Introducing Boris

[Boris_Badenoff]

@Eddie

My learning to recognize the good side of religion was a healthy rebalancing, not a naive lack of awareness of the other side.

There is no good side of religion. It doesn’t make people better, smarter or more honest. Religion makes otherwise intelligent people sound ridiculous.

@Eddie

The reason that did not happen is that educated scholars, trained in the study of literature, history, and ancient languages, have no more doubt over whether Jesus existed than over whether Napoleon existed.

I’m glad you mentioned Napoleon. "As for myself, I do not believe that such a person as Jesus Christ ever existed; but as the people are inclined to superstition, it is proper not to oppose them. -Napoleon Bonaparte. Add him to the list. These people you mentioned “knew” when they were small children that Jesus existed. When they grew up without ever questioning it they still “knew” Jesus existed. When some fell away from their once deeply held faith those people still “knew” Jesus was real. There’s never been any significant doubt in their minds that Jesus was a real person. So why in the world would they ever question whether Jesus existed? They’ve always “known” Jesus existed. Sorry but I don’t trust the opinions of people on a subject they’ve never even bothered to look into. It’d be like trusting the opinions of home-schooled creationists on the subject of evolution.

@Eddie

“Yes, there are people who don’t believe that Jesus ever existed, but their arguments are weak and in some cases downright silly, and have all been refuted countless times.”

That’s easy to say but impossible to do. I’ve seen and heard all those “refutations” and they’re absurd. If anything they’ve just made me bolder and even more sure of myself. If you could refute the claim that Jesus never existed you would have done so by now. Instead you’ve resorted to Bart Ehrman’s argument for an historical Jesus which goes like this: “Scholars believe, they really really believe!” Of course he goes on: “There were eyewitnesses!” And who are these eyewitnesses to Jesus Bart? “Why the disciples of course!” That’s like proving the existence of Superman by citing the eyewitness testimonies of Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, Perry White and Inspector Henderson. They’re all part of the SAME STORY. Of course if there was no Jesus there were no disciples. None of the apostles, including Paul ever made it into the historical record. They’re a real as Santa’s reindeer. So step up to the plate and refute away. Let’s see those refutations. Again. Or did I just shop down your best arguments? That’s all you have you know: arguments and arguments are not evidence.

@Eddie

For someone who claims to have studied religion at the college level, I can’t say much for your research skills. The whole “quest for the historical Jesus” of the 19th century was a scholarly quest, and in almost all cases it presumed there really was a man Jesus,

Yes scholars presumed there was an historical Jesus and then set about to prove there was. Starting with a conclusion and then digging up whatever you can that seems to support that conclusion and disregarding anything that disproves or argues against the conclusion is the hallmark of pseudoscience. Your conclusion is incorporated into your opening premise thereby proving nothing at all - except that you don’t recognize logical fallacies.

@Eddie

It remains true today that most scholars – people who have taken more than the handful of undergrad courses you say you have taken, and have spent their lives studying the languages, culture, and literature of antiquity – believe that Jesus was a Jew and teacher who really lived in ancient Palestine roughly between 6 BC and 30 AD

Okay name something Jesus did that can be verified by facts.

@Eddie

When Bible scholars get things wrong they are savaged by other Bible scholars. Bible scholars are the most anally retentive nit-pickers in all of academia.

Bible scholars are like small children who believe in Mother Goose stories. “Of course Mother Goose wrote those stories and rhymes, how else could they exist? Where else could they come from?” Their search for history goes like this, “Of course the cow didn’t really jump over the moon and the dish running away with the spoon is probably exaggerated. But the dog laughing probably means barking and that’s entirely plausible and no doubt the historical kernel of the story.” - from Finding the Historical Mother Goose.

@Eddie

Given this fact, it is not surprising that the majority of readers here, given a choice between your interpretation and that of the the majority of the world’s top scholars, will choose the latter.

Well you’re all different than me. I don’t pick and choose among the ideas of other people and decide who I should believe the way you three do. I have my own source material. It’s called the Bible and other literature from the same epoch of time and the same place. I’ve seen no evidence here that any of you have ever even picked up a Bible, let alone read any of it.

@Eddie

I have nothing against your being an atheist, or anti-Christian, or anything else. I’m objecting not to your conclusions about religion but to the inadequate methods by which you have arrived at those conclusions.

I don’t care about methods, degrees, fancy expensive schools, years of study when it comes to the question of Jesus. There’s only one question one needs to ask: Is there any evidence besides the stories about him themselves that such a person ever existed? Well is there? If so let’s see it. Name it and claim it.

