First the birth narratives. In Mark there is no birth narrative. Jesus higher metaphysical standing begins when He is chosen at his baptism. This is a story that Jews would have known well. The Old Testament is replete with God adopting servants - sometimes even called sons - during a communicative moment in their lives. Mark did not believe Jesus status differed greatly from Gods chosen sons of the past; David, Elijah, Moses, Elisha etc. In fact, in writing for a Jewish audience, he thought it important to strongly align Jesus with the prophets of old. Marks Christology is thoroughly earthly and - when judged against later alterations - mundane. However, this aspect of Mark is of paramount importance; the earliest Evangelist, the one least removed from Jesus life, did not know what Christians now know. It is simply absurd to believe that, of all the things Mark knew about Jesus and with all the time he took to compose and disseminate his gospel, Mark just didnt know that Jesus birth was a once-in-an- eternity miraculous event. While Mark certainly plays up the figure of Jesus, he was not willing to go that far. When Mark is taken by itself--a gospel lacking a birth narrative and a resurrection narrative (the last twelve verses are almost universally agreed to be later additions), fraught with a persistent messianic secret in which no Apostle is able to completely understand Jesus status, and Jesus constant, oblique, third person references to a figure called the son of man (almost assuredly a reference to Daniel 7:13 )--no interpretation even remotely resembling Christianity can be culled from it. Instead Mark fits squarely into well-known traditional Jewish stories of chosen prophets instructing the Jews as to Gods will. For Matthew and Luke this Jewish Jesus would not do. Rather than taking a modern viewpoint that the earlier source should be trusted (that is, if you care about historical accuracy which, as Ive said, they clearly did not), Matthew and Luke (written c. 80-90) decide to insert important facts into Marks general narrative that raise the status of Jesus to a figure whose scope extends beyond Judaism. With this in mind, doctoring what he said was not as important as doctoring who he was. Thus, they go back to his birth and tell incompatible, incredible, and clearly manufactured stories of Jesus miraculous birth to a virgin. In doing so they both establish Jesus higher ontological status than the prophets of old, and - by bending over backwards to place Jesus in Bethleham - they make sure that Jesus satisfies the prophecy that the Messiah was to come from the city of David. Looking at the differences between the Synoptics, we are also able to see the solution to the oft-mentioned problem of Jesus missing years. Other than Lukes small story of a twelve-year-old Jesus teaching in the Temple, we have no other (canonical) stories of Jesus between birth and baptism. By comparing Mark with Matthew and Luke, the obvious answer presents itself; such stories didnt exist because no one cared about Jesus until he established a ministry. Jesus missing years are no more bothersome than the missing years of the majority of Hebrew prophets. But John would change everything and one- up all who came before him. Jesus wasnt merely chosen, adopted or created from a miraculous set of circumstances. No, Jesus is something else all together. Feeling it wasnt good enough to go back the the beginning of His ministry or the beginning of His life, John decides to go back to the beginning of time (John 1:1 In the beginning was the word...) to establish the nature of Jesus. Thus, Jesus has been raised to the ultimate heights; dizzying heights that would have confused and shocked Mark. Likewise, the death of Jesus changes dramatically throughout the Gospels. The changes (of which there are many more than these) can be summed up in the three different accounts of the last words of Jesus: Mark 15:34 and Matthew 27:46 My god, my god, why have you forsaken me. Luke 23:46 Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. John 19:30 It is finished. The development of Christianity is encapsulated in the move from the utterance of pain, ignorance, nonacceptance, and suffering seen in Mark and Matthew to the statement of acceptance, foreknowledge, and peace that is seen in John. These are incompatible interpretations of Jesus. The character in the gospels may have the same name but it is not the same man hanging on the cross. The Gospels are guides to belief written by believers. This is a horribly unreliable way to learn accurate information. When you already believe The Truth, distortions that you consciously engage in - that you see as promoting The Truth - are not seen as lies, but rather, as efficacious ways of getting The Truth to the hearts of readers. We dont know why the evangelists believed as they did, but in the gospels they dont give us the reasons they believe, they give us reasons to believe; an entirely different matter. But we do KNOW they invented things. We KNOW that the theological conception of Jesus changed as the believers grew more distant from his life. What Christians believe most fervently (i.e. Jesus being God, appearing after he died, dying for the sins of the world) are concepts that were developed later. They are concepts that did not exist in the earliest generations of Christian belief. They certainly did not exist when Jesus was alive. Early Christians invented myths to overcome the stumbling-block (1 Cor. 1:23) of the cross. Paul knew that, for the Jews and Gentile Greeks, the execution of Jesus represented a major problem. The king of the jews was not supposed to be an executed lowly peasant. The savior of mankind was not a common criminal. Over time, theological concepts developed that explained this hang-up. Thus, an executed traitor was turned into a victorious Messiah.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 14:46:46 +0000
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