I"m not seeing much connection between what I wrote and what you wrote. I was contrasting those who think they are writing about events of the past and those who know that they aren't.
Ted
DCHindley wrote:What I think you are talking about is what White calls "ideological implication." However, all writing reflects the ideology of the writer. Hand in hand. Now it is fair that folks differ in their opinions about the ideology expressed.TedM wrote:I suspect that writers who are writing stuff they think reflects the past DO WRITE DIFFERENTLY than writers who are writing stuff that they KNOW does NOT reflect the past, but are trying to make it appear that it does. As such, the gospel of Mark should show such differences from the other gospels IF in fact GMark was the latter, and the other 3 are the former.spin wrote:
The best that we can hope for is that they writers believed that what they passed on reflected the past
The reason I BELIEVE they would be different is 'common sense', 'intuition', 'logic' or some combination of these - that simply recognizes the fact that people behave differently when their motivations are different. They may TRY to behave exactly the same and the more clever ones can perhaps get away with it, but the fact remains that their THOUGHT PROCESS is DIFFERENT. This should in theory make their results subject to testing that helps reveal their true motives.
Do I have those tests, or good examples? NO.
K. Marx, for instance, interprets historical evidence using his socio-economic theories. We can differ over their value for interpretation, or how they were used, out of context, by the various parties that fought for the socialist cause(s) in the Russian Revolution (1917+). Marx himself was an expert at classical economics, but he thought he could improve on it by taking the implications of market forces to their extremes and thus predict the future, a utopian communist world state. You don't have to agree with Marx to find value in his book Capital, which is why I own a set.
M. Rostovtzeff sees ancients applying capitalistic principals as if everyone in all periods have always done so, but borrowed the terminology of Marx to describe how Rome fell apart. They were not capitalistic enough. He wrote in 1926 after the Communists had won control of all Russia from the control of the "White Russians" and the western armies that had intervened, forcing him to seek exile in Sweden, the UK and finally the USA. Besides English, he wrote later editions in German and Italian. The English edition was finally revised in by P. M. Fraser in 1957, incorporating Rostovtzeff's ideas from the German and Italian editions. Fraser was well aware that much of his terminology was anachronistic, but he examined things in minute detail, making the book a valuable reference work, which is why I own a set.
But in 1973, M. I. Finley, influenced by Karl Polanyi and Max Weber, blew apart any notion that modern socio-economics existed in ancient times, but that exchanges and profit motives revolved around the status groups jockeying for power in city states, and that one of the strongest motives for social change was relief from debt obligation and resulting slavery. There may have been a few principals to derive from the multitude of local economies centered around city states, and these really only applied to Greece and Rome, not to the Ancient Near East in general. Wealth was accumulated from aggregation of power over rents and taxes, not from application of economic policy. Local economies just happen when status groups vie for power over one another. His work came out in a second edition in 1985. I don't agree with everything he says, but I own a copy.
But then in 2002 there was an anthology of articles from a wide array of contributors edited by Walter Scheidel and Sitta von Reden that took the debate to new levels, showing that Finley was dead wrong in some areas, but not too far off in others. I don't agree with everything that everybody says, but I own a copy.
It could be argued that Rostovtzeff's reconstruction of ancient economics is heavily indebted to his anti-communist POV. It could also be argued that Finley's reconstruction of ancient economies was heavily influenced by the economics of Polanyi and the sociology of Weber. Same goes for those who contributed to Scheidel & von Reden's book. I can overlook these, and pick out what seems out of place, based on what I have read and think I know about ancient history, applying the same principal advocated by postmodernists, that the past is always interpreted by the critic's present, including my own.
I say we just have to learn to live with this situation. Things still happened in the past, some of which relics tell interesting stories, but not the whole story. No one can know everything that happened, and even if one was actually there, would not know every cause that caused "it" to happen. We'd have to be an all-knowing god to know everything, and most of us (here) aren't sure that such a god exists, at least as a conscious entity.
Well, need to go and take a shower before dinner when the wife gets home from her late day at work.
DCH