Classicists and the General Public

A few days ago, I was observing, not for the first time, an online discussion by non-Classicists of Ridley Scott's Academy Award-winning movie Gladiator.

"Are you not entertained?" Scott's fictitious Maximus shouts. The general public shouts back, "Yes!" while those who have studied even a little bit of Roman history clutch our heads in dismay and groan "No!" but are unheard. We're groaning and clutching our heads, not because the masses are entertained, but because they're all praising Gladiator's supposed historical accuracy, while describing themselves as "history buffs."

I thought about jumping into the discussion and pointing out the long list of glaring inaccuracies and absurdities in Gladiator, and how they are not merely matters of detail, but give a spectacularly inaccurate overall impression of the Roman Empire in the late 2nd century. I thought about pointing out that the general public is quite simply wrong in thinking that Gladiator towers above other sandal epics in historical accuracy.

I've jumped into these discussions before, when the topic is Gladiator, when it's the fate of the ancient library at Alexandria, and when it's something else. And one thing which has struck me every time is the near-complete indifference of the general public to everything which I, and professional Classicists who know more than I, have to say about ancient topics. With few exceptions, the general public have already decided on a version of history which is convenient for them, and have no desire for experts to tamper with their version of things.

This last time, I ended up just turning away, without contributing a word to this particular online discussion. Was I right to do so? Was I right in thinking, this time, quite differently than I have thought in the past, that all I would do was to unnecessarily annoy people who were enjoying themselves? I'm not asking these questions rhetorically. I rarely pose rhetorical questions. I'm asking because I don't know and would greatly appreciate the opportunity to learn the views of anyone else who's considered the same questions: what to do, when one comes across a group of people who believe that Commodus was slain in the Colosseum by Maximus, thus returning the Republic to Rome? Or that Constantine and the Pope wrote the Bible at the Council of Nicea? Or that there are thousands of surviving written documents composed in Jerusalem during Jesus' supposed lifetime, none of which mention Him?

What to do, in short, when confronted with people who have a mistaken view of certain historical topics, and who are not the slightest bit interested in being corrected? Be a Sisyphus and roll that boulder of our knowledge of the sources uphill with all out might? Let the general public believe whatever they like, ignore them and concentrate on discussing things with our fellow ivory tower-dwellers? Something else? I repeat: I'm not asking any of these questions rhetorically, I'd really like to learn the opinions of other who've pondered such things.

Historia Augusta, Eusebius, Gibbon, Burckhardt

The Historia Augusta, written in Latin, claim to be a collection of biographies of Roman Emperors written by 6 authors in the 3rd century AD. Many or most historians of ancient Rome now consider them to be the work of one author in the late 4th century, which perhaps was not meant to be read as history at all, but belongs to some other genre -- perhaps historical fiction, perhaps parody of historical writing. In the opinion of most specialists, the identity of the author of the Historia Augusta remains unknown. A notable exception is the French historian Stéphane Ratti, who says that he has established that the Historia Augusta was written by the elder Nicomachus Flavianus, friend of the illustrious Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, statesman and courageous, albeit unsuccessful defender of the traditional Roman religions against the encroachment of Christianity. If there is a substantial school of thought which follows Ratti in this, it has thus far escaped my (amateur) attention.

The Historia Ecclesiastica is a history of Christianity written in Greek by Eusebius, Bishop of Caesaria, who lived from ca AD 265 to 339 or 340. Which means that the subjects of these first two paragraphs are in the wrong chronological order. They're in the order they were thought for many many centuries to follow.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was written in English by Edward Gibbon and published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. It covers the period from the late 1st century AD until after the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453, with some remarks referring to the period right down to Gibbon's own life.

Die Zeit Konstantin des Grossen (The Time of Constantine the Great) was written in German by Jacob Burckhardt, published in 1853 and revised several times over the next several decades.

Both Gibbon and Burckhardt repeatedly complain about the unreliability of both the Historia Augusta (neither suspecting that it might not actually be historical writing at all) and Eusebius. And both judge Eusebius more harshly. Burckhardt, who usually in his many works of history, art history and culutural criticism writes in a conventionally composed scholarly style, completely loses his composure when referring to Eusebius, not only calling him completely dishonest, the first thoroughly dishonest historian of the ancient world (and Burckhardt was under the impression that the Historia Augusta were written before Eusebius' lifetime), but also becoming quite personal and repeatedly calling him disgusting, the most disgusting liar imaginable, and so forth.

Gibbon was among the earliest European authors who took very little trouble to conceal that they were atheists; Burckhardt rudely abused a highly revered historian of early Christianity. From their own times to the present, without interruption, Christian historians have accused Gibbon and Burckhardt of anti-Christian bias, of having less faith in Christian sources because they were Christian, and more faith in non-Christian sources because they were non-Christian. In their turn, these Christian historians have been accused of being biased in exactly the opposite direction. It has not always been Christians who have attacked Gibbon and Burckhardt and non-Christians who've defended them.

For my part, I find it impossible to imagine an historian who is 100% free of bias. The best we can hope for in reading historical accounts is that the historian we're reading might be less biased than some others.

I find that Gibbon and Burckhardt were at the absolute cutting edges of their times when it came to historical accuracy and insight, to separating the valuable information from the nonsense in the texts they read, out of which they made their own texts. I find that there is still much of value in their work. You may or may not find me quite silly for thinking so.

But, of course, the work of historians constantly continues. We build upon the work of those historians whom we consider to be the best, and we improve their work in the light of new information. This can sometimes be painful to admit, if one has developed a personal fondness for an historian of a previous time. But to expect Gibbon to out-do the historians of the 21st century in all things would be somewhat like believing that a watch made during Gibbon's lifetime

could outperform a quality 21-st century watch

in every way. It would be cuckoo-bananas. Aside from the entire thicket of Eusebius' honesty and Burckhardt's opinion of Eusebius and Burckhardt's objectivity and the objectivity of someone impuning Burckhardt's objectivity, and countless other questions from which it would be somewhere between very difficult and impossible to remove the last trace of prejudice, there are objective advances. Things are discovered, artifacts and texts. The historical picture is revised in the light of new information.

Or it is figured out, by no means with total certainty yet, but approaching it steadily, that what was thought to be a collection of historical writings is... not. That it may be a parody of historical writing. Or perhaps a glimpse into a non-Christian culture which persisted, but went into hiding as the Christians took over the Empire. Or perhaps something else. You see how in this case historians and Classicists, by arriving at an unexpected answer, have multiplied rather than reduced the number of open questions.

Ronald Syme Redux

Seven years ago, I published on this blog a post in which I declared, among other things, that I found the prose of Ronald Syme to be unreadable.

In that post, I jokingly speculated whether there had been something wrong with Syme's medulla oblongata, and mocked his prose style thusly:

"Syme irritates me with the over-use of periods. Which unnecessarily breaks up medium- to long-sized sentences. Into smaller ones. Which in turn leads to the above-mentioned conjecture. About the poor man's lower brain stem. A medical speculation not necessarily to be taken seriously. And not the only stylistic affection of Syme's which annoys me. But to find the others, I'd have to read more Syme. Which I really don't want to do. So suffice it for now to say that the turnip would use twelve periods after the last semicolon above. By the time I would use one. If I were not mocking him."

Ronald Syme, for those of you still wondering, lived from 1903 to 1989 and was among the the 20th century's most prominent Classical scholars and historians of ancient Rome. In fact, in the years since writing the above-mentioned dismissal of him on the grounds of unreadability, I kept coming across his name in the work and footnotes of other scholars, so often and with such positive remarks that I finally decided, quite recently, that I had to try again to read his work, that I had no choice, that surely the problem was with me and not with the way Syme wrote.

