A Poll — just for the sake of killing my cat

Curious to know where visitors of this blog stand on the question. I get the impression most are fence-sitters. This poll may confirm that, or it may disconfirm it, — either way I will probably always wonder if I can trust this poll.

Vridar, not a mythicist blog, but a blog for Christian origins and the nature of the early evidence

Updated  an hour after initial posting.

There is no historical inquiry comparable to: “Did Julius Caesar exist?” That ought to tell us something about the nature of mainstream historical investigations — and also something about the evidence for a historical figure of Jesus as an originator of the Christian religion.

I have posted far more in depth articles and discussions from mainstream scholarly publications on this blog than anything by or about “mythicists”, and I have never posted what aspires to be a comprehensive argument for mythicism. I used to say I rejected the label “mythicist” because such a label implied that I was somehow dedicated to presenting arguments for the idea that Jesus was not a historical person. (How, then, to explain that I have posted very little on mythicism per se or on publications by mythicist authors, opting overwhelmingly for non-mythicist publications? I have actually read very little on mythicism. One can get some idea of my reading range and interests on my librarything page.)

I certainly do think those arguments that claim Christianity originating with a historical person of Jesus and a few followers after his death are implausible, romantic and circular. And I do believe that many mainstream biblical scholars are in denial over the circularity of their methods, and have opted to bypass and denigrate rather than address serious challenges to their culturally sanctioned historicist paradigms.

So I finally realized it is less confusing if I do not attempt to disown the label “mythicist”. But my interest is not with arguing a case for a mythical Jesus per se.

Lighter literary intellections on the Gospels

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Let’s keep it simple and consider the Gospel of Mark only. No heavy analysis this post; only a moment to look out the window and think over how the arguments of recent posts would affect our reading of Mark.

Firstly, we open with the prophetic announcement. What we are about to read is a fulfilment of prophecy as framed and announced in the opening of the book. The anonymous implied narrator is addressing an implied audience that reminds the real reader of the apparent audience of the prophets of Isaiah and Malachi. (Woops, that does not sound the least bit light. I will avoid repeating the “implied readers/narrators” and “real readers/authors” for the rest of this post, though I am certainly framing everything within those four points of view, and considering how it is all working out between them all.)

That is the way stories in novels and tragedies and epics are guided. Prophecies from the divinity announce what is to happen, and the audience then is held in suspense till they see how it all happens just as predicted.

These same genres use the same device to offer course corrections or details along the way in the middle of the plot. And that’s exactly what happens in Mark, too.

How to read the Gospels

Sara Mandell and David Noel Freedman give us some valuable tips on how to read

1. the pagan Greek work of “History” by Herodotus
2. much of the biblical history of Israel (Genesis to 2 Kings)
3. and the Gospels

in their 1993 volume The Relationship Between Herodotus’ History and Primary History (Genesis to 2 Kings).

Among several threads tying all these three pieces of literature together:

1. all three are about human affairs being directed by divinities
2. all three contain strong theological themes and messages
   • and this message is reinforced with somewhat nebulous endings that contain a mix of optimism and uncertainty as to the future (i.e. Herodotus, 2 Kings, Mark)
3. all three ostensibly present themselves as “histories”
4. all three contain a mix of mythical (including nonhuman) characters and historical persons
5. all three relate miraculous and supernatural events as significant functions in their narratives
6. all three contain a similar narrative structure in that there is a significant change in tone and types of events and course of action once the setting moves to a traditional homeland or theologically charged centre (e.g. the Greek mainland, the Promised Land, Jerusalem)
7. all three are predominantly prose narratives, yet at the same time all three contain a mix of genre elements such as epic, tragedy, novella and poetry.

In my previous post (or the one before that) I cited two key points that are fundamental to understanding any literary work. I repeat them here and add one more:

Correlations between the “Histories” of Herodotus and the Bible’s History of Israel

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Both Herodotus‘ History and Primary History (Genesis to 2 Kings)

1. are national epics
2. had been divided into nine books at some time in their history
3. are both about the same length
4. begin with a prehistory that includes myths, fables, folk-tales, and legends that are treated as factual
5. and continue in this vein until well into historical time
6. consist of a basic format that changes concomitantly and abruptly under similar circumstances:
   • in Herodotus’ History this happens when Persians are about to fight on the Greek mainland
   • in Primary History this happens when the Sons of Israel are about to enter the Promised Land
7. take on a semblance of historical narrative once the “homeland” becomes the locus of action
8. – albeit one that includes miracles, marvels, and divinities who act in or at least guide history
9. think of historic causation as being intimately tied to the will of the divinity

This is from the preface (p. x) to The Relationship Between Herodotus’ History and Primary History by Sara Mandell and David Noel Freedman, 1993.

