Re: Does anyone have On the Historicity of Jesus yet?
Posted: Sun Jul 06, 2014 7:56 pm
...
Carrier on
Acts as Historical Fiction
Part2
" The author of Acts also uses features of the John the Baptist narrative to construct Paul's conversion story: (1) the names of John (the Baptist) and Ananias (who restores Paul's sight) mean the same thing in Aramaic (John = io-utmes = yahu-hanan = 'Yahweh Is Gracious'; Ananias = anan-ias = hanan-yahu = 'Gracious Is Yahweh'); (2) John says 'prepare the way [hodos] of the Lord, make his paths straight [euthus]' (Lk. 3.4), and so Paul takes shelter on Straight Street (euthus: Acts 9.11) after attempting to destroy 'the way' (hodos: Acts 9.2), but instead sees the Lord in the way {hodos: Acts 9.27) and takes up the cause of preaching the way; (3) and finally, the initial order of events is almost exactly reversed: God speaks to Paul in a vision from heaven (Acts 9.3-8). then Paul prays (Acts 9.11), and is baptized (Acts 9.18), then goes on to teach the gospel (Acts 9.20); Jesus is baptized, then prays, then God speaks to him in a vision from heaven (Lk. 3.21-22). and then (in this case just like Paul) goes on to teach the gospel (Lk. 3.23).
" Luke has also taken elements from the book of Tobit. When Paul is healed after his blinding vision, by Ananias acting on God's orders, we're told 'immediately [the blindness] fell from his eyes like scales [lepides], and he saw again and rose and was baptized' (Acts 9.18). In Tob. 3.17, the angel Rafael is told by God to 'scale away' (lepisai, the verb of lepides) Tobias's blindness. Literally the text in Tobit says, 'to scale away the whiteness', as Tobias's eyes had become clouded with white (Tob. 2.10), so here scaling away the whiteness makes sense, whereas there is no intelligible reason why Paul's blindness should be described as like scales, except as an allusion to the tale in Tobit, which also involves a story of traveling on a road with a divine being in disguise (in this case an angel), on a mission that would result in saving lives. And just as Paul is given letters from the high priest authorizing him to arrest Christians in Damascus (Acts 9.1-2), Tobias was given a letter from his father authorizing him to claim a deposit of money—also, like Paul, in a foreign city (Tob. 5.1-3). More tellingly, the angel accompanying Tobias poses as 'the son of Ananias" (Tob. 5.12), and provides the means to cure the blindness of Tobias, just as in Acts the analogous divine being (the Lord Christ) provides the means to cure the blindness of Paul through a man named Ananias (Acts 9.10-17). Other descriptive elements of Paul's encounter on the road also derive, more loosely and creatively, from Ezekiel and Daniel.21
"For this to be history, one has to posit all these agreements and parallels are historical coincidences, which is far less probable than that they are inventions, intelligently designed to reflect each other. And when you remove them all, you have no real story left to call authentic. Any one or two or even three of these parallels or coincidental details could be historical (at a stretch), but not all of them together. Maybe there is some historical core to either or both tales that has been dressed up with all these fabricated symbols and coincidences and tall tales, but we have no way of knowing what that core might be, or even if there is one. Therefore these stories cannot be relied upon as evidence of any historical fact, beyond the vaguest of generalizations, such as that Jesus may have originally appeared as a divine heavenly light, or that Christians may have believed God could visit them in the guise of an ordinary stranger; but such conclusions are neither certain nor helpful to the present purpose.
"The same kind of analysis repeatedly destroys every narrative in Acts. I've presented only a few examples.22 But even in general, Acts shares too many features with popular adventure novels of the same period to warrant trusting it as a genuine history: (1) they all promote a particular god or religion; (2) they are all travel narratives; (3) they all involve miraculous or amazing events; (4) they all include encounters with fabulous or exotic peoples (e.g. 'bull-sacrificing pagans of Lycaonia in Acts 14.8-19, superstitious natives of Malta in 28.1-6, and philosophical Athenian dilettantes in chapter 17'. as well as fanatical pagan silversmiths of Ephesus in 19.23-41, and so on); (5) they often incorporate a theme of chaste couples separated and then reunited (a token nod to this element exists in Paul's chaste interaction with Lydia in Acts 16.13-40 and his many women followers, named and unnamed); (6) they feature exciting narratives of captivities and escapes (as in Acts 12, 16, 21 and 26); and (7) they often include themes of persecution, (8) scenes involving excited crowds (who become a character in the story, as in Ephesus and Jerusalem, in Acts 18-19 and Acts 6-7 and 21-22), (9) and divine rescues from danger; and (10) divine revelations are always integral to the plot (through oracles, dreams and visions, all of which feature in Acts).23 In fact, Acts looks far more like a novel than any historical monograph of the period.24 If Acts looks exactly like an ancient novel (and it does), are we really going to chalk this up to coincidence?
