No Robots

Name the stories you have in mind, please.

Please also explain what you mean by parallel. Do you mean there is a causal connection?

Accusing others of churlishness is rich considering that you habitually dismiss published refutations of mythicism as "bog standard apologetics".

jjramsey

Not necessarily. One thing I've noticed is that many people, especially those who are some flavor of True Believer(TM), act as if they think that if they can convince everyone that something is true, then it becomes true. The Ministry of Truth in Orwell's 1984 comes to mind (which in turn is a reflection of the behaviors of the Communist and Fascist parties of Orwell's day), as do the activities of creationists today. The authors of the gospels of Matthew and Luke appear to share this tendency. There's a reason the gospels are often described as propagandistic.

Are you talking about the female hero undergoing an actual resurrection or a Scheintod (being found alive after being apparently dead)?

Look for things for which the simplest explanation is that it is history.

Take Mark 6:1-6, for example. One can argue that Mark is showing Jesus being fallible for the sake of drama, but the problem with this is that Mark looks like he is trying to hide the implications of this passage. Mark deflects the blame onto the Nazarenes (verse 6:4), and Mark 6:5b looks a tacked-on attempt to counter the damaging implications of "he could do no deed of power there." It is easy to read between the lines of the passage and see a failure of the placebo effect: Jesus is better able to wow strangers with his charisma and make them feel that they were cured, but has a much more difficult time dazzling those familiar with him.

Actually, despite your claims, the crucifixion is an odd thing to explain as pure fiction. It is one thing to suffer the embarassment of proclaiming something as oxymoronic as a crucified messiah as a way of salvaging a belief that one's crucified master was the messiah. It is another thing to suffer that embarassment to proclaim a mythical oxymoron; indeed, the impetus for even creating such an oxymoron seems noticibly missing.

Actually, there are a lot of problems with the idea that Mark is Hellenistic fiction. Why is his Greek so rough? If Greek doesn't come that easily to him, why would we expect him to be familiar with Hellenistic fiction? Why does Mark seem relatively low in melodrama compared to other Hellenistic fiction? Why is it that we see no sign that people saw Mark as fiction? Why is it that the Gospel writers who use Mark present their own stories as if they were fact?

Aside from looking for specifics indicating historicity, I'd say another sign of historicity is that some forms of the HJ fit the data much more easily, especially Jesus as apocalyptic prophet. That model is easily consistent with Paul's own expectation of the time being short, the parables of the Synoptics, the sayings where Jesus talks of the end coming within the lifetimes of some of his audience, and the signs of backpedaling from the expectation of a recent end in 2 Peter and the Gospel of John. Plus, this model does not lead to a Jesus that anyone would naturally embrace, though some have learned to love such an HJ, like Dale Allison. So I've got a model of an HJ that fits the data cleanly, and several MJs which don't. Which am I going to find more credible?

mens_sana

Why would they not treat it as such? When did Mark become "scripture" and no longer flexible?

Vorkosigan

That is an interesting question, because Plutarch as I recall says somewhere that he is telling lies for their educational effect.

Some. That's a question that I hadn't really thought about in the Jesus context. For example, the main femme of Chaereas and Callirhoe, Callirhoe, is the daughter of a famous Syracusan leader who was known from history to have had a daughter. Ancient Greek novels positioned themselves in history without necessarily using it in a slavish way.

Lots of minor characters are real people from history, borrowed by the author, sometimes juxtaposing characters who lived hundreds of years apart.

I don't know what kind of signal they gave to the reader. I think it is pretty clear that while the texts were intended to be read as history, they were not to read as real history. They derive much entertainment value from their resemblence to history, borrowing its conventions and narrative techniques.

A good comparison, for the Alexander Romances have 24 rescensions, with the later ones heavily Christianized. A problem similar to that of the Gospels.

There isn't much difference in simply reading. I think you're overdramatizing the relationship between Plutarch and Petronius, because Plutarch made stuff up if it suited his purpose. But the relationships run deep, because the Greek novels naturally drew on historiography and biography for their narrative techniques, so that they all look like history.

Here's a passage from my interpretation of Mark (emphasis added).

