Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Gamera · 05-09-2006, 12:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Amaleq13

Only if they were recognized as such and I know of no evidence that this blatantly idiotic requirement was the focus of any early criticism or Christian commentary. The notion that the failure of early Christians and their opponents to recognize the idiocy of the requirement somehow suggests it is not idiotic is, itself, entirely ridiculous.

This is truly a strange notion. First you claim that the census claim is blatantly idiotic. Then you claim that nobody at the time noticed it was blatantly idiotic, and it took some clever scholars 2000 years to figure it out. So much for blatancy.

If the claim isn't blatantly false, and we had to do a fair bit of construction to prove its "idiocy," perhaps this suggest that the claim is not that idiotic after all, but rather garbles some well-known event that occured in Judea, but not recorded elsewhere.

Gamera · 05-09-2006, 01:07 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by S.C.Carlson

That would be one approach, but there appears no evidence of such a practice and that any such requirement would have been unprecedented in the Roman Empire. However, before we get to deciding whether Luke is reporting something accurate or inaccurate, I think we should make sure that we are understanding Luke accurately.

The relevant text is from Luke 2:3-7 --

3 And everyone would go to get registered, each to his own town. 4 Joseph too went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, into Judea, to David's city called Bethlehem, on account of his being of the house and family of David. 5 to get registered with Mary who was betrothed to him and pregnant. 6 It so happened that in their being there, the days were fulfilled that she give birth, 7 and she gave birth to her son, [her] firstborn, and she swaddled him and laid him down in a feed-trough, because there was no place for them in the loft.

So, according to the text, everyone went to their own hometown to get registered, including Joseph. Since the text has Joseph go to Bethlehem, it implies that his hometown is Bethlehem. Verse 4b explains why Bethlehem is his hometown: Joseph's family has lived at least since the time of David. Thus, Joseph is not in Nazareth because he was living there, but because he had business to do, such as finding a bride.

Another way of determining where Luke thought Joseph's hometown to be is to ask and answer the question: Where did Luke think Joseph and Mary were married?

According to v.5, Mary was merely engaged when she came to Bethlehem pregnant and according to v. 6 it was in Bethlehem where she gave birth. This places the wedding in Bethlehem. Since marriage was patrilocal, the wedding was held in the groom's family, so the sequence of events in vv.5-6 also supports Joseph and his family being from Bethlehem.

Three reasons have usually been given against this reading of Luke, but they are not strong enough for me to go against the plain meaning of the text.

First, it is contended that v.7 "no room in the inn" means that Joseph did not have a home of his own in Bethlehem. This objection relies on some misperceptions. First off, katalyma probably does not mean "inn" but "upper room" or "loft" as it does in Luke 22:11. Also, in an honor/shame culture, Joseph's not having a room for him does not mean that Joseph was not family--it means that the room was used by someone in town of higher status than Joseph. And Joseph's status in this scenario could not have been enhanced by his choice to go through with a marriage to a woman who was already pregnant.

A second reason is that Luke 2:39 states that "they returned to Galilee, to their own town Nazareth." However, this occurred more than a month after Jesus's birth (the redemption of 2:22b is supposed to occur at 30 days), and does not directly address the issue of Joseph's residence before the marriage (Luke 1:26-27 only places Mary in Nazareth). Indeed, land in Nazareth would have been an inducement for Joseph to marry a pregnant woman.

A third counter-argument is found in Fitzmyer's commentary: "The Matthean infancy narrative knows nothing of this and implies rather that their 'house' was in Bethlehem (2:11). One should not read that into the Lucan account." Not much of a counter-argument, and it only works on the assumption that Luke and Matthew are independent (i.e. the Q hypothesis). Those who dispense with Q, on the other hand, have no problems with Luke's agreement with his source, Matthew, for the idea of a Bethlehem home for Joseph.

