How did early Christian texts just go missing?

[neilgodfrey]

Thus Neil Godfrey start talking about their being a case for interpolation (ho-hum, circularity the jewel).

IIRC it was Bart Ehrman who made the case for interpolation and I was referencing him in one of the posts at http://vridar.org/2014/01/16/the-born-o ... -44-index/

If there is circularity there then please do point it out to me.

[rakovsky]

In the first century BCE slavery increased across the Roman Empire. Slavery was normal in the Greek world. (Paul thinks of it as normal). During the first century CE slavery was on the increase in Roman society. There were economic pressure for the increase in slavery. In the second century CE laws were passed to give some rights to slaves. After the Emperor Constantine more people were bound to the land as coloni. The increase in the number of these serf like people has been seen as one of the reasons for the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Slavery continued in the Byzantine Empire for example. It is said that when the Byzantine Empire re-conquered Crete in the tenth century they took off the island 200,000 slaves.

I am not convinced you understand what life was like for the average person in the first two centuries CE.

Most people in the Roman empire AFAIK were not slaves. Typically the persons narrated in the New Testament, Acts, and Epistles don't tend to be slaves either, although some were and there was a Christian appeal to slaves. I guess Corinth and the other places could have been underground slave churches, but I doubt it.

Paul was able to travel quite far, along with various apostles. With a family it's true things are different, but still people can make travels a few times a year when something as important as your religion requires it (eg. pilgrimages).

I did not get the impression that you were only thinking of being a Jew before 66 CE.

I wasn't. Rather, I was thinking of the likely audiences of the people in the 1st c.
They included principally, in order of distance: Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Syrians, Phoenicians, and Jews. Quite a number of early Christian works have been found in those cultures' languages: Latin, Greek, Coptic, and Aramaic, and they were the target audiences described in the New Testament.

Someone in Rome would have a long way to go, whereas Egyptians would have to traverse a distance comparable to that between Boston and NYC, and Jews would already be in the local area.

Check the stats though for females born in 1851 who make it past 20.
Life expectancy shoots way up when you get past the childhood years.

According to the Wikipedia article life expectancy was under 30 in ancient times a

I encourage you to think more about what I wrote above.
The specific categories are:
1. Women (who live longer on average than men)
2. Women who make it past 15 and could therefore have had familiarity with Mary's backstory based on contemporary rumors.

One can also add in women who could have heard backstories about Mary, like Celsus' later Ben Pandera story. She would have had nieces and nephews who would have known things like whether she was originally from Bethlehem or Nazareth, whether she had royal blood, whether there were rumors about her betrothal, how old Joseph was, etc.

Really I would be interested in any of the insightful questions, not just the virgin birth. So for example if Paul claims "500" witnesses, then you can try to find out if even they exist, and what exactly they claimed to have experienced (eg. a mental image?). Or you could try to find out what happened to Judas (suicide? got stomach worms?), or what Pilate really thought of Jesus (was he just pressured by the priests), or whether there were guards posted at the tomb, etc.

This implies you are living before 66 CE.

Much information could have been gathered by living in 67-150 AD.
1. You could find out what the rabbis' own version of Jesus' story was. In the Talmud, we do have a version, but the dates when Talmud stories were composed is not clear.
2. You can find out some very basic things debated by some skeptics today like whether the story of Jesus even existed, whether Nazareth even existed, whether Jews in the 1st c. even had any higher hopes for Messiah (NeilGodfrey claims they didn't).
3. Whether Christians thought that the Tomb of the Holy Sepulchre was the same location and there was a legend of the Shroud or painting (eg. Image of Edessa or Turin's)
4. Whether glossolalia sounded like total gibberish, and whether there were all other weird kinds of claims that could be proven to be total obvious nonsense.
5. Whether Paul was excommunicated basically by the Jewish Christians around James or the Christian community was united
6. Whether there were all kinds of stories that got suppressed or lost
7. What were the various narratives of the resurrection, and whether these were appearances, mental visions, etc. You could go to people like the apostle John and ask him to narrate this in more detail. (Analogy: When Mormons were asked to describe some of the original Mormon miracles years later, the stories started to look even far more doubtful than before.)
8. How common were stories of Jesus appearing to apostles after his resurrection? We have mentions of appearances to James and the 500, but scant information about appearances after that. Ireneaus, Apocryphon of James (by the heretic Cerinthus?), and AScension of Isaiah talk about 18 months of Jesus staying with the apostles post resurrection, not just 40 days.
9. You could find out what the Romans' own version was. We just have some passages in Tacitus, Pliny, Suetonius, etc. Skeptics note that we don't have the information about where they got their sources from. For example, Was Tacitus getting this directly from Christians? Does "Chrestus" mean Christ (I believe so) and does it refer to Jesus in particular?

