Where is the First Person if Moses and some Disciples wrote Torah and Gospels?

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Bart answered ... · Continuing with Leo Yohansen · With Leo Yohensen, Snappy Version · Leo Yohansen is Back · somewhere else : Apostles and St. Irenaeus · Where is the First Person if Moses and some Disciples wrote Torah and Gospels? · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Also under the video with GMS and Leo Yohansen

Silent Reading is a fairly recent invention.

I think it was St. Augustine who got surprised at St. Ambrose bending over a book, not voicing anything, but still apparently attentive and so apparently reading.

I have this from C. S. Lewis, and I forget which work. And it's so long ago, it could be the reverse, but the roles of the two people (bishop Ambrose teaching rhetoric to an as yet pagan Augustine) suggest I got it right.

Now, what has silent reading have to do with this? This: in a narrative read by a silent reader (after c. 380 AD), the reader may imagine the first person as speaking directly to him. But prior to this, standard procedure of reading was asking a slave to read to you, aloud.

You would not imagine the slave as actually the first person narrator.

Even if a priest read a certain text in Church, or earlier on in the Temple or the Tabernacle, during the Old Testament, you would not imagine the Cohen as Moses, especially if the first Cohen Gadol was Moses' brother Aaron, and you would not imagine the Christian priest as St. Luke watching St. Paul raise the dead boy or as The Beloved Disciple.

The use of first person in any kind of narrative was rare.

In the case of Augustus Caesar, steles were raised with his self account in the first person, very few are left, one very complete one being in modern day Ankara, back then Ancyra, therefore the text is known as Monumentum Ancyranum. Probably having the priest to Augustus (who was deified) read from the Stele did not work very well for imagining Augustus speaking. And the show being bad was called off in more than one place.

So, what was the solution? Moses wrote of himself in the third person, so did Julius Caesar, and so did the Beloved Disciple. This way, when someone else was reading the story, aloud to you, you did not need to be able to imagine that someone as the narrator speaking to you of his own life - the authors imagined how someone else would sound when speaking of them.

One of the first longer accounts in he first person was speech number 1 by Libanius. Speeches by orators were typically (first time over at least) performed by the orator himself who had written them. Except when the first person of the speech was their client, back in Athens - and the orator was coaching the performance of the client before he spoke on his own behalf (but not without all the aid of an orator).

The persons who claim, the lack of first person in Torah and Gospels, as well as Acts, prove the authors are not Moses, actual disciples, or St. Luke, are simply handicapped in cultural history. And for one, haven't read Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars or even Asterix, where Goscinny ridicules this "speeking of himself in the third person" as if it were a personal foible of Caesar.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Ember Wednesday after Epiphany*
12.I.2022

* No Ember days after Epiphany, I misplaced the Ember days after As Wednesday ... my bad.