An icon of Saint Mark the Evangelist
How we know Mark was the earliest Gospel
How did students of the four Gospels determine that the earliest of them is Mark? The answer is fairly simple and the case is overwhelmingly clear. How certain is the conclusion? It is so certain that only a small percentage of scholars hold to any other theory. The large agreement among different interpreters of the Gospels that Mark came first is for a simply reason. That reason is what happens when you lay side by side the three “Synoptic” Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
These three Gospels have been called “Synoptic,” a word which means “seeing together,” because they share in common a large amount of material, follow the same basic order, and stand apart from John, whose Gospel is unique among the four.
Long ago people realized you could display the text of the three Synoptic Gospels side by side in columns to form a synopsis or parallel Gospel or a harmony. When you do this you find that a large percentage of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are parallel. They share a large amount of verbatim agreement, though each of the three has unique ways of diverging from each other in small and large matters. Much is the same and some is different.
For a long time, people who have studied the Gospels in synopsis (parallel columns) have referred to “the Synoptic Problem.” That problem is: how do we account for the agreements and differences in the parallel accounts and in the other material in the Gospels? Many of the observations I will share here come from a book that I think is the simplest and best-explained handbook on the topic, by Mark Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze.
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Editor’s note: The rest of the above article may be read: here.
I must refer again to the bold-typed words in the first instalment of this series. For those priests of the 14 words who are knowledgeable about the secular approaches to the New Testament, the implications of those bolded words are enormous. But for white nationalists who are not so educated in this matter, before you continue reading my Mondays’ essay-review of Carrier’s book, I would recommend a little online research to become familiar with the evidence that Mark was the earliest of the four canonical gospels.
This is fundamental, as the other gospels are mere re-writings of the original Mark gospel, where the authors added fictional material of their own to an already fictional talltale.
3 replies on “Unhistorical Jesus, 2”
Now that I have just read chapter 11 of Nixey’s Darkening Age, and another part of Goodrich’s Summer 1945, I realise that it doesn’t make sense to continue with the series ‘Unhistorical Jesus’. Since 2012 I had noticed that my entries reproducing a book that preceded that of Richard Carrier, Gospel Fictions by Randel Helms, did not interest readers.
A book like On the Historicity of Jesus, or at least the author’s YouTube lectures, should cause the interest of American nationalists because, as Sunic says, their country is a nation dominated by a version of Christianity most friendly to Jews. Precisely for that reason a radical analysis of Christianity, including its alleged founder, should be at the top of the list of researchable subjects.
I will continue reading Carrier’s book and, if I find another gem like the one I put in bold a week ago, I’ll pick it up on this site. But I think that a long review each Monday is no longer necessary. Listening to Carrier on YouTube or reading his book is a task that should come from those who want to save their race from extinction. In this site I prefer to continue with the translations of Karlheinz Deschner, or my quotes from the book of Catherine Nixey, as the material of the former is unavailable in English.
You think like Carrier that there was no historical Jesus whatsoever. But have you heard of italian researchers Luigi Cascioli, David Donnini and Emilio Salsi? Their hypothesis is that the real person behind Jesus was a jewish revolutionist/zealot, who tried to overthrow the romans from palestine in 36 a.d. in an armed revolution, but failed and was crucified. His real name was Jonn of Gamala. Then the early christians modified his story, which was written in some early gospels by the essenes and probably in the works of Josephus Flavius, falsified the historical records and made of him a pacifist. The most convincing argument is that the description of Nazareth in the Gospels bears no resemblance with the actual location, but it almost exactly corresponds with that of Gamala, the town from which came the zealot chiefs. Nazarene was actually a title given to a religious group. I think they are quite convincing, thir work is good and you should check it out.
LINK
Sounds a bit like Caesar’s Messiah. Evropa Soberana also wrote that Jesus was a crucified rebel in his Rome vs. Judea essay. The very first one who proposed that theory is someone I admire, Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768). See my post about Reimarus: here.
The point is evidence. There is no historical evidence outside the gospels that Jesus existed. And the very first documents about him, Paul’s seven genuine epistles (the others are forgeries) do not mention a terrestrial Jesus at all.
All those secular lives of Jesus contradict each other, as there are as many Jesuses as secular exegetes of the New Testament who believe there is a historical layer beneath the legendary tales. The Carrier video I embedded in this post explains why Occam’s razor should move his listeners not to hypothesize a historical figure.