The Ongoing Uphill Battle Against Nonsense

The other day I was in an online discussion which had been started by someone who said that we had no primary sources for 7th-century European history. This amounted to asserting that nothing written in Europe during the 7th century has survived to our day -- or, if one were inclined to be especially generous to them, one could understand them as having said that no historical writing had survived from the 7th century.

The assertion was completely wrong either way, of course. They replied to me by moving the goalposts and saying that we had very few primary sources for the 7th century, and that any given century during the Roman Empire was better-known to us today. I replied that I wasn't sure that the 3rd century wasn't even more poorly attested than the 7th. As an example, I mentioned the Augustan Histories, a purported collection of biographies of Emperors by six different authors, focusing mainly on the 3rd century, upon which both Gibbon and Burckhardt had relied heavily for the period, although both of them were utterly exasperated by its many inaccuracies. There simply wasn't much more writing to be consulted for the 3rd century -- and there still isn't, I added, although today almost all scholars agree that the Augustan histories are the work of one author, not six, and a growing number are coming to suspect that the work is not really history at all, but something more like a parody of historical writing. 

 

At this point someone else said that Gibbon and Burckhardt were very antiquated, and that we today had access to many more sources of 3rd century history than they did.

All fake innocence, I replied that I was fascinated to hear this, and asked them to list some of these sources. I was partly convinced that they were talking out of their butt, and partly curious about whether they actually knew of some 3rd-century sources I hadn't yet heard of. 

They did not. Their reply listed a few Latin authors, all of whom are cited by both Gibbon and Burckhardt, and some of whom are much later than 3rd century and therefore not primary sources. They added that we had Greek sources as well! Not to mention an enormous amount of Roman legal writing and court cases.

Gibbon and Burckhardt were both quite fluent in Greek and cited Greek authors very frequently in their works, and Gibbon, at least, consulted sources in still other ancient languages. Whether he read these untranslated, or had someone translate them for him, I'm not certain. Gibbon greatly advanced the practice of adhering to primary sources, and  Burckhardt was a Musterbeispiel of it. 

And the amount of Roman legal writing we have is not enormous. We have the Corpus Juris Civilis, a summary compiled by Justinian in the 6th century in the 6th century, and a few more items. Romans did not preserve records of every single court case that way we do.

And in any case, Gibbon and Burckhardt had access to these legal writings. 

Other than inscriptions and coins (some classify coins as inscriptions, some don't) which have been discovered and catalogued since their time, and the mostly Greek papyri discovered mostly at Oxyrhynchus, there is in fact very little writing about the Roman Empire which we have and Gibbon and Burckhardt didn't.

And this guy didn't know it. They were saying they "couldn't remember at the moment" all the details of Gibbon and Burckhardt, while making it pretty clear to those have have read Gibbon and Burckhardt, that they haven't.

So what? Happens all the time, somebody talking out of their butt on the Internet. What was different about this time?

This time it made me sad. And also a little ashamed, because this person reminded me a little bit of me: half-bright enough to get away with some of his BS.  I try to talk nonsense less than I used to, but I don't know that I've actually stopped yet. It's hard to stop a train.

Of course, BS doesn't fool everybody. Most of the people who know you're full of it just stop talking to you. 

But not all of them. Over the past couple of years another person on the Internet has corrected me over and over on points of Latin and subjects related in one way or another to Latin literature. It's a new experience for me, and very annoying. I don't know whether they're too young to realize how annoying the corrections are, or too autistic, or what.

Annoying or not, I realize that the corrections are good for me. They help me learn -- you know? So I thank them, and do my best to hide my annoyance.

Jacob Burckhardt

About 35 years ago, David Lee, then the Head of the department of Germanic and Slavic languages at the University of Tennessee, and the instructor of an undergraduate course I was taking, explained to me, as we were chatting between classes, that Germany has a tendency toward the monolithic. More than some other cultures, the Germans tend to regard one person or entity as being the greatest in its category: the greatest conductor, the greatest painter, the greatest automobile manufacturer, the greatest culinary country (not Germany, Germans freely admit) -- the greatest professor of history.

It's the latter category which concerns us here. In the mid-19th century, the University of Berlin was considered by Germans to be the greatest university -- certainly the greatest in Germany, and perhaps in the world. Cultured Germans were certainly not unaware of the Sorbonne and other great universities in other lands -- and Leopold von Ranke, the chairman of the history department in Berlin, was a figure treated with awe. If there was a greater historian than Ranke somewhere in the world in 1872, then Germans, at least, didn't know much about that. In 1872, Jacob Burckhardt,

who had caught Ranke's attention as a student in Berlin, and who was then a professor at Basel, was offered Ranke's chairmanship -- and to the surprise of many, he declined. Burckhardt preferred to stay in Basel, where he had been born in 1818, where he had taught from 1843 to 1855 and again since 1858, and where he would remain until retiring in 1893. And where he had, among great throngs of devoted students, a notable prodigy of his own: Friedrich Nietzsche. If Burckhardt had gone to Berlin in 1872, and if Nietzsche had come with him -- not an unreasonable thought, surely a number of people would've followed Burckhardt anywhere -- what all might have been different in the world since 1872?

Heinrich von Treitschke ended up succeeding Ranke in Berlin, a highly respected figure, to be sure, but not as charismatic, as individualistic, as memorable as Burckhardt. Somewhat the way Nietzsche did in philosophy, Burckhardt drew outside the lines in history. He did things his own way, to the extent that many people describe him as an art historian, or an historian of culture, or something else rather than just an historian. I think it's best to describe him simply as Jacob Burckhardt. To the best of my knowledge, there have not been others like him. Very much of his prose, perhaps most of it, combines political, art-historical, philosophical and other considerations, in a way which no-one else I know of has done. His best known book is probably Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, but he also wrote Der Cicerone, a book intended to be used as a field guide to painting, sculpture and architecture in Italy, from the Greek temple of Paestum, built around 600 BC, up to 18th-century works; Die Zeit Constantins des Grossen (The Time of Constantine the Great); Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (World-Historical Considerations); and other works which don't fit into similar categories any more than the ones I've named.

