Well, like I said, I have read parts of it. Just never seem to be able to finish it.John2 wrote:I assumed you had already read MacDonald's book on Mark and Homer since you recently mentioned reading his Two Shipwrecked Gospels....
I can well understand that. For me, what Two Shipwrecked Gospels does is to remind me that there are lots and lots of indicators in our extant texts that other texts came before; I do not have to agree with any one reconstruction of a nonextant text in order to appreciate the arguments that led to positing that text.....(which I'm reading now on googlebooks thanks to you but not enjoying, which may be due to my distaste for speculation about hypothetical sources).
There is a part of me that would love to reduce it all down to what we have to hand: just embrace the Farrer theory, for example, and relax. Goodacre and Goulder before him are masterful at showing how much of what we see in the Q material could easily be Luke copying from Matthew. Trouble is, Kloppenborg and others are masterful at showing the limitations of those arguments, how there are simply materials that do not look like they flowed in the direction of Matthew to Luke. There is a small contingent even arguing that the Q material flowed from Luke to Matthew. And there are good arguments involved (a lot involving order of parallels). Put it all together and I become convinced that there is some document or group of documents standing in between Matthew and Luke from which both of them copied. Two Shipwrecked Gospels gives me a rather different perspective on that issue.
And see, some of those matters have, in my judgment, better explanations. The messianic secret, for example, I think comes in from a completely different direction, having nothing to do with Homer (it is all about, in my judgment, a hidden first advent; but there it too much there to go into at this moment). Sailing on boats... nothing to do with Homer, in my opinion. It is all about the nature miracles, about what Crossan calls "sea and meal," about the Exodus (Red Sea and manna), and about fulfilling certain Psalmic, theophanic, mythical concepts (calming the sea, walking on water) which hearken all the way back to Tiamat and Babylonian chaos. The unfaithful crew... again, better explained in my judgment as responding to tensions between two kinds of apostle, tensions which only escalated once Marcion and his critics came on the scene. (Ask JoeWallack about why the disciples are unfaithful in Mark; he can tell you aaaaaaall about it, boy howdy.) Have not decided on the carpenter issue yet; I see nothing standing in the way of Homer being at the root of it... but I feel like, as soon as I say that, some Dead Sea Scroll or something will come to my attention that explains it even better. That is how it has always seemed to happen for me with the Homeric stuff that I have absorbed so far....The Mark and Homer idea works for me because I can see Homer and Mark and the LXX, and I can see that Homeric mimesis existed in antiquity, and MacDonald's theory explains features of Mark (e.g., Jesus being a tekton like Odysseus, sailing on boats like Odysseus, having an unfaithful "crew" like Odysseus, and concealing his true identity like Odysseus) convincingly enough for me.
Ben.