One more demonstration that conservatives in the USA are losing their marbles

[fpb]

The opening sentence - the opening sentence, mind you - of today's Dennis Prager column:

One of the reasons for the ascendance of the English-speaking world has been that the English language is almost alone among major languages in having the word "earn."

The man evidently knows no foreign language, and, what is more, does not expect any of his readers to. Incidentally, whatever he was paid for this column was not money well earned.

Comments

Re: Way Way Way Off Topic

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this is still of any use to you, but I failed to give a proper answer when I should have, and I apologize. I pretty much left you to deal with this deluded person on your own.

So. From the viewpoint of the ordinary historian, to have to argue that Jesus existed is rather like having to argue that Napoleon existed. The evidence for the life of Jesus is as good as that for most known figures of his time, better than that for many. (For instance, the life of the famous "five good Emperors", Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Augustine and Marcus Aurelius, is known mostly through poor and unreliable sources.) But if I had to produce an argument, I would say this: that if Jesus had been invented, he had been invented with the witting collaboration of large strata of educated Roman opinion and of the Roman State, and within a decade or two of his "supposed" life and death.

To begin with, there is the evidence of the Gospels themselves. In the nineteenth century, there was a concerted effort - mainly from drifting Protestant academics and French liberals - to demonstrate that the New Testament was written no earlier than the second century, and thus had no historical value as a contemporary record. This desperate attempt, always improbable in view of the testimonies of Papias, Ignatius of Antioch and Irenaeus of Lyons, broke down completely when papyrus fragments proving the earlier existence of the Gospel of John were discovered, and twice over upon the evidence of the archaeologist Sir William Ramsay, who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, proved beyond reasonable doubt that the author of Luke and Acts had lived in the first century and could not have lived in any other, because his works are full of references to contemporary realities that often changed in a matter of years, and eyewitness descriptions of actual fact. After Ramsay, a series of similar discoveries were also made about John. Neither Luke nor John can possibly have written after about 90 AD, that is, outside living memory.

The historian G.W.Bowersock, in his important study Fiction as History, has since added an important consideration. He has given us strong reason to believe that the stories of the New Testament, including the Crucifixion, were widely known and an important cultural influence on later Roman literature. (Hence the title.) He traces this influence back and finds that it appears, suddenly and with no precedent, at the court of Nero in the work of Petronius Arbiter. Nero was the Emperor to whom Paul appealed against a death sentence.

There is a lot more to be said, but these few facts, alone, are enough to dispose of the superstition of the "unhistorical Christ" for anyone who has any respect for the craft of the historian. In fact, it was dead long before most of its supporters had had any opportunity to debate it. So why has it proved so enduring in some quarters? Well, apart from the obvious ideological appeal, there is the way that such people promoted each other and their doctrine to the newspapers. Every time their work was quoted, was in a cloud of admiration of their scholarly and personal integrity. You never hear mention of Loisy, to mention a prominent one, without high praise of his scholarship, integrity and progressive attitude, and of how wrong the Church was to condemn him; and yet, as a matter of pure and obvious fact, the Church was right and Loisy wrong. The counter-proof to his theories came up within his lifetime, and he refused either to debate or even to acknowledge them - so much for scholarship and integrity. They are pretty much all like that, except for Harnack and JAT Robinson, who changed their minds when faced with evidence.