Seriously.
I don't understand the whole approach of Christian scholarship. Why is it we spend so much time trying to understand 'Jesus'? I don't think it matters one iota who Jesus is. All that matters is who Mark, the original author of the gospel, is and I can't believe that all these 'smart' minds haven't seen this before.
If I want to understand Hamlet the play I need to know who Shakespeare is and why he might have written X or Y about Hamlet. Yet when it comes to understanding the gospel - our only source for any information about Jesus - the morons in New Testament scholarship direct us to abandon all established techniques of literary criticism and focus on the protagonist rather than the author.
What gives here?
Is it that they already know - through some supernatural consciousness they inherited from the Church Fathers - that it is impossible to figure out the real historical identity of Mark? If so why aren't we putting these New Testament scholars under the microscope in order to prove once and for all the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit into modern times.
This would be a major breakthrough. It would prove the veracity of the Catholic Church once and for all.
I would however suggest that we actually take the time to look for a Jewish writer named 'Mark' in the first century, a Jewish 'Mark' who can be demonstrated to have been in Galilee during the ministry of Jesus, who can be traced back to Jerusalem so as to be a witness to his historical Passion, who took an active interest in Daniel 9:24 - 27 and its application to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, who was in Paneas in the lead up to the destruction and most importantly - a Jewish 'Mark' who could conceivably be taken to have the authority to write out the new Torah of Israel in an age when the old Law seemed to have come to a fiery end.
Yes I know, most of us don't like to think 'out of the box' but there is more to it than this.
We have been discussing the nexus of 'Jewish' Mark's who believed that only the ten utterances came from heaven and how the evidence points to Marcus Agrippa as the historical figure behind that 'Jewish' Mark.
We also have to consider that the Alexandrian Christian tradition is the one which is - for whatever reason - the most intimately connected with St. Mark and much of its evidence for the identity of this Jewish 'Mark' confirms that he was Marcus Agrippa including:
- his father being named 'Aristobulos'
- his mother being named 'Salome'
- his marriage to Berenice
- his having a secretary named Justus
- his interest in blending Greek philosophy and Jewish scriptural exegesis
- his being an enthroned 'king' in some form who received a (symbolic) coronation in Alexandria in a Jubilee year
Yes there are objections to my identification of Marcus Agrippa, the last king of Israel as St. Mark. There are arguments against any theory. Some of the arguments are more substantial than others. Yet none of them can completely disprove that Marcus Agrippa might have been the historical evangelist. There simply is too much going for the theory. Read my book and find out for yourself.
So let's acknowledge the objections and turn against its detractors. Who then is St. Mark? What is the rest of the original evangelist name after "Marcus ..."?
Oh, we don't know. We can't know. Then how can we say ANYTHING authoritative about the gospel? Oh yes I see. Even though you aren't saying it you still think that in some form it came down from heaven and doesn't even really have a human author.
Well interesting that would have been Marcus Agrippa's opinion too (see previous posts).
Scholarship has failed to find any other viable candidate to account for the evangelist's historical identity because they want to preserve essentially the idea that the gospel had a supernatural origin. Yet we can demonstrate time and again that even this supernatural argument comes from Agrippa. Isn't it time the last king got his due?
If this were a truly scientific field my hypothesis that Agrippa was St. Mark would be accepted until a better explanation came along. As it is scholarship continues to examine the protagonist of the gospel rather than its original author and not surprisingly all its discoveries are ultimately worthless.
Indeed, what would we expect to be the result of making 'the historical Hamlet' the sole investigative tool used to make sense of Shakespeare's play?
Maybe preventing people from making sense of the gospel has been their agenda all along ...
