The rest of that post struck me as pretty reasonable, but I would quibble at this part. Esther definitely seems to be a “historical fiction”, and more in the category of Jonah or Job than a retelling (even an exaggerated one) of anything that actually happened in the course of real human events. There was really such a place as the Persian Empire. Ahasuerus may have been based on, or intended to be, a real historical figure (such as Xerxes I / Khshayarsha). But the actual story itself (the beautiful Jewish girl who becomes Queen after winning some kind of empire-wide beauty contest, then valiantly saves her people from a wicked royal decree that, for some reason, the king himself can’t just annul)? About as likely to have any basis in historical fact as some bodice-ripping historical romance that happens to feature Alexander the Great or King Henry VIII or Josef Stalin or some other historical figure as a major character.
I give it the benefit of the doubt because I think we can date it reliably to the 4th century which would put it less than 100 years after the setting. That’s close enough that I think people would be suspicious if such a person didn’t exist. If I were to write a book about how Edith Wilson was de facto the first woman President due to Woodrow’s stroke, you might quibble over the facts, but it would be tough to quibble over her existence. Of course, the Book of Esther may have never been written as a history at all, but then I question why it was being written to justify Purim if it was meant to be taken as a fable or fiction? My inclination is that there was an Esther, she was a Jewess and was the king’s wife or concubine. Anything more than that may or may not be true.
A lot of those names are nothing but names (to me at least). What does it mean to say that a bare name refers to “not a real person”?
Let’s say, for the sake of example, that you put the “not a real person” divider between, oh, Addi and Melchi. So Melchi was a real person but Addi wasn’t. But, surely Melchi had a father—are we just saying we’re mistaken about what the guy’s name was?
Hypothetical lineage: My name is Mike, son of Dave, son of Chuck, son of Robert, son of Edward, son of Paul Bunyan. Now, while it is true that Edward did indeed have a dad, this does not in any way make Paul Bunyan a real person.
Then your answer should be “I don’t know”, shouldn’t it?
Heck, I think I’m about 10% myth, and I’m a real flesh and blood person alive at this point in time. Its just that stories about people are made up and enter common knowledge all the time. Historical truth can be very difficult to establish.
If someone claims that they can trace their lineage back to Adam and Eve, they just didn’t “get the names wrong”. It’s the same as if someone claimed that the Good Samaritan from Jesus’ tale was their many-times removed great grandfather.
David might certainly have been a real person (albeit the subject of a lot of “George Washington and the cherry tree” or “Charlemagne in The Song of Roland” exaggerations and myth-making). Going from David back towards “Adam”, things get mythical or legendary pretty fast; Boaz is from the Book of Ruth, which I don’t think has been mentioned, but also looks to be more in the genre of didactic fiction (along with Esther, Jonah, Job, or Daniel) than anything that’s likely to be historical record.
Going the other way, from David towards Jesus, Nathan is mentioned as a son of David in 2 Samuel 5:14 and 1 Chronicles 3:5. After that, that whole list of names is just “the son of random name you’ve never heard of, the son of random name you’ve never heard of…” (The two genealogies do seem to briefly match up at Matthew 1:12 and Luke 3:27, with Shealtiel and Zerubbabel, who can presumably also be found in Ezra 3:8; the writers of the Gospels may in turn have been identifying the father and son Shealtiel and Zerubbabel from Ezra with the grandfather and grandson of those names–who were listed as royal descendants in 1 Chronicles–but nothing else really matches up at all.)
Basically, nobody in the New Testament seems to know anything at all about Jesus before his adulthood (and the start of his career as a preacher or prophet or teacher or cult-leader or however you want to characterize him). Genealogies don’t match; events from his childhood and early life don’t match; nothing matches. There was apparently an early tradition of a virgin birth (thus found in Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark or John or the epistles), and Jewish tradition would say that the Messiah had to be a descendant of David and from Bethlehem, but Matthew and Luke don’t remotely agree on how you get from David to Jesus, nor do they even agree on how the family got to Bethlehem. In Matthew, that’s just where they’re from, I guess, and then the family flees to Egypt (after Herod’s massacre of the firstborn, not mentioned by anyone else that I am aware of, in or out of the Bible, even though various other unflattering stories were told about Herod in more-or-less contemporary sources) and eventually fetches up in Nazareth up in Galilee. In Luke, we have the absurd census in which the Roman Empire supposedly makes everyone go traveling all over the place to go back to the home town of their forefathers to be counted, then after the census and the birth they just go straight back to Nazareth. John just seems to think Jesus was from Galilee. John doesn’t mention the Virgin Birth either, in spite of having a very lofty and apotheosized view of Jesus.
