Well, this is a mess. The advertised subject, "The Original Jesus Was Hidden in Mark" never turns up. Ehrman keeps getting distracted, but then I know from his podcasts that he's eminently distractable. So is Derek the interviewer. It makes for a toxic combination.
I've now watched a number of Bart Ehrman's podcast videos, and one or two interviews he's given other podcasters. Even on his own turf he is a poor speaker, badly organized, prone to fits of maniacal giggling. I wonder what he was like in the classroom, but the lecture he gave when he retired suggests that he can do better than he does in his podcasts. I would expect, however, based on my own experience speaking to college classes from the 1970s to the 2010s, that Erhman would have organized his thoughts on a basic and familiar topic that he must have covered in his undergraduate classes over decades. Instead he sounds as if this is all new to him and he's never talked about it before. The same applies to interviews. Interviewers love to distract their subjects, if only because of their own ignorance, and someone who gives interviews regularly should learn how to push the discussion back in the direction he wants to go. With all due immodesty, I think I could do a better job on this topic than Ehrman did here.
But going with where Erhman let himself be led: I agree that the empty tomb is a legend; I figured that out soon after I began studying the New Testament and the scholarship in the early 1980s. I suspect that Mark invented the legend, though of course there's no evidence either way and we'll probably never know.
The stuff about "the Jews expected a military messiah and couldn't cope with Jesus being all peace-and-love-and-shit" motif was popular in mid-20th century New Testament scholarship, and I see it's still with us. It's not necessary to invoke it to explain the disciples' cognitive dissonance, though. Mark shows Jesus preaching the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God, and most scholars agree that there's no reason to think he was at odds with the normal messianic expectations of his day, though it's not certain what those were. There's a famous old article by Morton Smith, "What Is Implied by the Variety of Messianic Figures?" (Ehrman surely knows it),* which shows that a wild variety of contradictory messianic expectations were current and not grounds for serious dispute. That article is still often cited. According to Mark and the rest of the New Testament, Jesus expected the Kingdom to arrive with violence and the punishment of poorly-defined evildoers. But the cognitive dissonance came from the fact that the Kingdom not only didn't arrive, its announcer was crucified. (Mark's stories about Jesus predicting his death are also probably legends, as I think Ehrman would agree.)
What I was expecting from this video was some discussion of Mark's theme of secrecy around Jesus and his mission, which has been much discussed, especially since Wilhelm Wrede's 1901 book The Messianic Secret,** though Wrede has frequently been misunderstood and misrepresented. His discussion is detailed and complicated, which helps to explain the misunderstandings. For example, he often paraphrases other scholars' attempts to explain the problems he discusses, then refutes them, so I think some of his readers mistook the paraphrases for his own position. I'm rereading it right now, so I was interested in Ehrman's take on secrecy in Mark. Not enough to pay money for the lecture series, though, sorry. His endless cackling and preacher-style jokes are just too annoying.
Ehrman has written about Wrede and the messianic secret on his blog, I see. I think he got it wrong, partly because of the need to simplify for his non-academic fanbase; inder one of those posts, a commenter asks "Isn’t it your view that Jesus did think he was the messiah and only told his inner circle about this? So in a sense it is historical that he kept it a secret?" and Ehrman replies "Yup." I disagree, but neither of us knows for sure, because there's no reliable evidence about it.
Briefly, in Mark's gospel Jesus goes around exorcising demons and healing the sick and dying. The demons he drives out recognize him as the Son of God, and he tells them to shut up. Several though not all of his healing miracles are done privately, with only his inner group of disciples (Peter, James, John) present, and he then tells the people he's healed not to tell anyone about his work. Naturally, they tell everybody. The more he tells them not to, the more they do it anyway. And some of his miracles are done in public, so I don't know who he was trying to kid. The theme continues through Peter's recognition that Jesus is the messiah, which Jesus also orders to keep secret, until Jesus' triumphant entry into Jerusalem just before his arrest and execution; but he still has some secrets, like the prediction the Temple would be destroyed and he would come on clouds of glory within a generation. Because Matthew and Luke left out most of this secrecy, I suspect that most Bible readers just assume that Jesus did everything in public; but Mark said otherwise. If this interests you, try reading the gospel of Mark yourself - it's not very long - and pay attention to its depiction of Jesus' secrecy.