Notes
" 1. See Richard Pervo, The Mystery of Acts (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge. 2008): and Richard Pervo, Acts: A Commentary (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. 2009). for the most thorough accounting of this fact (see especially the latter, pp. 17-18). with substantial support in Thomas Brodie, The Birthing of the New Testament: The Intertextual Development of the New Testament Writings (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix. 2004), esp. pp. 377-445 (on Acts specifically); Dennis MacDonald, Does the New Testament Imitate Homer? Four Cases from the Acts of the Apostles (New Haven. CT: Yale University Press, 2003); and John Dominic Crossan, The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus (New York: HarperOne. 2012), pp. 196-217. See also Clare Rothschild, Luke-Acts and the Rhetoric of History: An Investigation of Early Christian Historiography (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck. 2004); Loveday Alexander, 'Fact, Fiction and the Genre of Acts', New Testament Studies 44 (1998), pp. 380-99; and P.E. Satterthwaite, Acts against the Background of Classical Rhetoric', in The Book of Acts in its Ancient Literary Setting (ed. Bruce Winter and Andrew Clarke; Grand Rapids, Ml: William B. Eerdmans, 1993), pp. 337-80. There are conservatives who protest, but not with logically valid arguments.
2. That Luke used Josephus as a source to fill his account with various items of historical color, see note in Chapter 7 (§4). That similar details also appear in his account of apostolic travels outside Judea suggests Luke may have used other historians (of those regions) to color those accounts as well (those historians were simply not preserved for us to detect their influence now).
3. If Luke did not use a source text (a 'Kings Gospel") for the material equating Jesus and Paul to Elijah and Elisha. then Luke obviously had to have invented that material himself. That Luke knew and used (mainly to subvert) the Pauline Epistles see Dennis MacDonald. Two Shipwrecked Gospels: The Logoi of Jesus and Papias's Exposition of Logift about the Lord (Atlanta. GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), pp. 50-52: and Richard Pervo. Dating Acts: Between the Evangelists and the Apologists (Santa Rosa. CA: Polebridge Press. 2006).
4. Dennis MacDonald. 'The Shipwrecks of Odysseus and Paul". New Testament Studies 45 (1999). pp. 88-107 (88): with Vernon Robbins. 'The "We" Passages in Acts and Ancient Sea Voyages'. Papers of the Chicago Society of Biblical Research 20 (1975). pp. 5-18: and Henry Cadbury. •"We" and "I" Passages in Luke-Acts'. New Testament Studies 3 (1956-1957). pp. 128-32. It is sometimes argued that the 'we" passages (portions of Acts where the author inexplicably switches from third person to first person plural and back again, without ever explaining why, or who 'we' are) indicate an actual source. Some even argue these prove the author was an actual companion of Paul, but few scholars believe that's likely—it isn't what the author himself ever says, yet it was standard practice of the time to say so. if that is what the author meant to be understood. But fabricating a fictional narrative using 'I' or 'we' is already evident in the pre-Christian book of Jubilees, a made-up rewrite of OT history-adapted from Genesis, passed off as a revelation given directly to Moses, even though it was actually composed around the second or first century bce So the motif has an established precedent in historical fiction. A more famous model for writing fiction in the first person is the Odyssey of Homer, and notably (as MacDonald demonstrates) the 'we' sections in Acts all center on sea travel.
5. Dennis MacDonald. The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (New Haven. CT: Yale University Press. 2000). pp. 9-14.
6. MacDonald. Does the New Testament Imitate Homer?, pp. 44-65 (with pp. 19-43).
7. MacDonald. Does the New Testament Imitate Homer?, pp. 74-102 (with pp. 69-73).
8. MacDonald, Does the New Testament Imitate Homer?, pp. 107-19 (with pp. 105-106).
9. MacDonald. Does the New Testament Imitate Homer?, pp. 137-45 (with pp. 123-36).
10. Euripides. Bacchae 440-49 (miraculous unlocking of chains), and 585-94 (escape due to an earthquake). Compare Acts 12.6-7 and 16.26.