There’s much more. But this is just for starters to justify my previous post’s speaking of Herodotus and the Bible’s core historical narrative in the same breath.

Reading an ancient historical narrative: two fundamental principles

It is a naive mistake to approach every ancient narrative that purports to be about past events on the assumption that we can take it at its word — unless and until proven wrong.  Even the famous “father of history”, the Greek “historian” Herodotus, turned fables into history. The Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) does the same. If we are to understand how to  interpret the New Testament literature we might find it useful to study ancient Hellenistic literature in general. Knowing how ancient authors worked across a wide spectrum of genres in the cultural milieu preceding and surrounding the time of the Gospels might lead to an understanding otherwise lost to us. If nothing else, a broad understanding of how ancient texts “worked” will alert us to possibilities that need to be considered and evaluated when we do read the Gospels.

I focus in this post on Herodotus and draw out lessons from modern critical studies that might profit us in reading the Gospels and Acts, perhaps even the New Testament epistles.

In school I learned that Herodotus was “a credulous collector of anecdotal data”. That was wrong. That perception was the result of taking his writings at face-value and making modern-reader judgments about that face-value reading. That’s not good enough and leaves the door open to many misreadings of the text.

Is it necessary for “mythicists” to date the gospels late?

No, not at all.

My own interest in dating the gospels late has nothing to do with arguing for a mythical Jesus. I am not interested in arguing for a mythical Jesus as I have said many times in the past. My interest is in explaining the literature and evidence for Christian origins using the same basic methods I learned as a student of ancient, medieval and modern history some years ago now, and as I still see in vogue in history books currently being published. They even apply the same fundamental rules of evidence and inquiry that I imagine crime detectives or court-room judges understand. Generally self-testimony means little unless you can back it up with supporting independent evidence. If the external supporting evidence all points to a late date for the gospels, then why knock it? (External evidence may not always mean an explicit identification or testimonial, and it can take a range of forms, including prevailing ideologies, debates, literary styles and language, etc.)

The results of my approaches to investigating the origins and nature of the gospels, and the evidence for dating the literature, lead me to believe that the best explanation for the narratives of the gospels is that they originated as creative theology. I don’t know when, but suspect from the time of the early second century.

But it would not make any difference if the gospels were all dated conclusively between 70 and 100, or even between 35 and 65. That would not change certain facts about the gospels themselves, such as their literary and theological borrowings from earlier Jewish (and non-Jewish) literature, and their genre when analyzed from the perspective of ideological messages and communications rather than externals such as style or topics and language used.

Such an early date would raise questions in other ways, such as how to explain their stress on persecution at such an early date. But the historicity of their narrative contents stands independent of when they are dated.

 

 

How Late Can A Gospel Be?

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Would it not be wonderful if our Gospels were all signed and dated so there could be no debates about who wrote them or when?

The hermeneutic of charity would rule and only the hypersceptical and “minimalists” would entertain any doubts.

Well, there is one gospel that is signed, addressed and dated. It was written by James the step-brother of Jesus in the very year in which Herod died and Jesus was born. At the end of this gospel it is written:

And I James that wrote this history in Jerusalem, a commotion having arisen when Herod died, withdrew myself to the wilderness until the commotion in Jerusalem ceased, glorifying the Lord God, who had given me the gift and the wisdom to write this history. And grace shall be with them that fear our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be glory to ages of ages. Amen.

What more could any student of the Bible want? Except maybe to have that sort of information tagged on to the Gospels in the Bible. This is from what is known as the Infancy Gospel of James (or the Protevangelium of James).

The problem appears to be that this identification is attached to a gospel that did not make it into the Bible. I am sure no biblical scholar and probably no serious Christian really believes what they read here. But there is more to it than simply not being in the Bible. This Gospel is about Mary and her own miraculous birth as well as her perpetual virginity. Jesus only appears at the very end as a little babe born in a cave. Probably most scholars would place this belief about Mary and her exaltation well into the second century. But Luke’s prologue itself points to much the same idea.

So why not place this Infancy gospel around the same time as Luke in the first century?

The basic ideas in what follows, and the title of this post itself, are all drawn from pages 340-1 of Dating Acts : Between the Evangelists and the Apologists by Richard I. Pervo. I have played a little with the way in which the ideas are presented but not much more. Just to be perverse, this post is not really about the Infancy Gospel of James at all despite the surface-discussion speaking of that Gospel most of the time, but about the dating of the Gospel of Luke.

