Ben C Smith

The popular nineties TV series The X-Files featured a set of characters who comprised a fringe conspiracy-theory group called the Lone Gunmen; Fox Mulder, one of the two central characters in the show, often consulted the Lone Gunmen (Byers, Frohike, and Langly) for support and information. The Lone Gunmen became such popular peripheral characters that they eventually garnered their own spinoff, The Lone Gunmen, which aired (like The X-Files) on Fox.

The pilot episode of this short-lived conspiracy drama (only 13 episodes were aired, I think) dealt with a terrorist plot similar to the 9/11 attacks on New York City.

Fortunately, the relevant scenes are available on YouTube. In one relevant scene Byers, one of the Lone Gunmen, is talking to his father about a government plot (I have boldfaced the most relevant details):

Byers: We know it's a wargame scenario, that it has to do with airline counter-terrorism. Why is it important enough to kill for?

Father: Because it's no longer a game.

Byers: If some terrorist group wants to act out this scenario, why target you for assassination?

Father: Depends on who your terrorists are.

Byers: The men who conceived of it in the first place. You're saying our government plans to commit a terrorist act against a domestic airline....

Father: There you go, indicting the entire government, as usual. It's a faction, a small faction.

Byers: For what possible gain?

Father: The Cold War is over, John. But with no clear enemy to stockpile against, the arms market's flat. But bring down a fully-loaded 727 into the middle of New York City and you'll find a dozen tin-pot dictators all over the world just clammering to take responsibility and begging to be smart-bombed.

Byers: I can't believe it.

Later in the show, the Lone Gunmen are working frantically to prevent the plot from succeeding:

Frohike: I'm mapping the data now.

Langly: Byers, your flight's going to make an unscheduled stop in exactly 22 minutes.

Frohike: Corner of Liberty and Washington. Lower Manhattan.

Byers: World Trade Center. They're going to crash the plane into the World Trade Center!

I can hear some asking: So what?

The thing is, this pilot episode aired on March 4, 2001, a full 6 months and 7 days before 9/11. In fact, it is said that some of those who worked on the show were quite concerned at first, as the events of September 11 unfolded, that their pilot episode had inspired some idiots to emulate the plot in real time. (Subsequent investigations would lay such fears to rest, since the plot had been in the planning stages long before the Gunmen pilot aired.) The way in which this TV drama foreshadowed 9/11 is almost eerie.

And what, you may ask, is the relevance of all this to the IIDB Biblical Studies forum? Well, if some future historian knew about the 9/11 attacks and also happened to chance upon this pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen, but without any indication of the date, I think he or she would quite naturally assume that the episode was inspired by and therefore postdated 9/11. Would that not seem to be the most likely scenario in such circumstances? If a piece of literature contains an apparent allusion to an already known and dated historical event, the usual supposition is that the literature postdates that event. This is one of the most common ways of dating otherwise undated works.

So what I am wondering is what a scenario such this one involving a TV pilot episode and a notorious historical event might do to this kind of dating. My thoughts turn especially to the use of the fall of the Jewish temple in 70 to date various works or portions of works.

For example, Matthew 22.7 is often used to date the gospel of Matthew after 70. (I myself have done this. This OP is not intended to exempt its author from its scope of inquiry.) But the king in the parable burning a city is not any closer to the events of 70 than a plot to crash an airliner into the WTC is to the events of 9/11, is it?

As another example, 1 Thessalonians 2.16 is often used to mark this section of the epistle as an interpolation (or occasionally to date the entire epistle to after 70). But this supposed allusion points even less directly to 70 than the Matthean parable does. How secure are we that this verse must postdate 70?

I think also of Wars 6.5.3 §300-309, concerning Jesus the son of Ananus predicting doom against Jerusalem; on this forum I have seen suspicions (I forget by whom) that Josephus is retrojecting here. Even amongst those who accept that Jesus ben Ananus really made this prediction before 70 there is a tendency to excuse the prediction as being natural given the increasing Judeo-Roman tensions of the time. In light of the prescient Gunmen episode, are such excuses necessary at all?

I am not offering firm answers here; I am asking questions. What do you think? How secure is our method of dating works by apparent allusions (as opposed to outright references) to known events?

Thanks.

Ben.

gstafleu

That's an excellent point. I think what it shows is that more attention needs to be given to the idea of something "being in the air" as opposed to being able to pinpoint an exact etiology. Take that thread about Robert Price, where mention is made of how he compares plot elements of the passion with those found in more-or-less contemporary romances. The important point here is that these plot elements "were in the air," rather than an attempt to establish an exact "from A to B to C" causal chain. IOW, the passion and these romances are examples of a then-known type of story, without trying to say who was on first and who on second.

