A Sense of Doubt blog post #2117 - Brief History of Early Christianity and Dead Sea Scroll Forgeries?
Rarely, do I write anything that attacks another religion or has the semblance of such an attack. And yet, in the natural reading of the many blogs and newsletters I follow, some closely and some not so much, I came across the main text of today's blog entry from another blog entitled Brane Space written by someone with the online handle of Copernicus.
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2020/03/a-brief-history-of-early-christinaity.html
Saturday, March 7, 2020
A Brief History Of Early Christinaity
In fact this is a fairy tale that has no real scholarly support. What I'd like to do here is to provide a kind of concise history of early Christianity, up to about 300 AD. Most of the content has been extracted from some notes on Early Christian History (from Loyola) as well as the recent books: The Gnostic Gospels and Adam, Eve & The Serpent (by Elaine Pagels), and Lost Christianities, by scholar and former fundamentalist, Bart Ehrman.
The intent here is not to badmouth Christianity or diminish it, but to show it in its historic light, as opposed to the (often) fantastic, and ahistorical light many have used to portray it.
One of the aspects that most stands out is it's eclectic nature. Contrary to being a font for monotheism, early Christianity was anything but. Nor had the "god Man" claim for Jesus yet become entrenched, as it did later (mainly compliments of Paul) in the institutional religion.
In terms of the eclectic nature, Prof. Ehrman points out (op. cit.) that "some of the early Christians believed in one God, some in two, and some others in thirty". He also expressed the divergence of belief concerning Jesus:
"There were some who believed Jesus' death brought about the world's salvation (likely the precursors of evangelicals who wouldn't appear in full bloom for another 17 centuries, and others who thought it had nothing to do with it. Others said Jesus never died. We examine here some of the chief Christian voices-groups in the early centuries."
Perhaps the first were the Ebionites, and also the earliest of the banned sects, later to be called "heretics". This group believed in Christ but saw him as the Jewish Messiah, sent from the Jewish God to the Jewish people in fulfillment of Jewish scriptures. This take (of Ehrman) also comports with that of Oxford Scholar Geza Vermes, who notes (in his monograph ‘The Authentic Gospel Of Jesus’ (page 415):
“The religion revealed by the authentic message of Jesus is straightforward, without complex dogmas, mythical images or self-centered mystical speculation. It resembles a race consisting only of the final ‘straight’ – demanding from the runners their last ounce of energy and with a winners’ medal prepared for all the JEWISH participants who cross the finishing line."
Vermes goes on to observe (ibid.) that Christianity seems to "belong to another world, with its mixture of high philosophical speculation on the triune God, its Johannine Logos mysticism, and Pauline Redeemer myth of a dying and risen Son of God"
But why express surprise here? The fact is the myth of a redeemer god -Man had been in the cultural -religious zeitgeist (for example with the Mithraic pagans) for over twelve centuries. If a new faith wanted to claim exclusivity or unique gravitas and "separate from the pack" so to speak, it couldn't do better than to appropriate the same god -Man myth then weave it into its textual accounts. Readers of an inquiring mind couldn't do better than to access the Yale University Religious Study course lectures below:
The Historical Jesus
Arguing with Paul?
In line with the above, Jesus for the Ebionites was not a member of an eternal Trinity, but rather an ordinary man who kept Jewish law to perfection. As for their sacred text - accepted by them- it excluded the Gospel of John (which many current biblical historians have trouble with as well, partly for its elaborations - like on the trial of Jesus - which no other synoptic gospel discloses) while it retained most of the Old Testament and the Gospel of Matthew.
It's also noteworthy here, that the Ebionites - like the Gnostics- had a particular dislike for Paul, and also like the Gnostics viewed him as "the enemy" for his claim that all of Jewish law was rendered irrelevant by belief in Christ.
The Marcionites were another early Christian group, founded by a shipping magnate, Marcion, ca. 139 AD in Rome. Here, in this manifestation, we find the first appearance of the "double God", later circulated also by the Gnostics. The Marcionites thus accepted the world was created by an "evil God" (the one described in the Old Testament, in his various assorted genocides etc.) and that this evil god imposed a death sentence on humanity when it could not meet its impossibly high demands. In juxtaposition to the evil god was the "God of Jesus" and by belief in him, humans could escape from the vindictive wrath of the evil god. Those who did not, would remain in the evil god's clutches and join him in hell. (Again, we find exact resonances of this in modern evangelical Christianity who worship the same evil God in the OT. At least I've never heard or seen any of them reject him!)
Perhaps the most developed Christian group at the time, with the most refined philosophy and belief system, were the Gnostics. At least a few scholars speculate in fact that Gnosticism is at least partially an offshoot from early Greek philosophy. To summarize the Gnostic take:
'The world is essentially a cesspool and we're all mired in filth and ignorance. We all came from somewhere else, and salvation is finding our way back."
