At 09:14 AM 12/10/2008, Jeffrey B. Gibson wrote:
>I'm thinking of surveying scholars whose production of articles and
>books is enviable and whose research and knowledge of the filed is
>prodigious, to find out how they "do it".
>
>What sort of questions about reading and writing habits etc. etc. do
>list members think I should ask?
>
>What sort of habits are yours?
>
>Jeffrey

Jeffrey,
I'd ask'em who was their role model for writing and publishing? I suspect
that the influence of one's grad school teachers is extremely influential.
     * Ask about how obsessive (or not) their grad faculty was in getting
every last detail right
     * Ask how their mentors decided when something was "ready" to publish
     * When they heard a voice saying "Its ready," whose voice was it?
(voice may be internal or external)
     * Find out whether they set aside large blocks of time for writing, so
that they were able to gain some momentum, or whether they were able to
"write on the run."
     * Find out if they focused on one writing project at a time, or if they
had a bunch of projects going all the time.
     * Find out if they decided in advance on the scope of a particular
writing project: what the objective was, how well-defined the project was
at the beginning, or whether they just went with the flow as the subject
and their interest developed
     * Find out if they rushed to publish the juicy stuff first, and then
let the details languish, or whether they'd lay out the details first, and
then spice it up with some juicy stuff for flavoring.
I've struggled with these questions for my whole career. If you took all
the stuff I've ever written on XTalk, there'd be enough material for
several books. (I didn't say it was GOOD material!) But did I ever write
one? Not since 1996, when I first joined.

Maybe when I retire...

Bob Schacht
University of Hawaii


>--
>Jeffrey B. Gibson, D.Phil. (Oxon)
>1500 W. Pratt Blvd.
>Chicago, Illinois
>e-mail jgibson000@...
>
>
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Jeffrey, I don't know about those who are so productive as you note, but I see
that I've gotten more productive as I grow older because I am better at
filtering out the unnecessary from the necessary as I do research.
 
Some of the scholars whom you would be interested in interviewing would perhaps
have advice on how to filter out the unnecessary from the necessary as they
pursue their research.
 
Again, in my case, I usually already know the answer before I undertake the
research, so I know what's not profitable to follow up. Of course, if I come
across a powerful anomaly, I revise and head off on the changed course.
 
Some scholars are just a whole lot better at this than I am -- and perhaps Bruce
offered some of the reasons.
 
Jeffery Hodges


--- On Wed, 12/10/08, Jeffrey B. Gibson <jgibson000@...> wrote:

From: Jeffrey B. Gibson <jgibson000@...>
Subject: [XTalk] OT "How they do it"
To: "Crosstalk2" <crosstalk2@yahoogroups.com>
Date: Wednesday, December 10, 2008, 1:14 PM

I'm thinking of surveying scholars whose production of articles and
books is enviable and whose research and knowledge of the filed is
prodigious, to find out how they "do it".

What sort of questions about reading and writing habits etc. etc. do
list members think I should ask?

What sort of habits are yours?

Jeffrey

--
Jeffrey B. Gibson, D.Phil. (Oxon)
1500 W. Pratt Blvd.
Chicago, Illinois
e-mail jgibson000@...


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Yahoo! Groups Links





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

To: Crosstalk
Cc: WSW
In Response To: Jeffery Hodges
On: How To Do It
From: Bruce

JEFFERY: . . . I see that I've gotten more productive as I grow older
because I am better at filtering out the unnecessary from the necessary as I
do research.

BRUCE: Somewhere in here, I think, may be the root of the whole business.
Some people have a knack for seeing the right place to begin work on a
problem, or on sensing when a much worked-on problem is ready to "go;" they
are adept at snaking the kinglog out of the jam. Oppenheimer had a positive
genius for this sort of thing; in my field, Sinology, George Kennedy of Yale
was conspicuous for it. As far as my experience or my reading go, that is a
gift which few have; it can to some extent be developed. The other key is
good old Germanic thoroughness; seeing the work through to the end, without
getting distracted by the byways, and then getting it out the door in 14
pages or less. This skill is a little more common than the first; it too
(including the much-neglected concision aspect) is developable up to a
point, and worth cultivating up to that point.

The rub is that very few people have both skills; they might even be said to
imply opposite temperaments. That is why a good research team (a concept
almost unknown in the humanities, but fertile where it *is* known) usually
includes a good finder as well as a good completer. Or a good finder and
fourteen good completers. Consider Edison, or Rutherford, or Pauling. That
is how people do it, who care about doing it consistently.

Jeffrey G's survey reminds me a little of the one undertaken a while back
among mathematicians, to discover the roots of mathematical creativity.
Hadamard has a little book on the results (The Psychology of Invention in
the Mathematical Field); worth reading for anyone who cares about these
things. See also Beveridge, The Art of Scientific Investigation (also much
reprinted). This literature is not much known among humanists. And sure
enough, the research productivity of humanists (as against their logorrhea,
which is after all not quite the same thing) is notably low. Which may be
why, in the current worldwide budget narrows, physical science vacancies are
being replaced, at our so-called "research universities," while humanities
vacancies, by and large, are not. Administrations are suddenly getting
serious about research. Who would have thought it?

Too late to change the condition of the much-bewailed but little-regarded
humanities; the crunch is now and the tab is being paid now. But wouldn't it
have been auspicious if someone had raised these questions about a
generation ago?

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

JEFFERY: . . . I see that I've gotten more productive as I grow older
because I am better at filtering out the unnecessary from the necessary as I
do research.

BRUCE: Somewhere in here, I think, may be the root of the whole business.
Some people have a knack for seeing the right place to begin work on a
problem, or on sensing when a much worked-on problem is ready to "go;" they
are adept at snaking the kinglog out of the jam.
 
Addendum from Jeffery Hodges: I think that a couple of things help with that
knack: (1) breadth of vision that comes from wide-ranging curiosity and (2)
concentration upon narrowly focused questions that can broaden out into
broad-ranging solutions.
 
Like Prufrock, we should avoid the overwhelming question.
 
Jeffery Hodges

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Reply to : Jeffrey Gibson (et al)
>
> I'm thinking of surveying scholars whose production of articles and
> books is enviable and whose research and knowledge of the filed is
> prodigious, to find out how they "do it".
>
> What sort of questions about reading and writing habits etc. etc. do
> list members think I should ask?
>
> What sort of habits are yours?
>
> Jeffrey
>
>
Can I ask a supplementary question, which (as a non-scholar) I have
often wondered : How on Earth do you fill in all those references ?  For
example, when Darrell Bock, in Jesus According to Scripture, refers to a
specific page of a specific edition of Jesus and the Gospels by Craig
Blomberg in support of the incipient trinitarianism in the story of
Jesus' Baptism, how does he know where to find that reference ?  If I
look at the books on my shelf, I can't even remember reading some of them.

--
Richard Mallett
Eaton Bray, Dunstable
South Beds. UK

To: Crosstalk
Cc: GPG
On: Mark (9)
From: Bruce

Sunset and evening rain, and another Mark reflection.

RIKK: I appreciated her [Adela's] seeing Isa 53 behind Jesus' passion
predictions, but in the pages devoted to the topic was surprised to find
only a couple of very general sentences, namely, "Jesus gave his life for
many," as to what it all meant for Mark.

BRUCE: The theory of Vicarious Atonement is only one of many possible ways
in which the death of Jesus might have been construed by Jesus's followers.
Among them are:

(a) Nothing special. Jesus's death is the end of the Messianic movement.
     Not too clear what the ethical implications are, hence very soon:
(b) Ascension. Jesus is in Heaven, and will return to judge the world.
     If we do right, we will be saved, otherwise not
(b) Resurrection. Jesus was raised from the dead, we shall be also.
     If we do right, otherwise not
(c) Atonement. Jesus atoned for our sins by his death
     So no right-doing is needed; only belief in Jesus
(d) Election. Those to be saved have been preselected by God
     Good luck in the Heavenly Lottery.

All these (repeat: all these) figure in Mark, I would say at different
successive strata of Mark, but one way or another, there they are. And they
conflict terribly with each other. Paul, for instance, seems to get tangled
up in the implications of (b) and (c), which together generate the dilemma
of Lawfulness.

So, in Rikk's terms, it meant *a lot of things* to Mark, and since Adela is
not prepared to accept the idea of a stratified text (save in Mk 14-16;
nobody raised the question of why she does not acknowledge a stratification
of the whole text, since her commentary ad locc gives ample countenance to
it), she is stuck with finding one theory for Mark. This she cannot do, nor
can anyone else, without simply ignoring the other five or six theories that
also turn up unmistakably in Mark. So I would rephrase the objection in
terms, not of failure to sufficiently emphasize the One Markan Christology,
as of reluctance to concede that Mark has many Christologies, and that we
need to account for that in terms of the composition history of that text.

RIKK: There was no comment on how this fulfills Scripture (which is what
she'd earlier said of Mark), nor why it should come here in the gospel (we
were promised that structural issues would be addressed throughout the
commentary).

BRUCE: Adela would probably say that the Three Passion Predictions are the
centerpoint of Mark, and that the Passion itself (namely, her version of the
core text) is the foreseen end. But it turns out that there are at least
three structurally intentional centerpoints in Mark.

1. Davidic Messiah text. The centerpoint is Peter's recognition of Jesus as
the Messiah.
2. Ascension Doctrine. The centerpoint is Peter and company's vision of
Jesus in Heaven, along with Moses and Elijah, both of whom were thought at
the time to have gone straight to Heaven at their deaths, and not to have
suffered the usual bodily corruption in the interim. There is no
Resurrection scenario here.
3. Resurrection Doctrine. The centerpoint is the Three Predictions, above.
It is at this level that the Burial and Tomb scenes were added to Adela's
core Passion narrative. She has correctly identified them as later
appendages, but so far has declined to recognize the implications of them as
later additions, and thus of the doctrine they exemplify as a later
theoretical development within early Christianity.

