The Seventh Sign, Pt. 3: Recap

In this post, I showed how the author of Mark used a characteristic feature throughout his gospel, particularly in his healings, namely: Jesus heals with his touch.  I argued that this was a feature deliberately introduced into the narrative by the original Markan author, in order to combat the docetism of Simon Magus.

So in this post, I subtracted those touch-healings out from the miracles found in GMk to see what we might find in terms of pre-Markan source material.  We then discovered that there was another, smaller group of related miracles among those remaining, namely: the Markan exorcisms (and there was another exorcism on the touch-healing list).  These all seemed closely linked to the Markan theme of the Messianic Secret, so we then subtracted those out, too.

From the penultimate list, we also subtracted out the doubled miracles of the Water-Walking and the Feeding of the 4000, since they look like just a doubled copying of the Storm-Stilling and the Feeding of the 5000.  We also subtracted out one piece of material that was probably post-Markan: Michael Turton has shown that the healing of the Syro-Phonecian woman's daughter probably isn't Markan at all, because it lacks a chiastic structure (I argue it was likely added by the canonical redactor). 

We were then left with the following miracles:



The Paralytic
The Storm-Stilling
Feeding the 5000
The Blind Man of Jericho

We realized that three of these four were signs, found in Fortna's reconstructed Signs Gospel.  And the fourth, the Storm-Stilling, is (as we just explained) doubled in the Water-Walking which Forna includes as part of the sign of the Feeding of the 5000.  So all four of what remained just happened to be directly related to the signs source.  This was intriguing.

Then in this post, I proposed that Mark did in fact use the Signs Gospel as a source, and I showed how the raising of Jairus' daughter is just a Markan version of a fifth sign: the healing of the official's daughter (a version of which we find in GJn).  Michael Brodie in The Crucial Bridge showed how the Markan author used the Elisha narrative in 2 Kings as a template for Jesus' career in Galilee, and Michael Turton returns again and again to this thesis to illuminate how the Markan author constructed the raising of Jairus' daughter.  Turton thinks that 2 Kings was all Mark needed to construct the raising of Jairus' daughter, but I argue he was also inspired by the healing of the official's child in the Signs Gospel.

I myself then showed how this miracle was actually constructed: by blending the sign of the healing of the official's child from the Signs Source with Elisha's raising of a child from death's door in 2 Kings.  The original sign (preserved in GJn) was a healing from a distance, and shows no relationship with the Elisha miracle from 2 Kings (rather, it's more closely related with tales from Jewish folklore about the Tannaim).  It's Mark who used 2 Kings to transform it into the healing of Jairus' daughter.

But then in that same post, I also showed how SGM1 is constructed in the same manner, i.e. from elements of the healing in Signs combined with elements of the healing in 2 Kings. 

And at that point, I was able to show how the raising of Lazarus is really just a Johannine redaction of SGM1, itself blended again (by John) with the raising of Jairus' daughter (which John also found in SGM, since SGM was really just the original version of GMk).

So to recap:

• The author of the Signs Gospel wrote the sign of the healing of the official's child, related to Jewish folklore about the Tannaim.

• The original Markan author blended this sign with Elisha's raising of a near-death child in 2 Kings, and adding his Markan signature of a healing by touch, producing two separate miracles.  The first result was the raising of Jairus' daughter; the second result was the raising of the youth in what we now know as SGM1.  This is typical of Mark, who liked splitting and doubling his narrative material.

• John then used both Signs and SGM (=original GMk) to write his gospel.  He adapted the sign of the healing of the official's child mostly as found in the Signs Gospel.  Later, he would blend the raising of Jairus' daughter with the raising of the youth (what we now know as SGM1) to create the story of the raising of Lazarus from death. 

Meaning...that the raising of Lazarus is not one of the seven signs found in the Signs Gospel.  It's Johannine redaction of secret, original GMk.

That leaves us with only six miracles.  And we now know versions of at least four of them (and a possible parallel to a fifth) can be found in GMk:

The Paralytic
The Raising of Jairus' Daughter
(The Storm-Stilling)
Feeding the 5000
The Blind Man of Jericho

But as Fortna has explained, there must have been seven in the Signs Gospel.  So what was the seventh sign?

Before we answer that question, we'll be looking at the other two signs: the Water into Wine and the Catch of Fish.  We'll find that they've left behind traces in GMk, demonstrating even further that GMk was using the Signs Source to write his own gospel.