aa5874

It is just erroneous that "the identification of Paul with Simon Magus is widespread".

Toto, that is the reason you are so ineffective because you are using erroneous and misleading information in your arguments.

Very few identify Paul with Simon Magus.

In Acts of the Apostles Simon Magus and Saul/Paul are two different characters.

Simon was ALREADY known as a magician in Samaria and had converted and De-converted BEFORE Saul/Paul was blinded like a Bat in Acts.

Solo

We were discussing El Greco revolutionary style of painting, not Boole or Babbage, or the impact of les frères Lumière on the Transformers, Iron Maiden’s debt to Woody Guthrie or the origins of industrial sabotage. Not sure where you think the argument that there is ‘nothing new under the sun except in small increments’ is persuasive. It is clearly circular. There are often instances when knowledge and/or ingenious skill do literally the impossible and open new vistas suddenly, unexpectedly.

Unsure of what you are trying to communicate here. But I have often marvelled how obsessive thoughts suffer in their encounters with syntax. How novel was Mark’s hypnotic narrative ? Let me put it this way: He covered thirty modern pages with ink. On those thirty pages he conjured a persona which would dominate the Western culture for seventeen hundred years and the world for three hundred. There is nothing written before or after Mark that can even remotely compare with the effect of this modest literary experiment.

Come to think of it though, the extent of Mark’s innovation is not that hard to describe. One, he provided a narrative thread to “the parables of Jesus” (in the sense of the objective genitive), a form which almost certainly was developed before him in Gospel of Thomas (rudiments of which existed at the time of Mark’s writing), and which was a way to present the manifestations of the spirit, guide the adepts through the ecstatic experience including the management of psychotic reactions. Also, the idiom of the spirit personified as “Jesus” was used to express community beliefs, values and standards. This was one set of building tools which Mark deployed. The other large component in Mark’s toolkit was Paul’s teachings. Mark adopted the cross theology which, his gospel tells us, did not originate with the disciples who did not understand the earthly mission of the Pauline Cosmic Messiah and mistook him for the coming of a parochial Jewish shepherd king who would restore the old kingdom. Of course they could not understand Paul’s kind of Christ because he did not exist in Jesus’ time. Mark’s asserts it as paradox, referring at to Paul’s letters as “scriptures” (most significantly in 14:49, in Judas delivering Jesus up as the fulfillment of Paul’s Rom 4:25, 8:32, Gal 3:13-14) that govern the working of the gospel. The messiah must be delivered to the cross. The reason the women in Mk 16:8 flee from the tomb is that it must be Paul’s gospel (in Mark’s allegorical encoding) that first proclaims Christ crucified. The third element, is what professor Aichele described as ‘the fantastic in Mark’. Aichele observes there exists “An irreducible, opaque remainder of the text is not finally consumed and absorbed along with the rest. A stupid monument, a marker of the limits of meaning, appears at points at which the Gospels resist interpretation and reading becomes difficult. This undigestible remainder, this unexplainable residuum, marks the fantastic”. One really needs to ponder the difficult figures and thought process of Mark which come so close to what the current psychiatrists describe as ‘formal thought disorder’. Robert M. Fowler (Let the Reader Understand (or via: amazon.co.uk)) describes well the syntactic and stylistic issues which are unique to Mark. So rather than manufacture formulas of how much novelty Mark represents, lets dig in and see for ourselves how unique his writing is.

This guy. (or via: amazon.co.uk)

This theory fever does not help much. Even if what you say held as general trends it would not help us much to establish the level of schooling within the first communities. Urban classes in the the European Middle Ages until Renaissance were generally much less schooled that their counterparts in antiquity. Yet, among the reform-minded, education was a high priority. Wycliffe popularized the translations of the Bible into European native languages. Barely a hundred years after him Aeneas Silvio Picolomini (the future pope Pius II.) travelling in the Hussite Bohemia noted with astonishment that among the Utraquists not just men but, nearly all women, knew the scripture and were able to interpret it. (Historia Bohemica (or via: amazon.co.uk)). The Taborite settlement was founded on the example of the Jerusalem brethren and the NT was used to regulate the life of the sectaries. There was no schooling system in existence outside the church, and yet suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, there was a highly literate community.
So if this latent literacy at large could and did establish a highly literate community (robust education for men and women became a Protestant tradition nearly everywhere), there is no reason to claim it could not happen in antiquity. There were schools and private tutoring, which would be generally only available to the wealthy and privileged. But literacy and knowledge would have a way of penetrating self-supporting groups with a common purpose, since many of the urban literate persons, the grammateis and the paidagogoi were freedmen and slaves, at one time or another servicing the households of the rich. I imagine that the availability of the tanakh in Greek, meant above all the assault on the privilege of the Jewish scribal class, especially in the diaspora. It facilitated (if not directly ‘accounted for’ ) the emergence of amateur self-taught interpreters like Paul founding new societies among the intellectually curious (regardless of class) in Greek-speaking cities.

