The evening news—the one t.v. show I watch besides “60 Minutes,” detailed Pope Francis’s visit to the “Holy Land” (he’s actually in Jordan). Well, I suppose I could live with that, but what rankled a tad was a shot of Francis being driven to the Jordan River by King Abdullah II, and then standing there, head bowed and hands clasped, with the narration:
“The Pope prayed at the spot where Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist.”
Really? Shouldn’t there be an “allegedly” in there?
After all, this is the news. It’s as if a correspondent, standing in the North Woods, said, “It was near here that Paul Bunyan found the young Babe, the faithful blue ox that would become his faithful sidekick.”
It’s bizarre that someone like the Tsarnaev brothers must (and rightly so) be described as “alleged killers” before conviction, while the news casts no doubt on the historicity of a 2000-year-old book of fiction. It’s 2014, and time for reputable news organizations to stop treating myths as if they were true.
If you want accurate news, you should just watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. It’s a lot better than the rest of the news. Admittedly, it’s got a bias, but that bias is towards reality.
Yeah, I think the “allegedly” belongs between “NBC Evening” and “News”. Insert allegedly in front of the names of news sources you used to trust as needed.
“This Week Tonight with John Oliver” is also excellent: it’s even more pointed than TDS and TCR. It’s also peppered with hilarious and effective profanity.
His sketch on anthropogenic climate change has gone viral. As well as Bill Nye (because, as he shows, no programme on climate change is complete without him) he has 97 scientists (in white coats to prove it) to answer three deniers.
Also, how could they possibly know if they were anywhere close to the actual spot even if you assume Jesus existed and the story of the baptism is a faithful rendition of the alleged event? Ten bucks that the same people who covered the Popes visit would be less credulous had it been a Muslim visiting the place Muhammad was alleged to have flown on a winged horse to heaven upon his death. Or a Mormon visiting the place that Joseph Smith supposedly dug up those golden plates.
Admittedly, baptism is nowhere as fantastic as flying horses.
This baptism, though, was more fantastic than flying horses. YHWH himself parted the clouds and spoke from the heavens to proclaim Jesus his son of whom he was proud. In contrast, horses are at least capable of ballistic flight, and the catapult had already been invented….
Cheers,
b&
Good one 🙂
Actually, I dug up those plates on a trip to New York once. Can’t run ’em through the dishwasher, though.
So the newscasters got a little sloppy with mythology, or with what is fact and what is not. Maybe they don’t always validate thoroughly before they report. People will figure things out for themselves. Nothing to worry about. Like with aluminum tubes. And Iraqi (Iranian, too, ulp!) nuclear capacity.
URL:http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2012/09/08/the-lies-that-led-to-the-iraq-war-and-the-persistent-myth-of-intelligence-failure/
“…where [the Bible says] Jesus….”
Would have kept them out of trouble.
The Bibel never specifies a precise spot, does it? At the Jordan (allegedly), but never says which bank or what latitude.
Or “traditionally”.
I go with “reportedly” but “traditionally” is good. “Allegedly” carries a tone of disbelief that may be justified, but isn’t impartial.
He, say what you want about Jezus, but hands off Paul Bunyan and Babe. I believe in them.
“And right here, at platform 9 3/4, is where Harry Potter set off for Hogwarts.”
Precisely! It isn’t always necessary to specify “is alleged to have [done something]” when referring to well-known mythical figures. Sherlock Holmes and 221B Baker Street would be another example, also the Reichenbach Falls at Meiringen where he battled Moriarty (the sign for the Reichenbachfall-Bahn has a cameo picture of Sherlock Holmes in the corner complete with deerstalker hat and pipe)
The difference is that everybody knows that Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes are fictional.
Last year I was startled to find myself at the crossroads at Daulis, between Thebes and Delphi, where Oedipus [reportedly] killed his father Lauis. The monument there had only some lines of dialogue though, between Oedipus and Jokasta, and a signature: Sophocles
“And that Baptism was so exciting and important, people wrote about it. Just two generations later.”
I never talk about Jesus Christ (doh!). It’s either Just Jesus, or Jesus of Nazareth. The Christ bit has religious implications, and I can’t go for that (no can do!).
Of course, it’s nonsense to claim that you know where Jesus was baptized.
But to propound that say, Mark’s Gospel, is fiction or a myth tout court is to say more than we can know.
