Ancient Texts and the Question of Being Right, or Helpful

I'd rather be right and helpful all of the time, but I just don't know whether that's possible. On the one hand, there is the vast amount of very important subjects about which I know little or nothing, and about which anything I'd have to say is likely as not to be incorrect.

On the other hand, there is the little amount that I know, which doesn't seem to be of use to any but a small number of people who probably already know most or all of it anyway.

Let's jump right into the example of religion.

Just now, for about the thousandth time, I heard someone point out that Jesus never said anything against lgbt's. Which, as far as I know, is correct: Jesus says nothing in the New Testament about LGBT's, and I don't know of any statements by him on the subject in any apocryphal writings either.

And, not for the first time, I suppressed the urge to point out that he's not recorded as saying anything in favor of LGTBT's either, and that he lived in a society which definitely was homophobic, so that his total silence on the issue could more logically be construed as homophobia than not. I suppressed the urge to say these things because, in the discussion today where someone pointed out Jesus' silence on the issue, my remark about the context of that silence would be more helpful to today's homophobes than to those championing LGBT rights, and I am definitely among the latter.

Some say that Christianity is simply different from Judaism when it comes to gay rights. My honest response to that is that Christianity was almost unanimously homophobic until, a few decades ago, many Christians suddenly made a U-turn on the issue, perhaps a majority of Christians, but not, as far as I can see, before a similar proportion of Jews made a similar U-turn. But, frankly, it seems to me that both most Christians and most Jews would rather that I just shut up about the histories of their various religions. To me, it's history. To them, it's religion. Not the same thing at all.

I think it's great to read texts which are thousands of years old, but when I do, I'm constantly reminded of how progress has been made in various areas in the thousands of years since those texts were written. I feel quite free to point out this progress in reference to pre-Christian Latin texts, but when it comes to speaking openly about the Bible, Old or New Testament, all of a sudden, people get quite touchy.

And the New Atheist approach to this sort of thing, summed up as "Oh, you're offended? So fucking what?" doesn't work for me. I don't go around throwing people's lunch on the floor, and I don't want to go around doing the verbal equivalent of that, either. I would like my remarks to be productive, and not just for two or three people who already think pretty much exactly the same way I do. Lately, the memory of those posters in a couple of classrooms when I was a schoolboy, posters which said: "Be not simply good. Be good for something." -- the memory of those posters has suddenly become much more poignant -- I don't know whether poignant is the right word but it's as close as I can come. It's as if I'm beginning to learn something which is already very widely known.

What this entire post may boil down to is that, at the age of 57, I may finally have stumbled across the reasons for, and the usefulness of, that subject, which is older than the Bible, known as rhetoric, one of the subjects I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Rhetoric, I believe, has to do with having a desired effect with one's words, as opposed to just ruthlessly blathering away with the full and unfocused force of one's erudition.

Forged Ancient Literary Works

Many of the best-known ancient literary works in Greek and Latin, scholars now agree, have long been presented as the work of authors who did not write them.

Gradually, the findings of scholarship about ancient literature make their way toward the consciousness of the general public in the West. The findings about one ancient compilation, about which the West is particularly obsessed, make their way more quickly than all others to the public, and to wider circles of the public: those having to do with the Greek New Testament. If someone believes that all 13 of the books of the New Testament traditionally attributed to St Paul were actually written by Paul, it may come as a shock to learn that scholars now believe that Ephesians, First and Second Timothy and Titus were written by someone else, and that the authorship of Colossians and Second Thessalonians is debated.

This is less shocking for those who have a broad knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin literature, because, among the ancient "pagan" authors, such forgeries are quite common. Take the case of Homer -- well, Homer is a special case to begin with, because there is absolutely no agreement among scholars about whether a writer named Homer ever existed, or whether, if this writer did exist, he wrote the Iliad or the Odyssey or both -- however, it is almost universally agreed now that, whoever wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, the works known as the Homeric Hymns, and attributed to Homer by the time of Thucydides at the latest, were written by someone else.

No one doubts that Plato existed, or that he wrote many philosophical works centering around Socrates -- but he didn't write all of the dialogues he was once thought to have written. In the collection traditionally thought of as the work of Plato, First Alcibiades, Clitophon, Menexenus and the Epistles are now controversial as to whether or not Plato wrote them, while Second Alcibiades, Epinomis, Hipparchus, Minos, Amatores and Theages are all now generally agreed to have been written by someone else. That's a total ten of the thirty-six works traditionally attributed to Plato, and this does not count nine more works attributed to Plato which were already seen in antiquity to have been spurious: Axiochus, Definitions, Demodocus, Epigrams, Eryxias, Halcyon, On Justice, On Virtue and Sisyphus.

Vergil, on the strength of his works the Aeneid, the Georgics and the Eclogues, is considered by many to be the finest poet ever to have written in Latin. For a long time, an additional collection of poems, the Appendix Vergiliana, were thought to have been poems Vergil wrote in his youth. Now almost no-one believes that Vergil wrote them.

Julius Caesar wrote commentaries about his experiences leading Roman troops in the Gallic and Civil wars. Many editions of Caesar's work have also included commentaries on the Alexandrine, African and Iberian wars, originally presented as works by Caesars, now considered not to have been written by him.

Sallust, an historian and contemporary of Caesar's, is known for works on the Catiline and the Jugurthan War. Editions of his work also contain letters which he ostensibly wrote to Caesar, and a speech against Cicero and one by Cicero against him, which are considered to be forgeries.

An enormous amount of prose survives which was written by Cicero, whom many have called the greatest of all Latin authors. Collections of his works have also included Rhetorica ad Herennium and Commentariolum Petitionis, both almost certainly written by someone other than him.

Ovid is one of the most beloved ancient Latin authors, known for several humorous volumes of what today might be called dating advice, as well as for the Metamorphoses, an extraordinary re-telling of many traditional myths, and the Fasti, a book on Roman holidays which is better than you might think a book on Roman holidays could possibly be, and for other works. Additionally, several works not written by him have circulated along with his works: Consolatio ad Liviam, Halieutica, Nux and Somnium.

There are many, many further examples. Many of these works continue to be of great interest to Classical or biblical scholars, for one reason and another, even after they have been shown to be fakes. One is almost tempted to say that no Classical author can be considered truly great before a spurious work has attached itself to his or her oeuvre.

The authors of such spurious works are often referred to by putting the prefix "pseudo-" in front of the name of the author who is being imitated. More and more, separate editions are dedicated to the work of the forgers, rather than including them in the editions of the forged authors as a sort of afterthought.

Perhaps, as these widespread, and often well-respected forgeries become better-known, the shock of the layman at things like pseudo-Pauline epistles will become somewhat less.

Biblical Scholars Be Trippin'

The meme above is one of those things that's hysterically funny if you understand it, and if you don't, explaining it to you would probably just exhaust me and bore you. So I'll just say that one reason Biblical scholars be trippin' is that they continue to discover huge amounts of extremely-old Biblical manuscripts.

