Amaleq13

It is as true today as it was two thousand years ago. Future historians will undoubtedly know more about the time we are living in than we do.

Gamera

I doubt they will know various details, passed on by family tradition because they were relevant to individuals, but not to authorities or because they were simply lost in time.

Like I say, my grandmother passed on stories about WWI and my dad passed on stories about the Greek Civil War, which are not recorded anywhere. I expect I'll pass them on to my kids. The stories will make sense for a while and then peter out (studies indicate that most oral narratives become unreconizable within a hundred or so years, something like that --though I have the luxury of writing them down).

These stories which may obliquely reflect "official events," won't be recorded anywhere and will grow garbled in time about the underlying facts. But underlying facts there are. I think something like this happened with Luke, who says he went around talking to witnesses and perhaps picked up a half-garbled story about some aspect of a Judean census that happened about the time of the Augustan census and may have been related to it, but wasn't recorded elsewhere.

Doug Shaver

In what dictionary?

And, presumably, people of that time would have been in the habit of using such resources to investigate every religious claim they heard? I don't think so. Human nature has not changed that much in the past 2,000 years.

Yes, the author claims to be writing history. To take his assertion at face value, though, is to assume your conclusion that it is in fact a work of history.

What do you mean "from the start"? I have not always been skeptical about Christian dogma. I used to be a Bible-believing Christian. The people who changed my mind about inerrancy had to work very long, very hard, and very patiently with me.

Oh, you think it's hard getting people to think fiction is history?

Never? According to whom?

Ben C Smith

Mind you, I still think Luke has made a census mistake here, but, if Luke 2.39 is proof that Nazareth was the city of Mary and Joseph (πολιν εαυτων), then is Luke 2.3 proof that Bethlehem was also the city of (at least) Joseph (την εαυτου πολιν)?

Ben.

Diogenes the Cynic

No because 2:3 wasn't specifically about Joseph, because Luke gives another explicit reason for the trip to Bethlehem and because he names another town as Joseph's "own." I don't think that 2:3 is meant to imply anything vis-a-vis Joseph and Bethlehem other than that it was his "own" ancestral village.

Vivisector

I wonder if the business of the census, Bethlehem, Nazareth, etc. could be explained by Jesus's having been (similar to John the Baptist and James, perhaps) a member of the sect of Nazarenes (IIRC, Loisy's hypothesis) before beginning an independent ministry? To flesh it out, perhaps we see Luke and others trying their best to rehabilitate Jesus by saying, in effect, "No, no, he wasn't a Nazarene, he was from Nazareth." This would have separated Jesus from his (possibly embarrassing) very Jewish roots, thereby diminishing the relevance of the Jerusalem Church and Jewish Christians (Ebionites/Nazoreans). I suspect this would have played well to Gentile Christians with little interest in living according to Jewish law (especially its more painful aspects). Of course, the gospel authors now have to situate Jesus in/around Nazareth, and they have to somehow weave in Bethlehem. Perhaps the difficulties in all this could have resulted in exactly the mess we see.

A bit conspiratorial and probably more than a bit wacky, but would still be interested in reaction (or links to reaction).

V.

Ben C Smith

Granted, but according to 2.3 the census demands that everybody go to his own city, and then Joseph goes to Bethlehem in accordance with the census requirement; so Bethlehem is (at least in some sense) his own city.

I think you and I would agree that this explicit reason has to do with Joseph being a descendant of David. But is another interpretation possible?

Luke 2.4 says that Joseph went to Bethlehem because he was of the Davidic house. This reasoning is obviously abbreviated, leaving out an important bit of information. You and I would probably fill it out as follows:

Joseph went to Bethlehem because he was of the house of David [and the census required people to return to the hometowns of distant relatives].

Perhaps, however, it is also possible to fill it out differently:

Joseph went to Bethlehem because he was of the house of David [and members of the house of David were still known to reside in Bethlehem out of ancestral respect].

