Who Said That?
Friday, July 11, 2008 at 03:35PM 
"Mark's story [i.e. the Gospel of Mark] is most likely Mark's fiction . . . .The gospel was indeed Mark's creation, a narrative that brought together two distinctively different types of written material representative of two major types of early sectarian movements. One stream was that of movements in Palestine and southern Syria that cultivated the memory of Jesus as a founder-teacher. The other was that of congregations in northern Syria, Asia Minor and Greece wherein the death and resurrection of Jesus were regarded as founding events . . . . Mark fabricated his story."
OK, you know how this works . . . Leave your guess in the comments section below. Please no google searches or cheating. The whole point is to make a guess, not look up an answer!
Kim Riddlebarger
This is a quotation from Burton Mack's book, Myth of Innocence (11-12). Mack is one of the Jesus Seminar crew, and he is also John Wesley Professor at Claremont Graduate School. It amazes me that a guy who believes the gospel to be a myth, and that Jesus was merely some sort of pithy sage, could actually take a paycheck from a "Christian" institution. Mack is a also Southern Baptist, who claims to remain a Southern Baptist only because it made so many of them mad. Swell.
Reader Comments (25)
Either that, or someone who thinks that Mark is a genius and was able to merge the two bits so coherently as to make it as if there was a continuous flowing story that always has Jerusalem and Calvary getting closer.
Yup. One of those guys.