My Understanding of What Mark Was Trying to Express with his Gospel

One of my regular readers - 'Dimitris' - has asked me to clarify what I think the 'proto-Christianity' of Mark looked like so I am reprinting a post from November to help explain matters to him. As you will see the style of my old posts was more confrontational. I apologize in advance but I am very busy today and can't spend a lot of time 'fixing' what was originally written. At the very least you get the idea of what I am suggesting emerges from all my research. Sorry if some of you have read this before ...

I have to confess that I think that ninety percent of the things written about early Christianity are completely misguided. It's not that I think I am smarter than 'real' academics (to some extent I think I have joined the ranks of 'real' academics with the two articles I just published in 'real' academic journals'). It's just that while I admire hard work and people that work hard, there is nothing that can take the place of asking the right questions.

New Testament scholars typically ask the wrong questions in their published works because they are afraid of exposing how little we - and they - actually know with any degree of certainty about earliest Christianity.

Of course no one can know everything there is to know about everything. Indeed there is often times just too much knowledge to keep track of within a given discipline let alone crossing over into another field of research. As such most of us carry out our research within very tightly define parameters and then - at the end of the day - find it difficult to get people interested in our 'little discoveries' because the world is filled with other 'little people' like ourselves.

Yet as I have said time and again at this blog there is one task that has a conspicuous lack of volunteers in the 'business' of scholarship - the job of taking a wrecking ball to the whole study of early Christianity and starting over again WITHOUT all the inherited presuppositions.

Scholars like to pretend that we can go forward with certainty that the surviving tradition of Christianity which emerged from a connected nexus of writers stemming from Irenaeus of Rome (I never identify him as 'of Lyons') is an authentic representation of what the beliefs of the tradition were going back to the earliest apostolic community. I of course shake my head in disbelief at their basic acceptance of Irenaeus and his claims of being 'anchored' in the apostolic witness of Polycarp (Florinus' implicit refutation of Irenaeus claims about Polycarp's true beliefs essentially casts doubt over Irenaeus' testimony).

The truth is that it is quite easy to poke holes in Irenaeus' story from a number of different angles. Irenaeus is not nearly as reliable a witness as some (indeed many) might want to imagine and in the end our successful refutation of his credibility leaves the whole study of earliest Christianity drifting in a void.

It is so utterly unbelievable that scholars fail to piece together even something resembling a 'history of the golden age of Catholic Christianity.' They prefer instead to bury there heads in the nuts and bolts of Irenaeus' surviving texts without working up the courage to piece together a historical context to put them in.

Jerome spells it out for us when he says that Irenaeus' authority coincided almost exactly with the rule of the Emperor Commodus. Eusebius makes it very explicit that the reign of this most blood thirsty and despicable rulers was nothing short of the first golden age for the Church. Irenaeus seems to acknowledge that it is self-evident that he and many of his Catholic co-religionists sat in the Imperial court of Commodus. A number of contemporaries however regarded 'being in the pocket' of Caesar as nothing short of the fall of Christianity from its state of grace and a replaying of the Golden Calf incident.

As I have noted many times here, the fact that most religious scholars refuse to develop anything resembling a historical sense for how the 'immaculate Church' could have gotten into bed with a tyrant (whose mistress happened to be a Christian) represents nothing short of gross negligence on their part. Scholars simply want to take Irenaeus and the other Church Fathers after him at face value. They are not for the most part interest in doing the hard work of dissecting truth from fantasy in his writings.

The question of 'where did Irenaeus get the authority to mandate what orthodoxy and heresy was' is never even so much as investigated.

I have always had my suspicions about this 'first golden age of the Catholic Church.' I like to think I know human nature and can't possibly believe that you could get any one in antiquity to agree on anything without the threat of a big stick. Irenaeus' work when read on its own makes little intuitive sense because we're not seeing 'the big stick' behind him. It was the perception that Irenaeus was well-connected (which he himself infers in Against the Heresies Book iv, Chapter 30) which provided the 'incentive' to start the ball moving toward great ecumenism in the Church.

Irenaeus established a new fourfold gospel revelation which remained the preferred expression of Christianity throughout the reigns of Commodus (177 - 192 CE), Septimus Severus (193 - 211) and Alexander Severus. Of course it is difficult to PROVE exactly how this relationship between Church and State played out in the third century with any exact details. Details are difficult to find in the period other than to point to high ranking Catholic officials in the Imperial court down through to the assassination of Alexander Severus (235 CE)

I also happen to believe that over course of the century before Diocletian reasserted Roman authority over the Empire, it became impossible to ignore that asserting control over Christianity as a body was intimately intertwined with that objective. Christianity was in effect a separate governing body within the Empire. There was an ecclesiastical hierarchy which was witnessed from the time of Hadrian which - I have always argued - was originally rooted in Alexandria, a city of great strategic significance to the Empire as a whole.

