Post by hibernicus on Oct 21, 2013 19:54:36 GMT
I am told one of the Irish radio stations had a show yesterday (with an atheist presenter) giving a totally uncritical and reverential reception to an atheist claiming that Jesus and the Apostles never existed and Christianity was created by the Romans to divide the JEws
This sounds like the same guy:
www.patheos.com/blogs/publiccatholic/2013/10/one-more-nutty-attack-on-christianity/
Note particularly this link from the combox of the post linked above:
EXTRACT
Fabio Paolo Barbieri • 10 days ago −
What horrifies me is the hideous, swinish ignorance - not from the man himself, that is part of it - but from anyone in the media who have given him so much as a paragraph on Page 35. In the name (if you will not have God) of sense and truth and honesty and elementary knowledge, is there anyone there who has the least idea of the Romans? Of who these people were, how they thought, and how they acted? This creation of front movements in order to drain the support of rival movements - fake trades unions to diminish real ones, front democratic parties to deceive grassroots activists, and so on - is a strictly twentieth-century phenomenon. Even the imperial powers of the nineteenth century did not think of it. You can even point at the place when it was first thought of and created: Austria-Hungary, the eighteen-nineties, when someone set up a "national socialist party" to draw the support of German speakers in the empire away from the swift-growing socialist parties of the time.
That movement got nowhere, though the name, of course, had a huge future; it took the rise of the Communist Party, with its huge fertility in front movements and corporations and its habit of taking over other people's trades unions and even churches by subversion, fraud, and force, to make the creation of front movements a serious matter in politics. But until then, no Englishman in India, no Frenchman in Algeria, no Austrian in Italy or Spaniard in Cuba or Russian in Central Asia, had ever considered creating a front movement among their imperial subjects. It was impossible: they did not have the culture required.
And much less did the Romans. If you read Tacitus, who is, ONE, among the best known and most widely read classical authors today, and thus one whom anyone interested in Rome would be likeliest to know, and, TWO, a Senator and former Consul of the Empire, at the centre of politics and as knowledgeable about it as anyone; if you read Tacitus, I say, you will find that he knew little of the Jews and understood even less. His passages on the Jews and the Jewish war of 64-70 AD are classics of cultural misunderstanding, quoted in every course. And these people are supposed to have set up the Christian movement as a false flag operation? A movement, mind you, that offended Temple and Pharisaical/Rabbinic Judaism so deeply that the most savage writings against it went on for centuries and well on into the middle ages, even when Jews were living largely within a Christian society and cursing Jesus and his followers was clearly dangerous? A movement whose tenets make no sense in terms of Roman and Greek thinking - just read, in succession, some Tacitus or Pliny the Younger, and the First Letter of John - and which shows in every line of its sacred writings an almost incredible originality with respect both to contemporary Hebraism and to the official Greco-Roman culture? Give me a break.
What this is, alas, is the symptom of a culture that has completely uprooted itself from its own past and from the world around it, that lives in a made-up universe designed exclusively on its narrowest present-day experiences. I have observed it in cases where even intelligent, educated people, not only college students but college teachers, take so-called "gay marriage" not only to be a right but to be universal, found everywhere, rather than the purely local caprice it is. It arises from post-modernist readings that extend to all our past the late-twentieth-century categories of gender and sex, of post-colonialism and resistance and so on. Anyone who has had a humanities-related course inflicted on them in college is likely to know the sort of thing I mean. (But it is not only the PC college brigade who are responsible for this: I found an equal incapacity to step outside one's own contemporary little prejudices and lies among second-amendment NRA fanatics, with their completely false and fraudulent idea of even very recent history.) We write and read books that actively make us more ignorant - more elaborately, purposefully and self-centredly ignorant, making ignorance a matter no longer of isolation but of will and party allegiance, and so turning it from a misfortune to a sin which involves the whole soul in arrogance, vanity and denial - in sin. No wonder that it always turns against Jesus.
