An ancient conversation

There was a discussion here quite more than a month ago now that was to some
extent about the historical Jesus and that centered (at least my part of it)
around the Gospel of John. I bailed on that conversation primarily because
I couldn't keep up with the extraordinary pace set by Jim and Tina.

This afternoon, with a reprieve from other duties provided by Isabel, I
re-read from that conversation the last few messages that I had left in my
inbox with the long-ago-abandoned hope of responding to them. Most of it I
found myself perfectly eager to discard, though there was one message to
which I probably should have responded after first reading it since it was
very brief but included one or two verifiably erroneous statements about the
Greek language and Pythagoras and Greek geometry (I expect that Tina was
simply crossing memories of different facts from the book she referred to).

I was also compelled to attempt again clarifying to Jim that I meant to be
speaking throughout only of the size of the vocabulary of the BOOK called
John, never the size of the vocabulary of the man who wrote it, whoever he
might have been. I maintained that literary mastery can be exhibited
through a small vocabulary and gave contrasting examples of Shakespeare and
Racine, and it continued to seem to me that Jim's responses suggested that
we were talking about the vocabularies of men rather than of books -- my
point being that an author with a vocabulary however large can deliberately
limit his writing vocabulary to spectacular effect, as I think Racine, or
Hemingway, or the author of John clearly demonstrate (and I associated this
with the Hebrew tradition, which probably influenced all three of these
writers one way or another, because of its characteristic reticence,
simplicity, and subdued style).

What remained of that conversation beyond these things is too far gone now
for me to recover (and I haven't the time, anyway).

But as one final note, I must ask Jim if he has any of his sources easily
accessible in his memory. He continually said things to the effect that
many scholars and in fact all of the scholarship he has read supposed the
author of John to be "only marginally literate" (and elsewhere, "[not] that
terribly literate") and that I'm the first person he's heard say otherwise.
I was upon first reading this quite surprised to hear it -- I suggested that
he was crossing John the supposed author of the Gospel of John with John the
self-declared author of Revelations -- and remain very curious about it. I
have not read any credible reader of Greek (or anybody else, for that
matter) disparage the Greek of John, perhaps aside for references to a few
small Hebraisms that one might, depending upon one's preferences and
alliances, read either as elegant flourishes or as ugly Semitic incursions
into purer Hellenic beauty. I would leave this as I am the rest of the
conversation but for a sustained interest in this particular book and its
language, and I am thus very curious to read more strictly negative
estimations, and certainly any argument that this author was only marginally
literate. If you have them easily available to you, Jim, I would love to
know what scholars you were talking about.

A hurricane's a-comin',

Robbie
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Received on Thu Sep 18 17:13:06 2003