How often do we hear people “explaining” religious beliefs by stating “The Bible says so,” as if the Bible fell out of the sky, pre-translated to English by God Himself? It’s not that simple, according to an impressive and clearly-written book that should be required reading for anyone who claims to know “what the Bible says.”
Bart Ehrman’s Exploration: Who Changed the Bible and Why?
The 2005 bestseller, Misquoting Jesus, was not written by a raving atheist. Rather, it was written by a fellow who had a born-again experience in high school, then went on to attend the ultraconservative Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Bart Ehrman didn’t stop there, however. He wanted to become an evangelical voice with credentials that would enable him to teach in secular settings. It was for this reason that he continued his education at Wheaton and, eventually, Princeton, picking up the ability to read the New Testament in its original Greek in the process.
As a result of his disciplined study, Ehrman increasingly questioned the fundamentalist approach that the “Bible is the inerrant Word of God. It contains no mistakes.” Through his studies, Ehrman determined that the Bible was not free of mistakes:
We have only error ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways.
(Page 7). At Princeton, Ehrman learned that mistakes had been made in the copying of the New Testament over the centuries. Upon realizing this, “the floodgates opened.” In Mark 4, for example, Jesus allegedly stated that the mustard seed is “the smallest of all seeds on the earth.” Ehrman knew that this simply was not true. The more he studied the early manuscripts, the more he realized that the Bible was full of contradictions. For instance, Mark writes that Jesus was crucified the day after the Passover meal (Mark 14:12; 15:25) while John says Jesus died the day before the Passover meal (John 19:14).
Ehrman often heard that the words of the Bible were inspired. Obviously, the Bible was not originally written in English. Perhaps, suggests Ehrman, the full meaning and nuance of the New Testament could only be grasped when it was read in its original Greek (and the Old Testament could be fully appreciated only when studied in its original Hebrew) (page 6).
Because of these language barriers and the undeniable mistakes and contradictions, Ehrman realized that the Bible could not be the “fully inspired, inerrant Word of God.” Instead, it appeared to him to be a “very human book.” Human authors had originally written the text at different times and in different places to address different needs. Certainly, the Bible does not provide an an “errant guide as to how we should live. This is the shift in my own thinking that I ended up making, and to which I am now fully committed.”
How pervasive is the belief that the Bible is inerrant, that every word of the Bible is precise and true?
Occasionally I see a bumper sticker that reads: “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.” My response is always, what if God didn’t say it? What if the book you take as giving you God’s words instead contains human words. What if the Bible doesn’t give a foolproof answer to the questions of the modern age-abortion, women’s rights, gay rights, religious and supremacy, western style democracy and the like? What if we have to figure out how to live and what to believe on our own, without setting up the Bible as a false idol–or an oracle that gives us a direct line of communication with the Almighty.
(Page 14). Ehrman continues to appreciate the Bible as an important collection of writings, but urges that it needs to be read and understood in the context of textual criticism, “a compelling and intriguing field of study of real importance not just to scholars but to everyone with an interest in the Bible.” Ehrman finds it striking that most readers of the Bible know almost nothing about textual criticism. He comments that this is not surprising, in that very few books have been written about textual criticism for a lay audience (namely, “those who know nothing about it, who don’t have the Greek and other languages necessary for the in-depth study of it who do not realize there is even any “problem” with the text).
Misquoting Jesus provides much background into how the Bible became the Bible. It happened through numerous human decisions over the centuries. For instance, the first time any Christian of record listed the 27 books of the New Testament as the books of the New Testament was 300 years after the books have been written (page 36). And those works have been radically altered over the years at the hands of the scribes “who were not only conserving scripture but also changing it.” Ehrman points out that most of the hundreds of thousands of textual changes found among the manuscripts were “completely insignificant, immaterial, of no real importance.” In short, they were innocent mistakes involving misspelling or inadvertence.
On the other hand, the very meaning of the text changed in some instances. Some Bible scholars have even concluded that it makes no sense to talk about the “original” text of the Bible. (Page 210). As a result of studying surviving Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, Ehrman concluded that we simply don’t have the original words constituting the New Testament.