In my estimation it would have been nothing short of gross negligence on the part of any Emperor NOT TO HAVE ATTEMPTED such a 're-engineering' of Christianity in the Commodian period or earlier.

The point now, is to disentangle ourselves from this 're-engineering' project which occurred in the late second and early third century and battled its way through to Nicaea and start again with an understanding of the tradition as the creative vision of a guy named Mark as this is the name of the person almost universally acknowledged to have written the original gospel.

I think we also have to disentangle ourselves from the inherited Protestant interpretation of what the gospel and the New Testament represented and how they were originally used. A text called 'the gospel' written by a Jew named Mark must necessarily have been conceived as the new, perfected Torah - the revelation prophesied by Moses in his Great Song (Deuteronomy 32).

I know and accept that most New Testament scholars have an embarrassing lack of knowledge of what Judaism is or how to read or interpret the so-called 'Old Testament' and this alone accounts from the general unworkability of most of their models for the origin of Christianity.

When I get to this initial plateau in my reworking of the origins of Christianity - the simple statement that a Jew named Mark wrote the original 'gospel' for the tradition - I like to stop writing or even thinking about anything in particular and just soak up 'the moment' as it were in the same way that I might stop during a hike up a mountain just to appreciate the view from a small increase in altitude.

Just this idea alone - that a Jew named Mark wrote the original 'gospel' which was the new Torah - is enough to any Jewish person or person with a reasonable working knowledge of Judaism to anticipate what we are going to see at a 'higher altitude.'

After all, Mark couldn't have 'known' that other evangelists were coming after him to complete the divinely sanctioned 'quaternion,' could he? Oh I forgot traditional New Testament scholars don't think about 'Mark' as a person. He is just 'one of the four' simply because Irenaeus mandates that this is so.

Yet let us for once go beyond what Irenaeus tells us we should believe to be true. Let us go back to the original Semitic soil from which the plant of Christianity original grew.

The man who received this great revelation - a revelation of such magnitude that not even Moses and the 'first Israel' were worthy of its reception - simply can't be conceived as being anything short of a person of equal greatness to the revelation. The example of Mohammed is worth our consideration or Mani among the Manichaeans or indeed the Apostle among the so-called 'Marcionites.'

It is among this last group that I necessarily find myself drawn time and time again given the fact that the preservation of the name 'Marcionites' in Syriac in the writings of Aphrahat the Persian stage clearly witnesses that they were in fact followers of St. Mark.

I have argued time and again that the Marcionite gospel is witnessed by countless statements in the Church Fathers as Mark's original gospel. No Hippolytus certainly did not subscribe to this view but he reports a belief which was current in his day and openly ridicules it.

Of course the fact that somebody - undoubtedly Marcionites - believed that their gospel was a 'gospel of Mark' is very significant. The fact that it is ignored by New Testament scholars is only testimony to their devotion to Irenaeus.

I think loyalty is a great quality ...

... in a dog.

For a scholar it is a vice. Honest scholars are supposed to go where the evidence leads them, not lead the evidence back to conventional belief structures.

The unconditional acceptance of Irenaeus' statement that the Marcionite gospel was a corrupt version of Luke has led scholarship to ignore Hippolytus' (and a handful of other scholars otherwise equally devoted to Irenaeus as they). The proper question of course here would be what caused Hippolytus to contradict his master. The question is never asked because again it casts doubt over Irenaeus' testimony.

Hippolytus does that on a number of occasions in his Against the Heresies proving that even this ancient dogmatist was more open-minded and truthful than contemporary scholarship.

That's a distinction would should shame anyone.

Whatever the case may be, there is enough evidence that once we disentangle ourselves from an uncritical acceptance on Irenaeus' testimony that the Marcionite gospel was considered by its believers as the ur-text of our canonical Gospel of Mark. Yes it was 'longer' than canonical Mark. Yes it 'incorporated' Matthaean,' 'Lukan,' and 'Johannine' material but it began and ended with what basically appears in Mark and had pronounced western textual readings of Mark throughout.

The point of all of this again is that if you divorce what amounts to being my 'educated guess' that the historical Mark was Marcus Agrippa we are left - just by my identification of 'Marcion' as the real head of the Markan tradition - with a new understanding of what Mark was 'saying' with his gospel.

I find it impossible not to see that the typical Alexandrian emphasis on the 'divinity of Jesus' (vis. 'monophysitism' as such) was rooted in 'Marcionite' thought (which consistently emphasized that Jesus was angelic having no material nature in reality, i.e. only 'seeming' to).

I will forgo connecting Irenaeus' many statements about 'those who prefer Mark' and their interest in positing 'another Christ who was not Jesus' (and its reflection in various statements in our earliest representative of Alexandrian orthodoxy - viz. Clement of Alexandria). The idea that this 'separation' of Christ and Jesus necessarily meant that the 'Christ who was not Jesus' was a royal figure who fulfilled the two advent tradition of Alexandrian writers and especially Origen will also be deliberately avoided so we can concentrate on the other aspect of this original Markan theology - the idea that Jesus must have been EXCLUSIVELY interpreted to be the angel of the presence.

