4 ms·

[Unable to edit previous comment, so posting a new comment to clarify what I actually mean] The Bible was created by the accretion of fake stories. Why do peo

[Unable to edit previous comment, so posting a new comment to clarify what I actually mean] The Bible was created by the accretion of fake stories. Why do people have an objection to the addition of some fakes over others? That is why make a distinction between the original fakes vs the later ones?

ogogmad 4y ago
I'm not sure what you're asking. The article concerns what some scribes who lived 2000 years ago wrote in their own hand - not the veracity of their beliefs. Something is fake if they didn't write it but it was passed off as theirs.
moloch-hai 4y ago
It is a good point. We like our forgeries to be as old as they are supposed to be. Then again, sometimes they do report factual details, or accurately tell us what somebody at the time wanted believed. Best scholarship today says there was no person who walked around Judea telling the parables related in the gospels. It all seems to have been made up two generations after the cult started. Congregations demanded a person to have told the parables, and a narrative about where and when they were told. "Mark" is that narrative, with the other three gospels cribbed from it adding doctrinal "corrections" favored in different places. ("Mark" etc. names were pasted on centuries later; nobody knows who wrote them.) The only otherwise-plausible bits of evidence of such a person, in Josephus, are transparent later insertions. Pliny and Tacitus, often cited, only repeat what they had been told Christians believed. Third-century Church authorities were thorough in destroying all documents they controlled but what they chose to put in the Bible. In later centuries they fabricated industriously. So almost everything claimed to be contemporaneous is transparent fakery, Paul excepted. Pauline material is cut'n'pasted freely, and often doctored, sometimes even accidentally. See Richard Carrier, "Why Invent the Jesus?".
- rthomas6 4y ago
  I am sorry to be contrarian, but I do not think Richard Carrier represents the best scholarship today, and the mainstream scholarly view is in fact that Jesus was a real person. The theory of Jesus as myth is in fact considered a fringe theory without much scholarly support. Here is one piece of evidence for the existence of an actual historical Jesus: Paul claims to have confronted Peter in person in Galatians, which is one of the Pauline epistles considered to be genuine. This is solid evidence for Peter being a real person. Peter is supposed to have been one of Jesus's disciples. So how can we plausibly claim that early Christianity did not have a Jesus? This is the same level of evidence for many Greek philosophers being real people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Carrier#Reception_and_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Carrier#Reception_and_...
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    There are methods to distinguish original text from later insertions and alterations. Paul is generally agreed to be a distinct author writing in the 60s, but with numerous later insertions and alterations, often by Eusebius (or possibly his teacher). For example, a rant in Thessalonians excoriating Jews for executing Jesus is transparently Eusebius, by several different lines of evidence. Somebody named Peter could easily exist and be written about without need for a physical Jesus. Lots of cults of the time "had" a Jesus/Yeshua. It was more or less required. Having a live Jesus, and that Jesus actually saying and doing what was very clearly made up decades later, are not the same. Wikipedia is notoriously unreliable about current scholarship, being heavily 'curated' by retired professors with nothing left to do but defend what they picked up in grad school against new information.

ogogmad 4y ago

I'm not sure what you're asking. The article concerns what some scribes who lived 2000 years ago wrote in their own hand - not the veracity of their beliefs. Something is fake if they didn't write it but it was passed off as theirs.

moloch-hai 4y ago

It is a good point. We like our forgeries to be as old as they are supposed to be. Then again, sometimes they do report factual details, or accurately tell us what somebody at the time wanted believed. Best scholarship today says there was no person who walked around Judea telling the parables related in the gospels. It all seems to have been made up two generations after the cult started. Congregations demanded a person to have told the parables, and a narrative about where and when they were told. "Mark" is that narrative, with the other three gospels cribbed from it adding doctrinal "corrections" favored in different places. ("Mark" etc. names were pasted on centuries later; nobody knows who wrote them.) The only otherwise-plausible bits of evidence of such a person, in Josephus, are transparent later insertions. Pliny and Tacitus, often cited, only repeat what they had been told Christians believed. Third-century Church authorities were thorough in destroying all documents they controlled but what they chose to put in the Bible. In later centuries they fabricated industriously. So almost everything claimed to be contemporaneous is transparent fakery, Paul excepted. Pauline material is cut'n'pasted freely, and often doctored, sometimes even accidentally. See Richard Carrier, "Why Invent the Jesus?".

rthomas6 4y ago
I am sorry to be contrarian, but I do not think Richard Carrier represents the best scholarship today, and the mainstream scholarly view is in fact that Jesus was a real person. The theory of Jesus as myth is in fact considered a fringe theory without much scholarly support. Here is one piece of evidence for the existence of an actual historical Jesus: Paul claims to have confronted Peter in person in Galatians, which is one of the Pauline epistles considered to be genuine. This is solid evidence for Peter being a real person. Peter is supposed to have been one of Jesus's disciples. So how can we plausibly claim that early Christianity did not have a Jesus? This is the same level of evidence for many Greek philosophers being real people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Carrier#Reception_and_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Carrier#Reception_and_...
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  There are methods to distinguish original text from later insertions and alterations. Paul is generally agreed to be a distinct author writing in the 60s, but with numerous later insertions and alterations, often by Eusebius (or possibly his teacher). For example, a rant in Thessalonians excoriating Jews for executing Jesus is transparently Eusebius, by several different lines of evidence. Somebody named Peter could easily exist and be written about without need for a physical Jesus. Lots of cults of the time "had" a Jesus/Yeshua. It was more or less required. Having a live Jesus, and that Jesus actually saying and doing what was very clearly made up decades later, are not the same. Wikipedia is notoriously unreliable about current scholarship, being heavily 'curated' by retired professors with nothing left to do but defend what they picked up in grad school against new information.