Job 32-34

[wolfpurplemoon]

Just read an appropriate post at Pharyngula: The idea that the Bible should be interpreted as a metaphor is a good one — because it melts the superstition away.. I guess I need to stop trying to take every word of the bible literally, not that I know how else to take it.

Elihu was showing respect for his elders by just listening while they squabbled, but now they've reached a dead end in their discussion he's decided to let them know he thinks their arguments were flawed. He is very sure that he knows better than them.

Comments

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

There really is nothing improbable about Thermopylae. Remarkable, yes, but sadly, not at all improbable. People have been dying in hopeless causes as long as there have been people. Remember the Alamo! (Or Dien Bien Phu. Or Stalingrad. Or Iwo Jima. The list is very, very long.)

You mentioned in your other note (to which I hope to respond today) that you study philosophy. My own study was of English and history, though I did take Phil 101. (Aced it, in fact, but that's not saying much, and it was a while back.) Historians do not regard ancient texts as records of the past, but merely as pieces of the puzzle.

I used to think highly of Luke's Gospel because of how the author located his narrative in historical time. I taught as much in adult Bible study. Sadly, it does not bear scrutiny.

We run into trouble the moment we open Luke, because his genealogy differs significantly from Matthews. Then we get to Luke 2, which tells us Caesar Augustus decreed a world wide census for taxation purposes during the time Cyrenius was governor of Syria, requiring each man to register in his ancestral city. We can further triangulate because Luke 1:5 says this was during the time that Herod the Great was king.

Herod died in 4 BCE. Cyrenius was not governor of Syria during Herod's reign - he took office in 6 CE. There is no historical record that Augustus ever declared a world wide census.

Josephus records that Cyrenius conducted a census of the Judean province after taking office: ...Cyrenius came himself into Judea, which was now added to the province of Syria, to take an account of their substance, and to dispose of Archelaus's money... An uprising ensued, led by Judas of Galilee, an early skirmish of the Zealot movement that led to the first Jewish-Roman war in 66 CE. This would have been significant to Luke's readers, since it was written after the sack of Jerusalem.

The idea that the Romans, or anyone, would create the utter chaos of requiring people to register in their ancestral towns is absurd on its face, and few now give it credence. The Romans were nothing if not good at administration. Besides, Joseph's purported ancestor David had been dead for a thousand years.

Matthew tells us about a flight into Egypt to avoid Herod until after he died (again - he died in 4 BCE). Luke sends the family to Jerusalem forty days after the birth, and thence home.

I could go on, but this should be enough to make my case. Luke's Gospel is not an historical record. The writer of Luke was not an eyewitness; his sources were probably oral tradition, Mark's Gospel and the lost work one of my clergy friends called "The Gospel of Blessed Saint Q."

Most scholars date the original to between 80 and 90 CE, at least fifty years after the death of Jesus. However, we don't have the original. We don't have a copy of the original, or even a copy of a copy. Our earliest fragments are from ~ 200 CE.

Historians would therefore call the Lukan account a legend or myth, based on oral and written tales, with some obvious finagling of the details in an attempt to fulfill what the author thought of as prophecy.

[vequenor.livejournal.com]

I grant that my illustration was flawed.

(I wish you the best of luck in deciphering my other post; I was in a bit of a hurry, and typos tend to breed when I am in a hurry.)I am glad that you did so well in Phil 101. Before I began my studies in philosophy and psychology, I was much enraptured by ancient and medieval history. Now, granted, I never studied it in a collegiate setting past two "world civilization" courses, but I have quite the historical library. That being said, you are the first person I have ever heard that denies that ancient texts are at least flawed, biased, and very unsatisfactory records of the past. If all ancient texts were simply legends or myths, I should think they would be of very little use as puzzle pieces, as that the authors would have little reason to at least attempt to relate events accurately. Yes, Arrius and Rufus offer flawed and contradictory accounts of Alexander the Great's actions. That does not, however, translate into a denial of Alexander's existence or actions. (Again, this is merely an illustration. If it is flawed, my apologies)

It is interesting that the genealogies do not match. Polybius and Livy never could get themselves to agree on exactly how many Romans were present and slaughtered at Cannae(for somewhat obvious reasons), but that hardly detracts from the fact that there was a battle near Cannae, and that Rome lost it. You know, my Luke merely says that Augustus ordered the census, and that people went to their own towns to register. That does not translate into August ordering people to return to their ancestral homes, nor does it indicate that all Israelites felt that need to return to their ancestral homes. Luke 1:5 merely mentions that Herod, king of Judea was ruling while Zechariah was a priest. So, firstly, Herod the Great's presence(if indeed it is Herod the great, since three of his children bore his surname and ruled in the area under various titles) would seem to have more to do with John the Baptist, and less, if anything, to do with the census.

