Kata Markon

["Patrick Rogers" <patrogers AT eircom.net>]

> would appreciate any suggestions or critical feed back  > Ted Weeden
> (Papias,  etc., now discounted) for information> about Mark's community,

 

Thanks for your most interesting & detailed suggested criteria for finding the community's location within the Gospel text.  But I wonder can we be quite so dismissive of the witness of Papias, Irenaeus etc. whose ideas about the Gospels' origins may be based on something more than wishful thinking, or mere speculation.  Certainly, their "traditional" views need to be corroborated in some ways from the actual text. But to offload them as utterly unfounded may turn out to be a regrettable hubris, for which another generation of Bible scholars will smile at us.

IMHO, there is little worth in citing that "the tide of scholarly opinion has begun to shift" in one direction or another. This is more difficult to measure than sea-tides, and perhaps no more durable. 

In light of the wide diversity of views on the subject, the late Ray Brown opined just four years ago that as we "cannot know precisely the locale addressed by Mark" we had better focus on what can be deduced about the addressees:  These consisted - at least in part - in part of Greek speakers who did not know Aramaic, and lived in an area where Latin had influenced Greek vocabulary; they needed at least some Jewish customs to be explained to them (NT Intro, 163).  If all of this fits with the area around Caesarea Philippi, then maybe..

 

BTW, have you documentation for placing Bethsaida "east of the Jordan"?  Its ruins as now located are surely well to the west of where river meets lake.

_________________________________
(Patrick Rogers,  Mount Argus,   Dublin 6W)

 

"Once you begin to lose your memory, just forget it!"