Io, Saturnalia
Or: The War against "Christmas"
Or: The War against Saturnalia
Um, news flash: Jesus wasn't born on Christmas. (I'm supposing here that there really was such a person as Jesus, because I'm assured by a biblical scholar I know and trust that there's fairly good evidence that this is true. I'm not assuming anything about his divinity, but I suppose you know where I stand on that question.) Anyway, he wasn't born on Christmas. Oh, maybe he was, I dunno. I guess there' s a 1/365 chance that he was. But the Winter Solstice holiday is really (in a somewhat contentious sense of 'really') a celebration honoring Saturn (noted child-eater. Hey, is that any way to promote family values, I ask you?).
So, you see, "Christmas" is really a war on Saturnalia. Since every now and then I'm a born again Pagan, I find this very annoying. If things offended me, I'd find it offensive too, you betcha.
Or: The War against "Christmas"
Or: The War against Saturnalia
Um, news flash: Jesus wasn't born on Christmas. (I'm supposing here that there really was such a person as Jesus, because I'm assured by a biblical scholar I know and trust that there's fairly good evidence that this is true. I'm not assuming anything about his divinity, but I suppose you know where I stand on that question.) Anyway, he wasn't born on Christmas. Oh, maybe he was, I dunno. I guess there' s a 1/365 chance that he was. But the Winter Solstice holiday is really (in a somewhat contentious sense of 'really') a celebration honoring Saturn (noted child-eater. Hey, is that any way to promote family values, I ask you?).
So, you see, "Christmas" is really a war on Saturnalia. Since every now and then I'm a born again Pagan, I find this very annoying. If things offended me, I'd find it offensive too, you betcha.
posted by Winston Smith at
5:43 PM
11 Comments:
And I'm fairly well assured by a biblical scholar I know that there's little to no evidence that there really was such a person as Jesus. Or, at least, a person such as is represented in the gospel accounts.
Yeah, well, that's where things get hazy...how much of what Jesus was supposed to have done must he actually have done in order for it to be reasonable to say that there was such a person?
Since (I'm supposing) we can agree that there were no miracles, he wasn't God, nor the son of God, etc., but just a human, we've already cut out a lot. I was tacitly supposing that it was enough that this guy went around teaching roughly the moral and religious messages written about in the New Testament, and then was crucified by the Romans.
According to my colleague, there's fairly good evidence that that happened. He's quite objective and level-headed about all this stuff--and I've known him for about 4 years and have no idea what his religious beliefs are like, so it's not even clear he has a dog in this fight.
But I don't know anything about it myself.
I'm no expert either and I have no idea what the religious beliefs of the person I talked to are.
However, given that the gospels were written (at earliest) 50 - 70 years after the death of Jesus, and that no historical documents exist on such a person (all such documents (e.g., Josephus and Seutonius) have been shown to have been 'doctored), there is little evidence that Jesus of Nazareth as portrayed in the gospels actually existed or was crucified.
Such a person may have existed but the evidence is just not there.
The scholar also mentioned that the method of execution during that time was not crucifixion, but implanting via a stake. But I'd need to check on that again.
I also got in a chat with another religouis professor who's also an ordained baptist minister and part of the "Jesus Project" (to determine what in the gospels may actually have been spoken by Jesus). He also indicated there's no firm evidence that the person Jesus existed. He believes he did, but knew of no historical or archaeological proof...and in fact if you look at the gnostic gospels.
So, FWIW, I err on the side of him probably not existing. But what do I know?
This is a discussion that comes up occasionally on a mailing list I'm on, and our resident biblical scholar makes a good argument that, based on how myths and legends tend to form in human societies, and the sorts of things the various Gospels attribute to Jesus, and how various texts cross-influenced each other, there probably was a rabble-rousing preacher in first century Judea who was crucified for upsetting the guys in charge of the Temple in Jerusalem on whom the whole story is based. It would be very unlikely for any original record of such a person to have survived this long. We barely have any evidence that Pilate existed, for that matter, and he was far more prominent than yet another iternerant preacher (who were a scheckle a dozen at the time).
For those interested, the Jesus Seminar referred to here accepts the burden of proof that there was a fellow named Jesus who said some rather remarkable and unique things.
My fundamentalist friends are appalled at a lot of it, which should recommended it to most here.
aa,
My colleague listed the reference in Josephus as one of the better pieces of evidence, I believe. I'll ask what he knows about the possibility that it was doctored.
tvd,
Thanks for he link. Will check it out.
BTW, Jesus will no longer be known as "Jesus." He's now the "holiday infant."
(Like to claim credit for that, but it was from a letter writer to O'Reilly.)
The Jesus Seminar website doesn't make it clear, but the "burden of proof" riff goes something like if Jesus' sayings were to survive from his lifetime to the eventual writing of the Gospels, they would be short, pithy, unique, and surprising.
There was a theory developed by German Biblical scholars in the 1700s that there are sayings in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke that seem to be grafted onto the narrative of the Gospel of Mark, which apparently was written first. They postulated that they came from a lost "sayings Gospel" they called "Q," from the German quelle, meaning "source."
When a "sayings Gospel," the Gospel of Thomas, was discovered in 1956, it gave the German theory support.
The Jesus Seminar rejects the "I Am (the truth, the way, etc.)" stuff, and many other bland and conventional wisdoms as being glommed onto the Jesus tradition.
Still, they believe there is a core of Jesusian thought that survives to this day.
I liked it, even though it rejects vitually anything that could be called Christian mysticism. I recommend it for that reason to the skeptical as an introduction to Jesus.
(If faith in the rest of that stuff is ever to come, it will come. If not, at least the reader will gain genuine understanding of what Jesus said, instead of the hideous caricatures of "what the Bible says" that most nonbelievers embarass themselves with.)
Yeah, my colleague of whom I spoke specializes in Q. If I'm not mistaken, the theory you outline and say that the Jesus project rejects is still the orthodoxy among experts. In a case like this--i.e. a case in which I'm neither interested enough in the subject nor qualified to do my own research (My Aramaic and Coptic Greek are, ahem, a bit rusty), I just stick with the consensus among the experts.
Still, I'm going to poke around a bit in TJP just cause it looks cool.
tvd wrote:
"If faith in the rest of that stuff is ever to come, it will come. If not, at least the reader will gain genuine understanding of what Jesus said, instead of the hideous caricatures of "what the Bible says" that most nonbelievers embarass themselves with"
I find this interesting and it seems to be a bit of a bait and switch.
"If faith will come...gain genuine understanding of what Jesus said..."
Considering the Q document does not still exist (or if it does, it has never been made public - e.g., it is buried in the vatican archives), and all we have is the gospels to go by, gaining genuine understanding of Jesus is impossible outside the gospels. And if the gospels (internally incosnstent as they are) cannot be used as written, we have to use faith? Faith that the gospels are an accurate portrayal of the man Jesus because the gospels say they are? Maybe I'm simply misunderstanding the argument that is trying to be made.
As for faith Mark twain put it succinctly "Faith is belieiving what you know ain't so".
As for "what the Bible says" I hear this mostly from Believers. "But the bible says..." is their most common argument. So are believers also embarassing themselves with it?
holiday infant is pretty close to Holy Infant, so tender and mild.
Assuming Jesus did exist as flesh and blood, he was the Elvis to the Negro R&B of the Essenes.
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