tanya

Documents?

I was not restricting my view of the evidence of Alexander's genuine human existence to written documents.


Statues created during the lifetime of Alexander:

Can you produce something like this, from the lifetime of Jesus?

If we visit a museum, today, devoted to exhibition of war planes manufactured for fighting in the second world war, and one of them has a caption that reads:
"Here is the very plane, flown by Captain Yossarian, fighting the fascists in Italy in 1943", will you believe the text, simply because it is written on a piece of paper?

aa5874

Please, it is irrelevant whether or not people invented stories about Alexander the Great because it was NOT the FALSE statements that was used to secure him as a figure of history.

Again, the existence or non-existence of Alexander the Great has no bearing whatsoever on the existence of Jesus.

The existence of Alexander the Great needs a Separate and INDEPENDENT Inquiry and the results cannot be transferred to the inquiry of the character called Jesus.

It is totally absurd and without a shred of logic to put forward the notion that stories about Alexander the Great can determine if Jesus did exist 300 YEARS later.

Please, if it is extremely difficult to show that Alexander the Great was a figure of history although his parents were documented then please say why it is going to be easy to determine the history of a character whose father was documented as a Ghost by those who supposedly Knew him and every event is total fiction or implausible???

The events about Jesus in the NT are total fiction or implausible from BIRTH to ASCENSION.

aa5874

There must be a cut-off point for people who continuously promote absurdities like LegionOnomaMoi,

We have gone through the absurd debunked nonsense about Alexander the Great.

Please, the evidence for an Historical Jesus was supposed to be FAR better than Alexander.

We were supposed to have Contemporary sources that mentioned Jesus.

The Pauline Letters were supposed to Corroborate a real human Jesus.

The Pauline writers and Jesus were supposed to have LIVED the same time.

But something went TRAGICALLY wrong.

1. The Pauline letters were Manipulated.

2. The Pauline writers NEVER claimed they Met or Saw a real human Jesus.

3. The Pauline writers WITNESSED the Resurrected Myth Jesus.

4. A Pauline writer ACTUALLY stated that he was NOT the Apostle of a Human being.

5. Letters to place Paul before c 70 CE have been deduced to be forgeries.

Please, LegionOnomaMoi, whether Alexander the Great was a Myth God or not cannot change the Pauline letters written by a supposed Contemporary.

The Pauline writer, the supposed contemporary, claimed Jesus Christ was WITNESSED as a Resurrected being and that without the resurrection there would be NO remission of Sins and No Jesus cult of Christians.

Remarkably, unlike all other Myth characters, we have a WRITER posing as a Contemporary who SWEARS by God that he WITNESSED the Resurrected Myth Jesus.

1 Corinthians 15:15 KJV We must establish a CUT-OFF point or else we wont get anywhere on BC&H. LegionOnomaMoi is just spouting ERRORS AFTER ERRORS and FALLACIES ATER FALLACIES without end.

LegionOnomaMoi

I can produce the such evidence for Zeus, Herakles, and other mythic persons. Coins, statues, frescoes, inscriptions, and similar "evidence" exist for Greco-Roman deities.

aa5874

Can you produce anything for Jesus??? That is the Genuine question.

Please, there is NOTHING for Jesus EXCEPT the shroud of Turin and 2nd century or later writings by FAKE authors.

Solo

The problem with your theory "of limited innovation" is that simply cannot predict anything. You use it to rationalize your preferred interpretation on the text(s) arguing that another interpretation would violate some imaginary law of developing literary forms. In reality, there are no such restraints, or at least you do have not have a way of proving them.


It's not popularity but the effect of the writing. Further, the fact of "historical" Jesus does not enter into the debate whether Mark was writing allegory looking like an ancient style of biography.


How about doing a little reading on the educational standards of antiquity. Your view is poorly informed. You can start here.


You do not understand the argument. What I am saying is that even in societies which have low levels of literacy there are groups which buck the trend, if not like the medieaval church, monopolize learning. So it it is plainly irrelevant and tangential to my point whether the Lollards were "a small subset" or whether the other translation to European languages followed Wycliffe.


Another deep thought.

So let us summarize our respective positions. You believe Mark is a simple work written for simple illiterate people who did not know much of anything.
I on the other hand believe it is a very smart work, written for bright cult members (and to fool outsiders), whose original purpose even at this late date is not fully understood, as it became co-opted by the later church.

