Biblical Scholars Be Trippin'

The meme above is one of those things that's hysterically funny if you understand it, and if you don't, explaining it to you would probably just exhaust me and bore you. So I'll just say that one reason Biblical scholars be trippin' is that they continue to discover huge amounts of extremely-old Biblical manuscripts.

For example, James Snapp Jr wrote last June about some palimpsests. When the ink is scraped off of a piece of parchment to make room to write something new, the indentations left by the old writing are a palimpsest. For over a century, people have been getting steadily better at using technology to recover palimpsests: that is, to make them readable again. Snapp wrote:

For at least the past five years, reports have circulated about the contents of palimpsests (recycled manuscripts) that were discovered in 1975 at Saint Catherine’s monastery. National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, The Atlantic, ScienceBlog, Ancient-Origins, and the BBC have all told readers that major research is underway that involves ancient manuscripts and expensive manuscript-reading equipment.

Now the Sinai Palimpsests Project has a website, and visitors can easily get some sense of the scale of the work that is being done with the (relatively) newly discovered manuscripts. The manuscripts at Saint Catherine’s include all kinds of compositions: ancient medicine-recipes, patristic sermons, poems, liturgical instruction-books, Old Testament books, and much more.

Fifteen continuous-text Greek manuscripts are among the newly discovered palimpsests. All but one of these New Testament manuscripts have been given production-dates in the 500s or earlier.

Another thing they be trippin' about is claims that the Codex Sinaiticus, famous for being the oldest complete Bible known to exist -- and named Sinaiticus because it was found in the very same St Catherine's monastery in Sinai where they have found the above-mentioned palimpsests -- is actually not nearly as old as had been thought. It was dated to the 4th century, now here come these guys saying it was made in the 7th century. But apparently that brouhaha has come and gone and the 4th-century dating has survived. But don't take my word for any of this: let Steven Avery tell you all about it.

"Tout Comprendre C’est Tout Pardonner"

That's not a quote from the Buddha, and it's not from Tolstoy either. I don't know whether it's originally French or if it came from another language. (Note to self: screenplay for geeky sci-fi movie: IT CAME FROM ANOTHER LANGUAGE!)

In English it means: "To understand everything is to forgive everything."

As regular readers of this blog know, I resist believing uncritically in cliches, including the cliche: "Cliches are cliches because they're true." Instead, I think that cliches are cliches because they sound good. But this one, "tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner," this one strikes me as somewhat deep. I'm not able easily to dismiss it.

Over and over, I have asked myself, how does anything ever get done? That's when I'm waiting in a line, or in traffic, for the people ahead of me to get their shit together and get out of my way. But recently I had an insight: I'm only out there in those lines or in that traffic very seldom, and I spend a lot of time getting ready for those occasions. Typical adults are in those situations all the time. If I had a more typical life and was constantly interacting with others, I might be unusually slow during the several days it took me to have a complete mental breakdown.

I understood something, and since then I tend to be more forgiving.

So anyway, today a discussion broke out about the snake in the Garden of Eden, and as usual I'm greatly annoyed with almost everything everyone is saying: some atheists who seem very angry at God, and ask, "Why would God...?" That seems to me to be the wrong question. God didn't... anything, since He's imaginary. Yes, there are contradictions and inconsistencies in the Bible. It was written by people who believed that the God they worshiped was all-powerful and loving, and yet they still suffered, and this was what they came up with to try to figure it out.

Then there are the people who insist that Genesis was never taken literally until the 19th century. This one always makes me head explode with rage, familiar as I am with the abundant evidence of all the billions of people who took the Bible literally from the time it was written until now.

So, what is it which I have to understand in order to be able to take part in these conversations in a form other than my usual: No, you're wrong, and you're wrong too, and so are you, and you, and you... ?

Good question. That approach does not make me universally beloved.

Maybe I need to understand all of the reasons people take part in these conversations other than making the kind of sense they would be expected to make in a good and sound course in archaeology?

Or maybe I need to throw "tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner" onto my scrap heap of rejected cliches. It doesn't seem to mesh at all with another bonmot, one which I think I like more: #5 from the chapter "Sprüche und Pfeile" in Nietzsche's book Götzen-Dämmerung: "Ich will, ein für allemal, vieles nicht wissen. – Die Weisheit zieht auch der Erkenntnis Grenzen." ("Once and for all, there is much that I don't want to know. Wisdom puts limits even on knowledge.")

Yeah, I think I should go with Nietzsche in this case. "Understanding everything" -- what does that even mean, "understanding everything"? It's a nonsense concept. As Steven Wright said: "You can't have everything -- where would you put it?" And I'm afraid that understanding everything is just as impractical as having everything.

Instead of striving to understand the people in these discussion about God and Genesis, these discussions which aggravate me so -- how about if I simply stop trying to understand all of them and all of their points of view? Wow: just thinking for half a minute about stopping, and I'm so relaxed. I think I'm onto something here. If I just give up on this, it may not make everybody love me, but it very well might make a few people dislike me less, and that's certainly a palpable achievement.

So. Just let those arguments go. And instead... keep looking for more interesting, less enraging discussions.

Once More About Mythicism

It seems to be in the news again, at least in the small-pond news of New Testament scholars and we mythicists who aggravate them so much, so I'll take the opportunity to state my position at present.

Typically, academic Biblical scholars describe mythicists as amateurs and nuts. Unfortunately, they're right, with some rare exceptions such as G A Wells, and -- of course -- myself. But just because a lot of people argue a position ineptly does not mean that the position itself is unsound.

Those writing the news and quoted in the news -- and not just the journalists who are not Biblical scholars, but sometimes the academic scholars as well -- often repeat the erroneous view that mythicists are convinced that Jesus did not exist. But mythicists such as Robert Price, Richard Carrier, G A Wells and myself are not convinced that Jesus did not exist: we are all just none of us convinced that he did exist. [PS, 9 January 2018: Actually, G A Wells (22 May 1926–23 January 2017) ceased to be a mythicist some time before 2000; but the difference between himself and a mythicist remained so small that almost no-one noticed it.] And we all agree that the academic mainstream of Biblical scholarship is much too opposed to debating the matter. They, the academic Biblical scholars, are the pros. They're the ones with the advanced training. They are the people ideally qualified to investigate whether or not Jesus existed. And they're simply not investigating it. Four centuries ago, almost everyone assumed that Abraham was an historical figure, and that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. Today, we don't assume that either Abraham or Moses is historical, and before the discovery of the Tel Dan stele there were some doubts about David as well, and their remains quite a bit of controversy over whether David's kingdom was anywhere near as large as described in the Bible. And all of that is due to the efforts of these very same Biblical scholars, the very same ones who are not subjecting the question of Jesus' historical existence to the same kind of scrutiny.

Typically, the academic Biblical scholars aren't nuts. But many of them are religious believers, and many more are somewhat reluctant to upset religious believers, and this may have something or everything to do with why they aren't asking (in spite of the title of that book by Bart Ehrman), Did Jesus exist? but rather continuing to routinely assume that he did, and go from there.

We mythicists don't all agree about much else other than that Jesus' historical existence has not been firmly established. What follows is my own position. Other mythicists disagree with some or all of it, so don't assume that I'm speaking for anyone else but myself. For their positions, read their books and their blogs.

With one possible exception, there are no known mentions of Jesus written earlier than Paul's letters and at least 3 of the 4 Gospels. That one possible exception is the Gospel of Thomas. Assuming that those who date Thomas to the 30's are wrong -- a very safe assumption in my opinion -- the earliest mentions of Jesus are from Paul, who by his own admission only saw Jesus "in a vision," whatever that means: in a dream, or a daydream, or an hallucination, or does it simply mean that Paul made Jesus up?