It's just a little more complicated than this; see page three of the
Accretional Mark session handout for a diagram of the intended structure of
each of the first three layers in Mark. I think that handout can still be
downloaded from

http://www.umass.edu/wsp/biblica/quest/index.html

RIKK: Similarly, given her intention to read Mark from a first century
perspective, I was surprised there was not even a raised eyebrow at Mark's
Jesus' revamping of Israel's foundational meal by changing the menu and
making himself its centre. Surely that must rank as one of the most
astonishing events of all time: what first century Jew would even dream of
doing such a thing, let alone imagine that another Jew would even
consider doing so?

BRUCE: The record shows that it was in fact done, hence any retrospective
astonishment may not be well grounded. And it is not clear, at least to me,
that the first Lord's Supper was meant as a structural replacement for the
Jewish Passover. It may well have been in early competition with it. The
early Christians fasted, but not on the same days as the Jews (or the
followers of John), etc etc.

As for Jesus making himself the center of that ritual, let's keep a sense of
proportion. What chiefly riled the Jews, if Klausner's summary may be relied
on, was (1) Jesus's interference with the Law of Moses, (2) his misleading
the people by magic tricks, and (3) the claim of his followers that he was
divine, and had been raised from the dead. The rabbis don't seem to spend a
lot of anger time over shifts in the symbolic meals as such. These Rabbinic
controversy points seem to match pretty well with what Mark (at one layer or
another) spends a lot of time expounding, or in some cases rebutting. That
is, there are grounds for believing that the Rabbinic picture of Jesus was
not only pretty observant, and rather reasonably prioritized, but that it
was observant of things which we can now say were relatively early in the
development of the movement. That is where I get interested in it. Can we
pinpoint, in terms of the stages of early Christian evolution which are
sandwiched together in Mark, the point at which these objections were
crystallized? I would say, Yes we can. In my terms, it is somewhere between
Layers 3 and 4 of the Markan layer cake. That would put it right about the
time of the early Paul (not so much the late Paul, by which time things had
moved on a little bit), and we all know how well the early Paul got along
with the local Jewish communities he encountered in his travels. Don't we?

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

To: Crosstalk
In Response To: Richard Mallett
On: How They Do It
From: Bruce

RICHARD: How on Earth do you fill in all those references?  For example,
when Darrell Bock, in Jesus According to Scripture, refers to a specific
page of a specific edition of Jesus and the Gospels by Craig
Blomberg in support of the incipient trinitarianism in the story of Jesus'
Baptism, how does he know where to find that reference?

BRUCE: NT books often don't have subject indexes (as distinct from Authors
Quoted and the Index Locorum), or when they do, they are not very complete.
So something else is indeed needed. As far as I know, people do it different
ways. Some are: (1) You have the book on your shelf, and you reach out and
grab it. It helps a lot if you have made your own select subject index on
the endpaper, at the time you first read the book. (2) Photographic memory.
The catalogue of Manchu language books in the Tôyô Bunko Library (Tôkyô) was
compiled, not on site, but in Seattle, and in part (as I understand) from
the memory of Okada Hidehiro. Remarkable guy. But even the least of us can
sometimes recall, Well, it was on the upper left corner of an opening toward
the front of that medium-sized book with the burgundy cover. This cuts down
the back-search time considerably. Use what memory you have. (3) My teacher
had the habit of recording locations of reviews of a book on the TP of his
copy of that book. Of course, this involves owning the book; it doesn't work
if you are dependent on some library located outside your house. (4) Some
people keep copies of articles, or sections of books, in 3-ring binders
labeled and arranged by subject for future reference. With stick-on notes
protruding above the top margin at points especially likely to be required
later. (5) The classic method is cards, traditionally 5x8 rather than 3x5,
with one quote plus source per card, and the topic as a heading at the top.
They teach this in history methods courses, or used to. It works best when
you are researching one very particular subject at a time. If two at a time,
you keep two little files of cards, and so on. (6) As a more compact version
of this, I have found that a large Rolodex has its merits.

Whatever works. What *doesn't* work very well is trying to think, eighteen
months or years later, Now where did I read that? And having no visual or
lexical clue to help you.

As to what books to consult in the first place, there are many very good
guides to the NT literature, or to certain segments of it. One general
source worth mentioning is New Testament Abstracts, very complete (it
includes both journal articles and books). It is put out by the Weston
Jesuit School of Theology. I should suppose that the real libraries can be
distinguished from the others by the fact that the former subscribe to it.
There is now, I understand, an online version, produced in collaboration
with ATLA, and available to libraries through EBSCO.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

To: WSW
Cc: CGC, Crosstalk
Forwarding: Book Recommendation (Law and Religion in China)
From: Bruce

I have received, by several intermediate steps, a note from James Robson
describing a forthcoming book of interest to this list as well. I venture to
repeat the substance of it here, for those who, or whose libraries, can
still afford a book published by Routledge.

------FORWARDED DESCRIPTION------

Dear Colleagues,

I would like to draw your attention to a new publication by Paul R. Katz
entitled Divine Justice -- Religion and the Development of Chinese Legal
Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2009) [In press].

The primary goal of this book is to consider the ways in which religious
beliefs and practices have contributed to the formation of Chinese legal
culture. It does so by describing two forms of overlap between religion and
the law: the ideology of justice and the performance of judicial rituals.
The former extends to the ways in which the gods control all human affairs
in this life and the next in order to ensure the attainment of justice.
Because this ideal is rarely realized in earthly courts, many people place
their faith in underworld deities who have the power to pass judgment on
both the living and the dead. Such conceptions of the afterlife, which have
been shaped by both indigenous religions like Taoism and the impact of world
religions like Buddhism, vary significantly from those of the Middle East
and Europe, which tend to place less emphasis on the legal nature of
underworld procedures and punishments.

The second form of overlap between religion and the law may be found in the
realm of practice, and involves instances when men and women perform
judicial rituals like oaths, chicken-beheadings, and underworld indictments
in order to enhance the legitimacy of their positions, deal with cases of
perceived injustice, and resolve disputes. These rites coexist with other
forms of legal practice, including private mediation and the courts,
comprising a wide-ranging spectrum of practices that I refer to as the
judicial continuum.

Individuals ranging from high-ranking officials to commoners have performed
judicial rituals for centuries. Such rites have also shaped the legal
histories of overseas Chinese in colonies like Batavia, the Straits
Settlements, and Hong Kong, as well as those who immigrated to countries
like Australia and the United States. In Taiwan, a high-tech democracy with
a vibrant civil society, judicial rituals remain an integral component of
legal practice, but in China such rites remain largely underground. Inasmuch
as the effective functioning of any legal system requires a certain degree
of entirety, the extent to which the Chinese government proves willing to
tolerate such rites may influence the degree to which people may feel
confident in their ability to obtain true justice.

------COMMENT------

It will be obvious, I suppose, that the general subject is of importance in
other parts of the world also also, wherever secular and sacred traditions
of judgement overlap or impinge, or where (as in early Christianity) two
sacred systems of judgement collide, or where (as in Melanesia) an overlaid
and a native tradition of law compete.

Bruce

Bruce Brooks wrote:

> .......
> nobody raised the question of why she does not acknowledge a stratification
> of the whole text, since her commentary ad locc gives ample countenance to
> it), she is stuck with finding one theory for Mark. This she cannot do, nor
> can anyone else, without simply ignoring the other five or six theories that
> also turn up unmistakably in Mark.

Bruce,

Surely there is a fundamental error in your reasoning here.

Inconsistencies in a document can arise in a whole variety of ways including
the following, occurring either separately or in combination:

1. The document has undergone successive 'updates' or 'editions'.
2. The extant text has been polluted by a few significant interpolations.
3. The author has made use of two or more sources and not attempted to
smooth out the apparent contradictions.

You appear to assert that only the first of these ways can provide a tenable
explanation of Markan Christology. I suggest that the third way produces a
simpler explanation. For example, Jesus as Messiah derives ultimately from
Jesus, mediated via oral tradition and/or Mark's contact with Paul (Phm 24);
Jesus as Son of Man derives from the logia (which has multiple references to
the title); Jesus as Son of God derives from Paul.

Ron Price

Derbyshire, UK

Web site: http://homepage.virgin.net/ron.price/index.htm

To: Crosstalk
Cc: GPG
In Response To: Ron Price
On: Mark (9)
From: Bruce

Ron feels that I am not giving enough room to non-accretional possibilities
for Mark. In particular:

RON: Inconsistencies in a document can arise in a whole variety of ways
including the following, occurring either separately or in combination:

1. The document has undergone successive 'updates' or 'editions'.
2. The extant text has been polluted by a few significant interpolations.
3. The author has made use of two or more sources and not attempted to
smooth out the apparent contradictions.

BRUCE: Right. But given the possibilities, how do we distinguish between
them? In principle, there are two options here, not three. #1 (a layer
theory; a set of several interpolations) and #2 (a few interpolations) are
both interpolation theories. They hold that the original text has had later
material, whether a lot or a little, inserted into it. Sometimes that
process leaves traces, most commonly a segment which interrupts the
surrounding material, and which, when removed, renders the surrounding
material consecutive. Sometimes it is more subtly done, and no such obvious
traces exist, which makes this situation harder to detect. #3 is an integral
text which has been compiled from discordant material, but which, as a text,
is consistent. This is the other option. In this option, no "interpolation
scenarios" should occur, and the only sign of internal contradiction is
simply the contradictory content itself.

