No, we cannot. Unless and until your book is refuted, this is a fatal problem for Ev priority.The bigger problem is that the Gospel of Mark and *Ev are essentially the same story, but the Gospel of Mark has many more and much tighter parallels to both the Jewish scriptures and the Pauline letters. Again, we can't just move past this point.
It is all but impossible to think that Mark took the Ev, chopped out the sermon on the mount, and found a very tight allegory with the Septuagint for every single line of what was remaining. Oh, and started nesting one of Ev's stories in side the other to form self-commenting chiasms. And change from past tense to present tense in the middle of stories. etc etc
But if you *reverse* the priority, it makes all kinds of sense. It's easy to imagine the author of Ev trying to distance the story of Jesus by obscuring these allegories.
Its easy to imagine ditching the Secrecy motif, because Marcionites had no secrets (like those damnable Carpocratians!) and they thought everybody could be saved, not just the inner circle who happened to hear some good stuff.
Its easy to imagine the well-meaning author of Ev thinking that Mark's nested stories were bad style--like Mark was forgetting which story he was telling and wandered off for a while, until he could get back on track.....and might as well fix that too while changing this ugly parataxis to melifluid hypotaxis, and making sure the text didn't randomly change tense all the time, etc etc.
It is far, far easier to imagine somebody *adding* the sermon on the mount than cutting it out. I still can't fathom how anybody would cut it out. IMHO its one of those things that--once it is written, stays written.
Statistics: Posted by RandyHelzerman — Mon May 20, 2024 7:34 pm