Polemics

Did the eyewitness Peter influence the material in Mark’s gospel?

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Sherlock Holmes and John Watson: let's take a look at the facts
Sherlock Holmes and John Watson: let’s take a look at the facts

Today, I want to talk about the earliest gospel using a post and a podcast from J. Warner Wallace. When you are discussing the New Testament with non-Christians, you always want to go for the earliest sources. If you can find a fact in two independent sources, and at least one of them is early, then it’s much easier to claim that this fact is historical. I.e. – that historical methods make it part of history, rather than something made up. Mark is typically dated early 60s, although the atheist historian James Crossley dates it 37-43 in his book. So Mark passes the early test.

You also want to be able to trace the material in the book back to as many eyewitnesses as you can find. The gospel of Matthew is supposed to be based on the eyewitness Matthew, and the gospel of John is supposed to be based on the eyewitness John. Luke’s gospel is based on his traveling companion Paul – an eyewitness. And the gospel Mark is based on the eyewitness Peter. That means that Mark’s gospel passes the eyewitness test, too.

There is a list of evidence for that last claim from a post on Cold Case Christianity.

Here are a few from the list:

Peter Is Mentioned Frequently

Peter is featured frequently in Mark’s Gospel. As an example, Mark refers to Peter twenty six times in his short account, compared to Matthew who mentions Peter only three additional times in his much longer Gospel.

Peter Is Named By the Church Fathers

A number of early Church witnesses and authorities confirm Peter as the source for Mark’s Gospel. Bishop Papias of Hierapolis (60-130AD) repeated the testimony of the old presbyters (disciples of the Apostles) who claimed Mark wrote his Gospel in Rome as he scribed the preaching of Peter (Ecclesiastical History Book 2 Chapter 15, Book 3 Chapter 30 and Book 6 Chapter 14). In his book, “Against Heresies” (Book 3 Chapter 1), Irenaeus (130-200AD) also reported Mark penned his Gospel as a scribe for Peter. Clement of Alexandria (150-215AD) wrote a book entitled “Hypotyposeis” (Ecclesiastical History Book 2 Chapter 15). In this ancient book, Clement confirmed Mark was the scribe of Peter in Rome. Early Christian theologian and apologist, Tertullian (160-225AD), also affirmed Peter’s contribution to Mark’s Gospel in “Against Marcion” (Book 4 Chapter 5). Eusebius (Ecclesiastical History Book 6 Chapter 25) also quoted a Gospel Commentary written by Origen (an early church father and theologian who lived 185-254AD) attributing the Gospel of Mark to Peter.

Peter’s Embarrassments Have Been Omitted

There are many details in the Gospel of Mark consistent with Peter’s special input and influence,including omissions related to events involving Peter. How can Mark be a memoir of Peter if, in fact, the book contains so many omissions of events involving Peter specifically? It’s important to evaluate the entire catalogue of omissions pertaining to Peter to understand the answer here. The vast majority of these omissions involve incidents in which Peter did or said something rash or embarrassing. It’s not surprising these details were omitted by the author who wanted to protect Peter’s standing in the Christian community. Mark was quite discreet in his retelling of the narrative (other Gospel writers who were present at the time do, however, provide details of Peters ‘indiscretions’ in their own accounts. See Cold-Case Christianity for a more detailed explanation).

The last one is my favorite, because it makes me laugh to imagine Peter looking over Mark’s shoulder and saying “no, don’t put that in it” and “no, don’t tell them I did that”. Funny!

If you want to listen to a podcast about this, where J. Warner Wallace goes over all the evidence, you can find the podcast here.  It’s one of the older ones (I like them better) so it goes 90 minutes.

News

Former inmate prays with the officer who arrested him eight years ago

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Former inmate prays with the police officer who arrested him
Former inmate prays with the police officer who arrested him

This story is from the Daily Caller. Let’s take a look and then I’ll link it back to Christianity and parenting.

Excerpt:

Prompted by the slew of attacks on police officers, a former inmate who turned his life around, caused a social media frenzy by praying with the officer who arrested him eight years ago, asking God to protect police from violent criminals.

