Didymus

Whom do you have in mind??

Instead of playing the innuendo game, why don't you name names and confront those misguided posters head on?

Didymus

Spenser

I wade carefully into discussion here because I am a laymen, but it seems in the discussion between Vork and Ramsey that the latter seems to think that the gospels mere existence is enough to use them as a historical basis for HJ. He's been asked repeatedly for a methodology and keeps claiming to present one but it just seems it goes back to a HJ best suits what the gospels say happened.

I am I reading this wrong?

jjramsey

I think you are confusing "literal" with "accurate." My point was that the natural reading of the Gospels is to interpret them as saying that certain events happened in the first century. For example, Mark is saying in verses 5:1-13 that Jesus really exorcised a man in the vicinity of Gerasa and sent the demons from him into pigs who dove into a nearby lake and committed suey-cide. Now, we know that this is bunk because Gerasa is nowhere near a lake. Mark, however, is nonetheless saying this and expects his audience to believe it.

Doug Shaver

I don't think that is a necessary assumption.

Did Kahlil Gibran expect his readers to believe that a prophet named Almustafa gave a bunch of minisermons to the people of Orphalese while he was waiting for a ship to take him back to his homeland? If you don't think so, why not?

Amaleq13

No, I'm questioning your claim that reading the stories literally "comes so naturally". As you acknowledge, reading the story of the exorcism in Gerasa literally is only natural if we assume that both the author and his readers were equally ignorant of or equally willing to ignore the geographically problematic aspects of the story.

If we do not make that assumption, an allegorical reading seems just as, if not more, "natural".

That Mark's author expected his audience to accept it holds true if we understand it as an allegory.

Upon what basis do you found your assumption that both the author and his audience were ignorant of the geographical problems of the story?

Didymus

Seems like a lot of quibbling over some pretty undefined territory.

I think both assumptions are fair, but a willingness to ignore the geographical problems really amounts to a willingness to accept the story as allegorical.

Both Mark and his intended readership were probably "equally ignorant." It seems to be pretty well established that both he and his audience lived in the Diaspora. I don't think we have much information about how frequently Jewish merchants traveled between, say Alexandria and Jerusalem or Damascus and Sepphoris, but regardless, they would have stuck to established routes and probably had only a spotty knowledge of Judean geography. And - I may be wrong about this - most Jewish families living in the Diaspora had been there for centuries. Of course, even recent arrivals would be unlikely to know the proximity of Garasa to a body of water.

My reading is that the Christian (Nazarean?) sect gave up on Jews living in Palestine before the middle of the first century. Later, when Jesus was historicized, Christian missionaries from the Diaspora would have been viewed as carpetbaggers attempting to push a phoney baloney history that was known by the locals to have been false. (This rejection was attributed to Jewish perfidy and hardheartedness, of course.) Until the fabulous events in the Christians' pseudo-historical account had receded sufficiently into the past, Christians would have avoided Jerusalem like the plague. Acts notwithstanding, I don't think there's any believable evidence of significant Christian activity in Judea during the 2nd century, but the Diaspora was a beehive.

Under those circumstances, Mark, an evangelist writing in the Diaspora in the very late first century, would have had little to lose by portraying geographical nonsense regarding Judea as fact. For his audience, also in the Diaspora, the geography needed only to sound plausible. The miracle was what mattered; what did he or they know or care about geography?

Didymus

jjramsey

I'd say we have some evidence that readers who knew there was a geography problem were not willing to ignore it. In the parallel account in Matthew, Gerasa is "corrected" by replacing it with Gadara, which is somewhat closer to water, although still dodgy geography. In other manuscripts, Gerasa is replaced with Gergasa, which according to Origen, was "an old town in the neighbourhood of the lake now called Tiberias, and on the edge of it [...] a steep place abutting on the lake." Note that Origen pointed this out in response to objections about Gerasa not being near water. Obviously, people who found the geographic problems were bothered by them, which indicates that they took the account literally.

Didymus

Well, we think we know how it was received by the author of Matthew. And we think we know how the other early church fathers received it, assuming we can rely on Eusebius. But do they really represent the "broader Christian community"? I don't think we can rely on their responses to inform us about how it was received by semi-educated gentiles in the Diaspora and some Jewish converts. (I suspect there were very few of the latter by the end of the first century.)

(Although I admit to being a fan, I'm actually not convinced about Doherty's midrash theory. Despite the appropriation of Hebrew scripture, the gospels, the entire theology - even the authors, for that matter - seem more Hellenistic that Jewish. It seems unlikely that the form would stand in such opposition to the content.)

IMHO, historical accuracy would matter more to Jews than to gentiles. After all, Jewish beliefs were grounded in history, both real and invented. That concern - not Jewish hardheartedness - accounts for the failure of Christianity to have any impact on Judea until well into the third century. On the other hand, things were different in the Diaspora. There was no way to fact-check the stories, and ordinary gentiles didn't care about facts anyway when it came to religion. The mystery religions and the various popular gentile cults had no pretense of a historical foundation; in fact, they weren't based on very much at all except the vissisitudes of the human character. To the average pagan, a good story was a good story; whether it was historical fact or a tale of the supernatural was beside the point.

Seems like the gospels had something for the masses and something for the classes.

They appear to have written, not as historical accounts, not as allegories, but as both. They served as dramatized homeletics with great appeal to uneducated gentiles, and as theological histories (or history-based theology) for the educated elite, among whom there was growing skepticism about the fantastical popular cults like Mithraism and the Mysteries.

Didymus

Amaleq13

Not much of a correction and not necessarily Mark's original audience = not much support for the claim. It seems just as possible that Matthew's author simply replaced the name with one that was more familiar to himself and his readers.

I would hope by now you would recognize that "obviously" is inappropriate for such speculative mind-reading. Your conclusion here is, IMO, nowhere near as strong as for Matthew's defense of the empty tomb. The author might have been bothered and he might have taken the story as literal though inaccurate but it is far from obvious that this is true.

jjramsey

Right, and the name that Matthew replaced it with just happened to be nearer to water.

I think that you missed my point somewhat. I was not saying that Mark himself was aware of the geographical problems. I'm saying that if Mark was not meant to be read literally, there would have been no reason for the readers of his work who did see the geographical problems to have cared about them--but they did.

They probably are at least roughly representative, since they (at least the church fathers) are leaders in the Christian community, and they are, at least to some extent, addressing their concerns.

But there doesn't seem to be evidence for this contention. Of course, the Gospels often were interpreted allegorically; for example, some Gnostics read Luke's statement that Jesus' started his ministry at age thirty as an indication that there were 30 aeons. The problem is that such interpretations look like readings into the text, rather that something the author intended.