 |
|
|
|
X Misses the Mark
And He Gets It In the End
J. P. Holding
All right, you have to ask yourself: In my article on the end of Mark, I gave reasons why Mark 16:8 is not the original ending of Mark; it has nothing to do with Skeptics, so why in the world would Skeptic X want to waste our time and his addressing it? Is he that foolish? Is he that obsessed? Er, YES. What we have on our hands by now is a sick mind in the grips of an obsession. If you think not, ask whether X's homepage, with only 4 out of 60+ articles by him of this date NOT about yours truly, should be renamed, "The Tekton Review."
So what's X got to beef about? I note that "even scholars of a liberal or moderate bent who say Mark ended at 16:8 (and no portion thereof is lost) do not see this 'problem' at all. X whines that I "did not say how many or what percentage of scholars 'of a liberal or moderate bent' do not see any problem in the ending of Mark." Uh, gee, well, any person reading that I would think would see, "100%" implied, though that is obviously limited to those I have read, which is about two dozen. If X has a contrary opinion, why didn't he present it? It's because he can't, because it requires WORK to do so, which is much less easy than just sitting at your terminal and belching "prove it" over and over again. If it is not "typical", let X prove it with numbers. He doesn't. What he DOES do is haul in the word of Lindsey Pherigo (which I have never seen at my library, which is little wonder, since OCLC has no records for it) and says that Pherigo "devoted an entire page to problems in the ending of this gospel that have bothered biblical scholars," but he doesn't say whether Pherigo thought the abrupt ending was one of the problems, or whether it was once thought a problem or now isn't, much less whether Pherigo is aware of or interacts with answers of the sort Campenhausen, et al provide. This is the sort of mushy "research" X thinks is competent; in the meantime he repeats the fan-of-his favorite "Philo" quote we retorted to here where we also had a closer look at X's research pathology. When will he learn that Philo was not a modern Biblical scholar, and that research involves more than pulling quotes and gotchas out of your patoot?
It will of course be hilarious to watch X respond to seasoned scholars, and as usual, embarrass himself offering the pretense that a community college teacher of English has anything to say to someone like Campenhausen who is degreed out the wazoo and has so many credits that he makes X look like a Junior Cub Scout straining for his swimming badge. Campenhausen [Tradition and Life in the Church, 61, 71] supposes that Mark wished to show by the women's silence that the disciples themselves had nothing to do with the tomb
being empty; an "anti-theft" apologetic in line with Matthew's account of the guards. He adds: "One can hardly take the text as meaning to the simple reader, and therefore to the author, anything but that the women first kept silent, so that the events which followed took place without any help from them and without any regard to the empty tomb." X, a little more dense than usual, claims I "didn't bother to explain how the silence of the women would have been an 'anti-theft apologetic in line with Matthew's account of the guards,'", as if it were not patently obvious that this was Mark providing an "alibi" for where the women were and what they were doing, as opposed to stealing the body. That deserves a Golden Duh alone. He also says this idea is "in obvious conflict with Matthew's account", missing the obvious point that Campenhausen, who is not an inerrantist and would not know one from Adam, made: Mark deliberately emphasized one aspect of the women's experience -- their journey on the way to tell no one -- to create an "anti-theft" apologetic. X still has the cornpone idea that inspiration and inerrancy means, "according to Western standards of reportage" when the standards in question didn't even exist yet! How long it took for the women to say something is beside the point -- whether an hour, two days, a week. Does X even bother to understand what scholars say before he runs his mouth? From what we see in the link above, obviously not.
X next comments on Robbins' idea, and wastes time asking, "If Vernon Robbins' opinion of the book of Acts is of no value, because he gave it "about the same credence as a roll of toliet [sic] paper," how can we be sure that his opinion of Mark is any more worthwhile?" We'll ignore X's banana-skin answer and give him the real scoop: Per the link above about his pathology, it is a matter of critical comparison, peer review, and scholarly interaction. Robbins' work on Acts has been heavily criticized; his work on Mark, less so; his point here, not at all that I have yet found. In X's world there is only black and white; you either appreciate all of a scholar's works 100%, or your dump them all down the loo. Of course playing this game is far, far easier than critical comparison and evaluation, which is why X does it.
In the end, X says he agrees with Robbins' take, but says it remains a problem because it contradicts the other records, and the women did not ever execute their command -- completely missing the point, as usual, that such tactical textual work creates a new semantic contract in which Western precision-comparison is a gai-jin intruder with smelly armpits and no soap.