[SlightlyOddGuy (Matt)]

This whole thread is very odd and seems very silly. To me, it’s trivial to accept that someone named Jesus existed in the past based on the stories we have. The tough part would be swallowing all the miraculous stuff attributed to him. @Boris_Badenoff (welcome, btw), skimming through all these replies, I get the sense that, for you, Jesus’ existence is about as difficult to accept as the latter case, rather than the former–would you agree with that?

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

@AlanFox

I didn’t know there was a question on the Old Testament.

That’s because no serious scholar doubts that the vast majority of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, and that the Septuagint or Greek translation was a much later development. Your impression of the state of scholarship is a correct one.

The claim of Boris Badenoff that:

@Boris_Badenoff

The Greek OT is smooth and does not look at all like a translation whereas the Hebrew is primitive, choppy and looks like a copy.

has no support in the academic literature. Hebrew is more laconic and “choppy” than Greek generally, because Hebrew syntax is cruder than Greek, but nobody has drawn from this the conclusion that the Hebrew was copied from the Greek. I studied under world-class scholars with immense knowledge of both the Hebrew text and the Septuagint, and there was never a hint of a possibility from them that the Hebrew was a translation from the Greek.

More generally, the more Boris Badenoff writes about ancient religious texts, airing his various pet theories, the more he sounds like the sort of autodidact who argues that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. His opinions seem to be moving from the “unfounded” to the “crank” territory. If you want to know current thought in the field, you would do better to ask DeuteroKJ.

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

@Boris_Badenoff

The NT writers only knew the Septuagint which is why they have Jesus quote from it instead of the Hebrew.

Have you personally verified, by checking the Hebrew and Greek in every case, that the Gospel writers always have the Septuagint in mind and never the Hebrew? Or are you just repeating hearsay?

@Boris_Badenoff

My upbringing was devoid of religion.

And apparently devoid of exposure to historical scholarship written by Jews, based on what you’ve written.

@Boris_Badenoff

The Greek metaphors for fertility and barrenness are clearly present in biblical literature and reflect similar purposes patterns. The ebb and flow of Dionysus’ life is a reflection of antiquity’s struggle between famine and fertility. These themes, metaphors and motifs existed in literature long before the Hebrews even existed.

You’ve moved the goalposts. Your original claim was that the Greek myths preceded the Bible; now you seem to be claiming that common ideas animated both Greek myths and Biblical literature. The latter idea is quite plausible. The first claim has no documentary evidence.

As for fertility, barrenness, famine, etc., those are universal human concerns and hardly “Greek” specifically. There is no reason to assume that because the Bible shows such concerns it reveals “Greek mythological” thinking.

@Boris_Badenoff

@deuteroKJ

This might be the most uninformed comments in this whole thread (and that’s saying something).

Says who?

Says me, for one. Though you have since outdone yourself, with this doozy:

@Boris_Badenoff

The NT writers knew nothing of First Century Judaism, its people, its customs, its actual history, Herod, or the geography of Judea.

The world-class Classicists and Biblical scholars (in a secular university setting, I add, not some fundamentalist college) who taught me Judaism and Early Christianity would roll their eyes and smash their foreheads to hear this kind of drivel.

@Boris_Badenoff

The gospels were written and Christianity was born right where it still sits today: Rome.

You have in your possession the front end pages of the originals of the Gospels, showing their place of publication?

@Boris_Badenoff

Jesus in the gospels is no more Jewish than the pope.

A number of very informed Jewish theologians and historians would not concur with this judgment. And in the year-long course I took with a Jewish scholar who was quite frankly anti-Christian, he stressed many times that Jesus on some issues was in line with existing Jewish traditions, and even took quite conservative rabbinic stances.

Your historical interpretations have all the earmarks of autodidacticism and crankery. It’s impossible for me to take you seriously as an academic discussion partner in these areas. Get your thoughts published in a book by a respectable academic publisher, and let us know when it comes out, and then I’ll consider responding to you again.

@Boris_Badenoff

Instead you’ve resorted to Bart Ehrman’s argument for an historical Jesus which goes like this:

I’ve not read Ehrman’s argument for a historical Jesus, so that blows that claim.

@Boris_Badenoff

Starting with a conclusion and then digging up whatever you can that seems to support that conclusion and disregarding anything that disproves or argues against the conclusion is the hallmark of pseudoscience.

Sounds like a pretty good characterization of your presentation here.

[AlanFox]

@Eddie

If you want to know current thought in the field, you would do better to ask DeuteroKJ.