The idea that Luke is imagining a census that ordered people to go back to their ancestral towns is commonplace but not ultimately supported by the text. A more straightforward understanding is that the census had people registered in their own towns. When Joseph went to Bethlehem with the pregnant Mary, he was returning home to marry her. Luke's careful mention that Joseph complied with the authorities distinguishes Jesus's mother's husband from that rebellious Judas of Galilee, so well-known to the audience of Flavius Josephus.

Stephen Carlson

This is an interesting approach. I guess everything then turns of verse 4 and Luke's "explanation" relating to Joseph being of the House of David through the term "dia."

I guess one way to test this would be to see if there were any studies about demographic movements in Judea over the period from David to Joseph. If populations tended to remain sedentary, it would add weight to your claim (though of course Joseph and his family could be an exception to any rule to the contrary).

Does the fact that Luke appears cryptic here suggest that his audience would not find it odd that Joseph's family had remained in the same city for 1000 years or so? That too might be a testable hypothesis.

Amaleq13 · 05-09-2006, 07:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gamera

First you claim that the census claim is blatantly idiotic. Then you claim that nobody at the time noticed it was blatantly idiotic, and it took some clever scholars 2000 years to figure it out. So much for blatancy.

It is blatant from our perspective given the available evidence. There is no reason to assume a similar level of knowledge of the general practices of the Roman Empire. Based on the evidence, neither early Christians nor their early opponents spent any time considering this particular claim.

Amaleq13 · 05-09-2006, 08:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by S.C.Carlson

So, according to the text, everyone went to their own hometown to get registered, including Joseph.

According to the text, everyone went to their "own town" but it is also clear from the text that this phrase did not have the single, fixed meaning of "one's hometown" in the sense of being born there or spending one's childhood there.

Why are you not allowing the plain reading of the subsequent definition of the initial use of this phrase to dictate its meaning (ie "because he was of the house and lineage of David")?

The context of the second use appears to imply a meaning of "where he settled with his family".

Diogenes the Cynic · 05-09-2006, 08:07 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by S.C.Carlson

Luke's characterization of Mary as "betrothed" in 2:5 is a strong reason that he did not contemplate a prior wedding in Nazareth.

I didn't say it had to be prior, I'm saying there's no reason it couldn't have been subsequent to the birth. I just don't find it credible that Luke intended his audience to understand that a wedding took place sometime between their arrival in Bethlehem and the birth of the child. Everything in the text mitigates against that.

Steven Carr · 05-09-2006, 08:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by S.C.Carlson

I cited Luke 22:11. Here's more from Malina and Rohrbaugh's Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, p. 376:

While the Greek word in Luke 2:7 can sometimes mean "inn," it normally refers to a large finished room attached to a peasant house and is best translated "guest room." The only other use of the term in the New Testament is in the story of the Last Supper (Mark 14:14; Luke 22:11), where is translated "upper room." The normal room for a commercial inn (pandokeion) is used by Luke at 10:34; such an "inn" was a place that "receives all." The fact that there was no "place" for Joseph and Mary in the guest room of the home thus meant that someone who socially outranked them already occupied it.

Gosh, I'm surprised that Malina and Rohrbaugh don't know the name of this person.

After all, what does a mere lack of evidence of any guest, or any guest room or any house have to do to prevent them speculating about the priority of relatives of Joseph - for whom they have no evidence anyway.

Why exactly did Malina and Rohrbaugh put the word 'science' into the title, rather than 'confabulation'?

Should we assume that people would not have regarded someone about to get married , and his pregnant bride ,as having quite a high claim on a bed?

I assume Joseph crossed these people off his wedding-guest list....

