In the report on the census of Quirinius, it is said that the miscalculation of Dionysius Exiguus (Dennis the Fat)placed the birth of Jesus in AD 1. Not quite. D.E. placed the bris (i.e. circumcision) of Jesus as January 1, 0001 A.D. (which is why, until recent years, January 1 has been celebrated as the Feast of the Circumcision). D.E. actually had Jesus’ birth as December 25, 0001 B.C., which is why we celebrate Christmas on December 25, not January 1.
Here’s the link to the report.
On this site, John P. Pratt argues that Herod didn’t die until 1AD, and the most likely date for Jesus’s birth is shortly before on Dec 29, 1 BC. Some of his supporting arguments are pretty weak (e.g that Jesus lived exactly 33 years - a tradition due more likely to liturgical concerns than to history) and he seems biased toward finding the traditional date to be the correct one, but his main argument, that a lunar eclipse reported in Josephus is more likely to have been the early evening eclipse of 1 BC than the late-night eclipses of 4 and 5 BC, seems reasonable to me.
However, he must disregard the coins that date Herod’s successors to 4-3 BC. He does this by suggesting they antedated their reign: although the reign began in AD 1, they counted that as the 5th year of their reign.
Does anyone know if such antedating was common in antiquity?
What was Quirinius’ middle name, anyway? The report shows it as “Sculpinius” (in section 1) and “Sulpicius” (in section 2).
I think the whole analysis done by the Straight Dope advisory guy is very disengenuous. He states categorically that Luke was wrong. It didn’t take me long to surf the net to find some very plausible explanations for many of his arguments.
Personally, I put my stock in Luke over some schmuck here at the Straight Dope.
Sorry.
I have just a small comment on your discussion of the Lucan census, which seems by and large fine to me. But at the end you refer to a “common or garden variety” something or other, clearly assuming (as most people do) that the two words are synonyms. In fact it’s my understanding that the phrase originated as a way of differentiating between two kinds of plants or flowers, the common kind, which grow wild in the fields and hedgerows, and the garden kind, which people plant and cultivate. One would use the phrase in that sense, I suppose, to say “I surround myself with roses, common or garden variety makes no difference to me.” Or “All novels delight me, common or garden variety.” One could then insert “whether” to make it clear (“whether common or garden variety”).
I have not pursued the question, but I actually think treating the two words as antonyms rather than synonyms makes sense.
Where? The closest to that that I could find was “The remainder of Luke’s account is also highly improbable (I’m being generous here),”
People who are already convinced that the Bible is true will find anything is “plausible”.
Around here, we tend to prefer recent, well researched and documented reports to centuries old collections of legends and rumours. Sorry.
What was the reason for the use of “Galilee” at one point and “the Galilee” at another?
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Mind sharing what you found? Cecil Adams and the authors of the Staff Reports have never been afraid of rebuttals.
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Namecalling. Nice. :rolleyes:
I should also note that having met him, CKDexterHaven is not just “some schmuck.”
He’s a very special schmuck.
<< It didn’t take me long to surf the net to find some very plausible explanations for many of his arguments. >>
I omitted those arguments because they are generally either ludicrous or just plain silly.
The one argument – that Quirinius served two different terms – has not been disproved, but there is no evidence backing it up either, beyond the author’s speculation. The existence of invisible leprechauns hiding under my desk hasn’t been “disproved” either, but I’m disinclined to present it as a serious possibility.
If you check other Bible-related staff reports that I have done, I have usually bent over backwards to present the “traditional” arguments. In this case, the “traditional” arguments just don’t hold together logically, and require much more stretching than I am willing to do.
On the “common or garden” variety, I believe the expression is British, where the “garden” means the backyard. (I’m travelling, so don’t have access to my info sources to confirm.)
On the spelling of Quirinius’s middle name, thanks, we’ll correct.
On “Galilee” vs “the Galilee”, both terms are used. It’s not like “the Bronx” (see Archives!) or “The Hague” where it is incorrect to omit the “the.”
That cover all the bases?
