Re: Responses to Robbie and Tina

Thanks much for the reply, responses below:

L. Manning Vines wrote:

>Jim writes:
><< Your following paragraph uses Racine and Shakespeare as counterexamples.
>I don't think that's really relevant...why do you? It would be more
>relevant to compare John's Greek to the Greek of other works from the same
>period and go from there. >>
>
>I do think it is relevant, because my assertion was that the size of the
>vocabulary in a book or body of books does not bear any necessary
>correlation to literary sophistication, to linguistic sophistication, or
>even to lexical sophistication. To an assertion of an unsophistication in
>any of these respects, claims of small vocabulary are immaterial. Racine is
>a particularly good demonstration of this, and I mentioned Shakespeare and
>estimates of average English vocabularies only to lend Racine's statistics a
>context.
>
I think it works as a good illustration, but not necessarily as a
relevant example. I don't know that Racine's genius would work the same
way 2000 years ago, in a different culture, with a different language.
I suspect you see genius as being essentially the same across time and
culture. I think that's a possibility, but I'm not taking that for
granted.

>As you suggest, I could have attempted to demonstrate the same thing with
>Greek names instead of a French one, but the French one was so clear and
>handy that I didn't bother, not seeing what benefit it would provide anyway
>since my point was purely of the worthlessness of counting words to
>demonstrate unsophistication in literature.
>
>If I had been more ambitious, I surely could have gone beyond these small
>claims to discuss John's Greek in more detail, and THIS would, as you say,
>require comparison to other Greek works. Such an ambition, however, would
>require much time and many words to attain my satisfaction, and I doubt that
>any other active participant of this list has the technical background to
>follow it without too much effort for me to expect you to exert for such a
>trifle anyway, so for all my time I'd probably only be read by you and
>Scottie (or maybe only Scottie). Thus I never had such an ambition.
>
Yeah, that's fair, I don't blame you. I will say that this latter type
of comparison is the basis of many scholars' opinions that the author
of the Gospel of John was only marginally literate. But as I just said
in a post to Scottie, I don't know what recent scholarship on John says
about this.

>I wrote:
><< I do not doubt that the John in Acts could speak Greek, nor that he could
>have learned to write it if he didn't already know how to write it when
>depicted there and that he could then even have written a book. But that he
>would have written THIS book, though I cannot call it impossible, seems to
>me unlikely. >>
>
>And to this Jim responds:
><< Ok, but let's examine the chain of reasoning that leads to this judgment:
>
><< 1. The Pharisees are recorded in Acts as judging the apostles as
>"unlearned" men.
> a. You assume that the Pharisees were accurate in their judgment --
>which from the narrative itself we know was an on the spot guess.
> b. You assume that this assumption is relevant to the apostle's
>facility with the Greek language, rather than just familiarity
>with/education in Jewish tradition.
> c. You assume that 30-50 years isn't long enough to develop a degree
>of sophistication in language use, when you have nothing upon which to base
>a comparison. >>
>
>1. I don't think that the judgment is strictly by the Pharisees, but by a
>generic plural subject when something like "rulers and elders" were present;
>and the judgment is not of the apostles, but specifically of Peter and John.
>
You're probably right, I may have gotten some details wrong. I haven't
gone back to reread the passage. But since we're talking about John,
and since John was one of those mentioned, it's still a relevant point.

>a. I do not assume that they were accurate in their judgment, which is why I
>have throughout included such clauses as "If their judgment is correct," or
>"Supposing for now that we can trust this report and their estimation," (I
>am sure I said things to this effect two or three times, at least). And we
>actually do not know from the narrative that their judgment was a guess --
>the narrator uses the verb katalambanô, which I discussed with Scottie, a
>word that in contexts like this carries the force of "to realize" or "to
>comprehend" (it comes from a root meaning to seize, like our "grasping" of
>an idea). Perhaps we are not to trust their realization, but the author
>certainly had available to him Greek words meaning to guess or to suppose or
>to believe, none of which he used here.
>
If you find it hard to believe that the author of the Gospel was the
unlettered apostle John being described in this passage, then you are
assuming "they were accurate in their judgment." This has been the very
cornerstone of your argument so far -- that John the apostle was
described as unlettered, and that the author of the Gospel was certainly
not.

