganusz on October 30, 2020 at 2:47 pm
    
    was OtHotG the title of Chapter 10? it seems phrased as though OHJ is being referred to by another title …
  - Richard Carrier on October 31, 2020 at 2:09 pm
    
    Oh yes. Thank you. Good catch. That was a typo. Fixed.
R. G. Price (@rationalrevo) on October 27, 2019 at 6:57 am

“Though in this case Paul does say he has that teaching from Jesus”

Careful now. Paul doesn’t say that “Jesus” said this, he said this is an instruction that comes “from the Lord”.

But of course we have to remember that the Jewish scriptures are filled with thousands of lines that, “the Lord says”. Indeed, I argue that the original “teachings of Jesus,” as identified by Clement and Paul and others, were essentially a collection of specific passages from the scriptures in which, “the Lord says.”

When we look at broad themes, of course Paul was railing against the law and a major theme of Mark is Jesus addressing “the law” along Pauline lines.

But yes, this to me is the biggest issue in Biblical “scholarship” right now. The fact that mainstream scholars have ignored this for so long is collective malfeasance. But this is really the issue at the heart of everything.

I address the mainstream handling of the Mark/Paul relationship on my book’s website here, toward the bottom:

http://www.decipheringthegospels.com/examples.html

Essentially what mainstream scholars have done is completely misinterpret the evidence in a way that leads them in a completely opposite direction. When they see similarities between Mark and Paul, instead of seeing this as evidence that the sayings come from Paul, and thus not from Jesus, they conclude that this is evidence of a shared oral tradition that dates back too Jesus! It’s quite absurd.

And the thing is, what the evidence really indicates is that the entire idea of the Crucifixion comes from Paul, and the only reason it became a major element of the Christian religion is because the first story write about Jesus is a Pauline epic, from which everyone else copied. Really, outside of sources that draw from Paul, there is no mention of a Crucifixion or even of Jesus having suffered in any way. It appears that the suffering of Jesus is a Pauline idea, which was not broadly shared. This is why 1 Clement and the Epistle of of James both talk extensively about suffering and associate suffering with the Jewish prophets, not Jesus.

As for Q, I think David Oliver Smith has done an excellent job addressing this. I also expand on this issue in relation to the Eucharist as well here:

http://www.decipheringthegospels.com/on_q.html

About a third of the way down I address a claim by Richard Bauckham that the Eucharist in Luke “can’t possibly” have been quoted from Paul. This is of course absurd. What I discuss here is how DOS’s work helps to inform the Q discussion and how it provides a much better understanding of what happened.

Mark built his Last Supper scene from Paul’s Eucharist ritual. But Mark, in his typical fashion, paraphrased Paul and rearranged his words to better fit his scene.

Luke, then, comes along and Luke is trying to make the “most correct” version of the Gospel. Luke is using Matthew, Mark, and Paul (as well as other sources). Luke treats Mark as being more authoritative than Matthew and Paul as more authoritative than Mark. This is why Luke often follows Mark instead of Matthew, but uses Matthew to fill-in gaps in Mark. But likewise, when Luke sees that Mark is using Paul, Luke also follows Paul instead of Mark!

This is why Luke’s Eucharist ritual matches Paul almost word for word. And we see other cases of this in Luke as well, where Luke sees that Mark is using using Paul and then Luke goes directly to Paul.

I also think that the ending of Mark, where the women say nothing is itself part of the Pauline message. Again, David Oliver Smith has pointed out (actually others before his as well) that the ending of Mark, where the women are afraid, is a reference Abraham’s wife Sarah being afraid. This reference was first made by Paul in Romans 4. In Romans 4 Paul has a whole digression on this scene from Gen 18.

The ending of Mark builds on this Pauline reference and leaves the ending of the story open, with no one telling the world about the risen Jesus, because it is Paul who tells the world about the risen Jesus.

According to Mark, the resurrection of Jesus IS A MYSTERY left for Paul to reveal, as he explicitly says in his letters. That’s the ending. The ending is a riddle, for which the answer is Paul.

I myself didn’t figure this out when I wrote my book, I came to this conclusion later after having read DOS’s book and was writing about the History Channel (garbage) series Jesus his Life.

So it’s maddening to me that we have all of this discussion about Mark and the Gospels that completely ignores this Pauline connection, which is actually central to everything. You can’t possibly comprehend Mark without understanding its relationship to Paul.

But the issue is, once you realize that Mark is built on Paul, the whole case for historicity falls apart, which is why it’s being ignored. But this can’t be ignored. The relationship between Mark and Paul is the defining key to understanding Christian origins.

Trying to understand Christian origins without understanding the way that Mark is built on Paul is like trying to understand the development of life on earth without acknowledging evolution.

The relationship between Mark and Paul IS THE KEY to understanding Christian origins period.

http://www.decipheringthegospels.com/
Reply
- Richard Carrier on October 27, 2019 at 10:08 am
  
  I agree overall. However…
  
  On the first point: Note, as I said, “Paul usually distinguishes revelations and scripture as his sources—and never mentions having any other source than these.” Unlike Clement, who doesn’t. So when Paul says he has something from the Lord, he in particular most likely means not from scripture; else he’d just cite scripture (moreover, odds are we’d be able to find at least one of these teachings in extant scriptures; it seems apparent Paul had to say he got these things from the Lord because the scriptures had nothing to say on the subject.)
  
  On the second point: It is highly improbable that Paul invented the crucifixion doctrine; and contrary to what you said, no other text exists from the first century lack it, that isn’t by or derivative of Paul.
  
  When Paul argues over his new gospel’s acceptance with the Galatians, the only point of contention is admitting Gentiles without converting to Judaism. There is no way that could be the case if his gospel not only claimed the messiah was crucified, but that this was what the other apostles were teaching (as he says in 1 Cor. 15). Such a lie would never survive. He’d be done for. He thus would have had to defend this; that he never has to, means he wasn’t teaching a different gospel than they were (much less lying and claiming they were; he’d have been found out, and would have to have written a very different letter to the Galatians than we now have).
  
  Moreover, the only thing that distinguishes Christianity as a distinct sect is its ability to abandon temple cult, which required a messianic sacrifice or equivalent to replace the temple role in Passover and especially Yom Kippur (just as Hebrews 9 explains).
  
  There are many other reasons besides this. I see no way to get the thesis that Paul invented the crucifixion to be probable on present evidence.
  
  See: Dating the Corinthian Creed.
  
  Also, please note, there is no evidence for Q; it is based on the same failure of logic you find in the consensus regarding Mark and Paul; but even if we were to accept a Q, as the material shared by Luke and Matthew not in Mark, that material includes material from the crucifixion narrative, and references the crucified-resurrected-savior doctrine in the Sign of Jonah and Price of Discipleship discourses; moreover, even if we were to double-circularly argue that Q is a subset of that material, the one that just conveniently omits any mention of the crucifixion, we have no way of knowing that material was ever even Christian, i.e. Matthew and Luke may have just been using a biography of John the Baptist and simply adapted it all to Jesus, just as later Christians would do with the Eugnostos Epistle.
  
  See: Why Do We Still Believe in Q?
  Reply
  - R. G. Price (@rationalrevo) on October 27, 2019 at 12:25 pm
    
    Agreed. I didn’t mean that I thought the teaching on divorce came from a scripture, but rather that it isn’t a teaching that is being passed on “from Jesus”.
    
    When Paul says “from the Lord” this means revelation. And, in any event, instructions “from the Lord” were commonplace. I’m pointing out that the Jewish scriptures are filled with sayings “from the Lord”, none of which are thought to have actually been spoken by God, any more than we should think that when Paul says “from the Lord” he means something actually spoken by Jesus.
    
    As for the Crucifixion I’m not so sure. Yes, I agree that from Paul’s letters one doesn’t detect a need to defend his teachings on the Crucifixion per se, but DOS has made a case that this was indeed one of the issues that was in disagreement between Paul and James.
    
    In addition, look at 1 Clement 4 & 5. The letter talks extensively about suffering, but never mentions a suffering of Jesus. The letter first points to the suffering of OT prophets, then points to the “more recent example” of suffering from Peter and Paul. How can this be if the author had any concept of the Crucifixion of Jesus?
    
