Solitary Man

Where did I make that claim?

David

Here

-No mention of playing devil's advocate.

-No qualifiers like maybe or perhaps (except in reference to the meaning of the non literal passage).

-a response to xaxxat asking (rhetorically) whether Tacitus meant his audience to take certain speeches as literally true.

-Two previous attempts at asking you, the first ignored, the second answered with a second cryptic reference to Tacitus being non literal.

-And now, after I ask a third time, you ask where you made the claim which, of course, carries with it the implication that you didn't.

Is that about where we are?

If you had posted this after my first attempt at asking I might have been inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt, but as it stands now, I think the thread speaks for itself.

Solitary Man

I see nowhere where I actually claimed that Mark meant it to be taken literally. I asked if it would be fraud if Mark didn't mean it to be taken literally? Beats me when asking a question amounted to making a statement.

Yes. The thread speaks a great amount of your inability to correctly interpret someone's position.

dog-on

Simply following precedent, my friend.

I put on my Goggles of Prognostication and determined an unknown author's inner-most intentions...

...and btw, he's kinda pissed about the additions... :wave:

David

Actually, my biggest mistake seems to be in assuming that you actually know this material. The raising of Lazarus.....Mark?

nevermind,

.....as I said, this thread speaks for itself.

David

I'd like to "bump" this, so to speak, in the hopes that the original participants are interested in continuing. This was becoming a very interesting (and civil) exchange.

Solitary Man

Sigh.

First, I was asking a question. If you understood the context, which apparently you cannot do, I asked aa5874 a very specific question - if the author did not intend for it to be taken literally, is it fraud. It doesn't matter what the "it" is. My example with Tacitus exemplified that perfectly. Tacitus placed speeches into the mouths of foreign leaders, etc. These speeches never happened. Did Tacitus commit fraud? No where does Tacitus explicitly say that he is placing these speeches. We recognize a literary device.

With the gospels, we have a number of impossible events. There are a few explanations for them that don't, like Tacitus, involve fraud:

a) they were devices to portray something else;
b) they actually happened but without the miraculous, and later became embellished;
c) there was some early confusion and it entered the tradition.

Which is more likely? If you were to read The New Moses: A Matthean Typology (or via: amazon.co.uk), you would begin to understand how an author like Matthew constructed much of his gospel to purposely imitate the Moses story. Why would he do this? Why would Vergil imitate Homer? Precedence. Imitation like this allows the readers - ancient readers, mind you, not some snobby nosed punk who couldn't pick up the gospel in a literal translation, much less the original Greek! - to associate the two stories. Using Mosaic typology allows Matthew to present Jesus theologically as a new Moses.

Perhaps responding specifically to Lazarus wasn't wise - I'm not a Johannine scholar, nor do I pretend to be. But aa5874 was making a statement about all the gospel writers using that one passage in particular. I myself was not remarking specifically on the Lazarus incident as the one and only thing that should not be taken literal. I would have thought from context, again, that would have been obvious. Did Mark mean for his gospel to be taken literally? Did Matthew mean for his gospel to be taken literally? Did Luke mean for his gospel to be taken literally? Did John, with his Lazarus story, mean for his gospel to be taken literally? Out of the four, I can only say with some assurance that Luke in fact meant it to be that way. I don't see anything in Mark or Matthew to point in that direction, and if as some claim that the little snippet about being a witness is John isn't authentic, or isn't to be taken literally, then John too becomes closer to the philosophers which preceded him.

There, now can you stop being so self-righteous and indignant?

Roger Pearse

We do know that this *is* a standard ancient literary device, tho, because Thucydides tells us that he is doing so in his history, if I recall correctly; likewise Pompeius Trogus in his now lost but epitomised history criticises Livy for doing so too much. I'm afraid I do not have references or quotes, but offer these scraps of memory in case they may be useful.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Hypatia of Academia

Greetings:

This thread appears to have taken a turn, but as a NT scholar (working on my PhD), I thought I would throw in my proverbial two cents.

I was not raised in a Christian home, I am not currently a Christian and I shall never be a Christian. Perhaps my worldview is skewed (I'm a student at Claremont), but I know several non-Christian students in my program (atheists, pagans, agnostics, etc.). While I am not an atheist, I do appreciate and respect the work of Doherty, Carrier, Kirby and others.

Yes, there are a lot of Christians in this field. Yes, SBL is overrun with anti-academic Evangelical hacks. Yes, most people in my field won't even entertain the idea that there was no HJ. All of these factors are crippling NT scholarship and I sincerely hope that a non-religious approach can help to change that.




~Hypatia~

mens_sana

Thucydides explained that he had "put into the mouth of each speaker the sentiments appropriate for the occasion, expressed as I thought he would be likely to express them, while at the same time I endeavored, as nearly as I could, to give the general purport of what was actually said" (History, 1.20.1).

This same method of writing "history" was still being practiced centuries later by Lucian of Samosata (115-200 CE), How To Write History 58: "If some one has to be brought in to give a speech, above all let his language suit his person and his subject ... It is then, however, that you can exercise your rhetoric and show your eloquence."

The authors of the gospels wrote their "theological literature" in this tradition.