Another motif Wrede discussed that I think is important is Mark's frequent alternation between Jesus teaching his disciples in private and Jesus teaching the crowds in public. No matter where he is - in town, by the sea, on a mountaintop - Jesus will suddenly interrupt himself and call the crowd to him, as though hundreds of people were waiting to be summoned and then dismissed. As Wrede said, this is not plausible or possible, and it shows that Mark isn't writing history but a sort of drama. My favorite example, though I don't remember if Wrede mentions it, is in Mark chapter 13. Jesus has taken Peter and James and John and Andrew aside on the Mount of Olives and predicted the bad times to come. Mark (I suppose, but it could be Jesus, why not?) interjects "Let the reader understand" at 13:14 about "the abomination of desolation" that will be set up in the Temple, and finally warns in verse 37, "What I say to you I say to all: Watch." The crowd is always there, out of earshot but ready to come running at a moment's notice.
The theme of secrecy is bigger than these details, though. Dramatic irony runs throughout Mark, and to some extent through all the gospels. That is, the reader knows from the beginning who Jesus is, and how the story will turn out; but the people, the disciples, the priests and the Pharisees and the scribes, don't know. Think of Sophocles' Oedipus: the audience knows from the beginning of the play who Oedipus is, what he did and what it all means, but the characters in the play don't. Mark tells the reader too (1:1, RSV): "The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God."
In The Cost of Authority (Fortress Press, 1982), Graham Shaw suggested (I think reasonably) that Mark's stress on secrecy may have reflected his own intention (p. 189):
It was, for example, never intended to be printed, so that everyone might have a copy. The stress on the esoteric within the book suggests that access to the text may itself have been a privilege which the reader could not take for granted. Although it very quickly acquired a public use in the new Christian community, ... a much more private use may have been the original intention. The injunction 'let the reader understand' (13.14) seems to envisage an individual rather than a colletive audience... The phrase in ch. 13 already quoted assumes that the reader will come to the text well furnished with a knowledge of Christian lore.
I like this, but I'm not sure about it. While Mark does stress the esoteric, he also is revealing those secrets, publicizing them, letting the reader into the privileged circle of them who know. To this day people write similar books; the Amazon algorithm points me to them daily. These secrets were hidden for thousands of years from everyone but the Elect, but now I am revealing them to you for the price of this book!
Remember that the Greek word apokalypsis means "revelation," and that Mark includes some typically apocalyptic material. I still think that Mark could be classified as an apocalyptic book like Daniel, Enoch, or the New Testament Revelation. One of the things it has in common with Daniel and Enoch is the motif that these truths were kept hidden, secret, sealed until now, which explains why they weren't known before, but also implies that the End has arrived. The New Testament book of Revelation is different on that: John is told not to seal up the book (Revelation 22:19, RSV): "And [the angel] said to me, 'Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near.'" Oops! Well, nobody's perfect.
Matthew and Luke threw open the doors, which indicates a change in the knowledge ordinary Christians were allowed or expected to have. (And not only Christians: by the mid-second century, hostile educated pagans wrote attacks on Christianity based on some knowledge of Christian writings.) If so, it happened fast, like other developments in early Christianity that we'll never be able to reconstruct now but which are visible in the New Testament writings. Paul, for example, also refers to esoterica in his letters. Later on, the Gospel of Thomas would begin, "These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down." As with Mark, we're entitled to ask how secret those teachings were by the time they were written down. This is the sort of stuff I thought Ehrman would touch on in this interview. No such luck. But maybe only the truly worthy are given to know the original Jesus who's hidden in Mark.
No, wait: I don't really mean that. For one thing, I see no reason to believe that Mark knew anything about "the original Jesus", and Ehrman probably would agree, so the title is a misleading come-on. That's complicated by the fact that at times Mark, or some of his sources, show accurate information about first-century Judaism. That's why this MythVision video is so frustrating: like Mark, Ehrman promises to reveal "the original Jesus hidden in Mark," but it's just a tease.
If, as most scholars think, the gospel of Mark was the first of the four to be written down, its success indicates that it found a market and an audience rather quickly. Very soon afterward, the authors of Matthew and Luke produced new, improved gospels based on Mark's outline, which overtook it in popularity. Mark was bumped down to second place, after Matthew, in the emerging canon. More imitators followed, and "gospel" came to mean a particular kind of book about Jesus. (Similarly, the success of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings made it the three-volume template for many imitators.) I don't think the author of Mark foresaw that.
----
*Journal of Biblical Literature 78 (1959): 66-72.
** English translation published by James Clarke & Co., 1971.
