TedM

I was contrasting Mark's portrayal of Jesus with Paul's. Mark portrays Jesus as having a powerful ministry of teaching and miracles on earth. Paul portrays him primarily as the savior who ushered in the kingdom of god which included the Gentiles and the concept of salvation through faith. He focused on Jesus' death and crucifixion and its meaning as revealed (to him) in the OT. The emphasis is very different for both. If Paul portrayed a Jesus who didn't teach and perform miracles on earth as the mythicists say, I hold that this would have been a major point of discussion because people--by their very nature--don't overlook such differences. It's fairly obvious to me, but I could be wrong.

ted

freigeister

Hill himself acknowledges the problematic nature of applying the term "fiction" to ancient Jewish writings, arguing that "fiction and history, and therefore novel and history, be seen on a spectrum" (p.12). In other words, ancient Jewish writings were not written as fiction. That critics today assign them to that category is a stark example of anachronistic genre assignment.


I have given you the source for my hermeneutic methodology: Spinoza. What is the source for your exclusively comparative methodology?

Amaleq13

Hill's comment seems reasonable to me but your paraphrase does not. The comment does not deny the existence of ancient Jewish fiction.

What "critics"? As far as I can tell, these are scholars of literature exploring similarities in writing genre across cultures. Unless you have a source that makes an explicit argument, it would appear you have no basis for your assertion that ancient Jews never wrote fiction.

freigeister

I suggest that you read Hill's introduction where he discusses fiction (p. 9-13). The entire thing is an attempt to communicate that the ancients generally had no concept of fiction, that it was "treated more as a theoretical possibility than a reality", that "the distinction of fiction and non-fiction is perhaps more of a problem for modern readers and scholars than it was for the ancients, and this is probably the case because prose fiction is now an accepted and honored category." That is to say that fiction was not a category to the ancients. And all this comes from somebody defending the idea of ancient fiction.

Ben C Smith

Well, a pretty good criterion of earlier tradition. I am not certain that we can tell exactly how early the item is merely from the apparent embarrassment.

My notions in this arena are still in flux, but I find myself sympathizing with what Vork has to say about, for instance, the baptism of Jesus. Is Mark embarrassed about Jesus undergoing a baptism for the remission of sins? We can see it in Matthew for certain, perhaps in Luke, and also in John, and certainly in the Jewish gospels, but Mark does not appear to flinch. And, if his Christology was basically a form of adoptionism (a view that tempts me indeed, but I am as yet undecided), then we would not necessarily even expect him to be embarrassed about a sinful Jesus, at least not before the baptism.

And I have read some of his objections based on Frodo and such. It would seem that genre decisions are of the utmost importance in that regard. I think that such decisions must precede decisions made on individual items within the text.

Yes. Your how much is plausibly pre-Marcan is my relative antiquity. And your how much plausibly derives from Jesus is my absolute originality. I agree. This distinction is, I think, crucial to method.

I do think that embarrassment can sometimes lead to decisions of historicity in conjunction with other observations.

But only, IMHO, after we have decided that the author is indeed making historical claims. If Vork is correct about Mark, then Mark is making no such claim from the outset, and we probably should not look for historicity except of the incidental variety (like reading a Victorian romance to gain insight into Victorian England). At present I think that Vork is wrong about the genre of Mark.

I also, as I indicate in my other posts, find myself thinking that Vork is completely wrong to lean so heavily on OT parallelism as an indicator of invention.

What do you think?

Ben C Smith

Vorkosigan, perhaps you could clarify in this regard whether you regard embarrassment as incapable even of pointing to earlier tradition or think it useful for that but simply find no embarrassment anywhere in Mark.

(If this sidetracks the discussion on parallelism, perhaps another thread.)

Amaleq13

The literary categories of ancient Jews seems entirely irrelevant. The claim above does not argue or even suggest that ancient Jews never wrote stories which we would categorize as fiction. IOW, it does not suggest that they never wrote stories that had no basis in any actual knowledge of "how things really happened" (ie what we would categorize as history) but were, instead, the creation of the imagination of the author.

Vorkosigan

Why would he not fail? He's a human being, isn't he? Mark presents Jesus as a human being who has been adopted as son of god by the descent of the spirit of god into him. Why would such a person be omnipotent? Mark presents other examples of Jesus' failure, such as the failure of the first attempt to cure the Gerasene Demoniac. Mark's presentation of Jesus is consistent -- strong, but not omnipotent.

