It would take some doing to confuse the genre of Piers Plowman with the genre of the Gospel of Mark.
In Mimesis, the history of realism in Western literature, Auerbach compares the Gospel of Mark with the historian Tacitus and the comic writer Petronius. His argument is that the Gospel, written by, for, and about non-elites, is making serious innovations in realism of depiction compared to contemporary writing.
He makes no judgement about the historicity of the Gospels but they're not told in the same way as most myths.
(Auerbach does not discuss any stories of the miraculous but I think it is notable that few of them contain any special effects. The Transfiguration but not the Resurrection is the major exception. Later non-canonical gospels clearly thought this was an oversight since I gather some of them do contain depictions of the resurrection.)
It would take some doing to confuse the genre of Piers Plowman with the genre of the Gospel of Mark.
In Mimesis, the history of realism in Western literature, Auerbach compares the Gospel of Mark with the historian Tacitus and the comic writer Petronius. His argument is that the Gospel, written by, for, and about non-elites, is making serious innovations in realism of depiction compared to contemporary writing.
He makes no judgement about the historicity of the Gospels but they're not told in the same way as most myths.
(Auerbach does not discuss any stories of the miraculous but I think it is notable that few of them contain any special effects. The Transfiguration but not the Resurrection is the major exception. Later non-canonical gospels clearly thought this was an oversight since I gather some of them do contain depictions of the resurrection.)
There’s also something to be said about how the miraculous events in Mark are depicted. They’re given as so mundane that the disciples don’t even recognize them. The gospels are overall a wholly unique form of writing. They bear some generic resemblances to contemporary writings, but differ in so many ways that they really need to be considered as just sui generis.
I'm no expert but would agree @Thomas Rowans but have a friend steeped in the classics who thinks the Gospels are closer to roughly contemporary Graeco-Roman narratives than many Christians are willing to concede.
But then he's a rebellious son of the manse and has a rather Gibbon-esque take on things and is also convinced that Christ and his disciples were a bunch of irresponsible hippies and that Paul messed the whole thing up.
He's as inflexible in that conviction as the most ardent fundamentalist is on the historicity of the creation account in Genesis.
I can’t easily find any definition of a historical event. If you are unwilling or unable to state what you mean by a historical event, perhaps, in the interests of good discussion you can point us in the direction of an online definition for what is apparently so widely held.
I'm no expert but would agree @Thomas Rowans but have a friend steeped in the classics who thinks the Gospels are closer to roughly contemporary Graeco-Roman narratives than many Christians are willing to concede.
But then he's a rebellious son of the manse and has a rather Gibbon-esque take on things and is also convinced that Christ and his disciples were a bunch of irresponsible hippies and that Paul messed the whole thing up.
He's as inflexible in that conviction as the most ardent fundamentalist is on the historicity of the creation account in Genesis.
Scholars debate it, definitely, but they all differ in major ways from ancient biography, history, and the like. I’ve found the idea that Mark is influenced by ancient thinking of tragedy to be particularly neat, especially when you read some of the recent research surrounding the communal aspects of tragedy.
But I don’t get too excited about these kinds of textual-genealogical arguments.
@Martin54 you have posted eleven times on this thread today, and only two of those posts have contained any form of discussion.
The rest are your usual gnomic one- or- two liners. These may occasionally spark interesting responses, but when the thread is becoming dominated by them, serve only to derail and confuse.
I’ve found the idea that Mark is influenced by ancient thinking of tragedy to be particularly neat, especially when you read some of the recent research surrounding the communal aspects of tragedy.
But I don’t get too excited about these kinds of textual-genealogical arguments.
Yes, I think such things are interesting and can sometimes shed light on certain aspects of the text, but I don't think they necessarily impinge on the historicity or otherwise of these texts so much as adoption and re-purposing of particular literary forms.
It would be highly unlikely that the authors of the Gospels also happened to be boundary defying literary figures.
