Rick Sumner

It's one of the bases used to identify themselves--legitimate claim to the priestly line. It is difficult to have a claim to a line that is only fiction.

Yes, which is precisely my point. You cannot hold ancient texts to modern standards and expect to achieve any sort of solid conclusion. Toto's criteria are, to be blunt, wrong, because they use markers we'd use to assess a contemporary author's understanding of a text, not an ancient one's.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Vorkosigan

Basically I read Matthew like one of my students, with an excessively literal mind so well-compartmentalized he had no idea what he was doing. He is like the teenagers who go to horror movies and yell at the main character on the screen "No! Don't open the door!" The writer of Matthew is very serious, hates ambiguity, and takes his cod liver oil every night before he goes to bed. Everything in his house is very very clean, all objects are in their appointed places, and his slaves are on pins and needles lest they dirty anything.

When he saw Mark he tut-tutted in horror. All of Mark's errors on Judaism would have to be corrected, and the geography was not right either. And that hole in the Empty Tomb story would have to be plugged by the insertion of guards! And it wasn't really long enough -- have to insert some more sayings in there...let's see, where can I get more of them? And all of it is going to be clarifed with the addition of more scripture -- how could Mark be so obtuse....??? Sheesh...what a mess!

Michael

Diogenes the Cynic

Call it pious invention, then. My more basic point is that I still think Luke's "historical" form looks like an artifice- like he's trying to fit an order.

Amaleq13

And lists like that are precisely what oral traditions tend to do well.

So we don't see any variation in the records of the priestly line?

Can't we reach a solid conclusion that a given ancient author does not provide what would be considered, according to modern standards, a reliable account?

Rick Sumner

You see variations in it in the canon, much less outside it. The stance of the Jews on the history contained in their texts is that it's "more or less true (a sentiment I'm ascribing to them, not voicing myself, as I'd tend decidedly more toward "less true")" rather than an exact accounting. Virtually everything, as near as can be ascertained from the textual record, was always very fluid.

No ancient author does. Not one. You can take that as bedrock solid. For an example I cite frequently, Herodotus, the father of history, makes up the entire account of Solon and Croesus in the first book of his Histories. Is it true? No, but Herodotus thought it should be, and that's good enough for him.

Even examples frequently cited here--Josephus and Tacitus--as being "good" historians are, by modern standards, laughable. Both frequently made things up (speeches in particular are generally considered to reflect the thoughts of the author), Josephus notoriously exaggerates, frequently fails to cite sources, even when we're sure he had them, and so on. His entire career is characterized by being an apologist--for the Romans, for the Jews, for himself--if he's "good" history, it doesn't say much about historians of the era, does it?

Modern history, in the sense of being a wholly accurate recording of events, is a relatively recent development, and thus attempting to ascertain how a given ancient author understood another given text based on how well he kept the original story intact is hopeless. Toto's criteria--that later authors liberally editted GMark--shows nothing, because it was a frequent occurrence even when dealing with texts that were considered history.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

yalla

I'm reluctant to post this cos it may be seen as simplistic and argument from incredulity.
But IF I believed that JC was the son of god, the messiah etc and I read what "Mark" said about him and I believed it to be historically true, then I don't see how I would then be able to go on to change, add, delete what "Mark" said about my god.
After all this is about my god/belief, isn't it?

What sort of ego and belief system would I have to have to invent stories about god [or the son of, same thing] and write words for him to utter?

IF I believed in JC a la "Mark" and yet had the temerity to add, correct, delete stuff about him surely I would expect godly dire cosequences?

Vorkosigan

Why not? Don't moderns make up stories about Jesus and Peter and James etc? Don't the write songs? Don't they ignore parts of the Bible they don't like? How people represent their own behavior to themselves and others, and what they actually do, are two very different things.

A mind that celebrates Jesus. How many Christians love the little drummer boy? But what bible book is that one from?

Why? Hellenistic civilization was syncretic and polytheistic, and there were many myths that told contradictory stories about the same god. Why should anyone expect dire punishment for correcting a bad story?

Vorkosigan

Ben C Smith

He is referring to a real census (and I am on the edge of thinking that he got that census from Josephus). He may botch the date, the extent, the means, and the effects, but the census itself is historical.

Again, I am as baffled as anybody at the degree and kind of seeming invention in the four gospels. But, with Rick, I am often just as baffled at the degree and kind of seeming invention in other ancient historical works.

In this case it looks like Luke took two events that he regarded as historical, the birth of Jesus and the census under Caesar, and illegitimately linked them together. Such a linking to a theological mind must have seemed eminently appropriate; providence forced the decree of the Roman son of god to facilitate the biblical birth of the true son of God.

Did Luke know that he was creating a nonhistorical link? I am not sure. Even modern historians create nonhistorical links, do they not? They are more careful to frame such links as hypotheses rather than as raw data, but they do it nonetheless.

There is a difference between fiction and bad history.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

I do not believe I have yet explicitly tipped my hand on my view of the traditional authorships of the gospels. But let us look at your points.

Not everyone. Not the woman who anointed him. But yes, all the disciples fled, according to Mark.

Agreed.

Mark 14.27, yes.

Disagree. Mark certainly describes more of the miracles and such than the teachings (especially compared to Matthew), but he repeatedly insists that Jesus was a teacher: Mark 1.22, 27; 4.1-34; 6.2, 6, 34; 8.31; 11.18; 12.35, 38; 13.5-37; 14.49. Furthermore, teacher is one of the most common Marcan titles for Jesus: Mark 4.38; 5.35; 9.17, 38; 10.17, 20, 35; 12.14, 19, 32; 13.1; 14.14.

Mark is certainly not alone in calling Jesus a teacher (number 4), nor in supposing that the events surrounding Jesus had fulfilled prophecy (number 3). He has secular support for the execution of Jesus (number 2). The desertion of the disciples is trickier; I do not yet feel qualified to comment much on that.

But that part about fulfilling prophecy is interesting. If the gospel authors thought that Jesus had fulfilled prophecy, could they simultaneously have been cognizant of writing outright fiction? It looks to me like the other way round: They were so convinced that the Hebrew prophecies had come true in Jesus that they blithely assumed in many cases that this or that prophecy had been fulfilled; they genuinely thought that Jesus had really done what they were writing about because the scriptures (in their interpretation) said that he would.

That looks like a solid mechanism for how somebody could be both (A) making something up and (B) writing what he regards as history, not fiction.

Ben.

Vorkosigan

Could the writer of Mark's nasty lampoon of the disciples really have fooled himself to that extent? Plus, there are really two kinds of invention going on, and discussions about theological embellishment blur them. First, there is invention like Matt's use of Zech 9:9 in creating the entrance to Jerusalem -- that's direct creation -- OT prophecy becomes NT scene. But the gospels use the OT in another way -- creation by paralleling, in which the OT story -- not prophetic -- becomes the framework for the NT story, as in Mark's use of 2 Sam in the Gethsemane scene. I would argue that these two different views are subsumed under the label midrash and not distinguished from one another. The writer of Mark did not blindly select the underlying structure of the Gethsemane scene. He knew what he was doing...

Michael