That is a non sequitur.
You think it’s foolish to go by what the gospels actually say, even while you admit it’s accepted practice for them to exaggerate. I think it’s foolish to go by what you want to believe, without any scriptural basis.
I will agree to disagree.
But you are factually wrong about Passover. Deut 16:16 says that all males will go to the Temple each year, not once in their lives. I concede I don’t know how faithfully that was followed in the 1st century.
Apparently it was followed very faithfully:
“The entire Jewish nation converged on Jerusalem from all corners of the ancient world to celebrate Passover in the Holy City. Some lived nearby, and had a comparatively easy journey; some came from neighboring lands and others traveled great distances, even from as far away as Rome. The pilgrims came in caravans, numbering hundreds and sometimes even thousands of participants. Each group brought the obligatory “half-shekel” donation to the Temple treasury, on behalf of their respective constituency.”
This is attested by Philo of Alexandria, writing during the time that Jesus lived.
Actually, three times a year.
I don’t see your analogy as particularly persuasive.
It also seems to betray an fundamental misunderstanding of the roles of the Supreme Court and historians. SCOTUS justices are rarely looking at the evidence of any particular case but rather the interpretation of the constitution. Their philosophical views directly contribute to the questions before the court. Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are viewed as originalists, with a belief that the constitution is a fixed static document.
The Supreme Court justices are selected after a much longer formative period. They have developed their philosophical views and have ruled on them for decades in lower courts. Their records and views are plain, readily apparent and fairly consistent. They were nominated by a president because of their philosophical views and they continue to hold them.
There is no expectation to perform their job 100% “objectively” because it’s impossible. There is no one single way to interpret the constitution.
OTOH, historians face an entirely different job. It is their job to look at the evidence objectively and to question their own biases while they do. Obviously, there are those who do not follow this on both sides of the issues. There are religious historians who let their beliefs cloud their judgement, as well as other such as the atheist Richard Carrier who IMHO lets his beliefs color his interpretation.
The argument that historians carry the same bias based on their views in high school is a stretch because people often change their views from high school in later life. I was highly religious as a teenager but am an atheist now, something which many, many people also have similar journeys. I frequent another message board of fellow ex-Mormons, and the number of people who have quit run into the thousands or tens of thousands there.
Your assertion that it is almost impossible to overcome childhood indoctrination through logic and reasoning is based on nothing outside of pure speculation and is directed contradicted by empirical evidence.
You argue that we are dealing with a subset of people who self select to study the New Testament, but I have listened to or read from a number of scholars who do are agnostic or atheist and do not have this religious bias.
Having an interest in ancient history is not limited to the pious. I find it incredulous that the only reason scholars would be interested in Biblical studies is because of their current beliefs. Look at the number of people who are interested and debate this issue, and you see a whole spectrum of religious views.
Dr. Dale Martin, a professor of religious studies at Yale University recounts his faith crisis as a post graduate student when he found he could no longer support his life-long fundamentalist views including the inerrancy of the Bible. There is an excellent Open Course series on the New Testament which records his lectures.
He rejects much of the other information in the books of the New Testament as not being historical facts. He does accept the historical Jesus because of how he judges the evidence.
Bart Ehrman is another scholar who is agnostic atheist and accepts the historic Jesus along with the baptism and crucifixion.
Martin addresses this and discusses how historians must be aware of their biases. I think you are underestimating the ability of historian to objectively weigh evidence.
The fact that the baptism was unrecorded is not surprising. That cannot be used as a criteria for judging most of the evidence from that period because we expect that it wouldn’t have been recorded.
Historians only have the Gospels for most of their evidence, and as such carefully weigh that against known cultural information. The difficulty of doing so is such that most historians only accept the baptism and the crucifixion as the only two events which most of them agree.
The argument for the including baptism is because it would have made Jesus into a follower of John, which the authors of the Gospels would have seen as an embarrassment. Jesus would have been in lower status to John. There actually isn’t a positive aspect for Jesus to have been a follower of John, but because it was known that he was, the writers had to spin the fact.
So Mathew’s spin is that John recognized him as a superior, something not likely to have been historical. It would have been much more likely that Jesus was a disciple of John and branched out on his own.
John, which was written later than the synoptic Gospels, does not directly have John the Baptist actually baptize Jesus, however since the encounter was recorded then historians accept this as evidence of the relationship.
There is good evidence that John the Baptist existed and was engaged in that activity. While that does not itself prove the case, it does provide some evidence.
There are historians who believe that Jesus being of Nazareth is also likely because it flies in the face of the expectation that a messiah would not come from there. However, not all of them agree that this rises to the same level.
Historians not only accept the crucifixion because of the accounts in the Bible, but also because it makes sense in the historical setting.
