Peter Kirby

Bede, thanks for your response. I have read both Christianizing Homer and The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark very recently, and I am still undecided with regards to my stance on each. Perhaps you can help me. Do you think that MacDonald at any point makes any good argument for the influence of some part of the Homeric epics on any part of the Gospel of Mark? If so, what are a few of the best examples offered by MacDonald for such an influence?

best,
Peter Kirby

Alexis Comnenus

Peter,

Homer was ubiquitous in Greek literary culture at the time so I fully expect to see some echoes of the epics in almost anything. On crosstalk I squeezed 17 allusions to Shakespeare into one short post and still said what I wanted to.

But use a critical mind to go through the parallels MacD presents and ask - if this was Nostradamus or something else I know can't be true, would I buy it? MacD allows himself such a wide range of parallels where both the same things and there being different are significant, he could easily find connections between any two texts.

In depth discussions here on MacD:

"http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=6&t=000268&p="
"http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=6&t=000252&p="

With the most important work from a Cambridge classicist which I'll reproduce here and keep meaning to put on my site:

Some notes on MacDonald’s ‘The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark’

It is my intention to divide this short review into three sections: ‘Why I think that MacDonald [hereinafter MacD] is wrong’; ‘Why MacDonald’s thesis is antecedently improbable’; and ‘Why it doesn’t really matter anyway’. These sections have been arranged in reverse order, in the hope that anyone who doesn’t get to the end will at least see the most important bits.

Why it doesn’t really matter anyway

The more irritating thing about MacD’s book - or rather, not his book, but the people with axes to grind who make use of his research - is to (mis)appropriate his work to prove something that it manifestly doesn’t.

The thing that they think it proves is the theological bankruptcy of Christianity. Here’s why it doesn’t.

Lay Christians assailed by atheists triumphantly brandishing copies of MacD who don’t know much about classical literature or NT scholarship will probably immediately take refuge in one of two arguments: (a) similarity doesn’t prove influence; and (b) Mark could have used Homer for ‘literary reasons’. And these are, in fact, the main argument that I come across in bog-standard refutations of MacD on Christian websites. Now, atheists are entitled to scoff at them, since they show every sign of having been plucked from the air by people who know that MacD can’t be true and have chosen to take refuge in a couple of apparent fail-safes. Fortunately for them, however, on closer inspection, the arguments turn out to be perfectly good and valid ones.

Below, I’ll try to show that most of the supposed parallels are quite illusory. But suppose that MacD had proved his case beyond all reasonable - no, all possible doubt. So what? Would Mark’s harnessing of Homer as a literary model prove that Christianity wasn’t an authentic revealed religion? Of course not. If I wanted to write a biography of one of my friends or colleagues, I’d have no difficulty in singling out episodes in their lives bearing some resemblance to episodes in Homer (remember that the forty-eight books of Homer are each several hundred lines long, while GMark is quite a petite little text - the shortest of all the Gospels, in fact).

The only indictment which could plausibly lie
against Christianity on the basis of MacD’s study is that (to put it crudely) Mark made up bits of his Gospel to fit his Homeric model. Now, I hardly need point out that the notion that Mark massaged details or made creative use of narrative structures in pursuit of his literary ends would be problematic only to a hardcore inerrantist (or an atheist who has already decided that MacD’s book proves that there is something fishy about the Bible, whatever it may be, and doesn’t want to relinquish what s/he feels sure must be a valuable weapon). I can say with confidence that, even if it were proved that Mark had, as a creative artist, taken literary and/or historical liberties with his material in a way which adherents of modern positivistic historiography might find uncomfortable, that fact would not even come close to proving that the creation of his text was not inspired by God to stand as an authoritative witness to the life of Jesus Christ. After all, you don’t have to be a liberal to accept that the Christic discourses in John’s Gospel can’t be read like a news report in yesterday’s New York Times.

It is impossible to underestimate the significance of these few basic facts. They don’t merely discredit the atheists’ strongest MacD-based argument: they completely destroy their only one.

Why MacDonald’s thesis is antecendently improbable

What MacDonald doesn’t do is explain that he’s got an uphill struggle on his hands (excuse the mixed metaphor) from the outset. There are several reasons for this.

Perhaps the most irritating thing about MacD’s book is that he never explains why Mark allegedly drew on Homer so heavily (not MacD’s fault, since that’s not the function of his work). It seems probable a priori that Mark’s intention was to write a text which could be used in the instruction and/or evangelization of sub-élite Romans (or, if you accept the Goulder-Spong thesis, in public worship). Now, while Mark’s target audience will have been reasonably familiar with the contents of the Homeric epics, the idea that they would have picked up on the sort of things that MacD purports to have identified is almost incredible. That would have taken long, hard study by a skilled and determined scholar. Did Mark really go to all that trouble just to put together a playful little jeu d’esprit for the benefit of an educated minority? Or was his principal concern the salvation of souls after all?