Texas City patrolman Salvador “Sal” Chapa was attending a barbecue on Saturday when he was approached by Doc Amey, a man he arrested eight years ago for a gun offense. So disturbed by the attacks on police, Amey pulled Chapa to the side of the crowd, where the two joined hands and said a prayer for the officer’s safety, according to ABC13.

Fellow barbecue-goer Kevin Woods was so touched by Amey’s prayer, that he snapped a picture of the pair and shared it on Facebook saying, “We should be seeing more of this in America. There shouldn’t be race involved and this is living proof that color doesn’t matter. This is a prime example. All lives matter ONE NATION UNDER GOD!”

According to the now-viral post, Amey was arrested by Chapa on a gun charge, and received a five year sentence for the crime. While in jail, Amey devoted his time to prayer and getting his life in order. He was released from prison after serving only a year and a half, and has since graduated from Bible college with perfect attendance.

According to Chapa, he and Amey had seen each other in town before, but never talked. Moved by the recent trend of attacks on police officers in America, the reformed criminal was compelled to approach the Chapa who arrested him nearly a decade ago, and ask God to protect the officer from the rampant crimes.

The picture has received nearly 30,000 Facebook shares, including a share by the Texas City Police Department’s official page.

“After seeing the picture getting posted and all, I was overwhelmed but at the same time I was happy it happened. I hope whoever views it looks at police in a different aspect. We’re here to help everybody,” Chapa told ABC13.

I want to be friends with that man. He is a good man!

So I want to make two points, one theological and one about parenting.

First point, Christians who read the Bible carefully will develop a tolerance for God chastising them with suffering, because they know it shapes their character to be more like Christ. This is the process of sanctification, where a Christian is made more like Jesus through the process of encountering the moral law, and learning how to obey it. If a Christian makes a wrong decision, and God lets him suffer, he praises God for teaching him right and wrong. He does not turn away from God, block him out of sight, and then continue to make bad decisions as if nothing had ever happened. Christians, of all people, need to be reading the Bible practically. We need to make ourselves comfortable with being judged, and not be rebellious when it happens. We need to learn to respect God and his moral law, and not make the same mistakes over and over.

Second point, about parenting. I think that there is a lot of hostility on the secular left towards parents who want to discipline their children. This story shows how disciplining is supposed to be done, and what the right response is to being judged and having boundaries placed on you. When a child stays up late and then sleeps right through a test and fails it, the parent should ground the child so that the child associates staying up too late the night before a test with a punishment. Most parents today would be mad at the teacher and the school for bruising the ego of their child. That’s wrong. It’s much better for the child to suffer a trivial punishment now, and not make much bigger mistakes with much bigger punishments later. In computer science, it costs MUCH LESS to fix a defect when it is discovered by the project team in the early requirements elicitation phase than it does to fix it if it’s discovered by customers after the deployment to production phase. Find the mistake early and fix it. The longer you wait, the more it costs to fix it.

Here’s a good passage from the Bible about accepting the suffering God allows you to experience after making a bad decision:

2 Samuel 12:1-13:

1 And the Lord sent Nathan to David. He came to him and said to him,“There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor.

2 The rich man had very many flocks and herds,

3 but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. And he brought it up, and it grew up with him and with his children. It used to eat of his morsel and drink from his cup and lie in his arms, and it was like a daughter to him.

4 Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was unwilling to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the guest who had come to him, but he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him.”

5 Then David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man, and he said to Nathan,“As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die,

6 and he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.”

7 Nathan said to David, “You are the man! Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you out of the hand of Saul.

8 And I gave you your master’s house and your master’s wives into your arms and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah. And if this were too little, I would add to you as much more.

9 Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and have taken his wife to be your wife and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites.

10 Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house, because you have despised me and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife.’

11 Thus says the Lord, ‘Behold, I will raise up evil against you out of your own house. And I will take your wives before your eyes and give them to your neighbor, and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of this sun.

12 For you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel and before the sun.’”

13 David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.” And Nathan said to David, “The Lord also has put away your sin; you shall not die.

