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.

Mysteries, Solved And Unsolved

I'm still having trouble finding information about Classical Studies in Latin America. (Yes, I know I could assuage these difficulties as easily as contacting a university professor or two.) The other day, I thought that perhaps I had come across an indication of the study of ancient Latin in Peru: in Eutropii Breviarum Ab Urbe Condita, edidit Carolus Santini, Leipzig: Teubner, 1992,



on p xii and p xviii, a 14th-century manuscript of Eutropius is referred to as "Perusinus H 75." Could this be a manuscript currently held in a library in Puru? I asked myself excitedly. However, an Internet search for the term perusinus quickly taught me that it does not refer to Peru, but to the Italian city Perugia, which was once an Etruscan city. Most of the Google results in my search for perusinus refer to the Cippus Perusinus,

a stone inscribed in Etruscan, discovered near Perugia early in the 19th century. There are some claims that the Etruscan text on the Cippus Perusinus has been diciphered. However, if I have understood things correctly, the academic consensus is that Etruscan remains a lost language, not yet deciphered by modern people.

Anyway: the question of "Perusinus" was cleared up very easily. Only my laziness prevents me from beginning to learn about Classical studies in Latin America. (You know, it seems I recall that someone actually told me the titles of a couple of books on that very subject, and I've been too lazy to follow that lead, or even to jot down the titles in a place I'd remember.)

It seems that another question may remain somewhat more difficult: I've heard repeatedly from various sources that "the earliest Greek manuscripts of the New Testament known at the time of the making of the King James Bible were from the 12th century." The more times I hear that repeated, the more implausible it sounds.

Now, it may be that the oldest Greek manuscripts actually used by the makers of the KJV were 12th century. But much older manuscripts were found by Western scholars in Egypt beginning in the mid-19th century: complete Greek Bibles, Old and New Testament, as old as 4th-century, many other copies of individual books or of the Gospels, in Greek, Coptic or Syriac, 6th century and older, and all of this before the beginning of the excavations at Oxyrhynchus began to yield New Testament fragments as old as the 2nd century.

How much of the statement: "the earliest Greek manuscripts of the New Testament known at the time of the making of the King James Bible were from the 12th century" can possibly be anything but stupid Western provincialism and sheer ignorance of non-Western Biblical scholarship? Are we to believe that no-one in those Egyptian monasteries which contained those much older manuscripts was actually studying them, before rich Westerners swooped in and bought them and took them away to the West? Not to mention scholarship done in Greece, Syria, Armenia, Georgia, Ethiopia, etc?

That's not just very hard for me to believe, it's impossible for me to believe. That so many Western scholars, to this very day, would be wholly ignorant of whatever Biblical scholarship has existed of the West, is staggering, to be sure -- but, sadly, I can believe it.

Frankly, it's also hard for me to believe that nowhere in Western Europe, before the 19th century finds in Egypt, was there any manuscript of the Greek New Testament older than the 12th century. Frankly, it strikes me as downright odd that there would be no Greek New Testament manuscripts as old as the 9th century or older well-known in England at the beginning of the 17th century, when the King James Bible was being made. But I don't even know whom to ask about this. I google these things and get all sorts of different answers from all sorts of different people. I can easily find all sorts of statements which are clearly nonsense. It's not at all clear to me who knows what they're talking about.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Bible Hunters" With Dr Jeffrey Rose

I'd rather be writing about a TV series having to do with the manuscripts of Livy, but, of course, there are no such TV series. I suppose I will have to make that series myself. So spread the word about me and talk me up so that I can win that Nobel Prize and have the clout to host TV series on previously-obscure topics which deserve broader audiences, k thnx.

