GakuseiDon
May 26, 2012 at 12:29 am
For me, Doherty’s strangest use of the Arguing from Silence is his analysis of Second Century apologists. Doherty concludes that the following apologists believed in “a Platonic religious philosophy grounded in Hellenistic Judaism which failed to include any historical Jesus”:
* Tatian (when writing his “Address to the Greeks”)
* Theophilus of Antioch
* Athenagoras
* Minucius Felix
* The author of ‘Epistle of Diognetus’, and even Justin Martyr (initially).
* Justin Martyr (initially)
So all the above, writing in the second half of the Second Century, did not believe in a historical Jesus, according to Doherty! But it is Doherty’s views on Justin that are
Doherty believes that Justin’s “Dialogue with Trypho” records the nature of the Christianity Justin joined into before later coming to believe that there was a historical Jesus. Doherty believes Justin converted from paganism into a “Platonic” Christianity that had no historical Jesus. Doherty bases this partly on Justin’s account of his conversion, where the “Old Man” philosopher who convinced Justin “has not a word to say about Jesus of Nazareth, nor about any incarnation of the Son.” The fact that Justin then actually goes on to talk about those things is not relevant to Doherty.
So it isn’t even silence in a whole letter that Doherty finds significant: even silence in just a few paragraphs (where the author is not silent elsewhere) is enough! This is not logic, nor scholarship. It is as bad as any bad apologetic argument you can find among fundamentalists.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 26, 2012 at 1:07 am
@Don: Interesting list of SS’s — silent sources. Amazing, truly amazing, especially of course the discussion of Justin–unfathomable. Btw, my grandfather, who was German, did not mention Hitler. Do you think Hitler existed?
Reply
GakuseiDon
May 26, 2012 at 4:50 am
RJH, if your German grandfather did not mention Hitler, then that is evidence that Hitler either lived his life in some celestial realm, or was some obscure figure that nobody knew about. Nothing allowed in between!
Doherty’s examination of Justin’s views is laughably bad. Doherty takes Justin’s Trypho character’s comment that “And you, having accepted a groundless report, invent a Christ for yourselves” to suggest that it is “a current accusation by some Jews that ‘You have invented your Messiah,’ lock, stock and humanity.”
While Doherty doesn’t insist on it, it is a bizarre reading in context to the rest of Justin’s “Trypho” letter. His views on the other Second Century apologists like Tatian and the others are just as weird, and dependent on viewing Second Century high context culture writings from a 21st Century low context culture perspective.
rjosephhoffmann
May 26, 2012 at 8:32 am
@Don: I agree. Justin uses the dialogue style as a pedagogical tool and as someone who was “classically” trained (meaning in context, educated) is able to use the device with great effect. There is so much one could say about the use of historical sources in the hands of untrained amateurs—-a bit like giving a scalpel to a 12 year old really with instructions to remove an appendix–but the most obvious thing is: Why would a Justin who was naive about the history of Jesus choose to have his discussion with a Jew? What is especially amusing is the way some mythicists can use arguments from silence to double effect: For example, Justin can be used by Doherty to suggest that the Jesus story he knew must have been close to Paul’s idea of a celestial saviour or a neoplatonic myth; an especially dotty mythtic takes this one step further by saying “Rather more pertinent than the ethereal Clement is the testimony of Justin Martyr, who, in the mid-2nd century, discussed the apostolic mission to the Gentiles at length. Yet Justin not once mentioned Paul or his epistles, not even when arguing the point so crucial to Paul’s heart, that “circumcision was unnecessary”! Nor is there any reference to Paul in the fragments that we have of the work of Hegesippus (?110-180), a contemporary of Justin and himself a Jew.” You won’t be surprised to learn that the writer of this, a guy named Kenneth Humphrey, also pronounces the Pauline correspondence a fraud and Paul a cipher: http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/epistles2.htm
Earl Doherty
May 26, 2012 at 8:16 am
No, Don. It’s called allowing yourself to think outside the box and letting the texts lead you where they may, always within the larger picture which the full record provides. You should try it sometime. Quite exhilarating and astonishingly fruitful. It gets you out of a lot of ruts. The process is quite unlike anything that your average “apologist” indulges in.
I’m surprised you didn’t bring up your ‘comparison’ with Tertullian’s Ad Nationes. I guess it’s because I’ve demolished it I don’t know how many times.
When you can actually ‘demolish’ my analysis of Tatian, and especially of the “crucified man” passage in Minucius Felix (you never have addressed my Appendix 10 on it in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, rather than just heap scorn on me ad nauseum and think that that’s all it takes, maybe then you’ll have something to crow about.
Earl Doherty
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 26, 2012 at 9:49 am
As to Hitler or Wells’s analogies from silence (he once used the building of the London subway system as an analogy in my presence): My point was to be ironic and you took the bait: alas! There would be no comparison between Hitler 1933 and Jesus 33 CE. A single event like my grandfather not mentioning Hitler would be dispositive of nothing except perhaps he was out of touch with reality. A failure for Roman records and historians to mention an inconspicuous Palestinian rebel of no importance to anyone that mattered outside a single unruly Roman province is dispositive of nothing. (Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence applies in spades). The literary artifacts surviving from this movement, and their historical and cultural fit to other popular movements of the era attested in both Jewish and Latin literature, on the other hand, are dispositive.
GakuseiDon
May 26, 2012 at 2:58 pm
@Earl. If I am ‘in the box’, I am in good company. I have GA Wells and Richard Carrier in here with me. Carrier (even though a mythicist himself) describes your views on Second Century apologists as one of your “wilder flights of fancy”.
So who do you have with you outside the box? Seriously: does ANYONE support you on this? On Justin? On Tatian? On the rest of those Second Century apologists?
Fortunately Justin Martyr’s “Dialogue with Trypho” is freely available on-line, and people can check for themselves to see if it supports the “wild flight of fancy” idea that it holds some secret code indicating that Justin originally converted to a non-HJ Christianity. And I urge readers here to do that very thing, and then come back here to tell us whether they agree or not.
One thing worth mentioning: Justin writes that “When he [the Old Man] had spoken these and many other things, which there is no time for mentioning at present, he went away, bidding me attend to them.” I pointed this out to you, Earl, suggesting that this indicated that Justin was telling us he got many of the other things he included in the same letter from the Old Man; a view you rejected, explaining (IIRC) that Justin would have had the Old Man spell it out right there and then. To me, this is a good example of “high context culture vs low context culture”.
To be clear: “HC culture vs LC culture” is not something that was created for biblical studies. It is part of sociology studies, as any Westerner working for a multinational company who has been posted to China, Japan (me!) or the Middle-East can tell you. Yet AFAIK you don’t even touch on this subject in your books.
Do you think that, when examining early Christian writings, we need to take “high context culture vs low context culture” into consideration when setting expectations about what we find?
Earl Doherty
May 26, 2012 at 8:29 am
And you’re also off base on Diognetus, Don. It is akin to the Pauline cult in that it has a sacrificial Son but no life on earth in view (and belongs to the first half of the 2nd century), but you’re right, no HJ. And if you’ll check out my Appendix 11, you’ll find that Aristides also likely did not have an HJ originally. Scoff all you like in principle, but until you actually rebut the case I make in regard to any or all of these, you’re just blowing wind. And that goes for anyone else here whose idea of counter-argument seems to be the same: scorn is all it takes.
By the way, not mentioning Hitler might indeed prove he didn’t exist, if that lack of mention came in a whole bunch of documents and correspondence talking about and even giving a “full and minute” account of the history of the Nazi party in the 1930s and 40s, while a separate body of stories about the Nazis which was the only testimony to a Hitler turned out to constitute midrash on the First World War.
Earl Doherty
Reply
GakuseiDon
May 26, 2012 at 3:18 pm
@Earl, on the Epistle to Diognetus, I’ll leave the burden of proof on you. AFAICS, there is nothing in “Diognetus” to support you, other than what YOU expect the author should have written.
Am I right in assuming that you have not taking high context cultures into account in your analysis? And that no scholar takes the same view as you on the author of “Diognetus” not believing in a historical Jesus? And that the letter seems to be expressing Christian views that are consistent with the views of proto-orthodox Christians of the same period? Am I not correct on all three points above?
ROO BOOKAROO
May 26, 2012 at 8:33 am
To: GakuseiDon
“RJH, if your German grandfather did not mention Hitler, then that is evidence that Hitler either lived his life in some celestial realm, or was some obscure figure that nobody knew about. Nothing allowed in between!”
All very cute. But the question you never ask, but that G. A. Wells and Alvar Ellegard kept asking:
“How come Hoffmann speaks of Hitler since he had no input from his grandfather? The grandfather never mentioned it, so where did Hoffmann get the idea of a Hitler from? How did the concept of Hitler ever enter Hoffmann’s consciousness to be able to use this name of Hitler allowing him to describe his grandfather’s ignorance? Where did the knowledge of the name Hitler come from for Hoffmann to use it in a story about his grandfather? Without the grandfather’s input, this becomes a real mystery.”
But Hoffmann has enough erudition and Biblical references to ferret out some that may explain how the concept and name of Hitler came to be used by him. Perhaps the grandfather was not the only possible source?
Then Hoffmann’s conclusion is a farce, a rip-off, an act of Jesuitical casuistry, no? Was Hoffmann initially trained by the Jesuits?
This would explain the value of the grandfather argument.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 26, 2012 at 9:32 am
@Roo: There are some very obvious answers to these Wells’s-derived queries, which I’m sure being a clever clogs you can figure out for yourself. Btw, historians do sometimes argue very tentatively from silence in collating textual sources and establishing MS priorities and groups, dates and attestations for example. They know when they do this they are on very thin ice. The most thunderous exception to doing anything like this in the case of the gospels would be the physical evidence of the gospels themselves and not when they were first quoted by “reliably datable authors,” though I have often been amused at the bowling alley attempts of mythtics like Humphrey who, when confronted with additional obstacles, simply say that the reliably dated authors aren’t dated reliably. Take the case of a claim made by C P Thiede that P. Magd. Gr. 17 = P64, the Magdalen-Oxford papyrus of a section of the gospel of Mathew, dated from the last part of the first century based on a distinctive script that was common in extant 1st century Greek MSS but unattested in MSS after the first century. You will be interested in the following discussion of the process here, since you claim to know what it is that biblical scholars do when they apply established method: http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/Tyndale/staff/Head/P64TB.htm But even if you find that heavy slogging, the best reason for saying that the mythtic version of arguments from silence doesn’t work is that there is much less silence now than there was in 1900 when the main works still being used by modern mythtics like Doherty were fashionable–especially concerning the trajectories we can now identify in the rapid spread of early Christianity. Mythicism, at least the kind that fills in the silence with its own contrivances and conspiracy theories, is quickly becoming an antiquarian’s pastime and is making the non-existence thesis increasingly unsupportable.
Reply
steph
May 26, 2012 at 11:58 am
Oh Roo… it’s ironic that you posted on Vridar what you described as “A comment by Jacob Aliet disputing some of Maurice Casey’s assumptions about Mark’s origins being in an Aramaic source”. It’s ironic because you cut and pasted it after I had responded to it without acknowledging my refutation which seems a little dishonest don’t you think Roo. Mind you, it’s no worse than an invisible dummy aka earl doherty, posting all his comments as a post on Vridar and failing to acknowledge the many rebuttals of those comments on this post, including many incisive rebuttals by RJH and one by Casey.
You have also completely misrepresented Casey. He does not make ‘assumptions’. He provides arguments and evidence in meticulously detailed and careful monographs. You also misrepresent Casey in suggesting his thesis is a demonstration of ‘an Aramaic source’. It is no such thing. He provides evidence and argument for a chaotic model with mixed source material, all of which Jacob’s comment and you, ignore.
By the way your little parody, a flight into ridiculous fantasy, was almost amusing. You have an keen sense of mockery and imagination and should write more fiction and call it such. At least it had a hint of art as opposed to the extraordinary leaps in reality made by other comments on Vridar, drawing from my criticism of Cohn, a criticism of all Jewish scholars. This is quite frankly ludicrous considering the round table discussions we have frequently which naturally involve Jewish scholars as well as scholars of no faith or other faith. It also deliberately ignores my direct references to Fredriksen, Amy-Jill Levine, and Vermes.
Reply
ROO BOOKAROO
May 26, 2012 at 1:33 pm
Do not worry. All readers at Vridar are now fully aware of the shenanigans happening here and are eager to come and visit for fear of missing the fun. I simply reconfirmed the link that was requested in a most civil fashion.
And no, since Maurice Casey pulled that white rabbit of “high-context” culture to dismiss the major conundrum of the original spread of Christianity — the 17 early documents of the first century by 9 different authors, including Paul, which show total silence on a historical Jesus; and further, 21 separate documents of the first half of the 2d century by about 13 independent authors, which show only mere allusions to Jesus’s biographical details — I must confess that I lost my trust in his own reliability as a scholar. He may brandish and mutter as much Aramaic as he wants, this will not restore my confidence after such a trick.
As for your outbursts, the only thing that comes to my mind is not puzzlement at your remarkable and superior honesty, or stupefaction at your amazing pretensions at being an arbiter of taste and scholarship, but my fond memories of those lovely performances of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” in Central Park by a luminous summer evening. One play that you may have great fun seeing some day.
rjosephhoffmann
May 26, 2012 at 3:27 pm
@Buckaroo: “The 17 early documents of the first century by 9 different authors, including Paul, which show total silence on a historical Jesus; and further…” I don’t know these documents. Where can I find them. They will change…everything.
steph
May 26, 2012 at 3:57 pm
Extraordinary Roo. What makes you think I haven’t read all of Shakespeare’s plays, played in them, worked on their stage productions, and watched many different companies perform them from the north to south pole? Your behaviour here makes it quite transparent why The Taming of the Shrew particularly appeals to you. You remind me not just of the rest of the mythers who, like you, consistently misrepresent scholarship, but of Kanga’s Roo. Not the real AA Milne Roo but Walt Disney’s hijack – the pseudo Roo.
steph
May 26, 2012 at 6:14 pm
It may not be so transparent to someone less familiar with The Taming of the Shrew, but this Roo the Buckaroo will no doubt be enraptured by this wonderful play because it is the most deliberately misogynistic of all Shakespeare’s plays and will give this Roo the Buckaroo all the positive reinforcement he could wish for.
Antonio Jerez
May 26, 2012 at 2:46 pm
Funny that you mention the late Alvar Ellegård. I had a public debate with him at the Göteborg Book Fair about ten years ago in conjuction with the publication of his book Jesus – one hundred years before Christ. I argued that that a Jewish healer and preacher named Jesus existed at about the the time and place the gospels claim. Ellegård argued that the Jesus of the gospels was almost a total phantasy – Jesus had actually been the Teacher of Righteousness at Qumran and lived about a 100 years before he
was transformed into Jesus of Nazareth. The late Ellegård, may he
rest in peace, was just as much an incompetent in
historical methodlogy as Doherty and Carrier. As I pointed out to
Ellegård – you really need a lot of imagination to get from the
Teacher of Righteousness to Jesus from Nazareth, two figures
who basically stood at opposite poles of Judaism of the times.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 26, 2012 at 3:36 pm
@Antonio. I don’t actually blame Ellegard r.i.p. exclusively for the error –there are many nincompoops out there as this discussion is proving minute by minute. The mythtics think parsimony is a vegetable and need to have Morton Smith’s caution about inventing myths to explain myths emblazoned on their foreheads. The amazing thing is, when challenged to name a respected scholar who supports the views of the Drivel whoops Vridar Club, they seem to suggest that all “respected scholars” are also myths. Perhaps they have gone to Mars where they will meet Erich van Daniken, who will explain everything to them.
Antonio Jerez
May 26, 2012 at 4:09 pm
Joseph,
Alvar Ellegård actually held a professorship in English here at Göteborg University. I suppose that he was good in that subject, although when it came to doing history he was totally out of depth. His two books on Jesus are so badly researched and argued that I suppose that he would have got thrown out any history department of repute if he had been a mere student. The few places where you can get away with intellectual acrobatics like this is usually among Jesus mythicists and Evangelical “scholars” tied to Evangelical or Fundamentalist biblical seminaries.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 26, 2012 at 6:20 pm
@ Antonio: Yes, I know: I tried to engage him once; we had two very profitless discussions and finally he barked off.
Maurice Casey
May 26, 2012 at 2:31 pm
Referring to Initial comment by Doherty above
Maurice Casey responds:
Doherty’s first point has all the malice and spite now to be expected of mythicists. According to him, I think we should not expect to find ‘later Christian tradition’ in the writings of Paul. What I actually wrote was, ‘The last thing we should expect to find in first century documents is the deposit of centuries of later Christian tradition.’ In the context of Doherty’s book as a whole, ‘centuries of’ is important, but Doherty replaces this with ‘”later tradition” like the fact that Jesus was crucified on earth as crucified on earth, by Pilate, that he taught anything about loving one another or any of the ethical teachings of the Gospel (not even inauthentic ones), that he performed miracles, prophesied the End-time, and so on. Boy, what an HJ that leaves to champion! Imagine devoting one’s professional life to protecting the existence of such an undetectable mundane figure, no matter what the cost in surrendering one’s scholarly principles!
There are two central points wrong here. One is the replacement of everything I have written with this incompetent summary. I defended the historicity of parts of Mark’s passion narrative in a scholarly work which Doherty is not learned enough to read (Aramaic Sources of Mark’s Gospel CUP, 1998, summarised for the general reader in Jesus of Nazareth T & T Clark/Continuum, 2010, pp. 429-53), I discussed what are often called ‘miracles’ in the light of the most recent and competent secondary literature (Jesus of Nazareth, ch.7), and I wrote about his ethics as well (Jesus of Nazareth, ch 8). I have not for one moment suggested that this is ‘later tradition’, let alone ‘centuries of later tradition’. But the misrepresentation, malice and spite reach a climax in the final sentence. I have not proposed that Jesus was an ‘undetectable mundane figure’, and ‘no matter what the cost in surrendering one’s scholarly principles!’ is a quite mendacious attack on my scholarly integrity, which no-one properly familiar with me or my work has made.
Doherty then misrepresents the effects of my comments on ‘high context’ and ‘low context’ cultures. He interprets this to mean that ‘no one….felt the slightest urge to mention anything that was said or done by Jesus on earth.’ This misses all the main points, one of which is that some people, including Paul, did mention what they needed (e.g. the death, burial and Resurrection of Jesus at 1 Cor 15.3-8). The second is that they did not need the main points of the historic ministry of Jesus to be constantly repeated in the writing of occasional letters which were basically about problems in the Pauline churches. Despite grave temptation, I have never described mythicists as ‘“low culture” idiots’, but I did make the important point that they all belong to a low context culture, and consequently have unrealistic expectations of what Paul needed to mention in his epistles. I also noted that these problems will have been exacerbated by the problems of writing at all, which Doherty does not mention.
Another major point is the late date of documents used by Doherty. He refers without reference to the dating of the Similitudes of Enoch by ‘the once highly regarded Yonge’. However, in accordance with his customary lack of learning, he gives no reference. Does he really mean C.D. Yonge (1821-91), who translated the works of Philo in the middle of the nineteenth century, on the basis of a pre-critical text? Of course all such works are now long out of date.
Doherty then comments on the dates of the Apocalypse of Elijah and the Vision of Isaiah. As usual, he gives no proper references. In Jesus, Neither God nor Man, p. 164, he simply quotes from the translation of the Apocalypse of Elijah by Wintermute (Charlesworth, OT Pseudepigrapha¸ p. 736) of the text, which survives only in Coptic. The mss date from the 4th century onwards. Wintermute suggests a date for the original Greek in the third century, albeit with significant uncertainty, as is appropriate for a text which survives only in Coptic from the fourth century onwards. Schürer-Vermes-Millar vol III, pp. 799-803, which was revised jointly by Vermes and Goodman, date the Coptic work to the second half of the third century CE, but comment that ‘Whatever Jewish ingredients it may contain are likely to go back to the previous century at least.’ They do not however say which elements these might be. Doherty notes that I make the (blindingly obvious and therefore universally agreed point that) the date of these documents is ‘difficult to determine’, but omits the reasons why no-one else dates it as early as the end of the first century, ‘even though I do indeed give reasons for so doing and dispute Knibb’s arguments for not doing so’ Doherty’s so-called ‘reasons’ are quite unreasonable because, unlike Knibb, he does not take seriously the date and provenance of the manuscripts of this work, nor its lack of a reasonable setting in anything like a Pauline environment.
Doherty makes unsatisfactory comments on my supposedly ‘unsympathetic personal attitude toward the existence of “what some scholars call Q” (obviously those as incompetent as myself)’. I never have, and never would, accuse scholars such as Kloppenborg and Tuckett of being as incompetent as Doherty. I do of course have reasons not to agree with them. I expressed the most important in An Aramaic Approach to ‘Q’ (MSSNTS 122. CUP, 2002), and I was very glad to have fruitful discussions with each of them at the Oxford Conference on the Synoptic Problem. However, it is disappointing that they continue the regrettable tradition of New Testament scholars not being properly competent in Aramaic. My reasons for believing in a chaotic model of the Double Tradition are of course the scholarly ones which I presented at some length in Aramaic approach to ‘Q’, and summarised for the general reader in Jesus of Nazareth, pp. 78-86, not some mysterious ‘unsympathetic personal attitude’. Doherty, however, is not competent to read Aramaic Approach to ‘Q’. This entails his total inability to see why I have a chaotic model of the Double Tradition, which he ignores with the ignorance characteristic of mythicists.
Doherty announces that I include ‘a very dubious defence of why Luke would not have taken anything from Matthew’s nativity story if he was using Matthew. Shades of Goodacre…’ Of course there are shades of Goodacre, because Goodacre has provided the best recent defence of the whole idea that Luke knew and used Matthew. Doherty cannot however defend his position effectively: I pointed out in my essay that he is dependent on the work of a fundamentalist Baptist Christian, R.H. Stein at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. No decently educated person should take that seriously, and Doherty gives no answer to my detailed arguments, which do indeed follow from those of Goulder and Goodacre.
Doherty then comments on my point, often made by others, that if you believe in too strong a version of ‘Q’, ‘the disappearance of Q is difficult to explain. Doherty, who, let us remember, could not and naturally therefore did not read my book on the double tradition, simply declares, ‘That’s nonsense, and I’ve given very reasonable explanations for such a situation’. As usual, he gives no references, and I know of nothing of the kind.
I noted that early Christian piety did not require shrines or relics. Doherty’s comments on this are completely inaccurate, and misrepresent my comments as usual. The main points are the ones which I have made more than once before. Firstly, Doherty inherited an interest in relics from the Catholic faith in which he was brought up, and read it back into early Christianity because that suits his fantasy world. There is no sign of any Christian interest in relics before Constantine’s mother Helena visited Israel/Palestine in the fourth century CE. The documentation of the church fathers, which is quite considerable by the time we get to Eusebius, mentions no such veneration, and there are no relics surviving from that period either.
Finally the main point is that Doherty, and his followers, are drastically incompetent, and quite incapable of following evidence or argument. I was sorry to have to comment in my essay, ‘I hope this is sufficient to indicate that the mythicist view is based on ineducable ignorance, prejudice and absolute contempt for anything like learned scholarship.’ I regret to say that this has been abundantly confirmed by the comments on the essays of Stephanie and myself. They also attribute to both of us an astonishing degree of incompetence and insincerity to find which they must have gazed into their mirrors.
Maurice Casey
Reply
steph
May 26, 2012 at 2:34 pm
Maurice Casey is very grateful to Joe Hoffmann for his helpful and incisive comments.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 26, 2012 at 3:41 pm
Joe Hoffmann is very grateful that scholars like Maurice Casey (to mention one of the most courageous) are willing to defend historical process against these newest Ophites.
Reply
Jacob
May 28, 2012 at 3:00 pm
I hope Casey will be responding to the linguistic arguments about Aramaics and the word ß?a????e?. Especially the post by spin.
Reply
steph
May 29, 2012 at 1:05 pm
Was my reply insufficient Jacob? He has ‘responded’ in his work which you have ignored. You say he has not ‘explained’ or ‘provided evidence’ when he has in his meticulously detailed monographs and articles. Let me repeat your mistakes for you: Your comment ignores most of what Casey has written. In Aramaic Sources of Mark’s Gospel, he gave abundant evidence that Mark knew Aramaic, but that he was a bilingual translator who made the sort of mistakes which are typical of bilingual translators. You ignored all such features, which include ‘I say to you’, which is the sort of thing which bilingual translators do sometimes put in. We know the Aramaic for ‘sons of thunder’. What Mark was not very good at was transliteration, a normal fault in bilingual translators who have no modern training. It is very regrettable that Casey’s massive arguments of cumulative weight for Mark not only knowing Aramaic, but making large numbers of comments which reflect Aramaic sources, keep being ignored by people who are not Aramaists and have convictions that Mark was not using any Aramaic sources, and who consequently ignore arguments to the contrary. It is not true that Casey ignored features of Latin: he discussed legion, centurion, Herodianoi and denarion, probably the most important from a historical perspective.
Have you read his monographs on Aramaic? His argument and evidence is there. I don’t see why you think he should respond to a comment that ignores most of what he has written.
This is from Maurice Casey to you: “Your comment is hopeless. This response is absolutely fine. I would have said nothing more. You have made up a silly story and ignored all the things I have written as Steph has made clear.”
Reply
Jacob Aliet
May 30, 2012 at 3:28 am
Steph,
I have no training in Aramaic, leave alone Biblical studies. And I haven’t read Casey’s book. But I can read arguments made in Endlish and follow them clearly. You keep regurgitating the same content-free response that I ignore most of what Casey has written. As spin has pointed out, that is just your unfounded assumption. And Casey has shamelessly failed to deal with the detailed arguments that spin has presented above (on May 26, 2012 at 7:14 pm) yet he has the gall to say that my “comment is hopeless”! How irresponsible is that? Is this what scholarship is?
Your kind of response, and Casey’s is what is called weaseling. And it wont fly.
In the first place, you claim Mark knew Aramaic. This is your central argument.
But the text exposes several errors and latinisms and even ignorance of the geography of Judea.
So what do you do so rescue your case in the face of these difficulties? You claim that Casey has “massive arguments” and “abundant evidence”. If you had it, you could have presented it. Plain and simple. You have nothing.
So you resort to inventing excuses and claim that Mark was a poor bilingual translator whose transliterations sucked. This weaseling from ignorance to incompetence doesn’t help your case because ignorance breeds incompetence so it is reasonable to infer from his incompetence that he was not an Aramaic speaker.
Casey doesn’t explain the dipthong in the first syllable of ß?a?e??e?, which speaks against the writers knowledge of Aramaic. Because he cannot do this, spin argues, Casey claims that ß?a?e??e? was not the work of the writer of the gospel. This is ad hoc and untestable.
Spin also argues that Mark’s only Aramaic transliterations are so trivial and are not sufficient to suggest that the writer wasn’t working from Aramaic at all. Latinisms in the text further strengthen this view. In defense, Casey and you claim that Mark was not very good at transliteration, a ‘normal’ (supply the statistics please) fault in bilingual translators.
In addition, his lack of geographical understanding speaks against his being from Judea/Galilee and thus not being directly familiar with its languages.
You can clear the egg from your face by responding spins post of May 26.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 30, 2012 at 6:46 am
Just for the sake of astonishment as I am sure MC will respond, but why in the world are you seeking clarification of a technical point like this when you yourself claim you can’t read or understand the proof? It would be like me asking Andrew Wiles to suss out the fine points of his proof of Fermat’s Theorem.
Reply
David Marshall
May 30, 2012 at 9:04 am
Maurice / Joseph: I’m not sure I want to right now, other languages being in line already, and life drawing on, but how would one go about learning the relevant dialect of Aramaic, if one wanted to? I taught myself Koine Greek (to some extent) by simply reading the NT, looking up vocab from two dictionaries (one on-line), plus a little grammar from a textbook or two. The same basic method worked, more or less (I did have an excellent teacher at one point) for classical Chinese, for which the Chinese Text Project is an invaluable on-line source. Are there analogous texts / on-line dictionaries / alphabet and grammar guides available for learning 1st Century Aramaic? (I assume the stuff a few people speak nowadays has evolved out of recognition?) Thanks.
steph
May 30, 2012 at 10:37 am
“I have no training in Aramaic, leave alone Biblical studies. And I haven’t read Casey’s book” but you claim to know that he hasn’t explained or provided evidence and argument in work you haven’t read and you what to know intricate details about a language you don’t understand. Simply amazing. Professor Casey will respond to your arrogance anon. Eggs? Spin? The irony.
Reply
steph
May 30, 2012 at 12:25 pm
An example of an unsupported claim by Jacob reflecting his oblivion to the work he is attempting without knoweldge to ‘demolish’: “Casey doesn’t explain the dipthong in the first syllable of ß?a?e??e?, which speaks against the writers knowledge of Aramaic.” There is no dipthong – this is an example of a mistake of reading it as though it is English. It is an example of two attempts by a translator to create a shewa in Greek, a point which is explained in an argument several pages long in ‘Aramaic Sources of Mark’s Gospel’ which you have not read.
Reply
spin
May 30, 2012 at 8:59 pm
“It is an example of two attempts by a translator to create a shewa in Greek”! Inventive, but no prize. You don’t conjecture novel means of representing something without support evidence. That’s just ad hoc. Whether you like to admit it or not, the Greek /?a/ is a diphthong to anyone reading the text. It may have come directly from a shewa, but then why don’t we see any other such transliteration? The treatment of the shewa in ?aµa should disavow you of your conjecture. Randall Buth (JSNT, 1981, p.29) says “Among the possibilities are both ßa?e- and ß??e-. Either a or o can transliterate a shva; the problem is that ?a, together as in ß?a?e-, is not a possibility.”
This is what Casey says: “Either a or o was possible, but both together are ludicrous.” He’s right (as was Buth 30 years earlier), but unlike Buth, Casey thinks it is still derived directly from the original, yet gives no credible trajectory for the /?a/. And there is no reason for one to blame bilingual inadequacy for the diphthong, when there is nothing to suggest the specific blunder from the rest of the text. The ayin/ghayin divide is quite reasonable as would be the word final mem/samek confusion, if it reflected the scripts of the time (but look for example at Cross, FM, “The Development of Jewish Scripts”, in The Bible & the ANE, ed GE Wright, p.190 script 6 and p.209 script 3). If the mem/samek confusion were true, it argues against Casey’s claim. How was this bilingual able to get the notion of thunder from ???? The claim that the writer translated the text from Aramaic doesn’t account for the form of ß?a????e? from an original ??? ????. (And isn’t ???? the Aramaic form? If so, the mem is not word final and the samek confusion is not likely.)
There seems to me more trouble attempting to derive ß?a????e? directly from the Aramaic than the theory can handle.
Reply
Maurice Casey
May 30, 2012 at 8:13 pm
From Maurice Casey to Jacob Aliet
Firstly, this illustrates perfectly the sort of audience in the especially internet-based attempts to promote mythicist arguments. It is essentially amateur. It has both ‘Christian apologists’, whom mythicists love to hate, and atheists who are determinedly anti-Christian. Both groups consist largely of people with closed minds who are impervious to evidence and argument, a quite different world from the critical scholars among whom I am happy to have spent most of my life, whether they were Christian, Jewish or irreligious.
Aliet’s post, and that of the appropriately named ‘Spin’, whom he follows, illustrate this perfectly with their determined ignorance. Both are also perfectly rude, which used not to be a feature of scholarship. In particular, it should be noted that Stephanie made the main point correctly, commenting above,
‘An example of an unsupported claim by Jacob reflecting his oblivion to the work he is attempting without knowledge to ‘demolish’: “Casey doesn’t explain the dipthong in the first syllable of ß?a?e??e?, which speaks against the writers knowledge of Aramaic.” There is no dipthong – this is an example of a mistake of reading it as though it is English. It is an example of two attempts by a translator to create a shewa in Greek, a point which is explained in an argument several pages long in ‘Aramaic Sources of Mark’s Gospel’ which you have not read.’
One of the most important points is at the beginning of Aliet’s comment:
‘I have no training in Aramaic, leave alone Biblical studies. And I haven’t read Casey’s book. But I can read arguments made in English and follow them clearly.’
One main point here is that Mark did not write in English, and Aliet and Spin discuss him as if he did. Another main point is that I have answered all of Aliet and Spin’s points at great length in published work which they have not read. This confident ignorance is at the centre of the mythicist case.
I explained at very great length in books which could not possibly be repeated in our essays, that Mark really was in difficulties trying to transliterate shewas from Aramaic into Greek. Both a and e were normal, but having been obviously told this, Mark did both. He did not like this, so the next time he did neither. This is perfectly normal in an untrained ancient translator.
My book An Aramaic Approach to Mark (SNTS monographs 102. CUP, 1998), summarised in parts of Jesus of Nazareth (T & T Clark/Continuum, 2010) is only one place where I have made this case clearly and at length. The idea that Stephanie could have repeated more than one book in a single essay is quite ludicrous. Nor can I do so here. Anyone genuinely interested in this material should read my books before spinning out more codswallop.
Reply
spin
May 30, 2012 at 9:32 pm
There is actually nothing in this post by Casey that requires a response, except briefly “Both a and e were normal, but having been obviously told this, Mark did both” which is simply unhelpful for his claim that the writer of Mark derived the /?a/ from a shewa. This is followed by an unfalsifiable claim: “He did not like this, so the next time he did neither. This is perfectly normal in an untrained ancient translator.” We are supposed to be doing philology, not mindreading.
Reply
steph
May 31, 2012 at 10:54 am
Have you spent years researching ancient texts that have been translated? Casey gave basic bibliographies to the study of the Septuagint and translation studies. How on earth do you think you can comment on translations without taking into account what happens to bilinguals who translate? Do you really love learning? I think not.
Reply
spin
May 31, 2012 at 6:19 pm
You can certainly answer your irrelevant questions and the answers would be foregone. Seriously, little girl, do you really love learning? Have you come to this? Casey has not justified his apparently absurd handling of ß?a????e?. He’s got an unexplainable treatment of the shewa, a phonological explanation for the ayin to gamma, and an orthographic explanation for the the mem to sigma. If this mix and match approach is credible to you, perhaps I could interest you in a lucrative land deal.
Jacob Aliet
May 31, 2012 at 12:44 am
Thanks for your response M Casey, so other than the content-free tangential diatribe about internet-based this and that and atheism and imperviousness and confident ignorance and repeating the ad hoc, untestable claim that Mark was incompetent, your basic response is “go read my book.” This is a very convincing response. When you say the title is An Aramaic Approach to Mark do you mean Aramaic Sources of Mark’s Gospel? I openly admit that I am not trained in these languages and that I have not read your book. It is because I know the importance of that admission. But it does not mean the same case applies to spin. For you and Steph to repeat to me the very same thing I have said does not reflect very well on yourselves. What is important is for you and every other responsible person in this discussion is to clarify matters, not to spend time attacking me and what you imagine I am about.
Reply
steph
May 31, 2012 at 12:33 pm
The point of reading Maurice’s book is that the argument and evidence is laid out in brief and it takes a whole book to do it. You are perfectly welcome to read the whole book and ask questions as a result of your reading. You will obviously have questions about Aramaic but there is no point discussing anything when you don’t read the arguments he has written in his book and its not helpful that you can’t read any Aramaic. I don’t think your comment with your unwillingness to do this, reflects well on yourself.
Reply
spin
May 31, 2012 at 4:28 am
Further on the mem/samek issue Casey says lies behind ß?a????e?, he writes of his Marcan writer: “He then misread the final ? [mem] as ? [samek]. The orthography of the Dead Sea scrolls makes this a perfectly intelligible misreading.” (Aramaic sources of Mark’s Gospel, p.198) However, if one peruses the Aramaic texts among the DSS we find a different story. Neither mem looks like a samek. For example, in 4Q156 (4QtgLev) frag.1 line 6, ??? ????, no-one could confuse the final mem with the samek, which looks a bit like an Irish harp lying on its left side and incidentally is above the bottom horizontal stroke of the kaf, while the final mem descends rather far in a large rectangular loop. They are unmistakably different. In 4Q197 (4QTobit b ar) frag.4 col.1 line 12 & 14 there are both sameks and mems (including finals) ?? ??, again unmistakable. If Casey actually looked at specific DSS to check his claim, I’d love to know which.
Reply
steph
May 31, 2012 at 11:14 am
“If Casey actually looked at specific DSS to check his claim, I’d love to know which.” This is hilarious. How do you think Casey has become an expert on Aramaic? Don’t you think perhaps that it has been the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls which has given us evidence to further advance knowledge into the language and how it was used? Do you realise we have bookshelves lined with the texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls which Casey has been reading for years to acquire his expertise in Aramaic? Certainly we can find other confusions of a mem looking like a samek. How many mems do you think there were – two? You seem to presuppose that Hebrew orthography is different from Aramaic. It’s not.
Reply
steph
May 31, 2012 at 12:40 pm
Spin(!)
In lama at Mk 15.34, the second a is of course a genuine one. The first one has a multitude of ms variations, to the point where it is very difficult to know what Mark wrote. Moreover, what he wrote at 15.34 cannot control what he may have written at 3.17.
Mark did not of course get ‘sons of thunder’ from the Aramaic – this was the meaning transmitted to him, in Greek.
The orthography of Hebrew and Aramaic are the same and there are many examples of mems and sameks in the DSSs. Maurice Casey has spent years going through them all. I don’t see the point in spending a couple of weeks going through them again for you – do you?
Incidentally Buth believes Jesus spoke all his parables in Hebrew. He belongs to the Jerusalem Synoptic School who follow the teachings of a particular rabbi… and all the rabbinic parables, ironically, were in Hebrew, so… And Cross wrote an excellent book in 1965, before most of the DSSs were available.
“There seems to me more trouble attempting to derive ß?a????e? directly from the Aramaic than the theory can handle.” There is no ‘attempt to derive’ from Aramaic. The evidence is in the text. The argument is laid out in the book. Parsimony does not reflect historical realities.
