"Already did. Ramsey's remarks about Luke are very clear and he set out to disprove the historical accuracy of Acts"
Ramsey's remarks may be clear, but I have already indicated that they tell us nothing about the origins of the Jesus myths and miracles. There are thousands of miracle workers and stories recorded--not of Jesus. The fact that archeological data can be related to mundane claims of certain cities existing or such hardly proves extraordinary claims of events. Charles Dicken's writings are archeologically sound, too. There IS a London. And there IS a Copperfield and there IS a Pip--but not the fictional people he referred to.
Here is a good analysis of "Luke":
infidels.org
Why I Don't Buy the Resurrection Story (2000)
Richard Carrier
3. The New Testament Casts Suspicion on Jesus Actually Appearing After Death
3k. Was Luke a Learned Man? Would That Even Matter?
"What you can't dispute," a critic wrote to me some time ago, "is that the book of Luke was written by a learned man, a physician and historian. If Luke had written a 'secular' history book, nobody would dispute his accounts." That isn't true (see below). It is also important to note that whoever wrote Acts was not a critical historian, nor were they necessarily "learned" (more on that below, too). We know of no critical history of Christianity until centuries after the fact. The first true "historian" of Christianity is Eusebius, writing in the 4th century (the Christian Julius Africanus wrote a chronicle in the 3rd century, but that is not a critical history either).
Luke's being a doctor is also merely a supposition. It can certainly be disputed. The physician companion of Paul may not be the author of Acts or the gospel attributed to him. We have no evidence, in fact, that he was. It was merely presumed by others, a century later. Luke doesn't sign either book, much less tell us his profession. His accounts are less fabulous, and thus show signs of an educated seriousness lacking in the other gospels, but these works display no details that would require him to have had an actual medical education. So we cannot know if he was a doctor.
One might argue that there is then no basis for disputing the notion that the author of Luke was a doctor, but if it were sensible to believe eveything that we have "no basis for disputing" we would have a lot of very odd beliefs. Why, by that reasoning, Alexander the Great was a sausage seller and an acrobat, and a magician on Wednesdays. But we have positive reasons to doubt that Luke, the author, was Paul's companion, "Luke the doctor." First of all, Luke the author tells us the wrong stories about Paul's conversion, and gets many of Paul's ethical opinions wrong. His companion would not likely have made such mistakes. Luke also explains insanity as the product of demons, a very unmedical opinion of the matter, certainly showing that Luke was not a member of the Methodists or Empiricists, the only two schools of medicine with rational views about the world. Thus, if Luke was a doctor, he was a superstitious one, and no more reliable a witness to fact than any other superstitious man of his age.
It has also been lamely argued that if all we are left with is tradition, that will have to do until proof becomes available. But by that reasoning, Jesus wrote a letter to the King of Persia. For we have that letter: it is in Eusebius' history of the church, the same place where both Lukes are proclaimed the same. If you doubt the veracity of Eusebius in offering a letter as actually written by Jesus (and he displays absolutely no doubt in its authenticity), then you must doubt the veracity of his other claims to tradition, including the equation of the two Lukes.
The fact is that ancient history is replete with examples of assuming that two names refer to the same people simply because they are conceptually related. Thus it was long assumed that Origen the Platonist and Origen the Christian were the same man, and that the Celsus of Lucian's acquaintance was the Celsus who attacked Christianity in the "True Doctrine." In both cases, this was simply because they had the same name and lived in the same time and place. But they have been shown to be different men. This kind of mistake is so common that it is wiser to assume that this is one such mistake, unless we have any evidence suggesting otherwise. For example, Tertullian the Christian and Tertullian the Lawyer are reasonably believed be the same (though this is still uncertain) because his writings show a competent and technical understanding of the law and the rhetorical and analytical techniques of Roman lawyers. We have no such clues allowing an equivalent observation in Luke's case, and even observations against it (like the attribution of insanity to demons). For instance, compare how two doctors report the miracles of Vespasian in Tacitus (Histories, 4.81). Nothing like that is in Luke or Acts.