    The same goes for the Epistle of James. This letter talks extensively about suffering yet never makes any association between Jesus and suffering. The letter points again to OT prophets and examples of people who endured through suffering. How can this be?
    
    It is impossible to imagine any Gospel-informed apologists talking about suffering and not looking first and foremost to Jesus as the example.
    
    I would agree, however, that it hasn’t been established that Paul invented the idea of a suffering/Crucified Jesus, but I also wouldn’t say that it can be ruled out.
    
    At the very least we have evidence of other early writings in which the suffering of Jesus plays no role, even when suffering itself is a topic of extensive discussion.
  - Richard Carrier on October 27, 2019 at 1:59 pm
    
    “none of which are thought to have actually been spoken by God”
    
    You mean, by us. What they thought is a separate question. We cannot tell on present evidence between their lying about that, and their having had actual visions or dreams communicating these ideas, which they believed real: see my discussion in the footnote on it attached to Element 15 in OHJ, Ch. 4.
    
    [The inclusion of a crucifixion theology] was indeed one of the issues that was in disagreement between Paul and James.
    
    There is zero evidence of that.
    
    And I have no patience for unevidenced speculations like this. It’s fine to think about the maybes, but they are completely unusable as a premise.
    
    The letter talks extensively about suffering, but never mentions a suffering of Jesus.
    
    1 Clement 4-5 is about betrayal caused by envy; not suffering. His whole homily is about convincing the rebels at Corinth to surrender control back to the church elders. The suffering of Jesus is nowhere pertinent. Rather, he references it where it is pertinent, in 1 Clement 16, with proof texts, and a complete atoning death theology. So no case can be made his theology wasn’t based on that. (Likewise, the resurrection of Jesus is used as an example in 1 Clem. 24 and 42, which entails belief in his death.) That he didn’t use the hyper-specific word for “crucified” is not relevant.
    
    Meanwhile, the Epistle of James has no occasion to mention the death of Jesus. Nor can it be dated. So it’s useless as evidence here. The one section where he discusses suffering, he means, to endure with faith that the Lord will come; he offers a single example of someone doing that (the prophets). It wouldn’t make sense to offer the Lord as an example of waiting for the Lord; nor would the comparison work well rhetorically as the Lord was superhuman and had special knowledge; James needed an example of an ordinary human without special knowledge (i.e. Jesus had lived since the dawn of time in outer space as an archangel and so perfectly well knew what would happen; none of the prophets had that kind of direct knowledge). A perfect parallel is Hebrews 11, which expands the same point in James with a whole slew of examples. None of them Jesus. And no one can accuse Hebrews of not promoting the suffering atoning death of Jesus!
  - R. G. Price (@rationalrevo) on October 27, 2019 at 8:29 pm
    
    “1 Clement 4-5 is about betrayal caused by envy; not suffering.”
    
    Yet 1 Clement goes on and on about persecution, even persecution unto death. You don’t think there was any opportunity here to mention the persecution and death of Jesus? I’m quite confident that Origen or Tertullian or anyone else from the 2nd century on would have worked in a statement about the persecution and death of Jesus here.
    
    Same with James.
    
    “the Epistle of James has no occasion to mention the death of Jesus.”
    
    Surely in James 5 a mention of the suffering of Jesus was warranted.
    
    “7 Be patient, therefore, beloved,[b] until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. 8 You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near.[c] 9 Beloved,[d] do not grumble against one another, so that you may not be judged. See, the Judge is standing at the doors! 10 As an example of suffering and patience, beloved,[e] take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. 11 Indeed we call blessed those who showed endurance. You have heard of the endurance of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.”
    
    Is Jesus himself not a model of patience and suffering?
    
    Be patient and endure suffering for the Lord, just as he bore suffering for us? No? Nothing, no occasion to mention that Jesus suffered for us so we can endure for him? Seems relevant if one thinks that Jesus had suffered…
  - Richard Carrier on October 28, 2019 at 10:57 am
    
    You don’t think there was any opportunity here to mention the persecution and death of Jesus?
    
    He mentions it elsewhere in the letter. So clearly not. Nor did it not being applicable here prove he had no such knowledge. He extensively reports such knowledge elsewhere in the letter. So you need to get your methodology right: read the whole letter. Don’t take things out of context and claim Clement “never mentions” things that in fact he mentions repeatedly.
    
    I’ll remind you, Hebrews did the same thing, in Hebrews 11. Yet Hebrews clearly also advocated the full Pauline theology of suffering, crucifixion, and resurrection. So your methodological assumptions here are clearly defective. Adjust them.
    
    Surely in James 5 a mention of the suffering of Jesus was warranted.
    
    No, it’s not. It’s a single line. To which the only applicable example had to be ordinary humans awaiting Jesus, not God’s supreme archangel who was Jesus (Jesus isn’t waiting for Jesus; and isn’t epistemically analogous to an everyday Christian).
    
    Is Jesus himself not a model of patience and suffering?
    
    Please read these texts more carefully. James’s argument is not “suffer like Jesus.” His argument is: keep faith that Jesus will come, as others have done. There is no way Jesus himself is an applicable analog here.
stevenjohnson on October 27, 2019 at 1:05 pm

But aren’t the real problems with Mark the politics? There is the association with John, the two trials, the Barabbas story? How is this reconcilable with a straightforward use of Paul and other literary influences?

I’m also inclined to believe the naked young man was intended to be a claim to secret teachings from Jesus himself. (Possibly why the original ending was not very conclusive, moving on to oral teaching only.)
Reply
- Richard Carrier on October 27, 2019 at 1:23 pm
  
  I don’t know what you are referring to. Why would Mark’s politics differ from Paul’s? They are quite in agreement.
  
  The Barabbas narrative is a myth against military messianism and its replacement with a spiritual messianism that eliminates reliance on the violence-inducing temple cult. This is very much Paul’s thing. And Mark simply reifies it into stories. See my discussion of it in OHJ (see the index for Barabbas).
  
  The double “trial” is a myth about the complicity of worldly powers in effecting injustice—through ignorance among the Romans and malice among the Jews (or to be precise, the Jewish elite, not all Jews—Christianity was a counter-cultural sect, teaching that most Jews were failing to hear God, especially the governing and academic elite, and that therefore they, and “the common people” among the Jews, were the true Jews). This reifies Paul’s teaching in 1 Cor. 2 and all through Romans.
  
  The association with John is appropriation: Mark is portraying Christianity as the endorsed successor to the Baptist sect, another “we’re the true Judaism” theme, co-opting a famous anti-temple counter-culturalist to sell that message. Paul would have approved.
  
  The naked young man is an allegory for death and resurrection. Notice he is stripped naked of a linen cloak at the arrest; and appears after the resurrection in a radiant white robe. These were well known literary tropes (the body of flesh as linen garment; the resurrection body as donning a glorious white robe). I analyze this in my chapter on the Empty Tomb legend in The Empty Tomb. The man’s anonymity allows him to stand in for everyone, including Mark’s readers/hearers.
  
  There were certainly also secret teachings. Paul says so. And Mark does as well. But often we can’t know what they were. And speculation is idle. When we have evidence, we can say. When we don’t, we can’t. And here we have some evidence. Whether there was more to it, unknown.
  Reply
  - stevenjohnson on October 28, 2019 at 1:37 pm
    
    But, however much John is now believed to be, in Gospel-syncretic Christianity, another innocent victim of the Jews, the Baptist openly denounced, even in Mark, the temporal authorities. That is the politics that the Pauline tradition repudiates too, not just violence. Pauline tradition actively endorses the governors as placed there by God. Further, the endorsement of Jesus as King of the Jews, is a political content that seems to me very different from Paul’s. And lastly, revising the Kingdom of God to be a magically non-violent thing, while possibly appropriate to Gospel writers who lived after the Romans won a Jewish war (or three,) is just discretion being the better part of valor. Kingdom of God, king of the Jews, none of this seems the same politics as Paul’s, where the temple still stood. Jesus being from Galilee, land of Judas the Galilean, as well as Galilee of the Gentiles, must have meant something to people then.
    
