Shalom my dear sisters and brothers,
For most of my life, I have enjoyed mystery dramas and whodunnits, and so I have become attuned to looking out for inconsistencies, and basically picking up on anything that doesn’t add up.
If you were brought up in mainstream Christianity, you were probably trained on a subconscious level not to notice inconsistencies in the gospel narratives. You were likely conditioned to see only what supports Paullist theology and messianic claims, and filter out anything in the gospels that doesn’t fit with the accepted Christological system of beliefs.
For example, you don’t notice that the individual writers of each gospel had their own, separate agendas, and their own distinct theologies to prove. For example, the earliest gospel, Mark (written in about 66-75 CE), assumes that Jesus became the messiah at his baptism; there is therefore no need for a birth narrative. In contrast, both Matthew and Luke, by the time they wrote their gospels (80-90 CE), the accepted Christian belief had become that Jesus was born the messiah, hence the need for a nativity story. You are subliminally trained not to notice that the two birth stories are quite different.
Then we have John’s gospel. The author of the Gospel of John is unaware of the belief that Jesus was born in Bethlehem (Jn 7:40-43; cf Jn 1:46 – people object to Jesus’s qualifications, because they are aware that he was born in the Galilee, not Bethlehem; their objections also presuppose that, at one time, it was common knowledge that Jesus was not of Davidic descent).
How the Apostles are portrayed in Mark
When you take each gospel separately, you begin to notice the nuances and peculiarities of each one. One thing I always noticed in Mark, even when I was a Christian, was that he didn’t appear to have a very high opinion of the apostles. They just don’t seem to comprehend who Jesus was – just like his Jewish family, the Jewish elders, and the rest of the Jewish people.
As an aside, Mark consistently calls the apostles merely ‘disciples’. He calls them the twelve disciples ( = the 12 followers), instead of apostles ( = someone sent out by any Jewish teacher, in order to disseminate that teacher’s message verbatim, so that if you hear the apostles, you are effectively listening to the specific master who originated the message).
As I said, I have always found it odd that the writer of Mark seems to paint the apostles in a not-too-flattering light. Recently, my personal suspicions were given voice in a new video by Bart Ehrman; apparently, New Testament scholars have also noticed this idiosyncrasy in Mark. Most people don’t notice it, because the other gospels have a better view of the apostles – Christian tradition even values the authority of the apostolic line of succession, and relies on it for their justification.
It is therefore interesting to note that in the gospels – particularly in the narratives of Yeshua’s ministry – most of the individual apostles have very little or nothing to say. Peter is given the most to say, Judas is the betrayer, while James and John, the sons of Zebedee, are merely glory-seekers (Mk 10:35-40). The apostles nearly always speak collectively as a faceless group; most of the Twelve don’t speak as individuals during Jesus’s ministry – they are given no individual personalities or identities in Mark.
Why does the author of Mark have a seeming disdain for the apostles?
Various scholars offer their own diverse theories as to why Mark paints a poor picture of the apostles. I myself have my own hypothesis which, so far, no scholar has shared.
Collectively, the apostles don’t get who or what Jesus is – or at least, who the author of Mark believes Jesus to have been. They often don’t understand what Jesus is even teaching (as Bart Ehrman says in his video, “They’re doing their best, but it just isn’t good enough”). The Jewish elders and the Jewish people don’t get who Jesus was either – a literary device meant to explain why the Jewish people in general never accepted Jesus or his message.
Even Jesus’s own family are embarrassed by his preaching, and just don’t get who he is; they are annoyed by his popularity. It is possible that the reason why aspersions are cast even on Jesus’s relatives, is so that if any of them were encountered by Paul’s Christians, they will already have been depicted as ‘untrustworthy witnesses’. If his own relatives were to say that he was not the messiah or a descendant of David, they know from Mark’s gospel that they were not to be believed, because his own family rejected him.
Mark also has a literary device to explain why none of the Jewish people knew Jesus was the messiah, known as, ‘the messianic secret’. When anyone realises who he is, he commands them to silence (eg when Peter calls him messiah, he orders him to tell no one, Mk 8:29-30).
Paul himself was very dismissive of the apostles in his writings – he had a sneering disdain for them (eg Gal 2:6a). Paul was proud that he received no part of his message from the apostles (Gal 2:6b). Taken together with Mark’s low opinion of the apostles, I get the overall impression that the very earliest Gentile Christians might have been taught by their Paullist leaders to put no trust in the apostles (and indeed in any Jewish follower of Yeshua). If this is true, then it suggests that the message the apostles taught, and the message Paul taught, were not the same – remember, we don’t know their words, because they are not recorded in the gospels.
