Kata Markon

["Rikki E. Watts" <rwatts AT interchange.ubc.ca>]

Title: Re: [gmark] Re: The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark

Thanks for the response...a thank you and a couple points.  This will be my last post on this matter, but free to respond..
Joe: 
> ... However, we apparently disagree about Homer being “so 
> fundamental” to Mark. Following MacDonald, I found in Mark about 170 verses 
> spread over nine different events ( 
> http://members.aol.com/jalw/joseph_alward.html <http://members.aol.com/jalw/joseph_alward.html> ) which contained elements 
> which I could accept plausible, possible, or probable parallels to elements 
> in _Odyssey_  Only forty of those 170 show plausible Homeric influence. Thus, 
> 94 percent of Mark’s 678 verses have nothing to do with Homer, in my 
> opinion.  This slight contact doesn’t make Homer fundamental to Mark in any 
> sense of the word, I believe. 

Rikk:
Thanks for the clarification, if only 6% of Mark has anything to do with Homer, then I’ve obviously misunderstood how important you felt Homer was; my apologies. Based on the 6% figure then we have at best some minimal touching up.  Can I say then that you would agree it would be something of an overstatement to say baldly that Mark rewrote Jesus to resemble Odysseus etc? 

=====
Joe:
You seem to be begging the question, no doubt unintentionally.  Your premise 
> is essentially the very thing we’re arguing about: that MacDonald can NOT 
> have been the first person in two millennia to have written about Mark’s 
> Homeric connection.  It would be easier to believe in MacDonald’s parallels 
> if the ancients had also written about, them, but in the final analysis, 
> one’s argument must be directed not to the person, but to the facts and the 
> logic which connects them.  If we see evidence of Homeric contact, then that 
> cannot be rejected just because others couldn’t see it.  
 
Rikk: I think we are missing each other here.  This issue for me is not whether MacDonald is the first person to see this but instead whether he is seeing what he thinks he sees.  You suggest that we are talking about “the facts” (allusions to Homer in Mark), but that’s precisely the point at issue.  Larry and I do not yet see any such allusions.  We are not yet agreed on the “facts” and consequently much less their supporting explanation.  Where you see a carefully planted garden we see natural growth—insisting on the existence of the garden doesn’t help much, even less positing a gardener to explain it.  Given that allusions are highly subjective, it might be a good thing to establish some criteria.  I am suggesting one: let’s ask others to adjudicate for us to see if we are seeing things or not.  And who would be better equipped to help us if not Mark’s contemporaries?  It would have helped enormously if you could cite just one single ancient in support—but alas.  To repeat, that not a single ancient author (for or against) saw the putative allusions must surely raise doubts as to whether your/MacDonald’s garden and hence the explanation you provide for it actually exists.  I can’t quite see how this is question-begging.
====
> Rikk: 
>   
> You seem to assume that for the Fathers to observe 
> parallels between Jesus and Homer would imply to them that Mark's Jesus was 
> a mythical figure. But why?  Why not, perhaps analogously with Philo, 
> simply see here divine intervention/patterning such that yes indeed Jesus is 
> both superior to Odysseus and moreover, far far superior, even the son of 
> God? 
> ===== 
> Joe: 
>
> Irrespective of whether the Fathers actually believed there was a son of God 
> named Jesus, evangelizing would have been much more difficult if they had to 
> tell the pagans that God had Homer write his epics so that a thousand years 
> later Jesus could be compared favorably to Odysseus.  With all the 
> virgin-born, miracle-working, resurrected gods they’d been worshiping for 
> centuries, comparing Jesus to a mythological god-like being would have made 
> Jesus just one more god among many to the pagans.  The Fathers would have 
> kept their mouths shut about Homer if they’d seen it in Mark. 
>  ===== 
Rikk: Interesting suggestion, but how do you actually know this to be the case?  Luke’s Paul seems to have no trouble with the altar to the unknown god.  I find your suggestion fascinating because not that long ago precisely the opposite was argued: that Jesus was assimilated to Greek deities to make him more acceptable (and cf. the theios aner debate).  But the more one argues that the Fathers, universally and without exception, felt the pressure not to assimilate, the more difficult it becomes to explain why “Mark” was the odd man out.  (Out of interest, who are all these virgin-born, miracle-working, resurrected gods you speak of?)  

I’ll snip most of what follows.  
  
>  Now, finally, Occam’s Razor.  Given that Homer was in the everyone’s blood 
> in those days, and that children began to imitate, revise, 
> paraphrase--concealing as best they could--the epics, we should be surprised 
> NOT to find some Homerian parallels inMark.  Which explanation would Occam 
> regard as simpler?  I think the answer is clear:  There are events in Homer 
> which Mark put in his gospel; he did it so poorly that nobody noticed, but he 
> didn’t care:  He wasn’t the real “Mark”anyway, whoever he was. 
>   
It sounds like you are suggesting that we should find evidence of Homer in all first century (narrative?) literature; do you really mean that?  And if not, then it is not clear why we should necessarily expect Homer in Mark.  Second, if Homer is in everyone’s blood to such a degree that we should expect everywhere then surely you are proving too much since it calls into question whether you can argue for intentionality.

I don’t want to create a straw man but you seem to be suggesting a) that the early church somehow managed at this one point to stifle any dissent—but with the exception of “Mark”—which in this early period they clearly failed to do on any number of other fronts (Joe, I went to the recommended website on mind police and found an apologetic list of ex-Christian testimonia from the 20th century...I’m not sure how much this relates to conditions in the first century; did I miss something?), b) that whereas everybody else (all of them) utterly avoided connecting Homer and Jesus, Mark not only doesn’t but actually tried (very poorly as it happens) to dress Jesus up in Homeric garb, c) that again (sorry) not one other individual saw this until the 20th cent, and now d) we discover that there were in fact two Marks (one good at his OT and signaling his sources, and another inept Homeric Mark—whose only redactional fingerprints are apparently and somewhat fortuitously poor Homeric allusions and refusal to cite his sources) and all this on the basis of putative allusions that themselves are under question.  This strikes me as rather odd if not tendentious.  It seems to me that you are being forced to multiply (some very dubious) hypotheses to save your theory. Isn’t this exactly the kind of development Occam rejected?   Isn’t it a far simpler explanation that there are no significant Homeric allusions in Mark, and that this is the one “fact” that makes best sense of all the historical and literary data?
Thanks for the exchange, I’ll now withdraw from the field.
Rikk