The Survival of the Gospel of Mark and the making of the Fourfold Gospel

      The Gospel of Mark as we have it today is unfinished, a mere rough draft, and with its notes,  escaped its authors death and found its way to the cult core where it was finished twice, over 20 years, and was used more leisurely  by John and finally published and survives today in anthology with at least the Gospel of John. 

          Three approaches show gMk is unfinished. 

It has no ending, classically unfinished. The ending from 16.9 on was tacked on after the Fourfold Gospel was already a canonized riddle.

It has two speeches of topically sorted teaching, parables and apocalypse, but has no speech devoted to like antiestablishment or ethics or the greatest hits material Mattew puts into the Sermon on the Mount. 

And, the gospel of Mark was finished twice, and those authors knew it was unfinished.

     I assume for reasons discussed later that gMk and so-called Q were written by Saint Mark who was probably crucified in Nero's massacre of christians at Rome in the year 64.

     The Gospel genre is written as a claim to be Bible, the bible book of the messiah, fulfillment of a lot of biblical prophesies.  

     The last draft and notes were taken to the successor of peter, John the surviving member of the inner three apostles of the synoptic narrative  (Mathew Mark and Luke tell much the same thing) , and the core lent the manuscript and notes to one author or a commitee to finish.  These finished it according to the evident wish of the author, i suspect there was a prophesy Mark would write Bible, and the work hit the streets canonized with the simple name The Gospel.  If you would say according to who they would say Mark and Peter.


     Twenty years later after the destruction of the temple, an old companion of Paul, i will show this in the essay on the second book of Acts, named Luke, started a multivolume canonical history of the church beginning with a gospel not so jewish perhaps than the one already canon. To show it is authorized by the old Peter and bro James cult, the core lent the Markan draft and notes to Luke, who had done research on his own.   When the Gospel of Luke came out Luke had used the Markan material which even unseen would have become known as Mark, and the old first published Gospel would lose its claim to Mark and became called as according to Matthew. With multiple instances they got these names, rather clumsy names, but names change hard.

     GMt gets its name either because the apostle Matthew worked on it, which is thouroughly possible, or because of his name shift to Levi in the text.

     Meanwhile, the head of the post Petrine church is writing a leisurely Gospel of his own, clearing up details and showing the wonderous meanings of the Gospel  and using the gMk draft for small details like the word nard for the anointing oil the woman used to anoint Jesus.  By this i see he has the original.

     After John is arrested and exiled, John's successors finihed off John's Gospel  and were faced with what to do with the Markan maerial, most of which notes had got into the other synoptics, but the narrative already had a reputation. This explains the survival of gMk.

     Thereafter, it would not be long before it was noticed that the leaf form of book allowed for the four authorized Gospels to be packaged together.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jesus

 My best guess at the bio Jesu model is the messianic secret theory that Albert Schweizer made in his Seccert of the Kingdom of God, modified by my appreciation of the role of the Baptist's movement, modified slightly by the gospel of John.      We start with the Baptist Movement.  Josephus mentions the Baptist as an extremely popular religious reformer. Many ppeople made the trek down to the Jordan River, and as it was a take home movement instead of a commune, the people trekked home, up the 1300 ft to sea level and up 2000 more ft for those from Jerusalem. Like most reformers, John was anti establishment, his movement held the mainstream to be deficient and negligent. So it took some commitment to go see him.      Jesus met the fishermen at the Baptist's and they did not just leave their nets and dad suddenly but already knew jesus as a rabbi. And the synoptic gospels give the impression of a short ministry for Jesus but the Gospel of John woul...
Read more

OVERTURE My first century church history theories

       Here are a number of thoights, some my own theories, some others theories, some obvious of my view of the first century church.       The chronology an be broken down to the life of jesus till 30, the petership of simon bar jonah till 64, the petership of john bar zebedy till 94, petership of jude bro jamestheless and maybe petership of polycarp till 155.      Peterships after Simon peter are my own theories to prove or not, of course, but some of the other theories and observations progress through the times.     My theory a second book of acts was planned and perhaps mostly written, and its most likely contents, spans the time acts leaves paul in rome to probable reasons it was not published (leaving aside theological meraphisical reasons) and perhaps i can suggest some nepharious role for Luke's historical rival, josephus.      My theory on the Gospel of Mark, that it is an unfinished draft an...
Read more

On the Lost second book of Acts

 The Lost Second Book of the Acts of the Apostles  Surely luke planned at least one more book in his series.            He ends by leaving Paul in Rome he says for two years. Luke evidently knows what happens after two years, but he does not tell us.           It is against narrative logic to describe one set of characters and events and halfway througgh introduce another character and follow the second character without mentioning something that happened to the first bunch, but Luke does exactly this, he drops Peter halfway through and follows Paul.  Evidently he has composed a usual length of a handy scroll and finds a nice transition to take up the dropped characters in the next volume.           And most of all reasons to show Luke meant to write at least a second book of Acts, our Acts of the Apostles  ends exactly when the most interesting decade in the histiry of the church, from t...
Read more