I think Mark is a sectarian in Paul’s clade. Indeed,
I think he’s his first mythopoeic advocate. That doesn’t mean they ever met, of course. I suspect not, but there is no way to know.
On manuscript distribution, that’s unknowable because we don’t know what the intentions were or the investment scale. For example, was this just for select churches to read out? Or was it a propaganda campaign seeking to flood the market of ideas? Or was it a literary exercise circulated only among certain literary houses and thus maybe aimed at certain library collections (per Walsh)? Etc. Since we don’t know (we have no reports at all from the period of their composition; the only thing close comes from Papias a generation or two later, and it’s obviously completely uninformed and gullible), we can’t say.
We can say more about the anti-Marcionite edition that included Mark (
which will have been composed two average lifetimes after Mark), since that clearly appears to have had a propagandistic intent and appears to have had a lot of money backing it, and this is even evidenced by the fact that it succeeded: it flooded the market so conclusively, not a single extant manuscript comes from any text but it, and we are finding such manuscripts even within fifty to a hundred years of its publication (which means there were so many in the market by then that they appear in the record even after statistical wipeout).
Comparatively, therefore, we can say that Mark (original) was nowhere near that widely published. But that could be because of limited investment funds, not necessarily a lack of desire to win some propaganda war. But one can speculate it’s more likely Mark’s agenda was more in-house, and because he (and his backers) had no competition yet (assuming no prior Gospel existed), the need of scaling production would not have been as immediate. Even Matthew, which I think did intend to “replace” Mark, was aimed at a different market (Torah observant churches). Luke and John (or our redactions thereof) were written so close to the flooded Edition in time that even if they were scaled, it soon swamped them.
So, all that said, my guess would be somewhere between 10 and 100 copies were made in Mark’s lifetime. Whereas the Edition clearly was mass produced (and so rapidly as to even compromise quality; cf. link on the edition above). It must have generated something on a scale of 100 copies a year, if not 1000. And that sounds like a lot, but it really isn’t,
as I discussed in respect to manuscripts of Daniel:
Every major city and base of leadership in Judea would have at least one copy within mere weeks of its promulgation. And from there, dozens of copies could be made a year. But if there were even just ten “initial edition” copies disseminated to elite centers, and then each was in turn copied only twice a year, after just ten years (much less forty), there would be over ten thousand manuscripts of Daniel in Judea (a relatively small geographic era I should remind you; little bigger than Vermont). I need not claim there were so many; my point is that it makes no sense to claim such a book couldn’t or wouldn’t be all over Judea in no time at all.
So it really comes down to purpose. Did Mark’s generation think it sufficient to have only one copy per church and thus not scale beyond that? If so, they could easily hit that mark within a year, much more so ten. But they might then not have continued, reserving resources merely for maintaining the copies they had.
On that last question, possible, yes, but very unlikely; so if we had to say that (if, for instance, Paul mentioned a boy Jesus), this would greatly reduce the probability of mythicism, probably by enough even to make it a less probable hypothesis (it would depend on exactly what Paul said about the boy Jesus; e.g. if he said he lived on Venus, well, that’s one thing, but if he said he lived in Galilee, that would end the matter, and if he was ambiguous, it would depend on how ambiguous and what other precedents in Paul we could adduce to assess it by).
As for Mark, I do not believe Mark had any idea of his book being taken literally by Christians. That intent seems to arise slowly after him (Matthew flirts with it by fleshing out the biography and saying it was all predicted by scripture, thus he is selling the myth as just like Deuteronomy or Exodus or any Life of Moses; Luke starts pretending it’s history; John then insists you take it as such or be damned). When Mark wrote, everything is allegory.
And he isn’t at all interested in expounding any cosmology of Jesus.
As I expounded in my last comment, his book is all about behavior (what does Baptism mean and why should you get one? How should you react to the temple’s destruction? How should you market the gospel? How should you deal with enemies and doubters? Etc.) rather than metaphysics (Where does Jesus live? Who really killed him? Is Jesus an angel? What order of angel? What is his body made of now? What was his body made of then? Etc.).
So the birth of Jesus is simply irrelevant to Mark’s intentions. His book is not about any such thing as that. To Mark’s design, the Baptism
is the Nativity (his mythical adoption as God’s son, and thus his “birth” is represented allegorically
that way).
--Comment by Richard Carrier on November 21, 2023 at 12:57 pm per
"How Textual Criticism Can Help or (Sorry) Hurt Your Cause".
Richard Carrier Blogs. 15 November 2023.
secularfrontier.infidels.org