Burckhardt's reputation may have faded a bit since his time. One of the reasons I say this is that I had a very, very hard time finding a copy of Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, and the copy I found was published in Bern in 1941. And I can't find any record that it was ever translated into English. World-Historical Considerations, that's my own translation. This is a collection of lectures making up a course which Burckhardt gave at Basel just twice. He didn't repeat himself very much, to put it mildly. Those lectures blew students' minds, and they carried his reputation with them out into the world. He very much believed in the view of history being shaped by geniuses, by "world-historical figures," a phrase made popular by Hegel (and then, after Burckhardt's time, by Edward Albee), although Burckhardt is at pains in these lectures to point out how his views differ from those of Hegel. The view that history is shaped by great individuals, by geniuses, is rather unpopular at the moment among academics. But it makes sense to me. And for that reason, it makes sense to me to assume that Burckhardt's reputation will rise again at some point.

Ancient History Deserves More Respect

In the following essay, I have used the terms "historian" and "Classicist" as if they were somewhat interchangeable. This may distress some historians and Classicists, to whom the distinctions between their disciplines are extremely important. To them, I apologize. Those distinctions are quite simply not as important to me.

Along with countless smaller shocks, three major ones have brought me to the conclusion that the study of ancient history is in a dire state of neglect:

First, a few years ago, I became aware of the New Atheists. One of the first things I learned about them was that their most prominent and well-respected member -- indeed, their widely-acknowledged leader -- is Richard Dawkins. I had read read two books about biology by Dawkins, The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale. I had heard about his more recent book The God Delusion but hadn't read it. However, I assumed, on the basis of the other two books, that it must be brilliant, and that any atheist movement with him at its head must be out there actively making a lot of good sense.

An atheist since childhood myself, I eagerly joined New Atheist communities online, but soon became very impatient with people repeating, ad nauseum, ridiculous memes such as calling the authors of the Bible "Bronze Age goat herders," or: "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." I wondered when I was finally going to get to some well-educated New Atheists, when some of them besides me was going to try to correct some of the more dopey memes.

Then came the first of those above-mentioned three major jolts: I learned that those two memes and a lot of other oft-repeated New Atheist slogans were direct quotes of, or paraphrases from, Dawkins himself. I heard or read about Dawkins saying shockingly racist things in the guise of an enlightened critique of Islam. Dawkins, who'd called the Old Testament God "jealous and proud of it," but reserved most of his most poisonous comments for Islam, has never read the Koran, and never will, and is proud of that.

Despite the good advice of Alcoholics Anonymous, that when we assume we make an ass of you and me, I had assumed, on the basis of The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale, that Dawkins was incapable of writing a bad book or saying a horrid thing, although, in order to make this assumption, I had had to ignore a jarring clue right there on the first page of the first chapter of The Selfish Gene, "Why are People?" where Dawkins approvingly quotes GG Simpson to the effect that all attempts to describe human nature made before 1859 are worthless and should be ignored.

As a matter of fact, all sorts of eminently-sensible things written before 1859 point out the hazards of people telling you to ignore entire eras while simultaneously telling you non-stop about those very eras, about which they are proudly ignorant.

The second major shock came from Stephen Greenblatt's inept book The Swerve, which claims that Poggio was solely responsible for saving the text of Lucretious from oblivion, that Lucretius was solely responsible for rescuing Epicurian philosophy from oblivion, and that Epicurian philosophy, via Lucretius, via Poggio, ushered in the Renaissance and the modern world, three ridiculous assertions. After having heard so much praise of the book that I finally decided I had to read it for myself and see if it was as bad as it descriptions of it sounded, I found that it was actually worse. The shock was not that such a bad book was written, nor that it was a bestseller. There are books far worse on the bestseller lists all the time. The shock was that this book had won so many awards and gotten such high praise from so many people who, I would have thought, were well-educated.

Or should I say: these people are well-educated, of course they are, and the shock was in perceiving how small a role a knowledge of history could play in a good education.

And most recently, the third shock came when I learned that the story of Christians having willfully destroyed the great library at Alexandria had been passed along, and perhaps greatly popularized, by Carl Sagan on his TV series Cosmos.

Thanks to people like Dawkins and Sagan, the general public is now in touch, to some degree, with cutting-edge science. That is an immense and laudable achievement. But very often, cutting-edge scientists, working at the West's greatest universities, are not in touch with the bullet-points of the current study of history. (I don't know whether historical illiteracy is as widespread in the science departments of the great non-Western universities, and I won't pretend as if I know. Dawkins does enough of that sort of pretending for himself and me both.)

I believe that history is every bit as important as science. I can't prove this as directly as a scientist explaining climate change and what can be done about it, but perhaps I can persuade the reader to give it some thought. (Some readers won't need much convincing: for instance, if they're familiar with one of the non-English languages which call history a science.)

Science deals with how things work, and history with what happened. If we don't know what happened, we're in no position to know how things work, or to know much of anything at all. If we're satisfied with any old account of Greek philosophy, or ancient libraries, or the Renaissance, or with a version which matches our political agenda or the axes we wish to grind, then, in effect, we're content not to know what happened. There are specialists working full-time on uncovering these subjects, uncovering them figuratively and also literally in the case of the ancient libraries, and if we don't consult them and see what they've made of the texts and other artifacts of the times they study, before we ourselves make pronouncements on related subjects, then we're acting very much in the spirit of Richard Dawkins and GG Simpson and Stephen Greenblatt and Henry "History is bunk" Ford.

(That seemed much more impressive in my head before I actually wrote it down. But perhaps it's a start.)

What can historians themselves do in order to introduce more of their work into the public consciousness? There's one thing I can think of, which the historians might very much not want to do: they might become a little less polite. How have most Classicists reacted to Stephen Greenblatt's book The Swerve? With one of the most fearful weapons in their arsenal: they mention Greenblatt's name more seldom. If one has become familiar with the community of Classicists and their mores, this shunning is chilling indeed. To the general public, however, it's almost entirely as good as imperceptible, and there's almost no way of learning that Greenblatt's assertions do not conform to the findings of current research. The few who've ventured further outside of the ivory tower in Greenblatt's case, to plainly state the distance between The Swerve and current scholarship, are solitary needles in the haystack of rapturous reviews of The Swerve by laypeople. And then there are those Classicists who've written reviews of The Swerve which are negative, but so polite that to many laypeople they may seem positive.

(We could make a game of this, and see which readers can guess which very famous Classicist I have, in a searing rebuke, deliberately avoided mentioning in this essay. But how would we discuss this? Not publicly, surely not.)

