Scholars generally agree that the Gospel according to Mark was the first one of the four Gospels written, and that Luke and Matthew were written subsequently with knowledge of the book of Mark, but also with a secondary source – known as ‘Q’. Much of what appears in Luke and Matthew seems to have been written on the template set down by Mark. Where Mark is concise, Matthew and Luke are verbose. Due to the source ‘Q’, there are stories shared in Matthew and Luke that aren’t present in Mark. Apparently, Mark was the source of the narrative, while Q possessed a collection of stories and teachings.
It is supposed that the four books of the Gospels were written for different audiences, but record the same events. The expectation for continuity is so great that many modern believers deliberately create an amalgam “gospel” from the material in the four Gospels by throwing out any perceived conflicts and combining all the stories into a single timeline. The resulting combination is a story different from the one told in any single Gospel, yet is perceived as being more true. Each Gospel story is distinct and presents such different perspectives that they should cause the reader to wonder if they are the same events.
So far as we know, Mark is the narrative source of this story. Regardless of whether this was an eyewitness account or if he made it up on the spot, the person who wrote it had a specific reason to do so, and enough political clout and financial power to have such a book created and distributed throughout the Empire. We cannot assume that the books of the Gospels looked the same in the 2nd century as they do in the 21st. We cannot assume that the book of Mark originally created is reflected in the works we have today. The best we can do is to compare to versions from less than a thousand years ago and whatever scraps of parchment can be found in the Syrian desert.
What we can assume is that the creation of a scroll or book in the first century was an expensive and time-consuming activity limited to the small fraction of elite Imperial citizens. Parchment was expensive, ink was expensive, and training people to read and write was expensive. A copy of a book took weeks and would cost more than a small farm to produce. No one casually wrote and distributed a book; only the upper class had the capacity to purchase or enjoy a book. We can’t assume that people created or possessed books for the same reasons then that they do now. We have to assume that the creation of the Gospels was a deliberate act, that it was carefully crafted and engineered, and that every word used was precious and carefully selected to serve multiple ends.
When we look at an English translation of the Gospels, with their chapter and verse delineation and concordance references in the margin, there’s a lot of structure and shape now present in the Gospels that wasn’t there in the original. There’s a good chance the original Greek text didn’t use punctuation, except perhaps for some indication of sentence endings. It certainly didn’t have red ink for certain voices, thematic section titles, or verse and chapter markings. A modern English translation will include punctuation and spaces between words and paragraphs, with important nouns capitalized and important phrases italicized. In a German translation, all nouns are capitalized. All this imparts a kind of meaning that wasn’t part of the original versions of the text.
Modern readers of the Gospels must rely on additional information to make sense of the stories told. These stories depend on the audience knowing things about Roman culture and history, and about the state of Roman politics at the time of the stories. Without this external context, a great many misleading meanings can be generated from the Biblical text. Many Christian readers are told the Early Church myth, which posits that the first Churches were created by the Apostles, who traveled all over the world and became bishops in the biggest cities they wound up in. Further, the popularity of the church spread among slaves and women, despite widespread and persistent persecution, until the men were forced to acknowledge it when Constantine listened to his mother and became Christian.
The text of the Gospels is notoriously confusing, with unexpected turns of phrase in every chapter. Folks who use the Early Church myth as the context for their reading of the New Testament inevitably find a few troublesome verses that they simply have to skip over or decide are copyist errors for failing to conform. From a logical standpoint, this lack of comprehension indicates that the context itself is incorrect. It is the context that is misleading the reader about what is being read. One must assume that if one reads these books in the correct context, every verse would make sense.
There is an historically accurate context one can use to understand the development of Christianity, and this context explains who wrote the Gospels and why, and how Christianity became the exclusive faith of empire. In this context, Christianity was the organic result of centuries of political transformation by the Roman Empire, a product of Roman cultural traditions and political realities faced by different Imperial families.
Specifically, Christianity was a product of the Imperial cult system, constructed to celebrate a specific imperial family as inherently Roman and worthy of rule. The Flavian Imperial cult boasted of the military victories of the family, and the inherent rightness of Roman culture. After a few civil wars, this cult was cut loose from Imperial control, and in the 2nd century formed into proto-Christianity that developed into “Arian” Christianity in the 3rd century, and from there into “Trinitarian” Christianity in the 4th century.
Students of Biblical exegesis have long known that there were many changes and additions made both deliberately and accidentally to the original books as part of the copying process. I propose Constantine significantly added to and changed the New Testament texts, such that the books of John and Revelations were added, Luke was broken into Luke and Acts, and more text was added to Luke. It’s not clear when the Epistles of Paul were added, but probably during the 2nd or 3rd centuries. The texts present during the original Flavian era were likely only the first three Gospels, and a handful of non-Pauline epistles. As such, it is expected that whatever material found in Mark would have been a part of the original Flavian cult.
Reading the Gospels from this context does, in fact, produce a remarkably different result. This is an attempt to read Mark through this lens, and explain – at least to myself – what all this was supposed to mean.
For the Greek text, I’m reading from the Septuagint; the Latin Bible used is the Vulgata Clementina (2006). Unless otherwise noted, English translations are from the New American Standard Bible (1995).
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