Amaleq13

Not at all. It is just that Gamera has a special "complex" dictionary.

Hey, man, there is no "reality". There is only narrative and your relationship to it.

Solo

Hi Andrew,
the examples were given after Gamera made several quite general claims about his ability to distinguish between the writing style of fiction and a historical narrative from the first page of a book. He made further some other claims as to the unreliability of historical fiction vis-a-vis works of history. My examples were chosen to challenge this view.
There may be books of history which are quite unreliable (factually) despite being well researched and quite readable - and I thought of Goldsmith. On the other hand, some fiction-looking historiography, or even historical fiction, may turn out to be truer to historical fact, especially when the author chooses fiction to fill in unknown or obscure details in reading out the intents of the players.

probably not, but as I showed on the example of C.S.Lewis, the idea that the gospels are stylistically a "historical reportage" and the narrative style itself guarantees the historicity of the accounts is not new.


I am not sure I follow: I believe both a/ and b/ are true, but I can't not say that see "intention" directly flows from the combination of the two. It would help if we had some view of the communities that Mark was addressing, and their beliefs about Jesus. But we don't have that view. I see the historical setting as largely allegorical panoply serving two purposes: 1) a theological polemic against the Palestinian Jewish Jesus followers who were denying (or emptying) the cross, and 2) an indictment of the Temple establishment and the Pharisees in the death of Jesus, and the consequent destruction of Judea. The second focus contains an element of judgment and retribution specifically for Jesus' death which I do not see as coming from Paul. In Mark, Paul's Christ crucified meets another tradition about Jesus in which he dies a violent death, this time not for lack of "wisdom" but at the hands of "lawless men" (Acts 2:23). This establishes historical ground for Mark's Jesus on very good probability. I would not go further than that.

Jiri

andrewcriddle

The Lewis quote (whether Lewis is right or wrong)
is a claim about genres in the early Christian centuries, not a claim about genres in all times and places.
I think I am using "historical in intention" in a weaker and broader sense than you are. I would regard Goldsmith as clearly "historical in intention" even if she is more concerned with issues in modern women's studies than what really happened in the past.

I meant that Mark IMO is constrained by what happened (or was generally thought to have happened) in a way that prevents the sort of thing that occurred in the legends of some genuine saints (eg the way in which the simple humble Procopius becomes a leading Roman general.)

Andrew Criddle

andrewcriddle

Thinking it over Lewis does seem clearly to be confusing "historical intention", in my sense, and historical accuracy.

IE Lewis is using internal evidence from the Gospels to argue not only that i/ the Gospels were intended to be regarded as history but also that ii/ the Gospels are reasonably historically acuurate.

Lewis' argument for Claim i/ may or may not be valid, it depends on such things as how good a stylistic and technical parallel the hellenistic novels are. Lewis' argument for Claim ii/ is IMO wrong in principle.

Andrew Criddle

Solo

Oh, I see what you mean. Goldsmith definitely has a political attitude of a 1990's NOW feminist which she projects into her material. That attitude informs her grasp of 19th century Spiritualism as something in which women in that age were using to liberate themselves from the yoke of patriarchy. It may be seen as kerygma of sorts, but historically it would fall under anachronism.

I would agree with the "constrained" view but I do not think it would prevent Mark from confabulating. One of the few things I feel pretty sure of is that Mark "knows" the spirit; he is informed by the spirit about Jesus and it is the spirit (and not Mark) who "controls" the gospel. In modern terms, we would be speaking of "channeled" or "automatic" writing. Now, since it is clear as day that Mark was addressing a community, and that the community had already some traditions about Jesus (whether Jesus as a teacher, as a thaumaturgist, or - in the main - about the spiritual "union" with the Pauline Christ through the spirit) they would be binding to Mark as points of reference. These were shared assets and would serve as "proofs" of the gospel's truth in its novel form. So, Mark would undoubtedly use whatever was available to him to demonstrate his "inside track" on Jesus to the community. But I would not say his proclamation of Jesus had 'a historical intention', in the way I understand the term.

Jiri

aa5874

This "feeling" of yours has no real significance and in terms of this discussion is just higly speculative.

It is evident the author of Mark controlled Jesus and all the spirits in his gospel.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Gamera,

Thank you for the advice about writing a peer-reviewed paper. I shall consider it, although I am not sure if I need to as the idea that the gospels are not to be considered Greco-Roman biolography is already the mainstream one.

