Gregg

BTW, Mech, I don't understand why the theory that Jesus might not have existed seems to upset you so much. If you don't have any emotional investment in Jesus' historical existence--since you're apparently not a believer--why can't you be more interested in the reasons people might have for thinking he might not have existed, instead of angrily rejecting the whole idea out of hand as absurd?

I'm not an idiot, and I'm not given to believing crazy or outlandish theories. I used to be a lot like you, thinking that Jesus probably existed but that all the miracles and things were later embellishments. That explanation made sense to me. But since then I've been exposed to more information and I've changed my thinking. It's as simple as that. I wouldn't go for the non-historical Jesus theory if I thought it didn't have any more behind it than a desire to "disprove Jesus' existence," or if it claimed that the gospels were "lies and forgeries" made up by people trying to "prove the existence of somebody who never existed."

Seriously, aren't you a little curious why I find the non-historical Jesus theory convincing? Take a look at www.jesuspuzzle.org and see what you think.

Belle

:notworthy :notworthy :notworthy

MechAnimal

It doesn't upset me at all. What I don't get is why, taking into account four gospels, the letters of James, Jude, John, the letters of Paul, the three letters of Peter (FORGOT THOSE! one is actually two, and two are written by Simeon Cephas and the other by Peter himself), and Acts, I don't know why you people are disputing his existence. Scientifically speaking, that should be overwhelming evidence for his existence. I really don't get what the big dillio is, yo.

>Because they were written too long after the events supposedly took place.

From what evidence have you drawn this conclusion?

>I don't find it "hard" to believe that the original actual apostles could have written the gospels. It's just that's not what the evidence shows.

What evidence? People keep talking about evidence but no one's showing me anything.

Just to touch up on Q... If Q really existed, the quotes would be much more similar and it's more likely that, since the church was so old, that would be in the New Testament instead of all those gospels. But the quotes and the chronological order is so different it's more likely that they came from miltiple source -- people.

>The ONLY contemporary non-Biblical references to Jesus are found in Josephus, and both references are highly suspect. Paul, writing well before the gospels, does not tell us a single thing about Jesus the human being.

We don't need non-biblical evidence for Jesus' existence because it's not something that requires that much evidence. Miracles do, but someone's existence doesn't. Paul's letters confirm that the church existed early on and that there were many apostles around who believed he existed.

>Sheer assertion. And I guess you know more about text criticism than people who have devoted their lifetimes to the field.

Yes, it is sheer assertion...... for now....

>Yes, Mt. and Lk. drew from other sources besides Mark and changed some things around. That's common knowledge. But the influence of Mark is strong and unmistakable.

PLEASE! Appeal to popularity. Where's the evidence? Show me some! Matthew's much longer, and Mark much shorter. How could Luke and Matthew have possibly drawn from him? What's the point? They obviously had much stronger sources. That their sources were completely different is obvious, too. Mark knows very little about the ministry -- only what Peter told him, Luke's chronological order is very mixed up but he has a lot of content, which indicates that he had a lot of apostles telling him this stuff, and Matthew's is nice and neat and orginized and thick, indicating that he was one of the twelve.

>1. It's not "overkill" to "disprove" the existence of Jesus. I couldn't care less if Jesus existed as a real person or not, except as a matter of historical interest. I have no emotional investment one way or the other, since his mere existence doesn't make other Christian claims about him true (i.e., miracles, resurrection, only Son of God and only Savior, etc.) It's just that to me, the evidence says he didn't.

Then why are you ignoring all the evidence in the New Testament? There is absolutely no evidence that he didn't exist. I have never seen a single scrap of it.

>3. "What was the point of creating this religion anyway, if Jesus didn't exist..." Again, the Christians believed that Jesus existed, in the same way that Jews, Muslims, Hindus, the Vikings, Romans, Greeks, etc. believe(d) that their god(s) existed. Jesus was a dying/rising savior god, who performed his redemptive act in a heavenly setting. "Mark" wrote Jesus into an allegorical drama in which Jesus interacted with real and fictional human beings as a human being himself. Nothing odd about that, fictional/allegorical stories about gods interacting (as humanlike beings) with real and fictional human beings were commonplace.