Historical Imitations and Reversals in Ancient Novels — and the Gospels?

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If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, but doesn’t quite quack like a duck, then maybe it is not a duck. Just because we see one or even a few features in the gospels that we recognize from historical or biographical writings, we cannot assume that the gospels are therefore history or biography. Formal features can be easily copied from one genre and applied to another.

Mere formalities of style — word-choice, content, syntax — that appear to be trademarks of one particular genre can and often are copied and re-used in other genres for special effects.

There can be no such thing as a completely new genre emerging on the scene. No-one would know how to understand any such beast. New genres emerge through borrowing one or two elements at a time from other genres and repackaging them into another genre so they convey new meanings.

To understand the gospels it is a good idea to have a reasonable grasp of the wider literary world of the gospels. How else can we evaluate a study that purports to argue that the gospels are “ancient biographies” by means of drawing attention to certain formal features in common? I suggest the reason Burridge’s Are the Gospels Really Biography has apparently won widespread acceptance among biblical scholars is that relatively few such scholars have given much time to studying ancient literature. What accord hath Christ with Belial?

This post looks at how ancient Greek novels — fictional narratives — borrowed some of the literary formalities of well-known works of history. It is worth keeping such examples in mind whenever one encounters arguments that the gospels themselves are some form of history on account of similar formal resonances with non-fiction literature of the day.

As in the preceding posts, much of the following draws upon Cueva’s The Myths of Fiction, although Cueva does not himself discuss biblical literature at all. Those comparisons here are mine alone.

Tripoli

How irrelevant is all this shite about Paul and the gospels.

Did Paul receive the gospel the same way the other apostles did?

Not long ago I skimmed through an online discussion over whether or not Paul learned about the gospel of Jesus from other apostles like Peter and James, or whether he relied entirely on direct revelation from the spiritual Lord.

One side pointed to the letter to the Galatians where Paul said that he was not impressed with the status of “pillars” in the Jerusalem church like Peter, James and John, and insisted that all he knew about the gospel he knew because he was taught it by (the heavenly) Jesus Christ himself. So Galatians 1:11-12, 15-17

Novels like Gospels (3) : How a Hero is Created from Myths and Meets Historical Persons

The previous post covered some of the indications that the heroine of Greek novel Chaereas and Callirhoe was modelled on Ariadne of Theseus and the Minotaur fame. This post looks at the way the author Chariton has constructed his hero, Chaereas, from cuts of other mythical and legendary figures, in particular from Achilles.

Once again, of equal significance is that these fictional characters whose creation was inspired by mythical figures interact with real historical characters in the novel. This is similar to what we find in the Gospels: fictional characters and events modelled on Jewish and Greek stories interacting with historical persons such as Pilate, Caiaphas and Herod.

Ancient Novels Composed Like Gospels continued (2)

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This continues the previous post that introduced Edmund Cueva’s study in the way our earliest surviving Greek novel was composed by combining historical persons, events and settings with fictional narrative details and characters that were inspired by popular myths.

Cueva is not comparing these novels with the gospels, but I do think it is important to compare them. There are quite a few studies that do argue that many of the details in the gospels narratives, even some of the characters, were copied from older stories found in both the Old Testament and in popular Greek literature. This would mean that the gospels are not unlike some popular Greek novels to the extent that they are stories that combine both historical and fictional characters and events in their story, with those fictional characters being conjured up by imaginative extrapolations of mythical characters.

In the previous post I focused mostly on the historical characters and events that are major players in Chariton’s novel Chaereas and Callirhoe.

In this post I outline some of the evidence that the heroine of the novel and her adventures were imaginatively inspired by popular Greek myths, especially those about Ariadne and Theseus. (I do so with apologies to Cueva, too, because what I include from his discussion is necessarily a savage simplification of his arguments for mimesis. Cueva includes in his discussion verbal echoes between Chariton’s novel and Plutarch’s Life of Theseus, and discusses more characters than just the heroine, Callirhoe.)

Ancient Novels Like the Gospels: Mixing History and Myth

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The earliest ancient novel we have is a tale of two lovers, Chaereas and Callirhoe, by Chariton. A summary of its plot can be found here. It is dated to the early second century.

I have discussed or alluded to this novel in the various posts found on this page as a comparison to the Gospels, and this time I will show that its characters, plot and setting are drawn from a mix of historical and mythical sources.

