Toto

From that link:

and on an on in this vein.

Brunner seems to have an idea that Spirit is good, physical bodies are bad, and since the ancient Hebrews were his heros, they must have only written about Spirit. I'm afraid this does not give me any confidence in Brunner's ability to decide if the Hebrews wrote fiction or not.

Ben C Smith

Vork, I wrote:

I can see where someone who has not been following this thread might read my words as implying that parallelism is your only real strike against historicity. My statement was not as clear as it could have been.

But I was in no way intending to imply that. My point was that it seemed to me that the mere presence of OT parallels automatically toggled on your OT-creation criterion without even having to account for how the parallels would work if the story was historical.

If you wish to use parallelism against historicity, you have to address how an historicist would treat the parallelism. You have to defuse the idea that Jesus himself, or his followers, intentionally acted out a scene from the OT or Jewish tradition instead of Mark composing the entire scene on that basis. If you do not, then the argument from parallelism itself is neutered. And that is what I have been saying all along. Parallelism itself is a neutral indicator. It is compatible with opposites (historicity and fiction).

In other words, you may have found twenty other indicators against historicity in this pericope (the triumphal entry). But none of them matters to my argument. I am questioning whether OT parallelism ought to be listed among those indicators.

Here is how you responded:

Do you see how my argument works in this context? If I am correct, then this list is actually only 3 elements long, not 5, since numbers 2 and 3 are rendered innocuous (once we make certain not to prejudge the issue with a word such as creation). If you are correct, then you get to keep all 5. Again, I am not (at this juncture) arguing that the triumphal entry (or any other synoptic unit) is historical. I am arguing that, if it is not historical, such a judgment about it should not (even partially) derive from the presence of OT parallelism.

This is an important distinction, because we shall see that there are moments in which you appear to agree with my proposition, namely that OT parallelism is compatible with both fiction and history, and therefore insufficient as a criterion for or against either.

Fine, but often your statement is much stronger than you would have it here (to wit, Mark is fiction, Andrew, following a raw list of OT parallels).

And this is one of those spots in which you appear to perhaps be agreeing with me. Yes, I agree that OT parallelism is not an indicator of historicity. I also claim that it is not an indicator of nonhistoricity. Therefore, I can easily join you in chorus, with regard to the use of parallelism in any situation, that history is not supported (adding for the sake of clarity that neither is it negated).

Lack of support for historicity is not what I am addressing. I would agree with that much. It is the use of parallelism as a negative criterion against historicity that I am arguing against.

I am not sure whether I agree with this or not, but, as it is completely beside my point, I can let it slide.

Again I get the impression that my point has been skirted. I am not claiming that we would know all of these things for certain just from some scrap of papyrus describing events that are nowhere else supported. I am saying that, in this case, all the OT parallelism in Luke 21.20-24 happens to be compatible with historicity. And, if the OT parallelism is compatible with historicity, then it is useless as a criterion against historicity. If the criterion fails for Luke 21.20-24, then I have little reason to think that it will somehow succeed for the triumphal entry.

Furthermore, my list was in response to your claim of overwriting. I demonstrated that, even in the presence of OT parallels, the careful critic can still (at least hypothetically) pick out important elements of history.

As even-handed as such a statement is, it still lacks rigor (at least with regard to the particular negative criterion on the table at the moment). Even where outside vectors do not exist, parallelism carries no weight at all.

Provisionally agreed.

I do not think so, because I suspect that if we sat down over cocktails and hashed out what we meant we would probably come out saying pretty much the same thing. I do not mean to imply that we make genre decisions before even reading the text or analyzing it for genre considerations.

I asked:

Now, note what is at stake here. It is my contention that OT parallelism itself cannot make this kind of distinction. We would need, obviously, some other indication that it was the author, or the participants, or someone else. And how do you answer my question...?

By using another indication, that of the doublet with Mark 14.13-16. But literary doublets are not my target here.

You do track the Elijah-Elisha cycle through the triumphal entry (based on 2 Kings 9.13, I presume, though your bit about the peace talks paralleling the late hour in the temple complex is comparitively weak), but, as the Elijah-Elisha saga belongs to the OT, you would still have to demonstrate that Jesus himself did not model his career after Elijah and Elisha, or at least aim at fulfilling in some way the Jewish expectations of Elijah coming before the great day (see Malachi 4.5). Mark is full of hints that both John the baptist and Jesus were doing exactly that. And Mark insists that the crowd did not miss the point (Mark 6.15; 8.28; 15.35-36). The parallels to the Elijah-Elisha complex, on their own, are not able to tell us whether it was Jesus and his contemporaries making those connections or Mark as author.

