The money amount is not in Mark. So that is Matthew, recognizing Mark’s sources and bringing it to the story of Judas.

That’s worth pointing out. The relevance of Matthew is exactly that: it shows awareness of what Mark was doing. Which is indirect evidence. So the same could apply to Luke-Acts (where the entrails component arises, albeit so late historically it’s harder to be sure this was awareness rather than just Luke embellishing Mark; even more so John, who is later even, unless the spearing is an early layer of redaction, but these can all be argued).

Matthew and Luke’s different accounts of Judas’s deaths are different receptions of Mark’s impressive use of 2 Samuel.

Good use of mimesis criteria. (For people who aren’t aware, this technique comes from MacDonald, expanding on Brodie, and I brief the method and its logical validity in Proving History.)

I’m less convinced by your application. But I’d still need to see it formally done and vetted.

That would include details like:

David calls sons of Zeriuah le satan = Where?

Peter is told by Jesus to get behind me Satan = nowhere near Judas though; so why does this connect?

Soldier tells where Absalom is = cite the specific passage to establish nearness or order

Then money is spoken of by Joab = same

David’s omniscience = same

Woe to the one who harms Absalom = any actual verbal lifts from the Septuagint? (Here or anywhere in the parallels)

Judas hangs himself (Matthew) = per above, a competing hypothesis would then be that Matthew is not detecting Mark’s intent but layering onto it his own lift from the Absalom story. So more work is needed to secure the theory that Mark already is using it before Matthew embellishes; because Luke knows Matthew, and John Luke, so it Matthew created this layer, that explains all the evidence. This would still be useful to establish. Even if Matthew added this (and thus it no longer explains Mark’s invention of the core story) that is still an important thing to establish (as it explains a lot of the embellishments).

Shimei taunts David as he leaves Jerusalem in a sad procession = issues of order and connection here would need to be addressed or resolved.

Using them alternately or in tandem was what I see the gospel authors doing.

It’s plausible. But I’m not convinced yet. But assigning that as H1, the alternative hypotheses are: (H2) no such connection (all coincidence) and (H3) Matthew added this layer (it did not inspire Mark’s invention of the core story). I would rank them right now as P(H3) > P(H2) = P(H1). To get P(H1) > P(H2) or even P(H3) would require a cleaned up formal analysis, ideally passing peer review or able to. But I think the effort would be worth the bother. It’s not a crazy idea. Especially as P(H3) > P(H1) is still a worthwhile and useful result.

The money amount is not in Mark. So that is Matthew, recognizing Mark’s sources and bringing it to the story of Judas.

That is an important aspect of Matthew and Luke and John. They are the reception history of Mark’s use of earlier myths.

That is why it is important to realize that Matthew and Luke’s different accounts of Judas’s deaths are different receptions of Mark’s impressive use of 2 Samuel.

1. Popularity/Accessibility, check
2. Usage of analogous imitation of same story or speech, Only one in the victorious entrance of Solomon portrayed in Zechariah 9:9-10
3. Volume, check
4. Order, iffy
5. Distinctive traits: Kiss, hung on tree, speared on tree, laying in field gutted, hung himself, taunting of the Lord’s anointed (Christ in LXX)
6. interpretability of differences: tree is updated to cross

2 Samuel 18 -20 -> Mark;
David calls sons of Zeriuah le satan-> Peter is told by Jesus to get behind me Satan;

Soldier tells where Absalom is -> Judas goes to arrange to tell where Jesus is;

Then money is spoken of by Joab, after the soldier decides ->Money is offered by the chief priests;

Joab feigns kiss as he slices Amasa open ->Judas kisses Jesus in betrayal;

David’s omniscience->Jesus’s omniscience about knowing who betrayed him;

Woe to the one who harms Absalom ->Woe to the one who betrays the son of Man;

Absalom killed, dies hung in a tree->Jesus captured, crucified on cross;

Absalom speared -> Jesus speared (John);

Absalom’s advisor hangs himself(2Sam17:23)->Judas hangs himself (Matthew);

Absalom’s captain’s guts sliced open, left in a field -> Judas’s guts burst open, laid in a field (Acts);

Shimei taunts David as he leaves Jerusalem in a sad procession -> Jesus taunted as he carries the cross

Again, Zechariah 9-14 is simply the Succession Narrative applied to Alexander through the sacking of Jerusalem in 320 BCE. Zechariah 9-14, to people used to reading literary emulation, was a window into the Succession Narrative. Using them alternately or in tandem was what I see the gospel authors doing.

I’ll show you, lol. Someday, I will have this written out proper, and you may just be convinced. Thanks for your time and your critique.

2 Sam 20:8-12. Amasa is fooled by a fake kiss by Joab, who then guts Amasa. Later Amasa is rolled into a field, to get him out of the way.

The elements don’t line up though. The wrong guy is ending up guts out in a field. The kiss never actually happens. It isn’t a signal to anyone. The setup and outcome don’t track anything in the Jesus story. And so on.