Reply
spin
May 31, 2012 at 8:50 pm
If “Mark did not of course get ‘sons of thunder’ from the Aramaic”, which was after all just a straight translation of ??? ??? (isn’t it?), then perhaps he didn’t get ß?a????e? directly from Aramaic either. As I said in my first post here (May 26, 2012 at 7:14 pm), it seems to have come from a chain of transmission. In fn. 8 on page 198 of AsMG Casey says, of Strabo’s ??asada, “this shows that Strabo could not transliterate very well either.” How absurd to think that Strabo got ??asada from a written Semitic source. Strabo seems not to have visited Palestine and relied on outdated sources (Menachem Stern, “Greek and Latin Sources on Jews and Judaism”, 1974, p.262f). This is another example of a transmission problem. Strabo, like the Marcan writer, received a mediated form. (Incidentally, the May 26 post has not received a response. It puts forward the notion that Casey hasn’t considered the Latin influences evinced in Mark at all seriously. Mentioning a few lexical items is missing the forest for a few trees.)
You should know that Cross was part of the international team of scholars working directly on the source documents from the beginning: he had acess to everything, so there is no ducking from his scripts. We need to have a responsible explanation for Casey’s claim that the “orthography of the Dead Sea scrolls makes this a perfectly intelligible misreading.” A confusion between final mem and samek just doesn’t jump out as probable, but only appears to be Casey fudging his data.
His approach to the literature he is trying to retrofit Aramaic to seems to be extremely uncritical. Take for instance his treatment of “rabbi”. He “infers” because it is found four times in Mark that it “was already a natural address for a teacher” (p.198-9). I guess given the rabbinical evidence for a late start for the use of the term and the fact that the parable of the bad tenants implies a date well after the fall of Jerusalem and thus the overthrow of the Jews was evident (as also indicated by the rent temple curtain), that maybe “rabbi” was already a natural address. But I don’t think that Casey would accept such a late date: it wouldn’t be very helpful for his Aramaic original, would it? He is just not approaching his material with sufficient caution. This statement “Given their position among the twelve, Jacob and John must surely have sat on his right and left from time to time” (p.199) makes me wonder if the book weren’t written seventy years ago with such a naive literalist approach to the material.
And I’m sure you are Casey’s crowning glory, but Casey has some explaining to do.
Reply
steph
June 1, 2012 at 8:17 pm
‘Spin’, offers another mistake about Strabo’s Moasada, which is the same mistake in transliteration, but ‘spin’ announces ‘How absurd to suppose that Strabo got Moasada from a written Aramaic source.’ It does not matter whether Strabo got this from a written Aramaic source or not: we don’t know where he got it from. The main point is that someone made the same mistake as Mark, for reasons which are perfectly easy to understand, and Strabo produced or reproduced this. ‘Spin’, does not tell us who he is but stupidly attempts to belittle me by calling me “little girl”. He could be related to Buckaroo Roo or is this just a common feature of his ilk? It is astonishing that both ‘spin’ and Roo seem not to have evolved since the nineteenth century, and joined the modern convention of addressing human beings equally without being sexually discriminating and derogatory. Of course I know who Cross is. Perhaps ‘spin’ doesn’t understand what scholarship is. By 1965 Cross had done excellent work from which a lot has been learned and much progress has been made. Since 1965 the DSSs have become more widely available and scholarship has advanced in knowledge since Cross and the team began working things out in the early years. Half a century is a long time in scholarship – more than a generation, ‘spin’. As to ‘spin’s’ extraordinary rudeness, arrogance and ridiculous assumptions regarding Professor Casey, ‘spin’ deserve no serious reply from him at all. Casey has spent many years researching and writing up evidence and arguments in work ‘spin’ is unwilling to read. In regard to ‘spin’s’ persistent demands that a comment has not been responded to, I scrolled up this overlong thread and did indeed find a comment dated 26th May preceding one dated 25th. I will answer tomorrow. Yes, ‘spin’ has made a lot of mistakes. I’m also beginning to suspect that ‘spin’ hasn’t even grasped Casey’s basic thesis as several times ‘spin’ refers to ‘Mark’s Aramaic source’ in a way that suggests Mark had a single written Aramaic source, which does not reflect Casey’s chaotic hypothesis at all. The trouble with anonymous identities cruising loose in the free world of the live internet, is that it give these anons the courage to make up and say anything they like, like a myth.
Reply
spin
June 2, 2012 at 3:56 am
Well, “steph”, when a person uses such ridiculous rhetoric as “Do you really love learning? I think not”, you really can’t wonder why they get treated with such distain. Overburdening arrogance such as yours is not a sign of scholarship, but of untrained youthful exuberance. I see little sign of you having opened a book. Perhaps you don’t need to.
I also realized that there could be a quibble about the “*written* Aramaic source”, when “Aramaic source” was sufficient, but it was too late after it had been posted. Still, you claim, “The main point is that someone made the same mistake as Mark”, which you cannot say meaningfully. You just don’t know that the writer of Mark made such a mistake, just as no-one can know that Strabo did. They both appear to be tradents and not themselves responsible for the forms they pass on. The problem of the ridiculous claim regarding the Greek /?a/ remains despite your obfuscation of the matter. Casey simply hasn’t provided a coherent or credible analysis of how ß?a????e? was derived.
You persist in demonstrating that the DSS are not part of your competence. Cross has been the doyen of Qumran palaeography for much of the last sixty years. When he wrote the palaeography article for Schiffman and VanderKam’s Encyclopedia of the DSS (Oxford, 2000), Cross of course had no trouble whatsoever citing the article I mentioned. He also contributed an article to DSS after 50 Years on the subject. Casey’s book had already been written before these. Cross is the backbone of DSS palaeography and a scholar’s dog would know that. To quote Chris Rollston (BASOR 335, 2004, p.107), “It is noteworthy that although much has been written about the Jewish scripts since Cross’s seminal article, four decades later it still remains the single most authoritative treatment of the script of the Dead Sea Scrolls.” “…single most authoritative…” Have you got the message yet?
Perhaps you can now actually look at the DSS I pointed you to regarding exemplars of final mem and samek. I can give you lots of them if you need, but you’d have to look. While it may be quite easy to confuse resh and dalet or yod and waw, it’s not the case with final mem and samek.
Your groupie defence of Casey is admirable but unconstructive. That’s the keyword for your latest post: “unconstructive”. It has little content, so I guess I’ll have to wait with bated breath to see you handle the Latinisms in Mark (beside the few lexical items) that Casey avoided, as you handled Cross. I really have no interest in your musing about internet identities, they just distract you from being substantive. And the audacity of you talking about my “extraordinary rudeness, arrogance and ridiculous assumptions” is pure noise: you need to remove the mote in your eye before attempting to point out the speck in another’s. So, if we can dispense with the pleasantries, perhaps you can actually get on to saying something tangible and I won’t have to ridicule you.
And if Casey doesn’t want to defend his statements, then that’s fine. Just save readers from another of your underwhelming broadsides.
steph
June 2, 2012 at 11:49 am
Well, whoever you are, it appears you can hide behind unacademic anonymity and be as rude as you like. You mentioned philology which as you know etymologically is the love of learning. To accuse me of “untrained youthful exuberance. I see little sign of you having opened a book” and “overburdening arrogance” with “ridiculous rhetoric” is extraordinarily rude and hypocritical. Have you opened the work you are attempting to demolish? Thank you for the youthful exuberance. Excuse me but where were you ‘trained’?
Casey does not argue for an Aramaic source. It is more than a ‘quibble’. Your misrepresentation of his work is a demonstration that you haven’t read it.
“Groupie defence” is pathetic and nothing to do with defending what he has written against misrepresentation which is quite a different thing. You bossy demands and assumptions that I don’t read the DSSs let alone anything else are appalling. Technical questions require technical answers from fragmentary documents and take time to answer unless you’d prefer me to be inaccurate like yourself, whoever you are. You still haven’t got the message of what happens in fifty years of scholarship. Perhaps you haven’t moved ahead yourself in fifty years, still preferring to stick to what is now outdated scholarship and ideas.
Casey discusses his work abundantly with real people who have actually really read it. Carrion being as rude as you like, it appears to give you confidence to continually make mistakes. Your cowardly over confidence is astonishing.
Reply
steph
June 2, 2012 at 2:33 pm
Replying to a comment dated May 26th by one ‘spin’ who cowers behind anonymity. One of ‘spin’s’ assumptions is that Mark’s Latinisms, which Casey has not needed to discuss very often, somehow mean his Aramaisms are not there. This is not so, and had it been so, Csaey would have discussed them at length. He had no reason in previously published work to discuss most of them, however defined. The most striking are the two genuine examples of Latin idiom duly catalogued by Blass-Debrunner-Funk (A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and other Early Christian Literature, F. BLASS AND A. DEBRUNNER A Translation and Revision of the ninth-tenth German edition incorporating supplementary notes of A. Debrunner, by ROBERT W. FUNK (Cambridge/Chicago: CUP/ Univ. of Chicago,1961), pp. 3-6.) Their examples include to hikanon poiein (Mk 15.15) = satisfacere, from the account of Pilate releasing Barabbas; and tithenai ta gonata = genua ponere (Mk 15.19), from the account of Roman soldiers mocking Jesus. There is no suggestion here that Mark’s Latinisms in any way undermine the importance of his Semitisms, which they could not possibly do. Moreover, in many cases, including both of these, the expressions occur in Greek elsewhere, so it is not always clear that they would be perceived as Latinisms when they were spoken. In these two cases, however, it is likely that Mark’s informants were Latin-speaking, even if they spoke to Mark in Greek, so it would be natural for their Greek to include more Latinisms than the language of most speakers of Greek.
This does nothing to remove Aramaisms elsewhere in Mark. As is well known, these include occasional Aramaic words, such as talitha qum in the authentic story of the restoration of a synagogue leader’s daughter, whom some people had taken to be dead (Casey, Jesus of Nazareth, pp. 268-9), as well as idioms such as the ‘son of man’ saying at Mark 14.21, and ‘we will not add to drink’ (Mark 14.25) (Casey, Jesus of Nazareth, pp. 432, 435). No amount of Latinisms, whether lexical or idiomatic, can remove the large quantity of evidence of this kind. Casey included those which he thought were of genuine historical importance, legion, Herodianoi, denarius, and centurion (Casey, Jesus of Nazareth, pp. 242-3, 341, 422-3, 450).
‘Spin’ also turns down Casey’s explanation of ß?a????e? as an attempt to transliterate the Aramaic bene re‘em because he reads it as if it were a diphthong, which is how it could reasonably be understood if it were written in English. In fact, however, the author of Mark tells us that it means ‘sons of thunder’ (Mk 3.17). This is what makes it reasonable to see it as a transliteration of the Aramaic bene re‘em, albeit a faulty one, which is normal in bilingual translators. In a subsequent post, ‘spin’, offers another mistake about Strabo’s Moasada, which is the same mistake in transliteration, but ‘Spin’ announces ‘How absurd to suppose that Strabo got Moasada from a written Aramaic source.’ It does not matter whether Strabo got this from a written Aramaic source or not. The main point is that someone made the same mistake as Mark, for reasons which are perfectly easy to understand, and Strabo produced or reproduced this. Like many fundamentalists, and consequently mythicists, ‘spin’ does not seem to be properly capable of coming to terms with mistakes in the texts which we read.
Well, whoever you are, it appears you can hide behind unacademic anonymity and be as rude as you like. Casey does not argue for an Aramaic source. It is more than a ‘quibble’. ‘Spin’s’ misrepresentation of Casey’s chaotic hypothesis, which argues for several sources for some of Mark, is a demonstration that ‘spin’ hasn’t read it. Casey discusses his work abundantly with people who have read it.
ADDITIONAL COMMENT PASTED FROM MAURICE CASEY
Stephanie’s response here is perfectly competent, accurate and appropriate. ‘Spin’ again fails to tell us who he is. This is completely dishonest, and consequently he cannot reasonably be regarded as a proper scholar. He has also written another quite unscholarly piece, in which he completely misrepresents my work, to the point where he cannot have read it with any semblance of care or understanding. The first book in which I discussed some passages of Mark’s Gospel in detail was Aramaic Sources of Mark’s Gospel (MSSNTS 102. CUP 1998). The title alone should have told him that I found reasons to believe in more than one Aramaic source for some of Mark’s gospel. This was worked out in detail, with appropriate bibliography to Septuagintal studies and Translation Studies. I published an updated summary for the general reader in Jesus of Nazareth.
Finally, hiding behind his pseudonym, ‘Spin’ is appallingly rude about Stephanie, the last doctoral student to work with me. She did not offer a ‘groupie defence of Casey’, she pointed out some misrepresentations of me. Moreover, when dealing with normal people, she is unfailingly polite, but ‘Spin’ and people like him are very trying, unlike most of the people with whom she has had to deal at international conferences.
It is to be hoped that too many people will not take anyone as deceitful as ‘Spin’ too seriously.
Reply
Ed Jones
June 2, 2012 at 3:26 pm
A fundamental statement over against the legitimacy of mythicism: from Earl Doherty’s Neither God Nor Man, “The advent of the Internet has introduced an unprecedented “lay” element of scholarship in the field . . . has meant that the study of Christians origins is undergoing a quantum leap in the hands of a much wider consistency than traditional academia.” As nonsensical as saying: “The advent of a recent phenomenon has introduced an unprecedented “lay” element of scholarship in the field . . . has meant that the study of origins of the Universe is undergoing a quantum leap in the hands of a much wider consistency than traditional academia of Quantum Relativity Physics.”)
A viable historical solution to the “Jesus Puzzle” has taken place within the Guild of NT studies, the only discipline capable, not only of identifying our primary Scriptural source of apostolic witness to Jesus, but of appropriately interpreting this source as well. However, “few are they who find it” even among well-known NT scholars. Finding it, this historical solution, is “a task to which specialized knowledge in the areas of philology, form and redaction criticism, literary criticism, history of religions, and New Testament theology necessarily applies.” (Hans Dieter Betz). “Over the last two centuries, there gradually emerged a new access to Jesus, made available through objective historical research.” (James M. Robinson). Under the force of present historical methods and knowledge this new access was brought to a highly creditable understanding during the 1980’s. Schubert Ogden: “We now know not only that none of the Old Testament writings is prophetic witness to (Jesus), but also that none of the writings of the New Testament is apostolic witness to Jesus as the early church itself understood apostolicity. The sufficient evidence for this point in the case of the New Testament writings is that all of them have been shown to depend on sources, written or oral, earlier than themselves, and hence not to be the original and originating witness that the early church mistook them to be in judging them to be apostolic. [“The sufficient evidence” without the agonizing detail of what the writings of the NT does contain, which now supplies the grist for the blogosphere mythicists’ mill] – - the witness of the apostles is still rightly taken to be the real ‘Christian’ norm, even if we today have to locate this norm, not In the writings of the New Testament but in the earliest stratum of (Scriptural) witness accessible to us, given our own methods of historical analysis and reconstruction. Betz identifies this earliest stratum to be the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:3-7:27). “This source presents us with an early form – deriving from (the Jerusalem Jesus Movement) — which had direct links to the teaching the historical Jesus and thus constituted an alternative to Gentile Christianity (hence to orthodox Christianity) as known above all from the letters of Paul and the Gospels, as well as the later writings of the New Testament. [All are written in the context of imaging the Christ of faith, not the man Jesus]. If the Sermon on the Mount represents a response to the teaching of Jesus critical of that of Gentile Christianity, then it serves unmistakably to underline the well-known fact of how little we know of Jesus and his teaching. The reasons for our lack of knowledge are of a hermeneutical sort and cannot be overcome by an excess of good will (apologetics). The Gentile Christian authors of the Gospels transmitted to us only that part of the teaching of Jesus that they themselves understood, they handed on only that which they were able to translate into the thought categories of Gentile Christianity, and which they judged to be worthy of transmission. (More to the point they included no more than they thought sufficient to lend historical credence to their Pauline Christ of faith myth). – - from these texts his original teaching can neither be reconstructed nor abstracted in its entirety.” This calls for a new reconstruction of post-execution Jesus traditions. Ed Jones Dialogue -Vridar is such an attempt.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 2, 2012 at 3:55 pm
Hi Ed: Nice to hear from you. Yes, Betz has good reason to think that, and Ed Sanders’s view that the attack on the temple cult is also hard core, Mark 11.15-19 & pars + Jn 2.13-16 (dislocated) — though no doubt the appeal to Ps 69.9, added by John, is a christological point. Schubert Ogden’s point, “from these texts his original teaching can neither be reconstructed nor abstracted in its entirety” also connotes the reason why they cannot be used against his historicity. If that sounds confusing, I’d be happy to ramble on.
Reply
steph
June 2, 2012 at 4:22 pm
Ed, Thank you for your contribution. It’s always appreciated, thoughtful and refreshing, bless you.
Reply
steph
June 2, 2012 at 6:53 pm
PS Ed, I really do like your analogy. Absolutely apt and very amusing.
Reply
spin
June 3, 2012 at 2:12 am
Started off well, “steph”. Here’s your false claim: “One of ‘spin’s’ assumptions is that Mark’s Latinisms, which Casey has not needed to discuss very often, somehow mean his Aramaisms are not there.” Here’s what I said in the post you claim to be responding to: “A Semitic influence is easy enough to understand given the source of the traditions used in Mark, but there are very few ways to explain the weight of Latin influence in the Greek text of Mark.” Does a “Semitic influence is easy enough to understand given the source of the traditions used in Mark” equate to somehow meaning “his Aramaisms are not there”? You get a fail for reading comprehension. I have no doubt that there is an Aramaic component behind the gospel. You are functionally the one in denial.
Now we get you finally opening a book (Brass, Debrunner & Funk) and cherrypicking two well-known Latin idioms translated into Greek. Well done, though you did breeze past several others. But these translated idioms were not what I commented on, though I did mention one idiom:
‘Consider for example the Latinism ? est??, used like the Latin hoc est, to give an explanation, though not usual in Greek. (And some of those explanations are aimed specifically toward a Roman audience, “two lepta, that is a quadrans” or “a hall, that is a praetorium”.)’
? est?? is used nine times through the gospel to give explanations, including those two specifically giving Roman cultural equivalents. Not strangely Matt only has two exemplars and Luke has none. It wasn’t acceptable Greek. Six times in Mark it is used with a translation of an Aramaic source (including ß?a????e?) to help the reading audience, an audience unaware of Jewish customs and that favored Roman explanations given with a Latin idiomatic structure. The Aramaic influence is easy enough to understand, but all I got was silence from you regarding this Latinism.
Another Latinism I mentioned in the post you are supposed to be responding to regarded “the use of ??a with verbs of speaking, comparable with a similar use of ut in Latin.” You’ll find this structure used 31 times in Mark, though many fewer times in the other synoptics, eg 5:43 (cf. Lk 8:56), 6:8 & 7:32. The Aramaic influence is easy enough to understand, but all I got was silence from you regarding this Latinism.
Yet another Latinism untouched by you in that post regards “Latin favoured syntax with accusatives and datives before the verb”. Aramaic comes from a language family that was VSO, though there was a drift towards SVO. In Greek accusative and dative generally follow the verb, but in Latin the verb is routinely placed last. When the object and/or indirect object precede the verb we look not to Greek or Aramaic here, but to Latin. See eg 3:10, 3:11, 5:10, 8:22, 9:18, 9:37, etc.
So, not only are there straight transliterations of Latin lexical items and translations of Latin idioms, but we have indications of grammatical and syntactical influence from Latin in the gospel of Mark. Most of the Aramaic items are translated or explained for the reading audience, yet the Latinisms stand. While you here, “steph”, are acting as Casey’s front person and saying “Latin influence? what Latin influence?”
Nobody’s denying that there is an Aramaic component in the composition of Mark and there is no reason for you to have thought such a thing, except through not reading what was said, but there needs to be a serious treatment of the Latin influence in the text for, as I said, “A Semitic influence is easy enough to understand given the source of the traditions used in Mark, but there are very few ways to explain the weight of Latin influence in the Greek text of Mark.” Casey’s treatment of ???d?a??? was mere assertion, showing a disinterest in the fact that Greek and Aramaic both have ways to construct such gentilics and that the use of bound morphemes tend to reflect the language whose morpheme it is, ie as -?a?- is Latin, the fact tends to reflect a Latin context for it. You don’t really have to worry about the Aramaic in Mark, as it is only to be expected, you (and Casey) have to face the Latin. He has strenuously and unjustifiably minimized its significance, apparently because he is too enamored with his approach to the more easily justifiable Aramaic. You need to think of the Latin evidence as analogous to a lectio difficilior: it requires you to give it a good explanation.
It was a good move to drop your misguided attempts to take Cross out of the picture. DSS scholarship clearly shows you wrong. Cross’s sequences attest to the difficulty of confusing final mems with sameks, as do a large number of DSS themselves, so Casey’s approach to the sigma in ß?a????e? gets no support from the writing of the era. The manifestation of the ghayin allophone of ayin requires a native speaker with a dialect that has the allophone. (How else can one explain Gomorrah, Gaza, Fogwr [Peor], or Segwr [Zoar] in the LXX?) A native speaker would not foul up the pronunciation of the first syllable and there should be no reason for a transcriber to use two vowel letters to represent a single sound from the pronounced shewa. Perhaps you can provide another example of a pure vowel indicated by two different Greek vowel letters together, otherwise the claim seems sorely ad hoc.
Do give my regards to Casey and tell him his addendum was a hoot.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 3, 2012 at 7:35 am
@Spin: I will post this and then ask for a reply. I am not an Aramaic specialist so the answer will eventually have to come from Professor Casey, who is. It does however seem especially curious to harp on Casey’s “strenuously and unjustifiably minimizing its [Latin's] significance” when the whole purpose of his study is to focus on Aramaic constructions. Perhaps you can refer us directly to your articles and monographs on the subject so that we can savour your argument in its entirety? As it is we are just getting disconnected snapshots of your objections. Is there some reason you have not shared this information with readers?
The moderation rules for the site in any event require moderation when an exchange becomes merely argumentative and this achieved that a few posts ago. On the other hand, I would have to say that you have demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt how the technical procedures of Biblical scholarship make the use of anything as facile as Bayes Theorem completely risible, in any connection. So thank you for graphic [sic] and (what may be) inadvertent corroboration. Not that that has been your primary purpose.
Reply
steph
June 3, 2012 at 1:37 pm
You have an interestingly broad definition of Latinisms which doesn’t seem to take into account the evolution of language from Hellenistic Greek and the Latin speaking world of the Roman Empire. But Maurice Casey will respond to your “extraordinarily rude and erroneous comment” in a while. I didn’t ‘drop’ Cross at all. I had disputed your dependence on his 1965 book and not contradicted his later scholarship at all. In fact in my second to last comment I suggested that your dependence on 1965 scholarship perhaps meant you haven’t moved ahead yourself in fifty years, still preferring to stick to what is now outdated scholarship and ideas. I did not say Cross had not made progress since. Now, whoever you are, it’s interesting that you did not contradict what I wrote about Randall Buth. It is also interesting that you haven’t engaged with Maurice Casey’s essay but instead, seem to have found this as an opportunity to use an anonymous identity to attack him personally. I say personally because you don’t represent his work at all or show signs of having opened his books and read them. I was wondering therefore whether you might in fact be Randall Buth who belongs to the Jerusalem Synoptic School and who has “led a life dedicated to the study of God’s word”? Whoever you are, don’t you think it would be more honest to engage with your true identity? And there is no need to attempt to deride me by placing my name in inverted commas. I am not hiding behind anonymity.
Reply
steph
June 3, 2012 at 2:43 pm
MAURICE CASEY SAYS:
Stephanie has responded above and I will include a short reply too. This is another shockingly rude piece by a pseudo-scholar. He does not even seem to realise that his failure to say who he is is sufficient to mean that he is not a decent honest scholar. Lack of honesty is sufficient to mean that a person is not a proper scholar. His attacks on Stephanie are especially rude and inaccurate.
I do not propose to answer all his points. I have had endless debates with honest scholars with whom I have disagreed, but anyone who needs to hide under a cloak of anonymity should not be taken seriously. It is blindingly obvious to anyone fully competent in Hellenistic Greek that it absorbed a lot of expressions from Latin, the lingua franca of the Roman empire.
Again, ‘we get you to finally opening a book’. This is a specious insult under a cloak of anonymity. That anyone ‘finally opening a book’ would start with Blass-Debrunner-Funk is very silly, as only learned people can read it. ‘Spin’ then accuses her of ‘cherry-picking two well-known Latin idioms translated into Greek’. They were however the two most obvious Latin expressions which might have been transmitted to Mark in Latin, which he may perfectly well have spoken – neither of us has suggested otherwise, but it is so well known that it is not what I have previously needed to write. ‘Spin’ also has a very general conception of what ‘Latinisms’ are, as if none of us have come across them, simply because it happens to have been more important for us to write about Aramaisms, which have not been so well known, because so many Aramaic sources have become available relatively recently.
He ends, ‘Do give my regards to Casey, and tell him his addendum was a hoot.’ My addendum was this:
Finally, hiding behind his pseudonym, ‘Spin’ is appallingly rude about Stephanie, the last doctoral student to work with me. She did not offer a ‘groupie defence of Casey’, she pointed out some misrepresentations of me. Moreover, when dealing with normal people, she is unfailingly polite, but ‘Spin’ and his ilk are very trying, unlike most of the people with whom she has had to deal at international conferences.
To what sort of dishonest pseudo-scholar is that a ‘hoot’? It underlines that fact that ‘Spin’ is dishonest, and has never taken even the most basically scholarly step of identifying himself.
Emeritus Professor Maurice Casey.
Jacob Aliet
June 3, 2012 at 3:42 pm
From the arguments made, there are four problems that confront Maurice Casey’s theory. Please allow me to explain this as simply as a layreader like myself can.
This is how I understand the argument:
Casey argues that passages in Mark indicate that the author of Mark derived them from an Aramaic source and the Author also was an Aramaic speaker – and thus a native of Galilee/Judea. The four problems are as follows:
1. The (transliterated) Aramaic words in the (selected) passages question (Talitha cumi, Abba, Ephphatha, Eloi Eloi…etc) are largely ornamental and trivial and are not sufficient to argue that the original text was written in Aramaic or that the author of Mark knew Aramaic any less than finding terms like mutatis mutandis, prima facie and habeas corpus in an English text prove that the author knows Latin.
That is problem number one. Insufficiency of the case.
2. Problem number two is that the author of Mark shows ignorance of the Geography of Judea. This argues against his likelihood of being a native of Judea.
3. Problem number three is that some of the passages in mark have Greek translations that betray a possible garbled second or third hand transmission – for this argument, spin has provided examples of talitha kumi and ß?a?e??e? (which is unexplainable as a transliteration – spin details the argument above – spin readily rebutted the conjecture presented by steph that that was “an example of a mistake of reading it as though it is English. It is an example of two attempts by a translator to create a shewa in Greek” so this problem stands and its weight alone begins to crumble Casey’s argument). This argues against the author of Mark necesarily using an Aramaic source (an original Aramaic source). Casey does not handle this possibility cogently and in an ad hoc fashion, posits that it is Mark who was a lousy bilingual translator who made mistakes. Casey uses this same (contradictory) excuse to argue that as a result Mark was a poor untrained transliterator. Talk about eating your cake and having it.
4. Problem number four are the Latinisims in Mark. As spin argues, some of Casey’s Aramaic explanations are seen by others as Latin loan translations. For example (?d?? p??e?? in 2:23, iter facere). Casey deals with these by claiming they were already in Mark’s Aramaic source (Jesus of Nazareth , page 341) as Carr points out above. This is so arbitrary it is dizzying. This renders Casey’s case unfalsifiable and lacking in any disciplined methodology. The upshot of this is that Casey’s theory cannot be relied on as providing a correct interpretation of the (arti) facts.
The words that are unmistakably derived from a Latin source like (a) ? est?? and (b) “the use of ??a with verbs of speaking, comparable with a similar use of ut in Latin. You’ll find this structure used 31 times in Mark, though many fewer times in the other synoptics, eg 5:43 (cf. Lk 8:56), 6:8 & 7:32.” and (c) “Latin favoured syntax with accusatives and datives before the verb.” (spin) These “indications of grammatical and syntactical influence from Latin in the gospel of Mark” argue against Casey’s proposal.
A more parsimonious explanation suggested by spin that deals with all the above difficulties that confront Casey’s theory, is “that the text was written in a Latin speaking context with Greek as a lingua franca, probably Rome, which would supply the Latin substratum for the Greek. This gives a meaningful linguistic context for constructions such as ???d?a??? and s???f????ssa (7:26)–this latter implying a Roman perspective which saw both Syrophoenicians and Libophoenicians, ie Carthaginians.”
That is how I understand the argument as it is. Over to you steph/Maurice. And, oh, please feel free to fault my lack of instruction in Aramaic if you think it is the cause of my failure to understand any of these points.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 3, 2012 at 5:18 pm
@Jacob: Where can I find the source for this information; if as you say you are a lay reader it does not come from your head because you are clearly relying on what you assume to be expert testimony. If these have been published, we would all be interested to know where. Something else confuses me as to “Boanerges,” however: I think it is generally acknowledged that “Mark” was working in a trilingual context where Mishnaic Hebrew and Aramaic competed with koine and Latin in everyday discourse. ‘rgaš’ (‘tumult’) Aramaic (????), or ‘rgaz’ (‘anger’) Aramaic (???) and misreading (or mishearing) the word for thunder, ‘r`am’ seem plausible to me, though I think it is true that thunder is the likeliest. not least because that is what the writer provides as a translation, and it seems to me that this is in general keeping with Mark’s style. You apparently do not. Why? I would personally be hard-pressed to decide the provenance of Mark on linguistic grounds alone, but Rome would not be ruled out because of Aramaisms and a Palestinian origins cannot be ruled out because of Latinisms and Aramaisms. Especially if the provenance is Jerusalem-Judaen. Do you dispute this solely because there are geographical details Mark gets wrong? Kümmel [Kumm.Int, 97] accuses Mark of “numerous” geographical errors. He names three: Mark 5:1 (the Gerasene swine), 7:31 (Tyre in relation to Sidon and the Decapolis), and 10:1. What sort of detailed map would Mark be working from, or do you attribute an eidetic memory to him. I myself would be hard pressed to get from where I am sitting in Ithaca to Utica (good classical names by the way: do you think I’m somewhere in the Med?) without a GPS.
Reply
steph
June 3, 2012 at 6:30 pm
Jacob: Casey does not argue that the author of Mark was a Aramaic speaker or a native of Galilee. This is a misrepresentation of his work. On point 1, Casey has written books discussing idioms in Mark’s gospel. On point 2, we all know perfectly well that Mark shows ignorance of the geography of Judea and he doesn’t come from Judea. On point 3, the notion that the author of Mark is a ‘lousy’ bilingual or ‘poor’ translator belongs to the world of people who know nothing about translators. Modern translation experts not only know that people trying to translate and transliterate make mistakes, but they make the same mistakes, and can be classified. See Casey’s bibliography on translation studies and pp.55 f. On point 4, we all know that there are two possible explanations of Mark 2.23 taken on its own. And as Joe says it is very important that the author of Mark was at least working in a trilingual context.
David Marshall
June 3, 2012 at 8:26 pm
The geographical argument, or variations I have seen of it, strike me as absurd, on many levels. First of all, having spent years on the road, I have long since given up expecting natives to get all their minor geographical details right. A quick skim of Mark turns up 40 or so fairly specific geographical references; if he got three wrong, I actually don’t think that would be so bad. Second, it’s hard for me to see what could even potentially be wrong about 10:1: the sequence of events is vague. and what is supposed to be wrong with crossing the Jordan with Judea as either starting point or destination? Third, the questions of exactly where Jesus is reported to have cast the demons out, outside of (how far outside of) which “chora” or “polis,” whether there is any conflict at all between the different reports, and what towns Mark would have expected his audience to recognize, seem rather complicated. Certainly this is not the sort of blunder, if it is a blunder at all, or even an imprecision, that would disqualify Mark as a native, even a native who loved maps.
I don’t see that this argument has any force, at all, at least not in that direction.
spin
June 4, 2012 at 10:30 am
@Joe
Unfortunately, as you can see, despite my efforts to show evidence of a substratum of Latin in the language of the writer of Mark, nothing is forthcoming from “Emeritus Professor Maurice Casey”, who is too busy talking about dishonesty and showing no balanced analysis of my interactions with “steph”. (I use the quotes with names for the same courtesy they’ve shown to me.) I have maintained an online presence for the last ten years or more and that presence is under the name of spin. I keep my net life separate from my daily life. I can understand that for “Emeritus Professor Maurice Casey” this may be difficult or somehow not kosher, but it is all irrelevance if we are dealing with evidence and argument based on it. I don’t know either of these people from a bar of soap, but have only received incredible rudeness from them both.
My last post here was an attempt to get back to the basic issue of the language of Mark and the place of Latin in it. If there is more than trivial evidence of a Latin substratum, one should expect someone advocating Aramaic sources behind the traditions preserved in Mark needs to treat the issue of Latinisms with due consideration. The most revealing thing to come from “Emeritus Professor Maurice Casey” is that I am supposed to have “a very general conception of what ‘Latinisms’ are”, because I necessarily consider a wide range of indications of Latin influence. Lexis alone is certainly insufficient as evidence for a language substratum, though not insignificant. Loan translations may not be sufficient, for they may represent new concepts borrowed from the language of the source notion and are thus needed to convey the notions, but the exemplars that can be indicated in Mark don’t reflect particularly novel notions, so the Latin idioms translated into Greek are weighty enough to require consideration when trying to decide about the composition of the traditions in Mark. But Latin syntactic traces, if that’s what they really are, cannot be explained away with the sort of casual wave of the hand that “Emeritus Professor Maurice Casey” gave with the few transliterated lexical items he looked at in his 1999 book. The only way I can think of to explain this Latin influence is that it is part of the writer’s normal language habits. You usually know when a person is communicating in a second language by the syntactic and grammatical awkwardness they manifest. As a few modern indicators, an Arab speaker of English may easily have trouble with verb tenses; a Turk may have troubles with articles; an Italian may prefer all adverbs immediately after verbs or adjectives after nouns; and so one. Lexical items are only the tip of the iceberg.
Now “Emeritus Professor Maurice Casey” makes a case (p.122) for ?t? the first time used in Mk 9:11, to ask a direct question, is an Aramaism. The conjunction is used 92 times in Mark, but how many times is it used to indicate a direct question? The word ??a, used a total of 59 times in Mark, when found with verbs of communication thus paralleling Latin ut in similar context, is found 31 times (Adam Winn, “The Purpose of Mark’s Gospel”, Mohr Siebeck 2008, p.82). What has “Emeritus Professor Maurice Casey” actually shown with his lone exemplar of ?t?? Of course, his objective was not specifically to individuate this use of ?t? as an Aramaism but to explain the significance of a difficult verse. We know that the writer’s command of Greek is not strong, given the limited expressiveness available to him, plus those Latinisms I’ve already mentioned and noting the stylistic improvements of the gospel writers who used Mark. It should be no surprise that he reproduces the linguistic problems of the tradents who provided him material.
Mark is a repository of traditions, shaped and elaborated on by a writer who is himself a tradent, receiving traditions and passing them of through a text. As I’ve said from the start, Aramaic can only be expected in a collection of traditions centering on a religion that sprang out of Judaism. But how much Aramaic source material is there in the gospel?
Now can we say that the writer of Mark “was working in a trilingual context where Mishnaic Hebrew and Aramaic competed with koine and Latin in everyday discourse”? If we go on the Latinisms, Mark seems to have been written in a location such as Rome, where there was a large Greek speaking community, but where Latin was strong enough to have the effect that has been left on the gospel. If that is the case, then the context was bilingual, Greek and Latin. Stories circulated across the Mediterranean, perhaps carried by the sorts of itinerant preachers warned about in the Didache 12.
Now “Emeritus Professor Maurice Casey” makes a case (p.122) for ?t? the first time used in Mk 9:11, to ask a direct question, is an Aramaism. The conjunction is used 92 times in Mark, but how many times is it used to indicate a direct question? The word ??a, used a total of 59 times in Mark, when found with verbs of communication thus paralleling Latin ut in similar context, is found 31 times (Adam Winn, “The Purpose of Mark’s Gospel”, Mohr Siebeck 2008, p.82). What has “Emeritus Professor Maurice Casey” actually shown with his lone exemplar of ?t?? Of course, his objective was not specifically to individuate this use of ?t? as an Aramaism but to explain the significance of a difficult verse. We know that the writer’s command of Greek is not strong, given the limited expressiveness available to him, plus those Latinisms I’ve already mentioned and noting the stylistic improvements of the gospel writers who used Mark. It should be no surprise that he reproduces the linguistic problems of the tradents who provided him material.
Mark is a repository of traditions, shaped and elaborated on by a writer who is himself a tradent, receiving traditions and passing them of through a text. As I’ve said from the start, Aramaic can only be expected in a collection of traditions centering on a religion that sprang out of Judaism. But how much Aramaic source material is there in the gospel?
Now can we say that the writer of Mark “was working in a trilingual context where Mishnaic Hebrew and Aramaic competed with koine and Latin in everyday discourse”? If we go on the Latinisms, Mark seems to have been written in a location such as Rome, where there was a large Greek speaking community, but where Latin was strong enough to have the effect that has been left on the gospel. If that is the case, then the context was bilingual, Greek and Latin. Stories circulated across the Mediterranean, perhaps carried by the sorts of itinerant preachers warned about in the Didache 12.
You mentioned “‘rgaš’ (‘tumult’) Aramaic (????), or ‘rgaz’ (‘anger’) Aramaic (???) and misreading (or mishearing) the word for thunder, ‘r`am’ seem plausible to me, though I think it is true that thunder is the likeliest.” But was it misheard or misread? If the original was ??? then it needed to be both: it had to be misread so that a final mem could become a sigma and misheard so that an ayin could become a gamma. Then we get the mystery of the “ridiculous” non-diphthong /?a/. Together these indications suggest that things were garbled in transmission. Our writer was not responsible for the form he received, nor was the initial transmitter. But then, Boanerges is only a tangent from “Emeritus Professor Maurice Casey”‘s argument.
Reply
spin
June 4, 2012 at 12:52 pm
Well, that’s certainly a cut and paste gone wrong! Sorry for the mess.