Not a few scholars today who specialize in literary analysis of the Gospels have argued that this is how the Gospels were also constructed: from a mix of history and myth. Most recently along these lines I have posted a few times on Spong’s arguments that Gospel characters like Judas, even the “Twelve Disciples”, Jairus’s daughter who was raised from the dead, blind Bartimaeus, and Zechariah and Elizabeth (the parents of John the Baptist) are all cut from literary fictions. The character of Jesus himself is based on Moses in the Gospel of Matthew and on Elijah in the Gospel of Luke. At the same time, however, we have obviously real people — e.g. Herod and Pilate — appearing in the Gospel narratives.

Some criticisms of these posts have been along the lines of saying that ancient authors did not write stories with historical characters mixed up with fictional characters whose creation was inspired by mythical tales.

Well, that particular criticism is wrong. Chariton is evidence that ancient authors did indeed make up stories that included a mix of historical persons, events and settings along with character and plot details drafted from popular myths and older fictional literature.

This post draws its details from The Myths of Fiction: Studies in the Canonical Greek Novels by Edmund P. Cueva.

Was the Last Supper/Eucharist “originally given” by Jesus AFTER his resurrection?

One of the most fundamental plot details of the narrative of the gospels is that Jesus held a final ritual meal with his disciples in the night hours before he was betrayed, tried and crucified. That final meal was the beginning of the eucharist rite that is celebrated in most churches in some form ever since.

But not all early Christian communities seemed to have believed this origin-story about this ritual. It seems to me that there is some reason to think that some Christians actually thought Jesus instituted this last supper after his resurrection. It was not a memorial of his death, or of his body, but a thanksgiving meal and recollection that he had come (if only for a short time) in the flesh.

The subversive point to this exploration is, of course, how to explain the types of divergences such as these in the extant early Christian evidence. Are they best explained by the historical Jesus/gospel narrative or some other model?

Hymn hates

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Oi! I just had a look over at Dr Jim’s Thinking Shop & Tea Room because I was in need of a good humour shot, but was not amused to see that way back (ten days ago) he had written that he was “tagging Vridar” to continue some silly superstitious chain mail/post thing. I think he was saying it’s my turn to write about a hymn I hate and then tag a couple of others to do the same.

I don’t know no hymns. So he’s killing the game by “tagging” me.

But I do recall:

Gentle Jesus meek and mild,
Look upon a little child.
Da de da de da de de
Suffer me to come to thee.

Or was that:

Suffer me to come to thee,
Da de da simplicity.

I never knew what “suffer me to come to thee” meant except that it sounded like I was a pain that Jesus had to suffer by having me beg to tag along with all the other kids.

Now that recollection has sent me on a roll:

Jesus loves me this I know
For the Bible tells me so
Little ones to him belong
They are weak but he is strong.

Quixie on Mythicism #1 – Idea Non Grata

Leo Quix has an interesting post discussing the current (and historical) reception of the idea that Jesus was not a historical figure.

It sums up pretty much the main point about mythicism per se that I have attempted to express here on this blog. Leo Quix also discusses the phenomenon of the “new mythicists” on the internet in within the broader context of mythicism. It’s a good read.

 

Did no-one know about the Gospels before half way through the second century?

If the gospels were known at all anytime in the first century through to the middle of the second century why did no-one seem to write about them or mention the story in them? Why did they even write about Jesus’ life on earth in ways that directly contradict what we read in the Gospels?

Is the table by Glenn Davis a useful guide to get an overview of who quoted what from the Gospels in the early centuries of Christianity?

Here is one example of where a well-known “Church Father” writing in the middle of the second century drops a detail about the life of Jesus that just does not make a lot of sense to anyone who knows about the Gospels:

Miracles as symbol, not history or biography

This post continues from earlier ones on Spong’s discussion of the meaning and nonhistoricity of miracles in the gospels. See the link above to Spong: Jesus for the Non Religious for these earlier posts.

In discussing the miraculous cure of the blind man in the Gospel of John, John Spong makes a point that I have made in recent posts about Gospel genre: the gospels are not designed to relate marvellous events performed Jesus, but rather to focus on pointing out the identity of Jesus. If this truly is the point of the miracle narratives in the gospels, then some questions come to mind over what reasons anyone might have for thinking they might have some historical basis.

Firstly, if they are told to illustrate a theological construct about Jesus, then we have a candidate for a tendentious motive in their appearances in the narratives.

Secondly, if they are not told to focus on the astonishing personality and impact Jesus had among his contemporaries as a renowned healer (or even shaman, as some have suggested), then we have no reason to think that they formed part of any genuine biographical information about Jesus.

