spin

This sounds like mumbo-jumbo to make you feel happy in a more critical world. So far, the critical evaluation I have seen has not been based on historical evidence. No-one has shown how you can jump ship from narrative to reality with Jesus.

You didn't answer Minimalist's question: "What evidence?" How do you go from narrative to reality? The task requires some tangible evidence, not this pussyfooting around:

I happen to think those documents can be critically evaluated using careful criteria, so that some valid evidence can be extracted

You can "critically evaluate" a text as much as you like, but, without an outside way in, such as contemporary support, it will always just be text. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.


spin

spin

Is it plausible that Paul and his converts didn't need a real live historical Jesus in order for them to believe?


spin

spamandham

Open a NT and start reading Mark. You will see that (almost?) every section has textual references to the OT (in case you didn't know, that's what all the footnotes at the bottom of every page of the NT are all about). Is it possible that these textual references developed from oral tradition? Sure, but is that a simple hypothesis? The Jewish tradition is textual, not oral, that's why we have the ancient Jewish texts in the first place.

There's nothing in Mark to indicate an oral tradition, and plenty within it to indicate the derivation from texts instead (as well as external arguments based on what we know about 1st century Judaism). This hypothesis is also consistent with the scholarly assessment of the genre, whereas oral tradition is not.

Why are you proposing oral tradition, when it doesn't fit the evidence, and there is no reason to suspect it in the first place?

True, but he's still the most recent among the mainstream in regard to genre. There's a reason his work has not been overturned.

...well, that is what "What is a Gospel" is all about of course.

That's fine, but you need to explain why from an objective perspective. You need to explain why you don't think his categorization is valid, in a way that stands up to scrutiny the way his work has.

Agreed. But, if you agree with Talbert's assesment of genre, it does mean that there is no reason to presume the gospels were intended as historical records. Since recording history is not their purpos, to the extent they do record any history, it's happenstance.

It's a short book as far as NT studies go.

spamandham

Mainstream historians would demand that you understand the intents of the author before proceeding with critical evaluation.

If you don't know the author's intents and can not reasonbly infer it from the evidence, then the best you can do is to use the text to analyze the culture and ideas that were present at the time, because all genre's reflect the culture in which thay are written, and no text is born in a vaccum.

Ben C Smith

A word or two about Talbert and his place in scholarship may be in order here.

It was the work of Talbert and a few others like him that eventually led to the current near-consensus that the gospels form a subgenre of ancient biography, or βιος. The scholar who finally, actually tipped the scales on this was Burridge, who wrote in the nineties.

Talbert offered principally a negative treatment of the issue, since he was responding to Bultmann, who was the main reason scholars ceased thinking of the gospels as βιοι and started to regard them as sui generis for many decades. Talbert simply started with the gospel elements Bultmann had seized upon to show that the gospels could not be βιοι, and he found legitimate examples of ancient βιοι that also featured those elements. He did not construct his own positive case for identifying the gospels as βιοι, then, but rather dismantled the case that Bultmann had made against the identification. (For example, Bultmann had argued that a biography should have a birth narrative; so Talbert found true Greco-Roman biographies that lacked one.)

This kind of argumentation is rarely enough to change a consensus on its own, but it was certainly enough to get other scholars thinking, including Burridge, who constructed his positive case under inspiration from Talbert and those few others who had bucked the consensus.

Maybe he is, but each step he takes has validity on its own merits. It is worthwhile, for example, asking how an ancient reader would read one of the gospels, and the only way for us to discern this is to compare the gospels with other ancient writings. This step entails making some kind of genre identification.

This notion self destructs. If they were doing something completely, utterly different, their original readers would have no clue how to read them. New genres do develop, of course, but they derive from older genres at some point, usually step by step; otherwise nothing would be communicated.

In this case, if Talbert and Burridge are correct, finding that the genre of the gospels is βιος helps us to determine what may be historical and what may not be.

For example, what if we had discovered that the gospels were Hellenistic novels? (Ancient βιοι, to be sure, share some features with ancient novels, but they bear a different intent in the long run.) We would then have little hope of finding much history in the elements unique to the gospels (that is, in material not reflecting the culture at large; even novels are usually true to life in many of those details, such as place names, major events, and major historical personages).