RON: You appear to assert that only the first of these ways can provide a
tenable explanation of Markan Christology.

BRUCE: Not exactly. I claim that only an interpolation scenario will explain
the substantive discordances of Mark and also account for the textual
interruptions that are found in Mark.

RON: I suggest that the third way produces a simpler explanation. For
example, Jesus as Messiah derives ultimately from Jesus, mediated via oral
tradition and/or Mark's contact with Paul (Phm 24); Jesus as Son of Man
derives from the logia (which has multiple references to the title); Jesus
as Son of God derives from Paul.

BRUCE: This theory addresses derivation; it does not of itself distinguish
mode of combination. It may be simpler (though that might also be
challenged), but is it more adequate? To put it in specific and testable
form: Is the Paul material (if we posit such material for purposes of
argument) simply present in the Markan mixture? In that case we have option
#3. Or has it been at least in part interpolated into a previously simpler
and more consistent Mark? In that case, we have the interpolation scenario,
#1-2. That is the question, and it can be solved not by speculation, but by
inspection.

I proceed to the inspection.

INSPECTION 1: Son of God

Is the Son of God material at any point interpolated into Mark? Yes, it is.
The prime example is Mk 1:23-28, which interrupt the Preaching at Capernaum.
The insertion and its context look like this:

22    And they were astonished at his teaching . . .
23        And immediately there was in their synagogue a man . . .
24        And he cried out . . . the Holy One of God
25        But Jesus rebuked him . . .
26        And the unclean spirit . . .
27        And they were all amazed . . .
28        And immediately his fame spread everywhere
29    And immediately he left the synagogue

44    [Healing of the Leper]
45    . . . and to spread the news, so that Jesus could no longer . . .

The signs of interpolation are three: (1) the audience twice acclaims Jesus,
once after his preaching, and very similarly again after the exorcism; that
is to say, the Capernaum Synagogue segment actually ends twice, which is
once more than par for a narrative segment; (2) the preaching episode is
perfectly consistent without the exorcism passage; and (3) the exorcism
passage conflicts with 1:45 as to the moment when Jesus's fame became
generally known. If we accept 1:28, then 1:45 is superfluous and indeed
suspect. If we accept 1:45, then 1:28 is ahead of schedule and thus suspect.
1:28 itself is suspect since it seems to imply an interlude of time, say at
least 15 minutes, for Jesus's fame to travel all over Galilee, but the
following text asserts instead an instantaneous beginning of the next
segment, namely the Healing at Peter's Mother-in-Law's House. The two
immediately following events are thus in conflict with each other. In all
these conflicts, one member is found in the Exorcism section. Then it is
this segment where the interference with the surrounding narrative (at three
different points) is coming from. Its removal solves at one stroke all three
problems.

Then this particular Son of God (= Holy One of God) passage is interpolated,
and the remaining ones in the Son of God set become also suspect as
interpolations.

INSPECTION 2: Son of Man
Another addition to an early scene, in this case a Mk 2 healing:

5a     And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic
5b        My son, your sins are forgiven
6          Now some of the scribes . . .
7          Why does this man speak thus? It is blasphemy
8          And immediately Jesus, perceiving in his spirit
9          Which is easier, to say to the paralytic . . .
10        But that you may know that the Son of Man . . .
11    I say to you, Rise, take up your pallet and go home.
12    And he rose, immediately took up the pallet, . . .

Here again, the passage without the Son of Man "Forgiveness" segment reads
perfectly consecutively. Notice the duplication of the introduction to
Jesus's word to the paralytic, which is similar to the repeated conclusions
(1:22 "they were astonished," 1:27 "they were all amazed") in the above
passage.  This duplication at the edges is a very common trait of
interpolations; including a couple in Homer.

If this passage is an interpolation, then the thematically linked Son of Man
passages become suspect as a group.

Mark is a very choppy text, and it is not difficult to insert a new module
in between two previously adjacent modules without producing a conspicuously
more choppy arrangement. There are only a handful of cases where a Markan
passage is literally interruptive. But those few are surely important
indications of how the text came to be the way it is. I submit that they
help us decide between the integral text model based on already inconsistent
materials (Ron's suggestion) and the integral text model which has
subsequently undergone literarily and substantively inconsistent
interpolations (mine). For the reasons spelled out above, I think mine
provides better for the artifacts of insertion which we can actually observe
in the text.

Respectfully resuggested,

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

To: Crosstalk
On: Mark (10)
From: Bruce

Friday, and the last of this series of comments on Rikk Watts' comments, for
the authoritative version of which, again thanks.

RIKK: overall then, lots of great info, background etc. and I DO mean that,
but somehow the sense of Mark's narrative and what he thought about Jesus .
. .

BRUCE: Plural

RIKK: . . . got a bit lost. BUT an enormous amount of work, really, and for
that honor where honor was due.

BRUCE: Amen

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Bruce Brooks wrote:

> ..... To put it in specific and testable
> form: Is the Paul material (if we posit such material for purposes of
> argument) simply present in the Markan mixture? In that case we have option
> #3. Or has it been at least in part interpolated into a previously simpler
> and more consistent Mark? In that case, we have the interpolation scenario,
> #1-2.

Bruce,

This is a fair presentation of our different ways of assessing the Markan
mixture.

You go on to present your arguments for Mk 1:23-28 and Mk 2:5b-10 as
interpolations. These are based in large part on your belief that repetition
is a sign of interpolation. Well it can be. But not always. The problem here
is that Mark is *full* of repetitions. They are to be found all over the
place. They include an inordinate fondness for EUQUS, a threefold passion
prediction, two cases of healing a blind man, and two cases of miraculous
feeding of multitudes. It seems clear to me that to the author of Mark's
gospel, repetitions were a useful tool for emphasis rather than an
embarrassment.

In any case I would argue that the inconsistencies are too minor; the
removal of the two supposed interpolations, although leaving a plausible
text in the immediate context, does not *improve* the continuity; a
plausible motivation for the interpolations was not identified.

Moreover as I tried to show in a previous communication (not XTalk), Mark's
gospel has a fairly detailed and clear structure with each section allocated
a particular number of pages. If this 40-page codex model correctly
represents the archetype, as I am confident it does because the match
between sections and pages would otherwise involve an extraordinary
coincidence, it completely rules out interpolations of the size you are
proposing.

Ron Price

Derbyshire, UK

Web site: http://homepage.virgin.net/ron.price/index.htm

To: Crosstalk
In Response To: Ron Price
On: Structure of Mark
From: Bruce

PROLEGOMENA

As will appear, Ron and I are both in the NT market with a theory of the
structure of Mark. There we are  competing with a Major Brand, the integral
theory of Mark, according to which, as I gather, gMk was written at one
time, by one person. My case is made from the seeming theological diversity
of Mark, with which evidences of interpolation (structural inconcinnity)
happen to coincide, suggesting the successive addition of later material,
which in a few cases actually interrupts the previous text.

Adela Yarbro Collins, in her Mark commentary, actually applies evidences of
the kind I recognize to produce a stratified picture of part of Mk 14-16.
That was the reason for my particular interest in her work. I argue only
that she should recognize that the same signs apply throughout the Gospel,
and that they lead, not to a Pre-Markan Passion Narrative (as she
concludes), but more generally to a Pre-Markan Narrative. Which, given the
signs of stylistic similarity, are more plausibly called an Early Markan
Layer.

Ron, for his part (as veterans of the Synoptic list may remember),
recognizes exactly two interpolations: the related insertions 14:28 and
16:7. Again, I agree, but again I point out that similar structures also
exist outside the zone of Mk 14-16.

Insofar as Ron and Adela follow out the interpolation structures which they
recognize (Adela especially; the point of Ron's 14:18 and 16:7 is merely to
add to the power of Jesus by having him predict what was undoubtedly the
narrative intention of the Tomb narrative), they help to reduce the
notorious complexity of:

(1) Markan form (see Larsen 2004, "For decades now, Markan scholarship has
struggled to uncover the structure of Mark's gospel")

(2) Markan ideas of Jesus (see Naluparayil 2000 ("How does Mark present
Jesus in his Gospel? Who is the person named Jesus according to the Markan
presentation? A variety of answers have been given to these questions in the
course of Markan research, each accenting a particular aspect of Mark's
presentation of Jesus. The Markan portrayal of Jesus has been the seedbed
for several Christological theories"). That is surely a useful, if still
incomplete, result.

To have reduced even part of this complexity is major progress. My
suggestion is that these beginnings, if carried out thoroughly (we need a
word in English corresponding to durchführen, not to mention durchgreifen),
will end up resolving *all* of the seeming complexity in a layer structure
which has a very intelligible motive: to keep the text of Mark current with
developing ideas of Jesus.

That said, here are some specific replies to Ron:

SPECIFICS

RON: You go on to present your arguments for Mk 1:23-28 and Mk 2:5b-10 as
interpolations. These are based in large part on your belief that repetition
is a sign of interpolation.

BRUCE: No. Repetition at the edges is a not uncommon feature of interpolated
segments (also in Homer; see my short paper at
http://www.umass.edu/wsp/biblica/quest/index.html), but I wouldn't make it
part of the diagnostic. The diagnostic, as I thought I had said, is this:
(1) conflicting content, either locally or elsewhere) and (2) manifest
insertion, curable by removal. It is not proper argument to misdescribe a
procedure, and then to refute the misdescription. My argument for Mk 1:23-28
and 2:5b-10 is of the same kind as the one Ron accepts for Mk 14:28 and
16:7.

