Vorkosigan

My system DOES NOT allow for so many variations in the center. All centers are doubled brackets. Even where I break it down really fine grain, there are only three types: ABAB, ABBA, and ABC ABC.

That is not all it takes. First you need to find a passage in Josephus where the chiasm is extremely obvious and can be reconstructed thematically so you can figure out what rules Josephus used when he wrote. You're going about it backward. Then you need to test them against all other passages to see whether your rules produce consistent structures. Other tests might be that where your rules fail, scholarship has found reason to doubt Josephean authorship. It wouldn't surprise me that Josephus wrote in chiasms. Your problem is specifying why you chose to break the text at one point and not another, in a way that you can demonstrate to another person. And people who "critique" my work based on the "you-can-do-this-with-anything" argument simply demonstrate that they haven't understood it. The whole point of my reconstruction of Mark is that you CAN'T do it with anything.

Vorkosigan

Ben C Smith

That seems like a lot of variety to me, especially since the ABAB and ABCABC variations allow us to break away from the chiastic structure.

Look, there is an extent to which your work has persuaded me on the structure of Mark. I am not trying to be hypercritical. For instance, I think that you are spot-on when it comes to the Marcan A brackets; he chooses movement from one place to another to move the story along. (Back in the golden years of synoptic research one might have said that he uses movement to string the pearls together.)

It is those centers that trip me up. It looks like I could fit almost anything in those centers. When I was doing the Theudas chiasm, for instance, I was stuck on the center portion for a while, until I remembered that I could just forget the actual chiasm there and go ABAB with it.

And then, when another Marcan literary expert comes along and states flat-out that Marcan centers are never doubled (about which more below), I begin to suspect that we could do whatever we wish with these things.

That is because I am testing the validity of the principle itself, not figuring out how Josephus used the principle. (My question is not which structural rules Josephus or Mark consciously followed but rather whether they consciously followed any.)

In this case I chose to break the text at certain points based on how those breaks would fit one or more of your Marcan patterns. It was a test, not an attempt at pure Josephan scholarship.

I mentioned John Dart above (though without his name), of whose work you are of course quite aware. I have never laid eyes on his book, though I hope to shortly. For what follows I am entirely indebted to your own review of Decoding Mark on your blog site.

You structure Mark 6.1-6 as follows:

A1 And he came out thence, and he came unto his fatherland, and his disciples followed him.
B1 And when it was sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue. And many who heard were amazed, saying:
C1 Whence did these things come to this man, and what is this wisdom given to him and such powers done through his hands?
D1 —
a Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?
b And they were scandalized at him.
D2 —
b And Jesus said to them: A prophet is not dishonored....
a ...except in his fatherland and among his kinsmen and in his house.
C2 And he could not do any powerful feats there except that he laid hands upon a few sick and healed them.
B2 And he wondered on account of their unbelief.
A2 And he was going around the villages in a circle, teaching.

I note a more conventional chiastic a-b-b-a center here. But Dart renders the same passage thus:

A1 And he came out thence, and he came unto his fatherland, and his disciples followed him. And when it was sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue. And many who heard were amazed, saying: Whence did these things come to this man, and what is this wisdom given to him....
B1 ...and such powers done through his hands?
C1 Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?
D And they were scandalized at him.
C2 And Jesus said to them: A prophet is not dishonored except in his fatherland and among his kinsmen and in his house.
B2 And he could not do any powerful feats there except that he laid hands upon a few sick and healed them.
A2 And he wondered on account of their unbelief. And he was going around the villages in a circle, teaching.

So... which is what Mark was really thinking? I note that your own effort has a certain advantage over that of Dart in at least one respect: You have set the offense (scandalized) against the honor (not dishonored), placing them in the opposing b brackets at the very center. That seems very logical. Dart inexplicably has the scandal in D and the honor in C2.

But then, Dart has a certain advantage over you in another respect: He has noticed that Jesus is tagged with two very different career titles in this pericope. The townspeople say carpenter, and Jesus replies with (no, not carpenter but) prophet. In fact, to me this very contradistinction seems to lie at the heart of the passage. Dart has elegantly placed carpenter and prophet, then, in the opposing C brackets. You inexplicably have the former in a and the latter in b.

Furthermore, you have the following structure in the second half of your center:

b And Jesus said to them: A prophet is not dishonored....
a ...except in his fatherland and among his kinsmen and in his house.

Do your rules allow that? Your rule #5 says:

Speeches, regardless of length, must be single brackets, so long as they are one speech directed at one audience.

Your rule #6 allows an exception:

Speeches may be broken up if there there appears to be a natural demarcation between two parts, when the audience has shifted. This typically takes place when there is a shift from an address to persons present in the narrative, to a general saying, often signaled by a formula like "Truly I say" or "But I tell you.."

But I do not see any shift in audience, natural demarcation, or truly I say to you kind of transition between b and a above. How does rule #5 not apply in this case?

Now, it may well be that I have utterly failed to apprehend your system, despite having gone over it in some detail over the past few months. But my head is simply swimming with these kinds of questions about the chiasms that you have identified.

I hold to Marcan priority. It would just tickle me if I could use chiastic structures as another plank in the platform. So far, however, I have too many questions about the process. I can see the very general chiastic structure at the periphery of most pericopes, but all too often fail to grasp the specificity of the centers.

Thanks for the feedback.

Ben.

Yuri Kuchinsky

OK, Vork, my previous criticism was off the mark, sorry. But I'm still extremely sceptical about all this 'chiasm' business.

Essentially, what you're doing is literary criticism. But, myself, I'm just not interested in literary criticism.

Because, in literary criticism, there's basically no rules... it seems like there are as many exceptions as there are rules, if not more... Everything is fungible. Currently, Ben is questioning some of your views, and offering some counterexamples, and such questioning can go on till kingdom come, I'm afraid.

The field is way too 'soft' and wishy-washy for my taste. I'd rather stay with science.

In the end, if you prove that Mk is a perfect literary creation, with all these nice bells and whistles hidden in it (than nobody but yourself could 'get' for all these 2000 years!), to me, this'll be a good argument that it is not really the earliest gospel, but rather a much later and highly polished literary production... In other words, what you're doing seems to be basically refuting itself IMHO.

Regards,

Yuri.

Yuri Kuchinsky

OK, Ben, that's fine then...

Fair enough...

OK, so you've given up on 2ST. Welcome to the club!

Agreements in omission are perhaps somewhat less telling than the 'agreements in comission', true, but they should still be reckoned with... You cannot sweep them under the rug.

Hmm... Well, this is your opinion, but is there any actual evidence for this -- that this is what Lk is doing?

The simplest thing for Lk at this spot is just to copy Mark's account. But this is not what Lk is doing...

So you think that Mark is the earliest? But what do you do about the Lukan Great Omission/Bethsaida Section, I wonder?

This is clearly the Achilles Heel of Markan priority... See my short analysis here,

http://www.trends.ca/~yuku/bbl/earluke.htm

Regards,

Yuri.

Ben C Smith

Thanks. Though I doubt I am as far away from it as you are.

You mean other than the fact that Mark 3.11b and Luke 4.41b are virtually identical, and when Luke gets to the place where the parallel for Mark 3.11b belongs (or when Mark gets to the place where Luke 4.41b belongs) it is absent? I certainly think somebody is copying from somebody, whether Luke from Mark or Mark from Luke. A very similar phenomenon exists at Mark 4.1 and Luke 5.1, 3, where the teaching-from-the-boat scene belongs to the parable discourse in Mark and to the calling of the first disciples in Luke. Somebody has moved the scene, because it does not appear twice in either gospel.

But a mere move by itself does not prove the direction of copying, in my opinion. Either of our suspects could have moved it. That is why I say that this particular pericope helps us precious little in deciding directionality.

That would have been the simplest thing to do at many points in the synoptics, yet it was often not the thing that actually was done.

Not sure yet. I have read Koester on that, but am undecided.

