Vorkosigan

These two ideas are related. If you ask "Could Christianity have arisen with a Jesus?" and then assert a scheme that does not need a Jesus, you're not getting any closer to answering the question. Everyone pretty much concedes a historical figure is possible; now we're working on addressing plausible.

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

You can't, for the second claim is essentially a demand to prove a negative. All you can do when proving a negative is an exhaustive search of the data, coupled with a construction of a model that does not require or rules out history.

In this case, an exhaustive search reveals that all the stories in the travel narrative are either (a) derived from extant models in the OT or (b) typological structures whose function is literary -- one part of the text talking about another part of the text.

The second problem with the second half of your question is that the "historical core" is essentially a Popperian conventionalist twist, added to save the theory. It cannot be refuted -- if I demonstrate that the story of Jesus in the Temple is a Markan fiction, you can respond that, well, something happened in the Temple although the account is fictionalized. If I demonstrate that nothing could have happened, you will respond that the text actually records an outburst against the Temple -- speech, not actions. Since you can adjust the size of the historical core to any claim I might make -- it asks to prove a negative, and then shifts the goalposts -- there is no way I can refute your claim. A double dose of fallacy, the historical core is.

Turn your question around. What reason is there to assume the travel narrative contains history? Answer: none. It is merely a faith statement about the text, since no reliable methodology exists to strain out the history.

If you can show at every level that the account is fiction, and if there is no external confirmation/it is externally disconfirmed, then I would say your grounds for concluding it is fiction are pretty firm. It could well contain history, but then unicorns could well live in the clouds of Jupiter.

Vorkosigan

GakuseiDon

I thought that this was answered earlier? We can examine how the text was treated by others. Mark appears to have treated as history by the earliest writers who refer to GMark. That to me is circumstantial evidence towards Mark believing he was writing history.

An example would be comparing Russel Crowe's The Cinderalla Man with the Rocky movies. There are many similarities between the story in the movies, but there is really no way to show that one is based on fact and the other isn't. But if you heard people talking about Crowe's movie being based on a real story, then wouldn't it be reasonable to assume there was a historical "Cinderalla Man" at the core?

I know you complain that there is no reliable methodology to determine what is fiction and what is history in the Gospels. But on the broader question of whether the Gospels were based on a real person called Jesus who was crucified, why doesn't the fact that everyone regarded the Gospels as recording history at least prima facie evidence for the existence of that person?

Vorkosigan

He's always saved at the last minute. In The Greek novels the male hero is rarely killed and resurrected (he tends to undergo miraculous escapes and not be killed) but the female hero is killed and resurrected quite a bit. But it would be churlish to argue that stories in which the main character is recognized as a divine being, tried before the king, executed during a religious festival, are not parallel. The writer of Mark had different goals than the writers of Greek Romantic fiction, but he used the same narrative elements.

The writer of Mark already knew that Jesus had been crucified from reading Paul. But Paul gives no details of this event and in any case the writer of Mark had his own agenda to grind in describing Jesus. Fortunately the writer of Mark had at hand a whole body of literature with trials, empty tombs, resurrections and crucifixions, into which he dipped and took out conventional elements of those texts, and then arranged them according to his narrative goals. Just as in Hollywood there are numerous buddy movies that rearrange the elements of the buddy movie differently, but nevertheless form a recognizable genre.

I think the issue here is to avoid the fallacy that Alter points out in his book on biblical literature. He observes that if we had a genre of film westerns where the sheriff is a large healthy male who is deadly with a pistol, and then we encountered a film where the sheriff was a shriveled lame male with a rifle, we would recognize that the conventions have been suppressed for ironic or comic effect. But in Bible studies, he argues, the tendency is to recognize the lame rifle user as a different genre.

If you have a group of texts that offer travel narratives, crucifixions, resurrections, empty tombs, loyal slaves that follow the hero, strong female characters, trials before potentates, executions during religious festivals, construction by paralleling sacred texts, and so on, and you unearth another text which offers all of those features....let's put it this way: 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.

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

But the whole point here is that Matthew and Luke DON'T treat Mark like they think it is history. Matthew reinterprets Mark as sacred history, and deletes lots of stuff, rearranges things, and explains what Mark is silent on. He appears to understand Mark as creating off a source text by paralleling, as his famous error involving Zech 9:9 shows, when he got busted doing the same thing. Matt, at least as far is can be known, didn't act as if he thought of Mark as history. Luke goes even further. And whoever added the angel and the extra Septaugint language to Mark's Gethsemane scene in Luke knew full well that it was a fiction created by paralleling a source text. In other words, antiquity shows that the authors pretended they were writing history when in fact they knew it to be fiction created by paralleling a source text which they were frequently able to locate and expand on.

