sophiaserpentia | (no subject) (Reply)

Let's make this a trilogy of readings in modern liberal theology.

This excerpt is from Burton Mack's Who Wrote the New Testament?. Mack is an atheist, or agnostic, member of the Jesus Seminar, and his book makes for pretty dry reading. But some of the information he presents is, IMO, invaluable.

Most readers of the Gospel of Mark soon notice that there are two miracle stories about Jesus and the disciples crossing the sea, and two stories about Jesus feeding a crowd in the open. Why two? This question then triggers other questions about the miracles that take place around and about these major events (Mark 4:35-8:10). Why so many?

In 1970, a study by Paul Achtemeier showed that Mark had used two sets of five miracle stories, each of which had originally been intended to stand on its own. This did not immediately tell us why Mark had used two sets instead of one, but it did suggest that there must have been some rhyme or reason for the set of five stories independantly of the way Mark used them to help compose his gospel. That was because both sets followed the same pattern: first a sea-crossing miracle, then a combination of one exorcism and two healings, ending with an account of feeding a multitude.

...At first glance these stories look like reports of miracles, especially healings, typical for the Greco-Roman age. Hundreds have been collected for comparison, and the genre in general is exactly the same, whether for the miracles from the shrine at Epidauros, those reported of the Greek god of healing Asclepius, or those told about Jesus (Kee 1983). But then some differences begin to be noted. Achtemeier and others have been able to show that... the content of the Jesus stories had a special twist. Themes and certain details seemed to be reminiscent of miracles associated with the epic of Israel. A miraculous sea crossing and a miraculous feeding of the people in the wilderness were standard items in the story of the exodus from Egypt, for instance.... Perhaps, so the suspicion began to develop, some Jesus group wanted to portray Jesus as a founder figure who looked somewhat like Moses and a little like Elijah.

...[T]he problems facing the people in these stories were extreme. They were hopeless cases of illness, including demon possession and death. A closer look showed that the people represented very unlikely candidates for (re-)entry into the society of Israel. According to the purity system, these people were impossibly unclean.... They include a Gerasene, a Syrophoenician, an official (most likely Roman), women, children, the blind, lame, deaf, and dumb. None of these would have been ostracized by Jewish attitudes of the time, but all of them were off the charts whenever the priests ranked the social roles of importance for a working society (Neyrey 1986).

The point turns out to be a wondrous myth of origin for a group of Jesus people. Jesus, the founder of the new movement, was like Moses, the leader of the children of Israel out of Egypt, and like Elijah, the prophet whose appearance would restore the children of Israel to their rightful role as the people of God. But that only underscored the fact that the congregation Jesus led and cared for looked peculiar. It was made up of socially marginal people who did not fit the picture of Israel as the Jewish people. ....

...[T]he contours of a Jesus movement also begin to emerge. It was a movement that had developed quite a strong self-consciousness about itself as a group. The people were ethnically mixed, gathered for meals, had leaders who cared for the association and its needs, perhaps had some way of distributing food among themselves, and may have been in the process of ritualizing and symbolizing their common meals. Here was a Jesus movement that took a look at its members, noticed the social formation taking place, delighted in its novelty, realized how strange they must appear to others, wondered how to imagine themselves in comparison with other peoples, found the comparison with "Israel" fascinating, and had a great time trying out various scenarios before settling on the set of miracles that cast Jesus in the roles of a Moses and an Elijah. pp. 65-67