"Are you OK Scott? Aside from the obvious error in historical methodology, this statement is clearly predicated on the actual existence of the man named Jesus who lived"
LOL! Your entire post is full of these absolutely incomprehensible falsehoods and misunderstandings.
IF if we take the teaching ascribed to Jesus in the gospels as authentic"..."this would be a drastic violation of all ordinary rules of history..."
He then states that even the All-Christian-Commitee admitted that not one single saying of Jesus IN THE GOSPELS can be proved to have actually existed in the century when Jesus was purported (IN THE GOSPELS) to have said them.
His position is CLEARLY that the existence of Jesus as depicted in the gospels is not argued by history and cannot be believed on the basis of historical evidence. He does think the myths were attached to an actual figure, but that is conjectual and not historically sound. Nor is it the Jesus that you believe in.
For you to parrot your same old tired bromide is noisome. For you to put it in the mouth of the scholar, McCabe, who wrote tirelessly to expose the irrationality of fundamentalist ideas...THAT is reprehensible.
I have some important things happening today so I will leave you to fasten up your blinkers once again and to run around the track without a rider. But don't get too carried away because when I come back I will tear your lies into shreds...although I suspect that Scott and others will not allow you to get away with your simple-minded avoidance and twisting of facts!
The rest of your post is even more ridiculous than the part I have commented on! But let us give McCabe back his name which you have characteristically sullied. What does McCabe believe about the existence of Jesus?
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"The Fiction Of The Gospels
The less learned of the clergy pour fine scorn on the modern denial of the historicity of Jesus. It is a humorous illustration, they say, of the extravagances of the spirit of denial. There is a legend amongst them that an archbishop once showed that on the same principles you could prove that Napoleon I never existed: which certainly would be a humorous thing to do, as there were plenty of people still living in the archbishop's time who had actually seen Napoleon! I have myself known old ladies who remembered his death.
The ordinary believer is startled by, and is apt to be impatient of, the very question which forms the title of this chapter. But a very little reflection, if he will condescend to it, will show him that it is a quite serious question. A number of characters whose historical existence was as certain as the sun to whole ages -- King Arthur, Homer, William Tell, etc. -- have proved to be legendary. Adam is certainly a legend: Moses and Abraham are most probably legends: Zarathustra is doubtful. if the historicity of Jesus is so very certain, there must be some quite indisputable witnesses to it. Who are they?
The Gospels. Now, just as science is said to be "organized common sense," so modern scientific history organizes or directs common sense in these matters. Who wrote the Gospels? No one knows. They are entitled "According to Matthew," etc., not "by Matthew," etc., in the oldest Greek manuscripts and in early references to them. Indeed, even if they professed to be written by Matthew, etc., it would not follow that they were. But they do not profess this. Many scholars think, on very slender grounds, that the third Gospel was actually written by Luke. We shall see; though it matters little for our purpose, as the writer expressly says that he was not an eye-witness. He is, he says (i, 1-3), writing down for a friend, as "many" others have done before him, an account of what they have heard about Jesus.
What we want to know about the Gospels is whether the men who wrote them were in a position to know the facts. In ordinary history we ask two questions about any writer: what was his knowledge of the facts, and is he truthful? In dealing with religious documents, especially Oriental documents, we have to be particularly critical. Let me illustrate this.
About twenty years ago Mr. Myron H. Phelps wrote an account ("Life and Teachings of Abbas Effendi") of the origin of the new Babi or Babai religion which was then finding adherents in America. It arose out of the teaching of a Persian reformer, Ali Mohammed, called "the Bab" (gate). Like Christ, but in the year 1844 A.D., Ali Mohammed set out to reform the accepted creed and to bring people back to the worship of a purely spiritual God. He and hundreds of his followers were put to death, in 1850, by a combination of Persian priests and government; and what Sir J.G. Frazer calls "the bribe of immortality" had no place in the faith of those fearless martyrs. But the significant point is this: two or three years after the death of the Bab his life was written, and it was a purely human account of a Christ-like man; but some decades later a new life appeared richly embroidered with miracles in the Gospel manner!
