Abuse of Ancient History by New Testament Scholars

[_huckelberry]

I'm afraid it doesn't reassure me to see Symmachus apparently saying that the historical existence of FDR is less certain than that of Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great. I'm sorry, but that just really sounds like you've drunk the kool-aid of your profession. We have video of FDR. We have photographs. We have recordings of fireside chats. There are still a few people alive who remember the man. How the hell is this weaker evidence than we have for Julius Caesar?

I rather suspect Symmachus made an oops in constructing the sentence about FDR. I think Mike Licona made an oops on listing letters about the assassination. I also think Symmachus made an oops reading Licona's comment as Symmachus's clear and reasonable statement appear to be in agreement with Licona's, at least as far as what is the evidence.

They appear to agree except perhaps Mr Licona is happier jumping from seeing historical context for the Gospels to his personal belief in the report of a resurrection despite the fact that that event or nonevent is not historically open to determination. Some people find it easier to believe the Jesus story than to believe the Nephi story because of historical considerations even if it is clear that history cannot prove faith claims about who Jesus was.

[Guest]

First, Physics Guy, let me clarify the syntax of my sentence:

As for the "weak" case for a historical Jesus, there is nothing on offer with more plausibility, and it is only weak in relation to something else: it is weak in relation to case for the historical existence of Franklin Roosevelt, still weaker than historical Caesar and Alexander, but not weak in comparison to a historical Odysseus or a historical Nephi.

To me it seems clear that "it" (pronoun = "case for historical Jesus") is the subject of the first term of the series and is implicitly the subject of the remaining terms, since no other subject is expressed. I could have (should have?) written it this way:

The case for historical Jesus is weak in relation to the case for the historical existence of Franklin Roosevelt, and the case for historical Jesus is still weaker than the case for historical Caesar and Alexander, but the case for historical Jesus is not weak in comparison to a historical Odysseus or a historical Nephi.

I'm sorry I gave the impression that I was saying the case for Caesar's existence is greater than that of FDR, though I honestly don't know how I gave that impression. I don't drink kool-aid, and never have, but I've frankly never heard of anyone who thought we know more about Caesar than FDR, and I'm kind of surprised you could think a person who was able to write anything I've ever written in this forum could be capable of asserting such an absurdity.

In a sense, you've kind of given me an example to answer your first concern: of course people can wildly misread an author, and of course an author can write so that s/he is wildly misread. And that is the kind of issue you find in comparing manuscripts. Outright forgeries of the kind "too good to be true" aren't that common, and when they are, they are vigorously contested with a lot more than just a mere hunch, which is all that "too good to be true" really is. Go ahead and claim that Caesar wasn't murdered in the way all of our sources say: the burden is on you (not to be misunderstood: the general "you," not you personally) to explain 1) what actually happened and 2) how the wrong information came about and was perpetuated.

Moreover, there are several examples of texts whose manuscript history extends close a 1,000 years (Vergil, for example), and the variations are minor: places where Virgil was misunderstood, scribes tried to correct, for example. Or take Homer's Iliad, the earliest manuscript of which is 9th century. Beginning in the 19th century, lo and behold papyri from hundreds of years earlier were unearthed from Egyptian sand and we can actually trace the accuracy of the 9th century manuscript. It turns out to be quite stable. Same goes for the Bible, the earliest manuscript of which were from 10th century until the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls. There are some interesting cases of deviation (shorter Jeremiah, but we already knew about that from the Septuagint), but on the whole the text seems to have been very stable over exactly that 1,000 year span. This holds true even in the case of orally transmitted texts. The oldest manuscripts of the Rig Veda, for instance, are from the 11th century AD, but the linguistic evidence shows irrefutably that vast portions of that text are essentially unchanged from at least the 13 century BC—24 centuries. Nor should this be surprising if you look at the subcultures whose job it was to maintain the tradition. In India, for example, there were entire families who memorized sections of the Rig Veda backwards, and anytime there was a question about the accuracy of the text, their version was compared to the those who had memorized it forwards. Obviously, for that former group, the reverse Rig Veda was nonsense and was valuable precisely because the later dialect of Sanskrit couldn't interfere. And the Leningrad Codex of the Hebrew Bible was maintained by a family of scribes—real professionals, I'm talking about, not just people "trying to do the best they can"—who counted ever letter, then counted every paragraph, then counted every section and left their tallies in the notes and manuscripts so later scribes in the family could check. So, what do you (general "you") think the monks doing all that copying were doing? They were highly trained professionals who knew what they were doing, and the result is that it is extremely rare to find any serious deviation in manuscripts. The fact that it was a process over a 1,000 years and more is irrelevant, and anyone who is going to brush away the thousands of cumulative man-years and man-power that went into all that had better know what they're talking about.