    Least things last, which is that Jesus’ clothes being distributed by lot seemed to me to put that trope on the figure of Jesus himself. Putting off linen, then putting on radiant white as a metaphor for death by a young man then becomes a double metaphor, where death and resurrection is the metaphor for conversion. And the young man in the tomb is thus an example of how the believer is to evangelize. This is all so convenient to every purpose I am surprised this wasn’t used by all the gospel writers. Except maybe the point was that women should listen to the men?
    
    Barabbas as the Son of the Father has always seemed ambiguous to me. The common people wanting to save him is not quite so pro-Roman or pro-violence? But the Hart translation hints that Barabbas to was falsely put in with the rebels. The double who dies instead, both Barabbas and the peculiar insertion of the man from Cyrene who carried the cross (a hint he was the one who died on it,) hints that Mark was having it both ways, that Jesus died on the cross…but maybe someone else, a lamb provided by God, as he did give one in lieu of Isaac?
  - Richard Carrier on October 28, 2019 at 3:22 pm
    
    However much John is now believed to be, in Gospel-syncretic Christianity, another innocent victim of the Jews, the Baptist openly denounced, even in Mark, the temporal authorities.
    
    Not exactly. Mark denounces only the Jewish elite of the past (no such parties existed in his day; there was no Judea, and no temple cult, all destroyed, which in fact Mark is explaining); but notably never a Roman, for example. Pilate is depicted as reluctant and merely ignorant (and ultimately a necessary actor in God’s plan), not as a villain. And Mark never says anything about John saying otherwise.
    
    In this he is identical to Paul, who likewise mentions persecution from the Jewish elite owing to ignorance and demonic influence. But never denounces Romans, but rather calls for deference to them, as God’s chosen authorities. Paul was writing in a different context, but this resonated with Mark’s post-war perspective, who thus weaves stories of how God destroyed Judea and the temple cult, using the Romans as his vehicle. His now chosen agents. Accordingly Mark depicts Romans favorably several times. And never unfavorably.
    
    As for the “king of the Jews” stuff, that’s all allegory in Mark for Paul’s notion of kingdom, which was spiritual, not military. Mark writes everything to match this (the slain swine, the Barabbas parable, etc., it all depicts militarism as “not getting it,” and recognizing the kingdom as spiritual as “getting it,” exactly Paul’s message too). Their politics are exactly in agreement.
    
    Mark only uses John to endorse Jesus as his successor and teach a lesson about the elite corruption of the Jews that led God to destroy them at the hands of the Romans. That much is new, but only because it happened, so Mark has to explain it. Paul didn’t see it coming. He thought God would nuke the world before that. Mark is interpreting Paul in light of what actually happened, not as Paul mistakenly imagined things would go. Because Mark had to. Indeed, that’s possibly the entire reason Mark wrote this Gospel: to explain that unexpected outcome, and capitalize on it, adapting Pauline theology and politics to the purpose.
    
    Note also that Paul was already an anti-temple sectarian. Christianity was such fundamentally from the beginning; so Paul was adopting that political stance the moment he joined. That’s why he is teaching freedom from Torah on the back of the Christian doctrine of Christ’s atonement. Paul acknowledges Jesus has replaced the temple cult (as both Passover and Yom Kippur sacrifices); it’s actually a very short line from there to Paul’s modified gospel of just doing away with the rest of the Torah as well (albeit only for Gentiles; by Mark’s time this may have evolved a bit).
    
    Jesus’ clothes being distributed by lot…
    
    That reifies Psalm 22 (almost verbatim; that’s the crucifixion psalm; followed by the funeral psalm, Psalm 23; followed by the exaltation psalm, Psalm 24; marking Mark’s three day sequence of death, grave, resurrection). Much of Mark’s crucifixion details are lifted directly from Psalm 22 in fact. It’s also a common metaphor. Clothes are the body (Mark uses this metaphor with the young man in the very next chapter—not a metaphor for conversion, but for resurrection itself). And many dying-and-rising saviors had their bodies torn apart at their deaths (Romulus, Dionysus, Osiris), so there was some sort of messaging in that that was more obvious to people then than now. I doubt it had any political relevance. It’s, if anything, theological.
    
    Except maybe the point was that women should listen to the men?
    
    Not exactly. Mark is using irony, reversal of expectation, a repeated theme in his Gospel. And here the women scene exactly reverses the John the Baptist scene (see OHJ for a breakdown and details). The women are symbolic; they don’t represent actual women. So he is not messaging about gender relations here. At most, it’s just symbolic of the gospel as a whole: the last shall be first, and the first shall be last.
    
    See my analysis of the Barabbas parable (and it is really just a parable) in OHJ. Where I cite three peer reviewed scholars concurring, as well as Origen himself in his own analysis in the third century. Barabbas is the scapegoat in this metaphorical Yom Kippur; so Mark is saying those who choose military messianism are choosing the fate of the scapegoat, whereas those who reject that are choosing salvation in the atonement offered by Jesus. This is one of the most easily proved allegorical messages in Mark.
    
    …the peculiar insertion of the man from Cyrene who carried the cross (a hint he was the one who died on it,) hints that Mark was having it both ways, that Jesus died on the cross…but maybe someone else, a lamb provided by God, as he did give one in lieu of Isaac?
    
    No. Mark is not saying any of that. Mark would probably smirk at you for even taking his story that literally. This is all allegory. You are acting like the outsiders condemned by Jesus in Mark 4.
    
    Simon of Cyrene (meaning a foreigner; in particular, a foreigner from the other side of Egypt, a common metaphor for death in Jewish mythology of the time) is the ironic reversal of what Jesus said to the other Simon, Simon Peter: that he must take up his cross and follow. Instead, Peter flees, and a stranger named Simon from beyond the realm of the dead picks up Jesus’s cross and follows. Mark in no way says or hints that this Simon did anything else. Mark is perfectly clear it’s Jesus who died. This is not a third century “replacement” heresy. (There may be other symbolism here, which I outline in OHJ, but can’t prove.)
    
    Paul’s theology actually very clearly has Jesus the replacement for the lamb who replaced Isaac. It’s reversing that mistake in history, thereby repairing a flaw in the Jewish temple system. That’s the entire logic of Christianity from day one. It’s fundamental to the theology Mark is preaching. The reason Jesus’s sacrifice doesn’t have to be repeated every year is that human sacrifice has mojo that animal substitutes don’t (see Hebrews 9).
    
    The Isaac sacrifice (and actual substitution) was widely understood then to have been the first Yom Kippur. It is the aetiological myth for that sacrifice: “We sacrifice lambs as a substitute for humans, ever since that day, lo, when…” was the whole basis of temple Judaism. Jesus reverses this by substituting a beloved son back in place of the lamb, completing the cycle of the ages (exactly as Jesus reverses the rebellion of Satan, thus fixing the world; Philippians 2 being basically the mirror image of that legend).
- David Oliver Smith on October 27, 2019 at 8:23 pm
  
  In reply to “there is zero evidence of that” (Paul and James disagreed on the crucifixion.)
  
  There is not zero evidence of that. See my article “Another Jesus, the Christology of Paul’s Opponents,” Journal of Higher Criticism, Vol 13, No. 2, pp 49-64. I have developed a method of rhetorical analysis where I find chiastic and parallel structures in NT scripture (in this case Paul’s epistles) and one can sometimes detect interpolations interrupting the original literary structure. In this article I show, in support of Bob Price’s article, “1 Corinthians 15:3-11 as a Post Pauline Interpolation” Journal of Higher Criticism, Vol. 2, No 2, pp 60-69, that 1 Cor 15:3-11 is indeed an interpolation interrupting a chiastic structure running from 1 Cor 15:1-15 if vv 3-11 are eliminated. That is the only place in Paul’s epistles where Paul appears to say that the Jerusalem apostles accepted the crucifixion. Also I show that close analysis of Galatians and 2 Corinthians demonstrates that the real Christological difference between Paul and the Jerusalem apostles was a belief in the crucifixion and resurrection. It is my belief that Paul thought Christ had been crucified and resurrected based on Isa 53 but the JA believed there was no crucifixion based on Dan 7:13-14. But they were both waiting for Christ to descend with the clouds and institute the kingdom of God.
  Reply
  - Richard Carrier on October 28, 2019 at 11:00 am
    
    That’s not evidence. That’s a circular argument, whereby you fabricate evidence by inventing an excuse to take Pauline passages out of context and invent new letters that don’t exist, in order to use those new invented letters to prove the conclusion you used to invent those letters in the first place. This is not sound methodology.
    
