I’m not sure what you mean. Jesus’s injunction against divorce is from Mark 10. This was redacted into Matthew 5. Which was redacted into Luke 16.

Why it appears where it does in Mark and Matthew is easy to explain (see my discussions of those Gospels’ structure in OHJ, Ch. 10). The question of why it appears where it does in Luke (where it does seem wholly out of context), there have been many proposals (see The Purpose of Luke’s Divorce Text (16,18) by John J. Kilgallen for a survey; and many more proposals have appeared since, e.g. by Teresa Bednarz, by Thomas Kazen, etc.).

I haven’t studied the matter so I don’t know what is most likely. My first-bet hypothesis is that it has been moved by scribal error (like the Pericope Adulturae, which got moved around between John and Luke in the manuscripts; in which case the Lukan text might not have been original to Luke at all but a marginal gloss absorbed into the text). But I would want to look closely at the literary hypotheses (like those linked above) before concluding either way.

That wouldn’t be incompatible with the military metaphor. Both can operate simultaneously.

But the latter is supported by that being a recurring theme in Mark and contextually salient (his whole Gospel is a response to the Jewish War and what it resulted in and how he, i.e. Christians, have a better option than that to offer). And the fact that Mark is naming them the same, both are Son of the Father, thus he wants you to see them as twins, representing the same thing in some respect, and the most available respect is the messianic ideal Mark says they represent (indeed, in some manuscripts of Matthew, by exactly the same name: he is Jesus Barabbas, “God’s Savior, the Son of the Father”; and I think it likely that’s how Mark originally read, as Matthew is unlikely to have added that).

You have to interpret it as they would: this would immediately be seen as a Yom Kippur metaphor. And as Origen explains in his analysis of the passage (which I discuss in OHJ), that means Barabbas is the scapegoat who is eventually pushed off a cliff and killed, to “kill” the sin of Israel that that goat absorbs and thus literally embodies and represents. That the sins specifically enumerated by Mark are “rebellion and murder” directly links this tale to the Jewish War and military messianism, in contrast to the pacifist martyr messianism that Jesus represents. In the Yom Kippur context, Jesus is the “identical goat” who is pure and whose death atones for all the sins cast into the scapegoat—who has to be identical to the sacrificial goat, so that they can represent each other: this is one goat, half of which carries sin and is (eventually) killed, the other half pure and given to atone for those sins.

Mark specifically says the crowd chooses the scapegoat. And in result fail to recognize they should have chosen the atonement. This is an obvious comment on the War: these are the Jews who chose murder and rebellion (and were essentially “pushed off a cliff and killed for it” by the Romans acting as God’s agent). Wise Jews (and Gentiles) should learn that lesson, wink wink, and thus make the right choice now. This is a theme all throughout Mark’s Gospel (e.g. the Gergesene swine, the Little Apocalypse, the temple and fig tree, etc.).

I’ve been interested in the Barabbas story for a long time. I think the interpretation of the allegory as a rejection of a military messiah is interesting and coherent. I, however, interpret it differently. (I’m coming to it with a background in literary criticism, not history.) I see Barabbas not as a potential messiah but the allegorical embodiment of humanity. It is an interpretation that fits perfectly into the central premise of Christianity, that we (and Barabbas) are sinful, guilty, and deserving of death and the grave. WE are Barabbas. He is us. And as we confront death, another figure steps in. He is the innocent sacrifice that faces death in our place. He (Jesus, of course) is the ultimate scapegoat that makes no further sacrifice possible. In my reading, Barabbas isn’t a potential scapegoat that is rejected as such. Jesus who, like Isaac, is a “son of Abraham,” becomes the offering. Barabbas is the beneficiary who is set free, not because he deserves it, but because Jesus the Christ willingly dies in our stead, we/Barabbas are “saved.”

Cool. Thanks. I’ll look at that in April.

In the meantime, is there any argument in it you particularly want to see my response to, or is it all a pretty usual case of not actually responding to what I said or deploying more possibiliter fallacies etc.?

That’s not a development, though. That’s been the mainstream consensus for decades now. It’s a position already taken in On the Historicity of Jesus, with bibliography. So there isn’t anything more to say. Moss was just bringing this knowledge to the public, using more colloquial language. I’m glad of that though. I’d like to see more honest popularization of what the academy has actually long thought about things like this.