Not only do we not have the originals, we don’t have the first copies of the originals. We don’t even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later-much later. In most instances, they are copies made many centuries later. And these copies all differ from one another, and many thousands of places . . . Possibly it is easiest to put it in comparative terms: there are more differences among our manuscripts and there are words in the New Testament.
In Misquoting Jesus Bart Ehrman spells out the ways in which several critical passages of the New Testament were changed or concocted. They are startling examples:
A.) Everyone knows the story about Jesus and the woman about to be stoned by the mob. This account is only found in John 7:53-8:12. The mob asked Jesus whether they should stone the woman (the punishment required by the Old Testament) or show her mercy. Jesus doesn’t fall for this trap. Jesus allegedly states “Let the one who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her.”
The crowd dissipates out of shame. Ehrman states that this brilliant story was not originally in the Gospel of John or in any of the Gospels. “It was added by later scribes.” The story is not found in “our oldest and best manuscripts of the Gospel of John. Nor does its writing style comport with the rest of John. Most serious textual critics state that this story should not be considered part of the Bible (page 65).
B) after Jesus died, Mary Magdalene and two other women came back to the tomb to anoint the body of Jesus, according to Mark 16:1-2). They were met by a man in a white robe who told them that Jesus had been raised and was no longer there. The women fled and said nothing more to anyone out of fear (16:4-8). Everyone knows the rest of Mark’s Gospel, of course. The problem with the remainder of the story is that none of it was originally in the Gospel of Mark. It was added by a later scribe. Those additions include all of the following:
Jesus himself appeared to Mary Magdalene. She told the eleven apostles (minus Judas) about this vision, but they did not believe her. Jesus then appeared to the apostles, chastising them for failing to believe. He tells them that those who believe will be saved and those who don’t will be condemned. Then follows a critically important passage of the Bible.
And these are the signs that will accompany those who believe: they will cast out demons in my name; they will speak in new tongues; and they will take up snakes in their hands; and if they drink any poison, it will not harm them; they will place their hands upon the sick and heal them.
Jesus is then allegedly taken up into heaven and sits at the right hand of God, while the disciples go forth into the world to proclaim the Gospel in miraculous fashion.
Without the above passages (which, again, were not written by Mark) the Pentecostals lose their justification for speaking in “tongues.” And the Appalachian snake handlers have no basis for their dangerous practices.
C) John 5:7-8 is the only passage in the entire Bible “that explicitly delineates the doctrine of the Trinity (that there are three persons and God but that all three constitute a single God):
There are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word and the Spirit and these three are one; and there are three that bear witness on earth, the spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one.
Ehrman cites strong evidence that this Trinity passage was entirely concocted and foisted upon Erasmus by outraged theologians who needed support for their prized theological doctrine (page 81).
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Ehrman reveals numerous other difficulties with the popular assumption that the Bible was perfectly handed down from its original written expression.
Many believers rely fervently on the King James version of the Bible, for instance. They sometimes even say “If the King James was good enough for St. Paul, it’s good enough for me.” Ehrman points out many problems with the King James version, warning that “we need to face up to the facts.”
The King James was not given by God but was a translation by a group of scholars in the early 17th century who based their rendition on a faulty Greek text.
(Page 209).
So what should we make of the Bible? Ehrman argues that the attacks of the New Testament are not simply collections of obvious, self-interpreting words. It’s the same problem we have with other important documents, such as the United States Constitution:
Texts do not simply reveal their own meanings to honest inquirers. Texts are interpreted and they are interpreted (just as they were written) by living, breathing human beings, who can make sense of texts only by explaining them in light of other other knowledge, explicating their meaning, putting the words of the text “in other words.”
(Page 217) The scribes changed the original words of the New Testament by putting them in other words.
In my experience, many people who cherry pick excerpts from the Bible as the proper way to determine what is moral are in utter denial that we don’t have accurate copies of the original writings. Most of them refuse to acknowledge that current popular versions of the Bible contain numerous discrepancies, even compared to the earliest manuscripts we do have. This is on top of the fact that their are hundreds of patent contradictions in the English version of the Bible. To most believers, none of this matters. Stay the course! In fact, in my experience most believers rarely read what the consider to be God’s own inspired word.