Whatever my problem was, it's now gone, to my amazement. I now find that my above-quoted satire of his prose is quite unfair, because far from all of his sentences are extremely short, and those which are I now find to be justifiably so. I now find Syme's prose quite good, witty, extremely erudite, polished, elegant -- in short, suddenly, my opinion of his writing now much more closely resembles the opinion of the rest of the world, and my earlier distaste is now mysterious to me, as it surely must have been to anyone else who'd noticed it.

I had two of Syme's books laying around, The Roman Revolution, first published in 1939, and Ammianus and the Historia Augusta, first published in 1968. I devoured the former with great delight and am now struggling, with just as much delight, with the subtleties and many, many footnotes of the latter. I had already begun to, as Edward Gibbon put it, "dive into the ocean" of the Historia Augusta. Now, unlike Gibbon, I have the very best guide to the flora and fauna of that ocean.

As has the rest of the world, for the past half-century. I apologize to the rest of the world, and to Syme's memory, for taking so long to catch up.

In case you're wondering what the Historia Augusta are: they are a collection of biographies of 2nd- and 3rd- century Roman Emperors, purported compiled by six authors writing in the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine. Or, as the world has gradually been figuring out since Hermann Dessau had a major breakthrough in the late 19th century, they are a parody of biographies of 2nd- and 3rd- century Roman Emperors, written by one jokester in the late 4th century or later. Back when they were considered to be historical writing, the more perceptive of later historians, such as Gibbon, were constantly cursing them for the many errors they contained. Now, when they're seen as historical fiction with a satirical bent, as many papers and volumes and conferences are devoted to them, as speculation rages about who actually wrote them and when, we're able to see more and more delicious jokes in them. They are, as Syme says, a "garden of delights."

Great Caesar's Ghost

I began to feel a little bit of polylinguistic sophistication when I discovered -- don't ask me when. I'm terrible when it comes to remembering when various events of my life happened. It could have been 20 years ago, it could have been 30 -- not only that "Kaiser" was the German word for "Caesar," but that the Germans, although spelling it differently, were pronouncing the name correctly, while we Anglophones, with very few eccentric exceptions, were not. It was around the same time that I learned that both the Greek Byzantine Emperors, from the 4th century until 1453, and the German Holy Roman Emperors from 800 to 1806 called themselves Caesar, as did the Austrian Emperors from 1804 to 1919, and the German Emperors -- often the only ones meant by English-speakers when they say "Kaiser" -- from 1871 to 1918.

Some time after this discovery -- do not ask me how long after -- I learned that "Tsar" was Russian for "Caesar." Still later, I learned that the rulers of Bulgaria called themselves Tsars from the 10th to the 14th century, and then again in the 20th century, and that the last reigning Tsar of Bulgaria, 80-year-old Tsar Simeon II, who ruled as a minor in the 1940's and was Bulgaria's Prime Minister from 2001 to 2005, has not yet formally renounced the title of Tsar.

After the conquest of Constantinople, the Ottoman Sultans included among their titles "Qaysar-i Rūm," "Caesar of Rome."

To be clear: all of those leaders, those of Byzantium, of the Holy Roman Empire, of medieval and 20th-century Bulgaria, of Imperial Russia, of the Ottoman Empire, and of the Austrian and German Empires of the 19th and 20th centuries, called -- and in at least one case, call -- themselves Caesar, not because they thought the named sounded cool or anything like that, but because they, and probably others of whom I am still unaware, were quite seriously claiming to be the political heirs of Julius Caesar.

Why? In this case, as with most questions to do with politics, there are few logical reasons. Julius Caesar was the sole ruler of Rome for less than 5 years. Ah, but his actions as ruler were unique? Name one. We'll wait.

Caesar's successor, his actual heir Octavianus, who changed his named to Augustus, and added Caesar to his name, beginning a long-lasting custom, was the sole ruler of Rome for over 40 years, and ruled in a much more absolute manner than Caesar had. Caesar's predecessors Sulla and Pompey each ruled longer than he did.

I think the first first part of the reason for the lasting nature of the power of Caesar's name has not to do with his rule, not to do with his life at all, but with his death. He was stabbed to death in the Senate, by Senators. Assassinations don't get much more dramatic than that. Augustus used that drama, as he so skillfully used so many things and so many people, to increase his own power. Augustus, without a doubt, ended the Roman Republic and founded the Roman Empire. It has very often been remarked that Augustus ended the Republic while constantly insisting that he was upholding it, fooling no one from his time to our own while achieving tremendous feats of change. If political titles were distributed logically, then thousands of years' worth of monarchs would have been known as Augustus -- and it's true that many of the Caesars were also called Augustus, but, with a lack of egotism quite rare among emperors, Augustus saw to it that Caesar's name was going to remain the most prominent.

Why? perhaps because, with an even greater lack of ego, Augustus saw that Caesar had been charismatic, and that he himself was not. This gave him the opportunity to enhance his own power by glorifying someone else. How many great politicians have ever been able to choose between power and glory? That choice is more one for a monk than for a politician.

But I'm just guessing, just as one has to guess whether Augustus foresaw the pax romana and valued an end to civil war over his power. Just as one has to guess so often about his motives.

There was a sphinx on Augustus' signet ring and in official portraits of him. Was this to commemorate his victory over Cleopatra? Yeah, maybe.

Whom Can You Trust? Sources of Ancient History

There is not a lot of ancient written material to be considered, certainly not in comparison to modern written material. For the entirety of ancient Rome, almost a thousand years of history, most of it encompassing a huge area and millions of people, the works of only a handful of historians survive. I should say: part of the works of those historians has survived, part is missing. Other historians who wrote in and about ancient Rome are known by name, but there are not many of them, either.

And not everyone who used to be considered an ancient historian is still thought of that way: the Augustan Histories, formally regarded as the work of six different authors writing around AD 300 and covering the reigns of the Roman Emperors from 117 to 284, is coming more and more to be regarded as the work of one author, writing around 400 and pretending to be six different earlier writers. And more and more, it is thought to have been written as something other than history -- as a satire of historical writing, perhaps. So what we used to think happened in the Roman Empire between 117 and 284 has to be re-considered to a very great extent. This agonizing re-appraisal is going on right now.

Not that the actual ancient historians are trusted completely. Far from it. They're regarded as themselves being entirely too trusting of written accounts of events of which they themselves were not eyewitnesses; they're suspected of twisting their historical accounts to serve their political agendas (perhaps contemporary historians are not suspected of this as much as they should be), and much of what they write is what we today would call historical fiction: for example, speeches and conversations with which the authors would have no way of being familiar are written out word-for-word, clearly invented by the authors, for what we would call dramatic purposes.

Because of the small amount and suspicious nature of the ancient historical writings, historians have no choice but to turn to other sources: ancient authors of non-historical works, including fictional and legendary works, are combed through for whatever tidbits of history reality they may contain; ancient coins and inscriptions are studied; the few surviving legal works and official versions of speeches of emperors are inspected.

And since the 19th century, the papyri from the eastern part of which have been unearthed, mostly written in Greek, found above all at Oxyrhynchus, besides ancient copies of Biblical and literary texts, some of which had been previously lost, have also added everyday items like personal letters, petitions, shopping lists and so forth.