• The ancient Greek novel in its many variations evolved out of prior literary traditions, transforming them as it did so. The genre encompasses a wide range of fiction, including romance novels like Chaereas and Callirhoe or The Ephesian Tale, travel narratives like Lucian’s True Histories and The Wonders Beyond Thule of Antonius Diogenes, folk biographies like the anonymous The Life of Aesop, and various others. The novel as a distinct genre, as J. R. Morgan , explained, was a problem for ancient literary theory, as it shared a narrative mode with historical writing, but it used prose to produce fiction (1993, p178). Hence there is little discussion of it in antiquity from the standpoint of literary theory. Morgan also observes that this was because “it was within historiography itself that the contract of fictional complicity was first extended to narrative prose, thus allowing fiction, recognized and generally, if reluctantly, licensed elsewhere, to enter a new form and generate a new and more equivocal literature of pleasure in prose: fiction in the form of history” (1993, p187). In short, one of the sources of ancient Greek fiction was a transformation of the narrative practices of Hellenistic historical writing to produce works of fiction that looked like history.

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

That's the kind of distinction that is invented to create distinctions between literary constructions that are obviously related. A scheintod is a resurrection. Obviously they couldn't kill their characters because they couldn't bring them back to life. The writer of Mark had an advantage the Greek writers did not: he knew that his main character had been killed and resurrected, not apparently killed.

Unfortunately your explanation does not account for many aspects of the text. Nor is it the simplest.

Note that your simple reading begins by making assumptions about the text -- it can be read out as history. If you do not read it out as history, but instead begin with an analysis of its structure and its position in the narrative, as well as note the fact that it has probably been tampered with in antiquity, you will begin to think about it properly. For if you give up that extra assumption you've made, v6.5 is not tacked on to repair the damage -- "damage" being a result of your assumption about the text -- but it is the reason that "he could do no deed of power there" was written. In other words, the narrative goal of the text is to get to the aphorism about prophets and native lands, a common one in Hellenistic society. One problem with the embarrassment criterion is that it only works if the text is history. So far you've provided no reason to read the text that way.

Your "simplest" explanation turns out to demand an extra assumption about the text, unsupported by any methodology, which then in turn colors your reading in a perfectly circular way. Don't make that assumption.

That's probably why -- DOH -- I don't explain it as pure fiction.

Yes, that's why I've never claimed the writer of Mark invented the crucifixion. That's why I've always claimed that the writer of Mark got the fact of the crucifixion from Paul. That's why I've always claimed that the writer used conventions that were ready at hand to tell a story he never intended to be history.

No idea. I have my suspicions.

Because it was read out loud and performed, in many different literary and dramatic modes, and its conventions can be found in both "lower" and "higher" forms of literature. There's a whole literature of Greek fiction around marginal characters and lowlifes that has survived only in scraps, for example.

Because Mark is borrowing its conventions to tell a completely different story!

Because you obviously didn't look hard! Here's my remarks to Don G above:

• 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.

All indications are that the writers of the later Gospels treated Mark as fiction and knew how it had been constructed.

Because Greek historical romances were presented as if the stories were fact, and because they had their own sociopolitical agendas, and because you personally keep making the extra and unnecessary and unsupporterd assumption that they are history. What supports your claim that it was history?

Sure, if you assume the text is history, harmonize texts that were not meant to be harmonized and can't be harmonized because they are not independent of each other, treat Paul as an independent source when Mark knows it, slash away data that won't fit your model, ignore the complex literary structure of Mark, ignore the fact that the sayings and events are typological and literary rather than historical in nature, ignore the fact that both 2 Peter and GJohn are second century documents (2 Pet copies Jude!) and make numerous other mistaken assumptions and of course, totally lack any methodology for straining out the history, sure....you can come to the conclusion that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet. Weclome to it.

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

Don and I were wondering about how the ancient writers saw Mark.

Good question. But when it become scripture, did it become inflexible? It looks to me like all the redaction signals that the text was valued for its normative effects. Hence whoever controlled the redaction controlled its sociopolitical effects.

jjramsey

You dodged my question, but I gather from your response that they were all scheintods.

No, what I'm seeing is Mark writing as if he is rationalizing and hiding a failure of Jesus. This would be out of place in fiction, since the failures that would be in the characters would be the failures that the author is trying to show.

That "except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them" is the "reason that 'he could do no deed of power there'"? There must be a typo because this makes no sense.

