Re: An ancient conversation

Good to hear from you again Robbie, it's been too long ;). First,
thanks for clarifying the distinction between an author's vocabulary and
a book's vocabulary. If I didn't get it before, I got it now.

Next, I'll see if I can find my sources about the quality of John's
Greek. I guarantee you they are old, and that it's easily possible
scholarship over the last 20 years has changed its mind about this, then
you wouldn't see it unless you were drudging up old, outdated stuff. I
may have mentioned this in my previous e-mail.

I'm flying to Orlando this weekend, so I may not get to this till Monday
or later. I'll try not to forget about it, though.

Jim

L. Manning Vines wrote:

>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 17:24:28 2003