    There is no actual document anywhere that supports your thesis. Only documents you invented, using the thesis as the basis for inventing them. Such circular fabrication of sources is just like what scholars do in the Q travesty. It’s a wholly defective method and should be universally rejected.
    
    However, the one argument here that could carry some effect is the one about a chiasmus in 1 Cor. 15. I’d be willing to review that if you email the paper to me. But inventing evidence I do not accept.
  - David Oliver Smith on October 28, 2019 at 5:29 pm
    
    I fail to see how the argument is circular. I assume you have not read my article “Another Jesus.” Paul warns at 2 Cor 11:4 to beware those preaching “another Jesus.” It is reasonable to assume that those preaching “another Jesus” are the Jewish apostles of Christ Paul mentions at 2 Cor 11:13 and 22. What is “another Jesus”? That must be a Jesus with characteristics different from Paul’s Jesus. The only characteristics of Paul’s Jesus that we can glean from his epistles is that he was crucified and resurrected. That is some evidence that Jewish apostles were preaching an uncrucified Jesus. Paul makes similar statements elsewhere. At Gal 3:1 he calls the Galatians foolish because someone has convinced them that Christ was not crucified. These would be the same persons who espoused “a different gospel” at Gal 1:6-7. Notice the similarity between “another Jesus” and “a different gospel.” At Gal 5:11 Paul says that if he is preaching adherence to the law then the “stumbling block of the cross has been done away with.” If the cross is a stumbling block, someone doesn’t believe it. Who could those villains be? In Gal 2:7-10 Paul says he made a contract with the pillars. At Gal 2:11-15 Paul writes that the pillars broke the contract by showing up among the uncircumcised. At Gal 3:15 Paul cites contract law, meant to remind the Galatians that the pillars broke the contract. At Gal 5:7-12 Paul complains about the group that is bothering the Galatians, and by now we have no doubt it is those contract breaking hypocrite pillars that Paul wants to castrate. And further, at 1 Cor 1:23 Paul says a crucified Jesus is a stumbling block to Jews. Is that the average Jew on the streets of Jerusalem Paul is worried about not believing in a crucified Christ? No. They are the Jews that oppose Paul. The Jews on Paul’s mind. Those of 2 Cor 11:13 and 22.
    
    Does Paul write anything that would make us think the Jerusalem pillars agreed with him about a crucified Jesus? Yes. There is one statement that seems to contradict the accumulated evidence from Galatians, 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians. At 1 Cor 15:3-4 Paul supposedly says that he delivered the gospel of Jesus dying and being resurrected. Then at 1 Cor 15:11, after listing all those who saw the risen Christ and making some self deprecating remarks, he says that they all preach the same gospel (of the crucified and resurrected Christ). However, in that section of 1 Cor 15 v 1 is parallel to v 15b; v 2a is parallel to v 15a; v 2b is parallel to v 14c; v 12a is parallel to v 14b; v 12b is parallel to vv 13b, 14a; and finally v 12 c is parallel to v 13a. This is a 6 stitch chiastic structure – A, B, C, D, E, F, F, E, D, C, B, A. However, there is a large block of text, vv 3-11, that interrupts these chiastic parallels. This block of text seems to be irrelevant from the rest of the section which is making the argument why the Corinthians should believe in the resurrected Christ. It appears to be a later addition. This is some evidence that vv 3-11 might be a later, harmonizing interpolation, that is trying to minimize the disputes between Paul and the Jamesian group, as was done in the book of Acts.
    
    I know you’re fond of citing 1 Cor 15:5-8 as evidence that Paul was writing about a resurrected Jesus and not a human being. And I agree with you that that is the tenor of vv 5-8. But even if Bob Price and I are correct that vv 3-11 have been interpolated, the redactor could have been attempting to harmonize different beliefs about a celestial Jesus and had no knowledge of a purported human Jesus. The human Jesus belief could have arisen after the subject interpolation. I don’t think one can say there is zero evidence of Jamesian group not believing in a crucified Christ.
  - Richard Carrier on October 30, 2019 at 2:09 pm
    
    That must be a Jesus with characteristics different from Paul’s Jesus. The only characteristics of Paul’s Jesus that we can glean from his epistles is that he was crucified and resurrected.
    
    That’s a non sequitur.
    
    Paul tells us what the difference was in Galatians 1-2: Jesus’s teachings on Torah observance. The difference that is never mentioned? The atoning-sacrifice role of Jesus. So that clearly was not the difference. The difference Paul does mention was.
    
    At Gal 3:1 he calls the Galatians foolish because someone has convinced them that Christ was not crucified.
    
    No. Paul never says anyone told them that was false. Read the rest of Galatians 3: only one subject is mentioned as what they were told, and it’s about Torah observance. Paul is not saying someone told them Christ was not crucified. Paul is saying someone told them that sacrifice didn’t release them from Torah. Because that’s all Paul says, over and over again, in that whole chapter. Please read verses in context.
    
    If the cross is a stumbling block, someone doesn’t believe it.
    
    Wrong. Read the verse in context. Paul says “if I am still preaching circumcision” etc. He is not talking about people stumbling over the atoning crucifixion; he us talking about people stumbling over its atoning effect negating Torah. How do we know that? Because that’s what Paul says. Over and over and over again, in that whole chapter, again. Please read verses in context.
    
    Likewise 1:23 is not about Jewish Christians, but non-Christian Jews.
    
    And so on.
    
    In each case, you are changing or ignoring the context of every verse. Exactly like a Christian apologist.
    
    That method is invalid. Please stop using it.
    
    As to the chiasmus, that’s simply not a correct understanding of how chiasm works. You’ve got elements out of order, you’re splitting verses, you’re ignoring verses, your reading verses weirdly to force fits that aren’t there (e.g. there is no intelligible link between v. 1 and v. 15b; etc.). It’s a mess. That’s why I don’t buy this. It’s a lousy argument. Unless you have a better version of this chiasmus claim I haven’t seen. In which case, please email it to me and I’ll evaluate it.
cmessenger99 on October 27, 2019 at 7:12 pm

I’d love to see your version of a timeline for the books/writings of the 1st century, including the Ascension of Isaiah, the Pauline letters, x James, x Peter, Hebrews, x Clement, the gospels, etc. Also, what I’d really like to see for each is your take on what the author thought about Jesus – did the author to consider Jesus to be a celestial being?

To bring it back to your post (which was fascinating), did “Mark” think Jesus was a celestial being? I mean, the obvious answer from what you wrote is that Yes, he did – given that he was creating a historical Jesus from Paul’s celestial Jesus. But then the question is, what about “Matthew” and “Luke”? Or, winding back before Mark, what about Clement? Or the author of Hebrews? Going all the way back to James and Paul, obviously they would have known Jesus was a celestial being.

In short, just when did the switchover happen? Who was in on it? Clearly, there were writers (including Mark) who knew Jesus was celestial, but strove to convince others he was a historical person. What other writers fit this category? Was Mark the first?
Reply
- Richard Carrier on October 28, 2019 at 11:28 am
  
  I’d love to see your version of a timeline…
  
  You probably wouldn’t. The error bars are so large it would just be a completely uninformative blob. Pretty much every single one is roughly either “between 50 and 66 AD” or “between 70 and 130 AD.” So you can build out the whole timeline yourself. Just deduce which documents fall into category one, and which into category two. Or if you just want to know, I cover which is which in Ch. 7 of OHJ.
  