Spong himself does not question the historicity of Jesus. Spong is clear that he believes “of course” there was a historical figure who was baptized by John, crucified by Pilate, and who gathered a few (though probably not twelve) disciples such as Peter (but not Judas, who was an anti-semitic invention).

But when I read the sorts of literary arguments by Spong where he points out that the miracle stories are not so much about the person of Jesus as a figure of history, but rather about a theological identity attributed to him by later authors, then I wonder why the question of historicity should not arise. Is not Spong’s argument essentially an argument that favours the Gospels being entirely theological-narrative inventions?

This looks post at the last of the healing miracles addressed by Spong in Jesus for the Non Religious.

Hope for a real beacon of democracy for the Middle East and beyond

Still on a euphoric roll over the incredible news from the people of Egypt.

Remember that time when a U.S. president promised to make Iraq “a beacon of democracy across the Middle East”? Some of us protested then that the humane way to do this was to support  resistance movements within Iraq.

Now it’s the Egyptian people who are the ones set on course for becoming that beacon instead.

A thousand ironies lie in there somewhere. Stereotypes and myths have been shattered.

Even the Muslim Brotherhood is failing to conform to western expectations now one of their “pillars of stability” has crumbled:

• Brotherhood won’t seek power in Egypt
• US Spy Chief: Muslim Brotherhood is Secular

The people of Egypt. The obscene criminal destruction of Iraq. What a contrast.

Will be breathing secular prayers that the people of Egypt will not suffer betrayal in the coming months.

Date of Ascension of Isaiah (3: M.A. Knibb)

This post looks at M. A. Knibb’s discussion of the date of the Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah. It is taken from The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (v.2) edited by James H. Charlesworth, published 1985.

I will skip here Knibb’s discussion of the various component parts that are generally thought to have been stitched together to make the whole document of eleven chapters. The main sections were discussed by R. H. Charles, and Knibb does refine some of Charles’ conclusions about these, but this can be bypassed for purposes of the discussion on dating the Ascension.

As with my previous post, the links to the Ascension, and copies of some of the singled out parts of the document, are found in the first post in this series: The Date of the Ascension of Isaiah (1).

Date of the Ascension of Isaiah (2: H.F.D. Sparks)

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I am not happy with my previous post. I had intended it to cover the arguments for dating by R.H. Charles, but the post only covered those particular paragraphs (and related references from other pages) that explicitly discussed the possible dates of the parts and whole of the (Martyrdom and) Ascension of Isaiah. But there is much more that I did not touch on yet that necessarily comes into play when making assessments about dates. The “primitiveness” or otherwise of specific titles, terms and theological ideas is also of significance. These must also be considered as part of any assessment in arriving of a likely period of composition, and the observations made of these details are important alongside other discussions explicitly addressing a date.

Maybe, if I can keep up with this personal commitment I have set myself, I will be able in another post address some of these aspects as well.

But till then, I will continue with the original plan to post various scholarly views on the date of the Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah and its respective parts.

This post outlines the arguments found in The Apocryphal Old Testament edited by H. F. D. Sparks and published 1984. In his preface Sparks discusses the challenges of how this work came to be in part a successor publication to the two volumes by R. H. Charles. Sparks uses the same translation of the Ascension by R. H. Charles, but revised by J. M. T. Barton.

See the previous posts for links to the text and copies of independent sections within the text.

The Date of the Ascension of Isaiah (1: R. H. Charles)

Earl Doherty discusses the Ascension of Isaiah’s relevance for his case that some early Christians thought of the Christ’s activity occurring entirely in a non-earthly realm. So the date of the document is significant.

I had hoped to include with the following notes from R. H. Charles some discussions on dating found in more recent commentaries, but since that will take too long to prepare all in one hit, I will follow up this post with another post to complete the discussion.

R. H. Charles published in 1900 a translation of the Ascension of Isaiah that included a detailed discussion of the text in its various manuscript forms. This is available online at Cornell University Library archives. In his introduction he includes a discussion of the dates of composition of the “various constituents” of the Ascension (pp. xliv ff).

Charles first addresses the date of the Martyrdom portion. This is the bulk of the first half of the “Ascension of Isaiah” document. In fact, the document is sometimes more comprehensively titled The Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah. Majority scholarly opinion, but not unanimous opinion, is that the Martyrdom portion originally circulated as a narrative quite independently of the Ascension chapters. (Will discuss some of the arguments in a future post.)

Other sections of the Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah discussed by R. H. Charles are The Testament of Hezekiah and The Vision of Isaiah.

