At Christmas thoughts do not naturally turn to Mary's crazy, problem child of the Gospel of Mark

Bart Ehrman, December 2014, here:

Mark does not narrate an account of Jesus’ birth. Mark never says a word about Jesus’ mother being a virgin. Mark does not presuppose that Jesus had an unusual birth of any kind. And in Mark (you don’t find this story in Matthew and Luke!!), Jesus’ mother does not seem to know that he is a divinely born son of God. On the contrary, she thinks he has gone out of his mind. Mark not only lacks a virgin birth story; it seems to presuppose that they [sic] never could have been a virgin birth. Or Mary would understand who Jesus is. But she does not.

It’s no wonder that when Matthew and Luke took over so many of the stories of Mark, they decided, both of them, *not* to take over Mark 3:20-21. They had completely different view of Jesus’ mother and his birth.

The post-modern academy is the pre-modern academy but more perverse, arguing about how many gay angels can fit on the head of a pin

Seen here, where righteous Lot (2 Peter 2:7) might as well be the inhospitable bad guy and welcoming gay people might as well be the same thing as Abraham welcoming the Trinity at Mamre:

The men of Sodom were not “gay” in even the remotest sense of contemporary LGBT identity if for no other reason than the ancients did not share modern conceptions of sexual orientation. ... as Longman rightly insists, “We should not consider the city of Sodom to be filled with men who have same-sex attraction. Rather, these men want[ed] to humiliate their foreign visitors” through a heinous act of sexual violence. ... The ancient audience of this text would thus have seen the “abominable”/tôʿēbāh sexual acts of the men of Sodom as the culmination of gross inhospitality, not as sexual desire per se, and certainly not as a signifier of any kind of underlying LGBT sexual orientation. ... the sin of Sodom does not pertain to sexual orientation as conceptualized today. The men of Sodom were not sinful for “being gay,” but for attempting to commit an appalling crime—the humiliation of vulnerable foreign guests through an act of sexual violence. Despite the ugly caricature in Jack Chick’s Doom Town, the men of Sodom are emphatically not representative of loving, consensual same-sex couples today.

We're supposed to believe a town full of heterosexual men bent on sodomizing not Lot's daughters but his male guests is a more plausible tale?

Has a greater calumny been invented by the gay mafia against the heterosexual majority than this? Not even the Red Army invading Berlin in 1945 was said to have stooped to such lows, raping every German woman in sight.

The account in Genesis is obviously an etiological tale, invented to explain theologically the historical fact of the destruction of the cities of the plain in approximately 1700 B.C., as a place where predatory "men inflamed with lust for one another" (Romans 1:27) were fried to a crisp by "a Tunguskalike, cosmic airburst event". 

No, no, no, say our experts, defying the ancient theological explanations.

Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.  

-- Jude 1:7

We live in an age of delusion where facts exist merely as fodder to be blown to smithereens to please our perverted whims, including the fact of predatory homosexual promiscuity, which has existed proverbially since time immemorial for a reason, because it's real:

A 1978 study reported that 75 percent of male homosexuals had been with 100 or more partners; 28 percent, the largest subcategory, reported more than 1,000 partners; 79 percent said more than half their partners were strangers; and 79 percent said more than half their partners were men with whom they had sex only once. Another survey 16 years later found that while 67.6 percent of men and 75.5 percent of women had only one sex partner in the previous year, only 2.6 percent of men and 1.2 percent of women engaging in same-sex relationships had thus limited themselves. Supporters of homosexuality, and advocates of gay marriage, rarely acknowledge the many partners gays have -- including those living together as couples.

Christians do not believe in the historical Jesus

Bart Ehrman, here:

The overwhelming majority of Christians do not, and never did, believe in the historical Jesus — despite what they may say or think. Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher of the imminent destruction of his world. That’s not whom Christians believe in. They believe in the God Christ. Had Jesus not been proclaimed God, nothing like the Christian faith would have emerged. And we would not have our form of civilization.

Contra Bart Ehrman, Albert Schweitzer Thought It Entirely Plausible That Jesus Thought He Was The Coming Son Of Man

'The Baptist appears, and cries: "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." Soon after that comes Jesus, and in the knowledge that he is the coming Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and He throws Himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him. Instead of bringing in the eschatological conditions, He has destroyed them. The wheel rolls onward, and the mangled body of the one immeasurably great man, who was strong enough to think of Himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend history to His purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is His victory and His reign.'

-- Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 3rd ed., tr. W. Montgomery, London, 1954, pp. 368f.

Bart Ehrman Is Mistaken To Think Jesus Thought The Son Of Man Was Someone Other Than Himself

Here is Bart Ehrman most recently on this subject:

And [Jesus] talked about someone else, rather than himself, as the coming Son of Man. ... His message is about the coming kingdom to be brought by the Son of Man. He always keeps himself out of it. ... I have already argued that he did not consider himself to be the Son of Man, and so he did not consider himself to be the heavenly angelic being who would be the judge of the earth. 

Against this Mark 2:10f is plain enough:

But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (he saith to the sick of the palsy,) I say unto thee, Arise, and take up thy bed, and go thy way into thine house.

Of course, Ehrman evidently discounts the authenticity of this and similar sayings on the grounds of their character as miracle stories, but as Albert Schweitzer taught us long ago, the thorough-going eschatological interpretation means that we can accept the presentations of both Matthew and Mark pretty much as they are without doing serious violence to them.

 

Of course, there are other self-referential examples which are not miracle stories.

 

And it came to pass, that, as they went in the way, a certain man said unto him, Lord, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest. And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head. 

 

-- Luke 9:57f.

To be clear, Ehrman is right to stress that it was God who would initiate the events of the heavenly appearance of the Son of Man to execute judgment on the world, not Jesus. Indeed, Jesus is completely passive in this regard throughout the Gospels (which incidentally completely nullifies the zealot hypothesis), and even right up to the bitter end, only giving up it seems on the cross: "My God, My God, Why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46/Mark 15:34). The problem of how Jesus still imagined himself in this role of Son of Man even as he tells the high priest at his trial that the high priest would see the Son of Man coming on the clouds remains nearly insoluble, not to mention that the subsequent Johannine interpretation and the presentation of the exalted Jesus in Acts performing the comparatively most trivial, even superstitious, divine interventions completely reject it. But the value of Schweitzer's original conceptualization is that Jesus thought this way at several points during his ministry but remained undeterred by events which showed him that he was mistaken, especially early on in Matthew 10 when he thought the end would come before the disciples had finished going throughout Israel on their mission trip (an expectation by the way which is completely incompatible with a suffering servant of the later passion narrative and for that reason absolutely remarkable for its survival as witness to Jesus' original self-conception). And then it seems Jesus expected it again on his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, only to be disappointed again, and then in the Garden of Gethsemane when he boasts that he could call down the heavenly legions, and then finally at his trial. But in all instances Jesus holds himself back as it were, dare we say it, the way only a crazed fanatic does when faced with the immediate improbability of his own false expectation.

There is more than a hint of mental illness in all of this, which many people suffering from bipolar disorder will instantly recognize. And we can see Jesus' progeny in the many end-time enthusiasts of our own time, whose message often attracts a certain sort of personality.

It is not meant as an insult to someone worshipped as a god, nor to his worshippers.

Desperate times produce extremes of their own, for which we should above all show compassionate understanding. 

You Got a Friend?

It will probably come as a surprise to many readers that the late-1946 film "It's a Wonderful Life" wasn't terribly successful in its debut. The movie placed 26th in revenues for 1947. One reviewer called attention to its unreality and "sentimentality," which is underscored in the closing when the angel Clarence, who finally gets his wings, tells George that "no man is a failure who has friends." Audiences fresh off the horrors of war weren't exactly overwhelmed. It took a generation to garner its critical acclaim and to reach its popularity as a Christmas staple, which its creator Frank Capra said in 1984 was sort of like seeing your kid grow up to be president. Obviously something had changed in America. The baby boomers had to take over before the film could really succeed.

In the intervening period the trend has continued in different forms with the buddy movie, a wildly successful television comedy called "Friends," and the meteoric rise of a friends craze on social networks such as Facebook, among others. The thirst for that sentimental something is strong among the boomers, but it gets harder to get a buzz on no matter how much they drink, and the morning after remains lonely, and is getting lonelier. Consider the conclusion of a 2004 study that the average number of confidants per citizen had dropped in America from three to two since 1985, and fully a quarter of the population reported having no friends to confide in at all.

