Solo

What a red herring ! She said Mark as allegory "....is quite in line with the work of many scholars". How could that be taken as saying, that it is nothing but allegory ?


None of the people you name are known as Markan scholars. Burridge's name is tied with his gospels as "genre" work. Graham Stanton was known primarily as a Matthean scholar. Dirk Frickenschmidt I don't know but his name bubbles up in connection with his Evangelium als Biographie i.e. in relation to Burridge's bioi thesis.

The biggest name in Markan studies right now is Joel Marcus: He is the author of the monograph "Mark - the interpreter of Paul" (2000) and has recently finished his two-volume Commentary. He discribes his position as 'middle of the road'. He says that Mark 'has not created his picture of Jesus totally out of his head but has been inspired and, to a certain degree, constrained by the memories of Jesus' words and deeds that have been passed to him in the church'. That would the middle of the road position.

If you want to delve into something more substantially on the 'literary creativity' side of opinion, you need to start with Willi Marxsen, who was the dean of the modern redaction and literary study of the earliest gospel. Norman Perrin would be another great influence on the present state of the art. (He considered Mark 'the implied author' of the gospel). Werner Kelber is his brightest student. John Donahue's 'The Gospel in Parable' (1988) is a classic. A brilliant analysis of the interactive techniques in Mark's narratives was done by Robert M. Fowler ('Let the Reader Understand'). A very good synopsis of the Markan 'literary' study field was given in Donald H. Juel's 'A Master of Surprise: Mark Interpreted'. James G. Williams made a most outstanding contribution in his ground-breaking 'Gospel Against Parable' (1985) where he laid down the golden rule in exiling the 'historical interpretations' as a dead end:

Attempt to find a foundation for faith in discrete historical events, whether the approach is liberal or conservative, is a positivism which finally founders on two scores:
1) The impossible task of apologizing for the gospel text or any hypothetical strata thereof as a source of detailed historical information in the face of modern canons of historical criticism (see Van A. Harvey The Historian and the Believer,N.Y. Macmillan, 1966, ch 2).
2) The untenable conviction that God’s acts in history are demonstrable from derived sense perception in the web of historical and natural events.

Mary Ann Talbot belongs to the literary studies of Mark, as do George Aichele, Norman R. Petersen, Theodore J. Weeden, Robert Tannahill, Dennis R. Macdonald, Jerry Camery-Hoggatt, M. Eugene Boring, Randell Helms. Frank Kermode is a celebrated literary critic who has made a sublimely clever and devastating analysis (or via: amazon.co.uk) of the gospels as protesting (their own verity) too much.

All these authors (there are more - but I am not Jeffrey Gibson ), are in line with the view of Mark as an allegorical work of fiction to a varying but mostly substantial degree.

Good with that ?

Best,
Jiri

LegionOnomaMoi

How is this difficult? The OP simply states "Let's presuppose Mark was written as allegory" and That's what I responded to, and my response is what Toto stated was Almost without exception, scholars believe that one of the gospel's purposes was to tell the story of the life of Jesus, someone the author thought actually existed, and actually did the things (or most of them) which are described in it. The interpretation of the tradition recorded in Mark is something else altogether.

So, if Mark only contains allegory, but was not intended to actually talk about the life and works (given a particular interpretation) of a historical individual, then the OP (who descripes this allegory as a "genre") is assuming something which is seen almost nowhere within academia. Hence the question about "in it's entirety."


Not "in relation." It's a seperate study. And if you're getting that from the wikipedia article, then I wrote it (a few years ago; I've been meaning to update it, actually, to include more nuanced works to ancient genre).


No. Not at all. Because the OP states: And I responded by stating that the assumption about Mark was quite an assumption. To which I received the response:Now, you listed many works (some of which I've read, and most of the authors I've read) but none agree with the OP about Mark being "entirely allegorical. This was what I questioned, and it was in response to my questioning this Toto wrote, and hence my question concerning by "in line with the work of many scholars" this meant "nothing but allegory."

That Mark contains little in the way of historical accuracy (and was never intended to be, primarily, a historigraphcial work) is a view shared by many scholars over the past 2 centuries. That it was never intended to be anything but allegory (which is what the OP states) is something else altogether.

aa5874

There is virtually no way you can show you know the intention of gMark. We can show that gMark is NOT history rather easily.

Once gMark is reasonably deduced to be fundamentally non-historical then we cannot accept any event or character in gMark WITHOUT corroboration.

Toto

I'm glad we all agree on that.

From the scholarship that I have read, this appears to be a touchy subject. Someone who makes a living or a career in academia is going to very careful not to step on too many toes, or push an assertion beyond what can be established with certainty. And many academics in this field have a faith commitment that they try to separate from their scholarship, with a greater or lesser degree of success.

And how can anyone possibly prove or disprove the assertion that the author of Mark's gospel intended it to be 99% allegory versus 100% allegory?

So a careful academic will leave this question open. But why is it so unthinkable? Mark didn't need a historical individual to compose his gospel. Paul didn't need a historical individual. If there was a historical individual at the origins of Christianity, he has receded so far into the background that he might as well not exist.