END
Useful links include this (has more links)
tomverenna.wordpress.com/2013/10/09/update-10313-no-joe-atwill-rome-did-not-invent-jesus/
and this by an atheist who believes Jesus never existed. Note some of his specific arguments contain atheist-nonChristian views which should not be accepted uncritically. Note also that Richard Dawkins is prepared to promote this stuff via Twitter even though it's on the same intellectual level as young-earth creationism:
freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/4664
EXTRACT
Historically, Atwill’s thesis is more or less a retooled version of the old Pisonian Conspiracy Theory, by which is not meant the actual Pisonian conspiracy (to assassinate Nero), but a wildly fictitious one in which the Piso family invented Christianity (and fabricated all its documents) through its contacts with the Flavian family, and thence Josephus (who indeed adopted that family’s name when they made him a Roman citizen, after he had tricked his officer corps into committing suicide and then surrendered to the Romans during the War…oh, and conveniently declaring Vespasian the Messiah).
This pseudo-historical nonsense is over a century old by now, first having been proposed (in a somewhat different form) by Bruno Bauer in Christ and the Caesars in 1877 (Christus und Caesaren). It has been revamped a dozen times since. Atwill is simply the latest iteration (or almost–there is a bonkers Rabbi still going around with an even wilder version). Atwill’s is very much like Bible Code crankery, where he looks for all kinds of multiple comparisons fallacies and sees conspiracies in all of them, rather than the inevitable coincidences (or often outright non-correspondences) that they really are. Everything confirms his thesis, because nothing could ever fail to. Classic nonfalsifiability. He just cherry picks and interprets anything to fit, any way he wants.
Why the Priors Are Dismally Low on This
There are at least eight general problems with his thesis, which do not refute it but establish that it has a very low prior probability, and therefore requires exceptionally good evidence to be at all credible:
(1) The Roman aristocracy was nowhere near as clever as Atwill’s theory requires. They certainly were not so masterfully educated in the Jewish scriptures and theology that they could compose hundreds of pages of elegant passages based on it. And it is very unlikely they would ever conceive of a scheme like this, much less think they could succeed at it (even less, actually do so).
(2) We know there were over forty Gospels, yet the four chosen for the canon were not selected until well into the 2nd century, and not by anyone in the Roman aristocracy. Likewise which Epistles were selected.
(3) The Gospels and the Epistles all contradict each other far too much to have been composed with a systematic aim in mind. Indeed, they contradict each other in ways that often demonstrate they are deliberately arguing with each other. From the ways Matthew changes Mark; to the way the forged 2 Thessalonians actually tries to argue 1 Thessalonians is the forgery; to how the resurrections depicted in Luke and John are deliberate attempts to refute the doctrine of resurrection defended originally by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 and 2 Corinthians 5; to how some Epistles insist on Torah observance while others insist it can be discarded; to how Luke’s nativity contradicts Matthew’s on almost every single particular (and not just in placing the event in completely different periods ten years apart); to how Acts blatantly contradicts Paul’s own account of his conversion and travels; to how John invents a real Lazarus to refute a point Luke tried to make with a fictional Lazarus; and so on. (I discuss some of these, and more, in my forthcoming book On the Historicity of Jesus.)
(4) The Gospels and the Epistles differ far too much in style to have come from the same hand, and many show signs of later doctoring that would problematize attempts to confirm any theory like Atwill’s. For example, Mark 16:9-20, John 20 vs. 21, the hash job made of the epistle to the Romans, etc. Even the fact of how the canon was selected creates a problem for Atwill’s research requirements–for instance, the actual first letter to the Corinthians is completely missing, yet Paul refers to its existence in “our” 1 Corinthians.