John the Baptist is the only low-class Gospel character who is independently attested – by Josephus who died around 100CE. There is a school of thought that he got his reference from Luke’s Gospel, rather interestingly for those who want to date Luke to the middle of the 2nd century.
Some academic, whose name I forget, ran a computer program comparing Josephus’ Jesus references with those of Luke and claimed that it demonstrated a definite structural and linguistic similarity: looking at his evidence it was frankly laughable. He saw what he wanted to see. I think that Josephus had an independent source for John the Baptist, irrespective of whether Luke’s Gospel had been written by then.
Is it possible that JtheB baptized Jesus? Yes it is. More than that we cannot say. Because, if we’re being rigorously historical about it, we have to be straight about it. And balance possibilities. We can’t run the experiment again. We have to admit that we don’t know.
Slaínte.
“Is it possible that JtheB baptized Jesus? Yes it is.”
Not very probable though (0.001%? — too generous?), since the evidence for the simple existence of Jesus is extremely thin.
“More than that we cannot say. Because, if we’re being rigorously historical about it, we have to be straight about it. And balance possibilities. We can’t run the experiment again. We have to admit that we don’t know.”
I agree we don’t know. There is no good evidence for any of the “events” in the life of Jesus reported in the Bible. There is some evidence that the gospel stories are all fictional, but that’s probably not totally conclusive either. But why would it need to be? I don’t know, but I see no evidence to make me believe in the naturalistic parts of the gospel story so I’m not going to believe any of it. The supernatural bits are not worthy of consideration at all, and I think we agree on that too.
Regarding this modern dichotomy between naturalism and supernaturalism in the Gospels I disagree, Achrachno, I think it’s much more complicated than that.
You have to take into account the way people thought 2,000 years ago.
Take an obvious proto-Enlightenment Son: Pliny the Elder – a totally admirable man, inquisitive, sceptical, a man who wanted to know everything and how it came to be the way it was. Yet he could think the most absurd ideas: that precious metal was created from the observable work of minute animals. Yes, materialistic, but totally wrong.
The reason why he thought that was because he had heard the story from India. And the exotic nature of the tale probably added authenticity to the story for him.
Go to 1st century Palestine: they really did believe in what we would consider magic. So when we read of the miracles in the Gospels, that to the listenership was utterly real. It was quotidian, believable, real, banal even. That’s the way they thought. And that’s probably why those stories circulated.
Slaínte.
If you have such a low opinion of the credibility of first century reporters, why then do you give them such credence at all?
Similarly, if you’re so confident that they got the overwhelming majority of what they wrote about absolutely worng, why do you place such certainty in your own radically-different reconstruction of what you think they really were reporting about?
In any other context, a witness sincerely describing massive zombie invasions and flying pigs and talking clouds and the like would be considered so profoundly impeached that you wouldn’t even trust him to tell you that the sky is blue. But not this context?
Cheers,
b&
Ben, in answer to your 1st question, which is unnecessarily loaded, you evaluate it: as a historian you look at independent sources, if they exist, and come to a judgement, on the balance of evidence.
Sorry, Ben, question number 2, I simply don’t know what you’re referring to. I presume you’re on the pop, like me. Unless you mean the magical, miraculous world-view of yer peasant, working-class 1st century Jew: well, that’s well-attested. Almost not worth referencing, because we know it. My construction of what the evangelists were reporting isn’t contre vous radically different: it’s mainstream. It’s only ‘radically different’ if you lap up the priest’s Sunday toast.
Question 3: ask yourself the proper historical question. When was it put in there? Why?
It’s just pathetic and intellectually lazy, culturally incoherent to interpret these works as always having been like this: they evolved. Of course, they evolved.
It’s chuffin’ easy to point out what a load of weirdos the early Christians were: and everybody does. On Facebook. But that’s just the start of it.
The scholarly approach is, first of all, to try to understand the way some of our ancestors thought: and that’s fascinating.
Slainte.
I generally agree with Ben’s comments, below, and am puzzled why you give any credibility to the gospels. You might be interested in this essay. http://infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/kooks.html
However, contrary to Ben, I do believe in flying pigs. http://tg24.sky.it/tg24/spettacolo/photogallery/2011/09/26/pink_floyd_animals_rimasterizzazione_cd_maiale_londra_copertina_album-algie.html
“You have to take into account the way people thought 2,000 years ago.”
