Early dates for GMark, part II: How could Jesus say such a thing?

10th Century Lion of Mark

This series (first post here) is about Jesus’ prevision of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple complex, which is found in Mark 13:2,

Jesus said to him, “Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone on another, which will not be thrown down.”

How much support does Mark’s reporting of this statement lend to estimates that Mark’s Gospel was composed after the Romans destroyed those great buildings in 70 CE, rather than sometime before? The question itself is somewhat curious, since Jesus is supposed to have said this in the 30’s.

This post finds that Jesus could easily have said such a thing back then even if he, or whoever first attributed the remark to him, lacked foreknowledge of the disastrous Roman-Jewish War. Jesus wouldn’t necessarily have intended his remark as a personal prediction of a specific near-future (about 40 years) catastrophe. Finally, it isn’t much more or less likely for Mark to have included this remark in his story, depending on whether the Temple was or wasn’t intact when he made his choice.

Early dates for GMark, part I: Two previsions of 9-11

Click to enlarge.

Today is the fifteenth anniversary of a beautiful late-summer morning when thousands of people were murdered for no reason. Some victims died in Washington, D.C. and others in a Pennsylvania field, but the enduring iconic images concern the last hours of the mortally wounded Twin Towers in New York City.

To your right is an advertisement that appeared in the New York Times on May 2, 1968. Its purpose was to protest the then-proposed construction of the World Trade Center. The artwork depicts an airliner about to crash high up into what appears to be the northeast face of the North Tower, just where the first impact would occur a generation later.

Although the ad warns about something that eventually really happened, the ad does not foresee the fate of the towers. One of the ad’s backers owned the Empire State Building, into which a plane had crashed in 1945. Concern about airplanes and skyscrapers was based upon memory, not prescience. The ad itself is the opposite of a prediction. It aspires to be self-negating. If the ad had achieved its purpose, then a disaster like what it tells us about could never have happened.

An especially eerie feature of the ad is its headline, a gratuitous play on the colloquial phrase “If the mountain will not come to Mohammed…” Why that unmistakable reference to Islam?

The end of Alexei’s dragon

A few years ago, the Uncertaintist posted about whether dogs remember their dead comrades (link on image). The piece focused on the alpha Akita Clea, her late brother Alexei and the small dragon plush toy that had been Alexei’s, which Clea carefully preserved and kept with her. After Clea died in December 2013, I lost track of the dragon. I assumed that Alexei and Clea’s housemates had stored it away, as a keepsake.

Alexei had had a favorite among his human companions, a girl he had helped to raise, and of whom he was besotted. In Alexei’s later years, she had gone away to school. Whenever she came home to visit, Alexei walked two inches off the ground. No need to ask whether his beloved was in residence, you just looked at Alexei.

Several months after Clea’s death, this now grown woman rescued Amy, a dog who is a breed unto herself. A few months ago, your correspondent was honored to sit with Amy. As our visit progressed, attention turned to Amy’s toys. There among them was Alexei’s dragon, bright and pristine, scarcely different than it was when I had first photographed it resting against Clea’s cheek more than three years before.

I photographed it again. Amy watched me closely as I fussed over the toy, but didn’t interrupt. When I was done, I returned the dragon to rest among her other toys.

A few weeks later, I sat with Amy again. This time, when I looked through her toys, the dragon was in tatters.

At first, I was of two minds about what Amy had done. I had grown fond of that whimsical little survivor. It reminded me of two dogs whom I love. But then so does Amy herself, unlike the Akitas physically, and yet large-spirited and completely suited to be their successor.

There is no mystery that a dog would tear apart a toy designed for a dog to tear apart. The mystery is that Amy hadn’t done so before. What had she been waiting for?

I think Amy reasoned as follows. When her human companions first gave Amy the dragon, Clea’s scent was all through it. Clea had kept it close by her for years and had regularly licked the dragon to clean it. Alexei’s scent was possibly still there, too. Amy knew that despite its apparent purpose, the dragon hadn’t been a toy for Clea. Dead or alive, Clea was an alpha dog, something else that Amy knew by smell. Amy prudently left Clea’s dragon alone.

Amy

Amy likely knows that I knew Clea, Alexei and the story of this dragon that unfolded before Amy was born. She could see without being told that I recognized the dragon, and that I promptly performed a human ritual act that Amy is familiar with. I took photographs of it, much as so many people in Amy’s world often take photographs of her. Amy surmises this must hold some meaning for us.

And then, although I didn’t mean to, I probably sealed the dragon’s fate. When I finished my ritual adulation, I replaced the dragon among her toys while Amy watched. I thereby gave the dragon to her again, this time after a demonstrated awareness of what the dragon had once meant to another dog. Amy was oblivious that I was thinking only that I ought to return what wasn’t mine to where I’d found it. My mistake, not hers. I was oblivious to how this vignette looked to her.

Amy had been waiting for assurance that whatever the history of the dragon was, whatever it had been for the formidable Clea, this toy was now one of Amy’s toys, without conditions or complications, to use as Alexei’s human companions had originally intended that he use it years ago. And so she did use it, maybe more crisply than usual, lest somebody living or dead change their mind.

An ancient teaching that Jesus didn’t exist

Preaching of the Antichrist by Luca Signorelli ca 1500 (detail, click to enlarge)

An earlier post discussed ancient critics of Christianity who vigorously expressed their doubts about the factual reliability of the Gospels, the character of the Apostles, and the discernment of their Christian audience. We couldn’t find an example, however, of an argument based on the possibility that Jesus never existed.

Some modern apologists would explain that this is because there never was any example. “The argument that Jesus never existed, …was not one that the enemies of Christianity in the ancient world ever used,” James Carleton Paget, a Cambridge academic flatly assured his readers (link).

It turns out, however, that an ancient patristic author wrote that there was a Christian group who taught that the proto-orthodox Jesus was an enchantment devised by a First Century magician. According to this magican’s followers, he was the real historical figure whose words and deeds inspired Christianity, not Jesus. Jesus was a thing of smoke and mirrors, or maybe not even that.

Josephus and Jesus IV: How Origen gave James a new brother

This is the last installment of the series on Josephus’ Antiquities. We examine the brief mention of a man named James who is described as the “brother of Jesus called Christ.” Those few words, found at 20.9.1.200, are the only known non-Christian mention of Jesus Christ securely dated from the First Century, except for Josephus’ much-garbled Testimony which was discussed in the previous installments.

The story in which James briefly appears would make fine sense if its James had been identified as the brother of either of two other Jesuses who figure in the same storyline. Given the evident lapses in transmitting the longer Testimony, how can there be any confidence that this James wasn’t the brother of one of those Jesuses, and the text wasn’t altered by a few words to make him James the Just instead? What possible test could reliably authenticate two or three words of ancient text?

The answer is three remarks by Origen from the mid-Third Century saying that Josephus had written about James the Just in Antiquities. Origen used that same distinctive and otherwise rare “called Christ” phrase as we now read in Josephus (in Greek, legomenos Christos). Origen wrote his remarks too early for Christian scribal alteration to be a plausible explanation of what he reports.

Recall, however, that Jerome told his reader that Jospehus had reported that there were supernatural voices in the Temple during Jesus’ crucifixion, contrary to any known copy of any work discussing the voices incident. Is it plausible then that Origen, like Saint Jerome, may have grossly misremembered something he’d read?

Josephus and Jesus III: Estimating a plausible Testimony

What if Josephus did write something about Jesus? It would likely have resembled a short mention that Tacitus wrote two decades afterward that explained why Christians are called that. This estimate stems from a Tenth Century Arabic language report of a different version of Josephus’ Testimony.