This is a lovely story, but does it hold up to scrutiny?
Let's look at the "gospel evidence" for Jesus a little bit. The first thing to note is that the names of the gospels are purely cosmetic. The gospels are anonymous works. The claims that they were written by more or less prominent Biblical figures is patently nonsense. If anyone wishes to dispute this with me, I would challenge them to look at the Gospel of John, and explain to me how an illiterate, Aramaic speaking, fisherman came to be able to write in polished Greek, and yet somehow managed to forget the one time that he saw Moses and Elijah, and heard the voice of Yhwh himself. I am, of course, talking about the "Transfiguration", which is mentioned in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, yet John (who was supposedly one of only three people to witness it) has nothing to say on the matter. This simply cannot be reconciled with the idea that the gospels were written by their namesakes. It's beautiful propaganda, but it has no basis in fact.
The second thing we should note is that the Bible has the gospels shuffled a little bit. The order that the gospels were written in was Mark (65-73 CE), Matthew (70-85 CE), Luke (80-90 CE), and John (90-110 CE, although it is generally held to have been written in segments and then put together later, meaning there is no one composition date). Also Mark, Matthew, and Luke are collectively known as the "synoptic gospels", and John is… well John.
Mark, the Playwright.
1. Omniscient Narration
Now then, let's start from the beginning: The Gospel of Mark. Throughout Mark's work (I will continue to refer to the author as "Mark" just for simplicity's sake) the story is primarily told through the voice of an omniscient narrator. In 1:10-11, we see Mark's first instance of omniscient narration as he was aware of a private conversation between the almighty, and Jesus (although the voice came "from heaven" it was specifically addressed to Jesus. Clearly if everyone heard a voice say "You are my beloved Son" everyone in attendance would've assumed that they must be the messiah, so it's fair to assume that this was a private conversation. Matthew will later upgrade it to a public proclamation, but this was not present in Mark's original). This omniscience is repeated in Mark 1:35 the narrator is aware that Jesus went to a desolate place one morning, and that he prayed while he was out there alone. In Mark 2:6-8, where Mark is aware of what the scribes were "reasoning in their hearts" (or what they were thinking but being careful not to actually say), and also knows that Jesus was aware of this "in his spirit". In Mark 5:27-29, he knows that a woman's menstrual blood stopped flowing when she touched Jesus' clothes (In the context of a Jewish society, knowing such information would be unthinkable, especially for a man). Mark even knows the conversation that occurred between Herod and his wife's daughter, at his birthday party In Mark 6:21-29, which was only attended by family and important officials. In Mark 7:25-30, the author is aware that, when the Syrophoenician woman went home, the demon had left her daughter (Are we to suppose that he followed her home to check?). Again in Mark 14:32-40, Mark knows the words that Jesus prayed, and how often he prayed them, despite the fact that Peter, James, and John (the only possible witnesses of this event) were all asleep. Over and over again throughout Mark's gospel, Mark knows things that he could not possibly have known (the above paragraph is nowhere near an exhaustive list of instances). Clearly this cannot be considered an eyewitness account of the life of Jesus, as Mark reports information that he did not, and could not have witnessed!
2. A Play By the Uneducated, For the Uneducated
While some Christians may try to explain this omniscience by claiming that Yhwh must've recounted this story to Mark while Mark took dictation, let's look at a more reasonable explanation. I would ask you, as the reader, to ask yourself the following simple question: What kinds of works typically have an omniscient third-person narrator? The short answer: Fiction. Plays, novels, some movies, etc.
Consider, for example, the 1946 classic "It's A Wonderful Life". The film begins with a brief prologue in which "God" explains to Clarence the Angel that he has to save a man named George Bailey from committing suicide, and if Clarence succeeds he will have earned his wings. The first half of the movie (give or take) is spent having the voice of "God" narrate virtually every salient point in George Bailey's life, and every meaningful interaction he ever had with anyone. Then, for nearly the entire second half of the movie, Clarence temporarily grants George's wish to never have been born, to teach him a lesson. While all of the changes to George's hometown are somewhat expected by the audience (after all, we understand that George has never been born), George remains completely oblivious to the fact that he has never been born, no matter how many times Clarence explains it to him.
