I recently took down my page about the crucifixion of Jesus because I decided I should not take the historicity of Jesus for granted in my writings on this website. In these times that is something that needs to be demonstrated rather than assumed, and I am looking into how persuasive a case can be made.
But if you had read that page, you may remember that I thought it likely that “Mark,” the author of the earliest gospel (that we know of), drew upon an oral tradition or maybe a written account of the events from Jesus’ arrival in his final visit to Jerusalem through his crucifixion. Subsequent to examining the gospel accounts and writing up my findings, I obtained a book on the subject by the well-regarded Biblical scholar Raymond Brown. This provoked some new thoughts that I want to share with you now that I’ve finished reading it.
The book is thirty years old, and so does not incorporate more recent research, but it is highly detailed and well versed in the research up to that time. Brown had a sterling reputation as a rigorous scholar. He was also a Catholic priest, and although often criticized for questioning the historical basis of certain claims of the the church, he was not one to question the real existence of Jesus or the central dogmas of Christianity. For these reasons I found what he had to say in this book especially interesting.
Much of the book was a line by line comparison and commentary on latter parts of the passion accounts in four canonical gospels and the less-known Gospel of Peter. I confess I skimmed much of that material. But as the second of his two volumes it also included several appendixes with studies of particular aspects of the topic. It was a couple of these that I found revealing.
The first is Appendix VII, “The Old Testament Background of the Passion Narratives.” In this section Brown gives a thorough listing of every passage in the Jewish scriptures that the gospel passion narratives seem to refer to. There are dozens of them, which raises the question of whether Mark’s narrative was created from what he regarded as prophecies in the Jewish scriptures rather than any pre-existing oral or written account of the passion events. Brown rejected the theory that Mark based his narrative purely on an imaginative reflection on the Jewish scriptures. But he conceded that those scriptures “influenced heavily early Christian presentation of the passion” in order to expand “the preaching outline into dramatic narratives.” In other words, Mark probably knew a basic outline of what happened to Jesus at the end of his life but created much of what he wrote about it as an exegesis of those scriptural passages.
The second is Appendix IX, “The Question of a PreMarkan Passion Narrative.” This was written by Martin L. Soards and edited by Brown for this book. Soards goes thr0ugh a long list of scholars who examined the question of whether there was a pre-existing passion narrative that Mark drew on, examining their methods and findings. He concludes that there was such a narrative, but that discovering what was in it “may finally be an impossible” task. His reason for thinking there was one is based entirely on Mark’s mention of “Judas, one of the Twelve,” in his passion account. Soards asks why Mark would feel it necessary to identify Judas when he had already brought up Judas earlier in his gospel. His answer is that Mark must have relied on an earlier account in which this was the first mention of Judas. That sounds pretty tenuous to me.
What was striking was that Brown, who fully accepted the historicity of Jesus, indicated by publishing these two appendices that much (most?) of Mark’s account of the passion events was creative exegesis and that it was near impossible to recover the historical events behind it. This back in 1994, long before any mythicist arguments about the historical Jesus had become widely known. It reinforces my belief that I was correct in deleting several of my pages so that I can avoid assuming Jesus’ historicity before taking a more careful look at the problem.
Thanks for joining me on this journey! As always, I welcome your comments on this blog post.