Reply
steph
June 4, 2012 at 1:55 pm
Once again you have misrepresented Casey’s arguments. For example, Casey argues on p.122 that ?t? is “an example of interference in a bilingual translator” and you claim he makes a case for an “Aramaism”. This is not the same thing, he is not making a case for an Aramaism. You are not being truthful when you say ‘I don’t know either of these people from a bar of soap’. There are several books to tell you who Casey is and he has identified me. We are not hiding dishonestly behind anonymity. You, whoever you are, use the internet to cower behind a pseudonym ‘spin’ to make rude personal attacks. You hijack this site and have failed to engage with either of our essays, to engage with, to attack Casey personally. Your sanctimonious assumption that your anonymity be respected when you have shown Maurice Casey and I nothing but disrespect and insult is hypocritical and appalling. If you are HONEST about your identity perhaps your ideas will be engaged with by Maurice Casey but your failure to acknowledge your identity and recognise academic dishonesty so far, Maurice Casey says is sufficient to disqualify you. It appears you can be as rude as you like to me so I will not waste my time and be exposed here to your ‘mockery’.
steph
June 4, 2012 at 2:16 pm
Hi David Marshall:
Firstly I wouldn’t apply this concept of ‘natives’, as it’s not appropriate to Mark. Secondly most geographical references in Mark probably came from sources, and that there is nothing detectably wrong with e.g. the reference to Capernaum at Mark 9.35 does not tell us anything about where Mark came from. Consequently, counting the references which are not wrong does not tell us where he was from either. And third, it isn’t appropriate to use modern day analogies for first century culture. Most people living in Galilee or Jerusalem would have known the distance between them in terms of days’ journeys.
The three references usually considered problematic are 5.1, with 5.13; 7.31; and 10.1. At 5.1, they are supposed to have gone to ‘the country of the Gerasenes’ (the variant readings are surely due to the following problem). There Jesus dealt with a demoniac who called himself ‘legion…because we are many’.When Jesus granted his/their request to be sent into a herd of pigs, ‘the herd rushed down the steep slope into the sea, about 2,000 (of them) and drowned in the sea’. The story has no hope of being literally true, and the author, who must have had in mind Legio Decem Fretensis with its symbol of a boar, and which was stationed miles to the north, is just oblivious of the fact that it was 33 miles from Gerasa to the nearest sea/lake (Galilee).
At 7.31, Jesus ‘went out from the borders of Tyre through Sidon into the sea of Galilee through the region of Decapolis.’ Sidon is to the north of Tyre, so a rather peculiar way to go to Galilee, nor would one go through the Decapolis to get to the sea/lake of Galilee.
At 10.1, Jesus went ‘into the regions of Judea beyond the Jordan’. There are variant readings due to the obvious fact that none of Judea was beyond the Jordan.
It is not surprising that this has caused some scholars to think that Mark came from outside Israel, given that he knew Aramaic, was well informed about many aspects of the life and teaching of Jesus, and did not finish his Gospel. It is also not surprising that some scholars have adhered to late Christian tradition which claims the author wrote in Rome.
Reply
Jacob Aliet
June 4, 2012 at 3:16 pm
I think we can all see below what happens when one lets others defend their own work.
rjhoffman asks: Jacob: Where can I find the source for this information?
What information? A lot has been said both by myself and spin. Several secondary sources have been mentioned. Several primary sources have also been cited. I am sorry if you are not more specific, I may not be able to point you to the “source.” If you imply that since we have not published a rebuttal of Casey’s “approach” in a scholarly journal then we should not attempt to critique it, that would defeat the very purpose of what you call the Consortium of the Jesus Process, now, wouldn’t it?
After all, Mythicism: A Story of Bias, Incompetence and Falsehood has not been published in any respectable scientific journal. So we are just treating it in kind. On the basis of the Aramaicisms, Casey argues (above) “that some traditions in the synoptic Gospels are perfectly accurate.” How he links Aramaicism to historical accuracy is unclear though but this foothold is clearly loose and can’t support the historical weight he would like to place on it. Appeal to Aramaicism as a historical criterion needs to be presented clearly and not implied.
rjhoffman states: “I would personally be hard-pressed to decide the provenance of Mark on linguistic grounds alone”
This is for Casey to respond to. As for “‘rgaš’ (‘tumult’) Aramaic (????), or ‘rgaz’ (‘anger’), spin has responded above.
rjhoffman states: “I think it is generally acknowledged that “Mark” was working in a trilingual context where Mishnaic Hebrew and Aramaic competed with koine and Latin in everyday discourse.”
Please cite your sources for this “trilingual context” for Mark Professor. Casey may need to deal with this because it does have implications on his theory. A trilingual translator surely would do a work that is different from a cackhanded bilingual translator, no? In any case, if you want to open the door of trilingualism, we might as well open the door of quadrilingualism. Turner argues that the linguistic milieu of the first century Palestine was quadrilingual and that Jesus could have spoken four languages: that language contact due to bilingualism in Aramaic and Greek led to Semitized Greek (i.e. Jewish Greek) and Hellenistic Greek (Nigel Turner, ‘The Language of Jesus and his Disciples’ in Grammatical Insights into the NT,1965) p.182. Where would that leave us? More importantly, where would that leave Caseys theory?
You said it: in trouble.
steph says: “Casey does not argue that the author of Mark was a Aramaic speaker or a native of Galilee. This is a misrepresentation of his work. ”
Not true. He says AMark was a bilingual translator: he (the author of Mark) spoke Aramaic because it was the lingua franca in Judea and could speak Greek because it was the language of commerce in Judea. Are you with me so far? That is the starting point.
In addition, Casey’s assumes that the sayings and narratives he handles were “collected” in the early Christian context (pg.41 of AA of Q). What early Christian context or Sitz im Leben could this have been other than Judea? In any case, NT scholars generally argue that Mark has a semitic flavour to it and it has been said that there are semitic syntactical features that influence the form of the Greek used by Mark. It is also argued that the Aramaicisms in Mark indicate it was written for an Aramaic audience.
steph notes: “On point 1, Casey has written books discussing idioms in Mark’s gospel.”
Yes, it is his books are that are being challenged here. Are you capable of addressing the issues raised or would you like Casey to respond himself?
Steph continues: “On point 2, we all know perfectly well that Mark shows ignorance of the geography of Judea and he doesn’t come from Judea.”
It would be good to get this admission from Casey himself because it has implications about his theory. And I hope rjhoffman and Marshall can agree with you on this matter of ignorance about the geography of Judea. Would the consortium like to take a moment and agree on a common position on this?
Steph adds: “Modern translation experts not only know that people trying to translate and transliterate make mistakes, but they make the same mistakes, and can be classified. ”
If we grant this, doesn’t it render Casey’s theory (of Aramaic sources for Mark) unfalsifiable? Yes or no?
Steph concludes: “On point 4, we all know that there are two possible explanations of Mark 2.23 taken on its own. And as Joe says it is very important that the author of Mark was at least working in a trilingual context.”
No, we don’t know this (that the author of Mark was at least working in a trilingual context). Do you have any sources for this claim? Is this consistent with Casey’s supposition that AMark was a bilingual translator?
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 4, 2012 at 4:16 pm
Your sources? The ones you must be using if your are not making it up in your head. I have no problem with quadrilingualism; a little time in Lebanon and Israel will expose the same phenomenon today–French, Hebrew, Arabic, English, Armenian, a little German tossed in on the side, though Greek–not so much. And the translations! Oh my goodness. Why would you suppose a phenomenon that has remained virtually constant in the Middle East since the time of Alexander, beyond the Crusades and to the present day was not working to confound us in the first century. However, you may be saying something quite different and if you are give me your thesis about Mark in 50 words or less. As to the geography of Mark: I actually think this is now a parlour game–interesting when NT scholars were beating themselves over the head trying to collate what Papias is supposed to have said with what Mark actually did–but practically of no value in this discussion. Maybe we can pour it all into the Bayes Grinder and come up with some probabilities, or more sausage. (Professor of Civilisation Studies, American University of Beirut, 1999-2003, just felt like tossing that in)
Reply
steph
June 4, 2012 at 7:18 pm
Jacob:
Casey does not argue that the author of Mark was a native of Galilee. This is a misrepresentation of his work. He argues that Mark was at the very least a bilingual and he argues that it is most probable that the author wrote outside Israel within the Roman Empire. He argues against the tradition of Rome given the early Christian ideological commitment by the second century. There is no ‘supposition’ that Mark was bilingual. It’s extraordinary that a scholar can write whole books and have his conclusions taken out of context of argument and evidence and branded as ‘supposition’.
Casey does not ‘link Aramaicism to historical accuracy’ and neither does he ‘imply Aramaicism as a historical criterion’. Casey has devoted books to arguing historicity of some narratives which contain Aramaisms. He has also argued his methodology and demonstrated clearly that the criterion is not enough on its own at all and thus it is never appealed to on its own. On your point 1, read his books. Arguing that the author of Mark was at least bilingual, Casey argues that the sayings were collected in an early Christian context so of course they could have been collected in Israel and passed on at festivals in Judea. Modern translation experts not only know that people trying to translate and transliterate make mistakes, but they make the same mistakes, which can be classified. No it doesn’t make Casey’s hypothesis falsifiable at all and I can’t imagine why you think it should. Casey does not discuss a trilingual context but it is clear throughout his work that the author of Mark was working in an environment with more than two languages. You demonstrate complete lack of understanding and sympathy for multilingual translators but hopefully Joe’s clear and incisive description has enlightened you.
By the way, it’s often an advantage to spell names accurately and Hoffmann, has two enns.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 4, 2012 at 7:44 pm
Hahahaha: It’s very funny isn’t it: we can argue over transcriptional errors and diphthongs—yods und gimmels–from 2500 years ago and no one thinks a second n in Hoffmann matters–though it spells the difference between Germany and Holland (or Sweden), and often enough between Jews and “Gentiles”; very funny!
steph
June 4, 2012 at 8:49 pm
Verily, lack of attention to detail, accuracy, historical and cultural context, can get you into all sorts of ‘trouble’. This reminds me of the good old American Herr Wernher von Braun – learning Chinese.
spin
June 5, 2012 at 11:23 am
This is all very sad really. The dynamic duo had the opportunity to deal with something a bit more tangible than their rather down market slagging of mythicism. Instead of taking that opportunity, “Emeritus Professor Maurice Casey” fell at the first hurdle mumbling incoherently about dishonesty and other tangents, while slandering “steph” spent several posts producing nothing but raucous noise. Let’s call it “Aramaic Folly: A Story of Incompetence, Bias and Ego”. I’m sure your readers will be impressed. It has been revealing and entertaining.
And you anecdotal experiences from Lebanon! They really consolidated the notion that the writer of Mark “was working in a trilingual context where Mishnaic Hebrew and Aramaic competed with koine and Latin in everyday discourse.” With anecdotes like that who needs evidence?
The Jesus Process has got off to quite a train wreck. You certainly got good value for money.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 5, 2012 at 12:15 pm
Thanks, Dr Spin: Scholarship proceeds from taking seriously the inexpert comments of anonymous drive-by snipers like you, and your named cohort–Godfrey, Carrier, and Doherty–who can only harp on what they can’t understand or invent preposterous defenses for a discredited and yellowing thesis about the existence of Jesus, the crumbling pillars of which have been reduced to powder through this debate. I gather that this valedictory acknowledges that you cannot plug your diphthong into Bayes and get a satisfactory answer? You have been unable to produce one whit of evidence to refute Professor Casey, preferring instead to put a respectable title in scare quotes, on the order of what a Vridar aficinado (whose name and qualifications escape me) had done with “pure mathematics” thinking perhaps it was a heretofore unheard of term. –And you are the folk who are defending statistics? I fail to see how a reference to Lebanon and Israel (that’s the region we are discussing one way or the other, isn’t it: look at the map) which I venture to say are just faraway places for you is not relevant to linguistic contexts, and for just the reasons I said, though I did not say that an allusion to context constitutes evidence of anything.
Train wreck? Aunt Sally’s corset! Look you lot: You have had Paul’s silence explained to you in detail that you have yet to acknowledge or understand; had a plausible explanation given for the Aramaic under-pinnnings of Mark’s gospel, lost the battle over the identity of James, been made aware of the more serious factual errors in mythicist writings, reminded that the naive historiographical tendencies and legend/fact mixture of the gospels also appears in Roman historical writing, and challenged to produce serious counterarguments–which you have failed to do. I suppose Doherty has come off worst because along with Acharya S. (Dorothy) he holds the most stubbornly troglodyte ideas about myth, and seems to have retired to a friendly corner hoping that this will all die down. It won’t. There may yet be some life in the Carrier pitch, but it has been fatally wounded by the laws of inapplicability and parsimony. It is a pre-dead horse that won’t lie down.
It would be one thing if this conversation were being carried on by scholars with real points of view and not just evidence-deniers who enjoy being bad boys(and girls) by testing the teacher’s patience. It is cute. Merely cute. And I suppose it keeps Vridar’s numbers up and his fans (and the Carrierites) happy, which is the name of the game, right? That is the travesty really, because many of your ilk profess to value evidence, and science, and reason but are quite boneheaded about assessing anything except the myth of Christian origins that you have invented for yourself. Please–by all means–ignore my irrelevant anecdotes and read for edification Morton Smith’s concise and withering assessment of mythicism in Jesus in History and Myth. But in case you can’t find the time offline the gist is this. Jesus fits not the pattern of a hero or a god but a job description that was common in Hellenistic Palestine–or rather several non mutually-exclusive job descriptions. The god-stuff (pardon my language) is what happens to this pattern post-resurrection (event). You do not have to be a NT scholar to see the pattern. But you do have to be able to read a gospel for what it says and not for what you think is broiling under the surface. In Mark alone, you will find a magician, a healer, an enthusiast, an end-time prophet, and an outlaw. These are not job descriptions from the 19th or 12th or even the 8th century, but they are for the Hellenistic Jewish world. And while you read Smith, lose your attire: older men don’t look good in diphthongs.
Reply
Neil Godfrey
June 8, 2012 at 5:12 am
RJH writes: “preferring instead to put a respectable title in scare quotes, on the order of what a Vridar aficinado [sic] (whose name and qualifications escape me) had done with “pure mathematics” thinking perhaps it was a heretofore unheard of term.”
Presumably at the time RJH wrote this he had not read Tim Widowfield’s post addressing the sad results of RJH’s dabbling with the paranormal (professing to read thoughts) http://vridar.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/hoffmann-serf-reviews-my-bayes-theorem-post-proving-this/
rjosephhoffmann
June 11, 2012 at 5:21 pm
I did read Mr Widowfield’s post and actually used the comments of one of his respondents to draw out the analogy between Jesus denial and a law case. I didn’t see anything especially redeeming about it; he says he knows the difference between pure and applied mathematics and we must take him at his word. I have no idea why he then alludes to the practice in American universities of combining the fields as Cambridge isn’t an American university, but I take him at his word on that as well. More troubling is his attempt to weasel out of his putative error by saying that he was of the opinion that statistics was included under applied mathematics (which I had never mentioned). Statistics is the applied spawn of probability theory which belongs to pure mathematics: Huygens, Gauss, et al., but I think gambling and games of chance have been used as a source of examples for a long time, and if the implication is that Bayes’s theorem belongs to the level of doing card tricks at a party, I am with him. Btw, look up the definition of the word “screed” before you deprive it of all meaning.)
David Marshall
June 5, 2012 at 12:15 pm
I haven’t had time to answer Hoffman yet; I don’t entirely agree with his points about Mark.
But let me address both sides in this tiff over Aramaic vs. Latin, first.
I’m an outsider to this specific debate — I come to NT studies from the perspective of comparative religion, or theology of religions more precisely. I read some koine Greek, but neither Latin nor Aramaic. But I’ve read (and written) enough in the general field to follow the argument with interest and a reasonable degree of understanding.
Internet debates go the way of the devil, more often than not, as water pours down when it reaches the lip of a dam. But perhaps a couple comments from one not yet too near that lip might (who knows?) help.
My impression is that both sides have made some interesting comments, and know enough to belong in the debate.
It also seems that there has been some misreading, some misunderstanding, perhaps culpable to some slight degree, on both sides.
The issue appears to be not whether Mark had a Latin background — that seems to be accepted all around — but whether he also had an Aramic background, or whether his Aramaic renderings were mere “borrowed tradition.” This latter strikes me as a worthy question, and the discussion has made me more interested in pursuing it some time.
I would think that not only specificly linguistic questions about Aramaic leavings in Mark or elsewhere would be relevant to deciding that issue, but also “how translators work” in general, as well as in the specific social-historical-lingual context in which Mark found himself. I gather Casey has touched on all these issues in his work.
Specifically, I am wondering if one can find examples of Romans borrowing as much as Mark does, either from Aramaic, or some other provincial language, just to add “local color” or because their source passed it along? Maybe this question is naive, and a positive answer wouldn’t undermine any evidence of seat-of-the-pants translations from Aramaic in Mark. But I hope the debate doesn’t descend into a content-free mud-flinging free-for-all, less because I’m innocent of ever enaging in those myself, than because a lot has been interesting so far, and the outstanding questions are more interesting than the mere fisticuffs.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 5, 2012 at 12:51 pm
@David: “Specifically, I am wondering if one can find examples of Romans borrowing as much as Mark does, either from Aramaic, or some other provincial language, just to add “local color” or because their source passed it along?” This is a brilliant question. First because with all the chat about influences we forget that Mark’s gospel is written in everyday Greek, not Latin; that Latin in the Augustan age was at its most complex and this is not a Latin Mark would have handled terribly well (try a few lines of Vergil) and that the cultural interplay usually dictated that writers would aspire to be proficient in the language of their colonial masters–e.g., Josephus’s Greek, which is prety good–rather than trying to emulate folk traditions by importing the odd word or phrase from the provinces. You may however be missing (or mything) the hidden question here: because the moment you concede that Mark’s Aramaism is “natural” rather than contrived, you lose the game of believing that the Gospel of Mark (apud Bauer and boys) was a forgery perpetrated in Latin and clevery disguiied in “ordinary” Greek with sprinklings of badly formed Aramaic thrown in for good good measure. What do ya get? Jesus. Unfortunately we are missing a modus operandi for this forgery: to start the Christian church so that it might grow strong, overthrow the Roman order and kill Jews? Most of the reasons for holding this conspiracy theory, which is a sub-genre of mythicism, are simply bilious. .
steph
June 5, 2012 at 2:22 pm
David wrote ‘I gather Casey has touched on all these issues in his work.’ He has dealt with them at some length as well as providing bibliographies to scholarship in other fields…. and there is still a mything enn… Perhaps it’s an example of cultural interference in translation.
Jacob Aliet
June 5, 2012 at 3:57 pm
I reproduce below the substantive portion of Jacob Aliet (aka “Dr Spin”‘s) last comment, an attempt to double sum up his case against Casey. It was, indeed, a very good game as Jacky Spin says, but its only point is to cling to the last gasp mythicist hope that there is no Aramaic source for Mark or else you lose (yet another) pillar in your decrepit argument. [yr 'humble moderator J. Hoffmann]
Alright, lets sum this up…
I stated four problems for Casey’s theory that the author of Mark (hereafter AMark) was (a bilingual) translator who wrote the gospel by translating from Aramaic source….
For all these three, I and spin have provided specific examples and expected specific answers…
I rest my case. Thanks for playing.
You are most welcome Jacky Spin. Thanks for being played.
Jacob Aliet O. Agwa
Born: 1976
Profession: Computer Programmer (Microsoft Certified Solution Developer)
Degrees:
Currently pursuing an M.B.A. at Nairobi University, Kenya (expected completion in 2007).
B.Sc. Information Technology, Moi University, 2001.
Internat’l Diploma, Institute for the Management of Information Systems, 1997.
Affiliations:
Member, Institute for the Management of Information Systems
Publications:
“Globalization–Not Counter-Penetration and Domestication: A Response to Prof. Ali Mazrui.” Alternatives: Turkish Journal of International Relations Vol. 6, No. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2007).
Personal: I am a metaphysical naturalist with interests in science, history, Greek, biblical and ancient Near East studies, literary theory, and philosophy.
Reply
brettongarcia
June 6, 2012 at 6:14 am
Finally? As long as we are all now making attempts to discover the real names, the real personalities behind the verbiage, we might as well recall the reason for all this interest in Aramaic behind/within the Greek of the New Testament. Remember that the reason for all this discussion, the hope of many recently, has been that we might begin to see the outline of the original, perhaps Aramaic-(proto-Persian/Arabic) speaking authors of the New Testament. In fact? Many people think that Jesus himself spoke Aramaic. And so? If we look at the traces of that language, influencing the Greek of the Old Testament? The hope (and in Ehrmann, the near-assertion?), is that we can begin to see or hear the outline, the voice, of Jesus himself.
But is it true? By looking at traces of Aramaic in the Greek of the New Testament, are we getting closer to seeing the outline of Jesus himself? It may be that if we find traces of Aramaic in the Greek of the Gospel of Mark say, there is no more or less there, however, than the traces of Latin influences. While Latinisms in the Greek of Mark,would might lead one to suspect a Roman church of writing much of the New Testament. And lead us not to Jesus, but to Rome. (Assuming Jesus himself had no roman influences).
While for that matter? It may be that Aramaic influences within the Greek of the NT, might merely indicate/forward, longstanding influences in Hebrew and Greek after all; parts of the Old Testament, the Book of Daniel, were written in Aramaic.
Or? Even if we find the outline,the traces of a possibly Hellenized Jewish author, or a Judaised Greek, in the occasional mashup of Greek and Aramaic? That might be simply yet another ecclesiastical author or editor in the Eastern Med.
Or finally, I suggest here? No doubt there were many Aramaic influences in the Greek of Palestine, c. 400 BC-200 AD; many “borrowings” or “loanwords” and so forth, as semanticists call them. And those multi-cultural borrowings are moreoever, not peculiar to a single individual; but are common to the language used by many resistents of Jerusalem, Palestine, in this era.
So that? Regarding the reason for all this; regarding the key attempt to reconstruct or hypothesize, the outline of a single person – perhaps Jesus himself – from these various Aramaic influences? Might not quite work. Culling out Aramaic influences from the New Testament, MIGHT or might not, outline an originary individual. Indeed, if such borrowings were widespread, then any attempt to reconstruct an individual speaker, from these borrowings, would amount to nothing much more or less than …. the over-reification of a linguistic stratum; the over personification or anthropomorphization, of a cultural melding. To create a false “individual.” A “person” that we might call, say, “Mr. Loadwords QBorrowing Q. Loanwords.”
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 6, 2012 at 6:18 am
@Garcia: Using the kind of CSC that precedes any theory: (1) What is your first order explanation of why there are Aramaic loan words transliterated (some badly) in the gospel attributed to Mark? (2) Why are there so few of them?
Reply
Brettongarcia
June 6, 2012 at 7:53 am
Joe Hoffmann et alia.:
Lacob Aliet (Dr spin?) above, seems to have articulated a few good, now-standard responses to the argument here. In his 3- or 4-point objection on June 3, and in his summary.
One major objection? Is that in the gospels, the use of Aramaic – and or loanwords, garbled transliterations – is so spare, as to be “oramental.”
A key case in point, that was perhaps not fully articulated above? Is the last prounouncement of Jesus on the cross, which is often offered in Aramaic. In Mat. 27.46 (and Mark 15.34): “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying Eli, Eli, lamasabach-thani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast hou forsaken me?” (KJV).
Here, someone might suggest that “El” has long since become a standard name for God, in Hebrew it seems? (Cf. Aramaic, Arabic).
More importantly? Note that this whole Aramaic speech, as it is often presented, is extremely rare. (t is itself highly questionable, and highly likely to be ornamental. (All the more so if it is clumsy, or merely transliterated. Some scholars today suggest that other scholars not too long ago, put it into Aramaic, to make it look authentic?)
In any case though, this particular Aramaic phrase is problematic in many other ways. Though here many are looking just at linguistic evidence, it is also extremely important to consider the theological context of this particular remark, especially. Namely: Jesus is here on the cross, uttering a sentence wherein he clearly assumes, that he himself, Jesus, has been abandoned by God.
Incredibly, Jesus is here saying he had been abandoned by God. Which leads us quickly to a profound theological problem: logically, either 1) Jesus is right – and Jesus was abandoned by God. In which case, Jesus could not be God. Or 2) Jesus is wrong, and he had not been abandoned. But? Being wrong … he therefore could not be the Son of God. (While the apologetic defense that Jesus is just quoting the Old Testament, does not hold: since in a sense, the whole NT is a “quote” of the Old; and those quotes are meant to be relevant to the new situation on hand, not just the old).
The above Aramic pronouncement of Jesus is perhaps the most famous example of Aramaic in the New Testament. But it is is in fact, very, very highly problematic in two ways – both linguistically, and theologically – for many traditionalist believers. Theologically … since it does not lend support to the idea of Jesus was the Son of God. Indeed, it does not even support the idea that God supported Jesus in any way. (And for that matter, it does not lend Bultmannian support to the Jesus of “Faith” either. Since here, Jesus himself “doubts” as many note; and does not deserve our faith in him, either, it would seem).
Possibly to be sure, even that conclusion is acceptable for Jesus Historicists? Since, if we ignore all these problems, it DOES furnish some evidence for the thesis that in fact, there might have been an historical Jesus; but this very traditional also noted that the real Jesus himself did not regard himself as being closely related to, or favored by, God. (“El”).
Reply
Brettongarcia
June 6, 2012 at 6:29 pm
In general? I regard the attempt to reconstruct a Aramaic Jesus, or an early Aramaic author of the gospel, to be essentially prone to simply reifying or personifying a linguistic stratum that had been found in both Greek and Hebrew, for hundreds of years by the time of Jesus. Such reification merely produces the false image of a false “person”; that is best called, parodically, “Mr. Loanword Q. Borrowing.”
That is my main objection to such current efforts and hints at an “Aramaic” voice in the New Testament, found here and elsewhere in remarks by Ehrman and others. But in addition, Lacob Aliet (“Dr spin”?) above, seems to also have articulated a few current, emerging objections to the argument claiming a clear Aramaic personality behind the gospels. Objections articulated in his 3- or 4-point objection on June 3, and in his summary.
One major objection? Is that in the gospels, the use of Aramaic – and/or garbled transliterations – is so spare, as to be “ornamental.”
A key case in point, that was perhaps not fully articulated above? Is the last pronouncement of Jesus on the cross, which is often offered in Aramaic. In Mat. 27.46 (and Mark 15.34): “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying Eli, Eli, lamasabach-thani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (KJV).
Here, someone might suggest that “El” or “Eli” has long since become a standard name for God, in Hebrew it seems? (Cf. Aramaic, Arabic). So that we see interchange between Hebrew, and Aramaic, going back perhaps quite some time before the time of Jesus.
More importantly? Note that the whole Aramaic speech on the cross, as it is often presented, is extremely rare, in being presented in our English bibles in apparent, rough Aramaic. (Rare as it is, it is itself highly questionable, and highly likely to be ornamental. All the more so if it is clumsy, or merely transliterated. Some scholars today suggest that other, earlier scholars, simply put it into Aramaic, to make it look authentic?)
In any case though, if it is not ornamental, this particular Aramaic phrase is extremely problematic in another way, than just linguistic. Though here many are looking here just at linguistic evidence, in regarding the apparent Aramaic phrase on the cross, it also extremely important to consider the theological context of this particular remark, especially. Namely: here, Jesus is on the cross, uttering a sentence wherein he clearly assumes, that he himself, Jesus, has been abandoned by God.
Incredibly, Jesus in the Aramaic phrase on the cross – as narrated in Mat. 27.46 (and Mark 15.34) – is implying that he had been abandoned by God. Which quickly leads us to a profound theological problem: logically, either 1) Jesus is right – and Jesus was abandoned by God. In which case, Jesus could not be God. Or 2) Jesus is wrong, and he had not been abandoned. But? Being wrong … he therefore could not be the Son of God. (While the common apologetic defense, that Jesus is just quoting the Old Testament, does not hold: since in a sense, the whole NT is a “quote” of the Old; and those quotes are meant to be relevant to whatever new situation is on hand, not just to idly invoke the old. Suggesting that Jesus himself felt abandoned).
The above Aramaic pronouncement of Jesus is perhaps the most famous example of Aramaic in the New Testament. But it is very, very highly problematic in two ways – both linguistically, and theologically – for many traditionalist believers. Theologically it is problematic… since, incredibly, it does not lend support to the idea of Jesus was the Son of God. Indeed, it does not even support the idea that God supported Jesus, in any way. As it has Jesus himself telling us that God has “abandoned” him. (While for that matter, it does not lend Bultmann-ian support to the Jesus of “Faith” either. Since here, Jesus himself “doubts” as many note; and does not deserve our faith in him either, it would seem).
Possibly to be sure, even that theological or Christological conclusion is acceptable for Jesus Historicists? Since, if we ignore all these problems with this theology for conventional Christianity, the Aramaic phrase DOES furnish some evidence for the Historicist thesis. That in fact there might have been an historical Jesus; but this very Aramaic tradition also noted that the real Jesus himself, did not regard himself as being closely related to, or favored by, God. Jesus here is finally, just a rather ordinary human person. With no particularly strong tie to God or ultimate truth, after all.
Reply
steph
June 7, 2012 at 11:37 am
You seem very muddled BG. Why don’t you try reading the recent secondary literature on Aramaisms in Mark? Jesus’ cry on the cross in Mark is not problematical for critical scholars. It is only problematical for orthodox Christians and the early Church which is why the later gospel authors changed it.
Reply
Brettongarcia
June 7, 2012 at 1:55 pm
To the extent that Jesus’ “doubt” as it is called, remains a part of the Bible – and one conflicting, by your own account, with later parts? It remains a theological problem for say, believers today.
Unfortunately, I do not presently have access to a scholarly database; would you care to briefly explain why Jesus’ doubt, is not longer a problem for scholars? For those of us without access to a scholarly library, if you would present the substance of scholarly arguments, rather than summary judgements, would be better.
rjosephhoffmann
June 7, 2012 at 6:21 pm
@Garcia: Maybe you mean to refer to the “agony” in the garden? I know some exegetes who see this as an expression of doubt. You can see an appeal to this idea as theology at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/audiences/alpha/data/aud19881130en.html the Vatica website. Ps 22 is much on the mind of the authors of the passion narrative:
Tehillim 22:17 ?? ?????? ????? ??? ????? ??????? ???? ??? ?????
According to the Jewish Publication Society Bible the verse is translated:
Psalms 22:16 (22:17) For dogs have encompassed me; a company of evil-doers have enclosed me; like a lion, they are at my hands and my feet.” (JPS)
???? = Like (a) lion. According to the King James Version bible the verse is translated:
Psalms 22:16 For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet. But ‘pierced’ seems to me an overstatement for dug, though Gk for pierced is already present in the LXX.
Anyway, whilst you ponder that: Ps 22 was not considered a declaration of despair; read it. Its attribution to Jesus is typical as it was one of the usual “prayers before death” spoken by most Jews on the point of dying–nothing unusual about it. ‘Mark quotes the words in Aramaic. One may suppose that the cry appeared so characteristic that the witnesses who heard it, when later recounting the drama of Calvary, deemed it opportune to repeat the very words of Jesus in Aramaic’. Try reading this: http://faculty.gordon.edu/hu/bi/Ted_Hildebrandt/OTeSources/19-Psalms/Text/Articles/Heinemann-Ps22-BS.pdf
stephanie louise fisher
June 7, 2012 at 4:27 pm
You ask me why Jesus’ doubt is no longer a problem for scholars and assume it requires a small essay to enlighten you. It has never been a problem for critical scholars who may be liberal believers or not religious at all. You are still very muddled between orthodox believers and critical scholarship. The Jesus of history is not the Jesus of dogma. Schweitzer identified Jesus as a mistaken prophet and scholars have known this for over a hundred years. Ever since biblical scholarship identified the differences between the gospels when viewed synoptically by Lessing, Holtzmann and others after the Enlightenment, one of the pieces of evidence for the priority of Mark’s gospel has been the doubt expressed in it by Jesus on the cross and the glossing over by later evangelists, evidence of their later redaction. For critical scholars the ‘problem’ is determining the method of applying criteria to evidence in order to be as accurate as possible with history. No problem exists for critical scholars in what we will find. We have found an observant human Jew who lived in the first century and was crucified, not a divine man. This is the “the substance of scholarly arguments” and not “summary judgements”. Critical scholarship is about following the evidence where it leads. You are determined to identify critical scholars as some sort of fundamentalists. You really are confused, but should not project your inability to understand simple logic and accuse me of insubstantial arguments when answers are clear and simple.
mick
June 6, 2012 at 8:11 pm
Boanerges, seems to me, to be more likely a transliteration of the Aramaic bnai regesh (sons of rage). Thoughts anyone?
Reply
steph
June 7, 2012 at 12:30 pm
Older scholarship advocated this trying to transliterate ß?a????e? back into Aramaic, and this led to the invention of an Aramaic word regaš. This scholarship has since been refuted and regaš shown not to exist. H.P. Rueger, ‘Die lexikalischen Aramaismen im Markusevangelium’, in H. Cancik (ed), ‘Markus-Philologie: Historische, literargeschichtliche und stilistische Untersuchungen zum zweiten Evangelelium’ (WUNT 33. Tuebingen, 1984), p. 77, proposed to believe in an Aramaic regaš on the basis of Tg. 1 Ks 18.41; Tg. Isa. 17.12f., in neither of which it means ‘thunder’, and undated and uncited sources from an unmentioned Arabic dictionary. We should not proceed like this.
Reply
mick
June 7, 2012 at 7:13 pm
Hi Steph, long before “older scholarship” advocated that ß?a????e? should be bnai regesh, it had already been done many many centuries before. Whoever produced the syriac peshitta quite comfortably saw ß?a????e? as bnai regesh.
Were they “inventing” a word too?
steph
June 7, 2012 at 7:50 pm
Scare quotes????? Older scholarship is simply not recent more advanced scholarship, Mick. Is that clear? And yes, Spin, the Peshitta was translated many many years after the New Testament writings were canonised. J.Aliet: that’s what happens when culture interferes with translators. “Quite comfortably”?!! The irony is so ghastly. The consequence is the invention of new words which could be misappropriated as evidence for earlier Aramaic, such as is the case with Rueger.
mick
June 7, 2012 at 8:45 pm
Steph, I dont know when the peshitta was produced I know Metzger acknowleded that Voorbus demonstrated that it predated rabbula of Edessa.
My point is only that if whoever produced the syriac peshitta saw ß?a????e? as bnai regesh, and bnai regesh transliterates quite easily, then , to me it is a better fit.
Obviously the word regesh did exist, its just that it didn’t literally mean thunder, but rather tulmut or commotion or something similar.
I’m not trying to be argumentative, just to voice my opinion. Can you explain what you mean when you say regas has been shown not to exist?
mick
June 7, 2012 at 9:57 pm
Checking on CAL I see that regesh does not mean tulmut but, rage (amongst other things). rg$ V
011 Syr to rage
012 Syr to stir oneself
013 Syr to sense
014 JBA to feel
041 Syr to rage
042 Syr to be moved
043 Syr to sense
031 passim to sense
032 Syr to make to sense
033 BibArDan to gather together urgently
034 Syr,JBA to stir up
033 Syr meTul to inform
061 Syr to sense
LS2 713
steph
June 8, 2012 at 11:15 am
The original transliterator was so incompetent that they transliterated ??? ???, ‘sons of thunder’, as ß?a????e? (Mark 3.17). By the fifth century the Peshitta transliterator had done their best to produce a Syriac version of what was regarded as a sacred Greek text, containing ß?a????e?, an error. They produced what they did on the assumption that the words in the text in front of them did exist, whether they were previously normal Aramaic, or not. The point is not that regaš did not exist, but that it did not mean ‘thunder’ in anything like the Aramaic of Jesus’ time (no independent attestation) which you acknowledge, whereas ??? does. Jerome noticed a mistake, though he did not explain it. In commenting on the names at Dan. 1.7, he added, ‘filii Zebedaei appellati sunt filii “tonitrui”, quod non, ut plerique putant, “boanerges” sed emendatius legitur “banereem”’. Jerome’s ‘a’ then ‘e’ for the two shewas will be noted. For the text, see F. Glorie (ed.), S. Hieronymi Presbyteri Opera. Pars I. Opera Exegetica. 5. Commentariorum in Danielem Libri III (IV) CChR.SL LXXVA (Turnhout: Brepols, 1964).
Hans
June 7, 2012 at 12:57 am
Is that the self same Spin who posts on rationalsceptics I see posting here?.
He certainly was good for afew laughs there. http://www.rationalskepticism.org/christianity/what-can-we-reasonably-infer-about-the-historical-jesus-t219-4240.html#p583364
Reply
steph
June 7, 2012 at 10:30 pm
Casey wrote an essay which is published here on New Oxonian. Casey does not indulge mythicists, who cower behind multiple identities, in on-line debate. He does not oblige those who hijack this site to attack his work which they have not understood or read but are determined to misrepresent. But Jacob Aliet, pretending not to be ‘spin’, has found a new preaching podium for falsehoods and other incompetencies, on Richard Carrier’s atheist ‘freethought’ blog. It’s a shame he cut and pasted so much because among other things, he perpetuates his inaccurate spelling which is merely a demonstration of his inattention to accuracy, detail and context.
‘Spin’ cited two pages, available on google, from one book by Casey. This is not evidence of having read his work or even one book. Furthermore, misrepresenting what he cites (eg Casey was not making a case for an Aramaism) is more evidence he has failed to understand Casey’s arguments or accurately represent them. In fact, consistently misrepresenting his arguments and failure to demonstrate comprehension of his arguments at all, is evidence of his incompetence. It is also blindingly ‘unarguable’ evidence that he has not read his work. There is further evidence of not having read his work with his claim that Casey’s case rests on four reconstructed passages when Casey has published much since ‘Aramaic Sources of Mark’s Gospel’ and reconstructed many more passages. Furthermore he persistently talks about Casey’s translation studies when I quite clearly said Casey had listed relevant literature in his bibliographies of translation studies and work in other fields.
There are not the problems for Casey’s thesis that ‘spin’ (aka Jacob Aliet) claims. Neither are Casey’s arguments dependent on a Galilean origin and failure to understand why is more evidence of not having read his work. ‘Spin’ (aka Jacob Aliet) has failed to understand the problems of translators, and his convictions about implications of geographical inaccuracies, his convictions about Rome (the centre of myth? hallelujah) and Latinisms are not a ‘rational response’ and have been refuted on the essay thread. It’s all a game to him and his target is Casey because he is compelled by his mythicist bias to reject all arguments for Aramaic. The problem is he is too incompetent to understand Casey’s arguments and he lost the game he invented. Complaining about his anonymous identity being compared to other mythicists who apply similar ‘tactics’ when his specialty is vitriol, repetition of mistakes, persistent lack of comprehension, “feeble” untruths (Steph didn’t promise Casey would respond one day and Hoffmann didn’t admit not understanding any arguments etc etc etc) and cowardice (further dishonesty) with anonymous identities, is the real irony.
