reniaa

Firstly I appreciate the work you put into this reply jay

Some of it is disturbing especially your liberal changing of wording to make it fit your arguements better, either saying that doesn't fit so lets get rid of it as with "my time has not yet come bit" or making chief steward a recognised job not done by mother of family but usually a respected servant changed into jesus's mother just to fit your arguements which to me weakens them a lot. You really have to take the texts as it stands if you start twisting, taking away and adding to suit your own wishes you really are invalidating your own arguements.

If it doesn't fit with your conclusions without you having to take away or add then i would suggest readjusting your evalutions and conclusions, making extra jigsaw pieces as an answer really doesn't work.

But since your bringing greek language translation into this debate as well I would like to see if others on this forum also with knowledge on translation would care to contribute to your conclusions on this?

DFrechetteNH

Seeing that mary is in a long list of Virgin Births in which the gods impregnated some poor unsuspecting woman, perhaps it would be best to poll the other myths to see how those gods 'did it' so to speak.

WVIncagold

Well Zeus seams to of favored a golden shower!:rolling:

PhilosopherJay

Hi Reniaa,

My intention is not to fit the text to my conclusions, but to simply get the text to make sense with the least amount of changes possible to the text.

For example, let us say we are confronted with a bit of text like this:

Mother: Son, go to the market and buy us some milk.
Son: Yes mother, I will hurry.
Mother: Do not forget to sacrifice a dove to the Thunder God.
Son: I'm back, father, I prayed in the Church to Jesus as you requested.

It is fairly obvious that the text does not make sense as written. The narrative is illogical. The mother has suddenly transformed into a father without reason and the sacrifice to Zeus has changed into a prayer for Jesus. The simplest way to have it make sense would be to assume that the original last line was originally "I'm back, mother, I sacrifices a dove to Zeus as you requested. We may assume that an interpolator/editor did not like the reference to Zeus and changed it to a prayer for Jesus.

Now, this type of reconstruction may appear arbitrary, but in fact, it is very strict and precise if one follows certain rules: First, one can only make changes when the text does not make any sense. If the text makes sense as it is, then we have no reason to change it; second, we must make only the most minimal number of changes necessary to get the text to make sense. We could easily imagine different conversations between Jesus and his mother, but we must keep strictly to the text as written, and only offer the most minimal changes to the text necessary to get it to make sense; third, substitutions must fit, so if "B" appears to have suddenly replaced "A," then "A" and only "A" must go in its place. For example, in the wedding text, Jesus' mother orders the wine. Yet, when the wine is brought, it is the Chief Stewart who tastes the wine. Yet logically, in any other narrative, we would expect that the person who orders the wine would be the one to taste the wine when it is brought. Also, logically, the narrative demands that we find out what happens to the mother who ordered the wine. Was she pleased or displeased with Jesus' actions? We cannot substitute "Peter" or "Thomas" or anybody else at the party for the chief stewart. We may only substitute the person who ordered the wine (Jesus' mother) for the chief stewart (the taster of the wine). Any other substitution does not make the narrative more logical. Only this substitution does make it more logical.

One question we may have about this method of psychoanalyzing the text is how can we apply Freud's method of dream interpretation to a text which is not a dream. It is my belief that Freud's method of dream interpretation also applies to non-fiction works. For example, it may be applied to films to understand their construction. When something does not make sense in a film, one often looks for later editorial changes that were made to explain the illogical nature of the narrative. An example of this is the ending to the film "Kiss Me Deadly" (Aldrich, 1955). It has the extraordinary ending of the hero (Mike Hammer) and the woman he rescues (Velda) being killed in an atomic explosion. The ending does not make any sense. Why have the hero rescue the girl and then die? It turns out the movie's ending developed from two acts of censorship. Originally the movie was about stolen narcotic drugs, but this was a taboo subject under the censorship of the Catholic Hayes Code in effect at major studios in the 1950's. Therefore the writer, A.I. Bezzerides, changed the novel's story into one about a stolen atomic bomb. In the original ending, Hammer and Velda escape and, while running away on a beach, they stop to look back at the atomic explosion. Apparently, evangelical preachers in the South objected to the ending as it was an obvious reference to Lot's wife turning back to look at the destruction of Sodom. The studio, behind the director's back, edited out this footage. Without this footage, it appears that the hero and his girl die in the atomic explosion. Thus we see how censorship produces non-sense or illogic in a narrative text.

Thus when we see non-sense or illogic in a narrative; for example, when an important character disappears and a meaningless character inexplicably says lines that only make sense when said by the important character, we may assume that an act of censorship or an editorial change has been made in the narrative. By undoing the substitution, we may see the form of the original narrative.

