Context is everything (from Golgotha to Honolulu)

Barack Obama's birth certificate.

Accounts that circulate about prominent people - when those prominent people and those who knew them were still alive - are more likely to be true accounts than those which circulated long after.

That may sound trivial, but consider this example:

1. A thousand years from now, people will be able to know with some certainty that there was a real group of people known as “birthers” who didn’t believe Barack Obama was born in the United States. There will also be a large body of material dismissing those allegations.
   
   What will they be able to presume? Barack Obama was real, the arguments about his citizenship were real, and in all probability Mr Obama was as American as apple pie.
2. If a thousand years from now someone unearths a document dating from 2114  that proves Barack Obama was not born in the United States, folks in 3114 will probably regard it as unreliable, since it will have been created 100 years after Obama was president, after he and anyone who knew him had died, and it’ll conflict with sources more likely to be contemporary.

Of course you know where I’m going. What gospel accounts were probably circulating in the first century and likely tell us something important about Jesus and his death?

A fragment from an early copy of the Gospel of Mark.

This is a short list of elements that fascinate me because the details are so unusual that it would be hard to invent them if they were not true or possibly true:

1. Women are credited with first learning of the Resurrection. (Mark 1:1ff)
   
   (Disregarding for the moment the affront to modern sensibilities, in ancient times that would have been like having a jailhouse snitch testify to the citizenship of President Obama.)
   
2. Pilate gave permission to have Jesus’ body removed from the cross and buried the same day he was executed. (Mark 15:42-42)
   
   (Crucifixion was intended not only to be painful, but to be humiliating and deleterious, ie, the condemned would hang and decompose as a warning to others.)
   
3. The angel that occupied the empty tomb was sitting down, meaning the tomb likely had a bench, and probably didn’t have a niche (kokh) or shelf. (Mark 16:5)
   
   (Benches, niches and shelves are all common features of first century Jerusalem tombs. Some tombs lately proposed as burial places for Jesus do not have benches. They have niches and shelves instead. It is not possible for a person to sit up in these structures.)

Closing comment: I am not saying these observations prove anything. I am saying they are small details that interest me.

[2014-04-08]

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