Dave Sim's blogandmail #216 (April 15th, 2007)

A very brief update on my Gospel commentaries.


I had intended to work on a finished version of my Mark commentaries while I was also spending the Christian portion of my Sabbath doing my rough Luke commentaries, but then I happened to hit the same story in Mark that I was working on in Luke and realized that the two versions read very differently in their respective contexts. This surprised me in a way and didn't surprise me in a way, but definitely compelled me to abandon the finished version of Mark in favour of the rough version of Luke. I quickly lost track of which narrative was moving in which direction and started confusing the two. In fact I had to abandon both for some weeks and then come back to Luke and reread what I had written to that point in order to make sure that I was following the thread of Luke and not confusing it mentally with Mark.


I do suspect that this was an intentional effect in the debate between God and YHWH, at least as YHWH had intended it: that the three Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke are very much at variance with each other and therefore violate the Judaic cornerstone of faith that if two or more accounts don't agree then the accounts are self-evidently false. There is overlapping material in Matthew, Mark and Luke that tell roughly the same story but usually with one or more details at variance. And then there are anecdotes which only appear in Matthew or only appear in Mark or only appear in Luke. To YHWH it must have seemed like a "no brainer". If the Synoptic Jesus was going to be hailed as the Davidic Meschiach and if the foundation of his church (the "proto-synagogue" as I've come to describe it) was Judaic in nature, then it was a given that the reformed Judaic proto-synagogue would experience schism between the adherents of the three different accounts. The "Matthewists" would separate from the "Markites" would separate from the "Lukeists" and there would be wholesale conflict and destruction as a result. It was a distinctly YHWHist way of looking at things which assumed that human nature could be overridden by fiat of what YHWH assumed would be an on-going dominance of faith and definition of faith by a tripartite mutated Matthew Mark and Luke based Aaronic priesthood (or Matthewist Pharisees as against Markite Sadducees as against Lukeist Something Elses) as dominated and/or defined by the subsequent equivalent of the Rabbinate and Talmudic scholars.


Men would do and be what the priests (and later rabbis) told them to do and be and the only recourse would be to pick your account of the life of the Meschiach and fight to the death against those who held an opposing view. What YHWH failed to see is that God can tell a story -can have men enact a story - which is so compelling at its essence that it would override any attempt to assert a single specific stringent ideology directed by the priesthood centering on the specific details of the accounts. Schism would come eventually, but along the lines of how much Jesus was a man and how much Jesus was God, a far larger question than what Jesus specifically said on a given occasion: whether the phraseology of Luke was accurate or whether Mark was accurate. The fact that all of the accounts are roughly the same - the term Synoptic comes from synopsis; that is, that the respective synopses of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke tell roughly the same story - satisfied base level human nature and never really became an issue as the disparity between the accounts isn't really an issue to this day anywhere in the Christian Church.


Focusing on the details was a clear example of not being able to see the forest for the trees. The forest was the birth, life and death of Jesus Christ, God's only begotten son and the redeeming power of that life enacted as it was. The Devil is in the details - but only in the details: the individual trees of when in the sequence of his ministry Jesus declared Peter (or Peter's words) to be the rock upon which he would found his church. Or whether he in fact said that at all. Or how he said it. Or what he said afterward. It allowed for a very neat schism, but between Judaism and Christianity, not within Christianity itself. Any Orthodox Jew worth his salt would read Matthew, Mark and Luke and say "There are literally dozens of internal contradictions here which can't be rationalized logically and which point in three different directions. Whatever this is - and it looks like warmed-over Roman and Greek mystery cult stuff - it definitely doesn't pass even the meanest test of what scripture is and isn't." There was just no way to participate in something so self-evidently wrong and remain a good Jew.