Bottom line, Jesus probably wasn’t from Bethlehem–he was from Galilee–and if he was a descendant of David, it was presumably in the same way that everyone in Europe is probably a descendant of Charlemagne.
My guess would be Abraham (being a real person).
The Bible never stops being myth. The likelihood that it uses the name of an historical person increases in later sections but the historicity of the text is, essentially, nil. It probably compares to other heroic texts, Compare:
All mention actual people who once lived but none are accurate historically.
And then there is this:
Tel Aviv University archaeologist Ze’ev Herzog wrote in the Haaretz newspaper:
This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom. And it will come as an unpleasant shock to many that the God of Israel, YHWH, had a female consort and that the early Israelite religion adopted monotheism only in the waning period of the monarchy and not at Mount Sinai.
Probably not. If it’s a myth, the Council of Jerusalem is just a weird thing to make up. Luke-Acts falls very firmly within the genre of Greek Historiography. You could argue that he gets the history wrong and that the accounts he relies upon are biased, but they certainly don’t fall within the genre of mythic literature by any stretch of the imagination. There are arguments about the details, but it is largely thought that Acts relates relatively true happenings, though some likely false things do appear in it.
The"Council of Jerusalem" sounds a lot like the Jewish tradition of specifying The Law as seen in the Talmud. Nothing weird there really, and exactly what I would expect someone to “cite” if they wanted to demonstrate authority.
Acts is mostly heroic legends. They may mention more historical figures and known places but they were written to prove a point, not as an objective history.
Yes, indeed, you’ve convinced me. To the myth cycles of Hercules’s 12 tasks, the impregnation of Xquiq by the severed head of Hun Hunahpu, the defeat of the Bull of Heaven by Gilgamesh and Old Man causing a woman to explode with the size of his penis, we can now add that great mythic legend of ‘A bunch of old guys meet up and decide that circumcision is too rough of a requirement for entry into their religion.’ Truly one of the great myths.
My assumption would be that everything much further back than David’s father/grandfather will be questionable. Similarly for Jesus, we might expect that they knew the name of his father, grandfather, and maybe great grandfather, but after that you’re going to be running into problems.
During David’s time, it seems reasonably likely that we’re still talking about early pastoralists who had only recently made the switch from nomadic life. Writing itself was probably introduced at this time, coming from the Semitic states along the Mediterranean that were trading with the Phoenicians. One suspects that as the kingdom was formalized, one or two scribes would have been brought over from the coast, to keep records for Saul. But previous to that, there were probably no records for any family beyond living memory in that area.
(There was an earlier writing system used by the Ugarits, but that is in the region of Syria, where urbanization had begun a few centuries earlier. That writing system does not seem to be the origin of the early Hebrew systems, except perhaps by influencing the Phoenicians. As-is, it’s believed that Hebrew began around 1050, which is the time of Saul.)
Nazareth (as best we can tell) was a shanty town that developed near a raised Roman city (I forget the name at the moment), housing day laborers that were employed to help reconstruct the city. It’s unlikely that Jesus’ family would have had any written records of their lineage beyond human memory, being really at the bottom of the social ladder and completely uneducated (and I don’t mean that in a disrespectful sense - just literal). And it’s hard to see how Luke could even have inquired about the family tree. I don’t believe that he ever went to Jerusalem or ever met any of Jesus’ family. That leaves the question of whether anyone other than Luke would have thought to ask about it, and circulate the information. Or if, simply, Luke asked Peter or Paul or someone, and that person BSed up a list of names.
If there was a historical David, almost certainly Jesus would have been related to him - just as any Jew of his period would likely have been - nor is it impossible that there might be some paternal lineage between Jesus and David, since there might be a variety of paths that you could take. David did, after all, have eight wives/concubines and at least a dozen children (purportedly) and the population of Israel at that time was probably only 50,000 or so people. And, then, of course, his sons were more likely to have their own set of concubines and giant child count than your average person, and their sons, and their sons.
So while I wouldn’t be surprised for there to be no male-only lineage between Jesus and David, I wouldn’t be surprised for there to be at least one either, given perfect knowledge. I just strongly doubt the truth of Luke’s list. It seems unlikely to have been recorded for Jesus’ family and unlikely for Luke to have been able to attain.