I worked with two people convinced by their versions of Christianity (29,743 & 36,661 say) that reading Harry Potter would teach children witchcraft. They aren’t alone. For one, mental illness = demons.
There’s no modern dichotomy twixt naturalism and woo of any kind, it has always been thus…
Josephus wasn’t born until 37 CE. He mentioned John in Antiquities, which he wrote in 94 CE. John, we are to believe, lost his head in 36 CE.
Unless you would have us believe that senior citizens have reliable memories of when they were babes in arms of…well, of anything, it would seem to be more than a stretch to describe Josephus’s mentions of John as “independent attestation.”
And for Josephus to have mentioned John but not Jesus…and that somehow makes Jesus an historical figure? Seriously? In your words, we get a footnote for a “low-class character,” but nary a peep about the most spectacular superstar of all history…and that demonstrates historicity?
Cheers,
b&
Again, Ben, you demonstrate your inability and unwillingness to interpret what other commenters actually write. This is really pretty poor.
Josephus independently attests John the Baptist from a different source to the Gospels: not from his own personal knowledge, but from some presumed written or oral source. There. Is that clear enough? Even for you? FFS, the bloke was an effin’ historian: not a great one, but we know that he did at least do some proper work.
And get rid of this hopeless troll that Jesus was a big guy: academically, you’re 180 years out of date, and what’s more you probably know that you are. You set up a straw man by pretending that Jesus was known throughout the Roman Empire. No serious scholar, even any reputable Christian biblical scholar, thinks that.
So get with the real debate: we’re on what is effectively a scientific, but anti-theist website. Yet we’re in a very small corner of it – the limits of historical certitude. You know as much as I how much we can know historically, especially in classical history. Stop pretending that you know more than you possibly can do: and start acquainting yourself with the conditional mood.
But I do care about the historical method. And I see you, Ben, every time playing fast and loose with it. Your chutzpah is astonishing. You ascribe ideas to me that I don’t propound. This is a pattern of your behaviour. What are you talking about?
Re: John the Baptist and my characterization of him as a ‘low-class character’. Of course he is. Not like the Herodian dynasty and the female princesses whom Josephus also mentions. They are high class. Nor the Jewish High Priests, whom Josephus also refers to. They are high status.
Specifically, stop pretending that you know that a Jesus character didn’t exist: of course, very little in the NT probably related to the Jesus of the Gospels. But you don’t know how much and neither do I. Yet your repeated categorical statements of Jesus’ non-existence are obviously father to the thought, whereas I in my daily life couldn’t give a flying one either way.
Slaínte.
Give me but one reference from within a quarter millennium of the time you think your real Jesus really was really roaming Judaea, one which describes him as neither divine nor a participant in prominent public spectacle and / or power politics, and I’ll buy an hat just so I can eat it.
And that all your “serious” scholars have no doubt but that Jesus is as you describe and yet are utterly unable to adduce any evidence advancing the claim lays bare just how shallow the scholarship of the entire study seriously is.
One reference! Within a quarter millennium! Is that really so much to ask?
Cheers,
b&
I can easily answer that, Ben: but on Jerry’s 10% rule, or whatever it is, and on the basis that it’s 5.17 a.m. in the U.K., I’ll quit.
Ben, you really know that you’re talking unhistorical ballocks, don’t you?
Slainte.
Btw. Didache 9:2. Jesus as ‘servant’; effing easy.
To bed, I’m knackered.
Slainte.
Didache?
This one?
Seriously?
In which universe is a paean to “our Father, for the holy vine of Thy son David, which Thou madest known unto us through Thy Son Jesus” and “Thy kingdom; for Thine is the glory and the power through Jesus Christ for ever and ever” a description of some randomly mortal nobody schmuck?
Well, I suppose I should at least thank you for so forcefully demonstrating that there really isn’t any evidence to support the historicist position.
Maybe try another tack. Justin Martyr argued extensively, thoroughly, passionately, and most convincingly for, in his phrases, the analogies between Jesus and the Sons of Jupiter. Do you agree that those analogies do, in fact exist? Assuming you agree — and I can’t imagine anybody who made it out of secondary school with a passing grade not agreeing — do you accept his explanation of evil daemons with the power of foresight planting the stories of pagan demigods in advance, or would you accept a more modern and less psychotic explanation of it being garden-variety syncretism of the same sort that created Serapis from Osiris and Apis? And, if the latter, after subtracting out just the examples that Martyr himself listed, what on Earth is left of an individual that could possibly be recognizable as Jesus?