RON: Well it can be. But not always. The problem here is that Mark is *full*
of repetitions. They are to be found all over the place. They include an
inordinate fondness for EUQUS, a threefold passion prediction, two cases of
healing a blind man, and two cases of miraculous feeding of multitudes. It
seems clear to me that to the author of Mark's gospel, repetitions were a
useful tool for emphasis rather than an embarrassment.

BRUCE: See? Give Ron the word "repetition" and he brings in instances of
word-fondness, structural patterning, and whatnot, to show that these are
characteristic of "Mark." So they are. But that is not the kind of
repetition I mentioned as typical of interpolations. See again my previous
note.

And see also the text of Mark, noticing especially the two statements of
wide knowledge of Jesus's powers, one at the end of the interpolated
passage, and one at the end of the Healing of the Leper. No case of EUQUS
refutes another EUQUS: that is not the nature of the word. The more EUQUS,
the merrier. But these two *lines,* taken together, *do* conflict. They give
two narrative points at which knowledge of Jesus's powers becomes general.
One narrative point would have sufficed. Which shall we take as the real and
presumably original one?

Answer: Can't definitively decide the question if it is asked in that form.
But if we ask related questions, in that part of Mark, we find that there
are several conflicts or inconsistencies there, and that one term of all
such conflicts occurs in the segment Mk 1:23-28. That is, Mk 1:23-28 is
being repeatedly identified as the spot which is common to all the little
single inconsistencies. That constitutes a strong case for considering it to
be an intrusion into the otherwise consistent and consecutive text. Removing
it makes the text consistent and consecutive, in more ways than one. That is
the next to last test of an interpolation. For the last test, namely the
test of plausible motive, see further below.

RON: In any case I would argue that the inconsistencies are too minor; the
removal of the two supposed interpolations, although leaving a plausible
text in the immediate context, does not *improve* the continuity; a
plausible motivation for the interpolations was not identified.

BRUCE: The inconsistencies are there to be noticed; see above. Removal of
the suspect text does indeed leave a plausible text; that is one of the
tests of an interpolation. The resulting continuity *is* improved, because
it does not have all the little snags above noticed. It becomes clear, for
one thing, at what point Jesus's powers became generally known. Consider,
for example, the following intelligible narrative sequence:

1. Jesus chooses Simon etc as followers
2. He preaches in their home synagogue, wowing the audience
3. He goes to Simon's house; Simon's mother-in-law is ill
4. He restores her to health and function (first example of curative powers)
5. He goes outside next morning to meditate
6. His followers say people (in the village) are looking for him
7. He decides to preach in other villages, and not go back
8. He cures a leper (second cure, and a more difficult one)
9. The leper blabs it all over.
10. Result: Jesus can no longer enter towns (cf #7)

The cumulative effect, Jesus's discovery and wider use of his curative
powers, is narratively convincing. The incident with the leper, which ended
Jesus's free access to settlements, marks a narrative division in the story,
and introduces a period of preaching outdoors.

If Mark in that form were given to the Sunday Schoolers, none of them would
ever find it troublesome. If it were given to the seminaries, learned theses
would result, on how subtly, in Mark, the reader is gradually made aware of
Jesus's powers, as indeed he seems gradually to discover them. A tactful and
effective presentation. Comparisons would be made with the exquisitely
tactful Buddhist version of the story of the Prodigal Son, and the sun would
rise each morning on a rational scholarly situation. An Eden of the
literate.

NOW

What does the intrusion of the Capernaum Demoniac do to all this? Answer: It
short-circuits it, by revealing Jesus's powers at a high level before he
ever gets to Simon's house; that is, it presents Jesus's powers at full
strength *from the beginning.* It confuses the point at which Jesus becomes
widely known, again by putting it *earlier* than the healing of the leper
(though that statement, improvidently, is retained in the text). That is how
the text is improved by its removal, and that is how the next to last test
of an interpolation is met in this case.

MOTIVE

So if Mk 1:23-28 does all that damage to the previous text, why was it
intruded? I should speculate: precisely to produce those effects. Mark can
be read as the story of Jesus gradually (in the last half of the book)
discovering his Resurrection scenario. But readers will ask, If he is so
great, didn't he always know that? In gJn, he does indeed always know that,
there is no limit on his powers of self-knowledge, and the inconcinnity, the
all too human picture of gradual discovery, is eliminated as offensive to
faith. Mk 1:23-28 accomplishes something of the same result, not by
rewriting the whole Gospel, but by putting a Full Power Miracle up front, so
that the previous gradualism is narratively eliminated, and Jesus from the
first is seen as Master of the Unseen Beings. A much more powerful
introduction than having him cure some woman's mild afternoon indisposition.
Don't you think?

So, I submit, did Mark.

THE TWO THEORIES OF MARK

RON: Moreover as I tried to show in a previous communication (not XTalk),
Mark's gospel has a fairly detailed and clear structure with each section
allocated a particular number of pages. If this 40-page codex model
correctly represents the archetype, as I am confident it does because the
match between sections and pages would otherwise involve an extraordinary
coincidence, it completely rules out interpolations of the size you are
proposing.

BRUCE: Indeed it does, and as I earlier noted, our two models are in
conflict. They cannot both be right. The success of one will preclude the
success of the other. Hence, I suppose, Ron's note.

I have said why Mark, coming back to his previous text with a view to
strengthening it, and to strengthening the effect it would have on believers
present and future, made the additions he did. He continually works toward a
more powerful and a more *consistently* powerful Jesus. I think that motive
is reasonable. Indeed, I note that it is exactly the same motive as we find
in the Gospel of John, which improves on the consistency, and the
chronology, of all previous efforts, and in addition translates Jesus out of
the human world altogether, and makes him a cosmological presence from the
beginning of the world. I have called this the Divinization Trajectory. We
can see it operating from one Gospel to the next, and as I have tried to
show in miniature above, we can also see it operating in the successive
layers of Mark.

RON'S TURN

But what exactly would be the motive for Mark to set out, as his primary
objective, to produce a text where the page turns coincide with leaf
boundaries, and where the total adds up to an integral number of leaves,
with no papyrus left unused? Can Ron show that something of this sort is a
viable model for Mark, and that it gives an adequate account of Mark's
motivations, his reasons for writing (and in the case of the agreed
interpolations 14:28 and 16:7, later rewriting) his Gospel in the first
place?

Respectfully requested.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

To: WSW
Cc: GPG, Crosstalk
From: Bruce

There are, as it seems to me, interesting parallels between the way Paul and
his Deuteropauline successors made use of prior Jesus tradition, and the way
Mencius and his Deuteromencian successors made use of prior Confucius
tradition.

PAUL

In the one case, Paul sometimes cites "a word of the Lord," and once
specifically distinguishes it from a ruling handed down "by me, Paul." But
in other cases what seems to be recognizable as early tradition (perhaps
most notably the hymn in Philippians 2) is simply embedded in what he says,
as though it were *part* of what he says. This appropriated material
suggests to me that there were probably deep and still largely unsuspected
connections among early local church practices, early mission checklists,
and early encyclicals like the Epistle of James, and that Paul, so far from
being the total innovator that he appears to us today, is really following
on a whole tradition which is now only visible in a few extracanonical
documents like the Didache and by excavation from the canonical documents.
The data sets thus take digging out, and I note that people who do the
digging out sometimes get different results. Koester in Ancient Christian
Gospels has one list; others have their lists, and the various lists are
somewhat divergent.

Would anyone care to refer me to what they consider to be a careful and
adequate list, of everything in Paul that is not original with Paul? (I
already have Hunter, rev 1961).

MENCIUS

In the other case, though Mencius himself only once uses what we can
recognize as a saying of Confucius, his followers in both the northern and
southern schools do openly quote Confucius (Kungdz). Sometimes they also
refer to Jùng-ní, which is a somewhat distinctive way of doing it. And
sometimes, as with Paul, they simply incorporate what to us are recognizable
"Confucius" sayings into their pronouncements. Sorting all this out (even on
the imperfect personal sort on which I am here relying) shows that there are
interesting differences between the two Mencian schools, not only in content
(the northerners were inclined to be philosophical; the southerners,
political), but in text affiliation (the northerners were in much closer
touch with the evolving Analects, and sometimes pick up the new sayings in a
just released new chapter of the Analects; the southerners didn't pay all
that much heed to the Analects people back in Lu). Was the northern school
not simply a breakaway from the southern, a few years after Mencius's death,
but more specifically a reversion from the Mencian political position back
toward Lu orthodoxy, just as the early Jesus movement moved very soon after
his death to revert to his ancestral Johannine practices: baptism, personal
prayers, and fast days, not to mention the basic Apocalyptic set of the John
movement.

A better list than mine would presumably give still more precise results.
Does anyone happen to know of a really good list, their own that they might
share, or something published that they could refer me to?

The large topos here is the use that the cutting edge people make of the
material that lies behind them: the knife in back of the cutting edge,
which, as any chef will tell you, is how the cutting edge does its work.

Thanks for help at either end,

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Bruce brooks wrote:

> Ron, for his part (as veterans of the Synoptic list may remember),
> recognizes exactly two interpolations: the related insertions 14:28 and
> 16:7.

Bruce,

Just for the record, I also take Mk 9:12b and 14:61b-64 to be
interpolations.

>> You go on to present your arguments for Mk 1:23-28 and Mk 2:5b-10 as
>> interpolations. These are based in large part on your belief that repetition
>> is a sign of interpolation.

> No. Repetition at the edges is a not uncommon feature of interpolated
> segments .....

Sorry. I should have been more precise here: "repetition at the edges".

