Mark 14:55-61a runs as follows:
55 The chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin were looking for evidence against Jesus so that they could put him to death, but they did not find any.
56 Many testified falsely against him, but their statements did not agree.
57 Then some stood up and gave this false testimony against him:
58 "We heard him say, 'I will destroy this man-made temple and in three days will build another, not made by man.' "
59 Yet even then their testimony did not agree.
60 Then the high priest stood up before them and asked Jesus, "Are you not going to answer? What is this testimony that these men are bringing against you?"
61a But Jesus remained silent and gave no answer.
And Mark 15:29b:
29b ... and saying, "Ha! You who would destroy the Temple and rebuild it in three days,
In no synoptic Gospel does Jesus boast that he will destroy the Temple. The context implied by "this temple" should be a narrative set at or adjacent to the Temple grounds, but no such narrative exists in Mark, and Mark does not even give a hint where else the priests may have picked up that idea.
John Dominic Crossan, in Who Killed Jesus?, conjectured that Mark
portrayed Jesus actually destroying the Temple: "Mark insists...
that the Temple accusations were not true, yet... he knows that Jesus had destroyed the
Temple in 11:15-17
". But that symbolic action is not explicitly cited by Jesus's
accusers.
Later, in Mark 13:2 (== Matt 24:2 == Luke 21:6), Jesus does explicitly say that the Temple will
be destroyed, and then goes on to tell how it will happen, to the point of referring to
the Son of Man. But the Son of Man does not come to destroy but to call his people to him.
Mark did not view this passage as relevant either; he could have
had a parenthesis about it to Mark 15, perhaps reading "for Jesus had only prophesied
the Temple would be destroyed, not that he would be the one to do it
".
Mark 14:55-61a does not depend on a saying in Mark. But it may depend on one outside it.
The earliest known external source for the priests' accusation is John 2:19, in which
Jesus does say:
"Destroy this temple and I will resurrect it in three days
". This saying
additionally provides the necessary context: it
follows the Passover assault on the Temple market (John 2:13-16, see also
Mark 11:15-17).
The Gospel of Luke did not mention the "three days" prophecy at all.
Matthew 26:59-63a and 27:39-40 follow Mark very closely, only removing more-or-less superfluous
details like Mark 14:59 ("Yet even then their stories did not agree
") and the second half of
14:61a ("and gave no answer
"). So this was already part of Mark when Matthew received it.
Luke may have omitted Mark 14:55-61a and 15:29b exactly because she did not find any sayings in Mark to match the false accusations. But even so, I wonder why Luke did not bring up Luke 21:6 (the mirror of Mark 13:2), and why Matthew did not have a similar problem with them. Also, unlike other parts of Mark whence we can be sure Luke omitted material (Mark 8:22-27a), there are no references to these passages elsewhere in Luke.
But Mark 14:55-61a and 15:29b are in a context not of Luke's changes to Mark, but of Mark's changes to itself.
Luke's and Mark's order of events for Mark 14:61b-72 are neatly reversed. Luke moves to the rooster-crow of 22:56-62 (== Mark 14:66-72 == Matt 26:69-75), roughs Jesus up in 22:63-65 (== Mark 14:65 == Matt 26:67-68), and finally interrogates him "the following day" in 22:66-71 (== Mark 14:61b-64 == Matt 26:63-66). Yet through all this Luke 22:55 retained Peter's presence at the Council fire from Mark 14:54, and Luke 22:66 managed to preserve the high priest's presence at the interrogation from Mark 14:61b. Either Luke removed Mark 14:55-61a in the course of rearranging that material, taking care to eliminate 15:29b as well; or else an editor of Mark added those pericopes prior to Matthew - and possibly rearranged 14:61b-72 from the positions in which Luke had found it.
In addition John's order of events for the Passion mirrors Mark's and Matthew's against Luke's. After Peter is admitted to the Council fire (18:16-18), Jesus is interrogated (18:19), then Jesus is beaten (18:22), and finally Peter is confronted while the rooster crows (18:27).
Evan Powell wrote a wonderful, if incomplete, study of Mark and John, which I've summarised here. He noted that John's order makes sense as a trashing of Peter's reputation. The rooster crows at the end in John, just as in Mark and Matthew. But in John, Peter starts the denials even before the interrogation (18:17).
Powell also noted that Mark's and Luke's orders also make sense - they both keep the rooster, and Peter's denials, separate from (and therefore independent of) the interrogation. They even have Peter weep after his denials.
But some orders are more orderly than others. Where Luke kept the Peter section contiguous, it was Mark (followed by Matthew) who cut Peter's denials loose of the Council fire. Mark first incorporates 14:55-61a, second has an interrogation with no interspersed denials in 14:61b-64, and third has the beating in 14:65. The denials of 14:66-72 interrupt Jesus's tale from 14:55-65 and 15 on.
