Ben C Smith

You are claiming that the inclusion of fictional material and the modelling of events based on previous literature turns a text into the ancient equivalent of historical fiction, correct?

What, then, was the ancient equivalent of historical fiction?

Ben.

Didymus

Paraphrased: He was mythicized, and ordinary men are never mythicized. Therefore he was no ordinary man.

Sir Cular strikes again.

Ddms

dog-on

Yes.

The ancient equivalent, if it's not called historical fiction, than I don't know the proper terminology and was about to ask you that exact question.

dog-on

I think a better question would be:

Jesus is portrayed as the son of Yahweh, what evidence do you have that he was an ordinary man?

Start there.

Ben C Smith

I do not think there was an ancient equivalent to historical fiction. At least not in a one-to-one way. This is driving to the center of the matter now. If we ask which ancient genres admit of fictional elements, the list generated would be pretty long:

• Epic.
• Novel.
• Biography.
• Encomium.
• Even some history.

This is not meant to be exhaustive. All of these genres can bear similarities to what we now call historical fiction.

IOW, the identification of blatantly fictional elements in an ancient text has not helped us very much with the genre of that text. We still have a lot of work to do.

Do the gospels contain fictionalized elements? Very well, then. They may be biographies. Or they may be novels. The difference between these two genres would be pretty important to a lot of questions that get asked on this board, I think. For example, I doubt the reader of an ancient novel would expect the lead the character even to have existed, while the reader of an ancient biography almost certainly would.

Ben.

aa5874

Now, please refer to post #104 of this thread where I admonished you to start another thread.

Post #104 You have developped a predictable pattern.

Toto

Jesus is only an ordinary man when historicists try to explain why no Roman official noticed him and wrote about him.

Ben C Smith

I have already started another thread on that topic.

What pattern is that?

Ben.

Toto

But in previous discussion of bioi, I believe it was mentioned (or I read) that a bio could be written about a mythological or legendary (non-existent) person.

So the question of genre might be an interesting topic for a literary critic, but doesn't really get to the issue of the value of the work for history.

Ben C Smith

Yes. I was (one of) the one(s) who mentioned it.

Like Romulus, for instance. I agree.

Notice that I framed the issue very carefully as what readers would expect. I think the reader of a biography such as the Life of Romulus would expect the author to believe that Romulus existed, unless the author seriously mitigated that expectation somehow, and even then the very fact that a biography was written about such a person is a good indication that somebody thought he really existed.

Same goes for, say, the Life of Moses by Philo. People thought, rightly or wrongly, that Moses really existed.

I agree. But it is still pretty common around here to identify a handful or even a host of fictionalizations in the gospels and then roundly declare the gospel itself a work of fiction. I know you have read the threads; I know you know that these claims exist. Robert (dog-on) appears to have made a similar claim (in the form of a rhetorical question) on this very thread. Another Robert (spamandham) has made this claim in the past. And this thread was inspired by just such a claim from patcleaver (that fabrications of portions of the gospel from Jewish scripture was a clear indication that the story itself was fiction).

Do you agree that identifying the gospel of Mark as an ancient biography, regardless of its actual value for HJ studies, would indeed have consequences for some of the theories that are proposed on this board (to wit, that Mark wrote a piece of intentional fiction and the other evangelists misunderstood him to be writing biography)?

Do you also see a difference between the potential historical value of a biography written about a figure from the time of the Trojan War or the Exodus from Egypt and the potential historical value of a biography written about a more recent figure like Jesus, Apollonius, or Augustus?

Ben.