The drama of Mark is set up in a similar of way. The play begins with a brief prologue, in which the narrator introduces the title of the play, indicating that they will be witnessing a story about the "Son of God", and quotes a single verse of Jewish scripture, indicating that someone will be "crying in the wilderness" ("crying" as in "yelling", not "tearing up") and that this person will prepare "the way of the LORD". As the curtain rises on Mark 1:4-11, what should we see but John the Baptist tromping through the wilderness, preaching the coming arrival of the messiah. John baptizes Jesus, and thus establishes that Jesus is this "Son of God" who will be the center of the remainder of our story.
Throughout Mark's story, minor characters such as assorted demon-possessed men and "unclean spirits", a gentile woman, a blind beggar, and a Roman Centurion use their brief periods on stage to proclaim that Jesus is the "son of God", "son of David" or "Lord", while the disciples can't seem to figure it out. Jesus very plainly foretells his own death for the second time in Mark 9:31-32, but (like George Bailey) the disciples can't seem to understand what they were explicitly told, no matter how plainly, or how often Jesus explains it to them.
It is also worth noting that the way the story was put together also lends credibility to the idea that Mark was writing a work of dramatic fiction.
For example, the style of this drama seems to indicate that it was written to be enacted primarily by illiterate, amateur actors, with no prior theatre experience being necessary (which probably explains why children are so able to enact gospel-based plays). The only two characters who have enough dialogue to require that they be literate or have any prior experience are Jesus and the Narrator (and perhaps a third actor who would appear as multiple trivial characters such as John the Baptist, a demon-possessed man, etc. and therefore would have many lines). The remaining actors spend most of their time coming on stage, standing there, and leaving the stage, with only the most minimal and concise exchanges of dialogue in between. For example, the disciple Peter (the most verbose character save for Jesus himself) has only seven lines of dialogue in the entire gospel, and only one of those lines is longer than ten words. Judas Iscariot gets one line and then calls out "Rabbi!" John gets three lines, two of which he shares with James, and the remainder of the disciples only speak as a collective.
Similarly, the rapid changes of scene seems to indicate that Mark understood that he needed something to keep a poorly-educated audience engaged. Throughout the gospel, the scene changes approximately 68 times in only 661 verses (meaning that 68 verses are spent telling the audience where Jesus went next and, on average, the action stays in one place for fewer than 9 verses at a time). In Mark 11 alone, Jesus enters and exits Jerusalem no fewer than four separate times, encounters the same fig tree twice, and makes a stop by the temple to flip some tables. Mark 12 is somewhat unique in that Jesus remains on stage for nearly the entire chapter, but after telling a parable, the Pharisees come, ask a question, Jesus responds, and they leave. The Sadducees then show up and repeat the sequence. And then a scribe shows up and it repeats again. Even when the scene is stable, the characters on stage change in dizzying succession, which serves just as well as rapid scene changes to keeping the attention of an uneducated audience.
3. Sketchy Knowledge of Culture and Geography
Aside from the way the drama was written, there are a few more technical issues that indicate that this is in fact a work of fiction, and not any sort of eyewitness testimony.
The first and most obvious problem comes in Mark 7:3-4. In this passage, Mark feels compelled to explain the washing rituals of "the Jews" as though his audience would be unfamiliar with Jewish people or their customs. If Mark was a Jewish eyewitness to the Jesus story, he would be so intimately familiar with the Jewish ceremonial hand washing, or the ceremonial washing of cups or pots etc. that it would never have occurred to him to mention such things. (If you, reader, have traveled to a place with a vastly different culture, you can probably readily identify several things that seemed strange to you, that the local people took completely for granted.) On the other hand, if Mark was a Greek playwright, mentioning some ritual washing belonging to a distant culture would be just exotic enough to keep the audience interested while keeping the story moving.
The biggest, but possibly the least obvious problem, is that Mark has only the crudest grasp of Judaean geography.
For starters, the distance from Tyre to Sidon is nearly 37 kilometers (or 23 miles) one way. Was Jesus gaining weight from all of the Matzo Ball soup and decided that he needed a good 74 kilometer (46 mile) walk on top of 55 kilometer (34 mile) walk that he already had in store just to get to the near shore of the Sea of Galilee? Or is it more likely that the author didn't know much about the geography, but figured his audience probably didn't know much about it either so it would be ok? (I think the latter is probably more correct.) What's more, it's similarly farfetched to say that the Sea of Galilee is "within the region of the Decapolis". Just look at it. It's pretty clearly not. If it is in any region at all, I'd have to say that it's in Galilee. Sure the southern end is near the Decapolis, but almost the entire gospel narrative takes place in or near Capernaum on the northern end. What would Jesus have been doing down in the Decapolis?
