Rewriting the bible

[Minimalist]

BTW, the gospel story of John the Baptist is good evidence that there is a historical kernel to the life of Jesus.

In "Drums Along The Mohawk" there are appearances by Benedict Arnold, Nicholas Herkimer, and Joseph Brandt. That does not make the main characters, Gil and Lana Martin, any less fictional.



Moving on.

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.

Do you think the peasants were dancing in the fields, ever? In a fairly short period time Judahite peasants went from Judahite overlords to Babylonian overlords to Persian overlords holding the whip? Do you think they celebrated when the Babylonians left? I doubt they even noticed. The commons was virtually an irrelevancy in antiquity. Revolts were led by disaffected nobles who, when so inspired, brought out their retainers to do the actual fighting.

On top of that, though, have you ever noticed that there is one thing which is conspicuously absent in Herod the Great's reign? Popular unrest. The nobility was pissed about him but his massive building projects provided employment ( and therefore wealth) to the commons at the expense of the nobles. It's a complex subject by itself, though.

So why would this fictitious story about a Palestinian Jew evolve in the Hellenic world of the 2nd century?

Because it was not unique (there were many dying and resurrected gods throughout the ANE.) Remember, the earliest xtian art we have depicts "jesus" as a clean-shaven, Greco-Roman, toga-wearing, philosopher. Odd, no?

Paul is mentioned in the epistles of Clement (ca 95 CE), Ignatius (ca 110 CE)

But are those real or pseudoepigraphic bullshit?

http://www.bible.ca/history-ignatius-for...-250AD.htm

Somewhere around here was a discussion about Clement of Rome who seems to be as fictional as Ignatius. The Xtian Forgery Mill was going great guns by the 3d-4th century. I'll see if I can find the Clement reference.

In any case, you must know, or should know, that there was no authoritative committee, at least not for over 1000 years.

Athanasius was writing his commentary on what should go in the canon some 40 years after the earliest bible we have: The Codexes Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. Vaticanus is missing 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, and Revelation which indicates that the process was still going on long after the so-called bible was written. IN addition there are numerous verses and phrases from other books which did not make the cut....or which were added in later for political purposes.

The issue remains not that we have this nonsense in the 4th century but that we have no record of it in the first.

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.

Deist-Paladin is much more of a hardliner on the James reference. I see it as an innocent mistake by a later scribe. Some xtian scribe sees the word "christos" in the text and wets his pants shrieking "There's Jesus!" But what did "christos" mean to Josephus? It was an act of anointing a king or high priest and virtually everyone in that passage with the exception of the two Romans was anointed at one time or another. So a helpful scribe moving a marginal note into the text does not impress me....but neither does it rise to the level of full-blown forgery as the Testimonium Flavianum does.

The JtheB tale does not conform to the gospel accounts. We have only the gospel tales linking the two anyway. So what?

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

I regard Herodotus as a gullible old fool. There is a lot of fantastic shit in Pliny's Natural History, too. But there is not a word about a dead criminal coming back to life.

[Aractus]

---

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.

---

Excellently written xp, well rounded unbiased information.

[The Valkyrie]

"Once upon a time Bronze Age tribesmen with no understanding of science made up a mythology to explain things they did not understand. Since then the mythology has been used to slaughter millions, enslave millions, control billions and justify some of the most horrific crimes in human history. It has also given rise to several other mythologies and the followers of the three main mythologies have been slaughtering each other ever since. Three thousand years later, people are still doing it.

The end. Please let it end!"

[xpastor]

Min, I'm going to drop this controversy now. (Just a few more jabs. )

From my perspective you are clutching at straws to deny the historical existence of JC. I suppose from your perspective, I am clutching at straws to affirm his historical existence.

My only interest in the topic is determining what is most plausible historically.

I certainly have no sentimental attachment to JC. I regularly present him as an apocalyptic preacher who thought the world was going to end in his time. I reject the historicity of all the miracles. They were added later by the church, as were any assertions that he was giving his life as a ransom. I don't think much of his moral teaching, which was eloquently expressed but utterly impractical as it was based on the premise that the world would end any day now—take no thought for the morrow, etc., etc. I also agree that the mythological elements were added on, e.g., the dying and rising god.

It is interesting that with all this taken out we still know a lot about his teaching and have pretty accurate summaries of his actual words, which is remarkable for a backwoods preacher in that era. What I regard as authentic are the apocalyptic pronouncements and all the parables, which most people do not realize are apocalyptic too, all about the imminence of the kingdom of heaven.