>> Well it can be. But not always. The problem here is that Mark is *full*
>> of repetitions. They are to be found all over the place. They include an
>> inordinate fondness for EUQUS, a threefold passion prediction, two cases of
>> healing a blind man, and two cases of miraculous feeding of multitudes. It
>> seems clear to me that to the author of Mark's gospel, repetitions were a
>> useful tool for emphasis rather than an embarrassment.

> See? Give Ron the word "repetition" and he brings in instances of
> word-fondness, structural patterning, and whatnot, to show that these are
> characteristic of "Mark." So they are. But that is not the kind of
> repetition I mentioned as typical of interpolations. See again my previous
> note.

You are missing my point. By definition, 'repetition at the edges' is a
subset of 'repetition'. You agree that Mark is perfectly content with the
several examples of repetition quoted above. So it seems to me entirely
reasonable to suppose that he would also have been perfectly content with
repetition at the edges.

> It is not proper argument to misdescribe a
> procedure, and then to refute the misdescription.

Agreed. But this is not what I did, as should be apparent from my statement
above. My (admittedly implicit) assumption was that your narrower category
of 'repetition at the edges' is contained within my wider category of
'repetition'.

>> .... In any case I would argue that the inconsistencies are too minor; the
>> removal of the two supposed interpolations, although leaving a plausible
>> text in the immediate context, does not *improve* the continuity; a
>> plausible motivation for the interpolations was not identified.

> The inconsistencies are there to be noticed

My judgment is that they are minor, yours is that they are significant.
Further progress here on this seems unlikely.

> The resulting continuity *is* improved, because
> it does not have all the little snags above noticed.

"little" indeed. In the context of the gospel as a whole, they seem to me
entirely trivial: merely a characteristic of Mark's style.

> .......
> What does the intrusion of the Capernaum Demoniac do to all this? Answer: It
> short-circuits it, by revealing Jesus's powers at a high level before he
> ever gets to Simon's house; that is, it presents Jesus's powers at full
> strength *from the beginning.*

Healing a man with 'an unclean spirit' surely ranks rather low among the
Markan miracles. The declaration about Jesus has a twofold subtlety: (a) it
was spoken by one of society's rejects and (b) with the label "Holy One of
God" it hints at Jesus' divinity with a phrase used of OT heroes, rather
than using the higher designation "Son of God", which Mark reserves for key
places in the narrative structure (1:1 and 15:39).

> It confuses the point at which Jesus becomes widely known .....

In 1:28 the fame is simply great. By 1:45 it has become a nuisance. This is
not mere repetition. Judging by modern newspaper reports, these phases are
quite typical of what many modern celebrities experience at an early stage
of their careers.

> I have said why Mark, coming back to his previous text with a view to
> strengthening it, and to strengthening the effect it would have on believers
> present and future, made the additions he did. He continually works toward a
> more powerful and a more *consistently* powerful Jesus. I think that motive
> is reasonable.

In my estimation this is not a sufficiently strong motive, bearing in mind
the difficulty of writing or modifying a book in the first century.

> Indeed, I note that it is exactly the same motive as we find
> in the Gospel of John, which improves on the consistency, and the
> chronology, of all previous efforts, .....

I agree that the text of John has undergone considerable development. But in
John this development generally *confuses* the text and the chronology. It
is this very confusion which is the primary clue to the formation of the
gospel, the details of which can be found on my Web site.

> and in addition translates Jesus out of
> the human world altogether, and makes him a cosmological presence from the
> beginning of the world.

On the contrary, in the first 'edition' of John as I have reconstructed it,
Jesus literally came down from heaven to earth, and in the second 'edition',
probably to bring the Johannine gospel closer to the popular gospel of
Matthew, Jesus is tentatively linked to both Bethlehem and Nazareth. Thus
the history of the formation of this particular gospel contains a
significant exception to the 'human to divine' trajectory which is prevalent
in the NT as a whole.

> But what exactly would be the motive for Mark to set out, as his primary
> objective, to produce a text where the page turns coincide with leaf
> boundaries, with no papyrus left unused?

I presume you mean where section boundaries are on page boundaries, for
that's what I'm positing.

It's a combination of two motives, one a consequence of the other. Firstly
Mark knew the scroll was associated with Judaism, so he wanted a new medium
to reflect the new wine of Christianity (Mk 2:22). Having chosen to compose
his gospel on a codex, the most practical way of filling all the papyrus and
thus inhibiting additions at the end was to choose the total number of pages
to be a whole multiple of four, then divide his material into logical
sections and allocate one or more pages to each section. Allocating
single-page sections towards the end would make it easier to get it right,
and this is just what he appears to have done.

You have seen the 'arrangement' which links sections with pages (which I
could also publish on XTalk if required). If my structure reflects the text
of Mark better than any other proposed structure, then it deserves to be
taken seriously. If not, then it doesn't.

> ..... in the case of the agreed interpolations 14:28 and 16:7 .....

It seems clear to me that the rehabilitation of Peter was the motivation for
interpolating these verses. The same motivation was surely also behind the
addition of ch.21 to the gospel of John.

Ron Price

Derbyshire, UK

Web site: http://homepage.virgin.net/ron.price/index.htm

To: Crosstalk
Cc: GPG
In Response To: Ron Price
On: Interpolations in Mark
From: Bruce

As I mentioned, Ron's model doesn't permit the recognition of interpolations
elsewhere than in a few places; I personally find his model too rigid, for
this among other reasons, and I don't see quite what benefit that rigid
model confers, in explaining the well-known problems in Mark. See further at
end. As to agreed interpolations, we had:

RON: Just for the record, I also take Mk 9:12b and 14:61b-64 to be
interpolations.

BRUCE: Hmm, let's see.

9:11.   And they asked him, Why do the scribes say that Elijah must come?
9:12a. And he said to them, Elijah does come first to restore all things,
9:12b.     [and how is it written that the Son of Man should suffer many
things,
                 and be treated with contempt?]
9:13.  But I tell you that Elijah has come, and they did to him whatever
they
           pleased, as it is written of him.

Maybe. There is certainly a possibility there. If we leave 12b out,
everything is about Elijah (so also with variations Bultmann), and as Adela
points out, the 12a/b transition is "harsh." Myself, at least for this week
I would read 9:13 as a sort of answer to the question asked in 9:12b. What
otherwise motivates the ALLA of 9:13?

As for the Sanhedrin Trial, I am on record as agreeing with Adela that the
whole thing is a later addition. It is built our of details from the
perfectly original Trial Before Pilate, and it has the characteristic
internal duplications that such clones normally have. One part with
precedent in the Pilate scene, but much elaborated in the climax of the
Sanhedrin scene, is precisely the segment in question.

14:61a. But he was silent and made no answer.
14:61b.     Again the high priest asked him, Are you the Christ,
                  the Son of the Blessed?
14:62.       And Jesus said, I am, and you will see the Son of Man
                 sitting at the right hand of power, and coming with the
                 clouds of Heaven.
14:63.      And the high priest tore his mantle, and said,
                 Why do we still need witnesses?
14:64.      You have heard his blasphemy. What is your decision?
                 And they all condemned him as deserving death.
14:65. And some began to spit on him, and to cover his face, and
            to strike him, saying to him, Prophesy! And the guards
            received him with blows.

Hmm, another Son of Man saying deleted by Ron. I agree that the Son of Man
sayings in Mark are, as a group, textually insecure in Mark. For me, indeed,
they are the defining core of Layer 3 in Mark. Not just these two, but all
of them. As to whether this particular confession was inserted into the
Sanhedrin scene, or was instead an integral part of the Sanhedrin scene,
which as a whole constitutes the interpolation in this case, I tend to
prefer the latter alternative. To ask the obvious question: If we omit
Jesus's statement in 14:62, and the following verdict in 14:64, what
justifies the behavior of the rest of the group in 14:65? Do we have
narrative continuity here?

LARGER QUESTION

And what exactly results, theologically or otherwise, if we recognize these
two passages as interpolations? For one thing, that step leaves the Son of
Man generally where it was before, so its contribution to the solution of
that problem would seem to be minimal. I would think that it makes better
sense to regard the Son of Man passages as a group. (Books have in any case
been written on that basis, so there is some countenance in the literature
for this hypothesis). And if we conjecture that they are a group, then it
follows that they move together, so if any of them is a clear interpolation,
then the rest (subject as always to further verification) are presumptively
interpolations also. The question for the SM group, then, is: is any of them
clearly interpolated? I am not convinced by either of Ron's suggestions,
though open to further argument in favor. But consider this one:

9:30. They went on from there and passed through Galilee.
          And he would not have any one know it.
9:31        For he was teaching his disciples, saying to them,
               The Son of Man will be delivered into the hands of men,
               and they will kill him, and when he is killed,
               after three days he will rise.
9:32       But they did not understand the saying, and were
               afraid to ask.
9:33. And they came to Capernaum, and when he was in the house,
          he asked them, What were you discussing on the way?

This is surely narrative confusion. Jesus has just been talking to them, so
why does he ask what the conversation was? But if we leave the travel a
blank (by omitting any direct report of it, and implying that Jesus did not
hear what was being said), then the question of 9:33 has some point. What
point it has was that the previous conversation (which they were ashamed to
reveal to him) turns out to be about who would be the greatest in the future
Kingdom. A quite different subject than the one in 9:31-32. No?

