Non-Discussions About Early Christianity

A friend of mine posted a link on Facebook to a story about the Gospel of Jesus' Wife,

and it happened again: another one of those exchanges which you can hardly call a "discussion," because many of the participants weren't listening to each other at all, just asserting their competing erroneous versions of the history of Christianity. The usual suspects were there: the assertion that Jesus was a rabbi (perhaps true, perhaps not) and that all rabbis 2000 years ago were married -- not true. In fact, there were entire Jewish sects who were celibate, such as the Essenes, who are well-known today primarily because of their similarities to Christians. A lot of people in these non-discussions really seem to think that Christians invented religious celibacy. Can they say "Vestal Virgins"? The Vestal Virgins was the priestesses in one of the oldest and most revered religious cults in ancient Rome, a cult hundreds of years older than Christianity, and just one example of religions older than Christianity who have a revered place for celibacy.

I've only been hearing the claim that all ancient rabbis were married for a couple of years -- can it be that the claim is no older than that? Where did it come from? Perhaps from discussions of the Gospel of Jesus' Wife? People who wished this little scrap of forgery to be an authentic description of Jesus, perhaps they adopted the belief that all ancient rabbis were married because it bolsters their belief that Jesus was married, which they believe because they wish it to be true?

The assertion that the Bible as we know it was a creation of the Council of Nicea. This time, the Council of Nicea was described as a gathering of Jewish clergy under a pagan Emperor, and that the Bible as we know it was created there.

I can't remember hearing somebody claim, before this, that the participants of the Council of Nicea were Jewish. The Council took place in AD 325, and the division between Christian and Jew was already long-established and very hostile by then. And Constantine was at least partly Christian at the time. And the Bible was neither written, in whole nor in part, at the Council, nor was it even discussed whether this or that biblical book was to be regarded as canonical or heretical. The main thing the Council of Nicea accomplished was to adopt the Nicene Creed, which was favorable for the Christians who eventually came to be called Orthodox and Catholic, and was another nail in the coffin of the Christian movement known as Arianism, which has nothing more than a coincidental similarity in spelling to do with Aryans, who, before the Nazis, were no more and no less than Iranians. I couldn't tell you whether "Aryan" or "Iranian" is closer to the pronunciation of the corresponding word in Persian, which is also called Farsi, which is the language of Iran.

So anyway, after making just a couple of comments in this discussion on Facebook, I realized that nobody in that discussion -- or at most very few of them -- was the slightest bit interested in being corrected about anything. One of the exceptions is my friend, the one who posted the link which started the whole non-discussion. My friend doesn't always assume he's right. You can talk to him. That's one of the reasons he's my friend. Others, however, in this discussion and in countless other discussions about Christianity...

So what do you do, what do you do, when a whole bunch of people are wrong, objectively wrong about concrete, demonstrable facts, and they want to stay that way?

That's not a rhetorical question. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be very grateful to hear them.

In my case, instead of continuing to comment there, I came here and wrote this post.

Jerome's Vulgate is a beautiful piece of writing. That has nothing to do with the rest of this post.

"Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery" On CNN

The episodes of CNN's series (and it is hardly alone among TV shows about ancient history in being like this) "Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery" ought to begin the way they finish:

NARRATOR: The (fill in the blank: piece of wood, bone fragment, etc), thought to (fill in the blank: have come from the True Cross, be the remains of the Apostle [fill in apostle's name], etc), has/have been proven by Carbon-14 testing to come from (fill in actual time 200 to 1500 years later than the 1st century), and so is/are inauthentic, and does/do not bring us any closer to the historical Jesus.

CNN might object: "If we did that, many viewers would change the channel and miss the next 59 minutes and 45 seconds of our 1-hour show!"

To which I would respond, "Well they might! Especially if they had already seen 1 or 2 episodes of the series, in which 80 to 95% or so of the first 59 minutes and 45 seconds are repetition, fluff and theological babble, only very mildly mitigated by the odd intelligent remark not edited out or the occasional glimpse of a lovely artwork! Have you thought about how many of those viewers you've already lost doing it your way? Here's a bold new approach for you: you want viewers to hang around for an hour? Fill up the whole hour with actual content!"

Obviously, CNN is not taking my advice these days.

But imagine: a show about Jesus' place in history where they told you what they know about this episode's artifacts right away, first thing, but was so interesting and filled with still further information -- and more of the art: I've seen a tremendous lot of really beautiful art in shows in this genre, but I haven't seen one yet which wouldn't have benefited from still more -- that the actual general public would watch breathlessly all the way to the end.

