The Paradox of Marqe

I hope my readers aren't getting too distracted by the seeming familiarity of much of Mark's reinterpretation of Exodus. Here is how you have to read the material. You have to think in terms of paradox of discovering someone like Mark at the core of the surviving Samaritan tradition.

Talk to a Samaritan and they will tell you that they are the oldest sect, that their tradition is so and so many centuries old, that it preserves the original teaching of Moses etc.

Ask them about Mark and they will tell you how great he was. But what they will fail to tell you - because they don't recognize it themselves - is that Samaritanism is really only as old as this Mark fellow.

Yes of course there were Samaritans before Mark. The writings of Moses even in their Samaritan form are much older than Mark. But that isn't the point.

The central paradox is - how did someone like Mark come to define a tradition which ALWAYS identified itself as 'the guardians' of the original orthodoxy?

This is one of the reasons why I have such disdain for scholarship. A good scholar is like an attentive lover and the text he studies, his beloved. Above all else, he notices NUANCE. He doesn't just 'jump on top of' material and basically forces his will upon the subject matter.

You know I have been doing too much research when I start developing allegories about making love to ancient texts ...

Nevertheless there is a point here. When reading Marqe - or any important religious text for that matter- you have to try and draw a clear portrait of the author (even if the author - or subsequent editors - want to make it seem as if he has no 'personality' and is merely a 'vessel' for the Holy Spirit).

The paradox of Marqe is that in the second century - or perhaps the late first century as Broadie and I think - this guy Mark managed to define 'orthodoxy' within a tradition which ALWAYS CLAIMED TO BE THE ORIGINAL ORTHODOXY, that it preserved the original teachings of Moses. Indeed where those teachings included the idea of 'one like Moses' appearing at a certain time after a long period of iniquity and who would have the task of restoring the truth, of calling Israel back to repentance.

Take a guess who I think - and all the evidence suggests - this 'Mark' guy was understood to be by his contemporaries?

Yet this is where the dilemma really begins. Which camp did Marqe originally belong to? If we assume that Samaritans were split between Dositheans and another community who - for lack of a better term - we call 'the orthodox,' does it make any sense to identify Mark with the orthodox camp?

It has already been observed among Samaritan scholars that at some point in the period under Islam rulers, that the dwindling Samaritan factions likely reconciled with one another. In other words, that modern Samaritanism is not a pure descendant of the orthodoxy of the pre-Islamic period but somehow decided to reconcile Dosithean ideas alongside the original orthodox beliefs.

I won't get into the arguments in favor of this proposition other than to say that they are impossible to argue against. All of which brings up the ultimate question - to which group did Marqe originally belong? While even this question requires a knowledge of Samaritanism that few of my readers likely possess, I for one am very open to the idea that Marqe might well have been a Dosithean.

The Dositheans were famous for employing a baptism ritual which gave individuals the power to be sons and daughters of the apostle (to loosely quote the section in Abul Fath). The Dositheans were accused by the Samaritan co-religionists of adopting many of the beliefs and practices associated with the Jews.

The fact that Dositheans were also identified as a Christian heresy and Dositheans were included by the original gospel writer as prominent converts to Jesus' preaching also makes the identification of Marqe as a Dosithean particularly intriguing.

Of course there are still some difficulties. We have to imagine that at some point in relatively recent history the orthodox Samaritans decided to allow Marqe's teachings and liturgy to define the tradition as a whole. If however we decide to accept the existing Samaritan notion that Marqe WAS NOT a Dostithean but wholly orthodox we are still left with the paradox that somehow Marqe came to redefine even the orthodoxy of the orthodox in the late first century or early second century.

How did he manage to get these 'guardians' of the original beliefs of the community to abandon their ancestral practices which must have went back many, many centuries?

There is another possibility which I just thought of which really doesn't help resolve these difficulties. Perhaps Marqe's writings were already established as the basis to BOTH traditions.

As I said as you read the text you should pay careful attention to the 'paradox of Marqe' - the idea that an acknowledged great, but mysterious historical figure who was not a high priest somehow managed to get the most zealous of ancient observers of ancestral customs to allow him to wholly redefine those ancient, ancestral customs in the late first century/early second century.

Quite a paradox ...