In my opinion, the only significant evidence we have at this time about whether or not Jesus existed is the New Testament. All that Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus have to tell us is about the existence of Christians, which is not the same as the existence of Jesus. The good news is that we just keep on finding more and more ancient texts. Mostly in Egypt near the Nile, but also some as far east as Mesopotamia. So, more evidence may turn up at any time. But in the meantime, it seems to me, only the New Testament can help us figure out whether or not Jesus existed. And I honestly don't see how it alone can answer the question conclusively one way or the other.

The problem with the New Testament as history, obviously, is that so much of it is legend. But we can't conclude from that that it's entirely legend and that Jesus is a fictional character. I like to compare the New Testament to the Nibelungenlied. Both contain a high percentage of legend. In the case of the Nibelungenlied we have a great deal of historical material about the same time and place, and because of that other historical material, we know, for example, that Etzel in the Nibelungenlied is an historical person: he's Attila the Hun. If we didn't have as much of that other historical material, we would have to rely much more heavily on the Nibelungenlied in trying to understand the history of 5th- and 6th- century central Europe. Because of the lack of other historical material, we have to rely very heavily on the New Testament when trying to understand the history of 1st-century-AD Judea and Galilee, because it comprises a very great portion of all the written evidence we have, and when it comes to the life of Jesus, it comprises almost all of the significant evidence we have.

Another comparison I find helpful is to compare Jesus to Achilles. In my opinion, there's about as much reason to assume that one existed as the other. This, of course, will cause academic Biblical scholars to point at me and laugh and laugh, because they think it's so obvious that Jesus existed. But it still isn't obvious to me, and they shouldn't laugh so much, because their job is to explain stuff to people like me, and as yet none of them has begun to convince me that it's obvious and certain that Jesus existed.

I'm not so upset about it. I'm a 54-year-old autistic man who wasn't correctly diagnosed until the age of 45, so I'm quite used to being laughed at for all sorts of reasons. And laughter is a physically healthy thing. Who am I to begrudge it them?

But they haven't convinced me, and that's their job. To convince me, or to admit that the matter is not yet settled. When it comes to Jesus, the academic Biblical scholars -- with a few exceptions -- are not doing their jobs.

The Academics Haven't Convinced Me That Jesus Existed. With Very Few Exceptions, They Haven't Convinced Me That They've Really Begun To Investigate The Matter

Here we go again, round and round and round, getting all worked up, getting nowhere. Isn't it all just perfectly dreadful.

Historicists, people who believe that Jesus of Nazareth existed, including many atheists who don't believe any of the New Testament stories of supernatural things, often correctly point out that the great majority of academics are historicists. And they often correctly point out that most of the mythicists, the people who have doubts about Jesus' existence, are amateurs, and often do a spectacularly poor job of making the case that it's less than certain that Jesus existed. To be clear: mythicists don't merely doubt the supernatural stories about Jesus. They (we) are not convinced that those stories are even based on a real person, named Jesus, who came from Nazareth. We figure: so much of the New Testament is clearly legend, the existence of Jesus might be just one more legendary detail -- a rather small detail when one considers the proportional of legend in the New Testament.

I agree that there are a lot of zany mythicists. I've criticized some of them so harshly in this blog that some of them, apparently having stopped reading before the end of one post or another, have assumed that I am an historicist, or even a very devout Christian. So, for the billionth time and the 2nd time in this post: I'm an atheist and I'm not convinced that Jesus existed.

Yes, I've criticized some mythicists very harshly. I've also pointed out that the fact that some of them argue the mythicist case very poorly says nothing at all about the soundness or unsoundness of the case itself, the soundness or unsoundness of the position: it is not certain that Jesus existed.

There must be a term in formal logic for this sort of fallacy: the fact that A argues the case for 1 poorly does not say anything about the soundness or unsoundness of 1. Whatever logicians would call this fallacy, it's the primary argument of the historians.

Surprisingly, historicists who are also academic specialists in Biblical studies very often assert that the evidence for Jesus' existence is more extensive and solid than the evidence for the existence of Socrates or Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great. Surprisingly, because it's so obviously wrong: we have writings from 3 of Socrates' contemporaries, compared to 0 for Jesus. Besides Caesar's own writings we have those of his contemporaries Cicero and Sallust. We have likenesses of Socrates and Caesar and Alexander in the form of sculptures which were obviously based on real people. We know what each of them looked like. Not so with Jesus. And in the case of Caesar and Alexander there's the little detail of them having been the leaders of huge armies and huge states, which means that huge numbers of people would have had to have been silent about them being fictional.

And you know what? Just like the historicists pointing out unsound mythicist arguments doesn't prove that Jesus existed, my pointing out unsound historicist arguments doesn't prove he didn't exist. Far and wide here, no one is proving anything one way or another about whether Jesus existed.

Still, the fact that the academic consensus that Jesus existed is so solid impresses many people. And the consensus shouldn't just be dismissed. However, it is not quite proper to compare mythicists, people who challenge that consensus, to global warming deniers and Holocaust deniers, people who oppose the consensus of climatologists and historians of the 20th century respectively, as Bart Ehrman has done, because Biblical studies is not exactly the same as climatology and 20th century history. Biblical studies is problematic, as scholars say when they suspect that some nonsense may be afoot, screwing up the work of serious people. Biblical studies is not always distinguishable from theology: sometimes a person whom everyone would think of as a Biblical scholar has diplomas which say that his or specialty is theology, and sometimes a theologian has diplomas which say that he or she is a Biblical scholar. There is a certain amount of overlap.

And theology is certainly not at all like 20th century history or climatology. It simply isn't, and if you want to insist that it is, I have nothing to say to you about it. Instead, I'm trying to communicate with serious people here.

Christians theologians are the people who made the Dark Ages dark, who wiped out pagan religions, who tortured and killed fellow Christians for not being the proper sort of Christians and not believing the correct things about the way the world was. They imprisoned Roger Bacon, over academic differences. They killed people for saying that they believed Copernicus' theories. They threatened to torture Galileo, and kept him under house arrest for the last several years of his life. All over academic differences. They condemned Darwin's theories when they were new, although by that time, the mid-19th century, they were no longer allowed to torture and kill the people who disagreed with them. They were slow to come around concerning 20th- and 21stcentury physics. They're still interfering with stem-cell research.

I'm not claiming that present-day theologians want to torture and kill people who disagree with them. (Not all of them.) I also don't deny that, although they're very opposed to even discussing the question of whether or not Jesus existed, most of them presently do acknowledge that Adam and Eve and Noah and Abraham are mythical figures. Most of them. Many have even stopped arguing altogether for the existence of Moses.

But they haven't led the way in academic consensus, they've never been cutting edge and they're still not.

That's the theologians, though. Not the Biblical scholars, the very ones who have dismantled our belief in the literal truth of the earlier stories in the Bible, the very ones who've shown us that Bible, supposedly the inalterable word of God, has indeed gone through some revisions over the course of centuries.

Except that you can't always tell who's one and who's the other, who's a theologian and who's a Biblical scholar, and who's partly both. Except that sometimes it seems that the theology still corrupts almost every single scholar in the field. Times such as when people try to discuss Jesus' historicity, and the scholars almost all insist that that already has been thoroughly studied, and that Jesus' historicity has been solidly proven. And even more so when many of them go even farther than that and needlessly insult people for thinking that there could be any doubt, for merely wanting to discuss the question. I get a really unpleasant sense of being in the presence of traditionally-Christian, Medieval attitudes at such times.