Now, in this case, the line "My time has not yet come" does not make sense because there is no reference point for the audience. Jesus' mother does not know that Jesus is going to die soon, so such a statement just makes Jesus look cowardly and death-obsessed to the audience who know the ending, and completely crazy to the audience who do not know the ending. On the other hand, if it is just a reference to his time for getting the wine, it is almost a mockery of later pronouncements by Jesus about his own death. Therefore, it has to be considered highly suspect as a later interpolation.

As far as the chief stewart being a respected servant, the term ὁ ἀρχιτρίκλινος according to Strong's Greek dictionary means "The director of entertainment" It refers to the person in charge of the wedding. The text shows us Jesus' mother doing this function as she is a) in charge of supplying the wine and b) she is in charge of all the servants. Both of these are jobs that the ἀρχιτρίκλινος would have. It can hardly be coincidence that she disappears in the text after performing these jobs and the ἀρχιτρίκλινος shows up, saying things that one would expect the person who asked for the additional wine would say.

In my analysis, I left out the obvious substitution that the text makes of the bridegroom for Jesus at the end. To be quite honest, I believe the structure of the narrative indicates that the bridegroom must have been Jesus. It begins with Jesus' mother asking Jesus to get more wine and ends with her congratulating him for saving the best wine for last. The editor wanted to cover up the fact that Jesus was being married, even more than the fact that Jesus' mother liked to drink wine.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

PhilosopherJay

Hi Reniaa,

A good objective methodology will refute a subjective hypothesis. In this case, after analyzing the wedding story a bit more, I have to reject my original hypothesis that Jesus' mother was portrayed as a drunk. In fact she was not portrayed at all at the wedding. A deeper analysis of the text reveals this and more interesting things.

The structure of the story, after the previous analysis still leaves important questions unanswered: Why should the disciples see Jesus tricking his mother at his wedding into drinking watered-down wine as a miracle and why was Jesus portrayed as being angry at this mother at the beginning of the text. Both of these questions are answered if we assume that it was not his mother at all that he was angry at and tricked, but rather his bride. The twin problems of Jesus being angry at his bride for asking for more wine and the disciples being pleased at the trick becomes understandable if in the original text there was a bride instead of the mother.

The bride would be the Samaritan woman at the well. All meetings of women at wells in the Hebrew Scriptures precede a wedding between the man and woman who meet. We may take it that this is what happened in this case. Although the scene at the well is (mis)placed after the wedding scene, we may take it that in the original the well scene came just before the wedding scene. In that scene, there is another piece of nonsense that has to be unraveled:

Jesus wrongly tells her that she has a husband. The woman says that she has no husband. Jesus agrees, but then tells her she has five husbands and says nonsensically "he whom you now have is not your husband." Somehow , the woman deduces that Jesus is a prophet from this. It appears that the editor has turned this dialogue into nonsense by making a substitutions to cover up what is really going on. Logically, we understand that Jesus predicts something, but it cannot be that she has no husband or that she has five husbands. Since he marries her at Cana, we may assume that he predicts that he will be her husband. Also, the reference to the five husbands makes sense only if it is five brothers. We may rewrite the scene to make it reflect its original sense this way:

By erasing Jesus' proposal of marriage and changing the five brothers into husbands, the editor made nonsense out of the Samaritan woman's "you are prophet" declaration. We can now rewrite the scene at the wedding in line with this.

Rheims NT, NAB.

It was customary for fathers to attend the wedding. The father being at the wedding would lend legitimacy to it. The mother being at the wedding adds nothing. The editor changed it to Jesus' mother as Jesus' father was supposed to be God. The mother is a double substitute, first a substitute for the father and then she becomes a substitute for the bride when asking about the wine. The chief stewart then becomes a substitute for the mother, as it was probably deemed improper to show Jesus' mother enjoying wine, even in watered-down form.

The wedding takes place in Cana, since it is Jesus' wedding, we may take it that he was from Cana.

This helps us to understand Mark (16.9) Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons and (Luke 8.1) ...And the twelve were with him, 8.2 and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out,

Mary had seven demons and five brothers. These twelve are the original "disciples" of Jesus in the original story. Since this is the first "miracle," we may take it that in the original gospel story, seven demons are tricked by Jesus. These are his seven miracles. The first demon is apparently an alcoholic demon. We must go through the exorcism miracles one by one to find the other six demons of Mary.

We may propose from this is that the original gospel story was called something like "The Seven Demons of Mary." The seven demons are sins or bad habits of Mary. Her prophet-husband cleverly cures her of each one.


Warmly,

Philosopher Jay