I am not the only reader of Mark who has noted the strange incongruence between his highly sophisticated chiastic structures, and complex recursive idiom on the one hand and on the other the generally artless Greek, at times, as noted by Fowler (see above), verging on idiotic reasoning (such as one finds in people with formal thought disorder). He calls out specifically some of the gar structures ‘tardy and awkward’ misplacing or falsely annexing, as it were, information which the text already passed. One example, “immediately the girl rose and began walking for she was twelve-years old”. (5:42) This structure, a competent psychiatrist today would note, contains a characteristic knight-move in logic. The girl’s rising and walking does is not logically qualified by her age. Similarly, the gar structure of 16:3-4: And they were saying to one another, "Who will roll away the stone for us from the door of the tomb?" And looking up, they saw that the stone was rolled back; for it was very large. In this instance, the qualification of the size of the stone, relates to the imagined difficulty of rolling it, therefore the natural sequence of the events would be: 1) recall that the stone at the cave was large, 2) wondering who would help in moving it, 3) discovery it has been moved already.

Now, there are two possibilities: one, Mark really writes artlessly; two, Mark mimicks the bizarre thinking (and behaviour) of people who are affected by the Spirit. I opt for the latter as I observe a very purposeful and competent execution of a writing plan.

But I am not saying that Mark attempts to copy Paul’s meaning. He simply abducts 'mē aposterēite' for his own purposes (which I have explained above). Clearly, such a saying is not given by the authority of Moses’ Decalogue. Mark appears to borrow from another authority which his community takes for granted.

You see that’s exactly the point. Mark might have been so good at hiding his purposes (as per 4:10-12) by playing a simple fool telling a simple story of a great martyred sage that nearly everyone feels superior to him and believes they have got him figured out.

I think there is a closer parallel. Gospel of Thomas says explicitly the sayings are a test of cerebral fitness: GT(1): And he said, "Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death."


Best,
Jiri

Vorkosigan

Thanks, Solo. I love reading comments like LoM's from mainstream exegetes in which the exegete imagines himself superior to Mark when in fact he doesn't understand Mark at all. The harping on Mark's greek and his apparent low IQ is a result, I think, of the way knowledge of Greek functions as a legitimizing strategy in New Testament studies: "Look! I am superior to Mark, for his Greek was baaaad!"

I've pondered the meaning of Mark's strange logic on many occasions. He being by far the deepest of the Canonical Gospel writers, I can't help but conclude we're missing some point he was trying to make or some structure he was creating.

Anyway, the major structure of the gospel finally dropped into my head the other day. I'll be posting next week on it....

Vorkosigan

tanya

Thank you Jiri, for this excellent point, illustrated beautifully by the El Greco masterwork, (and one could add Einstein, or Aristotle, or Bach, and so on....)

Looking forward to that....

LegionOnomaMoi

A decent starting point is Tim Whitmarsh's Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance. Not only did the proto-novel only really develop when the gosepls were being composed, but the extant texts we have were not written during the first century. There are other reasons for demarcations which I will get into in other posts here and in what I have written for a seperate thread I intend to start.

LegionOnomaMoi

This is where logic comes into play. I said "we don't have a single example of narrative like the gospels which we know was intended to be viewed as ahistorical. It is utterly irrelevant as far as the truth value of my proposition is concerned if there existed billions of such works. I said only that we don't know of any narratives like the gospels which were intended to be viewed as ahistorical. If they were intended to be viewed as such, that in no way affects the truth value of what I said, because we don't know that they were.

Which is even less relevant.


We have no such simple descriptive data, for a biological Jesus.

And which documents "associated with" Alexander the Great do not attribute mythic/legendary lineage, actions, associations, etc., to him?

LegionOnomaMoi

How are you defining "history" or "historiography" in the ancient world? And what type of narrative is supposed to be an alternative? The placement of the gospels within the category of ancient biography is perhaps the most commonly accepted view among specialists today. The problem with this categorization is first the idea that such a “genre” really existed.

