I have discovered a few things about the way the Christian religion was formed. Also I have discovered that the Gospel of Mark is, in many parts, a coded story. Unless you discover the code, you cannot interpret it correctly. There are two discourses in Mark’s narrative, one is overt. This is what everybody recognizes. The other discourse is covert. It reveals that the overt discourse is misleading in two ways. On the one hand, it transforms the historical Jesus in order to make it one and the same as the resurrected Christ. On the other hand, the memory of important events that led to the crucifixion of Jesus and justified it were repressed, otherwise his death could not have been redemptive, and the entire Christian faith would have collapsed.
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1 -There are two burial stories in the Gospel of John. According to the first one, the Roman soldiers disposed of the bodies of the three crucified men. Mary Magdalene and her female companions knew nothing about what the soldiers did. According to the second story, Joseph of Arimathea put the body of Jesus in a tomb, while the female disciples observed what he did. Consequently, they went to the tomb on the first day of the week and found it empty. My study shows that the second story evolved from the first one. It must be discarded as pious forgery.
2 – Peter is indeed the source of Mark, as Papias has said in the early Second Century. Therefore, Peter, not Mark, is responsible for all the inconsistencies that are found all over Mark’s narrative.
3 – As I said in my introductory statement, Mark’s narrative consists of two discourses. One is overt, and the other one is covert. The overt discourse is what all readers see when they read the text. The covert discourse has remained unrecognized to this day. I have discovered it. What happened is that Peter repressed the memory of very important events concerning what Jesus did and said in the last phase of his life, because those events contradicted his faith in Jesus Christ, Son of God. On the other hand, he had no choice but invent stories that were not historical, the purpose of which was to show that the historical Jesus and the resurrected Christ were one and the same person.
4 – During the last phase of his life, Jesus received a new revelation. In order to introduce that new revelation, he organized big rallies in an isolated place near the lake of Galilee. He did so with the help of his disciples. He sent them all over Galilee to invite the people to a big rally. He had something new to introduce. So, on the appointed day and time he went there with his disciples. Five thousand people were waiting for him. They had come with plenty of food for the entire day. Peter says that he spoke for a long time. He must have said what was revealed to him, namely that the Temple sacrifices were about to become obsolete, and that the Passover meal can be celebrated anywhere in the world, since it was no longer sacrificial. When this meal ritual was repeated a second time, the people recognized in Jesus another Moses and wanted to make him king. The twelve disciples and their leader, Peter, must have been the organizers of that movement. But Jesus rejected the idea and scolded Peter very harshly. The immediate consequence was that Jeus lost his popularity in Galilee. The large crowds stopped following him. Jesus had to act alone. He will go up to Jerusalem, enter the Temple and proclaim the same message. In Galilee, he lost his popularity. In Jerusalem he lost his life.
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Interested? I invite you to get acquainted with my discovery and put it to the test.
Please feel free to go anytime to the Blog page and say what you think.
I need your constructive criticism. Thank you.
Joseph Codsi
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Table of Contents
1 – Unrecognized Revelations in John and Mark
2 – Two Enigmatic Texts in the Gospel of Mark
3 – Secret Revelations in Mark
4 – Review of Reading Mark by Kelly R. Iverson
5 – Mark’s beginning and ending
1 – Unrecognized Revelations in John and Mark
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1 – Two Burial Stories in the Gospel of John
First Story – The Roman soldiers disposed of the bodies of the three crucified men. How and where? The text does not say.
Second story – Joseph of Arimathea gave Jesus an honorable burial in a well-identified tomb.
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My study shows that the second story goes back to the Gospel of Mark and was derived from the first one. It has all the features of a pious forgery. Consequently the empty-tomb story is also pious fiction.
The purpose of those two stories is to show that the resurrection affected the body of Jesus, and was not a purely spiritual experience of the disciples.
The resurrection experience of the disciples was real and had a formidable influence on them. But, if it did not affect the dead body of Jesus, it must have been purely subjective. The immediate consequence of this fact is that the Christian faith in the bodily resurrection of Jesus is unsustainable.
There is another passage in the Gospel of John which confirms the fact that the resurrection experience of the disciples was strictly spiritual. This shows that their experience was similar to the experience of mystics, who have visions and dreams through which they receive revelations from the other world. The mystical experience is to itself its own proof, and is enough to justify faith. No tangible proofs are needed. This point is confirmed by the study of the mystical experience that was conducted by Michel de Certeau in a book entitled The Mystic Fable.
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2 – Mark
Based on a new and intelligent way of reading selected texts of Mark, I can say that the resurrection experience of the disciples was so powerful that they had no choice but invent stories that corroborated their faith in Jesus Christ, Son of God, whose death redeemed the world. They recognized that they had no choice but do what they did when they acknowledged that their hearts were hardened. The hardening of the heart is a reference to what happened to the Egyptian Pharaoh in the days of Moses. God hardened his heart so he would not listen to Moses. Along the same line, the hearts of the disciples were hardened so that they would invent fake stories that confirmed their faith. We have here a very important confession made by the disciples of Jesus that they had to sin in two ways. They repressed very important memories that would have rendered their Christian faith unsustainable. On the other hand, they invented stories that confirmed their faith in the resurrection.