Thank you for pointing out Richard A. Burridge. I have only read the first chapter of his book "What Are the Gospels" but he is interesting. He acknowledges that most Twentieth Century writers have not found the gospels to be in the Greco-Roman biographical tradition. He is trying to bring back the Nineteenth century tradition which did believe they were part of that genre. He mentions Renan, Votaw, Schmidt, Bultmann, Kummel, Lohse, Hadas, Robinson, Koester, Kline, Goulder as supporting the gospels as sui generis position. Only Talbert, Schuler, and Downing support his position.

He proposes to only look at the four gospels and works of Greco-Roman biography to determine if they fit in the category. This methodology seems absurd. Why would you limit your investigation to just these areas? It is like trying to determine if the moon could be made of swiss cheese and claiming that we will only investigate the shape of the moon and cheeses found in the deli aisle of supermarkets. One is not surprised, given the restricted limits of the investigation, if the conclusion is that the moon is made of swiss cheese or some type of cheese.

I do not think that one has to read very much Twentieth Century narrative theory to understand how fictional the gospels are. For example, in Bruno Bettelheim's, "the Uses of Enchantment," he describes how frequently in fairy tales, prepubertal chidlren are either cast out of their homes or given to servants to be killed. He writes that "In the first form the child's fear of desertion is given expression; in the second, his anxiety about retaliation" (pg.. 98).

The Gospel of Matthew begins with this clear fairy tale element of the child in danger. The powerful Herod who plays the role of the evil father/step-father fears the new-born child and orders it killed. Joseph acts the role of the servant-protector of the child.

Now, it is noteworthy that the writer of the Gospel of Luke does not include this fairy-tale story in his birth story. Instead he puts in four good-omen stories (the shepherds, Simeon, Anna and the lost/not lost child). Unlike Matthew, this does resemble Greco-Roman biography. However, as it gives no sources, it is done in a mock fashion that is still easily identifiable as fiction.

Documentary or non-fiction elements are often placed into fiction to slightly increase believability. For example, a popular television series from the United States in the 1950's was the Jack Benny Show starring the comedian Jack Benny. Shows would often be about things that Jack Benny did when he was at home. These shows would often start, not with Benny, but with his valet/butler named Rochester. Now, in real life, Benny did not have a valet/butler named Rochester (although millions of viewers believed Rochester was a real living historical person, who actually lived with Benny.) If we were actually going to Benny's house, we would expect to see a servant first. Thus the introduction of the servant character first was simply a mock non-fictional element that added believability to the scripted story. This did not make the story any less fiction.

Nowadays, technology like the internet, encyclopedias and public libraries, makes it more possible to separate out the mock non-fictional elements from real non-fictional elements in stories. In ancient times, it was much more difficult. Thus, Gods, Goddesses and Heroes were nearly universally believed to exist in those times, but nearly universally believed not to exist in our times.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

Gamera

This simply misses the point. You don't have to read much of 20th century narrative theory to realize how "fictional" much of ALL Graeco-Roman biography are. Narrative form has a content of its own, as White points out in The Content of the Form (or via: amazon.co.uk), a seminal work on how historiography is always "fictional" in the sense it is discourse, not life.

The issue isn't factuality, but genre, and through genre historicity.

Again historicity is a relationship of readers to certain texts (that we deem historiography). It isn't really about what is real and what isn't. Discourse isn't life, and not even a biography of Bush is "real life." Even though the guy is alive and you could in principle go and talk with him about the veracity of the text.

As to your claim that Burridges' methodology is "absurd." It is absurd only if you think historicity is about real life and not about texts. I think Burridge is prudently dealing with the latter (what kind of text is this?), while you keep reverting to the former, as if we (i.e., you?) has some special access to the experience of past lifes that are forever lost in time. All we have is texts. It is a salutary exercise to get used to that.

Gamera

So you have access to past reality without texts?

Please tell us how you do it. Time machines, perhaps? Or channeling the dead?

History is a special kind of discourse, with signifiers and readers Get used to it.

Gamera

Needless to say, Ben, we don't have time machines. What we have are texts (and other signifiers, like artifacts). We read certain texts one way (oh, this is just a myth), and we read other texts another way (oh, this is historiography).

So while in simplistic form we talk about historicity as a relationship to people (if we went back in time, I would see Alexander . . .), we cannot even in principle recreate that relationship. What we really mean is that we have a particular relationship with particular texts -- we think about the personages in a text deemed historiography differently than we think about the personages in a text we deem a novel. The texts may treat them exactly the same. The only thing that changes is our relationship to the text and what that means in our writing of history.

Declaring historicity does not and cannot bring us any closer to experiencing persons in the past, since they are lost forever in time. Declaring historiticy affects what we think and write about the past (and hence what we think and write about ourselves). But let's not pretend for a second that historicity is other than textual. It never can be other than that.