However, the major sources remain those written by ancient historians. And besides wondering how far these historians themselves are to be trusted, there is the question of how accurately manuscripts of ancient authors reflect what those authors actually wrote. The attempt to re-construct as closely as possible what authors originally wrote is called textual criticism, and textual criticism is a very large and endlessly fascinating part of Classical Studies. In the case of Classical Greek, the above-mentioned discoveries of papyri have added a great deal of evidence with which textual critics can work. In the case of ancient Latin, recent discoveries have come much more seldom. In the case of most ancient Latin authors, there are no existing manuscripts older than the 9th century (Charlemagne, God bless him, instigated a huge revival of the study of ancient Latin). In some cases, there are no known manuscripts older than the 15th century (when printing began to replace manuscripts), and in the case of some authors, there are no manuscripts left at all: we have printed editions, but the manuscripts from which the earliest printed versions were made are gone. It is to be assumed, in the course of hundreds or thousands of years of copying and re-copying, some alterations to the texts were made.

And so, in the discussions which revolve around the textual criticism of ancient historians, there are debates which may look to the untrained observer as if they are debates about what exactly happened at a certain place and time, when actually they revolve around what a certain historian wrote, completely apart from the extent to which it is historically accurate. I saw these sorts of misunderstandings often in online discussions of Biblical texts, because, generally speaking, laypeople are much more interesting in discussing the Bible than in discussing any Classical authors: scholars, all atheists, none of whom believe in anything miraculous or otherwise supernatural, might be discussing, or trying to discuss, the best possible Hebrew or Greek version of a Bible passage, the version as close as possible to what the author actually wrote, while at the same virtual time and place, New Atheists and fundamentalists argue over whether or not the miracle describe in that passage actually occurred, and mostly ignore my attempts to tell them that the scholars were discussing, or trying to discuss, something entirely different.

Similarly, scholars might be discussing Vulgate manuscripts online, talking about whether the text of a particular manuscript showed that it was a copy, or a copy of a copy, of a manuscript made in a certain place and time, while constantly being interrupted by people asserting and disputing the literal historical accuracy of the Vulgate.

If you want to join a discussion, it's good to have a clue about what the people there are discussing: are they talking about what happened in a certain ancient time and place? Or what an ancient historian said about what happened in that time and place, or what we can infer from an ancient non-historical author? Or about what chance there is that the surviving manuscripts accurately record what that historian (or other author) wrote? Or about what he or she may have written instead of what is in the manuscripts? Or about what the pattern of mistakes in manuscript A say about where and when the now-lost manuscript α was made, from which manuscript A was copied, or from which another now-lost manuscript, β, was copied, from which B was copied? Or one of many other topics which are not what happened at a certain time and place, but which may be a vital part of constructing a more accurate idea of what may have happened at that time and place?

Intellectual Laziness: The Sad Case Of Michael Paulkovich And Myself

The two first posts I wrote concerning Michael Paulkovich's claim to have studied 126 ancient historians, looking for evidence of Jesus' existence, which I posted here back in September 2014, continue to be the two most-discussed, most-viewed, most-linked things I have written. They both continue to generate pageviews on my blog. And that's great. I was about to describe them as "most-read" along with "most-discussed" and "most-linked" and so forth, but the thing is, I don't know how carefully-read those posts have been. And not reading written works or just skimming them, and then acting as if you familiar with their contents, is the theme of this post.

First, there's Paulkovich: he claims to have studied 126 ancient historians, looking for evidence of Jesus' existence, but he hasn't: he has listed 126 names. But of those 126 people, few are actually historians. There are writers of fiction, physicians, lyric poets, people who died before Jesus was born, 4 writers who actually do mention Jesus, and more than 40 of whose writing nothing has survived, so much for Paulkovich's claim of having studied it. That's a particularly spectacular case of intellectual laziness, as is Free Inquiry's having published Paulkovich's piece and their continuing to defend it to this day.

Then there are the many people, other than the editors of Free Inquiry, who have taken Paulkovich's word when he says that he has studied historical texts written by these 126 people. And those who take his word when he describes himself as an historian and Biblical scholar. All of those people who assume that Paulkovich's assertions are sound, who haven't gone to the trouble of checking them. And sweet Lord Vushnu, you don't have to check Paulkovich's list of 126 names very extensively before you start to notice that something is wrong. (If Paulkovich is an historian, I'm a freakin' unicorn.)

Among the people who have described Paulkovich as having done devastating damage to the case for Jesus' historicity is Jerry Coyne, one of the world's most highly-respected biologists, but when it comes to his rep as an authority on ancient history, not so highly-respected anymore, along with fellow big-time, no foolin' biologists like Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers. Besides being some of the world's leading biologists, Coyne, Dawkins and Myers are also New Atheists, which among other things means they don't know much about ancient history and seem determined to stay that way. They would never accept any statement about biology whatsoever, made by anyone whatsoever, by an unknown or a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, as uncritically as Coyne accepted Paulkovich's claims about ancient historians.

Coyne may now know better about Paulkovich, someone may have been able in the meantime to explain to him what's up there, but if so, I haven't heard about it yet.

Besides Coyne, many others have assumed that Paulkovich knows what he's talking about when it comes to ancient historians. I hope that not many of them are also academics, but I have no idea how many of them may be.

All of the above has been perfectly clear to me all along.

So. Then comes me, with my blog posts concerning that list of 126 names, and a lot of people have praised those two posts of mine and linked them and so forth.

But how many of the people who have been so enthusiastic about my blog posts have checked my work? I'm complaining because people have uncritically accepted what Paulkovich says, but how many people who accept what I say about Paulkovich are just as uncritical?

Before we even get to the question of whether readers have checked my facts, it's been clear all along that many people have commented on my posts without having read them carefully at all: for instance, because they describe me as convinced that Jesus existed and/or a believing monotheist, although I state in those posts that I am an atheist and that I'm not sure whether or not Jesus existed. These are mostly people who defend Paulkovich, and apparently assume that pious Christian belief is the only reason anyone could have for having any problem with him.

Those are obvious cases. But today it suddenly hit me that most of the people who take my side against Paulkovich probably haven't checked my work any more thoroughly than those who take Paulkovich's side have checked his. If they had checked my work at all, then they would've given an indication of it in their comments underneath those countless online articles and blog posts. They would've given an indication by saying: Bollinger is right, person X -- fill in the blank: has no writing which survives, or, wrote only fiction, or wrote only about medicine, or actuallly does mention Jesus, etc.

And a few people have made such comments, and I've had some very rewarding online discussions with them. But for the most part it's people saying: look here, Paulkovich has made a great case that Jesus never existed, against people saying, look here, Bollinger has made a compelling case that Paulkovich doesn't know what he's talking about.

And all sides are choosing their authority -- Paulkovich, or me, or someone else -- for no sounder reason than because that authority is saying what they want to believe is true.

It just dawned on me very recently how rare it has been, in this entire controversy over Jesus' historicity, for someone to actually go to any trouble at all of actually digging into the source texts and doing a little research for themselves. Hearing arguments about who wrote this or that text, and when, and whether or not it may have been altered, by mistake or on purpose. Actually attempting to figure out how reliable this or that modern or ancient authority might be. Weighing the non-literary evidence. Considering opposing points of view while attempting to keep an open mind. And then reaching their own conclusions rather than just accepting someone else's, and actually basing those conclusions on ancient evidence rather than contemporary politics.

Well, it's a shame when people don't do all of that, because that's the fun stuff in the study of ancient history.