The Christian faith is apostolic. It rests on the testimony of the Apostles, and I should say on a blind trust in them. But I have discovered that the testimony of the Apostles takes two forms. One is overt, and the other one is covert. In their overt testimony they proclaim the Christian faith as we know it. In their covert testimony, they recognize that they have tampered with the evidence. In a sense, the Apostles were pathological liars. But they were honest liars, because they confess that they have lied, not by choice but by divine necessity.
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Here is a PDF version of the following discussion, https://christianfable.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Two-Burial-Stories.pdf
1 – Two Burial Stories
in the Gospel of John[1]
“The distortion of a text is not unlike a murder.
The difficulty lies not in the execution of the deed
but in the doing away with the traces.”[2]
The two burial stories appear side by side in John’s narrative.
First burial story
A – 31It was the Preparation day, and so, to prevent the bodies from remaining on the crosses during the Sabbath (for that Sabbath was a great day), the Jews asked Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies removed. 32Accordingly the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first man, and then those of the other who had been crucified with Jesus; 33but, on coming to him, when they saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs.
B – 34and so instead of breaking his legs, one of the soldiers pierced his side with a lance; and immediately came out blood and water. 35This is the evidence of one who saw it—true evidence, and he knows that what he says is true—and he gives it so that you may believe as well. 36Because all this happened to fulfill the words of scripture: ‘No one bone of his will be broken.’ 37And again, in another place scripture says: ‘They will look to the one whom they have pierced.’
John 19:31-37
Second burial story
38After this, Joseph of Arimathea, a disciple of Jesus – but a secret one, owing to his fear of the religious authorities – begged Pilate’s permission to remove the body of Jesus. Pilate gave him leave; so Joseph went and removed the body. 39Nicodemus, too – the man who had formerly visited Jesus by night – came with a roll of myrrh and aloes, weighing nearly a hundred pounds. 40They took the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen with the spices, according to the Jewish mode of burial. 41At the place where Jesus had been crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a newly made tomb in which no one had ever been laid. 42And so, because of its being the Preparation day, and as the tomb was close at hand, they laid Jesus there.
John 19:38-42
First story
I have divided the first story into two parts. Part A reports what was in the source used by John. Part B introduces new concerns that are unique to John. In itself, Part A is of no interest to John. He uses it only to explain why the soldiers did not break the legs of Jesus, which is for him a sign that Jesus is the Passover lamb of which no bone can be broken.
Next comes the piercing of Jesus’ side (Part B) and the coming out of blood and water. This is the point that is of interest to John, who sees in it a miraculous sign that calls for faith. This sign is strengthened by the fulfillment of two scriptures.
Verse 35 is in the center of Part B. It introduces the witness who saw what the soldiers did and what happened when one of them pierced the side of Jesus with his lance. Now this witness remains a mystery. Who was he? The Greek text refers to him in the masculine form. So he must be one of the male disciples. But according to Mark 15:50, all the male disciples of Jesus run away when he was arrested. Only some female disciples were present near the crucifixion place. According to John, however, the disciple whom Jesus loved was present there with Mary, the mother of Jesus (see John 19:25-27). The Beloved Disciple is mentioned only in the Gospel of John and his identity remains a mystery. I have written a paper about him. You can find it in section 3. Let me say here that what pertains to the Beloved Disciple is likely to involve special theological insights that are unique to John and his gospel.
This explains why John forgets so easily the last part of what the soldiers had done, namely that they removed the bodies of the three crucified men once they were dead, and disposed of them in a common grave. None of the disciples, including the women, knew where it was. The women could have seen the soldiers come and break the legs of the two men who were crucified with Jesus. But as the sun was about to set, they had to leave on account of the Sabbath. They did not see the soldiers remove the bodies and do what they had to do.
John left the action of the soldiers unfinished. But they must have obeyed the orders they had received and made sure no traces of the crucifixion were left during the Sabbath. John reported what the soldiers were ordered to do, because this was for him a way of introducing an important testimony of the Beloved Disciple.
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Second Story
The second story is centered on Joseph of Arimathea, who went to see Pilate and asked permission “to let him remove the body of Jesus.” His obvious intention was to give Jesus an honorable burial. His request differs from that of the Jewish council in one major point: he was interested only in Jesus. He had no objection to leaving the other two men on the cross during the Sabbath. In other words, Joseph did not share the concern of the Jewish leadership to have the crucifixion ordeal ended before a particularly important day.
The second story is well known. Not only is it found in John, it is the only burial story in Mark, Matthew, and Luke. In comparison, the first burial story is barely implied in the text of John. This is why, I suppose, it has been ignored to this day.
I will argue that the second burial story was derived from the first one. But first, I would like to analyze the significant discrepancies that plague the four accounts of the second story. They show that each evangelist tried to overcome the problems inherent in that second story.
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Part 1
Comparative study of the second burial’s
four versions
We have read John’s version. Here are the other three versions.