Nobody's proven anything here. The academics haven't proven that Jesus existed. Not to me, anyway. Not yet. I certainly haven't proven that Jesus was made up by St Paul or someone else. But maybe, just possibly, I've gotten one or two people to begin to wonder whether the academic Biblical scholars sometimes cease to behave like 21st-century academics in fields like meteorology or chemistry or 20th-century history or physics or Classical studies or math, and begin to get a little Medieval, when the question of the Historical Jesus is brought up.

Editions Of The Greek New Testament And Other Ancient Texts

If I counted correctly, the editors of the 27th edition of this version of the Greek New Testament, known as the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland,



consulted 586 Greek New Testament manuscripts, of which at least 291 were made before AD 800, and at least 35 before 300. It's "at least" because several of those manuscripts are dated 8th or 9th century, and several are dated around 300, or 3rd or 4th century. There are thousands of other Greek New Testaments available to scholars, but these editors -- Erwin Nestle, Barbara and Kurt Aland, Johannes Karavidopoulos, Carlo Martini and Bruce Metzger -- were satisfied with these 586. However, in addition to the Greek manuscripts, they also looked at 62 Latin New Testament manuscripts, at least 44 of those older than AD 800. The current location and catalog number of each of those 586 Greek and 62 Latin manuscripts is given, so that you can look them up or find photos of them, and look at exactly what the editors were looking at when they prepared this edition. They also consulted editions (that is, printed versions) of the New Testament in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Gothic, Ethiopian and Old Church Slavonic.

And in the lists of these sources they have assigned a symbol to each one -- for example, p40, 2298 and d -- and in the so-called "critical apparatus" (I love that term), which is the strange stuff at the bottom of each page below the main text, they indicate which part of their text is supported by p40, or 2298, and so on -- and also indicate which manuscripts contain some other version of the text which they consider significant. (p40 comes from a fairly standardized list of New Testament papyri, from p1 into the p120's and still counting. I assume that 2298 is from some list of other New Testament manuscripts running into I don't know how many thousands. If I knew where that entire list was I'd tell you. I bet Bart Ehrman knows.)

And the editors of series like Oxford Classical Texts



or the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana (that's Latin for Teubner's Library of Greek and Roman Works)



do the same in each volume: provide a list of all the manuscripts and other sources they have consulted in preparing their texts, with a symbol for each one (Usually each symbol is a capitol letter because usually less than 26 manuscripts are used for a given text. But in cases of authors like Vergil or Terrence, editors might run out of capital letters, and also use small letters, and/or Greek letters, and/or numbers or abbreviated words or what have you.), and then at the bottom of each page they indicate which sources have the same text as the one they've chosen, and indicate other versions, which they consider significant, from other sources. In addition to these major variations, the Nestle-Aland provides dozens of pages' worth of minor variations at the end of the volume. In the Oxford Classical Texts and the Teubneriana and other editions of ancient works, such as this edition of the New Testament, the editors typically describe the manuscripts they've used, and in a case like this where there are more existing manuscripts besides the ones used, they'll give their reasons for using these ones and not those, and so forth.

They show their work when editing Sallust or the Bible, is what I'm getting at. It's usually not the same guys editing the Classics and the Bible, but the techniques are similar. Classics or the Bible, it's known as scholarly editing. And so while you or I might reasonably disagree with what Bruce Metzger said about how it's certain that Jesus existed, if we're going to criticize what he said about Biblical manuscripts and how the text of the Bible changed over the centuries, we better come correct, cause he was all up in it.

Some Manuscripts Of The Vulgate

There's the Codex Amiatinus,

which contains the entire Vulgate version of the Old and New Testaments, and is generally considered the Mac Daddy of all manuscripts of the complete Vulgate. It was made in Northumbria in the 8th century. As you might have guessed from the photo, however, complete Bibles in olden days could be rather bulky. They didn't slip easily into one's pocket. Some devout Bible readers liked to carry around volumes containing only a few books of the Bible, or maybe just one, as in the case of Psalters, volumes containing the Psalms. Here's a page from the 14th-century Lutrell Psalter:

The Stockholm Codex Aureus:

contains the 4 Gospels and was made in the 8th century in Southumbria.

And finally, here's a page from the St Albans Psalter,

so named because it was made either at or for St Albans Abbey in the 12th century.

So, why did I make this blog post? To share some pretty pictures, for one thing. And also to take a break from some people trying to tell me that the Bible wasn't written until about AD 800, and that Constantine coined the name Jesus in AD 450, and stuff like that. The kind of people I sometimes think about converting to Orthodox Christianity just to spite. The 4th edition of the Weber-Greyson edition of the Vulgate,



not the latest edition, cites over 100 manuscripts, that is: the text of that edition was compiled on the basis of those manuscripts, over 80 of which were made before 800. Plus over a dozen printed editions.

Over and over, I hear wildly ahistorical claims. Over and over I ask, Where the rude euphemism did you get that?! I rarely get an answer.

"Bible Hunters" With Dr Jeffrey Rose

I'd rather be writing about a TV series having to do with the manuscripts of Livy, but, of course, there are no such TV series. I suppose I will have to make that series myself. So spread the word about me and talk me up so that I can win that Nobel Prize and have the clout to host TV series on previously-obscure topics which deserve broader audiences, k thnx.

This series is okay, not nearly as dumb as some other TV shows covering the same ground, namely, the discovery of early (6th century and older) manuscripts of the Bible, and of manuscripts of New Testament apocrypha. The host and narrator, Dr Jeffrey Rose, is an archaeologist, and his approach is to follow in the footsteps of some of the 19th and 20th century scholars who made major discoveries of manuscripts -- on one occasion going so far to pay homage to his predecessors and re-create their experience as to ride on a camel with Bedouin guides from Cairo to St Catherine's monastery at the foot of Mt Sinai, where the famous 4th century Codex Sinaiticus was found by the scholar Constantin von Tischendorf in 1844, and where many other significant Biblical manuscripts have been found since. Besides the camel ride, Dr Rose's journey's to various Egyptian locations are mostly portrayed by shots of him riding various motorcycles. Larry Hurtado has written 2 excellent blog posts about this series, and in his post on Part 1 he asks the very good question:

Quite why the presenter was filmed motorcycling around places in Egypt, I can’t say. Couldn’t he have simply ridden in the car with the camera-guy . . . who was filming him riding a motorcycle??

I can only hope that it was, as Dr Hurtado surmises, a guy in a car, if not an entire film crew in a van, and not something dangerous like a cameraman filming from the back seat of a 2nd motorcycle, or something even more dangerous, like a cameraman riding a motorcycle solo and filming at the same time. Most likely, of course, it was a cameraman in a car or a whole crew in a van.

And who filmed Dr Rose and his Bedouin guides on their camels -- a lone cameraman on a camel? I'm picturing something much more like a van with a film crew and a well-stocked fridge, just in case Dr Rose -- or the Bedouins, for that matter -- preferred a sandwich or a TV dinner to the bread which the Bedouins cooked on hot rocks and which Rose exclaimed was delicious and "cooked to perfection!" I know that I'm old and out of touch and that technological development keeps racing along, but the images and sound on the road trips were impressive. If a lone camera did that, then I want a camera like that.

Why so many documentaries continue to cling to the practice of presenting the illusion of the intrepid host exploring the world all alone, and cut out any interaction with the camera person and/or crew, I don't know. They should stop. It's as corny as laugh tracks on sitcoms. Wake up and smell the 21st century, documentarians: we're on to you!

Other than that run-of-the-mill technical documentary stuff, "Bible Hunters" is refreshingly free of the huge wince-inducing historical and technical errors of which the typical shows on these texts from the so-called "History Channel" are jam-packed, and of which even most shows from PBS or the BBC or the Smithsonian Channel have a few. ("Bible Hunters" first appeared on the BBC a few years ago, and now it's appearing in the US on the Smithsonian Channel -- in the same form in which it appeared on the BBC, with nothing cut out or added? Good question. I have no idea.)