There are non-specialists selling millions of books, scientists reaching television audiences of tens of millions, who sometimes get things entirely wrong when it comes to ancient history or ancient texts. If historians and Classicists want to do anything about this, they might not have to become rude, but they will certainly have to speak up much more emphatically. The historians and Classicists who work on the same campuses as scientists who are wont to spread public misconception on historical topics could, perhaps, be so bold as to speak to those scientists about such things. Perhaps even face-to-face and out loud.

They could ask to be heard. They deserve to be heard.

Ethnic Diversity and Racism in Ancient Rome

A brouhaha has erupted in Britain about ethnic diversity and racism in ancient Rome: Alt-right commentator gets 'schooled' by historian over diversity in Roman Britain, and now people are arguing about who got schooled by whom and who is or isn't alt-right.

I don't know who is or isn't alt-right or who got schooled by whom, and I also don't know how racist or ethnically-diverse ancient Rome was.

I do know that here, as seemingly always and everywhere, a lot of people are making up a version of history which suits them, rather than actually studying history.

It seems that people are so anxious to be sure that racism was unknown in ancient Rome that they've even taken to translating "white" and "black" out of Catullus' notorious 93rd poem: "Nil nimium studeo, Caesar, tibi velle placere/ nec scire utrum sis albus an ater homo." ("I don't care much about pleasing you, Caesar, or knowing whether you are white or black." This short poem was Catullus' response to an invitation to dinner by Caesar.) As Caesar said, "Libenter homines id quod volunt credunt." ("Men gladly believe what they wish to be true.") And Caesar's bonmot applies equally to those who underestimate the prevalence of racism in ancient Rome and those who overestimate it, rather than examining the evidence with an open mind. And it applies as well to those who are convinced that Jesus was "black" and also to those who are convinced he was "white" (I contend that his historical existence is uncertain and his appearance completely unknown), and to everyone else who claims to be studying history when what they are actually doing is making uninformed pronouncements on historical subjects with closed minds and little information.

If I had translated Caesar as "People gladly believe[...]" instead of "Men gladly believe[...]," I would've been editing out his sexism, which he shared with almost all ancient Roman men of whom we know, a sexism which is much more obvious and plain than the degree to which ancient Romans were or were not racist.

Have people already begun to present a non-sexist version of ancient Rome?

I feel very lonely at times when I consider how very few people care at all about getting an accurate view of historical subjects.

The Bad Mental Habit of Anachronism

The Roman roads were not "the Internet of the ancient world." Clipper ships were not "the Internet of the 19th century." I really dislike this tendency on the part of some historians, and some pseudo-historians and sort-of-historians, to say that something was "the (insert 21st-century thing) of (insert earlier era.)" That does not help people to understand what the earlier era was like.

In the ancient world, yes, the Roman roads did improve travel significantly. But it still could take months or years for news to travel from one part of the world to another. But most people didn't travel much at all, unless they were soldiers, which could be a very unpleasant way of traveling.

There were no newspapers in the ancient world. To say that the Roman Acta Diurna were daily newspapers is again a disservice to anyone trying to understand the ancient world. They were daily announcements, but they were not newspapers. More like signs, put up in a public place in Rome, with a little bit of information or misinformation which the government wanted the people to receive. The earliest thing in Europe resembling a news periodical was the Notizie scritte which began to appear in Venice in the 16th century. It only appeared monthly. In 1631 a weekly news publication, La Gazette, began to appear in Paris. The earliest daily newspaper of which I am aware was the Daily Courant, which began publication in London in 1702. And none of these early European news publication was affordable to the general public. Newspapers aimed at the general public didn't begin to appear until the 19th century.

So what? So stop telling me that there are no mentions of Jesus in any ancient newspapers, that's what. The Acta Diurna were not a newspaper; no copies of any of them have survived; they weren't made and distributed in big stacks of papyrus copies. That would have been an extremely extravagant expense. They were scratched into stone or metal, a few words a day. One copy. Occasionally somebody would copy something down from one of them and send the copy to a governor.

It's hard to imagine what earlier eras were like. Often it's very difficult for us to remember earlier times in our own lives. I've noticed this in the records of earlier eras: people who lived most of their lives without the telegraph, for example, or passenger trains, took them completely for granted once they had been available for a few years. (Available to their privileged classes, that is. The difficulty of imagining the lives of those less fortunate seems to be another constant feature of human consciousness.) I'm 55 years old. I know that in my childhood there were 4 channels on TV, 3 commercial networks plus PBS, and that there was no Internet, and that very few people could afford computers, and that computers much simpler than the simplest of today's pocket calculators were as big as typewriters, or bigger.

I know this, but it's hard to really remember what it was like, and how much different things were back then. I know things such as that Presidential candidates could say one thing to one crowd, and something completely different to another crowd later the same day, and it was much harder to nail them for it if there wasn't any audio or video of either speech, and often there wasn't. So, for example, when Hunter S Thompson tells me in his book on the 1972 Presidential campaign, during which I turned 11, that Hubert Humphrey did that sort of thing constantly, I have to take his word for it. (I do take Thompson's word for that. But why should you? Well, that's a tough one.)

Ah, but I'm going to have to explain to many of you what typewriters were.

They were not the Internet of the mid-20th century. There was no Internet back then.

Intellectual Laziness: The Sad Case Of Michael Paulkovich And Myself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, There Are No Fifth-Century Viking Maps Of Canada

In some cases,

who's right and who's wrong depends completely upon your point of view.

In SOME cases. In other cases, I'm right, you're wrong, and you're also wrong about it being a question of point of view, and you're a huge pain in the ass, because I've spent years carefully studying the primary sources relating to this question, while you got your information from the so-called "History Channel" and you don't even know what a primary source is, and you're telling me that everything is a matter of point of view.

Like when you tell me that there are 5th-century Viking maps of Canada. No. Shut up, sit down and listen: There is one map which may be from the fifteenth century (you left out the "teenth"), before 1492, and appears to show Greenland and parts of the west coast of Canada found by the Vikings around AD 1000. It's known as the Vinland Map.

It may be from the fifteenth century, or it may be a twentieth-century forgery of a fifteenth-century map. There are a couple of huge reasons for suspecting forgery: 1) The Vikings in 1000 didn't use maps, didn't have maps. Any maps. 2) The entire outline of Greenland is shown. The Vikings landed on the south-eastern coast of Greenland, but no one is known to have sailed all the way around the island until 1900.

