Rewriting the bible

[Minimalist]

From Jesus, Interrupted Pg 5-6:

A very large percentage of seminarians are completely blind-sided by the historical-critical method. They come in with the expectation of learning the pious truths of the Bible so that they can pass them along in their sermons, as their own pastors have done for them. Nothing prepares them for historical criticism. To their surprise they learn, instead of material for sermons, all the results of what historical critics have established on the basis of centuries of research. The Bible is filled with discrepancies, many of them irreconcilable contradictions. Moses did not write the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) and Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did not write the Gospels. There are other books that did not make it into the Bible that at one time or another were considered canonical—other Gospels, for example, allegedly written by Jesus’ followers Peter, Thomas, and Mary. The Exodus probably did not happen as described in the Old Testament. The conquest of the Promised Land is probably based on legend. The Gospels are at odds on numerous points and contain nonhistorical material. It is hard to know whether Moses ever existed and what, exactly, the historical Jesus taught. The historical narratives of the Old Testament are filled with legendary fabrications and the book of Acts in the New Testament contains historically unreliable information about the life and teachings of Paul. Many of the books of the New Testament are pseudonymous—written not by the apostles but by later writers claiming to be apostles. The list goes on.

The contradictions are serious and incontrovertible, Danny.

[Aractus]

^That has more to do with OT contradictions than gospel-contradictions, which I didn't comment on.

[robvalue]

Yeah it's all very confusing. I have to come down on the side of agreeing with Ehrman (and everyone else) that the NT is at best filled with mistakes and at worst complete fiction. But I don't agree with him about HJ. (Unlike in religion, we don't have to accept everything or nothing.) I don't find his arguments convincing when it comes to HJ. I think Carrier has his number on this. But I'm only starting to dig into this, so that's subject to further understanding on my part.

I never actually thought about the whole "reproducing by hand" thing. It not only causes huge amounts of errors, but there's nothing to stop people just making stuff up or removing stuff as well. For all we know huge sections got added, got spread around and became popular, while others got lost because people didn't like them. The NT is about the worst kind of evidence I can imagine, even our earliest actual copies of it. At the very best case we have:

Events happen -> Eye witnesses die -> Hearsay is recorded -> Hearsay is copied huge amounts of times

And that's assuming the whole thing isn't just a fiction, which is utterly impossible to know. But even given that best scenario above, it's full of shit. Would a court admit it? They wouldn't even let you in the court room holding something like that. They'd bring back hanging and stoning just for you. And this is before it gets translated into other language.... man. We're talking about unreliable copies of a possible fiction with virtually nothing else to back it up. There's nothing magical about these stories. People are quite capable of making stuff up.

I know first hand how chinese whispers can play out. I told my wife a story and I heard her relaying it to someone else, and she had misheard one part and played up another part. I'm not criticizing her, this kind of thing is to be expected. So that's the first whisper, and already it has mistakes and exaggerations.

And no, I didn't get buggered by a priest. I know I don't have to be involved in religion. I'm trying to do my bit to reduce the harm it does to the world, and hopefully someone out there reading what I say will pause for thought and just maybe question their beliefs. If so, that is worthwhile. (Of course that applies to all discussion on here, I'm not trying to say I'm special or something. But each perspective, and "out" atheist helps the cause.) I did get metaphysically buggered, but it's very hard to prove that in court.

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Anyhow... although interesting, the HJ debate isn't actually of much importance. The best it can accomplish is that there was some guy, called Jesus, who did or said maybe a handful of things in the bible. The kind of things anyone could do or say. Either way, I feel my original post holds in that editing the bible at this point is not a big deal as we don't even have the original "accounts" recorded in any kind of accuracy anyhow.

[Aractus]

The NT is about the worst kind of evidence I can imagine, even our earliest actual copies of it. At the very best case we have:

Events happen -> Eye witnesses die -> Hearsay is recorded -> Hearsay is copied huge amounts of times

And that's assuming the whole thing isn't just a fiction, which is utterly impossible to know. But even given that best scenario above, it's full of shit.

That just is not true.

Here are the main psychological factors of wellbeing (in peer review literature):

• Geographic location and the physical environment
• Culture
• Social Support
• Religion & Spiritualty
• Wealth
• Life events
• Education
• Employment
• Age (the older the better in this context).

I'll bet no one has ever shown you this list before. Wellbeing across Europe. Would you look at that, Ireland is happier than their closest neighbour.

Now I think what's interesting is that you insist upon holding to an unsupported point of view. You're looking for a whole bunch of negatives which aren't there.

For the NT, the book of acts from chapter 15 on, the epistles of Paul and most of the other epistles are all interesting and provide useful information about the early church. They are all somewhat reliable for that purpose - because they're talking about contemporary events.

Now your little graph might apply to the four gospels and the first half of acts - i.e. "that stuff's in the past, it wasn't contemporary when written". They're still based on a historical account. I mean this is clear just from the Synoptic-John convergences. The authors of Mark and John are unaware of each other's work, yet even by giving very clearly separate accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus they hare a number of similarities. For instance, the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. I think that's a clear example of something we have very little doubt occurred.

The fact that only copies of copies exist is irrelevant - that's all we have for much ancient literature, and in fact for a lot of ancient literature only translations that were made centuries later survived.

But the thing that is interesting, which I didn't see you acknowledge because you didn't bother to mention it, is that by the 4th century AD there are already example of a number of distinctly different textual traditions of the text. This is an excellent thing because it means that they didn't all come from the one line of recessive copying; and it leads to a far far greater accuracy of textual representation of the original works than exists for any other ancient literature. That is, the critical text of the N.T. is around 99.9% accurate to the original autographs (with around 99.5% word-for-word accuracy). You don't get that with any other text.

Stop being irrationally biased. The N.T. text overall is quite good, yes some of it is fables, and some of the letters may be forgeries - even discounting those letters you still have around 15-18 ancient texts written in the first century A.D., that are not "pure works of fiction" or anything of the sort.

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Either way, I feel my original post holds in that editing the bible at this point is not a big deal as we don't even have the original "accounts" recorded in any kind of accuracy anyhow.

Yes we do, I've pointed this out to you many many times. We have 99.5% word-for-word accuracy of the N.T. though textual criticism, a fact acknowledged by Erhman and to my knowledge every single serious NT biblical scholar.

[robvalue]

I accept you have objections to what I say, but I'm happy with my overall conclusions for now. I will continue to think and to study. I don't want to get into point-by-point bashing as it is irrelevant to my original point of this thread. I have no doubts at all that there is sufficient problems with the text to warrant my argument. You may be right about some things, but I don't feel like carrying on debating it. As I said I'll continue to look and learn. I have read what you wrote and will think about it. If you want to claim that as a victory, then you are welcome to.

[Aractus]

Your conclusions are not supported by any experts. And by experts I mean people who are involved in the research and publication of evidence, i.e. new testament scholars (which is just a fancy name for historians who specialise in the study of the new testament period) who produce peer-review or other academic level literature.

[xpastor]

We know that 1st century Palestine was filled with apocalyptic preaching.

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.

but sentiment favored these four.

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.

[Godscreated]

I accept you have objections to what I say, but I'm happy with my overall conclusions for now. I will continue to think and to study. ..... As I said I'll continue to look and learn.

NO, you will continue to look and form biased opinions by ignoring the long time work of professionals who are experts in this field. You've proven this throughout this thread by avoiding facts by making excuses.

GC

[Cato]

Would you look at that, Ireland is happier than their closest neighbour.

Beer and whiskey for the win!

[Minimalist]

John the Baptist was quite possibly an Essene.

Really? We have one decent description of what the Essenes were from Josephus in The Jewish War (Book II 8).

What part of the JtheB persona matches up with Josephus portrayal? The Essenes are a communal sect, living in the towns. In the briefer discussion in Antiquities of the Jews he describes them primarily as agricultural workers. But there is nothing to suggest that they live lone-wolf style in the countryside. For another, there is nothing to suggest that they sat around copying books, either.

The whole "Essenes copied the DSS" stuff is under heavy attack. Israeli archaeologists Magen and Peleg concluded extensive excavations at the site and determined that it had been pottery factory when finally overrun by the Romans in 68, and pointing out in the process that the site was far too small for the "monastery" that Roland De Vaux pulled from his Dominican memory and foisted on the world.

Here is Magen and Peleg's initial report.

http://www.antiquities.org.il/images/sho..._color.pdf

In any case, the main activity at the site was the production of
pottery, a fact that we find is hardly consistent with the identification of Qumran as a communal center for the Judean Desert sect.

We are fully aware that it may not be easy for readers to accept our conclusions. Certainly it has not been easy for us to express them aloud, let alone put them in writing. But after ten years of excavations, these conclusions are inescapable

I'll get back to your other points later in the day as time permits.