For example, James Snapp Jr wrote last June about some palimpsests. When the ink is scraped off of a piece of parchment to make room to write something new, the indentations left by the old writing are a palimpsest. For over a century, people have been getting steadily better at using technology to recover palimpsests: that is, to make them readable again. Snapp wrote:

For at least the past five years, reports have circulated about the contents of palimpsests (recycled manuscripts) that were discovered in 1975 at Saint Catherine’s monastery. National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, The Atlantic, ScienceBlog, Ancient-Origins, and the BBC have all told readers that major research is underway that involves ancient manuscripts and expensive manuscript-reading equipment.

Now the Sinai Palimpsests Project has a website, and visitors can easily get some sense of the scale of the work that is being done with the (relatively) newly discovered manuscripts. The manuscripts at Saint Catherine’s include all kinds of compositions: ancient medicine-recipes, patristic sermons, poems, liturgical instruction-books, Old Testament books, and much more.

Fifteen continuous-text Greek manuscripts are among the newly discovered palimpsests. All but one of these New Testament manuscripts have been given production-dates in the 500s or earlier.

Another thing they be trippin' about is claims that the Codex Sinaiticus, famous for being the oldest complete Bible known to exist -- and named Sinaiticus because it was found in the very same St Catherine's monastery in Sinai where they have found the above-mentioned palimpsests -- is actually not nearly as old as had been thought. It was dated to the 4th century, now here come these guys saying it was made in the 7th century. But apparently that brouhaha has come and gone and the 4th-century dating has survived. But don't take my word for any of this: let Steven Avery tell you all about it.

13th-Century Translations Of The Bible

On the first day of July, 2011, I published a post quoting a dispute I had with a couple of other people over some 13th-century translation of the Bible about which they claimed to know. I googled 13th-century bible translations and found some interesting things, but nothing having to do with 13th-century translations of the Bible. I googled "13th-century bible translations" and got 0 hits. 0 also for "13th-century translations of the bible."

Without quotation marks around the search terms, search results occur with references to the Cathars, and to their demands, in opposition to the Catholic Church, for vernacular translations of the Bible -- the opposite of what the idiots in the 2011 Wrong Monkey post claimed to know about, translations made by the Catholic Church. Maybe that's what the idiots had in mind. As I said, I've found references to demands made by the Cathars for translations of the Bible. I'm still looking for actual translations of Biblical texts made during the 13th century.

Someone claimed on Wikipedia that King Dinis of Portugal (1261-1325) translated a part of Genesis into Portugese, a translation which since has been lost.

On Wikipedia. I haven't so far been able to find any mention of this anywhere else.

Here we go: 13th-century Spanish translations: La Fazienda de Ultra Mar, a Spanish account of travels in the Holy Land, appeared early in the 13th century and contained Biblical passages in the vernacular. And was suppressed by the Council of Tarragona in 1234. And then a complete Castilian Bible appeared under the reign of the renowned scholar and patron of scholars, Alfonso X, King of Castile, León and Galicia from 1252 to 1284.

I could be wrong, but I don't think this is what the idiots were thinking of back in 2011. I think it was more like this: some New Atheists overheard something somewhere about King James having some Bible verses altered in the King James Bible to suit his political ends. Without first bothering to learn which verses these were or how or why they were altered, they took this assertion of politic-religious mendacity and ran with it, put it through their New Atheist echo chambers and games of Elephant, and by the time these particular idiots met me, they thought they had learned about Bible translations (into what language or languages?) made by the Catholic Church (by whom in the Catholic Church?) to suit the Church's agenda (in what way?), and without even posing any of the question in parentheses there, let alone answering them, they thought that they had blown the lid off of an historical scandal.

Something like that. This is what many New Atheists do, which they think is studying history. The way they tend to react to people who actually know something about the historical topic they think they're discussing, is illustrated by they the way they behave toward me in the Wrong Monkey post from 2011 linked above. I for one am not getting paid nearly enough to put up with that sort of treatment. Why would actual historians want to hang around for it, when some of us actually appreciate what they do? I wonder how Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson get treated when they try to talk to Bill Maher about vaccines.

It's stupidity. Stupidity isn't merely ignorance, it's the dogged determination to remain ignorant.

"Tout Comprendre C’est Tout Pardonner"

That's not a quote from the Buddha, and it's not from Tolstoy either. I don't know whether it's originally French or if it came from another language. (Note to self: screenplay for geeky sci-fi movie: IT CAME FROM ANOTHER LANGUAGE!)

In English it means: "To understand everything is to forgive everything."

As regular readers of this blog know, I resist believing uncritically in cliches, including the cliche: "Cliches are cliches because they're true." Instead, I think that cliches are cliches because they sound good. But this one, "tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner," this one strikes me as somewhat deep. I'm not able easily to dismiss it.

Over and over, I have asked myself, how does anything ever get done? That's when I'm waiting in a line, or in traffic, for the people ahead of me to get their shit together and get out of my way. But recently I had an insight: I'm only out there in those lines or in that traffic very seldom, and I spend a lot of time getting ready for those occasions. Typical adults are in those situations all the time. If I had a more typical life and was constantly interacting with others, I might be unusually slow during the several days it took me to have a complete mental breakdown.

I understood something, and since then I tend to be more forgiving.

So anyway, today a discussion broke out about the snake in the Garden of Eden, and as usual I'm greatly annoyed with almost everything everyone is saying: some atheists who seem very angry at God, and ask, "Why would God...?" That seems to me to be the wrong question. God didn't... anything, since He's imaginary. Yes, there are contradictions and inconsistencies in the Bible. It was written by people who believed that the God they worshiped was all-powerful and loving, and yet they still suffered, and this was what they came up with to try to figure it out.

Then there are the people who insist that Genesis was never taken literally until the 19th century. This one always makes me head explode with rage, familiar as I am with the abundant evidence of all the billions of people who took the Bible literally from the time it was written until now.

So, what is it which I have to understand in order to be able to take part in these conversations in a form other than my usual: No, you're wrong, and you're wrong too, and so are you, and you, and you... ?

Good question. That approach does not make me universally beloved.

Maybe I need to understand all of the reasons people take part in these conversations other than making the kind of sense they would be expected to make in a good and sound course in archaeology?

Or maybe I need to throw "tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner" onto my scrap heap of rejected cliches. It doesn't seem to mesh at all with another bonmot, one which I think I like more: #5 from the chapter "Sprüche und Pfeile" in Nietzsche's book Götzen-Dämmerung: "Ich will, ein für allemal, vieles nicht wissen. – Die Weisheit zieht auch der Erkenntnis Grenzen." ("Once and for all, there is much that I don't want to know. Wisdom puts limits even on knowledge.")

Yeah, I think I should go with Nietzsche in this case. "Understanding everything" -- what does that even mean, "understanding everything"? It's a nonsense concept. As Steven Wright said: "You can't have everything -- where would you put it?" And I'm afraid that understanding everything is just as impractical as having everything.