This series is okay, not nearly as dumb as some other TV shows covering the same ground, namely, the discovery of early (6th century and older) manuscripts of the Bible, and of manuscripts of New Testament apocrypha. The host and narrator, Dr Jeffrey Rose, is an archaeologist, and his approach is to follow in the footsteps of some of the 19th and 20th century scholars who made major discoveries of manuscripts -- on one occasion going so far to pay homage to his predecessors and re-create their experience as to ride on a camel with Bedouin guides from Cairo to St Catherine's monastery at the foot of Mt Sinai, where the famous 4th century Codex Sinaiticus was found by the scholar Constantin von Tischendorf in 1844, and where many other significant Biblical manuscripts have been found since. Besides the camel ride, Dr Rose's journey's to various Egyptian locations are mostly portrayed by shots of him riding various motorcycles. Larry Hurtado has written 2 excellent blog posts about this series, and in his post on Part 1 he asks the very good question:

Quite why the presenter was filmed motorcycling around places in Egypt, I can’t say. Couldn’t he have simply ridden in the car with the camera-guy . . . who was filming him riding a motorcycle??

I can only hope that it was, as Dr Hurtado surmises, a guy in a car, if not an entire film crew in a van, and not something dangerous like a cameraman filming from the back seat of a 2nd motorcycle, or something even more dangerous, like a cameraman riding a motorcycle solo and filming at the same time. Most likely, of course, it was a cameraman in a car or a whole crew in a van.

And who filmed Dr Rose and his Bedouin guides on their camels -- a lone cameraman on a camel? I'm picturing something much more like a van with a film crew and a well-stocked fridge, just in case Dr Rose -- or the Bedouins, for that matter -- preferred a sandwich or a TV dinner to the bread which the Bedouins cooked on hot rocks and which Rose exclaimed was delicious and "cooked to perfection!" I know that I'm old and out of touch and that technological development keeps racing along, but the images and sound on the road trips were impressive. If a lone camera did that, then I want a camera like that.

Why so many documentaries continue to cling to the practice of presenting the illusion of the intrepid host exploring the world all alone, and cut out any interaction with the camera person and/or crew, I don't know. They should stop. It's as corny as laugh tracks on sitcoms. Wake up and smell the 21st century, documentarians: we're on to you!

Other than that run-of-the-mill technical documentary stuff, "Bible Hunters" is refreshingly free of the huge wince-inducing historical and technical errors of which the typical shows on these texts from the so-called "History Channel" are jam-packed, and of which even most shows from PBS or the BBC or the Smithsonian Channel have a few. ("Bible Hunters" first appeared on the BBC a few years ago, and now it's appearing in the US on the Smithsonian Channel -- in the same form in which it appeared on the BBC, with nothing cut out or added? Good question. I have no idea.)

[PS, 6 June 2016: There is one fairly serious error repeatedly committed by Rose on this show: he often says "text" when he should be saying "manuscript." A text is a series of words, whatever form they are recorded in. For example, "Mary had a little lamb" is exactly the same text whether it is spoken aloud, written on paper or carved into stone. Dr Rose refers to people discovering texts when they discovered manuscripts. If it's a manuscript of the Gospel of Matthew, then the text is already known. A discovery of a text occurs when some previously-unknown collection of words is discovered. And the date of the text is when it was first composed, which, in the case of Biblical and apocryphal texts, has always been different than the date of the manuscript. So for example Rose makes the mistake of referring to "a six-century text" when he should have said " six-century manuscript of a second-century text," if the manuscript is a copy of something first written in the 2nd century. Other than "text' and "manuscript, I didn't notice any technical errors in the show.]

In his post on Part 2 of the series (as it appeared on the BBC), Dr Hurtado says:

I have to say that I found it strange that some really crucial (arguably more important) manuscripts finds were totally ignored.

I agree that it's arguable that Rose left some of the most important manuscripts out of the program. But the series is only a few hours long, and with a series like that, choices have to be made about which finds to include and how long to dwell upon each one. Clearly, Rose loves Egypt. "Bible Hunters" confines itself to Biblical manuscript discoveries made in Egypt (which are huge in the scheme of all such discoveries, to be fair to Rose). If you're curious about the important manuscripts which were left out by the show, by all means follow the link to Dr Hurtado's blog, he gives you a very good overview.