[_SteelHead]

See I would have to question the assertion that Oral versions of the Rig Veda were accurate 20 some odd centuries ago against the way it appeared in the oldest written version. If it was un-written, how could you test the assertion? There seems no way to authenticate whether the Oral version drifted or not.

[Guest]

See I would have to question the assertion that Oral versions of the Rig Veda were accurate 20 some odd centuries ago against the way it appeared in the oldest written version. If it was un-written, how could you test the assertion? There seems no way to authenticate whether the Oral version drifted or not.

The arguments that the earliest layers of the Rig Veda go back to the 2nd millennium BCE are highly technical and depend on several languages and the complexities of the metrical systems of Indic, Greek, and Iranian. I know anything that isn't a hard science is supposed to be easy to grasp, but I'm not sure how I can explain this in something less than a book. The date is partially rooted in archaeology, but the crux of the argument has to do with the fact that Vedic managed to preserve metrical structures and linguistic features that simply could not have been known at the time that writing first appears in India (excepting the script of Mohenjo Daro, which is undeciphered and pre-dates the arrival of Indic speakers), let alone the time when the first manuscripts appear. More to the point, they could not have been known at any time after about 1200 BCE. The fact that they are not isolated features but constitutive of the Vedic text itself calls out for an explanation. Pairing what we know of how these texts were transmitted, the hypothesis I've presented seems to be the best and is widely accepted by scholars who work on this stuff, but a better one is welcome if you have one.

Saying all this is a version of an authority-based argument. I hate arguments from authority, but sometimes I get kind of impatient in talking about this stuff here, because the assumption is always that something non-mathematical should be immediately apparent and easy to grasp in plain English (and no other language) in one or two posts, and if it isn't, then skepticism is considered justified when it is based on two data points and some common sense, which is really lack of knowledge of the topic. One tries to fill it in but it becomes fruitless when the response consists of cnclusions that are masquerading as curiosity and ultimately amount to nothing more reasoned than an Abe Simpon-eque “I don’t buy it.” Someone like Physics Guy (whom I genuinely respect) asks a question that I assume is sincere, and the response to an informed answer is an uninformed skepticism and what seems like a willful misreading that comes close to dismissing the field he is supposedly curious about. His skepticism is simply not justified. I am sorry to say it but in your case too your skepticism is simply not justified on this topic, but you're free to reject any pretensions to authority I may appear to have present your own informed claim. “I don’t buy it” doesn’t cut it.

[_SteelHead]

No I understand that you know what you are talking about, but I fail to see how the persistence of language idiosyncrasies across the time period guarantees the preservation of specific individual details, nor prohibits the introduction of new elements early in the transmission of the story.

[_Symmachus]

No I understand that you know what you are talking about, but I fail to see how the persistence of language idiosyncrasies across the time period guarantees the preservation of specific individual details, nor prohibits the introduction of new elements early in the transmission of the story.

Yes, and not knowing anything about physics and in possession of very minimal training in math, I fail to see how time is relative to speed when the clock in my car keeps the same time as the clock on my microwave. And I fail to see how the speed of light cannot be surpassed, since drivers from Massachusetts seem to do it all the time, especially in school zones.

[Guest]

The case for historical Jesus is weak in relation to the case for the historical existence of Franklin Roosevelt, and the case for historical Jesus is still weaker than the case for historical Caesar and Alexander, but the case for historical Jesus is not weak in comparison to a historical Odysseus or a historical Nephi.

