Gospel of St.Luke

[chero23]

I think this is a great example of debunking sola scripture, why do I say this? Because it’s obvious and st Luke says so, he got his information through oral tradition.

 

[cornbread_r2]

But this is exactly the period I cite.

I don’t know how a valid comparison can be made about the number of historians writing about Nero within 150 years of his life with ECFs writing about Jesus when many/most of those ECFs were writing 250 or more years after the death of Jesus. (I also still don’t know how you came up with 65 ECFs.)

Surely you realize that is is a silly claim. There WERE no such things as “historians” at the time. A “historian” was somebody who recorded history.

What history relevant to Jesus did the ECFs record? As far as I know, all of the putative history recorded about Jesus is found in the gospels and none of the ECFs wrote the gospels.

I have never made any such assumption, and I am sure that we are unaware of many of them. But I do know that we have many works of non-pagan historians. It seems unlikely that the works of persecuted (Christian) criminals should eclipse the writings of faithful (pagan) Romans.

As I understand it, after the fall of the empire, virtually the only people preserving and copying manuscripts and texts were Christian monks. It seems unsurprising then that the number of extant Christian works should far outnumber the number of extant pagan works.

May I ask you to say what criteria you would accept?

Accept for what?

 

[GaryTaylor]

I think this is a great example of debunking sola scripture, why do I say this? Because it’s obvious and st Luke says so, he got his information through oral tradition.

 

[josh987654321]

Hi.

Saint Luke says “just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word”(Luke1:2)

According to this verse, he is not a eyewitness to his account and he just quoting Anonymous eyewitnesses and servants of the word.

So how can we trust him, historicaly and theologically?

ُُ

Hi javid

If you like, I have quoted an Extract on the Historical Accuracy of the Gospels from the book “The Reason for God” by Timothy Keller as I greatly enjoyed it. (It may seem like a bit of reading, but you can’t fit much in a post, so it really isn’t much reading, it’s only about 2 pages in the book ).

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Hope I have helped

Thank you for reading
Josh

 

[Prodigal_Son]

The point was not whether the Fathers knew Jesus or the apostles, the point was that there 20 times the number of historians in the same period of time who wrote about JESUS (an obscure person from a tiny occupied country who died an ignominious death) as opposed to those who wrote about NERO CAESAR, the EMPEROR of ROME, who RULED an EMPIRE of hundreds of thousands of people, whose actions were literally the life and death of thousands of people, and who would have been ‘known’ by those and by also those who knew his predecessors and successors. . .

But this is simply not true.

If we talk about contemporaries of Jesus and contemporaries of Nero who wrote about them, we have a smallish number for Jesus and a larger number for Nero. (I don’t know how much larger, but even just glancing through Wikipedia made it clear that there would be a lot of contemporary Latin sources for Nero).

If we talk about people who wrote about Jesus or Nero after Jesus or Nero died, we have a gigantic number for both of them.

Now if we talk about historians, we may have no eyewitnesses accounts of either Jesus or Nero written by historians. I’m not sure why that matters, though.

My intention here is not to undermine the reliability of Saint Luke, of course, since I think Luke’s gospel is reliable. But I do want to point out that those who make extreme and unsupported claims in support of Christianity often undermine Christianity. I study the ancient world for a living, and the claim that we have no first-hand contemporary sources discussing Nero just sounds absurd to me on its face (and further investigation verifies the absurdity). If I were an atheist and I read this claim on a Catholic website, it would not give me a good impression of Catholic scholarship.

 

[javid]

Hi javid

If you like, I have quoted an Extract on the Historical Accuracy of the Gospels from the book “The Reason for God” by Timothy Keller as I greatly enjoyed it. (It may seem like a bit of reading, but you can’t fit much in a post, so it really isn’t much reading, it’s only about 2 pages in the book ).

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Hope I have helped

Thank you for reading
Josh

Hi.

thanks.

Whitch part answers my Question?

 

[DavidFilmer]

I don’t know how a valid comparison can be made about the number of historians writing about Nero within 150 years of his life with ECFs writing about Jesus when many/most of those ECFs were writing 250 or more years after the death of Jesus. (I also still don’t know how you came up with 65 ECFs.)

I simply counted the ECFs in Jurgen’s “Early Church Fathers” who wrote prior to about 180 AD. You can count for yourself in the protestant Early Church Fathers: ccel.org/node/70.