Mark
42The evening had already fallen, when, as it was the Preparation day – the day before the Sabbath – 43Joseph from Arimathea, a council member of good position, who was himself living in expectation of the kingdom of God, came and ventured to go in to see Pilate, and to ask for the body of Jesus. 44But Pilate was surprised to hear that he had already died. So he sent for the officer, and asked if he were already dead; 45and, on learning from the officer that it was so, he gave the corpse to Joseph. 46Joseph, having bought a linen sheet, took Jesus down, and wound the sheet around him, and laid him in a tomb which had been cut out of the rock; and then rolled a stone up against the entrance of the tomb. 47Mary of Magdala and Mary, the mother of Joseph, were watching to see where he was laid. (Mark 15:42-47)
Matthew
57When evening had fallen, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who had himself become a disciple of Jesus. 58He went to see Pilate, and asked for the body of Jesus. Pilate ordered it to be given him. 59So Joseph took the body, and wrapped it in a clean linen sheet, 60and laid it in his newly made tomb which he had cut in the rock; and, before he left, he rolled a great stone against the entrance of the tomb. 61Mary of Magdala and the other Mary remained behind, sitting in front of the grave. (Matt 27:57-61)
Luke
50Now there was a man of the name of Joseph, who was a member of the Council, and who bore a good and upright character. 51(This man had not assented to the decision and action of the Council.) He belonged to Arimathea, a town in Judea, and lived in expectation of the kingdom of God. 52He now went to see Pilate, and asked for the body of Jesus; 53and, when he had taken it down, he wrapped it in a linen sheet, and laid him in a tomb cut out of stone, in which no one had yet been buried. 54It was the Preparation day, and just before the Sabbath began. 55The women who had accompanied Jesus from Galilee followed, and saw the tomb and how the body of Jesus was laid, 56and then went home, and prepared spices and perfumes. (Luke 23:50-55)
Main differences
The three synoptic gospels make sure that the women knew where the body of Jesus was laid. This was essential for the story of the empty tomb, in which it is assumed that the women had witnessed what Joseph of Arimathea had done. Only John fails to mention this point. He has Mary Magdalene go to the tomb early on the first day of the week (see John 20:1). How did she identify the tomb? This inconsistency suggests that John picked up the story, from Mark or its source, in which the women see where Joseph of Arimathea had left the corpse of Jesus. According to Mark, Jesus was hastily buried, and the ritual preparation of the body was not performed but rather was left for the women to do after the Sabbath (see Mark 16:1). John realized that putting the ritual off until then meant that Jesus had not received a proper burial, so he had Joseph and Nicodemus perform the ritual burial and, I should add, without the presence of the women. In addition, John must have thought that Joseph could not handle burying Jesus all by himself, so he gave him a helper in the person of Nicodemus.
The time factor
Mark states that Joseph went to see Pilate “when evening had come.” This means that, if Joseph was concerned with observing the Sabbath law, he had to act quickly because the interval between evening and night is short in that part of the world. Matthew paid special attention to this point. He reduced Joseph’s activity to the bare minimum: wrapping the body in a clean linen cloth and depositing it in his own tomb. Thus Joseph did not have to go and buy anything for the burial of Jesus, as in Mark (and John), and he did not have to look for a tomb, as in John.
John, on the other hand, does not mention that evening had come when Joseph went to see Pilate. This provided more time for what Joseph (and Nicodemus) had to do. In John’s story, Nicodemus comes with a wagonload of myrrh and aloes, and the two good Samaritans gave Jesus a royal burial, a time-consuming activity. But, at the end, they had to hurry and find a tomb, because the day of Preparation was about to end and the Sabbath about to start. So they just used a tomb that was there! John’s story is not realistic here. Matthew is the only one who cared to avoid the strange conduct of using a tomb that was just there.
The identity of Joseph of Arimathea
According to Mark, Joseph was member of the Jewish council. This identification was problematic because the council had handed Jesus over to Pilate for crucifixion. Mark emphasizes that the council’s verdict was unanimous (Mark 14:64), which obviously implies that Joseph had voted to condemn Jesus—an embarrassing problem that Luke explicitly contradicts in Luke 24:51. In order to overcome this difficulty, Mark specified that Joseph was a pious Jew who waited expectantly for the Kingdom of God (Mark 15:43). Matthew must have thought that piety was not enough to motivate Joseph’s action. He transformed him into a disciple of Jesus. He also made him a rich man in order to explain how he could afford to have his own tomb hewn in the rock.
In order to make Joseph’s action believable, Mark spoke of the courage he showed when he “boldly” went to Pilate to request the body of Jesus. Matthew and Luke omit this detail.
John avoided a big problem by not associating Joseph with the council. For him, Joseph was a secret disciple of Jesus. This explains his concern about Jesus, but not the access he had to Pilate. If he was not an important person, he would not have had a chance to reach the Roman governor.[1] This is a weak point in John’s story. But he was wise to give Joseph a helper in the person of Nicodemus.
Conclusion
This quick survey of the four accounts shows that the tradition of a burial by Joseph of Arimathea was problematic. Each gospel writer tried to fix it as best he could.
