As I was riding today (I guess bike rides are bad for religious orthodoxy) I happened on a few other thoughts.
Hi, Ichy. I still plan to get to your larger question, but it's been a very busy time for me, so I probably won't post on that til tomorrow.
If the author of Mark really thought that the end was coming in a very short period of time -- like 3 1/2 years -- why bother writing anything down? Writing is meant to last, why not rely on word of mouth for such a message, especially since word of mouth can move much more quickly and makes more sense in a world before printing?
See, now you're getting to some of the arguments which speak directly to Mark's intent and methods.
It's questions like these which suggest rather strongly that Mark's primary purpose was to establish a narrative which included the core orthodoxy of his community (or communities), rather than sculpting a new theology.
It's hard to make sense of the totality of Mark if his intent is to produce an entirely coherent original theology out of the scraps. He just doesn't make the choices we'd expect if that were his goal.
So it's more likely that his criteria had more to do with (1) perceived orthodoxy at that time and place, and (2) fit within the narrative.
The fact that he bothers to write at all is, as you point out, an indication that a re-imagining of the words of Jesus -- a more metaphorical re-interpretation, such as that in 2nd Peter -- was in wide circulation by that time, and in fact had likely been well established.
I see sense in using/creating the Transfiguration in Mark -- the whole text concerns Jesus being completely misunderstood and it occurs after Peter declares that he (Jesus) is the Messiah. So, that makes sense from a literary perspective. But why was the Transfiguration included in Matthew and Luke where it simply seems superfluous? John didn't include it.
It was included because it was central to their schools of thought.
In fact, because the Transfiguration may be seen as not fitting well with the narrative flow of Matthew and Luke, its inclusion strongly suggests that it was so central to their communties of belief that it simply could not be omitted.
For them, the conception of Jesus as a new Moses and a new Elijah -- the founder of the nation of Israel and the renewer of the nation of Israel -- was indispensible.
John, writing farther outside the Jewish community and tradition, and perhaps later in time after the destruction of the Temple, is much less connected with a sense of fulfillment of Hebrew prophecy. From his omission of the Transfiguration -- as well as his rather generic treatment of "the Jews" as something other than the Jesus movement -- we can conclude that his community were primarily concerned with a Pauline focus on personal salvation through faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
In fact, for John, this is something of an ahistorical event, a spiritual event injected into human time, through which we connect with the divine. It hardly seems to matter that God chose to perform that event when and where he did. If God had decided to make the Word flesh somewhere in Greece, for example, that would have done just as well.
If we have a strong written tradition preceding the gospels that we inherited, why is John so very different from the others? I mean, John's gospel bears the slightest resemblance to the others and contradicts sometimes directly (the day of Jesus' death) and sometimes indirectly (timing of the cleansing of the Temple, the length of the ministry, etc.) the other accounts.
Well, after the destruction of the 2nd Temple, which effectively marked the end of Judaism as it was practiced in Jesus' day -- and, for that matter, the legalism and practices and political conflict he so vehemently opposed -- much of the justification for the original Jesus movement simply vanished.
Their theology had to be reinvented.
And as Xianity was transplanted to other communities, all of those references lost their immediate significance, and they were simplified, re-interpreted as metaphor, or seen as symbols of larger truths applicable to the communities of those places and times.
After the destruction of the Temple, and outside of the Jewish culture, there is simply no longer anyone to restrain the narrative, so it begins to grow in unanticipated directions.
What we see in John is a narrative composed of later, post-Temple, extra-Jewish traditions.
ETA: For the audience of Matthew, the loss of the Temple would have been seen as a cataclysm, and apocalyptic expactations would have been high. For Luke's audience, it would likely have been viewed more as a sign of the fulfillment of days. Mark's account may have been written before the destruction of the Temple. For John's audience, it appears to have been much more distant, much less central.
). Josephus also mentions messianic pretenders, one being