What history relevant to Jesus did the ECFs record? As far as I know, all of the putative history recorded about Jesus is found in the gospels and none of the ECFs wrote the gospels.

How utterly silly. Are you saying that Peter and Paul were not among the Early Church Fathers? If not them, then NOBODY. Did you really think about that silly thought before you recklessly submitted it? Upon WHAT grounds could you possibly justify this remark?

As I understand it, after the fall of the empire, virtually the only people preserving and copying manuscripts and texts were Christian monks. It seems unsurprising then that the number of extant Christian works should far outnumber the number of extant pagan works.

If this were a valid argument, we should expect to find a similarly diminished number of Christian works, accompanied by an abundance of pagan writings. After all, Rome and Constantinople and Christian lands were conquered by the pagan Goths, Jutes, Lombards, Vandals, and the Persian Empire, among a dozen others.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

How utterly silly. Are you saying that Peter and Paul were not among the Early Church Fathers? If not them, then NOBODY. Did you really think about that silly thought before you recklessly submitted it? Upon WHAT grounds could you possibly justify this remark?

What a rude comment. Is this your notion of apologetics?

If this were a valid argument, we should expect to find a similarly diminished number of Christian works, accompanied by an abundance of pagan writings. After all, Rome and Constantinople and Christian lands were conquered by the pagan Goths, Jutes, Lombards, Vandals, and the Persian Empire, among a dozen others.

There’s no reason I can think of that these latter groups would find Christian writings any more objectionable than Roman pagan writings. It’s not like “paganism” is some unified doctrine that they supported.

 

[josh987654321]

Hi.

thanks.

Whitch part answers my Question?

All of it.

I believe he provides some good reasons to trust the Gospel accounts.

Thank you for reading
Josh

 

[TimothyH]

The point was not whether the Fathers knew Jesus or the apostles, the point was that there 20 times the number of historians in the same period of time who wrote about JESUS (an obscure person from a tiny occupied country who died an ignominious death) as opposed to those who wrote about NERO CAESAR, the EMPEROR of ROME, who RULED an EMPIRE of hundreds of thousands of people, whose actions were literally the life and death of thousands of people, and who would have been ‘known’ by those and by also those who knew his predecessors and successors. . .

Are there any other purported ‘Messiah claimants’ of the time who have been written about and remembered, at length and in exhaustive detail, within the first couple of centuries of their death, for whom hundreds, then thousands, then millions, of people embraced that person as the Son of God and Savior of the World?

Jesus was not obscure.

Kings came from Eastern nations when he was born. Herod killed two thousand children in an attempt to end his life. All of Judea went to the Jordan River be baptized in anticipation of his coming. Great crowds followed him where ever he went. The entire city of Jerusalem came out to greet him on Palm Sunday. He was the one man whom the Governor was going to release from prison a a gesture to the Jews on Passover. There is no way that Jesus could be called obscure. The entire region was in an uproar over him.

And the land of Israel might be small in size but it was one of the most important areas in the world. The “Kings Highway” from Egypt to Persia went straight through Israel and is one of the most fought over, bloodies places on the planet. Israel was occupied because of its strategic value and was not some backwater nation. Alexander the Great tried to hellenize the entire known world but was so impressed with what he saw in Israel that he allowed them alone to keep their language, culture and religion.

-Tim-

 

[patrick457]

Jesus was not obscure.

Kings came from Eastern nations when he was born. Herod killed two thousand children in an attempt to end his life. All of Judea went to the Jordan River be baptized in anticipation of his coming. Great crowds followed him where ever he went. The entire city of Jerusalem came out to greet him on Palm Sunday. He was the one man whom the Governor was going to release from prison a a gesture to the Jews on Passover. There is no way that Jesus could be called obscure. The entire region was in an uproar over him.

And the land of Israel might be small in size but it was one of the most important areas in the world. The “Kings Highway” from Egypt to Persia went straight through Israel and is one of the most fought over, bloodies places on the planet. Israel was occupied because of its strategic value and was not some backwater nation. Alexander the Great tried to hellenize the entire known world but was so impressed with what he saw in Israel that he allowed them alone to keep their language, culture and religion.

-Tim-

Well, one might argue that since the gospels are the product of the memories and reflections of Jesus’ disciples and their disciples (and their disciples), the pure historical fact, the ‘what-happened’ - which of course we have no way of getting - is filtered through that. Since of course, for the early Christians Jesus is a very (the) important person, and since they’re to convince other people that Jesus is an important person, their accounts of course would also I think reflect that belief/bias. I don’t think you have to hyper-literally interpret the reference in the gospels to “great crowds” or “all of Judaea” as meaning that the whole, entire population of Palestine, down to the last man, woman, and child, knew of Jesus or followed Him.