The Historical Jesus And The Absence Of Contemporary Writing About Him

This is to a certain extent a re-hashing of things I've already written in this blog: in this post, for example, which is just a summary of the Cambridge Ancient History, 1st ed, vol X: The Augustan Empire, 44BC -- AD70 4th, corrected printing, 19666, pp 866-876. Perhaps I've done a poor job of explaining this. (Perhaps I've done a magnificent job, and no-one has paid any attention. Yeah. That sounds more like it.) Oh well, once more into the breech:

THERE IS NOTHING STRANGE ABOUT OUR HAVING NO CONTEMPORARY WRITING ABOUT JESUS, BECAUSE WE HAVE ALMOST NO WRITING AT ALL FROM THAT TIME AND PLACE. SORRY ABOUT SHOUTING LIKE THIS, BUT IT'S REALLY CRUCIAL FOR ME TO GET THIS POINT ACROSS.. Contemporary observers may have written a great deal about Jesus, if he existed. It seems to me that if he existed, whatever else he may have been, he probably was pretty interesting.

But that's not the point, because however much was written about him by eyewitnesses, that's exactly how much has gone missing in the meantime. If 5 eyewitness accounts were written about Jesus, then that's how many eyewitness accounts of him have gone missing: 5. If 4,386 eyewitness accounts were written about him, then exactly 4,386 such accounts are now unknown to us.

And there's nothing suspicious about all of those accounts having gone missing, because almost everything written in Galilee and Judea during Jesus' lifetime has gone missing. Almost everything written by anyone about anyone or anything. The only exception I know is the Pilate Stone. Here's the entire text carved into that stone which has not eroded away over 19 centuries:

TIBERIEUM (...) TIUS (...) ECTUS IUDA (...)

And there's nothing at all suspicious about so little written material having survived from that time and place, when you look at how little writing has survived from the entire Roman Empire (see linked blog post above).

Let's take the example of Livy, hands-down the most highly-regarded historian among the ancient Romans. In scarcely any other time and place on Earth has an a historian been so universally well-respected as Livy was by his contemporaries. He wrote a long history of Rome, 4 times longer than the Bible, including both the Old and New Testaments. It covered Rome from the legends of its beginnings up until 9 BC. About 1/4 of that work is now known to us. I and a few other wild-eyed crackpots dream of finding the other 3/4. You know how much of it has been dug up in the past 200 years? This much:

[------ .e(m) [----- ing]ens [ei era]nt ha[u]t pro[cul G]abiis [u]rbe. cu[m] [Ga]uios nouos exer[cit]us indictus [e]sset ibique centuriati milites essent, cum duob(us)milib(us) pe[ {.} ]ditum profect[u]s in agru(m) suom cons[ul?] and g[-------] ar[------] se[d] reaps[a nega]tam eo [[e]]dicto f[acturum] quoa[d inuissu suo in pr[ovi(n)-] cia maneat, et [si] pergat dicto non parar[e], \[s]e/ [i]n praese(n)tem habiturum imper[i]um. Fabius, [acc]eptus mandatis-----]

You're welcome. (The parts in parentheses are guesses where the text -- on parchment in this case -- is hard to read or gone altogether.)

How many of the authors of the Roman Empire wrote things which we now don't have? The answer to that is easy: all of them. Every single one. Julius Caesar, Vergil, Ovid, Tacitus, Horace, Plautus -- all of them. In many cases, we have lost everything except their names, mentioned by other authors, but even that much is sometimes very important to our understanding of the history of the Roman Empire, because that's how little we have to work with. (See linked blog post above again.)

That's the state of the remains of the writings of the authors the Romans cared about most. Authors who lived in or close to the city of Rome. They didn't care much about Galilee and Judea, which makes it less suspicious that anything written there during Jesus' lifetime has survived (except the Pilate Stone).

Another thing which makes it much less suspicious still is that the Romans crushed a rebellion in Jerusalem in AD 70 and destroyed the Temple, the center of life for many people in the city, and the center of writing. There probably was quite a bit of interesting written material in Jerusalem in AD 69 which was already gone forever by AD 71.

People talk about the written records of the trial of Jesus. I don't know how many official written records of trials the ancient Romans kept. I do know how many such records we have today -- none. Not just none of Jesus' trial, not just none of any trials in Jerusalem -- none of any ancient Roman trials, period. And that's why it's not suspicious that we don't have any official written records of Jesus' trial. Okay? So can we please finally just move on about that one? (Yeah, I'm acting like people have read this post all the way to the end. I'm a cra-zeee dreamer!) (I must mention again that I used to be one of those people who prattled on about "detailed official Roman records," before I got a clue. I'm sincerely sorry about that. Even back then, some people assumed that I knew what I was talking about.)

IF YOU WANT TO LEARN ABOUT ANCIENT HISTORY, THE CAMBRIDGE ANCIENT HISTORY (1ST EDITION, 12 VOLUMES, OR 2ND EDITION, 14 VOLUMES) IS AN EXCELLENT PLACE TO START!

I Was So Excited When I First Heard There Was Something Called "New Atheism"

I was so excited, just a few years ago, when I found out that there were people called New Atheists, and started finding online atheist communities. Now, several years later, having read the same several dozen slogans 473,786,365,897,7563,8672,188 times in those online communities, having repeatedly been accused of secretly being a Christian or Muslim and been banned from atheist groups for not agreeing

1) that the Bible was written by Bronze Age goat herders or

2) that Constantine and the Pope re-wrote the Bible or

3) that it's 100% certain that the story of Noah was "stolen" from that of Gilgamesh or

4) that Judaism was "stolen" from Zoroastrianism or

5) that it's certain that Jesus never existed (or

6) for even caring whether there was a non-supernatural Jesus) or

7) that there were newspapers in ancient Jerusalem,

to name only of a few of the more spectacularly stupid mistakes which routinely pass as wisdom in many such communities; and after, several times, having finally, with great effort and tenacity, actually convinced someone that one of 1) through 7) or many more up to 30) or so, was a mistake, was ahistorical, getting the response: "So what?" and having people tell me they were going to go with the mistake anyway because that's what others in the group were doing --

-- after all of that, my enthusiasm has cooled somewhat.

Of course, not everyone in those communities clings tenaciously to all of these historical errors. And of course, not all of them are clearly errors. Some, like Jesus' non-existence and the story of Noah having come directly from that of Gilgamesh, are just premature conclusions. Those assumptions could be correct. But they could be incorrect, too, and we'd be learning much more quickly and effectively, as atheist groups, if we didn't rush to embrace every assumption as fact which would allow us, if true, to score points against believers. It could also be correct, for example, as is routinely assumed in atheist communities, that there never was a Moses or an Exodus from Egypt to Canaan in the 13th century BC. If there was one it was much smaller than the 600,000 families which the Bible says wandered for 40 years. But try to get a discussion of small-Exodus theories going in atheist communities. Go ahead, try it.

There are just so damn few of us in these groups who, when considering historical topics like these, are actually more interested in knowing what really happened than in framing a narrative which is as unflattering to religion, primarily unflattering to the Abrahamic religions, as possible. Precious little serious historical discussion going on here. It no longer surprises me that historians tend to take such a negative view of movement atheism.

It no longer surprises me that so many movement atheists assume that academic historians, in and out of the fields of Biblical Studies and "the relevant fields," are either believers, or corrupted by the money and power of believers. It still greatly disappoints me, but it doesn't surprise me any more.