In another example there are some historians who believe that the sign above Jesus on the cross is likely to be historical, but others reject that.
If you don’t mind me asking, you state that you believe the Jesus is historical. How do you accept that? Aren’t most of the arguments for the historical Jesus made by Biblical scholars, who shouldn’t be trusted? Or do you accept that on reasons outside of those given by historians?
According to contemporary sources, the pilgrimage was more of a mass thing: the Temple’s allegedly fabulous wealth depended on it. Of course, for most Jews living at the time, it was a lot easier to do than the Hajj: Judea is a very small area, and most still lived in Judea. We don’t know how faithfully it was observed, of course.
On a personal observation note, travelling to view the ruins of the Temple today still gives one a sense of the scale of the Herod re-build. All that is left is the retaining walls (the “Western” or “Wailing Wall”) holding up the Temple Mount. That wall is truly gigantic - the Temple must have been an extraordinary sight.
Excellent post.
I strongly disagree that Supreme Court justices are not expected to look at the evidence in their cases, or to be as objective as possible. But that’s another debate, so I’ll just have to live with the fact that you don’t like my analogies.
So we agree on that.
But I’m not talking about all people and all views on all subjects. I’m talking about Christians, i.e. people who believe that the NT was the most important document ever written, who decide to devote their lives to studying it. Surely you can see that that’s a special case.
But there are billions of people who adopt the religion they were taught and never change, so there’s no use in trying to impress me with ten thousand.
Oops, you accidentally cut off my assertion right before it said that was true only for a certain type of person, and that it had nothing to do with intelligence or education. As a former altar boy myself, I’m well aware there are degrees of susceptibility.
And you are mistaken that it is pure speculation; there is abundant empirical evidence that it’s true. All you have to do is look at a map of the world that is colored according to the dominant religion of the various countries. You will notice that Latin America is mostly Catholic, eastern Europe is mostly Orthodox, the Middle East is mostly Muslim, etc. Of course not everyone in Turkey (picking a Muslim country with a secular government) is Muslim, and not every Muslim in Turkey is devout, but the fact remains that if you pick 100 adult Turks at random, you’re likely to find 50 or more devout Muslims and no more than one or two devout Roman Catholics, with the numbers reversed if you pick 100 Mexicans at random. I guess it’s possible that it’s just a coincidence it comes out that way, but I doubt it.
Obviously, even a devout layman may not spend as much time studying religion as a scholar, but any intellectually curious adult with access to a library or the internet is going to be aware that his religion, no matter what it is, is in the minority, and that the distribution of religion is not random, and that it’s possible that he believes in X only because he was taught to do so before he could think for himself. But it doesn’t seem to matter; most people who think about that end up thanking their God that they were born into the correct religion.
Well, we are. Nobody held a gun to their heads, although I imagine there are a few who did it to please Dad or whatever.
Then, obviously, I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about the ones who grew up Christian, and remain Christian. And since you seem not to notice when I qualify my statements, let me clarify that I didn’t say that anything a Christian NT scholar says is crap; I said that if I disagree with his conclusions about an issue on which I feel reasonably informed, I’m not as ready to defer to his expertise as I would to, say, a physicist.
And I find it incredible that in an attempt to refute my assertion of unconscious bias, you so completely (and unconsciously, I’m sure) distort what I say. I haven’t said anything remotely resembling that there is no reason to be interesed in Biblical studies than a belief in Christianity or Judaism. In fact, I’m a devout agnostic, and I would say that with regard to the God of the Bible, I’m a hard atheist, and yet I probably spend more time posting about the Bible than on any other subject, because I keep trying to understand how anyone can believe it’s divinely inspired.
I’ve heard Martin’s lectures, and I’ve read Ehrman’s books, and I’m well aware that there are other scholars whose logic circuits have not been short-circuited when they examine their own beliefs. But my scandalous opinion is, the fact that 100% of Biblical scholars are not agnostic is proof that on the whole, humans aren’t rational about their religion.
Surveys show that the typical Christian knows next to nothing about the Bible, and I find that very comforting, because it explains how they can believe it’s divinely inspired — they’re simply ignorant of its contents. I like it when things make sense.
But Biblical scholars don’t have that excuse, and I have spent the last few decades wondering how in the world a Christian scholar can say, "Oh, of course this genealogy was fabricated, and of course Matthew contradicts Luke’s infancy narrative in order to present a higher truth, and of course when Jesus said that you would get anything you prayed for he was speaking allegorically, and of course when Jesus said that he would return within a generation he was speaking symbolically, and of course when Jesus said believers would be able to drink poison and heal the sick he didn’t mean it literally, etc., etc.
“But when he said that anybody who believes in him will have eternal life, that was literally true.”
