And no, it is not intellectually meritorious to look up the critics of MacDonald's work and then say “it's not a convincing theory”. His harshest critics welcome the investigation of Homerisms in the New Testament, they do not doubt there are Homerisms, they do not even doubt that there are Homerisms in gMark - they just doubt (or doubted) and disputed MacDonald's scholarship on it. If I say you're on a wild goose chase you don't immediately say to me: aha, so you've read Shakespeare! That's just a cultural idiom these days, no one needs to have personally read Shakespeare to know Shakespearean idioms.
MacDonald's critics simply think that many of the Homerisms in Mark are better explained as cultural Homerisms. I've gone over here what I think is the slam-dunk proof that nobody can deny: many of the same Homerisms are found in the Gospel of Nicodemus - written 3 to 4 centuries after Mark - and they were noticed by J Rendel Harris published in this 1898 book. The Passion narrative uses the death of Hector for most of the narrative elements in the death of Jesus. It has a level of specificity to it that requires a literary connection, not just cultural understanding of the Greek classical literature. This doesn't mean that Mark didn't come up with narrative ideas from elsewhere, it just means that the bulk of them for the Passion come out of Iliad 22 and 24 - he still makes some use of the Odyssey, he still makes use of the LXX for reasons other than narrative, and yes he absolutely makes use of the early Christian traditions. But people have a weird idea about what these traditions were: they were religious customs and practises, rituals, rites, sacraments, prayers, song, poems, profession of their beliefs and so-on. How do you take the baptism ritual and put it into narrative? It's in the Passion - Mark worked out a way to put it in his Passion imagery despite the fact that he's following the Iliad's death of Hector for the narrative. Mark starts with the Baptism of Jesus, and he ends his gospel with what appears to be in part Baptismal imagery.
The issue I think is that most people whether Christian, atheist, or other cannot wrap their heads around how ancient Greek prose writing worked. They also don't seem to understand or appreciate how many literary problems with Mark are solved with this proposed solution. You can't look for a historical answer to a literary question - that's illogical. To quote Williams 1999:
Mark 16:7–8 records the instructions of the young man to the women at the tomb and their surprising response. “But go, say to the disciples and to Peter, ‘He is going before you into Galilee; you will see him there, just as he said to you.’ And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment took hold of them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Do these verses make adequate sense as the conclusion to Mark’s Gospel? Some would say “no” and would search for an explanation to the problem of Mark’s ending in the historical circumstances surrounding the writing or preservation of this Gospel. Perhaps Mark was unable to complete his Gospel, and even though he stopped at 16:8, that was not his intended ending. Perhaps the real ending of Mark’s Gospel has been lost.1 However, those who suggest such solutions to the problem of Mark’s ending must recognize that they are providing an historical explanation for a literary problem. Does the conclusion of Mark’s Gospel at 16:8 make adequate sense? This question presents a literary problem dealing with the meaning and function of the text. At times, historical conjectures are necessary to solve literary problems, but a literary solution should be sought first.
Mark's use of Homer solves not just this one problem, but many other literary problems in his gospel all at once. That's the true reason that some scholars fear it: it's as powerful as Marcan Priority in terms of how it may reshape one's entire understanding of the gospels - it upends the final set of assumptions that critical scholars have felt was safe going back to the 1800's for historical criticism - it means that historical criticism of the gospels is no longer on any firm ground and may need to be discarded entirely in favour of the other more fruitful approaches. West's introduction in Watts 2013 is liberating:
“The theological and exegetical worlds do not need to be shaken to their foundations: they need to be utterly and thoroughly demolished and rebuilt from the bottom up. The way scholars have engaged the biblical text for the past 200 or so years has gotten us virtually nowhere. Fad methodologies have come and gone and we still can’t assert with any sense of assurance that ‘this biblical passage means this’ (indeed, many would suggest these days that texts don’t mean anything, it is only what the reader thinks that matters). Nor can we confidently insist that this or that biblical author wanted to communicate this or that idea. A new approach is needed. We need not build on the shaky and uncertain foundation of historical criticism: we need a new paradigm. It may well be that in halting first steps Watts’ effort might lead us to at least the proper path.
“Yet being something of a realist I understand that most biblical scholars will continue to utilize tools developed many, many decades ago. And that is a shame. Medical specialists utilize new tools and so do other professionals. Biblical scholars alone seem fixated on making use of methods long since abandoned in other fields of research. Biblical scholars are, it seems, excessively conservative.
“If we at least were to entertain the possibility that Watts is ‘on to something’ (and I am not yet fully convinced that he is) then we might finally break free from our shackles and discover new facets of biblical texts which we have not yet seen.
“The book at hand is a starting point. A first step. It is not, and shouldn’t be imagined to be the ‘last word’ or ‘the definitive treatment’. But as a first step, it is in fact quite bold. As the first salvo in a demolition operation, it is worthy of consideration. Let the demolition commence.”
