Narkissos,
Good reply - actually I think my post was perhaps too provocative, but we ąre reaching an interesting conclusion so it was worth it.
(1) There is no such thing as simple literature. Even when someone relates a "personal experience" in his/her "own words" (as if that could mean anything) in the most "candid" way you can still detect in his/her talk an impressive number of stereotypes, literary and narrative clichés. Even more so if s/he has to write it.
I still think it is valid to talk of "simple" and "complex" literature if we make a distinction between intentionally encoded literary meaning and the "stream of consciousness" type of meaning which as you pont out contains all sorts of cultural archetypes as well. But even if we say that Beowulf and Wasteland are two equally complex pieces of literature, there is a significant difference in the amount of intentional complexity between them.
So my question concerns the amount of intentional complexity involved.
Which leads us to your second remark:
(2) To me this is not a moral issue: so I would avoid pejorative words such as "conspiracy".
Actually I wrote "literary conspiracy", which I thought would be a funny way of making my point about the intentional literary complexity of the Gospels. I made it clear that I didn't mean to say anything definitive:
I'm not saying I would agree with this thesis, I'm just asking if it follows from your approach and analysis.
In fact I find it hard to believe there was any conspiracy. I only meant to ask Leolaia if the impression of intentional complexity I got from her post is correct, or is her analysis based on an anthropological perspective in which she reveals the meanings which were not so obvious even to the writers themselves.
3) Although the Gospels are clearly a highly "sophisticated" literary construction, I think they are not qualitatively different from the rest of Jewish and Graeco-Roman literature (think of the endless creation/rewriting of pseudepigraphical/apocalyptical works in one case, of mythology and tragedy in the other).
Well you know that the Gospels have always been viewed and treated rather differently from other literature. They were written to be taken as reliable accounts of actual events. If it hadn't been the intention of the writers to make things sound real, then we'd have many different versions of the events. I'm not sure how many ancient Greeks actually thouhgt any of the tragedies they saw staged as an account based on real events. Not so many cared I guess because they knew it was just art anyway.This was not the case with the Gospels.
So I still dare say there is a qualitative difference between those religious accounts and other sorts of literature. And I still think it interesting to ponder over the amount of intentional meaning the writers of the gospels consciously encoded in their work.
Pole