(5) Christianity was probably constructed to “divert Jewish hostility and aggressiveness into a pacifist religion, supportive of–and subservient to–Roman rule,” but not by Romans, but exasperated Jews like Paul, who saw Jewish militarism as unacceptably disastrous in contrast with the obvious advantages of retooling their messianic expectations to produce the peaceful moral reform of society. The precedents were all there already in pre-Christian Jewish ideology and society (in Philo’s philosophy, in Essene and Qumranic efforts to solve the same problems, and so on) so we don’t have to posit super-genius Aryans helping the poor little angry Jews to calm down.
(6) Pacifying Jews would not have been possible with a cult that eliminated Jewish law and accepted Gentiles as equals, and in actual fact Christianity was pretty much a failure in Palestine. Its success was achieved mainly in the Diaspora, where the Romans rarely had any major problems with the Jews. The Jewish War was only fought in Palestine, and not even against all the Jews there (many sided with Rome). How would inventing a religion that would have no chance of succeeding in the heart of Palestine but instead was tailor made to succeed outside Palestine, ever help the Romans with anything they considered important?
(7) If the Roman elite’s aim was to “pacify” Palestinian Jews by inventing new scriptures, they were certainly smart and informed enough to know that that wouldn’t succeed by using the language the Judean elite despised as foreign (Greek).[*]
(8) The Romans knew one thing well: War. Social ideology they were never very good at.[*] That’s why Rome always had such problems keeping its empire together, and why social discontent and other malfunctions continued to escalate until the empire started dissolving. Rome expected to solve every problem militarily instead–and up until the 3rd century Rome did so quite well. The Jewish War was effectively over in just four years (any siege war was expected to take at least three, and Vespasian was actually busy conquering Rome in the fourth year of that War). So why would they think they needed any other solution?
With all that counting against Atwill, he has a very high burden to meet. And he just doesn’t. He actually has no evidence at all for his thesis, except “Bible Code”-style readings of coincidences among texts, which he seems only to read in English and not the original Greek, all the while relying on egregious fallacies in probabilistic reasoning...
END OF EXTRACT
But hey, why would an atheist presenter on Irish radio need to bother looking for any of this before endorsing this flim-flam? All that really matters is that he and some more mental adolescents out there can make themselves feel smart by jeering at the Christians. And thanks to official neglect of apologetics, some Christians teetering on the edge of unbelief will sadly fall for this.
This sounds like the same guy:
www.patheos.com/blogs/publiccatholic/2013/10/one-more-nutty-attack-on-christianity/
Note particularly this link from the combox of the post linked above:
EXTRACT
Fabio Paolo Barbieri • 10 days ago −
What horrifies me is the hideous, swinish ignorance - not from the man himself, that is part of it - but from anyone in the media who have given him so much as a paragraph on Page 35. In the name (if you will not have God) of sense and truth and honesty and elementary knowledge, is there anyone there who has the least idea of the Romans? Of who these people were, how they thought, and how they acted? This creation of front movements in order to drain the support of rival movements - fake trades unions to diminish real ones, front democratic parties to deceive grassroots activists, and so on - is a strictly twentieth-century phenomenon. Even the imperial powers of the nineteenth century did not think of it. You can even point at the place when it was first thought of and created: Austria-Hungary, the eighteen-nineties, when someone set up a "national socialist party" to draw the support of German speakers in the empire away from the swift-growing socialist parties of the time.
That movement got nowhere, though the name, of course, had a huge future; it took the rise of the Communist Party, with its huge fertility in front movements and corporations and its habit of taking over other people's trades unions and even churches by subversion, fraud, and force, to make the creation of front movements a serious matter in politics. But until then, no Englishman in India, no Frenchman in Algeria, no Austrian in Italy or Spaniard in Cuba or Russian in Central Asia, had ever considered creating a front movement among their imperial subjects. It was impossible: they did not have the culture required.
