jgibson000

That's nice. But the issue is not what you think, but what Mark and his readers and the larger Jewish and Greco Roman world thought that they should be divided so exclusively.

Do you have any evidence that they did?

JG

gstafleu

Asking for primary texts is a bit of a staple on this forum. Not surprising, since its name is BC&H, and historians like texts. But when it comes to mythology--and certainly primitive mythology--we are not always dealing with history but often more with what one might call paleo-anthropology. There texts are much less of a given. One sometimes has to go to the extent of looking at current "primitive" cultures and then extrapolate back to the assumed past. Or dig up artifacts and draw conclusions from them. For example, from finds and excavations it appears that Neanderthals (200,000 BCE) had ritual burial practices, and from this it is inferred that they had some some form of religion.

Is, in your view, that whole field invalid, and do only the few bits that we can retrieve from actual texts count?

Gerard Stafleu

gstafleu

I thought there was a criterion for judging the likely historicity of an event which essentially says that if we don't see the event happening in current times (e.g. walking on water) then its historicity is dubious. I forget the name of the criterion. That is what I was referring to.

Gerard Stafleu

jgibson000

Sorry. This was not clear. And if you think that any contemporary evangelist actually heals, I suggest that you have a good look at James Randi's The Faith Healers (or via: amazon.co.uk).

JG

Ben C Smith

Of course paleoanthropology is valid; or at least it is not invalid. If that is what Solo is after, then he needs to show me the finds. Referring to anthropology (or to archaeology, since the two overlap here) is not a way out of basing arguments on primary evidence.

I refer you to the OP:

To which Jeffrey responded:

Have I missed something, or has nobody ventured to show us the primary texts (or artifacts) that would back up the specific claim that the birth narratives were derived from pagan myths about god-man saviors?

I take that back. Jeffrey Gibson and I have both ventured to point out a few primary texts that may well parallel the birth narratives. As I recall, when I suggested one of those primary texts, Judges 13, the connection was greeted rather coolly.

But, just to keep us on track, what is wrong with the following scenario?

1. Augustus is reputed to have been born of a god. This motif is not uncommon in antiquity (Alexander is given a similar birth, for example; see Plutarch, Life of Alexander).

2. The gospel tradents, right from the beginning, set up Jesus as an alternate to the Roman imperial cult. This can be shown by the rich overlap of terminology and conceptual imagery between imperial propaganda (especially Augustan) and Christian tradition (my concrete example is the Priene inscription, but there are certainly others; see Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East and Evans, Commentary on Mark 8.27-16.20).

3. Since it was customary to give your preferred savior a miraculous birth, and since Augustus was given one, the gospel tradents decided to give one to Jesus. To do so, they mined their usual materials, to wit, the Hebrew scriptures. From the LXX version of Isaiah 7.14 somebody got the idea for a virgin birth, and from Judges 13 somebody got much of the structure of the narrative. Other parts of the OT contributed features, too (the endangerment of Jesus as a child in Matthew, for example, may have been inspired by the endangerment of Moses as a child), along with very general Jewish and Greco-Roman ideas about what a fitting birth should look like.

Not that I am absolutely committing to such a scenario, but is there anything missing in it? What is so inexplicable about the birth narratives in terms of using the OT to counter imperial dogma that we would have to go looking for other parallels? (This is not an invitation to call off the search; if some ancient myth explains the narratives better than the OT and imperial propaganda, I want to know about it!)

Ben.

gstafleu

No, I don't--the odd purely psychosomatic case excepted. But just as the healings are "real" to the evangelists' audience, so a similar performance by an HJ could have been "real" to his audience.

Gerard Stafleu

Solo

You are not being fair, Ben. The healing "power" of Jesus is transferable to his disciples (Mk 3:15) - it's a secondary effect. The miraculous manifestations of Jesus (or Holy Spirit, in the Acts) are not, at least not outside the gnostic strands of the movement. I think it's perfectly justifiable to make that analytical distinction.

You are right, good catch !.....Ok with that (the allusion is to a feeding disorder, I thought it was to both sleeping and feeding, but overlooked the transition to the next story).

The miracle had already happened but only in your head. Mary Magdalene OTOH would not have received the miracle in hers until an angel talked to her early in the morning.

What miracle had already happened ? I was quoting Matthew's start of the fig tree story.

Ben, it's just stats. "Being with Jesus" meant to his early worshippers, being very busy at night. (People who don't sleep, hallucinate, their perception and cognition changes.) Even the Sanhedrin would have had to extend its office hours to capture and condemn Jesus in an all-nighter. I have no problem with that because I think Mark was writing mostly a coded allegory and I also think that Joe Wallack is right when he says Mark was often ironic.

BTW, Paul used to say 'night and day' did I labour (1 Th 2:9), 'night and day' did I pray (1 Th 3:10)...'nuktos kai hemeras'. Mark (4:27) takes up the Pauline inversion of a common Greek idiom. Haenchen assures me that LXX has almost always the day first. Any idea where that speech habit comes from ? Was there any known stylistic or cognitive point in that inversion ?

Jiri

Ben C Smith

You are right. I was thinking of Mark.

It is at this point in our typical exchanges that I begin to lose your entire train of thought.

I really have no idea. I never thought about it before.

Ben.

Solo

Ok, see how far we can go together:

1) Do you agree that Sanhedrin did not sit after sundown and on the eve of a festival ?

if yes then,

2) did Mark likely know it ?

if yes, skip to 5.

3) if Mark did not know the Jewish legal procedure he would have imagined the customs of Jewish legal procedure as parallel to the one he was familiar with (assume Roman). True or false.

if True,

4) how likely is it that Mark knew of a single session of a Roman court which lasted the whole night ?

if very, very unlikely

5) how likely is then that Mark meant the trial taking place at night allegorically,

if likely,

6) how close would you say the usage of robber (lestes) and thief (kleptes)
in the early Christian sayings,

if close,

7) then would you not find it ironic that the one whose day is known to come "as a thief in the night" gets arrested as a robber at night and tried in an imaginary night court ?

Let me know where I lost you

Jiri

Ben C Smith

Somewhere between 1 and 5. There are too many alternate possibilities at each step of the way to make this exercise, which reminds me a bit too painfully of a tax form, very meaningful.

Granted that a Sanhedrin trial at night is illegal, for example, there is still nothing automatically forbidding a secret, one-off, informal meeting being expanded into a fullblown trial by the time Mark gets hold of it.

Your step by step process simply assumes that Mark is the one in control here. That may be, but what if he got the story from tradition, and other tradents were responsible for the shape of the account?

As for the connection between the thief in the night and coming out to Jesus as if against a thief, I am of the opinion that Mark preceded Matthew and Luke. If Mark intended such a connection, why did he fail to give the saying about the thief in the night? If either Matthew or Luke intended it, why did they use different terms for the thief? I find this kind of alleged connection extraordinarily unpersuasive.

Ben.