Ehrman’s book points out numerous troublesome issues that demand attention even assuming that the original writers of the Bible accurately reported the events described in their original writings (whatever those writings were). The elephant in the room, however, is that none of the authors of the Gospels ever claimed to witness any of the events they were reporting. Further, the extraodinary nature of Biblical claims demands extraordinary proof that ancient self-contradictory writings are simply incapable of providing, except to those of us who believe that the Bible is completely true “because it says so in the Bible.”
For all of those people who continue to go around clentching and thumping those Bibles they bought at Wal-Mart, and for all the rest of us who want to get the story straight, Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus should be required reading.
[Administrator’s Note: More than 540 comments were quickly contributed to this post, making this page too long to download and display. Therefore, on March 23, 2007, I closed off new comments. Last night (February 4, 2009), I discovered a WordPress plugin that allows me to paginate comments, thereby protecting the site from the sudden and repeated load of 540 comments.
Here’s the good news, then. Anyone who has not yet had his or her say on Bart Ehrman’s book may now jump in at the original post and post a comment. That’s right! If none of the 540 comments that have come before you didn’t address an important aspect of Bart Ehrman’s book, you may now remedy that omission, right here in the comments to this original post. Godspeed. ]
If we can expect the meanings of various words in a language to change over a course of time, how can one not expect people with various degrees of understandings and personal experiences and thus different interpretations to result in entire schools of thought that are at odds with each other?
Can anyone tell me why Noah would have cursed his grandson Canaan when it was his father Ham who was stated as having uncovered Noah's drunken nakedness?
If you can understand this you will understand how different people can read the same words and each see various degrees of meaning from both the context and how they perceive the application to their own lives.
God did not condone what went on here, Noah was partially to blame for what ended in a judgment upon Canaan, which carried down generation after generation between the descendents of Noah.
The story is given as an attempt to explain why the progeny of Shem, Japheth as well as the rest of Ham's where considered in a preferential way to Canaan's progeny, obviously an improper outcome. It ended in a outcome that was divisive, to the races of mankind.
This incident took on a meaning of its own that produced ramifications that caused prejudice and slavery for thousands of years, some of which still continues in various forms to this very day.
First of all, Noah was so drunk the night before he probably had no first hand knowledge of what had transpired. Would nothing have come of this if either Ham or Canaan hadn't told others what had happened?
So I ask again, why was Canaan singled out from the rest of Ham's children?
Karl: Precisely. Makes no sense. But see my comment on the other thread about the findings that Canaan predated Israel and the authors of that particular story were just disgruntled former servants (not slaves).
To the victor…
History is written by …
Etc…
When you write the stories, you get to choose what you want included – see Egyptian accounts of their various histories…not too many defeats.
When you don't have modern indexing and cross-referencing tools, you can't edit well and end up with a host of inconsistencies. All of the reasonable questions could have been eliminated if someone had edited well (and destroyed all evidence of the problems). Given that they didn't, we have too many problems that require apologetics – a distinctly oily profession that tries to explain away what should never need explaining away if the document were truly inerrant or divine.
Anyway, the flood myth was around in many many forms long before it was appropriated by the Jews. They just put their stamp on it. Long suffering and all. One shouldn't put too much stock in trying to make sense of it. Some guy in charge of an oral history got mad at somebody for drinking and decided to adjust (revise the moral landscape of) a long told story to teach a slightly different lesson. Maybe. Could be. Pascal Boyer talked about studies that showed how people humanize (change) even very specific stories about God, so it would be very illogical to assume they didn't change stories about men.
Jim,
Finally someone who will discuss what many would call another one of those apparent "problems" found in the Hebrew Scriptures.
I also call it a "seeming" puzzle, but not for the same reasons you do.
It is a seeming puzzle because people have "assumed" that God "directed/inspired" Noah to give this curse upon Canaan, but this was not the case.
It was a simple statement about how Noah (and family) responded and followed through upon there own biases and wrong tendencies.
The Bible presents the weaknesses of its authors in ways that most other histories don't. This is why I consider it more reliable and true than those that embellis the facts to make their writers 100% bonafide truth seekers with only correct inspired motivations as well.
