I was talking to somebody earlier who claims the likeness of Mark’s telling of Jesus rebuking the wind on the sea of Galilee is far too similar to Johnah’s story from the OT. Therefore he claims Mark ‘obviously’ copied the OT story for his own account of Jesus.
I know this can’t be true, however what is the official line on this?
I’m gonna tell you something related here.
The scholar John Dominic Crossan thinks that the passion narratives were simply invented by the early Christians out of passages from the Old Testament. In his theory, all the (male) disciples of Jesus knew was that He was crucified; they never knew the exact details of His death, because they ran away, and the women only saw Him from afar. (Apparently, in Crossan’s theory, they were so scared they never even bothered to recover His body, which ended up in God knows where.
) In order to fill those in, he claims that they pored over the Scriptures for passages which they thought described/foretold Jesus’ death, and made a story out of them. He calls his theory ‘prophecy historicized’ (which to be honest is a very nifty term).
I think the guy you’re talking to is proposing a related idea. And since we’re talking about ‘prophecy historicized’, I’ll recommend this answer to Crossan by another scholar, Mark Goodacre, who says that perhaps we shouldn’t be thinking about ‘prophecy historicized’ (i.e. stories invented out of OT prophecies) but ‘scripturalization’ (i.e. stories of Jesus’ life and death told and retold using the language of the Hebrew Scriptures). After all, Christians did (and do) have the conviction that Jesus’ life and death were foretold in the OT - “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures.”
As he explains it:
The multiple echoes of Biblical themes and the varied allusions to Scriptural precedent are plausibly explained on the hypothesis that from the beginning there was an intimate interaction between event, memory, tradition and Scriptural reflection.
Events generated Scriptural reflection, which in turn influenced the way the events were remembered and retold. And the process of casting the narrative in this language might be described, to utilise a somewhat cumbersome but nevertheless illuminating term from Hebrew Bible scholarship,
scripturalization. This term is used by Judith Newman of Jewish prayers in the Second Temple Period, which increasingly used Scriptural models, precedents and language. The thesis of Newman’s book is that increasing devotion to developing Jewish Scriptures, in a liturgical context in which such Scriptures were getting used more and more, led inexorably to the intermingling of those Scriptures with Jewish prayers. It is a view that could shed some very interesting light on the Passion Narratives in the Gospels.
markgoodacre.org/swan.pdf
markgoodacre.org/Markcrucif.pdf
podacre.blogspot.jp/2011/04/nt-pod-53-are-passion-narratives.html