Drop the "historical re-enactments," the sequences in which actors are portraying Jesus and his contemporaries, like a hot rock. What will you put in their place? I refer you to the above-mentioned beautiful art. (It wouldn't kill you to occasionally mention, if you happen to know, when and/or where and/or by whom the painting or sculpture or altar or church or temple was made.) You can also show manuscripts: hopefully, a large part of the evidence of what you're telling your viewers comes from primary sources. You can show maps, old and also freshly-made. You've already flown academics in to Jerusalem or Rome or wherever -- give them more time to show the viewer around. Get out of their way, use this rich resource in a more appreciative way. If you're doing it remotely close to right you won't have to repeat one frame of film to fill up an entire hour.

That's right, CNN: I just said you're not doing it remotely close to right. Well, there it is. What's that you say? You're asking if I think I could do better? I can't produce an entire documentary right now. But if you hired me as a consultant on your next project of this type: yes, I don't think that could help but result in a drastic improvement. And/or: you could simply stop hiring Simcha Jacobovici. That alone would result in a tremendous improvement. You're welcome!

Philip Harland Says Early Christians Were Widely Considered To Be Atheists

Breaking news: Early Christians were impious atheists...in the eyes of some angry Greeks and Romans, that is. So claims Harland.

Well, Professor Harland and I disagree. Harland says that Tacitus and Pliny the Younger "imply" that Christians are atheists. I disagree with him about that. It could be that Harland is much better at reading between the lines than I am. Or it could be that he pulls the charge of atheism in Tacitus and Pliny the Younger out of -- thin air, so to speak. The offense of the Christians in Tacitus and Pliny -- and Tacitus implies that Nero trumped up the charges -- is that they refused to go along with the public offerings to the gods which included deified Emperors. The concern is not so much with what the Christians believe as with whether or not they are loyal Roman subjects. Politics and religions were very much combined in pre-Christian Rome, and everyone was expected to go through the motions of making sacrifices to the deified Emperors, much the same way that everyone was expected to pay whatever taxes were levied on them. If people refused to go along with the public sacrifices, it was suspected that they might refuse to pay taxes also. (And this suspicion sometimes turned out to be right.)

The only texts Harland produces in which Christians are called atheists are the Martyrdom of Polycarp and the Acts of the Christian Martyrs -- hardly the most reliable historical sources. (See "The Myth of Persecution" by Candida Moss.)

And in any case, being an atheist was not an offense to pre-Christian Romans, not the way it became an offense under Christian rule. Many ancient Romans -- for example, Pliny the Younger's dad, Pliny the Elder, the celebrated author of an encyclopedic work we know as the Natural History -- made it quite plain that they didn't believe any of that religious stuff, and many more made ambiguous statements which certainly could be taken as implying that they didn't take any of religion's supernatural claims seriously, from Ovid pointing out in his Metamorphoses that since his subject in that work was deities, it was certainly practical to behave as if he believed they existed, to Suetonius' account of the Emperor Vespasian crying out on his deathbed, "Oh no, I think I'm becoming a god!" The general reaction to this passage in Suetonius -- respect for Vespasian's character, because it seemed he had a sense of humor about himself right up to the last, and not outrage because he was making light of the supernatural -- seems to indicate that among the Romans skepticism about the supernatural was widespread, and not a big deal. They just weren't in the habit of going out of their way to rub believers' noses in it, nor did they connect their atheism with a rebellious attitude against the Roman Republic or Empire. Occasionally a believing Roman got offended anyway, the way that Manilius was offended by Lucretius (deceased when Manilius wrote) and other Epicurians, but Manilius didn't get anyone killed over the issue, nor do I see any evidence that he would have wanted things to have been taken that far. He just felt that Epicurus and Lucretius and their followers were mistaken and that the gods existed, and he wanted to make that point very clear.

So. Professor Harland says that the early Christians were widely regarded as impious atheists. I agree that they were widely regarded as impious, as were all monotheists, whether Jewish, Zoroastrian or Christian, because to the Romans piety meant respect toward all of the deities in the world. But atheism was not required in order to be impious, nor was it guaranteed, just because someone was an atheist, that he was impious as well. Lighthearted statements of disbelief in all supernatural things seems to have been widespread, and accepted. But grim attacks against the reality of this deity combined with the worship of that one -- that was impiety, to the pre-Christian Romans.