There has been a similar trend toward the sentimental within the church of the boomers, where theology has taken on a distinctly more familiar tone, emphasizing a personal relationship with God and drinking deeply from the well of ideas found in the Gospel of John. There one meets such notions as being "born again" and "knowing" God, and its Jesus talks about friendship in ideal terms: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." These Christians appropriate these ideas and think God is deeply, passionately interested in everything about them and has an individual plan for each and every life, as if Salvation History culminating in the Incarnation was kind of beside the point. What matters in their minds is finding your own divinely appointed purpose in life. It is narcissism writ large.

These developments help explain the penetration of pentecostalism into mainstream Christianity in the 1970's, and the subsequent exodus from mainline Protestantism into conservative "evangelicalism" after that. But the novelty has definitely worn off. Maybe the boomers are finally ready to grow up. While the country today is still overwhelmingly Protestant, self-identification with it has now dropped below 50% and the numbers of the unaffiliated and the sectarian are on the rise. For growing numbers of people it would not be wrong to say that familiarity has bred contempt. More and more books are appearing which recount the de-conversion experiences of people from Bart Ehrman at Princeton University to William Lobdell, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, who wrote Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America-And Found Unexpected Peace.

In the same way the World War II generation was so different temperamentally from its children, it is interesting how the Synoptic tradition, which contains little if any positive teaching on friendship, differs dramatically in substance and in tone from the Fourth Gospel. For example, the Gospel of Matthew warns that "A man's foes shall be they of his own household." Its command to "love your enemies" practically makes friendship irrelevant by annihilating the category itself, which, as we have said before, is characteristic of the religious impulse. For the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels, this abolition of the antonyms occurs at the eschaton, which for him has already dawned: "Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand." Wherever this thorough-going eschatological message of Jesus predominates in the record, conventional social constructions are overthrown. "For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother," in contrast to his actual family which was in the street looking for him in the house where he was teaching. "In the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven."

Cultivating strong friendships is about the last thing on Jesus' mind in part because there simply won't be time for them. The end of all things approaches so fast that one must abandon all traditional roles immediately and follow Jesus. The normal niceties of interaction no longer apply. At one point we see how even his closest associate is rebuked for a misplaced intention to protect him. Jesus may indeed call many to follow him, but few are actually chosen. And even those whom we would call his mates were always kept at a certain distance despite various purported confidences shared, and the record shows that these followers consistently misunderstood him, failed him, and at length even betrayed him. If with Cicero a friend should be as a second self, Jesus didn't just die alone, he lived that way.

Which makes the emergence of the ideal of divine friendship in the Fourth Gospel quite startling: "Henceforth I call you not servants . . . but I have called you friends." Here we meet with a response of interpretation to the failure of the imminent end of the world to materialize. But instead of adopting the later development which we see already at work in the apocalyptic narratives in the Synoptic Gospels where hope of terrestrial transformation is postponed to an indeterminate time in the future, the Fourth Gospel eschews talk of the "second coming." Instead it conceives of the promised kingdom in a new way, located in a celestial venue where Jesus has gone "to prepare a place for you." His kingdom will not come with the Son of Man appearing with the clouds of heaven, but rather "My kingdom is not of this world." This is how the original ideology is neatly transferred by the Fourth Gospel to the unseen world, where it can cause little offence.

The Fourth Gospel's response to the Synoptic tradition also is on display in the way it co-opts the eschaton. One way it does this is through its notion of the coming of the Spirit: "the Father shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth." Another is through the love teaching of Jesus, which no longer emphasizes love of enemies but rather brotherly love within the Christian community: "Love one another, as I have loved you. If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him." Christians will continue to co-exist with other human beings who are still going to hate them and be their enemies. But Christians are to look at it this way: "In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world."

It is interesting how for the Christian community imagined by the Fourth Gospel it is not the Lord's Supper but the washing of one another's feet which Jesus establishes for its social cohesion. "I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you," he says of this custom, instead of "This do in remembrance of me" which he says of the Lord's Supper in the Gospel of Luke. The reason for this is precisely because the Lord's Supper is still understood by the author to be potently invested with the original eschatological significance, which is why there can be no place for an account of its institution in his gospel. It is an issue best left unaddressed, and better yet replaced, in view of the changed circumstances.

When it comes to choosing between variant readings in the manuscripts it is often the case that we choose the more difficult reading because its existence is harder to explain. The same holds true of interpretation. The Fourth Gospel in the main is comparatively more easily explained as derivative of the contents of the Synoptic Tradition. The latter puts us closer to the Jesus of history, but he is a sterner, more urgent, and less friendly figure.