aa5874

What?? There are made up characters in the NT that the Jews accept as figures of history.

Again, you seem unfamiliar with Jewish Mythology.

The God of the Jews, the Angel Gabriel, Satan the Devil and Demons are believed by Jews to actually exist whether or not their words and deeds are embarrassing.

ficino

Hello Ted, I didn't miss the point of the criterion of embarrassment, but I am afraid I did not make my own point clear enough.

First, what I had enclosed in quotation marks was not a quotation from any scholar. It was my representation of what I take to be the thinking of someone who might seek to apply the CoE to the crucifixion.

Second, the CoE doesn't argue from the eventual success of Christianity, so your suggestion that it was unlikely that the cult would have been successful without a historical crucifixion is not germane to discussion of the CoE. I'm sure we're agreed that the CoE operates from the assumption that sayings or actions of Jesus that the early church would find "embarrassing," i.e. a hindrance to promulgating its message, but that it included in the gospels anyway, are likely to be historical. My paragraph about probability was meant to argue that the above assumption is unwarranted, because it rests on two further, unwarranted assumptions: 1. that listeners in general were likely to reject the gospel (the success of the gospel shows that significant numbers did not find it a stumbling block or foolishness); 2. that the early preachers of the cult felt that the crucifixion was an embarrassing or problematic part of their message.




Ted, your last sentence above is an example of the thinking that I was attempting to contest in the second point of my earlier post. The "eyes were opened" phenomenon that you speak of is an artifact of the gospel text. It is intuitively attractive to imagine a back-story in which the disciples regroup and try to come to terms with what's happened, and they generate a message that addresses "embarrassing" things like Jesus' crucifixion. Such a back-story, however, is itself a creation of the narrative of the gospels, as is the back-story presupposed by any narrative (Gerard Genette's "histoire," as opposed to the "recit," the narrative text itself.) We don't have any such back-story independent of those texts. The tradition from the earliest stage we can access is a tradition of a crucified AND RISEN messiah; there is no element in the tradition that is prior to the resurrection. It all aims at and presupposes the resurrection. The "nobody knew what Jesus was talking about" stuff in gMark that you reference is, again, an element of a tradition that already was permeated in every fiber by the dye, as it were, of the triumphant resurrection. The ignorance of the disciples is an element of the tradition of the risen messiah. As is every other item in the gospels. There is no way to pick out historical material FROM THE GOSPELS that is imagined to be uninfected by the driving message that creates and organizes those texts

Belief in a historical event is, again, already presented in the gospels.

It may be that the crucifixion of Jesus was a historical fact, but the CoE cannot give access to it because the material it works with, the gospels, is already a system of interpretations.

TedM

But how do you deal with Paul explicitly saying that the crucifixion was a stumbling block to Jews? That seems to argue for it being 'problematic' if not 'embarrassing' due to prior expectations of their Jewish audience. I do not think though that believers had a problem with it, so it doesn't really fit CoE as far as a believer or gospel writer is concerned. I see it more as a CoE as far as the original development of the idea is concerned: It was so bizarre and anti-Jewish that it seems hard to believe it would have been taken seriously had there not been a real (and probably 'special') person involved.



I don't quite follow this. Don't historians also have their own interpretation of history? In the case of the crucifixion, it has to happen, along with the resurrection, so I think I understand you.

But in other cases the alleged events didn't have to happen at all, yet are recorded: The examples of the baptism and of Jesus not being able to perform mighty works in his hometown can be given explanations, and they are, but to me the very weakness of the explanations given ('to fulfill all righteousness', 'a prophet is not accepted in his own hometown') suggest to me that the writer is doing his best to put real history of Jesus in as good a light as possible. If he is just writing fiction or doesn't really believe it happened he could simply remove it. This is where the CoE, to me, has validity. No, we can't get into the minds 100% but seriously, 'to fulfill all righteousness'? Let's call a spade a spade--it's an weak/unclear attempt to explain why Jesus was getting baptized by John. It doesn't mean it happened, but I sure think it means 'Matthew' believed it happened.

spin

Sadly you still haven't got an argument. You are doing much worse than TedM usually does, when he eventually gives up the ghost and falls back to dogma. You, however, started with dogma and have not gone beyond that into the real world. Your linguistic incapacities as regards to the analysis of what Paul says is extremely old and tired. That's why whoever you are has gone for the pure apologetic approach you presently display.

You have failed to recognize the fact that we have no anterior documents for the Johannine version in order for you to claim that the writer left out the baptism scene. That omission is pure conjecture. You've made no attempt to show that the writers of the synoptics actually evinced any hypothetical embarrassment. You merely assume that the changes they made were motivated by embarrassment.

