Merged Topic - Historical Reliability of the Gospels

[Randy Carson]

The chain of custody for the bible is broken in so many places it would not be admitted as evidence in a court of law, let alone a scientific analysis. Anyone could have messed with it along the way, even if all parts of the bible were written when you say they were written.

I covered this in a detailed, four-part OP here:

The Text of the NT is Accurate
http://atheistforums.com/index.php?topic=9994.0

Not only were the texts written early, but we have accurate reconstructions of them as explained in that thread.

[Baruch]

You paint with a broad brush.  I am a member of the ABA, have been for decades, and have had positive life experiences with that group, mostly due to interactions with other members.

Of course, you have no experience whatsoever with the ABA, or its members.

I conclude, on this topic only, that you are full of nonsense.

We will have to agree to disagree.  I am not claiming they are doing anything illegal or immoral.  Just business ;-(  I don't believe in other professions, medicine for instance.  The professionals are ... doing what they do ... for personal profit ... like everyone else.

[Randy Carson]

Alexander the Great founded Alexandria and its great library. He was king of Macedonia and conquered the Persian empire and sought to conquer India. There are books of his campaigns, with excerpts surving in secondary sources. These are not trivial marks on history, unlike Jesus whose only influence during his lifetime seemed to be some small headaches for the local government, a cult following, and works written by people who had not directly met him.

Socrates had two students, Plato and Aristotle, whom we do have original works and accounts.

Scholars who study ancient literature have far more New Testament manuscripts to work with. This is significant, and I covered that in the other thread. This chart gives you a helpful visual.

[Baruch]

You see this as positive, not a negative.  With so many different manuscripts, there are many small differences to be mulled over (by the folks who write their own definitive edition of the Greek text).  If there were only one surviving manuscript (as happens with many old texts that miraculously don't get discarded) ... then these curiosities would be less of a problem.

[Randy Carson]

I understand that it was written by people who had not directly met Jesus. This is hardly a point in your favor.

Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus. See the account of this event in Acts 8. Additionally, he learned the proto-creed contained in 1 Co. 15:1-8 from the apostles in Jerusalem, and they had met Jesus, also.

This is covered here: http://atheistforums.com/index.php?topic=8929.0

Were the authors of Mark, Matthew, and John not literate, then? Or your much vaunted Paul? You can't have it both ways.

Nor am I attempting to have it both ways. Someone who lives in a predominantly oral culture can know how to read and write. Conversely, people today can develop memory skills that most of us neglect.

This was not one of your stronger points of disagreement.

Anyway, the kind of memorization you talk of takes the form of rehersed epics, with plenty of time to practice and memorize, and in a particular form that aids memorization. This essentially transforms the memory into procedural memory, which is much more robust because it is practiced. Of course, as the epic developed, who knows how many alterations the text experienced before attaining that form.

The guardrails on the narrative, however, is the fact that the audience is already familiar with the story. While some deviation is permitted to the orator, the audience would not permit wholesale changes.

And finally, what gives you leave to say that "people who had to memorize things all their lives" were "GOOD" at it?

When you practice a skill, you get better at it. This is just common sense.

Cherry picking your defenders again?

Simply pointing out that even atheists reject Carrier. As do theists, of course.

In reading through Ehrman's reply, one thought kept occuring to me. You previously mentioned that the Pharasees thought of Jesus as an enemy, and that the man had made such a pest of himself that Pontius Pilate had to intervene directly in what, in any other case, would be an internal matter of the client state. For someone who attracted as much attention to himself as Jesus did, so much so that the Roman constabulary was sent in to capture him, had a Roman trial, deferred to the locals what was to be done with him, and had a Roman execution, why did Jesus have a nonexistent presence in the Roman records. While Ehrman made the point that the Romans didn't record everything as Carrier claims, surely this would have been recorded.

Thanks for taking the time to read the article. It is a pleasure chatting with someone who is willing to consider the material properly.

If there was no written record of Pontius Pilate, why would there be much contemporaneous record of Jesus. As atheists love to point out, the Romans crucified people all the time. Jesus was just one more victim of their oppressive rule of Palestine.

And for someone who did such amaizing things over the course of his lifetime, he didn't seem to attract much attention from the Romans either.