And of course, once again -- if you're into non-Christian ancient literature, you're left totally out in the cold by this series, just as you're left out in the cold by every other series on the great finds of Biblical manuscripts. Dr Rose's show covers Oxyrhynchus, both by commenting on Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt and the huge amount of papyrus fragments they found there,



and also with footage of Rose interviewing Dr Dirk Obbink, the current head of the Oxyrhynchus Papyrus Project, and Obbink showing Rose around the still-active Oxyrhynchus dig sites -- but the show doesn't contain as much as a half-dozen words about the non-Biblical texts found at Oxyrhychus, which have turned the world of Classical Greek studies upside down, and also had a not inconsiderable impact on the world of Classical Latin, and also included priceless treasures for those interested in everyday life in Ptolomaic and Roman Egypt: personal letters, legal documents, shopping lists and so forth -- things which had been almost entirely lacking from the sources available to historians before Grenfell and Hunt thought to look through the ancient trash heaps at Oxyrhynchus. Rose shows the libraries of Egyptian monasteries, but doesn't mention any of the Classical texts in those libraries -- and most of the Classical Greek and Latin literature we have today comes from manuscripts made in Christian monasteries.

And this show says almost exactly squat about all of the Old Testament manuscripts in all of the places Rose goes. Again, that's pretty typical about TV shows about ancient manuscripts: it's pretty much all about Jeebus.

More Self-Criticism

A couple of days ago, in the blog post Signs That There's Something Seriously Wrong With Me, I attempted to begin a course of rigorous self-criticism. Now I'll attempt to continue that criticism and get more in-depth:

Earlier today I blogged about a popular talking point among movement atheists, the assertion that they know the Bible better than Christians do, that many of them have read it all the way through. I... Uh... Well I flat-out called that assertion horseshit. So in the post about bible-reading, it seems I did pretty much exactly what I criticized myself for a couple of days ago: I was harshly unpleasant, I delivered more or less a verbal slap in the face.

Well... that's what I do here, in a lot of posts anyway: criticize others without a lot of restraint. But I'm actually not going to criticize the harsh blog post about Bible-reading right now; rather, I'm going to examine some of my actions following the publishing of that post. Maybe I need to critique such posts, maybe I very badly need to do so, but facing that possibility is more than I can handle right now. Crawl before you can walk.

I linked the Bible-reading post in a few online discussion groups, and right away I got some negative responses from atheists claiming to know the Bible very well. Today's self-criticism will consist of examining my responses to some of those comments:

One person claimed that I could open a Bible to any page and he'd be able to tell me exactly how the text had been altered. My response to that was: "Ah, more bullshit, right on cue!" Last I checked there had been no response to that, neither by the person I was addressing nor from a third party.

Another person asked what was my evidence that movement atheists didn't know the Bible well? I told him that I had already answered that question in the link to the blog post, which mentioned how movement atheists' discussion of the Bible tended to revolve around the same 12 verses from Genesis and Leviticus and 5 snarky quotes about the Bible from famous people. He said that wasn't an answer. I felt it was an answer, but I didn't respond, nothing to say occurring to me which I felt would be productive. (Insulting responses occurred to me but I kept them to myself.) After we had exchanged a few more comments, some having to do with the Flood, I said that I was unsure whether Moses or Jesus had existed, much less Noah; he said he doubted if any of them existed; by "all of them" I understood him to mean "all of the people mentioned in the Bible," and I said: "That's exactly the kind of statement that makes me doubt you've read the Bible at all." Perhaps a minute later, I commented: "Sorry, maybe I misunderstood you: if by 'all of them' you just mean 'Noah, Moses and Jesus,' that's certainly completely different than if you meant 'all of the people mentioned in the Bible.'" This guy had been sending a pretty steady of stream of comments, and I waited a while for more, but no more came, and that's when it occurred to me that he might have broken off the conversation, perhaps un-subscribed from the thread, because I was being rude and insulting.

Perhaps other people looking on both of those threads un-subscribed because I was being rude.

Maybe people stop communicating with me all the time because I'm being rude.