They might have been the "Jewish scribal class" but the text evidently found its way out of the "privileged" orbit.

Got an older sister name Mary, by any chance ? :huh:

Best,
Jiri

LegionOnomaMoi

And were I interested in predictive models, this would be more of a problem. But we are dealing with history. It's a lot harder to construct a sound predictive model when any "just so" story can "predict" the data.

However, you aren't really accurate here. For one thing, we can test such a model of literary innovation against those found in comparable societies and individuals. I don't see how any such tests are necessary though, as it is like conducting an experiment to see if someone who can't master algebra is likely to produce a break-through in combinatorics.

Ignoring the epistemological problems with the idea of "proofs" outside of closed systems (mathematics), including science, we do have a way of testing these. We can look at literary innovations over time across cultures, including what factors tend to create greater differences between literary styles (including novel genres) and what the best predictors are for individual innovations.



Now that's something we have no way of testing. Was Mark popular because of the work, or because it was the first written account of already popular traditions, which became increasingly popular because Mark enabled their dissemination more readily?




A 50 year old book. You have some problem with the findings of the works I cited earlier?
True, those focused more on literacy than education, but I find it hard to believe that your book is somehow so superior to something like Lee's Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity as a general text on the subject that it matters. Granted, if we are talking education among women in antiquity then I'm much more limited (I can only think of one monograph offhand I've read on that subject, and a few papers). But you recall that when I cited the works I gave above, I went on to explain and answer? So we can play "cite references" all day if you want (come to think of it, as a paper I wrote as an undergrad was published, I could even cite myself if I really wanted to embarrass myself by the quality of my sophmore work in classical studies and feminism). Or you could say exactly what problem you had with what I wrote.

I understood it. It's just irrelevant, unless you are arguing that Mark was authored by a group effort. The issue with reading Mark as an innovative work isn't because such an innovation is impossible a priori, any more than was the genre of history or the novel. It's the stylistic and literary quality of Mark that makes it so vastly improbable the work was intended as some sort of new historical-religious-fiction (that and the fact that if Mark was meant to be allegory, why write a work which resembles a bad example of ancient historical/biographical narrative?)


No. Simplistic and lacking even the basic literary and sylistic competence the other gospel authors had. I believe that Mark was an attempt to string together pre-existing traditions (Jesus' sayings, actions, teachings, and so forth) which the author believed were actually the product of a real, historical person, but that the author's capacity to do this was limited. Which is why Mark reads like a simplistic stringing together of disparate traditions in an attempt to weave the type of historical narrative common in the Greco-Roman world.


I'm assuming that you've read plenty of Greek narratives (of all types) both before and after Mark. If your explanation is correct, then why does Mark's narrative lack the qualities which distinguished good narratives (regardless of genre) from bad? Many of these exist independent even of language or era (hence Dancygier's The Language of Stories: A Cognitive Approach which, unlike most other analyses of narrative as a general phenomenon, is not basically psychoanalytic post-constructionalist crap because literary theoriests needed "theory"). Flow, transitions, varied complexity, lexical variety, etc., all mark superior forms of narrative, although there is a point at which complexity (lexical and syntactic) ceases to be as important. Mark does get anywhere near that point, and Greek allows for considerably greater complexity via hyperbaton and other discontinuities than do languages which rely on word order rather than agreement.


Certainly there were non-privileged who could read. The question is how many? And what was the general state of literacy during the Roman Empire both within and outside of the Jewish milieu? For example:

"A great deal is now agreed about Roman uses of writing. It is certain that relatively few individuals possessed that broad set of skills in creating and using the texts that today we term full literacy." from "Literacy or Literacies in Rome" in Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Ancient Grece and Rome, which delves into the increase in simplistic "literacies" required of an increasingly dispersed and diverse empire.

or

"At least some level of temple or priest connection persists in every sort of early Jewish textuality. Nevertheless, as this chapter ["Synagogue, Sabbath, and Scripture: New Forms of Hellenistic Jewish Textuality and Education Beyond the Temple"] will demonstrate, we also see- by the first century C.E. at the latest- an increasing distribution of non-temble based forms of textuality in early Judaism, forms often linked with Sabbath gatherings at early Synagogues. These forms are not opposed to the temple. Indeed priests are priveleged insofar as they are present, and the Torah texts used in these contexts may well be checked against temple exemplars." from Carr's Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature.

