To: Synoptic
Cc: WSW
In Response To: Jeffery Hodges
On: Sources Not Acknowledged
From: Bruce

I had suggested that other texts which a later writer decides not to
incorporate are sources of a sort.

JEFFERY: But what if -- and this has never happened -- I really hated an
article by some scholar and refused to 'use' it even though I was implicitly
arguing against it. Would that article be a source?

BRUCE: Absolutely. It is something out there which shapes the thing that is
in here. If you hate your father, and arrange your whole life to be the
opposite of what your father represents, are you being influenced by your
father? The psychoanalytic profession, here (for once) with support from
myself, would unhesitatingly say so.

JEFFERY: Are there three sorts of sources:

1. sources used (presence in text);
2. sources not used, ignored (absence in text); and
3. sources rejected, but not ignored (absence present in text)?

Number one is what I ordinarily consider sources. Number two is what I
ordinarily do not consider sources. But number three? I haven't thought
about this before, not very carefully, at least.

BRUCE: I very much like the phrase "absence present in text." And I don't
promise not to use it in other contexts. But sure, absolutely, how could it
not? Modern authors, and modern analysts envisioning early authors, too
readily assume that something they have not anthologized is not in the
picture. I think it's too simple. In the early Chinese texts, most of which
are adversative, the opponent is sometimes named (Sywndz explicitly attacks
Mencius's theory of human nature), and sometimes not (the Mencians in return
attack what is obviously Sywndz's theory of human nature, but under a
different name). Sometimes a snide if cryptic remark in the late Analects
(the house text of the Confucian school: time depth, 0479-0249) will
obviously have Sywndz in mind - Sywndz was obviously a very easy guy to
hate, and from his voluminous writings, it is voluminously clear why - but
you have to know the territory to recognize that fact. The people at the
time, needless to say, would have picked it up without the slightest
difficulty. The trick for a modern student is to somehow get familiar enough
with the early milieu that you can move in it the way the people at the time
did. Unfortunately, this is not so easy.

How much of, say, Luke is oppositional? Instead of asking, What is the
lesson here, what if we routinely ask, What is the teaching which is here
being opposed? I think that a lot of the logic of Luke gets clearer in the
process. Luke is often not so much putting on paper a sincere and received
picture of Jesus, as he is discouraging rival views of Jesus, and (at that
late date) of the direction which Christianity as a whole was taking. His
arguments against the Galilean churches alone are worth the price of
admission, and then there is his treatment of the reJudaizing tendencies in
Matthew, which are the more insidious because the more popular (the
Galileans are an easy target, like the Jwangdz Primitivists were for Sywndz;
he doesn't really get exercised over them; they are wrong of course,
everybody but Sywndz is wrong, but his real enemies are elsewhere).

Oh, that mine enemy had written a book! I forget just who said that, but it
fits the ancient controversialist atmosphere very well. Let not many of you
aspire to be teachers, teacheth Jacob, meaning, aspire to write books and be
authorities. Were there already too many Gospels in his day? It may bear on
the dating of that particular Epistle. Or anyway, in the layer of it in
which that particular advice appears.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst