aa5874

But, novels contain plenty of novelistic elements, so it must be very easy to think that texts filled with plenty of novelistic elements, like the gospels, are indeed novels and not biographies.

Ben C Smith

Yes, it is very easy to think this, provided you have no interest in critically analyzing which elements are the ones that make a difference.

Ben.

aa5874

You are the one who claim that there are plenty of novelistic elements in the gospels. It must stand to reason that the more there are novelistic elements in a text that it is easier, less difficult, to think the texts are indeed novels and not biographies.

If it cannot be established that there was an historical Jesus, claiming that the gospels are GRB cannot be confirmed or has no real validity.

Refering to the gospels as GRB only presupposes that there is some history in the gospels, when in fact, a critical analysis may show such a scenario may not be really true.

dog-on

So, I take it that you have no example. You should have just said so. :wave:

dog-on

But doesn't Herodotus actually claim to be writing history, ie, 'The Histories'?

So all Amaleq now has to do is show me where Mark claims to be writing history, or provide an example of an ancient and fantastical work that is taken as history when the author makes no claims, provides no sources, etc, like Mark, that it was intended to be understood as history.

Maybe you can help him out, as I am actually curious.

Ben C Smith

Case in point:

This is false, as has been pointed out often enough. The Life of Romulus, for example, is a βιος by genre regardless of whether an historical Romulus existed.

Ben.

aa5874

Biographies are of a REAL person's life. It is not true, or in other words, false that you can have a biography of a fictional character. Fictional or mythical creatures have no real life.

There may be different versions of stories of fictional or mythical characters, but not biographies.

And once Romulus did not exist at all, there are really only versions of mythical fables of Romulus.

One clue to help in identifying that a story is not a biography, but just a novel, is when the date of death of the creature is unknown even though a huge amount of details are given about the creature.

The date of death of a real person, especially when deified, famous, or infamous would be known by the populace and would be of extreme historical value when writing biographies.

dog-on

Ben, are you saying that the though you can classify a work as a βιος, such a classification, in and of itself, is basically useless for identifying real history?

Just to make sure I understand your position.

Ben C Smith

I think you are confusing several different issues (and in several different ways). You seem to be looking for a single text that (A) offers fantastical events, (B) contains no claims of any kind to be writing history, and (C) contains no references to sources.

There are several things to sort out in this search, and the very way in which you frame the search implies to me that you need to do more research on the ancient distinctions. There are ancient biographies, for example, that contain fantastical events, and there are ancient biographies that contain no claims to be writing history (more on that below), and there are ancient biographies that offer no sources. Is there a single text (besides Mark and Matthew) that does all three things at once? Offhand, I am not certain. And, offhand, I do not see how it matters for the genre classification (though it may certainly matter for how seriously we take the work within that genre; not all poems are great poems, not all history is great history, and not all biography is great biography), for the simple reason that nobody supposes that any one of those three things is the sine qua non for any genre.

Let us take the Life of Alexander by Plutarch as an example. (A) Does it contain fantastical events? Indeed it does. In fact, the very first thing said about Alexander is that he was descended from Hercules through his father, who had spied on his wife lying with the god Ammon, who had taken the form of a serpent. (B) Does it lack a claim to be writing history? Yes; better yet, Plutarch explicitly tells us in the prologue that he is not writing history; he is writing biography. This is what leads me to suspect that you have not fully thought out the implications of these ancient genres; you keep talking about history instead of biography. (C) Does it contain references to sources? Yes, it does. Often these sources are anonymous (it is said, we are told, agreed by all). Sometimes particular sources are mentioned (Callisthenes and Cleitarchus, for example).

So is the Life of Alexander a perfect match for, say, the gospel of Mark? Of course not. There are no perfect matches for any of these texts. Each has to be taken on its own merits. And Mark, taken on its own merits, as has been argued before, would have to be classified as biography (or as nothing at all, sui generis, which I think has been aptly deflated). That does not mean it has to be a good biography or an accurate biography; it may be no more historical than the Life of Romulus.

What this means, however, is that your approach is too simplistic. You point to Jesus seeing a vision of the holy spirit and being tempted by Satan in the desert, note how early this vision comes in the text, and then proclaim:

By these criteria (fantastical event, early in the text) the Life of Alexander is a work of fiction. (You must have added the criteria of historical claim and source material later on in the conversation; nothing of those appears yet at this stage.) Obviously fantastical events early in the text do not make the text a work of fiction.

And notice that you are the one making the claim here. Only later in the debate with Amaleq13 did you start asking him to prove that Mark claimed to be writing history (which is in itself a category mistake, as I have shown). Originally your claim was that (A) fantastical events which (B) come early in the narrative are an indication of fiction. The burden is on you to show that this is so. You need to compare Mark to ancient works written in some genre implying fiction (the novel, perhaps) in order to establish that Mark was buying into that genre by placing a fantastical event early in his narrative.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

Almost. It is my position that the genre classification in itself does not mean even that the personage in question is historical (though it has to be admitted that he usually is), much less any of the events in his life.

But I would not say that the genre identification is useless for identifying real history, since the existence of the biography is evidence that somebody thought the personage really lived (it is, IOW, indirect evidence, not direct); this may be useful in distinguishing scenarios in which nobody ever thought the person existed from scenarios in which at least some did. And I think the (chronological) distance of the biography from its subject is also an important factor.

But yes, I think it is possible for an ancient βιος to be written about a person who never even existed.

Ben.