Julian

Ah, yeah, because I really know how to say that in Greek. Maybe it's because I don't have the relevant training...

Julian

PhilosopherJay

Hi Jeffrey,

Thanks you for your comments.

In regards to the point of avoiding anachronistic thinking, I quite agree. It is important to understand the culture and what people in that time would have considered entertainment and theatrical. This is basic and goes without saying.

However, one may examine the development of classical Greek Theater (a study of the play "Electra" by Aescylus, Sophocles and Euripides should be sufficient) or the way the Theseus myth developed out of the Heracle's myth and the Aeneas character developed out of stories about Odysseus and Julius Caesar to see that popular ancient works developed along the lines of popular modern cinematic works, as I described. If I use examples from modern cinema in illustrating a principle, it is because they are widely known, quickly graspable, and easily verified.

As far as the need to reconstruct the precise wording in the orginal language, I will leave that to professional linguists who have spent time studying the many problems particular to this area. Only when there are specific linguistic textual problems does it need to be done. As you know, more than 99.9% of all Biblical exegesis is not done in the original languages of Greek and Aramaic. While there are significant questions and important issues that can be solved by a careful study of such linguistic problems, for me, there is a great deal of theoretical work on understanding the gospel texts that does not require such investigative technigues, at least at this particular stage.

The interesting linguistic questions related to this passage involve individual phrases that appear in some manucscripts and not in others, such as: 1) (8.6)mh prospoioumenos, translated in the King James Bible as "as though he heard them not." 2) (8.9) kai upo ths suneidhsews elegcomenoi, "being convicted by their own conscious" and 3) (8.10) kai mhdena qeasamenos plhn ths gunaikos, "And saw none but the woman." These all seem to me to be explicative expansions of the texts not justfiied by the context and thus not part of the original story.

The one substantive question you raised in relation to my work was about teaching in the temple. I have been unable to find any texts that suggest this activity took place as you suggested in the Temple. If you or any one else would be so kind as to point out to me the relevent text, I would be quite grateful. I do consider this an important test to see if my reconstructions are proceding along the correct lines.

Thanks.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

jgibson000

Is that so? So far I only have your word for it that they did. Can you provide actual and specific examples that actually show that this was the case?

Nevertheless, even if we grant you showed that such a principle exists in cinema, pointing to the modern examples is irrelevant to the main claim that the development you see in cinema can also be found in the way the ancients developed popular entertainment. This has to be shown.

More importantly, it's also irrelevant to your claim that the principle applies to the development of the Gospels since you've not yet shown that the original intent of these works, let alone of their reputed Vorlage, was to entertain.

What problems? You are making a claim that you know what the original shape and wording of the Vorlage to the PA was as well as what was changed in that Vorlage by its later redactors. If you do not know what it was, then you have no right to make any claims about what was and what was not an addition to, or a redaction of, that Vorlage.

How do you know if there are specific lingustic and textual problesm if you don't know the Greek or Aramic wording of the "original" text?

Forgive me for saying this, Jay, but I have the uncomfortable feeling that your precinding here, and your elaboration of "reasons" that excusing you, from doing what I asked you do (not to mention what you should be able to do given your claims about the nature and extent and direction in which the original text was changed) means that you cannot do this. Is this so?

In fact, Jay, can you actually even read the languages in which the Vorlage was presumably originally written in?

I know no such thing, and I challenge you to back up this claim especially with respect to the exegesis engaged in by professionals in the field of Biblical Studies. Where or earth did you get this figure?

The interesting lingustic questions are how on linguistic grounds, not on the criterion of personal incredulity, you know these were not originally part of the original story.

Where have you looked?

Jeffrey Gibson

PhilosopherJay

Hi Jeffrey,

The similarities of the transformation of ancient narratives to the transformations of literary and cinematic works I describe in my book is a nice exercise for students. I've already studied and analyzed the material to my satisfaction and don't need to do it. One must allow people to do some things on their own.

As far as my understanding of ancient gospel languages. I have been reading and studying ancient texts for over 30 years in translation. I read Greek, but not well enough to read the gospels without a dictionary by my side. My wife is a native Greek woman who studied ancient Greek in school. She gives me her opinion when precise translation is really necessary to my work, but this is rare, as I am mainly looking at various narrative elements that work on the level of transmitting meaning within a story context. I studied Hebrew in Hebrew school as a child for five years. I don't remember it very well beyond a few words and sentences and I passed a one year course in Latin in graduate school.

We should remember that People have been translating the gospels into English for some 600 years now. There are well over 100 versions available. In some instances they different significantly, but in most they do not and they simply differ on simple grammatical points. For example, whether the Priests brought a woman "to" Jesus or "before" Jesus seems a trifling distinction, especially if a formal analysis of the narrative reveals that the original text proclaimed that the disciples brought Mary to/before Simon. It is the major changes in the story's narrative that concerns me, not the simple grammatical enhancements that were constantly being made over the long history of the copying proces. I look for contradictions, jumps and breaks in the story narrative to find these major changes. They are generally the same in whatever language one reads.