In all four narratives, Joseph of Arimathea appears out of the blue and saves the day. Not only does he give Jesus an honorable burial, but he provides the premise for the empty tomb story. This is why he reminds one of a deus ex machina, lowered in a basket at the end of a Greek play, who resolves all the problems.
As a deus ex machina Joseph appears to be fictive, and the four gospel accounts concerning what he did for Jesus are likely to be pious fictions as well. But is the evidence really conclusive? I must admit that all the evidence that I have produced so far is circumstantial. An impartial jury might find it impressive, but not conclusive. Is it possible to produce some really compelling evidence?
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Part 2
How the second burial story evolved from the first one
The proof that Joseph’s story is a pious fiction can be found in Mark’s text. Let us read it once more.
When evening had come, and since it was the day of Preparation, that is, the day before the Sabbath, Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the council, who was also himself waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. (Mark 15:42-43)
There is, in this text, a causal connection between Joseph’s request and the fact that “it was the day of Preparation.” This is very strange, because the impending sabbath had nothing to do with Joseph’s request. He just wanted to give Jesus an honorable burial. If he had acted in anticipation of the impending holy day, he would have included the two other men in his request. What seems to have happened is that Mark (or the tradition he is following) transformed the story of the first burial using a simple substitution: the original request from the Jewish leadership became a request from just one of them, Joseph of Arimathea. In the first story, it is the impending holy day that motivated “the Jews” to request the removal of the bodies. But it is clear that Joseph was not interested in all three men, only in Jesus. Mark has inadvertently reproduced a feature of the first burial story in his revision. While his explanation, “since it was the day of Preparation,” made sense in the first story, it did not in the second one. Matthew and Luke removed that incoherent reference to the day of Preparation. Mark’s mistake is the “smoking gun” that shows he knew that first story when he wrote his own.
Another honest mistake is found in John’s version of the second burial story, in which he has Joseph and Nicodemus bury Jesus when the female disciples were not present. Therefore, the women would not have known where Jesus was buried. John exposes his error when he has Mary Magdalene go to the tomb on the first day of the week, as if she had seen what Joseph and Nicodemus had done.
A third discrepancy exists in Mark’s account. He says that Joseph of Arimathea was a member of the council. Now, according to Mark, all the members of the council agreed that Jesus deserves to die (see Mark 14:64). This means that Joseph of Arimathea condemned Jesus. How could he have been waiting for the Kingdom of God, the central feature of Jesus’ message?
It is easy to change a story. What is difficult is to do so without leaving traces of the forgery. When a story is judged unacceptable, it is not so easy to invent another one in its place without betraying oneself. Mark’s text illustrates this point with its mention of the day of Preparation. The tradition concerning the first burial survived for some time but was finally lost, while the written texts of the second story survive to this day.
Conclusion
Based on the evidence that I have produced, I conclude that the second burial story, in which Joseph of Arimathea is the central actor, is pious fiction. The body of Jesus must have been disposed of by the Roman soldiers. This is clearly implied, although not explicitly said, in the first story.
The two burial stories illustrate a phenomenon that occurs very frequently in the various narratives concerning what happened during the life of Jesus. Important memories of the past were repressed. Other events were invented. Traces of those systematic transformations exist in the texts. Some of them are easily recognizable; others are not. This is particularly the case of memories that were repressed, and have remained unrecognized to this day.
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John Chapter 14
In chapter 14, the context is very different. On the eve of his death, Jesus is having intimate exchanges with the disciples. They ask him questions and he answers them. Here is one of those exchanges.
Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?” 23Jesus answered him, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.” (John 14:22-23)
The question that is raised here refers to the fact that the resurrected Christ was going to appear to his disciples and not to the general public. What is strange here is that the question anticipates the knowledge of what was going to happen after the death of Jesus. We tend to think of this as normal, since those exchanges take place in what we call the farewell speech. In it Jesus announces his departure and promises not to leave the disciples orphans.
I think that we have here a fiction that is misleading. The exchanges between Jesus and his disciples that are reported here are most likely exchanges that took place between the author of the farewell speech (whom I call John 3) and his disciples. I see in those exchanges a graduate seminar. His disciples ask him questions and he answers them. What we have here is the way John 3 understood the Christian mystery.
This interpretation is based on the fact that the farewell speech anticipates the Easter mystery in a pre-Easter context. In my view, any anticipation of the Easter mystery (death/resurrection) in a pre-Easter context is highly suspicious. Let me explain.
According to John 20:9, nobody knew during the life of Jesus that “he must rise from the dead.” The same idea can be found in Mark 9:9-10. As Jesus and the three disciples were coming down the Transfiguration mountain,
He ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead. So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what this rising from the dead could mean.
This passage conveys the same idea. The disciples knew nothing about the resurrection of Jesus before the fact. Therefore Judas could not have asked Jesus about the modality of the resurrection, and Jesus could not have discussed the Christian mystery in the alleged farewell discourse.
Because of this, I say that the question that is raised here by Judas is anachronistic. It anticipates the disciples’ knowledge of the resurrection. This confirms my idea that all those questions and answers must have taken place in a different context. Most likely they express the author’s theological understanding of the Christian mystery.