LegionOnomaMoi

"Prove" is quite a loaded term (hence its use in mathematics, where the universe of discourse is constructed and contained, compared to science or history). However, the more general question of demonstrating that Mark intended his work to be read as one describing, at least to some extend, historical events and certainly a historical person, is an issue of comparison with other other ancient "histories" (which is exactly what Burridge, whom I quoted, and others addressed). Of course, the structure of Mark (in particular, the constituent parts which, taken individually, are not so problematic from a literary perspective, but which are put together in a way that suggests the author did was not responsible for much of the material) is another indicator. But if one wishes to see Mark as a novel, a biography, a work of allegory, or whatever, then one has to compare Mark to similar AND dissimilar works, and see to what extent it agrees with, for example, "novels", and (on the other hand) is dissimilar to, say, bioi.

A careful academic will not state "it is certain that Mark is an example of X" (where X is some genre). However, a careful academic may (and should, if there is good reason to) state "it is very likely that Mark is (or is similar to) X" or "we can be reasonably certain that the author of Mark did not intend X."

It's not unthinkable. By way of illustration, take Wright's third volume on the historical Jesus. The basic argument is that there's no good argument which explains why the early christians asserted Jesus rose from the dead. Let's grant that for a moment. Wright then concludes that the correct explanation is, then, that Jesus DID indeed rise from the did, as we have no good probable explanation. This is ridiculous. It makes no sense to conclude that we have no good historical explanation for X, and thus we must conclude that an EVEN MORE impropable explanation (so improbable it is a literal miracle) is the correct explanation.

Wright's explanation is not "unthinkable" just so VASTLY improbable it would require an actual, literal, miracle.

That Mark composed a pure allegory is likewise not "unthinkable." It's just a terrible explanation given the evidence while we have far, far, better ones.

aa5874

"Prove" is used in court trials and in the resolution of certain arguments. It is just erroneous that "prove" is used in mathematics only.

A simple statement can be "proven" to be false or true.

What is evidence do we have that gMark did NOT compose a pure allegory???

gMark as presented is pure allegory.

It is a wholly terrible thing to say that a writing which is pure allegory was NOT intended by the author who wrote it.

Toto

I think you were not on this board when Joe Wallack dissected Burridge in this thread.

Burridge appears to be the only one who has written extensively on genre - others are just happy to point at him and claim that the issue is settled (as if figuring out the genre of a work tells you anything about its content.) But the people who have taken a critical look at Burridge are not convinced.

You took a lot of verbiage to get to the point, and then you missed the point by a mile.

Wright is obviously pushing his religion in advocating a supernatural explanation that has virtually 0% probability.

But there is no miracle involved in Mark composing a pure allegory. People write fiction or allegories all the time - much more often then they write careful, unbiased history. You have not made the case that this is a terrible explanation, or even unlikely.

I think that a lot of historicists, especially around the Jesus Seminar, think that the gospels are comparable to Zorba the Greek. Zorba was a real person who was the hero of a novel by Niko Kazantzakis. None of the events in the novel actually happened and the other characters are fictionalized, but the novel is based on Zorba's personality, which made a distinct impression on Kazantzakis. However, there is no way that we would have known that Zorba was a historical person without other evidence - and it would be silly to claim that a novelist could not have invented a character like Zorba.

LegionOnomaMoi

He isn't. He neither started the extensive analysis nor had the (so far) "last word." He is certainly one of the most influential scholars when it comes to gospel genre, but as I told you earlier, even classicists like L. Alexander have focused almost exclusively on the issue of genre here.

Who? We have Loveday Alexander arguing that the genre of Luke is more akin to a technical work, MacDonald and his Homeric influence argument, various orality approaches to written texts (from Bultmann and Gerhardsson to Kelber and Bauckham). Within classics and ancient history in general (in fact, within the entirety of literary/textual studies) the issue of genre and what it implies is hardly "settled."

Quite a naive approach. Authors today write Harlequin Romances all the time. If we found an equivalent in our extant Hittite texts, that would be a nearly "miraculous" find. If one wishes to assert that the author of Mark composed an allegorical fiction, then the use of literary devices, linguist constructions, etc., must be compared to other such contemporary works, and also with works within a different genre. This has been done, and while the views range from the extreme "Mark was almost entirely fictional" to "Mark, or John Mark, recorded Peter's acount", the view that Mark is allegorical fiction in its entirety (and was intended to be read as such), and that he did not think Jesus historical, is simply not (as you asserted) "at all contentious".

Adam

Why continue insisting that gMark is allegory and ignoring what I have presented (once again) in Jesus as an Exorcist (Post #13) about the Proto-Luke/Johannine Passion Narrative combination into The Gospel According to the Atheists that is not only almost free of miracles, but devoid of exorcisms as well? Since the earliest sources are free of supernaturalism, we have a Historical Jesus. It's simple, it's not allegory. So let's discuss that over there:
Jesus not as Exorcist?

Meanwhile resume here in this thread discussing whether later sources and/or gMark are allegory.

Toto

Yes, there were novels written at the time that involved crucifixions, empty tombs . . . you still haven't given a good reason for thinking that Mark is not 100% fiction, as opposed to 99%.