Akin addresses this point here:

The Procurator and the Peasant
http://jimmyakin.com/2014/10/the-procurator-and-the-peasant.html

This is hardly a point in Tacitus's favor. Bad evidence doesn't become good in the absence of proper good evidence.

Sorry, but I can't determine which point about Tacitus you are referring to.

A fair note, but that still leaves Richard Price and other mythicists. Even Ehrman conceeds some points to Carrier.

As is only reasonable. Carrier is a smart guy with a legit Ph.D. He's going to get some things right!

[Baruch]

"Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus. See the account of this event in Acts 8. Additionally, he learned the proto-creed contained in 1 Co. 15:1-8 from the apostles in Jerusalem, and they had met Jesus, also."

Paul had a vision of Christ, he never met Jesus in the flesh.  I would suggest, since the main problem the Jerusalem church had with him, was the manner he was preaching, that it was latitudinarian, resulted in him being tolerated ... but rejected by Peter, Barnabas and Mark eventually ... so long as he only preached to Gentiles not to Jews.  The idea that he had a vision of Jesus wasn't controversial.  I would suggest the reason why was ... that the Jerusalem church had never met Jesus in the flesh either (literally) ... that they were also recipients of prophetic visions, such as induced by Kabbalah practices.

[Harassed]

Bible written by Romans about 1700 years ago.  They thought it easier to control the ignorant masses with mono theism vs the previous party-on gods.  Religion is just another tool the ruling class used to control the ignorant masses.

[Randy Carson]

Bible written by Romans about 1700 years ago.  They thought it easier to control the ignorant masses with mono theism vs the previous party-on gods.  Religion is just another tool the ruling class used to control the ignorant masses.

Right. Christianity was invented by the Romans to control the masses.

Except that there is no record of this conspiracy (conspiracies being notoriously difficult to maintain) and the process backfired when the Roman empire became Christian.

[Hakurei Reimu]

If a God who created the entire universe from nothing exists, would it be too much for him to raise Jesus from the dead?

Why are you going all the way to "who created the entire universe from nothing" levels of power? Let's scale it back again to suit the particular claim: A God who could resurrect Jesus from the dead.

First off, that's only possible if resurrection is a thing at all. If resurrection is impossible, then God cannot do it, period. The impossibility of resurrection precludes the possibility that a god with the ability to raise people from the dead exists. That's just logic.

So this is scenario is only coherent if resurrection is possible. But seeing how this God hasn't seen fit to raise any other creature besides Jesus, resurrection remains a very very tiny probability, close to zero. That is, P(r) <<< 1 â€" the probability that anyone has ever been resurrected is pretty darn close to 0. But now you've thrown an unevidenced God into the mix. Furthermore, even if we could conceed that resurrection is what happened to Jesus, there's still a chance that your resurrection-causing God wasn't the agent responsible. That is, P(g|r) < 1 â€" the probability, given that anyone has ever been resurrected (namely Jesus), that the agent responsible is God is less than 1. Perhaps not much less than 1, but less than 1. That means that the probability that Jesus was resurrected and that God caused it is P(g&r) = P(r) P(g|r) < P(r) <<< 1. In other words, the probability is less.

In other words, throwing in the interference of God doesn't strengthen your case

But people did write about him, and they did so very early. Not a "hundred years".

And your question about Josephus and Tacitus is self-defeating. If they did hear of him, how?

You asked me a hypothetical: what if nobody wrote about Jesus such that Josephus and Tacitus were the only one in a position to do so? I answered that if nobody wrote about Jesus, Josephus and Tacitus wouldn't know about him to write at all. At least, if it's the Jesus Josephus and Tacitus are talking about.

Because of the existence of the Christian Church. But who founded this Church?

The so-called diciples or more probably their followers. Like it or not, they did all the heavy lifting.

Correct. He would either be a liar (since he claimed to be God knowing full well he wasn't) or a lunatic (since he claimed to be God out of madness).

Or legend. That is, the fantastic stuff about him was actually a later addition.

Sure. But "respecting" is not the same as "agreeing", is it?

Yes. And it also means that the Jesus Myth theory is still a respectable one, dispite your earlier bluster.

There is no need for "extraordinary evidence". This is a smoke-screen that atheists hide behind. At the end of the day, you evaluate the evidence and determine for yourself whether the claims of the resurrection are believable or not.