I have singled out each of these sections and colour-coded them at the end of this post. The one section we are most interested is the last one, The Vision of Isaiah. This is the second half consisting of chapters 6 to 11, but I have not included a copy of these chapters here.

I will in a future post try to examine minority arguments that hold that the whole document should be seen as a unity, albeit in some cases apart from a few more obvious later insertions such as 11:2-22.

The composite document is dated to the second or third century c.e. But individual sections themselves (at least two) that are still believed by scholars to have originally circulated independently are dated to the first century. I am addressing the primary documents, so do not cover the later possible sprinklings of Christian terms here and there — nor the major interpolation at 11:2-22 — in this post.

Response to McGrath’s circularity and avoidance of the methodological argument

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In a “response” to a recent post of mine about historical method, James McGrath illustrates well the very problem and question begging that my post was intended to highlight.

McGrath’s opening statement affirms that he simply fails to grasp the argument I am presenting.

[Neil Godfrey's] post begins by stating and commenting on the principle which was the focus of my [McGrath's] post: “If all we have is a story that has no corroboration external to the narrative itself to attest to its historical status, then at the most basic level we have no way of knowing if the story has a historical basis or not.”

Whether this describes the situation in the case of the Gospels or not is perhaps best left to one side for now. Certainly the Gospels are not without a context provided both by Paul’s earlier epistles and by their reception history.

That second paragraph that I have highlighted demonstrates a failure to grasp the meaning of the words of mine he has just quoted. McGrath says the “context” of the Gospels consists of the early epistles of Paul and their reception history, but this “context” is not the same thing at all as providing external corroboration or controls that can testify to the historicity of the narrative of the gospels. They may indeed provide “context”. But that misses the point.

When all you have is a story what can you say about history?

Let’s cut to the chase. If all you have are the gospels then what can you say about the historicity of Jesus?

If all we have is a story that has no corroboration external to the narrative itself to attest to its historical status, then at the most basic level we have no way of knowing if the story has a historical basis or not.

Some biblical scholars have liked to compare what they call their historical methodology to courtroom testing of evidence or detective investigations. Well, they would know that anyone’s “self-testimony” normally requires independent corroboration in order to carry any weight. An alibi needs to be checked out. (Of course, we are talking about “independent” corroboration. Where there is suspicion that several witnesses have come from the same community, room, club, family and thus had time to share and exchange stories, we can hardly call any of these “independent”.)

If there is no independent witness to corroborate a story then that alone by no means can be used as evidence that the story is not true. Of course not. It simply means we have no way of testing the claims of self-testimony.

In other words, at this purely logical level, self-testimony cannot be used as evidence for historicity or nonhistoricity. The most we can say at this formal level is that we simply don’t know either way.

But that does not always mean we are necessarily left in the clouds.

Bartimaeus continued: If the disciples be fictional, what be their leader?

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There are two accounts in Mark’s Gospel of restoring the sight of blind men. The first one, two-staged healing that took place at Bethsaida, was discussed here. Much of the following is owed to the discussion by Vernon K. Robbins in that linked post, even at points where I do not explicitly state this.

In that first healing it is clear that the placement of the story within the narrative structure brings out the symbolic meaning of the miracle. One can readily recognize the symbolic suggestiveness of the restoration of sight being worked out in two stages, as discussed in the previous post. Here is a recap the structural placement of the Bethsaida healing:

A: First there is Jesus’ reminding his disciples of his two attempts to open their eyes to spiritual understanding

8:17 But Jesus, being aware of it, said to them, “Why do you reason because you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive nor understand? Is your heart still hardened? 18 Having eyes, do you not see? And having ears, do you not hear? And do you not remember? 19 When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets full of fragments did you take up?”

They said to Him, “Twelve.”

20 “Also, when I broke the seven for the four thousand, how many large baskets full of fragments did you take up?”

And they said, “Seven.”

21 So He said to them, “How is it you do not understand?”

B: Then comes the two-stage healing of the blind man at Bethsaida — in secret, away from the crowds

Jesus, bearing the diseases he had healed?

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I used to wonder if whoever wrote the Gospel of Mark intended to have Jesus in the last half of the Gospel largely reverse the role he had carved out in the first part of the Gospel.

The gospel is characterized by reversals and ironies at many points. The one who raised the dead dies, but is resurrected, too. Demons recognize who he is but his disciples fail to do so, yet when they finally do their leader himself is rebuked as a “Satan”. The way to gain one’s life is to lose it. Those commanded to silence speak, and those who are commanded to speak are silent. Jesus performs great miracles in Galilee, but when he reaches Jerusalem as the Messianic King he is powerless, rejected and slain.

