neilgodfrey

What are you talking about? I'm not sure that you read more than one line of my post. At least I cannot relate any of your post to anything I have said or think about the subject. Can you explain your point without any presuppositions about what you think I should understand?

And you would be nice if you could do it without the supercilious condescension (no idea how or why i provoked that in you), but that would be an optional extra.

Neil Godfrey

P.S. -- just one more thing, do please explain your grounds for the following put-down of yours:

Quote:

Trying to determine attribution based on what you think Tyson thinks Tertullian thought, is [understatement] inefficient [/understatement].

neilgodfrey

It might help if you summed up exactly what you think my argument is that you are apparently refuting and sum up your own refutation too. How the passages you cite from Tertullian is (presumably) meant to counter the argument I was proposing completely escapes me. And the point of your commentary to what I was saying escapes me too. Maybe you are not approaching me with sufficient condescension and need to spell it out even more clearly.


Neil

P.S. Is there anyone who would like to discuss this topic in a good-natured and even kind of professional way?

Ben C Smith

You are welcome. It was well worth a shot.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

I see.

I have read most of those before; what I was hoping was that you would present a few tidbits from them on this thread as a sort of third proposal. Turns out you did post some, and for that I thank you.

I do not think it does, though I agree readily that it may cast doubt on some of the details (many of which were already doubtful for other reasons).

I think this is exaggeration. Unless your list is severely truncated or abbreviated.

Likewise, there are elements of the passion story that are not drawn from OT allusions.

Again, I think this is accomplished only with exaggeration and guilt by association. How, for example, do you remove all the details of Acts 27.6-8 in the manner you suggest?

Let me be clear here. It is possible these details derive from novelistic concerns; good details make for good stories. But your claim seems to be that, once we have compared Acts with the epic literature and stripped away everything that lines up as a parallel, there is nothing left, not even incidental details of this kind.

If that is not what you are really claiming, then I think the language you used is misleading; if that is what you are really claiming, then I think you are mistaken.

I think this is the source of our disagreement; you write of the literary as opposed to historical context, as if they were mutually exclusive, and in my view they are not. History is a form of literature; historians are allowed to write literarily and allude to other literature in their histories.

Let me point out something else about the we passages in Acts. I have casually searched for parallels for this anonymous first person usage in ancient literature, so far without exact results. The ancient writers tend to name themselves at some point (the I Porphyry, for example, in the Life of Plotinus); or at least they are more specific as to the nature of their participation. However, so far I have found this to be the case in the ancient novels and romances, too. Am I right?

IOW, if the first person plural narration (not forgetting the first person singular prologue, however) does not exactly match the practice as we find it in the ancient histories, encomia, and biographies, does it exactly match the practice as we find it in the ancient novels and romances? So far it does not appear to me to be so.

If the phenomenon we find in Acts does not precisely match any of the ancient genre markers, where does that leave us? I think we are left with the usual meaning of the first person; the only reason an author would not need to use genre markers is because he is using the first person in its usual sense, as an indication that he participated in the events being narrated.

I welcome being proven wrong on this score; I really do. If there is an exact parallel out there to this apparently anonymous first person collective narration from antiquity, I would love to see it, be it from the novels, from the romances, from the histories, from the biographies, or from the epics. Robbins tried to provide some; and I think he failed to do so.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

You mean you corrected my statement on the basis of an article you have never read? Not only the reviews of it, but indeed the article itself??

Ben.

spamandham

Yes. I rest on authority occasionally (this time RM Price), until shown to have been unwise.

Ben C Smith

Well, so do I sometimes, but I like to mark those occasions as such. You seemed so... definite (no they don't).

Ben.

spamandham

I guess you missed the parenthetical, where I thought I had made it clear I was resting on Price.

Ben C Smith

No, I saw that parentheses. I did not interpret it as your sole source for the assertion; I interpreted it as support for it.

Ben.

neilgodfrey

[QUOTE=Ben C Smith;5421454]I think you are right. By historical context I mean the reality of events outside the text itself. By literary context, I mean nothing more than the words within the page of the text. And the author of those words is again another entity entirely. I'm thinking of how authors necessarily project through a literary persona, or a literary voice. That voice, then, is the expression not of the real person, but of the "implied narrator" projected by the real person. Now it may happen that the meaning of the words in the text really do coincide with the historical reality outside the text, but we need independent evidence to confirm that. We can't assume it from the internal evidence of the text alone. The text alone is only evidence of itself, not of anything external to it. It only becomes evidence of something external to it (history) if there is some external control that allows us to interpret it as such. So we have archaeological and other contemporary literary texts (primary evidence) that give us some confidence that Julius Caesar's memoirs of his Gallic wars are by and large what they claim to be. But we have no external primary evidence to give us any confidence that any of the text of Acts is what it claims to be. Without primary evidence there is simply a lot of "history" that we simply cannot do for ancient times. We can't change the rules and give ancient history special allowances because justifiable historical methods (starting with primary evidence) can't get a foothold in many topics that we'd like to know about there. Acts is primary evidence of something, but not of the events it relates. It is primary evidence of its own provenance. We don't know what that was for sure. So the best we can do is put Acts under a microscope and attempt to analyse exactly what it is, and then consider those findings against the first layers of texts we find testifying to its existence.

If we don't have a precedent, and can't match something to anything else we know, then we cannot arbitrarily decide to give it any specific meaning at all. It is just as valid to say we are left with the usual meaning, a first person of an implied narrator, regardless of the extent to which that implied narrator coincides with a real person and external history. In fact, rhetorical analysis means the "we" in Acts must necessarily refer to the implied narrator. All narratives are spoken through a voice of an implied narrator. That's the very nature of narrative literature. It is another question whether that voice and implied narrator expresses the historical experiences of the real narrator external to the text. It may do, but we need external controls to assess that. The narrative alone can't do it for us.

I think our differences arise over how we understand and approach literary texts. A naive reading of a text (naive in the technical sense -- I'm not meaning to be pejorative at all) requires as much justification as any other kind of reading of it. I see no justification for any default position (such as a naive reading) in the absence of any external controls relating to a text. The self-attestation of texts, especially ancient texts, has proven unreliable in too many cases.

So when I speak of the literary context of "we" I am purposefully distinguishing it from historical context. The only evidence we have available to us for the identity of "we" is the text itself, the voice of the implied narrator. Pending further evidence (external to the text), all we can come to understand about the meaning and identity of "we" can only come from within the text itself.

Neil