Is Biblical Scholarship Crawling with "Unscientific" Piety?

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An excellent find! I had not read the work Boris cited, and simply took Boris’s word for it that it was Philo speaking. I looked up the original Greek of the passage, to verify the accuracy of the translation, and even read a little bit before and after it, but not far enough back to get the context needed for identifying the 'I", and I trusted Boris when he represented the “I” as Philo. This added context clears things up nicely. Boris was grabbing the passage out of context. Whether he did so with intention to mislead, or innocently, I cannot say, but even if it was done innocently, it shows that Boris did not know the work he was quoting from, and was simply grasping for a proof-text from it.

So, to return to Boris’s claim that started this discussion: Boris argued that Philo had spent significant time in Judaea during (or not long after) the years when Jesus was active, enough to have known about his activity, and, since Philo did not mention that activity, therefore the activity never happened. But the ancient sources report only that Philo visited Jerusalem once, and do not specify the year(s) or the length of time of the visit. For all we know, he might have visited Jerusalem solely for the purpose of pilgrimage, desiring to see the Temple just once in his life, and after only a week or two gone home to Alexandria, and the visit might have been before Jesus’s public activity even started. There is no statement indicating that while he was in Jerusalem he engaged in any deep research about current events in Galilee or Judaea, whether relating to Jesus or Christians or any other matter. When all of this is taken into account, his silence about Jesus proves nothing about the existence or non-existence of Jesus.

No time at all. I learned the term way back in the late 1970s when studying under two Hebrew Bible scholars. The structure appears in the story of Noah’s Flood, and I believe that’s the first example that was pointed out to me.

The two things are not incompatible. A story might be told in a deliberately “literary” way, yet contain accurate statements about the past. I of course agree that the Gospels are not meant as “histories” in the sense of modern scholarly histories, which eschew such literary devices, but it does not follow that they did not mean to convey information about past events. And it certainly does not follow that no such person as Jesus ever existed.

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Boris, are you going to admit your error in representing the words of Agrippa as the words of Philo? And that you now have no ancient passages testifying that Philo spent any length of time in Judaea? And that your argument – that since Philo does not discuss Jesus that is further evidence that Jesus did not exist – is invalid?

Or will you simply pass over this error in silence?

A real scholar would admit the error.

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Yes, like Meyer did with the ribosome Oh, wait…

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Pshaw. I stopped trusting quotes a long time ago. Finding out Boris was passing off a quote-within-a-quote as being by the quoter not the quotee was a surprise, but nothing to get excited about. It may even have been accidental.

It’s not like he’d concatenated extracts from two works written a decade apart into a single passage, such as I recently discovered when reading Michael Denton.

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It may have been, as I already granted. Still, even if it was only accidental, he should openly acknowledge the error.

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Yes, absolutely. People purporting to be scholars should openly acknowledge and correct their errors. Not allow them to remain in print for years, or even decades, and tolerate their acolytes repeatedly citing these erroneous statements as facts. I am glad we can agree on something.

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You’re missing the important point. Let’s say Philo was never in Jerusalem at the time Jesus supposedly was. That means that he has that in common with Josephus Flavius, Cornelius Tacitus, Gaius Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, Lucian of Samosata, Mara Serapion - all people Christian “scholars” and apologists and Internet trolls claim as evidence that Jesus actually existed. At least Philo was alive during the time Jesus supposedly lived. You know who never visited Palestine and they were not alive when Jesus supposedly lived? The gospel writers.

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Okay it’s likely an error. The gospels say Jesus’ fame spread throughout the land all the way to Syria. Great crowds saw him! Unlike the list historians Christians appeal to in order to “prove” Jesus existed Philo (20 BCE - 50 CE), Seneca The Younger (4 BCE - 65 CE), Pliny The Elder (23 - 79), Petronius (c. Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella (4 - c.70) were all alive then and just must have forgotten to mention him.

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Another undemonstrated claim. Since we don’t know with certainty who any of the Gospel writers were, we can’t say when they lived and whether they were in Palestine when Jesus lived. What can be said, however, is that if the currently accepted dates for the first three Gospels are accepted, the writers could have been in Palestine when Jesus was alive. A healthy person in ancient times sometimes lived to 70 or 80, and so a 30-year-old who heard Jesus in 28 AD/CE could have written Mark or Matthew or Luke. John, written later, maybe ca. 90-100, would be a bit of a stretch, but not impossible, if the writer knew Jesus as a child or very young man.

Well, yes; but the great crowds are usually depicted as crowds of plain folks, mostly everyday Jews, in rural areas or in smaller provincial towns. There aren’t too many passages which say something like: “And thousands saw Jesus heal the blind and the lame – Greek philosophers, Phoenician traders, Roman magistrates, Persian nobles…” In other words, the Gospels don’t give the suggestion that highly educated writers and thinkers from other countries would have personally heard Jesus speak or seen any of his miracles.

