When the Gospel was Translated from Hebrew It Lost Context

[Ben C. Smith]

I actually found another example in popular music of something that mirrors an issue that's often discussed when it comes to dating the gospels. I don't think it lends itself to an entire thread, but it's interesting enough to mention in the context of the above, IMHO. The song is Notorious B.I.G.'s Juicy:

....

[Side note: Needless to say, this can be a sensitive topic of discussion for people. In case it wasn't obvious, I bring it up to a serious end, and I'm not at all making light of a tragedy!]

Anyway, at ~0:45 Biggy says:
"Now I'm in the limelight, cause I rhyme tight
Time to get paid, blow up like the World Trade
Born sinner, opposite of a winner
Remember when I used to eat sardines for dinner..."

If someone from many years in the future heard that verse, I don't think there's any doubt they would assume the line about blowing up was joke in extremely poor taste, composed sometime after Sept 11, 2001. In the same vein, we see references to the destruction of the temple in Mark, and assume it was composed post 70 CE. The notable part of all this, however, is that Juicy was released in 1994, and (of course) the line in question refers to the deadly but apparently botched attack on the towers one year earlier (which also makes it a little like the temple's destruction with its multiple 'component events'). On the whole though, I'd guess this kind of coincidence is so unlikely that it shouldn't influence ones certitude with these things very much at all. It does show you strange happenings are possible though!

Similarly, The X-Files spawned a spinoff, The Lone Gunmen, whose pilot, which aired on Fox on March 4, 2001, included a plot to crash a plane into the World Trade Center:

Byers: We know it's a wargame scenario, that it has to do with airline counter-terrorism. Why is it important enough to kill for?

Father: Because it's no longer a game.

Byers: If some terrorist group wants to act out this scenario, why target you for assassination?

Father: Depends on who your terrorists are.

Byers: The men who conceived of it in the first place. You're saying our government plans to commit a terrorist act against a domestic airline....

Father: There you go, indicting the entire government, as usual. It's a faction, a small faction.

Byers: For what possible gain?

Father: The Cold War is over, John. But with no clear enemy to stockpile against, the arms market's flat. But bring down a fully-loaded 727 into the middle of New York City and you'll find a dozen tin-pot dictators all over the world just clammering to take responsibility and begging to be smart-bombed.

Byers: I can't believe it.

Later in the show, the protagonists are working frantically to prevent the plot from succeeding:

Frohike: I'm mapping the data now.

Langly: Byers, your flight's going to make an unscheduled stop in exactly 22 minutes.

Frohike: Corner of Liberty and Washington. Lower Manhattan.

Byers: World Trade Center. They're going to crash the plane into the World Trade Center!

This episode aired a full 6 months and 7 days before 9/11.

[Aleph One]

@Ben wow! I'm pretty sure I've heard mention of that show's unsettling similarities to the actual 9/11 attacks before, but I didn't realize just how close some of the parallels appear! Add to that the proximity in the time, and the conspiratorial nature of the t.v. show itself, and it seems tailor-made to prod "9/11 truther"-types toward the deep end..


@theterminator haha...the line stuck in my head, for some strange reason, after writing the post was "Honeys play me close, like butter plays toast"

[spin]

I think the transformation from ur-gospel to canonical gospel developed in a similar manner. Whatever the gospel meant to its original audience of Jewish proselytes these ideas were simply untranslatable into Greek. Instead we get a two dimensional story about a human messiah or more important a 'messiah' who has none of the nationalistic symbolism traditionally associated with this role in its original culture. Indeed the transference or confusion over what is a messiah and what is a god in Judaism is even more indicative of the butchering of the text. A messiah wouldn't look like Jesus. Traditional scholarship says that the 'historical Jesus' has been 'tamed' for Roman tastes. I don't think so. I think the revelation that God has come to earth has been obscured simply because this expectation didn't exist in Greco-Roman culture. Indeed where 'myths' were referenced but not believed in any sort of seriousness. The Jews by contrast must have on some level had the capacity to believe that their god would appear as a man in front of real people. In order to 're-imagine' this untranslatable idea, the story really became about a human messiah (out of what originally was a misunderstanding of the Pharisees and scribes undoubtedly)

The earliest gospel tradition we have is preserved in Paul's letters. His view of his christ is certainly unlike any Jewish notion of the messiah from the time of the Psalms of Solomon to Simeon bar Kosiba. This would suggest that the earliest Jesus traditions were already heterodox in source nature. The development of earliest christianity as I see it involves a disparate collection of communities each of which acts as a receptacle of ad hoc Jesus knowledge fertilized by the transference and development of information passed from one to another via itinerant preachers. Some communities committing their Jesus knowledge to written tradition changed the game somewhat, allowing the dissemination of large corpuses of Jesus knowledge and probably consigning itinerant preachers to the countryside. (The lone author theory of gospel production is so simplistic, it's there alongside playdough and crayons.)