What happened in the East in the nineteenth century could, surely, happen in the first century. If these lives of Jesus, the Gospels, were not written until some decades after his death, we must read them with great caution. The American Fundamentalist, who is the last to realize this, ought to be the first. He knows well how Catholic enthusiasm still makes miracles at Lourdes and St. Anne. Enthusiasm, even innocently, always glorifies its cause with miracles. In the early days of Spiritualism an eminent British judge published some remarkable experiences he had had a few years before; and he was compelled, in great confusion, to admit that his !memory was entirely wrong and he had misstated the facts in every important detail.
It is therefore most important to know when the Gospels were written. If they were not written until several decades after the death of Christ -- if the stories about Christ passed merely from mouth to mouth in an Oriental world for a whole generation at least after his death -- it is neither reasonable nor honest to put implicit faith in them. There were no journals in those days. Few people could read and write. Moreover, the Jews were scattered over the earth by the Romans in the year 70 A.D.; and the Christians had previously been scattered by the Jews themselves. What should we make of a story going from mouth to mouth in such conditions as these for several decades?
However, let us approach the subject on common-sense lines. How are we to test whether the writers of the Gospels knew the facts and did not merely put on parchment what was being said in the obscure and scattered Christian communities? Some Christian writers try to apply what are called internal tests. They say that the description of places and customs and daily life in Judea is so confident and precise in the Gospels that the writers were evidently familiar with the country in the time of Christ.
Tests of this kind are very delicate and uncertain. In one of Mr. H.G. Wells' novels -- "Marriage," I think -- the story is partly located in Labrador, which is minutely and accurately described. I found that few people had any doubt but that Wells had been there. But, when the able novelist was writing that book, he told me that he had just collected all the available books on Labrador and was "steeping himself" in the subject. He has never been near Labrador. Similarly, Prescott, the vivid American historian of the conquest of Mexico and Peru, never saw either land. He was blind.
A careful writer can easily "get up" a country in this way -- Keeping common sense as our guide, however, we will not suppose that a number of early Christians "got up on" Galilee and Judea in order to write lives of Jesus. In point of fact, they have only a very general and often inaccurate knowledge. Mark is generally admitted to be the oldest Gospel, and it is by no means detailed and precise in topography. In others, such as Luke, there are historical errors. Luke admittedly did not know Judea.
But we need not linger over tests of this sort. Take the book of Daniel. It is as vivid and precise and circumstantial as any Gospel; and it is quite demonstrably a forgery written centuries after the time it describes. We should say the same of a very great deal of the Old Testament. Such tests are useless. They would break down hopelessly in Homer. They would prove that Dante had really visited hell. They would make Keats a native of Corinth.
The first condition of any confidence in the Gospels is to ascertain that the writers lived within a reasonable time of the events described; and one hundred and fifty years of biblical scholarship have not succeeded in finding any proof of that. At present the general opinion is that Mark, the oldest Gospel, was written between 65 and 70 A.D.; and Matthew and Luke in the last decade of the first century; and John in the second century. Mark, it will be remembered, knows nothing about the miraculous birth of Christ; the first account of that turns up at least ninety years after the supposed event!
Moreover, the resurrection story and other details are not supposed, and cannot be proved by anybody, to have been in Mark by the year 70. Scholars have come to the conclusion that there existed at first a simple sketch of the life of Jesus which is the groundwork of the first three Gospels (and is best seen in Mark) and a collection of teachings which is most used by Matthew. At what date this sketch was written nobody knows. What precisely was in it nobody knows. You cannot put your finger on a single verse and say that it is part of the original Gospel. And, even if you could, there is not a scrap of evidence that it was written within thirty years of the death of Christ. Remember Ali Mohammed and his miracles!
If a religious reader thinks that he can dismiss all this as "Higher Criticism stuff," and points out how much these critics have changed their theories and how contradictory they are, let him reflect on his own position. He trusts the Gospels without any evidence whatever; without making the least inquiry into their authority. His preachers dogmatically say that the Gospels were "inspired" -- though the opening verses of Luke plainly say the contrary -- and he takes their word as simply as a child does.
This "Higher Criticism," which he hears so much reviled, is a very serious and conscientious effort of Christian divines, sustained now for more than a hundred years, to prove that the Gospels are worthy of ordinary historical credence. It has failed. The miraculous birth, the death on the cross, the resurrection and ascension, and the healing miracles, it is compelled to sacrifice altogether. By great effort it then concludes that some sort of, small Gospel or life of Jesus was in existence thirty years after the death of Christ; but that is too late to be reliable, and no one knows exactly what it said.
