Season 8 of "South Park" debuts this Wednesday. I know exactly what I'd love to see them do at some point, since it's such a gargantuan target. I'm putting it onto extended entry just in case, by some unlikelihood, I happen to be right.
The local church organizes an outing to see "The Passion." Kenny, Stan and Cartman totally freak out. The only one who still has his mind is Kyle since, of course, he didn't see it 'cause he's Jewish. But Kenny, Stan and Cartman now hate Kyle. Kyle, distraught over the situation, calls Jesus on his talk show and asks him for advice. Jesus hasn't seen the film yet, but he goes to see it and is totally horrified, feeling his message of love, sacrifice and brotherhood has been totally lost in a two hour bloodbath. Infuriated, Jesus (or perhaps Santa Claus, or maybe even Satan) goes after Mel Gibson and inflicts hours of torment upon him, which has little effect on him because it turns out he actually loves it.
At the end, Kyle announces he's learned something today, but we never know what it is because he's stoned to death. But all turns out well when God resurrects him.
This, by the way, is not intended as a commentary on the film or its maker. I still haven't seen it. It's just speculation on the approach "South Park" might take.
PAD
Posted by Peter David at March 14, 2004 11:21 PM | TrackBack | Other blogs commentingPeter:
Knowing the kinds of episodes they have produced in the past, you have probably just written your first South Park script!
Wanna go for a second?
"Bloodbath"? Yeah, like the actually thing was clean and painless.
I know it's ridiculous to bring up issues of continuity when discussing something like South Park, but I think they probably meant to stop having Jesus appear on the show after they, y'know, killed him off in the 2002 Christmas episode.
But then, they did bring Kenny back after he was dead for a whole year, so who knows...?
The scenario you described would make a kick-ass episode, though.
I actually started to write a South Park script myself a few years back, but the whole idea behind it was to force them to hire at least one more voice actor by including a character who would only work if he had a properly impersonated celebrity voice...I stopped working on it because there were changes in the show that made the B-story not work, but, oddly enough, everything has now been changed back and now it would all work again (except for the fact that Kenny never gets killed anymore).
Paul
well, according to south park studios, the offical site:
New Season!
On March 17th the eighth season of South Park begins with seven new episodes!
South Park presents a very special Easter episode, "The Passion of the Easter Bunny."
so, it might not be of the christ, but theyve sure got their passion down pat.
Not that I wouldn't like to see your idea done, PAD.
Adam Schwartz
Going to be tough-- they killed Jesus a few seasons back, as he heroically saved Santa Claus. A very special episode... I think we all learned something today.
Peter, I'm an agnostic, but I saw the film, and it was quite powerful. The torture and crucifixion were harrowing to watch, but overall it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be (because of the way hype and word-of-mouth creates an exaggerated expectation). I highly recommend it.
And I'd KILL to see them make another South Park MOVIE out of your suggestion! :-)
Well, I wouldn't kill for it, but I'd whip, flog and crucify someone for it....
Or maybe Kenny, Stan and Cartman go see the movie and are moved by the film. They decide to dust off their family Bibles and actually read about Jesus. They read how he was sent to earth to die for our sins. They realize that our sins nailed Jesus to the cross, and that by confessing their sins and asking Jesus into their hearts they would be saved...
...but I suppose that wouldn't be funny.
Not funny? Well, let's see: technically according to the bible and the church, we're still responsible for our own sins, god already forgave people in the old testament if they repented, and the notion of 'hereditary' or 'original' sin is primitive, disgusting and devoid of any sane morality.
And if true, it was pretty much god's own decision to nail jesus to a cross and therefore his responsibillity to do it, not the jews or the romans or our sins. He just suddenly decided just forgiving us for being imperfect (after creating us that way), wasn't doing it for him anymore. And he needed a bloodbath to guilt-trip us into worshipping, fortifying his message of 'goodness' which comes down to 'obey me or else it's hell fer ya'.
And then there are other usable issues like how the israelites were butchering whole cities on god's command, down to the last man woman and infant. Hell even the livestock had to be killed. Cuz ya know, god's GOOD!
Not funny? I'd say it's hilarious!!
Peter, ya got enough South Park material there for a season or 2!
Or better yet, perhaps they'd dust off some books on the historicity of the Bible, and realize that there's no historical evidence that a Jesus of Nazareth even existed, or that there was no location called Nazareth at the time alleged in the Bible.
I dunno, given the anti-PC quality of the show, coupled with their loathing of liberal Hollywood celebs (Mecha-Barbara gets me every time)and their general dislike of people who condemn a film without seeing it...I expect mel may not be the only one skewered.
The Mormon show, where they simultaneously skewered the religion's origins while celebrating the values of its followers...brill. These guys are real subversives. Looking forward to the Easter Bunny episode.
Incidentally, the movie is fast approaching 300 million dollars worth of tickets and the only folks who have been moved to violence seem to be the radical Islamofacists who were killing Jews and anyone else they could before the movie opened. huh. How puzzling.
I didn't even know that Kenny was back from the dead. But if he can rise again, why can't Jesus?
The Easter Bunny, though...might be an occasion to rerun "Night of the Lepus." Or the famous Holy Grail rabbit...
The only thing I don't understand is why, when I click "Remember personal info?" and I return to this web site, I have to type all my personal info all over again. Doesn't it store it in some kind of database so I don't constantly have to retype my email address and web site URL? If not, what good is that radio button?
Or is the web site asking me if I remember MY OWN personal info? Is this some way to screen out the mentally impaired? If so, considering some of the posts, it isn't working.
Or maybe Kenny, Stan and Cartman go see the movie and are moved by the film. They decide to dust off their family Bibles and actually read about Jesus. They read how he was sent to earth to die for our sins. They realize that our sins nailed Jesus to the cross, and that by confessing their sins and asking Jesus into their hearts they would be saved...
Ah, now come on, James. You know better than that.
More likely Cartman would say: "So, let me get this straight. I can be a complete bastard and sin all I want, but so long as I do this whole 'confess my sins' crap I get into heaven? Sweet!"
Well, I'm a huge South Park fan as well as a Christian, and I think parody is fine. I'll be looking forward to seeing "The Passion of the Easter Bunny." I've laughed through Jesus' boxing match with the devil, his "Super Friends" adventures with the other gods, and his death saving Santa Claus. It's all done in good humor.
However, as a Christian, I loved "The Passion of the Christ." It is not entertainment nor a "bloodbath." It's quite refreshing to watch a movie that has a message instead of the typicaly Hollywood crap-fest/sequel-rama.
- Mike
"Let's just say that on this day, a million years ago, a dude was born who most of us think was magic. But others don't, and that's cool--but we're probably right. Amen."
-Homer J. Simpson
However, as a Christian, I loved "The Passion of the Christ." It is not entertainment nor a "bloodbath." It's quite refreshing to watch a movie that has a message instead of the typicaly Hollywood crap-fest/sequel-rama.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
So you're not expecting "The Return of the King of Kings?"
David
touche, i gotta say the return of the king of kings got a definite chuckle.
what about an entire parody where cartman is judas, kenny is jesus, and stan as a disciple and kyle as the pharise calling for kenny's crucifixion?
since the bible so thoughtfully left people of color out of the bible despite the fact that a lot of it takes place in egypt, some fun could be had with Chef as well.
First of all, let me just say that I saw the Passion and thought it was a bad film. Not racist, not offensive, just bad.
However, considering how many topics you've devoted to The Passion, Peter, I think you should finally go see the movie and give it a fair day in court. I'd like to see what you think. After all, if you're going to post comments on how your friend said it was anti-Semitic, you should at least see the film yourself.
Chances are good you'll think it was a piece of crap like I and most of my friends did.
"since the bible so thoughtfully left people of color out of the bible despite the fact that a lot of it takes place in egypt, some fun could be had with Chef as well."
Why do you think there are no people of color in th Bible? They may not be explicitly described as such but maybe it wasn't considered important. I mean, we don't know which way Jesus parted his hair but once you've called him the Son of God that sort of detail might seem a bit petty.
I have to agree with Donald (and his friends as well), The Passion was just bad filmmaking (although parts of it looked great). I can only assume that it was not a concern to tell a story or make you feel for the characters. It seems like Gibson made the film only for those that already feel a personal connection to these characters. That's fine - I'm just surprised that so few reviews mention it. I have Catholic roots, so I am familiar with the story (and actually reread the gospels after the film), and was hopeful that the film might effect me in some way, but clearly the connection was not strong enough.
At the risk of hijacking the topic, I'm interested to get the take of some of the other people that saw it (especially those that liked it). The biggest detriments to my enjoyment were the over the top nature of a few of the scenes and the lack of any connection with many (most?) of the characters. Those of you that really enjoyed it - did you like it as a movie, or just because it spoke to you in some way?
And what was the "inventing high tables" scene all about? I found that just odd...
Or better yet, perhaps they'd dust off some books on the historicity of the Bible, and realize that there's no historical evidence that a Jesus of Nazareth even existed, or that there was no location called Nazareth at the time alleged in the Bible.
The Roman historian Tacitus wrote about Jesus between 115-117 A.D He was a pagan historian, hostile to Christianity, who had access to records about what happened to Jesus Christ.
Mention of Jesus can also be found in Jewish Rabbinical writings from what is known as the Tannaitic period, between 70-200 A.D.
That there is any mention of Jesus at all is unususal. As far as the Roman world was concerned, Jesus was a nobody who live in an insignificant province, sentenced to death by a minor procurator.
what i mentioned about there being a shortage of characters of color, but is the subject of many debates within the black community. I'm a white male, but I have to say that I was shocked when I read some of the arguments of black religous leaders about "we're supposed to believe there were a bunch of middle class white guys running around the Middle East and Egypt?"
How many dark skinned images of Jesus have you seen. For the record his skin is escribed as "the color of Bronze" in the bible, but he is depicted as white. I don't feel it was an oversight. I feel it was the interpretation of a predominantly white church that white men would be the central characters in both the writing of the bible and the choosing of which gospels would be included in the bible. Other gospels such as the gospel of Mary Magdalene depict Jesus's life quite differently. By the way, why leave out ages 18-30? And under Pope Constantine there was a vote as to whether or not Jesus was to be depicted as the son of God, if memory serves me correctly I believe it passed 5-4. One vote varied and history is changed forever. Don't tell me that Jesus's race is as unimportant as to what way he parted his hair. And for the record, the fact that his hair isn't mentioned hasn't stopped almost every image of Jesus to give him long hair and a beard.
How many dark skinned images of Jesus have you seen. For the record his skin is escribed as "the color of Bronze" in the bible, but he is depicted as white.
Most images of Jesus are based off of paintings from hundreds of years ago. Obviously Jesus was not a while male with long, light brown hair. In fact, he most likely looked like your average middle eastern that you see. I'm always amazed how good they make Jesus look as well. I have a feeling he was quite plain/normal looking. Don't think the paintings you see hanging on the walls in some churches are what all Christians think Jesus looks like.
if i was founding a religion on the teachings of a man, i would commision a painting of him so all his followers could see what he looked like. I'd be shocked if they didn't, but again the white controlled church very likely did not want the image of Jesus as a colored man to circulate. of course that is speculation though.
However, as a Christian, I loved "The Passion of the Christ." It is not entertainment nor a "bloodbath." It's quite refreshing to watch a movie that has a message instead of the typicaly Hollywood crap-fest/sequel-rama.
So would this be a bad time to mention the news blurb on the radio this morning that Gibson has announced his next film will be The Resurrection?
Y'see, PAD...I've learned something today (cue Piano). I've learned that if you come up with a sweet, kickass story idea in which a manipulative jackass gets his fictional comeuppance...You can't just come out and say so. You've gotta trail off with a disclaimer. That way, people won't think that you think the jackass is a jackass, or that you're advocating that he, y'know, oughtta be flogged within an inch of his life, figuratively or literally, for, y'know, his sins and stuff, or his crackpot theology, or "Lethal Weapon 4".
Chef: That's right, children...it's called 'covering your ass', and its very very important.
"How many dark skinned images of Jesus have you seen. "
Well, if you picked up "Fallen Angel #9," now on the stands, you'll have seen at least one. The depiction of Jesus in that issue is based on the latest historical theory as to what he most likely would have looked like.
PAD
Regarding the historicity of Jesus:
Actually, there isn't a whole lot of historical evidence for Jesus. As a matter of fact, there are no verifiable non-ecclesiastical records of his existence, id est, nothing trying to be reasonable or scientific or present Jesus as a historical figure.