If Mark had wanted people to pick up on the Homeric parallels adduced - and it’s difficult to believe that his motives in writing his Gospel were identical to those of Elgar composing the Enigma Variations - he would have made it very clear. If the Homeric epics really had provided the interpretative key to GMark, the fact would have become well-known. Indeed, it could plausibly be argued that it would never have been forgotten - at any rate, one would expect to find some reference to GMark’s Homeric pedigree in the record somewhere. Instead, there’s a deafening silence. None of our Christian forebears mention anything about Mark being influenced by Homer, not even the Apostolic Fathers, despite the fact that they tell us a reasonable amount generally about the authorship of the Gospels and the circumstances of their composition. That fact alone should set alarm bells ringing in our minds.

This brings me onto another vital point: if MacD were right, it would almost defy belief that the extensive and detailed parallels which he uncovers lay hidden for twenty centuries before being excavated by him. The Fathers knew their Homer - as MacD himself points out, various later works of Christian literature are manifestly Homeric hypertexts. Yet none of them noticed anything fishy about GMark. Archbishop Eustathius, Ecumenical Patriarch (Head of the Orthodox Church) during the Middle Ages, was one of the greatest Homeric scholars in history: he even wrote a massive commentary on both epics that dwarfs every single one of its successors. Yet he didn’t smell any rats. And what of the nineteenth-century German skeptics? Homer was just as popular a target for Wellhausens as the text of the Bible, and dozens of academics working on the NT would have been just as familiar with Homer as Mark. It is incredible that MacD is unable to call to the stand any of these distinctly unsympathetic witnesses.

Then there is the linguistic argument. Briefly, Homer wrote in a very peculiar dialect. When later authors deliberately Homerized, they frequently added Homeric colouring to their work at the verbal or syntactic level. Mark simply doesn’t do this. (To be fair, MacD is aware of this problem, even though he never really surmounts it.)

Finally, there is little formal resemblance between the epics and GMark. When Virgil ripped off Homer’s two 24-book oeuvres, he wrote a 12-book poem which followed the Odyssey for the first 6 books and the Iliad in its second half. Likewise, Nonnus’ Dionysiaca received 48 books - to show that it was as good as both Homeric epics put together. There isn’t even a ghost of this in Mark.

I could go on and point to things like the absence of a prooemium (which would be an absolute gift to a Christian writer - just look at the beginning of ‘Paradise Lost&#8217 - but you get the idea.

Why I think that MacDonald is wrong

I’ll start with one strange parallel which seems to be quite popular on the Internet: that between the stories of Elpenor and Eutychus.

Odyssey Bible Odysseys and crew left Troy Paul and crew stopped at Troas having And sailed back to Achaea. Left Achaea to sail back to Jerusalem.

This is seriously misleading. Odysseus’ voyage back from Troy began long before the Circe episode (to which the Elpenor incident belongs), and Odysseus had had numerous strange adventures in the meantime. Also, Achaea is a big place, and Paul hadn’t been anywhere near the spot which Odysseus was making for (the island of Ithaca, on the far side of the Greek peninsula).

Narration in the first-person plural. Narration in first-person plural.

This doesn’t even count as a parallel. What other person could the Bible-writer have used under the circumstances?!

After a sojourn, the crew and After a sojourn, the believers and Paul Odysseus ate a meal. ate a meal. Disaster came at night. Disaster came at midnight.

Of course, what this doesn’t note is that Odysseus and his crew have by this stage in the Circe episode done lots of things that Paul and his friends don’t - the Eutychus incident assumes a certain prominence in Paul’s narrative which Elpenor’s mishap just doesn’t have in Homer (which raises the question again: what on earth did the Bible-writer think he was achieving by patterning his narrative after such a strange and trivial incident?). Odysseus’ friends, since you ask, have by this stage been turned into animals (and back again) by a witch, who obligingly goes to bed with Odysseus when he objects.

The crew slept in Circe’s “darkened “There were plenty of lamps in the upper Halls.” Room.”
Elpenor fell into “sweet sleep.” Eutychus fell into a “deep sleep.”

If the Bible-writer really had been basing his narrative on Homer, “sweet sleep” would have been an absolute gift as a means of flagging up what he was doing on the level of vocab. “Sweet sleep” is an absolutely standard Homeric phrase - occurs numerous times in the epics.

The narrator switches to third person. The narrator switches to third person.

Well, of course he does!

“There was one, Elpenor, the “A certain young man named Eutychus.” youngest.”

