When does the Bible stop being myth, lineage wise?

In My Humble Opinion
101

His claim is that people see an Egyptian Pharaoh list (say the Abydos list) and generally accept it with few qualms. We’re not having an argument on here about whether or not say Menkare was real or simply myth. We generally just accept his existence as so unless compelling evidence convinces us otherwise.

He’s saying that the evidence for David is at least as great as the evidence for Menkare, but that some people don’t accept the existence of David and he believes that it is due to their preconceived anti-religious prejudices.

102

I know what he is saying, and I’m asking him who is accepting of Egyptian lists but not Biblical lists? He made a claim of hypocrisy, so who exactly is being hypocritical?

103

Your 70-80% and 10% seem quite plausible to me, though I’m not qualified to judge. However I admire your use of such figures. Many would adamantly insist on 0% or 100% as the only possible answers! :rolleyes:

104

Because I have had this same debate with you.

When asked for documentation, someone points to the Bible, but that is dismissed out of hand, but some religious writings on a papyrus are accepted as documentation.

105

You have never had this argument/debate with me.

106

Well one question is what people mean when they say, “exists”.

Does Santa Claus exist, for example? Most people would say, “no”, even though the St. Nicholas was actually a person and saint. Clearly the popular presentation of him as a still living being, living at the North Pole is fantastical. But it is a wild distortion of a historical figure, not 100% made up from whole cloth.

Back when Diogenes the Cynic was on the site, we argued about this with Moses. His position (as I understood it) was that there’s so much fantasy in the story that it’s not useful to call Moses real. I’m, personally, more ambivalent on that. I accept that, if there was some event that inspired Exodus, it’s probably so far removed from the tale we’ve been told that it really tells us nothing about whatever person was at the middle of the adventure. He might not be named anything like Moses (the name Santa Claus is completely unrelated to St. Nick, for example), he might not have been in Egypt, he might not have been a slave, he might not have been fleeing anyone, he might have been a she, or a couple… Personally, I’m willing to accept that, despite all that, there could be something and someone who are the progenitors and minus any better term it’s most useful to call that event the Exodus and that person Moses, until we have better information on what names to use, and I’m willing to say that there’s a 10% chance that there was some historical event or person that inspired all this.

But I can easily see how using these terms and taking about the original events and people could confuse people, when we’re accepting that the real story might share almost literally nothing with the stories in the Bible. And for the purpose of saving confusion, it’s more useful to say that it’s false and, minus evidence to the contrary, just a fiction. Why presume a factual basis when also presuming that the factual basis shares nothing with the reality?

So it does need to be made very clear that by saying I think David most likely existed, I don’t mean that he existed as written. Most or all of it may be fiction. His name might not have been David. But I do think that there is a person who inspired the story, and in this case I think that the bare bones, between the lines version seems plausible enough that it’s worth treating like it had historic merit. The Goliath story, in the other hand, thpppt.

107

Santa Claus comes from the Dutch Sinterklaas (via the dialectual Dutch pronunciation which sounded like Sante Klaas) which was a contraction of Sinter Niklaas, which is of course the Middle Dutch pronunciation for the saint we call Saint Nicholas.

How he got associated with Christmas instead of December 6, is a different story.

108

Fair enough!

109

I agree with everything you wrote except that I’d replace “event or person” with “event(s) or person(s).” (And after that amendment, would increase the 10% somewhat.)

IIRC, Diogenes insisted that the only historic basis for Exodus was the Hyksos expulsion ca 1550 BC. Why couldn’t it be that expulsion and another event combined into a single fable. I guess Josephus even mentions a candidate for such a conflation.

(Similarly, the Arthur stories may be a commingling of two or more real circumstances. But that discussion in this thread would be a hijack too far.)

110

I’m not feeling like anyone is going to come along with any further details related to the OP’s GQ/GDish question that somehow never got us moved. :smiley:

Maybe I’ll start a thread for Arthur sometime this weekend. Biblical, Arthurian, and Koranic history are my areas of historical interest but the other two never come up on the site, so I’ve never had much chance to discuss them. I was happy to have Arthur come in (though it’s been a while since I looked through everything, and I’ve now forgotten most of it).

111

I guess, but that’s really just a guess, that additionally a bit of High German attributed to it too, as Nicholas is Nikolaus in German, and Klaus/Claus as a contraction is a common first name.

112

When it is pointed out that tracing Jesus’ linage back through the bloodline of Joseph all the way to Moses(or beyond) is problematic because his real father was supposedly a god, one of the arguments used is that it is allowed because Joseph adopted Jesus. Is this commonly allowed when it comes to Jewish fraternal bloodlines?

113

Well, I can’t answer in general terms, but there are pointers that, in the Jewish view of things, actual blood descent is not the be-all and end-all in determining family relationships. Recall the privision in the Levitic code that, if a man died leaving no children, his suriving brother was to beget a child with the widow, and that child would be taken as the descendent of the deceased. Whether there were broader notions of fosterage or adoption in Jewish culture of the time I can’t say, but clearly there was some scope for familial relationships to be constructed on societal conventions rather than simply inferred from the brute facts of biology.

