I was organizing my posts and saving them to a hard drive when I realized that this post was not published on the date that I had planned to publish it. So, here it is, out of order and late…

We’re continuing on with the arguments from James Crossley’s book, DATE OF MARK’S GOSPEL – INSIGHT FROM THE LAW IN EARLIEST CHRISTIANITY (2004).

The third modern criticism listed by Crossley is “form criticism.” This is the argument that the oral tradition must have taken some time before it was written down. Crossley uses the arguments of Dennis Eric Nineham (1921-2016, British theologian and Oxford academic) from the Introduction to his book THE GOSPEL OF MARK, published in 1969, saying, per Crossley, that 40 years is the “normal” amount of time for the ripening of the oral traditions (I found Nineham’s book, but was unable to find where Nineham actually said “40 years”). Crossley feels that 10 years was an adequate amount of time. 

Nineham says a lot more than Crossley reports. Nineham is sure that all the early Christians expected the world to end any minute, so they weren’t interested in handing anything down to posterity. Nineham also makes up this whole plan of how the oral teaching was done, and how things were added and subtracted from what actually happened. Here’s a brief quote that shows his basic distrust of the Gospels:

“In the first place it means that what the Evangelist had to work on, apart from an outline Passion narrative and perhaps one or two short collections of material relating to special subjects, was a series of essentially disconnected stories. This at once explains an otherwise puzzling feature of the Gospels, the way it consists of a number of unrelated paragraphs set down one after another with very little organic connection, almost like a series of snapshots placed side by side in a photograph album.”

“[D]isconnected stories”? This does not give me any confidence in his commentary on Mark. As a matter of fact, at one point in his Introduction, he goes off on a tangent about the “secret Messiahship” in Mark: when Jesus tells people not to talk about the miracles He is performing. Nineham, and those he quotes, seem to have no idea why Jesus was doing this: maybe “Our Lord feared that the character of his Messiahship might be misunderstood;” maybe Mark made it up; maybe Jesus wasn’t really the Messiah, but the Apostles wanted Him to be, so they added that stuff in later. My confidence in Nineham kept dropping the more I read. 

Nineham’s arguments about how things get passed on verbally work fine for myths or folk tales. That’s not what we are discussing here. I think we can all agree that at the time of Jesus’ death, the Apostles still hadn’t put everything together yet. But, after the Resurrection, they started to understand the big picture as Jesus taught them about how, what He accomplished, fit in with the Old Testament. 

When the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost, that’s when they achieved a deep  understanding, not only about what was going on, but what they were to teach. After that they had a short time in Jerusalem to discuss and try out the topics they would teach before they started to scatter into the world. This was not a slow, drawn-out process. The Bible makes it quite clear, in my humble opinion, that this development was rapid.

Even Paul, whose theology was more advanced than that in the Gospels, only took a couple years after the road to Damascus to come to grips with what to teach.

Crossley next moves on to talk about the “offensive” passages in Mark:

“… in the case of Mark’s gospel some of the passages are famously ‘offensive’ and what may be called ‘undeveloped’ and significantly altered or omitted by Matthew and Luke, such as Jesus being labelled ‘out of his mind’ (Mk 3.21), his lack of healing powers in Nazareth (6.5;cf. Mt. 13.58), and his refusal to be called ‘good’ (Mk 10.17-18; cf. Mt. 19.16-17; Lk. 18.18-19).”

But when His own people heard about this, they went out to lay hold of Him, for they said, “He is out of His mind.”    
(Mark 3:21; NASB)

Now He could do no mighty work there, except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them.    
(Mark 6:5; NASB)

Now He did not do many mighty works there because of their unbelief.     (Matthew 13:58; NASB)

¹⁷Now as He was going out on the road, one came running, knelt before Him, and asked Him, “Good Teacher, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?” ¹⁸So Jesus said to him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God.    
(Mark 10:17,18; NASB)

¹⁶Now behold, one came and said to Him, “Good Teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?” ¹⁷So He said to him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God. But if you want to enter into life, keep the commandments.”    
(Matthew 19:16,17; NASB)

¹⁸Now a certain ruler asked Him, saying, “Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” ¹⁹So Jesus said to him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God.    
(Luke 18:18,19; NASB)

Being out of His mind maybe left out of Matthew and Luke, but the other verses are in Matthew, and the last in Luke, and they are essentially the same as in Mark. Crossley uses these passages as evidence for Markan priority. The first seems to me to just be a characteristic of Peter’s speech patterns. The others are not unique at all.

