Ben C Smith

I think the entire article assumes that the gospels are at least attempts at history. Turn this article into an argument against fictive gospels and it would be a very different piece of work. It seems unfair to demand that every historicist counter the fiction alternative every time he or she sets pen to paper; mythicists are simply not the chosen dialogue partners in this article.

Ben.

Steven Carr

So that is not a conclusion, but a presumption?

Steven Carr

Apart from making things up, Bauckham also selects his evidence to fit what he says.

Bauckham writes 'In no case does a character unnamed in Mark gain a name in Matthew or Luke'.

What about Annas and Caiaphas , I hear you cry?

Well , Bauckham says he is excluding chief priests.

Why? Why should chief priests not be relevant to Bauckham's hypothesis that people were named if they were well known to Christians at the time of writing.

Silence. There is NO methodology.

Unless Bauckham cooked the data by ignoring chief priests simply so he could claim 'In no case does a character unnamed in Mark gain a name in Matthew or Luke'.

Well, if you are going to ignore cases where that does happen, you can certainly claim there are no cases where that does happen.

But you either have to cook the data to do it, or explain why you are making the selection that you do.

Making stuff up and cooking the data.

Such is the state of NT scholarship....

Ben C Smith

For the sake of the article, yes.

Just as Q theorists sometimes write articles or books arguing for the existence of Q (in which its existence is the point at issue) and also sometimes write articles or books arguing for a particular version or interpretation of Q (in which the existence of Q is taken for granted), likewise theorists in other fields sometimes write for outsiders, as it were, and sometimes for insiders.

Bauckham names his dialogue partners in the article, and they are not mythicists; they are form critics. Michael wrote that mythicism is safe from the likes of this article, and I agree. In fact, mythicism is safe from most articles which were not written against mythicism.

And, to anticipate a possible objection on your part, I am on record as stating that I am not very impressed with most historicist attempts to date to counter mythicism. I actually kind of wish that mythicism (preferably of the Wells and Ellegard variety rather than the Doherty variety, which I believe to be so laden with excess baggage as to be untenable from the start) had a slightly louder voice in the academy than it does, in order to force the issue and bring out the best in those scholars defending the historicist view.

Ben.

Cheerful Charlie

The earlist gospel, Mark, is apparently a composite work. Chapter 16 has been extended.
All gospels have been added to, redacted, andthus are works of several anonymous people.
The "woman taken in adultery" in John is and addition, added in some manuscripts to Matthew.

And indeed there lists of the apostles in all four gospels is confusing, contradictory and in case of John, the complete twelve are not mentioned. This to me is very strong proof these are not from apostles. You do not forget people you lived with intimiately in a crusade like this in an intense
situation such as they partook in with Jesus. If these were books by apostles these would not be
so contradictory and lacking in vivid detail when it comes to the apostles. This to me for many years has shown me these anonymous books are in no way possibly written by apostles, of course, there was no apostle named Mark. I have had more than one argument with christians on the apostalic origin of the gospels with people who did not know that. Many christians do not read these sorts of books carefully.

Cheerful Charlie

Cheerful Charlie

So Matthew says the apostles never met Jesus in Jerusalem and Mark says he did and ascended to heaven from the room where he meets them. This sort of makes Bar-Timaeus irrelevant to more important problems as to why these gospels are so contradictory.

In a sense I like these sort of stupid books. Smart people realize something is wrong as these clowns tie themselves into wheezing pretzels to try to deal with these things. Books about the problems of these things by sceptics are not going to be read widely by true believers, but the apologists books are.

Always good in a sense, these who are still capable of rational thought will be disturbed at how stupid these apologisms are, how clumsy, how ineffectual. How just bizarre they are in some cases.

It might be fun sme day to take one thing, the problem of the differing versions of how Jesus appeared again to his apostles and see how the many apologists books deal with that problem.
Did he tell them to meet him in Galilee (Matthew) tell them to not leave Jerusalem (Acts).
Did he ascend to heaven (Luke, Mark) or apparently not? (Matthew, John, especially John)

Cheerful Charlie

Vorkosigan

I'm not asking that mythicists be chosen dialogue partners, Ben. But within mainstream NT studies there are numerous papers on the ficticity of specific pericopes and individuals which at least could be nodded at, and which should have been nodded at. Bauckham mentions BOTH Jairus and Bartimaeus as real people known to Mark but dropped in Matthew because they had faded from memory. Not is only is that an absurd and unsupported ad hoc assertion, but Bauckham for some reason does not mention that both names signify in relation to the their context in the text. Bauckham thinks that both were real people. He never considers that Mark might have invented them for his reasons, and Matthew modified them for his. Do you think Jairus was a real person whose daughter Jesus raised from the dead?