  Did “Mark” think Jesus was a celestial being?…
  
  He certainly would have; in the same sense Paul did. Mark is simply a Pauline. He is allegorizing, thus has reduced everything cosmic to earthly parables. Just as was done for other savior gods (Osiris is a prime example: stories of his adventures on earth were well recognized—by insiders—as allegories for what was really a cosmic drama).
  
  However, that does not answer whether Mark thought Jesus was both. The mainstream historicity thesis is that the first Christians believed Jesus was both: both a historical, incarnate, earth-visiting man, and an eternal celestial being. So we still can’t say which (whether Mark was a historicist or a mythicist). It’s 50/50 on present evidence. Unknown and unknowable.
  
  …what about “Matthew” and “Luke”?
  
  Less and less certain. We aren’t told. So can’t know. Things were changing exactly in these decades. Who were they writing for? No one tells us.
  
  The only thing I’d say we can be sort of certain of is that John is either a historicist or wants his readers to be. His is the only Gospel that explicitly says it is trying to convince the reader these things really happened. Luke almost does that, although in a way that could still be a wink to insiders and a veil for outsiders.
  
  Indeed, the transition can be seen chronologically: Mark seems overtly allegorical; Matthew adds “proof of prophecy” lines that sort of almost sound like an attempt to historicize but are vague on whether that’s a dupe for outsiders or not; Luke gets more explicit in pretending to be writing history, but still doesn’t explicitly say he’s doing that (read closely, his exact words are still compatible with both interpretations) rather than pretending to; we don’t get explicit assertions of historical truth until John.
  
  Notably, this is exactly the opposite sequence we should expect if Jesus actually existed.
  
  …what about Clement? Or the author of Hebrews?
  
  Covered in OHJ (Clement: Ch. 8.5; Hebrews: Ch. 11.5). I show both appear to not know of an earth-visiting Jesus; but we can’t be certain, because they don’t explicitly say the opposite either. Their statements are vague. But that’s actually what’s weird about them. As with Paul’s Epistles. As I note in Ch. 8.12, any letters these guys wrote that were explicit about it, would not have been preserved anyway. So we are looking through the self-selecting filter of medieval historicizing Christians. We don’t get to see any others.
  
  …just when did the switchover happen?
  
  Sometime between 66 and 130-ish. We have zero documentation to tell what was happening in that period, so we can’t be more precise than that. All we get is sources after 130 ignorant of what happened in that period (and before). And a few documents written in that period that either don’t mention an earthly Jesus, or tell us nothing about their context or purpose (or even author or audience). See How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus? for details (to the limits of our knowledge).
  
  Who was in on it?
  
  Unknown. Per above, we have zero documentation for about 60 years of the church’s history. We have no idea who was running things, who was writing anything, what they were saying to each other, what the debates were, what factions there were, which were growing or shrinking, how many there were. In short, we know nothing. Because all pertinent records are gone. They aren’t even referenced in later literature; Christians after 130 have no knowledge of this period. Though they started spouting unsourced rumors and legends to fill that gap, none are plausible.
  
  Was Mark the first?
  
  The first whose text is extant for us to see it. Beyond that, unknown. However, I think it is inaccurate to say Mark was “trying to convince” anyone that Jesus existed. That is not the apparent purpose of his text. As he says in Mark 4, his purpose is to fool outsiders into not understanding what he is actually doing or saying, so that insiders can feel special and be saved. What that means in terms of what Mark thought insiders should believe about Jesus is wholly unknown. Because he never says. Nor does anyone who would know.
  
  The same uncertainty holds across subsequent Gospels, but for the sliding move toward historicizing I already noted above, which only gets explicit by the time we get to John, and yet even he might have been just more assertively doing the same thing: fooling outsiders, to bolster the secret teachings of insiders. I think that’s on balance of probability less likely, but not so improbable as to rule out. We simply aren’t told by anyone who would know, what that document’s author or original audience actually believed or intended.
  Reply
chirala1948 on October 27, 2019 at 10:09 pm

I have read this carefully reasoned essay on Mark’s use of Paul’s Epistles and this is just what I have been hoping for. Since Mark’s is the first gospel, and the basis for all other gospels, it is important to know where he got his materials and ideas. Do we know who Mark was writing for, where his community was, and what his slant on the narrative is? Is it purely to mimic Paul’s ideas or did he have an agenda of his own. Can we guess his education? Is his Greek good? Where did he get the chiasmus idea? Does that come from a particular contemporary school? Just questions that come to mind–you really make my mind work! Thank you for this informative piece! Elaine Olson
Reply
- Richard Carrier on October 28, 2019 at 10:50 am
  
  Do we know who Mark was writing for, where his community was, and what his slant on the narrative is?
  
  We do not know for sure, because we have no records applicable. Mark wrote most likely in the late 70s AD. We do not hear even from a single reader of his text until the mide-second century, almost a hundred years later. And those mentions reveal Christians then had no records of what was even going on in their church in the first fifty years of Mark having written. They didn’t really know who he was either, or where he wrote, or for whom, or why.
  
  So all we can do is conjecture or draw inferences from the scant available evidence internally. Like the clues Mark gives in Ch. 4, and the way he constructs stories allegorically (as I document in Ch. 10.4 of OHJ), and what the structure of his Gospel communicates, and so on. The results of these observations are as I report them above.
  
  As to his education, we do know Mark must have received a very good education, up to the level of what we would call college today, which then was the level you had to reach to learn Greek composition of the kind Mark demonstrates facility with. Such education always included pericope and chiastic construction and mimesis. In the past it has been reported that his Greek is very simple, but that’s no more illustrative than that Mark Twain wrote in the common vernacular, despite being a well educated and literate man. Mark is writing in the common tongue on purpose, which is an example of something we do have that tells us something about who his audience was.
  
  For more on how ancient education worked (and there was only one kind) see my book Science Education in the Early Roman Empire.
  Reply
Art. 25 on October 28, 2019 at 4:44 pm

A question. I’m totally ignorant in the field, but I believe there were more than 4 gospels, weren’t there ? They were just not included in the canon, if I’m not mistaken.
Do they bring something new into this discussion, or can they be discarded without further ado ?
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- Richard Carrier on October 30, 2019 at 1:49 pm
  
  We know the titles of over 40 Gospels written over a span of about two centuries. But we cannot establish any of them pre-date the Gospels in the canon; or at least, some could predate the later canonicals, but none appears to pre-date Mark (so far as we can tell).
  
  The Gospel of Peter, for example, a major competing Gospel condemned as heresy by the church that picked the canonicals we now have, is clearly dependent on Mark and Matthew and thus post-dates both. The Gospel of Thomas has similarly been proved by Goodacre to derive from and thus post-date the Synoptic Gospels, and it is only now debated whether GThom precedes or follows GJn, as one has been claimed a response to the other.
  
  All the non-canonicals are like this. Which makes them essentially useless as data. Except in proving a basic concept: that this is what Christians did—make up fictional Gospels by lifting from and riffing on prior Gospels, without any other identifiable sources.
  Reply
  - Art. 25 on October 30, 2019 at 1:58 pm
    
    Thank you.
LA_to_the_Bay on February 26, 2020 at 1:29 am

Dr. Carrier,

Your efforts to legitimize mysticism are impressive and appreciated. The mainstream must take your arguments seriously because of how you’ve presented and tested them, as it were, through the peer review process. This is key for our view to be taken seriously in scholarly discourse and for us to be viewed as something other than tin foil hat crackpots. Well done, sir.

With that being said… my questions do call for educated speculation on your part. If you’ve addressed any of this in one of your books, please let me know. I admit I haven’t cracked open OHJ yet (only because I’m wrapping up another beast of a book) but I’ve seen probably all your (YoutTube) lectures and debates, read Price, Ehrman, and many of your blog posts.

If Mark was from a Paulinist sect, why does Mark feel the need to Euhemerize Jesus and physically place him on earth in his gospel? Is this to make its “hidden message” easier for the masses to digest via missionary work? One big allegory, sold as a truth such that converts can mine it for its nuggets of wisdom without the complicated Pauline cosmic drama? Or do you think Mark and the other earliest authors never truly intended the material to be taken literally (Mark 4:10-12 allegory within an allegory)?

