What Would Have Happened To A Document that Said 'Agrippa was the Messiah Not Jesus'?

There are objections to all kinds of things in this world. Some people don't think Obama has a birth certificate. Others used to think George Bush didn't have a brain. The list goes on and on but the bottom line is still the same. No one really thinks that Obama was born outside of America in the same way that no one really believed that George Bush was stupid. It was all and is all a game that partisans play to make the 'other side' prove something.

Prove to me that your guy isn't an idiot or a Muslim-Socialist-radical-racist.

As long as everyone knows this is all b-----t, it can be a lot of fun.

I happened to have written a book which tried to identify the apostle Mark. Everyone and their uncle comes up to me now and says, 'I don't see any definitive proof for your assertion,' or 'why aren't there more footnotes in the book,' or any number of other objections.

I read one review were someone even complained that I use too many 'obscure references.' How come I don't know about all of this? he asked.

The short answer of course is - that's because you're an idiot but you can't say that sort of thing, at least in public.

The truth is that I spent a lot of time dwelling on the fringes of New Testament studies while you were reading the New York Times or getting your real estate license. I befriended members of the Samaritan community and wine, dined and mined their intellect for new ways to look at old problems to do with the Bible and related literature.

Instead of going out to clubs on the weekends I spent time with members of the Coptic Orthodox Church learning about their tradition too. I don't have much of a social life nor do I have a lot of friends.

In the end, coming from a persecuted minority community within Judaism, having my mother and grandfather survive the Holocaust under extra-ordinary circumstances, having my father and his father shipped off to a Siberian prisoner of war camp and hanging around Samaritans, Copts and other people who almost continually persecuted for the last two thousand years it doesn't seem all that strange to me that almost nothing survives about Mark in any of these traditions.

Unlike most people, I see persecution as an inevitable part of the human condition.

Only the ignorant European whose culture has been the hammer to the rest of the world's anvil expects their to be 'tangible documentation' for every belief. After all, HIS libraries weren't destroyed, HIS religious heritage has remained basically intact since the third century.

So when you look to the Samaritan culture for instance, they have this commentary on the Pentateuch by a guy named Mark which ranks second in importance to the Torah itself.

But they don't have a bloody clue who Mark is.

How could Samaritans have their second holiest book by a guy named Mark and their whole religious system engineered or re-engineered by this guy Mark and know almost nothing about him other than his name? Is it because they are somehow 'inferior' to us? Or less intelligent?

No, they just had the stuffing kicked out of them for the last two thousand years.

If you ask them who Mark is, they will basically shrug their shoulders and say they don't know. However if you press them they will tell you something odd. They will say that he was 'like Moses' or that he was 'the son of Titus' but really have little to add to the conversation after that.

I don't think that any of this should seem all that strange to anyone here. After all most of us use a thing called 'the Gospel' which most of think was written by a guy named Mark who we know little or nothing about.

Given that our tradition is based on Peter or John it may not be that surprising that we haven't a clue who the original evangelist is. But if you go to visit with Copts and listen to what they have to say about their Mark you find it remarkably similar to the situation among the Samaritans.

Yes, there are stories about who the father of Mark is but they are just as conflicting as among the Samaritans. Yes we know Mark wrote a book which - like the Samaritans - is now viewed as being centrally focused on someone else's status as either the messiah or the apostle.

Yet if you really look closely it is not that hard to see how Mark MIGHT have been originally making the case that HE was the messiah or the one who Moses prophesied would come.

The problem again is that those who guard these traditions have been so traumatized by their abuse that they are incapable of making sense of it (or at least openly expounding those beliefs to outsiders).

So it is that I not all concerned that there isn't a piece of paper lying around somewhere from antiquity that says 'Marcus Agrippa wrote the gospel and used it to have Jesus proclaim his own messianic advent.' There can be no doubt that such a document would not have survived antiquity in the same way that information about Mark in the Coptic and Samaritan communities was not allowed to survive.

The abuse on the souls of these cultures is proof enough that they knew something they weren't supposed to know. The question as always is whether people of the historically dominant culture in the world are capable of understanding suffering - not merely as an individual concept - but rather the suffering that comes from being a persecuted faith or a persecuted group.

If that is possible then prove it to me by stop expecting there to be 'explicit testimony' surviving about the very thing the Imperial government worked so hard to destroy - period!