The reason why we need extraordinary evidence is because of that extraordinary claim. You don't argue with someone who claims that they've seen cars on the road because... well, you've seen cars on the road, many times, and furthermore, that's what the road is there for. On the other hand, if that person claimed to have seen a pink elephant dancing down the road, that would immediately set the bullshit bells off in your head, because elephants aren't pink, elephants don't usually go down roads, and elephants don't dance. The claim is extraordinary because it is out of the ordinary. You are going to need more than that person's word alone to make you believe in the dancing pink elephant.

Even by your own admission, the resurrection is extraordinary. The miracles of Jesus are extraordinary. Even more extraordinary than a dancing pink elephant. There is nothing in the body of scientific knowledge that says that these things should be possible at all.

I agree.

Jesus does have miracles attributed to him. We will need to sort that out. But first, we have to agree that Jesus even existed.

So, what is your view? Was there a man named Jesus (and no, not just any man because "lots of people had that name") whose disciples believed was God, etc.?

There could be a cult lead by a man named Jesus, with a few followers (otherwise it wouldn't be a cult), as portrayed in the bible (except the miracles). But there might also be a cult lead by Jeshua, or Mark, or Matthew, or John the Baptist, with all combinations of names of cult leaders, composition of followers, and composition of beliefs and claims of divinity. The fudge factors are enormous. Why are you to be believed when you assert that the Jesus et al portrayed in the bible is how it "really happened"?

True. But in this case, the stone corroborates what the authors of the gospels said. Prior to this discovery in 1961, atheists would have argued that Pilate never even existed because there was no record of him, the Romans were such excellent record keepers, Pilate's position was important, etc, etc. The usual sorts of arguments they throw at the existence of Jesus. Then, BOOM! Pilate's existence was confirmed. The authors of the gospels were proven to be historically reliable. Again.

On that one fact. It's rare that a shyster doesn't include some true information to make the lies go down easier, and deluded truth tellers aren't any less likely to get some or even most things right either. It's very rare for a book to have everything right or everything wrong. That's why serious research papers and books are extensively sourced, with a bibliography and everything, so that there's a way to check facts should you feel neccessary to do so.

(Also, have athiests ever argued that Pilate never existed?)

The bible is not an extensively sourced book. To take even the mundane claims seriously, outside, independent corroboration that have not been bundled with the book for the last thousand-plus years are needed.

Sorry, bub, you're just going to have to wait until those claims are confirmed, one by one, before you get to crow victory. We did the same for every other claim in myths and legends of every other culture, and we'll do it for you; you don't get special treatment.

There are two ways to approach the resurrection:

1. From the historical evidence found in historically reliable books or
2. From the facts of history which must be explained (such as the conversions of Saul and James, etc)

Conversions are not extraordinary evidence of anything. Otherwise, you would be worried by the fact that the Catholic church is the christian sect that loses the most followers due to conversions. Conversions can happen for any number of reasons, and I think we are overstepping our historical bounds to guess on the psychology of an ancient person, especially second-hand.

A historically reliable book would be one that is well-sourced in all the relevant facts. The bible is not that book. You would need at least corroborate those facts with other sources before I would consider them to have merrit. Furthermore, even if the bible was historically accurate, it can and will get some things wrong, and the things most likely to be wrong is the stuff that we have good, scientific reasons to believe are virtually impossible, like the resurrection. "Science is true, even in history books."

Thank you. I appreciate your acceptance of this fact, and I hope you see it as I do: the gospel writers wanted to write accurate accounts of what they had witnessed, and the archaeological corroboration gives us reason to believe that they accomplish that goal.

Every history writer wants to write accurate accounts. Every history writer has failed in this very often. That's why we source and corroborrate.

I'll break here. Back in a bit.

[Harassed]

Right. Christianity was invented by the Romans to control the masses.

Except that there is no record of this conspiracy (conspiracies being notoriously difficult to maintain) and the process backfired when the Roman empire became Christian.

NO conspiracy. Everyone with more than 10 brain cells knows it to be a fact.  Bible and romans succeeded, see all their gold and power, even today. 

All your writing is pseudo science, psycho babble. Not worth 2 seconds.  Too obvious how you try to cover previous posts with a full page of BS.  I got YOUR number.

