Doesn't this make it easy to tell at a glance where the reported dialogue ends and the author's commentary begins? The dividing line is between vv. 12 and 13, the same point I had previously identified, based on entirely different textual evidence, in this post.
2 comments:
I think this is likely, given your assumption (and that of the red highlighted Bibles) that this Gospel is indeed divided into speech and 'commentary'.
But I don't think that division was a part of the way that people wrote (and thought) at that time.
Even as late as Medieval texts, there was no apparent concept of an ideal of accurate reportage being separated from scribal additions. eg. King Alfred's translation of Boethius has additional commentator's (Alfred's) sections that are not demarcated from the translated sections. Or, Geoffrey of Monmouth put a lot of (wholly conjectural) directly reported speech into the mouths of (legendary) characters from pre-literate times.
By Barfield's way of thinking, this looks like a different kind of consciousness for which such distinctions are incomprehensible, meaningless.
The modern idea of history only emerged around 1800, and took a while afterwards to get established.
Bruce, I know what you're saying, but I think you're overstating things a bit. I know that authors like Thucydides often put their own words in the mouths of historical characters, but there's still an important distinction between, say, Thucydides writing what is supposedly a speech by Pericles, and Thucydides writing in his own voice -- and a distinction that the ancients would have understood. If (to make up an example), the sentence "Athens is strong" occurs in Thucydides, it's important to understand whether Thucydides meant that Athens was strong at the time he was writing, or whether he was having one of his characters say that Athens was strong at that point in the historical narrative.
In the same way, I am sure that some of the lines attributed to Jesus in the Fourth Gospel are in fact the author's own -- but he is still writing them in the voice of Jesus, as opposed to his own voice, and that makes a difference. As I have said before, the interpretation of a line like "the Son of Man must be lifted up" depends crucially on whether it is supposed to have been said before or after such events as the crucifixion and the ascension.
What I am saying is that vv. 13-21 are the author's words presented as the author's words; that he is not putting them in the mouth of Jesus or anyone else.
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