That doesn't mean we can't say anything more about it, though. For example, the idea of using planes as bombs was not a new one even for the Lone Gunmen. It had already been "published" in intelligence documents. If memory serves me well, it was the reason why there were all kinds of security measures taken around a conference in Italy(?) about half a year(?) before 9/11.

So with respect to the Gospels and the Doom of the Temple (we could turn that into a nice movie), positing that the author could reasonably have foreseen that outcome is not totally unreasonable. It would of course be nice if we found a record of someone else also foreseeing it, but that might be asking too much.

Gerard Stafleu

God Fearing Atheist

Have you read this?

Evans, C.A. 1992. Predictions of the Destruction of the Herodian Temple in the Pseudepigrapha, Qumran Scrolls, and Related Texts. Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 10: 89-147.

gurugeorge

It's a good point, but it only works because you've got one work that happens to parallel and predate 9/11; but aren't there are lots of NT works that have something that looks like the fall of the Temple in them? It would be beyond chance that a bunch of works could pre-date like the 9/11 example.

Toto

This isn't online as far as I can see. It appears to have been reprinted in Qumran Questions (or via: amazon.co.uk).

Could you summarize?

Ben C Smith

This might be true, but we are not trying to date the NT as a single unit; we are trying to date each book.

If seven different NT books each bear one such coincidence, as it were, how would you sort the positives from the false positives? How would you tell which ones are the Lone Gunmen examples and which are the honest-to-goodness back-referencing inspired-by-true-events allusions?

Ben.

Timetospend

With or without the gunmen analogy, any method that cannot be verified might not be correct. As such, no such method can be considered as secure if built on apparent allusions that might simply be inferred only by the reader. The author might not have intended to imply them at all.

Thanks,

God Fearing Atheist

Evans cites predictions of the Temple's destruction in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (TLevi 10.3, 14.1-15.3; TJud 23.1-5), 1 Enoch (90.28-29, 91.11-13), the Sibylline Oracles (3.665), Lives of Prophets (10.10-11, 12.11), Josephus (Wars 3.8.3, 6.5.3-4) and Yohanan ben Zakkai and Zadok in the rabbinic literature (e.g. y. Sota 6.3; b. Git. 56a).

He regards it as "unclear if the Temple itself was expected to be destroyed" in the stuff he provides from the DSS (e.g. 1QpHab 9.2-7).

PhilosopherJay

Hi Ben,

One has to weigh the possibilities of predictions coming true against known facts. If I say that a Republican or Democrat is going to win the presidency in the United States election in 2008, and one does, it really doesn't tell anything about my political acumen. If I say that Vladimir Putin will win the American Presidential election in 2008 and he does, then it does say something.

In the case of the Lone Gunman episode, there was no prediction being made. Based on the attack on the World Trade Center in 1991 and the continued declared desire of certain groups to see it destroyed, it was not beyond the realm of speculation that an attack by airplane would be made. Apparently the writers shared the same sense of drama as the attackers.

Predicting catastrophic events in the near future is generally not difficult. I attended rallies in 2002 along with hundreds of thousands of other people and everyone at these rallies predicted that the American invasion of Iraq would lead to disaster for both countries.

On the other hand, predictions of disasters ten or twenty years into the future are almost invariably wrong as political situations change rather rapidly. Almost every Christian evangelical leader for over 50 years in the United States at some point predicted a war between the Soviet Union and the United States. They predicted it in the 1940's, 1950's, 1960's, 1970's and 1980's. Many based their predictions on their readings of Biblical texts.

In the particular case we are talking about, a person predicting more than 30 years in advance the destruction of the largest temple complex in the ancient world, one may suppose that the chances are virtually nil that anyone would have made such a precise prediction or that it would have been remembered thirty or more years later. Please remember that soothsayers by the thousands made predictions every day in the ancient world. It is virtually certain that the text, including the prediction was written after the event in question to make it seem that the character in question had prophetic powers.

The serious question is whether it was written a short time after the event in question (as presumed by certain writers) or closer to one hundred years after the event, when we first start getting hints of the existence of the text in question (as supposed by certain other writers).

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

Ben C Smith

The particular case I am talking about is Matthew or Paul (or both) potentially writing sometime before 70. But probably not 30 years before 70. I was thinking more like the fifties or sixties.

(If you mean Jesus himself predicting the destruction, I was not presuming to actually put the Matthean parable on his lips, and Paul does not attribute his own statement to Jesus. I was speaking only of the gospel of Matthew itself. Also, please understand that I presently date Matthew to well after 70; this is a question of methodology, not results.)

Ben.