And much less did the Romans. If you read Tacitus, who is, ONE, among the best known and most widely read classical authors today, and thus one whom anyone interested in Rome would be likeliest to know, and, TWO, a Senator and former Consul of the Empire, at the centre of politics and as knowledgeable about it as anyone; if you read Tacitus, I say, you will find that he knew little of the Jews and understood even less. His passages on the Jews and the Jewish war of 64-70 AD are classics of cultural misunderstanding, quoted in every course. And these people are supposed to have set up the Christian movement as a false flag operation? A movement, mind you, that offended Temple and Pharisaical/Rabbinic Judaism so deeply that the most savage writings against it went on for centuries and well on into the middle ages, even when Jews were living largely within a Christian society and cursing Jesus and his followers was clearly dangerous? A movement whose tenets make no sense in terms of Roman and Greek thinking - just read, in succession, some Tacitus or Pliny the Younger, and the First Letter of John - and which shows in every line of its sacred writings an almost incredible originality with respect both to contemporary Hebraism and to the official Greco-Roman culture? Give me a break.
What this is, alas, is the symptom of a culture that has completely uprooted itself from its own past and from the world around it, that lives in a made-up universe designed exclusively on its narrowest present-day experiences. I have observed it in cases where even intelligent, educated people, not only college students but college teachers, take so-called "gay marriage" not only to be a right but to be universal, found everywhere, rather than the purely local caprice it is. It arises from post-modernist readings that extend to all our past the late-twentieth-century categories of gender and sex, of post-colonialism and resistance and so on. Anyone who has had a humanities-related course inflicted on them in college is likely to know the sort of thing I mean. (But it is not only the PC college brigade who are responsible for this: I found an equal incapacity to step outside one's own contemporary little prejudices and lies among second-amendment NRA fanatics, with their completely false and fraudulent idea of even very recent history.) We write and read books that actively make us more ignorant - more elaborately, purposefully and self-centredly ignorant, making ignorance a matter no longer of isolation but of will and party allegiance, and so turning it from a misfortune to a sin which involves the whole soul in arrogance, vanity and denial - in sin. No wonder that it always turns against Jesus.
END
Useful links include this (has more links)
tomverenna.wordpress.com/2013/10/09/update-10313-no-joe-atwill-rome-did-not-invent-jesus/
and this by an atheist who believes Jesus never existed. Note some of his specific arguments contain atheist-nonChristian views which should not be accepted uncritically. Note also that Richard Dawkins is prepared to promote this stuff via Twitter even though it's on the same intellectual level as young-earth creationism:
freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/4664
EXTRACT
Historically, Atwill’s thesis is more or less a retooled version of the old Pisonian Conspiracy Theory, by which is not meant the actual Pisonian conspiracy (to assassinate Nero), but a wildly fictitious one in which the Piso family invented Christianity (and fabricated all its documents) through its contacts with the Flavian family, and thence Josephus (who indeed adopted that family’s name when they made him a Roman citizen, after he had tricked his officer corps into committing suicide and then surrendered to the Romans during the War…oh, and conveniently declaring Vespasian the Messiah).
This pseudo-historical nonsense is over a century old by now, first having been proposed (in a somewhat different form) by Bruno Bauer in Christ and the Caesars in 1877 (Christus und Caesaren). It has been revamped a dozen times since. Atwill is simply the latest iteration (or almost–there is a bonkers Rabbi still going around with an even wilder version). Atwill’s is very much like Bible Code crankery, where he looks for all kinds of multiple comparisons fallacies and sees conspiracies in all of them, rather than the inevitable coincidences (or often outright non-correspondences) that they really are. Everything confirms his thesis, because nothing could ever fail to. Classic nonfalsifiability. He just cherry picks and interprets anything to fit, any way he wants.
Why the Priors Are Dismally Low on This
There are at least eight general problems with his thesis, which do not refute it but establish that it has a very low prior probability, and therefore requires exceptionally good evidence to be at all credible:
(1) The Roman aristocracy was nowhere near as clever as Atwill’s theory requires. They certainly were not so masterfully educated in the Jewish scriptures and theology that they could compose hundreds of pages of elegant passages based on it. And it is very unlikely they would ever conceive of a scheme like this, much less think they could succeed at it (even less, actually do so).
