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Writing historical accounts back then, wasn't exactly what most people set out to do.
True, and not least because the vast majority were illiterate. That is why we're all reading tea leaves. As you said -- maybe gentiles didn't convert to Christianity in large numbers until after the destruction of the temple -- but they certainly COULD have.
My guess is no one can say for sure. Most of us assume they did because that's the way the NT depicts it, as an early-days controversy. Culturally and religiously it has become an assumption, bolstered by a longstanding consensus of relatively early dating for the NT writings, especially those of Paul. We're habituated to that story arc. The reality is that it's all pretty by-guess-and-by-golly; it only seems less so because of 2,000 years of narrative assumptions.
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Originally Posted by Mink57
Even looking at historical accounts within the past 100 years or so, MOST people who were directly involved with those events, haven't written about them...haven't written about them for the public to see...
True in the literal sense of "most". Even in our nearly 100% literate world, a lot of people aren't comfortable expressing themselves in writing. But it's still a very different situation from 2,000 years ago. One could fill a warehouse with writing, interviews, video, audio, legal documents, medical records, police reports, and on and on. We can (and have) examined 9/11 with INFINITELY more precision than we'll ever examine the life of the early church.
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Originally Posted by Mink57
The dating's of the writing are a 'best guess' at best. While we claim that the Gospels were written in whatever early a.d., it doesn't necessarily mean that they didn't START to write them BEFORE that.
I think Thrill's argument -- which I basically agree with -- is that our reasonably complete manuscripts of the NT documents dead-end around 300 years after the time of the ministry of Jesus. While we can, through textual criticism, be fairly certain that what we have today is substantially what people had around 350 AD, we are reduced to a lot of technical arguments to establish the date of authorship of these books. And it is only via religious faith that we can imagine that some sort of process of divine inspiration preserved the essential truth of the Message from the time of Jesus to its final written form, however exactly it came about.
We know that during this era, oral traditions tended to come first, then "sayings of" documents, then more narrative accounts, usually compiled and written / curated by educated elites who would tend to have some sort of agenda.
Make of that what you will.
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Originally Posted by Mink57
Heck, I could start writing an autobiography TODAY, at 64. My first conscious memory was of my father standing in our living room...his hand on the front door. I was kneeling in front of my mother, who was crying. My father looked at us, and opened the door...and left. My mother stopped crying long enough to to ask me,"Oh, Mink...do you like daddy?" I said to her, "I don't if YOU don't."
That was over 50 years ago. The only witness to this back then was my mom, and she passed away a few years ago.
If I wrote about that experience TODAY, does that mean that it didn't happen, simply because someone else wasn't there to witness it?
It doesn't mean it didn't happen, but it does mean that it's your earliest memory because of its strong emotional valence (your father's betrayal, your alarm at your mother's sorrow) and it was filtered through the mind of a young child and by years of time passing.
Now if part of your account was that your mother was a goddess or prophetess with miraculous powers and important messages from god, such that I should order my life around your account, I'm sorry, but I'd need a little more than that to go on, and if god expected me to hang my hat on it, he'd have to provide it. Happily, you aren't making such extraordinary claims or demands so it's low-risk for me to assume that your account is, in its basic essentials, accurate. It's all about the bar set by the material, and its implications.
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Originally Posted by Mink57
I do not believe these writings about Jesus, just came to be, because of some "hallucination", or someone's creative endeavors. I don't think they said to themselves, "Yeah! I'll say THIS, and what I say will live on, LONG after I've dead!" They saw/witnessed something...something that was so 'fantastic', that they were willing to die for their truth.
The followers of Jim Jones and David Koresh not only were willing to die, but did die, for their beliefs, which I suspect you have zero respect for, just as I don't. People willing to die for something doesn't provide evidence of the truthfulness or correctness of their ideology or truth claims.
I don't think the NT is the product of hallucinations (Revelation being a possible exception, lol) but I think what they may represent is an evolving origin story for a new faith, consisting of some unknown and probably unknowable combination of truth, hagiography, biography, legend-making and outright fantasy and later embellishment.
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Originally Posted by Mink57
Even though the ONLY two people who knew about this are now dead...even thought there's not documentation about it, doesn't mean it didn't happen.
And I see Christ's life the same way.