And if we want to locate another Son of Man insertion in Mk 9, then in
preference to Ron's proposal (9:12b), at least for this week, I might
suggest the whole Son of Man sequence, 9:9b-13. It is true that it is not
interruptive like the cases we have been discussing. It is slid neatly
between two self-contained units. What is wrong with 9:9b? It presumes that
the meaning of the previous Transfiguration scene was Jesus's death and
resurrection after three days. But the Transfiguration has nothing to do
with Jesus's death and resurrection after three days. It has to do with his
glorification in Heaven. (And that there was a Christianity with just those
beliefs about Jesus is further suggested by the hymn embedded in Philippians
2:6-11 (see especially Lohmeyer's reconstruction), which mentions Jesus as
glorified, but not as resurrected). It is a Son of God passage, the second
one in Mark where God himself testifies in that sense (it is the centerpoint
of the Son of God Layer, being bookended by the Baptismal Son of God
proclamation, and the concluding Roman Soldier testimony).

And the Son of God passages do not overlap with the Son of Man passages in
Mark, save at the Sanhedrin passage discussed above (which has both "Son of
the Blessed" from the high priest and "Son of Man" from Jesus). Otherwise,
they occur separately, and tend to have different associated motifs.

Into details of which it would not be suitable here to go, but I mention (as
an "offer of proof") that a segmentation along those lines does seem to
succeed, and does have immediate and obvious consequences, as well as
providing a motive for the whole process. It was this: Mark was several
times overwritten to bring it up to date with developing theology in the
local community, whatever that may have been.

MOTIVE

So much for the Accretional Mark proposal. Ron has given his counterpart
answer to the motivation question at the end of his recent note. It is, in
effect, that Mark's wish was twofold: (a) to use the new codex medium as
symbolic of the newness of Christian doctrine, and (b) "Having chosen to
compose his gospel on a codex, the most practical way of filling all the
papyrus and thus inhibiting additions at the end was to choose the total
number of pages to be a whole multiple of four, then divide his material
into logical sections and allocate one or more pages to each section."

An easier way to avoid interpolations, I should think, was to put an ending
phrase, or a line count, or a decorative colophon, at the end of the text,
whether or not the papyrus happened to run on beyond that point. All these
devices may be seen as ending decorations and perhaps also as text security
measures in other ancient books. Do we have any reason to think that any
other ancient book, besides Ron's conjectured Mark, was ever written with
the primary motive, not of telling a story, but of entirely filling a
certain amount of pre-allotted space?

Was the first Christian Gospel primarily an artifact of typographical
considerations? To me there is something lacking in this proposal. But the
final decision does not lie with me, and I invite others to be heard on the
question.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Bruce Brooks wrote:

> 9:11.   And they asked him, Why do the scribes say that Elijah must come?
> 9:12a. And he said to them, Elijah does come first to restore all things,
> 9:12b.     [and how is it written that the Son of Man should suffer many
> things,
>               and be treated with contempt?]
> 9:13.  But I tell you that Elijah has come, and they did to him whatever
> they
>         pleased, as it is written of him.
>
> Maybe. There is certainly a possibility there. If we leave 12b out,
> everything is about Elijah (so also with variations Bultmann), and as Adela
> points out, the 12a/b transition is "harsh." Myself, at least for this week
> I would read 9:13 as a sort of answer to the question asked in 9:12b. What
> otherwise motivates the ALLA of 9:13?

Bruce,

Elijah came, *but* he was rejected. That surely makes sense of the ALLA.

It looks to me like a classic case of a marginal gloss. A marginal note by a
puzzled reader was taken by a later copyist to belong to the text, and
accordingly incorporated into it during his copying.

> As for the Sanhedrin Trial [in particular the proposal that 14:61b-64
> is an interpolation] ....... If we omit
> Jesus's statement in 14:62, and the following verdict in 14:64, what
> justifies the behavior of the rest of the group in 14:65?

It doesn't need a justification that you or I would recognize as fair. The
whole point Mark is making is that the trial was unfair. Note especially
verse 55: "the whole council sought testimony against Jesus to put him to
death; but they found none". We are left with an alleged threat to destroy
the temple.

> LARGER QUESTION
>
> And what exactly results, theologically or otherwise, if we recognize these
> two passages as interpolations? For one thing, that step leaves the Son of
> Man generally where it was before, so its contribution to the solution of
> that problem would seem to be minimal.

It wasn't meant to solve that problem. But since you raise the issue, I
divide the Markan Son of Man sayings as follows:

8:38 is from the logia and probably close to a genuine saying of Jesus.
13:26 is loosely based on logia sayings.
9:12b is a marginal gloss interpolated into the text.
14:62 is part of the interpolated 14:61b-64.

All the other Markan Son of Man sayings were created by Mark and can be seen
as consistent with his presentation of the *man* who would eventually start
to be seen by others (15:39) as the Son of God.

> ..... I am not convinced by either of Ron's suggestions,
> though open to further argument in favor. But consider this one:
>
> 9:30. They went on from there and passed through Galilee.
>        And he would not have any one know it.
> 9:31        For he was teaching his disciples, saying to them,
>             The Son of Man will be delivered into the hands of men,
>             and they will kill him, and when he is killed,
>             after three days he will rise.
> 9:32       But they did not understand the saying, and were
>             afraid to ask.
> 9:33. And they came to Capernaum, and when he was in the house,
>        he asked them, What were you discussing on the way?
>
> This is surely narrative confusion. Jesus has just been talking to them, so
> why does he ask what the conversation was?

See D.E.Nineham "Saint Mark" pp. 250-51, quoting J.H.Ropes. In essence he
says that the last part of ch.9 may look a little crude, but it stresses the
disciples' incomprehension of the passion prediction, and then tells his
readers of the need for self-sacrifice.

> And the Son of God passages do not overlap with the Son of Man passages in
> Mark, save at the Sanhedrin passage discussed above (which has both "Son of
> the Blessed" from the high priest and "Son of Man" from Jesus).

Maybe you should take that as a clue. Mark himself avoided such overlaps.

> An easier way to avoid interpolations, I should think, was to put an ending
> phrase, or a line count, or a decorative colophon, at the end of the text,
> whether or not the papyrus happened to run on beyond that point.

Any blank space at the end would still invite interpolations.

> Do we have any reason to think that any
> other ancient book, besides Ron's conjectured Mark, was ever written with
> the primary motive, not of telling a story, but of entirely filling a
> certain amount of pre-allotted space?

I'm disappointed that you think it necessary to descend into ridicule. I
never said that filling the space was Mark's *primary* motive. His primary
motive was of course to present the gospel as he saw it. This conversation
has gone on for too long. I hereby conclude my part in it.

Ron Price

Derbyshire, UK

Web site: http://homepage.virgin.net/ron.price/index.htm

To: Crosstalk
In Final Response To: Ron Price
On: The Motive of Mark
From: Bruce

Ron is signing off the topic of his theory of the origin of Mark, and I will
join him. There was just one question still open, and I will end by
repeating it for anyone who can help to answer it:

RON (Recently): I'm disappointed that you think it necessary to descend into
ridicule. I never said that filling the space was Mark's *primary* motive.
His primary motive was of course to present the gospel as he saw it. This
conversation has gone on for too long. I hereby conclude my part in it.

BRUCE: For the record, here again was Ron's previous description of Mark as
he sees it:

RON (Previously): "It's a combination of two motives, one a consequence of
the other. Firstly Mark knew the scroll was associated with Judaism, so he
wanted a new medium to reflect the new wine of Christianity (Mk 2:22).
Having chosen to compose his gospel on a codex, the most practical way of
filling all the papyrus and
thus inhibiting additions at the end was to choose the total number of pages
to be a whole multiple of four, then divide his material into logical
sections and allocate one or more pages to each section. Allocating
single-page sections towards the end would make it easier to get it right,
and this is just what he appears to have done."

BRUCE (Present): I continue to find this a strange aganda. Can anyone cite a
precedent, or a contemporary parallel, for an author structuring a book in
advance, in this particular way? Not in form -- Matthew has his structure
based on discourses, Luke his threefold division, and so on; that we know
about  -- but in terms of page layout?

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

To: Crosstalk
Cc: GPG
In Response To: Gregory Leiby
On: The Anger of Jesus (Healing the Leper)
From: Bruce

GREGORY: My understanding of Jesus and the leper (no reference to other
researchers) is that he wanted the miracle verified by the proper
authorities (which were the priests at that time).

BRUCE: I agree; in effect, he wanted his curative powers to be on record. I
would add that, apart from that certification process, Jesus in this story
was very concerned that the news of the healing not get out generally, hence
his stringent admonition to the leper. The leper's disobedience on this
point (we are never told about the certification part) led to Jesus being
inconvenience by too large crowds. All this makes sense as narrative. Mark
himself (or whoever) explains, in the later story, why Jesus made his
request so emphatically. It was to avoid the crowds. So far so good, and
Mark is with us all the way.

I think that what the adverb in question does (I would render it as
"stringently") is to emphasize Jesus's concern not to attract large public
crowds. It is not anger at the leper, or at the fact of his illness, over
which it seems to me the commentators have labored overlong. Does this in
turn make sense? Yes, as a wish to avoid official notice. This is the
Messianic Secret in its probable real historic sense: Jesus's plan to bring
God back to Israel as a realization of the Davidic promise which was
familiar to every Jew of the time, and which actually sparked several
literal revolts in the 1c. Since any such plan was not merely theological,
but would have immediate practical repercussions for the Romans and their
Quisling collaborators, the Romans may be assumed to have been on the
lookout for any manifestations of this sort, with a view to stamping them
out as soon as possible. Jesus's avoidance of the big cities (Tiberias etc),
where crowds would immediately attract police attention, is thus very
understandable. The villages were therefore his best bet: concentrations of
people, but small enough to escape the immediate attention of the city-based
Roman troops. It is just these villages that Jesus had set out for, a few
verses earlier in Mark. What the leper's disobedience did was to foreclose
even the village option, which was a strategic problem for Jesus.