For instance, the Talmudic writings were written long after the time of Jesus and the fall of Jerusalem, and seem mainly designed as defensive mechanisms by orthodox Jews to preserve their culture against the proselytization of Christians during the diaspora. It was easier to say that Jesus existed but he was a bad person than that one has no traditional information on him. Other otherwise reliable historical documents suffer from this same problem; they attest that there was a Christian religion preaching that a person Jesus of Nazareth, was crucified, etc, but offer little more evidence than that.
For a long time, it was fashionable to deduce, from this, that there was no historical Jesus -- usually because such reconstructions were done by vocal opponents of Christianity.
However, starting with the work of deistic and early liberal christian historians (mainly German and French) during a period that was called the Old Quest for the Historical Jesus, it was concluded that there was no reason to assume that the figure of Jesus was entirely phantasmic, despite a lack of evidence to the contrary. In other words, not only is it difficult to prove a negative, but comparisons between the Christ figure and other mythic heroes, while suggestive, means nothing without systematic, predictable correlation of elements or clear evidence of borrowing. A completely phastasmic origin theory would leave much unexplained, while a historical Jesus would handily account for the subsequent development of all the mythic apparatus and christology associated with him.
The Old Quest period was followed by the No Quest period, initiated by Albert Schweitzer, who expressed the theory that all attempts to reconstruct the life of the historical Jesus would only reflect the assumptions of the reconstructionists, that the available historical documents (primarily the four gospels and fragments of earlier gospels) are inherently theology and thus propagandistic, rather than historical, and made a plea that the historical Jesus should remain unknown.
The No Quest period, was followed by the New Quest for the Historical Jesus in the conservative fifties, based on the idea of continuity between the historical and the mythic figure.
We are now in the Third Quest period, begun in 1980, which incorporates new and undeniable historical and archeological evidence about the life and times of Jesus, but which, ironically, has only indirectly confirmed his historicity. Nevertheless, modern scholars across many different fields no longer doubt the existence of Jesus of Nazareth as a historical figure. They are also, for the most part, agreed that he was, indeed, very Jewish in thoughts, attitudes, dress, and habits, that he never claimed to be the son of God, and that he didn't expect the end of the world while he was alive. Most reconstructions posit that he was some sort of charismatic social reformer.
"Don't tell me that Jesus's race is as unimportant as to what way he parted his hair."
Well, it's obviously important to you. To me that seems like not seeing the forest for the trees but I guess we all have to decide what it is about Jesus, or any other man, that is important. Someone's race isn't all that important to me but I'll respect your point of view.
Nevertheless, your statement that the Bible has few people of color is unsupported, as many are not given any physical description. To assume that someone is white just because they are not described differently strikes me as chauvinistic
From comments I've seen of the film, it frankly seems to be Jesus Christ Superstar with more blood and less dancing.
actually this movie is the exact antithesis of jesus christ superstar. that was a fairly liberal view of Jesus' life including him having a girlfriend and not being the son of God. The Passion is a very conservative right wing look at it.
I really think this conversation would be much better served if people took the time to actually watch the movie before bashing it.
I got in an argument awhile ago with a woman I worked with about the film Dogma. I mentioned that it was one of my favorite movies, and she told me that it was a horrible movie and that her and her friend "protested that piece of shit". I asked her what she did't like about the film and she told me she protested it because her friend said it was horrible, so i asked what her friend didn't like about it and she told me that her friend hadn't seen it either.
If I cared about something enough to take time out of my day to complain about it, I'd take the time to at least watch the movie or find out more about it before opening my mouth. But that's me, I'm a learner.
Yah...Jesus died. There's no way he could be resurrected...
I think the comparison between JC Superstar and Passion is that both were movies about Jesus that have been controversial. The fact one is based on a liberal perspective of Jesus, and the other an extreme Conservative, Pre-Vatican II perspective is irrelevant.
It will be interesting to see how the Catholic Church, Opus Dei, and others respond to The Davinci Code, which is being filmed. (Directed by Ron Howard)
This is pretty OT but I'd really like it if PAD started watching the OC over on Fox since I tend to keep coming here to read the feedback on the the TV discussions.
I'm very surprised I like the show since I figured it would be another 90210 knockoff. Instead it's smart, well-written and as a bonus has comic book references in pretty much every show.
Well in all fairness there is not a lot of evidence for Hannibal crossing the mountains with his elephants either. There were only TWO known records of his crossing one was written by Hannibal himself (Yeah, that's going to be accurate), and the other was written 300 years after is supposedly occurred. Yet that is in a lot of history books and taught in school as absolute fact.
Perhaps Kenny could become a Jesus Freak, after all he is white trash who's resurrected just about every week. Also, they could give us Mecha-Streisand vs. Mel Gibson's Dad, since I bet that's one Jew that even Papa Gibson wouldn't be able to ignore!
"actually this movie is the exact antithesis of jesus christ superstar."
I've been surprised at how many people have complained that Pontius Pilate was given too sympathetis a portrayal in Gibson's film. In Jesus Christ Superstar he was practically as sympathetic as Jesus himself. For that matter, the Jewish Mob in Superstar were every bit as bloodthirsty as in Passion--worse maybe. There's even a lyric given to Pilate where he talks about how, in his dream, the "wild and angry" Jews fall upon Jesus and leave him to take the blame. Wow! Where were the complaints about anti-semitism then?
(For that matter, the version I saw performed also had Herod portrayed as a flaming Queen. Anti-semitism AND homophobia! Good thing it had a liberal Jesus!)
Speaking of Hutton Gibson, I couldn't help but think that what Luigi said was somewhat similar to his whole "the holocaust never happened thing." Sure there is more evidence for the holocaust, because ya know it only happened 60 years ago. There are pictures of it and people alive who experienced it. So a better comparison might be
something like "Julius Caesar never existed."
If you actually watched south park I think they would have more of the overreaction of the film. I think they would make fun of the people who accused it of being antisemetic. s
Well, with this being South Park, they're likely to make fun of *everybody*. And do it wonderfully.
One of the great things about South Park is that, as an animated show, they can be contemporary *now*, since an episode takes only days to create, rather than months.
Some of the best of South Park has been influenced by events that occur within a week of an airing of the episode, like the episode based on that Cuban kid a couple of years ago and Saddam's capture.
The Blue Spider: Luigi, you believe that shite?
Luigi Novi: I generally tend to believe what is considered to be empirically true by virtue of examination of evidence and scientific consensus, and in keeping with the scientific method, I revise or reverse such positions when new evidence presents itself that requires me to do so.
If you can illustrate why what said was “shite” through this method, please do so.
James Tichy: The Roman historian Tacitus wrote about Jesus between 115-117 A.D He was a pagan historian, hostile to Christianity, who had access to records about what happened to Jesus Christ.
Luigi Novi: Tacitus didn’t live during Jesus’ alleged lifetime. He was born in 64 C.E., at least 30 years after the alleged crucifixion of Jesus. He gives a brief mention of a "Christus" in his Annals, Book XV, Sec. 44, but gives no source for his material. In addition to the numerous disputes of the authenticity of Tacitus' mention of Jesus, the very fact that he was born after Jesus’s death can only provide us with hearsay accounts.
Moreover, Tacitus’ mentions of Jesus the Christ are not referred to by Tertullian, even though he was a scholar of Tacitus and frequently quoted his works, it is not quoted by Clemens Alexandrinus, who set himself the task of collecting and anthologizing all the admissions and recognitions of Christianity made by pagan writers before his time, nor is it mentioned by Bishop Eusebius (despite the fact that Eusebius stated that it was moral to lie in order to further the kingdom of God, and that most historians believe he forged the two mentions of Jesus in Flavius Josephus’ writings).
Tacitus does not mention Jesus the Christ or “Christians” in any of his other writings, nor is there is any trace of the existence of the Tacitus passage anywhere before the 15th century (an era notorious for its clercial forgeries). Many people may be unaware, in fact, that the Bible did not exist in its current collected form until the Guttenberg Printing Press was invented in that century, before which church fathers could’ve revised and rewritten and translated passages to their liking.
Lastly, at the time Jesus the Christ is alleged to have lived, the word "Christ" was merely a title, one held by many people at the time. It would be equivalent to a person today writing, "During this time there lived a man known as the President." The original disciples of what came to be known as the Christian religion were first called Christians at Antioch because "Christian" was a designation applied at that time as a term of honor given a respected person. (The word "Christian" is used only three times in the NT, and never by the followers of Jesus themselves).
James Tichy: Mention of Jesus can also be found in Jewish Rabbinical writings from what is known as the Tannaitic period, between 70-200 A.D.
Luigi Novi: Which is about 40-170 years after his alleged crucifixion, making such accounts—like all others—hearsay.
Ben Lesar: Speaking of Hutton Gibson, I couldn't help but think that what Luigi said was somewhat similar to his whole "the holocaust never happened thing." Sure there is more evidence for the holocaust, because ya know it only happened 60 years ago. There are pictures of it and people alive who experienced it. So a better comparison might be something like "Julius Caesar never existed."
Luigi Novi: There is evidence for the Holocaust, and for Julius Caesar’s existence.
Not only is there evidence of Julius Caesar’s existence in the form of coins, portrait busts, letters, poems, cups, inscriptions, and other historical accounts from Paterculus, Suetonius, Appian, Plutarch, etc. (makes sense if you’re the ruler of an empire as opposed to a simple Palestinian carpenter/stone mason), but which is contemporaneous with Caesar. Caesar crossed rivers with his armies to attack Gaul. These types of events leave evidence. Hell, Caesar wrote entire books on his campaigns against Gaul, called Commentarii de bello Gallico as well as on the Civil Wars called Commentarri de Bello Civili. He also wrote letters to Balbus, Oppius, Cicero, and there are letters and speeches by these people as well.
There is no equivalent writings left by a Jesus the Christ of Nazareth, or any equivalent evidence at all. Why so many people use this false analogy of Julius Caesar when it is pointed out to them that there is no corroborative evidence for Jesus, I don’t know.
Luigi, I'd like to comment on some of the things you said here, if I may:
It is indeed suspicious that Tacitus is not mentioned by Eusebius, but it is not reasonable to claim that 'Christus' was ever a title--it might have been an uncommon family or personal name, but not a title. You see, around the time of Christ, Greek 'Christos' (transl. Lat. 'Christus') only meant 'ointment, oil, salve, cream, balm'. The word was used to translate 'anointed, meshiach' in the Old Greek LXX, by analogy to the verb 'chrismo', to anoint (it was possible in Koine Greek to use abstract nouns as titles if they were preceded by articles). However, even among the Hellenized communities where the LXX was used, Christos was not used as a title, because the Hellenized Jews, by and by large, were not messianic.
It wasn't until attempts, ever the death of Christ, of aramaic speaking messianic Jews to evangelize the Hellenized community that the word 'Christos' became a title.
Looking over Tacitus use of the word more carefully, there is no reason to assume that it meant anything other than the Christ, whom we are familiar with. Conversely, there is no reason to assume that he had access to any other evidence than what the christians were themselves saying:
"Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular."
(this quote taken from http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/~tomshoemaker/handouts/tacitus.html)
I also think that it is somewhat misleading to say that the Bible did not exist in it's collected form until the printing of the Latin Vulgate by Gutenberg. It wasn't as if church leaders all decided one day to stop arbitrarily rewriting it. The printing press stopped accidental scribal errors, it's true, and created a standard version of the scribal errors that were going around, but the text had been preserved with a high degree of fidelity for about a thousand years previous to that.
The original text was not lost completely either (if you can even talk about an original text). Using the accepted principles of textual criticism, we can reconstruct, with a high degree of certainity, the text as it existed sometime in the second or third century from the manuscript witnesses available. Most reputable, recent bibles are translations of just such a critical text.
Luigi Novi: I generally tend to believe what is considered to be empirically true by virtue of examination of evidence and scientific consensus, and in keeping with the scientific method, I revise or reverse such positions when new evidence presents itself that requires me to do so.
I was never aware that scientific method was applicable to history.
According to Frank Wolfs of the University of Rochester: "The scientific method has four steps
1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.
2. Formulation of an hypothesis to explain the phenomena. In physics, the hypothesis often takes the form of a causal mechanism or a mathematical relation.
3. Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations.
4. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments."
I'm not very convinced that this method could be used to properly claim the life or death of George Washington, let alone that of a man purported born circa 2000 years ago.
Regardless of religion it is the typical action of a dogmatic secularist to outright deny the existence of the relevent Jesus, and claim that the only evidence of His (his?) existence was recorded in a collection of epistles and other writings whose collective accuracy is already held in collective suspicion. (Another typical action of a dogmatic secularist is to assume and insist the Bible is one book and not a collection of previous written, copied, and distributed material). That is why I say that it is old. I deny that it is sensical.