I read your original version as analogous to, "Spiderman is weak compared to Superman, still weaker [i.e. weak to a yet greater degree] compared to the Hulk, but not weak compared to Batman." At the time of my post I could only see that way of reading your sentence; the unbelievable meaning seemed clear.

In fact I was surprised enough that you would say that that I kept thinking about your post later, and eventually I thought of the other parsing of your sentence. By then I was already half asleep and I figured you'd be able to clarify, as you have. I'm sorry for getting hold of the wrong end of the stick, here.

About the solidity of the documentary case for ancient history, even your short answer here has been very interesting. I don't read popular physics books, because they're unlikely to inform me and all too likely to infuriate; in the same way you probably don't read the kind of history books I read. So I can perhaps bring the sad news that popular histories tend to tell engaging stories about the past without giving any hint about why we should believe those stories. You're much more likely to read invented color text about how Caesar must have felt on that last morning than to learn about Petrarch's discovery of Cicero's letters.

There's probably a great book to be written, explaining to the public how history actually works. Perhaps one could tie it together with fake news somehow and make a bestseller.

[Guest]

Many thanks, Symmachus. As always you delight and surprise with your display of erudition and eloquent, logical, and organized argument.

I will add that evidence for historical events recorded in the manuscripts can be checked against other texts (including inscriptions), numismatics, and archaeological finds. Suetonius—another author with a narrow manuscript history that starts in the 9th century—used to be doubted rather readily by some, particularly where his anecdotes seemed hyperbolic. Subsequent archaeological finds suggest that scholars had been hasty in doubting details about the imperial palaces that seemed overblown.

Let’s go back to the assassination of Caesar. The Queen of Latin inscriptions, the first emperor Augustus’ Res Gestae divi Augusti (Deeds of the Divine Augustus), completed by Augustus in his final year of life, begins with an account of his revenge against Caesar’s assassins. Copies of this document were inscribed in stone in Turkey, and an almost complete version of the text was discovered at Ankara. Augustus was a contemporary of Caesar, his grand-nephew, and his posthumously adopted son.

Nicolaus of Damascus, someone else Licona mentions, wrote a biography of Augustus that included lengthy passages about events in Caesar’s life. Nicolaus was the tutor of Cleopatra’s children. The Cleopatra, who had affairs with both Caesar and Antony. Nicolaus, in other words, knew many of the principals involved in the events of the final years of the Republic. He used a lost autobiography of Augustus as one of his principal sources.

All of this is to say that the words of Brutus and Cassius are confirmed by contemporary sources. I don’t see how it would be possible to doubt seriously the assassination of Caesar as people have come to doubt (erroneously, in my view) the historicity of Jesus. That’s because the assassination of Caesar is much better attested than the life of Jesus. Licona’s comparison was a bad one to begin with. He cherry-picked an event he believed would make the case for a historical Jesus seem better than it is (unnecessarily, since it is good enough as it is).

[Guest]

The Queen of Latin inscriptions, the first emperor Augustus’ Res Gestae divi Augusti (Deeds of the Divine Augustus), completed by Augustus in his final year of life, begins with an account of his revenge against Caesar’s assassins. Copies of this document were inscribed in stone in Turkey, and an almost complete version of the text was discovered at Ankara.

Amazing. Another example of important source information that never seems to make it into the books I read. It's weird, because this kind of detail seems much more interesting than a lot of what they do put into those books. Maybe popular authors just have a phobia about mentioning anything that seems too technical.

[_SteelHead]

No I understand that you know what you are talking about, but I fail to see how the persistence of language idiosyncrasies across the time period guarantees the preservation of specific individual details, nor prohibits the introduction of new elements early in the transmission of the story.

Yes, and not knowing anything about physics and in possession of very minimal training in math, I fail to see how time is relative to speed when the clock in my car keeps the same time as the clock on my microwave. And I fail to see how the speed of light cannot be surpassed, since drivers from Massachusetts seem to do it all the time, especially in school zones.

Symmachus, you've inspired me to do some reading in this topic. I work with digital communication. In digital communication their is the understanding that a single transmission error, a bit flip can have a very bad outcome and so techniques like hamming codes exist to detect and correct errors. From my reading it seems that there were some built in integrity checks into the rigveda. It is interesting stuff.