My Review of "Bible Myths and Their Parallels In Other Religions" by T.W. Doane

Guess you missed that part in "Bible Myths" where it was talked about that there's no record of the Jews having such myths until a Jewish priest "discovered" a 500-year-old manuscript after the Babylonian captivity which "just happened" incorporate many of the same myths that the Babylonians had?

And if you can produce documents by the Jews which have that information and were written before the Babylonian captivity, that would be great.

It seems to me that the passages regarding personal conduct in the New Testament are meant to be considered authoritative.

And while I don't see the Old Testament as binding upon Christians, the fact that God makes allowed methods of sexual expression MORE RESTRICTIVE in the New Testament in regards to heterosexual behavior it makes sense that it would not be LESS RESTRICTIVE in regards to homosexual behavior.

Simple logic.

I didn't want to simply take that guys word on it.

Supposedly, there are Native-American stories which go back 40K years that describe heroes hunting down and killing mammoths. Such things are certainly possible, however, I doubt that the specific details of such tales would be accurate. One of the things that we have learned over the years about oral traditions is that a story would be considered "true," even if it described events which never happened, provided they fit within the expected behavior of a character.

To put this another way, Galaxy Quest, can be considered to be a Star Trek story because the characters within it act as we expect folks like Shatner, etc., do, even though none of it could have ever happened.

"What are the odds?"

And what do you base this on? Why should certain passages in the NT be given more weight than passages in the OT, or other works from that time period.

First, however, you have to provide the evidence of why either the NT or the OT should be given greater weight that other religious works. What makes the Bible more significant than the Upanishads, the various Buddhist Sutras, or, perhaps, the religious writings of beings on a planet we know nothing about? We can, for example, date any number of works, as being far older than the earliest accounts we have for the Bible. Why does the Bible supersede those? What if we encounter an alien race which has religious works that far pre-date any of those known on the Earth? Would you convert to their belief system?

No. Age doesn't infer truthfulness.

And what do you base this on?

Weeeell...

In historical study--particularly that involving religious materials--it's always desirable to uncover the earliest possible version of a writing. Texts change over time, and in ancient times, when manuscripts were hand-copied by scribes, sometimes "fixes" were made to bring the text in line with the prevailing orthodoxy. For instance, we know the historian Josephus wrote a small entry about Jesus in his history (one of the few contemporary references to Jesus outside the NT!). Unfortunately, this book has only come down to us through Christian scribes, who felt obliged to "correct" Josephus's misunderstandings about the significance of Jesus by changing the text.

The Gospel of Mark--indisputably the earliest of the Gospels in the NT--originally ended with the women finding an empty tomb. We know this because the oldest copies of Mark that we have end there. All of the subsequent material in the Gospel is a later addition. It's said that if you read Koine Greek, you'll notice jarring differences in style and language between the original Mark and the ending, something that won't come through in an English translation. Without the added ending, there are no post-resurrection appearances of Jesus...and that could be rather significant in uncovering what the first Christians believed, no?

So, while age doesn't necessarily imply (pet peeve: not "infer") truthfulness, in documents it does tend to get us closer to the original idea.

What is this claim based on?

Four Gospels--Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John--right?

Matthew and Luke are enhanced versions of Mark. Large parts of Mark appear in both. Additionally, Matthew and Luke each incorporate their own unique material (M, L, respectively), and both incorporate material from a document--called Q--that is lost to us, but is believed to be a collection of Jesus's sayings. References to war and persecution in Mark suggest that it was composed around the year 65 CE. Paul does not mention any gospels, so it seems unlikely they were composed in his lifetime.

John is harder to date, but its high Christology (Mark's Christ is merely the messiah, John's is the eternal divine Word) and its context--a Christian community breaking away from a Jewish one--tend to indicate a later composition. There is a hard separation between Christians and Jews in John that doesn't exist in the earlier Gospels (just count how often John refers to "the Jews") because Christianity was little more than a Jewish sect in the beginning.

If you deny that Mark precedes Matthew and Luke, you're left to explain why someone would redact, say, Matthew down to Mark, while miraculously preserving all of the "Markan" material in Luke.

If you deny that Matthew, Mark, and Luke came before John, you're left to explain how John's view of Christ--which became the orthodox view--was totally ignored in the other three gospels, and also why the Jewish/Christian schism is not apparent in them.

This is all pretty simplified. The case for the ordering of the Gospels is very, very strong. If you want to read more about it, click here.

That's like saying because I saw a clip of Reagan in the movie Alien Nation we can conclude that aliens showed up on Earth in the '80s.

Our ability to "route around" such things is growing by leaps and bounds, however. If our technology hadn't advanced beyond that which we'd developed in the 1950s, you could successfully hide something like the Holocaust (possibly, I'll get to that in a moment). However, it has. Dig up enough bodies from say, 1920 and 1950, in Europe, and we can spot the necessary genetic markers to indicate that there was a significant drop in the population size of certain ethnic groups (Jews, Roma, etc.), add that to other data we can date from that time period (pollution levels, etc.), and we can definitely say that something "big" happened which led to the deaths of a significant number of people who had certain genetic markers. Could we (assuming we were aliens completely ignorant of Earth's history) come up with the specific details of what happened between 1939-1945? No, but we absolutely would know that there was some kind of genocidal war which involved the near extermination of certain sub-groups of humanity, and that most of the planet was involved in it.

Now, how does someone who's only limited to 1950s technology figure out that something like the Holocaust happened? We'll assume, for the sake of argument, that not only have the various concentration camps been destroyed, but all the documentation about them from that era have been destroyed, as well. For one thing, it's entirely possible to notice that after a certain date, no one with a certain surname, which is commonly associated with a specific ethnicity, appears in any documentation after a set date. Another way would be to notice that there were a large number of mass graves that suddenly appeared in numerous places in Europe. Again, you wouldn't be able to pin down specific details, but you'd be able to figure out that "something big" happened at some point in time.