I don't think you can compare Jesus to the myths of other religions. Yes, he performs miracles, but he is portrayed as a much more real person in the gospels than any of the other pagan gods are. The apostles' fanaticism for Christianity is much more intense than the pagans' ever were, indicating that a real Jesus actually existed. Immediately after he was crucified they went around and started preaching, according to acts.

>It wasn't until the gospels became more widely read that the notion took hold that they were biographies and that Jesus had actually existed as a human being.

More evidence that he existed is indicated by the fact that by the first century there were churches all over the middle east. Damascus, Antioch, Corinth and many other places already had churches that had been around in decades. But the beginning of the first century popes had already came and went in Italy, there were established bishops and the Christian church already had a short history. With that evidence, we can tell that people began believing that he really existed right from the get go.

>Mark's motivations were probably quite innocent, he had no idea what he was unleashing by writing his allegorical tale. Ditto for the other gospel writers. They just saw a good idea and adapted it for their own purposes.

No one's going to write that much material for such a petty reason.

>Do you honestly believe that people can't be inspired by anything but other people? Haven't you heard of ideas, concepts? Jews and Muslims firmly believe their God exists, and are inspired even unto giving their lives for Yahweh/Allah, even though they would not dream of claiming that he ever took the form of a mere human being and walked on Earth.

I'm sure they could, but their reason for being martyred was specifically Jesus of Nazareth, not doing this or doing that. They were killed for worshipped him and not the pagan gods or just Yahweh as the Jews did.

>What's an "inauthentic" gospel? Who decides which ones are authentic and which aren't? What are the criteria?

What the very early church fathers had to say about them. The church fathers were directly connected to the apostles, and so it's only natural that they got the authentic ones and the other ones fell into the hands of the cults.

>ONCE AGAIN. Nobody's denying that there were Christians who believed Jesus existed. They are just saying that HE DID NOT EXIST AS A HISTORICAL PERSONAGE. But to the Christians he was every bit as real as Yahweh was/is to the Jews, and as Al-lah would later be to Muslims. Get it?

Good, then maybe you'll admit that the reason they believed in him was because he existed.

>Acts was written long after the gospels. They are the source of its information. So it's not independent testimony to Jesus' existence.

How do you know? Yes it is. I know I'm repeating myself, but it shows that early on the apostles believed in Jesus' existence. A lot of when and where and in what language these gospels, acts and letters were written in can be found in some of Jerome's writings. I think he writes about it in the beginning of his Latin translation of the Bible.

>Christian forgery.

Prove it. Maybe the reason some of the early copies of Josephus' history of the Jews, in his reference of Jesus' existence, isn't there is because the Roman empire didn't go Christian until the fourth century and the Jews didn't want that in their copies so they just took it out. And I really don't see what the point is of putting it in there since it's a *Jewish historry* and the Christians already had the entire New Testament if they wanted first hand accounts of Jesus' existence.

>Not a shred of independent evidence that he did.

Not necessary. The second hafl of the Bible is proof enough.


*****************

>On what specific evidence did you reach this conclusion?

I'll give three, general reasons for each. I don't believe in the miracles for the following reasons:

1. All cultures in the history of the world have, in general, shown an inclination to come up with miraculous events that never happened. That that occurs regularly lowers the credence of the claims of the miracles in the Bible.
2. That Jesus existed was not the point of writing the gospels. That he was the Messiah, was, and that was the purpose of creating the miracles.
3. The technology we have today would not be sufficient enough to create the miracles as described in the Bible, and especially not 2000 years ago, giving me even less reason to believe that they actually occured.
One more.......
4. The creation myth and the flood never occured, the evidence of which can be found in many of the general sciences such as archeology, geology and astronomy. That basically disproves the rest of the Bible since those two myths were used as inspiriation by many of the founders of Judiasm, especially Moses. Therefore Jesus could've never performed any miracles since the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god doesn't even exist.

I believe that Jesus was a real person for the following reasons, all of them having to do with Jesus' unique personality:

1. He had good values, in contrast to an impartial, average Joe that someone would've just thought up in their head.
2. He had a strange philosophy that sounded a bit Buddhist/Taoist.
3. He was an outcast. He didn't adhere to traditional Judiasm and instead desired to create his own religion.

I also think that if he weren't a real person he would've been talking less in the gospels and performing more miracles.

******************

>I agree. The Gospels are about faith in Christ and not about providing a history lesson. That's why I find it strange you would rely on them for a historical conclusion.