Next Crossley gets into Aramaic. 

“Casey has gone even further and argued that Mark’s gospel contains a significant amount of literal translations of Aramaic sources (probably from eyewitnesses) which is lacking in serious secondary editing, so much so that it may have been written c. 40 CE.”

 “Casey” refers to Maurice Casey (1942-2014), a British scholar of the New Testament and Early Christianity. His specialty was Aramaic sources behind the New Testament. He was also into Q and Markan priority, and he didn’t believe in the divinity of Christ, or in His miracles or His Resurrection. He thought that the miracles were Jesus healing “psychosomatic illnesses.” He stated that the empty tomb was “a legend.” He said that the Gospel of John is “unreliable” and “deprived of historicity.” I have less faith in Casey’s ideas than I did in Nineham’s.

As we’ve discussed in an earlier post, Aramaic was most likely not the  lingua franca of Israel at the time of Jesus: it was more probably Hebrew. The Jews definitely spoke in Aramaic while in exile in Babylon, but, of course they maintained their Hebrew, at the very least in their worship. There were still Hebrew-speaking Jews left in Judea, and, as we know, there were some Jews (like Daniel, though he didn’t return to Judea) who remembered being in Israel speaking Hebrew before they were exiled, so there was little reason for them to maintain the Aramaic once they were back in the land. Of course, some would have continued in Aramaic, and some Aramaic words may have lingered within the Hebrew; I’m told that Hebrew-speakers understand Aramaic fairly easily because they are very similar languages.

I have read in several sources in the past, that the idea that Aramaic was the lingua franca of Judea at the time of Jesus was grabbed onto by Christian commentators of past centuries because, somehow, it made Jesus seem less Jewish. Here’s a quote to that effect:

“But more important than the theological side is the philosophical. Why does much of the Church and academic community insist that Jesus spoke Aramaic and not Hebrew? Many have accepted this idea for years because there seemed to be no debate. But for some of us, the thought of a thoroughly Jewish Jesus makes us a little uncomfortable. It’s easier for people to accept the pale-skinned Jesus found in many paintings, or even the Aramaic-speaking Middle Easterner, because they struggle with Jesus being a Hebrew-speaking, Torah-reading, Jewish Son of Israel.

“In 2014, we saw this happen in real-time when the Pope was visiting Israel. He was interviewing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said, ‘Jesus was here, in this land. He spoke Hebrew.’ Netanyahu’s statement was jarring; even Yahoo news reported that the Pope looked ‘unhappy at his comments, quickly correcting the prime minister.’ The Pope responded, ‘He spoke Aramaic.’ Probably realizing this was a fruitless debate, Netanyahu conceded, ‘He spoke Aramaic, but He knew Hebrew.’

“Why was this major Christian leader so apprehensive about the idea that Jesus spoke Hebrew?
“There is no question that antisemitism has been a major part of church history and has been an unfortunate black stain on the Church for years. Whether it was the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, the Holocaust, or hundreds of other examples, terrible things have been done to the Jewish people in the name of Jesus…We like to think of Jesus as the first Christian, not the Messiah of the Jewish people. We have tried to ‘de-Jew’ Jesus for centuries, whether through a stained-glass window of a blue-eyed Jesus or the poor carpenter who spoke Aramaic in ‘Palestine.’ Either way, it feels like we don’t want to confront Jesus’ Jewishness – or how the enemy is trying very hard to conceal that idea from the Church.”     [from centerforisrael.com/article/what-language-did-jesus-speak/]

Casey gets into the fact that some of the Old Testament is written in Aramaic.  He deliberately avoids mentioning that the reason Ezra and Daniel were writing part of their books in Aramaic had to do with being in Babylon…Daniel was moved there as a teen, Ezra was born there…and yet, both wrote most of their books in Hebrew. 