Like the Marcionites, the Gnostics believed an evil and inferior god ruled over the world (and also created our bodies). They called it demiurgos. Existentially, it was roughly on a par with Satan. So the evil god and Satan formed an evil twin duo. Gnostics, in terms of their scriptures and what they believed, penned their own "Gnostic Gospels". They rejected the Old Testament as antiquated rubbish about the demiurgos, while they rejected much of the New Testament because of the Pauline wording corruptions, and references to Jesus as "savior". They believed none of this was original, but the work of Paul's copyist henchmen.
Their core belief was that at the last instant of manifest existence a higher, supreme God would appear and insert into each of us his spark of divinity. At this stage, we would each attain a high enough level of knowledge (gnosis) to conquer our attachment to material reality and become Christs unto ourselves.
Thus, in the Gnostics, we see the first emergence of a totally different version of "Christ" from what Paul taught and circulated. Pagels observes ('The Gnostic Gospels', Vintage-Random House, 1979), p. 124 :
"While Pauline Catholics taught a reality of 'sin' and that 'Jesus alone could deliver healing and forgiveness of sins', the Gnostics on the contrary, insisted that ignorance, not sin, is what involves a person in suffering. The gnostic movement shared in this certain affinities with contemporary methods of exploring the self through psychotherapeutic techniques."
Also(p. 125):
"Whoever remains ignorant... cannot experience fulfilment. Gnostics said that such a person 'dwells in deficiency'. For deficiency consists of ignorance."
Perhaps the most daring, and threatening proposition of the Gnostics, was their belief in gnosis, or the 'de-localization' of Christhood. Why? Because if the (Institutional-doctrinal) Church accepted this, they'd have to surrender their coveted power wielded via intermediaries (priests, bishops, cardinals, etc.). Paul knew this full well, which he fought against the Gnostics' egalitarian Christhood with all his might. There was no way he'd accept that every human could bcome a Christ in his own right.
Pagels echoing the principle of gnosis (ibid., p.134):
"Whoever achieves gnosis becomes no longer a Christian, but a Christ."
Even today, Gnostic churches exist, despite Paul's effort to wipe them out. In Barbados, a large Gnostic church still remains not far from the Constitution River in Bridgetown. When I last visited, at least three members declared that they were nearly at the level of "Christhood".
In effect, in the Gnostic teachings, anyone had the capacity to become 'a Christ'. Pauline Catholicism, meanwhile - held there could be only one, on which all others had to depend for 'salvation'. The Gnostics, for their part, regarded the Pauline teachings of a unique god-Man as utter blasphemy. NO mere human (which they regarded Jesus) could also be God, but each human could eventually become a limited divine manifestation known as Christ. (They did allow Jesus might have reached that stage before other humans)
Pagels goes on (ibid.):
"We can see, then, that such gnosticism was more than a protest movement against orthodox Christianity. Gnosticism also included a religious perspective that implicitly opposed the development of the kind of institution that became the early Catholic Church. Those who expected to 'become Christs' themselves were not likely to recognize the institutional structures of the church -its bishops, priests, creed, canon, or ritual - as bearing ultimate authority."
For this reason, As Pagels notes (p. 102), the Catholic orthodoxy and tradition (including many Church Fathers such as Tertullian- the original theocon) saw fit to consistently denounce the Gnostics "while suppressing and virtually destroying the Gnostic writings themselves." And of course, we had the likes of the unscrupulous idiot Irenaeus calling them 'frauds'. (Pagels, p. 17) To serve his own purposes of course!
One is left to wonder, why - if the Church and St. Paul felt so self-righteous, they had to destroy and suppress the Gnostic gospels and writings. Was their Church so weak and tepid that it couldn't co-exist? Seems so. Just like today's evangelicals are evidently so weak and tepid that they can't tolerate and co-exist with other Christian groups.
In any case, by the 4th century AD the early eclecticism had nearly vanished and an institutional Pauline Christianity ended up the prime descendant of the original teachings and a religion which had essentially succeeded in wiping out or suppressing all groups not centralized in Rome. The major turning point was undoubtedly the "Edict of Milan" which removed all penalties for professing Pauline Christianity.
The latter subsequently achieved immense strength as it became the official religion of Rome, thanks to aligning itself with many elements of the Roman Sol Invictus (Sun worship) cult including adopting the same date for Its Nativity: the Winters Solstice or Dec. 25th. See also:
Revisiting The Origin Of Christmas & Sol Invictus
The rest as they say, is history, though historians such as Edward Gibbons have linked the decline and fall of the Roman Empire to its uneasy integration with the Pauline variant of Christianity.