Why? Mark's very public messiah DOES perform miracles, but some miracles are harder than others. He's quite clear on that. Mark's Jesus is a limited human augmented by the power of god, not a god.

And are you sure that 12:35-7 represents a defense of a David descent? What if Jesus is being ironic? Your claims depend on interpreting the text in a certain way.....

• 35: And as Jesus taught in the temple, he said, "How can the scribes say that the Christ is the son of David? 36: David himself, inspired by the Holy Spirit, declared, `The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, till I put thy enemies under thy feet.' 37: David himself calls him Lord; so how is he his son?" And the great throng heard him gladly.(RSV)

Tolbert (1989, p249) interprets this as Jesus clarifying his status: it is fine to say Jesus' is David's son, so long as one remembers that he is also his lord. The witty chreia-like structure of the opening verses is also evident. The Messiah is David's son? But how can that be, when David himself calls him Lord?

See the problem? Sure, on one interpretation of the how the verse should be read, it might be embarrassing. But there are plenty of others.

<shrug> But what the content is can be, as we have seen, a matter of interpretation. Further, your idea of what the text is also affects your interpretation of the content. If you think Mark is writing history, you might regard the Naked Young Man Who Flees as a real person. If you think Mark is writing a baptismal document,, you might interpret him as the a baptismal initiate, or reference to such. There's a feedback loop between interpretation and content, not a simple unidirectional relationship.

Definitely not. The Papias reference is either a lie or a later forgery. The writer's elaborate structures, his extensive and deep use of conventions of Greek fiction, his extensive and deep use of OT paralleling at every level, his mastery of irony and satire, his negative view of the disciples, and his dependence on Paul, all indicate that Mark is not a Petrine Gospel. Most likely the reference was invented to Petrinize Mark.

Vorkosigan

GakuseiDon

I can understand the idea of Mark 'data mining' the OT to look for information about the Messiah, in order to construct his Gospel. But why would he need to look outside Messianic passages? What would drive him to look at non-Messianic passages, and even Hellenistic/Roman ones, in the first place?

I'm not arguing necessarily that you're wrong, just trying to understand the ramifications. Mark using Messianic passages to construct events in Jesus life, I understand. But it seems that any reasons for non-Messianic parallels can only be circular , e.g. "Mark must have included that information because it was important" and "It must have been important because Mark included it".

Here is one of the parallels you give early in Mark: GMark 2:1-12........2 Kings 1:2-17. What was there in 2 Kings 1:2-17 that made GMark want to use it for the life of the Messiah? It doesn't appear to be Messiah-related. What made Mark think "I better model part of Jesus's life after THAT particular passage in 2 Kings"?

Vorkosigan

Would we learn this? Let's imagine we never knew about it AND the siege was missing from archaeology and concurrent texts as well. What historical data could we get from that? Maybe there was a siege. But maybe it was just a local battle, skirmish, or bombardment that Luke has inflated into a whole siege. Or maybe look invented the siege for theological reasons. We'd never know.

That's good! You'll be wearing our skeptic t-shirt yet.

No, because as I make clear, where outside vectors exist all negative criteria carry less weight, or no weight at all. The negative criteria are all less problematic than the positive, because they do not have any axiomatic assumptions about the nature of the text built into them. They work on any text.

No, as a matter of methodology, it must come after. There 's no way you can make a decision on what Mark is prior to analyzing it. Perhaps our real disagreement is here.

Weeden I like a lot, but he seems to have become obsessed with the idea that Mark was written to the villages of Caesarea Philippi and won't let it go and thus it is difficult to talk with him, especially when you're a mythicist who thinks Mark is second century! LOL. I corresponded with him briefly. He's so perceptive and writes so strongly, I really enjoy interacting with his work. Thanks for the compliment, BTW...

Because there are many, many other story elements of Greek fiction in Mark, and construction techniques as well. I agree on the Maccabee references, of course, but they are a middle level parallel. Basically I am building a model of "What was the writer of Mark thinking when he wrote _____?" and so identifying what conventions he is carrying around in his head is really important. Why is Mark a travel narrative surmounted by a city entry, a trial before the local potentate, a judicial execution, death, rising, and empty tomb? Because those are the way Greek romances are written......