I think you may have a point that the author of Acts may have worded the
narrative to indicate his own agreement with the Pharisees, but it seems
to me the language can just as easily be communicating the Pharisees'
own certainty. In other words, they were really guessing but thought
they were certain. Because the Pharisees were certain, that doesn't
mean we have to be. Thinking about it, the most likely reading is the
one you've suggested -- that John was accurately described as
"unlettered" by the people present in the minds of those present and in
the mind of the author of Acts.

>b. I do not assume that this judgment is SPECIFIC to Peter or John's
>facility with Greek, but that a general judgment of being unlettered and
>common, if it is accurate, is relevant to one's capacity for composing
>literature.
>
Ok, but why do you make this assumption? These were _Palestinian
Hebrew_ religious leaders, among others, and would probably define
literacy in terms of education _as they understood it_ -- which would
not revolve around literacy in Greek, but in Hebrew.

The important thing to my overall point is simply the existence of the
assumption, though.

>c. I do not assume that 30-50 years (or any other number of them) is
>insufficient to develop a degree of linguistic sophistication (though I
>don't know how you can say that I have "nothing upon which to base a
>comparison," since probably most of us are familiar with learning languages
>and the relative degrees of aptitude shown by people learning our language,
>and it happens that my own father's native tongue is not the same as mine,
>and through his family I know people who speak my native tongue to varying
>degrees of aptitude, who have started with it at varying ages and continued
>with varying effort and varying skill for varying numbers of years). I only
>assume that one cannot accept it as ordinary -- though I have repeatedly
>backed away from saying "impossible" -- when someone goes from slack-jawed
>yokel (or, to be fair, "unlettered and common," though I'm not sure the
>former is starkly in disagreement even with the gospel account) to literary
>mastery in his adult life. Perhaps you are of the opinion that with a good
>knowledge of the language and enough pluck, anyone can write a masterpiece,
>and in this case I am powerless to convince you. But I am not of this
>opinion. As I see it, most people just ain't got the chops, and no number
>of years will give it to them -- and people who can without surprise be
>described by strangers as unlettered and common might be particularly
>unlikely to have the chops.
>
The relevant point here is that you ascribe to the author of John a
pretty high level of sophistication. If he was a genius, he was
certainly capable of attaining these levels in a 30-50 year period
starting out from relative unsophistication. Remember you didn't want
to say earlier that the author of the Gospel of John was inferior to
Conrad, who is a striking example of someone who adopted a foreign
tongue relatively late in life and over time wrote masterpieces in it.
If you accept that modern parallels are relevant, and accept that the
author of the Gospel had some genius, you shouldn't have a hard time
accepting that the author of the Gospel could have started out an
unlettered man 50 years previously, that is all.

>And:
><< Now this is what I meant by the statement that the "traditional" views of
>authorship are based upon evidence while rejections of it are based upon
>speculation. >>
>
>But, as I've taken pains to state and restate and emphasize, I am not
>rejecting it -- I am rejecting only your apparent conviction of it.
>
As I've said again and again, the evidence supporting the traditional
view of authorship isn't conclusive :).

And I didn't say you were rejecting apostolic authorship. You have said
it was very unlikely, though, which is a kind of provisional rejection.

>And:
><< The book of John claims to have been written by an eyewitness, there are
>some small markers supporting that claim, and church fathers who actually
>knew the apostles ascribed the Gospel of John to the apostle John (Clement
>and Irenaus, I think...and I'm thinking there was another guy whose name
>started with a P). >>
>
>We know as little or less about the earliest church fathers than about the p
>eople in question (and wasn't Irenaeus a middle-to-late second-century
>figure? I thought the tradition was that he knew people who knew the
>apostles). The "small markers" like visual details in the narrative are
>sparse and not compelling (I think less compelling than literary readings
>that incorporate them, but I suppose you'll disagree with that).
>
>And it becomes hard to believe ancient histories, even ancient eyewitness
>accounts, the way we believe newspapers, after one reads something like
>Herodotus (the Father of History, he's called, but Thucydides called him the
>Father of Lies). And in any case, the claim of authorship at the last notes
>of John is, as I've said before, often suggested as an addition, and the
>section in which it sits would be suggested as such a candidate even if not
>for the claim at the end.
>
>But I'll say it again: none of this is to be a rejection of apostolic
>authorship. You seem to be giving it a slant of, Well, of course we don't
>know but it sure does look like it -- and I'm just trying to scratch that
>last bit, which I don't think we can say so confidently as you seem to be
>doing.
>
>
No, I'm not asserting apostolic authorship with certainty at all. I
don't really see that in my posts. What I am saying is that a case can
be made for it, and that we have some physical evidence supporting it --
as opposed to other positions.

