Vorkosigan

After reading Dart, I was inspired to tie up some more chiasms I'd been toying with. Took today off to catch up my reading and blogs, and study some Greek. The results have been pretty pleasing, at least to me.

Anyway, I thought I'd share this classic of the writer's art with you all. Consider this one strictly for enjoyment:



Let me explain this....

A: feature Pilate dealing with crowds, who bind/release and then deliver up.
B: Pilate asks a question and does not get a sensible answer.
C: Chief priests and crowd (who are linked and paired throughout this chiasm) condemn Jesus
D: Pilate again asks a question.
E: Chief priests stirring up crowd and bringing charges
F: Pilate wonders, and then answers his own question -- it was out of envy.
G-A: A prisoner is released
G-B: the genius of the writer of Mark is displayed here. The B-B' bracket is a towering crescendo of Markan irony. At first glance the two brackets appear to have no relationship at all. But then the irony slowly sinks in. Rebels is opposed to crowd, because the crowd is in rebellion, of course, against its True King, Jesus. Pilate meanwhile is linked to Barabbas as one who has committed murder during an insurrection, as Pilate actually did during this period. The writer has not only made Barrabbas a double of Jesus, he has also made him a double of Pilate. That's art, man. :notworthy :notworthy

Hope you enjoyed seeing this as much as I enjoyed finding it!

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

The writer's skill is so strong that he has even incorporated miniature ABBA chiasms that link the larger brackets, in many cases. For example, consider the interior G-A/A' brackets above:

A: 6: Now at the feast he used to release for them one prisoner for whom they asked.
...
...
A': 9: And he answered them, "Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?"(RSV)

A: Now at the feast he used to release for them one prisoner
B: for whom they asked.
B': And he answered them
A': "Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?"(RSV)

>sigh<

JoeWallack

JW:
Yes, the low Christology of "Mark" has made it an unwitting time capsule witness to the Original fictional & contrived story. How else can you explain the lack of fitting for a fictional virgin birth as "Matthew" and "Luke" received and more importantly no resurrection sighting. It was the Liars for Jesus, "Matthew" and "Luke", that made the fictional Word Incarnated Historical flesh.

Vork, if you only knew some Greek you'd be really dangerous:

Mark 15: (KJV)
1 And straightway in the morning the chief priests held a consultation with the elders and scribes and the whole council, and bound Jesus, and carried him away, and delivered him to Pilate.
2 And Pilate asked him, Art thou the King of the Jews? And he answering said unto them, Thou sayest it.
3 And the chief priests accused him of many things: but he answered nothing.
4 And Pilate asked him again, saying, Answerest thou nothing? behold how many things they witness against thee.
5 But Jesus yet answered nothing; so that Pilate marvelled.

Pilate's first reaction to Jesus is "marvelling".

Mark 15: (KJV)
44 "And Pilate marvelled if he were already dead: and calling unto him the centurion, he asked him whether he had been any while dead.
45 And when he knew it of the centurion, he gave the body to Joseph."

Consider this evidence from the Original Gospel and compare to the modern Liar for Jesus, Mel Gibson's Passion portrayal.

Pilate's last reaction to Jesus is "marvelling".

The same Greek word with probably the best translation of "amazed". Brown is the only commentator I've seen who notes this but in a 1,000 page, fine print work amazingly doesn't see any significance worth discussing. Obviously "amazed" is out of context when considering the possible connection of crucifiction and death so "Matthew" and "Luke" don't use it. So we see the original contrived fiction dishonestly ignored by Christian Bible scholarship for 2,000 years.



Joseph

rlogan

This thread along with the "Original Ending to Mark" thread is getting at the crucial inflection point in the Christian literary history: The period in which the myth became "historic".

Mark is still controlled by Hebrew prophesy as well, with being silent and rejected by his own people, etc.

I have wondered about the use of Barabas as a magnum-sized irony. Specifically if this sort of thing was a common feature of literature at the time. We have the tragic greek hero model who has some failure that leads to his downfall - but this is not quite the same kind of irony.

