Bilby: a mix of fine exegesis and naive historicism

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
User avatar
Ben C. Smith
Posts: 8994
Joined: Wed Apr 08, 2015 2:18 pm
Location: USA
Contact:

Re: Bilby: a mix of fine exegesis and naive historicism

Post by Ben C. Smith »

Looks like a post of yours got hung up in moderation for a while. That can happen to a newly enrolled forum member.
vocesanticae wrote: Wed Sep 16, 2020 7:44 am
Ben C. Smith wrote: Wed Sep 16, 2020 4:29 am
vocesanticae wrote: Tue Sep 15, 2020 10:49 pmFor example, if I gave you three statements, how would you order them sequentially as to when they first emerged in history and how they are related to each other?

1. "May the schwartz be with you."
2. "The schwartz, the force, same difference."
3. "May the force be with you.
In this case, because of my awareness of how puns work, I would probably stack them in the order 3, 1, 2 (original, pun, explanation of pun). But that is only because I know how puns (usually) work in English.

What about something like this?

1. Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy were great Presidents.
2. Presidents Lincoln, Kennedy, and Reagan were great Presidents.
3. Presidents Lincoln and Reagan were great Presidents.

In this case, I would have no idea, because preferences for which Presidents are great can vary from person to person. Maybe person 1 made an assertion, person 2 added a name to the list, and then person 3 agreed with the addition but disagreed with one of the original names. Maybe that exact same process happened in the order 3, 2, 1. Maybe person 2 started with a full list, but persons 1 and 3 each removed the paradigmatic member of the political party to which each belonged (Republican or Democrat). Maybe person 3 named two Presidents, person 1 proposed an alternative for the more modern of the two, and person 3 said, "No, they were all great." Maybe that same thing happened in the order 1, 3, 2. I cannot tell.
Good point. Not all signals are clear. That's why it's crucial to analyze hundreds of signals and their synthesizing journeys over time so as to delineate textual strata clearly.

By the way, you got the sequence right! Nice job! Have you seen Star Wars? Spaceballs? Did you look at their release date?
I have watched Star Wars (the original trilogy plus the follow-up trilogy decades later; nothing after that). I watched Spaceballs once late at night when I was a late teenager, got little out of it, and for the most part have forgotten about it since then. However, I have had friends who say, "May the Schwartz be with you," and I have always been pretty sure from context that Spaceballs was their source.
Did you do a Google search on #2.
No. I did no searching.
ΤΙ ΕΣΤΙΝ ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ
vocesanticae
Posts: 115
Joined: Tue Sep 15, 2020 3:10 pm

Re: Bilby: a mix of fine exegesis and naive historicism

Post by vocesanticae »

maryhelena wrote: Wed Sep 16, 2020 11:13 pm
vocesanticae wrote: Wed Sep 16, 2020 8:55 am
Irish1975 wrote: Wed Sep 16, 2020 8:02 am
vocesanticae wrote: Wed Sep 16, 2020 7:16 am Movie production today is obviously far more involved and complicated an undertaking than the production of ancient texts.
Is it? Movies are made in a matter of months. From conventional Paul to the First Edition (circa 160 according to David Trobisch), the New Testament gestated for a hundred years. Also, there is a movie industry, a set way of doing things, a professional role for all participants. But our authors, although they wrote literature in the generic sense, had only the Hebrew Bible as a precedent, which they sought to “fulfill” with an artistic subtlety we can only partly comprehend.
Socratic question. What's one of your favorite songs that has been covered by another band?
The Ataris’ version of Boys of Summer is fun. They swap out Don’s reference to the Grateful Dead and instead sing “I saw a Black Flag sticker on a cadillac.”

In folk music, the rules are all different, because it’s not about a studio version. You can strip the song for parts, turn it upside down, rip its heart out, like in the early days of hip hop. Or like what John did to Mark.
I'm in completely agreement with Trobisch about the 100 year process, particularly for the Gospels. That is a compilation (like the Pentatech). There were about 10 significant productions/albums released from the start of the process in the late 60s to the conclusion in the 140s or 150s.

