Toto

It's been quite a while since anyone mentioned Alexander on this thread (except Bede). I suggest that the person who has the most at state on the Luke issue is Richard Carrier, who has published an article on the web with his professional reputation behind it, and has an open invitation to anyone who thinks he has missed any arguments to email him. Several of us have emailed him, and perhaps we need to make sure he has received the messages, rather than force Peter to work on this issue.

edited to add: I am not sure which post of joedad's was so potent as to knock Bede virtually speechless. But if he is indeed training to be a professional, he and Richard should be speaking the same language.

[ October 10, 2002: Message edited by: Toto ]</p>

Sauron

Layman overstates the appeal that Herod had with the Jews. There is no reason to believe that the Jews would have rolled over and quietly accepted a census by Herod, but revolt in the streets and reject one from Quirinius.

1. In the first place, Herod's bloodline and lifestyle made him repugnant to the Jews.

2. Secondly, Herod had committed specific acts of sacrilege that had enflamed the Jews (see below).

3. And third, Herod was already engaged in levying heavy taxes in Judea, as pointed out by Josephus (below). Thus a hypothetical additional census would be an even more onerous financial burden on the inhabitants of Judea. Therefore contrary to Layman's assertion, a census would have been even more likely to cause Jewish rioting. (Reminder: a census is not the same as taxation.)

<a href="http://www.livius.org/he-hg/herodians/herod_the_great01.html" target="_blank">http://www.livius.org/he-hg/herodians/herod_the_great01.html</a>

[..]

This appointment caused a lot of resentment among the Jews. After all, Herod was not a Jew. He was the son of a man from Idumea; and although Antipater had been a pious man who had worshipped the Jewish God sincerely, the Jews had always looked down upon the Idumeans as racially impure. Worse, Herod had an Arabian mother, and it was commonly held that one could only be a Jew when one was born from a Jewish mother.

[...]

With building projects, the expansion of his territories, the establishment of a sound bureaucracy, and the development of economic resources, he did much for his country, at least on a material level. The standing of his country -foreign and at home- was certainly enhanced. However, many of his projects won him the bitter hatred of the orthodox Jews, who disliked Herod's Greek taste - a taste he showed not only in his building projects, but also in several transgressions of the Mosaic Law.

The orthodox were not to only ones who came to hate the new king. The Sadducees hated him because he had terminated the rule of the old royal house to which many of them were related; their own influence in the Sanhedrin was curtailed. The Pharisees despised any ruler who despised the Law. And probably all his subjects resented his excessive taxation. According to Flavius Josephus, there were two taxes in kind at annual rates equivalent to 10.7% and 8.6%, which is extremely high in any preindustrial society (Jewish Antiquities 14.202-206). It comes as no surprise that Herod sometimes had to revert to violence, employing mercenaries and a secret police to enforce order.

On moments like that, it was clear to anyone that Herod was not a Jewish but a Roman king. He had become the ruler of the Jews with Roman help and he boasted to be philokaisar ('the emperor's friend'). On top of the gate of the new Temple, a golden eagle was erected, a symbol of Roman power in the heart of the holy city resented by all pious believers. Worse, Augustus ordered and paid the priests of the Temple to sacrifice twice a day on behalf of himself, the Roman senate and people. The Jewish populace started to believe rumors that their pagan ruler had violated Jewish tombs, stealing golden objects from the tomb of David and Salomo.

[ October 10, 2002: Message edited by: Sauron ]

[ October 10, 2002: Message edited by: Sauron ]

[ October 10, 2002: Message edited by: Sauron ]</p>

Benjamin Franklin

Hi Peter Kirby

Thanks for your opinion on whether there could have been a pre 6-AD census. Please don't waste your time looking into this issue if you are not interested in it.