It's either a fifteenth-century map, in which case it is an extraordinary artifact which leaves all sorts of unanswered questions about the geographical knowledge of some Europeans before Columbus; or it is a twentieth-century forgery, in which case it is an extraordinary forgery. After a huge amount of scrutiny, no one has yet definitively proven that it is a fake (although it probably is). If it's a fake, it must have been made by someone who was an expert in 15th century manuscripts and in spotting fakes (but who made a big mistake in including the entire outline of Greenland, because that just screams "FAKE!!!" although it doesn't quite prove it's a fake).

I'm right -- everything I've written in this post is correct -- and you're wrong, and it's not a matter of opinion. Shut UP!

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.

"Religion Is A Sand-Castle, And A Tidal Wave Of Reason Is About To Wash It Away!"

Another parallel to the fundies: the fundies say that Jesus is coming back really soon, any minute now, and the New Atheists say that Reason will wash religion away really soon, any minute now.

If the New Atheists read more than scientific journals, comic books, the occasional sci-fi or fantasy novel and each other, they might have come across some of the atheist philosophers and historians from one or two centuries ago who sounded exactly like the 21st-century New Atheist over-optimism quoted in the title of this blog post. The Age of Reason could also have been called The Age of the Premature Belief in the Coming Final Victory of Reason.

I believe that if humanity survives long enough, religion will eventually fade away. If we're not killed off in the meantime by an asteroid or by our own nuclear weapons, or by ironically actual tidal waves, strengthened by the climate change we're causing, or by some disease, or one of the many other things which could quite suddenly render this discussion moot. But not only has religion proven much more tenacious than those historians and philosophers from the late 18th to the early 20th century thought: in addition, atheism in its current form has some problems.

Probably the most serious of those problems right now is that the most prominent leaders of the atheist movement are ignorant obnoxious pricks. Arguably, they are slowing the progress of atheism down more than they are aiding it, because they're so repulsive. They're inducing some atheists to deny that they're atheists and call themselves something like skeptics instead, lest someone should assume that they're with THEM. That's not a hallmark of the best possible leadership. Sam Harris, in addition to many, many other glaring shortcomings, believes in spirituality, which in my opinion raises serious doubts about whether he is really an atheist at all. He and Dawkins and Hitch and Myers and other leading New Atheists are atrociously ignorant Islamophobes. Dawkins, who simply cannot shut up about Islam and how horrible and dangerous it is, has never read the Koran and announces proudly that he never intends to, reminiscent of the Ayatollah Khomenei putting a price on Salman Rushdie's head for writing a book which the Ayatollah did not read. Dawkins has recently referred to Christianity as a valuable bulwark against the menace of radical Islam, which for me raises questions about his credibility as an atheist just as Harris' nonsense about spirituality does.

Harris claims that Islam is currently going through its "Medieval" phase, which shows you that he can count to 14: the beginnings of Islam are 1400 years ago, and 1400 years AD Christendom was in its Middle Ages (or at least some of it still was). It also makes one wonder, not only how the tremendous flowering of Islamic science, philosophy and art during the actual Christian Middle Ages fits into Harris' chronology, in which Islamic culture's progress is to mirror Christendom's, but 600 years later, but also whether Harris gave any thought at all to the fact that most of the oldest cities on Earth, Eridu, Ur, Babylon, Memphis, Thebes, are in the most central regions of Islam.

But you can't give much serious consideration to that which you never learned to begin with, can you?

A really remarkable, truly striking example of New Atheism's negligence of the study of history is the widespread New Atheist ignorance of both the history of religion and the history of atheism. Remarkable and striking because, if you're going to have an atheist movement which isn't absurd, the leaders of that movement should be among the leading experts on that history. Otherwise, what is the movement actually about? Batman and Spidey may be pretty cool, I wouldn't know, but they're no substitute for Thucydides and Livy and Gibbon and Voltaire and Marx and Burckhardt and Nietzsche.

By no means should the leaders of an atheist movement be as ignorant of science as Dawkins, Harris, Hitch, Myers and New Atheists generally are of history and philosophy. Looking at the New Atheists, the gulf between the sciences and the humanities seems as huge and strong as ever on the part of the scientists, but fortunately, the people who used to be known as humanists have been much better at filling it. Perhaps Bronowski should've been scolding both scientists and the people who used to be known as humanists about it, and not just the people who used to be known as humanists. (You see, before the New Atheists appropriated the word, a humanist was a specialist in the humanities. Made sense, didn't it? Ah, all the amazing things you can learn by studying history!)

Decline Of Religion

"Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid." -- Abraham Joshua Heschel

Heschel was Jewish, and the only religion I feel qualified to speak about is Christianity. It was always irrelevant, dull, oppressive and insipid. It is declining now because it has been refuted. And/or because after 1000 years of torturing and killing everyone who disagreed with them, Christian leaders gradually have been forced to accept more open discussion of these things. Without the torturing and killing, would Christianity ever have spread so far to begin with? In other words: did people EVER really accept it, or did they act as if they accepted it, because -- torture and burning alive? We'll never know. Because torture and burning alive as punishment for questioning orthodoxy don't encourage people to go on record with their real opinions.

That is far from a brilliant insight on my part, it's quite simple and evident. And yet it's one of the simple and plain aspects of the history of Western civilization which still is rather rarely acknowledged. Whether the Christian authorities stopped torturing and killing simply because they lost the authority to do so, or because they actually became more tolerant and merciful on their own, they still very energetically push a lot of nonsense. Where they have stopped actively combating the natural sciences, they now often turn to combating those of us who are struggling to make some sort of sense of history. Heschel is Jewish, but his statement quoted at the beginning of this post could have come from any of a number of Christian theologians and theologically-inclined historians of Western civilization who energetically, full-time, propagate nonsense about the subjects they ostensibly teach. Religion became oppressive? It has been 200 years since the Inquisition tortured and killed anyone. Clearly, religion is less oppressive in Western society today than it was in the Middle Ages. Few things could be so clear. But a lot of people who are supposed to be teaching about the Middle Ages are doing all they can to make them less clear.

