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no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 11:37 am (UTC)Doe US copyright law apply to the whole world or something?
no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 12:51 pm (UTC)So it's not that US law applies to other works, it's that it applies to US works everywhere, and other countries' laws apply to their works everywhere, and changes to US law in this matter tend to get reflected in other countries' laws sooner or later.
(The real reason for the continual copyright extension is simple: Mickey Mouse. The laws in the US will continue to change, to extend copyright indefinitely, every time Mickey Mouse approaches the Public Domain. Why? Because Disney is a megacorp and they own senators.)
no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 11:38 am (UTC)Sure, you can -- and should -- make arguments about Canaanite/Midianite influences on ancient Israelite religion. But that's way, way before Jesus' time.
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Date: 2011-01-03 02:13 pm (UTC)That's a big reason why I don't take the Bible too seriously as an historical document; it's been rewritten (by committee to boot) too many times in the intervening years.
-- Steve remembers that Saturn is (probably) the Reason for the Season, or at least the date on which it's marked, in any case. Mithras et al. had little to do with that.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 02:19 pm (UTC)I've been to a number of theology lectures at Cambridge university on the New Testament, and the view those scholars have is that the NT text we have today is essentially that which was originally written.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 03:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 06:54 pm (UTC)I've not read Fox's book myself, but from what I've heard it doesn't support the contention that the NT was rewritten (which is what was claimed here). Can you quote me where it says that?
no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 08:30 pm (UTC)As for the rewriting, though, he certainly does give examples of both actual revisions and differences between early texts, although he makes the point (as do I) that none of this need cause problems for the core of the Christian faith or those who follow it, just for those who claim that the Bible is the unerring and eternally unchanging word of God, and who base important bits of doctrine on the literal truth and accuracy of the surviving texts.
He gives two particular examples of influential second-century Christians who edited the scriptures: Marcion of Sinope, who went off down a rather Gnostic route, cutting bits out of Luke's Gospel and editing ten of Paul's letters to support his theology, and Tatian the Assyrian, who combined the four canonical gospels into one (the Diatesseron), again deleting and modifying bits he didn't agree with. Marcion was denounced as a heretic, although his followers retained some influence for a while after his death, while the Diatesseron of Tatian was the standard text in Eastern Christianity for some time. Lane Fox makes the point that if this sort of thing was routinely going on, then a gap of even as little as a hundred years between the events themselves and the oldest surviving texts is potentially disastrous: If the earliest extant written fragments date from the middle of the second century, then we have no way of knowing which bits have been altered during the previous hundred years since the original events themselves.
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Date: 2011-01-03 08:45 pm (UTC)One question would be whether this was common place or not, but another would be whether even if it were that the effect would be as he claims.
I think the answer to the first question is that it wasn't common, although scribes did make certain types of copying errors and would on very rare occasion alter a reading or add a a new verse (usually to make a reading 'easier'). I don't have appropriate quotes to hand, but I believe this is the mainstream scholarly position.
With respect to the second question, I don't think that sort of scenario would corrupt the copies we have today. People often think about the Bible being corrupted in this way as if it were a big game of chinese whispers, but of course the Bible wasn't transmitted like that. There isn't a series of released copies leading from the autographs to us, rather there's a tree spanning out from the autographs, of which certain nodes on the tree remain (or at least have been discovered) today. It doesn't matter whether the Bible was changed before year X when we first have a copy of some part of it's text, what matters is whether all copies that existed in the world at point X (of which later child positions on the tree exist today) were similarly changed.
The only way this could really happen would be extremely early corruption (e.g. the immediate copies were corrupted) but that is unlikely for obvious reasons (not just that the copies circulated in the lifetime of the authors), or if there were a central authority that controlled all the copies in the world who could impose some textual change on all existing / future copies. Although that sort of thinking might make for a good Dan Brown novel it doesn't match what actually happened - there was no central authority which could control all the texts in the world, the church was not as we think of the Vatican now, but a disparate group of people spread throughout the Roman empire, and similarly the manuscripts that exist today are from throughout the Roman world.
If when you've finished Fox's book you're planning to read something with an alternate perspective I'd recommend (the much much lighter) The New Testament Documents: Are they reliable?.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 03:41 pm (UTC)The NT texts we have today were written decades after the events they portray, and only one testiment (Paul's IIRC) was written by the man himself while he was an old and sick man. The other testiments were collated from the Apostles' other writings by later editors, as were the much-later-written Epistles, and what went into those collations was in flux until late in the 4th century AD. (Hence the Dead Sea Scrolls' divergeance from the canonical texts, as well as that of the Gnostics.)
I haven't read them in person, but I have listened to scholars examining the exchanges of letters that went on during the writing of the King James Version as the translators agonised over choosing between preserving the poetry or the literal sense of the Latin text... and how often the poetics won in order to make the texts more appealing to English readers and particularly more useful to clergy preaching from the KJV.
-- Steve also suspects that the "original" texts were also translated; it's unlikely that an Aramaic-speaking son of a Nazarethian carpenter would be making puns that work in Greek but not in Aramaic, Hebrew, or Latin.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 04:21 pm (UTC)Hence the following rewrite of what was the more-likely way that scene would've played out. (Granting, of course, that there was an historical Jesus which is a debatable issue.*)
-- Steve suspects that his rewrite won't go over too well in certain circles.
*Myself, I think it's entirely possible that there may have been a Jeshua ben Joseph, carpenter's son turned radical rabbi, in the area at the time and maybe even crucified for acts against Rome. However, there are no supporting documents for this; no census record indisputably lists him, and there is no record of his execution.
I do think that Biblical texts tend to overemphasise how important such a person would be in a Roman province, and that much of the vitriol around the crucifixion reflects more the schism between early Christians and mainstream Jewish faith than anything else. One more support for the "Bible as fanfic" argument, I guess.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 07:21 pm (UTC)You do realise this isn't a position supported by scholars, right? And by that I mean conservative and liberal Christians, other theists, agnostics, and atheists...
There are only a handful of people who support this hypothesis and their methods and conclusions are not well regarded in academia. Quoting from the relevant Wikipedia article:
no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 07:14 pm (UTC)True of the gospels, certainly.
and only one testiment (Paul's IIRC) was written by the man himself while he was an old and sick man.
Paul didn't write a testament (or a gospel): he wrote letters, or epistles as they're called. The authentically Pauline letters are generally believed to have been written in his lifetime :-) and the earliest (1 Thessalonians, around 50 AD) pre-dated the writing of the gospels.
what went into those collations was in flux until late in the 4th century AD
Well, yes and no: some stuff was always going to be in because everyone accepted that someone important in the very early church had written it. That said, it's worth asking how we know that Hebrews is meant to be in and 1 Clement isn't, for example.
how often the poetics won in order to make the texts more appealing to English readers and particularly more useful to clergy preaching from the KJV.
This isn't really relevant to the integrity of the Greek texts or the accuracy of the Greek originals, though. Almost everyone knows the KJV isn't a great translations (bar some bonkers Americans who think it was itself inspired by God or something). Better translations are available.
You do find eager atheists over-egging the pudding a bit with regard to both the transmission and accuracy of the NT (or rather, the lack thereof): I don't see any particular reason to treat it differently from other ancient documents or sacred texts: we're likely to have a fair bit of the original text with some interpolations, and the original authors probably made some stuff up. Herodotus is pretty reliable but also writes about dragons. I don't believe in those either: Hume's argument will do on its own, just as it will for resurrections (and zombies coming out of their tombs to accompany Jesus's own resurrection), water into wine, angelic visitations, talking snakes and all the rest.
In general, educated Christians are going to call atheists on their special pleading when dealing with the Bible. A better response than using that sort of pleading is to call Christians on their own: the NT stories are worse evidence than the evidence for a lot of other guff that Christians mostly don't believe. This seems to have been Chris Hallquist's approach, though I haven't read his book.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 07:15 pm (UTC)OK, so you don't actually mean that the text was rewritten, but you're referring to the formalisation of the canon at the Council of Rome in 382? Of course with some exceptions this was mostly a formalisation of the existing recognition of which books were considered to be special (in the sense that they were written at the time, by eyewitnesses / apostles, etc).
With respect to the dates the texts were written, is your issue that they were written later than you'd expect a modern historical account to be written (although of course we often do write historical accounts that sort of period after today, but not always)? Given that they had an aural tradition, some of the texts are based on earlier writings (that have not survived), they were written by eyewitnesses, and are excellent in terms of date of writing and copies available relative to other historical works of the period I take the mainstream scholarly opinion of considering them to be largely reliable documents.
On bible translation - I guess it doesn't matter very much (for most of the western world!) how the KJV was translated, as the majority of bibles used are more modern translations. The issue of how to translate (dynamic equivalent or formal equivalent) is an issue for all translation. I've written about it in some depth over here looking at the translation of hilasterion.
It seems to be extremely likely that Jesus spoke Greek, but it's also very likely that he primarily spoke in Aramaic. So if one wanted to get as close as possible to the exact words Jesus said you'd be right I think in thinking that some of the nuance might have been lost in the translation to Greek, but it'd be very foolish to overplay this.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 08:41 pm (UTC)Anthony Blond's rather entertaining book A Scandalous History of the Roman Emperors says: "Pontius Pilate, who we now know to have been a prefect, not just a procurator, was constantly being complained about. Philo quotes Agrippa as calling him 'inflexible, heartless and obstinate'. Pilate was never prosecuted, but was recalled to Rome in AD 36 for what amounted to lack of tact on a monstrous scale."
Given the generally brutal mores of the time, one does have to ask how bad Pilate must have been in order for the Roman authorities (Tiberius would have been emperor at this point, succeeded by Caligula a year later) to have considered him relatively beyond the pale.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 11:39 am (UTC)This (the idea that the way to keep house prices steady is to build more houses) is a myth, albeit one that's quite widely-believed and oft-repeated, even by those (like housing ministers) who really should know better. It turns out that things just don't work like that, not least because it's unclear how you'd get the developers to join in: their entire business model relies on being able to make large profits from building new houses and then selling them for as high a price as they can get.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 11:45 am (UTC)The worrying thing is just how many people jumped on the property development bandwagon, and as soon as interest rates start to go up again... I fear a lot of people are going to be in a world of hurt.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 02:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 05:39 pm (UTC)Apparently an early draft of the Barker Review highlighted this issue, but the final report was persuaded to confirm the accepted supply-demand wisdom. There are, I'm told, a fair number of academic papers on housing policy which point out the flaws in this reasoning, but I don't have any specific citations to hand (although Abi says an academic journal search for "Barker Review" should turn up a few).
The problem, as I understand it, with the supply-demand argument is essentially what
Some of these factors are geographical: We're currently in the process of buying a 4-bedroom detached house with a garage and nice garden, in a nice quiet bit of Coventry, for a price that might get you a one-bedroom flat in an ok-ish but not especially up-market bit of London. This difference in price isn't because there are more houses available in Coventry (there aren't), but because more people want to live in London than in Coventry.
Another factor is social in nature: house prices are pretty low in some of the dodgier inner-city areas of Liverpool, say, but that's not because there's an oversupply of housing, but because relatively few people want to live in those neighbourhoods.
Supply and demand works fine for things like Mars bars: if I own the necessary factories, and notice that the price of chocolate is going through the roof, then I can take on more staff, buy in lots more sugar etc, and then have a warehouse full of the things within a couple of weeks, which can then be distributed to retailers in order to meet the geographical variations in that demand. If there's a big shortage of housing in a particular area, though, then it'll take a year to build, say, ten at a time, in a fixed location. Also, you have to be very careful about what sort of houses you build: developers building one-bedroom flats for single executives might be profitable for the developers, but isn't going to do anything to bring down prices of 3- and 4-bedroom family houses, especially if you build those flats in the wrong area (eg near local schools but away from mainline railway stations or motorway junctions, etc).
Even if you could bring down the demand by carefully targeting the supply, then (if I've understood what Abi just told me correctly) in order to keep house price inflation to about 2%, you'd need to build about a quarter of a million new houses a year - which hasn't been happening for the last few decades. Also, the developers aren't going to do that, because they rely on house prices remaining high in order to make a profit.
So unfortunately it's all a bit more complicated than most people realise. It's not entirely clear whether the current housing minister does realise this and is just presenting it as a simple issue in order to look like he and the rest of the government have a workable plan when they don't, or whether he actually does think the problem is easier to solve than it is.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 04:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 05:11 pm (UTC)I mean, the verbal principal makes sense, but how does one decrease demand?
no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 05:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 06:18 pm (UTC)Or slap on a huge land transfer tax, or raise interest rates into the stratosphere, or sit on the sidelines as your major source of employment folds tents with no visible means of replacing the lost jobs, or switch off the water mains and sewers. You could also sharply curtail the extension police/fire/emergency services to new developments as an austerity measure.
-- Steve thinks there are tons of ways to make buying a new home unattractive enough that few people would go on the market.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 10:49 pm (UTC)Lol.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 05:31 pm (UTC)Aside from
-- Steve's boggled at the (in a literal sense) decivilisation happening just a couple of hours down the road from his home.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 11:40 am (UTC)Which will obviously hit people with mortages, who have had it incredibly easy the last 7 or 8 years with these record low interest rates we've had. And probably be the thing that drives the correction in house prices.
I'd guess the housing minister maybe wants to try and get ahead of the curve on this one...
no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 11:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 01:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 05:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-03 10:47 pm (UTC)Lol.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-04 01:29 pm (UTC)(i) that Lucas made starwars with little or no desire to make an entertaining story (which seems unlikely for any director)
(ii) that if someone didn't intend something as entertainment, then it's not entertainment, even if it's sold and consumed as entertainment
(iii) that the best stories are not typically produced by people with a vision rather than people striving for popularity (both seem to have their place)
...
no subject
Date: 2011-01-04 01:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-04 01:49 pm (UTC)Further, I think that if you made a commercial film, you are inherently trying to be entertaining at least a bit, because (a) at a minimum, you need someone to produce it and (b) most people (I guess) even if they're doing something else, would LIKE people to appreciate it. Even if the primary purpose is something else, if you're trying to be entertaining too, I'd think that was entertainment.
But my core objections are (a) I find it really hard to believe he was NOT trying to produce an enjoyable film -- that ought in principle to be settled by evidence (b) many of the best stories are produced by someone essentially for their own enjoyment. People normally think that being non-populist gives a work a stamp of literary authenticity :) It seems bizarre to suddenly criticise an immensely popular film for not trying to be popular.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-04 01:54 pm (UTC)And he's not criticising it for not trying to be be popular. He praises Lucas for getting his vision out there and doing what he wants. He's just pointing out that at least some of the flaws in it can be seen as the result of a creator whose prime focus is world-building/mythology-building, not entertainment.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-04 02:06 pm (UTC)I think I sort of see, but still not really. The set-up of the first film is pure fairly-tale: the evil emperor, the good princess, the good-hearted farmboy, etc, etc. I assume this is what people mean by creating a mythology: creating a story which lives on outside of the medium that created it.
But it seems entertaining BECAUSE of that, not despite it.
It's possible that Lucas really enjoyed episodes I-III. (I thought they were good fun, if not very outstanding.) But I didn't think they were boring because they tried to tell the story of how Vader came to be: I thought they were boring because they didn't do it very well.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-04 02:08 pm (UTC)And yes, the first ones were entertaining, but nobody is disputing that.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-04 02:29 pm (UTC)Well, Scalzi agreed they were entertaining, but seemed to think that it was mostly by accident?
they did a good job of doing _what Lucas wanted_ - which was to tell the story of how it happened.
It reminds me of Atlas Shrugged. Rand had a fairly good idea of the story she wanted to tell, and the morals she wanted it to have. And she had a good tone for some of it, but much of it was lamentably turgid.
It seems reasonable that Lucas was more attached to the story, and for whatever reason didn't make the film tell it in an entertaining way. But he obviously tried at least a bit -- there's much in the films that are obviously supposed to be enjoyed by viewers and don't have anything to do with the plot. It seems up in the air whether he didn't care and put in a token effort, or tried and failed, or tried, but without the drive of a young and still-to-be-proven director didn't try hard enough, etc.
But I still think "not entertainment" is a ridiculous measure to describe it. Most authors love things about their books more than "are they popular", and many make them enjoyable anyway, and some don't, and no-one says they're not entertainment.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-04 02:39 pm (UTC)Star Wars is myth building. It happens, sometimes, to be entertaining too, but that's not its purpose. When it's at its most entertaining (Empire), it's because other people have been handed the myth framework and been given enough leeway to make it entertaining. But its primary purpose is not to be an entertainment, and if that got in the way of the myth-making, the myth-making won.