On this reading, it seems that everything fits, and there is nothing left
about the story that should feel strange in our ears. Which is probably as
it should be. Modern literary critics love conundrums, and modern
scholarship has become very impressed with modern literary critics, but I
have to think that it was not in the interest of the Evangelists to set up
present conundrums for the amusement of future critics. I think they wanted
to be understood with the least fuss possible, by the people they were
addressing.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Everyone is familiar with the Ichthus symbol used by ancient (and
modern) Christians.  However, in Ephesus (and perhaps elsewhere, I am
not sure), there is another symbol that is said to represent Ichthus.
  It is often referred to as a "wagon wheel", a circle with "spokes".
Interestingly, in the pictures I've seen, "Ichthus" is spelled out in
Greek and this "wagon wheel" symbol is found next to it.

An image of the wheel can be seen in the Wikipedia article on Ichthus:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthys

Of course one can certainly see the letters in the wheel with a bit of
effort, but does anyone know if this symbol was mentioned in any
ancient literature as representing "Ichthus" (or any ancient mention
of the symbol at all)?

The reason I ask is because while staring at the image, I suddenly
recalled some paintings of a bakery in Pompeii and some images of
preserved bread.  The ancient bread had the exact same form as this
"wagon wheel" symbol!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Pompei_pane.jpg

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/images/gal_daily_baking.jpg

Since Ichthus was fully written out and accompanied by the wheel
symbol, I had to wonder if this was highly symbolic.  That is, in
addition to the Ichthus acrostic, perhaps it also recalls the miracle
of the "fish and bread" and that Jesus is called the "bread of life"?

Does anyone know of any research on this "wagon wheel" symbol?  Have I
just discovered something already known (a.k.a., there's "nothing new
under the sun" syndrome)?

Thanks!
Bryan Cox

My understanding of Jesus and the leper (no reference to other researchers) is
that he wanted the miracle verified by the proper authorities (which were the
priests at that time).

If such a miracle happened toady, the instruction might be to go to a physician
and have all the lab work done to verify a miracle had truly taken place.

In Acts 4: 13-17, the leadership was dumbfounded how to react to a verified
miracle.
_________________________
Gregory Leiby
Greenville, SC, USA
http://www.theleibys.com/


--- On Sun, 12/7/08, E Bruce Brooks <brooks@...> wrote:

> From: E Bruce Brooks <brooks@...>
> Subject: [XTalk] The Anger of Jesus
> To: "GPG" <gpg@yahoogroups.com>
> Cc: "Crosstalk" <crosstalk2@yahoogroups.com>
> Date: Sunday, December 7, 2008, 3:20 AM
> To: GPG
> Cc: Crosstalk
> On: The Anger of Jesus
> From: Bruce
>
> Dictionary or no dictionary, I have to feel that those who
> see anger in
> Jesus's treatment of the leper in Mk 1:43 are barking
> up the wrong stem. The
> story doesn't work unless Jesus feels compassion for
> the leper, heals him
> with a touch (the characteristic gesture of the Mark Layer
> 1 healings), --
> and then sternly counsels him not to say anything to
> anyone, except the
> Mosaic authorities, lest Jesus's whereabouts become
> known.
>
> This latter was no trifling or enigmatic matter; it was
> life and death.
> Israel was an occupied nation at the time, and Jesus was
> dodging the secret
> police as he went about trying to recruit enough righteous
> persons to bring
> about the return of God to Israel, so as to oust those very
> Romans, and
> their Quisling collaborators, the Temple authorities and
> the "Herodians."
>
> So no, all Jesus feels in Mk 1:43 is compassion for the
> sufferer, plus a
> decent concern for his own day to day safety. Mk 1:43
> balances those
> feelings in a perfectly convincing way.
>
> But Jesus does sometimes feel real anger, and it is
> interesting to note
> WHERE and AT WHOM he feels it.
>
> ONE
>
> One is the moneychangers of the Temple, whose commercial
> defilement so
> pollutes the premises as to prevent the return of God to
> the place (see
> Malachi) where he must return if he is going to return
> (Malachi 3:1,
> helpfully spotted at the head of the Gospel, where nobody
> can miss it). This
> is original Mark, and it is quite possibly also original
> Jesus. The anger
> here is hot.
>
> TWO
>
> There are quite different anger moments, where Jesus
> expresses impatience
> with "a sinful and adulterous generation," and
> refuses to give a sign that
> will prove his credentials, though in other passages he has
> been passing
> miracles like they were going out of style. These
> "anger with the
> generation" passages are sometimes textually insecure
> in Mark, and my
> conclusion is that they are late. And that they do not
> express Jesus at all,
> but are the voice of the Church leadership's impatience
> at their flock's
> wish to see some hint that the long awaited Second Coming
> was about to come
> off. Years had passed . . . Well, they had passed for the
> leaders also, and
> truth to tell, some of the leaders were about out of
> reassuring things to
> say. You can see this as one letter of Paul succeeds
> another, and I submit
> that you can also see it as one layer of Mark is laid down
> over the previous
> ones.
>
> Ennui.
>
> I think this may help explain the excitement that was
> apparently felt by the
> believing public at any event that threatened a crisis
> (such as the
> threatened Caligula defilement of the Temple in the year
> 40). Not that a
> crisis as such was exactly welcome, but they had been
> waiting so long that
> ANYTHING, no matter how dire, would have been a relief.
>
> As Wellington is said to have said at Waterloo, "Would
> that night or Blücher
> would come."
>
> Respectfully suggested,
>
> Bruce
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> The XTalk Home Page is http://ntgateway.com/xtalk/
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>
>

Loren Rosson wrote:
>
>
>
> Actually it does. The leper's appeal to help could be construed as an
> honor-challenge that puts Jesus on the spot in front of crowds. "If
> you choose, you can cleanse me", is a veiled way of questioning Jesus'
> ability to heal, and daring him to prove himself. That's part of the
> reason why Jesus rebukes him and tells him to get lost
>








Well, that's an interesting way of reading the story, and it makes
sense.....except that it doesn't, because Jesus does not send the man
packing ("get lost"). He heals him, tells him to present himself to the
priest (so that the healing can be certified and he can be reintegrated
into normal social life) and then tells him not to spread about the news
of what has happened to him.

David Cavanagh
Major (The Salvation Army)
Florence (Italy)


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

E Bruce Brooks wrote:
>
> To: GPG
> Cc: Crosstalk
> On: The Anger of Jesus
> From: Bruce
>
>
>
>
> According to Bruce Jesus feels anger at "the moneychangers of the
> Temple, whose commercial defilement so
> pollutes the premises as to prevent the return of God to the place (see
> Malachi) where he must return if he is going to return (Malachi 3:1,
> helpfully spotted at the head of the Gospel, where nobody can miss
> it). This
> is original Mark, and it is quite possibly also original Jesus. The anger
> here is hot.
>

















I agree about the anger......but isn't Jesus' term "lestes" the same
term Josephus uses for brigands, and which also reappears in the
crucifixion accounts of the two men Jesus was crucified with? I agree
about the extent and force of the anger, but it seems to me that the
motive is different: not abhorrence for commerce (which, as Sanders
points out, was a virtual necessity, and for the abuse of which we have
very little evidence) but the use of the Temple as a focus for
nationalistic hopes......

David Cavanagh
Major (The Salvation Army)
Florence (Italy)



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

To: Crosstalk
Cc: GPG
In Response To: Brian Cox
On: Ichthus Symbology
From: Bruce

Brian refers to a Wikipedia article, namely

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthys

and to an Ephesus inscription in which there, to quote Wikipedia, "an
ancient adaptation of ichthus is a wheel which contains the letters ΙΧΘΥΣ
superimposed such that the result resembles an eight-spoked wheel."

But as Brian notes, the picture actually contains the spelled out word
ichthus PLUS a picture of an eight-spoked wheel. It is of course possible to
imagine the letters of ichthus - or almost any others - superimposed so as
to give such a wheel. But that is not necessarily its origin; it may perhaps
more easily be seen as a rationalization, an ichthycizing of a symbol which
originally meant something else.

We might start with the fish itself. It seems to be iconographically
attested, in Christian contexts, already in the 1c. But it is not
necessarily Christian in origin. For example, in the Wikipedia article in
question, we have this remark:

"There are a large number of historians who note that the fish symbol
existed before Christianity in the same geographical area, and represented
several goddesses. The fish symbol can literally refer to a dolphin or fish
(as a fish-shaped amulet or fish as a symbol of fertility, much like Easter
eggs and rice at weddings are used today)."

That strikes me as pointing in the right direction. But if the fish symbol
(whether as a word or as a picture) itself is not primarily Christian, might
the same be true of the wheel? I suggest so. That particular kind of wheel
has a long iconographic history. For part of it, check out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharmacakra

It is not so much "a symbol for Buddhism'' as this article states (the wheel
motif is central in Hinduism also) as it is a symbol of dialectical and
soteriological completeness, among other things. Such an icon, in such an
understanding, it seems to me, might easily have been picked up off the
trade routes by the proto-Gnostics of the Ephesus area, as a suitably
enigmatic coding of their own ideas. One thing the wheel has going for it,
symbolically, is that its roundness is even more evocative of the cosmos
than is the curvaceous but in the end merely linear fish. I suspect that
something like this may have been its actual origin. That the wheel did not
catch on more widely may merely mean that the fish symbol was already pretty
well established as a Christian recognition-mark by that time (whatever the
date of the Ephesus inscription may be; and do we know?).

