Is the Gospel of Mark Unreliable?

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I can’t like your post (I have to wait some more apparently) but I can concur. It’s the earliest Gospel, and recent research tends to support Papias’ testimony that it was written in a Roman context.
 
What do you make of the “errors” of geography in Mark’s Gospel? These arguments from the OP are used to show Mark was unfamiliar with Palestine geography, thus he wasn’t an eyewitness to Jesus and Luke & Matthew thus copied and expanded on Mark’s Gospel (building up Jesus’ biography). It’s an interesting objection.
 
The Gospel of Mark aka the second book of the New Testament is reliable since it is in the Bible. It is also one of the four Gospels. Telling the Gospel and telling the death,burial,and resurrection of Jesus so yeah it’s reliable.
Yes… .only those who seek to deny The GOSPEL (non-Christians by definition) would go on and on… 🙂
 
I realize intellectual truth will only get me so far, I need to experience God. All my topics I created reveal what I most struggle with.
pray and avoid sin. If you do you will see changes an how Lord works in you. Avoid sin.
 
Did Nazareth exist during the life of Jesus?

In AD 70, at the end of the Jewish war with the Romans, the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, and this meant that Jewish priests and their families had to be redeployed. An inscription was discovered in 1962 in Caesarea Maritima that documents that the priests of the order of Elkalir came to live in Nazareth. This has only been confirmed by later discoveries. For example, in 2009, the first Nazarene home to date from Jesus’ era was excavated by archaeologists. The house was a simple structure, consisting of two small rooms and a courtyard. Did Nazareth exist during the life of Jesus? | GotQuestions.org
Jim
 
For centuries, critics claimed that there was no proof that Pontius Pilate existed, nor did he release one prisoner as he did in the story of Jesus and Barabbas

However, I believe it was a late as 1948, archeologist uncovered Roman documents with tons of proof that Pilate not only exited in Jerusalem during Jesus time, he did in fact release prisoners for various Jewish holidays as a sign of good will with the Jews and Passover was a major holiday he kept that tradition.

Jim
 
However, I believe it was a late as 1948, archeologist uncovered Roman documents with tons of proof
I don’t know about that but in 1961 archaeologist Antonio Frova discovered a stone slab in Caesarea Maritima that reads ‘Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea’ (in Latin of course). Up to that point, many ‘scholars’ questioned that Pilate ever existed.
 
I think scholars say Matthew was first, which coincides with the eaarly Church
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Was The Gospel Of Matthew Originally Written In Hebrew? Sacred Scripture
Was The Gospel Of Matthew The First Gospel Written, Composed Before 70 A.D., And Originally Written In Hebrew? Source: shatteredparadigm.blogspot.com/2008/06/was-gospel-of-matthew-first-gospel.html Traditionally, the universities of the western world have taught that the Gospel of Matthew was not the first gospel written, that it was written in Greek, and that it was authored after 70 A.D. However, as more and more discoveries have been made, those assumptions have been shown to be stone cold…
 
For example, in Mark 10:12, he has Jesus say that if a woman divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. As G. A. Wells… puts it: ‘Such an utterance would have been meaningless in Palestine, where only men could obtain divorce .
Mark 10:12 does not mean that the woman was conferred with rights to obtain a bill of divorce. The woman obtains a bill of divorce from the husband in the legal structure of the day. A first century woman could indeed be the cause, and convince her husband to give her a bill of divorce. Times haven’t changed that much.
 
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Philo, a contemporary of Josephus’ (roughly), clearly refers to Pilate. So does Tacitus.

How do “scholars” get away with it?!
 
That article has everything backwards. Originally, the consensus was that Matthew came first, then Mark. Later, and this continues to today, i.e. the scholarly consensus is that Mark came first, then Matthew. The article’s claim that people originally put Mark as first and then are now recently switching to Matthew is the opposite of what happened.

It also claims this is based on “new evidence”, namely the testimony of some early Christians… but this isn’t new evidence, this is long known and was a major reason people believed in Matthew priority!

At present, the general viewpoint among scholars is actually that Mark came first. Some scholars disagree and assert Matthew came first–this is the “traditional” position–but the prevailing view right now is in favor of Marcan priority. That article has basically everything backwards.

I’m not taking a position on which came first–having examined the evidence, I am unsure personally–I’m merely saying the article isn’t reliable.
 
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As to the original questions:
Here is an argument to show the unreliability of Mark to further show the Gospels are unreliable that Luke & Matthew: “plagiarize[d] (largely word-for-word) up to 90% of the gospel of Mark, to which they add sayings of Jesus… and would-be historical details.”
This doesn’t mean they took from Mark. It could mean they have a common source. Or, simply put, they agree on these because they actually happened.
“Mark shows no first-hand understanding of the social situation in Palestine. He is clearly a foreigner, removed both in space and time from the events he alleges. For example, in Mark 10:12, he has Jesus say that if a woman divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. As G. A. Wells… puts it: ‘Such an utterance would have been meaningless in Palestine, where only men could obtain divorce. It is a ruling for the Gentile Christian readers… which the evangelist put into Jesus’ mouth in order to give it authority. This tendency to anchor later customs and institutions to Jesus’ supposed lifetime played a considerable role in the building up of his biography.’”
G.A. Wells is a fringe author. More to the point, it’s a goofy complaint. Yes, at the time, a man could divorce his wife (in terms of taking the steps to do so) but a wife could not divorce her husband–at least not directly. I believe she could indirectly do so by appealing to the local authorities who would then put strong pressure on the husband to effectively force him to divorce her.