I'm no expert but would agree @Thomas Rowans but have a friend steeped in the classics who thinks the Gospels are closer to roughly contemporary Graeco-Roman narratives than many Christians are willing to concede.
But then he's a rebellious son of the manse and has a rather Gibbon-esque take on things and is also convinced that Christ and his disciples were a bunch of irresponsible hippies and that Paul messed the whole thing up.
He's as inflexible in that conviction as the most ardent fundamentalist is on the historicity of the creation account in Genesis.
There's certainly an argument that there were romantic stories which circulated in the ancient world and some were written about the (biblical character) Paul. There's one called Acts of Paul and Thecla which is like this.
So that absolutely happened. The question is whether biblical books like Acts and (some of) the gospels are also part of this type of literature.
There's also the intriguing story about St Josaphat I was reading yesterday.
It dates from the 10th century so doesn't have any impact directly on early Christianity however it is interesting how ideas have been synchronised and combined into other narratives. I'm interested to know more about this example if anyone else knows anything
Jumping Josaphat ... or should that be Jehosophat?
Interesting. Thanks for bringing that to our attention @KoF.
As for whether Acts and (some of) the Gospels are part of the kind of romanticised literature you describe. I don't see why not, both in stylistic terms as @chrisstiles has indicated and also in terms of some of the material. For instance, I'm happy to accept that Herod Agrippa died suddenly (poisoned?) and that the early Christians took this as a sign of direct divine retribution - see Acts 12:20-23.
Also it's weird to be accused of something (quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur) when you are the one asserting the historicity of impossible events.
Thanks for the reply.
You still haven't explained why the resurrection is impossible. Simply calling it that doesn't make it so. If you have a logical proof that God doesn't exist, please share it. Otherwise we have to deal with the evidence regarding a very real possibility that God acted in history.
The fact that dead people do not ordinarily rise is itself part of early Xian belief, not an objection to it.
Isn't wishful thinking a reasonable explanation for all those other religions you don't believe in? Including quite a number where people died for their confession of faith.
I'm not sure I see the point you're making. Please unpack things.
Straight after Jesus' crucifixion, the disciples were doing what history tells us every other C1 Jewish movement did when their Messiah died- trying to get out. Their hope was gone; dead Messiahs were simply liars.
The disciples were denying they had anything to do with Jesus, and were hiding under a big table soiling themselves every time an Amazon courier knocked at the door. The only wishful thinking going on was the wish that the last three years had never happened, and that they were at home with their mummies.
Then, suddenly, they became this fearless force, with a very changed understanding of God's relationship to humanity.
The world hadn't changed, at least not in any obvious way, yet they declared that the Kingdom of God, that long awaited earth-shattering event had finally happened. The usual visions and dreams were strenuously denied, with an unheard of post-resurrection body in their place. The humiliated liar had become the King of the world.
By inference to the best explanation. A series of meetings with a living Jesus will do that. Nothing else will.
@Martin54, you have linked to a 34 minute YouTube video. It would be helpful if, in addition to linking to the video, you could also give a brief outline of what the video is about, and then a sentence or two indicating how this information advances the discussion.
My apologies @North East Quine. @Vase said 'You still haven't explained why the resurrection is impossible'. The video shows how death works. Nature cannot reverse that. That's why it's impossible. Leave a new bottle of perfume open in a sealed room and the bottle will be empty of everything but perfumed air in a few weeks. If the room and the bottle last a thousand years, or a trillion, the perfume will not refill the bottle by chance (so evil-ution, HAH!). Some savant will be able to tell us how long I'm sure.
Ah, but with God all things are possible. Who? Oh but science says that you can't be certain about anything, so God could exist. Well if the savant above works out how long it would take for the perfume bottle to refill to three sigmata, He'll be probably less likely than one in that to that years.
