Ben C Smith

I think you modify this correctly below.

In my view, that is the usual meaning. The narrator is saying that he himself participated in the events being narrated in the first person (whether singular or plural). Whether those events and that participation is fictional or historical is a matter for the genre of the whole.

Agreed. But recall that I (we?) are in dialogue with Robbins, too (or rather with those who have interpreted Robbins in certain ways). I am not certain whether Robbins is the actual source for this notion, but I think many who have read him wind up claiming that the we narration has a purpose different than implying narrator involvement, that the author is now merely writing in a generic style that his readers would not interpret as involving the narrator in the events. This, I think, is false. I think the reader of Acts is supposed to imagine the narrator boarding the ship and sailing Romeward.

I think the same criticism can be levelled at your idea of a vicarious audience experience with regard to the voyage to Rome. Unless you have examples of we passages implying this sort of collective experience in other literature, I think we have to stick to narrator involvement as the meaning, as it were, of the passages. Unless I am completely misunderstanding you.

I agree; that is in great part a question of genre.

What do you think the genre of Acts is? If you determined that it was a novel or a romance, would that affect your judgment on whether the narrator participation is fictional or historical? If you determined that it was a(n auto)biography, an historical monograph, or an historical treatise of some kind, would that affect your judgment?

Ben.

neilgodfrey

Genre cannot tell us if a specific incident has a historical reality outside the text. This is the position of those who would argue that we should believe in miracles and supernatural prodigies on the basis of the genre in which they appear. And authors have been known to tell fabrications about their personal involvement in the events they say are historical. Personal diary genres can be completely fictitious and people can be fooled if they read a genre naively on the basis of its genre. Personal letters can also be completely fictitious despite their genre. While on the other hand fiction genres can inform readers of historical events that happened outside the text.

Genre, of itself, cannot determine the question of fact or fiction. Biblical scholars are very aware of this truism when they decide that some gospels and acts are spurious and others are genuine.

I was not thinking of Robbins here. I think Peter Kirby has done well to add a note to his critique of Robbins to explain that the question under discussion is a genre or stylistic one, as you clearly acknowledge, and not one about identity of authorship.

My argument is that the only "we" we know is the "we" in the literary text, and is therefore, by definition, a "literary-textual we" -- not an "historical we". There is no external control to give us any grounds for assuming anything more than the "literary we".

Obviously (to me, anyway) a "we boarded the ship" type expression is meant to convey the image of an implied narrator, or the image of another character within the narrative, boarding a ship in company with another.

But it is arbitrary to assume that this coincides with an historical event outside the text.


I would agree that there is "implied narrator involvement". But we have no way of deciding if behind the implied narrator is a real person who experienced historically the events described. There is no way that can be determined given the evidence we have to work with. Some questions are beyond any possibility of serious enquiry simply because there is no evidence to work with.

It is not a novel or a romance. I suspect (at the moment) the author was attempting to write something of an historical epic to glorify and promote a certain theological position as the rightful one for the Church. He employs many features of Hellenistic romances, but he is writing something he wants readers to take as their history for a certain theological perspective/establishment.

Texts need to be judged and understood in their own right. They need to be studied as literary texts within some overall theory of literary texts. It is an error, I believe, to confuse narrative claims with events or characters external to the text, unless there are external controls of some sort that justify this.

Whatever the genre of Acts, a reader reads the implied narrator's voice. Often this voice will be relayed down through various levels of characters within the narrative. Or sometimes through what appears to be some anonymous "objective from-the-outside" comment on the action and characters. This is true of all genres. It is an implied narrator's voice. Without external evidence we have no way of determining what the real narrator thinks or believes or has experienced. Regardless of genre, we can only gain confidence in "historicity" or "facticity" insofar as external controls relating to a text -- any text of any genre, ancient or modeern -- allow us to.

Neil

dog-on

Acts is nothing more than religious propoganda, disguised as history. Its purpose being to attack the Marcionite church by rewriting the history of Paul (the Marcionites main man), making him (Paul) subserviant to a fictitious group of men that where invented to give "authority" via "Apostolic Succession" to a certain other ROMAN church.

neilgodfrey

Ben, I have too much time on my hands. In between jobs. And I have probably had too much time to rain extraneous stuff on this post instead of just being good and responding directly.

So here goes my comment on Pro 1:

Is there any reason other than the self-attestation of the narrative to assume its historicity? Is self-attestation the sole reason for assuming historicity?

It is commonplace in biblical studies to accept self attestation of a text as primary evidence for historicity. I don't know, so this is an open question, but in what other studies is self attestation of a text, alone, in the absence of external controlling evidence, allowed to pass for historicity?