Western culture, for the most part, embraced a system of calender dating counting years from this person's supposed birth. Would the collective Powers That Be from these various and disparate groups of individuals really cling to this calendar for this exceedingly long period of time without some sort of confirmation that they are not basing their comparative measurement of status quo on myth? The answer is irrelevent of course. If it is a myth they did, if it is a myth they didn't. There's nothing to test and no way to confirm.
One primary reason that I embrace the notion of Jesus's historocity is that the most timely and relevent claims of his non-existence would have been documents and treatises generated circa Jesus' life and the birth of the movement. Any insistence that Jesus didn't exist or was not what the Gospels portray him to be would have been loudest and most relevent when the movement was first growing and when these documents were first distributed. In other words, the health and growth of the movement from then until now could be attributed to the idea that opponents and critics of Christianity that existed when it was its most threatening did not have the means to undo it. Logically, nearly two millenia later I expect critics to have even less power, as evidence towards either notion has largely faded into dust with history.
The most basic evidence of Jesus' historicity is the birth of the movement. It is not rock-solid proof by any measure, but it's more believeable that a movement came together to follow a man rather than put together to follow an idea of a man.
the 18th Chapter of Josh McDowell's A Ready Defense contains many interesting ideas. It lists many non-Christian references to Jesus. All of these are questionable. What is concretely established is that to these writers the historicity of Jesus wasn't as open to question as was his status as God.
A good deal of commonly accepted ancient references to Jesus are examined here. I would never say that Homer does not nod, nor would I accuse Flavius Joshephus or his contemporaries of perfection and total historical accuracy.
Any mention of Jesus in old records would be stinking rare to say the least, as is apropriate... many mentioned that to the Romans, Jesus was a nobody. To non-Christian Jews Jesus was either a threat to their beliefs or one of many religious martyrs and either way to see so many mentions is somewhat amazing. None of these can be confirmed to a huge degree of certainty.
An edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica states concerning secular records of Jesus of Nazareth: "These independent accounts prove that in ancient times even the opponents of Christianity never doubted the historicity of Jesus, which was disputed for the first time and on inadequate grounds by several authors at the end of the 18th, during the 19th, and at the beginning of the 20th centuries."
Basically, I'm willing to accept the existence of this man simply because enough historical individuals from that time and up to five centuries afterward accept the historicity of Jesus, especially at a time when that status could be most easily challenged and when it would have been most profitable to do so. If these people from the first five centuries since accepted it, I may question it but I will not dismiss 20 centures later out of hand.
I consider it shite because it's a very easy thing to do to just say that someone never existed, especially if the existence in question is of extensive vintage and the figure is controversial. Indeed if a figure is so controversial, it's easier to discount the historicity of the individual rather than his or her veracity. If you don't believe he exists than there is no call to even begin debate what he said, as he obviously didn't say it anyway.
Frankly I'm not seeking to dissuade you of your beliefs... merely establish that I think the historicity of this particular figure is well-established and that if it were less so much religion would have vanished into myth. He may not have been God, but casual dismissal of the Nazarene's existence seems to me so much shite. I've read that argument many times from those who, like me, tend to make too many blanket statements.
CJA
John David Ward: "The original text was not lost completely either (if you can even talk about an original text). Using the accepted principles of textual criticism, we can reconstruct, with a high degree of certainity, the text as it existed sometime in the second or third century from the manuscript witnesses available. Most reputable, recent bibles are translations of just such a critical text."
As I recall there are a greater number of original manuscripts existing of the various writings collected within the Bible than there are of say, Plato's Republic. Comparing the quality of the manuscripts of Plato's work to those of the Gospel-writers' and Plato's words tend to be less consistent across the board than the Gospel-writers'. Also, the age of the so-called Biblical manuscripts is closer in proximity to the claimed date of relevence and occurences... and even the estimates of when the Gospel writers put pen to papyrus... than the distance of time between the oldest manuscript of The Republic and the time in which Plato could have written that document.
In any case, we still believe that Socrates exists.
Historical records from these freaking time periods are spotty.
CJA
The other thing that needs to be factored into any quest for a 'historical Jesus' is that most ancient texts are lost to us.
There are countless things we know from Antiquity almost by chance; many things would be unknown to us had even one manuscript not survived.
Jesus' existence is well-attested compared to countless figures from Antiquity - the first Gospel was probably written within 35 years of his death, and Paul's letters were written before that Gospel.
What's more, the existence of Christian communities is attested from very early on; it would seem madness to claim that these groups were following an imaginary figure, and indeed that many of them were willing to endure persecution in his name. You can extrapolate Jesus' existence - in some sense anyway - quite easily from the existence of his followers.
The details given about our sources for Hannibal above are wrong, but the point is valid. Our sources on Jesus are far closer to him chronologically than they are for, say, Hannibal.
And as my English teacher used to say, we actually know far more about the historical Jesus than we do the historical Shakespeare.
Cracking idea for a South Park script either way!
Now THAT'S low, disgusting and filthy Jack...
spammers must all die!
I've never watched South Park (I watched the proto-South Park Christmas short and was the only person in the room not laughing, so I quickly realized it just wasn't in keeping with my particular sense of humor) but I thought I'd mention that there actually is a radio station that claims to have a Jesus-hosted talk show. Sometimes you just can't make this stuff up.
I don't know if this has been mentioned yet, but the March 24 episode of South Park is titled "The Passion of the Easter Bunny." FWIW.
Non-Political? Apolotical? That's nonsese. Everthing is political. Everything involves somebody talking and thinking and even in tiny ways influencing or mentioning how things should be done.
There are times when it's overt, sometimes when it is subtle, sometimes when it's heavy and specific and other times when it's just a general larf.
But everything is politics.
And South Park will take a shot at anything... which is why it's good. Everyone will get offended at one point or another... so don't watch what doesn't tickle you... but if it tickles you, watch it.
Man, that seems obvious.
CJA
Sorry, Dee, but I gotta respectfully disagree with you about SP not being political. They have always been poking fun and making statements about the world we live in. And in a damn funny, clever way. Their movie, one of the funniest movies ever made IMO, made a very clever statement on censorship and the misplacing of blame when it comes to people raising their kids. And it made us laugh at the same time. Good times, indeed.
Matt Petersen: Well in all fairness there is not a lot of evidence for Hannibal crossing the mountains with his elephants either. There were only TWO known records of his crossing one was written by Hannibal himself (Yeah, that's going to be accurate), and the other was written 300 years after is supposedly occurred. Yet that is in a lot of history books and taught in school as absolute fact.
Luigi Novi: In the first place, there’s a difference between questioning the historicity of a given event undertaken by a historical figure, and questioning the historicity of that person’s existence.
Second, your statement that there are only two known records of his crossing the Alps is incorrect. As far as I know, there is no account of the event written by Hannibal himself. If there were, it would be strong evidence of Hannibal’s historicity, since a record/artifact left by the person in question is generally looked upon as such (and it is this lack of first-person evidence for Jesus of Nazareth that is one reason why his existence cannot be conclusively substantiated). There is an account of the Second Punic War by the historian Polybius, which includes Hannibal’s crossing of the alps with war elephants. There is also an account of this war and the crossing by the Roman historian Livy.
John David Ward: It is indeed suspicious that Tacitus is not mentioned by Eusebius, but it is not reasonable to claim that 'Christus' was ever a title--it might have been an uncommon family or personal name, but not a title. You see, around the time of Christ, Greek 'Christos' (transl. Lat. 'Christus') only meant 'ointment, oil, salve, cream, balm'. The word was used to translate 'anointed, meshiach' in the Old Greek LXX, by analogy to the verb 'chrismo', to anoint (it was possible in Koine Greek to use abstract nouns as titles if they were preceded by articles). However, even among the Hellenized communities where the LXX was used, Christos was not used as a title, because the Hellenized Jews, by and by large, were not messianic. sIt wasn't until attempts, ever the death of Christ, of aramaic speaking messianic Jews to evangelize the Hellenized community that the word 'Christos' became a title.
Luigi Novi: Words and their usage and conjugations evolve, John. The LXX used “Christos” for “Messiah,” which just means “The Anointed One.” It is true that the Christains took the Jewish concept of “messiah” and turned it on its head, but a reading of Paul will show that the word “Christos” is used as a title.
John David Ward: I also think that it is somewhat misleading to say that the Bible did not exist in it's collected form until the printing of the Latin Vulgate by Gutenberg. It wasn't as if church leaders all decided one day to stop arbitrarily rewriting it. The printing press stopped accidental scribal errors, it's true, and created a standard version of the scribal errors that were going around, but the text had been preserved with a high degree of fidelity for about a thousand years previous to that.
Luigi Novi: The huge number of textual variants are evidence to the contrary.
Luigi Novi: I generally tend to believe what is considered to be empirically true by virtue of examination of evidence and scientific consensus, and in keeping with the scientific method, I revise or reverse such positions when new evidence presents itself that requires me to do so.
The Blue Spider: I was never aware that scientific method was applicable to history.
Luigi Novi: The Scientific Method is valid for testing empirical knowledge. It does not merely involve knowledge from scientific fields like biology or chemistry.
The Blue Spider: According to Frank Wolfs of the University of Rochester: "The scientific method has four steps
1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.
2. Formulation of an hypothesis to explain the phenomena. In physics, the hypothesis often takes the form of a causal mechanism or a mathematical relation.
3. Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations.
4. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments."
I'm not very convinced that this method could be used to properly claim the life or death of George Washington, let alone that of a man purported born circa 2000 years ago.
Luigi Novi: There are many versions of the Scientific Method, and many different ways that empirical knowledge can be tested, both for phenomena observable today, and for historical phenomena. There are experimental sciences such as biology, and historical sciences, such as cosmology, geology, paleontology, paleoanthropology, archaeology, and of course, history. The historical disciplines use different methodologies, but are equally able to track causality, and prove historical events. The existence of George Washington can be confirmed through evidence that he left behind, including records of his birth, life and death, records of his Presidency, his military record, speeches and other documents that he wrote, letters to and from him from his contemporaries, etc. The same does not hold true for Jesus of Nazareth.
The Blue Spider: Regardless of religion it is the typical action of a dogmatic secularist to outright deny the existence of the relevent Jesus, and claim that the only evidence of His (his?) existence was recorded in a collection of epistles and other writings whose collective accuracy is already held in collective suspicion.
Luigi Novi: You have not proven that my statements are made dogmatically, nor offered any evidence for that notion. You don’t know me, or anything about me, nor do you have knowledge of my state of mind. My responses are made sincerely and in good faith, and I make them after having studied quite a bit about the subject. I even conducted some further checking with a historian friend after reading the posts by Matt Petersen, John David Ward, yourself and Greg, which contained some arguments that I had not heard before. Such an endeavor is hardly indicative of dogmatism.
Indeed, if I were a dogmatist, then why am I not still a Catholic? I was raised Catholic, baptized, confirmed, went to parochial school for eight years, went to church every Sunday, etc. If my responses to material that challenged what I understood to be true were based on dogmatism, then I would’ve dismissed the material that pointed out that there is no historical corroboration for a Jesus born in a village named Nazareth who was considered to be the Christ, performed miracles, and crucified by Pilate. That I was able to change my position on the religious beliefs with which I was raised—a gradual process that took years of exposure to material critical of the subject that was denied to me growing up—belies the idea that my responses here are somehow “dogmatic.” It is religion that is adhered to and usually argued on the basis of dogma, not secularism, since there is no authority present in secularism.
Ironically, by merely presuming that my responses here are dogmatic, and that I am incapable of arriving to my conclusions without carefully researching and considering the arguments on both sides, and without providing any argument or evidence to explain this accusation, you are essentially arguing dogmatically yourself, CJ.
The Blue Spider: (Another typical action of a dogmatic secularist is to assume and insist the Bible is one book and not a collection of previous written, copied, and distributed material). That is why I say that it is old. I deny that it is sensical.
Luigi Novi: This is a Straw Man. No historian claims that the Bible is not a collection of material written, copied, and distributed at different times. This is a given. In fact, I believe that I already stated earlier that it was not collected into one book until the Guttenberg Printing Press was invented in the 15th century.
The Blue Spider: Western culture, for the most part, embraced a system of calender dating counting years from this person's supposed birth.
Luigi Novi: And days of the week whose names in English are derived from Norse and Roman Gods. Does this mean you believe that Thor and Freya were actual gods who lived, CJ?
The Blue Spider: Would the collective Powers That Be from these various and disparate groups of individuals really cling to this calendar for this exceedingly long period of time without some sort of confirmation that they are not basing their comparative measurement of status quo on myth?
Luigi Novi: See answer above.
