Another example is the genre of the gospels. Paul Eddy and Gregory Boyd write:
Fourth, and more recently, a number of scholars have argued that the Gospels are best understood in terms of ancient "fiction."...
There is no consensus among scholars within this camp as to what exact kind of fiction the Gospels are intended to be. Candidates include "folktale," "storytelling," "myth," "legend," "historical novel," "fantasy," "comedy," and even "joke." (The Jesus Legend [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2007], pp. 314-315)
Eddy and Boyd discuss some of the problems with such proposals. One of the most significant problems with all of the arguments for a fictional genre is that both the earliest Christian and the earliest non-Christian interpreters of the gospels viewed them as non-fiction:
Fifth, if Acts [which is relevant to the genre of Luke] was indeed intended to be fictional, it is somewhat surprising that no one in the early Christian community ever read the work as such. James Dawsey rightly asks, "If the Acts of the Apostles were the creative [i.e., fictional] work of an author, why would it not have suffered the same fate as the Acts of Paul?"...
As a matter of historical fact, neither the early Christians nor anyone up to very recent times ever thought of interpreting Mark or any other Gospel as intentional fiction, let alone as fiction patterned after Homer's Odyssey and Iliad [as Dennis MacDonald proposes]. MacDonald himself writes, "Readers for two thousand years apparently have been blind" to the fact that Mark was writing a fictional "prose anti-epic of sorts." One wonders how everyone got it wrong for so long.
This problem is particularly acute since, to make his larger case, MacDonald argues that "ancient authors could expect the readers to draw connections to Homer that are invisible to us." However, by his own admission, no one did. As Karl Sandnes has pointed out, MacDonald's thesis about Mark is missing at least one essential element: in the ancient world when one text was imitating another - even in an exercise in transvaluation - the subtle moments of emulation were accompanied by very clear moments of "advertised intertextuality," moments in which the emulation exercise was "broadcast in ways that alerted the reader." These clear moments of advertised emulation are missing from Mark's Gospel. It seems Mark's alleged allusions to Homer were as "invisible" to his original audience, and even his fellow Gospel authors, as they are to all modern scholars - except MacDonald. This obviously begs the question of whether it is all other readers throughout history, on the one hand, or MacDonald himself, on the other, who missed Mark's real intention. (pp. 339, 342-343)
I know it's hard for you to accept, Jason, but your Jesus isn't coming back. Get over it and move on.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous said:
ReplyDelete"I know it's hard for you to accept, Jason, but your Jesus isn't coming back. Get over it and move on."
This is the typical airhead response that Jason gets when he does a post. Jason will post something with a lot of documentation to back up his claims.
Unbelievers respond with fact-free denials.
Anonymous confirms the biblical anticipation of his views.
ReplyDeleteIn trying to defeat its claims, he confirms its message!
Steve says "Unbelievers respond with fact-free denials."
ReplyDeleteHow can you say it's a "fact-free denial"? The anonymous poster cited the facts that it's hard for Jason to accept and that his precious Jesus is not coming back. Those are facts. Prove they aren't, big guy.
Anonymous said:
ReplyDeleteSteve says "Unbelievers respond with fact-free denials."
How can you say it's a "fact-free denial"? The anonymous poster cited the facts that it's hard for Jason to accept and that his precious Jesus is not coming back. Those are facts. Prove they aren't, big guy.
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You say it's a fact that Jesus isn't coming back, but you offer no argument. So what you've given us is a fact-free assertion of a "fact."
Steve "So what you've given us is a fact-free assertion of a "fact."
ReplyDeleteYou beg the question by assuming it's fact-free simply because no argument was presented in the comments section itself. Such a requirement is quite arbitrary. It's like requiring that a dissertation be presented in a chatroom.
Even on your own standards, what you give is simply your own fact-free denial of the first anonymous commenter's statement. So you commit the very error you charge him of committing. Nice.
Anonymous said:
ReplyDeleteSteve "So what you've given us is a fact-free assertion of a "fact."
You beg the question by assuming it's fact-free simply because no argument was presented in the comments section itself. Such a requirement is quite arbitrary. It's like requiring that a dissertation be presented in a chatroom.
Even on your own standards, what you give is simply your own fact-free denial of the first anonymous commenter's statement. So you commit the very error you charge him of committing. Nice.
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I see you have a problem remembering how all this began. Jason did a post in which he presented some evidence for his position. He also linked to other material.
Therefore, the onus likes squarely on the wobbly shoulders of his critics to offer a counterargument using counterevidence.
An anonymous poster wrote:
ReplyDelete"Even on your own standards, what you give is simply your own fact-free denial of the first anonymous commenter's statement. So you commit the very error you charge him of committing."
If Steve was using the phrase "fact-free" in the sense of an absence of supporting argumentation, as the first sentence in his post you're responding to suggests, then why would he need to include argumentation when making that observation? Anybody can scroll the screen up and see the lack of supporting argumentation in the first anonymous poster's comments. That anonymous poster's comment about whether "Jesus is coming back" isn't in the same category as what Steve said. Such an issue (whether "Jesus is coming back") can't be settled by doing something like scrolling the screen up. We would expect accompanying argumentation from the first poster. There's no reason to expect it from Steve's post, given the different nature of what he was discussing.
But unlike you and the other anonymous poster (assuming that you're not the same person), Steve has produced thousands of pages of material supporting his beliefs in the forum in which this discussion is occurring. And I began this thread with a discussion of some of the evidence pertaining to the genre of the gospels. Instead of interacting with our material outside of this thread or my material at the beginning of this thread, you've chosen to defend a two-sentence response by an anonymous poster who changed the subject to whether "Jesus is coming back" and offered no accompanying arguments to support his assertions. Even if Steve hadn't been writing in the context of a blog at which he had published thousands of pages of material supporting his beliefs, he could still validly illustrate the absurdity of your comments by dismissing those comments in the same manner in which the first poster dismissed mine. If you don't expect the first poster to argue for his position, then why expect Steve to argue for his? And if you want Steve to argue for his position, then why don't you interact with what he's posted in other threads and in other contexts or tell us where you've already done so? Why would non-Christians allegedly so interested in interacting with Christian arguments keep ignoring the arguments they've already been given?
You write:
"You beg the question by assuming it's fact-free simply because no argument was presented in the comments section itself. Such a requirement is quite arbitrary. It's like requiring that a dissertation be presented in a chatroom."
Our conclusions about the truthfulness of his claims would be based on more than what's posted in this comment section. We don't reject his claims "simply because no argument was presented in the comments section". Where did Steve say or suggest that his conclusions about the truthfulness of the first poster's claims would be based only on what's posted in this thread?
Tsk tsk! These triabloggers are really easy to rouse, aren't they? They take every little comment so darn seriously!
ReplyDeleteYeah, I guess they assume someone posting a comment actually intends to interact with the material in question. Silly T-bloggers.
ReplyDelete"I guess they assume someone posting a comment actually intends to interact with the material in question"
ReplyDeleteYou must be pretty daft to guess this. Look at what the triabloggers continually say in response to their visitors. Meanwhile, it's funny to watch them get their panties in a bunch every time someone makes a comment. They sure don't like disagreement!