Rewriting the bible

[Aractus]

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We do?

Yes, we do. Notably the Essenes of Dead Sea Scroll fame. John the Baptist was quite possibly an Essene. At any rate, his message as recorded in the gospels is thoroughly apocalyptic: The axe is laid to the root of the tree. Then there were the Pharisees, who, unlike the Saducees, believed in the resurrection of the dead, an apocalyptic concept.

BTW, the gospel story of John the Baptist is good evidence that there is a historical kernel to the life of Jesus. If it were totally made up, then the hero of the story (Jesus) would be represented as baptizing John. Instead, there is just a rather clumsy attempt to deal with this, a later interpolation where Johnny asks, "Hey, man, shouldn't you be baptizing me?"

What history tells us is that things were fairly quiet in Palestine for the most part. Direct Roman rule of Judaea began in 6 AD and ended with the appointment of Herod Agrippa I in 37 AD. He died in 44. There was a brief interregnum while Herod Agrippa II came of age during which Roman procurators ruled under the auspices of the Imperial Legate of Syria. By 51 the Romans had officially washed their hands of Palestine again although they continued to appoint procurators who also had deal with Agrippa II. However, things had begun to get awkward.

But during the reign of Tiberius and mostly for that of Augustus the Jews had it pretty well. It was the jews themselves who petitioned Augustus to remove Archaelaus and become a Roman praefecture and he gave them what they asked for. ...

The fact that the era was relatively peaceful in Judea hardly precludes apocalyptic sentiment. I'm sure the fat cats among the Jews were fairly satisfied with the situation, but I doubt that the peasants were dancing in the fields. More likely the usual round of hard work and long hours without much in the way of comfort. So, yes, I expect the poor of the land were longing for God to shake up the social order, make the last first and the first last, as the prophets had promised in the past.

First off, I reject the term "conspirators." Far too modern. This shit evolved over a period of time. No one sat down to create it. That's a red-herring. What we can see is that whoever wrote "luke" had no idea that at the time he was setting his tale that Galilee ( Nazareth?) and Bethlehem were in different polities. Galilee ruled by Herod Antipas and Judaea, as we have seen, a Roman prefecture initially governed by one Coponius. With all the changes which had taken place in the 2d century it certainly seems possible that a poorly educated writer might miss that but had he lived in the first century then, no. I can't buy it. The events would have been too recent.

Okayyyy. So they weren't conspirators. So why would this fictitious story about a Palestinian Jew evolve in the Hellenic world of the 2nd century?

As for Luke's mistakes in geography and history, I can easily buy it. No reputable NT scholar thinks he was writing any earlier than ca 85 - 90 CE, and no one thinks he lived anywhere near Palestine. I often have to check in Wikipedia to get the dates right for events that happened in my youth. I hear the internet was down for 10 years when Luke was writing.

Second, we don't know what the "original" epistles of "paul" said. We don't have any of them...as far as we know. We are told by church fathers that they were included in the canon created by Marcion who they condemned as a heretic. Justin Martyr, writing 20 years after Marcion never heard of any "paul" and, in spite of his alleged scriptural knowledge that 'scripture' turns out to be predominantly OT stuff. All we know is that while the proto-orthodox (to borrow Ehrman's term) were tossing Marcion out on his ear they decided to keep "paul" in the mix. Further, it looks like they decided that Marcion's idea of a canon had some merit, too, because that is when it seems they began to concoct one of their own. If you ever read up on Marcionism he makes a number of good points about the relationship of 'jesus' to 'yhwh.' What better time to separate from the jews than shortly after the end of the bar Kohkba revolt? The jews were on the top of the Roman Empire's shitlist after 3 revolts in 80 years. The key to understand xtian origins lies with Marcion, IMHO.

Aren't you glossing over quite a bit? Paul is mentioned in the epistles of Clement (ca 95 CE), Ignatius (ca 110 CE) and Polycarp (ca 140 CE). Clement seems to allude to several specific verses from a number of epistles, including the relatively late forgery known as Hebrews. You can protest that all we have are copies of copies of copies, but so what? The earliest manuscript of Cicero's letters appears to have been copied in the 9th century—we can't be sure of the date since it was destroyed in the religious wars of France in the 16th century. One of the greatest works of pagan antiquity, Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, survived only in one 8th century manuscript. .

#3 is easy. Mark is the most primitive but generally matt and luke follow it and only go off on tangents if Mark is silent on a subject ( i.e. the nativity.) Luke seems to have been targeted to a Greco-Roman audience while Matty is more geared to Palestine itself. John is the oddball in the mix but you must remember that the xtian canon is the result of committee work. [my emphasis] Ever serve on a committee? Lots of compromises are made. Sometimes really stupid compromises are made. John had its fans and those fans held out for its inclusion probably agreeing to support another group's favorite just like the horse-trading that goes on in Congress or Parliament to get a bill through.




Politics favored those four. You're a great guy, X-P but the world does not run on 'sentiment.' Shit happens for a reason.

Perhaps I should have said "majority opinion" meaning the churches where these gospels were used for public readings.

In any case, you must know, or should know, that there was no authoritative committee, at least not for over 1000 years. There is a popular misconception that the Council of Nicaea established the canon, but it never even considered the question. A regional North African synod under Augustine may have endorsed the present Catholic canon, maybe, but the record of its acts is lost. So the first authoritative statement is from the Council of Trent in 1546. All we have from ancient times are individuals listing the books they think are canonical, the Muratorian fragment (maybe ca 170 CE) and Eusebius who tells us which books were universally accepted and which were "spoken against."

The first Greco-Roman writer to make reference to "jesus" is Lucian of Samosata c 165 and even he does not know the name ...
No, we must wait for Celsus to actually write the name "Jesus" into the Greco-Roman narrative....c 185 AD.

Maybe Josephus wasn't Greco-Roman? Although he was a Roman citizen and wrote in Greek. In his Antiquities (ca 94 CE) modern scholars almost universally accept the references to James, the brother of Jesus, and to the story of the imprisonment and execution of John the Baptist. There is a broad consensus that the reference to Jesus himself contains an authentic kernel, but it has been subject to Christian interpolation.

No, thanks to Ehrman's work I find all of the NT thoroughly discredited. It's the old axiom "where one lie is detected a thousand are suspected." Best to dismiss the whole tale and just concentrate on the facts.

There's lot of fantastic shit in Herodotus, but I wouldn't dismiss him as 100 per cent fable.

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Excellently written xp, well rounded unbiased information.