Um, if someone would teach me how to do that, I’d be happy to.

Any chance of posting a pdf version that we could download?

Russell, here are some possibilities for understanding the very negative portrayal of Peter in Mark’s Gospel:

(1) Peter is the main source behind this gospel, and asked for (or whatever) these stories to be included out of humility, whereas the other gospel writers didn’t include them because they weren’t interesting in making Peter look weak. In fact, I think part of the evidence for the [now generally disregarded] historical belief that Peter was a source for Mark is that otherwise Mark would never had had the chutzpah to portray Peter this way!

(2) Other sources (some canonical, some not) imply that there was conflict between (a) Peter and Paul and (b) Peter and Mary. So Mark may be coming from the perspective of Paul, of Mary, or of a hypothetical-but-precedented third challenger to Peter and his authority.

(3) I would imagine that one of the main challenges that the early Church faced was the potential for division between ‘Those Who Knew Jesus in the Flesh’ and ‘Those Who Didn’t.’ (You can just see it, can’t you? I’ve also wondered about this dynamic in the early Utah church regarding those who did and did not know the prophet Joseph. . .) It may be that emphasizing Peter’s dense-ness during the time he knew Jesus–assuming that the audience knows (perhaps personally) Peter’s leadership role in the church–serves to teach that knowing Jesus in mortality was neither necessary nor sufficient for faith/leadership after his death.

(4) Mark seems to have drawn the ‘good follower’/'bad disciple’ line strictly along gender lines. This may have been an effort to affirm the role of women in a church that was attempting to minimize their roles; it seems that Luke did something similar but in a different way (i.e., by providing matched examples of women and men in at least a dozen cases). This may or may not hint at the sources for Mark’s stories of Jesus being female disciples. (Again, Luke hints at this when Mary ‘ponders these things.’)

LisaB, you point to a grossly-overlooked connection between John 11 and John 12–it doesn’t seem plausible that one could/should read 12 without seeing the pattern for Jesus’ actions in 11. There is a similar theme in the Gospel of Mary, where Peter and Andrew complain about all that Jesus had revealed to Mary that he didn’t reveal to the other (i.e., male) disciples.

Here’s a link to the text of the Gospel of Mary: http://www.webcom.com/gnosis/library/marygosp.htm

J. Stapley, I hope you’ll get back to us with more 19C perspective.

The woman’s role as a prophet coincides with the 19th century perspective of this woman as a priestess. Messianic annointing coresponds to the annointing of kings. There are also others.

While I am still trying to digest the nineteenth century perspective, I find many aspects compelling. I appreciate your additional insights, Julie.

As a side note, your text brought back unexpected memories. My master’s thesis was on the Gospel of Marc, a critical edition of this Gospel in the first French Bible translation in the 13th century. Typical medieval manuscript study. And my very first little academic publication was an article on that topic.

Care to speculate as to why the author of Mark may chosen to make Peter, out of all the disciples, into a particular whipping boy for purposes constructing a narrative so full of reversals and juxtapositions? Might the author have been affiliated with the Pauline movement, and hence have found it easier to castigate those disciples, like Peter, more closely associated with the Jerusalem church? I ask only because I had long thought that scholars had suggested a close identification between Peter and the Markan tradition, that perhaps the author of Mark was even an associate of the historical Peter. Your argument, assuming that human psychology has changed that much in two thousand years, would suggest otherwise.