Or another other tack: tell us how you’d identify this particular “Jesus” of yours from all the other men of that name mentioned in ancient sources. Give us even one identifying feature that a Christian would recognize as a property of Jesus, one that you hold as a true fact about Jesus, and the evidence by which you know said fact to be true.
Are these requests really so unreasonable? I ask for anything not describing Jesus as a larger-than-life figure from within a couple centuries, and you come back with an echo of the Lord’s Prayer with Eucharistic special sauce. I’ve just offered up what should be irrefutable evidence from the earliest Christian apologist of the entirely syncretic nature of Jesus, and I’m sure you’re going to completely ignore it. And I’ve offered yet another should-be-trivial challenge for providing positive evidence that I’m sure you’ll also ignore or dodge.
And yet you accuse me of “talking unhistorical ballocks.”
Maybe you’re a Poe, trying to discredit the field of Biblical history. It’s about the least uncharitable theory I can offer.
b&
For humanistic scholarship–and that is what ‘biblical studies’ is– to be ‘out of date,’ whether yesterday’s of that from ‘180; years ago, new and credible information has to have come to light, and/or the methodology of analysis and synthesis has to have been revolutionized. No new information, so no and/or; just new methodology, which works fine for fiction. ‘To try to understand how some of our ancestors thought’ is indeed a fascinating enterprise. But the enterprise can only be ‘history’ if the word is synonymous with ‘story.’ Leave this to the novelists: they’re much better at it.
Shouldn’t that be “the Pope allegedly prayed”? The reporter has no access to the Pope’s thoughts. Francis might actually be thinking about that hot Arab boy the King told him about.
Yes, you are quite right. You can, however, say “The Pope preyed…” without the allegedly part. And speaking of preying, Cardinal Dolan was written up in the New York Times recently. It had to do with his comfortable lifestyle, which contrasts with that of Bergoglio. Dolan is prized by Catholics for hiding millions of dollars from lawsuits against the church for you-know-what.
Maybe people are not yet ready to accept the word alleged in a newscast. After all it’s about keeping viewer’s and advertisers happy. A good compromise is to use the opening disclaimer, “According to the Bible.” Perhaps in the future news will accept using a more skeptical investigation of religious claims.
“Allegedly” is used quite often in newscasts when a crime is involved.
…when a currently undecided criminal legal proceeding is involved.
But it should be used more widely.
Agreed.
Right. And also acceptable would be “…which Christians believe…” The problem is that I used to hear these qualifying phrases fairly often in the past; not so much recently.
I don’t read too much into the comment. Sure, in an ideal world the term “allegedly” would be used. Those who believe will believe, even with an “allegedly” in there. But then for me, the comment means nothing. No great surprise that a religious story is treated in a way that supports religious mythology.
Thought I’d check the british media and they all give go with believed/understood no certainty
It is stunning how often news reports go on about “god” as if this belief were about something real! The only way this religious nonsense should ever be dealt with in the news media is to point out that such things are “according to what some believe,” not as something all of us go mindlessly along with. This is all part of the undeserved respect and honor “faith” (believing something for which there is no evidence or evidence against) still gets way too often in our society.
Well the Bible is not in the Fiction section of a bookstore. Widely held myths get a pass from the news media, especially if exposing them to skeptical thought will provoke a storm of outrage and sponsor cancellations.
I totally agree. I also cringe whenever I read a news article referring to “God”. That implicitly suggests that “God” exists and therefore gives credence to all kinds of religious nonsense, which just happens to always be in the eye of the beholder. If news organizations referred to “a possible god”, I would be slightly less offended but still discouraged.
I made exactly the same point recently about an NPR broadcast. Not only did the person in charge sneer publicly at atheists in response, but the NPR ombudsman didn’t even reply.
I had the same reaction when that same report was broadcast on New Zealand television. It doesn’t matter how many people want to believe otherwise, the Bible is not a book of facts and shouldn’t be treated as such in the news.
many media outlets pander to religion
several years back, an Air France(?) jet was slammed into the runway by a violent t-storm, slid off the end and into the creek(?) – only minor injuries.
Miracle! is the immediate response, of course.
A day or two later, Glowbawl News runs a report confirming the miracle. 4(3?) holy people and 1 skeptic are interviewed in this order – faithful, faithful, faithful, skeptic, faithful.