Reply
Blogger Godfrey’s Reply (1) to Emeritus Professor Maurice Casey of the The Jesus Process ©®™ « Vridar says:
June 8, 2012 at 12:00 pm
[...] So when Casey quotes Earl Doherty saying that his aim was to reach “the open-minded ‘lay’ audience” (p. viii of Jesus, Neither God Nor Man), he cannot conceive that such an audience as encountered on the internet could be viewed as “open-minded”. Doherty writes that he intended to reach the open-minded people beyond the confines of academia but Casey implies that such an audience simply does not exist on the internet: This [Doherty's reference to "the open-minded 'lay' audience"] is as inaccurate as possible. The internet audience is ‘lay’, but it is not open-minded. . . . (Casey, Mythicism, A Story of Bias, Incompetence and Falsehood). [...]
Reply
steph
June 8, 2012 at 2:26 pm
Entertaining psychological assessment of Emeritus Professor Maurice Casey by ‘Dr’ Blogger Godfrey, if not irrelevant and littered with falshoods. For example, Doherty observes that “it is generally agreed” among the scholarly community that there is no evidence for Galilean synagogues in the time of Jesus. Naturally Casey does in fact deny that this is generally agreed among his peers, contrary to Godfrey’s assertion. Casey argues there were places where people met regularly for worship and other things, but that we just don’t know whether they were separate buildings. Again, contrary to Godfrey’s assertion that he does not address it. It’s ironic Godfrey takes such objection to what he describes as Maurice’s elitist attitude, when Maurice has never encountered this reaction from colleagues students and friends, until he became a focus of mythtics. Godfrey can’t cope with The Jesus Process at all. I wonder why he is so afraid, poor dear.
Reply
Neil Godfrey
June 9, 2012 at 7:39 pm
Hi Steph,
I would appreciate your itemizing what you see as any “falshoods” in my post since I do try to be accurate and honest in what I write. Corrections are always welcome, though it would be even nicer if they were offered with an understanding that I may have unintentionally committed errors.
But I fail to see how the one example you provide is actually a falsehood. Casey is clearly disputing what he sees as the presence of synagogues in Galilee and not — at least not in the way he has expressed himself in his essay — Doherty’s claim about what “is the general view among his peers”. The “general view” is at no point discussed by Casey.
And yes, I think we all know about the hypothesis that synagogues were not separate buildings (our culture is not that “low context”) but surely Casey is addressing — as is Doherty — the clear understanding of the term as found in the gospels. And Casey confirms this by concluding with references to archaeological sites of synagogue buildings.
That is all clear enough to me and is how I have interpreted Casey in good faith according to his own words — and by reference to the sources he cited.
Again, you fault my identifying what I see as the elitism of Casey by countering that Casey is not elitist in person. I am quite sure you are right and Casey is always a gentlemen with people he meets. But again, i am analysing the words of his essay, his thoughts expressed about “internet audiences” in his post. Now I fail to see anything positive in any of his words applied to “internet audiences”.
Perhaps Blogger Casey might like to publish a clarification and qualify his original claims if you do not believe he has expressed himself accurately.
steph
June 9, 2012 at 11:33 pm
“I do try to be accurate and honest in what I write. Corrections are always welcome…………”
That’s interesting. Ironic.
Maurice Casey is finishing writing a book which will go to press at the end of July.
Neil Godfrey
June 9, 2012 at 7:45 pm
Steph, have you actually read Schweitzer’s chapter from which I quoted? Have you read what he says about Christianity needing to ground itself in a metaphysic and not on an historical event? I ask because what you say here is in conflict with his words as translated into English in 2000. I have little to dispute with other points you have made about Schweitzer but I do think you are ignoring another facet of his thought as expressed in the chapter from which I quoted.
But again, the bigger question is, do you fault the logic of S’s words that I quoted? Do you dispute that the logic of his words is relevant to historical methods today?
Reply
steph
June 9, 2012 at 10:05 pm
What a ridiculous question. I notice another extraordinary fiction in which you imply Casey has not read Doherty or Malina, part of the Context Group. I wonder what all these assumptions reflect. Perhaps therefore the question is whether you read the whole book (preferably in German for ‘his words’) and how many, if any, of his other works you have read. Obviously it is your interpretation of Schweitzer, not Schweitzer, even in translation, that has failed. And you constantly misinterpret him and fail to understand historical context as you demonstrate again. Most Christians’ faith has always been based on a metaphysic, and critical historical scholars’ view of Jesus, like Schweitzer’s own view of Jesus, is based on, historical methodology. What Christians believe should have no influence in how academic enquiry is pursued and personal mythtic or religious views are nothing to do with critical scholarship. Therefore your comment which I quoted above is irrelevant and misleading.
Reply
Neil Godfrey
June 9, 2012 at 11:49 pm
Steph, it is not “an extraordinary question” but a very sincere one that arises from your repeated failure to address the actual quotation of S’s that I used, and from your statements on what you think S said about the needed future grounding for Christianity that contradict what S wrote in chapter 23. Instead of scoffing that I should ask the question, why not answer it with a simple and polite Yes or No?
If you read what I wrote you would see that I was raising the possibility that Blogger Casey had not read Doherty’s “whole book” for himself because he says things about it that I cannot understand if he had read it. It would actually be in his favour if he had not read it whole since one would not want to accuse him of knowingly lying or lacking the most elementary reading comprehension.
Reply
steph
June 10, 2012 at 12:59 pm
It is an extraordinarily impertinent question Neil because it is you who perpetually and arrogantly fail to recognise or just ignore your error. Of course I have read Schweitzer’s whole book and the German edition too. I keep quoting Albert Schweitzer, and asking you to see him in his historical context as a committed German Lutheran who wrote long before the current stage of the Quest of the Historical Jesus, as it has been called since this was the title of an English translation, also a long time ago. It is quite ludicrous to imagine that I could do this without reading his book in the first place. I have also read much of his other work on ethics and theology including his autobiography. I’ve even looked into his musical composition and performance. Your insistence that others should believe as you do is distorting your ability to be self-critical and compromising logical comprehension.
Why is it I wonder that mythtics, hearing their faults critiqued, can only throw back their own inadequacies critiqued, verbatim from the critique, and accuse those who have described them with exactly the same description? Perhaps it’s something to do with dependence. And attempting to apparently ‘criticise’ Casey by identifying him inaccurately is facile and petty. He wrote one essay for publication here. Blogger is an identifier for purposes of clarity. It is not a derogatory label. He speaks favourably of many blogs in his forthcoming book. He devotes a section “in order not to cast any aspersions on excellent scholarly blogs. Some scholarly blogs are very helpful to scholars and students, because of the large amount of useful information which they provide.” He lists and describes various blogs from Goodacre, NT Wrong, Sheffield and Dunedin School to New Oxonian. Your excruciating pretence at politeness here is quite a contrast from your blogs and comments at Vridar isn’t it.
Neil Godfrey
June 10, 2012 at 6:54 pm
Stephanie, all I asked was if you have read chapter 23 of the book in question. Have you?
A simply Yes or No will do.
Neil Godfrey
June 10, 2012 at 6:57 pm
You have overlooked my other question, too: Do you fault the logic of S’s words that I quoted? Do you dispute that the logic of his words is relevant to historical methods today?
Would you like to answer this directly, without shouting out about a lot of stuff we both know and understand about Schweitzer but that has no bearing on the point raised here.
steph
June 10, 2012 at 9:24 pm
I thought the answer was implicit. I’ll clarify: no, and yes, other than for historical value. And obviously ‘the stuff we both know’ is why. ppp.
Blogger Godfrey’s Blog Reply (2) to Blogger Casey’s Blog Post on the Internet « Vridar says:
June 9, 2012 at 7:16 pm
[...] a false assertion and I am surprised Emeritus Professor Maurice Casey would write it since he says elsewhere Lack of honesty is sufficient to mean that a person is not a proper [...]
Reply
When Is Paul’s Silence Golden? « Vridar says:
June 10, 2012 at 11:16 pm
[...] were treated recently to another dose of apologia run amok in Maurice Casey’s “frightful” diatribe against Earl Doherty. Following in the footsteps of fellow apologist, J.P. Holding, Casey explains [...]
Reply
steph
June 11, 2012 at 1:30 pm
Godfrey makes things up, and malicious best describes them. Appealing to Buckaroo who is still fixated on my sexuality, Godfrey misrepresents the Jesus Process with his neurotic symbol obsession and erroneously claims I ‘feed’ Casey my ‘grievances’ which he will ‘spew’ out in his book. This is ridiculous and a malicious falsehood. When I mentioned Casey’s forthcoming book with the implication that all necessary response will be published in it, Godfrey claims I made an ‘implied threat’. Does Godfrey pretend he knew nothing about the book he’s known about for over a year? He inaccurately claims ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ received a ‘lukewarm response’. He claims superior knowledge to Hoffmann. He knows nothing about Hoffmann and inaccurately assumes things of him which are untrue. I think the rants belong to Godfrey. Casey is not a blogger – that is an inaccurate label in a misguided attempt to insult. Casey is not an apologist, and does not ‘follow Holding’ another falsehood and attempt to insult. However Holding is indeed a Christian apologist and it appears that Godfrey must be doing mythtic apologetics.
Godfrey expects us all to quote Malina as if he’s an unbiased authority. We do indeed, from necessity, keep up with scholarship published by the ‘Context Group’ but see Crossley, and especially Crossley in ‘Jesus in an Age of Terror’ pp. 119-34 etc, for substantial critique of Malina et als regarding the so-called ‘Arab mind’ etc. Godfrey complains that Casey does not mention that Conybeare dated the Testament of Solomon in the first century CE when he wrote in 1899, before even a decent text and translation were available. It should be obvious that his work is out of date. He made more appropriately, careful reference to Schürer-Vermes-Millar. Schürer-Vermes-Millar, in a section primarily the responsibility of Vermes, note correctly that its ‘complex textual history naturally makes it difficult to date.’ There is however good reason to think that ‘it was current in some form around A. D. 400’; further, ‘the archetype of all the full versions (incorporating the demonology) cannot have been put together before the early third century A. D.’ This means that it is quite ludicrous of Doherty to conclude on the basis of this evidence that ‘by Paul’s time they [i.e. the demons] have become vast powers that infest the heavens.’ There is no such idea in 1 Enoch, and the Testament of Solomon shows only that such ideas were believed by some people some 200 years after Paul’s time. But Godfrey’s bias defends Doherty uncritically here.
His final sentence is ludicrous psychological projection. I won’t address all the silly mistakes and falsehoods I see in Godfrey’s posts because Casey can do that himself, without anyone ‘feeding’ him grievances. Godfrey gives him plenty of those. Poor dear – he describes me and Casey as a ‘dangerous pair’. Be afraid, very afraid of being exposed, poor dear. (ppp).
Reply
steph
June 11, 2012 at 3:19 pm
Godfrey makes things up, and malicious best describes them. Appealing to Buckaroo who is still fixated on my sexuality, Godfrey misrepresents the Jesus Process with his neurotic symbol obsession and erroneously claims I ‘feed’ Casey my ‘grievances’ which he will ‘spew’ out in his book. This is ridiculous and a malicious falsehood. When I mentioned Casey’s forthcoming book with the implication that all necessary response will be published in it, Godfrey claims I made an ‘implied threat’. Does Godfrey pretend he knew nothing about the book he’s known about for over a year? He inaccurately claims ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ received a ‘lukewarm response’. He claims superior knowledge to Hoffmann. He knows nothing about Hoffmann and inaccurately assumes things of him which are untrue. I think the rants belong to Godfrey. Casey is not a blogger – that is an inaccurate label in a misguided attempt to insult. Casey is not an apologist, and does not ‘follow Holding’ another falsehood and attempt to insult. However Holding is indeed a Christian apologist and it appears that Godfrey must be doing mythtic apologetics.
Godfrey expects us all to quote Malina as if he’s an unbiased authority. We do indeed, from necessity, keep up with scholarship published by the ‘Context Group’ but see Crossley, and especially Crossley in ‘Jesus in an Age of Terror’ pp. 119-34 etc, for substantial critique of Malina et als regarding the so-called ‘Arab mind’ etc. Godfrey complains that Casey does not mention that Conybeare dated the Testament of Solomon in the first century CE when he wrote in 1899, before even a decent text and translation were available. It should be obvious that his work is out of date. He made more appropriately, careful reference to Schürer-Vermes-Millar. Schürer-Vermes-Millar, in a section primarily the responsibility of Vermes, note correctly that its ‘complex textual history naturally makes it difficult to date.’ There is however good reason to think that ‘it was current in some form around A. D. 400’; further, ‘the archetype of all the full versions (incorporating the demonology) cannot have been put together before the early third century A. D.’ This means that it is quite ludicrous of Doherty to conclude on the basis of this evidence that ‘by Paul’s time they [i.e. the demons] have become vast powers that infest the heavens.’ There is no such idea in 1 Enoch, and the Testament of Solomon shows only that such ideas were believed by some people some 200 years after Paul’s time. But Godfrey’s bias defends Doherty uncritically here.
His final sentence is ludicrous psychological projection. I won’t address all the silly mistakes and falsehoods I see in Godfrey’s posts because Casey can do that himself, without anyone ‘feeding’ him grievances. Godfrey gives him plenty of those. Poor dear – he describes me and Casey as a ‘dangerous pair’. Be afraid, very afraid of being exposed, poor dear. (ppp).
Reply
Concluding Response of Blogger Neil Godfrey to Blogger Maurice Casey of TJP®©™ « Vridar says:
June 11, 2012 at 8:05 pm
[...] of a book was a suspicious indicator that I had not read the book. Well, our next circus act is Dr Maurice Casey censuring me because I “did not give proper references” in a blogpost. Ouch! (I hyperlinked [...]
Reply
The F.A.C.T. of the Resurrection of Jesus « Ratio Christi-At The Ohio State University says:
June 24, 2012 at 8:00 am
[...] by Joseph of Arimathea. Therefore, I generally leap with joy that they have not fallen into the internet mythic Jesus sensation and agree with some of the following points: Jesus’ crucifixion is attested by all four Gospels. [...]
Reply
Biblioblog Carnival “according to Mark” « Euangelion Kata Markon says:
July 3, 2012 at 8:15 pm
[...] the endless debates about mythicism? After May’s launch of the Jesus Project (courtesy of Maurice Casey, Steph Fisher and R. Joseph Hoffman), Hoffman continued with posts about the arguments of Shirley [...]
Reply
How I Escaped Fundamentalism — 5 Myths about Ex-Fundies « Vridar says:
July 4, 2012 at 10:09 pm
[...] of the universe will probably change over time, but that’s all right. I’m reminded of Casey’s calumny: One example is blogger Neil Godfrey, an Australian who was a baptised member of the Worldwide [...]
Reply
Apologetics & Frustration: the Follow-up « Philosophical Bread says:
July 10, 2012 at 3:30 am
[...] just apologists who treat such sceptics in this way; pretty much all Biblical scholars do. I think this article, by a scholar who certainly is no Christian apologist, explains the distaste for scepticism about [...]
Reply
Seriös eller oseriös debatt? « Jesus granskad says:
July 14, 2012 at 3:00 pm
[...] blogg, så lät den brittiske nytestamentlige forskaren Maurice Casey där publicera ett inlägg, Mythicism: A Story of Bias, Incompetence and Falsehood, vilket väl kan sägas vara symptomatiskt för denna debatt. Argumenten består mestadels av [...]
Reply
stevenbollinger
November 18, 2012 at 4:15 pm
I really don’t know what to make of all of this.
Casey writes: “the view that [Jesus] did not even exist. This view, unknown in the ancient world, became respectable during the formative period of critical scholarship in the nineteenth century”
I’ve heard another story: that this view has never been widely respected in academia, that the first academics to suggest that Jesus’ historicity was not certain tended to get fired for their trouble, and that to this day some theologians, clergypeople and scholars of the Bible and ancient history who aren’t entirely certain are under great peer pressure to keep it to themselves. Is all of that just more mythicist myth?
If it’s not entirely myth, if there is in fact a systemic tendency to discourage discussion of the question and to disparage people who do — or, if they are academics, to claim that they don’t exist. I know it always annoys me when someone claims I don’t exist — then that would fly in the face of Casey’s assertion that the academic authorities on the historical Jesus are all just wonderful, wonderful, wonderful people, as open-minded and intellectually curious and unbiased as can be.
And speaking of authority, I don’t know of another area of inquiry than that of the historical Jesus where non-academics are so frequently attacked for being non-academics. If someone’s arguments are unsound, fine, attack her arguments. But to disparage her lack of a PhD before even addressing her arguments makes one guilty of the fallacy of appeal to authority. You don’t need a PhD to know that. You don’t necessarily even need to take an introductory course in formal logic to know that.
But Casey goes further in this particular fallacy, when he says that Doherty, Murdock and Godfrey all “claim” to have certain degrees from certain institutions. What is the reader to make of this? Is he imply that they have lied about their formal educations? if so, why doesn’t he come right out and accuse them? Does he mean to be witty here? Is this business about “claiming” to have degrees an inside joke of some sort?
For my own part, I am not at all impressed when someone goes on at such length about their opponents’ lack of Doctorates. Address what your opponents actually say. And if there is something to these allegations of systemic bias, it shouldn’t surprise anyone if there are people with open minds on one side, and with thorough training on the other, and relatively few with both.
Of course, Casey does eventually get around to commenting on what Doherty, Murdock, Godfrey and other mythicists have actually said. Let’s say for the sake of argument that their work really is as inept as he claims — would that in itself prove anything about the existence of Jesus? No.
And by the way, Casey does not even mention G A Wells, who has addressed those early-twentieth-century works by Smith et al which, according to academic orthodoxy, laid the whole matter to rest.
I know that I do not know nearly enough about Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic to have an independent opinion on Jesus’ historicity. I’m just taking other people’s word for a lot of things. And I see abundant reason to mistrust just about everyone weighing in on the matter.
Reply
steph
November 19, 2012 at 4:57 pm
Steven – you quoted a little bit in which Casey pointed out that the view that Jesus did not even exist was unknown in the ancient world, and became respectable during the formative period of critical scholarship in the nineteenth century. You say you have heard another story, with which you don’t show a lot of concern for dates or cultural context. You say for example that the first academics to suggest that Jesus’ historicity was not certain tended to get fired for their trouble. This was true in the nineteenth century, and has nothing to do with modern scholars to whom Casey has made favourable reference. You continue that to this day some theologians, clergy people and scholars of the Bible and ancient history who aren’t entirely certain are under great peer pressure to keep it to themselves. Is all of that just more mythicist myth? No, but it has nothing to do with the scholars to whom Casey referred, and is entirely consistent with perfectly plausible gossip about people employed in American theological seminaries, and there is increasingly plausible gossip that it has become true in the UK, due to the employment of Americans from conservative theological seminaries. It is extremely difficult to check up on all this now, but it has nothing to do with other people with whom we work with in independent British universities. You misrepresent all this too, commenting on Casey’s assertion that the academic authorities on the historical Jesus are all just wonderful, wonderful, wonderful people, as open-minded and intellectually curious and unbiased as can be.
He never made any such assertion. What he referred to in a very short article was the critical scholars among whom he has been happy to have spent most of his life, whether they were Christian, Jewish or irreligious. They were not concerned by ‘peer pressure’ or the ‘constraints of academic tenure’, except that they were united by an absolute determination to oppose any threat to the academic freedom of people in universities, regardless of status, colour, race, religion or creed. I think Casey would stand by that, provided that it is understood to the critical scholars to whom he referred, not to anyone who can be referred to as academic authorities on the historical Jesus.
He does discuss Wells in his forthcoming book. By the way, Joseph Hoffmann has written an excellent foreword to George Wells, ‘The Jesus Legend’. http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Legend-George-Albert-Wells/dp/0812693345
Reply
Lazarus and Osiris? « James’ Ramblings says:
January 18, 2013 at 2:01 am
[...] But there are also a number of Christian apologists, as well as scholars who are not beholden to Christian apologetics, who dispute that many of these so-called parallels indeed are parallels. See here at Yahoo Answers (only the answers here to the question about Lazarus and Osiris are not particularly well-documented), and also Maurice Casey’s critique of D.M. Murdock’s work here. [...]
Reply
What Can We Know About Jesus? Resources on the Historical Jesus and Historicity of the New Testament « Ratio Christi- At The Ohio State University says:
January 19, 2013 at 6:31 pm
[...] The Jesus Process: Maurice Casey: Mythicism: A Story of Bias, Incompetence and Falsehood [...]
Reply
Apologetics & Frustration: the Follow-up | The Bread of Thought says:
February 1, 2013 at 3:09 pm
[...] just apologists who treat such sceptics in this way; pretty much all Biblical scholars do. I think this article, by a scholar who certainly is no Christian apologist, explains the distaste for scepticism about [...]
Reply
Prove the Bible in One Paragraph | The Great Christian Debate says:
March 5, 2013 at 6:45 pm
[...] that Jesus had to be real and he is his own person. Some great articles I’ve been led to are here, here, and here. There are no sufficient arguments detailing that Jesus was mythical. The greatest [...]
Reply
.
Leave a Reply
Enter your comment here...Enter your comment here...
Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo
Twitter picture
Facebook photo
« Previous Post
Next Post »
. .
Topics
Uncategorized
Archives
August 2013
July 2013
June 2013
May 2013
March 2013
February 2013
January 2013
December 2012
November 2012
October 2012
September 2012
August 2012
July 2012
June 2012
May 2012
April 2012
March 2012
February 2012
January 2012
December 2011
November 2011
October 2011
September 2011
August 2011
July 2011
June 2011
May 2011
April 2011
March 2011
February 2011
January 2011
December 2010
November 2010
October 2010
September 2010
August 2010
July 2010
June 2010
May 2010
April 2010
March 2010
February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
Blog at WordPress.com. The Manifest Theme.
Follow
Follow “The New Oxonian”
Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.
Join 160 other followers
Powered by WordPress.com
loading
The New Oxonian
Books etc.
Comments and Moderation
Vita Brevis
..
Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient
The Jesus Process: A Consultation on the Historical Jesus
by rjosephhoffmann
Controversy, Mythicism, and the Historical Jesus
© 2012 R. Joseph Hoffmann
Framework
While the New Testament offers the most extensive evidence for the existence of the historical Jesus, the writings are subject to a number of conditions that have dictated both the form and content of the traditions they have preserved. These conditions did not disappear with the writing of the first gospel, nor even with the eventual formation of the New Testament canon. They were expressly addressed by Christian writers in the second and third century who saw an incipient mythicism as a threat to the integrity of the message about Jesus. The history of this controversy is long, complex, and decisive with respect to the “question” of Jesus.
The process through which the memory of Jesus was preserved was a reflexive attempt to relay what was known and what was believed about him, while at the same time separating the received traditions from the corrosive effects of a pervasive salvation myth. The process cannot be established by analogy to the way in which historical traditions were preserved in contemporary histories such as Livy’s (or later, Tacitus’s) books, and it cannot be discounted by reference to antecedent and unrelated mythologies which have influenced the form of transmission.
This essay is in part an attempt to clarify procedural issues relevant to what is sometimes called the “Christ-myth” or “Non-historicity” thesis—an argumentative approach to the New Testament based on the theory that the historical Jesus of Nazareth did not exist. I have come to regard this thesis as fatally flawed and subject to a variety of objections that are not often highlighted in the academic writings of New Testament scholars. The failure of scholars to take the “question of Jesus” seriously has resulted in a slight increase in the popularity of the non-historicity thesis, a popularity that—in my view—now threatens to distract biblical studies from the serious business of illuminating the causes, context and development of early Christianity.
It is my view, simply stated, that while facts concerning the Jesus of history were jeopardized from the start by a variety of salvation myths, by the credulity of early believers, by the historiographical tendencies of the era, and by the editorial tendencies of early writers, the gospels retain a stubbornly historical view of Jesus, preserve reliable information about his life and teachings, and are not engulfed by any of the conditions under which they were composed. Jesus “the Nazarene” did not originate as a myth or a story without historical coordinates, but as a teacher in first century Roman Palestine. Like dozens of other Hellenistic teachers, but lacking sophisticated “biographers” to preserve his accomplishments, Jesus is distinct only because the cult that formed around him perpetuated his memory in ritual, worship, and text, while the memory of other attested personalities of antiquity, even those who enjoyed brief cultic popularity like Antigonus I, Ptolemy I and Demetrius of Macedon are known to us mainly through literary artifacts.
The attempt of “mythicists” to show that Jesus did not exist, on the other hand, has been largely incoherent, insufficiently scrupulous of historical detail, and based on improbable, bead-strung analogies.[1] The failure of the myth theory is not the consequence merely of methodological sloppiness with respect to the sources and their religious contexts; that has been demonstrated again and again from as early as Shirley Jackson Case’s (now dated) study, The Historicity of Jesus (1912). It is a problem incipient in the task itself, which Morton Smith aptly summarized in 1986: The myth theory, he wrote, is almost entirely based on an argument from silence, especially the “silence” of Paul. “In order to explain just what it was that Paul and other early Christians believed, the mythicists are forced to manufacture unknown proto-Christians who build up an unattested myth . . . about an unspecified supernatural entity that at an indefinite time was sent by God into the world as a man to save mankind and was crucified… [presenting us with] a piece of private mythology that I find incredible beyond anything in the Gospels.”[2]
The following remarks are designed as a kind of summary of what we know for certain about the conditions and the process through which historical tradition emerged. It is a preface of sorts to a more ambitious project on the myth theory itself and what we can reliably know–if anything—about the historical Jesus.[3]
i
The Literary Matrix:
We can acknowledge, first, that the gospels came from somewhere. Scholars disagree widely about the when and where, but the textual tradition, based on when datable writers first use them and quote from them has settled many issues as well as establishing a controversial but adequate relative chronology of Paul’s (and the Pauline) letters.[4] As Helmut Koester has shown[5], fragments based in oral tradition appear in the Apostolic Fathers (early second century), writers who do not seem to have possessed all four, do not use them authoritatively, and who do not quote from them extensively.[6] The heretic Marcion of Sinope (b. ca. 70 CE, d. 154)[7] was probably the first to attach a gospel to a collection of Paul’s letters.
At the same time, we cannot be sure that Marcion was not acting from a precedent that has been lost to history except through its effects. The “gospel +” pattern is evidenced in the combination of Luke and Acts, and the Fourth Gospel and the Johannine letters. It is not unreasonable to wonder if Marcion was using a pattern developed much earlier in the Pauline circle, in which the “gospel”—which traditionally in New Testament scholarship has been seen as a self-referring term used by Paul to mean his preaching or message—actually referred to a written source to which his letters were seen to be an indispensable addition. That, at least, is how Marcion saw it. The “contest of gospels” referred to by Paul in Galatians 1.11-13 appeals against private preaching, with Paul “boasting” that his gospel was given through divine revelation: G?????? ??? ?µ??, ?de?f??, t? e?a??????? t? e?a??e??s??? ?p’ ?µ?? ?t? ??? ?st?? ?at? ?????p??·
In refusing to assign title to his own gospel, Marcion does not seem to have challenged but rather preserved Paul’s claim to its uniqueness; but the question of whether Paul’s “preaching” is coterminous with the content of that gospel (normally thought to be an assured conclusion of New Testament scholarship) must remain a live question. It seems clear that Marcion did not share the view of modern biblical scholarship that Paul possessed no physical record called “gospel,” a fact habitually overlooked in New Testament studies, as also is the heretic’s claim that his gospel was older than the ones being circulated in the churches of his day.[8] I regard the reference to (RSV) “perverting” (metastreyai means to alter or to change) the “gospel of Christ” a reference to an established, probably written tradition, as polluting a fluid oral tradition does not seem a sensible way to interpret the fractures in the Galatian community.
The African church writer Tertullian,[9] determined to see Marcion as an apostate, believed he had maliciously “mutilated” the gospel in such a way as to diminish the physical reality of Jesus. We now are relatively certain that Marcion was working not from a canonical gospel but from a lost prototype akin to a synoptic source which lacked, among other things, a birth narrative and significant portions of the resurrection story. Careful and cautious analysis of Tertullian’s description suggests that this source: (a) was an archetype or very early version of a written gospel, and (b) that it is antecedent to the synoptic tradition, judging by Tertullian’s unfamiliarity with the text and his preference for a later more expansive version—a “Lucan redaction.” This lost gospel is significant in Jesus- studies because, unlike the “sayings source” [Q] which is necessarily hypothetical,[10] Marcion’s gospel is multiply attested, was composed very early, and despite Tertullian’s exertions to make it so, is not a Gnostic composition.[11] It also brings Paul’s contribution to the development of early Christian literature into closer alignment with historical traditions, a fact which is often ignored in favor of the standard model of literary development.
Marcion was also an editor and perhaps the earliest collector of Paul’s letters, lacking a number of the “deuteropauline” compositions (some written in direct response to his activity) but possessing one to the Laodiceans[12] which seems to have been a model for a letter like Ephesians and sections of Colossians, now usually reckoned to be secondary to Paul as well. As David Trobisch has suggested,[13] Marcion was challenged by his contemporary and arch-enemy Polycarp of Smyrna by a fuller edition of the gospels and letters (which Trobisch sees as the first “edition” of the New Testament) to prevent his short canon from becoming dominant. Based on linguistic analysis of his work, Polycarp is also the likeliest candidate to be the author of three anti-Marcionite epistles called the Pastorals (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus).[14] The historicity of Jesus is not, as such, at stake in this literary warfare, but historical traditions are.
The primary point of reference in the study of the Jesus question is the controversial context in which a particular interest in the humanity of Jesus first becomes apparent—this against the background of a number of salvation cults, with discrete saviours and myths, where no such historical interest can be documented.[15] As Walter Bauer demonstrated in relation to the development of early orthodoxy,[16] Roman historical interest as exhibited by Mark’s gospel rather than Anatolian eclecticism, as reflected in Paul, would be largely responsible for the shape of this controversy and decisive in preserving its historical components.
It is a major weakness in the argument of the mythicists to point to the Hellenistic mysteries, with their utter lack of historical orientation, as an explanation for the religious environment in which the gospels were formed. Often, their litany of dying- and rising- god cults gives the impression of attempting to create a chain of direct influence through the simple duplication of unconnected traditions. In fact, we have no examples from classical antiquity[17] of a religion that insisted from the beginning on the historical existence of its founder in both explicit and implicit ways and no way of explaining why Christianity would differ so markedly from the cults in this respect.[18]
ii
The Later Second Century
By the time we enter the late second century, Christian bishops like Irenaeus [19] (fl 176), and later Tertullian himself (fl 205), are working with a fixed set of four gospels and a collection of letters closely resembling what we possess today and which had become standard sources for refuting heretical opinion.[20] Knowing what we know of the controversies of the period, that in itself, combined with the evidence of the gospels having circulated from Gaul (Lyon) to Carthage as an a???????a, is an impressive early achievement. Irenaeus quotes from all four (and from 21 of the eventual 27 books), and also is the first to quote indubitably from the Book of Acts,[21] usually thought to originate from the same writer or school that produced Luke’s gospel, which in turn is the one Marcion is accused of mutilating.[22]
Irenaeus’ goal is not to argue that Jesus “really lived,” but to show that a “living voice of tradition,”[23] separate from heretical interference, survived down to his own day—the basis for the more elaborate doctrine called “apostolic succession.”[24] While almost no one ignores the apologetic intent of Irenaeus’ claims about apostolicity, it would be irresponsible to think that he systematically misrepresents the traditions of an earlier period. In fact, the possession of large numbers of Gnostic writings has now vindicated much of what he had to say about the teaching and practices of the Gnostics, lending greater weight to what Irenaeus says about the traditions he claims to represent.[25] While he quotes from written Gnostic sources, he regards the control against heresy not simply oral precedent but “delivered,” graphic tradition, largely because the Gnostics “normatively” appealed to secret oral traditions. [26]
It is true that the existence of the gospel traditions about Jesus and patristic appeals to them do not prove his existence. What they prove instead is a coordinated effort to prevent a deposit of historical tradition from being eviscerated by the religious mythicizers of the period.[27] The actuality of his existence was not the topic of discussion in the ancient period.[28] It is taken for granted by all ancient commentators, including Paul, whose entire career pivots on the message of the crucified/historical Jesus and the glorified Christ (1 Cor. 1.23; 1 Cor. 15.3-14). [29]
But viewed against the background of first and second century Latin history-writing especially, the story of Jesus is not as unusual as has been thought, and its “uniqueness” has been more a function of the sacred status accorded to the books by the Church than any essential ingredients in their composition. That is to say, the question of Jesus has been infected with the doctrine of the divine nature of the gospel’s protagonist as well as with the later belief in the inspired authority of the text–both essentially outcomes of patristic discussion–making the issue of “historicity” as the term is normally used, more compelling than it deserves to be.
Book I of Livy’s History[30] does not prove the story of Romulus, or the ruse used against the Sabines, even though he believes it to be factually solid; yet no one doubts the existence of Rome or Augustus, apart from anything credulous Livy might have thought, and got wrong, about Rome’s beginnings. Moreover, we know the gospel writers weren’t writing that kind of history, even though Luke seems to have been challenged to produce something akin to it “from the sources available among us” (1.1-4)—but ends up telling essentially the same story as Mark, with ornamentation and flourishes, and a special tranche of tradition that seems to have been unique to his region.[31] Indeed, Hellenistic critics of early Christianity, beginning with Celsus (ca. 177) carp at the unoriginality of the legendary elements of the gospel without calling into question Jesus’ existence, and this is so, presumably, because the historical literature of the time was fraught with such legends. Take this for example from Livy’s account of the birth of Romulus and Remus:
But the Fates had, I believe, already decreed the origin of this great city and the foundation of the mightiest empire under heaven. The Vestal [virgin, Rea Sylvia] was forcibly violated and gave birth to twins. She named Mars as their father, either because she really believed it, or because the fault might appear less heinous if a deity were the cause of it. But neither gods nor men sheltered her or her babes from the king’s cruelty.[32]
Or this from Suetonius’ account of the return of Augustus to Rome subsequent to the events of the ides of March, 44 BCE—an episode which becomes the later basis for the Christian Aracoeli legends:
When [Augustus] returned to Rome from Apollonia at news of Julius Caesar’s assassination, the sky was clear of clouds, but a rainbow-like halo formed around the sun; and suddenly lightning struck the tomb of Caesar’s daughter, Julia …. [33]
Celsus presses his main objections against Christian teaching in propria persona as a “Jew” for the purpose of denigrating the novelty of the Christian faith, an objection grounded in the accusation that its founder had appeared “only recently.”[34] He does not challenge the importance of prophecy and augurs, merely the idea that Jesus (as opposed to a hundred others) had fulfilled them. In fact, his choice of persona is almost certainly dictated by the fact that neither Jews nor pagan critics doubted that Christianity had had an historical founder, this despite the muddled nature of so-called “external” sources like Josephus and Tacitus, and the “anti-gospel” Toledot Yeshu, dating from the sixth century CE, but incorporating Talmudic traditions from an earlier period.[35]
While it is fairly common for myth-theorists (as well as others) to point to the unreliability of the external notices, the absence of any suggestion among Jewish and pagan polemists that Jesus was the contrivance of a small clutch of believers—while explicable on other grounds—is as noteworthy as the absence of any tendency among the church fathers to defend against such a “slander.” To explain this away, we would be obliged to say that the Jews and pagans “bought” the Christian story wholesale after it was fully formulated; but passages such as Matthew 28.11-15, elements of the Magdalene tradition, as well as of the controversy-stories render such an explanation implausible and point as well to an early date for competing accounts of the resurrection.[36] The controversies enshrined in the New Testament, as John Fenton recognized two generations ago, bring us very close to the live debates in which the history of Jesus was being compiled, but not created in the churches.[37]
We also know that the gospels, whatever they are, were not designed to convince people that Jesus existed. They were written (eventually) to recall key moments in a brief public life—narrative snapshots based on reminiscences, sayings, and hearsay “traditioned” by various communities, but fairly early in point of time compared, say, to the distance between Livy ( BCE 59-CE 17) and the Roman Republic of the sixth century BCE. As old and inconvenient as this defense of the historicity of important elements of the gospels may be, it is still a detail to be reckoned with.
The tension between the purposes of the gospels—to “bring” the news of Jesus to the Jewish diaspora and the Roman provinces–and the worldview of the gospels is even more important because the (perhaps inflated) apocalyptic fervor of the earliest communities, which cannot have been the same voltage in all sectors of the Christian diaspora,[38] would not necessarily have been friendly to the more mundane aspects of tradition: thus, the delay of the end-time and its corollary—the fact that Jesus did not come again–seems to have set into motion an effort to recover historical elements of the life of Jesus that the passage of time was threatening to occlude[39]—not only the core story of his death and resurrection but information about his teaching and predictions. One of those stories—that of his trial and death—is entirely probable if not a chronicle of events, like the story of the death of Hannibal[40]—and one of them—the resurrection, like the story of Alexander’s conception[41] or the apotheosis of Romulus[42]–is not historical, but does clearly refer to historical outcomes: the belief of Jesus’ followers. It is difficult if not impossible to point to equivalent outcomes in relation to the beliefs of ordinary Greeks and Romans being triggered by events close to their own time.[43] The legendary and the “factual” are comingled in all ancient history, from Thucydides onward. But as an axiom, the incredible in ancient literature does not nullify the credible, or if it did we would know almost nothing about anything before the dawn of modernity.[44] For this reason among others, it is perilous to regard disaggregated analogies to the legendary matter in the gospels as proof against the totality of their assertions and “reports.”[45] As Paul Veyne has shown, in the ancient world the miraculous, the legendary and the historical walked upon a single stage, and our judgments about “what really happened” are imperiled even as we try to view it.[46]
iii
Is Paul’s ‘Silence’ Active or Passive?