There is, in this passage, an opposition between the disciples and the world. The world is the enemy. It is excluded from any intimacy with Jesus. It cannot understand nor appreciate the Christian mystery. Therefore the Christian revelation is not for the world.
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Here is how the resurrection experience of the disciples is understood
Those who love Jesus and “keep his word,” that is to say his commandments (John 14:21) fulfill the prerequisite condition for seeing him after his death. The Father will love them. He will come with Jesus and dwell in them. The “world” remains “outside.” It is excluded from this intimacy.
In other words, this passage recognizes the spiritual dimension of the resurrection. The resurrection is not an objective event, but a spiritual one. It does not affect the dead body of Jesus, but the mind of those who love him and keep his word.
Trinitarian dimension of what happened after the death of Jesus
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you” (John 14:15-17).
Special attention should be paid to the following passage.
“I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you” (John 14:25-26).
The physical presence of Jesus ends with his death. It will be replaced with a spiritual presence, and this spiritual presence will be represented by the Holy Spirit. In other words Jesus will remain with the disciples under the new form of the Spirit. To see Jesus after his death is to receive the Holy Spirit. What will change is the form in which Jesus is present. Jesus in the flesh will become the vivifying Spirit.
In this passage, the Spirit fulfills two roles. It will teach the disciples everything and it will remind[2] them of what Jesus had told them.
It will teach them everything they need to know about the Christian mystery. Jesus’ message was about the Kingdom of God. The Spirit’s message is about the Easter revelation. In other words, the original message of Jesus was not about himself but about the Kingdom of God. The message of the Spirit, on the other hand, is centered on the identity of Jesus in the Trinitarian context.
The second point that is made in this passage is that the Holy Spirit will remind the disciples of all that Jesus has said to them. This suggests that, under the influence of the Spirit, their memory of the past was changed. In other words, the apostolic discourse about Jesus is not based on their “natural” memory, but on the way that memory was transformed by their new understanding of the Christian mystery. This is a way of recognizing that there is a difference between the historical Jesus and the Christ of the faith. The raw material that goes back to the historical Jesus was transformed in the disciples’ memory under the influence of the Spirit. In other words, their memory of the past was transformed according to the new revelations that they had received after the death of Jesus.
According to this understanding of what happened after the death of Jesus, there is no need for an empty tomb. The original burial story can be retained according to which the body of Jesus was disposed of by the Roman soldiers in an unknown grave. As far as the author of John 14 is concerned, after his death, Jesus’ physical presence was changed into a spiritual presence, and the resurrection experience affected the disciples. I did not affect the dead body of Jesus.
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Note on the apparitions to the disciples
In chapter 20, John speaks of the apparitions in two ways. First, the descriptions are realistic. It is as if Jesus was physically present. At the same time, however, he displays features that are not of this world. He appears and disappears. He goes through closed doors. This dualism is typical of what the mystics see in their visions.
The resurrection experience is shared progressively
Thomas needed time to be convinced. He doubted for a while. But he joined the group. There is here a form of solidarity and evolution.
Matthew confirms the fact that some of the disciples doubted (see Matthew 28:17).
Judas Iscariot, on the other hand, seems to have been unable to believe in the resurrection, and was, therefore, demonized.
The entire story started with Mary Magdalene. She was deeply in love with Jesus. She had seen the soldiers come and break the legs of the two men who were crucified with Jesus to hasten their death. But Jesus was already dead. As the sun was setting, she had to leave on account of the Sabbath. So the first day of the week she went back to the crucifixion place to find out what happened to Jesus. But no traces of the crucifixions were left. So she went looking for information. But nobody knew what the soldiers did with the bodies. She was about to go out of her mind, when she felt a presence. Jesus was there, but she did not recognize him. She recognized him when he called her name.
Mary told her female friends about this encounter. But they would not say anything to the male disciples. When they became sure of themselves, they became bold enough to tell Peter and the other disciples. This is how the resurrection experience was communicated gradually to group with the exception of Judas.
We know that there are schools of prophets in the Bible. For a while Saul was one of such a group. This shows that the mystical experience can be shared and communicated. This is especially true of small groups that have a lot in common.
Appendix
Here is what Michel de Certeau wrote about the spiritual/mystical experience of Mary Magdalene. He follows the second burial story by Joseph of Arimathea and what happened at the empty tomb.
Before the empty tomb stood Mary Magdalene, that eponymous figure of the modern mystic. “I do not know where they have put him.” She questions a passerby: “If you are the one who carried him off, tell me where you have laid him.”[3] That question, articulated by the entire primitive community, was not limited to one circumstance. It structured the apostolic discourse. In the Gospel of John, Jesus has no presence other than that which is divided between historical places in which he no longer is, and the unknowable place, says Jesus, “Where I am.”[4] His “being there” is the paradox of “having been” here previously, of remaining inaccessibly elsewhere and of “coming back” later. His body is structured by dissemination, like a text. Since that time, the believers have continued to wonder: “Where art thou?” And from century to century they ask history as it passes: “Where have you put him?” With events that are murmurings come from afar, with Christian discourses that codify the hermeneutics of new experiences, with community practices that render present a “caritas”, they invent a mystic body—missing and sought after—that would also be their own[5].