Diogenes the Cynic · 05-09-2006, 08:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by S.C.Carlson

I cited Luke 22:11. Here's more from Malina and Rohrbaugh's Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, p. 376:

While the Greek word in Luke 2:7 can sometimes mean "inn," it normally refers to a large finished room attached to a peasant house and is best translated "guest room." The only other use of the term in the New Testament is in the story of the Last Supper (Mark 14:14; Luke 22:11), where is translated "upper room." The normal room for a commercial inn (pandokeion) is used by Luke at 10:34; such an "inn" was a place that "receives all." The fact that there was no "place" for Joseph and Mary in the guest room of the home thus meant that someone who socially outranked them already occupied it.

Luke 22:11 is actually a copy of Mark 14:14 so it can't really be cited as an exemplar of specifically Lucan vocabulary. I also don't think it clearly supports any definition of kataluma as an "upper room" anyway. Lk. 22:12 (still following Mark) says that the kataluma (which Strong's says should be understood in this case as "guestchamber" or "dining room) is located in an upper room. If, as Malina and Rohrbaugh claim, kataluma should be translated as "upper room" in Mk. 14:14 /Lk. 22:11, then why does Mk. 14:15/Lk. 22:12 make the redundant clarification that this upper room is located in an upper room? In fact, Luke duplicates Mark's use of the word anogeon (lit. "away from the ground." "above the ground.") specifically to mean "upper room."

Why does Liddell and Scott fail to offer such a definition of kataluma even as a secondary or tertiary meaning if it is in fact, the "normal" meaning and where do M and R find the attestations for their definition? Every Lexicon I've looked at says that that a kataluma is a lodging place or a guest chamber.

Quote:

They also note, based on Bethlehem's small size, that the small village "almost certainly had no commercial inns anyway."

That depends on what you mean by "commercial inns." The chances are low that Luke was talking about anything with private rooms. A one-room building with a stable attached would have been sufficient to house and feed travellers who would have eaten and slept in the same room. Moving a woman to the stable to have a baby would have been the logical move in those circumstances.

Even if Bethlehem lacked such a modest caravanasary as that, I think it's a insignificant detail since Luke wasn't writing history in any case (and wasn't much of a historian). Contriving an inn was a logical device to drive his story. Whether Bethlehem actually had any public places of lodging 90 years before Luke was writing was no more important to the author than the location of Gerasa or any of the other mistakes he makes or repeats from Mark.

Diogenes the Cynic · 05-09-2006, 09:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by S.C.Carlson

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic

This conclusion relies on nothing but your own assumption that they must have gotten married before the birth

And the problem with this assumption is?

That it's unfounded. Not only does the text say nothing to support this idea, it does not seem to provide any time or circumstance for it within the chronology of the narrative. At very best, your hypothesis is under-supported and resoundingly unpersuasive. At worst it sounds like the kind of scrabbling apologetics which I haven't been accustomed to seeing from you.

Gamera · 05-09-2006, 09:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Amaleq13

It is blatant from our perspective given the available evidence. There is no reason to assume a similar level of knowledge of the general practices of the Roman Empire. Based on the evidence, neither early Christians nor their early opponents spent any time considering this particular claim.

But that's the rub. You claim historians 2000 years after an event would be more aware than people living in the area under Roman rule of a famous event that happened within a few generations of the text. That seem on its face unlikely to me. All the audience would need is a story about a grandparent or great parent who met his wife during his travels in the great Augustan census. Or that he broke his leg and had to settle in the current town. Or that he died in a hold up. Big events stir family histories that are passed down. I know alot of WWI because of my grandmother's renditions of it.

Amaleq13 · 05-09-2006, 09:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by S.C.Carlson

Luke's characterization of Mary as "betrothed" in 2:5 is a strong reason that he did not contemplate a prior wedding in Nazareth.

It is my understanding that a "betrothed wife" involved a contract that was as binding as an official marriage but traditionally precluded physical intimacy until the actual ceremony was completed. Wouldn't the fact that Mary was already pregnant have required that they skip the traditional year-long wait and make it official ASAP?

IOW, "To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child." does not reflect the typical response to cultural standards so interpreting the passage as though the characters were adhering to those standards is inadvisable.

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