Great cover analogy, to show how the retelling transforms the original. Now, if you or another musically gifted singer covered it today and knew well both the original and the Ataris version, do you think traces of both performances might show up in the 3rd cover? Do you think you'd be able to tell if a more recent cover of Boys of Summer was influenced by the Ataris version? And if that more recent cover became popular, and another cover were made 10 years from now, do you think you'd be able to detect the sequence of the covers? Hint: it wouldn't just be the words or the notes, but the style and trends and cultural setting of the *precise time* in which any more recent cover was composed that would give away its later date. When Disturbed covered Simon and Garfunkel's Sound of Silence, they couldn't help but sound like Disturbed and to sound like other music of the 2010s.

All of us are syntheses of the signals we have received in the past. Traces of our past and our present are always there to see in our communications, if we have the eyes and ears to see and hear them.

In the immortal words of George Clooney, "Consider the lillies of the field, G-damn it!"
Love the music analogy - even though I can't hold a tune (afraid that's one Irish trait I don't hold...sadly..)

Ah, but maybe I can lay claim to another Irish trait.....a radical mind and a fighting spirit.... :eek:

Thomas Brodie has that Irish radical mind (though, sadly, it seems his fighting spirit has taken a knock...)

Brodie turned his ear not to music but to words from the past:


Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus

Terms such as 'echo' and 'allusion' do not do justice to the complexity of how the New Testament uses the Old Testament. 'Echo' is appropriate insofar as it pictures the transfer of sound or words from one place to another. But in echo, the energy for the transfer comes from the source, whereas, in the various forms of rewriting, the energy that forms the echo comes especially from the destination, from the writer who takes the older text and gives it new meaning and often a new shape. So 'echo' tends to underplay the active role of the later writer...

.......................

So to summarize. Three of the main methods of using existing tests are: quotation, allusion and transformation. Among these three, biblical research has gone far in articulating one and two - quotation, and (narrative) allusion. The third method, in so far as it involves major transformation, is still largely unexplained.

Agreed with Brodie about "echo" being a less than helpful term here. To quibble with him a bit, "quotation," "allusion," and "transformation" are less than optimal, precisely because even quotations and allusions can be extremely transformative depending on context (see Wittgenstein). Disturbed radically transformed Sounds of Silence, even though they were quoting it. If you haven't read the work of James Kugel, either *Traditions of the Bible* or *The Bible as It Was,* I can't recommend it highly enough to show that scripture is *always* being retold and being transformed in the retelling. Even modern printed Bibles are transformative retellings, adding current content and perspectives and expressions, both in and around the central scripture in focus on each page.

If we can stay in the domain of acoustics and performative art, I'd rather classify the Gospels, both as wholes and parts, as covers (clear re-performances of an earlier narrative, but almost inevitably inclined to transform and contemporize them in the re-performance), and original performances (which still will be deeply inevitably indebted to past performances). Quality artistic work--whether covers or original works--inevitably evokes new covers. In terms of information science, neurology, and human communication, performances are nothing more than a set of signals.

Google Scholar has learned how to tell apart 100s of millions of scholarly writings, even in specific fields of study where 1000s of authors have the *same name*. They do this through signals analysis and clustering. All of us have unique signature patterns in our oral and written communication. Turns out those can be identified, and if enough of them are clustered, then you can identify the person simply based on the writing. It's trippy, but true. Again, all of us our unique signals synthesizers, products of all of the signals we have heard in the past.

Another trippy thought. Just like DNA can reveal our ancestry and their geographical origins, our voices can do the same. A really talented team of Natural Language Processing coders and forensics scientists can engineer ways--if they have a large enough dataset of our vocal signals and those of others--using nothing more than our vocal patterns, to trace our ancestry, and perhaps even (with enough computing power and nuance), to trace some of our past interactions with influential friends, where we have traveled, whether we have studied other languages, what authors have most influenced us, etc.

