Freethought & Rationalism Archive

sschlichter · 05-30-2008, 11:54 AM

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Originally Posted by funinspace

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Originally Posted by sschlichter

According to Josephus (Wars of the Jews), the Romans first attacked in 66 and then withdrew for some reason before attacking again. After the withdrawal, Josephus also stated the many of the Jews fled (as if swimming from a sinking ship).

Eusebius confirmed this and wrote that the christians did heed Jesus' warning and left Jerusalem for Pella.

Info on Pella: http://www.bibarch.com/ArchaeologicalSites/Pella.htm

First, thanks for the link to in interesting web site on Pella.

However, there are a couple problems with what you state. Eusebius came 250 years after said events, and can hardly confirm anything. At best, if he quotes accurately, he can relay what previous writers have said, and has otherwise been lost.

The site itself puts Josephus's writing as a questionable reference:

This paragraph pretty much sumerizes the web sites view of the historical information regarding Christians fleeing Jerusalem:

Quote:

Firm archaeological evidence of the refuge in Pella and return to Jerusalem remain inconclusive. The literary accounts are of limited value because of the speculative and highly redacted nature of Josephus, and the remote and hearsay nature of Eusebius and Epiphanius. Moreover, there is no hard evidence suggesting that they reported any more than the unsubstantiated traditions they encountered in the highly superstitious context of Byzantine Christianity.

Seems like a fair statement. Although Eusebius seemed to be citing the event so he could go into his ominous interpretation. He does not seem to feel it necessary to substnatiate the vent at all.

~Steve

sschlichter · 05-31-2008, 09:12 AM

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Originally Posted by Malachi151

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Originally Posted by jaymack2

I was doing a little reading recently about the Roman conquest of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple in 70 AD. According to Josephus, who was there, the devastation was widespread. He claimed that more than 1 million Jews were killed, I believe. I don't read much about this event in discussions of early Christianity, or at least I don't think it's given as much emphasis as it deserves. I mean, here you are only 35 years removed from the death of Jesus, and in all probability many of the remaining eyewitnesses on the Jewish side were killed or driven off. My point is that the skeptics, the people who saw Jesus and didn't believe his story, weren't around anymore so there was only the Christian side of the story after that. Perhaps this accounts for the lack of mention of Jesus in Jewish writings -- the contemporary records were probably destroyed by the Romans. And then the Romans came back and finished the job in 135 AD, so there was nothing left but ashes.

I'm intrigued by the fact that the Jerusalem branch of early Christianity struggled to survive, and did not have as many converts as the other branches of the early Church. I wonder if it was because there was more skepticism in Jerusalem about Christianity, simply because there were more people there who had seen Jesus when he was alive, and didn't believe all the Resurrection/Divinity hoopla. And then, when they died off or were dispersed by the Romans, there were no dissenting voices left. Any thoughts on this?

My view is that the first Gospel is a fictional story that was inspired by the destruction of Jerusalem, and that all of the other Gospels are just based on this first Gospel.

Detailed article here: http://www.rationalrevolution.net/ar...ospel_mark.htm

One thing I find interesting about this view is that it conflicts entirely with those that debunk prophecy in the same book on the grounds that it was not fulfilled. This post http://iidb.infidels.org/vbb/showthr...91#post5363891 is one such argument.

If Matthew was written later, how would you account for what some feel is the apparent tricky wording in the prophecy. Why not (when forging prophecy) be more precise and take out the possibility of objections?

Also, for the claims of christianity (Jesus as the final sacrifice only foreshadowed by animal sacrifice) wouldn't the end of animal sacrfice be too tempting of an argument to make had the book been written after the sack of Rome. Wouldn't Matthew specifically have been all over this fact?

Hebrews, for example was written to Jews and is making the argument that Christ is better than the sacrificial system. Wouldn't you expect that the destruction of the sacrificial system would have been a good point to bring up?

~Steve

Malachi151 · 05-31-2008, 12:09 PM

Firstly, Mark and Matthew are two completely different works. You can't apply the analysis of one to the other.

Secondly, I'm not sure what that thread was talking about, but the whole issue of prophecies is highly confused in the Christian understanding, and thus, in many cases, in criticism of the prophecy idea.