Instead of striving to understand the people in these discussion about God and Genesis, these discussions which aggravate me so -- how about if I simply stop trying to understand all of them and all of their points of view? Wow: just thinking for half a minute about stopping, and I'm so relaxed. I think I'm onto something here. If I just give up on this, it may not make everybody love me, but it very well might make a few people dislike me less, and that's certainly a palpable achievement.

So. Just let those arguments go. And instead... keep looking for more interesting, less enraging discussions.

Seen On The Internet: "ATHEISM IS RATIONAL!"

Well, yeah, sometimes it is.

Unfortunately, though, just because a person is an atheist doesn't mean that everything they do and say is rational.

For a while there it seemed to me that there was absolutely no reason to think that atheists, as a whole, were more rational than religious believers, but then I reminded myself that my observation is limited to the behavior of a small number of people, and that, like everyone else, I select what I pay attention to, and that I focus on atheists who are dumb. The reason I focus on them is because it seems to me that many atheists are not practicing nearly enough self-criticism, neither of themselves nor of other atheists. If you're not stupid already, just assume that everything you say and believe is factually correct, and you'll become stupid soon enough.

In addition, not everyone who is an atheist announces it all the time or puts it in large all-caps at the top of their Facebook page. It may very well be that the average atheist who announces his or her atheism very aggressively is less intelligent than the average of all atheists. It may be lately that some of the more intelligent atheists are announcing it less than they used to, because the thought of being associated with dimwitted, agressively-atheist atheists embarrasses them.

Sometimes I'll say something like "not everything an atheist says or does is necessarily rational" to someone who's said something like "ATHEISM IS RATIONAL!" and they'll agree with me. And if all they meant is that skepticism of religious belief, all other things being equal, is more rational than belief, then I agree with them.

Other times they'll get hostile.

It may happen that a person who is as atheistic as anyone may ask when Jesus died, and someone may reply that Jesus never died because He never was born and that the Bible is completely fictional. In such as case, sometimes it turns out that the person saying that Jesus never existed means that the supernatural things related in the Bible never happened. In that case, I agree, but wonder when the word is going to get around that some of us occasionally discuss a completely non-supernatural Jesus. If by saying that Bible is completely fictional, someones means no more than that they have no belief in the supernatural, well then I'm sorry, but I think they expressed themselves unclearly. The Bible is studied by quite a few people who have no belief whatsoever in the supernatural, and there is quite a lot of historical content alongside the tales of the supernatural. How much historical content?

That's exactly what we're discussing, a lot of the time: how much history the Bible contains. And the reason that it's such a significant topic is because for many historical topics, we currently have few or no written sources other than the Bible. Completely ignore what the Bible has to say, and you've chosen to completely ignore centuries' worth of the history of large areas of the Middle East. Yeah yeah yeah, we know, you don't believe in the supernatural, neither do we, we're talking about something else now, is how we often feel when you interrupt our conversation because you think we believe in God. And you know what? Sometimes some of the people in these discussion do believe in God, but everybody understands that we're discussing something else at the moment and everyone's discussing it rationally.

By the way, discussing how much history a written work contains? That's exactly the same thing we often ask about works written by historians. We don't consider anyone to be infallible, not even historians, not even *gasp* scientists. (Not even atheist scientists.) We question everything. Everything.

Where was I? Ah yes: atheists are rational. Yes, occasionally we are. I often try to be. In spite of constant misunderstandings.

Once More About Mythicism

It seems to be in the news again, at least in the small-pond news of New Testament scholars and we mythicists who aggravate them so much, so I'll take the opportunity to state my position at present.

Typically, academic Biblical scholars describe mythicists as amateurs and nuts. Unfortunately, they're right, with some rare exceptions such as G A Wells, and -- of course -- myself. But just because a lot of people argue a position ineptly does not mean that the position itself is unsound.

Those writing the news and quoted in the news -- and not just the journalists who are not Biblical scholars, but sometimes the academic scholars as well -- often repeat the erroneous view that mythicists are convinced that Jesus did not exist. But mythicists such as Robert Price, Richard Carrier, G A Wells and myself are not convinced that Jesus did not exist: we are all just none of us convinced that he did exist. [PS, 9 January 2018: Actually, G A Wells (22 May 1926–23 January 2017) ceased to be a mythicist some time before 2000; but the difference between himself and a mythicist remained so small that almost no-one noticed it.] And we all agree that the academic mainstream of Biblical scholarship is much too opposed to debating the matter. They, the academic Biblical scholars, are the pros. They're the ones with the advanced training. They are the people ideally qualified to investigate whether or not Jesus existed. And they're simply not investigating it. Four centuries ago, almost everyone assumed that Abraham was an historical figure, and that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. Today, we don't assume that either Abraham or Moses is historical, and before the discovery of the Tel Dan stele there were some doubts about David as well, and their remains quite a bit of controversy over whether David's kingdom was anywhere near as large as described in the Bible. And all of that is due to the efforts of these very same Biblical scholars, the very same ones who are not subjecting the question of Jesus' historical existence to the same kind of scrutiny.

Typically, the academic Biblical scholars aren't nuts. But many of them are religious believers, and many more are somewhat reluctant to upset religious believers, and this may have something or everything to do with why they aren't asking (in spite of the title of that book by Bart Ehrman), Did Jesus exist? but rather continuing to routinely assume that he did, and go from there.

We mythicists don't all agree about much else other than that Jesus' historical existence has not been firmly established. What follows is my own position. Other mythicists disagree with some or all of it, so don't assume that I'm speaking for anyone else but myself. For their positions, read their books and their blogs.

With one possible exception, there are no known mentions of Jesus written earlier than Paul's letters and at least 3 of the 4 Gospels. That one possible exception is the Gospel of Thomas. Assuming that those who date Thomas to the 30's are wrong -- a very safe assumption in my opinion -- the earliest mentions of Jesus are from Paul, who by his own admission only saw Jesus "in a vision," whatever that means: in a dream, or a daydream, or an hallucination, or does it simply mean that Paul made Jesus up?

In my opinion, the only significant evidence we have at this time about whether or not Jesus existed is the New Testament. All that Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus have to tell us is about the existence of Christians, which is not the same as the existence of Jesus. The good news is that we just keep on finding more and more ancient texts. Mostly in Egypt near the Nile, but also some as far east as Mesopotamia. So, more evidence may turn up at any time. But in the meantime, it seems to me, only the New Testament can help us figure out whether or not Jesus existed. And I honestly don't see how it alone can answer the question conclusively one way or the other.

The problem with the New Testament as history, obviously, is that so much of it is legend. But we can't conclude from that that it's entirely legend and that Jesus is a fictional character. I like to compare the New Testament to the Nibelungenlied. Both contain a high percentage of legend. In the case of the Nibelungenlied we have a great deal of historical material about the same time and place, and because of that other historical material, we know, for example, that Etzel in the Nibelungenlied is an historical person: he's Attila the Hun. If we didn't have as much of that other historical material, we would have to rely much more heavily on the Nibelungenlied in trying to understand the history of 5th- and 6th- century central Europe. Because of the lack of other historical material, we have to rely very heavily on the New Testament when trying to understand the history of 1st-century-AD Judea and Galilee, because it comprises a very great portion of all the written evidence we have, and when it comes to the life of Jesus, it comprises almost all of the significant evidence we have.