Who knows how things might have turned out if a 21st-historian came into AD 33 and wrote a book about it. Jesus may not be ‘obscure’ in the sense that He did have a considerable following, but when you look at the entire history of the region, an outsider might say that Jesus was simply a blip in the radar. He’s just another one of the miracleworkers/prophets/teachers/messianic claimants the region is filled with. Were it not for the claims that He was resurrected and vindicated by God (which is what separates Jesus from the other messianic claimants of His time - the disciples succeeded and flourished despite their Leader’s death), we would probably look at Jesus the same way we look at the unnamed ‘Egyptian’ guy Josephus wrote about - someone who temporarily attracted a following but was quickly put down by the authorities.

 

[zz912]

Herod killed two thousand children in an attempt to end his life.

-Tim-

Two thousand??? Seems too high. Bethlehem was not that big, and certainly not big enough for a population of two thousand infants/toddlers.

 

[patrick457]

Two thousand??? Seems too high. Bethlehem was not that big, and certainly not big enough for a population of two thousand infants/toddlers.

Definitely not. One estimate suggests that at the 1st century, Bethlehem, which was a small village, perhaps had only around a population of 300 at the most, which would make the number of victims - going by Matthew’s “two years and under” age limit - only somewhere around six or seven toddlers. Later Christians tended to inflate the number though. In the 6th century apocryphal work Martyrdom of Matthew, 3,000 babies were killed; in the Byzantine tradition, 14,000 babies were murdered; and in Syrian calendars, you have an even higher number - 64,000 (!)

 

[Faith1960]

Definitely not. One estimate suggests that at the 1st century, Bethlehem, which was a small village, perhaps had only around a population of 300 at the most, which would make the number of victims - going by Matthew’s “two years and under” age limit - only somewhere around six or seven toddlers. Later Christians tended to inflate the number though. In the 6th century apocryphal work Martyrdom of Matthew, 3,000 babies were killed; in the Byzantine tradition, 14,000 babies were murdered; and in Syrian calendars, you have an even higher number - 64,000 (!)

I learned in Bible study that the numbers were much lower than what we usually think of them being.

 

[cornbread_r2]

…]

How utterly silly. Are you saying that Peter and Paul were not among the Early Church Fathers? If not them, then NOBODY. Did you really think about that silly thought before you recklessly submitted it? Upon WHAT grounds could you possibly justify this remark?

…]

A list of ECFs from Early Christian Writings.

A list of ECFs from the Catholic Encyclopedia.

A list of ECFs from Catholic Answers.

You’ll note that none of these lists includes any of the Apostles; that many wrote after 180AD and that most are regarded as theologians and not historians.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Those who expect nothing are never disappointed.

Hi cornbread!

I just wanted to comment on your signature. It’s not only that those who expect nothing are not disappointed. I might point out that those who expect Heaven are never disappointed (with respect to that expectation) either – whether or not Heaven exists!

 

[Novocastrian]

Tell ya what - I will make you a deal. I will give you a thousand historically accurate eyewitness testimonies of Jesus if you can give me just ONE historically accurate eyewitness testimony of the Roman Emperor Nero. If I cannot fulfill my half of the deal, I will give you a thousand dollars. If you cannot produce such contemporary testimony, you give me a thousand dollars. Do we have a deal?

You would be a fool for accepting, because you would loose.

Can you cite anybody who actually knew Nero Caesar who wrote about him? What about someone who knew someone who knew Nero Caesar. Can you cite me such a name? What about someone - ANYONE - who even lived during Nero’s lifetime, who ever wrote about him? What about someone - ANYONE - who KNEW anyone who lived during Nero’s lifetime? The man was the EMPEROR of Rome for fourteen years! Surely there is SOMEBODY.

You cannot cite any such source. And, notice that I have not imposed some idea that the sources must NOT be Roman citizens (as some insist on non-Christian historians who wrote about Jesus, because, apparently, Christian historians who write about Jesus are presumed to be unreliable, but Roman historians who write about Nero are presumed to be reliable, even though there WERE no such Roman historians).