Mennonite Brethren criminal scum.
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[Randy Carson]

Why are you going all the way to "who created the entire universe from nothing" levels of power? Let's scale it back again to suit the particular claim: A God who could resurrect Jesus from the dead.

First off, that's only possible if resurrection is a thing at all. If resurrection is impossible, then God cannot do it, period.

God cannot breathe life into an object that does not have it? How do you know this?

The impossibility of resurrection precludes the possibility that a god with the ability to raise people from the dead exists. That's just logic.

No, that's just a presupposition. Merely stating your opinion is not the same as providing evidence for what you believe.

Please prove that resurrection of the dead is not possible.

So this is scenario is only coherent if resurrection is possible. But seeing how this God hasn't seen fit to raise any other creature besides Jesus, resurrection remains a very very tiny probability, close to zero. That is, P(r) <<< 1 â€" the probability that anyone has ever been resurrected is pretty darn close to 0. But now you've thrown an unevidenced God into the mix. Furthermore, even if we could conceed that resurrection is what happened to Jesus, there's still a chance that your resurrection-causing God wasn't the agent responsible. That is, P(g|r) < 1 â€" the probability, given that anyone has ever been resurrected (namely Jesus), that the agent responsible is God is less than 1. Perhaps not much less than 1, but less than 1. That means that the probability that Jesus was resurrected and that God caused it is P(g&r) = P(r) P(g|r) < P(r) <<< 1. In other words, the probability is less.

If Jesus was raised from the dead, then the probability that Jesus was raised from the dead is one. And if Jesus was raised from the dead, then the probability that God exists goes up really dramatically, doesn't it?

You have asserted that the probability of ANY resurrection is very low, but you have not proven that the probability of Jesus' resurrection is zero.

You asked me a hypothetical: what if nobody wrote about Jesus such that Josephus and Tacitus were the only one in a position to do so? I answered that if nobody wrote about Jesus, Josephus and Tacitus wouldn't know about him to write at all. At least, if it's the Jesus Josephus and Tacitus are talking about.

Why not? Were there no Christians in Rome? Were there no Romans who had spoken to these Christians? Pliny speaks of interviewing Christians about their beliefs before condemning them to death.

The reason why we need extraordinary evidence is because of that extraordinary claim. You don't argue with someone who claims that they've seen cars on the road because... well, you've seen cars on the road, many times, and furthermore, that's what the road is there for. On the other hand, if that person claimed to have seen a pink elephant dancing down the road, that would immediately set the bullshit bells off in your head, because elephants aren't pink, elephants don't usually go down roads, and elephants don't dance. The claim is extraordinary because it is out of the ordinary. You are going to need more than that person's word alone to make you believe in the dancing pink elephant.

You believe in cars on the road because you have seen cars on the road. There is nothing extraordinary about believing what you have seen. The disciples said that they had seen Jesus alive three days after he died on the cross. He wasn't pink and he wasn't dancing. But he was alive, and that is not something that we would normally expect after someone dies. Nonetheless, there would have been nothing extraordinary about believing that Jesus was alive again if you had seen it with your own eyes. Trusting in your own experience would satisfy you in the case of the cars, the pink elephants or Jesus.

[facebook164]

Resurection is impossibble because when people die and the heart stop beating parts of the body becomes broken beyond repair. Unless you are willing to believe that absoluteky anything is possible.

But then you are nothing but a fool.

[Randy Carson]

Resurection is impossibble because when people die and the heart stop beating parts of the body becomes broken beyond repair. Unless you are willing to believe that absoluteky anything is possible.

But then you are nothing but a fool.

For God, anything that can be done is possible. If God can make the entire universe out of nothing, if he can breathe life into dust and make a man, then yes, bringing a dead man back to life is not impossible.

[facebook164]

For God, anything that can be done is possible. If God can make the entire universe out of nothing, if he can breathe life into dust and make a man, then yes, bringing a dead man back to life is not impossible.

For santa, delivering presents to children all over the world is not impossible.

[Hakurei Reimu]

I covered this in a detailed, four-part OP here:

The Text of the NT is Accurate
http://atheistforums.com/index.php?topic=9994.0

Not only were the texts written early, but we have accurate reconstructions of them as explained in that thread.