Another comparison I find helpful is to compare Jesus to Achilles. In my opinion, there's about as much reason to assume that one existed as the other. This, of course, will cause academic Biblical scholars to point at me and laugh and laugh, because they think it's so obvious that Jesus existed. But it still isn't obvious to me, and they shouldn't laugh so much, because their job is to explain stuff to people like me, and as yet none of them has begun to convince me that it's obvious and certain that Jesus existed.

I'm not so upset about it. I'm a 54-year-old autistic man who wasn't correctly diagnosed until the age of 45, so I'm quite used to being laughed at for all sorts of reasons. And laughter is a physically healthy thing. Who am I to begrudge it them?

But they haven't convinced me, and that's their job. To convince me, or to admit that the matter is not yet settled. When it comes to Jesus, the academic Biblical scholars -- with a few exceptions -- are not doing their jobs.

The Ancient Israelites WERE Dumb Enough To Take The Biblical Stories Literally

John Dominic Crossan says: "“My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”

I, on the other hand, say that the ancient Israelites were dumb enough to take the Bible stories literally -- which is nothing to be ashamed of. It doesn't make them any dumber than the ancient Greeks with Homer or the ancient Germanic tribes with tales of Odin and Thor -- and that a lot of people today are dumb enough to take John Dominic Crossan, not to mention John Shelby Spong, seriously.

I'm sorry, I'm not going for it at all. A smaller percentage of Christians and practicing Jews are taking the Bible literally now than thousands of years ago, not a greater percentage. I do not believe that symbolic intent on the part of the Biblical authors would have been completely misunderstood for 2000 years until the late 20th century when then likes of Crossan could suddenly set everyone straight again. I do not believe that Biblical literalism was a completely Gentile thing, and that the Christians were simply too out of touch with the Jews, or that the Jews were simply too polite, for the misunderstanding to have been pointed out for 2000 years.

Crossan and Spong and other modern theologians don't want to let go of the privileged position of the Bible and other early Christian writings, and put them in the perspective of being just myths among other myths. And further, they don't what to admit that people thousands of years ago were more primitive in their beliefs than people generally are today. And so, since there is nothing actually in Biblical texts to justify seeing them as standing apart from other ancient myths, nothing to justify the way the Christians destroyed so many other religions, and since there is nothing in any ancient myths to justify denying that they are primitive and cruel and crude, Crossan and his ilk make things up like complex symbolic layers of meaning, and insist that those thoroughly modern things -- postmodern, actually -- actually are there in the ancient texts.

There's no reason to be ashamed of ancient texts. We've have thousands of years to learn since the Iliad and Genesis were written. We've built upon ancient texts in many large and small ways. They're wonderful things when seen for what they really are, they deserve a place of honor in the history of our society. (Just, not nearly as central a place as the Bible had in the European Middle Ages with its Inquisition torturing and killing everyone who didn't honor it enough.) They don't need to be gussied up by any of this modern theological bullshit. Hesiod's description of Achilles' shield doesn't contain myriad layers of symbolic meaning. It's just a vivid description of a wicked-cool shield.

Chronological List Of Early Bible Translations

I had already known for a long time that Ulfila's translation of the New Testament into Gothic was older than Jerome's Vulgate; but that chronological tidbit didn't really strike me until recently, and when it did, I thought it might be fun to chronologically list some early Bible translations.

My interest in this topic is mostly linguistic, while the interest of many or most people who have looked into it has been greatly or mostly theological. It's difficult for me to sort out the more authoritative Biblical scholars from the less authoritative, in part because there are so many of them, and unfortunately, the biased nuts do not helpfully affix labels in bold print at the head of their papers saying WARNING: BIASED NUT. DO NOT USE FINDINGS. Despite the lack of such labels, gross bias is often easy to spot, as when a member of a particular denomination affixes a significantly earlier date than anyone else to the translation most closely associated with his denomination, and acts as if he has never heard of the more conventional dating.

We do not know when some of these translations first appeared, and can only say that they are first firmly attested at such and such a date, and more weakly at such and such an early date, and speculate about the translation's beginnings.

Such is the case with the oldest-known (to me) Bible translation, the Septuagint, the translation of the Old Testament into Greek. The best I can do is to tell you that this translation was made in the 3rd and 2nd centuries in and/or around Alexandria, where a Jewish community had resided long enough that many or most of them were more familiar with the Greek language than with Hebrew.



Next come Syriac and Old Latin translations of the New Testament. (The term "Old Latin" is used to distinguish the earliest Latin Biblical translations from Jerome's Vulgate.) There is evidence of translation of parts of the New Testament into both of these languages both as early as the late 2nd century.



Next, we have evidence of translations of parts of the New Testament into Coptic going back as far as the 3rd century.



And then comes the "Gothic Bible," or to be more exact, the Gothic New Testament translation by Ulfila. It is well-established that Ulfilia (ca 311-383) was the translator.



Next, Jerome's Vulgate, begun after 382 and finished by 405. Recently scholars have been falling all over each other in the rush to proclaim that it is not correct to call this work Jerome's Vulgate, because not every single bit of the translation is Jerome's work, which is true, but most of it is by Jerome, and he at least inspected and approved the rest in the "Old Latin" versions, and revised those parts to some extent -- so I personally have no problem calling it Jerome's Vulgate. Just be warned, some people do have a problem with that.



It is with no great confidence at all that I guess that Biblical translations into Armenian, Ethiopic and Georgian began in the 5th century. I could be wrong, for all I know they could have begin earlier or later. There may be some really great and authoritative scholarship on the origins of all three of those written languages, but I haven't found any of it yet.



And finally there are Saints Cyril and Methodius, Byzantine missionaries to the Slavs. They are said to have translated parts of the Bible into Old Church Slavonic in the 860's. But some sources say they did this, while other sources say they "are credited" with doing this, which looks to me like scholar-speak for "they didn't do it, but for a long time a lot of people have thought they did, and I don't want to get into the middle of a huge argument right now." So I'm going to guess (guess!) that biblical translations into Old Church Slavonic began some time before 900, possibly by Cyril and/or Methodius.



By 900, writing in vernacular German had begun, and it would soon get underway in French and Spanish, which meant some translations into those languages of some parts of the Bible, although the Vulgate was well-established all over Western Europe and would remain overwhelmingly the preferred version there for centuries to come.

And if you're asking, Well, so what?! then I say: Well, it sort of lends a little bit of perspective to the 21st-century squabbles, in some English-speaking regions, over the 17th-century King James Version, doesn't it? and to the uproar caused by the KJV and Luther's German Bible and by the great unwashed in England and Germany learning to read at last. Every one of the translations of the Bible I've listed above, with the single exception of the Gothic version, has been continuously used by a wide reading public ever since it was first made.