Actually, I find Paul's letters more about faith than anything else. I actually do think the gospels were written for historical purposes, but also for inspiration.

>They cover, at best three years of his alleged life. IIRC, the Fourth Gospel condenses his entire ministry into a single year. That is neither long nor detailed. They are actually quite short, relative to the entire lifespan of the alleged individual, and provide only those "details" relevant to the beliefs of the authors.

You failed to mention that they do provide some accounts of his birth -- although somewhat fictional -- and his childhood. It depends on how you look at it. For those 1-3 years that they did write about, they were quite detailed.

>You seem to be accepting Papias' mention of a guy named "Mark" writing down the memories of Peter as though there is evidence connecting it to the Gospel attributed to that name. There isn't any such evidence and the earliest evidence connecting the existing Gospel with that name is no earlier than the latter half of the 2nd century. The vast majority of scholars consider the first Gospel to have been originally anonymous and even the Catholic Study Bible doubts the tradition.

That's something I'll have to look up, but you might be right. For that, another thread should be started on the authorship of the gospels.

>"Petrine influence should not be exaggerated. The evangelist has put together various oral and possibly written sources -- miracle stories, parables, sayings, stories of controversies, and the passion -- so as to speak of the crucified Messiah for Mark's own day." --Catholic Study Bible, pg67 of the NT section.

I'd rather go by an older source than one coming from someone who lived two thousand years after the fact.

>What is the specific basis for your judgment that the events with Peter in them are "better"?

Another thread, my friend, which I shall start in due time. For the moment I'm a little busy and that would take time to look up. I'm trying to reply to everyone here.

>He also contradicts the others often enough that they are collectively called "The Synoptics" leaving the Fourth out of the club. For example, he implicitly denies that Jesus was born in Bethlehem when he fails to argue against the complaint that the Messiah could not come from Nazareth. He also places the Temple disruption scene at the beginning of Jesus' ministry while the others place it at the end.

OK OK, I know about this, and I can explain it. I will get back to you on that.

>Where else do you think the miraculous stories originate? Or do you believe that many "saints" actually rose from the dead and walked into Jerusalem when Jesus died?

I'm talking about everything besides the miracles. The quotes, the other events. Jesus' speaking at the temple and arguing with the Pharisees and Sadducees, for example.

>I think that is only because you have not read enough scholarship on the issue. Vorkosigan has provided a specific link but I would encourage you to browse through all of Kirby's website. He has done an absolutely incredible job of collecting the texts and scholarly commentaries there. I think you will be amazed at how much of what you appear to assume is true is actually dismissed as unreliable by the majority of scholars (including Christian scholars).

I will not be pointed to some "link". If someone has something to say, they need to post it on the board. I could provide "links" to all of you as well, but I'd rather just put my evidence here where everyone can read it.

>I'm not implying anything. I'm simply stating a fact. Tacitus does not refer to "Jesus" and does not provide any information that could not have been obtained from a somewhat superficial knowledge of Christian beliefs.

So Christus was someone else? And I guess that doesn't prove that Christianity, as a religion with people who believed in Jesus, didn't exist early on? Nope.

>I think you will find that everything I've stated accurately reflects the conclusions of modern scholarship. You've got some reading ahead of you if you are genuinely interested in challenging your currently held conclusions.

Yeah, let's all blindly follow the scholars. If everyone did that then no one would learn anything. Nobody comes to good conclusions by just blindly thinking the way everyone else thinks, they do so by investigating it themselves. That's why I did, and very thoroughly, and these are the conclusions I've came to. With the evidence of Jesus shoved in my face as it is, as clear as the sun rising every morning, I cannot deny it, no matter how many scholars believe in something contrary to what I do.

I think that's it... I hope I've replied to everyone. Maybe I'll start a new thread on the authorship of the gospels, if I have time.

Vorkosigan

MechAnimal, let's take a quick look at those sources. None of the epistles are thought by scholars to have been written by the people they are generally attributed to, with the exception of some half dozen of Paul's epistles. None of the gospels was written by an eyewitness; they take place long after the events in question. Mark, generally considered the earliest, was written after 70, and maybe after 110 (IMHO). Matthew was written after Mark, and Luke after Mark, Matthew and John. We know this because of the way that they all copied each other.