Transcript:
The Museum of the Bible has admitted to being the victim of a massive fraud: it turns out, there is no god and the Bible is just nonsense made up by a bunch of semi-literate goat herders.
Just kidding! They haven’t quite gotten there yet but they have done something quite unexpected for an ostensibly religious organization: they hired outside experts to examine their most prized artifacts, and then actually made the results public despite the finding that all of those artifacts are bogus.
I’m talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls, texts on parchment and papyrus that are some of the earliest known manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible. Now before I go any further, let me take a moment to pop some bubbles for the edgy atheists crowing on social media: this news is not about the 1,000 or so Dead Sea Scrolls that are currently housed in the Israel Museum’s Shrine of the Book. Those were discovered in the mid-20th century in some caves near, as you might have guessed by the name, the Dead Sea. They date from about 400 BCE to the first century AD, according to radiocarbon and paleographic dating as well as from coins found nearby.
That is actual science, and the existence of fragments of the Bible dating back to that long ago does not in any way support the existence of an angry God who gives people boils for fun, just like how the discovery of the Homeric Hymns, which predate the Dead Sea Scrolls by several centuries, in no way suggests that Dionysius exists. So even if all of the Dead Sea Scrolls were found to be forgeries, it wouldn’t put a dent in any of the evidence for or against the existence of the Christian God.
That said, all of the Dead Sea Scrolls were not found to be forgeries -- only many of the Scrolls that were “discovered” after 2002, and all of that which were on display at the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC.
This isn’t shocking news, even to the Museum of the Bible. For years, experts have questioned the authenticity of the newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls. You see, the originals were discovered literally by a bedouin looking through caves to find his lost sheep. From there, they went to an antiquities dealer and then to researchers. Bedouins have constantly beat archaeologists to these finds, and that makes it kind of difficult to determine their provenance. So when the son of the original trusted antiquities dealer started peddling new discoveries, collectors just sort of accepted that they must be real. Unfortunately, when skeptical experts started examining them more closely in the past few years, they found some problems. For instance, one fragment had modern day ground up salt crystals on it. Was one authenticator eating potato chips while he read over it? No, because the ink on the leather was written over top of the salt. There are a lot of other more subtle problems with them but that one really sums up how completely ready these people were to be suckered.
That’s why this was such a comparatively easy grift: the collectors really, truly wanted these to be real Dead Sea Scrolls. The person fabricating them didn’t even need to try very hard, just putting some Bible verses on ancient pieces of leather in blocky Hebrew. Despite inconsistencies, each fragment was quickly and easily selling for tens of thousands of dollars to churches and individual believers who desperately wanted a piece of their religion’s history.
And not to say that Christians are any more gullible than anyone else but it’s not like they have a lot of experience with real evidence and real historical artifacts. I mean, throughout history there have been many churches that claimed to have the official, confirmed foreskin of Jesus Christ. They have philosophical debates over who has it, or if anyone has it because maybe the foreskin actually ascended to heaven with Jesus even though it wasn’t attached at the time. Historians of religions gotta deal with a LOT of bullshit.
Anyway, it’s been known for years that many of the Museum of the Bible’s Dead Sea Scrolls are forgeries. So kudos to them for actually sponsoring independent investigation, and then for actually publishing the results when it came to light that exactly zero of their Scrolls were real.
Why would the Museum be so honest about all this? Well, I have a theory. The Museum is funded by none other than Hobby Lobby. You may know Hobby Lobby for their virulent opposition to women’s bodily autonomy and affordable healthcare, or for their illegal smuggling operation that looted thousands of antiquities from Iraq. But what you might not know is that Hobby Lobby is also a craft store. And what do they have on sale right now? That’s right: Dead Sea Scroll forgery supplies. Ancient leather. Reed pens with worn nibs. Hebrew letter stencils.
The entire thing was just an international multi-million dollar marketing scheme! And now that you’re all quarantined, what else are you going to do with all your time inside? There are only so many shows on Netflix! You might as well know how to forge your own Dead Sea Scroll!
That’s my theory, anyway. It could also be that they realized it was only a matter of time before everyone knew they had forgeries anyway so they may as well get ahead of the story and use it to remind everyone that there’s a Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC. No such thing as bad publicity for a religion, after all! So it could be that. But my money’s on the crafts.
Transcript:
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Redditors suddenly cried out in ecstasy and then came in their pants. So I checked and yep, it’s a study saying that atheists are smarter than Christians. Time to jerk that circle, everybody!
As an atheist myself, I know I need to be very, very careful when talking about a study like this. Why? Because it’s really, really easy to believe anything that you want to be true. As much as I get annoyed by “organized” atheists, I gotta admit that if something is proving that either atheists are theists are smarter, I’m gonna hope it’s atheists. Because I am one.