I want to be an extremely rich and famous writer. But if I became rich and famous, and got invited to be a guest on "Conan," and Conan and I were chatting about, oh, let's say, the Bible, and at a certain point the crowd responded to something which Conan or I had said with enthusiastic applause, and I turned to the audience, or should I say turned on them, and interrupted the applause by saying something like, for instance, "Applauding that just demonstrates that you're all uneducated and ignorant," well, I suppose it's possible that one single such comment at such a place and time might suddenly make me much less popular. I can imagine Conan, and other talk-show hosts, not inviting me back to their shows because of one single remark like that. And the thing is: I can easily imagine myself saying something like that at such a time and place, saying it spontaneously, without a thought.

And the thing is -- I've said a lot of things like that to a lot of different people over the years. In fact, I've said a lot of things which were much harsher than that to perfect strangers, for no reason at all other than that I thought it would be funny to be mean.

Okay. Getting clearer and clearer: I have a problem. It's especially a problem if I want millions of people to love me.

Up until that other post a couple of days ago I tended to agree with my Mom's opinion of me: that I'm a sensitive angel and a misunderstood genius. Can't really go 100% with that assessment any more. (Thinking about this reminded me of Marge Simpson looking at each member of her family in turn and saying what she admired about them, and coming to Bart, and saying: "I like Bart's... [long pause] ...I like Bart.") Whaddayagonnado, she's my Mom. I love you, Mom. But if I continue in this new habit of looking mercilessly at myself, maybe I can become a little less of an unbearable asshole. And maybe that will lead to some good changes in my life. I would like a whole bunch of good changes in my life, please.

One thing I'm not going to do is to start lying, and saying positive things I don't mean. For example: I stand by what I said about movement atheists/New Atheists not being the Biblical scholars they claim to be. It may be a harsh truth, but it's the truth. But maybe I can change the way I phrase things, change my choice of words. Maybe in some situations, for example, "I call bullshit" is a less constructive choice of words than, oh, I don't know... "I think we may have been living with an illusion here." I will give all of this some serious thought.

As always, I wonder how many Facebook groups I've been banned from today.

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.

Why I Have Doubts About Jesus' Existence

Don't expect to be blown away here: I'm an amateur, a layman. But after I've repeatedly said that I think the people who are convinced that Jesus existed are closed-minded about the subject, and have nothing much to offer except appeal to authority, saying that the matter is settled because the experts say it's settled, and that they settled it decades ago -- which they didn't. Look at the work of Biblical scholars from decades ago, and it'll be very familiar: they say that the matter was settled some time before, and not much else -- and that the only mythicist worth reading is G A Wells,



many of my readers may be growing impatient and muttering to themselves, "Oh yeah? Well why should we even listen to you on the subject, Mr Monkey? You ain't wrote none a them dang Mythissuh... Mythooss... Jesus-Didn't-Exist books yrself. What makes you opinions so cotton-pickin special?"

Nothing makes my opinions about the subject so cotton-pickin' special. Yes, I took down Michael Paulkovich, here, and here, and here, but anybody with a BA in Classics from a good college could've done that. That was EASY. Yes, I can see closed-mindedness and a lock-step rejection of speculation about Jesus' existence on the part of the academic experts, but it's easy to spot that too. It seems that millions of people have noticed it. It sticks out like a thumb with a compound fracture which has been ignored for days and has flies and gangrene on it.

I and all of the aforementioned BA's -- and of course, all of those Biblical scholars -- know how sparse the written record from Judea and Galilee in the 1st century is. Really, the only crucial records about Jesus, the only things available to study in order to form your opinion about whether he was a man or just a character in a story, are the books of the New Testament. Everything else is secondary. Of course, that might change completely today or tomorrow if something is dug up which significantly adds to our knowledge. And something like that could be dug up at any time. Or archaeologists might keep digging for thousands of years, if we haven't heated or polluted ourselves to death by then or blown ourselves up, and never find anything which changes the picture. In the meantime, when we talk about the historical Jesus, we're talking about the New Testament.



Everything else often referred to as primary materials in the case of the historical Jesus: Josephus, Tacitus,



Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, has to do with Christians, and is every bit as easily explainable with Christians who were Christians because they had heard a story about Jesus as with Christians who had seen Jesus in the flesh. Actually, the material in Pliny is much more explainable with people who'd only heard stories about Jesus, because if they'd seen him they would have had to be very old when Pliny met them.