Your explanation is based on something that looks quite familiar to me, phylogenetic analysis. In organisms, we can compare their genomes at various loci and, with the assistence of an outgroup, figure out their relations. Now, it's a wonderful tool for puzzling out the relation between organisms, but it does have a number of limitations:

(1) It cannot date the changes. At best, it can only tell you which branches are basal to which other branches. It cannot even tell you the order of changes on different branches. Any date fixed for one branch do not apply to dates for other branches, even at the same locus.
(2) It cannot detect extinct branches. If there were a branch where there is no exant members available, they are completely invisible to the analysis.
(3) It cannot tell you which of the changes are original, or even if any of them are. If there are six examples where at one particular locus, five of them have one letter, and one has another, then you cannot tell if the lonely member is a mutant of the original, or if the five are the more successful mutation, or if they're both mutants and the original is lost. The only way to guard against this is to specify an outgroup â€" a sample separate from the ones of interest, that is similar enough to use as comparison, but assuredly the most basil to the root of the tree (Ie, it split off first).
(4) It does not deal well with horizontal transfers. Horizontal transfers from other branches altogehter are not really a problem, but they can play havoc an analysis on a single group. With enough loci in consideration, these kinds of situations can be detected and even unraveled, but they will always be uncertain to a certain extent.
(5) It cannot get you past bottlenecks. Related to (2), if there occurs a point where all of the side branches to a line become extinct, then this kind of analysis can take you no further than that point. The analysis can only tell you about exant branches; extinct branches must be discovered through other means.

It's easy to see how these limitations would have direct analogues to textual criticism.

Now lets call up that chart...

...Yeah, that one. Ignoring the rather glaring order of magnitude error in the age of the first copies of Natural History (did the 7500 year difference really not tip anyone off?), the earliest fragment of the NT is AD 114. According to you, the gospels were written about AD 35. That leaves a good 80+ years where we have no fragments available. Even if we accept the majority opinion, it's still a good 44 years before the existence of the first fragments.

It is during this time that the most interesting things are going to be happening to the books of the bible. It's the time where the vqrious sects of christianity (and yes, we know they existed â€" the gnostics were one) are going to be competing for members, borrowing text, and most imporantly, driving each other out of existence. The unique and home versions of books of eaten sects become either incorporated, or often neglected â€"extinct. Since this is the time where the least text exists (you're not going to have many more copies as you do members), it is unlikely we are going to find fragments in exactly the time the biblical books are going to be changing the most. After all, if you only have a few copies of a version of Mark in existence, there are only a few to dispose of should you decide to change it. After this period, when only a handful of sects survive and books finally come to be written, most of the books have already crystalized and attain their final forms.

By the time your textual criticism comes in, where Bruce Metzer notes the similarities in the biblical versions, most of the interesting stuff is already well behind the bottleneck, invisible to the technique, and the only clues of those halcyon days are to be found in the final texts. As such, it's not really surprising to me that, as Ehrman notes, "most of the changes found in early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology," because by this time those issues had already been sussed out.

It's also not clear whether these >98% figures are for single named text (only versions of Mark is compared with other versions of Mark, for example), or with multiple texts (comparing Mark to Matthew). I doubt it's the latter, given the large amount of text from Q in Matthew and Luke. But the former is not an acceptable conclusion because (citing the large amount of borrowing from Mark in Mt&L), the gospels are not separate works from each other, but actually separate versions of the same work (or at least, the same schema). And not just the canonical gospels, but also the gospels not included in the canon (Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of George, Gospel of Larry, Gospel of Curley, Gospel of Moe â€" okay, the GoT is the only serious one, but there are undoubtedly other gospels besides the canonical ones). After all, we know that the Catholic canon excludes 26 books from the OT and 16 from the NT... that we know of. There were probably much more, and if you exclude all the gospels most problematic for your theology, of course the remainder is going to be no problem. If we had all of the texts from all of those various sects in our hot little hands, I don't think that the theological and ideological concerns would be nearly so clear-cut.

Oh, about that graph... most of the 5000 someodd copies are going to be fragmentary, with a small percentage distinct books. Also, Tacitus's Annals. Isn't that the one with one of your "independent corroborations" of Jesus? If you get to keep a text with a 1000 year gap between work and first copies, I get to keep Socrates and Alexander the Great. Or do corroborations only work when they suit you?