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[1]John was perceptive enough to give Peter an associate who could help him gain access to the high priest’s courtyard (see John 18:15-16). He should have known that, as disciple of Jesus, Joseph could not have had access to Pilate.
[2] Why was there a need to have the Spirit remind them of what Jesus had told them? The text does not answer this question. But if I may speculate, I would say that this strange remark refers to the disciples’ memory problem that is discussed in Mark 8:17-21. Under the influence of their resurrection experience the disciples’ memory of the past was retroactively transformed. Their memory of certain events was repressed and their memory of the historical Jesus was transformed.
[3]John 20:13 and 15.
[4] See John 7:34 and 36; 12:26; 14:3, 17, 24; etc.
[5]The Mystic Fable, translated by Michael B. Smith, the University of Chicago Press, 1992. 81-82.
[1] This paper was published in The Fourth R, November-December 2018.
[2]Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, translated by Katherine Jones (Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1939) 70. A PDF copy of the book is now available on the Internet.
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2 – Two Enigmatic Texts in the Gospel of Mark
Those texts appear right after the first and second collective meals in which Jesus fed five and four thousand people. They refer to those meals and say that the disciples had serious problems with them. They could not understand the reason why Jesus had performed them, and they could not remember exactly what he did or meant to do. This suggests that what the disciples tell us about those two meals is not quite correct. But the texts don’t identify what was not correct. This makes them enigmatic.
First Text
After the first meal, Jesus ordered the disciples to go back by boat. He dismissed the crowd and went to a quiet place to pray. When it was still dark, he joined the disciples walking on the water. This incident ends with the following remark,
The disciples were utterly amazed, 52for they had not understood about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened.
Mark 6:52
Second Text
After the second meal, Jesus had an unpleasant encounter with some Pharisees. So he warned the disciples about the yeast of the Pharisees. But they did not understand what he meant by that, and thought that he was speaking of bread. At that point Jesus became impatient with them. He told them,
17“Why are you talking about your being short of bread? Don’t you yet see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? 18Though you have eyes, do you not see? And though you have ears, do you not hear? Don’t you remember, 19when I broke up the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets of broken pieces you picked up?” “Twelve,” they said. 20“And when the seven for the four thousand, how many basketfuls of broken pieces did you pick up?” “Seven,” they said. 21“Don’t you understand now?” he repeated.
Mark 8:17-21
This text wants us to believe that what is told here happened during the life of Jesus and right after the second collective meal. But is this sustainable? How the disciples could have forgotten what had happened one or two days earlier? Usually memory problems materialize with the passing of time, or in connection with pathological problems. This is why I think that the disciples’ problem materialized after the death of Jesus. His ghost haunted them and accused them of having betrayed his memory and what he had meant to do on those two occasions.
A similar thing can be said about the story of Jesus walking on the water. This story has many features of an apparition of the resurrected Jesus to his disciples. What seems to have happened here is that the disciples were terribly confused, and did not know the difference between what happened during the life of Jesus and what happened after his death. What happened during his life is pre-Pascal, and what happened after his death is post-Pascal. In the Gospel of Mark, this elementary distinction is never made. On the contrary, those two phases are systematically confused. We shall see many illustrations of this feature in our investigation.
Let me say, in anticipation of what will become clear later, that Peter must have been the source of Mark and that he must have been deeply disturbed, because he had to lie by hiding important information concerning what Jesus did in the last phase of his life, and by inventing fake news that confirmed his faith in the resurrection.
Joseph Codsi
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3 – Secret Revelations in Mark
When Jesus was at the height of his popularity in Galilee, he organized a big rally with the help of his disciples. He sent them out to invite the people to an all-day affair. He had something new to introduce. When they returned from their mission, they reported that many were going to come. So, on the appointed day, five thousand people showed up. They came with plenty of food for the entire day.
But the source of Mark, most likely Peter himself[1], transformed this event into improvised miracle. In this way, he managed to hide important information about what Jesus said and did. What Jesus said and did on that day must have become radically incompatible with the Easter faith of the disciples. Consequently Peter had no choice but transform the story into a big miracle and hide what had really happened.
The text says that the disciples’ hearts were hardened. This is a reference to what happened to Pharaoh in the days of Moses. God hardened his heart, so he would not listen to Moses. Something similar happened to the disciples. Under the powerful influence of a mysterious force, their memory of what happened then was altered. The hardening of the heart did not take place during the life of Jesus, as the text wants us to believe, but after his death, and once he had become in their eyes Christ and Son of God. In other words, their Easter faith took precedence over everything else. Everything that Jesus had said and done that would have contradicted that faith had to be repressed (removed from their memory). The fact that memories are sometimes repressed is well known. Freud discovered that what has been repressed returns under a disguise. Traces of that return can help us reconstruct what had happened.
Repressed in Mark, not in John.
The Gospel of John says this about the people who had witnessed the miracle of the loaves.
14When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.” 15Wen Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.
John 6:14-15
This means that Jesus rejected the Messianic crown and that he did not consider himself a Messiah. Consequently he lost his popularity.
Many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.