What methods are used for dating the epistles and gospels? It seems I only ever get a ‘high-level overview’ of how this is done in practice (references to them by Church Fathers in 2nd and 3rd centuries, philology). Also, I’ve read that you refute Robert Price’s assertion that Paul’s letters are (or at least their final redactions) the product of 2nd Century Christians. To me, it always seems as if Paul is addressing concerns of a congregation much older than one he personally established c. 33 CE to c. 67 CE. The sort of minutiae discussed not of a fledgling religion, but one that’s got its legs under it a bit (I concede that circumcision and Torah observance are probably pretty paramount and would have been a topic from jump).

It would seem that, to ascribe to mysticism, one also must discount or outright ignore the so-called Jesus Movement out of Jerusalem; the assumption being the “Pillars” would have either a) based their religion on an actual historical figure or b) concocted a fictional character but set him against the backdrop of reality – in either case, Paul’s relationship with its members (apparently Peter, a pretty important figure whether literary or, especially, if historical — we’ll skip Jimmy Christ, Brother of the Lord) seems tenuous at best. If there’s some sort of conflict (as I understand it, Peter advocating for stricter Torah observance and Paul a more relaxed method so as to appeal to gentiles), wouldn’t this suggest that not all parties agreed on a cosmic origin of Jesus? Efforts to smooth Paul over (Acts) and more align him with Petrine doctrine would seem to suggest Jerusalem’s take would be that of an Earthly (or even Ebionite mortal) Jesus in direct conflict with Paul’s take. Though I have no material basis, it really does seem as if Paul’s sect and Peter’s sect arrived at Christianity independently with some albeit weak thread that ties each belief to some guy named Jesus. I’d like to include “from Palestine” though I’m not sure Paul ever actually identified an Earthly home for Jesus. Only later does it seem redactors harmonize the two sides.

Is it possible to cobble together a rough timeline of authorship and perhaps an explanation of how these two sides (and potentially others) arrived at such different conclusions about the birth/manufacture and life/existence of Jesus? That church officials reconcile with later redactions is comprehensible (necessary) enough but I have trouble wrapping my head around Paul’s being the earliest surviving writings and having SUCH a disconnect with what one might imagine would be in apparently older Petrine writings.

Thanks!
George G.
Reply
- Richard Carrier on February 26, 2020 at 3:17 pm
  
  If Mark was from a Paulinist sect, why does Mark feel the need to Euhemerize Jesus and physically place him on earth in his gospel?
  
  Because that’s what all mystery religions did. So we could expect inevitably someone would do it to Christianity. If not Mark, it’d have been someone else. See OHJ Chs. 4 and 5 for pertinent background elements. As to his specific motive, that would be exactly what he tells us in Mk. 4 (and elucidated further by Origen later; as I note and quote in OHJ). The secondary utility is that of all myth whatever (the same reason anyone ever wrote any myths at all), which I lay out in Ch. 10 of OHJ. But I also discuss this process with analogs (from King Arthur to Betty Crocker) in Ch. 1, and the Noll thesis in Ch. 8.12.
  
  What methods are used for dating the epistles and gospels?
  
  See Ch. 7 of OHJ for references. I rely on mainstream scholarship’s date ranges for everything, simply for want of anything better. I only reject late dating of Hebrews and 1 Clement, for the reasons I explain when discussing those sources (in Ch. 11.5 and 8.5, respectively); and I side with the late dating of the Ignatians (discussed in Ch. 8.6).
  
  As for the seven authentic Paulines, given their content (their own internal relative dating and references to external events) IMO they cannot date to any other decades than the 50s AD or the 50s BC. The latter would be intriguing but is weakly supported by external evidence relative to the former.
  
  Price’s arguments for Paul are implausible and consist almost entirely of speculation on top of speculation and go against the grain of evidence (see my discussion here). By contrast see my comments on dating relative to Aretas in comments here and here.
  
  As for the rest of your comment, I don’t understand what you mean. Maybe you’ll get a clearer idea after reading OHJ, but the thesis is that the Pillars and Paul were preaching a revelatory being, analogous to Gabriel to Islam and Moroni to Mormonism. Stories portraying Jesus as a regular historical person arrive only a lifetime later, and only in a foreign land and language, and were first aimed specifically at Gentiles, and then Diaspora Jewish converts decades after that. We have no evidence the movement ever much caught on in Palestine, and no texts survive, even by mention, that targeted native Palestinian audiences (nothing we are told about “Ebionites” for example is early enough or reliable enough to conclude anything from).
  
  Is it possible to cobble together a rough timeline…?
  
  No.
  
  We have zero data.
  
  That’s why honest datings for the Gospels have enormous ranges, e.g. as far as we can at all prove, Mark dates somewhere between 70 and 140 AD, and even that is weak. And we have zero documents about who Mark was, what he was doing, who for, when, why, what anyone at the time thought about it, who at the time even knew about it, etc. We have zero such documents not merely for the decade Mark wrote it (and which decade is that?), but for close on a hundred years (zero usable information appears of this kind between 70 and 165 AD, and I’m being generous to cut that off at 165; meanwhile, from Papias, writing maybe 130 AD, it’s clear even they didn’t have access to any reliable information about any of that by then—they appear to have had no real sources for anything going on in the church in the first century).
  
  Since all the documentation we would need to talk about who started or changed what ideas when is gone, we just can’t answer questions like yours, alas. See my discussion here.
  Reply
  - LA_to_the_Bay on February 26, 2020 at 7:48 pm
    
    Ah, so Peter and possibly James the Just were identified as pillars, leading from Jerusalem as early as the 50s CE, per Paul, right? My assumption was that as Peter was a contemporary of Jesus, per Mark, this Peter mentioned by Paul would have been a companion of a physical Jesus — hence my difficulty being able to reconcile a contemporaneous school of Paul and of Peter, how they could coexist and be seemingly worlds apart in philosophy (they’d have to if Peter knew Jesus — and especially if we entertain the interpretation of James as his biological brother, just for shits). But as there’s no physical evidence Peter and James taught anything but an extraterrestrial Jesus, I could see why any differences Paul had with them would be otherwise insignificant (or at least less significant than a physical vs. astral savior).
    
    So, it really seems any historicist’s argument hinges on being able to connect a member of the early church or any sort of eyewitness to a physical Jesus and their best bet is Peter and maybe James. I suppose this is the motive of 2 Peter’s author but even then, ‘eyewitnesses of his majestic splendor’ leaves a bit to be desired.
    
    And Mark simply retroactively places Peter in as one of the Twelve because his entire narrative is fiction anyway, so — easy enough. Pre-War Jerusalem is a convenient setting for a tale written Post-War by a Greek speaker seeking to uncouple Temple Culture from this new religion.
    
    Thanks for the prompt response. Bought the book, made a note of the suggested reading.
  - Richard Carrier on February 27, 2020 at 5:51 pm
    
    James the Just was never called a “pillar.” That is a confusion that arose much later.
    
    James the brother of John is most likely whom Paul meant as the third Pillar (after Peter), to judge from the triad depicted in the Gospels.
    
    But that said, the alternatives are these:
    
    Peter dreamed a vision of Jesus reporting the sacrifice had occurred, and Peter went about preaching this, his band soon had confirming visions, and so the religion began. Paul then claimed a vision later, making him, too an Apostle; an Apostle being anyone having a vision of Jesus. A lifetime later this revelatory Jesus was transformed (as all other celestial saviors were) into a person walking around Galilee, appointing Peter before his death and so on. Before that, no one had ever taught such a thing.
    
    Or…
    
    Peter was a follower of Jesus, then after Jesus was killed, Peter claimed visions confirming Jesus was exalted, and so on.
    
    Those are the options. In option one, if you went back to the year 60 and asked Peter how he met Jesus, he would say “In a vision, after his cosmic sacrifice.” Only in option two, would he say, “I started following him during his ministry in Galilee before the Romans killed him.” Likewise if you asked Paul how Peter met Jesus, he’d answer the same: in option one, “in a vision, like I did”; only in option two would Paul answer, “he was a follower of Jesus before the Romans killed Jesus.”
    