It's the author, because the Entry into Jerusalem is a doublet of the opening of Mark 14 that also tracks the Elijah-Elisha story he has been using through his narrative.

I have no in principle objection to this position. Weeden's new book demonstrates at least one story in Josephus constructed off of the OT, and there appear to be others. Atwill has showed that the history in Josephus has been redated to conform to the OT and in at least case is satirical and malicious. It would not suprise me if there were many things constructed off the OT in Josephus; in fact, it would not surprise me if the whole thing was fiction. I have no trust of Josephus as a historian at all any more.

But Ben, I don't know how to deal with your argument here. The "example" you've given grossly misconstrues how paralleling in Mark works -- it is NOTHING like my standards. First, Mark usually signals where he gets a story from through the use of direction citation. Second, creation of events by paralleling in Mark never uses different tales in the slipshod and ad hoc manner you show above. Rather, a Markan pericope almost always has a single OT tale behind it. For example, Mark 1:16-20 has only one tale framing it, the Calling of Elisha. Similarly, the overall story frame of the Temple Ruckus is controlled by the Elijah-Elisha cycle. Mark does not connect disparate parts of the OT together in the way that you have described above. Even those who interpolated stories, such as the Death of JBap in Mark 6 also worked that way, with the story that follows the Esther tale and the citation of Esther almost word for word from the Greek. Daniel 6 is the overall story frame from the trial of Jesus (Dan 6 is apparently cited in Mark 14).

I thank you for this example, which I shall put on my website as a good example of "counter-arguments" that fail to counter the argument.

Want to feel the abyss open beneath you? Go ahead and try and explain why not. There's little reason to trust Josephus -- who after all is a Roman propagandist and employee of the Flavians -- and nothing would be less surprising than to find out that he has made it all up. But I plan to tackle Josephus after I retire. That is an ocean too big for me to swim in at the moment.

Sure.

It's not! "Why is it not impossible.....?" is not a positive argument but an emotional ejactulation one could make about any similar piece of fiction. Why is it impossible that The Eagle has Landed or Where Eagles Dare is not true? Since that entry is in fact ripped off from the OT, Maccabees, and the conventions of Hellenistic fiction, and more deeply, Hellenistic religion, why should I accept that it is history? The fact is that those "capable scholars" you refer to do not possess any reliable and accepted methodology for recovering history from Mark.

If Christianity did not insist that this was history, would anyone accept it as history?

Here was my actual conclusion as opposed to how you have mischaracterized it:

• The presence of the supernatural juxtaposed with OT creation at both the level of detail and of the plot structure, along with the presence of Mark literary creation (the doublet of v1-6), and the conventionality of the entry in Greco-Roman culture indicate that there is no support for historicity in this pericope.

In fact I cite -

1. presence of the supernatural
2. OT creation of details
3. OT structuring of plot
4. literary creation -- scene is a doublet of scene in Mark 14
5. city entry was a convention in Greco-Roman culture

Note that I do not include (6) entry into the city by divine-like person greeted by cheering crowds is a convention in Greek fiction. That is simply one more strike against this story that I have withheld for the interpretation.

Because faith in "it's history!" is so strong, I have to list many, many things in order to establish that there is "no support for historicity" -- note that I have taken the weaker position (history is not supported) not the stronger one (there's no history). That's the difference between what I believe and what I can prove. If this were any other document, unsupported by vested interests, it would have been dismissed as myth a long time ago. No one maintains that the Life of Aesop, which resembles Mark in many ways, is history because no one is committed to the historicity of the details as a religious belief.

How? Obviously you could not have been convinced by rational argument, since there is none.

OK....

It will be interesting to see what you do then, since absent a serious and robust model of human cognition, criteria are all we have.

I agree. And that position is compatible with Mark's narrative being fiction or history.

Certainly not! The two invasions were wildly different, except in the very general level of "Invaded Russia, was defeated". Find one who can fit that description.

My point is not B, as the parallels are a strike against the story. I'll keep saying it until I am blue in the face -- they are just one very powerful strike against the story, especially where the story details can be paralleled one-to-one by the OT, and where the writer cites the OT.

Vorkosigan