I want to emphasize that monophysitism must necessarily have been developed as monarchianism in its most primitive form - viz. the idea that Jesus was just the living presence of the Father. He wasn't 'the Son' according our familiar and inherited sensibilities. Jesus was just conceived as the Logos (an distinction which emerges time and again in various Arian offshoots). While we have been preconditioned to see the terms 'Son' and 'Logos' as interchangeable, the original Alexandrian tradition did not. The Son as I understand it was originally that 'Christ who was not Jesus' figure, the 'heir' to Jesus who had 'real' physicality and sat in a real throne where he became the living embodiment of the coming together of the three elements of the trinity - i.e. the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

I suspect that this Sabellian conception was mistrusted by the Imperial authorities from the time of Commodus because it essentially posited the existence of a figure higher than Caesar - i.e. the Patriarch of Alexandria. Indeed if the Christians wouldn't swear before Caesar BUT DID BOW DOWN before their Patriarch it was in a very primitive - indeed in an almost playground mentally - suggested that the Patriarch was superior to the Emperor.

I think this is AND ONLY THIS was the real basis to the persecutions in the century between Commodus and Diocletian. It also explains the re-engineering effort too. The whole business of a Church founded after St. Peter was just a way of making the seat of power in Christianity closer to - or even indistinguishable - from Caesar. I will develop this at greater length later.

For the moment let us get away from the contentious ideas that there even was a 'Christ who wasn't Jesus' at the heart of the earliest Markan tradition (Irenaeus makes explicit reference to it so I don't know how it can be refuted) and end our brief discussion here with the corollary of this original argument that Jesus was a wholly divine figure who mission was to descend from heaven to help perfect humanity through his Christ.

The easiest way to express this understanding is to look to the parallel persecutions directed against the Samaritans by the Roman community - a community which was rooted in a religious reformer who was also named 'Mark.' The chronicles of Abul-Fataḥ make clear that in almost every period where Alexandrian Christians of St Mark the Samaritans of Marqe were undergoing a similar re-engineering.

Without getting into the specifics for the moment the easiest way to reconcile the two traditions is to suppose that Marqe was a Dosithean. The opening words of the gospel similarly start with a revelation to a Dosithean - the Samaritan woman Foti. The theology of Marqe is so obviously Pauline (it is 'Marcionite' even by virtue of it being 'of Mark' i.e. Aramaic marqioni).

The easiest way to express this similarly is to venture into a brief discussion of some of the Samaritan writings of Marqe which have a canonical status just below that of the writings of Moses (Marqe is openly identified as an expression of an apostle 'like Moses' in several references in their literature dealt at much greater length in my book).

The Samaritan Mark (Marqe) begins his exegesis in Book Four of the Mimar Marqe with talk of a “new creation” at the end of the age (when presumably the “returning Moses will appear”). He takes special interest in the third and fourth verses of Deuteronomy 32: “I will proclaim the name of the LORD, [I will] praise the greatness of our God! He is the Rock (tsur), his works are perfect, and all his ways are just,” to show that at the end of time humanity itself would become transformed by a power referred to in the Torah as “the glory.” The Rock, or tsur, is equated with the very concept of tamym po’olo [Deut 32:4] by the Samaritan apostle Mark - i.e. as if "the Rock" was the "perfect work” of God - in the very same manner as our apostle Paul viz. “the rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4).

In another hymn of Marqe, this time from Book One of the Mimar, he illustrates this same principle. The reader should notice the idea of God (Alahota) establishing creation and then his 'glory' (kavod) coming at the end of time to perfect what was originally just 'good.' I suspect Jesus was essentially the Christian equivalent of this 'glory Lord':

Divinity appeared and established the covenant; glory appeared and magnified what was good.
The angels came to magnify what was glorious and they were all assembled for Adam.
Divinity formed him and the breath of life was breathed in him; glory made him complete with a great spirit; the two of them were clad in two crowns of great light.
Divinity put in him a perfect mind and Glory gave him powerful illumination.
Divinity also glorified him with speech and Glory glorified him with perfect knowledge.
The angels were witnesses to him of what he would do and they are all mentioned gathered in every place where God is mentioned in Truth.

I just wanted to give an illustration that there is another explanation for how the Marcionites likely interpreted the NT. Not a complete rejection of the OT but the idea that the Law was the first step in a process of purification and perfection which was completed with the re-appearance of 'his glory' at the end times.

This I think was Mark's point in writing the gospel AT THE TIME OF THE DESTRUCTION OF THE JERUSALEM TEMPLE. It represented a new way forward after the (permanent collapse) of the traditional path of attaining righteousness ...