BR__The Great Code Northrop Frye Flashcards
Chapter 1: The Great Code by Northrop Frye
This report will be segmented by chapters. About the author. Northrop Frye [1912 - 1991] He has written many books and has 28 honorary degrees. He is judged by his peers as the Literary critic of the 20th Century.
INTRODUCTION: The Bible has traditionally been read as a unity, but the word, “Bible” itself means “the little books.” The Bible is a very long and miscellaneous book, and many of those who have tried to read it straight through have bogged down very soon. One reason for this is that the Bible is more like a small library than a real book. It almost only seems that it has come to be thought of as a book because it is contained for convenience within two covers. For quotations this book uses the Bible “Authorized Version” of 1611.
Chapter 1: Language The New Testament was written in a Koine Greek unlikely to have been the native language of its authors.
There are three ages in a cycle of history: a mythical age, or age of gods; a heroic age, or age of an aristocracy; and an age of the people, Each age produces its own kind of language, giving us three types of verbal expression that Vico calls, the poetic, the heroic or noble, and the vulgar which I shall call the hieroglyphic, the hieratic, and the demotic. These terms refer primarily to three modes of writing, because Vico believed that men communicated by signs before they could talk.
(Metonymic: Adj. Metonymy: Noun. Associated with figure of speech like crown in “lands belonging to the crown.” Metonymy is a figure of speech where a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by something associated in meaning with that thing or concept. //In metaphorical language the central conception which unifies human thought and imagination is the conception of a plurality [Polytheistic] of gods. In metonymic language this unifying conception becomes a monotheistic “God” a transcendent reality of perfect being that all verbal analogy points to. As Christian theology gained cultural ascendancy, thought began to take on a deductive shape in which everything followed from the perfection of God.
[Because of all the different cultures and languages, much of the Bible had to be written] through allegory, which is a special form of analogy, a technique of paralleling metaphorical with conceptual language in which the latter has the primary authority. Allegory smooths out the discrepancies in a metaphorical structure by making it conform to a conceptual standard. [MN: This is why Paul (in Galations) explains the story of Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael was an allegory to get the idea across.]
Chapter 2: Myth
Myth means not really true. For me the two statements “The Bible tells a story” and “The Bible is a myth” are essentially the same statement.//In Western Europe the Bible stories had a central mythical significance of this kind until at least the eighteenth century.//The stories about Samson in the Book of Judges were mythical for Western Europe. //After the rise of metonymic language, stories are frequently used as concrete illustrations of abstract arguments, in other words as allegories.
As god is a metaphor identifying a personality
Granted that the narratives in the Bible are myths in the sense we have given the word, whether they are histories or fictions, are they histories or fictions?
The Flood. They (stories) resemble other creation and deluge myths over the world, and are not the oldest forms we have of such myths.
The Egyptians knew nothing of an exodus, just as the Emperor Augustus knew nothing of the birth of Christ.
Clearly the Bible is a violently partisan book: as with any other form of propaganda, what is true is what the writer thinks ought to be true;
[MN: The truth will ruin the story!]
What is more important is that whenever we move from the obviously legendary to the possibly historical, we never cross a clear boundary line. That is, the sense of historical fact as such is simply not delimited in the Bible, anywhere.
And just as the historical books of the Old Testament are not history, so the Gospels are not biography. The Gospel writers care nothing about the kind of evidence that would interest a biographer. They care only about comparing the events in their accounts of Jesus with what the Old Testament, as they read it, said would happen to the Messiah.
Nothing said here will be new to Biblical scholars, who are well aware that the Bible will only confuse and exasperate a historian who tries to treat it as a history.
It has been obvious for at least a century that “mythical accretions” are what the Bible is.
The Biblical myths are closer to being poetic than to being history. To use Aristotle’s principle. History makes particular statements, and is therefore subject to external criteria of truth and falsehood; poetry makes no particular statements and is not so subject.
End of chapter 2
Chapter 3: Metaphor I
“The Bible is not literary in intent.”
It is interesting that of all figures of speech, the hyperbole, or intentional exaggeration, is the one that departs most explicitly from the representation of fact.
Violent hyperboles as when we read of camels going through the eye of a needle, or of people having “beams” in their eyes.
Jesus makes a number of metaphorical statements about himself: “I am the door” “I am the vine, ye are the branches” “I am the bread of life” “I am the way, the truth, and the life” , How seriously are we to take these?
We clearly have to consider that metaphor is one of its controlling modes of thought. [MN: Thought Control]
Gospel of Thomas was discovered in 1945.
The Bible has a historical myth that by passes conventional historical criteria.
Why did they write this way?
They wrote this way to conceal their deeper meanings from the profane and vulgar, and reserve them for an initiated elite. [MN: Esoteric people]
By late classical times, most of the effective gods had become star gods.
In Christianity the Virgin Mary took on some of the attributes of a Queen of Heaven, with her blue robe and her star emblem, which had also been attached to Isis. //The creation was an absolute beginning, and to ask what God was doing before the Creation is a question in bad taste. But to be told that we should not ask a question merely increases its urgency, in any healthy mind.
Q: There is no doctrine of resurrection in the Old Testament.
Q: Good news will not sell in a mass market until it is perverted into bad news.
Q: Astrology is based on a conception of coincidence.
Chapter 4: TYPOLOGY 1
How do we know that the Gospel story is true?
Because they are confirmed by the prophecies of the Old Testament. Evidence, so called, is bounced back and forth between the testaments like a tennis ball. They form a double mirror, each reflecting the other but neither the world outside.
[MN: It is CIRCULAR REASONING. Just like asking a criminal “did you do it?” He says no! So how do you know he didn’t do it? Because we asked him and he says no, he didn’t do it. And that proves his innocence.