I still have exactly the same major problem with the academic mainstream which I had before I ever heard of New Atheists. (I had heard of Richard Dawkins before this, and read 2 of his books on biology, and I thought they were great, and I still do, and just like many historians I wish he would go back to biology, back to something he's good at.) That problem is their refusal, with very very few exceptions, to even consider the possibility that Jesus might have been a mythical character right from the start, and never an historical figure. But compared to all the problems I have with the movement atheists, it's not an overwhelming problem. It's a significant problem, but there's just one of them.

Apparently, one of the very very few mainstream academics who aren't convinced that Jesus existed, Thomas L Thompson, who was a professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen from 1993–2009, who because of his doubts is naturally very popular among the non-academic mythicists, was until very recently unaware that those mythicists existed, because he only read primary materials and peer-reviewed academic material. Last I heard he had no intention to start reading the non-academic mythicists. Ah, what blissful ignorance that must be.

Why Am I So Angry At Michael Paulkovich?

That's what some people want to know. I'll keep trying to explain. (Some people have urged me to just let it all go. Hahaha. Haha. Hahahaha. No, I won't be doing that.)

I suppose it can't hurt to keep repeating, near the beginning of each of these rants, what many people seem to keep overlooking: not only am I an atheist, I'm far from certain that Jesus ever existed. I'm not criticizing Paulkovich for saying that Jesus never existed, I'm criticizing him for not knowing his ass from a hole in the ground about ancient Judea and Galilee and the question of Jesus' historicity, while trying to pass himself off as some sort of expert.

Actually, I'm angrier at the people who publish Free Inquiry than I am at Paullkovich. Someone described Paulkovich's article about "the 126 silent historians" as a striking example of sloppy thinking and sloppy research. But I don't think that what Paulkovich did here was research at all. Him posing as a researcher, and Free Inquiry and the Council for Secular Humanism continuing to stand behind him, is an insult to all actual researchers in ancient Greek and Latin, including the sloppy amateur ones like me. Sloppy research would have been if he had actually studied the writing of some ancient writers, and then drawn some dubious conclusions from that study. Mis-translated a few Greek and Latin words, not understood some obvious issues of context, things like that. In the case of 40-some of his 126, it's obvious that he didn't study their writing because there is no writing left to be studied. If he had actually read the Latin version of the story of Jason and the Argonauts, or another writer's book on architecture, or the Satyricon, the only surviving work of Petronius -- the same Satyricon upon which Fellini based his movie of the same name -- or the half-dozen verses of love poetry which are all that remain of the work of another writer on his list of 126, etc, etc, he would have known that there was no reason to expect to find Jesus mentioned in those works, and furthermore, he would've realized that anyone who was actually familiar with those writers would know that it was ridiculous to look for mentions of Jesus in their work. He would've realized that he'd be exposing himself as a charlatan posing as someone who'd done some research.



If he had taken the trouble to actually do some research into the extent of all the surviving work of ancient Greek and Latin authors, he would've realized that there are barely 126 historians among them, let alone 126 who mentioned Judea or Galilee, let alone 126 who would've mentioned a wandering preacher with all of 12 followers, who was one of the many people Pontius Pilate had crucified. He would've learned that apart from the Bible and some of the Old and New Testament Apocrypha and the Dead Sea Scrolls and Josephus, there's very little surviving ancient writing of any kind from that time and place, and that it's very big news among actual contemporary historians whenever any little scrap of more is found.

I'd really like to know just exactly how Paulkovich came up with that list, and where he got the notion that it was a list of 126 HISTORIANS. I'm picturing him gathering information from sources like jesusneverexisted dot com and the blogs and books of some of the wackier mythicists. There's simply no way he could've come near anything resembling a reliable reference work, or conferred with anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Roman Empire and its literature, and still come up with that list. Perhaps he thinks that most people familiar with ancient Greek or Latin are a part of the Plot. I'm just speculating here. It's actually very difficult for me to imagine just how that list of 126 names came to be, and just exactly how Paulkovich came to believe that historical writing from all 126 of them had survived.

And yes, there is also the little detail that it is extremely well-known, even among mythicists, that 4 of the people on his list, Josphus, Tacitus, Suetonius and Pliny the Younger, actually do mention Jesus and/or Christians.

And that the first 3 of those 4 actually are historians, quite unlike most of the 126, showing that the rate of "silence" of ancient historians about Jesus is actually rather low.

And yes, there is also the little detail about how Paulkovich bases his assumptions about what would have had to have been written about Jesus if he'd existed, on the Bible's claims about Jesus. That is to say, if Jesus had really healed all of those people and risen from the dead and so forth, more people would've noticed. Either Paulkovich is being inconsistent here in looking for evidence of a supernatural Jesus, or I have been wrong in assuming that Paulkovich is an atheist who doesn't believe in the supernatural. Whatever. At this point of silliness I don't much care anymore. But to some people, this assumed inconsistency apparently is a big deal.

And of course all of this still leaves the question untouched of how those responsible for the publication of Free Inquiry managed to miss all of this.

Well, at least Paulkovich didn't claim that there were newspapers in ancient Jerusalem, and that big stacks of them are still lying around, along with detailed records of every criminal case which came before Pilate -- all very suspiciously free of any mention of Jesus. There actually are some people, aside from the religious believers in Jesus' miracles and resurrection, who are running around making claims about Jesus and the historical record which are even more ridiculous than Paulkovich's. (Unless I'm giving him too much credit, and he actually does make such claims in his book. I haven't read his book.)

There's nothing particularly unusual about Paulkovich. There are very many people talking and writing about the historicity or lack of historicity of Jesus without having more of a clue on the subject than he does. It's mysterious to me that so much energy is expended flapping their gums about it, and such a tiny fraction of that much energy learning about what they're constantly yapping about. It's mysterious, and it makes me angry. And it makes me that much more angry when we're talking about people who claim to value rationality and free inquiry and knowledge and solid research so highly.

The Extent Of The Work Of Ancient Latin And Greek Historians Which We Possess

I don't know why people so often insist that they know a certain subject when they clearly don't. For example, I don't know why people go around saying things like "we possess the works of more than 50 historians who were in Jerusalem during Jesus' lifetime," or "there are 126 ancient authors who should've mentioned Jesus if he existed, but, mysteriously, they don't," and furthermore, I don't know why so many other people take them seriously. But people do go around saying such things, and other people take them seriously, and that gives me something to do. (Not to mention making it unsurprising that someone like Bart Ehrman would compare them to tinfoil-hat-wearing people talking about UFO's.)

Clearly, some people greatly overestimate the extent of the ancient Greek and Latin literature which has come down to us. I certainly did. When I decided to read some Greek tragedies, because so many people seemed to be saying that they were a major building-block of Western Civilization, I was amazed to discover that only 33 of them have survived down to our time: 7 by Aeschylus, 7 by Sophocles and 19 by Euripides.



All together, those 33 plays form a reading assignment about the same length as the Bible. And just as in the case of the Bible, if you read the Greek tragedies you'll understand a lot more of the jokes which authors have made in the past 2400 years.

There were many more tragedies written, many more than 33. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides each wrote many more than 33, and there were many other authors of tragedies working in Athens contemporary with them. However, it was not until the 380's BC, by which time Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides had all been dead for a while, that the Athenians began to get into the habit of performing any one of these tragedies more than once, even though for quite some time just one play could be enough to make its author rich and famous for life. This is one example of how differently ancient Greeks thought about permanence than we do. It makes us wince quite painfully to think of all of those lost plays. Back when they were written, their authors, performers and audiences had much more of a "That was great! Now what's next?" attitude.

