Carrier And Mimesis

[MrMacSon]

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Here's a review of MacDonald's The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark by Richard Carrier.

I can't see a date for that review, but it's probably over a decade old(?)

[John2]

I'm on board with MacDonald's theory. Even the fact that Mark is written in Greek points in this direction in a broad sense, as Carrier notes in his review:

"MacDonald begins by describing what scholars of antiquity take for granted: anyone who learned to write Greek in the ancient world learned from Homer. Homer was the textbook. Students were taught to imitate Homer, even when writing on other subjects, or to rewrite passages of Homer in prose, using different vocabulary. Thus, we can know for certain that the author of Mark's Gospel was thoroughly familiar with the works of Homer and well-trained in recasting Homeric verse into new prose tales."

[DCHindley]

In Carrier's book, "On the Historicity of Jesus", Carrier proposes that the gospel of Mark was based off the Homeric epics. He cites Dennis Macdonald extensively. Now Macdonald came out with a lot of this work quite a few years ago and it hasn't really caught on. Has his work been debunked? Is it just parallel-mania? What does the consensus of scholars think on his work and mimesis in particular? Thanks

Unfortunately, the term "mimesis" is being used somewhat incorrectly.

Surprisingly, the Wiki page in the term is rather good:

Plato and Aristotle ... contrasted mimesis [Greek μίμησις] with diegesis (Greek διήγησις). Mimesis shows, rather than tells, by means of directly represented action that is enacted. Diegesis, however, is the telling of the story by a narrator; the author narrates action indirectly and describes what is in the characters' minds and emotions. The narrator may speak as a particular character or may be the "invisible narrator" or even the "all-knowing narrator" who speaks from above in the form of commenting on the action or the characters.

So, "mimesis" would not be imitation of Homer by the author of the gospel of Mark, at least in classical form.

In a rather poorer quality section of this page, which confuses Greek and Latin rhetoric and is repeated in several forms in a number of linked pages related to Dionysius, it is noted that

It was ... Dionysius of Halicarnassus (born ca. 60 BCE, died post 7 BCE) who created a "literary method of imitation ... [being] the rhetorical practice of emulating, adapting, reworking, and enriching a source text by an earlier author."

Dionysius' concept marked a significant departure from the concept of mimesis formulated by Aristotle in the 4th century BCE, which was only concerned with "imitation of nature" instead of the "imitation of other authors."

If I am following the links correctly, Dionysius' concept of mimesis was adopted by Latin writers as "Dionysian imitatio". Dionysius was himself an Atticist and wrote in Greek.

Apparently there is a fragment of the Greek work entitled "On Imitation (Περὶ μιμήσεως ...), on the best models in the different kinds of literature and the way in which they are to be imitated." "A prominent Latin follower of Dionysius was Quintilian, who shared with him the view of imitatio as the practice that leads to an historical progress of literature over time."

I cannot tell whether Dionysius won over his fellow Greek rhetoricians, as the Latin writer Quintilian flourished ca. 35 – ca. 100 CE. Are we to assume that the Greek author of Mark was influenced by Dionysius, or by his Latin admirers? Carrier is using the term in the sense embraced by Latin rhetoricians, so perhaps he should have called it "imitatio".

Back to Wiki:

One of the best-known modern studies of mimesis, understood as a form of realism in literature, is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature [1946], which opens with a famous comparison between the way the world is represented in Homer's Odyssey and the way it appears in the Bible.

The first two chapters, are most relevant:
1 Odysseus' Scar, on the relation of the Odyssey by Homer and Genesis 22
2 Fortunata, on the relation of the Satyricon by Petronius, Annals Book 1 by Tacitus and Mark ch. 14

Another interesting work of Auerbach is a reprinted article in Scenes from the Drama of Euro Lit (1959) entitled "FIGURA". Figura is a Latin term that refers to the interpretation of figures in past works as "prefiguring" later ones, and is Auerbach's even later expansion of mimesis as understood by later Latin rhetoricians such as Quintilian. The Chapter of this article that is most interesting is chapter II (2) "Figura in the Phenomenal Prophecy of the Church Fathers." I think anyone can find a scan of the chapter available online if one looks even moderately hard (as I did).