However, whether the gospels (or any ancient work) should be called a “biography” is somewhat irrelevant. What matters is whether or not the authors of the earliest extant gospels, particularly Mark, intended to recount the past. That is, whatever other intentions, goals, and purposes the author of Mark had, the important questions is whether one of these purposes was to tell what the author believed was an accurate account of the teachings and actions of a historical individual.

Before I continue, a certain caveat is important. During the first half of the 20th century, when the largely dominant approach to the gospels and the Jesus tradition in general was form-criticism, most followed Bultmann in the belief that the early Christians cared little about what Jesus actually said or did, and freely attributed to him sayings, teachings, and actions. This is somewhat equivalent to the treatment of myth in drama. In an essay published elsewhere I followed McDermott and others arguing that Euripides’ Medea was the first version of the myth in which Medea herself killed her children. However, even if this is not true, we do know that other versions of the story, in which she did not kill her children, existed. Despite the supreme importance of the Homeric epics, nobody much cared about the particulars of the myths recorded or referred to in these. Orthopraxy, not orthodoxy, reigned supreme in world of Greco-Roman religion. Although the form-critics built their model of early Christian accounts of Jesus on then-current folklorist theories rather than Greco-Roman treatment of myth, the result was about the same. The risen Christ, nor the Jesus who lived and preached, was what mattered, so much so that no one cared to distinguish historical components of Jesus’ ministry from the “revelations” provided by the risen Christ.

Yet despite this belief, even Bultmann scoffed at the notion of an entirely mythical Jesus. No matter how ahistorical the gospels were, these could not exist without some historical Jesus to inspire the Christ-traditions attributed to him. So while an early model of a more reliable treatment of the Jesus tradition was rejected at the time, and the notion that the gospels were akin to ancient biographies did not yet exist, the idea that a mythical Christ somehow inspired the NT and other non-canonical early traditions was found wanting. I’ll hope to return to this later, but I wish to make clear that even for those who believed the early Christians, including the gospel authors, did not care about relating history still did not think that Jesus himself was ahistorical.

But was Mark (and the other gospels) an attempt to accurately relate what happened in the past? To a modern reader, the answer is clearly negative. After all, we have a “protagonist” who performs miracles and rises from the dead, and is the son of god. This is not history, but myth. The problem with this view is that it ignores not only the style of the gospels, but what ancient historiography was. “History” wasn’t just an attempt to recall the past. Biographers did this as well, but biography was distinguished from “history”. This was not because biography wasn’t “historiography” in the way we think of it today, but because it differed in narrative form from the “genre” which grew out of the work by Herodotus. Additionally, both “history” and “biography” either attempted to use myth as a source for what happened in the past, or actually reported myth/legends as history. Moreover, a work which better or more accurately reported history was not necessarily considered historiography by ancient readers. Caesar’s reports are among the better accounts of the past, yet the style of his narratives ensured that contemporary readers would not consider them “histories”. The same is true of “biographies”. The fact that certain works which were considered “histories” were less reliable than certain works which were considered “biographies” was irrelevant. While a modern reader would probably consider a biography as historiography, the ancient world did not have this category under which various genres (biography, autobiography, historical journalism, professional historical scholarship, etc.) could be considered members. Instead, various types of narratives were written at least largely to report history, but only a subset of these were considered “histories.”

Legends and myths are not the only elements of ancient historiography which are foreign to modern conceptions of historical works. Even the monumental history of Rome by Gibbon is of a qualitatively different style than most modern history. Modern historians, even those who write popular works, do not tell a story the way older authors of historical texts did. Ancient historians didn’t just frequently rely on myth and legends as evidence, the styles they adopted grew out of story-telling. In other words, narrative dominated all of these works as much as it did proto-novels. An interesting example is the author who wrote what is perhaps the first “biography”: Xenophon. Xenophan wrote history, but his Cyropaedia was perhaps the first “biography.” He also authored what could be considered a biography by a modern reader with his account of Socrates. Yet this work (Memorabilia) belonged to another ancient genre: logoi Sokratikoi, and Xenophon wrote other works which belonged to this category, a genre specific to Socrates. Such works (which include virtually everything written by Plato) did belong to this genre simply because they centered around Socrates, however. Diogenes Laertius also wrote about Socrates, yet his account clearly falls under the category of ancient biography. Again, this is not because it is more accurate. Diogenes Laertius was writing centuries after Socrates was dead, and his “biographies” include far more mythic elements than the logoi Sokratikoi. The form/style of the narrative is again the key here.

Before moving on to an analysis of the gospels, a final note is important here. In Plato especially, it is clear that his accounts of Socrates’ teachings are not historical. Apart from anything else (such as the witness of Xenophon, Aristotle, Aristophanes, and Diogenes Laertius), Plato’s depiction of Socrates in some works contradict that in others (in particular, many things which Socrates says in Plato’s Apology are contradicted elsewhere). Nor can we say with any certainty that Xenophon is more accurate in his depiction. Although some have argued, along with Boutroux that it is Xenophon “…seul de nos témoins qui fût historien de profession...” and that therefore “…l’historien a le droit aujourd’hui, non seulement d’invoquer le témoignages de Xénophon à côté de ceux de Platon et d’Aristote, mais encore de le mettre en première ligne…”, at least as far back as Schleiermacher the problems with such a view have been thoroughly examined. And Aristophanes’ account exists only in his plays (one of which is extant). In fact, it isn’t until Diogenes Laertius, writing his novel-like biographies centuries after even Aristotle was dead, that we have an attempt to document the life of Socrates. However, even though we have no really reliable sources for Socrates’ life, teachings, beliefs, etc., nobody doubts he existed, and few doubt that we can know a fair amount about him.

What makes Jesus so different? The most obvious answer is religion. As Christianity has influenced and biased people before even Paul, it is no surprise that neither our ancient accounts (filled with theological motives and miraculous accounts) nor modern analyses (often overtly influenced by Christian faith) are unproblematic. Yet even for those who are less willing to place Mark and the other gospels within the category of ancient biography, the narrative clearly limits the literary framework of these texts. There is no meter, which define epics and poetry. The next question is what other literary works used narrative but were never intended to report what happened in the past. In his Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance, Whitmarsh begins his analysis (after the introduction) with the origins of the “novel” and the earliest extant example we have. Although this work is later than the gospels, the origin of the “novel” (or proto-novel), “is very much a product of the early imperial era.” That is, it dates from the first century. From Chariton’s Callirhoe to The Golden Ass, we have examples of narratives which clearly do not attempt to tell the reader what happened in the past, but are rather examples of fiction.

The problem with putting Mark in such a category is not simply the fact that this genre didn’t really develop until around the time Mark was written, and by a very different literate group. For those who have studied both the Greek language and read ancient Greek literature extensively, Mark stands out even from the other gospels, let alone other forms of narrative literature. The study of narrative and stories has a long history in modern scholarship. More importantly, such studies are not limited to literary theory, which relies on academic jargon and psychological theories which psychologists have deemed to be without any empirical or scientific support. For example, a cognitive scientist and linguist who is among the most respected researchers in the field very recently wrote a monograph The Language of Stories: A Cognitive Approach which uses a vastly more empirically based approach to language and cognition than most analyses of literary form and narrative. Unfortunately, even the post-modern descendants of French deconstructionism offer about as much help when it comes to ancient narratives. Simply put, narrative comprised too much of literature in the ancient world for such analyses to distinguish narrative histories from narrative fiction.

Luckily, though, we are not left with simply analyses and models of narrative. In addition to enough extant literature to track developments within various traditions and frameworks over time, we also know quite a bit about the interaction between Jews and the rest of those who fell under the authority of Rome (and previous conquerors of Judaea). And, while at one time the Greek of the NT was thought to be unique, the discovery of papyri (among other things) has forever discredited this theory (which had served the Christian agenda: the Greek of the NT was special because it was inspired by god).

The capacity to write any sort of lengthy work, or even to read one, was rare in the ancient world. Thus, while in modern times a poorly written narrative could be accounted for by a lack of education, or the age of the writer (a 10 year old can hardly be expected to write even a Hardy boys quality narrative), when Mark was written any work of that type had to be the product of an educated individual. This does not mean, though, that all education was equivalent, and still less that all narratives were equally well written. None of the gospels can be considered “great literature” when it comes to ancient Greek narratives. But Mark in particular stands out as an inferior work. Just about everything one would expect from a good narrative is lacking: transitions, complex constructions, use of particles, lexical variation, erudition, etc. For those who cannot read ancient Greek, or who cannot read it very well, a fairly decent analogy is a history paper written by a child: “And then X happened. After that Y happened. And then Z. And suddenly W. And suddenly U. And B…And C…And D…” et cetera. Plato’s accounts of Socrates are similar to the gospels in that they are focused on a single individual. But like all such accounts of Socrates, they are of vastly greater literary quality. They read like the creations of those who are interested in creating a narrative focused on the story of an individual, regardless of whether the components of the story have any basis in historical fact. Mark, on the other hand, does not. It reads like someone who took a collection of disparate accounts of Jesus’ deeds, sayings, teachings, and so forth, and sought to put them into one coherent single account (and one which included particular theological/religious motives), but lacked the ability to do this well.

Apart from any other argument, then, the stylistic inadequacies in Mark render problematic any view which sees this text as something other than an attempt to weave disparate oral traditions about Jesus into a single narrative. Mark does not resemble the works of Plato or Xenophon in it’s account of Jesus. These “flow” in a way that none of the gospels, but especially Mark, do not. Such flow is much easier, even for an unskilled author of the ancient world, if most or the entirety of the work springs from the mind of the author. And even Plato, perhaps the most intelligent author of antiquity, wrote works which lacked the narrative quality of proto-novels. This was not due to some authorial inadequacy, but to the genre (or literary framework) to which Plato adhered. A work of pure fiction, in which not only the plot but also the characters are determined by the author, enables an inferior author to produce a narrative superior to Plato.

Given both the quality of Mark and the available frameworks (even accounting for innovations), is there any alternative to viewing Mark as an attempt to weave oral traditions which developed because of an actual, historical Jesus, into a single account? MacDonald, in more than one work, has argued that Homer provided a literary model. Yet like all other such alternatives, such comparisons rely on “loose” equivalents. They don’t provide a model for the actual content of Mark or the other gospels. Moreover, the knowledge of Jewish scripture and writings (even if only in Greek translations) provide a superior framework for understanding the educational background of the gospels’ authors. While even native speakers of Latin were often educated using Homer, Jews who could not read, write, or understand Hebraic languages still had the LXX. Thus, as easy as it is to search through Greek literature for themes or stylistic equivalents to pieces of the gospels, or for the educational background which enabled the authors to write at all, those like MacDonald and Carrier put too much stock in the importance of the Homeric epics among the non-Jews of the Roman Empire. Those who were either born Jewish or who were familiar with Jewish literature (which was true of many even before Jesus was said to have live) had other texts from which they could learn how to read or write. Yet although there are not only quotations from Jewish writing in the gospels, but also texts which potentially explain the literary capacity demonstrated in certain NT texts, none of this gets us the gospels in general or Mark in particular.

Which brings us to what DOES get us Mark. I mentioned the stylistic inadequacies present in the text. But more important is what they convey. A bad author of fiction (or an author who is writing a fictional work which is intended to be simple) shows said inadequacies in rather specific ways: limited vocabulary and syntactical simplicity. But although Mark by no means contains complicated syntactic constructions or otherwise shows literary skill in his/her choice of lexemes, the most telling evidence of limited ability is the transitions between ideas/thoughts/narrative components/etc. The author of Mark is clearly educated, and must have read numerous works in Greek, including historical works. Yet Mark reads like someone trying to take the accounts of others, both short and longer, and string them together. Moreover, he doesn’t combine a simple series of moral/theological/ethical/religious traditions into his own sort of theological narrative. There is no series of components strung together each of which serves some individual purpose. Rather, Mark is the product of an author taking various traditions and trying to weave them into one narrative.

Even more significant is the resulting narrative. Despite the amount of mythical material, Mark is clearly an attempt to take disparate accounts, from pithy sayings to miraculous events, and weave them into a historical account. The author does not abstract certain moral, theological, or even Christological lessons from a particular time and space as was typical, but grounds every disparate tradition into a specific space and time. Even were the author a creative genius, and the poor quality of Mark a product of the traditions used, the fact that these are located in time and space in a way lacking in myth makes anything other than an attempt to construct a historical account severely faulty.

Mark is not an allegorical work, nor some midrash, nor a novel, nor anything other than an attempt to take traditions about a person who was believed to be a wonder-worker chosen by god and make these into one narrative. It is an attempt to take disparate traditions about a certain individual and put them together. That these traditions concerned an entirely mythic figure is just too implausible. There would be no point to Mark if the author understood these accounts as such.