Crossan called Mark's location for 14:66-72 not an interruption but an intercalation,
a framing device to highlight the connexion between Peter's denials and Jesus's conviction
(p. 102). Crossan additionally gave the examples of 3:19b-35 and 5:22-43. I can understand intercalation to protect
Jesus against charges of insanity and to link death with menstruation (respectively).
But why intercalation against Peter?
Crossan calls it "a very deliberate model for Markan Christians of how
(like Jesus) and how not (like Peter) to act under... persecution
".
But that contrast is so stark as to be an insult to Peter, more worthy of John
than of Mark. Given Mark's attempts elsewhere to exonerate Peter, it is difficult to
see Mark as the author of this, unless he had been forced into it.
Similar rearrangement happened with respect to the vinegar anecdote, as seen in wholly different contexts in Mark 15:36/John 19:28-30 against Luke 23:36.
The problem with the Powell hypothesis - that Mark was reacting to John's slander - is that Mark shows no knowledge of John's special vocabulary of light, darkness, and sons-of-God. But Powell had not yet conceived of another source that would be like John in parts, yet does not contain that vocabulary.
One need not beg Powell's question to derive such a source.
Crossan pointed out (pp. 60-61) that
John 2:19 disagrees with Mark and also Thomas 71 in framing
the saying as a challenge to the Jews: "Destroy".
Mark and Thomas have it as a personal boast: "I will destroy".
In the latter form it cannot be, as John 2:21 asserted,
"referring to the temple of his body
", which was to be destroyed by others.
This is therefore a false prophecy about the Temple "made by hands", as Mark noted.
If Mark and Thomas are independent - which most scholars assume -
they must be working from a shared source, and the reading most likely to be original
is the reading least agreeable to biased redactors. Mark related it in a hostile fashion,
and that is why he chose not to change it.
In addition, John's version is less relevant to John 2 than is Mark's (or Thomas's). If the original compiler of John 2 had agreed with John 2:21, it is hard to see why he would have made a contrary association by locating 2:19 outside a real, non-metaphorical house of worship. Even John admitted that the onlookers "misunderstood" the saying.
That John diverges from Mark and Thomas, even against John's own narrative context,
implies that either John or a source in John's
private line of transmission was the one who changed their shared source,
doubtless to shield Jesus from the charge of false prophecy.
But Bethsaida-Mark 14:55-61a managed to catch the saying (complete with its
context-sensitive "this") and condemn it before John
or his immediate sources were able to clean it up. The saying "I will destroy this Temple...
and in three days I will build/raise...
", with its Templar context, must therefore predate John.
I propose that Mark 14:58==John 2:19 is a claimed saying of Jesus in a shared narrative source of Bethsaida-Mark and John.
I have shown (or helped to show) here that a large segment of Mark came in after Luke used it, and that this section bears numerous parallels to the Gospel of John. At least one "proto-John" is responsible for that particular section - the Egerton Fragment (but note that does not preclude the possibility of other shared sources, like Fortna's putative Signs Gospel). I propose that Mark 14:55-61a and 15:29b represents a second such section: a later edition of Mark dependent on a source of John.
This adds a new wrinkle. I had mentioned earlier that "Bethsaida Mark" is a witness to the formation of John, and yet not a revised incorporation. But given that Mark 14:55-61a contradicts proto-John 2:19, it seems that this Markan variant is a hostile witness to that source of John.
John and Bethsaida-Mark treated Peter in such a way as to highlight his behaviour in contrast with Jesus's. The easiest way out is that the source of John 2:19 did have the Passion, and that this was the anti-Petrine version seen in John and later introduced into Bethsaida-Mark.
It seems likely that the revisor of Mark, as well as incorporating proto-John 2:19, rearranged the Passion according to that document's order. He also cast John 2:19 in the mouths of Jesus's enemies, as (1) a falsehood and (2) a mockery of Jesus. The motive of the Bethsaida revision, then, was to replace that source of John.
So there are three contenders for the shared source of Bethsaida and John: the Egerton Fragment, the Signs Source, and now the proto-Johannine Passion following proto-John 2:19.
But in John, Mark, and Matthew we could have the order and content of proto-John's Passion - with or without "semeia". In Luke we would then have the original order and content of Mark's. Lastly, we have stronger evidence for Evan Powell's hypothesis, that Mark and proto-John were at loggerheads over Peter's legitimacy in the nascent Church.
Any thoughts? e-mail me :^) zimriel@sbcglobal.net
The first version of this project was written 5-8 May 2002. 13 May, intercalation & redaction-history of John 2:19. 14 May, narrative context. 15 May, we don't need Egerton to prove the point.