Apologetics makes historical writing worse. Some scholars who in previous ages would have concentrated on non-stop invention of nonsense about "spiritual realms" -- that is, worlds of make-believe -- now concentrate full-time on shamelessly distorting those earlier eras, on making them seem less crazy and horrid than they were. They'll say that the beauty of Medieval cathedrals reflects an extraordinary level of piety and religious fervor in the time they were built. I agree with them that the Cathedrals are beautiful, but I say that they reflect a time in the dominions of Catholicism when the Church was far and away the biggest patron of the arts, and for very many artists the only patron who could ever pay them. Cathedrals are magnificent because when they were built, they were the only opportunity for most artists to express themselves. Art in Medieval Europe for most people equaled Catholic art, not because everyone was a fervent Catholic but because Catholic art was the only art that was allowed. Art must have been an especial comfort in that dull, oppressive, insipid time.

New Chronology And Mythicism

Recently I came across the New Chronology of Anatoly Fomenko and others. I had heard of this stuff before -- claims that conventional chronologies of ancient and Medieval history were drastically mistaken, and that most of what we think of as ancient history actually happened after AD 1000 -- but this is the first time I've taken a closer look at it.

I haven't yet (knowingly) discussed historical topics with proponents of this New Chronology, but for some reason I can vividly imagine how I would react to them, and it's strikingly similar to the way that Biblical scholars react to mythicists, people, including me, who think that it's possible that Jesus is a legendary character and was never an historical figure.

I've complained many times on this blog about the way that Biblical scholars react to mythicists: they dismiss us contemptuously.

I would have difficulty reacting to someone talking to me and advancing Fomenko's ideas about history in any way other than contemptuously dismissing them. Some propositions are simply beyond the pale: that God or Santa Claus exists, that Muslims in general are pro-rape, or, as Fomenko asserts, that Suleiman the Magnificent (16th century AD) is the actual Biblical Solomon (10th century BC) and built the Hagia Sophia (in Instanbul, built by the Emperor Justinian in the 6th century AD, originally a church, for a long time a mosque and now a museum), which is the actual Biblical Temple of Solomon.

Or, as Fomenko asserts, that Aeneas found Rome in Italy in the 14th century AD. Or that the events described in the Old Testament occurred from the 14th to 16th centuries AD in Europe and Byzantium, centuries later than the events of the New Testament, which occurred in AD 1152-1185. Or that the histories of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome as we know them today were invented during the Renaissance by scholars who based these histories for the most part on documents which they themselves forged.

I would have a very difficult time remaining polite if someone were to confront me with assertions like these. Very much the way that Biblical scholars often seem to find it difficult to remain polite when one of us mentions that he's not convinced that Jesus existed. If I replied at all to Fomenko or one of his fans (who include former chess world champion Garry Kasparov), I would say that the amount of things someone needs to be ignorant of in order to accept such cockamamie nonsense is staggeringly huge. The number of people who would have had to have been in on the conspiracy of historical falsification is ridiculously huge. The amount of science which would have to be completely faulty in order for the New Chronology to hold up would be huge and would include things like carbon-14 dating. Millions or billions of artifacts would have to have been mis-dated by hundreds or thousands of years by people dating them for a living, using many methods, of which carbon-14 dating is just one. These mistakes would have to have been committed by people presenting their finding publicly for peer review for several centuries now.

Biblical scholars sometimes compare us mythicists (just to be perfectly clear: I'm not at all sure whether Jesus existed or not. I could absolutely eventually be convinced that he did or that he did not) to people who believe in nutty stuff like this New Chronology.

And in some case, mythicists actually are as crazy and ignorant as that.

But I'm not. But why should you believe me? Well, as far as I'm concerned you don't have to take anybody's word for anything. More research is needed -- everywhere, all the time, about everything. By all means, research everything further. I'm completely for that. Research me if you feel the need to, by all means. Read Fomenko if you want to, if you're not yet convinced that he is, in fact, crazier and more ignorant than I am. Think for yourselves. Please. If you come to the conclusion that Fomenko is right and that academic historians are wrong and/or lying for some reason, well, okay then. But in that case be prepared for the fact that I'll probably consider you to be a little slow.

Yes, I'm saying that I consider Garry Kasparov to be a little slow -- when it comes to history. The only place I've seen geniuses who were smart about everything is in fictional characters in TV shows and movies. In real life I've never encountered anyone with no serious weak points mentally. Kasparov is a genius at chess and a bit slow in the study of history. I'm good at language acquisition and quite bad at sarcasm detection. I'm sure I have other mental weak spots of which I'm unaware, because one reason why people have these weak spots is because they're unaware of them, and remain stubbornly unaware of them somehow even when other people repeatedly point them out, and I see no reason to assume I'm unique in this department.

Abraham

"You know Abraham probably didn't exist, right?"

You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? No, actually, I don't know anything about the probability or improbability of Abraham's existence. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I see no reason why there couldn't have been a man who lived in Mesopotamia in or around the 18th century BC and heard voices telling him to move to the area which would later become Jerusalem, where, in obedience to the same voices, or voice, he prepared to sacrifice his son, but then changed his mind and sacrificed an animal instead. None of the above strains my credulity in the slightest. It's all entirely possible. As far as how probable or improbable it all is, I don't have nearly enough data to say.

And neither do you.

Claims that Abraham was the first monotheist seem much more farfetched to me than claims that he may have existed.

Of course, when considering the historicity claims of legendary figures, there is always the question of how closely history must fit the legend before one is justified in saying that the figure existed. I don't see how there can be an absolute and objective answer to this question. If someone existed who preached everything in the Sermon on the Mount, but he existed in the 2nd century BC and was named Nathan, is he the historical Jesus, or does he prove that there was no historical Jesus? What if Nathan lived in Syria and died in Damascus? If we find evidence of a 5th century baron in Britain who was married to a Guinevere and befriended to a Lancelot, and ruled over a territory of 5 acres, have we found the historical Arthur, or proven that there was no historical Arthur? What if his wife was named Portia and their friend was named Offa? Where do you draw the line between an historical figure and an historical source of a legendary figure?

I'm only asking these questions, not offering answers to any of them.

No, actually, I will offer an answer: I'm not interested in drawing such lines, but I am intensely interested in increasing our knowledge whenever possible. Finding out what actually happened in times and places where legends began is a process of historical research, and finding out how legends grew and developed is also historical research, and the more explicitly clearly the one investigation can be distinguished from the other, the better.

Back to the story of Abraham and what may have inspired it -- what I find particularly interesting about it is the thought that the story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac may have been inspired by a culture's transition from human to animal sacrifice. Many cultures go through such a transition -- most or all cultures if James Frazer was right. Perhaps there was no historical Abraham, and the story of Abraham and Isaac, in which there was no human sacrifice whatsoever, but almost one single instance of it, may have gradually developed as a more comfortable way of remembering a time when human sacrifice was routine. Or perhaps there was a man who was about to sacrifice his son, but stopped and sacrificed an animal instead, and this one man's story was remembered and embellished because that was more comfortable than remembering that human sacrifice once was routine.

