29-Mar-2009, 04:42
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Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: area LI
Posts: 681
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Re: Robert Graves
Poet, novelist, essayist, critic, translator ... to which must be appended scholar, as that underlies all the other modes, perhaps congenitally (not just dad but mum's great-uncle). But traditional dryadsdust deadbelowthewaist modes of scholarship were not for him, even with such projects as The Nazarene Gospel Restored , described at the Robert Graves Archive:
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... The book deals with much of the same New Testament material, but it was written significantly later than [the novel] King Jesus (which was published in 1946 by Cassell), and with the assistance of his co-author, Joshua Podro, a skilled Hebraicist and Biblical scholar. King Jesus by contrast leans heavily in the direction of the researches which produced The White Goddess: there is a good deal in the novel about Graves' ideas of the sacred king, and also the tree alphabet, for example, which does not reappear in The Nazarene Gospel Restored, though Graves had made the aquaintance of Joshua Podro by the time he came to write King Jesus.
Jesus in Rome is [...] also co-authored with Joshua Podro (published by Cassell in 1957). It might be regarded as an extended addendum to the earlier study of the Gospels.
One of the most interesting of the speakers at the August 1995 Centenary Conference in Oxford was Hyam Maccoby. He was there principally to acknowledge his indebtedness to Graves' work in the area of New Testament studies. Maccoby contributed a paper to the first issue of Gravesiana (June 1996) which was based on what he had to say at the 1995 conference, titled: 'Robert Graves and the Nazarene Gospel Restored'. Maccoby explains that:
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In King Jesus, the main preoccupation of Jesus is to combat the Goddess. His death is the revenge of the Goddess, whose reign he has challenged in the name of Jehovah, the patriarchal God. All this has disappeared in The Nazarene Gospel Restored. Instead, Jesus is simply an apocalyptic Jew, whose aim is to fulfil the prophecies of the Old Testament about the coming of a human liberating Messiah, and thereby [to] release his people from slavery to Rome. His death comes about not in combat with the Goddess, but with the imperial power of Rome.
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Maccoby also throws light on the poor reception accorded to The Nazarene Gospel Restored, pointing out that
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From the standpoint of New Testament scholarship, The Nazarene Gospel Restored belongs to ... the Tuebingen school founded by F. C. Baur. This school of thought builds on the insight that the early Christian Church was split into two warring factions, the Jerusalem Church (sometimes called the Petrine Church) and the Pauline, or Gentile Church. ....The Jewish-Christians of the Jerusalem Church, on this view, regarded themselves as part of the general Jewish community, not as a new religion. They saw Jesus as a human Messiah... who never claimed divinity.... The Pauline Church on the other hand, had turned Jesus from a Jewish messiah into a Hellenistic saviour-god, substituting mystical identification with the death of the god for the Jewish belief in the revelation on Mount Sinai....
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The Tuebingen theory was strongly opposed at the time. Maccoby argues that 'part of the opposition to The Nazarene Gospel Restored arose from the indignant conviction that Graves and Podro do were reverting to dangerous theories that had been safely scotched.' Maccoby also indicates that more recent scholars have brought new evidence to bear, showing that the split between Paul and Peter has a real basis, and mentions in particular S.G.F. Brandon.
The implication of the Tuebingen argument is that important political aspects of the life of Jesus and the activities of the various religious groups mentioned in the gospels have been downplayed, distorted, or even removed from the texts. Graves view was that 'many of the incidents in the Gospels have to be "despiritualised" in order to arrive at their historical meaning'. Paul made Jesus acceptable to Rome by depoliticising his life, and avoiding 'all awareness of Jesus as a claimant to the Jewish throne'.
The book is also short on the kind of scholarly apparatus one might expect in a work of New Testament exegesis. This has led some readers of the book to doubt that Graves worked from a base of thorough knowledge of his sources. Maccoby argues that the contrary is true, a fact which was shown by the libel action taken out against the Times Literary Supplement, which had published a hostile anonymous review. This review 'was followed by a correspondence in which the reviewer accused Graves of deliberately falsifying the Greek of a New Testament text. Graves was able to show that his textual scholarship was far superior to that of the reviewer, who had failed to take into account some important textual variations. The TLS eventually published an apololgy and the libel action was never taken to court'. Original sources are cited fully, but Graves was reluctant to become involved in dull exchanges with the views of other scholars: the consequence is that it has been too easy for scholars to dismiss the importance of the book.
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Graves was an imaginative scholar who defined himself first and foremost as a poet. (I am neither: I merely stumble upon stray facts, Graves herds them; I have made poems but they have not made me a poet.) One of his concerns in The White Goddess is how the true poet is defined, and he does so mythopoetically, requiring an encyclopaedic knowledge of form and unstinting focus on the proper subject. In my view, this is too restrictive: the true poet establishes a grammar, or tests the limits of one already established. And that was Graves' approach to scholarship.
(None of the above is on my TBR list, but thx johnr for reminding me of the Mann, especially now that John E. Woods has translated.)
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