[PS, 6 June 2016: There is one fairly serious error repeatedly committed by Rose on this show: he often says "text" when he should be saying "manuscript." A text is a series of words, whatever form they are recorded in. For example, "Mary had a little lamb" is exactly the same text whether it is spoken aloud, written on paper or carved into stone. Dr Rose refers to people discovering texts when they discovered manuscripts. If it's a manuscript of the Gospel of Matthew, then the text is already known. A discovery of a text occurs when some previously-unknown collection of words is discovered. And the date of the text is when it was first composed, which, in the case of Biblical and apocryphal texts, has always been different than the date of the manuscript. So for example Rose makes the mistake of referring to "a six-century text" when he should have said " six-century manuscript of a second-century text," if the manuscript is a copy of something first written in the 2nd century. Other than "text' and "manuscript, I didn't notice any technical errors in the show.]

In his post on Part 2 of the series (as it appeared on the BBC), Dr Hurtado says:

I have to say that I found it strange that some really crucial (arguably more important) manuscripts finds were totally ignored.

I agree that it's arguable that Rose left some of the most important manuscripts out of the program. But the series is only a few hours long, and with a series like that, choices have to be made about which finds to include and how long to dwell upon each one. Clearly, Rose loves Egypt. "Bible Hunters" confines itself to Biblical manuscript discoveries made in Egypt (which are huge in the scheme of all such discoveries, to be fair to Rose). If you're curious about the important manuscripts which were left out by the show, by all means follow the link to Dr Hurtado's blog, he gives you a very good overview.

And of course, once again -- if you're into non-Christian ancient literature, you're left totally out in the cold by this series, just as you're left out in the cold by every other series on the great finds of Biblical manuscripts. Dr Rose's show covers Oxyrhynchus, both by commenting on Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt and the huge amount of papyrus fragments they found there,



and also with footage of Rose interviewing Dr Dirk Obbink, the current head of the Oxyrhynchus Papyrus Project, and Obbink showing Rose around the still-active Oxyrhynchus dig sites -- but the show doesn't contain as much as a half-dozen words about the non-Biblical texts found at Oxyrhychus, which have turned the world of Classical Greek studies upside down, and also had a not inconsiderable impact on the world of Classical Latin, and also included priceless treasures for those interested in everyday life in Ptolomaic and Roman Egypt: personal letters, legal documents, shopping lists and so forth -- things which had been almost entirely lacking from the sources available to historians before Grenfell and Hunt thought to look through the ancient trash heaps at Oxyrhynchus. Rose shows the libraries of Egyptian monasteries, but doesn't mention any of the Classical texts in those libraries -- and most of the Classical Greek and Latin literature we have today comes from manuscripts made in Christian monasteries.

And this show says almost exactly squat about all of the Old Testament manuscripts in all of the places Rose goes. Again, that's pretty typical about TV shows about ancient manuscripts: it's pretty much all about Jeebus.

More Self-Criticism

A couple of days ago, in the blog post Signs That There's Something Seriously Wrong With Me, I attempted to begin a course of rigorous self-criticism. Now I'll attempt to continue that criticism and get more in-depth:

Earlier today I blogged about a popular talking point among movement atheists, the assertion that they know the Bible better than Christians do, that many of them have read it all the way through. I... Uh... Well I flat-out called that assertion horseshit. So in the post about bible-reading, it seems I did pretty much exactly what I criticized myself for a couple of days ago: I was harshly unpleasant, I delivered more or less a verbal slap in the face.

Well... that's what I do here, in a lot of posts anyway: criticize others without a lot of restraint. But I'm actually not going to criticize the harsh blog post about Bible-reading right now; rather, I'm going to examine some of my actions following the publishing of that post. Maybe I need to critique such posts, maybe I very badly need to do so, but facing that possibility is more than I can handle right now. Crawl before you can walk.

I linked the Bible-reading post in a few online discussion groups, and right away I got some negative responses from atheists claiming to know the Bible very well. Today's self-criticism will consist of examining my responses to some of those comments:

One person claimed that I could open a Bible to any page and he'd be able to tell me exactly how the text had been altered. My response to that was: "Ah, more bullshit, right on cue!" Last I checked there had been no response to that, neither by the person I was addressing nor from a third party.

Another person asked what was my evidence that movement atheists didn't know the Bible well? I told him that I had already answered that question in the link to the blog post, which mentioned how movement atheists' discussion of the Bible tended to revolve around the same 12 verses from Genesis and Leviticus and 5 snarky quotes about the Bible from famous people. He said that wasn't an answer. I felt it was an answer, but I didn't respond, nothing to say occurring to me which I felt would be productive. (Insulting responses occurred to me but I kept them to myself.) After we had exchanged a few more comments, some having to do with the Flood, I said that I was unsure whether Moses or Jesus had existed, much less Noah; he said he doubted if any of them existed; by "all of them" I understood him to mean "all of the people mentioned in the Bible," and I said: "That's exactly the kind of statement that makes me doubt you've read the Bible at all." Perhaps a minute later, I commented: "Sorry, maybe I misunderstood you: if by 'all of them' you just mean 'Noah, Moses and Jesus,' that's certainly completely different than if you meant 'all of the people mentioned in the Bible.'" This guy had been sending a pretty steady of stream of comments, and I waited a while for more, but no more came, and that's when it occurred to me that he might have broken off the conversation, perhaps un-subscribed from the thread, because I was being rude and insulting.

Perhaps other people looking on both of those threads un-subscribed because I was being rude.

Maybe people stop communicating with me all the time because I'm being rude.

I want to be an extremely rich and famous writer. But if I became rich and famous, and got invited to be a guest on "Conan," and Conan and I were chatting about, oh, let's say, the Bible, and at a certain point the crowd responded to something which Conan or I had said with enthusiastic applause, and I turned to the audience, or should I say turned on them, and interrupted the applause by saying something like, for instance, "Applauding that just demonstrates that you're all uneducated and ignorant," well, I suppose it's possible that one single such comment at such a place and time might suddenly make me much less popular. I can imagine Conan, and other talk-show hosts, not inviting me back to their shows because of one single remark like that. And the thing is: I can easily imagine myself saying something like that at such a time and place, saying it spontaneously, without a thought.

And the thing is -- I've said a lot of things like that to a lot of different people over the years. In fact, I've said a lot of things which were much harsher than that to perfect strangers, for no reason at all other than that I thought it would be funny to be mean.

Okay. Getting clearer and clearer: I have a problem. It's especially a problem if I want millions of people to love me.

Up until that other post a couple of days ago I tended to agree with my Mom's opinion of me: that I'm a sensitive angel and a misunderstood genius. Can't really go 100% with that assessment any more. (Thinking about this reminded me of Marge Simpson looking at each member of her family in turn and saying what she admired about them, and coming to Bart, and saying: "I like Bart's... [long pause] ...I like Bart.") Whaddayagonnado, she's my Mom. I love you, Mom. But if I continue in this new habit of looking mercilessly at myself, maybe I can become a little less of an unbearable asshole. And maybe that will lead to some good changes in my life. I would like a whole bunch of good changes in my life, please.

One thing I'm not going to do is to start lying, and saying positive things I don't mean. For example: I stand by what I said about movement atheists/New Atheists not being the Biblical scholars they claim to be. It may be a harsh truth, but it's the truth. But maybe I can change the way I phrase things, change my choice of words. Maybe in some situations, for example, "I call bullshit" is a less constructive choice of words than, oh, I don't know... "I think we may have been living with an illusion here." I will give all of this some serious thought.

As always, I wonder how many Facebook groups I've been banned from today.

