It is critical to note that the signs Jesus’ gives his disciples are general and vague and always contemporary. War and suffering, famine and earthquakes, persecutions and false Messiahs have not only been prevalent throughout history; they are the also to be witnessed and experienced in the present, and they will be encountered in the future. Thus, the posture that Jesus is encouraging his disciples to take is not one where such signs signal the imminent end of history, but rather that such events remind them of the necessity to be ready for the end because they cannot know from these signs when it will take place.
Allan R. Bevere, Keeping Up WIth Jesus, p. 52 (forthcoming)
This was too good not tomention. I’m doing a final editorial read on this book which will be available shortly. Allan calls it a “narrative devotional commentary” which is a good description of what it accomplishes. I’ll post more here when the book is available.
This will be on my YouTube channel and Google+ at 7 pm central time tonight.
I’m actually going to start from what I left off last week and talk about “this generation shall not pass,” which will require me to talk a bit about biblical inspiration. Following that I plan to introduce my (not so original) simple view of eschatology and then look at Mark 13 and how it might fit in.
Next week I’ll be looking at the variety, and some history of prophecy in Old Testament times, and then next week we’ll tackle chapter 4 of Dr. Vick’s book, Prophecy and Apocalyptic.
As I work on these, I’m also working on a series of four talks on Revelation to be presented to some teenagers during the month of October. That may be more challenging than these presentations.
While I titled the event Eschatology: Mark 13, Matthew 24, and Luke 21, I will be focusing on the first. I will be mentioning the parallels and likely working directly from gospel parallels. I’m embedding the YouTube viewer first, then I’ll make a few comments.
I had hoped to post more earlier, but the work load this week prevented it. I also hope to post something more this afternoon, giving some background for what I’ll be saying. It is obviously impossible to do a detailed exegesis of Mark 13 in an hour, so I’ll be looking at some key points.
First, yes, I won’t be able to resist. I’ll mention some elements in the parallels that could play into arguments over Markan vs. Matthean priority.
Second, I want to talk about my overall view of biblical eschatology, and how I read that in Mark 13. Note that this is, to a certain extent, eisegesis. My overall view is the result of my study of many eschatological and apocalyptic passages, and not a derivative from Mark 13. Yet I will use it. I had planned to wait to present this overview, but I think it’s better for me to give my “mini-eschatology” first and then develop how I connect it with much broader and deeper eschatological views as I move forward.
Third, I want to focus on just what the disciples would have expected when they heard or encountered this material. Thus I’ll discuss the debates on whether this is original to the gospel (as a whole), whether certain elements were added later, and also just when this was written.
All of that leads to the point where I—finally—talk about “this generation shall not pass,” which has provided fodder for biblical and theological debate for the last two millenia. How was it understood in the past and how shall we read it now?
In studying eschatology from a biblical perspective, it is important to realize that one needs to resolve a broad range of questions nearly every time one wants to resolve one question. For example, the way in which one understands Daniel 9:27 impacts how one will understand “the abomination of desolation” and how one understands the vision of Daniel 7 will impact how one understands the son of man coming in the clouds. Not to mention whether one is certain those particular references are in view. Deciding how to understand those chapters involves a range of decisions regarding the text of Daniel as well as its historical and cultural context. Those decisions involve a number of issues regarding how one dates literature.
I say this because I expect to circle back to many of these passages after we’ve studied others. I think it would be useful to read Mark 13 again after we have done further study of Daniel. Jesus did not live in a cultural or theological vacuum either. Certainly his disciples did not. How might they have drawn these passages into their understanding of the words in the gospels? It is possible that what you or I decide in studying Daniel might be the correct historical understanding, i.e., we might be right about when it was written and how it would have been understood by its original audiences, but that the understanding we get there might not be the one the disciples would naturally draw in as they studied the words of Mark.
I had a great time yesterday interviewing Drew Smith for my study on the gospel of John. I wanted to talk to him about how one “does” biblical thelogy and do some comparisons between John and Mark. Drew is very knowledgeable, having written his dissertation on a narrative critical reading of the gospel of Mark for his PhD in New Testament from the University of Edinburgh.
Here’s the interview:
We were left with one question: Is there a case in Mark where one can unequivocally say that the title “son of God” is not the equivalent of Messiah. “Unequivocally” is a tall order, but Drew said he’d look at it. I look forward to posting the results in the comments here.
Drew will be my guest on my study of According to John on April 16 to discuss how biblical theology is done. One of the questions I’m going to ask him is how the view of the crucifixion and exaltation differ from Mark to John. I think the answer to that question can illuminate some of the topics I’ve been discussing in the study.
There’s obviously a serious question about hermeneutics lurking in the discussion, but what I would like to see discussed is just what text of Mark is authoritative. We tend to assume that what we want is the most original text. What did Mark write?
But we count as scripture what was recognized by the church councils as scripture. (I ignore here whatever reasons they may have had for their choice.) The Gospel of Mary or the Gospel of Peter are not authoritative, but Mark is. What text of Mark were the church fathers looking at when they made it canonical? Does that matter?
I think it would relate (in a distant way) to the question of whether a gospel retains its authority if one thinks it was authored by someone other than the traditional one. If the church fathers canonized a gospel they believe to have been written by Mark, and then it turns out he didn’t write it, should their decision be reviewed?
I ask these questions because we often try to dodge doctrinal difficulties through textual criticism. I think that is not always (or often) the right approach. It has its value, but creates its own difficulties.
