ENGLISH IS A STRANGE language, the way that some words can mean both a thing and its opposite, "inflammable" being a famous example that can mean both something that burns easily or something that doesn't burn at all. Then there are words that mean one thing then are intentionally distorted to mean something very different for intentional ends. "Antisemitism" is one of those words I've been examining here since the IHRA intentionally turned that word into a smoke screen to privilege the bad behavior of the Israeli government, so it can do what the most infamous of antisemites in history did to another branch of "semites." I wonder the part that the denotation slippage of our slippery, sloppy language plays in enabling that kind of thing. Though, of course, English is hardly the only language that is so strange but as the United States is the primary patron of the Israeli government and has long been since they figured out (some say through the Six Day War in 1967) that Israel could be the American base to exercise out sized power in the middle-east, the facility with which English can be lied so consequentially with is an important consideration.
But this is about how not only words but entire ideas can be twisted and distorted in response to some snark that came my way about how I've gone from the old, conventional, "enlightenment" practice when it comes to matters in the first century (or earlier) when the topic is religion of doubting everything while still using the exact same testimony about events in the ancient past recorded then when it is, literally, the only thing we have to go on to even know what may have happened, to someone who is willing to believe that they might just be leaving us an accurate description of reality. What got me thinking about the slips and slops of language and, so, the thinking behind words is how the very same 17th - 21st century academics who heap up doubts about the reports of the experience of the world of the first and other centuries while claiming to be able to present a description of that world as part of their academic scribbleage, what they get paid to do assume that those very words are unreliable. I've criticized the "historical Jesus" industry that does just that to get many an academic on the make for the relatively big bucks that such academics can get from getting on TV "documentaries" about "the historical Jesus" or by writing best sellers on the topic.
It was while I was reading one of the best of those, John Dominic Crossan, specifically his claim that the body of Jesus wasn't given a decent burial by Joseph of Arimathea but was thrown into a shallow, common grave, likely dug up and eaten by stray dogs, that I realized that he, 20 centuries after Jesus was making up a story of the kind that he said the first century authors of the Gospels, some of whom may have seen Jesus and who very likely knew people who did see and hear Jesus, likely some of those witnesses to his Crucifixion and possibly eye-witnesses to the event did in reporting on his burial.
I had already caught on to the game of such modern academics of claiming that the years and decades between the presumed date of Jesus's death and the writings of the Gospels as a means of debunking their accuracy or even veracity realizing that one is not to notice that such academics expect you to ignore the nearly two millennia of years, decades and centuries between the death of Jesus and their story telling, not to mention their own entire remove from any eyewitnesses, also their own motives in telling the stories they make up as alternatives. And, as already said, topped off by them having to rely, entirely, on the canonical Gospels and those not in the canon, which are often suspected of even greater remove from the life and times of Jesus than the supposedly debunked canonical Gospels. Almost all of the apocryphal gospels I've read contain even more fantastic stories about Jesus than the canonical ones, but many such modern scholars claim them as more reliable than the officially accepted ones.
And that's Crossan who has some record of producing credible reviewed academic writing, many of the most influential voices in the land of TV and internet documentaries have little to none of that. Some of them make claims such as the absurd one that "organized Christianity" that came up with the various Scriptural canons "suppressed" the alternative Gospels. That's certainly not the case of the Eastern, the Orthodox and the Catholic churches, which clearly took claims about Mary found in the apocryphal gospels to incorporate those in its holdings about Mary, her parents not mentioned or named in the Gospels, and, at least in the case of the Catholic churches, making that the basis of papal "infallible" doctrine and dogma. The Protestant tradition is, actually, the source of most of the suppression of the apocrypha, though they have certainly also been the source of much of the scholarship around such writings, too. Yet I'd expect that at least 98 out of 100 college-credentialed People who believe they know anything about this would repeat the lie that Christianity tried to destroy those poor-put-upon "alternative gospels," those meanies! Elane Pagels has made a career out of peddling that line.
I don't have any problem with honest disbelief in what the canonical Gospels say, so long as one standard and not two or more are applied to the literature and history done in that period. I have a big problem with double standards, whether in the treatment of academic topics or the behavior of governments and the societies that produce those governments. I have a really big problem with dishonesty and sloppy, slippery representations of reality. I'll bet that something approaching 90 percent if not ninety-eight of college-credentialed Americans who absorbed that forged "gospel" that "proved Jesus was married" still believe that years after it was exposed as a forgery made by a known and named forger and peddled to a member of the "Jesus Seminar" working at that most august and reputable of American universities, Harvard. That scholar, Karen King, finally had to admit it was a fraud that she bought whole hog when it was fairly easy work by real experts to identify not only that it was a clear forgery but were rapidly able to figure out who had made the forgery. About few topics is a lie as quick to fly around the world and lodge in the common received so-called wisdom of the college-credentialed as about Christianity. To be fair and even-handed, the same is at times as true among those who aren't hostile to Christianity, though they tend to be contained within some specific, often very conservative sections of Christianity and those who are pretty naive about history and its allied fields of research.
I think that the two accounts, in Matthew and Luke, are more reliable than any of the later alternative sources about the Incarnation of Jesus, his birth and early life. I think if the early followers of Jesus were making it up they would have come up with something far, far less likely to promote ridicule and snark and skepticism with motives other than finding the truth. The Virgin Birth and the accounts of the infancy of Jesus in those two Gospels would have to be designed to invite that if they were invented either by the evangelists who wrote the Gospels or their sources. Or, like Mark and John and Paul, they could have just not addressed the conception, birth and early life of Jesus. I've been over the asserted discrepancy between the Septuagint and the Masoretic passage from Isaiah about a virgin giving birth not being a "Christian distortion" of the text but, rather, the understanding of what was supposed to constitute a sign by God by those who translated the text into Greek. I would suspect that many who read it in Hebrew would have understood it to mean a virgin as, clearly the translators did. It makes a lot more sense if you figure a sign to be even noticed as a sign would be something out of the ordinary and a young woman giving birth in a society in which very early marriage (by modern standards) was the norm. Who would even notice something everyday as a sign of anything? I think it was the interpretation of Isaiah in reaction to Christian claims that distorts the text, both Hebrew and the character of the Greek translation made before the birth of Jesus.
We are as reliant on what the ancient writers said whenever we want to think or talk about the People, times and places back then, archeology and speculation based on physical evidence can only take you so far, when remains of specific, nameable People or animals isn't available, it it almost never is outside of Egyptian royalty, that written record is all we have to go on, it's even necessary in the case of those mummified remains of the royals who we need a text to identify. In the case of Jesus constructing him, his mother, etc. on the basis of "typical" Jewish peasants, is as much historical fiction as many sand and sandal movies or 18th century bodice rippers. If there is one thing we know about Jesus, he was unique among first century Jewish or other peasants, he is the motivating personality and central figure in a religious and moral movement that has lasted two-thousand years. There is every reason to believe there was little that was typical about him and, likely, his parents. You can't reconstruct anyone person out of generalizations from archaeology and things like speculative demographics from the lost past, individuals are too individual for that. You certainly can't settle the truth of a claimed to be unique miracle such as the Virgin Birth of Jesus with science, though one of the most famous of scientists falsely claimed you could. You couldn't do that without a number of securely identifiable remains which yielded reliable DNA samples and those are not and never will be had. And you'd have to rely on textual evidence to identify them, to bring that old post in line with the topic of this post. I will point out that since 2006 I have chosen to believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus based on the evidence available and the consequences of believing in it. As I said the other day, I think it's a hugely and universally beneficial belief.