[Michael BG]

Much information could have been gathered by living in 67-150 AD.
1. You could find out what the rabbis' own version of Jesus' story was. …
…
(you could find out what different groups of Christians believed)
…
9. You could find out what the Romans' own version was.

It is questionable that you could find any reliable information after 70 CE. If you could travel back in time (before 70 CE) and space and speak and understand the languages you could try to get answers to these questions. This assumes that these all groups had stories about Jesus et al and that they would honestly discuss them with you. There is also the problem of knowing if what you are told is true or not, even if the person telling you believes it to be true.

Most people in the Roman empire AFAIK were not slaves. Typically the persons narrated in the New Testament, Acts, and Epistles don't tend to be slaves either, although some were and there was a Christian appeal to slaves. I guess Corinth and the other places could have been underground slave churches, but I doubt it.

Most people in the Roman Empire were poor. This is why I stated that the average person would not be able to travel as you think they could. There must be evidence for scholars’ opinion that most Christians were poor or slaves.

We know that in Rome the vast majority of people were poor. There was a problem for the later Roman Republic in finding people in Rome rich enough to equipment themselves as soldiers.

It is estimated that the elite were about 1.5% of the population. It is estimated that half of all slaves worked in the countryside on large estates or in mines. The Roman elite had estates across the majority of the Empire. It is estimated that in Italy about 40% of the population were slaves. It is thought that the number of slaves reduced as the Empire no longer expanded. Slaves were replaced with poor people. Even if only 15% of the total population were slaves more than 50% would have been poor. It is possible that about 10% were mobile artisans.

If you were a Jew living in Palestine It would be possible to leave your farm once in a while to travel to Jerusalem. I don’t think any historian thinks that the majority of Jews managed to get to Jerusalem.

I have not stated it was impossible for some people to travel. I just stated that for the average person it would have been either impossible or very difficult. Therefore if you were a member of the elite like Josephus then you could travel. If you had a family which was rich enough for you to train as a Pharisee like Paul then you could afford to travel. If your family owned a fishing boat like Peter you could afford to travel. Perhaps if your family were builders like James you could afford to travel. However there does seem to be some rich women in the background of early Christianity and it might be them who provided the money for some of these Christians to be able to travel.

1. Women (who live longer on average than men)
2. Women who make it past 15 and could therefore have had familiarity with Mary's backstory based on contemporary rumors.

One can also add in women who could have heard backstories about Mary, like Celsus' later Ben Pandera story. She would have had nieces and nephews who would have known things like whether she was originally from Bethlehem or Nazareth, whether she had royal blood, whether there were rumors about her betrothal, how old Joseph was, etc.

Today women live longer than men but most of this is because child-birth is a lot safer than it was. With the average man living to about 30 the average woman would be expected to live to 35. If we date Jesus’s birth to 4 BCE then most of his generation would be dead by 50 CE. Traditionally James, Peter and Paul are all dead by 67 CE. The Jewish population of Palestine must have suffered during the war of 66-70. This is why it is questionable that you could find out any reliable information after 70 CE. (It is generally accepted that Mark created the Messianic Secret and this is evidence that it was difficult for anyone living around 70 CE to check what they were told.)