It's all data. We are *all data.* It's time we start applying that to understand ourselves and all of the texts of our past, including and especially sacred texts.
vocesanticae
Posts: 115
Joined: Tue Sep 15, 2020 3:10 pm

Re: Bilby: a mix of fine exegesis and naive historicism

Post by vocesanticae »

davidmartin wrote: Thu Sep 17, 2020 5:03 am Ben, how does a reconstructed proto-Luke differ from the gospel of Mark?
If there isn't much difference then what Luke adds to Mark...
If all Luke adds is the virgin birth and a few hell references in line with Matthew plus the Lukan affinity for the poor
That's about it. There is nothing really surprising or controversial in Luke at all in a milieu where Mark is accepted except a predisposition to favoring Matthew as well which may have been more controversial
Hi David,

Turns out reconstructed proto-Luke differs *substantially* from Mark. See section 10 (Comprehensive Analysis of the Synoptic
Receptions of the Markan Source) for several charts that show this clearly: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3927056
User avatar
Ben C. Smith
Posts: 8994
Joined: Wed Apr 08, 2015 2:18 pm
Location: USA
Contact:

Re: Bilby: a mix of fine exegesis and naive historicism

Post by Ben C. Smith »

davidmartin wrote: Thu Sep 17, 2020 5:03 am Ben, how does a reconstructed proto-Luke differ from the gospel of Mark?
If there isn't much difference then what Luke adds to Mark...
If all Luke adds is the virgin birth and a few hell references in line with Matthew plus the Lukan affinity for the poor
That's about it. There is nothing really surprising or controversial in Luke at all in a milieu where Mark is accepted except a predisposition to favoring Matthew as well which may have been more controversial
Sorry, David, I missed this post of yours somehow.

The proto-Luke constructed from how the Marcionite gospel is described is quite different from Mark. The extent of the gospels are similar (both lack infancy narratives, for example). But the contents are recognizably different.

So I agree in substance with the following:
vocesanticae wrote: Thu Sep 17, 2020 4:13 pm
davidmartin wrote: Thu Sep 17, 2020 5:03 am Ben, how does a reconstructed proto-Luke differ from the gospel of Mark?
If there isn't much difference then what Luke adds to Mark...
If all Luke adds is the virgin birth and a few hell references in line with Matthew plus the Lukan affinity for the poor
That's about it. There is nothing really surprising or controversial in Luke at all in a milieu where Mark is accepted except a predisposition to favoring Matthew as well which may have been more controversial
Hi David,

Turns out reconstructed proto-Luke differs *substantially* from Mark. See section 10 (Comprehensive Analysis of the Synoptic
Receptions of the Markan Source) for several charts that show this clearly: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3927056
ΤΙ ΕΣΤΙΝ ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ
User avatar
MrMacSon
Posts: 8798
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2013 3:45 pm

Re: Bilby: a mix of fine exegesis and naive historicism

Post by MrMacSon »

davidmartin wrote: Thu Sep 17, 2020 5:03 am Ben, how does a reconstructed proto-Luke1 differ from the gospel of Mark?
If there isn't much difference then what Luke adds to Mark...
If all Luke adds is the virgin birth and a few hell references in line with Matthew plus the Lukan affinity for the poor
That's about it. There is nothing really surprising or controversial in Luke at all in a milieu where Mark is accepted except a predisposition to favoring Matthew as well which may have been more controversial
1 It might depend on who's version of proto-Luke you were considering.