From your Historical Commentary on the Gospel of Mark:

In your above examples, as far as I can tell, prophets and philsophers are unjustly rejected or denied honor. The obvious setting for such a proverb would be something clearly showing that Jesus wasn't getting his due, something more akin to Luke 4:14-30. If Mark wanted to take a less typical way to showcase this proverb by displaying Jesus' weakness, then this account is also written oddly, because Mark writes as if he is trying to hide or mitigate this weakness.

What's to harmonize? I'm not arguing that there aren't contradictions in the Gospels.

The evidence for this is lacking.

So far, there seems to be nothing to slash. Please explain.

As if an embellished biography couldn't have a complex literary structure.

Mark 9:1 looks like a straightforward falsified prediction to me.

Why would I have to ignore that? By the beginning of the second century, one should expect grumbling about end-of-the-world predictions being behind schedule, hence the backpedaling in documents dating from then.

jjramsey

There's a problem with your reasoning here. Now Matthew and Luke are presenting their works as if they were fact. As Ben C. Smith pointed out, the way Matthew defends the empty tomb story against the charge that the disciples stole the body presupposes a readership that will take him literally. The prologue of Luke also makes clear that he expects his readership to take him literally. Now Mark has probably circulated to more people than just Matthew and Luke. If Mark was recognized as fiction at the time, then one has to wonder why Matthew and Luke weren't afraid that someone wouldn't recognize the Markan material in their works and ask, "Why is this stuff I know is fiction in this work that's supposed to be fact?" If it was not widely known at the time that Mark was fiction, then what made Matthew and Luke privy to the knowledge that it was such?

These difficulties go away if Matthew and Luke's deviations from Mark are not due to them knowing that Mark is fiction, but from Matthew and Luke acting like cops who embellish their case because they "know" their suspect is guilty. In other words, they don't change Mark because they see it as fiction from which they can springboard, but because it has what they think is inconvenient information which they, like good propagandists, wish to suppress. While the presence of the Markan material is obvious, the deviations from the Markan material are either subtle enough to not be glaring on a casual reading, or dramatically different enough as to not appear obviously Markan in the first place, e.g. Luke 4:14-30.

Ben C Smith

If you could give a cite for that, it would be greatly appreciated. I have noticed that claims that so-and-so admitted he was a liar somewhere rarely look as impressive when the lines are actually quoted.

A daughter named Callirhoe? Or do we know for sure?

This example is close to what I was talking about, but still does not seem to furnish a main character already known in his or her own right as historical.

Oh, of course. Like when a fictional character in a sitcom gets to meet a real sports star and gets free box seat tickets. But that is very different than the main character being historical.

Why in the name of all that is good and sacred in this great world of ours do you always accuse me of overdramatizing things? (Second time in a week I got to use that.)

That is kind of my point. I do not think very many ancient biographers or historians avoided the temptation to make things up.

Here is what I am toying with as the main difference between a Plutarch and a Petronius. See if it resonates at all.

I suspect the ancient reader of Plutarch would expect both (A) that the main character of the biography existed and (B) that the basic contours of his life are accurate. If Plutarch wrote that the main character was born in Italy and killed in Greece, the ancient reader would be disappointed to learn he was actually born in Spain and died of natural causes in Syria. If Plutarch wrote that he was known as a philosopher, the reader would be disappointed to learn he was actually an athlete who was suspicious of philosophy. I also suspect the ancient reader would be disappointed to learn Plutarch had invented very much of it whole cloth; the accumulation of many legends and educated guesses as to what happened, even those passed off not as guesses but as facts, would probably go unnoticed for the most part, so long as the legends and facts seemed true to the character.

The exceptions to the above would be those biographies written about figures so far back as to be mythical, as Plutarch himself admits in the prologue of his Life of Theseus.

With Petronius, on the other hand, I doubt the ancient reader ever expected Encolpius to be a real figure from history.

Such is my thinking on the difference so far, for what it is worth.

Sometimes you make it sound like Mark included a crucifixion and a resurrection because they were standard themes in Greek fiction. Here you admit that he actually got the crucifixion and the resurrection from those before him (Paul?). If the crucifixion and resurrection came to him from the tradition, is it really fair to lump them in with conventions of fiction that he was following?

Ben.

jjramsey

Another thing to consider. Why should we think that Mark got his idea of resurrection from scheintod, rather than from the ideas of resurrection from the Jewish milleu in which Jesus is set? The latter are certainly a more obvious resemblance.