I don't think the Greek historical tradition is really relevant to even
Greek works coming out of the Hebrew tradition. There is an almost
legal claim of validity attempted by the apostles, who were chosen
specifically because they were "eyewitnesses" of the events in question
-- following Jewish law, where every matter was to be established by two
or three witnesses. We have 12, presumably one for every tribe of
Israel (at least symbolically). Furthermore, the accounts aren't
exactly flattering to any of the main figures except Christ himself, so
they lack the motivation that politically determined accounts -- or
official histories -- obviously have behind them.

>After after where I've cut him off above, Jim says:
><< Now I'm not saying this physical evidence is conclusive. It's not for a
>number of reasons, and that's why your description of scholarly consensus in
>your next post was a fair and accurate description. But it has more
>physical evidence on its side than any other claim, that's all. >>
>
>It's that last sentence where it looks to me like you're grasping. If by
>"any other claim" you mean claims that it is impossible for apostles to have
>penned any of the gospels, I'd say that both sides have essentially
>negligible physical evidence, though such claims of impossibility are
>obnoxiously naysaying (and very rare) while yours seems rather too hopeful.
>
No, of course I'm not grasping. I'm describing the evidence. The actual
physical evidence all lies on one side, and is non-existent on the
other. You can dismiss the actual physical evidence, but that doesn't
invalidate its existence, and of course the dismissals themselves are up
for debate. That's all.

I think you're right about Irenaus, btw. I have my names confused. I
think the "P" was Polycarp, by the way. Clement was certainly an
associate of Paul, though, and there was one who was an associate of
John (Polycarp). Irenaus does come later, but also does assert
traditional authorship for John. Origen, to my knowledge, while he had
no idea who wrote Hebrews, did hold to traditional opinions of the
authorship of John -- and he was a fairly critical thinker about these
issues (among my favorite of the church fathers).

>Jim goes on to write:
><< What I should have said was that the reading of John you were suggesting
>seemed like a very _modern_ manipulation of a sign system. I can't think
>of too many documents from that time period that used a sign system in
>quite that way. [. . .] you aren't arguing for an allegorical reading, but
>something more subtle. >>
>
>I don't think it needs to be seen as a modern manipulation of a sign system,
>and it seems to me that this is still the sort of thinking that leads us to
>believe that the ancients were too simple to do things as we can do them,
>though it is here more responsibly phrased.
>
No, not at all. It's just a recognition that the last 2000 years has
produced some different reading strategies. This isn't that great a
stretch, and it's not to say that modern reading strategies are
inherently more sophisticated than ancient ones.

>As I said before, we can read other ancient texts in ways very much like
>this (your suggestion of Ovid is probably a good one), but if one isn't
>convinced that it's valid for this book he won't be convinced that it's
>valid for the others either. And besides which, the claim that no other
>ancient book was written this way does not argue against this one's having
>been. Honestly, I have a harder time comparing my reading of this book to
>my readings of modern books than to other ancient ones -- perhaps this is
>simply because the most immediately accessible list in my mind is weighted
>that way, while yours is weighted the other.
>
Probably true...

>And:
><< I don't think this is a good comparison to John, though, because the
>author of that Gospel clearly intended his audience to understand his
>writing as eyewitness history -- and what I don't think you see in
>literature of the period is too much eyewitness history that has very dense
>layers of symbolism. >>
>
>I don't think it's so clear that the author intended his audience to read
>this as eyewitness history, and if he did he had a very different sense of
>eyewitness history. There are, for instance, lapses -- of a sort which I'll
>always associate with The Great Gatsby since their presence in that book was
>brought prominently to my attention while I was in high school -- where the
>narrator narrates something he should not know.
>
>And both the Greek and Hebrew traditions of those days and earlier (along
>with many, many others) allowed much more wiggle in what was "history" than
>we do, as is abundantly clear in almost all of the historical or
>somewhat-maybe-historical books from both.
>
Hey...could you describe those "lapses"? That'd be interesting. Also,
even the assumption of John being an eyewitness account doesn't exclude
information he couldn't have seen for himself -- there's no reason the
Gospel couldn't be drawing from sources and supplementing it with
eyewitness information.