11. See Randel Helms. Gospel Fictions (Amherst, NY: Prometheus. 1988). p. 21.
12. Robert Price, The Pre-Nicene New Testament: Fifty-Four Formative Texts (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature. 2006). p. 841.
13. For a survey of Luke's methods as a historian compared to his contemporaries: Carrier, Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 173-87.
14. Joseph Tyson. 'Why Dates Matter: The Case of the Acts of the Apostles', in Finding the Historical Jesus: Rules of Evidence (ed. Bernard Brandon Scott; Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge. 2008). pp. 59-70 (67).
15. On the rate of Christian expansion and growth almost certainly being nothing like what is depicted in Acts, see Carrier, Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 407-48.
16. Burton Mack, 'Many Movements. Many Myths: Redescribing the Attractions of Early Christianities. Toward a Conversation with Rodney Stark', Religious Studies Review 25.2 (April 1999), pp. 132-36 (134).
17. Price. Pre-Nicene New Testament, p. 484.
18. Price, Pre-Nicene New Testament, p. 483.
19. The parallels among these three synagogue incidents are even more numerous and obviously intentional: see Crossan, Power of Parable, pp. 205-207.
20. though in Luke the third man on the journey is Jesus walking along in disguise (Lk. 24.15) he never tells anyone his name: whereas in Acts Jesus appears as a light from heaven, but Paul is accompanied by at least two unnamed men (Acts 9.7).
21. Ezek. 1.26-2.3. Alan Segal. 'Conversion and Messianism; Outline tor a New Approach", in The Messiah: Developments in Earliest Judaism and Christianity (ed. James Charlesworth: Minneapolis. MN: Fortress Press. 1992). pp. 296-340 (331-35). Similarly. Dan. 10.2-21.
22. For many more, see the scholarship cited in earlier notes (esp. n. 1). For example. Pervo. Mystery of Acts. pp. 55-91. 101-40.
23. Price, Pre-Nicene New Testament, pp. 492-93.
24. See the table in Pervo. Mystery of Acts. pp. 168-70. where he enumerates ten different respects in which Acts is notably unlike ancient historiography (yet all ten are commonly encountered in ancient fiction). "
Carrier on
Acts as Historical Fiction
Part2
" The author of Acts also uses features of the John the Baptist narrative to construct Paul's conversion story: (1) the names of John (the Baptist) and Ananias (who restores Paul's sight) mean the same thing in Aramaic (John = io-utmes = yahu-hanan = 'Yahweh Is Gracious'; Ananias = anan-ias = hanan-yahu = 'Gracious Is Yahweh'); (2) John says 'prepare the way [hodos] of the Lord, make his paths straight [euthus]' (Lk. 3.4), and so Paul takes shelter on Straight Street (euthus: Acts 9.11) after attempting to destroy 'the way' (hodos: Acts 9.2), but instead sees the Lord in the way {hodos: Acts 9.27) and takes up the cause of preaching the way; (3) and finally, the initial order of events is almost exactly reversed: God speaks to Paul in a vision from heaven (Acts 9.3-8). then Paul prays (Acts 9.11), and is baptized (Acts 9.18), then goes on to teach the gospel (Acts 9.20); Jesus is baptized, then prays, then God speaks to him in a vision from heaven (Lk. 3.21-22). and then (in this case just like Paul) goes on to teach the gospel (Lk. 3.23).