Today he posted on a possible allusion (my term) to Judges in Mark in his post Trees Like People Walking. I see what he’s saying, and I see the connection, though it would be very hard to prove such an idea. He notes the difference in terminology between the LXX and the story in Mark, but if what we have is just a reference to the idea of the story, that vocabulary wouldn’t matter.
So it becomes something of a look into the mind of the author. Nonetheless, in the context, it makes sense to me. That may not mean much. I was accused way back when I was working on my MA with being obsessed with parallels. Nobody said “parallelomania,” but I suspect some of them thought it. Or maybe Sandmel’s term hadn’t gotten wide enough circulation at that point in time.
There’s a great moment in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (the book, not sure about the movie) when the truly incredible synthesizer on the ship is trying to produce tea. The results? Something almost, but not quite totally unlike tea.
A favorite argument against the existence of Q is simply that no manuscripts of Q have ever been discovered. No more than this bare assertion is usually made. But a little probing shows that this argument has some serious weaknesses to it.
He does make some good points regarding the likelihood that Q would continue to be copied if it was absorbed into Matthew and Luke as well as the scarcity of manuscripts dating from the first or even early second century. Thus, absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. One always needs to qualify that little line by noting that if there is an event that would definitely leave evidence, and that evidence is absent, that absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence.
Having now tried to attain a record for the use of “evidence” and “absence” in a single paragraph, let me move on to the technical content. Dr. Wallace presents us with eight papyri containing just portions of the gospel of Luke and suggests it’s hypothetically possible that at least one or two of these are actually papyri of Q.
He continues by presenting all the reasons one might reject that hypothesis with respect to a particular manuscript, and what happens next might be described as the case of the mysteriously vanishing evidence. One manuscript of these eight remains after the sifting, and Dr. Wallace’s conclusion hardly seems conclusive:
Altogether, the evidence thus far presented can hardly be said to build confidence that any missing Q fragments have actually been discovered.
You know, that’s what I thought before I read his post, so what’s this “has serious weaknesses” thing of which he speaks?
I do not absolutely reject Q myself. I have simply become less and less confident that it existed. I started on this path reading the works of William R. Farmer, and most recently when my own company published Why Four Gospels? by David Alan Black.
I still feel that the redaction theories for Mark that I’ve encountered are less than convincing. But my confidence in Markan priority and the existence of Q has still been seriously weakened.
I’m trying to correct some headlines. OK, my headline is wrong also, intentionally so. Here’s what happened: Dan Wallace said in a debate that a fragment of Mark has been found which one paleographer dated to the 1st century. There has been a good deal of discussion of this on the biblioblogs, for example, John Byron comments (accurately) here.
Note that the TEXT of both the post and of the Christian Today article is largely accurate. It’s the headlines I’m complaining about.
Now I’m not trying to beat up on the blogger who posted this, but I do want to correct some false impressions. First, this is not “the gospel of Mark.” It is a fragment, a tiny piece. Finding an early fragment is extremely exciting, but it is not the same as finding a whole manuscript. I think this is important because very often when speakers tell Christian audiences that there are thousands of Greek manuscripts, people assume that these are all complete copies of the various Bible books, or even complete copies of the New Testament. In fact, they vary from fragments containing portions of a couple of verses up to complete copies of the New Testament. Not surprisingly, the complete copies tend to be later.
Second, this fragment of Mark has not yet been published. The claim is simply that one paleographer has dated it to the 1st century. We need to wait for publication and study by other scholars before we jump on the dating of this manuscript.
It’s important to keep all this in mind, because misinformation lives forever once it makes it onto the Christian circuit. There will be claims years from now that there is a copy of Mark that comes from the first century even if further study shows that the fragment is not from the 1st century.
Since I write this blog primarily for non-scholarly readers, I want to make these things clear. Please don’t believe every sensational headline about the Bible. Let these things be tested.
My daily lectionary readings for the day included both Ephesians 6:10-24 and Mark 5:1-20. (I get my readings from The Voice.) It’s an interesting combination, because the Ephesians passage is the famous one about the armor of God and thus features in just about any discussion of spiritual warfare, while the passage in Mark, regarding the healing of the demoniac on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, is spiritual warfare.
Now what interests me here is the demonstration of what is meant. In his just released study guide to Ephesians, Bob Cornwall notes:
For Christians uncomfortable with military imagery, this passage can prove challenging. The ingenuity of it, however, needs to be recognized. The author took a picture that every one of his readers would immediately recognize, and used it to encourage them to become actively engaged in their faith, thereby helping to bring to an end the rule of the evil one. Such a calling would be difficult, which is why the word of encouragement is central to this message: Stand firm.
There are several points here that I’d like to emphasize, because I believe spiritual warfare is often misunderstood and certainly misapplied.
Spiritual warfare is a metaphor. It is not intended as an endorsement of violence. Notice how Jesus behaves in Mark. There is no violence or fighting, except on the part of the demonized man.
Spiritual warfare is not a method. We’re not the ones who defeat evil by practicing some set of techniques. I know people who feel that they need to “pray on” the armor of God every morning or they might be susceptible to the attacks of the devil that day. Now as a spiritual exercise, I see no problem with praying through this passage, but this is not some magical ritual that protects you. It’s about belonging to Christ. Bob uses the excellent phrase “actively engaged in their faith.”
A metaphor may be especially valuable to a particular time. I think spiritual warfare provides one way of understanding the conflict with evil. Unfortunately, when it gets into the hands of those who think violence solves everything, it just imports ungodly habits and behavior into our spiritual lives and the damage can be substantial.
I really liked having these passages together, because the way Jesus is portrayed in the gospels is peaceful and confident. The evil spiritual realm falls, not to combat, but to a confident faith in God.
