brenmcg said

Porphyry said

 

Well, one possibility is setting the scene. He may be distinguishing night from early evening or dusk. Perhaps he is indicating that they have been inside from some considerable time, and now, as Judas comes out, it is truly night and no longer shortly after sunset.

And it is symbolic: the night, the sudden sense of darkness, as you step out of the candle light into the spring night, with only the light of the moon from behind the clouds, nicely adds to the foreboding: the evil plot is now in motion, danger and evil lurk. 

But then why not wait until the end of chapter 14 when Jesus says “rise, let us go from here”. Why tell us “it was now night” immediately after telling us Judas had left?

 

The disciples don’t guess that Judas has to “go before night falls.” You have invented that. It is simply not in the text. Jesus says to go quickly, there is nothing from Jesus or the apostles about going before night falls. 

Its implied. The reader is supposed to understand why the disciples made that mistake. 

 

So is it your proposal, then, then they were just reclining around the table . . .  just sitting? While they were sitting there. . . just sitting . . . Jesus gets up and washes their feet. And with that done, they resume . . . just sitting? And they keep on . . . just sitting . . . until Judas is given a single bite to eat, and then leaves, at which point they are finally free to eat? Does that seem normal? When you have people over to dinner, do you seat them at your dining room table and just . . . wait for a while . . . kill some time . . . do some things that don’t involve eating . . .until you serve food? 

The text from John repeatedly says that they were at supper long before Jesus gives Judas the morsel. 

How long? 

How long passes between verse 2 “and supper having arrived” and verse 4 “Jesus got up from the supper”. 

Jesus reclines again in verse 12 after which he shares food with Judas. Did the washing of feet interrupt the eating of the meal or did it precede it? 

Had Judas eaten bread previously before Satan entered him in verse 27?

 

Even if you do think they were just sitting at the table and not eating, would it be normal to describe things that happen in that interval of just sitting (without eating!) as happening “during supper” or if you got up from just sitting around the table (without eating!), would you accurately call that “rising from supper”?

Jn 13:2 “during supper” Jn 13:4 Jesus “rose from supper” and washed their feet. Did John need to say, “while they were masticating their food, Jesus, having swallowed the food he had previously placed in his mouth, rose”? 

It depends how you understand 13:2 – it can just mean “supper having arrived”. If Jesus waits til they are all reclining and then gets up to wash their feet then is no sitting around without eating.

Suppertime arrives, Jesus gets up from the supper, washes their feet, reclines again and shares bread with Judas, tells him to do quickly what he is going to do, disciples assume its buy something for the feast or give alms, Judas leaves, its now night.

  

I see. I’ll cede you that Jn 13:2 is ambiguous and could mean “with supper beginning . . .,” perhaps indicating that the time to start dinner had arrived with the table set and them gathering round just sitting down. I still think Jn 13:4 is strangely written if it means that all this happened before dinner actually started. If we all sit down for a meal, and before we have had a chance to start eating, I immediately get up to do something, would we say I was rising “from dinner”? Maybe. Seems an odd way of speaking though. 

And I still don’t think it makes much sense for the disciples to think he was being sent to make the donation or to get supplies for the meal given that that the time for the meal had already arrived. Even if your interpretation of 13:2,4 is right, it would be too late to do those things for the passover if this was the passover feast that they were literally already seated to eat. 

I’ll go back to what I said earlier, I think it is possible to make the harmonizing reading work, but I don’t think it is the most natural reading. I think the only reason people endorse the harmonizing reading is that they have an antecedent commitment, from the synoptics, to the last supper being on passover.

People have been arguing about this practically from the beginning. If there were a truly conclusive answer, if there were something in the text that definitively removes any ambiguity and settles the question, it would long ago have forestalled any further argument. 

JAS said

Porphyry said

Second, the kinds of disparities we see between the Gospels (especially the synoptics) aren’t the sort that arise between confused witnesses with faulty memories.

  

Here is the assertion made without any foundation.

  

Except you ignored what immediately follows where I give reasons for that conclusion:

Porphyry said
 

Second, the kinds of disparities we see between the Gospels (especially the synoptics) aren’t the sort that arise between confused witnesses with faulty memories.

Mt and Lk are copying extensively from Mark. This shows that Mark is a source, and they are relying on him–there is a documentary dependence: we aren’t talking about oral history or faulty memory. But they are also freely reworking him, not just correcting infelicities in his Greek or incorporating stories he omitted but taking events he relates and fundamentally changing them, sometimes in ways that create narrative problems.

That process of composition, which we can see pretty clearly, is really really hard to reconcile with a desire to present an historically accurate account. The only way I can imaging someone who is sincerely trying to convey an historically accurate account writing in that fashion (freely changing the facts recorded by his source) is if the person had a bunch of conflicting sources that he was trying to reconcile, because those other (lost in this case) sources might give a justification for the author changing the basic facts his principal source relates. 