Empty Attacks On The King James Bible

A lot of people I know are disparaging the King James Bible, calling it a huge distortion of the texts it purportedly translates, and a cynical political project designed to support King James and monarchy in general. So? So for all I know both of the points might be valid, but I don't think that most of the people repeating those points can back them up. At all.

I don't mind you criticizing something -- if you know what you're talking about. If you don't, you're not really criticizing, you're just parroting talking points.

They say that the KJV was deliberately altered in thousands of places --

and they don't name any of those places.

Let's say for the sake of argument that they're absolutely right. Imagine that one of the most ardent and cynical of the supporters of James was also a Biblical scholar, and one of the creators of the King James Version of the Bible, and that he positively cackled with evil glee as he distorted the Bible into a piece of royal propaganda. Say that he was a relatively young man when the King James Bible was completed in 1611, and was still in England in 1649.

Imagine how he must have felt, seeing all of those Puritans led by Cromwell, thumping and quoting the King James Bible as they deposed, arrested, tried, convicted and executed James' son, King Charles. If the KJV was designed as a tool of royal propaganda -- and I'm not saying it wasn't, I'm just admitting that I don't know -- then at the moment of Charles' beheading it must have seemed a particularly ineffective tool.

Or when all those American readers of the KJV revolted in 1776 and in the next few years threw off royal control altogether.

Now at this point, some of the people I'm complaining about here, who call the KJV a gross mistranslation and a cynical tool of royal propaganda, will do something else which particularly irks me: they'll insist that the leaders of the American Revolution were hardly Christian at all, and/or that they objected to the KJV because it distorted the original texts in a pro-monarchial manner. And I KNOW that's bullshit. Anyway, back here on Earth, the supposedly extremely pro-royal King James Bible was, in fact, read by just about everyone in the British colonies who could read English, and it doesn't seem to have been pro-royal enough to have stopped the Revolution. Was the difference between Tory and Patriot a greater love for the King James Bible? Well -- no.

There are lots and lots of nuts today in the US who insist that the King James Version is the only valid version of the Bible -- I can't imagine what these people think when they think about the parts of the world where people's native language isn't English. Like the tens of millions of people in the US whose native languages is Spanish. Material for another blog post, perhaps -- but these fanatical supporters of the KJV don't seem to be calling for a monarchy in the US, other than that of the King of Kings, of course.

Now of course the ineffectiveness of a strategy does not prove that that strategy doesn't exist, and I haven't proven that the KJV wasn't designed as royal propaganda. As I said: maybe it was. But all of these people I know haven't proven to me that it was. And I think that the great majority of them are a few years' worth of intensive study of Hebrew and Greek away from beginning to be able to prove it to me.

In the meantime, if they could make this case by quoting some arguments culled from the works of some Biblical scholars -- scholars whom they name, and quote verbatim, naming the books or articles and the pages which contain those quotes -- well, that would be a huge improvement over what they're doing now. That might even be enough to start a discussion in which I'd like to take part.

Shakespeare And The King James Bible

I don't know very much about the King James Bible. I see a lot of people who all seem to regard themselves as authorities contradicting each other's statements about how the King James Version was made, and as yet I have very little idea which of these people should be trusted as authorities. So please accept the following as the completely unqualified guesses of an amateur.

I don't see why Shakespeare couldn't have taken English Bible passages from the translators and improved them, made them sound more like Shakespeare. And many passages from the KJV do indeed sound a lot like Shakespeare. But I'm almost entirely certain that Shakespeare did none of the actual translating. Shakespeare seems to have had very little knowledge of non-English languages: a smattering of French and a few phrases' worth of Latin. Then as now, it was very unusual for an Englishman with almost no knowledge of Latin to have any proficiency in Greek, and even more unusual for a non-Jewish Englishman with almost no proficiency in Latin to know any Hebrew at all.

That's all I got.

Someone Asked What Version Of The Bible People Use

KJV, Revised Standard, New American Standard, Today's English Version (officially approved by the RCC 1993), Abegg-Flint-Ulrich Dead Sea Scrolls Bible, JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh, the Coptic-English-French critical edition of the Gospel of Judas et al by Kasser et al, the Casiodoro de Reina Santa Biblia, theTraduction œcuménique de la Bible, Bijbel: vertaling in opdracht van het Nederlands Bijbelgenootschap bewerkt door de Daartoe Benoemde Commissies, vol 3 of the Expositor's Greek Testament ed by Nicoli, some Russian version, some Syriac version, Die Heilige Schrift uebersetzt von Menge, some Armenian version, the Rahlfs-Hahnart Septuaginta, edito altera, the 4th edition (1994) of the Stuttgart Vulgate, and the 27th edition, 5th, corrected printing, of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament.

I think that's all of them for now. Sure would like the Gothic Bible. And a Luther Bible with the actual 16th-century orthography. And a Georgian bible. And Ethiopic. And Coptic (all I have in Coptic now are, as mentioned above, the few apocryphal works from the Codex Tchacos).

PS: To try to cheer myself up from all the homophobes and book-burners and other morons responding in the thread ("Any version is good for tinder, heh heh heh." "Queen James was completely gay, heh heh heh." "I rely on the FSM archives, heh heh heh." "I use the Skeptic's Annotated Bible, so I'm protected at all times from religious cooties, heh heh heh." Etc. Risu inepto res ineptior nulla est.), I went ahead and ordered a copy of the Gothic Bible from Amazon, so add that to my list.

(4th-century Gothic. More than 400 years older than the next-oldest thing written in any Germanic language. One thing I've come to understand by studying history is that new things don't occur to most people naturally; someone has to do a new and strange thing, and then people become accustomed to the idea, or they don't, and if they don't the thing may not be done again for a long time. In Western Europe in the 4th century, they spoke whatever language they spoke, a Germanic language in some cases, and either they knew how to write in Latin, plus Greek in a few cases, or they didn't write. It didn't occur to people that there was any reason to write anything in any Germanic languages. Except for this one guy who translated the Bible into Gothic. And then 400 years later, around AD 800, as a part of his massive support of education which mostly meant education in Latin, Charlemagne encouraged some people to write some things in German, the first things written in German. And the writing in the Germanic languages still didn't really catch on until after AD 1000.)

ԱՒԵՏԱՐԱՆ ԸՍՏ ՄԱՏԹԷՈՍԻ 1:1

βιβλος γενεσεως ιησου χριστου υιου δαυιδ υιου αβρααμ

Յիսուս Քրիստոսի՝ Դաւիթի որդիին, Աբրահամի որդիին ծնունդի գիրքը:

liber generationis Iesu Christi filii David filii Abraham

Geslachtsregister van Jezus Christus, de zoon van David, de zoon van Abraham.

Tabla genealógica de Jesucristo, hijo de David, hijo de Abraham:

Généalogie de Jésus-Christ, fils de David, fils d’Abraham.

