Ecrasez L'infame

Hello.

I've just registered (tho' I've been lurking for some time), and I thought I'd introduce myself. I should start by saying I love these forums, and am looking forward to contributing. I love the way everybody here is quite prepared to go into detail, to take their arguments to as low a level as necessary. I happen to think that it's the tiny, fiddly, details that win arguments and advance human knowledge - and that all the high level abstract hot air that passes for argument elsewhere not only hinders clear thought, but escalates debate into conflict. Seems to me, it's the big words like Democracy, God, Right, and the People that people go to war over even if they're in agreement about them.

Ahem. Anyhow, I'm 40 and live near London, UK, with my partner and cat. For a year, we haven't had a TV, which frees up an amazing amount of time in the evenings for reading, chatting, blogging, calling on people, and polishing my unpublishable novel (which I promise I'll never mention again). In recent years I've developed a taste for modern English literature, people like Greene, Orwell, Fowles, Golding... and Robert Graves. It was through Graves that I became interested in BC&H.

Graves (d 1985) was mainly a poet, but he did write half a dozen pretty queer books on ancient history. He translated Suetonius & Apuleius, and published what seems to be a re-written translation (!?!) of the Gospels and the first half of Acts called "The Nazarene Gospel Restored" (with Joshua Podro). He also wrote a novel based on Jesus' life, and (of course), "The White Goddess", a "historical grammar of poetic myth". This last book almost single-handedly, along with the work of Marija Gimbutas, created the recent great-goddess marketing phenomenon; open any C-format book from the goddess shelves today and you'll find Graves & Gimbutas's careful arguments, bowdlerised and unattributed, yelling back at you.

Now, Graves had some interesting ideas, some wacky, all ingenious; but he tended not to argue them down to the lowest level like the contributors here do - instead he argues by connection, making syncretic links across cultures and ages, emphasising the importance of symbols, trying to get into the head of the ancient people. The result is very similar to reading Robert Eisenman - you're left feeling that he has huge knowledge that he somehow keeps in his head all at once, but you're overwhelmed rather than convinced. Impressive, but (as I say) not the way knowledge advances.

So, one of things I'd like to try is floating some of Graves's ideas, and trying to defend them the Internet Infidels way - down to the chapter and verse level. I've very apprehensive about this - I know just about enough about BC&H to know how good some of you are - so go gentle on me, and please help in the defence if the ideas strike you as plausible.

Here's one of Graves's ideas that I haven't seen anywhere else. Jesus' family were from Nazareth in Galilee (assuming there was such a place), and he grew up there - yet he was born in Bethlehem in Judaea, about 120km away as the crow flies (much further than that in practice - Mount Gerizim is in the way). gLuke gets round this by inventing a census which required the family (Mary nine months pregnant, if you please!) to return to the home of Joseph's ancestors, Bethlehem. After they'd registered, they all trotted back to Nazareth. Why did Luke have to have Jesus born in Bethlehem? Well, maybe it actually happened that way, and Luke doesn't know why - but doesn't want to leave the matter hanging without explanation, so invents one. Maybe the family were from Bethlehem all the time, but settled in Galilee later - more or less the account in gMatthew. Actually, I've just noticed that this fits in with Lk 1:39, which says Mary was living in Judaea for at least some of her early pregnancy.

So far, so good. But of course, Matthew has to make out that Bethlehem isn't any old town, but the subject of Micah 5:2 - "Beth-lehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel." (KJ, the only version worth reading, IMO, just for its love of language). If you don't believe in prophecy (or egregious coincidence), this implies Matthew and Luke invented the nativity in Bethlehem to make Micah work. In other words, Matthew and Luke thought like this: Jesus is the prophesied leader, THEREFORE the Micah quote must be about him, THEREFORE he must have been born in Bethlehem. Then each came up with different ways to make this possible.

Well, seems a lot of trouble to go to for a minor prophecy (my Contemporary English Version lists Micah as "a minor prophet", and Wikapedia gives him all of 100 words). And there's even some doubt about what Micah meant; as several Infidels point out (for example here), he might have been saying that the ruler would be a descendant of someone called Bethlehem, rather than someone born in a town called Bethlehem. BTW, that source insinuates that Matthew at least knows this, and deliberately mis-quotes Micah to hide the fact... Matthew'd do well in modern politics.