Next up, X wants to find contradiction between the women's "fear" in Mark and their "joy" in Matthew -- oblivious not only to that these emotions are not mutually exclusive, but to that Matthew's contrived account required condensation of their reactions. Matthew telescopes the joy of the final reaction; the real problem is that X will never break the fundamentalist mindset that fails to see ancient works as being as much art as they are historiographical science.
In the meantime, X rejects once again the process of historical inference common to all historians -- in the point that the women obviously told someone, hence the narrative exists -- as a "quibble," "desperate," etc., which we'd like to see him tell professional historians who do the same thing. He also muffs the point about women as bad witnesses with a ridiculous allusion to Esther (!) as one held in high esteem; not that she was a witness to anything, and that she didn't live 500 years too soon to be affected by FIRST century Jewish ideas about women as credible witnesses -- much less Deborah, Ruth, or Huldah, either; where is it shown that Phoebe and Phillip's daughters ever had to give testimony before prospects? Does X even pay attention to the points being made, or does he think a lot of general mishmash about respect for women in general circumstances contradicts specific points about female testimony in legal/testimonial settings in first century Judaism? The situation is that a woman's testimony was considered of no worth in an evidential setting, or in a court of law. This, and its relevance to the rez narratives, is not open to dispute, X's hayseed aside. That men went to check out the tomb after women reported to them is not germane; this was not a court setting before hostile prospects, and the men even so did not indicate belief that the women's account was accurate -- as opposed to being an unreliable account of something else that happened at the tomb, an idea X in his uni-dimensionalism doesn't even consider. In the end, it is with some hilarity that X, driving to the greatest depths of paranoia possible in this context, hypothesizes that Matt, et al purposely made women the first witnesses as a way of tricking people into thinking, "Gee, they wouldn't do that unless it were all true". I recommend X take up the Roman Piso theorem, or try for the idea that Jesus went to live in India, to go with that new ideology.
X repeats his error about the purpose of 1 Cor. 15 which we noted here and thus his argument following is dead on arrival. It is much more in line with the social data that the omission of women from the creed represents either the lack of respect for female witnesses; or better, that 1 Cor. 15 was meant to highlight that Jesus had been seen by the leaders of the church, and the church at large. Conspiracy theories like X's are found in the Toys R Us section of the scholarly library, written not by Biblical scholars but by professors of German and kidney specialists.
My article of course is about the end of Mark, and why 16:8 was not the real end. I note Witheringon's points on this, and X, in typical hayseed fashion, provides not contrary data but the usual "prove it" bellowing while reminding his gullible sycophants that religious people are just a bunch of biased jerks, which was a most needful comment if X's retorts have any real worth (as opposed to being X, as a chihuahua, barking up at Witherington's scholarly heels). But let's look at how X tries to twist With in the wind.
The Gospel of Mark, like all the Gospels, is in the genre of a laudatory biography. Such a work "is most unlikely to end in this fashion" but rather would end on a positive note. X yells at this one, not with any look at other laudatory bios of the ancient world, but with a spate of burps and whinnies such as, "gee, the resurrection itself was unlikely, so why is this a problem" (let the goofiness and irrelevance of this comment speak for itself) and "hey, Witherington didn't give any evidence for that" as if a seasoned scholar like Witherington, who has read all the lit and all the laudatory bios, is required to step down and kiss X's whining patoot. It runs down to that X would not know a laudatory biography from a loud noise in a lavatory, and scholars are under no obligation to fill in the niggling details to ignorant hacks like X who would never pick up an ancient laudatory biography if it bit them.
Mark as a whole "goes to great lengths in the passion narrative to reveal fulfillment of early promises and predictions, especially those of Jesus, and this leads us to expect the same with the prediction of the resurrection appearance." Nothing new here, once again X just burps that Witherington didn't prove it, which is nothing but a cover for X's inability to provide any sort of answer. X claims he read Mark's passion narrative and found no "effort" at all, just two examples he could figure. Well isn't that darling. X wants us to believe his hayseed English modernist reading over that of a scholar of Witherington's caliber; as if X had written dozens of critically-acclaimed books and appeared in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. What X misses is that not all of Mark's "effort" involves, "this happened to fulfill" comments, but also allusions to OT passages, such as Jesus' saying he is Daniel 7's Son of Man, and his answering nothing like Is. 53's Suffering Servant, and yes, even Mark's report of the vinegar on the sponge. Like a typical fundamentalist, X sees no "effort" unless it is spelled out in crayon.