Karl's method:
Premise: The Bible contains issues that disclose the "weaknesses of its authors."
Therefore, It is a highly reliable and true document.
By the way, Karl. All bible scholars agree that the four "authors" of the gospels were NOT witnesses to the things they were allegedly reporting. Further, lawyers, judges and psychologists who study trials all agree that even first-hand eye witnesses are terribly unreliable. With the bible we are dealing with undocumented SOURCES of the information, which was written down generations after the purported events. Stir in the motivations of the authors (have you read Ehrman's book yet?) and you have the recipe for a writing that has almost no credibility with regard to the magic events reported therein.
I have read Ehrman and many others who have an interest in teaching in colleges and universties that should no longer be considered seminaries in the proper sense. When a seminary changes its founding articles of faith it should cease to be called that seminary and the entire institution should be forced to reorganize under a new name and new articles of faith. This way people would better understand the true nature of the changes that have occurred in many American seminaries.
Harvard, Yale and Princeton wouyld no longer be seminaries if this were the case. The articles of non-faith of these institutions are no longer in alignment with the articles of faith of their founders.
Seminaries were intially begun for the furtherance of both education and the religious beliefs of the founders of the seminary. What better way to destroy a seminary than to obtain tenure and then start teaching directly against what the founders of the seminary held in importance.
The only way to protect the original articles of faith from such charlatans is to require signed agreements to the statement of faith of the institution.
There are simply too many seminary leaders whose main concern was to find a place of secure employment and then to go about as if they have no concern for the orginal founders reasons for beginning the seminary, or church, or
It's like this. If you don't like or believe what someone else does believe, what better way to work around it than to persuade others of your qualifications debunk it from the inside out.
BTW,
Ask ALL of your Scholar friends if Matthew was written by Matthew one of the twelve original disciples of Jesus or if someone was only wrting from the perspective of Matthew.
Matthew was written by a first hand eye-witness.
Karl: Was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone written by Harry Potter?
I know you really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really want to believe what is comfortable for you, but sometimes what is comfortable is not true. Many of my of my own beliefs induce considerable stress and discomfort. For instance, I don't believe that I have a big Guy in the sky looking out for me. This is painful and emotionally expensive (in the Zahavian sense). It would be really nice to believe that I have that kind of backup, and rather lonely and scary to think that I don't. Yet that is what I believe–that there is no supernatural being watching over me. The inconvenience of my beliefs do (I must say) suggest that they are more credible than the religious beliefs of other people that they find comfortable. To summarize: uncomfortable beliefs are more credible, as a general rule.
My question to you. SUCCINCTLY state (don't send 87 links) how it is that you know (real evidence) that a man named "Matthew" authored the Gospel attributed to "Matthew." Tell me, also, how it is that we know that he was an eyewitness to the tales he tells. You will be penalized for simply insisting that you know or for telling me that God told you so.
Karl,
I believe that has been shown to be false. None of the Gospels was written by first-hand eye-witnesses.
As Mark notes, current scholarship is in general (meaning majority) agreement that of the four gospels that were chosen by vote over the many many more that didn't entirely support the canon that Athanasius and his followers wanted were not written by eye witnesses. Too many pieces of the Synoptic gospels are taken from each other and folded to really determine which came first, let alone single authorship. And the Apocryphal John was clearly written by someone relating stories heard and not seen.
Half the books attributed to Paul are now understood to be written by others, and yet that byline persists. Where one flaw exists, one must necessarily question and suspect all.
(Hint: the answer to Erich's question is that you can't and no one can.)
There is no internal, all conclusive evidence for authorship of the Book of Matthew. Sometime early in the second-century the Gospel of Matthew was designated as such.
This at least offers prima facie evidence that the apostle Matthew wrote this work, though some of the actual materials have been from or actually have been the "Q" document or "logia" which may have actually have been Matthew's original Hebrew or Aramaic text.
The earliest piece of external, direct evidence for the authorship of the Gospel of Matthew derives from Papias (60-130), as quoted by Eusebius. Papias makes the following obscure statement about the origin of the gospel (H.E. 3. 39. 16):
"Matthew composed the sayings in the Hebrew language and everyone interpreted as he was able."