Ok, so they’re both young..! Once again, the Bible-writer’s not making it easy for us, is he? Why couldn’t he just have made Eutychus the youngest? Or by bringing in this new ‘young man’ noun? What does he think he’s doing?

Incidentally, the fact that their names both begin with ‘E-‘ doesn’t count, since the ‘Eu’ is a diphthong, and diphthongs in Greek don’t alliterate with monophthongs.

Elpenor fell from the roof. Eutychus fell from the third story. Elpenor’s soul went to Hades. Eutychus’s soul remained in him. Associates fetched the body, dead. Associates took up the body, alive.

Ok, so one person falls from one place and dies and someone else falls from another place and survives.

Elpenor was not buried until dawn. Eutychus was not raised alive until dawn.

And this is where MacD gets seriously misleading. Firstly, Eutychus was never ‘raised alive’ - he was never dead to begin with, and all that happened was that Paul let him go on sleeping until - naturally enough - dawn. Secondly, before Elpenor’s body was dealt with, lots and ltos of things happened to Odysseus and his crew, including a book-long trip to the underworld, which have no conceivable biblical counterpart.
So the similarity between the two passages comes down to the fact that in each of them someone has a fall while asleep. Hardly faith-shaking stuff.

The irony here is that the NT passage comes from Acts, traditionally ascribed to Luke. Even if we admit Homeric influence here, so what? Either we take the common-sense view that it has no bearing on GMark (and hence the rest of MacD’s book) - or we start getting into the realms of conspiracy theories and hypothesize that there was some kind of plot among the NT writers to infringe Homer’s copyright without letting anyone know.

After that rather detailed scrutiny of a typical MacDonaldian exercise in parallel-drawing, let’s now take a bird’s eye view of MacD’s case for associating the Marcan Jesus with Odysseus, which he nconveniently summarises at the start of his book.

1. Both sail seas with associates far their inferiors, who weaken when confronted by suffering.

Yes, but Odysseus wanders, lost, for 10 years while trying to get home from the wars, spending much of his time in mythical space, while Jesus takes a few short boat-trips on inland seas in Palestine. The whole purpose of Odysseus’ companions is that they point up a contrast with the hero. And it’s hardly surprising that the disciples didn’t always match up to the Messiah. Not really a parallel at all.

2. Both heroes return home to find it infested with murderous rivals that devour the houses of widows.

I wondered what MacD was talking about here until I discovered later in his book that he is lumping together various assorted money-changers, scribes, pharisees etc who feel the rough edge of Jesus’ tongue with the suitors of Penelope. Now, most of Jesus’ enemies aren’t murderous, just self-righteous and hypocritical; and none of them have much to do with widows (though some of them are vaguely referred to as oppressing women whose husbands have died). Penelope isn’t a widow, anyway, and Homer never describes her as one. Nor are Jesus enemies in his ‘home’ (the Temple - the House of the Father - is in no way analogous to Odysseus’ palace).

3. Both oppose supernatural foes, visit dead heroes, and prophesy their own returns in the third person.

Nearly all heroes oppose supernatural foes, and the supernatural foes of Odysseus (notably, Poseidon and the Sun) are manifestly not comparable to Jesus’ supernatural adversaries. Odysseus visits the underworld in a book-long interlude and sees or converses with various great men of the past; the nearest Jesus comes to this is the Transfiguration (entirely different - much fewer ‘heroes’ are invovled, and not much conversation takes place). Later in the book, MacD will compare each of these incidents with something completely different in the other text -notably, the Transfiguration gets compared with Odysseus’ recognition by Telemachus, which seems truly bizarre, an impression which isn’t assuaged when one reads MacD’s feeble attempt to marry arbitrarily-chosen passages from the two texts. And does anyone, even MacD himself, take seriously the suggestion that Jesus’ prophecies of the Second Coming were suggested to Mark by his reading of Homer?

4. A wise woman anoints each protagonist, and both eat last suppers with their comrades before visiting Hades, from which both return alive.

The woman at Bethany who anoints (a almost completely obscure character of whom we know almost nothing and who plays an insignificant role in GMark) is supposed to counterpoint Eurycleia (Odysseus’ old nurse who has known him from childhood and plays a major role in the later books of the Odyssey), on the basis that the latter pours oil onto Odysseus’ body too. Say no more. Moreover, Eurycleia’s recognition of Odysseus by his childhood scar is supposed to counterpoint the Bethany woman’s recognition that Jesus is going to die (and here MacD has to torture the text to extract this particular detail - apparently, she anointed him because she realised he was a goner). Nothing in the Odyssey even slightly resembles the Last Supper, so I won’t waste time on this alleged parallel, which is gossamer-thin even by MacD’s hair-raisingly generous standards. Odysseus’ trip to the underworld is divided into two parts - the first is spent on earth talking to some ghosts who rise out of a trench and appear in front of him; the second (which was probably inserted into the Odyssey’s text at a relatively late stage) is spent actually walking around in Hades looking at sinners suffering unspeakable punishments. Now, you (and Prof. MacD) might see some point of contact here with the Cruficixion and Resurrection, but I’m afraid that I’m personally less than convinced.