But you nowhere demonstrate that Marcan invention is preferable to such a scenario as regards the OT parallelism itself. If you hold that your other criteria (the supernatural, the implausible, literary devices such as doublets) rule out historicity, fine; but that is not the point. The point is whether parallelism itself strikes a blow against historicity.

(My reference to your standards was misleading. I apologize.)

Josephus is not Mark. He is not necessarily going to use the same methods.

Let me be clear; I am not claiming that Josephus does exactly what Mark does. I am claiming that OT parallelism appears in Josephus. Parallelism is the issue. If you want to make a specialized argument that parallelism usually has nothing to do with historicity, but when Mark does it his particular method somehow requires a fresh, fictional start, then you are free to do so, and we can discuss that. But I have not seen such an argument yet.

Wait a minute. You are saying that Josephus is clumsy (slipshod, ad hoc) in paralleling the OT, and that Mark is not. Let us say that I agree with you. Are you then saying that Mark is more likely to contain fiction than Josephus because he is a better writer than Josephus? If Mark is the literary genius that you take him to be, then surely he would have less difficulty integrating history with the OT than Josephus. If Josephus attempts to integrate history with prophecy and it comes out incompetent, so be it. If Mark attempts to do the same and it comes out brilliant, so be it.

Surely you are not saying that literary brilliance is an argument for ahistoricity, as if all great writers have to be novelists or poets, never historians or biographers.

But it is your claim (in your commentary, at least) that the triumphal entry is based both on the tale of the acknowledgement of Jehu as king in 2 Kings 9 and on the tale of Simon Maccabeus entering Jerusalem after the crisis under Antiochus; and you also throw in 1 Samuel 9-10, the tale of the future king Saul looking for lost donkeys! And Zechariah 9.9 (admittedly not a tale) has to come in there somewhere, as do your Hellenistic motifs.

How is this so very different from Josephus echoing the exodus from Egypt, the entrance into Canaan, and the defeat of Goliath in a single story, particularly since the basic narrative actually follows only the former two, and the latter is a mere tag? Again, you may argue quality, but that surely has nothing to do with historicity.

Let us run with this for a moment. You said above that a Marcan pericope almost always has a single OT tale behind it. The triumphal entry looks like a rather glaring exception, but let us assume for the moment that only one tale serves as the main source of the sequence. You would still agree that allusions to other OT passages are common on top of the main story, right? For example, in the trial sequence that you adduce here, I agree that one can find parallels to Daniel 6 in Mark 14, and Mark 14.55 appears to echo Daniel 6.4. But can we deny the reference to Psalm 110.1 in Mark 14.62? Can we overlook the common OT motif of tearing clothes in Mark 14.63? Can we ignore the echo of the OT legal texts and Psalm 35.11 in Mark 14.56-57? Are we not allowed to find in the silence of Jesus in Mark 14.61 a parallel to the silence of the suffering servant in Isaiah 53.7?

So the outline of a single OT tale can be filled in with material from various OT passages, correct?

How does this substantially differ from the passage in Josephus? The main tale is a highly compressed retelling of the exodus from Egypt and entrance into Canaan. Gather your belongings (like the children of Israel in Egypt), come with me to the river Jordan (like the children of Israel after the desert wanderings), cross over on dry land (like the children of Israel under Joshua), and take the land. The references to the Deuteronomic prophet (which is actually quite relevant to the theme of entering the land) and to the head of Goliath are the filler.

I am not certain what you mean by connecting them in the way that I have described, but Mark does connect disparate parts of the OT together, as in the triumphal entry and the trial of Jesus, right?

Recall that it is not necessary for me to explain why the OT scripts in Josephus are or are not fabricated. You are the one claiming that OT parallels count against historicity. The burden is yours to explain why passages full of OT parallels are already, before any other criteria are engaged, more likely fictional than historical.

You could have held absolutely that the narratives in Josephus were fiction because of those OT parallels too, but you did not. When I wrote...:

...you responded:

If, despite the presence of OT parallels in these Josephan passages, the passages could still be historical, then clearly the presence of OT parallels is not a barrier to historicity.

It appears, then, that you agree with me that the presence of OT parallels in this story is not an indicator against historicity.

You are correct. But I have not even tried in this thread to present a positive criterion for historicity, so I am not certain to whom you are addressing this point. I am disputing a particular negative criterion. Methodologically, if I can get you to agree (as it appears you have) that the alleged criterion is compatible with either an historical or a fictional setting, then my purpose is accomplished.

