The Seventh Sign, Pt. 2

(REVISED)

With this post, I'm starting to add headers to the sections of my posts, which are growing rather long and unwieldy.  It's my hope that these headers will help guide the reader through the argument in a more step-by-step manner.

Healing a Child: The Fourth Sign

GMk actually has four of the signs; the missing sign from this list is the raising of Jairus' daughter.  That was in the first list of healings, in this post, for Jesus heals her by taking her by the hand.

I have shown previously how the raising of Jairus' daughter is related to the healing of the Centurion's servant in Q, and the healing of the official's son in GJn.  And in fact, I argue all three of these derive (one way or another) from the original story in the Signs Gospel, a healing of an official's child.



I argue Mark (the original Markan author, I mean) was the first to modify this story, turning it into the raising of a synagogue ruler's daughter.  This version was "Markanized", turning it into a personal healing by touch.  Notice Jesus takes the crowd and "puts them all out", keeping only the parents and his disciples, maintaining the typically Markan theme of secrecy and privacy.

What Q/GPet then did was modify the original Signs pericope into the healing of a centurion's servant, under the influence of the story in Josephus about Petronius (see this post for an explanation of why the centurion must be related to Josephus).  He may also have been influenced by the Jairus story in original GMk.

John, reacting to this, basically just copies the original version from Signs to show what the original story was.

So, I propose that Q/GPet and GJn preserve the original form of the story, each in their own way.  The level of detail in the Markan version makes it impossible that Q/Pet and GJn rely solely on it for their versions; they must have had access to an alternate version, and they can't have known each other directly, due to the stark differences between their gospels.  Therefore there must have been a middle term besides original GMk, and we have a candidate for that middle term: the Signs Gospel.

So there are at least four (and possibly five) signs in GMk:

The Paralytic
Healing the Official's Child
The Storm-Stilling (not one of Fortna's signs, but keep an eye on this...)
Feeding the 5000
The Blind Man (of Jericho)


Raising the Dead: The Fifth Sign?

What's interesting about the Secret Gospel of Mark is that it seems to add a fifth sign to the Markan gospel: A Man Raised from Death, parallel to the raising of Lazarus in GJn that Fortna sees as a Johannine version of one of the signs.  However, I'm going to make a controversial claim that Fortna got the signs wrong.  He's right about six of them, but he's wrong about the raising of Lazarus.  It was not one of the seven signs.  This miracle is simply a conflation of two others: the raising of Jairus' daughter in Mk 5:21f, and the raising of the man in SGM1.  Both of these were in Secret Mark, and that's where John conflated them from.

The raising of Jairus' daughter is the Markan reworking of the earlier raising of an official's child found in Signs.  But so is the raising of the man, in SGM1.  Mark has, again, doubled a pericope, just as he did with the water miracles, the feeding of the multitudes, and the healing of the blind man.  For example, just as with the raising of Jairus' daughter, SGM1 hints that it's not really the raising of a dead youth; the man in the tomb "cries out" to his sister and Jesus as they approach the tomb, suggesting that Jesus is really healing a sick youth who was thought to be dead.  Thus the subject of SGM1 and the healing of Jairus' daugher are the same, indicating that they are really the same story told twice.  But the person who told this story twice was Mark, suggesting that both versions are a duplicate of a single version that Mark was working from.  And we have that single version: it's the healing of an official's son in Signs.

The structural change in both from the Signs healing is also typically Markan: in Signs, the child is healed from a distance, but in GMk/SGM, Jesus goes to perform the healing personally.

Furthermore, I see no reason to think that the signs author would have felt it necessary to include a miraculous raising of the dead.  It wasn't prophesied of the Messiah.

So it seems that the raising of Lazarus is not one of the seven signs at all; it's a Johannine conflation of the healing of Jairus' daughter in Mk 5:21ff and the raising of the youth SGM1--and those, in turn, were both Markan transformations of the healing of an official's son in Signs, which John independently used in Jn 4:46ff.  The suggestion of an actual resurrection was introduced by Mark.


From Signs to GMk 5

The healing of an official's son in Signs featured a child who was healed from a distance.  The framework for this kind of healing is known from Talmudic tradition, where Hanina b. Dosa heals a father's child from a distance by prayer (sometimes this father is Gamaliel II, sometimes Johanan b. Zakkai).

So the original Markan author transformed this sign into the raising of an official's daughter (with a second miracle, the healing of a bleeding woman, inserted into the middle):

--Jesus is first approached by the child's parent, as in the Signs story (itself related to the b. Dosa healing), but then:

--The official's daughter is healed in a personal setting, because that's how Mark's Jesus heals, and:

--The daugher is healed when Jesus takes her by the hand, a typicially Markan element.


From Signs to SGM1

And so I claim the Markan author then went on to create the story of the raising of the man in SGM 1.  This structure resembles that of the healing of Jairus' daughter:

--a family member approaches Jesus, and makes a petition

--Jesus heads off to perform a personal healing, entering the tomb like he entered Jairus' house

--Jesus takes the youth by the hand and heals him

There is even a distant fourth parallel element:

--Jesus instructs the youth in mysteries, just as he tells Jairus and his wife to tell no one of the healing

The man's status is ambiguous, just like that of Jairus' daughter--is he dead, or was he just on the point of death?  For despite the fact that he is in a tomb, he cries out to Jesus and his sister.  The presence of all these elements confirms that overall, this pericope is essentially the work of the original Markan author.  Like the raising of Jairus' daughter, SGM1 is a Markan revision of the raising of the official's child, based on the same typically Markan elements.  Mark has just doubled the miracle, as is typical of him.


From GMk 5 and SGM1 to Lazarus

John, in Jn 4:46ff, preserved the original version of the healing of the official's child found in Signs, more or less whole.  However, John also knew original, Secret GMk, and the other healings he found there were such impressive demonstrations of Jesus' power and message that John felt compelled to include them, too, in his gospel somehow.  So, he went on to create the raising of Lazarus, by conflating the two original Markan versions of the story, which we now know from Mk 5 and SGM1, but which were found together in original, Secret GMk. (Remember, each of these were themselves Markan transformations of the original sign of a healing of an official's child).  John blends them as follows:


--Jesus is approached by a woman, who asks him to heal a member of her family (SGM 1)

--Jesus says the man is sick, but not dying--just as he says the official's daughter (=Jairus' daughter) is not dead, but "sleeping" (GMk 5)

--He then departs to heal the man, just as he departed to heal the official's daughter in original (GMk 5) and to heal the NEANISKOS (SGM 1)

--On the way, he encounters another woman with whom he has a dialogue--just as he did with the bleeding woman on the way to heal the official's daughter (GMk 5)

--When he arrives, there is much weeping--just as there was over the official's daughter (GMk 5)

--He then resurrects the man from the tomb (SGM 1).  He also uses a verbal command, as he did with the official's daugther (GMk 5).  (John leaves out the touch of healing--John isn't totally comfortable with the embodied Jesus of Mark and Cerinthus.)

--Lazarus exits the tomb clad in cloths (SGM 1, in which comes to Jesus later clad in a sindon).


Thus the raising of Lazarus is based on a conflation of two stories, the raising of Jairus in Mk 5 and the raising of a dead man in SGM1, both originally found in the "secret" Markan gospel, i.e. the original Markan gospel.  These stories were themselves Markan transformations of the original Signs-story, modified using Marks' interest in portraying an embodied Jesus.


So if raising Lazarus from the dead was not the fifth sign, what was?  My next post will make a proposal: that the Storm-Stilling was really the fifth sign.  In GJn, this was replaced by the Water-Walking, the original version of which was a Markan composition.