Some internal evidence –
Only the Gospel of Matthew refers to "Matthew the tax collector" in the list of the disciples (Matt 10:3; see 9:9-13). (Being a tax-collector was not something in which to take pride in Jewish culture.)
The Gospel of Matthew gives details of Jesus' call for Matthew to be a disciple.
If one accepts the testimony of the early church fathers, one must assume that at some point the original Hebrew or Aramaic Gospel of Matthew was translated into Greek.
Jerome (342-420) more than once asserts that Matthew wrote his gospel in Hebrew, and says that it is not known with certainty who translated it into Greek. He even claims that the original Hebrew gospel can be found in the library at Caesarea (De vir. ill. 3; see Ad Damas. 20; Ad Hedib. 4).
Eusebius reports the view current in his time is that Matthew's gospel was based on his preaching to Palestinian Jews, whose first language no doubt would have been Aramaic. Naturally, Matthew's gospel would have been written in Aramaic. He writes, "For Matthew, who had at first preached to the Hebrews, when he was about to go to other peoples, committed his Gospel to writing in his native tongue, and thus compensated those whom he was obliged to leave for the loss of his presence" (H.E. 3.24.6).
I know and accept that Matthew was not a eye-witness to everything that is written in the Gospel of Matthew. Similarly, I know Erich Veith is only an eye-witness to a very small fraction of what he writes and comments upon in his writings.
Believe what you will, but don't make a claim that all the scholars you know doubt that Matthew wrote/compiled a Gospel account about Jesus.
This only means you haven't sought to listen to others about the topic
Karl: I don't make claims that people walk on water or that one basket of food fed 5,000 people. I try to build upon things that can be tested and confirmed independently.
Mark,
How do you know with such surety that none of the Gospels were written by eye witnesses?
I think a more scientifically accurate statement would be something like this: "I feel with some degree of certainty that the Gospels were not written by eye witnesses, based on my current knowledge of the studies and opinions of biblical scholars that I've read." To boldly state as you did "None of the Gospels was written by first-hand eye-witnesses" suggests either the felt presence of direct experience (you were there, you saw it, you touched it, etc) or magical insight of some sort (personal divine revelation).
Mike,
I believe I said "I believe that has shown to be false." How much more equivocal do you want me to be without just walking off drooling about how nothing can be known? The two parts of my statement are dependent on each other.
Enough scholarship has been done that I accept with high certainty the conclusion that none of the Gospels came from an eyewitness. Furthermore, given the inconsistencies between them, one would have to determine that if any of them are eye witness accounts, which one is, and since we know "Luke" was never an apostle, then the provenance of all of them is thrown into sufficient doubt that we can say none of them are first-hand accounts.
Good enough?
Karl,
I don't think there's any doubt that the four Gospels all derive from some first-hand accounts of some of the events. All of them cut-and-paste and embellish (some more than others). It as likely to have been a oral tradition as anything in writing. Other Gospels were, for one reason or another, discluded in the final assemblage, which may have more claim to primacy than those included. But the final "drafts" as it were are not first-hand accounts, even if they used some as source material.
How can anyone claim that the gospel of John was not an eye witness, unless one simply refuses to believe that what was written has been so corrupted by editors and revisionists that we could never even know an original if one happened to show up in a cache of scrolls from the first century.
I follow a simple rule. The person making claims needs to prove them with evidence, which can include making references to highly trustworthy sources. For those making extraordinary claims about supernatural beings who come back from the dead and who maintain elaborate invisible Otherworlds, I require extraordinary proof. The Gospel according to John utterly fails my test. Your claim that John was an eyewitness to the events about which he writes utterly fails.
If you want to loosen up the test, you let in all of the bizarre claims of all the other worlds religions. It's your life and your choice. I like to be more certain of what I proclaim to be true than you.
So now it's John. Hm.
Here's what I believe, Karl. Around about 4 B.C. a kid was born and grew up educated by various philosophers and had a wide range of experience in his part of the world. He'd seen a lot, read a lot, was a pretty sharp guy, and one day hung out his shingle (so to speak) as a teacher, most likely in the Greek fashion, and gathered around him a colloquium of students-cum-acolytes. They hit the road.
