Mythtaken Genre: Epistles and Mythicism

Last updated on: October 11, 2010 at 1:41 pm by James F. McGrath

Mythtaken Genre: Epistles and Mythicism 2010-10-11T13:41:00-04:00 James F. McGrath

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A characteristic feature of mythicism is to make much of the fact that Paul’s letters do not provide a narrative description of the life of Jesus nor much in the way of teaching of Jesus explicitly attributed to him.

As one commenter noted in the past, however, the relative lack of information is every bit as much a problem for mythicism, if not more so. Specific details about the supposed Christ-myth, his conflict with celestial forces and/or whatever else made him a savior figure, are likewise given at best minimal coverage.

But I suspect that it would be a mistake to make much of this either in support of or against mythicism, since the mythicist emphasis on this point reflects a failure to appreciate what is characteristic of the epistolary genre. One of the first things one learns when studying letters is their occasional nature. With rare exceptions, they represent either a moment from a conversation, or an address to specific needs and circumstances. Rarely is the letter used as a means of putting down one’s views in a comprehensive and systematic manner.

In order to collect a wide array of illustrations of this point, and not having the time to wade through a number of individuals’ letters that I would find it fascinating to read (and not only in order to illustrate the point being made in this blog post), I thought I’d ask readers of this blog to share examples, across a range of time periods, of events we’d have to assume never happened, and details we’d have to assume to be unhistorical, because they are never mentioned in an individual’s letters (even though we may know about them from other sources). Are there events or people that Pliny never mentions? Works that Wagner or Tchaikovsky might be thought not to have composed, events that they might be assumed not to have lived through, or people they might be assumed not to have met, if we only went by their letters? Of course, in the case of the composers I mentioned we have a far greater number of letters than in Paul’s case (more than 10,000 from Wagner and more than 5,000 from Tchaikovsky) reflecting the increase in literacy, the reduction of cost of writing materials/inexpensive paper, and changes that allowed for writing to become something other than a professional activity almost entirely the purview of scribes. Nevertheless, looking at even relatively recent and more extensive letter collections, I suspect we might find things are not mentioned which we can be confident happened, reflecting the occasional nature of the letter. Obviously in an ancient context this would all the more have been the case.

So I appeal to the range of interests and areas of expertise represented among readers of this blog: What examples can you offer of things that happened but are not mentioned in a particular individual’s letters?

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