Ran across this last night while reading Ehrman's "Jesus Before The Gospels" again. It seems that early jesus freaks ran into the same problem of a sinning jesus and had to find a way to fix it. A sure sign of made up bullshit!
It's little fuck ups like this which cement the position of 'mark' as the earliest and most primitive gospel. The fact that matty ( and as Ehrman points out later on) luke come up with different solutions to the problem of jesus being a sinning little prick that demonstrate that the gospels are just made-up shit, edited and re-edited to fix doctrinal problems that jesus freaks could not abide.
Quote:THE BAPTISM OF JESUS AND HIS RELATION TO JOHN—The earliest account of Jesus’s baptism is in Mark. It is the first episode that the Gospel narrates. John is said to be preaching “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”
Along with “all the country of Judea” (surely an exaggeration) Jesus comes to be baptized. When he comes up out of the water, the heavens split open, the Spirit descends upon him like a dove, and a voice comes from heaven, “You are my beloved son; I am well pleased with you” (Mark 1:9–11).
It appears that this simple narrative created problems for early Christians, for a fairly obvious reason: in early Christian ritual it was widely thought that the person doing the baptizing was spiritually superior to the one being baptized. So how could Jesus be baptized by someone else? Wouldn’t that suggest his spiritual inferiority? Mark’s Gospel already works to counter the idea that John could have been Jesus’s spiritual leader and teacher by having John proclaim that he was merely a forerunner: someone else was coming soon who would be greater than he.But there was an even bigger problem that Mark doesn’t try to resolve. If John’s baptism was for “repentance,” to show, or to bring about, “the forgiveness of sins,” why was Jesus baptized? Did he need to repent and be forgiven of his sins? The early Christians obviously did not think so. What sins?But if he had no sins, why was he baptized? Matthew’s Gospel provides an answer, which appears to have come about later in the tradition as the story was told and retold. Here, when Jesus arrives at the Jordan to be baptized, John tries to prevent him, by indicating that it is Jesus who should baptize him. But Jesus urges him to go ahead and do his duty, “to fulfill all righteousness” (Matt. 3:13–17). Here the earlier problem Christians would have had with the baptism is dealt with efficiently. Jesus now does not actually need to be baptized; he does so because it is the right thing to do. It is interesting to note that the voice from heaven that comes at the baptism in Matthew’s account says something slightly different from Mark’s. Here the voice speaks not to Jesus (“You are my son”) but to either John or the crowd (“This is my son”). Did the voice say both things?
It's little fuck ups like this which cement the position of 'mark' as the earliest and most primitive gospel. The fact that matty ( and as Ehrman points out later on) luke come up with different solutions to the problem of jesus being a sinning little prick that demonstrate that the gospels are just made-up shit, edited and re-edited to fix doctrinal problems that jesus freaks could not abide.