The Council of Jerusalem is basically embarrassing for the early church, implying that Jesus failed to tell his family and followers that he intended to ditch the laws of the Old Testament for gentiles but maintain them for Jews, and that the Jerusalem Church should so decide when Paul showed up during a famine with a bag of silver for the starving church. This is also where Peter decides to abandon the Jerusalem church in favor of Paul, similar as he had moved on from following John the Baptist. (Granted, John died before he migrated, but there was presumably a more orthodox Johnist church left in Jerusalem, possibly becoming the Sabians or Essenes, and later the Mandaeans, that he could have stayed with.)
I would generally assume that it is true since it doesn’t require magic and a “cleaner” presentation for posterity could have been written if one was willing to bend the truth more.
This first one is clearly false. Look the Egyptians raided that area from time immemorial, bring back loot and slaves, they have records of Habiru slaves. Now, we have little or no evidence of specific “israelite” slaves, but that’s because the Egyptians didn’t consider them a separate people until sometime before the Merneptah Stele in 1200 BC or so.* There is evidence for these slaves. That of course doesnt make them Israelites or even proto-Israelites, but it would have been very odd for the Egyptians to go raiding in that area and bring back slaves from many other tribes, but never Israelites. That is extremely unlikely.
*Which is oddly about the time of the exodus. give or take a couple hundred years.
So certainly some slaves could have escaped and taken new clever egyptian ways of doing things back to their pastoral relatives. Maybe a few hundred, maybe even a thousand.
What DID NOT happen, is the numbers. The numbers as given and the forty years are clearly numerological fantasies or done for symbological or mystical meaning.
And all the various Kingdoms in the Middle East were pretty much small tribal kingdoms.
What I love is the logic of people like this:
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The Egyptians never mentioned the Israelites until around 1200 BC. Therefore, even tho Egyptologists know the Egyptians raided that area and brought back lot sof “habiru” slaves, since they never *called *them Israelites (until 1200BC or so) , none of the habiru could have been Israelites. :rolleyes::dubious:
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The numbers mentioned are impossible, thus it didnt happen. :dubious::rolleyes:
Hell then the Battle of Thermopylae, didnt happen, as Historians are pretty damn sure the Million man Persian army was more like a tenth that. Nor did the Battle of Gaugamela , and many others. Yeah, the numbers in the Early OT can’t be trusted. Nor can most of Ancient History, even quite a few Roman estimates of their foes are known to be greatly exaggerated.
This is more or less a Holocaust denier type logic, i.e. if it really wasn’t Seven Million Jews- then the Holocaust never really happened.
So- it is true, that if you are a Biblical Literalist, then you’re in deep shit with the story of the Exodus. It sure as hell didnt happen exactly as give in the OT. That’s doesnt mean that a lesser version never happened.
I would put a divider between Joseph and Jesus: based on what it says in the gospel, Jesus would only be related to Jesus through any half-brothers that Joseph sired of Mary. Joseph was not Jesus’ father, or the scripture is a lie.
Okay, well so say that at some point in time a group of a dozen or two spaces broke out of Egypt and successfully made it back to the Midian. So?
It’s not just the numbers, the Pentateuch wasn’t written until 1000-500 years later and there was no monotheistic tradition among the Israeli people until 1000-500 years later. There was never a conquest of Canaan. The Egyptians failed to notice or comment on the extreme calamities that befell them in order to help the slaves escape, or the splitting of the sea.
So yeah, it’s possible that there is some trivial story that became the largest fish ever caught tale yet told in the history of mankind, but that still amounts to Exodus being false since the numbers and the conquest and the laws and miracles are really what the story is all about so far as most people are concerned. If you remove all that stuff and you’re left with is a story with equal significance as, say, the hardships endured by every family that emigrated to the Americas before powered cruising. There is, perhaps, some sentimental value to the descendants, but that’s about the limit of it.
Personally, I’m inclined to think that the story is a metaphor for something larger than that, given that the tale of Abraham does seem to match the movement of the Amorites and if you track habitation of Edom, Moab, etc. to the tales of the begetting of the various tribes off from the descendents of Abraham, the order follows what we see in the archaeological record. It would be odd for Exodus to not be back linked to some notable historic event. But I do grant that it could just be the tale of a dozen slaves who escaped once and the story just bears no relationship to the reality anymore. All you get from that, though, is that Exodus isn’t useful for the religious nor the historians.
Plus, during the time that the Exodus was supposed to happen, the land that is now Israel was occupied by Egypt. So escaping slaves would be going from in the frying pan into a slightly cooler part of the frying pan.