Not that all this matters. Doctors could be just as superstitious as anyone else in antiquity, even employ magic in their healing practices (consider the medical writings of Theophrastus). And we are not told which school of medicine Paul's companion belonged to. Nor did being "learned" make one less gullible or more reliable. Herodian, a historian of the Roman Empire, is notoriously unreliable. And Pliny the Elder reports a lot of marvels as facts, and he was one of the most learned men in antiquity. Certainly the gospel author was educated. He could write, and less than 10% of the population at the time could claim that. But was he "learned"? The only men whom we feel qualified to call learned are those who cite or quote many other ancient authorities--the definition of being learned is, after all, having read many authorities. Plutarch and Pliny were learned. I see not even a single piece of ancient source material even mentioned in Luke. So he does not qualify as learned--at least not on what we have of his work. And Luke proves a serious lack of academic skill in one respect that has already been noted: he appears to have not read Paul's letters--also a good reason to reject the claim that he was paul's companion. He seems ignorant of many of Paul's theological positions, including his views on justification. And many other details, such as his account in Acts of Paul's conversion and travels, contradict many of Paul's own accounts (such as in Galatians). Moreover, Luke seems to have drawn details from Josephus, but in doing so screwed them up (see my essay Luke and Josephus).
One final word about "secular" history is necessary. It amazes me how Christians think us historians are all gullible dupes who "never" dispute anything an ancient historian writes. Indeed, I know of no ancient author, of any genre or subject, whom any modern historian completely trusts--and that even includes the most meticulous of them all, Polybius and Thucydides. The first thing we are taught as historians is not to trust any source. We are taught to find ulterior motives, weaknesses of evidence, the tendency to embellish and regard rumor and myth as fact, the attraction of amazing tales over sober reality (an attraction more than once explicitly stated, in even serious historians like Tacitus), as well as literary features such as redaction, propaganda, and agenda. And all these distortions find their way into all ancient sources, secular or otherwise.
Physical evidence is also essential to the reliabality of many historical claims. Yet we have none to support the miracles of Jesus, yet plenty to "support" the healing miracles of Asclepius. Certainly, if amazing recoveries happened in the temples of a pagan god, there can be nothing divine about the same thing happening in the presence of a Jewish holy man. And if we can be told about giant ants by Herodotus, who treats this tall tale as if it were true, then the tall tale of the zombies in Matthew should not surprise us either. The same things can be said of every aspect of the gospel accounts, in Luke or otherwise.
I have been asked if physical evidence is really all that important, and the answer is often yes. If there is a reason to doubt the reality of a person, it is generally doubted without physical evidence. Historians doubted the existence of Alexander of Abonuteichos, whose account we only hear in Lucian, until we recovered evidence corroborating Lucian's account: coins and statues. Many of the people attested in early books of Livy are still dismissed as inventions simply because there is no physical evidence. Likewise the Historia Augusta is divided into "reliable" and "unreliable" halves, based on the observation that after a certain point the people it refers to are not attested anywhere else, whereas in the first half we have coins, inscriptions, and papyri (or other references) confirming their existence (on the use of evidence in establishing the historicity of persons and events, see Lecture).
However, I do not dispute the existence of a man called Jesus. Nor do I think even physical evidence is a guarantee of truth. Although it is possible that "Jesus" was invented, this is not the most likely explanation of the facts. There were many men named Jesus, many of whom preachers of religious reform. His existence is plausible. What is in doubt is whether the miracles and other claims about Jesus are true. And whereas we have physical inscriptions of the miracles of Asclepius, we have none for Jesus, so that his miracles are even more doubtful than those of Asclepius (or have natural explanations, cf. my section on historiography). And although he is claimed to have had wealthy supporters (Joseph of Arimathea), by whom he was supposedly believed to be the divine savior of all mankind--the most important person ever to have lived, God Incarnate--somehow no inscriptions of any kind were ever commissioned. But we have the Gospel of Epicurus on stone, commissioned by Diogenes of Oenoanda. He obviously cared more about his savior's message than Joseph did about that of Jesus. What does that tell you?
[See my review of In Defense of Miracles for a much more thorough discussion of this issue, especially my comparison of Julius Caesar with Jesus, where I also refute absurd claims such as that made by Edwin Gordon Selwyn, "The fact that Christ rose from the dead on the third day in full continuity of body and soul--that fact seems as secure as historical evidence can make it" (cited by Josh McDowell, 1st ed., § 10.3A.2B, p. 190)] |