Most Documentary TV Shows On Ancient Topics (Biblical Studies And Early Christianty, Mostly) Really, Really Suck

A recent program about the fragments of the True Cross did a fairly good job of presenting the viewer with a story about the activities of the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine the Great and a devout Christian, who according to that story pretty much invented what we now know as Christian veneration of relics. The program tells us that Helena went to Jerusalem, found a piece of wood and declared that it was the Cross on which Jesus was put to death, cut it up into little pieces and distributed these pieces to churches all across the Roman Empire. This is the traditional story about how Helena began the belief that all of those pieces of wood in churches are pieces of True Cross. There are very good reasons to doubt whether Helena ever interested herself in relics at all. If these reasons were presented during this program, I must have blinked or zoned out at the time.

The same program did a particularly bad job of presenting the information it had on some recent scientific evaluation on the authenticity of the True Cross: a piece of wood considered since the 11th century to be piece of the True Cross was carbon-14 dated, and found to have come from a tree which lived in the 11th century. Not even close to the supposed time of Jesus, not even close to Helena's discovery in the 4th century of what she called the True Cross.

The carbon-14 dating was presented to the viewer in the very last several minutes of the 1-hour show. Why not at the very beginning of the show? Why not inform the viewer right at the start that any preoccupation with the Cross or any other relics on Helena's part is not solidly demonstrated by any historical evidence?

Perhaps the show's producers were afraid that if they did that sort of thing -- made sense -- it would be hard to keep viewers' attention for the rest of the hour. Perhaps they were exactly right about that. In any case, their handling of the material was pretty typical of such shows purporting to present the latest scholarly knowledge about ancient religious things: present a mix of comments by serious scholars with obfuscating narration, as if what the producers actually want is mainly to keep the viewer confused. The scholars will discuss "the tradition," that is, what the most conservative of believers regard as history, although almost no-one else who's studied the subject matter still does. The shows do not make plain what is meant by "tradition," they don't make plain that the experts are not relating what they consider to be fact. To make things worse, often crackpots who DO regard the traditional fables as factual are interviewed along with the experts.

Is there any rational reason at all to believe that Helena would have had any means at all of determining that what she had discovered was the True Cross? (IF, for the sake of argument, she actually looked for the Cross at all?) I doubt it very much, but my point is that the question was not discussed on air. The people most well-qualified in the world to discuss such matters, and quite willing to share their expertise, were interviewed, and we got a recitation of a bunch of fairy tales and precious little evaluation of what history, if any, is contained in them.

I have to wonder just exactly how much edifying information is routinely edited out of such interviews. I wonder whether one can hold out some hope that the raw footage of the entire interviews tends to be preserved, and will someday be edited into something much better than most of what goes on the air these days.

Thank goodness, these scholars write books, books with which the producers for half-assed "Secrets Revealed" shows on the so-called "History Channels" and NatGeo and the Smithsonian Channel, etc, have nothing to do. If you watch some of these shows and are intrigued by what is said by people like Professors Ehrman, Pagels and Chilton, you might find it quite interesting to read their books and see how badly the TV shows present what they have to say.

And then you'll walk around angrily muttering to yourself all the time about how TV jerks us around, just like I do. Just like me, you'll shout, "Why don't the experts insist on better shows being made? Is it just money, simple as that? Are the experts afraid that if they rock the boat they'll kill the golden goose? Et tu, Bart?!" Yes, you'll be angry, but I'll be a little bit less alone.

People Who Doubt The Authenticity Of The Gospel Of Jesus' Wife Seem To Be Grasping At Straws

(Before I begin here, let me try to be as clear as possible: "authenticity" means that the famous postcard-sized piece of papyrus containing the so-called Gospel of Jesus' Wife is ancient, that is: more than 1000 years old, and perhaps over 1600 years old, and not a 19th-or 20th-century forgery. No serious academics are saying that this text records the actual words of Jesus, talking about his wife. None of them are saying this proves that Jesus was married. What Prof King has said all along, consistently, is that this document may perhaps show that one group of early Christians thought of Jesus as having been married. It's a real shame that so many people are somehow managing not to hear her.)

Professor Karen L King, who came under heavy criticism in 2012 when she presented the so-called Gospel of Jesus' Wife to the public in 2012, when critics said it was a modern forgery, and not a 4th-century Coptic translation of a 2nd-century Greek text, seems to have been at least partially vindicated.

But some experts are still skeptical:

"Brown University Egyptology professor Leo Depuydt [...] points to grammatical mistakes that he says a native Coptic writer would not make"

If Depuydt is right about that: so what? King says this is a 4th-century translation of a 2nd-century Greek text. There's no reason why a native speaker of Greek in the 4th century couldn't have translated something into Coptic, making mistakes no native Coptic speaker would have made. Ideally translations are made by native speakers of the language being translated into. Ideally, but certainly not always, as countless people of many different natives languages have discovered when they've had great difficulty trying to decipher texts in their own native languages in owner's manuals for appliances.

