Solo

Make up your mind, Legion. Is your would-be theory testable or not ? I would say it fails even the rudimentary tests of logical coherence. You don't even know what you want to argue. You only have some itchy antipathy to certain approaches to the texts (and specifically Mark) and you would like to quash them by some academic-sounding abracadabra. At a closer look, you can't even formulate ideas in a way one could respond to them. To wit (from post #62) :

Hello, word salad !


Didn't you just say such tests were not "necessary" ? And what, for crying out loud, are "factors [that] tend to create greater differences between literary styles" and "best predictors for individual innovations" ?

I was talking about the effect of a thirty page cultic mystery paean on the development of Western culture. (I assume the majority scholarship view that Mark is the earliest gospel is correct). Incidentally, there is nothing in the first century to indicate that the Jesus tradition had a wide dissemination. Such ideas are propagated by people who do not understand the literary function of the large crowds in the narrative and naively interpret it as guarantee of significant historical events.


No, I had problem with statements like "urban classes had no counterpart in the Roman Empire" and "there was no schooling in the first century or really at all in antiquity.".


It could be though that it isn't Mark who was limited but you, in your conviction that there is nothing beyond the capacity to read the work on the text level.


Forget all this nonsense ! Remember Camus' talkative type in La Chute: 'Si on manque du caractère, il faut bien se donner une methode'. In the end you will need to answer a simple question: could Mark use a known form of writing for his (or his community's) purposes ?


Best,
Jiri

LegionOnomaMoi

Then you should probably study logic. "And were I interested in predictive models, this would be more of a problem." Assuming you don't require predicate calculi to follow the logic behind counterfactuals/contrary-to-fact conditionals, and that a simple rephrasing with an equivalent meaning will suffice: "I am not interested in predictive models, and therefore the "problem" you identified doesn't really matter".

Notice, however, that this does not mean that my theory isn't capable of formulating as a predictive model, nor did I say it wasn't testable.


Testing and predictive power are not synonymous.

I know quite well want I want to argue, but I thought that what I said was perhaps better than saying "why the fuck would you think a theory about the past requires predictive power? Is it just ignorance?" Rather than say that, I made a statement about historiography and prediction which I hoped would cause you to question the applicability of the "problem" you identified. Instead, it seems to have gone over your head. I'll make sure to be clearer in the future about the irrelevance of your points.

My apologies. I didn't realize parsing more complicated sentence structures was such an issue for you. Let me rephrase again: Authors do not write in a vacuum. The are influenced by the literature of their time period. Some authors copy the basic form of others. Aristophanes, Euripides, and Sophocles all basically wrote the same kind of work: plays. Other times, authors build on the existing literature. They introduce something novel. For example, Batrachomyomachia may be the first fully developed parody of epic. However, it is almost certainly later than Hegemon of Thasos' works. These in turn would be impossible without epic.

Innovations happen all the time, but there are limits. How likely is it that graphic novels would exist before comics and novels? Or even just comics?

Then there is the issue of the time period and literacy during this period. When the mere ability to write a few sentences distinguishes one from the majority of the population, we wouldn't expect frequent creations of new genres clearly distinguishable from previous genres. Nor do we find this. In fact, what we see are gradual innovations such that a story/novel written centuries after Herodotus contains many of the elements of his Histories.

Finally, there is the skill of the author. Regardless of era or region, innovative literary styles and genres tend to be the product of authors with superior talent. Plays from ancient Greece shareda great deal with plays written a 1000+ years later. Gradually more characters were introduced, the chorus vanished, and the stranglehold of Aristotle's interpretation of drama ceased to reign supreme. With drama and literature in general, when we find innovations they are generally the product of talented authors who are familiar with the literature of the day. Shakespeare read contemporary works and ancient plays. So did Chaucer. So did Ranke. So did Gibbon.

We have a vast population of authors and literary works to use as a model for the evolution of literary styles and genres.

The author of Mark wrote what appears to be a badly written historical narrative of Jesus' ministry, trial, death, and resurrection. The style is simplistic. The language is simplistic. There is nothing which is readily identifiable as innovative. We have no reason to think the author is creating a new type of literature: some sort of theological allegory which uses historical narrative as a model instead of allegory or myth. If the author had that kind of artistic capacity, we would expect it to show in the text. It doesn't. And while authors tried to imitate attic long after the dialect died, just like much later authors did with Shakespeare, those following the author of Mark did not. They wrote with greater skill we would expect from more talented writers.

To summarize the main points:

1) Mark isn't a stylistically superior well-written work. It's mainly sentences and disparate accounts poorly strung together.
2) The work resembles the narrative common to ancient historical accounts (with the exception of inferior quality).
3) It ended up being understood as an account of the past, not some new kind of genre.
4) The author's skill is hardly of the level we would expect of somone capable of any literary innovations.
5) There were better models which the author could have used or extended if the intention was not to recount the past.

If it walks like a duck (even a lame duck), and looks like a duck (even an ugly one) it's probably not a swan.

Yes, but you seem to have missed why. It's possible to look the entire history of literary developments here, but when we have a work that looks like a bad attempt at historical narrative, there's not reason to suppose we're dealing with a artistic genius who has cleverly written some kind of theological allegory that is so unrecognizable as such it took 2000 years for anybody to figure this out.