Again, I see little evidence that the Herod referenced was Herod the Great, save that it mentioned that he was king, and it wasn't until Herod Agrippa I that there was another king in Judea. However, it seems unlikely that the difference between an ethnarch and a king would matter that much to the Jews at the time. Again, it is curious that there would be no such record, and, indeed, unimportant.

Ah, Josephus; I recall reading quite a few people who disliked his attempts at history.

As above, I don't see why anyone would think that the Romans would have required anyone to return to their ancestral homes. And, while David had been dead for quite a while, he had been a king; I think that would make being his descendant slightly more important. Again, I am not sure why Joseph would have gone to Bethlehem, nor do I really need to know why he went. I don't know why Athens was stupid enough to get involved in Persian-Ionian affairs; but they did.

Matthew has the flight to Egypt take place after the departure of the Magi; most people I've talked to place the arrival of the Magi two years after the birth of Christ, so there's no contradiction there that I can see.

Have you read Luke 1:1-4? I'm not saying that Luke is a perfectly accurate record of anything; but it would seem that the man at least tried to create an accurate account. I never claimed Luke was an eyewitness; neither Livy, Arrius, nor Seutonius were eyewitness to all of their histories, so I fail to see the damage this does. Indeed, those would seem to be three fairly good sources, from what I can tell right now.

The lack of an original copy of the account is troubling, and may account for many of these oddities that you have pointed out.

I sincerely doubt they would call it a legend or a myth, since it does not seem to have been based on "tales" to much as "record." I haven't seen any obvious finagling, but that's just me.

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, I'm really falling behind.

Very quickly - I do not say that all ancient texts are myths and legends. I do say that Luke contains elements that are confected and constructed with a very clear aim in view: the burnishing of a legend.

I understand that Livy, Arrius, Suetonius, et cetera were not eyewitnesses to the battles they report. And their accounts are given extra scrutiny for where they might be currying favor with the current administration rather than reporting facts that might not be politically expedient. They were reporting battles and political maneuverings, fairly commonplace human activities.

Compare their battle descriptions with those of Homer. Homer was also not an eyewitness (duh!). We know that Troy existed and was destroyed - archeologists have been poring over the site for twenty years. But the battle is not what Homer really wrote about. He wrote about the struggle between men and gods. Does anyone believe for a moment that Achilles was protected by the goddess Athena?

Of course not - it's a legend. Still, the Illiad is one of the foundation documents of our civilization.

Now take a look at Luke, written over a eight hundred years later. There are doubtless some solid facts. The ultra-orthodox Sanhedrin existed. So did the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Zealots. Herod, Pilate, Quirinius are all documented in multiple sources. But what about the miracles attributed to Jesus? Luke only knew what Mark and "Blessed Saint Q" wrote. Did they really occur? Historians can't answer that. History records no miracles. It cannot.

Luke is not a fabrication out of whole cloth, but it does contain elements that are clearly manufactured to fulfill the needs of the fledgling community, and then very probably redacted further by still later believers. Remember, there was no "Christianity" in the second century - there were Christianities. Orthodoxy wasn't established until later, so there were competing beliefs and opinions about everything from the nature of God to the nature of nature.

Sorry - this is quick and off the cuff. It's past my bedtime. More later.

[vequenor.livejournal.com]

That's quite alright; I'm sure you have much more important things than live journal in your life.

I don't see why you would say that. I simply have never seen any evidence or support for such a claim.

I doubt anyone outside that particular culture was ever really supposed to believe that Athena protected anyone.

Yes, Luke did only know what Mark, Saint Q, and the quite-trustworthy oral tradition of the Jewish culture of the time could tell him. How does that in any way detract from his work, or differ from the situation of any other historian? As for miracles, I see no reason why they could not have happened; indeed, the only reason I can see to assume that their record is false would be assumption that miracles are not possible. This reasoning would seem to be flawed. I see no reason to believe that history could not record miracles; history is the in habit of recording events, is it not?

