The first evangelist of Jesus

Vridar back in 13 October (I missed a lot of stuff mid October) mooted an interesting phrase: the first evangelist. Not "Matthew", nor "Mark" nor even "Paul".

We own four manuscripts titled "Evangel" in full, plus or minus the odd textual deviation. They purport to evangelise Jesus as Christ. Vridar, I am pretty sure, believes that the Gospels we call "Matthew" and "Luke" edit and rewrite (respectively) some ancient version of Mark's Gospel; so, for him, neither of them will be first. That leaves Mark and "John". But, Saint Paul had already done that evangelism. It was kind of Paul's thing.

For Paul, the text was epistolary but the subtext is his Gospel, which he preached as truest to his baptism. For the Evangelists' manuscripts titled "Gospel", the text is the Gospel. As to subtext . . .

As Evan Powell looked at Mark and "John", he saw a conflict over the figure of Saint Peter. Mark by tradition was a child who barely remembered Jesus' ministry, if at all; but he did know Peter quite well, and his Gospel - Papias tells us - is Peter's side of the story. Either way, Powell demonstrated how his gospel reads out a defence of Peter. (This, by the way, is why I don't put Mark in "quotes".) As for "John", in chapters 1-20 we have a gospel that casts Peter as the new Judas.

This means that the two gospels we own which are mutually independent are not gospels of Jesus. They are sectarian documents more concerned with presenting Peter and anti-Peter as the correct heir to Jesus.

I dimly recall how John Dominic Crossan argued that the Passion narrative was compiled from Old Testament tropes mainly from the second Isaiah and Psalm 22. Vridar is saying the same for Jesus' vita leading to that - whoever first composed it, had cobbled it from Josephus' depressing litany of failed Jewish revolutionaries. The *evangelist would have to be cribbing Josephus' text, or an extremely recent competitor; on account his forerunners include Jesus ben Ananias whose tale ends at Jerusalem's siege.

Now, here is why I doubt that Vridar's putative *evangelist could have plagiarised Josephus directly: this first evangelist would exempt John at the Jordan, whose tale the Gospels tell independently of Christ.

The simplest solution is that John's movement was too infamous. The Mandaeans today could well preserve a spinoff, retroactively. John and the Mandaeans represent popular Roman-era Judaism with a miqveh independent of Jerusalem. (And not Samaritanism. They owned their own Temple.)

But what's the point for Jews without Temple - why even care about John? Answer to that: this *evangelist did his work when John's memory still mattered, when is whilst the Temple still stood. Which precedes Josephus' memoirs.

We would still have to explain Josephus' coincidences around Jesus ben Ananias (Hananyahu...?). But if we're at the point of doubting Josephus' honesty (which Vridar, like lots of my Jewish cousins, does), we could explain this now-fictional character by Josephus taking an actual Jesus who was Yahuhanan's figurative "son", warping a few names and bringing much of his story forward in time. When you doubt a narrator, you've declared the name of the game to be "Calvinball". Anyone can play.

To sum up: if there existed a First Evangelist who drew in from previous sources to compile a true Gospel Of Jesus, as opposed to Jesus' Gospel For Or Against Saint Peter, the core of this source was most likely one Jesus a disciple of John who came to Jerusalem to preach against the Temple, and got punished by the Romans for his trouble.

TOWARDS A BETTER ARGUMENT 11/1: The Slavonic text. Here is a Jewish War with both Jesus bar Anan[yahw] (four years before the war) and the wonder-worker of the Gospel(s). Someone like John is in here, too. On the one hand, the Slavonic version hints that Bar Anan was known to Josephus before the Revolt; on the other hand, it also points to someone who looks a lot like our Jesus (alongside someone like our / the Mandaeans' John) - albeit unnamed.