I know, I know, never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
That to the that. And it takes 3-6 months for such bottles to dry out. It's a permutation calculation isn't it. A tenth of a mole of perfume in a thousand moles of air. What's the probability of OOM 10^23 molecules randomly coalescing out of 10^27, all in the right same place? And that's not factoring in the necessary local cooling!
Your recent two posts merely state that God's existence is nearly impossible, without providing any reasoning. Neither the video nor your summary make a relevant argument on that subject. Unless you can show we are without God; then with God, all things are possible, as someone once said.
I'd like to offer some thoughts on an earlier post of yours, if I may:
(a) Agreed.
(b) Why not?
(c) That's your post hoc interpretation of Genesis 12:3 2/2. Not even Jesus did that.
(d) You mean the folk religion springing up about Jesus?
(e) No, by a group of totally beguiled people, intoxicated with the vision and its man. And even so, they didn't rush to follow His witness.
(f) Which beliefs? ...<snip>...That's what Paul encountered in a handful of years.
It's a very easy novel to write.
And that message keeps beguiling.
Naturally.
(a) ?You're agreeing that “the very existence...of Earliest Christianity relies on the resurrection”?
(b) Because this is Jesus as the representative of the Jewish nation doing what they had hitherto been unable to do, dealing with the 'sin of Adam' through Torah. This is Jesus, doing what the ancient Jewish prophets had said would happen; God returning to His people, inaugurating His Kingdom, fulfilling the promise to Abraham.
Next time you look at the Christmas NT passages, it's worth checking out how Jewish they are.
(c) That's Paul's post hoc interpretation (Romans 4). God's Kingdom (KoG) beginning and fulfilling the promise to Abraham were seen as one and the same in C1 Judaism (e.g. see Luke 1).
Rather like Jesus' body, the (d) seems to have vanished (in your quote of me), leaving me calling for further explanations.
(e) In my two previous posts I think I explained why wishful thinking simply won't do as an explanation. Jesus had proved himself to be a complete liar.
(f) Do I understand your explanation correctly?
Jesus preached that we should go around being nice to each other, and be absolutely non-violent. The Romans and Jewish authorities, instead of encouraging him as he was essentially helping them to keep power decided to kill him instead. We abandon standard historical method to ignore the huge mass of multiple forms, sources and references in the NT, that Jesus talked all the time about KoG. We should say instead that he preached socialism, even though we have little to no actual evidence of that.
So locked in to this Corbynist belief set were his followers, that they decided to completely change the message, declare KoG had begun, death had been defeated, and that Jesus had reappeared multiple times in a physical body.
Your recent two posts merely state that God's existence is nearly impossible, without providing any reasoning. Neither the video nor your summary make a relevant argument on that subject. Unless you can show we are without God; then with God, all things are possible, as someone once said.
I'd like to offer some thoughts on an earlier post of yours, if I may:
(a) Agreed.
(b) Why not?
(c) That's your post hoc interpretation of Genesis 12:3 2/2. Not even Jesus did that.
(d) You mean the folk religion springing up about Jesus?
(e) No, by a group of totally beguiled people, intoxicated with the vision and its man. And even so, they didn't rush to follow His witness.
(f) Which beliefs? ...<snip>...That's what Paul encountered in a handful of years.
It's a very easy novel to write.
And that message keeps beguiling.
Naturally.
(a) ?You're agreeing that “the very existence...of Earliest Christianity relies on the resurrection”?
(b) Because this is Jesus as the representative of the Jewish nation doing what they had hitherto been unable to do, dealing with the 'sin of Adam' through Torah. This is Jesus, doing what the ancient Jewish prophets had said would happen; God returning to His people, inaugurating His Kingdom, fulfilling the promise to Abraham.
Next time you look at the Christmas NT passages, it's worth checking out how Jewish they are.
(c) That's Paul's post hoc interpretation (Romans 4). God's Kingdom (KoG) beginning and fulfilling the promise to Abraham were seen as one and the same in C1 Judaism (e.g. see Luke 1).