What if we had discovered that the gospels were Hellenistic histories such as Thucydides or Polybius wrote? We might then be pretty optimistic about evaluating most of the material within them.

If the gospels are βιοι, however, we walk a line between these extremes. There are elements in ancient βιοι that seem to be intentionally fictional, if you will, and there are elements that do not seem to be intentionally fictional. (Talbert does not discuss this much; his argument principally concerns the genre identification.)

An observation that one may make, for example, is that βιοι seem to deal with two very different time periods. Some of them are set in the very distant past, in the time of myth (Heracles, Moses, Romulus), while others are set in more recent history, within actual events (Apollonius, Augustus, Empedocles). The βιοι that are set in mythical times may not even concern real historical personages (did Hercules exist?). The βιοι that are set in more recent times, however, indubitably tend to contain much more real history, though of course often with an encomiastic spin. To which category would the gospels belong? This seems like a potentially profitable line of investigation, does it not?

I hope you can indeed stand him. He is a fairly important figure in gospel genre studies.

I have some quotes, BTW, from Talbert and Burridge on one of my web pages. I may someday develop this page into something more substantial, but right now it is just a holding page for isolated quotations on our topic.

Ben.

bacht

Teamonger seems intent on rescuing some historical information from the gospels. Is this really feasible?

If we work backwards from the 2nd C, analyzing the motives of Catholics and heretics, maybe we can separate later agendas from primitive writings of the 1st C such as the epistles. If everything we have dates from Marcion and later then we may have to conclude that the whole thing is a fantasy.

The "real" story could boil down to Catholic gentiles appropriating the Jewish scriptures :huh:

aa5874

But, didn't Burridge in one his books claim that it was a concensus of the 20th century that the Gospels are NOT biographies?

No Robots

As I have pointed out before, the assignment of the Gospels to the genre of Greco-Roman biography obscures their wholly Jewish nature. Burridge himself acknowledges the wholly Jewish origin of the Gospels:

Thus the literary shift from unconnected anecdotes about Jesus, which resemble rabbinic material, to composing them together in the genre of an ancient biography is not just moving from a Jewish environment to Graeco- Roman literature.--Richard A. Burridge / What are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography (Second Edition. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2004), p. 304.

Burridge is incorrect to say that the Gospels moved from Jewish literature to Greco-Roman literature. The similarity with biography is simply a matter of form:

For it must not be forgotten that the materials of the Synoptic Gospels were in existence before they assumed a written form. Literary analysis is apt to forget this obvious fact, and to proceed by literary comparison alone.--Net Bible.

The high Christology of the Gospels is not a Greco-Roman transformation of the original Jewish material, but is present in the earliest layers:

The synoptic tradition was transmitted and written down in the context of a Church which did not believe Jesus to be a mere earthly teacher. It believed him to be the Messiah: Christ, the Son of Man, the Servant of the Lord, the Son of God, the Lord — to mention only a few of the messianic epithets. This high Christology cannot be disconnected from the impression made by Jesus on his disciples, and furthermore it must have some original connection with Jesus' own view of his work, of his position, and of himself. The opinion expressed by so many scholars, that the Christology of the NT is essentially a creation of the young Church, is an intelligent thesis, but historically most improbable.--Memory and Manuscript / Birger Gerhardsson, p. 325.

The Gospels are previously inexistant ammé haaretz literature. For Burridge to claim that they belong to Greco-Roman literature is like saying that presenting The Iliad in English prose makes it English literature.

aa5874

How does Burridge confirm the Synoptics were already in existence without evidence?

Burridge's statement is completely fallacious and contradictory.

It is evidence that supports obvious facts, not imagination.

Ben C Smith

Yes, he says that this was the consensus after Bultmann but before the nineties. Essentially, a new consensus has formed since the first edition of his book came out. (Get the second edition; there is extra material explaining this shift of scholarly thinking.)

At this moment, for now at least, the Bultmannian sui generis consensus on the gospels is dead. (And no scholar can blithely assume it anymore without detailed argumentation against the emerging consensus.)

Ben.