John 6:66
The memory of those important events was repressed in Mark’s narrative. But what was repressed returned in a totally different context and has remained unrecognized to this day. Here is Mark’s text.
10When he was alone, those who were around him along with the twelve asked him about the parables. 11And he said to them, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; 12in order that they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.”
Mark 4:10-12
In this passage, the large crowds that enjoyed listening to Jesus are not entitled to the explanation of the parable. They are excluded as those who are outside. This is very strange. It contradicts what Mark writes about them.
1Again he began to teach beside the sea. Such a very large crowd gathered around him that he got into a boat on the sea and sat there, while the whole crowd was beside the sea on the land. 2He began to teach them many things in parables.
Mark 4:1-2
At that point, Jesus had not lost his popularity, and the large crowds had not abandoned him. When the text refers to them as “those outside” it shows that Mark’s source knew about what happened later. The reference to “those outside” confirm the fact that is reported in John after the miraculous meal. Consequently Mark agrees with John on this point.
Something remains unknown
We know that no miracle had taken place. Therefore the real reason why the people recognized in Jesus another Moses is unknown. It must be related to what Jesus had to say on that day. Mark says that he spoke for hours before the meal, but he does not mention a single word that he said. He must have explained the reason why he had organized that big rally. But the memory of that speech has been totally repressed. Jesus must have said something that became totally unacceptable to the disciples after they had become witnesses to the resurrection. John, on the other hand, puts in the mouth of Jesus the long speech on the Bread of Life. John had no access to the real speech of Jesus. What his Jesus says in that speech is not based on any knowledge but on theological speculation.
But we know one thing. After he lost his popularity in Galilee, Jesus decided to act alone. He went up to Jerusalem and proclaimed in the Temple what he had said in Galilee. In Galilee he run into trouble because the people recognized in him another Moses, that is to say another lawgiver. In Jerusalem, he run into deeper trouble, he was crucified. Was Jesus proposing some radical change in Judaism? Let’s examine that possibility.
What if Jesus acted as another Moses and another lawgiver? In Galilee this notion was very well received. Not in Jerusalem. But what kind of changes was he advocating? Whatever he had in mind must have been related to the Temple sacrifices and the Passover ritual. What if he had declared the Temple sacrifices obsolete and that the Passover meal can be celebrated anywhere in the world? This would have amounted to a moral destruction of the Temple. Now John as well as Mark agree that Jesus mentioned something about the Temple, when he went there and did what he had to do. But it is clear that the Christian memory erased the truth about that question. Instead, the Christian memory put in Jesus’ mouth the declaration that he made before the High Priest.
The fact remains that Jesus was condemned unanimously by all the member of the Jewish Council. Legally speaking, the case must have been clear cut.
Jesus was a great prophet. But prophets can be delusional. Even when they are sure of what was revealed to them, there is no way to guarantee the divine source of those revelations. They can be absolutely sure of themselves, and yet be mistaken. This seems to have been the case of Jesus, as he cried out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:74)
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Joseph Codsi
[1] Papias said that Peter was Mark’s source of information about Jesus. On the other hand, there are, in the Gospel of Mark, traces of repressed memories. Only an eyewitness could have known about those memories and felt the need to repress them. Therefore, Papias is believable.
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4 – Review of Reading Mark
By Kelly R. Iverson
Cascade Books,
An imprint of Wipe and Stock Publishers,
Eugene, Oregon.
2023
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Kelly R. Iverson is a gospel scholar. His little book is an introduction to the Gospel of Mark for beginners. It shows how complex the study of the text can be. Consequently, there is a variety of opinions among scholars about many questions. This is to be expected in the scholarly world, but at the same time, I find this lack of certainty problematic when one is teaching at a Christian conservative college as is the case with Iverson. Those who believe that the sacred text contains no errors and says what happened exactly as it has happened, have a hard time explaining the fact that the texts can be interpreted in many different ways.
Someone who has just finished high school is likely to find the central chapters of this book hard to digest. In them scholarly conundrums are summed up. I would reserve them for more advanced readers, who are less interested in clear answers than in the problems that scholars encounter. Beginners should read the first two chapters and the beginning of the last one. These are easy and informative readings.
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There are two kinds of gospel scholars. Some are conservative; others are progressive. Those who are conservative take for granted that whatever the sacred text says is exactly what happened. If the text says that Jesus predicted his death and resurrection, then this cannot be doubted. But there are progressive scholars who would read the same text critically and conclude that Jesus could not have said such a thing. For them the way the followers of Jesus remembered the past was tainted by the faith in Jesus Christ Son of God. Now this faith is based on the disciples’ resurrection experience, in which they became convinced that God resurrected his servant Jesus and elevated him to heaven. This is how the divinization process of Jesus started.
According to the Belgian scholar, Camille Focant, the Gospel of Mark is an attempt at showing that the historical Jesus and the resurrected Christ is one and the same person[1]. This is what the Christian faith takes for granted, and this is what Mark believed to be correct. But we have here a serious problem. Mark’s narrative seems to contradict this point in many places and many ways. Consequently it becomes possible to think that Jesus was deified after his death and on account of his alleged resurrection. In other words, he knew nothing about what his disciples were going to make of him after his death. According to this possibility, the historical Jesus and the resurrected Christ become two distinct persons, one real and the other one a pious invention of the disciples. Those two persons were amalgamated in one person who was human, on the one side, and divine, on the other.