For the former, we have (among others):

1) Widespread literacy
2) Numerous already clearly demarcated genres.
3) Education
4) A culture which appreciates innovation over traditional forms.
5) A culture in which literature can be accessed by a large portion of the population

For individual capacity for innovation, talent is pretty key. That and familiarity with contemporary and previous literature.



Which is utterly irrelevant to this garbage:
"Hypnotic narrative"? You can read Greek, correct? And again you are arguing in circles:

"Mark was a novel, sophisticated work."
"Why do you say this? It's a poorly written ancient historical narrative."
"Well it's clearly novel and hypnotic because it conjured up a persona which was so incredibly influential within Western culture."

So, Mark isn't an attempt to write about a historical person, but is a novel work, and the evidence for this is that the ahistorical person conjured up by Mark's author captured the imagination of thousands.

You need the author of Mark to have the capacity for such innovation in order to view his work as having created a persona. I don't. For me, the fact that this work reads like badly strung together bits of traditions which predate the work itself is because...[pause for dramatic effect]...that's exactly what it is.

However, as this doesn't seem to fit the "theological allegory" theory of Mark, this can't be because your theory is flawed. Instead, it must be that the monotonous string of "and then X and then Y and suddenly Z" type transitions in narrative lacking almost any sort of sophistication is somehow the work of an innovative artistic master (unless you are confusing monotonous with hypnotic). That way you can avoid the text itself, and focus on the affect of the "persona" you assume was created by the author.

You assume he wrote this novel type of fiction, and you use that assumption to support his ability to write this. Circular reasoning.

Unless one is using scholarship as a basis. In which case the reason for thinking that these texts were widely disseminated is that they survived in the way that they did (e.g., the date, number, and regional variation of extant fragments, quotations by just about every christian author after the gospels were written, the difficulties inherent with copying lengthy texts even those which didn't belong to persecuted communities, etc.).


Let's go back:
The "urban classes" you referred to had no counterpart in the Roman Empire. Urban regions in the Roman Empire were often poverty stricken and were composed largely of the poor. Urban regions also had merchants, nobility, etc. However, medieval Europe had serfdoms, followed by the growth of towns, the appearence of universities, increased authority of kings (which meant an increase in state control), and other things which make your comparison of "urban classes" either meaningless (as we can hardly talk about early medieval "urban classes" in Europe when we don't actually have much in the way of urban regions) or baseless. And although apparently the juxtoposition of "universities" with "schooling" followed by how the "elite were educated" in the quote wasn't enough for you, as you seem to have read this as "nobody had any education" rather than "there was no formal system of education during the Roman period compared even to the monastic education system let alone the birth of univerities."

Of course educated people existed in Rome. However, schools did not (perhaps a handful of exceptions).


Generally speaking, when looking at a piece or literature, I tend to look at it in the literary context in which it was created and examine the style, language, and literary quality of the piece. Apparently (at least with Mark) you prefer to assume that the author created a persona, and then use the influence of this persona to argue that the author of Mark had the ability to create it in the first place rather than relate accounts than simply write what Mark appears to be: a bunch of traditions about Jesus strung together into an inferior ancient historical narrative.




Right. Why bother with literary analysis when you can simply use the impact of christianity and the assumption that Mark created this Jesus persona instead?
I believe it's "when" not "if". But I could be misremembering. In any event, I've argued from the start that Mark was using a known form: historical narrative. These varied so much from one another that the variations made possible the inclusion of the gospels in the genre of ancient biography. However, I think that the majority is incorrect here, because they rely too much on the variability between "lives". Instead, it is better to recognize that historiography in the ancient world, whether focused on a war, an era, or a person, told a story about the past. Biographies did differ in their treatment of temporality, but this is true of the gospels, which likewise largely disregard actual alleged sequences of Jesus' ministry.

aa5874

An historical account of a resurrection??? What!!! The author of gMark did NOT even state he was writing history.

Please, just read gMark. Even stories that appear plausible are fiction from the Baptism with the Holy Ghost bird and the voice from heaven to the Resurrection.

1. The Baptism story with the Holy Ghost bird and the voice from heaven--total fiction.

2. The 40 days Temptation with SATAN--Total fiction.

3. The Instant healing of the leper--total fiction.

4. The Instant healing of the man with Palsy--total fiction.

5. The instant healing of the man with the withered hand--total fiction.

6. The instant calming of the storm--total fiction.

7. The drowning of the 2000 pigs story--total fiction.

8. The raising of the girl from the dead--total fiction.

9. The feeding of the 5000 men--total fiction.

10. The walking on the sea. total fiction.

11. The instant healing of the deaf and dumb--total fiction.

12. The feeding of the 4000 men--total fiction.

13. The transfiguration--total fiction.

14. The instant healing of the Epileptic--total fiction.

15. The instant healing of Blind Bartimaeus--total fiction.

16. The cursing of the fig tree-total fiction.

17. The resurrection of Jesus--total fiction.

gMark is just a 2nd century Myth Fable just like the Myth Fables of the Roman and the Greeks.