gurugeorge

Great post, nothing really to quibble about. Just to clarify, in this quote:

In "accounting for the evidence", your authors are talking about the accounting for the existence of the texts right? (Not some prejudgement that there's historical evidence in the text?)

Ben C Smith

I think they are talking about the data within the text, not exactly the existence of the text as a whole, but the notion is about the same, and I do not think there is any prejudgment going on (if there is prejudgment going on on the part of Howell and Prevenier, I take exception to it). One may, I think, hypothesize either an historicist process or a mythicist process to account for, say, the datum that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. Maybe something like the prophecy in Zechariah completely accounts for this textual datum without remainder. Maybe not. But in either case the hypothesis is trying to explain how the donkey ride came to be written down in our texts.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

I know you were addressing Doug, but allow me to chime in here.

I have in no wise taken a tally of such instances, but I think the proportion probably depends in great part on how close the first evidence for figure X is to the purported time and place of figure X. I am betting that, for those personages who are only attested centuries later (Moses, Achilles, Romulus) or at great geographical remove (Prester John), the proportion tips in the direction of pure myth most of the time; for those personages who are attested more in keeping with their own time and place, and especially not in some remote time of legend or place of exotic fancy, I imagine the proportion tips in the direction of an historical kernal. Doubtless there are exceptions on both sides, of course, so we must still tackle the evidence on its own terms, regardless of the initial probabilities.

Ben.

gurugeorge

What about urban myths? Would you say that they mostly have real events behind them?

Whoa! Hang on a cotton pickin' minute there, that's already a pretty heavy amount of interpretation. Prima facie (God help me! ) this Joshua Messiah seems to be convinced he's god's son from the get-go.

And I'd say there needs to be more interdisciplinary work, you historians need to get your noses out of the texts and start chatting to anthropologists, psychologists, neurologists, etc. Religion is a real phenomenon, still current, and mostly it's very little to do with writing stuff down - that's quite rare. And the real phenomenon, starting at the right end of the evidence about what human beings do (and then subsequently write about, if and when they do) is visionary experience and mystical experience. Whether one goes Jiri's way and interprets it as full-blown madness, or the way I look at it as just a possible thing brains do, is up for debate, but really this whole conversation will keep going round in circles until research into texts marries up with broader and more varied kinds of research into what human beings do that's called "religion".

Religion is madness, sometimes ecstasy, always passionate, always experience. An interpretation of Paul that has him as a spindly academic playing about with concepts and ideas is a misinterpretation of Paul. He was a religious nut, first and foremost - that means, he had peculiar, religious experiences, and those are the basis of what he writes.

IOW, if you really want to know the truth about those texts and how they came to be, you cannot limit investigation to the notion that these texts are just about ideas and the manipulation of ideas. It makes textual research easier to think that this is the case (my keys/lamppost example), but actually religious texts are fundamentally about peoples' experience. The ideas, the bricolage , the shuffling of symbolic calculi, are a concomitant, an adjunct, more important to some than to others, but hardly ever less important than their living, breathing experience of (what they believe to be) the Divine.

Clivedurdle

I have quoted this from myths and heroes before, but it is worth repeating

gurugeorge

Hehe, maybe it's because I've been re-reading Wittgenstein (for the umpteenth time trying to get a handle on that profound and difficult philosopher), but I can't help wondering what he would say about this. I think he's say something like this: there is no "thing" that's "Jesus riding on a donkey" that's the "same" across a mythicist versus a historicist account. They are two completely different "things", two "grammars" (in W's sense), one a made-up donkey ride, the other a real donkey ride. But if there are these two grammars or bundles of logical necessity links, it's not like there's one kind of "investigation" that can be done that will decide between the two. Unless there's something external to collapse the ambiguity.

I don't know if that makes sense, but it kind of points to what I've been fumblingly trying to get at in my mental fog.

But you have cleared up the fishiness I'm smelling a bit. I'll have to keep thinking about it

Ben C Smith

Even in Mark? Where he comes to the Jordan river to undergo a baptism of repentance for sins?

Ben.

Ben C Smith

Well, Witt is pretty hard to make sense of, anyway, IMVHO.

Just for the record, I am currently inclined to think that the donkey ride into Jerusalem did not happen. Currently.

Ben.

gurugeorge

It depends on whether the synoptics are all talking about one and the same entity

If Jesus was also the same Jesus as in the other gospels, then this was merely a formality (like dotting the is and crossing the ts) and "Mark" has simply chosen to start at that point, missing out the earlier biography because it wasn't important to him. (This is kind of how I was taught it in Catholic school actually )

Thinking out loud: so has something (in this case birth and precocious bratty youth story) been added in the other gospels or missed out by "Mark"? We have external historical coincidences to both parts of the story (in the one case, the census, in the other, JtB). But is it necessarily the case that "Mark"'s account, simply by being simpler, is more likely to have genuine historical nuggets? After all, the simplest accounts in the earliest texts seem to have him already as the god-man, full-blown, only very sketchy. It might be the case that "Mark" is merely adding a more human layer on top of that because he's more interested in the man side of the god-man equation, and in forging a link of continuity with JtB (and then the other synoptics have other ideas and add birth stories, etc.).

Ben C Smith

You did not comment on my main meaning. Mark portrays Jesus as coming to the Jordan river to undergo a baptism of repentance for sins. If Jesus in Mark is God already, why is he being baptized, without explanation (contrast Matthew 3.14!), for repentance for sins?

No, not by virtue of being simpler. I think stories can get either more complex or more simple; therefore, simplicity is not a very good criterion for primitivity.

Ben.