Too Busy To Post Today

As such, I've posted the text from the comboxes that involve nudity and Markan authorship(involvement?) in the earliest written Gospel. Since this is a matter of "lowercase 't' tradition" as opposed to "Capital 'T' Tradition," I figure it should generate enough controversy to keep you kids jabbering until I have the leeway to post something else about robots, the pope, or eugenics. Have at ye!

SIXTHSCALE said...
a silly tradition claims that the naked dude is mark... but the text and simple reason seem to disprove that....

Anonymous said...
Sixthscale, I don't see how you can infer from the text or simple reason that the young man wasn't Mark. Mark 14:48-52 (RSV) reads: "And Jesus said to them, 'Have you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs to capture me? Day after day I was with you in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me. But let the scriptures be fulfilled.' And they all forsook him, and fled. And a young man followed him, with nothing but a linen cloth about his body; and they seized him, but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked."

I agree that there's little there to indicate that the young man *was* Mark, beyond the fact that Mark would have been young at the time, and may have the account as an act of humility or something like that. But I don't see anything in the text that would rule out his being Mark.

Anonymous said...
"[may have] included [the account]" is what I meant to say. "Always preview," I tell myself, but do I listen?

SIXTHSCALE said...
sorry i didn't mean the text of that verse alone... i meant the text of all of the Gospel of Mark.

there is reason to believe from the text that the person who wrote mark got his information from an eyewitness (tradition says it was peter and the text offers a fair amount of support for this as well)
but the writer of Mark's gospel doesn't seem to be personally familiar with the Geography or customs of the area where it takes place...

also the vocabulary of the greek that Mark is written in is much more latinized than the other synoptic gospels implying that the writer wasn't from israel...

there is no indication whatsoever that Mark was the naked guy.

Dustin F said...
The argument for that naked person being Mark, I think, is that the comment about a young man following Jesus, wearing nothing but a linen cloth, is quite a random, pointless comment to insert in the passion narrative unless, perhaps, that person was more significant than simply some random bystander--was, say, the writer of the gospel himself.

And the fact that Mark uses a latinized vocabulary, or that he doesn't seem to know Palestinian geopgraphy all that well, doesn't imply that he wasn't there. Jerusalem was not the most important city in the region (that, I believe, was Caesarea Phillipi), but it wasn't some podunk town, either. There are a number of reasons why Mark might have been there, even if he wasn't a natural Palestinian.

Isn't Mark supposed to be connected with Antioch, actually?

Fill the combox with your theories, my little poppets.