and it happened again: another one of those exchanges which you can hardly call a "discussion," because many of the participants weren't listening to each other at all, just asserting their competing erroneous versions of the history of Christianity. The usual suspects were there: the assertion that Jesus was a rabbi (perhaps true, perhaps not) and that all rabbis 2000 years ago were married -- not true. In fact, there were entire Jewish sects who were celibate, such as the Essenes, who are well-known today primarily because of their similarities to Christians. A lot of people in these non-discussions really seem to think that Christians invented religious celibacy. Can they say "Vestal Virgins"? The Vestal Virgins was the priestesses in one of the oldest and most revered religious cults in ancient Rome, a cult hundreds of years older than Christianity, and just one example of religions older than Christianity who have a revered place for celibacy.
I've only been hearing the claim that all ancient rabbis were married for a couple of years -- can it be that the claim is no older than that? Where did it come from? Perhaps from discussions of the Gospel of Jesus' Wife? People who wished this little scrap of forgery to be an authentic description of Jesus, perhaps they adopted the belief that all ancient rabbis were married because it bolsters their belief that Jesus was married, which they believe because they wish it to be true?
The assertion that the Bible as we know it was a creation of the Council of Nicea. This time, the Council of Nicea was described as a gathering of Jewish clergy under a pagan Emperor, and that the Bible as we know it was created there.
I can't remember hearing somebody claim, before this, that the participants of the Council of Nicea were Jewish. The Council took place in AD 325, and the division between Christian and Jew was already long-established and very hostile by then. And Constantine was at least partly Christian at the time. And the Bible was neither written, in whole nor in part, at the Council, nor was it even discussed whether this or that biblical book was to be regarded as canonical or heretical. The main thing the Council of Nicea accomplished was to adopt the Nicene Creed, which was favorable for the Christians who eventually came to be called Orthodox and Catholic, and was another nail in the coffin of the Christian movement known as Arianism, which has nothing more than a coincidental similarity in spelling to do with Aryans, who, before the Nazis, were no more and no less than Iranians. I couldn't tell you whether "Aryan" or "Iranian" is closer to the pronunciation of the corresponding word in Persian, which is also called Farsi, which is the language of Iran.
So anyway, after making just a couple of comments in this discussion on Facebook, I realized that nobody in that discussion -- or at most very few of them -- was the slightest bit interested in being corrected about anything. One of the exceptions is my friend, the one who posted the link which started the whole non-discussion. My friend doesn't always assume he's right. You can talk to him. That's one of the reasons he's my friend. Others, however, in this discussion and in countless other discussions about Christianity...
So what do you do, what do you do, when a whole bunch of people are wrong, objectively wrong about concrete, demonstrable facts, and they want to stay that way?
That's not a rhetorical question. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be very grateful to hear them.
In my case, instead of continuing to comment there, I came here and wrote this post.
Jerome's Vulgate is a beautiful piece of writing. That has nothing to do with the rest of this post.
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