Back to the historians: amazingly, someone said: "We possess the works of more than 50 historians who were in Jerusalem during Jesus' lifetime." and even more amazingly, some otherwise-sensible people believed him or her.

That figure is off by more than 50. Unless Paul of Tarsus was in Jerusalem during Jesus' lifetime -- and I don't see why he couldn't have been -- we possess the works of exactly zero writers of any kind, historians, theologians, lyric poets, epic poets, physicians, architects, military strategians or what have you, who were in Jerusalem during Jesus' lifetime. If Jesus existed and Paul was in Jerusalem during his lifetime, then we possess the work of 1 such writer.

If we define "ancient" as the time between the earliest writing in Latin or Greek until AD 400, when the Christians were starting to take over and things were beginning to get Medieval, then I don't know whether we possess the works of 50 ancient Greek and Latin historians, period. Unless I'm missing someone, I believe there are surviving historical works by 7 major ancient historians writing in Latin: Caesar, Sallust, Livy, Tacitus, Suetonius, the author of the Augustan Histories and Ammianus. Some would object to my calling the author of the Augustan Histories a major historian. Some would object to calling him an historian at all and point out that he seems to be posing as 6 authors and so forth, and say that he was actually writing a satire of historical writing, which unfortunately has often been mistaken for history, leading to widespread confusion and annoying generations of actual historians going back to Gibbon and earlier. I say let him be considered major until proven minor or a satirist, stipulating that for our purposes "major" does not always equal "skilled" or "accurate."



We have the works of some other ancient Latin historians, but these are mostly people who condensed parts of Livy's work: Florus, the anonymous author of the periochae, Julius Obsequens, etc. We currently possess about 1/4 of Livy's work; if we find the rest, the interest in Florus and the periochae and Julius Obsequens will presumably drop drastically. In earlier eras Livy was considered to be Rome's greatest historian. Nowadays the overwhelming favorite is Tacitus. Writers' reputations rise and fall and rise again. Others made similar Reader's Digest Condensed Versions of Tacitus and other major historians. They are called minor historians. Curtius Rufus translated some Greek material -- now mostly gone -- on the life of Alexander the Great. Some of the work of Cato the Elder survives, but not his history of Rome which was so much admired by other Roman writers. Counting major and minor writers, in Latin and Greek, I don't know of 50 ancient historians. I'd have to branch out into other languages and/or the Middle Ages to reach a total of 50.

Of course, historians glean all sorts of information from other types of writing than the historiographical. Considering the contributions of Cicero, Pliny the Younger, Symmachus, various Emperors and others, the other genre of most use to historians may be letter-writing. I grimaced as I wrote that because I can't stand Cicero. I consider it to be a crying shame that barely 100 pages of Sallust's writing has survived, while we have thousands of pages' worth of that thoroughly ordinary guy, Cicero. I'm sure several readers grimaced as they read the preceding 2 sentences, but I'm not going to sit here and lie to you about my opinion of Cicero. Today Cicero is probably still considered by most to be one of the very finest writers of Latin. In the Renaissance Cicero was beyond a doubt far and away the single most highly-admired Latin author. For many people writing in Latin in the Renaissance, good Latin writing equaled imitating Cicero. Like I mentioned above, writers' reputations rise and fall. Cicero's reputation as a genius of a author has fallen noticeably since the Renaissance, and I consider that to be progress and hope it continues, so there.

If anyone thinks I'm completely wrong and that people are right who are claiming that we have the works of 50 historians who were in Jerusalem between ca 6 BC and ca AD 40, or that there really are 126 or more ancient authors from whom the absence of any mention of Jesus is downright suspicious, they are of course more than welcome to comment. I could use a good laugh.

Suetonius And "Chrestus" And Jesus

As the ever-diligent Tim O'Neill helpfully pointed out, I erred in my post referring to Michael Paulkovich's 126 when I said that someone named Chrestus appears in Tacitus. O'Neill is correct: Chrestus appears in Suetonius, not in Tacitus. The beginning of chapter 25, part 4, of Suetonius' account of the Emperor Claudius begins:

Iudaeos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuantis Roma expulit.

(Because the Jews, led by Chrestus, were constantly making disturbances, he [Claudius] expelled them from Rome.)



Some mythicists point to this Chrestus and say that it shows that Jesus (Christ, Christus) never existed: it wasn't Christus, it was Chrestus, and he was never in Jerusalem, he was in Rome. Sez so right there in Suetonius. That's what some mythicists argue.

I just want to point out that I find it ironic that these particular individuals, who find reasons to doubt so many references to Jesus' existence in so many different texts, and to assume so many wholesale rewrites of the New Testament when we have so many NT manuscripts and there so little reason to doubt things, because we can see fairly clearly what changes were made and when by looking at all of these thousand of Biblical manuscripts, including some manuscripts as old as the 2nd century, perhaps as early in the 2nd century that they were made when Suetonius was still alive -- Ah say Ah say Ah say these non-historians, these non-experts calling themselves experts in the early history of Christianity have no problem whatsoever believing in the existence of a leader of the Jews in Rome in Claudius' reign called Chrestus, not Christus, rather then think that this may be a misspelling of Christus, in manuscripts of Suetonius of which the oldest are 9th century. And they are more ready to believe that the rather ambiguously-worded sentence clearly shows that this Chrestus was alive in Rome in Claudius' reign, rather than think that Suetonius does not mean to refer to a living leader present at the time, or, more likely in my opinion, that Suetonius simply didn't know much about the Christians, had heard some vague accounts of them linking them to someone named Chrestus, and made a mistake when he wrote about them. Or someone told Suetonius about Christus and he misheard it as Chrestus. Or Suetonius wrote "Christus," and some time between when he wrote in the 2nd century and when the oldest-known copies of his work were made in the 9th century, someone copied one letter wrong.

And these mythicists accuse others of bending the truth to suit their pre-conceived notions and grasping at straws.

SOME mythicists have done this with Suetonius' mention of "Chrestus." Not all of them -- or all of us if everyone not convinced that Jesus existed is a mythicist. I'm pretty sure Wells never has.



As I often point out, I am not a pro at this. I'm pointing it out once again in connection with some of the wackier mythicists because I want to make the point, again, that one by no means needs to be a pro or an expert in order to see that they are neither. (Wells is a pro. Probably the only living mythicist pro. Surely if there were another I would've come across him or her by now.)

Here's Some REAL Info About Ancient Historians

Michael Paulkovich will no doubt have many objections to the following. Besides it being obvious that I am a part of The Plot, I am referring to a book of history which is several decades out date; even Cambridge agreed that it was, and so published a completely overhauled edition



between 1970 and 2005. The first edition was published between 1924 and 1939, and I'm referring to vol X of that edition, first published in 1934: The Augustan Empire, 44BC -- AD70, pages 866 through 876, the section entitled Appendix: The Literary Authorities For Roman History. My copy is from the 4th corrected printing, from 1966. The thing is, although this volume is out of date, all 126 of Paulkovich's authors were well-known to historians in 1934, and the texts by those authors recovered since the 1930's might add up altogether to a page or so of fine print. Maybe. (A page of fine print suspiciously lacking any mention of Jesus.)

A more detailed list of sources, both ancient and modern, including things like inscriptions and coins, is provided on pages 893 through 993. What we've got on pages 866-876 is a discussion of the ancient Latin and Greek writers who could reasonably be called historians, plus a few others who help to round out our picture, who wrote about the Roman Empire between 44BC, when Julius Caesar was killed, to AD70, when the Jewish Rebellion was crushed and the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed.

