JoeWallack

"Mark's" DiualCritical Marks. Evidence Of Intentional Fiction In The Original Gospel. Part II

JW:
This Thread is a continuation of my Award winning Thread:

Mark's DiualCritical Marks. Evidence Of Intentional Fiction In The Original Gospel

where I demonstrate and than some that Literary Criticism of "Mark" provides revelation of multiple evidence of intentional fiction:

In defiance of CBS (Christian Bible Scholarship) I have actually developed criteria to help detect evidence of Literary Contrivance:

Regarding parallels, the battle over whether "Mark's" John the Baptist/Jesus Domnamic Duo parallels with Elijah/Elisha is largely over. A reSounding Skeptical victory. Super Skeptic Neil Godfree is now at it again illustrating parallels so scary between "Luke" and "Bacchae" that it's enough to make you turn Jew:

The Point of the Dionysiac Myth in Acts of the Apostles, #1 [Cross fingers that Joel Watts does not somehow claim this as copyright infringement]

Godfree goes on (and on) citing excellent parallels between Acts and Bacchae and I have to confess that it even makes the words of Isaiah sound prophetic "Now they shall see what they have not been told." (but referring not to "The Jews" but CBS).

My related commentary to Godfree:

JW:
For purposes of this Thread, if it can be demonstrated that "Luke" used intentional fiction (here = Clear and Presently Dangerous parallels to Bacchae) than that is evidence that c. contemporary and fellow Gospeller and primary source for "Luke" did also.

The Superior Skeptic should keep in mind that in the mind of "Mark's" audience there were no other Gospel narratives to interpret "Mark" by. That was "Mark's" Act, his Jesus did not come dancing. On the other hand this audience would have been able to see the parallels much better than us as they would have been the prominent, classic literature of the Age not to mention in the same language.


Joseph

ErrancyWiki

spin

Fiction is what Chariton of Aphrodisias wrote, Apulaeus and Petronius also. They wrote stories with characters who they knew were not real. Other people didn't write fiction, even though what they wrote may not have necessarily reflected reality. Even when historians wrote, they often cloaked one figure in the trappings of some past person for political or stylistic purposes. We see that John was considered a later Elijah. If Jesus was real, would it be strange that he were seen to have been Elisha reborn? Ancient historians often wrote the speeches they thought the people they were writing about should have given under the circumstances of their narratives.

Tradition sits on the names that spawned them, whether the names were of real people or not. Once a figure had a community interested in him/her, that tradition tended to develop through creative retelling. This retelling is the act of passing on the tradition which reshapes it. As long as a community has interest in a tradition it lives and grows and changes. The process doesn't stop when the tradition is written down. Variants and additions from elsewhere if the tradition is shared over a wide area, just as all cultural manifestations tend to vary over distance, habits, pronunciations, foods, expectations, interests, amusements. A development in a sport at Rugby in England eventually spread across the country and formed a basis of various sports from Ireland to America. So variants in christian traditions can spread to other communities. A meme goes from one community to another which has a written corpus, via an itinerant preacher, and it may get added to the corpus. Or the various nuggets such a preacher tells gets written down, disseminated and it reaches a community with a written tradition and those nuggets may get added to that community's tradition. The important thing about the tradition is that both the one who passes it on and the one who receives it believes the tradition to be veracious, otherwise there would be no passing it on.

This is certainly something other than intentional fiction.

stephan huller

Agreed

MrMacSon

Depends on how it started; but the consequence is essentially tradition built on initial fiction.

spin

I don't know what you mean here by fiction. Joe makes clear his meaning by prefixing it with "intentional". What we see at the earliest stages of christianity, contra the conspiracy theorists, is believers accepting the veracity of their narrative. Beyond that there seems to be no meaningful way to interrogate the origins.

neilgodfrey

Chariton also wrote historical characters into his fiction. Hermocrates, Ariston, the Persian king were all as historical as were Pilate and Herod.

The only people who considered John to be Elijah were those who gave us the narrative of his successor, -- the Elijah label is demonstrably as much theological fiction as is the virgin birth.

Tradition very often finds a need to invent names in the past to explain its existence. Customs need explanations. Myths are invented to explain them.

Ideas do not pass on like viruses or genes -- "memes" are as mythical as leprechauns. Sociology, psychology, communication theory, cultural anthropology and group dynamics have not been replaced by the meme myth yet.

Ideas spread for all sorts of reasons. Meaning and group cohesion and competition can outweigh what individuals themselves personally find as part of their conviction and belief systems.

We can only follow the evidence itself, and the evidence is the literature. Everything at this point is literary -- even Herod and the Persian king. We are a long way from having sufficient data to justify imputing social movements and group dynamics to the evidence.

Stuart

My view of Mark is different in that I think its a conflation of two ür-Gospels that were also the base documents of Matthew and Marcion's Gospels respectively (I think there was one and it morphed into two forms, likely different locations, one with the four thousand loop and one without). As a result maybe 10% of the words in Mark are unique, and many of those are trivial, or minor expansions on a micro scale of the text. And some of those unique words are probably later accretion in the Catholic layer which all books got to varying degrees. What value is in 13:3 (or 1:29) adding "Peter and James and John and Andrew," or 15:21 adding "the father of Alexander and Rufus," or 2:26 "when Abiathar was high priest" and so on? Verse 10:32 suggested above, and maybe it's Mark or perhaps later Catholic addition, does indeed reduce the status of the disciples.

I simply see a small layer that adds a few details and makes the disciples show more doubt, perhaps to explain the heresies (no matter which camp Mark fell in) around as the result of wayward disciples - a mid 2nd century theme.