(2) We know there were over forty Gospels, yet the four chosen for the canon were not selected until well into the 2nd century, and not by anyone in the Roman aristocracy. Likewise which Epistles were selected.
(3) The Gospels and the Epistles all contradict each other far too much to have been composed with a systematic aim in mind. Indeed, they contradict each other in ways that often demonstrate they are deliberately arguing with each other. From the ways Matthew changes Mark; to the way the forged 2 Thessalonians actually tries to argue 1 Thessalonians is the forgery; to how the resurrections depicted in Luke and John are deliberate attempts to refute the doctrine of resurrection defended originally by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 and 2 Corinthians 5; to how some Epistles insist on Torah observance while others insist it can be discarded; to how Luke’s nativity contradicts Matthew’s on almost every single particular (and not just in placing the event in completely different periods ten years apart); to how Acts blatantly contradicts Paul’s own account of his conversion and travels; to how John invents a real Lazarus to refute a point Luke tried to make with a fictional Lazarus; and so on. (I discuss some of these, and more, in my forthcoming book On the Historicity of Jesus.)
(4) The Gospels and the Epistles differ far too much in style to have come from the same hand, and many show signs of later doctoring that would problematize attempts to confirm any theory like Atwill’s. For example, Mark 16:9-20, John 20 vs. 21, the hash job made of the epistle to the Romans, etc. Even the fact of how the canon was selected creates a problem for Atwill’s research requirements–for instance, the actual first letter to the Corinthians is completely missing, yet Paul refers to its existence in “our” 1 Corinthians.
(5) Christianity was probably constructed to “divert Jewish hostility and aggressiveness into a pacifist religion, supportive of–and subservient to–Roman rule,” but not by Romans, but exasperated Jews like Paul, who saw Jewish militarism as unacceptably disastrous in contrast with the obvious advantages of retooling their messianic expectations to produce the peaceful moral reform of society. The precedents were all there already in pre-Christian Jewish ideology and society (in Philo’s philosophy, in Essene and Qumranic efforts to solve the same problems, and so on) so we don’t have to posit super-genius Aryans helping the poor little angry Jews to calm down.
(6) Pacifying Jews would not have been possible with a cult that eliminated Jewish law and accepted Gentiles as equals, and in actual fact Christianity was pretty much a failure in Palestine. Its success was achieved mainly in the Diaspora, where the Romans rarely had any major problems with the Jews. The Jewish War was only fought in Palestine, and not even against all the Jews there (many sided with Rome). How would inventing a religion that would have no chance of succeeding in the heart of Palestine but instead was tailor made to succeed outside Palestine, ever help the Romans with anything they considered important?
(7) If the Roman elite’s aim was to “pacify” Palestinian Jews by inventing new scriptures, they were certainly smart and informed enough to know that that wouldn’t succeed by using the language the Judean elite despised as foreign (Greek).[*]
(8) The Romans knew one thing well: War. Social ideology they were never very good at.[*] That’s why Rome always had such problems keeping its empire together, and why social discontent and other malfunctions continued to escalate until the empire started dissolving. Rome expected to solve every problem militarily instead–and up until the 3rd century Rome did so quite well. The Jewish War was effectively over in just four years (any siege war was expected to take at least three, and Vespasian was actually busy conquering Rome in the fourth year of that War). So why would they think they needed any other solution?
With all that counting against Atwill, he has a very high burden to meet. And he just doesn’t. He actually has no evidence at all for his thesis, except “Bible Code”-style readings of coincidences among texts, which he seems only to read in English and not the original Greek, all the while relying on egregious fallacies in probabilistic reasoning...
END OF EXTRACT
But hey, why would an atheist presenter on Irish radio need to bother looking for any of this before endorsing this flim-flam? All that really matters is that he and some more mental adolescents out there can make themselves feel smart by jeering at the Christians. And thanks to official neglect of apologetics, some Christians teetering on the edge of unbelief will sadly fall for this.