" Luke has also taken elements from the book of Tobit. When Paul is healed after his blinding vision, by Ananias acting on God's orders, we're told 'immediately [the blindness] fell from his eyes like scales [lepides], and he saw again and rose and was baptized' (Acts 9.18). In Tob. 3.17, the angel Rafael is told by God to 'scale away' (lepisai, the verb of lepides) Tobias's blindness. Literally the text in Tobit says, 'to scale away the whiteness', as Tobias's eyes had become clouded with white (Tob. 2.10), so here scaling away the whiteness makes sense, whereas there is no intelligible reason why Paul's blindness should be described as like scales, except as an allusion to the tale in Tobit, which also involves a story of traveling on a road with a divine being in disguise (in this case an angel), on a mission that would result in saving lives. And just as Paul is given letters from the high priest authorizing him to arrest Christians in Damascus (Acts 9.1-2), Tobias was given a letter from his father authorizing him to claim a deposit of money—also, like Paul, in a foreign city (Tob. 5.1-3). More tellingly, the angel accompanying Tobias poses as 'the son of Ananias" (Tob. 5.12), and provides the means to cure the blindness of Tobias, just as in Acts the analogous divine being (the Lord Christ) provides the means to cure the blindness of Paul through a man named Ananias (Acts 9.10-17). Other descriptive elements of Paul's encounter on the road also derive, more loosely and creatively, from Ezekiel and Daniel.21
"For this to be history, one has to posit all these agreements and parallels are historical coincidences, which is far less probable than that they are inventions, intelligently designed to reflect each other. And when you remove them all, you have no real story left to call authentic. Any one or two or even three of these parallels or coincidental details could be historical (at a stretch), but not all of them together. Maybe there is some historical core to either or both tales that has been dressed up with all these fabricated symbols and coincidences and tall tales, but we have no way of knowing what that core might be, or even if there is one. Therefore these stories cannot be relied upon as evidence of any historical fact, beyond the vaguest of generalizations, such as that Jesus may have originally appeared as a divine heavenly light, or that Christians may have believed God could visit them in the guise of an ordinary stranger; but such conclusions are neither certain nor helpful to the present purpose.
"The same kind of analysis repeatedly destroys every narrative in Acts. I've presented only a few examples.22 But even in general, Acts shares too many features with popular adventure novels of the same period to warrant trusting it as a genuine history: (1) they all promote a particular god or religion; (2) they are all travel narratives; (3) they all involve miraculous or amazing events; (4) they all include encounters with fabulous or exotic peoples (e.g. 'bull-sacrificing pagans of Lycaonia in Acts 14.8-19, superstitious natives of Malta in 28.1-6, and philosophical Athenian dilettantes in chapter 17'. as well as fanatical pagan silversmiths of Ephesus in 19.23-41, and so on); (5) they often incorporate a theme of chaste couples separated and then reunited (a token nod to this element exists in Paul's chaste interaction with Lydia in Acts 16.13-40 and his many women followers, named and unnamed); (6) they feature exciting narratives of captivities and escapes (as in Acts 12, 16, 21 and 26); and (7) they often include themes of persecution, (8) scenes involving excited crowds (who become a character in the story, as in Ephesus and Jerusalem, in Acts 18-19 and Acts 6-7 and 21-22), (9) and divine rescues from danger; and (10) divine revelations are always integral to the plot (through oracles, dreams and visions, all of which feature in Acts).23 In fact, Acts looks far more like a novel than any historical monograph of the period.24 If Acts looks exactly like an ancient novel (and it does), are we really going to chalk this up to coincidence?
Notes
" 1. See Richard Pervo, The Mystery of Acts (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge. 2008): and Richard Pervo, Acts: A Commentary (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. 2009). for the most thorough accounting of this fact (see especially the latter, pp. 17-18). with substantial support in Thomas Brodie, The Birthing of the New Testament: The Intertextual Development of the New Testament Writings (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix. 2004), esp. pp. 377-445 (on Acts specifically); Dennis MacDonald, Does the New Testament Imitate Homer? Four Cases from the Acts of the Apostles (New Haven. CT: Yale University Press, 2003); and John Dominic Crossan, The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus (New York: HarperOne. 2012), pp. 196-217. See also Clare Rothschild, Luke-Acts and the Rhetoric of History: An Investigation of Early Christian Historiography (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck. 2004); Loveday Alexander, 'Fact, Fiction and the Genre of Acts', New Testament Studies 44 (1998), pp. 380-99; and P.E. Satterthwaite, Acts against the Background of Classical Rhetoric', in The Book of Acts in its Ancient Literary Setting (ed. Bruce Winter and Andrew Clarke; Grand Rapids, Ml: William B. Eerdmans, 1993), pp. 337-80. There are conservatives who protest, but not with logically valid arguments.
2. That Luke used Josephus as a source to fill his account with various items of historical color, see note in Chapter 7 (§4). That similar details also appear in his account of apostolic travels outside Judea suggests Luke may have used other historians (of those regions) to color those accounts as well (those historians were simply not preserved for us to detect their influence now).