You demonstrate your eisegetical bent making personal claims about phrases such as 'to fulfill all righteousness' and 'a prophet is not accepted in his own hometown'. Your quibbling with the former shows you are unaware of the discussion of righteousness in Mt and your mention of the latter seems to overlook the fact that the Marcan passage which first uses the expression and assumes its currency as an expression was written around the phrase. Notice how the expression "in his own hometown" (εν τη πατριδι αυτου) is the same as the introductory "to his own hometown" (εις την πατριδα αυτου). This unnamed hometown that Jesus came to exists in the mind of the person who wrote a story around the expression regarding prophets and hometowns, so that it could be the punchline. Everything points to the hometown rejection just being a story, a fact that shows how there is no hope to get anything out of the criterion of embarrassment.

We are dealing with stories in a tradition. You have no way to interrogate them as they go into the tradition for their veracity and once they are in the tradition they are beyond interrogation. There is no access to any "real history" behind it. Imagine you are blindfolded as people put things into a display case or alter them one person at a time. The blindfold is removed after they are gone and you are asked to describe what was there in the first place and who added what. The gospel tradition is similar. All you can see is the final result and you can make a few conjectures. What's left is textual analysis, ie analysis within the final form of the written tradition.

Even if you could spot embarrassment, you cannot say anything about the evolutionary steps that led to the production of that which caused the embarrassment. Think of a Wikipedia article. There's a lot of nonsense on Wiki. You come to an article that interests you and find the nonsense and try to improve it. Without a preserved history of all changes you could not say who was responsible for the nonsense or at what point in the article's development. You just have the final text of the gospel. Like the Wiki article you have a system of interpretations, a pastiche of transmitted traditions, but without an epistemology to see the chronological changes. This means if there were embarrassment, you'd have no way of attributing the source.

hjalti

What I would like to see explained is this: Let's assume that the authors of Lk and Mt changed the baptism account in Mk because they didn't like how it (call it 'embarassment' if you want). How do we go from there to "it's probably historical"? I see no reason to think that the author of Mk was embarassed by it.

So what we're left with is later authors not liking an earlier version of a story. I really don't see how that's very helpful :l Lather Christians were "embarassed" with Jesus having brothers in Mk, does that mean that it's also historical? Or does it just mean that later authors had different ideas? :huh:

ficino

Hello Ted, thanks for considering what I wrote. As to the above, I think you are doing what Meier and others do, i.e. treat a large, diverse group as though it is unitary in thinking. I'm not sure how certain we can be about the numbers of Jews who joined what I'm calling "the cult" in its early stages, since many of the sources are productions of the cult itself (i.e. the NT). But it seems clear that some Jews accepted the message. And remember, the message from the get-go was of a crucified and risen messiah. So that's attractive on a lot of levels. Second, it may seem that it would be hard for the message to be taken seriously had there not been a real person at its core, as you say, but I think here you rely on unwarranted assumptions. It is not hard for stories to spread; that's a topic that has been addressed often so I won't go into it here.



On the point that the gospels are already a system of interpretations I quote Ralph Rodriguez' paper on the CoE in Keith/LeDonne: p. 146 "The facts become embarrassing when we place them into larger historical narratives. But this is a disheartening conclusion: the criterion of embarrassment renders a historical datum embarrassing; it does not authenticate already embarrassing historical data." All this stuff comes to us from a purported post-crucifixion context. p. 147 "It all made sense within and served post-crucifixion theological and ideological perspectives." In other words, the data are already representations.

Rodriguez does believe in a historical crucifixion, but I'm not clear on his grounds for doing so. It's not the CoE.

In my last post I referred to a narratological distinction between the narrative (Genette's recit) and the back story that we presume stands behind the narrative, of which the narrative presumably gives a piece (histoire). E.g. the heroine enters, wearing a blue dress. The narrative never says where she got the dress, but the "histoire" that is created by the narrative must include the proposition that she acquired the dress somewhere. I was suggesting that our picture of early christians being embarrassed by various things and thinking up how to present them (even whitewash them) is itself a secondary artifact or effect of the text. We don't know that the "histoire" behind the narrative is historical because we don't yet know that the narrative is so. To try to detach pieces from the narrative and treat them as historical nuggets involves circular reasoning without external confirmation from outside the narrative.

ficino

Yes, exactly.

TedM

And you blather endlessly. I blew your silly 'messianist' argument out of the water and you simply ignore it and prefer to make a big deal about how sacred your 'spin' name is.. ridiculous.


This is stupid. If you think so and don't really think that is says what is really does say, why don't you simply address that damn post SPIN?



On second thought, lets drop it all. You have thoroughly demonstrated to me a significant deficit in your ability to construct a logical sequence of thought. You remind me more and more of aa. There is simply no point. I've lost a lot of respect for your manner of analysis and don't want to hear anymore. I've got a lot of better things to do.

Good bye.
:wave:

TedM

Good questions. If you don't like a story you remove all traces of it if you think it didn't happen.

TedM

It's the Messiah. Expected to be a man. A king. To deliver them from real oppression.




And I'm not suggesting that CoE is by itself definitive. Thanks for your thoughts.

I've got too many other things to do than to continue on this forum like I have the last few days...will be posting less of go on self ban again.