But what does this have to do with anything? The point Jesus is making is that if a husband and wife divorce, and either remarries, they commit adultery. Wrangling hands about how the wife doesn’t “technically” divorce the husband is missing the point she is in fact divorced and the rule applies to her.
“One further evidence of the inauthenticity of Mark is… in chapter 7, where Jesus is arguing with the Pharisees, Jesus is made to quote the Greek Septuagint version of Isaiah… Unfortunately, the Hebrew version says something different from the Greek. Isaiah 29:13, in the Hebrew reads ‘their fear of me is a commandment of men learned by rote,’ whereas the Greek version – and the gospel of Mark – reads ‘in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men’ Revised Standard Version). Wells observes dryly [p. 13], ‘That a Palestinian Jesus should floor Orthodox Jews with an argument based on a mistranslation of their scriptures is very unlikely.’”
I do not see how the Hebrew rendering of this verse in any way changes Jesus’s point that their commandments were made by them. This complaint doesn’t make sense.
 
I see where this quote is a bit of a problem if it’s what Jesus actually quoted…the Septuagint Greek translation rather than the Hebrew. But, why couldn’t Mark…writing in Greek…just have decided to use the Greek Septuagint quote when writing…since he was writing it all in Greek anyway.
 
Continuing:
Gerasa, the place mentioned in the oldest manuscripts of Mark, is located about 31 miles from the shore of the Sea of Galilee! Those poor pigs had to run a course five miles longer than a marathon in order to find a place to drown!.. Later copyists of the Greek manuscripts of all three pig-drowning gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) improved Gadara further to Gergesa, a region now thought to have actually formed part of the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee.”
http://www.tektonics.org/ntdocdef/markdef.php#mk51
“According to Mark 7:31, Jesus and the boys went by way of Sidon, 20 miles north of Tyre on the Mediterranean coast! Since to Sidon and back would be 40 miles, this means that the wisest of all men walked 70 miles when he could have walked only 30.“
http://www.tektonics.org/ntdocdef/markdef.php#mk731

(I’ll skip over the 1 Corinthians 7:10 argument, as my previous answer on the divorce question applies here as well)
Also with the Gospel of John:
“The inauthenticity of the Gospel of John would seem to be established beyond cavil by the discovery that the very chapter that asserts the author of the book to have been ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’ [John 21:20] was a late addition to the gospel. Scholars have shown that the gospel originally ended at verses 30-31 of Chapter 20. Chapter 21 – in which verse 24 asserts that ‘This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things: and we know that his testimony is true’ – is not the work of an eye-witness.”
Claims that Chapter 21 were missing are actually relatively speculative, as we have (to my knowledge) no manuscript missing it. Granted, it is possible it was added at some point before those manuscripts, but the manuscript evidence is reasonable proof that it was real. If it were added later, we would expect to see divergent manuscripts with it, which is not the case.

But let us suppose that Chapter 21 was added later. First, that doesn’t even mean it was by a different author, as the author could have added it in a later draft. But even if was added by someone else, how does that disprove John as the writer of everything that came before it? It doesn’t, because that verse is not required to assert John was the author–heck, it doesn’t even explicitly identify John as the author anyway, so it’s not a real loss when it comes to arguing authorship.

But even if it did somehow disprove John–or another disciple–was the author, all it would prove is that it wasn’t written by an eyewitness. The argument you quote somehow comes away with the idea that makes it “inauthentic” which is highly confusing. Do you know how many historical documents were written by non-eyewitnesses? It’s silly to throw them all out. In fact, that argument you posted is presumably written by someone who didn’t live in the 1st century–why should we accept THEIR claim as accurate when they weren’t there either?
 
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Galilee was pretty Hellenized, so it’s not far fetched Jesus would quote from the Greek Scriptures instead of the Hebrew.
 
For example, in Mark 10:12, he has Jesus say that if a woman divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.
This shows why it’s wrong to take a verse-by-verse approach (remember, the inspired writers did not write in chapter and verse – that was imposed on the Bible around 1200 AD.)

Let’s take off the blinders and read a bit more:
11) He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; 12and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

Jesus is not bound by the customs of Palestine. He sees women as having the same rights as men in this matter.
 
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Hmmm, I question that. Gallilee May have been Hellenized but Jesus wasn’t. I have a hard time thinking He would use other than the Hebrew Bible but I guess it’s possible? I wouldn’t say probable, however.
 
Jesus most certainly spoke in Greek to Pilate, so it is not unlikely that he’d use Greek in other contexts.
 
Also, clearly that bit at the end was written about the Beloved Disciple (traditionally John, though there have been other contenders) rather than by him. In fact, since it seems to have been written to debunk the notion that the Beloved Disciple was immortal (or at least would live until the Second Coming made earthly life kind of irrelevant), we would expect it to be written by a different author after the BD had died.

While the scholars who write of a “Johannine community” behind the Gospel usually don’t believe that community had any connection to an eyewitness, tradition holds that John lived until the turn of the second century and had disciples of his own. So there can surely be no great traditional objection to the idea that John’s Gospel was based on his teachings (“This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true”) and completed by his followers upon his death.
 
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Jesus most certainly spoke in Greek to Pilate, so it is not unlikely that he’d use Greek in other contexts.
It’s likely that Jesus did not speak greek at all. When the greeks came to visit Jesus, the apostles with greek names (Philip and Andrew) appear to act as interpreters for him. John 12:20-22.
 
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