The Blue Spider: The answer is irrelevent of course. If it is a myth they did, if it is a myth they didn't. There's nothing to test and no way to confirm.
Luigi Novi: Which may work for people who claim that they accept the tenets of their religion on faith alone. It is most certainly relevant for those who argue these beliefs empirically, and claim that they can be proven historically and scientifically.
The Blue Spider: One primary reason that I embrace the notion of Jesus's historocity is that the most timely and relevent claims of his non-existence would have been documents and treatises generated circa Jesus' life and the birth of the movement.
Luigi Novi: One wouldn’t expect claims of his non-existence if his life was a myth that gradually developed over time.
The Blue Spider: Any insistence that Jesus didn't exist or was not what the Gospels portray him to be would have been loudest and most relevent when the movement was first growing and when these documents were first distributed.
Luigi Novi: If Paul is any indication of early Christianity, there was no interest in a historical Jesus in the early days of the movement. Putting aside the fact that the modern practice of historiography as we know it today was not fully developed back then, and the fact that the Gospels were not written to be historical documents, they were written anonymously 40 or more years after the events they describe, at a time when there would have been few people still living who had witnessed the events who could challenge the stories (remember that people lived to be about 30-40 back then), it seems odd that anyone would expect there to be protests.
The Blue Spider: In other words, the health and growth of the movement from then until now could be attributed to the idea that opponents and critics of Christianity that existed when it was its most threatening did not have the means to undo it.
Luigi Novi: When Christianity was at its most threatening, it destroyed its opponents and critics.
The Blue Spider: The most basic evidence of Jesus' historicity is the birth of the movement. It is not rock-solid proof by any measure, but it's more believeable that a movement came together to follow a man rather than put together to follow an idea of a man.
Luigi Novi: Argument from Incredulity. The fact that you find yourself personally unable to accept that belief in someone who may have not existed is not possible is a logical fallacy. Not evidence.
Throughout history, people have believed—and continue to believe—in all sorts of things. Look at how people believed in all sorts of things from goblins to succubae to angels to witches.
Look at how children are made to believe in everything from Santa Claus to the Easter Bunny to the Tooth Fairy. Look at how easily myths and misconceptions can become widespread, like the notion that spinach has a lot of iron, that running outside in the cold when you’re wet will give you a cold, that the Earth is facing overpopulation, etc.
Look at how people down in Clearwater Florida turned the window on a building into a shrine because the simple parabolic shape formed on it from water splashed onto it is believed to be an image of the Virgin Mary.
Look at the entire careers and industries that exist today to promote the idea that aliens are abducting humans, that people can talk to your dead uncle, that astrologists can predict your future, that diving rods and other similar devices can detect water and precious metals, that homeopathic medicine works, and so forth.
Large numbers of people would not form movements based on things that were not true, CJ? You obviously haven’t looked around much.
The Blue Spider: the 18th Chapter of Josh McDowell's A Ready Defense contains many interesting ideas. It lists many non-Christian references to Jesus. All of these are questionable. What is concretely established is that to these writers the historicity of Jesus wasn't as open to question as was his status as God.
Luigi Novi: The historicity of William Tell was accepted for centuries. We now know he is entirely legendary.
Whether something was open “to these writers” is irrelevant. What is relevant is the evidence they cite for their conclusions. What are these non-Christian references? Are we talking about Josephus? Tacitus? Suetonius? Pliny the Younger? None of them are considered reliable sources by historians.
The Blue Spider: An edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica states concerning secular records of Jesus of Nazareth: "These independent accounts prove that in ancient times even the opponents of Christianity never doubted the historicity of Jesus, which was disputed for the first time and on inadequate grounds by several authors at the end of the 18th, during the 19th, and at the beginning of the 20th centuries." Basically, I'm willing to accept the existence of this man simply because enough historical individuals from that time and up to five centuries afterward accept the historicity of Jesus…
Luigi Novi: The fact that people accepted his historicity is not evidence of it.
People accepted that Zeus, Mithra, Herakles (Hercules), and all sort of other gods from various pantheons all over the world were actual beings that lived. There are about 650 million Hindus in the world today who accept the gods of that religion. By your logic, those gods exist just as much as Jesus of Nazareth did.
The Blue Spider: I consider it shite because it's a very easy thing to do to just say that someone never existed, especially if the existence in question is of extensive vintage and the figure is controversial. Indeed if a figure is so controversial, it's easier to discount the historicity of the individual rather than his or her veracity.
Luigi Novi: I’m not sure how you’re distinguishing “historicity” from “veracity,” but again, whether you consider it “easy” is not an argument. Putting aside the fact that my conversion from a Catholic to an agnostic was not “easy,” such a statement is rhetorical, and hardly refutes any of the things I have said here, which unlike your “easy” comment, are based on reasoning, not personal feelings about “ease.”
The Blue Spider: If you don't believe he exists than there is no call to even begin debate what he said, as he obviously didn't say it anyway.
Luigi Novi: What he is believed to have said is a different argument, and has no bearing on whether he existed. Debating what he said is most certainly necessary, particularly since his admonitions about brotherly love and tolerance co-exist with his ordering his disciples to hate their parents in Luke 14:26, his support of slavery in Luke 12:41-48, etc.
The Blue Spider: Frankly I'm not seeking to dissuade you of your beliefs... merely establish that I think the historicity of this particular figure is well-established and that if it were less so much religion would have vanished into myth. He may not have been God, but casual dismissal of the Nazarene's existence seems to me so much shite.
Luigi Novi: I have no problem with someone attempting to dissuade me from the conclusions I have reached, since any and all conclusions on empirical matters should be tentative, and must be subject to revision and when necessary, reversal if new information is presented that requires it.
Jesus of Nazareth’s existence is not well-established at all, and there is nothing “casual” about such a statement (which sounds like just another way of saying that it is “dogmatic”). Historians who have concluded that the evidence does not support a historical Jesus arrived at that conclusion after a very careful examination of the evidence presented to them. There is no contemporaneous evidence for him, and no archaeological evidence. The gospels are anonymous, late, contradictory, and erroneous. Paul provides no historical information on Jesus. Josephus is most likely an interpolation, and many believe his two mentions of him were forgeries. These statements are not casual ones, nor are they dogmatic ones. They are reasoned ones. They might be incorrect, but in order to prove that, you have to do so by the same methodology: evidence and reason. Not mere incredulity or rhetoric.
If anything, it is the acceptance of a historical Jesus is done casually by most people, who don’t bother to examine the evidence. The fact that so many Christians repeat the transparently untrue claim that there is more evidence for the existence of Jesus than for Julius Caesar bears this out.
The Blue Spider: As I recall there are a greater number of original manuscripts existing of the various writings collected within the Bible than there are of say, Plato's Republic.
Luigi Novi: There aren’t any original manuscripts of Biblical writings. All extant manuscripts are copies.
The Blue Spider: Comparing the quality of the manuscripts of Plato's work to those of the Gospel-writers' and Plato's words tend to be less consistent across the board than the Gospel-writers'. Also, the age of the so-called Biblical manuscripts is closer in proximity to the claimed date of relevence and occurences... and even the estimates of when the Gospel writers put pen to papyrus... than the distance of time between the oldest manuscript of The Republic and the time in which Plato could have written that document. In any case, we still believe that Socrates exists.
Luigi Novi: Plato is not the only source we have for Socrates. Xenophon, who knew Socrates, wrote about Socrates in Memorabilia.
Greg: What's more, the existence of Christian communities is attested from very early on; it would seem madness to claim that these groups were following an imaginary figure, and indeed that many of them were willing to endure persecution in his name. You can extrapolate Jesus' existence - in some sense anyway - quite easily from the existence of his followers.
Luigi Novi: Can we also extrapolate the existence of, say, Herakles, from the existence of his followers? Why is it mad to think that groups would follow imaginary figures or endure persecution in the name of an imaginary figure? Is the fact that the priests of Cybele engaged in self-flagellation evidence that Cybele was a historical person?
That notion that it is possible for people to devote their entire lives to concepts and people whose existence are unconfirmed is not madness. It’s something that man has done throughout history and continues to do to this day. Belief in something is not, and has never been, evidence for it, even when those who share that belief are numerous. To argue that it is is a logical fallacy.
Greg: And as my English teacher used to say, we actually know far more about the historical Jesus than we do the historical Shakespeare.
Luigi Novi: Your English teacher is mistaken. We know when and where Shakespeare was born, when he died, where he is buried, how many brothers and sisters he had, whom he married, what he wrote, and so forth. The same does not hold true for a Jesus of Nazareth.
You make some good points there, Luigi, but you go too far.
Extrapolating a cause from an effect...
To compare the fact that there were followers of Jesus with followers of, say, Herakles, is absurd. There were significant numbers of Christians in Rome by the mid-sixties - around the time Mark's Gospel was written - or earlier, many of whom were willing to die rather than refute their fate.
The Greeks, on the other hand, believed Herakles to have lived before the Trojan War, which itself was thought to have been fought more than Homeric Poems. In other words, we know nothing of how the Herakles myth developed, save that those who felt he was a God believed he had lived many generations before their own day.
Jesus's existence was a bit more immediate to his followers.
You're how old?
It doesn't work to challenge the Gospels either on the grounds that there wouldn't have been people around to challenge them, since they were written 40 years or more after Jesus's death and people didn't live past 30-40 back then.
Mark's Gospel is generally thought to have been written between 65 and 75, so just over thirty years after Jesus's death. People could actually live quite a long time in Antiquity; Romans in the Army of the Republic were expected to serve sixteen annual campaigns during the years of regular service - 17 to 46, after which they would become a kind of home guard, still being called on for service when necessary. There was no shortage of these.
What's more, if you think about famous figures from Antiquity, most of them lived a long time. Julius Caesar's political career only really started to take off when he was in his forties.
But what about the texts?
Luigi, you're quite right to say that there are no original manuscripts of any books of the Bible; unfortunately for your argument exactly the same thing can be said of any book from antiquity. The Bible does better than any other book in this regard, as it happens.
This makes the Hannibal comparison particularly apt. Our earliest accounts of his doings are to be found in the writings of Polybius, who wrote more than fifty years after the invasion of Italy (and still managed to interview some participants in the war.) After Polybius we have to wait for Cornelius Nepos and Livy, writing from a Roman propagandist viewpoint more than 200 years after Hannibal's death. And then we've to wait for Appian and Plutarch for any information...
All these sources are further away from Hannibal than the Gospels are from years, and yet we basically accept them, though we get more suspicious the later the sources are. And of course, all our manuscripts for these things date from the Middle Ages! More than a thousand years later!
As for the claim that Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny are considered unreliable by historians, I'd have to disagree. We have to treat our sources with caution, but that doesn't make them unreliable.
Suetonius claimed that the Jews were expelled from Rome in 52 because of disturbances caused by Chrestus; this is generally taken to refer to quarrels between Jews and Christians, who were seen as a Jewish sect. Furthermore, Suetonius claimed that Nero persecuted the Christians, adherents to 'a novel and mischievious superstition', in 64.
Tacitus' reference to the Neronian persecution is quite clear too, and is something that I've not seen doubted by any serious historians.
As for the famous passage about Jesus in Josephus's 'Jewish Antiquities', sure, plenty of scholars see it as having been tampered with, but few see it as a complete interpolation. In fact, a tenth century Arabic manuscript of Josephus has the same passage, attesting clearly to Jesus' historical reality, but shorn of the probable Christian modifications seen in the Greek versions.
And as for Shakespeare?
Well, let's just say that we only know more about Shakespeare the man than we do about the historical Jesus if we decide that every piece of evidence we have about Jesus is unacceptable.
Gosh, that was long. I never want to talk about this again.
(Again, I still like PAD's idea for the show.)
To prove that I am still politic even unconscously...
Luigi Novi: "You have not proven that my statements are made dogmatically, nor offered any evidence for that notion. You don’t know me, or anything about me, nor do you have knowledge of my state of mind. My responses are made sincerely and in good faith, and I make them after having studied quite a bit about the subject. I even conducted some further checking with a historian friend after reading the posts by Matt Petersen, John David Ward, yourself and Greg, which contained some arguments that I had not heard before. Such an endeavor is hardly indicative of dogmatism."
I've covered my arse. I haven't explicitly accused you of dogmatism.
I may have done it implicitly, but I do a lot of things implicitly. (Actually, upon further reminicing, I don't think I meant to accuse you implicitly).
I also feel free to claim that I do not know what is in any of your hearts.
I feel especially free to say that my statement generally holds true.
CJA
Luigi Novi:' I’m not sure how you’re distinguishing “historicity” from “veracity,” but again'
It's the question of their existence versus the question of their various qualities and properties such as strength, character, and powers.
CJA
Well Peter David looks like we were both wrong. They mentioned the Passion but in a way that either side could interpret it as finding it anti semetic or making fun of people who thought people would find it antisemetic. Funny, but I guess that's the brilliance of southpark!!
Greg: To compare the fact that there were followers of Jesus with followers of, say, Herakles, is absurd. There were significant numbers of Christians in Rome by the mid-sixties - around the time Mark's Gospel was written - or earlier, many of whom were willing to die rather than refute their fate. The Greeks, on the other hand, believed Herakles to have lived before the Trojan War, which itself was thought to have been fought more than Homeric Poems. In other words, we know nothing of how the Herakles myth developed, save that those who felt he was a God believed he had lived many generations before their own day.
Luigi Novi: Your original point—the one I was responding to—was that Jesus’ existence could be derived the mere existence of those who believed in him and the fact that they were willing to be persecuted for that belief, which you argue would not be possible if he did not exist.
Both notions are false, and remain so.
The idea that you can extrapolate Jesus' merely existence from the existence of his followers is FALSE. If it’s not, then how do you explain the followers of the Hindu religion, which also includes a holy trinity?
The idea that such followers are proof of their god’s existence because they were willing to suffer is also FALSE. People throughout history have done and continue do all sorts of bizarre things, which do not necessarily serve as proof of the legitimacy of their claims. It’s like saying the Moses really did get ten laws carved into stone by a divine being because Jews insist on cutting off their foreskins, or that Mohammed really was a prophet of the same god because Muslims today practice self-mutilation to commemorate the death of his grandson. Is the fact that the priests of Cybele engaged in self-flagellation evidence that Cybele was a historical person?
I asked you this question before, and you didn’t answer it. Why is that?
To argue that one equals the other is simply a non sequitur, and your inability to believe that people would do inexplicably bizarre things for figures that may not have existed is nothing more than and Argument from Incredulity. It’s a logical fallacy to argue that followers would not do this for a person who didn’t exist for the simple reason that they are not AWARE that there is no evidence of his existence, and compartmentalize indications that he may not have. They, like most theists, are genuinely unaware of the history behind the Bible, its writings, its translations, its collections, its inaccuracies and contradictions, the fact that little of it is original, and that it borrows heavily from sources with identical stories that preceded it by millennia, etc.
By now shifting the point to things not pertinent to this issue, like when the alleged figure lived, is just hairsplitting. What difference does it make if the Greeks believed Herakles to have lived before the Trojan War (which itself is an occurrence for which there is no evidence)? How is this relevant? And how does knowing nothing about how the Herakles myth developed have to do with anything? The fact that we know nothing about it helps lead to the conclusion that he didn’t exist? If anything, the opposite is true, since not knowing anything about such occurrences makes it more difficult to gauge their truth. The fact that we do have some idea of how the Jesus myth and other aspects of the Bible developed (as well as knowledge about the historical context that would call it into question) helps us conclude that he may not have existed. It doesn’t hinder it. Knowing nothing about it would make it harder to doing anything other than reserve judgment.
Greg: Jesus's existence was a bit more immediate to his followers.
Luigi Novi: It was not immediate. Christianity didn’t begin until decades after the time of his alleged crucifixion, and didn’t spread until the century following it. In what way was it “immediate”?
Greg: It doesn't work to challenge the Gospels either on the grounds that there wouldn't have been people around to challenge them, since they were written 40 years or more after Jesus's death and people didn't live past 30-40 back then. Mark's Gospel is generally thought to have been written between 65 and 75, so just over thirty years after Jesus's death.
Luigi Novi: If Jesus the Christ was born in 6 B.C.E. and died when he was 33, then Mark, which the consensus dates at about 70 C.E., was written about 40 years after the event. There is absolutely zero evidence that its author was the disciple of Jesus known by that name (the four Gospels were arbitrarily attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John by early Church fathers), and even if the texts supported the notion that it was written by apostles, consider that the average life span of humans in the first century was around 30, and very few people lived to 70. If the apostles were about the same age of Jesus, while he lived, that would put Mark at least 70 years old, and John at over 110.
From its own words, we can deduce that the author of Mark had neither heard Jesus nor been his personal follower. Whoever he was, he simply accepted the mythology of Jesus without question and wrote a crude an ungrammatical account (improved by the author of Matthew, who based his gospel on Mark’s but who wrote with better grammar) of the popular story at the time. According to Gospel analyst Randel Helms, whoever the author of Mark was, he was at least at a third removed from Jesus, possibly the fourth removed. People who wish to portray themselves as eyewitnesses will write in the first person, not in the third person.
The Gospels describe narrative stories, written almost virtually in the third person. Many of the passages attributed to Jesus could only have come from the invention of its authors. For example, many of the statements of Jesus are said to have come from him when he is allegedly alone. If so, who heard him? And how did the authors write passages that described what Jesus was thinking? Clearly, they employ techniques that fictional writers use, and can only serve, at best, as hearsay, and at worst, as fictional or mythological stories.
Greg: People could actually live quite a long time in Antiquity; Romans in the Army of the Republic were expected to serve sixteen annual campaigns during the years of regular service - 17 to 46, after which they would become a kind of home guard, still being called on for service when necessary. What's more, if you think about famous figures from Antiquity, most of them lived a long time. Julius Caesar's political career only really started to take off when he was in his forties.
Luigi Novi: Did 1st century Jews live as long as Roman soldiers or Emperors? Wouldn’t Roman Soldiers and politicians have had better lives and longer life expectancies? Or are you arguing that the Gospels were written by Roman soldiers and Emperors?
It is widely known that life expectancy among Jews was only about 30 years. About one in three women died in childbirth. Wives often died before their children were married and left home. The average marriage probably lasted about 15 years before being ended in the death of one spouse. This also held true for other people in the East like Egyptians, and it held true for centuries.
Greg: Luigi, you're quite right to say that there are no original manuscripts of any books of the Bible; unfortunately for your argument exactly the same thing can be said of any book from antiquity. The Bible does better than any other book in this regard, as it happens.
Luigi Novi: I’m not sure what other book you’re comparing it to, but the fact remains that it was not written as a historical record.
Greg: This makes the Hannibal comparison particularly apt. Our earliest accounts of his doings are to be found in the writings of Polybius, who wrote more than fifty years after the invasion of Italy (and still managed to interview some participants in the war.) After Polybius we have to wait for Cornelius Nepos and Livy, writing from a Roman propagandist viewpoint more than 200 years after Hannibal's death.
Luigi Novi: Historians don’t accept that Hannibal invaded Italy from Spain by crossing the Alps merely on the say-so of Polybius or Livy. There is other evidence to support the historicity of Hannibal, the use of war elephants, the Punic Wars, etc. Moreover, the accounts of Polybius and Livy differ greatly from the Gospels in that they were written as history, (although Livy included a lot of legendary material in his version, as was common in ancient times). Modern historians don’t simply accept ancient sources at face value. The writers of the gospels, who are anonymous, were not writing history, and there is little if any corroboration for what they wrote. Much of what they wrote is demonstrably inaccurate, such as placing the birth of Jesus during the governorship of Quirinius and the reign of Herod and the census of Augustus. The census and Quirinius’s governorship were in 6 C.E.; Herod died in 4 B.C.E.
Greg: As for the claim that Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny are considered unreliable by historians, I'd have to disagree. We have to treat our sources with caution, but that doesn't make them unreliable.
Luigi Novi: Josephus’ mentions of Jesus are not taken as reliable, with many scholars believing they are forgeries by Eusebius. Tacitus gives a brief mention of a "Christus" in his Annals, Book XV, Sec. 44, but he gives no source for his material, and there are many disputes as to the authenticity of his mention of Jesus. The fact that he was born in 64 C.E., well after the alleged life of Jesus, means he can only give hearsay accounts. Ditto for Suetonius, who was born in 69 C.E., and whose mention of a "Chrestus" is assumed by Christians to mean “Christ,” but which is disputed by historians.
Even if any of these writings were reliable, they only mention a Jesus, but tell nothing about him.
Greg: Suetonius claimed that the Jews were expelled from Rome in 52 because of disturbances caused by Chrestus; this is generally taken to refer to quarrels between Jews and Christians, who were seen as a Jewish sect. Furthermore, Suetonius claimed that Nero persecuted the Christians, adherents to 'a novel and mischievious superstition', in 64. Tacitus' reference to the Neronian persecution is quite clear too, and is something that I've not seen doubted by any serious historians.
Luigi Novi: This mentions Christians. It doesn’t mention anything that indicates that the central figure of their worship was historical figure.
Greg: As for the famous passage about Jesus in Josephus's 'Jewish Antiquities', sure, plenty of scholars see it as having been tampered with, but few see it as a complete interpolation. In fact, a tenth century Arabic manuscript of Josephus has the same passage, attesting clearly to Jesus' historical reality.
Luigi Novi: It does not “clearly attest” to his historical reality. Josephus lived during the 1st Century. Most historians, including Christian ones, consider the two mentions of Jesus in his works to be 3rd century forgeries. Earlier versions of his work dating from before the second century do not mention Jesus at all. The flowery and worshipful paragraph on Jesus is totally inconsistent with what we know about Josephus, and was probably added to Josephus's work at the beginning of the 4th century CE, during Constantine's reign, by Bishop Eusebius (who said that it was permissible for Christians to lie in order to further the kingdom of god).
It wouldn’t surprise me, therefore, that in 600 years, one of these forgeries made their way into an Arabic manuscript.
Greg: Well, let's just say that we only know more about Shakespeare the man than we do about the historical Jesus if we decide that every piece of evidence we have about Jesus is unacceptable.
Luigi Novi: Your wording implies that any conclusion that effect would be arbitrary or capricious. In fact, that which is alleged to be evidence for a historical Jesus of Nazareth has been properly examined by historians. It isn’t merely “decided.”
Luigi Novi: You have not proven that my statements are made dogmatically, nor offered any evidence for that notion. You don’t know me, or anything about me, nor do you have knowledge of my state of mind. My responses are made sincerely and in good faith, and I make them after having studied quite a bit about the subject. I even conducted some further checking with a historian friend after reading the posts by Matt Petersen, John David Ward, yourself and Greg, which contained some arguments that I had not heard before. Such an endeavor is hardly indicative of dogmatism.
The Blue Spider: I've covered my arse. I haven't explicitly accused you of dogmatism. I may have done it implicitly, but I do a lot of things implicitly. (Actually, upon further reminicing, I don't think I meant to accuse you implicitly). I also feel free to claim that I do not know what is in any of your hearts. I feel especially free to say that my statement generally holds true.
Luigi Novi: Without having offered any evidence or argument that supports it.
The only people who think SOuth Park isn't political are the ones who are too stupid to understand the actual plots and sophisticated jokes & are just laughing at the low-brow fart jokes.
I guess sometimes the most pointed or obvious satire just flies underneath the radar of many people. Just look at how Parker and Stone slid the subtitle of the movie right past the MPAA.
In respone to Luigi Novi's point about Cybele, Cybele was never described as a person per se. She's a concept of the mother earth and fertility and such, who came to Rome as a black stone in the river (according to one version of the Roman government's spheel anyhoo) during Rome's time of crisis to lend aid(when many of the soldiers and citizens were abandoning faith in the Olympian Pantheon and investing belief in other gods and goddesses due to their nation's misfortunes and the cultural exchanges between individuals in disparate colonies that were filtering back to the home areas). Anyway, the point is that even if the physical reality of Cybele was just a black stone in a river, or just a black stone the Roman government said they found in the river, (never mind the thoughts and beliefs of the myriad follwers Cybele had in the countries east of the Roman territories for hundreds maybe thousands of years previously) then in a very real way Cybele exists, because hundreds of thousands of people believed in her (it?). And that's all it takes, screw the physical reality - that's what shrines and holy parades and objects are for, to link the belief to the physical world - belief is just as real and religious belief is something that is shared and therefore much more powerful.
Unfortunately The Passion of the Easter Bunny did not even make it on last night. Instead we got a killer parody of Anime and Manga. Hopefully the Passion of the Easter Buny will be appear a lot closer to Easter cause I still want to see what they have planned.
Luigi, let's just quit the whole 'historians say' malarkey, shall we? I am one. I specialise in the ancient world. I've written the only full length study of any ancient battle ever. And yes, it's on Hannibal. I've spent years working through this sort of stuff. I'm not saying this to establish my own credentials, just to say that phrases like 'historians say' won't wash. Historians disagree. Most believe Jesus exist. Some think he was the son of God, some think he was a teacher, no more. Hardly any think he didn't exist.
You accept that Tacitus and Suetonius refer to Christians in Rome in the mid sixties? And indeed that there are passages in their works that suggest their presence in the mid fifties? In other words, Christianity had spread to Rome within at most three decades of Jesus's death. Paul's letters demonstrate the existence of Christian communities throughout the Greek world in the intervening decades; they also make it very clear that Christianity had been viewed as a serious threat in Palestine from the first.
The issue of immediacy is an important one, Luigi, it's not just hairsplitting. It's crucial to the historical method. The closer your sources are to the events they describe the more credibility they have, as a rule. In other words, you can extrapolate the existence of Jesus from the fact that he definitely had followers twenty and thirty years later; you cannot extrapolate the existence of Herakles from the fact that he had widely conflicting cults in his honour eight hundred years later.
What alternative are you presenting? That the likes of Paul and Peter sailed around the Mediterranean, enduring persecution and ultimately death in order to spread the word about somebody they'd made up?
As for Mark's Gospel, it was ascribed to him at the very latest by 130 AD, when Papias of Hierapolis said that he had been told that it was written by Mark, the interpreter of Peter. There's nothing arbitrary about that. It might be wrong, but it's not arbitrary.
As for the claim that the Evangelists use the tools of fiction writers when they say what Jesus was thinking, can you give me some examples? I'm kind of puzzled by this.
I'm intrigued by your faith in 'historical sources' that you don't indentify. I mean, you talk about manuscripts of Josephus from the second century, though the earliest existing one is from the ninth century. The controversial passage is still debated by historians, but most historians consider it to be genuine, albeit corrupted; very few see it as a complete interpolation. In other words, Josephus believed that Jesus did exist. That doesn't prove anything by your criteria, though, since Josephus is thought to have relied purely on oral evidence for the period 4BC to 66AD.
As for the age thing, where on earth have you dragged up this notion of people living for only thirty years? Roman soldiers in the Republican army were amateurs - they were a citizen militia, composed of farmers, carpenters, stonemasons, potters, whatever. And yet they were expected to be able to do perfectly good military service until they turned 46, after which they'd still serve, but as a kind of home guard.
The Romans were far from abnormal in this regard. The fifth century Greeks certainly lived into their sixties and beyond on a regular basis. Why on earth would the first century Jews have been any different?
Dylan, yes, the Anime/Manga send up was hilarious, but I never even saw the punchline at the end comng till it hit, and it was wonderfully done, insightful into America (if a few months late), and HILARIOUS!
I think Passion fo the Easter Bunny is scheduled for next Wednesday.
I don't know if it was originally intended that way, or if they decided to shift episodes around at the last minute.
Luigi Novi: Without having offered any evidence or argument that supports it.
You want me to come up with evidence of my beliefs about the human heart.
You want me to come up with a dedicated treatise about why I think steak taste good, too?
CJA
Hell, it sounds like you want me to write a treatise about why guys like steak.
CJA
this it?
"Regardless of religion it is the typical action of a dogmatic secularist to outright deny the existence of the relevent Jesus, and claim that the only evidence of His (his?) existence was recorded in a collection of epistles and other writings whose collective accuracy is already held in collective suspicion."
Proof. Proof. Support.
Nobody would ever ask me for this if they read the Op-ED columns in the local student newspaper.
I mean NOBODY. It'd be freaking obvious.
CJA
Assuming that I'm awake again... what the blazes is your source for a THIRTY-year lifespan for Jews?
I have never heard that EVER in ten years of casual research, spanning the gap from childhood to adulthood. If it was true. P-goshdamn-BS would have told me that three times by now, followed up by the experts at ABC where they create a new "is Jesus real" documentary every three years or so.
I want to know your source, because none of mine, either reliable or third-rate have ever made that claim.
CJA
CJA
The Blue Spider: Western culture, for the most part, embraced a system of calender dating counting years from this person's supposed birth.
Luigi Novi: And days of the week whose names in English are derived from Norse and Roman Gods. Does this mean you believe that Thor and Freya were actual gods who lived, CJ?
Um, Luigi, a bit more accurately, the days of the week derive from the Teutonic gods, one Roman god and two heavenly bodies revered by early humans.
Sunday and Monday are the "Sun"day and the "Moon"day respectively.
Tuesday and Wednesday derive from the Teutonic gods "Tiw" and "Woden" (as opposed to the more Norse renderings, "Tyr" and "Odin").
Thursday and Friday seem more derivative of the Norse gods "Thor" and "Frigga", though how much of this is due to the Teutonic versions being less distinct is uncertain. ("Donar" is more Teutonic than "Thor", but there's uncertainty as to which version was actually revered by the Angles. "Fricka" seems more Teutonic than "Frigga" but, the distaff side of Northern mythology wasn't quite as distinctive as in Rome or Greece. Certainly, though, "Freyja" is not the source of "Friday"--that was a different goddess.)
Saturday is the only day specifically derived from a Roman god, "Saturn" (and certainly, it's an oddity).
speaking of South Park did anyone see the season premiere? it was seriously one of the most twisted things they've ever done, up there with "Do you like your Chili, Scott? I call it - Mr. and Ms. Tenorman Chili." If you haven't seen it, and you have bittorrent, go to www.mrtwig.net and download "801 - Fun With Weapons". You WON'T be disappointed.
>>>The only people who think SOuth Park isn't political are the ones who are too stupid to understand the actual plots and sophisticated jokes & are just laughing at the low-brow fart jokes.
Now, now. Insulting these people is just appeasement, you liberal freedom-hating heretical liberal commie pinko longhair liberal terrorist-loving farm-animal-rutting liberal intellectual high-brow ACLU-lover fag liberal Hollywood commie liberal bastard.
America. Don't think about it, or leave it.
I dunno, I know people who won't watch South Park because it's just plain vulgar and such.
But then, these are some of the same people who don't "get it" either.
And yeah, the season premiere was lots of fun. :)
"And days of the week whose names in English are derived from Norse and Roman Gods. Does this mean you believe that Thor and Freya were actual gods who lived, CJ?"
That doesn't parallel the importance of calender dating.
I find more similar to naming planets after gods.
Now, while I don't believe in them, I can't find a reason to discount them.
I don't discount the existence of something just becuase I cannot see it, because that would literally be discounting an existence out of ignorance.
So for all I know there were Greek gods. I just don't care so long as they leave me the Frigga alone.
CJA
skii: In respone to Luigi Novi's point about Cybele, Cybele was never described as a person per se. She's a concept of the mother earth and fertility and such, who came to Rome as a black stone in the river…even if the physical reality of Cybele was just a black stone in a river, or just a black stone the Roman government said they found in the river, (never mind the thoughts and beliefs of the myriad follwers Cybele had in the countries east of the Roman territories for hundreds maybe thousands of years previously) then in a very real way Cybele exists, because hundreds of thousands of people believed in her (it?).
Luigi Novi: But the whole point of my question to Greg was, does the mere fact that she had followers who believed in her and flagellated themselves mean that any part of her was real? Greg’s position is that the existence of followers willing to bear persecution is evidence of someone’s existence. It is not. Such a statement is a non sequitur.
skii: And that's all it takes, screw the physical reality - that's what shrines and holy parades and objects are for, to link the belief to the physical world - belief is just as real and religious belief is something that is shared and therefore much more powerful.
Luigi Novi: And entirely irrelevant to the point Greg made.
Greg: Luigi, let's just quit the whole 'historians say' malarkey, shall we? I am one. I specialise in the ancient world. I've written the only full length study of any ancient battle ever. And yes, it's on Hannibal. I've spent years working through this sort of stuff. I'm not saying this to establish my own credentials, just to say that phrases like 'historians say' won't wash.
Luigi Novi: Agreed. Which is why I never relied on such statements.
My statements emphasized the study of EVIDENCE. Not mere Arguments from Authority, which by itself, would be a logical fallacy.
Greg: Most believe Jesus exist.
Luigi Novi: That is not an argument. In fact, it’s same Argument from Authority that you just admonished me for supposedly using.
Yes, most people are under the impression that he was an actual historical figure. I used to be one. But most of them are ignorant of the quality of historical evidence for him, a subject that is not widely publicized, and which they may not seek out for study.
Greg: You accept that Tacitus and Suetonius refer to Christians in Rome in the mid sixties? And indeed that there are passages in their works that suggest their presence in the mid fifties? In other words, Christianity had spread to Rome within at most three decades of Jesus's death. Paul's letters demonstrate the existence of Christian communities throughout the Greek world in the intervening decades; they also make it very clear that Christianity had been viewed as a serious threat in Palestine from the first.
Luigi Novi: But it does not mean that central figure in that religion was an actual person who lived.
Greg: The issue of immediacy is an important one, Luigi, it's not just hairsplitting. It's crucial to the historical method. The closer your sources are to the events they describe the more credibility they have, as a rule.
Luigi Novi: And as I mentioned above, the “sources” who wrote the gospels were not close to him at all. They were anonymous people who likely never met him or heard him speak, writing at the earliest, four decades after his alleged death, provided no sources, wrote in the format of fictional narratives, and contradicted each other. How is any of that “immediate”?
Greg: In other words, you can extrapolate the existence of Jesus from the fact that he definitely had followers twenty and thirty years later…
Luigi Novi: Non sequitur. The existence of followers three or four decades after the alleged fact is not evidence of the existence of the person of their veneration.
Greg: What alternative are you presenting? That the likes of Paul and Peter sailed around the Mediterranean, enduring persecution and ultimately death in order to spread the word about somebody they'd made up?
Luigi Novi: I didn’t say they made him up. You do have a penchant for Straw Man arguments, don’t you? I could’ve sworn that I said above that it was a myth that gradually evolved. The classic “They wouldn’t have done what they did for someone they didn’t believe in” is a commonly repeated argument. It’s also a fallacious one, since no one ever said that the early Christians didn’t believe that he was real, or that they “made him up.”
Greg: As for Mark's Gospel, it was ascribed to him at the very latest by 130 AD, when Papias of Hierapolis said that he had been told that it was written by Mark, the interpreter of Peter. There's nothing arbitrary about that. It might be wrong, but it's not arbitrary.
Luigi Novi: He was told by who that it was written by Mark? Who was this source that would’ve known this? Who would’ve known in 130 C.E. who the author was of a text 60 written years previously about events that took place 40 years before that? Yes, the Oxford Companion to the Bible mentions this allegation by Papias, but no one knows who told him this, or who the “Mark” (a common name) he mentioned really was, and today the authors of the Gospels remain anonymous. The only people who claim any degree of certainty that they were the apostles of a Jesus of Nazareth are fundamentalist theists.
Greg: As for the claim that the Evangelists use the tools of fiction writers when they say what Jesus was thinking, can you give me some examples?
Luigi Novi: As I already pointed out above, the Gospels are written in the third person. People writing eyewitness accounts do not do this. As far as examples of the authors knowing what characters were thinking or feeling:
Mark 2:6-8 Now some teachers of the law were sitting there, thinking to themselves, “Why does this fellow talk like that? He’s blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Immediately Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts, and he said to them, “Why are you thinking these things?”
How does the author know what the teachers were thinking? And how would Jesus know what they were thinking? Just because he said he did?
Mark 9:30-32 They left that place and passed through Galilee. Jesus did not want anyone to know where they were, because he was teaching his disciples. He said to them, “The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into the hands of men. They will kill him, and after three days he will rise.” But they did not understand what he meant and were afraid to ask him about it.
How does the author know what Jesus wanted this, or why? How does he know the disciples didn’t understand this, or are too afraid to ask? If they didn’t ask, how does the author know the reason why?
Mark 14:10-11 Then Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve, went to the chief priests to betray Jesus to them. They were delighted to hear this and promised to give him money. So he watched for an opportunity to hand him over.
How does the author know this? Who was there during this clandestine little transaction to record it?
Mark 14:35-36 Going a little further, he fell to the ground and prayed that if possible the hour might pass from him. “Father,” he said, “everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.”
This is when he is praying to his father in Gethsemane while the Apostles are supposed to be standing watch. Each time he returns to them, he finds them falling asleep, and goes back to pray the same thing. How did the author of these passages know what he was praying if he was alone, and the only people nearby were asleep?
Greg: I mean, you talk about manuscripts of Josephus from the second century, though the earliest existing one is from the ninth century. The controversial passage is still debated by historians, but most historians consider it to be genuine, albeit corrupted; very few see it as a complete interpolation. In other words, Josephus believed that Jesus did exist. That doesn't prove anything by your criteria, though, since Josephus is thought to have relied purely on oral evidence for the period 4BC to 66AD.
Luigi Novi: I did not mention manuscripts from the second century.
That is when he wrote his works, but I didn’t mention anything about extant manuscripts from that century.
What I meant to say was that other early Christian writers fail to cite this passage, even though it would have suited their purposes to do so. This is one of the main pieces of evidence on which a suspicion of tampering is based.
In looking back over my prior post, I did say, “Earlier versions of his work dating from before the second century do not mention Jesus at all,” when I should have said “earlier mentions of Josephus’ writings…” This may have appeared to be a reference to extant writings by him dated to that period, so I apologize for the error in wording.
That passage was known to Jerome and in the time of Eusebius, but Jerome's Latin version renders "He was the Messiah" by "He was believed to be the Christ." And again, the passage is highly pro-Christian. It is hard to imagine that Josephus, an orthodox Pharisaic Jew, would write such a laudatory passage about a man supposedly killed for blasphemy. Indeed, the passage seems to make Josephus himself out to be a Christian, which was certainly not the case.
The early Christian fathers were not acquainted with it. Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen all would have quoted this passage had it existed in their time, but they didn’t. Why is this? Ambrose, writing in the generation succeeding the passage’s first appearance (360 A. D.) didn’t buy the passage as coming from Josephus. Chrysostom and Photius both reject this passage. Chrysostom, a reader of Josephus, who preached and wrote in the latter part of the fourth century, in his defense of Christianity, needed this evidence, but was too honest or too wise to use it. Photius, who made a revision of Josephus, writing five hundred years after the time of Eusebius, ignores the passage, and admits that Josephus has made no mention of Christ.
The passage’s brevity alone makes its inclusion suspicious. Josephus’ work is voluminous and exhaustive. Recording every important person and event of the first 70 years of the Christian era, it comprises twenty books. Whole pages are devoted to petty robbers and obscure seditious leaders. Nearly forty chapters are devoted to the life of a single king. Yet this remarkable being, the greatest product of his race, a being of whom the prophets foretold “ten thousand wonderful things,” a being greater than any earthly king, is dismissed with a dozen lines. Why does Josephus not mention these “wonderful things”? Or the disciples? If he was crucified by Pilate, why doesn’t Josephus mention him in connection with the Samaritan upheaval in the next chapter? Given that Josephus mentioned all the different Jewish sects, why didn’t he mention the Christians?
Greg: As for the age thing, where on earth have you dragged up this notion of people living for only thirty years?
Luigi Novi: For a professional historian (not that you were saying this to establish your own credentials or anything), you certainly tend toward emotive words with biased characterizations instead of more objective ones. Putting “faith” in historians. Now one of my points has been “dragged up,” as if it’s something I pulled out of a sewer. Quite amusing.
For a historian.
As far as the 30-40 year lifespans of 1st Century Palestinians are concerned, while it is true some Romans lived into their 60s or 70s, infant and child mortality rates were high, and many women died in childbirth, or died young from the effects of repeated pregnancy and lactation, and when you divide the number of years a given people live by the number of people, you get an average life expectancy of 30-35.
The page at http://freethought.mbdojo.com/didjesusexist.html, however, states, “Even if the texts supported the notion that it was written by apostles, consider that the average life span of humans in the first century was around 30, and very few people lived to 70.” The first part of that statement is correct because it is an average, but the second part may have been an error, and I repeated it. I apologize if I misunderstood this part of the information. However, even granting early dates to the gospels, that would make the apostles pretty damned old when they began writing them and bearing persecution for them.
Another sources that uses that figure is at:
http://econ161.berkeley.edu/movable_type/2003_archives/001846.html. I did, however, find another source claiming it was 45 (which I found when writing this post) at http://ffrf.org/articles/dbarker/?t=rise.txt. Perhaps there is a variance in the consensus?
Luigi Novi: Without having offered any evidence or argument that supports it.
The Blue Spider: You want me to come up with evidence of my beliefs about the human heart.
Luigi Novi: You didn’t state any beliefs about the human heart.
You argued that my statements were made dogmatically—that is, that they were based on unyielding authority, faith-based belief, or fiat, rather than reasoned analysis or careful consideration. By making this accusation, you were claiming to have knowledge of my state of mind when responding to posts.
The Blue Spider: You want me to come up with a dedicated treatise about why I think steak taste good, too?
Luigi Novi: If it comes with a good recipe or two, go right ahead. ;-)
The Blue Spider: this it?
"Regardless of religion it is the typical action of a dogmatic secularist to outright deny the existence of the relevent Jesus, and claim that the only evidence of His (his?) existence was recorded in a collection of epistles and other writings whose collective accuracy is already held in collective suspicion."
Proof. Proof. Support.
Luigi Novi: The proof that you believe supports your claim that my responses are dogmatic rather than reasoned and considered is to simply repeat the earlier statement in which you made it?
Try again.
The Blue Spider: If it was true. P-goshdamn-BS would have told me that three times by now, followed up by the experts at ABC where they create a new "is Jesus real" documentary every three years or so.
Luigi Novi: PBS? You mean the same station that showcases Dr. Gary Null’s prescription of magnets and other medieval tools to prevent aging, and his belief that arthritis is caused by our thoughts? The same station that often features holistic health guru Deepak Chopra, and his medieval medicine? The same station that features such programs as How to Find Your Guardian Angel? The same station that devoted time to feng shui “expert” Deborah Gee? The same station that, along with such other “educational” networks as the History Channel, The Learning Channel and the Discovery Channel, airs huge amounts of uncritical programming on talking to the dead, Atlantis, and the Bermuda Triangle?
Well, I’m convinced!
Seriously, this is just another non sequitur.
The idea that “if this were true, I’d hear about it” or ‘if it were true, this authority over here that I respect would’ve told me” is false. When I first saw that Discovery Channel documentary Jesus: The Complete Story narrated by Avery Brooks that they run every year around Christmastime, I first learned about Josephus’ mention of Jesus, and assumed, like presumably everyone else did, that this was a given, and that Jesus’ existence was not in question, even if the details or his supernatural qualities were. No mention was made whatsoever in the documentary that these references to Jesus are disputed at all in the historical community. Only later did I discover this when coming across other sources critical of the Bible, something I never see anywhere in the mainstream media, wherein any mention of things like Jesus is always presented as a given.
I’m not familiar with which program you saw on PBS, but it’s possible that the point of lifespans was simply not mentioned, or it’s possible that it was, but you missed it. Maybe it was not considered salient enough to make the edit. Did they specifically mention that lifespans were longer than 30-35 years?
It’s egocentric to argue that if something were true, a given individual would necessarily have heard it, or that just because a station has aired reputable programs like Nova, Cosmos and Scientific American Frontiers, that it is necessarily the be-all and end-all of truth. To argue this it is just another Argument from Authority (i.e.: dogma).
Joseph: Um, Luigi, a bit more accurately, the days of the week derive from the Teutonic gods, one Roman god and two heavenly bodies revered by early humans.
Luigi Novi: Thanks.
Luigi Novi: And days of the week whose names in English are derived from Norse and Roman Gods. Does this mean you believe that Thor and Freya were actual gods who lived, CJ?"
The Blue Spider: That doesn't parallel the importance of calender dating. I find more similar to naming planets after gods.
Luigi Novi: Your original point was that the various and disparate groups of people in Western culture would not cling to a timekeeping system based on a figure that was purely mythical, but rather only if they had some confirmation of his historicity.
By pointing out that we do just that with the days of the week, I disproved that notion.
This has nothing to do with planets. Planets are not used by these various peoples as reference points of timekeeping, so your analogy is false.
The Blue Spider: Now, while I don't believe in them, I can't find a reason to discount them. I don't discount the existence of something just becuase I cannot see it, because that would literally be discounting an existence out of ignorance.
Luigi Novi: First of all, this has nothing to do with the earlier point, since we were not talking about discounting or believing in them, but in whether we base our system of time on them despite the fact that we don’t regard them as historical figures.
Second, one does not require a reason to discount them. One requires a reason to establish them. The burden of proof in matters of extraordinary claims like that of the existence of gods is on the claimant making that claim, not the respondent to disprove it.
I'm troubled, Luigi, and not just by Jim Walker's laughable 'free thought' site, replete as it is with errors and absurdities.
It’s egocentric to argue that if something were true, a given individual would necessarily have heard it, or that just because a station has aired reputable programs like Nova, Cosmos and Scientific American Frontiers, that it is necessarily the be-all and end-all of truth. To argue this it is just another Argument from Authority (i.e.: dogma).
Whither then your belief that if Josephus had really written about Jesus that Origen would have written about it?
There are many hypotheses about the main passage referring to Jesus in Josephus. Most historians fall into two camps on this one, the bigger one arguing that the passage is basically authenthic, but has been seriously altered; the other mainstream view is that this passage has replaced a passage that was genuinely offensive towards Jesus.
It would have been astoundingly odd if Josephus had not made some sort of mention of Jesus and of Christianity. After all, it would appear that Jesus wasn't an insignificant figure in first century Palestinian history, and the church was already becoming quite important. By the time Josephus wrote three of the canonical Gospels had already been written.
Would you argue that these written sources were less authenthic than the oral sources upon which Josephus relied? They might have been, but why would you think so.
As for my claim that most historians believe Jesus existed, how is that an argument from 'Authority'? You seem to have misunderstood me. I never said most people believe that Jesus existed. I said most historians believe it. That kind of scuppers your claim that 'most people are under the impression that he was an actual historical figure... most of them are ignorant of the quality of historical evidence for him, a subject that is not widely publicized, and which they may not seek out for study.'
I wonder are you just misunderstanding me; after all, you completely misrepresent my case, and argue with what you evidently expect me to say when you observe that: 'Greg’s position is that the existence of followers willing to bear persecution is evidence of someone’s existence.'
I never said that. I said that the fact that within at most a few years (think of Saint Stephen) of Jesus' death there were people willing to die for him is fairly powerful testiment to his existence. So too is the fact that people were willing to kill those followers, seeing them as a threat to their own society - all you have to do is read Paul's letters in that regard. They can't possibly be classed as hearsay, though if it makes you feel better you can think of them as lies.
These letters are eloquent testimony to the existence of Christian communities within thirty, even within twenty years of Jesus' death, written by somebody who had persecuted those very people years before. You really don't think that those churches had been founded around a real person? Surely, it takes a bigger leap to see them as having been founded on a fiction than a reality, however corrupted.
How is it a non sequitur to say that Jesus' existence can be extrapolated from the fact that he had followers? If you see a footprint, don't you assume there was a foot? If you see a child, don't you see there was a parent? Causes have effects. It's simply a matter of reasoning backwards.
Now, you're not denying the existence of these communities, are you? After all, you don't seem to be denying that Peter and Paul existed, sailed around, and persecuted, blah blah blah. Fair enough, that's something anyway. Now, you don't think that they made Jesus up. Grand. However you do think that Jesus' existence was 'a myth that gradually evolved', yes?
Okay, so Peter, who supposedly knew Jesus, and Paul, who had been persecuting Jesus's followers were willing to go to all that effort preaching and dying for something they knew to have been a myth?
How is this myth supposed to have developed? Remember that Peter and Paul knew what they were talking about, after all...
Of course, as I said, if you wanted you could always argue against their existence too, and against that of Stephen, the first martyr, and James, who Josephus seems to have thought was the brother of Jesus.
Your problems with the Gospel-writers come down to a few things, as far as I can see. You claim that 'They were anonymous people who likely never met him or heard him speak, writing at the earliest, four decades after his alleged death, provided no sources, wrote in the format of fictional narratives, and contradicted each other,' and argue that 'the Gospels are written in the third person. People writing eyewitness accounts do not do this.'
Well, first of all, eye-witness accounts are written in the third person as often as not, depending upon whether they're trying to be objective or subjective. It was normal in Antiquity for eyewitnesses to write in the third person. Thucydides, Xenophon, and Caesar are all excellent examples of this.
And fictional techniques? If the techniques of the Gospel are those of fiction writers they're pretty damn clumsy. Surely they could have covered their tracks better than that. How could the Apostles have known what Jesus was thinking? Well, maybe he told them. As for the other examples you cite, though Christians would easily be able to give supernatural explanations, I'll concede that you might be right in saying there was literary license at work.
Be that as it may, it was exceedingly rare for writers in Antiquity to cite their sources; if the Evangelists had done so it would have got in the way of the story. John does claim to have lived through the events he describes, as it happens, though he waits until the end to point this out.
Are the Gospels written after Jesus supposedly lived? Of course. But then, the earliest extant accounts of the Persian Invasion of Greece or the Hannibalic Campaigns in Italy were written just as long after those wars. Are you willing to throw those out too?
And there are conflicts between the Gospels? Of course there are. There are conflicts between the accounts of the Battle of Zama as described by Polybius, Livy, and Appian. Plutarch, Caesar, Suetonius, Cicero, Dio, and Appian all convey different pictures of life in Rome in the 50s BC. This is perfectly normal.
Would you accept any Gospel as true, if every so often the Evangelist said, 'Really. I was there. It was great!', and then ended by saying 'Yep, it was me who saw all this, just a few years ago, me, Bob from Bethlehem, who knew Jesus when he was just a knacker with the arse out of his trousers'?
Next week on South Park: Kyle goes to see "The Passion". No joke.
Wein's Law tells us: If we don't see Jesus's body, that means he can come back. When we LEAST EXPECT IT!
Just saw the newest episode of SP. Looks like you weren't all THAT far off in the end, Pete.
Sorry for the belated response, but between my trip to Italy, settling back in after returning, work, and other things, I was unable to reply earlier in such a way that would’ve done the material justice.
Greg: I'm troubled, Luigi, and not just by Jim Walker's laughable 'free thought' site, replete as it is with errors and absurdities.
Luigi Novi: Could you elaborate on some of them?
Luigi Novi: It’s egocentric to argue that if something were true, a given individual would necessarily have heard it, or that just because a station has aired reputable programs like Nova, Cosmos and Scientific American Frontiers, that it is necessarily the be-all and end-all of truth. To argue this it is just another Argument from Authority (i.e.: dogma).
Greg: Whither then your belief that if Josephus had really written about Jesus that Origen would have written about it?
Luigi Novi: The two situations are nowhere close to being analogous, and the fact that you think they are demonstrates your paralogia.
The are good reasons why the PBS program may not have mentioned the notion of lifespans, which I mentioned above. There are no obvious reasons, on the other hand, why Josephus would not have mentioned Christ.
Greg: It would have been astoundingly odd if Josephus had not made some sort of mention of Jesus and of Christianity. After all, it would appear that Jesus wasn't an insignificant figure in first century Palestinian history, and the church was already becoming quite important. By the time Josephus wrote three of the canonical Gospels had already been written.
Luigi Novi: Which is precisely one reason why his two brief mentions of him is suspicious, as I mentioned earlier. To reiterate, Josephus’ work is voluminous and exhaustive. Recording every important person and event of the first 70 years of the Christian era, it comprises twenty books. Whole pages are devoted to petty robbers and obscure seditious leaders. Nearly forty chapters are devoted to the life of a single king. Yet Jesus the Christ, the greatest product of his race, a being of whom the prophets foretold “ten thousand wonderful things,” a being greater than any earthly king, is dismissed with a dozen lines? And why does Josephus not mention these “wonderful things”? Or the disciples? If he was crucified by Pilate, why doesn’t Josephus mention him in connection with the Samaritan upheaval in the next chapter? Given that Josephus mentioned all the different Jewish sects, why didn’t he mention the Christians?
I mean, did you not read this point when I mentioned it in my March 22nd post? You concede that it “would have been” astoundingly odd for Josephus not to make some mention of Jesus, when in fact, the manner in which he supposedly did mention him is suspicious for that very reason.
Greg: I wonder are you just misunderstanding me; after all, you completely misrepresent my case, and argue with what you evidently expect me to say when you observe that: 'Greg’s position is that the existence of followers willing to bear persecution is evidence of someone’s existence.'
I never said that. I said that the fact that within at most a few years (think of Saint Stephen) of Jesus' death there were people willing to die for him is fairly powerful testiment to his existence.
Luigi Novi: And the significant difference between these two statements is…?
My response to this supposedly “different version” of the prior statement remains: It is NOT evidence.
Greg: So too is the fact that people were willing to kill those followers, seeing them as a threat to their own society
Luigi Novi: Again, that is not proof. You are simply arbitrarily assigning the label of “proof” by fiat. You hit the nail on the head when you say that people were willing to kill those followers because they saw them as a threat, and it is for that reason that they were killed: Because those in power are often threatened by changes and challenges to the status quo. This does not mean that the empirical assertions made by those challengers is true. It can hardly be argued that the type of people who typically kill those who challenge them are behaving logically or rationally. Just as followers can and historically have done all manner of illogical things, so too can those who respond to them. To argue that “Those in power killed the followers” somehow equals “The central figure in the followers’ belief system actually existed” is a NON SEQUITUR.
Greg: all you have to do is read Paul's letters in that regard. They can't possibly be classed as hearsay, though if it makes you feel better you can think of them as lies.
Luigi Novi: Thing is, I don’t form conclusions on what makes me “feel better.” I form conclusions on rational interpretation of available facts. Paul’s epistles were written some time before 60 C.E., and nowhere therein does he mention meeting an earthly Jesus.
Hearsay.
Greg: These letters are eloquent testimony to the existence of Christian communities within thirty, even within twenty years of Jesus' death, written by somebody who had persecuted those very people years before.
Luigi Novi: We’re not talking about the existence of Christian communities. We’re talking about the existence of Christ.
Greg: You really don't think that those churches had been founded around a real person?
Luigi Novi: I think that there is no concrete evidence that it was. Maybe he did exist, but there is no evidence for that.
Greg: Surely, it takes a bigger leap to see them as having been founded on a fiction than a reality, however corrupted.
Luigi Novi: Again, that is an Argument from Incredulity. That you cannot find it within yourself to believe something could be true, without offering any evidence or reasoned argument to explain why it cannot be true, does nothing to mitigate the possibility—or even the likelihood—that a religion can be founded around a mythological character, which most religions have.
Greg: How is it a non sequitur to say that Jesus' existence can be extrapolated from the fact that he had followers?
Luigi Novi: Because one does not necessarily follow from the other. Hence the phrase “non sequitur.”
Greg: If you see a footprint, don't you assume there was a foot? If you see a child, don't you see there was a parent? Causes have effects. It's simply a matter of reasoning backwards.
Luigi Novi: And where is the footprint or child of Christ? Your analogy is utterly false, because both footprints and children are EVIDENCE of a person’s existence. Show me a footprint or child fathered by Christ. Instead, you’re pretending that followers are equivalent to these things. They’re not.
Greg: Now, you're not denying the existence of these communities, are you? After all, you don't seem to be denying that Peter and Paul existed, sailed around, and persecuted, blah blah blah. Fair enough, that's something anyway. Now, you don't think that they made Jesus up. Grand. However you do think that Jesus' existence was 'a myth that gradually evolved', yes? Okay, so Peter, who supposedly knew Jesus, and Paul, who had been persecuting Jesus's followers were willing to go to all that effort preaching and dying for something they knew to have been a myth?
Luigi Novi: For the third time now:
I did not say they knew he was a myth. Like any other believer, they likely thought he was real. But that doesn’t mean he was.
Greg: What alternative are you presenting? That the likes of Paul and Peter sailed around the Mediterranean, enduring persecution and ultimately death in order to spread the word about somebody they'd made up?
Luigi Novi: What part of “I didn’t say they made him up” are you having trouble processing mentally? We just got through an exchange above, wherein I repeatedly stated they did not, and yourself stated, “Now, you don't think that they made Jesus up. Grand.” And yet now you’re repeating that Straw Man all over again.
The classic “They wouldn’t have done what they did for someone they didn’t believe in” is a commonly repeated argument. It’s also a fallacious one, since no one ever said that the early Christians didn’t believe that he was real, or that they “made him up.”
Greg: How is this myth supposed to have developed?
Luigi Novi: What difference does it make? They developed in the same general way myths in general develop. How did the Egyptian myths develop? Or the Greek? Or the Native American? They are explanations for naturally occurring phenomena, moral questions, questions about what we don’t know, stories to bring hope to oppressed peoples, etc. Many aspects of the mythical Jesus are shared by the messiahs of other mythical characters, including Hercules, Mithra, Hermes, Prometheus, Perseus, Osiris, Zoroaster, Horus, Apollonius of Tyana, etc., such as being born of a god and a mortal, being one with his father, baptism, having twelve followers, healing the sick, being associated with a cross, martyrdom, resurrection, ascendance into heaven, etc. Moreover, messiah myths in general are simply oppression-redemption myths that often recur across many cultures that experience oppression or persecution.
Among the nineteenth-century Native Americans, for example, a myth developed about a great spirit that would descend to displace the white man and allow the Indians to live freely in their aboriginal home. The white soldiers would be defeated because the Indians’ bodies would be impervious to their bullets. The white man would disappear, the dead would return to life, etc. This myth came to be known as the Ghost Dance.
Sound familiar?
How do you think this myth developed? Why did it not develop until the Native Americans were being destroyed by the white man? Why were there also Ghost Dance myths among the African Xhosa, who were being persecuted by the English, or New Zealand’s Maori, who were oppressed by whites, or Siberia’s Altai Turk’s, whose land was confiscated by Russian Orthodox missionaries? Why are the militant modern day members of the Nation of Islam believers in a similar type of Ghost Dance myth involving a messianic “mothership” hovering over the Earth that will topple the white government? Why regard the Jesus myth as unique in this regard?
Greg: Remember that Peter and Paul knew what they were talking about, after all...
Luigi Novi: How so? Paul wasn’t a contemporary of Jesus, as aforementioned, and many scholars question the authorship of Peter of the epistles. Even within the first epistle, it says in 5:12 that it was written by Silvanus. As for the second epistle, doubt about its authenticity occur as early as the time of Origen (217-251 C.E.).
Greg: Well, first of all, eye-witness accounts are written in the third person as often as not, depending upon whether they're trying to be objective or subjective. It was normal in Antiquity for eyewitnesses to write in the third person. Thucydides, Xenophon, and Caesar are all excellent examples of this.
Luigi Novi: Funny, I’ve never read any of Peter David’s BID columns in which he spoke of himself in the third person. I’ve never seen court testimony in which witnesses spoke of themselves in the third person.
Besides, these writings were not merely written in the third person; they are in some cases explicit in their lack of first person quality. Why in the world, for example, would Luke admit to being an interpreter of earlier material and not an eyewitness? And just how consistently do you wish to apply this generosity of reasoning? Would you extend it to the writings of other mythological characters? Or does it only hold for Jesus, even though the Gospels were not written contemporaneously?
Greg: And fictional techniques? If the techniques of the Gospel are those of fiction writers they're pretty damn clumsy. Surely they could have covered their tracks better than that.
Luigi Novi: Why would they? The modern science of historiography didn’t exist back then, and who could have known back then that such modern disciplines, not to mention other tools of research, like carbon dating, comparative writing analysis, etc., would expose them?
Greg: How could the Apostles have known what Jesus was thinking? Well, maybe he told them.
Luigi Novi: Isn’t the notion that they were written by the same point of view as writers of fiction more reasonable? Why would they ask him what he was thinking, but not say, “I asked Jesus, and he told me…”?
Greg: Are the Gospels written after Jesus supposedly lived? Of course. But then, the earliest extant accounts of the Persian Invasion of Greece or the Hannibalic Campaigns in Italy were written just as long after those wars. Are you willing to throw those out too? =
And there are conflicts between the Gospels? Of course there are. There are conflicts between the accounts of the Battle of Zama as described by Polybius, Livy, and Appian. Plutarch, Caesar, Suetonius, Cicero, Dio, and Appian all convey different pictures of life in Rome in the 50s BC. This is perfectly normal.
Luigi Novi: Since you have completely ignored the above statement by me that answers this point, I will repeat it.
Historians don’t accept that Hannibal invaded Italy from Spain by crossing the Alps merely on the say-so of Polybius or Livy. There is other evidence to support the historicity of Hannibal, the use of war elephants, the Punic Wars, etc. Moreover, the accounts of Polybius and Livy differ greatly from the Gospels in that they were written as history, (although Livy included a lot of legendary material in his version, as was common in ancient times). Modern historians don’t simply accept ancient sources at face value. The writers of the gospels, who are anonymous, were not writing history, and there is little if any corroboration for what they wrote. Much of what they wrote is demonstrably inaccurate, such as placing the birth of Jesus during the governorship of Quirinius and the reign of Herod and the census of Augustus. The census and Quirinius’s governorship were in 6 C.E.; Herod died in 4 B.C.E.
Greg: Would you accept any Gospel as true, if every so often the Evangelist said, 'Really. I was there. It was great!', and then ended by saying 'Yep, it was me who saw all this, just a few years ago, me, Bob from Bethlehem, who knew Jesus when he was just a knacker with the arse out of his trousers'?
Luigi Novi: Another Straw Man.
I would accept Gospels as reliable if they were consistent with eyewitness accounts, of which the language used is only one factor. Your caricaturized version of this point is utterly irrelevant.