Again, it is really suspicious when the historical facts reported by an author fit a larger theme or agenda of the author a little too perfectly, despite the facts that (a) the historical “facts” the author presents are objectively fairly important events and yet, (b), they don’t get mentioned anywhere else. If the slaughter of the innocents happened as Matthew claims, we would expect some other source (Jewish, Christian, pagan) to mention it, and yet he is the only witness we have of any such event, so it is more than suspicious that this event develops a clearly Matthaean theme about Jesus as a new Moses. Again, if Jesus actual went around historically saying in public things along the lines of “before Abraham was, I am” we’d expect some other Gospel author to have mentioned his saying such things: That is objectively a pretty big deal (as Jn notes in the text). And yet even so, remarkably, it is only John with his Logos theology who has any recollection of these sort of momentus sayings. 

Of course biographers, historians, journalists can look at the same events and paint different pictures: They can find different facts noteworthy, and construct different narratives out of the same data. But there are some events that are objectively important and that people won’t just pass over as insignifiant.

  

It hardly seems fair to classify something as an assertion without foundation while passing over the arguments given for the assertion. You may not think it is an adequately justified conclusion, but it isn’t a bare assertion. 

CEJ said

Morton Smith believed the bulk of Mark was written around 70 AD and the Secret Mark passages were added to it about 20 years later.  He believed this in part because the passages Clement quotes from Secret Mark were too similar to Mark’s writing style to actual be his, though Smith felt the passages were too short to draw a definitive conclusion.  Nevertheless, Smith concluded canonical Mark was a successor to this longer version of Mark.  That is, according to Smith, a late first century imitator expanded an earlier version of Mark to create Secret Mark, and then a more orthodox redactor shortened Secret Mark to create canonical Mark. 

Smith, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, pp. 144-6.

  

That’s a really tight theory. I’ll say it again, if Morton Smith invented this, it was a really well thought out fraud. 

Robert said

Did these myth-makers consciously intend to deceive any in their intended audience who were not aware of the myth-making process of theological historical fiction? I’m not sure they would have had a modernist sense of clearly articulating your question.

I think my question is even more basic than this. Do they mean to write something we might call “theological historical fiction,” and did they expect that their readers would understand that what they were reading was theological historical fiction? 

To some extent story-tellers are hard-wired to believe their stories if only because of their personal commitment to their own creative art of story-telling. I suspect most of us most of the time believe the lies we tell ourselves.

But is it true that story-tellers tend to believe the claims they make in their fictitious or embellished stories? It does not seem to me that this is generally true, whether we are talking about Shakespeare and his histories or Stephen Crane and the Red Badge of Courage or a parent telling a kid a bedtime story for the kids, or a liar trying to cover his tracks; I think, as a rule, when we make up stories, we know the parts we have made up. 

I recognize, there are cases where an individual will tend to believe the stories he invents, but I don’t know how to apply those patterns, or the psychological mechanisms that give rise to them, to the gospels. The cases I can think of:

First, you might have a case in which an arch-conspiracy-theorist starts to actually believe the nonsense he started spouting for some sort of personal gain (think Alex Jones or Sidney Powell). I honestly don’t know whether this happens to these extreme conspiracy theorists, but if it does it seems like an unusual and extreme case. Normal people know when they are telling complicated and carefully calculated lies; they don’t lose track of the fact that they carefully calculated their lies–that’s why our tort law distinguishes between negligence in libel (you might have believed it, but you should have been more careful) and malice (you knew it wasn’t true and said it anyway).

Again, a person may be unable to acknowledge his own responsibility and my convince himself of his own exculpating stories. This is a pretty common phenomenon. I suspect it actually explains some of the rise of Christianity (imagine you are a close friend and follower of Jesus, and you encourage and support him in his belief he is the messiah–then he gets brutally tortured to death for his messianic claims. You might feel a crushing guilt, and *need* to explain your contribution to this tragedy away: “I wasn’t mistaken in thinking him the messiah; the messiah was always supposed to suffer and die before he accomplished anything visible. I don’t bear any responsibility for his getting brutally killed; that was God’s plan for him all along. He will still fulfill the messianic prophesies at his second coming”) This sort of self-deception is not uncommon at all, but it only makes sense when one is somehow personally involved. If, as I think pretty well established, the gospel authors were removed from Jesus and his historical ministry, then it doesn’t make much sense for them personally. 

Finally, I think a person writing fiction that is based on his own experience could start to blur the imagined fiction into the real experience it was based on. Our memories are suggestible and maleable. This is why we might have a vivid “recollection” of some story about us that we have heard others tell over and over again, even though the event in the story took place when we were too young to form long-term memories. We’ve heard the story of us as a young child a million times, and the image we form in hearing a story about ourselves becomes indistinguishable from a real memory. This is also why sometimes, in trying to remember details, what starts as an inference of what must have happened becomes a lifelike memory. Its also a reason that a sincere witness can be contaminated by hearing the story of another witness: you imagine what the other person is describing and that imagination becomes part of your memory. Again, this is quite common, but it only works if you might plausibly have been there so that the memory of an imagined scene could be mistaken for an accurate memory of a real event. If we presume that the gospel authors weren’t eyewitnesses, then I don’t see how they could have confused their imaginations with memories of Jesus. I mean, I don’t see how Matthew could have formed a false memory of the slaying of the innocents unless he was a alive at the time and in the general location (which are massive and I think unjustified assumptions). 