The letters of Paul contain no historical data on Jesus. There is no mention of Pilate, for example, except in a verse in Timothy which everyone believes is interpolated. In any ase, Timothy was forged in Paul's name by a later writer, as every scholar knows. There is no mention of the Temple incident, or any other major incident of Jesus' life prior to the Crucifixion. Paul seems to know next to nothing about Jesus.

Many, many pieces of evidence indicate that they were written long afterword. The first clue is the famous Olivet discourse, found originally in Mark 13. It shows the writer of Mark was aware that Jerusalem was destroyed. Other clues in the gospels and Acts also show this. A second piece of evidence lies in certain bits of textual cross-relations. For example, scholars have for many years been aware that there is some kind of relationship between Luke-Acts and the writings of Josephus, and the evidence points to Luke being dependent on Josephus rather than vice versa. This would put Luke after 95. There are other pieces of evidence as well; the general atmosphere of Mark's work puts it after 70; indeed, seems to locate it in the period around 73-75.

Because, MechAnimal, to do so would be to recapitulate the last 200 years of gospel scholarship, and nobody is willing to waste their time doing that. It is up to you to become familiar with the last two centuries of scholarly discourse, through an introductory work. Good ones include Schnelle's History and Theology of the Early Christian Writings, Brown's Introduction to the New Testament, Ehrman's Introduction to the New Testament. Luke Timothy Johnson's Introduction to the New Testament, and Koester's History and Literature of Early Christianity. The last happens to be my personal favorite. AFAIK all these writers are Christians, except perhaps for Koester.

For discussions on the Historical Jesus, you should read Theissen and Merz's The Historical Jesus to get an idea of the debates, the evidence, and what scholars think it might be possible to know.

Yes, of course they came from people. The issue is -- which people? For the debates on Q, read Tuckett's Q and the History of Early Christianity and Mark Goodacre's reply The Case Against Q. Do they stem from oral traditions about Jesus, from common sayings everyone knew, or from the imagination of the writers? How can you show the first is true and not the second or third?

Yes, that's correct. Many apostles believed he existed.

The reason that the biblical evidence for Jesus is so bad is that the gospel evidence is clearly made up out of the Old Testament. The Passion story depends on heavily on the Psalms, particularly Psalm 22. Jesus' life as portrayed in Mark seems to have been created out of the Elija-Elisha cycle of legends in the Old Testament (see Brodie A Crucial Bridge). Solid historical evidence is highly lacking in the Gospels.

Mech, this is common knowledge among scholars and those who have read scholarly works. The relationship between Mark, Matt, and Luke is complex and is known among NT scholars as "The Synoptic Problem." If you type that phrase in Google, many websites will pop out.

Important clues as to who is using who are evident in copying, corrections, and order. More than 90% of Mark is reproduced somewhere in Matthew, who also closely preserves their order. As Schnelle notes, on p167 of History and Theology, of 118 Markan sections taken over by Matthew, all but 12 are not preserved in the Markan order. Another argument is the "linguistic and material improvements made by both Matthew and Luke.(Schnelle, p168). Matthew and Luke frequently correct, improve, and smooth out Mark's greek. Luke replaces simple Markan verbs like "cry" with longer ones like "cried out." He deletes or translates Mark's Aramaic. Yet another argument is the sheer quantity of Markan material replicated in Luke and Matt. Just three pericpes are not found in either Mt or Lk. Of the 11,078 words in Mark, 8,555 are reproduced in Matt, and 6,737 in Luke.(p169, Schnelle).

Their sources were largely each other, as modern scholarship has demonstrated.

None of these is a valid argument. Orderliness and organization do not indicate that one belonged to a certain group, they simply indicate that the author was a conscientious arranger of his material. In any case, the question now becomes, if Matt was really a disciple, why did he copy from everything from Mark?

Inasmuch as you seem completely unaware of the conclusions of modern NT scholarship, your comment that "I have never seen a single scrap of it" cannot carry much weight.

Wholly incorrect. The "real" Jesus is a copy from the Elijah-Elisha cycle and other sources.

Acts is almost entirely fiction. Fanaticism indicates nothing except a willingness to enter more deeply into one's social identity than most people are. The pagans were simply more sensible about religion than the early Christians were.

No evidence indicates this.