I responded above about aligning the Greek and Hebrew traditions. I do
distinguish, as you do, a difference betweeen the Hebrew and modern
assessments of what constitutes "history", but I think the Hebrew comes
closer to the modern than the Greek does. The introduction to Luke's
Gospel is pretty interesting -- it sounds as if the guy interviewed
eyewitnesses to create his narrative.

>And, concerning my talk of Maimonides and other Jewish commentators:
><< Good summary of the history, but I think it also demonstrates the problem
>with your thesis. Kabbalah isn't a very good point of reference for John's
>Gospel either. >>
>
>Maimonides was not a Kabbalist (and neither were the other commentators I
>had in mind).
>
You did mention Kabbala in that paragraph.

>And:
><< Now if you claim Hebrew influences in John, though, you should recognize
>that "authority by affiliation" was very common in the Hebrew prophetic
>tradition, but none of them -- not a single Hebrew prophet -- was ever
>accused of blasphemy as Christ was. >>
>
>True or not, I'm not sure that this particular uniqueness requires the sort
>you seem to be hunting for.
>

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by this. My argument at this
point is that Christ seems to have been claiming deity because, as a
prophet, he was making unique claims that were immediately and
accurately understood by his opponents (the Pharisees are even recording
as saying that Christ, being a man, makes himself out to be God). His
opponents weren't responding to your average authority by affiliation
claim, in other words.

>Then:
><< Authority by affiliation was a common claim, but Christ's claims were
>understood by his contemporaries (and his opponents) as going far beyond
>that. >>
>
>In the Gospel of John, which is the only book I really mean to be talking
>about here (and which is the book usually pointed to as containing the
>boldest claims of Jesus' divinity or godhead or messiahship or whathaveyou),
>Jesus' contemporaries accuse him of blasphemy for making himself as God by
>saying that his father is God, and HE responds that the Hebrew scripture
>says Ye are sons of God. It's not a big deal, he says. Books you
>yourselves consider religiously authoritative say the same thing about all
>of you.
>
I think this depends upon the translation you read. From what I
remember, the response was, "Have I not said, ye are Gods?" -- from the
Psalms. Christ's embellishment was along the lines that "If he called
them gods, to whom the word of God came..." why do you have such
difficulty with what I'm telling you now?

It's not clear, then, that the books "say the same thing about _all_ of
you." This passage could have been used to communicate to the Pharisees
that they shouldn't be unfamiliar with or unprepared for the claim
Christ was making -- that if those who receive the word of God are gods,
then what more can we say about the person embodying the Logos of God?
(this is how we should read this within the context of John's Gospel).

>As depicted in John, Jesus' religious ideas were certainly a threat to the
>authority and he certainly said things that were deliberately provocative
>and taken as blasphemies. But, very interestingly, the author has ample
>opportunity to have Jesus (or his own narrative voice) come right out and
>say it, the one thing we want to hear clearly and explicitly, no more
>riddles or funny talk, and he just never does it.
>
Before Abraham was, I AM ? How can you get more explicit than that?

What is explicit is defined culturally, and in the opinion of the
Pharisees Christ was quite clear. I think you're demanding that Christ
say it in the way a 20th cent. reader would want him to say it, and I
don't think that's reasonable.

>And:
><< At this point we have a few options. First, we can assume that we
>understand Christ better now, 2000 years later, than the Pharisees who were
>listening to him, or we can assume the whole thing is made up -- but then we
>have to ask why?, or we can take the claims at face value and admit they
>were a bit disturbing. >>
>
>I think the author of John certainly HOPES that we would understand Jesus
>better than the Pharisees depicted there. And I don't doubt that the
>particulars of most or all of the specific interactions on the street are
>made up, but I don't think I have to ask why any more than I am obligated to
>ask that about any other literature, or semi-historical literature.
>
>(And the claims, taken at face value as you suggest, certainly were
>disturbing to the Jerusalem religious authority, but they do not explicitly
>include claims of deity.)
>
I think the point is that they were disturbing to the Jerusalem
religious authority because they do explicitly include claims of
divinity. These claims were made in ways clearly relevant to and easily
understood by the people living in and speaking the language Christ
spoke, and that is why I suggest that people living 2000 years ago,
hearing Christ on the street, had a better chance of understanding him
than we do now. To me, even at this remove, the claims seem pretty
clear -- but then I'm contextualizing him within the Hebrew tradition..