Bauckham's article is awful. He takes everything at face value, never contemplates alternatives other than "it's all history" and proffers no method to support his conclusions. It is simply one long working out of Bauckham's presuppositions. This is a spectacularly low-quality work from any scholarly perspective, not merely the mythicist one. So how the heck did it get published in a peer-reviewed journal?

It is hard to understand how mythicists get labeled cranks but archconservatives continue to enjoy happy membership in the scholarly community -- am I reading wrong, or does Bauckham appear to imply that Jesus must have magically healed Jairus' daughter? How then is it acceptable -- from a scholarly standpoint -- to imply that the supernatural occurs, but unacceptable to imply that Jesus didn't exist (no supernatural necessary). Surely the answer lies in the politics of NT studies, rather than in the scholarship and arguments made on all sides.

Vorkosigan

Ben C Smith

I find most of those kinds of name games unpersuasive. They are especially weak in the case of Jairus.

I do not know. But one thing is certain; I have no qualms about Jairus being a real person. And I have no qualms about something having happened to his daughter that was interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as a miracle.

What is your own explanation for the fact that, on Marcan priority, Matthew and Luke tend to subtract, never add, names for minor figures that appear in Mark? And, given your own preferred explanation, are you honestly saying that the hypothesis that Bauckham presents, namely that those figures were known to the Marcan readership but unknown to the Matthean and Lucan readerships, is unworthy even to be presented? How such a thesis is too radical to even be suggested is quite beyond me.

I cannot speak for the whole world of Bible scholars. But I myself will usually listen politely when anybody with a Ph.D. or the equivalent makes an argument in his or her field. Trained mythicists right now are not very numerous. Those that are out there (Carrier, Price, Detering?) I honestly enjoy reading, and I learn a lot from them, although I disagree with them far more often than I agree.

Are you merely wishing there were more mythicists in the scholarly community, or are you suggesting that conservatives be banned from it?

Ben.

Steven Carr

No hypothesis is too radical to be suggested (except possibly the one that Paul did not know of a recent historical figure called Jesus)

But how does Bauckham test his hypothesis? He doesn't.

How does he evaluate it against any other possible hypothesis? He doesn't.

What evidence does he present in favour of his hypothesis? None.

So it is all just terrible scholarship.

And why do you call Bartimaeus a 'minor figure' when Bauckham says he was known as a 'living miracle' to early Christians?

Why did Bauckham omit certain figures as not relevant to his hypothesis of why names were dropped, not added?

One reason is that those figures broke his rule that names were dropped, not added.

As Bauckham never explains why he chose the methodology he did (ignore people like Annas and Caiaphas), his methodology is unjustified. Literally. He literally does not justify it.

As an aside, people like Craig say Mark omitted the name of Caiaphas, because Caiaphas was so well known :-) (I think Craig uses that argument)

Is that an unreasonable thesis?

No it isn't.

So it is a reasonable thesis to say Mark mentioned people because they were well-known.

And it is a reasonable thesis to say Mark did not mention people because they were well-known.

So Bauckham has to produce data enabling us to see which reasonable thesis is right.

But, of course, producing real evidence is much harder than pulling the date of the death of Bartimaeus out of various parts of your anatomy.

Ben C Smith

I do not regard that hypothesis as too radical to be presented, though I do regard that hypothesis as too poorly argued of late to make any headway.

He does. On pages 46-47 he critiques Bultmann, who argued that the tradition tended to pick up details, including personal names for previously unnamed figures, as it went along.

There is no contradiction between being a minor figure in a published work and being a living miracle.

I agree that he should have done more to speak to the issue of Malchus and even perhaps Mary of Bethany. He even neglects to mention Peter as the one who cut off that ear in Gethsemane, another example of John naming a figure unnamed in Mark.

On the other hand, the synoptics are the main thrust of this part of the article, at any rate. So the synoptic data requires an explanation on its own merits. See below.

Steven, I started a much longer post to you before realizing that I was not sure what you actually wanted Bauckham to do.

We have the basic data in hand, I think: Some minor figures are named in the synoptics (let us stick to them for now for the sake of simplicity, though John needs analysis too in the long run) while others are not. Furthermore, Matthew and Luke never name an unnamed Marcan figure, but several times drop the name of a named Marcan figure.

What is your explanation for this phenomenon? Please show me (however briefly), with respect to your own preferred explanation, what you think Bauckham should have done. Present your hypothesis for this trend, present your evidence, and test your hypothesis against it. It might help me to understand where you are coming from if I see a good example of it in action.

Thanks.

Ben.