I hadn’t heard the claim before that the OT was originally written in Greek and translated into Hebrew. I realize committed Christians would have trouble examining any evidence there might be to support or refute that suggestion. I’m curious about the provenance. Who wrote what, when and why?

[AlanFox]

@Boris_Badenoff

What’s odd about it? The NT writers knew nothing of First Century Judaism, its people, its customs, its actual history, Herod, or the geography of Judea. Had they bothered to visit Jerusalem they would have seen that not all of the temple was destroyed. The gospels were written and Christianity was born right where it still sits today: Rome.

That’s what’s odd.

[RonSewell (RonS)]

@Boris_Badenoff

The Greek OT is smooth and does not look at all like a translation whereas the Hebrew is primitive, choppy and looks like a copy.

Psalm 119 is an an acrostic poem of 176 verses, organized into 22 stanza’s, the 8 verses of each stanza all beginning with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet progressing from aleph to tau. This structure, readily apparent in the original Hebrew, is completely lost in translation into English, and Greek. While Psalm 119 is the most pronounced example, other instances of acrostic form is found in the poetic and wisdom literature of the Old Testament.

From Genesis 1 onwards, the Old Testament is permeated with poetic expression and characteristic wordsmithing which only makes sense in Hebrew. The autographs were no more written in Greek than the Iliad was written in Hebrew. This is beyond obvious to anyone with an once of familiarity with these source languages.

[Boris_Badenoff]

When in doubt follow the money.

[Boris_Badenoff]

The stories we have are obviously not evidence that the stories are true or that they were ever meant to be understood as literal history by their authors. That’s what these guys are missing. The gospel writers were well aware of the audience’s critical sensibilities. The gospels are meaningless without the miracles. The story in the gospels of five loaves and two fish recalls the story in 2Kings where Elisha feeds a crowd with just a few pieces of bread and some ears of grain. With leftovers! In John’s version there’s a riddle to the story when the food is regathered: The five loaves represent the Torah’s five books which are more than enough to feed the twelve tribes of Israel. The Jesus historicists want to toss that story out because it’s a miracle and we need to disregard them in order to find this historical Jesus. All they’re doing is ruining an otherwise good story that the ancients understood but has gone right over the modern reader’s head.

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

@AlanFox

I hadn’t heard the claim before that the OT was originally written in Greek and translated into Hebrew.

Of course you haven’t, because no academic book or popular summary (at least, none known to me) makes that claim. The standard view has long been that the Septuagint translation was made for the Jewish community in Egypt, many of whose members could no longer read Hebrew, starting in the late third century or early second century BC.

Only the very latest books of the Jewish Scriptures could even theoretically have been originally composed in Greek, because the Jews did not adopt Greek as a daily language of writing and reading until the Hellenistic era, by which time all but a very few of the Jewish Scriptures had already been composed (in Hebrew). But I know of no serious scholar who thinks that any of the canonical Jewish Scriptures, even the latest ones, were originally written in Greek. (The works known as the Apocrypha, mostly written in Greek in the original, found their way into the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Old Testament canons, but were never part of the canonical Jewish Scriptures.)

Boris Badenoff’s historical, literary, philological, and history of religion claims are a mixture of error and confusion, and should not be relied upon.

If you are interested in a readable lay history of Bible versions in different languages, a good introduction to the subject is found in F. F. Bruce, The Books and the Parchments. For a drier and more academic, but still clear, discussion of the various ancient versions, including the Septuagint, Wurthwein’s The Text of the Old Testament is useful.

[colewd (Bill Cole)]

@AlanFox

I hadn’t heard the claim before that the OT was originally written in Greek and translated into Hebrew.

Do you think in addition to scholarly opinion the evidence of the age of the Dead Sea scrolls makes Boris’s claim almost certainly false?

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

@AlanFox

I realize committed Christians would have trouble examining any evidence there might be to support or refute that suggestion.

The question of which language the Old Testament was originally written in is not a part of Christian doctrine, so I see no reason why any “committed Christian” would be offended by fresh ideas about it. This has nothing to do with religious commitments of any kind; it’s about good vs. lousy scholarship.

The overwhelming majority of the world’s greatest Biblical scholars – and Biblical scholars today include a large number of atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, and Jews – would say that the claim that the Old Testament was written in Greek and later translated into Hebrew could only come from someone with massive philological and historical ignorance. You’re witnessing such philological and historical ignorance in the posts produced by Boris.

For some references, see my companion post to this one.

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

@Boris_Badenoff

You purposely blur the distinction between Historians, Classicists and Bible scholars.

