Amaleq13

Yes, it is entirely possible that the author's choice of replacement "corrected" a problem you perceived but the author did not.

Right, you are assuming that both he and his audience were not.

The actions of individuals revising a story really tell us nothing about the intent of the original author.

I didn't miss your point. I'm denying that you have a sound basis for asserting it.

The problem with such an objection is that it looks like a presupposition that, absent an interview with the author, can never be refuted.

By what methodology do you determine an author's intent with regard to allegorical or literal?

jjramsey

So it is not a problem that a miracle story involving pigs diving into a lake is set in a place nowhere a lake?

Um, not quite. As I pointed out above, some of Mark's readers were aware of the geographical problems and saw them as problems.

This only makes sense if you presume that the reception of a text is not an indication of the author's intent. Considering that an author writes a text with the intent of having it received in a particular way, this is a dubious presumption.

Given a choice between the alternatives that

• an author so cleverly concealed his allegorical intent that his work was confused even by his contemporaries and near-contemporaries as being meant to be read literally, or
• that an author was read literally by his contemporaries because he was writing literally,

then I will take the latter as being more likely, simply on the grounds of Occam's razor. There should at least be some level of agreement, preferably a consensus, that the text is an allegory, and some non-arbitrary way of treating it symbolically.

Amaleq13

Not if accurate geography was irrelevant to the author's intent, no. OTOH, I learned in the course an earlier discussion of this subject with praxeus that there is archaeological evidence suggesting Gerasa had a port on the lake.

You pointed out that the author of Matthew changed the name and you inferred from that the assumption he considered it to be a problem. I see no reason to also assume that the author of Matthew was part of the original, intended readership of Mark.

It is a presumption of logic. There is no apparent necessary connection between the intent of an author and the interpretation provided by a given reader.

Lord of the Flies can be quite "naturally" read as a literal description of actual events but that doesn't prevent literary critics from suggesting the author intended it to be read as an allegory nor does it prevent them from disagreeing about the exact nature of that intended allegory.

How does that guarantee or even suggest that all subsequent readers will know and understand the intent of the author?

Replacing the name of the city seems inadequate to establish that Matthew's author took the story literally but please explain how the author of Lord of the Flies signals his intent that his story be understood allegorically.

jjramsey

Notice that you are doing with Lord of the Flies what I was doing with Mark, namely using the reception by its audience to judge the author's intent. Notice, too, that there is a vast difference between disagreeing with the exact nature of the allegory and disagreeing about its overall thrust.

I never read the book so take the analysis with a grain of salt. I am using the information here to make some of my judgments:

http://www.gerenser.com/lotf/

Anyway, an initial clue is that Lord of the Flies is known fiction to start with. Obviously, not all fiction is allegory, but in a fictional work, it is much easier to shape the characters to fit the desired symbolism. Another clue is a certain amount of stylizing in the characters, an exaggeration of certain traits so that they reflect certain aspects of human nature more than others. For example, Jack is not only evil, but his face is "ugly without silliness." Piggy, the intelligent one, wears glasses and is overweight, and today he would be recognized as an archetypical "nerd." This makes it easier to see the characters as symbols of certain aspects of humanity.

Didymus

This issue has been argued to a fair-thee-well, and now we're into an analysis of Lord of the Flies. Could we take a large step back?

Let's say there was irrefutable evidence that the possessed porkers story - or Mark's entire gospel, for that matter - was intended as an allegory. Well, that would certainly indicate that the author didn't regard Jesus as a historical figure. In turn, that would greatly increase the likelihood that the Jesus he described didn't exist. In fact, because Mark is our primary source for the words and deeds of Jesus, the odds would approach 100%. But the problem is in the premise: At this point, despite an excellent effort, it's pretty clear (to me, anyway) that Amaleq13 can't make a surefire case for allegorical intent. I have a hunch nobody can. (I do wish such a case could be made, because that would settle the question once and for all and put Christian doctrine in the tank where I think it belongs.)

On the other hand, if the author's intent was to tell his audience what actually happened, would that constitute an equally airtight case for historicity? Or somehow "disprove" the theory that Mark's Jesus was a mythical figure? Of course not. It is certainly possible - highly likely, I think - that a mythical, legendary Jesus could have been sincerely believed by the Markan author to have been a gen-u-wine historical person, and that he intended to convey the details of his life to his readers.

So even if jjramsey were to make a perfect, ironclad argument for sincere historical intent, he would only prove that Mark thought Jesus to be historical, and nothing more. Of course, by so doing, he'd deprive the mythicists of "allegorical gospel" and "gospel as midrash" theories. But he'd still have to show that Mark's belief was based on fact, and not on a hodgepodge of hashed up oral traditions of Jesus, the Pauline gospel, his own assumptions regarding how events should/would have unfolded, and diligent extrapolations from scripture.

I must be missing something here, because right now this debate seems like a very long walk for a very short beer.

Didymus

jjramsey

The way I look at it is from this perspective: Why is it more likely that Christianity started with a "hodgepodge of hashed up oral traditions of Jesus, the Pauline gospel, his own assumptions regarding how events should/would have unfolded, and diligent extrapolations from scripture," rather than with the itinerant preaching of a Galilean Jew whose story snowballed? And I wouldn't mind if you did answer this question, since the answer will at least be interesting.

Amaleq13

You need to read more carefully because I've done no such thing. I've referred to the opinions of others who claim that the work was intended to be read allegorically. I do not consider their speculative attempts at mind-reading to necessarily be any more reliable than your own.

My point with Lord of the Flies is that the ease with which one can read a story literally is apparently irrelevant to notions of allegorical intent on the part of the author. You have denied an allegorical intent on the part of Mark's author because of the ease with which it can be read literally. This does not appear to be a sound basis for dismissing the notion.

Ah, but how did it come to be "known fiction" and how does that compare to Mark? I would suggest that there really is no comparision given the absence of any publishing house to whom the author would have reported this information.

Which brings us back to the absence of a reliable methodology by which fiction might be differentiated from non-fiction.

Like Judas as an exaggeration of the negative traits at least some early Christians attributed to Jews?

I disagree. There is nothing to prevent an author from depicting an historical figure in an allegorical story.

Just to be clear, I'm not trying to establish allegorical intent. I tend to agree that, absent an interview with the author, it cannot be done. What I have been trying to establish is that there is no sound basis for dismissing the possibility that at least parts of the story were intended allegorically.

jakejonesiv

You keep building these straw men and blowing them down. You should at least familiarize yourself with The Dutch Radical Approach Otherwise, you just look desperate.

Jake Jones IV

jjramsey

The "publishing house" to which Mark would have reported would have probably been the local Christian community of which Mark was a part, members of which copied his work.

Judas was portrayed as a thief in the Gospels, and the stereotype of the Jew as a moneygrubber dates more from medieval times, when lending money at interests was one of the few niches that Jews could fill but not Christians because of the rules barring Christians from lending at interest. His suicide by hanging in Matthew also doesn't quite fit with that, since it attributes a sense of shame to Judas which is hardly attributed to the Jews. (That Judas is unhistorical or slandered I am willing to entertain, since he is in some ways just too convenient a bad guy, but that's a different subject.)

Didymus

First and foremost, a mythical origin for the Jesus story is more likely because the minute amount of factual material in the gospels is completely swamped by the material that is known to be fictitious - the birth story, the miracles, the scripturally-based passion narrative, the resurrection. Other major elements - the Trial, many of the sayings and pericopes - are disputed, even among Christians. Even mundane facts and assertions about times and places are false. When the great bulk of a work is known to be false, it's reasonable to distrust the rest. That's a sound principle of jurisprudence: a witness who is known to tell lies or repeatedly make errors of fact cannot be relied upon.

After you discard the acknowledged fiction, you're left with two minor, commonplace figures - an itinerant Galilean preacher/philosopher and a crucified insurrectionist - merged into one.

Without supernatural intervention, there is no way that the tale of a charismatic preacher who got himself crucified could have gained the traction to "snowball" into Pauline theology or the Gospel of Mark. There was no greatest story there; there was no story at all, unless you consider "A fool with a death wish made a mess of the Temple grounds and they killed him" to be a story worth repeating.

Christians often point to Jesus' obscurity when trying to explain why his life and deeds went unremarked by first century Roman writers. They have a point, but what would have been the impact of an ordinary itinerant preacher if a miracleworking savior who fed thousands on a few loaves of bread was just a small, er, snowball?

(While we're at it, I would be interested in hearing your explanation for your "snowball" theory. In the absence of all those miracles, how could an ordinary preacher have evoked such a response? Or do you think he really did perform those miracles?)

On the other hand, it was a time of elaborate mythmaking. Imagination far exceeded comprehension; just look at the intricate, fanciful scenarios imagined by the Mithraists and the Gnostics. The natural world didn't have priority as it does now; as in today's Islamic world, myth and history had held equal sway for centuries. To many ordinary Romans, they were virtually interchangeable.

That was the world of Paul. Appropriating Hebrew scripture from the LXX, he put the all-important mythical (and mythic) framework in place. More evidence for the priority of that framework: Jesus' words in the gospels and his crucifixion made little theological sense without it. (As Paul's congregations would have testified, the reverse is not true.) In addition to the myth, the sayings of a wandering preacher named Jesus were in the air; what was needed was a cast of characters and a plot that would flesh out the story by placing Paul's humble god/man in recent history and having him utter all those pithy words of wisdom.

Times were changing, and that novel approach would be instrumental in Christianity's success. By personifying the Almighty and humbling him down, the gospels would one-up the Roman deification of their deceased emperors. Point Mark.

IMHO, an ordinary man didn't snowball into a religion; Mark and the other gospel writers put a human face on a myth. Or on a theology, if you will.

Didymus