Depuydt says, "the text … is a patchwork of words and phrases from the [...] Coptic Gospel of Thomas."

And again I say: if Depuydt is right, so what? A 4th-century translator could've been familiar with the Gospel of Thomas, which was not officially condemned by the Orthodox authorities until the 4th century. If his or her native language was Greek, it would be only natural for him or her to depend on words and phrases which he or she knew from a Coptic text, such as, for example, the Gospel of Thomas.

Depuydt is not convincing me at all that the Gospel of Jesus' Wife is a modern forgery. If this is the best that the skeptics have, then I say, forget 'em, and consider the artifact to be authentic. (And forgive me for being a broken record, but please be sure you understand what is meant here by "authentic," as explained in italics and bold print at the beginning of this blog post.)

Tacitus On Nero's Persecution Of Christians

Sometimes something's right in front of you for a long time before you notice it. I think I may (finally) have come across a reason to doubt Tacitus' account, in book 15, paragraph 44 of his Annals of how Nero blamed the great fire in Rome in AD 64 on the Christians, who were generally disliked, in order to divert suspicion from himself:

"Sed non ope humana, non largitionibus principis aut deum placamentis decedebat infamia, quin iussum incendium crederetur. ergo abolendo rumori Nero subdidit reos et quaesitissimis poenis adfecit, quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Christianos appellabat. auctor nominis eius Christus Tibero imperitante per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio adfectus erat; repressaque in praesens exitiablilis superstitio rursum erumpebat, non modo per Iudaeam, originem eius mali, sed per urbem etiam, quo cuncta undique atrocia aut pudenda confluunt celebranturque"

People eager to establish that Jesus existed -- too eager, in my humble opinion -- point to that passage, by Tacitus, who not only was not a Christian but disliked Christians, as evidence that he existed. Other people, who actually want to investigate the matter as opposed to declaring it settled, more reasonably characterize the passage as evidence of the existence of Christians, in Rome, during Nero's reign.

That's how I'd always thought of the passage. I wasn't convinced by arguments that the passage is a later Christian interpolation, or that "Christus" is a misprint and should read "Chrestus," some other guy, not Jesus. [PS, 5. August 2015: My bad, "Chrestus" appears in Suetonius' biography of Claudius, not in Tacitus.]

And I'm still not convinced by those arguments, I still find it reasonable to believe that the passage above is reasonably close to how Tacitus wrote it, (The oldest manuscripts we now have containing the passage are from the 15th century, so reasonably close is as close as we're going to get unless and until some much older evidence of Tecaitus' text appears.) and I still see no reason to presume that Tacitus was referring to anyone other than Christians.

And Tacitus has a very good reputation, entirely well-deserved, I think, for being a careful and accurate historian.

But we should never assume that it's certain that any assertion made by any historian is accurate, without looking into the matter a bit for ourselves. What had been staring me in the face for a long time concerning this passage in Tacitus, one of the most closely-inspected and thoroughly-discussed texts concerning the question of Jesus' historicity, without my noticing it, are the following reasons to wonder whether Tacitus may have been mistaken:

Tacitus was about 8 years old in AD 63 when the great fire occurred, and most likely he was not in Rome at the time. In all likelihood there is nothing first-hand about his account of the fire, which was written after AD 100, and maybe as late as 125 or later. Also, many scholars have conjectured that, meticulous and scrupulous as he was, he may have been prejudiced against Nero, and eager to make him look worse than he was. This prejudice may have coincided with a desire on the part of the Christians -- a perennial desire on their part -- to cast themselves in the role of victims. Also, the Christians may have wanted to exaggerate the size and early date of their presence in Rome. I'm picturing Tacitus eagerly taking dictation while a Christian witness eagerly exaggerates things: "Tortured and killed all of you he could find in the most cruel ways he could think of, did he?! Tell me more!"

What really makes me stop and think is that after AD 100, perhaps after 125, writing for an audience many of whom lived in the city of Rome, Tacitus describes who Christians were and where they came from and who their first leader, Christ, had been, and how Christ had died -- in short, he seems to have assumed that his readers hadn't heard of Christians. Does it make sense that in 100 or 125 practically no one in Rome knew who Christians were, while back in the year 64 they were so widely known and disliked that they suggested themselves as natural scapegoats for a disaster?