This Appendix, unlike Paulkovich's attempt to cover some similar ground, is very helpfully divided into non-existent sources and existing sources. Whoever wrote the Appendix, S A Cook, F E Adcock, M P Charlesworth or some combination of the three (they edited vol X), gives an account of how much influence each non-existent source -- each source which we know was written, but which has disappeared sometime during the past 2000 years so that we can't read it today -- may be expected to have had upon the existing sources, the stuff we can read (cause it exists).

For example, it is noted that the now-vanished History of Asinius Polllio was a major source for Appian's work.

For example, books 116-142 of Livy's history, which cover the period 44-9BC, are gone, but there are several condensed versions of those books made by others which are available to us. Condensed to around 1/100 of the length of the original, for example, in the case of the



periochae. Note also, that Livy is of course an existing source in that a great deal of his work survives, but a non-existent source for the period 44BC -- 70AD.

For example, the author or authors of the Appendix give the opinion that we cannot know much more for certain about the historians Aufidius Bassius and M Servilius Nonianus than their names and that they wrote histories covering parts of the period.

So: the non-existent historians writing in Latin listed here for the history of the Roman Empire from 44BC -- 70AD, mentioned because of their possible, likely or certain influence on the existing sources, are, in Latin, Asinius Polllio, Livy, Aufidius Bassius, M Servilius Nonianus, A Cremutius Cordus, Cluvius Rufus, Fabius Rusticus, Pliny the Elder, Bruttedius Niger, Cn Cornelius Lentulus Gaetulicus, Seneca the Elder, Julius Secundus, Pompeius Planta and Tib Claudius Balbillus. Then there are listed some non-historians who may have contributed to the works of historians existent or non-. Then come three historians writing about the period in Greek whose work is missing, Nicolaus, Timagenes and Phlegon.

On to those who wrote about the period whose work we can read: in Latin, Cicero, Augustus, Velleius Paterculus, Valerius Maximus, Tacitus, Suetonius; then some who condensed the work of others centuries later: Florus, Eutropius, Aurelius Victor and Orosius. Then technical works by Vitruvius (a delightful writer)



on architecture, by Frontinus on aequaducts and military strategy and by Vegetius (4th century) on military matters in general.

There remains in the Appendix a discussion of 5 illustrious Greek authors whose work has to do with the Empire from 44BC -- AD 70, Strabo, Philo, Josephus, Plutarch and Dio Cassius, plus a few more who lived and wrote between the 6th and 11th centuries.

No doubt some of you have been snorting contemptuously for some time now and saying, "You think yr so damn smart?! All you did was summarize a dozen pages from a dang book!"

Yr darn tootin that's all I did! And the reason why that's all I did was to give you an idea of how easy it is, if you know where to look, to get a general idea of the written sources available to us -- before we get to things like the New Testament and the Dead Sea Scrolls and Oxyrhynchus and Fayim and Nag Hammadi and inscriptions (words carved into stone) and coins and so forth -- which cover the history of the Roman Empire from 44BC -- AD70. That's the entire Empire over the course of 114 years, an era which is covered much more minutely by surviving sources than many another ancient epoch before and after. 114 years for an area reaching from England to the Red Sea, not just 33 years in an area about 1/10th the size of Wyoming, an area which interested most of the writers mentioned above about as much as Wyoming interests most of the writers on the east and west coasts today.

Religion May Be Declining. But Stupidity May Not Be

An atheist said yesterday, about the Bible: "Nothing on those pages of that book are [sic!] based on fact or reality. Not one thing." He said it in a well-visited public place on the Inter-Tubes, but only one person challenged what he was saying: me. And I don't think it's that no-one else had anything to say about it, but rather that such things are said so often that they have become a familiar part of the background noise, like the ravings of fundamentalist Christians. There's too much of it to deal with it all, and so we shut it out. If none of us had heard a remark like "Nothing on those pages of that book are based on fact or reality. Not one thing." for months, then, perhaps, several of us might've made a concerted attempted to acquaint this person with Ancient History 101. But we hear it day-in and day-out. This time only I responded, while presumably several other people also read the comment, but just groaned and continued looking for someone sensible to discuss things with. Which I find perfectly understandable. That's my usual response when I come across a fundie spouting old-time religion: make a wide berth. Do nothing to catch their attention. Move on.

This atheist had said "Nothing on those pages of that book are based on fact or reality. Not one thing." in response to a fundie who'd said that EVERYTHING in the Bible was true. Then I chimed in saying that both statements were about equally absurd. The atheist then said:

"Really? Do tell me all of the facts that come out of the bible. I know, people really do live to be 900, and all women are descended from adam's rib, and.... well, I'll let you have your turn."

I responded by naming four people named in the Bible who actually existed: David, Solomon, Nebuchadnezzarand Paul.

The turnip responded: "Really now? Cuz you were there and you know. Laughable." And he told me to keep my nonsense in my own home and my church and out of his life and his home. No discussion, no consideration of whether there ever really was a Nebuchadnezzar, just dismissal.

This makes my head spin. Apparently this guy can see no middle ground between believing everything in the Bible and believing none of it. Apparently there is no room in his mind for the concept of an atheist who does not assume, as he does, that there is no factual content in the Bible, zero.

And also, obviously, he knows squat about ancient history.

Both he and I reject religion. Presumably for similar reasons: because we see that belief in God requires a great suspension of logic, and because elementary levels of logic contradict it. But he doesn't seem to get that by flatly asserting that there is nothing factual in the Bible he is repeating the same kind of logical lapse and refusal to acquire even elementary knowledge which make religion so objectionable. The fundamentalist Christian: God said it, I believe it, that settles it. The atheist moron: It's all crap, I'm done. No doubt in either mind, no curiosity for greater detail about the subject. Moron A: It's all true. Moron B: It's all false.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

So you figured out that there's no God. Whoop-dee-freakin-doo, Sparky. You really don't need to be so proud of that achievement. It doesn't mean you're a genius. It's pretty easy to figure that out, and it gets easier every day, because progress is actually being made when it comes to human knowledge. Now that you've figured it out, you still need to keep learning. There is still an awful lot you don't know. There's no shame in that: there's an awful lot the greatest geniuses in the world don't know. But In your case, I would recommend Ancient History 101 at your local Learning Annex, or in your elementary or junior high or high school or university if you're still a student. I would urgently recommend it.

Atheist Fundamentalism -- For Real This Time

In a previous post on the blog, I proudly and sarcastically claimed the title of a fundamentalist atheist. Sarcastically, because I didn't really think there was such a thing, that it was just another in the list of straw men and flat falsehoods theologians routinely employ when attacking such atheists.

I still think that that list is long, but I might have to take fundamentalist atheism off of it. There does seem to be a well-defined group of dumb atheists, dumb as fundamentalist Christians, with their own well-defined set of myths which they do not question any more than the Christian fundies question their dogma. Both groups gather together for the purpose of telling one another they are right, and to proudly cite people who seem to agree with their myths, and to refer to such people as authorities because of that perceived agreement, and for no other good reason. The biggest superchurch of the atheist fundies is the website jesusneverexisted.com, where they gather to tell each other that Jesus never existed, that Christianity was invented by the powerful as a means to manipulate the masses, that not one aspect of the Jesus myth is original, everything having been borrowed from earlier myths, that in the early first century AD Bethlehem was uninhabited and Nazareth did not yet exist, and so forth. What a huge circle-jerk.