I'm just suggesting that they are apples and oranges. They have some things in common: people, and poor documentation that wouldn't satisfy a skeptic. But again, you aren't starting a religion that you hope becomes popular. You are just telling your story. The bar is INFINITELY lower. That's why no one is particularly motivated to even BE skeptical about your account. It's just not that consequential to others. In fact it's low-cost to accept it in toto because you're not selling anything, you're relatable, kind and reasonable and the story is heartfelt. You have no motivation to embellish or invent details, and the fact that your account is not fabulist, but relatable, suggests strongly that you haven't. But by the time the NT was canonized, LOTS of people had LOTS of motivation to make stuff up, and the basic narrative is fantastical. Very different situation.
True, and not least because the vast majority were illiterate. That is why we're all reading tea leaves. As you said -- maybe gentiles didn't convert to Christianity in large numbers until after the destruction of the temple -- but they certainly COULD have.
My guess is no one can say for sure. Most of us assume they did because that's the way the NT depicts it, as an early-days controversy. Culturally and religiously it has become an assumption, bolstered by a longstanding consensus of relatively early dating for the NT writings, especially those of Paul. We're habituated to that story arc. The reality is that it's all pretty by-guess-and-by-golly; it only seems less so because of 2,000 years of narrative assumptions.
True in the literal sense of "most". Even in our nearly 100% literate world, a lot of people aren't comfortable expressing themselves in writing. But it's still a very different situation from 2,000 years ago. One could fill a warehouse with writing, interviews, video, audio, legal documents, medical records, police reports, and on and on. We can (and have) examined 9/11 with INFINITELY more precision than we'll ever examine the life of the early church.
Yes, I agree that we do have much documentation from 9/11...TODAY. But what about 2000 years from now? Is that proverbial 'warehouse' still going to be filled with the same original writings, interviews, videos, audios, legal docs and even personal journals as it is today?
The point is, that we can examine the documentation available to us regarding 9/11, even 20 years later, as most of those records are still intact. But what about in another 100 years? How about another 1000 years? As a contrast, that proverbial 'warehouse' TODAY, may become a proverbial 'shoebox' 2000 years from now (I'm exaggerating, but you get the gist). Records will be lost in transit...lost to fires and natural occurrences, like earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes...Records will be deliberately destroyed to "make way for the new."
Two thousand years ago, people didn't have cell phones...or telephones...or telegraphs...or photographs...or xerox machines. They only had what was available to them, which was their oral word, their written word and artistic design. And because they didn't have nearly the technology to preserve records 2000 years ago, I don't think it's fair...or appropriate...to apply today's standards to yesteryear's events.
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I think Thrill's argument -- which I basically agree with -- is that our reasonably complete manuscripts of the NT documents dead-end around 300 years after the time of the ministry of Jesus. While we can, through textual criticism, be fairly certain that what we have today is substantially what people had around 350 AD, we are reduced to a lot of technical arguments to establish the date of authorship of these books. And it is only via religious faith that we can imagine that some sort of process of divine inspiration preserved the essential truth of the Message from the time of Jesus to its final written form, however exactly it came about.
Again, 1700 years ago, people were using the docs they had available to them at the time. While WE may no long have the docs THEY were using, it doesn't mean that THEY weren't using what was available to them.
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We know that during this era, oral traditions tended to come first, then "sayings of" documents, then more narrative accounts, usually compiled and written / curated by educated elites who would tend to have some sort of agenda.
Make of that what you will.
It doesn't mean it didn't happen, but it does mean that it's your earliest memory because of its strong emotional valence (your father's betrayal, your alarm at your mother's sorrow) and it was filtered through the mind of a young child and by years of time passing.
Now if part of your account was that your mother was a goddess or prophetess with miraculous powers and important messages from god, such that I should order my life around your account, I'm sorry, but I'd need a little more than that to go on, and if god expected me to hang my hat on it, he'd have to provide it. Happily, you aren't making such extraordinary claims or demands so it's low-risk for me to assume that your account is, in its basic essentials, accurate. It's all about the bar set by the material, and its implications.
Hmm... I have to chew on what I bolded for a bit, so I can't respond right now.
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The followers of Jim Jones and David Koresh not only were willing to die, but did die, for their beliefs, which I suspect you have zero respect for, just as I don't. People willing to die for something doesn't provide evidence of the truthfulness or correctness of their ideology or truth claims.
While it doesn't prove anything, it still can be considered to be 'evidence'.
And, you're right. I don't have respect for Jim Jones, David Koresh, et al.
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I don't think the NT is the product of hallucinations (Revelation being a possible exception, lol) but I think what they may represent is an evolving origin story for a new faith, consisting of some unknown and probably unknowable combination of truth, hagiography, biography, legend-making and outright fantasy and later embellishment.
Possibly. Then again, possibly not. I'm not Sola Scriptura, so my 'faith' doesn't begin and end with Genesis through Revelation. I consider other events that have occurred since then, as part of the journey (i.e., Fatima, Miracle of the Sun, writings by some of the Saints, such as Gertrude and Padre Pio, et al.) In other words, just because WE stopped writing at Revelation, doesn't mean that God stopped talking!
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I'm just suggesting that they are apples and oranges. They have some things in common: people, and poor documentation that wouldn't satisfy a skeptic. But again, you aren't starting a religion that you hope becomes popular. You are just telling your story. The bar is INFINITELY lower. That's why no one is particularly motivated to even BE skeptical about your account. It's just not that consequential to others. In fact it's low-cost to accept it in toto because you're not selling anything, you're relatable, kind and reasonable and the story is heartfelt. You have no motivation to embellish or invent details, and the fact that your account is not fabulist, but relatable, suggests strongly that you haven't. But by the time the NT was canonized, LOTS of people had LOTS of motivation to make stuff up, and the basic narrative is fantastical. Very different situation.
Well, thank you for that, Mordant. But I gotta ask ya...what would be the motivation for the individual to make stuff up?
What about someone like Bernadette Soubirous? I mean, it's not as if she had these visions, and ran off announcing them in the town square! She was terrified that if she told anyone, she wouldn't be believed. Even when she told her parents, her parents didn't believe her. And it's not as if the Blessed Virgin told her, "Hey, Yo! Berny! Keep coming back here, and I'll make you famous!" When she kept going back to the grotto, becoming famous was the last thing on her mind...if, at all.
She endured quite a bit. Ridicule...sarcasm...being told that she's a liar...being told she's "crazy" or "sick". Even being threatened with jail. Countless interviews by members of the Catholic Church...who didn't believe her! She wasn't exactly known for being 'strong-minded' or 'strong-willed'. If her experience happened to ME at her age, I'd be a royal mess.
But she endured. She didn't seek out people to tell (unless she was told to do so). She would only tell those who asked.
Let's not forget something, thrill. What was communicated back then was communicated orally. So, we can't say that "nobody" would have known that Jesus' death was for the sins of man through the written word. Jesus spoke orally to his apostles. Once Jesus was resurrected (at least), the apostles 'went out' and preached what they witnessed...and what others had witnessed...orally, at first.
The idea was taking hold immediately after Jesus' death, but again, not by EVERYONE. If the whole idea took hold like gangbusters, you'd think that Jesus...never would have been crucified in the first place.
Back then, the Jews and the Romans had a very tense (understatement) relationship. The Jews rebelled against the Roman's. How better a way to 'get back' at someone than to attack the very beliefs the opposer holds.
If the non-believing Jews continued to make sacrifices to Yahweh, the Roman's wouldn't have liked that. Just my own theory here, but if the Roman's destroyed the temple, in their minds, the Jews would have had no place to offer sacrifices...which, in the Roman's minds, would have caused Yahweh to be angry with the Jews...and allowed them to be wiped out.
Then again, if the some of the Jews continued to make sacrifices to Yahweh after Christ (that is, the one's who didn't believe in Christ), the Roman's may have believed that if they destroyed the Temple, the Jews would have no other choice but to worship their own Roman gods.
Of course, there's always 'door number three'...
Regardless, the Roman's did destroy the physical temple...not realizing that the spiritual temple had already been established with Christ's death.
It's hard for me to make responses to you, Mink because I deal in facts and you deal in theories for the most part. And that's not your fault, of course--that's what apologists do, compounded by your training as a paralegal--invent theories to cover the potholes in Christianity. I say, "The car negligently drove into a brink wall." You say, "That's not necessarily true, Thrill. Maybe bad guys built a brick wall in the middle of the night and the driver wasn't able to avoid hitting the brick wall." "But Mink, how could they build a brick wall so fast?" "Thrill, twenty bad guys working nonstop without a coffee or toilet break could get a brick wall up in five hours." "In the middle of rush hour?" "No, silly, in the dead of night."
And you know, Mink, crazy as your theories sound, if one stretched their imagination to the ends of the earth they just might work. And that's all attorneys care about--just introduce the slightest doubt in the readers' mind and you've won your case.