Is Anyone Out There Fluent In Armenian?

The thing is -- I'm not. Not even close. I recently obtained my first Armenian Bible, and I have no idea what sort of a Bible it is. Its ISBN number is 978-1843640660.

Now, I know some of you are shaking your heads and saying aloud, "What the Heck, Steve! Wouldn't it make more sense to get at least close to fluent in Armenian before getting books written in Armenian, ya big goof?!"

For some people, maybe most people, that might make more sense. My method of language acquisition tends to lean less on language courses and textbooks, and more on books written for native speakers, than average. Maybe my method actually doesn't make much sense for me, either, and reflects above all my lazy unwillingness to spend sufficient time in the drudgery of the textbooks. But occasionally, believe it or not, it has worked. Maybe my method makes more sense for someone who is autistic than for someone who is neurologically-typical.

Maybe it makes absolutely no sense at all. Please don't mistake me for an expert on language acquisition.

When I ask what sort of Bible ISBN 978-1843640660 is, I'm wondering what its relationship to the earliest Armenian translations is, and what the footnotes mean -- do they refer to textual variants, or to verses elsewhere in the Bible with similar content, or both, or something else? That sort of thing. I looked and looked for some indication of which version of the Armenian Bible might be considered standard, or even critical, by scholars, but, since I'm not fluent in Armenian, that was hard.

I'm interested in when and how the Armenian language was put into writing. The thing is this: some sources tell me that in the early 5th century, Mesrop Mashtots created the Armenian alphabet and John of Egheghiatz and Joseph of Baghin translated the Bible into Armenian, while other sources tell me that traditionally, the creation of the Armenian alphabet and the translation of the Bible occurred in the early 5th century. The problem is that word "tradition." It's a word very often used by scholars who are well-informed about a topic in the history of a religion, but determined to appear to most of their audience as if they were not well-informed, in order not to hurt people's feelings. For example: the scholar may begin a sentence very loudly by saying:

"Traditionally,

this piece of wood, which has been stored in this reliquary in this church since the 12th century, is said to have been a part of the True Cross," and then complete the sentence by mumbling very softly, "[...]although recent carbon-14 tests have shown that it comes from a tree which died in the 12th century."

So when some sources say that traditionally, Mesrop Mashtots created the Armenian alphabet and John of Egheghiatz and Joseph of Baghin translated the Bible into Armenian in the early 5th century, it makes me wonder whether those sources know something which they're not saying. Something like: those people did create the Armenian alphabet and translate the Bible into Armenian, but not that early. Or: some of the Bible was translated into Armenian then, and the rest later. Or: historians now wonder whether Mesrop Mashtots or John of Egheghiatz or Joseph of Baghin actually existed.

I don't want to upset anyone by wondering about such things. I just want to know what actually happened.

Of course, historians and we laypeople with a special interest in history know that investigating history, wanting to know what actually happened, always upsets a lot of people, no matter how good our intentions are, and that the upset is greatly increased whenever religion is involved. We can apologize over and over for doing what we do, or we can mumble or speak in code whenever we're afraid of offending someone -- or we can be interviewed for shows on the so-called "History Channels" and not worry about having to mumble, because we know that whatever we say will be edited all out of recognition anyway -- or we can grow thick skins and get on with it.

The Battle Of Lepanto And The Sinking Of The Spanish Armada

I wonder how many of you have heard of one of the events mentioned in this post's title and not the other. In 1571 the combined naval forces of Spain, the Pope and Venice scored a great and unexpected victory over the navy of the Ottoman Empire in the Gulf of Patras in the Ionian Sea. 17 years later, in 1588, the same Spanish navy, the dreaded Spanish Armada, suffered a great and unexpected defeat at the hands of the English navy when they attempted to invade England.

Both events have been written about at great length, but what strikes me is that, to the best of my recollection, I have never heard them mentioned in the same breath, as I am doing now. Garrett Mattingly's The Armada, an above-average book about the 1588 battle,



has 3 entries in its index under "Lepanto, battle of," but 2 of those references merely mention that Don Juan of Austria and the Marquis of Santa Cruz had been at Lepanto, and that Sultan Selim II had spoken disparagingly of the battle's significance. Mattingly actually says nothing at all himself about the battle.

The I Tatti Renaissance Library recently published an entire volume of poems in Latin written shortly after the battle of Lepanto and celebrating the Christian victory,



and nowhere in the poems, the index or introduction or well over 100 pages of notes about the battle and its background and significance is any English man or woman mentioned, let alone Elizabeth I, let alone the sinking of the Armada.

I thought that surely HG Wells, in his great 1-volume history of Earth, The Outline of History,



would prove an exception and discuss both battles. But no. And more surprisingly still, the battle he mentions is Lepanto. Maybe he was deliberately thumbing his nose at those of his countrymen who in his estimation went on and on at entirely too much length about the supposed significance for world history of the sinking of the Armada.

Which brings me meandering roundabout to my point: some historians have written at great length about either Lepanto or the sinking of the Armada, either because they felt that it was of great significance in world history, or that its significance had been greatly exaggerated by historians. Either one battle or the other -- and the other was barely worth a mention.

Surely many Spanish sailors and soldiers must have been in both battles, just 17 years apart. Surely they, if no-one else, often thought of both battles at the same time, and considered them to have some connection to each other. Such sailors and soldiers were themselves an obvious connection.

But individual historians have rarely -- if ever -- felt that both battles were worth writing about. Which is my point: the great subjectivity of decisions about what is "historically significant." Surely the treatment by historians of these 2 battles shines a very great light on the fact that objectivity is an illusion. Historians write about what is significant from the point of view of the entire world? No, they cultivate myths of significance. If they are especially sympathetic to Catholicism and/or Spain, they nurture the myth of the significance of Lepanto, they talk up the glorious nature of the Catholic, or Spanish (or Venetian, or Papal) victory, and don't mention the Spanish defeat in 1588. But if they happen to think that England is particularly glorious, they support that preconception by dwelling on the sinking of the Armada, and by making it seem as glorious as they can.

Objectivity, schmobjetivity. There is no such thing. Research these 2 battles and you will be shown objectivity's nonexistence in a particularly striking way.