Why, indeed. But that is not the question under discussion. The question under discussion is, not whether you have to accept the historicity of Palm Sunday, but rather whether the OT parallels are one of the indicators that you may use to attack the historicity of Palm Sunday.

Not sure what this has to do with whether OT parallels undermine historicity.

I strain to see the relevance of this exchange to whether or not OT parallelism impugns historicity, especially as I was responding to a statement in which you implied that I held to historicity because I was a Christian. Which statement was not only irrelevant but also a little misleading.

You asked why, if Mark had history to recount, he decided to parallel the OT every time Jesus did something major. I answered:

To which you responded:

Yet again you appear to be agreeing with me. The position that OT parallels are compatible with both fiction and history is mine.

You forgot in winter. And I will resist the urge to pull out some of the many story parallels that you adduce in your commentary that appear to me to be wildly different than how they come out in Mark.

You admitted above that the parallels are compatible with both fiction and history. It is therefore hard to see how the parallels are simultaneously a very powerful strike against the story being history.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

Perhaps, but I would need an example, and the examples that come to mind seem fraught with the same difficulties that I am discussing with Vorkosigan, including this one...:

Without meaning to sound harsh, since I greatly appreciate Meier (and his discussion of Jesus walking on the waves stands out as particularly good), I suspect that the real reason Meier (quite justly) rejects this pericope as historical is the heavy miraculous element.

Let us imagine for a moment that Jesus really was divine and really was able to perform feats of such scope and magnitude. If this were the case, then what barrier would the OT parallels pose against him really having walked on water? In that case, he would be intentionally fulfilling the prerogative of Yahweh as laid out in all those OT passages that Meier adduces. He would be intentionally echoing Yahweh to Moses and Yahweh to Israel with his fear not, I am statement. Mark (or his tradition) then picks up on the fact that Jesus was making a divine claim when he walked on the water and merely makes this fact explicit by adding the note about Jesus wanting to pass the disciples by; Meier has an excellent discussion of that phrase.

Such a scenario might be silly, but it is silly IMO not because the pericope brings the OT to bear so heavily but rather because it imagines a human being walking on water. Or so it seems to me.

In other words, Jesus potentially orchestrating a fulfillment of the mythical OT passages about Yahweh trampling on the waves of chaos is no different than Jesus potentially orchestrating a fulfillment of Zechariah 9.9 as a restaging of the entrance of Simon Maccabeus... except that the former requires a miracle of the highest order while the latter merely requires advance planning and a few compliant people (followers?) in the crowd.

I take the walking on water to be invention. This is one of those cases in which I feel that the OT parallels, as usual, do not of themselves negate the historicity of the pericope, but once the historicity is negated on other grounds we have a pretty good idea whence the story was probably invented.

One kind of case that comes to mind where OT parallelism might count against historicity is a situation in which the parallelism lies both outside the control of interested participants and outside the normal expectations of historical probability. For example, if the author paints a picture of the Romans or of nature itself fulfilling OT prophecies and motifs (in some detail, not vaguely), then we may have a ringer. Examples (which I have not yet thoroughly examined) may include the offering of bitter drink, the piercing with a spear, and the three-hour darkness at the crucifixion.

But, in a real sense, these examples (if they hold up as nonhistorical) do not go so much to parallelism as to implausibility, or to the miraculous power of detailed (not vague, I stress again) prediction. (And, when you really think about it, the miraculous is just an exotic subset of the implausible.)

Ben.

Ben C Smith

To be succinct, Mark 6.47-52 and its parallels (Jesus walking on water) are good examples of OT parallelism being compatible with fiction. Luke 21.20-24 (the siege of Jerusalem) is a good example of OT parallelism being compatible with history. Ergo, OT parallelism, since it can be accomplished with either fiction or history, is a poor indicator of either.

freigeister

Well, not quite. The body itself is not bad, but badness lies in our absolutization of the body, our materialistic monism that denies the validity of the Spirit, of the ideal.

Well, if you don't like Brunner, here is a review of Wills that states essentially the same thing:


I give Brunner credit for having seen a century ago that scholasticism would attempt to erase all distinctions between types of literature, so that it is all seen on the same plane as the latest trash novel. This is the result of the denial of Spirit, of the absolutization of the material.

Amaleq13

This comment is from a post in another thread:

When I read this it occurred to me that this would be a great way to create a text that encouraged the reader to obtain a specific education/understanding even if a teacher was not available.

Do you consider Mark to have been primarily an instructional text? A sort of interactive primer on the author's Christian beliefs?