Even more Jews were killed during the 155-117 CE revolt. We are told by Cassius Dio that 580,000 Jews died during the Bar Kokhba revolt 132-36 in Judea. It is generally accepted that the Jewish population of Judea was devastated. It is unlikely a person living after 132 CE would be able to find out anything reliable.

[rakovsky]

rakovsky wrote:
Check the stats though for females born in 1851 who make it past 20.
Life expectancy shoots way up when you get past the childhood years.

1. Women (who live longer on average than men)
2. Women who make it past 15 and could therefore have had familiarity with Mary's backstory based on contemporary rumors.

With the average man living to about 30 the average woman would be expected to live to 35. If we date Jesus’s birth to 4 BCE then most of his generation would be dead by 50 CE.

Dear Michael,
Did you at least understand what I was trying to tell you in the underlined sentences about how the statistic is different if we are talking about women in general vs. women who make it past 15? Or am I really that awful at communicating?

Common misconceptions about science II: Life expectancy
Psychology Today, Satoshi Kanazawa

Another common misperception about science, ... is that, both in our ancestral past and in many developing nations today, people die at a much younger age than they do in contemporary western industrialized nations. They assume that, for example, the average life expectancy of 40 years means that most adults die at or around the age of 40. Contrary to this misconception, most adults, both in our ancestral past and in many developing nations today, live to be about as old as people do in western industrialized nations.

What is commonly known as “average life expectancy” is technically known as “life expectancy at birth” or “life expectancy at age 0” and refers to the average number of years that a newborn baby can expect to live in a given society at a given time. ... A major determinant of life expectancy at birth, especially in our ancestral past and in many developing nations today, is infant and child mortality rate. ... If half the children die before the age of 12 (let’s say, at the average age of death of 6), then the remaining half would have to live on average to be 74, for the life expectancy at birth to come out to be 40, with the implication that roughly half of the remaining half – a quarter of all babies born – live to be older than 74.

Another way of putting it is that, while life expectancy at birth is much lower in our evolutionary history and in many developing nations today than in contemporary industrialized nations, life expectancy at 15 and life expectancy at 30 in the former are not that different from what they are in the latter. Life expectancy at birth of 40 in a given society decidedly does not mean that a 20-year-old can expect to live only for 20 more years. More than likely, a 20-year-old in such a society can expect to live for another 50 years.

Adults everywhere and at all times, including our evolutionary past and in many developing nations today, live to be about the same age.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/th ... expectancy

[Kunigunde Kreuzerin]

I would add by the way, that due to the Chiastic structure and parallel between Mary Magdalene (finding an empty tomb due to a miraculous resurrection) and Mary of Nazareth (having Jesus in a cave due to a miraculous birth), that Mark and for that matter the other gospels at least allude to the virgin birth concept.

I understand very well why rather conservative Christians assess Mark’s conception of sonship, often called adoption, as unsatisfactory.

Although there is no direct parallel to the virgin birth (and Matthew did his best to give a biblical background to it), to me Matthew’s and Luke’s conception has always a taste of pagan idolatry and John’s a taste of Hellenistic philosophical ideas.

Christians should be more proud of what Mark was doing. Measured by the “Old Testament” only Mark gave a true biblical conception of sonship.

[rakovsky]

It is generally accepted that Mark created the Messianic Secret and this is evidence that it was difficult for anyone living around 70 CE to check what they were told.

Dear Michael,
I find the question about the "Messianic Secret" document of Mort Smith to be interesting as far as sleuthing frauds goes. It reminds me of the movie "Catch Me if You Can". I highly recommend the following to you:

Second Thoughts on the Secret Gospel, by the Center for Inquiry's ROBERT M. PRICE
https://www.ibr-bbr.org/files/bbr/BBR_2 ... Gospel.pdf

there are some scholars who still think that Secret Mark was originally part of Mark. But my sense is that the view is now in the minority.

