by VorJack
Ken Schenck throws out an interesting comment over at his blog Quadrilateral Thoughts after reading one of N.T. Wright’s pieces: “Sometimes I think people like Wright are more clever than the biblical authors themselves…”
James McGrath picks up on this and explains: “Ken’s point (as I understand it) is that sometimes we come up with something more complex than the author is likely to have had in mind – and in that sense “cleverer” than the original author.”
Another was of putting it is that the good Bishop of Durham is being too clever by half.
It reminds me of a question that one of Mark Goodacre’s students asked him (which was recorded in the extended episode 2 of NT pod, I believe): how long do you think it took the authors to complete the Gospels? As part of his response, Goodacre explains how hurried and unpolished the Gospel of Marc appears. The whole thing has a rushed tone, and the grammar is rough in places with a lot of sentences that start with “and,” (“Jesus did this. And then Jesus did that.”) Much of this is smoothed out in translation.
So Goodacre suggests that the Gospel of Marc may have been written in an afternoon. That would certainly fit the scholar’s consensus that Marc was written during the First Jewish War; the author likely believed that the end times were here. No time to let the ink dry.
But it raises the question: how much literary complexity can you cram into a work that you write in an afternoon? Is it possible that the people who see a deep underlying structure and subtle wording in the Gospel of Marc and being too clever?
Some of the same arguments can be applied to the letters of Paul. As Philip Harland has pointed out, each letter is “situational;” Paul is writing to a specific group that is usually dealing with a specific crisis. What’s more, Paul is running all over the Mediterranean at this point, dictating these letters as he goes about establishing churches, getting shipwrecked and facing persecution.
Isn’t is possible that expecting Paul to provide theology under these circumstances is asking too much? Paul is trying to hold these fledgling communities together just long enough for the apocalypse to arrive. Perhaps he occasionally threw in some things simply because he thought they sounded good and might pacify the warring factions.
You could make a lot of the same arguments about Revelations – horrible grammar, written as a letter – but not many people who read this blog are looking to Revelations for deep meaning.
If you believe that the Bible was divinely inspired, then this probably isn’t a useful discussion. God presumably had infinite time and infinite wisdom with which to craft his work. But if you’re approaching the Bible from a secular perspective, I think it may be worth asking ourselves if our interpretations aren’t too clever by half.
After all, if we’re always going to prefer more complex and unlikely interpretations, we might as well all be mythicists. (heeee…)
It’s not just fiction — it’s poorly written fiction.
Though Wright sometimes stretches his conclusions, he is often doing with the biblical texts what many secular readers would want, find the context for the work. Ken reaction was to a piece on the rapture in the premillennial sense, an idea that Wright finds foreign to the Scriptures. Sometimes you need a person that’s clever, otherwise known as applying some higher criticism. Isn’t that what a secularist would do? I’ve always liked Wright’s work on Romans, because he lays out the background of the church there and the influence of Torah on the text that Paul wrote.
I also doubt that many of the texts of the NT were written as hurriedly as we might think. But even if they were that wouldn’t necessitate them being shallow empty pieces of literature. Time and length aren’t always prerequisites of beauty and depth. E=MC2; short, sweet but deep and powerful as well.
E=MC^2 is short to write but was not, in any manner, quick to create or comprehend. I agree that time and length (though I don’t think this post was discussing length anyway) aren’t necessary to create a beautiful or complex piece of literature – sometimes the pieces just fall into place. However if something is thrown together in a slapdash fashion, the chances of careful consideration being given to the words in order to evoke a deeper meaning grow very slim.
I don’t think I buy that at all. Take music and poetry as easy examples. Have there ever been incredibly moving songs or poems written that were literally thrown together in just a few moments?
My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard
And they’re all like “It’s better than yours”
LOL! Exactly, trj. Thank you.
I think most things that are good are thought out. But that doesn’t mean all are. Lots of wit is spontaneous and famous examples have been quoted endlessly.
Also Chesterton comes to mind who would dictate an article to someone while at the same time writing one. Many of Paul’s letters were dictated. And while I’m sure some songs took years to write, I’m sure others are written in hours.