It's hardly my job to belittle people who are ignorant and don't know that they're ignorant. That approach that some atheists take is arrogant in its own right because they too do not know what they're ignorant of.
The questions that mimesis criticism can solve when used in combination with redaction criticism and source criticism goes well beyond what's available using the traditional literary criticism approaches alone. Redaction criticism answers (or seeks to answer) what literary criticism cannot, but the core principle of redaction criticism absolutely applies to the literary methods. And that is that until one knows otherwise, one should start with the assumption that the author's form of the text that we have is intentional. 95% of the so-called errors in the Gospel of Mark are not errors at all, they're creative literary choices that only look like errors if you hold them up as history. Mark doesn't care if he's contradicting Paul at times - that's his choice. Paul was an apostle writing in the 50's CE and Mark's writing (probably) in the 70's CE an entire generation later - things have moved on since Paul's day. He's by far the closest of the gospel authors theologically to Paul, but that's also because he's chronologically the closest. My best guess for the other gospels is: Matthew 90's, Luke-Acts 115-135, and John around 140s-150s CE. John is probably writing around 100 years after Paul - of course it'll look different.
The weird biblical literalists need to stop accusing us of attempting to find non-historical explanations for everything in the Bible. I'm just a lay researcher, but I've been looking for answers I've finally found after more than a decade in looking into this stuff - it's not motivated out of trying to “remove” biblical history. Yes it's a consequence that the historical Jesus probably didn't instigate the Eucharist because it seems to originate with Paul... that doesn't mean the historical Jesus didn't share meals with his disciples, it simply means that the Eucharist is a later sacrament developed by an apostle. Mark was honouring Jesus by drawing comparison to the Greek heroes: his entire intention is to show that Jesus is greater than the Greek heroes. He is expressing his theological truth, he's not attempting to write literal history - and neither are the other Evangelists. What it means is that John Shelby Spong was 100% right in his conclusions that the gospels are not literal history, the Jesus Seminar and the Acts Seminar made progress that was not made in 200 years of biblical scholarship, and it is no longer intellectually nor academically credible to ignore mimesis criticism and call it invalid. Of course not everything that Dennis R MacDonald thinks may turn out to be correct - you either cast the net too wide or you cast it too narrowly to find what you're looking for. People will debate the looser Homerisms as being potentially cultural in origin - and that's fine, that's healthy. Almost all of the literary problems known to exist in the Marcan Passion are solved with Mark's use of Homker - that's not coincidence, that's too powerful to be coincidence. The rest of them are solved with ordinary Greek literary conventions... and understanding that it's a theological document written in prose - it really doesn't take much.
MacDonald's critics simply think that many of the Homerisms in Mark are better explained as cultural Homerisms. I've gone over here what I think is the slam-dunk proof that nobody can deny: many of the same Homerisms are found in the Gospel of Nicodemus - written 3 to 4 centuries after Mark - and they were noticed by J Rendel Harris published in this 1898 book. The Passion narrative uses the death of Hector for most of the narrative elements in the death of Jesus. It has a level of specificity to it that requires a literary connection, not just cultural understanding of the Greek classical literature. This doesn't mean that Mark didn't come up with narrative ideas from elsewhere, it just means that the bulk of them for the Passion come out of Iliad 22 and 24 - he still makes some use of the Odyssey, he still makes use of the LXX for reasons other than narrative, and yes he absolutely makes use of the early Christian traditions. But people have a weird idea about what these traditions were: they were religious customs and practises, rituals, rites, sacraments, prayers, song, poems, profession of their beliefs and so-on. How do you take the baptism ritual and put it into narrative? It's in the Passion - Mark worked out a way to put it in his Passion imagery despite the fact that he's following the Iliad's death of Hector for the narrative. Mark starts with the Baptism of Jesus, and he ends his gospel with what appears to be in part Baptismal imagery.
The issue I think is that most people whether Christian, atheist, or other cannot wrap their heads around how ancient Greek prose writing worked. They also don't seem to understand or appreciate how many literary problems with Mark are solved with this proposed solution. You can't look for a historical answer to a literary question - that's illogical. To quote Williams 1999:
Mark 16:7–8 records the instructions of the young man to the women at the tomb and their surprising response. “But go, say to the disciples and to Peter, ‘He is going before you into Galilee; you will see him there, just as he said to you.’ And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment took hold of them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Do these verses make adequate sense as the conclusion to Mark’s Gospel? Some would say “no” and would search for an explanation to the problem of Mark’s ending in the historical circumstances surrounding the writing or preservation of this Gospel. Perhaps Mark was unable to complete his Gospel, and even though he stopped at 16:8, that was not his intended ending. Perhaps the real ending of Mark’s Gospel has been lost.1 However, those who suggest such solutions to the problem of Mark’s ending must recognize that they are providing an historical explanation for a literary problem. Does the conclusion of Mark’s Gospel at 16:8 make adequate sense? This question presents a literary problem dealing with the meaning and function of the text. At times, historical conjectures are necessary to solve literary problems, but a literary solution should be sought first.