This is Church mythology, MechAnimal. Many people see this "history" as fictions invented in the second century to give proto-Orthodoxy weight in its struggles with other Christian groups (Docetists, Marcionites, and Gnostics).

LOL. All of the early Christian movements were cults. It is just that one cult managed to exterminate all of the others.

Again, you seem to be unaware of the debates over this, and of Josephus' place as the premier historian of the period. Indeed, some Syriac churches bundled Josephus with their NT as part of their holy writings. Of course forgery in Josephus, a non-Christian historian, would carry enormous weight.

Mech, Papias' words are quoted in Eusebias three hundred years later. The do not appear to refer to any of the gospels we know.

All of the events concerning the Temple appear to be fictions based either on Josephus or the OT.

Mech, Peter's site www.earlychristianwritings.com is one of the best on the net. Another good one is Goodacre's www.ntgateway.com. Goodacre is a Christian and a prominent NT scholar. Familiarity with the information contained in those websites should be considered mandatory if you want to engage in some kind of discussion here.

The difference between you and scholars, Mech, is not conclusions but methodology. If you take everything in the NT at face value, well of course it looks like Jesus is an historical figure. Many of us believe it is designed to look just that way! But scholars do not take things at face value. . They have what you don't have, a critical methodology that engages with the texts, its sociological and historical background, its linguistic and textual evolution, and so on. Many methods used by NT scholars are used in all text criticism; others were invented for use with this material to reflect its unique aspects. That is normal in all fields.

Once you come to understand the ideas and applications of scholarly methodologies, you will begin to understand why it is so difficult to get good history out of the NT.

For example, most scholars believe that the passage in which Matthew has Jesus riding into Jerusalem on two animals is a fiction based on the LXX. Now, since Matthew has presented us with a fictionalized version of this event, how can we demonstrate that it is history? Imagine if the only thing that survived from the US Civil War was Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind which we knew was written 70 years later. How would we be able to tell whether Atlanta had really been burned, or which characters were fictional and which not?

Vorkosigan

Gregg

MechAnimal,

I think you need to cool down and take it easy. You don't seem to have read anything I said very carefully.

Once again. I do not have any emotional investment in believing Jesus was a real person or not. I am not "hell-bent on denying his existence." I don't have any problem with the idea that there might have been some Yeshua dude who preached the Kingdom and somehow ran afoul of the Jewish authorities and the Romans and got himself crucified. At one time I DID believe that, and for some of the reasons you believe it.

My switch to the Jesus-as-divine-being-who-later-was-historicized camp was the result of a gradual accumulation of knowledge. First I became familiar with modern scholarship on how the gospels developed. Then I followed the Jesus Seminar for a while and read books and articles by Burton Mack, Robert Funk, etc. Later I read Robert Price' "Jesus: 100 Years Before Christ" and John Shelby Spong's "Liberating the Gospels" (my first exposure to the concept of midrash and its possible application to the writing of the gospels). At that point I still thought the idea that Jesus hadn't been historical was kind of nuts, but I was open enough to the possibility that when I came across the work of Earl Doherty (www.jesuspuzzle.org), I was willing to give it a look.

I came away as convinced as one can be that Christians first believed in Jesus as an entirely spiritual being, whose crucifixion took place in the sublunar heavenly plane at the hands of demon spirits. At least a couple of things led to Jesus being historicized--the writing of the gospel of Mark (as a piece of allegorical fiction, for teaching, inspiration, encouragement, liturgical purposes, etc.), and the gradual development of a founder figure as the "source" of the collected sayings of the "Q" community. Once the Christ had been fully humanized and brought to earth proper, in an identifiable period of history, Christianity's appeal and popularity increased and the other mystery cults began to go into eclipse.

Hey, I know it's a lot to take in all at once. I was exposed to all of this new information over a several-year period of time, so I was able to absorb it and adjust to it. When I finally got around to reading Doherty it wasn't as big a jump for me as it obviously is for you.

So again, I say--calm down, cool off. Nobody's making you say Jesus wasn't historical. But perhaps you can at least admit that maybe you don't know as much as you think you know and that you might even (gasp!) be wrong about some things. There's absolutely no shame in that, it's true of every one of us.

Amaleq13

If you bothered to follow the link to Kirby's website, you would find out. At the very least, you might realize the enormous volume of information you have been ignoring.