    As for option one, the only difference between what Paul and Peter were preaching was that Paul claimed Jesus told him Gentiles could join without converting to Judaism. That’s it. And he persuaded Peter to go along with this (arguably because Paul was bringing money in from his Gentile converts; references to this money are littered across the epistles).
    
    Yes, 2 Peter is a second century forgery. It wasn’t even written by the same person who wrote 1 Peter (and 1 Peter never references ever knowing Jesus in life or Jesus ever being on earth; all its author’s info comes from visions and scripture). And yes, Mark has many advantages for pulling off his switch of context: the war, the death of everyone notable, writing to a foreign audience in a foreign language, and for a sect that had already left the original sectarian commitments; plus, Mark would likely have been selling his story inside the church as allegory, not as literal truth (in accordance with what he has Jesus say in Mark 4).
LA_to_the_Bay on February 27, 2020 at 8:17 pm

What would you say the pagan climate was like in 1st, 2nd century Roman Empire? I’ve seen your comparisons of Christianity to its contemporary dying-and-rising gods and I think the parallels are pretty well established.

I mean would you see what we have today back then? Fundamentalists, Moderates, Agnostics (“Sure the gods created everything but the Iliad et al are just allegories, fellow Roman”) sharing the same space given the lack of a centralized pagan “church” authority.

I’m curious because if, like you say, Mark likely sold his gospel to his fellow Christians as allegory, would Christianity’s ultimate transition to being taken literally be unusual in the Empire?
Reply
- Richard Carrier on February 28, 2020 at 10:27 am
  
  No, it wasn’t unusual at all. As I discuss in OHJ, the Noll thesis is that everyone trends toward literalism over time (or at least some such faction always arises and grows). And the ancients even observed this; as I quote Origin pointing out the less educated and most set in their ways don’t accept allegorism and need literalism, so he encourages a “double truth” use of scripture, where he pretends its literal for the benefit of the salvation of the masses but enlightened elites like him know it’s really allegory. And Euhemerism (converting mythical beings into historical ones) was popular even among the elite.
  
  We see this among pagans as well: whole wars were fought over taking the myths of Hercules literally; and the uneducated public disdained the educated elite for not taking their religious myths literally (I document some examples in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire). So it was actually hard to keep people from trending toward literalizing their myths back then. I discuss some of why that is in my early discussion in OHJ of the King Arthur legend as an example; and later when I discuss the way the cargo cults invented historical founders, like John Frum and Tom Navy.
  Reply
  - LA_to_the_Bay on April 27, 2022 at 1:37 am
    
    You’re a sport. I bet most of these questions answer themselves when one actually reads OHJ (which I finally just did)
Patrick Lemaire on March 1, 2020 at 9:08 am

Do we have any idea where Paul got his ideas? Are there obscure religious texts which anticipate Paul? How much of Philo’s attempt to rewrite Judaism matches Paul? They are contemporaries. The Church sets the NT material as special, i.e new and authentic. Is there any research which inscribes the NT material in a continuity, i.e. there is earlier material which is the same, like earlier gospels, or the NT material is fundamentally the same as the apocryphal material and the distinction made by the Church is devoid of any legitimacy.
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- Richard Carrier on March 1, 2020 at 9:45 am
  
  We can trace only some of Paul’s ideas. Most of his sources don’t survive, or survive only in altered form.
  
  As to what “anticipates” Paul that’s too broad a question to answer. You need to be more specific.
  
  I cite the scholarship on how much overlap there is between Paul and Philo in OHJ.
  
  There are no known Gospels prior to Mark. But Mark emulates a hybrid of Hellenistic and Jewish mythic biography. Some sub-elements have specific precedents (e.g. we recovered some beatitude literature from Qumran). I cite the scholarship on the genre and precedents for Mark in OHJ.
  
  “Apocrypha” is too varied and broad a category to answer your last question. Some of it is pretty much just an extension of the NT (more forged letters of Paul; other Acts and Gospels that look like the ones in the NT; apocalypses; etc.) and some is relatively unusual (different kinds of Apocalypses or Gospel texts; different ways of framing forged Epistles; forged Homilies; etc.). Most of this (including material in the NT) can’t be shown to be “legitimate.” See Element 44 in Ch. 5 of OHJ.
  Reply
Anthony on November 29, 2020 at 8:46 am

Hello Richard,

Mark 7:19 is a gloss (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean).

Check the original verse : https://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2020/32/3/1596639582-cb1972d4-8f5c-45bd-b077-f58e7b505de5.png

Best regards,
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- Richard Carrier on November 29, 2020 at 2:11 pm
  
  We all know that. What relevance does that have to anything here?
  Reply
  - Anthony on November 29, 2020 at 3:45 pm
    
    « Mark 7:15 says “nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them,” and in 7:19 that Jesus “declared all foods clean, »
    
    He didn’t declared it. I made a correction.
    
    Why are you on the defensive like this?
  - Richard Carrier on November 30, 2020 at 1:55 pm
    
    A gloss is not a correction. It’s an explanation. Mark is presenting here a Pauline interpretation of divine logia.
Anthony on November 29, 2020 at 9:32 am

About the miracles, he just used the bible :

Isaiah 29:18
In that day the deaf will hear the words of the scroll, and out of gloom and darkness the eyes of the blind will see.
Isaiah 35:5
Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped.
Isaiah 42:16
I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them; I will turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do; I will not forsake them.
Isaiah 53:4
Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.
2 Kings 4:42
A man came from Baal Shalishah, bringing the man of God twenty loaves of barley bread baked from the first ripe grain, along with some heads of new grain. “Give it to the people to eat,” Elisha said.

43 “How can I set this before a hundred men?” his servant asked. But Elisha answered, “Give it to the people to eat. For this is what the LORD says: ‘They will eat and have some left over.'”

44 Then he set it before them, and they ate and had some left over, according to the word of the LORD.

We had verses about the water walking and the quiet storm too.
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- Richard Carrier on November 29, 2020 at 2:12 pm
  
  Yes. We all know that. I’ve written extensively on Mark’s use of the OT as models for his constructs and even mention that in my article.
  Reply
  - Anthony on November 29, 2020 at 3:42 pm
    
    « So Mark must have invented the idea of Jesus as exorcist and miracle worker, as a model for, and based on, Christian missionaries. »
    
    That’s why i told you he used the tanakh and not christian missionaries.
  - Richard Carrier on November 30, 2020 at 1:54 pm
    
    Paul already attests to the Christian missionaries exhibiting these abilities. So we know that’s the model. That Christianity was a Jewish sect is why it models other Jewish sects (as Josephus, in turn, attests), which model scripture. That is, in fact, where the Tanakh got the idea. It wasn’t the other way around.
Anthony on November 30, 2020 at 4:37 pm

I think Isaiah’s verses on the deaf and blind or those in the books of kings on the multiplication of the loaves or the resurrection are more relevant for an inspiration of Mark than those of Paul. But he can have used both of course.
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- Richard Carrier on November 30, 2020 at 11:51 pm
  
  You are confusing different things. I didn’t say “multiplication of the loaves” was a literal Christian missionary activity, for example. And Isaiah’s verses are about common Jewish missionary activity that Christians replicated. And so on. I think you are trying too hard to ignore distinctions and focus only on the OT text as Mark’s source. It often was. But it wasn’t always, and even when it was, it sometimes was because of how it dovetailed with practical realities Mark is preaching about. And yes, he often merged several kinds of materials into a single narrative, so it could often “be both.”
  Reply
David Oliver Smith on December 1, 2020 at 10:32 am

I think you’ll find, as I pointed out in my book “Unlocking the Puzzle” that in general Mark used the OT as a source for events in Jesus’s life and he use Paul as a source for Jesus’s teachings. The complementary discourses, the Parable Discourse and the Olivet Discourse have a mixture of OT and Pauline sources.
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- Richard Carrier on December 1, 2020 at 11:07 pm
  
  That’s a reasonable way of putting it. I haven’t checked to see if that’s always the case, but it is certainly a Markan trend.
  Reply
Bill on July 28, 2022 at 10:56 pm

What do you think of Price’s suggestion that Paul is the unnamed exorcist in 9:38-41? Also, my Interpreter’s Bible commentary dismisses the Pauline school connection to Mark as “outdated” (this was published in the early 1950s). Do you know if the New Interpreter’s Bible still has that in there or if they changed it?
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- Richard Carrier on July 29, 2022 at 12:56 pm
  
  I don’t know how we could prove Mark 9:38-41 was specifically about Paul. But it certainly is meant to indicate support for outsider Apostles, like Apollos as well as Paul (and many others, only some of whom Paul mentions, e.g. Junia). So it would include Paul in its intent.
  
