Modern myths about the Gospels debunked

[Kulindahr]

This is worth watching: the guy takes the standard principles of historical scholarship and applies them to the Gospels, treating them no differently than any other document. It's impressive because he sets aside his own beliefs and goes with just scholarship.

[video=vimeo;35688256]http://vimeo.com/35688256[/video]

 

[TX-Beau]

Right, I never had some professor tell me or anyone I've ever known that he was going to try and turn us atheists.

Bullshit. Ruined everything he said. If people don't like evangelicals, they only have themselves to blame.

Let's see this data he keeps using as authority.

 

[Stardreamer]

Finally got a chance to listen to this, though admittedly while working on other things so I might have missed quite a bit. The one thing that strikes me on his commentary on discrepancies, it boils down to my own viewpoint of the Bible, it was written by Humans often years after the events and from differing viewpoints. That fact alone should put lie to the claim that it must be read as total literal accurate truth even if it is divinely inspired. God may be the source but there is static in the medium the message is transmitted through so to speak as the authors themselves introduce these variances in the process of recalling and writing the information.

 

[Kulindahr]

Right, I never had some professor tell me or anyone I've ever known that he was going to try and turn us atheists.

Bullshit. Ruined everything he said. If people don't like evangelicals, they only have themselves to blame.

Let's see this data he keeps using as authority.

I've never heard of a professor saying he was going to make anyone an atheist at the colleges I've attended, but I encountered one professor who said he hoped that by the time the term was over, everyone would understand how stupid it was to be a Christian, and several friends had professors who never let a week go by without denigrating Christianity.

I also had a prof who was a declared Deist, who loved pointing out that if fundamentalists are stupid to take the Bible literally without even inquiring as to literary genre, then atheists who read it the same way are even stupider. I don't recall him ever actually saying flat out that fundamentalists are stupid, and in fact once when a gal asked him if they were, he responded by asking if she was conceding an inability to think for herself. That was in keeping with a poster in his office that advised to never let anyone do your thinking for you.

 

[Spensed]

...It's impressive because he sets aside his own beliefs and goes with just scholarship.

That simply isn't true. His beliefs clearly color his scholarship and his critical thinking on many of the points he makes. His presentation is at each turn a sympathetic rationalization for what he would like to see.

For example, he analogizes the different witness recollections about the Titanic sinking to the differences in the Gospels. He concludes that just as the differences in the Titanic accounts don't detract from the fact that the ship sank so the Gospel differences don't detract from the fundamental events. While that may be true, he completely glosses over the fact that the result of the Titantic differences is that the witness accounts are, taken by themselves, unreliable as evidence of what occurred. So similarly he glosses over the fact that the Gospel differences, albeit explicable, detract from the reliability of the testimony presented. The issue is not whether the Titanic sank or not. It's how it sank.

His whole approach lacks the critical thinking and skepticism that one would expect a genuine historian to bring to the table. Everything that doesn't fit in with what he would like to see can't just be acknowledged as such, but has to be dealt with with, in my view, largely glib answers that would not survive objective review. He is trying to argue that a 35 or 65 year time gap is still reliable eyewitness testimony, when all he can muster from his audiences memory of World War II is two isolated voices, which contract the point he's making.

I don't even get to the fact that, as the word of God, one would expect the Gospels to operate to a more unimpeachable level of historical accuracy and internal consistency. What's the point of the word of God couched in time-bound literary convention and "telescoping" explanations to paper over lack of continuity problems? The presenter is treating the Gospels like any other human generated ancient text, which belies the need to see it as a much more remarkable product than that.

I'm not saying he's wrong about everything, just that he is an apologist and everything is tailored to fit in with his faith and preconceptions. Nothing new there then. Without his belief, one would see a much more rigorous and critical dissection of the material. IMHO.

 

[Jacquemar]

^^ So many good points. I wanted to argue some of them myself, but I didn't want to be patronized, yelled at, then called a liar.

 

[Kulindahr]

^^ So many good points. I wanted to argue some of them myself, but I didn't want to be patronized, yelled at, then called a liar.

He starts off by contradicting himself, admitting that the point about the Titanic is true but then saying the testimony was unreliable. To be consistent, he'd have to conclude that we can't know if the Titanic actually sank.

Then he makes a baseless claim, essentially asserting that WWII vets' memories can't be trusted because they're old, or some such thing, despite the reality that such memories tend to be burned into a person's memory.

The third paragraph then re-introduces exactly what the speaker doesn't do: treating the documents as special rather than as historical documents.

So, where were the "many good points"?

 

[Telstra]

These Christian/Muslim motivation speakers are bullshit artists.

 

[Kulindahr]

These Christian/Muslim motivation speakers are bullshit artists.

What the frak are you on? That was a history lecture by a history professor.

 

[Telstra]

What the frak are you on? That was a history lecture by a history professor.

He sounds like a motivation christian apologist speaker to me ...