I wonder if Richard could weigh in on the article for the Daily Beast Dr. Candida Moss published a week ago claiming along with Dr. Hugo Mendez that there is good reason to think the Gospel of John is a forgery?

It’s here:

Moss’ article is here: https://www.thedailybeast.com/everyones-favorite-gospel-the-gospel-of-john-is-a-forgery-according-to-new-research

Mendez’s article is here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0142064X19890490

I did a short blog post about the possible relationship between GJohn as a forgery and Jesus in GJohn lying to his brothers about not going up to the feast. It’s here:

http://palpatinesway.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-lie-of-jesus-in-gospel-of-john-with_20.html

Yes. It’s like all other “methods of criteria” (as I survey in Ch. 5 of Proving History): the method only makes logical sense in extremely specific and quite peculiar conditions; but they try to apply it everywhere, where none of those requisite conditions are actually met.

For an analogy, see how I show a valid form of the Argument from Embarrassment would operate (Ibid., pp. 124-26, 158-69). It requires very peculiar and convoluted conditions, none of which are ever realized in the Gospels. So you can employ it, but not there.

For “undesigned coincidences” the McGrews themselves give examples in police interviews (albeit I think all made up examples; they never do any actual research, e.g. to find real world examples of detectives using the method to catch a criminal or prosecutors using it to prove guilt in court, but I will just assume for the sake of argument that that was just laziness rather than the actual absence of examples they might have found had they tried).

What you need is a condition that is improbable on any other explanation but “actually happened.” Which requires a lot more to be the case than any example they find in the Gospels. Consider the example of Arrian’s discussion of his sources with respect to Alexander the Great’s journey to the oracle at Siwah:

Ptolemy son of Lagus relates that two speaking snakes preceded the army and Alexander ordered the guides to follow them and trust in the divinity; the snakes then led the way to the oracle and back again. But Aristobulus says (and most writers agree with him) that two crows flew in front of the army and served as guides to Alexander. I can assert that there must have been some divine intervention to help Alexander, because this is what seems probable.

Previously Arrian had explained these two named authors were eyewitnesses, traveling companions of Alexander. From other information we know they wrote separately; at most it’s possible Ptolemy had read Aristobulus, but we have no specific evidence he used him as a source. If we only had Ptolemy’s account, we’d likely dismiss the whole business as a made up legend (two talking snakes led them to the oracle, really?). But we can do more than that since we have another witness who reports it was two crows, who merely flew ahead (and this would be a common scouting practice: to follow birds in a desert, as they are likely to be heading toward water, and Siwah was the only water source in that region; although obviously they didn’t need scouts: the route was well traveled and well marked; it would just be a common coincidence that birds would also be going there to drink; bird augury was also a common superstition then, so we’d expect note to be taken of there being just two, their being crows, etc.).

Put all this together and we have at least a weak argument for the conclusion that this really happened: there really were two crows flying ahead of Alexander’s unit to Siwah. The way this gets preserved by a second eyewitness, who embellishes it into “two talking snakes,” actually, ironically, corroborates the other account because of the peculiar detail of there being two of them, and the common theme of animals leading the way: two facts that are improbable if these authors were independently making things up; but probable if they are both referring to an actual event, which Ptolemy has unrealistically embellished. The balance of probability thus favors Aristobulus here, and strengthens him in a way we’d not have without Ptolemy’s separate eyewitness account, as silly as it is in its reinvention of what happened.

This is still a weak argument, because the alternatives are not so improbable we can fully rule them out. Maybe Ptolemy didn’t remember this at all, but read Aristobulus, and decided to embellish it into his amazing narrative instead. Unlike the Gospels with respect to each other we have no evidence Ptolemy used Aristobulus as a source though. So it’s an uncertainty. And this argument can’t be used to prove Ptolemy and Aristobulus were eyewitnesses; we already have established that from an abundance of other evidence. So we could not do with this evidence what the McGrews want to do; nor would it generate a particularly strong argument even if we could. But what we can do with this argument at least approaches logical validity in a way none of the McGrews’ examples do.

That having been said, do you think there is a logically valid hypothetical version of this argument? What would you need to see to be convinced? I would think I would need to be shown that the two sources citing each other was unlikely and that any text with a supposed undesigned coincidence would need to see that coincidence be best explained not by even chance confluence or literary necessity.