The “most contemporary” historian to write about the Emperor of the Roman Empire for fourteen years wrote about 100 years after Nero’s death. The next closest “contemporary” authors (all of - ahem - two of them) wrote fifty years later (about 150 years after Nero’s death). 150 years after the death of the most powerful man in the world, we have all of three historical accounts. All written by Romans. All were of the Senatorial class.

The scant three authors who wrote about Nero between 100-150 years after his death were Tacitus, Suetonius and Cassius Dio, who were all members of the Roman Senatorial caste. I have no idea who was the first non-Roman historian to write about Nero, but I think I am safe in assuming that it was a LONG time later.

Now consider Jesus. He was Emperor of nothing. He was a member of a conquered race living in a conquered land. He was one of MANY ragtag preachers (Acts 5:34-37 describes the testimony of a Pharisee named Gamaliel who testified on behalf of the Apostles, while citing the failed ministries of other such “teachers” such as Theudas and Judas the Galilean). Jesus attracted a small dedicated following of only twelve men (Gamaliel says that Theudas had 400). His ministry was largely ineffective, as he was condemned by a crowd of his own countrymen in favor of an acknowledged criminal. He was sentenced to a slave’s death by a Roman governor - the cruelest death that the Roman Empire could devise - scourging and crucifixion. He hung on the Cross naked. When he was taken down, he did not even have a grave, but was buried in a donated grave. His execution took only three hours, and the Roman soldiers who executed him were home in time for supper.

In the 150 years after the death of Jesus, how many historians wrote about his life and activities? At least 65 (and I refer to authors, not writings - if we count according to writings, it numbers into the mid-500’s). And some were primary witnesses (such as St. John).

They were all Christians. And Nero’s scant three historians were all elite Romans (who wrote exactly three accounts, none of which were contemporary, - not 500+).

Nero was the Emperor of the Roman Empire for fourteen years. Jesus was the head of twelve Apostles for some three years before being executed by the very Empire that Nero would soon come to rule. And, yet, the ratio of historians is staggeringly unbalanced. 65 to 3 (or 500+ to 3, depending on how you count “sources”).

Errr, Seneca the Younger? He was Nero’s tutor and adviser…

Admittedly he wasn’t writing as a historian per se, but we have works (e.g. the *De Clementia *which were written to Nero himself). So obviously that’s very close and significant evidence for reconstructing any picture of Nero and his reign.

 

[cornbread_r2]

I simply counted the ECFs in Jurgen’s “Early Church Fathers” who wrote prior to about 180 AD. You can count for yourself in the protestant Early Church Fathers: ccel.org/node/70.

…]

I checked your source as well and, again, I’m not finding any Apostles listed and only about 13 or so ECFs writing before 180 AD or thereabouts.

 

[DavidFilmer]

I checked your source as well and, again, I’m not finding any Apostles listed and only about 13 or so ECFs writing before 180 AD or thereabouts.

Hmmm. That well may be. As I said, my source was actually Jurgens’ Faith of the Early Fathers, not the (protestant) online source that I referred to (I cited it because there’s no online access to the Jurgens collection). I didn’t actually verify that the online source was as complete (and I’ve never used it myself), but I am rather surprised that it is so incomplete.

But, even if we accept the incomplete source, it’s still ten more people who wrote about Jesus than who wrote about Nero.

And this list doesn’t include the Gospel writers or St. Paul. So that’s fifteen more. If we accept the common belief that Revelation was written by another St. John then it’s sixteen.

The fact remains that there were many more ancient people writing about a crucified Roman criminal than about the Emperor of the Roman Empire who was the most powerful person on earth for fourteen years.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Hmmm. That well may be. As I said, my source was actually Jurgens’ Faith of the Early Fathers, not the (protestant) online source that I referred to (I cited it because there’s no online access to the Jurgens collection). I didn’t actually verify that the online source was as complete (and I’ve never used it myself), but I am rather surprised that it is so incomplete.

But, even if we accept the incomplete source, it’s still ten more people who wrote about Jesus than who wrote about Nero.

And this list doesn’t include the Gospel writers or St. Paul. So that’s fifteen more. If we accept the common belief that Revelation was written by another St. John then it’s sixteen.

The fact remains that there were many more ancient people writing about a crucified Roman criminal than about the Emperor of the Roman Empire who was the most powerful person on earth for fourteen years.

Wait, did we talk about how many people wrote about Nero before 180 AD? I think that number would be more like 100 or 200, not 3.

Also, there are other sources that talk about Jesus before 180 AD, if I recall correctly a good number of them.