Jesus is portrayed as the Son of God (cum “son of man”) until he reaches Jerusalem. He casts out the hidden demonic rulers of the world and releases those who had been held captive to their power, either with sin, sickness or outright possession. (Illnesses were believed to be caused by demons.)

The first miraculous act by Jesus when he begins his mission in Capernaum is an exorcism of a man in a synagogue. The moment of the evil spirit departing is described as follows:

And when the unclean spirit had convulsed him and cried out with a loud voice, he came out of him. (Mark 1:26)

The moment of Jesus’ death is not unlike the signs of an exorcism, with a loud shout and exiting of one’s spirit or breath:

Blind Bartimaeus: some meanings of the story surrounding his healing

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Slightly revised 9th Feb. 2010, 3pm

John Spong finishes off his chapter (in Jesus for the Non-Religious) about healings by discussing the healing of blind Bartimaeus as found in the Gospel of Mark and healing of the man born blind in the Gospel of John. I’ll be sharing material from an old article by Vernon K. Robbins about Mark’s treatment of the Bartimaeus episode. Spong covers much the same theme but in less depth. (The article I use is The Healing of Blind Bartimaeus (10:46-52) in the Marcan Theology, published in the Journal of Biblical Literature, June 1973, Vol. 92, Issue 2, pp. 224-243.) Will also draw on Michael Turton’s Historical Commentary on the Gospel of Mark.

The story of Bartimaeus is constructed to inform readers that Jesus is greater than the traditional idea of the Son of David. The details of the story serve only to point out the identity of Jesus Christ and the meaning of discipleship. The healing of blindness is only the symbolic way in which these messages are conveyed. Take away the theological meanings of the story and it becomes a meaningless tale. There are no details left over that give us any reason to suppose that the story was ever anything more than a symbolic or parabolic fiction.

This is the story (Mark 10:46-52)

Postal delay

Serious work is catching up with me again at last. Hoped to dash off the next in the series on the meanings of Jesus’ healings tonight but after spending far longer than I’d like to admit on only getting as far as discussing the name of Bartimaeus I’m going to have to leave this to finish another time. — (Or after that, if my reading assignments on the Ascension of Isaiah don’t overtake me first.)

 

 

Time wasting and “mythicism”

At least one theologian has seen fit to write regular posts about mythicism even though it becomes more apparent with each one of his posts that he has simply never read very much at all by way of publications by mythicists. He certainly never cites his sources or quotes the places where he claims “mythicists say” or “mythicism says” this of that. Such vagueness certainly conveys to me the impression that he is doing nothing more than surmising from some general idea he has heard or skimmed somewhere. I certainly can’t relate his claims about “mythicist” arguments to any “mythicist” publications I have read. His claims are usually straw man parodies.

Jesus was not a healer (2)

Following on here from my earlier post.

As noted in my previous post, Matthew and Luke inform us directly that the miracles of Jesus were for the purpose of identifying Jesus as the Messiah in accordance with the prophecies in Isaiah.

We may, if we wish, speculate that there really were a set of healings performed by charismatic, shaman-like person and that gospel authors completely re-imagined the way these occurred and subsumed those imaginative reconstructions beneath their primary interest of writing a narrative to demonstrate prophetic fulfilments of Isaiah, but that can never be anything more than idle speculation. We have no evidence for such historical antecedents so let’s work with the evidence we do have.

As the discussion following my previous post on this topic shows I have discussed this several times before with detailed analyses of certain miracles (particularly in Mark’s gospel) showing they were intended to be read not as literal events but as symbolic of theological messages. This post draws heavily on Bishop Spong’s perspective of the same argument as found in his Jesus For the Non-Religious. Of the passages in Luke and Matthew in which Jesus is quoted as telling the messengers of John the Baptist that the miracles are signs that he is the Messiah, Spong writes:

Secret violence good, public violence bad

It’s nice to see that the US State Department perceives the United States’ national interests coincide with a public call for the Egyptian presidency (specifically the vice-president) to hold accountable those responsible for the violence pro-Mubarak persons inflicted upon the demonstrators.

It is a pity that it was not apparently deemed to be in U.S. national interests to make similar calls during the past thirty years of Mubarak’s tortures, exiles and executions of dissidents, or his participation in torturing of others in secret rendition progams.

Jesus was not a healer (1)

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Jesus no more healed people than he was born of a virgin or walked on water or rose from the dead.