As for "intertextuality", the term was introduced in the late 1960s by Julia Kristeva, a French semiotician (think Ferdinand Saussure).

Kristeva broke with traditional notions of the author's "influences" and the text's "sources," positing that all signifying systems, from table settings to poems, are constituted by the manner in which they transform earlier signifying systems. A literary work, then, is not simply the product of a single author, but of its relationship to other texts and to the strucutures of language itself. "[A]ny text,"' she argues, "is constructed of a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another."
http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0278.html

I think I have seen the concept expressed as "any one narrative text has been influenced by every other text (written or oral) the author has been exposed to" (don't ask for a source, I have paraphrased).

DCH

[John2]

That Wikipedia also quotes pseudo-Heraclitus (c. first century CE):

""From the earliest age, children beginning their studies are nursed on Homer's teaching. One might say that while we were still in swathing bands we sucked from his epics as from fresh milk. He assists the beginner and later the adult in his prime. In no stage of life, from boyhood to old age, do we ever cease to drink from him."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimesis_criticism

[MrMacSon]

Surprisingly, the Wiki page in the term [ mimesis] is rather good:

Plato and Aristotle ... contrasted mimesis [Greek μίμησις] with diegesis (Greek διήγησις). Mimesis shows, rather than tells, by means of directly represented action that is enacted. Diegesis, however, is the telling of the story by a narrator; the author narrates action indirectly and describes what is in the characters' minds and emotions. The narrator may speak as a particular character or may be the "invisible narrator" or even the "all-knowing narrator" who speaks from above in the form of commenting on the action or the characters.

... it is noted that

It was ... Dionysius of Halicarnassus (born ca. 60 BCE, died post 7 BCE) who created a "literary method of imitation ... [being] the rhetorical practice of emulating, adapting, reworking, and enriching a source text by an earlier author."

... Are we to assume that the Greek author of Mark was influenced by Dionysius, or by his Latin admirers?

or indirectly influenced by the then, relatively-recently developed, literary method of "Dionysian imitatio" ?


This might be related to something we discussed briefly recently -

• Ethopoeia - “character making” - literary imitation (μίμησις; mimesis) of the character of a person
  
  • and Dionysius of Halicarnassus features there, too
    
    Bruss, Kristine S. (2013) 'Persuasive Ethopoeia in Dionysius’s Lysias' Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric, Vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 34-57.

and the defined related literary phenomena -

• Prosopopoeia - "person-making" -where a person and the character are created simultaneously
  
  Eidelopoeia - "apparition-making" - attributing words to a known person now deceased.

Combinations would be possible eg. creating a person and the character, saying they were deceased (thus in the past), and attributing words to them.

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[MrMacSon]

That Wikipedia also quotes pseudo-Heraclitus (c. first century CE) [Ps.-Heraclitus, Quaest. Hom. 1.5-6]:

""From the earliest age, children beginning their studies are nursed on Homer's teaching. One might say that while we were still in swathing bands we sucked from his epics as from fresh milk. He assists the beginner and later the adult in his prime. In no stage of life, from boyhood to old age, do we ever cease to drink from him."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimesis_criticism

That's interesting (and fits with what you quoted above about what Carrier said that MacDonald said - http://www.earlywritings.com/forum/view ... 585#p49585)

It seems there are two Wikipedia pages: the one you cite and mimesis

[MrMacSon]

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From mimesis -

In Mimesis and Alterity (1993), the anthropologist Michael Taussig examines the way that people from one culture adopt another's nature and culture (the process of mimesis) at the same time as distancing themselves from it (the process of alterity).

Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-90686-5.

From alterity -

In anthropology, alterity has been used by scholars ... to refer to the construction of "cultural others" ..

and

The concept of alterity is also being used in theology and in spiritual books meant for general readers. This is not out of place because, for believers in the Judeo-Christian tradition, God is the ultimate 'Other'. Alterity has also been used to describe the goal of many Christians, to become themselves deeply "other" than the usual norms of behavior and patterns of thought of the secular culture at large.

While that commentary applies to the present day it could also apply to the peoples of antiquity - a desire to become 'deeply "other" than the usual norms of behavior and patterns of thought' of the culture' of their age.