What I'm saying is that the Gospel of Mark was not written to have anything to do with prophecies. What happened was that the author of the Gospel of Mark was using literary allusions. Later readers then interpreted these literary allusions as "prophecies", but clearly they don't really make sense in that manner.

The writers of all of the other Gospels, especially Matthew and John, themselves interpreted "Mark's" literary allusions as "prophecies fulfillment". Thus, they constructed their own "prophecy fulfillment" scenarios in a similar way that the author of Mark did, but in their cases they were trying to present these elements as "fulfillment of prophecy".

However, since they were taking "Mark's" lead and using a lot of the passages that he used and using the style that he used, these "prophecy fulfillment" scenarios never quite came off properly.

Thus the reason that in all of the Gospels what we actually end up with are Gospel passages that are based on "Old Testament" passages, but when you really look at the "OT" passages it never quite makes sense as a prophecy in the first place.

It's because this all started with literary allusions, not prophecies.

That's why the narrative elements in the Gospel of Mark that are based on "OT" passages aren't based on Messianic prophecies in the first place, because that author never intended for those passages to be seen as prophecy fulfillment, he intended for them to be seen as literary allusions.

Apparently most of the other readers never understood that. All that they saw were parts of the Jesus story that paralleled parts of "OT" passages. They saw these correlations as simple cases of prophecy in the "OT".

For these readers they, for example, read Marks account of the crucifixion and recognized that some of the events described in the crucifixion, such as the casting of lots for clothing, exactly matched events described in Psalm 22. Therefore, they simply saw Psalm 22 as a "prophecy" for the crucifixion of Jesus.

The author, however, never intended that interpretation, the author was simply using literary allusion.

The way that the writers of Matthew and John and other early Christians interpreted all of this, however, was that the Jewish scriptures were "secretly encoded" with prophecies of the future.

They didn't conceive of the prophecies in a straight forward way. They didn't think that there was supposed to be a direct passage that said "the Messiah will do X", and then Jesus was supposed to have done X. That's not how it worked. The way they saw it, there were secret codes built into the Jewish scritpures and it was impossible to know what was really a prophecy except for the fact that when Jesus supposedly did these things then you could go back and see, "Aha, look! That was predicted".

The reason they thought that was because of the way that Mark was written. I discuss this here towards the end of the bookmarked section, where it talks about The Proof of the Gospel and First Apology: http://www.rationalrevolution.net/ar..._history.htm#3

Its pretty clear in First Apology:

Quote:

CHAPTER XXXVI -- DIFFERENT MODES OF PROPHECY.

But when you hear the utterances of the prophets spoken as it were personally, you must not suppose that they are spoken by the inspired themselves, but by the Divine Word who moves them. For sometimes He declares things that are to come to pass, in the manner of one who foretells the future; sometimes He speaks as from the person of God the Lord and Father of all; sometimes as from the person of Christ; sometimes as from the person of the people answering the Lord or His Father, just as you can see even in your own writers, one man being the writer of the whole, but introducing the persons who converse. And this the Jews who possessed the books of the prophets did not understand, and therefore did not recognize Christ even when He came, but even hate us who say that He has come, and who prove that, as was predicted, He was crucified by them.

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CHAPTER XLII -- PROPHECY USING THE PAST TENSE.

But when the Spirit of prophecy speaks of things that are about to come to pass as if they had already taken place,--as may be observed even in the passages already cited by me,--that this circumstance may afford no excuse to readers [for misinterpreting them], we will make even this also quite plain. The things which He absolutely knows will take place, He predicts as if already they had taken place. And that the utterances must be thus received, you will perceive, if you give your attention to them. The words cited above, David uttered 1500 years before Christ became a man and was crucified; and no one of those who lived before Him, nor yet of His contemporaries, afforded joy to the Gentiles by being crucified. But our Jesus Christ, being crucified and dead, rose again, and having ascended to heaven, reigned; and by those things which were published in His name among all nations by the apostles, there is joy afforded to those who expect the immortality promised by Him.

They account for the apparent strangeness of the prophecies via the apology that the prophecies aren't straight forward. Well, the reason that they aren't straight forward is because they aren't prophecies at all, they are literary allusions.

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