**DrDeth, **look, I get we all don’t remember and can’t find certain things we thought was said. And it wouldn’t surprise me if you could find an evangelical or fundamentalist apologist source saying it somewhere, but unless they actually could document any of these skeptics doubting Pilate’s existence in some credible major work before the stone was uncovered, then please don’t use that charge again, and let’s just move on. Too many other interesting things to talk about.
Can’t say I’ve read it, have read a few reviews on it. Neil Godfrey does a constructive critique of it, and was fair with him. Several good parts, I liked one of the things Neil singled out and gives credit to Reza when he says:
For every well-attested, heavily researched, and eminently authoritative argument made about Jesus, there is an equally well-attested, equally researched, and equally authoritative argument opposing it. (p. xx) Think about this, each and ever time such a discussion like this comes about.
Reza has a Jesus that he thought was married. I’ve read from another book that made that claim, and that’s the reason I didn’t get this one because I thought they were simply inventing how they wanted their Jesus to be. How well does Reza do here? I get that it would have been more popular for Jesus to have been married, but it seems the writers who made the gospels managed to get plenty of mileage of sticking with a single, celibate Jesus.
I see where Reza mentions the Essenes. If I can find it, McCabe argues that the Essenes would have fit in well for Jesus, since he wasn’t married, and gives some plausible arguments for it. I think you’ll enjoy those. Might be able to find it on-line somewhere as well. I’ll check and see.
Neil also gives Reza credit for NOT going with the Josephus’ Testimonium Flavianum, but he does on the other part. Says Neil:
In ancient and medieval times, uneducated and illiterate people probably comprised nearly 90% of the population. Literacy was so rare that “benefit of clergy” was based on the fact that hardly anybody but the clergy possessed it.
And even today, there are many educated, literate Fundamentalists, so I reject your claim that education automatically meant a liberal interpretation in the past.
As for theologians, “taking the Bible literally” is often a straw man. As I said in the post you responded to, of course theologians have allowed for allegory, poetry, figures of speech like “the four corners of the earth,” etc., so by that standard, they didn’t take the Bible literally. But before the Enlightenment, none of them doubted the basic historicity of the Bible stories, like the Flood, the Exodus, the Conquest, etc., as well as what we would call young-earth creation. And even in the last 500 years, the default position has always been that the Bible is historically accurate, and that position is held on any particular fact until the preponderance of evidence makes it untenable.
What makes Fundamentalists unusual is that they hold to the historicity of the Bible even after it has become untenable. But before 1700 or so, there was very little daylight between fundies and any other large Christian denomination with regard to the historicity of the Bible. Mainstream Catholics and Protestants most certainly did not think that the historical parts of the Bible were never intended to be taken as historical, as sophisticated Christians try to pretend today.
I’ve had Aslan’s Zealot at my side while posting in this thread; I thought I’d mentioned it but now see I haven’t. (Searching does show that I informed SDMB six years ago when I ordered the book!)
While Aslan emphasizes that Jesus was a a revolutionary, he also affirms that Jesus was a healer and exorcist — Jesus’ power as healer is a main theme in the earliest Gospels — but he treats it as commonplace: there were several such “men of deeds” in competition with Jesus, a main difference being that Jesus offered his healing for free. Anti-Christians did not argue that Jesus did not work miracles; they argued that he did so with dark magic prohibited by the Law of Moses.
In his discussion of Jesus’ miracles, Aslan makes one claim that startled me. After healing a leper in 8:4 of Matthew’s Gospel (“And Jesus saith unto him, See thou tell no man; but go thy way, shew thyself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded, for a testimony unto them.”) Aslan says that “Jesus is joking,” that his is a sarcastic swipe at the Jewish Temple.
ETA: Aslan also claims that the early readers of the Gospels did NOT take stories like Bethlehem literally, and weren’t intended to. They understood the concept of mythic embellishments even if later Christians did not.
Medieval maybe, but the scads of ancient graffiti shows that many of the ancients could at least read and write “Brutus sucks it”.
“People called Romanes, they go, the house.”
You are talking apples and oranges. I was talking about the authors and you are talking about later interpreters. Certainly some of the Old Testament was a recording of tribal “histories” and intended to be taken as such. I was unclear that I was referring to the New Testament in my comments. The intent of the original authors and the interpretations given them by later readers bear little resemblance.
Actually, the Christians had a higher death rate than the Jews and Muslims (I don’t know about the pagans) because those two religions have a concept of ‘ritual purity’ that involves washing and sanitation rules that resulted a lower probability of getting the plague in the first place. Of course, the Christians then leaped to the conclusion of ‘sorcery’ as the obvious explanation and killed as many, or more, Jews as the plague didn’t kill.