The crucifixion scene is played out from the script in Psalm 22.//The 30 pieces of silver are played out from Zechariah 11:12-13.
The resurrection on the third day is played out from Hosea 6:2.
The suffering Christ is played out from Isaiah 53. Even Paul’s “the just shall live by faith” is a quotation from Habbakuk 2:4.
This style of writing is Typology.
Q: What happens in the New Testament constitutes an “antitype”, a realized form, of something foreshadowed in the Old Testament.
In 1 Peter 3:21 Christian baptism is called the “antitypos” of the saving of mankind from the flood of Noah.
[MN: Topology used to crowbar random words of OT into fabricated NT] No other book in the world has a structure even remotely like that of the Christian Bible.
Typology is a form of rhetoric. Typology is a figure of speech that moves in time: the type exists in the past and the antitype in the present, or the type exists in the present and the antitype in the future. What typology really is, as a mode of thought.
Rhetoric is a way of arranging words.
Paul’s allegory: Galatians 4:24. The story of Abraham’s two wives is an allegory.
Typology is not allegory: allegory is normally a story-myth that finds its “true” meaning in a conceptual translation.
As century after century passed without a second coming, the Church developed a progressive and forward moving structure of doctrine, one that carries the typology of the Bible on in history and adapts it to what we have called second-phase, or METONYMIC, language.
Typology is a one directional and irreversible conception of history.
In the OT the worrd Messiah means only a legitimate ruler. The Bible records only two periods of relative independence and prosperity for Israel. [MN: REM Israel has been in captivity an astounding 15 times!]
If a severe drought hits a country, its ruler must consult an oracle of the appropriate god to find out the reason, and take the blame if it is his fault. This includes King David.
Matthew and Luke trace the ancestry of Jesus through David to Joseph, even though Joseph was not Jesus’ father.
Chapter 5: TYPOLOGY ii
This begins part II of the book.
I see a sequence of seven main phases for the Bible: Creation, revolution or exodus from Egypt, law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel and apocalypse. Five of these phases have their center of gravity in the Old Testament and two in the New Testament. Each phase is not an improvement on its predecessor but a wider perspective on it.
This is another aspect of Bible typology, each phase being a type of the one following it and an antitype of the one preceding it.
The general feeling persists, in Christianity, in Islam, and now in Marxism, that nothing will ever go right until the entire world is united in the right beliefs. [MN: This is why Holy wars, Honor killings and Terrorism engulf the planet!]
Anyone coming “cold” to the Book of Revelation, without context of any kind would probably regard it as simply an insane rhapsody.
[MN: Didn’t have much interest in this chapter. It talked a lot about ancient myths of creation coming from a sexual experience, like a mother earth type of thing and that the Bible comes from a Sky-God creating the universe out of absolutely nothing. He just speaks it into existence.]
Chapters 6 & 7
Chapter 6: Metaphor II
[MN: was not interested in this subject at this time of reading]
Chapter 7: Myth II
The Bible is U shaped. When viewed as a divine comedy, things go bad then they end up great! Examples like banishment from the garden of Eden then in the end, all is happy at the end of Revelation.
The disasters and restoration of Job and in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son.
Realize that all the high points and all the low points are metaphorically related to one another. //Abraham, Moses and Joshua, the judges, David, and Solomon are all prototypes of the Messiah or final deliverer.
Q: The life of Christ as presented in the Gospels becomes less puzzling when we realize that it is being presented in this form.//Like that of many Gods and heroes, the birth of Jesus is a threatened birth: Herod orders a massacre of infants from which Jesus alone escapes. Moses similarly escapes from an attempt to destroy Hebrew dhildren, as they in turn escape later from a slaughter of Egyptian firstborn [MN: Passover]. [MN: see the typology? Moses and Jesus escapes]
Moses organizes the twelve tribes of Israel: Jesus gathers twelve disciples. Israel crosses the Red Sea and achieves its identity as a nation on the other side; Jesus is baptized in the Jordan and is recognized as the Son of God. The baptism is the point at which Mark and John begin.
Israel wanders forty years in the desert; Jesus forty days in the desert.
A brazen serpent is placed on a pole by Moses for protection from fiery serpents This brazen serpent was accepted by Jesus as a type of his crucifixion (John 3:14)//[MN: Still to this day the ambulances have the serpent on the vehicles.]
There is no evidence about the time of year which Jesus was born, and in celebrating Christmas the Church was apparently content to take over the winter solstice festival FROM OTHER RELIGIONS. The most important event in the Mithraic ritual [Pagan God Mithra] calendar was the birthday of the sun, celebrated on December 25th.
Lent: The 40 days of wilderness wandering by Jesus are commemorated in Lent, which is immediately followed by Good Friday and Easter.
Q: The visit of the wise men to Christ is the antitype of the Queen of Sheba’s visit to Solomon.
Chapter 8: Language II
Rhetoric//Q: The Book of Revelation, difficult as it may be for literalists, becomes much simpler when we read it typologically, as a MOSAIC OF ALLUSIONS to Old Testament prophecy.//The closing of the canon is a more mysterious process, but by Jesus’ time there was a general feeling that the law was complete and that the voice of prophecy had ceased. A large body of post prophetic writing, known as apocalyptic, was produced by both Jewish and Christian writers, but none of it other than Revelations stayed in the canon as we know it.
[MN: REM Revelations was in and out of the canon]
Pseudepigrapha, meaning “false writings”.
Q: Most of the generally accepted data of Biblical scholarship are connected with demonstrating that many if not most books of the Bible are pseudepigrapha.
[MN: Most of the Bible books are fakes!]
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