Thoughts on Atheism and Apologetics

[The Grand Nudger]

Yeah, right?  Either the disciples were irretrievably stupid, afflicted with some strange group amnesia, or really badly written characters.

None of the above.....they're serving the function of the greek chorus....I was only half joking earlier. They halt the narrative, they interrupt and bring the audience in, pointing out the important bits of the narrative incase you'd...oh...IDK....fallen asleep.....

The people who wrote the NT were steeped in greek literary device. Had they not intended to port it in, they would have done so by accident (just as authors do today with the tropes and devices common to our narrative styles - even when they make a conscious effort not to). It's just the way that stories were told, and we tell stories the way that we do because it is effective to do so. This device seems ridiculous to us simply because -we- have changed, we prefer our stories told a different way, those old devices have, through centuries of repeated use...lost some of their oomph (though by no means all).

Another fine example is the census. We need to get the godmans mommy to the right place......dues ex machina. A situation wherein we need to move the narrative past an obstacle that the protagonists would have either no means or no motive of resolving themselves. The authors either intentionally or -accidentally- wrote a novel, rather than a biography (as so often happens to this very day).