I had read it before, and I just skimmed it again. The thing is, much of your argument depends on the primitivity of material in Luke compared to the other synoptists, and I regard material primitivity as a separate issue from literary borrowing. I too am often impressed with the primitive look and feel of Luke (especially if the western, er, peripheral text is correct at the last supper!), but that does not mean that he did not use and even correct (if you will) Mark as a literary source. Luke tells us plainly that he was aware of many early accounts; there is nothing to have prevented him from correcting Mark against some of those early sources.

For me, it is the arguments from redactional tendency and editorial fatigue that clinch Marcan priority, at least in my thinking so far. If Vork is correct about the chiasms, such evidence would fall under redactional tendency. But, as you have seen, I have my doubts about all that.

For what it is worth, I find at least some primitive material in all three synoptics, and in John too. I also find what I would regard as later material in all the gospels. But the primitivity of material is pretty much irrelevant to the case for literary dependence. One can write later with better traditions or earlier with worse.

Just my three cents.

Ben.

Yuri Kuchinsky

Everybody who gives up on 2ST deserves some respect AFAIAC.

It's that massive herd of brainless 2ST drones that I find quite pathetic...

Yes, you've got a point there, I suppose... It is clear that, for the editor of Mk, Mk 1:34 would not have stood in isolation either from what was happening just before in Mk 1:23-26, or from Mk 3:11b. So these additional influences tend to complicate the analysis of Mk 1:34.

Well, with the evidence examined so far, perhaps so... But I also have some additional evidence, as mentioned before. This is the Bezae version of Mk 1:32-34. This is one more item for Mk being based on Lk here IMHO, and I'll post about this soon.

It _can_ be treated as a separate issue, but I wonder how far you can go down this road before the evidence may accumulate to such a point where quantity will have to transform itself into quality, so to speak... At some point, you may come to the conclusion (as I did eventually) that there's actually very little in Mk that is early, other than its short form.

Yeah!

Yes, Luke's intro tells us this plainly, but the question is, Who really wrote the intro to our canonical Lk and when?

After all, it's quite plain that the first two chapters of Lk didn't really belong to the original Lk. So if some later editors added the whole two chapters at the beginning of Lk, why should we necessarily assume that they didn't also add anything to the intro?

In fact, I'm quite certain that the intro to our canonical Lk had been padded up at some later point... The whole thing sounds rather literary and conventional -- such features are just the sorts of things that would be added by a later editor.

"Redactional tendency" tells me nothing... "Editorial fatigue", from what I know, is not much.

Hear, hear!

Yes! But some of them have more "later material" than others...

Thanks for your three cents. Actually, it may be more like $3...

BTW, are you familiar with this article I wrote?

(Dec 22, 2004)
The Hebrew Matthew and Luke: an Important Key to the Synoptic Problem
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=109985

This is perhaps the single best proof that Mt depends on Lk. The sheer amount of evidence that is backing this thesis up is simply overwhelming.

And here's a follow up,

(Feb 7, 2005)
I found a mistake in Howard! (Hebrew Mt & Lk)
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=114837

So these are the sorts of things that refute Farrer conclusively.

Best regards,

Yuri.

Ben C Smith

I shall look forward to it.

Maybe, maybe not. I am nowhere near a definitive answer to the synoptic problem.

The first two chapters of Luke are a question, no doubt. But I have a hard time imagining them being written by somebody other than the author of the rest of the book. A first edition without them and a second edition with them would not be farfetched, but again I am undecided as yet.

Or just the sort of thing an author with historical pretensions would write.

Yes, the term is vague. I wish I could come up with a better one. But I am referring to the sorts of observations that make editing sources seem capricious and arbitrary in one direction but natural in the other.

I take it the Goodacre article fails to impress you.

I have read something from your site about Howard and Shem Tov, but am not certain if those are the same thing or not.

I guess I am just very skeptical about using medieval documents to solve the synoptic problem.

