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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1444 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 8, 2025

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There are some fun similarities between Cicero’s Rhetorica Ad Herennium (90bc), which is a treatise on rhetoric and memorization, and the Passion narrative in the gospels. Cicero explains how to craft the most memorable mental scene, one that can be recalled with fidelity in the future:

since in normal cases some images are strong and sharp and suitable for awakening recollection, and others so weak and feeble as hardly to succeed in stimulating memory, we must therefore consider the cause of these differences, so that, by knowing the cause, we may know which images to avoid and which to seek.

If we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonourable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable, or laughable, that we are likely to remember a long time.

All normal stuff. Now the examples he provides next:

A sunrise, the sun's course, a sunset, are marvellous to no one because they occur daily.⁠ But solar eclipses are a source of wonder because they occur seldom, and indeed are more marvellous than lunar eclipses, because these are more frequent

We ought, then, to set up images of a kind that can adhere longest in the memory. And we shall do so if we establish likenesses as striking as possible; if we set up images that are not many or vague, but doing something; if we assign to them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness; if we dress some of them with crowns or purple cloaks, for example, so that the likeness may be more distinct to us; or if we somehow disfigure them, as by introdu­cing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint, so that its form is more striking, or by assigning certain comic effects to our images, for that, too, will ensure our remembering them more readily.

These elements are all explicit in the Crucifixion:

  • the solar eclipse (the earliest manuscripts actually specify that it was a solar eclipse, rather than a darkening of the sky)

  • the crown

  • the purple cloak

  • the disfigurement (“many were astonished at you— his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind”)

  • the blood (the beating, scourge, then crucifixion)

  • the comic effect: the irony of the actual king being mocked as a fake king

  • all the things which Cicero mentions earlier, combined (and the usual subject of sermon): base, dishonourable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable

The crown and robe are also brought into the narrative in a very peculiar way in John:

Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, “Behold the man”

The word behold here is ἰδοὺ, can be is translated as see!, or look!, remember! and similar interjections. Essentially a call to pay attention.

the solar eclipse (the earliest manuscripts actually specify that it was a solar eclipse, rather than a darkening of the sky)

Please specify, which manuscripts of which texts?

In the early Greek manuscripts of Luke

τοῦ ἡλίου ἐκλιπόντος / tou heliou eklipontos— “the sun was eclipsed.”

https://www.textkit.com/t/luke-23-45-eclipse-or-darkening/15248/4

Footnote A here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2023%3A45-47&version=NET

Luke 23:45 tc The wording “the sun’s light failed” is a translation of τοῦ ἡλίου ἐκλιπόντος/ ἐκλείποντος (tou hēliou eklipontos/ ekleipontos), a reading found in the earliest and best witnesses (among them P75 א B C*vid L 070 579 2542) as well as several ancient versions. The majority of mss (A C3 [D] W Θ Ψ ƒ1,13 M lat sy) have the flatter, less dramatic term, “the sun was darkened” (ἐσκοτίσθη, eskotisthe), a reading that avoids the problem of implying an eclipse (see sn below). This alternative thus looks secondary because it is a more common word and less likely to be misunderstood as referring to a solar eclipse. That it appears in later witnesses rather than the earliest ones adds confirmatory testimony to its inauthentic character.sn This imagery has parallels to the Day of the Lord: Joel 2:10; Amos 8:9; Zeph 1:15. Some students of the NT see in Luke’s statement the sun’s light failed (eklipontos) an obvious blunder in his otherwise meticulous historical accuracy. The reason for claiming such an error on the author’s part is due to an understanding of the verb as indicating a solar eclipse when such would be an astronomical impossibility during a full moon. There are generally two ways to resolve this difficulty: (a) adopt a different reading (“the sun was darkened”) that smoothes over the problem (discussed in the tc problem above), or (b) understand the verb eklipontos in a general way (such as “the sun’s light failed”) rather than as a technical term, “the sun was eclipsed.” The problem with the first solution is that it is too convenient, for the Christian scribes who, over the centuries, copied Luke’s Gospel would have thought the same thing. That is, they too would have sensed a problem in the wording and felt that some earlier scribe had incorrectly written down what Luke penned. The fact that the reading “was darkened” shows up in the later and generally inferior witnesses does not bolster one’s confidence that this is the right solution. But second solution, if taken to its logical conclusion, proves too much for it would nullify the argument against the first solution: If the term did not refer to an eclipse, then why would scribes feel compelled to change it to a more general term? The solution to the problem is that ekleipo did in fact sometimes refer to an eclipse, but it did not always do so. (BDAG 306 s.v. ἐκλείπω notes that the verb is used in Hellenistic Greek “Of the sun cease to shine.” In MM it is argued that “it seems more than doubtful that in Lk 2345 any reference is intended to an eclipse. To find such a reference is to involve the Evangelist in a needless blunder, as an eclipse is impossible at full moon, and to run counter to his general usage of the verb = ‘fail’…” [p. 195]. They enlist Luke 16:9; 22:32; and Heb 1:12 for the general meaning “fail,” and further cite several contemporaneous examples from papyri of this meaning [195-96]) Thus, the very fact that the verb can refer to an eclipse would be a sufficient basis for later scribes altering the text out of pious motives; conversely, the very fact that the verb does not always refer to an eclipse and, in fact, does not normally do so, is enough of a basis to exonerate Luke of wholly uncharacteristic carelessness

But in the above, it seems to me copium to interpret that word as other than a real eclipse in the context. The natural reading is that it was an eclipse, which is why Origen went so far as to say enemies of the church inserted the word in to scandalize the church among the intelligent

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