BEN: On p. 52 you make a helpful distinction between an interest in personality and an interest in character on the part of ancient biographers. Can you unpack this idea a bit for the readers? HELEN: Yes, this comes from the Classicist Christopher Gill but has been taken up by Christopher Pelling too (who has worked so much on Plutarch). The basic idea is that ‘personality’ involves all the quirkiness and idiosyncrasies that make us the unique humans that we... Read more

BEN: In Chapter 3 we really get down to brass tacks, as my mother used to say, and one of the more intriguing things about studying ancient bioi is that the ancients were totally innocent of Freud and Jung, and mostly didn’t adopt or adapt developmental models of human personality. No Citizen Kane stories for them about early childhood trauma shaping one’s life. No, they largely believed people were born with a certain character and stuck with it. Gender, generation,... Read more

BEN: Though a little tangential to our focus on Mark, one of the things I learned from reading various classics scholars who were experts in the literary and educational character of antiquity is that when the ancients read documents of their age, they normally counted on discovering both what kind of document they had just picked up and what it’s subject matter was from the first few lines of the document itself not least because it was in scriptio continua!... Read more

https://www.bookreviews.org/pdf/13162_14680.pdf This is a helpful and fair review. BW3 Read more

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Two of the three Great Tales in the boxed set, did not appear in their current form until 2017. The second of these is a great romance involving Beren, a human being, and Luthien an elfin maiden. The story is one part Romeo and Juliet, one part quest for the Simaril, and one part battles to stay alive and be together despite opposition. Beren, in order to have Luthien as his wife, is given the near impossible task of going... Read more

BEN: On p. 29 you make an important distinction— namely that while the OT has much influence on the content of the Gospels, it has little or no influence on its form, as there are no biographies writ large in the OT. I agree with you about this. Can you unpack this important distinction a bit for our readers? HELEN: I think there’s always a danger when you’re focusing on one aspect of the gospels that people will assume you’re... Read more

BEN: I was a little surprised that in your review of older analysis of the genre of the Gospel you didn’t start with D.F. Strauss’ very influential ‘leben Jesu’. Was this just because you only wanted to back up to the early 20th century? HELEN: Truthfully, I didn’t think of it (though I’m a huge fan of Strauss)! I didn’t want to spend too long surveying the past in the first chapter, largely because there are plenty of very good... Read more

BEN: You have suggested that Mark’s biography seems most like the biographies of ancient philosophers and teachers. And yet oddly, Mark includes little teaching material of Jesus, except in Mk. 4 and 13? When one compares this to Matthew’s Gospel, it hardly seems a major emphasis in this Gospel. What is about the biographies of ancient philosophers that suggests you are right about such a comparison? HELEN: It’s certainly true that Matthew has more teaching than Mark, but I think... Read more

BEN: Another thing that is obvious early on in your study is that ancient biographies tended to have ethical aims of forming character, promoting virtues and prohibiting vices, and unless I’m mistaken you see Mark’s Gospel as also an attempt at that sort of identity and character formation. Right? But what kind of identity formation and how does the theological content and the uniqueness of Jesus fit into such an aim? HELEN: Yes, I think identity and character are very... Read more