In this case, the key evidence appears to be that a document named after Matthew happens to have a plethora of Lucan parallels. Fair enough. But why does this have to mean that Luke was the first gospel? Why could Shem Tov not be a Hebrew conflation similar to the gospel of the Ebionites that Epiphanius discusses? I take that document to be secondary, yet it bears the name of Matthew and at the same time has a lot of distinctly Lucan parallels.

Cheers.

Ben.

Yuri Kuchinsky

Hi, Ben,

Well, it's good to know that your mind is not all locked up and sealed in regard to this matter.

That's for sure... Have you heard that the Jesus Seminar
actually voted overwhelmingly that the first two chapters of Luke probably originally did not belong to the gospel?

In my view, there was no single 'author of Lk'. It was probably a product of the community. But, yes, the first two chapters may well have been produced by the same community.

See above about the Jesus Seminar vote.

Or maybe it was a later editor who had the historical pretensions...

This needs to be discussed separately.

Not necessarily... I've read Goodacre article long ago and, as I recall, he seems to be making a good case for a couple of places where Mk is early. And I can certainly live with this.

But I also have a few hundred passages where Mk is definitely late.

You see, from my perspective, it's the accumulated weight of evidence that really counts. Just showing a couple of passages to the contrary isn't much.

Because I freely accept that each of the 3 Synoptics does contain some early material.

This new material probably isn't even on my site yet. (My website hasn't been updated for a while, sorry.)

Are you aware that, as we have it currently, the Old Testament is a medieval document?

Why bother reading it then? :Cheeky:

Sorry, but this excuse you're offering now is very weak.

You should really try and inform yourself about Howard's Hebrew Matthew. Please read the Anchor Bible Dictionary article about it, to start with...

It is NOT "a document named after Matthew". It is actually a full text of Matthew's Gospel.

It is not a "conflation". Before I pointed out all those Lukan parallels in the Hebrew Matthew, nobody was even aware of them before (as any sort of a significant feature of HMt). And, yes, this includes Howard himself.

Ben, please learn more about the Hebrew Matthew. You're really disappointing me now...

What you're showing is really a certain kind of bias against "medieval documents". But are you aware of the fact that just about EVERY work of classical literature survives today only as a "medieval document"? So should we throw them all away then? And the Hebrew Bible too, together with them?

Sorry, but this sort of a bias is really inexcusable.

And you should also keep in mind all those massive parallels between Hebrew Matthew and the ancient Aramaic Matthew. So this is a "medieval document" for you...

Regards,

Yuri.

JoeWallack

JW:
For Christ's sake Yuri, you sound like a Liar For Jesus here. You take the agreement between "Matthew" and "Luke" of the omission of "And the whole city was gathered together about the door" as evidence of a Later "Mark" yet you also take the agreement between "Luke" and "Mark" as to Jesus telling the demons to dummy up as evidence of a Later "Mark". And this is presumably one of your best proofs for Not "Mark" priority (not to mention you have nearby textual evidence of "Matthew/Luke" assimiliation for both)! You also have the chiasm (Vork). You're wasting all your language ability trying to support pre-conceived conclusions. Look at Kirby's analysis of the Synoptic Problem. Consider ALL the evidence. Please.

There's a reasonable explanation for the omission by "Matthew"/"Luke" already explained to you. "And the whole city was gathered together about the door" has the smell of fiction. Why would everyone follow here a Jesus, who was rejected by "The Jews", before he had done his thang? Doesn't sound historical. If you are writing an Ironic Greek Tragedy though having ALL follow Jesus at the Start Contrasts nicely with having NONE follow Jesus at the End.

What you are likely seeing here are "Matthew"/"Luke" (including Editors of course) Converting Fiction ("Mark") to History.



Joseph

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

Yuri Kuchinsky

This is an insult.

If you do this again, I'll inform the moderators about your behaviour.

Correct.

Incorrect.

Incorrect.

You're wrong.

So then why are you explaining it again?

If you're trying to make any sort of a new argument here, it's not clear what it is.

Unless you apologise for this hostile posting, I will not reply to you again.

Yuri.