Ancient Texts and the Question of Being Right, or Helpful

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

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

Let's jump right into the example of religion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once More About Mythicism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editions Of The Greek New Testament And Other Ancient Texts

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



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

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

And the editors of series like Oxford Classical Texts



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



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

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

Why I Have Doubts About Jesus' Existence

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



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

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

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



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



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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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



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

The 8th Of August, 2013: The Day I Formally Declared War On Stupid Atheists

Why the war? Why today? Well, because today was when I finally had heard someone say "Prove that Jesus existed. And don't use the Bible" one too many times.

I'm waging this war on behalf of intelligent atheists, of course. To try to prevent our being identified with those morons saying things like "Prove that Jesus existed. And don't use the Bible." Also to try to help reasonably-intelligent people not be sucked in by such incredibly stupid memes. I realize that some stupid people, both atheists and believers, will think that I'm not an atheist, because I'm harshly criticizing people who happen to be atheists. At least with this standard disclaimer in place I can say to them, "Hey, Chuckles. Go back and read the 2nd paragraph again, assuming you read that far yr 1st time through. Read it 3 times through if you have to. Move yr lips while you read if you have to."

To say that a lot of half-educated people are weighing in on the subject of the historicity of Jesus would be an insult to the half-educated. Given the lack of evidence other than the New Testament, and unless and until we can find other evidence, the debate over Jesus' historicity is very little other than a debate over how much history we can extract from the New Testament. I disagree with the scholars who say it's certain that Jesus existed, but they're much more serious than those who reject the New Testament as relevant to the question in that they are examining the existing evidence.

Imagine if paeleontologists unearthed a fossilized bone which appeared to have belonged to a previously-unknown species of dinosaur. And imagine if they said, "Well, since this bone appears to be from a species for which we have no other evidence, we're going to have to completely disregard it. Instead of studying it, let's grind it up into dust instead, and see if we can manage to get an ingredient for half-decent fertilizer or concrete out of it." Hopefully you are appalled by the very thought of paeleontologists behaving in such a manner. Hopefully no one will have to explain to you why that's no damn way to run a railroad. And hopefully you can see the similarity between palaeontologists acting like that, and people saying "Prove that Jesus existed. And don't use the Bible."

In this Wrong Monkey blog post I addressed the currently-popular mistaken notion that we possess the works of many historians who were in -- or anywhere near -- Jerusalem during the supposed time of Jesus. The morons who may challenge you: "Prove that Jesus existed. And don't use the Bible" may go on from there to challenge you to go through the works of the fifty or so non-Biblical historians in which all mention of Jesus is suspiciously absent. Which you can't do because the number of such historians who said anything at all about Jerusalem at that time is not fifty but zero, which in turn of course tells you that the person challenging you to do your homework doesn't know his own ass from a Boing 757. It tells you how far they are from being able to find, and/or from taking the trouble to find, anyone else who has a clue about the history of that time or place before proceeding to tell you what's what about that time and place. There's no substitute for reading the ancient texts themselves, but someone who tells you, "Prove that Jesus existed. And don't use the Bible," immediately before or after saying, "We possess the works of over fifty historians who were in or around Jerusalem during Jesus' lifetime" is not only obviously unfamiliar with those ancient texts, but also might have serious difficulty recognizing anyone else who is familiar with someone who is familiar with those texts. "Fifty historians," my Aunt Fanny! Just for fun, see if you can get them to name 10 historians who lived in the 1st century. Lived anywhere, be it Spain or China or the city of Rome. Very likely most of the writers they manage to name won't have lived in the 1st century AD, and will have written poetry or drama or philosophy or treatises on mathematics or rhetoric or medicine or architecture or military strategy, and not one word which they may or may not have written on any historical subject will have survived.

Know your sources. Including the people saying "Prove that Jesus existed. And don't use the Bible." Know them, and know the distance between them and, oh, for instance, me. And get it through your heads, whether you're trying to prove Jesus' existence or disprove it, or if, like me, you're simply curious about the question whatever the answer might turn out to be, that, barring some new discovery, almost all of the evidence for or against is in the New Testament.

And also, if you want people to think you've read the Bible -- read it. Endlessly referring to the same half-dozen verses having to do with shellfish and genocide and Lot's daughters is no longer maintaining the illusion. And while you're at it, you chuckleheads, read an entire book or two by Mark Twain. Your name is legion, and your endless repetition of a half-dozen lines from Twain has become every bit as tedious as the endless repetition of a half-dozen lines from the Bible.

Saying "There Is No Evidence That Jesus Existed" Is A Misuse Of The Term "Evidence"

I'm not convinced that Jesus ever existed.

