Clivedurdle

One of the main pastimes of the Librarians at Alexandria were interpreting, translating and writing commentaries and analyses of.....Homer!

A Jewish version would be an obvious bi-product.

What would be interesting is to compare and contrast retellings of Homer for other cultures.

Mark makes a lot of sense as an Alexandrian creation.

Maybe Mark has been classified incorrectly as a religious work when actually it is a reinterpretation of Homer.

http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...erandmark.html

jon-eli

I've read his book Writings of the New Testament (or via: amazon.co.uk), so I may have gotten it from there. But I'm pretty sure I remember the discussion from a series of lectures he did for the Teaching Company, called Apostle Paul.

And I never found out that he was considered conservative and ideological until after I'd read his book. He's obviously Roman Catholic, and traditional in a sense, but none it feels like apologetics (so I don't understand why he's got such a bad rep).

His grasp of Graeco-Roman culture and Hellenistic-style rhetoric is impressive, which is what I find so endearing; he paints a very detailed context before he discusses anything. It sometimes seems like he might get along well with Robert Price.

/edit
If you go over to Google Books, you can actually read the whole section of Writings of the New Testament that discusses 1 & 2 Thessalonians. I'm not sure if it's the same discussion I'm thinking of, but it should give you an idea of whether you like his approach or not.

gentleexit

I think to be a retelling of Homer, a work needs many details of place and person. That's why I don't see any Homer in the bible tales. Not all journeys are Odysseys. Not every head-strong son is Hector.

More narrowly, could Mark be read as an Athenian tragedy? A man fatally deluded about his mission only to find "why have you abandoned me?" Maybe. But only if you see Mark as a telling of failure, of a prophet deluded. That would mark Mark as Greek, not Jewish.

As for Alexandria and Mark. He is the apostle of the Copts. They believe he went there to preach. I don't know much of their lore. Do they think he wrote his gospel there?

Clivedurdle

Coptic is a corruption of Egyptian!

And they believe they have the ark of the covenant!

Definitely worth exploring the Alexandrian Connection further.

I did not realise that Alexandria was one of the major cities, with Rome and later Constantinople and as such was very important.

Their ecological niche was in fact producing religions and Alexandria should be understood as the capital of the Greek world for almost a millennium.

Huon

"Evolution" would be more polite ...

Patriarcates of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch (325), Jerusalem, and Constantinople (381).

Roger Pearse

But Coptic isn't a corruption of evolution...

gentleexit

Out of Alexandria - Septuagint, Philo down to Origen, monks started right outside, Arius and the trouble he wrought and Athanasius whose victory was pyrrhic for his city. After his dominance, thought there stopped. Didn't they first use "pope"? I think they used an equivalent of the label first.

We overlook the copts. Christianity in the west is seen through the prism of pro or anti Rome. But while Rome was a conceptual backwater for Christianity and the religion's numbers there were still small, Alexandria and the rest of Egypt held the Christian crown. I havn't seen much evidence for a large church beyond Egypt until Constantine.

gurugeorge

Great broadcast. One thing the lady was saying that rang bells for me was about how, while the idea at first was to impose and extole Greek culture over the surrounding Egyptian, over time there was more integration.

I'd recently read Garth Fowden's book on Hermeticism, and this rang bells. He has Hermeticism as being a product of this kind of synthesis. Scholarly opinion has veered back and forth about how much Egyptian influence there actually was in Hermeticism, Fowden and others seem to say "Quite a bit, but still mostly Greek."

Also: in a way, the idea that the Library went out with a whimper rather than a bang is rather hopeful, it suggests that it may still be possible to find bits of it.

andrewcriddle

In the early forms of the tradition of Mark-in-Egypt he wrote his Gospel before going to Egypt see eg Jerome De Viris Illustribus IIUC there are late variants in which the Gospel was actually written in Egypt.

Andrew Criddle

DCHindley

On the contrary, I'd have to say that if the Jewish scriptures had not been translated into Greek then Christianity could not have arisen.

Christianity, as we know it, was a gentile reinterpretation of the "true" message contained in the Jewish scriptures. Whatever their motivations, these gentiles avidly read and studied the Greek translations of Jewish scriptures (mainly the Law and the Prophets).

It is usually assumed that they were attracted to Judaism (for whatever reasons) and were exposed to their scriptures at synagogue, and maybe this is true (with modifications), but I have seen others suggest that some gentiles were attracted to Judaism much like some modern Westerners are attracted to eastern religions (Buddhism, Taoism, Krishna Consciousness, etc) and syncretistic New Age thought in general. Some modern Westerners have gone as far as learning Sanskrit or Chinese (wrt the first category above) or ancient Aramaic (wrt some of the more bizzare New Age religions that claim to be based on "Enochic" or "Essene" thought) in order to study them intensely. It was a kind of fad, or even an obsession. There is literary evidence that Roman authorities had to periodically put the brakes on some citizen's obsession with Egyptian, Jewish and other cults.

Personally, I think that the Jewish scriptures were originally translated for the benefit of Greek speaking Jews in Alexandria more than anything, first the Law, then the Prophets, finally the Writings, and with the exception of the Law not as groups but one at a time by different folks. Still, there must surely have been a certain intellectual curiosity among some Greek speakers concerning what they actually did say. As a result, there could be some truth to the legend that the translation of the Law was formally commissioned by king Ptolemy of Egypt.

DCH