In our last post, we ended by wondering if there is direct textual evidence that the author of Mk 3:28-29 relied on Did 11:7 as his source for the saying about the unforgivable sin, rather than GTh 44. This post will present that evidence.
Mk 3:26-29 features two Thomasine sayings. The first is about divided kingdoms; the second is about the unforgivable sin. Let's look at the pericope carefully: it runs from Mk 3:19b-30 (with v. 31 as both a conclusion and the beginning of the next pericope). If you run through the logic of the pericope, something seems amiss. The first Thomasine parallel has nothing to do with the second one. The first tries to ridicule the idea that Satan could drive out Satan. The second condemns those who would call the Holy Spirit demonic. These are unrelated ideas. The first is a logical argument about Satan driving out Satan, followed by a conclusion: Jesus is binding Satan, not using his power. The second, on the other hand, is just a judgmental statement about critics of those who use the "Holy Spirit". It bears a totally separate relationship with the framing verse--"He is possessed by Beelzebul" etc. What we really have here is a narratively self-contained refutation of this framing verse ("How can Satan cast out Satan?") followed by a superfluous, second refutation, equally self-contained.
Some (like Michael Turton) claim to have found a chiastic structure in Mk 3:19b-30(31). Turton, for example, finds mirroring parallels within the pericope, each end reflecting the other. But his chastic structure doesn't work--when he tries to break it into two chiastic structures, representing what he call a "masterwork" of paired keywords, the structures overlap, destroying the chiasm. I agree there is a chiasm here, but it isn't the one Turton thinks it is. Furthermore, he pairs the wrong keywords. "Demons/Satan" is not paired with "blasphemy/holy spirit"; the parallel makes no sense. If "blasphemy" parallels "demons", then how does "holy spirit" parallel "Satan"?
I suspect that there is (or was) a chiasm in this pericope, but it's been spoiled by the addition of v. 28-30. And v. 30 seems like an awkward insersion--a paranthetical aside that tries to make clear the relevance of the preceding two verses, as though the author knew they might seem out of place. If these verses are part of any chiastic structure, it seems like the makeshift work of a later editor, who perhaps also added v. 21 to try and maintain the chiasm he found in the original pericope. (I realize that Boring, as mentioned above, finds a chiasm within the saying itself here. This might be true, but this doesn't mean it's the work of the same author who built chiastic pericopes into Mark in general. Brief ancient sayings were frequently chiastic, regardless of their source. Furthermore Boring's argument is not that the Markan author crafted the chiastic saying; his argument is that it was already a common, chiastic saying, prior to its use in GMk.)
So I think there was an original version of this pericope, written by the Markan author (who Turton and others have demonstrated wrote largely in chiasms), and incorporating logion 35, that was then edited later by someone who introduced the saying about blasphemy against the holy spirit. But this saying was not taken from GTh; it was taken from the Didache. This editor (i.e. the editor of canonical GMk) made his own characteristic editorial decisions: he
1) spoke of "all sins" by combining the Didache's mention of "all prophets" and "every sin"
2) used "AMARTHMATA" instead of the Didache's "AMARTIA"
3) converted the concept of "testing and judging" to "blasphemy"
4) turned the "spirit" into the "holy spirit"
5) spoke of "not having forgiveness" instead of "not (being) forgiven"
6) and drove home his claim by insisting that the blasphemer was guilty "of an eternal sin". These are typically prolix decisions by the canonical editor (who is also responsible for didactic material like the beheading of John, and, as we shall see, most of the Little Apocalypse).
Meanwhile the Q-author, using Secret Mark (that lacked any mention of the blasphemy against the spirit), created his own separate saying out of GTh, but independently influenced by the Didache. This became the Q-version of the saying, which was unconnected with the Beelzebub incident.
Matthew, using Q and canonical GMk, more or less joined these two sayings together (though the language of both is somewhat interleaved) and left the material where he found it in canonical GMk, at the end of the Beelzebub incident. Luke, also using Q and canonical GMk, blended them together in a fairly seamless whole, mostly though not entirely reflecting the Q version. He keeps it independent from the Beelzebub incident, because...it was kept separate from it in Q. Q had a Beelzebub incident, without any mention of the blasphemy against the spirit. Because...the Beelzebub incident was an invention of Secret Mark, and Q drew it from there.
In the next post, I'll make a detailed presentation, phrase by phrase, of how Did 11:7 and GTh 44 made their way through Secret Mark and Q into the canonical gospels.
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