The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

Вот родословие Исы Масиха[a], потомка Давуда, потомка Ибрахима.

Okay, that's Matthew 1:1 in Greek, Armenian, Latin, Dutch, Spanish, French, English and Russian. I wanted to include the verse in some other languages too, some of the ones into which it was translated earliest, such as Coptic and Syriac and Ethiopic, but, because of a combination of my linguistic limitation and the issue of browsers reading fonts -- it was hard. Hard work made me quit.

The title of the post is "Matthew 1:1" in Armenian.

Why did I make this post? Because I've listened to a lot of people, some expert, most not, talking and debating and arguing and screaming at each other about the transmission of the Bible, and it occurred to me that most of the discussion had to do with the bible in its original form, and in English. And then a little bit about the Latin Vulgate, because Catholicism.

And the Bible has been translated into -- how many languages? According to Wikipedia, 539 languages for the complete bible and 1329 languages for the New Testament. Who knows how accurate or out of date those figures might be. Not me, that's who.

So anyway, there's all this screaming back and forth which I've encountered, about the problems of corruption and translation and deliberate and accidental distortion of the Bible text, back and forth, between all of these people who rarely mention any languages others than Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin and English.

So, what are the features of the Armenian, Dutch, Spanish, French and Russian translations I've given above, how many of them are the most popular and/or familiar versions in the given language, how many are the versions most highly regarded by scholars, most widely esteemed by them to be good and accurate translations of the original Greek? That's a really good question. I don't have the slightest idea. I also don't have the slightest idea what sort of discussions and debates and screaming matches are going on about the text of Bible in Armenia or Holland or Flanders or Spanish-speaking areas or France or Russia, how much those screaming matches in other languages might resemble the ones I've seen in English, how much the histories of Bible translation in each of those languages might effect those screaming matches. Absolutely no clue. It has just now only begun to occur to me to wonder about such things.

Actually, I remember now, I do have a little bit of a clue: I've seen such screaming matches in German as well as in English. Disappointingly, the German dust-ups weren't much different than the English ones. But one can always hope. The bible was first translated into Armenian long before the English or German languages even existed. Maybe that makes a difference. Is the Armenian Matthew 1:1 I copied and pasted above the same as the Matthew 1:1 in the first Armenian translation? I don't know. How many Greeks read the original Koine New Testament and/or the original Septuagint, how many read versions which are substantially different?

It may surprise you to learn that I don't know.

It's a big world. I left out Chinese and Portugese and Arabic and Japanese and Korean and Italian and Hindi versions of Matthew 1:1. Just to name a few of the biggies I left out. Biggies in terms of numbers, not necessarily in terms of interesting issues they might raise for scholars of the Bible.

What sort of issues? Yeah. Again: Excellent question.

The Shape Of The Earth And Of New Atheism

"The world is a sphere can only be colored in so many ways."

Have you heard it colored this way? If the New Atheists were even slightly acquainted with Hebrew and Greek, they'd know that those Bible passages mentioning the shape of the Earth can be understood to refer to various shapes including spheres. In other words, although New Atheists love to insist that the authors of the Bible all believed that the Earth was flat, it's far from clear that this is the case. And that's one way -- one of many -- that we who are familiar with ancient languages and have gone round and round with Dawkins & Co on subjects like the Biblical descriptions of the Earth know that the New Atheists not only aren't familiar with ancient languages, they don't want to become familiar with them.

If they learned a little Hebrew and Greek and Latin and Coptic and Aramaic, they might learn some new things. And they definitely don't seem interested in learning new things when it comes to Judaism, Christianity and Islam and their holy books. They know everything they feel they need to know. They're set. They're done.

They're stupid.

Luke Savage knows what I'm talking about. Here are a few tidbits from his recent and delicious takedown of New Atheism's Islamophobia :

"[...]it is a crude, reductive, and highly selective critique[...]Its leading exponents wear a variety of ideological garbs, but their espoused politics range from those of right-leaning liberals to proto-fascist demagogues of the European far-right[...]The title of Hitchens’s bestselling book tells us something about the priorities and focus of the New Atheist movement ('God is Not Great' is clearly intended to be a facetious inversion of the common Arabic phrase Allahu Akbar, which translates as 'God is Great,' something which he no doubt thought was both hilarious and iconoclastic). Without exception, an overwhelming preoccupation with Islam infuses the whole discourse, even as it posits itself as a disinterested scientific critique of religion as such[...]Sam Harris’s much-discussed October appearance on 'Real Time with Bill Maher' — a crude spectacle in which he pigeonholed most Muslims as 'jihadists,' 'Islamists, or 'conservatives' — merely complements a lengthy record of Islamic demonology from him and other leading figures in the New Atheist movement[...]For the New Atheists, then, all religions are equally bad — but Islam is more equally bad[...]The excessive focus on Islam as something at once monolithic and exceptionally bad, whose backwards followers need to have their rights in democratic societies suppressed and their home countries subjected to a Western-led civilizing process, cannot be called anything other than racist[...]

I highly recommend the entire article. And I would just add that the crudity and ignorance which New Atheists apply to Islam, they apply to most of the rest of the world as well. (It's amazing to me that several of the leading New Atheists are competent or brilliant biologists -- how can they be so sensible, so informed, and so eager to learn about one scientific discipline, and about absolutely nothing else?)

I don't highly recommend this absurdly over-optimistic piece in the Spectator declaring that Richard Dawkins has lost. But if you despise the New Atheists and want to comfort yourself with a daydream that they're about to blow away like dry leaves, then by all means read it.

I, on the other hand, am cursed with an aversion to illusion. We're going to be dealing with these chumps for a while.

I also don't like that the Spectator refers to the atheists who are done with the New Atheists as New New Atheists, rather than Steven Bollinger Can Haz Nobel Atheists.

New Atheists Are Always Fighting Fundies, Even When There Are No Fundies Around

A quotes some verses from the Bible praising love and kindness and little birdies and puppydawgs.

B mocks A by posting a meme showing someone reading a Bible verse about being sure to beat your slaves, or slaying someone for eating shrimp, and thinking, "God is awesome!"

A says, I was talking above love and puppydawgs, not slaves, and not capital punishment for shellfish eaters! I don't even believe in God! What's wrong with you?

What's wrong with them, A, is that they are New Atheists. (I'm an atheist, but not a New Atheist. I'm a Steven Bollinger Can Haz Nobel Atheist.) New Atheists are constantly arguing with literalist fundamentalists, the people who say that every word of the Bible (usually the King James Bible) is the perfect eternal word of almighty Gawd. New Atheists argue with those fundamentalists all the time, whether there are any around or not.

That's what's wrong with them. Mention the Bible, and they accuse you of advocating the slaying of people who eat shrimp. For them, fundamentalists are always around -- in their heads. A lot of them were raised by fundies and are clearly still traumatized by that, but after they escaped the fundamentalist frying pan they leaped right into the New Atheist fire and started distorting things, and seeing who can outdo whom in -- well: zealotry. There's no other name for it.