Rather like Jesus' body, the (d) seems to have vanished (in your quote of me), leaving me calling for further explanations.
(e) In my two previous posts I think I explained why wishful thinking simply won't do as an explanation. Jesus had proved himself to be a complete liar.
(f) Do I understand your explanation correctly?
Jesus preached that we should go around being nice to each other, and be absolutely non-violent. The Romans and Jewish authorities, instead of encouraging him as he was essentially helping them to keep power decided to kill him instead. We abandon standard historical method to ignore the huge mass of multiple forms, sources and references in the NT, that Jesus talked all the time about KoG. We should say instead that he preached socialism, even though we have little to no actual evidence of that.
So locked in to this Corbynist belief set were his followers, that they decided to completely change the message, declare KoG had begun, death had been defeated, and that Jesus had reappeared multiple times in a physical body.
Is that your explanation?
(a) I don't understand how you could possibly infer that.
And we can go no further until you show your working.
Comments
The same as any historian's. You?
In Mimesis, the history of realism in Western literature, Auerbach compares the Gospel of Mark with the historian Tacitus and the comic writer Petronius. His argument is that the Gospel, written by, for, and about non-elites, is making serious innovations in realism of depiction compared to contemporary writing.
He makes no judgement about the historicity of the Gospels but they're not told in the same way as most myths.
(Auerbach does not discuss any stories of the miraculous but I think it is notable that few of them contain any special effects. The Transfiguration but not the Resurrection is the major exception. Later non-canonical gospels clearly thought this was an oversight since I gather some of them do contain depictions of the resurrection.)
There’s also something to be said about how the miraculous events in Mark are depicted. They’re given as so mundane that the disciples don’t even recognize them. The gospels are overall a wholly unique form of writing. They bear some generic resemblances to contemporary writings, but differ in so many ways that they really need to be considered as just sui generis.
But then he's a rebellious son of the manse and has a rather Gibbon-esque take on things and is also convinced that Christ and his disciples were a bunch of irresponsible hippies and that Paul messed the whole thing up.
He's as inflexible in that conviction as the most ardent fundamentalist is on the historicity of the creation account in Genesis.
Scholars debate it, definitely, but they all differ in major ways from ancient biography, history, and the like. I’ve found the idea that Mark is influenced by ancient thinking of tragedy to be particularly neat, especially when you read some of the recent research surrounding the communal aspects of tragedy.
But I don’t get too excited about these kinds of textual-genealogical arguments.
@Martin54 you have posted eleven times on this thread today, and only two of those posts have contained any form of discussion.
The rest are your usual gnomic one- or- two liners. These may occasionally spark interesting responses, but when the thread is becoming dominated by them, serve only to derail and confuse.
This is a discussion board. Please use it as one.
North East Quine, Purgatory host
Hostly hat off
(ETA formatting, DT)
Yes, I think such things are interesting and can sometimes shed light on certain aspects of the text, but I don't think they necessarily impinge on the historicity or otherwise of these texts so much as adoption and re-purposing of particular literary forms.
It would be highly unlikely that the authors of the Gospels also happened to be boundary defying literary figures.
There's certainly an argument that there were romantic stories which circulated in the ancient world and some were written about the (biblical character) Paul. There's one called Acts of Paul and Thecla which is like this.
So that absolutely happened. The question is whether biblical books like Acts and (some of) the gospels are also part of this type of literature.
It dates from the 10th century so doesn't have any impact directly on early Christianity however it is interesting how ideas have been synchronised and combined into other narratives. I'm interested to know more about this example if anyone else knows anything
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barlaam_and_Josaphat
Interesting. Thanks for bringing that to our attention @KoF.
