Where is the prominence in Paul's letters of Mary Magdalene?

Where is the prominence in Acts of Joanna and Salome? In other words, Bauckham can produce no evidence of this prominence. Prominent in the early church and were associated with the transmission of these traditions. There are no claims that Lazarus recounted stories of his being raised from the dead, or claims that Mary M, told X who told Y who told Z who told Luke.įurthermore, these women arguably remained I find Bauckham's claims extraordinary, and his basic thesis has no evidence for it.Īt least Muslims produced isnads, claims of authority which allegedly go back to Muhammad or people with him. Nor does the Epistle of James, and nor does Jude, which claims to be the brother of James, but gives no hint of any siblingship with any other name that might have rung a bell with early Christians.Īnd Paul does mention a 'Rufus', but it goes without saying that there is no connection made to any Gospel Rufus.īauckham claims these people went to various Christian communities, yet nobody has ever named himself as ever meeting any of them, and Paul talks about entirely different people being in various Christian communities - Andronicus, Priscilla, Titus etc. (*) While Paul does mention brothers of the Lord, Luke/Acts give no hint that any James had ever even seen Jesus. The BVM, Joseph, Joseph of Arimathea, Bartimaeus, Nicodemus, Lazarus, Simon of Cyrene, Rufus, Alexander, almost all the disciples, the brothers of Jesus (*), Mary Magdalene, the other Mary, Joanna, Salome, Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all.

Isn't that the point of writing history - so that these people should not be forgotten?įrom Acts 2 onwards, as soon as the church enters public record, and from Paul's Epistles on to Hebrews, 1 Peter, James, Jude, 123 John, the following people disappear from the story as though they had never existed, until the Gospels mention them. If Luke was writing an orderly account, then why did he not set about rescuing the name of Bartimaeus from the obscurity it was sinking into? Isn't this like claiming that the names of Muhammad's wives could well have become too obscure for Muslims to be able to place them when they heard stories about them? Luke wrote, too obscure for them to wish to retain the names when they were engaged in abbreviating Mark’s narratives’. These names can be explained as a result of a realisation that some of them would have become, ‘by the time Matthew and The tendency of Matthew and Luke to omit some of Throughout their lives, the authoritative sources and guarantors of the traditions about Jesus.' 'The historical argument (most of the book) is that the eyewitnesses of the events of the Gospel history remained,

Jesus and the eyewitnesses