Third in sketching the process, there is the “problem of Paul,” or rather Paul’s imputed silence concerning Jesus of Nazareth and his preaching of what Schweitzer called a “Christ-the-Lord mysticism.”[47] Myth theorists have often worked from the general postulate that as Paul’s writing is earlier than the written gospel (a simplistic assumption at best), it is remarkable that Paul seems to know nothing of the historical tradition concerning Jesus of Nazareth.[48] I believe this assumption is grantable to the mythicists only if it is the case that there is no supervening reason in Paul’s career that makes ignorance a more compelling reason for his silence (or virtual silence) than some other explanation. In my view, there is a clear reason for Paul’s unhelpfulness which has nothing to do with him not knowing the Jesus tradition but much to do with his not knowing Jesus of Nazareth.
We have Paul’s letters less because of their literary value and theological significance than because one unusually persistent heretic roamed the provinces from Pontus Bithynia to Rome trying to convince people of the second century that Christianity could be boiled down to believing in a heavenly redeemer who slipped past the archons and became a sacrifice for sin.[49] It may seem surprising that anyone would be persuaded by Paul’s conglomerate of Jewish tradition and Hellenistic theosophy, but Paul was not wedded to a univocal view of Jesus. A propagandist driven by success and a man of many messages,[50] Paul changes course and charts new argumentative paths when he needs to, and he needed to because a great many of his “churches” didn’t like him or what he said.[51] Moreover, a great deal of the Pauline tradition and the need for additional letters in his name is simply graphic confirmation of his obscurity and incomprehensibility.
The battle for Paul’s name and “authority” has been over-stressed, however, and edges on the anachronistic.[52] His reputation is para-canonical rather than original to the tradition. His prestige was not at all guaranteed in the first and second century: it was largely an accidental quarrel over interpretation, forced on church writers by a specific heresiological crisis. Historically, the mythicist view assigns him relevance on the basis of a significance that is contextually untenable—as though Paul and the Jesus-tradition are synonymous “equi-valent” terms: as Paul is an early witness to the tradition (the argument normally runs), where is the tradition in Paul? [53] In fact, it is a lamentable feature of the mythicists that no single study has emanated from their circle that deals in a mature way with the historical, constructive features of Paul’s thought, as their main interest has been to use his silence about Jesus forensically to “prove a lacuna” in tradition that more careful analysis shows does not exist.
Ernst Käsemann aptly observed more than fifty years ago that most writers of the second century found Paul’s theology unintelligible.[54] In general, Paul does not deliberately contribute anything to a discussion of the historical Jesus and the dating of his letters is work fraught with danger and despair. This disjunction in early Christianity has been recognized since earliest times—first of all by the writer of the Book of Acts, which seems to have arisen, at least in part, in the anti-Marcionite fervor of the mid- second century..[55] The battle for “ownership” of Paul artificially magnified his importance; but in fact, there would have been no nettle for this quarrel if Marcion had not tried to make the Apostle authoritative to the detriment of the gospels. His theology may very well have sunk without trace and stayed sunken.
It seems to me that this distinction between what early writers called the apostolikon (meaning, almost exclusively, Paul) and the euangelion needs to be reiterated in the appropriate historical context: The survival of Paul’s letters and theology is largely accidental, stems from controversy, theological and political dispute, and is as much polemically charged as it is theologically spontaneous. The existence of the gospels is purposeful, even when specific controversies arising later can be identified within the text. To use the former as a criterion or standard for the historical memory preserved in the latter is to establish a relationship between the two that runs contrary to their separate development. The silence of Paul as a passive matter—based on his ignorance of any historical tradition or a very rudimentary one–is untenable. The reasons for his active silence are considered in the following section.
iv
Competing Christologies and Complicit Silence
And so we are thrown back to the gospels, chiefly but not exclusively on the synoptics. Are they pristine, objective, verbatim accounts of the life of Jesus? Hardly. Are they infused with assumptions about who Jesus is and approximations of what he said?[56] Yes. Can we find “heresiological”, or more properly controversial material in them—material intended to defend a sketchy proto-orthodox teaching about Jesus against less acceptable beliefs? Of course—as John Fenton showed,[57] especially in relation to Matthew’s gospel. These considerations, however, are the surest proof that Jesus really lived and that the preservers of the Jesus-tradition knew what they were defending: they were squeamish about the divine man Christology[58] that dominated in much of the church, and is at least “available” in the gospel of John. The tenuousness of their task is already implied in the phrase “Jesus Christ”[59] though given different prior outcomes, they might have regarded the phrase “Christ the Lord” too extreme–a quiet reason for their general disuse—or rejection–of Paul’s theories in shaping their Christologies.[60] It is remarkable that the gospels use the much earlier descriptions “son of man” (? ???? t?? ?????p??, with its clear rootage in Hebrew and Aramaic passages: cf. ??? ???) and “(a)son of God” (with meanings ranging from goodness to royalty; cf. Ps. 2.7), in reference to Jesus. Yet unless we can conclude that Paul was actively rejecting or was ignorant of terms he may have regarded as anachronistic, useless to his broader purposes, or pejorative, we are obliged to see these traditions as being in competition by the ’50's of the the first century CE. Christology is not metaphysics in the first century; it is part of the broader contest of ideas in which historicity is at stake.
When I say that Jesus “really lived,” I mean lived in history, like anyone else. It has to be said this way because the idea of historicity is a construct of the Enlightenment and later, when scholars like Leopold von Ranke,[61] Theodor Mommsen[62] and others turned their gaze on the difference between legend and actual events, defining history, no more and no less, as “what really happened” (“wie es eigentlich gewesen“)[63]. In the mid- twentieth century, scholars thought they could answer this question by settling once and for all what “kind” of writings the gospels really were: short stories, encomium, chronicle, tall tale, Kleinliteratur,[64] Hellenistic novel, narrative drama, a script for a mystery religion–Christos Soter?[65] None of the analogies quite stuck, though everyone had a favourite one. In the end however, the safest solution was to say that a gospel grew organically out of the experiences of people who had heard Jesus, or had heard about him, and had come to believe that he was some sort of savior or redeemer, or prophet—or (unhelpfully) all three.
The theological matter of Christology is nothing more than recognition that the gospels are a stew of opinions consisting of what people believed, surmised, and reported–expressed with appropriate irony in the Markan “confession” scenario (8:27-33) where Jesus is given to inquire, Who do men say that I am? [66] Peter’s response, is not especially telling and Mark does not mean for it to be.[67] That is to say, the gospels are not coherent sources for the life of Jesus, and even when we are brought to the edge of knowing who Jesus really is (cf. Mark 15.2), the gospel writers offer impressions, often attributed to opponents, crowds, onlookers, or followers, rather than “data.”[68] Only in the jesuine discourses of the Fourth gospel is the natural reticence of the synoptics cast aside in favor of bold assertions and self-reference. As they stand, they invite preaching and interpretation (Mark 16.15; Matthew 28.18f.; John 20.31) and that is just how Paul and his associates used them. That these sources also grew in scope as a result of their function is also probable; but the alleged linear development from “kerygma” to “written gospel” (the Dodd-Bultmann uniqueness-hypothesis) is a theologically loaded way to conceptualize the process and stems from over-attention to the intratextual domain of the canonical writings themselves.
Once purged of the mythical and the obviously legendary, the guessing about original tradition begins. Indeed, it begins prior to that because plausible theories exist for belief in the resurrection that do not rely on a supernatural interpretation of an event following the death of Jesus.[69] Just as we have to account for the existence of the Jesus-tradition in the gospels, we have to account for belief in the resurrection of Jesus. That has been the central task of academic New Testament criticism for more than a century while only a literalist fringe have been occupied with defending (and attacking) its “historicity.”[70] Denying that the resurrection was a historical event, using nothing more than textual variants that have been charted for two centuries, does not provide that explanation.[71]
Thus we are required to confront the intentions of the gospel compilers—what they are trying to do: how does this intention reflect the context from which the gospels emerge? Were they inventing a story, repeating one they thought to be true, or adapting such historical traditions as they possessed to a larger frame of reference that included both legendary embellishments and a myth or paragon of salvation?
Using premises that predate the contemporary understanding of myth, myth-theorists have normally held that the gospel writers (or as for Drews and Bauer, an individual, original writer) wrote fraudulent or consciously deceptive tales. [72] It is important to emphasize that myths do not arise from fraudulent intent; they arise as explanatory stories. For the most part, the gospels (unlike the Book of Genesis) fail as myth because they fail to explain anything. It is true that over time Christian theology educes consequences of enormous importance from the story—doctrines like atonement and salvation—but the stories do not arise as narrative subterfuges to explain how salvation happened. As William Henry Furness, following Renan,[73] observed in the nineteenth century, their authenticity and integrity lay in their artlessness and not artifice.
“Myths” as that term has been used in modern scholarship, especially in anthropology and phenomenology of religion, are typically etiologies of why something is as it is, or how it came about. Genesis is an etiology of the world, the creation of humankind, languages, sacrificial customs, and finally (beginning with Abraham) of the formation of the Hebrew nation. Even when populated by ordinary people, places and names, this etiological function is not far from the surface.[74] Are the gospels etiologies in this sense, and if so, what are they attempting to explain?
In my view, even the most esoteric of them, the Fourth Gospel, remains an unsuccessful hybridized attempt to relate a stubbornly historical tradition to a pre-existing mythological structure. If there are etiological components, like the Prologue in heaven (1.1-16, a creation story), they are not consistently developed and demonstrably false to the historical traditions preserved by the authors in other sections of the work. And the jesuine discourses, even at their most obscure and theologically charged, are “spiritualizations,” as Maurice Wiles has called them, rather than falsifications of these historical traditions.[75] That John was driven by a different agenda was widely acknowledged even among the church fathers—a spiritual gospel according to Clement of Alexandria[76]— and almost all critical church historians and biblical exegetes since the Reformation, not one to be read merely as a history of Jesus.[77]
People of the first and second century did not need to be persuaded that there were gods, omens, miraculous births, and returns from the jaws of death. The stories of gods and heroes routinely used the motif because, after all, it was core to the idea that a god was immortal. If you read the stories of Osiris, Persephone, Heracles, the deaths of gods, the sojourns to the underworld, and their triumphal return, you can be forgiven for saying that Jesus was a hero like that. The fact that one gospel begins by declaring that God became man (? ????? s??? ????et? ?a? ?s????se? ?? ?µ??) shows the attractiveness of a mythical overlay of events that John (erratically) sees being played out on earth and in heaven at the same moment. Likewise, Paul’s vision of a descent to a lower world followed by a triumphal ascent through the archontic hosts to a higher one (Philippians 2.5-11) encourages the thinking that we have on our hands a garden variety savior myth with historical trimmings. That, of course, is the hub of the mythicist argument.
But what is only partly true of the Fourth Gospel [78] is flatly wrong with respect to the synoptic traditions, something even a casual reader of the texts can discern by intuition without having to go deeply into questions of date, provenance, and composition. These historical elements, as Harnack realized a century ago, were vulnerable from the beginning to an encompassing myth that threatened to (and in the case of the Gnostics did) overwhelm it.[79]
Rather than being constructed myths, the gospels were, among other things, attempts to bring an existing and unruly mythology under control. I do not subscribe to the view that this process can be expressed in the formula “from Jesus to Christ,”[80] as liberal theology tried to chart its development in the nineteenth and through most of the twentieth century. The gospels reflect partisan struggles within individual communities corresponding to those Paul describes in 1 and 2 Corinthians and Galatians. In some of those, from as early as the fifties, if not earlier, the historical particulars of the life of Jesus had been rendered insignificant by the totalizing attraction of a salvation myth. Paul attempts to take control of this myth with his strange concoction of Jewish and “Hellenistic” additives, but he does not attempt to confront it head on or to challenge it with historical information. Judging from the outlook and practice of the Corinthian church at least,[81] to do so would have been to sacrifice the congregation there entirely. The argument in 1 Cor. 15.45f. rejects a temporal history in favor of a typology (the first and second “Man”) that functions mainly as allegory, but comes as close as Paul ever comes to developing a fully fledged mythology of salvation, one briefly reiterated in Roman 5.12-17.
In its purest form, this encompassing myth is Gnostic and perhaps our closest approximation to it, outside Paul, is the so-called Hymn of the Pearl.[82] It is that mythology, in some form, that Paul knows from his vantage point in ancient Turkey where Anatolian myth blended with Greek mystery ideas to the detriment of all historical interest.[83]
Paul is able to exploit that mythology as a “non-follower” of Jesus (a non-apostle who insists on his right to be called one) because the story for him is not about “flesh and blood” which after all can “never inherit the kingdom of God.”[84]
On a few occasions, to nullify the “judaizing” fraternal claims of the superior apostles (hyperlian apostoloi) who are related to Jesus by blood (as brothers or cousins) or adoption, especially James the Lord’s brother,[85] Paul sometimes generalizes the concept of the brothers (adelphoi) to refer to Christian believers, converts or neophytes symbolized in the mystical body of Christ (the “man from heaven”) though Jesus himself does not become (and is never accounted to be) one of these brothers; he is rather the spiritual sine qua non—The Lord–through which the community comes into being.[86] No one can “boast” because all are one in Christ Jesus. Without understanding Paul’s apologetic motive for this usage, the author of Acts maintains it as a synecdoche for the community (e.g., Acts 1.16; 11.1; 13.26; 20.26 [KJV only]), often associated with believers, listeners, aspirants or “children of Abraham” but also maintains the historical precedent that the apostles are distinguished from the brothers and the unique status of James.[87]
The elimination of James as a “prop” for the historical Jesus has been a priority of the myth theorizers from the beginning of the twentieth century, but has also simply exploited the confusion over the identity of James, or multiple James’s, as an alternative structure of facts. The most familiar example of this is Arthur Drews’s[88] insupportable contention in The Christ Myth (German, 1909) that the easiest way to dispense of the brother-tradition is to recognize that the term “brother” is used equivocally in the sources:
Certainly that James whose acquaintance Paul made in Jerusalem is designated by him Brother of the Lord and from this it seems to follows that Jesus must have been an historical person. The expression Brother is possibly in this in this case as so often in the Gospels a general expression to designate a follower of Jesus, as the members of a religious society in antiquity often called themselves Brother and sister among themselves. 1 Cor. 9.5 runs “Have we not also the right to take about with us a wife that is a sister even as the other apostles and brothers of the Lord and Cephas.” It is evident that the expression by no means necessarily refers to bodily relationship but that Brother serves only to designate the followers of the religion of Jesus.”[89]
Famous for his academic inexactness and sensationalism even in his own time, Drews begins his observation with the glaring mistake that the “followers” of Jesus may here “as is so often the case in the gospels” be referred to as brothers in an honorary or cultic sense. In fact, followers and disciples of Jesus are never once addressed as brother(s) in the gospels in any of the instances where a clear biological relationship is asserted.[90] Then, into the tortured syntax of 1 Corinthians 9.5, he inserts a relative construction missing in the Greek, to justify his belief that “sister” is being used as a circumlocution for “believer.” µ? ??? ???µe? ????s?a? ?de?f?? ???a??a pe????e?? ?? ?a? ?? ???p?? ?p?st???? ?a? ?? ?de?f?? t?? ?????? ?a? ??f??; The more obvious meaning of course is “a sister,” [or] “a wife” (i.e., a woman), which has, in fact, become the majority translation. As to the phrase “brothers of the Lord,” it either excludes the higher ranks of “apostles and Peter” or must envisage them as biological brothers (cf. Mk 3.31, Matt. 12.46; K; Lk 8.19; Jn 2.12, 7.3, 5, 10), such as James, who is not mentioned here. Without Drews’s conclusion that the language of the mysteries, absent in the gospels, can be invoked to explain a verse in the epistles, the most obvious translation would be that brothers of Jesus, along with apostles, were seen by Paul as having a right to female companionship or service. The context of the passage, indeed, makes this the only coherent translation: Paul is here talking about the right of an apostle to be served, be paid, and have a share of the earnings (“the fruit’) of his labour, not about “the Christian mystery.” The phrase “brothers in the Lord” in Philippians 1.14 suggests that the author could make a clear distinction between a relational genitive such as Galatians 1.19 (?de?f?s t?? ??????) and an instrumental dative (?de?f?i ?? ?????) such as we find in Philippians 1.14.[91]
Yet to assume that Paul’s deliberate and defensive disuse of the tradition nullifies the tradition is abjectly nonsensical. The Christian story as we know it and celebrate it in the Church is basically Paul’s mythos, especially in its Eucharistic form. It is missing in John, who uses Eucharistic images in a different, arguably a more physical and anti-gnostic way (“I am the bread that has come down from heaven”), and works from a slightly different variation on the core salvation story. But it seems clear in both cases (Paul implicitly, the Fourth Gospel directly) that the writers are exploiting a prior tradition and that this tradition was centered on an historical figure named Jesus.[92]
But the Jesus tradition did not begin there. It began simply enough in Roman Palestine with the teaching of a figure named Jesus and his teacher, John the Baptist. The historical moorings are crystal clear and plausible; the prologue in heaven (John 1.1-15) is later. It is manufactured: it is exegesis. Paul’s salvation story is not earlier than the historical elements of the gospel. It is a highly speculative interpretation of the tradition, though not a rejection of it. While Marcion seems to have singled out a pattern of corrupting the gospel, dating back to the apostles themselves,[93] Paul does not polemicize against tradition—just against those like Peter and James, who use it for self-aggrandizement.[94] Both Marcion and Paul, however saw corruption of tradition as a program carried out by “historical” followers of the Lord, not by devils.[95] In asserting this, Paul becomes the first interpreter to place his interpretation of the gospel ahead of its historical embodiment.
In broad outline, the message of Jesus concerning the coming kingdom of God—that is, his eschatological message– is completely plausible. It is both historically credible and fits into most of what we know from other sources about Roman Palestine at the time of Roman occupation. In that story, Jesus does not fall out of the sky or propel himself back into it[96] –he simply lives and teaches and dies, a victim of the raucous age. The question of what he taught and the completely useless attempt of various Jesus seminars and quests to isolate authentic sayings will surely go down as one of the most regressive episodes in biblical-studies history. It seems certain he said some of it and the fact that others said similar things (Nihil sub sole novum) is proof, not disproof, that he said some of it. I have never budged from the view that Jesus was an eschatologist, that he preached judgment and repentance, probably in fairly stark terms. The gospels make no bones about it. What they do in addition to repeating the kerygma in conventional language drawn from a variety of Jewish apocalypses is to make Jesus not only the agent of change but the focus of deliverance.[97]
What the gospels also do is to make Jesus the agent of judgment, the unexpected, unheralded, and finally unrecognized messiah.[98] This is an apologetic stance forced on believers and recorders by the discomfiting events of the later first century. Yet even their rationalization of events is within the domain of the predictable: the belief that Jesus said something specific about dates and times trails off into uncertainty about dates and times (Mark 13.32) like a father’s rash promise to buy a daughter a diamond for her eighteenth birthday and his demurrers on the last day of her seventeenth year. Nothing is more ordinary, more explicable.
But even here, the synoptic gospels are notably sketchy, even circumspect, about the extraordinary or as critics in the post-Enlightenment era would call it, the “supernatural.” And in Mark even the extraordinary is related in matter-of-fact terms using both temporal and geographical markers, a trait of Hellenistic history but not of myth and legend.[99] Mythicists have often pointed to the fact that the gospel writers sometimes get the geography and temporal markers wrong—a feature readily noted by most New Testament scholars[100]–without complaining about the same persistent tendency in secular historiography from roughly the same period.[101] It is difficult to know what historical standard they are invoking, or whether their naivete is simply a result of having a deficient knowledge of the ancient world.
Moreover, the “incredible” elements of the gospels do not form a coherent narrative scheme: the miracles, a dozen healings, a few unlikely wins in debates against “teachers of the law.” Collectively, these do not constitute a myth; they are the legendary bits, though the Jesus-deniers often conflate myth and legend–which in fact serve different literary purposes and have different origins.[102] But the historical Jesus undergirds—and is presupposed by–the legends, in a way distinct from purely legendary figures like King Arthur and Robin Hood whose entire existence is predicated on adventure, feats and tests of stength, and romance. In general, apart from the obviously miraculous and legendary elements of the gospels, such as the birth stories, the story of Jesus is mundane and possesses none of the primary characteristics of pure legend: it is the story of a teacher gone wrong who is killed for his teaching and probably also for some of his displays of magic and healing. Only later, and under the watchful eye of canonists, do stories about Jesus like those contained in the apocryphal gospels achieve fully legendary proportions.[103] Put a bit flatfootedly (though this is not a new argument), the gospels do not show sufficient consistency to be pure legend and are not abstract enough nor sufficiently symbolic to qualify as “myth.”
v
Saving Jesus from the Gnostics
Fifth and finally: it becomes the job of the early Church to protect the core reality of a flesh and blood Jesus against the second and third century mythicizers, the Gnostic covens. The early writers, known and unknown, do this partly by bringing Paul under control—Paul who virtually disappears from view in the early patristic period.[104] They do this by lambasting Marcion’s attempt to subordinate the gospel to the letters by giving the gospels precedence; they do it also by continuing to write tendentious letters in Paul’s name—especially the so called Pastoral epistles with their transparently anti-Marcion bias. They do it by writing minor texts assigned to other apostles—James, Peter, Jude, and John—to diminish Paul’s standing at a period when his teaching had lost relevance. That these are forgeries, or more politely pseudonymous works, is now widely accepted. That the deuteropauline correspondence is radically different from the same technique in the hands of the heretics is equally obvious.[105] Just as the gospels reflect the real life context of first century Palestine, the canonical letters, authentic and inauthentic, reflect real life situations that have arisen in the later life of the Christian community. In the long run, it is their contribution to the historical life of communities—a certain practical relevance lacking in Gnostic writings–rather than proof of authorship that guaranteed their survival.
This protective reflex is very early, and at least goes back to the time of Polycarp, Ignatius and the author of the pastorals who warns specifically of those who follow the elaborate myths.[106] This “protection” is called for by the worry of a teaching that Jesus Christ “did not come in the flesh.”[107] In its most radical form, that is to say in Gnosticism, human nature is devalued and a doctrine of spiritual elitism more extravagant than anything we find in Paul is put forward. According to Irenaeus who spends years of his life gathering evidence about them and attempting to sort them out (“though they spring up like weeds”[108]) they were not a unified front but a congeries of sects, each with a slightly different salvation story. In their more flagrant but milder form, they stretch back to Paul’s day and to the time of fourth gospel (which may in part have originated in their circles.) Being a “docetist” or a Gnostic was a matter of emphasis, but all would have argued that Jesus was a kind of apparition, not a flesh and blood human being. He was not historical though historical is not a term they would have comprehended. As a revealer, he was preternal, might have come before, might appear again, but never in a time-bound, material sense.
The battle between orthodox writers and the Gnostics (and their forerunners) was foremost a battle over a theory of atonement or redemption: if Jesus did not possess flesh, it was thought, he could not have redeemed flesh.[109] For the Gnostics, flesh cannot be redeemed; thus a true savior could not possess it (cf. 1 Corinthians 15.50). [110] But the basis for this theory was the bedrock historical material of the gospel: the life and the crucifixion and death of Jesus as real events, not cosmic tokens of salvation available to the te?e??te?e?– the “perfect ones.” It is an interesting but common feature of most mythicist narrative about the New Testament that they have a very poor grasp of the Gnostic literature, and rely extensively on earlier myth-theorists whose works were written two generations and more before the Nag Hammadi documents were available to illustrate the shape of a fully fledged Christian myth. Perhaps the most odious example of polemic masquerading as scholarship is the work of a certain Richard Carrier, whose vanity published (Lulu, 2009) Not the Impossible Faith manages in over 400 error-strewn pages to ignore entirely the fundamental theological challenge of the New Testament era.
As all New Testament scholars know, or should know, the difference between a Gnostic gospel and a canonical gospel is not only a difference in “style” but in purpose. Joseph Fitzmyer once famously called the Gnostics “the crazies of the second century.”[111] That may or may not be so, but their success is evidence of the general popularity of their cause and seems to have justified the concern of orthodox bishops.
The euphoria that greeted the Nag Hammadi discovery of 1945 and the first publication and translations between 1972 and 1984 encouraged extreme notions that the Gnostics were a liberal heterodox alternative to “male dominated” conservative orthodoxy.[112] But we are in a better place today to judge the threat of Gnosticism as it was seen in its own terms– not by autocratic bishops ruling from their thrones by fiat–that is a Hollywood parody of the second century church–but by leaders of a young religious movement struggling against a tide of religious mythicism. The living tradition that Irenaeus defends is historical tradition; it extends from Jesus to John to Papias and the elders, and even includes references to teachers who had “gone astray” from tradition like Cerinthus and Marcion.[113] Indeed, the standards of historicity were strict enough for Eusebius in the fourth century to call Papias’s judgment into question on account of his chiliasm. It includes before the fourth century a critical element that rivals anything in secular historiography, both in Papias’s comments on the evangelists and Eusebius’ negative feelings (Hist. Eccl. 3.39.13) about Papias’s gifts as a reporter.[114] As to Papias’s dates, we have Irenaeus to thank for identifying him as “a man of old time” (Adversus Haereses V 33.4) and thus a contemporary of Marcion and Polycarp, and perhaps just as significantly an Anatolian from provincial Hierapolis
To challenge every speck of this tradition is certainly possible, but what possible motive would there be for doing so? The simple insistence of the early writers is that the historical tradition about Jesus came first, the “myths,” according to the Pastor, later. Indeed, cumulatively, that is just what the texts as we possess them suggest is the case. The church fathers would have been in a position to distinguish paradosis (what was delivered, and considered authentic) from the “myths and fables and old wives tales,”[115] and what was new from what was received. To impugn their motives moves us away from a methodological suspicion of sources into the realm of master-theories, cynicism and baseless assumptions for which there is no textual support.
The core of Gnostic belief was not that there was no Jesus but a salvation myth that did not require him as a distinct personality. By contrast, for all their legendary embellishments, the canonical gospels want to insist on the historical reality of Jesus, located in a specific corner of the Roman world at a particular moment in time. That corner is Roman Palestine, and the basic details are true to life and credible. In saying this it would be jejune to suggest that I am defending the miraculous; but I would want to defend the historicity of the healing stories. It would be simplistic to say that critical New Testament scholars are still arguing for a physical resurrection; but many, including myself, regard the basic proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus as a historic and defining event in the history of the church, though its form varies from source to source (cf. 1 Corinthians 15,6).
Modern scholarship has unearthed many figures from the period whose careers run roughly parallel to that of Jesus: Judas the Galilean, Jesus Barabbas, Theudas, Shimeon bar Kochba and John the Baptist himself have similar proportions and messages, and inhabited a social world of religious insurgencies, banditry, and political opposition to Rome in a countercultural Judaism that ends with a bang in 70CE. The unveiling of that social world has further solidified our confidence in the portrait of Jesus in the gospels.[116] It is a social context about which the mythicists are largely silent and, given their presuppositions and methods, embarrassingly deficient. The age was an age of radicals, revolutionaries, messianic claimants, and self-styled prophets of the end time. We have investigated targums, pseudepigrapha, ostraca, ossuaries, tombs, and remnants of village life that put us tantalizingly close to a village like Nazareth.[117] The net result of these investigations has not been to push the gospels in the direction of fantasy and fabrication but to establish a probable landscape within which the events described in them plausibly occurred. It does not take a great deal of historical or literary sophistication, for example, to see that the rudimentary nature of their contents places them squarely in the first and early second century, proximate to the events they describe, rather than at a perceptible distance from these events, as the apocryphal and Gnostic writings are.
If the Nazareth tradition embedded in the synoptics and John is more elaborately attested in the gospels than in other literature contemporary to it, the most efficient explanation is that the gospel writers knew about the place because Jesus, in the tradition they possessed, was associated (even if mistakenly) with it, not that they invented it. Matthew’s laborious attempt to find a prophecy to fit it (and various attempts to invent an alternative etymology for “Nazareth” and “Nazarene” based on Hebrew and Aramaic roots)[118] suggest that the village was an embarrassment to the followers, as it was already traditioned in Mark’s famous story of Jesus’ failed attempt to preach there and Luke’s finessing of the older tradition (Mark 9.1; 6.1-7; cf. Luke 4 .16-30). Recent excavations (2008, seq.) led by Yardena Alexandre[119] show that Nazareth (as Bagatti had conjectured) was small (±500), but (as Princeton archaeologist Jack Finnegan argued) a strongly Jewish settlement.[120] The basic picture that has emerged is entirely compatible with what the gospels say about the area being inconspicuous, poor, and suspect (John 1.46; cf. 7.41). Nevertheless, even if the identification of Nazareth could be proved to be mistaken and the name educed from the phrase “Jesus the Nazarene,” there would hardly be a strong case for rejecting the Galilean provenance of Jesus or his actual existence; it would show only that the gospel writers were attempting to sort out a tradition that had come to them unsorted.[121]
Contextually, the gospels are about right, though they get things wrong. Like your grandmother’s stories, they changed over time. Details were lost and some geographical details were modified and forgotten—and others like Bethlehem, invented as a way of doing what every leader since Epirus and Augustus himself tried to do: improve a pedigree or establish a res gestae of their deeds .[122] But the description of Pilate, of Herod Antipas (another casualty of pedigree), the muddled version of the trial, and the mechanism of punishment and death are completely plausible. They were no more written by eyewitnesses than Livy’s descriptions of Republican Rome; nor is that the standard we normally require in ancient history. Once the peculiar nature of the history contained in the gospels is acknowledged, it is useless to try to hold them to a historiographical standard higher than that expected of their secular counterparts—unless the point of the inquiry is not to discover the facts within the sources but to discredit the sources.
Stripped of its theological and liturgical embellishments—which are as masterful in their way as Plato’s fictional mise en scène for the death of Socrates[123]– the crucifixion drama becomes the simple story of the death of a Galilean troublemaker and teacher. Taken as it stands, it is the story of the death of the messiah, or of a son of god, replete with liturgical embellishment from the Psalms and the Wisdom of Solomon, among other sources. Almost all New Testament scholars accept that pious accretions form a heavy emulsion over the bare bones. But likewise, most realize that the simple factual recitation of these events unaccompanied by such interpretation would be false to the story as they rationalized it and understood its significance. If modern literary criticism has taught us anything, it is that there is no such thing as uninterpreted narrative. The gospels do not exist “propositionally”: they exist “hermeneutically.” It has not been the task of New Testament scholarship since the time of Strauss and Feuerbach to answer the question “whether” Jesus rose from the dead, but rather how the early Christians understood this belief, and how it arose within the religiously and politically charged environment of the time. Even if all questions of interpretation could be decided in favor of factual assertions, the gospels would still not exist propositionally.
Vi
The Mythicist Position – The Paul Cipher
The cumulative effect of these considerations drowns the mythicist position, which had its beginnings in the excitement of radical New Testament scholarship in Holland, Britain and America at the end of the nineteenth century, and in Germany before that. As a connoisseur of these and later mythicist theories, I can safely say, almost no stone was left unturned in attempting to debunk the gospels. Those stones have now been turned over and over, without much effect and nothing hiding under them.
Despite the energy of the myth school from Drews, Robinson, Couchoud and van Eysinga down to Wells, its last learned, reputable proponent,[124] its conclusions have been rendered wrong by the historical scholarship of the later twentieth century.[125] It remains a quaint, curious, interesting but finally unimpressive assessment of the evidence—to quote James Robinson’s verdict, an agenda-driven “waste of time.” Methodologically it disposes of anything contrary to its core premise—Jesus did not exist—in a quicksand of denial and half-cooked conspiracy theories that take skepticism and suspicion to a new low. Like all failed hypotheses, it arrives at its premise by intuition, cherry picks its evidence in a way that wants to suggest that the ambiguity, uncertainty, and complexity of texts and traditions are meaningless inconveniences invented by the discipline of New Testament studies, and defends its “conclusions” by force majeure. The myth theory, in short, is a dogma in search of footnotes. Most of the ones it continues to exploit in the form of references, problems, and allusions are a century old. While it is untrue to say that the theory is not taken seriously by responsible scholars, it happens to be true that its most ardent supporters, then and now, have been amateurs or dabblers in New Testament studies and those least equipped by training or inclination to assess an enormously complicated body of evidence.
History as a discipline has been in the business of exposing fraud at least since the time of Lorenzo Valla.[126] But the exposure of fraud is not the discovery of factuality or truth—of “what really happened.” History requires a certain patience with ambiguity, sometimes surgical care with delicate sources that have an ounce of reliable data buried beneath the layers of additions and corrections. Harnack believed that the procedure was like peeling husks away from a nob of corn,[127] but it was an unfortunate image, as his critic, Alfred Loisy reminded him.[128] New Testament scholarship has learned more recently to distinguish between event and allegory which are unevenly blended in the story of Jesus. However that may be, the outlines of an historical figure are clear. As the hyperactive Tertullian argues in his treatise on the Flesh of Christ (De carne Christi, ca. 212), against the mythicizers of his day,
Why do you allege that that flesh is celestial which
you have no data for thinking celestial, why deny that that is
terrestrial which you have data for recognizing as terrestrial? It
hungers when with the devil, is athirst with the Samaritan
woman, weeps over Lazarus, trembles at the prospect of death–
The flesh, he says, is weak–and at last sheds its blood. You take
these, I suppose, for celestial signs. But, say I, how could he, as he
said would happen, be despised and suffer, if in that flesh there
had shone any radiance from his celestial nobility? By this means,
then, we prove our case that in that flesh there was nothing
brought down from the skies, and that that was so for the express
purpose that it should be capable of being despised and of
suffering.[129]
The language is odd to us, because Tertullian is arguing against a renegade disciple of Marcion named Apelles. But the message is plain: Jesus was real.
When I began my work on Marcion at Oxford, I entertained the idea of the non-historicity of Jesus. I was obligated to because Marcion also toyed with the idea–and rejected it. His sole surviving gospel was his lonely concession to that reality, while his project—to give Paul’s theology pride of place over it—was dominant in his thought. His followers like Apelles seem to have assumed the so-what attitude that can be traced back to Paul’s contempt for the hyperlian-apostoloi, the super-apostles, with their boast about knowing Jesus “after the flesh.” “So what if we knew him that way,” Paul sneers, “since we know him that way no longer”(2 Cor. 5.16).
But Paul, writing in the fifties of the first century, says more in that irritated and offhanded comment than he does anywhere else in his letters about the historical Jesus: he tells us why, as a personal matter, he does not “preach” Jesus’ life story, but instead begins with the skandalon of his cross, a usage that means Paul knew at least one piece of information about Jesus, and also that preaching it came at a price among Jews and “Greeks.”
Unfortunately, a standard response to the “opponents” controversy between Paul and the Jerusalem church among the mythicists has been to ignore the controversy, or to deny the existence of the Jerusalem church, or (even) to deny the existence of Paul himself.[130] When Mark Twain felt the plot and character in a novel called Those Extraordinary Twins had become too cumbrous to drive the story forward he decided to drown the surplus in a “poison well.” Loads of surplus information lay at the bottom of the mythicist well.[131] Much of that material concerns our lengthening understanding of the world and context of Paul.
There is no reason at all to doubt the best attested schism in the earliest history of the church (if we discount the ones for which the evidence is less clear). This schism was at least partly about the claim of “certain men from James” (Gal. 2.12) to be physically, perhaps familialy close to Jesus—while Paul “every bit as much an apostle as they are!”—grounds his message in a revelation of the risen Lord. In the bitterest sections of 2 Corinthians, the New Testament’s most complex letter, one which seems to have had special relevance to Marcion judging from Tertullian’s long-winded handling of it in the Adversus Marcionem—we have some insight into the first corporate management crisis in the Christian religion. Unsurprisingly it is a war between executives appointed by the founder and an upstart “idea man” who came on board after the founder’s death. Even “Luke’s” conciliatory prose in the Acts of Apostles, written more than fifty years later, doesn’t succeed in erasing the damage created by the schism. Yet the crisis itself points indubitably past the legend of the twelve to the historicity of Jesus, his disciples, and James.[132]
What mattered in the early church, however, was the significance of Jesus’ unexpected death—its projected meaning as the mysterious conquest of evil, and its consequences, by the powers of God’s grace—not the basic humanity of the sermon on the mount or the (unoriginal) piety of the Lord’s Prayer, or the choosing of preachers to carry on the cause. It was that significance variously construed that created the apostolic community, drove Paul’s missionary work, and the hostility towards it, inspired Marcion’s gospel of love, and Irenaeus’ defense of living tradition. Or rather–what mattered more was the significance of his death, since there is no evidence that interest in the mundane and the super-mundane aspects of the life of Jesus did not arise at around the same time and in some sense as competitive motifs.
For all his speculativeness and infatuation with Paul’s theology as he knew it, Marcion was also something of a literalist, and very probably an Anatolian Jew, where Christianity developed early inroads and was fully fledged by the time of Pliny’s governorship in 110-13—a period when Marcion would have been active as a teacher. A core part of his teaching is that there is a greater and a lesser God, Jesus being the embodiment of the love and goodness of the higher, previously unknown power. But the evolving church could not even accept this much. It risked a kind of theological incoherence (which it seems to me remains long after Chalcedon) in insisting on the total humanity and divinity of Jesus rolled into one.
Further, Marcion detected no literary artifice in the gospel he possessed: he held that the followers of Jesus were poor pupils and finally false witnesses to his teaching. He does not base this finding on a literary “motif” in the gospels (where at least in Luke the apostles are already caught up in a process of rehabilitation)[133] but on a skepticism towards the trustworthiness of the apostles that comes from Paul himself. Was Paul its source, or simply a recipient of the “false apostle” theme? What were Paul’s criteria for his sneering dismissal of the pretense of superior apostles? Is a formerly historical, celestial Jesus, once known physically, who can continue to impart revelation and appoint apostles after his death more relevant for Paul’s odd message not more useful than an historical Jesus who appointed them all during his lifetime? Or can we be myth theorists about it and say the entire conflict is manufactured by story tellers?
***
A Conclusion among Others
What I have just recited is a lesson plan for why I believe no serious and responsible scholar who makes a thorough study of the discussions of the early church would argue that Jesus never existed.