3. If Luke did not use a source text (a 'Kings Gospel") for the material equating Jesus and Paul to Elijah and Elisha. then Luke obviously had to have invented that material himself. That Luke knew and used (mainly to subvert) the Pauline Epistles see Dennis MacDonald. Two Shipwrecked Gospels: The Logoi of Jesus and Papias's Exposition of Logift about the Lord (Atlanta. GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), pp. 50-52: and Richard Pervo. Dating Acts: Between the Evangelists and the Apologists (Santa Rosa. CA: Polebridge Press. 2006).
4. Dennis MacDonald. 'The Shipwrecks of Odysseus and Paul". New Testament Studies 45 (1999). pp. 88-107 (88): with Vernon Robbins. 'The "We" Passages in Acts and Ancient Sea Voyages'. Papers of the Chicago Society of Biblical Research 20 (1975). pp. 5-18: and Henry Cadbury. •"We" and "I" Passages in Luke-Acts'. New Testament Studies 3 (1956-1957). pp. 128-32. It is sometimes argued that the 'we" passages (portions of Acts where the author inexplicably switches from third person to first person plural and back again, without ever explaining why, or who 'we' are) indicate an actual source. Some even argue these prove the author was an actual companion of Paul, but few scholars believe that's likely—it isn't what the author himself ever says, yet it was standard practice of the time to say so. if that is what the author meant to be understood. But fabricating a fictional narrative using 'I' or 'we' is already evident in the pre-Christian book of Jubilees, a made-up rewrite of OT history-adapted from Genesis, passed off as a revelation given directly to Moses, even though it was actually composed around the second or first century bce So the motif has an established precedent in historical fiction. A more famous model for writing fiction in the first person is the Odyssey of Homer, and notably (as MacDonald demonstrates) the 'we' sections in Acts all center on sea travel.
5. Dennis MacDonald. The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (New Haven. CT: Yale University Press. 2000). pp. 9-14.
6. MacDonald. Does the New Testament Imitate Homer?, pp. 44-65 (with pp. 19-43).
7. MacDonald. Does the New Testament Imitate Homer?, pp. 74-102 (with pp. 69-73).
8. MacDonald, Does the New Testament Imitate Homer?, pp. 107-19 (with pp. 105-106).
9. MacDonald. Does the New Testament Imitate Homer?, pp. 137-45 (with pp. 123-36).
10. Euripides. Bacchae 440-49 (miraculous unlocking of chains), and 585-94 (escape due to an earthquake). Compare Acts 12.6-7 and 16.26.
11. See Randel Helms. Gospel Fictions (Amherst, NY: Prometheus. 1988). p. 21.
12. Robert Price, The Pre-Nicene New Testament: Fifty-Four Formative Texts (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature. 2006). p. 841.
13. For a survey of Luke's methods as a historian compared to his contemporaries: Carrier, Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 173-87.
14. Joseph Tyson. 'Why Dates Matter: The Case of the Acts of the Apostles', in Finding the Historical Jesus: Rules of Evidence (ed. Bernard Brandon Scott; Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge. 2008). pp. 59-70 (67).
15. On the rate of Christian expansion and growth almost certainly being nothing like what is depicted in Acts, see Carrier, Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 407-48.
16. Burton Mack, 'Many Movements. Many Myths: Redescribing the Attractions of Early Christianities. Toward a Conversation with Rodney Stark', Religious Studies Review 25.2 (April 1999), pp. 132-36 (134).
17. Price. Pre-Nicene New Testament, p. 484.
18. Price, Pre-Nicene New Testament, p. 483.
19. The parallels among these three synagogue incidents are even more numerous and obviously intentional: see Crossan, Power of Parable, pp. 205-207.
20. though in Luke the third man on the journey is Jesus walking along in disguise (Lk. 24.15) he never tells anyone his name: whereas in Acts Jesus appears as a light from heaven, but Paul is accompanied by at least two unnamed men (Acts 9.7).
21. Ezek. 1.26-2.3. Alan Segal. 'Conversion and Messianism; Outline tor a New Approach", in The Messiah: Developments in Earliest Judaism and Christianity (ed. James Charlesworth: Minneapolis. MN: Fortress Press. 1992). pp. 296-340 (331-35). Similarly. Dan. 10.2-21.
22. For many more, see the scholarship cited in earlier notes (esp. n. 1). For example. Pervo. Mystery of Acts. pp. 55-91. 101-40.
23. Price, Pre-Nicene New Testament, pp. 492-93.
24. See the table in Pervo. Mystery of Acts. pp. 168-70. where he enumerates ten different respects in which Acts is notably unlike ancient historiography (yet all ten are commonly encountered in ancient fiction). "