I studied under all three types, and they all agree on the points I’m making, against you. So there is no need to blur any distinctions.

@Boris_Badenoff

I did that [published in a book by a respectable academic publisher] a long time ago.

Yet what you say next shows that you didn’t. What you did was:

@Boris_Badenoff

put together a bunch of essays I wrote in college and sent out about 30 or 40 sample chapters to non-academic mainstream publishers.

@Boris_Badenoff

got myself invited as a guest for an entire hour on a few Christian radio broadcasts.

And you published some of your undergrad essays and interviews on Christian radio broadcasts on your Facebook page.

None of that counts as getting your thoughts published “by a respectable academic publisher.”

By the way, when you published your undergrad essays on Facebook, did you also include scans of your original papers, with the professors’ comments to your essays, so that people could read what your professors thought of those essays?

@Boris_Badenoff

Both wrote back and said my stuff is interesting but they didn’t think they could make any money on it.

Yet hundreds of books on the historical questions you deal with are published by academic publishers every year. Many of the people I went to grad school with have had long careers publishing such works. If the books are good, if they add something to our historical knowledge of the Bible, respectable academic publishers will publish them. If you can demonstrate that virtually every Bible scholar in the world is wrong and you are right, you will have no problem finding a top academic publisher. They are eager to be the first to publish controversial, breakthrough studies. The fact that you have not succeeded in finding a legitimate academic publisher for your ideas, and have had to settle for self-publishing unrefereed works on Facebook and chatting on minor radio shows, speaks volumes.

@Boris_Badenoff

Nobody cares about the Bible anymore.

This is this the sort of statement that brands you as someone who can’t be taken seriously. Nobody cares about the Bible anymore? In the USA, the land of the Bible Belt? In a country with huge religion and Biblical studies programs at all its top universities? In a country in which religious books remain among the top sellers in all bookstores, brick and mortar or online?

You’re talking here to a number of people (not myself, but a good number of the others, including all the atheists and several of the non-fundamentalist Christians) who have complained here (it seemed almost daily sometimes) about how Christian fundamentalists (who surely “care about the Bible”) put Donald Trump into office and what a disaster that was (in their view) for the country; do you think such people are going to buy your claim that no one in America cares about the Bible anymore? You’re also talking here to a group of people (again, not me, but the atheists, and a few of the Christians) who think that the Discovery Institute is heading a plot to turn America into a Christian, Bible-based theocracy, and funding their machinations with the donations of millions of fundamentalist Christians. Do you think they will swallow your claim that no one cares about the Bible anymore?

You seem to live on another planet, not the one the rest of us inhabit.

[Chad_the_Layman (Chad Stewart)]

@Boris_Badenoff

The gospels are meaningless without the miracles. The story in the gospels of five loaves and two fish recalls the story in 2Kings where Elisha feeds a crowd with just a few pieces of bread and some ears of grain. With leftovers! In John’s version there’s a riddle to the story when the food is regathered: The five loaves represent the Torah’s five books which are more than enough to feed the twelve tribe of Israel. The Jesus historicists want to toss that story out because it’s a miracle and we need to disregard them in order to find this historical Jesus. All they’re doing is ruining an otherwise good story that the ancients understood but has gone right over the modern reader’s head.

There are plenty of folks (myself included) who see the literary design of the gospels which present Jesus as the fulfillment and moving forward of ancient Israel’s story as told in the Hebrew scriptures AND who believe that Jesus was/is a real person.

“Historicists” and Jesus Mythicists don’t represent all the positions.

[Boris_Badenoff]

Some of the books, songs and poems were probably written in Hebrew. A few of the Dead Sea scrolls are written in Greek.

[AlanFox]

@Eddie

Boris Badenoff’s historical, literary, philological, and history of religion claims are a mixture of error and confusion, and should not be relied upon.

I’m not relying on Mr Badenoff. Nor would I rely on you. I’m just wondering how both of you can be so certain in your conclusions. What evidence exists other than texts of doubtful provenance.

[Boris_Badenoff]

@Eddie

Boris Badenoff’s historical, literary, philological, and history of religion claims are a mixture of error and confusion, and should not be relied upon.

Maybe not. People should do their own research. I don’t think the claims you’ve made about yourself can be relied upon either. Here is some very good evidence that the entire OT was redacted between 167 and 164 BCE. Notice how the authors worked backward in time from the rededication of the temple to the birth of Adam. This also explains why the authors had to make up extravagant ages for the earliest humans. This is based on the Greek Great Year of 4000 Years, which is more evidence for the Hellenistic influence that permeates the supposed “Hebrew” scriptures.