Push techology forward 100 years, and there's no telling what we might be able to figure out. Maybe the crazy theory that Arthur C. Clarke held to, that one can find audio evidence embedded in certain things, like paint, will pan out. So we could actually hear the screams of people murdered in gas chambers (provided the paint was drying when the people inside were being gassed), or maybe there's epigenetic changes caused by things like a World War that we can figure out in the future. I don't know. I do know that saying we can "completely erase" something is highly unlikely, however.

I am not implying that the NT is entirely historical, only that certain historical claims made within it are supported by evidence. One such thing is that a man named Pontius Pilate was the procurator of Judea.

I don't believe Jesus was in any way divine--I don't believe in divinity--but I am fairly convinced he was a real person and that a few elements of his life are preserved in the Gospels.

^Plus there's a lot more (both in quantity and quality) evidence supporting the validity that Christ of the Christian religion was a real person than supports the validity of the AGW-acolytes' religion.

There are also, supposedly (because I haven't read the original manuscripts, so cannot say for certain), a number of instances where notes made by one scribe, were later on, taken to be part of the original text. It was only when earlier versions of the text were discovered that people realized what had happened.

One of my problems with Bart Erhman is that he just "assumes" many things. In his last appearance on the "Reasonable Doubts" podcast (I think that this is it), he mentions that he had always just "assumed" that the scene at the tomb in the Bible was based on real events (with the supernatural elements added in later). Only later did he do research and discover that it would have been an absolute violation of Roman law to allow someone who'd been crucified to be buried. To me, this indicates that folks like Erhman are proceeding from a false premise, in that they're assuming certain elements must be true until proven false. Suppose, for example, the only evidence we had that WWII happened was because we had copies of Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Would that be enough evidence to prove there was a guy named Yossarian who fought in the war? Not really. But we might well be able to conclude that the war happened based on things which the book described and things we discovered by poking around in the places it describes.

And what would that evidence be?

Which tells you exactly that. There are comic books that have superheroes helping to clean up after 9/11. Should I think that those are real?

Certainly it is possible, just as it's possible that there was a figure who inspired the myths of Odysseus, Thor, Odin, or any number of figures, but I'm not going to claim that it was a certainty that any of them lived, without much better evidence. In one of the "Great Courses" series (it might have been The Dead Sea Scrolls, the Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battles over Authentication, or Gnosticism: From Nag Hammadi to the Gospel of Judas), the argument is made that the creation of Jesus might have been inspired by the unknown founder of an extinct Jewish sect, and that while there might have been an actual person by that name, who he was, and what he did have been so lost in the mists of time that he's no different the figures who may have inspired Thor, Odysseus, etc. I don't know.

I do know, in direct contradiction to TW Doane's argument, however, that the evidence available does not point to there actually having been someone a person could point to as the inspiration for Jesus. Everything I've read seems to indicate that the figure of Jesus was such an amalgam of various elements that nearly anybody who might have been alive from the time period in which Jesus has said to have lived, could be considered to be an "inspiration" for the character.

Aren't you ignoring the possibility that all four gospels are the inspired word of God?f

And that God ordered them written in the way they were for different reasons?

If you don't at least allow for the possibility that the Bible is in fact the inspired word of God or for that existence of God and his power being used to directly influence human events............then why bother arguing about the Bible at all. You've made up your mind.

The miraculous is, by definition, untestable because it isn't constrained by the laws of nature. You can't hold to the miraculous explanation without rejecting other explanations that don't involve the miraculous, even when those other explanations are compelling and highly plausible.

If you saw Bob rob the gas station last night, but Bob said he was at home at the time, do you think perhaps God made you see Bob for some reason, or do you think Bob is probably lying? How skeptical of your own faculties are you going to be?

And for what reasons would God order the gospels written in ways that invite inquiry into their origins? Perhaps He WANTS us to investigate them. You can't rule that out, by your own logic.

The book itself is important because it has influenced so much of the world for a very long time.

Well, I've decided the miraculous is not an acceptable explanation, at least not without a great deal more evidence.

And, aside from the fact that someone told you this and you've believed it a long time, and you're probably surrounded by people who similarly believe it, how do you know this is true? On what evidence do you support this belief?

Not every belief is supported by personal exposure to evidence.

I would wager you believe in a vast number of things you have no evidence of personally. But you have faith in scientists, researchers, engineers, et cetera.

You've made legitimate points. Not saying I agree with them necessarily but they are not unreasonable.

In regards to Bob robbing the gas station, you do know that eyewitness accounts of a crime are considered the LEAST reliable form of evidence?

I do, and I've seen this faith vindicated many, many, many times. In fact, pretty much on a daily basis.

What I really believe in is the soundness of the scientific method and the rigor with which it evaluates new ideas. There's not a single thing I "believe" with regards to science that I wouldn't stop believing as soon as science could refute it or provide a more sound explanation.

I'm even open to incredible, counter-intuitive ideas like dark energy or quantum wavefunctions if they can have evidence to support them.

Okay, suppose Bob is videotaped robbing the gas station. How do you know Bob did it and not that God made the videotape say that?

Paladin's not talking about evidence in a court but you believing what you saw with your own eyes.

Isn't something I saw with my own eyes (experienced personally) considered "anecdotal?

But no, I would not necessarily trust what I saw with my own eyes.

So your faith is in a "process"? One that hasn't been around all that long historically.

But one that has been enormously successful. No other human institution comes close.

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