Here's my suggested solution, based on a clue in Graves's 1946 book (Graves himself actually rejects this solution, for unstated reasons - possibly fear of prosecution for blasphemy). There were two Bethlehems. Twinning place names was common in the ancient Mediterranean (see Bernal's Black Athena for examples), and indeed, we do find a village in Zebulun's land called Bethlehem (Jos 19:15). It still exists today, called Beit Lahm. It is 11 km from the site of (the modern) Nazareth. Oddly (or is it?), Nazareth is not mentioned in the list of villages or towns in Joshua - or anywhere else pre-NT, BTW. In any case, we have a historical Jesus, of Galilean stock, born in Bethlehem (Galilee). Seventy-five years later Matthew & Luke get to hear about this, but both being city slickers think it means Bethlehem in Judaea. This reminds them of the only two things they know about that Bethlehem, viz that David was born there - aha! therefore Jesus was a second David! - and Micah's prophecy, which maybe has to be changed slightly. But Micah's prophecy also talks of the leader's ancestry. So they then have to invent an ancestry for Jesus... which goes back to David! (Matthew 1, Luke 3 & (briefly) Luke 2:4. See John 7:42 for an intermediate stage). Good, they think - but how to get Mary from Galilee to Judaea and back? Luke's solution is particularly brilliant - it is precisely because of Jesus' ancestry that the family must go to Judaea. Matthew's is lazier - they were there all along.

What d'yer think?

911

I don't really know but here's a thought:

The bible was canonised long after it was actually written.

I don't know: are there some accounts of Jesus' life that was discarded? (I seem to remember that there was... but that was so long ago in my memory.

It could very well be that the people who canonised the bible; tried their best to mesh it into a logical flow, discarding that which did not fit and using that which fits?

It was not Luke or Matthew but the editors?

Wayne Delia

Try The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which (if I remember correctly) details the multiple murders Jesus committed as a five-year-old.

There's nothing illogical about the way the Infancy Gospel of Thomas fits into the flow of descriptions of Jesus's life. The problem is it doesn't fit into the way people want to think of Jesus - the idea of Him being a multiple murderer is not a very popular idea in Christianity.

WMD

911

Thanks for the link - I would probably have to spend some time before I actually come across it and even when I find it - I might not have known what it is. I mean before I looked at the site; what keywords should I have used to google that site?

Pendaric

Aside from the fact that the ideas presented were not politically convenient for the Church, was there any other reason to discard this Gospel?

Javaman

Peter's META flags are as follows:
so they should have worked and may also find you some new stuff. Once you're at the main page, though, you can then read through the Gnostic and especially the Apocrypha sections.

911

Not fair not fair... that comes from hindsight.

vsop44

Hi run over the infamous one ( I like your name)
Bethlehem means house of bread and it was a common town and village name in Palestine so there were a few of them .
But think a little , Joseph had to take his 8 1/2 month pregnant wife on a 4/5 days trip on a donkey at the beginning of winter over hills and roads where even the Romans dared not venture unless there were about 20 of them together , for fear of brigands , thieves or rebels . The best part of the story is that she did not give birth to Jesus halfway on the side of the road ( that would ruin the Xmas stories) and that they came back through these unsafe roads with a little fortune in gold that the wise men had given Jesus !!!

Ecrasez L'infame

Thanks. It's Voltaire (I think - I've never been able to locate the source). In the context, "crush the infamous thing" is closer - he meant the Church. (Of course, "infamous" is the old sense of vile, not the new sense of "very famous".)

I find it interesting that Voltaire could say that, yet also hold that "I might not agree with what you say, but I would die for your right to say it." Out of contradiction comes wisdom, I think (see also the US First Amendment).

Was it a common place-name? The OT doesn't mention any other than these two... Also, people were sometimes identified by the place they came from - wouldn't that have been confusing if the same place-name kept cropping up?

This is from Appx A to my copy of BJ (Williamson & Smallwood):

"The word ... 'bandit' or 'brigand' denotes in Josephus not a highwayman seeking personal gain but a terrorist, a guerrilla, ... a freedom fighter, a man working towards a political goal." So maybe the family would have had less to fear on the roads than 20 Romans.

OTOH, there is the story of the Good Samaritan, where real robbers are definitely mentioned. It's a moot point, because just about the only thing we can be sure of is that the journey never took place.

S.C.Carlson

Although I'm skeptical about this suggestion, it has nonetheless been expounded just this month in the magazine Archaeology in an article by Aviram Oshri, "Where Was Jesus Born?", Archaeology 58.6 (Nov./Dec. 2005). A link to the article's abstract is here. So you're not alone on this.

Stephen