Atheists Who Claim, Among Other Things, That They've Read The Entire Bible

You ever wonder why so many atheists who claim they've read the entire Bible only ever talk about 12 verses from Genesis and Leviticus, plus 5 snarky quotes about the Bible from famous people? If you have, I certainly hope it didn't take you too long to figure out that it's because they're actually only ever read those 12 verses and 5 quotes.

Now let me be clear -- some atheists actually have read the entire Bible.



For example, a lot of academic Biblical scholars are atheists. I wouldn't be surprised if you're surprised to hear this: those academics don't tend to announce loud and proud that they're atheists, the way that New Atheists, aka movement atheists, tend to do. In fact, they tend to suck up to the huge rich religious institutions which butter their bread much too much to suit me. (NO ONE ESCAPES MY WRATH! NOT EVEN ME!)

Back to the movement atheists: who are they kidding? Each other, that's who. The nonsense about how they've all studied the entire Bible AND the Koran AND the Epic of Gilgamesh is a familiar example to anyone who's familiar with this movement. I came across another example today, a particularly striking example of an atheist kidding him- or herself: someone asking rhetorically why religious believers are so so desperate to gain the approval of atheists. I'll tell you why, Sparky: because they're not. Because you made that up.



But how do I know that so many movement atheists/New Atheists are making up that bit about having read the entire Bible? It's not just that they only mention those 12 verses and 5 snarky quotes over and over and over and over, and never mention Moses' confrontations of Pharaoh, or Ezra, and how it seems pretty clear now that it was Ezra and not Moses who collected and edited the Pentateuch, or Saul and Jonathon and David and Goliath and Solomon and Bathsheeba, or Job, or any of the particularly dramatic aspects of Revelation, or anything. If you've read all 2000 pages you've noticed more than those 12 verses. But over and above that, if there really was a community of Bible readers here, then people like Michael Paulkovich would get laughed out of that community long before being published in its leading periodicals. I'm not saying that Paulkovich hasn't read the entire Bible, it's just possible that he has. But it seems pretty likely that he's somehow managed to avoid any knowledge of the Greek and Latin classics which were written around the same time. That sort of avoidance is possible with one individual who's already gone to the trouble of reading the entire Bible, but extremely unlikely impossible in an entire close-knit community full of people thoroughly familiar with the Bible.

On the contrary, what we have here is a bubble, people sealing themselves off from those who actually have studied these ancients texts. Sealing themselves off and creating a fictional world in which religious believers are desperate for their approval and the entire Bible is like Leviticus and ancient Judea and Galilee were swarming with historians and there were newspapers and detailed court records so that anyone remotely resembling Jesus would have been mentioned in numerous non-Biblical written sources, a fictional world in which Muslims are either terrorists or approve of terrorism, and Obama is secretly an atheist because no Christians are as progressive politically as he is, and only religious believers teach Biblical studies in universities, and so forth.

Obviously, not all movement atheists/New Atheists are that wrong about all of the above. The point is that none of the above is immediately laughed out of the room, and all of it should be. All of the above is directly at odds with common knowledge. (Again -- maybe except for the part about the religious beliefs of academic Biblical scholars. Again, that may not be common knowledge, because the scholars tend to suck up too much to the religious institutions who give them all those fat grants and fellowships, and so they don't want to rock the boat by making their lack of belief too plain. The same way that almost none of the academics dare to rock the boat by voicing less than full certainty that Jesus existed. NO ONE ESCAPES MY WRATH!)

What's the point of shaking off nonsensical religious beliefs only to turn around and either constantly spout other nonsense, or act as if that other nonsense is fine because it's atheists who are spouting it? Sorry guys, but I'm not having it. The main point here is making sense. The existence or non-existence of God is just one of very many topics upon which we can make sense or not. You don't get a free pass from me on all those other topics just because we agree on that one.

Iron Chariots On The Creation Of The Early Parts Of The Bible

Yesterday I noticed a reference to Matt Dillahunty holding forth, in a video from his radio show, about the creation of the Bible. For any number of reasons, I didn't feel like sitting through the entire video, but I was curious to know what Matt might have to say on the subject. (Regular readers of this blog know that I am occasionally somewhat critical of the statements of New Atheists on historical topics.) I looked for a printed text by Matt on the subject. I didn't find much in that vein, although I did find a ton of links to Matt on video. I also found out that he is a founder of Iron Chariots, a wiki which describes itself as "intended to provide information on apologetics and counter-apologetics."

I posted the following quote from Iron Chariots about the writing of the Bible, and said it was pretty much okay:

"The Jewish and Christian Bibles are actually collections of what were originally a number of independent books. The overwhelming majority of Christians refer to the Bible as the combination of Hebrew Scripture, known to Christians as the Old Testament or First Testament; and the New Testament, which describes the life and message of Jesus. For Roman Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox, and some Protestants, the Deuterocanonical books — various writings important in the Second-Temple period of Judaism (often regarded by many Protestants as (or part of the) Apocrypha) — are considered to be part of the Old Testament and as such part of the Bible, although they are rejected by many Protestants and are not in the Hebrew Bible as accepted in modern Judaism. Some books considered deuterocanonical by Orthodox Churches are considered apocryphal by other Orthodox Churches and/or Catholics. For Jews, the term refers only to the Hebrew Bible, also called the Tanakh, which includes the Five Books of Moses (the Torah) as well as the books of the Prophets and Writings. Both Christians and Jews regard the Bible as divinely inspired, with widespread variation on its accuracy, interpretation and legitimacy. Archaeological study has shown that the primary elements the first five books of the Bible, especially Exodus, were around before the Old Testament was. They were found in several unrelated oral traditions around 500 BCE, but the oldest examples of biblical scripture were dated using radiometric dating to have been written between 325 and 125 BCE. The Bible is nowhere near as old as claimed by the majority of Jews and Christians)"

But overnight a couple of things occurred to me:

1) Iron Chariots sez "the oldest examples of biblical scripture were dated using radiometric dating to have been written between 325 and 125 BCE," and that date may be accurate for the oldest OT manuscripts from the Dead Sea Scrolls and Oxyrhychus, but a 7th-century-BC silver scroll has been found containing the Priestly Benediction (May the Lord bless and keep you[...]" etc. That's Numbers 6 24-26, by the way, and it's a good passage to keep in mind when people are trying to tell you that the early books of the Bile are all about Massacre all of the unbelievers and Rape your daughters and If your slave touches pigskin or a shrimp, slay him. If you have no idea who would try to tell you that the early books of the Bible are made up exclusively of such horrors, then you've been much luckier than I in avoiding the company of some simpleminded and fanatical atheist communities.)

2) The article sez "The Bible is nowhere near as old as claimed by the majority of Jews and Christians." What do the majority of Jews and Christians claim about it? I don't know, and I don't think the person who wrote the Iron Chariots article knows either. I think a much more accurate statement would be something like: The traditional view was that Moses wrote the 1st 5 books of the Bible sometime between 1200 and 1400 BC. In the 17th century doubts about Moses' authorship of those texts began to be raised. Today scholars have very serious doubts about whether Moses really ever existed at all, and generally agree that if there was an exodus from Egypt to the land of Israel, it was much smaller and briefer than the one described in the book of Exodus. And furthermore, there is no evidence of written Hebrew of any sort, let alone the entire Pentateuch, as early as 1200 BC.

Still. Credit where credit is due: the above-quoted passage from Iron Chariots is miles ahead of a lot of the dimwitted nonsense you're going to hear from a lot of New Atheists about Bronze-Age goat herders and Constantine and the Pope writing the Bible at Nicea, and celibacy not being valued highly by Christians until about AD 1000, when the Vatican figured out how much more property they could inherit from clergy if the clergy were childless, and Aristotle being Belgian and so on.

