Ross G. R. Caldwell wrote: 06 Sep 2020, 09:05
Can you quote Charlesworth for me where he discusses Jesus and Mary's marriage? That is really blockbuster, for a mainstream biblical scholar to come down on one side or another of the question. I myself still have not! But he might persuade me.
I think my biggest departure from mainstream biblical scholarship is to accept John Robinson's arguments for "Redating the New Testament" to all pre-70 dates.
Honestly I was a bit shocked once the book arrived and I was able to read his argument in detail, but as noted above, Charlesworth spends the entirety of Ch. 17 exploring "Is it conceivable that Jesus married Mary Magdalene?: Searching for evidence in Johannine traditions" (460f), in
Jesus as Mirrored in John: The Genius in the New Testament,2018. Unfortunately Amazon just has the beginning and a few pages of the Conclusion scanned, and Google has no pagination but clearly sections pertaining to Magdalene (hopefully the link works for you):
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Je ... =Magdalene
Perhaps his most radical argument is that the wedding at Cana, the details garbled somewhat in the recension that has come down to us, was the union between the Magdalene and Jesus! Its too hard to summarizes all his points. Less controversial is his insistence on interpreting the Magdalene's encounter with Jesus at the tomb which oddly revolves around the latter's
haptic rebuttal - to not touch him. Why would she have ever had that level of familiarity and when she finally recognizes him as resurrected why does she call out to him with the rare diminutive of Rabbi (
Rabbouni), as if a familiar term of endearment? No reason to go Dan Brown, but Magdalene material was certainly excised out of the Gospels, undoubtedly for Christological reasons, but enough remains to piece it back together, which is what I think Charlesworth has adequately done. The most common sense reason Jesus married was that all rabbis married - it was a cultural imperative (and there are really no other choices besides Magdalene, who also had an active leadership role in the movement).
Regarding your last point, of course there is "Q" for the synoptics, but for the Gospel of John, Charlesworth points out specific descriptions of geographic locations in Jerusalem in John that have fairly recently been verified by modern archaeology, so at least a core group of passages goes back to the Second Temple because those features were reduced to rubble in 70 CE (only now painstakingly reconstructed), and were not mentioned in the synoptics. So all of John is not necessarily the last gospel written. Charlesworth also points out the only reason its called "John" is the first name mentioned is John the Baptist (the otherwise anonymous text had to be called
something, not that JB was the author) and that it is the result of a school or sect remaining fairly Jewish but believing in Christ, actively engaged with Jewish groups that were more influenced by Enoch (which also heavily influenced Qumran); so to some degree John is polemical towards Enochian-influenced beliefs. That is really the quiet revolution that has gone on in contemporary biblical studies for anyone not in the field (and I certainly am not) - the acknowledgement of the profound influence of Enoch, mainly 1 Enoch, on Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity; see for instance the collection of essays in
Enoch and Qumran Origins: New Light on a Forgotten Connection, 2005, ed. Gabriele Boccaccini, in which Charlesworth has the last word in "Summary and conclusions". Most have come to view John the Baptist as influenced in some way by Qumran, and the synoptic gospels have direct correlations with passages in 1 Enoch (Matt 7 times, Luke 6 times and Mark 3 times - discussed in Charlesworth's last book on John as well in detail, see especially 300-301). Charlesworth makes the aforementioned case that John too is influenced - negatively - by Enoch, right near the beginning, John 3:13 "No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man" - that is a direct shot at Enoch, who has himself ascended and enthroned with God, and "Son of Man" is an Enochian phrase. I find the synoptic treatments of the Enochian material even more interesting (mind-blowing to some degree, when you connect the dots), but that's another long-winded tangent.
Here's the Amazon link to the John book:
https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Mirrored-J ... 0567681556