And yes, the authors of the New Testament would have had to be pretty old if they'd seen Jesus, except Paul, who only saw him in a vision (we'll get back to that vision), but that's not a serious reason to discount the New Testament accounts. Eyewitness accounts could've been handed down for a generation or two, and/or there could be older texts, now missing, from which the Gospels were made.



So. My objection to assuming with no question that Jesus existed, or to taking the word of experts who tell us that this case has been closed for a long time, has nothing to do with the number of authors who give us information about Jesus. On the contrary: the number of authors in the New Testament writing about Jesus is impressively high. For someone from that time and place it's extra-special super-dooper impressively high. My objection also has nothing to do with the dates when the New Testament texts were written. Again, on the contrary: when we're talking about someone from Galilee 2000 years ago, who may have been completely illiterate along with most of his friends (most, not all: tax collectors like Matthew had to be able to read and write), the collection of texts in the New Testament was amassed impressively early.

My objection to believing without question that Jesus existed is, I believe, the same that millions of other people have had, people who unlike you and me have never heard of Tacitus or Josephus or Q and have no idea when the New Testament texts are believed to have been written. My objection has to do neither with the amount nor with the date of the earliest writings about Jesus but with the quality of those writings.

It's a shockingly obvious objection, that's why it occurred to me decades ago, before I was full-grown, before I had heard of Josephus or Tecitus, that's why I share it with millions of others past and present, it's the elephant in the room in which all those Biblical scholars keep straight-facedly assuring us that there is no elephant and that crap does not keep accumulating in huge piles: it's the proportion of the obviously-mythological in the story of Jesus: the Immaculate Conception, the census of the Empire which never was, the star of Bethlehem, the Magi, the Massacre of the Innocents and the flight to Egypt, walking on water, water into wine, multiplying loaves and fishes, healing lepers, madmen, a blind man, raising Lazarus from the dead and then rising from the dead himself.

In a story in which so much was obviously made up and the dates don't fit more firmly-established history, how is it at all unreasonable to ask if the man's very existence is more than one more fictional detail of the story?

That's it. That's all I got. And I think that's all I need. Oh, and you should see the academics do what they consider to be addressing my concerns. (My concerns and those of millions of other people, because they're such shockingly obvious concerns.) If the term "mental gymanstics" hadn't already existed, it would have to have been invented to describe the ways in which the specialists claim that the mythological elements and the discrepancies between the various Gospel stories make Jesus' existence MORE likely, not less. Talk about crap piling up...

And now, as promised, back to Paul's vision of Jesus. I think that the story of Jesus, if there never was any Jesus and it's all just story, 100% mythological and not the 98% to which the scholars are still stubbornly clinging, could have started in a number of different ways, but the most plausible explanation, to my amateur eyes, seems to be that Paul first told people about Jesus.

And that doesn't mean that I think that Paul necessarily lied. He could actually have had a vision: a dream, or a daydream or an hallucination, and believed that it was real.

Yes, if this is how Christianity started, then Paul's back story, about how he had persecuted Christians before his vision, before he had changed his name from Saul (the name of the mighty Israelite king) to Paul (which means "little guy") would be untrue, since there would have been no Christians yet for Saul/Paul to persecute. But just like Jesus' existence, Saul/Paul's persecution of Christians seems like a rather small detail compared to all the supernatural elements in the story of Jesus, and when we go from Jesus to the stories of the apostles and the martyrs, if anything, the stories become even more farfetched. Even before Christians started rewriting their own Gospels and other texts.



Or the figure of Jesus could have arisen when people were talking about John the Baptist, whose existence I don't doubt. Or it could've begun some other way. Or, yes indeed, Jesus might really have existed. MAYBE.

So, what in th wide, wide world of sports is a goin' on here? Am I just too dense to see something which is plain as can be, as exasperated Bible scholars have said to me when I've had conversations with them about all of this? Or, when those professors point to all of this evidence which I still can't see, is there no there there, as Gertrude Stein said about her home town of Oakland?



Oakland has changed a lot since Gertrude left in 1893 at the age of 19, never to return. But that's neither here nor there.