This guy was a bit of a radical. He preached a couple of things that must have raised some eyebrows—like universal equality, tolerance, self-analysis, and the ephemeral nature of human endeavors. Some of it got him on the wrong side of the local power brokers and eventually they shut him up after he made a spectical of the hypocrisy of running a money exchange (at profit) in a place where such things weren't supposed to happen. The Roman authorities were called in and a case was made that this guy was a terrorist—a zealot, in the parlance of the day—and he was set up, arrested, tried, and executed as a rebel.
Fast forward. The message the guy had stuck. At least parts of it. Universal equality, especially to the down-trodden, must have sounded pretty good. Doubtless he made a case for it, probably better than it is made in the New Testament. But how could a mere man be that smart? Must've had some divine intervention there. Some other people over here decided his life fit some version of a prophecy they read from the Old Testament, and then, like a game of telephone, the story got distorted from repetition and embellishment until we reach the point where it gets written down as some kind of messianic fulfillment. The message gets kind of muffled inside the airier stuff about a return of Hebrew greatness and ousting Rome and such stuff. At one point, it gets run through some Ptolemaic scholars and they see the rough outlines of Horus and lay on a couple more layers and voila! we have this congeries of myths making him not a new Socrates but the Son of God!
And we poor dumb idiots, who have seen this kind of thing before, and still see it today (Mormons, Scientologists) decide for whatever reason that this one must be real.
But the original message is still potent. Universal equality, self-analysis, tolerance. All the rest is window-dressing. Unfortunately, window-dressing people have been killing each other over for millennia and now, today, threatens to distort a political process that just might work well without all this mythic crap.
Mark,
Thanks for your vantage point.
It sounds like you have gone about as far as you will ever get regarding the rest of the written documentation about Jesus. Pick and chose as you will, I can't fault you for considering how human nature could have really messed up all of these perspectives to the point that even a really decent fellow waas turned into a raving lunatic by his followers.
Not at all surprising that you will believe only so far and no further.
I believe (but could be mistaken) that it was Gibbon who first observed that all miracles are reported only second or third hand.
Outside the Bible and a few apocryphal fragments, there is no "rest" of written documentation about Jesus. He never appears in any contemporary historical documents. (Josephus doesn't count – that's only a compilation of stories told by the Jews he was chronicling. And it came after the fact, as the gospels.)
Accidental use of a colloquialism – "after the fact". Gonna burn for that one.
My reference to the rest of the documentation about Jesus is the rest of the Old and New Testaments which are unbelievable from your chosen scientific and naturalistic view point.
Thomas Jefferson did the same thing. In essence this is the a purported to be a purely scientific perspective.
Jesus was okay as a teacher, but his followers really carried the whole matter way out of proportion when anything written seems to be an uncomfortable account of anything even hinting of being scientifically unexplanable, especially the resurrection from the dead and the ascension to heaven.
And then there are all of the "before the fact" prophecies which were all manufactured to fit or simply interpreted to fit because the followers of Jesus had nothing but a sense of grand delusion of the importance of "happenstance."
It seems the only historical evidence you'll accept would have to be a time capsule that couldn't possibly have been "tampered with" – from some well known, famous secular Roman Scholar/Official who would have risked a great deal for even suggesting in writing that Augustus or Tiberious may have had some serious competetion worth risking everything for the sake of truth. Give me a break – like that kind of information would survive to this very day.
There is a good reason why the is no offical Roman documentation other than the crucifixion of Christ.
Do you not know that Roman Officials at the time of Christ basically were required to worship Cesaer (at least publically) or risk their very lives.
People will believe what they want to believe, especially with regard to their own preferences concerning the earliest of human writings.
Some simply discount what they don't believe as incredulous, others have a need to logically construct reasons to debunk these writings by using "secular" scholarship or science to debunk what was recorded in the past.
Secular writers, as you well know, have to carefully choose what they write so that they aren't linked personally to what is believed by others.
For those who think Roman writings didn't have a slant to them read about the imperial cult that went into full swing under Augustus and didn't end until Constantine.
