Celsus

Well the mere ability to write in ancient times suggests formal training. However, good Greek or bad Greek can be explained away quite easily. One need only look at Jamaican dancehall or Scandinavian metal (musical genres, to the musical philistines :P) to see that their English is plainly terrible (in the former it is at least intentional), but their songs and the structure of their songs is perfectly acceptable. Languages that become the lingua franca of a large area tend to be subverted at the fringes. There are more pidgin forms of English worldwide today than there are languages in Western Europe (and I include Yankspeak in those numbers ).

And no, I'm not a genius. Il y a un truc.

Joel

Vorkosigan

Here's a basic intro paper. First go here; for some reason you can't directly to it through the link.

http://www.chafer.edu/journal/back_issues.html

Then click on the paper on chiasms in Vol 9, 2 Fll 2003, at the bottom of the page. From it:

• "A third major factor is the reality that ancient Greek thinkers “were trained throughout their school years to read from the center outward and from the extremities towards the center.â€?27 Beginning students of the Greek alphabet were trained to conceive of its twenty-four letters in three distinctively different ways. First, the alphabet was taught from beginning to end (from alpha to omega). After this it was also taught “backwards, from omega to alpha, and then both ways at once, alpha-omega, beta-psi . . . (to) mu-nu (in the middle).28 All of these factors are consistent with an inherent characteristic of the common medium of scrolls in the ancient world (it was probably not until the early second century A.D. that “the codex, or leaf-form of book began to come into extensive use in the Churchâ€?).29 When fully unrolled, a scroll creates a symmetrical perception of the overall content and leads to a focus on the content in its center."

I beg one pardon. I had construed from Tolbert that the ancients had a specific term for "overlapping at the edges" but that was merely Lucian's term for what was generally understood that the parts must flow into each other without a sharp break. "One thing should not only lie adjacent to the next, but be related to it and overlap at the edges" says Lucian (De Conscribenda Historia).

Michael

Vorkosigan

Augustine Stock, cited in Dart (p50) noted that the reason moderns miss the chiasms in Mark is that we are not educated to spot them. "Chiasms were pervasive in the in the education systems of Greek and Roman antiquity" (Dart's summary of Stock's ideas). "if moderns have lost their appreciation for chiasmus, it is because they have been educated in a vastly different way." (Stock cited in Dart). In addition to its function in aiding memory, chiasms afforded a way for anituqity to organize writings that had no internal subdivisions like paragraphs, punctuation, etc.

Vorkosigan

Scriptural schemes: the ABCBAs of biblical writing
Christian Century, July 13, 2004 by John Dart
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl...21/ai_n6159299

Here is some background info:

Dart says
"What rules were followed are unknown because chiasms went unmentioned in rhetorical handbooks of the Greek classical period. In fact, chiasmus as an interpretive term does not show up until a Greek text dated between the second century and fourth century."

Clivedurdle

Don't know if this reference is any help.

This is referenced in

http://www.inthebeginning.org/chiasm...prehensive.pdf

Clivedurdle

.

Celsus

By the way Amaleq, if you're interested, someone better versed in the classics than I has told me to point you to Longinus' On the Sublime, if you are interested in some methods of ancient literary criticism. "Chiasmus" isn't as strictly defined as the Hebrew version, simply a sort of word reversal, and so is very common in Latin works. Apparently. Don't quote me, etc.

Joel

Amaleq13

Thanks. I can see it is going to take me some time to get through it with anything approaching an understanding.

Godless Wonder

First off, I'm probably not qualified to answer, but this all seems a little weak.

For instance:

E: Chief priests stirring up crowd and bringing charges

Well, one of the E's is "stirring up the crowd" and the other is "bringing charges." Just putting and "and" in there doesn't make the two lines related.

F, also seems weak, looking at the the offered translation.
A, A' looks a little weak to me as well.

A much stronger example, perhaps, of this sort of thing is to be found in Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach: and Eternal Golden Braid" particularly in the "Crab Canon" and in discussions of the nearly impossible translations of that bit into Chinese and other languages in "Le Ton Beau de Marot."

Vorkosigan

Well, both E brackets relate to actions of the chief priests.

Did you catch the F bracket connection? In F, Pilate wonders. In F', he answers his question. Does that not make sense to you? Hmmm...

They are mirrors. In A, jesus is delivered to pilate, in A', pilate delivers Jesus. The vocab AFAIK is the same. Binding opposes releasing. In Mark A brackets almost always involve movement on both ends.

Vorkosigan