All the data is dependent on the 480-430-215 year scheme, as well as the date of the Exodus in the year 2666 and Abraham’s birth in 1946, are explained within this Hellenistic ontology of time.
Adam… 1AM
Birth of Abraham…1946 AM
Call of Abraham…2021 AM
Entrance into Egypt…2236 AM
Exodus from Egypt…2666 AM
Solomon’s temple…3146 AM
Exile to Bayalon…3576 AM
Edict of Cyrus…3626AM = 538 BCE
Rededication of the temple 4000 AM =164 BCE
This is how we know the universe is 6184 years old… give or take 14 or 15 billion years.
I don’t claim to have some fantastical education during which I studied under the best of the best, the greatest scholars ever! Unlike you I show my work, I don’t brag about having done it.

[deuteroKJ (Kenneth Turner)]

@Boris_Badenoff

@deuteroKJ

This might be the most uninformed comments in this whole thread (and that’s saying something).

Says who?

Says a guy who researches, teaches, and publishes on biblical languages for a living. I’ve actually read through both Greek and Hebrew OTs (plural) multiple times. I’ve translated (and published) on several OT books. I don’t really know what “choppy” and “primitive” mean…except that it could come across as anti-Semitic. Even if one granted your claim, the conclusion would be the opposite. Translations tend to smooth things out, not the reverse.

There is no singular Greek OT or Hebrew OT. There are multiple text types. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s–probably the find of the 20th c.–did two basic things: (1) It confirmed that the text type of the Masoretic tradition goes way back into BCE years, showing the care taken in transmitting the text for over 1000 years; and (2) it opened up Pandora’s Box by evidencing text types/traditions (in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic) that we were not previously aware of. After more than 70 years, we’re still sorting this stuff out.

Even if we ignore all this and just look at the so-called Septuagint (though, again, there is no one main Greek text) and Masoretic Text, there is no uniformity in style and sophistication within each. This is especially true for the Greek texts, since different individuals were responsible for different parts, and there was not the same updating and editing known for the the Hebrew Bible. Every text-critical indication points to the Greek translating, or often struggling to translate, an underlining Hebrew text.

[On another topic: The NT citations of the OT mainly draw from known Greek text traditions (and this is wholly unsurprising), but not always. There are a few places that match the Hebrew over the Greek, and there are some which don’t match any known tradition. So, either a NT author is drawing on a yet-to-be-discovered tradition, doing his own translation, or paraphrasing.]

[nwrickert (Neil Rickert)]

@Eddie

… could only come from someone with massive philological and historical ignorance.

It could also come from a practicing troll. And if that’s what @Boris_Badenoff is, then he is pretty good at it.

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

@Boris_Badenoff

Here is some very good evidence that the entire OT was redacted between 167 and 164 BCE.

What you present is not “very good evidence”, but even supposing that a redaction occurred then, that hardly proves that the original language of the OT was Greek rather than Hebrew, which is one of your claims.

@Boris_Badenoff

This also explains why the authors had to make up extravagant ages for the earliest humans.

It explains no such thing. If they felt a need to make things add up to 4,000 years, they could have done so just as easily by inventing a number of extra generations of pre-Abrahamic ancestors with more typical lengths of life. Given your assumption that the whole Bible is a fabrication anyway, why limit the number or types of fabrication that its authors or redactors might have employed?

@Boris_Badenoff

Unlike you I show my work

And such work as you’ve shown is either riddled with philological or historical errors, or does not establish the conclusions you think it does.

Again, if your research is solid and your conclusions are unassailable, you should be able to persuade some academic publisher to publisher your work. The fact that you haven’t done this suggests either that you aren’t nearly as confident about your conclusions as you make out, or that you have submitted such work to publishers and that their academic referees have told them that the work is substandard and should not be published.

If you think you are going to change the world’s opinions about the historicity of Jesus, the origin of the Gospels, the language of the Old Testament, etc. by publishing combative posts on a blog site like this, one frequented mostly by biochemists and biologists who do not contribute to the world of Biblical studies, you are thinking in a very fuzzy way. Even if you could persuade all the biologist-atheists here of your views (and it’s clear from their reaction to your posts that you haven’t persuaded them), that victory would have no effect on the fields of Biblical studies, religious studies, Classics, ancient history, etc. The discussions about the Bible here are barroom conversations, not part of worldwide Biblical scholarship. If you want to change the way scholars think, the places where you need to win people over are the great universities of the world, where the scholars research and teach. Let us know how you make out with this project.