And if the author of Mark lacked access to Greek or Roman examples of narrative, there were certainly plenty of Jewish examples (see e.g., Jewish Literature Between the Bible and the Mishnah or the edited volume The Bible and the Narrative Tradition).

The author of Mark was among the select minority in the first century of the Roman Empire whose literary skills surpassed the simple ability to sign documents or participate in the wider "literacies" (from certificates to graffiti) of the period. His work is clearly a narrative, whatever else it may be. Yet as a narrative it is poorly constructed compared not just to someone like Thucydides, but even to the other gospel authors, and certainly to just about any author of "novelist biography", "novel", or any other narrative type. And only by ignoring the actual structure of the text (both at the micro and macro level) and abstracting away "motifs" can we get the work to resemble some sort of allegory. Why, then, is the author incapable of doing much more than stringing sentences together with constant use of kai plus verb or adverb? Because he wanted his work to be something like "See Spot run. Spot runs fast. Run Spot Run!" ?

Grog

This doesn't make any sense at all. A "category" is an artificial way of organizing things. That's it. A "category" only exists if it is recognized that certain objects have similar characteristics. To say that a "genre" did not exist in the ancient world is nonsense. A "genre" only exists to the extent that we in the modern world recognize certain repeating features. What we know existed in the ancient world, is what we have.

Think about species in the biological sense. Biologists sometimes have trouble sorting out exactly what species an organism belongs to. That doesn't mean that the organism doesn't exist. It means that in our drive to categorize everything, we sometimes have difficulty applying artificial labels to the real world.

The rest of this is word wall mish mash, actually. It could be said much more succinctly, which would be more appropriate for a forum such as this.

Here:

1. Even the form-critics of yore, such as Bultmann, while recognizing the mythical character of the Gospels, believed there had to be an historical core as inspiration.

I would say, Why? and So?

2. The Gospel of Mark is difficult to categorize because a) there is no meter, b) he is a poor writer.

Neither of these establish a Jesus in history. You could, if you accept the argument, say that Mark is a chronicler of "oral tradition." But can you then say that the oral tradition necessarly goes back to a real earthly Jesus?

I'll bring in your last paragraph after what was really, a lot of nothing:

So you say. And yet we can find nearly every major plot point in OT writings...

LegionOnomaMoi

How is it nonsense? We have created categories of works, peoples, and religions in the ancient world which didn't exist as such at the time. The notion of "genre" is modern (see Aristotle's Poetics or Plutarch's comments about his biographies as something other than historical works). We categorize works in particular ways, and there is a rather lengthy tradition of trying to force ancient works into our schemata. But the distinctions between various types of narrative are not that clear. However, should we say "histories" didn't exist simply because the genre meant something else at the time? Or biographies?

And what we know is that clear-cut distinctions between ancient historiography and the reporting of legends and myths is baseless. This doesn't mean that ancient historians didn't attempt to record the past, simply that historiographical genres were united mainly in their use of narrative combined with a desire to report the past. However, they frequently used myth, legend, rumor, and even myth disguised as history. Nor are works which do not fit within this mold somehow less intended to describe or narrate events which had happened (like Caesar's BG).

Why would a waste my time? Biological classification used to be called "typology" until this method was seen as deficient and lacking validity. However, typology remains useful within linguistics. Neither are appropriate analogues here. As long as you want to bring in the sciences, the applications of fuzzy set theory within the social sciences would be far more fitting.


Unless you are a creationist, you are conflating categorization of human creations with those which are not. The former is significantly easier in many respects, but the comparison is pointless.

Congratulations. You've aptly summarized points I didn't make and missed important ones.

I can say that this seems to be more plausible than any other explanation of our evidence, which is about as much as one can ever say of the past.




Yes, and we can find every major plot in Shakespeare as well. It's very easy to find parallel motifs, especially when you are searching through a literary tradition which developed over centuries and represents an enormous collection. The cherry-picking the early christians used is no different from that of most mythicist accounts: search through a collection or work which is large enough, and you can find all the parallels your heart desires. Of course, such cut and paste jobs miss everything of import.

aa5874

What a joke!!! Tell us of the parallels of Alexander the Great and Jesus. Can you remember the parallels??? You spent some time talking about the parallels between Alexander the Great and Jesus.

And what about the parallels between Haile Selassie and Jesus??

Please, you need to take a time out. You are going in circles.