The gospels alone, even when the unusual circumstances of their composition and their interdependence and differences are taken into account, do not prove him. But the complex of material that survives and tells us the story of Christian beginnings points to conclusion that Jesus existed, when and where the gospels say he did. The core elements, many of the details, and especially the conflicts and controversies that form the stage for the life of Jesus, are still irreducibly clear. They are not the work of a mastermind, or a master-forger, or a duplicitous tale-spinner. They are the work of serious if culturally limited writers who are trying to do their best with collected traditions existing in a variety of what later scholarship would call “forms.” Whether Jesus gave the sermon on the mount in a field or on a hilltop, all at once or in bundles, does not negate the tradition that he gave it at all. Too much has been claimed for the heuristic value of suspicion in probing a naïve literary tradition, not enough attention to the persistence of a consistent frame and the historical coherence of its central character. In their own way, and at a time when Jesus might simply have been gobbled up by a dozen analogous myths and rituals, the gospel writers and their interpreters, the church fathers, insist on this frame.
As I remarked in the Sources of the Jesus Tradition, God- denying and Jesus-denying are different tasks. I do not think the evidence of history is dispositive in deciding the existence of God in the most general sense of that term and apart from its cultural expressions. I think the Bible, both testaments, and all other sacred literature, is collectively unhelpful in settling the question.
But I think the basic factuality of Jesus is undeniable unless we (a) do not understand the complexity of the literature and its context, or impose false assumptions and poor methods on it; (b) are heavily influenced by conspiracy theories that–to use a Humean principle—are even more incredible than the story they are trying to debunk; or (c) are trying merely to be outrageous. To repeat Morton Smith’s verdict on Wells, the idea that Jesus never existed requires the concoction of a myth more incredible than anything to be found in the Bible.[134]
The use of any single “theorem” to deal with the values discussed here beggars the credible. Yet there are self-appointed experts in this camp who lead equally gullible and unwary amateurs down a path of pseudo-mathematical probability based on the absurd notion that the gospels can be approached using true or false modalities, without reference to the recipients who neither accepted nor understood the preaching about Jesus in modal terms. It invites the opposite of careful research because it relies on an anachronistic and “legal” approach to the gospels as a collection of truth claims that can be answered yes or no. But that is not what the textual tradition gives us to decide. The “Jesus Tradition” is so-called because it is less than a history of events as we’d want to know them. Between Jesus and us, the community intervenes, not once but pervasively. It is their voice we hear, not the voice of Jesus. That fact does not entail the conclusion that therefore Jesus had no voice, anymore than repeating a story your grandmother told you entails that you made it up and had no grandmother.
When the Ann Arbor conference Jesus in History and Myth convened twenty seven years ago, the then best-known advocate of the Jesus-Myth theory, George A. Wells, was aboard for the deliberations. I was then a fledgling assistant professor at the University of Michigan.
In my own presentation, “Other Gospels, Heretical Christs,” I commented on the possibility that we need to change our view of the gospels from corroborative to corrective, a fairly unexciting conclusion, I thought, considering what we know today about their interconnections. That is, we cannot use the synoptic writings as mutually corroborative testimony to a single event, as they were regarded once upon a time, in Tatian’s day. But we can regard them as serving independent corrective functions in relation to the traditions they incorporate and each other, a fairly common device among classical historians as well. “What are they correcting?” Wells shot at me when I finished, “since there is no indisputable historical detail to serve as a standard.” At this, the late Morton Smith, who ‘required’ a historical Jesus to serve as the hero of his magician theory, said “Well, they might have flown off in all directions. They didn’t. Their resemblance is pretty strong evidence that they were trying to preserve something and I believe it is historical memory.”
“And while we’re at it,” Smith went on, “what is an indisputable historical detail?”
And this brings me back to the starting point. They preserve something, and I believe it is historical memory as well. They might have gone off in all directions. The apocryphal Jesus story does just this, with tales of ascents into heaven, a divine brat who slays his playmates, and a revealer who descends to hell and puts demons in irons.[135] That is pure legend. It “flies off in all directions.” The Gnostic gospels do it too. But the canonical gospels do not. If a contrived mythology is the sufficient explanation of these literary artifacts, it is the job of the myth theorists to explain why they are such poor examples of the mythic tradition—not why they tell the tale of a man who ascends triumphantly into heaven, in some late accounts, like Romulus in the famous apotheosis of Livy–but why they begin with someone who bothered to touch the ground at all.
In short, the gospels stand as the best refutation of the myth theory of their origins. So indirectly do the theological defenses of the reality and humanity of Jesus. So finally does Paul’s self-confessed rejection of the historical Jesus in the context of his fight with “those who were apostles beforehand.” They are in essence and substance a refutation of a particularly seductive soteriology, the tale of a divine being sent from above to an elect few to whisper the gnosis of salvation.
We cannot say how successfully they domesticate this myth to the historical reality of one man’s life, death and limited teaching. Gnosticism is our surest evidence of how it might have been if the historical contours had been sacrificed to a theory of salvation, and the gospel of John evidences an intermediate stage—a halfway compromise so to speak—between reality and myth. We know what a gospel is, in other words, because we know quite clearly today what failed gospels look like in the form of a prevenient mythology of redemption populated by abstract time-travelling revealers. Yet the preoccupation of the gospels is not cosmic, it is worldly and the teaching of Jesus ranging from advice on divorce to his adumbrations of his impending death—which I take to be commonsensical and plausible rather than prophetic—are the normal concerns of a man whose time is running out.
NOTES
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Perhaps one of the best examples of bead stringing and analogue-accumulation in lieu of argument is the work of Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries: Was the Original Jesus a Pagan God? (Three Rivers Press, 2001), which takes its view of gnosticism (not a Hellenistic mystery as such) almost entirely from Elaine Pagels’s book on the topic, and is deficient in understanding the form, context, and workings of the Hellenistic mysteries in general.
[2] Morton Smith, “The Historical Jesus,” in R. Joseph Hoffmann, and Gerald Larue, eds., Jesus in History and Myth (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1986), pp. 47-8.
[3] The important studies, without prejudice to their quality and date are: S. J. Case, The Historicity of Jesus (Chicago, 1912), reflecting the state of the question at a relatively early date; F. C. Conybeare, The Historical Christ (London, 1914), a rational defense of the historical Jesus by a leading Oxford Orientalist; Maurice Goguel, Jesus the Nazarene, Myth or History (London 1928; rpt. Amherst, 2008), a clear refutation of the position by one of the leading French exegetes of his era; R. T. France, The Evidence for Jesus (London, 1986), a respectful but uneven indictment of the mythicism of G.A. Wells; and Morton Smith, “The Historical Jesus,” in Jesus in History and Myth, ed. R.J. Hoffman and G.A Larue (Amherst, 1986), who concluded that the myth theory is “almost entirely an argument from silence,” pp. 47-48)
[4] Issues variously summarized in Charles Horton, ed., Earliest Gospels: The Origins and Transmission of the Earliest Christian Gospels (Library Of New Testament Studies), (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2004). A useful general survey is G.B. Caird, “The Chronology of the New Testament,” Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Vol. 1. pp. 599-60; Dennis Eric Nineham, Historicity and Chronology in the New Testament. Theological Collections, No. 6. (London: S.P.C.K, 1965); A.J.M. Wedderburn, “Paul’s Collection: Chronology and History,” New Testament Studies 48.1 (2002): 95-110; and Colin J. Hemer, “Observations on Pauline Chronology,” Donald A Hagner & Murray J Harris, eds., Pauline Studies: Essays Presented to F.F. Bruce (Exeter: The Paternoster Press, 1980), pp.3-18.
[5]Helmut Koester, The Synoptic Tradition in the Writings of the Apostolic Fathers (Synoptschen Überlieferung bei den apostolischen Vätern (diss. Marburg, 1953); rpt. Texte und Untersuchungen, 65 (Berlin, 1957). Koester’s view is that there was a free oral tradition paralleling the synoptics until around 150CE. Only 2 Clement and Didache 1.3-2.1 form an exception. Koester’s argument pivots on the idea that orthodoxy and heresy “are not distinct categories before the time of Irenaeus,” though much pivots on the definition of “category” in his assessment. See also T.C. Mournet, Oral Tradition and Literary Dependency: Variability and Stability in the Oral Tradition and in Q, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament, 2 (2005).
[6] While there are questions concerning the date of the Ignatian correspondence, these have often been pursued most vigorously in the history of scholarship by evangelical and “non-episcopal” theologians who have taken exception to this relatively early endorsement of the authority of bishops. Andreas Lindemann noted, for instance, that Lechner takes for granted the notion that the Ignatian Epistles were a late second century forgery by someone using the antithetical confessions of Noetus of Smyrna. The matter is admirably sorted out in “Paul’s Influence on Clement and Ignatius,” in Trajectories through the New Testament and Apostolic Fathers, ed. Andrew Gregory and Chris Tuckett (Oxford, 2007). An excellent summary of the connections between the controversies that link the earliest Antiochene church and that of Ignatius is Raymond Brown and John P. Meier, Antioch and Rome (Paulist, 1983). Following Lindemann’s statement of the difficulty of dating the correspondence, John-Paul Lotz has provided an interesting study of the controversy surrounding the how the concept of homonoia (concord) was understood in the churches of the second century; see his Ignatius and Concord (Vienna and Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007).
[7] On Marcion, see generally A. von Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, trans. by John Steely (Wipf and Stock rpt. edition, 2007); and R. J. Hoffmann, Marcion: On the Restitution of Christianity. An Essay on the Development of Radical Paulinist Theology in the Second Century (American Academy of Religion/Scholars, 1984), p. 31 (on the biographical frame for Marcion’s activity), and Joseph Tyson, Marcion and Luke Acts: A Defining Struggle (Columbia, SC: USC Press, 2006).
[8] Tert., Adv. Marc. 4.4.2: ‘Alioquin quam absurdum, ut, si nostrum antiquius probaverimus, Marcionis vero posterius, et nostrum ante videatur falsum quam habuerit de veritate materiam, et Marcionis ante credatur aemulationem a nostro expertum quam et editum.’ (‘Otherwise how preposterous it would be that when we have proved ours the older, and that Marcion’s has emerged later, ours should be taken to have been false before it had from the truth material <for falsehood to work on>, and Marcion’s be believed to have suffered hostility from ours before it was even published:’ [Evans trans.]) That is to say, Marcion directly made the claim that his gospel was the basis for later versions of the gospel. Cf. 4.4.1.
[9]Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem, Latin with English trans. By Ernest Evans (Oxford: OECT, 1972), 1.1.
[10] The literature on “Q” is prolific; a popular general survey is Burton Mack, The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins (New York: Harper, 1994). Mack’s thesis is speculative and on the fringe of New Testament scholarship. Also see: David R. Catchpole, The Quest for Q. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993; Adelbert Denaux, “Criteria for identifying Q-passages : a critical review of recent work by T. Bergemann” Novum Testamentum 37 (1995), 105-29; and the still sober discussion of Werner Kelber, The Oral and the Written gospel : The hermeneutics of speaking and writing in the synoptic tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q. (Indiana, 1997); John S.Kloppenborg, Excavating Q : the history and setting of the sayings gospel (Fortress, 2000). Standard skeptical discussions are Austin Farrer, “On dispensing with Q,” Studies in the Gospels: Essays in Memory of R. H. Lightfoot (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955), pp. 55-88 (never superseded); Michael Goulder, “Is Q a Juggernaut?” Journal of Biblical Literature 115 (1996), pp. 667-81; and Mark Goodacre, The Case against Q (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2002).
[11] Cf. Hoffmann, Marcion (1984), xi.
[12] For a discussion of my argument concerning Laodiceans-Ephesians/Colossians within the broader context of the Pauline canon, see Stanley Porter, The Pauline Canon (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 132-134. Further, Hoffmann, Marcion, pp. 252-279.
[13] David Trobisch, The First Edition of the New Testament (Oxford, 2000); see also his Paul’s Letter Collection: Tracing the origins (Quiet Waters, 2001). A credulous reconstruction of canonical origins that greatly underestimates the influence of Marcion is Harry Gamble’s The New Testament Canon, Its Making and Meaning (Wipf and Stock, 2002).
[14] On the “heresy” behind the Pastoral letters see Hoffmann, Marcion (1984), pp. 281-305; and Joseph B. Tyson, Marcion and Luke Acts: A Defining Struggle, pp. 26-45. Among older works, Martin Dibelius, The Pastoral Epistles: Hermeneia (Augsburg, 1989) and more recently, Paul Hartog, Polycarp and the New Testament: The Occasion, Rhetoric, Theme, and Unity of the Epistle to the Philippians and Its Allusions to New Testament Literature (Mohr, 2001). The study by Kenneth Berding, Polycarp and Paul (Brill, 2002) suggesting that allusions in Polycarp to the Pastorals can be used to prove their early date is not persuasive. The general conclusions of von Campenhausen (1963) and Harrison (1921) especially on linguistic evidence and hapax legomena in the epistles have not been persuasively challenged.
[15] See the still most reliable survey, Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989), and Hugh Bowden, Mystery Cults of the Ancient World (Princeton, 2010).
[16] See Bauer’s concise epitome of Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei in G. Strecker, ed., Aufsätze und Kleine Schriften (Tübingen, 1967), pp 229-33.
[17]The cult of the healer-god Asklepios is often referred to as analogous. Most descriptions date from the second century of the common era and beyond and are associated with precinct healings by animated statues. See Callistratus, Descriptions 10 (trans. Fairbanks) as well as Plato, Phaedo 118a; Pausanias, Description of Greece 1. 21. ; 2. 26. 1; Aelian, On Animals 7.13; Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana, 3,4; etc. Aside from its distinction from the cults, there is the obvious fact that Christianity’s historical interest is as much a reflection of its Jewish and biblical beginnings as of its Hellenistic missionary environment. See Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine During the Early Hellenistic Period (Wipf and Stock, 2003): “It is not possible to say that Judaism maintained a straight course through the Hellenistic period…Still less can it be claimed that it was completely permeated by the Hellenistic spirit” (p. 310).
[18] Perhaps the most ambitious if also the most unsuccessful attempt to argue influence by accumulation is the work of Earl Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle (self published by Age of Reason Publications, 2005). An older example of the genre is German controversialist Arthur Drews almost manically disorientated The Christ Myth (Die Christusmyth, 1909; ET 1910), which argued a kind of proto-Nazi paganism based on the theory that the totality of the story of Jesus was drawn from Jewish and Hellenistic cults of the period (see especially pp., 310-315). Drews is significant largely because he created the flashpoints to which many mythicists return again and again, and his conviction that the Christ myth was not an innocent process but a conspiracy perpetrated in the interest of finding support for their beliefs: “As early as the first few centuries of the present era pious Christians searched the Jewish and pagan writers for references to Jesus, convinced that such references ought to be found in them ; they regarded with great concern the undeniable defects of tradition, and, in the interest of their faith, endeavoured to supply the want by more or less astute ‘pious frauds,’ such as the Acts of Pilate, the letter of Jesus to King Abgar Ukkama of Edessa, 1 the letter of Pilate to Tiberius, and similar forgeries.” (Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus [1912], p. 1, McCabe translation). Without any attempt to discuss the criteria for establishing the spuriousness of these sources, he goes on to indict the gospels for perpetrating a fraud.
[19] Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, 3.4; ET by Alexander Roberts (reprint edition, CreateSpace, 2012)
[20]This basic function is often overlooked; for example, the Pastor’s advice that “all scripture is inspired by God and is useful for reproof, correction and training in righteousness” (p??? d?das?a??a?, p??? ??e?µ??, p??? ?pa?????s??, p??? pa?de?a? t?? ?? d??a??s??? (2 Tim. 3.16) suggests a provenance for the letter within a specific heresiological context that did not exist in Paul’s day. On the Pastorals and Marcion, see Hoffmann, Marcion, pp. 231-305.
[21] C.N. Mount, Pauline Christianity: Luke-Acts and the Legacy of Paul (Supplements to Novum Testamentum: Brill, 20001) , esp. p, 23: “The obscurity from which Irenaeus rescued the text of Acts reflects the relative unimportance of Acts in the life of early Christian communities, and prevents ant firm conclusions about precursors to Irenaeus’s use of Acts for scholarly debate about the canon.”
[22] According to Williams, Marcion is accused on numerous occasions of omitting material from Luke’s gospel which does not appear in Luke at all; the most notable example is the accusation that he omits Matthew 5.17, which he charges three times over. Additionally, Marcion’s gospel underwent revision after the death of Marcion himself, though proposed ways of deciding the degree of change have not been persuasive. See Tyson, Defining Struggle, pp. 42-44.
[23] Irenaeus, Adv. Haer, 3.2.1: “But when we refute these people [the heretics] out of the Scriptures, they turn and accuse the very Scriptures, on the ground that they are mistaken or not authoritative or not consistent in their narrative, and they say that the truth cannot be learned from them by persons who do not know the tradition, and that that was not transmitted in writing but by word of mouth.”
[24] See Hoffmann, “The Canonical Historical Jesus,” in Sources of the Jesus Tradition (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2011), pp, 257-265.
[25] A good general study of Irenaeus is Denis Minss, Irenaeus (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1994). There is no outstanding scholarly treatment of Irenaeus’ life and thought. See also Eric Osborn, Irenaeus of Lyon (Cambridge, 2005), p. 180: As Osborne mildly understates the case, “If Marcion first propounded a canon of scripture, then Irenaeus’ canon could be seen as a catholic response.”
[26] Ecclesiastical Authority and Spiritual Power in the Church of the First Three Centuries by Freiherr von Hans Campenhausen [Hans von Campenhausen] (1969), p. 170, regarding Adv.Haer, 3.2.1); D B Reynders, Paradosis, l’idée de tradition jusqu’a saint Irenée, RTA, 5 (1933), 155-191
[27] Especially Irenaeus’ arguments in Adv. Haer. 3.4.
[28] R. J. Hoffmann, “The Canonical Historical Jesus,” in Sources of the Jesus Tradition (2011), pp. 157-165.
[29] Goguel, Jesus the Nazarene (1926), p. 109. Ultimately the discussion is deadlocked between camps representing one of two views: one that claims Paul’s silence is ignorance and should therefore be construed as not knowing historical “information,” a view that Dunn describes, on the basis of what we know about the sociology if new religious movements, as highly implausible; and another view that sees Paul as essentially an interpreter and not a preserver and reciter of data. As the first clear instance of the controversial context through which the Jesus tradition came into existence and was moderated, it is clear that Paul’s position cannot be interpreted as mere ignorance, and unlikely that it stems from the feeling that the history of Jesus is irrelevant.
[30] T. Livi, Ab Urbe Condita, Liber I. 1-11; Latin ed., M. Alford (Macmillan, 1941).
[31]See David L. Dungan, Constantine’s Bible: Politics and the Making of the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2007) and John Clabeaux’s review of Hoffmann, Marcion, Journal of Biblical Literature ( Vol. 105, No. 2, Jun., 1986), 343-346. In fact I do not believe that Marcion’s gospel was UrLukas as that designation is conventionally understood, but a prototype existing within Marcion’s community, compiled by Marcion himself. The association with Luke, arguably based on his fictional devotion to Paul (Col 4.1.4; 2 Tim. 4.1-11) gives us some hint of the process through which the third gospel was domesticated. Millar Burrows’s serviceable discussion of “Special Luke” (9.51-18.14) is still useful for the general description of the material: Jesus in the First Three Gospels (Nashville, 1977). The provenance of this tradition is still a matter for speculation. As a thematic concern, it has often been noted that the special section contains a number of stories emphasizing Jesus’ concern for women and the poor. It is interesting circumstantially that Marcion’s gospel is attacked for emphasizing the benevolence of the “alien” God and the high status of women within the Marcionite churches. On the question of Marcion abbreviating Luke, see the discussion by Andrew Gregory, The Reception of Luke-Acts in the Period before Irenaeus (Tuebingen, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2, 2003), which suffers unfortunately from reliance on the hypothesis of Han Drijvers and Gerhard May.
[32]Livy, 1.4.
[33] (Aug. 95); see the discussion in Paul Burke, “Augustus and Christianity in Myth and Legend, “ New England Classical Journal, 32.3 (2005), 213-220.
[34] Celsus, On the True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians, trans. R. Joseph Hoffmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 116, quoted in E. Komoszewski, James Sawyer, and Dan Wallace, Reinventing Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI.: Kregel Publications, 2006), 313.
[35] On the last of these, see Hugh J. Schonfield, According to the Hebrews (London: Duckworth, 1937); the Toledoth text (primarily from the Stassburg MS) is on pages 35-61 and the still valuable discussion of Joseph Klausner Jesus of Nazareth: His life, times, and teaching (orig. 1922, Engl. transl. 1925, London, George Allen & Unwin) page 51; 1705 Hebrew version at http://lemidrash.free.fr/JudaismeChristianisme/huldreich.pdf; a superb recent discussion is David Biale, “Counter-History and Jewish Polemics Against Christianity: The Sefer toldot yeshu and the Sefer zerubavel,” Jewish Social Studies 6.1 (1999) 130-145 (evaluated from the standpoint of Amos Funkenstein’s concept of the purposes of counter-history.) Some of the Jewish sources are summarized in R. J. Hoffmann, Jesus Outside the Gospels (Amherst, 1987; 1991), pp. 36-53.
[36] This was essentially Goguel’s argument against the myth theorists of his day. On the absence of pagan and Jewish skepticism towards the historicity: “The importance of this fact is considerable, for it was on the morrow of His birth that Christianity was confronted with Jewish opposition. How is it possible to suppose that the first antagonists of the Church could have been ignorant of the fact that the entire story of Jesus, His teaching, and His death corresponded to no reality at all? That it might have been ignored in the Diaspora may be admitted, but it appears impossible at Jerusalem; and if such a thing had been known, how did the opponents of Christianity come to neglect the use of so terrible an argument, or how, supposing they made use of it, does it happen that the Christians succeeded in so completely refuting them that not a trace of the controversy has been preserved by the disputants of the second century?” (Jesus the Nazarene: Myth or History, London, 1926, p 72).
[37] See the discussion of these tendencies in the essays edited by James M. Robinson and Helmut Koester, Trajectories through Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress; Wipf and Stock, 2006), and my own discussion of the question in “Other Gospels, Heretical Christs,” in Jesus in History and Myth, ed. Hoffmann and Gerald Larue (1986), pp. 143-155.
[38] The conversation since Ernst Käsemann first suggested eschatology as a problematical and defining issue has been largely centered on outcomes and inferences drawn from ideal situations, using Paul’s authentic letters and the synoptics as benchmarks in apocalyptic fervor. See New Testament Questions of Today (London: SCM, 1974) and Perspectives on Paul ( London, SCM, 1969). Several useful appraisals of the outflow of apocalyptic thought, which is especially relevant to the development of the canon, are found in Robert Daly’s edited volume, Apocalyptic Thought in Early Christianity (Holy Cross Studies in Patristic Theology and History; Baker, 2009); and Bengt Holmberg, Paul and Power: The Structure of Authority in the Primitive Church as Reflected in the Pauline Epistles (1978).
[39] The question of how social memory was structured is a matter of heated debate and is interestingly summarized in R. Rodriguez’s revised Sheffield doctoral dissertation: Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance and Text (Library of New Testament Studies; London: T&T Clark, 2010). The study contends that oral performances installed the Jesus tradition in early Christian collective memory and “became vital parts of the traditional milieus in which Jesus’ earliest followers lived, and that Jesus in early Christian memory provides the thread of continuity that binds oral performances to each other and to the written Gospels.”
[40] Cornelius Nepos, Hannibal 12.5; Juvenal, Satires X.164
[41]Plutarch, Alexander, 3.2.
[42] Livy, 1.16; more elaborately, Plutarch, Numa, 2; Ovid, Fasti 2. 475-532.
[43] Paul Veyne, Les grecs ont-ils cru a leur mythes? (1983) trans. By Paul Wissing as Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Veyne’s conclusion is that the ancients regarded the myths as belonging to a different time scale and did not expect “historicity” from them—a concept he finds alien to the conceptual world they inhabited. As the demarcation between “pagans” and “Christians” and to a certain extent “Jews” is highly artificial with respect to their historical predilections in the first and second century it is notable that early Christian literature appeals to the immediacy of the Christian experience and not to a historically uncertain long ago or “in the beginning”—with the deservedly famous exception of John 1-1-2.
[44] And even after: Howard Zinn has pointed to the use of Columbus’ 1493 description of “Hispanolia” (the Bahamas) as a tissue of lies confected to convince the Spanish court to equip a second voyage. See A People’s History of the United States (Harper, 1980), p. 2, compared to the severe account (ca. 1515) of the treatment of the Indians by Columbus in Las Casas’s History of the Indies.
[45] The most energetic accumulator of “parallels” was the freethinker John M. Robertson (1856-1933) whose Christianity and Mythology (1900) was a model of indiscriminate piecework. It was roundly rejected by F. C. Conybeare, who was a professor of theology, a member of the Oriental Institute at Oxford, and also a member of the Rationalist Press Association (The Historical Christ: or, An investigation of the views of Mr. J. M. Robertson, Dr. A. Drews, and Prof. W. B. Smith, 1914), accusing the mythologists of being “untrained explorers [who] discover on almost every page connections in their subject matter where there are and can be none, and as regularly miss connections where they do exist.” Conybeare’s final position was radically historical and akin to Schweitzer’s: “Thus the entire circle of ideas entertained by Christ and Paul are alien and strange to us to-day, and have lost all actuality and living interest. . . . Jesus Himself is seen to have lived and died for an illusion, which Paul and the apostles shared.” (Myth, Magic and Morals [1909], p. 357)
[46] Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths? (Chicago, 1988), pp. 5-27.
[47] Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1998), esp. pp, 3-36. Schweitzer’s sober approach to both Jewish and pagan sources for Paul’s mysticism and the contemporary assessment of Bousset, Reitzenstein and Deissmann still sets the standard for a historical typology of Paul’s thought. Less convincing is Schweitzer’s discussion of the Gnostic turn in Paul’s thought, pp. 71-73.
[48] A useful summary of the myth argument concerning Paul is given in P. R. Eddy and Gregory Boyd, The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus (Baker, 2007), especially chapter 5; the book however suffers from a certain degree of methodological naivete and is best viewed as an apologetic response to the myth theory as an “attack” on traditional Christianity.
[49]Ephesians 2.1-12
[50]Three studies can be mentioned of the thousands that have been published: Alan Segal, Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee (Yale, 1990)’; *John Ziesler, Pauline Christianity (1983; 1990\2 [1991]); and Jerome Murphy O’Connor Paul: A Critical Life (Oxford, 19966). The opponent controversy was first extensively treated by Dieter Georgi, in 1964 and in The Opponents of Paul in Second Corinthians (Nashville, 1986). The classic short study in English is C.K. Barrett, “Paul’s Opponents in 2 Corinthians,” NTS 17 (1971), 233-54; and cf. Stanley Porter, Paul and His Opponents (Leiden, 2009). Schweitzerm Nysticism, pp. 75-99.
[51]Discussed masterfully in James D.G. Dunn’s The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids/New York, 2006), pp. 60-67. The defining study of Paul’s opponents remains The Opponents of Paul in Second Corinthians: A Study of Religious Propaganda in Late Antiquity (Studies in the New Testament & its World) (London: T&T Clark, 2000; original German, 1964.
[52] Dennis MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon (Westminster 1983).
[53] “The Epistles of Paul afford then precise testimony in support of the existence of the Gospel tradition before him. They presume a Jesus who lived, acted, taught, whose life was a model for believers, and who died on the cross. True it is that in Paul are only found fragmentary and sporadic indications concerning the life and teachings of Jesus, but this is explained on one hand by the fact that we possess no coherent and complete exposition of the apostle’s preaching, and on the other hand by the character of his interests. He had no special object in proving what no one in his time called in question—namely, that Jesus had existed. His unique aim was to prove (what the Jews refused to admit) that Jesus was the Christ.” (Goguel, Jesus the Nazarene, p, 109). See the recent mythicist arguments of Earl Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle (Canadian Humanist Publications, 1999) or for a typical version of the argument from silence.
[54] Ernest Kasemann, “Die AnfängechristlicherTheologie,” ZThK 57 (1960), pp. 162-85. Published in English in Journal for Theology and Church 6, Robert W. Funk, ed. (New York, 1969), pp. 17-46.
[55]I have argued this extensively in “The Reclamation of Paul: The Orthodox Critique of Marcion’s Paulinism,” in Marcion (1984), pp, 233-280 and “How Then Know This Troublous Teacher?” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6.3 (Oxford: 1987-1988), 173-191. On the dating of Luke Acts: I follow F. C. Baur’s placement of Acts and canonical Luke in the second century. A solid and objective assessment is given in Tyson, “The Date of Acts” (2006, pp. 1-11). The following stages of development seem clear: The prototype of the text, already established, originating in Marcion’s circle as an anonymous composition ca. 100; (b) the intercalation of sayings- traditions (Q), independently of Matthew’s use of the same tradition; (c) a second century “Lukan” redaction, including the dedication, an infancy story, editorial additions (e.g., temple-finding) an expanded resurrection account, and ascension story carried over into a still later composition, the Acts.
[56] Thucydides’ disclaimer concerning the accuracy of the speech he attributed to others, such as Pericles, is apt: “In all cases it is difficult to carry them word for word in one’s memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions” (History of the Peloponnesian Wars, 1.22.1)
[57] John Fenton and E. A. Livingstone, Controversy in the New Testament.
Studia Biblica, 3 (1980) 97 – 110.
[58]On the divine man concept, see especially Aage Pilgaard, “The Hellenistic Theios aner: A Model for Early Christian Christology” in The New Testament and Hellenistic Judaism, ed. P. Borden (Aarhus, 1995), 101-112.
[59] The phrase “Jesus Christ” occurs only in the jesuine discourse at John 17.3 and at the conclusion of the prologue, John 1.17.
[60] Calvin J. Roetzel “Paul in the Second Century.” The Cambridge Companion to St Paul, ed. James D. G. Dunn (Cambridge University Press, 2003).Cambridge; less satisfactory, M. Bird and J. R. Dodson, eds., Paul and the Second Century (London: T& Clark, 2011).
[61] Van Ranke, Geschichte der romanischen und germanischenVölker von 1494 bis 1514 (History of the Roman and Germanic Peoples from 1494 to 1514, 1824) and Peter Gay and Victor G. Wexler, eds. Historians at Work (1975) vol. 3, pp 27-29.
[62] Theodor Mommsen, A History of Rome (London: Routledge, 1996)
[63] Ranke, “Preface: Histories of the Latin and Germanic Nations from 1494-1514“, in Stern, The Varieties of History (New York: Vintage, 1973), p.57
[64] John S Kloppenborg, The Formation of Q: Trajectories in Ancient Wisdom Collections (Trinity Press, 2000), pp. 3-5. This is not Koppenborg’s best performance but his assay of the reticence of New Testament scholars to take on the task of genre criticism is brief and precise.
[65] Charles Talbert, What is a Gospel? (Atlanta, 1984), provides a general survey of speculation concerning the genre of the gospels; see especially “Compositional Procedure and Attitude in Ancient Biographies,” pp, 124-8.
[66]The Christological discussions within Gustav Aulen’s Christus Victor (1969; rept, Wipf and Stock, 2003) are still instructive. See also Gerald Collins, Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus (Oxford, 2009)
[67] The Messianic secret as describe by Wrede and his successors explains only a fraction of the ambiguity generated by Mark’s technique; the idea that it was a theologico-literary device was based largely on an examination of references within the gospel. See also A. Schweitzer, The Mystery of the Kingdom of God: The Secret of Jesus’ Messiahship and Passion (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2001 [rpt. Of 1900 ET]) The Marcionite tradition on the other hand, perhaps driven by Marcion’s adulation of Paul and his conflict with the “twelve,” regarded the apostles as fundamentally ignorant, and explained the injunctions to silence as corrections of a “false witness.”Discussion in Hoffmann, Marcion (1984), pp. 75-83.
[68] The plummeting fortunes of the “messianic secret” since Wrede (1901) as an explanation for the secrecy motif in Mark and the synoptics is reviewed by James L. Blevins, The Messianic Secret in Markan Research, 1901–1976. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1981. There is however nothing to be said for the idea that the theme is cognate to the secrets in the mystery cults since the central mimetic action of the gospels, the Lord’s last supper, is regarded as corporate, public and repeatable and no correlation exists or is asserted between the teaching of Jesus and this ritual act. Moreover, the parables are formally pedagogical not esoteric: their meaning is only “hidden” from the blind (unrepentant, unbelievers) who are equated with the wise of the world.
[69] Gerd Lüdemann, The Resurrection of Jesus: History, Experience, Theology, John Bowden, trans. (London: SCM, 1994). An interesting conservative position is outlined by N. T. Wright, using Bultmann’s view that crucifixion and resurrection were not understood separately in the early community; see “The Resurrection of Jesus as an Historical Problem,” Sewanee Theological Review 41.2, 1998.
[70] A favorite debating topic in free-thought circles, a typical view is set down in a lecture transcript by Richard Carrier at http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/resurrection/lecture.html, “Why I Don’t Buy the Resurrection,” retrieved 5 May 2012.
[71] An interesting attempt, though finally unsuccessful, to examine the resurrection against the presuppositions of modern critical historiography is Richard R. Niebuhr’s The Resurrection and Historical Reason (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957). The penchant of some mythicizers to re-litigate the resurrection narratives is one of the most trying parts of their agenda. Both biblical scholarship and academic theology has long come to terms with the legendary components of the resurrection tradition; see especially Helmut Koester, Introduction to the New Testament, ii,: History and Literature of Early Christianity (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000) p. 64-65 and James D.G. Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit: A Study of the Religious and Charismatic Experience of Jesus and the First Christians as Reflected in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997). Besides these careful studies there are a number of attempts to discredit the accounts in the form of counter apologetics: see especially Robert Price, The Empty Tomb (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005).
[72] The suggestion dates from the dispute between D. F. Strauss’s idea that the gospels were composed by the “half conscious mythic tendencies” of naïve religious writers to Bruno Bauer’s more radical view in Christus und die Cäsaren (1877) that “communities do not write literature”; hence Bauer eventually came to believe that the first gospel writer, Mark, invented Jesus as a complete fiction. See on the evolution of his ideas, D. Moggach, The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
[73] R. Joseph Hoffmann, “William Henry Furness and the Transcendentalist Defense of the Gospels,” New England Quarterly, 56 (1983), 238-6
[74]Mircea Eliade, on the phenomenological side explores this level of meaning in Myth and Reality (Waveland, 1998); in anthropology, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth by Walter Burkert and Peter Bing (1986); and in cultural studies, René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (Stanford, 1987).
[75]Maurice Wiles, The Spiritual Gospel: The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel in the Early Church (Cambridge, 2006).
[76] Clement of Alexandria (ca. 215-6): “the tradition of the old presbyters”, that the Apostle John, the last of the Evangelists, “filled with the Holy Ghost, had written a spiritual Gospel” (Eusebius, HE 6.14.7)
[77]Kyle Keefer, Branches of the Gospel of John: The Reception of the Fourth Gospel in the Early Church (Library Of New Testament Studies: Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2009), drawing largely from Hans Robert Jauss’s theory of Rezeptionsaesthetik.
[78] As Henry Wansbrough says: “Gone are the days when it was scholarly orthodoxy to maintain that John was the least reliable of the gospels historically.” The Four Gospels in Synopsis, The Oxford Bible Commentary, pp. 1012-1013, Oxford University Press 2001; and see Douglas Estes, The Temporal Mechanics of the Fourth Gospel: A Theory of Hermeneutical Relativity in the Gospel of John, BIS 92 (Leiden: Brill, 2008).
[79]Harnack regarded this mutation, which he saw as the genesis of dogma, as the “acute Hellenization of Christianity,” (History of Dogma, vol. 1, trans. Neil Buchanan [Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1902], 48ff.) an opinion that while imperfect as stated expressed the vulnerability of history to increasingly esoteric formulations of the significance and identity of Jesus. Karen King’s discussion of the morphology of Gnosticism is also relevant: “Adolph von Harnack and the Acute Hellenization of Christianity,” in What is Gnosticism? (Harvard, 2005), esp. 55-109.
[80] An example of the usage is Paula Frederiksen’s From Jesus to Christ (Yale, 2000); the model has been taken over almost uncritically from New Testament theology (Martin Kähler, 1900) and the attempt to separate the “Christ of faith” from the “Jesus of history,” is a separation not dictated by the sources but by a theological program arising from critical scholarship. The fundamental flaw is the notion of a linear progression from data to corruption of data. In fact, the traditions from the start were preserved within specific controversial and interpretative contexts reflecting struggles with communities, regional perspectives, ethical and practical conflicts (e.g., marriage and divorce) and social identity. If Gnosticism was the greatest conceptual threat to historical tradition, it does not follow that historical tradition was unmarked by other challenges.
[81]Edward Adams and D.G. Horell, Christianity at Corinth: The Quest for the Pauline Church (Westminster, 2004) brings together some of the scholarship of the last fifty years; C. K. Barrett’s 1964 study, Christianity at Corinth, is still useful; and on social demarcations, Gerd Theissen’s pioneering studies gathered in The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity: Essays on Corinth (Wipf and Stock, 2004), edited by John Schütz, is indispensable.
[82] “Hymn of the Pearl,” from the Acts of Thomas in Wilhelm Schneemelcher, ed., translation by R. McL. Wilson, New Testament Apocrypha : Writings Relating to the Apostles, Apocalypses and Related Subjects (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1992), pp. 322-411. Trans. by R. J Hoffmann, The Secret Gospels: A Harmony of the Apocryphal Jesus Traditions (Amherst, 1996), pp, 191-194.
[83] The Anatolian matrix has not received the attention it deserves; it is surveyed in Marcion, pp, 1-28. Not only Paul comes from the region, but Marcion, Polycarp and Irenaeus (from Polycarp’s hometown of Smyrna in Asia Minor, (now Izmir, Turkey) where a variety of non-gnostic dualistic cults thrived.
[84]1 Cor. 15.50: ???t? d? f?µ?, ?de?f??, ?t? s??? ?a? a?µa ßas??e?a? ?e?? ???????µ?sa? ?? d??ata? ??d? ? f???? t?? ?f?a?s?a? ???????µe?.
