The Devil, Demons, Judas, and "the Jews"

Opponents of Christ in the Gospels

Torsten Löfstedt

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781666704549, 9781666704556
• eBook ISBN: 9781666704563
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

What place do the four Gospels give Satan, demons, and Jesus' human opponents (including Jewish leaders but also Jesus' disciples) in their accounts of Jesus' life? This study takes a literary-historical approach to the Gospels, examining them as narratives. It shows how the authors were in the process of developing the devil as a character and determining which roles he filled. New interpretations of individual passages in the Gospels are given as well as new understandings of the theological emphases of each author. This study is also a contribution to redaction criticism and the relative chronology of the Gospels. It employs the theory of Matthean posteriority which revolutionizes our understanding of the literary relations between the Gospels and allows for a new understanding of theological development in early Christianity.

Chapter 1: Mark

Introduction

Authorship

Mark is considered to be the earliest of the Gospels; most scholars agree that it was used by Matthew and Luke. The author does not refer to himself by name in the Gospel, and many scholars have questioned whether this text always bore a title that ascribed it to Mark.151 Scholars similarly question the authorship of the other Gospels. For example, Ehrman writes, “we know that the original manuscripts of the Gospels did not have their authors’ names attached to them.”152 Assertions like this, though common, are not firmly grounded. Since the original manuscripts of the Gospels have not been preserved, we cannot know whether authors’ name were on them or not. All extant manuscripts of the complete Gospels specify whose Gospel it was,153 even though they might put that caption in different places; some put it in the beginning of the Gospel, others at the end of the Gospel, others both before and after.154 There is no record of Mark’s text having been ascribed to anyone else.155 Collins finds it likely that from the beginning whenever the text was copied and circulated it bore the name of Mark.156 I agree with Collins. There is good reason to believe Mark is the author also because there would be no reason to attribute it to him otherwise. Mark was not a name that carried as great authority as that of one of the apostles.157

Who then was Mark? As is the case with most New Testament authors, the author of this Gospel appears to have had Jewish background.158 Boyarin shows that contrary to what many scholars have asserted, Mark had a good understanding of contemporary Jewish practices, such as Pharisaic rules regarding how to wash one’s hands before a meal (7:3).159 The intended readers appear to include both people of both Jewish and Gentile backgrounds. Mark includes Aramaic expressions which would probably be of greater interest to Jews than to readers of Gentile background (5:41; 7:11, 34; 14:36; 15:22, 34), but he also makes parenthetical remarks that seem primarily directed to non-Jewish readers, such as that explanation of how Jews wash their hands before a meal.

Traditionally the Gospel has been attributed to “John whose other name was Mark” referred to in Acts 12:12, 25; 15:37, whose mother had a house in Jerusalem and who was close to Peter (cf. Acts 12:12) and is thought to be the same as the person called Mark in 1 Peter (5:13) and the person called Mark who was cousin of Barnabas and an acquaintance of Paul (Col 4:10; Phlm 24; 2 Tim 4:11; see also Acts 12:25 where John who was called Mark travels together with Barnabas and Paul; see also Acts 15:36–40).160 This identification is supported by several early sources, including a quote attributed to Papias, bishop of Hierapolis and a companion of Polycarp (d. 155). Papias had gathered material he had heard from prominent early Christians into a series of five books called An Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord. These books have not been preserved to our day, but Eusebius of Caesarea, writing in the early fourth century, had access to them. He quotes Papias as saying that “the elder John” said “about Mark, who wrote the Gospel” the following:

When Mark was the interpreter of Peter, he wrote down accurately everything that he recalled of the Lord’s words and deeds—but not in order. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied him; but later, as I indicated, he accompanied Peter, who used to adapt his teachings for the needs at hand, not arranging, as it were, an orderly composition of the Lord’s sayings. And so Mark did nothing wrong by writing some of the matters as he remembered them. For he was intent on just one purpose: to leave out nothing that he heard or to include any falsehood among them.161

According to Papias, Mark was not one of the original disciples of Jesus, but he became a follower of Christ and served as an interpreter or translator for Peter. His Gospel includes what Peter recalled of what Jesus had said, but he did not arrange the material in any particular way.162 Some of what Papias writes rings true. It is not unlikely that Peter, an unlearned Aramaic speaking fisherman, needed a translator when preaching to Greeks.163 Consistent with Papias’s words, Mark is nowhere said to have been an eyewitness to Jesus’ earthly ministry. And as we shall see, Mark’s Gospel appears to many not to be carefully constructed. The source for Papias’s account of the origin of Mark’s Gospel is “the elder John,” a man Papias...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Mark
• Chapter 2: Luke
• Chapter 3: Matthew
• Chapter 4: John
• Summary and Conclusions
• Bibliography