However, unfortunately, the above passage is also higher in quality than much of the rest of the long Iron Chariots article on the Bible, and, and this is my point, much lower in quality than what you could learn from easily-accessible reference works such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica or the Cambridge Ancient History, not to mention more specialized works by legit Biblical scholars, which I ain't and those guys at Iron Chariots ain't either, not to mention actually *gasp* learning Hebrew and Greek and Latin and Aramaic and referring directly to the primary materials and becoming a legit Biblical scholar yrself.

Writing that Iron Chariots article rather than referring to the actual scholars is a real disservice to atheists who want to know what's up with the Bible. It's sort of an insult to those atheists to assume that direct contact with the real scholarship might give them Judeo-Christian cooties and that they might not be able to detect pro-religious bias in that scholarship all by themselves. (Of course, a lot of the legit scholars are actually *gasp* atheists and aren't going to give anybody religious cooties.)

Biblical Schmiblical!

Jay Michaelson claims that Jesus had 'advice' for homophobes. What?! you're saying. Yeah, that's what I said: What did this joker just make up and put into Jesus' mouth? Turns out Michaelson is referring to Matthew 22:21 : "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." What?! you're saying. How does does that have anything to do with homophobia? It doesn't, of course, but in Christian theology, just as in punk rock, there are no rules. If you've sat through very many Christian sermons, and actually stayed awake and paid attention, you know that it's standard procedure to pick a topic from current politics, pick a Bible verse, and then invent a connection between the two. Such was the traditional authority of Christianity that it was seldom that a member of the congregation dared to say something so shameless, so wicked and surly as, "But Reverend, that doesn't make any sense," no matter how senseless the supposed connection between the Bible verse and the current political topic may have been. Sorry, Reverends, but those days are gone.

Nevermind the way you put a statement on gay rights into Jesus' mouth, Dr Michaelson -- as someone with a a PhD in religion from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, you ought to know how high the chances are that the author of Matthew put those words, about what to give to Caesar and what to give to God, into Jesus' mouth: Matthew was probably the last of the 4 canonical Gospels to be written, and many of the possible reasons for differences between Matthew and the other 3 Gospels, besides pure accuracy on the part of Matthew, are among the things taught to freshmen pursuing Bachelor's degrees in Biblical studies or Christian theology. They're also taught things such as how many changes were made to the New Testament over the course of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, and many of the reasons, besides a pure concern for accuracy, why these changes may have been made.

Maybe it's time for me to stop taking umbrage at people like you for things like that, and finally accept how widespread "lying for the Lord" is, including the lie that the Mormons are more guilty of it than others.

But nevermind the complete non-sequitor of claiming that "give Caesar the things that are Caesar and give God the things that are God's" has some relevance to the, it now appears unsuccessful, thank goodness and common sense, attempt on the part of the Arizona state legislature to give legal backing to discrimination against gays on religious grounds. And nevermind the high probability that you know damn well that Jesus very likely never said anything like Matthew 22:21, and that you probably already know much better than I do why that verse is in the Bible, and nevermind the possibility that Jesus never existed at all -- yes, ?I can picture very well the sneer you would give me for saying that, I'm very much used to getting that sneer. Don't worry, Reverend: we're sneering right back. And we in fact are not climate-change skeptics or Holocaust deniers, we're neither scientifically-illiterate nor bigoted, and we can see quite plainly the difference between when an authority provides copious data, as meterologists do when asked about climate change, and the quite curious case of authorities appealing to authority, as Biblical scholars do when asked why they're so sure that Jesus existed -- nevermind all that.

Let's say for the sake of argument that Jesus existed, and that he made that remark about giving Caesar his and giving God his, and just for the sake of argument that there really is a perfectly clear statement in there about the the legal status of LGBT's -- so what? It was Christianity which introduced homophobia into Christian lands to begin with. Homophobia was foreign to most of them before they were converted. We don't need theological arguments to undo this damage which theology has wrought.

Oldest-Known (To Me) Examples Of This and That Sort Of Writing

A story about the oldest-known, recently-discovered Jewish prayer book (9th century) got me thinking about the oldest manuscripts and inscriptions of various types. Manuscripts, writing made with a pen or similar instrument on something like papyrus or parchment or paper, interest me much more than inscriptions, except that inscriptions are much more durable, and provide us with our oldest evidence of writing. The oldest known complete scrolls of the Torah are several centuries newer than this prayer book. It used to be customary to bury such scrolls when they became worn. Very few have survived from before the 15th century.

As far as any Hebrew writing is concerned, the oldest-known example -- please keep in mind that "oldest known" always means "oldest known to me." I'm not being particularly modest here, just particularly careful to be clear and accurate. Keep in mind when anyone talks about the oldest-known this or that that it always means "oldest known to them." Also keep in mind that all of us are estimating about these dates and that bias sometimes is involved in dating. More about that below -- is the Tel Zayit abecedary, a rock upon which the Hebrew alphabet was scratched in the 10th century BC. Tel Zayit, the rock's location, was over 30 miles away from Jerusalem in the 10th century BC, way out in the sticks in those days. This suggests that literacy in Hebrew may have been rather widespread by the 10th century BC.

The oldest hard copy of whole Hebrew words was found on a tiny silver scroll dating from the 7th century BC, upon which was inscribed the Priestly Benediction: "May the LORD bless you and keep you[...]" etc. Then there are the oldest of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are as old as the 2nd century BC, and some of them alleged by some to be much older, but I suspect unscientific bias in those earlier datings, but I don't really know.

Examples of Greek from the 8th century BC and of Latin from the 7th century have been found. The earliest Greek texts which are still widely read today are those of Hesiod and Homer. Hesiod was writing around 700 BC -- well, it's not certain that he actually wrote. Many of the earliest renowned ancient Greek authors are known to us not by anything they wrote, but by things which others wrote about what they said. Hesiod may well have personally written down much of the writing associated with him. (On the other hand, some of the writing associated with him was clearly added to the corpus of his works centuries after he lived.)

Of course, in the case of Homer, on the other hand, the question of whether or not he actually even existed is quite controversial. Hesiod helps us out here by inserting many references to his life and his surroundings into his writings. Homer doesn't say anything about himself. Whether Homer existed, or whether the songs of the Iliad and the Odyssey were attributed to a blind singer who never was, is extremely controversial. It's generally agreed that if Homer did exist and did come up with those famous tales, he sand them rather than wrote them. When they were first written down is extremely controversial. Probably in the 6th century BC or earlier. There are many linguistic characteristics in the Iliad and the Odyssey which come from long before the 6th century, but the preservation of these archaic details can be explained by singers carefully copying earlier singers as well as by the poems having been written down before the 6th century.

The earliest hard copies we have of any texts by Homer date to the 3rd century BC, and the earliest copies of Hesiod from the 1st century BC, and there are quite a few copies of both authors from those times up until the 6th century AD, but these are fragments, mostly rather tiny fragments of a few words each, found by archaeologists in the Middle East since the 19th century. One welcome exception to the generally fragmentary nature of these old manuscripts is the Bankes Papyrus, made in the 2nd century AD and containing most of the 24th and final book of the Iliad (18 pages in Richmond Lattimore's translation).

Although the oldest traces of any writing in Latin are almost as old as those in Greek, it's later before we encounter any Latin literature which is actually interesting for its own sake as literature, as opposed to very sketchy specimens interesting only to historians and paeleographers. There's a collection of laws from the 5th century, the Twelce Tables, meh. Yes, extremely interesting for the sake of the history of early Rome, and extremely revered by ancient Romans, but as actual reading material, meh. A Roman literature worthy of the name doesn't get underway until the 3rd century BC with Livius Andronicus, who, like the other two great early Roman writers, Plautus and Terence, was actually a Greek writing in his adopted 2nd language of Latin.