I realize that scholars dealing with the historical Jesus don’t address the supernatural, but I don’t see why they are immune to that sort of inconsistency, where scholars dealing with Biblical exegesis are not.
To me, a devout X, where X is any organized religion I’ve ever heard of, is just as irrational as a young earth creationist, or a climate change denier. If someone like that is clearly intelligent and educated, then I have no other explanation than that his brain is wired differently than mine. Either he was more susceptible to childhood indoctrination, or he is more susceptible to the comfort and certainty that religion offers.
I’m sorry if it sounds arrogant to say I’m right and they’re wrong, especially when they know much more about the scriptures and their historical context than I do, but I can’t make myself ignore the IMO obvious disconnect between their evidence and their conclusions. And it’s also true that no matter what faith or denomination they are, the majority of religious scholars also think they are wrong, so it’s not like I’m the only one.
I have no problem with it being unrecorded. I accept it (minus the heavenly endorsement), as I accept most of the mundane events in Jesus’ life. My problem is with putting it into the top two of the most certain events of his life, because IMO it is no more certain than any other plausible but unrecorded event.
All I can say is I disagree. To give another analogy that you won’t like, I’d say being baptized by JtB is like a Presidential candidate graduating from Harvard. I suppose that his enemies could say that he is subordinate to his commie professors, but he has to go to college somewhere, and for most people, going to the most prestigious college is a plus. But being accused of being born in Nazareth is like a Presidential candidate being accused of being born in Kenya. He has to go to great lengths to prove that he was actually born in the US.
More distortion. I didn’t say they shouldn’t be trusted. I expect that they have their facts as accurate as possible, and that they are not consciously lying about them. But I do think that in forming their conclusions, they are more susceptible to unconscious bias than someone in the hard sciences, and therefore I’m not as likely to defer to them when IMO the evidence doesn’t support their conclusions. In other words, they’re only human.
As for my opinion on Jesus being a real person, AFAIK I came to that on my own, so long ago that I don’t remember the details, but it has been several decades since I came to the conclusion that the lengths Matthew and Luke went to in order to explain why he wasn’t “Jesus of Bethlehem” are strong evidence for a real “Jesus of Nazareth.”
But even without that, I wouldn’t have a problem accepting that Jesus existed, because if you don’t accept the supernatural stuff, it really makes no difference whether he lived or not. If I claim to have seen Elvis appear to me after his death, and then float up into the sky, does it make any difference to your opinion of my testimony that Elvis undoubtedly was a real person?
ETA: and I made a New Year’s Resolution to spend less time writing long posts that will be read by five people, and will impress zero, so I’m going to call this a wrap.
You are mistaking Facts and Faith. One can be unsure of the facts, or even dubious- but still take Eternal Life, etc completely on Faith.
Going back to this, it’s not clear in your various posts which scholars are you attempting to presume are biased and unable to overcome that. You’ve stated that people who choose to study Biblical history because they feel that it is the most important book while ignoring the very real other possibilities for other reasons to be interested in them.
My objection was that you seemed to be painting all Biblical scholars as Christians, or at least ones who were so before high school, and hence at least subconsciously biased.
I would agree that it can be extremely confusing and there are many who are biased. However, my argument is that there are sufficient numbers of Biblical scholars who are able to be critical enough to be treated as we would any other historians. Two of which are those I named in my previous post: Dale Martin and Bart Ehrman. There are many, many others. I will label this type of scholar as “critical scholars” although the ones who let their biases show would likely feel annoyed to not be included in this category.
Critical scholars do not get a free pass on whatever they say or write. Like anyone else, they should be scrutinized.
This was an analogy which you mentioned several times and are unwilling to defend it? I did mention several specifics to the details of the differences so anytime you are interested in supporting your arguments it still is here.
Your statements are all over the place any you employ confusing terms. It was not at all clear who you were referring to.
You are acknowledging that there are Biblical scholars such as Martin and Ehrman who are unbiased. As such, we can restrict our discussion to these sort of critical scholars. We can cut out all the other discussion concerning people changing religion or not.
Yet you made it a point to specifically emphasis it, calling it a “completely unrecorded baptism” which is meaningless in a discussion purely about the historicity of this event. It does seem that you are addressing believers with that sort of wording as critical thinkers would not expect it to be recorded.
Here is an interesting point for discussion. Let’s go back and see what you posted earlier.
My emphasis.
Your ridicule is addressed to believers and not to the critical historians who do not assume and in fact reject the notion that it would have happened as was portrayed in the Gospels. They also do not look at any supposed miraculous events.
Yet these critical scholars still do list it as one of the events they feel the most sure about.
You yourself believe it was likely to be true so why don’t you accept that critical scholars would also agree? Or do you? I really can’t tell what you are arguing because your points conflate all scholars with non-critical believers.