Mark, if he had wanted to suggest that the command by the angel to speak was disobeyed, would have introduced their activity with an adversative as he does in other situations of disobedience (1:45, 7:36, 10:14, 10:22, 10:48, 15:23, 15:37). X supposes his readers and I need a little help understanding what the point is here, but despite X's ego trip, we know what an "adversative" is and so does my "choir"; Till though thinks you are stupid enough to require an explanation. We don't agree, so we'll get to right where X tries to spit on Witherington. X says that "Mark 16:18 [sic] is structured differently from the examples quoted above" (he gives a couple of the examples Witherington cited), which is a "duh" in context and a "so what" in reply. X notes that in Mark, between "the command and the disregard, there is intervening material that would make the sentence awkwardly structured if the disregard of the command had been introduced with an adversative conjunction." Yeah, RIGHT. This is nothing but a manufactured EXCUSE that X cooks up for lack of an answer. There is nothing in Greek grammar or composition that regulates how much space must appear between a command and a disregard for an adversative to be required. X is just making up this junk as he goes along, covering his inability by repeating himself over and over again to cover the lack of substance in his reply. X's last desperate move is a claim that "Mark did sometimes connect a command to an act of disregard without using an adversative conjunction," but his example is a piker:
Mark 1:23 Just then there was in their synagogue a man with
an unclean spirit, 24 and he cried out, "What have you to do with us,
Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the
Holy One of God." 25 But Jesus rebuked him, saying, "Be silent, and come
out of him!" 26 And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying
with a loud voice, came out of him.
Excuse me? X thinks that the spirit "disregarded" Jesus' command to "be silent" because he cried out with a loud voice? This is ridiculous! For starters, if the spirit was being cast out in distress, how is this "disregard"? If you are being tortured by having X's articles read to you, and he orders you to "stop screaming," but you can't help it, is that "disregard"?!? What a pompous idiocy this is! Of course, this assumes to begin with that "to be silent" was anything but Jesus telling the thing to shut up and stop talking.
Mark's Gospel as it stands end with an unusual word, a conjunction, that does not appear as the last word in any work, with the possible exception of a work of Plotinus. It would be a very unusual word to end a work on; it amounts to ending a work in "because" or "for." There are sentences and paragraphs that end with this word (including John 13:13) but to end an entire work thusly is otherwise unverified, except for Plotinus, and that may also have lost an ending! X replies to this with the asinine comment that he could easily, in English, end a work in "for"; the lack of evidence in any Greek writings does not stop him from suggesting that "shucks, any rule can be violated if we want to" and to impress the masses, quotes the meaning of gar from Arndt and Gingrich (but not Danker) and then repeats the claim that hey, it can be done in English, why not also in Greek? Of course that Greek is identical in rules, custom, and usage to English is the sort of hayseed reply we would expect from someone who thinks that nothing new can ever be learned about ancient languages.
X points to the irrelevancy that the "for" in 16:8 is an explanation of the women's reaction (which is still beside the point of its position) and notes A and G's point that it could not come first in a clause, and so asks, rather crazily, "duh, where else was Mark going to put it, if not at the end"? How about: That he would put more words after it. Otherwise, forget actually answering with evidence; X says he has "not personally researched the gar ending of Mark 16:18 [sic]," but has "seen claims in articles on the subject that more than a dozen ancient Greek documents are known to have sentences that end with gar." We're not talking about sentences; we are talking about entire works, to which X obviously has no answer, other than pointing to Plotinus, to which he says we "gave no evidence" that the end of his work was lost, which from the perspective of textual criticism is an absurd demand to begin with; if the end of a work is lost, context alone tells us, and here that context is the ending of for. Finally X, who says he "dislike[s] citing sources" (we knew that already!) decides to do so anyway, pointing to a work by Kelly Iverson of Dallas Seminary which he claims "very methodically dismantles" the claims that no work could end in it. Unfortunately Iverson "dismantles" this claim by giving examples of sentences, not works, that ended in gar, which doesn't address the issue in the least. X seems to think anything that passes by with the same words amounts to a "methodical" dismemberment. The claim that "common sense" dictates that if a sentence or paragraph can end with gar, a whole work can, too, is nothing but nonsense; a word like gar set at the end of a whole work is anticlimactic, and so there is no comparison to be made.