I think Thrill's argument -- which I basically agree with -- is that our reasonably complete manuscripts of the NT documents dead-end around 300 years after the time of the ministry of Jesus. While we can, through textual criticism, be fairly certain that what we have today is substantially what people had around 350 AD, we are reduced to a lot of technical arguments to establish the date of authorship of these books. And it is only via religious faith that we can imagine that some sort of process of divine inspiration preserved the essential truth of the Message from the time of Jesus to its final written form, however exactly it came about.
And this is why I say,
If the Christian god really wanted us to believe in Jesus as his son sent by him into the world to save it, then the Christian god would have have done a much MUCH better job at preserving the texts, archeological artifacts, testimonies, etc that would have established Jesus' credentials to the point that no one in their right mind could deny who Jesus was. That the Christian god made such a botched-up mess of leaving behind credible testimonial evidence of Jesus is proof positive the Christian god had absolutely nothing to do with who or what Jesus was and and/or couldn't have cared less about Jesus' mission.
The proof is in the pudding, I'm afraid.
In the end Jesus, real man or myth, turns out to be a minor figure in the religious scheme of things who only achieved the exalted position he did because of the work of a single man--Constantine the Emperor who chose him to be the avatar god of his Roman Empire. Absent that, Jesus would have disappeared in the mists of time and we'd all be worshiping Mithra today.
Yes, I agree that we do have much documentation from 9/11...TODAY. But what about 2000 years from now? Is that proverbial 'warehouse' still going to be filled with the same original writings, interviews, videos, audios, legal docs and even personal journals as it is today?
Relatively speaking, yes. The digital portions will in principle be subject to a degree of "digital rot" (obsolete file formats that no one knows how to read anymore) but for such a momentous event one can also expect over the years that they will be converted to new formats as they appear, and thus preserved. Most of the paper stuff would have been scanned and preserved in digital form as well. It won't 100% survive for 2,000 years but we aren't talking about papyrus scrolls, either.
There is the possibility of loss through disaster such as global nuclear war -- the ancient equivalent would be the burning of the library at Alexandria, etc. But the point is there are orders of magnitude more material from orders of magnitude more sources, so orders of magnitude more will survive, all things being equal.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mink57
Two thousand years ago, people didn't have cell phones...or telephones...or telegraphs...or photographs...or xerox machines. They only had what was available to them, which was their oral word, their written word and artistic design. And because they didn't have nearly the technology to preserve records 2000 years ago, I don't think it's fair...or appropriate...to apply today's standards to yesteryear's events.
Thanks for agreeing with my point above, then. BTW, I don't apply today's standards to 2,000 years ago -- I don't expect there to be that much surviving and I don't think it's necessarily some kind of plot that more didn't survive -- though it's natural to assume that the victors both wrote history with their own slant and stomped out Gnostics and other dissenters, along with their "heretical" writings. But just because it's organically true that there won't be as much evidence, doesn't mean that more evidence isn't needed to assent to the extraordinary truth claims and assertions of the faith. It's not my problem -- an all powerful god could have arranged for sufficient evidence to convince folks like me, but for some reason didn't bother.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mink57
Possibly. Then again, possibly not. I'm not Sola Scriptura, so my 'faith' doesn't begin and end with Genesis through Revelation. I consider other events that have occurred since then, as part of the journey (i.e., Fatima, Miracle of the Sun, writings by some of the Saints, such as Gertrude and Padre Pio, et al.) In other words, just because WE stopped writing at Revelation, doesn't mean that God stopped talking!
Nor does it mean he DID keep talking. Many Christians think revelation stopped because the Bible is sufficient. I was one of those. Today, I am not invested in that. Just not for the same reasons as you -- I think the scriptures are not god-breathed to begin with.
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Originally Posted by Mink57
Well, thank you for that, Mordant. But I gotta ask ya...what would be the motivation for the individual to make stuff up?
The people who decided what was (un)orthodox were the elites of the day, not passionate laypersons. It was the ancient version of smoke-filled rooms, basically. There is no reason to assume they did NOT put their fingers on the scales in their own favor. It still happens today, as the post I made yesterday about the lost writing of Luke points out. To challenge orthodoxy today, even in the supposedly dispassionate world of objective archeology, history and higher textual criticism, is to be "encouraged to leave out" controversial material.
You cite a commoner girl given visions of god and heroically telling of her experiences despite people not believing her. But the driving forces in church history are not those heartwarming stories. They are political (figuratively, but often literally) forces in a battle to the death with competing sects, all vying for dominance and to preserve that hegemony once they have it.