Now, some people say that, and what they mean is: sure, there was a Jesus who inspired the stories in the New Testament, but I'm not sure that all of those miracles actually happened. That's not what I mean. I don't believe any of the miracles described in the New Testament happened, and I don't feel that that is worth debating, any more than it would make sense to debate the existence of Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. What I mean is, I'm not convinced that there even was a completely non-supernatural person named Jesus, or even with another name, who preached in Galilee and Judea and was crucified on Pilate's orders, or even wasn't actually crucified, and inspired the stories in the New Testament. So much of the New Testament was invented, the descent of Jesus from David, the virgin birth, the star of Bethlehem, the slaughter of the innocents, walking on water, water into wine, rising from the dead, etc, etc, etc, that it seems quite reasonable to me to wonder whether Jesus' non-supernatural existence isn't just one more fictive detail.

It also seems to me that many Biblical scholars, including seemingly most of the most prominent ones in the US, react quite unreasonably to any doubts about Jesus' existence. Perhaps the most notable example in the past few years is the normally quite reasonable Bart Ehrman's book Did Jesus Exist? -- a more accurate title for which would've been the last three words in the book, Jesus Certainly Existed, with a couple of rude insults to all who are not certain in the subtitle.

Rude but unfortunately not untypical. Refusing to acknowledge that reasonable people -- lots of them -- have doubts about Jesus' existence does not encourage those reasonable people to study the scholarship of the professionals has driven many of them into the arms of amateur self-appointed experts. (I, of course, am completely different from all the other amateurs. Harrummph. All of them. Yeah, that's the ticket!) With the predictable result that the level of discourse about the historicity of Jesus is pretty abysmal. I (harrummph) am doing what I can to help.

You will often hear the assertion that there is no evidence that Jesus existed. This involves a drastic misunderstanding of the term "evidence." Evidence is not the same as conclusive proof. Evidence can be strong or weak, conclusive or inconclusive, strong or absurd. The New Testament is the primary evidence of the existence of Jesus. If the New Testament by itself doesn't convince me that Jesus existed, that's fine with me, it hasn't convinced me either. But if you discuss Jesus' existence without considering what the New Testament has to say, you're ignoring most of the pertinent information having to do with what you're (allegedly) talking about. Knock it off. If you want to take part in this discussion, study the New Testament in depth. If you don't you're a silly person and you should go away.

While I'm here: in these discussions, you'll often hear the assertion that apart from the New Testament, no 1st-century writers mention Jesus at all. That's almost correct: Josephus mentions Jesus, but just barely, in a passage which is mostly about James, known as the brother of Jesus. (The other passage, in which Josephus praises Jesus at length, is a fake.) The thing is, though, other than the New Testament authors, Josephus and Philo, no one whose work we now possess says anything about Gelilee or Judea during Jesus' alleged lifetime at all. So, no, we do not have reams and reams of descriptions of the time and place in which all mention of Jesus is suspiciously absent.

"This Could Be The Last Time, I Don't Know..."

I've tried many, many times to correct some of the widespread misconceptions about the early history of Christianity. Then yesterday this happened:

A: well, Constantine THREW HALF OF THE "BIBLE" AWAY, so even the POPE doesn't have a clue what his own religion is based on...aside from the whims of the editors and rewriters through the century

ME: Constantine ordered 50 copies of the Bible to be made. That's the most that we know about his involvement with the Bible. To me it seems quite possible that he never read a word of it. The topic of what was in the Bible and what was not was not on the agenda of the council of Nicea in 325. No doubt, Arians and Gnostics and other groups of Christians, along with the texts they considered holy, were wiped out with Constantine's help, but that bit about Constantine putting the New Testament together is just one of the many things Dan Brown got wrong.

A: I make no reference to Dan Brown, and the finalization for THAT TIME was at Carthage; in general, the fact that Constantine, the Niceans and later a bunch of other HUMANS decided which fairy tales were "based in reality", and at Nicea the Arians surely got their beliefs torn to shreds and discarded, along with other sects you mention.

Okay, first of all, did you get all that? Yeah, me neither. And secondly, not only did I have no more interest in talking to this person, but also, suddenly, and for the first time, I got the feeling that I no longer wanted to correct anyone who, for instance, believes that Constantine edited the New Testament. And that's an awful lot of people. I probably will keep making the effort, but all of a sudden I just felt so exhausted, and so disinclined to talk about these subjects with anyone who hadn't gone to the trouble of researching what they were going to pontificate about, or had drastically erred in estimating who constituted reliable research material. Is this similar to what Joseph Hoffmann means when he refers to Jesus fatigue?

This is the question of the ivory tower. And I guess I know that I'm going to continue to answer that question the same way: I'm going to stay outside of the tower and try to, please pardon the phrase, educate people. I just can't bring myself to give morons like Dan Brown and all the yokels at the History Channel the satisfaction of giving up and not pushing back any more against all of their bullshit. Even though my task is very difficult and aggravating sometimes.

PS, 10:05 AM: I just came across a comparison of the Bible and Harry Potter for about the 1000th time. Merely simpleminded is nowhere near as irritating as simpleminded and completely unoriginal. It occurs to me that there actually must be very many people have never read any books other than the Bible and Harry Potter.