Toto

Are the Synoptic Gospels Copy Exercises? Jesus and Anacreon by R. Joseph Hoffman

Clivedurdle

I understand one of the main purposes of the Library at Alexandria was to reinterpret Homer for the current times. The connections between Mark and Homer have been noted.

Might the gospels be made in Egypt?

neilgodfrey

This makes more sense, I think, than my earlier suggestion that anonymity was technique for introducing an innovative story with a claim to some authority in an environment resistant to innovation. I had based this on an argument by Bernard Levinson in relation to the introduction of Deuteronomy in an earlier period.

Hoffmann's suggestion comes closer to explaining the evidence as we have it: the gospels do not appear with any certainty until Irenaeus announces them with their authorial names. The only earlier suggestion of their existence is with Justin Martyr. If so, then Justin refers to them without personal names. To him they are Memoirs of Apostles.

Now Memoirs are the sorts of tasks that would be the topic of grammatical exercises. Write an account of a scene in the Iliad as if you were the character, say, Paris. Write an episode from his perspective.

I am not saying that the gospels were school-exercises. But it was a well-known technique to write stories from various perspectives, and this involved retellings with new details, modifications to known data, and removal of others.

It seems to me that at a time when a narrative of Jesus as a human was not yet developed, but was only a piece of theological doctrine, it would only be a matter of time before the demand for more details was met.

We see this at work, I believe, in Justin Martyr. He speaks of Jesus having performed miracles -- but refers to the Old Testament prophecies to prove his point. He says that the manner of Jesus' origin into the world was unknown, but can only quote, again, the OT. When he discusses the birth of Jesus from a view with some similarities to Matthew, he teasingly remains aloof from any Matthean reference and appears to be relying solely on his own interpretations of the OT prophets.

One is left wondering if whoever wrote Matthew was a companion of Justin Martyr, and had discussed the possibilities with him, then produced his own version.

By explaining the gospels as originating as "groping attempts" to flesh out a bare theological datum with a narrative, Hoffmann's explanation here makes more sense than explanations that see the gospels as having already attained an authoritative status among various communities.

If the latter had been the case, the evidence is completely lacking. It would even appear that Justin and Irenaeus went to extraordinary pains to hide such a "fact".

Clivedurdle

Has it not been proposed that the koran might be a school book?

Would it not be terrifying if our main holy books were originally school exercises?

Roger Pearse

Perhaps American scholars of the 19th century were lacking in this area; I wouldn't know. It can hardly be a valid statement elsewhere. Familiarity with classical civilisation was so much a given for all education in the period that, to enter Oxford or Cambridge, it was a requirement to demonstrate proficiency in Latin and Greek; even if you were reading Chemistry. That "proficiency" would mean a level of learning hardly aspired to today, unless I am much mistaken. No gentleman needed a translation.

All the best,

Roger Pearse