No. All we would know is that other people claimed they thought it was history. We would not know what they actually thought, and we would not know what the writer thought. Like the old legend that Orson Welles caused a panic by broadcasting a Martian invasion. Everyone thought it was real. So what? Means nothing. The real question is what people in the position to know thought. We don't know who wrote Matt and Luke and thus, we do not know what they were in a position to know -- except through their use of Mark, whch shows that they regarded the narrative as plastic and knew it had been created by paralleling a source text.

Because your primary claim here.....

• he fact that everyone regarded the Gospels as recording history

.....is false, Don. Everyone else's use of Mark shows they behaved as if they were working with a text that was created by paralleling a source text, and was plastic and open to manipulation. Of course one cannot know what they actually thought; one can only observe their actions.

However, I do agree that if the writers of the later gospels had treated Mark as history, then we would have prima facie evidence that it was thought to be history in antiquity. Luckily for my position, we don't.

Vorkosigan

GakuseiDon

Since Paul wasn't writing fiction, then can we assume that Mark believed that Paul believed that there really was a Jesus who was crucified (regardless of whether Paul thought Jesus lived on earth or not)? Mark believed that Paul thought that this was something that really happened?

GakuseiDon

Yes, good points, Vork. Matthew and Luke rearranging Mark is strange if they thought that Mark was writing history. I agree it knocks the feet out of my argument.

Vorkosigan

Yes, I agree with all of them. But Don, couldn't this be true about either an exalted figure or a myth?

Right, but the knife cuts both ways here, since Moses represents a tradition of Divine mediator figures that later developed into the Two Powers in Heaven -- out which then Jesus could have evolved. Not only that, but the exalted status of Moses and Enoch and others are the result of many decades of development. I don't think this argument helps you.

Look, I think you can read Paul several ways. I don't think what we've arrived at is compelling evidence to read Paul one way or the other. I didn't become a full-blown mythicist until I read Mark carefully and could demonstrate that he knows Paul, and that everything in Mark is fiction -- which means that you can't back-read the Gospel tales into Paul........which means that Earl's reading got a lot stronger, at least for me.

But on the other hand, this might help a historicist case, for without Paul having the burden of proving the fictions in the gospels, he is now free to speak to us of the Jesus he knew, which might well prove to be historical albeit totally different than what we see in the Gospels. So what historical figure can you pull out of Paul? And how?

Michael

Vorkosigan

I have often pondered this very point, and my conclusion to date is that the writer's own agenda is stamped so strongly on Mark that I can't tell what dog he has in the mythicist/historicist clash. Jesus in Mark is adoptionist and I think he's just a narrative character who is meant to stand for, and interact with, the believer who is coming to Christianity. I don't really think that Jesus being Adoptionist in Mark is really a historical datum one way or the other. It just doesn't work that way, at least for me. Reading Mark for information about Jesus is a bit like having only The Man in the High Castle or SS-GB for our information about WWII.

Vorkosigan

Ben C Smith

You have made this point before to the same good effect. I wonder what our intrepid excavator would make of the works of Plutarch if, instead of Christianity, it was our outside knowledge of Alexander or Augustus that was lacking.

Let me ramble for a moment here.

I myself cannot always tell whether a movie is based on a true story or not until I actually see the line, based on a true story. Perhaps ancient biography and fiction were like that; the ancient reader would need some sort of signal to the effect that now we are talking about a real person. What would such a signal be? Or did antiquity lack such a signal?

My first instinct is to examine whether the presumed historicity of the main character would be a signal of that kind. How many of the main characters in the Greek romances are historical? Any?

The pushback to such a stance would be the Alexander romances, in which the main character was indeed an historical figure. However, these romances postdate Alexander himself by many centuries. On the other hand, some of the elements of the later romances appear to have been in place even during his lifetime. I would call such elements legendary.

So let me ask you the same question I asked Amaleq on another thread: What is the difference, if any, between Plutarch and Petronius? How would the ancient reader approach the Lives as compared to or contrasted with how he would approach the Satyricon?

Ben.