In fact, the mixture of the apocalyptic teaching with all the other material which convinces me that there is a historical kernel. I can understand how a failed apocalyptic prophet could be transformed into a miracle-working savior god who rises from the dead. I can't see why people in the second century creating the figure of a savior god would toss in the failed prophecies of the end. The apocalyptic material is there because he really uttered those words and they were preserved in his followers' memory and eventually written down, simply because they were from a collection of Jesus sayings.

[Minimalist]

From my perspective you are clutching at straws to deny the historical existence of JC. I suppose from your perspective, I am clutching at straws to affirm his historical existence.

Yes. I have no straws to clutch at, though. That is the problem. Not straw #1. Like you, I certainly have no attachment to the story. I suspect where we differ is that you are still attaching a historical plausibility to the idea which I simply cannot see. What we know of Greco-Roman literature at the time is that such tales were a dime a dozen. It's a little more disquieting when it happens in our time.

In Carrier's book he mentions that in 1945, Betty Crocker was named the second most popular woman in America by Fortune Magazine, behind Eleanor Roosevelt. http://www.pbs.org/food/the-history-kitc...y-crocker/

The only problem is that Betty Crocker is fictitious - a creation of an advertising campaign in 1921. So we have evidence for how such tales can grow even in relatively modern times. Then of course there are the somewhat earlier examples of William Tell and Ned Ludd.

The point being that a real person is not necessary for tales to grow. They didn't have Snopes back then.

[xpastor]

From my perspective you are clutching at straws to deny the historical existence of JC. I suppose from your perspective, I am clutching at straws to affirm his historical existence.

Yes. I have no straws to clutch at, though. That is the problem. Not straw #1. Like you, I certainly have no attachment to the story. I suspect where we differ is that you are still attaching a historical plausibility to the idea which I simply cannot see. What we know of Greco-Roman literature at the time is that such tales were a dime a dozen. It's a little more disquieting when it happens in our time.

In Carrier's book he mentions that in 1945, Betty Crocker was named the second most popular woman in America by Fortune Magazine, behind Eleanor Roosevelt. http://www.pbs.org/food/the-history-kitc...y-crocker/

The only problem is that Betty Crocker is fictitious - a creation of an advertising campaign in 1921. So we have evidence for how such tales can grow even in relatively modern times. Then of course there are the somewhat earlier examples of William Tell and Ned Ludd.

The point being that a real person is not necessary for tales to grow. They didn't have Snopes back then.

My argument is that one or more of those fantastic dime-a-dozen fables got attached to a person who really existed, and the cracks show because what was accidentally preserved of his authentic teaching doesn't mesh very well with the fairy tales.

I'd never heard the one about Betty Crocker. My all-time favorite example of myth-making is the story of the Angels of Mons. Within a few months everyone in Britain believed it although the author protested that he had just been writing a totally dictional short story.

[Minimalist]

Yes, I understand you fully. My point is that a real person/event is not necessary for these stories to grow.

Ptolemy I is supposed to have invented the god "Serapis" to replace Osiris as a consort for Isis and thus meld Greek and Egyptian culture. I suppose anyone who objected got a spear point up his ass. Doubtlessly an effective means of discouraging consent. But did the first group to hear the story really believe it?

That's another good addition to the catalog of examples, too.

[Firewalker]

The thing is, the story is utter nonsense.

God created logic so he doesn't have to follow its laws

Christians create that because they weren't following the ways and words of Yehoshua. They rewrote the true laws and added stories to suit their purposes under that umbrella. There is no way that John the Baptist ate locusts and honey. Manna Pancakes and honey, yes. Yehoshua definitely would not eat meat, but they rewrite to make it ok for them. Dietary restrictions were HUGE parts of their lives all the way back to Moses. "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is not even correct. The words "lo tirtzach" mean "Thou Shalt Not Kill Anything Whatsoever". This was a DIETARY EDICT, not a moral edict. You cannot eat something you kill. They were fruitarian. This is the TRUE LOGIC, Christianity evolves to suit their own agendas.

[Minimalist]

Yeah.

A salesman from a major chicken fast food chain walked up to the Pope and offers him a million dollars if he would change "The Lord's Prayer" from "give us this day our daily bread" to "give us this day our daily chicken." The Pope refused his offer. Two weeks later, the man offered the pope 10 million dollars to change it from "give us this day our daily bread" to "give us this day our daily chicken" and again the Pope refused the man's generous offer. Another week later, the man offered the Pope 20 million dollars and finally the Pope accepted. The following day, the Pope said to all his officials, "I have some good news and some bad news. "The good news is, that we have just received a check for 20 million dollars. The bad news is, we lost the Wonder Bread account!"

[Aractus]

The words "lo tirtzach" mean "Thou Shalt Not Kill Anything Whatsoever". This was a DIETARY EDICT, not a moral edict. You cannot eat something you kill. They were fruitarian.

No they weren't.

Dumbass.