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.

People's Stupidity Makes Me Strong

I'm copying "Your hatred makes me strong!" which Conan O'Brian used to exclaim during his monologues when a joke got a negative reaction.

Well, stupidity makes me angry, and anger seems to make me blog, so hello again. I just heard on TV, on the soundtrack of a commercial for an upcoming program about Hitler's army in Russia:

"Whoever heard of an army being stopped by WEATHER?!"

Seriously? And this wasn't even one of the so-called "History Channels," where such a doofus clueless remark would be about par for the course, it was the Smmithsonian Channel, which usually does somewhat better.

Whoever heard of an army being stopped by weather? Oh, only anybody who knew anything at all about armies, or anything at all about Russia. Napoleon, anyone? Hannibal in the Alps ring a bell?



SHEESH! How does anything ever get done?

Things I Wish I Knew

For a while -- in retrospect it seems like it was a couple of years or more -- I wished I knew what Charlemagne's native language was. It's possible to read a lot of history about Charlemagne and his realm and his times without coming across any references to language at all. Because most of the people who're curious about Charlemagne aren't curious about languages. The actual historians who write accounts about those things have to have some familiarity with languages, plural, and mostly with Latin, because that was the predominant written language of Charlemagne's empire. During this time, the mid 80's, when I wanted to know, but didn't yet know, what Charlemagne's native language was, I didn't even know about Latin's predominance among the written languages of Western Europe during Charlemagne's reign (King of the Franks from 768 until his death in 814, Holy Roman Emperor from 800 on).

Anyway, eventually I stumbled over some reference to Charlemagne's native language. It was German. The Franks were a Germanic tribe. In fact, the beginnings of written German coincide with Charlemagne's reign, because the establishment of written German was one of the very many substantial things which happened because he ordered that it be so. After having stumbled over a reference to Charlemagne's native language somewhere in some book of history "aimed at a wider audience," as they say, I learned more about Charlemagne's relationship to the development of the German language in the course of getting a Bachelor's degree with a major in German.

If people were sensible like me, things like Charlemagne's native language would be common knowledge, and people professing to be interested in the Middle Ages would learn Latin instead of aping Renaissance English, and people full of the sort of facts I crave would be best-selling authors, as they should be, and Dan Brown and George W Bush would be janitors at best.

But instead it's this world, and people don't know what Charlemagne's native language is, why? Because they don't care. Perhaps in France many people go beyond not caring and actively don't want to know, because they prefer to think of Charlemagne as a Frenchman and the founder of France. It's easy to think that. For a long time "Frank" was synonymous, more or less, with "Frenchman," and I suppose that to many people it still more or less is. The Franks referred to very frequently in accounts of the Crusades did in fact come from France, and when they didn't speak Latin, they spoke French. And in English we know Charlemagne by his French name. People don't care about his native language. Very few of us care. In case you're one of those few and don't know yet: Charlemagne -- Carolus Magnus in most of the writing about him at the time, because most of that writing was in Latin, Karl der Grosse to Germans today, Charles the Great or Charlemagne to us -- couldn't read or write, although he made great efforts to learn late in life. Besides his native German, or Frankish, if you will, he could also speak Latin and Greek, and perhaps French and Arabic as well. His empire was large enough that he had much to do with native speakers of all of those languages.



As with the native language of Charlemagne 30 years ago, so today I'm interested in the language of the Lombards and Lombardy, and like 30 years ago, I'm not sure where to get the answers to my questions. Pretty much nobody knows, because pretty much nobody cares. I know that the Lombards were a Germanic tribe like the Franks and the Goths and the Vandals and others. I know that they had a kingdom in northern Italy from the late 6th century until Charlemagne absorbed that kingdom in the late 8th century. I know that the Germanic Lombard language was never recorded in any written documents except for occasional Lombard words in Latin texts, and those occasional Lombard words are all that scholars have had in their attempts to learn that language. I know that at some point the Lombard language died out and was replaced, in the region of northern Italy still known today as Lombardy, by an Italian dialect.

I do not know how much, if at all, the Lombard Italian dialect has been influenced by the Germanic Lombard language.

I do not know how much of the population of Lombardy was ever the Germanic-speaking people. I do not know whether this Germanic-speaking people ever constituted a majority of the population of the area. In England, the Norman Conquest of 1066 was carried out by French-speaking people. For several centuries after the Norman Conquest, although almost all the writing made public in England was in Latin or French, the French-speaking ruling class was a minority among an English- (or Anglo-Saxon-) speaking majority. Eventually the ruling class adopted the English language. I have no idea what percentage this French-speaking minority was of all the people living in England. Was the Lombard kingdom similarly a Germanic-speaking people ruling an Italian-speaking minority? I don't know.

Some linguists of Italian and historians of the Dark Ages know such things, and soon, I will too. And nobody cares. And people don't know what they're missing, and life is funny that way.

I certainly hope that it goes without saying that if anybody reading this knows all this stuff I hope you'll tell me or at least refer me to some helpful books, and that if you do we'll be best buds forever, because that would mean that I'll know even sooner than I'd hoped I would.

Is This An Autistic Thing?

The following remarks were all contributed by one person to an online discussion about Jesus' historicity, over the course of the past day and a half:

"[...]you have no hope of answering that question with anything but gross speculation[...]With so little evidence you cant make a case for or against his historicity. You can only speculate and give your opinions[...]these were books that were being edited and put together to express a message being fashioned in real time by a panel of church elders. They chose the message they wanted to send and made sure it was reflected in the writings that made it into the bible. In one of those cases the mention of Jesus was out of context with the rest of the text, as if it was added later, or at least, that was the conclusion of the folks who study such nonsense. I stick to science[...]I think speculating is worth less of my time then doing things for which there can be answers. Not that I dont do it, but I don't squander it - i save it for speculation that I care about[...]the point is what does it matter? you will solve nothing, you will accomplish nothing, the conversation has been ongoing for hundreds of years. Do something useful instead. Go feed a hungry dog[...]this is what I mean by a waste of time[...]"

The last remark was made just a few minutes ago, and I have no idea whether or not the end is in sight yet. I fear we're not nearly there yet.

Jumping into the discussion so many times just to say that he doesn't think the discussion is worth having.

I don't understand this guy. And it's not just him. I run into this sort of thing a lot: People interrupting discussions about whether or not Jesus existed to inform the discutants that they don't care whether or not Jesus existed. And when I told him that his behavior mystified me, he got very mad.

