Question about the Gospel of Mark

[KiwiNFLFan]

I skimmed through an article on John Piper's website supposedly listing evidence for the Christian faith. I knew how to answer most of them, but this caught me off guard:

 

Quote

Third, the empty tomb account in the gospel of Mark is based upon a source that originated within seven years of the event it narrates. This places the evidence for the empty tomb too early to be legendary, and makes it much more likely that it is accurate. What is the evidence for this? I will list two pieces. A German commentator on Mark, Rudolf Pesch, points out that this pre-Markan source never mentions the high priest by name. "This implies that Caiaphas, who we know was high priest at that time, was still high priest when the story began circulating." For "if it had been written after Caiaphas' term of office, his name would have had to have been used to distinguish him from the next high priest. But since Caiaphas was high priest from A.D. 18 to 37, this story began circulating no later than A.D. 37, within the first seven years after the events,

 

Has anyone come across this before? Can you point me to some resources answering this?

[LogicalFallacy]

I'd have to dig up material from Richard Carrier, but I'm sure he and price has gone over this.

 

The guy mentions a 'pre Markan' source. I'm am not aware of any source, apart from oral tradition, that's earlier than Mark. There is talk of a Q source, but scholars are split over if it even exists. Mark was written around 70 AD, the Pauline epistles around 50 AD. Those are the earliest actual sources.

 

But even then, what do we have? People reporting that a tomb was empty and that Jesus rose from the dead. Assuming people are actually reporting that so what? People report all sorts of things today that are not true.

[Blood]

1 hour ago, KiwiNFLFan said:

I skimmed through an article on John Piper's website supposedly listing evidence for the Christian faith. I knew how to answer most of them, but this caught me off guard:

Third, the empty tomb account in the gospel of Mark is based upon a source that originated within seven years of the event it narrates. This places the evidence for the empty tomb too early to be legendary, and makes it much more likely that it is accurate. What is the evidence for this? I will list two pieces. A German commentator on Mark, Rudolf Pesch, points out that this pre-Markan source never mentions the high priest by name. "This implies that Caiaphas, who we know was high priest at that time, was still high priest when the story began circulating." For "if it had been written after Caiaphas' term of office, his name would have had to have been used to distinguish him from the next high priest. But since Caiaphas was high priest from A.D. 18 to 37, this story began circulating no later than A.D. 37, within the first seven years after the events,

 

Has anyone come across this before? Can you point me to some resources answering this?

 

That is quite a leap from "Mark doesn't mention the high priest by name" to "Caiaphas's name would have been used if the story was written after 37." The most likely explanation is that Mark didn't know the name of the high priest when he was inventing the story 40+ years later, or did know but didn't care, since the high priest is just a minor character in the story. 

 

Also, seven years is not "too early" to be legendary. The mythology of the crashed alien in his flying saucer grew within weeks of the aircraft crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. 

 

[Joshpantera]

First of all, any apologist claiming Mark was written earlier than around 70 CE is doing the reverse of secularist's who put the gospels into the 2nd century, with less good reason for doing so. The gospels don't appear into the historical record until the 2nd century. But people assume that they were written around the end of the 1st. There's no pre-Mark aside from wishful apologetic thinking. And the logic here seems more like what Blood mentioned than anything else. Because the evidence points to a post war authorship. 

 

 

 

[Geezer]

Beware of apologist disguising themselves as historians. Apologist have a vested interest in promoting the gospel as history, but its really just one of many theological myths.