 

[Kulindahr]

He sounds like a motivation christian apologist speaker to me ...

Maybe if he was trying to motivate people to study history.

 

[Telstra]

Maybe if he was trying to motivate people to study history.

Just watch him, he didn't look at any papers while he is speaking.
Just bullshit stuff out from his mouth, it is called a bullshit artist.

 

[Kulindahr]

Just watch him, he didn't look at any papers while he is speaking.
Just bullshit stuff out from his mouth, it is called a bullshit artist.

I taught high school for a while -- I didn't need papers when I talked to a class.
I taught at college level for a while -- I didn't need papers when I talked to those classes, either.
It's called knowing your material.

A lot of what he's saying is just common knowledge to historians, like his references to Plutarch -- and he tells where to look it up to check on him. He gives his sources -- you don't do that with "bullshit". I looked up some of his sources online, and in every case he was right -- like Dunn on the traditional authorship of Matthew and John.

A lot more of what he's saying is just explaining common sense things, like the difference between different perspectives and contradictions. There, I like the illustration from the burning of Rome; I'd never realized the three main sources disagreed that much!

Just because a lecturer makes something fun or uses examples people can relate to doesn't make him or her a "bullshit artist". If that were the case, then I had an astronomy professor, a geology professor, and a biology professor who were "bullshit artists". But no, they weren't, they were just good communicators.

 

[Telstra]

His speech is not history.
It is called Opinions.

 

[Kulindahr]

His speech is not history.
It is called Opinions.

You've never had a real history course, have you? History isn't, despite the way grammar school books portray it, a set of facts, it's a set of bits of information we try to piece together to make sense of. He spends a lot of time here explaining how historians do that -- like how to decide who actually wrote something when there's no author's name on it, or how to sift out what happened when three people reporting the same scene don't report the same thing.

Opinion is what you get in 'history' books when you're fourteen. What he's describing is how you figure out what goes into the books.

 

[Jacquemar]

His speech is not history.
It is called Opinions.

He has too little credibility. As one of the above posters said, he beliefs clearly colored his scholarship.

 

[Stardreamer]

He has too little credibility. As one of the above posters said, he beliefs clearly colored his scholarship.

And of course, no other scholar ever allows that to happen.

 

[Kulindahr]

And of course, no other scholar ever allows that to happen.

LOL

I've watched it three times now, and he sets aside a LOT of his beliefs and sticks with scholarship -- in fact, it looks like his scholarship has shaped his beliefs; most people with his background insist on a much "higher" view of scripture.

And he's right as far as scholarship on the dates and authorship -- that's a pendulum that's been swinging back since it became evident that the "Jesus Seminar" faithful weren't doing scholarship much, just indulging their subjective attitudes.

 

[Jacquemar]

^^ Uhhh... I never said they didn't. But in this case it's quite obvious.

 

[Spensed]

He starts off by contradicting himself, admitting that the point about the Titanic is true but then saying the testimony was unreliable. To be consistent, he'd have to conclude that we can't know if the Titanic actually sank.

Simply not true. The Titanic testimony is unreliable to the extent that it contradicts itself. But you can't face the possibility that inconsistent Biblical testimony is similarly unreliable. You have to stand on your head and argue that the inconsistencies aren't really inconsistencies because leaving out material particulars isn't inconsistent, etc. The issue is not whether the Titanic sank or whether Christ died, it's the "how of it" and whether the testimony can be trusted.

Then he makes a baseless claim, essentially asserting that WWII vets' memories can't be trusted because they're old, or some such thing, despite the reality that such memories tend to be burned into a person's memory.

Again, simply not true. I didn't say anything about vets being old. The presenter was arguing that testimony recorded 35 to 65 years after the event is still reliable and current eye witness testimony. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to appreciate that is nonsense and that point is compounded by the very small number of WWII vets in his audience.

The third paragraph then re-introduces exactly what the speaker doesn't do: treating the documents as special rather than as historical documents.

The speaker doesn't treat the Biblical texts as historical documents. Where is his caution and skepticism about, on his own case, 35 to 65 year old recollections? Sure some inconsistencies could be explained by additional commentary on the same event, but the additional commentary could also be evidence of inconsistency or poetic license. His agenda is very clear and the same kind of faith motivated apologia never pass muster with respect to non-religious historical events.

To the extent that the Gospels purport to be the word of God, obviously, they are special and it would reasonable to expect them to be of a higher standard that an ancient text time bound by its own historical context and literary traditions. Even the speaker realizes he can't make that obvious case. So he is left polishing up clearly undivine material to fit in with his beliefs.

Same kind of thing that one has been reading on these boards for ever. It would be much better to acknowledge the Gospel inconsistencies than deny them. They don't actually affect the trust of God's word, if one want to see the texts as such.

So, where were the "many good points"?

Well, you're hardly going to see them in a cloud of faith.