The only Jews who could go along with it were bad Jews or fundamentally ignorant Jews or willfully rebellious Jews or corrupt Jews: in short, any Jew who could ignore the fact that the three (and, later, four) gospel accounts were internally self-contradicting. The goyim, having no background in the importance of accounts having to conform to each other in order to be regarded as Scriptural, instead came from the Greek and Roman tradition that still dominates faith and atheism today, holding that scriptural stories are archetypal and not literal. That is, that there never was a capital "f" Flood, just manifold Jungian stories of The Flood, that God and YHWH and Zeus and Odin were just different names for the same archetypal non-existent Jungian being. As a result the goyim could participate in what was (from a Judaic standpoint) a corrupted form of Judaism which married Judaism with Greek and Roman mystery cults just as the bad and ignorant Jews did: on the basis of the overall sense conveyed in the Synoptic Gospels. "This is a really good mystery cult and it works really good!" I think this was all intentional on the part of God, an exercise in devotional housekeeping to get the debate back on track (God's version of reality versus YHWH's version of reality) by making use of YHWH's own corruption (that the debate was archetypal and hypothetical and not concrete and actual) to subsume the Greek and Roman mystery cults - and Goddess worship and all of his/her/its other delusional digressions - back within this primary debate by making the new overall issue What Christianity IS: a Judaic Corruption (as far as Orthodox Jews were concerned) or a Judaic Corrective (as far as Christians were concerned). Try and have a debate with a woman about a serious subject that she feels strongly about and you'll understand why the strategy became necessary. She will avoid being proven wrong by expanding the parameters of what is being discussed until everything is meaningless, it's all just words and names and made up things and she wants to stop talking about it now. The enactments of the Synoptic Jesus and the Johannine Jesus made that impossible by being both actual and being All Encompassing Archetypes. All Goddess worship in Latin countries was subsumed within the Cult of Mary, Mother of God (and now the Cult of Magdalene, Girlfriend of God or Wife of God or Mother of God's Children which always makes a big comeback when "harlot" becomes a protected lifestyle choice) as an example.


What the Jews and Christians did have in common from the beginning was a perception of Scripture as a series of unrelated anecdotes. Abraham did this, Abraham said this, then Abraham went over here and did this, then Abraham went over here and did this other thing, then Abraham said this and then Abraham died. It isn't treated as a specific narrative where each event builds on the previous event and makes a larger point. Jesus did this, then Jesus said that, then Jesus went over here and did this, then Jesus came back over here and did this other thing, then Jesus said this and then Jesus died. As far as I know, I was the first one to treat the Torah as a narrative rather than a series of disconnected and unrelated anecdotes in my commentaries in Latter Days - the story of the eons-long argument between God and YHWH, which, to me, continues into the Synoptic Gospels and the Johannine Gospel, reaches an uneasy conclusion in John's Apocalypse and then resumes in the Koran. As a result, I think I'm the only one who sees Matthew, Mark and Luke as being entirely separate narratives, diametrically opposed to each other in many key areas just because I see them AS narratives and it really makes a fundamental difference to the sequential logic of the narrative if this episode takes place at the beginning of the Synoptic Jesus' ministry or somewhere in the middle or if it doesn't occur at all.


Excuse me, I'm writing this on April 3, Passover this year, so I have to go and start my noon prayer a little early with a reading of the Passover account in Exodus 12-14.


Okay, I'm back. Where was I? Oh, right. So, it should be interesting if I can get to the point of publishing my commentaries on Matthew, Mark and Luke to hopefully get the two or three people interested in reading them to see what it is that I'm talking about, how the same basic roster of events when they're told in a different sequence fundamentally change the nature of the narrative-as-scaffold where this story point builds upon the previous story point which builds upon the story point before that one.


I'm not sure where or when it would be published but I think it would be/will be interesting if and when I get there. God willing.

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This may also be viewed at http://davesim.blogspot.com/

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If you wish to contact Dave Sim, you can mail a letter (he does NOT receive emails) to:

Aardvark Vanaheim, Inc
P.O. Box 1674
Station C
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2

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If you wish to contact Dave Sim, you can mail a letter (he does NOT receive emails) to:

Aardvark Vanaheim, Inc
P.O. Box 1674
Station C
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2

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