Couple of comments:
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BCE stands for “Before Common Era” not “Before Christian …”
I can only assume that this was a way of avoiding problems with
non-Christian biblical scholars who may have felt the term too offensive. This is only a guess; someone else may have a better
explaination -
From my very limited reading of Roman history and the Bible, and various commentaries, I get the impression that exact dates were not that important and that if you were off by a few years, who cared? What counted were that the events happened even though not necessarily in that order. One can look at the Synoptic Gospels and point out the that events were switched around from one from another (e.g., Jesus in the wilderness for 40 days, the order of temptations are switched from one Gospel to the next). The same goes with the Hebrew Bible when parallel stories are told about various kings (Chronicals vs. Kings, etc.). Their world view about time would seem quite alien to us. I know it’s a stretch to use the Bible as an example to some folks, but remember it is a compilation of various books and the theme of not quite getting the time just right reoccurs again and again.
So if Luke got it wrong, assuming the events were written 80 years after the fact (of course, there’s plenty of argument on this date too), I’ll cut him some slack. Having reread my hiking and biking log books from 25 years ago, I’m surprised at the capricious nature of memory which has caused me to distort or reorder events over time good and bad; but it didn’t deny the events happened.
P. S. Pardon my spelling
Continuing the discussion of “common or garden,” I’ve checked the OED, which says the phrase is “a jocular substitute for ‘common’, ‘ordinary’.” But in fact all the senses for “garden” in the OED entry have to do with cultivated space, never ordinary, and so I still think the “or” in the phrase suggests opposition rather than alternation.
CKDH’s explanation of “garden” as the British ‘backyard’ is certainly true–but the opposition is between cultivated space and the graveled or asphalted “yard” where one parks the car or houses animals. So that doesn’t actually clarify the issue, which comes down grammatically (as opposed to semantically) to the function of “or” in this phrase.
I truly don’t know the origin, and normally I’ll go with the OED over anything. Further, because the way language is used determines what the real meaning of a word or phrase means, I guess one would have to agree that by now this phrase simply means “ordinary.” But that also means that I have to accept that “enormity” just means the same thing as “enormousness,” and I’m not willing to give on that, now or in the decades to come. I guess I’ll do some work on slang dictionaries and so on. But I don’t think it can be resolved by looking at the meaning of the nouns by themselves. (In fact the American use of “yard” to mean what the British call a “garden” is just an extension of the word “yard” to mean a cultivated space. But the British use of “garden” is always cultivated–so that works for me, not against me.)
Yoou make a very common mistake that many scholars (at least you’re in good company) make when analyzing evidence for or against inofrmation in the bible.
First of all. Luke was there. He lived during this time frame. I think he is much more able to tell YOU when such and such ocurred than you can being several THOUSAND years. If there is an error, commonly what happens is when a neophyte like you tries to analyze what the bible says (thus, we have many cults) you neglect to go to the original language, in this case Greek.
The word used is “protos” Which can mean “first” for “BEFORE”. The original translators of this passage, not having available to them any archeological evidence to the contrary chose this to refer to the first cencus of Quirinius’ rule. It is OBVIOUS that this is the wrong use of the greek word protos knowing what we know now. Luke is referring to a census BEFORE Quirinius’ census.
You used no qualifiers in your statements. You chose to just say that Luke is wrong. You have stumbled unwittingly into the hole known as “arguing from negative evidence” plus not looking at the greek language.
Go back to school.
johnnygeneric
Gosh. I reread my post and my spelling was HORRIBLE! I am sorry about that. However, everything I wrote I stand by. Also, I’ve been having some trouble getting on. This is a VERY popular site.
Here is the URL of a PDF file located on John Ankerberg’s website. I’ve followed John Ankerberg’s work in the past and find his analyses of issues compelling and well thought out. He taps into the greatest contemporary minds to help people on difficult issues including cults and so-called discrepencies in the bible.
Unlike the Straight Dope writer who is so quick to throw out any Christian explanation (because, we all know Born-Again Christians have an AGENDA and atheists and agnostics don’t - hah!) I ask you to read his essay. Extremly clear and to the point.
http://www.ankerberg.com/Articles/_PDFArchives/theological-dictionary/TD1W1201.pdf
Could Luke be wrong? Possibly. But, let’s look at all the arguments instead of just saying “Luke was wrong”.