Anyway, I suppose my overall point is, yes, people do often believe the stories they make up, but the cases where I know of that happening with any regularity involve them being personally involved; these are problems we get with eyewitnesses, not problems (so far as I’m aware) that come up with later uninvolved story-tellers weaving fiction and then forgetting what is true and what they invented. 

So what is the genre of writing that each ‘evangelist’ was working within? That’s an interesting but totally different question. It is akin to the preached gospel about salvation in Jesus, and in that sense it is sui generis, not fully classifiable as an already existing genre of writing that already existed at the time. In my opinion, it is closest to an apocalyptic history of a new relationship now available with the God of the Jewish scriptures, which is why I think the question can seriously be entertained as to whether the authors intended to be writing scripture. If they intended to make it into the canon of Jewish scriptures, they failed miserably, and would need a new upstart journal with a radically new peer-review process, not one tied to the more prestigious Hebrew scriptures. In a few centuries this endeavor would succeed with the beginnings of a canonical hybrid of the LXX-NT

This is a fascinating (and amusing) passage. 

But first, I don’t see why the question of genre is entirely distinct from the question I’m asking. The genre of a work tacitly communicates to the reader the degree to which the author intends to make actual historical claims and to what degree he intends his indicative past tense sentences to be read as fiction. If today I start a story with “Once upon a time in a kingdom far away. . . ” every mature reader will know this is a fairy tale and that whatever I report is to be taken as fiction (but the story is better if you play along, suspend disbelief, and pretend it actually happened). In the ancient Greco-Roman world, a lengthy speech, even in a history, was understood not to be an historically accurate transcript. 

I do think it is interesting and complicating that the gospels are sui generis. Or at least they are as far as our knowledge of ancient literature; but I think there is a clear and strong survival bias–the canonical gospels survived (and indeed are the best attested works of antiquity) because they were the sacred texts of a growing religion; any really comparable prior or contemporaneous works there might have been have, as it happens, been lost. Unless you are looking at the Hebrew Scriptures as parallel, but that just raises a similar set of questions again–were they understood as historically reliable or as mythology. 

Looking at subsequent works (e.g., Christian apocrypha) and looking at subsequent reception of the canonical works is also interesting but inconclusive. It seems obvious to me that many subsequent proto-orthodox christians did take the historical claims of scripture seriously and literally. This is why apparent apostolicity ended up being a requirement for canonization–having orthodox theology and developing the Christian myth in interesting and theologically fruitful ways wasn’t enough, needed to be credible as an historical witness. This is reinforced by proto-orthodox apologetics and polemics (e.g., Tertullian in his Prescription against Heretics) who explicitly attack the heretics (especially the gnostics) on historical grounds–their historical claims are not historically defensible, they make bare historical claims without any reliable documentation–in distinction to the orthodox. And evidently because of that concern with historical truth, it seems clear that there were fraudulent apocrypha that were very deliberately calculated to deceive–again indicating that the historicity mattered at; east to some christians. The point is that is seems absolutely undeniable to me that there were at least some christians who were acutely aware of and very much concerned with historical veracity.

I do not think a Tertullian or an Irenaeus (to say nothing of an Augustine) would have considered it theologically acceptable to hold that the gospels were mythological or legendary. I think they are manifestly aware of the difference between history and myth or legend, and the difference is absolutely critical to them and to their theology. Of course whether that reflects the attitude of the evangelists themselves is another question, but I think it shows at least that the concern with historical truth was understood and was in some contexts seen as important in the ancient world. 

But going to the other extreme and looking earlier than the gospels, Paul certainly and famously (at least if we take him at face value) takes the historical truth of at least one historical claim as of paramount theological consequence.

Again, in the gospels themselves, even if Luke and John’s insistences on relating reliable information are mere literary devices, it shows that there was an awareness of and a concern for historical reliability. People recognized the importance of eyewitness testimony and careful research, as opposed to rumor and hearsay.

On the other hand, looking at the fabulous and very imaginative nature of some of the apocrypha does leave one seriously wondering whether some christians of the 2nd and 3rd century were not as concerned with historicity. It strikes me as entirely plausible that different sects of Christianity had entirely different attitudes to the importance of the historical Jesus and the historical details of his life and ministry. 

Am I being fair to your questions?

  

I certainly don’t think you are being unfair, though I’m not sure I had advanced my concerns adequately.  I suppose I should ask whether I seem to have I understood your answers and responded appropriately?

Robert said

Should I answer this question with another question?

  

ha. 

Your answers were extremely helpful and very much on point. Thank you. 

I think I need to try better to understand this genre of of apocalyptic history; I thought I knew what it meant, but it seems I had missed some key elements.