~Bart Ehrman
https://ehrmanblog.org/why-was-the-gosp ... d-to-mark/

For a fuller treatment by Ehrman, see his chapter on it:
https://books.google.com/books?id=URdAC ... el&f=false

Among the earliest doubters was one of the greatest scholars of Christian antiquity of the 20th c., Smith's own teacher at Harvard, A. Darby Nock... to the end of his life his instincts - he was famous for his instincts - told him no, this was not genuinely Clementine. In his view, it was... a forgery by someone to see if he could get away with it. But Nock evidently did not think that it would have been a modern forger, let alone Smith. Others habe thought otherwise. .... From the moment Smith took his photographs, no other scholar has been able to subject the book to a careful and controlled examination.

He writes that "scholars in increasing numbers have begun to suspect that it is" "a forgery by a modern scholar intent on deceiving the academic world".

Unmasking a False Gospel
NY SUN, Bruce Chilton
this text is not an ancient manuscript at all. "Secret Mark" is supposed to be an 18th-century copy of a letter written by the second-century theologian Clement of Alexandria.
http://www.nysun.com/arts/unmasking-a-f ... pel/42197/

[neilgodfrey]

I highly recommend the following to you:

Second Thoughts on the Secret Gospel, by the Center for Inquiry's ROBERT M. PRICE
https://www.ibr-bbr.org/files/bbr/BBR_2 ... Gospel.pdf

For a fuller treatment by Ehrman, see his chapter on it:
https://books.google.com/books?id=URdAC ... el&f=false

Unmasking a False Gospel
NY SUN, Bruce Chilton
this text is not an ancient manuscript at all. "Secret Mark" is supposed to be an 18th-century copy of a letter written by the second-century theologian Clement of Alexandria.
http://www.nysun.com/arts/unmasking-a-f ... pel/42197/

Just muttering to myself as a bystander to this discussion (MichaelBG can certainly does not need my assistance) --- rakovsky, have you also read (or even looked for) the relatively recently published works arguing against the forgery claims? have you balanced the arguments of the above with the arguments against them? or is it sufficient for you to skim sources that support your preferred beliefs and to ignore the arguments that might challenge them?

[andrewcriddle]

If you were a slave you clearly couldn’t travel unless your owner let you.

If you were a poor labourer or farmer with a family you would not be able to afford to travel far from your home.

Most people I imagine were not slaves. Judaism had some rule against having Jews as slaves, and anyway I imagine that the gentiles weren't mostly slaves either. In Feudal Europe however, I expect that most people were serfs, a kind of permanent indentured servent.

In the first century BCE slavery increased across the Roman Empire. Slavery was normal in the Greek world. (Paul thinks of it as normal). During the first century CE slavery was on the increase in Roman society. There were economic pressure for the increase in slavery. In the second century CE laws were passed to give some rights to slaves. After the Emperor Constantine more people were bound to the land as coloni. The increase in the number of these serf like people has been seen as one of the reasons for the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Slavery continued in the Byzantine Empire for example. It is said that when the Byzantine Empire re-conquered Crete in the tenth century they took off the island 200,000 slaves.

I am not convinced you understand what life was like for the average person in the first two centuries CE.

Paul was able to travel quite far, along with various apostles. With a family it's true things are different, but still people can make travels a few times a year when something as important as your religion requires it (eg. pilgrimages).

I did not get the impression that you were only thinking of being a Jew before 66 CE.

Early Christianity seems to have been largely an urban phenomena. In the early Roman Empire city dwellers were probably quite mobile.

Most people in the Roman Empire were rural with little opportunity to leave their farms and travel. However these people were not the typical Christians in the 1st century CE.

Andrew Criddle

[Michael BG]

Life expectancy shoots way up when you get past the childhood years.

1. Women (who live longer on average than men)
2. Women who make it past 15 and could therefore have had familiarity with Mary's backstory based on contemporary rumors.

With the average man living to about 30 the average woman would be expected to live to 35. If we date Jesus’s birth to 4 BCE then most of his generation would be dead by 50 CE.