Some think they spoke Akkadian (a mix of Babylonian and Assyrian, the original language of Babylon). [from arch.cam.ac.uk/about-us/mesopotamia-history/mesopotamia-languages] Akkadian was a very closely related semitic language to Aramaic and Hebrew, both being older languages than Akkadian. Aramaic was the language of the ancient Aramean tribes of the northern central or northwestern area of the Middle East, thought to have first appeared in about the late 11th century BC. 

“By the 8th century BCE it had become accepted by the Assyrians as a second language. The mass deportations of people by the Assyrians and the use of Aramaic as a lingua franca by Babylonian merchants served to spread the language, so that in the 7th and 6th centuries BCE it gradually supplanted Akkadian as the lingua franca of the Middle East. It subsequently became the official language of the Achaemenian Persian dynasty (559-330 BCE), though after the conquest of Alexander the Great, Greek displaced it as the official language through the former Persian empire.”      [from britannica.com/topic/Aramaic-language]

Most of the returnees from Babylon would have, at least initially, been in the south of Israel because that’s where Babylon grabbed them. But, even in the south there were some Jews left there after the Babylonians stopped coming…and they spoke Hebrew.

The north was overtaken by Assyria, not Babylon, and there was no large scale return from Assyria (i.e., the lost 10 tribes). The Samaritans were peoples from other areas, settled there by the Assyrians, and they intermarried with some of the remaining local Jews. Nazareth and Galilee had some Gentiles living there, but there were, most likely (per Richard Horsley in ARCHAEOLOGY, HISTORY, AND SOCIETY IN GALILEE, 1996), some remaining original Jews living there. They didn’t intermarry with non-Jews, or even relate to each other much. These Jews were of the 10 tribes and not Judean…though Judeans moved there in 1st century BC. [from margmowczko.com/galilee-first-century-ce/ ]

Some sources talk about the Dead Sea scrolls, only (or mostly) mentioning the Aramaic scrolls, as if their presence in the cache of scrolls proves that Aramaic was the main language of Israel. About the Dead Sea scrolls, I’ve found the following information:

Hebrew: ~76-79% including biblical books, non-biblical literary works, and documents like deeds and letters; Assyrian block script used (like modern Hebrew); these texts were not marked by significant interference from Greek; there was some interference from Aramaic, conclusions have been made that this proves that at least some Jews spoke Hebrew primarily, and may have been the primary language of at least some Jews.

Hebrew: ~0.9-1.0%; unknown Hebrew scripts

Paleo-Hebrew: ~1.0-1.5%; earliest use found so far is a Proto-Canaanite script found in Jerusalem from the 11th or 10th century BC, the Paleo-Hebrew script developed from this and was used until the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BC by the Babylonians, when the Judeans came home from Babylon they brought back the Assyrian block script which eventually replaced the Paleo-Hebrew script [from biblicalarchaeology.org/biblical-artifacts/inscriptions/precursor-to-the-paleo-hebrew-script-discovered-in-jerusalem/]. The Paleo-Hebrew script is very close to the Phoenician script, and the Samaritans carried on using this script for some time. [from ancient-hebrew.org/ancient-alphabet/paleo-hebrew-alphabet.htm].

Aramaic: ~16-17% includes a wide variety of Aramaic dialects

Greek: ~3%; uncial script, used from 3rd century BC to 8th century AD

Nabataean: ~0.2%; used from 2nd century BC to 4th century AD

About 40% are copies of texts from Hebrew scriptures

About 30% are non-canonized texts from the Second Temple period, like Enoch, Jubilees, Tobit, etc.

About 30% are previously unknown manuscripts that provide information about different sects or groups within greater Judaism.

Within Judaism there is a custom of storing worn-out sacred texts until they can be properly buried in a cemetery. The Qumran texts, as well as some others, like at Masada, were texts stored in earthenware vessels in caves (“under the earth”), either as permanent “retirement,” or as a temporary storage before permanent burial that was then forgotten about, either due to war or the deaths of those who did the storing. The scrolls at Qumran are dated from 3rd century BC to 1st century AD. Interestingly, because the fragments of documents are on organic material (papyrus and parchment), they are able to be matched up by using DNA.