AFAIK Xian fundamentalism is a fairly recent development, maybe a century old. Fundamentalism “usually has a religious connotation that indicates unwavering attachment to a set of irreducible beliefs.[1] However, fundamentalism has come to be applied to a tendency… characterized by a markedly strict literalism as it is applied to certain specific scriptures, dogmas, or ideologies…”
A Xian fundamentalist holds that every word of their favorite biblical anthology is an inerrant proclamation of their all-mighty deity - except those bothersome OT bits the NT superseded. Any interpretation is a heresy. But seeing scriptures as symbolic, not meant to be taken literally, has the deity not meaning what it says and not saying what it means. Thus an interpreter can make biblical texts mean whatever they want.
That’s the problem with biblical historicism. It’s either literal nonsense or symbolic sophistry.
again, Cite?
Don’t know about the higher death rates, but I imagine Deltree is extrapolating that from all of the synoptic teachings of Jesus concerning his teachings of not washing your hands.
Some religious sites want to say, if Jesus hands were dirty he really would have washed them, but by not doing so because it is some kind of a symbolic ritual of cleansing or some other explanation. It sounds post-hoc, since many know about germ-theory today, and know how unhealthy it would have been to be doing so.
I don’t have to imagine it. There is a prominent person today who does just that. Sorry to go a bit off-topic.
(Due to the length of your message I’m assuming you weren’t being sarcastic.)
Sorry, I didn’t realize you knew the original authors personally.
And I repeat, I’m amazed that anyone would assume that. How could I have made it more obvious?
This discussion seems to be veering. One confusion is a mindset that the Gospels are either 100% true or 100% false. These extremes may describe fundamentalists and extreme skeptics, respectively, but they don’t apply to most of us.
Example 1:
The mindset here seems to be that EITHER “faith healing” can cure ANY disease or it can cure NONE of them.
EITHER (What?) OR (What?). I think some of the Bible is historical. Which fancy phrase applies to me?
And** TonySinclair **failed to come up with a cite for that claim.
Cherry-picker, probably. Pick what may be corroborated elsewhere, or what you just find satisfying, and ignore the rest. That’s how Gawd-Is-Love apologists deal with biblical calls for infanticide, genocide, slavery, family abuse, etc.
I have trouble reconciling oral tribal histories, transcribed after many generations, with claims of holy textual inerrancy. Either Jehovah mumbles and is misunderstood, or human transcribers missed much, or it’s not to be taken seriously. Genesis rides on at least three incompatible origin myths. Exodus is bolstered by zero archaeological evidence. Major Gospel events don’t match known history. What a pickle!
Believers are free to pick whatever texts they want to justify themselves. Be sure to sell your daughters into slavery.
Wait, you want a cite for the claim that the Black Death devastated Europe at a time when it was 90% Christian? And not just nominally Christian like many today, and not “sophisticated” Christians who say the Bible was never meant to be taken literally, but Christians whose faith was solid as a rock, because there was no theory of evolution, no geology, no cosmology, no archaeology, and no pinko libtard atheist professors poisoning their minds?
My mindset is that “faith healing” as the term is used today can cure none of them, or at best, only ills that were psychosomatic in the first place. More commonly, it’s an utter fraud. Modern hucksters use hidden radios and the power of suggestion; in earlier times, they just used confederates in the audience.
If it were the manifestation of the powers of an omnipotent God, then of course it would be able to cure any disease.
It’s one of several empirical tests that Jesus very generously gave us to see whether or not the gospels were true.
At the end of Mark, he says:
There is not a Christian alive (for long) who would take that challenge. Note that the passage doesn’t say anything about not tempting God, or other excuses used to explain away passages like this – it doesn’t just say that if you’re minding your own business and a snake sneaks up behind you and strikes, you will be OK; it says you can deliberately pick up the snake, as late lamented snake handlers do. It doesn’t just say that you will be OK if your evil wife slips you some poison; it says you can drink anything without harm. And it doesn’t just say you can cure the sick on occasion, if the malady isn’t too serious; it says if you lay hands on them, they ***will ***recover. Who knows how many children have died needlessly because the faith of their parents was so strong that they didn’t feel the need of a doctor?
Jesus gave us even easier tests. You don’t need to find a snake or a sick person to demonstrate your faith; he says with faith, you get anything you ask for. He even gives a couple of examples to demonstrate that it doesn’t have to be something noble or unselfish — killing a fig tree for not having fruit (even though it was the wrong season for fruit), and casting a mountain into the sea. The first just spiteful, the second just showing off. Again, you will never find a Christian who can demonstrate this power for you, because it is a lie.
The apologist’s excuse is that our faith isn’t strong enough for it to work. But Jesus said the smallest speck of faith was enough. And by the way, he also said you had to have faith to be saved. So if you can’t move mountains, heal the sick, and raise the dead, what makes you think you have enough faith to go to heaven?
I didn’t demand these empirical tests. They were offered, unsolicited, by Jesus. And they all fail. I don’t know what could be more clear.
There’s a simple test of belief. Has a so-called follower abandoned their wealth and family? If not, they don’t believe. Oops, better skip parts of Matthew and Luke. Civilization would collapse if gospels were taken seriously.