Less interesting to me personally than Graeco-Roman literature and much more interesting to the public at large are the questions of when the earliest parts of the New Testament were written, and how old the oldest copies we have are. As with Homer and Hesiod, so with the Bible (and with a lot of other ancient literature) : our oldest copies are recently-discovered papyrus scraps. Experts seem to agree that the scrap known as p52, containing a part of the Gospel of John, dates from the 2nd century AD and is the oldest New Testament papyrus whose date is well-established.

However, is there a 1st-century fragment of Luke set to knock p52 off its position as king of the hill age-wise? Daniel Wallace, who found it, thinks so. Mark Roberts, who wrote this article about it, thinks that Wallace is correct with this 1st-century date. But here we come to considerations of bias: Roberts, whose article mentions a recent debate between Wallace and Bart Ehrman, refers to Ehrman as an "extreme skeptic." That already makes me somewhat skeptical about Roberts' objectivity. As regular readers of this blog know, I've had my disagreements with Ehrman, but I would never call him an extremist. Wallace, whom Roberts praises and refers to as an eminently reliable scholar, has written books with titles like Who’s Afraid of the Holy Spirit? An Investigation into the Ministry of the Spirit of God Today and Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ. Before I've cracked either one of those books, their titles have already made me suspicious of Wallace's judgment and his agenda. And Roberts has authored tomes with titles like Jesus Revealed: Know Him Better to Love Him Better and No Holds Barred: Wrestling with God in Prayer, which brings us up to about 6 or 7 strikes against this claim of a 1st-century manuscript of Luke. But I have to keep an open mind here. Just because Wallace and Roberts are clearly crazy in some areas, and more than just a little eager to establish a paper trail right back to Jeebus Hisself, doesn't necessarily mean that they don't know squat about ancient manuscripts.

But still.

The Idea That Stories In The Bible Are Metaphors Is A Contemporary Myth

Nota bene (That's Latin. It means "note well."), I'm not saying that I believe that Noah built an ark and saved all those animals, or that Samson killed all of those people with the jawbone of an ass. I'm saying that the authors of the Bible, and ancient Jews and Christians, and also most Jews and Christians and Muslims until pretty recently, believed those things happened. Of course, the fundies still believe it. But there has emerged this other group within these religions which still believes in God, and still believes that the Bible is the most important book in the world, but not only no longer themselves believe things like the stories of Noah actually happened, but also are insisting, not only with straight faces but also with advanced degrees in theology and sometimes, unfortunately, in other fields as well, such as Biblical Studies or even ancient history in general, that those stories were ORIGINALLY WRIITEN AND UNDERSTOOD as metaphors, and that literalism and fundamentalism are aberrations from the main traditions of these religions, when, in plain fact, they are not aberrations but holdovers, continuations of the old beliefs.

Where does this recent belief in the non-literal intent of the Bible authors come from? Like other irrational religious beliefs, it comes from an unwillingness to face certain realities. In this case it's an unwillingness to see the ancient world for what it was, the unwillingness to see the similarities between the Abrahamic religions and other ancient beliefs, and the unwillingness to see how much primitive ancient mentality has been brought into our own time by those religions.

Some people believed that Hercules actually existed before Christianity came into the Graeco-Roman world and stomped all over the local religions of which the tales of Hercules and Zeus and Athena and Hermes were a part. In the case of metaphors and fiction, it's clear to both the authors and the audience that the stories are made up. Not so in the case of myths and religion. The Greeks and Romans, many or most of them, believed that lightning and thunder were giant spears hurled by Zeus (whom the Romans called Jupiter), that when the seas became stormy it was because Poseidon (Neptune to the Romans) was agitated, that Aphrodite (the Roman Venus) looked after people in love, and so forth. The Greeks and Roman pagans were much more tolerant when it came to open discussion of religion than were the Christians who wiped their religions out, and so every now and then an ancient Greek or Roman philosopher would express his opinion that all the stories about the gods were nonsense and that no rational person should believe they existed -- but these philosophers were expressing minority opinions, they were going directly against the grain of their society at large. There's no reason to believe that most pre-Christian Romans and Greeks didn't believe in the literal existence of many, many gods and goddesses. The city of Rome in particular was famous as home to a vast number of religions collected from all over the Empire, and many individual Romans each worshiped many different deities. Some of them worshiped Jesus along with many other deities, before Christian authorities made it very plain that to properly practice Christianity meant no longer worshiping deities of any other religions, and, in the late 4th and early 5th centuries, destroyed the many temples of other religions which stood all over the Empire.

There's no RATIONAL reason to believe that the tales of the supernatural in any ancient religions, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam, began as anything other than stories which were believed to be literally true. An irrational reason to believe that they began as fiction and metaphor, with everyone understanding that's what they were, is to deny the distance between the literal belief in them on the one hand and modern knowledge of how the world works on the other, and to insist that the Bible and the Koran are full of "timeless wisdom," and do not merely reflect the worldview of people who believed -- really, literally believed -- that what happened to them was the result of the actions of a huge supernatural Being, and that angels, actual winged angels, watched over us, and that after we died we would be judged and sent to a paradise to live in joy forever or to a pit to be tortured forever, a pit run by an evil angel who'd been expelled from the paradise, and so forth. It's as clear as can be that the founders of these religions and the authors of these holy texts literally, unmetaphorically believed all of that, just as the Graeco-Roman pagans literally believed that their gods lived on Mount Olympus and frequently came down in disguise from the mountain to take part in human affairs. One thing which these ancient books actually can tell us is how far we've come in our understanding since the time when they were written.

That is, of course, some of us. Clearly, others can't get through a single day without making things up. Luckily for very many of them, today just as thousands of years ago, religion offers them jobs.

The 8th Of August, 2013: The Day I Formally Declared War On Stupid Atheists

Why the war? Why today? Well, because today was when I finally had heard someone say "Prove that Jesus existed. And don't use the Bible" one too many times.

I'm waging this war on behalf of intelligent atheists, of course. To try to prevent our being identified with those morons saying things like "Prove that Jesus existed. And don't use the Bible." Also to try to help reasonably-intelligent people not be sucked in by such incredibly stupid memes. I realize that some stupid people, both atheists and believers, will think that I'm not an atheist, because I'm harshly criticizing people who happen to be atheists. At least with this standard disclaimer in place I can say to them, "Hey, Chuckles. Go back and read the 2nd paragraph again, assuming you read that far yr 1st time through. Read it 3 times through if you have to. Move yr lips while you read if you have to."

To say that a lot of half-educated people are weighing in on the subject of the historicity of Jesus would be an insult to the half-educated. Given the lack of evidence other than the New Testament, and unless and until we can find other evidence, the debate over Jesus' historicity is very little other than a debate over how much history we can extract from the New Testament. I disagree with the scholars who say it's certain that Jesus existed, but they're much more serious than those who reject the New Testament as relevant to the question in that they are examining the existing evidence.

Imagine if paeleontologists unearthed a fossilized bone which appeared to have belonged to a previously-unknown species of dinosaur. And imagine if they said, "Well, since this bone appears to be from a species for which we have no other evidence, we're going to have to completely disregard it. Instead of studying it, let's grind it up into dust instead, and see if we can manage to get an ingredient for half-decent fertilizer or concrete out of it." Hopefully you are appalled by the very thought of paeleontologists behaving in such a manner. Hopefully no one will have to explain to you why that's no damn way to run a railroad. And hopefully you can see the similarity between palaeontologists acting like that, and people saying "Prove that Jesus existed. And don't use the Bible."