An outline of Thomas L Brodie's is here http://www.earlywritings.com/forum/view ... 212#p94212 and can be viewed on google books by scrolling up to p. xxviii

(also see the diagram in the next post in that thread)
Last edited by MrMacSon on Thu Sep 17, 2020 9:42 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Giuseppe
Posts: 13732
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2015 5:37 am
Location: Italy

Re: Bilby: a mix of fine exegesis and naive historicism

Post by Giuseppe »

vocesanticae wrote: Wed Sep 16, 2020 1:57 pmAbout the bandits on the cross, that was the entire focus of my UVA dissertation. It's published in the series Cahiers de Biblia Patristica with Strasbourg/Brepols. Feel free to consult its relevant, detailed sections on GMarc.
Thanks. I am particularly curious about how you have derived the idea that the two bandits were released by the official in charge, since you write in your blog:

1) The official in charge “released two evildoers”. The use of the nominative for the evildoers (κακοῦργοι) does not make sense grammatically, but then again, who says the earliest Gospels always have to follow proper Greek grammar?

(my bold)

In your thesis I don't find the reference to "released".

Have you arrived at that conclusion by the mere fact that the reconstructed source mentioned "two evildoers" and then you have supposed that they were the people released by Pilate ? My interest derives from the fact that PLT is the semitic root for 'the one who releases", hence there may be some irony in PiLaTe who releases someone. In addition, I am entirely supportive of Couchoud/Stahl's interpretation of the release of Barabbas. Thanks in advance for any disturb to answer. :thumbup:
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
User avatar
maryhelena
Posts: 2892
Joined: Tue Oct 08, 2013 11:22 pm
Location: England

Re: Bilby: a mix of fine exegesis and naive historicism

Post by maryhelena »

vocesanticae wrote: Thu Sep 17, 2020 12:51 pm
Great cover analogy, to show how the retelling transforms the original. Now, if you or another musically gifted singer covered it today and knew well both the original and the Ataris version, do you think traces of both performances might show up in the 3rd cover? Do you think you'd be able to tell if a more recent cover of Boys of Summer was influenced by the Ataris version? And if that more recent cover became popular, and another cover were made 10 years from now, do you think you'd be able to detect the sequence of the covers? Hint: it wouldn't just be the words or the notes, but the style and trends and cultural setting of the *precise time* in which any more recent cover was composed that would give away its later date. When Disturbed covered Simon and Garfunkel's Sound of Silence, they couldn't help but sound like Disturbed and to sound like other music of the 2010s.

All of us are syntheses of the signals we have received in the past. Traces of our past and our present are always there to see in our communications, if we have the eyes and ears to see and hear them.

In the immortal words of George Clooney, "Consider the lillies of the field, G-damn it!"

Love the music analogy - even though I can't hold a tune (afraid that's one Irish trait I don't hold...sadly..)

Ah, but maybe I can lay claim to another Irish trait.....a radical mind and a fighting spirit.... :eek:

Thomas Brodie has that Irish radical mind (though, sadly, it seems his fighting spirit has taken a knock...)

Brodie turned his ear not to music but to words from the past:



Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus

Terms such as 'echo' and 'allusion' do not do justice to the complexity of how the New Testament uses the Old Testament. 'Echo' is appropriate insofar as it pictures the transfer of sound or words from one place to another. But in echo, the energy for the transfer comes from the source, whereas, in the various forms of rewriting, the energy that forms the echo comes especially from the destination, from the writer who takes the older text and gives it new meaning and often a new shape. So 'echo' tends to underplay the active role of the later writer...

.......................

So to summarize. Three of the main methods of using existing tests are: quotation, allusion and transformation. Among these three, biblical research has gone far in articulating one and two - quotation, and (narrative) allusion. The third method, in so far as it involves major transformation, is still largely unexplained.

Agreed with Brodie about "echo" being a less than helpful term here. To quibble with him a bit, "quotation," "allusion," and "transformation" are less than optimal, precisely because even quotations and allusions can be extremely transformative depending on context (see Wittgenstein). Disturbed radically transformed Sounds of Silence, even though they were quoting it. If you haven't read the work of James Kugel, either *Traditions of the Bible* or *The Bible as It Was,* I can't recommend it highly enough to show that scripture is *always* being retold and being transformed in the retelling. Even modern printed Bibles are transformative retellings, adding current content and perspectives and expressions, both in and around the central scripture in focus on each page.