Crossley leaves modern criticisms at this point, and introduces his next topic like this:

“It has also been argued that if Markan passages containing certain Jewish cultural assumptions can be identified and if it can be seen how Matthew and Luke use these passages then this may provide an earliest possible date for these adaptations. The most useful topic for this kind of approach is early Christian disputes over the law because there is firm datable evidence for such disputes in the first century. These datable legal issues in Acts and the Epistles may usefully be compared with changes made in the synoptic tradition. This requires a discussion of the portrayal of Jesus’ attitude towards the Torah as portrayed in the synoptic gospels, because not everyone accepts that the synoptic Jesus is portrayed as a Torah observant Jew.”

This study assumes Markan priority; I’m also suspicious that we are going to be re-arguing the ‘did Mark borrow from Paul, or Paul from Mark’ question again.

Also, I don’t know about you, but I do see Jesus as a Torah-observant Jew. I agree that rules He broke were man’s rules, not God’s. Crossley makes his point by discussing: the “fringe” or “tassel” of Jesus’ cloak (that in touching it, could produce healing) which indicated Torah-observance; the question of the Greatest Commandment (which came from Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18); and Jesus’ criticism of the sacrificial system (which came from multiple Old Testament sources, such as Isa. 1:10-17 and Jeremiah 6:20, 7:21-28).

Then Crossley discusses Jesus’ “overriding” of the Sabbath law. He rightly concludes that Jesus was breaking no biblical law in His behavior. He quotes Ed Parish Sanders (1937-2022, American New Testament scholar and theologian) as saying: “the synoptic Jesus behaved on the sabbath in a way which fell inside the range of current debate about it, and well inside the range of permitted behavior.” Crossley then says that Sanders “often underestimated” the “seriousness of the synoptic Sabbath disputes.” E. P. Sanders wrote a number of books on Jewish practices of the first century (i.e., JUDAISM: PRACTICE AND BELIEF 63 BCE – 66 CE), on Jesus’ relationship with Judaism, and on Jewish Law. It seems, from Wikipedia, that he was a well-respected authority on these topics. I was able to borrow his book COMPARING JUDASIM AND CHRISTIANITY: COMMON JUDAISM, PAUL, AND THE INNER AND OUTER STUDY OF RELIGION on Internet Archive (not one of the books in Crossley’s bibliography by the way); he had a section on the Sabbath. He quoted from a 1962 summary of the Damascus Document (a foundational fragmentary text from Qumran) written by Geza Vermes:

“The sectary was not only to abstain from labor ‘on the sixth day from the moment when the sun’s orb is distant by its own fullness from the gate (wherein it sinks)’ (CD 10:15-16), he was not even to speak about work. Nothing associated with money or gain was to interrupt his Sabbath of rest (CD 10:18-19). No member of the Covenant of God was to go out of his house on business on the Sabbath…He could not cook. He could not pick and eat fruit and other edible things ‘lying the in the fields.’ He could not draw water and carry it away, but must drink where he found it (CD 10:22-23). He could not strike his beast or reprimand his servant (CD 11:6,12). He could not carry a child, wear perfume or sweep up the dust in his house (CD 11:10-11). He could not assist his animals to give birth or help them if they fell into a pit; he could, however, pull a man out of water or fire with the help of a ladder or rope (CD 11:12-14, 16-17)”

Sanders goes on to discuss how the Damascus Document says that the only sacrifice that can be offered on the Sabbath is the Sabbath sacrifice; if a festival falls on the Sabbath, they cannot offer the festival sacrifices on that day. He goes on to say that Hillel made the decision to sacrifice the Passover lamb “even when the festival fell on the Sabbath.” Thus, it can be seen that the rules laid out in the Damascus Document were rabbinic decisions; interpretations of biblical passages, to be taken seriously, but not un-opposable by other Rabbis. This set of rules were stricter than some other sets of rules, and so different Rabbis and groups would choose which set of rules by which to live. Perhaps now we can see that Sanders did consider the seriousness of the “Sabbath disputes.” We can also see more clearly what Jesus was talking about when He spoke about man’s rules vs God’s rules.