  This is a reification of Paul’s repeated assertion that his ability to perform miracles proved he was legitimately “sent” by Jesus (the actual meaning of the word Apostle being “one sent”). By making this into a general principle, I suspect Mark intends it to encompass more than just Paul.
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Evan Bartlett on January 2, 2023 at 11:10 pm

Dr. Carrier, if Paul is claiming that Jesus died, and explicitly notes Jesus was buried as at 1 Corinthians 15, how do you reconcile that with your claim of Paul’s mythical inventions (or the mythical elements parts he acquired from others) of these details about Jesus?

What celestial deities are physically buried after death? I’m not aware of any parallels in ancient Judaism or other religions of the ancient near east.

Clearly Paul firmly is of the view of a human Jesus here who died and was buried on Earth. A celestial or spiritual being would not be physically buried, surely?
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- Richard Carrier on January 6, 2023 at 4:24 pm
  
  It is clear by this comment you do not know what my thesis is.
  
  My thesis is that Jesus was believed to have worn a mortal human (indeed Jewish and Davidic) body.
  
  I explain where this was believed to have happened, including his ensuing death and burial, if mythicism is true in On the Historicity of Jesus (or if you prefer a colloquial introduction: Jesus from Outer Space).
  
  But for an example of beings being buried in the heavens in Jewish tradition, see Adam’s Burial in Outer Space. And for the celestial humanity of Jesus see: Can Paul’s Human Jesus Not Be a Celestial Jesus? and Empirical Logic and Romans 1:3.
  
  The parallel of Osiris is discussed in Historicity (e.g. Plutarch explains the earthly legends of Osiris were fictions and the real Osiris acquired a mortal human body in outer space and is actually killed and resurrected there).
  
  You apparently have some catching up on the scholarship to do.
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Russell Dowsett on March 22, 2023 at 11:51 pm

Dr. Carrier, the following question was recently put to me and I was not sure how to respond, other than to say perhaps things had moved on.

“If Mark and the others knew Paul, then why not include Paul’s unique “atonement theory” which is nowhere in the gospels? How people should “live in Christ,” etc? Paul’s consistent language of “transformation?”

What do you think?
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- Richard Carrier on March 23, 2023 at 12:23 pm
  
  The Gospels clearly allegorize. Especially Mark. They are not saying anything literally. They are also keeping secrets, reserved for the oral instruction of converts (as taught by example in Mark 4:10-13; much of this instruction, backfilling the understanding of converts, may even derive from Paul). So if you want to find Pauline teachings in them, you have to look for the allegories, hiding those secret teachings by signaling them rather than explicitly stating them, just as Jesus himself is made to warn the reader.
  
  Paul’s entire soteriology is: merge with Christ through baptism and communion (which shares in his death and resurrection); God will then adopt you as his son (thus making you a brother of Christ); in consequence of which, you will co-inherit with Christ God’s future Kingdom; and thus be raised from the dead; because Jesus paid for all your sins already (thus negating any need for the temple cult).
  
  This is taught from the Baptism scene (it is a symbolic death and resurrection culminating in adoption by God: Mark 1:9-14; on its parallels to the crucifixion and resurrection narrative at the end, see my section on it in OHJ) and Communion scene (which is almost verbatim from Paul: Mark 14:22-25).
  
  So fictive kinship replaces actual (as taught in Mark 3:31-35), the temple cult is negated and replaced (as taught in Mark’s fig tree/temple sequence, again see discussion in OHJ), because Jesus’s death replaced the atonement of Yom Kippur and the saving-from-death of Passover (the entire Barabbas-Crucifixion narrative: see discussion in OHJ).
  
  The fate of the anonymous “young man” (loss of linen “body,” acquisition or transformed “body,” allegorically through his changed body from the Arrest scene to the Empty Tomb scene) then establishes what happens to those saved: the role of garments as body symbolism is even from Paul, as I prove in detail in my chapter on this in The Empty Tomb.
  
  So Paul’s entire system is there. It just isn’t presented “literally.” Because that isn’t what the Gospels do. Indeed you’ll notice no Gospel ever explains what “the gospel” is yet says Jesus taught it a lot (so why don’t we hear what it is?); they instead have Jesus talk around it a lot, in metaphors and parables, and Mark even has him outright say that only insiders will ever be told what those things mean—so they won’t be in the written text at all.
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Sinouhe on March 23, 2023 at 12:49 pm

Richard, it would be amazing if you can present this subject on Mythvision.

Being a mythicist myself, i discovered the subject via this article and i dug almost every books and studies on this particular subject.

That’s an amazing and underrated subject that reinforce strongly the Christ myth theory. If Jesus existed, why Mark quotes Paul and his teachings and not Jesus’s teachings.

So it would be great if you can educate people on this subject. I don’t see any scholars doing this in the future on youtube.

All the best
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Bill on November 24, 2023 at 6:39 pm

I was reading my Decker textbook on Koine Greek and on page 68 it says, “Mark uses it (“kai euthus”) to mean, ‘the next thing I want to tell you is….’ This is a unique Markan idiom; it does not mean ‘and immediately”. Is this accurate?
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- Richard Carrier on November 26, 2023 at 10:01 am
  
  More or less. But to be clear, the word never meant “immediately” in the modern English sense. It could take that sense when context required, but its root sense is more like “with nothing else ado.”
  
  For example, you could use it to refer to something happening at the beginning of Summer (as the lexicon linked uses as an example), which is hardly down to a minute’s time or even a day’s. Its more basic sense is “nothing else important happened between that last comment and this” or “and he went straight to doing this,” where the “going to” part is uninteresting action in no need of narrating, no matter how long it might nevertheless have took.
  
  But it does carry a sense of urgency in respect to time, which is why it can easily mean “immediately” when the context requires.
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ncmncm on February 1, 2024 at 12:30 pm

I was surprised to discover, in yesterday’s livestream with MythVision, that MacDonald did not even recognize Eurell’s name, never mind show any familiarity with his argument. And he still carries the torch for Q.
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- Richard Carrier on February 1, 2024 at 1:32 pm
  
  MacDonald needs Q to be real. In particular, his Q, “Q-Plus.” He is trying to sell a religious message with it, arguing that he has found the true (historical) Jesus and it solves all our problems if we just listen to Him.
  
  He has thus abandoned all objective methodology in this debate. He could countenance being wrong about the Gospels’ use of Homer and Greek literature, because no religious-political argument he is defending depends on any of that being true.
  
  But now his Q-Plus does. And so endeth any interest in facts or scholarship pointing otherwise, IMO.
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  - ncmncm on February 1, 2024 at 7:21 pm
    
    Odd, he claims now not to be religious at all.
  - Richard Carrier on February 2, 2024 at 9:52 am
    
    Not quite. He claims not to believe in the supernatural. He identifies as a Christian atheist. And he has very strong views on how religions should reorganize their moral systems in line with what he finds in the “real” Jesus. He is quite evangelical about it, imagining himself as a religious reformer, and not anti-religious.
ncmncm on June 14, 2024 at 6:06 pm

Should we be considering whether Mark cribbed the line about the millstone directly from 1 Clement, instead of necessarily having whatever scripture they got it from?
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- Richard Carrier on June 14, 2024 at 6:29 pm
  
  That would be my first hypothesis. It’s possible Mark had the original text and split it apart. But given Mark’s abundant use of Paul’s Epistles to spin stories out of, I think it’s at least slightly more likely Mark is adapting 1 Clement.
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