This attitude of being grateful for judgment and boundaries is not popular on the left. The left is all about not judging, and especially about not punishing. They call it compassion – letting people who make mistakes get away with it instead of teaching people who make mistakes a lesson that will make their future decisions better. I often see Christians refuse to judge other Christians when they make mistakes. Instead of warning them, we want to pray that their mistake will “work out”. My advice for people, and especially Christians, is to not run away from being judged and having boundaries placed on you – if they come from someone who is wiser and who loves you and is looking out for you on a long-term basis. Parents are like that, most of the time.

News

Scott Walker: eliminate NLRB, enact national right-to-work, ban federal public sector unions

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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker

I hope that by the end of this post, everyone will consider whether it makes more sense to elect someone who says they will do something conservative as President that they have already done in their state, as Governor.

The story is from the Daily Caller.

Excerpt:

Republican presidential hopeful Scott Walker promised Monday to go far beyond what he did to rein in union power in Wisconsin if elected to lead the country.

The plan includes eliminating the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), eliminating federal employee unions and implementing a national right-to-work law. It will also do away with federal workers being allowed to do union work on taxpayer time.

[…]The plan would go far beyond the career defining reforms Walker pursued in 2011 during his first term as governor of Wisconsin. The changes to labor policy in the state, known as Act 10, mostly just outlawed mandatory union dues for state public employees.

[…]Critics have argued the NLRB unfairly benefits unions, often at the expense of employers and their workers. This includes changes to union elections, contracting and the franchise model. Walker also promised to outlawmandatory union dues for all public and private workers. A policy known as right-to-work.

[…]Walker also plans to end the policy which allows government workers to do union work on taxpayer time. The practice is known as “official time” on the federal level.

“In 2012, taxpayers subsidized 3,395,187 hours of ‘official time’ time spent working for the union or lobbying,” Walker noted. “That cost the taxpayers $156 million.”

“While the IRS was busy harassing conservative organizations they also had more than 200 federal employees whose only work was for the big government union bosses,” Walker continued. “How about the Department of Veterans Affairs? While more than 600,000 veterans were facing delays for medical care in the VA system, more than 250 federal employees.”

There’s no question in my mind that Walker has the strongest record of activism as a fiscal conservative in the GOP primary. He is only proposing to do at the federal level what he already has done at the state level. No other candidate has the record of past performance that Walker has. Been there, done that – wrote a book about it. It’s very important that we get the public sector unions out of politics, because they are always pushing for bigger and bigger government, which means higher taxes for you and your children. And of course the unions are pro-abortion and anti-natural-marriage. By the way, workers like right-to-work: a recent Gallup poll found that non-union workers are happier with their work than forced-unionized workers.

I expected Walker to do this if he were elected President, which is why he was my first choice for so long. (He is now #2, behind my #1 pick Bobby Jindal) It’s a shame that he had to tip his hand, because it will make it harder for him to win in the general election, now. I really think I might have to put him back in as my #1 choice because I think that getting rid of NCLB and public sector unions would be such an Earth-shattering conservative move. This truly would be on the level of some of the radically leftist policies that Obama pushed for. I trust Walker to do what he says, because of his record of achievement in Wisconsin along these same lines. This is not just talk.

People should have understood what they were getting in Scott from his past record, but I fear that many Republican voters (not evangelicals, of course) are not looking into the candidates’ backgrounds. They are being swayed by charismatic talk from leftist clowns like Donald Trump. They should be looking for proven leaders who have made good things happen at the state level – as governors, preferably.

By the way, Walker is one of one three candidates who has a plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. The other two are Jindal (of course) and Rubio.

Related videos

Anyway, for the rest of this post, I want to include a few short, 5-minute, videos on capitalism and unions. These are all from Prager University, and I hope they help you to understand why you need to support the free enterprise system, and oppose public sector unions.

George Mason University professor of economics Walter Williams on “Is Capitalism Moral?”:

Entrepreneurship guru George Gilder on “Why Capitalism Works”:

City College of New York professor of political science Daniel DiSalvo on how unions influence politics:

Stanford University professor of political science Terry Moe on how teacher unions oppose the interests of students:

Please look into these issues, and consider supporting either Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal or Ted Cruz for President in the general election. These guys understand economics, and will get good things done if elected President.

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