It goes without saying that Iverson does not mention any problems of this kind. He rejects all those possibilities a priori.
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Iverson teaches at a very conservative Christian school located in Waco, Texas. But as scholar, he has to recognize the existence of some problems in Mark’s narrative. In many places Mark’s text is not clear. It can be interpreted in different ways. If the text says exactly what happened as it did happen, how is he to explain the difficulties in knowing what the text says? Here is another way of putting the question. If the text is inspired, it should not have any deficiency. It should be clear and understandable. How can one claim that a text is divinely inspired if it is unclear and even contradictory?
In other words, when fundamentalists become gospel scholars, they are forced to admit, at least implicitly, that Mark’s narrative raises many problems most of which have remained unsolved. Perhaps his book is a way of saying that. But it is not transparent about this point.
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There are other major problems with Mark’s narrative that have not been recognized by gospel scholars even when critical thinking is not a problem for them. Here is how I would summarize what is yet to be recognized.
Peter, the head of the twelve disciples, was Mark’s principal source of information. He had severe psychopathological problems. He admits that he was forced by a mysterious power to tamper with the evidence. He did so in two ways. First, he repressed memories of significant events that did take place during the life of Jesus. Second, he invented other events that confirmed the Christian faith in Jesus Christ, Son of God. In other words, he was a compulsive liar. But at the same time he was an honest liar, because the memories that he had repressed returned and revealed what he had done.
Joseph Codsi
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5 – Mark’s beginning and ending
Mark’s Gospel begins with the story of John the Baptizer and ends with the empty-tomb story. What is missing in the beginning is the birth story of Jesus. And what is missing in the end is the apparition of Jesus to the disciples and the instructions he gives them. How can one explain these important omissions?
The most obvious answer is that Mark’s Gospel was written before the infancy gospels were invented and before the apparitions stories were developed.
The infancy Gospels
The infancy gospels of Matthew and Luke and the prologue of John were produced when the second leg of the Christian revelation was developed. The first leg is ascending. It begins with the resurrection of Jesus and continues with his ascension to heaven. After his death, Jesus was no longer present physically. His presence became spiritual. The down poring of the Holy Spirit represents this new form of presence. The ascending movement shows that Christ was a divine person. This means that he must have existed from the beginning. From this reasoning comes the descending movement.
The second leg is descending. As Son of God, Jesus came down from heaven and was born through Mary’s agency. This is referred to as the mystery of Incarnation.
The ascending movement is related to the mystery of Redemption. The descending movement is related to the Incarnation.
The third mystery of the Christian religion concerns the Trinity of the one God, Father, Son and Spirit.
The apparitions Gospel
The apparitions to Peter and the other disciples are not reported in the Gospel of Mark because they had not been invented yet. They must have taken form and shape slowly. All we have in Mark’s ending is an allusion to those apparitions. Paul is the first one to refer to those apparitions. He just mentions the fact without attempting to describe it. But it seems that Peter, the source of Mark, was reluctant to claim that the resurrected Christ appeared to him and commissioned him to lead the new movement.
Discrepancies of this kind are to be expected if one recognizes the subjective or spiritual nature of whatever happened after the death of Jesus. What happened then affected the disciples, not the dead body of Jesus. The resurrection experience of the disciples is likely to have evolved slowly from a spiritual one to a physical one.
We tend to take the later forms of the Christian discourse as the norms of what happened. Eventually they became the norms of the Christian faith and discourse. But, most likely, this was not so in the beginning.
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The fact that the resurrection of Jesus was a spiritual experience that affected the disciples, not the buried body of Jesus is confirmed by the following discovery. We have in the Gospel of John two burial stories, one by the Roman soldiers and another one by Joseph of Arimathea. Mark, Matthew and Luke know only the second story. What seems to have happened is that Mark was the first one to report the burial by Joseph of Arimathea. All the other gospel writers followed his lead. But a careful study of Mark’s texts shows that the story of Joseph Arimathea derived from the first story, and is an awkward forgery. It is easy to forge a story. But it is not so easy to do so without leaving traces of the forgery. Now in Mark’s text, it is very easy to spot a trace of the forgery.
When Mark’s gospel was written, the Christian movement desperately needed a connection between the faith in the resurrection and the body of Jesus. The story of Joseph of Arimathea was invented in order to link the resurrection experience of the disciples to the body of Jesus. They needed a tomb that was easy to identify and could be found empty.
Now we know that the bodily resurrection of Jesus is fake news, and that the entire Christian faith is based on two forged events, the burial by Joseph of Arimathea and the discovery of the empty tomb.
Gospel scholars follow the rule of thumb that a story that is attested by all four gospels must be historically correct. We have here a refutation of this rule. The fact that the same forgery is reproduced in all four gospels does not make the story true.
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[1] Camille Focant, L’évangile selon Marc, Cerf, Paris, 2010, 30.