Now, most fundies are homophobic, and most of the general population side with the New Atheists in opposing the homophobia of the fundies. Where the distortion of the New Atheists come in is how they are always ragging on the Bible verses about things like keeping your slaves in line and beating your daughters and killing the eaters of shellfish and touchers of pigskin, as if slavery and killing people for touching pigskin were still widespread problems.

Where "progressive" theologians tend to distort things is in the other direction: trying to make it sound as if NO people EVER persecuted gay men and lesbians, or owned slaves and beat them, on the authority of the Bible, when clearly, both of those were majority Jewish and Christian positions for a long, long time, and when it's equally clear that most of the cultures which became Christian had previously been non-homophobic.

It'd be nice if it were so clear that it didn't need to be said that quoting a passage from the Bible doesn't mean that you're either a fundie or a "progressive" theologian or any other kind of Christian or practicing Jew or a New Atheist either. Yeah, it'd be nice if people didn't go off like hand grenades of absurdity as soon as anybody mentioned certain things.

(I'm not sure how seriously the seafood injunctions were ever taken -- I mean, I know that to this day many Jews and some Christians follow a kosher diet. What I'm talking about is, I don't know exactly how severely people were ever punished for violating kosher dietary rules. You'll have to ask an historian of Judaism or Christianity about that. In other words -- don't ask a New Atheist. They're about as un-expert and little interested in historical investigation as the fundies in their childhoods and in their heads.)

So in conclusion: feel free to think for yourself and like or dislike this or that part of the Bible as if it were actually just another book, despite all those crazy fundies and New Atheists.

PS: Another thing that's wrong with New Atheists recently is that they're really over-doing it with the memes. But to be fair, they're hardly the only ones.

Why Aren't Homer And The Pentateuch Mentioned More Often In The Same Breath?

They come from the same part of the world. Greece and the Western coast of Turkey aren't so far from Egypt and Israel. They each occupy a central, dominating place in a culture, first the Greek culture in the one case and through it the Graeco-Roman and its heirs; and in the other case the Jewish culture, and then through it Christendom and Islam and very many of the same cultural inheritors. The events portrayed by each of them occurred, if they occurred, in the 13th century BC or thereabout. They each existed as oral epic passed down for some time before they took written form. Each one took roughly the written form with which we're familiar no later than the 6th century BC.

In hindsight, we can see both Greece and Israel for the first time after what is called the Ancient Near East Dark Age or the Late Bronze Age Collapse: a period of chaos and destruction in Egypt and the Hittite and Canaanite civilisations in the 13th and 12th centuries, from which we have very few written documents. As with the European Dark Ages between AD 476 and 800, this period in the ancient Near East is sometimes called a Dark Age because very little contemporary writing sheds light on what happened, and also because what we do know about the era seems to have been very desolate and bleak and bloody. After this gap in the historical record, we can see Greece in what had been the territory of the Mycenaeans, and Israel in what had been Canaan. It's unclear to what extent the Greeks were descended from the Mycenaeans, and to what extent the Israelites were descended from the Canaanites. The Mycenaeans and the Canaanites had written with a syllabic script, and the Greek and Israelites both wrote with alphabets which both came from some original alphabet. We don't know exactly when or how the Greeks and the Israelites began to write.

Homer and the Pentateuch both describe events which may or may not have actually happened -- the Trojan War and its aftermath, and the Exodus -- but which if they did were no doubt significantly altered in the written versions. It's debatable whether there ever really was a Moses or Joshua, or an Achilles or Helen. Or a Homer. The parallels just don't stop.

Can it really be that these parallels are not often remarked upon and investigated?

Well, they should be mentioned in the same breath, for countless reasons, and if it's really the case that nobody before me has done so, then it's high time someone did and I'm someone and I'm mentioning them, so there!

Constantine And The Council Of Nicea And The Bible For The Billionth Time

Oh, it's so awful, the way that laypeople talk about early Christianity without having either A) a clue or B) any trust of those who do have a clue because they study such things all day every day for a living, the theologians and Biblical scholars, and C), the way that the experts unfortunately often enough give the laypeople reason to distrust them -- it's all such a mess.

One example out of -- thousands, probably, is the way that the widespread error persists that the Bible was re-written or at least edited at the Council of Nicea in AD 325, a notion for which there is not a shred of historical evidence -- and there are quite a number of contemporary and near-contemporary descriptions of the Council.

It seems that two different things are being confused here:

1) The purging of the Arians. I don't dispute that this got underway on a large scale at the Council of Nicea. I certainly wouldn't call Constantin­e an innocent bystander in this process, although I speculate -- speculate! -- that if the Arians had formed a majority at Nicea, Constantin­e might've sided with them and begun the purging of their opponents, because his primary concern was that the Christians stop fighting among themselves and agree to some degree about what their religion was and what it stood for. He cared about political order, not theology.

2) A 4th-centur­y rewrite of the NT. I do dispute that this took place. Some Gnostic texts were destroyed along with the wiping out of the Arians, but these all dated later than the texts which were later canonized, and the texts which were eventually canonized were all or almost all already accepted by most Christians well before Nicea. Irenaeus, for example, (ca130-ca2­00) refers to the four eventually canonized Gospels at around the time that the Gnostic Gospels were first being written. He quotes from 24 of the present 27 NT books, all but Hebrews, III John and Jude.

Hopefully it's clear that I don't have a theologica­l stake in any of this. I don't believe in God, I'm not sure whether Jesus existed, I don't believe in walking on water or rising from the dead or other miracles. I don't believe in any Christian doctrine, canonical or heretical, nor do I have any non-Christ­ian religious (or spiritual or mystic, po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to) beliefs. I'm interested historical accuracy here. That's all. And when it comes to the Council of Nicea and the Bible, the historical record is unusually clear.

Editions Of The Greek New Testament And Other Ancient Texts

If I counted correctly, the editors of the 27th edition of this version of the Greek New Testament, known as the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland,



consulted 586 Greek New Testament manuscripts, of which at least 291 were made before AD 800, and at least 35 before 300. It's "at least" because several of those manuscripts are dated 8th or 9th century, and several are dated around 300, or 3rd or 4th century. There are thousands of other Greek New Testaments available to scholars, but these editors -- Erwin Nestle, Barbara and Kurt Aland, Johannes Karavidopoulos, Carlo Martini and Bruce Metzger -- were satisfied with these 586. However, in addition to the Greek manuscripts, they also looked at 62 Latin New Testament manuscripts, at least 44 of those older than AD 800. The current location and catalog number of each of those 586 Greek and 62 Latin manuscripts is given, so that you can look them up or find photos of them, and look at exactly what the editors were looking at when they prepared this edition. They also consulted editions (that is, printed versions) of the New Testament in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Gothic, Ethiopian and Old Church Slavonic.