Moreover, while there is no evidence at all that the Gospels, our Gospels, existed before the end of the first century, there is very serious evidence that they did not. No Christian writer mentions one of our four Gospels until a hundred years after the death of Christ or makes any clear and certain quotation from any one of them. That is serious, surely. Yes, you may say, if it is true; but it may be another bit of Higher Criticism or of Rationalism. It is not. It is the very serious verdict of a committee of historians and divines appointed to study this question by the Oxford (University) Society of Historical Theology, an ecclesiastical society. They courageously published this disappointing result of their labors in "The New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers" (1905).
Pope St. Clement of Rome, for instance, wrote an important letter, which we have, about 96 A.D.; and a second letter bearing his name, though probably a Christian forgery, was written later. About the same time, or a little earlier, there were the so-called "Epistle of Barnabas" and the first part of the "Teaching of the Apostles." These never quote from, or refer to, the Gospels. For the first three decades of the second century we have the second part of the "Teaching," the "Pastor" (supposed to be by "Hermas"), and letters of Bishops Ignatius and Polycarp. Not one of these mentions the Gospels or makes a clear quotation from them. They quote certain words which roughly correspond to words in Matthew, Luke and (at a late date) John; but this proves nothing, as by the second century these sayings of Christ certainly circulated in the Church. We must say the same of the "Sayings of Our Lord" (or "Logia"), a second-century fragment containing seven "sayings," two of which are in the Gospels. It has no significance whatever, unless it be to discredit the Gospels. The writer clearly knew of no Gospel collections.
It is not until about 140 or 150 A.D. that Christian writers refer to and quote from the Gospels. They are clearly known to Justin, Marcion and Papias. The latter, the Bishop of Herapolis, an ignorant and credulous man who writes a good deal which nobody now believes, is known to us only from quotations in the fourth century historian Eusebius; a man who notoriously held that the use of statements to the Church was more important than their accuracy. This fourth-century quotation of a second-century obscure bishop is the only "serious" evidence for the Gospels! Papias says that he learned from older men that Mark and Matthew really wrote Gospels. That is not evidence that any historian would credit, and, in fact, divines do not believe it.
In order to realize the full significance of this, it is necessary to know a little more about the early Christian world than a Christian usually knows. He imagines just a loyal group of virtuous men and women meeting secretly here and there, at Corinth or Ephesus or Thessalonica, to break bread and pray to Jesus. On the contrary, from about 50 to 150 A.D., early Christianity was a most intense ferment of contradictory speculations. Greek, Persian, Jewish, Egyptian, and all kinds of religious ideas were blended with Christianity. We know the names of at least a score of Christian intellectual leaders and sects of the time. Gradually, of course, these people were thrust outside the Church and called "Gnostics"; but in the first century and the early part of the second Christian communities everywhere swarmed with these mystics.
It was in such a world that the Gospels gradually took shape. The idea of the average believer, that someone sat down one day and, under inspiration, wrote a "Gospel according to Matthew," and so on, is naively unhistorical. The writer of Luke indicates what happened. For decades the faithful merely talked about Christ. Men like Paul went from group to group, much as the cheapest types of revivalists do today, and talked about Jesus. Probably few of them could read, in any case; and Paul, to judge by his Epistles, had very little to say about an earthly life of Jesus. Then, here and there, some who could write put upon parchment what was being said. All sorts of wild and contradictory stories about Jesus were going about. Our four Gospels are just four that were selected in the fourth century out of a large number. These little biographies and lists of "sayings" grew larger and larger. There was no central authority to check them; the various communities were a day's, or even a week's, journey apart; and travel was costly for poor folk. There was not the slightest approach to what we call standardization.
So it is mere waste of time to write a Life of Jesus by a sort of intelligent selection of what you think is probable in the Gospels. All the Rationalist and other such biographies, from Strauss and Renan to Papini, are just subjective compilations. You may think it probable that Jesus really did this or that, but you cannot call it an historical fact because it is in the Gospels. The figure of Jesus, the biography, grew, as time went on. And, since that growth took place, during at least half a century of unchecked speculation and argumentation, in a world of Oriental mysticism and theosophy, you see the strength of the writers who hold that Jesus (as many of the Gnostics held) never was a man at all."
CON'T... |