LegionOnomaMoi

Not "history" but a form of "historiography." That is, the authors of the gospels wished to recount what happened in the past, as apposed to those who had no interest in doing so (e.g., those who used historical individuals as a mouthpiece for their own views) or those who wrote proto-novels. However, the gospels are closer to an attempt to record history than many works about Socrates. Additionally, we have the literary framework Mark tried to fit in. Finally, we have the Jesus sect itself and 100+ years of sociological research into religious movements, not to mention the even lengthier study of ancient cultic developments.

Yet your conclusion utterly ignores the context for such "people [who] can easily assume that a historical person lies behind a story..." This is of central importance. Modern people can be fooled by technology, and early modern people by other mechanisms. But the literary categories, connectedness (in the "small world" of graph theory or social network analysis), and other means through which the Jesus story could turn from Christ myth to history lacked the mechanisms for such transformations.


What was Paul's name? His allegedly authentic letters (and inauthentic 1) Have you studied the mass of scholarship on the creation of fictional letters?
2) What is your basis for assuming that the Acts of the Apostles is "fiction" in the modern sense?
3) Contradictions occur in eyewitness accounts given to law enforcement today. So much so that too much similarity is suspiciuos.
4) The "letter" of the ancient world belonged to a genre. If you wish to critique Paul's letters, it is necessary to deal with this genre.

No such claim exists (not clearly, anyway). Nor would it necessarily be a boast, as neither Jews nor early Christians had any love for Rome.

That has nothing to do with the lack of information. We have an unbelievable amount of information concerning the Jesus tradition, but in terms of manuscripts and accounts. Look at the accounts of "Antiphon" (who may or may not be one or a few individuals) or any number of figures to see this.

LegionOnomaMoi

Talk about circular. If such knowledge and skill allows novel extensions, then obviously it is unexpected. Nobody looked at Herodotus and thought "Well, we always figured he'd turn narrative into the origins of historiography."

This has almost nothing to do with syntax. See my most recent posts here.

This argument relies on a logically problematic basis. Popularity need not matter at all. If Mark was the first to set down the "persona" which already existed in oral form in various communities which belonged to the Jesus sect, then he could have written a far inferior work and be just as influential. If you assume a mythic Christ and no historical Jesus, then your argument has some weight. But granting that assumption makes the entirety of the debate irrelevant. And if you are wrong, it's like saying the account of a child who interviewed the first alien life form from lightyears away is influential because of the writing. If those who copied and ensured the transmission of Mark did so because they like the author of Mark always viewed it as historiography, then the influence is utterly irrelevant. They believed Jesus was the chosen of YHWH who could perform the impossible. In a highly illiterate world, who cares if Mark is crap from a literary perspective?


So basically a nobody?


And your basis for this is? First, "urban classes" had no counterpart in the Roman Empire. Second, while universities (which grew mainly out of a need to educate priests) existed ~1000 years ago, there was no schooling in the first century or really at all in antiquity. The tiny minority composing the elite were educated in the way those like Cicero, Pliny, Ovid, etc., were.


Completely wrong. First, "Wycliffe's Bible" was accesible to a small subset of the English speaking population. Second, middle English dialectical differences made any single translation into English unreadable to most. Third, the "European native tongues" were almost entirely distinct from the English of the Wycliffe translation.

It's called the printing press. Even after cheap paper, increased literacy, and other factors, even before Luther the printing press made possible the things you claim were just as impossible in the early modern period as they were in antiquity. Only that's simply wrong.




The "slaves" who were educated were Greeks who served rich romans. The "tutoring" involved these Greeks or similar people. And literacy did not have a way of "penetrating" much of anything, at least not in a way which would explain the gospels.

Who the hell do you think created the LXX if not the Jewish scribal class?


Literary "form" is not exactly the issue. For example, Dr. Seuss and the most talented English speaking poets may share certain tendencies (like rhyme). Nobody argues this means much at all. And recursive idiom? How is fucking up over and over again indicative of any sophistication?



That's like using HPSG to understand ancient grammarians.

Only Mark neither imitiates the behavior of anyone, nor do we have any indication that the author of Mark mimics the thinking of anyone.




Which would make him the most sophisticated author who ever lived.


That isn't explicit. Do you know that explicit means?

mountainman

Does this criteria of expected dissimilarity apply to the gospels equally as well whether they are either ...

(a) historical eyewitness accounts, or

(b) fabricated fictional accounts.?