Now aside from the fact that they somehow managed to end up nearly five miles off course on a lake that is only about six miles wide, and spent seven to ten hours in the process, there's one additional problem. Christian scholarship has typically held that the miracle of feeding the 5,000 took place in Tabgha, which is roughly a mile west-southwest of Capernaum. If this is the case, then Jesus told the disciples to sail northeast to Bethsaida, yet they somehow ended up sailing southwest to Gennesaret. Did the disciples screw up that bad? This whole story only makes sense if Mark knew the names of a couple of cities in the region, but didn't know where they where, and didn't really have any clue about the size of the "Sea of Galilee", so he just decided to put them where he wanted them. (It's almost as though he were a Greek playwright who had never been to the region and knew nothing of its geography, but wanted to write a story set in an exotic landscape.)
(For those who are familiar with eastern Wisconsin, we're talking about a lake with less than 30% of the surface area of Lake Winnebago. The Sea of Galilee would be more aptly named "the Puddle of Galilee".)
4. Mark's Jesus: A Prophet Without Power
The final point of interest in Mark's gospel is the character of Jesus. The Jesus written of in Mark's gospel is very much different from the Jesus that most Christians pray to. As we might expect from a Greek playwright, this Jesus is described as the "Son of God" but is clearly not a deity himself (in keeping with other sons of the Greek gods like Hercules, Achilles, etc who were clearly powerful, but also clearly human).
Mark's Jesus is very much human, and has very limited access to divine power. For example, in Mark 6:1-6 we are told that, when Jesus went to his home town, he "could do no mighty works there... and he marveled because of [the people's] unbelief." Here we are presented with a picture of a Jesus who's divine power is limited by the faith of those around him. Similarly Mark 8:22-26, shows us that Jesus is far from all-knowing, far from all-powerful, and his work is far from perfect. In this passage, Jesus spits on a blind mans eyes, and then touches his eyes to try to heal him. When Jesus asks him if it worked the man replied that he could see, but it was very blurry, so Jesus had to do it again, and the second time it worked. Now I'll grant you, if this were an historical event and not a play, I'd be impressed. But as a character of a play, Jesus didn't have the power to heal him in one try, and didn't know that he lacked this power - having to ask the blind man if it worked. As a third example, consider Mark 7:31-35. As though Mark was aware that his audience would be in need a good laugh at this point in the performance, he decided that healing a deaf man would require Jesus to stick his fingers in his ears, spit, and then touch his tongue! Honestly, I would say that, even today, a bizarre and humorous ritual like that would be sure to get a few laughs from the audience.
Throughout Mark's gospel, Jesus was very clearly portrayed as a man who had some degree of clairvoyance and some degree of divine power, but he was nowhere near being a deity. In fact, he was not even the demigod that Matthew will later upgrade him to.
5. In Closing
To recap very briefly: Far from being an eyewitness account, Mark, the first canonical gospel, tells a fictional story by means of a third-person omniscient narrator who is aware of all of his characters thoughts and emotions in realtime. By utilizing very limited and stylized dialogue, a rapid succession of scene changes, and by setting the drama in an exotic foreign land, Mark was able to keep a poorly-educated audience entertained. Inserting the names of actual cities and regions like Tyre, Sidon, and the Decapolis, lent some degree of realism to his play by placing it in a pseudo-historical setting. Once this setting was established, Mark used it to tell his story about the son of the Jewish deity Yhwh, who was sent as the (allegedly prophesied) Jewish messiah, but was sentenced to death by the Jews instead. While Mark cannot really be considered a plagiarist since he was the original author of the Jesus story, that does not make his work any less a work of fiction. Overall, I'd say that Mark is no William Shakespeare, but for a first century work, it's a decent attempt at a nice, short play.
Well, I was hoping to get through all four gospels in one post, but I clearly have written way too much for any of that, so I'm thinking we're going to make it a series... Come back next week for Matthew's Mighty Makeover!
End Notes:
It is worth mentioning that Mark's gospel ends at 16:8. Mark 16:9-20 was not added until long after Matthew, Luke, and John had been written. Most Bible publishers include a footnote acknowledging that the oldest manuscripts do not contain Mark 16:9-20, but publishers still print that passage because many Christians have come to expect it to be there.
While much of this post is my own work, I borrowed heavily enough from Ken Humphrey's youtube channel that I feel that I should provide links to his videos that I used (and fact-checked) in writing this.
Mark -- Knowing the Unknowable
Enter Jesus, stage left
Fabrication of a Christian Holy Land
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