I think this is just a coincidence (a completely unrelated story that just happens to involve mention of a trick kiss). It lacks all the criteria markers of mimesis. Especially as Mark makes no mention of Judas being dead in a field. That’s the rewrite in Acts (one or two whole generations after Mark had been circulating). Perhaps that author saw a link and decided to use it to build-out the story, but by then Judas had long since been invented.

A far better parallel is the one I cited already: “Israel’s device of betraying his way into God’s inheritance with a kiss (Genesis 27),” whereas “Judas betrays his way out of God’s inheritance with a kiss” and “in the OT the one kissed is Isaac, the sacrificed firstborn son for whom an animal is substituted (Genesis 22), while in the NT the one kissed is Jesus, the sacrificed firstborn son substituted for that same animal” (cf. Hebrews 9).

Here we have coincidences too improbable to be chance, whereas in the Amassa case there are so many mismatches the coincidence isn’t that improbable. More likely the Amassa and Markan stories both independently riff on the famous Isaac betrayal kiss, without Mark also using Samuel. At best maybe Luke-Acts did, but only for color. There is no symbolic relevance to the lifts.

Likewise the money element in Mark comes from Zechariah (the amount is identical even though it’s anachronistic in Mark’s era), not 2 Samuel. And so on.

To rule out happenstance coincidences and identify real probable mimesis, we need better line-ups than this, according to well-developed criteria (see the end of chapter five of Proving History where I explain).

Sorry I got off course.
2 Sam 20:8-12. Amasa is fooled by a fake kiss by Joab, who then guts Amasa. Later Amasa is rolled into a field, to get him out of the way.

So here we have both the false kiss and a method of death similar to Judas’s death is Acts.

You already mentioned Ahithophel, who died like Judas in Matthew. Both Ahithophel and Amasa were leaders helping Absalom in the rebellion.

Another concept associated with Judas is the idea of payment for betraying or exposing the location of Jesus of Nazareth. While this is a composite – Mark uses so many composites- one part of this idea comes as Absalom is killed.

2 Sam 18:10 A man saw it and told Joab, “I saw Absalom hanging in an oak.” 11 Joab said to the man who told him, “What, you saw him! Why then did you not strike him there to the ground? I would have been glad to give you ten pieces of silver and a belt.”

Notice the person exposed the location before any money is talked about. In Mark, Judas goes out to ‘expose’ Jesus before he is offered any money.

When Jesus is at the last supper and speaks about the person who would expose him, the speech is conceptual near to what is said by the soldier who saw and tattled on Absalom, 2 Sam 18:12 But the man said to Joab, “Even if I felt in my hand the weight of a thousand pieces of silver, I would not raise my hand against the king’s son, for in our hearing the king commanded you and Abishai and Ittai, saying, ‘For my sake protect the young man Absalom!’ 13 On the other hand, if I had dealt treacherously against his life[c] (and there is nothing hidden from the king), then you yourself would have stood aloof.”

Especially here the idea is that nothing is hedden from the king. In the same way Jesus is omniscient at the dinner and at his arrest.

These may seem tenuous but they are part of a huge amount of Mark using 2 Sam, especially Absalom’s rebellion.

I know you are a busy person and probably have plenty of projects to work on, but here are my ideas on Mark using prior sources, mimesis style, step by step. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gmk14bAj_Su4X5wkqA6v_NCqH2Xgflq11fI1vtkw47c/edit?usp=sharing

Same problem.

Same problem.

I’m not seeing any reference to a “kiss” here. Or any other connection to Judas as a literary character.

There are connections between Zechariah and Judas (I discuss them above). But none you are talking about here.

So help me out here. What Judas connections am I missing? Especially, what kiss narrative did you mean? And did you mean only that connection, or others? And if so, what?

One more thing. I think you may be missing some potential research into the early mythological Jesus cult in your use of Achtemeier (1970, 1972). His idea of epiphany stories of Jesus in the early days after the supposed death of a physical Jesus would seem to be a corollary to the idea that Jesus appeared to Paul, Peter, the 500, and then James.

This might mean there was earlier literature about Jesus that Mark used for his 10 miracles in chapters 4-8. But it was based on ‘appearances’ of Christ during the eucharist meal, or some sort of covenant meal. Just a thought.

Again, but this time its Suk Yee Lee, An Intertextual Analysis, p106-7 she finds Zechariah 9:9 referring to the promise to Judah in Genesis 49:11. Fine, and I agree. But she says because its plural it also refers to the white riders on donkeys in Judges 5!!

She notes that donkeys are used by the royal household in the instance of 2 Sam 16:2 and that Solomon used horses in 1 Kings 10:26. But Solomon riding in on a mule is invisible to her analysis because it is a mule.

Yet on page 113 Lee claims a sustained allusion to Psalm 72 in Zechariah 9:9-10. In my NRSVUE, the heading for Psalm 72 reads: OF SOLOMON.

So Lee’s work was tremendously useful, very exhaustive, spanning only Zechariah 9-10. Yet her overt denial of allusions to the early Davidic kings contradict her own work!

So I give you citations, but just know the authors of those works absolutely would not agree with me. And that is exhausting for something that is so obvious, imho.