Then why don’t you buy what I say at all? I’m saying it’s very unlikely to occur. We are basically agreeing, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say it is impossible, it has been known to happen that something powerful and laden with rich imagery is written within a very short period.
Looking back, I think I misread you the first time. My bad.
I think we do agree. Most of the time, complexity in literature implies lots of time and effort, but there are exceptions to that general rule.
It’s an interesting theory, vorjack, and I agree on quite a bit, actually, but I think it has some pretty serious problems. Especially with respect to Mark and Paul.
Maybe so. Maybe not. We can’t know with certainty. What I do think is pretty clear, though, is that the literary complexity is in fact there. Even the most skeptical biblical scholars I’ve read don’t deny the literary complexity in Mark. You can see it if you read it in English, and you can see it if you read it in Greek. It’s undeniably present.
I know that you know Paul well enough to know that the earliest letters from Paul are quite different in tone than the later letters of Paul. So even if this is true to an extent (and I think it probably is, FWIW), it’s probably more applicable to the earlier works. Take Romans as an example. Whatever else it is, it’s intentionally systematic and theological. The Corinthian correspondence, while much more ad hoc in nature, is still very theological in nature.
Overall, I would agree with the main thrust of what you’re saying. I think a lot of Christians ask way, way too much out of the biblical writings. But if you push that too far, well, I just think you end up on shaky ground … and you end up arguing a conclusion into the evidence rather than the other way around.
One of the points some Mormons missionaries made to me is that Smith wrote the Book of Mormon in a few days (or so they thought). They wondered how such a marvelous book could be written so quickly and saw that as evidence of divine inspiration.
But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the SIMPLICITY that is in Christ. 2 Cor 11:3
But I fear, lest by any means, as the John C beguiled Eve through his subtlety, so your minds should be corrupted from the SIMPLICITY that is in Atheism. 2 Dan 11:3
I’ve written some poetry I don’t understand myself.
–Carl Sandburg
What’s that got to do with this thread?
First, I think in some instances you might be right, but this is not a program we can stretch over the entirety of the biblical canon. For instance, some of the Psalms follow an acrostic structure beginning with an aleph line, then a bet line, and so one for twenty-two lines following the Hebrew alphabet. Other sections have a chiastic structure, or palistrophe, in which the literary features in the first half mirror those in the second. I would also argue that the Greek of Romans 9:1-5 evidences some intentional rhetorical devices on behalf of Paul or his amanuensis. Many scholars also argue that the Greek and argumentation of Hebrews are more polished than many other sections in the NT.
Second, no ‘s’ on the end of Revelation. There’s just one.
First, I think in some instances you might be right, but this is not a program we can stretch over the entirety of the biblical canon..
Agreed, and I wouldn’t argue such. The three examples I used are the ones I could come up with.
Second, no ’s’ on the end of Revelation. There’s just one.
I do it just to annoy you, Scott…
My dad always says “Revelations” and it makes my spine tingle every time.
LOL…
Having read a good deal of textual criticism, I’ve long been under the impression that most of the works of the N.T. were either situational-reactive (e.g. the letters of Paul) or else the product of the beliefs of a faith-group, having had sources either in no-longer-extant documents, or oral traditions, or other mythical backdrops.
In the case of the gospel of Mark, it’s possible — although by no means certain — that it had at least one discernible, external source, that being the so-called “Passion Narrative.” It might also have had another even more obscure source in common with other gospels, including John (which is ironic since Mark was later a source for the “Synoptic gospels,” and John is not one of them).
So even if the original document which we now know as “Mark” were written in an afternoon (making its author more of a redactor or compiler than a creator), that does not take into account that it includes extant material, and we have no idea how long it took to write any of that.
Burton Mack also authored an extensive analysis of Mark, its structure and its purpose (i.e. A Myth of Innocence. Not everyone is a fan of Mack — and that includes both Christians as well as less devout students of the N.T. — but even if he’s wrong in his conclusions, his point that Mark shows a good deal of literary complexity — structurally speaking — definitely leans away from a “single afternoon” hypothesis.
If anything I have to wonder if Mark hadn’t been written by a committee … and if that’s the case, I can’t see how it could have been cranked out in a matter of just a few hours.