But my view is not held by many here, so I just put it out to explain why I do not think Mark has in mind Intentional Fiction. But it is of note Mark adds several phrases about teaching the Gospel, which indicates the concept of written Gospel is already present when he wrote it (e.g., 1:1, 1:15, 13:10 - this last one looks like a later Catholic addition).

But as most of you believe Mark as the first Gospel, then you have a wealth of material to work with. So I abstain from the debate, but wrote this simply to explain my "no" vote.

aa5874

Once gMark is read and understood it can only be intentional fiction.

The stories of Jesus in gMark are not only non-historical but they could NOT have happened from the baptism with the Holy Ghost bird to the resurrection after three days.

Every single single event surroundinding Jesus has never been corroborated by contemporary non-apologetics who lived in the 1st century.

Even one presumes that the author of gMark used some other source for his stories of Jesus it is clear that there could have been NO witnesses or actual evidence to corroborate the baptism with the Holy Ghost bird, the walking on the sea, the transfiguration, the miracles where he instantly healed the blind, deaf, dumb and raised the dead.

The author of gMark must have known that what he was writing did NOT have any witnesses.

spin

Then demonstrate it rather than assert it.

Traditions don't care where the original memes come from and once they are part of the tradition, you can't source them. Any attempts to do so purely using the tradition will have no basis.

Postulating myths requires communities that share the myth.

I don't see the reason for this unreasonable objection to the notion of memes. Memes are merely small chunks of culture that get spread.

OK.

As we have traces of indications that the gospel texts are tradition in nature, ie none of them present as the work of single authors but of materials that have been mediated, we have grounds to analyse them as traditions rather than works of unique authors, such as the fabled Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. This means we can apply what is known of traditions generally to help us understand the texts and understand the limits of what we can do with them.

JoeWallack

JW:
Yes, what do I mean by "Evidence of Intentional Fiction"?

Reminds me of the way I hooked my Psychiatrist wife. Before ever meeting her I left the following joke on her answering machine (courtesy of Mad Magazine):

[The frame consists of two people passing each other in the hallway. The first says hello and the others response is based on their description]

First person: Hello

Psychiatrist: (thinking to himself) Hmmm, I wonder what he meant by that.

Actually she didn't think it the least bit funny but found it remarkable that someone who had never met her would leave something so stupid on her answering machine. I should also clarify the meaning of "Psychiatrist wife". This was not my Psychiatrist's wife but my wife who was a Psychiatrist.

δε, regarding what do I mean by "Evidence of Intentional Fiction"? Let me backslide here. All this Thread is doing is Literary Criticism. Regarding possible narrative, Literary Criticism is not going to prove fiction. It's probably not going to demonstrate fiction likely. You would need Source Criticism for that. For those who need points sharply explained, you could use:

1) First hand statement from the author that it was fiction (a credible "Mark" writing a credible statement that "Mark" was fiction).

2) Second hand statement from someone who knew the author that it was fiction (a credible so and so writing a credible statement that they knew "Mark" and "Mark" wrote fiction).

3) A solution for 2,000 years of possible transmission error.

Boy, are we a long way from that. The standards for witness testimony regarding fact or fiction are exactly the same. You can not present modern standards against ancient writings being fact and than lower the standards for evidence of fiction and thereby posture fiction. That is just as naughty as Apologists lower modern standards down to supposed ancient standards to get their "facts" under the Bar.

I'm going to break out the statement "Evidence of Intentional Fiction" into two parts:

1) What part of the narrative am I referring to?

I'm primarily referring to the part of the narrative which has evidence of direct parallels to an unrelated narrative. This evidence becomes progressively weaker as the distance from the direct parallel increases.

Note that the key here is relationship and not absolute. The closer a part of a narrative is to a clear parallel, the better the evidence for intentional fiction is. Measurement of movement is more objective than trying to classify in absolute terms.

For example, "Mark's" John's supposed baptism of "Mark's" Jesus. There are clear and direct parallels to The Jewish Bible. My claim is that the more direct and clear the parallel, the better the evidence that that parallel is intentional fiction such as specific word, phrases, images and sequences matches. The farther you move from specifics though such as at an extreme, the broadest possible narrative assertion, that John baptized Jesus, the weaker the parallel evidence becomes in arguing that such a broad assertion is fiction. For that you would have to have Source Criticism to make a good argument. Clear and direct parallels are evidence that the entire story is fiction, just not quality evidence as it is entirely possible that subsequent authors are just spinning an original.

So my entire argument here is just inventorying (proof-texting for fiction) for evidence of fiction. The extent of the evidence here is just relative, it can move towards a conclusion of fiction. But it is not absolute, it can not prove that an entire story is fiction.

2) What is my definition of intentional fiction?

The objection here is that if "intentional fiction" is an absolute, than there is no intentional fiction unless an author knew exactly what was historical and therefore knew exactly what was not historical. For this Thread I use a relative definition. In modern usage if someone has motivation to make a statement that the evidence available to them does not support, we would generally describe that as intentional fiction. Even though it's possible that it was a true statement and the Stater did not know for certain that it was a false statement.

Here we have Gospellers who have motivation to promote Jesus in any way including/especially literarily. If they move away from their source evidence towards parallels they created or at least were unusual for their sources than at a minimum they knew that the evidence did not support the parallels. The specific objection here is that if in spite of the evidence they outright believed the parallels were fact or at least believed it possible they were fact than it is not intentional fiction. This is a perfectly reasonable understanding, maybe even the correct one. But for purposes of this Thread I have the lower standard of moving from what the evidence probably indicated to them. For promotional purposes of this Thread "Evidence of Intentional Fiction" is much better than "Evidence of Not Following the Evidence Which was Available to Them."


Joseph

ErrancyWiki