If we can stay in the domain of acoustics and performative art, I'd rather classify the Gospels, both as wholes and parts, as covers (clear re-performances of an earlier narrative, but almost inevitably inclined to transform and contemporize them in the re-performance), and original performances (which still will be deeply inevitably indebted to past performances). Quality artistic work--whether covers or original works--inevitably evokes new covers. In terms of information science, neurology, and human communication, performances are nothing more than a set of signals.

Google Scholar has learned how to tell apart 100s of millions of scholarly writings, even in specific fields of study where 1000s of authors have the *same name*. They do this through signals analysis and clustering. All of us have unique signature patterns in our oral and written communication. Turns out those can be identified, and if enough of them are clustered, then you can identify the person simply based on the writing. It's trippy, but true. Again, all of us our unique signals synthesizers, products of all of the signals we have heard in the past.

Another trippy thought. Just like DNA can reveal our ancestry and their geographical origins, our voices can do the same. A really talented team of Natural Language Processing coders and forensics scientists can engineer ways--if they have a large enough dataset of our vocal signals and those of others--using nothing more than our vocal patterns, to trace our ancestry, and perhaps even (with enough computing power and nuance), to trace some of our past interactions with influential friends, where we have traveled, whether we have studied other languages, what authors have most influenced us, etc.

It's all data. We are *all data.* It's time we start applying that to understand ourselves and all of the texts of our past, including and especially sacred texts.
All very interesting. So, all we need today is someone (committee) to have a go at transforming the NT into something relevant to our lives in the 21st century. A new re-write - a new update - something along the lines of Windows updates....Long overdue - who wants to still work with Windows XP.....

Seriously though - perhaps we first need to know where we have come from before we can forge a road forward. So, good luck with your digging through the words of the past. Archaeology of the mind.... :cheers:
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
W.B. Yeats
davidmartin
Posts: 1589
Joined: Fri Jul 12, 2019 2:51 pm

Re: Bilby: a mix of fine exegesis and naive historicism

Post by davidmartin »

MrMacSon wrote: Thu Sep 17, 2020 7:47 pm
davidmartin wrote: Thu Sep 17, 2020 5:03 am Ben, how does a reconstructed proto-Luke1 differ from the gospel of Mark?
If there isn't much difference then what Luke adds to Mark...
If all Luke adds is the virgin birth and a few hell references in line with Matthew plus the Lukan affinity for the poor
That's about it. There is nothing really surprising or controversial in Luke at all in a milieu where Mark is accepted except a predisposition to favoring Matthew as well which may have been more controversial
1 It might depend on who's version of proto-Luke you were considering.

An outline of Thomas L Brodie's is here http://www.earlywritings.com/forum/view ... 212#p94212 and can be viewed on google books by scrolling up to p. xxviii

(also see the diagram in the next post in that thread)
Thanks and Ben i accept your comments here!
I re-read my post and i don't know what i was getting at
i suppose i just felt a 'proto-luke' has much more in common with mark that it does matthew even if there are differences
if that's so it's quite curious. i get this weird feeling Luke may have been trying to replace Mark just like perhaps Matthew was hoped to replace all the others (i suspect this) and like the gospel harmonies had the same intent. i suspect before the 4-fold gospel of Ireneaus there may have been competition and desire to promote one as 'the one' (and Marcion wasn't the only one doing that)

when Luke describes his 'authentic account' in the incipit - isn't he doing more than declaring his gospel authentic - isn't he by extension declaring all the others unreliable?