I am just scattershooting here; I still think Luke is in error on this point. It is just that in this case the error is so, so egregious I have always found it hard to explain why Luke, or anybody, would fall into it. Even if it was a Lucan lie, he surely meant it to be a credible lie.

Ben.

Gamera

[QUOTE=Doug Shaver]Don't look to Webster to understand intellectual history. Look to what people are actually doing.

Your assumption is historical research methods, 2000 years removed from an event, are superior to firsthand accounts passed down through family tradition for a few generations. Quite an assumption.

Well, the problem is if you take the fictive view, he wouldn't claim to be writing history.

Your confusing two things, seems to me: one is whether the representations of Jesus's teachings are accurately repesented in this or that text. The other is whether those teachings are "true." I'm not intersted in the second matter (at least not here). I am interested in the first. The priority of Paul suggest that he accurately represented Jesus's teachings, claims, and self-definitions. Whether those teachings were the result of a madman or the Son of God cannot be determined through historical analysis. My point is merely that Paul got it right.

Yes, if the genre is fiction. If the genre is fake history, that's a different matter. Crossan and others claim that Luke isn't lying, he's just producing fiction, which his audience would see as ficition, a kind of religious fiction. Then somehow, the fictive understanding of the work was lost and people began taking Luke as a historian. That process is utterly left unexamined by the critical approach to the NT.

Well, according to me who got my Ph.D in Old English studies, and according to every scholar I know who examined the issue. It's pretty passe for anybody to argue that Beowulf was anything other than a Chrisitian work, presented to a Christian audience, as a work of fiction with symbolic and moral meanings. Beowulf's audience was pretty sophisticated and understood attempts at real history vs poety. Similarly anybody educated enough to read Luke would likely be rather sophisticated and understand the difference between fiction and history. Your assumption that the audience of Luke were country bumpkins is utterly unsupported.

Diogenes the Cynic

I don't think it's necessary to see it as a deliberate act of deception. The evangelists were probably honest to the extent that they sincerely believed that the Hebrew Scriptures were a guide to finding information about Jesus. Luke and Matthew both believed that the Messiah had to be born in David's hometown but both also evidently had to deal with an existing meme that Jesus was from Galilee (as I think is demonstrated in John)/ They both found different ways to get Jesus to Bethlehem to be born and different devices for getting him back to Nazareth but that doesn't mean that they were "lyng" in the sense that they were trying to spin a deliberate falsehood. If Luke really believed that Jesus had to have been born in Bethlehem and he really believed that Joseph was a descendant of David, then the census of 6 CE would have been appealing to him as a likely explanation for how it happened. I think he would have seen it as a bit of deduction and detective work rather than lying.

spin

We have seen apologetic christians swear blind that the conundrums they construct to explain problems are the way it was. I believe that they believe their explanations at the time of writing. It is not a matter of lies, be they credible or not. The gospel writer had his own problem to deal with, ie how to thread two traditions together -- that of Bethlehem with that of Nazareth --, and he did it differently from the writer of Matt. Although I'm skeptical about their efforts (and about most other things), I see no reason to propose that they were liars.

How many believers over how many centuries were able to follow these writers down their twisted paths and find the way satisfactory. Our Richbee has the highest regard for Luke. It's not that they all were necessarily gullible or stupid, but that their commitments kept them on the path. How many believers can see that the two birth accounts actually contradict each other in places, besides having very little in common? Why should the writer of Luke be any different. Whether he thought up the solution used or inherited it doesn't matter.

The lie, as our solution to the problems of these writers, doesn't make too much sense. Wanting something to make sense and be true is usually sufficient to perceiving them as such. People don't want to believe in lies and don't like being hoodwinked, but they will fight for the most contorted and ill-conceived ideas. (How many people swore till they were blue in the face that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction even when it seemed evidently farcical to some??) Resorting to the lie is making the world simpler than what it is.

Whether he had been or not, the Lucan writer didn't need to go to Bethlehem to form his obviously true theory about the birth of Jesus.

ETA: I note that DtC swung this club before me.


spin