• that is essentially what Constantine and Licinius did with their Edict of Milan

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[DCHindley]

That Wikipedia also quotes pseudo-Heraclitus (c. first century CE):

""From the earliest age, children beginning their studies are nursed on Homer's teaching. One might say that while we were still in swathing bands we sucked from his epics as from fresh milk. He assists the beginner and later the adult in his prime. In no stage of life, from boyhood to old age, do we ever cease to drink from him."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimesis_criticism

The Wiki article was Mimesis. The article you cite is on Mimesis criticism and is essentially referring to imitatio as defined by Dionysius of Halicarnassus.

I have to agree with MacDonald's critic Karl Olav Sandnes, that MacDonald assumes a greater familiarity with Homer among early Christians, and by the author of Mark, than is likely to have actually been the case. The only folks who received this in-depth education were the elite classes. Everyone else (well over 95% of the population), all functionally illiterate (just literate enough to get by in daily business or interpersonal transactions, but could hardly read Koine much less comprehend Attic literature), knew of what Homer and other great authors wrote through hearsay and rumor. The author of Mark, for sure, was not as savvy as the author of Luke, and the author of Luke does not seem to cite Homer or recognize the passages of Mark as alluding to Homer.

This is where Kristeva's concept of "intertextuality" comes into play. There may be allusions to bits and pieces of Homer in Mark, but these are part of the jetsam and flotsam of the marketplaces of the day.

DCH

[John2]

DCH,

You wrote:

"The only folks who received this in-depth education were the elite classes."

This would fit the candidates for the creation of the NT that I have in mind and have mentioned recently on another thread, like Epaphroditus or Tiberius Alexander.

You also wrote:

"The author of Mark, for sure, was not as savvy as the author of Luke, and the author of Luke does not seem to cite Homer or recognize the passages of Mark as alluding to Homer."

Regarding Mark, Carrier notes in his review of MacDonald:

"Though Mark's Greek is extremely colloquial, not at all in high literary style, this itself is surely a grand and ingenious transvaluation of Homer: whereas the great epics were archaic and difficult, only to be mastered by the educated elites, only to be understood completely by those with access to glossaries and commentaries and marked-up critical editions, Mark not only updated Homer's values and theology, but inverted its entire character as an elite masterpiece, by making his own epic simple, thoroughly understandable by the common, the poor, the masses, and lacking in the overt pretension and cleverness of poetic verse, written in plain, ordinary language. The scope of genius evident in Mark's reconstruction of Homeric motifs is undeniable and has convinced me that Mark was no simpleton: he was a literary master, whose achievement is all the greater in his choice of idiom-his "poor Greek" was deliberate and artful, as was his story."

So that's an idea regarding Mark's "poor Greek" that supports its creation by an elite like Epaphroditus.

And Luke may not have recognized the Homeric mimesis in Mark, but there are indications that he imitated Homer too, as mentioned in the Wikipedia link I gave above:

"In the same way, one can justifiably argue that Luke has used the story of Elpenor from Odyssey 10-12 as a model for his account of Eutychus in Acts 20:5-12 using the criteria. Criterion 1 (Accessibility): Books 10-12 of Odyssey were among the most popular in antiquity. Criterion 2 (Analogy): Among the many imitations of these books in antiquity, Virgil's Aeneid contains two, the stories about Palinurus and Misenus. Criteria 3 (Density), 4 (Order), and 5 (Distinctive Traits) can be seen to be met by referring to the above table. Of particular significance is Luke's name choice: Homer often called Elpenor "unlucky" (Odyssey 11.61, 76, 80); Luke's Eutychus literally means "good fortune." Furthermore, the raising of Luke's Eutychus occurs in the Troad, the cite of the Trojan War. Criterion 6 (Interpretability): Luke emulates Homer in the following ways. Elpenor fell to his death because he was in a drunken stupor; Eutychus appeared to die after falling asleep (out a window) while listening to Paul preach deep into the night. Odysseus was unaware of Elpenor's misfortune; Paul knew immediately about Eutychus' fall and also that "his soul [was] still in him." Later in Homer's story, Elpenor's body was buried at dawn; at dawn, the other believers lifted up Eutychus alive."