You appear to be relying on your own impressions and traditions that even the Catholic Church recognizes are not reliable. Considering there are professional scholars who have devoted their entire working lives to studying the New Testament and the vast majority of them have come to completely different conclusions than your assertions, common sense would suggest you need to critically examine your lack of a sound methodology.

Do you ignore what experts in every field have to say or is it only biblical scholarship you feel can be ignored?

Who said anything about "blindly" following anybody? I'm talking about establishing a fundamental background knowledge so that you might reach informed and systematically established conclusions.

Rejecting the consensus without understanding the basis for it is as foolish as accepting it without understanding the basis for it.

What I have shared with you are the conclusions that professional scholars who otherwise often strongly disagree with one another agree the evidence establishes. This is the common ground from which their opinions diverge.

Occams_Razor

MechAnimal:

Like other posters here have said, I have nothing invested in whether Jesus was a real historical figure or not, but I do find the question interesting and have been reading about the debate for the last few months.

To me the most convincing argument, the nail in the coffin that Jesus likely did not exist, is certain and I think significant missing evidence.

Putting aside the problems with the gospels and the authenticity of belated historical texts where Jesus is mentioned, my problem is that those historians who were active contemporaneously with Jesus' alleged existence failed to leave a record of him or his fame.

For instance, "Philo Judaeus, who lived from about 25 BCE to 50 CE. A well-known historian and philosopher, he was living in or near Jerusalem and writing a history of the Jews during his lifetime at the time Jesus would have arrived there to preach" does not mention him.

"Justus of Tiberius, a native of Galilee who wrote a history covering the time Jesus supposedly lived, does not mention him. Nor does Seneca, a Roman historian who was born about the same time Jesus would have been and lived until around 60 CE. Nor does Pliny the Elder, a historian who was born in the 20s and died about 80 CE."

"If Jesus Christ had been an actual, historical person, we would expect to have first-hand, contemporary documentation: records of his words and deeds written by people who actually saw him, or who at least were alive during his lifetime. We would expect the record of his life to be plentiful from the very beginning. On the other hand, if he was only a legend later turned into a real person, we would expect not to have any first-hand witness to his life. We would expect the historical record to be scanty and details elusive or non-existent at first, these details appearing only later as the stories about him grew in the telling. We would expect clear references to him not to appear until long after his supposed death. And of course, in reality, the latter scenario is exactly what we do find."

Quoted from: http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/camel1.html

Yet the first mention of Jesus is two brief passages from Josephus, written around 90 CE.

If Jesus and the events surrounding his life were significant during his lifetime, I find it very hard to believe that the contemporaneous historical record would be devoid of his mention.

NOGO

We are not programmed robots applying simple rules.
The conclusion is based on a varierty of evidence, this being one of them.

It is just like you, Bede, to oversimplify an issue just to make a point.

It is one thing to quote a line from Shakespear to relate a personal experience and another to tell the story of your neighbour's life using nothing but borrowed literary devices. Surely you can appreciate the difference.

But again this is just one piece of evidence among many.

Raydo97

I've been away for a while and haven't had a chance to jump back in to this thread. It looks like this topic has certainly taken off!

I've looked over the posts and I can see that my question has been answered. Apparently, my co-worker's husband (the preacher) was referring to the handful of dubious and disputed writings from Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny the Younger that I had mentioned.

It looks like I haven't missed any evidence that would support a historical Jesus. Somehow, the preacher and I are looking at the same information and evaluating it differently. I see dozens of historical writers who make no reference to Jesus at all and a couple of disputed mentions of Jesus as a telling lack of evidence. This preacher, on the other hand, sees this same information as a wealth of evidence to support the existence of a historical Jebus.

To me, the most damning problem is that, even if you accept these extra-biblical references to Jesus as being legitimate, they still don't establish Jesus' historicity because none of them are first hand accounts of Jesus. These so called "historical" records were written several years after Jesus died by people who never met him. What kind of evidence is that?

My guess is that this preacher knows that he can easily say "Jesus' life and wonderful works have been recorded by dozens of historians" and know that his flock will never do any fact checking. After all, he cherry picks from the bible every week and no one ever calls him on that!

Thanks for your help.

Craigart14

I believe it was Ben Jonson. In Shakespeare's day, educated people learned both Latin and Greek. Shakespeare was considered something of a bumpkin by serious--and envious--playwrights.

Craig