The Gospels do not portray Jesus as a physician or literal healer of some sort. They portray him as the Christ, or Messiah, and they introduce stories of healings only in order to portray him as that Christ and spiritual Saviour, not as a greater Asclepius. The Gospel authors did not use raw material from oral tradition or eye-witnesses to any healings. They relied on the Old Testament prophecy that in the messianic age the sick would be healed, the blind see, the cripples walk. And even that Old Testament prophecy was figurative. The healings in the Gospels are just as symbolic as the so-called “nature miracles” of Jesus stilling the storm and walking on water.

(I like the author of Jesus the Healer so I feel a bit awkward about the title of this post, by the way.)

Here is one of the healing prophecies that obliged the Gospel authors to introduce healing narratives into their Gospels: Isaiah 35:3-6

Jesus crucified by demons (not on earth): The Ascension of Isaiah in brief

Earl Doherty has argued that the New Testament epistles, unlike the Gospels, portray Jesus as heavenly being who was crucified by demons in heavenly places, and that it was this event that was revealed to early Christian apostles such as Paul by visionary or mystical spiritual experiences or insights into their readings of Jewish scriptures. They described the gospel that they preached as a “mystery” that had been revealed to them by the Spirit of God in what they believed were “the last days”. The crucifixion of Jesus was not an earthly event enacted by a human agencies. The New Testament books and other extra canonical writings give ample evidence for their being a wide variety of “Christianities” in the two or three centuries, but the canonical Gospel narratives and the book of Acts have so completely dominated our understanding of Christian origins that we have failed to see just how “riotously diverse” Christianity was before and even after the Gospels were written. Our canonical gospels — the orthodox narrative of Jesus — and the book of Acts were not widely known among Christian communities until the mid to later half of the second century. We know this from the testimonies of various ancient texts.

Doherty’s arguments are extensive and founded on a wide spectrum of evidence both within the New Testament writings and beyond. But there is one ancient document that appears to describe the very scenario that Doherty believes is found in writings such as the epistles of Paul and other New Testament letter-writers, in particular the Epistle to the Hebrews. This apocryphal text is The Ascension of Isaiah, which in its present form is a relatively late second century Christian document. I will discuss some details of the dating of this document in a future post, but can make it clear now that scholarly introductions to translations of this text generally acknowledge that the current complete text was made up by stitching together at least two originally separate texts, and that along the way various Christian copyists or editors have added their own Christian messages into the original.

The original layer may not have been Christian at all, but Jewish sectarian. It is not impossible that the author of the New Testament’s Epistle to the Hebrews knew of the one of the original Jewish documents that became the basis of the later Ascension. Hebrews speaks of a prophet being sawn in half, and the Ascension of Isaiah is the only other text we know of that testifies to this happening to a prophet. Even apart from that possibility, the earlier (quite likely) pre-Christian text was composed in the later part of the first century.

But to cut to the chase. Here are the highlights of one of the pre-orthodox-Christian passages of what became known as The Ascension of Isaiah. (Many of us I know have read this in full from the online versions or in other books. This is for those who find ploughing through the lengthy compressed text and rambling details, especially with scholarly commentaries, hard going.)

How many stories in the gospels are “purely metaphorical”?

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Dale Allison concludes his book Constructing Jesus with a discussion of the intent of the gospel authors. Did the gospel authors themselves think that they were writing real history or did they think they were writing metaphorical narratives, parables or allegories?

Allison refers to Marcus Borg and others (e.g. Robert Gundry, John Dominic Crossan, Robert J. Miller, Jerome Murphy O’Connor, John Shelby Spong, Roger David Aus) who have gone beyond their scholarly predecessors for whom the question was, “They thought they wrote history but can we believe them?”, to “Did they think they were writing something other than history and have we misunderstood them?”

They are not claiming that we must, because of modern knowledge, reinterpret the old texts in new ways, against their authors’ original intentions. They are instead contending that the texts were not intended to be understood literally in the first place. (p. 438)

I would love to read the books Allison cites but till then will have to rely here on his brief remarks.

Of O’Connor, Allison informs readers that he reasons that Luke’s two accounts of the ascension of Jesus are different because Luke did not think he was writing history (The Holy Land: An Oxford Archaeological Guide from Earliest Times to 1700 (4th ed., 1998)).

Earl Doherty Responds

Earl Doherty has begun his detailed response to GakuseiDon’s review of Earl Doherty’s new book. His responses are being posted on the Freeratio discussion board here, and when complete will appear on his own Jesus Puzzle website:

Doherty’s Response to GDon’s Review of Jesus: Neither God Nor Man