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

To: Crosstalk
Cc: GPG
In Response To: David Cavanaugh
On: The Anger of Jesus
From: Bruce

I had earlier suggested that it makes no narrative sense to construe Jesus
as being angry at the leper, but that Jesus's anger at the temple vendors is
unmistakable. Then:

DAVID: I agree about the anger......but isn't Jesus' term "lestes" the same
term Josephus uses for brigands, and which also reappears in the crucifixion
accounts of the two men Jesus was crucified with?

BRUCE: Yes, and I think Jesus (as here reported; the early Markan Jesus)
regarded the vendors as polluting the Temple, which in effect meant the
impossibility of any return of God to that temple (as had been forecast by
Malachi, in a line significantly quoted at the head of the Markan
narrative). Jesus wanted God to return to Israel, and as he saw it, and
indeed acted upon it, the pollution of the temple was one of the factors
blocking that return.

DAVID: I agree about the extent and force of the anger, but it seems to me
that the motive is different: not abhorrence for commerce (which, as Sanders
points out, was a virtual necessity, and for the abuse of which we have very
little evidence) but the use of the Temple as a focus for nationalistic
hopes......

BRUCE: With due trepidation, I here venture to disagree with that particular
page of Sanders. I think that the earliest Markan Jesus indeed regarded the
Temple as a "focus for nationalistic hopes." Ed points out that such views
were not very common at the time. That might be a fatal objection, except
that we are told in so many words, in Mark, that Jesus's ideas were new,
startling, authoritative despite being unfamiliar, not the same old thing
over again. Ed in effect objects that Jesus's views as I see them in Mark
were not mainline Judaism. Mark replies, precisely, that Jesus's views were
indeed not mainline Judaism, and were opposed by the conventional law
interpreters and the certified ritual leaders of his time. If you go through
Mark and highlight the passages where Jesus is represented as differing with
standard contemporary Jewish opinion and practice, you are going to wind up
with a very yellow-colored text.

If there is "very little evidence," as David notes, for an abhorrence of
commerce, but if such evidence as there is nevertheless clusters strongly in
the Gospel of Mark, and I submit that it does (leading, among other things,
to a cult of poverty among at least some of the early followers of Jesus),
then I have to think that the picture Mark intended to give of Jesus is not
refuted by the fact that such ideas are uncommon outside, in run-of-the-mill
1c Judaism.

Was Jesus a failed conventional Jew? Did he try to master the thousand
prohibitions, and not succeed completely? That, to my eye, is not how Mark
invites us to read Jesus. I think he took a much higher hand with the
prohibitions, and the commercial defilements, and with other people's wealth
in general, which in his view (at least as repeatedly expressed in Mark, and
Mark is all I have), was keeping both the nation and individual people *in*
the nation from God.

Money and hyperritualism: these were the chief things in the way. No?

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

To: Crosstalk
Cc: GPG
On: The Anger of Jesus (2)
From: Bruce

I think it is manifest in such documents as we have that the followers of
Jesus grew discouraged with the long wait until the Last Days. They were
repeatedly warned not to believe the phony prophets who showed, by signs,
that the Last Days were at hand. Does Mark have Jesus himself comment on any
of these attitudes?

I think so. There are several places where Jesus expresses impatience with
"this generation," meaning, the one which he elsewhere assures us "will not
pass away" until the Last Days actually come. And since he adds a "Verily"
to this assurance, the hearer of this passage is pretty much helpless to do
otherwise than believe it.

I think that these expressions of Jesus are implicitly late, since they deal
with an Early Church matter and not with anything that can plausibly be
ascribed to the lifetime of Jesus; that is, they are anticipatory.

How do these late passages deal with the demand of the early Christian
faithful for a sign? By equating those Christians with the paradigmatically
erroneous Pharisees, and telling those symbolic Pharisees that he is not
going to give them some sensational miraculous "sign," the sign they have
(the third-day Resurrection, the "sign of Jonah") must suffice them.

Jesus heals, from the very first layers in Mark. As earlier argued, I think
that the Leper is one of his early healings, and whatever the lexicon may
think, I don't see that Jesus is angry at the leper. There is one place,
however, where he does seem to be impatient with a patient, or anyway with a
patient's parent. This is in the Healing of the Epileptic Boy, Mk 9:17-29).
The striking line there, surely, is the father's cry, "I believe; help thou
mine unbelief."

Now, faith is necessary for the healing to work (compare Nazareth, where
there was no atmosphere of belief, and thus next to no healings). But the
father here, as it seems to me, is in effect asking not only for the healing
of his son, but for the necessary faith to make that healing possible (that
his faith is tentative, a willingness to believe rather than an actual
belief, and thus not sufficient for the medical task at hand, shown by the
remark on which Jesus seizes with some impatience: "if you can do anything,"
Mk 9:22). Isn't the point of this that faith itself is a gift of God? If so,
I think we are very far evolved theologically from the earlier position
reflected in most of Mark, and well down what might be called the Path of
Paul.

It may also be noticed that this is not exactly a healing of Jesus, in the
usual conventional sense of a Markan healing, but a failed attempt at
healing by the disciples (the frame story). Then in a sense this story may
be an evocation of, and contain an authoritative reply to, doubts arising in
the later movement, including disappointment in the healing efficacy of the
leaders of that movement. The miracles were tapering off, at best, in the
years after Jesus had departed this earth, and the doubts were growing.

However this particular passage may come out, one of the things which
strikes me about Mark (as it also did von Soden, about a hundred years ago)
is that in one zone of Mark, Jesus is giving signs and passing miracles all
over the place, and moreover, those signs and wonders are being greeted with
enthusiastic acceptance by synagogue audiences and rural crowds. But in
another zone of Mark, Jesus grudges signs, complains of unbelief, and in
general conveys a petulant attitude.

The problem of dwindling faith among the early Christians, of course, is not
one which is likely to have dwindled over time. Much more likely, it
increased with time. And thus it is (I submit) that in the later Gospel of
Luke, we find Jesus taking an even more accusatory tone on this issue, in a
moral gratuitously tacked on to the unique Lukan parable of the "unjust
judge:" "Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on
earth?"

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

David Cavanagh wrote:

> Jesus does not send the man
> packing ("get lost"). He heals him...

I certainly didn't mean to imply Jesus didn't heal the man, only that the
following stern warning is probably more along the lines of a curt dismissal if
Mk 1:40b was an honor-callenge.

Loren Rosson III
Nashua NH
http://lorenrosson.blogspot.com

To: Crosstalk
Cc: GPG
In Response To: Loren Rossen
On: Anger of Jesus
From: Bruce

Are we belaboring this Leper Healing passage too much? Quite possibly. If
so, I hasten to add a word in order to bear my fair share of the possible
guilt:

LOREN: I certainly didn't mean to imply Jesus didn't heal the man, only that
the following stern warning is probably more along the lines of a curt
dismissal if Mk 1:40b was an honor-challenge.

BRUCE: Which I think there is room to doubt. And why? Contrast this with the
recently mentioned Healing of the Possessed Boy:

Mk 1:40 (Leper): "If you will, you can make me clean." (Jesus) "I will, be
clean." There is here no dare by the Leper; no doubt by the Leper of Jesus's
powers, rather a certainty that if he puts them forth, the leper will be
cleansed. Jesus supplies the missing datum, again without detectable rancor,
"I will." The only stringency comes later in the episode. I think it wrong
to retroject it back to the beginning of the episode.

So far, so good. Now contrast:

Mk 9:21 (Father): "If you can do anything, have pity on us and help us."
(Jesus) "If you can! All things are possible to him who believes." Here,
there is doubt, not only about Jesus's willingness to help, but about his
ability to help ("if you can do anything"). This is in the strongest
contrast with the Leper's confidence in Jesus's powers, where the healing
depends only on Jesus's willingness to use those powers. And Jesus's answer
is also in strong contrast to his response in the previous case. He is in
fact indignant; he repeats the father's remark verbatim, but sarcastically:
"If you will!" And he proceeds to challenge the father's faith as the real
element lacking in the cure: "all things are possible to him who believes."
It is the father's defective faith that is holding up the proceeding.

The Leper had no such defect.

INTERPRETATION

And so the question passes, not to the question of Jesus's curative powers,
but to the question of the believer's *degree of faith* in those powers
(implicit in the one case, explicitly defective in the other). I think that
such a contrast is real in these two passages, and that it is also visible
at other points in Mark. I think that this set of contrasts is significant
for the analysis of Mark.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

<<But if the fish symbol
(whether as a word or as a picture)  itself is not primarily Christian, might
the same be true of the wheel? I  suggest so. That particular kind of wheel
has a long iconographic history.  For part of it, check out:

_http://en.wikipediahttp://en.http://en.w_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharmacakra)

It  is not so much "a symbol for Buddhism'' as this article states (the wheel

motif is central in Hinduism also) as it is a symbol of dialectical and
soteriological completeness, among other things. Such an icon, in such an
understanding, it seems to me, might easily have been picked up off the
trade routes by the proto-Gnostics of the Ephesus area, as a suitably
enigmatic coding of their own ideas. One thing the wheel has going for it,
symbolically, is that its roundness is even more evocative of the cosmos
than is the curvaceous but in the end merely linear fish.>>

The 8-pointed wheel in the Wikipedia article is also reminiscent of the  star
and diadem prutot issued by Alexander Jannaeus (the so-called 'widow's
mites'). While I can't come up with an obvious connection with fish, it's not 
hard
to see how a symbol like that, combining Baalam's star prophecy with a  royal
diadem, might have been used for Jesus. It's also easy to see why it
wouldn't catch on with a movement eager to seem non-threatening to Rome!

Regards,

Robert Brenchley
Birmingham  UK



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A Happy Christmas to one and all.

Best Wishes

--
JOHN E STATON (BA Sheffield; DipTheol. Bristol)
Hull, UK
www.christianreflection.org.uk

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