What is he mad about? Why is he wasting so much of his time to insist that he won't be wasting any of his time on this? I don't think it ever occurred to him to apologize for wasting MY time, or the time of other people trying to discuss the topic at hand. And implying that discussing whether or not Jesus existed makes dogs starve? Is that any less irrational than insisting that cuss words make Baby Jesus cry?

I don't think people barge into discussions on other topics very often just to express their disinterest in those topics. Clearly, the topic of Jesus makes people go a little nuts.

Still. Behavior like this baffles me. I'm just about at the point where I think that trying to understand this may be a waste of my time. I'm past the point where I've concluded that responding directly to this guy is a waste, or worse. (Seems to fire him up and egg him on.) So this blog post, besides being motivated by the fact that it's been 4 days since I posted anything here, is also me sort of winding the issue up and tying a bow around it.

But besides that, I'm wondering whether this is an instance where someone's behavior baffles me because I'm autistic and the other person is (I'm assuming in this case) neurologically-typical. I also assume that the majority of you, my readers, are neurologically-typical. And so, before I do my utmost to put the subject behind me and return to topics which I find more interesting -- such as, for example, whether or not Jesus existed -- I'm asking whether any of you might possibly find this person's behavior not so bizarre, not so mystifying. If you'd like to comment, if you could possibly explain some of this to me, explain why a person would interrupt a conversation with so many assertions that he doesn't care about the topic of discussion, that would be very helpful. I've got to live among you, the neurologically-typical, and greater understanding eases the co-existence.

Is he motivated by kindness? It doesn't feel at all kind to me, but hey, I misunderstand people very drastically on a routine basis. Is he trying to be helpful by warning me that I'm wasting my life? Is he actually obsessed with Jesus, but in denial about it? Those are just wild guesses on my part, I really don't understand this.

Do you also find his behavior bizarre?

I Could've Been Even Clearer: New Atheists Are Ignorant ABOUT HISTORY

(I'm not ignorant of the objection which will be raised by some, that "ignorant about" in the title is incorrect and should be "ignorant of," but those who would so object may themselves be ignorant of the ways in which language changes more quickly than manuels of supposedly "correct" language. I'm lucky I eventually found me a whole differnt kind a English teacher. "About" is correct in the post title. "Ignorant of history" would suggest that New Atheists are unaware that there is something known as history, and honestly, in several cases it's not as bad as that.)

This insight -- that I could've been clearer about the bug the New Atheists have put up my butt -- came to me last night in the midst of a horribly unsuccessful attempt to communicate with someone about my previous blog post. The New Atheist with whom I was trying to communicate was disputing my accusation of Richard Dawkins' ignorance, and referred to Dawkins' refutation of Anselm's cosmological argument.



That led to an a-ha moment for me: Dawkins engages in theological disputation, and I don't. I mean, I knew already that Dawkins debated theologians, but this suddenly made clear to me how Dawkins and I approach certain subjects, such as Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109, in two completely different ways: Dawkins from a theological perspective and I from an historical perspective. I've never engaged in a theological debate, and I don't ever intend to. I've got a streak going, 54 consecutive years without engaging in theological debate, and I'm proud of that streak and I intend to keep it going. Dawkins has spent some time countering Anselm's ontological argument. I'm much more interested in Anselm's role in things like the investiture controversy, a power struggle in the 11th and 12th centuries between some Popes and some European monarchs, because those Popes and those kings and the power they fought over all actually existed, whereas God, the sole subject of ontological arguments, does not. It's similar to the way that long debates over who would win completely imaginary fights between completely imaginary comic book heroes -- debates not seldom participated in by New Atheists, notorious for their comic book fandom -- do not interest me, while discussions of things which do exist or have existed do interest me.

So there it is, one major difference between me and Dawkins: I have nothing to say about theology. Maybe I'm wrong, but it really does seem unnecessary to me to respond at all to someone like, for instance, Terry Eagleton. In my opinion, Eagleton makes himself seem quite horrible enough. No need for any help from me. And as Eagleton attacks people like Dawkins he also promotes Christianty, making it look horrible too. What is there left for me to do, except perhaps to ask people to please note that just because Eagleton and I both criticize Dawkins, it doesn't mean we'd have one nice thing to say about each other?

Yes, I know that theists do exist, and that some of them are ready at the drop of a hat to discuss Anselm's theology and in some cases even to defend it. But because of historical developments between Anselm's time and our own, there is no requirement for me to pretend that Anselm's theology is worth taking seriously, or that there is any Christian theology which doesn't bore me excruciatingly. Maybe I'm wrong, and Dawkins is right, and there actually is a need to critique theology. I think all that's needed is to offer something better. And what's not better than theology?

When I take Dawkins to task for talking about Islam without having read the Koran, it is not a theological objection -- although Dawkins going into detail about someone like Anselm makes his proud ignorance of the contents of the Koran look even more provincial than it already did -- but an historical one. From my point of view with my emphasis on the importance of the study of history, the importance of reading the Koran is not in order to be able to discuss God. What is said in the Koran about God resembles what Anselm said about God in that both are talking about something purely imaginary, and therefore infinitely less interesting than all of the Muslims who have actually existed and actually do exist now. We're talking about billions of people, and one book, not even a particularly long book, which might just tell you more about all of those people than any other book could. If you're at all interested in those people, why on Earth wouldn't you read that one book? And Dawkins, as we all know, can't seem to shut up about all of those people. He's constantly trying to tell us all just exactly what is going on with all of those people. It's beyond the beyond. It reminds me of the anti-Western cleric in exile in London in Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses,



who constantly issues stern warnings of the evils and dangers of the West, who stays in an apartment with the curtains always drawn so that he will not see the West, and whenever he must leave the apartment his followers walk before and behind him and to his left and right and hold up veils so that he will never get a glimpse of the West. The West he's always criticizing and damning. Okay, Dawkins isn't actually quite that daffy, but he's headed in that direction.

And he has set the tone for New Atheism, and so we get things like Free Inquiry's publication of Michael Paulkovich's list of 126 people who supposedly should've left us some mention of Jesus but didn't -- a publication in the leading New Atheist magazine, in New Atheism's flagship, almost, of an essay that would've gotten an F in any Ancient History 101, because it purports to be about ancient history, and yet is so jaw-droppingly free of any connection to something like historical facts.