Ben C Smith

That is a good analogy for what I think has happened quite a bit in Matthew and Luke. I shall have to remember that.

:thumbs:

Ben.

jjramsey

From the beginning of the review of The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark:

That at least suggests what might be a signal to the reader. Judging from this page,

http://www.chss.montclair.edu/classi.../CHARITON.HTML

it seems that the broad melodrama was also a signal to the reader.

I'm surprised that given all your effort to show that Mark was Hellenistic fiction, you did not establish what these signals to the reader were supposed to be. One would think that it would be important to discern these signals so that their presence in Mark could be demonstrated.

polyseeme

I think this is where I am at in my thinking at the moment. For me, the question is whether the Jesus story had to arise with an INDIVIDUAL Jesus, or whether such a fiction could have been invented by Messianic Jews as a way of resisting the repeated Roman use of crucifixion to demoralize them by killing off their leaders. What do we know about first-century thinking? Is standing the conventions of a particular genre on their heads (like the lame rifle using sheriff in V's western film example) too sophisticated a move for us to believe they would have made? During a literature course in my Master's program, I read some medieval histories and travel narratives and found their credulity totally incompatible with modern thought. It is of course possible, however, that people of an earlier and perhaps more literate time and place - the Hellenized Jews of the first century Roman Empire - would have been both credulous in some ways, yet philosophically sophisticated in others.

jjramsey: What I think I want to say is, if the crucifixion of a particular individual really happened, and his story became so important to the world as to be a major religion, why would no contemporary witness OTHER than Roman or Jewish authorities - of ANY religious perspective - have written about the actual event? Is it likely that ALL contemporary records of the public execution of the individual Jesus were lost, including those written by individuals presumably as credulous as later medieval historians and travelers? I know this is begging the question, in a sense, but doesn't an argument from ignorance cut both ways? What evidence do we have for an individual Jesus? Why are the earliest copies of the NT in Greek rather than Hebrew, in the language of people who would have been predisposed to write from that particular mythos and distinctive literary style? Does anyone know of Hebrew NT documents being found that pre-date the Greek ones?

jjramsey

I wouldn't say it's too sophisticated, but it's unlikely compared to the other options that we have. Vork's statement, "if there was no Christianity, and somebody found Mark in an excavation, no one would hestitate to assign it to the class of Hellenistic historical fiction," is also problematic. Mark's Greek is rough, and his work lacks the melodrama of something like "Chaireas and Callirhoe." If there were none of Paul's letters, and no Church Fathers, one might have difficultly figuring out what it was, but I doubt it would be classified as Vork thinks it would.

IIRC, we don't have much in the way of contemporary records of first century events, period, so the lack of ones pertaining to Christianity in the first century isn't too surprising.

Vorkosigan

Hellenistic Erotic fiction. Look that up. Start with Xenophon's Ephesian Tale.

Yes. The writer of Mark has borrow the literary conventionsof his day.

No, I dismiss bog standard apologetics as bog standard apologetics. Most of the "published refutations" are not from serious scholars but from apologists who work at a very low level.

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

Mark got the Crucifixion and Resurrection from Paul, as I have ALWAYS said. He happened to have at hand an entire literary genre in which those were conventions. He then borrow the conventions of that genre to create his fictional narrative. I'll get to the other points later.

Michael

Vorkosigan

Alas, if only there was some support for this statement.

We already know you doubt it, jj. We also know that your doubt is a matter of faith, not argument.

A text contains resurrections, crucifixions, travel narratives, magic, answered prayer, people taken for divine beings, entrances into cities, empty tombs, construction by paralleling sacred texts, trials, jealousy-driven enemies, executions during public festivals, trials where the defendant is innocent but lets himself/demands to be killed, a restricted range of settings, plenty of action along seacoasts, crowds following the hero, literary doublets and triplets, typologies that control later sections of the text, and many other conventional elements of Hellenistic historical fiction, would very clearly be classed as a piece of Hellenistic historical fiction, albeit an unusual one, Were it not for the insistence of Christianity, no one would read this text as history.

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

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No, actually, I explained how the whole point of your question on scheintod vs. resurrection exists to create a false distinction. a death and rising motif is a death and rising motif, regardless of details. Your position is sort of like arguing that Barbed Wire and Casablanca can't be parallel because in the former the bar owner is a woman and in the latter a man.

Only if you first assume the text is history and then import that reading into the text, and then ignore numerous features of the text -- such as its literary paralleling, typological aspects, and fine structure. Also ignore the fact that Luke and Matt move it around -- clear evidence that they didn't see it as history. And so on.

That "historical" assumption is an unsupported a priori you bring to the text -- exactly like those weirdos who read intensely personal allegories into the text. The only difference is that this particular subjectivity is widely shared and socially approved.

I think you misread. It says that he couldn't do anything, except lay hands on people, which the author portrays as a minor power.

*sigh* The writer of Mark isn't writing as if he is hiding or mitigating the weakness -- he says bluntly that Jesus could do no mighty work there. "Hiding" or "mitigating" is strictly in your mind, not the writer's. See how your reading creates meaning in the text that doesn't exist? I mean, if this happened, and the writer wanted to hide or mitigate it, why reproduce it at all?

Why was the Gospel of Mark written?

As for the Paul-Mark link, the evidence for this was good even before I uncovered the recursive structure the writer built to signal us that he is using Paul as scripture.

Well, you leave out all the construction by paralleling, the typological functions of the passages, the fine structure, the historical fantasy and impossibility of so many events, the indications that other writers who copied it did not think of it as history, etc.

Again, the faith statement. Show that it is an "embellished biography." So far you keep mistaking your reading of the text for a methodology. What allows you to read the text as history? Nothing that you have put forward so far.

Well, that's certainly one interpretation of it. It looks like a straightforward fulfilled prediction to me. But then I'm not hampered by a reading of the text that adds all the extra assumptions that yours does.

How do you know that 9:1 relates to the end of the world?

Vorkosigan

jjramsey

From page 10 of a PDF of a "Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean" blog entry:

This is clearly a scheintod, but calling it a resurrection is a gross stretch. I'm sorry, but there is a big difference between a fake death followed by a finding out that the person who appeared to die is okay, and a real death followed by an undoing of that death.

No, the hiding and mitigating is in two places:

• Deflecting the blame on the people of Nazareth
• Tacking on "except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them"

My alarm bells go off when I read about hidden structures in the text that are supposed to be signals to the "careful" reader.

All of which can be used to shape the presentation of historical material.

Which can also be the product of embellishment.

The problems with this assertion have been covered on previous posts in this thread.

Only if you "spiritualize" what it means for God's kingly rule to come in power, which doesn't square too well with Paul saying that the time is short or the backpedalings in 2 Peter and John.

Vorkosigan

It's nice that the reviewer thought that a single line is a signal of fiction. But he established this how? Why do you think the writer of Mark would need to signal to the reader that it was fiction?

Vorkosigan