Three days from when? Nothing in the Greek grammar determines that. You are still dodging the question.
Regarding the symbolic use of “forty” in the Bible, I have not contested it. It is well-known. I also am well aware of the frequency of the numbers 7 and 12, and of how often their meaning is more than merely literal. But none of that proves that the 7s and the 12s all come from astronomical realities. For that matter, why aren’t you insisting that all the 40s in the Bible come from astronomical realities? What is it about the heavens that is “fortyish”?
There is no reason to assume that New Testament uses of 12 are based on anything other than Old Testament conventions about the 12 tribes of Israel. Your further claim that the tribes of Israel number 12 because of something astronomical remains unproved.
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I’m against censorship of any sort, and have argued vehemently here against censorship connected with “political correctness” in the university and elsewhere.
I’m not trying to censor your views; I’m merely asking for evidence for them.
You see lots of 12s in the Bible, and 12 is significant in astronomy (e.g., 12 constellations of the zodiac); everybody grants this; but to conclude that the 12s are in the Bible because of the fact that 12 figures in astronomy, you need evidence.
You haven’t provided a single contemporary (1st century) source to show that even a single reader of Mark had ever read any Homer, let alone any evidence that knowledge of Homer was so widespread among the first readers of Mark that all or even most of those readers would have immediately recognized that Mark was making use of Homer. Where are your sources for this claim?
Would the average Galilean fisherman have read Homer? The average Jewish citizen of Jerusalem? The average follower of John the Baptist? Where are all these early Jewish or Gentile Christians who had studied Homer so closely as to note subtle astronomical references in Homer? Why can’t you name even one of them? Why can’t you produce even one text written by a 1st-century Christian that shows an in-depth knowledge of Homer? And if you can’t produce even one example, how can you expect anyone to believe that the author of Mark would have written his Gospel for people well-versed in Homer?
The most likely people to “get” subtle reference to astronomy in a text would be highly educated people who were used to certain literary conventions, subtle references, etc. And the most likely people to put such references into their works would be very educated individuals, well-versed in classical Greek language. But the Gospel of Mark is written in Koine Greek, not classical Greek, and as someone who has studied that Greek text in detail, I can tell you that even as Koine Greek goes, the Greek in Mark is pretty abominable; it isn’t the Greek of a someone who is fluent and natural in the language. (The Greek in the Gospel of John is much better, for example.) Mark reads like “translation Greek”, as if it’s coming from someone who still largely thought in Aramaic, even though he knew some Greek. The narrative style is also quite choppy and abrupt. So we are to believe that a hacker, writing in his second language of Hellenistic Greek, is well-versed in ancient literary theory and has read all the Greek classics of centuries earlier, written in a much more sophisticated version of the language? And we are to expect that a motley audience of early readers of Mark, a good number of them with only makeshift ability to read Greek (because they were merchants or fishermen, not scholars, and their native language was Aramaic or something else), would just naturally pick up subtle astronomical references?
You seem to be presuming a highly educated audience for the Gospel of Mark – only the cultured elite of the Hellenistic world at the time would be attuned to the sorts of literary subtlety you are claiming, whereas as far as we can tell, the vast majority of the early readers of Mark were among the yokels, with a knowledge of Greek about as subtle as the knowledge of English of the first immigrants to the USA on Ellis Island.
So it that your claim, that Mark was written by a hyper-educated Hellenistic writer, a master of Greek literature, and that he was writing for a very small, elite audience? It must be, because otherwise your whole scenario makes no sense. But then you have to explain why a hyper-cultivated Hellenistic literary theorist, writing for an upper-class educated elite who were used to reading Plato and Homer in the original, would write in barbaric Koine Greek. That’s the equivalent of someone who wants to explain the thought of Immanuel Kant to an audience of philosophically talented people writing in the language of the typical sports columnist in a New Jersey newspaper. It just doesn’t make sense.
So you need to give a much clearer account of who you think Mark was, what social class you think he was from, what you think he had read – and why he wrote in barbaric Greek. And you also need to give a much clearer account of the first readers of Mark’s Gospel – who they were, where they lived, what level of education they had, how good their Greek was, and so on. Only then could your theory about what Mark meant and how his first readers would have understood him could make any sense. But you don’t appear to be willing to do the hard historical and textual work to establish any of these things. And then you complain that the scholars are unfairly rejecting your ideas. But from where I sit, the scholars are doing exactly the right thing; they don’t pay any attention to you, because they’ve never even heard of you, and they don’t pay any attention to ideas like yours, because they have seen such ideas many times before, expressed with the same level of hyper-confidence and accompanied by the same lack of historical and philological evidence. Your place in the scholarly pecking order is exactly the right place.