Only in the Book of Acts do the apostles approve of Paul, but we have to bear in mind that Acts is Paullist propaganda, to hide the split between James’s Jewish followers and Paul, in about 49 CE at the Convention of Jerusalem. It is possible that it is only when all the apostles are dead and buried, and therefore no longer able to speak up for themselves, that Paul’s Christians can safely start claiming apostolic authority and succession – apostles they were once taught to mistrust.
The failings of the apostles in Mark
The most notable failing of the apostles in the Gospel of Mark, is that they don’t really understand Jesus’s teachings (Jesus consistently has to explain his parables to them). I feel this is meant to cast doubt on their teaching authority – whatever the apostles taught after Yeshua’s death can’t be trusted, because they didn’t understand what he taught when he was alive. But we have to ask, why follow someone if you don’t understand a word they say?
It is generally agreed by scholars that the final verses of Mark, Mk 16:9-20, were added later. In the original ending of Mark, the apostles don’t even get to hear about the resurrection. Mk 16:7-8 has the angel instruct the women at the tomb to tell the apostles what they have seen, but they are so afraid, they tell no one:
“Go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to the Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” But they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
That is where the original gospel of Mark ended.
The purpose of this is to show that these Jewish women did not understand what they had seen, and so were not participants in the joyful faith of the resurrection, and neither were the apostles. All along, Mark tries to demonstrate that the reason why the apostles don’t get anything about Jesus, is because they were not told, they didn’t know anything, or they didn’t understand.
Notably, there is only one person in Mark’s entire gospel who gets Jesus and his message, and that is a Gentile pagan, a Roman centurion. When he sees how Jesus died, he says, “Truly this was the Son of God!” (Mk 15:39). Mark’s point is that Jews – even the Jewish followers of Jesus himself, who walked with him, witnessed him with their own eyes, and heard him speak with their own ears – did not and do not understand the teachings of Jesus. Only Gentiles, Paul’s Christian converts, will ever understand the truth of who and what Jesus was (the risen messiah who died to save humanity from their sins) – this is the basic purpose and assertion of Mark’s gospel.
Peter as the only apostle who redeems himself
In Mark’s gospel, the apostle who gets the most to say is Peter. He is the only apostle to recognise Jesus was the messiah, even though it was the wrong type of messiah. In the Book of Acts, Peter has the most contact with Paul, mostly from his time in Antioch, after fleeing from Herod Agrippa’s persecutions in Judea. Peter believed Jesus was the messiah, but then Jesus went and died (which was a body-blow for Peter). However, Paul convinced Peter that Jesus had to die, and so Peter’s faith in Jesus was renewed. Peter is so prominent in Mark’s gospel, because he was the only apostle who went over to Paul’s side; I am certain that all the other apostles remained on the side of James son of Clophas ( = Jacob the Pious, the leader of Yeshua’s Jewish followers after Yeshua’s death).
Peter spread his Petrine form of messianic Paullism around Judea, and these Judean followers eventually became the messianic sect of the Nazarenes (in Ray Pritz’s book, ‘Nazarene Jewish Christianity’, this is how Pritz understands events). In the Clementine Literature, James gets to hear of Peter’s new teaching. Peter is subsequently asked to explain his new beliefs. Since it is at variance with what the other apostles teach, James and the others strip him of his authority to teach – he basically loses his apostolic authority. Peter is unhappy at this decision, and decides to leave his homeland for good, and heads off to Rome, where he becomes a close friend of Paul.
Summary
The general Jewish view is that the messiah is meant to be triumphant; he is not meant to be defeated by his enemies and die – and certainly not die a criminal’s death on a Roman cross. Mark’s gospel is written to explain the Paullist belief that Jesus was the messiah, precisely because he died. It is possible that James and the apostles opposed this view, and so the earliest Paullist Christians were taught not to trust anything they said or wrote.
It becomes obvious that Mark’s gospel, when read in isolation, has a pretty low opinion of the apostles. They always have difficulty understanding Jesus’s teaching, and they don’t get who Jesus is, almost as if they’re not too bright. I personally believe that this was all a deliberate attempt to make Paul’s Gentile Christians distrust and disbelieve whatever the apostles and their Jewish followers taught. Only the teachings of Paul and his Gentile Believers are to be trusted (even if James and his approved teachers say anything to the contrary). Only when all the apostles are dead, with no one around to object, can Christianity safely start portraying the apostles as accepting Paul’s beliefs. Hence the Book of Acts becomes propaganda, to show that there was never any split or disagreement between Paul and the apostles in Jerusalem.