Mary was betrothed to Joseph at the time that Jesus was conceived. Maybe the fact that Joseph didn’t call off the wedding meant that, socially and legally, the child was treated as his, whether or not it was biologically his? If we have a legal presumption of paternity in the case of a married couple - and we do - first century Jews may well have had something analogous.

114

There is still a conflict if it is truly believed by Christians that

  1. God is really the father and
  2. There is nothing written that God gave up custody.
115

If there is any idea that adoption allowed heritage to bypass bloodline, then it would come from the Bible which would, in turn, come from the laws of God. By the same token, if God ordered that you could have multiple heritages through adoption, all at once, then that would just be the way that it is. (This is, in essence, the argument that Joseph Smith made with his multiple marriages arrangement.)

There was an episode of Mythbusters with James Cameron, where they were testing whether or not the bit of wood that was floating in the water, at the end of Titanic, was really too small to support both Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet. After they determined that the prop was larger than the story needs, and would have supported both of them, James Cameron made the point that the reality we’re presented with in the film is not the reality of the film. The reality of the film is what the director has decided, and the director’s word is the end of the story. If the prop was too large, that doesn’t matter. di Caprio was going down, because that’s what James Cameron ordered.

I would view this as the same sort of logic. Whatever imperfections you might detect are, at the end of the day, wrong. The director has said that Jesus is his son and the director has said that Jesus is the descendant of David. End of story.

116

For some historical context, though, it should be noted that the Son of God idea - I don’t believe - was the predominant view among most of the early churches. In the various books of heresies written in the 2nd century, most of the churches outside of Paul’s believed that Jesus was a straightforward prophet or had inherited the spirit from John the Baptist, on his death. And, if you read the Gospels, there’s a fairly reasonable reading in Jesus’ quotes that everyone was a child of god, not just him.

E.g., John 1:12-13: Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

In general, the virgin birth, the bethlehem/census story, filling the role of the messiah, etc. all seem to be things that were added on by the Orthodox church - not actual claims of Jesus - and required a fair amount of (sloppy) historic revisioning.

The safe bet is that Jesus was born in Nazareth, either as the son of Joseph, or some random person. It’s not entirely implausible that Mary was a prostitute. There’s a 2nd century accusation of such, it’s unclear how Mary would have made a living in Nazareth and no indication that she was living with her parents, Jesus was friendly with the prostitutes in Jerusalem, and the “immaculate conception” tale would make sense as a cover for her having a child before/soon after marriage.

117

[my bold]

From which side? Do you have a cite? I’ve never heard of such accusations. OTOH it has always been a cheap shot to call important women you don’t like whores, so I’m very skeptical.

118

It’s been a while since I read. It looks like I misremembered and he had simply accused her of adultery.

Apparently, there’s a Babylonian of the Talmud that may or may not have an allusion to her having worked as a prostitute, though. But it looks like most references in the Talmud also only accuse her of adultery with a Pandera/Panthera.

119

There are many references to Yeshu ben Pandera. The meaning of ‘Pandera/Panthera’ is controversial, as is the dating — some place this Yeshu long after the time of Jesus.

However, Rabbi Eliezer ben Hurcanus, famous brother-in-law of Rabban Gamaliel II and born circa 30 AD(?), mentions an early encounter with a disciple of Yeshu ben Pandera (or Jeshu ben Panthyra or ben Pantiri). At least one ancient writer claims explicitly that the mother Mary had an affair with a Roman soldier named Pantera. Such an extramarital parentage might explain why some New Testament references are, unusually, to “Jesus son of Mary” where “son of [father]” is more normal.

Pantera wasn’t a common name. However “Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera (c. 22 BC – AD 40) was a Roman soldier whose tombstone was found in Bingerbrück, Germany, in 1859.”

120

Probably not, the Romans weren’t occupying Galilee at the time of Jesus’s birth. It was being run as a client state under Herod.

The Pandera suffix is definitely used in conjunction with Christ, but shows up in the Tosefta as its earliest cite which wasn’t written until about200 AD or so, long after anyone would actually know much about Mary’s goings-on. Why exactly it was used is really a guess. It could have been used much earlier in oral traditions or it could just be a 2nd century name that caught on among Jews. I personally like the theory that it’s a reference to Pandarus-a Greek hero who was tricked into betraying Menelaus in the Iliad. We know that by the 4th century, Pandar was used as a generic term for betrayer and it’s not unreasonable that it was in use earlier in that context (In a similar way to how we might say someone is a Judas.) I think that that theory requires the fewest speculations. ‘Jesus the Betrayer’ seems like a more reasonable reading than ‘Jesus the <wink, wink, nudge, nudge> son of a random Roman soldier implying that his mother was a prostitute.’