[85]A credible recent survey is the study by John Painter, Just James: The Brother of Jesus in History and Tradition (SPNT; Columbia, SC: Univ. of South Carolina, 2004), especially as it concerns his critique of Robert Eisenman’s ingenious but unconvincing identification of James with the Qumran teacher of Righteousness. Puzzlingly, Hegesippus (d. 180?) Comm. 5.1, “After the apostles, James the brother of the Lord surnamed the Just was made head of the Church at Jerusalem.” I consider the “James” and “Mary” traditions instances of doublets that were unsatisfactorily resolved by the compilers, both between the gospels and between the letters of Paul and the Book of Acts. (On the multiple-Mary problem, especially see Jesus outside the Gospels, pp. 41-50). It seems clear that apologetic tendencies govern this confusion. The external evidence is unhelpful and unreliable, causing the difficulty of determining which James is in view, as well as the possibility of pseudonymity and redactional stages, rendering any discussion of the name untidy: James the (obscure) father of Judas (Luke 6:16; Acts 1:13); James the son of Alphaeus (Matt. 10:3; Mark 3:18; 15:40 [here called James the Younger]; Luke 6:15; Acts 1:13); James the son of Zebedee and brother of John (Matt. 4:21; 10:2; 17:1; Mark 1:19, 29; 3:17; 10:35; 13:3; Luke 9:28; Acts 1:13; 12:2); James the Lord’s brother (Matt. 13:55; Mark 6:3; Gal. 1:19; called [?] simply James in Acts: 12:17; 15:13; 21:18; and in 1 Cor. 15:7), mentioned only twice by name in the Gospels (Matt. 13:55; Mark 6:3). Hegessipus’ conclusions however must be read back into the tradition to secure the identity of James as head of the Jerusalem church as Luke asserts. See also my online comments on the topic, “Faccidents: Bad Assumptions and the Jesus Tomb Debacle,” Butterflies and Wheels 7 March 2007, at http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2007/faccidents-bad-assumptions-and-the-jesus-tomb-debacle/ retrieved 7 May 2012. Since 2007 I have come to see Galatians 1, 18-20 as more problematical. While clearly reflecting a key element in the opponents tradition, it seems that 1.16 is in apposition to 1.18-19 as a list of the hyperlian apostoloi, though Paul does not use the language of 2 Corinthians 11.15//12.11; using instead phrases that imply historical priority (p??? t??? p?? ?µ?? ?p?st?????); for that reason, it is entirely possible that the phrase ton adelphos tou kyriou applied to James in Galatians 1.19 is meant to suggest biological relationship and as a term to distinguish James from the dishonesty (Gal 211-13) of Cephas. Rhetorically, in this section, Paul uses himself and Barnabas as a paradigm of faithful preaching of a gospel to the detriment of Peter, James and John (Gal 2.9), who merely “seem to be pillars”: ????ß?? ?a? ??f?? ?a? ???????, ?? d?????te? st???? e??a? de???? ?d??a? (i.e., of significance). Accordingly, the possibility that Paul is asserting biological relationship between James and “the Lord” in this passage between James and Jesus cannot be ruled out, since he is ridiculing the pretensions of the “reputed pillars,” not affecting to be inclusive.
[86] 1 Cor. 12.27; cf. 1.2; Rom. 12.5.
[87]Acts 1.13-14; Acts 12:17; Acts 15:13–21; Acts 21:17–18; cf Gal 1.18-20; 2.9-10, 12; 15-3-7; 1 Corinthians 9,5): Usually disjunctive as in 12.17, ?pa??e??ate ?a??ß? ?a? t??? ?de?f??? ta?ta. (“Tell these things to James, and to the brothers…”) and at 21.17, adelphoi is inapposite to presbyteroi as being believers of different rank.
[88] Arthur Drews, The Christ Myth, trans. C.D. Burns (London, 1910), pp. 172-174.
[89] Drews gives the source of his assessment the work of Dutch radical theologians, followed by Schlaeger in his “Das Wort kurios (Herr) in Seiner Bezeichnung auf Gott oder Jesus Christus,” Theol. Tijdschrift 33 (1899) 1. According to Schlaeger, cited by Drews, however, all passages including this one “which speak of Jesus as Lord” are interpolated!
[90] Mk 3.31, Matt. 12.46; Lk 8.19; Jn 2.12, 7.3, 5, 10
[91] One mythicist confidently says after missing this simple grammatical point that “Brothers in the Lord” (ton adelphon en kurio) appears in Philippians 1:14 (the NEB translates it ‘our fellow-Christians’). Surely this is the clue to the meaning of the phrase applied to James.” Earl Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle website http://jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/rfset3.htm (retrieved 10 May 2012)
[92] I do not believe that Paul’s “cosmic” view of salvation presupposes any specific knowledge of the birth or life of Jesus; however, it is unwarranted to deprive Paul of those passages where a historic tradition may be implied based on the prior assumption that he did not now any! Gal 4.4; 1 Cor. 11.23-26; 1 Thess. 4.15 etc. The agreed conclusion that Paul did not write everything attributed to him does not translate into the principle that everything attributed to Paul was written by someone else.
[93]Tertullian, Adv. Marc. 5.4; see Tyson, Marcion and Luke-Acts, p. 38.
[94] Cf. 2 Cor. 11-12; Considerable work has been done on the question by S. J. Porter,detailed in Identifying Paul’s Opponents, The Question of Method in 2 Corinthians (JSNT Supp, 40; Sheffield, 1990), 15-67 and Paul and His Opponents (Leiden: Brill, 2005). See my “The Pauline Background of Marcion’s Reform,” in Marcion (1984), esp. pp. 75-97.
[95] But see John 8:37-39; 44-47
[96] The legend of the ascension appears in the two Lukan compositions and as an addition to Mark (16.19). It is formally a legendary accretion, an apotheosis. It does not reflect a prevenient myth in the way, for example, that John’s prologue does. See on the topic generally Arthur E. R. Boak, “The Theoretical Basis of the Deification of Rulers in Antiquity”, in Classical Journal, 11 ( 1916), pp. 293–297. It is interesting that since earliest times the ascension has been formally less compelling even as a matter of devotion than the core legend, that of the resurrection, suggesting that belief in the former was neither as widespread nor as devotionally central to the communities, and may have been entirely lacking in many regions. The church tradition of The “Golden Legend” linked the ascension, even in terms of chronology (forty days according to Luke) to resurrection as a “certification.”
[97] The relevance of the Jewish apocalypses for the study of the gospels, especially Mark 13 and Matthew 24, has been settled for over a century; the classic study remains F C Burkitt’s 1913 Schweich Lectures, Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (London: British Academy, 1913).
[98] On the historical background of the arraignment and trial, see Gary Greenburg, The Judas Brief: Who Really Killed Jesus (Continuum, 2007), pp. 168-179.
[99]Generally speaking, as anthropologists and students of religion came to take a more impartial view of the world, it was recognized that certain Christian stories shared many of the features of myth, and could be called myths as long as the idea that a myth was necessarily false was shed. This is the point d’appui for Bultmann’s program of demythologizing. While a myth gives a religious explanation for “how things began” or “why they are as they are,” a legend is a story which may or may not be an elaborated version of an historical event, but is told as if it were a historical event, usually without allegorical or symbolic intent. See Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903; rpt. University of Toronto Press, 2011).
[100] Raymond Brown, for example: “Mark 5:1, 13 betrays confusion about the distance of Gerasa from the sea of Galilee Mark. 7:31 describes a journey from Tyre through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee in the midst of the Decapolis. In fact one goes SE from Tyre to the Sea of Galilee; Sidon is north of Tyre, and the description of the Sea of Galilee in the midst of the Decapolis is awkward. That a boat headed for Bethsaida (NE side of the Sea of Galilee) arrives at Gennesaret (NW side: 6:45,53) may also signal confusion. No one has been able to locate the Dalmanutha of 8:10, and it may be a corruption of Magdala,” Christ in the Gospels (Liturgical Press, 2008), p. 369)
[101] See Michael Grant, Greek and Roman Historians: Information and Misinformation, (Psychology Press, 1995), commenting that the ancient historians not only made mistakes but “rather too many of them. … Individual elements of the tradition were conflated, modified and sometimes invented.” (p. 83).
Jonas Grethlein, Time and Narrative in Ancient Historiography (Cambridge [scheduled],2012), on the use of the plupast as an historical technique; A.H. Merrils, History and Geography in Late Antiquity (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Fourth Series, 2005) on the use of classical description and authority; E T Merrill, “On certain ancient errors in geographical orientations,” Classical Journal (1966), 88-101.
[102] The view that myth serves a religious purpose has been challenged by a number of scholars; the most pertinent orientation for exploration of the use of myth comes from writers such as Alan Dundes; see “Binary Opposition in Myth: The Propp/Levi-Strauss Debate in Retrospect,” Western Folklore 56 (Winter, 1997), 39–50; for the concept as employed by phenomenologists and religionists, M. Eliade, Myths, Rites, Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader, ed. Wendell C. Beane and William G. Doty, vol. 2. (New York: Harper & Row, 1976) and Myth and Reality, trans. Willard R. Trask (NY: Harper & Row, 1968); also see G. S. Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and Function in Ancient and Other Cultures. Berkeley: Cambridge UP, 1973, which makes the contemporary case that the category of myth extends beyond religion and sacred story.
[103] See my introduction to The Secret Gospels (1996), pp. 4-28. Harnack wrote in 1900, “Sixty years ago David Friederich Strauss thought that he had destroyed the historical credibility not only of the fourth gospel but of the first three as well. The historical criticism of two generations has succeeded in restoring that credibility in its main outlines… What especially marks them off from all subsequent literature is the way in which they state their facts. This species of literary art, which took shape partly by analogy with the didactic narratives of the Jews and partly from catechetical necessities—this simple and impressive form of exposition was even a few decades later no longer capable of exact reproduction….When all is said and done, the Greek language lies upon these writings like a diaphanous veil and it requires hardly any effort to retranslate their contents into Hebrew or Aramaic. That the tradition here presented to us is in the main first hand is obvious.” (What is Christianity? (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, rpt. ed, of the original English translation by T.N. Saunders, 1957), pp 20-21.
[104]Michael Bird and Joseph Dodson, eds., Paul and the Second century (London: T&T Clark, 2011); on the usefulness of apocryphal compositions such as the Acts of Paul, see especially Andrew Gregory’s essay, pp. 169-188. On the other hand, a disappointing contribution from Todd Still, “Shadow and Light, Marcion’s (Mis)construal of the Apostle Paul,” shows none of the historiographical sophistication needed to cope with the patristic evidence.
[105]In general the comments of James D.G. Dunn distinguishing pseudonymity as a literary tradition with closer resemblance to classical imitation than to forgery are useful: See The Living Word (Philadelphia, 2009), pp. 53-56.
[106] References to “Jewish myths” (Titus 1:14), “myths and endless genealogies” (1 Tim 1:4, see 4:7), “what is falsely called knowledge” (1 Tim 6:20), the necessity of ascetic practices (1 Tim 4:3) and the denial of the resurrection (2 Tim 2:18) are interpreted in light of second-century Gnostic beliefs and as evidence of it.
[107] Polycarp, Phil. 7.1; cf. Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 3.3.4
[108] On the origin of heresy, see Irenaeus Adv. Haer. 2.14.1 and Tertullian, Praescrptio, 7; 29-31.
[109] “The mighty Word and true Man reasonably redeeming us by His blood, gave Himself a ransom for those who had been brought into bondage. And since the Apostasy unjustly ruled over us, and, whereas we belonged by nature to God Almighty, alienated us against nature and made us his own disciples, the Word of God, being mighty in all things, and failing not in His justice, dealt justly even with the Apostasy itself, buying back from it the things which were His own” (Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 5.1.1)
[110] Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston” Beacon, 2001), pp. 189-199.
[111]“The Gnostic Gospels According to Pagels,” America, 16 Feb. 1980, 123.)
[112]Part of the confusion was propagated because of the belief that Marcion’s liberal church policies, castigated by Tertullian, were “Gnostic in character and that these policies therefore were typical of the heretical communities in general; see my critique, “De Statu Feminarum: The Correlation Between Gnostic Theory and Social Practice,” Église et Théologie 14 (1983), 293-304; and ‘The “Eucharist” of Markus Magus: A Test-Case in Gnostic Social Theory,” Patristic and Byzantine Review 3 (1984) 82-88; Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (Vintage, 1989), pp, 2-18. This popular introduction performed the useful service of alerting ordinary readers to the existence of the Gnostic sources from Nag Hammadi. In retrospect, however, the claims made on behalf of the gospels were extreme, especially as regards the “probative” value of Gnostic Thomas (GnTh) for “Q” See Maurice Casey, An Aramaic Approach to Q (Cambridge, 2005), p. 33. In her discussions, moreover, Pagels seemed to regard the nascent orthodoxy of Irenaeus as an episcopal prerogative exercised against beleaguered and misunderstood heretics, which is at best a liberal description of the conflict between aggressive mythicizers and defenders of historical tradition. See “One God One Bishop,” pp, 28-47. Also, H. Koester, and Thomas Lambdin (translators), (1996). “The Gospel of Thomas” in James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English (Revised ed.) (Leiden, New York, Cologne: E. J. Brill 1996), p. 125; Hoffmann, Jesus Outside the Gospels (New York: Prometheus, 1987), p, 86-88.
[113] Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 3.11.1; 3.3.4
[114]It is notable that Eusebius, in spite of his desire to discredit Papias, still places him as early as the reign of Trajan (A.D. 98-117). See W. Schoedel, Anchor-Yale Bible, vol, 5 (Doubleday-Anchor, 1992), 140-143.
[115]1 Tim. 1.4
[116] John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library, 1991-2001, volume 3 (2001). The studies of the social matrix of radical opposition to Roman rule and such topics as banditry and religious radicalism are numerous; see among others J. Massyngbaerde Ford, My Enemy Is My Guest: Jesus and Violence in Luke (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1984); Walter Grundmann, “Kakos, akakos, kakia, … .” TDNT 3:469–487; E J Hobsbawm, Bandits (New York: Dell, 1969) and Primitive Rebels (New York: Norton, 1965); William Horbury, “Ancient Jewish Banditry and the Revolt Against Rome, AD 66–70,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 43 (1981), 409–432 and “Bandits, Messiahs and Longshoremen: Popular Unrest in Galilee Around the Time of Jesus.” Social World of Formative Christianity and Judaism. Edited by J. Neusner. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press), 1988, 50–68; “Christ as Brigand in Anti–Christian Polemic.” Jesus and the Politics of His Day, ed. by Ernst Bammel and C.F.D. Moule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 183–196;“The Zealots: Their Origin, Relationships and Importance in the Jewish Revolt.” Novum Testamentum 28, no. 2 (1986): 159–192; William Horbury, and John S. Hanson, Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs: Popular Movements in the Time of Jesus (New York: Winston Press, 1985); Jesus and the Spiral of Violence: Popular Jewish Resistance in Roman Palestine (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993).
[117] The difficulty of establishing an archaeological record for “Nazareth” has been noted since the time of Guignebert (Jesus, 1933/ET 1956, p. 76f.).
[118] Shawn Carruth, James M. Robinson,“Q 4:1-13,16: The Temptations of Jesus : Nazara,” ed. Chris Heil (Peeters Publishers, 1966), p. 415.
[119] Y. Alexandre, “Archaeological Excavations at Mary’s Well, Nazareth,” Israel Antiquities Authority bulletin, May 1, 2006
[120] The Archaeology of the New Testament, Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1992: pages 44-46. Attempts of controversialists like Rene Salm to suggest that Nazareth was not an occupied location in the time of Jesus have now been persuasively discredited by recent excavations of Israeli archaeologists led by Yardena Alexandre. The dwellings and older discoveries of nearby tombs in burial caves suggest that Nazareth was an out-of-the-way hamlet of around 50 houses on a patch of about four acres. See further, Ken Dark, “Review of The Myth of Nazareth: The Invented Town of Jesus“, STRATA: Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society, vol. 26 (2008), pp. 140–146; cf. Stephen J. Pfann & Yehudah Rapuano, “On the Nazareth Village Farm Report: A Reply to Salm”, STRATA: Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society, vol. 26 (2008), pp. 105–112.
[121] ?a?a???e (“Nazarene”) and its variants are at Mk. 1:24; 10:47; 14:67; 16:6; Lk 4:34 and 24:19. ?a???a??c (“Nazoraean”) and its permutations are at Mt 2:23; 26:71; Lk 18:37; Jn 18:5, 7; 19:19; and six times in the Acts of the Apostles. “Q certainly contained reference to Nazara,” cited in J. M. Robinson et al, The Critical Edition of Q. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2000), pp. 42-43; F. C. Burkitt, “The Syriac forms of New Testament names,” in Proceedings of the British Academy, (Oxford, 1911), p. 392.
[122] See Thedor Mommsen’s edition, Res gestae Divi Augusti ex monumentis Ancyrano et Apolloniensi. Berlin: Weidmann, 1865)
[123] W.K.C. Guthrie’s survey History of Greek Philosophy (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 74-77. The scene is properly a foundation myth for Plato’s academic cult and functions in approximately the same way as the crucifixion scenario in the gospels; see J. Barret “Plato’s Apology: Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the World of Myth,” The Classical World, 95:1 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 3-30
[124] See my discussion in the reprint of K. Jaspers and R. Bultmann, Myth and Christianity: An Inquiry into the Possibility of Religion without Myth (Amherst, 2005), 9-22, which also provides a summary of major trajectories in the myth theory.
[125] A still fascinating look at the early twentieth century reaction to mythicism is Maurice Goguel’s essay, “Recent French Discussion of the Historical Existence of Jesus Christ,” Harvard Theological Review, 19.2 (1926), 115-142.
[126] Carlo Ginzberg, History, Rhetoric, and Proof (The Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures; Brandeis, 1999), pp. 54-71.
[127]The image is Harnack’s favourite: What is Christianity? (rpt of 1901 edition; Martino, 2011), pp. 12, 15, 55, 179, 217.
[128]See the discussion by W. Wildmann, Boston University Collaborative Encyclopedia, “Alfred Losiy and Adolph von Harnack” http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/bce/loisy.htm retrieved 15 April 2012.
[129] Tertullian de carne Christi (Trans. Evans, Oxford, 1956), 9.39.
[130] Hermann Detering, The Falsified Paul, Early Christianity in the Twilight (Journal of Higher Criticism, 2003); and see J. Murphy O’Connor, Paul, A Critical Life (Clarendon, 1996).
[131] “Book Editing: Killing Characters With Mark Twain’s Deadly Well”(12 January 2102); http://www.deborahteramischristian.com/writing/mark-twain-editing-books/ retrieved 5 May 2012.
[132] I do not deal in this essay with the conundrum of multiple Jameses and the redactional gymnastics that have brought them into existence. Dealing only with Paul’s letter to Galatia, it is my view that the James referred to in Galatians 1.18 and the brother referred to in Mark 6.3 represent the earliest strand in the literary tradition. The allusion in 1 Corinthians 15.7 (cf. 5) is a doublet, perhaps representing two different versions of the letter, or two different resurrection traditions, one associated with Peter and the twelve, the other attached to James and the apostles.
[133] See my extensive discussion in Marcion, 101-133,
[134] See note 2, above.
[135] See J. K Elliott, ed., The Apocryphal New Testament A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation (Oxford 2005) and introduction to The Secret Gospels, ed. R. J. Hoffmann (Amherst, 1996).
___________________________
Share this:
Facebook6
Twitter1
Email
StumbleUpon
Digg
Reddit
Print
Like this:
?
Published: May 22, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: Biblical studies : early Christianity : historical jesus : incompetence : internet scholars : Jesus myth : myth theory : mythicism : New Testament ..
64 Responses to “The Jesus Process: A Consultation on the Historical Jesus”
.
THE JESUS PROCESS (c) « The New Oxonian says:
May 22, 2012 at 7:32 am
[...] R. Joseph Hoffmann, “Controversy, Mythicism, and the Historical Jesus” [...]
Reply
The Jesus Process on The New Oxonian | Ge??aµµ??a says:
May 22, 2012 at 12:08 pm
[...] R. Joseph Hoffmann, “Controversy, Mythicism, and the Historical Jesus.” [...]
Reply
Antonio Jerez
May 22, 2012 at 5:46 pm
Excellent essay, Joseph! Yes, the mythicists still have a lot of explaining to do as to why the traditions in the canonical gospels didn´t fly around wildly. And Goguels´s argument against the mythicists of his day is just as valid against modern charlatans like Carrier.
Reply
chazpres
May 22, 2012 at 9:38 pm
Wow! This is really outstanding. Thoughtful, well written and attested. Thank you.
Reply
neodecaussade
May 22, 2012 at 10:21 pm
Reblogged this on Neodecaussade’s Weblog and commented:
Happy to pass along this information.
Reply
alnitak
May 23, 2012 at 12:25 am
I must say that this essay is a pleasant contrast to the other two essays; by all means let us reason together about the issue, rather than casting aspersion on those who disagree-and that goes for everyone involved.
It does seem difficult to create the Jesus of theology from the record described here. To say that an “ordinary” prophet passed through Galilee and died in Jerusalem hardly seems like the story that the church put forward about the very son of the very god. If this is the Jesus who existed, is he enough to fill the role of the Jesus expected by the Christian churches?
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 23, 2012 at 9:34 am
@Jim: But Jim I think we need to distinguish what the church writers did with the gospels and the gospels; the mythicizers actually are the first to fail in making this distinction by bundling later doctrine together with earliest story.
Reply
Grog
May 24, 2012 at 1:56 am
What is “earliest story”?
rjosephhoffmann
May 24, 2012 at 7:26 am
It is a phrase. You can call it kerygma if you want. I don’t much like the term. Do you need kerygma defined or can you work it out in relation to the phrase?
Blood
May 23, 2012 at 12:43 am
Dr. Hoffmann, thank you for this well reasoned piece. I did disagree with this part: “For the most part, the gospels (unlike the Book of Genesis) fail as myth because they fail to explain anything.” It seems to me that the gospel myth was conceived as a method of trying to explain or justify why Gentiles were using Hebrew Scriptures sans Jewish authority. It unfolded against a backdrop of generations of Greek-speaking Gentiles embracing monotheism and using the Septuagint, in churches that probably included ex-converts and ex-God-fearers leading the ekklesia. The gospels are preoccupied with dehumanizing Jews, whose leaders’ main function in the story is plotting to kill “The Son of God” from a very young age. Mark is certainly a Gentile writer with an axe to grind, as I suspect are all of the other gospel writers as well, including the supposedly Jewish Matthew. So while Jesus may have been a historical figure, I have no faith that the evangelists had any interest in preserving authentic traditions that might have existed about him. Rather, they seem to have exploited them for purposes completely antithetical to what a Galilean apocalypticist said or stood for, namely, a Jewish religion without any ethnic Jews.
Reply
Ben Schuldt
May 23, 2012 at 2:34 am
Subscribing.
Reply
stephanie louise fisher
May 23, 2012 at 7:45 pm
Ethical Society? Responsible public debate. I think that’s quite ironic don’t you? And hypocritical too, when you have accused the author repeatedly of being a “fucking liar” on Carrier’s posts. Do you ever look in the moirror? I’m sure you do Benzie….
Reply
Manoj Joseph
May 23, 2012 at 4:34 pm
Hoffmann says:
“Book I of Livy’s History[30] does not prove the story of Romulus, or
the ruse used against the Sabines, even though he believes it to be
factually solid; yet no one doubts the existence of Rome or Augustus,”
…
If the very existence of ancient Rome or Augustus is known to us
through “Book I of Livy’s History” and very little else, then the
comparison with the historical Jesus scenario might have been apt. But
that isn’t the case, is it?
Perhaps a better comparison would have been to say “Book I of Livy’s
History[30] does not prove the story of Romulus even though he
believes it to be factually solid; yet no one doubts the existence of
Romulus.” Oh wait, that doesn’t sound right!
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 23, 2012 at 5:30 pm
No: I said what I meant: Livy’s credulity is typical of much ancient history writing. I think I know what you were going for but your sentence doesn’t get you there.
Reply
Samuel
May 24, 2012 at 1:46 am
Absolutely amazing. Thank you for writing this Mr.Hoffmann
Reply
Ananda
May 24, 2012 at 9:14 am
Greetings Joseph,
How is your historical Jesus similar and different from Bart’s?
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 24, 2012 at 9:25 am
Ehrman’s book is for popular consumption. I’ll eventually review it in N.O.; but it should be clear from my not even alluding to it that the Jesus Process is not about Bart Ehrman. But to tantalize you: we would not see eye to eye either about how one can derive the evidence for HJ nor about what, of substance, we can know about him.
Reply
brettongarcia
May 26, 2012 at 11:16 am
Hoffmann:
Do you feel that your essay goes beyond mere erudite speculation, to finally describe the exact facts of the case?
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 26, 2012 at 12:01 pm
@ Garcia: Garcia: If I knew what “the exact facts of the case were” speculation erudite or other would not be needed.
Reply
Brettongarcia
May 26, 2012 at 7:34 pm
Isn’t there a kind of logical circularity in arguing (in spite of occasional objections and caveats) that the “Jesus” of the Bible, more or less, is true – while allowing/ primarily presenting only Bible quotes, as the only acceptable evidence for or against this? (While at times ignoring “external” scientific evidence against miracles, and so forth?).
Isn’t a “Biblical” approach to historical Jesus, really begging the question? Which is … does the Bible itself (and its view of God) have any validity?
If there is no Jesus, then the Bible that presents Him, has no validity in an argument for or against him. Or if the Bible itself is largely unreliable, then citing it as evidence for much anything at all, seems like a flawed methodology.
So that? The real argument should be: is the Bible absolutely true, or not? And if not? Then why continue to use it as your primary source for evidence for or against Jesus?
This is no doubt one of the reasons that Historians like Carrier, would like to develop a still more critical approach to the Bible itself; including a probabilistic approach to it, and to religious assertions in general. While finally stressing other authorities entirely, than the Bible.
Of course, I’m aware of several possible standard Historicist responses to this objection. That say, PARTS of the Bible might seem to correlate to History; so that at last a part of Jesus can be said to be “historical.” But considering the masses of evidence of inconsistency, textual invention and alteration and simple fraud in so much of the Bible, isn’t the Biblical approach to Jesus, inevitably fated? Doesn’t it rest far too much, on quoting a highly unreliable source?
So that? If Mythicists are lacking some scholarly knowledge of the Bible itself? That in itself, would not be such a serious flaw, as more traditional bibliocentric or religious scholars might think. Perhaps they have other, more relevant knowledge; of mythic systems in general, for instance. Or a fuller knowledge say, of statistics, and so forth.
To ignore other relevant fields of study, and to insist that the battle must be fought entirely on the traditional turf of Biblical criticism and belief – by way of primarily, Biblical quotes – is finally, circular. And is logically a form of begging the question.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 27, 2012 at 10:44 am
@Garcia: “That say, PARTS of the Bible might seem to correlate to History…” This is the central fallible issue with your argument: Do you mean that some things in the Bible happened and some things in the Bible didn’t and others didn’t happen as described–and the things that didn’t nullify the whole? Is this not the same thing as reifying history as the domain of objective fact, and then expecting the Bible to “correlate to it”–as one domain to another. The reason it cannot work that way is that the “domain” we call history (if you use a standard definition of that domain to mean What really happened in the past?) is constructed from all kinds of pieces; in the case of ancient Near Eastern history, for example, is partly constructed from the Bible and partly from what is learned outside it from other sources, e.g, the story of the Exodus gives us one view of the Hebrew experience in Egypt, the 3rd century BCE writer Manetho gives us a very different view. Neither source is perfectly “reliable” in the way sources of later periods might b—e..g, if the “plagues” or the Exodus hd been recorded by Pathe films. To use a slightly later example: Some people who called themselves or were called son of God in antiquity were historical figures, and some weren’t: What form of the “title” is being applied to Jesus? What permits us to say so? Neither the mythicist nor the fundamentalist Xn position adequately accounts for the complexity of the task of interpreting a positive welter of complex information–and slapping probability on the unsorted mess, working from premises that range–as far as I can judge– from feeble to absurd, is not the way to do business. Let me change your last sentence: So that? If young earth theorists are lacking some scholarly knowledge of geology… That in itself, would not be such a serious flaw, …Perhaps they have other, more relevant knowledge in general, for instance. Or a fuller knowledge say, of statistics, and so forth…” I know it is difficult for you to accept that not anyone with half a brain can do the kind of technical history I am talking about, but day by day and comment by comment the mythicists lining up on the Jesus-denial side of this discussion are proving their incompetence–even to accept minor correction. I said in my own article that mythicism is not a scholarly position worth taking seriously any longer but a dogma in search of footnotes. One final comment: Do you really think that Biblical scholars don’t know the “myths” you claim other have more knowledge of? For the most part, it was early 19th century bibclal scholars and archaeologists who discovered them!
Reply
brettongarcia
May 27, 2012 at 12:48 pm
It is true that there are many different perspectives on “reality,” including especially historical reality: 1) the Bible, the 2) Greek and Roman writings, the 3) findings of Science, 4) the perspectives of secular History, all offer useful information here, But if so, then why favor the Bible itself, so heavily? Suppose we try to keep ALL the major perspectives on ancient reality open; to see if the different perspectives correspond at any points, and in effect triangulate certain items.
Keeping this interdisciplinary method in mind, suppose we recall especially the great accomplishments/fruitfulness of, say, science. And say favor the fingings of science, against say, the Biblical assertion of miracles. Or suppose we consider secular History as another perspective. In that case, using these two perspectives, it seems to many that a major portion of the Bible – its promises of miracles – collapses.
If major portions of the Bible begin to collapse, does that mean we should entirely abandon the Bible as a useful perspective on the past, and on the nature of say, Jesus? It does suggest at the very, very least, that we should not regard the “authority” of the Bible as being sufficiently great, to generally, outweigh other perspectives on History.
Does the Bible still have SOME value in determining the nature of the past? Yes it has some. But? Other perspectives have proved to be so good – like Science – that increasingly, many feel that internally-situated studies of Christianity, the Bible, should no longer be the very centre of historical studies, even regarding the early days of Christianity itself.
To be sure? To the extent that the BIblical documents retain any value at all … we should thank specialists who know a great deal about it. At the same time however? If nonbelievers treat this document more and more casually – or even bypass it entirely? Possibly we should not be so impatient with that. Since many other disciplinary perspectives are equally – and even more – valuable.
Am I consistent in this? Would I forgive a young-earth advocate, for refusing to look at Geology? No I would not … because he has neglected a very major criterion; the criterion of the full spectrum of what the sciences say.
Am I privileging Science? I am favoring it … because it has been so so successful. Or “fruitful” in Biblical terms. (So that, oddly enough, the scientific approach is, in its way, Biblical; by their “fruits,” it judges the prophets).
To be sure? Study situated within the Bible itself, and immediate environs, retains some value. Of particular interest to me for example, is the matter of the various names of God/Christ, the “lord.” Likely, the term did not necessarily connote godhood, though other times it did. And? Admittedly, mythicists should be more receptive here, to correction by specialists in this area. But also … vice versa.
My own view is that the Historical Jesus might have existed, as according to one of the more minimal models, as a rather nonsupernatural man. But in any case, certainly the “Jesus” of most churches, and perhaps even the Historical Jesus, was formed by, “written” by, programmed by, the prevailing cultural beliefs. Which included many Greco-Roman cultural opinions … or myths. So that ironically? I suggest that even a “real” Humanistic Jesus, would have had his mind, teachings, formed by … local myths.
So that even if he “really” historically existed? Jesus would still be essentially, a walking, talking … myth. That is, he would be phsyically real … but his ideas would be composed of cultural beliefs, or myths. So that therefore? Just as useful as traditional Bible-centered studies, would be …. Comparative Mythology.
To be sure, traditional studies centered on the Bible itself retain some value. And it is regretable, when Mythicists attempt to use some of that material … but don’t get it right. Though? Mythicists are perhaps suspicious of too much use of Biblical material; worried that perhaps those who rely so much on it, are after all not entirely objective. But are retaining some emotional attachment to the old beliefs. While remaining resistant to … really objective research. Culling their countless “facts,” in such a way as to serve their opinions, rather than vice-versa.
Both sides in the Mythicist/Historicist argument are probably guilty of some oversights to be sure. And so? Possibly rather than just publically reviling one side or the other? We should humbly and sympathetically offer whatever additional information and clarification we can. To help resolve our fuzzy images of this remote historical era. And even the image of Jesus.
Some scholars like Dr. Woodbridge Goodman argue in fact, that the new “appearance” (“parousia,” etc.) of Christ, that is cumulatively offered by assembling all the work of serious scholars of every relevant discipline, is arguably the foretold “second appearance” of Christ. Goodman argues that this is perahps the fuller and more accurate view, the “full”er “appearance” of “Christ,” that finally leads us to a better kingdom after all. Though the Jesus we finally see, by triangulating the different disciplines, may be more human, less supernatural, than many thought.
Feel free to offer corrections…. Since all scholars of all disciplines – including Historicist studies and Mythology too – offer another piece of the larger elephant; and help realize the “full”er outline of Christ, after all. Humble, human, as it might be.
Hope I am not talking past too many of your own useful statements? I’ve tried to address a least a half dozen or so….
brettongarcia
May 27, 2012 at 3:06 am
Simply put, in the language of Logic: if there is no Jesus, then the Bible is false. Therefore? Logically, quotes from the Bible should not be allowed to have any force, in any inquiry into the question of whether Jesus exists.
In more complicated language? The New Testament and the assertion of the existence of Jesus, are inextricably linked. The New Testament is the chief (and almost only) early document that says that Jesus exists; and the assertion of the existence of Jesus is its main point. We only think Jesus exists, because the Bible says so. So? If we are questioning whether Jesus exists, we are also questioning, in effect, the verity of the New Testament itself. And vice-versa: if we question the validity of the Bible, then we question the existence of Jesus, at the same time.
The existence of Jesus, and the question of the validity of the Bible, are inextricably interrelated, interdependent hypotheses. If one is overall, mostly false, then the other is mostly false as well.
Therefore? Quotes, evidence from the Bible, should have little bearing in any discussion on the question of the historical existence of Jesus. Such quotes are highly prejudicial. Taking them as authoritative commits the basic Logic error, of “begging the question”: taking the Bible as authoritative assumes the very question, that needs to be proved.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 27, 2012 at 4:07 am
@Garcia: A total solipsism. In logic, propositions are true or false, not Bibles. I have liked some of what you have said here but this is web of confusion and false assumptions, beginning with sentence one and moving on to “The New Testament and the assertion of the existence of Jesus, are inextricably linked.” The NT does not assert Jesus exists. It asserts that Jesus is the son of God. “Sons of god” as we all know don’t need to exist historically, though we’re pretty sure Augustus did and he was proclaimed one even on his coins. (I can send you a picture if you like or you can see one here: http://ejc-nexus.net/AMBS-Handouts/Jn1.1-18-SonofGodandAncientCoins.pdf ) You can frame the entirety of what follows in your solipsism by saying if sons of God do not exist, then Jesus did not exist either and as the Bible has something to say about that (actually only a very small part does) it is false. You them proceed to chase your tail by asking why we would use a source demonstrated to be false to prove the existence of Jesus. Is that about it? That is as far as a solipsism can take you in this and that is the simplest formulation of what you say here.
Your last sentence is the most tendentious and reveals perhaps too much of your skewed thinking on the topic: (a) “Therefore? Quotes, evidence from the Bible, should have little bearing in any discussion on the question of the historical existence of Jesus.” and (b) “Taking them as authoritative commits the basic Logic error, of ‘begging the question’: taking the Bible as authoritative assumes the very question, that needs to be proved.” But what do you mean by “authoritative,” –inspired”? Useless as evidence? Why, since we know many things both true and false including a sizeable chunk of ancient Near Eastern history from it. If Abraham is “false” on your calculation is no part of the Hebrew Bible “true” because the books are not “authoritative.” No scholar I have lunch with takes them that way. It is a mark of naivete bordering on the absurd that so many mythtic fans and Jesus-deniers seem honestly to believe that they need to educate biblical historians on the integrity of historical inquiry; colloquially put “We’re good.” But your QED (b)doesn’t even flow logically from (a) since without the evidence you disclaim as having a bearing on the case is the only evidence that can settle it. If I were a praying man, I would pray for you to catch your tail so that at least you would ave something to cling to.
Reply
brettongarcia
May 27, 2012 at 6:30 am
Thank you for your positive remarks on some of my prior comments. But I’d like to stick to my defense of Mythicism, over and above say, specifically, HJ, or Historical Jesus studies. To be sure, I’m familiar with the methodology of this subfield of study, and see good reasons for some of its methods; sticking mainly to the Bible itself as the major object of study, seems necessary, given the lack of any other external early evidence for the existence of either a godlike, or manlike/Humanitistic or historical, Jesus. But to be sure, Historical Jesus studies are not quite an entire, permanently secure field, but are rather a tiny and somewhat new subfield of study (within say History? Or Religious Studies?). And as a relatively new and small subfield, many of us feel that it often becomes a bit provincial. And locked into its own varieties of solipcism, or circularity.
I am aware that many scholars in this field are not necessarily “believers.” But at the same time, many entered the field of religious study originally became of an emotional attachment to it/belief. And many retain some of the old habits of believers. Including a kind of formal, logical circularily found in believers for example. That for example, they believe that the Bible is true – because it said it is true. But that common belief, is circular: if the Bible was not true, then we should not believe its assertion of accuracy. It is rather like asking a liar, if he is lying, and then simply believing the answer. Never mind that of course, a liar will usually lie about … lying. These things can be spotted by Formal Logic.
So there is a kind of solipcistic circularity, I believe, not in my own thought, as much as in the field of religion: in believing in the authority of the Bible, just because it tells us it is an authority. And though, to be sure, many more critical readers, scholars, have perhaps gone beyond that? At times I feel that the mere fact that they continue to focus mainly on the Bible itself, as their main source? Even on a now more critical view of it? They still, ironically, share some of the old circularity. They are still focused, rather too narrowly (and sometimes almost exlusively) on an overwhelmingly unreliable document. And still believing they can get at least some good historical information out of it. Enough to confirm at least, say, a Jesus who was merely or at least a man, probably Jewish, and not necessarily godlike: an “Historical Jesus.” But perhaps even this vestigal confidence in the old document, is too much; mythicists therefore suggest seeing Jesus more in the larger cultural context of general history/classicism/ Platonistic idealism, and especially the history of mythic beliefs.
On random related questions: does the Bible “assert” the physical existence and reality of Jesus? At times it seems to, in its assertion of the “flesh” of Jesus. While it seems to elsewhere, if not assert it, assume it. Scenes which picture Jesus as a physical person, walking and talking, seem to clearly assume that. But is even that very modest assumption reliable?