If there is a point of comparison within Mark, it is Mark 1:44, where a leper is told to be silent to others, but go and tell the appropriate person, the high priest. "This would suggest that the women were to be silent to the general public, but to communicate with the disciples." X can't figure out how to answer this with an actual answer, so he resorts to his usual standby of calling it "assertion" but also claims it is "illogical," for: "Why would the women have been expected to be silent 'to the general public' and to communicate only to the disciples? Wasn't the resurrection the 'good news' that was to be proclaimed to the whole world?" Boy is that a stupid question. X assumes that the women came equipped with a degree from Evangelism Explosion, but the fact is, that as yet no one knew that the resurrection would be part of the kerygma; it was, at this moment, a mysterious, troubling, counter-intuitive (against all Jewish expectation) surprise with a big party hat. And never mind that a woman speaking publicly to a man not her husband, unbidden, was a social gaffe to beat the band in conservative Judaea. There was also nothing kerygamtic to go with it. Imagine the scene then:
MARY: Oh, sir! Jesus was just raised from the dead!
MAN: Oh! How wonderful! So what do I do about it?
MARY: Uh ---
Perhaps X needs to remember that the "Great Commission," however he wants to place it, was well AFTER the women discovered the tomb.
X also whinges, despite not being a millionth of the scholar Witherington is, that "there is also no parallel between Mark 1:44 and 16:8," because while the women were told to tell the disciples, the text says that they "said nothing to anyone" -- in other words, X in his usual hyperfundy mindset would have us believe that Mark here means the women never said anything to anyone, EVER (as opposed to "anyone" being, "anyone on the way"), so that presumably Peter and John learned to go to the tomb, and Christianity got started, by someone using a Vulcan mind meld on Mary Magdalene. The rationale for saying otherwise, that "anyone" does not include the disciples, is common sense of the sort X in his hyperliteralism lacks.
From 15:40 to 16:8, Mark "has carefully built the case for the women to be valid witnesses" to the Easter message. Especially in light of the problem of women's testimony noted above, it hardly makes sense that Mark would build his case, then undermine it or render it moot be giving the women a case of permanent closed mouth. This is called common sense, but X replies by just saying, "hey, they were afraid, that's why they were quiet" without so much as a word about Witherington's point that it is ridiculous to think Mark would, after all this time, have undermined his case with such a pointed, permanent silence. X rather waffles to the idea that it is Mark's "explanation" for "why there had been no tales of a resurrected Jesus," a crackpot thesis countered by the simple point that 1 Cor. 15 shows that accounts existed of the resurrected Jesus 20 and more years before the late date that X and his ilk would assign to Mark.
Finally, there is this consideration: The parallel construction of the Greek, and the imperfect verb tenses, imply that "for the circumscribed period of time the women were in terror and fled from the tomb, they said nothing to anyone." They would speak once the fear (perhaps in the form of religious awe -- cf. Luke 1:29-30) had subsided. This is clearly above X's head, so he just calls it an "abstraction that says exactly nothing specific" in the hopes that his gulled thralls will just nod and not notice that he doesn't have an answer. It's not that I know Greek, but that Witherington does, and X doesn't, and belching about how he thinks this would work in English is no answer at all. The whine about "cutting and pasting" from experts is nothing more than X showing his Fruit of the Looms and admitting he doesn't have the ability to do the critical research and analysis necessary to provide an answer.
Points in close from X. He notes that it is unlikely Mark's end would have been lost from a scroll, because the end of the scroll was protected. To what extent this may be true (if X wants to nitpick, why is there no survey of ancient works with a lost ending and whether they were on scrolls or not?), it is more likely the end was lost at the end of a codex; X notes this, but counters by pointing to the Codex Sinaiticus (!), a fourth century codex that still leaves Mark a couple of hundreds years of life in codex form for the ending to be lost! Doesn't X bother to count years before he makes these silly claims?
Finally, X wraps up with the Cor. 15-oblivious, Marcan-priority-begged-question that without an end to Mark, "no one trying to sell the claim that a man had risen from the dead would have omitted references to resurrection appearances unless he had had an ulterior motive such as a desire to offer an explanation for why there had been no reported sightings of the formerly deceased at the time when the resurrection had allegedly occurred." X we well know prefers such simplistic explanations; ask him to explain how this movement made it past stage A, and where his evidence is for a Jesus movement with no resurrection other than this begged question, and you'll hear the silence roll for hours. Then X closes the popcorn bowl with a conspiracy theory that that the endings added to it show it was "tampered" with, and uses this to suppose (without textual evidence) that this means other texts were tampered with, though that all recorded evidence shows that no one was trying to foist our Mark 16:9-20 as "original" misses his attention. For X and his fans, "reasonable people" are those who accept any such wild and unevidenced conspiracy theory and make crude noises under the arm as a response to credentialed scholarship. Up next: X endorses the Roman Piso theory. Stay tuned.
Go Home! |
|
|
