Dennis R. MacDonald - The Gospels and Homer: Imitations of Greek Epic in Mark and Luke-Acts

The Gospels and Homer

The Gospels and Homer

Imitations of Greek Epic in Mark and Luke-Acts

The New Testament and Greek Literature, Volume I

Dennis R. MacDonald

Rowman & Littlefield

Lanham Boulder New York London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield

A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowman.com

Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB, United Kingdom

Copyright 2015 by Rowman & Littlefield

All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

MacDonald, Dennis Ronald, 1946

The gospels and Homer : imitations of Greek epic in Mark and Luke-Acts / Dennis R. MacDonald.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4422-3052-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4422-3053-8 (electronic) 1. Bible. MarkExtra-canonical parallels. 2. Bible. LukeExtra-canonical parallels. 3. Bible. ActsExtra-canonical parallels. 4. Homer. Iliad. 5. Homer. Odyssey. 6. Greek literatureRelation to the New Testament. 7. Bible. MarkCriticism, interpretation, etc. 8. Bible. LukeCriticism, interpretation, etc. 9. Bible. ActsCriticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.

BS2585.52.M26 2015

226.3'066dc23

2014027471

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Abbreviations

Introduction

Marks Transformation of Jesus Memory

Modern readers rightly view the New Testament Gospels and Acts as the foundational narratives of the Christian religion, but in their day these writings were avant-garde, imaginative, even revolutionary. Their literary creativity becomes transparent in comparison with writings about Jesus earlier than Mark, which is widely regarded as the earliest of the surviving Gospels.

The authentic writings of Paul, all of which antedate the Gospels, provide important information about Jesus but are spare on his sayings and nearly silent about episodes of his life. Advocates of the Two-Document Hypothesis, which today dominates Gospel scholarship, hold that the authors of Matthew and Luke not only redacted Mark but had access to a lost Gospel, conventionally called Q, from Quelle , the German word for source. Specialists attempt to reconstruct this work by comparing content shared by Matthew and Luke that they did not inherit from Mark. The lost Gospel almost certainly was written before the Jewish War of 6670 C.E. and thus seems to be the earliest Gospel of all.

My book Two Shipwrecked Gospels: The Logoi of Jesus and Papiass Exposition of Logia about the Lord (SBLECL 8; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012) offers a reconstruction of the lost Gospel about twice the size of other reconstructions and contends that all three Synoptic Evangelists (the authors of Matthew, Mark, and Luke) redacted it. This lost bookwhich I prefer to call Q+ or the Logoi of Jesus , its likely original titleapparently was an imitation of the Book of Deuteronomy to present Jesus as the promised prophet like Moses. I thus hold to the Q+/Papias Hypothesis (Q+/PapH).