In this Wrong Monkey blog post I addressed the currently-popular mistaken notion that we possess the works of many historians who were in -- or anywhere near -- Jerusalem during the supposed time of Jesus. The morons who may challenge you: "Prove that Jesus existed. And don't use the Bible" may go on from there to challenge you to go through the works of the fifty or so non-Biblical historians in which all mention of Jesus is suspiciously absent. Which you can't do because the number of such historians who said anything at all about Jerusalem at that time is not fifty but zero, which in turn of course tells you that the person challenging you to do your homework doesn't know his own ass from a Boing 757. It tells you how far they are from being able to find, and/or from taking the trouble to find, anyone else who has a clue about the history of that time or place before proceeding to tell you what's what about that time and place. There's no substitute for reading the ancient texts themselves, but someone who tells you, "Prove that Jesus existed. And don't use the Bible," immediately before or after saying, "We possess the works of over fifty historians who were in or around Jerusalem during Jesus' lifetime" is not only obviously unfamiliar with those ancient texts, but also might have serious difficulty recognizing anyone else who is familiar with someone who is familiar with those texts. "Fifty historians," my Aunt Fanny! Just for fun, see if you can get them to name 10 historians who lived in the 1st century. Lived anywhere, be it Spain or China or the city of Rome. Very likely most of the writers they manage to name won't have lived in the 1st century AD, and will have written poetry or drama or philosophy or treatises on mathematics or rhetoric or medicine or architecture or military strategy, and not one word which they may or may not have written on any historical subject will have survived.

Know your sources. Including the people saying "Prove that Jesus existed. And don't use the Bible." Know them, and know the distance between them and, oh, for instance, me. And get it through your heads, whether you're trying to prove Jesus' existence or disprove it, or if, like me, you're simply curious about the question whatever the answer might turn out to be, that, barring some new discovery, almost all of the evidence for or against is in the New Testament.

And also, if you want people to think you've read the Bible -- read it. Endlessly referring to the same half-dozen verses having to do with shellfish and genocide and Lot's daughters is no longer maintaining the illusion. And while you're at it, you chuckleheads, read an entire book or two by Mark Twain. Your name is legion, and your endless repetition of a half-dozen lines from Twain has become every bit as tedious as the endless repetition of a half-dozen lines from the Bible.

Is That You, Dan Brown?

No, actually this is someone else. But It may be someone who has read some of Dan Brown's stuff and thought it was non-fiction.

Let's see how many mistakes we can spot:

"The NT is not written evidence, its a compilation of writings/myths from much later than the supposed historical Jesus lived that were picked over by 4th century Italians combining pagan rituals and newer Christian beliefs into one unifying state mandated religion forming the basis of the Roman Catholic church that has been the center of greed, power and corruption in the world ever since and has spun off over 30,000 sects of Christianity that disagree with each other about the details."

Are the Biblical Scholars Partly to Blame For the Shortcomings of the New Atheists?

As I've mentioned before on this blog, Bart Ehrman is wrong to associate people who question whether Jesus existed with people who question the overwhelming consensus of meteorologists when they say that global warming is catastrophic, getting rapidly worse, and caused by humans; or with people who think aliens landed in Roswell in 1947; or even with people stupid enough to doubt that the Holocaust happened. Meteorologists and serious historians and journalists have gotten through with great ease to these people who aren't sure Jesus really existed; with tremendous ease compared to Biblical scholars who seem, the very great majority of them, to be sure that Jesus existed. Perhaps the problem isn't really so much that the doubters are terribly uninformed or resistant to reason, but that the Biblical scholars are, quite simply, unconvincing.

Perhaps even worse: maybe the Biblical scholars aren't even particularly interested, when push comes to shove, in sharing their findings to a broad public in a convincing way. If there is a general lack of a feeling of pedagogical responsibility in this academic field vis-a-vis the general public, an ivory-tower mentality, then it should surprise no one if that general public is more poorly-educated about the background and creation of the Bible than it is about most subjects.

Yesterday, online, I came across someone whose tagline reads "question everything," and who expressed the opinion, which is widely found among New Atheists and people who question Jesus' historical existence, that the Genesis story of Noah and the flood was "obviously directly plagiarized" from the Epic of Gilgamesh. I responded to this person that apparently the assumption that this "plagiarism" had not only occurred but that it was obvious and direct did not appear to be included in the "everything" of the person's tagline. This person hasn't gotten back to me yet. I've been wondering whether the response, if and when it comes, will include the assumption that I am a Christian interested in upholding a fundamentalist reading of the Bible. Such assumptions are quite common when I make such remarks. I'm so often prematurely labeled a Christian by New Atheists that I've been getting quite weary of correcting them on that point. Some friends of mine don't usually bother to make such corrections. Yesterday I thought for a short while about joining them in that respect, when I had a, you will please excuse the faddish expression, come-to-Jesus moment. Why had I bothered to communicate with this person at all? Was it only for the sake of making them look (even) sillier to a small onlooking group of my friends and admirers? Or was I actually trying to make them question whether their assumption about Gilgamesh and Noah might be, not necessarily wrong, but perhaps hasty?

It was the latter. I was actually trying to get through to them and convince them not to believe everything they read at jesusneverexisted.com or -.org, and not to mistrust everything said by an academic Biblical scholar other then the famous (in our circles) few who are skeptical on the Jesus question.

I have a feeling that the mainstream of today's Biblical scholars, who are so annoyed with all of these New Atheists for showing their scholarship so little respect, indeed so little heed whatsoever, have themselves brought about this state of affairs, by the lack of the will to make themselves and their work understood. Let's not forget, the New Atheists, who make the Biblical scholars cringe with their constantly-showing lack of competence in Biblical scholarship, include, indeed to a great extent are led by, Richard Dawkins. Who is about as far from a tinfoil-hat-wearing, global-warming-denying conspiracy theorist as one can be, so much for Bart Ehrman's thesis, with a mention of which I began this essay. Dawkins and many other New Atheists are in fact superbly well informed about global warming, aliens etc. The Biblical scholars are right that the New Atheists, even including Dawkins, are appallingly ignorant about fields of inquiry involving and overlapping with theirs. But how long are they going to stand pat with explanations of this state of affairs such as that the New Atheists are former fundamentalists who still apply fundamentalist preconceptions to the study of the Bible, and smile at the others in their little clique about how ignorant those people are who criticize them, before they actually decide to take responsibility, some responsibility, for the public being so ill-informed about their specialty? In the final analysis, whose fault can this be except the specialists'?

It's certainly easier simply to find fault and shake one's head and tell one another in the clique how learned and misunderstood you are.

Let's take the historicist/mythicist fooferah. 1) If on the one hand the number of specialists in the New Testament who are not strictly historicist is actually higher than the public perceives, whose fault could that mistaken perception possibly be except the specialists'? 2) If on the other hand the firmly-historicist position is so obviously correct to anyone with a basic grasp of the evidence as Ehrman, Crossan, Smith et al have insisted, whose fault can it possibly be that this obviousness has yet to be disseminated among people bright enough that they have no trouble understanding a consensus of meteorologists or evolutionary biologists?

I've been continuing to read the standard works of New Testament scholarship. And over and over I've been reading about how, although it's now agreed that the New Testament can tell us little if anything about what Jesus did or said, it has nevertheless by now been so firmly established that Jesus did exist that mythicism has been relagated to the realm of extremists and cranks, to tinfoil-hat territory -- wait wait, what?! Where was that firmly established? And how exactly? Yes, I missed it too, this convincing evidence they all insist is there. (WHERE?! Why TF can't any of them just point it out to me, or summarize, as the case may be, the dizzyingly-complex process by which clarity was achieved?) Gentle readers, I promise you, as soon as I gain the faintest glimmer of what these people are talking about when they say it's firmly established, if and when I ever have that come-to-Jesus moment, I will let you know.