one question i'd like answered is about the birth narrative in Luke
Since Luke tells us he pulls from various sources in the incipit - could the birth narrative been taken from one of the infancy gospels
I really wish i researched this better but from memory one of them parallels Luke strongly, in the boy Jesus at the temple and i hope my memory is right here - the angel/annunciation. Protoevangelion of James? I would love someone to tell me what these parallels are in a list
I would like to consider the possibility that Luke drew from an infancy gospel and whether the ones we have may in fact be those sources
User avatar
Ben C. Smith
Posts: 8994
Joined: Wed Apr 08, 2015 2:18 pm
Location: USA
Contact:

Re: Bilby: a mix of fine exegesis and naive historicism

Post by Ben C. Smith »

davidmartin wrote: Fri Sep 18, 2020 12:53 amone question i'd like answered is about the birth narrative in Luke
Since Luke tells us he pulls from various sources in the incipit - could the birth narrative been taken from one of the infancy gospels
I really wish i researched this better but from memory one of them parallels Luke strongly, in the boy Jesus at the temple and i hope my memory is right here - the angel/annunciation. Protoevangelion of James? I would love someone to tell me what these parallels are in a list
I would like to consider the possibility that Luke drew from an infancy gospel and whether the ones we have may in fact be those sources
I doubt one of the infancy gospels as we currently possess it served as the direct source behind Luke 1-2. Luke 1-2, however, could perhaps have been its own infancy gospel of sorts before being tagged onto the rest of Luke; it has a certain independence to it. The infancy gospel of Thomas ends at exactly the same point: the visit to the Temple at age twelve.
ΤΙ ΕΣΤΙΝ ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ
davidmartin
Posts: 1589
Joined: Fri Jul 12, 2019 2:51 pm

Re: Bilby: a mix of fine exegesis and naive historicism

Post by davidmartin »

Ben C. Smith wrote: Fri Sep 18, 2020 4:10 am
davidmartin wrote: Fri Sep 18, 2020 12:53 amone question i'd like answered is about the birth narrative in Luke
Since Luke tells us he pulls from various sources in the incipit - could the birth narrative been taken from one of the infancy gospels
I really wish i researched this better but from memory one of them parallels Luke strongly, in the boy Jesus at the temple and i hope my memory is right here - the angel/annunciation. Protoevangelion of James? I would love someone to tell me what these parallels are in a list
I would like to consider the possibility that Luke drew from an infancy gospel and whether the ones we have may in fact be those sources
I doubt one of the infancy gospels as we currently possess it served as the direct source behind Luke 1-2. Luke 1-2, however, could perhaps have been its own infancy gospel of sorts before being tagged onto the rest of Luke; it has a certain independence to it. The infancy gospel of Thomas ends at exactly the same point: the visit to the Temple at age twelve.
The infancy gospel of James has
" And she took the cup and went out to fill it with water. (2) Suddenly, a voice said to
her, "Rejoice, blessed one. The Lord is with you. You are blessed among women." (3)
And Mary looked around to the right and the left to see where this voice came from. (4)
And trembling she went into her house. Setting down the cup, she took the purple
thread and sat down on the chair and spun it.
(5) Suddenly, an angel stood before her saying, "Do not be afraid Mary. You have found
grace before the Lord of all. You will conceive from his word."
(6) Upon hearing this, however, Mary was distraught, saying to herself, "If I conceive
from the Lord God who lives, will I also conceive as all women conceive?"
(7) And the Angel of the Lord said, "Not like that, Mary. For the power of God will come
over you. Thus, the holy one who is born will be called son of the most high. (8) And you
will call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins."
(9) And Mary said, "See, I am the servant of the Lord before him. Let it happen to me
according to what you say.""

There is no obvious reason to think this couldn't be the source of Luke when the infancy gospel of James is dated to the 2nd century
So i wonder what is the research that has proved this wasn't the case beyond all reasonable doubt?
Does this infancy gospel use the rare word Kacharitomene like Luke?
I'm sure this work has been done but i'd like to read the arguments used
Post Reply