Crossley then says:

“…the Sabbath dispute in Mk 3.1-6 can hardly be seen as abrogating or rejecting the biblical Torah as healing on the Sabbath is not prohibited in biblical law. The portrayal of Jesus shows that Jesus does not believe that he is questioning the Sabbath, because he does not question the validity of the Sabbath as an institution but rather the emphasis is on what can and cannot be done on the Sabbath: ‘Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?’ (3.4). It has been rightly argued that Jesus is extending the dictum that saving life overrules the Sabbath….The conflict has been viewed as implausible by some scholars not least because Jesus is not breaking any known Sabbath law. Although the immediate concern here is not with the historical accuracy of the tradition, certain factors actually count in favor of this, namely the concerns over the legitimacy of minor healings in rabbinical literature (e.g. m. Shabb. 14.3f.) and the continual development of Sabbath law by strict Jews from the Second Temple period through to rabbinical times (Jub. 2.23; m. Shabb. 7.2). Mark may well be recording a plausible scenario which reflects contemporary debate.”

“There (were) two and twenty heads of mankind from Adam to Jacob, and two and twenty kinds of work were made until the seventh day; this is blessed and holy; and the former also is blessed and holy; and this one serves with that one for sanctification and blessing.”     (The Book of Jubilees 2:23; from pseudographa.com)

“One may not eat eizoveyon on Shabbat because healthy people do not eat it, and therefore it is clear that anyone eating it is doing so for its medicinal value. However, one may eat a plant called yo’ezer and may drink abuvro’e. Furthermore, all types of food that healthy people eat may be eaten by a person even for medicinal purposes. And one may drink all drinks except for water from palm trees and a kos ikarin because they are known as a remedy for jaundice. Therefore, it is prohibited to drink them on Shabbat for curative purposes. However, one may drink palm tree water on Shabbat in order to quench his thirst, and one may smear ikarin oil on himself for non-medical purposes.”     (Mishnah Shabbat 14:3; from  sefaria.org)

“This fundamental mishna enumerates those who perform the primary categories of labor prohibited on Shabbat, which number forty-less-one. They are grouped in accordance with their function: One who sows, and one who plows, and one who reaps, one who gathers sheaves into a pile, and one who threshes, removing the kernel from the husk, and one who winnows threshed grain in the wind, and one who selects the inedible waste from the edible, and one who grinds, and one who sifts the flour in a sieve, and one who kneads the dough, and one who bakes. Additional primary categories of prohibited labor are the following: One who shears wool, and one who whitens it, and one who combs the fleece and straightens it, and one who dyes it, and one who spins the wool, and one who stretches the threads of the warp in the loom…. “     (part of Mishnah Shabbat 7:2; from sefaria.org)

Again, we can see that these are interpretations of biblical law, not the laws themselves. I’m going to leave this topic here, even though there is a whole lot more that Crossley gets into to show that Jesus did not break biblical law. This is pulling us too far afield, interesting as it is. None of this proves Markan priority by the way, or any priority at all.

Crossley takes his conclusion that Mark didn’t show any “signs of biblical Torah being challenged”, and then compares that to Acts and Paul’s writings, where we start to see challenges being made by Gentile Christians to the role of Torah. He sees the first challenge in Acts 6-7 with Stephen seeming to “contradict the validity of a Jerusalem Temple.” I’m not going to go into depth on this because it is not clear at all that Stephen was actually making that case.

That takes us to Paul’s writings.

“Paul is of course the major figure when it comes to the question of law observance in Christianity. Some of Paul’s letters famously question the role of Torah observance so it is perfectly reasonable to attempt to find out when he first came to his major conclusions concerning the role of the Torah.” 

