Earlier quoted context omitted.
Admittance of ignorance is undoubtedly better than a lie, in general.
It’s impossible to say whether it is a lie, because of incompleteness.
Let's try the more charitable "unjustified certitude" instead of "lie".
An unorthodox scholar uses technology to expose Biblical forgeries
171–180 of 207 posts
Re: An unorthodox scholar uses technology to expose Biblical forgeries
#172Re: An unorthodox scholar uses technology to expose Biblical forgeries
#173[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?
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.
Re: An unorthodox scholar uses technology to expose Biblical forgeries
#174[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?
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?".
Re: An unorthodox scholar uses technology to expose Biblical forgeries
#175I think the title is misleading. There are no forgeries in the canonized books of the Bible
Or, they are forgeries from beginning to end. The honest ones, e.g. Paul, admit it right there in the text. (Transcribing "visions".)
Re: An unorthodox scholar uses technology to expose Biblical forgeries
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not quite. Provenance is the story of how an object came from the ground to wherever it is now. The question of authentication is larger than provenance. If there's good documentation showing the object originally came from an archeological excavation, that's a point towards authenticity. If the alleged provenance starts with an unnamed antiquities dealer by way of an anonymous Swiss collector, that doesn't help one…
You're strictly correct, but I made some simplifications that I think are appropriate and avoid the whole semantic mess of what "authenticity" means. Secure provenance is usually a sufficient condition to establish authenticity for archaeologists anyway.
Oversimplification is its own sort of forgery.
Re: An unorthodox scholar uses technology to expose Biblical forgeries
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you read Enoch 1? Also, Genesis does not merely reference Enoch, it introduces him. He is seventh from Adam and the first man to break the pattern of death.
> Have you read Enoch 1? Yes, among many other religious texts (whole Orthodox Biblical canon + a bunch of pseudoepigraphical works, most of the Buddhist canon, Taoist and Hindu works, some ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian texts, Quran, etc...). Got way too sidetracked in University. It's interesting though. > Also, Genesis does not merely reference Enoch, it introduces him Of course he was a character mentioned in…
Great. I have a hard to finding anyone whose has actually read these texts. I think we could have an interesting conversation, but HN threads are a bit constraining.
Re: An unorthodox scholar uses technology to expose Biblical forgeries
#178[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?
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 pe…
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/Richard_Carrier#Reception_and_...
Re: An unorthodox scholar uses technology to expose Biblical forgeries
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes - there is a presumption that someone has the truth, and we can all go and check against it. When in reality it is very hard to know truth, even in the present time, even in one's own experience. So, if that is the case, why make such an outlandish claim? Well, there is value to someone if they can say 'I have the truth' and other people believe them. The initial lie, once believed, takes on a life of its own tha…
I'm not really interested in discussing the truth of religion itself, just the meaning of "forgery" and "authentic" in this context. You don't need to believe any of the religious claims to discus that.
The historical development of texts and how they are doctored is informative.
For example, early Canaanite texts assigned territory to tribes according to their number of gods. In a later text, it was by their number of tutelary angels. In current texts it is unspecified why they got their allocation.
Oldest Canaanite texts have a goddess Asherah, equal to YHWH in importance (and always shown with a cake), involved in important rites. Nowadays they use a stick in her place, which appears to suffice. They clearly would have preferred to do away with her entirely, but weren't willing to abandon the rites that needed her.
Religious rites were indistinguishable from magic spells, and the ancients didn't care who they came from, if they seemed to work. They were swapped around like coleslaw recipes. You can see how they were thought of particularly in Numbers, where it clearly doesn't matter who uses them: if you say it, it works, priest or no.