These ‘notes’ have gone on for too long already, and I haven’t got time to explain why (my personal favourite!) Jesus’ Resurrection bears no resemblance to the ransoming of Hector’s body by Priam from Achilles, or why connecting the three lengthy laments which end the Iliad with Mk 15.47-16.1 takes considerably more imagination than I possess. The aroma of coffee, we are told, is like sex in that it promises more than it can ever deliver. ‘The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark’ might be an equally appropriate analogue.

Peter Kirby

I'm confused. Are Alexis Comnenus and Bede the same person? I thought it was Bede who made that post to XTalk.

best,
Peter Kirby

Toto

Here's a hint, Alexis (or Bede??? I thought there was a similarity in style, but not an identity. Maybe it's better if there is only one of you.) Leave off the " " and you will get automatic hot links:

It doesn't sound like you have added much to the previous discussion. MacDonald, we know, is a committed, practicing Christian. His book is literary criticism, not theology. The only conclusion you might draw from it is the one that Richard Carrier drew, that gMark cannot be used as historical evidence for the existence of a historical Jesus - but most secular and liberal Christians have taken that stance already.

Koyaanisqatsi

But not by Mark, who is alleged to both be a "witness" as well as inspired by God so a reading of the story from the perspective of an historically accurate account is what's in question here, not whether idiots in Mark's audience made such a stupid mistake.

It is? Mark states it is a man in white clothes. That means it is a man in white clothes.

Is this the "obvious" you're pointing to, or are you somehow stating that the obvious is not actually the obvious, rather something radically different, such as a man in white clothes is actually an angel from God?

If that is the case, then why in the world wouldn't Mark have stated, "Inside the tomb sat an Angel form God?"

Was Mark just an idiot, perhaps?

Yes, as they do, don't they, and since it has been fairly well established that Mark came first and Mark tells us that it isn't an angel, rather a man, I would contend that is proof positive that the myth originated with Mark and was obviously embellished upon by later authors, as you seem to agree with.

No, it does not. It clearly states that the man in the robe claims, "He is risen."

And as we both know, Mark 16:9-20 is of no use for any further clarification, so we are left only with 16:5-8:

So, as far as Mark is concerned--the chronologically first author to tell the story--all we have is a man in a robe sitting in the already opened tomb who claims that Jesus "is risen."

That's it. End of story.

"It" doesn't claim anything, again to be technical, which one must when one is considering whether or not one is dealing with authentic historical documents of events that actually occurred in the factual manner that they were allegedly witnessed to occur; the man sitting in the open tomb does the claiming and all he states is "he is risen" and that the body is not "here."

Nor do I, so I must rely upon scholars such as Crossan and Mack, who do in fact deconstruct the myth to be progressive and the notion of a bodily resurrection to occur only in John, if I recall my readings.

Still, it's all nonsense, so, half a dozen of one...

I am an adult.

Nor would I need to. Only the one making the positive claim needs to offer proof and since the only evidence we have is from an anonymous author from two thousand years ago who claims a man was sitting in an already opened tomb and told the Marys "he is risen" and his body is not "here" and go tell the others that they will see him in the town and that's the end of the story, I don't see any need to take it further than the obvious.

Do you?

Bede

Rumbled....

Peter Kirby

I am not sure that I agree with your assessment of liberal Christians. Can you name and quote just one Christian who has conceded that the Gospel of Mark does not furnish historical evidence for the existence of a historical Jesus? I might agree with this statement, but I would not agree that this statement has been adopted already by most Christians of any stripe.

best,
Peter Kirby

Toto

Perhaps I was overly broad (or optimistic). I have read Burton Mack most recently, but I haven't surveyed all liberal Christians.

I have most recently been reading Charlotte Allen's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684827255/internetinfidelsA" target="_blank">The Human Christ</a>. Are you familiar with it? It has a certain bias, but is quite fascinating. I am in the middle of her description of the various German approaches, many of which seem to work from the premise that the gospels are not a source of historical fact.

Toto

Hey, Bede, it's okay. Sock puppets are a dime a dozen.

Peter Kirby

Are you saying that Burton Mack is a Christian, albeit a liberal one?

I have heard of this book, and I have read some of Allen's journalistic efforts. Do any of the German Christians mentioned go so far as to say that the Gospel of Mark provides absolutely no evidence for the historicity of Jesus?

best,
Peter Kirby