And what did this girl's visions represent? A sea change in church doctrine or practice? Nah, it was nothing threatening to the status quo of the Church, so sure, throw the peons a bone once in awhile, give them a nice populist campfire story, why not? No harm in it. No one is threatened. So it's not suppressed.
It's hard for me to make responses to you, Mink because I deal in facts and you deal in theories for the most part. And that's not your fault, of course--that's what apologists do, compounded by your training as a paralegal--invent theories to cover the potholes in Christianity. I say, "The car negligently drove into a brink wall." You say, "That's not necessarily true, Thrill. Maybe bad guys built a brick wall in the middle of the night and the driver wasn't able to avoid hitting the brick wall." "But Mink, how could they build a brick wall so fast?" "Thrill, twenty bad guys working nonstop without a coffee or toilet break could get a brick wall up in five hours." "In the middle of rush hour?" "No, silly, in the dead of night."
And you know, Mink, crazy as your theories sound, if one stretched their imagination to the ends of the earth they just might work. And that's all attorneys care about--just introduce the slightest doubt in the readers' mind and you've won your case.
Science deals with theories too, thrill. Hence, the THEORY of evolution.
Science deals with theories too, thrill. Hence, the THEORY of evolution.
Yes.
Many try to pass off scientific "theories" as on par with scientific "laws".
A scientific law has been proved, fully established, without exceptions...it states what is known to be.
A scientific theory is an explanation for what has been shown, it's the best explanation for it and why it is the way it is.
Evolutionary Theory has itself done a lot of evolving...as we try to figure out how God functions.
So...it doesn't matter anyway...it's all God (The Oneness, All That Is, The Divine) that's being researched and analyzed.
Relatively speaking, yes. The digital portions will in principle be subject to a degree of "digital rot" (obsolete file formats that no one knows how to read anymore) but for such a momentous event one can also expect over the years that they will be converted to new formats as they appear, and thus preserved. Most of the paper stuff would have been scanned and preserved in digital form as well. It won't 100% survive for 2,000 years but we aren't talking about papyrus scrolls, either.
There is the possibility of loss through disaster such as global nuclear war -- the ancient equivalent would be the burning of the library at Alexandria, etc. But the point is there are orders of magnitude more material from orders of magnitude more sources, so orders of magnitude more will survive, all things being equal.
Thanks for agreeing with my point above, then. BTW, I don't apply today's standards to 2,000 years ago -- I don't expect there to be that much surviving and I don't think it's necessarily some kind of plot that more didn't survive -- though it's natural to assume that the victors both wrote history with their own slant and stomped out Gnostics and other dissenters, along with their "heretical" writings. But just because it's organically true that there won't be as much evidence, doesn't mean that more evidence isn't needed to assent to the extraordinary truth claims and assertions of the faith. It's not my problem -- an all powerful god could have arranged for sufficient evidence to convince folks like me, but for some reason didn't bother.
Nor does it mean he DID keep talking. Many Christians think revelation stopped because the Bible is sufficient. I was one of those. Today, I am not invested in that. Just not for the same reasons as you -- I think the scriptures are not god-breathed to begin with.
The people who decided what was (un)orthodox were the elites of the day, not passionate laypersons. It was the ancient version of smoke-filled rooms, basically. There is no reason to assume they did NOT put their fingers on the scales in their own favor. It still happens today, as the post I made yesterday about the lost writing of Luke points out. To challenge orthodoxy today, even in the supposedly dispassionate world of objective archeology, history and higher textual criticism, is to be "encouraged to leave out" controversial material.
You cite a commoner girl given visions of god and heroically telling of her experiences despite people not believing her. But the driving forces in church history are not those heartwarming stories. They are political (figuratively, but often literally) forces in a battle to the death with competing sects, all vying for dominance and to preserve that hegemony once they have it.
And what did this girl's visions represent? A sea change in church doctrine or practice? Nah, it was nothing threatening to the status quo of the Church, so sure, throw the peons a bone once in awhile, give them a nice populist campfire story, why not? No harm in it. No one is threatened. So it's not suppressed.
Sadly, it is such human processes and perversity that have enabled such primitive, barbaric, and patently absurd beliefs about God to survive for over two millennia and counting!!
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I have to chew on what I bolded for a bit, so I can't respond right now. 
But I gotta ask ya...what would be the motivation for the individual to make stuff up? 