"Clearly manufactured"? I am afraid that the manufacturing is not quite as clear to me as it seems to be to you. What the status of the various versions of Christianity at the time was seems somewhat irrelevant.

I too would rather be in bed, hence I neglected to go into a discourse on explanatory factors and the probability of events/miracles. I look forward to later.

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

You say that you have never seen any evidence or support for the claim of parts of Luke being apparently created to burnish a legend. You somehow forgot our earlier correspondence. King Herod and Quirinius were not contemporaries. Luke says they were. Augustus never ordered an empire-wide census, Luke says he did. No Roman official has ever required a person to report to the village of a long-dead ancestor to be registered. Luke says it was so.

As I see it, you have three choices:

1. The author of Luke is correct and accurate. Any seeming errors are due to my limited understanding or the snares of the Evil One. .

2. Luke made mistakes about these historical points, but was still absolutely correct about non-historical points such as the Annunciation, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, etc. Moreover, no later scribe thought to correct Luke's errors.

3. Somebody put together bits of Isaiah including the misinterpretation of the word "almah" as "virgin" rather than "young woman", as well as a bit about Bethlehem from Micah and thought that it would be really great if the stories about this Jesus fellow could be said to have fulfilled (unrelated) ancient prophecies. I referred to this as "burnishing a legend."

Take your pick.

LiveJournal limits the number of characters I can use in a single response, so I'm dividing this up into three parts. Read on for why history and miracles don't mix.

[vequenor.livejournal.com]

As I told you earlier: Luke never mentions Herod the Great. He mentions a ruler of Jedea named Herod, which could easily have been any of Herod the Great's sons who were contemporaries of Quirinius. There is no record of Augustus ordering a census; that does not mean that he did not order one, and, even so, such a minor point would hardly tell against the over-all accuracy of any other document. Thirdly, as I already told you, Luke does not say that anyone was required to go to their home town, merely that people did so. As such, I really wish you wouldn't just ignore previous discussion as you see fit and deliver false ultimatums.

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

Explaining why history cannot report miracles gets us rapidly into epistemology and philosophy, but I'm going to try to summarize.

I'm limited. I have two or three pounds of hamburger called my brain to process what some sensory capabilities more or less adequately tell me about my environment. I can observe patterns and call repetitive patterns "rules" and use those rules to predict future events. In over fifty years of personal observation, for example, the sun has appeared to rise in the east every morning. Some mornings have been too overcast for me to see the sun, but I am sure that it was there nonetheless - my rule says it rises every morning. That rule helped me learn about our solar system, and how gravity works, and how planets move around their suns in elliptical orbits, and that our planet is travelling about a hundred thousand kilometer per hour to maintain its orbital equilibrium.

Now, I read a story that an ancient general commanded the sun to stop so that he could slaughter his enemies, and it did.

Which do you suppose is more likely, that all of the observed rules about our environment can be suspended at the command of a general, or that this story is false, that storytellers exaggerated, that the tale grew in the telling?

If the first is true, then we can know nothing. We can predict nothing. The sun might rise tomorrow, or someone might command it to stop. We might orbit the sun at 107,300 km/h, or maybe we'll put the hammer down and start orbiting at 300,000 km/h. Gravity might work, or maybe not. We have no patterns, no basis for rules, and no knowedge. The ballistics needed to launch artillery or get to the moon are false.

If miracles are part of how we know what we know, then we are ignorant savages cowering in our cold caves from the dreaded lightening god.

In Part Three: History is never the last word.

[vequenor.livejournal.com]

True, and it would be unfortunate if an essentially epistemological discussion actually got around to epistemology.

I would be very surprised if your few pounds of hamburger told you all of this by observation, and did not rely on anyone else's hamburger in the process.

Where on earth did you read that? Joshua 10:12 records a prayer to God in which it is requested in imerative form that the sun be stopped.

When dealing with likelihood, it is always best to take the broadest possible view of the odds. As such, the question would seem to be whether or not it is likely that the universe functions with or without a supernatural being of some sort that would be capable of playing with reality as it saw fit. As that it is highly, highly improbable that the universe came into existence without such a being, it seems somewhat more likely that such a being exists. As such, it seems likely that such an event would be possible. As to whether or not the book of Joshua is historically accurate is another thing altogether, and, quite frankly, beside issue of Luke entirely.