Dear Michael,
Did you at least understand what I was trying to tell you in the underlined sentences about how the statistic is different if we are talking about women in general vs. women who make it past 15?[/b] Or am I really that awful at communicating?

Common misconceptions about science II: Life expectancy
Psychology Today, Satoshi Kanazawa
…

I am not sure how reliable Satoshi Kanazawa is, especially as he was banned from writing for Psychology Today.

However I do understand that children in the past had a greater chance of dying than adults. If we accept Kanazawa then of those nephews and nieces you spoke of half of them would die when children.

My point was that a woman in the past would have a greater chance of dying in adulthood than a Muslim scholar of the Middle Ages. Do you understand that women as adults had a greater chance of dying because of child-birth than adult men?

Poor people always have a greater chance of dying than rich people. Those people who have access to good health care will live longer than those who do not.

Satoshi Kanazawa’s conclusion “that most adults, both in our ancestral past and in many developing nations today, live to be about as old as people do in western industrialized nations” is wrong. The chance of surviving for a woman to over the age of 75 in western countries is greater today than it was 200 years ago.

The Wikipedia article you gave the link for (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy) uses Bruce W Frier to state, that if someone reaches 10 then they could be expected to live to 47.5 in Classical Rome, the BBC, that if someone reaches 21 they could be expected to live to 64. It also states than even in the C21st a poor man born in the Calton area of Glasgow has a life expectancy of 54.

According to the WHO in 2000 there were still areas of the world where for every 100,000 live births more than 1500 women died. In India it appears the figure was between 100 and 299 per 100,000 (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... C_2000.jpg).

If you look at the 50 CE date I am saying few people would reach the age of 54 in that year in Palestine. I further point out that in 70 CE the number of people of Jesus’ generation would be very, very small. This is why I am saying it would be hard to find eye witnesses after 70 CE. This is why I think it would be much better to travel back in time and witness the events rather than try to find reliable eye witnesses or relatives of eye-witnesses.

I have recently been reading about the campaign of the Duke of Monmouth to become king. An eye witness reports that the rebels (he was one) wounded many Royalist cavalry but killed none. The Royalist officer in command reported that of his men 4 had been wounded and 2 killed. This is why even eye-witness reports in this case the rebel was not reliable.

It is generally accepted that Mark created the Messianic Secret and this is evidence that it was difficult for anyone living around 70 CE to check what they were told.

Dear Michael,
I find the question about the "Messianic Secret" document of Mort Smith to be interesting as far as sleuthing frauds goes. It reminds me of the movie "Catch Me if You Can". I highly recommend the following to you:

Second Thoughts on the Secret Gospel, by the Center for Inquiry's ROBERT M. PRICE
https://www.ibr-bbr.org/files/bbr/BBR_2 ... Gospel.pdf

The Secret Gospel is not the same as the Messianic Secret
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messianic_Secret).

[rakovsky]

Just muttering to myself as a bystander to this discussion (MichaelBG can certainly does not need my assistance) --- rakovsky, have you also read (or even looked for) the relatively recently published works arguing against the forgery claims? have you balanced the arguments of the above with the arguments against them? or is it sufficient for you to skim sources that support your preferred beliefs and to ignore the arguments that might challenge them?

Hello, Neil.
I have read arguments on both sides of the issue, and originally I tended to assume that it was legitimate. After learning more, for me, what pushed it beyond unknown into likely forgery territory was the motive and coincidence aspect. M.Smith's theory was about homosexuality in early Christianity, and he just "happened" to find a document that no one else had ever found before proving his theory. Ehrman made other good points in his book.

Lest you think it's out of some Christian bias on my part, I also came across a detailed pro-Christian account by Pilate (not the Acts of Pilate), however reading it, I could just get a pretty strong sense it was penned in the 19th century based on the language and I couldn't find anything supporting the legitimacy of this Pilate document. The Jesus ossuary is another modern fraud, according to the Israeli Antiquities Association.

However, I do think that there is a sleuthing issue to "Secret Mark". Since it appears to be a well made fraud, sleuthing this out makes it interesting.