Is the Bible an absolute “authority” for serious scholars? Probably not. But the Mythicist point would be that it is still, even among many critical scholars, taken far too seriously and exclusively.
Is the Bible ENTIRELY useless as a source of historical information? Of course it is not entirely, absolutely useless. But? Most critical scholars like yourself well know that huge masses of material in it, are probably useless. So that finally, many of us outside the subfield, feel that the field might benefit, from giving up a bit of its obsession with the Bible itself as its primary source.
Can persons from outside a given field of specialization, offer anything helpful to those inside of it? In fact, this often happens: findings in the field of biology, greatly helped other fields, like Anthropology, and Psychology, for example. As we know in Interdisciplinary Studies.
And in fact, as you yourself well know, more often than not.
Probably mythicists are just asking here for a shift of emphasis; from the Biblical text “itself,” to far more, say, the Anthropology of myth systems. And if their own methodology has its own limitations? Still, what it does know and see, should offer some valuable input into the larger, bigger picture.
Reply
steph
May 27, 2012 at 11:11 am
BGarcia’s caricature of scholarship is a muddled and spiralling projection of wilfully irrelevant assumptions. Biblical scholarship does not ignore relevant fields of study. Methodology and application are discussed and debated carefully and interdisciplinary approaches (anthropological, sociological, archaeological, historical) incorporated in order to make progress in research and historical enquiry.
Reply
steph
May 27, 2012 at 3:16 pm
Eh?!!! You’ve just made all this up.
Reply
steph
May 27, 2012 at 4:04 pm
My ‘what on earth’ comment was directed at BG. Reflecting on Joe’s wisdom I reckon BG has been to a ‘Summer Bible Camp’.
steph
May 29, 2012 at 7:11 pm
Speaking of hats on previous thread, there is another expression. I think it refers to one talking through his hat.
brettongarcia
May 30, 2012 at 2:48 am
Steph:
I agree that there are many good interdisciplinary efforts out there, in religious study, that are now helping us to more accurately assess even say, 1st century Christianity. The application by Dr. Carrier, of Bayes’ theory of probability, might be one of them. But? The very resistence to Bayes, here, is one example that shows that such interdisciplinary efforts are still resisted in many conservative circles, within religious studies.
In the field of religious studies, there is still in fact an obstinate core of conservatism and neo-fundamentalism. One that wants to say, to “prove,” that Jesus was really, literally, physically real, at least to one degree or another. But to get to this sought-for conclusion, our new literalists, our new fundamentalists, the Historical Jesus crowd, committs many methodological sins. First of all, it allows ignoring or writing off huge portions of the Bible (like the writings of Paul, say) – while continuing to defend an increasingly tiny percentage of the text, that seems to partially support traditional religion.
Part of mjy point here, would be: what entitles defenders of Historical Jesus, to write off huge tracts of the Bible. (Like perhaps, the entire OT; then the half of the NT written by Paul, for example; then the parts of the NT picturing miracles, say). And then claim total validity, for their observations of an extremely cherry-picked remainder?
Specifically here: are we really entitled to simply focus just on the very vivid, even lurid, miraculous narratives of the gospels, as “true” … while ignoring all the warnings in Paul, especially, about other “apostles,” and their, “another Jesus” than the one he preaches; his own rather spiritual (and in effect proto-gnostic) Christ?
steph
May 30, 2012 at 12:34 pm
This has completely missed all the main points in recent critical scholarship and ignores the central issue of the essay above. The defence of the existence of the historical Jesus in such historical work has nothing to do with ‘obstinate conservatism and neo-fundamentalism’, as is obvious to everyone who is properly familiar with it all. It does not mean ignoring what Paul says at all, either. Your comments are enough to make one wonder whether you have read any recent critical scholarship at all and its hard to believe you have comprehended the essay above. Your caricature of scholarship, full of generalisations and assumptions, belongs to another world.
brettongarcia
May 30, 2012 at 3:35 pm
See my misplaced reply, above? Or repeated, here:Steph:
1) I am well aware that Historical Jesus scholarship, believes itself to have attempted to find a plausible Jesus, beyond the jesus of miracles, for example. But? How valid is that methodology? No doubt it considers Paul; but what if we consider what I am here calling his warning about … historicity itself? Should we just write that off?
2) I am aware of recent trends that suggest the “real” Jesus was primarily a loyal Jew; while any relaxation of circumcision, food restrictions, and a spiritualzation of the “kingdom,” are thought to be later additions by Paul and other Hellenized successors. But? I find Hellenism deep in jesus “himself.” And if Jesus himself is full of Greco-Roman culture – or myths? Then even a Real Historical jesus would be largely … mythic. His head or spirit, would be full of Hellenistic myths.
3) HJ scholars pride themselves on being unsentimental and realistic; locating a mere simple, quite human, unsupernatural, loyal Jew, as the historical Jesus. But? After all, I submit, even the most “hardheaded” HJ position, is a compromise with Fundamentalism: in that it after all, can say that it “believes in” a “real, historical Jesus.” (Never mind, in very much reduced circumstances).
4) Could all the gospels, in all their apparent agreement (ignoring their differences, and the non-synoptic gospels, and apocrypha, and pseudepigrapha?), have come to such agreement, without having a single real historical individual as their origin? Of course they could. If a) as Bruno Bauer suggested long ago, they had a single fictional work as their origin. And/or if b) the gospels were interdependent (having one or two common or related, grouped sources, like Q1, Q2, Q3, and/or Mark). And especially if c) the new Churches had time to edit these books for continuity, before say, 120 AD.
5) Considering too, huge methodological problems with HJ criteria?
6) Finally, Mythicism is more probable, than the “Real Historical Jesus.” Which begins to look all too simple, all too Apologetic, all too simply Fundamentalist, in essence.
7) Feel free to note more recent developments? That would address these specific problems.
Maurice Casey
May 30, 2012 at 10:36 pm
I think you’ve just demonstrated my point above with yet another caricature of scholarship. You have also demonstrated your confidence in the certainty of your own assumptions. In fact you have made a series of erroneous and flawed assumptions which have led you to your unarguable conclusion, that is, mythicism ‘is more probable’.
steph
May 31, 2012 at 9:00 am
that was steph to Garcia.
steph
May 31, 2012 at 6:46 pm
Of what?!!
steph
May 31, 2012 at 6:56 pm
Of what. You are a specific example of someone making up silly caricatures of “biblical scholarship” to give an impression of a discipline that does not exist in reality.
rjosephhoffmann
May 31, 2012 at 6:16 am
Tell me what you mean by Historical Jesus scholarship. I am not being facetious when I say that I know of no such discipline. Is this some “movement” mythtics have devised to make it seem that there are two sides engaged in a debate or battle royal. There are biblical scholars in the field of Christian origins who do, in fact, look at the so called “quests” of the historical Jesus. But the historical Jesus remains a fundamental postulate–not a “theory”–that requires defending. I need therefore to confront you with the sad news that mythicism has made absolutely no dent against this postulate and until it does it makes no sense to put what is clearly a weak thesis up against the consensus of scholarship as if the evidence is compromised by it. Your consistent attempts to equate anyone who believes Jesus existed with some sort of fundamentalism is simply berserk and continually show lapses in knowledge: Your number 4 is swimming in unlikely splices (Bruno Bauer was about as far removed from Q as you could possibly get) and canonically there is only ONE non-synoptic gospel(s) [sic]. Who/what are these churches that would be doing the editing? Where did they exist? From what literary circle would communities full of illiterate believers–as we know from the derision heaped upon Christian in the second century by pagan critics like Celsus–have hired their editors? Your confusion could be remedied by a few courses in the field; but it will not be helped by piling wrong assumption upon wrong assumption and then plunking down random conclusions. As I said before, your reasoning process becomes a model for the uselessness of Bayes. “Huge methodological problems with HJ criteria.” What are these precisely–that scholars get different answers? Hmmm. It seems to me that you should take a look as cancer research or whether caffeine is good for you or bad for you, or red wine, or…. You have deep respect for science. So do I. But you wouldn’t want to say, because research progresses and answers to questions change, that the whole process is fucked, now would you?
rjosephhoffmann
May 27, 2012 at 3:44 pm
@Steph: It would be useful to know who has actually taken a course in the history, philosophy or anthropology of religion. This looks suspiciously like people who can’t make rather crucial distinctions between what happens at Summer Bible Camp and what happens in a Harvard classroom but speak as though the (magically?) know.. Sorry to be blunt.
Reply
brettongarcia
May 27, 2012 at 5:15 pm
Religious studies are nominally interdisciplinary. However, it is my contention that specific elements of mainstream religious studies – or specifically HJ (Historical Jesus) studies – have neglected or underestimated the larger ANE and especially Greco-Roman context of early Christianity, and the influence of their myths, on its formation. In part because of their attacks on “Mythicism,” and in the attempt to establish the historical/physical reality of Jesus, they find it all-too-convenient to simply follow the Bible, and the apparently very physical narrative of the NT, as adequate proof of a physical, walking/talking, historical Jesus. And to ignore or denigrate the full extent of links between Jesus and various ANE myths; especially Greco-Roman Platonistic dualism/Idealism. (With its obvious ties to say, Gnosticism).
In contrast to the new fundamentalism of HJ studies, and its attempt to find a “real” material/historical Jesus? A more careful look at ANE cultural context, and especially myths … finds so many correlations between “Jesus” and ANE myths, that i suggest that we should find “Jesus” to be more mythic, than historical.
(As I noted earlier in an apparently lost post?).
Indeed, I would submit that there are SO many links between ANE myth and the character “Jesus,” that Jesus can be described as simply the intersection of a few dozen ANE myths. Even if there was ever a real character named Jesus, his mind and theology were so dominated by the culture of his time and place, that Jesus is best described as a composite of ANE myths.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 27, 2012 at 6:33 pm
You may submit this! It has already been litigated by perfectly intelligent, non fundamentalist scholars. If you cannot name them, that is not a problem for modern scholarship. MOST of what the mythtics claim is actually derived from NT scholarship; you don’t imagine they produce their own, do you: “HJ (Historical Jesus) studies – have neglected or underestimated the larger ANE and especially Greco-Roman context of early Christianity, and the influence of their myths, on its formation.” Please tell me what you mean, and do not cite the crazy Evangelical sources that biblical scholarship does not use. WHERE do you think these conclusions came from? A renegade band of independent mythtics above the hills of Rome? They came from perfectly sane, responsible, fastidious scholars who did not jump to conclusions or probability games. I think that the only reason for your tenacity against what I am saying is that you don’t know any of the literature I am discussing. That leaves open the possibility that you and a number of other commenters–Tanya rings a bell–are little better than members of a cult, and unwilling to entertain evidence at all. If arguments from silence and analogy are the best you’ve got, by all means use them. But don’t expect to answer the hard questions that way.
Reply
steph
May 27, 2012 at 7:34 pm
You hold an extraordinarily out of date dinosaur conviction that Hellenisation and Graeco myth are of central importance to biblical studies. This idea is sperm to the rampant parallelomania virus to which mythtics are so easily seduced. There is a perception among mythtics that anything said once cannot be said again independently, despite the old true proverb ‘there is nothing new under the sun’. Mythtics also have a driving urge to draw parallels where there are none by manipulation, misinterpretation and disturbance of ancient sources. In any case the old mistake has been successfully refuted by Mark A Chancey:
Greco-Roman Culture and the Galilee of Jesus (Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 134, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). The Myth of a Gentile Galilee (Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 118, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
As to your equally extraordinary conviction that Religious studies are ‘nominally interdisciplinary’, what on earth are you basing that pronouncement on? The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary? Asbury Theological Seminary? Princeton Theological Seminary? All of the above? Most European (which includes the UK) and Antipodean biblical scholars have first degrees in classics or broad first degrees in multiple disciplines from classics to anthropology, history and other things including religion. As graduates they specialise. Independent university religion departments offer papers on anthropology of religion, philosophy, sociology and a wealth of diverse topics approaching religion. Ironically one commenter over at the Drivel I mean Vridar, derided me for studying too broadly as if New Testament specialists being broadly trained wasn’t to their advantage. As to interdisciplinary method applied to texts, you could start with one of the essay authors and his latest book written for a wider audience which should therefore be within your grasp: Maurice Casey, Jesus of Nazareth, (T&T Clark, 2010). Read our colleague and member of the Jesus Process, James Crossley, Why Christianity Happened: a Sociohistorical Account of Christian Origins (WJK, 2006) and James G. Crossley and Christian Karner, Writing History, Constructing Religion (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2005). Then check their bibliographies and read further. Check out courses offered at independent universities in religion and have a look at the way some universities are amalgamating religion departments with other disciplines. And hopefully you might become more self critical and swallow those unqualified pronouncements.
Reply
brettongarcia
May 28, 2012 at 1:31 am
The idea that Greco-Roman and ANE myth are central to Christianity, has been held in the field of biblical studies, since at least the days of the apostate Tertullian (who to be sure spoke against it; arguing that there is nothing in common between “Jerusalem and Athens.”) But looking at the New Testament itself, a compromise between liberal elements of Judaism and various ANE conquerors of Jerusalem, was continuous in the history of Chrfistianity. INcluding say Paul’s embrace of “Greeks,” and his use of the complete vocabulary of Plato’s Theory of Forms. (Things here on earth, being mere inferior “copies” of the ideal forms or “models” in “heaven”). Through to our own time. And though it has been rejected by a neo-fundamentalist Evangelical “scholarship” recently? It is in fact an idea in desperate need of revival, and re-definition.
The massive importance of Greco-Roman influence was temporarily rejected in the 1980's especially, by the new right, “evangelical scholarship” movement. ( Though Evangelical Scholarship is, I would suggest, a contradiction in terms.) The theory developed, from a longstanding strain of thought, of the Wholly Jewish Jesus” that Jesus was (paraphrasing) “Not Christian. JEsus was not conscious of himself as being anything other than a wholly loyal Jew.” Thus rejecting non-Jewish – Hellenistic – elements of Christianity.
This “wholly Jewish Jesus” thesis is neo-fundamentalist, in that it attempts to apologetically defend Jesus, by asserting that he dutifully followed the Old Testament god and Torah, and did not depart from them by adding in any new (probably Hellenistic) ideas; like changing the law forbidding the gathering of food on the Sabbath for example. Yet clearly, Jesus DID change more than an “iota” of OT law, with what came to be called a “new covenant.” And he changed in in a direction, that would modify traditional conservative jewish thought, in the direction of “Greeks,” “Samaritans,” “Roman”s like Paul and so forth; changing especially the Jewish food prohibitions that forbid preparing food on a Sabbath, (or even eating pork?).
Examples of the neo-fundamentalist/evangelical literature would include “Steph”s approving citation, above, of the “refutation” of the “dinosaur” theory of Hellenization, by Chancey, Casey, et alia..
But in fact, as Hoffmann rightly notes, classic and longstanding religious scholarship has always been aware of Hellenistic influences on even the very earliest Christianity. And I would add? Mythicism is right to bring them up again, and even (over?) emphasize them; in order to counter the exaggerated suppression of this information, by … Steph and her friend: the now-fashionable, hypothesized, Wholly Jewish Jesus.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 28, 2012 at 3:31 am
@Garcia: “This “wholly Jewish Jesus” thesis is neo-fundamentalist, in that it attempts to apologetically defend Jesus, by asserting that he dutifully followed the Old Testament god and Torah, etc.” Even a little reading on the subject might have spared you these errors. I suggest you start with Martin Hengel’s Judaism and Hellenism to find out what the interface between the two cultures was in first century Palestine. As to the rest, perhaps the author can sort you out.
Reply
steph
May 28, 2012 at 2:44 pm
You hold an extraordinarily out of date dinosaur conviction that Hellenisation and Graeco myth are of central importance to biblical studies. This is not the same thing as saying there is no influence on Christian origins. “Mythicism is right to bring them up again”. They were never out. Most European and Antipodean biblical scholars have first degrees in classics and are equipped to reflect on influence reasonably. What mythicists do is make them of central importance and I discussed the reasons and consequence of that above. Hengel RIP should sort you out to begin with. Please stop making things up.
Reply
brettongarcia
May 28, 2012 at 12:12 pm
Hoffmann:
Suppose we address one of your own points: Paul (rather Gnostically) sneering at other (earlier?) apostles, and the “flesh.”
Doesn’t Paul’s rather gnostic disregard for, even disdain for, the real, physical existence things, suggest that Paul thought little about say, any earlier possibly real, physical apostles? Or even a physical Jesus? Paul was interestested more in the spirit, than in physical, historical realities. He in fact seems quite gnostic,in his aggressive lack of concern for the physical, material side of life; and what interested him about Jesus for example, was that Jesus gave up his physical life. For a spiritual one, in effect. The physical, historical existence of Jesus therefore, did not concern Paul so much it seems.
So possible real, physical prececessors, their physicality especially, were of little concern to Paul. And the suggestion we might get from Paul is? That therefore, we ourselves should not bother too much establishing the existence of a real physical – or “historical” – Jesus. What is important, Paul suggests is the “spirit.” Which manifests itself all around us at all times; while the apostles and even the physical Jesus, should be of less concern.
In that sense? The core message of Paul is quite anti- Historical Jesus. Indeed, as Doherty might seem to suggest, Paul is so unconcerned with a phsyical Jesus, that … it is for all the world as if such an historical creature never existed.
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
May 28, 2012 at 12:20 pm
Dr Garcia: Every point raised in this comment is addressed in the article. –Which says, in fact, that Paul says nothing of any substance that contributes to our knowledge of an historical Jesus. The article then goes on to explain the reasons for this, in some detail. Paul however is not “gnostic” because he depends for his theology on Jewish atonement and sacrifical thought, which requires a physical victim. He is certainly not anti-Historical Jesus unless you impute that to him by silecne, which si the standard recourse of mythicists. Good luck finding the answers to your queries in the article; they really are not hidden like words in the Wordsearch Game on a Denny’s napkin.
Reply
brettongarcia
May 28, 2012 at 1:02 pm
But perhaps you would enjoy fleshing out your position? For example? Paul’s argument is more than an “argument from silence.” It is not JUST that he is neglecting to note, to voice, the physical details of Jesus’ historical life; he is actually, actively, opposed to attaching much importance to the “flesh,” and physical, material, worldly life. Which might seem to imply? Lack of concern for the physical, material existence of Jesus.
To be sure, it might be said that Jewish atonement calls for a physical sacrifice. But? The whole theology of “atonement” is much debated. What seems more central for Paul, is the simple (if temporary) denial of the importance of material, fleshly things. Including perhaps, even a physical Jesus. Indeed, the whole core of atonement – sacrificing something phsyical – easily becomes a metaphor, for the process of becoming more spiritual: the sacrifice of our physical life, is part of learning to emphasize the other side of life: the spirit.
Corroborating the de-emphasis on material reality, the increasingly (proto?) Gnostic interest in “spirit” instead? Is Paul’s increasing emphasis not on the physical Jesus. But on … his two major concerns, both spiritual: 1) the spiritual quality of “faith,” believing even without seeing physical evidence. And 2) the very, very spiritual emphasis, in Paul, on The Holy “Spirit.”
So that? Paul is rather consistent, in rejecting almost any and all physical, material – and I would add, to that degree, Historical – realities. All physical things must be rejected; in order to foreground the spirit.
So Paul is not just ignoring, with his “silence,” any possible physical, historical realities to Jesus (and any possible biological, phsyical “brothers” of Jesus, say); he is actively (if implicitly) opposing them. As part of his (proto-Gnostic?) emphasis not on material, historical realities; but on “spirit.”
rjosephhoffmann
May 29, 2012 at 6:55 am
Garcia Says: “So Paul is not just ignoring, with his “silence,” any possible physical, historical realities to Jesus (and any possible biological, phsyical “brothers” of Jesus, say); he is actively (if implicitly) opposing them.” Yes that is in outline what I mean. But you then want to suggest that Paul is thus “gnostic”–and you need to be careful using that at a descriptor for all kinds of reasons. Gnosticism is a grab bag of different ideas, different from place to place and region to region. It thus makes no sense to say that Paul is purposelessly silent about historical realities if he knew historical realities in the form of Jesus and the brothers of Jesus, e.g., to exist, which I am convinced he did. What he does say, not by implication but directly, is that their physical existence is not what mattered to him. Unless you want to do what mythtics often do and say 2 Cor is full of spurious verses or that Paul didn’t write it or that Paul didn’t exist–you have to deal with what is actually THERE. You don’t seem to quote relevant texts in support of these every broad views: But here is one you need to deal with. 2 Corinthians is usually considered the core of the Opponent’s Controversy. It is in 2 Corinthians 5.16 that Paul becomes dismissive of the physical Jesus. Why do you think this is the case? —–because he is a gnostic, or because he is jealous of the men who knew Jesus personally? What would be the most obvious and rational explanation — that is, if you were not already married to the idea that there was no Jesus to get to know>
brettongarcia
May 29, 2012 at 1:11 pm
I think we are agreeing on many key points, if not all. We seem to agree for instance that Paul is deliberately “dissing” physical reality; and perhaps the idea of a Physical Jesus. In this I am for the moment also willing to call him say, merely “proto” Gnostic; in recognition of the the manifold and problematic nature of Gnosticism proper.
But perhaps I could persuade you that Paul, in seeming to reject a physical Jesus, is not necessarily – by the very act of rejecting apparently, something – accepting, implicitly, that there ever WAS such a physical existence. For example? 1) Logically, to say in 2 Corin. 5.16, that the new Christians no longer see Jesus from the human point of view, does not imply (in accepted translations like the RSV) that Jesus was ever physical, historical. It just says that, whatever Jesus was – physical, or spiritual, or whatever – we ourselves now see him as … or in terms of, spiritual things.
Here, Paul is not necessarily indirectly acknowledging the real physical existence of Jesus, even in the act of denying its importance. he might be denying the COMMON PERCEPTION of Jesus as physical, say. In the same way that I might say that “the recent panic caused by fear of Alpha Centuri aliens, can be ignored,” does not imply the actual existence of Alpha Centuri aliens. Likewise, the denial of the importance of the physical jesus, does not imply that Pau thought that Jesus had actually, physically existed.
2) And so, in my reading of Paul, in 2 Corin. 5.16? That is properly sometimes understood not as really addressing the physical existence of Jesus at all, directly. But is merely celebrating the spiritual persons’ triumph over crass materialism, the traditional “human” view of things, of jesus. Of specifically THE PERCEPTION OF Jesus, seen from the all too common, phsyical, “human point of view.”
Paul in 2 Corin. 5.16 was seeing and celebrating not the rejection of a real physical existence of Jesus; but the disappearance of a false perception. Celebrating a transformation in those of us who have become spiritual. A transformation of this nature: we now see or value any crass materialism, the physical side of things or of JEsus; but instead see and value, only the real spiritual essence.
Paul’s motives for rejecting the physical Jesus? Motives are hard to read. In this case, it Might be 1) as you suggest, jealousy for those who did know Jesus more directly; 2) or might be Paul’s conviction that the “real physical” Jesus did not quite succeed in delivering the promised physical kingdom; or 3) that indeed, as a proto-gnostic, Paul simply did not value the physical side of life, or of jesus, often. whether or not he actually existed.
Or indeed? Paul 4) might even have been warning, in his own way, the Jesus was a fictional invention; and had never been a physical person at all. He might have been an arbitrary invention, invented for an illustrative moral fable or parable, or midrash.
In any case, 5) Paul’s insistence – Paul, the apostle and saint, who wrote more than half the books of the New Testament; who wrote the first major corpus on Jesus – on the unimportance of the physicality of Jesus, certainly must be paid attention to. By all those who insist, against Paul and half the New Testament (and more), that Jesus should be regarded not just as spiritual metaphor, but as a real, historical, physical being. Paul apparently… disagreeing with them.
Reply
brettongarcia
May 30, 2012 at 2:49 pm
Steph:
1) I am well aware that Historical Jesus scholarship, believes itself to have attempted to find a plausible Jesus, beyond the jesus of miracles, for example. But? How valid is that methodology? No doubt it considers Paul; but what if we consider what I am here calling his warning about … historicity itself? Should we just write that off?
2) I am aware of recent trends that suggest the “real” Jesus was primarily a loyal Jew; while any relaxation of circumcision, food restrictions, and a spiritualzation of the “kingdom,” are thought to be later additions by Paul and other Hellenized successors. But? I find Hellenism deep in jesus “himself.” And if Jesus himself is full of Greco-Roman culture – or myths? Then even a Real Historical jesus would be largely … mythic. His head or spirit, would be full of Hellenistic myths.
3) HJ scholars pride themselves on being unsentimental and realistic; locating a mere simple, quite human, unsupernatural, loyal Jew, as the historical Jesus. But? After all, I submit, even the most “hardheaded” HJ position, is a compromise with Fundamentalism: in that it after all, can say that it “believes in” a “real, historical Jesus.” (Never mind, in very much reduced circumstances).
4) Could all the gospels, in all their apparent agreement (ignoring their differences, and the non-synoptic gospels, and apocrypha, and pseudepigrapha?), have come to such agreement, without having a single real historical individual as their origin? Of course they could. If a) as Bruno Bauer suggested long ago, they had a single fictional work as their origin. And/or if b) the gospels were interdependent (having one or two common sources, like Q and/or Mark). And especially if c) the new Churches had time to edit these books for continuity, before say, 120 AD.
5) Considering too, huge methodological problems with HJ criteria?
6) Finally, Mythicism is more probable, than the “Real Historical Jesus.” Which begins to look all too simple, all too Apologetic, all too simply Fundamentalist, in essence.
7) Feel free to note more recent developments?
Reply
Brettongarcia
June 1, 2012 at 12:44 pm
Steph and Joe:
You two seem strangely unaware of key developments in (your own?) discipline, and even on these very pages. Perhaps the problems is that there has always been a very, openly critical element in religious studies that has been too embarassing or controversial for scholars to acknowledge … at least publically. Which is of course the problem; not implicit understandings, but what is said to the Public.
No doubt it would be awkward to acknowledge Mythicism as a viable theory within the field. But? Of course, Historical Jesus studies exists as a very real subfield of concentration;, and so does its opposition to Mythicism, exists as a very real field of concentration.
1) First, historically? Remember all the controversy about Bruno Bauer, the theology professor who was fired in the mid 19th century, for supporting Mythicism, in effect.
2) Then? Further, similar researches, carried out by Bultmann.
3) These ideas did not die out in the 20th century, but after being forwarded by Bultmann, were carried out by many scholars. One simple, introductory source acknowledging the HJ thesis, vs. mythicism, that might be useful to non-scholars, would be say, at random, Dr. John F. O’Grady’s “Models of Jesus,” Doubleday, NY, 1981; Chapter 3: “The Mythological Christ,” pp. 58-73.
4) Was this issue “controversial”? At the time the above, simple general intro was published, the author was Assoc. Prof. of New Testament, at St. Bernard’s Seminary. And he ends his Chapter 3 on Mythicism, by explicitly noting a “controversy” on this subject.
5) And? That controversy, between Historical Jesus and Mythicism, has continued to this very day. As witnessed by … this very blog. And the response from the Internet. A quick survey of the Internet referneces to “HJ” will show that this is a discrete and flourishing subfield.
6) And so indeed, and contrary to both Steph and Hoffmann? There has long been an active study of “Historical jesus,” and it has often explicitly confronted a long tradition of Mythicists; it is not true that scholars have universally or even largely, “simply assumed” that Jesus simply existed.
How could anyone work in the field of religion for so long, and not know this? Perhaps the problem is that the field of religious studies has long been split between Believers, and Critics. And (until recently) it is been all too easy for some, to even go all the way through to the PHD and beyond, without seriously considering , knowing much about, the critical side of the discipline.
I am surprised that the two of you however, seem unaware of that side; or have chosen to emphasize a part of the discipline that, whatever is said privately, in public has the effect, the appearance, of being an Apologetic: of appearing to assure the PUBLIC at least, of “proving” that their Jesus was a real, physical, historical being.
No doubt, that impression would be dissolved by closer reading of the scholarship on the subject? But most people in the field remain very, very nonconfrontational, regarding the public.
Is that the reason that even a nonspecialist in your own field, has to point out major developments in it, that you seem unaware of?
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
June 1, 2012 at 1:05 pm
@Garcia: Yup. We are abysmally ignorant; my apologies. My point which stands is that there is no field called as an aggregate “Historical Jesus Studies,” there is a field called New Testament, Christian origins, and Early Church studies that deals with the historical Jesus. Some scholars more than others like to focus on this and produce books on the topic. If you had bothered to pay attention to the beginning of this discussion, you would know that it was prompted by Bart Ehrman’s suggestion that until his book, Did Jesus Exist? appeared, NT scholars have not tended to take up the mythtic position. That is partly true, but not entirely so. FEW have bothered, because the theory has been so poorly framed, argued, and defended that almost no one takes it seriously. In fact, I have taken it seriously and have rejected it.
But what you are trying to do is to juxtapose “Historical Jesus Studies” and “Mythicism” as if they were two equally viable theories–probably in order to legitimize the mythtic position. And honestly, if you had bothered to read my article, you could not possibly say anything as boneheaded as “And so indeed, and contrary to both Steph and Hoffmann? There has long been an active study of “Historical jesus,” and it has often explicitly confronted a long tradition of Mythicists; it is not true that scholars have universally or even largely, “simply assumed” that Jesus simply existed.How could anyone work in the field of religion for so long, and not know this? Perhaps the problem is that the field of religious studies has long been split between Believers, and Critics. And (until recently) it is been all too easy for some, to even go all the way through to the PHD and beyond, without seriously considering , knowing much about, the critical side of the discipline.” Honestly what crack in the earth did you pull that from? I wrote my first book on the subject in 1986; do your homework and find it; and two years later Jesus in History and Myth explored the state of the question in 1988. I promise, I haven’t been sleeping or in a coma since then. You persist in wanting to “fundamentalise” all scholarship that relies on the postulate of a historical Jesus, and since that is by far the bulk of NT scholarship you have your work cut out for you. Right now, the mythicist position being argued by Doherty and the non-existence idea being pushed by Carrier with his BT is about as ridiculous as the Birther controversy. You are asking for Jesus’ birth certificate, and we won’t cough it up. And you are totally incapable of seeing the weight the gospels and letters of the New Testament present as an historical problem, because in your head you think scholars who take them seriously “believe” in them. And that, my friend, is nonsense. –PS: Please feel free to reply, but unless you can add anything further to the discussion please don’t be surprised if it doesn’t escape the seventh circle of moderation until the Judgement.
Reply
Where to restart blogging? « Vridar says:
June 6, 2012 at 8:35 pm
[...] of Jesus, Joe Hoffmann profoundly disagrees. Hoffmann reminds us that Ehrman was merely writing for “popular consumption” and there is apparently very little in Ehrman’s book that Hoffmann sees eye to eye with. So [...]
Reply
Blogger Godfrey’s Reply (1) to Emeritus Professor Maurice Casey of the The Jesus Process ©®™ « Vridar says:
June 8, 2012 at 11:55 am
[...] Its intellectual pillars make no secret of their fear: The failure of scholars to take “the question of Jesus” seriously has resulted in a slight increase in the popularity of the non-historicity thesis, a popularity that — in my view — now threatens to distract biblical studies from the serious business of illuminating the causes, context and development of early Christianity. (Hoffmann, Controversy, Mythicism, and the Historical Jesus) [...]
Reply
The Jesus Process « The New Oxonian says:
June 24, 2012 at 8:47 pm
[...] a previous and more formal contribution to the Jesus Process, I gave what I consider to be the strongest reason for Paul’s imputed [...]
Reply
Biblioblog Carnival “according to Mark” « Euangelion Kata Markon says:
July 3, 2012 at 8:15 pm
[...] After May’s launch of the Jesus Project (courtesy of Maurice Casey, Steph Fisher and R. Joseph Hoffman), Hoffman continued with posts about the arguments of Shirley Jackson Case and a post providing [...]
Reply
A Farewell to Vridar and the Gang of Four « The New Oxonian says:
July 12, 2012 at 7:00 pm
[...] Paul’s reputed “silence” about the historical Jesus, for anyone interested to read it, in my contribution to the Jesus process. Essentially, the mythtics have shown gross ignorance of one of the central [...]
Reply
Roger Parvus
July 18, 2012 at 10:40 am
You quoted from Tertullian’s De Carne Christi and observed:
The language is odd to us, because Tertullian is arguing against a renegade disciple of Marcion named Apelles. But the message is plain: Jesus was real.
But, for the benefit of any readers unfamiliar with Apelles, I would like to add that Jesus was real for Apelles too. Even though Apelles had his own peculiar twist for explaining the origin of the body of Jesus, he was definitely anti-docetic and this was one of the several ways he distanced himself from his erstwhile teacher Marcion.
Here is how Epiphanius describes Apelle’s teaching on the flesh of Jesus:
He (Christ) has not appeared in semblance at his coming, but has really taken flesh; not from Mary the virgin, but he has real flesh and a body, though not from a man’s seed or a virgin woman… He did get real flesh, but in the following way. On his way from heaven he came to earth, says Apelles, and assembled his own body from the four elements. (Panarion, 44,2,2 and 3)
And this is clear likewise from an earlier passage in De Carne Christi:
This man (Apelles) having first fallen in the flesh from the principles of Marcion into the company of women, and afterwards shipwrecked himself in the spirit on the virgin Philumena, proceeded from that time to preach that the body of Christ was of solid flesh, but without having been born… He borrowed … his flesh from the stars, and from the substances of the higher world. (On the Flesh of Christ, 6)
To Tertullian, of course, the idea that Jesus had real human flesh but made from the four elements was still unacceptable. Tertullian was willing to concede that method of obtaining flesh for the angels who, according to various episodes in the Old Testament, visited this world. But he would not concede it for Jesus.
I would also like to comment on another verse from the passage you cited. Tertullian addresses these words to Apelles: “You take these, I suppose, for celestial signs” (referring to the hunger, thirst, weeping, trembling, and bleeding of Jesus). I am of the opinion that the Gospel of Apelles is the gospel that underlies the canonical Gospel of John. It would be what many scholars refer to as “the Signs Source.” Tertullian, who wrote a treatise (no longer extant) against the Apelleans, was familiar with the teaching of Apelles. And I think it is that familiarity that is the background for his bringing up “celestial signs” here. Apelles called his Gospel the “Manifestations” (Phaneroseis). And, as you know, the connection between signs and manifestations in the Fourth Gospel is established early on, as in: “This the first of his signs Jesus did at Cana in Galilee and manifested his glory; and his disciples believed in him. (Jn. 2:11, my emphases).
I think that before accepting Apelles’ Gospel the proto-orthodox subjected it to considerable reworking. Its Apellean origin, however, still protrudes in many ways. For instance, in the mildly gnostic dualism that is still present. And in the absence of any nativity for Jesus. And in the strongly negative stance toward Judaism (to include making sure that Jesus did not eat a Passover meal with his disciples). And in the suppression of its Ascension scene (Jn. 6.62; Epiphanius, in his Panarion, castigates the doctrine of Apelles regarding the Ascension).
On the plus side, the proto-orthodox did appreciate and keep Apelles’ strong anti-docetism. Apelles, says Hippolytus, taught that Jesus “showed them (his disciples) the prints of the nails and the wound in his side, desirous of persuading them that he was in truth no phantom, but was present in the flesh” (The Refutation of All Heresies, 7,26). A variation of this was allowed to remain in chapter 20 of the gospel.
Apelles is the most famous deserter of Marcion we know, and the only one whose name is present in the early record. My suspicion is that he was one of the deserters spoken of by Irenaeus: “He (Polycarp) it was who, coming to Rome in the time of Anicetus, caused many to turn away from the aforesaid heretics (Valentinus and Marcion) to the church of God…” (Against Heresies, 3.3.4). Although Irenaeus was not one to avoid naming names, he prudently omitted any mention of Apelles and his errors from his opus against heresies.
Reply
Obsessing about History and Jesus « Choice in Dying says:
July 27, 2012 at 1:43 pm
[...] me take an example. I am reading R.Joseph Hoffman’s piece “Controversy, Mythicism, and the Historical Jesus,” which he has put up at on his blog. It is his contribution to a consultation on the [...]
Reply
rjosephhoffmann
July 27, 2012 at 6:06 pm
You would think a man of this accomplishment could spell a relatively simple German surname like Hoffmann. I wonder, were his teachers so sloppy in checking his bibliography and references in school? I have often found it amusing that people who purport to be interested in science and precision seem to think that details don’t matter. In biblical studies we learn early that but for a single stroke a word could be molasses and not Moses.
Reply
steph
July 27, 2012 at 9:04 pm
He failed abysmally at comprehension but makes alot of waffles.
rjosephhoffmann
July 27, 2012 at 9:10 pm
And what goes best with waffles? Syrup.
James Lynn Paaage
August 21, 2012 at 5:54 am
Dear Professor Hoffmann,
I read your well reasoned essay, ‘The Jesus Process’ with interest, but can you enlighten me on the source for ‘Jesus Barabbas’ being a historical figure? As far as I am aware, there is no other evidence beyond the NT for this person.
James Lynn Page
Reply
Prove the Bible in One Paragraph | The Great Christian Debate says:
March 5, 2013 at 6:45 pm
[...] Jesus had to be real and he is his own person. Some great articles I’ve been led to are here, here, and here. There are no sufficient arguments detailing that Jesus was mythical. The greatest [...]
Reply
.
Leave a Reply
Enter your comment here...Enter your comment here...
Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo
Twitter picture
Facebook photo
« Previous Post
Next Post »
. .
Topics
Uncategorized
Archives
August 2013
July 2013
June 2013
May 2013
March 2013
February 2013
January 2013
December 2012
November 2012
October 2012
September 2012
August 2012
July 2012
June 2012
May 2012
April 2012
March 2012
February 2012
January 2012
December 2011
November 2011
October 2011
September 2011
August 2011
July 2011
June 2011
May 2011
April 2011
March 2011
February 2011
January 2011
December 2010
November 2010
October 2010
September 2010
August 2010
July 2010
June 2010
May 2010
April 2010
March 2010
February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
Blog at WordPress.com. The Manifest Theme.
Follow
Follow “The New Oxonian”
Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.
Join 160 other followers
Powered by WordPress.com
loading
No comments:
Post a Comment