And this isn’t like studies that might find that one race or one sex are smarter than another, because your religious outlook is malleable. It’s not based on unchanging genetics or biology we have no control over, really: it’s a conclusion you come to. So why wouldn’t I want scientists to tell me that the fact that I came to this particular conclusion means that I’m more likely to be smarter than someone who did not come to this conclusion? It would be like scientists finding that people who decide to dye their hair unnatural colors are more likely to be intelligent. Why yes, thank you, I agree with your scientific analysis.
But is the science sound? Let’s take a look at the data!
First of all, this isn’t just one study -- it’s a meta-analysis of 83 different studies that all looked at intelligence and religiosity. I’ve talked about this before: meta-analyses are great because they allow scientists to look at a large amount of data that shows us more of a scientific consensus on a subject, rather than just what one particular study may have found, which may be at odds with what 50 studies found prior.
The trouble with meta-analyses is that you need to be very careful with what studies you choose to include and what studies you don’t include. Ideally, scientists pick and choose studies based on the quality of the data and relevance to the hypothesis being studied, but a less upstanding researcher could just cherrypick studies that find what they want to find, and ignore studies that contradict them.
In this case, Miron Zuckerman, a psychologist at University of Rochester, was really just building on a previous meta-analysis he conducted back in 2013. That one included 63 studies and also found a link between intelligence and (less) religiosity, but due to heavy skepticism in the media at the time, he wanted to either confirm or challenge his previous conclusions with an extra 20 studies that have been conducted since the initial meta-analysis. Sure enough, the new data mostly confirmed the early conclusion: people who were less religious tended to have higher intelligence.
One major issue with this meta-analysis is how they choose to define “religiosity” and “intelligence.” In this case, “religiosity” was defined by belief, not behavior: so if you believe in God but you don’t go to church every Sunday, you’re still defined by this meta-analysis as being religious. In the first analysis they looked at both and found that the correlation was stronger for belief, so in this one they stuck with that for consistency and, probably, to get the strongest possible result. Also note by “religious” they actually specifically mean “Christian,” as all these studies were conducted in Christian-majority populations. This meta-analysis says absolutely nothing about non-Christian religions.
Next, what do they mean by “intelligence?” That’s pretty much always going to be a sticky issue, because scientists are constantly improving how they measure “intelligence” and what it means, exactly. In this case, it absolutely does not mean “educated.” The results were the same for people with college degrees and those who had never attended college. Instead, the correlation works for people who took a variety of IQ tests, like Wordsum, a simple vocabulary test, and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, the most common IQ test in the world.
And can we say for sure that what these tests measure is “intelligence?” Well, yeah, but it is hard to say what that means for “intelligence” besides the recursive view that “intelligent” means “you were able to do well on this test.” And that’s one issue that Zucerkman points out in his meta-analysis: less religious people tended to have higher intelligence, but they also tended to be more analytical thinkers. He says that maybe intelligence tests are really just testing analytical thinking, as opposed to intuitive thinking, and so maybe all he is really saying is that religious people tend to not be as analytical as non-religious people, which isn’t nearly as fun a headline as “religious people are dumber than atheists.”
Also, it’s worth pointing out how big the effect is: not very. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very clear, very strong result in that yes, there is little doubt that less religious people are more intelligent than religious people, but how much more intelligent? Not very. It’s so small, in fact, that scientists would not be able to predict intelligence based upon how religious a person is. Think of it like the difference between the height of men and women. American men are 5’9 on average, while women are 5’4. If I told you one person is 5’5 and another person is 5’7 you’d rightfully tell me you have no idea which is the man and which is the woman because the overlap is so large. The link between religiosity and intelligence is much, much smaller than that.
So with all that said, why are non-religious people ever so slightly more intelligent than religious people on average? This study doesn’t say, though Zuckerman has some guesses. He hypothesizes that perhaps religion offers benefits like raising your self-esteem, and giving you a better feeling of control over yourself and your circumstance, and more intelligent people already possess those things and so have no need for religion to give it to them.
Maybe! Or maybe the more analytical you are, the easier it is to see that the natural world has no need or even room for an all-powerful deity whether you want one or not. Because when I read Zuckerman’s conjecture, I realized that I absolutely could use some more self-esteem and feeling of control over myself and my environment. I spent a large portion of my early 20s wishing I could believe in a god because things were so much happier when I could imagine an afterlife for me and my loved ones. But I can’t, because it just makes no sense to me. It sounds like a fairytale. But maybe I’m just not smart enough to get all those benefits of intelligence and I just happen to be one of the dumber atheists dragging down the effect size for everyone else. Sorry, guys.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2012.04 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1981 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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