Man, I could write a better article. I am sorely disappointed.
Gosh, I hope I spelled things better this time!
johnnygeneric
For the sake of completeness, here is a rebuttal to most claims by fundamentalists that Luke and Matthew can be harmonized:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/quirinius.html#Word
By the way, Ankeberg’s last sentence, that Luke contains no errors of any sort, is enough to induce hysteria in serious Biblical scholars:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/lukeandjosephus.html
http://www.bowness.demon.co.uk/gosp2.htm
Luke, like every other book in the Bible, is infallible and error-free only to those who are ideologically precommitted to such a position.
P.S. CK Dexter Haven is Jewish, not atheist. And, contrary to what you say, I actually do trust a non-Christian to be less biased when answering questions about the Bible than a Christian, just like I’d expect a random group of 12 individuals to make a better decision about whether a man is guilty of a crime than his own mother. If the entire Bible is harmonized, it’s no skin off my teeth. As it now stands, I don’t know a single contradiction in any Hindu Scriptures (nor do you, I reckon), and yet neither of us are Hindus. On the other hand, evidence of error in the Bible would be quiet upsetting for an inerrantist Christian, and would thus warrant extensive harmonization efforts in order to shore up one’s faith.
Just when do you think Luke was born? 20BC? 30BC?
Again: where did he say that Luke is wrong?
Sometimes, that’s a valid tactic.
Quote from the article "Warning: If you believe that the New Testament has no errors and no inconsistencies, then please skip to Section 2. I wouldn’t want you to have a coronary or anything, and there’s no way that I can ride the fence on this one. "
He says there is no way he can ride the fence on this one, when in fact, he could.
Arguing from negative evidence has gotten more than one biblical scholar in trouble. It is NOT a valid tactic, because, it doesn’t really prove anything!
It was a bad article.
johnnygeneric
Your referenece to John Ankerberg saying Luke contains no errors of any sort is VERY misleading to the point of looking very deliberate. This shows how disengenuous atheists and agnostics are. The correct quote from Dr. Norman Geisler - he wrote the article NOT Ankerberg - is “His conclusion was that in references to thirty-two countries, fifty-four cities, and nine islands Luke made no mistakes!” This is NOT the same as saying what you claimed he said.
Time and time again, many atheists have argued over the centuries making claims where the bible is wrong, especially dealing with people or places and more often than not their claims have died due to new archaeological discoveries. The rest of the arguements are based on mis-translations of specific texts, be it KJV or whatever. Probably the most recent being the discovery of a reference to King David the past few years. Before that many people like you - basing their argument on NEGATIVE EVIDENCE would point and say the bible is flawed becasue there is no archaeologival evidence to back it up.
Could Luke be wrong? Could he have made mistakes in his book? Possibly. But to totally REJECT thoughtful scholarly ideas dealing with the census is MISLEADING and makes the Straighdope like like just plain Dope.
As far as this statement: “Luke, like every other book in the Bible, is infallible and error-free only to those who are ideologically precommitted to such a position” I suggest you read Lee Stroebels book called “The Case for Christ.” He was an atheist who started out to disprove the bible and in the end became a Christian. He was NOT ideologically precommitted towards Christianity.
Don’t be so closed minded. But, sigh, can I expect anymore from you? uh… NOPE!!
johnnygeneric
Italics mine.
Actually, in defending his positions, Ankerberg is fairly notorious for only tapping into the greatest comtemporary Christan fundamentalist minds. Most of the references footnoted on that monograph are fairly well know fundamentalist scholars. The only one I’m not familiar with is Ramsey, and the only one that can lay any claim to being even halfway independant is F.F. Bruce.
I think it’s pretty clear what he’s saying is “My opinion on this matter is so strong that I think it would be dishonest of me to pretend that it doesn’t exist”. To take it literally as “it is physically impossible for me to pretend that I don’t have an opinion” is ridiculous.
Oh, well, then. Now that’s YOU’VE PUT IN CAPS and added an exclamation mark, it must be true :rolleyes:.