Mark chapter 1

I’ve always said that three things have influenced my writing the most: Cormac McCarthy, Columbian cocaine, and the Gospel of Mark. The first two are self explanatory. The last requires a college dissertation.

The Gospel According to Mark is my favorite ancient text. It’s weird. It’s esoteric. And I believe it caused a massive shitstorm when it reached the ears of early Christians. For those who don’t know, Mark is the oldest surviving Gospel. Matthew and Luke made liberal use of it. And it is thus seen as the first ancient “biography” of Yeshua aka Jesus of Nazareth aka Jesus ‘H’ Christ. Sure, it is attributed to a guy named “Mark” but no one actually knows who wrote it and where and why it was written. At first glance, you might think it was composed poorly in Greek. Yet if you move through the text with that assumption, the author will make you look like a fool (which you are). But for ears willing to listen, Mark packs one thematic punch after another. It’s on par with any of the other shit floating around the Greco Roman world at the time.

But I think it was controversial. Like all good art, people weren’t ready for it. After all, there’s a reason why two other versions of the same story were composed 10 to 30 years later (Matthew and Luke. Plus John if you think there’s a synoptic relation). They had to explain some of the “problems” that Mark posed.

And the first problem is that of John the Baptist. John was apparently a real guy. The historian Josephus discusses him roughly 20 years after Mark. There’s a lot of academic speculation about what Jesus’s relationship to John was. Was Jesus a follower? Was he high up in John’s movement? Or was he merely passing by the Jordan River when he decided to get baptized by the preacher? It is common for scholars to declare Jesus’s baptism by John as an actual historical event. And why do they think this? The answer is something called the “criterion of embarrassment.” Mark states that John preached baptism for the repentance of sin, leading one to wonder what sins Jesus committed. Sounds like blasphemy, eh? It makes no sense. What’s funny is that Josephus states that this is specifically NOT the reason why John preached baptism. Nevertheless, John baptizes Jesus and, as Mark writes, he came up out of the water and “a Spirit” “descended” “upon” “him” “like” “a” “dove” and said “thou art my beloved son in whom I am well pleased” (or something like that). A clear reading of this would lead one to believe that Jesus was “adopted” as God’s son and his powers only activated after John’s baptism. Keep in mind, there is no birth narrative in Mark. This is literally Jesus’s first appearance and I’m assuming that this was a big ass problem because “birth narratives” were subsequently added to later canonical gospels. Therefore, theoretically, you can read in Mark that Jesus was a normal living sinner before his encounter with John.

Hence the “embarrassment”. Mind you I don’t think that criterion of embarrassment is sufficient enough to establish the baptism as a historical fact. Through this reading, it’s possible that the author of Mark (or his sources) was using John’s movement as a way to legitimize his own nascent Jesus movement.

Nevertheless, I think it’s an odd story to include. As mentioned, Mark was written in Greek. Presumably this meant it was written for a mostly gentile audience abroad and not for the Aramaic-speaking followers of Judaism in Palestine. There’s a very low chance of a Greek speaker in Thessaloniki during the 1st century CE, for example, having ever heard of John the Baptist. If one wanted to extol Jesus’s authority as the son of god, I imagine it would behove one to excise the story altogether. In fact, if you recall, baptism plays no role in the rest of Mark. Jesus baptizes no one. In my view, the best possible reason to include this story is because John’s movement was interwoven, somehow, with Jesus’s ministry and it was too big of a fact to ignore. And Mark, without the development of higher Christology by later Proto-Orthadox churches, simply didn’t see this as an “embarrassment.” I think that this is a better argument for Jesus’s baptism by John as a historical fact.

Jesus: Disciple of John the Baptist

According to the two oldest sources on the life of Jesus…the Gospel of Mark and the hypothetical Q Source(s) theoretically preserved in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke…the very first thing that happens is Jesus’s baptism by John the Baptist. The existence of this apocalyptic preacher, often thought of as the forerunner of Jesus, is independently confirmed by Josephus later in the first century.

This has led many scholars to believe that Jesus was a disciple of the Baptizer before starting his own ministry. The baptism by John is also considered one of only two events that nearly every scholar believes actually happened in Jesus’s life (the other being the crucifixion). Reasons for believing this is simple: if followers of Jesus really believed he was god, why would early Christians have included stories that made him appear subservient to John?

However, if the synoptic Gospels are any indication, Jesus’s theology would have differed significantly from John’s. John seemingly advocated for an ascetic lifestyle that lacked any hint of universalism that characterized Jesus’s ministry. At some point, it would appear, there was a philosophical break between John and Jesus, possibly caused by John’s execution by Herod Antipas (an event also recorded by Josephus). This break could have been the impetus for Jesus’s ministry.