Looking at why the majority of scholars agree on only the two events and not others such as Jesus being of Nazareth, we have to look at two points, why do critical scholars agree on the former and why do some disagree on the latter, if in fact they don’t.
I wrote some comments earlier and will address yours.
You are correct that I don’t like the analogy. I hope you don’t also neglect this one after my rebuttal.
This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the act of baptism by early first century Jews. It was not at all a universal act, which you seem to be implying with your analogy because “he has to go to college somewhere.” If you believe that all Jews needed to be or were baptized, then I’ll need to ask for a cite, since this is contrary to their customs. There was some who performed this ritual, including the Essenes, and it was a requirement in to convert to Judaism, but it was not performed for the masses.
Hence, for this reason alone, your analogy fails. In addition, there is no indication that being baptized by JtB was actually prestigious. This is purely conjecture on your part and is not supported by any evidence I’ve seen.
Third, as I wrote earlier and I will further explain, accepting baptism by JtB implies a disciple-teacher relationship which is entirely different than taking a course from a professor at Harvard. The view is not that Jesus simply was baptized but that he became an disciple.
I also agree that it’s likely that Jesus was born there. However, the question is why some scholars don’t accept that, if in fact they don’t. I don’t recall any real arguments from critical scholars which implies that they don’t so it could well be that this is a given. Because it’s not an “event” it may well be that this is also accepted. If so, then the only point we really disagree about is your arguments concerning JtB, which a cite would significantly help your cause.
How convenient.
Allow me to suggest the following …
What is under discussion is those element of the Christian narrative that most warrant provisional acceptance, i.e., that least warrant the suspicion of fabrication.
In the case of Nazareth, one could easily imagine the author of gMat having Jesus born in Nazareth in order to align the story with Micah 5 - the kind of “filling-in-he-blanks” that has somewhat of a midrashic quality.
Right, I don’t have the balls to face your irrefutable logic. Either that, or I consider the objectivity of Christian NT scholars a very minor point in the scheme of things, and I don’t want to spend two hours a day arguing about it, especially with someone who takes something I wrote where I state EXACTLY what I’m referring to with an “i.e. …”, and instead of addressing that, puts “his emphasis” on it by ignoring the “i.e.” and putting what came before and after it in boldface. Or who sees analogies as something to attack, rather than as an aid to understanding my viewpoint.
Guess what, it’s not hard to find differences between a 20th century term at Harvard and a first-century baptism. But congratulations, anyway.
I think you must mean Bethlehem rather than Nazareth in the bolded portion. If so, then yes.
Thanks. Actually, I should have said “from Nazareth.”
Odd that you would have used the Supreme Court justices example several times and argued the point for many more times for something so very minor and stated stated that is was something you feel very strongly about. It does sounds like you feel very strongly about very minor points.
I did not ignore your i.e., please go back and reread --or read-- my response.
I accepted that your i.e. was referring to your statement which you further explained and addressed your point. I also specifically addressed the object of your i.e. below.
You stated:
From my response
As noted, since baptism was not an ordination performed for everyone, Biblical scholars believe that accepting that ritual implied becoming a disciple of JtB. This obviously would not be a person who is one of a mob. It does look like you are relying exclusively on Luke for this account and not taking into consideration the Jewish customs.
On the contrary, your analogies are very clear at demonstrating your viewpoints and I address them directly, such as baptism not being for everyone and it not necessarily being seen as prestigious, neither of which you have offered a rebuttal and I’m still waiting for a cite.
And oddly enough, I only mentioned one difference which was a point you directly stated, so I found zero differences on my own. Nor did I nitpick or bring up any other of the obvious differences.
You guys take this way too serious. What I suggest everyone do at least once a month is to drive as far away from the big city as you can. Relax. Get away from the bullshit. Roll up a fat joint, smoke it and stare at the moon and the stars and just relax. Seriously. This religion shit is just to much. It’s going to kill us all
It seems to me that adolescent trolling use to be far more entertaining.
It’s against the rules to refer to someone as a troll.
Warning issued. Please don’t do it again.
Doesn’t narrative mean it was fabricated?
For example, when Kennedy called up troops and boats to blockade Russian missels, was that a “narrative” or, is it part of actual, historical fact???
let me rephrase this
When Cesar surround Vercingetorix and his forces, they built a wall around the city. Then they built another wall to keep people from outside in the countryside attacking from the back. They starved out Vercingetorix and his forces. There was a big battle at the end and Vercingetorix lost.
Is this narrative or is it part of the historical record? It dates from the same period as the question at hand, concerning Jesus.
(whether people inside the walled city actually at shoes and belts because they were so hungry would probably be part of the narrative of this story)