If you opine in his presence that you are not certain whether Jesus existed or not, such an atheist fundie may compare you to people who believe that Bigfoot and Spiderman are real and that pyramids and crop circles were made by aliens, and insist that there is no evidence for Jesus' existence.

Let's start with this last one first. I'm so tired of hearing it repeated over and over that there is no evidence for Jesus' existence. The New Testament is evidence. If it doesn't convince you of anything, fine, then call it unconvincing evidence. Stop saying nobody wrote about Jesus: the New Testament authors did. Call them deluded or charlatans if you wish, or deluded charlatans, but they were somebody, not nobody. Don't tell me that if Jesus had existed, surely there would be much more written evidence -- you're just telling me that you don't know what you're talking about. Lower-class people like the sons of carpenters weren't written about back then. The Romans did not keep written records of every person they crucified, not even if one of them had all of twelve followers. Twelve followers. Pontius Pilate, who ruled the entire province of Judea at the time, is known mostly from the New Testament. He can't be said to have been better-attested than Jesus until the mid-20th century, when a block of limestone was found in Israel into which Pilate's name had been engraved in the 1st century by all appearances.

And we know, all of us sensible people, that Stan Lee created Spiderman, that pranksters made those crop circles and that picture of Bigfoot, and that Egyptians and Mayans and Incas and other Earthlings made those pyramids. We don't know for sure who might've made up Jesus. It was the powerful! say these turnips. They invented Christianity to keep the masses down!

Well, it seems awfully strange that the powers that were would invent a story of a poor boy, born in a barn and killed 33 years later by crucifixion, a punishment reserved for poor people and slaves, for nobodies, as King of the Universe. That part of the Jesus story was a definite subversion of the prevailing power structure.

It was also original, so much for the meme about everything in the Jesus story having been borrowed from earlier myths. Buddha was a prince, Mithras was either a monarch or a deity, Dionysus was a god, whoops, the Christians didn't steal every part of the story, did they?

A poor person, a nobody from the despised classes which faced crucifixion if they were killed, unlike the stabbings and poisonings reserved for the big muckety-mucks, becoming King of Kings -- that part of the story was revolutionary. And Christianity at first spread mostly among the lower classes and slaves. Emperors tried repeatedly to wipe it out. Diocletian made the most strenuous of these efforts to destroy Christianity, and his successor Constantine then allied himself with it, by all appearances, out of necessity rather than choice. Christianity was invented by the powerful so that after two and a half centuries of pretending to oppose it, then could then cleverly make an alliance to keep the little people down?

That's tinfoil-hat territory, folks.

So is the stuff about Nazareth not existing until centuries into the Christian era and no-one at all living in Bethlehem in the 1st century. Augustus never made that census which would've required Joseph and the pregant Mary to travel to Bethlehem, but if he had, Bethlehem would've been there waiting for them, with people in it and at least one manger and everything. Trust me. Or don't, become expert in the ancient history of the area and make up your own mind who's talkin' smack, me or jesusneverexisted.

No, I don't believe in God, I don't think Jesus walked on water, healed the lame and insane, fed a huge crowd with a small basketful of bread and fish, raised Lazarus from the dead or rose from the dead himself. There are many other parts of the stories in the New Testament besides these that I think are clearly fiction. But I'm not going to dismiss the possibility of any factual core to the story because of obvious mythical elements, any more than I'm about to assume that George Washington never existed just because Parson Weems lied to us all about that cherry tree and the dollar young George was supposed to have thrown across the Potomac.

I don't know whether there was a real person, maybe named Jesus, maybe not, who inspired the New Testament stories, or whether someone else -- my prime suspect would be Saul/Paul of Tarsus -- made the whole thing up.

I don't know. Please don't lump me together with people who are sure on that question, one way or the other. I think that both Christians and others who insist, Of course Jesus existed, and atheists (and a few others) who insist, Of course he didn't! are trying to end investigation into the question. And pardon me, but that's just no fun. I see nothing remotely like convincing, debate-ending evidence either way here.

Level 2

A patient teacher would've gone back to the guy quoted in my last post and kept trying to reason with him. (As opposed to mocking him online or something like that.) Told him that translating the Bible into Languages A, B, C and and so forth was not like a game of Elephant, because in each case, if reputable people were at work, the translator would be working from the original Hebrew and Greek texts; that, if anything, the existence of more translations could help to improve one particular translation. For example, the translator translating the Bible into Language A might also happen to be fluent in Language B -- good translators tend to be multilingual -- and if he were stuck trying to find a good translation for a particular word or passage, the approach taken on the word or passage in the translation into Language B might give him an idea. Other translations are in no way a substitute for working with the source text, but they can now and then be a supplemental resource. For a competent translator, they certainly don't hurt a thing.

Sure, for all I know there might be many very sloppy Bible translations out there. For all I know there may be some translations in Language C made from other modern translations in Language B which were made from still other modern translations in Language A, ("Feel my skills, donkey donkey donkey donkey!") because the publishers were unscrupulous and the missionaries footing the bill didn't know any better. But the existence of those "monkey-strong" bad translations into Language C in no way prevent people from making good translations into Language C using the same resources used for any good translation, consulting the best ancient Hebrew and Greek texts and disregarding both the bad old manuscripts and the bad new translations.

I could've tried to explain those sorts of things to this guy who as of yesterday was convinced that there was no explaining gravity. But I am not a teacher, and as far as I know, I am not noted for my patience. I know that doing those sorts of educational tasks is very important, but I feel no vocation for it, no passion. What I want are discussion partners who are already up here on Level 2 with me. Commandos, not cannon fodder.

And anyway the whole subject of the textual transmission of the Bible is just a secondary interest of mine, one of the branches off of my more primary interest in ancient history and languages generally. It's just that problems of the text of the Bible come up in conversation much, much more often in conversation than problems of the text of Homer or Sallust. The latter are much more interesting to me personally, but whaddyagonnado. My autistic-spectrum condition led to an autodidactic education, and we autodidacts wander the non-specialized wilderness to some extent. And so I get caught up in these conversations about the Bible with theologians on the one hand, who tend to have a fairly good grasp of the history of the transmission of the Bible, but who often speak with fork-ed tongues, and clueless atheists and hateful sectarians on the other who say things like that the text of the Bible has gone through several thousand steps of re-translation before being given its final and thoroughly corrupt form at the Council of Nicea by Constantine the Great. In AD 400.

Because I am out here in the wilderness, although I have managed to gather, for example, that archaeology has all but ruled out any sort of large-scale Exodus of Israelites from Egypt into Canaan in the 13th century BC and largely contradicts the Biblical account of Joshua's battles, I do not know what experts might currently think of Freud's theorythat Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who changed his name to Akhenaten -- or Ikhnaten in Freud's and others' transliterations from a few decades ago -- and began more and more to emphasize the worship of Aten, the disc of the sun, at the expense of other deities, and whose memory was partly effaced after his death in reaction to this religious unorthodoxy, may have been both the first monotheist and the basis of the legend of Moses. It seems possible to me that a small group of Akhenaten's followers could have moved from Egypt to Canaan, joined the larger group which were or would become the Israelites, and profoundly influenced their religion.

I mean -- monotheism had to come from somewhere. This is one possible route.

Then again, I am not nearly as prepared to declare Akhenaten a monotheist, the first one or not, as is my sensationalistic bete noir with no damn editorial standards, the History Channel. This is all highly speculative on my part.