Forgive me, but we really can't know anything anyway. Everyone simply assumes that what their three pounds of hamburger interprets from supposed external stimuli is accurate. Everything anyone knows is based on an assumption that seems fairly poorly supported. Forgive me, that was epistemic. In any case, it would still be quite possible to know things even if such a being that could control human-produced laws of physics. A suspendable system is not necesarily a false one.

Odd...none of the theists I know cower in caves. Again with the fantastic and ill-supported statements!

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

History also is subject to revision in light of later information. Earlier writers gave glory to God for causing the indigenous people of our continent to sicken and die in sweeping plagues after encountering Christian settlers. It must be a Manifest Destiny! The germ theory of disease and the fact that Indians lacked antibodies for smallpox and other European bugs was not discovered until the late nineteenth century. Few would now be insane enough to assert that God wiped out the native Americans to make room for white people.

Miracles, on the other hand, brook no subsequent correction.

People rise from the dead all the time, in fiction. The Imperial Death Star can vaporize a whole planet, in fiction. Superman flies without regard to Newtonian physics, in fiction. We know all about making up stories. We do it all the time. How many miracles - the real deal, inexplicable by science and natural laws - have you observed today?

We know how easily we can be mistaken or misled. My mother told me of a priest in her town who enjoys the gift of bilocation - he can be miraculously in two places at the same time. I did not of course, tell her what I would tell you if you came to me with such a story - she is my mother, after all. But I tried to find our how she knew. Had she ever seen the phenomenon? She had not, she had the story from a friend from church whose word she trusted. My mother, who is otherwise quite sane and rational, and could catch me in a lie while the words were still on my lips, simply suspended critical faculties when it came to religion.

There's a charismatic wonder worker in my own town who, it is said, can heal the sick and pull gold coins out of thin air. Here's the thing: he himself has never made any such claims, just as I doubt the priest my mother heard of has ever declared his possession of miraculous gifts. They know better. They would be too easy to test and debunk. They are merely humble servants of God. Who are they to silence their enthusiastic if credulous supporters? Hosannah!

The account in Luke's Gospel cannot be considered an historical document, because it does not withstand historical scrutiny. There are elements that can be verified (a man named Pontius Pilate was Prefect of Judea between 26 and 36 CE), and other elements that cannot (Pontius Pilate agrees that a itinerant apocalyptic preacher "What is truth?" isn't really conspiring against Rome, but authorizes his execution anyway to appease the mob). It is easy, based on our daily experience, to see how certain features of the story are more likely to be imaginative interpolations than actual truth. Moreover, just as I would demand proof that my mother's priest can really be in two places at once, we must demand extraordinary evidence for the extraordinary claims of Luke's narrative. Speculative rationalizations are not evidence.

The Lukan gospel is a religious text or cultural heritage, not a history. It is legend.

[vequenor.livejournal.com]

Germ theory did not, however, change the fact that indigenous peoples died out. Ill-advised religious assertions that had no theistic backing were shown to be false, but that has little to do with Luke.

I haven't been looking for miracles. I have heard and seen as much record for mircales as I have for the existence of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Victoria Falls, and all manner of things that I'm told actually exist. Of course, there are apparently theological explanations as to why miracles seem to be less prevalent, such as the fact that the church is now the chief instrument of God's activities, leaving little need for modern miracles. Really, it doesn't matter whether or not modern miracles have been observed or not; I haven't observed elephants crossing Alps, mounted combat, chariots, or anything of the like. That has little to do with their existence of such actions and objects in their proper historical setting.

I note that you seem to have no actual evidence against these two people, other than the fact that they seem ridiculous to you.

Luke's account has withstood all historical scrutiny that I am aware of. If you were aware of the circumstances surrounding Pilate's descision, I'm sure you would realise how necessary his descision to appease the mob and leaders of the Jewish people was. Did you know that Pilate was already in considerble trouble with his superiors due to a bit of a massacre earlier on in his tenure? Pilate was required to keep the peace to the best of his abilities, and random slaughtering the locals was forwned upon at this point. As such, a policy of appeasement was in order, particularly since Pilate knew from experience how tenacions Jewish mobs typically were. At no point have successful shown one bit of significant failure of Luke's to withstand historical scrutiny. As such, the Lukan account itself functions as evidence for these events. This evidence would seem to be quite satisfactory, particularly considering that miracles are not all that improbable.

Rational thought would seem to disagree.