On Con 1:
Other significant arguments Con are that:

• there is no sure evidence that Acts was known until Irenaeus, and no secure evidence that canonical Luke was known before then either;
  
• there are numerous features of canonical Luke that can be understood as a polemical response to Marcionism (the prologue, the overt tying of Jesus to the Jewish scripture's "prophecies", the infancy and some of the resurrection narratives)
  
• the prologue of canonical Luke seems to say that there had been quite a few other gospels extant for some time, so it is difficult to imagine Marcion selecting a gospel that appears to have had the largest amount of work to be done by way of erasing passages he did not like.

But having said all that, it does appear that Marcion's followers used a gospel that "orthodox" writers identified as an abridged form of Luke.

That's it for an intro response. Happy to elaborate with patristic references etc.

aa5874

But, according to Tertullian, Macion rejected both Acts of the Apostles and Paul because they [ Acts and Paul] declared no other God than the Creator and and the Christ is the Son of the Creator.

Against Marcion by Tertullian Paul was not Marcion's main man at all. Paul's Christ was the son of the God of the Jews, Marcion's Christ was from another Greater God.

dog-on

Tert is merely saying that Marcion rejected Acts...

(I actually think Tert's showing a gross anachronism here...)...

Ben C Smith

Agreed.

Agreed. But all of these things are true even if the author names himself as he describes his involvement. IOW, we are in the same boat with Josephus, Porphyry, Thucydides, and many others.

I do, too, but Kirby elsewhere goes on to draw a firmer conclusion (one of probability, not certainty, of course) based partly on his findings with Robbins.

Is that the case with other historians who use the first person, as well? The question still remains: Does the literary we line up with an historical we? One cannot define this historical question out of existence.

If this is true, then we are stuck with internal controls. As is the case with other first person historians.

Agreed.

No, it is not arbitrary. It is just a first step to assessing the probabilities. Kirby, for example, mentions the alternative, to wit, that the author of Acts was making a false affectation to being a companion of Paul. And he weighs in against it.

I think this underestimates the abilities of a critical mind. It may be the case that we do not yet have enough evidence to make an evaluation of Acts (and I know that I myself do not yet have enough; hence this thread!). But I would hate to stifle the inquiry by stating from the outset that some questions are beyond the possibility of serious inquiry. We are not waiting for new manuscript discoveries, though such would be splendid indeed. We are not waiting for time travel. We are striving to invent ever more creative ways to evaluate the evidence that we have on hand.

It may even be that these new tests we devise end up disproving my pro 1 argument. As I said before, some of the materials from the we passages already seem doubtful. But I would rather go the distance and devise the test anyway than sit back and say there is no way we can know.

That is a solid first step.

No, it stands in a continuum, as I see it. There is self attestation (the we passages); there is genre (the author intends to be taken seriously in an historical sense); and there is the utterly nondescript way of inserting himself into the narrative. In a textual world where first person claims are routinely asserted, all gilded up and with silver linings (the I Peter of the gospel of Peter, for example, or the I James of the infancy gospel of James), one has to wonder why the author is so modest in this case, and why the earliest evaluators of these gospels wound up accepting the modest claim over and against the fantastic ones.

There is a bit more to the case, but for now I would like simply to observe that I find it difficult just to dispense with the we passages and have done. Maybe this is too subjective, but when I used to accept Robbins in the sense that I thought this was simply a genre device with no real implications for personal involvement, I always had this haunting suspicion that I was wrong, that I had given the more obvious option a short shrift.

I am certainly not trying to be unbalanced on this thread. My con 1 argument also haunts me in this same sense; despite the possibilities given by, for example, Solitary Man, I cannot shake the suspicion that Marcion did not name his gospel because he had no name to hand... and then how did Irenaeus get the name a generation later?

Trouble is, these twin suspicions of mine are not mutually compatible.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

I would rather read your extraneous stuff than most of the central stuff that many of the posters on this board write!

Ben.

aa5874

But, it is right there in the passage. Marcion rejects Acts and it agrees with Paul, so Marcion rejects them.

Can you show me where Marcion claims Paul is his main man?

This is Paul in Romans 1.1-3 [quote] Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God [which he had promised afore by his prophets in the Holy Scriptures] Concerning His son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David, according to the FLESH.

Paul claimed Jesus was made of the seed of David, according to the FLESH.

Paul could not be Marcion's main man.

2-J

It's possible Marcion believed that Paul's original teaching had been perverted, hence he edited the epistles to remove the offending content. In this case, Marcion still believed Paul to be his 'main man'.

Another scenario is that a lot of stuff was later interpolated into Paul (after Marcion, or contemporaneous to him) in which case it's possible Marcion's version of the epistles are more faithful to Paul... in which case also Paul is definitely Marcion's 'main man'!