Clivedurdle

Inside the Praetorium .

Haran

Vork, no offense meant, but how would you convince someone that these chiasms are not along the lines of The Bible Code? In other words, it seems that something similar could be 'discovered' in other works by someone who cared to take the time to 'discover' it. I know you know this, but don't forget that verse divisions are not original....

Vorkosigan

I agree completely that convincing others is difficult. That's why the vocab parallels are so important along with the tiny ABBA chiasms (see my second post). Consider, for example, the F bracket:

F 5: But Jesus made no further answer, so that Pilate wondered.
F' 10: For he perceived that it was out of envy that the chief priests had delivered him up.

Note the ABBA chiasm formed there:

5a A: Jesus no answer
5b B: Pilate wonders
10a B': Pilate figures it out -- it's envy
10b A': chief priests deliver

In the exterior, Jesus is paralleled to the chief priests, his enemies, while in the interior Pilate asks and then answers himself in an internal monologue. That's not an uncommon feature in Mark. This chiasm also begins and ends with an action that results in a change of location, a common feature in Markan chiasms. Many commentators have noted how Mark begins his events with geographical movement.

I also agree wholeheartedly with your comment about versification. Sometimes the versification is coincidentally dead on, like here. Sometimes the versification is completely wrong and it really screws up your ability to see things clearly. The traditional pericoping and versification are all wrong and do not reflect the writer's intent at all. Dart, who independently found many of the same ones I did, said the same thing. Once you get inside the writer's head and figure out how he structured things, you can find them easily. The problem is convincing others!

Mark didn't make this easy because he is good at masking his parallel structures. Further, he used a literary technique the Greeks called "overlapping at the edges" which means that the ends of the chiasm bleed into the preceding and following ones (also true of Mark's larger structures; they bleed into one another as well -- See Tolbert's _Sowing the Gospel_). For example, Mark 15:15 is the end of the first chiasm, but the beginning of the next one (15:15-20). Then the next one overlaps, beginning at 15:20...I will have the entire structure of the Crucifixion and mocking scene up tonight, I think. It's really grand.

Part of the problem too is that you can telescope chiasms. There's no reason you couldn't make this even more fine-grained, for example, by dividing the F bracket into two more brackets, and so forth, or collapse it some more. But the structure I have here seems to reflect the layout pretty well, I think, large enough to see it, without getting too large so as to make it unclear, or so small as to be iffy. So even the structure has a kind of arbitrariness that makes it difficult for skeptics to accept (now there's a role reversal for us!)

Hope this helps. I don't expect widespread acceptance. Not until I have the chiasmic structure of the entire Gospel laid out pericope by pericope using Mark's signature simple exterior-complex interior system of chiasms. That's the one place where Dart and I disagree.

Michael

Amaleq13

This claim has been made before by Bede with the same comparison to The Bible Code and the same absence of actual evidence. The thing is, somebody did demonstrate that the same amazingly coded information could be found in just about any book that was long enough (e.g. Moby Dick, War and Peace).

Why not actually do the same with Vork's chiasms rather than just suggest it might be possible to find them elsewhere?

Haran

I did not know he did. Perhaps it is the skeptic in us?

Chili

Neither does the creation argument gain much acceptance in the evolution theory while it really is the act of creation that makes evolution possible. The problem is that both are stubbornly wrong with the solution to be found in the consolation of philosophy.

The same is true with science wherein science extrapolates from omniscience (albeit from behind the eight-ball = stubbornly wrong). Regardless of this, as they reach the summit of their own discovery they will find themselves drawn to each other (wherefore all roads lead to Rome).

Now here you are finding mathematical truths in a faithless gospel. What you are really doing is extracting the beauty of art as an entity of its own which cannot be done without the beauty of the theme existing in the message itself. You can do this with Mark because the element of faith is removed in Mark. I'd say you better be careful or this will make you into a believer once again, which would be just as wrong if understanding is meant to be the end of faith.

Am I right in this or do I miss the whole concept here.