Pulling The Thread Podcast: Tracing Jesus Before Christianity Emerged, Jesus the Jew within Judaism! · Jeramiah Giehl

Mythic Parallels, Homeric Echoes, and Literary Imitation in the Gospels with Dr. Dennis: Episode 15

·57 min·3 clips

McDonald lays out seven criteria for literary imitation and says ancient readers recognized these parallels.

The host talks with Dr. Dennis McDonald. McDonald is the John Wesley Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Claremont School of Theology in California, and the opening stretch traces his Baptist father, his missionary parents in Italy, and the route from Bob Jones University into scholarship. He says he was ready to preach or evangelize. Instead, he found that scholarship matched his question about Christian origins better, and that turn led him toward the imitations of classical Greek poetry he sees in the New Testament, especially the Gospels. That pattern matters to him. He says he is known for almost 20 books, including Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark, Luke and the Politics of American Imitation, work on the Q document, and Synopsis of Epic Tragedy in the Gospels. The host then asks about mythicism. McDonald says mythicists should no longer be taken seriously as evidence that Jesus never existed, and he says very few Jewish scholars of the New Testament would agree with that claim. He places Jesus in his time. For him, Jesus sits somewhere in the spectrum of Jewish teachers, and the historical question is better handled there than by a blanket denial of existence. The host next widens the frame. The questions move toward Homer, Eliot, the aristocratic class that could pay to reproduce texts and books, and what Greek mythology does for the Christian story, and McDonald answers by starting with Mark. Mark is the key text. McDonald says it is written after the Jewish war and is trying to build a founding myth that can rival Virgil's Aeneid, which he calls the Bible of the people who destroyed Jerusalem. That changes the hero. A community shaped by that war cannot rely on a savior who is only a radical Jewish teacher, so Mark gives it a model martyr and keeps returning to Jesus's death. He also stretches the figure. Jesus is made competitive with Greek heroes such as Odysseus, Hector, Achilles, and Virgil's Aeneas through miraculous powers and a larger-than-life shape that does not erase his existence. McDonald thinks the gospels rewrite. He says Jesus would not have recognized himself in a gospel, and he understands why Mark, Matthew, and Luke reshape the stories for their communities, because they need a hero to sustain identity; as a critic and an atheist, he says that work should make the stories more meaningful, more appreciated, and more diverse in the way students understand them.

As heard by us

Mark, Homer, and a Jesus made larger than life.

Dennis McDonald presents Mark as part of a larger argument about how the Gospels borrow from classical Greek poetry and reshape Jesus for a Jewish setting after the Jewish war.

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Why you'd press play

You want Mark read beside Homer and Virgil, and it does not hurry.

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