To be sure, it’s likely that stories about a teacher and healer named Jesus would have found their way to other lands, but educated Greeks and Romans tended take such stories as frauds or exaggerations; they didn’t have high regard for Jewish religion, messianic prophecies, Jewish popular movements, etc. How many would be willing to take a boat journey, in some cases investing weeks of time for the round trip, to check out stories coming from what they regarded as superstitious, uneducated rabble in the colonies? So I don’t think the absence of discussion of Jesus’s teaching and healings in Classical sources proves anything. It doesn’t prove that he never healed anyone, and still less does it prove that no such person as Jesus existed.

On the other hand, the report of an earthquake and dead bodies rising from graves in Jerusalem would have been noticed even by outsiders. Jerusalem was a big city, not only a religious center but a place where Roman officials and foreign visitors could be found. There would have been plenty of critical, educated observers there. The fact that we have no record of those remarkable events in secular sources suggests that the events, whatever they were, were not exactly as described in Matthew. But that is not the same as a proof that there was never such a person as Jesus.

Which is why, once I realized my error about ribozymes and proteins, I withdrew the statement within about 24 or 36 hours of making it. And why, further up on this page, approximately post 109, I corrected an undetected historical error from one of my earlier posts.

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I agree with the first five words of that sentence.

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Yes. that is most laudable of you.

Have you an explanation why ID “scholars” almost invariably fail to observe such practices?

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Since I took the time to write a fairly detailed paragraph to answer your question, and you’ve given a terse and not very helpful reply, could you perhaps write something more expansive – just one paragraph, even – about why you are concerned about authorship?

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I’m not concerned about authorship at all. I’m curious about authorship (who, when, why). I suspect answers become more difficult or impossible to answer over time.

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Since that is not on-topic here, there is no need to get into it, no matter how often you and Mercer try to steer the discussion that way. But you are free to start your own topic on that question. :slight_smile:

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If it’s mere curiosity, then the general note I already gave you should suffice to get you started. Also, a good dictionary of the Bible, of relatively recent date, might be an even faster way. I would look for a major academic imprint, though; some of the Bible dictionaries published by evangelical publishing houses might not be reliable. You can also use online sources to get a rough idea, as well, but of course, some of them are written by hobbyists rather than scholars (e.g., many Wikipedia articles), so you should not rely on such articles as the final word, but only as the first step in your investigation.

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Mere curiosity?

It’s OK to say if you don’t know.

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No need. The point has been made.

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Since we don’t know with certainty who any of the Gospel writers were we can’t assume that they believed Jesus to be a real person and expected their audience to believe that too. That is more than just speculation it’s a wild leap of faith taken by New Testament “scholars” based not on any evidence but on Catholic tradition. The evidence we do have comes from litertaure not physical events that happened on Earth. That literature clearly tells us that John and Jesus are apocalyptic prophets who become part of Elijah and Elisha’s fictional narrative world. All this dating and mental gymmnastics trying make Jesus part of the real world is truly a fool’s errand.

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I don’t know what you are getting at, Alan. And I have noticed that your comments are sometimes so brief and so context-less as to be cryptic. I was trying to help you by answering a question, and now you’ve thrown another question back at me, “Mere curiosity?” without explaining why you are questioning my phrase. A little exposition would help. Are you averse to writing two or three connected sentences, with words such as “because” “although” “for example” to connect your ideas, so that people can follow your drift?

I haven’t assumed anything about that. I thought we were speaking about what the vast majority of Biblical scholars believed. The vast majority of Biblical scholars believe that Jesus was a real person. And that’s not just Christian ones but JEWISH ones and atheist and agnostic ones. Believing that Jesus was a real person is not (contra your repeated assertion) driven by the assumption of the truth of Christianity, since a large number of non-Christians and even anti-Christians believe it, too.

No, it doesn’t “clearly tell us” that. In fact, it’s not even clear what your sentence means. If you mean that the stories about Jesus and John contain elements that are also found in the stories of the Prophets, that’s true, but it’s obvious not only to all scholars but even to average Christians who know their Bibles well. But if you mean something more, you’re not expressing yourself well.

I was not talking about dating in order to try to make Jesus part of the real world. The Gospels are in principle datable without reference to the question of whether or not Jesus was a real person. We date all kinds of ancient texts which contain non-historical events, e.g., the satires of Lucian. It makes no difference at all that the events in Lucian never happened. There are still ways of dating his writing. You’re conflating two different issues.

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In regards to the Pauline core, what is our alternative here? Some boring nobody that nobody ever heard of, that nobody ever cared about and forgotten to history, with no church in existence because nobody yet founded the thing, furtively fabricated the epistles for yuks while on dole?

While ancient national religions may go back to who knows when, historical offshoots generally involve charismatic founders.

As @Eddie has argued, the idea that Biblical scholars are obsequious to tradition on authorship is ridiculous. Authorship has been contended for centuries.