Certain moslems believe there is something magical about the Arab language that prevents the Koran from being understood when it is translated into any other language. Forgive me, but while the study of etymologies is important, those who seek to limit the understanding of phenomena in the field to it seem to be possessed with the same fantasy in regards to the gospels and ancient Greek and Aramaic. There appears to me nothing magical about the Greek and Aramaic languages or the gospels that requires that work on them be done in Greek or that they can only be understood by reading Greek and Aramaic. Although, I would agree that reading the text in Greek does add to the pleasure of the text.

I am quite secure that my methodology is leading to real understanding of the construction process of the gospels. I am not much interested in explaining or justifying my process at the moment beyond a certain minimal point. At a later time, I'll get to that. My methodology has been influenced by Ludwig Wittenstein, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Ferdinand de Saussure and many others, modern and postmodernist writers.

If you do not believe that 99.9% of all exegesis on the Bible are not done on ancient Greek text, I propose a simple test. Choose a library with a large collection of books concerning early Christianity. Pick at random 100 books and see how much of the text of these books concern the ancient Greek of gospel passages or recite the ancient Greek of gospel passages. If you feel that the percentage 99.9% is wrong, then please tell us your prediction for how much will be found.

The percentage may be different if we limit ourselves to scholarly journals, but I hardly think you want to claim that scholarly journals are the only place that good exegesis in the gospels takes place.

As far as the passages I cited, when phrases are 1)not found in the Alexandrian manuscripts and are found in the Byzantine manuscripts and 2) these phrases can be eliminated, leaving a simpler and clearer narrative and 3) no-other passages before or after refer back to the phrases, one is justified in seeing them as later explanatory material designed to change the original interpretation of the passage.

I have looked in Josephus, Philo, the Mishnah and Talmud for the information you claimed that teaching took place in the Temple. I haven't found it. Again I beg you to be so kind as to give a citation.

Warmly,

Philospher Jay

Doug Shaver

Your eagerness to insult the scholarly integrity of anyone who disagrees with you tells me all I need to know about the scholarliness of your position.

Doug Shaver

Allow me.

The pericope supports his Christology. Therefore, what it says happened, really happened.

No Robots

That's very clever, how you make me look like someone who argues out of belief rather than knowledge. Did you come up with that yourself? Wow! So incisive!

Doug Shaver

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc. etc. You know the drill.

jgibson000

Why is "to your satisfaction" the criterion of whether your claims about the transformation of ancient entertainment narratives are true. If we are going to use such subjective criteria for determining whether your analysis is correct, why should "not to mine" not be something that over-rides your certainty that your analysis is good enough?

Would you also claim that classicists who are intimately familiar with ancient drama and with the development of the forms of tragedy and comedy would accept that your analysis is not only as thorough as it should be to establish your claim, but something that would garner their assent to its truth?

And without a good grounding in Hellenistic style of composition and in what in that period was accepted as good and bad narrative style, how do you know that what appears to you to be contradictions, jumps, and breaks, really are -- that is to say, that they would have been recognized by the ancients as such? Have you checked what to you seem to be contraditions, jumps, and breaks against what ancient authors tell us they regarded as such, let alone against what Classicists have noted that the ancients felt were such?

But it should have actually been informed by the works of experts in Hellenistic composition, not the above, as well as by the information found in handbooks on style from the ancient world. Did you do any work in these resources?

I'm not talking about books on early Christianity. Their authors are more often than not not engaged in exegesis. I'm talking about books focusing on the primary sources that are used in reconstructions of the forms and shapes and history of early Chitsianit -- books which are explicitly engaged in unpacking the meaning of an ancient text. So your test is skewed from the start. The selection should be from commentaries on ancient texts.

No. And I never claimed they were. But books on the broad subject of early christianity are not either.

No. The only thing one is justified in is seeing them as explications or variants of material in the last stage of the text in your schema of the story's tradition history.



Try JA 17: 149 ff.; Yoma 1; and also B. Pesahim 26:1. In the latter source, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai is described as sitting in the Temple mount and teaching the Torah: "she-haya yoshev be-tsilo shel hekhal kol hoyyom".

On these texts and, further, on the Temple as a place of, and setting for, teaching, further Shmuel Safrai. "Education and the Study of Torah." The Jewish People in the First Century, eds. S. Safrai and M. Stern, Philadelphia, Pa.: Fortress, 1976; idem , "The Temple and the Synagogue", in Safrai's _Bimey Habayyit u-vimey Hamishnah_ Jerusalem 1994, vol. 1, pp. 133-153

Jeffrey Gibson

RUmike

Could you give an english translation, please? I'm sure you did that in order to zing PhiloJay that he doesn't know the primary languages, but that's not very useful for the rest of us following the thread.