I'm not sure it does make sense. Perhaps not as much sense as the possibility that Tacitus is an early example of someone taken in by a Christian falsification of history.

Public Reactions To the Gospel of Jesus' Wife

"Even tiny fragments of papyrus can offer surprises with the potential to significantly enrich our historical reconstruction of the range of ancient Christian theological imagination and practice."

That is the conclusion of a paper, Jesus said to them, My wife… A New Coptic Gospel Papyrus, written by Harvard Professor Karen L. King, with contributions by Princeton professor AnneMarie Luijendijk, concerning a recently-discovered papyrus manuscript which, King says, appears to have been made in the 4th century, with a Coptic text copying and/or translating a text from the 2nd century in which Jesus refers to his wife. There had been some hints before in other New Testament apocrypha that Jesus might have been married, but this would be the first text in which Jesus himself says so. I say "would be," because the manuscript has yet to undergo some tests to make sure it isn't a modern forgery. I would be surprised if it is found not to be as old as King estimates. This is not like that "1500 year old" Syriac gospel of Barnabas recently discovered on a shelf in a Turkish courthouse, which rapidly turned out to bee 50 years old or younger; nor like the now-infamous "James Ossuary," purported for a short time to have originally stored the bones of the brother of Jesus, which furthered the career of a fake archaeologist who has his own TV show, while tarnishing the reputations of a few archaeologists who were either taken in or incorrectly cited by the fake archaeologist as believing that the things had not been crudely tampered with by someone whose knowledge of 1st century Jews in general and the state of the art of research into Jesus' life in particular had several serious deficiencies. This Coptic manuscript is either real, or an exceptionally good forgery.

The reactions from the general public have been many, varied and interesting. Not surprisingly, many people have been turned off by things like the "1500 year old" Gospel of Barnabas and the "James Ossuary" and other frauds, and assume that this is just another fraud. Others are confused about the dates of the manuscript and of the original text. Mainstream media outlets, as usual in stories about finds or possible finds of ancient artifacts, are contributing to this confusion with stories by laypeople full of inaccuracies -- although I must draw the reader's attention to one great exception among the mainstream media in this case: the Washington Post has published at least one story by an actual scholar, with competence in related fields, about King's discovery. Nice! Dare one hope that this is the start of a trend?

Many fundamentalists and other strictly traditionalistic Christians are rejecting this story out of hand, often without even noticing that Prof King is very careful to point out that she is making no claims about Jesus himself, but merely saying that this manuscript, if authenticated -- she's careful to include that reservation as well -- would shed some light on what some 2nd century Christians believed. A surprising number of others, on the other hand, both Chrisitna and non-, say that they had already assumed that Jesus was married, because, they say, all Jewish men of that time were married.

Say what?! Where did this meme come from? I labor mightily to put down one widely-held misconception after another, such as that the Old Testament was written in the Bronze age or that the New Testament was written at the Council of Nicea by Constantine and the Pope, only to see other ones pop up. Of course not all Jewish men were married. In some cases the misconception is limited to thinking that all Jewish men who had devoted their lives to religion were required to marry, but of course this was not the case either. For example, many of the Essenes were celibate.

Another common reaction to the news of the discovery of this Coptic manuscript wherein Jesus says, "My wife[...]" is, "Ah, so Dan Brown was right after all!" Well, one, a stopped clock is right twice a day, and if ever anyone was due to be right about something completely by accident, it's Dan Brown; and two, to parrot Professor King, this manuscript says something about the beliefs of some 2nd century Christians, and not necessarily anything at all of substance about Jesus himself.

As faithful readers of this blog know, I'd much rather see an old manuscript by Livy turn up than yet another old Christian manuscript, but still, I'm fascinated by textual transmission and old manuscripts to the point that any newly-discovered 4th century manuscript at all, or even a reasonably well-made forgery of one, regardless of its contents, will interest me greatly. (Not, let me make this perfectly clear, that I sympathize with forgers in the slightest. On the contrary: forgers are the natural enemies of people such as myself. They are The Right Monkeys.) My interest leads many people who are not paying close attention at the moment, or who do not ever pay close attention to anything, to assume, judging from my reaction when the conversation turns to old Christian manuscripts, that I must be Christian. These people also tend to assume that Professors of Religious Studies and biblical archaeologists must be religious. I'm getting used to such reactions. Whaddayagonnado? They're not paying attention. Anyway, by all means, read Professor King's paper, linked at the beginning of the 2nd paragraph above! It's good stuff!