Thursday, March 31, 2011

The Touch of Healing, Secret Mark, and Simon Magus

There's something interesting about the Gospel of Mark: many of the miracle healings are accomplished by touch.

Here's the list:

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Bethsaida, Secret Mark, and the Not-So-Great Omission, pt. 4

In the last post, I made a case for my claim that an original version of GMk was used by the Q-author to produce a Q gospel that lacked the Bethsaida section.  This Q gospel was then combined with a canonical version of GMk to produce GMt, which used the Bethsaida material in canonical GMk; and GLk/Mc, which left out the Bethsaida material in canonical GMk (since it was absent in the Q gospel).

To further demonstrate the plausibility of this scenario, we'll have to show that the Q-author would have had reason to omit each of the original pericopes in the Bethsaida section in his Q gospel.  Once again, these original pericopes were determined, by Michael Turton, to have been:

a) The Water-Walking
b) The Feeding of the 4000
c) The Blind Man of Bethsaida

We deal with each pericope in turn: