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timeasmymeasure
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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Date: 2011-01-03 02:13 pm (UTC)That's a big reason why I don't take the Bible too seriously as an historical document; it's been rewritten (by committee to boot) too many times in the intervening years.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.
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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.
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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?
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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?.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.