As for whether Acts and (some of) the Gospels are part of the kind of romanticised literature you describe. I don't see why not, both in stylistic terms as @chrisstiles has indicated and also in terms of some of the material. For instance, I'm happy to accept that Herod Agrippa died suddenly (poisoned?) and that the early Christians took this as a sign of direct divine retribution - see Acts 12:20-23.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts 12:20-23&version=NIV
That doesn't mean I take it literally that he was struck by an angel and was eaten by worms and died.
Ok, so where do I draw the line?
You still haven't explained why the resurrection is impossible. Simply calling it that doesn't make it so. If you have a logical proof that God doesn't exist, please share it. Otherwise we have to deal with the evidence regarding a very real possibility that God acted in history.
The fact that dead people do not ordinarily rise is itself part of early Xian belief, not an objection to it.
I'm not sure I see the point you're making. Please unpack things.
Straight after Jesus' crucifixion, the disciples were doing what history tells us every other C1 Jewish movement did when their Messiah died- trying to get out. Their hope was gone; dead Messiahs were simply liars.
The disciples were denying they had anything to do with Jesus, and were hiding under a big table soiling themselves every time an Amazon courier knocked at the door. The only wishful thinking going on was the wish that the last three years had never happened, and that they were at home with their mummies.
Then, suddenly, they became this fearless force, with a very changed understanding of God's relationship to humanity.
The world hadn't changed, at least not in any obvious way, yet they declared that the Kingdom of God, that long awaited earth-shattering event had finally happened. The usual visions and dreams were strenuously denied, with an unheard of post-resurrection body in their place. The humiliated liar had become the King of the world.
By inference to the best explanation. A series of meetings with a living Jesus will do that. Nothing else will.
@Martin54, you have linked to a 34 minute YouTube video. It would be helpful if, in addition to linking to the video, you could also give a brief outline of what the video is about, and then a sentence or two indicating how this information advances the discussion.
Thank you!
North East Quine, Purgatory host
Hostly hat off
Ah, but with God all things are possible. Who? Oh but science says that you can't be certain about anything, so God could exist. Well if the savant above works out how long it would take for the perfume bottle to refill to three sigmata, He'll be probably less likely than one in that to that years.
I know, I know, never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Your recent two posts merely state that God's existence is nearly impossible, without providing any reasoning. Neither the video nor your summary make a relevant argument on that subject. Unless you can show we are without God; then with God, all things are possible, as someone once said.
I'd like to offer some thoughts on an earlier post of yours, if I may:
(a) ?You're agreeing that “the very existence...of Earliest Christianity relies on the resurrection”?
(b) Because this is Jesus as the representative of the Jewish nation doing what they had hitherto been unable to do, dealing with the 'sin of Adam' through Torah. This is Jesus, doing what the ancient Jewish prophets had said would happen; God returning to His people, inaugurating His Kingdom, fulfilling the promise to Abraham.
Next time you look at the Christmas NT passages, it's worth checking out how Jewish they are.
(c) That's Paul's post hoc interpretation (Romans 4). God's Kingdom (KoG) beginning and fulfilling the promise to Abraham were seen as one and the same in C1 Judaism (e.g. see Luke 1).
Rather like Jesus' body, the (d) seems to have vanished (in your quote of me), leaving me calling for further explanations.
(e) In my two previous posts I think I explained why wishful thinking simply won't do as an explanation. Jesus had proved himself to be a complete liar.
(f) Do I understand your explanation correctly?
Jesus preached that we should go around being nice to each other, and be absolutely non-violent. The Romans and Jewish authorities, instead of encouraging him as he was essentially helping them to keep power decided to kill him instead. We abandon standard historical method to ignore the huge mass of multiple forms, sources and references in the NT, that Jesus talked all the time about KoG. We should say instead that he preached socialism, even though we have little to no actual evidence of that.
So locked in to this Corbynist belief set were his followers, that they decided to completely change the message, declare KoG had begun, death had been defeated, and that Jesus had reappeared multiple times in a physical body.
Is that your explanation?
(a) I don't understand how you could possibly infer that.
And we can go no further until you show your working.