Even common Roman citizens who taught/wrote anything that might contradict this would probably have had a lot of explaining to do as the Apostle Paul did on several occassions. Any official Roman historian who wrote that Caesar had any competition and thought that their writings might have survived the "fairness doctrine" were simply dreaming.
In the Roman Empire the Imperial cult was the worship of the Roman emperor as a god. This practice began at the start of the Empire under Augustus, and became a prominent element of Roman religion.
Roman religion no doubt regulated much of what was put in "official" documents and histories regarding anything concerning God or the gods.
Who changed the Bible and why? Maybe a better question should be who/what changed the Imperial Cult and why?
Karl,
As far as I know, no one has defended the Roman cults anymore than the Christian cult. Part and parcel of my approach has always been, when it comes to gods and such, they are ALL cracked. I've had a number of conversations with self-styled pagans who presume I am sympathetic with their world view because I'm not a Christian and are quite annoyed when I correct them on that point—no, it's a religion, it's based on a premise I do not accept. All of them.
Which is why I tend to insist that this guy Yeshua had a message that was very potent and it didn't have to do with gods and an afterlife. The Roman cult mindset would not have had a conception of sin the same way a Jewish or Christian concept held it to be, so the whole being saved thing would likely have sounded bizarre to them, certainly not a "normal" way of thinking. But the equality message…the personal is important message…there was some power in that and it wouldn't have been completely alien because a consequence of a certain way of looking at Socratic philosophy would lead one to similar conclusions.
The whole point of historical analysis is to tease out the facts in spite of the inevitable spin. I mean, hell, you can't take everything that Seutonius says at face value, either—he was a gossip monger!—but you can, with effort and cross reference to other records figure out a large part of the actually history.
But you take the records left behind by an isolated community who pointedly despised the world and kept to themselves and basically wrote to each other for some kind of defensible record? (The Essenes, in this case, who among other things really thought the world was about to come to an end, like, tomorrow!) Yeah, that's reliable as actual history.
The fact that the early church threw out a lot of the apocrypha and the alternate Gospels because they didn't agree with an agreed-upon story ought to raise all kinds of alarm bells about the reliability of the text at hand. Instead, you turn it all on its head and insist that they were the only ones who really knew the truth.
They were defending their organization. You can kind of see that happening today when people get irate when a factual depiction of the Founding Fathers comes out and certain details piss people off. They've already accepted that these men were somehow sacred, so why talk about their faults? Let that trend have ascendancy and never challenge it, in a few generations you get the kind of hagiographic "history" that admits to no error.
What's the problem, really? Why is so hard to put the emphasis on what the man said, instead of who he was? And if the former is to be our choice, wouldn't it behoove us to be sure of what parts attributed to him are legit?
Because what a man is and what he does can not be separated from what he says, or you have a confused, purposeless and hopeless existence. If good words matter more than good character there is really a huge disconnect.
Jesus never had to tell the demons who he was, they were never so fully connected to the physical world that they had a disconnect with their spiritual nature.
Far too many people believe there is no such thing as a spirit, they only believe in the physical nature of existence. That's why "being" is secondary to what they have to say.
It all comes down to who a man is, body mind soul and spirit.
Karl, you just stepped over into my pidgin. I could name a good dozen great writers who wrote wonderful stuff but were themselves odious, broken, or corrupted individuals. The capacity to see does not always equate to an ability to be. That doesn't diminish the seeing.
Concur on body and mind. And only the last two (soul, spirit) if they are another way to say "character". Spirit may be a state of mind, yet mind is already covered. "Soul"? No evidence. Maybe that's wrapped up in "mind" also. It's certainly a creation of a mind.
The people who write wonderful stuff but have "odious, broken lives" are able to do so because they and/or others have a sense of what they believe to be either remarkable ways of living or just plain remarkable ways of looking at a world that they seem to not be comfortable with.
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo is just such a work.
One sees tragedy on many levels, but the triumph as I see it is that that Jean Valjean is always seeking for ways to escape from the consequences of his past by trying to help others who basically don't trust him because of his past.
When one assumes external words or saying are more important than being, then one must also assume that asking is more important than changed behavior in a search for forgivness.