Crossley takes us through a lot of gyrations that finally conclude that we can’t really nail down the date when Paul first decided on law observance for Christians. He finally decides that “…in Paul’s chronological outline it is only around the time of the Jerusalem council in Gal. 2.1-10, some 14-17 years after his conversion, that there are the first definite claims of a gospel without some of the law imposed on gentiles.” He half-heartedly says that it could have been earlier than this, but admits that it can’t be proved.

So, his conclusion is that by the second half of the forties (at the latest) there were challenges to the biblical Torah, so: “Mark, unlike Matthew and Luke, shows no knowledge concerning the questions surrounding the observance of the biblical law it can be argued with a strong degree of probability that the gospel was written extremely early, earlier than the second half of the forties…” 

I have a problem with Crossley’s intimation that Matthew and Luke “show knowledge” regarding “the questions surrounding the observance of the biblical law.”  Both gospels have Jesus discussing matters of law, but not in the sense of His followers challenging that law (Luke 10:25-28; 18:18-27; Matthew 5). Matthew 5:17-20 is where Jesus says He is here to fulfill the law not destroy it, and this comes the closest to providing Crossley with evidence that it was written after the “questions surrounding the observance of biblical law” were brought up. But, as Matthew was writing for Jews, it is only natural that they should wonder about some of Jesus’ teachings and how they would be reconciled with the Law of Moses. This is not the same thing as Gentile Christians challenging the law, like we see in Acts. Here’s a quote that discusses this:

“In Matthew 5 the preceding context in v.16 is a call to good works, and the subsequent context in v.20 and the verses that follow is a comparison of Jesus’ standards of righteousness with those of the scribes and Pharisees. Matthew’s concern then in this section of his gospel, and indeed elsewhere, is for righteous living. It is not unlikely that Matthew is answering a Jewish accusation that Jesus’ way represented a departure from Jewish moral standards and a destruction of the law; so Matthew emphasizes Jesus’ righteousness and his condemnation of anomia [the uprooting or breakdown of any moral values or standards for individuals to follow] (e.g. Matt. 13:41; 25:31f., etc.).

“If that is the Matthean context, much the same may have been the original context in Jesus’ ministry. People were, I suggest, comparing Jesus’ revolutionary life and message with the teaching of the scribes and Pharisees, and their charge was that Jesus was a libertarian who was abandoning the high standards of the Old Testament law, for which the scribes and Pharisees stood so firmly. We know for certain that this accusation was made against Jesus because of his freedom towards the sabbath law and because of his friendship towards the sinners and outcasts (Matt. 9:10f.; 11:19).

“In this context Matthew 5:17-20 makes sense. V.17 is itself phrased as a denial of the accusation: ‘Think not that I have come to abolish the law…’”     [from the gospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/jesus-and-the-law-an-exegesis-on-matthew-517-20/]

To sum this up: Matthew and Luke are reporting issues that came up during Jesus’ ministry regarding Jewish law, brought up by Jews. Crossley is looking at when the Gentile Christians started having issues with Jewish law, which, as he says, happened in the mid to late forties. Thus, this is not a valid way to date the Gospel of Mark in my opinion.

Crossley goes on to try to use the same argument regarding: the Sabbath laws, an issue with sexual immorality in the early church, and issues in the early church with divorce laws. I would use my same arguments against him with these issues. For the Sabbath laws, the Jews would and did have issues with Jesus’ handling of the Sabbath laws during His ministry, so that He would feel the need to explain Himself (and it not being Matthew adding this later to answer an early church question).  As for the immorality of the early church and issues with the divorce laws, these were not new problems that cropped up only within the early church. The fact that Matthew had Jesus addressing these issues during His ministry does not have to lead one to believe that Matthew wrote much later and added these words of Jesus out of whole cloth in order to address things going on in the early church. Rather, it more likely shows that these issues were contemporary with Jesus’ ministry.

I’m very tired of the idea that, whenever some passage of the Bible doesn’t fit the narrative being pushed, the biblical writer must not be who we think it is, and/or is making it up.

This is getting long, so we must stop in Crossley one more time. In the next post, we will finish with Crossley and then finish up with a few more arguments from other authors on the topic of Mark.