And in the lists of these sources they have assigned a symbol to each one -- for example, p40, 2298 and d -- and in the so-called "critical apparatus" (I love that term), which is the strange stuff at the bottom of each page below the main text, they indicate which part of their text is supported by p40, or 2298, and so on -- and also indicate which manuscripts contain some other version of the text which they consider significant. (p40 comes from a fairly standardized list of New Testament papyri, from p1 into the p120's and still counting. I assume that 2298 is from some list of other New Testament manuscripts running into I don't know how many thousands. If I knew where that entire list was I'd tell you. I bet Bart Ehrman knows.)

And the editors of series like Oxford Classical Texts



or the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana (that's Latin for Teubner's Library of Greek and Roman Works)



do the same in each volume: provide a list of all the manuscripts and other sources they have consulted in preparing their texts, with a symbol for each one (Usually each symbol is a capitol letter because usually less than 26 manuscripts are used for a given text. But in cases of authors like Vergil or Terrence, editors might run out of capital letters, and also use small letters, and/or Greek letters, and/or numbers or abbreviated words or what have you.), and then at the bottom of each page they indicate which sources have the same text as the one they've chosen, and indicate other versions, which they consider significant, from other sources. In addition to these major variations, the Nestle-Aland provides dozens of pages' worth of minor variations at the end of the volume. In the Oxford Classical Texts and the Teubneriana and other editions of ancient works, such as this edition of the New Testament, the editors typically describe the manuscripts they've used, and in a case like this where there are more existing manuscripts besides the ones used, they'll give their reasons for using these ones and not those, and so forth.

They show their work when editing Sallust or the Bible, is what I'm getting at. It's usually not the same guys editing the Classics and the Bible, but the techniques are similar. Classics or the Bible, it's known as scholarly editing. And so while you or I might reasonably disagree with what Bruce Metzger said about how it's certain that Jesus existed, if we're going to criticize what he said about Biblical manuscripts and how the text of the Bible changed over the centuries, we better come correct, cause he was all up in it.

Some Manuscripts Of The Vulgate

There's the Codex Amiatinus,

which contains the entire Vulgate version of the Old and New Testaments, and is generally considered the Mac Daddy of all manuscripts of the complete Vulgate. It was made in Northumbria in the 8th century. As you might have guessed from the photo, however, complete Bibles in olden days could be rather bulky. They didn't slip easily into one's pocket. Some devout Bible readers liked to carry around volumes containing only a few books of the Bible, or maybe just one, as in the case of Psalters, volumes containing the Psalms. Here's a page from the 14th-century Lutrell Psalter:

The Stockholm Codex Aureus:

contains the 4 Gospels and was made in the 8th century in Southumbria.

And finally, here's a page from the St Albans Psalter,

so named because it was made either at or for St Albans Abbey in the 12th century.

So, why did I make this blog post? To share some pretty pictures, for one thing. And also to take a break from some people trying to tell me that the Bible wasn't written until about AD 800, and that Constantine coined the name Jesus in AD 450, and stuff like that. The kind of people I sometimes think about converting to Orthodox Christianity just to spite. The 4th edition of the Weber-Greyson edition of the Vulgate,



not the latest edition, cites over 100 manuscripts, that is: the text of that edition was compiled on the basis of those manuscripts, over 80 of which were made before 800. Plus over a dozen printed editions.

Over and over, I hear wildly ahistorical claims. Over and over I ask, Where the rude euphemism did you get that?! I rarely get an answer.

Atheists Who Claim, Among Other Things, That They've Read The Entire Bible

You ever wonder why so many atheists who claim they've read the entire Bible only ever talk about 12 verses from Genesis and Leviticus, plus 5 snarky quotes about the Bible from famous people? If you have, I certainly hope it didn't take you too long to figure out that it's because they're actually only ever read those 12 verses and 5 quotes.

Now let me be clear -- some atheists actually have read the entire Bible.



For example, a lot of academic Biblical scholars are atheists. I wouldn't be surprised if you're surprised to hear this: those academics don't tend to announce loud and proud that they're atheists, the way that New Atheists, aka movement atheists, tend to do. In fact, they tend to suck up to the huge rich religious institutions which butter their bread much too much to suit me. (NO ONE ESCAPES MY WRATH! NOT EVEN ME!)

Back to the movement atheists: who are they kidding? Each other, that's who. The nonsense about how they've all studied the entire Bible AND the Koran AND the Epic of Gilgamesh is a familiar example to anyone who's familiar with this movement. I came across another example today, a particularly striking example of an atheist kidding him- or herself: someone asking rhetorically why religious believers are so so desperate to gain the approval of atheists. I'll tell you why, Sparky: because they're not. Because you made that up.



But how do I know that so many movement atheists/New Atheists are making up that bit about having read the entire Bible? It's not just that they only mention those 12 verses and 5 snarky quotes over and over and over and over, and never mention Moses' confrontations of Pharaoh, or Ezra, and how it seems pretty clear now that it was Ezra and not Moses who collected and edited the Pentateuch, or Saul and Jonathon and David and Goliath and Solomon and Bathsheeba, or Job, or any of the particularly dramatic aspects of Revelation, or anything. If you've read all 2000 pages you've noticed more than those 12 verses. But over and above that, if there really was a community of Bible readers here, then people like Michael Paulkovich would get laughed out of that community long before being published in its leading periodicals. I'm not saying that Paulkovich hasn't read the entire Bible, it's just possible that he has. But it seems pretty likely that he's somehow managed to avoid any knowledge of the Greek and Latin classics which were written around the same time. That sort of avoidance is possible with one individual who's already gone to the trouble of reading the entire Bible, but extremely unlikely impossible in an entire close-knit community full of people thoroughly familiar with the Bible.

On the contrary, what we have here is a bubble, people sealing themselves off from those who actually have studied these ancients texts. Sealing themselves off and creating a fictional world in which religious believers are desperate for their approval and the entire Bible is like Leviticus and ancient Judea and Galilee were swarming with historians and there were newspapers and detailed court records so that anyone remotely resembling Jesus would have been mentioned in numerous non-Biblical written sources, a fictional world in which Muslims are either terrorists or approve of terrorism, and Obama is secretly an atheist because no Christians are as progressive politically as he is, and only religious believers teach Biblical studies in universities, and so forth.

Obviously, not all movement atheists/New Atheists are that wrong about all of the above. The point is that none of the above is immediately laughed out of the room, and all of it should be. All of the above is directly at odds with common knowledge. (Again -- maybe except for the part about the religious beliefs of academic Biblical scholars. Again, that may not be common knowledge, because the scholars tend to suck up too much to the religious institutions who give them all those fat grants and fellowships, and so they don't want to rock the boat by making their lack of belief too plain. The same way that almost none of the academics dare to rock the boat by voicing less than full certainty that Jesus existed. NO ONE ESCAPES MY WRATH!)

What's the point of shaking off nonsensical religious beliefs only to turn around and either constantly spout other nonsense, or act as if that other nonsense is fine because it's atheists who are spouting it? Sorry guys, but I'm not having it. The main point here is making sense. The existence or non-existence of God is just one of very many topics upon which we can make sense or not. You don't get a free pass from me on all those other topics just because we agree on that one.