>And:
><< This whole thing about a great misunderstood moral teacher who never
>really claimed deity but had that laid on him is a bit too...oh....too much
>like modern humanism looking at itself in the mirror and calling it Christ.
>It's too much like a reading we moderns would like. >>
>
>I don't pretend to know or even to have a reliable idea of whether Jesus the
>man ever claimed or believed himself to be a deity. Perhaps he didn't, and
>you can ugly up a summary like that to belittle the idea all you like
>without changing this. And perhaps he did. I'm talking about a book
>usually called the Gospel of John, though, and my claim is that this book
>can be read by someone who doesn't know about a tradition claiming that
>Jesus is God, and he will scratch his head a great deal and wonder just what
>the deal with that guy is supposed to be, but that he will not necessarily
>walk away with the conviction that this character in this book is supposed
>to be God.
>
I would say that a modern reader, in English, who only read the Gospel
of John and no other Biblical literature, could possibly walk away from
the Gospel and not get that Christ was God. He could also possibly walk
away from the Gospel and get that Christ was God -- again, this imagined
reader would see that the word was God in John 1, and that the word
became flesh and dwelt among us, and then see John the Baptist pointing
to Christ and make all the connections he needed -- if he wasn't reading
the Greek, just the English, and if he wasn't already predisposed to
question the tradition.

I would say a reader in English who read the entire Bible would be more
inclined to see claims of divinity.

I would say a reader in English who read the entire Bible and had some
knowledge of Hebrew culture would be hard pressed to avoid the claims of
divinity.

>And, referring to what I said about the word that can be translated as
>"tabernacled" :
><< If John was writing within the Hebrew tradition, and was as brilliant as
>you say, why is this too ingenious? >>
>
>I meant that the reading is too ingenious in the sense that it must work too
>hard to find its meaning. You said that the line might draw parallels
>between Jesus' body and the tabernacle, and this alone was what I thought
>was too strained -- certainly the word is suggestive in its placement there.
>And I say this because the line does not indicate the the logos
>"tabernacled" in flesh -- which is what it sounded to me like you were
>suggesting -- but that it became flesh and "tabernacled" amongst (or in) us.
>Following the grammar of the sentence makes "us" a more reasonable
>tabernacle than the flesh of Jesus' body.
>
The word became flesh and pitched his tent among us. ....

You're saying that the "us" itself is the tabernacle according to the
grammar of the sentence, rather than Jesus' physical body..

Hmmm.

You still have the same use of the word "tabernacled" or "pitched his
tent" in Paul to deal with, where it clearly refers to the believer's
physical body (and this was before the Gospel of John was written), and
you still have the very well known tradition of the tent in the
wilderness that housed the presence of God to deal with.

I'll grant that the grammar can go either way, but the textual tradition
leans toward the flesh being the tabernacle, not the huamn race.

I don't think these readings are mutually exclusive, though, and your
reading opens up some interesting possibilities -- the sentence
anticipates, then, what Paul said about the church being the body of Christ.

>And finally:
><< Putting John within the Hebrew tradition makes the statement that the
>Logos was God, the logos became flesh and "pitched his tent" among us, a
>clear claim that the logos was God the Creator in human flesh. I think it
>takes more ingenuity to dance around this. >>
>
>As I suggested before, this simple equation leaves out the messiness of "to
>be" and leaves out all manner of obscurity between those lines that are
>being drawn together. The logos does not simply equal God (nor does it
>simply equal Jesus). If it did, it would be a redundant term and all the
>difficulty of the first six or so lines would be empty. I think this
>messiness is ordinarily resolved by some very well-developed
>trinity-theology, but I see no reason to expect that most of this wouldn't
>be foreign to the author of John.
>
>-robbie
>
The logos could simply equal God and could simply equal Jesus without
being a redundant term -- as you pointed out earlier, it is connected
with a pretty rich tradition in Greek literature that John may have
wanted to appropriate for his Christian Gospel. It certainly would be a
term that would resonate with a Greek audience, giving them a point of
contact with this new Hebrew religion.

Jim

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Received on Tue Aug 5 10:48:07 2003