No Robots

Surely there's a good university library in Munich? Try there.

Rick Sumner

This should really be requisite reading. Probably the most oft-cited JBL paper ever written.

We might for our purposes define parallelomania as that extravagance among scholars which first overdoes the supposed similarity in passages and then proceeds to describe source and derivation as if implying a literary connection flowing in an inevitable or pre-determined direction.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Toto

But he also says:

Rick Sumner

Neither, to my knowledge, is anyone else.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

squiz

Will do.

squiz

Without having been able to read the article itself, it seems from what you are saying that he is claiming that any parallelisms are only of a "literary influence" nature and not of an organic nature. Is this so? What arguments does he use to back this up?

Rick Sumner

Heh, that's not quite his point, rather it was that people are frequently over-zealous in their assessment of what constitutes a parallel. He's on pretty solid ground on that. He points, in particular, to Strack-Billerbeck, which was not only overzealous, but accepted uncritically by many, if not most, NT scholars of the time. He's offering a warning to the burgeoning study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, put his points remain germane here.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

gurugeorge

It sounds like a salutary warning, but it's not really relevant to the mythicist argument as it's used these days so far as I can see. Not many people nowadays accuse Christianity of being derived form the Mysteries or from rising/dying deities or that kind of thing, nor do they use parallels to suggest "a literary connection flowing in an inevitable or pre-determined direction". The contemporary mythicist argument as I understand it (e.g. as Robert Price uses it in the OP's quote) is that the more elements of the story have mythic parallels, the narrower the range of elements you can reliably draw conclusions about historicity from. Also, the more mythic elements, the narrower the range of elements you can create a reliable interlinked chain of arguments about historicity from, therefore your range of plausible testable hypotheses is also narrowed down.

The same argument goes for parallels in other things as well as Mysteries, dying/rising gods, etc., such as contemporary and traditional literary tropes in general What I was most struck by in the OP is the bit where Price says:

Another shocker: it hit me like a ton of bricks when I realized, after studying much previous research on the question, that virtually every story in the gospels and Acts can be shown to be very likely a Christian rewrite of material from the Septuagint, Homer, Euripides’ Bacchae, and Josephus. One need not be David Hume to see that, if a story tells us a man multiplied food to feed a multitude, it is inherently much more likely that the story is a rewrite of an older miracle tale (starring Elisha) than that it is a report of a real event. A literary origin is always to be preferred to an historical one in such a case. And that is the choice we have to make in virtually every case of New Testament narrative. I refer the interested reader to my essay “New Testament Narrative as Old Testament Midrash,” in Jacob Neusner and Alan Avery-Peck, eds., Encyclopedia of Midrash. Of course I am dependent here upon many fine works by Randel Helms, Thomas L. Brodie, John Dominic Crossan, and others. None of them went as far as I am going. It is just that as I counted up the gospel stories I felt each scholar had convincingly traced back to a previous literary prototype, it dawned on me that there was virtually nothing left. None tried to argue for the fictive character of the whole tradition, and each offered some cases I found arbitrary and implausible. Still, their work, when combined, militated toward a wholly fictive Jesus story.

i.e., it's like, standard scholarship is happy to do exactly the same as the mythicist argument for certain bits of the story, but none of them sees that if every scholar can find some bits that can be explained this way, then actually the whole thing is suspect. (I'm putting it crudely but you get the picture - the whole thing is eventually just whittled away, if each scholar has whittled away a bit.)

Put the whole picture together and it's pretty obvious what happened: there was a cute "time inversion" of the mythical Jewish Messiah from the future into the past, mixed a bit with the idea of the rising/dying god (but not with any detail, just the abstract idea itself). This was a novel, inspirational idea, but it left a gap for imaginative, axe-grinding mythical/historical (not really that sharply distinguished at this stage) "filling in", which everyone gaily proceeded to do according to their fancy, taking their inspiration from all sorts of sources along the way (myth, literature, Scripture, mystical and visionary experience). There were a few coherent threads running through the stories, dictated by basic Jewish and Hellenistic ideas, and by the sociological and religious needs of the day, but early Christianity was basically a riot of colourful, competing attempts to "fill in" the historical gap left by the time inversion. Gradually "favourite" ideas emerged, a more or less coherent "lowest common denominator" storyline coalesced that everyone liked, and that also itself formed a different kind of underpinning for further speculation and myth making. One branch of Christianity, preferring a "hard" historicist line (hey, it's a logical option after all!), eventually took over the movement.

lpetrich

Zeichman, I've never heard of such a thing, and I doubt that most others here have either. Every discussion that I've ever seen states that both Matthew and Luke talk about the Virgin Birth.

And I reread Luke 1, and to me at least, it plainly describes the Virgin Birth.

Pure hairsplitting. The point is that Jesus Christ was described as a great religious leader, even if he did not have political sovereignty over any territory. In any case, he was described as a successor of King David, which makes him a monarch in a more literal sense.

Ben C Smith

IIRC, that was the position that Fitzmyer held until Brown convinced him otherwise.

Ben.