In my view, Jesus’s connections to John’s movement would have been too well known for early Christian writers to conceal. Therefore (much like the crucifixion) John the Baptist was integrated into Christian theology…as a “forerunner” to Jesus…to cover up what would have otherwise been an embarrassment.

https://jamestabor.com/was-jesus-a-follower-of-john-the-baptist-an-ancient-hebrew-matthew-offers-new-evidence/

The above link is from biblical scholar James Tabor, formerly of UNC Charlotte. I’ve mentioned previously that I sometimes find him a little gullible, but he usually makes interesting arguments. In the article, looking at a Hebrew translation of the Gospel of Matthew, Tabor observes that Jesus is, in fact, seen as lesser than John the Baptist. While ancient historians did state that Matthew was originally composed in Hebrew, insofar as I am aware, the Gospels that we have today were seemingly written entirely in Greek, meaning that these historians were mistaken in their belief. For this reason, I don’t put too much weight into Tabor’s claims. BUT, I add it here to highlight how early Christianity was far from uniform in its theology. In fact, it would look quite alien compared to contemporary Christianity.

jesus the cynic?

It’s interesting to view Jesus scholarship over the last 50 years. Most of it seems to reflect more on the political climate of the era it was written rather than on the actual historical Jesus, i.e. by turning Jesus into “Jesus the Revolutionary”, “Jesus the Mystic”, “Jesus the Philosopher”,etc.

It’s an easy mistake to make. Arguably I make it when I refer to Jesus as a “populist” figure of the time (I don’t mean that as a compliment. I mean that in its most literal sense: Jesus was addressing working class problems in a religious/political context.) It’s very difficult to separate our biases from the subject being analyzed, especially one as controversial as the historicity of Jesus.

I think there’s a (growing) minority consensus that Jesus took some influence from the Cynics. Some quack scholars might even say he was an outright Cynic.

I think this is an interesting question. In my view, the majority of mainstream scholars, both Christian and secular, wish to paint Jesus as a figure that almost emerged from a vacuum. It makes sense actually. All of the earliest, independently attested documents (The hypothetical Q…which survives almost in its entirety between the Gospels of Matthew and Luke…the epistles of Paul, Gospel of Mark, and Josephus) make no mention of Jesus’s origins (Q and Mark both start with the Baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist). So an attempt to say anything about Jesus’s influences, other than that of John the Baptist, would be pure conjecture. But there are some interesting parallels between Jesus and the Cynics: Mark 6:8, the location of Nazareth and its proximity to an apparent hotbed of Cynicism, Jesus’s confrontational style and eschewing of fame and fortune, embracing of poverty, etc. etc.

But read the Cynic texts. To the Cynics, Diogenes was their “Christ figure”. They all tried to emulate him. And to be honest, he was a disgusting asshole. While Diogenes definitely had his influence, I doubt he would have accumulated very many personal followers. I mean, many might have tried to ACT like him, but there’s no way anyone could have spent more than 10 minutes around him. Jesus, meanwhile, was probably trying to do something entirely different and would have certainly disapproved of things like…I dunno…MASTURBATING and SHITTING in public.

In my humble view, the Cynic modus operandi was likely something that was in the air at the time which some itinerant and apocalyptic preachers might have adopted. But just because that aesthetic was in vogue at the moment doesn’t mean that they were practicing Cynics.

While it’s fun to speculate, the simplest explanation is probably the correct one: Jesus was an apocalyptic Jewish preacher preaching to a mostly Jewish audience.

was Jesus an ascetic?

I don’t know man, I wasn’t there.

I’ll say this though: Jesus at least dabbled in asceticism. Any hard evidence for this? No. And none will ever turn up. BUT the two earliest accounts of Jesus’s life, the Gospel of Mark and the hypothetical “Q source” (which survives in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew) mention Jesus turning to the wilderness after his baptism from John the Baptist.

John the Baptist’s existence can be independently confirmed by Josephus, a first century Jewish historian. This is partly why it is universally agreed upon that the baptism of Jesus by John is a real historical event. The other reason why historians believe this is due to the criterion of embarrassment, which simply means that Jesus’s associations with John the Baptist would have been well known enough that it had to of been accounted for by early Christian writers, despite Jesus’s superiority to John.

It’s difficult to establish any degree of certainty from this period. Was John the Baptist an ascetic? It certainly appears that he had those tendencies from the surviving texts. It’s has even been suggested that he was an Essene, a “semi-ascetic” Jewish sect from the first century. Could Jesus have been a follower of John? We know that they met at least once, and the Gospels (whatever their historical worth) say that Jesus immediately did something ascetic-like after that meeting.

I like questions like these because it helps contextualize this era. I personally think that Jesus did ascetic-like things and might’ve ran with a few ascetic groups. But I don’t think he thought of himself ascetic or even monastic. Like I said, the historical information contained in the Gospels are dubious and hard facts will likely never appear, but I think it’s important to look at the language of the Gospels.

Mark and the “Q” source (or possible sources) seem to address a rural audience, meaning that Jesus likely focused his mission on the poor or “working class”. There are obvious problems with this assumption, the main one being that the entire New Testament is written in Koine Greek while the poor in Galilee and Judea, including Jesus, spoke Aramaic (plus the Gospels are written 40 years after the crucifixion of Jesus). How much of Jesus’s message was changed between his death and the written accounts is impossible to determine. Despite these problems though, I do think that Mark and Q are more than likely correct in Jesus’s focus.

So as I’ve said before, I think that Jesus was a religious-populist figure, and as we often find in populist movements, leaders often take a “postmodern” turn by becoming (as Apostle Paul later found out) “all things to all people”. This is why so many people can have so many different interpretations on what happened.