I was listening to HwaP by Tool recently! Maynard does something very similar in that song to a magician revealing his tricks! He’s peeling back the layers of his own mythology! You’re reading Mark like Maynard would! Imagine being a fan of Jesus, and then “meeting” him in your hallucinations only for him to tell you, “all you know about me’s what I’ve sold you, dumb f*ck!” 🤣🤣🤣

Your general conclusion is correct; and indeed the fantastical events are not the only evidence Mark is fiction. There are converging lines of evidence (I mentioned anachronisms already, but there are other signals, including format, mimesis, and discourse style, which I discuss in OHJ, Ch. 10.4).

There are diminishing returns, though. Once the hypothesis of fiction is already confirmed to a high probability, adding more fiction to it has less and less significance. For example, in terms of likelihood multipliers, 99.99% is ten times more than 99.9%, but in practice we do not regard this difference to significant. The argument was already over when you hit 99.

I discuss this some in OHJ: The Covington Review (Part 3)

I think the God’s Not Dead movie is a good analog for the Gospel of Mark. It’s a story of Josh Wheaton, a college student who defends his faith in a philosophy class against the atheist Professor Radisson. It was popular amongst the Christian community when it came out and was even shown in Christian churches across the world. The issue with this is that Josh Wheaton and Professor Radisson don’t exist. The footage shown in these churches is a literary creation of Pure Flix Entertainment. Josh and his professor are actors. The events portrayed in the film never happened. Yet if you were to ask these Christians that played the film in their churches if the movie God’s Not Dead is “true”, they would say “Of course it is!”. To them, the point of the film is to convey modern Christian persecution in the form of a narrative, not as a historical record of the college experiences of Josh Wheaton. Wheaton is just a character used in a story they want to tell. If we want to judge Mark on the merits of his story we first have to understand what his intent is. It’s a difficult thing to do because we don’t know who he was, when he wrote, or who he wrote to.

Mark is definitely an artist, very well educated, and a master of the craft. Especially for choosing to compose in a popular idiom (like Mark Twain did).

Normally, an author would boast of this (and thus their name would be all over it), but that isn’t always the case (the lives of Aesop are unnamed; as are many other ancient masterworks, so not everyone was inclined to market themselves over their art).

I believe Mark is sincere (he is not just pulling a FAFO, as Walsh might be taken to suggest, but really believes what he is selling), which means he takes seriously its entire central message (of humility, the least shall be first, etc., modeled by the woman forever remembered but never named, which may even be a version of the author’s signature—which does not mean the author was a woman, but that they symbolized themself with one, another act of humility).

As to how much of his ingenuity would be “visible” to the masses: contrary to many scholars, I think very little. It was the elite who were trained to appreciate this; and only exceptional members of the illiterate public could spot it on their own (this is why all religions trend toward literalism instead of allegorism).

Mark’s additional layer of genius is composing a tale that hits both markets well. His text can be sold as literal to an incomprehending public and still convey its core messages; while Mark would expect elite movement leaders to teach from the text and thus illumine the public that way, as Mark even illustrates by example.

Which would have a psychological effect (triggering an affective fallacy): as these clever devices are made clear to the public, they would feel the exhilaration of discovery and genius, mistake it for the holy spirit, and be more inclined to believe God is behind this movement.

On the other hand, it seems like at the time all these allegories and borrowings should be pretty easy to catch by the public? We may struggle with it 2000 years later, but wouldn’t the Moses analogies, for example, be obvious for contemporary Jews?

I explicitly agree. That’s why I said that I don’t count those things.

I outright said more than once that people saying crazy things is not fantastical (hence I score nothing in Mark 13, because it is just a speech that “consists of ridiculous and ahistorical apocalyptic teachings, but such beliefs were common and thus, though still obviously mythical here, nevertheless not fantastical”).

None of my scored items consists of someone merely saying or believing something crazy. They all consist of things that are simply extremely improbable physically or psychologically. For example, even Donald Trump and Deepak Chopra have never and will never walk up to someone who knows nothing about them and in two sentences convince them to abandon their property, jobs, and families to follow them on a religious mission. Even crazy people need more backgrounding and convincing than that. Hence, that is fantastical.

As for “being famous,” Jesus does not become famous for saying fantastical things. I only scored “Jesus somehow becomes famous for just this one event across the entire region of Galilee (1:27–28), even though Jewish exorcisms were common side-shows of the day” (no analogy here to Trump or Chopra, neither of whom became instantly famous for a single act that was commonly performed in their culture by hundreds of other people—much less without the existence of telemedia).

(Of course, Jesus warns of the fall of Jerusalem just as Jeremiah warned of the fall of Jerusalem, and it was important in both cases that the people did not actually understand. God warned them, so He is off the hook. Its not great logic, but it seems to be consistently used.)

Um. I actually already mention that. That’s why I give two final counts. Please look at my section on Chapter 16 above.

But if you are really interested in this, you should know there are actually, in fact, five different versions of Mark, including one that has Jesus fly into outer space with an army of angels, and another in which he gives a short soliloquy about Satan. I thoroughly document and discuss them and all the pertinent scholarship in a chapter in Hitler Homer Bible Christ.