Mark's use of Homer solves not just this one problem, but many other literary problems in his gospel all at once. That's the true reason that some scholars fear it: it's as powerful as Marcan Priority in terms of how it may reshape one's entire understanding of the gospels - it upends the final set of assumptions that critical scholars have felt was safe going back to the 1800's for historical criticism - it means that historical criticism of the gospels is no longer on any firm ground and may need to be discarded entirely in favour of the other more fruitful approaches. West's introduction in Watts 2013 is liberating:
“The theological and exegetical worlds do not need to be shaken to their foundations: they need to be utterly and thoroughly demolished and rebuilt from the bottom up. The way scholars have engaged the biblical text for the past 200 or so years has gotten us virtually nowhere. Fad methodologies have come and gone and we still can’t assert with any sense of assurance that ‘this biblical passage means this’ (indeed, many would suggest these days that texts don’t mean anything, it is only what the reader thinks that matters). Nor can we confidently insist that this or that biblical author wanted to communicate this or that idea. A new approach is needed. We need not build on the shaky and uncertain foundation of historical criticism: we need a new paradigm. It may well be that in halting first steps Watts’ effort might lead us to at least the proper path.
“Yet being something of a realist I understand that most biblical scholars will continue to utilize tools developed many, many decades ago. And that is a shame. Medical specialists utilize new tools and so do other professionals. Biblical scholars alone seem fixated on making use of methods long since abandoned in other fields of research. Biblical scholars are, it seems, excessively conservative.
“If we at least were to entertain the possibility that Watts is ‘on to something’ (and I am not yet fully convinced that he is) then we might finally break free from our shackles and discover new facets of biblical texts which we have not yet seen.
“The book at hand is a starting point. A first step. It is not, and shouldn’t be imagined to be the ‘last word’ or ‘the definitive treatment’. But as a first step, it is in fact quite bold. As the first salvo in a demolition operation, it is worthy of consideration. Let the demolition commence.”
It's hardly my job to belittle people who are ignorant and don't know that they're ignorant. That approach that some atheists take is arrogant in its own right because they too do not know what they're ignorant of.
The questions that mimesis criticism can solve when used in combination with redaction criticism and source criticism goes well beyond what's available using the traditional literary criticism approaches alone. Redaction criticism answers (or seeks to answer) what literary criticism cannot, but the core principle of redaction criticism absolutely applies to the literary methods. And that is that until one knows otherwise, one should start with the assumption that the author's form of the text that we have is intentional. 95% of the so-called errors in the Gospel of Mark are not errors at all, they're creative literary choices that only look like errors if you hold them up as history. Mark doesn't care if he's contradicting Paul at times - that's his choice. Paul was an apostle writing in the 50's CE and Mark's writing (probably) in the 70's CE an entire generation later - things have moved on since Paul's day. He's by far the closest of the gospel authors theologically to Paul, but that's also because he's chronologically the closest. My best guess for the other gospels is: Matthew 90's, Luke-Acts 115-135, and John around 140s-150s CE. John is probably writing around 100 years after Paul - of course it'll look different.
The weird biblical literalists need to stop accusing us of attempting to find non-historical explanations for everything in the Bible. I'm just a lay researcher, but I've been looking for answers I've finally found after more than a decade in looking into this stuff - it's not motivated out of trying to “remove” biblical history. Yes it's a consequence that the historical Jesus probably didn't instigate the Eucharist because it seems to originate with Paul... that doesn't mean the historical Jesus didn't share meals with his disciples, it simply means that the Eucharist is a later sacrament developed by an apostle. Mark was honouring Jesus by drawing comparison to the Greek heroes: his entire intention is to show that Jesus is greater than the Greek heroes. He is expressing his theological truth, he's not attempting to write literal history - and neither are the other Evangelists. What it means is that John Shelby Spong was 100% right in his conclusions that the gospels are not literal history, the Jesus Seminar and the Acts Seminar made progress that was not made in 200 years of biblical scholarship, and it is no longer intellectually nor academically credible to ignore mimesis criticism and call it invalid. Of course not everything that Dennis R MacDonald thinks may turn out to be correct - you either cast the net too wide or you cast it too narrowly to find what you're looking for. People will debate the looser Homerisms as being potentially cultural in origin - and that's fine, that's healthy. Almost all of the literary problems known to exist in the Marcan Passion are solved with Mark's use of Homker - that's not coincidence, that's too powerful to be coincidence. The rest of them are solved with ordinary Greek literary conventions... and understanding that it's a theological document written in prose - it really doesn't take much.
![[Image: mmm-donuts]](https://tv-fanatic-res.cloudinary.com/iu/s--CmM51gZs--/f_auto,q_auto/v1371220740/mmm-donuts)