BF

[ October 11, 2002: Message edited by: Benjamin Franklin ]</p>

joedad

Nothing was ignored and nor was I being vicious, and you're not a bad creative writer yourself. So, besides picking yourself up and dusting yourself off, would you please get that tongue out of your cheek, and respond to my earlier hypothetical question about Alexander's historical authenticity as a conqueror, before this thread dies a natural death? Pretty please? But then again, maybe it isn't worth an answer, as the non-response has been unanimous.
In the possibility that you are genuinely offended, I apologize. I generally ignore insult, perceived insult and apology. Perhaps it's a character fault. But I consider you and all participants in these discussions friends and colleagues. I accept that nothing and no one here is perfect or privileged. I am here to learn, to find a modicum of shared notice and acceptance, to express my lay curiosity, and hopefully contribute substantively to any discussion. Further, I hope that your professional career is rewarding and beyond rewarding. I have absolutely no reason to desire anything less.

joe

Vorkosigan

You are an amateur but I am training to be a professional, and perhaps those are the people I should talk to.

Don't let Bede's patronizing attitude get you down, Joe. Real professionals don't talk down to "amateurs." Part of being professional is engaging with people who are not in a stimulating and thoughtful way. It is no part of professionalism to deploy one's status as a tactic to get others to shut up.

Vorkosigan

Bede

joe,

(....reviews thread....) Do you mean this: "But no one is "inventing" an unknown conqueror. That is one of the points of the thread. Historical reality makes no such demand. Simply concluded, historical Alexander is real and mythical Alexander is not. Rationally speaking, there is no disentanglement issue."

I think the point here is that we need historical methods to untangle the myth from the history. You have no problem with our doing this with Alex. And why should you (although I did come across the blurb in the academic junk mail one gets for a new book called "The Roman Alexander" which started "If Alezander did not exist it would be necessary to invent him")? We should treat the the sources on Alex the same wasy as the sources for Jesus - we cannot just dismiss those on the later with the wave of a hand. You don't seem to accept this or realise how similar the two cases are which is fine, but does make a conversation about history rather pointless...

Yours

Bede

<a href="http://www.bede.org.uk" target="_blank">Bede's Library - faith and reason</a>

Vorkosigan

You don't seem to accept this or realise how similar the two cases are which is fine, but does make a conversation about history rather pointless...

The two cases are not similar at all. The are several crucial differences, including a profound lack of outside vectors for Jesus, the fact that founder figures such as Jesus are routinely heavily mythologized and even invented, the utter lack of sound methodology among NT scholars for pulling facts out of legend, the deliberate distortion of the evidence by Christian forgers, redactors, and interpolators, the existence of a number credible alternatives for Jesus' role in life (no source suggests that Alexander was not a fighting general), the fact that no one is faith-committed to the historical existence of Alexander, and so on. There is a huge difference between the two cases.

Vorkosigan

leonarde

I wonder if Vorkosigan can tell us the name of
a founder figure of another religion who was (found to be)"invented".

Cheers!

Toto

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0859896781/internetinfidelsA" target="_blank">The Roman Alexander: Readings in Cultural Myth (Exeter Studies in History </a> by <a href="http://www.arch-ant.bham.ac.uk/staff/spencer.htm" target="_blank">Diana Spenser</a> is about the uses of Alexander's story by the Romans and the "vast range of pop cultural appropriations of Alexander that came to dominate Roman cultural mythology". It has not yet been published, but from the descriptions, it does not appear to even hint at the idea that Alexander may have been a complete myth.

"If Alexander the Great had not existed, then he would have to have been invented" is a clever advertising gimmick, no more.

[ October 13, 2002: Message edited by: Toto ]</p>

joedad

Actually I was referring to the following post which got buried in the exchanges between Layman and Sauron:
I posed the question because the undiscovered "Gospel Jesus of history" has been likened to a cynic sage, wanderig peasant, common insurgent, and a few others, all rather diminutive in status when compared with a religious hero who raises himself and others from the dead, visits heaven and hell, and commands the storm.

I guess I was just trying to get thoughts on how that would impact a religious believer. Were I a believer in this "conquering" Gospel figure, and I discovered that my Priam's Cup was only a shadow of its mythical glory, I might be tempted to question and update my beliefs – my "faith."

However, upon reflection, this hypothetical scenario is flawed. After all, religious beauty is, in the end, in the eye of the believer. (no plagiarism intended)

joe